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Dec. 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:56
LOSING OUR PRIVILEGES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep238
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White privilege, I think we all know, is a complete absurdity.
But there are two other kinds of privilege that we seem to be losing in this country.
American privilege and the privilege of being raised in a two-parent family.
TV journalist John Stossel is going to join me.
We're going to talk about how he got Facebook to admit that its fact-checks aren't fact-checks at all.
I want to talk about Richard Nixon and his flawed greatness, a greatness that is apparent when you contrast Nixon with Reagan.
And finally, author Eric Metaxas will come on.
We're going to talk about, this is kind of a pre-Christmas discussion on the evidence for God and Christianity.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about the concept of privilege.
Now, we often hear about white privilege, and white privilege is largely bogus.
One easy indication that white privilege is not very operative today is simply ask yourself the question, in which direction are people trying to, quote, pass?
So to pass is to pretend to be a member of the other race.
By the way, about 100 years ago, lots of people who were black or mixed race, Why?
Because all the privilege then, let's just say in 1921, was in fact white privilege.
But today you notice that from Elizabeth Warren to Rachel Dolezal to many others, people are trying to pass themselves off as something else.
Pass themselves off as black, pass themselves off as Latino, pass themselves off as Native American.
And that's because, quite obviously, the legal privilege, the benefits for college admissions and government grants and promotions, and even the social chic is with, you may say, minority privilege.
But I want to talk about other types of privilege.
I've talked before about American privilege, the privilege of being an American in the world, and that's a privilege that was very real.
I think it still is real, but it was even more real between the 1940s, the end of World War II, and I would say perhaps the election of Barack Obama, because what's been happening under Obama and now continuing under Biden is an effort, and I think it is largely a conscious effort, an ideological effort, to unwind, to undo American privilege.
I want to talk today, however, about a different kind of privilege, and it's the privilege of being raised in a nuclear or two-parent family.
Now, there's a whole body of research on the importance of being raised in a family.
And I recognize that when I use the term family, family structures can differ over time.
There is no one kind of fixed recipe.
Just to give you an example, I grew up in a country that has more extended families than nuclear families.
You walk into the typical Hindu home in India and it's not a dad and mom and two kids.
That is the case in some families, but I would say in the majority, We're good to go.
But that being said, there's no doubt that children benefit enormously from being raised in a family with two parents, a dad and a mom, ideally, that are looking after you and that give you the benefit of their labor, their effort, their savings.
They provide for you. They look after you.
They put time into you.
They invest in you.
And other family structures, single-parent families, for example, or foster care, you don't quite have the same thing.
And even though single moms may be working...
Heroically, to try to do multiple jobs, it's not as easy as I think these moms would be the first to tell you.
Now, the strength of America is the strength of its families.
And all of this is a way of saying that the nuclear family, which was once really the norm in America, has been shrinking.
Here's an article based upon the latest government data.
Just 18% of U.S. household today We're good to go.
Women are marrying much later.
Men are marrying much later.
The fertility rate is down.
Many more Americans are living alone.
The percentage of adults in the US living with a spouse is down 50% from 10 years ago.
Wow! So you have a lot of places, not just single moms with kids, but single dads or just single men living just by themselves.
And there's a trend that is away from marriage and away from the nuclear family.
In 2021, 34% of those over age 15 have reported never being married.
That's up from 23% in 1950.
So these are important and lasting changes.
And now, the family crisis a generation ago, in fact, in the 1960s, was mainly thought to be a crisis of the black family.
Former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now dead, but Daniel Patrick Moynihan did a famous report on what he called the Negro family, I believe in 1965.
And he said, there's a crisis of the Negro family.
The illegitimacy rate for blacks in the country is 25%.
And people were a little shocked.
Now, of course, some leftists tried to blame this on slavery.
Slavery destroyed the black family.
And this is patent nonsense.
Yes, slavery put great stress on the black family when slavery existed.
But after slavery, blacks made a heroic effort to reunite their families.
And the black family structure between, say, 1900 and 1965...
Was pretty good.
Yes, the black illegitimacy rate was higher than the white rate, which was very low, 4% or 5% of the time.
But nevertheless, most black families were intact families.
Now, here's the real shocker, that if you fast forward to the present, you discover that the white illegitimacy rate today is higher than the black rate was in 1965 when Moynihan did his report.
So the illegitimacy rate for whites today is in the 30% to 35%.
