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Nov. 18, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HELLO PHILLY! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep460
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Coming up, I'm going to ask whether the voters themselves are to blame for the dismal results of the midterm election.
Debbie is going to join me.
We're going to review a series of issues from illegal migrants showing up in Philadelphia to Trump's big announcement to an election fraud investigation in Harris County, Texas.
And I'll continue my discussion of Christian apologetics by showing why God, not atheism, seems to be flourishing in the Darwinian framework of survival and adaptation.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
Even a week or more than a week, a week and a half after the midterm election, The result still seems perplexing.
We haven't quite put all the pieces together figuring out what happened.
And we aren't sure how really badly we did.
It seems worrying on many fronts, but there are a number of encouraging developments as well.
In fact, if you were to say, use the old Reagan question, are we better off than we were before the midterms, or even flashing back to a year ago, The answer is, politically speaking, we are better off.
And there's a very interesting, there's a fellow who did a little summary of some good things that have happened.
He makes a kind of a list.
And he goes, cheer up.
He goes, we're not doing as badly as we sometimes think, or we're not doing as badly as we feel.
He goes, and here's his list.
I'm just going to go through it and kind of comment on it.
He goes, Trump is running.
So this is obviously in Trump's case.
He's excited that Trump is running.
He thinks that that is, you know, that brings back the prospect of the Trump years, which despite all the division and all the screaming and even some of Trump's own irascibility, they were very good years economically and very good years even on the foreign policy front.
Number two, Florida completely red.
This is a huge development.
This is a state that's been a swing state.
In fact, it's been a swing state going back.
Remember the Bush-Gore election of 2000, which all hinged on Florida, and it was split right down the middle.
And it was split right down the middle even when DeSantis ran against Andrew Gillum.
The last time around, and DeSantis squeaked out the narrowest of victories.
So this is a very good thing. Florida, completely red.
Number three, Elon took over Twitter.
Now, he's mixing here cultural developments with political developments, but they are interconnected, and this, I think, is a huge development.
He's right to list it.
Majority in the Supreme Court.
Very important.
For really almost three decades, we've had this kind of precarious, which way will the court go?
We never really felt any sense of security in the court.
But now I think because we have not just a 5-4, but really a 6-3 margin, with Roberts being the, quote, Swing vote.
And he's not really a swing vote because we can actually get a majority even without Roberts.
So this is producing legal fruit.
Very important decisions and more to come.
Big decisions coming up over the next several months as well.
Control of the House.
Again, very significant.
Yes, it's a very narrow control.
We sort of only just got control.
The full numbers will be known probably in the next couple of days.
But We're guessing the Republicans will have, you know, three, four, five, maybe six seats.
So about the same margin that the Democrats had.
But look at the way that Nancy Pelosi, with an effective speaker, and Nancy Pelosi is effective from the Democrats' point of view.
This is why we hate her, because she's actually effective in prosecuting their agenda.
If we can do something of the same on our side, now the question is can we?
But if we can, then we could use the House very effectively.
It's very important to have it.
No legislation can go through without now the consent of the House leadership and in fact the House Republican majority.
Republicans win the popular vote.
Not a bad thing either.
Because it demonstrates that, you know, this idea that sort of we always lose the popular vote, and we have lost the popular vote in the last few presidential elections, even the 2016 election, which Trump won.
So I think the popular vote is a telling indicator.
It doesn't have significance by itself.
It doesn't mean, it doesn't automatically translate to anything, but it is good to win it.
Nancy Pelosi fired.
There you go. Good news.
He could have added some more things.
Right off the top of my head, I would add the Hispanic migration toward the GOP. So, adding all these things up, even though we're a little annoyed at the American voter, It's like, what are you thinking?
Federman, really?
Biden, really? Why didn't your disapproval of all the bad things that Biden has done translate to a much bigger margin of Republican victory this time?
But at the end, in a democratic society, you don't blame the voter.
