New Atheism: A Survival Guide with Graham Veale

Hank Unplugged: Essential Christian Conversations

The Christian Research Institute

Education, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2018

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Graham Veale is passionate about providing Christians with a defense against the “sneer pressure” of popular New Atheists such as scientist Richard Dawkins and comedian Ricky Gervais. On this episode of Hank Unplugged, Hank and Graham discuss confronting New Atheism by being equipped with answers to defend the truth of Christianity.

Topics discussed include: the three great apologetic issues (0:30); the hostile environment created by New Atheism, “sneer pressure” and the impact atheists such as Ricky Gervais have on the culture (4:30); teaching people to think critically by demonstrating it consistently in the way we live (8:30); New Atheism compared to Old Atheism (11:30); the positive relationship between Christianity and science (15:00); are many churches more concerned with entertaining rather than educating? (24:30); the need for Christians to live an authentic Christian life (30:30); Veale’s testimony and his passion for defending the truth of Christianity (35:30); the danger of thinking of Christianity as transactional rather than transformational (39:30); the Moral Argument for the existence of God (and how Richard Dawkins gets it wrong) (52:00); do most atheists embrace the logical implications of their worldview? (59:00); falsifying Dawkins (1:03:30); the Intelligent Design movement (1:09:30); drawing a correlation between New Atheism and the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter (1:14:00); and the importance of apologetics (1:24:00).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to another edition of Hank Unplug, the podcast that brings some of the most interesting, inspirational and intelligent people on the planet directly to you so you can listen to a conversation that is sure to make a difference in your life. And that's
0:38.9	really what we're trying to do. Make a difference in the lives of people for time and for eternity.
0:43.9	I've often talked about the three great apologetic issues. The first being the issue of origins.
0:50.7	How one views their origins will inevitably determine how they live their life.
0:55.0	If you feel as though you're a function of random chance, you're going to live your life by a different standard than if you know that you're created in the image of God and accountable to him.
1:05.0	Now obviously in a Christian worldview, the God who spoke and the universe left into existence, condescended
1:12.9	to reveal himself in time and space and demonstrated that he was in fact God through the
1:19.6	immutable fact of his resurrection, something that we do not have to believe through blind
1:26.1	faith, but rather can adhere to on the basis of faith founded
1:32.6	on a refutable fact. And then within the Christian worldview, we also consider the Bible to be a
1:39.2	reliable authority. And once again, we do not do that blindly. We do that because the Bible is
1:47.1	demonstrably reliable. And so the issue of apologetics is of transcendent importance to the
1:55.8	historic Christian faith. And I'm constantly looking for people who are able to articulate the great apologetic
2:04.4	issues in a compelling fashion for our generation. We're not responsible for the last generation.
2:13.6	We don't know what will happen in a future generation, but we are responsible for making a
2:20.9	difference in this generation. And so I'm constantly looking for people who are interesting
2:27.4	and inspirational and intelligent. And lo and behold, I found such a person in Northern Ireland.
2:36.4	He wrote a book called New Atheism.
2:39.2	His name is Graham Veal.
2:41.3	And he is extraordinarily enthusiastic about introducing apologetics to young people.
2:48.0	And I really care about that because young people live in an age of information overload,
2:54.1	and oftentimes cannot discern between wheat and chaff and heat and light.
	...

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