It depends on whether or not you count Hispanics in this or whether you count them separately.
And the black illegitimacy rate has just gone through the roof.
It's now something hovering around 70% to 75%.
So this means that the vast majority of black kids are not raised.
In a nuclear family, you have lots of children and youths growing up without their biological fathers.
Now, when I think back Growing up in India, I think about the fact that, yes, I grew up in a middle-class home, but there were lots of kids who went to our school, smart kids, hardworking kids, kids who made something of themselves, and they were much, much poorer than my family.
In fact, they would have one meal a day and then just have a little bit of a snack to kind of tide them over.
And nevertheless, these were kids who had a dad and they had a mom, and that's what really mattered.
That was their privilege, even in a third-world country.
And I think so it is in America today.
When I look at some of the broken families and some of these kids who migrate towards gangs, migrate towards violence, towards drugs.
Of course, they're responsible for their own actions.
I don't mean to imply that they're not.
But this is a problem rooted in the breakdown of the family.
Now, there's a political implication of this that I want to spell out.
And that's this. By and large, if you find a married couple with children and you test their politics, there's a very good chance that they're going to be voting Republican.
They're going to be leaning or solid Republican.
You find a married couple without children, and they're going to be politically harder to call.
They are probably going to be more toward the center, a little more difficult to predict.
They fall on either side of the fence.
You look at someone who's divorced or a single parent mom, chances are that they're going to be leaning or solid Democratic.
So what I'm getting at is that there is a correlation between family structure and political affinity.
And that means that the GOP, the Republican Party, for more reasons than wanting to heal the country, wanting to heal the culture, wanting to give kids a better life, all of that is true, but also to protect itself for its own political self-interest.
The GOP, the Republican Party, has a direct stake in the culture war.
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Guys, I talked yesterday about Facebook and its bogus fact-checking operation.
I'm delighted to welcome John Stossel to the podcast.
Boy, I was honored several years ago to be featured in one of John's specials.
This was on What's So Great About America.
John, this was several years ago.
John Stossel, in case you don't know, you probably do, is the founder of Stossel TV, previously at Fox News.
Before that, he was on network television, 2020, Good Morning America.
He's been a veteran investigative journalist focusing on economic issues for now, wow, almost half a century.
John, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
This is a fascinating story.
Let me start by just asking you to talk about the two stories that you did.
That were flagged or marked by Facebook as being somehow misleading or inaccurate or lacking context.
What were your journalistic sins that led to these tags?
Well, the sins are that the fact checker just doesn't want certain things said.
But the first story was one on California's wildfires where An environmentalist simply said, anybody who really looks at this knows it's not about climate change, like the governor says.
It's about bad government management.
These were government-fueled fires because they left all the debris on the ground and it burned.
Forests that were well-managed experienced just as much heat increase.
And I said, climate change is real.
It's gone up three degrees and A hundred years in California, but it's not the main reason for these fires.
So Facebook doesn't do the fact checking directly itself.
It partners with the Poynter Institute, this liberal so-called journalism group, and they approve certain groups.
And the one that's been that censored any discussion of the virus coming out of a lab in China It's the same one that attacked me.
It's called Science Feedback.
They have a subsidiary called Health Feedback and one called Climate Feedback.
Those are the people who just said, this is misleading and only partially true.
And, you know, who cares?
But they put a label on it.
And some of my fans felt I had betrayed them because here they trusted my reporting and now it's being called misleading and partially true.
And then looking at their link, they put up a quote in their review, which was something I never said.
The quote was, Blunt.
Climate change did not cause California's wildfires, it was government.
And, you know, that's part of it.
But I said, climate change played a part.
It's just, it's something I hadn't said.
So we complained to them, they don't change anything.
We complained to Facebook, they don't change anything.
Okay, we let it go.
Then a second time, another climate change story, same group.
This one was titled, Are We Doomed?
And three skeptics from climate scientists wanted to debate the alarmists.
And we set up a little debate stage with three empty chairs because the alarmists never want to debate anybody.
And they made their case For the fact that America could adjust.
Holland adjusted years ago with primitive technology, building dikes, and convincingly I thought, made a case that this is not the biggest crisis in the world.
24 million people watched that on Facebook.
Facebook at the time was my biggest outlet.
But then they attacked it again.
This one they called, I forget, their false, something like that, their designation.
And if you get two hits from this group on Facebook or any group, Facebook throttles your reach.
