One of the remarkable scientific discoveries of the past several decades is that the universe and Earth appear fine-tuned for life.

Philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer explains that fine-tuning “refers to the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life ... to exist.”

Earth’s position in the solar system is in what scientists call the Goldilocks Zone, where it’s not too hot and not too cold.

It’s important to note that the term “fine-tuning” or “fine-tuned” is a neutral description that doesn’t imply the existence of God. It’s a designation routinely used by scientists and scholars of all stripes.

Although scientific findings are always provisional, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that an incredibly powerful and intelligent being designed our universe to support life.

In what follows, we’ll look at the scientific credibility of fine-tuning, specific examples, possible explanations for it, and some objections to it. Fine-tuning is not surprising if Christianity is true, since God intended to create human and animal life (Genesis 1), but it is surprising in the case of naturalism, where it appears to be an astounding coincidence.

Believe the science

One will occasionally meet skeptics who believe fine-tuning is an idea invented by Christians but not taken seriously by scientists. This is a misconception, to say the least. Consider the following testimony:

Agnostic physicist Sir Fred Hoyle: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

Atheist physicist Stephen Hawking: “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Agnostic physicist Paul Davies: “The entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.” “On the face of it, the universe does look as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings.”

Atheist physicist Steven Weinberg: “Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.”

It’s notable that cosmic fine-tuning was one of the reasons the distinguished atheist thinker Antony Flew changed his mind about God’s existence, as recounted in his 2007 book “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.”

Against all odds?

Philosopher Robin Collins points out, “If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10⁶⁰[i.e., 1 followed by 60 zeros], the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible.”

This is a mind-boggling number. Collins likens this improbability to “firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.”

He also observes that “if gravity had been stronger or weaker by one part in 10⁴⁰, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist.”

If gravity were slightly stronger, stars would burn out in millions, rather than billions, of years (our sun is about 4.6 billion years old). If gravity were slightly weaker, most stars would never form at all — or would be too small and cold.

Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox helps us understand this vast improbability as follows:

Cover America with coins in a column reaching to the moon (380,000 km or 236,000 miles away), then do the same for a billion other continents of the same size. Paint one coin red and put it somewhere in one of the billion piles. Blindfold a friend and ask her to pick it out. The odds are about 1 in 10⁴⁰ that she will.

A little closer to home, Earth’s position in the solar system is in what scientists call the Goldilocks Zone, where it’s not too hot and not too cold, allowing for liquid water to exist on its surface. The size of Earth also ensures that it has the right gravity to retain an atmosphere suitable for life without being too strong to inhibit the mobility of organisms.

Many other examples could be cited, but these illustrate the almost inconceivable odds against a life-permitting universe and Earth.

By design

These numbers are so surprising that they call out for an explanation, and there seem to be only three options: physical necessity, chance, or design.

Regarding physical necessity — that the universe had to have the properties that it does — there are no good reasons to believe this. As far as scientists can tell, the universe could have had a vast range of different laws, constants, and qualities.

To cite Davies again, “There is not a shred of evidence that the [parameters of our] universe [are] logically necessary. Indeed, as a theoretical physicist I find it rather easy to imagine alternative universes that are logically consistent, and therefore equal contenders for reality.”

Regarding chance, we saw earlier how incredibly unlikely it is that any possible universe would support life. When you combine the improbabilities of all the fine-tuned parameters together, the odds against life become overwhelming. The one remaining option is design. All our experience tells us that only rational agents design things, and thus a cosmic designer is the best explanation for the universe’s fine-tuning.

Multiverse muddle

Space prohibits an extended discussion of objections to fine-tuning. I’ll briefly address two that are frequently mentioned.

The first is known as the weak anthropic principle, raised by physicist Martin Rees, among others: “Some would argue that this fine-tuning of the universe, which seems so providential, is nothing to be surprised about, since we could not exist otherwise.”

Thus, we should not be surprised that the universe is fine-tuned for life, since we are here observing that it is. But as philosopher Douglas Groothuis points out, this confuses two related but distinct ideas: 1) the truism that we couldn’t observe anything unless the universe was life-permitting and 2) an explanation of why the universe is so finely tuned. Acknowledging the first observation doesn’t negate the need to explain why, against all odds, our universe is life-permitting.

Second, some thinkers appeal to the idea of a multiverse to explain fine-tuning. If billions, or even an infinite number, of other universes exist, one of those universes will inevitably permit life. We happen to be in the lucky universe that does.

God is in the details

There is no experimental evidence, however, that a multiverse exists, and some see it as an ad hoc proposal to avoid the theistic implications of fine-tuning. As physicist John Polkinghorne writes, “Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes.”

While the multiverse hypothesis is complex, ad hoc, and lacks evidence, the design hypothesis is simple (one Creator) and, as noted earlier, draws on our universal experience that only minds design things.

Thus, fine-tuning provides compelling evidence that God exists and intended to create living beings. And this sounds very much like the kind of God we find described in Genesis — one who, from the beginning, “created the heavens and the earth” and declared his creation “very good” (Genesis 1:1, 31).

A version of this essay originally appeared on the Worldview Bulletin Newsletter.

