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Dec. 9, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:42
TRUMP UNSHACKLED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1227
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Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians the revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible?
The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
What if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
The Dragon's Prophecy.
Watch it now or buy the DVD at thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
Coming up, a huge case just went before the Supreme Court.
I'm going to show why the Supreme Court is likely to affirm President Trump's authority to fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission.
This is a very important case about the reach of executive authority.
And human rights attorney Brooke Goldstein joins me.
We're going to talk about the problem of anti-Semitism on the left and on the right.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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Before I jump into it, a quick reminder: here are the DVDs for the Dragon's Prophecy.
They're going fast, and it's really good to order now because you're going to get them in time for Christmas, in time for stocking stuffers, in time for gifts.
So go to thedragonsprophecyfilm.com and sign up for DVDs.
All right.
I want to talk about the hearing before the Supreme Court yesterday on a very important issue, which is what is the authority of the president to fire members of the so-called independent agencies.
Now, you know what these independent agencies are.
Typically, they are called alphabet agencies, things like the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, or the FTC, which is the Federal Trade Commission.
And there's a whole bunch of these.
And many of these agencies were created by Congress and they were given a certain authority to do certain things having to do with food or with drugs or with the communication system.
And these agencies were at one time quite small, but they have now become huge and so huge that they even make deals with foreign governments.
They regulate multi-billion dollar industries.
They make decisions that have a massive impact on our economy, but also a massive impact on people's lives, people's freedom, people's rights.
And here's an interesting question: although these agencies are set up by Congress, once they're set up, they are typically administered by sort of experts, bureaucrats, armies of PhDs.
And these are people who supposedly have some regulatory expertise.
They're usually plucked out of, sometimes out of the business sector, but more normally out of academia.
And they have all this power.
So who are they accountable to?
Certainly Congress doesn't exercise any direct oversight over these agencies.
And why not?
Well, because Congress is the legislative body.
They make laws.
The executive branch is charged with, well, executing or carrying out the laws.
And so here we get to the logic of Trump's position.
Trump's position is: well, if the executive branch has the authority to carry out these laws, the executive branch has to have authority over these agencies.
And this is the issue before the Supreme Court.
Now, all of this came about because Trump decided to fire a member of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission.
Her name is Rebecca Slaughter.
And Rebecca Slaughter argued that not only is her position independent of the executive, but the agency has its own authority.
That authority was given by Congress.
Not only that, Congress placed some restrictions on the ability of the president to fire members of the FTC.
And therefore, she is immune from presidential removal.
And this was the issue before the court.
Now, there is a governing case that goes all the way back to FDR, all the way back to 1935.
It's called Humphrey's Executor versus United States.
This was a law passed by the Supreme Court, not a law, but a ruling by the Supreme Court, when these agencies were just being established, and they had very little power.
And by and large, the Supreme Court said, you know, when Congress sets up these agencies, there's a limit to what the president can do to interfere with them.
But interestingly, over the years, this Supreme Court decision, going back now some 90 years, has been hollowed out, has been pulled back, has been scaled back.
And so when the issue came before the Supreme Court, you basically had a sharp divide between the six conservatives and the three liberals.
And what I'm saying here is that it looks like we are heading to a 6-3 ruling in which the Supreme Court is likely to strike down this 90-year-old decision, which is Humphrey's executor.
And the Supreme Court is likely to give Trump the authority to fire this woman slaughter, to slaughter her, if you will.
Now, the court could take a slightly narrower approach and not overturn the 90-year-old decision, but just basically say that the circumstances have changed.
And so, although the decision sort of remains in place, we're not overruling it.
We are merely applying it to completely different circumstances when these agencies have become mammoth and giant, and they now have huge tentacles of power, and they do require some sort of oversight.
And that oversight appropriately comes from the executive branch and not the legislature.
And therefore, Trump has every right to give this woman the boot.
Now, the Liberal justices were basically saying that a rule by experts is a good thing.
And rule by experts is particularly good in areas that require expertise.
