July 2, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| You had a podcast not long ago where you were talking about how Dawkins has basically said that, well, religion does have some benefits to society. | ||
| And I think he's realizing, too, that in Britain in particular, a tepid secularism is not going to resist a radical Islam. | ||
| But Christianity could be, just from a pragmatic point of view, from his point of view, can maybe blunt radical Islam. | ||
| So he's realizing there's some pragmatic uses to religion. | ||
| But I think originally the new atheism came out of 9-11. | ||
| These fundamentalists, you know, the old saying that science will teach you how to fly a plane, but religion will teach you how to fly a plane into a building, that kind of thing. | ||
| And so they were really adamant against any religion, and they would They would put them all together. | ||
| Islam, Christianity, all these religions are just basically looked at with disdain at the time. | ||
| And I think people are starting to realize that's not really the way the world works. | ||
| That's not really true. | ||
| These religions are different and they're different for good reasons. | ||
| Alright, we are at the local studio here in Miami, Florida and joining me today is the | ||
| author of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. | ||
| Great title, man. | ||
| Frank Turk, pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Dave, it is a pleasure. | ||
| Great being here with you. | ||
| Thanks for coming to town. | ||
| You've come from Charlotte, North Carolina. | ||
| I appreciate you making the trek. | ||
| Let's start with the title of this book. | ||
| I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. | ||
| I didn't think of it. | ||
| My co-author. | ||
| So I should say you are technically the co-author of this book. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about your co-author. | ||
| Well, Dr. Norman Geisler, when he died, he died in 2019, Dave, they added up the number of books either wrote, co-wrote, or updated. | ||
| It was 129. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The man had written more books, not only than most people have read, than most people have seen, because who goes to the library anymore, right? | ||
| This guy was brilliant. | ||
| And at one point, he and I were traveling the country doing a talk we called, The 12 Points That Show Christianity's True. | ||
| And he went through the fine-tuning argument that the universe is fine-tuned so incomprehensibly. | ||
| And after he got done with this amazing presentation, he finally said, in light of this, I just don't have enough faith to be an atheist. | ||
| And I went... | ||
| That needs to be the title of the book! | ||
| So it really was a throwaway line. | ||
| Yeah, he just said, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. | ||
| So he said, well, let's write the book. | ||
| So we wrote the book based on the seminar we were doing. | ||
| We sent it to the publisher and they said, we don't like the title. | ||
| I said, you don't like the title? | ||
| What do you think the title should be? | ||
| And they said, the truth about truth. | ||
| I said, sorry, that's a deal breaker. | ||
| We're going to another publisher. | ||
| They said, okay, we'll stick with the title. | ||
| And thankfully they did. | ||
| And the book came out in 2004. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about how you two linked up your journeys to get to the book, and then we'll dive into, obviously, the specifics of why you don't have enough faith to be an angel. | ||
| I was in the Navy, which stands for never again volunteer yourself, for eight years. | ||
| But I came to faith by reading books by a man by the name of Josh McDowell. | ||
| I was brought up in New Jersey, so I was Catholic, because, as you know, in Jersey, it's the law. | ||
| You're either Catholic or Jewish, right? | ||
| I went to Catholic high school, but I never knew who Jesus was. | ||
| And when I was in the Navy, I met the son of a Methodist minister, and I had so many questions for me. | ||
| He said, Frank, you just need to get Josh McDowell books. | ||
| Evidence demands a verdict more than a carpenter. | ||
| So I read those books, And I began to realize that Christianity is indeed true. | ||
| When I got out of the Navy, I happened to meet Norman Geisler, and he said, I'm starting a seminary in Charlotte. | ||
| Why don't you come down and check it out? | ||
| So we did, and six months later, we moved the whole family there. | ||
| Did you consider yourself a believer before that? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Or were you sort of nominally Catholic or just secular Northeast? | ||
| I became a believer in the Navy by reading these books and then starting to go to church. | ||
| And then when I met Geisler, who I didn't know at the time, but To use a dated reference, he was the Michael Jordan of apologetics, what we call evidence for the faith at the time. | ||
| And when I met him and looked him up, I said, if I want to get into this field, this is the guy, right? | ||
| You know, it's like in philosophy, your friend Jordan Peterson, if he was still at the University of Toronto and he was still teaching and you wanted to learn, that's the guy, right? | ||
| He was the Jordan Peterson of Christian apologetics. | ||
| So, the reason that I wanted to have you on now, and my producer Phoenix has been mentioning you for quite some time, is that there seems to be something interesting happening with the atheist movement, if we can call it a movement. | ||
| I mean, in essence, it has basically fallen apart. | ||
| You know, from Sam Harris sort of disappearing off Twitter and having, you know, a lot of political problems. | ||
| That whole Four Horsemen thing sort of disappeared. | ||
