Nov. 27, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
48:38
Sunday Special: IS ATHEISM DEAD? WITH ERIC METAXAS
Jack is joined for this Sunday Special by none other than renowned author Eric Metaxas! In this episode, they discuss a range of Christian topics, ultimately asking the question, is Atheism as it exists, dead? Get Eric’s latest book, Letter to the American Church, here: https://ericmetaxas.com/books/letter/Here’s your Daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiec Save up to 65% on MyPillow products by going to MyPillow.com/POSO and use code POSO Support the Show.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to the Sunday edition Human Events Sunday specialty.
Today we are joined with the great, and you guys, if you're not following this guy, if you're not reading his books, if you're not following him on Twitter, you are absolutely missing out because two of the best books that have come out really in the last two years are both penned by him.
Folks, it's Eric Metaxas, host of the Eric Metaxas Show, and these two great books, number one is Atheism Dead.
And then almost a companion book to that, Letter to the American Church.
And I think it's sort of it's it's asking the question and then providing the answer.
Right.
And that's what you get with both of those books.
Eric, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's great to be with you.
I have so much I'm excited to talk about, but I just want to say following you on social media has been a tremendous blessing and encouragement to me.
And it's fun to get to talk to you in this longer format.
No, I appreciate it.
I absolutely do.
We should do more stuff together.
I know we did that one, I think we did an interview at SAS a couple years ago, and I think that was it.
I was glad that we were able to make it our schedules to align, even though I know it's Thanksgiving week and everybody's trying to sneak out early and get filled up with turkey and all the good stuff.
Do you guys do full Thanksgiving?
Do you do the whole nine yards?
We don't believe in it.
I'm Greek.
Greeks don't have Thanksgiving.
Just kidding.
It's like we have Greek Easter.
Of course, Thanksgiving is it's as basic an American holiday.
And it's as wonderful an American holiday as you could hope for.
So, yeah, we just wonderful family time.
And and I have to say, I don't know if you were planning to ask me about this, but I've written about Thanksgiving.
I wrote a book called Um, If You Can Keep It, about America, about the American experiment.
And one of the most undeniably extraordinary miracles in the history of the world, as far as I'm concerned, is the story of Squanto.
I wrote it as a children's book, Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving.
But I tell the story in my, uh, my book about America called If You Can Keep It, The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.
And it really is hard.
I mean, I'm used to people who, you know, you present them with a clear miracle and they go, well, that's weird coincidence or something.
But the story of Thanksgiving and the story of Squanto, when I finally discovered this as an adult, I was so astonished.
I said, I've got to write a book about this.
I've got to tell the world about this.
And this happens to me often.
I discover something.
I get so excited.
I think, how could I possibly have not known this before?
I have to tell everyone I know.
And the story of Squanto is is one of those stories.
It seems to me To be difficult not to see God's hand in the beginning of what we now call America.
And you know, we talked about, we kind of did a Rush Limbaugh tribute on Thursday and I recounted, you know, sort of my telling of Rush's, as he always put it, the true story of Thanksgiving.
We got into Squanto, and I think a lot of people don't realize that Squanto himself was a Christian convert.
They have no idea about this.
It's completely glossed over.
It's, you know, these idiot pilgrims and these stupid colonizer Europeans come to the United States and they arrive in November.
That's stupid.
And then New England, that's even worse of all.
And then they have no idea what they're doing.
And then the natives come and save the day.
And that's what Thanksgiving's about.
Right.
And that's what we're all told in school.
And then you read the actual story and you find out that, OK, maybe there's a glimmer of truth to it.
But actually, the true story is not only far more expansive and more complex, It's also a lot more interesting, and to your point, it's fundamentally Christian.
It just simply is.
Well, to me, the crazy part, and it's always difficult to describe in a short form, but you have to understand in 1620, when the pilgrims landed, it's somebody like It's sort of like landing on the moon.
Like, who's been here?
No one.
No one ever comes here.
There are no ships back.
You know, it was a really extraordinarily lonely outpost, the fact that they show up there.
Half of them die.
And then, as if on cue, in a bad movie, out of the woods walks an Indian from that area, Who had lost his entire tribe and been wiped out.
He was the last of the Patuxets.
And he speaks English.
Right.
He's speaking their language somehow.
In 1620.
And he has nowhere to go.
And he offers himself to the pilgrims because he says, I grew up here.
Where you have settled is where I grew up.
My people were here.
I grew up here as a child.
I know everything there is to know about this area.
So they basically adopt him.
And he is In the words of William Bradford, who wrote about it, he says he was a special instrument sent of God.
And it seems obvious.
I mean, they were, you talk about on their last legs, they'd lost half of their number.
It's inconceivable to us in the modern era to lose half of those you've come with, that you bury them, you're dying.
Bradford's wife, Bradford's wife even died.
And then out of the woods comes an Indian from this area who happens to have been in London more recently than they.
His story, his backstory is insane.
It's insane.
Because they had come from Holland at that point.