So, what does the president know about what foods people should eat?
What does the president know about what vaccines people should take?
What does the president know about certain types of trade deals?
Remember, here we're talking about the Federal Trade Association.
And so, Trump needs to butt out.
This is basically where the liberal justices were coming out.
But none of the conservatives are buying it at all.
And notably, here we have Justice Kavanaugh.
No, actually, it's Justice Neil Gorsuch, I think, putting the matter in perfect perspective.
He says, This whole notion of independent agencies is a little problematic.
Who are they independent of?
Are they independent of the legislature?
Having been set up, they're now independent.
Are they independent of the executive?
Are they also independent of the judiciary?
In a sense, what you're saying is that they're independent of the American people.
Because where are the reins of accountability?
And moreover, this is how Justice Gorsuch put it: he goes, There's no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that is somehow quasi-judicial, quasi-legislative.
So, in other words, our constitutional scheme is tripartite.
It's in three parts: we have a legislature, they make laws.
We have an executive, they carry it out.
We have a judiciary, they determine the legality or constitutionality of the laws.
We don't have anything else.
Everything that we create has to fit into this tripartite scheme.
And so, I think this is the viewpoint that is likely to prevail.
Now, all of us in watching these hearings are to some degree engaging in tea leaf reading.
And sometimes it's hard to say.
The justices will ask probing questions, but you don't have a clear reading as to where this is coming out.
But this is not one of those cases.
If you listen to the hearings, you become pretty convinced: ha, it looks like the conservatives all understand you cannot have these rogue agencies that have all this power that is unchecked, that has no oversight, and the oversight appropriately comes from the branch of government that is entrusted with the carrying out of the laws.
And so, I'm not sure when this opinion is due, but I think it's going to be a big win for the conservatives, a big win for Trump.
If I was this woman slaughter, I'd be making other job and career plans.
And the ramifications of the decision are big.
Why?
Because even though it seems to be about one person at one agency, the Federal Trade Commission, in reality, we're talking about Trump's ability to fire people in all these independent agencies.
The only agency that Congress expressed some reluctance about was the Federal Reserve, where you have these governors, Federal Reserve governors, that are appointed through a complex system.
And there has been for some time talk about an independent, I think it's only a quasi-independent Fed, but that's really not an issue here.
This case does not involve the Federal Reserve, and so even though that came up as an interesting hypothetical, and maybe in that case, the Supreme Court would be more reluctant to give the President a kind of carte blanche in firing authority.
We're talking about the agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Surface Transportation Board, the so-called EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
By the way, these agencies are densely populated with left-wing bureaucrats.
And giving the government, in this case, a Republican president, the chance to put these people out on the street is overdue, is something that we've been waiting for for a long time.
Interestingly, previous Republican presidents have not even gone to the court and said, give us this authority.
We do want to boot these people out.
This really shows the uniqueness of Trump.
He goes where other Republicans have feared to tread.
I'm really glad he's doing it.
And it looks like in this case, it's going to pay off.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Brooke Goldstein.
She is a Miami-based human rights lawyer.
She is an author, an award-winning filmmaker.
She's recognized really internationally as an advocate on behalf of the Jewish community.
She's founder and executive director of the Lawfare Project.
And she's the author of Lawfare, The War Against Free Speech, and also a forthcoming book, which is End Jew Hatred, a manual for mobilization.
Brooke, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
And by the way, I also appreciate your helping me get the word out about the dragon's prophecy.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
And thank you for sharing the message.
It's an incredibly important film.
Thank you for making it.
Well, we were delighted to do it.
You mentioned to me a moment ago, and I want you to give more details, that you just won a big lawsuit against CARE, which is the Council of what, Arab Islamic Relations, I guess it is, a group that purports to be a civil rights group, but I think it's a long way from that.
Talk about the lawsuit.
What was it about?
Sorry, well, thank you.
Thank you again for having me on.
It's always an honor and a privilege to talk with you.
CARE, the Council on American Islamic Relations, as we know, is a Muslim Brotherhood Front group.