So I've gone from millions to thousands on Facebook.
And so, this time, I sue.
And Facebook, again, doesn't remove the inaccurate quote, doesn't do anything.
Except, recently, in court papers, they responded to the suit by saying, our fact-checks are opinion, and you can't sue us, because we're opinion journalists like you are, Stossel.
Well, let's pause for a second.
I'm quoting them now.
The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory.
To the contrary, they constitute protected opinion.
And then they also seem to suggest that this wasn't their doing.
These are the opinions of this external group called Climate Feedback.
Although, as you've pointed out, Climate Feedback is recruited by Facebook, and it's Facebook who puts the tags on you, not Climate Feedback.
Facebook is the one restricting your reach.
Facebook is the one that is flagging your posts.
And so Facebook has seemed to be trying to duck responsibility by saying, it wasn't us, it was these guys we hired.
And second, they seem to be saying...
Our fact checks aren't fact checks at all.
I mean, I have to congratulate you because to get them to say this is a massive accomplishment in and of itself.
I hope it does some good because these groups just ban the other side, ideas they don't want heard.
And we need more open debate, not less.
Do you think the solution, John, is to on the one hand hold Facebook accountable the way you're doing, but on the other hand to start building alternative platforms?
I mean, there's Parler, there's Getter, there's Locals.
I guess Trump is talking about a new platform.
But without those platforms, Rumble, absolutely, we're being throttled, as you said, from communicating even with people who are on our own side.
Right, but what is not so great about those platforms is it's all conservative.
It's conservatives talking to conservatives.
And I love Facebook.
I find my beach volleyball games that way and get to know people's names.
And it's a wonderful way to communicate.
And they do have more people.
And if America is going to thrive, we all need to talk to each other.
So do you think, John, then the solution is something more along the lines of perhaps antitrust or taking away the Section 230, which clearly is not going to happen until at least 2024, that some way of taking these, I think it's fair to say, quasi-monopolies and either breaking them up or making them respect the principle of free speech on the grounds that they are at least working in some coordination with government entities to do what they do?
I'm skeptical of all those solutions.
I don't think laws are the answer.
With my lawsuit, I'm hoping someone high up at Facebook would just look at the facts and say, oh, look what we did.
This is disgusting.
And they will get rid of these Poynter Institute leftist track checkers and say, look, except for child molestation and direct incitement of violence, we're We're going to let people say whatever they want.
But I mean, John, I detect in this a kind of optimism that doesn't seem to be backed up by the behavior of these entities.
In other words, what if their view is, listen, we're in a big political debate in this country, and we, the Silicon Valley moguls, are on one side of that debate.
Now, the more we can do to shut the other side up...
That's going to make our side stronger.
We're more likely to get our way if we're able to shut up the other side.
So it's a raw exercise of power and the appeals to goodwill.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg may be sitting, having his breakfast, just laughing if he watches this.
So be it.
I'm skeptical of your optimism about government solutions.
It's a private company.
He invented the thing.
He ought to get to do whatever he wants.
And I'm optimistic that if they really censor everything, that the public will turn against them and some news site will replace them.
Very interesting. Thank you, John.
I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on to share your thoughts.
Good to talk to you, Dinesh.
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There's a remarkable case out of Fordham University.
Fordham is the Catholic University in New York.
A lecturer in the English department, Christopher Trogan, has been terminated, fired, for what?
Apparently confusing the names of two black students in his class.
Wow. Now, apparently this mix-up occurred in September of this year.
It's a composition class.
And after the professor made this mistake, he sent an email basically saying he was really sorry that this happened.
It was a mistake. He called it, quote, an innocent mistake.
And he said that both the students had arrived late.
He was in the middle of reading the work of another student, and he got confused.
And I'm now quoting him.
He said, Now, one of the two black students, a person named Chantel Sims, Basically says, no big deal.
I wasn't offended. It's a mistake.
Anyone can make a mistake. But the other student, who appears to be a trans, and I say that because the student is using the pronoun there.
So this is a kind of...
Giveaway pronoun here.
And this student went and protested to the dean and basically said that they felt uncomfortable in the class because their name had been mixed up with the other kid.
And so the dean, Eva Badowska, apparently the dean of the faculty, first places this professor, Christopher Trogan, on immediate suspension with pay and benefits and then terminates him.
Now, the great irony of it is that this Trogan fellow is actually kind of a leftist himself.
