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July 21, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:43
Ravi Zacharias | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 60
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I think morality is good for civil coexistence, but morality alone will not save this society unless we develop an accountability to our creator, not merely for moral reasoning, but for the recognition that life at its core is sacred. not merely for moral reasoning, but for the recognition that Hello and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
Our special guest today is Ravi Zacharias.
He's author of over 25 books.
His newest book is The Logic of God.
He's a cultural apologist on behalf of Judeo-Christian values.
Ravi, thanks so much for joining the show.
You may be the guest most requested by our audience.
So I'm very excited to have you here.
Thanks for making the time.
Must have been my family who were riding in.
Well, I want to jump right in because there's a lot I want to cover with you.
Why don't we start with this?
You're obviously one of the most prolific debaters when it comes to religion and the presence of God in the universe.
You've debated a bunch of folks on the secular atheist side.
Who's the toughest debate you've ever had in terms of Well, you know, in the earlier days, I remember doing a couple of debates, courtesy of Emory University and so on, and overseas.
I debated some Islamic scholars in the city of Hyderabad, and Hindu scholars as well.
I moved away from the debating format, Ben, years ago, because I really felt it was nowhere near as effective as an open forum.
is where you give the privilege of the audience to ask you the questions and give them the opportunity to challenge what it is you're saying.
Otherwise you're pitting one intellect against another and whoever has read one more book can do better on the whole thing provided they've got the eloquence on their side.
So I think the toughest debaters to deal with are those of Contrary religious worldviews, where the animus becomes very intense and where the audience can be more provocative.
I've done dialogues of that nature.
No really difficult question, Ben, over the years of nearly 46 years of traveling this globe.
The questions are the same, although the relevance of issues has changed a little bit.
So, I would say the religious counter-perspectives, especially of a monotheistic stripe, they become tough because you're navigating very carefully one wrong word.
And that has now shifted into the open forum model where you're asked questions which are pretty point blank, but you're not necessarily given the privilege of a dissenting view while they themselves would call for the freedom of choice on all views.
So that would be my answer to your question.
I feel the tough ones are those who believe in absolutes, but from a different transcendent perspective.
You've answered thousands and thousands of questions from members of the audience.
What's the question that you receive most often when you do your events?
Well, you deal with it very much in your own book, which, by the way, I should say one of the finest I have read.
I need to go back to it.
I was reading it as I was preparing to come here.
What an amazing sweep of sensitive knowledge, Ben, that God has given to you.
You know, I think it ought to be required reading if any university professors have the courage to do it.
But as I look and do these navigational things, the two toughest questions to me, you know, once upon a time, the cosmological, the teleological, and all of these ontological arguments We're richly debated on the campus, but now there are more culturally sensitive issues that are raised.
However, the one thorn in the side of the theistic framework is the problem of evil, the problem of pain, the problem of suffering.
And I think what someone once said, virtue in distress and vice in triumph has made atheists of mankind.
I think it's the most real question, frankly, and many of the philosophers who ultimately, David Hume himself, you know, Did away with the notion of a sovereign first cause?
For them, this was the thorny question.
So to me, how can an all-powerful and an all-sovereign God and an all-good God allow so much of pain and suffering in this world?
I think it's a legitimate question, but that's the one Today it's much more cultural issues, so many things that you've dealt with.
I think the relevance of a moral law that Judeo-Christian worldview invokes, that we are not just beings intended to reason, but reason morally.
Those are the debates, I think, the two issues, and I think they are connected.
So, let's talk about the problem of suffering and pain.
Obviously, there have been a bunch of religious thinkers who have taken this on.
It's always puzzling to me when you hear secular humanists and atheists suggest that it's a revelation that this is a problem for religious thought.
Obviously, it's been a problem for religious thought since the very beginning.
What do you think is the best answer to that very difficult question?
Well, you know, Job is the one who wrestled with it the most.
Job, to me, came up with a very incredible answer.
That's, to me, a softer touch today, but I think a profound touch for those of us who have that knowledge of God.
To him, when he said, I had heard of you by the hearing of my ear.
Now I see, have seen you, I abhor myself and I'm horrified and he repented.
That relationship with God, same as with Habakkuk, you know, they struggled with these issues but that divine encounter gave them a pair of eyes so that they could see to the problem from a very different perspective.
God is, God acts, God changes.
That's what Habakkuk came up with, you know, the actuality of God in distinction to atheism, the eventuality of his working in distinction to deism, and the eternality of his perspective in distinction to pantheism.
So the question itself is well answered within the Judeo-Christian worldview.
But I think as a culturally relevant apologist, this is the way I deal with it, Ben, And I found it to be quite effective because the wheels start turning.
I was at the University of Nottingham years ago when it was first thrown at me.
And a guy stood up and he just said, how can you possibly talk of a good God, of goodness, When there's so much evil in this world, how can you talk about a God that actually exists in this kind of evil and this kind of suffering?
That, of course, Richard Dawkins and all of them raised the same.
So I looked at him and I said, let me ask you this.
You're talking about evil?
He said, yes.
I said, when you say this evilly, aren't you assuming that such a thing is good?
He said, yes.
I said, when you say that such a thing is good, aren't you assuming that such a thing is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil?
He paused for a moment on that one, and then I referenced him to Bertrand Russell's debate with Copleston, in which Copleston looked at Russell and said to him, how do you differentiate between good and bad?
