This call-in episode invites believers to prove their God is real. Callers Marlin and Adrian defend the Bible’s God while Chris and the hosts press them on the flood, blasphemy, testing God, the Kalam argument and what evidence would count.
Why did God drown the kittens, puppies and babies in Noah’s flood?
Chris asks Marlin why God could not simply change the hearts of wicked people, as he did with Pharaoh, instead of drowning animals and babies who did nothing wrong. Marlin calls the answer he was taught “might makes right” and says he no longer believes it. The hosts add that God could have closed wombs, as he did with Sarah. Adrian later argues God’s authority as holy creator means humans cannot question him, and Chris points to the double standard if humans are made in God’s image.
Does the Bible say God creates evil?
The hosts cite Isaiah 45:7, which they say has God declaring that he makes good and evil. They argue that denying this, whether by blaming free will or Satan, is blasphemy by the Bible’s own definition. They then ask Marlin about shellfish, shrimp and pork, noting he breaks other rules daily without worry. Asked why only one blasphemy is off limits, Marlin answers “I don’t know.” Chris says that is the problem, since believers cannot show this God is real.
Is testing God a sin in the Bible?
A host argues testing God is not a sin because the Bible invites it. In Judges 6, a man asks God to make the dew wet only the fleece, then everything wet except the fleece, and God does both. The host also points to Malachi, where God invites being tested. The hosts call Job a terrible example, since Job stood in God’s presence and could not deny him. Chris adds that Job’s situation is not analogous to atheism.
Does everything need a cause, as the Kalam argument says?
A host explains indefinite causal order, which shows that on an atomic level an effect can happen before its cause. Scientists say it does not explain the Big Bang, but it makes such a start possible, which challenges the first step of the Kalam argument. Chris adds radioactive decay, where each atom destabilizes at a random moment with no known cause, and half-lives range from about five minutes to billions of years. He calls doubts about constant decay rates a misunderstanding of science.
What evidence would convince an atheist that God is real?
Chris tells Adrian that beliefs are not chosen but formed by the brain from a web of prior beliefs, so new evidence has to overturn that whole network. If God were all knowing, he would know what evidence would break through, so either God does not exist or does not want Chris to know. His standard is evidence that is unambiguous, has no other explanation and can be sensed or measured. Adrian accepted that and said Christianity relies on hope in the unseen.
Transcript highlights
Selected passages from the live stream, lightly edited for readability. Click a section time to jump to that part of the video.
Odin, Noah’s Ducks, Babel and Duolingo
How are you today? I’m doing pretty well. It’s close to Halloween, so of course I had to dress up. I can’t tell who I am, because it’s probably something from something that I don’t know. Just Odin. Just the All-Father. Just the king of the gods, and the most powerful one. He had to give his eye to a well for a drink out of it.
[Commercial break]
Where’s your crows? They’re flying around the world. They usually do when they’re awake. You need to get little plastic crows to put up on your shoulders, like those little plastic ducks everybody gives people nowadays. My dad loves doing that. He off-roads all the time and he’s got a Jeep, and he gets ducks, and he loves the ducks. God didn’t love the ducks. God wanted to kill all the ducks.
