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Jan. 25, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:39
CAREER CRIMINAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep503
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Coming up, Biden has a long history of mishandling classified documents.
So if that's a crime, possession of the documents, this guy's a career criminal.
It's kind of amusing.
I'll talk about how an FBI official who accused Trump of colluding with Russia has now been arrested for, you guessed it, colluding with Russia.
Alfredo Ortiz joins me.
He's from the Job Creators Network.
We're going to talk about entrepreneurship and how that's really the way out for poor Black and Latino communities.
And I'll begin my discussion with a profound question.
Is the universe all that there is?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
So guys, I walk into the studio this morning, and Debbie's like, what are you wearing?
She leaves before me to head to the studio.
She doesn't always see my outfits.
We're going to get so many emails about your choice of sweater.
I like to wear sometimes what in our family is affectionately known as the one-of-a-kind Dinesh attire.
But, you know, I think I picked this up somewhere in Europe.
What? You know what?
It does have kind of an American Indian theme.
I wasn't going for that because, first of all, I don't like to confuse people.
Is he Indian? Is he American Indian?
What message is he trying to convey here?
Anyway, I want to talk about the classified documents scandal.
And there are two new developments.
One is that Biden has been holding on to classified documents, not just from his vice presidential days, but from his Senate days.
In other words, for decades.
What? Now...
Here's Kevin McCarthy posting today.
He goes, I'm not even sure how that happens unless a senator stuffs the documents in their pants or someplace else.
So what he's getting at is it's not easy as a senator to end up with classified documents.
These documents are made available to you for hearings and other purposes like that.
And so how do you take them home?
How do they end up in your garage?
How do they end up in your office?
Unless there was some effort to take them out.
So that's the first thing that's interesting.
But the second is that, look, if the possession of classified documents is a crime, well, it follows, kind of as night follows day, that Biden has been a criminal in this respect for decades.
He's been doing it a long time.
He's kind of a veteran of the classified document purloining scheme.
So that's the first development.
The second development is, Mike Pence has classified documents.
What? So this introduces almost a slightly comic element to the whole thing, because think about it.
Mike Pence is like the ultimate conscientious, straight-laced guy.
And he ends up with classified documents.
So the lesson appears to be that even conscientious, straight-laced guys leave and take documents they're not supposed to.
And so, what do we do with this?
Do we let it alone?
Do we prosecute all three?
Pence, Biden, Trump?
How do we deal with this?
What appears to be going on, and I've said this before, is that the left always likes to come up with rules.
Trump has broken the rules, and these are very serious rules.
These are top secret documents.
Now, first of all, as somebody who's worked in the government, I've got to tell you that most of these classified documents are pure rubbish.
There's nothing actually valuable about them.
There's a typical claptrap generated in government offices.
And yet some bureaucrats sit there with a stamp.
Top secret! Top secret!
So we shouldn't get too freaked out.
There are, in fact, a country does have real secrets.
But a lot of stuff that's classified doesn't need to be classified.
It's an email from Mr.
X to Mr. Y or a reply from Mr.
Z. You know, this stuff is just boring.
Now... But the point I'm making here is that the rules are being applied only against Trump.
Everybody else evidently gets to break the rules except Trump.
Now, the left has been trying desperately to show that there's a difference between what Trump did and what Trump did on the one hand versus what Biden and Pence did on the other hand.
Interesting, even the left is trying to defend Pence.
Why? Because I think they know that if Pence is guilty, well, Biden's going to be guilty.
And then the Pandora's box is open.
So their point is, no, they got to keep the focus.
Trump is the only criminal around here.
Now, why is that? Well, here's a classic example of an attempt to say that this is what Trump did that's unique.
Mike Pence found classified docs and alerted the FBI. Joe Biden found classified docs and alerted the FBI. Donald Trump stole classified docs, hid them, and refused to return them.
Let's start right there.
First of all, the idea here is that...
That Pence and Biden found the documents while Trump stole documents.
