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Jan. 6, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:59
CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP490
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, I'll reveal how the foundations of modern science, and particularly the idea of reason, is derived directly from Christianity.
I'll outline a GOP agenda for the House moving forward.
And Debbie's going to join me. We're going to talk about Al-Qaeda and the border, the questionable virtues of being short, the anniversary today of January 6th, and the Idaho murder suspect.
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.
Debbie and I are here for our weekly roundup.
Actually, it's the first one of 2023.
And so maybe I'll start by asking you...
To talk a little bit about, well, how are you feeling about the New Year?
And also we have a New Year's resolution that we have started to put into effect.
Yeah. So this morning, you know, I was telling you that spiritually we're off to a really good start.
So our spiritual health is really cooking.
You know, we've started reading...
What a way to put it! So we've started reading the Bible.
And we want to read the Bible this whole year, however long it takes.
You know, some people say, read the Bible in a year.
We don't really want to do that, per se, but we do want to read the Bible every day.
So we want to do a little Bible study every day, starting with the book of Genesis.
And so we're up to chapter 3.
And I have to say, it's really fascinating to do it with you, because I've studied the Bible many times, with women's Bible studies and all that, but you always give it a different spin.
And so your intellectual insight into theological Christianity Well, one of the things we've been talking about a little is how the kind of ingenious structure of the first three books of Genesis and how you can look at the first book of Genesis as the organizing of a moral order.
the second book of Genesis as a description of our God and man's activities in the world and of course in this case it's the Garden of Eden and then you can look at Genesis 3 which is the temptation and we're about to dive into that as referring to the inner world of subjectivity.
In other words what happens inside of our mind and of course the temptation that occurs yes Unless there's a serpent that shows up to do it.
but the temptation is inside the mind of Adam and Eve.
And the point here is that these three levels of reality, namely the invisible moral order and God, that's the first one.
The second is the operational practical world that we live in, that's Genesis 2.
And the third is the world of subjectivity, of how we perceive things.
Those are the three levels of reality that ordinary people, even if they're not religious, they've never heard of the Bible, they still operate on those three planes of reality.
So we're having a really interesting...
That's why I say our spiritual life is really doing well, but we haven't exercised at all.
We have yet to visit the treadmill after going to some really good Italian and French restaurants.
In New York. So I loved, you know, the food in New York was really good.
I loved all of the cool things that we got to do.
We got to go see the Rockettes and all those things.
But the one thing I did not like is the very, very frigid temperatures that New York had.
Now, from what, you know, from folks back home here in Texas, they're like, oh yeah, we had 15 degree weather.
We had 10 degree weather.
But we had it for like a day, whereas in New York it lasted like, Almost the whole time we were there.
And of course, Juliana wanted to go and shop and we were walking, you know, through Central Park and it was windy and it was seven degrees.
By the time we got to one of the stores, I couldn't feel my legs.
I could barely feel my limbs, but my legs were completely numb.
I don't even know how I walked.
So let's just say this tropical girl likes tropical weather.
One thing about the Rockettes I found interesting was that...
Oh, yeah. Well, you've got this sort of marvelous ensemble of dancers, and they're fantastic, and their precision is unbelievable.
I'd seen the Rockettes several years ago.
The question was in my mind, though, is that if you go to the performance for the first 30 minutes, you can say it's completely secular.
It's all about Santa.
It's about his elves.
It's the North Pole.
So it's soldiers and toy soldiers and all that stuff and Santa.
And then I thought to myself, wow, are they going to sort of carry this out the full way?
Are we going to have a Christmas show with no reference to the meaning of Christmas?
But no. And then surprise!
Because right then, in fact, almost at the climactic moment or leading up to it, they pivot right to the child in the manger, the three wise men, fantastic music.
It's all shown very elaborately.
In fact, we had a funny little debate because I thought that the camel that came on stage...
I thought it was Rockettes.
I thought it was Rockettes and kind of in a camel outfit.
But then we looked it up.
I was like, honey, there's no way their knees can't bend back like that.
You know, there's just no way.
And sure enough, they were real camels.
They used real camels, real sheep.
Real animals. It was a really great I mean, I loved it.
I had never seen anything quite like it, and it was a lot of fun to watch.
Well, we had a pretty large group, and, you know, Danielle had sent me sort of a list of six or seven things to do, and one of them was the ballet, one of them was the symphony, and then there was Handel's Messiah, of course.
