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Feb. 3, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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COME RIGHT IN! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep510
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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.
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Coming up, I'll discuss a university that removed the name of a donor from the university name for being a slave owner and Confederate sympathizer, and now the family wants its $50 million back.
Debbie's going to join me. We're going to talk about issues of the week, including Iranian terrorists showing up at the border and the Tyree Nichols case.
Continuing my discussion of Christian apologetics, I'll consider whether we live in a universe that is fine-tuned by an omnipotent, omniscient creator.
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.
Sometimes when you don't get what you paid for, you demand, and a right to demand, a refund.
Now, the logic of the refund is that you have done the work, you have provided the service, you have paid your money, and yet what you paid your money for didn't come to you, and so you want your money back.
Or as in the case of reparations, which is itself based on the same logic of the refund, but except in the case of reparations, you have the argument that is made by activists, sometimes black activists, that our ancestors paid in the form of work.
For which they were not paid.
And therefore, we, the descendants, deserve to receive that payment belatedly, admittedly, but this is why we are owed reparations.
Pay me or pay my descendants for the work I did for which I was never compensated.
Now, I thought of all this because of an article in Red State.
It's called, University removes slave-owning benefactor's name.
His family demands the $51 million back.
So here's the story.
We're talking about... A college that named its law school after a guy named T.C. Williams.
So the college is the university, it's called Richmond College, and the law school was called the T.C. Williams School of Law.
But then, recently, In the wake of the whole George Floyd business and the whole attempt to challenge our country's racist history, people went back, activists went back, and they found out that this guy, T.C. Williams, well, he attended Richmond College, And in the 1840s, as it turned out, in the 1880s, he became a trustee.
He developed a very successful business, many different types of products, including, as it turns out, tobacco.
And the activists who were doing their research seems to have found out that at one point his tobacco business owned 25 to 40 slaves.
Suddenly he became persona non grata.
Suddenly there was a big move to remove him and anybody else associated with slavery.
Let's remember that this is a school in Richmond, Virginia.
Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy.
It's not going to be surprising if you go back to the 19th century, particularly the first half, that you're going to find people who are in some way connected with slavery.
Not all, of course, but many.
And so Richmond College decided, you know what?
Let's kick this guy's name off the law school.
And so they changed it to University of Richmond School of Law.
Now, apparently, T.C. Williams' family got word of this.
No surprise. Their ancestor was on the name of the law school, and suddenly they realized he's been booted off.
And so they decided...
And this is very interesting. TC's great-great-grandson writes a letter to the school, and he basically says, you know what?
Give us our money back.
The school apparently has a new policy.
I'm not quoting the policy.
No building program, professorship, or other entity at the university should be named for a person who directly engaged in the trafficking and or enslavement of others or openly advocated for the enslavement of people.
And so T.C. Williams wasn't the only guy whose name was kicked off, but it's significant because his name was on the whole law school itself.
And his great-grandson steps in and says, and I think this logic is a little hard to refute, if suddenly his name is not good enough for the university, isn't the proper ethical and indeed virtuous action to return the benefactor's money with interest?
Is it not a form of fraud to induce money from a benefactor and then discredit the benefactor after he is long dead?
Surely the Williams family would not have given a penny to the university knowing that the university would later dishonor the family.
And so, so far, dead silence from the university.
They haven't said if they're going to give the money back.
This guy wrote, the president of the university, he was a fellow named Kevin, And he says to Kevin, he says, listen, I don't even see proof that my ancestor was in fact a slave owner.
Somebody says he was, but show me the evidence that this was even in fact the case.
Once again, the university is not responding to the great-great-great-grandson of the person who donated the money.
The grandson goes on to say, So you see what's going on here.
The effort to sort of destroy a person and a family's reputation on the basis of the alleged slave connection.
And I think what this family should do is sue this university.
They should sue them on the basis of what?
Breach of contract. Well, you may say, where's the contract?
Didn't he donate the money? Well, yeah, but when you donate money, it's under a mutual understanding.
Hey, if you give us the money, we're going to name this building or this chaired professorship or the law school after you.
And so both parties have to perform their side of the contract.
