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Feb. 13, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:23
THE TWO FBIs Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep516
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Coming up, two former FBI agents testified before the House, and one of them spoke about the two FBI's.
I'll explain. I'll review the credibility of journalist Seymour Hersh's expose that the Biden administration secretly destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline.
Balloons and more balloons.
I'll reflect on what may be going on.
And author Alex McFarlane joins me.
We're going to talk about the left's scheme to cancel Christians in mainstream culture.
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.
Two FBI agents, Thomas J. Baker and Nicole Parker, testified before the House Republicans, well, before the House.
And the testimony was interesting on a number of fronts.
Now, a lot of the focus was on Nicole Parker.
She's a young woman.
She's attractive. She was very emotional, at one point coming almost to tears.
She spoke in a very interesting way about the two FBIs, and I'll come back to that.
But as a result, the other guy, Thomas Baker, his testimony was a little bit sidelined, and there were There were important details that he revealed because when we talk about the FBI the way it is now, one question is, what is the genealogy?
What is the sort of origin?
How did the FBI become this way?
If the FBI has gone rogue, who made it rogue?
And Thomas Baker offers a couple of important clues as to the answer.
Not the full answer, but at least part of the answer.
And the answer, as it turns out, goes back to 9-11.
If we think of, in more recently, COVID as being a sort of dramatic event that changed the rules, was exploited by a lot of bad people...
Essentially, Baker says the same thing happened with 9-11.
The FBI was sort of taken by surprise.
Apparently, the president, George W. Bush, was very angry that this had gone undetected, that 9-11 had not been anticipated and blocked before it occurred.
And so the FBI, under Robert Mueller, made two important changes.
Number one, It began to centralize the FBI. So the FBI previously operated mainly through regional authority and regional field offices.
I remember under Ronald Reagan, Louis Freeh, who was then the director of the FBI, would always emphasize the strength of the FBI is the fact that we've got a lot of kind of eyes and ears out there and we trust our local offices to do the heavy lifting.
Essentially, Washington, D.C. is a kind of nothing more than a sort of coordination mechanism that links these different regional FBI. So the power then is local and it's decentralized.
Mueller changed that and he created a centralized FBI. And, of course, a centralized FBI is much easier to corrupt.
I think this is what Obama realized later, which was, hey, listen, if you've got all the power in one place, in Washington, D.C. at the top, then if you can kind of rot the fish at the head, you create a rotten FBI all the way down.
Why? Because the local FBI's are just taking orders from the centralized office.
The second point that was made by Baker, which I haven't thought about, but of course is a very obvious point, is that as a result of 9-11, the FBI began to coordinate more closely with the CIA. Now, the CIA is supposed to be operating only abroad and dealing with external or foreign threats.
But of course, because the hijackers who came from abroad nevertheless came here, some of them of course had taken flight school lessons here, The idea was that the FBI and the CIA need to work in really close coordination to avert future terrorist attacks.
But this of course meant that the line of distinction between working abroad and working at home becomes blurred, not to mention that the FBI began to take orders from the CIA.
So this is a dangerous blurring between the foreign and the domestic.
And so again, fast forwarding to now, when the Biden people say that the greatest threat today doesn't come from abroad, it's not foreign terrorists, it's domestic terrorists, well, what that means is that the FBI and CIA can now coordinate against these so-called domestic threats.
And so you have an FBI that as a result of the, quote, reforms of 9-11 is now tailor-made for the left to take over and is tailor-made for the left to deploy as a weapon, not against people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
not against the 9-11 terrorists, but against people like you and me who are sort of painted with the same brush.
So that was the significance of the Baker testimony.
And I want to turn to Nicole Parker, because what she talks about is the fact, and it's almost like a follow-up to what Baker said.
She said there are now really two FBI's.
She doesn't deny that local agents can go rogue, but she says, by and large, the action in the FBI is being driven from Washington, D.C., And it was kind of heartbreaking to listen to her talk because she's talking about, here you've got a woman who's obviously very dedicated, very patriotic.
It seems like she's a Christian.
I say that because Debbie pointed this out to me.
She concludes her testimony by saying, I'll pray for the FBI. And Debbie goes, that sounds like a Christian.
That sounds like a Republican.