Peter Hitchens: Leftist gadfly who found wisdom in fear of God

The late Christopher Hitchens had no shortage of objections to Christianity. But he reserved special contempt for hell — a doctrine he believed reduced faith to fear and the divine to a “celestial dictatorship.” A God willing to resort to such primitive extortion was hardly worthy of man's admiration, let alone worship.

Hitchens also certainly knew that bringing up eternal damnation was a good way to unsettle his Christian sparring partners, who often seemed vaguely embarrassed by the punitive side of the faith.

'I am no longer shocked by the realization that I may be judged,' he wrote later. 'It has ever after been obvious to me.'

Peter Hitchens had no such compunctions. Although he was every bit the cosmopolitan sophisticate his older brother was, it was precisely fear — base, desperate, and visceral — that led him back to the Anglicanism of his British childhood.

He was well aware of how unfashionable a motivation this was. "No doubt I should be ashamed to confess that fear played a part in my return to religion," he later wrote in his 2010 memoir "The Rage Against God."

The gift of fear

But it was the truth, and he was too rigorously honest to pretend otherwise. Besides, moments in his career as a globe-trotting journalist — crashing a motorcycle, dodging gunfire, confronting an angry mob — had taught him that fear could be a gift, a way of focusing the mind on what was essential to survive. Who was to say that it couldn't produce the same clarity in matters of the soul?

The crucial moment happened not in some far-off danger zone, but on a vacation in Burgundy with his then-girlfriend.

There, seeking a break from fine food and wine, he dutifully made a brief cultural excursion. Standing before the famous Beaune Altarpiece, 15th-century painter Rogier van der Weyden's massive polyptych depicting the Last Judgment, Hitchens initially expected very little.

Instead, he found himself rooted to the spot, mouth agape in terror.

The figures in the painting did not seem distant or medieval. “They were my own generation,” he wrote. Naked and therefore stripped of period detail, they seemed unnervingly modern — recognizable, immediate. “They were me and the people I knew.”

One detail stayed with him: a figure recoiling in terror, “vomiting with shock and fear at the sound of the Last Trump.”

Good and evil

The encounter forced him to confront something he had spent years dismissing — that the Christian account of judgment, of good and evil, might not be a relic of the past but a description of reality.

Raised in the Church of England, Hitchens discovered atheism as a teenager. As the 1960s gave way to the '70s, this adolescent rebellion gave way to an enthusiastic embrace of revolutionary politics with confidence. Reason and progress, Hitchens believed, could create a far more durable moral order than religion ever had. Like many of his generation, he assumed that once Christianity faded, nothing essential would be lost.

Experience had already chipped away at this faith in humanity. His reporting had taken him to societies where ideological systems had already tried to replace older moral frameworks. What he found — especially in the Soviet sphere—was not liberation but repression. Systems that promised a new moral order instead revealed how fragile moral claims become when they rest on nothing beyond power.

Then came that worn yet still vivid tableau, before which the 30-something Hitchens “trembled for the things of which my conscience was afraid.”

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Inevitable judgment

“I am no longer shocked by the realization that I may be judged,” he wrote later. “It has ever after been obvious to me.”

That recognition did not produce instant conversion. But it changed him. A year later, faced with a private moral decision, he found himself held back — by the same fear of doing wrong. “Without Rogier van der Weyden,” he wrote, “I might have done that thing.”

Hitchens did not return to Christianity for comfort. His account of faith is unsentimental, grounded in the belief that moral reality is not something we create and certainly not something we can escape.

The latter fact can chafe, leading to a rejection of God that is nowhere near as rational as its proponents would like to think. Instead, argues Hitchens, it amounts to a wishful thinking no less deranging than any "pie in the sky" sentimentality.

The most urgent question

That conviction has shaped his public life ever since.

Today, Hitchens defends Christianity not as a private belief or cultural artifact, but as the foundation for any coherent understanding of justice, responsibility, and human worth. Remove it, he argues, and what remains is not freedom but confusion — and, eventually, coercion.

The two brothers — one a leading "New Atheist" and author of "God Is Not Great"; the other the most outspoken defender of Britain's disappearing Christian heritage — may not seem to to have had much in common.

But what they did share is a willingness to challenge a sacred assumption of modern life: that faith is optional, interchangeable, and purely subjective.

To both Peter and Christopher Hitchens, the question could not be more urgent. To ignore it leads to hell — either here on Earth on in eternity. Wherever we think we're headed, the beginning of wisdom is to undertake the journey with our eyes open.

Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘philosophy’ wasn’t deep — it was dirty

Anyone can search the currently available Epstein files and see what turns up. As a professor at Arizona State University, I searched for my own school. I did not expect to find so much ASU-related material.

One reason: ASU employed Lawrence Krauss, paying him a substantial salary to write books arguing that the universe created itself from nothing.

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

That claim is its own story. You will object, rightly: “But we can’t get something from nothing.” Krauss replies, “By ‘nothing’ I mean quantum foam.” And you respond, “Then the title misleads. You don’t mean nothing. You mean quantum foam.”

