Shadowing Practice: This is Why I Don't Believe in God - Learn English Speaking with Video

My name is Alex.

I am a graduate of philosophy and theology and I'm a YouTuber.

And that's about all there is to me, I'm afraid.

But I'm ready when you are.

If you could let me know when I've got two minutes remaining.

If I say two minutes, that would be very helpful.

Thank you.

Thank you, of course, Brian and Jonathan and Sattler College and ladies and gentlemen for coming.

This is the second time that I've engaged with Jonathan publicly.

I'm glad to pick up where we left off.

We didn't quite get to the bottom of God's existence last time.

I'm confident we might get there today.

I wonder it'd be quite interesting just to get a fill of the room actually How many people here are Christians? Is that the time?

Okay, well it looks like I've got my work cut out for me, but that's my favorite kind of debate I think Of course this is an opening statement, so I won't respond to the arguments you just heard just yet.

Instead I want to make my own case that upon an honest analysis of the world we find ourselves in,

it should compel us to dismiss the hypothesis of a supernatural creator.

I will not be asking you to look in ancient scripture

nor to the beginning of the universe nor indeed down a microscope, instead just to your direct experience of the world and facts about the lives of people within it.

I will however indulge in a brief biblical recital because I want to begin with a book

with a reading from the book of Psalms.

So if you could all turn to Psalm 139, unless, of course, you've already committed this famous passage to memory.

Verse 7 onwards reads, where can I go from your presence?

Or where can I flee from your spirit?

If I ascend to the heavens, you are there.

If I make my bed in the depths of the Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall guide me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

This poem in its entirety is given by the NRSV, a title, The Inescapable God.

It's a message of bold reassurance to the believer, reminding them that since God is present everywhere, pervading every inch of our universe,

he is, in the happiest sense possible, inescapable.

But my first argument, and it's going to be the first of three, against the viability of theism,

flows from the demonstrable fact that this divine consolation is seemingly not offered universally,

and often in fact restricted from those who want it the most.

I'm going to be making the claim specifically that atheism or naturalism provides a better account for three facts of our universe.

The first being the hiddenness of God, the second being the geographical statistical arrangement,

shall we say, of religious belief, and the third will be the problem of gratuitous suffering, and we'll see if we get time to finish it off.

Far from being unable to escape God, there is a very real contingent of non-believers and I would count myself among their number,

who are unable by any means to discover him, who seek and do not find, who knock and receive, as it were, no answer.

This strange phenomenon is known as the problem of divine hiddenness.

If there is a God, then simply, why is he hidden from so many of us so much of the time?

If theism is to offer a sufficient account of reality, then it must offer an account of what J.L.

Schellenberg has famously labeled non-resistant non-belief, which he distinguishes from resistant non-belief.

It's sometimes said by a theist who wishes to explain the problem of divine hiddenness

that people simply disbelieve through their own fault.

They're too stubborn.

They're purposefully blinding themselves to the evidence because they don't want it to be true.

They're not approaching the arguments honestly with an open heart.

And that if they would only do this, then God would surely reveal himself.

Such a person would be what Schellenberg calls a resistant non-believer.

He disbelieves in some sense because he actively resists it.

For what it's worth, I do think that such people exist.

I think many such people exist.

There are people who come to this debate with their minds already made up.

There are people who want it not to be true that God exists, and in fact wouldn't submit to that truth even if it were true.

There was a recent poll run by the Atheist Experience YouTube channel, which I know, Jonathan, you're a fan of, which asked, if there was a God, would you worship it?

To which an astonishing 85% of respondents said that they would not.

There are, however, also people who disbelieve in God, not out of resistance or stubbornness or a hardened heart, but rather due to sheer lack of conviction.

Indeed, many such people actively want to be convinced of God's existence

and would jump at the chance of entering into a relationship with him if they thought that he did.

But no matter how hard they search, they simply find no answer forthcoming from the heavens.

