With the advent of Super Thanks, I'm starting a pledge to read and answer each Super Thanks comment left as I'm newly full-time and appreciate the financial support so much. For many reasons, I greatly appreciate the time and thought put in to every comment, but schedule and mental health prevents me from replying to each individually.

I subconsciously knew for years that Christianity was a lie. I suppressed that knowledge and tried (desperately) to live as a Christian. But eventually I brought my conscious and subconscious knowledge into alignment. Now I am whole and happy.

If a fool can figure out that there is no God, what's Greg's excuse?

Koukl is the modern example of 'the artful dodger'. If he doesn't like the question he works hard to rewrite the question to fit answers he likes to give.

I find it interesting that Greg claims atheists bring shallow arguments while presenting the most shallow argument ever, "You know, you know the truth, you're only suppressing it."🤪

I met Greg Koukl once in a bar. He told me he is just in it for the money. This definitely happened. And congrats to 100k subscribers!

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” And a wise man shouts it from the rooftops.

The sad thing is, it's entirely possible that Greg isn't being dishonest when he incorrectly summarizes previous interactions, because every time he has a conversation, a radically filtered version of that conversation gets filed into his long-term memory, and that becomes indisputable fact to him. When someone says "I didn't say that" he never doubts his own memory, he assumes the other person is either not remembering correctly, or is being deceptive. EVERYTHING that he hears and everything that he says gets filtered through a lens of confirmation bias.

That was worded very well. I've been with me 24/7 for 56 years and while I'm certainly not an expert on much, when it comes to *me* I'm pretty much the worlds leading expert. So, if you're trying to convince me that what you believe is true, demonstrating that you don't know what you're talking about, by attacking the one thing I am absolutely sure of, is not a great way to go about it.

When I was a Christian, and I saw books and writings, say like Htichens and "God is Not Good", I would actively avoid it, to say in my head that it is wrong whole-sale. It did NOT pursue reading and hearing things that went against my faith. If I heard x that was in contradiction, I would find an apologetic that shored up my faith, against the argument's logic or rationale. Truly, this is what I did. I suppressed truth. I suppressed real, logical arguments that had incontrovertible evidence, like how the Synoptics do contradict each other. I wouldn't hear it and would not study it.

I’m a simple man, I see a new Paulogia video, I drop what I’m doing, watch the video, and hit that like button.

I have issue with believers always telling me that I do believe but simply deny, as though they know what's going through my head. I spend way too much time trying to explain how belief is not the choice they make out to be. In my eyes, belief is the result of persuasion. Either I am convinced of something, thus believing, or I'm not. I don't get to choose. So, to me, the idea of going to hell for something that god has failed to do, or outright chosen not to do, i.e. convince me of its existence, is asinine.

"Things we know to be true, but we don't like" perfectly sums up my journey away from faith. Eventually the logical and experienced lack of evidence for God grew so big that I couldn't keep slathering more faith on top of it. It was a patchy mess with larger and larger parts uncovered and exposed. I couldn't ignore it any longer and I had to confront it no matter how much I didn't like admitting that I didn't believe in God even though that was the truth.

The “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” thing is a circular argument. You know, the same principle in Romans 1:18-20 can be applied to ANY fictitious deity.

I was suckered by a scam (an MLM) their promotional material was full of 'this is really true' statements and full of warnings that even my best friend would try and discourage me OUT OF JEALOUSY

Paul, one of my favorite things about your approach is that you don't put words in people's mouths. You show them speaking. Koukl is a repeat offender deceiver when it comes to "misremembering" (read: inventing) stories that help his cause, and I appreciate that you show this and move on. Growing up in the church, I can't count how many times I heard pastors and evangelists employ this Entirely Made Up Story tactic only to hear the faithful parrot those stories and insist they were true. Once enough time had passed, if you challenged these people, a lot of them would insist that they saw it happen... kind of like all the people who claim to have been at Woodstock.

I have ran into many instances of people who feel angst from something they are not actually guilty of, because they had been trained to use guilt as a goto instead of rational evaluation of something that went wrong.

It kills me the lies they will support just to sell another book.

But we’re not responsible for what happens in our subconscious mind. If we are, that means we’re also responsible for everything we do in dreams, because dreams are created by the subconscious mind. Going to the analogy Greg likes to use, it’s like sending someone to jail for killing someone in a dream.

The bible quotes: "the fool says in his heart...", so what? Darth Vader finds everyone not believing in the Force "...disturbing" (while magically choking him). Doesn't make Jedi, Sith and the Force any more non-fictional...

