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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The Dawkins delusion: Why atheism can't explain the one thing that matters

Consciousness is the ultimate wonder and the deepest mystery — even for the devout. Not dark matter or quantum mechanics, but the fact that you are reading these words, that there is something it feels like to be you.

Believers may affirm that God made man in His image, and I agree, yet the question remains: Why should dust, shaped by divine hands, open its eyes and know itself? Why breathe into us not only life, but the inner life — the hidden sanctuary where thought, memory, and prayer rise and take flight?

The mystery matter can't master

Scientists can catalogue every neuron. They can trace every chemical cascade and chart every flicker of electricity racing through the brain. They can build diagrams so precise you could almost mistake them for the thing itself.

Yet none of it explains the one detail that matters most — that there is an inside.

That matter, when shaped in a certain way, suddenly gazes back at the universe and says, “I am.” Perception isn’t just the processing of inputs. It’s the lived immediacy of them: the taste of coffee, the ache of loss, the terror before a fall. These are realities experienced, not merely computed.

Some argue this is a puzzle that can be solved. All we need is more funding, more computational power, and more time, the argument goes.

What nonsense.

Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.

The answer, it turns out, has been staring at us all along. Consciousness isn’t an accident of biology. It’s a fundamental part of reality, present before the first atom came to be. Matter doesn’t simply wake up by chance. It’s animated by something older, deeper, and impossible to quantify.

Call it spirit. Call it soul. Call it God.

The Dawkins delusion

For the Richard Dawkinses of this world — those allergic to religion — “God” sounds like a convenient escape hatch, a quick patch over the gaps in our understanding.

Yet the theological view is anything but a shortcut. It doesn’t merely declare, “God made man and switched on the lights.” It suggests that the light itself — the act of knowing — is the purpose. Awareness is the link between dust and divinity, binding the created to the Creator.

In other words, consciousness is no evolutionary afterthought but the central drama of existence, the stage on which heaven and earth meet within the human soul.

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This changes everything.

If awareness is fundamental, then the mind is not just an observer of the universe. It is a participant in it, a co-creator. The inner life becomes more than a collection of survival tricks honed by natural selection. It becomes the very arena in which the material and the divine meet.

Every moment of thought, every flicker of self-recognition, is a point of contact with something infinite.

That idea unsettles people because it shifts responsibility onto each conscious being. If awareness is a sacred link — which it is — then how we use it carries weight beyond anything science can quantify. The ethics of thought, intention, and attention move to the center. A life squandered in distraction or cruelty becomes much more than a personal failure.

In this view, it becomes the misuse of something unimaginably rare.

The sacred spark

Even our most advanced machines make the contrast clear.

They can mimic conversation, create art, and solve problems at rapid speeds, yet they remain completely vacant. There is no inner witness, no “I” behind the code. Their outputs may dazzle, but no one is there to be moved, to care, to suffer, or to rejoice. Set beside a single conscious breath, a single human glance, the difference is profound. And perhaps that’s the point. Consciousness is not about speed or efficiency. It is about relationship — between mind and world, self and other, creature and Creator.

For centuries, Christian mystics have spoken of the soul as a mirror made to catch and reflect the light of God.

Teresa of Ávila wrote of the “interior castle” with its deepest chamber reserved for union with Christ. John of the Cross spoke of stripping away every lesser light until only God’s radiance remained. The German theologian Meister Eckhart called it the “spark of the soul,” a place untouched by sin where God’s presence burns brightest.

In their eyes, consciousness isn’t a random flicker of awareness. It's the faculty by which the creature knows the Creator, the meeting place of heaven and earth within the human heart.

We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.

Modern science has given us remarkable tools to study the mechanisms of the mind, but the mechanism is not the mystery. The circuitry is not the song. You can dismantle a radio and never hear the music that once flowed through it. Likewise, you can map the brain and never touch the consciousness that animates it.

That gap — the chasm between matter in motion and the breath of being — is where the divine dwells.

Conscious by creation

We live in an age that prefers to compress the mystery into whatever measurements our tools can take. It's the spirit of 2025, an era when meaning is traded for metrics and a culture drifting toward nihilism mistakes data for doctrine.

