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April 21, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:58
THE VERDICT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 73
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Time Text
Why I'm not cheering the Derek Chauvin verdict, and why the two main themes of all the media coverage, racism and police oppression, were actually refuted both by the trial and by the jury.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
A lot of people are cheering wildly at the Derek Chauvin murder verdict.
at the Derek Chauvin murder verdict.
Kaboom! Touchdown!
Big win for our side!
There's a sense of jubilation.
Here's the African-American columnist Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post.
He goes, Derek Chauvin's conviction shouldn't feel like a victory, but it does.
Touchdown! So, you get the feeling here, and perhaps if you were to ask these guys, why are you cheering?
They would say, that's the sweet sentiment of justice.
So then I ask myself, I don't have that feeling.
My feeling is sober, almost somber.
Why? Well, it's not because I think Chauvin is innocent, the trial proved that he did nothing wrong.
It's not that at all. In fact, going back now several months to when I first saw the video, my reaction was one of sort of almost uncontained fury, and I said that publicly at the time.
Interestingly, this is not...
A situation that produced some big ideological divide from the beginning?
No. What we saw on the videotape was, in fact, appalling.
And the only question was, is that the full story?
Was there other information left out?
And that's why you have a trial.
That's why you have a jury.
Now, the reason that I am, although satisfied with the verdict, it's very well quite possible that justice was done, but we don't know for sure.
And why is that? It's because of the mob atmosphere surrounding the trial.
It was Abraham Lincoln who says, this is in the Lyceum Address of 1830, there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.
I don't think we can deny that there were powerful mob elements here.
Not just the crowd outside screaming and baying, we better get the verdict!
But powerful political figures showing up, egging on the mob.
Notably, Maxine Waters.
She goes up there. She basically says, we're expecting a guilty verdict.
And if we don't get it, guys, go out there.
Be in their face. Stay on the street.
Be more confrontational.
In other words, cause more violence.
That's almost a classic definition of incitement right there.
I think I saw Alan Dershowitz talking about it.
And he goes, hey... This is basically what the old KKK used to do.
I mean, the KKK would go up to the sheriff and go, you know, we better get a conviction or you'll be hearing from us.
So this kind of thuggery, there are echoes of it.
Now, the situations may be reversed in the KKK case.
They were targeting a black accused man.
In this case, it's a policeman accused of killing a black man.
So in that sense, the racial roles may be reversed, but the behavior...
The sort of idea that the mob is going to dictate what happens inside the courtroom.
This is the troubling aspect I'm talking about.
And then there's Joe Biden talking about the fact, before the verdict, that the evidence is completely compelling and convincing to him, as if he followed the trial minute by minute, which I'm sure he did not.
And so, what we have here is this idea that, and I'm sure it was in some ways felt by the jury.
In fact, some jurors confessed this up front before they were even chosen.
The fear that cities will burn.
Our families will be threatened.
There was an article in the local paper in Minneapolis.
That it was almost sort of saying, by the way, guys, we're not going to tell you exactly where these jurors live, but we're going to give you enough hints about where they might live so you might be able to find them afterward.
This is almost a case of using journalism as a form of intimidation.
Now, coming back to Eugene Robinson and his, you know, it shouldn't feel like a victory.
There's a little element of decency in Robinson.
He knows this should be a trial.
The idea here is presumed innocent.
The idea here is that the jury should be able to listen to the facts uncontaminated by outside pressures.
He knows all that.
But still, for him, it's a big score.
And what is the score?
I'm pretty sure that the way he looks at it is it's a racial score.
Basically, blacks one, whites zero.
Why? Because from the beginning, this was sort of seen through a racial lens.
It's a white cop. It's a black victim.
So this is a race fight.
And the verdict is almost reminiscent of the OJ trial.
Now, in the OJ trial, it was not guilty.
In this case, guilty. But in both cases, you've got the feeling of, touchdown!
Our team wins a big one.
This is kind of a racial ball-in-the-basket type of score.
And I think this is really where my anxiety comes from.
It's simply the idea that This is not what a trial should be.
Ultimately, it was Greg Gutfeld, a Fox News of all people, who spilled the beans on it when he said something very revealing just yesterday.
Listen. And now I'm gonna just get really selfish.
I'm glad that he was found guilty on all charges, even if he might not be guilty of all charges.
Really? Wow. I mean, I think Gutfeld is really just trying to be sort of candid.
He says, I'm just trying to be honest here.
I'm just trying to tell it like it is.
But like it is for him means that we're looking at this trial not as a trial of what one man did or one man supported by some other man did in a given situation.
We're looking at this as a way to promote peace in America.
Not stoke the crowd.
Avoid more violence. Let's not have Rodney King all over again.
Well, we don't sacrifice people in a free country in order to produce social peace.
So what I'm kind of saying is that if it wasn't for Maxine Waters, if it wasn't for the mob...
