A.L. Van Den Herik Talks Female Apologists/Riding Dinosaurs/Arguments For Faith
This is The Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to A. L. Van Den Herik who is the author of a new book called The Shortest Leap: The Rational Underpinnings of Faith in Jesus. This is a great dialogue about the historical, rational, and scientific arguments for Christianity and how a person decides to become a Christian.They discuss whether a woman can write an apologetics book, break Ethan's brain with Einstein's law of relativity, and trigger Kyle with old earth arguments. Topics Discussed C.S. Lewis and apologetics Women writers on the Christian book scene Allyson's conversion from hardcore atheist & leftist to Christianity Tarantula wasps and rabbits eating their own poop Dinosaurs are cool God's wisdom in how he has revealed Himself Time dilation & light speed travel or how the movie Interstellar maybe backs up the days of the Genesis creation account Were all of her professors at Stanford and Berkley like Kevin Sorbo's character in God's Not Dead? The Noah's Ark story and did people ride dinosaurs? Do people decide to be a Christian through pure reason? "Christians" that don't believe in God Pagan creation, flood and resurrection myths Parenting tips while working on big projects Working for Rush Limbaugh The Ten Questions To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Allison Van den Herrick, right?
Did I say that right?
Van Herrick?
Yes.
Should we call you AL the whole time?
Or Allie?
Yeah, you know, letting people know that you're a woman.
C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling.
And exactly, not letting people know I'm a woman.
Is that like a real concern for an apologetics author?
Wait, are you recording now?
Because I want to make sure this is on the.
Yeah, just keep going.
All right, we're recording.
Hi, everybody.
This is Allison Van den Herrick.
That's Kyle.
She's a very smart person that wrote a very big book.
Look how the size of this thing.
So just measure the book and you know how good it is, right?
That's that.
Yeah, so this book is two inches good.
Two inches good.
And we were just asking why she's named herself AL Van den Herrick on her book and promotional materials.
So now you're caught up.
And she does her own marketing.
So I think we thought maybe the marketing people were like, oh, you're a woman.
Yeah.
We're going to call you AL.
It was my own decision, actually.
Wow.
So I'm coming out right now.
This is my coming out moment.
I guess we should have assumed her.
The woman apologist.
Pronoun.
Crazy.
Yeah.
AL is just to eliminate any biases.
You know, I don't think that male Christians are biased against women necessarily, but they might be.
So that actually, a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, and the good thing is I don't even remember which good friend of mine it was, which I'm glad because she said that her husband would not read a book, even if it was a really good book and recommended, if he knew it was written by a woman.
So I'm really glad I don't remember who that friend was because I'm a little hurt, but I also can see that, you know, because there's a lot of Christian men that are like, you know, women are smart and all, but I don't know necessarily if I should be taught by a woman.
So making it AL just eliminates that if it is an issue.
So, and you know, I don't have any anger against him at all.
But yeah, AL.
I like the idea of this really chauvinistic guy that reads your book and at the end they're like, oh, this is pretty cool.
And then they find out that it's a woman.
I know.
I was thinking that would be great.
They'd listen to this interview and they're like, oh my gosh, I really thought it was a good book.
I guess I was wrong.
Anyway, yes.
Any other apologetics female except Nancy Piercy is the one I can think of?
Yeah, there are quite a few.
I know, yeah, there's got to be more.
I don't know of any others.
I mean, most of the books that I've read have been by men, you know, because I don't think women know what they're talking about.
No, I don't know of many women apologists.
There are many out there.
Well, it seems like apologetics kind of fits that the way men are singular focus and women are diffuse awareness.
Yeah.
Says Allison Armstrong likes to say.
That's what I was going to say.
They diffuse awareness.
They get stuck on, they can focus in on one thing and obsess and obsess.
So I think it takes that.
That's kind of unique for a woman to even think that way.
Because if I start talking apologetics, I think my wife starts snoring.
Yeah, well, you know what?
I really don't like apologetics.
I've been enrolled in apologetics classes before and I just haven't enjoyed it.
I don't know if it's because of the way they teach it.
It's kind of a little dry and it's not in the order that I would present the material.
So that's one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I think it's more interesting than the average apologetics course.
And I am not that apologetic to people who, yeah, they're not boring necessarily, but I just have my own style.
And maybe it is because I'm a woman.
But I really wanted to do it the way that I would have been interested in reading it when I was an atheist.
I used to be an atheist and I just, the apologetics books that I friends would recommend to me, I'd always brush off.
And of course, I needed to have my eyes open, essentially.
I needed to have the will to read them before I could do it.
As you guys are always pointing out in your articles, we only want to believe what we want to believe.
But this is an attempt to write the book that I would have wanted to read if I could have had the will to do it.
That's the way to do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, my assumption with seeing the AL was that, you know, anytime you see a book that's by a woman in the Christian bookstore, it's like how to be God's special princess.
Yes.
You know, or like, girl, put on your, wait, is that a Christian book?
A frilly, fancy face.
Girl, wash your nose.
Sure.
Something about girl do this.
Is that a girl wash your nose?
Well, your petticoat is showing.
We're talking about Christian books here.
Oh, those aren't Christian?
No, I'm just kidding.
I don't know.
It's kind of supposed to be.
Okay.
I'm out of the loop on those.
Yeah, most women authors in Christian bookstores are writing for books for women.
I would think that's a good idea.
You're right.
That's kind of the, I guess that's why.
Life is messy.
And maybe that's wrong, but that's my assumption.
Like I said, oh, it's not for me.
Right.
Well, I was thinking that might be, people might assume that I'm trying to hide my being a woman.
But also, you know what?