He says, quote, that his class is focused on issues of equity, justice, and inclusion.
He says he has, quote, devoted his entire life...
So it's a bitter irony that this is what has come back to bite this guy.
And I feel a bit sorry for him, even though clearly in some ways you could say he has made the bed that he is now forced to sleep in.
And of course, you've got all the signature moves of the left.
Here's Professor Trogan, quote,"...I was never informed of the charges against me, nor of the nature of the investigation to which I was subjected." And here you go.
The guy has no job.
They've cut off his salary, his health benefits, his life insurance, his retirement fund.
An Indian kid in the class, a woman, Pradhania Subramaniam, she says, Krogan was, quote, a really great professor.
And she goes, quote, I did not think that he did anything wrong.
So here we see how the doctrine of social justice...
And inclusion is used as a truncheon to go after guys who make, in this case, think about it, I mean, yeah, the guy made a mistake, but does the penalty fit the crime?
He deserved to be suspended, let alone fired, for mixing up two kids and then making a kind of heartfelt apology.
This is a very bad reflection, not just on critical race theory and the intolerance that goes with it, but also on Fordham University, which made itself a party to this kind of barbarous response.
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Feel the difference. Yesterday I had on the podcast Jeff Shepard.
A lawyer who had served in the Nixon administration, who's written this quite interesting and remarkable book, The Nixon Conspiracy, which is kind of a post-mortem, an in-depth look at what really happened in Watergate.
But it got my mind as I was listening to him, thinking about Nixon, a man that I always found remarkably intriguing, a very interesting figure.
many years ago when I was recently out of Dartmouth, some Dartmouth pals and I sat down and we sort of had an interesting discussion. We said if we could have breakfast with one person alive in the world, who would it be? And we made a list of candidates and of course Pope John Paul II, if I remember, was on that list. Reagan, who was president at the time, was on that list and so was Richard Nixon.
And when we counted the votes from about eight of us, Nixon came in hands down first.
We all thought it would be most interesting to meet Nixon.
Not Reagan. Because our theory on Reagan was that Reagan in person...
It would be pretty much the same as Reagan on TV. It would be just kind of what we already knew.
But Nixon would be really fascinating to see up close.
And so what we did was we created something, and this is a little bit of a scam, but we called it the Dartmouth Breakfast Club.
It didn't previously exist, but we created it for this purpose.
And we made some stationery that looked legitimate.
And we sent a letter to Richard Nixon in Saddle River, New Jersey, which is where he lived at the time, saying, you're invited to be the inaugural speaker of the Dartmouth Breakfast Club.
And to our complete astonishment, he accepted.
And he came, and he was very gracious, and we took photographs.
This is kind of a treasured photograph I have as a young man shaking hands with Nixon.
And he sat down, he had a nice breakfast in a private room in Washington, D.C. And then he gave us a little talk about the world, and it was just fascinating to hear.
He spoke for maybe 15 minutes, but here was a man who could quote Sun Tzu, and he could quote Disraeli, and he could quote Machiavelli.
And I think of all this now because I'm thinking to myself, you know, first of all, I don't even think Reagan could do this.
But certainly, George W. Bush, are you kidding me?
You know, Barack Obama, no way.
Biden, forget about it.
I don't even think Biden can read anymore, anyway.
So you've seen here in America, really in our own lifetime, a dramatic falling off of standards.
But even so, I have to say that although Nixon was this learned statesman, he didn't have Reagan's vision.
Nixon was talking at that time about, He called it, well, it was a form of real politique.
It was detente.
It was finding a way to contain and live with the Soviet Union.
But Nixon wasn't visionary enough to predict and work toward a world of rollback in which the Soviet Union itself would not exist.
Not just that Eastern Europe would be liberated, but the Soviet Union itself would dissolve.
It was Reagan who actually envisioned and carried out that vision.
At one point, one of our buddies, Greg Fossettl from Dartmouth, asked Nixon a rather uncomfortable question.
He said to Nixon that here we are in the 1980s and the Iran-Contra scandal is raging.
But, said Greg, it looks like Reagan's going to get out of it, even though it might have wounded him a little bit.
Reagan is going to survive.
And yet, said Greg to Nixon, Watergate, did you, Richard Nixon, in?
Now, why is that?
Why is Reagan going to make it when you couldn't make it?
And you could tell this question really irritated Nixon.