It was an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror financing trial and just recently was designated as a terrorist group by both the state of Texas and also Florida, which I think is a positive step.
Now, my book, my first book that you mentioned, Lawfare, the War Against Free Speech, details how Islamist groups like CARE have been weaponizing our legal system, filing frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to silence and punish and intimidate and really shut up anybody who's speaking publicly about issues of radical Islam, calling attention to CARE's connections.
And now they are targeting Jewish people for reporting on anti-Semitism.
And that is exactly what happened here.
We are delighted to report that the judge dismissed the lawsuit that CARE filed.
CARE was the attorneys in the case, Karashi V. Beer.
We represent the Beers.
And what happened here is very simple.
The Beers commented on social media.
Jew Hate Database posted an image exposing the plaintiff for her anti-Semitic and vile anti-Jewish rhetoric.
And the only things our clients did was post a link to where she works, which was a publicly available information.
And Chartwell Law subsequently then fired her.
And rightfully so.
And so Karashi then sued the Beers and the judge threw the case out.
And it was an absolutely correct decision because they recognized there was no cause of action here.
It is not illegal to post publicly available information.
And that certainly didn't lead to her firing.
What led to her firing was her anti-Semitic, vile Jew hatred and her posts about that.
So I think what this case shows is that the law can no longer be weaponized, that we have an impartial and objective judicial system, and that this type of lawfare will be met with justice.
And the lawfare project is committed and always has been and always will be committed to defending the First Amendment rights of all Americans, not just Jewish Americans, as they speak publicly about issues of concern, such as the rise in anti-Semitism.
Is the strategy, Brooke, that is employed by CARE one of using the accusation of Islamophobia and hate speech?
What is the vehicle that they use to try to shut people down and intimidate them?
You said that they've got like a systematic campaign of doing that and actually preventing public exposure of themselves.
What is their technique for intimidating people into silence?
Well, in general, there's three ways to intimidate people into silence.
We've seen violence carried out by radical groups.
We saw what happened to the offices of Charlie Hemdo in France when they dared to publish a cartoon with Muhammad and a bomb in his turban to satirize the whole issue of Islamist terrorism.
We saw what happened to Theo van Gogh, who was stabbed in the back on the streets of Amsterdam after he co-produced a movie with Ayan Hirsi Ali, who now I believe remains in hiding because they wanted to expose the treatment of women under radical Islam.
So there's the violent attacks and threats, and we see violent rhetoric online all the time.
Then there's the tactics used by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations of slandering people as Islamophobic or anti-Muslim.
This started mostly after 9-11, which I call the first great awakening in modern American history to the threat of radical Islam.
And we should have understood and realized what we were dealing with.
But right, you know, almost immediately following the tax, we had this huge, very well-funded campaign to slander people who were talking about radical Islam as a threat to our democracy and as a threat to world peace.
And it became politically incorrect to talk about it.
And then, of course, there are these lawfare lawsuits, which is what I wrote my first book about, Lawfare, the War Against Free Speech, the filing of frivolous and malicious and baseless lawsuits against counterterrorism officials, against members of the media, as you can see with my clients, just against anyone, you know, regular citizens who are posting online and talking about these issues.
And so this has basically led to a chilling effect in our society.
Now, we woke up again after October the 7th to this threat of Islamist terrorism and violence.
And we saw them globalize the intifada and bring this, you know, Hamas ideology to our campuses, to our streets in the United States.
And we, you know, need to talk about this stuff because if you can't talk about it, if you can't joke about it, if you can't write about it, we're not going to be able to understand it and defeat it.
And there is a very, very shrewd strategy that is being implemented by the Muslim Brotherhood.
It's 20 plus years already that they've been infiltrating our systems, our campuses through charitable front organizations.
Qatar is doing the same thing with their sovereign wealth fund.
They're funding our schools.
Qatar is the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood, is Qatar, is Hamas.
It's all the same radical ideology.
They're all supportive of each other.
And their number one goal is to reestablish the caliphate and to destroy America from within.