Did he have to? I don’t think he had to. He just wanted to because they could swim, right? They could fly. Hey, you know what? If all the ducks didn’t have to get on the ark, that means all the ducks would still be alive, and they would have overpopulated all the
Part 2
sure what you mean by that. 60,000 connections. So, give us a call and explain that at least. Usually when I hear people say that, they use the word hyperexts or hyperlinks instead of connections. But they’re all just trying to point out that all of these different weird connections. It doesn’t appear in any other book like that. Except again, they’re using words like the or is pronouns like he, she, and connecting it to every other iteration of that that comes up. Doesn’t mean anything. I I noticed too that uh they tend to talk in generalities and not be uh specific about things. So like usually when I ask a question and I really want an answer,
I always say please be specific and not give me a generality because we tend to get generalities instead. Like yep, I love Jesus is just speaking in generalities in the text chat right now. So yeah, it’s all generalities. But you know, we got the Bible contradictions image here that that is all the contradictions that connect to each other. That that similar image to that is the one I usually see when they say hypertexts uh or hyperlinks is they’re they all want to put all these connections together, but they’re they’re not really connections. Yep. I love Jesus. Probably not going to call us just because he’s a coward. can’t actually defend his belief in his God,
right? Just will sit there and tell us that we’re wrong, but doesn’t have an answer for why God had to drown all the kittens and the puppies. Yeah. Why did the kittens and the puppies and as long as we’re on young things, why did also the human babies, why did they all have to get drowned? I mean, yeah. couldn’t Flockmeister does point out the kitten the puppies and kittens pee all over the place. So maybe God was just try uh he was just done with the animals. He was just done with with trying to raise and train puppies and kittens even though the kittens would have had their own litter boxes. But he does have
this thing with with feces and urine. Like he doesn’t like them at all. I was going to mention that. Didn’t he have the Hebrews wipe out a city because the men were pissing on the walls? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he doesn’t like that. So, I guess that does make sense as a reason, but like is that a good moral reason which Who was that? What city was that? Oh, I don’t remember. I’m I have to look it up now. He doesn’t give rules about where you have to like you have to go outside of camp and outside of town to bury your your feces behind the thing because he doesn’t want any anywhere near. They would
interfere with the smell of the goats. Huh? God uses the phrase via the prophet Elijah to declare the total elimination of the king’s male heirs. The destruction of Ahab’s family line. Uh Bayasha’s house. The entire lineage is taken out. apparent and what it said what I just what I’m reading here is that there was no place that was wiped out because of men that were pissing on the wall but that it’s an idiom for men for men. So go there and kill every man every last man everyone pisses on the walls. Yeah. Everyone does it. I was led a little a led a little astraater by uh Mark Twain. I although I I might be
reme misremembering by Mark Twain on that one. Mark Twain would never misdirect anyone about it. [clears throat] Just remember I always remember the the line from Twain. There’s lies, damn lies and statistics. Yeah, we have one in in geology because uh he had he lost a lot of money by investing in mines and uh back then mining was not the science that it is today. So it was really easy to lose a bunch of money investing in mines and uh his quote to that was a mine is nothing but a hole in the ground surrounded by a bunch of liars. Yeah, I buy that. So, I’ve always enjoyed that quote. Sam Clemens has always had
Flood, Twain, morality and holy foreskins
Sarah couldn’t get pregnant because God kept her womb closed. Why couldn’t he have done that to the entire generation he wanted to get rid of? Then no babies would have had to die, just the ones already conceived and born, and then no more babies at all. He could have been a uterine doorman, closed the door, and let the generation go. Instead, he decides he’s going to drown everything. He could have just changed everybody’s hearts too, like he did with Pharaoh, all-powerful kind of thing. He could have, right? But he chose to drown everybody instead. I think that’s a good case for saying God is a sadist. He could have just changed everybody’s minds, but he decided to kill everybody instead.
I mentioned Mark Twain earlier. When I was about 16, I read some of the stuff Twain didn’t publish during his lifetime, and some of it is pretty interesting. He really hits on religion quite a bit. In one of his essays he says God is a sadist, and he proves it by saying that if God is omniscient and knows past, present and future, then he knew Adam and Eve would eat from the tree of knowledge if he put it in the Garden of Eden. He knew he would punish them if they did. So he put the tree in the garden just so he could punish them, and therefore God is a sadist. It was also that he had an excuse to punish them.
I’ve seen the Ark Encounter, but I have not been inside of it. I did go to the Creation Museum, which is about 20 miles away and run by the same people, but I did not go into the ark. It’s super expensive. Well, they’ve got to make money off of it somehow. It’s like a hundred bucks to go in. It cost them a ton of money to build it, and they didn’t get all the tax rebates they thought they were getting. So they’ve got to make up a ton of cash, and then they had to repair all the flood damage that happened to it too. There was like a million dollars in flood damage. That’s the part that is so funny, the flood damage on the ark.
