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June 14, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:15
God vs. Government | Ravi Zacharias, Michael Shermer, and William Lane Craig
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judeo-christian values lie at the heart and soul of western civilization itself And they lie at the heart and soul of a lot of the Enlightenment values that we ourselves tend to value as even secular people.
The very basis of the notion that human beings have intrinsic worth and intrinsic quality.
That is a notion that cannot be discovered from science.
It's not something that you can pick up just by looking at a science textbook.
After all, we're just an agglomeration of cells and an agglomeration of various firing synapses.
The idea that human beings have inherent value, that's something that springs from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The idea that we're all equal before God, that we have all equal rights before God, that again comes from the ideas in Genesis.
The idea that as human beings we are created as individuals made in the likeness of God and therefore we have to value the rights of other human beings.
The moral strictures of the Ten Commandments.
These are all the things that provide the grounding for a social fabric that allows for freedom to flourish.
Now, there are a lot of people who attack Judeo-Christian values because they believe that Judeo-Christian values is too exclusive, that Judeo-Christian values is rooted in faith as opposed to in logic.
But the reality of the situation is that everybody's moral framework is rooted in certain assumptions.
The question of how we are to live a moral life is rife with questions about how we ought to view human beings and their place in the world.
If you believe in the sort of scientific materialist worldview that says that human beings are basically just material wandering through space with the illusion of free will, it's very difficult to make a moral case for why you should act in a certain way, why you should act as though you have free will, why you should act in the interest of others as opposed to in your own interest.
If, however, you believe that there is a moral standard that stands above and beyond you, that you were created with a soul, Something that exists beyond death.
If you believe in Judeo-Christian values, in other words, that provides the logical framework that allows for the flourishing of human freedom.
Now that doesn't mean that every religion-based society is going to end in human freedom.
Very often, religion, just like any other force in human history, can be used for tyranny.
And you've seen that too.
People who want to cram down particular doctrines.
People who believe in a theocracy.
Where religious authorities get to declare what you can and cannot do.
But the true purpose of Judeo-Christian values is to determine your place in a universe that is governed by rules, that is discernible by human reason, human intellect.
This is rife in Judeo-Christian theology, ranging from Maimonides in Judaism to Aquinas in Catholicism.
To the great Protestant theologians as well.
The fact of the matter remains that if you want to have a free country, you have to have a social fabric that is supported by these moral ideas.
This is why the French Revolution was a failure.
Because the French Revolution tried to create a secular morality without the framework of Judeo-Christian morals.
And it turns out that it is very easy to discard the individual in that math.
It's incredibly easy to say the individual doesn't matter as much as the collective.
This was the logic that was used by Robespierre and, by the way, by Karl Marx.
It is easy to say that an alternative moral system in which individuals don't matter as much as the sort of collective will that individuals ought to be grounds dust.
And you saw this under communism.
You saw this under fascism.
The values that you believe in the values of free markets, the values of free exchange and free speech and free thought, the value being treated as an individual.
Again, that is rooted in the belief that you were made as an individual by God in God's image.
And those values have to be promulgated.
And responsibility has to be added to those values, because individualism, without any sort of teaching in your moral debt owed to others, ends with hedonism, and it ends with narcissism, and it ends with societal collapse and anarchy.
So if you want that balance between responsibility And freedom.
If you want the balance between virtue and liberty, you need Judeo-Christian values.
One of the saddest things that we've seen in modern society is people rebelling against churches, people saying the church is bad, people actively fighting against church, suggesting the church is the great oppressor, and that as soon as we get rid of church, that things will move in a far better direction.
That is obviously untrue.
A lot of the collapse in meaning that's taken place in American life, a lot of the violence that we see in our streets, a lot of the suffering that we see, is directly implicated in the destruction of churches, in the destruction of synagogues, in the destruction of organized religion, in which so many people found community, faith in their neighbors, a belief that the people who lived around them were good and decent human beings, and thus deserving of the same freedoms that they themselves were worthy of.
If you want an overarching government structure cramming down one rule from above, all you have to do is dissolve the social fabric that is rooted in Judeo-Christian values.
Alrighty, coming up, You're going to hear me talk about these issues and many more with the late Ravi Zacharias, as well as Michael Shermer, as well as William Lane Craig.
I really hope that you enjoy the episode of The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
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This week on the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special, we've moved into the summer off season and we're bringing you our best moments from the last two years of shows.
We'll listen to guests from my show and hear their unique perspectives surrounding a topic.
And I'll also be sharing some reflections on each of the guests and their episodes.
In this episode, we're focusing on the Judeo-Christian values that Western civilization has been built on and the dialogue I've had with guests about these values.
It feels natural to begin with, man.
I'd also like to take a moment to honor and remember Ravi Zacharias.
Ravi recently passed away after a fight against cancer.
