This episode is currently only for Paid Members of my Substack! Join Now & Get Watching ASAP
What does it truly mean to be good? Why should we care for the weak, fight for justice, or believe in the sanctity of life? Why defend human rights at all? More fundamentally—what even is a human, and why shouldn’t we treat people as we do any other mammal, like rats for example? If we are nothing more than complex clumps of cells, “meat suits” experiencing a fleeting hallucination of consciousness and free will—if we are simply the accidental byproducts of blind evolution—why should morality matter? Why should anything matter?
I’ve had this conversation with almost everyone I’ve managed to talk to for more than half an hour, and it turns out, almost no one ever thinks to ask the questions of why we believe what we believe. Inevitably though, after a moment of reflection, the response I hear most often is some well-worn platitude—“It’s nice to be kind” or “It helps society function.” But the Nazis believed that exterminating the Jews would help their society function. A rapist finds it “nice” to violate another. Push a little further, and the conversation will eventually circle back to the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Yet, those who invoke it rarely realize they are quoting Jesus himself, as if this moral axiom were self-evident and could stand on its own.
The problem is, morality can’t stand on its own, and it certainly isn’t self-evident. If morality were merely an emergent social contract, then what objective reason do we have to oppose cruelty or injustice? Even Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most prominent atheists, admitted in an interview with Alex O’Connor (Cosmic Skeptic) that he has no solid argument for why something is truly evil or wrong. From an atheistic standpoint, morality becomes a tangled, incoherent puzzle—one that ultimately collapses under scrutiny. As you can see here in this clip:
Morality is not a self-evident concept that exists in a vacuum—it is built on a series of foundational assumptions, each layer resting upon the one before it, like a carefully constructed framework. In this latest episode with Glen Scrivener, we see how, from a Christian perspective, morality begins with the most fundamental premise: a universe intentionally created by God. From there, the next layer is that human beings are not random accidents but are made in His image. This belief establishes the intrinsic worth of every person—our meaning is not something we invent, but something we inherit. Because we bear God's image, we possess inherent dignity, which in turn demands moral duty: we are called to love, to seek justice, and to care for the weak—not because society deems it useful, but because it reflects the nature of the Creator Himself, the very fabric of reality. Remove any one of these layers, and the entire moral structure begins to collapse.
So what does atheism’s story offer us? At best, a poetic cliché— “we are made from the dust of stars in the universe now experiencing itself” Nice words, but what do they actually mean? Does stardust care about justice? Does the universe call us to a higher good? Does the universe really care if one of us murders another? Aren’t we all just stardust anyway? Strip away the flowery language, and Neil deGrasse Tyson narration over footage from space, and you’re left with a bleak reality: life is a meaningless accident, joy and suffering are equally pointless, and in the end, oblivion swallows everything. If that’s the case, why endure the pain? Why strive, love, or fight for anything when the final destination is the same nothingness? The cold logic of nihilism leads to a chilling conclusion—why not simply jump off a building to end it all and become one with the worms?
Asking these questions has felt eerily similar to the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes—watching as society parades its grand spectacle of ethics and morality, only to…
