Hobbits, Wizards, and the Hidden Religion Behind Hollywood Heroes with Frank Turek
On this Sunday episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, Christian Apologist and author Frank Turek is back by popular demand to discuss his new book, “Hollywood Heroes.” They have a fascinating discussion about the hidden religious themes behind some of our culture’s greatest heroes—including Batman, Superman, Gandalf, Luke Skywalker, and Harry Potter. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Michelle Obama 2024 Movie00:02:19
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Frank Turek joins us about his new book, All About Hollywood Heroes.
It's a really fun, spirited conversation.
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Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Back by popular demand is a great patriot and incredibly gifted communicator and someone who I'm honored to call a friend, Frank Turek.
Batman vs Superman Parallels00:09:09
Frank, welcome back.
Charlie, always great being with you, brother.
But we're here today to talk about your new book and really go into depth into what you've put here with your son Zach called Hollywood Heroes.
Tell us about your book.
Well, first of all, let's start out by saying that Hollywood puts out a lot of garbage, right?
But notice, Charlie, that when they put out a blockbuster, well, maybe you haven't noticed, maybe the people out there have or haven't.
When they put out a blockbuster, it's actually to a large extent stolen from the greatest story ever told.
That when you look at the fantasy and superhero movies out there, Captain America, Iron Man, Lord of the Rings, Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Star Wars, these kind of movies, Charlie, they all have elements of the Christian story in them.
And that's why they resonate.
They resonate because these people are living in God's world, whether they're Christians or not.
And what resonates is sacrifice.
That's what resonates.
And so these movies, my son is just an amazing movie buff.
He's also in the Air Force, by the way.
We went through these movies and we pulled out how so many of them parallel the Christian story and how you can learn biblical life lessons and you can learn really the story of reality, which is the Christian story, by watching these superhero and fantasy movies.
Let's pick one out of the mix.
So Batman.
Batman.
What on earth could a Christian learn from Batman?
Well, first of all, Batman has the best, I think, most realistic view of human nature out there.
Notice how Batman, Charlie, is always fighting in the dark.
Why?
Because where there's darkness, that's where people are going to go.
Men love darkness rather than light.
Nothing good happens after midnight, they say, right?
So, Batman has to go after the bad guys at night.
And notice he never completely succeeds.
He never says, Okay, I can take a vacation now.
Gotham is free of bad guys.
Why is Gotham never free of bad guys?
Because human nature is evil.
You lock up one bad guy, the next night you're going to have to lock up another.
You're never going to create utopia by locking up bad guys because human nature is evil.
And Batman illustrates that better than any of the other series we look at.
So, the story of Bruce Wayne, right?
His father gets murdered.
I think his father and mother gets murdered in a foiled robbery, and he develops a fear.
Is there something to that?
That we have an internal fear and that we grow close to that fear and wear it as our identity, or is that just kind of a superficial detail?
That could be the case.
Batman obviously is motivated to try and avenge his parents' death by locking up bad guys.
And for a while, he succeeds in doing it in a way that doesn't compromise his integrity.
Like, he won't use weapons, he won't kill people, he'll just turn them over to the cops.
But things get so bad, Charlie, that he sorts of he sort of loses his way in the later Batman movies to the point where he is branding people, he's back to using weapons, he is almost becoming as evil as the bad guys he's locking up, and he has to catch up.
So, what's the biblical lesson from that?
Well, one of the biblical lessons is that human nature is evil.
And Charlie, you're one of the most eloquent people to talk about why Marxism doesn't work.
Why doesn't Marxism work?
Because you're running upstream against natural law and natural design.
Yeah, you're running up against human nature.
Human nature is such that you need to incentivize people to work.
Marxism thinks that, well, people will work as much as they can and take as little as they need.
The reality is, people will work as little as they can and take as much as they need because we're fallen.
Look, it's easy to be bad.
It's hard to be good, right?
And I always give people this illustration, Charlie.
I say, imagine you woke up one morning, you went into your bathroom to get ready for your day.
You look in the mirror and there's a sign attached to your head.
And this sign transmits every thought you have in big LED letters.
You can't turn it off.
You can't cover it.
Everywhere you go, people are going to be able to read your mind.
Would you leave your bathroom?
I wouldn't.
Why?
Because my thoughts are evil.
When I meet somebody, normally I'm judging them.
I'm going, man, that is an ugly shirt.
Man, where'd you get your hair cut?
Walmart?
I mean, you're thinking evil things.
Or you're thinking when you meet somebody, how can this person help me?
That's really what I want to know.
Can I take advantage of what this person has?
Can this person help me in such a way?
I'm not thinking, can I serve this person?
Unless I've been transformed by the blood of Christ, my mind is evil.
And so human nature is bent toward evil.
Batman illustrates that better than anyone.
So in the story of Batman, and again, I'm not sure if we're talking about the movies or the comics.
Usually the movies.
We're concentrating on movies in the book, Hall of Heroes.
So, in particular, the three most recent ones: Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises.
Is that right?
And Batman Begins, right?
Batman Begins, Dark Knight, and the Dark Knight Rises.
So, is there anything to this idea that Batman is not thanked for his good work?
Because there seems to be an element of that throughout the Batman series.
That no matter how much good he does, he actually gets portrayed as the villain.
Right, right.
That's true.
You're welcome for saving your civilization.
Is there something to that?
I think there is.
We don't have that in the book.
That's a new insight we'll put in there.
No, I'm not up to ask.
I haven't read the book yet, by the way.
I'm just kind of going.
But let me say one thing about Batman and Superman, because there's a movie called Batman versus Superman.
A lot of people didn't like that movie.
I intentionally didn't watch it.
Yeah, yeah, like why?
But actually, that movie, Charlie, actually goes into probably one of the most difficult questions that anybody needs to answer, even Christians, and that is: if there is a good God, why is there evil?
Because in this movie, Lex Luther, who's the evil character in it, is pitting Batman against Superman.
Why?
Because he thinks Superman is the God of this world, and he thinks Superman is a bad God because this Superman did not prevent Lex Luther's father from treating Lex Luther poorly.
So he's mad at God for not stopping evil in his life.
And that's why he's trying to get Batman to kill Superman because he thinks Superman is a bad God.
And right in this movie, Charlie, he starts quoting one of the most famous problems ever.
If there is a good God, why is there evil?
Is God not powerful enough or is God not loving or both?
This is actually in the movie.
And the interesting thing about this, and we unpack it in the book Hollywood Heroes, is that notice how Lex Luther is mad that God hasn't stopped his father from doing evil to him.
But you know, notice what Lex Luther is not mad about.
He's not mad that God hasn't stopped him, Lex Luther, from doing evil to other people.
And isn't this always the case that when we complain about evil, Charlie, we're always complaining about somebody else?
Hey, God, why don't you stop him?
Or God, why don't you stop her?
We never say, God, why don't you stop me?
Why doesn't God stop evil right now?
Because if he did, he'd have to take away our free will.
If he takes away our free will, then we can't love.