I always say that I get my morality from my empathy. I have the ability to step into another person’s shoes and feel what they’re feeling. I’ve said that to Christians, and they invalidate it. They say, “Well, that’s no good.” Why is that no good? Why isn’t my personal feeling of not wanting to hurt another person good enough for morality? That’s something I’ve never had explained to me. They say I don’t have something to ground it in. Do I need to ground it as long as I live by it? What do you even mean by grounding in that case? I’m not even sure. You would think someone who talks about grounding would know all about it. I don’t think morals need grounding.
You’re not going to believe this, but I was completely blown away when I first heard it. Jesus was a Jew, and as such, he was circumcised eight days after his birth. Guess what? They claimed to have the actual foreskin of baby Jesus. Five or six different churches each claim to have the actual foreskin of baby Jesus. But surely one of them is bound to be authentic, right? I’m sure they put it on display from time to time, as Catholic folk want to do, so you can probably even go look at the flesh of your holy savior if you want.
[Commercial break]
I found
Caller Questions Why He Believes in God
Chris asked the caller, Marlin, to confirm he was over 18 and to say what kind of theist he was. Chris then asked what made him believe that the God of the Bible is real. Marlin answered that he could hear them, and Chris asked what he had called in to discuss. When the conversation turned to the Bible, Chris made clear that he was not asking what God had done, but why Marlin believed God was real.
Marlin raised the story of Pharaoh, saying God was able to change Pharaoh’s heart when Pharaoh wanted to let the people of Israel go, and then God decided to make him change his mind so he could carry out the plagues instead. Chris pushed back: “Why couldn’t God just change the hearts and minds of all the wicked people so that they became good people instead of having to kill all the kittens, puppies, and babies?” Marlin replied, “So he was just being a bully.” Chris then restated the answer Marlin had been given as a child, that God had to show off his power because he is sovereign, and asked if that was accurate.
Marlin explained that the world had become so wicked, filled with very evil people, that God had to punish everyone. Chris agreed that it sounded unfair, but said the bigger question was why God had to drown the kittens and puppies too. “What did the kittens and puppies do? Why did they deserve to die?” Chris reminded him that God told Noah to bring two of every kind of animal into the ark. Marlin agreed that this was the story.
Chris then pressed the point further: “But what about all the ones that didn’t come into the ark? All the innocent kittens and puppies that didn’t come into the ark were drowned. Why did they all have to die? That is messed up when you put it that way.” Marlin acknowledged that a lot of innocent people were drowned too. Chris said that was exactly the point, asking why God would drown innocent people.
Marlin said his explanation was that God can show off his power whenever he wants, that he is the ruler of the universe, and that Christians should simply obey. He added that God had even gotten angry at him for questioning it. Chris said it seemed to him that Marlin was justifying God being a bully just because he is God, and asked if that was correct. Marlin answered, “It’s just might makes right.” Chris replied that he understood that was what Marlin had been taught, but asked why Marlin himself believed it.
Marlin said that he had been taught the same thing, but that he no longer believed it. Chris asked what had convinced him it was true in the first place. Marlin explained that he was born and baptized into the Roman Catholic Church as an infant and attended a Roman Catholic church school from kindergarten through high school in the Philippines. He said he never met an atheist until he went to a public college at about 17 or 18 years old, which was when he started meeting people with other views, faiths, and beliefs.
Chris restated what he had heard: Marlin believed because people he trusted, including his parents, grandparents, Catholic teachers, friends, relatives, and neighbors, told him it was true. Chris added that Marlin had never
Debating the Old Testament, Sin, and the Trinity
Because it’s to protect my fragile soul, not to be defiled, and no, it’s so they can control you. Could it be because you find out it was a lie? Wait, you guys think it was a form of control? Yes
Blasphemy, Testing God, and Quantum Causation
Listen to this, Marlin. Everything in that book is going to end up with you committing blasphemy, and the teachings people attach to the book that aren’t actually contained in it will make sure of that. One of the definitions of blasphemy in the Bible is attributing an act that is clearly of God to an entity that is not God. Now I’ll ask you this question. Does God make evil things? God is love, so does he make evil? It’s a yes or no question. No. Yes or no? That’s blasphemy.