Krauss also became close with Jeffrey Epstein. In one exchange, Krauss wrote: “I really do love you deeply as a friend Jeffrey. I don’t think I know anyone else who so honestly cares about me, and I don’t think I can ever truly express how wonderful that feels. Thank you. The cruise was a great reset.” In other messages, they discuss science and religion.

That is what caught my attention. As I read Epstein’s comments about religion — and listened to his interview with Steve Bannon on similar themes — a picture began to form of how Epstein made sense of the world and, more chillingly, of himself.

How a monster sleeps

A question hangs over every moral horror: How does a moral monster live with himself? Even if we limit ourselves to the explicit immorality in the files — without speculating about coded language or hidden networks — how did he sleep at night? What silenced his conscience?

Several pieces fit together.

In the ASU-related material and in interviews, Epstein does what I have often seen among intellectuals: He retreats into abstraction. He speaks about the history of ideas, mathematics, and cutting-edge research in a way that floats above concrete people and particular moral obligations.

That retreat protects a self-image. He can pose as the enlightened patron of science, funding humanity’s progress. That image sits in grotesque contrast with the cruelty he inflicted on actual human beings.

Abstraction as a moral anesthetic

This pattern tracks with Paul Johnson’s thesis in “Intellectuals”: Intellectuals who talk about serving “humanity” often treat individuals in their orbit badly. Grand claims become a shield. The rhetoric of progress becomes moral insulation.

Think of the professor who preaches liberation while using DEI programs to impose racial essentialism and ideological coercion. He can tell himself he is helping “the marginalized” even as he harms colleagues and students in the real world.

Or consider the pop star who repeats slogans like “no one is illegal on stolen land.” The moral performance happens at the level of abstraction. The carelessness happens at the level of reality.

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Epstein’s ‘unknowable’ God

Epstein goes further by trying to dissolve moral accountability at the metaphysical level.

He argues that physicists once believed reality could be fully captured by mathematics. Now, he claims, we understand reality is irrational. Mathematics can only approximate what he calls “the limit,” but the limit itself remains unknowable. Some call that limit “God.”

But if God is unknowable, then God becomes irrelevant to our calculations about life and moral choice.

At one point, Epstein frames this as a male-female divide. The male mind, he says, runs on logic and mathematics. Reality, however, does not fit that paradigm. Reality is fundamentally irrational and accessed through feminine intuition. Ultimate reality, in his telling, is best understood as the divine female.

Humans, in Epstein’s view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

He may have believed he was elevating the feminine. The framework reads more like a metaphysical excuse: reason fails, therefore the standard fails.

The tension between reason and intuition is ancient. Epstein narrows “reason” to a single project: reducing the world to material causes through mathematics. When that project does not deliver what he wants, he does not abandon reductionism. He abandons reason.

Francis Schaeffer described this move in godless intellectual life: When autonomous reason cannot sustain itself, the thinker does not repent. He escapes into irrationality. Intuition becomes the alibi. Mystery becomes permission.

Religion as therapy, not truth

In conversation with Krauss, Epstein defends a kind of religion, but not biblical religion.

Krauss, echoing the New Atheists, treats religion as an evolutionary leftover — maybe useful in an earlier age, unnecessary for modern man. After all, modern man allegedly knows universes can create themselves out of nonexistence.

Epstein pushes back, but only to reduce religion to psychological management. Religion concerns the “inner world,” he suggests, while science and mathematics concern the outer world. We cannot ignore the inner world. Its purpose is peace. Anxiety and depression signal inner disorder; religion restores equilibrium. That, for Epstein, becomes religion’s function.

Not worship. Not truth. Not repentance. Peace.

That is New Age self-help with a faux religious vocabulary.

A Nietzschean pattern

Put the pieces together and a Nietzschean outline emerges.

Nietzsche described the dialectic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian seeks order, reason, structure. Yet it can become sterile and suffocating. The Dionysian seeks raw experience — ecstasy, pleasure, intoxication, release. Dionysian revelry becomes not only indulgence but purgation: a controlled environment where darker impulses can be acted out so a man can return to ordinary life and call himself functional again.

God’s moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with "unknowable limits" as our excuse. We are without excuse.

Humans, on this view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

That is the worldview of the modern pagan: order and chaos, calculation and intoxication, “science” by day and ritualized transgression by night. Add Epstein’s skepticism about knowable truth and his reduction of religion to inner peace, and the method of self-justification comes into focus.

His reported fascination with longevity technologies and strange diets fits too. Death becomes the great enemy. It must be cheated — through science, mythic elixirs, or Silicon Valley innovation.

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Temptation is not his alone

The unsettling part: These temptations are not unique to Epstein.

Many people oscillate between cold rationalism and irrational indulgence. Many treat morality as a social construct and religion as therapy. Many use abstractions to excuse what they would never defend in plain language.

That should drive self-examination, not mere disgust. Are we living inside the Apollonian-Dionysian loop, shifting between self-justifying “reason” and self-excusing “release”?

The lie at the center

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

God has not hidden Himself. Scripture teaches that His eternal power and divine nature are clearly revealed through creation. His moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with “unknowable limits” as our excuse. We are without excuse.

The claim that reality is fundamentally irrational is not a profound insight. It is an evasion. It is a way to suppress what is plain.

