Andrew Clavin dissects Obama-era corruption, exposing the Clinton/DNC-funded Steele dossier’s weaponization of FISA warrants against Trump allies like Carter Page, citing FBI texts proving anti-Trump bias. He condemns Sessions’ flawed oversight and media dismissal of systemic abuse, warning it mirrors pre-communist China’s collapse. Meanwhile, Brian Clayton counters Pinker’s secular progress narrative, defending Aquinas’ "unmoved mover" as the foundation for order, rejecting materialism’s free-will denial, and framing evolution as God’s guided process. The episode ties corruption to moral decay, urging accountability to preserve democracy’s meritocratic core. [Automatically generated summary]
High school bully David Hogg is trying to use the last three minutes of his 15 minutes of fame to destroy conservative talk show host Laura Ingram by staging a boycott of her sponsors.
The foul-mouthed teenaged enemy of the United States Constitution targeted the longtime media star and former Supreme Court clerk over whether Ingram should have teased him when some of his college applications were turned down.
Oh, sorry.
Whether or not David Hogg should be teased is a very important issue for our country, of course, because Hogg, who has called Republicans sick effers and has called NRA spokeslady Dana Lash disgusting and has accused Senator Marco Rubio of being bribed by the NRA to let children die, feels that Ingram should be ruined for being impolite to him.
Many in the media are saying that Hogg shouldn't be criticized because after all, he's just a traumatized young person who can't be expected to behave or speak rationally and should therefore be invited on every TV show to discuss the Second Amendment.
But personally, I think young Hogg should have to decide whether he's a damaged and confused young man who shouldn't be consulted about anything or he's the leader of a movement and therefore open to mockery and criticism.
Because you can't be both in the real world, only on CNN.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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It's a Friday show.
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I mean, that's pretty good, too.
We also have a guest today.
Really interesting book.
I've just gotten to start it.
It's called Two Wings, Integrating Faith and Reason by two philosophy professors, Brian Clayton and Douglas Kreese.
I believe we have Brian Clayton, right?
He's the one we're going to speak to about it.
Really interesting stuff.
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All right.
So here's the thing I want to talk about because it's really interesting the way this story was reported.
I want to talk, first of all, just in general, about corruption.
Corruption's Impact on Inequality00:03:45
Corruption is a big, big deal.
I lived in New York in the late 70s when it was unlivable and it was terrible.
And it was simply corruption.
It was Democrat governance.
Same as in Chicago, same as in Baltimore, but it's that Democrat governance that works as a machine and it becomes internally corrupt and it's all about patronage.
It's all about giving your friends stuff and not calling your friends to account.
And then I have to give credit to first Ed Koch, who cleaned up Manhattan, and then of course Rudy Giuliani, who cleaned up the entire town.
But what happened was Ed Koch was a genuinely honest guy, and he had some conservative aspects to him and ultimately became a lot more conservative.
But one of the things that happened was he was so, I remember they actually tapped the mob mafia's phone and the mafia was talking about trying to bribe Ed Koch and the guy said, no, no, no, you cannot touch Ed Koch.
And what happened was because he cleaned up Manhattan, there was a huge scandal where all the other boroughs, all the corrupt guys in the other boroughs were exposed.
One of them killed himself.
It just was a huge thing in the 80s.
And that cleaned up the boroughs.
And then Giuliani came in and he was just incorruptible.
And that's how the city gets cleaned up.
You can't clean it up until the corruption is gone.
Now, the thing is, corruption is endemic to democracies.
Corruption is endemic to humanity.
And of course, plenty of authoritarian governments become corrupt.
But it's endemic to the system of democracy because you have to do favors for people to build coalitions.
So it's a great opportunity for people to come in and buy your favors and to give you a lot of money.
And then they give you money and you say, well, I've got to do stuff for them.
And then they start to slip you money behind the scenes.
And basically, you get owned by your coalition if you're not careful.
And the problem is, is that freedom creates inequality, right?
If you're free, you're going to be able to do what you do to the best degree.
And I'm going to be able to do what I do to the best degree.
And that means I'm going to not be as good a basketball player as LeBron James.
And LeBron James is going to be out there making a lot of money and doing all that and being famous and all this.
And I'm going to be sitting around in my driveway bouncing a ball because I can't shoot like LeBron James and I can't move like him.
People don't mind inequality, right?
Inequality, first of all, you shouldn't mind inequality because what difference does it make if the guy next to you has a billion dollars if you have enough money to do all the stuff you want to do?
You know, that's what always used to bug me about Obama, all the lefties.
It's like, oh, he has so much money.
Who cares?
Who cares?
But people don't mind inequality if it's natural inequality, right?
LeBron James was born with more talent than I have, and it inspires me and moves me to use my talent more to watch him use his spectacular talent on the court.