And this is the non-resistant non-believer.

Formally, then, Schellenberg's problem of divine hiddenness can be stated as follows.

Premise one, if there is a god, he is perfectly loving, something I'm pretty sure Jonathan agrees with.

Premise two, if a perfectly loving god exists, non-resistant non-belief does not occur.

Premise three, non-resistant non-belief does occur.

For, therefore, no perfectly loving God exists, and the conclusion from the first premise is that therefore there is no God.

A loving God, like the Christian God, would surely not refuse any willing person from developing a relationship with him,

and so if somebody is truly non-resistant and open to receiving God's grace, we should expect them to receive it.

Thus Schellenberg's assertion that if God exists, then non-resistant non-belief does not exist.

The question then, is there such a thing as non-resistant non-belief, a non-resistant non-believer?

To which all I can really say is nice to meet you.

The last time I debated Jonathan a number of years ago, when I was just a few months out of being a teenager, I said that even if I found Christianity to be true,

I still wouldn't want to worship the God that it promotes.

I now, since then, have realised how irrational and self-defeating this assertion is, and stand before you today as an example of a non-resistant non-believer.

I think it would be great if God existed.

I really do.

I would absolutely love to escape death.

I would relish being the recipient of unconditional love.

Less selfishly, I would love to be able to worship that which deserves to be worshipped.

I just don't think it's I try as I might, look where I can, I find no response, no hint, nothing.

I don't choose to disbelieve in God any more than I choose to disbelieve in aliens, despite how much I might want them to.

So when faced with a psalm like Psalm 139, I'm overwhelmed with a sense not of beauty and consolation, but envy and disappointment.

Where can I go from your spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

Where can I go, I should ask in response, to find it?

Of course you cannot know my heart, you can't know if I'm truly as non-resistant as I claim, but I hope that my actions here might betray me.

As a Catholic child I was once an altar boy I

would serve the altar of Mother Church every Sunday dressed in a white robe.

In the time since then, I have, to put it mildly, been looking for God.

I went to Catholic schools, I studied philosophy and theology at A-levels, I made a career out of engaging with religious arguments.

I have explored arguments from contingency, from fine-tuning, from motion, from mathematics,

from indeed from irreducible complexity and the alleged resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

It may surprise my followers online to learn that at university I visited numerous churches on the invitation of various friends.

I spent hours talking with religious friends until the sun rose again, if you like.

I attended Bible groups regularly too, which might surprise people as well, and in fact I still do attend such groups.

Just recently I agreed to embark on a series of study of the wisdom literature specifically,

reading it again in the hopes that this time I might finally feel a divine presence seeping from between the lines.

I moved into a house for a year with two devoutly Christian housemates with the express intention of seeing

if the obvious truth of Christianity and theism

that people like to talk about can be found in the minutia of daily life.

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I have looked, in other words, in a great deal of places.

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I read Athanasius and Anselm.

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I read Augustine and Aquinas.

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I looked in Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena.

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I looked at the sociological origin of religious belief in Durkheim and Marx and Freud and Jung.

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I looked at religious experience in William James and Rudolf Otto.

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I've looked in the modern works of people like Ed Fazer

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and Bill Craig and Michael Murray and Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga.

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I've looked in poetry.

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I've looked in the Psalms.

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I've looked in Job.

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I've looked in Ecclesiastes.

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I've looked in Dostoyevsky.

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I read C.S.

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Lewis.

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I listened to worship music.

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I prayed.

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I studied the Gospel.

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I even got an actual degree in theology from a university and nothing, nothing, not once, not nearly,

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not ever, not even briefly have I experienced anything that speaks to the existence of a God in the universe.

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I think it's asking a lot of any atheist to seriously engage with a religion

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that he does not believe is true in any circumstances, but I feel like I have I have gone above

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and beyond what can be reasonably expected of any atheist who wishes to entertain the God hypothesis

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and for my efforts I have been awarded radio silence.