Well, obviously, T.C. Williams did.
He gave the money. Yes, the university performed its side of the contract for a while.
And then decided to breach the contract, to kick the guy's name off the building.
And so it seems to me that the family has every right to say, it's your school, you can change the name of the law school, but we're the ones who funded it, and if you don't want our name on the university, and you want somebody else's name on it, in that case, please return the cash that we gave you with interest, a tidy sum of $51 million.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Debbie and I are here for our Friday roundup of the week.
We usually chat in the morning over coffee about what we want to talk about.
The first topic I have on the list is very interesting.
It's the Iranian guy showing up at the southern border and apparently being apprehended not by border patrol, but by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the so-called DPS. They find this guy with four other illegal immigrants in the trunk of a vehicle.
And, well, they suspected him.
They thought he was on the FBI's terrorist screening database.
And they checked him out.
Apparently, Department of Homeland Security is now saying, no, he wasn't on the database.
But, I mean, look at this.
You've got, first of all, this is not a guy living in Mexico and times are hard.
He's not even Mexican. He's not even Mexican.
He's not even South American.
So the bigger picture is, oh yeah, yeah, no, he's not the one.
Okay, first of all, just the fact that he is an Iranian citizen going through Mexico should give you pause for concern.
No? Am I wrong?
No. I mean, what's his motive right there?
Is he just simply a guy looking for a better life?
I thought life was wonderful in Iran during the times of the Iranian Revolution.
No, but I mean, it's just because, see, this kind of points to the bigger picture.
You know, Eric Stackelbeck talked about this, about the fact that Iran is really getting its sights on all of Central America, South America.
So it makes you wonder if these guys are in Mexico already.
Who are they? Why is this lone Iranian guy, did he become a Mexican citizen and all of a sudden he realized he didn't want to be in Mexico anymore?
I don't think so.
I think that there's a nefarious reason for him to be there.
And whether or not he's on the watch list, it doesn't appear like he's up to any good.
And not to mention the fact it blows up the whole rationale.
I mean, Biden's point is that, you know, we need to have humanitarian consideration of people.
Kamala Harris has said there are tough times on the other side of the border.
There's a lot of violence going on in some of those societies.
This has nothing to do with any of that.
Yeah, he's not here for a better life.
You know, the way that the other, the Mexican, you can argue, right, that the Mexican families that come across with their children want a better life.
They want to flee because of the cartels.
They're always being terrorized by them because, let's face it, the cartels are terrorists.
They really are. So they are running away from that.
But who is this guy running away from?
Better yet, who is he running toward?
Yeah. Well, the other point that you were making this morning is you were saying, look, you know, here we are.
We go to the airport. Oh, yeah.
And so we're subjected to take your shoes off, hold your hands up, don't move.
Take your laptop out, do all this.
Now, I bought TSA PreCheck, which is really ridiculous, but I bought it anyway just because I don't want to take my shoes off.
I don't want to take the computer out.
You don't have it.
So I go through one line, you go through another line.
But think of the amount of security that we have to go through every time.
I mean, I saw a woman just the other day being literally felt up by one of the TSA agents.
You showed it to me. It was virtually pornographic.
I was like, I would go, look at what they're doing to that woman.
Now, that woman didn't look like a terrorist.
She obviously did not have an Iranian passport.
But yet, here we are, this guy.
And if you looked at her face, she was like, what is happening to me?
She was absolutely appalled.
She was horrified. And it's so unnecessary.
You know, when we went to Israel, did they do any of this in Israel?
No, of course not.
Why? Because they profile in Israel, which is what they should do here.
Okay. Well, they also keep a pretty good track of who's on the plane.
So instead of just saying, listen, we're an equal opportunity screening center, they go, who exactly is on that plane?
Let's find out what we can about them, why they might be coming to Israel.
And this way you can make necessary discriminations between people who pose no threat.
Yeah. And people who need further scrutiny.
Again, Israel is really on the front lines of having to be very, very vigilant on who comes into their country.
I mean, look at just recently this Palestinian terrorist that killed so many, you know, seven people.
So they have to really be on the watch list.