I could kind of see him squirming uncomfortably.
And then he gave what was really a little bit of a nasty answer.
And he said about Reagan, he goes, well, you know, he says, at least he could say he was stupid.
And it took us all by surprise because we realized what Nixon was saying is that that's Reagan's defense.
I don't know what's going on.
Yeah, sure, I did the Iran-Contra deal, but, you know, I don't know what was really kind of the Biden defense you'd say today, where Biden can say, well, I don't even know my middle name.
Why are you asking me about this?
And Nixon's point is that he was too intelligent ever to be accused of not knowing what was going on.
So in a way, this was a rationalization by Nixon, blaming his undoing on his own, you may say, excessive intelligence.
But this was the kind of man that Nixon was, a fascinating character in his own day, and certainly the kind of character that is rare in our time.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast.
Welcome back to the podcast, Eric Metaxas.
Eric came on a few weeks ago.
We were talking about his fascinating book called Is Atheism Dead?
And I wanted to do kind of round two with Eric because this material is so rich and of course we're walking right into Christmas.
Eric is a fellow Salem radio host.
And also, his articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
He's written a number of bestselling books.
We're talking about his latest one, Is Atheism Dead?
Eric, let's start with the sort of wide argument of this book, because part of what you're saying, as I see it, is that there are converging currents of evidence that are coming in from physics, from astronomy,
from brain sciences, from From archaeology, all of which are leading to a stunning vindication of both God and Christianity, and that this is the exact opposite message of what we've been getting from the culture and from elites in the culture for decades.
Talk a little bit about this kind of bird's eye view of your book, and then we can zoom into some of the details.
Yeah, thank you.
That's precisely it.
It's as if The man lands on moon and nobody reports about it.
We have something happening right now that's been happening that is as big news as it gets.
But because the cultural elites, the cognoscenti as it were, are really...
Dramatically secular, even if they're not personally secular, they've adopted the secular narrative of recent decades, going all the way back really to the 19th century, that they have avoided even looking at this evidence.
And the evidence for God from science, and think of the irony, because we've all, even believers have internalized the nonsense that science is at odds with faith, reason is at odds with religion.
It's complete nonsense, but we've all internalized that And there is huge irony in the fact that now, while we're living, the evidence literally from science...
For the existence of a creator God, it's not just that the evidence has been coming in and it's interesting and it's pointing to God.
The evidence is so overwhelming, as I argue in the book, as to be open and shut.
In other words, if you want to be an agnostic today, that's fine.
We can talk about why you don't like the Bible or why you disagree with this or how can a good God allow you.
We can have a conversation. But if you want to be intellectually honest...
Today, I don't think you can say, there's no God.
I believe there's no God. Science, think of the irony.
Science has made that impossible.
The only problem is no one knows about it.
Nobody has heard about the science.
And so I put it in the book because I said, this is like a newsflash.
People need to know the evidence from science, from every part of science, is so dramatic.
So you don't know, what's the headline?
Is the headline that this evidence is overwhelming, that it effectively proves the existence of a creator God?
Or is the headline that this is the fact and no one's talking about it?
It's like the Hunter Biden laptop.
You think, this is really bizarre.
Can it be true if everyone refuses to talk about it?
That's what we're dealing with right now.
And when I was writing this book, I said to myself, there are going to be many people, including people who already believe in God, We're good to go.
You would think it would be over, above the fold, New York Times, Washington Post, major stuff, but somehow the culture has been locked into this kind of secular mode so that that evidence tends just to be ignored.
Sometimes people really have a hostility toward it, but usually I think people have just so internalized this secular idea, this lie, that Reason is at odds with faith, that they just tend to ignore this information.
And I'm here to say, and I say in the book, Is Atheism Dead?, that the evidence has become so overwhelming that we need to push back to anybody who says, oh, I'm an atheist.
I think you need to say, I don't think you can be an atheist.
If you want to be an agnostic, that's open to you.
But atheism is dead.
I think we need to be blunt and say that these are the facts.
The facts are, in fact, absolutely overwhelming.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to press Eric on what are two or three of these lines of evidence that he has found so powerful that even an agnostic would have to go, I better rethink my position.
We'll be right back. Breaking news, in case you haven't heard, U.S. consumer prices soared 6.8% compared to last year.
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Again, text Dinesh to 989898 I'm back, guys, with my friend Eric Metaxas.