Yeah.
So the whole thing is just...
You if you don't see the hand of God in it.
And again, I'm only giving a few details.
It is absolutely crazy.
It's a miracle.
It's the kind of a miracle that, you know, you pray, you say, God, we need a miracle.
Nothing but a miracle can save us.
You know, and out of the woods walks an Indian speaking English.
Kingsley who has nowhere to go.
He grew up where they were.
All of his people had died from smallpox or whatever, brought by traders a few years earlier.
He had been away, obviously, because he'd been kidnapped by some traders some years before, taken to Spain, taken to England.
I mean, the whole thing is just one of the most miraculous stories.
So I wrote it, as I said, in a children's book, and I talk about it every year on my radio program.
But I also put it in my book.
If you can keep it, because they said every American needs to know that at our beginning is a story so undeniably miraculous.
And think about this.
The peace between these Native Americans and the Pilgrims, you know, that's not the story we always hear.
We always hear about the enmity and the killing.
There was not just peace, but it's beautiful, the harmony between them that began.
And then because of Squanto, they kind of broker this treaty that lasts for 50 years of peace with the surrounding Indians.
I mean, the whole thing is amazing and beautiful, and it's perfectly right that we celebrate Thanksgiving as we do.
But I thought that's at the heart of it.
And I would be bold enough to say God is at the heart of it.
He made this happen and it's beautiful and we need to see it for what it is.
Well, and Eric, that's kind of what I wanted to get into over the course of this is this question of if God has been there since the beginning of the United States and we're both Christians, but you look that church attendance is down.
You look at the generations out there are becoming less and less pious, reverent, shall we say, that our society and our culture has become far, far more secularized.
And clearly when this program of, Of liberalism and social liberalism, cultural liberalism was enacted on the United States.
The very first target, the very first pillar of society, the very first institution that was targeted wasn't the schools.
It wasn't the the government.
It wasn't certainly wasn't the police.
They're on the police now.
Right.
You know, they kind of go back and forth on that.
But the very first one was the church and not necessarily the church directly, but the role of the church in the public square.
And I think that and it does and I think people don't understand the, you know, so the title of your book is Atheism Dead, is a play off of the Nietzsche title, God is Dead.
But I also don't think that people realize what Nietzsche was describing when he actually said that.
Because the idea wasn't necessarily that he thought that God was dead, it was that he could kind of see down the road.
He could see on the horizon that because of the rise of Darwin, because of the rise of Well, there's a lot there.
and social natural selection theory, as opposed to creationism, the role of the church, the role of theology, all of this was being eroded in his time.
And so he was looking forward to see, OK, well, if we remove some of those underpinnings and some of those moral guardrails from society, what's to become of us?
Well, there's a lot there.
First of all, I want to say that the title of my book is Atheism Dead, a Ostensibly, I get it from Time Magazine's 1966 cover article that says, is God dead?
And of course, they're getting it from Nietzsche.
But the point is that the powers that be in America in the mid 60s felt now is the time to introduce this unbelievable bummer of an idea that we're alone in the universe.
There is no God.
There's nothing special about us.
We just evolved out of primordial suit by accident.
Life has no meaning.
And let's just go on with let's go on with our lives.
You know, we'll use alcohol and like sports events to distract us from the bleakness.
Right.
So in 1966, Time magazine comes out with this article, Is God Dead?
And there's real temerity in them putting this in the middle of America's living rooms, this incredibly bleak idea, which most people know is preposterous.
You know, the idea that there's no God.
It really makes very little sense.
But the elites, you know, based on some of the stuff you mentioned, Darwin, Freud, a number of other things, they kind of thought, well, we've sort of figured it out.
We figured it out.
And it's time to introduce these ideas.
And the subject of my book, Which is, is atheism dead?
Is basically that science, since about the 60s, has done exactly the opposite of what they said was going to happen.
In other words, they kept saying, the more science progresses, the less we're going to need God, the more we're going to see how everything works without God.
Well, exactly the opposite happened.
The more we learned from science, this is in the last decade since we've been alive, The more we see that the universe and this planet and each of us and cells, everything has the earmarks of astonishing fine-tuning calibration that doesn't seem even conceivably possible through chance, through natural processes.
And so, as I've done my reading on this over the years, I finally said, I have to put this in a book because most Christians don't even know that the evidence for God from science It is mind-blowing.
There's no way to overstate it, Jack.
It is mind-blowing evidence.
Evidence for God.
Evidence for God from science.
Folks, we're coming up on our first break, so we're going to hold you right there.
What a teaser, right?
The evidence from science of God.
As we come back, I expect we might be talking about DNA just a little bit going into the next segment.
But folks, stay right there because we are going to be, we are so blessed to be joined by Eric Metaxas today, and he's breaking All this down for us.
Stay tuned as Human Events Sunday Special continues.
And we're back here.
We are talking today with Eric Metaxas, the author of pretty much everything out there that you've read and seen lately.
He's also involved in a bunch of movies and children's books.