And my talent may not make the kind of money that a basketball player makes, but I'm fine with that as long as it's natural inequality.
The problem with corruption is it takes the nature out of the inequality and it's just the guy who is in with the politician.
This is why leftism is so bad because it rewards who you know instead of what you know.
Capitalism rewards what you know and what you do and what you create.
So when a system becomes corrupt, freedom is under threat.
Freedom is under threat in ways that even somebody like even when a politician does something that temporarily crosses the line of the Constitution, that's a very bad thing, but it doesn't endanger the Constitution the way corruption does because take the Chinese communist revolution.
The so-called republic, the Kumintang, were deeply, deeply corrupt, and everybody knew it and all the villages, they knew it.
And when the communists came in, see, ideologues a lot of times are not corrupt.
The communists came in and they were not corrupt.
Why?
Because they believed in communism.
They passionately, passionately believed in communism.
Ideologues tend not to be corrupt.
Ideologues vs. Corruption00:15:22
And that gave them an attraction, that gave tyranny an attraction that it wouldn't have had because the Republic was so corrupt.
Okay, so, you know, this is, by the way, true of Obama.
Obama was an ideologue, and he was not corrupt in the sense of taking money.
I don't think you could bribe Barack Obama because he was an ideologue.
He was trying to accomplish something.
And that was one of the things that made his tyranny so his, you know, I shouldn't call him a tyrant.
He was less free, less committed to freedom than he should have been.
And that made it appealing because he actually was honest in that way.
He was corrupt in the other way.
He was corrupt in that he did exactly what the Democrats have done to New York, exactly what they've done to Chicago, is he turned Washington into Chicago.
He turned it into this machine that rewarded its friends and punished its enemies, as for instance, when the IRS came after conservatives.
So that, when you have that, you undermine, you undermine democracy, you undermine freedom, and that was the worst thing Obama did.
It wasn't the executive orders.
It wasn't even some of the, you know, terror, it wasn't Obamacare.
It was the corruption.
It was turning the government into a rigged system that did not, that punished its enemies and did not play fair.
It didn't play fair.
And one of the worst ways is now coming out.
And that's why this is so important.
I know, I know this scandal story is really important.
I try to keep it.
It's really complicated.
I try to keep it as simple as I possibly can because I know once you're saying this guy was giving to this and this guy's giving this.
Basically, basically the story, to keep it at its simplest, was Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid for OPO research on Donald Trump.
What they got was a dossier from this ex-spy, Christopher Steele, that was filled with Russian disinformation.
It was filled with information that Donald Trump was with prostitutes who were urinating on the bed, which I don't, I actually do not, there's a sex story about Donald Trump I don't believe because I think he's a germaphobe and he was probably busy at the time getting spanked by a porn star.
This guy's basically living my Google porn search.
He's like, you know, it's like something I'm just looking at.
He was actually doing, I'm joking, that's just a joke.
But anyway, the steel dossier was filled with all this dubious research.
And it seems the Republicans are making a very, very sound argument that through a lot of machinations behind the scenes, John Brennan going to Harry Reid, Harry Reid going to the FBI and James Comey, in their eagerness to get at Donald Trump, they used this dossier to get a warrant to spy on a guy who had worked for Donald Trump in a kind of ancillary way, Carter Page.
That's corruption.
That is one political party using the tools of government against another political party.
That is deep, deep corruption.
So yesterday, if you were just glancing at the newspaper, you would have seen this headline.
Sessions rejects Republican calls for second special counsel.
And that was the way it was played everywhere.
It was played like a big victory, a big victory for the Democrats against the Republicans.
Jeff Sessions was not going to have a special counsel to investigate this question of whether the Obama administration misused this steel dossier in spying on an American.
And that was the way it was all told.
Charles Grossley, Chuck Grassley, had asked for a special counsel.
Robert Goodlott of Virginia had asked for one, and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina had asked for a special counsel to investigate this.
And Sessions said, no, it hasn't risen to that level yet, although I may do it later, okay?
But the other part of the story, the other part of the story was buried under that headline.
Because earlier, about a month ago, a month ago, Donald Trump had tweeted, he's always picking on Jeff Sessions.
I really wish he wouldn't do this because Sessions is a good man.
He is a straight arrow, straight shooting guy who's doing the best job he can, and it's complicated.
You know, he has to be careful to be, when you're the AG, you've got to be above, you're like Caesar's wife.
You know, you've got to be above suspicion.
So Trump tweeted about a month ago, why is AG Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse?
The FISA court is the court that gave the warrant to spy on Carter Page.
So Sessions has said that he would appoint the, he would tell the Inspector General, directly the Inspector General, to investigate massive FISA abuse.
And Trump said, this will take forever.