Sometimes the voter is partially to blame, but nevertheless, you do your best to educate the voter, to convince the voter, and And I have to add, given what the Democrats are doing, to, in some cases, pick up the ballot of the voter in an evangelical church or pick up the ballot of the voter at a gun show and deliver that ballot legally to its destination.
In other words, play the same game the Democrats are so that we are not just as good as they are in making the case, but we are as good as they are or better in also delivering the votes in order to be counted.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESH. Debbie and I are together for our Friday roundup of some of the big issues of the week.
And I thought we'd start by talking about, well, the Trump announcement, some of the kind of one-way skirmishing that's gone on between Trump and DeSantis, and of course the left's egging all of that on.
And then finally, also Mike Pence kind of weighing in.
Now, I have a couple of initial thoughts I want to put on the table and see what, Hanis, have you react to them.
The first one is, I think that the left is, they have a game here.
They hate Trump and they hate DeSantis.
But they've realized, if we can kind of use DeSantis as a truncheon to beat up Trump, He's the guy we are really afraid of.
But if we can somehow knock him out with DeSantis, then the fight between them that we will encourage will be bruising enough that DeSantis himself will be wounded, and we're going to end up with our ideal nominee, Mike Pence, or somebody of that ilk.
In other words, someone who's just more placid, more kind of a non-entity, not threatening, certainly not threatening to the left.
Someone to the left goes, we can easily beat this guy.
If by some miracle he beat us, we'll have nothing to worry about.
We would be able to police this guy almost like a dog on a leash.
So I think this is what the left is going for with Trump and DeSantis.
They want to fight. And guess who else is on this bandwagon?
Fox News and Murdoch.
Right. They actually announced that they are going to support DeSantis and not Trump.
Well, it's really strange because you've got this news network that's supposed to be covering things.
And by the way, the Murdoch empire is not just Fox News.
It's the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
And I'm noticing really weird things in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
The New York Post literally did not cover Trump's announcement, except they buried it and they had some sarcastic reference, almost like a joke.
Former real estate developer announces.
I mean, this was insulting.
And they called him, not only that, but they called him a three-time loser.
That was the headline, actually.
Right.
You know?
So this looks to me like a Murdoch family vendetta against Trump, which look, billionaires sometimes have these quarrels, but to actually use your media empire as a kind of forum and as a weapon in itself, this is actually not really what journalism and news was to be about.
And I tell you, you know, they are actually teetering on losing a lot of viewers.
And so if they do this, if they try to do this, this, you know, support, really trying to dismantle the GOP is what they're trying to do.
This is, it's not gonna bode well for their viewers.
They're trying to remake the GOP in their own image.
And they, I think they have an arrogant view of their influence.
They sort of think, I mean, just look at the small example of 2,000 mules, right?
I was disappointed when Fox goes, we're not gonna talk about 2,000 mules.
But did it hurt 2,000 mules?
20 million people have seen the movie.
The movie got very widely out.
In fact, reached an audience that's quite honestly five times as big, bigger than Fox of people who saw that film.
So we obviously didn't need Fox.
And so I guess to your point, Trump doesn't need Fox.
Well, and the Trump base, if they feel that there is a kind of organized, systematic bludgeoning of the guy that they like in order to get some other guy through, I think people are not going to respond well to that.
Yeah, no, they're not.
Now, Pence, you have some thoughts about Pence.
Yeah, so I was listening to the interview that he did with Sean Hannity the other day, And the first thing that came to mind is this guy is from another era.
He is talking as though we are living in Reagan's America.
And, you know, he's just so out...
He's a really nice man.
Really, really nice, good Christian man.
But his instinct is completely wrong in the political arena.
I mean, just completely wrong.
As you say, they see him as prey, really.
And they know that if he were to become president, miraculously, that they would just stomp all over him and that they could get their agenda passed no problem.
Well, it's kind of like you have a guy who's like a sweet man and you have, you know, outlaws who surround your ranch...
