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June 24, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
26:51
Assumptions Institute
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You want to listen to a podcast?
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We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
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Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the podcast.
Today we're going to get into thinking.
We're going to get into why you think, how you think, and especially from a Christ-like perspective, some of the assumptions that may be holding you back in life.
I got a good friend of mine coming on.
We happened to meet up again about a month ago, actually on a trip, and settle this up.
So we're excited to have Dave Richardson on.
He'll be on just after the break, and we'll get into a discussion on assumptions and other things that are going on in this transparency in our lives.
So get ready for another great day on the Doug Collins Podcast.
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That's promo code COLLINS. Alright, good morning, Dave.
It's good to see you, buddy.
Hey, Doug.
Good to see you, too.
Well, it's been a while.
I've told people that people know this week has been in taping.
We travel a lot.
You end up getting sometimes going in and out of a lot of things.
And for me, this past week or so has been fighting a summer cold.
And it has just got me for a few days here.
But it's good to be back on the podcast with you.
Glad to have you with us.
We saw each other on a trip, but we are glad to make a connection again because we've met each other before.
First off, just sort of let's give a breakdown.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Tell us about the Assumptions Institute and then that'll get us into the book and everything else.
Sure.
Well, I started Assumptions Institute about nine years ago.
It was after being on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ, which is now called CRU, for about 30 years.
Most of my work during that time was, oddly enough, with university professors.
I never really worked with students.
I actually worked with their teachers.
So I was down at Georgia Tech And Emory and many other universities here in Metro Atlanta, as well as around the country and around the world.
And so I have a real good sense for how the powerful world of ideas works.
And one of the things I was trying to do is figure out how to get professors who are Christians to talk about their faith, not just in their offices, but in their work, you know, in their teaching and research, those kinds of things.
And along the way, developed a very simple, transferable way of teaching them how to connect their faith to what they do.
And that resulted in my book, and it resulted in me eventually creating a whole organization around a very unique method that I've developed that helps people figure out for themselves what's true, what's not, and how to connect truth from God and the Bible to real-world issues and situations.
Okay, well, excuse me, still have a little bit of hanging on.
If anybody wants to learn more, let's just get that out in front of the Assumption Institute.
You can look him up online.
He's got a great website, Learning to Discern, and it also leads into the book Transparent, which you just mentioned, and does the powerful assumptions.
And on the website, I wanted to just sort of dig into this as we go forward.
You talk about assumptions that control us, and I think that's so relevant, whether it's in our faith world, our political world, or our life world.
It's those assumptions that we may have had from early on, or it may have been made through the bombardment we get of inputs today.
But you made an interesting comment on the website.
It has an interesting comment that says, even atheists are religious at the level of their assumptions.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Talk about that for a minute.
I've had many conversations, obviously, with atheists.
In fact, I did my research when I was doing my postgraduate degree studying atheists and agnostic professors.
Did hour-long interviews with them.
But one of the interesting things is that, you know, all you have to do is spend a few minutes with my five-year-old granddaughter and you'll find out that you're not an all-knowing person.
Because she asks, well, why is that?
Well, it's because of this.
Why is that?
Well, because of that.
Well, eventually you reach the limit of what you know and what you don't know.
And when you reach that limit of what you know and what you don't know, you have to assume something to be real and therefore true that you don't know.
It's not that we don't assume, we all do.
It's not if we do it, it's how we do it.
And what are you assuming is the nature of everything?
And you know, you can start off by thinking it's just all physical stuff, or it's all just non-physical stuff, or you can assume that there's a creator and a creation, that there's actually two distinct realities, and that's the nature of everything.
But the thing is, these are things we don't fully know and really can't.
So they're the things that we don't question, we can't prove, and they're the thing we assume.
And how do you make an assumption?
It's the thing you don't know.
It's the thing you trust.
So that is your actual faith commitment.
I've done this with atheists many times, and once they finally figure out what I'm saying, their eyes are wide and their jaws are on the floor.
So, wow, I guess I am a person of faith, just a person of different faith.
They're putting their faith in something different.
Well, you're hitting on something there that I think, because I was sitting here as I was listening to that, and I've done the same thing with people, and it's very frustrating to go along because they are making an assumption, but they're making their assumption.
They're claiming fate is an abject object that can't be assumed, but yet they're not saying that the very thing that they assume is all-knowing as well.
And so they flip the switch.
Some of them would flip the switch on us and say, well, you don't know for a fact this is your Assumption, too.
Have you ever run across one smart enough to turn it back on that?
Oh, no.
Never.
Because what you do is you just push them to the limit of what they know and they don't know.
And when you reach that limit, every person does this.
Every person ultimately has to assume something about the nature of everything that they don't know.
A person says that it's all just physical stuff.
There's no God, there's no angels, demons, any of that spiritual stuff.
That's not real, that's not important.