And Russell said, the same way I differentiate between blue and green.
And Cobblestone said, but wait a minute, you differentiate between those colors by seeing, don't you?
He said, yes.
He said, how do you differentiate between good and bad, Mr. Russell?
He paused, and he said, on the basis of my feeling, what else?
I think that was the weakest point of Russell's debate.
So when I looked at him, he said, all right, I will agree to you that there is a moral law on the basis of which we differentiate between good and evil.
I said, evil, therefore good.
Good, therefore, a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate good and good evil.
I said, but if you posit a moral law, you must posit a moral law giver.
But that's whom you are trying to disprove and not prove.
Your whole point is invoking a moral law, which you cannot invoke without a moral law giver.
So your problem of evil actually disappears with the false assumptions that you're making.
Do you know, Ben, he paused and he looked at me and he said, what then am I asking you?
I was with William Lane Craig, whom you had on your program.
William Lane Craig and I were on a program with a physicist by the name of Bernard Lykan and a pantheist by the name of Jitendra Mohanty, sponsored by Emory University years ago.
And this was thrown back at me.
Why do you need to posit a moral law giver?
All right, we'll grant you there is this abstract moral law.
Why do you need to pause the moral law giver?
And my answer is this, Ben.
Every time the problem of evil is raised, it is either raised by a person or about a person, which means the questioner assumes persons have intrinsic worth.
And that is an assumption they cannot make in a random evolutionary universe with no primary mind and personal being as our creator.
So if we have the random collocation of atoms, how do we attribute essential work to ourselves?
So the person component is vital to the question and so the moral law needs a moral law giver if persons are to have essential worth.
So to me, the problem of evil when it is raised is a self-stultifying problem because it has to assume a framework that it cannot arrogate to itself in a random universe without personal value.
So how do we get from the idea of the moral lawgiver and a God who is present in the universe to what exactly that moral law is?
So there's sort of the God of the philosophers, this is obviously puzzled a lot of religious philosophers, there's the God of the philosophers, the sort of unmoved mover, the The being that generates a unity to the universe and an order to the universe.
How does that translate over into the sort of moral law that we practice or that we should practice?
Can you just do all of this on the basis of reason alone, just looking at the universe through natural law or do you need something like revelation?
I think that's a great question.
In your book, I think you have brilliantly given that dialectic of reason and purpose and meaning.
They are inextricably bound, and you really cannot have one without the other.
The way we get to it is something like this.
I do two frameworks on this, Ben, as an apologist dealing with the Judeo-Christian worldview.
We all need to know the truth.
Ultimately, we are in search for the truth, you know, where we need to accept the fact.
But how do we get to the truth?
And philosophers of old have told us there's the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth.
Correspondence applies to particular statements.
Coherence applies to a cumulative presentation of those statements.
So when you go to a court of law, the correspondence and coherence theory are always brought to bear in determining guilt or innocence.
But how do we get to it?
I say there are three ways of logical consistency Empirical adequacy and experiential relevance.
Is my argument logically consistent?
Is there any empirical basis for me to believe what I am believing?
And is there any experiential relevance to all of this?
But then this has to be applied to the four questions of life.
Origin, meaning, morality and destiny.
Where do I come from?
What does my life really mean?
How do I distinguish between good and evil?
What happens to a human being when he or she dies?
That closing chapter in your conversation with your daughter is brilliant, you know.
The question of eternality even comes into the mind of a little one.
There's that intuitive drive towards that origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.
Pursuit, truth.
Correspondence, coherence.
Logical consistency, empirical adequacy, experiential relevance.
When you form a worldview, these are the four questions you have to answer by applying the notions of truth.
So with the moment you say the word revelation, you know, ah, this is one of those dinosaurs who actually believes a book dropped out of heaven, and so on and so forth.
It's not as simplistic as that.
You take the revelation of God that has come across a millennium and a half of revelation.
You apply these tests and you see that the existence of God presents a framework for the existentially undeniable questions that we struggle with.
Those very questions are legitimized because of the value that we lay claim.
So yes, there's reason and revelation, but not some kind of pie in the sky, by and by, but propositional truth.
That is put to the test by a scrutinizing mind.
And the Judeo-Christian worldview, Ben, I believe.
I was raised in a counterculture to this.
I wasn't raised in either of those worldviews.
I was a naturalist.
I was a skeptic.
And I ended up on a bed of suicide when I was 17 years old.
Desperately looking for the very thing your book talks about, you know, that individual value and that individual purpose and a belongingness to a community and so on.
And it was then when the Bible—I couldn't even hold the Bible, by the way, because my body was dehydrated.
I had taken some poison that emptied me of all the water, moisture in my body.
And then to see how God, through the flow of history, and of course, even though we have our differences, we have a common background in communion with God.
Both of us have that goal.
And in the person of Jesus Christ, I found that answer.
And so my relationship to the person of God.
As Joe pointed out, as Habakkuk pointed out, that relationship is key because some answers to life transcend the propositional nature of things.
They don't violate it, but they transcend it.
So I think you get to the answer of who God is, not just by some leap of faith, which we sometimes attribute to people.
Mine was a very reasoned study of scriptures, and the reasoning that we applied was a rational type, but the importance was there was a moral reasoning behind the whole process.
So you don't just get to it by either reason or revelation.
