My guest today is the Counter Apologist AKA John Lopilato. John is active on Twitter as @CounterApologis. He has a YouTube channel called Counter Apologist. He is also one of the new co-hosts of the RealAtheology podcast. John has taught himself philosophy, apologetics and counter apologetics. In fact, he learned apologetics in a desperate attempt to keep his faith. Ultimately, he found the apologetics wanting. He became the Counter Apologist because he wanted there to be sophisticated answers to apologetic arguments that could not be easily dismissed. John can be found online interacting with apologists and discussing the relative merits and flaws of apologetic arguments. I appreciate John's approach. He is often more than fair to his interlocutors. In my conversation with him, he is very kind to my naive questioning. We discuss a wide range of topics including: debate culture, the burden of proof, lacktheism, the rationality of faith, values vs facts and how difficult it is to make a compelling argument when the two sides may have differing values and presuppositions. "I threw myself into apologetics to try and salvage my faith." Links: John's Blog: http://counterapologist.blogspot.com/ John on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CounterApologis John on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CounterApologist RealAtheology Podcast https://twitter.com/RealAtheology/ https://www.facebook.com/RealAtheology/ For further study: Kalam Cosmological Argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument Falsifiability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability A and B Theory of Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_series_and_B_series Interact: Send in a voice message to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/gracefulatheist/message Attribution: "Waves" track written and produced by Makaih Beats http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Makaih_Beats Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/