And the outlaws make it really clear.
They're in control. They're fiery torches.
Yeah. And they're like, we're going to burn this ranch down.
We're going to, you know, rape your wife.
We're going to kill your kids.
We're going to torch the whole place.
We're going to take it over. And this man is like, you know, I think the people outside, they're misguided.
They seem to believe.
Maybe if I just invite them over for dinner and feed them.
And talk about, you know, our Christian values.
And then Mrs.
Pence goes, Honey, do you really think it's a good idea to unlock the gates?
Yeah. Do you really think it's a good idea to let those guys...
Yes, I think it's a wonderful idea.
Yeah. So, look, I mean...
So, not to knock him, because, you know, I really do like him...
I'm not knocking him. No, I'm just saying, in general, we're not knocking Mike Pence.
But we're saying there's a level of naivete.
He's not... He cannot run in today's America.
He's not... He's running in Reagan's America and it doesn't exist anymore.
It's just not here anymore.
It's almost... I mean, to draw a historical analogy, this would be like in the late 1850s when the fires of secession are spreading throughout the country.
The rhetoric is incendiary.
A Democrat, Preston Brooks, has taken his cane and beaten a Republican senator in his office.
And then you have someone who goes, well, you know...
They act as if it's still 1840.
In other words, they act as if none of this is really happening.
There isn't a slavery crisis.
The country isn't splitting apart.
And you'd have to say to that person, yeah, you're a nice guy, but I think what we're saying is you're not the man of the hour.
You can't be. Right?
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So often we hear about these election improprieties, election irregularities, and then we just wait and nothing ever happens.
Now, I'm happy to say this came out from Greg Abbott, the re-elected governor of Texas.
I'm calling for an investigation into the widespread problems with the Harris County elections last Tuesday.
And the allegation of election improprieties in our state's largest county, by the way, this is the county that includes Houston, may result from anything ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal issues.
Yes. He's going to look into it, and he's calling on people to look into it, and this is overdue.
But more importantly, I'm glad Greg Abbott is on this, but people will say Greg Abbott is a Republican, and he didn't like the results, because Greg Abbott in Harris County lost.
Beto O'Rourke got more votes than he did, right?
However, and as you know, people that don't understand, Harris County is the largest county in Texas.
It's almost 5 million voters.
So Harris County encompasses all of Houston and a few surrounding areas, and that's about 4.7 million people.
But the most, I think, interesting part of all this is that the DA in Harris County, who is a Democrat, her name is Kim Og, is calling for an investigation herself.
So she is on this issue as well.
And she requested...
The assistance from the Texas Rangers to investigate the allegations, right?
And so she basically, in a letter, said that her office has received a referral from the Texas Secretary of State's office regarding issues that could potentially include criminal conduct.
So this, and hearing from different voters and different poll watchers in Harris County, apparently said Many people were disenfranchised.
They did not get to vote on Election Day.
Now, this is very reminiscent of what happened in Maricopa County.
Maricopa County is also a big county in Arizona, as is Harris County in Texas.
So, you know, it just really makes me angry.
That the left and even, you know, YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, they don't allow us to talk about voter fraud or voter irregularities.
But guys, it is happening.
We're not making this up.
There's a member of our film team who tried to vote.
In Maricopa.
And you've been getting the details.
Yes. But it's unbelievable.
The guy basically says, my vote isn't being counted.
Yes. And sure, he goes on the website, and he's even gone on Carrie Lake's website.
I think he's followed some of the threads of Charlie Kirk.
He's basically trying to make sure that his vote counts.
And to this date, as far as we know...
He tried to do it yesterday because they said that the cutoff was 5 p.m.
Mountain Time or whatever Arizona time is.
Yeah. Right? 5 p.m. And that if they couldn't get it then, then it didn't count.
Well, his vote did not count.
So, I think that...