It's the confluence of both in proper balance.
So in a second I want to ask you about the nature of the moral law.
Has it evolved?
Which part of it has not?
Which part of it is eternal?
Which part of it is evolving due to human reason?
I'm going to ask you about that in just one second.
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So when we talk about the Judeo-Christian moral law, one of the questions that I get from folks like Sam Harris or like Michael Shermer is, all right, let's assume that there is this eternal moral law that corresponds with some form of eternal truth and a lawgiver.
So, So why has that law evolved over time?
So to take for example, the example that they like best is slavery.
So originally the Bible contemplates that slavery is part of life and then over time we've decided that not only is slavery not a part of life, slavery is a grave evil that ought to be fought wherever it exists.
How do we justify evolution in the Judeo-Christian framework of morality?
Well, it's of course the metaphysical extrapolation of the naturalistic interpretation of the very origin of life.
So, when you talk about the evolution of humanity itself, they want to talk about morality itself also sort of evolving.
I think it becomes a circular argument.
The argument that somehow we were valueless to start with and just happened to be on this radar screen of time and that we developed all these things over a period of time, I think is a false view of the beginnings.
In fact, though, you know very well as a scholar within the Jewish framework, the very concept of slavery, a very different, very different idea of what we interpret as what slavery is all about.
And when you talk about Paul talking about how to treat the, quote, slave in the household and that he was willing to be there present and even redeem this person, in a socio-economic framework, that you have these kinds of terms used and systems used, we are bound to make blunders.
So then I would turn the question on its head and say, all right, if you believe that we have evolved more morally, why is it in the 20th century that we killed more people in warfare?
than all of the previous 19 centuries put together.
So it is not an honest representation of how we have actually come into believing in moral framework.
In fact, there are some things now that we have reversed over 5,000 years of civilized history for thousands of years.
Some people never believed some of the things that we have begun to believe.
So I would say that, to me, The most important phrase, Ben, in the Ten Commandments.
I don't believe there's a better moral framework that starts with the very being of God and all the way to the sacredness of my life, my neighbor's life, my neighbor's marriage, my neighbor's property.
I mean, this goes back, you know, to 3,500 years ago.
The most important phrase to me, Ben, in that is, I am the Lord your God that brought you out of the land of Egypt.
is prior to righteousness.
And then righteousness leads on to worship.
So when you get to Exodus 20 and you're dealing with that beautiful moral law, and then you move five chapters later and you move into the tabernacle and the framework of reference, I think it is the change of heart that is the only answer to the moral framework.
And here's the scary thing.
God did not send us his message to make bad people good.
Morality alone will never save us.
Sometimes in the name of morality, people have done some horrible things.
It is the fact that the heart is in need of redemption.
In need of forgiveness, and it is redemption that must precede righteousness.
So to talk about morality having been involved, when you go back 3,500 years ago, and the moral law is given to us, it was because people had already violated that relationship with God.
So I say, it's far from morality evolving.
Right from the beginning, we have known what it was all about.
So what happens in the first three chapters of Genesis happens in this world every day.
What happened in the Temptation Saga, Ben, I think is very critical.
And your book points out what has happened as a result of this flaw, okay?
In the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die.
That's the Word of God.
But the enemy of our souls comes and says, uh-uh, you will be as God, knowing good and evil.
That has been the battle for millennia.
What is the battle?
To allow God to be God or to play God.
And in the defining good of evil, and what happened when they are confronted?
I didn't.
I didn't, the serpent.
This idea of violating the authority of God and becoming autonomous, and then blaming everything else, this has not evolved.
This goes back over three millennia long, and we have challenged it every day in this victim culture.
What are we doing?
It's not my fault.
It's this person's fault.
We don't believe in absolutes.
We have autonomy.
So on the one hand, we claim to be autonomous, but when we go wrong, we blame somebody else.
It's someone else's enormous.
So I do not accept this idea that it is somehow evolved.
You go back millennia ago, and you see the value of human life and the value of a moral law millennia back.
So, in your worldview, do you make a distinction between that which is sinful and that which you consider immoral?
So, this is a sort of deep philosophical issue in the religious community.
Is there a difference between doing something that the Bible considers sinful and doing something that is moral on some sort of naturalistic level?
The difference between hurting somebody else and, for example, engaging in a consensual behavior, this is obviously taking a modern example, engaging in a consensual behavior that doesn't hurt a third party, per se, but maybe a sin against The natural law or sin against the Bible?
I think sin is a vertical term.
It is not merely a horizontal term.
When David sinned with what happened with Bathsheba and he falls on his face before God in Psalm 51, what does he say?
Against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.
Nathan confronted him.
Sin is a vertical thing.
Morality can very easily become a horizontal term.
And I think this is where we are getting grounded, literally and figuratively, Ben.
When we only talk about a moral framework, if you go to India today, moral reasoning is very different to that of, say, the moral reasoning of the West.
And sin, to me, is a violation, not of something abstract.
It's a violation of a personal command.
There is no sin in God.
That means there's no contradiction in God.
God is a self-existent being.
It is impossible for him not to exist.
He exists eternally.
So if I am to be in keeping with that will of my heavenly Father, when the prodigal son returns, what does he say?
I've sinned against heaven.
In that order, we take the vertical and make it horizontal.
And you know, our moral struggle these days, Ben, to me, which is very deep, by the way, and if I may just digress for just a moment.