And so the most important thing that we must do is safeguard our rights, our First Amendment right to free speech, because the more we talk about it, the more we can understand the threat and then understand how to combat it and eventually to defeat it.
What seems very strange to me, Brooke, is that if the goal is an Islamic caliphate with its accompaniment of Sharia law, it seems quite clear that this is something that really no one in the West would want.
And by that, I mean you wouldn't think that the left would want it.
You wouldn't think that the right would want it.
Who wants to live under Sharia?
Now, maybe some Muslim immigrants do, but you would think the vast majority of people on both sides of the spectrum would emphatically reject this goal.
And yet you have seen not only the rise of a strong anti-Jewish, anti-Israel sentiment on the left and on the right, but it's often kind of accompanied by efforts to kind of minimize or promote or ally with some of these Islamist elements, particularly not so much, I would say, al-Qaeda or ISIS, but certainly with the Muslim Brotherhood agenda, just as you have described it.
How do you account for this bizarre sympathy toward a goal that we would seem to be nobody really wants?
Well, I'd say I think it's a combination of ignorance, but it's also cognitive dissonance.
And there's also a strategy there.
So, you know, on the street level, it's incredible ignorance.
You have gays for Palestine, for example.
You know, women marching in tank tops and shorts that are pro-Hamas.
When the second they step foot in Gaza, they would be killed.
You know, gays are thrown from rooftops and hung and murdered.
So, you know, you have this extreme woke alliance with a radical Islamist ideology because they share the same purpose and that is to defeat Israel.
And, you know, that's why I also always say Jew hatred, anti-Semitism is not rational.
It makes people crazy.
And what is really interesting is how the Islamists are very open about, you know, first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.
We're coming for you too.
We were marching against Israel.
And now, you know, that October the 7th and the war apparently is over, but it really isn't.
But let's just call it a ceasefire right now.
You know, they're now marching in Christmas markets in France and Belgium and attacking Christian religious bookstores and throughout Nigeria and Sudan, engaging in mass slaughter of black Christians.
It's not about Israel.
I mean, this is the greatest diversion tactic is getting people to, well, first of all, starting a war, which is what Hamas did, getting people to believe that Islamism is only a threat to the Jews.
And if only we created another Palestinian Islamic state in a sea of failed Islamic dictatorships, all of a sudden there would be peace and diverting everyone's attention to the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict as though that is the cause of the problem, when it's really not.
It's the Muslims in mosques, the radical imams preaching throughout Europe, throughout the United States and Canada, death to the infidels, death to the Americans, death to the Jews, death to gays, subjugation of women.
The issue is radical Islam.
And what really we should be forming are alliances between minority communities and all communities, frankly, that believe in the upholding of Judeo-Christian values against the infiltration of radical Islam.
But going back to your earlier question, this should have been done 20 years ago.
But because of the Islamophobomania campaign, the coordinated and very well-funded effort to silence us, to sue us, to defame us, we couldn't organize or talk about this.
But now is the time.
Now is the time to wake up and understand.
You know, I always say that we're wasting our time with pro-Israel advocacy.
The goal should not be to get people to love Israel.
The goal should be to form alliances against the creep of radical Islam into our Western Judeo-Christian societies, because that is the real threat.
You know, there's no reason why a mother in Ohio should care about Israeli politics.
But when you show that mother a video of a young girl who dresses perhaps like her daughter walking down a street in Belgium and being surrounded by 15 Muslims who are shouting and threatening to rape her and attack her because she's not dressed in a Sharia compliant way, that is what you should be worried about.
And when they say globalize the intifada, that is what they mean.
Bring Sharia law and radical Islamist principles into the West.
And we see this all over Europe.
You know, it used to be faux pas to talk about the sharia no-go zones throughout France.
It's happening.
It's real.
There are places in France that the police can't even go to without full armor and automatic weaponry and they go in and they out.
And it's Sharia-compliant neighborhoods.
That's what's happening in Michigan.
That's what they want to happen throughout the Western world.
