HECKPHIRE: Intelligence aside, it always ends the same way for the atheist

2025 EP 18

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Episode 18: Intelligence aside, it always ends the same way for the atheist

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5…4...3…2…1 FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

Pursuing truth, torching idols, rebelling against the world. This is the HeckPHire podcast…

Well, it is Friday, which means it is time for the release of another HeckPHire. And here we are! Great to have you aboard. Thanks to everybody that is tuned in across all of the various podcast, podcasting platforms, as well as those of you who are tuned in via YouTube and checking it out there.

I, uh, I'm gonna play something for you today and comment on it, because this is the tale of the tape; this is how it always goes down. I do not care how intellectual. I do not care how book-learned, how scholarly the professing atheist, professing agnostic, professing deist— whatever the case may be— denier of God's applicability and God's involvement and interaction with human affairs, or the existence of God. I don't care how intellectual that person is as far as how many books they've read, how smart they are, how widely traveled they are— all of those things. When the debate settles into a discussion about morality, about right and wrong, the atheist, the agnostic, is completely undone.

I guess I should say, if they are debating or if they are conversing with a, um, a competent mind on the other side.

Okay, I'm not going to suggest to you that a four-year-old who's taking on, you know, a 46-year-old or 52-year-old atheist, that the four-year-old is going to be able to, to match wits, okay? But a competent, well-reasoned, decently thoughtful person is going to be able to. All they have to do is begin presupposition, presuppositional thinking. That sounds really …

The thing is, a lot of people avoid confrontation and avoid debate and avoid conversation, conversation, discussion or debate because they feel like, well, they're not trained; they don't have all the answers. And one of the reasons that they feel that way is because we use these kind of terms, like, well, “presuppositional thinking.”

Well, a lot of people, “I don't know what a presupposition is.” Well, you do. You may just not know the term for it. It just means your basic assumptions, your basic beliefs. You peel away the onion and get down to what it is that roots and grounds your thinking. That's presuppositional thinking.

And once you do that with an atheist or agnostic, they are undone. And I'll tell you why. Because the only reason that we live … We can reason. The only reason that we can reason is because the universe has meaning; because there is thought behind it; because there is mathematics and logic and all of those things.

If we lived in universe of chaos, if we learned … uh, lived in a universe of random chance— i.e., there is no God; there is no mind behind the universe— then we would not be able to fundamentally, we wouldn't be able to think, we wouldn't be able to reason, we wouldn't be able to rationalize. None of that can come about by material chance. None of it.

And without a moral law-giver, then it is flatly absurd to reason that there is such a thing as moral law. And yet, every single one of us— including the atheist, including the agnostic— they believe in a moral law. They operate with the basic assumption of moral law.

The difference is, the atheist has no ability to explain where it came from. They know it's there. They, they begrudgingly admit that it's there, but they have no basis for it whatsoever.

Let me, let me get into this. If you don't know who Sam Seder is, Sam Seder is the, uh, he's the host of The Majority Report podcast. It's a very well-listened-to and well-liked podcast. It's, um, he's on … what's the show? I'm trying to think of the name of the show. Bob's Burgers! He's one of the voices of Bob's Burgers. I don't watch the show, but I have here in my notes that it's Hugo. So if you watch the show, then you know who that is.

But Sam Seder, he is a professing agnostic— well, you'll hear him explain who he is. But he goes on this YouTube show called Jubilee, which is basically where they put a thinker in a room with 20 people that disagree with him. Okay? So in this case, they put Sam Seder, who is a left-wing Progressive atheist or agnostic thinker, reformed Jew, as he calls himself, they put him in a room with 20 MAGA Republicans, and they debate a wide spectrum of things.

There is a gentleman— Eliazar, I believe, is the guy's name— who gets up there and sits across, across from Seder who wants to address Seder's opposition to religious fundamentalism. Okay?

I want you to watch how this unfolds and understand that it does not matter … You could exchange Sam Seder for Sam Harris. You could exchange, exchange Sam Seder for Richard Dawkins. You could exchange him for Carl Sagan, if Carl Sagan was still alive. Anybody you want to put in that chair this ends up the exact same place. Every single time it will end up in the exact same place— which, by the way, should be telling us something.

A lot of people reject the idea of God because they believe, “Well, I don't, I don't need to believe in a God. I don't need the, the fairy tales. I don't need all of that stuff. If I can't see it, then it must not exist.”

Number one, that is incredibly arrogant. I always ask people this, because I don't think they intend to be arrogant, but when they come to such a hardened decision that, “Well, no there could be, there could be no God. There is no God.” Stop and consider how little you actually know. Show a little humility. In the grand scheme of the universe, all the mysteries that we don't get, that we don't understand—and I'm talking, when I say “we,” [of] mankind as a whole— but individually, think about yourself and how much is out there that you don't know, in all of the various fields of study, in all of it, all that there is to know, how little you actually possess in your mind.