If it wasn't for Antifa taking credit, here's Antifa saying, when the police murdered George Floyd, demonstrators brought that tragedy to everyone's attention by laying siege to the police precinct.
If not for their courage, most people would never have learned his name.
Let's give them the credit, not the courts.
In other words, what Antifa is saying is that we, the thugs, we produced this outcome, not some judicial procedure that was ultimately just deferring to us.
And so what I My conclusion here is really this, that if you didn't have this intimidation, you didn't have this mob mentality, you didn't have this air of prejudice and prejudgment, well, then we would have an untainted process.
Well, we then would have a verdict in which we could take some satisfaction, in which we could have some confidence.
And then, even if I wasn't saying touchdown or celebrating, I might feel that perhaps in this case, justice was in the end done.
What is the real lesson of the George Floyd murder trial, the Derek Chauvin murder conviction?
Well, if you listen to the media and you listen to the leading Democrats, there are two major themes that explode out of it.
The first theme is racism.
White supremacy. And the second theme is systemic oppression by the police, police brutality.
And that's what leads, of course, to calls to defund the police, to sort of remake the system.
Here is Kamala Harris reacting to the verdict and talking about the broader lesson that she takes from it.
Listen. First, I want to thank the jury for their service.
And I want to thank Mr.
Floyd's family for your steadfastness.
Today, we feel a sigh of relief.
Still, it cannot take away the pain.
A measure of justice isn't the same as equal justice.
This verdict brings us a step closer.
And the fact is, we still have work to do.
We still must reform the system.
So right there you have those exact two themes.
We need to have equal justice, which is to say we need to fight the racial inequality, and the second is we need to reform the system.
AOC chiming in, as she always does, I'm quoting her now, I don't want this moment to be framed as a system working.
And so this is the ongoing theme.
I just saw Gavin Newsom pick up on the race thread of it.
He goes, George Floyd would still be alive if he looked like me.
It's all about him. If he looked like me, it wouldn't happen to him.
That must change.
Now... So these notions, the racial lens, which in a sense, the racial lens makes George Floyd a stand-in for every black American.
And it makes Derek Chauvin a stand-in for every white American.
So the whole thing takes on this kind of racial drama.
And my question is simply this.
Where is the evidence? Is there any independent evidence, any at all, that shows that Derek Chauvin was a racist, is a racist, or a white supremacist?
Did this issue even come up during the trial?
I mean, this is all I hear the Democrats and the media and the left talking about.
And yet the prosecution didn't talk about it.
And the defense didn't talk about it.
And apparently the jury decided that this was not true.
Really a relevant issue in the trial.
Now think how odd that is. This is a murder trial.
And when you're discussing murder, one of the normal components of a murder is the motive.
Why do you do it? So if Derek Chauvin was motivated by bigotry, I hate black people, that would have come out in the trial.
You'd think the prosecution would highlight it.
And the reason they don't highlight it is because that wasn't an issue.
And the jury didn't see it as an issue, and they weren't asked to decide about it, and they didn't.
Now let's turn to the issue of the systematic police brutality or the systematic police oppression.
The whole thrust of the prosecution's case, by the way, cheered by the media and affirmed by the jury, is that the system is not racist.
Think about it this way. If the system were racist, Derek Chauvin would have to be exonerated.
Let's say the problem was with the system.
Let's say that they trained Derek Chauvin to do that to George Floyd or someone like George Floyd.
Let's say that there were police manuals that said, yeah, it's perfectly fine to put your knee on someone's neck and keep it there until they stop breathing.
Let's say that other police officers habitually did kind of the same thing.
In that case, it would, in fact, be a systemic problem.
But in that case, Derek Chauvin's defense was, hey, I was trained to do this.
The system told me to do this.
I'm simply following instructions.
I'm doing what all my peers do.
But the whole point of the prosecution was that's not the case.
No, we haven't trained you to do this.
This is not what the manual says.
This is a bad apple.
This is a guy who, quote, took the law into his own hands.
So the whole thrust of the prosecution's case was to convince the jury.
And the jury apparently agreed, yes, this guy is an outlier.
He deserves to be locked up.
Because if it was, after all, systemic practice, lock up all those other cops who came up to testify on behalf of Because after all, they're equally guilty.
They do the same thing. The system is like that.
This is not a problem with Derek Chauvin.
It's a problem with the Minneapolis or with the Minnesota Police Department.
Now, when I talked about this on social media, someone replies when I said, you know, this is really not even a race issue.
This is not a systemic issue.
Someone writes and they go, would that have happened to me?
I'm white. I'm a natural blonde.
I'm a female. No, it wouldn't have.
It probably wouldn't have happened to my husband either.
He's white also. And that's the point.
This is the kind of rhetoric we get all over social media, and I'm thinking to myself, everyone wants to make an analogy between themselves and George Floyd, but they don't follow the analogy through.