One of my favorite apologists, C.S. Lewis, went by.
I don't know if he went by C.S. because he was Clive Staples, but did his friends call him C.S. or Clifford?
They call him Jack.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
That's right.
I knew that.
So I figured if C.S. Lewis can do it, not that I'm anywhere like C.S. Lewis, I wish.
I know that, J.K. Chester.
You just compared yourself to C.S. Lewis.
Defend that.
I, yeah, no, that is a emulating C.S. Lewis.
I'm a little bit more, I can't even say I'm more rational than C.S. Lewis.
Wow.
So let me just say it this way.
When you read a book like Mere Christianity, it's kind of like an essay where he kind of goes off and explains morality and how Christianity makes sense of the existence of absolute morality and so forth.
And it's not as tight and step-by-step logic as my book is.
So it doesn't mean that he's not rational.
I don't in any way want to say that because C.S. Lewis is amazing and extremely rational, always looking for a reason for every single belief.
That's what I mean.
He's artistic.
Yeah, but it's more artistic.
Yeah, his writing is so eloquent and beautiful.
I absolutely love it.
And so my book is more, I like to think of my book as a collage, if you can think of a collage of writers, where I take all of these different brilliant people and weave it together so that it's basically a one-stop shop for just beautiful artist artistic writing, but woven together, not just disjointed.
So put into a logical framework.
So I'm not a PhD, but that doesn't mean that I can't quote PhDs.
So pretty much every quote in my book is from a PhD, whether they're atheist or believers.
But I put it in an order that I think the average person will be able to understand.
Did we say the name of your book?
I don't think we did.
This is The Shortest Leap, The Rational Underpinnings of Faith in Jesus.
And yeah, so what impressed us about this was like, this is like, this might be longer than any book I've ever read.
Well, maybe not.
700 words.
700 words.
200,000 words.
200,000 words.
And it really did strike us as this very comprehensive.
I mean, you go through the historical.
Ton of footnotes.
You go through the historical claims.
You go through the rational and philosophical objections and arguments for the faith.
Yeah, there's prophecy stuff in here.
Yeah.
I try to do everything in one book.
Yeah.
So this is basically the culmination of 20 years of work.
And not that I was working on it for 20 years non-stop.
There were a lot of periods where God was like, nope, I don't want you to work on it right now.
Yeah.
And I was just, but I was always researching.
And I just remember when I first became a Christian, I started reading books that, you know, I didn't want to believe it just because it sounded great.
And, you know, I don't want to believe it just because I want it to be true.
So I started reading books on the evidence and I realized that it was amazing how much there was scientific evidence and then the historical evidence and then the philosophical evidence and then the biblical prophecy.
But I had to read like 20 different books to get all of that.
And I thought to myself, well, why doesn't someone have one book that has everything in it?
It might be a long book, but at least it's all in your hands and you can skip around to the parts that are more important to you.
So anyway, eventually I realized, oh, maybe God is calling me to write that book.
I might be the one.
And over the years, I've fought with God and said, no, it's not me.
And there must be somebody else.
And I kept looking at the bookshelves to see if any new books were out that fit this category.
And no one ever did it.
So here it is.
I don't think there's another book like this out there.
All right.
So you said everything's in here.
We should grill her and make sure everything is.
Yeah, I couldn't.
Yeah, I couldn't have every single thing.
No, not all of the essentials.
Okay.
The essentials.
So flying spaghetti monster argument is that in here?
I was able to get that in the Babylon B article.
Oh, okay.
It's in the Babylon B article about this book.
Yeah.
But not in here.
Yeah.
So it's either in the article or the book, but everything is in there.
Rabbits eating their own poop.
Exactly.
We snumped Greg Kochel on this one.
Because rabbits have to eat their own poop in order to digest it.
Why would God design a rabbit?
Why would God design a rabbit to eat its own poop?
I agree.
Well, there's so many.
Because they can't digest it unless they eat it twice.
Yeah.
So there's.
Why would God require cows to have more than one stomach?
I mean, can't they just have one stomach?
God must not really be smart enough.
Exactly.
I mean, there's so many ways you could do that in nature.
Tarantula wasp.
The tarantula wasp.
And lay their egg in a dead tarantula that's not even dead.
Yes.
They knock out the, okay, it's a giant wasp, knocks out the tarantula.
They get a fight that takes like an hour and a half.
It's like if a human was fighting a bear.
Imagine your wife is like, I have a baby.
I got to go out to the forest and fight a bear.
And like she's fighting a bear for an hour and a half.
She finally poisons the bear with her stinger.
And that just knocks it out.
It's not dead.
The bear wakes up in a stupor.
He's got like a hangover.
He's like, I don't know what happened.
Last night I fought this human woman for like an hour and a half.
And then he starts stumbling around and all of a sudden a little baby's inside him eating his insides out.
And then all of a sudden the bear just dies and the baby like bursts out of his chest and is like, into the world.
And then he finds his mother.
I don't know if they ever meet again, actually.
Does the mother find the baby?
I don't know.
But God thought of that.
So the tarantula.
Because I was walking, I was taking a hike.
That's here.
I saw a wasp dragging a tarantula across the trail, like his knocked out body, just like dragging it.
Oh, my God.
That's a bad day.
I was going to say that is definitely, it's definitely.
If you look it up on YouTube, people watch them fighting, and it's a struggle for these wasps to get the egg into the tarantula.
They're not a lot bigger.
Often they're smaller, and they have to get that sting.
They can't kill it.
They got to sting it anyway.
Fascinating.
It was very fascinating.
I absolutely love all of those very weird things about nature.
I mean, the more you study it, the more you're just like, oh, my goodness.