And I was looking down and I thought, well, look, you know, we've got such a diverse group.
We need to pick something that, like, everybody is going to be into.
And sure enough, this turned out to be a really good choice.
Now, when we come back, we're going to...
Today is the second anniversary of January 6th, and we want to talk a little bit more about that.
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Make sure to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. Today is the second anniversary of January 6th and in fact we were planning to have one of the January 6th not just defendants but prisoners who is I believe no longer in DC. I think he's now in a prison in Pennsylvania.
This is Jake Lang. He's been on the podcast.
He's called in before from prison and we were trying to arrange that kind of a call through his cousin but it's a complex business and somehow it didn't didn't come about but But isn't it hard to believe that two years later? You've got people whose trials have not yet occurred. They're still incarcerated based upon this absolutely preposterous Assertion by these judges that they're a danger to the community
Well to be honest, you know, you know how I've been fixated on this on this alleged serial killer We're going to talk about that a little later.
You're talking about the Portland...
Yeah, about Brian Koberger, and we'll talk about that later.
But I did say it looks like they treat him better than they treat the January 6th defendants.
And what do you mean by that? I mean, they did raid his house.
They did kick in his windows.
In fact, we talked about how even that's super stupid.
What are we talking about?
So on December 28th, I guess it was, the FBI, they should have, they could have easily, this guy Brian Kohlberger went home.
They were following him, actually, and it's come out, and we'll talk about this on the other segment, but what I mean by they treat him better is in prison.
Like, he's not in solitary with no due process.
No, he's going to get his day.
Actually, yesterday, he got his day in court.
You know, he went back to Idaho.
So, prompt trial.
Yeah, yeah. And in fact, there's some discussion about how does he make sure he get an unbiased jury with all the media reporting.
Yeah, so anyway, so what I'm saying is he's getting better treatment than the January 6th defendants who, for two years, think about it, for two years, many of them, Have been in prison with no due process.
No court. No court date.
They keep moving court dates, as you know, because, you know, Kelly, who is the representative for Jake Lang, not his cousin, by the way.
But anyway, she said that he was supposed to have a court hearing on Monday, and they've moved it to July or June, you know.
So they keep doing this to these poor guys.
What's really corrupt, I think, about it and what makes it more chilling is it's one thing if you had a single bad actor or even a single agency.
Let's say the FBI was the bad actor, right?
But then you think that there'd be checks and balances within the system because judges would be like, no, we're not going to go along with that.
Or juries would be like, this is nonsense.
The problem is that you've got bad FBI, bad DOJ, bad judges, And bad juries.
And what I mean by bad juries is that these are not juries of their peers.
Exactly. Not juries of their peers.
And that's a big problem.
Because unlike a murder trial, right, where you can say jury of your peers, in a political trial, you really can't unless it's half Republican and half Democrat, right?
Right. And this applies both ways.
I mean, we live in a part of the country that is heavily Republican.
You know, you can bring some Antifa BLM guy and pick a jury in our community and you're going to get a very conservative jury, which will have no tolerance for any of that kind of thing.
So the opposite is occurring because these January 6th defendants are getting DC juries.
The judges could have shown a little bit of common sense and said, listen, why don't we have these trials in their home districts?
And that way they'll get an ideologically more diverse jury that will truly be a jury of their peers.
That's not happening.
Yeah, it's not happening at all.
And for the most part, the January 6th commission was set up merely to smear Trump and to get him.
It wasn't set up to find out what really happened, who really dropped the ball.
None of those things happened.
Not at all.
And so unfortunately, we have this kangaroo committee, kangaroo court, that did nothing at all except point the finger at one Donald J. Trump.
And it's a travesty.
Well, the Republicans now have an interesting choice because they can shut it down and basically go, poof, you're gone.
Liz Cheney, you're gone anyway.
Pelosi, you're no longer the, you know, you're gone as the House Speaker.
And we're just going to close shop.
Or they can take it over and start...
And actually do some investigation, which everybody wants to get to the bottom of.
Yes, there were some really bad players.
We get it. We understand that we're not defending people that broke windows or went inside the chambers or any of those things.
Or got into armed fights with the cops and started beating them.
Yeah, that is, of course, not acceptable anywhere.
And unfortunately, it did happen.
However, the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
Well, this is a key point. Even in the case where people lost their heads, they got out of hand.
And by the way, in some cases, they were acting defensively.
They saw that the cops had initiated violence.