Koukl always sounds like a used car salesman. His voice quality, cadence and pronunciation (adding the "y" sound before vowels -- thyat, yin, thyere, hyave...) grate on me before he even starts his dodge and deflect. Paul, I clicked to hear your analysis because it is ALWAYS informative.

It's always so *intensely* frustrating when apologists pull the "well, you think some things are right or wrong, therefore you have objective morality, therefore gAwD. Otherwise right and wrong is just opinion, therefore there's no real reason not to be bad". x_x I recognize that morality is a construct that exists from a combo of empathy and the social contract in order to ensure cooperative survival and yet I feel strongly about that morality, even if that's all it comes from. Things don't need to come from an authority to be true or exist.

congrats on the 100k dude, been here for half of it. love your stuff and your laid back approach. hope to be here for at least the next 900k. ps. loved seeing you on the creaky blinder's podcast

I wonder if Greg is capable of a sincere conversation with a non-Christian, or if he views every conversation through "tactical" lenses. What a sad way to see other human beings.

We didn’t evolve “morality” in the same way we didn’t evolve medicine. We evolved the ability to reason along with evolving to be a social species. We evolved to value survival and cooperation and used our reason to create tools to further those purposes. Tools like medicine, education, government, and morality. And just like any other technology, morality has been tweaked and refined, which is why we see so much variation in morality across cultures and across time. All moral systems, even Christianity’s, have the same aim: maximizing well-being, but as we learn more about the world and ourselves we find parts of morality that work better or worse for that purpose, and thus refine it. Humans used to think slavery was perfectly moral (especially Christians), but we don’t anymore since we realized that being of a different race doesn’t make someone less human (although some have yet to realize this unfortunately). So I would agree it is wrong to say that we evolved to be moral, but only because it is imprecise. We did evolve behaviors and instincts that led us to invent morality to better align ourselves toward humanity’s shared goals.

It would be interesting to see one of these guys actually try to convert someone rather than just reassure believers who might be having some doubts.

Greg's argument is directly reversible. It, more or less, describes my move, as a youth, from theism to atheism. I did not admit to myself, at first, that I found Christianity illogical, unhistorical, immoral and no more likely to be "right" than any other religion. Do this mean that if I find his line of reasoning unsound, I should find my reasoning unsound or am I confused?

Dang, you are good at analogies, Paul.

Well, now that Greg has read bible passages at me I am surely convinced.

Yayy! 100K subscribers! Congratulations Paul, it's well deserved

The real irony here is that Psalm 14:1 contradicts Romans 1:20 by outright saying that there are people who believe in their hearts that there is no god.

I love your work, Paul. Much sincerity from France

About 25 minutes in the woman says that “They [Atheists] don’t like god.” Would she like a person that is murderous, cruel, causes people to be sick, and is willing to burn people alive that don’t like him? Simple questions like mine actually get some of them to think about what they are saying. Good work, Paulogia.

"... a fool has said in his heart..." Well, yeah. My heart is a muscle. It pumps blood. It does not think nor reason. My brains however, has looked at the evidence, and found them wanting. Poor. So... I withhold belief.

Wow, the projection is impressive

Thank you for sharing this. GK's arguments seem to be one unfalsifiabe statement after another. We're lying to ourselves whether we know it or not. We hold to ideas until we don't and that's because we don't really hold to those ideas. It seems to be, I'm right and even when it looks like I'm wrong, I'm right. He's a shining example of how disingenuous apologists are.

The whole thing is summed up in one phrase. She said, "... is there a reason why some people do not accept the existence of God." This question is asked under the presumption that God exists,, while it questions people who make no such assumption. The existence of "God" has never been shown to be possible, let alone proven.

I've seen people asking for help because their faith was wavering. When they finally stop believing, it makes no sense to say that they suppressed the knowledge. They tried to hold on to a belief, not to suppress a knowledge.

Fool or not I have no reason to believe in the invisible sky wizard and plenty of reasons not too. If by chance that genocidal maniac in the sky exist. That is one monster I will not worship.

Congrats on 100k subs! And... You've got to love when theists call Atheists presumptuous for not holding the belief the theist presumes the atheist _must_ secretly have...

Ah, thank you Koukl, you finnaly cured me from my my unreasonable fear of being in Cars, through making me see that I am not really afraid of them! Great.

4.57 - 'We suppress, consciously, things that we know to be true but we don't like''. Yes, that would include things like the earth being billions of years old, humans being one of the great apes, common ancestry with all other living creatures, evolution, all that sort of stuff. Christians are brilliant at projecting their own shortcomings onto those who do not share their beliefs.

