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Oct. 26, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:49
Dennis Prager and Eric Metaxas Discuss Atheism
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To a prayer session.
And so I specifically said Bible class because Bible is Judeo-Christian.
Prayer could be any religion.
So he said, oh, what if you're a Jew?
And it's a bunch of Muslim fundamentalists.
So that's how he got around my challenge.
Isn't that interesting?
Well, what's interesting is he's dishonest.
It's called lying and being dishonest.
And if in order to make your case you have to lie or be dishonest, you have no case.
Listen, in this book, Is Atheism Dead?, I did not expect to get where I got with regard to the new atheist.
But I'm telling you, hearing that, it only confirms what I discovered.
When it really comes to being honest, they have such an animus against the God of the Bible, particularly, that they will just say anything.
It really is disheartening, because these are very intelligent people, but when it came to this stuff, it's just awful.
It's like Freud.
He might be a genius in psychoanalysis, but when you write about Moses and monotheism, you stink.
So, I mean, as I say, most of the book is science and archaeology.
I mean, for example, I've got to ask you, did you even know that they had discovered biblical Sodom?
Everywhere I ask people, nobody's even heard of this.
And I said, this is one of the most astonishing biblical discoveries in the history of the world, and nobody seems to know about it.
Well, I had a vague notion of it, but you know a lot more, so tell us why that means a lot to you.
Well, I mean, because...
People have, you know, since in the secular 150 years since Darwin, we've kind of discounted the Bible as mythic and so on and so forth.
And the middle section of my book has one after the other archaeological corroborations of obscure things in Scripture that you think there's just...
The specificity is astonishing.
But when I met this guy in Albuquerque who's a biblical archaeologist and had written this book about this, I thought, this has to be one of those things where it's kind of like iffy.
It is the antithesis of iffy.
There was an article published recently, a month ago, in Nature magazine, one of the premier academic peer-reviewed journals in the world.
Twenty-one scientists participated in the analysis.
They basically say, they can't say he discovered biblical Sodom, but they refer to it.
They say that the exact description in the scripture, the first couple of pages of Genesis, right, 1,700 years ago, is corroborated in what happened in this place and what is now Jordan.
In fact, something extremely similar happened in 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia.
You probably know about that.
The only thing that could create...
What they discovered at this Tel Haman in Jordan, which we now know is biblical Sodom, is what they call a cosmic airburst event.
In other words, an asteroid, meteor, whatever, about 180 feet in diameter, so not that big, coming into the Earth's atmosphere at about 35,000 miles an hour explodes a few miles above the surface and creates a heat of such intensity.
700-mile-an-hour winds just obliterate.
Everything.
This happened in Siberia in 1908, so we have the proof.
It flattened 80 million trees instantly.
I mean, it's insane.
They say that it was the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs.
So the folks who looked into what my friend Stephen Collins discovered in Jordan, it's the exact same thing.
And the more details you get, I wrote one or two chapters about it, It's just incontrovertible.
You say, this is amazing.
You might say, oh, well, I still don't believe in God, but you no longer can say the Bible is folklore or myth.
Over and over again, there are details upon details upon details.
And I think the larger issue that I'm writing about in the book, when I mention 1966 in the Time magazine article that they ask, is God dead?
It presupposes hostility between science and faith.
And that's been with us roughly since Darwin, and it's baked in.
It's so baked in that even Einstein bought into this nonsense when he discovered the universe is expanding.
He thought, oh, I've got to hide that because my colleagues will think I'm not a serious scientist.
They'll think I'm religious.
But the point is that now science is leading us to God.
It is showing that the intricacy Of the universe's design and the Earth's design, it's so exquisite.
It's so mind-numbing.
You almost can't take in how perfectly calibrated every detail is, including down to simple things like the composition of water, that when you take it in, it's almost frightening.
You think, who is this God who created this universe?
Now, this is what science is saying, and you can't get around it.
The only way they get around it is by saying, well, everything's really, really, really, really, really perfect, fine, but that's just in this universe.
There's probably a multiplicity of an infinity of other universes, and we just happen to be lucky we're in the right one.
That's a thousand times more preposterous than saying, I believe in the God of the Bible.
It's unworthy of scientists to even say it.
I have a question based on what we both recognized happened in the 60s.
In a nutshell, why do you think it happened in the 60s?
Why did everything become topsy-turvy?
Well, I think there are many reasons.
First of all, I believe God is the God of history.
You could say, why did the Holocaust occur in the early 40s?
There's a strange way things and ideas move.
And it's actually through Peter Hitchens, the brother of Christopher Hitchens.
Peter Hitchens, of course, is a Christian.
And his brother was an atheist.
But Peter Hitchens was the one who really alerted me to the fact that most of this stuff happened in Europe after World War I. Yeah, hold on with that.
That's really critical.
The book, Is Atheism Dead?
Self-Recommending.
Eric Metaxas, the author.
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