And we're mentioning it only because we don't think that he's an isolated case.
Right. Yeah, but this brings us to the larger point.
The state legislature in Texas is run by Republicans.
The state legislature in Arizona is run by Republicans.
Why are we having these issues in these two states?
The state legislature in Pennsylvania is run by Republicans.
The state legislature in Michigan is run by Republicans.
So there is a failure at the state level.
Very often these state legislators are...
They're not on it.
They don't realize the importance and urgency.
And in some ways, they don't recognize their own power.
They have been empowered by the Constitution to not only make election rules, but fix election problems.
I mean, this is like key, right?
You would think. We have control of these state legislatures.
So, guys, your job is to call your state legislatures, your representatives of your state, and urge them, bug them, call them, email them.
Email them. Send them letters so that they fix these problems.
You know, election integrity is extremely important.
And if we don't get it fixed in these places that we can get it fixed, I think we're done as a country.
I mean, the Democrats, think if they had this kind of, if they had the power, they use their power in the legislatures, they use their power in the courts, they go to the mat for what they believe.
And we need to do the same thing.
And if our legislators won't do it, we need to have them hear from us.
So people often ask us, what can we do?
And I've been saying, you know, you can demand that there be electronic surveillance on Dropboxes.
You can participate in the process, become a poll observer.
But here's something else you can do, and that is use the leverage you have, both through social media, but also direct communication with legislators at all levels of local and state government.
What are you doing about election integrity?
How can we be positive and certain that our elections in this state, in this county, are fair?
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Call 800-246-8751, that number 800-246-8751, or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Debbie and I have been talking about the power of state legislatures to address issues, and particularly election issues.
I mean, look at this. Look at the...
these states, but it's the degree of dominance. I'm just going to read very quickly. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming. And again, those are the states in which Republicans dominate both houses.
But the margins are huge.
Look at Wyoming. The Senate, Republicans 28 to 2.
It doesn't surprise me in Wyoming.
And the House, 55 to 5.
55 to 5.
But look at Texas, honey. Senate 19 to 12.
House 86 to 64.
So, I mean, you're not talking about one seat or two seat.
You're talking about decisive majorities.
Yes, yes. What Republicans say in these states goes.
And that's the point.
Now, let's talk for a minute.
I want to talk about a couple of things.
the Senate is pushing through.
It hasn't gone all the way through yet, but they've agreed to vote on this bill that supposedly codifies same-sex marriage into law.
And at first glance, I thought to myself, well, this is a stunt.
It's just purely redundant.
Because why?
Because we have a Supreme Court decision that is, in a sense, found, where they find these things is another question, but found a right to same-sex marriage.
I guess it comes from an application of the equal protection of the law principle.
But the idea here is that gay marriage isn't legal and constitutional nationwide.
So you think, okay, well, the matter is settled.
And what is the point of Schumer in the Senate trying to push through this idea of let's have another law...
But you said that when you looked at Ted Cruz's opposition to it, you realized that there might be a little bit more implications than what we think.
Basically, he came out and said that this is going to be very, very bad for pastors that don't want to marry same-sex couples in their church.
Whether it be that they don't receive federal funding or, you know, something similar to that, some kind of harassment for that.
Well, I mean, it could just be, you know, obviously pastors don't get federal funding, churches can't get federal funding, but I think what you're saying is this, and that is that if you identify a criticism of gay marriage as somehow breaking the law, now I don't think they can actually go that far, because quite frankly it would violate the First Amendment.
Right. But I think maybe what Ted Cruz is talking about is there'll be a chilling effect.
Yeah. Because you're going to have the federal government...
It could also be, you know, that they are a 501c3, right?
And so they won't get federal funding in that sense.
They'll lose their tax exemption.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the other idea would be that this is legal and we could have a lot more cases where pastors are now threatened.
Well, if you'll marry people, you're discriminating against this couple by refusing to marry them.
And so I can see that this is opening up a Pandora's box.