That is why Lawrence Krauss’ self-creating universe and Epstein’s divine female belong in the same category: idols. They exchange the truth for something else — something that grants permission.

Romans 1 describes the pattern of Epstein’s life: the darkened mind, the suppression of truth, the exchange of glory for self-justification, and the descent into sexual corruption. The cure is not oscillation between sterile rationalism and ecstatic purgation. The cure is redemption. The cure is communion with God restored.

We need Christ, who alone frees us from the pagan dialectic — ancient and modern — and grants eternal life, “that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

'Why I Am Not an Atheist' exposes incoherence of non-belief

Atheism likes to present itself as the adult in the room. Faith, by contrast, is cast as a childish indulgence for people afraid of the dark.

Christopher Beha’s "Why I Am Not an Atheist" examines this framing and demonstrates, with real precision, why atheism itself may be the most adolescent worldview of them all.

Atheism has a curious habit. It borrows Christian language — dignity, justice, compassion — while denying the metaphysical foundation that gives those words meaning.

This isn’t a book of defensive apologetics. Beha doesn’t hurl Scripture at doubters or claim that God can be demonstrated like a physics equation. Instead, he treats atheism as a coherent position and then tests it against reality. He walks its reasoning to its natural conclusion and reports back on the damage. What he finds there isn’t liberation but emptiness — sometimes dressed up as sophistication, sometimes as certainty, but emptiness all the same.

Godless

Beha’s journey begins in familiar territory. Like many sane, decent people, he wanted honesty. He wanted to “look the world frankly in the face,” to set aside inherited beliefs that, at that stage of his life, he believed couldn’t withstand scrutiny. God, to him, seemed unnecessary. Worse, He seemed embarrassing. Atheism, on the other hand, felt like intellectual courage.

Beha embraced the godless creed at first, wholeheartedly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.

Rather than joining the professional atheist class — the permanently outraged and faintly condescending set, à la Harris and Dawkins, who mistake self-indulgence for insight — Beha asks a far riskier question: What replaces God once He’s gone? Not as a thought exercise, but in real life. In daily choices. In suffering. In death.

Here, the book begins to shine.

Motion and chaos

Beha identifies two dominant atheist positions. The first is scientific materialism, which holds that only what can be measured is real. Everything else — mind, love, conscience, beauty — is reduced to physical process. Choice becomes brain chemistry. Human life is explained as motion and chance, sorted into probabilities.

The second is a newer, trendier alternative: romantic idealism. Instead of reducing the world to atoms, it centers everything on the self. Meaning is something you create. Truth is something you feel. The highest good is authenticity, and the highest crime is judgment. God disappears, and the individual assumes His place.

Both, Beha argues, fail in opposite but equally revealing ways.

Materialism reduces the human person to a biological incident. Consciousness becomes a chemical glitch. Love becomes an evolutionary strategy. It is an impressively sterile system, one that explains everything except why anyone should bother getting out of bed.

Romantic idealism reacts against this coldness by putting the individual will on the throne. The view seems warmer, and perhaps it is, but it is still incoherent. If everyone creates meaning, meaning ceases to exist. If truth is personal, truth dissolves. The self becomes both king and casualty, crowned with responsibility and locked in solitude.

Between them, Beha shows, modern atheism swings between delusion and despair. That may explain why so many of its most visible champions — from Bill Maher to Ricky Gervais to Penn Jillette — sound less liberated than irritated. Atheism can take things apart, but it can’t hold them together.

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Philosophical freeloading

What makes this critique effective is Beha’s refusal to hide behind abstractions. He doesn’t pretend that these systems fail only in theory. They fail in lived experience. They fail when existential angst arrives uninvited.

Atheism, Beha observes, has a curious habit. It borrows Christian language — dignity, justice, compassion — while denying the metaphysical foundation that gives those words meaning. It wants human rights without a human giver. What looks like intellectual bravery is closer to philosophical freeloading.

Beha is especially critical of the arrogance that often accompanies unbelief. Atheism flatters itself as fearless while demanding a strangely narrow universe — one small enough to fit inside a laboratory or a podcast episode. Anything that resists measurement is dismissed as childish. Transcendence is treated as something reserved for uncultured troglodytes.

Christianity, by contrast, has never sold comfort by making reality smaller. It doesn’t reduce the world to what feels manageable. It claims that meaning is real whether we want it or not, that God isn’t a projection of human wishes, and that right and wrong aren’t personal inventions. It doesn’t erase suffering. Instead, it meets it head-on. To be alive is to bear pain, and to bear pain is to be alive.

The way back

It is from within that hard-earned contrast — after years in the wilderness of unbelief — that Beha finds his way back, not to a vague faith, but to Christianity itself and finally to the Catholic Church. This isn’t a story of conquest. It’s an acknowledgment that atheism, however confident it sounds, left him more miserable and taught him to call that misery freedom — something he came to see clearly when his brother Jim nearly died in a car crash and later when he himself faced death with stage-three lymphoma.

Crucially, Beha isn’t arguing that faith banishes doubt. He would laugh at that idea. He remains a skeptic in the classical sense — aware of human limits, suspicious of tidy conclusions, allergic to ideological shortcuts. Faith, as he presents it, is the decision to live as though truth, goodness, and meaning are not clever hallucinations generated by neurons killing time.