Now, think of it the opposite way, and ask yourself, is it or is it not possible that in that huge swath— what do you want to say, that you know 1/1,000,000,000 of all there is to know in the universe? I think that may be exaggerating a little bit. I think it's probably a smaller amount than that. But let's, let's just say you know 1/1,000,000,000 of what there is to know in the universe. Are you telling me then, in those billions of parts that you don't know there isn't room for God, that it isn't even possible He could exist?

It's just flatly absurd. It's flatly arrogant for someone to profess that they know beyond a shadow of a doubt, particularly when there's all the fingerprints of God all over the place. So let's get into this.

One of the fingerprints, of course, is the fact that we reason, that we think. There must be a mind behind the universe, otherwise, that isn't possible. And then on top of it, the existence of moral law.

Watch how this begins with Sam Seder and this guy named Eleazar.

<video clip begins>

Eleazar, (to Sam Seder): Are you an atheist?

Seder: I'm a reformed Jew. I don't, I, my, I don't have a strong belief in the existence of God, but I don't think that religion, in and of itself, is bad.

Eleazar: Okay, so what's wrong with religious fundamentalists? So, like when you said, you said “trans rights and women's rights,” or something like that?

Seder: Well, the problem I have with religious fundamentalists, and really more, I guess, it's really theocrats, is that they want to impose their morality that comes from their religion on the rest of us. And I don't, I don't …”

<video clip pauses>

Peter Heck: Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. He doesn't want to, he doesn't like religious fundamentalism because it wants to impose its morality, people who are religious fundamentalists who want to impose their reality— or their morality, I should say— on everybody else.

Okay. What do you want to do, Sam? What do you want to do? You want laws enacted that you believe are … what? That you believe are right. So what are you seeking to do? You are seeking to impose your morality on everybody else.

This is, this is what always frosts me whenever we get into these conversations about, “Well, you can't legislate morality.” Okay, we really need to be specific about what we're saying. If, if you are saying that the law cannot change a person's heart, that is correct. I would agree with that. Though the law may be the great moral teacher over time— I think you can have an impact as to what people perceive— but I'll agree you can't change someone's heart by changing a law.

I think it was Martin Luther King, Jr. that said, “The law may not be able to make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”

Laws will restrain evil. That's the point of laws. Okay? To restrain evil, from the outside. Since it can't happen inwardly, it's going to happen from the outside.

By the way, this is another key point that it's, I think, is a demonstration of why religious principle is absolutely critical for the preservation of civil society. It's exactly why George Washington said that national morality will not exist, will not prevail, in exclusion of religious principle. If you exclude religious principle, then people are no longer going to be restrained within themselves, morally, and if … the less there is within, the more there will have to be without.

Which, by the way, if the government moves to restrict your ability to act, so as to protect other people— to restrain you from the outside— what are you losing a little of? <nodding> Right, you're losing a little freedom.

Do you see the relationship? Religious principle is essential in a society for freedom to endure, because “men's passions will forge their fetters.” That's what Edmund Burke said, and he's exactly right. The more we lash out of moral boundaries, then the people who are harmed are going to cry out to government for more laws to protect them. And when the government makes more laws to protect them because we aren't restrained morally from within, because we no longer have religious principle, then the government acting to restrain us from without limits our freedoms. It's, it's, it's a simple process in understanding this.

So we have to be specific about what we mean when we say “we can't legislate morality.” Yes, you cannot change someone's heart by force through a law; true.

But if what you're talking about is who is going to be determining what is the evil we want to restrain, every law is going to legislate some view of morality. If every law restrains something that is bad— it tells somebody what the limits are or what they can't do— that is, that's based off of somebody's or some group of people's view of what is right and what is wrong; what is good and what is evil.

So what makes the religious fundamentalists’ view of what is good and what is evil somehow inappropriate, but Sam Seder's view of what is good and what is evil as more appropriate? Explain that to me. Sam can't explain that to you.

Now, can I, as a Christian? Yeah. I absolutely can, because there is a fundamental basis for what good and evil is, and it's not my opinion; it's the character of God.

“Well, how do I know the character of God?” Well, I know the character of God because He chose to reveal it to us in the Scriptures. That is the only fundamental, grounded, rooted basis by which morality doesn't just become the whims and opinions of man.

It's kind of what Eleazar gets into in this discussion with Sam Seder. Let's keep going:

<video resumes>

Eleazar: But morality, from your view, is going to be a preference, right? It's not morality; it's a preference.

Seder: What’s, uh . . .

Eleazar: So, morality without a foundation is going to reduce you to a preference.