They were trying to protect people who were in their group.
So the point being, however, that for people who break the law...
The penalty must match the offense.
There's no such thing as, okay, yeah, you lost your head, you swung a shield of the cops, therefore you're a seditionist.
You're trying to overthrow the government.
No, it doesn't make you a seditionist.
It just makes you someone who shouldn't have done that.
So do you think...
You think it's better for the Jan 6 Committee to continue under now?
I think that they need to continue because the optics, right?
We need to change the optics.
And of course, they're not going to cover it now.
But at least if you bring out the other side of the story, whether or not the media adequately reports on it, yes.
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Debbie was telling me this morning some very strange business involving Al-Qaeda on the one hand, and then what's going on at the border, kind of a connection between the two.
So what were you talking about?
Yeah, so apparently there's a report from Judicial Watch, which I get, you know, via email.
And they said that Al-Qaeda is planning some plane attacks using new techniques and tactics, right?
Because air marshals, apparently, are now getting sent to the Mexican border.
They are apparently...
So the Biden administration is sending 150 to 200 air marshals monthly to the southern border to help with what they call a surge in irregular migrations.
Irregular migration.
I love all these euphemisms, undocumented aliens, irregular migration.
And now, here's the background of all this, of course.
After 9-11, the Al-Qaeda attack in 9-11, federal marshals were deployed to protect airlines.
They were part of the homeland security.
Yeah, and it's worked pretty well because, look, I mean, I think right after 9-11, many of us would have predicted that we're likely to see at least a number of attempted such attacks.
But quite honestly, if they've been attempted, they've been thwarted.
So the system as it is has, whatever you think of it, proved reasonably effective.
Or maybe Al-Qaeda decided to go try other things.
But what you're saying is that now that the air marshals have been redeployed, Right.
Well, and not only that, but I even go a little further to say that the citizens have gotten a little wiser to this.
So there's going to be some citizens that are going to be willing to fight to their last breath, right, in case this happens again.
But the interesting thing, of course, is that now the The Air Marshal National Council, which represents thousands of these air marshals, accused TSA Administrator David Pakoski and FAM Director Terrell Stevenson of violating federal law and overstepping their authority by assigning air marshals to assist U.S. Border Patrol.
So apparently... I mean, this is just the typical...
Think of it. This is the way the government operates.
First of all, they're negligent before 9-11.
Then when 9-11 occurs, it's like, okay, now let's get everybody to take their shoes off.
Let's create this massive bureaucracy, TSA. Let's deploy these air marshals.
And so they do that.
And then after a while, it appears like the attacks have subsided.
It's not happening. No other 9-11.
It's been 20 years. So suddenly it's like, well, let's not pay too much.
So the Air Marshal National Council fired off a letter to DHS Secretary Mallorca's And Pekoski and Stevenson reminding them that deploying these air marshals to the southern border to perform humanitarian work is reckless and it's putting the nation at extreme risk.
And I believe that not only is that happening, but just the pure porous border itself is putting the nation at risk.
So we have a lot of different angles putting our country at risk.
Not only at risk of terrorists attacking airplanes, but terrorists posing as Mexicans and coming in through the border, as well as the fentanyl crisis that has just, you know.
One thing that's worth keeping in mind, and you and I have talked about this before, is that if you follow the trajectory of these attacks, by and large, the ground for them is paved by Democrat leadership, or should I say lack of leadership.
Even though the 9-11 attacks occurred under Bush, the ground for that was prepared under Clinton.
Remember the attacks on Cobar Towers, the The attack on the USS Cole, the attack on U.S. embassies, the Clinton administration does nothing.
They even know where Bin Laden is, but they don't go after him.
And so Bin Laden becomes emboldened.
And then similar, so my point is that now that they have Biden there, and they know that Biden doesn't care about any of this, his attention is elsewhere.
Well, his attention is such as it is.
Well, I don't think he has much attention.
There's not a whole lot of attention going on.
I think he's one of those, he's really Bernie, Weekend at Bernie's, because that's exactly what he looks like to the rest of us.
I mean, it's gotten to a point where it used to be that we'd see these things, we'd roll our eyes, we'd make fun of it, but they've become so routine.
In other words, it is now expected that Biden says things that make no sense.
He has sentences that don't conjoin one to the other.
There's no logic there.
And nobody even feels like they need to criticize it or explain it because it's just like, this is Biden.
This is the clown.