The IG has no prosecutorial power, and he's already late with reports on Comey, et cetera.
And isn't the IG an Obama guy?
Why not use department lawyers?
Why not use U.S. attorneys?
And then in all caps, disgraceful.
So that was Trump's tweet about this.
Well, first of all, the IG is an Obama guy, but he's universally, Michael Horowitz, he's universally respected.
The Republicans respect him too.
Just because Obama appointed him doesn't mean he's corrupt.
So I think that was unfair.
But he says, why not use Justice Department lawyers?
But that was the story yesterday.
That is exactly what Jeff Sessions done.
Jeff Sessions has not only put the IG in charge of investigating this FISA abuse, he also announced yesterday that he's got this guy, John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, just like Trump wanted.
He's got this guy leading the investigation.
And Huber is also an Obama appointee, but he was reappointed by Mike Lee, who is a rock-ribbed Utah conservative.
So he should have the confidence of both parties as well.
So this is something that really is happening.
And they said it like, oh, he's not going to, but here's Jeffrey Toobin.
Jeffrey Toobin is CNN legal advisor, legal commentator.
And the fact that he is CNN is the only adjective to know, you need to know what I think of him and what I think of his opinion.
So here he is basically dismissing this entire idea, which I think the Republicans have come very close to proving, dismissing this idea that there was FISA abuse.
No, as far as I could tell, most of the accusations against the FBI are lunatic conspiracy theories, just not grounded in anything.
And I think the Attorney General did an appropriate thing here, giving this to the Inspector General.
That's why we have Inspector Generals.
But I expect there will be nothing found here.
And I think Sessions did the right thing.
He is asking Utah's top federal prosecutor, John Huber, to begin an investigation, an internal investigation as well.
What do you think about that?
I think that's appropriate.
I mean, that's the level of inquiry it deserves.
It doesn't deserve the whole superstructure of an independent counsel, I mean, or a special counsel, as it's called now.
There is, you know, inspectors general do investigate the department in which they work, so there's nothing extraordinary about this.
And given the flimsiness of the accusations, I think, you know, giving it to a U.S. attorney is about the appropriate level of inquiry that the whole subject deserved.
So he is selling this idea that by giving it to the Inspector General, I mean, this is the guy who just got McCabe fired, right?
This is Michael Harris, just got Andrew McCabe fired.
He's selling this idea that giving it to the inspector general, that doesn't mean anything.
It's just this kind of little investigation.
No, you know, this is like the internal affairs guy.
He's going to look at this.
And they've got a U.S. attorney on this who is trusted by both parties.
Obama appointed him and Mike Lee reappointed him.
So he's a, you know, he's a straight, obviously they feel he's a really straight arrow guy.
And the idea that there is nothing to see here is wrong-footed, completely contradicted by the fact that the FBI has been slow marching the documents that the Congress has subpoenaed from them.
And not only do they slow walk them, I'll talk about this more in a minute, when they get there, they got a lot of important stuff cut out.
They redact them into, you know, it's like that old joke where they show up and it's all blacked out, you know, and every now and again there's a word like he, you know, or the or something like this.
It's like they're doing, they're pulling every cheap trip.
And now they're starting, they're going to move on because Sessions called them in and said, look, you guys are going to be held in contempt if you don't do this.
And the Congress said the same thing.
So Devin Nunez or Nunes or Nunez.
How are you pronouncing that?
Nobody knows.
It's Nunes.
It's like, why are you, you know, I call this man sister.
There must be a way to pronounce it.
Devin Nunes pointed out that this is a classic case where every time somebody attacks Donald Trump by some kind of weird magic, maybe Trump sold his soul to the devil, I don't know, but he's got some weird magic where every time people attack him, it blows up in their face.
And Nunes says that's what's happening now.
The left has continued to say that this is Watergate and Trump's going to be impeached.
They've continued that.
Well, now this is effectively boomeranged on them.
And you have at least, I think, half of the American people now know that the other party, the Democrats, appear like they weaponize to some degree the intelligence services by using the foreign intelligence surveillance apparatus in this country to go and target the opposition campaign is totally unacceptable.
And that's what happened here.
And so people are beginning to learn the truth.
So I am happy that Bob Goodlatt subpoenaed these 1.2 million documents, but I said this earlier in the week.
We need those documents like yesterday.
Yesterday we needed those documents.
And what I think now, the difference where we were from a few months ago, because of the obstruction, because of the cover-up, the pressure that the American people are now putting on Congress by making everybody aware of this, asking their congressmen, why is it the Department of Justice can stonewall Congress for this long?
I believe that Bob Goodlatt's subpoena is going to be in force.
I think we're going to get all the documents.
And if we don't, then we should move quickly to contempt, and then we should move to impeachment.