I remember the first time I came to the West Coast.
It was in the 70s.
I was an undergraduate in Toronto at that time.
And I have to say to you, yesterday as I walked through Los Angeles, this state is a microcosm of the collision course in which we are headed culturally.
Probably one of the most beautiful states anywhere in the world.
It's got the mountains, it's got the oceans, it's got the deserts.
Finest minds in this country, from cyber capacity to artistic splendor, all of this.
And yet, what did I see yesterday as I walked?
If you had taken me back to Calcutta, 40, 50 years ago, I would have been walking past many homeless and thinking to myself, how are we going to solve this problem?
So what we have done in debunking the notion of sin and talking merely morality, we have ended up with a dead-end word that people really cannot relate to.
In fact, if you want to end a discussion with a press reporter, just use the word sin.
And that's it.
I swear, frankly, I like what you've done in your book.
To me, when I'm talking to a person and they say to me, what do you think is wrong then?
I say, it's a violation of purpose.
We have violated the purpose for which we have created.
They can connect much more with that existential rub.
And then, of course, they look at you and say, what do you mean by violation of purpose?
I say, if you take a car and run amok, In a crowd of people and kill them?
Can you blame General Motors for it?
Some will say, that's not why I fashioned this car.
It was for transportation.
So we've run amok in what we have done with our values.
And then we blame the Creator for it.
So I think morality is good for civil coexistence.
What Calvin talked about, the fourth use of the law type thing.
But morality alone will not save this society unless we develop an accountability to our Creator, not merely for moral reasoning, but for the recognition that life at its core is sacred.
The desacralization of life is at the core of what has happened.
We do not know what it means to be human.
And in losing that definition, as Chesterton would say, we were our feet firmly planted in midair.
So when we look at the role of government in all this, there's a really interesting debate that's broken out in the conservative movement right now between one wing that's more libertarian, and I will admit I'm in this wing, the wing that still defends classical liberalism, and a sort of fusionism, the idea that rights are important And rights are important because we have duties.
And the duties are to be imposed socially, but not necessarily by government.
And then there is a group of folks on the right who argue in convincing fashion that liberalism may in fact be part of the problem.
That if you have a liberal free society, this grants the ability for people who oppose traditional morality to tear down the structure, to tear away at community, that the individualism that is integrally Connected to liberalism, that that individualism tears away at a lot of the same communal values.
And so what you end up with is an atomistic society in which there is no community, no common moral fabric.
You end up with the rights without any of the duties and that eventually ends in exactly what you're talking about, the sort of breakdown of society.
So where do you think the proper role of government is in either enforcing morality or not enforcing morality?
What has to be done socially and what can the government be encouraging or should it be encouraging?
And that's the tough question of our time.
But what I know for greater certainty, what they ought not to be doing, and then we can move to what we can be doing.
You know, when you think of liberalism and or conservatism, it all depends on where you're talking.
You know, if I'm talking to the mullahs in Iran, may the heavens preserve us from that kind of conservatism.
You know, it's a demagogic conservatism that has not even understood what respect is for people of dissenting opinions.
So, I often put it this way, Ben.
Instead of right and left, we need to be thinking up and down.
I remember talking to a former governor and senator, and I was actually in Washington meeting one of the people who meets with more leaders around the globe than anybody else, and I just finished meeting with him.
Okay?
A few minutes.
And then I went out, my wife and I having donuts and coffee with this gentleman.
I'll never forget what he said.
I won't quote his name, but he looked at my wife and me and he said, there's one word that's dividing us here on Capitol Hill.
Just one word.
He said, that word is God.
If God exists or doesn't exist, if God doesn't exist, Ben, then these terms liberal and conservative actually become purely pragmatic words.
You know, you look at what happened under Stalin's Russia.
He was a believer in God at one time, seminary student, and he clenched his fist towards the heavens, which was literally the last gesture Before he died, his daughter and others standing in front of him clenched his fist towards the heavens one more time, threw his head back on the pillow, and he was gone, having taken the lives of 15 million of his own people.
I remember telling this story to a Russian general in Moscow during the days of the Cold War, and the tears were running down his face.
I said, is that what you want?
So the term right and left there meant something completely different.
But to the point of your question here, we at least have to agree on one definition, and until that we will not progress.
What does it mean to be human?
Are we just, on a grade and a hierarchy, a better animal?
Or are we something essentially different?
Until I answer that question, it cannot answer my question on why marital fidelity is important, why I need to be a good father, why I need to be a good citizen.
I think you touched a little bit of this in your book in talking about what citizenship actually means.
And I think you go back to the Socratic description and all, you know, you've got the person who just thinks autonomously, the idiot.
You think of the others who think tribally, their small group, and then you think of who is a good citizen.
The one who is a good citizen is willing to rightly accept the value of every human life and even to coexist different worldviews.
We took secularization evicted God, then we faced pluralism and pluralization, and we took it to mean relativism, and then we went to privatization where we were told that faith should be made private.
So the key to me is redefining whether secularism is really at the core of what our government should be, or will we honor the fact of our founding fathers that this was made for a moral people.
This was made for those who had the freedom to believe.
You privatize faith, you will ultimately privatize morality, and you will then publicize the destruction of one another.
The whole key to me is, are we a secularly conscious people, or is there a transcendent framework of value for me and you with All of our differences that we can cordially sit back and even agree to disagree and give each other a hug and say, hey man, here we go.