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The inescapable God of the NRSV, in other words, is for me the invisible God or the inapproachable God, the deaf distant God.

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The best account that I can give of this experience of complete

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and utter silence from deaf heaven is that all that truly exists to me is impersonal space and air and rocks.

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I know, I know it sucks, I'm sorry, it's a shame, but there's no need to cry about it.

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And nothing more.

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My question to Jonathan then is simple.

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How can theism account for this lived experience?

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How can it account, in other words, for non-resistant non-belief?

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And if atheism, doesn't atheism, offer a better explanation at the very least?

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Am I a non-resistant non-believer?

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If so, what offers a best account, or a better account, of such a condition?

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A universe in which there is a loving God who does want to be my friend, but is for some reason refusing, or hiding, or toying with me?

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Or a universe without one?

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Or is there no such thing as a non-resistant non-believer, which is the only remaining option?

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Do we all secretly resist in some way or other?

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After desperately, in other words, trying to convince myself of God's existence for years and being left painfully unconvinced,

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you just submit as if to add insult to this spiritual injury

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that this is in some way my fault and if it is then what could I have done differently?

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What should I be doing differently?

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What could I possibly have done differently given the course of my life?

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Now assume for a moment ladies and gentlemen the alternative hypothesis of naturalism,

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of atheism and ask if it provides a good account of non-resistant non-belief

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and I think the answer is obvious but it does get worse yet,

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you'll remember that my second fact that I said that I would bring up is the geographical predictability of religious belief.

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Not only does theism need to account for non-resistant non-belief, but also for the fact that such belief is unequally present across the globe.

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Stephen Maitzen has pointed out that the populace of Saudi Arabia is 95% Muslim and therefore 95% theistic,

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whereas the populace of Thailand is 95% Buddhist and therefore at best 5% theistic.

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How likely you are to be a theist, in other words, is intimately tied to the place in which you happen to be born.

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What can better explain this geographical spread?

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Theism or naturalism or atheism?

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Well let's consider our two competing hypotheses.

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Could it be that God does exist but

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that the Thai are simply naturally 20 times more likely to be resistant to belief in God than say the Saudis?

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Are they just naturally 20 times more stubborn or something?

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This seems implausible.

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It doesn't seem to be their fault.

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Okay, so maybe then it's not their fault

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and God just has some reason to hide his face disproportionately more from the Thai than from Saudis, or indeed from those born here in Massachusetts,

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which has a theistic, according to one statistic, is 75% theistic.

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If theism is true, it seems to me that God has a lot to answer for here.

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Is it not troubling, Jonathan,

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as a Christian, that your place of birth is a reliable statistical indicator of how likely you are to be saved?

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I'll say that again.

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Your place of birth, which is entirely arbitrary, is a reliable indicator of how likely you are on Christianity to be saved.

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You're significantly more likely to be a theist if you're born in Rwanda than if you're born in Thailand.

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Can this situation really obtain under the supervision of a God who wants to come to know us

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and makes his existence equally accessible to all?

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The chances seem infinitely small.

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Now consider naturalism or atheism.

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Religion varying by region is exactly what we would expect

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if it is a man-made cultural phenomenon and nothing like what we should expect

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if there is in fact one true God who loves all equally.

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Again I think atheism provides a much stronger account of this fact of our world.

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Finally, then, the third fact of our universe, which is gratuitous suffering.

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Gratuitous here means something like unjustified, or unwarranted, or meaningless.

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I do this because it's easy to see how some instances of suffering may be beneficial in certain circumstances,

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or necessary to bring about some desirable state of affairs, some desirable end.

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But the existence of meaningless, or unnecessary suffering, does seem to be incompatible with the existence of a God who loves us

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and has the power to prevent it from happening.

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We're sometimes told that God has morally sufficient reason to allow suffering to exist.

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Indeed, if God is good then he must have such sufficient reason.

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Perhaps suffering is necessitated by human free will.