I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with him about a year ago in episode 60.
Ravi was a Christian teacher with a 48-year long career preaching in over 70 countries, authoring over 30 books in which he argued for the existence of God and the case for Christianity by connecting faith with reason and focusing on the logical case for theism.
His ministry's motto is Helping the Thinker Believe, Helping the Believer Think.
His latest book is Seeing Jesus from the East, a fresh look at history's most influential figure, which was released since we've talked.
Ravi touched the lives of millions of people.
His memory will not soon be forgotten as the work of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries continues on.
I would have loved to talk many more hours about religion, philosophy, and God with Ravi, but I do feel a deep gratitude to have had the privilege to meet and connect with him through this show.
It was really fantastic to talk to Ravi.
He was one of the most requested people around the office.
People around the office just loved his work.
This was also one of our most popular episodes and one of the most requested.
What a charming and delightful and urbane and humane individual Ravi Zacharias was.
In our interview, listen to Ravi distinguish the Judeo-Christian worldview from all other worldviews.
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, is if you mention Judeo-Christian civilization, if you mention Western civilization, there's a whole school of thought 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
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.
It came through going through the hoops.
It 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, was 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?
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 we ought to give people the 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 given the fact that we do live in this immensely prosperous time, this immensely free time, you know, the case that I make and continue to make is that these are all outgrowths of a 3500 year process of history combined with reason and that you end up, this is basically when you, when you Continue to put pressure on a piece of coal, eventually you get a diamond.
And that is effectively what has happened with our civilization.
So why then are we watching the rise of prosperity over the course of the last couple centuries alongside the rise of secularism across the last couple of centuries?
Well, I think, you know, Anthony Kronman from Yale wrote that excellent book called The End of Secularism, and he was punning on the word end, meaning both its terminal point and its purpose.
And he said that the whole secular way of experiment was not properly communicated in the whole existential experience.
It wasn't lived out properly, and so it blew the whole thing.
Secular society is the logical way to actually try to build government, but the freedom to give dissenting voices their view is essential if secularism is to be a logical way of following.
Otherwise, if you're anti-God, anti-theistic, then you have actually Blocked the freedom to express.
I think you so well point out what Locke had talked about, you know, the whole idea of how we are endowed by our Creator with these rights.
That's key.
It's not given by government.
It is given by God himself.
But what we need is the freedom to discuss and interact.
You know, Ben, the most common question we are asked when we are on campus, and I have 90 fellow apologists on our team, we cover the globe, 12, 13, 14-year-olds come up to the microphone and talk about the struggle with suicide.
Can somebody here tell me what my life actually means?
Why I should keep from taking my life?
Secularism doesn't give you the answer because secularism is born out of the idea of saeculum, just this worldly.
But if a secularistic framework becomes to an antitheistic framework, then it's no longer a legitimate secularism, it is an antitheistic framework of thinking.
And that, to my way of thinking, is not what secularism is all about.
We have to have the absence of a theocracy, but the absence of a theocracy doesn't mean the presence of an antitheistic-ocracy of whatever comes in its place.
America is a beautiful nation.
You're right.
We're in the process of destroying it.
We're blowing it big time.
I came here at the age of 20.
I'm 73 now, 53 years later, and I look at what's happening.
If our children are to grow up in a country of respect and civility, I believe we have to go back to the values of the Judea Christian worldview, view, which give to us the sacredness of our origin and the sacredness of our relationships and the sacredness of my neighbor's property and the sacredness of time from everything of value that I am given by God.
It's a gift.
The past is the past.
The future, we don't know.
The present is rightly called the present because it's a gift.
It's given to us right now.
This is our moment to defend the worldview of the scriptures and to do it wisely and well.
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.
From episode six of the Sunday special, one of our very first guests was one of my favorites, Michael Shermer.
We'll get to his interview in just a moment.
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From episode six of the Sunday special, one of our very first guests was one of my favorites, Michael Schirmer.
Michael's a friend of mine.
He's also a founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.
That's a publication that examines and questions the latest in scientific thought.
He's the host of the Science Salon podcast, and he's a monthly columnist for Scientific American for the last 20 years or so.
Since his Sunday special air, he has a brand new book, Giving the Devil His Due, Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.
It talks about free speech and politics, science, and culture.
It's definitely worth the read.
I definitely appreciate Michael talking about Judeo-Christian values with me as somebody who really gets the importance of morality and individual liberty, but doesn't agree that these things are rooted in Athens and Sinai.
Listen to us debate when and how the perspective of the human individual enters history and what morality you can and can't achieve from pure reason alone.
This is one of the great puzzles of human history is number one, why this perspective on the human individual only arose in the 17th century.
If this is ingrained in human beings, that the individual is a value and that we have to work with one another, then why only in a certain place in a certain time did it arise?