| The new atheist movement, I don't know if you've seen that the president of the, I think, Atheists of America, David Silverman, has basically come out and said that the atheist movement was a failure. | ||
| This is just in the last two or three weeks or so. | ||
| I've seen other well-known atheists, like skeptic, my friend Michael Shermer, talk about how there is a purpose and a need for religion. | ||
| People fill that up with something else. | ||
| And of course, Jordan Peterson talking about how people end up believing whether they believe it or not. | ||
| So there's something interesting culturally happening right now, which is sort of why I wanted to bring you on. | ||
| I wonder if you have any thoughts on that, just sort of what's happening right now. | ||
| I think that the New Atheist Movement, Dave, was a reaction to 9-11. | ||
| Because at the time, The new atheists at the time were Christopher Hitchens. | ||
| I had a couple of opportunities to debate him in the 2000s, late 2000s. | ||
| Also Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. | ||
| Even Dawkins, I don't know if you've seen it in the last couple of weeks. | ||
| Well, I heard you had a podcast not long ago where you were talking about how Dawkins has basically said that Well, religion does have some benefits to society. | ||
| And I think he's realizing, too, that in Britain in particular, a tepid secularism is not going to resist a radical Islam. | ||
| But Christianity could be, just from a pragmatic point of view, from his point of view, can maybe blunt radical Islam. | ||
| So he's realizing there's some pragmatic uses to religion. | ||
| But I think originally the new atheism came out of 9-11. | ||
| These fundamentalists, you know the old saying that science will teach you how to fly a plane, but religion will teach you how to fly a plane into a building, that kind of thing. | ||
| And so they were really adamant against any religion, and they would put them all together. | ||
| Islam, Christianity, all these religions are just basically looked at with disdain at the time. | ||
| And I think people are starting to realize that's not really the way the world works. | ||
| That's not really true. | ||
| These religions are different and they're different for good reasons. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting because what you're describing as the Christian sort of argument | ||
| as the pushback against radical Islam, I think what we have here is the pushback against wokeism. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That people, and this is what David Silverman from the American Atheist was saying, he did not realize that wokeism was going to become, I think he called it a cult, not a religion. | ||
| And I think that's sort of what brings us to this moment in America. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And Silverman was the present American atheist. | ||
| In fact, I had a debate with him probably seven or eight years ago. | ||
| But then he left that role. | ||
| I don't even know what he's doing now. | ||
| I mean, the whole movement maybe has pretty much evaporated, really. | ||
| Hitchens, of course, passed away. | ||
| Dawkins is starting to realize there's utility to religion from a pragmatic point of view. | ||
| And I know it's going to sound odd. | ||
| Dave, but I have a lot of respect for Richard Dawkins because he has more courage than many American pastors. | ||
| I mean, Richard Dawkins has spoke against wokeism. | ||
| Richard Dawkins has said, I'm sorry, there's only two genders. | ||
| It's science, right? | ||
| Richard Dawkins has talked about the problems with radical Islam. | ||
| Most pastors are hiding under their desks on these issues. | ||
| They're not coming out and talking about this. | ||
| So to his credit, Richard Dawkins has said some things that I wish American pastors would say. | ||
| So what's going on there? | ||
| Let's dive into that a little, because it's not just pastors. | ||
| I mean, this is happening throughout Jewish synagogues. | ||
| It's happening through almost every denomination of Christianity, where the rabbis, the pastors, they're choosing wokeism. | ||
| They're choosing equity over Thinking it was going to bring more people in, I think, but it seems to be doing the reverse. | ||
| I think Christians have bought into the idea that politics is sort of off the table for them. | ||
| What they don't seem to realize is that, first of all, their ability to actually be Christians and live the Christian faith and preach the gospel, so to speak, is determined, to a certain extent, by what laws are made. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, here, we take it for granted we have religious freedom, but as you pointed out, and many others, it's evaporating, right? | ||
| So, for no other reason, Christians ought to be involved in politics is to protect the very ability to preach and live the gospel. | ||
| The second reason is, I always ask Christians this, or anybody this, should Christians care how people are treated? | ||
| Everyone says, well, of course. | ||
| Well, should Christians care how people are treated by their government? | ||
| Well yeah, that follows. | ||
| Now suddenly, you better care about politics. | ||
| You better care about the rules that are made, because if you care about people, you've got to care about what's going on. | ||
| And thankfully, you and others have been a champion for saying this transgenderism issue, particularly on children, should be off limits, and pastors even are afraid to talk about it, Dave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| I know it's crazy, and I see it every day, and that's why one of the things that's been interesting for me as someone who's not Christian, and certainly a certain set of Christians might have some issues with my lifestyle and everything else, I have found generally, especially evangelical Christians, to be the most welcoming, decent people out there, which did help me, I think, evolve in some ways in my thinking. | ||