When they make that claim, They don't know that.
They trust that.
Because is it possible that something non-physical like God might exist beyond the scope of your knowledge?
Unless you're all-knowing, which you're not, of course.
So the only way you can eliminate that possibility of something spiritual being beyond the scope of your knowledge is if you had access to all places at all times, which you don't.
So you don't know that.
You trust that.
You assume that.
And it's the thing you do not know, do not question, because if you question that, you can't make sense of anything.
It blows everything up.
So, you know, when people start getting defensive when you're talking with them, it's because you're getting close to that thing that you cannot question for them.
You're questioning the unquestionable.
It's the thing you don't question, you cannot prove, because it's not provable.
You can't get access to all places at all times, for instance.
And it's the thing you trust.
It's the thing you assume.
Yeah, so basically what you're getting at here is the assumption, because the reality is, as we speak of in the Christian faith all the time, is evidence of things unseen, that kind of whole issue.
And it's interesting enough, do you ever have in your conversations, because I've always said that there's two types of atheists, there's an honest atheist and a non-honest atheist.
An honest atheist believes that they don't know everything, and they just choose to believe this.
And a dishonest atheist says, I'm right, and assumes that they know everything.
But have you seen, when it comes to the fact that From that perspective, taking the faith perspective, how much have you seen resistance to then take the assumption that they've left in being that there is no God, there is no other being, to there is a being, there is a God, or is it still sort of left in limbo that they just now realize that they're not honestly right?
Yeah.
Well, most of the time, that's the issue because, again, the nature of a core assumption, like what I'm talking about, is the thing that you really can't question because if you do, it leaves you in a place where you can't answer anything.
You can't explain anything.
It's the point at which a person converts.
To a different understanding of the world.
If they're an atheist, converting to believing that there is a God who made everything.
That's not a question of rationality.
That's a question of the will.
I want to be the guy that's in charge of my life most of the time, and so I'd rather leave things with the status quo so I don't have to Answer to somebody else who may have made me and has something to do with me.
But I have had some professors, and there's one in particular that I'm thinking of.
It was an English professor at a university here in Georgia who learned this technique for using my critical assumptions test as a critical thinking tool and technique in her classes.
And she was not a Christian.
She was a progressive feminist.
And she was looking for a way to dislodge her Christian students and move them to a more enlightened understanding of the world.
And after honestly teaching this technique in her rhetoric classes for about five semesters, she began to realize Her assumptions just weren't that adequate, and she converted.
She became a Christ follower.
And now she talks with her students in her classes and thinks that her classroom is a great platform for helping people understand each other and how God relates to the real world.
One of the things that's going along right now, and there's actually been on the Internet, as everything is, just recently, I tend to get frustrated with A lot of these, quote, atheists are the only way to put it, I guess.
Atheist, agnostic.
Agnostics just heads of bed.
And Christians, and they get into the debates over the Bible.
They get into debates over, and there's one out there right now that's going on, Dinesh D'Souza, and some individual talking about the inconsistencies of the scripture.
In many ways, I feel that is not productive.
It isn't.
And hear me out.
And I think, because it's so interesting, because I think you're right on the right track.
You've got to get to the bottom line of assumptions here.
And narrowing faith in Christ down to a set of rules and letters, which is what everybody's always wanted to do.
And it was always relational, and you have to understand that.
How about that?
Going at it from that perspective where you can take different lines and different points of one book and, you know, there are four different versions of the Ten Commandments, there's two different versions of the creation, and they get into the offsets and they miss the real function, I think, of Christ and assumptions of what we have of who God is.
Yeah.
I do this a lot with youth groups.
I've done it with groups of adults, too.
I'll sit down with them, and we're looking at the Bible, and we'll read some verse in there.
And I turn to them, and it says, this claims to be true, and you can know it.
That this is the Word of God, that Jesus is the Son of God, that He really lived and died, and He is the eternal God in whom you can place your trust.
And it claims to be true.
How do you know it's true?
Just because it claims it?
Because the Quran claims something else to be true.
And the Vedas claim something else to be true.
Just because the book claims it, does that make it true?
Is it true because you accept it as true?
Is it true because you believe it's true?
That's not what makes it true.
It's because people have lost an understanding of what truth is in the first place.
I start with the very basic teaching that true things match real things, and real things are true.
If it isn't real, it can't be true.
And the reason that the Bible is true is because it talks about real things that happen to real people, including a guy named Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago, walked this earth, lived, died, and rose again.
If that didn't really happen, Then what is the Bible?
It's nothing more than a collection of moral tales like a Greek epic or a wild adventure like a Harry Potter novel or something.
But it's nothing worth giving your life to.
But if it's real, if it really happened, it changes everything.
So it's not a question of, is it true?
The question is, is it real?
And people say, you know, prove to me that God exists.