But we must let the mystery magnify us and let it widen our grasp of what it means to be alive. Consciousness is a bridge between two eternities — the dust God shaped us from and the divinity that calls us home. To stand in the middle is to bear the weight of the world and feel the pull of the world that awaits.

Atheists will no doubt roll their eyes, but the reality remains: Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.

We are not bystanders in God’s creation. We move through it as participants, shaping its story as it shapes us. We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.

Every thought, every act of attention, every choice is a line in the ongoing dialogue between Creator and created, a conversation that will echo into eternity.

Was 'Scooby-Doo' actually atheist propaganda for children?

Does "Scooby-Doo" teach children the core philosophical tenets of atheism?

I recently saw an atheist claim that "Scooby-Doo" was created to teach children about rationality and skepticism because every episode begins with a supernatural event — like a haunting ghost and unexplained phenomena — and ends with a "natural explanation" (i.e., it's just a person in a mask).

I saw this claim on Reddit:

I just realized scooby-doo was made to teach kids skepticism and rationality

Suddenly it makes sense why my ultra religious mother ended up forbidding me from watching it as a kid. Last night, it suddenly occurred to me based on what I could vaguely recall about the show before I was banned from it that every episode was about something supernatural happening and then getting proven to have a non-supernatural cause. I looked it up and it turns out that was exactly the case.

This argument got me thinking and raised two important questions:

Is "Scooby-Doo" naturalist propaganda for children?
How strongly does the plot of a generic "Scooby-Doo" episode bolster the argument for naturalism?

Subversive Scooby

When you stop and think about it, "Scooby-Doo" is actually kind of subversive.

It teaches children that whenever we think something is supernatural, it really just has a natural explanation. It drills into young minds that the right answer is always the non-supernatural one. The ghosts are never real, the curses are always fake, and the monsters are just people in costumes.

There's always a natural explanation. And by reinforcing this idea over and over, it teaches children that believing anything supernatural is irrational.

God isn’t one more cause among the many other causes in the universe. He’s not just another thing pushing particles around.

"Scooby-Doo" is not a neutral show. It's naturalistic indoctrination.

And here's why that's a problem: The argument that “every time we investigate, we find a natural explanation, so everything must have a natural explanation" is the same argument atheists use to claim that God isn't real.

Fatal flaw

The subversive argument of the "Scooby-Doo" plot is not only a problem because it's the same one that atheists use, but it's a problem because it's not a good argument.

In fact, it's a really bad one.

First, even if you grant for the sake of argument that a natural explanation is found on the other side of a supernatural cause, it doesn't require that all explanations are natural. That's just logically invalid. It's like saying, "All the swans I’ve seen are white; therefore all swans must be white," or, "Every time I walk into a house, I see carpet; therefore all houses have carpet."

These are inductive overreaches. It’s completely fallacious reasoning. Still, there's an even deeper problem.

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Atheists believe that if God existed, then we should be able to see him directly intervening in the world in a visible, testable way. They think that if we hear a weird sound in the attic, we should be able to climb up there and find God directly causing the sound.

But this is a bizarre line of logic, because that's not how God is understood in theism. God isn’t one more cause among the many other causes in the universe. He’s not just another thing pushing particles around. Instead, God is the one who makes the whole universe possible in the first place.

Worldmaker

Consider J.R.R. Tolkien. When you read "The Lord of the Rings," you don't see Tolkien himself in the story. Rather, you see Frodo walking to Mordor, Gandalf giving advice, and Aragorn being born from parents. You’d never see Tolkien manipulating Middle-earth — he’s nowhere to be seen.

If you lived in that world, you might think based on your experience that everything was caused by something else in that world. The characters have their own internal causes, and yet their ultimate existence and explanation is found in what? J.R.R. Tolkien. He brought all of it into being.

Notice that even though Tolkien is the ultimate explanation for everything in his world, you cannot find him directly causing anything in his world.

That’s how God relates to our world. He’s the reason anything exists at all. Just as Tolkien is the cause of everything in Middle-earth without being a character in it, God is the cause of everything in our universe without being a natural object within it.