It's kind of like, wait a minute, are you George Floyd?
Do you and your husband act like George Floyd?
Did you have a home invasion that occurred a year or two ago?
I mean, do you forge checks habitually?
Were you resisting arrest?
Are you often out of control because you've taken so much fentanyl, you don't really know what's going on?
So, if you and your husband behave like that, you are going to put yourself in a much more dangerous environment than you normally live in.
So, this is not a function of merely being white or living in a suburban neighborhood.
This is a function of being in an environment Which is very rough where the cops are there all the time and where people like Derek Chauvin show up and do bad things and need to be held accountable to them.
But what gets me about all this rhetoric is this.
It's in the end not about race.
There was nothing about race in this trial.
And second, it's not about systematic police oppression either.
It's about, and it should be about, what this man did in this situation, and he should be held accountable for it.
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What does it mean to be a conservative activist?
How should an activist respond when things turn against you?
Many of us were very disappointed and went into a kind of a funk, you may say, right after the election.
What has constantly inspired me, and I've been tracking him on social media, is the way that activist Scott Pressler never gives up and never seems to rest.
Welcome, Scott Pressler, to the podcast.
I last saw you on the set of the Trump movie.
We interviewed you for the movie.
At that point, you were doing garbage cleanups in major cities, kind of doing what the Democrats refuse to do in their own cities.
Now, let me start by talking about the immediate aftermath of the election.
You just said to me a moment ago that you went into a little bit of a depression.
Talk about that. You know, I poured my heart out, Dinesh.
I spent the last four years of my life helping to re-elect President Trump, registering thousands of new voters, bringing people into our Democratic Republic, inspiring them to take action.
So... You know, to say that losing the election was less than soul-crushing would be an understatement.
But I also know that the fight for freedom never ends.
And that's why I haven't stopped for a gosh dang second.
Well, this is the key, because I know, I mean, even on social media, I notice that some people have dropped off.
There are probably people who felt, oh man, the country is lost.
Or they felt like, I just don't have the Hartford anymore.
Or that the left is putting so much pressure on us through censorship and intimidation.
So talk about how it is that you, almost on your own strength, where do you get those resources to say, hey, look, I'm not going to let this bother me.
I'm going to push forward.
What? What do you tell yourself to get going in the morning every day?
Well, you know, I'm inspired by my family's history.
My grandfather was a retired Navy captain.
My dad is a retired Navy captain.
And although I haven't served, I feel a responsibility for my family, for my country, that look, I've been blessed with this platform on social media.
And if I don't use it, To fight for good causes, then what am I doing?
I'm letting an opportunity slip away to do something good with my life.
And so I feel a moral responsibility to continue pursuing for this fight for freedom and election integrity and teaching people how to run for office.
And ultimately, my goal is to win in 2022.
I saw you put out a tweet about the fact that Republicans do control the state legislatures in many of these states.
In fact, the swing states, the crucial states in the November 2020 election.
And so in a weird way, our fate is in our own hands, it seems.
Republicans are in a position to correct these laws, establish voter integrity, make sure that people vote who are eligible to vote, but no one else.
And why do you think Republicans have been slow to do this?
Is it that Republicans are just late to the party?
Is it just that they need to be stoked up more than the Democrats, who are somehow more motivated than our side?
What do you find on the ground when you show up in these places to find out, hey guys, why haven't you fixed this problem like yesterday?
Well, in part, Dinesh, it's because of us.
Where are we marching in the streets peacefully?
Where are we making those phone calls, posting on social media, emailing and lobbying effectively our legislators?
The reason why Republicans and elected officials of leadership don't listen to us and are is in part because of us.
We have to turn that finger back at ourselves and say no.
There is no reason why we can't have no vaccine passports, no mask mandates, open our schools, open our businesses, sanctuary states of Second Amendment for every single state across the country if we effectively lobbied our legislators.
So you at home watching this right now, you have power.
I want you to call your state representative, your state senator, and you demand all of the things that I said to you And if they do not represent you, then we need to primary, repeal and replace them.
Now, I noticed, Scott, that you also have been getting involved at the local level.
You've been talking about, well, just recently you talk about the fact that one of my goals is to elect conservatives to school boards across America.
There are some people who follow things at the national level, but they don't bother with local elections.
They don't bother with school boards.
But isn't it a fact that a lot of critical decisions, indoctrination in the schools, that's occurring not because of some federal mandate alone, but But it's occurring because of what school boards decide at the local level, right?
Absolutely. All politics is local.
And quite frankly, I think even more important than Congress are the state legislatures are the school boards are the city councils.
Think about COVID for a second.
Democrats were able to shut us down because they controlled major cities, major city councils, major school boards.
They were able to tell you That you can't send your children to have in-person learning.
