Religion chooses a substantial set of axioms derived from a mixture of philosophy and fantasy dreamt up by our pre scientific ancestors who thought bad smells caused disease then makes many forms of revision sinful. A set of beliefs without ability to revise everything from the ground up will forever be limited.

The problem with your set of axioms isn't MERELY the size. It's that you are asked to buy them in a box sealed millennia ago by people who if they were transported to our time frame would be regarded as lunatics because they believe crazy shit. Worse you are offered imaginary immortality and the threat of imaginary perdition in order to obtain actual service in exchange for wholly fictional benefits.

Now we go on to a false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful when it didn't arise in a peaceful time nor promote what we would today think of as peace, atheists being bigots, random comparison of atheism to antisemitism. Some hate for the Beatles. Comparison of Beatles fandom to satanism. I have to admit that this is entertaining. Having someone smart enough to read books and speak well while being absolutely committed to falsehood is like watching someone dress up their dog as a human being. The forms are there but not the substance.

People have been declaring society was going to hell in a hand basket for at least the last several thousand years and were we really going to hell we should have long since arrived in perdition. It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay instead of progression because one who is anchored in a particular set of mores and forms is unable to see the value in change. They perceive only the losses and never the gains.

Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all morality and I find myself unimpressed with his insight because people hold all sorts of beliefs including none at all and this seems positively uncorrelated with their observed degree of morality and decency. He has it in fact entirely backwards and the necessary fictions we create to explain our world our rooted in our essential nature as sympathetic and empathetic creatures. We look at our fellow man and see the need to care about them as we do ourselves and thus we elevate that concern to a natural law and produce something better than ourselves to defend it.

If we were inherently so lawless the need for law and justice as each society understands it wouldn't flow so effortlessly from our pens or spring so readily to our minds.

The reasoning is simple we developed a mind too complex for direct meta analysis of all its internal workings and a need to work beside others of our own species as complex as ourselves and the tools to understand and predict their behavior works well turned inward.

We perceive the difference between a desired state and a present state even if its not actually physically painful as suffering and produce a society where at least an in group minimizes suffering because its adaptive surely but also because we live not in the world but in our own heads in a model of the world constantly rewritten full of individuals we imagine with the same tools we use to imagine ourselves. If we destroy them or diminish them we must necessarily live in an internal world wrought in part of the blight we have brought about which we must perceive again with the same internal tools we use to experience ourselves. All evil and harm is self mutilation.

For a being capable of sympathy and meta-cognition morality would seem to come naturally even if the end results differ wildly in thoughts, results, and methods. Assigning it ex post facto to the god you created to enforce it is the tail wagging the dog. It's illogical because empathy came millions of years before your particular species of god.

13 minutes in and his argument seems to be that it would be really bad if God weren't real ergo God then some people who promoted atheism were bad dudes ergo we must reject atheism. This mirrors the exact argument he first falsely put in the mouths of his opponents and then helpfully debunked.

Now we are suggesting that atheism suggests that survival of the fittest be applied as a moral principal rather than a description of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a tired trope. If rabbits are different degrees of brown and the browner guys blend in better and the coyotes each more of the other fellows then more browner rabbits will on average breed over time leading to browner rabbits. Trying to apply this moralistically towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics, and science. We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad idea.

At 16 we segway into shitty parts of American history with a sideline into why Muslims are better because they don't kill women and children. Notably given the religious make up of American leaders these actions were largely perpetrated by people who also believe in God. This is neither here nor there but keeping score on that point seems pretty important to him.

At this point it looks like its important to him to establish a hierarchy of morality Islam > Christianity > Godless.

Since I don't have all day I'm going to skip from minute 18 to 45. Ok now we are proving the existence of gods we have the same tired arguments about a watch implying a watch maker and various aspects of our solar system being particularly amenable to life. One would expect such a discussion to happen on worlds,solar systems, and universes that themselves are amenable to our kind of life while silence is likely to reign in environments were life is impossible or unlikely.

If he had read more of the books he degrades by the "four horsemen" of atheism he might already have good answers to these arguments. Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually reading a book yourself.