For conservative Christians, "Why I Am Not an Atheist" matters because it doesn’t preach. It doesn’t wring its hands over secularism or bulldoze unbelievers. It does something far more damaging: It lets atheism talk, at length. Given enough space, its confidence begins to crack, its claims lose shape, and its bravado gives way to a worldview that can’t deliver what it promises. Atheism isn’t undone here by counterargument, but by relentless exposure.

In an age when disbelief markets itself as adulthood and faith as regression, Beha offers a bracing reversal. Atheism, he suggests, is a creed without the slightest bit of substance, built entirely on what it denies.

Christianity, whatever one’s denomination, remains the only worldview bold enough to say that life matters, suffering is not pointless, and belief answers to what is, not what we want.

George Soros ADMITS he’s an atheist

When you hear the name George Soros, one of the words that comes to mind is “globalist.” However, despite his obvious intentions for the world, what few know is what truly fuels his ideology.

“You think ‘open borders,’ which is accurate, but that doesn’t actually describe what he believes. He’s been somewhat reticent to admit publicly what his beliefs are. And so, some people will be like, ‘Oh, he’s a communist. He’s a Marxist. He’s a socialist,’” BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler says on “The Liz Wheeler Show.”

“Well, not exactly. ... In a sense, it would be easier if he were because it would be easier to define and identify the various parts of his ideology and his work, but he’s not. So, what is he? Because globalism and open borders — that’s not really an end. That’s a means to an end,” she continues.

That’s why Wheeler has done a deep dive into Soros’ background, and in doing so she stumbled on a 1998 interview Soros did on “60 Minutes.”

“Are you religious?” the interviewer asked.

“No,” Soros replied.

“Do you believe in God?” the interviewer pressed further.

“No,” Soros again replied, short and quick.

“Soros told us he believes God was created by man, not the other way around, which may be why he thinks he can smooth out the world’s imperfections,” the interviewer narrated.

“So, not to sound preachy here, not to sound religious, but George Soros’ hatred of the United States and our norms and our traditions and our sovereignty is based on hatred of the foundational principles on which our country was built, that of God and Christianity,” Wheeler says.

“And isn’t this always the case? It’s always a hatred of God that motivates them. That’s why they killed Charlie,” she continues.

“They want to destroy all definitions of objective reality, because that is written by God. That’s natural law,” she adds. “That’s why they’re seething with hatred at the United States, because we’re built as a Christian nation to allow us to glorify God. That’s why they want to dehumanize us, because we are made in the image of God.”

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Faith in the age of science: Why God still matters

Once an outspoken atheist, Stanford bioengineering professor Annelise Barron was deeply influenced by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — before rediscovering God through personal tragedy and the limits of science.

“I lost someone super close to me in a very shocking way to suicide two and a half years ago. And because he had killed himself, I suddenly became super anxious — like, is he in hell? You know, because this is what you vaguely hear, like, if you kill yourself, this is a cardinal sin,” Barron tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan on “Back to the People.”

“So I started researching it and reading the Bible, and I just, you know, had an incredible revival of my own faith based on thinking about that question,” she explains.

And when Barron began hearing the testimonials of other believers who survived tragic circumstances that science couldn’t explain, her faith deepened further.

“What’s astonishing is, like, from one moment to the next, if you ask for help in a sincere way, you ask for healing, it can be given. And whether it’s an addiction or a disease or, you know, a habit that you’re not happy with — so I am just 100% certain that God is real and that He does love each one of us,” Barron tells Shanahan.

“All He wants from us is to be in closer relationship with Him. And I think it’s extraordinary how that can help your personal happiness,” she adds.

Shanahan couldn’t agree more, explaining that the healing she’s “found in full faith of Jesus as savior” can’t be replicated “through any other bioengineered mechanism.”

“I believe that,” Barron agrees.

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Charlie Kirk's murder proves why atheism is a complete failure

Why is human life valuable?

Alex O’Connor, an online atheist whose popularity has skyrocketed in recent years, recently said this: “I call myself an ethical emotivist, by which I mean that I think ethical statements — statements like ‘Murder is wrong’, ‘Charity is good’, or ‘You shouldn’t steal’ — are expressions of emotional attitudes, and nothing more. They are not objective truth-claims.”

What Christianity provides, and atheism lacks, is an objective standard that can be universally held up to defend human life.

O’Connor, by all accounts, is an upstanding member of society. Not only does he not kill or steal, but he has become famous for treating his debate opponents with respect, especially in comparison to famous atheist polemicists like Christopher Hitchens. He should be applauded for that.

But in his morally relativistic view, human life is only as valuable as his emotions, or anyone else’s emotions, permit.

Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, had a very different set of emotions from Alex O’Connor. Whatever respect O’Connor subjectively chooses to show for human beings, Robinson allegedly chose the opposite. Robinson allegedly believed — subjectively — that the value of human life ended where his political resentments began.

If you’re Alex O’Connor, what would you say to a political assassin? How would you convince him that he’s wrong to devalue human life?