Was it a spontaneous combustion of human thought in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Or was this something that has deeper roots?
I obviously would argue this has deeper roots going all the way back to Sinai and Athens.
But how would you argue on that?
Yeah, so I think there's a tension there always between the individual and the group, and then how do we get beyond the small tribes.
A tribal size of about 150 plus or minus, a few dozen, where everybody knows each other or related to each other.
So evolutionary psych can get us all the way out to that.
Now, beyond that, we need politics, economics, culture, history, and so on.
And so the one model I use is, I call this the Indugoo effect.
So in Jack Nicholson's movie about Schmidt, You know, he's a retired insurance guy, and he's late night watching, and there's one of these infomercials about adopting a little kid, Ndugu in this case, and he gives money to little Ndugu, and the whole narrative plot is around that.
He doesn't know Ndugu from anybody, but they show him the picture of little Ndugu, and here he is with his soccer ball and his brother and sister, and here's their little hut they live in, and five dollars a day will give them, so on.
And now if you show a picture of 10,000 starving kids in Kenya, I'm not giving any money or I'll give a dollar or whatever, but you show me little Ndugu.
So really it's kind of tricking our brain into making little Ndugu an honorary member of our tribe, my family, my friend.
I care about it.
And that's our evolved brain.
We care about people we know or can identify with.
So to get beyond that, First of all, you have to get people to care about other people by identifying them as individuals that are like me.
So that sort of principle of interchangeable perspectives, that could be me, there but for the grace of, in your case, God.
That could be me.
So how do we do that?
Well, beyond getting people to truly care, just having a large society with the rule of laws and democracy where we at least feel like we have some say.
But more importantly, I think free trade is one of these things where as long as you and I are both profiting from some kind of exchange we have, I have no desire to kill you and maybe I'll even start to like you a little bit because you're doing something for me.
So we know Government, you know, sort of liberal democracies and free trade are these things that provide trust in a society among strangers such that I can go to the Starbucks, somebody waiting for me to wait on me.
I don't know them.
They take my money.
They trust me.
I trust them.
I don't feel like I'm going to get bonked on the head or hopefully not arrested for not paying and buying a Starbucks.
You know, modern society is based on this idea of trust among strangers and that requires all these extra add-ons.
So here I think of economics and politics as tools, social technologies.
So my question still remains.
Okay, I agree with a lot of your analysis.
Why the economics and politics of a particular time in a particular place?
Is it accidental?
Is it that we're just looking at a single sample size?
Why is it that only in Western Europe at a particular time, at a particular place in history, do we get this vision of individual rights that flowers out and then starts encompassing broader and broader groups of people?
Again, if this was embedded in human capacity from the very beginning, then why does it only happen as the outgrowth of one particular culture?
So you see where I'm going with this, right?
Yep.
So, well, I think Pinker tries to answer that, and the good social scientist that he is, this is a tangled web of correlations and intercausal variables that are going up and down, and it's really hard to answer.
I mean, you get a number of things going on.
You know, the Industrial Revolution, free trade is coming, you know, double entry, bookkeeping, and all these things that kind of drive prosperity to go up, which enhances a bunch of other things.
So we can afford better governance and so on.
Then we have better educational systems.
Also, literacy rates start to go up around the same time.
Do you think any of this has to do with the Judeo-Christian system that is undergirding all of this?
Yes, that's part of it, of course.
Just the Western idea that the Judeo-Christian is sort of founding helps push it along.
Yes, I know we can go back to maybe the 13th century or 14th century and the first humanists in the 15th century, long before the Enlightenment.
Yes, okay, so there's strain.
Right, Grotius is talking about human rights back in the 1530s, 1540s.
That's right.
So I think there's multiple strands.
When you write a book, you got to start the clock somewhere.
So I didn't go all the way back to Athens and Jerusalem, you know, like some people do.
Okay, so there's some threads there.
But the idea that the individual is what counts and we're going to protect the individual's rights You know, like the Bill of Rights, for example, is a perfect example.
It's not the group, it's the individual.
In fact, these rights are there to protect you from being considered a member of a group that we feel we can discriminate against.
No, you can't do that.
And those have been expanding.
That moral sphere has been expanding more and more.
Yeah, no question.
And I think that this is where we all end up in the same place.
It's really quite fascinating.
Again, I've had conversations with, you know, you and Sam Harris, and we're coming at it from a completely different angle as far as the impact of God in all of this.
Jonah Goldberg suggests that this is the miracle.
And one of my great objections to Jonah Goldberg's terminology in that is that I'm not sure that the miracle happened in 1650.
I think the miracle happened a lot earlier and that that was the enzyme, the catalyst that led to this great outpouring of human freedom.
But we end up in the same place.
So the question becomes, how do we argue for that?
Because we actually do agree on a lot of these same values, even if we think the source of those values is different, right?