Exactly. And this is really bad.
And I'll even go further reading this.
So apparently these air marshals are making sandwiches.
And I'm reading this word for word.
They're making sandwiches for them and driving them around like Uber or picking up supplies.
So our air marshals are Ubering illegals.
This is the Biden regime for you.
We can see the dual injustice here.
On the one hand, you have this chaos at the border.
On the other hand, the movement of people who could actually be doing things to protect our national security and protect our citizens now being used to handle this crisis completely man-made and deliberately engineered by the Biden administration itself.
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Here's an article in the New York Times that caught our attention.
There has never been a better time to be short.
Well, hold on.
This is an article written by Mara Altman, who apparently is unbelievably short.
She's five feet even.
Well, hello. Yeah, twins.
And then she goes, my husband, who's five foot six.
Okay, well, yeah, there you go.
Well, anyway, so let's discover what are these great virtues of being short.
She goes, short is better, and it is the future.
And as you read the article, this is when you have to start chuckling because she begins by saying the short are inherent conservationists.
Presumably, she goes, they eat less, they drink less water, and they apparently breathe less.
They don't breathe as vehemently as people who are large and tall.
So according to her, we save, the planet does, 87 million tons of food.
Oh my goodness.
Trillions of gallons of water.
And also they produce less trash.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah. And she goes on to say that she makes a kind of a Darwinian argument, which I think is actually untrue, by the way, that somehow being short is conducive to survival because your needs are less.
So think if you're operating in a scarce environment and there's a smaller quantity of food and you've got a bunch of short guys, they're going to be like, yeah, let's play.
We don't need for us because we're short.
We don't need much, right?
Whereas presumably if...
But the other side of it, of course, is that people who are bigger and larger can hunt more animals.
They probably are stronger.
And so the benefits of consuming less on the part of the short people is more than overridden by the survival advantages of the large, the tall, and the strong.
By the way, here we go. When you mate with shorter people, you're potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations...
So you're basically creating a bunch of shorties.
You're reducing the average size of the human race, right?
Apparently so. And then she goes on to say, which this is the kind of common fallacy you hear all the time.
There are some short people who thrive and do phenomenally well and lead fantastic lives.
And there are some tall people who are miserable.
Well, this is like saying that there are some women who are shorter, who are taller than men, but that doesn't change the overall fact.
Why don't you ask this short person what she thinks?
Yeah, I was going to say. I seem to be giving you the short shrift.
So why don't you weigh in on the benefits of short people?
So I don't know how many people know how short I am.
I guess those of you that have seen me, right, know how short I am.
But I always claim to be 5'1", right?
But I'm actually only 5'3".
Right? So I'm slightly taller than 5 feet, but not by a lot.
Well, I think you can always tell which way people want to be by looking at where they exaggerate.
So for example, I'm 5'9".
I'm just 5'9".
I would love to be 5'10".
You know what I mean? And in fact, when I was younger, I would even...
But I've never heard you saying you're 5'10", whereas I've said I'm 5'1".
Right, right. I noticed that guys who are like 5'7 always claim they're 5'8 or 5'9.
Yeah. People don't like to be...
5'9 is the average, so I don't really mind.
To be honest, I've never liked being short.
I don't know what this woman's talking about.
Short? Being short, in my opinion, like, for example, clothes.
Oh, my goodness. It's really hard to find pants.
Number one, it's really hard to find shirts that have sleeves that don't go down to, like, past my fingers, right?
Because when they make clothes, now that, you know, when they make petite sizes, they do do that.
But when you don't buy petite clothes, they make them for regular-sized 5'4", 5'5", women.
And there are some inches that are, you know, obviously different, right?
Well, you also have to reach for things.
I notice in the closet you're often standing on a ladder or you have a stick.
Often, always, okay?
Right. So that's a disadvantage.
And you know that we have to have a stepstool in the kitchen and in the pantry and in the laundry room, everywhere.
Well, another thing that you say, I'm just quoting you here.
You say that the disadvantage of being short is that it's really easy to gain a pound.
Oh my gosh. And it shows on you.
So when she talks about the fact that short people eat less, yeah, we have to eat less because if we eat like normal people, we would be 300 pounds.
So, yeah, there's a reason for that.
I mean, Debbie will say, you know, I didn't lose an ounce.
And Debbie is unbelievably disciplined in her eating habits.
Super frustrating. On the other hand, I eat, well, sometimes pretty voraciously.