And if we can't love, this is not a moral universe.
I always ask people, and we ask him in the book: if God were to stop evil at midnight tonight, would you still be alive at 12:01?
I wouldn't be.
God gives us free will, which we can do for evil or we can use for love.
And at some point, God is going to end all evil, but he's not going to end it by taking away our free will.
What's he going to do?
He's going to quarantine evil in a place called hell, where the people who don't want to follow God are going to be quarantined, and they're not going to be able to affect the people that do want to follow God in heaven.
And the way you get there is through the blood of Christ.
So the Superman story is an interesting one.
I don't know that one as well as Batman, but there is only one way to, you know, be able to basically stop Superman Kryptonite and the story of Superman.
What is the biblical story?
Not the Batman versus Superman, but the biblical story Superman.
Superman is probably the biggest parallel to Jesus and virtually all the superheroes.
It's interesting because Superman was actually Nietzschean when it was written.
It was actually written as a nihilist by the two guys from Cleveland.
I can't remember their names.
So tell me.
Well, it turns out that Superman is sent here by a God of another world to save this world.
He is the son of this God, Jorrell, I think his name is.
And he stays incognito until the age of 33 as Clark Kent, right?
But he's staying incognito so he can complete his mission of trying to save this world from evil.
And then by the time he hits 33, then people start to realize: oh, this Clark Kent is really Superman.
This Jesus is really God.
So it's a parallel to the Christian story.
To the messianic story.
Tony Stark and Sanctification00:14:34
Yeah, the Messianic story.
And you find this in all of these superhero movies.
Can I move on to one that I'm numb?
You can do whatever you want.
Iron Man.
Yes, so I don't know that one.
Wait, so the Iron Man would be Tony Stark.
Yeah.
Okay.
Robert Downey Jr., right?
Okay, so Iron Man, Tony Stark, starts off as an immoral playboy, very well Irish.
Oh, yeah.
He's the perfect guy.
And he actually lived it.
Yeah, that's exactly right, Charlie.
That's what we have in the book.
In the book of Heroes, yeah, Jon Favreau, who was the producer of, and I think the director of the first Iron Man, he's, by the way, the guy that plays Happy.
He's the security guard in the movie for Tony Stark.
And anyway, he wanted Robert Downey Jr. to play this guy.
And the production house said, no, no, no, we don't want Downey.
He's got too much of a bad reputation.
Because he had drug problems.
He had substance abuse problems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Favreau persisted.
He said, no, this guy is Tony Stark in real life, right?
It was incredibly well acted.
Yes, it was.
Anyway, so he starts off as this amoral arms dealer, Playboy.
His company is selling arms.
Literally.
The first scene is beautiful, not beautiful, but it's well done where he's casually with a martini selling a sophisticated missile system.
Right, to terrorists, to terrorists, and bragging about it.
And then what happens is one of his own weapons detonates close to him.
It puts shrapnel in his chest, and he has to have a device installed into his chest to protect his heart from encroaching shrapnel, to guard his heart from encroaching shrapnel.
No, I don't think the movie makers intended this, Charlie, but this is a beautiful illustration of what I think is the second most important verse in the entire Bible right now.
The first section, or the first most important verses, have to do with the gospel, but the second most important verse for this generation is Proverbs 4:23, which says, Above all else, guard your heart because everything you do flows from it.
Notice it doesn't say follow your heart, it says guard your heart.
If that device fails in Tony Stark's chest to guard his heart, he dies.
Same thing is true in our lives.
If we start following our heart without moral restraint, we're going to wind up alone, addicted, full of anxiety, like Tony Stark really is.
In fact, Tony Stark, Charlie, has everything we think we want to be happy.
He's got the big three.
He's got sex, money, and power.
Got a great girlfriend.
He's got power.
He's got money.
He doesn't need anything, right?
But he's miserable.
Why?
Because he has everything to live with, but nothing to live for.
He's got no purpose.
He's got no identity.
But once he begins to guard his heart, he focuses on what is really important.
And he ultimately becomes a hero who, at the end of Endgame, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen Endgame yet, this is what.
Yeah, I just have seen The First Iron Man.
Okay, okay.
Endgame is where Tony Stark sacrifices himself to defeat the Satan figure Thanos.
Okay, and it's inspiring.
He dies at the end.
And I mean, for people who are inspired by these kind of movies, love these movies, was kind of almost a tear jerker for a superhero movie because Tony Stark is, he dies trying to.
He's a very lovable character, too, right?
Yeah.
So he dies.
But imagine this.
Imagine this, Charlie.
Imagine if they get to the climactic scene in Endgame where all the superheroes are there trying to take out Thanos.
And Tony Stark, as Iron Man, looks at his Avenger buddies and goes, guys, I'm just not feeling it today.
I don't want to take out Thanos.
In fact, I got to get back to following my heart and taking care of just me.
I'm out.
And then the movie ended.
Would anybody go, how inspiring?
That really motivated me.
The guy followed his heart.
He chickened out.
He didn't actually take on Thanos.
He just did what he wanted to do.
It was best for him.
Everyone would go, that's awful, man.
I don't want to watch that movie.
No one wants to see, and we're going to get to this in a second as soon as we build out more of these details.
From a cinematic point of view and a spectator and audience point of view, if you extrapolate secular humanism, it's the most boring movie.
Exactly.
That's why I'm saying, Charlie, I don't think the writers of Iron Man had Christianity in mind, but they knew that they're living in God's world, whether they believe in him or not.
And they know that secular humanism, they know that following your heart, they know that being selfish is never going to motivate an audience or inspire an audience.
What will inspire an audience is what Jesus did for us, and that is laying his life down for his friends.
Actually, laying his life down for his enemies.
Love knows greater love than to lay down your life for your friends.
Well, Jesus laid down his life for his enemies.
That's us.
And so Iron Man is interesting because it is kind of this idea, and it could be a Christ story, but it feels more like Paul, right?
I think Iron Man is more like us than, say, Captain America.
Captain America doesn't need moral development.
I don't know much about Captain America.
Well, Captain America does, he's always righteous.
He doesn't do anything wrong.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, you never have to worry about, you know, is Captain America going to do the right thing?
He's always going to do the right thing because he's Captain America.
He's like Jesus.
Tony Stark, on the other hand, is more like you and me.
Tony Stark has issues, right?
Tony Stark needs sanctification.
And he goes on this character development arc over several movies to where, from where he is a selfish playboy, amoral arms dealer who is just in it for himself.
Pure hedonism, right?
Totally.
To the point where he's going to sacrifice himself to save his friends.
He's a strip club in his private jet.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, it's just whatever you could do.
And with martinis and drugs and sex and alcohol.
Yeah.
So, okay.
Let's keep building this out, and then I'm going to play some devil's advocate because I encounter this sometimes.
So, what other movies do you have?
Oh, well, here's one that's going to annoy a lot of Christians right now, and that's Harry Potter.
Okay, so let's take a timeout and a detour, and then we'll go back.
I get emails from parents a lot because we're a family-friendly show.