Awesome and congrats on 100 k Paul. You really do deserve it. You were critically undersubbed for years. I remember when you and Shannon, and others were doing vids on the GDC. You have come so far. Thank you for all the wonderful content over the years. It really is a pleasure watching your vids. I still look forward and get excited about your content everytime you drop a vid or now do a live. Keep up the great work bud

Congrats on the 100k subs!!!!

Intellectually, I understand cognitive dissonance, but the sheer levels it can get to always seem to surprise me. Like, how can you bring up the devil blinding people to God in the same conversation you are blaming those people for not processing their believe?

I noticed in the interview replay they cut him off when the guy said "a guy might not kill themself if they think they are going to hell..." when trying to explain how the idea might have had an evolutionary advantage.

Love to see PineCreek Doug getting more attention, even if it's tertiary. I just watched his video w/ Koukl the other day, and just couldn't look away.

when you need to sell a certain religious dogma or other superstitious nonsense - you write stuff like "the fool says in his heart" and you threaten people with eternal torture if they don't believe. Works like a charm apparently

What about people how never heard of his God? Are they suppressing belief in his God? Can you suppress something you had no idea existed? I think he knows God isn't real, but he's suppressing his disbelief. Great episode as usual Paul! Congrats on the 100k subs.

ANOTHER GOOD ONE PAUL. Very well thought out.

Greg "I only care about appearances" Koukl is one of our greatest allies. Think about it. He is arrogant, obnoxious and is projecting constantly. He probably has turned more people Atheist than Paul has. PS. Congrats on hitting the 100k mark.

11:50 Him saying that "a lot of these evolutionary stories are just that, stories" while believing in creationism because the bible says so is so hypocritical it's hilarious.

I was lying to myself when I was making mental gymnastics to conciliate what I knew to be real (the stuff I was seeing in my microscope) and what I wanted to be real (religion) because it would displease my family if I came out as an atheist. Apologists never seem to give atheists the benefit of the doubt, do they? We're all liars to this crowd. Might be they are suppressing the belief that we may have a point because their paychecks depend on the religion stuff being right.

This is my favorite weekend cartoon.

So convenient for apologists that their scripture tells them that non-believers are actually believers.

I love how this type of argument is probably held by the same people who would call "group hallucination" argument for the resurrection absurd😆. Like, every non-beleiver (billions) is falling under the same psychological phenomenon but a handful of people sharing one psychological event is *totally* out of the question😂 (not putting the hallucination argument forward, just an observation).

Ok, I'm envisioning you and ShannonQ siting around the house and you ask, "Explain the subconscious to me." As you take notes. LOL.

Paul just calmly disintegrated their nonsense. Top tier.

Book says a thing.

These two Christians on the video complain that atheists are shallow thinkers? I can't imagine a more shallow method of thinking than to go to an old book and believe everything written in it. I always thought that self reflection was part of deeper thinking but is seems memorizing quotes from an old book is far deeper.

Listening to these two is like watching a person use a hammer to shove every geometrical peg into a differently shaped hole, and then explaining why they all fit perfectly in any hole by nature!

Finally 100,000 subscribers!

I love how he drew all of his supporters at the end

Oh, gosh, Christians, via the Bible, say I am a fool. How shall I ever make it through my day?

Whoa almost at 100k subs! Congrats! 🎊

I watched this when it first came out and have rewatched it numerous times. It is one of your very best!

Koukl: "What's MISSING is the work of the spirit." I love how Koukl made all of his previous comments irrelevant by that last phrase.

Romans 1:20 "...God's invisible qualities...have been clearly seen...". How does THAT work? 😉

I had to watch, and listen, to this one twice. Really interesting the way you untangle a lot of material that would otherwise go over my head. Not that some of it still doesn't, but I get a lot further on with your help than without it. I enjoyed your approach. All the best in your endeavors.

I think this is one of your best videos ever. There is some very good thought put into this. I would be most interested in Koukl's response.

My “cos the Bible tell me so” meter is now off the scale and had a melt down 😂

Koukl said "relativistic morality". Yes, it's true; atheist standards of right and wrong that only apply at speeds approaching c.

Conversation between Pinecreek and Koukl on CC channel is worth watching. Koukl admits that people literally go to hell because God did not intervene in their lives. Still, he's too afraid to say that in his own view God is responsible for people going to hell (which is actually understandable given he really believes in a cruel tyrant ruling the world)

What if everyone who calls themselves "atheist" just starts calling themselves "agnostic" instead?

I salute your efforts, sir! "It's difficult to reason a person out of a position that they weren't reasoned into."

Doug is just suppressing that conversation with Greg. Or Greg is just making crap up.