I think the source of those values begins much earlier.
I think that it is embedded in certain biblical principles that are evaluated and reasoned through over time.
But how do we espouse those?
So for me, I can espouse those values in a particular way, starting from the premise that there's a certain absolute morality that was established by God.
This is where the God question comes in.
And so I'm wondering, without that absolute morality, How do we get to that point where we can convince people?
I just started reading Jonah's new book, The Suicide of the West, which is a weird title, because it's much more of an uplift.
At least the first half is very uplifting, like the miracle.
Right.
Well, you didn't get to the downside yet.
Oh, OK.
I haven't gotten there yet.
Well, but his first page, he says... There's no God in this book.
There's no God in this book.
And I'm only going to use reason to argue for these principles.
Perfect.
And the reason that, to me, is good, not just because I'm an atheist, but that it shouldn't matter what religion you are or In a sense, it doesn't really matter what the roots are, although it's intellectually interesting.
Whatever works.
If it works to increase human flourishing of more people in more places, then I'm for it.
And we should champion those and make reasonable arguments for why they're working.
And full stop.
That's all we need to do.
So where do you and I get our morals from?
How do you know what's right or wrong?
I tend to think we probably both get it from the same place.
That is, the still small voice within and then our culture, our parents, our traditions, and so on.
But where did those come from?
And at some point, if you go back far enough, you're gonna, I think, argue there's a supernatural intervention into the system that says this is what's right or wrong.
But my question would be, how do you know?
Because we know from biblical scholars that the Bible is something of a wiki.
It's an edited volume.
We know people wrote it down.
And you say, well, maybe God inspired their writings or words or something.
But if we just take something like, is killing wrong?
We wouldn't ask, is murder wrong?
Right.
Because murder by definition is wrong.
But killing is wrong.
Well, it depends.
And so how do you know?
And so this is, as you know, a Youth of Rose dilemma that if these moral principles are out there in some kind of You know, platonic space floating around up there.
Are they right or wrong because God said so?
Or are there reasons?
And if we have reasons for why it's right or wrong... Then what do you need God for?
Right.
You just skip the middleman and just go straight for the reasons.
So I actually disagree with it.
I know I've watched your debate with interview slash debate with Dennis Prager and on Dave Rubin's show specifically about this.
I'm not somebody who disagrees that you can In fact, Judaism basically says that.
Judaism essentially says that there are certain principles where if you were born in a wilderness, you would still be held accountable for failing to abide by those principles, and those do include murder, right?
So murder is wrong whether you believe in God, whether you were born in a barn, it doesn't matter, right?
There are certain things you can intuit.
But some of the higher order morality that we're talking about, the value of individuals, or how far you extend the tribe, I'm not sure that that stuff can be done simply through pure reason.
I'm skeptical of that specifically because I think that what we tend to do in the West is we tend to say everything that was good was Enlightenment thinking and everything that was bad was counter-Enlightenment thinking.
So this is my criticism of Steven Pinker's new book on the Enlightenment is that what Steven does is he writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and never mentions the French Revolution.
He writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and he never recognizes that Rousseau was a member of the Enlightenment caste.
He didn't call himself counter-Enlightenment.
That the French Revolution was happening at the same time as the American Revolution, essentially, in the broad scheme of things, that there's a whole line of thought, including communism and Nazism, that considered itself over-rational.
If you actually look back to the foundations of Marx, Marx is talking about imposing the reason of humanity on the economic system as a whole.
So pure reason, I'm not sure can get you there, is the argument that I'm making.
Well, first of the French Revolution, in The Better Angels, Steve talks about Burke and Burkean conservatism.
And Burke was in favor of the American Revolution against the French Revolution.
Why?
Because in the American Revolution, you had a balance between, we want to overthrow the systems that are not working, but retain the ones that are still good.
Because those are long, hard-fought traditions that work pretty well.
Now, unfortunately, slavery got thrown in there, but we eventually got rid of that.
The French Revolution was like, let's just blow the whole thing up and start over, including a new calendar.
But they did actually have a cult of reason, right?
They actually took the Notre Dame Cathedral and they actually put an idol to reason in the Notre Dame Cathedral and they had a cult of it.
So I guess my contention is that If you're going to make the argument that it's self-evident, these principles eventually are self-evident, I don't think in the absence of... The Burkean argument is, in essence, a religious argument.
There is a bunch of stuff that was passed down to us by our forebears, and we have the capacity, through reason, to evaluate whether we still think that the evidence is on the side of particular rules, or whether these rules have been misapplied.
Right.
But you have to acknowledge the value of what has been handed down, as opposed to the tabula rasa reason, which might be mandated by the social science Approach that is now being taken up by a lot of folks, people with whom I have great discussions.
But whenever I read Sam Harris's books and he says that, you know, throw religion out the window and we can come up with better than that.