And, you know, this is serious stuff because this corruption, as I said, this eats away at freedom.
It eats away at the foundations of government without your seeing it.
And I know all these investigations, I mean, I make fun of them all the time because they're investigating the people who are investigating the investigators at this point.
But it is important that they clean this out.
When they talk about draining the swamp, this is what they're talking about.
And it also means that we on our side have to hold Donald Trump to the same kinds of standards.
I don't care.
I truly don't care who Donald Trump slept with or who he sleeps with, but I do intensely care that he does not allow this kind of corruption that Obama allowed to take over the government.
And so far, it seems that he hasn't.
He's actually stocked the government with really, really good people.
And if you don't think that Nunes or Niñez or Nynez or whatever the hell his name is, if you don't think that he's right, that they are moving, trying everything they can to win the power to impeach President Trump, you are not paying attention.
I mean, this thing that the Democrats, the left, and the Democrats and the far left are virtually indistinguishable at this point, that the Democrats and the far left are so mobilized for the midterms, they're so ready to go, and that conservatives and Republicans look like they're kind of being a little bit drab.
You know, and do we like Trump?
And do we really, do we really like him?
He tweets, he's rude.
You know, this is crazy stuff because they, here, here is, let's see, we have Representative Eric Swalwell of California, this liberal guy who's talking to Wolf Blitzer.
Listen to the way he's talking.
He is like they are drooling to get their hands on the levers of power so they can impeach Trump when it really is Obama.
They should go back and put Obama back in the White House so they can impeach him posthumously at this point.
But listen to this guy.
When you say, Congressman, the president will be fired soon, what exactly are you suggesting?
Well, I hope it's at the ballot box this midterm election and then in 2020 by the voters.
But I think by his own conduct, he's inviting articles of impeachment before the House Judiciary Committee if he were to fire Mueller or if Mueller were to refer any charges.
Then, of course, there are the pending criminal investigations that are taking place.
My point, Wolf, is that there's going to be a reckoning for this president.
My hope for the country is that it comes at the ballot box by the voters.
Well, do you support impeachment?
I support investigations that are thorough.
And right now, we saw the House investigation shut down.
I think the only way we can get a thorough investigation is if the Democrats win the Congress.
And an investigation should first tell the American people what we're going to do to harden the ballot boxes and then hold the president accountable, whether it's on hiring his family, making money off the office, any work that he did with the Russians during the campaign.
But we should be, I think, more faithful to the facts and the truth than he is and not just jump to conclusions.
Okay, so you don't want to jump to conclusions.
Listen to this.
You want to talk about Jeffrey Toobin on CNN saying, oh, nothing to see here.
Crazy lunatic conspiracy theories.
Remember the FBI agent Peter Strzok and his love girl, Lisa Page, right?
And they're in the FBI and they're sending these texts back and forth how much they hate Trump and we need an emergency backup plan in case he gets elected and we don't quite know what they're saying to each other.
At one point, it turned out that they knew the judge, the FISA judge, Fisk judge, Rudolph Contreras, who was the judge in the case against Michael Flynn, the guy who's been forced basically to maneuvered into pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, even though it doesn't seem he lied about anything very important or anything that he did wrong, right?
So they had these texts going back and forth, right?
And Strzok says, here's that Rudy, Rudolph, by the way, he recused himself after this.
He recused himself from the case.
But he says, Rudy is on the FISA court, the Fisk court.
Did you know that?
Just appointed two months ago.
And this is Lisa Page.
Sorry.
Linda Page, isn't it?
I always forget what the...
Lisa Page.
Never mind.
It doesn't matter.
Nunes.
It's Nunes.
But Page says, Page says, Rudy is on the court.
Did you know that?
And Strzzok says, I did know it.
I need to get together with him.
And he said he'd gotten on a month or two ago at a graduation party we were both at.
And Strzzok and Page then began discussing planning a dinner party so they could meet with the judge without anybody knowing that that's why they were meeting with the judge to discuss the case.
So if they had a dinner party, then no one would know that this was a case.
And then the judge wouldn't have to recuse himself, right?
They're conspiring in these texts.
The texts show up at Congress, and this part of the conversation is blacked out.
It's blacked out.
How did they find out about it?
They read about it in the Federalist.
A source sent the actual unredacted things to the Federalists.
And now the DOJ is, the Congress is looking at the Federalists and finding the information that they're keeping out of the information they're turning over to Congress.
If there ain't corruption here, there sure is something that stinks and it matters.
It's not about going back and hunting down Obama post-case.
It's not about sending Obama to jail.
Conspiring Texts00:15:38
Don't get your fantasies going.
Obama's not going anywhere.
He's not going to jail.
It is about cleaning out these departments so that we can believe in our institutions again and have the kind of freedom that does produce a LeBron James, but we can feel that it's being done fairly.