That's how Republicans talk.
But nevertheless, she goes, look, the FBI, over the 12 years I've been there, has totally changed.
It's changed its focus.
It's changed its way of operating.
It even seems to have changed its mission.
And it's no longer going after the kind of people that I joined the FBI to help to bust, to help to catch in the act.
The FBI is not interested in crooks.
It's not interested in thugs.
In fact, it has become an organization of thugs.
It's interested in ideological opponents.
It's essentially doing a sort of task...
For the left, it's become the police arm of the left, perhaps somewhat similar to the way in which, for example, the Blackshirts became the police arm of Mussolini, or we can find similar analogs in other socialist and fascist countries.
It's a dangerous FBI. Here you've got two people both retired now, and one guy having retired some time ago, Baker, but the other, Nicole Parker, very recently blowing the whistle on what has happened to the FBI. Well, just when you thought things couldn't get better, Mike Lindell and MyPillow are launching the MyPillow 2.0.
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What's up with these balloons and these objects flying in the sky over the United States that are one by one being shot down?
It started off with the so-called, you know, China balloon.
And reports that there was another balloon going over South America.
And this appeared to be something that was fairly easy to trace.
This is a balloon from China.
And I was a little puzzled at the beginning.
Why'd they shoot it down as opposed to somehow grounding it so that they can study it?
Maybe they shot it down and it's still...
I don't know.
An object over Lake Huron.
The object was octagon-shaped and was at an altitude of 20,000 feet, posing a threat to civilian air traffic.
So there's obviously an immediate danger, which is that although the sky is very big, there are a lot of airplanes in the sky, if air traffic control doesn't know about these objects, then you could have an airline fly directly into it.
That would obviously not be good.
Interestingly, having shot these objects down, and by the way, over the last eight or nine days, the United States military has shot down at least four objects, at least four, meaning possibly more, over North America.
I've listened to some of the commentary about this, and no one seems to really know what's going on, and the Pentagon either doesn't know or isn't saying.
So I've seen speculation that this is a kind of China operation.
It's a prelude to some sort of EMP or electromagnetic pulse attack.
I saw a woman on CNN, in fact, Natasha Bertrand, a kind of massive spinner of conspiracy theories and not a reliable person.
But she was like, I've got some comments on it.
Maybe she's got some reports of what the pilots who shot down one of these objects were saying, and they were saying that these objects are really mysterious because there appeared to be, first of all, no one maneuvering these objects, and second of all, they appeared to have no propulsion.
Nothing appeared to be pushing it in one direction or the other, almost as if this was some kind of an extraterrestrial object.
And then someone from the Defense Department came out and said, no, these aren't extraterrestrial objects, but that would imply that they do know what they are.
But if they do know what they are, they aren't really telling us what they are.
Now, again, when you have something that is mysterious...
And the word mystery itself needs to be unraveled a little bit because there are two kinds of mysteries.
There's something that's mysterious.
You know, an airplane vanishes in the Bermuda Triangle.
Nothing is known about it.
That's one kind of a mystery.
We don't know. We really have no idea.
The other kind of mystery is something that is solvable, that it's a matter of being able to find out what's going on.
And let's, in an age of geotracking, in an age of being able to track objects in the sky, It defies, to me, credibility to say that you've got these objects that are in the sky.
How'd they get there?
Weren't they observed? Weren't they sighted in any way beforehand?
Is it really a surprise?
Oh, wow, there's There's an object over Montana.
Oh, wow, there's an object now flying across the Midwest.
You would think that with satellite uplinks, we would know.
We would have tracked these objects.
We would know exactly where they're coming from.
And so there's a lot of speculation that this is some kind of a distraction and some kind of a...
Look over here. There's something else going on over there.
It's some kind of a psychological operation or psy-op, as they say.
In any event, a number of the Republicans and some Democrats have been calling on the Pentagon to provide necessary and overdue answers.
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Who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline?
A, well, I don't know if it's a shocking answer, comes from the journalist, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, a journalist, by the way, who spent his whole career on the left, providing the answer.
We did. We, the Biden administration.
A covert operation.
And Seymour Hersh says, I've got the details.
And he spells it out in a riveting way.
It started out as a blog post, really, but a detailed blog post with all kinds of, well, chapter and verse.