Well, let's take some of those 10 million dollars that we spend on one congressional race and instead I say we invest in 500 city council races, 500 school board races.
And if you want to take over and harness power, then you focus on the local level first.
I mean, in some ways, what you're saying is, and this has been on the left side, the George Soros model, as I understand it, which is that he put a lot of money into local district attorney races, races that typically are fought with $50,000 on each side.
And so Soros realized, hey, listen, if through my groups, I put $250,000 into this race, I can pick the winner up front.
And so the importance of investing at the local level is, Now, let me ask you about the conservatives.
Is it something about the psychology of Republicans that makes them reluctant to do that?
I think if you said to a group of Republicans, why aren't you in the street?
They would look at you like, really?
That's kind of not my thing.
I'm not exactly a street type.
So, is it the case that there's something about Republican or conservative psychology that needs to change?
You evidently have no problem doing it, but do you find that other Republicans have a problem being like you?
I think some of my methods in the past weren't welcomed openly, but when people see my success, that I've registered thousands of new voters, they see my success, that we helped win these state legislatures in 2020, like in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, which only have Democratic governors, by the way, which we can flip in 2022.
And when they see the success of, we just elected a good friend of mine to the school board in Illinois.
And I was just in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for an upcoming election on May 18th for two additional school board candidates who we hope to get through that primary.
Result is success begets success.
And so that means that we need to change up our methodology if you want to win.
Look at the Democrats. I'm not saying to not have values or principles, but the Democrats win for a reason.
Because a silent majority...
We'll always be outdone by a loud minority.
And that's what the Democrats have done and why they win.
Because we are silent. We are apathetic.
We don't do what the Democrats do.
I think what you're also saying, Scott, is that this is not your grandfather's fight.
Correct. Do you agree?
This is dangerous, Dinesh, when the President of the United States of America says in a presser that no amendments to the Constitution are absolute.
Joe Biden, no amendments to the Constitution are absolute.
What about women's suffrage?
What about the right of women to vote?
What about the First and Second Amendments?
The right to practice your religion.
What about the Fourth Amendment to protect us from unreasonable searches and seizures, Joe Biden?
When you say, Joe Biden, that no amendment to the Constitution is absolute, that is dangerous, that is reckless, and that is an assault on our freedoms and liberties.
And quite frankly, that's part of the reason why I'm going to continue this peaceful democratic fight every single day, because the Democratic Party clearly is assaulting our freedoms.
Scott, you're an amazing guy and you're an example to us all.
Keep doing what you're doing.
I wish I could clone you a hundred times over.
But I think what you're doing is you're making activists and you're inspiring people to do with you and alongside you these projects that you're up to.
So please keep up the great work.
And folks, here's a role model for the rest of us.
We're thinkers, we're talkers, but at times we also need to be letter writers and phone call makers.
We need to get out on the street like Scott does and make it happen.
Thanks, Scott Pressler, for coming on the podcast.
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I spoke yesterday about Biden's decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, a decision that mirrored an earlier decision by Trump to do exactly the same thing.
Now, what I want to focus on today is not the wisdom of the decision, but the media coverage, the radically different media approach to what, when Trump did it, as opposed to when Biden did the same thing.
Now, these have been collected by Drew Holden on social media.
It's at Drew Holden 360.
Follow this guy.
He produces some great stuff.
And he talks about how Time Magazine covered it.
Now when Trump said it, here's Time's headline, Can Donald Trump Accept a Defeat in Afghanistan?
Now when Biden decided to do the same thing, here's Time.
Biden's move brings to an end America's longest war, a long-simmering conflict that meant solemn sacrifice for military families and changed so much of day-to-day life for all Americans, writes Philip Elliott.
So when Trump does it, he's taking a horrible defeat.
When Biden is not in defeat, it's actually bringing the boys home.
Here is NPR. The Trump administration says it will pull thousands of troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan by January 15th.
A drawdown that has military leaders worried.
So right away, this cautionary note against what Trump wants to do.
Biden makes exactly the same decision.
President Biden plans to withdraw all remaining troops from Afghanistan by September 11th, the 20th anniversary of a terrorist attack, a senior administration official says.
So this time, you just quote the Biden people.
Yeah, it's been 20 years.
It's long enough. Time to bring the boys home.
So this is, again, NPR covering the same event in two completely different ways.
Now we turn to the New York Times.
When Trump decides to pull out of Afghanistan, here's how they go.
The Taliban wanted the US to leave Afghanistan.
And they go, Trump has now to some extent obliged, but without getting anything in return.
So, incompetent foreign policy decision by Trump and kind of a win for the Taliban.
Now, when Biden makes the same decision, you'd expect the same kind of coverage.
It's an obvious win for the Taliban, right?
Wrong. Now they're quoting Biden himself.
We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack 20 years ago.
That cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021.
So they're giving Biden's side of the story.
Suddenly the concerns about a Taliban victory have completely evaporated.