And it really is important to keep going after this corruption.
All right, let us talk about, we're going to stay on the air just because we love you.
And it's Friday, it's Good Friday, and we figure, you know, as a religious act, we're going to stay on the air and let you listen to us talk about faith and reason.
But please go to thedailywire.com and subscribe, and then you'll never be cast into the exterior darkness where there is great wailing, gnashing of teeth, and no leftist tear tumblers.
That's in the Bible.
Professor Brian Clayton co-authored this book, Two Wings: Integrating Faith and Reason with Douglas Kreese.
Professor Clayton is the director of the Faith and Reason Institute, an associate professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University, where he teaches courses on faith and reason.
And one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, another author I like very much, Walker Percy and J.A.R.R. Tolkien, whom everyone likes.
Professor, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Two Wings Integrating Faith and Reason.
Why did you feel that you should write this book now?
Well, the book developed out of a course that we had team taught, Doug and I had team taught with the former president of the university, Father Robert J. Spitzer of the Society of Jesus.
And it really just sort of brings together everything we have been doing over the last 18 or so years and puts it in one place for students.
So it really originates in the course.
So I'm reading this book now by Steven Pinker called Enlightenment Now.
And his basic argument, I mean, to be a little unfair to him, to condense his argument, is look how great things are.
Everybody lives so much longer.
Everybody is healthier.
Everybody's got food, less disease.
And it's all because of the Enlightenment.
And the people in the Enlightenment, yes, some of them were deists, but that was just because they couldn't quite let go of this superstition.
But if we could just let it's the people who want to drag us back to faith in God, people who want to drag us back to religion who are getting in the way of this wonderful, wonderful thing that has happened to us in the last 300 years.
What's your argument against that?
Well, I think that there are people who have what some philosophers have called the Enlightenment agenda, where they were in the Enlightenment very much attacking religion, right?
And so those who have inherited that agenda sort of continue the attack, and I take Pinker to be part of that.
And what that involves in part is denying the actual history of the rise of modern science and the rise of the rule of law and so forth, much of which can be traced back to the medieval period and to Christian thinkers in particular.
I mean, it was in the Latin West, in the Latin Christian West, that modern science has its origins and going back as far as the 12th and 13th centuries.
So I think it's a very narrow view of the history of our civilization to think that the Enlightenment suddenly was this major break with what had gone before.
So that's part of the response.
And then on the other side, it seems to me that there are people who have kind of bought into, well-meaning people who have bought into the idea that there's an opposition between faith and reason or between science and faith.
And their response has been to become what we call in the book fideistic.
And so they sort of abandon reason.
So they give it over to the Enlightenment and to those who inherit the Enlightenment agenda.
And so you wind up with the Enlightenment having kind of a hyper-rationalist approach to things, and you have the fideist having a hyper-faith approach to things.
And then it's some of the fideists in particular who do the kinds of things that presumably Pinker is objecting to.
But if one has an integration of faith and reason, if one understands the history and the ideas and the arguments in particular, then one sees that there's no opposition between all the wonderful things that he likes in the modern contemporary world and faith, the traditional faith.
You know, I'm really happy to hear you talking about this so clearly because it seems absolutely true to me, but it also seems important to explain in ways that people can understand.
So we have this now fairly good mechanistic understanding of the world.
We understand that when you pull this lever, this thing flies out, and we understand the laws of thermodynamics and so on.
Why does God still remain a reasonable thing to believe in?
I would actually go back to St. Thomas Aquinas.
I'm not Roman Catholic.
My colleague Doug Kreese is.
I teach at a Roman Catholic University.
But I think St. Thomas, who had a great deal of respect for the new sciences that we're developing, offers a way of pointing out what gets left out of that sort of mechanistic picture.
That, yeah, we can think in terms of the mechanisms that operate at the material level.
But why, for example, is there order?
There doesn't have to be order, right?
And the things that are ordered, say the motions of the planets and so forth, we say, oh, well, that's due to the laws of nature.
Well, the laws of nature describe what happens.
They don't cause what happens, right?
So we need some account, some kind of causal account as to why things are as they are.
I agree with St. Thomas that probably the clearest way of getting this is getting at.
This is what he calls the the first way, or what's known as the first way, which is in order to understand the observed fact that things around us change, some kind sometimes called the unmoved mover argument, but it's the unchanged changer is the way to think about it.
We observe that change happens.
Okay, why is that?
Well, what's involved in change?
Well, anything that changes has the potential to change, but that potential has to be actualized by something.
Well then, that means you have to have an actualizer.
And then the question is, well, does that actualizer have any potentiality that needs to be actualized in order for it to operate as an actualizer?
Okay right, and so you can't have then, an infinite chain of actualizers that require actualization.