As I said to him when I was talking to him, well, you grew up five miles from me and we share a lot of the same principles.
So I'm happy to have that discussion with you.
But if you'd grown up in a society that had a different tradition, I have a feeling you'd be arguing something very different and so would I.
Right.
OK, so two things.
One, I think Pinker makes the point that most of these are counter-Enlightenment Romanticist traditions.
The blood and soil of the Nazis, for example, that it's the race that counts and so on.
Now, you may make rational arguments about that and say, I'm using reason, but your reasoning is wrong.
And so we can say we're both using reason and these arguments are better than those arguments.
So I think those are the two points about that.
Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but I think that the question there about the misuse of reason would be this.
Is that your pattern of reasoning is wrong or that your premises are wrong?
If your pattern of reasoning is wrong, then we can all spot the flaw in the reasoning and say, OK, here's where you went wrong.
But if the premises were wrong, then we're back into my argument, which is that the culture you inherit is a deeply impactful thing on whether you believe in individual rights in the first place.
So I guess what I'm trying to get you to, and maybe I'm trying to argue you into it, is acknowledging that Judeo-Christian values are at the very least utilitarian.
Even if you don't agree with the source of them, you agree that the legacy that begins with Judaism and through Christianity in the Christian world, that is a necessary, not a contingent part of history.
Maybe.
But how do you deal with then all the bad side of the Judeo-Christian tradition before the Enlightenment?
You know, the Inquisition, the witch hunts.
So the way that I deal with that is what I say is that the Bible was given to a specific group of people.
If I were to give you a written document right now, I'd have to speak the language that you and I were speaking.
I couldn't use terminology that you didn't know.
I couldn't give you rules that were so deeply radical that they would run counter to anything that you could possibly believe.
So, for example, when Maimonides talks about sacrifices, you know, these animal sacrifices that seem really barbaric to us now, what Maimonides is arguing in the 12th century is CE, right, about a document written presumably by Jewish tradition 2,000 years earlier.
He's arguing that if you're going to try and convince people away from sacrifice, you have to first change the nature of the sacrifice.
You can't just abolish something that people think is completely dependent and necessary.
And then over the course of time, there are certain parts of the Bible that speak to eternal human nature, right?
So, for example, this is what Judaism and Christianity would say is true about sexual matters, is that human beings are the same regardless of where they are, they always have the same sexual nature, that is non-changing.
But what is changing is the necessity to slaughter animals, for example.
Or what is changing is the evidence basis for witness testimony.
Yeah.
Do you mean like when Jefferson said, all men are created equal, but he has slaves?
By today's standards, nobody's a racist.
But really, he's just trying to get something done, and you can't have everything.
So he's saying, look, we have to use what we have now, and we could try to change it later.
Essentially, yes.
So to me, it feels like modern thinkers looking back at ancient texts saying, well, when Jesus said this in Mark 3, 27, he really meant women should have the vote.
Wow!
I mean, you're getting this out of that passage.
I think we're reading back into it, a lot of it.
I think that you can find traditions.
To me, this principle of interchangeable perspectives, that is, if we're going to set up a society, I can't know which group I'm going to be in, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and I as an individual can't convince you to treat me nice just because I'm me and you're not me.
And I have a privileged position just because I'm me.
So the golden rule is really that.
And it's metallic derivatives, as Pinker calls them.
And I like that idea because I think the basis of that is in this kind of evolutionary model of Myself, as genes, drive me to just want to hoard all the resources, but you're making the same calculation, so we have to come to some agreement.
One way to do that is for me to put myself in your position.
How would I feel if I were Ben and I was doing this to him?
Well, okay, I would feel bad.
So I think religions discovered certain eternal truths about human nature long before there was the Enlightenment or modern Western culture at all.
I don't know how, maybe by accident or just trial and error, at some point you're going to figure out... Or maybe!
Well, but by observation.
It's like the point Jordan Peterson makes about novelists having deep insights into human nature.
I think that's right, and there's a whole branch of evolutionary psych that does evolutionary literature.
Like when Shakespeare and Jane Austen write about their characters, they're really getting it right about how people behave, their sexual nature, power structures, hierarchy, the kinds of things that drive conflict in human relationships.
They figured it out long before there was anything even called psychology.
How did they do that?
By observing, by paying attention.
So I do think religions get it right a lot of the time just because they're 2,000 years, 4,000 years of observations that get written down.
And then what we do is go back and pick and choose the ones that seem right.
And the other ones, like capital punishment for X, Y, and Z, we don't practice that anymore.
We've rejected those.
We accept these.
Based on what?
Based on modern standards, like these are good arguments, so we'll use those and emphasize those to the flock.
OK, good.
That's fine.
Finally, I had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. William Lane Craig in our 50th episode.
Dr. Craig is a professor, philosopher, theologian.