So here's my tweet responding to this.
If Pence found the documents, who took them?
Obviously Pence.
And the same with Biden.
Both men took the documents and then later found them.
So, what about Trump?
The same. He took the documents and later found that he had them.
So, why use the word stole in connection with Trump while the other two supposedly just found the documents?
My point here is that this is a manipulation of language to camouflage the fact that all three men took the documents and subsequently found them.
Now, one guy responds to me, and this is just a guy on social media, he goes, because Trump refused to give them back.
Is that really so hard to understand?
Well, Trump didn't refuse.
Trump was negotiating with the FBI and the government over adequate security for the documents.
Remember, the FBI said put an extra lock on there.
And over which documents belong to the archives and which documents belong to Trump.
Now, the reason this is relevant is Trump is the only one of the three who has actual authority to declassify documents.
By the way, Biden had no such authority.
He does now as president, but we're talking about documents from his vice presidential days and his Senate days, and of course, Mike Pence doesn't.
Only the president has the authority to, just on his say-so, declassify documents.
So, I'll close with Lindsey Graham.
This is a moronic statement from Lindsey Graham, who's known to make these from time to time.
I've known President Biden a long time.
I'd be shocked if there's anything sinister here.
Who's talking about something being sinister?
We're just talking about whether something is unlawful or corrupt.
Either the possession of classified documents in a negligent manner is unlawful or it's not.
If it's unlawful, then it has to be prosecuted across the board.
If it's not, then all three of these guys did something stupid but not necessarily something that they need to be indicted for.
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Today is turning out to be kind of a fun day on the podcast, and I'm going to make it even funner, if I can use that term.
Turns out that a senior FBI official, we're talking about the guy who was in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence division in New York.
This is a fellow named Charles McGonigal.
Now, he retired in 2018, so he's not still with the FBI. But this is a guy who was involved in In the FBI campaign to depict Trump as colluding with Russia.
This is the guy who was involved with Crossfire Hurricane.
He was involved with George Papadopoulos.
The whole notion that Trump was colluding with Russia...
It was, of course, a lie and a left-wing democratic scheme to not only explain Hillary's defeat in 2016, but ruin Trump's presidency, possibly even get Trump indicted.
Ultimately, it was the basis for one of the two impeachments.
And so this guy, Charles McGonigal, is right in the mix.
And so, isn't it a delicious irony?
That this very same Charles McGonigal, this very same FBI counterintelligence division guy, this fellow who was a promoter and participant in the Russia collusion hoax, has now been arrested and And charged over, you guessed it, Russia collusion.
Now, let's follow this.
According to the indictment, this guy McGonagall, along with another fellow named Sergei Shestakov, who was a former Soviet and Russian diplomat who later became a U.S. citizen, these guys were apparently providing services to a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska.
Oleg Deripaska.
And this guy, Oleg Deripaska, is a really bad guy.
He owns massive Russian companies, energy companies, and so on.
But he's involved in all kinds of bribery.
He's essentially a front man for Putin.
And the United States imposed sanctions.
By the way, these aren't even the recent sanctions imposed over Ukraine.
But these are sanctions that were imposed several years ago.
And it was in 2018 that the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated this guy, Dara Pasca, as a sort of a national security.
He was someone who was named as someone you couldn't do business with.
So you had U.S. laws, and the U.S. laws were sanctions against Russia, and they said, you can't do business with all these Russian oligarchs who are part of Putin's circle.
Well, it turns out that this FBI guy, McGonagall, was working for Deripaska on two counts.
One, he was trying to get the U.S. sanctions against Deripaska lifted.
And number two, he was also providing services, including research into one of Deripaska's political opponents.
And he's not allowed to provide these services at all because this guy is under sanctions.
And McGonagall knew that.
And the way we know that he knew that is because he set up a whole system of communications and payments with Deripaska, which never involved Deripaska himself.
In other words, when he would communicate with the Deripaska people, they'd never name Deripaska.