Can I say one more point to this footnote, Ben?
I'll tell you what the mistake is.
The two words egalitarianism and elitism.
Egalitarianism bringing quality.
We are meant to be, as human beings, having that egalitarian right.
All human beings are created equal.
Elitism, but we do not believe all ideas are equal.
Some ideas are superior to other ideas.
Naturalistic framework has ended up reversing this in our time.
We have made an elitism of people and an egalitarianism of ideas, and that has put us on a collision course.
And so the elitists will tell us whether our ideas are good or not.
That's reverse.
I have to respect a person made Imago Dei, but I can say to them, your ideas and mine are not the same.
Let's reason them through and see why.
That egalitarian elitist tension is a tension with which we are living, having to reverse the poles of the current and short-circuiting life.
I talk with a lot of college students just the way you do, and many of them ask the question, you know, is your suggestion when you talk about religion, there can't be a good atheist or a good secular person?
I always say, well, I don't know a single religious person who believes that there can't be a secular person who acts well and acts in concert with public morality.
It's a silly question, but it does raise the secondary question, which is, okay, well, if I'm a good secular person, I don't believe in God, but I still abide by a certain level of morality, what makes God necessary to my life?
Why should I think about God as opposed to just sort of behaving in the way that we all sort of agree commonly is good?
I think it's a great question, but it hangs on the peg of one flaw, and that peg says autonomy is all that really matters.
being autonomous, that I'm a law unto myself.
First of all, your disclaimer is very valuable.
I believe there are many good people that I have met who are skeptics, who are non-believers in God.
Sometimes they put us Christians to shame, you know, when I see some of the courtesy and the generosity of some of them well-received.
But the fact of the matter is they are using a word that is only self-referencingly defined.
I am a good person.
How do I decide that?
And if I am only going upon my own reason, you know, in some cultures they love their neighbors, in other cultures they eat them.
Both of them may think that they are good and that they are doing good.
Think of what we are doing today while considering ourselves a good culture.
It is unthinkable some of the decisions we are making at the highest level of lawmakers, and yet we call ourselves good?
It is not a self-defining motive.
First of all, if I believe goodness is purely on my definition, I have to give that prerogative to every other human being.
Even the naturalistic framework of Immanuel Kant, you know, the universalizing of a principle, would apply right here.
But the fact of the matter is when I... I'm a cross-cultural person, okay?
Even within India, I was raised in the North, born in the South.
The color tension, Ben, the tension between the complexions of people while I was growing up.
I come from the South, so I'm darker complexion, but I moved to the North.
It was tough.
And in some parts of India, that is still so.
And you see the matrimonial column.
wanting to marry a wheat complexion, whatever that means.
You know, my brother used to say, is this a whole wheat or what we're talking about out here?
We've got all these tensions that go on.
So cultures have different values and self-referencing behavior.
Once upon a time, the Sati system in India, thank God it was abolished.
You know, where the wife had to burn herself and the pyre of her husband and so on.
They thought they were being good people.
So to say I am good is a highly risky statement if you do not believe in absolutes.
It is a relativistic term and if you say all truth is relative, then it is a self-destructing statement.
It destroys itself.
Is it an absolute or is that statement relative too?
So I say, yes, many good living people who are skeptics and have done wonderful things in this world, but to give oneself the prerogative of defining good leads to a world of chaos that is given everywhere else.
Here's what I say.
America talks a lot about rights, but we have not yet defined what is right.
My rights stand on the bedrock of an absolute definition of what is right.
And that's why people like Bilbo Force and others were at the forefront of fighting slavery, because it was wrong.
Nobody had the right to inflict that on any human being.
So that's my answer.
My answer is that there are good people, but they're living beyond the foundation on which their lives are standing.
So let's talk for a second about rights.
So you mentioned rights there.
And obviously there's been a lot of talk.
The United States is very ensconced in a lot of rights talk.
There are a lot of thinkers who have been very critical of this.
There's a book called After Virtue by Alistair McIntyre in which he talks about the movement of rights beyond sort of its natural law basis.
And the counter reaction from the folks on the secular humanist left to conservatives has been, well, what you actually want is a theocracy.
You guys define right.
You say that there is a right.
Where are you getting this idea that there is a right to do wrong?
What is a right except the right to occasionally do something wrong or do something with which we disagree?
If you truly believe in a Judeo-Christian framework, why not cram that down on everybody else?
And that's what a lot of secular humanists attribute to religious people.
It is a desire to do that from the top down.
So let's ask that basic question.
What is the value of rights if you do know what's right?
And I think MacIntyre does a good job even in some of the titles of his books.
You know, Who's Justice?
What Morality?
Those kinds of things that he brings out and was writing prolifically and several others.
Yaki was another one of those authors in this whole area of ethical reasoning.
First of all, I think anyone who enforces a religious worldview upon another one is probably in belief of a very ignoble worldview because God himself gave us one of the greatest gifts we have been for you and me, the freedom to believe and the freedom to disbelieve.
But one thing he did not give us was to disconnect the entailments of those two options.
He gave me the freedom to believe but gave me the logical outworking of what will happen and the freedom to disbelieve and the logical outworking of what will happen.
I think the fact is this concern has been violated by the critic of the theistic ideas rather than by the defenders.