Now, when you evaluate something like this, it is a little startling.
And I have to admit that times have changed.
30 years ago, if you told me the United States blew up this or that pipeline, I would be very skeptical.
But now I look at it a little differently.
I obviously distrust the Biden regime.
I distrust a lot of our institutions.
I don't take them at face value.
And I begin with the kind of very old sort of Sherlock Holmes question.
Who benefits? Who benefits from the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline?
Answer, not Putin.
Even though people say, oh, Putin blew up the pipeline.
And of course, you know, you have these US intelligence and Pentagon sources saying this repeatedly as if it makes one ounce of sense.
Why would Putin blow up his own pipeline that delivers all this natural gas to Germany, that creates dependency between Germany and Russia, Puts lots of money into Putin's coffers to enable him to do all kinds of stuff, including fight the war in Ukraine.
So it makes no sense.
Why would Putin do this?
On the other hand, Biden has repeatedly talked about the fact that we need to shut down the pipeline.
Now, let's remember, Biden is the same guy who approved the pipeline.
Let's remember that conservatives criticized Biden and said, don't approve the pipeline.
Nord Stream 1 is already operational.
It's already delivering all this natural gas.
Why would you approve Nord Stream 2, which is going to do more of the same and is going to create a very unhealthy dependency of Germany on Russia?
And Biden, for whatever reason, I don't know if this was something that came from China.
Hey, Biden, we've sent you a lot of money.
You know, listen, you better do what we say.
I don't know if it was the case where Biden was trying to please Xi Xi.
But nevertheless, Biden decided to go ahead to sign off on Nord Stream 2.
But then, of course, Putin invaded Ukraine and Biden's whole calculus changed.
Now, so Biden definitely has the motive.
And the question is, did he have the opportunity and did he actually do it?
Now, when you look at Seymour Hersh's article, and before I say anything about the article, I do want to point out how ridiculous it is that the reaction to the article from some of the so-called mainstream media, there's an article in Business Insider, for example, and it's from some reporter no one's ever heard of.
Discredited journalist Seymour Hersh makes claims about that, and this is playing into the hands of Putin.
First of all, nobody cares if it's playing into the hands of Putin.
Is it true or is it false?
That's really what journalism is about.
Did this, in fact, happen?
Yes or no? And so, to that, that's really where I want to focus.
Now, Seymour Hersh's article here has one great weakness, which, by the way, has also characterized his reporting in the past, and that is that he does use anonymous sources.
And this right away creates some, I think, justified skepticism.
Well, who really told you?
If it's anonymous, how do we know you didn't make this up?
There are plenty of journalists who use anonymous sources.
A well-informed person, someone close to the matter, could be yourself, claims this or claims that.
But I think sometimes the use of anonymous sources is alright when the source can't possibly reveal who they are.
They would immediately lose their job.
And the question is, you can verify what they're saying by looking at the detail described in the article.
So that's the key point. Seymour Hersh gives you the when, the where, and the how.
It's all in the article. So the kind of texture of detailed description is something that I think raises genuine suspicions.
And I saw, I think recently, it was Senator Mike Lee.
He goes, wow. He goes, you know, even as somebody with access to intelligence, I can't deny that what this guy is saying may be true.
We need to find out if it is true, because if it is true, we have a big problem.
If it is true, the United States is actively participating in what has to be called international terrorism and what could also be called, I think quite fairly, a provocation to war.
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Use discount code AMERICA. On February 7, 2022, so almost exactly a year ago, Biden gave a statement.
He was meeting in the White House with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
And at the press briefing, Biden said this, quote, There will no longer be a Nord Stream 2.
We will bring an end to it.
So here's Biden, almost startlingly, advertising what the United States would subsequently do.
And Seymour Hersh's point in his article is that this is what they actually started doing.
They started planning how to bring about an end to the Nord Stream pipeline.
They decided to use the US Navy.
The US Navy's Diving and Salvage Center, which happens to be headquartered in Florida, has skilled teams of deep sea divers.
And they decided, let's use a bunch of these divers.
We will send them off to the Baltic.
These are experts of planting explosives, and they're going to blow up the pipeline.
Now, it's going to be done in complete secrecy.