So to expect that you can "see God" in the chain of natural causes is like tearing apart the pages of a novel looking for the author's actual fingerprints.

The final answer

Still, there is a much bigger philosophical problem with this argument that atheists hate to acknowledge.

If you say that everything has an explanation, then you are forced to ask: Where does the chain of explanations stop?

Sure, perhaps natural things are explained by other natural things. But what explains those? And what explains the natural things that explain those natural things? It's a circular argument that results in infinite regress, which produces contradictions and ultimately explains nothing.

That's not rational.

There has to be something at the end of the chain, something that explains everything else but is not explained by anything else. Something that exists by the necessity of its own nature.

If the supernatural foundation of all reality has a mind, then that’s God.

That thing, whatever it is, must be radically different from everything else. It’s not one more link in the chain — it’s the foundation of the chain. And if it’s not caused, not contingent, and not dependent on anything else, then it's not "natural." It's supernatural, and it's fundamentally different from all of the "natural" stuff.

Once you realize this, you're forced to consider: Does this supernatural foundation have a mind?

And what do you find in the universe it caused? You find minds. Information embedded in DNA. Consciousness. Reason. Intelligibility. Purpose. Order. Morality.

None of these things we would expect to get from mindless matter. These are exactly the things an intelligent mind produces. We know this because we ourselves possess minds. So if the fundamental cause of everything contains the power to bring forth minds, intelligibility, and moral reality, then the most reasonable conclusion is that it, too, has a mind.

And if the supernatural foundation of all reality has a mind, then that’s God.

Maybe the real mystery isn't whether or not "Scooby-Doo" was debunking ghosts. The real mystery is why so many atheists think that repeating a cartoon plotline counts as an argument against the existence of God.

'Left-wing lesbian atheists': Oasis singer mocks liberal comedian who said he stole her audience

Oasis singer Noel Gallagher mocked a progressive comedian who claimed Oasis was the reason no one was showing up to her shows.

Kate Smurthwaite describes herself as a "comedian, writer, activist." Audiences may remember her from a plethora of culture-war clips dating back almost a decade, where she defended feminism, political correctness, and more, often resulting in her ridicule.

Smurthwaite was attempting the stand-up comedy portion of her career at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last week, and unfortunately her show coincided with an Oasis concert during the band's comeback tour stop in Scotland.

'What kind of a culture have we become?'

Smurthwaite posted a video from a venue last Wednesday that showed an empty room 25 minutes after her show was supposed to have started.

"This is the Oasis effect," she claimed. "Big groups of people in Oasis shirts are not interested in my show or anybody else's."

While Smurthwaite called it "heartbreaking" to have to cancel her shows, the Oasis singer — who is not known to bite his tongue — addressed her claims to a massive crowd in Edinburgh just two days later.

"Are there any left-wing lesbian atheists?" Gallagher asked the crowd, appearing in black and white on a massive screen.

Gallagher then looked to see how many of Smurthwaite's fans had made it to the Oasis show as opposed to going to hers.

"Can we get a show of hands, please? ... Not a f**king one."

"What kind of a culture have we become?" Gallagher sarcastically asked. "Disgraceful."

The artist immediately dedicated his next song to "lesbian atheists."

Gallagher did not seem to be far off, as Smurthwaite has been described in a favorable tone as a "left-wing, feminist, atheist, polyamorous comedian and activist."

Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images

In a follow-up video that showed off her armpit hair, Smurthwaite complained that the Oasis concert should not have been scheduled at the same time as the art festival, and that news outlets have "twisted the story" surrounding her claims.

She expanded on her original gripe that Oasis should be more considerate of fellow performers, adding that the story had been "spun to [sound] like, 'horrendous feminist comedian can't get an audience for her show because she's woke and she's not funny and nobody's interested and she's not as good as Oasis and she's bitter about it and she's furious.'"

Smurthwaite said the news coverage was overshadowing more important issues facing the United Kingdom, such as "climate change" and "horrendous racist immigration policies."