We are not. We are not.
And in fact, if we have another 9-11, God forbid, but if we do, I'm not going to be shocked.
Right. Well, you won't be shocked because we've created a porous border.
We've done so for other reasons.
But you're held responsible for decisions you make if there are foreseeable consequences.
And the Biden administration, for example, can foresee that this is going to help the cartels.
It's actually going to increase the profitability of the cartels, which will increase the militarization of the cartels.
And this will also make it easier for other types of terrorists to now show up at the southern border and slide right through.
And they know it.
And they're still letting it happen.
And so, to me, they bear direct responsibility for all this because even though it may not be part of their original intention, they're not trying to bring Iranians through.
It's going to be certainly an outcome. It's the foreseeable outcome of their deliberate actions.
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Things have suddenly gone a little quiet on the Tyree Nichols case.
Remember, the case sort of...
Blasted onto the headlines, tremendous amount of attention and media coverage.
And now suddenly the media coverage is a little bit muted.
And it's not muted because the case has become somehow less outrageous.
I mean, you showed me the video.
I'd heard about it, but I haven't seen the video.
Yeah. No, as a mom, I mean, I don't know which...
If you are a mother, how you wouldn't be horrified by this video.
First of all, I don't really know what happened before, you know, why they stopped him.
It doesn't matter. Yeah.
The fact is, they yanked him out of the car.
And listen, I've been on that end.
I know that I can't- You made a wrong turn.
I ran a stop sign.
I was in a really bad part of town.
I ran a stop sign because I couldn't see the stop sign.
And the police officer that was chasing someone else almost hit me.
But instead of continuing to chase that person, they surrounded my car.
So listen, I know how this, it's not good, but nevertheless, they yanked him out of this car.
They, you know, proceeded to, like, terrorize this poor guy.
He didn't know what he had done, really.
And so, anyway.
I mean, based on initial reports, I thought that he had, you know, refused to comply.
But I think when you watch the video, we don't even think that's the case.
Oh, no. And, you know, you said, well, he did run away.
Well, listen, if they had done that to me, I would have run away too.
You mean tased you? Yeah. Literally, he couldn't even put his hands behind his back because they were trying to get him to face down on the ground.
So he couldn't breathe, okay?
We know that scenario, right?
So he couldn't do that.
But then when he said, okay, okay, man, okay, I will...
The guy tased him.
Like, why? So, listen.
And then he got up and it was like fight or flight kind of thing, right?
So he gets up and he starts running.
I would have gotten up and started running myself, okay?
So this is not a matter of like he was resisting arrest.
First of all, why were they arresting him?
They had no reason to arrest this guy.
So, again...
Now, that all being said, what it turned into is not what we really would have liked for it to have turned into.
We would have liked for it to have turned into something like, you know what?
Police brutality is a thing.
We should address it.
We should not hire policemen that are not trained, you know, properly to do these kinds of stops or whatever.
But instead, it turned into, well, there must have been a white guy in there somewhere.
Right. Well, what you're saying is that an opportunity for the country to kind of come together in recognition that these things do happen, and they happen perhaps far too often, and something needs to be done about it.
And I think conservatives, Republicans, we'd be on board with that.
But then the sort of racial spin comes in.
And the racial spin, as you said, I think you said it poisons everything.
It removes the goodwill that is already there.
And in fact, it sort of, it starts putting the blame where the blame shouldn't be put.
Did whiteness make this happen?
Is whiteness responsible for what occurred here?
Nonsense. And so, but here's the point I think is interesting.
Look at George Floyd.
I mean, compare George Floyd with Tyree Nichols.
Tyree Nichols is a law-abiding guy.
He's a young guy. There are really no comparisons.
There's no comparison, right?
The other guys, they got him for home invasion.
He's high on drugs.
He shouldn't be there.
And you know how they put angel wings on him?
They should have put angel wings on him, on Tyree.
Well, this is the point, but see, so let's look at why that didn't happen, right?
Why is it the case that there will not be a massive, nationally televised funeral for Tyree Nichols?