Well, you have extra nine inches.
Well, there you go. You know what I mean? That's what I mean, yes.
So that makes a big difference.
But the funny thing...
Is that she makes the case for saving the planet.
This is where I got the chuckle.
Because, you know what?
Short people got nobody.
Short people got...
But apparently to her, we got everybody.
What seems to be a really strange phenomenon of our time is that people take things that have by and large been seen as undesirable.
And they've been seen as undesirable for the simple reason that they are.
Oh! What? I'm just saying, why would somebody want to be stunted or morbidly obese or ridiculously ugly?
I mean, look, some people are ugly and the point is I wouldn't want to make fun of it or attack it, but it's not a virtue.
So what really gets me is when someone takes something like that and goes, this is the season to be ugly.
No, no, no, but I think for her, because she doesn't like being short, she has to make it a virtue.
That's what I'm talking about. Okay, but the problem with being short is that, but she's not saying that it's like what I said, you know, the clothing and all those things.
She's actually saying that it will save the planet if you're short.
And you should try to procreate and have children that are short.
Because, you know, ultimately, short people are going to save the planet.
Right. And I guess what I'm saying is it's a rationalization.
In a very different way, you find the same thing with people who are morbidly obese.
Obviously, it's bad for you.
Obviously, it's not good for society either.
It imposes costs on society in all kinds of ways.
But nevertheless, you've got this sort of Fat esteem movement.
And even sometimes if I say something even slightly, you know, off the reservation, you kind of warn me and you're like, don't go there.
I should want to stay off that topic and so on.
And because I guess I don't want a really fat person sitting on my head.
Right? I could pay dearly for my fatterphobic remarks.
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Feel the difference. Okay, Debbie, is obsessed the right word here?
You are really fascinated by these Idaho murders.
And of course, now they've arrested Brian Koberger.
And you said from the beginning that you thought this guy was a serial killer.
Well, I said, let me just say, before anybody knew who did it, when these kids, well, first of all, when they were killed, I was horrified.
Not just because, you know, these four kids were killed, but, you know, Juliana was in college.
So I, like...
You know thought that is a parent's worst nightmare to send your kid to college and then have something like that happen to them So so I was very interested in the case because of that but you know as you know I've always been interested in all of this criminology and forensic science and all that that's why I I had you watching forensic files, like, for years, right?
Well, I think what I find interesting is I'm interested more in the crimes that have a motive, where someone comes up with a diabolical scheme or plot, and usually you can follow the trail by looking at who stands to benefit from this particular crime.
I mean, the mystery of the serial killer, or in this case, well, I guess he's not, we don't know.
Well, I think, I personally think, and this is, and I said this at the very beginning, I thought this was a sloppy serial killer wannabe because I thought that all indications were that this person went in to do some harm to not just one person, but many, right?
But they did it in a way that...
You know, eventually was going to catch up to them.
Because number one, they did it indoors.
And nowadays, where they have the DNA technology, now it can actually use touch DNA. So skin cells can be, you know, you can actually do a profile, a DNA profile on skin cells.
Whereas in the past you could only say, okay, this is the blood type that did this versus Oh this blood type, you know is is we have to omit it because that well Yeah, and now DNA is just amazing. I mean it has well I I think a fascinating aspect of DNA is not merely that they have the DNA profile But it used to be that they would put the DNA profile into CODIS, into one of these databases.
Oh, yeah. And the databases, of course, made up mainly of people who have criminal records.
But it was hard to get at people who didn't have criminal records.
They were not in the CODIS database.
But now they use these family...
Familial. It's called familial genealogy.
So DNA. So in other words, what they do is they go into this...
And I do Ancestry.com, but it's various ones.
And what they do is that something spits out, right, the DNA. And it could be like a cousin, a close cousin, a sibling, somebody really, an aunt, uncle, whatever.
And so they go there.
And then they go, okay, well, this person didn't even live anywhere near Idaho.
They lived 2,000 miles away, right?
Okay, so who's related to this person that lived in Idaho?
And so that's kind of how they do it.
I mean, what makes this particular case a kind of a cat and mouse type of case is that Brian Kohlberger is a criminology PhD student.
He's also a teaching assistant, so he's been an instructor.
He actually knows.
A good deal about DNA. He would know a good deal about crime scenes.
Yeah. And we were just talking about the very intriguing possibility.
Now, we saw this in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Rope, where you've got somebody.