Isaiah 45. God specifically says, “I make good and evil.” If you’re saying that he doesn’t make evil, you’re blaspheming. You’re attributing to an entity other than God a work that is clearly of God. I’m not sure of the exact verse. I think it’s Isaiah 45:7. I don’t have the Bible memorized, but it is in there where God says he creates light and darkness, makes good and brings evil, and that he the Lord does all these things. Any of those excuses, whether it’s free will or Satan, for taking away that God made evil things is blasphemy.
People tell me that all the time, but that’s blasphemy too, and it’s the unforgivable sin. By the way, do you eat shellfish? Do you eat shellfish like shrimp or scallops or clams or anything like that? I love shellfish. Okay, well, that’s blasphemy. You’re not supposed to eat that. God said don’t eat that.
I don’t eat shellfish. I eat shrimp, like prawns. You’re not supposed to eat anything from the sea that doesn’t have scales, and shrimp doesn’t have scales. So every time you eat shrimp, you’re committing blasphemy. Eating pork is a sin too. God said don’t do it, and you’re doing it. Every time you use the bathroom in your house, you’re creating blasphemy, because God tells you to do it away from where you live.
I could go to hell for eating lobster. That’s the point we’re trying to make, Marlin. You do blasphemy all the time. Even though you’re doing blasphemy on a daily basis, you take one thing and say, “I can’t do that, because it’s blasphemy.” Yet you can do all these other blasphemies. Why is this one thing not able to be done? Question that. Why is that the one blasphemy you can’t do, while you can do all the other blasphemies?
I was taught about the Ten Commandments, and I was taught growing up as a Christian to love thy neighbor as thyself and to love one another. That’s not explaining why one blasphemy is bad but all the others are okay. What you just answered was a different topic entirely. So why is it okay to perform all these blasphemies, but you can’t question it?
I don’t know. Yeah, see, that’s the problem, and that’s why we don’t believe. All we can say is, “Well, God does it.” But we don’t even know that God exists, so how do we know that God does a thing? When the people who believe in God can’t show us that this God is real, that’s the problem.
Also, testing God is not a sin. God invites testing repeatedly throughout the Bible. In Judges 6, there’s a story about the fleece. The man wants to know that it’s God, so he says, “If you are God, then in the morning make the dew touch everything except this fleece, and make the fleece dry.” Then the next day he does the opposite and says, “Make everything dry except the fleece, and make the fleece the only thing that’s wet.” God is happy enough to do it. He says, “Yeah, okay, sure,” and does exactly what he’s asked.
There’s also one in Malachi where God invites being tested. God is okay with you testing him. He’s okay with you not being sure. He’s not okay with you saying it wasn’t him.
What about the Book of Job? The Book of Job is the reason so many people become atheists, because it shows just how cruel God is. There’s no purpose behind the events other than God betting Satan that Job would stay faithful. At the end, God says, “Don’t test me, don’t question me,” because Job was getting ready to give up his faith. God scared him straight, essentially saying, “You already know I’m here, so you’re going to follow me.” It wasn’t about whether Job believed in God, because Job was standing in God’s presence and couldn’t deny it. It was about whether he still loved and worshiped God, and by scaring him, God kept him worshiping. So Job is a terrible story to go to.
I was told that God the Father has great love for you, but you must first prove yourself to him and commit to him, and then you will be blessed. Marlin, I’ve heard some other conversations you’ve had, and I think this one has been better than some. We’re going to go to a commercial now. We want to thank you for your call. The conversation was pleasant enough, and we weren’t screaming at each other, which is good.
[Commercial break]
Yeah, I’d like to have that conversation about meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are wonderful. I’m a huge fan of existentialism, which is all about trying to find meaning and purpose, or whether we have it at all. I’m an absurdist too, so I think the universe doesn’t have inherent meaning. If Christians are giving themselves meaning, then they’re doing the same thing atheists do. What purpose does your God serve when it comes to meaning? Unless you’re saying God has given Christians their purpose, in which case, prove it.
Chris asked me to explain something about indefinite causal order. One of the arguments we often hear from Christians is that there has to be an initial cause, and that cause has to be God. But what we’ve found on a quantum level is that this isn’t necessarily true. Anybody can look this up. Indefinite causal order, or ICO, shows that an effect can happen before its cause on an atomic level. Scientists will often say this does not explain the Big Bang or creation, but it’s a possibility that creation started this way, with something on a quantum level where the effect came before the cause and everything built off of that.
