Videos

Erik Wielenberg has proposed an atheistic theory of where morality comes from. He claims that God is not necessary in order to have objective morality by which humans are required to live. Wielenberg's theory has three main components: First, it is not a materialistic theory, meaning that it does not assume that the physical world is all there is. Second, Wielenberg's theory proposes the existence of "brute ethical facts" that exist outside of nature which ground moral values and obligations. Third, Wielenberg says that these facts become applicable to human beings by something he calls the "making relationship," whereby facts about circumstances in the world cause moral facts to become applicable to certain situations (to be instantiated). This lecture explains the main concepts of Wielenberg's theory and also examines some objections to his theory.

Philosophy presents us with many ultimate questions about life. How do we find the answers to these questions? Thinkers have proposed both faith and reason as ways to answer them. Popular culture today presents faith and reason as if they are incompatible. Some say faith is just the failure of reason by choosing to believe something without evidence. Others say reason is inadequate and that we just need to make a "leap of faith." Is this true? Are faith and reason really in conflict? Two very influential Western thinkers, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, would disagree. They both thought faith and reason could work together, that faith and reason worked best when they reinforced each other, not when they were separated. Join Adam as he talks about the ideas of these two great thinkers.

Metaethics is the study of what makes something good or bad. It is not the study of what is good or bad, but why there are such things as moral good and moral bad. What is morality? Where did it come from? There are many theories of what morality is; some think morality is subjective and depends on individual people, cultures, and circumstances. Others believe that morality is objective, that it is independent of human beings. Most theists think that morality comes from God, but many atheists claim that God is not necessary for morality. Non-naturalists, for example, believe that morality can exist objectively without God. Thinkers throughout Western history have defended many positions, both subjective and objective as well as theistic and atheist ones. Listen in as Adam gives an overview of the different metaethical theories.

What is philosophy? Philosophy can sometimes be a hard word to define since our culture uses it in many ways. However, the academic study of philosophy could be broadly summed up by three areas of study: the study of existence (metaphysics), the study of knowledge (epistemology), and the study of ethics. Philosophy deals with big ideas that shape cultures, including ours, and the ideas of our cultures shape how we think. Philosophy attempts to answer ultimate questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? If we want to understand how our culture thinks and why it promotes the ideas it does, we have to understand the philosophy that gave birth to those ideas and the history of how they came to be accepted.

Take a look with me at the greatest sermon of all time, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It’s three chapters in Matthew, chapters 5, 6, and 7. Many people throughout history, even many non-Christians, have said this is the greatest sermon of all time. We’re all aware that the best leaders know how to cast a powerful vision of how things could be, how things should be. They masterfully paint an ideal picture of what we should be striving for. Consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream…” speech; he said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Christians believe that the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is a message from God, but how do we know that the Bible is true? Can we really trust what we read there? How do we know what books should be in the Bible, and who originally made that decision? Join Adam for this eight-part series as he shows that there is good evidence to believe that the Bible really is a message from God and that we can trust what it says. In fact, our eternal destiny depends on its message.

On April 22, 2020, during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Adam Lloyd Johnson and Luke Pitts engaged in a debate over Zoom about whether the Bible was true and could be trusted. Adam, as a Christian, defended that the Bible is true, that it gets the major events right and is also correct in all its details. Luke, a skeptic, argued that the Bible was not reliable or trustworthy because of many strange, unusual, and even contradictory things found within it. The exchange included four speeches by each participant as well as a time for questions at the end.

In this interview by Crash Course Apologetics, Adam defends his model of morality which holds that God’s existence as a Trinity, His triune nature, is the foundation of all morality. Specifically, the loving relationships between the members of the Trinity are the basis for all moral values and duties for human beings since humans are called to imitate that love and reflect it to others. As Jesus explained in Matthew 22:37-40, love of God and love of neighbor are the foundations of all morality, and this love flows from the loving relationships within the Trinity, which is why Adam proposes that God’s triune nature is a superior explanation for the existence of morality than atheistic models.

Atheist Erik Wielenberg has proposed a theory of morality (also known as a “metaethical model”) which claims that objective moral values and obligations can exist without God. In this interview with Crash Course Apologetics, Adam critiques Wielenberg’s theory of morality by explaining how Wielenberg’s model is susceptible to what is called the “Lucky Coincidence Objection,” the idea that, without God, it is just a lucky coincidence that humans are able to know what is objectively morally right. (This interview is based on a paper Adam published in Philosophia Christi, which you can find here.)

The New Testament is the part of the Bible written during the first century which contains 27 books that Christians believe were inspired by God. But who chose to put these books into the New Testament, and how do we know that they put the rights books into the New Testament? Since the New Testament is just a collection of messages from God, the more pertinent question is this: how do we know which messages are really from God? The apostles were the group of first-century people appointed by God for a special mission to start and grow the early church. The apostles were given the ability to perform miracles to validate their message, to show that it really was from God. Thus, we can look at the historical evidence that early church councils used to discover which books the apostles said were messages from God as a guide to know which books should be included in the New Testament.