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Perhaps suffering helps to develop a person's moral character, or maybe it's necessary to achieve some other end that God wishes to bring about.

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But intuitively there appear to be instances of suffering that cannot serve any such end.

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And if even one example of these turns out to be an actual case of unnecessary or meaningless suffering, this would be enough to cause a problem.

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I want to propose something that might sound a little strange at first, which is that the biggest problem for theism here is not,

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famously, the great, intense sufferings of the world, like holocausts or earthquakes, but rather menial,

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less significant suffering, like being caught out in the rain, or stubbing your toe, or tripping over a curb on the street.

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Why?

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This seems a tad absurd, I'll grant you that, but consider this.

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When we experience a great suffering, like the death of a loved one, or a devastating earthquake, or indeed a holocaust,

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it's easy to imagine that this might somehow be part of a grand plan.

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The depth of our suffering may make us into better people.

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The people who die may be experiencing a much happier state of affairs in the afterlife now.

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Now, perhaps by allowing the Jewish holocaust to take place,

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God makes it such that we are far less likely to allow even worse projects of genocide to occur in the future.

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But what could possibly be served?

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What possible end could be served?

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What possible meaning could there be in subbing your toe?

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Or tripping over a curb?

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Or having a pigeon use your new suit as a restroom?

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Such instances are not significant usually forgotten within a day or two, and therefore do not and cannot develop the soul.

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Nor do they seem plausibly part of some grand design or plan.

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They seem, that is to say, meaningless and unnecessary.

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More meaningless, more meaninglessness, than instances of,

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let's say, great or intense suffering.

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Much more meaningless than these.

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And truly meaningless, unnecessary suffering is certainly more expected in a world without benevolent supervision than in a theistic paradigm.

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A successful theodicy, in other words, then, needs to provide not only an account of the great and intense sufferings of the world, but also the menial sufferings which pervade the human experience.

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Now, I'm actually quite surprised that I've made it this far without mentioning animals yet.

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It's quite unlike me.

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But that's a final consideration that does deserve our attention.

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Whatever theodicy might explain human suffering, The existence of animal suffering seems infinitely more difficult to explain.

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Animals are not free in the way that we are, and so are immune to the free will defense.

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They cannot morally develop in the way that we can, and so are immune to soul-making theodicies.

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They are, on most accounts, not going to heaven, and so they will not be compensated for their suffering.

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Yet their suffering is immeasurably large.

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Somewhere, right now, billions of animals are suffering in the wild, from predation, from disease, from hunger, from fear.

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Imagine a deer with its leg caught under a fallen tree, dying of starved confusion.

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It doesn't know why it's there.

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It feels hungry.

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It's starving to death.

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And it's trapped under a tree.

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And it has no idea why.

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What could possibly be the purpose or meaning of this?

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I'll remind you that this is exactly, exactly, the kind of thing

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So we should expect to see

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if the natural world is an amoral arena of accidentally existing organisms fighting with each other to stay alive.

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But can we really expect this on theism?

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Should we expect this on theism?

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What offers a better account?

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Keep in mind that, in other words, I'm not arguing that theism can offer no account of these kinds of situations and sufferings, though I am skeptical that it can.

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I'm only arguing that assuming that theism is false offers a better account of it than assuming that theism is true.

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from atheism, assume that human beings

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and other animals are nothing more than evolved creatures who developed

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pain receptors to make them more prone to avoiding the menial and great sufferings that upset our survival prospects.

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On this account, the existence of all suffering, small and great, is not only explained but expected.

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Thus atheism offers a better account, in my view, than theism of three crucial and unavoidable facts.

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Divine hiddenness, geographical religious statistics, and the existence of gratuitous human and non-human suffering.

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And I am truly excited to hear how Jonathan might account

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for these on theism in defending it as a more plausible account of our reality.

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Thank you.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: This is Why I Don't Believe in God - Learn English Speaking with Video

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