You know it better than most people here.
Go into a university campus today and who has to go in with high security and high protection, okay?
It is those who want to talk about the rights that we all really have, but we have a conservative view of life.
Those who Don't believe in that theistic framework.
They are not coming with protection because they are not being mocked.
They are being listened to very carefully.
So, enforcement of any kind of belief is not in keeping with the mercy and the grace of God himself.
You know, there's a guy, whom I won't name, who is violently opposed to any proclamation of the Judeo-Christian worldview on military bases.
Okay, so he founded this organization and fights anybody who wants to come and speak at military bases.
I've spoken at all of them.
I've not spoken at one.
At the Air Force Academy.
So I went to see this guy.
I visited him in his home city, and had two big German shepherd dogs on either side of him, you know, and then he looked at me and said, they like you.
I said, I wish I could say the feelings are mutual.
So we started discussing.
But you know, I said to him, in my conversation, I said, forget what you have against Christianity, and you've written a lot about it.
I said, what do you have against Jesus?
What do you have against God?
He said, because he holds a gun to your head and tells you you either believe or else.
I said, that's strange.
Isn't that what you're doing on the military academy campuses?
You hold a gun to their head and say, if you don't do what I'm telling you to, I'm going to take you to a court of law and ruin your family order.
I said, you got it wrong.
I said, God doesn't do that.
He is the one who tells you he gives you the privilege of your freedom to disbelieve.
I said, you are underestimating the intelligence of your military academies in thinking those cadets sitting in front of me don't have the intelligence enough to make up their own minds after we have presented our talks in an open forum.
Why do you think they're that dumb then?
Are you sending them to defend the whole nation when you think they can't even make the decision of such a thing?
Do you know what he looked at me?
He said, I like you.
He took me out for lunch, came to visit me in Atlanta along with his wife, and he said, I will never stand in your way again.
You can go to any one of these, and I'm about to go to Wiesbaden and do a forum there.
So I think we have to rationally and courteously talk.
If civility goes out of the marketplace, Ben, then what we've got is violence at the most sophisticated levels of the freedom.
So as I look at our society and say, am I forcing you to believe what I'm saying?
Not one bit.
We give you the freedom to reject, but let's at least be civil in the process.
Now here's what I say to the staunch skeptic.
If you really want the next generation to carry on the values to live and let live, and to have the courtesy of truly allowing those who come into our shores to be given respect, no matter what their belief system is, then you better believe that our moral values have an absoluteness to them.
If you truly believe in relativism, the America as you know it is finished.
And the truth is that they don't actually believe in relativism, even the ones who purport to believe in relativism, because they still suggest that their value system is the highest, obviously.
It's a self-defeating proposition.
But this does raise another question that you see very often in the debate between religious and non-religious, and that is the debate over free will.
So you mentioned that the religious worldview takes into account the idea that You're given the choice.
The Deuteronomy says that you choose to hear between life and death, and you're enjoined to choose life.
But that's a recommendation, not a compulsion.
There is a new breed of thought that I find maybe the most dangerous of any of the breeds of thought, and that is the outgrowth of a full-on scientific naturalism-scientism.
The idea that we don't have free will, that effectively we are just a cluster of cells moving meaninglessly through the universe.
To support this proposition, what you see a lot of the advocates doing is appealing to scientific experiments, the Labatt experiment, the experiments that suggest, for example, that you, that your brain is activating before you even know what you're thinking, that you're not making a conscious decision, that effectively you are just a series of firing neurons that thinks that you are willed, in the sort of Spinoza phrase.
How do you respond to accusations that human beings, there is no Truly innate value to human beings, basically we're just a piece of meat that has some firing electrical neurons.
Well, I would just ask him a simple question, is what you're saying true or purely determined?
You know, is this just the neurons firing that have made you come to this conclusion, or do you actually believe there's an objectivity to it that transcends everyone else's objectivity?
It's a wonderful backdoor exit for taking human responsibility.
How do, why do we even have our courts then?
They're just, you know, firing neurons.
They're behaving by predetermined ways.
About a month ago, I was in the most dangerous prison, what used to be the most dangerous prison in America, the Angola prison in Louisiana.
This is my third visit.
They have nearly 6,000 prisoners, and 85% of them are on life without parole.
Pretty hard laws out there.
And we were walking past every cell in death row.
It's a very sobering thing, Ben.
I'm sure you've been to places like that.
One tiny little, almost just an exaggerated cage, really.
A toilet, a bed, and a table.
And I'm talking to one man.
He puts his hands through.
He had been there already for 18 years.
And he asked me to pray for him.
They read.
That's all they can do.
They read books.
And then I heard the voice ringing forth through the corridor.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see.
I looked over and the guard there was wiping the tears away.
OK, so three or four of us walk over towards him.
And I look at him, and he is bellowing this thing out, a fine, beautiful African-American voice, you know, powerful, poor guy.
All races are represented there.
The first guy I met was from the white race, 18 years, waiting on death row, and yet this guy is singing that song.
So I said, how long have you been here?
He'd been there somewhere near 20 years.
His bed was covered with crosses.
Simple twine, a cross wound with twine.
And I said to him, are you making those?
He said, yes, sir.
And he gave me two of them.
And then he said, I've also painted this.
And he gave me his painting.
I asked him how he was doing and the whole story of the redemption that he found being there.