We might talk about that a little bit.
Right now, where we left you was the evidence from science for God.
Eric, what are you talking about?
We all know that science disproves God, this is a primitive, primordial, Upper Paleolithic belief, and really all religions just kind of evolved from the same false beliefs of our ancestors.
You know, the creation story is passed down, it's Gilgamesh, it's rehashed over and over.
That's all religion is, right?
Gilgamesh and Kindu, those incredible fictional characters.
Listen, I want to tell you, It's only the reason I have hope.
And I when I say this, this is not Pollyanna hope.
This is not false optimism.
I have genuine hope because part of the madness that has been unleashed on this nation in the last few years, whether it's election fraud, the confusion of covid, the authoritarian lockdowns and in other words, the madness that has been unleashed really only underscores that We've all been operating under a paradigm that's nonsense, right?
We all kind of act like, well, we think there's no God, and most of the elites don't believe there's a God, and we're going to try to soldier on without God, and there's no truth, and there's no, you know, and... Don't bury the leader, because I think what you just said is very insightful, because I really do believe that all of this started when the first thing that started to seep in, and I remember noticing this, was
There's not the truth, there's your truth, and there's my truth.
That's your truth, and that's my truth.
There's no objective truth.
Because if there's no objective truth, then there's no objective reality.
If there's no objective reality, then there is no reality.
If there's no objective reality, then there are no standards.
If there are no standards, then there's only relativism.
And this totally blows all of that out of the water.
Because if you believe in objective truth, if you believe in objective reality, then it's actually very hard to get away from an objective at either creator or at least a singular point of origin, which is kind of the same thing under under a different definition.
No, that's it.
That's exactly right.
And again, there's a lot here.
But just to sum it up, let's put it this way.
I realize that as things have become more and more unhinged, Many, many people are kind of waking up and they're looking around, they're thinking, none of this makes any sense.
Five minutes ago, somebody decided there's like 57 genders and I'm supposed to go along with that.
Suddenly having a border is a controversial idea.
That's weird.
Everywhere I turn, you know, these kind of basic things are being challenged.
And so I think people are sort of waking up and saying, you know what?
I'm not buying this.
I really, you know, I'm a nice person.
I don't like to argue, but this seems flat out crazy.
And it all stems, it's essentially the fruit of many decades of this idea that, you know, we can live apart from God.
And I think, ironically, Jack, this is to me the huge irony, is that the evidence for God, just as everything seems insane, the evidence for God has become Just unbelievably powerful.
There's no way I can underscore it.
And when I asked the question, the title of my book is, is atheism dead?
I happen to have a copy right here.
Uh, but the thing is, the thing is that when I asked that question, I don't have any doubt that if you are intellectually honest, you have to conclude, you must conclude atheism is preposterous.
Now, You have questions about the Bible, you have questions about Christianity, or you have questions about faith.
That's great.
We can talk about your questions.
The thesis that there is no God, the evidence from science in the last few decades has become so overwhelming.
The only thing you can do is ignore it or look away or just say, leave me alone.
I don't want to look at that.
There's a good cartoon of that that I saw recently, by the way, where it said, they said, well, how come you aren't an atheist?
And they said, well, I don't have enough faith for that.
Oh no, but I mean it's actually, it becomes, I should say that the book is Atheism Dead, the first part is science and faith, and I give evidence from science, and I know there are even people listening now thinking, what evidence from science, what evidence could there be?
Let's get into it, let's get into that.
I want to get into that.
So I want to say the first part is that, the second part is evidence from archaeology that points to the Bible as history, not as a bunch of folk myths, but as history.
That archaeology, just like science keeps pointing to a creator, that it's inevitable, archaeology continually points to the Bible as history.
And then the third part of the book, I deal with atheism itself as a philosophy, and basically say, just as enough time has passed that we can look at the science, enough time has passed that we can look at archaeology, enough time has passed that we can look at atheism and say, How's that going?
How's that been going for people who have tried to live out this philosophy, which was, you know, it was like really sexy in 1920, but like, how's that going a hundred years later?
So I look at these different things and I'm telling you, when I say I myself was astonished at how open and shut it becomes, it's like having a discussion on, so do we think the earth is flat?
Can we discuss that?
I don't want to be controversial.
What do you think?
You'd laugh.
You'd just say, well, we've kind of, we don't, we don't talk about that.
Like we know, we don't think the earth is not flat.
We now know that it's not flat.
That's how I feel about the existence of God.
So to start with the science, there's three things that I write about in the science part.
Number one is the evidence for the big bang, which we forget how controversial that was in the course of the 20th century.
Most atheistic scientists were just outraged by the evidence pointing to an expanding universe, which obviously came from a single point at some point in the past.
Dramatically disturbing evidence.
And so you have these people that just said, We'll do anything to argue for a steady state universe, because especially by the way, especially because, of course, the the Belgian cosmologist who really was is credited with coming up with this theory turned out to be a priest.
You're a sharp cookie, Jack.