People like Greg are vile. There's no other way to describe what he's doing here.

Fantastic Video. Thank you again. Really great content.

Paul. This is extremely good. It is obvious a lot of work and thought went into it.

The thing with Koukl's suppressed knowledge dodge is that we either consciously know something or we don't. Having "unconscious knowledge" (which is not the same thing as dispositional belief) is in no way relevant if we cannot access it deliberately. So "knowing something unconsciously but having it suppressed" is functionally the same as consciously not knowing it. And it is through conscious thought that we question the existence of God and/or come to the conclusion that he either exists or doesn't. 4:44 And here's the dodge. If you could not access that so called knowledge of God when you question God's existence, are you at that moment sincere in your disbelief of God or not? Koukl has to assert that you'd be DISHONEST and a "Fool" (how dare he insult the Great Fool That Doesn't Belong To This Era!) in that situation. That would be like saying someone misremembering something in a sworn statement in court committed perjury where perjury requires premeditation to answer with falsehood. 7:25 And when that atheist is saying that, even if we grant that there IS suppressed knowledge of God (which has not been proven even up to this point btw), is that belief deliberately suppressed, meaning that atheist is fully aware of that belief at the moment but is simply unwilling to acknowledge it. If not, then can we consider the atheist to be dishonest and a "Fool" given this circumstance? 9:45 Well he misses the point there as expected. Because the point is not that morality HAS to be objective, but rather it is as an explanation for how morality forms as a naturalistic process. In fact, while he is accusing Doug for here, is bringing to fore his OWN bias about morality necessarily being objective, which is exactly what he's attempting to accuse Doug of, for having preconceived "unconscious" beliefs that come to fore at certain moments. I doubt Koukl is even aware that he's doing this when he did this, so it certainly counts as exactly that in this case. 11:44 Yup, I called it, Doug wasn't saying that morality necessarily is naturalistic or relative/not objective. What he's doing is positing an answer to the assertion that morality could only come from a God (along with other things like creation of the universe), by offering a counter-explanation that features these things happening naturally. Doug isn't necessarily saying that that's what he believes to be or asserts to be the "truth" about morality and the creation of the universe in this particular context (notwithstanding whether or not he actually holds such beliefs in general), he's simply saying: "Your explanation is not the only one, here's another that doesn't need a designer or God." 12:00 This is projection at its finest. Koukl is implicitly asserting here that his beliefs are "quantified in the cellular sense", whatever that means, while the naturalistic explanation given by Doug is not. I would wager that the reverse is more likely to be true. 12:40 Hahahaha yeah. Jan 6th Capitol Insurrection based on the sincere belief that Trump won the 2020 elections but the win was somehow "stolen" by Biden. It is a belief that holds NO basis in reality, but even today, many people in the America (the FarQ party base for the most part) STILL hold on sincerely to that belief. I will never stop using this example over and over because it's as relevant an example as we can get right now. 13:39 And here it becomes absolutely clear just how shallow Koukl's belief is. His entire reason for believing Romans 1;20 is because it is Romans 1:20. Like that's literally it. 13:50 Again, how does this affect the sincerity of these people? If Romans 1:20 claims they aren't consciously aware, then can we call them dishonest? If Romans 1:20 claims they ARE consciously aware (and this seems to be the more likely case), then the Bible is simply wrong based on a simple example of how people who sincerely disbelieve in God exist. Whether or not they are MISTAKEN or unaware that God exists is irrelevant, we are talking about their sincerity here. 18:14 And this leads to subjective interpretations of such perceived reactions based on presupposed bias even when there might be none. At the very least, I can see how someone who already has the preconceived notion that all atheists are dishonest a la Romans 1:20 to "perceive" such "subconscious reactions" in the atheists they confront, regardless of whether or not that perception holds any basis in reality. I suppose I could argue that Koukl's erroneous recollection of his conversation with Doug can be considered such an example. 22:43 Great, more Biblical examples of how atheists are so dishonest and stuff, although now they pin in=t on something else, the Fall. Convenient out I must say. 23:18 And the 2nd biggest scapegoat for Christianity, the Devil. I wonder when they will get to the actual answer in their own theology and accuse their number one scapegoat, God, for all this. After all, nothing can happen without God's say so. If they say the Fall did it, then God allowed the fall to happen, God is the one who wanted men to "rise in rebellion against him" ultimately as he knew beforehand everything that would happen. Kudos for the explanation that Satan did it as Satan surely could not have done anything without both God's foreknowledge of the repercussions AND his consent and willingness. Finally if humans are simply that way by their own individual merit, then as the creator God created each and every single one of these dishonest atheists knowing that that's what they would become. In other words, he created such dishonest atheists with the intention that they be dishonest. 24:23 But at the same time that truth seeker would be honest about seeking what he cannot find. 25:31 Not necessarily because simply knowing that God exists does not automatically make God worth following or worshiping. It's the same if we ask them if they would follow Allah if we could prove that Allah exists and Islam is the truth. 29:45 Not to mention that the holy spirit angle kind of contradicts the other points. If a lack of the holy spirit's intervention would mean that those who disbelieve would never believe, then this not only puts the fault firmly on God since God IS the Holy Spirit according to the belief in the trinity, but also that the other explanations become worthless. Satan does not need to blind anyone, nor does the fall need to have occurred to mislead anyone, no indeed does any individual human have any responsibility for actively resisting God. No, even if we factor out all of those, so long as God doesn't make these unbelievers believe by entering them in the form of the Holy Spirit, then they will remain unbelievers. Which is to say all the unbelievers ultimately are unbelievers because of God deliberately withholding the Holy Spirit from them, and the rest of the explanations can simply discarded because this one explanation is the overarching one. I don't know if Koukl is a Calvinist, but this is as ringing a subconscious endorsement of Calvinism as any I've seen if so.