Suddenly we don't have to worry about that at all.
Here's MSNBC and Rachel Maddow.
When Trump decided it...
Within hours of Vladimir Putin's pivot to mention the US presence in Afghanistan, news of Donald Trump ordering a reduction of US troops.
So basically Trump, according to MSNBC and Maddow, is just doing what Putin wants.
Now, Biden makes the same decision.
Let's see what they say about Putin.
MSNBC headline, ending the longest war, Biden to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
Suddenly, Biden is no worries about Putin.
Doesn't matter if Putin wants the United States to do exactly the same thing.
That issue isn't even brought up.
So, the point I'm trying to make at is that if you were to step back...
And look at this differential coverage.
And we're not comparing apples and oranges.
We're comparing apples and apples.
We're comparing two administrations deciding on the same exact point.
And yet the media coverage couldn't be more different.
Suggesting what? Suggesting that there is actually no rational analysis being applied to the issue at hand.
If it benefits Russia for us to do it, it should benefit Russia in both cases, Trump and Biden.
If the Taliban has a big win when Trump withdraws, the Taliban has an equally big win when Biden withdraws.
So what you see here is not reason or rationality, but what you could call rationalization.
The premise is sort of like this.
If Trump does it, it has to be bad.
So no matter what it is, we look for reasons to make it bad.
And if Biden does it, it has to be good.
We're going to look for reasons to make it good.
Even if it appears bad, we will find the good in it.
And this is the kind of scurrilous, untrustworthy, dishonest.
And obviously, these people aren't that dumb that they don't know what they're doing.
They have to know what they're doing to do it.
So what we have here is not unintentional.
Discrepancy of coverage.
Feeling, for example, triumphing over reason.
But we have reason itself being deployed to serve partisan ideological ends.
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Cancel culture has come for Richard Dawkins.
news.
Remember Richard Dawkins?
This is the biologist, this is the atheist, the author of The God Delusion.
Together with the late Christopher Hitchens, these are perhaps the two leading faces of atheism in the world.
Dawkins has now gone sort of full-blown atheist with a whole series of books, ultimately moving him almost away from biological science and more into this kind of anti-Christian and anti-religious polemics.
Interestingly, the American Humanist Association, which was really excited about Dawkins' earlier bashing of religion, they gave him their 1996 Humanist of the Year Award.
And... And I guess they saw him as a champion of secular humanism.
But now they've decided to take the award back.
Why? Because they've gone all woke on Richard Dawkins.
Here's the American Humanist Association press release.
They say, established in 1953, the Humanist of the Year award is conferred for blah, blah, blah, being very human.
They go, Richard Dawkins was honored, but they go, regrettably, he has over the years had a history of making statements that used the guise of scientific discourse.
To demean marginalized groups.
So he doesn't use the guise of scientific discourse to marginalize and attack religion.
They're actually fine with that one.
But they don't like the fact that, well, his latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.
Now, what did Richard Dawkins say that provoked this ire?
I'm going to read the offending tweet by Dawkins.
He goes, In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of the NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black.
Factual statement. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men.
And here's the conclusion. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.
Discuss. Now, this is a fairly inoffending tweet.
It's just observing that when it comes to race, you seem not to be allowed to sort of traffic in racial identity.
I, for example, couldn't get away with saying, you know, Hey, I'm Oriental!
Or, Hey, I'm Black!
Or, Why? Because I'm not black.
I don't have any black ancestry.
So it would be fraudulent for me, and I guess for Rachel Dolezal, to pass myself off as black.
But evidently, it's not fraudulent for me to pass myself off as female.
It doesn't matter if I'm biologically male.
It doesn't matter what the doctor observed when I was actually being looked at under the ultrasound.
No, no. I identify as a woman and therefore I guess I can be or become a woman.
And I guess Dawkins is saying, how come?
How come one identity is malleable and not the other?
Now, when he's under criticism, Dawkins, of course, you know, I wish he was tougher about it because he kind of goes into this kind of whiny mode.
Here he is. I don't intend to disparage trans people.
I see my academic disgust question has been misconstrued as such, and I deplore this.
It was not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in the U.S. now exploiting the issue.
So, basically, to sort of avoid being criticized or canceled, what does Dawkins do?
He starts dissociating himself from the right.
The right is misusing this issue.
I, Richard Dawkins, am not.
I'm merely in the disgust mode.
Now, you might feel like my reaction to all this is going to be kind of, you know, karma, hello!
You want to cancel other people, it's going to happen to you, and we're going to be chuckling on the sidelines.
But I don't quite see it that way.
The way I see it more is that Dawkins is a kind of Trotsky guy.
Now, think of Leon Trotsky, who was, by the way, himself kind of on the communist side.
In fact, he was a communist. He fought against the czars.
He fought to defeat the old regime.
He fought to bring communism to Russia.