And by the way, Dead Man Walking was filmed right there at Angola.
And looking at his eyes, I was broken inside.
I said, what went wrong with this life?
How did it go wrong?
But here in every cell is a Bible.
And last time I went, one of them said to me, if this Bible had been in my high school, it probably would not have been needed here in my cell.
What a story.
And what were his neurons firing then?
Is transformation also just predetermined?
Or is it something we applaud and say, this man is now free to truly walk out after being freed from his inner slave?
So this sense of determinism.
Yeah, it goes back to, you know, B.F.
Skinner and some of these others who came out in the 70s.
It was just another backdoor escape to justify that we are the way we are.
If that is true, then we ought not to be mocking Anyone who believes to the contrary, because they too are predetermined to wire that way.
The moment you make a hierarchy of ways, you no longer believe in determinism.
You believe in an objectivity on the basis of which to define somebody's subjective response.
I mean, one of the things that I always find ironic about this particular argument is that people seem to exempt themselves.
It's all, everybody else is predetermined.
When it comes to me, I wrote this book.
It was I who created this population.
It never applies inwardly.
Okay, so let's talk about an area where we disagree, and that is on the veracity of the New Testament versus the Old Testament.
So let's start with some kind of the broader philosophical framework.
What do you think that Christianity adds to the world that Judaism didn't in the first place?
First of all, I want you to know how proud I am to have friends like you and Dennis Prager, Michael Medved.
I'll be back with Dennis again.
I think I remember Dennis's comment when we were talking on this.
He was brilliant, what he said.
He said, when Messiah comes, I will just have one question.
Have you been here before?
And I think that is what it'll really boil down to.
I don't like to say the word add because it seems like it is something superimposed that wasn't there.
I think it was already there, Ben.
Of course, my own upbringing was so different.
It was like my ancestors were Orthodox Hindu priests generations ago from the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood.
I think it is that one verse, one line, that the moral law hangs upon, I am the Lord your God that brought you out of the land of Egypt.
That redemption motif, I think it moved beyond the metaphor from Egypt, although it was real.
It moved beyond the blood sacrifices, and it moved the very person of the Son of Man that Daniel talked about.
And the perfection of the law, which was not violated, but affirmed and endorsed.
So what I see in the person of Jesus Christ are two very real things, Ben.
Number one, it is the fact that He embodied that which was the purest that was called for by this very rigorous 613 system of laws that were given.
And if you move down even to Habakkuk, Which is then quoted three times in the New Testament.
From 613, David reduced it to a handful.
Isaiah reduced it even more.
Micah brought it down to three.
To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before your God.
But the Habakkuk phrase of the just shall live by faith, which I understand is more correctly represented as by his faithfulness.
You know, that when you move into the person of Christ, two things happen.
The law is honored.
And not debunked, but the relationship question.
You know, when you give the four propositions in your closing chapter, you know, starting all the way from purpose and then in relationship, The most moving moment in your book is when you talk to your daughter, okay?
I loved it.
I'm a grandfather of five.
And my grandson Jude, brilliant guy, he uses words like hypothesis and all of that.
He's only about, he's turning eight tomorrow, okay?
When my daughter Naomi lost her car case, she stopped going crazy in the house, slapped her forehead and said, I must be losing my mind.
Little Jude, who was five and a half then, stood in front of her and he said, Mommy, whatever you do, please don't ever lose your heart because I'm in there.
That personal relationship, as much as I value and love the law, I need to go beyond that to relationships.
And so here's what I say.
The most beautiful moment in the New Testament to me.
If I were to choose one moment or two, first I would want to listen to Jesus' talk on Emmaus Road, because he connects all the dots going back to the beginning.
Brilliant history lesson.
You would love it, I think, as he talked on Emmaus Road.
But the second moment was when he was on the Mount of Transfiguration.
Who does he bring with him?
Moses and Elijah, two of the most thundering prophets for whom he was the undertaker.
Okay?
We don't know exactly what Moses was buried in.
Elijah goes up on chariots of fire, but then he goes to the cross.
I know I can't pay for myself.
The redemptive factor of the purest paying for the impure.
Not that there was no penalty, but he paid it and then rises again from the dead.
To me, it's a composite that doesn't violate what preceded.
I think it completes it.
And to me, the attractiveness, and I really appreciate you even giving me the opportunity to share it.
Let me give you an illustration of this.
I was in Jerusalem some years ago.
You may know the name of Moshe Sharon, the well-known scholar on Islamics in Israel.
I was writing a book on an imaginary conversation between Jesus and Muhammad.
It'll be released posthumously.
I've got it written, okay?
So I'll tell you what he said to me.
Great man.
He's probably written more on any inscripture in stone than any other human being around there.
He looked at me and he said, Mr. Zacharias, you're a very clever man.
He said, well, I'll tell you something you don't know.
I said, there's a lot I don't know, sir.
He said, well, let me tell you something.
He said, you don't know about me.
He said, I'm now a professor.
He said, but I used to work for the Mossad.
He said, Mr. Zacharias, you're a Christian, I'm a Jewish man, but we both have one thing in common.
I said, what's that?
He said, communion with God.
I said, you're right.
My goal in life is to have communion with God.
He said, so is mine.
He said, but I picked up extremists who would go and blow themselves up.
And what people don't know, he said, they would have a leaden girdle around that midsection so that they could protect what they felt they were going to use in paradise finally.