Go to the head of the class.
Honestly, that's one of the things I write about this in the book.
Obviously, there's a number of people in the 1920s and Lemaître was the was the Belgian priest.
Who, along with a few others, they just said, look, there's no doubt.
Like, this is not our opinion.
The evidence we now know, and this is again, Einstein blew it when around 1911, 12, he's coming up with his equations.
He sees an expanding universe.
But Einstein himself, the greatest scientist, you know, apart from maybe Newton, was so insecure.
That he said, this can't be right.
I can't admit this.
This looks like if the universe is expanding, that there was a point from which it expanded, which means there was a point at which the universe didn't exist.
That feels too religious.
I'm going to bury that.
So Einstein buries it and then it's Lemaitre and Their names are escaping me now, but but they basically over the decades following say, sorry, there is no doubt, Einstein, you got it right the first time.
You shouldn't have buried it.
And everybody remembers the astronomer who confirmed its name was Hubble, was Hubble, was the one that we named the telescope after him.
He's the one who confirms it.
And he becomes the one that said, yeah, Lemaitre and the expanding universe, a single point.
It's all of the calculations that this Catholic priest was was back in Belgium.
was making using the instruments available to him and at the time.
And I want to say that was, you know, really in like sort of the 1930s, 40s, 20s.
Right.
This all comes up and what they call it, the Hubble, the Hubble constant.
Right.
And it goes and confirms everything.
What makes it funny to me, though, is how people were writhing away from this idea, because it clearly implies a creator, a God, maybe not the God of the Bible exactly, but it was so disturbing that this controversy continues well into the 1960s and beyond, where there were people but it was so disturbing that this controversy continues well into the 1960s and beyond, where there were people still This implies that there's a God.
Now, again, that's the most basic thing.
And I developed a number of chapters in the beginning of the book where I deal with the Big Bang.
Honestly, it's a fascinating, fascinating story, which I hadn't been as familiar with.
So I had to write about it.
But the second and probably most compelling argument for God is what we call the fine-tuned universe.
And this is just, there is no way to get out of this.
The more science has learned, I mean, think how ironic this is.
The more science has looked at things, the more we have the ability now to say, you know what?
We have telescopes so powerful, we can see things we couldn't see a number of years ago.
We have microscopes so powerful, we can see things we couldn't see.
And as we examine things, we see levels of fine-tuning We could have before assumed, oh, it just happened.
But now we look at it and it's kind of like finding a watch on the beach or finding a laptop in the sand.
You wouldn't say, well, look what the wind and the waves have created.
You'd say.
Wow.
From a distance, it looked like a rock.
When I look up close, there's a keyboard.
And oh, my goodness, what?
You know, or maybe like I don't know, like like a coronavirus that just happens to be perfectly adapted to infect humans and jump from one to, you know, just just I mentioned that at random.
We're not going to be controversial, Jack.
You and I, we don't we don't get into controversy.
No, no.
So special.
We never go there.
But the fact of the matter is logic sometimes tells you This is an open and shut case.
This was created.
But the levels of fine tuning as science has progressed in since this, you know, kind of cavalier, arrogant statement, Time magazine is God dead since then.
Science has progressed, and it's like a year doesn't go by, a month doesn't go by, that we don't discover more elements of fine-tuning.
And this is on every single level.
We're talking about from the laws of physics, which were created 13.8 billion years ago, in the first moment of the Big Bang, the laws of physics are set in stone forever.
We know that if any of those laws of physics were even, you know, slightly different by .0000001, there would be no universe, much less Earth or people like nothing.
No universe, no us, none of it.
When you look at the solar system, when you look at why certain planets are here and why the Earth is the one that always kills me is that the size of the Earth.
I mean, growing up watching Star Trek, you think like any planet anywhere could have life.
You know, it's going to have like blue people with horns or it's going to have this or that.
And you start realizing, well, now that we know, now that science has progressed, we now know without any doubt, you don't need to be a Christian to know this, any scientist knows that if this earth were ever so slightly bigger, like a couple of percent bigger, there would be no possibility of us having an atmosphere to support life.
Like two, three percent bigger.
If it was two or three percent smaller, there is zero possibility of it holding an atmosphere like that.
Now, this is science.
This is not some, you know, Christian doctrine.
This is what science says, that the size of the Earth just happens to be perfect.
And that's just like one factor.
Everywhere you look, the size of the Moon, the distance of the Moon, it goes on.
The more you look, the more you just think, this seems like it was designed And the more I looked, the more it seems it was designed.
So I said, I've got to do a kind of like a soup to nuts survey course of fine tuning in this book.
You could read dozens of books on the subject.
But I said, most people aren't really familiar with this.
I'm not a scientist.
Let me just give the basics.
But everywhere you look, you see evidence of fine tuning.
That's just insane.
Another one that I love is the planet Jupiter.
Okay, the planet Jupiter is for our cosmic filtration system.
Okay, you know about this stuff.
So don't don't spoil it for the people at home.