We're talking about his terrific book, Is Atheism Dead?
Eric, you mentioned in the earlier segment the converging lines of evidence that, you know, you're saying doesn't really even leave that much room for doubt.
And people may be saying, wow, what's Eric even talking about here?
So, let me just put the ball in your court and say, if you were to start off, if I were to say, show me, Eric, proof that in the universe, or from the universe, we can see, as the Bible promises, right?
The Bible says that you can see evidence for God in the things He has made.
How would you provide a secular or perhaps a rational vindication of this biblical proposition?
Well, first of all, maybe the most astonishing thing is how we have really thoughtlessly adopted the secularist view, which is a A preposterous lie that science is somehow at odds with faith or the Bible.
We've all sort of acted as, well, that's reasonable.
Okay, it's not reasonable.
Literally, modern science comes directly from Christian faith.
Period. End of sentence.
Modern science, the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, would not have happened, did not happen, Until people with a particularly Christian viewpoint brought that viewpoint to looking at the world around us.
So not only is science not at odds with faith, but the Christian faith specifically gives us science.
So if you're a fan of science, you have to thank Christianity, historically speaking.
You don't have to be a Christian, but there's no way around it.
The earliest scientists, the greatest scientists who ever lived, the men who gave us modern science were usually devoted Christians.
They didn't just think that Christianity was compatible with science.
They believed that looking into the universe was proving the existence of a God so creative, so masterful, so intelligent, that it would bring us to our knees in awe.
The fact of the matter is that's true.
And so what would follow logically is that we would see through science evidence of God.
Now, it's a fact that we have, but as I was saying earlier, roughly since the 1966 Time Magazine article that said, is God dead?
We've kind of all adopted the secular narrative where we kind of ignore that evidence.
And the irony is that evidence has increased very dramatically.
Now, the fine-tuned universe is, that's the classic argument.
Some people know about it, you certainly do, but I'm amazed how many people, including people of faith, have never heard of this.
It was Christopher Hitchens, the arch-atheist, who was asked in the back of a car, what is the most compelling argument for God?
In other words, you argue against God.
What's the most compelling argument?
He said, without missing a beat, without any question, he said, it is the fine-tuned argument, meaning that science is now—it couldn't do it 100 years ago, even 50 years ago—but science is now so advanced that it can detect things— My goodness, this thing we've detected, this parameter, if it were.1% higher or.1% lower, there would be no universe.
If it were slightly changed over here, there would be no planet Earth.
Over and over again, science, again, think of the irony, discovers things that say, this looks very strange.
If it weren't for the moon being precisely the size that it is, doing what it's doing, we couldn't have life on Earth.
In other words, science finds more and more and more evidence that everything, and when I say everything, this is the shock, everything seems to be so perfectly fine-tuned and calibrated that That it doesn't seem logical on any level to even postulate that this could have happened randomly.
It's the classic case of finding a watch on the beach, and nobody would pick up the pocket watch and say, well, it's possible that the sand and the waves and the wind created this.
It's possible. We're good to go.
We're a tiny bit smaller.
It wouldn't have what we now know is called a magnetosphere.
It wouldn't be able to hold the atmosphere in.
We'd be like Mars, no life.
We now know this.
We couldn't have known this in 1966 when the Time Magazine article asks, you know, says, is God dead?
We now know that if the Earth were the tiniest bit small but larger, it would have too much gravity, too much mass, too much gravity, and it would Pull in things that would make it impossible for life to exist.
So you think, what could be simpler than the size of the Earth?
We would all guess, from having watched Star Trek forever, that the size of a planet could be absolutely anything.
Science now tells us, no.
In fact, if your planet weren't precisely the size it is, there's no life.
If the Moon didn't exist, and by the way, you look at the Solar System, there's nothing to compare with our Moon.
I mean, Mars has a couple of tiny rocks, we call them moons, and If that weren't exactly as it is, there is no life.
If the planet Jupiter, which some people can see in the night sky, it's a pinprick.
It's this tiny, tiny, it's 400 million miles away.
Science now tells us that, oh, by the way, if Jupiter weren't there with its tremendous mass and gravity, pulling away asteroids and meteors, those asteroids and meteors would actually be hitting Earth maybe a thousand times as many as currently hit Earth, and by the way, there would be no possibility of the emergence of life on Earth.
So this is science, Dinesh.
This is not the Bible.