How is 'the Christian God doesn't align to my internal moral compass' a trivial problem? If God wrote morality into my heart, then that is a major problem. Unless he intentionally made me with a corrupted morality, in which the all loving God condemned me to hell during my creation.

Paulogia, this was great! One thing you alluded to, I think many believers just coast without thinking about it, then something happens and they get more religious. These sometimes claim they were atheist! And another thing, most believers don't truly act like they believe, such as being distraught at death, even though, especially in the case of a child, they're sure they went to a better place. This can't be covered by 'we'll miss them', as it is often the same for some they rarely saw. There are other instances, too. 👍💖💙🥰✌

What a hammer blow at the end

This just means, that Psalm 14:1 is an ad-hom, Rom. 1:18 is an ad-hoc assertion, which leads right into the gaslighting of Rom. 1:20.

True, I'm a fool and I have said in my heart that there is no God. (as in Yahweh) I guess this makes Christianity a "greater fool scheme"?

Drowning in counterexamples. A cruel fate, but I ... I ... I supressed the idea.

The projection levels are over 9000 from Greg.

I hate the "you believe in your heart" argument. It is so egotistical that it just disgusts me. The entire thing is based around the thought that someone else knows what i think better than i do, and they can and do use that basic assumption to attribute whatever belief they want to me.

Whenever I get the chance, I will always point out Greg Koukl is the most intellectually dishonest apologist I’ve ever had the misfortune to hear.

What? An apologist bearing false witness?! It can't be...

Just one single human in all of history, who genuinely seeks and would believe if offered sufficient evidence, but does not believe because they cannot find that evidence, falsifies the god hypothesis. There must be thousands of such people at a minimum.

Greg is a man who is incapable of imagining people who are not himself.

If the Apologetic brings the Devil into play he is on a very slippery slope. How do we know that it was not the Devil who raised Jesus? Did the Devil also mislead Paul and the Gospel writers in order to bring confusion to the world? If you accept the concept of the Devil there is no way of knowing that.

Congrats on 100K

Paul playing hard to get “introduce me first” I mean maybe even a dinner & a movie.. make him work for it Paul 🍻

I think I heard Amy say she would love someone who would threaten her with torture, because they would threaten her with torture. Amy must be a masochist. A psychological masochist at the least.

I think Greg is lying to himself, and he doesn't even know it. I think he thinks, "I have good evidence and good reasons for believing in God," but deep down, he knows he doesn't, and he is suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. See, it's not nice, is it? So how about we all stop pretending to know each other's thoughts better than the person who is actually thinking those thoughts, and have a real conversation like grown-ups?

He ties everything he does to his book, his book is called "tactics" and is explicitly about using "manoeuvres" to win arguments... and he says that the other side are insincere and not genuinely seeking truth.

The best review of Koukl's video was by YODA who said "Load of crap biggest ever heard I is that." RightOn, Yoda, RockOn, Paulogia.

I did believe in Christianity... but I also had doubts. Things that bothered me... like the 'my way or go to hell'... the notion of everything being a sin. (Like Rev. Lovejoy in the Simpsons... 'Oh Marge... everything's a sin. Have you taken the time to read this through? Technically... we're not allowed to go to the bathroom.') Scenes in the bible where everybody says the same thing at the same time... It wasn't easy breaking away... but I'm glad I did.