For example, I was talking about a Netflix series called Ozark, which has nudity, it has swearing, and it has violence, a lot of swearing.
And some Christians were very upset that I was doing a commentary on it.
I did a podcast where I said I'm not defending what's in there.
I watch it with my wife, but from a literary point of view, there's some very complex and sometimes beautiful themes playing out.
Let's just, just from your standpoint, where should Christians draw the line on the consumption of art?
I think it depends on the age appropriateness and the individual person, right?
And the setting, right?
Yes, yes.
If you're a parent and you think any of those things are going to lead your child astray, by all means, keep them away from those things.
If they're mature and they can recognize that this is sin and this is not something to emulate, then perhaps there can be more value in watching it than not.
Yeah, and it's important to note that I, for example, I'm not going to make a defense of Ozark.
I actually think it ended poorly, but there is some incredibly biblical and just, I think, timeless wisdom baked into the story, right?
I mean, so if you're watching something and they're swearing, like, I don't like that, you're not watching it for the swearing.
Of course not.
Right?
And so is there something to that that the intent is to try to draw out a deeper moral lesson?
Well, let me put it this way.
The Bible's rated R. Especially Song of Solomon.
Yes.
Well, not just.
Son of songs or whatever.
Think about the adultery, think about the murder, think about the deceit.
That's very interesting.
Think about how much evil is in the Bible.
And it's in there because God is just telling the truth about how immoral his people were, which is one reason why I actually believe the Bible's true.
In fact, we talked about it last night on the Freedom Night.
I told you that embarrassing stories, embarrassing details are actually evidence that these people are not sugarcoats.
So this is Dennis Prager's number one argument.
Exactly.
I was just going to mention Dennis.
Yeah, and he's a friend.
He's amazing.
He said, why would the Jews make themselves look so bad?
That's right.
There's no way.
That's right.
And by the way, Connor says the fact that the Bible is rated R is a great point.
Connor's listening in.
Yeah, it is.
Now, this isn't licensed to watch whatever you want.
Personally, I think nudity and pornography bypasses the intellect and goes right to.
I totally agree.
That's something I'm going to draw the line.
No, and I try to fast-forward scenes and all of that, right?
But I'm not making a defense of it.
I want to be very clear.
Yes, yes.
But what I said to my audience is everyone has their own scales of that.
And I said, you watch it with your wife, so you're not doing it for the point of consuming it.
And I will say, Ozark in the later seasons, they basically sunset it.
But there was a lot of drug usage, a lot of swearing.
But again, the intent for that was not, oh, let's go try to watch.
You know what?
There's an incredibly interesting story unfolding of someone who sinned small and ends up sinning big and did it all for the ends, justifying the means.
That's what the whole saga is about.
And honestly, beautifully acted, great music, great cinematography.
So I just took that detour for a reason because we're about to talk about Harry Potter from a biblical context.
Now, just aside, when I grew up in Christian Heritage Academy, suburbs of Chicago, my parents were okay with me watching Harry Potter, okay with me reading Harry Potter.
But a majority of the kids I went to third, fourth, and fifth grade, there was a prohibition on even mentioning Harry Potter.
It's the occult.
It's the demonic.
You can't mention it.
And so just comment on that a little bit, and then let's go into Harry Potter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We comment it in the book, Hollywood Heroes.
We deal with this, but let's just lay this out.
First of all, if you think your child is going to get into the occult by watching a movie, then by all means, keep them away from the movie.
Okay, I agree with parents.
If you're a parent and you say, hey, this isn't appropriate for my kid, fine.
I'm with you.
But to say that no Christian should watch this, I think is going too far.
Let me give you a couple of reasons why.
Number one, the kind of occult in Harry Potter is made up magic.
It's not real.
J.K. Rowling doesn't think that you can fly on a broomstick and play this modified game of soccer that they play in the movie.
These are not, this isn't the real occult.
There may be one exception in the last movie.
They tried to contact the dead.
It never really went anywhere.
But generally, the kind of occult that's in Harry Potter is made up magic out of Rowling's mind.
She doesn't believe it's really true.
She just made it up according to her.
And by the way, she's an Anglican Christian.
I don't know if she's born again or not.
No extra charge for this, but she has stood firm on the transgender issue, as you know.
In any event, she says, look, I put magic in here because it gives the kids a kind of power they don't have.
But the center of the story is not magic.
The center of the story is human nature.
And she says, Harry thinks he can fix everything by waving a wand.
That's not true.
Whether you can wave a wand or not, you have to deal with human nature.
And that's what this whole story is about.
Now, didn't Narnia Osul have magic in this?
Well, that was just my second point.
You're way ahead of me.
Narnia and Lord of the Rings, Chronicles and Narnia and Lord of the Rings have magic in it too.
In fact, in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is a wizard, and so is Harry Potter.
Why are we okay with Gandalf and Lord of the Rings, but not Harry Potter?
The reason, and this is where you're going to, they'll say, okay, Narnia and Tolkien, or Lewis and Tolkien, had Christian arcs, but you're saying Harry Potter does too.
Oh, yes, I'm saying Harry Potter.
In fact, this is going to probably give you some negative emails.
We argue in the book Hollywood Heroes that out of all the characters we cover, and we cover a lot of characters in this book, that arguably the person, the character that parallels Jesus more than any other in modern fiction is Harry Potter.
People go, what?
Well, let's just give you four parallels.
Number one, Harry Potter is actually prophesied before he is born to be the savior of his world, Charlie.
And an evil figure tries to kill him as an infant.
Voldemort.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
He who must not be named.
That's right.
He wants to kill him, just like Herod wants to kill Jesus, right, as an infant.
Secondly, in order to be the savior of his world, Harry Potter has to live a moral life, just like Jesus.
Thirdly, Harry Potter sacrifices himself to defeat the evil Voldemort, the Satan figure, just like Jesus does.
And fourthly, Harry Potter rises from the dead, and his followers have to put their faith in him in order to ultimately defeat Voldemort.
Does this sound familiar?
In fact, J.K. Rowling said, you can sum up the entire Harry Potter series in two Bible verses which appear in the story.
One of them is the last enemy to be destroyed is death from 1 Corinthians 15.
And the other is from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which says, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
These appear in the movies.
And J.K. Rowling says that's really the inspiration for the whole series.
She said, but I never wanted to talk a lot about this because I didn't want readers to know where we were going.
I didn't want readers to know that I was basically using the Bible story in order to write the Harry Potter series.
And so there's other biblical themes, though, weaved throughout Harry Potter.
I mean, for example, in Chamber of Secrets, the idea of facing the basilisk that could turn you to stone, that's a legend that has been around for thousands of years.
And the Bible deals with that in a variety of different ways of, you know, no one wants to sin.
No one wants to be caught in eye contact with their sin, that you must face, you know, your enemy straight on.
Talk about also this theme, and we talk about this, which is the idea of the hero's journey, which is someone who grows up without parents, usually raised by their uncle in a place of vulnerability, like under a stairwell on Tatooine or in the Shire, gets a call to adventure, Abraham, right?