Science is telling us that almost every single thing we look at, the more we look into it, the more we realize it gives the appearance of astonishing fine-tuning, and I don't know how logically you get out of that.
They bring up Some, you know, hardcore atheists bring up really preposterous, evidence-free solutions like the multiverse or whatever.
The flying spaghetti monster theory is actually more logical than the multiverse theory.
So, again, the headline is that the evidence has become absolutely overwhelming, and we kind of need to get up to speed.
Let me just briefly summarize what you said, because I want you to give me a yes or no answer to this.
What you're saying, using the analogy of the watch that you find on the beach, is not merely, I take it, that the Earth is the watch, or the solar system is the watch, But the entire universe is the watch.
In other words, the entire universe has to be the way that it is because if the constants and the forces of the universe, things like the speed of light, were to be changed, not only would we not have this universe, but we wouldn't have people like us to be able to contemplate the beauty of the universe.
The levels of design are breathtaking.
In other words, yes, we could simply talk about the existence of the universe, the Big Bang.
What do we need? Nobody really discusses that.
In other words, when you're talking to physicists, cosmologists, they will say the idea that there is a universe to begin with This is simply mind-bending.
when you look at what is necessary, what was necessary to create a universe with planets and stars and others, all the stuff that we take for granted, anyone who knows about it and who's begun to look into it says, wow, this shouldn't be.
How is it that things were so utterly, outrageously, perfectly calibrated that we got this universe?
They're in awe of it.
The same thing with the existence of the Earth.
They say that what's necessary for a planet like this that could support life, whatever, the variables increase and increase and increase and increase until any logical person says, you know what?
The only possible answer is that a divine infinite intelligence planned this, And we're living in a new day.
And it's up to us, in a sense, to get used to the fact that the evidence has come to this place.
And whether you like it or not, it's the science.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to talk to Eric Metaxas about the evidence for events that are described in Scripture.
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I'm back with my friend Eric Metaxas.
We're talking about his book, Is Atheism Dead?
Eric, let's pivot to the evidence about Scripture and about the reliability of the manuscripts of the Bible.
Now, you mentioned earlier Christopher Hitchens.
I think in Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great, he implies that Jesus may not even have existed historically.
He goes, hey, listen, you know, you've got Greek and Roman mythology.
Nobody would seriously claim that Diana or Apollo was real.
And so he casts doubt on the idea of both Jesus' historicity and the reliability of Scripture.
Address that, if you will.
Well, I'll simply say this.
You, unlike me, have debated some of these figures, some of these new atheists.
You've looked into this stuff. I almost had to avert my eyes.
I didn't really want to be bothered at the time.
But when I wrote this book with the title, Is Atheism Dead?, I realized, okay, I'm doing evidence from science, evidence from biblical archaeology.
I need to also look at some of what these atheists have written.
And I got to tell you, Dinesh, I think we on our side have been infinitely too gracious and kind with people like Christopher Hitchens.
No one could be more full of baloney than Christopher Hitchens.
I was not less than staggered to realize the intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness of folks like him and Dawkins.
I was almost unable to believe that it was that bad.
Christopher Hitchens likes to win debates, and so he would say things that were not only unprovable, but patently wrong, sort of daring his opponent to prove, you know, it's like people say, when did you stop beating your wife?
There's no answer.
You won't have enough time to recover from the lie and the attack.
And so he says things that are so ridiculous, but he was banking very cynically on the fact that people wouldn't know what to do or what to say about it.
In the book, I write about him talking to Charlie Rose, and Charlie Rose says, well, what about Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
He's an example of a Christian who lived a great life and lived heroically and stuff like that.
Christopher Hitchens, on the Charlie Rose program, knowing that Charlie Rose wouldn't have an answer, says, oh, oh, he says Bonhoeffer was not actually a Christian.
He really was a humanist.
He throws that out and then moves on to the next thing.
And what I noticed is that people on our side, so to speak, weren't pushing back hard enough.
I think somebody needs to say, excuse me, that's ridiculous.
That's not true.
Why are you saying things that are not true?
He did that a lot.
And even the idea, Dinesh, even the idea that Jesus was an historical figure, Even if you hate Jesus and the Bible, the idea that Jesus wasn't a historical figure is at this point like saying, I don't believe Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon were historical figures.
You'd laugh at that person.
You'd say like, well, I might not be a fan of Nixon or Agnew, but to suggest that they're not historical figures, like saying that people never really landed on the moon.