Seder: Well, I have a foundation for my morality.

Eleazar: Which is what?

Seder: It's a humanist vision of what basically creates as little suffering as possible for as many people.

<clip pauses>

Peter Heck: Okay, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. His standard is, “what creates as little amount of suffering for as many people as possible.”

First of all, who told him that suffering was wrong? Where did that idea come from? Where is it written down, or where is it established, that if I have to hurt somebody to get something for myself, that it's wrong for me to do that?

By the way, I believe that it's wrong for me to do that, but how do I know? Because that's contrary to the character of God. That's my fundamental basis. Where does Seder get this idea? Where does Seder— or any agnostic, any atheist— where do they come up with the idea that it is wrong for one person to take advantage of somebody else? Is that not the law of nature? Is that not what Darwin taught us?

I'm not trying to lump Darwinian evolution in with the whole thing, but isn't that the rule? If we're all animals, isn't that what we do? So, who says that there is some moral principle that tells me I can't? An animal doesn't worry about moral principles, so why should I? I'm just a further evolved animal, am I not?

Apart from what he would call “religious fundamentalism”— I'll say apart from the Bible— there is no standard that is grounded that can apply across civilizations and across times and eras and eons. It's absolutely critical for that.

All right, let's keep going here with what he says.

<video clip resumes>

Eleazar: Okay, so you're like a Consequentialist? Utilitarian?

Seder: Uhhh, I, uh, I don't really, uh—

Eleazar: Okay; it’s fine—

Seder: — bother myself with being a Consequentialist or Utilitarian.

<video clip pauses>

Peter Heck: He doesn't, he doesn't “bother himself” with definitions of what he is. Can I tell you what that means? That means he makes a living off of attacking and criticizing religious fundamentalists, but he has never been asked to provide his own basis for anything. And this is the way of the world in Western society now. People live off of criticizing the Christian worldview. And if you want to criticize it, it's fine, but you need to be able to explain and offer something better and something different, and Seder cannot.

He can tell me everything that's wrong with religious fundamentalism from his viewpoint, but he cannot explain why his viewpoint is the better one and the more logical one. That's a big problem. Go ahead; roll it.

<video clip resumes>

Eleazar: It's always going to reduce you to a preference. So if you say that killing is wrong and I say it's right, you would really have no contention with that.

Seder: Well, no, I, I, I don't base my understanding of civil society on religion.

<video clip pauses>

Peter Heck: Yes, he does. He does base it on religion: a religion of humanity, or, I believe in Seder’s case, a religion is in his own mind. He is the god of his own little universe. He'll determine in his own mind what is right and what is wrong.

He thinks that murder is wrong. That's good. I'm glad that he does. But, what happens if tomorrow he changes his mind? Does that somehow make it right?

Well, Seder wouldn't have a grounding by which you could say, “No, it's not right.”

All right, get back to this.

<video clip resumes>

Seder, continuing: And so we have a civil society. We have laws that we have decided as a society in a democratic way. And for some people, it's okay for it to be informed by their religion; that's okay.

Eleazar: Okay, perfect. So if tomorrow, society comes together and we say, “Hey, trans- folks don't deserve rights,” you would be okay with that?

Seder: No, I would, I would, I would be against it. But, I mean, it would be . . .

Eleazar: It would be morally right under your view—

Seder: Not morally right.

<video clip ends>

Peter Heck: Yes. Yes, he is talking about morals.

I mean, this was … This seems like he just got trapped; like it was a gotcha moment, but it's not. There's nothing “gotcha” about that.

Okay, Sam, explain to me that— this is all that Eleazar does here— he simply says, “Sam, explain to me why you think that something is right or wrong; how do we explain that?

And Sam's explanation was, “We've come together as a society, and we've decided that these things are right and these things are wrong; popular opinion. That's how we've decided what morality is.” That's what he just defined morality to be.

And so, boom, the logical question is, then, “Okay, well, there was a time when the majority of civilization felt like slavery was okay.” Just … We're living in a time where a majority of civilization thinks that it's okay to murder a baby in the womb. That that's how we determine it?

So, if tomorrow we decided that transgender people shouldn't have rights, or maybe— we'll take it a step further— should just be executed, then it would become a moral thing?

And immediately, Sam knows, “No, that's not right. No, that's not … No, it wouldn't be okay if a majority of society decided that.”

Okay. He's right. Of course, it doesn't suddenly become okay because morality is objective. It is rooted in something concrete— the character of God. That's how we know. But how does somebody like Sam, that doesn't profess belief in God, how does he know?

Well, Paul explains that when he says that the moral law of God has been written across men's hearts, so that men are without excuse. Even those that reject belief in, believing in God, they still have the moral law that judges them, that holds them accountable. It's there; they’re without excuse.