Get out of your place of comfort.
That's right.
Builds a team, usually counseled by someone who's been around before, know the road ahead, ask those coming to you.
Bruce Wayne, Alfred.
Yeah, exactly, right?
Building Teams Like Gandalf00:08:47
Bruce Wayne with Alfred or Gandalf with Frodo.
Yeah, yeah.
Or Obi-Wan Kenobi with Luke Skywalker or Dumbledore with Harry Potter.
That's right.
And then they create a team, no more than two or three people of which usually show the entire kind of arc of different characters, right?
Which is kind of loyal, blumbling, bumbling idiot, which of course is Ron or Sam or Hans Solo, but very loyal.
Right, right.
Right.
And then also the very wise and shrewd, discerning, but quite honestly, not very socially, let's just say, very disagreeable person, right?
So that would be Hermoine.
And in Lord of the Rings, there's not a great example.
I guess, yeah, Lord of the Rings could be Aragon or could be Legolas or could be any of those.
Well, actually, Gollum is so disagreeable, but he actually helps achieve the mission inadvertently in Lord of the Rings.
In this final scene.
But what I'm getting at, though, is all of them, and I'd love your thoughts on this.
In all three movies, they, of course, have to fight evil, this invisible dimension, right?
All three of them in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and in Harry Potter, there's an invisible dimension, right?
And it's all called something different, right?
It could be called the Force.
It could be called all sorts of things.
But what they end up having to conquer is their own struggle within.
They do.
Right.
Which is the voice in their head.
Harry Potter had it as a scar.
Luke Skywalker had it as premonitions.
And of course, boy, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and then Lord of the Rings.
Yeah.
Frodo had he literally wanted the ring for himself.
Can you talk about that?
Well, you talked about it so beautifully right there.
Well, it's one of my stump speeches.
I have five or six of them.
That's why I like that.
That's perfect.
In fact, let's take a look at Lord of the Rings in that context, okay?
Tolkien, in fact, what we say in the book Hollywood Heroes is not all the movies, quite obviously, are written by Christians.
Most of them are not.
But one of them that is, is Lord of the Rings.
Peter Jackson was a Christian?
I didn't know that.
No, no, no.
No, Tolkien.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you meant the book, Book versus Morgan.
Yeah, well, the book, but they're adapting the book pretty accurately.
Yes, got it.
So Tolkien was a legitimate Christian.
He was a Christian.
He was a Catholic.
In fact, we got to bring C.S. Lewis into this because we both love C.S. Lewis.
And the Narnia movies are not very good, but that's a separate issue.
Right, yeah.
That's another issue.
But Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were in a group called the Inklings, where they would get together and talk about what they were writing.
And Lewis was a big fan of these dying and rising gods.
Most of them came after Christianity, and he thought it was enchanting that a god would die and rise again to save people.
And Tolkien said to him, Hey, Jack, because that's what they called C.S. Lewis, hey, Jack, why are you so enthralled with all these mythical stories about dying and rising gods?
But when it comes to the real myth, the true myth, he called it, in the pages of the New Testament, you're turned off by that.
And Jack's going, what do you mean by that?
He said, Tolkien said, Christianity is the true myth.
All these other myths, which didn't happen, are pointing to the event that actually did happen.
Jesus actually did come, die, and rise again.
It's true.
And of course, Lewis researched it and realized it was, and then he became the greatest apologist of the 20th century.
The true myth is that Jesus did come and die and rise again.
So what Tolkien did, however, is he did not like straight allegory.
He didn't want Chronicles and Arnea.
He didn't want Pilgrim's Progress.
So he had little mini archetypes.
Yes.
And what he did is he divided the Christ figure among three main characters.
Interesting.
Aragorn?
Aragorn's one.
He's the returning king, Frodo and Gandalf.
Interesting.
Gandalf.
I never thought of it though.
Gandalf is the strategist.
According to Tolkien, he's an angel.
He's a messenger.
He's going to help Frodo.
Why is he going to help Frodo?
Well, Frodo's weak.
Frodo can't do that.
So is he an angel or is he the advocate?
He's an angel, according to Tolkien.
So Michael or Gabriel.
Yeah.
He's a messenger.
He's acting like an angel, right?
Got it.
Okay.
Aragorn is the returning king, which is what Jesus is.
And Frodo is the weak character that has to depend on them.
And what we say in Hollywood Heroes is that Tolkien is showing his true Christian colors when he uses the weakest characters to achieve the greatest result.
So who are the, in fact, according to Tolkien, the hero of the Lord of the Rings series is Sam.
Of course.
Right.
And the movie does a pretty good job of depicting that.
Yeah.
So Sam says to Frodo.
Mr. Frodo, Frodo says, I'm going to Mordor alone.
What does Sam say?
Of course you are.
And I'm going with you.
And so there's a point where Frodo, on his way to Mordor, just can't go any further.
And Sam says, I can't carry it, but I can carry you.
That's right.
And he grabs Frodo and he literally carries him up the hill into hell and right up to the point of Mount Doom, right to the point of dumping the ring in the lava.
And we all know what happens after that.
Gollum shows up after Frodo says, I want to keep the ring.
And through divine providence, that's where Gollum comes in.
He actually inadvertently causes the ring to go into the lava and destroy.
Who is Gollum in this movie?
Well, Gollum is an evil character that is someone who has been overcome by the power of the movie.
No, I know that.
I'm saying archetypically, though.
Oh, just, I would assume a demon.
That's a good question.
Yeah.
Well, that would make sense because he was a hobbit prior, right?
It could be Judas.
It could be something like that.
It could be.
The thing about Gollum is that he demonstrates what happens when you give in to human nature.
He demonstrates that when you give in to temptation, you are going to actually destroy yourself.
I mean, think about this.
The ring gives him the ability to be invisible.
Yes.
And yet he lives.
Harry Potter has a similar way.
Which is you could do any sin as long as people don't see it.
Right, right.
What would you do if people couldn't see it?
Yeah, what would you do if people couldn't see you?
Well, think about this, though.
Gollum has this ability, if he has the ring, to be invisible, and yet he lives alone.
Why is it?
It's destroyed him internally.
And this is what Tolkien is saying, that sin will destroy you internally.
You need to redo your mind.
But let me go back to the three.
Aragorn, Gandalf, and Frodo.
It turns out this is almost like a trinity in the sense that you need someone to plan salvation.
You need someone to accomplish salvation.
And you need someone to inspire salvation among the people.
So Gandalf actually strategizes.
He is the one that strategizes salvation, plans it.
Frodo is the one that accomplishes it, and Aragorn is the one that inspires salvation among the people.
Just like the father planned salvation, the son achieves it, and the Holy Spirit inspires salvation among the people.
Who would be the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit in this point is Aragorn.
Yeah, Aragorn is inspiring his men.
I suppose that makes sense, right?
Because I leave you with the advocate.
That's right.
So Aragor remains.
But there is a messianic component to Aragorn, too, right?
Sure.