In fact, it's going to be done as an intelligence operation so that we don't really have to inform the Congress.
We're not going to tell anyone about it.
In fact, we're going to publicly pretend that we didn't do it, we meaning the United States didn't do it, and we're going to count on the media to cover our tracks.
In fact, isn't it interesting? As far as I know, no major media has deployed investigative reporting to find out what really happened to the Nord Stream pipeline.
There was just some such, Putin probably did it, and then the matter was completely dropped.
In fact, only the Russians have been talking about the fact that the United States needs to provide some answers for its role in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Seymour Hersh says that there were...
And a plan was devised that would bring about a secret essentially blowing up of the pipeline.
But the United States wouldn't be able to do it by itself.
They would have to do it with the help of Norway, and the Norwegians evidently were closely involved in this operation.
So sometime in March, a US team flew to Norway to meet with the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy, and they said to the Norwegians, where's the best place to plant these explosives?
The Norwegian Navy said this, and I'm now quoting from Hirsch.
The Norwegian Navy was quick to find the right spot in the shallow waters of the Baltic Sea a few miles off Denmark's Bornholm Island.
The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor there that was only 260 feet deep.
So the key point is the pipeline now is close to the surface, and that means that divers can get to it.
The Norwegians also said, here's a place where there are no major tidal currents, which would normally pose problems for the divers.
So the divers are going to have an easy time in being able to blow up the pipeline.
There's a lot more of this kind of stuff.
But I think what impresses me about the article is Seymour Hersh basically said, I've got an anonymous source.
And this guy tells me that we blew up the pipeline.
But I don't really know who did it.
I don't really know when.
I don't know how this was planned.
I don't know who was involved.
I don't exactly know where the explosives were set off.
Then you'd be like, this is all hinging upon the identity of someone that you can't divulge.
And so there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
But the beauty of this article and the detail of it is that now the House Intelligence Committee, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee can follow up on this and there can also be queries posed to the Norwegians.
We can find out a lot more and we can demand answers from the Biden administration.
This is pretty scary stuff.
I mean, for the United States, I mean, certainly Biden made a bad decision in approving this pipeline in the first place.
He shouldn't have done it. Having made this blunder, he decides to, quote, rectify it.
But he's rectifying it in what can reasonably interpret it as an act of war.
Particularly when, again, look at it from Putin's point of view, he goes, listen, you approve the pipeline.
The pipeline was an economic arrangement between Germany and Russia.
This was not something that the Russians blackmailed the Germans into.
The Germans willingly did it for their own benefit.
They had a plentiful supply of energy.
They had lower energy prices.
So for you now secretly to turn around and blow up the pipeline...
That's an invitation to Russia to do the same kind of thing to you.
And so we have the risk of dangerous escalation, escalation in this case, not between Russia and Ukraine, but dangerous escalation between Russia and the United States.
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We are getting slowly, piece by piece, almost as parts of a jigsaw puzzle.
The complex, multi-layered nature of the censorship establishment, the censorship regime that has now developed in the United States, but even beyond the United States.
And we're seeing that it is a web.
This is not a case where it's not so simple as in every case the government is doing it.
The government is telling the private sector what to do.
There are private companies that are taking orders from the government.
That is happening. But it's also the case that there is an in-between sector that involves academia, involves the non-profit institutions, that involves think tanks.
So there's a massive infestation here.
And it's almost like it's a web that has to be rooted out.
But in order to root it out, we have to understand what this web is and how it operates.
Now, one little piece of the web emerged in an interesting article recently from the Washington Examiner, a very good piece of investigative reporting.
Examiner does this kind of thing periodically, and it's well worth reading.
So what the Examiner found out is that the U.S. Department of State We're good to go.
That is supposedly in the name of disinformation, but it turns out the disinformation is coming from all the outlets kind of on our side of the aisle.
And we're not talking here about people who are denying the existence of COVID or saying don't take a vaccine.
We're talking about major news outlets, places like Breitbart and places like The Daily Caller and mainstream outlets We're good to go.
We'll come back to the so-called disinformation, but this is kind of how it works.
The State Department gives money to something called the Global Disinformation Index, sometimes called GDI. This is a group that operates out of Britain, so it's a foreign operation, but it works in conjunction with a couple of American non-profits.