| Yeah, you had a I just re-listened to it, it was four years ago, that dialogue you had with my friend John Lennox and Justin Briarley. | ||
| That was a great event. | ||
| If every Christian was like John Lennox, the whole world would be Christianized, because you can't not like John Lennox, right? | ||
| He's just a fun guy, smiling, telling you this and joking. | ||
| He's like your favorite uncle, who has all these great stories. | ||
| And John is just one of the guys I look up to in my field of work, because he is just so affable, but yet so intelligent. | ||
| I mean, he's a PhD in mathematics and philosophy. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| Okay, so I just want to return to the title for a moment. | ||
| I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. | ||
| I think from an American sort of broad cultural perspective, most people It's not that they're atheists, but they just sort of don't know what they believe. | ||
| We have just sort of a set of things that we kind of wake up to every day, a culture war, a political fire, and then that's kind of what they believe in, the thing that's happening sort of every day at the moment. | ||
| And I think that sort of leads people to a degree of craziness. | ||
| So how would you unfurl, if you think that's a fair premise, how would you kind of unfurl people out of that? | ||
| There's two questions that need to be answered. | ||
| Does God exist? | ||
| And if so, what has He said? | ||
| Those are the two big questions. | ||
| Alright, let's do it. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| So, does God exist? | ||
| I think, when somebody asks me, how do I know God exists? | ||
| I say, I know God by His effects. | ||
| If there's a creation, and there is, this universe had a beginning as even atheists are admitting, then there has to be a creator. | ||
| The creation is the effect that causes the creator. | ||
| Right, so they might say it's the Big Bang and it was just a bunch of gases and this, well they wouldn't say miracle, but they would say just this thing happened, this causeless thing happened. | ||
| They will say that, but it seems to me that if space-time and matter had a beginning, The only thing that could have caused that is something that transcends space-time and matter. | ||
| In other words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create, because impersonal forces don't make choices. | ||
| Only a person can make a choice to go from nothingness to a state of creation. | ||
| The cause would also have to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice. | ||
| So I always ask people, I say, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of? | ||
| And most people say God, but then they'll say, well, how do you know it's the Christian God? | ||
| And the answer is, we don't know if it's the Christian God unless, because this God could be Allah or some other theistic God, right? | ||
| Unless Jesus rose from the dead. | ||
| And if you can discover that Jesus really did rise from the dead, then we can say that the same being that walked out of the tomb 1,990 years ago is the same being whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing. | ||
| So you don't get all the way to Jesus from one argument. | ||
| But if you can show that the universe had a beginning, and had a beginner with those attributes, and you can see that Jesus rose from the dead, then you can show that Christianity is true. | ||
| And that's just one of several arguments for God. | ||
| Yeah, feel free to make a couple others. | ||
| Why don't we go through a couple others? | ||
| Yeah, the second is the teleological, or the design argument, which is so incredibly difficult to explain from an atheistic perspective that even Christopher Hitchens said, I don't know how to explain this one, right? | ||
| For example, the gravitational force, if it were altered by more than 1 in 10 to the 40th power, that's one part in one with 40 zeros following it, we wouldn't exist. | ||
| And an illustration I like to give is this, if you were to take the entire North American continent, from Central America all the way to Greenland, stack it in dimes to the moon, 238,000 miles, then do that on a billion other North American continents, take all those dimes, put them in one pile, mark one dime red, mix it in, blindfold a friend, throw him on the pile, say pick one dime, the chances he would pick that one red dime is one chance in 10 to the 40th power. | ||
| He's not going to pick that dime, right? | ||
| So, the implication here is, and this is just one of several factors about the universe, change any one of them, we're not here, is that what best explains that? | ||
| Chance, whatever that means, or design? | ||
| I mean, either this value was designed or it wasn't. | ||
| And it seems, if we're going to be rational, we have to say it's designed. | ||
| And as I say, it's just one of several. | ||
| So that's one aspect of the design argument. | ||
| Then when you get to biology and you see that in every one of your hundred trillion cells there's a software program 3.5 billion letters long. | ||
| I mean, if we were to go out to the beach right here, right now, Dave, and we're walking along Miami Beach and it says, John loves Mary in the sand. | ||
| We wouldn't go, well, the waves did that, or crabs came out of the water and made that message. | ||
| No. | ||
| We'd say that that message had to come from a mind. | ||
| But what happens when we find a message that's 3.5 billion letters long in every one of our hundred trillion cells? | ||
| If John Loves Mary requires a mind, doesn't a message 3.5 billion letters long require a mind? | ||
| Seems to me, that's an effect that needs a cause, like God. | ||