According to commenters on YouTube, the Oasis song Gallagher dedicated to the "lesbian atheists" was the 2000 single "Where Did It All Go Wrong?"

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The left’s real enemy isn’t Sydney Sweeney

The recent outrage over an American Eagle ad featuring actress Sydney Sweeney would be hilarious if it weren’t so revealing. The ad shows Sweeney wearing jeans with the cheeky caption, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” It’s a harmless pun — wordplay on both genetics and denim.

But as we know, grievance culture doesn’t do humor. According to outraged leftists, this ad is “Nazi-coded propaganda” because Sweeney has the wrong look: blonde hair and blue eyes. That’s right — Sweeney didn’t goose-step across your screen or quote “Mein Kampf.” She just smiled in a pair of jeans. Apparently, that was enough to unleash the fury of the perpetually offended.

It’s not a crime to recognize beauty. It’s an act of sanity.

Why does something so lighthearted spark such disproportionate rage?

Beauty threatens the left

At first glance, the reaction seems to fit a familiar pattern. Sweeney is white. She’s conventionally attractive. She’s not apologizing for either of those things. That’s three strikes in the diversity, equity, and inclusion playbook.

The new cultural catechism of the left says that beauty is a “social construct.” It’s used by oppressive systems to maintain unjust hierarchies, so it must be redistributed according to equity quotas.

Admiring beauty becomes an offense. It must be deconstructed — if not altogether abolished — and reprogrammed with DEI.

But there’s something deeper at work — something more visceral and more theological. You can sense it in the feral energy of the backlash. It’s not just that Sweeney is beautiful. It’s that she didn’t earn it. And the leftists are mired in high-schoolish insecurity.

She didn’t pass a DEI review. She didn’t seek approval from the sensitivity board. Her looks aren’t the result of a curated political identity — they’re the result of, well, her parents.

And that’s what drives the left insane. Beauty, in this case, violates the central tenet of their moral framework: fairness. Sweeney didn’t do anything to deserve being attractive (aside from perhaps watching her diet and going to the gym). Her features are, largely, inherited — in their language, “privilege.”

‘Why not me?’

The old-school leftists like Herbert Marcuse rightly critiqued the one-dimensionality of ads like American Eagle’s. Commercial culture does not aim at beauty, truth, or goodness. But the modern leftists dropped that message. Now, beauty is whatever the activist class tells you it is, as long as it serves the cause.

This is the theology of the grievance industrial complex: If something is unearned, it’s unjust. It's just not fair. “Why not me?” is the battle cry — less a revolution, more a toddler’s tantrum.

This is why leftists don’t just go after people — they go after beauty itself. I’m not equating sex appeal to beauty. But the outrage is beyond sex appeal and is aimed at the very idea that someone can be beautiful without approval from the Committee of Twelve.

Spend five minutes on any state university campus or in Democrat-run city and look at the newest buildings. They are intentionally not beautiful. They have even abandoned Soviet functionality. Concrete cubes with exposed ductwork and LED-lit virtue slogans where cornices and stained glass used to be are statements of contempt, monuments to cynicism and self-hatred, rather than structures designed to lift the soul.

The leftist assault on beauty goes beyond architecture. University art galleries — such as the one run by my school, Arizona State University — are considered “activist installations.” Chaotic splashes of rage, deconstruction, profanity, and noise aren’t merely misguided attempts at beauty — they are refusals of it. They reject order and celebrate cacophony.

A war on God

This reveals a deeper truth: Leftists' war on beauty is ultimately a war on God.

Beauty is not a construct. It is not the invention of Western power structures. Beauty is real — it flows from the nature of God Himself. As Augustine wrote, ”Being is good.” Evil is not a thing in itself. It’s the corruption of the good. Likewise, beauty is not a weapon of oppression. It’s the radiance of order, truth, and harmony.

But if you hate the Creator, you will hate creation. You won’t rejoice in beauty; you’ll resent it. The truly dark impulse behind much of leftist cultural production is not liberation. It’s vengeance.

