From the editor:

It sounds strange when you first hear of it: A Christian role-playing an atheist. Sean McDowell, J. Warner Wallace, and other Christian apologists have been doing it for years, though. The purpose is training: What does it take to be ready for the “live fire” of challenges to your faith?

You can check it out for yourself! You know that this is a simulation, but as you listen to Sean presenting the case for atheism, do you know how you would answer?

Every boss on the job knows that most skills aren’t learned in books or the classroom. Employees need to put those skills to the test, with on-the-job guidance and feedback. Sometimes you don’t want it all on the job, though. The military does a whole lot of controlled live-fire practice and a fair amount of computer-simulated training, too, where soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines can put their learning to the test without the dangers of real combat. No military person is trained until they’ve done at least that.

Students are certain to hear atheism taught in social media, on entertainment media, and all across the college campus. If they’ve gone to church they’ve learned truths of Christianity in church, and in some churches (not enough, sadly) they’ve heard some reasons to be confident it’s really true. Rarely, though, will they get to practice what they’re learning.

An atheist role-play is a lot like a military simulation. Students face the challenge of an “atheist” who knows the best atheistic arguments. Typically they find out they’re not ready to face those arguments. But then at the end it turns around.

Halfway through this video, Sean McDowell reveals who he is, and then leads a discussion explaining how those arguments aren’t that hard to respond to after all, once you’ve learned those answers and been trained in them. And if the case he presents for atheism bothered you when you heard it, you’ll find out, too, that Christianity has solid, evidence-based, reasonable answers to it all.