That's the wrong question.
Of course God exists.
He exists at the very least as a concept of the mind.
That's not the question.
The question is, is God real?
And if you've met Him and you know Him, you know He's real.
Right.
I noticed there's a line out of this that's been showing on clips, and I have some folks who've been posting on Instagram, and I see this.
In my world, I see a lot of these different philosophies going on.
And one of the interesting points is the...
This gentleman who's debating D'Souza gets into the fact of, you know, how can the sun be created after the earth and all this kind of, you know, light and dark kind of stuff.
And I was sitting there laying there and just listening to it.
And I was not feeling well the other night.
And I heard this and I said, look, I said, I solved this debate by one thing.
The first four words in the beginning of three words, if you want to put that way in the beginning, God, period.
That's all I have to get to.
In the beginning, God.
I just set it up right there.
Whatever comes from there came from God.
And if you can't get past that first verse, you will have a hard time assuming or believing anything else in the book.
Because that's the base assumption of God.
Is it in the beginning, God.
It's not in the beginning, something.
It's not in the beginning, vapor.
It's not in the beginning, four things and a trick.
It's in the beginning, God.
Yeah.
And actually, it's the four words.
In the beginning, God created.
Because what that shows is that there's not a single reality.
That, in fact, there's God, and then there's the creation.
And they're two distinct realities.
They're not the same thing.
God is not the universe.
The universe is not God.
You can tell them apart.
And that's the core assumption that all Christians start from.
And you hit it right on the head.
That is the core assumption.
And the only way we know that is because God revealed it to us.
We live in this created reality, and we can't get out of it to see what it's like completely, and we only know it in part anyway.
So what we know about God is what He's shown to us, and that's the very first truth in the Bible.
In the beginning, God created.
There's a creator and a creation, and if there's two things, then God is the source of everything in this created world, including us.
Yeah, and that's the whole part.
You've got to go back.
Everything has a beginning.
Yes.
And I think that's the whole part.
And where does that beginning?
Well, if you have a beginning, and then you really want to hurt your mind, really, literally, you sit there and think about it.
Everything has a beginning.
Well, who started the beginning?
And then it just blows your mind at that point because God is infinite.
Right.
Because he's distinctly different from all the created things.
Exactly.
So he's the one that self-existed.
He's the one that's always been.
Anything in this created reality hasn't always been.
He's the source of it.
And so you can more easily understand those kinds of things if you know that there are two realities, not just one.
Right.
Alright, tell us about the book and tell us about the courses that you teach because what is interesting to me was you do this not only with, you have youth versions and adult versions and stuff like this and how you go about doing these classes.
Yeah, our courses are at learntodiscern.com slash Doug Collins.
I've got a special landing page with a special offer just for your listeners and your viewers.
And what they're all about, we have...
Our essentials course that teaches the basics of this discernment skill.
There's an actual, tangible, critical thinking skill that you can learn for yourself.
You don't have to be told by some pundit or some professor or some authority figure what truth is.
You'll know how to figure it out for yourself, and you'll know it's true.
And what I'm focusing on is not complex arguments, sophisticated ideologies.
You know you might want to learn those things one day, but I'm focusing on the simple assumptions that make those arguments possible.
If the assumptions are true, then probably what you're being told is true.
If the assumptions are false, though, anything built on a false assumption has to be false, even if you don't understand the argument, even if you don't understand the ideology.
So what that allows me to do is teach middle schoolers how to think.
They don't know Marxism.
They don't know feminism or critical theory or any of those kind of very sophisticated things.
But I can teach them about the simple assumptions that make those ideologies possible.
And they can, with a little practice, using a phone app to practice with, they can detect those assumptions in 20 to 30 seconds.
It doesn't take much and it doesn't take long.
Well, Dave, I want to hit something here.
I'm going to deer away from it and believe, you know, learn to discern, folks.
Go to backslash.com.
Get this information.
It's great stuff.
Because you just hit something that just really triggered something in me.
I have my bachelor's degree, I have a master's in divinity, and I have a law degree.
All three, you know, advanced degrees and moving through.
But I will tell you this.
What you just hit, I think, is the key problem we have in our society today.
And I didn't learn it in college, and I did not learn it in my Master's of Divinity at Cemetery.
I call it cemetery, seminary.
But law school, I did.
And law school, for what everybody thinks, everybody picks on lawyers.
Nobody wants a lawyer until they need one.
And I get that.
And they always say they're argumentative.
They always do the lawyerly answers and everything else.
But what law school makes you do Is break down every argument.
You have to actually look at where does that argument come from?
What's behind that argument?
What's the assumption behind that argument?
Okay, if you say that, my wife, you know, sometimes will get upset.
She'll say something.
I say, okay, well, you're assuming that this is actually true to make that statement.
No, because, and we get into the discussion.