400 million miles away.
There's this pinprick of light.
Sometimes you can see it in the night sky.
400 million miles.
My son loves by the way, almost every night when when it's a clear sky, we'll go out there and he's four years old.
But we do we always do if the planets are visible.
I'll say which one is that?
Which one is that?
And we'll do Jupiter, Venus, Mars, if it's visible, Saturn.
I take it you don't live in Manhattan like I do.
I do not live in Manhattan, no.
We can't see nothing.
We can't see nothing from here.
You might think it's a star, it's really just gunshots going off.
This one pinprick of light, Jupiter, okay?
We now know, and you already know this, but if it weren't there, 400 million miles away, we couldn't be here.
And you think, that seems ridiculous.
What does that pinprick of light in the sky have to do with it?
Well, it just so happens that it's so massive and it has so much gravity that it pulls away all of the asteroids and the meteors that would otherwise strike Earth and make life impossible.
And again, you think Jupiter, Saturn, like they need to be there.
They need to be the size they are and they need to be there.
And again, this is the tip of the iceberg.
The more you look, the more levels of fine tuning you discover.
And it is so open and shut.
It's so crazy.
That you realize that if you want to be an atheist, don't read this stuff because your atheism will evaporate in a millisecond.
You cannot be an atheist.
We're up on our, we're up on our break.
Hold it right there because I got to ask you in the next segment about DNA.
A language written into cells.
I thought only intelligent beings could come up with language.
How does that make any sense?
Hold it right there.
Eric Metaxas will be right back.
Human Event Sunday Special.
And we're back.
We're talking about the solar system.
We're talking about the cosmic filtration system that is Jupiter.
Why don't the asteroids hit us?
Because they hit Jupiter first.
It's what it's there for.
The comets seem to hit Jupiter.
They seem to be attracted to it.
It seems like it doesn't make sense.
And it's an awfully, awful big coincidence.
And as Steve Bannon likes to say, there are no conspiracies, but there are coincidences.
And so when we look at the system, the solar system, the way that it is, we look at the laws of physics, the way that they are, that literally, if any of them were shifted in any such way, if the Earth were Just a little bit further from the sun or a little bit closer to the sun.
We need to be burning up or we'd be completely frozen.
We're in what's called the Goldilocks zone.
Our bodies, our cells wouldn't be able to function if gravity on planet Earth wasn't this way.
And so when we look at all of these things and we're talking here with Eric Metaxas, you know, Eric, one of the things that just blows my mind, the more I think about it is DNA and the fact that we have essentially What something that even when the DNA was really discovered, you wouldn't necessarily put it in these terms.
But we have a computer code.
We have a computer code that's written into our cells, that's written into the cells of all living things on Earth.
We all have it.
Yet every computer code that's out there, every programmer, you know, we always say learn to code when somebody loses their job.
You know, we talk about Twitter and Elon Musk is going to hire the best coders.
Why would we have a code in our living cells?
Why would we have Essentially a language in our living cells that randomly came up by itself.
I mean, there's that whole theory of the tornado hitting the junkyard, but I don't quite think that Darwin's theories or that pure evolution can really explain this for us.
Why is there a language in the cells of my body?
Why?
To be an atheism, you know, you said it requires too much faith.
You have to be utterly willful.
To be an atheist.
You basically, in effect, you cannot be an atheist.
What you can say is, I hate God so much that I won't admit that I believe he exists.
That's where you have to go.
Because, I mean, look, there's so much evidence in my book from science that I didn't even go into the DNA and I didn't even get into the evolution stuff because there is so much other evidence that I thought other people are unfamiliar with.
I said, we need to know.
That the evidence for God from science is at this point open and shut.
Like we solved the case.
It's over.
We know there is no way conceivable.
It's not even conceivable that everything emerged randomly.
When you talk about DNA, that's the most dramatic example.
When you talk about a single cell, that's what got me starting to write the book.
Actually, I met a nanoscientist.
He's a dear friend, James Tour.
at Rice University in Houston.
He starts telling me about the theory that we all grew up with.
It was on the test growing up that in 1952, some scientists at the University of Chicago ran some electricity to simulate lightning through some prebiotic soups.
So there's no life.
Right.
And they get amino acids and they lose their minds like we're on our way.
Amino acids.
And then next thing you know, we're going to have proteins.
Next thing you know, like we're on our way to figure out how life evolved randomly.
Right.
And what this friend, James Torr, says to me a couple of years ago, he says, Eric, it's been 70 years.
They haven't moved that ball forward one millimeter.
In fact, The more we have learned from science, the ball has basically zipped off to the other side of the universe.
We now know that the idea that this sequence that starts with amino acids, it's like, forget it.
The more we know about what constitutes a single cell, the simplest form of life.
If you say to a scientist, hey, how did life emerge?
They say, oh, four billion years ago on Earth, single-celled life emerged.
You'd say, great, great.
Tell me, how did that happen?
They have no idea.
They will blow smoke.
And James Tour is calling him on it.