Now, in that case, he wasn't a criminology student.
But in Rope, you've got a guy who's interested philosophically in crime.
Yep. And he's interested in the idea, can I do a crime and get away with it?
How do I fool the people who are trying to detect it?
And it could be that here you've got a guy, maybe he has a certain disposition and that's why he goes into criminology.
Or he goes into it and he goes, I wonder if I could do it myself and get away with it.
Right. Well, I don't know. I mean, as you know, it's come out that his DNA was all over the place, right?
So I think it's going to be a task for his defense attorney to say, okay, well, let's see here.
What other reason would there be for his DNA to be in X or Y or whatever?
whatever, so that she can try to poke holes, right?
It's going to be a fascinating case, and I'm probably going to follow it on court TV.
We'll probably talk about it some more, but the point we're making, and we'll close on this, is just the fact that they could argue that Brian Kohlberger went to a party in this house and therefore his DNA was there, but if his DNA is on the crime scene, i.e. on the bodies, or conversely, you made this point, if the DNA of the victims is in his car, then it's going to be pretty hard for him to get out of it.
I want to talk today in the podcast about the Christian roots of modern science, of the whole scientific method and the whole scientific outlook.
And so far I've been focused on how Christianity has played a key role in a lot of the core concepts of Western civilization.
The idea of human dignity, of human rights, of human equality, the affirmation of ordinary life, the right of conscience, individualism, and so on.
But now I want to talk about the issue of science.
And this is an important issue because there are a lot of people who think that somehow science and Christianity are at odds.
In fact, science and theism are irreconcilable, that there's a sort of a war between religion and science.
As it turns out, this whole concept of a war between religion and science is an atheist invention of the late 19th century.
It was devised in a series of polemical books that created a false impression that somehow religion and science have always been at each other's throat, so to speak.
And that idea continues to resonate with some contemporary skeptics and atheists.
Here's E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist.
He says there's a, quote,"...insoluble enmity between religion and science." Several years ago, Time magazine had a cover story, God vs.
Science. So you can see that that idea is still very much alive.
But as we think about it, right away there is a problem with it.
And the problem is this.
Science, as it turns out, developed as an organized, sustained enterprise only once in human history.
And where did it develop?
Did it arise in...
The Far East?
Southern Africa?
No, it arose in the West.
It arose in Europe. The civilization then called Christendom.
So the question then arises, why did science develop there and nowhere else?
Now... In a speech that he gave in 2006, this was in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict, this is the late Pope Benedict, said that the reason science developed in Europe and in the West is because Christianity has from the beginning emphasized reason.
And it's this idea I want to try to explicate.
The Pope's remarks, by the way, became controversial for other reasons.
He made some remarks that had to do with Islam and the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
But what I want to say is that an unbiased look at the history of science shows that modern science is an invention of medieval Christianity.
The greatest breakthroughs in scientific reason have been made by Christians, by people who are very devout in their faith and their belief.
And even atheist scientists today, they might reject the theism, they may reject the Christianity, but they work with Christian assumptions that are somehow hidden or invisible to them.
Before science, there was the idea that we live in an enchanted universe, a universe that is populated by spirits.
And really, every rock, every river, every tree, every stone was thought to have a kind of spirit that was inhabiting it.
The world was mysterious.
It was capricious.
It was unpredictable. It was uncontrollable.
And then you had all these polytheistic religions.
The religions of the Babylonians, the religion of the Pharaohs and the Egyptians, of the Greeks.
And by and large...
What you had is that these religions came up with divinities that were connected with nature.
The god of the river, the god of hunting, the god of thunder, the god of the forest, and so on.
So you could almost say that gods were personifications of nature.
Sometimes this is called animism.
Then we had the great religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, and of course the three monotheistic religions of the West, namely Judaism and Christianity and Islam.
But only one of these, Christianity, is a religion that I would say is based on reason.
And what do I mean by this?
Now, Judaism and Islam, which are the closest cousins, if you will, to Christianity, are religions of law.
And law is a set of edicts.
Do this, don't do that.
Law is essentially a judicial command, which is authoritative for human beings.
In the case of Judaism, the laws apply to God's chosen people, namely the Jews.
In the case of Islam, they supposedly apply to everyone.
But in both cases we're talking about divinely revealed and handed down laws.
Humans are basically instructed to follow them.