A world that won’t conform to their demands must be punished. If they can’t make reality fair by their standards, then they’ll make it ugly and demand that you call it a masterpiece

Reject the mob

But you aren’t required to play along. You don’t have to pretend that brokenness is beauty, that chaos is art, that bitterness is profound, or that atheism is intellectually deep.

You don’t have to nod along when they tell you that Sydney Sweeney’s ad is a hate crime and that art school murals of screaming female body parts are sublime. You can say, without apology: That’s not beautiful.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

And that’s a kind of cultural resistance we desperately need. Christians in particular must recover a theology of beauty. We serve the God who clothes the lilies of the field in splendor, who filled the skies with stars and the oceans with wonder, who made the human form. This God of beauty is the same one who redeems the lost sinner and works all things together for good.

So don’t let the rage mob deprive you of beauty. Don’t let their tantrums over privilege drive you into false guilt. And don’t let the secular liturgists of ugliness define what your heart is allowed to love.

We were made to love what is good, true, and beautiful. That includes a well-cut cathedral, a sonata in a major key, a sunrise over the Grand Canyon — and God, who created all of this.

It’s not a crime to recognize beauty. It’s an act of sanity.

Farewell to Stephen Colbert, fake laughs, and lame late-night bias

Those who still remember what real comedy looks like got some good news last week: CBS announced that it’s canceling Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

I know what you’re thinking — hadn’t that already happened? Spiritually? Emotionally? Creatively? Fair questions. After all, the last time Colbert got a genuine laugh, the Comedy Network still existed, and you could make a joke on TV without it requiring a full apology tour.

Look, I’m not saying no one ever laughed. But if someone did, it probably wasn’t because of his act. More likely, they were laughing at him. People often told him his show was funny — just not his show. Somewhere on television that night, something was funny. That counts, right?

Colbert spent a decade scolding America to sleep, hoping the canned applause would drown out the snoring.

Let’s be serious for a moment (which is more than Colbert’s done in about a decade). Without his show lulling viewers into a state of dull leftist self-congratulation each night, we might see a nationwide spike in melatonin sales. “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” served as a free sleep aid for coastal elites who needed to be reassured — just before bed — that they were smarter than everyone else. No comfort like being tucked in and handed their favorite Squishmallow.

Melatonin for the masses

From the beginning, Colbert built his career on mocking conservatives. His original shtick on Comedy Central was a parody — a pretend conservative who was mocking real conservatives, but with just enough smugness to pass as “clever” in a faculty lounge.

It worked — for a while. But like most one-joke acts, it wore thin fast. When he made the jump to CBS, the parody turned into reality: a genuine leftist, playing the role of a leftist, telling jokes only a leftist could love — while aiming hate at conservatives.

See on Instagram

Colbert wasn’t a comedian. He was an actor pretending to be a comedian, which is only slightly more honest than most modern pundits pretending to be journalists.

Bias dressed as truth

But there’s a deeper lesson here. Colbert belongs to the same cultural bubble as NPR’s president, the university diversity officer, and the late-night writers’ room packed with Ivy League graduates who somehow believe their worldview is “neutral.”

They talk a big game about identifying bias — but can’t see the deep blue (or Marxist red) lens that shapes everything they see and say. They honestly believe they’re just “telling the truth” — a truth that, conveniently, always punches right and kisses left.

That’s what made Colbert’s show feel like a parody of itself. You kept waiting for the wink, the nudge, the moment he’d break character and admit the absurdity. But it never came.

Instead, he delivered gentle laughs for Democrats — “Teehee, aren’t they quirky?” — and launched into furious monologues about Trump, DeSantis, or anyone to the right of Mitt Romney. It wasn’t satire. It was seething partisan rage, disguised as applause-sign comedy.

You wanted it to be a bit. But it wasn’t. It was just Colbert. Night after night. Until the ratings finally collapsed and put the whole sad production out of its misery.

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

One shining moment

I’ll give credit where it’s due. Colbert did have one moment of brilliance — a genuine philosophical zinger. It happened years ago, back when Colbert still hosted “The Colbert Report.” His guest was none other than Lawrence Krauss — the disgraced ASU physicist who became famous for telling people the universe came from nothing (a philosophical trick so bold it somehow earned him a book deal and a speaking tour).