Well, here's a bunch of GOP senators who voted yes.
And I've been watching their rhetoric.
I'm not surprised at any of them, but I am surprised at Romney, given that he's a Mormon.
Well, Romney put out a statement where he made it sound like that this is nothing more than a reaffirmation of what the Supreme Court has done.
So he acted like he wasn't taking a very radical step other than to ratify the status quo.
But, yeah, this is, it's problematic, and we'll see how this all plays out.
Now, let's talk about, we were talking about Governor Abbott earlier.
Governor Abbott has dispatched a busload of migrants to...
Hola, Philly. To Philadelphia.
Exactly. Hello, Philadelphia.
Yeah. And, of course, right away, John Fetterman now, I think you said he didn't write this.
No, this is, this tweet that was put out by...
John Fetterman is actually not really him.
It's too cohesive.
Well, I mean, this could be like Biden, where Fetterman sits down to write and they put note cards in front of him.
And then he just transcribes what's on the note card.
He goes, the Statue of Liberty doesn't say, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and then throw them on the bus for a cheap political stunt.
We're better than this.
Mm-hmm. So John Fetterman basically wants these poor, huddled masses to stay on the border.
Right. It's a political stunt because they're showing up in Philadelphia, whereas it's not a stunt if they stay in Texas.
Exactly. And I think this is really the...
Yeah, Abbott's point is, listen, you say you want them.
We don't say we want them.
They're coming over our way.
You're letting them in.
You say you want them. You can have them.
I mean, the logic of this is so clean and so effective.
Well, I mean, honey, we know that they are hypocrites.
We know that. And so does Abbott.
And I think he's trying to prove that point.
And I think the Democrats are, it's a gotcha on them, so they don't like it.
So they're like, this is just a political stunt.
You're merely trying to score political points.
Well, you know what? We are. We are trying to score political points and it must be working because you are squealing with, you're like, ouch, ouch, ouch, which means obviously that we kind of burned you.
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Feel the difference. I want to talk some more about the midterms and an interesting article in the Daily Caller about how Republicans are starting to make real gains with Muslims in votes.
And this is occurring in places like Dearborn, Michigan, but it's also occurring nationwide.
See, I think what's going on here is that the left offered a kind of bargain to the Muslims.
And the bargain is this.
We will give you a recognized kind of minority status in the Democratic Party.
In other words, we'll create a plantation for you, just like we've done for the blacks.
I mean, you can really look forward to a wonderful life that we have in mind for you on the Muslim plantation.
But we want something from you in exchange.
We basically want your children.
We want to sexualize them, corrupt them, pervert them.
And this is a great deal.
Why would you say no?
And the Muslims are like...
They went, no. And the Muslims are like, no.
Yeah, they're, you know, I think, I mean, and I could just be, you know, saying, you know how I feel about all this, right?
Sharia and the rest of it. Yeah, but I do think that the Muslim parents are They they really galvanized and made a real big statement Versus the Christian parents the Christians are in the background I also saw an interesting article, and I wanted to do a segment on it, about how in the Muslim community, the initiative, now you can say this is just patriarchy or whatever, but it's taken by the men.
And when you looked at the protest, the Dearborn protest, it was Muslim dads, one after the other.
And by the way, these guys weren't like, these guys were in westernized dress, they were basically very Americanized, and they were saying, listen, You know, we raise our kids.
We raise them in an environment where we want them to be exposed to Islamic values.
We want to teach them modesty, decency, courtesy, civility.
And then they go to school and they're exposed to these books that are graphically sexual, just downright disgusting.
And so the parents are in an uproar.
The point I want to make, though, is that in the Christian environment, it looks like it's the moms who step forward and the dads kind of play a backseat.
I'm not involved. I'm going to let my wife take this one.
But not in the Muslim community.
The dads are willing to step forward.
And it's interesting because our friend Abdul, who drives us to the airport, he was not political.