Objectively, you couldn’t. Because O’Connor doesn’t think the statement “human life has value” is objectively true, but rather a matter of personal tastes. Even if he personally finds Robinson’s alleged views and actions repugnant, he couldn’t point to any objective standard to justify that.

The trouble with atheism isn’t that atheists personally live immoral lives. Everyone has met atheists who are good spouses, good parents, and good citizens. The problem is that atheism can't provide an objective defense to the proposition that all human life should be valued by everybody all the time.

According to atheist Richard Dawkins, “We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

People discard machines routinely without any thought at all — laptops, phones, iPads, cars, and many other things. Drive down to the local junkyard and look at the decaying and forgotten corpses of old Toyota Camrys. No one mourns them, no one gave them a funeral, no one had moral qualms about throwing them away.

If Dawkins’ description of human beings as “survival machines” and “robot vehicles blindly programmed” is accurate, then why would human beings be any different from those Toyota Camrys?

Atheism has no answer to that question — but Christianity does.

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In his landmark work "Theology of the Body," Pope John Paul II said this:

Man, whom God created male and female, bears the divine image imprinted on his body "from the beginning."

This is a restatement of Genesis 1:26, which is the foundation of Christian anthropology. In this verse, God declares: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Man has objective dignity because man bears the divine image.

Romans 5:8 goes on to say: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” This shows that even serious moral failings do not eliminate the objective dignity of a human being.

"Dignitas Infinita," a Vatican document released in 2024 and approved by Pope Francis, further states that “every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.”

If Christianity is true, then God is the author of truth itself. And if God is the author of truth itself, and he has assigned infinite dignity to all human beings, then that dignity is a universal truth not dependent on the emotions or whims of any person.

Of course, this does not guarantee that Christians will live by that. Many so-called Christians have warped ideas of what their faith demands. Some use it as a cloak for their political ideology. Vance Boelter, who allegedly murdered former Minnesota Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, seemingly had no respect for human life.

But what Christianity provides, and atheism lacks, is an objective standard that can be universally held up to defend human life against anyone who threatens it. It provides an objective way to say “Tyler Robinson is wrong,” instead of “I personally don’t like what Tyler Robinson [allegedly] did.”

This matters deeply at the societal level, and the data bears it out.

According to Pew Research, in 1972, 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians, while 5% identified as religiously unaffiliated. By 2022, the percentage of Christians had shrunk to 63% while the religiously unaffiliated percentage had risen to 29%. This is mirrored in other Western countries, often even more precipitously: 90% of Canadians in 1971 identified as Christian, according to census data, with only 4% identifying as non-religious. By 2021, the Christian percentage was just 52% and the non-religious percentage had risen to 34%.

Of course, “religiously unaffiliated” or “non-religious” are nebulous terms that might not refer to atheism in the strictest sense, but at best, they refer to a vague and subjective worldview that, like atheism, allows for someone to assign his own subjective morality, or lack thereof.

The effects of this shift can be seen with the explosion of abortions in the U.S. that coincided with the acceleration of secularism in the 1970s and 1980s. According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions skyrocketed from 744,000 in 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was handed down, to a peak of 1.6 million in 1990, and to this day they remain well above the 1973 levels, though they have mercifully declined in recent years.

Euthanasia has gained immense popularity in the secular age as well. A horrifying report in the Atlantic — hardly a conservative publication — described how Canadians of all walks of life are requesting doctors to kill them in order to end some form of physical or emotional suffering they are experiencing.

In fact, under Canada’s euthanasia law, mental illness alone will be sufficient for eligibility by 2027 to terminate one’s own life with the help of doctors.

Mass shootings have dramatically increased as secularism has spread. While humans have been killing each other since the fall of man, such killing has usually had a clear motive of some kind: defeating another nation in battle or seeking some form of regime change.

Mass shootings, however, represent a nihilistic form of violence apparently driven by narcissism that has no clear precedent in human history. According to the Violence Project, there were only five mass shootings between 1965 and 1969, but that number rose to 33 between 2015 and 2019 — a shocking increase of over 600%.

Nearly everyone condemns mass shootings, though unfortunately, the same cannot be said about abortion or euthanasia.

But in an atheistic paradigm, can that condemnation be based on anything other than personal emotions, as O’Connor admits his opposition to murder is based on?

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As people increasingly treat the value of human life as subjective, consistent with O’Connor’s “emotivist” view, it seems that more and more people are willing to subjectively insert exceptions into their worldview — situations where life can, in fact, be discarded like an old Toyota Camry.

Does this prove Christianity? Not by itself. Just because something would be helpful if it were true doesn’t mean it’s true.

But at the very least, it should make people open to hearing the arguments for Christianity. It should make people want it to be true, and it should move them to investigate the evidence for why it might be. Many people dislike religion and plug their ears when the topic comes up. But the alternative is too dark to just casually accept without any consideration.

Why is human life valuable? In today’s chaotic age, a subjective answer to that question is simply not enough.

Science's God-denying narrative just got crushed again

Scientists have made a discovery that should shake the foundations of modern biology.

When organisms die, some of their cells might not simply shut off like light bulbs. Instead, they reorganize, build new structures, solve problems, and make decisions. These researchers call it a “third state” of existence.