Eventually, you have to get to something that actualizes without itself being actualized.
As a matter of fact, it can't be uh, can't be actualized, it's unactualizable, it's just fully actual.
And Thomas says and this is what we call god.
So, if we're, in order to understand, sort of the basic phenomena that we see in The world around us uh, this is Thomas's argument uh, there are certain conditions that have to be met.
One of those conditions is you need a fully actual actualizer, and this is what we call god.
That's what creation is and and and it's not.
It's not like a finger knocking over a domino, it's more like a hand spinning a rope, right?
I mean, it's actually the thing that's happening in the it's.
Yes, it's happening right now.
Creation is not something that happened in the past, it's happening right now.
Um, it's more like the musician singing a song, and so the, the musician, the singer And the song, right?
They're going on at the same time together.
I mean, what's misleading is that that's a process that happens in time.
And of course, God isn't in time, can't be in time.
So, but this is when I look around the world right now, I'm seeing creation, the creation.
It's the one act that God is doing.
Right, right.
The singer in the song, great metaphor.
It's not original.
It sounded like it had some tradition behind it.
Now, what about this new science?
And this is the thing that Pinker pushes very hard.
A lot of the new atheists push this very hard.
The idea that eventually they're going to find, and they're finding now, that our decisions that we think are free will are actually happening at the quantum level, and we only become aware of them after they're already made by material things.
Do you worry at all that anything in the new brain science and anything in these new amazing looks at the human machine?
Do you worry at all that they're going to erase the idea of individual freedom?
I don't, and on several different grounds.
But just one, for example.
If one looks at what's going on inside the body when I'm thinking about something, one doesn't see thinking, right?
You see neurons firing, you see blood flowing in particular ways, other systems in the body reacting and so forth.
But you don't see a thought.
You don't see the act of thinking itself.
So thinking seems to be, which would be involved, say, in deciding, exercising will.
That doesn't seem to be the same kind of thing that's being talked about when I'm talking about neurons firing or I'm talking about neurochemicals or whatever.
And it's not clear at all how you're supposed to relate to the two.
You may get a correlation.
Oh, well, whenever somebody is thinking, there are these neurons firing and there's brain moving in these or blood moving in these ways.
But that's not the same thing as the thinking.
And how do you get from neurons firing to thinking or deciding or exercising my will?
It's a conceptual problem.
I just don't see how you ever bridge the gap.
It always confuses me of why, when they say that, why they don't posit that the thinking causes the brain flashes rather than the other way around.
I mean, that something is happening.
Because it's outside of the material world, so they can't imagine.
Now, what about the vexed question of evolution?
I am a believer in evolution, but I've never understood why anybody should think it's random or how you would even know it was random if you're inside the system.
It's like an ant knowing that his anthill is, you know, what's happening outside of his anthill.
I mean, I. Right.
It.
Does evolution bother you in terms of biblical teaching?
No, not at all.
And of course, speaking from a Roman Catholic university, the Catholic tradition has a long history of reflecting on this and not having a problem with the idea that part of the way in which God creates or part of his creation that he's creating is to set in motion or cause to be things that have causal properties that behave in regular ways.
They have causal powers.
And so it's perfectly open to God to bring about living things through processes that he has established, existing things that have causal powers that enable them to undergo a process of natural selection or whatever.
And you wind up with things that are alive, or you wind up with different kinds of species, et cetera.
So, I mean, certainly in broad outline, I don't think there's a problem.
And as far as the biblical account itself, if one goes back to someone like St. Augustine, Augustine wrote a work on the literal interpretation of Genesis, and he says, Well, whatever's going on when it talks about the six days of creation, the day of rest, it can't mean days like we mean days, right?
Because when the sun is created, for one thing, it's conveying something else, right?
It's attempting, it's communicating that all of creation is dependent at all times upon the creator for its existence.
And that's really the point.
And then, of course, then you have the chapters devoted to the creation of humans, and it's making a different point there.
It's talking about the special dignity that human beings have.
But all of that is compatible with the scientific theory of descent with modification by means of natural selection.
I suppose there's a kind of a basic question that's in, I'm not sure that Pinker has ever said this, but it's kind of inherent in Pinker.
It's certainly inherent in some of these thinkers that if I can feed people with science, if I can make people live longer, if I can even this guy who wrote this book, Sapiens, basically believes soon people will live forever.
Why do I need God?
Why do I need faith?
Well, I mean, first of all, it's an acknowledgement of reality.
It changes your, that kind of, I would think that would be important to a scientist to acknowledge reality.
And if it is the case, as I as I think it is, and we have good arguments to show this, that the whole created order is dependent upon God, say the unmoved mover, God, and the uncaused cause, the intelligent cause of all else that exists.
And then one goes on to reflect on, well, what is this reality that we're talking about?