He's written over 30 books, including the bestseller, En Garde, Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision.
These books are really fascinating, really compelling investigations of the conflicts and the confluence between faith and reason.
Check out his books and also check out his podcast, Reasonable Faith, where he covers apologetics.
Like me, Dr. Craig spends a lot of time speaking on college campuses.
He also frequently debates atheists on the existence of God.
So I've actually read a lot of Dr. William Lane Craig's work, and he is a really interesting human being, just on a very personal level, has a really interesting story, and really a creative thinker.
He sort of picks the apples off the tree.
It's fascinating to talk with him.
You can listen to us discuss how Christianity seems to be losing its place as a cultural influence in the United States, where this supposed gap between reason and faith came from, and how to defend biblical thinking from critics who say it's backwards.
We're living in an increasingly secular age, where people, by polling numbers, seculars are now, by polling numbers, the largest religious constituency in America, Why do you think we're seeing such a decline in religious belief in the West right now?
I think what's happening is not so much increasing secularization, Ben, as the collapse of the old mainline Christian denominations, like the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, and so forth.
And as a result, there is an increasing polarization in American society.
People are evacuating the middle and going either to the secular end or to the evangelical end.
Evangelicals are maintaining their percentage of the American population, keeping up with the population growth.
But the impression of increasing secularization exists because the middle is emptying out, and these old-line denominations are collapsing.
Why do you think they are collapsing in on themselves?
And we're seeing it in Judaism as well, that the old conservative Jews and Reform Jews, they're kind of dying away, and you're getting the modern Orthodox movement even moving toward more Orthodoxy.
Why do you think that's happening right now?
That's very interesting, and I think it's a reflection of the fact that People who are just nominally religious, in a sense, come to the realization that they don't really believe this.
And so, why should you get up in the dark and the cold on a Sunday morning to go worship somebody you don't really think is there?
And so, as a result, those who have been simply nominal in their beliefs, I think, are increasingly recognizing that, in fact, they're secular.
And the unfortunate byproduct of this is that Christianity has lost its place of cultural influence in the United States as this middle mainline denomination empties out.
And it's my hope that in coming decades, increasingly, these evangelical Well, Friedrich Nietzsche declared the death of God back in the late 19th century, and it took a while for that to become a reality in the United States.
that was once held by the mainline denominations.
Well, Friedrich Nietzsche declared the death of God back in the late 19th century, and it took a while for that to become a reality in the United States.
As far as occupying any significant portion of the public mind, we're still significantly more religious than Europe.
Oh, yes.
But starting in the 1960s and moving beyond, there was a real move away from religious belief generally.
What do you think presaged that?
Why do you think that happened?
Considering we have a civilization built on Judeo-Christian values, we're incredibly prosperous, incredibly free, and yet we seem to be moving away from a lot of the religious beliefs upon which our society is based.
Well, I think in Europe and in Canada, it's the lingering shadow of the Enlightenment that swept away the...
The church, along with the monarchy, because these two were aligned and resulted in a deep disaffection with Christianity, which was seen to be aligned with the old order.
In the United States, I think it's hard to underestimate the influence of the Vietnam War.
That war tore this culture in two and resulted, I think, in the alienation of many, many young people from the values and the beliefs of their elders.
And I suspect we're still living with the results of that.
There's sort of a mainstream discomfort with religion that we see these days.
Religious believers are seen as sort of anachronistic.
If you say that you believe in the Bible or the God of the Bible, then you're seen as somewhat of a fool these days.
As somebody who speaks on college campuses a lot, and I speak in purely secular forms about politics, whenever I'm asked about religion, it's always phrased in a...
sense of derision or condescension.
Why would you believe all that old stuff?
Well, your work has been based on the idea that faith is in fact backed by reason and that the presence of God is a reasonable assumption to make about the universe.
Why do you think that, first of all, there's that gap that occurred, that breach that occurred between reason and faith that two were considered to be mutual buttressing and supportive of one another for centuries?
What presaged that gap?
Well, I do think that this is confined to certain disciplines at the university, particularly the soft sciences and the social sciences.
Those who were disaffected by the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution went into anthropology, sociology, women's studies, literature, religious studies, and so forth.
But in the hard sciences and in my discipline, philosophy, I think, frankly, there's a renaissance of theistic belief.
And there is a virtual revolution going on in Anglo-American philosophy right now, where Christian philosophers represent a significant and respected voice in the philosophical community.
So, I find there's tremendous interest on university campuses.
In these topics, when I debate a secularist on our university campuses, we will have hundreds and sometimes thousands of students attend these debates.
And the discussions are always rational, respectful, deliberative.
And so my experience is that there is tremendous interest in our culture and in the university age group in hearing a rational, fair discussion of issues related to religious belief.