And what does this organization do?
By the way, this organization got some money from the National Endowment for Democracy, which again, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up.
I was a supporter of it.
It was an effort to promote US ideals abroad.
And look at the way in which this organization has now become twisted to becoming a vehicle for censorship at home.
The State Department has something called the Global Engagement Center.
That group put up $100,000, steering the money, by the way, through a third party.
So this is really a kind of horrible octopus.
We're tentacles that stretch abroad and at home into the nonprofit world.
And what makes this particular operation different is that they're not telling the social media platforms to ban this guy or that guy.
What they're doing is going to these so-called ad exchanges.
So this is a key twist.
Ad exchanges are the consortiums that take money from various corporations and place their ads on various social media platforms.
So you have Microsoft owns one of these ad consortiums.
And these ad consortiums have a lot of power.
Why? Because they can pull corporate advertising from your site.
And so what's happening is that this group, the GDI, the Global Disinformation Index, is going to these ad exchanges and saying, hey, listen, we're going to give you a ranking of so-called high-risk advertising.
These are high-risk websites because they are highly at risk for disinformation.
We're not going to identify any specific disinformation.
We're just going to call them high-risk.
Why? Because we're now going to count on you to then pull your ads from these places.
So you see what's going on?
What you have here in the name of fighting disinformation is an effort to defund Conservative organizations like the American Spectator, which is, by the way, a serious opinion-oriented magazine, well worth reading, a little bit like National Review, except these days better.
Newsmax we all know about.
The Federalist often has invaluable articles.
And again, the GDI is not identifying specific violations.
They're merely Putting a kind of warning tag on the entire website and their idea is to defeat these websites not by outright banning, not even really by shadow banning, but by cutting off the money supply.
So you see how ingenious the left is?
It operates at multiple levels.
It's censorship is partly, let's throw this guy off the platform, let's de-amplify that guy, but they don't necessarily always have to do the kind of coordinated attack that they did on Parler.
Sometimes what they just do is they go, listen, these guys obviously all rely on advertising.
How else can they pay their writers?
How else can they basically function, keep their offices open, if they don't have any source of revenue?
So why don't we go after the sources of revenue and try to pressure the ad exchanges into pulling their ads?
And by pulling their ads, you ultimately either weaken these conservative platforms or take them down, make them financially unviable altogether.
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Guys, I first met Alex McFarland about a decade or so ago at an apologetics conference that he organized.
I think it was in North Carolina, but I'm not sure.
Alex McFarland is the leader of Alex McFarland Ministries.
He's co-author of 100 Bible Questions and Answers.
He does a bunch of media.
He's a youth culture and religion expert.
His website, alexmcfarland.com.
Hey Alex, welcome.
Great to have you. It's been a long time.
Long time no see, as they say.
But you've been busy out there fighting and also exposing the effect of cancel culture, particularly in the Christian world.
Talk a little bit about how even the church...
Is now being subjected to this kind of intolerance and shutting people down.
It's going on even in the church, isn't it?
Well, it really is.
And Dinesh, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to this.
And I want to say what a great honor it is to be with one of the great minds of our time, yourself.
It's a great honor to be with you.
And I've got to tell this quick story before we really dive into the topic.
But I remember the first time you came and We're good to go.
And I was in the wings with a dear friend, Chuck Colson, that many of your listeners will recall.
Chuck Colson and I were watching you from the wings, and Colson looked over at me and he said, this guy is brilliant.
And You were and you are, and to converse with you today is a great honor.
Well, that means a lot. Thank you so much, Alex.
All right, so there's a lot going on with cancel culture.
We know about it happening out there in the publishing world and in the media, on social media, but people, we may not know as much about what's happening inside the orbit of the church.
And particularly the evangelical church, which by and large you might think would be the most resistant to it.
So talk about that.
Well, it's amazing to me how many within the church pastors are just being so compliant and rolling over and playing dead when really we are called, if you're in ministry as I am, you are called to preach, quote, the whole church.
And the Bible tells us things that we maybe don't want to hear, but we need to hear.
And Dinesh, I could name names of people that say, you know, you don't talk about homosexuality or transgenderism.
You don't talk about responsible immigration policies or a free market economy.