He said, that's a different world.
That's a different worldview.
He said, you and I can talk because we have the same goal, communion with God.
But if a person thinks of an erotic and essentially driven eternity, I'm not on the same page with that person.
We have completely different goals.
So I say, to me in Christ, I see the completion of the story because I hunger, not just for propositional truth.
Jesus comes down from the mountain, and Peter goes, what does he say?
But now we have the word of the prophets made most certain, and you would do well to pay heed to it as a light in a dark place.
So I think it is a completion, and my friend Prager was absolutely right.
When the Lord returns, I'll say, truly, have you been here before?
But my goal would be to get there before he returns.
I'm 73 now, but that's my answer to you.
So I do want to ask you, you know, one of the issues that now comes up routinely and I saw it with my book.
I know that you've experienced it as well.
If you mention Judeo-Christian civilization, if you mention Western civilization, there's a whole school of thought out there now that this is effectively just a form of racism, that this is a form of white supremacy, which comes, I think, as an ironic accusation toward both you and toward me.
But that attempt to paint Even the term Judeo-Christian civilization is inherently exclusive.
Do you think that that reflects any accuracy?
In other words, what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian worldview from some of the other religious worldviews?
You mentioned early on that when you have debates with folks or discussions with folks who are of other monotheistic faiths, that those tend to be some of the hardest conversations.
Where do you think that the Judeo-Christian worldview diverges from some of the other faiths with which you've discussed?
You know, I think we're also paying the penalty of our flaws.
Historically, the Church has made huge blunders.
You point out some of this in your book as well.
How do we hide from that?
What it really showed, and even the way they handled scientific progress at times, which was not well done, It actually ends up proving the depravity of man.
It doesn't prove who Jesus is, what the Bible actually teaches, but it proves what we become as human beings when we give to ourselves power over everybody else.
So I say we have to own up our mistakes, but we have no more mistakes made than those who are of a counter-perspective.
Which are the two most rogue regimes in the world today?
If you go back to the 20th century, more people were killed in communist countries than any democratic, capitalistic system put together, and you know that well.
You put the slaughter of people between China and Russia alone, and then you bring in Vietnam and Cambodia.
I was in Vietnam in the 70s, not as a fighter, but as working with the chaplains.
I was only in my 20s.
I saw what was happening.
I was in Vietnam a few weeks ago, and they themselves talk about what is being done to them under this heavily atheistic regime.
The fact of the matter is to point this finger against those of a Judeo-Christian worldview shows a prejudice that is not in keeping with history.
Why is it people come to the shores of this country?
I came here when I was 20 years old.
It came through legally, came through going through the hoops, came through answering questions because we saw some ethical norms here and less corruption in the political process than from whence my brother and I were coming.
He was 22 and I was 20.
And the fact of the matter is people don't realize it was the bequest of that Judeo-Christian framework.
When China, before this particular one, who's quite demagogic, was starting to send their scholars over to here, you talk to almost any Chinese at that time, you know what he would say?
We were thinking of why is this country so ethically driven and has the values of human life, contrary to mine.
When Tocqueville came, whom you mentioned too, What did he say?
That we were a people of faith.
We are now throwing out that which engendered our values.
And now we think we can have values without that foundation.
Yes, mistakes have been made, but greater mistakes have been made by those who denied the existence of God.
Every one of us believes in God.
Everyone.
The only difference is whether you believe in the real God or end up deifying ourselves.
Okay, now, what about the other perspectives, especially the pantheistic worldviews?
One famous Indian politician just recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that we give freedom to whatever you want to believe, and go on and on.
Well, that's very noble, if that is the case.
But then we should revisit that and talk about, should we be making anti-conversion laws then, if we make anybody give people the freedom to believe?
Why then are we barricading Anybody who wants to choose otherwise so we have to think these things through and so what I say is Freedom to believe or to disbelieve.
And we ought not to have a theocracy, because dictating religious belief is the best way to kill that belief, as Europe finally evicted, you know, the priest and the king, as it were.
So I believe you give the freedom to believe, and the biggest place we need to be given this privilege is in our academic institutions.
If universities would open their door to intelligent dialogue with our differences, I believe things will change.
It is the fact that they have blocked out a prejudicial description of what the Judeo-Christian worldview is all about.
Think of it this way.
When the Judeo-Christian worldview was reigning, yeah, we had our views on sexuality, but we weren't sending people to jail.
Or the whole process.
Now when relativism holds sway, we are bringing everybody out of the woodwork and what they did 20, 30, 40 years ago because we just want to see them in jail.
It just goes to show you that what you said earlier, we all have our absolutes.
We only bring them out when it serves our own purposes.
It is not the Judeo-Christian worldview that is to blame.
It is the way some people use their belief that I think engenders this kind of prejudicial reaction.
So, in one second, I want to ask you a final question.
I want to ask why secularism seems to be, and is statistically, in the ascendancy, given the fact that there are all sorts of internal contradictions in this philosophy.
I want to ask that final question, but if you want to hear Ravi Zacharias' answer, you actually have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Well, Ravi Zacharias, it's really an honor for you to be here, and I really appreciate your time, sir.
Thank you so much, and Godspeed.
God bless.
God bless you, Ben.
So nice to meet you.
Thanks for the freedom.
I appreciate it.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Donovan Fowler.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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