| And then, of course, the third argument that we often talk about, which is probably most germane to the topics you talk about, is the moral argument. | ||
| Because if there's no God, everything's just a matter of opinion. | ||
| There's no standard beyond us, no transcendent A standard of righteousness that we're obligated to obey, then there's no difference between Mother Teresa and Hitler from a moral perspective, right? | ||
| It's just your opinion against somebody else's opinion. | ||
| And so that argument I think probably carries the most weight with people today. | ||
| Right, so is that the one you think that maybe led us to so much of the craziness today when we're debating, as my friend Douglas Murray often says, things that we've put to bed years ago and suddenly we're debating, you know, whether boys are girls or girls are boys. | ||
| It's because we have sort of no moral basis anymore at scale in society. | ||
| Yeah, it's a free-for-all, but the very people that are arguing for that are arguing as if there's a moral right to do this, you notice. | ||
| Because everybody's trying to impose a moral position, the only question is whose moral position? | ||
| All laws legislate morality. | ||
| The only question is whose morality? | ||
| And what I try and say to people is, I don't want to legislate my morality. | ||
| I don't want to legislate your morality. | ||
| I want to legislate the morality, the one Thomas Jefferson said was self-evident. | ||
| So that self-evident morality upon which this nation was found is the morality we ought to get back to. | ||
| Even though they were inconsistent with it, obviously, on slavery and other issues, they were inconsistent. | ||
| But they knew in their hearts, in fact, Jefferson and the founding fathers knew that slavery was going to be an issue. | ||
| That it wasn't morally right. | ||
| They just couldn't figure out how to get rid of it at the time. | ||
| As I tell people all the time, he was writing the documents to free the slaves as he himself was a slave. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| He was just a man of his time, as incredible as he was. | ||
| What would you say to the line? | ||
| One of the things that I think shifted me on a lot of this, Jordan Peterson, you know, when we toured together, it would come up literally every single night. | ||
| People would say, please define God, explain God, how did you become a believer? | ||
| And the short answer, he really didn't like that question, not because he didn't think it was valuable, but because it was just coming up all the time. | ||
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Right. | |
| And he felt that there's so many other things to talk about and everything else. | ||
| But the simplest version of it would be that he behaves as if God exists. | ||
| That's what he would say. | ||
| And I thought that was pretty solid. | ||
| That that was almost enough for most people. | ||
| Do you think that's fair? | ||
| That he can't sit there and tell you, okay, God exists, but he will behave in such a way. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I think Jordan takes more of a utilitarian approach to God, that whether he exists or not, we better believe in him. | ||
| Because if we don't, it's going to be as Dostoevsky said, you know, if there is no God, everything's permissible, right? | ||
| It's going to be chaos, as Nietzsche pointed out. | ||
| However, I think there's evidence that God exists. | ||
| And I think you can show beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt, I could be wrong, right? | ||
| But I think that God does exist. | ||
| And if Jesus rose from the dead, and I think we can give evidence that he did, then the Christian God is the true God. | ||
| So if that's the case, who is God? | ||
| God, in the abstract, is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, and intelligent. | ||
| In the flesh, he's Jesus. | ||
| He adds humanity to his deity, and he comes to earth not to give us some sort of new moral code, But to be our substitute. | ||
| He is the one that lives the perfect life in our place. | ||
| So by trusting in Him, we can have our moral transgressions forgiven, and we can be given His righteousness. | ||
| So Christianity, contrary to what many will say, is not a system that tries to get you to live better. | ||
| Christianity is a system that tries to get you to accept the substitute, and because you do accept the substitute, out of gratitude for what he's done for you, then you will live a moral life. | ||
| It's a result, in other words. | ||
| So what would the role of, in your perfect world, what would the role of Christianity be in, say, the United States? | ||
| Well, I believe in freedom of religion, and I think God does too. | ||
| Otherwise, he'd be pestering us all the time, right? | ||
| He gives us enough freedom in order to go our own way. | ||
| So I think we have freedom of religion, and I would not want any sort of theocratic government. | ||
| But I think what people confuse, Dave, on this issue is I just remember, I'll bring up a name from the past. | ||
| Remember old Chris Matthews? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Before MSNBC went completely insane. | ||
| He was like kind of hanging on by a thread. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
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He used to say, we can't set up some sort of theocracy. | |
| And I would say, Chris, We're not talking about telling people where, when, how, or if to worship. | ||
| We're not telling them they have to be a certain religion. | ||
| That would be establishing a religion. | ||
| But we can't avoid telling people how they ought to treat one another. | ||
| And that's legislating morality, and everybody's trying to do that. | ||
| It's what the wokesters are doing right now, that was your point. | ||