And he kind of started coming out saying, you know, I don't like the way that the party is pushing the sexualization of children and And, you know, the trans issue and all those things.
Very interestingly, I mean, and certainly in Abdul's case, in the beginning, I noticed that his conservatism was mainly economic.
Right. It was about, it's about having an entrepreneurial society.
Yeah, he has his own business. It's a traditional Islamic way of life, and it's coming from the Democrats and from the left.
Look, the Muslims are not a majority in America, but in certain parts of America, they're a substantial population.
I think that all these groups belong in the Republican Party because their aspirations align with the Republicans.
I mean, pretty much everything you could say about Hispanics, family-oriented, They want upward mobility.
They want economic opportunity.
You could say about Muslims.
You could say about Asian Indians.
You could say about people from Cambodia.
You remember the idea I had about sending those push cards in the valley, about having the Democrat platform and the Republican platform side by side so they could actually see what the party that they embrace embraces, right?
Well, why can't we do it for the Muslim community?
Why can't we do it for the Asian community?
Why can't we do it for all the communities that actually have values, like real values?
This is something Republicans, again, Republicans have neglected a lot, but this is an area they have neglected, and that is very concrete outreach.
Not outreach that does, you know, data gathering, but outreach that focuses on getting information out about what the parties actually stand for.
Here's another interesting article, and this is an article that pertains to some degree to Florida, but it pertains more widely.
And that is that the migration of people, as people leave blue cities and they move to Texas, they move to Florida, they make Texas and Florida more red, but they make it harder for Republicans to win in those cities.
states the cities are blue but the state is purple. And so think for example if people are getting out of places like New Jersey and coming to Florida. Now New Jersey you might say Democratic state well it's a Democratic state in certain pockets. There are red areas of New Jersey. They're making those red areas blue. They're making the red areas more difficult to win. Now New York is a kind of counter trend because in New York Republicans did pretty well
despite the New York exodus out of New York. And I think that was just a reflection of how badly the Democrats have run New York.
And so even Democrats were voting for Republicans.
voting for people like Lee Zeldin.
By the way, I've been messaging Lee Zeldin.
He wants to come on the podcast.
Oh, let's have him on. Because he has a lot of ideas about what the GOP can do going forward, how it can win not just purple, but you may say blue votes.
And I'm very interested in hearing from him about that.
So we'll have him on the podcast shortly.
That's wonderful. Yeah. And again...
We, you know, in Texas, we welcome those California, you know, conservatives.
Not so much the liberals because, as you know, they leave a state because they can't stand the way things are in that state.
Yet, they come and they try to make it that state again.
I don't get it, but it is a reality.
It is a reality. Yeah.
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Some evolutionary biologists are really baffled by the adaptive significance of religion.
The atheist Richard Dawkins says that maybe religion serves the purpose of what he calls wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking. So his argument is that religion has persisted over the centuries in so many different cultures because people like to believe things that aren't true.
And this gives them a certain type of psychological comfort.
But this explanation, if you think about it for a minute, makes no evolutionary sense.
It's really odd coming from an evolutionary biologist because evolution punishes beliefs that are ridiculously untrue, that are, you may say, wishful thinking.
So here's Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist.
By the way, Pinker is himself an atheist.
He's kind of an ally of Dawkins in the atheist crusade against religion, but even he's pointing out that the wishful thinking argument doesn't really work.
I'm quoting Pinker, quote, a freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm.
A person face to face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that he is a rabbit.
In other words, what Pinker is saying is that, yeah, if you have people who like to believe things because they wish they were true, hey, I'm really cold, but you know, I wish I was warm, and that's somehow going to make me feel better.
He goes, no, it doesn't make you feel better.
In fact, it gives you the illusion that you don't have to go find a warmer place, and so you're more likely to freeze because you have this wrong belief that your imagination can kind of create warmth.
Similarly, says Pinker, if there's a lion about to eat you, your survival instinct should be run.