That's the same here.
I kind of tend to love it.
I love it.
And it shows that I think God has a sense of humor.
I think that there's a lot of things that you can point to and say, God must have a sense of humor.
And obviously, sense of humor came from God himself.
He created everything.
But when I see stuff like that, I'm like, well, it doesn't disprove God, in my opinion.
Yeah, well, and even that goodness and truth is more than just happy, cuddly stuff.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Or that everything has to be perfectly efficient.
My God, it's just this mathematician.
Everything is going to be as efficient and moral and then apply it to God.
Yeah.
Right.
And in the world, given the limits of the laws of physics, you're going to have a trade-off in everything you create.
I mean, you're not going to be able to have a huge truck that has a low or the high miles per gallon.
You have to constantly be, whereas you can make a smaller car with a high amount, lots more miles per gallon, but you always have that, you can't have everything be perfect efficient.
There's always going to be trade-offs.
So anyway, even when God's creating within the laws of physics that he created, it's not going to be as efficient as you would think.
Anyway, I just think that it's ridiculous to see that God has to work within laws of physics and make things act perfectly.
And why wouldn't God use the evolution to create all of the animals that exist?
I mean, that's his medium, if you will.
Just as a painter used paint, he might be using genetic code to twiddle with the order of the nucleotides to get animals to be the exactly way he wants.
So anyway, a lot of their arguments against God just crumble if you realize that God doesn't necessarily have to do it the way you would think he'd do it perfectly.
Yeah, I picture him sitting up there going, you know what would be awesome?
Tarantula wasps.
Tarantula wasps.
I made the tarantula.
What they need is a wasp.
Yeah, and why are there dinosaurs, for example?
I mean, we love dinosaurs.
People love dinosaurs.
My son was obsessed with dinosaurs.
And what a gift that God gave us to study these kids and to have them be sure to go extinct before we came along.
But anyway, there's just so many beautiful things about nature that don't disprove God, but actually make just he's a loving God who wants to give us these amazing things to discover in his in the world that he created.
So you went to Stanford.
I did.
And you see Berkeley.
I know.
It was a difficult time.
How are you not like a socialist?
Yeah, that's one more wonderful thing.
Yeah.
Where are you?
I know.
Well, it just proves that God can save anyone, really.
Because I was at Stanford in Berkeley.
I was pretty much as left-leaning as you can be.
And yeah, I had all the bumper stickers on the body.
You said you used to be an atheist who proudly displayed a coexist bumper sticker on her car.
Yeah.
I had coexist.
I had the best things in life are free, which I still think is true.
It's true here.
Yeah.
But, you know, I had an old like sob, you know, one of those really cool looking ones and bumper stickers.
And I thought Christians were pretty much lame, I guess is the best word.
I remember the first time.
Yeah, exactly.
And I was accurate for most of my life.
I definitely remember one moment when I was a freshman at Stanford and I just joined a sorority.
And I discovered that one of the sorority sisters was a Christian.
And I just was like, well, she can't be a Christian.
She's really cool and she's really smart.
Like, what is her problem?
So I just remember that thought.
And it just brings me back to the time when I really did think Christians were just like, you know, they just believed it because it's a fairy tale.
They made their life easier.
They were raised by that.
Yeah, and especially at Berkeley, I was just, I was definitely, I would walk by all the tables of the born-again Christian clubs and just flip them over.
Flip them over.
Drive them out with a whip.
Breaking their VeggieTales DVDs in half.
Exactly.
I would roll my eyes and feel sorry for them.
Yeah.
So it was not until I was around 30 when God entered my life.
Wow.
That's.
So how's that possible?
Was it the arguments that convinced you?
No, that's the funny thing.
The arguments, I started reading about the arguments for Christianity after I became a Christian.
So in my case, God still can use them to open people's eyes.
So I'm just saying in my case, it was the Bible.
Kind of a funny story.
And I'll tell the brief version.
I was on vacation in Rome and I had just finished giving an art history tour.
So I love science, I love art, and I used to be a teacher.
So in the summers, I organized this tour of Italy to the art.
And I was in my hotel room in Rome and had just finished a book that I'd been working on for a while.
And I realized I didn't have anything else to read.
And I'm just a reader.
I love having something to read all the time.
So guess what was in the side table of my hotel room?
The Bible.
What are the Gideon's Bibles?
And the cool thing about this Bible, I don't think I would have read it otherwise.
Is it Italy?
It was in English, Italian, French, and German.
And I'd already studied all of those languages.
I mean, my Italian was pretty good because I spent a year in Italy when I was in college, my junior year of Stanford.
So I thought, wow, what a great way to refresh my Italian.
So I started reading in Italian, and then I started flipping over to English to figure out what it meant.
And then I started reading only in English.
And then by that time, my friend and I had gotten to the south of France.
And I was actually on the south of France laying topless on the beach reading the Bible.
So I wanted to fit in.
I thought it was just in the Garden of Eden.
Yeah.
I wanted to fit in on the south of France.
So going topless.
But the Bible really made me stick out like a sword to.
But anyway, after reading it, that's when I was.
That's hilarious that being naked doesn't make you stand out in France.
Yeah, it's the Bible.
Reading the Bible isn't what my father's in.
Reading the Bible on the beach was definitely a sign that it was not one of them.
But yeah, so it was kind of a funny story that I God took something that I love that is languages to make me be willing to read the Bible.
And then I ended up not even reading in Italian.
So you're reading in like the New Testament?
You just started off?
It was just the New Testament.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I love reading the Bible, of course, now.
But previous to that, my dad had been a Christian since I was two.