| Yes, that's what they're doing. | ||
| The only question is, who's morality? | ||
| So, I think, and I'll part with some of my Christian friends here, This country was not founded on Christianity. | ||
| It was founded on the moral law consistent with Christianity. | ||
| When Jefferson says we hold these truths to be self-evident, that we're endowed by our Creator, what he wanted to do was have a new government that wasn't completely relativistic and have no God. | ||
| But he didn't want a government like they came from England that said, you've got to be a member of the Church of England. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He wanted to have the best of both worlds, religious freedom, but also moral absolutes that come from God. | ||
| So he said, we're going to establish this on the moral law that comes from God's nature. | ||
| That moral law, we know, comes from the same God that wrote the Bible or inspired the Bible. | ||
| But you don't have to be a Christian to know it. | ||
| You don't have to be a Christian to be a citizen here. | ||
| This nation is open to everyone. | ||
| That's the kind of government I think we ought to have. | ||
| Is that the brilliance of the line, self-evident, more than anything else? | ||
| Because, again, when I quote this line about Douglas Murray, that we're debating things that shouldn't be debated anymore, it seems to me we're in this odd spot right now where, culturally, nothing's self-evident anymore. | ||
| There's nothing that's just settled. | ||
| What is settled anymore? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Was JFK assassinated? | ||
| Did we go to the moon? | ||
| Are boys girls? | ||
| Et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Oh yeah, it is crazy in that regard, and I think part of that is what happens, to use a biblical phrase, that when you suppress the truth long enough, God gives you up to a depraved mind. | ||
| I mean, to the point where you don't even know there's a difference between boys and girls. | ||
| By the way, transgenderism presupposes men and women. | ||
| Because if I'm a man and I think I'm a woman, I have to have some idea what a man is and some idea what a woman is to know I have this mismatch between my psychology and my biology. | ||
| If there weren't fixed genders, I wouldn't be able to know that. | ||
| Also, if I'm going to try and make the so-called transition, I have to have some idea what a man is and some idea what a woman is in order to make the transition. | ||
| So on one hand, they're trying to say, oh, gender is completely fluid. | ||
| On the other hand, it would be impossible. | ||
| Transgenderism would be impossible if there weren't fixed genders. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because one of the things I've been talking about on the show is when it's the same argument, I've made it slightly different way, which is that with kids, they're taking a young boy who maybe likes the color pink or Barbie. | ||
| On one hand, they're telling you none of this matters. | ||
| And on the other hand, they're saying, oh, he likes pink and Barbie. | ||
| Thus, he must be a girl. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So it's the most radically authoritarian while it's also saying it's the most tolerant and diverse and everything else, which I suppose that doesn't surprise you because it's disconnected. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's it's when when when you When you move away from God, even just say a generic God, the God of right and wrong, when you move away from that, God's a gentleman. | ||
| He gives up on you eventually. | ||
| He says, I know you don't want me, so I'm going to pull myself away. | ||
| God is not going to force you into his presence against your will. | ||
| And from a theological perspective, that's what hell is. | ||
| Hell is separation from God because God will not force you into his presence against your will. | ||
| I always say, If you don't want God now, you're not going to want him in eternity. | ||
| Why would he say, you're with me now in eternity? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's going to pull himself away. | ||
| And the problem is, if this is true, if Christianity is true, and I think it is, Then the worst place you can be is separated from God because He is the source of all love. | ||
| He is the source of all goodness. | ||
| He is the standard. | ||
| I mean, you've been talking about this. | ||
| You've been talking about there's got to be some sort of transcendence out there. | ||
| There has to be something beyond this. | ||
| It's not just this. | ||
| It's just not just this. | ||
| I know that much. | ||
| And maybe that's part of the reason, going back to your original question, Dave, that the new atheism doesn't We're not just molecular machines. | ||
| We're not just moist robots. | ||
| And if we are moist robots, why should we believe atheism is true? | ||
| We shouldn't believe our thoughts because our thoughts are completely driven by the laws of physics, according to them. | ||
| Materialism is really self-defeating, and that's the main atheistic view now. | ||
| In fact, Thomas Nagel, who I think John Lennox mentioned in your dialogue with him—he's an NYU professor—wrote a book about 12 years ago called Mind and Cosmos, where he said, even though he's an atheist, he said—I'm trying to remember the subtitle—he said something like, why the neo-Darwinian materialistic viewpoint of the world is almost certainly false. | ||
| And he got so much pushback from his fellow atheists because he's essentially saying, look, I know there's something transcendent out there. | ||
| I'm an atheist. | ||
| I don't know how to explain it. | ||
| But materialism isn't the answer. | ||
| Materialism makes us moist robots. | ||
| Why should anyone listen to me? | ||