It shouldn't be, I wish I wasn't a human being.
I wish I was a bird who could just fly away or a rabbit who can run into a small hole.
You're not a bird. You're not a rabbit.
And human beings confronted by lions who think that they're birds or rabbits are very likely to get eaten.
So this is the point, that That the wishful thinking explanation really doesn't work.
So then Steven Pinker goes, well, let me think of my own explanation for why religion has this kind of continuing hold on humanity, a hold that has not diminished with time, with modernity, with technology, with progress,
with any of it. And Pinker gives an explanation, I think, that is, in a way, no better than Dawkins, which is, he goes, well, maybe there is a, quote, God module in the brain that predisposes people to believe in transcendence or in the Almighty.
So this is almost like saying that there is a God gene.
But of course, that only begs the question, how would this God gene have evolved?
What is its adaptive purpose?
So you're not explaining something by simply saying that there is a gene.
You have to explain how that gene came about.
So for example, just to take a look at a different area, if I were to ask you to account for the fact that men are more, let's say, aggressive than women, Something that is true, certainly on average, and can be verified by looking inside any prison population to see that violent crimes are disproportionately committed, for example, by men.
It's no answer to say, well, you know, men have a kind of aggressive tendency or an aggression module.
The question obviously becomes, why is it that the male physiology has developed in such a way as to have this predisposition?
So in other words, I don't think that this God module explains anything.
It's another way of saying, I don't have an explanation.
In fact, Pinker kind of admits this when he goes on to say, in effect, he says, hey, listen, maybe there really is no evolutionary value to the so-called God module, but maybe it developed in conjunction with other things that do have evolutionary value.
So it's kind of an accidental byproduct of that.
And again, this is another way of confessing, I don't know the explanation.
If somebody asks you, how do you explain this little squiggly mark?
And you say, well, I don't have an explanation, but maybe when I was trying to draw a picture, the squiggly mark was accidentally created, then the squiggly mark has no explanation in terms of the picture.
It just is something that you're saying happened to show up while something else was actually going on.
Now, Randy Alcorn, who is the founder of Eternal Perspective Ministries, kind of blows this whole evolutionary argument out of the water, in my opinion, by giving an example, giving a kind of thought experiment.
A thought experiment is putting a couple of things in front of you that make you really think and make you see that it is really...
Transcendence. It's belief in religion that has adaptive significance.
And the thing that doesn't have adaptive significance is secularism, is non-religion, is atheism.
So let's look at what Randy Alcorn has to say.
I'm just going to begin and then I'm going to continue discussing it in the next segment.
He goes, I'm going to give you two creation stories, and I'm going to ask you whether it matters which one is true.
Here's the first one.
You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three and a half billion years ago.
You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance, and natural forces.
You are a mere grab bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance.
You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe.
You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind, from a microbe, a virus, or an amoeba.
You have no essence beyond your body and at death you will cease to exist entirely.
In short, you came from nothing and are going nowhere.
This is the first account.
When we come back, I'll pick it up and give you...
Randy Alcorn's second account.
And the question you want to keep in mind is, which account is more likely to give human beings a sense that I want to live, I want to continue living, I want to have children that persist into the next generation?
In other words, which of these two accounts lends itself to a greater adaptive or perhaps Darwinian survival value?
Randy Alcorn goes on to now give his second example.
In his second example, he writes, quote, You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God.
You are created in His image, with capacities to think, feel, and worship that set you above all other life forms.
You differ from the animals, not simply in degree, but in kind.
Not only is your kind unique, you are unique among your kind.
Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that He has a perfect plan for your life.
In addition, God gave the life of His only Son that you might spend eternity with Him.
If you are willing to accept the gift of salvation, you can become a child of God." End quote.
Now Randy Elkhorn isn't purporting here to say which account is true.
He's just asking a different type of question.
Imagine two groups of people.