He's done these YouTube videos.
I just interviewed him for Socrates and the City on this subject because he hasn't written a book about it.
It is mind bending, Jack.
It is like it's the greatest evidence for God that exists and no one ever talks about it.
So that's really what made me write my book, Is Atheism Dead?
Because I said, this is the most dramatic example from science that you want to ask a scientist the most basic question, life, how did that begin?
They have no idea.
In fact, it's worse than they have no idea.
They know that they don't know and they're blowing smoke and they're taking a lot of funding.
You'll also find some, well, that you get, you get the, you get the alien spore theory.
Some people will throw the stuff out there and say, well, what does that mean?
Because they try to get away from, from saying, you know, from discussing God or even intelligent design by itself, they will say, well, Aliens came and seeded life on Earth.
And that's where it came from.
They don't know where the aliens come from.
Where do the aliens come from?
I actually write about this in the book.
I'm not kidding.
In the book is A.V.
Isn't that I deal with exactly what you said, because it's actually like comedy.
It's like saying, like, make the cake.
Who baked the cake?
And they say, well, somebody brought it down the hill, carrying it in a pan.
And you're like, well, we don't care.
We want to know who baked it.
Did someone bake it?
We can't talk about that.
We just know that it probably was delivered by some stranger.
It's so it's so funny, actually.
Anyway, so the first part of the book is science.
The second part of the book is archaeology.
And the evidence from archaeology is equally mind blowing.
It seems like every day they discover something in the sands of the Middle East.
Like they go, oh, we never thought that we'd find an actual seal from King Hezekiah.
Here it is.
You know, everywhere you look, you find evidence.
And the biggest one, and I wrote about it in the book, is the discovery of biblical Sodom, Sodom and Gomorrah.
For me, that is the one of the end all be all discoveries.
And it's really only been in recent times that, you know, and I think they discovered the site in the 70s and they've been trying to debunk it ever since.
No, this was, this is a, uh, this was, uh, sorry.
It was around 2000.
This is a new, we don't, we don't have time to go into this, but I'm telling you it was literally because of James tour, uh, in Houston on the science thing.
And because of Dr. Stephen Collins in Albuquerque who discovered biblical Sodom in the early two thousands, the level of detail, Of what he can tell you.
In fact, an article was written in Nature Magazine about a year and a half ago.
Peer-reviewed Nature Magazine.
20 scientists wrote about it.
Again, it's open and shut.
It is mind-blowing.
I posted that article everywhere when it popped.
I posted it again.
We just got back from the Holy Land.
And so, listeners of the podcast will remember that when we were there, we spoke about this at length because we essentially drove right past it.
And we did an episode talking about this very fact that You've got a city that's exactly where the Bible says it would be, that shows the evidence of exactly what the Bible says happened to Sodom, right east of Abraham's tent.
And the word exactly isn't even good enough.
Like it's so precise that it's scary.
It's so precise it's scary.
It's the first few pages of the Bible.
We're not talking about something, you know, 2000 years ago.
We're talking something about 1700 B.C.
It seems mythic that we could never discover it.
They have discovered Every detail.
I mean, that is one of the reasons I wrote the book.
The book, Is Atheism Dead, exists because of Dr. Stephen Collins, whom I met in Albuquerque, and because of Dr. James Tour, who I met in Houston.
One gave me the science, one gave me the archaeology, and those pieces of information are so huge, I said, I need to write about that and that and everything else.
You know, Eric, of course, of course, what, by the way, and if you follow me on Twitter, you know, you know, my followers can be a little bit of a rambunctious bunch every once in a while.
And so, of course, you know, half the people that, you know, when I shared out this, oh, my gosh, this this proves, you know, one of the key stories, the Bible.
This is something that we can obviously show that can prove.
And then the other half of the of the of the responses were all like, Lord, it's time again.
I have a list.
We have a list of cities that I was going to say, it's hard not to go there in this day and age.
I'm not going to mention San Francisco by name.
No, I would never bring up San Francisco like that.
It might slip out.
It might.
Not publicly, not on a program like this, but privately.
This is a Christian show.
Well, we're on, by the way, and I want to put this out there for folks, if you're out there, I've got listeners and people in the audience who Uh, you might be atheist, you might be agnostic, you might be secular, you might be someone who had a bad experience with, uh, with the church or, uh, with your, with organized religion writ large.
And, you know, we're, we, we pray for you.
We love you.
But what we're doing is offering something other than sort of your, your regular, just angry, nasty, Oh, God is terrible.
And those priests are just trying to take your money and, uh, you know, force you to live in a certain way to give them power that, you know, actually it seems that some of the stuff that these guys were talking about, might actually be based in reality.
And I think that if we are gonna be open-minded and discuss these things, we should, and we should take time on these programs here on a Sunday to actually delve into this.
Because look, even myself as a believer, as an adult and someone who has kids, I'm raising them to be believers, that I hope I'm teaching them the right thing.