One of the things I think that's happened in the religious community is you see people who are brought up in religious homes and they're taught the stories of the Bible, they're never taught any deeper philosophy or theology that attaches to that.
So they have sort of a children's eyes view of what God is and how to think about God, sort of think of God still as the old man in the sky who's controlling things.
What, in your opinion, is the most reasonable proof of God?
What have you found to be the most convincing proof of God's existence?
Well, I think that those are two questions.
For me, my favorite argument for the existence of God that I find the most compelling is a version of the cosmological argument, which goes like this.
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Something can't just come into being from nothing.
Secondly, the universe began to exist.
I think we have both good philosophical arguments and scientific evidence for the finitude of the past, from which it follows.
Third, therefore, the universe has a cause.
And when you do a conceptual analysis of what it is to be a cause of the universe, You arrive at a being which is an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful personal creator of the universe.
So for me, that is a very convincing argument for God.
But I find that with university students, that's not the most convincing argument.
You can ignore philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past or scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe.
But the argument that they find I think the most compelling is what I call the moral argument.
And it would go like this.
One, if God does not exist, Then, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
That is to say, in the absence of God, everything becomes socioculturally relative.
Two, but objective moral values and duties do exist.
There are some moral absolutes, some objective values and duties.
Three, therefore, God exists.
Now, this is an argument which is impossible, I think, to ignore because every day you get up You answer by how you treat other people, whether you regard them as having intrinsic moral value or whether they are mere means to be used for your ends.
And so this argument, I find, tends to be the most convincing for people.
The other argument that is brought up an enormous amount is the supposed backwardness of the Bible itself and biblical morality.
This happens largely with regard to, for example, homosexual marriage.
It's been brought up with regard to abortion, which I think is more, again, easily disposable, because I think there's a solid secular argument in favor of the protection of human life.
But homosexual marriage is the one that most often comes up.
You also hear arguments that the Bible permits slavery.
So if the Bible is so wonderful, then why are there all these weird sections of the Bible where it talks about wiping peoples from the earth, where it talks about enslaving other human beings?
Some things that we would certainly consider moral evils today are contemplated by the Bible and not banned by the Bible.
So why is that?
Well, let me address briefly first this question of slavery.
When we hear the word slavery, Ben, we think of slavery as it existed in the American South.
And as you know, that is nothing like the system that existed in ancient Israel.
In ancient Israel, there was no social safety net sponsored by the state.
There was no poverty program.
So, if a man got himself into a situation where he couldn't pay his debts, He could keep his family together and retain his self-respect by selling himself as an indentured servant to his creditor until he could work off his debts, and then he would have to be set free.
After seven years, he had to be set free in any case.
So this was really a form of indentured servanthood.
It wasn't slavery as we think of that term.
This was actually an anti-poverty program.
And in some respects, I think it's better than what we have in modern Western culture, which destroys families, ruins people's self-respect because they're not working.
Whereas in ancient Israel, a man retained his self-respect, he worked for an income, he paid his debts, he kept his family together.
And to call that slavery is just a gross misrepresentation.
Now, the first thing you mentioned, I forgot.
Homosexual marriage.
Same-sex marriage.
With respect to some of these other moral questions, I think we need to remember the first premise of the moral argument.
If there is no God, Then there are no objective moral values and duties.
Everything is socioculturally relative.
So who's to say that the moral values of a society that discriminates against people and oppresses people is worse than one which is liberal and tolerant?
We just sort of assume that the liberal values are the ones that would be objective, when in fact they're just as relativistic As any of the other ones on atheism.
So, if we need God to be the anchor point for objective moral values and duties, we cannot escape the question, when thinking of moral right and wrong, well, what does God think of this?
And if God proscribes something, it seems to me that's entirely within his right.
If God were to say, thou shalt not eat beans, or thou shalt not eat pork, that would be our moral duty.
And we should obey it.
That is his prerogative as the moral lawgiver and the supreme good.
And so if God says, my plan for human sexuality is heterosexual marriage, that's his prerogative.
And there is no basis for calling that, I think, into question.
So let's talk about the evolution of morality, and I want to go back to slavery for just a second.
So it is true that Hebrew enslavement, the Jewish enslavement of others is really more indentured servitude, and there's a whole section in, I believe it's Numbers or Leviticus, I think it's Leviticus maybe, where it speaks specifically about the slave who doesn't want to leave and you're supposed to pierce his ear on the door post as a punishment for him not wanting to leave and all of this.
But by the same token, So enslavement of people who are not inside the Israelite, inside the Jewish kind of tradition, that's not proscribed.
So the idea of war captives is obviously taken into account and not banned.
So certain things are banned in the Bible, certain things are not banned.
Now the way that biblical believers have practiced over time is that very early in the church's history, they're already starting to eliminate slavery, although not for people who are captured.