Once you accept that life itself shows signs of intention, you must also acknowledge that there is an Intender.

But to anyone steeped in Christian thought, it sounds less like a new scientific category and more like an old truth, a glimpse of the life that refuses to be reduced to chemicals and chance.

Mind in matter

Consider the strange case of xenobots, tiny clusters of frog cells lifted from their natural role and placed in a lab dish. They were expected to wither.

Instead, they began to move, formed patterns, and worked together in ways that showed clear intention.

Dr. William Miller calls this consciousness. Not the kind of awareness you and I possess, but the raw ability to adapt, to choose, to pursue a purpose. When placed outside their usual role, cells don’t behave like blind molecules colliding at random. They behave like agents. They cooperate. They solve problems. They move toward goals.

That fact alone shatters one of materialism’s deepest dogmas.

The evolution lie

For more than a century, the reigning narrative has been that consciousness is a late arrival on the evolutionary stage. It's nothing more than an accidental byproduct of brain complexity, born only after countless mutations stumbled into neurons, then into networks, then into awareness.

The atheist worldview depends on this sequence. It argues that life has no inherent meaning because what we call “mind” is simply chemistry scaled up. In this view, free will is an illusion generated by firing synapses.

But these cells expose the lie of that story.

If consciousness exists at the cellular level, then it doesn’t wait for brains. It doesn’t emerge as a lucky accident after billions of years of trial and error. It’s present from the beginning, written into life at its smallest scale.

That flips the entire evolutionary tale on its head. Instead of matter groping toward mind, we see mind animating matter. Instead of dead particles producing life, we see life infused with purpose at the very first step.

The intender revealed

What if mind, not matter, is primary? This is a profoundly important question, one that doesn’t just challenge the materialist narrative but annihilates it. Once you accept that life itself shows signs of intention, you must also acknowledge that there is an Intender.

The real shock is that these cells don’t compete; they collaborate. They don’t claw for survival but sacrifice for a greater whole. Every one of the 30 trillion cells in your body could, in theory, serve itself — yet they don’t. They choose unity. Skin cells shield. Heart cells pump. Brain cells think. All of them working in harmony with no central command.

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Random mutation cannot account for this. Natural selection doesn’t explain why self-interest gives way to selflessness billions of times a day inside your body. Something is directing the orchestra.

And consider the scale of the information problem. DNA contains more information than our minds could possibly fathom. Cellular machinery reads, copies, and executes these instructions with astonishing speed and near-perfect accuracy, millions of times every second. Our best computers look painfully clumsy beside such precision.

Materialists insist that this miracle of information arranged itself over billions of years. But information doesn’t just organize itself. A letter always points back to an author, a painting to a painter, and a symphony to a composer.

God's living code

The xenobot research confirms this reality. It's what some scientists call “biological agency.” And where does this awareness come from? Scientists can describe what it does, but not where it begins. They can measure its effects, but not locate its source.

Christianity, on the other hand, has always given the only coherent answer: Consciousness originates in God, the eternal, self-existent Being who imprinted His image on creation, a God who designed life not as machinery but as community.

The Bible says humans are made in God’s image, reflecting His consciousness, His creativity, His moral compass. What Miller and others are now uncovering is that this reflection stretches deeper than we imagined. Every cell of your body participates in it. Right now, as you read these words, trillions of cells are making choices, collaborating without rest, preserving your existence.

Some might view this as a fortunate accident, another curious quirk in the endless lottery of evolution.

But randomness doesn’t yield purpose. Blind collisions don’t generate systems that adapt, collaborate, and surrender for one another with unfailing order. What we see isn’t chaos but choreography, not accident but authorship.

I see it as divine purpose. The God signal has been there all along, humming beneath the fabric of life. And now even the microscopes are beginning to see it: design in the details, direction in the data, destiny in the DNA.

Lee Strobel’s top supernatural stories to challenge your atheist friends

Atheists believe the universe is made up of only physical material. Souls, spirits, divinity, the afterlife — it’s all fiction.

But how do they reckon with phenomena — those hair-raising moments that shatter physics and turn our brains inside out? How do they make sense of miracles, like the terminal cancer patient who’s healed after prayer or the clinically dead person who wakes up with knowledge impossible for him to have?

The hardened skeptics will clutch their materialist beliefs even tighter, insisting there must be some scientific explanation. The more curious ones who allow themselves to venture down mystical rabbit holes, however, often find themselves in the position where disavowing the supernatural takes more effort than acknowledging its existence.

That was Lee Strobel — famous Christian apologist and author of the beloved book “The Case for Christ.” He set out to debunk Christianity, but his rigorous investigation into miracles and the veracity of biblical claims shattered his atheist beliefs and led him to the feet of Jesus.

In this fascinating interview with Glenn Beck, Lee shares several documented cases of miracles and wild stories that will challenge even the most committed atheist.

Proof of the soul

“There are 900 scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals over the last 40 years on the topic of near-death experiences. These are cases where a person is clinically dead — generally, no brain waves, no respiration, no heartbeat. Some of them have been on the way to the morgue. ... But then they’re revived,” Lee says.