He's the returning king.
Yes.
And so Tolkien has spread the messianic, the Jesus figure among those three.
But notice that Aragorn has to get the orcs out of Mordor in order to allow Frodo and Sam to make it to Mount Doom.
To draw them out.
He has to draw them out.
He has to inspire all these people to basically put their lives on the line in order to achieve the mission.
Wow.
And so it's just, it's so amazing.
And in the Bible, Charlie, in the Bible, who are the heroes?
All the weak people.
Right?
They're all weak.
I mean, you think about Paul, David.
You think about Mark, who he left his first missionary journey with Paul.
Paul was so annoyed with him.
He said, I'm not taking him again.
What does he do?
He connects with Peter.
He writes a gospel.
Matthew's a tax collector.
Nobody likes him.
He writes a gospel.
John is just a kid.
He writes a gospel.
Mary Magdalene.
I mean, she's a formerly demon-possessed woman, and yet she's the first one to see Jesus, potentially a prostitute.
It's debated, yeah.
I mean, there are so many weak characters, and Paul says, when I'm weak, I am strong.
Why are you strong when you are weak?
Because you have to depend on God.
You can't say, I can do it without God.
You need God, and you know you need God.
So we list in the book Hollywood Heroes, we list all the weak characters in the Bible and say, if you want to do something great for God and you're weak, you can.
You just need to depend on God in order to do it.
What other movies you got before I go to two objections that I want you to help navigate?
Anakin Skywalker's Messianic Story00:06:29
Why don't we deal with Star Wars?
Yeah, so I mean, let's do that.
So Star Wars, I actually think, is an easier sell to Christian parents than Harry Potter.
It is.
And I personally believe, and you could prove me wrong, there's parts of Star Wars that actually get the biblical story better than Lord of the Rings.
So what do you mean?
I think, for example, the story of Skywalker himself is very messianic and very Christ-like from growing up in a place of vulnerability or just desolation, could be Nazarene, and going on a series of stops and trips to eventually have to confront evil itself.
What's your thoughts on Star Wars?
Well, it's my son's favorite series out of all the ones.
We cover seven or eight series in this book, Hollywood Heroes.
And when he was a kid, well, first of all, I was a kid when the first one came out.
I was 15 years old.
And I actually think that's the best one.
In 1978, I think it's 18.77.
Yep, I was 15 years old.
It came out.
It's a brilliant film.
It is.
New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and the Return of the Jedi.
And then he was 15, or no, he was like 11 when the Phantom Menace came out.
So it's a generational thing.
When I was 15, people were going to the movies dressed up, Charlie.
You know, it's a cultural event where people are dressed up to go to the movies.
I think Phantom Menace and Clone Wars and whatever the third one is.
I don't like those three I thought were poorly written.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But that's what started him off on it.
And what we love about Star Wars, as Lucas himself says, it's a total morality play.
That's what it is.
And in Star Wars, there's a couple of, first of all, redemption is big, as you just mentioned, right?
Obviously, the redemption of Darth Vader is huge, but there's a redemption of another character that we find even more fun, and that is, of course, Han Solo.
Han Solo is the rule-bending skeptic who's on the good side, but he keeps saying stuff like, Kid, this force is just mumbo-jumbo.
It's nothing but simple tricks and nonsense.
You need a good blaster at your side, kid, right?
And then through a series of events, Han Solo, by the way, Han Solo, perfect name for this guy.
Why?
Because it's all about him, Solo, right?
He doesn't want to be part of the team.
That was the name of the spin-off, wasn't it?
Yeah, which I found insufferably boring.
He's in it for the money, Charlie, right?
Look, your worshipfulness.
I'm not here for your little goal here.
I'm in it for the money.
I expect to be paid well for what I do, right?
But then what happens to him?
He's frozen in debt by Jabba the Hutt, who's way bigger than a hut, by the way.
And because Solo can't pay him.
He's in debt.
And so who has to come rescue him?
Luke Skywalker has to come rescue him, and he cancels his debt by killing Jabba the Hutt, right?
It's over.
So he's redeemed.
And then, after that love that Skywalker displays to Han Solo, Han Solo then is motivated to join the team in a bigger way.
And later on, he says, Kid, he says, it's all true.
I used to think it was nonsense, but the force is real.
He actually becomes a believer through the evidence, Charlie.
That's what we're supposed to do.
We're supposed to look at the evidence and go, hey, this is really true.
So Han Solo is redeemed, one, by having his debt canceled, which is what Christ does for us.
Secondly, through the love of a friend who did redeem Han Solo.
And thirdly, because he saw the evidence.
And that's the recipe for Christianity.
You become a believer through love, redemption, and evidence.
And so the Star Wars film kind of bounces all over the place, right?
And it kind of continues to kind of replicates.
So the story of Anakin could be the story of Lucifer, too.
Yes.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah, beautiful.
We have a whole section in Hollywood Heroes on Anakin.
How does Anakin go from a Jedi?
You were supposed to be the one.
You were supposed to be the one.
He slips into sin, Charlie.
First of all, he's fearful.
He doesn't want to lose what he has.
He doesn't want to lose his power.
He doesn't want to lose his wife, obviously.
He doesn't want to lose his family.
And he puts those up as idols.
And what happens is he's enticed and dragged away by his own desires.
And this is exactly from the book of James.
Because James says, how do you sin?
You sin because you're enticed and dragged away by your own desires.
And so what happens is Anakin goes from supposed to be the savior to being enticed and dragged away to the point when the future emperor displays himself as a Sith Lord.
That's the guy Anakin's supposed to be fighting.
But the Sith Lord says to him, I can give you what you want.
I can give you the power.
I can protect your family.
Just come on my side.
And he ultimately does.
And Lucas actually says, George Lucas, who as you know is no Christian, actually says in an interview, that's when Anakin gave in to the temptation of the devil, when Anakin went and became basically a Sith.
And what happens to him afterwards?
Well, he's all burned up.
He has to be put in a suit of armor.
He's half man, half machine.
And what Lucas does in these movies, the sins of the characters are displayed in their physical appearance.
So Darth Vader is a breathing machine, basically.
He's encased.
The emperor is all wrinkled up.
His eyes are droopy.
They're red.
He's nasty.
Sin is displayed physically in their physical appearance.
And that happens to us eventually, too, just much more slowly, right?
You sin enough.
You're just going to show physically.
Totally agree.
But when you look at, say, Luke and Leia, they're pure.
They look good all the time.
And so the light side and the dark side are illustrated by their physical appearances.
And so Lucas put that right into the story.
Wow.
So let me get into kind of two objections here.
So the first would be this, which would be kind of a Jungian psychological critique.
Are you going Jordan Peterson on me right now?
Physical Signs of Sin00:07:55
Yeah, somewhat, which would be that these are not biblical stories, right?
These are ancestral stories.
Every country, every civilization has these sorts of stories.
Exactly.
And it's not anything necessarily biblical.
It's just within who we are as a species that they would say, and I don't believe this, just as a disclaimer, you know, we evolved as a species.