And we cannot allow this to happen.
We cannot have a subset of Sharia-compliant neighborhoods within our Western democracy because it is just not compatible with our constitutional rights.
In some ways, Brooke, it seems to me that if this is really a fight about Judeo-Christian values, I can sort of understand why some people on the left, particularly people who are products of our media, our education system, they could say, well, we don't like Judeo-Christian civilization.
So naturally, we're going to be somewhat pro-Islamic because we agree with them that it'd be really good for this civilization to be taken down.
It seems to me, though, much more surprising to encounter the same kinds of sentiments coming from the right, because the people on the right profess to be dedicated Christians, avidly in support of Western values, and yet you see an echo of some of those sentiments kind of right of center.
And some of us who are on the right are like, where is this coming from?
Do you have any thoughts about where it's coming from and why?
Well, I'm happy you brought it up because this to me is the greatest concern.
We've lost the Democratic Party.
It's been completely captured by the radical left, the woke, the progressives, and their alliance with Islamists.
We see that.
And now the goal is to capture the right.
And, you know, a lot of people are accusing Qatar of being behind it.
I know that Tucker Carlson came out recently and said he hasn't taken any money from Qatar, but Lara Loomer just broke that.
In fact, he did at least take a couple hundred thousand dollars allegedly from Qatar when he was doing one interview.
So if he's lying about that, perhaps he's lying about other things.
And you see now this resurgence of a perverted version of an originally perverted ideology of replacement theology coming back and a targeted attack to the Christian evangelical youth to pervert really the words of Jesus, to accuse Israel wrongfully of bringing us into these so-called forever wars when really we should be thanking Israel for being on the front lines of the war against.
radicalization and turning American youth towards radical ideologies.
Now I'm very concerned that the next presidential election we're going to see on stage both from the Democrats and potentially, God forbid, the Republicans, radical candidates.
And so we have to look deep within how is this happening?
And really it's happening through social media.
It's happening through TikTok.
It's happening through the infiltration of our educational systems.
You know, Qatar has spent over $1 billion a year, at least that we know of, infiltrating academia through DEI, through the so-called critical race theory.
But we've seen this in the past.
We saw, for example, the Mufti of Jerusalem meet with Hitler back during World War II when the Nazis, you know, they hate the Semitic people.
They were anti-Semitic in every sense of the word, right?
They had no love for the brown Arabs that live in the Middle East, and yet they saw an alliance, and that alliance was based solely on one thing, Jew hatred.
And that's why Jew hatred is a disease.
It's a virus.
It drives societies crazy.
It is not rational.
It is partially responsible for these, you know, convenient alliances between people whose values otherwise don't align.
Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that's how they see it.
But I'm telling you, again, first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.
And this is not something I'm making up.
This is something that is openly admitted.
If you watch, you know, any of the translations of the media coming out of the Arab world, they are very open about what their strategy is.
And they frankly see Israel as a little America, not vice versa.
They see Israel as the outpost of Western democracy in the Middle East.
So that is why it is so important that we uphold our values.
It's important we get the foreign funding outside of our educational system.
I think we should get foreign funding, especially from countries that fund terrorism.
Qatar is the number one largest state sponsor of terror right now.
It's the main backer of Hamas.
I don't know why their sovereign wealth fund is able to operate freely.
I've heard this statement over and over again, especially when it comes to the reinvigoration of the Abraham Accords, that economic partnership leads to peace.
And I don't know why that is taken as a given, because what I call it is economic entanglement.
When we allow Qatar to own our schools, to own our hospitals, to fund media, that has not led to peace.
That has led to destabilization of our country and the spread of radical values and anti-American ideology.
And so I just ask people to question, even with the Abraham Accords, these Islamist countries, and they're Muslim countries.
They will always be Muslim countries.
They can dial up the radicalism and they can dial it down.
Saudi Arabia, don't forget 9-11, but all of a sudden they want to be part of the Abraham Accord.
So they're taking the Jew hatred and the anti-Americanism out of their curriculum.