What is this creator reality that we're talking about?
Well, it's completely different than anything else that we know.
And yet, and so God is utterly transcendent in that way, but also fully imminent, right?
Present to every part of my body at all moments at which I exist.
Nothing's closer to me than God is.
Then you begin to ask, well, what's my relationship with this reality?
And that's where the religious question really comes in.
I mean, what's the proper response to this reality?
And theists have always responded, the proper response is worship.
Okay.
All right.
I guess I'm running out of time, so I but I really do want to ask you this final question.
I read a lot of books about people worrying about the state of the West and worrying about our tradition collapsing.
And again and again, I've seen this now in maybe five or six books.
The writer, usually a very proficient intellectual, very accomplished intellectual, will say, you know, yes, it all depends on Christianity.
Christianity is the bottom block in the Jenga Tower, but I just can't believe.
I can't believe.
I can pretend I'm a Christian.
I can support Christian tradition, but I can't believe.
And I usually feel that what they're stumbling on is the miraculous, the idea, you know, I always joke that I believe a Jewish carpenter rose from the dead, and I've never even seen a Jewish carpenter.
I think, you know, I sympathize.
I sympathize with this.
The Train Track of Sin00:10:11
I mean, we live in this world of wonders.
Do you need the miraculous?
Do you need to believe in the miracle of the resurrection for one thing and in some of the other miracles to have true faith?
Yes.
I mean, if Christ be not risen, our faith is in vain.
Right.
But again, if we take the idea, the classical understanding of God that theists have, the idea of miracles doesn't look like somebody standing outside the machine, to take that mechanical metaphor, and reaching a screwdriver in and trying to make adjustments.
So it's not like some kind of intervention.
Instead, the miracles are themselves part of the one act of creation.
It's woven into the whole story as we experience it in time of God creating.
So if we look at it as a kind of intervention, and how do we justify, you know, why would God intervene?
And why would it be reasonable to believe that God has intervened?
I think that's the wrong way to think about it.
It's more like, oh, the singer was singing this song, and we thought it was going to go in this direction, but no, it kind of varied, right?
We had a variation on the theme here.
And that does happen.
I mean, we see it in life, and then you find the reasonable explanation afterward, and you explain it backwards.
Yeah.
Really interesting.
Brian Clayton, the co-author with Douglas Crees of Two Wings, Integrating Faith and Reason.
Very clear, as you speak very clearly.
You write very clearly.
And it's much appreciated.
I hope you have a great Easter.
And thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Have a happy Easter yourself.
Thanks very much.
Thank you very much.
I'm always happy to hear those things explained so well.
And it's obvious that he's given it a lot of thought.
And the book, like I said, I've only been able, I got the book very, very late, and I've only been able to dip into it and read parts of it, but it's incredibly clear.
And when I went, what I did, as I often do when I'm testing something, is I went to the parts that I know about and found it really responsible, not just well-reasoned, but also well-read and intelligent.
Two wings integrating faith and reason.
So it's Good Friday.
We will end our week of holy week meanderings and holy week mutterings of my own that are just things that I have been thinking about.
Good Friday, of course, is the day of the crucifixion.
And people always say, why do they call it good?
It is not because I have an extra show.
Some people say it's a misinterpretation of the word God.
It was God's Friday.
Other people say it's good because, of course, it's part of the act of salvation, even though it was so much suffering for Jesus and such a tragedy for the people around him.
It was actually good because it worked out man's salvation.
The question that I always hear, and I think that the news media, which is kind of anti-religious, kind of anti-religious, it's like raveningly anti-religious, is always saying, why did Jesus die?
Why did Jesus have to die?
And the idea behind this is that there's something uncivilized, that someone should have to sacrifice something to appease God.
Isn't that what we used to do when we threw virgins into volcanoes?
Why does this have to happen again?
And of course, the argument that it is God sacrificing himself to end essentially all other sacrifices, the one sacrifice ever needed, never really makes it into the magazines.
But still, there's still something in explanations that I find not untrue.
The explanation, the normal explanation is not untrue, but sometimes I find it non-immediate.
You know, the usual explanation is Adam sinned, man fell, now Jesus has to pay for that sin with his death.
That sin brought death into the world.
Jesus takes the sin on himself, becomes sin, and dies for us, and now we have the opportunity to live eternally.
And I sort of think like, well, yeah, I believe that, but what good does it do me right this minute?
You know, and I drive theology, just so you know, if I'm driving you a little crazy, theologians when they talk to me get really driven crazy because they'll talk and they'll say brilliant, brilliant things.
And I'll go, yeah, yeah, but what am I supposed to do?
You know, what does that mean for me?
Do I eat fish on Fridays or what?
And how does that help?