So he always wanted me to read the Bible.
And I even went to a Christian school, but it was all like, eye roll, eye roll.
Why do we care about a group of people wandering around a desert?
It didn't make any sense to me.
So I'd always started to read the Bible in Genesis, which is actually pretty interesting.
But then you get to Exodus and Leviticus and you're like, oh, this, I don't really want to do.
So you give up.
But, you know, if anybody hasn't read the Bible before, I recommend starting in the New Testament.
You don't have to start at the very, very beginning, especially the Gospels.
It's just amazing.
And just hearing words of Jesus is sufficient, I think, for God to really work in you.
Yeah, that's kind of what I was wondering.
Someone says, I just picked up the Bible and that's how I got saved.
I'm like, well, there's certain parts of the Bible that if you read, you would be like, very confused or maybe grossed out.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's the, I think the brilliance.
Well, of course, God is brilliant, but he is perfectly wise.
Right.
And he created a book that allows someone who doesn't want to believe to not believe.
You know what I mean?
It's like you have to truly want to understand the Bible to get to those layers of meaning where you see that the like, for example, the sacrifice of Isaac.
How horrible is that?
Like God asking a man to kill his own son?
That's just horrible.
And that would be enough for me to say, forget Christianity.
I don't want to have anything to do with that.
But once you want to understand what God is telling you, it is the most beautiful story.
I mean, it was just absolutely beautiful that he would be willing to give up his own son because God asked him.
And then that just points to God giving up his own son.
Like what he didn't ask Isaac to do, he did himself.
So just those kinds of stories you don't even get until you have the will to really understand it.
And that's God's brilliance.
I mean, I think it just gives us that freedom of will, of freedom of choice, I guess you would say.
So you read the Bible, you fly back home, you go to your car, peel off the coexist bumper sticks.
Exactly.
Just leave the title.
I put on a fish.
No, okay.
I didn't put the fish on right away.
It was still a little bit like what happened to me.
I remember I walked into my dad's church and my dad had been praying for me for 28 years.
28 years.
He was like, Lord, just take off her hate or just remove the hate she has for anything to do with religion.
And I walk into his church and I just, you know, I think he was preaching that day.
My dad, whatever, he's a very intense Christian.
I used to think he was way off the deep end, but he's a very, very intelligent man who knows the Bible inside and out.
And so I probably went because he was preaching that day.
And all of these people were coming up to me and saying, congratulations.
And I was like, why?
What are you talking about?
I had no idea the extent of what I had done.
I had emailed my dad in France and told him I accepted Jesus as my Savior.
And I just figured that was not that big a deal.
The accepting Jesus thing, you did that quietly all by yourself.
It was.
It was just like, because my dad always said that my whole life.
I wouldn't let him talk to me about it, but he would just say, okay, but just remember, just ask Jesus into your heart.
And I'd be like, okay, whatever, dad.
So I emailed him.
I said, dad, I think I just asked Jesus into my heart.
And so, of course, on the other end of the whatever wire across the ocean, he was probably jumping up and down, excited.
And for me, I was like, I have no idea what that means.
But yeah, the next year I pretty much figured it out.
I went from zero to like 100 in two seconds with my Christianity.
I joined a church right away, went to the Bible study.
And then, yeah, it's the rest is history.
I started writing the book within that first year.
Wow.
So on it.
Yeah.
I've made up for all the lost years.
Yeah, that's encouraging to me because I got a daughter who's a teenager and she seems like she's headed off on this.
Yeah.
She's really into the super left-wing.
And it's for, I had my son, I even paid him.
I said, I really want a 15-year-old boy perspective on my book.
So I'll pay you to read it.
And he's a good reader.
I mean, he had no problem reading it.
And he liked it.
But, you know, he still got his left-wing opinions and it's whatever.
We live in a culture that is, our kids are being assaulted.
They're just constantly being bombarded with all of these belief systems.
So it's, but they have to go through a period when they, when they wrestle with it themselves, when they work.
That stuff doesn't meme well, right?
Yeah.
You need a meme.
You need an Instagram meme.
I need a meme to believe.
Yeah, to encapsulate your 600 pages.
It is.
It's so true.
Kids need memes and this just translate well.
But they have to come to it themselves.
They have to go through the same things I went through, like the difficulties in life when you're like, what the heck?
I thought career was going to give me meaning in life and it didn't.
Or I thought finding a boyfriend would give me meaning in life and it doesn't.
Those are the things that people need to go through before they realize that Finding Jesus is like the only thing that will ever satisfy you.
So I don't expect my book.
Well, I don't expect my book to do anything.
God is the one that does it through the book.
But it's mainly meant for Christians who doubt and we all doubt.
I mean, even I, having written all this evidence, still have to go back and reread it and say, oh, yeah, okay.
So it is really true.
It's not just this thing I believe because I want it to be true.
So it's a great way to grow deeper in your faith.
I mean, God wants us to worship with all of our heart, soul, and mind.
And this is a way with our mind, we can make sense that what we believe is not just wishful thinking.
It's there is evidence, scientific, secular scientific, not some, you know, what I won't criticize any other types of scientific evidence.
But anyway, evidence from secular scientists that is consistent with the Bible and historical evidence that is consistent with Jesus living and dying and rising again.
And then all of the experiential evidence, or I call it explanatory evidence, that you look around the world and it just makes sense from a Christian worldview point of view.
I mean, if you're an atheist, the world just doesn't make as much sense.
It's not as Christian worldview explains so much about the world we live in.
And then biblical prophecy and so forth.
So you've been writing this for 20 years.
On and off, yes.
On and off.
Although researching mainly.
A lot of research.