We can invest with them.
We're not becoming rich.
Saudi Arabia becomes rich.
Qatar becomes rich.
And maybe certain investment funds in the United States get wealthier, but the American people are not getting wealthier from these partnerships.
We're enriching these countries.
And 10, 15 years down the line, we're going to be so economically intertwined with them and reliant on them that when they turn up the Islamism again and they start funding terrorism, there's going to be nothing that we could do about it.
So these are the things that concern me the most right now.
I mean, this is very interesting, Brooke.
What you're really saying is in some ways, Qatar and even Saudi Arabia are more dangerous than even Iran, because when somebody's got their guns and nuclear weapons or potential nuclear weapons pointed at you, well, it's not difficult to see that they don't wish, they don't mean any good, right?
But I think what you're saying is when people come in and buy your land and buy your businesses and claim to cooperate on AI, you think, well, wow, we're making trade deals with these people.
And you're saying their agenda may still remain exactly the same.
And all of this is part of a long-term strategy.
Guys, I've been talking to Brooke Goldstein, Executive Director of the Lawfare Project.
The forthcoming book, End Jew Hatred, a manual for mobilization.
Check it out.
By the way, you can follow Brooke on X at Goldstein Brooke, B-R-O-O-K-E, and the website thelawfairproject.org.
Brooke, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me today.
It's still going on, guys.
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You know, in the conversation I just had with Brooke Goldstein, she made a reference to replacement theology, a topic I've alluded to often on this program, but I haven't really gotten into it.
And many of the people who advocate this replacement theology, they sometimes do it as a distinction to or in contrast to the idea of dispensational theology.
Now, dispensational theology is a kind of Protestant understanding of the way in which the end times will unfold, the various eras or dispensations.
And some of the people, not all, but many, who advocate the replacement theology think that they're coming out of like a Catholic understanding that is older, more venerable, more reliable than this sort of newfangled Protestant view.
And so I thought to myself, as someone who's actually studied the Catholic intellectual tradition for a long time, in fact, I went through Catholic catechism many, many years ago when I was a child.
I thought to myself, let me look up what the greatest thinker in the Catholic Church, the philosopher Thomas Aquinas, in a sense, this is a guy who's considered the official Catholic philosopher.
And apart from, say, Augustine in the fourth century, it's hard to think of a thinker of comparable eminence.
What did he think about replacement theology?
So I've done a little bit of digging into it, and I want to summarize Aquinas's conclusions because I think they throw a lot of light on this very muddled debate.
Basically, what Aquinas says is that the replacement is true in a particular sense, in a theological sense, in a salvational sense, but not in any other sense.
So let's be clear about what he means.
What he is saying is that in the Old Testament, or prior to the coming of Christ, let us say, salvation was based upon trust in God and good deeds.
You didn't have Christ having paid the ultimate sacrifice for sin.
And so, what are you supposed to do if you are Abraham or Isaac or Jacob or Joshua?
You can't exactly place your faith in Christ because Christ hasn't come yet.
And so, for the Jews of the Old Testament, God had rules.
He had laws, he had rights and commandments, and the Jews were asked to keep those.
And if you keep those, then, and if you have, as Abraham did, trust in God, let's remember when God told Abraham to take Isaac to the top of the mountain and sacrifice him, what does it reflect, if not trust, for Abraham to go, I will do as you say.
And he almost went through with it until God himself said, stop.
And so that's trust.
That is obedience.
That is ultimately letting God have his way.
Now, says Aquinas, once Jesus comes, once Jesus dies and is resurrected, there is a new spiritual era.
Salvation now is through Jesus.
Jesus is in fact the way, and Jesus is in fact the only way.
So in this sense, there is a replacement.
The replacement is that the kind of old way of climbing the spiritual ladder and getting to the pearly gates, if I can put it crudely, is now replaced with a new way, which is accepting the free gift of salvation that comes from the sacrifice that is done by Christ.
And so, says Aquinas, if you have Jews now who reject Christ, who know about him and go, no, thank you, then they are cutting themselves off from that way.