They would use shell companies as counterparties.
So, in other words, McGonagall Shell Company would sign a contract with Deripaska Shell Company.
But this was a way of trying to hide the fact that a U.S. senior retired FBI agent was doing business with a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
And finally, the payments between Deripaska and McGonagall were hidden.
Again, they passed through the Shell companies.
So all of this shows motive.
It shows that this guy knew that what he was doing is wrong, knew that what he was doing is illegal.
And the only surprising aspect about this is that it is the Biden DOJ... I'm looking to see.
They're taking a risk by going after this guy because he could talk, he could spill the beans, and then a lot of the corruption of the FBI could come out.
I certainly hope that that happens.
My guess is that they're trying to show that they're even-handed.
Hey, look, we even go after our own.
Here's an FBI agent who did wrong.
And sure enough, if you look at some of the rhetoric coming out of the Biden DOJ, It is self-congratulatory.
Look, we operate without favor.
Everybody is accountable to the law, blah, blah, blah.
But in this case, I'm actually happy that a guy who tried to go after Trump and get Trump, well, finally, they get him.
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Code Dinesh. I subscribe to an academic service that sends me scholarly articles, and they have a search function that sends me scholarly articles that refer to me.
I just got one I wanted to talk about.
It's quite amusing.
It's written by a communications scholar, a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin.
This guy's a professor in Queens, New York.
His name is Michael Lacey, and the article is called...
Black Frankenstein in D'Souza's 2016 Obama's America.
So the article is an analysis of my Obama film.
And the article is full of the typical academic gobbledygook.
But fortunately, there's a sort of abstract or summary up front.
And that's the summary I want to comment on because it's just so typical and it's also so entertaining.
First of all, this essay offers a critical rhetorical analysis of neoconservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza.
Stop right there.
I've never called myself a neoconservative.
True, I was at the American Enterprise Institute along with a lot of neoconservatives, but I don't think I've ever been fairly described as one of them.
He goes on to talk about my, quote, popular political documentary, and he goes, I argue that the documentary's narrative emulates conservative...
Black Frankenstein Stories!
Now, first of all, I've never quite heard that phrase.
And so I was like, Black Frankenstein stories?
Is this some kind of a genre?
So I look it up, and it turns out there was a movie that came out a couple of decades ago called Blackenstein, which was apparently about a Black Frankenstein.
But what this guy is basically saying is I'm using the Frankenstein theme, which, by the way, never mentioned in 2016.
But I guess he means I'm sort of subtly invoking it as a kind of dog whistle.
the idea that Obama is a black Frankenstein.
Quote, quote, whereby a monstrous black slave revolts against his white slave owner, justifying a violent white backlash to restore white supremacy.
Now it's really important to point out that one of the things I do right away in the Obama film is I make the point that this is not a film that is about race or about slavery or about the civil rights movement.
None of those things.
It is actually about something that involves white and black and brown people but is fundamentally not racial at all.
Namely, colonialism and anti-colonialism.
See, the British didn't come to rule India because the Indians were brown.
The British came to rule India because there was territory to be conquered and they wanted to be the lords of more and more land.
And the British were ultimately modeled on the British.
The Nazis tried to conquer land and, of course, they conquered land in Europe.
They invaded Poland. Of course, the Germans and the Poles are both white.
So the idea of colonialism Or even anti-colonialism, it intersects with race, but it's not fundamentally a racial idea.
And so the notion here that somehow I'm presenting Obama as some kind of a slave revolter, kind of like Nat Turner who led a slave rebellion, is downright preposterous.
Goes on to say that I use anti-black racist caricatures.
Where are the caricatures?
In Obama's America, I show Obama.
In fact, the voice running as a narrative alongside mine is Obama's own voice.
See, I discovered that Obama read his own book.
In audiobooks. And so I had Obama's voice, which I was able to play in the film.
And the real power of that film was, it's undeniable.