There was a funeral, and in fact, I saw yesterday, I shook my head, Al Sharpton was there, and apparently Al Sharpton was using the funeral as an occasion to sell his book and promote his website.
What a weirdo! Listen, if you want to get a copy of my book, can you believe this?
But my point is, no statues are going to be erected to Tyree Nichols.
Nancy Pelosi and Schumer are not going to be taking a knee in worshipful deference to Saint Tyree.
Why? They might.
They might find an excuse.
They might find that white connection, that racist connection in this whole thing, which really there isn't any.
There was a white dispatcher who sent the police out.
They're searching. They're desperate.
The point is, for them, facts are meaningless if they don't fit a narrative.
Even with George Floyd, there really wasn't a racial connection either.
No. The guy that did what he did, what's his name, Chauvin...
Derek Chauvin. He was not being racist.
He was being a bad cop, but he wasn't being racist.
But again, these people do not, these race baiters do not care about police brutality.
I mean, that became really clear when Chauvin went to trial.
Yeah, exactly. Because if they had racial stuff on him...
Oh, yeah, this guy's long-hated blacks.
He's made a lot of anti-black comments.
None of that was even brought up for the simple reason it didn't exist.
And so, yes, in a sense, the two cases are similar.
You've got cops getting out of hand, arrogant, misusing their authority, going too far, and as a result, creating a terrible and, in both cases, unnecessary loss of life.
And yet, the reaction to the two cases on the part of the left couldn't be more different.
This is why the media has packed up its cameras, and this is why they've moved on.
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There's an interesting case in Massachusetts of a woman who has been arrested and accused of killing her three children.
And when Debbie and I were discussing the case, the whole issue of postpartum syndrome came up.
Depression. Postpartum, well, I guess there's postpartum anxiety.
Yeah, it's postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis.
Right. And those aren't all exactly the same, but you know something about this, so let's talk about what do you think happened here?
Let's give a couple of details.
The woman's name is Lindsay Clancy.
She's just 32.
She's from Duxbury, Massachusetts.
So the question becomes, what on earth would make a mom, a mom who obviously wanted these children, three of them, to do the bizarre act which would seem to run totally against nature of killing her own children?
Why would somebody do that?
Well, as it turns out, there is a potential or a possible medical explanation.
Right. So postpartum depression is actually quite common.
It's not super uncommon.
I had it with my firstborn, with Justin, who is going to be 28 soon, so a long time ago.
But, you know, it's one of these things that you have a baby and you think you're just going to be like beaming with happiness because you just had a child.
But what happens is your hormones become like just completely just jumbled, haywired, right?
And then you become, well, I, at least in my situation, I became very, very sad, crying just about everything and anything.
I also became very possessive of Justin, and I didn't want people to hold him.
I was extremely agitated by just even light.
I had to have all the shades drawn.
And so I was diagnosed, actually, with postpartum depression.
And they did put me on medication because they didn't want it to spiral out of control.
I think you said you even had thoughts of harming yourself.
Of myself, yeah.
Harming myself. I never had any thoughts of harming Justin, but I did have thoughts of harming myself.
So that's why it was not a good combination.
But a while ago, back in, I don't remember what year exactly, maybe 2008, maybe 2008, A woman named Andrea Yates was in the news because she was accused of killing her children.
She drowned them in a bathtub.
That's right. And she had, again, what she was diagnosed with was psychosis, postpartum psychosis.
She went crazy. She thought Satan was speaking to her, telling her to do things or, you know, that...
Well, I mean, here in this article, they talk about some of the symptoms, hallucinations, delusions that alter a person's sense of reality.
After giving birth. So it's very specific.
It happens after giving birth.
Sometimes it does cause them to harm themselves and their children.
So in Andrea Yates' case, that was the case.
And in fact, she got, I think she, I don't remember exactly what penalty she got, but it was overturned.
And she was put in a mental institution.
So in other words, what you're saying is she first got convicted of murder.
Murder. And then later they realized that she was sick.
Well, apparently one of the impacts of the postpartum is the psychosis.
And the psychosis is not exactly the same as the anxiety.
It's sort of anxiety, depression, psychosis.
So it's differences of degree.