| Why should I listen to myself? | ||
| It's just not that fun. | ||
| It's not that sellable. | ||
| I think that that's part of it also. | ||
| There's no imagination there. | ||
| I got into, I don't know if you saw it, but I got into a bit of a debate about belief, taking the believer side with Bill Maher. | ||
| On his podcast not too long ago, and it just struck me as, oh, you don't believe in anything sort of magical. | ||
| It's like, that's such a fundamental part of being human. | ||
| Whether we could whittle this down into the firm belief in Christianity or any other religion, that the need to believe is just innate to humans. | ||
| You will believe in something one way or another. | ||
| Yeah, and you've mentioned this, and Jordan Peterson has mentioned this, everybody has some kind of God. | ||
| There's a hierarchy of values and there's something at the top of all of our priority lists. | ||
| So what would you say, so you mentioned you've debated Christopher Hitchens on this, when you look at someone like Hitch or you look at say Carl Sagan or even Albert Einstein, the people that were sort of, I don't know that Einstein was fully, he thought that God didn't play dice with the universe was the famous line, but when you look at the people that were sort of not religious per se, Somewhat separated from belief, but clearly lived good, inquisitive, interesting lives, you know, didn't do harm as far as I can tell, something like that. | ||
| What would you say about that sort of character, that person? | ||
| Well, I certainly have always said, and I said this to Hitchens several times when I said, Christopher, I'm not saying that since you're an atheist you can't do good things. | ||
| I'm not saying you don't know what right and wrong is. | ||
| Everybody does. | ||
| What I'm saying is you can't justify what right and wrong is. | ||
| You can't You can know it, and you can do it, but you can't justify why it's good. | ||
| If there's no God, it's just your opinion. | ||
| I sometimes give an analogy. | ||
| I notice there's a lot of speed limit signs around here in Miami. | ||
| Have you seen these people drive? | ||
| We have a lot of different cultures here. | ||
| It's a real thing. | ||
| And there's cameras everywhere. | ||
| Anyway, you can go outside and see speed limit, 35 miles an hour, and you can obey that speed limit sign while you deny there's a traffic authority. | ||
| But there would be no speed limit sign unless there was a traffic authority. | ||
| The same thing is true with God. | ||
| You can know that, say, murder's wrong and deny there's a God. | ||
| And you can not murder, do good things, and deny there's a God. | ||
| But it wouldn't be wrong to murder, from an objective point of view, unless there was a God. | ||
| And what would Hitch's answer have been on that? | ||
| Well, Hitch was so rhetorically gifted, he would never directly answer a question. | ||
| I don't try and judge my own debates, but I will say this. | ||
| The first debate I ever had, other than with my wife, which I lose repeatedly, but the first debate I ever had was against Christopher Hitchens. | ||
| During the debate, literally, Dave, I was sitting there going, I like this guy. | ||
| I didn't even know what he was talking about, because he was all over the map, but you know, just his accent, and his wit, he was just fabulous. | ||
| And I'm kind of daydreaming, going, I really like this guy. | ||
| And I think people in the audience, when they're watching the debate, they're doing the same thing. | ||
| But if you look at the transcript of the debate, and you're reading it, you're going, What's he talking about? | ||
| This has nothing to do with even the topic! | ||
| You know, the first debate was called, Does God Exist? | ||
| So I got up and I tried to give some of the arguments we already mentioned. | ||
| You know what he got up and started doing? | ||
| He started talking about how Mother Teresa was a bad person. | ||
| And I was just baffled. | ||
| What does this have to do with whether or not God exists? | ||
| Mother Teresa may have been good or bad, that's not the point. | ||
| What about God? | ||
| And he just never engaged on this issue. | ||
| Unfortunately he's not here so we can't fully rehash it. | ||
| But would you say that the flaw, if he and some of these other people I mentioned lived roughly decent lives and everything else, would you say that the flaw is more functional in that it just can't scale? | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| So it can work for individual people. | ||
| I have no doubt that you believe that an individual atheist can live a perfectly moral and good life. | ||
| Not perfectly. | ||
| None of us. | ||
| Within the context of being a human being who can live a fairly moral and decent life and everything else. | ||
| But that it just sort of can't scale over time. | ||
| It just doesn't give you enough for generations to pass on to live in some sort of functional way. | ||
| And I think that's sort of why this American Atheist thing collapsed and why the movement has collapsed. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I know it's going to sound odd, but I don't think the purpose of life is to live a moral life. | ||
| I think the purpose of life is to know God and make Him known. | ||
| And if you do do that, you will live a moral life. | ||
| In other words, it's a result. | ||
| It is not the cause. | ||
| Because we're all fallen. | ||
| And if God is God, which means He's infinitely just, I've been unjust in my life even today, just coming over here. | ||
| How many people did I cut off because I was late, right? | ||
| Okay, I'm unjust every day, and if God is infinitely just, at the judgment, I'm in trouble. | ||
| And so I need somebody to cover my sin, somebody to pay for my sin. | ||
| An unpopular word in today's culture, but it's transgression against God or other people I've done that. | ||