So I mean, it's almost like your faith journey.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I put it in order that I thought make the most sense.
And I describe it in the book as like a bullseye.
For me, the biggest hurdle to really believing that I wasn't just believing in some pie in the sky type of thing was scientific evidence because my undergrad degree is in biology.
So when I started reading the scientific evidence, I started thinking, okay, I'm not just believing this because I want to pretend I'm going to live forever.
There's science that proves it.
So what are some of a few of your favorite science-y nuggets of science?
The nuggets.
What's your favorite science nugget?
Okay, well, there are some.
You have to own an atheist with.
Drop this on them.
Boom.
Mic drop.
Oh, my God.
There's so much.
Well, I boiled it down to seven main scientific evidences.
And so you can read the book to find out what those are.
But one element of the first is one element of the first chapter, I would say, because that was on physics and astronomy, is the nature of time.
So I read about this in a book called The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder.
He's an MIT physicist who is Jewish.
And I had never read any other apologetics books that refers to this.
But Einstein's law was theory of relativity.
Now it's the law of relativity.
It says that the flow of time changes depending on the force of gravity acting on you and your speed.
So actually, if you're going at the speed of light, time ceases to flow.
So super, super weird stuff.
That makes no sense to me.
Explain like we're five years old.
Okay.
So if we were on a much heavier planet, let's say it's like 100 times the size of Earth.
I'm tracking.
Time would flow slower.
So the amount of time.
Because it moves slower.
Oh, I've seen interstellar.
Is this like an interstellar?
It's really bizarre.
I don't even quite get it.
But it's true based on the law of relativity.
Time flows slower on a much, much heavier planet.
And you can actually, the example that Schroeder gives, I'll give you guys this example.
Time on the sun flows shorter, slower than the time on Earth by a factor of 2.1%.
What does that look like?
I guess, because me, I think of time as interstellar.
Have you seen interstellar?
It's artificially created with a clock.
Have you seen interstellar?
No.
They fly down to the really heavy planet, and then when they come back up, the guy in the ship had aged like 10 years or 20 years or something.
Is that what it means?
You age at a different pace?
Yeah, I guess by the way.
I might have gotten that wrong.
But it's time based on like biological processes like breakdown.
I guess so.
I don't really know exactly how it works, but something that would take a year on Earth would take a lot longer time on this heavier planet.
So, okay, to get to the point, I'm going to just bring it all home here.
So, for example, the time on the sine of flow is two seconds or two parts per million slower.
I know the brain is hurting.
So, anyway, what you can do is determine the flow of time at the Big Bang, at the time when the Earth came, or the universe came into being using the cosmic background radiation.
And I explained this much better in the book, so definitely get the book.
But it turns out that for every one day that passes on Earth, six or one million million days would pass at the beginning of the Earth, at the beginning of the solar.
And it turns out to be exact six days.
So read about it in the book, because I'm totally just chopping it up right now.
And then Schroeder goes through and shows what happened on each day of Genesis, what happened in the history of the universe.
So the first day was about 8 billion years.
That's when light and electrons separated from the photons and light came into being.
And then it basically matches up day for day.
So the first day being 8 billion years, the second day was 4 billion because as the Earth's, the universe is expanding at an exponential rate.
But anyway, that to me was like, boom.
How is that not possible?
And why don't other people talk about that?
But then I talk about the Big Bang and I talk about fine-tuning and the language of DNA.
It's a book by Francis Collins on that.
And I talk about all of the evidence from irreducible complexity that he talks about.
And we talk about evidence from fossil fuels.
I don't know why.
There's a lot in there.
There's a lot in there.
Have you ever seen God's Not Dead?
Yes.
Yes, I did see that.
Are all the professors like Kevin Sorbo in that movie where they tell all the kids, like all the biology students, to sign this paper that God's not dead?
Is that how they are?
Or God is dead?
Sorry.
God is dead.
Is that how they do it?
That is exactly what they teach.
They do that at Stamford?
Yeah.
Oh, it's pretty much understood that that's what you believe.
I mean, why would you be studying science and still believe in God?
So that's actually the atmosphere.
One of the misconceptions.
I'm just curious.
I'm really curious.
Absolutely.
Well, my favorite class was human behavioral biology.
And one of the goals of the class was to explain how all of our emotions, all of our behaviors have an evolution and just unguided evolution.
That is just because of the way we were.
So we're altruistic because we share genes with our cousins and so forth.
So we want to help our tribe.
There's so much ways.
Everyone is trying to explain things without necessitating God.
And so it's become almost like if you believe in science, ergo, you don't believe in God, which I think is completely the opposite of what it should be.
I mean, the more I study science, the more I realize there has to be a God.
This is absolutely incredible that this happened within the 16 or 13.7 billion years that the universe has been around.
That this diversity of life and the human brain, that's the kind of capstone of God's creation, just way too short a time for that type of evolution to happen without somebody fiddling with the genes.
So anyway, read my book.
It'll explain it better.
It's just like when you look at the science and you see God as the engineer behind the complexity and beauty of all that is created, you have a much more appreciation of God as opposed to wanting to discard him, which is what they try to do in the universities, secular universities at least.
So have you ever been to the Ark Encounter?
Kin Ham?
The Ark Encounter.
Oh, the ark.
The big ark.
The big ark.
I haven't.
Because they've got like dinosaurs, like Jesus riding the dinosaur, like all the.
So you're not.
You believe Jesus rode dinosaurs?
You don't think like.
No, I'm not sure.
There's two camps.
And there's probably more than two, but the two main camps are the young earth.
Young earth.
Thank you.
Share the short earth.
But it doesn't sound like you're like day age or like gap theory.