We've always had to overcome adversity.
We've had to have courage, build teams, have heroes to go forage and hunt and gather.
What would you say to that potential?
I would say it's partially right because we live in God's world and he has put eternity on our hearts, says Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3.
We all have eternity on our hearts and we all want to be taken from this place of pain and suffering, Charlie, to a place of bliss.
And that's what these pagan dying and rising gods are about.
Redemption is a theme of humanity because we live in God's world.
We all have this desire to be taken out of this place and taken to a place of bliss.
All of these fictional stories are pointing to the true story, the true myth, as Tolkien put it, that Jesus literally did come and die and resurrect after living the perfect life so he could remain just and justify sinners like us and ultimately take us to a place where there is no pain, suffering, crying, or tears.
Yes, we agree.
It doesn't come from evolution.
It comes from God is putting this all on our heart.
So you would expect that even secular writers who may not believe in God at all would include this in their stories, just like they include morality in their stories because morality is written on their hearts as well.
They know what resonates with an audience.
So yeah, I agree partially.
That's true.
But it comes from God, not evolution.
Yeah, and so they would say that it's not, the Bible only is fitting the story.
The story is not fitting the Bible.
That would be true if God didn't exist and Jesus didn't rise from the dead.
But the evidence is that God does exist, and Jesus did rise from the dead, which means on Jesus' authority, I'm trusting what the Bible says because he said the entire Old Testament is the word of God and he promised the New Testament.
So, yeah, with those two facts that God exists and Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true.
Christianity is the true myth.
It really happened.
It's not just another one of these fake myths or what we're talking about.
Yeah, and that's where some, and that would be the second objection that we could spend some time unpacking, which is a Bible-believing Christian might find exception with this book, saying you're flirting with allegorical gateways here.
All right, let me ask a question of this skepticism.
And again, I don't believe this.
I think this is actually incredibly helpful and beautiful.
Skeptical Christian.
Number one, what does Paul do when he goes to Mars Hill in Acts chapter 17?
He's speaking to secular in Greece, right?
Greece.
I've actually stood on Mars Hill.
Oh, it's beautiful.
In Athens, yeah.
Yeah, you got to go.
I didn't know it was called Mars Hill.
I think of a church in Seattle when I think of Mars Hill.
Yes, no, no, this is Mars Hill or the Hill of Aries.
Same thing.
Yeah, yeah, okay, got it.
Sure.
He's there, and he's got the Acropolis right there.
Right behind him.
Yeah, the hall of the pagans.
That's right.
The temple to Athena.
That's why they call it Athens, of course.
And Paul, in order to bring these Athenians to the point where they might consider Christianity, you know who he quotes?
He quotes their own philosophers.
He quotes Epimenides.
He quotes their own poets.
I don't remember that.
He's quoting in Acts 17, he's quoting their movies of the day in order to bridge them to the gospel.
That's what he does.
And that's all we're doing in the book Hollywood Heroes.
It's a tool of evangelism.
It is.
Also, think about this.
The stories, the 39, by the way, I was listening to the Charlie Kirk podcast this morning coming over here, and you were talking about how there are 39 parables.
Yes.
And you mentioned that, I don't know, maybe 11 or 15 of them have to do with money.
Yes.
No extra charge for that, by the way.
But.
Which is true.
In these 39 parallels, Jesus is telling fictional stories to illustrate a moral or theological point.
For example, the story or the parable of the Good Samaritan.
If you were there with Jesus 2,000 years ago and he told the parable of the Good Samaritan and you said, Jesus, what was the Good Samaritan's name?
He'd go, What are you talking about?
This stuff didn't really happen.
I'm inventing these stories to illustrate a moral or theological point because stories drive home moral and theological points sometimes better than straight prose or just didactic teaching.
We're doing both in the Bible, but I'm telling stories to illustrate a theological or moral point.
Jesus is using stories in order to bring people to the truth.
That's what these movies do.
That's what we're doing in Hollywood Heroes.
So some Christians would say the danger with this is then you're going to look through the entire Bible through an allegorical lens, right?
And so this is an objection of a lot of Baptists, for example.
Not to say it's just, but it seems to be a lot of the criticism comes from that denomination where they'll say the issue with this sort of a book or this sort of an approach is that all of a sudden people are going to look less about the miraculous intervention of God, Jonah and the whale, Red Sea departed, and instead, what is God, what is the story trying to tell you here?
What is the moral lesson here?
But would you say it both can be true, the miraculous intervention and the story?
Yeah, and I think this is one of the problems we have with biblical interpretation.
In fact, we have a course on our website, an online course at cross examine.org called How to Interpret Your Bible.
And it's a 12-week course, but let me give you the core of it.
It's an acronym, STOP, S-T-O-P.
Whenever you come to a Bible passage, you need to stop.
And here's what you need to figure out.
What's the situation?
What's going on?
What book are we in?
Who's this about?
Who wrote it?
Right.
Who was written?
What's the situation?
T, what type of literature is it?
Is this just straight prose?
Is it law?
Is it poetry?
Is it parable?
Is it apocalyptic literature?
Some people take exception of even calling part of it poetry.
But poetry is poetry.
Look, if you and I are reading a poem of the Civil War, Charlie, we're going to get some good historical information out of that poem.
But we're not going to stretch every line to its literal wooden extent.
We realize it's a poem, right?
And so we need to do that with the Bible.
We need to figure out what type of literature it is because we're going to interpret different literature differently.
You're not going to interpret poetry the same way you would interpret, say, Leviticus, law, right?
It's different.
The O stands for...
Matthew first-hand account.
Exactly.
Or the resurrection itself, which is an actual event in history.
The O in stop stands for, who is the object of the passage?
Is the object just the Jews?
Is the object a church in Corinth?
Yeah, church in Corinth.
Who is this written to?
And then the P in stop stands for, is this prescriptive or descriptive?
What do you mean by that?
Well, you hear people saying, well, you know, Solomon had many wives, so the Bible must be for polygamy.
No, that's a description.
It's not a prescription.
He doesn't want us to have many wives.
He's simply pointing out this is what Solomon did.
And look at all the pain that resulted in his life.
It drove him mad.
It took him away from God.
It split the kingdom.
He did not finish well.
No, he did not finish well at all.
So you always have to figure out what's the situation, what type of literature, who's the object of the passage.
And is this passage prescriptive or descriptive?
Describing Biblical Truths00:15:10
And then you can say, okay, now I can see what the interpretation is and how it applies to my life.
So if people are going to say, well, Jesus is talking about a parable here, so it's not literal.
No, every parable tells a literal point, but it doesn't tell it in a literal way.
It tells it in an allegorical way, or it tells it in a parabolic way.
It tells it in a fictional way to point out a real truth in life.
And that's what movies do.
That's what stories do.
Yeah.
And I'm sure you've received some of these criticisms before, but whenever I'll talk about the story of the Bible, some hardline Christians, I'm not saying that negatively, by the way.
I'm a hardline Christian.
They'll say, stop talking about the story.