And sadly, the intellectual and spiritual gatekeepers, which are the people in the pulpits, they should be telling our nation hard truth right now.
But sadly, in many cases, they're not doing it.
And in fact, not only are many pulpits silent, but they're encouraging other ministers to be silent.
And it really is jeopardizing the future of our country.
Alex, how would you answer?
We've heard preachers who say something like this, that there is a core message of Christianity.
And that core message is essentially very simple.
No matter how much of a sinner you are, Christ died for your sins.
And by accepting Christ, you open the gateway to salvation.
And they say, well, we really need to focus on that.
Because there are other issues that are not unimportant, but they're secondary to this.
And so if we start getting into the border and we start getting into Ukraine and we start getting into abortion, we're going to divide the audience on the peripheral issues and that's going to dilute our core message.
Well, how would you answer a pastor who in good conscience said to you, Alex, I really want to focus on bringing people to Christ and saving their souls.
You know, we'll let the political stuff take care of itself.
Well, you know, Dinesh, and I've heard that many times, that's really kind of a Pollyanna worldview, because the fact is, if we don't speak to the cultural and social issues, then our opportunity to tell people about Christ will go away.
I mean, as you and I both know, there were many ministers during the time of the American Revolution who That talked about the justness, the legitimacy of the revolution.
And if we had the crop of pastors from 2023 in 1776, we would have never had an America.
So it might seem nice and appealing just to say, you know, I want selling myself with politics.
I'll just talk about politics.
I get that, but the thing is, if we don't defend truth, we're going to lose the opportunity for free speech to tell others about Christ.
C.S. Lewis, in his 1943 book, The Abolition of Man, talks about the mandate to speak about the cultural issues, and Lewis said, good philosophy must exist because bad philosophy must be answered.
And it's up to the church to do that, to be not only the conscience, but really the intellectual center of the community.
Alex, one of the issues that you talk about, and this is in the specific context of an effort at Princeton to cancel John Witherspoon, because the idea is, well, John Witherspoon has a checkered history with regard to slavery or race relations or whatever.
And you describe cancel culture as being driven by...
Presentism. Presentism.
Can you define what presentism means and what's wrong with it?
Well, thank you, Dinesh.
Presentism is a philosophy or ideology that gives a lot of credit to our perspective right now, this minute.
And we are at liberty to pass judgment because we somehow have some moral superiority that we pass judgment on all of history that ever came before us.
And look, I love young people, but millennials and younger, there's just this high quotient of hubris in their perspective.
And they want to cancel all the people that lived and died to give them freedom of expression and to save us from viewpoint discrimination.
So So presentism says that I right now have all the answers and I will stand above the fray and critique everybody who ever came before me.
And basically all of the figures of history that aren't as woke as me.
We're going to censor them.
It's fascism as applied to the public square, Dinesh.
It doesn't mean that you can't evaluate them or even pass judgment on them, but the judgment has to be an informed judgment and not start from the premise that I, today, am an enlightened, virtuous individual and they, living then, are sort of accountable to me.
Isn't that right? Exactly.
Very well said. And that's just the arrogance of wokeism.
I mean, it's the arrogance of wokeism.
And we've seen this many times.
And I've got to say, you know, with Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 so many years ago, we saw that in school and we never thought something like that would happen.
But this is like Fahrenheit 451 on steroids.
And my goodness, when the left, I spoke last spring at a university in East Tennessee, and my goodness, whenever I would even invoke names like Abraham Lincoln or even John F. Kennedy, I mean, students today have been,
by their, I would say, highly ideological young professors, they've been so skewed Against anything historical, but I would say, Dinesh, this is actually a well-planned attempt to clear the field to the vacuum that will be created by the absence of all history makes it possible for people to be controlled and for socialism slash communism to be imposed on them.
We erase our history at our own peril, and I know that So many people, they need to know our history.
We're not saying that all of the founders of the country were perfect.
We're not saying there haven't been misdeeds in past history.
But as you said so well, the context helps us ameliorate our judgment and condemnation of people that frankly, in many ways, were morally superior than we today.
Great point, Alex. Hey guys, check out Alex McFarland.
His website is alexmcfarland.com.
He's co-author of 100 Bible Questions and Answers.