But in the psychosis condition, evidently...
There's such a feeling of panic that is created in the mom's mind that you feel that you have to rescue your child by killing them.
Yeah. I mean, this seems almost incomprehensible.
It does. But evidently, these are the feelings that overtake your mind and cause this kind of terrible tragedy to occur.
Right. I would hate to be on a jury in a case like this because on the one hand, you feel some terrible wrong has been committed.
And yet, the point is, you know, this is truly a case where it might be that you don't have full control of your actions.
Yeah. The interesting statistics of this, it says one in eight mothers, according to the Centers for Disease Control, one in eight mothers.
But it says here that women suffering from postpartum psychosis, it says about 5% of those women will attempt suicide and 4% will commit infanticide.
I mean, that's a rather startlingly...
I mean, I don't know how many women have this condition of the psychosis.
There really is no malicious intent, which is really so incredibly...
Like, interesting, right?
The psychosis.
Well, I mean, you can just imagine the horror of the mom when she realizes what she's done.
I mean, that to me almost is punishment enough because you realize that you have done something irreparable.
You can't bring your own kids back to life.
You were the instrument. How terrible.
Not to mention the family.
They are suffering so much because how do they...
They can't hate her for doing something that she really had no control over, yet she took three members of their family.
And so this dichotomy is just so difficult to understand.
Our prayers go out to the Clancy family and Mr.
Clancy, who is, I'm sure, suffering greatly.
She's still in the hospital because she jumped out of a window, by the way.
And so she's recovering from those injuries.
But it's going to be a long road of recovery for everybody involved.
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Feel the difference. We wanted to talk about something that is, well, I don't know if we can really call it funny because it involves a very funny guy, Jay Leno, but this guy, it turns out, keeps getting seriously injured.
I mean, we heard a few months ago.
Yeah, a few months ago, back in November, he suffered second-degree burns because he was doing something in his garage and it It, like, ignited.
Well, hold on. Let me read.
This is from an interview with Jay Leno talking about this.
He goes, I was underneath the car, and it had a clogged fuel line, and I asked my buddy to blow a little through the fuel line, and boom, it hit me in the face with a quart of gas.
There was a spark nearby and ignited it, and my face caught on fire.
I mean, it's hard to chuckle because...
No, I'm sure it was horrific.
And we like Jay Leno.
We're not like reveling in the burning of Jay Leno.
I mean, it's so sad, right?
But he was very much, you know, like, hey, guys, it's fine.
It's fine. I'm good.
I'm good. And then...
Well, what happened is, this actually is amusing.
Apparently, Jay Leno had a second accident, but he didn't want to tell anybody about it because there had been a whole bunch of news reports on the burning.
And so he thought, what the heck?
So the second accident, well, let's talk about the second accident.
This is a motorcycle accident.
He has multiple broken bones.
And I think he broke his rib cage.
Here we go. You got a scar across his neck, two broken ribs, two broken kneecaps, and a snapped collarbone.
And then, of course, being Jay Leno.
And then he goes, it's a little painful, but it's not the end of the world.
Well, he goes, a 72-year-old man driving an 83-year-old motorcycle.
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong? So, I mean, the thing about Jay Leno, first of all, this guy loves anything that moves.
Any type of vehicle.
And the faster, the better.
Yeah, he's a car guy. Do you know he owns 204 cars?
Yeah, I did. And 168 motorcycles.
Yeah, he talked about that when he was on The Tonight Show.
He talked about all his car collection and all that.
So I knew he loved all that.
I feel really sorry for his wife.
Yeah. She probably wants to keep him at home.
Who has to endure this man's, like, obsession with these fast vehicles, you know?
Well, you know, there are some people. Well, we know people.
We have a good friend who, until very recently, was driving race cars.
Oh, race cars, yeah. And, I mean, no matter how good you are at it, we imagine that it's something of a risky thing to do to be going 200 miles an hour around a track.
Oh, my God. Oh my gosh, yeah, that too.
You can skid, you can blow up, you can hit other cars.
No, it's not good. But anyway, so Jay Leno just has a really funny sense of humor.