You can't say, “Well, you can't hold me accountable because I didn't know God and I didn't worship Him, and I didn't read His Bible> I didn't do any of that stuff!”

Sorry, the moral law is written upon your hearts, and that's what Sam is expressing right here. When he knows of course, it's not right to strip people, execute people, or strip people of their rights. No, you can't do that. That's not moral.

But according to Sam's own definition of morality, it would be moral. That's the problem. It always ends up the same way.

Yes, when people say, “Well, I can be good without God,” hold on. You can do good things apart from believing in a god, but how do you know that they're “good?” I can say you did good things apart from [you] knowing God, because I have a basis for what good is.

You helped an old lady across the street. Okay, how do I know that that's good? Because that's the character of God, and God is goodness; He is the definition of what good is. So if your behavior is like God, then I know that that is good. If it's contrary to who God is, then I know that that behavior is evil, that that behavior is bad, and it needs to be avoided. That is a concrete understanding of what morality is.

So, yes, Seder can help an old lady across the street and say, “I'm doing good.” He is correct. He is doing good because he is loving his neighbor— a direct command, and directly the character of God.

The problem for Seder is [sic] isn't that he can't do any good; it's that he has no standard by which he can determine what good is and bad is, other than the moral law written upon his heart which drives him to do those things, and he doesn't attribute it to the God who deserves that credit.

This, this played out in a debate that I had with the president of American Atheists years ago, and I'm not going to run that clip for you, but she professed to me— I think it may even still be on YouTube; Ellen Johnson was her name— but she professed to me on the radio that there is no morals or ethics or, you know, a core belief system for an atheist; everything is relative.

And it was like 90 seconds later, she had brought up how Muslims, Islam, they beat women in the Middle East, and they base it off of their religion, which I think she thought was proving that religion is immoral. But of course, in order for her to declare it immoral, she has to have a standard, and that's what I said to her.

“You said that all ethics are relative, but it sounds like you're pretty cut and dry on beating women. That there is an obvious right and wrong when it comes to beating women; assault.”

She said, “Yeah, and I'm an atheist.”

And I said, “Right, that's the point. You know that there is this moral law. So how do you know? Where does it come from?”

The atheist, the agnostic, will never be able to explain that. They'll never be able to explain it without eventually being reduced to where Seder was, but didn't want to stay. Which is: it's just an opinion. It's a majority opinion at best, or personal opinion at worst.

Listen, there are a lot of Christians, a lot of Bible-believing Christians, who believe oftentimes or feel oftentimes intellectually subservient, intellectually inferior to some of these big time professors at universities, and these scholars who are atheist or agnostic, or they know so much, and they know so many words, and they have all of these degrees, all this alphabet soup after their name, and they feel, Christians feel, so inferior. Man, if you understand that God is the basis of morality, you are, logically-speaking, a million steps beyond where folks like Sam Seder and leading intellectuals on college campuses, where they are in their understanding of the world that we live in. It's, it's astounding every time you see it.

Is it worth pointing this stuff out? Yeah, I think it is. Not, because I think that Sam Seder is going to be changed, or the most rabid people … That, that's the thing about these debates.

My friend, John, posted on Twitter. “The problem with debates like this is the losers oftentimes don't even know that they lost.”

And I would agree that Seder is not going to believe that, and Seder’s, people are going to rally around him, even if they know it didn't go real well, and they'll defend, “Oh, well, yeah, look at these ignorant, these ignoramuses that he's debating.”

So, in that sense, yeah, kind of … what was that worth? But it helps us to discuss it, because you and I have personal conversations. And they don't have to be in front of cameras. They don't have to be in a situation where somebody feels put on the spot.

But simple questions that we can ask, driving a person. “Okay, I know you think that I'm nutty for what I believe as a Christian, but have you ever thought, like, why do you know some things are right and wrong? How do you know? Have you ever thought through that?” That's, that's a pretty effective use of logic. It's a pretty, pretty winsome way to talk to somebody. So if nothing else, take that from this debate.

Appreciate your thoughts. Peter@PeterHeck.com is the email address. Peter@PeterHeck.com.

If you are a paid subscriber, coming up in the second half here of the, uh— well, I shouldn't say “the second half”— coming up in the After-Hours edition. Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson has stirred the pot again by talking about how Iran is really not the biggest threat in the world, and it's all a distraction, and people just saber rattling and wanting to go to war with Iran, and we got a lot bigger problems than radical Islam. And I was initially pretty opposed to that idea. And I could … I'm gonna show you some video of what radical Islamists just did in Syria. You're not seeing it on the news, because when it happens to Christians, oftentimes it doesn't get noticed. I think it's in Syria and Nigeria.

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