Let's call them the secular tribe and the religious tribe.
And they subscribe to these two worldviews.
The secular tribe subscribes to the secular worldview, which is basically, you've come from nothing and you're going nowhere.
And the religious tribe subscribes to this, you are unique, you are a child of God worldview.
And Randy Alcorn just asks, which of these two tribes is more likely to survive and flourish?
And his answer is obviously the religious tribe.
They have an incentive not only to build their own life in the hope and expectation of a successful and good and godly life on this earth, but also a continuing existence after.
And moreover, they have every incentive to bring children into the world, children who are also themselves children of God, who themselves have hope, and who themselves have this ability to flourish.
And Randy Alcorn implies, conversely, that if you believe that human beings have no purpose, no point, we're just essentially material beings in a material world, our only purpose is immediate and short-term self-gratification, our death is the end of us, then the question becomes...
What's the big deal?
I mean, why, first of all, if the amount of pain is greater than the amount of pleasure in your life, why not even take your life?
Moreover, why have children?
What is the point of that?
Since there's no continuation for these children in the sense that you're going to be gone, you're not going to be here to see their life.
So, in other words, the point is that you would expect We're good to go.
And having said all this, Randy Halcorn looks around the world and he goes, well, isn't that the way it is?
Isn't it the case now that in secular societies, notably Europe, people are having fewer children?
This is now increasingly true also in America.
Here's sociologists Pippa Norris and Ron Englehart.
Richer, more secular countries, quote, are producing only about half as many children as would be needed to replace the adult population.
So these societies are decadent in the very literal sense that they are shrinking.
And if this decadence continues, they will in fact die.
And by contrast, you find that in the developing world, people are having more children, and they're having more children.
Now, it used to be held for a long time that the reason this is the case is that, you know, in poor societies, you need people to farm on the field.
Poor people have more children because they need more workers per household.
Much of this type of analysis has been discredited by more recent research that shows that, Or even the argument that used to be very common when I was growing up, well, yeah, Dinesh, of course, people in India have so many children, it's because it's a really poor country and there's not a lot to do.
And so the argument that sort of you have children as a form of entertainment, because, of course, you don't have MTV or you don't have Netflix, this actually was an argument that people in the past thought had some plausibility.
Well, it may be the case that children are, in a kind of labor sense, more useful to the poor.
But it is a little silly to say that people in poor countries, especially today, don't have access to phones or don't have access to TV. You can go into the India of slumdog millionaire and you'll notice that there is, today, running water and there are phones and there are TVs.
Wealthy people can afford to have more children than poor people, and yet they choose to have fewer children.
And again, this is not a law of nature.
Wealthy people in the past had more children.
So if you go back a hundred years and look at wealthy families, you'll notice three, four, and five children.
So there's nothing inevitable about having more money that makes you say, I want a smaller family.
Frankly, when you go to other parts of the world, places like India, places like the Muslim world, you find that A, they're not, in the case of the Muslim world, that's not the poorest part of the world.
You have oil-rich countries over there, yet the Muslims have a lot of children.
Practicing Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Evangelical Christians are hardly the poorest groups in the country, and yet many of them have large families.
It seems to be the case that secularization has contributed to declining birth rates in the West as a whole.
And the point I'm getting at here, and I'm only implying it, I'm not trying to solidify the argument, is that in a way religion provides something that secular society doesn't.
Which is a sense of the meaningfulness of life and a sense of transcendent purpose.
And so it may be not religion, but secularism that really requires a Darwinian explanation.
I mean, secularism is a little bit like homosexuality.
You're not really sure how it fits in with the doctrine of Darwinism or natural selection.
Why would nature select people who mate with others of the same sex and you get no reproductive advantage at all?
It seems equally perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see absolutely no higher purpose in life or in the universe.
And so maybe atheism, like the human tailbone or the panda's thumb, is just a kind of evolutionary byproduct, a kind of a spillover from our ancient and primitive past.
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