They said it's about the facts.
It's about the reality of it.
They said stories is not, you know, you're now getting into a defense of literature.
And I disagree with this.
I think that, for example, the incredible fountain of art that has come out of the West is based in the biblical canon.
Yes.
From the best songs to the best paintings to the best movies, is that there needs to be, you can't just look, I think that God gave us the gift of reason and creativity to be able to look at the gospel three-dimensionally and look at it, like, oh, wow, I never thought of Jesus' sacrifice through this story, but it now means even more to me.
Yes.
And that's basically what you're building out here, right?
Yes.
Wow, that movie that I really liked growing up, I kept watching.
Maybe there's a reason I liked it because it was speaking to my soul.
It is.
It is.
That's the whole point.
And in fact, a friend of mine, Jay Warner Wallace, the guy I mentioned last night, the cold case homicide detective, has written a book called Person of Interest, where he does exactly that, Charlie.
He looks at literature, movies, art, even architecture, science, education, and he points out how Jesus has revolutionized all of those areas of culture.
That the story of Jesus, the account, the facts of Jesus have impacted culture more than any other.
And what we point out in Hollywood Heroes is not only does he do that, but all of the heroes that we go through in this book point to the ultimate hero, Jesus of Nazareth.
And where these characters have certain aspects of Jesus in terms of their characteristics, their hero qualities, Jesus is the perfect hero.
He's the ultimate hero.
He has qualities that other characters don't have and could never have.
They couldn't hold in tension these characteristics.
Let me just give you a couple of examples.
Notice that Jesus is, on one hand, loving, but also completely mission-focused.
I mean, usually people who are mission-focused are not really good that much with caring about people.
I struggle with it all.
All the time.
Get out of my way.
I got to do this, right?
Jesus is both, right?
Jesus is completely confident, but he's also humble at the same time.
Do you know anybody that is completely confident and yet humble and gracious at the same time?
Jesus, 100% truth, 100% grace at the same time.
Jesus is actually totally confident in what he's doing, but he's still people-focused.
And you look at this and you go, there's no character in all of fiction.
There's no character in all of non-fiction other than Jesus.
There is no way the writers of the New Testament, most of them were fishermen and just average people, who could have invented this character, made him authentic, and pulled him off if he wasn't a real character.
So one of the objections that Bill Maher, for example, popularized in his movie Religilist, which I'm sure you've seen.
Yeah, it's a while ago, though.
And I'm just drawing from memory here, but it stuck with me because it is repeated on college campuses, is the mythology of Jesus, which I don't believe in.
You believe in the reality, so do I.
But they'll say the mythology of Jesus is found all throughout sort of Egyptian river culture.
Like Osiris.
Yeah, exactly.
So virgin birth and humble beginnings and a blameless life and God manifesting as a human being.
What would your response be?
Yeah, most of that's nonsense.
Most of that.
Tell us why.
It's just on the internet.
It's not in real life.
You ask the scholars that look into Jesus is just someone that has been actually talked about before in one character, they'll say, no, it's not true at all.
In fact, Edwin Yamauchi, used to teach at Miami of Ohio, was an expert on this.
I think he was in Case for Christianity.
He was, exactly.
You're remembering.
In fact, it was Lee Strobel who did the case for the real Jesus and had Yamauchi in that as well, pointing out, no, this is not the truth.
Now, there are parallels in certain areas to Jesus from these other worldviews.
But as we talked about earlier, Charlie, I think that's God pointing to the fact that, yeah, in culture, there's going to be things that parallel Jesus.
And when Jesus shows up, people are going to go, yeah, that's what we've been looking for.
This is the real deal.
And what someone in Jordan Peterson's position would say, which he does not call himself a Christian, but he is.
Or is he close, hopefully?
I don't know.
He said he needs a couple years to figure out historical Jesus.
That was two years ago.
Is he done?
No.
Okay.
He's had some difficulties, I think.
And there's a lot Jordan says I disagree with in a lot of different ways, but I think he's helpful in other ways.
He makes a great defense of the Bible in others and has brought people to the Lord.
And I think people are too hard on him on certain stuff.
He's obviously had some prescription drug addiction issues.
But what Jordan would say, or a follower of Jordan would say, this is all great, Frank.
This is all fine.
But it's the story that has captivated you with Christianity, not the facts and circumstances.
But you're saying, no, no, no, no.
It just so happens the facts and the evidence actually are incredibly overwhelming, which actually goes to your other book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and the work you do with Cross-Examined, which is like, wow, actually, the facts and circumstances are amazing, and the story is amazing.
Because what the Peterson people would say is if you get the story wrong, the civilization falls apart, right?
That the stories exist for a reason, they hold us together.
So it's just pragmatic for them.
It's very pragmatic.
That's all it is.
If you do not have legends, if you do not have stories, if you do not have icons, if you don't have heroes, the civilization falls apart.
You're not wrong by saying that.
No, they're not.
But it's totally incomplete and spiritually really, really dangerous.
Yes.
Why this story?
And why not another story?
Yeah, and they would say, well, because this story, and again, I don't believe this, is what helped us evolve, is what helped us survive, right?
Nurturing for the young and honoring the hero.
And these things are built into the moral code of what allowed us to get out of hunter-gathering and build civilization.
As you know, Charlie, one of the major problems with this kind of theory is, first of all, we could go down the rabbit trail of evolution, but if our minds are not designed to actually know truth, if they evolved, why should we believe anything we think?
In fact, C.S. Lewis famously said, and I'm paraphrasing, he said, Suppose my brain wasn't designed for the purpose of thinking, that thought is merely the byproduct of some atoms within my skull.
He said, in that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking, so I have no warrant to believe anything I think.
Yeah, well, there are some postmodernists that believe that.
I know.
They believe it.
Why?
It's self-defeating.
You know, if I'm just a molecular machine, why should I believe anything I think?
And I hate to go this far, but I mean, you go to Camus and they literally question existence.
Like, why even live?
True.
That's why.
That's the furthest extrapolation of.
Who was it, Sartre, that wrote the book Nausea?
Well, that's the ultimate outcome of nihilism.
That's a good question.
That's a good illusion.
Yes, that's true.
Yes.
And that's why we can't build a society on nihilism.
And that's where I think Jordan's been helpful in some ways.
Okay, pointing that out.
Well, he's at least building a firewall, saying that if you don't get this, you need some point of existence.
And he is deriving from biblical truth, but he won't go as far to say that this is the word of God.
Look, there's only two facts you need to establish to show that Christianity is true.
Just two.
Number one, God exists.
And number two, Jesus rose from the dead.
Charlie, if those two facts are true, Christianity is true.
Why?
Because if Jesus rose from the dead, he predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, then he's validating the fact that he's God.
He's proving he's God.
So whatever God teaches is true.
Jesus taught the Old Testament was the word of God in at least seven different ways.
We have them in the book, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.
And then he promised the New Testament.
So on Jesus' authority, if he really rose from the dead, then Christianity is true.
And you say, how do you know Jesus rose from the dead?