You can't say I'm paraphrasing Obama.
Here is Obama telling you about his own life in his own words and using his own voice.
Then it goes on to say that I suggest that, quote, racism and colonialism no longer exist, which is absurd.
And it concludes in this way.
Finally, I argue that the popular conservative depictions of Obama as a menacing mulatto monster...
So, by the way, this is itself a rather comical caricature of the film.
And if you haven't seen the film, by the way, it's available on iTunes.
You can easily find it.
You'll find it very eye-opening because this was a film that I made around 2011.
It came out in 2012.
And you will see that at a time when Obama was not clearly understood, I think I got him right.
You'll be able to see in retrospect that what that film says about Obama is It's clinically accurate.
It's 100% true.
But here's how the article concludes.
Finally, I argue that the popular conservative depictions of Obama as a menacing mulatto monster destroying America were precursors of a white backlash against America's first black U.S. president and his multicultural coalition culminating in Donald Trump's presidential victory.
So I'm responsible in a single film, a single documentary, not only for, you may say, blackening Obama's reputation, but producing single-handedly the election of Donald J. Trump.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast my friend Alfredo Ortiz.
He is the president and CEO of the Job Creators Network.
By the way, the website JobCreatorsNetwork.com.
And before joining the Job Creators Network, he was a marketing and corporate strategy consultant.
He's worked for a bunch of Fortune 500 companies.
He has his PhD, actually his MBA, from the University of Michigan.
Alfredo, welcome to the podcast.
By the way, we're going to talk about your new book, The Real Race Revolutionaries.
But I want, since this is your first time on my podcast, I'd like you to introduce yourself and your background because we're going to talk about entrepreneurship.
How did you discover that entrepreneurship is the key to upward mobility?
Thank you very much, Dinesh, to have me on your show.
It's a true honor.
The way I actually came about is because of my background.
I was saying that the first and best entrepreneur that I met was actually my mother.
I grew up poor down in Chula Vista, California, which is just outside of San Diego.
And I remember every week on Trash Day, my mom and I would go out.
We would collect aluminum cans and newspapers out of the trash cans.
And we'd head over to the YMCA and we'd cash that in.
You know, and that was her grocery money for the week.
And when we couldn't make ends meet, you know, she had bake sales, cookie sales, craft sales, garage sales, you name it.
But I have to tell you, she was truly the best entrepreneur that I ever met.
And, you know, fast forward to, you know, where I am today.
I finished high school, first one finished high school, college, grad school.
But, you know, I never forgot the work ethic that both my mom and my dad taught me.
My dad was a tailor.
My mom was actually a housekeeper.
And so taking all those experiences and that hard work and grit and the belief in yourself and the American dream, I am where I am today because of that.
And I actually started my own two businesses after having enough of corporate America, quite frankly.
I decided to start my own two businesses.
So I had a construction business and a consulting business that started in Atlanta, Georgia.
And to go from that background to standing next to President Trump as a commissioner of the White House Initiative on Excellence for Hispanic Education, I say, Dinesh, that only in this country does that really happen.
And so, you know, I take all those experiences and I put it into this book because I think it really adds a nice background and flavor to quite a hot topic that I think a lot of people fear on really having because of our whole woke culture now.
Let's talk about the book because the book is called The Real Race Revolutionaries.
And I take it that what you're arguing is that we think of revolutionaries as social agitators, people who try to turn things upside down, in some case people who light things on fire.
We think of revolutionaries as destructive people.
Or in some cases, fighting for a good cause, I think, of the civil rights movement.
They were revolutionaries in a sense.
But you're saying that if you really want to bring about change, at least today, the focus needs to be less on lighting a trash can on fire and not even necessarily doing a protest march.
But rather, entrepreneurship is the key, and it's especially the key for poor Black and Latino communities, but I assume that you would make the argument that it's the key for anybody who's trying to come up the ladder, right?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the past 10 years, I've run this organization called Job Creators Network, which our whole focus really is on, you know, protecting our small businesses in this country.