They are cutting themselves off from that road to salvation, which happens to be the only road.
So replacement theology is true in that sense, but in that sense alone.
Aquinas goes on to say that what is not being replaced is in fact the entirety of the biblical story.
The biblical story is a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It begins with creation.
It begins for the Jews and for the relationship with God.
The original covenant begins with Abraham.
It continues through Moses.
Jesus is, by the way, not the end of the story, but the middle of the story, because the end of the story is the return of the Messiah.
And says Aquinas, all kinds of events are foretold in the Bible, including conversions of the Jews, maybe not all the Jews, but many Jews.
And all of this, these are all earthly promises that are going to happen on this earth.
And they involve not necessarily the next world per se.
They have to do with things that are predicted and forecast to happen in this world.
And what of all that is repudiated?
Aquinas goes, none of it.
So you still have the relevance of the creation story.
You have the relevance of the Exodus.
You have the relevance of the Ten Commandments.
That certainly hasn't been displaced or replaced.
You have the Psalms.
You have the prophets.
You have the unfolding of the prophecies.
You have the early church.
And you have, of course, the times to come.
So that story, which the Bible kind of lays out from beginning to end, is in no way replaced.
The New Testament does not kick out the old.
The replacement does occur, but in the narrow sense I just described.
It's very important because it has to do with what Augustine would actually had called earlier, many centuries earlier, the city of God.
But God also makes many promises in the city of man.
And those promises, including, by the way, the land promises to Abraham, the land promises to Abraham's descendants, the land promises to the Jews, that is not repudiated.
That is not replaced at all.
I'm hoping today to complete the chapter on biology, which is called Undeniable Teleology.
This is from my book, Life After Death: The Evidence.
And the question we're exploring here is: does biology reveal some kind of a pattern in nature that points to a movement from the material to the spiritual, or from the material to the immaterial, or from plain physical objects to something as abstract and immaterial as consciousness.
We're looking for this in nature itself.
Now, many people will say the design of nature points to a designer, and that is a separate argument to be made on another day.
I agree with that argument, but I'm not really jumping from design to a designer.
I'm merely asking, what is the design?
Where is the design, such as it is, pointing to?
And that's what we're going to be looking at.
Now, I want to suggest that the pattern of biology and of nature is right before our eyes.
It's kind of amazing that biologists, by and large, don't see it.
They miss the forest for the trees.
And we can see this design, we can see this pattern not only in evolution itself, but also in the preconditions that produce evolution.
Now, what I'm about to say has nothing to do with theology.
It has everything to do with scientific description.
And it is a refutation of a common argument made by some biologists, fewer today, but it used to be very common a few decades ago.
Stephen Jay Gould is probably the most common, the most prominent advocate of this view, but others like John Maynard Smith also made it.
The idea is that evolution is based on like random accidents, and there's no pattern in evolution, and therefore there's no pattern in nature.
Now, Stephen Jay Gould in his book Full House basically makes the argument the following way: He goes, Where is the pattern in nature?
Sure, one thing evolves into another, but he goes, The thing that is the basis of this evolution, let's just say A evolves into B, and B evolves into C, and C evolves into D, but A, B, and C are still around.
They haven't been eliminated.
They might have produced new forms, but the old forms still coexist alongside the new forms.
And Stephen Jay Gould gives the example of bacteria.
He goes, bacteria may be, quote, the lowest of all the life forms.
Maybe they were there at the very beginning, long before man, but hey, we still have bacteria.
They're still around.
Here's Gould.
Fishes didn't die out or stop evolving because one lineage of creatures out of the ocean managed to colonize the land.
So this is the gold argument, that evolution is a mishmash.
There is no detectable movement, direction, or pattern.
But this view has been challenged in recent years by two mammoth figures, Christian De Duve, who won the Nobel Prize for the study of cells, and Simon Conway Morris, who is the world's leading expert on the so-called Burgess shale.