That’s a great counter to the idea that everything has to have a cause, the start of the Kalam argument.
Radioactive decay, science and theist dishonesty
Chris explains that radioactive decay has no known cause for individual atoms. Each atom simply destabilizes at a random moment, and different isotopes have very different half-lives, from about five minutes for some uranium isotopes to billions of years for others, with no known reason why. So, he argues, not everything has to have a cause. He also recalls a Christian who asked how we know radioactive decay rates have stayed constant over history, which he calls a silly question that shows a total misunderstanding of science.
Chris says the question amounts to a rejection of what science has learned and of what the scientific method is. The method is a process for helping us detect things, and when its conclusions are backed by evidence, that is what we know. Science admits it could always be wrong, he says, but many theists believe they cannot be wrong. That, he argues, is the most intellectually dishonest stance to take in any argument.
Mike and Chris turn to the chat, where a viewer named Fireman has been silent. They joke about why he might be reluctant to come on, and Mike says he hopes Fireman will look into the claims he has been making. Mike notes that Chris’s earlier conversation with Marlin was sad, because Marlin accepted what people he trusted as a child told him without ever looking into it. Chris says he told Marlin to keep asking questions.
They read a super chat from Epher Brandon, who called Mike a fellow absurdist. They also recall that Marlin has called into several debate shows and once claimed to manifest a cold can of Mountain Dew by turning his head, and that he claimed to know lottery numbers in advance. Chris and Mike quip that the birds must be drinking it, and the meme of parrot tea from another host’s chat gets a laugh.
With about half an hour left, Mike says he hopes a Christian will call in to defend why God drowned the kittens and puppies, though he suspects most apologists in the chat are cowards. Chris says he is trying to get people in chat to call in, arguing that if they are so confident in their text claims, they should talk in person.
Fireman then calls in, but audio problems follow. Chris and Mike cannot hear him at first, then the audience hears only one side of the conversation, and the caller eventually refreshes his page to try again. Once he can be heard, Chris says he has stopped debating Fireman because Fireman makes many claims without backing them up, does not want to debate, and simply asserts he is absolutely correct without listening to anything else.
Why God Drowned Kittens and Puppies
Adrian, a viewer, argued that God’s authority as creator means humans cannot question how he handles things, even when his methods look harsh. He said that as a parent he has the authority to discipline his children but not to kill them for doing evil, and that the difference is that God is a holy creator who can act as he chooses. Chris pushed back that if humans are made in God’s image, the double standard needs explaining. Adrian answered that this was his personal opinion and that questioning God could itself be disrespectful.
Adrian then turned to the story of Job, saying Job questioned God but still stayed faithful. Chris objected that Job already knew God existed, so the story cannot be analogous to atheism, where the person is not convinced God exists and cannot simply choose faith. Chris also praised Adrian for saying “I don’t know” easily, which he said many apologists refuse to do.
When Chris asked what evidence would convince him, he explained that beliefs are not chosen but formed by the brain from a web of prior beliefs, so new evidence has to overturn that whole network. He said that if God were all knowing, God would know what evidence would break through, and so either God does not exist or God does not want him to know. Chris said his standard would be evidence that is unambiguous, has no other explanation, and can be sensed or measured, the same standard people use for nearly everything they believe except the paranormal and gods.
Adrian accepted that standard and said Christianity relies on hope in the unseen rather than what is seen. Chris replied that nearly every religion relies on something that cannot be proven, and that he cannot believe in something that cannot be proven because that is how his mind is built. He said he respected Adrian’s answer and thanked him for the conversation, and Adrian said he might return the following week.
Planning weekend live streams and host schedules
The section is mostly housekeeping. Chris Mallard said the team would try to get a caller on the line the next day, and hosts discussed who would be around for Halloween. Chris also proposed replacing weekend repeats with live streams run by different hosts, with Beard planning a separate afternoon show and a Saturday dashboard being set up. Chris praised the new dashboard for handling chat, commercials, and guests in one panel instead of switching between OBS and other tools.
[Commercial break]
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