Dinesh, you know this community well, it's 30 million small businesses, hire 60 million or so Americans, hardworking Americans.
So we have a community of 90 million hardworking Americans in this country that are dependent on success of small business.
And in particular, when you look at minority 10 million of those 30 million are actually minority entrepreneurs.
That represents two trillion dollars, trillion dollars of net worth overall.
And when you look, for example, I have one data point in there.
I have many data points really that I think back up my theory here.
But one in particular I think is eye-opening is the Black Caucus Foundation, mind you, the Black Caucus Foundation, did a study and found that the net worth of Black entrepreneurs is actually 12 times greater than that of Black non-entrepreneurs.
So in other words, entrepreneurialism in those cases really has been the answer for these folks to get out of this racial and economic divide and have part of that American dream.
But when I gave testimony, for example, which is another reason I wrote this book, because I was actually so, quite frankly, angered almost by the reaction of the Democrats.
I gave a testimony in the spring of last year in front of the whole House Ways and Means Committee, where I was the sole Republican witness.
And I actually argued that, you know, entrepreneurialism is the way to kind of cure that economic and social divide.
The Democrats, of course, said, no, it's more about more government regulation, more government intervention that's really going to be the answer.
And so when I actually said what I said, they actually had the nerve of calling me ignorant and inappropriate, despite the background and history that I bring to the party.
Unbelievable. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, we're going to dive further into Alfredo Ortiz's new book.
It's called The Real Race Revolutionaries.
We'll be right back. The Biden administration's New Year's strategy seems to be tax and spend and turn a blind eye to inflation.
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I'm back with my friend Alfredo Ortiz.
He is president and CEO of Job Creators Network.
And he's also the author of the new book, The Real Race Revolutionaries.
Alfredo, you're talking about the benefits of entrepreneurship.
I mean, this is something that Debbie and I try to teach our kids.
Who have an education and could get normal jobs working for companies.
And they do.
But we make the point that there are really two benefits to being an entrepreneur.
One, of course, is that you're your own boss.
And that's always a nice thing to be.
Now, obviously, there are some people who think the great thing about being my own boss is I don't have to work really hard.
But I think you know and I know that the opposite is true.
But at least you're working for a guy that presumably you like, namely yourself.
But the second thing is that the upside opportunity of being an entrepreneur is often much greater than going to work for someone else.
Because if you're able to create a formula, produce a product that really meets the needs and wants of customers...
The sky's the limit. If you can figure out a way to ramp that up, you can really make a success to a degree that you can't if you are in a normal type of profession.
Do you agree with that?
Do you think those are the two main benefits of entrepreneurship over, let's just say, a standard type of job?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's even another component to it and call it a little bit kind of existentialist point of view here, but the idea of really doing something for your community, doing something that is going to better your community.
Because the one thing, Dinesh, and I'm sure you've seen where you live, is that small businesses And quite frankly, in any community, small businesses are truly the backbone of that community.
They build that community.
They support that community.
This whole country without small business wouldn't be a country because it is truly the backbone of our country.
I mean, when you go, for example, on weekends to a little league field or a soccer field or something like that, where you have little kids playing, look at those billboards, right?
Who's supporting that? It's not Citibank, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, right?
It is, you know, Jay's Pizza or, you know, Jones Dry Cleaners, right?
It's all the local shops, all the local businesses that really support that.
So that feeling of giving back, of being a local small business owner, for example, is a really great feeling and being able to give back to that community.
And so there is, I think, that along with the other elements that you talked about.
But really, in the end, it's being able to believe in yourself, this idea of hard work.
I mean, I go back to what my mom and my dad taught me, that if you really truly believe in yourself, you've got to go follow your dream.
And in this particular case, it's the American dream.
And trust me, after traveling tens of thousands of miles, in fact, I think over the 10 years, Dinesh, I've traveled over 110,000 miles crisscrossing the country, talking to entrepreneurs, minority entrepreneurs.