It was all staged in a movie studio.
The earth is really flat.
I mean, we have to laugh at these things, but normally we take it seriously and we debate them and stuff.
The evidence, not just for the historicity of Jesus, I mean, that's nothing.
The evidence for the accounts in the scripture is overwhelming.
And we need, in a funny way, the headline of my book is Atheism Dead, is to people like, listen, folks, the evidence is here.
But you just haven't heard of it and you aren't talking about it.
But the idea that is the evidence here, the evidence is so dramatic and has been piling up sort of silently, like we're sleeping and it's snowing outside and you wake up and you can't even open the front door because the drift is eight feet high.
That's effectively what's been happening.
We've all been sleeping. We're in the secular dream.
And the reality is dramatically different.
And so my book is meant to be a wake-up call to everybody to say that while you've been sleeping, the evidence for the veracity of the biblical account is almost beyond belief.
You want to talk about it?
Do you dare to look at it?
One of the things I talk about in the book is the discovery of biblical Sodom.
Even I, when I heard about this, was skeptical.
I said, you know, that's like people talk about discovering the ark or discovering the whatever...
You know, I'm skeptical.
Sodom was destroyed, according to the biblical account, in 1700 B.C., No one would dream that you could ever actually discover it or prove it if you discovered it, on and on and on and on.
Well, I met a man in Albuquerque, and this kind of kicked off why I wrote this book.
When I dug down and understood that this man has flat out discovered biblical Sodom with tremendous details of how it was destroyed by a meteor and on and on and on, I said, I don't know what the biggest news is, that he discovered biblical Sodom or that no one knows about it, because this is absolute headline news, and the more you know about the details, the more astonishing it becomes.
So I, you know, you can see that in a way, the headline for me is that we are living in It's outrageously, almost impossible to believe times when it comes to all the evidence for God in the Bible.
And the headline is, we simply haven't heard about it.
And we need to get busy kind of with the new narrative.
It's like science is not at odds with faith.
Science points to the faith of the scripture.
There's just so much stuff that I uncovered that it almost...
It makes me dizzy somehow, that we've lived in a world where good people like you and me have kind of accepted some of these skeptical views.
And I think it simply needs to stop, and we need to tell people like Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins, you're fraudulent.
You're lying. If you can do better, I suggest you come back with genuine facts and stop playing this really philosophical game.
I mean, you lay out evidence for Sodom, for the house of David, for the place of Jesus' trial before Pilate, for the Nazareth home of Jesus.
And I also found this statement very striking.
You say, you quote a rabbi saying, it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.
In other words, you would think that if it was archaeological evidence, some of it would be pro, some of it would be con, but nothing has invalidated the biblical account.
And for me, that is a very startling truth.
Well, again, the only real headline here is that the people to whom we look as authorities, as somehow impartial authorities...
We can now see that we ought never to have trusted them.
And that is not an easy thing to believe, to say, to think about.
But it is astonishing that the evidence in every direction...
And again, we're just talking about the Bible here, okay?
We're not talking about vaccines or election fraud.
But the point is, when you discover that the very people that you were looking to for some kind of impartial treatment of the facts...
Have failed, not only failed dramatically, but many of them have had a built-in animus against certain kinds of evidence.
And if it comes up, they simply avoid it.
They don't write an article or they write an article making it sound, you know, very far-fetched.
And I thought to myself, we are living in a time where many people are simply waking up to the fact that, in a way, much that we've been told and the narrative that we've been given is simply untrue.
The evidence for God is so overwhelming as to be literally, I think, beyond question.
You want to talk about the details?
Let's talk about that. But evidence for whether a God created the universe, I don't see how an intelligent person, looking at the facts...
I'm eager to hear from people, not people just with an animus against faith, but people who really want to understand this.
And I think that, you know what, maybe we're living in a time of a kind of a reformation where this evidence, you know, because you want to know why would God allow this evidence to come now?
Why was it possible in 1966 to look at the evidence and say, well, I don't, I think science pushes God out of the picture.
And then Five decades later, precisely the opposite is true, except we never moved past that 1966 secular narrative.
Why now? I don't know.
But I just find it delicious, funny, ironic, you know, very, very interesting.
How else do you say it?
Absolutely, Eric. Hey, listen, a fascinating book, Is Atheism Dead?
Thanks, Eric Metaxas, for joining me on the podcast.
Thanks for having me. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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