It's different than that.
It's different.
Yeah.
No, I think that the days in the book of Genesis were from God's perspective according to the flow of time at the time at the point of the universe's history that God was looking at.
The short earth and the, I cringe a little bit whenever I hear those arguments.
Not a fan.
Not a fan.
And it's not because they're not genuine.
They want people to believe.
They want people to believe.
But it does a little bit of a disservice when scientific people hear it and think, oh, I have to believe that in order to believe the Bible.
And they're like, just go there.
Yeah.
Get them in.
I believe that all of the evidence, you know, all truth is God's truth.
And the evidence that secular scientists find is consistent with the Bible.
There is nothing that is conflicting with the Bible unless you add things in the Bible that you think should be there.
Anyway, I won't go off on that tangent too much, but I do think kids these days need to see that it's consistent with science because it's hard for them to believe if what they're learning in a secular classroom is different than what they hear the Bible teaches.
And the Bible doesn't say that the earth.
Anyway, well, I'm not going to go down that road.
But anyway, I'm an old universe person.
Verses 13.
Would you go see the Ark Encounter if you were in Kentucky?
Oh, absolutely.
And you know, the measurements of the Ark.
I don't have this in my book, but the measurements of the Ark were actually that are given in Genesis are the correct dimensions for shipbuilding.
They've discovered like the 1600s or something to have a ship that is correctly built for but that's not in your book.
That's not your book.
I don't really, I don't do that kind of stuff.
You got to write another book.
You get into Noah's Ark.
There's like a little like you know factoids that I just kept out of there.
You got any Noah's Ark content in here?
I do.
I actually include, there's a chapter on symbolism from the Old Testament.
Okay.
And how Noah's Ark is a trigger word for some people.
Noah's Ark is a symbol of Jesus, you know, that we're in Jesus and we're saved.
And Noah was building the ark and people thought he was crazy.
Like, how is this ark out in the middle of a desert going to save you?
But now, and there's references in Hebrews and other parts of the New Testament to the ark as being pointing forward to a greater salvation.
But so I do talk about the ark, but not in the science.
Okay.
In a theological sense.
Yeah, more of a symbolism of the ark and having symbolism in the Old Testament that points forward to Jesus.
It's like God preparing us for the message of salvation.
Okay.
So Jesus is our big boat.
He's our big boat.
Yeah.
And he's going to save us from the ultimate destruction.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not.
The big flood of fire that we will ride on the boat on.
Yes.
All right.
I'm down with it.
I love it.
I look forward to the day when we can ride the boat together.
Perfect.
All right.
We have a sponsor this week, Faithful Counseling.
Sponsored the show a few times before, so thank you.
Yeah, very thankful.
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Yeah, you don't want to go to, which, yeah, he moonlights as a psychiatrist sometimes.
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Ethan, you're supposed to have another question.
Just have a question lock on.
What?
My next question was more ARC questions.
More arc questions.
I am happy to answer arc questions all day.
Well, it's just the, that's one of the stories people struggle with because that's one of the most fairy tale-sounding stories in the Bible, right?
The Jonah animals.
Yeah, the Jonah, the ark, Jonah, Noah.
Garden of Eden, it's a little rough.
Anytime an animal starts talking, you're like.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
It's very, that's exactly what I went through most of my life.
And especially going to a Christian school where I had to read the Bible.
But I can assure people that there are excellent, excellent explanations for all of these strange stories.
They either happen literally or they're symbols, allegorical symbols that help us understand deeper truths.
So once you realize that, then it doesn't bother you as much to hear that Balaam's donkey cut talked.
Does the Ark have to be a worldwide flood?
Or if it just seemed worldwide to the writers of it?
Exactly.
I don't think it has to be a worldwide flood.
I think it seemed like it was a worldwide flood.
Explicitly.
However, there are multiple, probably dozens of early myths that talk about a flood.
So I don't know.
I'm not sure on that.
There's some things we just will never know.
But to say it's a worldwide flood and to say that all of the features on the earth, like the Grand Canyon, are because of it, that's taking it a little far.
I don't think that's the reason.
I don't think that's the truth.
But yeah, at least to the perspective of the writers of the Noah's Ark story, it was a worldwide flood.
So Ken Hamlin listens to this podcast and his head just a boiling ham.
Yeah.
And I'm like the most non-offensive person in the world.
I hate offending people.
I hate saying that.
So you wouldn't debate Ken Ham about this?
No, no.
I refuse to debate anybody.
I'm just like such a wimp.
I have no spine.
I would cake.
We were just talking about this, how we would be bad debaters because we're just like, oh, that's mean.
Stop being so mean.
I know.
I grew up with a twin sister.
We always have like apology competitions.
No, I'm sorry.
No, I'm sorry.
No, no, no.
It's me.
I should be sorry.
So, how did your politics shift when you became?
Oh, yeah.
And what was the immediately put on a MAG American Creative Again hat?
Yes, my mega hats.
It just rose down.
The whole outfit.
It rose down.
It lowered.
Get a Trump stamp.
Descendant.
Well, you know what?
It didn't change overnight, but it definitely changed.
So, and my book, I don't really talk about politics.
And I don't want to make it.
No, about politics, but I do have strong opinions on politics.
I just don't want us to share them.
Anyway, I think that politics and spirituality are inextricably intertwined.
And when people on the left say we just have to keep God out of the public square, they don't know what they're talking about.
They do not know what they're talking about because atheism is essentially, it's a philosophy, but it's a religion.
Religion is essentially an idea about how the world works, the answers to the biggest questions, the meaning of life, what happens after we die.
And atheists have those exact same answers.