And these guys argue, and I think you can see the intuitive sense of it, that for all the babble about randomness, evolution follows predictable pathways.
They give one clear example, and that is the eye.
Now, evidently, the eye has evolved separately and independently many different times under evolution.
So it's not like the eye evolved and then one eye led to another eye.
It's that eyes developed in separate creatures and even species independently of each other.
So what does that show you?
Quote, it shows that even though you have these different groups of creatures, quote, each group has independently navigated to the same evolutionary solution.
Wow, pretty fascinating.
Not only this, but there's a phenomenon that these scientific giants call evolutionary convergence.
And what do we mean by evolutionary convergence?
It's that even though there's an element of randomness, obviously the conditions under which you survive are different from here to there, but what they're getting at is nevertheless, certain patterns are clearly detectable.
Let's give a couple of analogies of what they're getting at.
It's very random.
If I toss a coin, it's random whether I get a head or a tail.
But on the other hand, I can predict that if I toss a coin 100 times, I can predict roughly how many heads and tails I'm going to get.
Now, how can I do that?
Because even though each toss is random, the process as a whole is not random.
I'm going to get close to 50 heads and close to 50 tails.
It'd be really surprising to toss a coin 100 times and get 100 heads or 99 heads and one tail.
That could happen, but it's extremely unlikely.
So the point is that even though there's a randomization in the process, the results are fairly predictable.
Or think of water that is at the top of a mountain that's coming down.
Yeah, there's not an absolute established path for the water.
It could cut this way, it could cut that way.
Here's a tree, the water goes around the tree, there's a rock, the water goes around the rock.
But the point is, even though the water is coming down many different ways, it's going in the same direction, isn't it?
It's not going up, it's not going sideways, it is in fact going down, and very often the water will end in the same pool, it'll end in the same place.
And this is what these scientists are saying about evolution: that if you could rerun the tape of evolution, no, you wouldn't end up in some Timbuktu.
You'd pretty much find similar patterns that come out again and again and reach somewhat the same or similar results.
So, Christian De Duve has a phrase which I think is very resonant here.
He speaks about the arrow of evolution.
And the point about an arrow is an arrow flies kind of predictably toward a target.
And De Duve says, okay, when we look at evolution, we go through these stages or ages.
There is the age of chemistry, and then there's the age of information.
So we move from the first age to the second.
We have chemistry now too, but information is in a way the summit.
Similarly, you can speak of the movement from the age of the single cell to the age of multicellular organisms to now the age of the mind.
And let's spend a moment on what we mean by the age of the mind.
This is a very kind of arresting and interesting concept because it has produced a new order of being in the world.
If you go from a unicellular creature, one cell, to a multicellular creature, you're still dealing by and large with creatures.
But if you move from unconsciousness, or you move even from consciousness but not mental understanding to mental understanding, let's just say, for example, the consciousness of a deer or the consciousness of a rabbit to human consciousness.
Those are very different because human consciousness, for example, is capable of contemplating itself.
It is also capable of contemplating the process of evolution, which is not accessible to like a deer or to a rabbit.
And so we now have a special kind of being in the world.
And the point is, the pattern is really clear.
The universe has, in a way, enabled its own comprehension.
I'm quoting now from the book: Nature has unfolded a plan for nature itself to become known.
The progression of evolution on Earth shows an unmistakable trajectory, movement, from matter to mind.
Now, mind, as I've said many times, is not material, it is immaterial.
And material things like bodies are breakable, they're perishable, but immaterial things like ideas are not.
And so here we have a really important clue to life after death.
Why?
Because in showing that perishable matter has within itself the capacity to generate imperishable ideas, we see in nature a clue to unique creatures like us who can read nature's laws and patterns.
And just as nature is part material and perishable, and also part immaterial and imperishable, hey, so are we.
So it's possible that our individual destiny may follow nature's destiny in moving from one type of existence, material, to another, immaterial.
So the time will come when our bodies will irretrievably break down, we know, but it is possible, and I write, indeed, suggested within the script of nature, that a part of us might outlast these mortal coils.
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