And trust me, not one of them says, you know what I need?
I need more government, more regulation, and more taxes.
You know, Alfredo, when I was working on my book, The End of Racism, this is now a couple of decades ago, I noticed something I didn't know about, which is that there was a flourishing black business sector in America.
Now, this was a sector that operated under segregation, but you had black-owned banks, black-owned insurance companies.
A lot of this was based around Durham, North Carolina.
And very strangely, and of course unintentionally, when the civil rights revolution occurred, a lot of those people were then pulled into the orbit of government. They became bureaucrats, in effect. And so a lot of those business skills that were there before, now obviously, when you take down segregation, those black entrepreneurs should have been able to service anyone, any customer that wants their services. But instead, a lot of those guys packed up shop, and they ended up serving in the Social Security
Administration or some sort of welfare project. And this weakened black America, I think part of what you're saying is that those skills need to be reintroduced.
That's really what's going to rescue the inner cities and the barrios, right?
Yeah, absolutely, Dinesh.
And actually, in the book, I kind of resuscitated the back and forth that existed between Booker T. Washington and W. Du Bois because this is actually what we're talking about.
As you know, Washington really believed That the way out for Black Americans is not through really civil disobedience or through protesting and stuff like that, but it was to really build up through ownership, through education, through empowering them to become better than what, quite frankly, the government even thought they could be.
The whole idea of really putting belief, I go back to that Black Caucus Foundation study where the net worth of a Black entrepreneur is 12 times greater than that of a non-entrepreneur or Black.
I mean, that alone, think about that, right?
So if you want to get out of the situation you're in, And get a part of that American dream.
Entrepreneurialism really is the way to do it.
But quite frankly, a lot of what the government has done has actually really hurt us, has really hurt the minority community.
Think about Dodd-Frank.
Almost 2,000 community banks went out of business.
Why? All in the name of supposedly trying to make our banking system better, all it did was it made our big banks bigger and our small banks pretty much disappear.
And those community banks, Dinesh, We're in minority communities.
So now access to capital for minorities in particular is much, much harder than it used to be.
Alfredo, this is all good stuff.
And it sounds like your book really breaks new ground.
I recommend it to people.
The book is called The Real Race Revolutionaries.
By the way, if you want to find out more about the Job Creators Network, JobCreatorsNetwork.com.
Alfredo Ortiz, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
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Now go to balanceofnature.com.
Use discount code AMERICA. When I'm moving into a big new section of What's So Great About Christianity, I remind you that I'm doing a sort of mini introduction to apologetics using my book What's So Great About Christianity.
If you want to get it, it's available in paperback.
It's probably helpful to follow along with some of the themes I'm covering.
I'm now beginning a chapter called A Universe with a Beginning.
It's subtitled God and the Astronomers.
And here's the opening quotation.
It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a god who intended to create beings...
This is Stephen Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time.
Now, Hawking spends much of that book trying to avoid the implications of what he just said, to try to give some alternative explanation.
And we're gonna come to that.
But we're gonna begin slowly and begin at the beginning.
And although we're gonna be talking about science, we're gonna be talking about physics, a little bit about astronomy, later about biology.
I'm going to convey these concepts and explain them in a manner that everyone can understand.
So no specialized knowledge.
You don't even have to have taken a physics class in 12th grade or in college.
These concepts can be understood in simple language and that is going to be my job to produce.
Now, the real question we're looking at is, is the universe all there is?
Is it the only thing that exists?
There's nothing beyond or outside the universe.
You've got a universe, and that's all you've got.
This was the position of the astronomer Carl Sagan, and he made this slogan famous in his TV series, Of several years ago.
And so I'm going to be examining, is that true?
Is the universe all there is?
And second, can the design of nature, we're going to see that there's an elaborate design in nature, does it point to a creator or can it be given a purely natural or as some people say naturalistic explanation?
Now, here's Carl Sagan again.
The cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be.
And here's physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate.
As far as we have been able to discover the laws of nature, they are impersonal, with no hint of a divine plan or any special status for human beings.
I'm going to try to show that these statements are factually normal.
Not logically, but factually wrong.
And they're wrong not because Steven Weinberg and Carl Sagan don't know physics.
It's because they don't know what physics does.
They don't know the circumference of physics, or they don't know what kind of explanations are needed to account for physics itself.
We'll come to that.
And I want to take up a challenge issued by the biologist E.O. Wilson, someone whose work I otherwise admire, author of a great book, by the way, just called Human Nature.
And here's E.O. Wilson, if any positive evidence could be found of a supernatural guiding force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time.
And what I want to argue is that in recent decades, in one of the most spectacular developments in physics and astronomy and cosmology, such evidence has indeed been found.
I'm going to argue that in a stunning confirmation of the book of Genesis, let's think back.
What does the book of Genesis say?
In the beginning, so it posits a beginning.
There was a beginning. The universe has not always existed.
It's not an eternal universe.
There was a beginning. And the universe was, according to the book of Genesis, created.
God created it.
And God created it in a burst of light.
I'm going to argue that this is exactly what we know now.
The universe was created in the beginning in a primordial explosion of energy and light.
I've said before, but I repeat now, not only did the universe have a beginning in space and time, but the origin of the universe was also a beginning for space and time.
Space and time did not exist, quote, prior to the universe.
Now, think about it this way.
If the universe had a beginning, and if everything that has a beginning has a cause, think about that for a moment.
everything that has a beginning has a cause.
It follows, right?
Because if something has a beginning, something must have brought it into being.
Things don't just pop in and out of existence without something having caused them.
So if you accept that everything that has a beginning has a cause, then it follows that the material universe had a non-material or spiritual cause.
Why? Because the universe contains all the material there is.
There's no other material outside the universe.
So if the universe had a beginning and something caused it, it couldn't be a material cause because all material objects are inside the universe.
So the cause of the universe, I guess I'm saying, must have been non-material or spiritual.
And I think if that's the case, if a non-material or spiritual cause brought the universe into being, then the creation of the universe can be described in very clinical language as a miracle.
And its creator can be known to be a spiritual, eternal being of enormous, perhaps infinite, creativity and power.
More creativity and power than we can conceive, or any limit that we can imagine.
So, mind and not matter came at the beginning, and I want to show that with the help of science and logic, all of this can be rationally demonstrated.
How do we know that the universe had a beginning?
This is a fascinating story and I want to begin to tell it.
Because let's remember that for many, many centuries, scientists thought that the universe was eternal.
It wouldn't need a causal explanation because it's always been there.
And things that are always there, one could still argue that they still need some sort of ultimate explanation, but you don't have to ask the question, what brought the universe into being?
But we know now that the universe is about 14.5 billion years old, and the obvious question is, how do we know?
Interestingly, when Einstein published his equations of relativity, this is his equations of general relativity, not the special relativity theory, which came a little earlier, but general relativity, they predict an expanding universe.
Now, the logic of this is the following.
If the universe is expanding in time, And as it turns out, by the way, it's not just the universe that's expanding.
Because when people think of something expanding, they think the universe is somehow expanding in space.
But the remarkable thing is space is expanding too.
Space is getting, you can say, larger.
And Einstein's equations predict this.
And yet, when Einstein heard about it, in fact, a Russian astronomer wrote Einstein, Alexander Friedman, and he said, hey, your equations predict an expanding universe.
And Einstein realized if the universe has been expanding, And then you work your way back in time, the universe must have been smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.
And at some point, the universe must have started as a single point.
And the single point generated the explosion, the so-called bang, That then, to this day, has created galaxies that are flying further away from each other.
That's not due to some kind of gravitational effect.
In fact, gravity would pull galaxies together.
The galaxies are flying further and further apart even now, because even now, 14 billion years later, we're feeling the effects of the Big Bang.