And then what happened? Communism came calling for him.
He found himself with a pickaxe in his back.
Lenin saw him as a threat and decided, you know what, the first fight was against the non-communists but now it's time to clean up the people on our own side.
And that's what's really happening here.
Here's Dawkins. He's taking all this trouble.
I'm not a Republican. I'm not a conservative.
No, no, no. I'm really on your side.
I'm with the left.
I'm a man of science.
I've been listening to the science.
And you've been cheering me on as I bash religion.
But the left is like, you know what?
We're happy you did that.
But we're not happy you're doing this.
We're not happy you're exposing our hypocrisy and inconsistency on the trans issue.
And therefore, we're going to take back your award.
We're going to push you out of our fold.
You're not one of us.
Intellectually speaking, you're going to end up like Trotsky with a knife in your back.
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In the last segment, I talked about the biologist Richard Dawkins discussing the trans issue a little bit and the race issue and this whole notion of being able to identify as something else.
And then Dawkins ended his tweet with the phrase, discuss, discuss.
So I want to pick that up, but I want to take it in a somewhat new direction.
I want to discuss... The central proposition of one of Dawkins' best-known books.
Probably his most best-known book is called The Selfish Gene.
Very powerful book, well worth reading, by the way.
But his book that is most identified, I think, with evolution and the evolutionary argument, and one may say the transcendent or theological significance of that argument, is a book called The Blind Watchmaker.
Now, to understand this concept of the blind watchmaker, we have to go back To an argument that was made in the early 19th century, in fact in 1802, by an Anglican theologian named William Paley.
William Paley. And it was called the argument from design.
William Paley was trying to sort of prove the existence of God.
And he used a very ingenious argument, which I want to state now.
Basically, Paley said the following.
Try to imagine that you're walking, let's say, on the seashore.
And you're looking down and you see some shelves and you see some stones.
And as far as you know, you don't know where those shelves or stones came from.
As far as you know, they could have been there for a long time.
They could have been there forever, for all you know.
But now let's say that while walking you come across a watch and you pick it up and you look at it.
Paley says that by looking at it and examining it, you know right away that somebody made that watch.
In other words, you know right away that the watch didn't just sort of evolve.
It didn't just spring into being.
The watch is the product of intelligent design.
The working of the watch, its complexity, the dials, the keeping of time, all the different elements that make a watch, make it clear to you, even if you have no idea who made the watch, you know that someone did.
Some intelligent being constructed that watch, and that's the key difference between a watch and, say, a stone.
And Paley's point was that the universe is like that.
The universe shows, if you will, the signature, the handiwork of its intelligent designer.
So this was a very powerful, in fact, almost unanswerable argument at the time Paley made it.
And Paley, who was actually a kind of naturalist himself, gave lots of examples of this apparent design.
Now, Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker, is intended to refute Paley and is intended to say, no...
There's no watchmaker that is making the world.
The world is the product of a blind watchmaker.
And what is this blind watchmaker according to Dawkins?
It is evolution itself.
I'm now quoting Dawkins from his book, The Blind Watchmaker.
He talks about the fact that the apparent design of the universe and the apparent design of life itself is the result of a blind, unconscious, automatic process of natural selection.
He goes, the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life is the blind watchmaker.
Now, I want to think about this for a little bit because evidently Dawkins thinks that by describing the process of evolution, which is to say living creatures coming one out of the other, in fact, even human beings descending not from apes, but human beings and apes and other related creatures all coming from a common ancestor.
Dawkins thinks that if he's able to show that, he has proven that That there is a blind watchmaker.
In other words, that there is no intelligent design behind all this.
And I want to say that this is a massive, whopping non-sequitur.
In other words, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
I'm even going to, for the purposes of argument, grant the premise.
I'm going to grant all of evolution, not just microevolution, but macroevolution.
Let's assume it's all true.
And I'm going to ask what follows from that.
Now, let me give an example to sort of show where I'm going at.
If you were to show me a man, let's say a craftsman of the old days, making by hand a car, and at the end of the process you've got a car, it's obviously the product of intelligent design, and there's the craftsman, there's the guy who made it, that's kind of the Paley argument.
Now here's what Dawkins is saying.
Dawkins is saying, we come across a process, and let's call it an automobile factory, in which you've got all these mechanized things going on.
And in one place, they assemble the wheels.
In another place, they cut the steel.
And in the third place, they put all the seats and the leather in and so on.
And at the end of the process, at the end of this, let's even call it a blind process, we get...
A car. Boom!
And I look around and I go, where's the craftsman?
I don't see a guy putting all these pieces together.
I see a blind mechanized process.
But the fact is, in both cases...
You have a designer.
The factory doesn't assemble itself.
The pieces ultimately are programmed to be in there.
That's how they all work so harmoniously together.