Krauss was on to promote his book, “A Universe from Nothing,” and Colbert got him to admit that what he’s talking about isn’t nothing, but rather something called “quantum foam.” The book’s title was blatant false advertising.

And then Colbert — clearly out of character for once — did something I still show my philosophy students. He pressed Krauss: “So you believe the universe came from nothing?” Krauss nodded. “And you believe God doesn’t exist, that God is nothing?” Another nod. Colbert paused and delivered the knockout line: “Then aren’t you really saying the universe came from God?”

Boom.

That one line did more to dismantle Krauss’ book than any academic critique ever could. It was sharp, witty, and philosophically devastating. (You can watch my analysis of that clip here.)

If only Colbert had stuck to that kind of comedy — the kind that exposes absurdity rather than reinforces it. Instead, he spent the next decade scolding America to sleep, hoping the canned applause would drown out the snoring.

Make comedy great again

The sad truth is that we haven’t seen real late-night humor in years. I recently caught a rerun of Johnny Carson, and it was like discovering a comedic oasis in the desert. Carson could poke fun at both sides of the aisle without apologizing for loving his country. He didn’t flirt with the virus of multicultural guilt or the blame-America-first bug that has infected entertainment for the last 20 years.

He was funny because he understood something Colbert never did: America, for all her flaws, is still worth laughing with — not just sneering at.

So farewell, Stephen Colbert. I’d say we’ll miss you, but we’ve already had years of practice.

Club Misery: How the godless elite let the truth slip about atheism

What do Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Ricky Gervais have in common?

If you’re the sort of person who reads HuffPost, sips oat milk lattes, and thinks everything wrong with the world boils down to white men with opinions, you probably already have your answer: privileged patriarchal monsters.

Atheism, in its purest form, is an ideology of erasure, a faith in subtraction.

But if you’re a little more honest — and a little more curious — you’ll notice something different.

These aren’t just successful men. They’re atheists — and they’re also, quite clearly, miserable.

Bill Maher

Maher is a comedian by trade, but rarely funny any more — at least not in the way that feels joyful or generous.

On "Club Random," his podcast that masquerades as freewheeling conversation, Maher talks over his guests so relentlessly that it’s become the most consistent punch line in his YouTube comments.

“Stop cutting them off, Bill.”
“Let them speak, for once.”
“Do you invite guests just to hear yourself talk?”

He lectures, sneers, and plays the same greatest hits week after week. He’s not sharing ideas — he’s performing superiority. You can practically feel the clenched teeth through your screen.

Richard Dawkins

Then there’s Richard Dawkins, the patron saint of Darwinian superiority, the man who turned religious skepticism into a career of scowling, condescension, and book tours.

Dawkins hasn’t smiled in public since the Cambrian explosion. He scolds believers like a substitute teacher who can’t believe anyone is still talking about God after he’s assigned the fossil chart. Every public appearance is an exercise in barely contained frustration — at creationists, at the Bible, at people who pray for the sick instead of shrugging their shoulders.

Dawkins doesn’t merely disbelieve. He resents belief, and nothing is more exhausting than a man perpetually outraged that billions of people don’t think exactly like him.

Ricky Gervais

Some will point to Ricky Gervais as the exception.

An atheist, a comedian, a master of satire, and they’d be right — at least partly. Gervais is funny. Incredibly so. But happy? That’s another story.

Gervais has never struck me as someone content. Even in interviews, there’s a fog of irritation that never quite lifts. He’s always complaining, always nagging, always rolling his eyes at something. And while he packages the whole thing in charm and wit, the engine underneath doesn’t sound like joy. It sounds like frustration dressed up for a Netflix special.

His entire career — brilliant as it may be — has been a decades-long monologue of gripes. Yes, he makes people laugh. But the deeper source of it all feels like a man quietly suffocating on his own disbelief. If in doubt, feel free to watch his recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel, a practicing Catholic, where he spent minutes rambling about everything wrong with himself and the world — his body, his brain, society, death.