I watched at least half the lecture you posted and I found it deceptive, manipulative, and ill founded. It did a reasonable job of lobbing critiques at America's geopolitical actions which one might say are fairly easy targets but a poor job of addressing any big questions.

May I suggest you read something written by one of the "four horsemen" of atheism?

How is it a lie? It's a summary, sure, he can only go into so much given the time. He shows a book by one of them and the title is a giveaway of that summary.

> false rant about Islam being inherently peaceful

Based on what are you claiming that it is false? If you confusing peaceful with pacifist, then Islam is not pacifist.

> nor promote what we would today think of as peace

Then inform us what we would today think of as peace.

> It is common to mistake change in social norms as decay instead of progression

It's easy to see the social decay over time. Of course each generation is experiencing such a decay when they compare it to the previous generations, but we clearly see how things are speeding up. Just look at the ills that we see in so called "developed first world nations", the mental illnesses, the decline of morals, the normalization and over sexualization of behaviors, all the way to children, the destruction of the extended family, then the nuclear family. It's quite obvious where things are heading. This is not fear mongering. When you have someone like Kraus saying that he cannot find a moral argument against incest, then someone with half a brain should think about what this means.

> Your speaker declares that a fiction is the root of all morality

I'm not sure where he said that.

> Trying to apply this moralistically towards human beings is both a misunderstanding of humanity, ethics, and science.

No it isn't. From a purely secular and atheistic world view, there was nothing wrong or bad about horrific historic events like the Holocaust, the nuclear bombs, rape, Epstein, etc. I think it was one of those "four horsemen" who said that rape is not good or bad, but it's just a phenomenon like the spots on a cheetah. Even this atheist biology professor claims that there is no ultimate foundation for ethics from an atheistic world view: https://youtu.be/EqK_JPts26k?t=182

That is the only logical conclusion to arrive at from an atheistic world view, at least he's being honest with himself. More atheists should be honest with themselves as well and we'll see how things end up.

> We don't need Jesus or Allah to tell us this is a bad idea.

Based on the above, we sure do.

> while silence is likely to reign in environments were life is impossible or unlikely.

Yet, we exist. So our world is clearly viable for hosting life. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

> Likely he has but he hopes you will click a youtube video and sit back and passively absorb re-enforcement of your existing beliefs than actually reading a book yourself.

He's a professor and a scholar of biblical hermeneutics with field specialties in Sacred Languages, Comparative Theology, and Comparative Literature. He doesn't "hope" anything. It seems you're straw manning because you think we in Islam shy away from debates or discussion. That couldn't be further from the truth.

> May I suggest you read something written by one of the "four horsemen" of atheism?

Like the time where Dawkins falsely and cringely claims that Islam teaches that salt water and sweet water don't mix? I've watched lectures for those people, and their arguments are straw men, or just outright lies that shows their ignorance and malice especially when it comes to Islam.

Bear in mind that this lecture was just to have people expand their horizons, especially those that think that science is going to answer everything. It won't. There is so much material out there by good people who have torn down these atheistic arguments. People like Youtube these days, so I recommend Mohammad Hijab and Sami Ameri. I have lots more who speak Arabic, but I think this is not the right audience for them.

People may speak fantasies, but act - they mostly act as they honestly think. “Things” will end up just as they are now. You are dehumanizing atheists and, as I suspect, anyone who doesn’t follow your “ethical” god.

We all have a right to disagree, but thinking that all ethical people who do not agree with you are just not honest with themselves is delusional. You’re basically saying that if your god doesn’t prohibit something that other people may find highly unethical in their culture, you will still do that. That’s the essence of how most people see your religion.

I'm not. We see the evidence of the direction of where the world is heading right before our eyes. The wise people already see it coming.

> thinking that all ethical people who do not agree with you are just not honest with themselves is delusional.

I said that the conclusion that those atheists had reached is the ultimate and only conclusion to reach when one is honest with themselves. I saw many atheists, and they don't think about the implication of their world view. They just live day to day as things around us get worse, then people cry and complain about how bad things are, while being blind to the true causes.

Look at the big mess of the modern day economic system. People are crying about high interest rates, student loans, etc. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all prohibit usury (interest) for a good reason. Today people are trying to address the symptoms but not the cause, and they're failing at it. All these things have repercussions, but few people see it.