You know, like saying, it's not the end of the world, guys.
But in other news, I mean, I think he also talks about the future of comedy.
And you can kind of focus on that.
Well, he's been doing this show that is called You Bet Your Life.
And of course, earlier he was on The Tonight Show.
And he says his favorite part of The Tonight Show was the sort of jaywalking, where he'd go walk on the street, usually around Santa Monica, he didn't go too far, interview people.
Because he said, that's a way of me being able to react to what people say.
And he goes, and he says, both Johnny and him, this is a very interesting statement he makes.
He says, I think both Johnny, I mean Johnny Carson, and myself prided ourselves that people couldn't figure out our politics.
You made fun of both sides equally.
Mm-hmm. And now what Jay has realized is that even that doesn't work.
He goes, in fact, now the only thing that works for him is don't talk about politics at all.
Why? He says, because today, he says, I notice when I do shows, when I do political material, people would wait to hear the punchline before they decided they were going to laugh.
So they want to see, is he going to hit Hillary?
Is he going to hit Trump?
Is he going to hit Biden? And if he does, I'm not laughing because I'm a Biden guy.
Or I'm not laughing because I'm a Trump guy.
So comedy has been, well, politics has polluted And the political joke doesn't really even work anymore.
And he says when he did this You Bet Your Life, he went to the producers and he told them, listen, there's going to be no politics.
And they're like, no politics? How are you going to be able to even pull that off?
And he goes, listen, you'll see.
And I think he's very proud of the fact that he's made this show successful in And he says, look, it's not that I don't have politics.
He says, it's not that I don't believe things.
But he goes, look. He goes, you meet people and you go, okay, I can tell right now.
I'm not going to agree with this guy politically.
But hey, we're not talking about politics.
So it doesn't matter. So here's Jay Leno, basically a good guy in a bad situation.
Because our comedy is now twisted with political correctness, with woke ideology, cancel culture.
And Jay Leno just wants to...
Enjoy life and make observations about life that make people laugh.
He's an entertainer. And, you know, comedians shouldn't really be political because, again, you know, you want to go and you want to laugh about life's funny things, right?
Politics, it's almost like you want to take a break from politics.
So, you know, we're going to be going to Vegas in May.
We're going to see a couple of...
Well, say who. We're seeing this guy, this Italian-American comedian.
His name is Sebastian Manascolo.
Right. And we see he has a couple of specials on Netflix.
And what he does now, I think, which is very cunning and very effective, is he talks about the way things used to be versus the way things are now.
Now, what he really means is the way things used to be is right now.
And the way things are now is left.
And it's very clear that he is political, but in such a subtle way because he never mentions Republican or Democrat.
He doesn't go there. Once in a while he'll mention veterans and he'll talk about how much he admires veterans.
That's the extent of how far he'll go.
But we think he's hilarious and we're going to Vegas to see him.
And then John Lovitz, who I found out is actually a Democrat, but I don't think he's political either when he talks about, because I think he also thinks cancel culture is bad.
So, it'll be interesting to see these funny guys.
We've seen Jay Leno.
He's hilarious. In fact, I saw Jay Leno when he had black hair back in 1986.
I saw him at South Padre Island during spring break, back when I had black hair, too.
Uh-oh. I'd like to invite you to join my locals channel where you get content that you won't get anywhere else.
As you know, there's a lot of censorship on social media and I have to be a little careful on the podcast.
I try to go to the water's edge, but I can't go further because I'm going to be kicked off YouTube.
I'd be kicked off Facebook.
But if you want Dinesh uncensored, if you want Dinesh unchained, well, the place to find me is Locals.
And I do a lot of exclusive content.
I interact with you directly.
I have a weekly Q&A in which you can ask questions, and I respond in real time.
And I've also got a bunch of movies up in my Locals channel, which are all free to annual subscribers.
So these are movies by me, but also great films by other people.
Now the annual subscription is $50 a year, but that's less than $5 a month.
It's all worth it for the content that you get.
So sign up at dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
The website again, dinesh.locals.com.
I'm discussing a chapter in my book, What's So Great, about Christianity called a designer planet.