But now what I see, David, is this not in schools, but in news media and others, is we're living off of assumptions of others.
And this is becoming, and it's scary to me because I believe we're becoming a generational, not just the United States, but across the world, of And I hate this term, but it is kind of true, the sheep mentality that we rise to whatever sounds good and we're not questioning anymore.
And getting back to thinking in elementary school and high school is probably going to be the thing we need to look at most.
Yes.
In fact, even if you told a person that you need to ask good questions, what questions do you ask?
They don't even know what the questions are to ask.
Well, I can provide you eight.
Those are the eight questions on my critical assumptions test.
And they're automated with the phone app, and you learn how to practice using this thing.
So when you're watching TV shows and movies or a news broadcast...
They're throwing some message at me.
How do I know whether it's true or not?
How do I know whether I need to believe it or whether I need to throw it away?
When I'm in a classroom with a professor or listening to a podcast or something on the radio, or whether I'm reading an article, a web page, social media post, I'm bombarded by messages, thousands of them every day, and I have to evaluate them.
Do I have any reliable method where I can figure stuff out for myself?
And that's what we do with LearnToDiscern.com, is figure out what's true, what's not, and how you can connect truth from God and the Bible to those real-world issues and apply it.
Well, and I think that's the key right now.
Look, my concern is we've gotten...
In faith, and I've said this before, as a pastor for over 11 years, it's doing the political now for a number of years.
Well, I'm very concerned that the church, and this is pure to my faith here, I'm concerned that the church has begun to believe that everything Should be given.
In other words, it's just we don't have to work at it anymore.
People say all the time, I hear pastors say this all the time, but I don't think they ever mean it when they say we need to get back to the first century church.
I say, well, I agree with you completely, except there's one thing.
I believe that the first century church did not assume a Christian nation, did not assume a Christian mindset, did not assume a Christian worldview.
They assumed a non-Christian worldview.
They assumed a hostile environment.
And just like Paul, who would walk in and say, look, you've got statues here to everybody, including an unknown God.
I'm going to tell you who he is.
Yes.
And we don't do that anymore.
We hide in our Christian sort of suburbs, and I don't mean that literally, but I mean, Tony Campolo, a former author from the 90s, called it the Christian ghetto, actually, is what he said.
He said, we only listen to Christian radio, Christian stuff, Christian this, and we can't relate to those who don't believe like us.
At the end of the day, God tells us not to go change the world.
He says, go make disciples, which in turn changes the world.
I think we've got it backwards.
I think we're trying to change the world with civil means many times instead of going back to our faith that says faith in Christ.
But it takes argument and we've lost that skill.
It's not in our repertoire anymore.
Yeah, and that's why we created these essential series for individuals to learn it, for church small groups to use it.
But we've also created a semester-long course for Christian schools, for homeschools and homeschool co-ops, so that you can do a deep dive and become a truth ninja with this stuff.
You can become a leader where you can not only influence our culture for Christ, but also you can teach and train others how to do the same thing.
That is great.
Well, I've got a lot of friends, and I know they listen to broadcasts that do Christian School, Homeschool, and also public schools as well because I have a lot of folks listening to things.
I'm going to make sure I got one gentleman in mind in particular who runs, they have a very good Christian school here locally, and I want to make sure that he gets this information.
I'm a firm believer we're losing some of the battles of the world because we're not starting soon enough in critical thinking.
And I'm not taking away, I'm going back to the true literary, the Renaissance kind of education, the broad exposure.
I firmly believe the more that you're exposed to and then understanding why you believe the way you do gets you much further than simply saying, okay, I accept this list that you gave me.
I'm going to believe this list, not because I understood this list, but because you gave me this list.
And we've got to get better critical thinking in schools and critical thinking in our life.
Yeah, otherwise we're just living in a 1984 world where the Ministry of Truth tells us what truth is.
And as long as we're compliant with Big Brother, we're in great shape.
Otherwise, we're in big trouble.
I agree.
I agree.
All right, Dave, this has been great.
Give everybody, again, where they can go find all this information, where they can do it.
Give us the websites, anything else you want to give us.
You bet.
You go to learntodiscern.com slash Doug Collins for all of our training courses to be able to download the app because it's on all platforms.
You can also get my book at that site.
If you want to learn more about our organization, the think tank that creates all of this critical thinking revolution, this discernment revolution, you can find that at assumptionsinstitute.org.
And if you like what we do, please donate to our ministry.
Outstanding.
Folks, go there.
This has been great, David.
I've enjoyed this a bunch.
It took us a little bit to catch up with it.
We did, and I think it's a good time.
Looking forward to people finding out more about you, and I am as well, in looking at how we can work together in the future, okay?
Thanks, Doug.
I really appreciate you having me on.
Outstanding.
Thanks, everybody.
Folks, that's it for the Doug Collins Podcast for the start of this week.
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