Wow. In any case, when Einstein got this letter from Alexander Friedman, he was very disturbed because he understood the implications.
Einstein wanted the universe to come down to laws.
He accepted that there was kind of a mind perhaps behind these laws, but he didn't like the idea of something causally bringing the universe into being.
And so he wrote back to Friedman and he goes, you're wrong.
You made a mistake. And then Friedman writes back and goes, actually, no, sir, you have.
You have actually fudged your own equations to try to avoid.
Einstein had essentially introduced a number called the cosmological constant, a number that he sort of artificially made up in order to avoid the implications of his own equation.
So think about this. We often think of scientists as very objective.
They look at the facts. Just the facts, ma'am.
Follow the science. Well, here's the case where Einstein didn't want to follow the science because he didn't like where the science was pointing.
And yet, Einstein, being ultimately a decent guy and an honest guy, he looked back at Alexander Friedman's work and he saw that Friedman was right, he, Einstein, was wrong, and that Einstein's own equations point to this notion of a universe in which the objects in the universe, galaxies, are flying further and further apart from each other even now.
Later, of course, Einstein would call the so-called cosmological constant, the number that he made up, quote, the greatest mistake of my life.
Now, this is theory.
These are equations. But in the 1920s, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble began to look in the Mount Wilson Observatory telescopes, and he noticed something strange.
Really interesting. He noticed that these galaxies are receding from each other.
So just what I said, galaxies are moving away from each other.
And the way that Edwin Hubble was able to figure this out is by measuring something called the redshift.
The redshift is sort of like the Doppler effect.
We don't need to get into what the redshift is, but you can tell through the redshift that these galaxies, which are really far away, are moving even further away.
And what this meant is that our universe is absolutely huge.
In fact, much, much bigger than we had previously thought.
And these galaxies are moving away from each other at high speeds.
In fact, some of them are moving at speeds close to the speed of light.
And so we have an unimaginably huge universe.
In fact, if you're a believer, it makes you begin to think about the sort of magnitude of God, the infinite magnitude of God, because think of what it would take to create this kind of a universe.
Now, if we go back to the 17th and 18th century, you had scientists, Pascal, Newton, and they sometimes thought of space, so they wrote about space as if it was sort of very still, very changeless.
Pascal says he's terrified by the stillness of these unimaginably large spaces.
Well, he was right about the unimaginably large universe.
But what is wrong is that the universe is not quiet.
It's not still. Everything is moving and is moving at tremendous speeds.
And as I mentioned, it's not just that galaxies are moving further away from each other in space.
In a strange way, space itself is expanding.
And, as I say, reasoning back, scientists conclude if it's expanding now, space must have been smaller.
And it must have been smaller.
And you can measure this expansion in time and work your way back.
And by working their way back, scientists realized that about 14.5 billion years ago, billion, not million, there was a primeval explosion.
A moment in time in which the whole mass of the universe was compressed into the point, a single point of infinite density.
And when you had that point, in some sense, before that, there was no space, there was no time.
The entire universe was essentially smaller than a single atom.
And then in a single cosmic explosion...
Kaboom! This was really more of an explosion of light rather than an explosion of sound.
But nevertheless, the universe we now inhabit came into existence.
Quote, the universe was filled with light, writes Steven Weinberg.
In fact, it was light that formed the dominant constituent of the universe.
The temperature was about a hundred trillion degrees centigrade.
And so we come back to the book of Genesis.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And of course, a few lines later, light.
And so, think of it.
You have these ancient Hebrews writing this stuff down.
The book of Genesis composed when?
Sometime around 1000 or earlier BC. These are guys who did no experiments, yet they write as if they were there.
And they describe a process that only now, what, 3000 years later, has been shown to be true, has been shown to be almost clinically accurate.
There was a beginning.
It was a beginning not just in space and time, but of space and time.
And the universe was brought into being by a kind of giant explosion of light.
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