They're just the answers don't involve God.
So anytime we come to the public square to talk about politics, we are, it's the baggage is there.
What we think about life, what are the most important things in life, what happens when we die, what are our values?
Those are all things tied in with our religious beliefs, whether we believe in God or not.
So yeah, it does change.
So my voting, yeah, is definitely more consistent with conservative Christians.
I would say that.
Yeah, that's where that happens.
So Alison had just come out in support of President Trump.
Yeah, you know what's so frustrating in today's world?
Everything is so black and white.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, I know.
We hate that.
Okay, so if you vote for Trump, that means you love every single thing about Trump.
Like, really?
That's so, it's just ridiculous.
I mean, the guy's got some serious problems.
But anyway, I promised myself I wouldn't go down that road.
But yeah, everybody has, yeah, I think as humans, we want to make things simple.
So we want to say, you know, if you, yeah, you're, obviously, you're a terrible person if you vote for this person and you're a good person if you don't vote.
But there's just so many nuances and we don't like to think through all of those.
We'd like to think what we already think is true.
So we just look for, you guys have great articles on that.
Like, amazingly, after this big event happens, everyone continues to believe what they want to believe.
Yeah, absolutely.
You take away from it what you want to take away from it.
That kind of bias.
How do you think people like form beliefs and opinions like that?
Because I don't know if this is a question that you're prepared to answer or anything, but your book's called The Shortest Leap because you think that we all have to take a leap of faith at some point.
And for you, this is Christianity is the shortest leap to something that makes sense and something that's rational.
So do people think rationally, though?
Like you said, when you got saved, it wasn't necessarily a rational thought.
Not that it was irrational, but it wasn't.
It's a combination.
I mean, humans are complex, obviously.
The will, the human will is super powerful.
And we, the topic of religion is, it's so, it's so personal.
I mean, what you think about where you're going to go when you die is such a hugely personal thing.
So people are always on guard.
At least I was.
I never wanted to talk about religion with anyone because it really kind of was so, so personal to me.
And that's one of the reasons I'm terrible at sharing my faith because I really don't want to make somebody uncomfortable.
But the point is that we make our decisions primarily based on what we want to believe.
You know, it's easy to just want to believe that everything's going to be fine when I die.
I just become part of the soil again.
Or I'm just going to go to heaven because I'm a good person.
Those are all like really comforting beliefs.
And I understand why people believe them.
Like I always did.
I always believe like to each his own.
Everyone can follow their own path to God.
And we all end up in the same place anyway.
But it doesn't make sense.
I mean, if you think about it rationally, you can't say Jesus is God.
And then somebody else say, well, Jesus isn't God.
And both of those are true.
Either one is true and the other one's not true, or they're both not true.
But people don't want to think about that.
That's a long non-contradiction.
So you have to think about this rationally.
And what I do is I go through and say, well, even when you say there is no absolute truth, you are making a statement of absolute truth.
Because your absolute truth is that there's no absolute truth.
So you're basically telling everyone else who disagrees with you that they're wrong.
You're right.
You should believe like me.
There is no absolute truth.
But you're doing the exact same thing that Christians do when they say Jesus is the one way.
You're doing the exact same thing, but you're not admitting it.
That's the frustrating part.
You're like, you're a hypocrite of the worst kind because you don't even recognize that you're doing it.
But anyway, so this book is an attempt to show people that you're always using emotions, really, unless you come to it with a scientific, rational point of view, which I try to do in the book.
So yeah, I would think, I would say that most people who reject Christianity do it because of emotions rather than rationality.
So if you disagree with me, read my book.
You'll hopefully recognize that I'm right.
I'm thinking even, I mean, God even uses emotions and that kind of decision-making for good.
I mean, because I think I can't say that my faith was entirely this rational.
Like I have calculated all the options and Christianity is the best.
There was a spiritual things we choose in life ultimately.
Very, very rarely.
Absolutely.
That's why I make a big point of how I didn't even know any evidence before I became a Christian.
And God saves everyone in different ways.
And he will use rational evidence for a lot of people.
But for most people, it's a recognition that life has no meaning unless you have this relationship with your creator.
And recognizing when you read the Bible that, boy, there's nothing that I could do to save myself.
I mean, I'm just a wreck.
If we're all honest with each other, with ourselves, actually, and then with each other, hopefully, we should recognize that there's nothing we can do to save ourselves because we're just so wrapped up in selfishness and wanting to be right and wanting to look good to other people.
I mean, we're just a bundle of pride and sin.
Even the best of us, that's really what convinced me because I was always just the perfect person.
I'd always do everything right.
And I don't need God.
I'm perfectly moral and I treat everyone well.
And if everyone were like me, I'd be, it would be just the perfect planet.
And once I started reading, especially Romans, I realized, oh my gosh, my self-righteousness is disgusting.
It was completely disgusting.
And like, I just look down my nose at everybody.
And that's all we do as humans is try to prop ourselves up.
And we look down at somebody else who's not like us.
Yeah.
You know, they're either, you know, not smart enough or they're lazy or they're, you know, different race.
Or, you know, admitting that we always are trying to prop ourselves up.
We're always selfishly motivated.
Just that was that realization, which is an emotional thing for me.
It's just like, I'm disgusted with myself.
I need a savior.
Anyway, so, but you're right.
It's a combination.
It's not only rational.
It's not only emotional.
It's a spiritual, rational, emotional.
And of course, God has to initiate it.
So, so do you have any, uh, academic friends who were real upset when they found out your, Oh my goodness.
I've lost a lot of friends.
Yeah.
You know what?
We didn't really lose each other up until Facebook came out.