| I do it all the time. | ||
| So I need somebody to cover my sin. | ||
| That's why Jesus came. | ||
| The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. | ||
| And this is the only religion in the world, Dave, that actually is built on grace rather than works. | ||
| In other words, you don't earn favor with God, He just gives it to you. | ||
| And then because He's given it to you, then you live a life out of gratitude to Him that will live in a moral way. | ||
| You will live in a moral way. | ||
| So connected to that, how much of what you think is happening sort of culturally in America right now, and really all over the world? | ||
| As you may know, I just spent about 12 days in Israel. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And went, you know, to all of the holy sites, and went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and went to the Western Wall. | ||
| You did some college work there, didn't you? | ||
| In the Negev? | ||
| That was 20-something years ago, a long time ago. | ||
| But one of the things that struck me was that the story was very clear, especially being in Jerusalem for about five days. | ||
| That you know they're digging down and excavating and uncovering history and then they're also building up. | ||
| I mean the city is just absolutely flourishing. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| What I kept thinking was people don't know history and because they don't know history they can't even connect any of the the philosophic underpinning. | ||
| So we just sort of all walk around spinning all day long and we need to know history to know some of this stuff. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| We go to Israel every year. | ||
| We bring a group to Israel. | ||
| In fact, Eli Shukron, who is the archaeologist who discovered the Pool of Siloam and excavated most of it. | ||
| Oh, well, we went down there. | ||
| It's being excavated right now. | ||
| Yeah, well, he excavated it back in 2004. | ||
| And that church there, believe it or not, didn't want him to continue the excavation. | ||
| And somehow they just got approval last year to finish it. | ||
| And so Eli, who was the guy who originally discovered it, is normally our tour guide when we go. | ||
| We're going to go in November again. | ||
| He also discovered what might be, and this is an amazing discovery if it's true, I've seen it myself, he thinks he has found a standing stone in the city of David which goes all the way back potentially to Melchizedek. | ||
| Now this is Abraham's time, so this is 2000 BC. | ||
| And that's right there in the city of David. | ||
| This is a thousand years before David. | ||
| So he's an amazing archaeologist and there's no question this was the Jewish homeland long before anybody else ever got there, other than the Canaanites who were there, you know, prior to them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this whole political argument, I think, is just overcome by archaeology. | ||
| When you're down there, and so we did the walk through the City of David, and they're excavating it now, you can go basically from the pool all the way up to what would have been the temple. | ||
| Ellie excavated that too. | ||
| Right, so when you're there and you're with the archaeologists and all that, are most of the archaeologists believers, or are they more purely people of faith? | ||
| Ellie is certainly a believer in Yahweh. | ||
| He's an Orthodox Jewish believer. | ||
| I don't know, I can't speak for the others, I just know Ellie personally. | ||
| But there are Americans, as you know, that go over there quite a bit, that do excavate. | ||
| Guys like Scott Stripling, who just discovered one of the oldest inscriptions ever found in Israel, up in Shechem, which is Mount Ebal, next to Mount Gerizim. | ||
| He thinks he's found that near Joshua's altar. | ||
| So this would be, say, 1400 B.C., or 1200 B.C., somewhere in there. | ||
| He's a Christian and he excavates quite a bit over there. | ||
| There are several other guys, but as you know, Israel is Every time you stick a spade in the ground, there's another discovery. | ||
| There's 10 different layers of something. | ||
| A layer cake. | ||
| They described it to us on our walk of City of David as a tiramisu. | ||
| Basically you're just going through and there's just another layer and another layer of ash. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| So as a Christian, would you say that Christianity then In essence, it's sort of part two or just the continuation of the story that the Jewish Bible came out of, that that sort of didn't end. | ||
| Purely with the ending of the Old Testament. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The Old Testament prefigures Jesus and predicts Jesus. | ||
| One of the most astounding prophecies in the Old Testament, of course, is Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant passage, written 700 years before Christ came. | ||
| It talks about this servant taking our iniquities on himself, that he is the lamb that goes to the slaughter. | ||
| And so when you see that written 700 years before you came, yeah, you go, wow, there's something to this, and there's other prophecies. | ||
| So you think that was like a nugget, or what would they, in a video game, it's like, what do they call it in a video game? | ||
| Like the secret thing in a video game? | ||
| They give you an Easter egg. | ||
| Oh, it's an Easter egg! | ||
| Yeah, we found it! | ||
| There it is! | ||
| You know, and then they know that it's there. | ||
| So how do you combine those two things? | ||
| Obviously, Jews still exist. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| Israel still exists. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, and there's a future for Israel as well. | ||