And I began by talking about the Copernican principle, the principle that human life is nothing special.
We are unimportant, unimpressive specs on a planet that is far away from other planets and just part of an unimaginably huge universe.
And I said that this Copernican principle of human beings being unimportant is not something that contradicts directly the biblical worldview.
Of course, never says that the Earth is at the center of the universe.
That was taken for granted based upon pre-Christian Greek cosmology, but that's not something that's in the Bible.
But the Bible does say that man, humans, have a privileged status in God's creation.
The universe was in this view made with us in mind and perhaps even for our sake.
And how can these traditional beliefs that God loved man, God created man in his image, God bestowed on man, The control of nature.
How can that view be reconciled with the idea that, wow, we live in a huge universe with numerous other planets and galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars, some of them so far away that they are burned out by the time their light even reaches the Earth?
When we look through a telescope, you feel this You seem to feel this eerie emptiness of space and with it a sense of cosmic alienation.
This is in fact what the mathematician Pascal felt when he looked through a telescope out at Out at the universe.
Now, it's hard to avoid the question, if man is so central to God's purposes in nature, why do we live in such a marginal speck of real estate in such a big, seemingly indifferent universe?
Now, in recent years, physics has given us the tools to answer that question.
And what physics has done, incredibly, is overthrow this Copernican principle of mediocrity What physics has done is affirm man's special place in the cosmos.
It turns out that the vast size and great age of our universe are not coincidental.
They're not just there.
They are the indispensable, necessary conditions for the existence of life on Earth.
In other words, the universe has to be as big as it is and as old as it is in order for it to have living inhabitants like you and like me.
The entire universe with all its laws appears to be a kind of conspiracy, a conspiracy to produce, well, us.
Physicists call this incredible finding the anthropic principle.
So the word anthropos means human or man.
And so the anthropic principle is the principle of the universe that apparently exists in a special relationship with man.
Wow! The anthropic principle states that the universe we perceive must be of precisely such a nature as will make possible living beings who can then turn around and perceive and understand that universe.
So the Copernican narrative has been sort of reversed and man has been restored to his ancient pedestal as the favored son and maybe even the, well, the raison d'etre, the very purpose of creation itself.
Now, physicists stumbled upon this anthropic principle by asking a simple question.
Why does the universe operate according to the laws it does?
I mean, think about it. Universe follows a very specific set of laws or rules, but it didn't have to have these rules.
So why do we have these rules and not any other rules?
Take a simple case. The speed of light.
Light goes at a known speed, speed c, 186,000 miles a second.
Why? Well, why can't light go at a different speed?
What would the universe look like if the speed of light was 250,000 or 800,000 miles per second?
Force of gravity.
Gravity has a known force.
Newton understood it, measured it, calculated it.
What if the gravitational force was different?
What if it operated differently for different objects of different masses?
So in other words, What if the gravitational force was stronger than it is, or weaker than it is?
Or consider the universe is 15 billion years old, 14 billion years old, and about 15 billion light years in size, at least.
And the question is, what if the universe were 10 billion years old?
What if it were smaller or larger?
What would altering these variables do to the universe?
This is the question. And the physicists who asked the question came to a remarkable conclusion.
In order for life to exist, in order for the universe to have observers like us who can take notice of it, the gravitational force has to be precisely what it is.
Not close. It has to be what it is.
Light has to travel at the speed that it does.
It cannot go at a different speed.
The Big Bang had to occur when it did.
Not before, not after.
So if the basic values and relationships of nature were different, even slightly different, Our universe would not exist and neither would we.
So fantastic though, it seems, the universe is fine-tuned.
This is the key phrase, fine-tuned for human habitation.
And what this means is that we live in a kind of Goldilocks universe.
Let's remember, in Goldilocks, the story of Goldilocks, the conditions were just right, not too hot, not too cold, just right.
And so the universe, as you may say, cut or shaped, Or devised just right to enable the existence of people like us.
To quote physicist Paul Davies, we have been written into the laws of nature in a deep and, I believe, meaningful way.
The anthropic principle is the principle that states that the universe has to be the way it is.