So in other words, by switching from the craftsman making the car to the factory making the car, you haven't proven that there was no design.
You've merely altered the type of design.
The way in which the designer has worked is not directly, but through a process.
It was the poet Robert Frost who saw this very clearly.
He was at one point confronted by his old mother.
And his old mother said,"...I don't understand what all these scientists are saying.
They're telling me that man was made out of mud." She goes,"...I thought that man was made by God.""...What do you think about this, Robert?" And first of all, Robert Frost points out to his mom that this idea that man is made out of mud is somewhat similar to the biblical idea, dust thou art and to dust thou will return.
In other words, the Bible is not against the idea that we're made out of mud.
The Bible actually says it.
But Frost's deeper point was he goes, Mom, have you ever heard of prepared mud?
No. And what Frost is getting at is there are two types of mud.
There is mud, and there is mud that has been prepared by someone, by some transcendent mud maker, to make mud of a certain type that's going to generate bacteria, and viruses, and molecules, and then unicellular creatures, and then multicellular creatures, and ultimately...
Animals and man and a creature with consciousness who is able to turn around and understand that whole entire process.
Bottom line?
It doesn't matter whether you believe in evolution or not.
In neither case have you refuted the idea of a watchmaker who is not blind and who has in fact put this entire process into motion and supervises it, is in a sense presiding over it at all times.
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There are two major engines, I would say, of driving modern atheism.
One is the idea that a good or just God would not have created so much injustice or allowed so much injustice and evil in the world.
I've written a whole book on this subject.
It was called God Forsaken in the hardcover and then What's So Good About God in the softcover.
And the other engine of atheism is the idea of evolution.
The idea that, hey, we don't need an explanation of God for the universe or even for life because we already have one.
And it's a sufficient explanation and it gives a full account of It gives a full account of life.
And I don't think this is true.
And so I want to actually look at evolution for a moment now.
Once again, not disputing the evolutionary argument as it is made, even by the most fervent atheist.
But rather pointing to the four or five key points that evolution does not account for.
In fact, in some cases doesn't even pretend to account for.
It's important for us to know that evolution presumes certain things that it cannot itself prove.
Let's say what those are first.
Evolution cannot account for the beginning of life.
This is actually fundamental and accepted by every honest evolutionary biologist, that evolution can explain how one form of life became another form of life under the pressures of natural selection, but evolution doesn't account for life itself.
How did we get life? Evolution doesn't know.
Evolution starts with life and then goes, now that we have this life, how do we get another type of life that is similar to this?
And we're going to try to show you how that process works.
So evolution starts with living things and then moves to how they generate other living things.
Number two, evolution cannot explain the cell.
Now, the cell is an extremely complicated piece of machinery.
In fact, the cell can be almost described as a sort of computer.
This isn't my analogy.
This is the analogy given by the biologist Franklin Herald in kind of a standard textbook, a classic work called The Way of the Cell.
I'm just going to read a few lines from it.
Even the simplest cell, he says, is an exceedingly complex mixture containing thousands of different molecules.
Cells display levels of regularity and complexity that exceed by orders of magnitude any other non-living object found in nature.
In fact, he says, cells gives every indication of what any engineer calls purpose.
He goes, quote, So cells are able to break down foodstuffs, extract energy, manufacture precursors, assemble constituents, note and execute genetic instructions, and keep all this frantic activity coordinated.
The cell functions almost like a sort of a software program, the equivalent of many encyclopedias.
The processing power of a cell, says Harold, is comparable to that of a supercomputer.
Moreover, he says, cells can copy themselves.
Now, think about that.
This is sort of like saying, like, you can put the most complex modern engineer to work and ask him, can you make a hammer that knows how to make other hammers?
That can make on its own other hammers?
No. Can't do it.
So, for all the marvels of modern science, modern science doesn't know how to make a fruit fly, let alone fruit flies that can make other fruit flies.
So, evolution cannot account for the cell.
Evolution assumes that we have cells, that the cell is the basic unit of life.
Evolution takes the cell for granted.
So, if the cell is the product of design, evolution relies on that pre-existing design.
Now, Let's move to number three.
Evolution can't explain consciousness.
Yes, we are material beings in the world.
In that respect, we're made of some of the same physical components, some of the same chemical components as this pen, for example, or this phone.
But the difference, of course, is that the pen doesn't have consciousness.
We do. So what is the evolutionary function of consciousness?
This is actually debated to this day, but there's no account of it.
There's no good, plausible account of why human...
Because it is conceivable we could be human beings and do all the things that we do in the world.
We could survive, we could reproduce, we could do all this stuff without being conscious.
But we are. Evolution can't account for it.
And finally, evolution doesn't really account either for human rationality or human morality.
It doesn't account for human rationality.
Why? Because according to evolution, we are programmed to survive.
And so, our minds are not designed for truth.
Our minds are designed merely to adapt and to survive.