You just look at the evidence, and we cover it somewhat in the book, Hollywood Heroes.
I've seen our sister episode two, the one we did at Freedom Night.
Okay, so it'll be in there.
Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, so that's so the that's helpful for, I think, a lot of our audience members.
The book is Hollywood Heroes because that's a struggle that some people are having, which is you focus too much on the story, then you kind of do the Bill O'Reilly thing where Bill O'Reilly used to say, oh, no, no, the Bible is just a bunch of allegories, nice stories that we tell ourselves.
Yeah.
How'd you come to that conclusion?
I'd ask him.
What evidence do you have for that?
He would just say, I don't believe in miracles.
It's unrealistic.
Legends, you know, no different than Godzilla or Loch Ness monster or whatever.
That's what they would say.
Bigfoot, Paul Bunyan.
They say stories tend to be larger than lies.
Except this universe is a miracle.
It came into existence out of nothing.
Even Stephen Hawking, who was an atheist, as you know, until probably the top atheist in the world until he died about five years ago, said, almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.
Now, Hawking was an atheist, and he couldn't figure out how you could get this space-time continuum without God.
Just to reinforce that, don't mean to interrupt.
That is an irrefutable fact at this point.
Even an ardent atheist will believe the universe started at a moment.
Right.
Time started with it.
That's right.
Now, space, time, and matter had a beginning, ladies and gentlemen.
Whatever created space, time, and matter can't be made of space, time, and matter.
In other words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create, because to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation, someone had to make a choice.
Also, the being would have to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice.
So I always ask people, Charlie, I say, look, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of?
Harry Potter.
It's God, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm giving you a hard time.
Let me ask you the final question, which we get.
And honestly, I have my own answer to it, and it's not great.
And I just think it's a silly question.
You've heard every silly question.
Well, then who created God for him?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, if you don't think about it, it is a good question.
But once you start thinking about it, you realize it's a bad question.
Why?
Because who created the uncreated creator?
No one.
That's the whole point.
Look, there's only two possibilities, Charlie.
Either the universe is the uncreated creator or something outside the universe is the uncreated creator.
All the evidence shows that the universe had a beginning.
In other words, it's not the uncreated creator.
So whatever created space, time, and matter has to be spaceless, timeless.
Now, if you're timeless, do you have a beginning?
Nope.
No, you is.
You are.
You are.
I am.
I am.
Yes.
You are the great I am if you're timeless.
You don't have a beginning.
So to say who created the uncreated creator is like asking a bachelor what his wife's name is.
Well, he's a bachelor.
He doesn't have a wife.
An uncreated creator doesn't have a creator.
He is the uncreated, eternal being that, say, Aristotle would call the unmoved mover.
In fact, here's the interesting thing, Charlie.
Years ago, before we discovered the universe had a beginning, go back 100 years, we didn't know the universe had a beginning.
And now we do.
Atheists had no problem believing in an eternal universe.
They thought the universe was eternal.
Had no problem at all believing that.
And now we notice the universe.
It's expanding and then it will contract.
Yeah.
And now we realize that's not the case.
It had a beginning.
It's not eternal.
But they had no problem believing the universe was eternal.
Now we're saying, okay, the universe isn't eternal, but God is.
And they go, oh, no, you can't have an eternal God.
Wait, wait, whoa, Why can you have an eternal universe, but not an eternal God?
Something has to be eternal.
You can't go on an infinite regress of causes.
So the ultimate cause is what we call the uncreated energy.
And isn't the atheist's job in some way annoyingly easy in the sense all they have to do is constantly try to poke holes and deconstruction?
Yeah, the problem is it's easy to smell a rotten egg.
It's hard to lay a better one.
You have to lay a better egg.
Tell me why this universe exists.
That's right.
Put them on defense, right?
Instead of them poking holes in everything.
That's right.
And I say to atheists, I say, look, you have the burden of proof just like I do to tell us why the universe is the way it is.
Why is there a universe at all?
Why is it fine-tuned?
Why are there objective moral values?
Even either Hitchens or Dawkins said it's the hardest one for them to respond to.
Why are there objective moral values?
Why do we have the ability to reason?
Why are there laws of logic, laws of mathematics?
Why is the universe set up on a mathematical grid?
Why are we conscious, conscious?
How did Jesus rise from the dead?
Where does all this come?
How about Old Testament prophecy?
You need to explain all of these from an atheistic perspective.
C.S. Lewis said, in order for there to be a God, one part of the Bible has to be true.
Just one thing.
Right?
In order for the atheists to be right, it must all be wrong.
Well, also, think about this, Charlie.
If atheism is true, that means every single spiritual experience and miracle claim in the history of the world.
Both pagan and Christian.
In the history of the world has to be false.
And by the way, you and I reject paganism, but I don't doubt that some of them have demonic encounters.
Not at all.
The Bible teaches that.
So if they say, you know, I saw my ancestors, I believe it.
Not a problem.
But I see through pharmake other interventions.
Yeah.
Okay.
I mean, I think you're playing with the most dangerous thing you could do.
That's right.
Yeah.
But I don't think you're lying.
That's right.
That's right.
No.
Atheists is always just hallucinogenics.
Everything has to be false for atheism to be true.
Every spiritual story in the history of being, from Native American tales to the Indus River Valley, it's all wrong.
That's right.
Moses was wrong.
Jesus is wrong.
Paul is wrong.
Everybody in history has been wrong about spirituality.
Except them, because they're not.
Except the reasonable ones.
That's right.
So let's bring this back because we only have a couple minutes here.
So it's Hollywood Heroes.
How your favorite movies reveal God.
And you also have your other book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, which we don't have time to get into right now.
We have to have you back again to talk about this, but it's a lot of fun.
Talk about cross-examine as well.
Yeah, cross-examine, what we do is we present evidence for Christianity.
Cross-Examining Atheist Ideas00:01:17
We cross-examine ideas against it.
We go to college campuses, high schools, and churches.
We have a podcast called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
We have a TV show by the same name on DirecTV, Channel 378, the NRB Network.
Oh, that's awesome.
And we go to college campuses, as I mentioned.
We also have a bunch of online courses where we teach online via video, but then we also do live Zoom QA, which people really like so they can interact with the instructors.
I'm not the only instructor.
You know, we've got Gary Habermas, you know about.
He's amazing from Liberty.
He's one of the greatest.
We've got Elisa Childers.
We've got Jay Warner Wallace, Sean McDowell.
Just really quick, I know we're really ton of time.
Do you see momentum?
You've been doing this for a while.
You're starting to see more and more momentum on this.
Yes, yes.
I sure feel that way.
Yeah, yeah.
I think people are more interested in answers.
They're more interested in truth.
There's always going to be naysayers.
There's always going to be people going the other direction.
But look, Charlie, our job is to be faithful.
Just preach the truth.
Leave the results to God.
Frank Turek, everybody, cross-examine.org, Hollywood Heroes, and I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.
God bless you, Frank.
Thanks, Charlie.
God bless you.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.