It has to have the rules it does.
It has to have the laws it does in order to enable the existence of beings like us who can live in and perceive and comprehend that universe.
Now, this anthropic principle has gained wide acceptance among scientists today.
Here is John Barrows and Frank Tipler.
They've written the kind of classic account of the anthropic principle.
It's called the Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
I've got this book and I've made my way through it.
It's about a 600-page book with a lot of equations and a lot of science, but its basic premise, its basic conclusion is the idea that the universe must have In the introduction of that book, here's physicist John Wheeler, by the way, a physicist highly respected by Einstein, by many others.
John Wheeler writes that, quote, End quote.
Now, in recent years, the chief astronomer of Great Britain, in fact, the official royal astronomer, his name is Martin Rees, published a book called Just Six Numbers.
And what he said is that if you look at the universe, it comes down to six critical laws or six critical equations, which Reese loosely called six numbers.
And Reese argues that these six numbers underlie the physical properties of the universe, and each is an exact value that is required for life to exist.
If any one of the six, one of them, for example, is a so-called gravitational constant or the so-called strong nuclear force.
If these are different, quote, even to the tiniest degree, end quote, and now I open quotes again, Rees writes, there would be no stars, no complex elements, no life.
Now, Martin Rees disavows any theological implications.
He says, I'm not talking about God.
I'm merely telling you, That these six critical numbers that define nature, that define the whole world, the whole universe, they have to be exactly the way they are.
You change them even a little bit and essentially we disappear from the picture.
Now, there is an astronomer at Princeton, Lee Smolin, whom I've quoted before.
And Lee Smolin is actually an outspoken atheist.
But nevertheless, Lee Smolin makes the following observation, which I think is helpful to understand the anthropic principle.
He says, try to imagine...
God, as a kind of master technician.
And God is sitting at a desk, and on the desk you have a whole bunch of dials in front of Him.
And one dial is the mass of the proton, one dial is the charge of the electron, one dial is the gravitational constant, and so on.
And what God is doing is He's kind of randomly spinning these dials.
And now, says Lee Smolin, what is the probability that random spinning of these dials will produce a universe that has stars and planets and life?
I'm now quoting him.
The probability, he says, is incredibly small.
How small? Smolin's estimate is it is one chance in 10 to the power of 229.
In other words, what Smolin is saying is And his point is put slightly differently by Stephen Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time.
I'm now quoting Hawking. If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand millionth million, the universe would have re-collapsed before it even reached its present size.
So the odds against us being here are, you could say, astronomical.
And yet we're here. So who is responsible for this?
Now, let's turn to Psalm 19, 1.
It says, Here's the Apostle Paul, writing in verse 20 of the first letter to the Romans,"...ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." This astounding statement by Paul is making the point that we can't see God.
God is invisible. So, his invisible nature.
At the same time, says Paul, we can see God through his creation.
God's creation is the signature of God.
It's almost like you watch a Dinesh D'Souza film and you go, man, that's a Dinesh D'Souza film.
Dinesh isn't around. I may not even be in the film.
But hopefully my work has a signature, so to speak, or even a book.
If I remove my name from the title, you read the book, but maybe the book is distinctive enough in its choice of topic, the way it's covered, that you go, yeah, that's That's Dinesh, and that's what Paul is saying here about the universe.
The universe advertises the presence of its maker.
So, the anthropic principle appears to be a thrilling confirmation of these ancient passages.
Not only does the anthropic principle suggest a creator who is incomparably intelligent and resourceful, But, and this is the key point, it suggests a creator who has special concern for us.
Why? Because the universe is built in such a way, and it had to be built in this way in order for us to be in it.
So this is a personal creator, not some abstract first mover who, like, uncorked the universe without any evident care for the creatures who would eventually inhabit our planet.
Through science, we're witnessing powerful evidence that our human destiny Seems to be an intrinsic part of a divine plan.
We don't have to be intimidated by the vast, empty spaces of the cosmos.
They exist for our sake.
And contrary to the principle of mediocrity, we live in a meaningful and purposeful universe.
The anthropic principle suggests that human beings are part of the intended handiwork of God.
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