You know, you reconnect on Facebook.
I have friends from college that are, they're just strong atheists, and they think I've gone crazy.
They really do.
And it just breaks my heart because I try to explain it to them, like, no, I'm not crazy.
Read my book.
It's so easy to form a straw man in your head of who somebody is when you see them say something on Facebook.
You know all their motivations, you know everything about them.
See my posts on Facebook must think I'm just an extremist because I love the Lord.
I'm a total Jesus freak.
So, but I, but I'm also like totally like laid back.
Like, I know how people who are atheists and people who are nominal Christians think.
And I don't want to offend anybody.
I just, this is how I believe now.
And I really want other people to believe too.
But Facebook just makes it right in your face.
And I have to be really careful when I share things to make sure people realize that I'm not saying you're a bad person because you don't think like I am.
I mean, we're all bad people.
We all need Jesus.
But, you know, it's social media has just brought everything to a head.
It's just so intense.
So intense.
It's like this polarization effect.
And I've never seen anyone be convinced by an argument on Facebook.
Like no one's like, hey, you know what?
That's a really rational point.
Thanks for bringing that up.
Thanks.
Yeah, you know what?
I totally changed my mind.
Thank you.
Exactly.
It is, it just doesn't happen.
So I think it's more for the person who's sharing, you know, that they feel like I'm sharing this because it's important to me than for the people that they're sharing with.
I mean, that's probably what I really believe in, and I want to share it.
It's not because I'm actually going to convince you, but maybe in a little way, I'm hoping I can.
Yeah.
But you're right.
An argument never really.
That's why I don't share my faith that much.
I just don't feel comfortable trying to convince somebody.
I'd rather just write a book and say, okay, just read my book.
Yeah, I do that.
I don't have a lot of jobs.
I just read 600 pages and just write articles.
Yeah, I don't.
If I've ever shared my faith and someone said, oh, I want to pray the sinner's prayer with you.
Can we pray right now?
I mean, I have all these friends that tell me that happens to them all the time.
I'm like, it's never happened to me.
Am I doing something wrong?
There are probably very many appeal people.
Yeah, and I'm very, I just don't want to offend anybody.
I want everyone to be to like me.
And if I tell them that they're going to hell, if they don't believe in Jesus, they're going to be like, what the?
But if I can give them, you know, a book that says this is really something the Bible talks about, I'm not just saying it because I'm feeling better than you.
I really want you to understand.
Does this book tell them that they're going to hell if they don't?
It talks about Jesus being the only way because we, on our own efforts, on our own morality, can't do it.
We have to have someone be our representative before God.
And that's due to you.
Do you have like a mail-in at the back where they can check yes or no?
Yeah, there's a prayer at the end.
I saved it to the end.
I try to be very sensitive to people that are not really into Christianity.
So I don't have any Bible, Bible.
Like at the end of a Bible quote, I don't put like Hebrews 11, 10 or whatever.
I just put it in the footnotes.
Oh, yeah, you do have it.
Cool.
But I do have a prayer at the end.
There's no mail-in flyer, but.
No mail-in flyer.
There's a link to my website.
Link to the one.
Same thing.
Let me see if they fill out a form on the website that they've been saved.
But yeah, it's a very conservative Christian point of view that you do need to have faith in Jesus because personal effort alone and morality is just insufficient.
Is that conservative or is that just Christianity?
I think it's Christianity, yes.
But people would serve it.
Do you realize there are a lot of Christian churches?
And when I started researching Christianity, especially the chapters on liberal Christianity, like the Jesus Seminar and Gnosticism, those Christianities, I don't know if you even call it Christianity, don't believe in God.
They don't believe in miracles.
And that surprised me.
I'm like, wow, you call yourself a Christian, but you don't believe there's a God.
I mean, there's one thing to say, I don't believe Jesus really is God, but to say there is no God, I was just thrown by that.
Seems like that's part of the deal.
Yeah, it's all kind of, yeah.
I think the term Christian has come to me in so many things now.
I'd love to learn more about some of the crazy stuff you learned while researching this, but let's break into our subscriber portion.
And if you want to check out the book, The Shortest Leap: The Rational Underpinnings of Faith in Jesus by A. L. Van Den Herrick, it's a mouthful.
It's on Amazon.
It is.
Elsewhere.
Yeah, pretty much.
Is that the best place for people to check it out?
ChristianBook.com has had better prices.
ChristianBook.com.
Okay.
But Amazon's price has changed.
Amazon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes it'll be like $40,000 on Amazon if it's like the last copy.
And yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
That's my last copy, and I'm making a big killing off of you.
Perfect.
And you have a website people can go to as well?
Shortestleep.com.
Shortestleep.com.
Perfect.
Cool.
All right, freeloaders.
See you later.
We're going to go to our exclusive subscriber stuff and we're going to get all the juicy details.
Yeah, we're going to ask the really quick personal stuff.
Great.
Just started switching.
She's going to say what she really thinks about President Trump.
I'm going to try not to.
But thanks for joining us, Allison.
And thanks.
Oh, we're going to freeloaders.
Goodbye.
Audience.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
Read the newspaper anymore.
So thank you guys for keeping me up to date on that.
I hear that from a lot of people.
They read the site and they're like, okay, now I know that Kamala was selected.
Yes, exactly.
You don't have to go read all the hot takes on it.
I mean, anything can be stressful.
It really, it turns out it's what you split your work is worth it.
If your significance depends on it, then it becomes stressful.
It's like the dumbest people have kids.
And how hard can it be?
Seriously.
Why didn't you gesture me when you said that?
I was trying to aim that between you guys.
Enjoying this hard-hitting interview.
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