| And it's amazing when you think about it, as you know Dave, there's no country in the history of the world that left its homeland for nearly 2,000 years, came back to it speaking the same language. | ||
| How does that happen? | ||
| And in Isaiah, I think it's Isaiah 11, he says he's going to bring the nation into the land a second time. | ||
| 1948 it happened. | ||
| And you've pointed out, others have pointed out, Think about how much land Arabs have in the Middle East. | ||
| We've got New Jersey for the Jews, and 20% of them are Arab citizens that have full voting rights. | ||
| So I'm having a hard time figuring out why certain people there don't want the Jews to have a homeland. | ||
| In fact, my friend Michael Brown has put it this way. | ||
| Maybe it may be attributed to Dr. Brown. | ||
| He says this, if the Israelites laid down their weapons, there would be no more Israel. | ||
| If the Palestinians laid down their weapons, there would be no more war. | ||
| Yeah, I think Golda Meir may have said that. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| So, we only have about five minutes left, so this went by very quickly. | ||
| So, how can we wrap this all up in a way that gives the average person who's watching my show, I think my show, one of the things that I'm very proud of is I think we have a nice cross-section of sort of atheists and believers and people of all different walks of life. | ||
| What would be the main thing that you think would sort of unite them in all of this, whether they're fully a believer or fully a Christian or they come more from the secular world or whatever it might be? | ||
| I guess the one question I would ask people, and I do this on college campuses because I speak on a lot of college campuses, and then we have open mic. | ||
| The question I always ask... You don't get people get shouted off the college campuses? | ||
| With all this radical stuff you're speaking of? | ||
| Well, because I'm going giving the evidence that Christianity is true. | ||
| I'm not necessarily giving a political message. | ||
| Although I talk about politics all the time, but it's not the focus of what I'm doing. | ||
| You know, my friend Charlie Kirk and I'm sure you and others, you'll get shouted down. | ||
| I've been shouted down with Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so you guys will take more heat because of the angle you're coming from. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's probably going to happen soon to me. | ||
| But anyway, on a college campus, if someone gets up to the microphone and expresses any hostility at all and normally stop and ask just one question, I'll say, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian? | ||
| And Dave, I've had atheists stand at that microphone in front of hundreds of people and say, no! | ||
| I say, no, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| I thought you claimed to be reasonable and rational. | ||
| How is it reasonable? | ||
| You wouldn't believe something if it were true. | ||
| Well, it's not about reason. | ||
| It's not about the mind. | ||
| It's about the heart. | ||
| They don't want it to be true. | ||
| They don't want there to be a God. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they want to be God of their own lives. | ||
| They're not on a truth quest. | ||
| They're on a happiness quest. | ||
| And they're just going to do whatever they think is going to make them happy. | ||
| And here's the problem. | ||
| You can make yourself happy over the short term doing a lot of fun but selfish things. | ||
| However, over the long term, it's a disaster. | ||
| And most of us that have passed 40 begin to realize this. | ||
| We go, I just can't live for myself all the time. | ||
| If I do that, I'm never going to have a good relationship. | ||
| I'm never going to find what really is right about life. | ||
| There's going to be trouble. | ||
| And what I say to people is, look, if you want true contentment, you've got to go straight through truth and Jesus is the truth. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| The problem is most people are looking for God like a criminal is looking for a cop. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| They want to go their own way. | ||
| And so God is a gentleman. | ||
| He lets people go their own way. | ||
| But I think he gives us, let me sum it up this way, he gives us enough evidence to know that he exists, and he gives us enough evidence to know how he wants us to live, but not so much that we can't be free and go our own way if we don't want to. | ||
| And that's what a gentleman does, right? | ||
| That kind of sounds like the message of America, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the founders knew, Dave. | ||
| This three branch system where the legislature is supposed to be the superior branch. | ||
| They don't exercise that very well. | ||
| But the founders knew that human beings are inherently selfish. | ||
| As Madison said, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They knew that we needed checks and balances because of the fallen human heart. | ||
| Yet the left now, they think people are inherently good. | ||
| That's the fundamental, in my view, the fundamental problem with leftism. | ||
| They think people are inherently good and they don't need incentives to stay in line. | ||
| They're just going to do the right thing. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| We're imperfect people. | ||
| We can't create a perfect system. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Frank, I wish we had more time. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Brother, God bless you. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about spirituality, check out our spirituality playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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