Today’s article is briefly going over this individual on YouTube who has deemed himself, “The Amazing Atheist”. After seeing him on CNN discussing the topic of atheism in America, along with Christian prominent apologist William Lane Craig, I was curious to see what his YouTube channel contained. After all, I’m not closed off from hearing what new up-and-coming atheists are contributing to their respective causes. Come to find out, his self-proclaimed title of “amazing” was either gratuitously self-indulgent or immensely sarcastic. I was coming from the viewpoint that if a major news network was going to hire an atheist to authoritatively counter Dr. William Lane Craig, they would hire a professional. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much dialogue between Craig and the Amazing Atheist, but as you can see in the video below, Mr. Amazing Atheist wouldn’t have been a comparable voice for the atheists as Craig was for the Christians.

On my search to see what his definition for atheism was, I found a video that provided me with exactly what I wanted. Next is a one minute video of his definition of atheism…

I’ve included a transcript below of this video because he is speaking rather quickly and I find that reading his words help absorb what he is trying to communicate…

“Atheism is the lack of belief in a God or gods. We’ll focus on monotheism here because it is more prevalent. We do not claim to know whether God does not exist but are simply unconvinced that he does. We view God as an un-falsifiable hypothesis much like elves or goblins. Since God is not immediately apparent to any of our senses, evidence is needed if we are going to give the idea of his existence any credence at all. The primary assertion of atheism is not necessarily that there is no God, but rather, there is no good evidence for God and until evidence for God is presented we will be atheists. The beauty of nature is not evidence for God unless the ugly aspects of nature such as disease, famine, rape, and death are evidence against God. Atheists view nature as lacking conscious planning and thus see both its beauty and ugliness as incidental. The Bible, the Koran, someone’s personal sense of God, these things are not evidence but articles of faith. Faith is the opposite of evidence. In fact, the definition of faith is belief without evidence, which is what many atheists are really against but many of these non-evidence based beliefs wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t influence societal opinions and attitudes and negatively influence public policy in our political discourse. With that said, not all atheists have qualms with other people’s religiosity but many people do take issue with it for the very reasons I detailed just moments ago”

Now that we’ve had an opportunity to view his own words, it’s important that we look at what he is saying. We must keep in mind; this is his foundation for his amazing atheism. Contrary to what he indicates, atheism is described as the belief that there is no God . Atheism is not simply the “lack of belief” in God but it is also the belief that God does not exist. As the Amazing Atheist indicated, “we do not claim to know for certain that God does not exist but we are unconvinced that he does”. From Amazing Atheist’s own words, he concedes that he cannot know for certain whether or not God exists. The concept of “certainty” will directly adhere with the degree of faith in a particular concept. The Amazing Atheists’ understanding of the scientific, philosophical, theological, and historical evidence led him to believe with a high degree of certainty that there is no God. However, since he admitted that he cannot know whether God exists absolutely, he filled the small remaining amount of uncertainty in the existence of a God by placing his faith in atheism. Whether or not the Amazing Atheist wants to admit it or not, he is placing faith in the worldview of atheism.

The primary goal of this article was to make my readers aware that people like the Amazing Atheist are becoming increasingly popular. The church needs to become more proactive in intellectually stimulating our youth with solid academic Christian scholarship so they don’t turn to people like this guy for answers to the hard questions. Christians, let’s take up our cross and pursue the task of educating our youth so they may respond with confidence to the non-sense excreting from secular media outlets, the Amazing Atheist, and academic atheists that will surely come.