The Atheist Experience 29.49 with Forrest Valkai and Jim Barrows

The Atheist Experience

The Atheist Community of Austin

Religion & Spirituality, Non-profit, Business

4.6 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 103 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode of The Atheist Experience, hosts Forrest Valkai and Jim Barrows tackle the dangerous rise of Christian nationalism and its alignment with fascism, explore the limits of biblical morality, and examine the overwhelming evidence for evolution and geology.

Lucy Spina in TX, ACA chair, details the Rainbow Rights Roadshow drive with Equality Texas, aiding LGBTQ+ resource deserts. Hosts stress "no strings attached" secular community support needed against current political threats. Is this grassroots outreach vital?

G-Man (nudibranchs jumping sea slugs) argues atheists lack objective morality, asserting God is the source of all good. Hosts challenge this as Divine Command Theory, making God the subjective arbiter. They critique God's immorality, citing the Flood and slavery. Does God's omnipotence and omniscience make him culpable for all sin?

Ujay in SD, a deconstructing agnostic, asks for a scientific explanation of evolution and dating methods. Forrest refutes the creationist claim that evolution begets racism, explaining it is Social Darwinism. He details radioisotope half-lives and Hubble's constant for dating the Earth and Universe. Can overwhelming evidence cure religious skepticism?

Hannah argues research on morphogenesis (Michael Levin) suggests evidence against materialism, supporting a platonic space of information. The hosts warn against using this gap as evidence for the supernatural. They challenge the assertion as an Argument From Ignorance, noting that complexity does not equal magic. Is Platonism a justifiable conclusion from current unknowns?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A week or so ago, a news story broke here in Oklahoma that's quickly gained national attention.
0:06.4	A junior pre-med student at the University of Oklahoma was given an assignment to write a short response to a scholarly article about gender in her psychology class.
0:15.0	Super common undergrad assignment.
0:18.0	However, rather than properly addressing or even properly summarizing this paper,
0:23.4	the student decided that this was her God's Not Dead moment. This was her chance to tell her
0:28.8	professor and the entire world about her strong biblical beliefs and to speak out against the
0:35.4	demonic lies that sprayer Satan is spreading against trans people and gender.
0:41.4	And this is not me being hyperbolic, by the way.
0:44.1	These are all things that she actually wrote for two miserable pages.
0:48.9	She wrote more than the assignment actually required just to talk about her personal religious beliefs.
0:55.3	And now she talks about how she's going to raise her children someday and in the light of
1:00.8	the Lord and how the belief in multiple genders is demonic and comes from hell.
1:05.6	And as a result, she was awarded an F for the assignment as anyone would expect, anyone else who flatly
1:13.6	refused to do their homework properly, would get the exact same result. But now, this student
1:19.3	is claiming that her professor has violated her rights and is targeting her and discriminating
1:24.8	against her and attacking her for her Christian beliefs and for using her freedom of speech, which of course is being eaten up by far-right conservatives across the entire country who think that equality and accountability are the same thing as oppression. Now, if this situation happened anywhere else, we probably wouldn't be talking about it right now. However, it happened
1:46.7	here in Oklahoma, which means this instructor has now been placed on administrative leave, and the
1:51.9	university has agreed to drop the student's bad grade, and the governor has spoken out against it,
1:57.6	and the student was even given a citation of recognition by the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
2:03.6	So let's just look a little bit beyond this student for just one moment.
2:08.1	This brand of Christianity, especially when it's paired with the nationalism that has been on the rise,
2:14.2	at such an alarming rate lately, it's more than just an embarrassing news story.
	...

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