Alex, a real pleasure.
Thanks for joining me on the podcast.
God bless you, my friend. I've been talking in this section on apologetics about the effort on the part of many scientists and on the part of many atheists to invoke multiple universes, some version of the multiple universes idea to try to account for the anthropic principle.
The anthropic principle is the principle that says that if the values and constants of nature, things like the gravitational force, the strong force, the weak nuclear force, Or even the various values, the force of gravity, the speed of light.
If you change these things even a little bit, you essentially get a different type of universe with no life and certainly with no conscious life, no creatures like us.
This is a real problem to explain how we got this universe.
Designer universe. And of course, the scientists and the atheists, for different reasons.
The atheists are motivated by, we gotta get rid of God.
We have to find a natural explanation.
The scientists come to the same conclusion, but not with the motive of getting rid of God per se, but rather because science is about the study of nature.
So from a disciplinary point of view, the scientists are like, we gotta find an explanation that is within nature.
But of course, an explanation within nature can account for nature itself.
This is like trying to use an explanation about the circulatory human functions of the blood or the organization of the human body to try to explain how we got humans in the first place.
It's really not going to work.
You're trying to use a kind of internal explanation to account for something that would seem to require an external explanation.
Here's physicist Stephen Barr summing the whole thing up.
He's reflecting specifically on multiple universes.
It seems that to abolish one unobservable God, it takes an infinite number of unobservable substitutes.
And I think that's the sort of state of the argument.
You can choose. You can say, look, I prefer to have faith in an infinity of universes, even though I have no empirical evidence for them, and we probably never will.
Or you can say, I prefer to account for this designer universe by pointing to a really powerful and really knowledgeable and omniscient and omnipotent designer.
Now, a point I want to close out with is the fact that we talk very often about the laws of nature.
We talk about the E equals MC squared.
And we somehow think that the universe runs according to these laws, almost as if the laws make it happen.
But I want to stress that laws don't make anything happen at all.
Laws are merely a description of what is happening anyway.
So, for example, if I look at something going on out there and I make some calculations and I show that it's operating according to the pattern, a certain type of pattern, let's say Kepler's laws of planetary orbits, It doesn't mean that the laws are causing the planets to move like that.
It means that when the planets move, we can understand that motion by summarizing it, by describing it in the form of certain regularities or patterns that we call laws.
A question that the physicist Stephen Hawking put many years ago is still relevant.
And the question is this.
This is a line out of, I believe, A Brief History of Time.
He says, who put the fire into the equations?
I think what he means here is that the equations by themselves don't do anything, but they have to, in a sense, come to life.
There has to be a something there that is operating according to these equations and not, in a sense, caused by them.
Here is the physicist Paul Davies, I think now at the University of Arizona, if the divine underpinning of the laws is removed, their existence becomes a profound mystery. Where do they come from? Who sent the message? Who devised the code? It's almost like nature operates according to a code.
But who is the programmer of that code?
That's the question that Davies is raising.
And the question can be posed in a way, in a deeper way, how can inanimate objects like electrons follow laws?
You and I can follow a law.
We know there's a speed limit, for example.
That's a law. We're like, okay, let's drive according to the speed limit.
But how does an electron know what to do?
Conscious agents can obey instructions, but how can inanimate objects that presumably aren't conscious nevertheless follow these kind of known patterns?
Throughout the history of science, scientists have found that even the anomalies in known laws are usually accounted for by deeper and more beautiful laws that seem to underlie the workings of nature.
The greatest scientists, and this is true not just of physicists but also of biologists and astronomers and others, they have an attitude toward nature that borders on the sacred.
Ursula Goodenough, the biologist, once talked about, quote, the sacred depths of nature.
There's something about nature that is not only beautiful but also mysterious.
And I think here is where scientists and religious believers can find common ground.
We both have the same attitude.
The scientific attitude, of course, stops at the sacredness of nature.
It's a profound mystery.
Let's try to understand that mystery as far as we are able.
And what we do as religious believers is we take the same mystery.
We Take into account all the findings of science, all of which corroborate, if you will, the beautiful, the complicated, and yet in the end, not so complicated but deeply simple structure of the universe.
And we say that this structure has and was put into place by a supernatural designer.
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