And so as I have thought about it, I've just, this is not to negate what I just said, but just to put it in practical terms, because I think it has to do with politics and the way we discuss politics, is the fact that history is inescapable.
It's not so much for me, as I look at it, that like Adam sinned and therefore there's some kind of poison that flows through our blood.
I don't believe that that's true at all.
What I believe is that once mankind sort of started taking on the responsibility for morality himself and sort of believing that he was the operator, he was the unmoved mover, history turned in a certain way.
And this is a real thing.
You know that all the injustice that's ever happened, all the murders, all the wars, all the terrible things that men and women have done to one another throughout history, they have brought us to this point.
Everything good we have, we stand not only on the shoulders of giants, we stand on the bodies of victims.
When the left talks about the mistreatment of the Indians, no one would say that the Indians were not mistreated.
And now you have a home that's on the land that they own.
Nobody would say that slavery was a good thing.
You know, my argument when guys like Tanahisi Coates say, well, slavery created an injustice.
That injustice is still here in the form of less wealth for black people.
So there ought to be reparations paid.
My argument is that injustice bends the arc of history.
And that's just more injustice.
Taking money away from people who didn't hold slaves to give it to people who weren't slaves is simply more injustice.
He thinks, well, it's a different injustice.
It's going to bend the ark of history back, but it's not.
It's going to keep bending that arc in injustice.
And that injustice never goes away.
You cannot fix history.
You can only live in history.
And living in history is living in sin.
Living in history is living in sin because you are benefiting from the deaths of a million people always, always.
Every one of us, not just white people, not just people in America, everybody, we are all living in a world that was made through incredible terror, rape, pine, rape, and killing, all those things.
You cannot step out.
And the world is on that track forever.
When Jesus came into the world, he brought with him, you don't even, forget about the miraculous nature of Jesus.
Just think of him as someone whose mind was so in conjunction with God, just for a moment, think of it this way, that he embodied the logic and the logos of God, the love of God, the creativity of God, that overflowing love that becomes creativity, the forgiveness of God, all those things that he embodied, he brought into the world.
When you look at the Good Friday story, the crucifixion story, you can point to villains.
People always try to point to villains.
But when you really look at it, he's killed by history.
He's killed by the world.
The world works like a perfect machine to murder the logos, the truth, the way that you're supposed to live, the life that you're supposed to have.
The world works to murder that.
And if you haven't noticed that, that remains as true today in a world that is much more peaceful, a world that's much more prosperous, a world that's much more healthy.
The truth will still get you killed.
The truth and decency and love and forgiveness will still leave you behind, will still get you killed.
The resurrection is the statement by God.
It is the statement by God that, yes, history is on that train track.
It is on that train track of sin.
Here's a door.
Here is a door.
Turn your ship in a different way.
It is the question of whether you are born into a world of sin or you are given a new soul to start the world again.
And the answer to those questions is yes.
They're both true.
They're both true at once.
When you follow the logos, when you turn toward the logos, when you turn toward the love, when you turn toward the truth and the life, you're going to suffer in the world.
You are going to take some hits in the world.
That's why I always laugh when people say, how can I stand up to my history professor and tell him the truth?
And what they really mean is, how can I do it without suffering?
You can't.
If you speak the truth, you know, you are going to take some hits.
If you live in a way that follows what you know to be the truth of God, you are going to take some hits.
You are going to take up a cross.
You are going to take up a cross if you follow Jesus.
But that gives you a fresh life.
When they talk about being free from sin, that's what they mean, that you're traveling against away from that train track.
It doesn't mean that you're suddenly a good person.
We all know you're not a good person.
I'm not a good person.
We know that.
It has nothing to do with that.
It's the direction in which you're traveling.
And I can tell you that all the wisdom in the world, all the joy in the world, all the true success, the happiness in the world, is in that direction.
It is in that direction.
Every time you step in that direction, you will get joy and freedom.
Every time you get on the train track, you will be carried away into that world of sin.
I can tell you that for a fact.
That is a fact.
And so that is the reason in some ways that Jesus had to die, maybe had to fulfill what C.S. Lewis called some deep magic in the world, but he really had to die because history had to kill him in order to continue to be the history that it is.
And it's his death and his resurrection are an invitation to you and to me to step out of that history, to step out into this new world that is, as I can tell you, a world of just, it just makes it an abundant life, a life that you are pleased to be a part of with all its suffering, with all its sin, with all its corruption.
It is a joy all the same to be walking in the right direction.
So on that note, have a wonderful Easter.
And if you don't celebrate Easter, celebrate Easter.
Great Passover Reflection00:00:48
A much nicer Easter to our Jewish friends have a great Passover, a wonderful celebration of freedom, which is, of course, what everything, everything is about.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
There's no show on Monday, but I will see you on Tuesday.
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