Jews and Muslims do have debates, but the debates are kind of about what these laws mean or what's the best way to interpret and apply these written codes.
See, Christianity is not a religion of law.
It's a religion of creed.
And what do I mean by creed?
I mean a set of professed beliefs.
Sometimes when people are talking about Hinduism, they'll say things like, Hinduism is a way of life.
And you say, well, what do you have to believe to be a Hindu?
And they go, well, nothing. We don't have any creed.
We don't have any set of beliefs that defines you as being a Hindu or not being a Hindu.
Rather, if you live a certain way, then you're a Hindu.
Just by virtue of your sort of customary practices.
But Christianity is not like that.
Christianity by and large holds that you believe in certain things.
The philosopher Ernest Fortin once said that while the highest discipline in Judaism and Islam is jurisprudence, the highest discipline in Christianity is theology.
I'm talking about Christianity and science while just beginning a discussion of this important topic, the relationship between the two.
And I just made the point that Christianity is a creedal religion.
It's a religion that depends upon belief, a professed belief in certain things.
And I quoted the philosopher and theologian, Ernest Fortin, saying that while Islam and Judaism elevate jurisprudence, that's their highest discipline for Christianity, it's theology.
But now I want to look at theology because when you first say the word theology, you don't think of science and maybe you don't even think of reason.
You might think of theology as nothing more than I'm talking about theology as a rational enterprise.
I'm talking about theology as an effort to use the mind, to use reason, to try to say certain things about God.
And I want to make the point that it is that same exercise of the intellect, the same exercise of reason that will provide We're good to go.
Let me begin by talking about the church father, Augustine, who lived around the 4th century.
He was a bishop in North Africa, the region called Hippo.
And Augustine was approached by one of his monks, who asked him an interesting question, which is to say, Hey, Augustine, I'm putting this now in my own words.
Let's think for a little bit about today.
Before today, there was yesterday.
And before yesterday, there was the day before, and so on.
But how far back does this really go?
Can there be yesterdays that go on sort of forever?
Or does there have to have been a particular moment in which all the days got started?
In other words, is the universe eternal?
And if so, how can we say that the universe was created by God?
How do you create an eternal universe?
And if the universe is not eternal and God made it, well, what was God doing before that?
God obviously would have had an enormous amount of time, infinite time, on His hands, because God doesn't have a beginning and an end, even if the universe does.
So how did God occupy His time?
Now, Augustine thought about this, and he gave the following answer.
And that is, he said, first of all, that the universe...
Does have a beginning that it doesn't make sense to talk about the yesterday and the day before and the day before ad infinitum.
There couldn't actually be an infinite series of yesterdays extending in an unlimited way back.
And so there has to be a first day and then there would be a day after that and so on.
But, said Augustine, it makes no sense to talk about what God did with his time before he created the universe because there was no time.
A startling idea.
Basically what Augustine is saying is that the universe is kind of like a series, one, two, three, four, and so on, but God is not in the series.
He's outside the series.
Or to put it somewhat differently, the universe is kind of like a novel and there are characters in the novel, but God is more like Shakespeare or God is more like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
God is the creator of the novel.
He doesn't inhabit the novel.
The novel is produced by him and so God is to that degree.
We get a new idea of what eternity means here.
It doesn't just mean extending time infinitely forward and backward.
Eternity means being beyond eternity.
Transcending, being in some sense outside of time.
Now this is a radically counterintuitive notion that Augustine advances.
And notice he advances it based on reason alone.
Augustine is not a scientist and he doesn't do experiments.
But he argues based on reason that A, the universe had a beginning and B, the creator of the universe, and there has to be a creator, Because the universe cannot bring itself into being, this creator of the universe is eternal in the sense of being outside of time.
Now, very interestingly, if you take modern physics, physics 101, you'll realize that what Augustine just said is completely correct.
It's completely supported, at least the material part of it, the idea that there is a universe.
That no, this universe does not have infinite regression.
It didn't always exist.
It came into being at a specific moment.
In fact, space and time came into being.
They are properties of our universe and outside our universe or beyond our universe.
If there is a beyond, there's no space, there's no time.
So you see here the way in which Augustinian theological reasoning is is stunningly vindicated by modern science.
And the broader point I want to make is this exercise of reason, which we will see, we just saw it a little bit in Augustine, we will see it next week in Aquinas.
This is the kind of reason that provided the broadest foundation for science and helps to explain why science began and to this day continues.
It's in its strongest form.
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