I'm not teaching them something that's gonna make them nuts. - Well, ultimately, we're talking about reality.
I don't wanna convert somebody to my way of thinking.
I want to convert people to reality.
I myself want to be converted to reality.
If there's something I believe that's not true, I don't want to believe it.
And that's what amazes me, is that if you posit the idea that there's a God who created the universe, the evidence of Him and the evidence of His creation, it is increasingly astonishing.
In these last days, as things are going loony, We are seeing more and more evidence for God, making it more and more difficult to deny Him.
And, you know, at the end of the book, I talk about the witness of beauty.
I really think that part of what makes God so amazing is that when you take Him out, the idea of beauty, of being moved by something, of weeping at something beautiful, none of that makes sense.
No.
God is what gives everything beauty and meaning.
to live a life really believing that there is no God, we're here alone, we're just a concatenation of atoms and stuff, it doesn't make sense on any human level.
And again, I make the case at the end of the book.
That gets us to where we are.
Eric, hold on a second.
Hard break.
Coming back.
Final segment here at Human Events Sunday.
And we're back We're talking with Eric Metaxas.
Is atheism dead?
And so, so Eric, you know, this is great, right?
This is great for Christians out there, for, for, for churchgoers out there.
So if atheism is dead, then that means the church must, must just be killing it right now.
Pews full, you know, everybody's believing again, crosses up on every yard.
I mean, that's what's going on right now in the US, right?
I mean, this is just, it's, it's, it's a fait accompli, right?
That's what's so funny.
Funny, sad, horrifying.
I think Part of the reason God gives us so much evidence, you know, and again, the reason I wrote the book is Atheism Dead, as I said, as things go crazy, God is giving us more evidence to bolster us, to encourage us that believing in me is not crazy.
Not believing in me is crazy.
The problem, and I know we're going to segue to the book that I just wrote, my brand new book, it's called Letter to the American Church, because effectively, I wrote a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who spoke out against the Nazis, was killed by the Nazis, an amazing Christian hero who spoke up for the Jews.
And he was instrumental in my conversion experience because I remember thinking, if that's Christianity, I could be interested in that.
That's a hero.
My thesis in the new book, Letter to the American Church, is that the silence of the church in Germany, because Bonhoeffer tried to get the church to wake up and to stand and to be heroic and to live out their faith, speak up for the Jews, speak against the Nazis who were dramatically atheistic.
Don't let anybody tell you anything different.
He failed.
The church in Germany was silent in the face of evil and the silence of the German church and their excuse like, We don't want to be political.
We're just going to stick to theology.
That led to satanic evil on a level that we can hardly dream of.
It's so sick, we don't even want to think about what happened.
I've always said this, by the way, that a pure atheist would always be obsessed with eugenics, right?
Because if you don't believe that there is only the here and now, then you'd be obsessed with the here and now.
And that's why I say things like the climate cult or wokeism.
These are essentially pagan religions.
What you've done is that you've created your own religion, your own theology, equity, diversity, these, you know, climate Gaia, which actually is an old religion itself, that you're erecting new religions.
You're not actually focused on the fact that all there is a here and now, but you take a group like that, the National Socialists of Germany, that yeah, absolutely they were focused on atheism because all they believed in was eugenics.
Well, the horror though, of course, is that the church in Germany had the ability to speak against They chose not to, effectively.
And the thesis of my book, Letter to the American Church, is that the American Church today, the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church, of which I am mostly a member, has been utterly silent in the face of evil today, and it is now leading to The triumph of evil just as it was in Germany in the 30s and just as they were blind to it.
Let's not think that they saw it coming.
They didn't see it coming.
They never dreamt that their silence.
But Eric, shouldn't the church be inclusive?
Shouldn't the church just, you know, Christ loves us as we are and isn't one of the biggest Christian values that Christ teaches us tolerance?
Actually, no.
I can detect your tremendous sarcasm, Jack, and it's why I love you.
I want to say that we are seeing the silence of Christian leaders, and I'm speaking mostly about, you know, evangelical leaders, but they give exactly, and again, this is the subject of the book letter to the American church, they give exactly the same excuses for their silence that the German They had these theologically fussy excuses for not speaking up, for not standing up, for not being heroic.
Their excuses were things like, well, Romans 13 says we're not supposed to be political.
You know, we're just going to stick to our theology.
Let me tell you.
The atheist Chinese Communist Party loves those kind of Christians.
Keep your faith in that building.
All over Nazi Germany, Romans 13, constantly.
Well, that's that's the point.
And basically, it's not right.
Romans 13 is not the whole Bible.
It's it's been right.
Exactly.
If you are any kind of a person of faith, you will speak against evil.
You'll speak against every kind of evil.
You'll speak fearlessly because you're supposed to believe you claim to believe.
That God defeated death on the cross, and therefore you don't even fear death.
You fear God in the sense that you fear what He thinks about what you're talking about and not talking about.
You don't kind of worry about what your neighbors are going to think.
You're going to speak the truth, knowing it's going to bless people.