And then over time, the West is the first place to eliminate slavery altogether, specifically citing the sections of the Bible that talk about human freedom and the innate value of every human being.
So is that an evolution of morality or is that a realization of a fundamental principle that was originally given to people who couldn't necessarily understand the full extent of the principle?
Oh, I think it's the latter, and I love the way you put it.
I think that's nicely put.
Jesus said something very much like this with respect to Old Testament regulations on divorce.
They asked him whether or not it was lawful to divorce a woman for any reason, and Jesus said, Moses allowed you to write a certificate of divorce, but it was not so from the beginning.
And he cites then the creation story of Genesis of Adam and Eve and said, what God has put together, let not man put asunder.
So what Jesus was saying there was that the law of Moses was a temporary prescription accommodating the hardness of heart of the people at the time, but it didn't represent the perfect will of God for human marriage, which was grounded in the creation story.
So, how exactly do we determine when we have moved beyond the biblical text in terms of the evolution of that morality?
When are we fulfilling a broader goal that was held back by temporary constraints, and when are we moving utterly beyond it?
And again, here I'm thinking of same-sex marriage.
So, when it comes to same-sex marriage, the argument is now being made by people in liberal churches Yeah, I think that's clearly false.
Pete Buttigieg, who's running for president, that basically Jesus was seeking equal respect for everyone.
He cared about the least of these.
And the prescriptions on homosexuality were really more, and homosexual activity were not eternal precepts, but were really attempting to crack down on the promiscuity of the time, or they were temporary expedients.
Yeah, I think that's clearly false.
When you look at these regulations, both in the Old Testament, and then they're repeated, in the New Testament, in the strongest terms in Romans chapter 1, there's no doubt that Paul is thinking of this as a moral law that has abiding significance.
And it's grounded again, I think, in the creation story, that God has created human sexuality, sexualities created man and woman in such a way that the fulfillment of that relationship will take place within the safety and security of a heterosexual marriage.
And that outside of that, sexual activity is not to be indulged in.
And this is a law that God has given us for our good.
So I do not think that this is capable of simply being relativized to time and culture.
So, when you argue with students, when you talk with students and discuss with them, what do you find is the best way to approach them when it comes to the precepts of traditional Judeo-Christian morality?
Do you come at it from the natural law perspective, or do you come at it from the biblical perspective?
I guess I share with them the moral argument that I shared earlier in our interview.
This moral argument is very powerful with students because, on the one hand, they've been taught relativism.
They are scared to death of imposing their values on someone else.
So it seems right to them that if God does not exist, that objective moral values don't exist.
They think they're subjective, person-dependent, and relative.
But then secondly, the premise also seems true to them that objective moral values do exist.
They think it's objectively wrong to impose your moral values on someone else.
And the values of tolerance, open-mindedness, and love have been deeply ingrained to them.
And so they believe both of the premises, but have just never connected the dots to see what logically follows from it.
And this can lead to some bizarre conversations.
I remember with one fellow, when we would talk about premise one, he would agree with it and deny two.
So when we talk about premise two, he'd agree with that and then deny one.
And so we went back and forth, back and forth, with this poor fellow flailing to try to escape the logical conclusions of what he himself So I find approaching it through this moral argument is the best way.
One of the things that's been fascinating to watch is people broadly accepting the efficacy of the precepts of religion without accepting the underlying truth of religion.
So here I would Point to my friend Jordan Peterson who talks a lot about the practices of basically what are religious practices.
The idea of make your room, do the moral thing, duty.
But he doesn't talk in specifically religious terms, he speaks in Jungian terms.
He talks about the idea of deeper precepts that are embedded in myth, which is really embedded in the human psyche.
He doesn't make the kind of truth of religion argument.
He instead makes the, if you want to get ahead, you're going to have to do this stuff argument.
If you want to be happy, you're going to have to do this stuff argument.
And that has tremendous cultural appeal.
Do you think that that is beneficial?
Do you think that that is enough?
How far do you think that goes?
I think it's beneficial, but it's not enough.
When I had a dialogue in Toronto last year with Jordan Peterson, rather than attack his position, what I tried to do was to be invitational and say, look, you and I both affirm the objectivity of moral values and meaning in life.
I want to offer you something.
I want to offer you a grounding for those values that we both hold dear.
Because for him, as you say, Ben, they're just sort of floating in the air.
They don't have any metaphysical ground in his worldview.
So he's got the right values and meaning by and large, but he has no basis for them.
And I'm still hopeful that he will come to embrace God as an objective metaphysical reality who will provide a basis for those values and meaning in life.
Thanks for joining us this week, gang, in our discussion about Judeo-Christian values.
Leave us a note in the comments and let us know which topics you'd like to see us cover in our future reviews of these Sunday specials.
We always appreciate you listening.
Thanks so much for joining us.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Glover.
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Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.
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