Funny? Sure, but also bleak. The laughter lands, but the undertow is pure despair.

And then there’s "After Life," his hit Netflix show. Lauded for its honesty, praised for its emotion. But look closely, and what you see isn’t fiction; it’s confession. A man mourning his wife’s passing, clinging to sarcasm like a flotation device in a sea of grief. It’s gulag humor without the bars — just a soulless bloke with a dog and a sharp tongue, cracking jokes to keep the walls from closing in.

Gervais is playing himself. "After Life" isn’t just a comedy — it’s an atheist’s eulogy.

Sam Harris

Gervais' close friend Sam Harris is no better.

Before he was consumed by Trump derangement syndrome, he was a sharp mind who took a blowtorch to radical Islam. Harris positioned himself as the cold, rational surgeon cutting through sacred narratives full of hate and delusion.

But even then, the man radiated pessimism. There was always an oddness to him — like he was describing humanity from orbit, distant and curiously detached.

These days, it’s worse. His permanent frown, his stilted delivery, his fixation on Trump supporters as if they’re some primitive tribe to be studied under glass — it all screams anxiety, not authority. He doesn’t project clarity. He projects burden. Every podcast, every essay, every panel feels like another brick in a bunker of airtight, joyless "reasoning" — sealed off from awe, from beauty, from anything resembling peace.

No comfort. No transcendence. No light. Just a man methodically dismantling meaning while sounding more drained with each attempt. Harris whispers meditations and mouths moral truths, all while insisting there’s no divine author behind any of it.

Christopher Hitchens

Even the great Christopher Hitchens — brilliant in so many ways — died with a cigarette in one hand, a scotch in the other, and a rage against the God he claimed didn’t exist.

Hitchens was a man of genuine intellect and rhetorical firepower. He could dazzle a room into silence. He could devastate an opponent with a single line. Joy, however, was never part of the package. The Brit burned hot, but never warm. His wit wasn’t rooted in love. It was weaponized. He didn’t laugh with you; he laughed at the absurdity of the world and often at the people trying to find meaning in it.

His takedowns of Mother Teresa, of Henry Kissinger, of religion itself — they were theater, yes. But they were also therapy. They came from a place of deep unrest. His war wasn’t just with belief systems but with the very structure of consolation. The human need for mercy, for absolution, for something sacred. He couldn’t tolerate it, maybe because he wanted it too much.

Atheism didn’t bring him peace. It gave him license to rage: to reject sentiment, spit on tradition, and scorn the spiritual longings of billions.

He could speak for hours. But when it came to rest — to true stillness — he had none.

The problem with atheism

The problem with modern atheism isn’t just lack of belief. It’s that it builds identity around lack itself, around the removal of things. Strip away God, strip away the soul, strip away metaphysics, strip away teleology, and what’s left isn’t freedom — it’s vacancy.

Atheism, in its purest form, is an ideology of erasure, a faith in subtraction. And subtraction, no matter how eloquently defended, is not a place from which joy can grow.

It is, however, a place from which misery flourishes. Consciousness gets recast as a glitch, morality as adaptive behavior. Love? A chemical bribe from nature. Everything that once lifted the human soul now gets filed under "illusion."

And illusions, we’re told, are best destroyed.

But here’s the truth atheists ignore: You cannot build a life — let alone a civilization — on negation. You cannot inspire the heart with “there is no God,” no matter how clever the phrasing. You can’t raise a child on “nothing matters” and expect the child to thrive. You can’t look into the eyes of someone dying and offer neurons as comfort.

This public face of atheism — the podcast hosts, the viral thinkers, the smug Substack intellectuals — don’t sell joy. They sell despair dressed up as clarity. They tell you that meaning is a delusion, that your suffering has no higher context, that the love you feel is just your DNA playing dress-up. They perform autopsies on transcendence, then wonder why their audiences walk away spiritually numb.

Humans don’t just crave truth. They crave belonging, direction, awe, and something to serve that isn’t themselves.

Atheism offers none of that. It hands you a mirror and tells you it’s a map — and then it dares you to walk in circles and calls it freedom.