But Christian leaders have been dramatically silent in our time, exactly, Jack, exactly.
You know which example I love to use for this?
I say, John the Baptist didn't speak up against Herod because he hated him.
He spoke up about Herod's infidelity and his sin because he loved the truth.
That's exactly right.
And that's what God expects his people to do.
When people claim to have faith, right?
You know, there's a scripture, the title of the book, Letter to the American Church, the new book, which is a very short book, I was going to title it, "Faith without works is dead," which is from the Epistle of James.
Faith without works is dead.
If you claim to be a believer, let me tell you, according to the scripture, if you are not living out this faith you claim to have, perhaps you don't have any faith.
That should scare you.
You can't just say, well, I believe it's an intellectual thing.
Not according to the Bible.
According to the Bible, if you do not live out your faith self-sacrificially in a way that's obvious to every demon in the neighborhood, that's obvious to God, that's obvious to your neighbors, To your friends, to your enemies.
If you're not living out your faith, maybe you don't have faith.
And I really think that that's what happened in Germany is that they basically said, look, we don't want any trouble.
We don't want to get political.
We're just going to keep our mouths shut.
And God is saying through Bonhoeffer, I raised you up for this hour to be a bulwark of truth and courage in the face of evil.
And you would be silent.
That is going to bring hell on earth.
And it did.
But letter to the American church, I'm basically saying that this warning applies to us today.
American church leaders have been silent in the face of evil.
You name it.
Okay.
Whatever, whether we're talking about the transgender lunacy, which is harming young people, destroying their lives, whether we're talking about vaccines or we're talking about corruption in government.
I mean, it doesn't even matter what we're talking about when people say, well, that's political.
I don't want to talk about that.
God requires us to speak against evil.
The slave trade was political and my hero William Wilberforce, because of his Christian faith, spoke against the slave trade.
He said this is an abomination and as a politician, talk about being political, he said we've got to go to war against this evil and by God's grace they defeated the slave trade.
And by the way, not to step on it, but I hope folks know that the William Wilberforce movie came about because of your work.
It was based on your work.
And telling this story, this amazing story, that it was the Christian West that ended the practice, at least the formal legal practice, of slavery.
This practice that had existed since the dawn of time, that had always been around, yet it's this Christian Westerner who steps up and says, look, I know we're all making money off of it, but we don't want to do this anymore.
Because it's wrong.
Whenever.
But this is I guess the reason I wrote the book in a way, this is the new book, Letter to the American Church, is because I said, wherever I go, if I speak about Bonhoeffer and how he spoke bravely against the Nazis and this the evil that they did to the Jews, we all cheer and we go like, if I was there, I would have been right there with him.
When when I talk about William Wilberforce and his heroism because of his Christian faith, speaking against slavery, we all cheer.
We say, oh, I would have been right there with him.
Well, the fact of the matter is, no, you wouldn't if you're being silent now.
On every single one of these issues, critical race theory, you're being quiet about Marxism, about cultural Marxism and critical race theory.
Are you being silent about transgender?
Are you being silent about corruption in government, about people destroying the nation, about Marxism, cultural Marxism, infiltrating, woke-ism, the highest levels of our government?
You're being silent about that.
Don't you understand human beings' lives are going to be destroyed because of your silence.
And if you claim to be a Christian and you think that squares with your keeping your mouth shut, you don't know what it is to have faith.
And I wrote this book really, uh, in the desperate hope that people who could be swayed, um, would be swayed to say, say to them, listen, folks, I know nobody wants to stick their neck out and get in trouble.
Nobody wants to get canceled.
But if the church would rise as one, if people who believe in these things would rise up, first of all, you'll see the church grow dramatically because there's a hunger in this country for people to speak the truth.
People want moral leadership.
They want moral leadership and clarity.
That's the only thing they want.
That is, Eric, we're in our final minute.
Where can people go to follow you, gain access to your work, your writings?
Folks in my audience, if you don't know Eric already, I hope you do, but where can they go?
I'm all over social media.
If you could just spell my name, Eric Metaxas, I'm on Twitter, Truth Social, everywhere you want to look.
My website is ericmetaxas.com.
I have a newsletter where I send out all the interviews I do on my radio program.
We have a Socrates in the City event coming up December 6th right here in New York City.
So if you just can spell my name, you can find me.
I hope you do.
And Jack, I'm really grateful For you and for your voice.
And it's wonderful to be with you on this program.
And I'm already looking forward to seeing you in Phoenix in the middle of next month.
Thank you.
That's right.
At America Fest.
Got to throw the promo in for Charlie out there.
That's right.
Eric and I will be there.
America Fest.
Go to AmFest.com.
If you're listening to this during your Black Friday slash Thanksgiving weekend, we have a sale that's going on right now.
So make sure you get your tickets.
AmFest.com.
Come see myself.
Jack Posobiec, Eric Metaxas, Charlie, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Kayleigh McEnany, Tim Pool, literally everyone's going to be there, so you better too.