“And when they come back, they say, ‘I was conscious the whole time. I was watching them try to resuscitate my body in the hospital.”’

Glenn and Lee revisit the spine-chilling story of a Hispanic woman named Maria, who suffered a severe heart attack in the 1970s and was resuscitated at a hospital in Seattle. When she regained consciousness, Maria reported having an out-of-body experience, claiming her spirit floated around the emergency room while she was being operated on.

Skeptics dismissed her initially, but then Maria told them there was a sticker on the top of the ceiling fan blade in her hospital room — a detail invisible from the ground. Hospital staff brought in a ladder and beheld the sticker exactly as Maria had described it.

Lee shares another story of a young girl who drowned in a YMCA swimming pool.

“[The doctors] just were keeping her body basically alive until they figured out what to do,” he says.

But three days later, she was miraculously revived. She told hospital staff that she was “conscious the whole time,” Lee recounts. But they scoffed at the girl until she began sharing confirmed details about what her parents were doing at home while she was clinically dead in the hospital.

The girl knew that her mother made chicken and rice for dinner; she knew what specific clothes her family was wearing and that her little brother had played with his G.I. Joe toys while alone in his room — “things she could not have known unless her body, unless her spirit really did follow them home.”

Documented miracles

In his recent book “Seeing the Supernatural,” Lee shares the story of a woman who was blind from birth due to an incurable condition.

“She married a pastor. And one night they’re getting ready to go to bed, and he comes over. ... He puts his hand on her shoulder, and he begins to cry and begins to pray, and he says, ‘God, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can do it, and I pray you do it tonight.’ And with that, she opened her eyes with perfect eyesight,” Lee says, adding that her vision was perfect for the remainder of her life.

“How do you explain that?” he asks.

He then shares another “well-documented case” of a woman named Doris, who had a deathbed vision.

“She sees the heavens open up, and she sees angelic beings, and she sees her father, who had died a couple years earlier. ... And then she gets this puzzled look on her face, and she said, ‘Wait a minute. What’s Vita doing there?”’ Lee recounts.

Vita was Doris’ sister, who had died a couple of weeks earlier. However, Doris’ family hadn’t told her the news for fear that it would worsen her waning condition.

Doris is one of many documented cases of people who “see something in the realm to come that they could not have known about.”

Radical redemption

Evel Knievel — the American daredevil and stunt performer famous for his death-defying motorcycle jumps in the 1960s and 1970s — radically encountered God at the very end of his life.

“He was a drunk. He was a womanizer and once beat up a business associate with a baseball bat and went to jail for assault,” Lee says, retelling the icon’s incredible conversion story.

Just a few months before his death, Knievel was “on the beach in Florida, and God spoke to him and said, ‘Robert ... I’ve saved you more times than you’ll ever know. Now, you need to come to me through my son, Jesus.”’

Freaked out by this profound spiritual encounter, Knievel called Frank Gifford, a renowned sportscaster and Christian, to ask about Jesus and Christianity. Gifford pointed him to Lee’s famous book “The Case for Christ,” and he came to faith in Jesus after reading it.

Knievel had a “180-degree change — more than anybody I’d ever seen in my life,” Lee says, noting that he and Knievel became friends as a result.

He was baptized in California’s Crystal Cathedral, and after he gave his powerful testimony, roughly 700 people spontaneously came forward to be baptized during the same service.

Angelic and demonic encounters

Well-known psychiatrist Dr. Richard Gallagher, who’s also a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and a psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia University, has a hair-raising story about his first demon encounter that set him on a 25-year journey of studying the demonic.

He and his wife had two cats, who had never had an issue getting along with one another. One night, however, they randomly began to savagely attack each other, shocking Gallagher and his wife, who had to put the cats in separate rooms to stop the fighting.

The very next morning, Dr. Gallagher had an appointment to psychiatrically examine a woman named Julia, who claimed to be the high priestess of a satanic cult.

“She looks up at him, and she sneers, and she says, ‘How’d you like those cats last night?’” Lee says.

Later that day, Dr. Gallagher was speaking to a Catholic priest about Julia on the phone, and during their call, a “satanic voice” interrupted and said, “You let her go. She’s ours.”

After years of studying the demonic, Dr. Gallagher has accumulated many terrifying stories of demon possession. He’s documented a case where “a petite woman ... picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room” and a case where “eight eyewitnesses saw a demon-possessed person levitate off a bed for half an hour.”

But there are just as many stories of angelic encounters too. One, which was documented in a doctoral dissertation, tells the story of a young girl in the hospital asking her mother if she could see the angels. “They’re so beautiful. Listen to their singing,” she told her mother, who was skeptical but played along.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I see them. Look at their big wings,” she told her daughter, who confusedly responded, “Oh Mommy, you don’t have to lie. They don’t have big wings.”

“She went on to describe these angels in great detail. You would think if this was just something coming from the subconscious mind of a little kid, they would imagine what an angel would look like to them from a cartoon,” Lee says, but “that’s not what they see.”

To hear more documented cases of miraculous occurrences, as well as Glenn and Lee’s personal experiences with the supernatural, watch the interview above.

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