So, we could have minds that adapt and survive and run when we're chased by lions and figure out ways to solve problems, but...
Have no concept of true and false because true and false is unimportant.
Survival is the things that matters.
That's what we're programmed to do.
And then finally, morality.
I realize there's a whole literature that tries to show that evolution actually does account for morality because morality is a form of disguised selfishness.
This was actually Richard Dawkins.
Our genes are trying to perpetuate themselves and so on.
And we benefit people because we have genes in common with them.
But if you just step back from all that, and all of it is all kind of ingenious, but at the end of the day, it's unconvincing to me for one simple reason.
When I think of the core meaning of morality, it can be summarized this way.
Morality is what Adam Smith called the impartial spectator.
A little being that lives inside of me where if I want to do something bad, and it's almost always something that will benefit myself in some way, morality is a little voice in my head that goes, no, you're not doing that.
You can't do it.
It speaks with this kind of unimpeachable authority.
And we all know it because we all have this morality inside of us.
In fact, if you don't have it, you're a psychopath, you're a sociopath, you're not even held responsible for your actions.
The bottom line of it is morality is an intrinsic feature of being human.
And the core function of morality is to check your desire to pursue unlimited self-interest, unlimited greed, unlimited conquest, unlimited this and that, which may all benefit you, but there's that little voice that speaks inside your head that goes, don't do that.
That's not right. That's wrong.
And ultimately, you may disagree with that.
You may decide not to follow it, but there it is.
And it's inside of you, and it's a part of you.
And evolution has no explanation for why it does that.
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I really rely on you to get the word out.
When I look at my views on this podcast, I'm being restricted on Facebook.
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So make sure that you subscribe to the podcast and put notifications.
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It'll be right there for you to see and help me get the word out.
I'm counting on you. To help draw more listeners and viewers to this podcast.
I really appreciate it. Let's go to today's mailbox and today's question. Listen Hi, Dinesh. My name is Lisa. Love your podcast and watch it every day. Enjoy the various guests and topics that you cover Last week you asked for feedback regarding your podcast and here's mine I would love to see you talk about how religion and science can coexist Many of my friends have chosen science over religion and
cannot seem to reconcile the two This is a Well, first of all, I love this question because it's so continuous with what I was just talking about in connection with Richard Dawkins, which is indeed the ways in which science and religion, but also specifically science and Christianity...
Far from being at odds, are actually marching in lockstep, are consistent with each other, even though they are doing different things.
You can almost say that science is describing the how, and religion is explaining the who and the why.
Now, I've talked in the last segment about biology.
I want to talk a little bit about physics, because physics is sort of the queen, if you will, of the sciences.
And by the way, all this stuff is covered at some length right here.
What's so great about Christianity?
I've done three books on apologetics.
If you start anywhere, start here.
And in fact, looking at the table of contents, I've got You know, three chapters under the headline, Christianity and Science.
I have Christianity and Reason, The Theological Roots of Science.
And then I talk about Christianity and the Invention of Invention.
And then I talk about, I go into the Galileo case in some detail.
Here I want to just give a single example that shows the ways in which science and Christianity can sort of harmonize in a beautiful way.
Hundreds of years ago, this is going back to around the 5th century, the 4th century AD, somebody asked a question of the church father, Augustine.
And the question was this.
What was God doing before he made the universe?
Kind of a startling question, but the premise of it was that God has infinite time on his hands, and so he must have been occupying himself in some way before he made the universe, before it occurred to him, let's make a universe, let's make man.
So what was God doing?
And Augustine to this gave a very remarkable answer.
He said that before the universe, There was no time.
In other words, the word before is kind of meaningless because God created time and space, by the way, along with the universe.
The time and space are properties of the universe.
You may almost say that once upon a time, there was no time.
Augustine uses this to give his explanation of eternity.
God is outside of time.
God just doesn't extend through time.
God is, in a sense, looking into the universe, and time is a property of that universe.
Now, this remarkable idea, which would have in some ways made almost no rational sense when Augustine said it, It's been stunningly confirmed by modern physics and specifically by the idea of the Big Bang.
Why? Because the idea of the Big Bang is that if you go back 14.5 billion years, there was a momentous event, what scientists call a singularity.
And not only did the universe, you may say, spring into being, bang...
But space and time also came into being along with the universe.
In other words, the whole premise of the Big Bang, the whole understanding of the Big Bang is that space and time are indeed properties of our universe.
So here you have Augustine.
1,500 years ago, making this stunning statement, which is now confirmed, corroborated, and supported by the most sophisticated modern physics of our own day.
This is just one way, and there are many ways, and I'll talk more about them as the podcast goes on.
Many ways. In which science is independently confirming, in exhilarating ways, the claims made long ago by a group of Hebrew prophets and church fathers who never did any scientific experiments, but they merely said, God told us.
And it turns out, they were right.
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