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1:18
This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast.
1:21
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
1:23
Let's get into it.
1:25
All right, guys, we got a special guest on the podcast today.
1:27
His name is Justin Briarley.
1:29
So he is the former host of Unbelievable, the radio show and podcast on premiere Christian
1:33
radio in the UK.
1:34
Let me get into why he's the former host of that.
1:37
He's also the author of Unbelievable, while after 10 years of talking with atheists, I'm
1:42
still a Christian.
1:43
And his brand new book, which is the center point of our entire interview today, which
1:46
is this book here, the surprising rebirth of belief in God, why new atheism grew old
1:52
and secular thinkers are considering Christianity again.
1:55
This is his third appearance on the podcast.
1:57
He's been here on episode 189 and episode 322.
2:02
But this podcast, it's one of my favorite conversations that we've done this year.
2:05
Part of it is because we scheduled a lot of time.
2:07
And so I didn't feel like I couldn't ask follow-ups or I couldn't really weave in and
2:11
out of the book.
2:12
But it really is a fantastic book.
2:14
And in this interview, we talk about the rise and fall of new atheism, why that happened,
2:21
why the four horsemen of atheism were considered to be these paragons of intellect and virtue,
2:26
and then it was just kind of found wanting how Matthew Arnold's The Sea of Faith kind
2:31
of features very prominently in the scaffolding of this book.
2:35
We talked about the, I guess, the different conversations that he's having with these
2:40
secular folks like a Jonathan Haider, Jordan Peterson, or Douglas Murray, and how they
2:44
have a reverence for scripture, even though they don't have a, I guess, typical belief
2:50
in the stories of scripture, if that makes any sense.
2:53
So we definitely get into a lot of that.
2:54
We talk about the cowardice of a lot of the four horsemen, especially guys like Richard
2:58
Dawkins, not debating people like William Lane Craig, just kind of coming out of that
3:03
cowardice, how the kind of the woke movement cannibalized new atheism, which is hilarious,
3:08
and I love it and I'm here for it.
3:10
But then just how new atheism wasn't speaking to young men, but people like Jordan Peterson,
3:16
who has a deep respect for scripture and reverence for scripture were speaking to young men.
3:20
But that wasn't it.
3:21
We get into a lot of other stuff about, I'm just trying to remember everything that we
3:25
talked about because we just wrapped up, but how, you know, how atheists kind of steal
3:28
from God in order to make their arguments about morality and justice, how people like
3:34
these secular folks are kind of teetering on the intellectual precipice of really becoming
3:39
Christians and what that looks like, how scientists are not, you know, neutral, but people pretend
3:46
like science is like those types of things.
3:49
We get into why we should keep Christianity weird, right?
3:52
And I actually challenged him again on the pronoun hospitality stuff.
3:55
And I really liked his answer this time around on that.
3:58
The dangers of what has been called the evangelical industrial complex, you know, these mega
4:03
churches, celebrity pastors, these scandals and all these different things.
4:07
And then we wrap up with, you know, my question to him about why he's so optimistic about
4:11
the future of Christianity in our world.
4:13
I really enjoyed the conversation guys, so I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
4:16
So without further ado, let's get into it.
4:19
Justin Briarley, welcome back to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
4:23
Well, thank you for having me back.
4:25
Yeah, this is what second time round with you.
4:27
I don't know.
4:28
This is the third time around.
4:29
And here's the thing.
4:30
I was on your show twice.
4:31
And so I was all prepared to be like, Hey, you're on mine for a third time.
4:35
Let's get me on yours for a third time, but Justin, the unbelievable podcast, but Justin
4:39
Briarley is now just the unbelievable podcast.
4:42
What in the world's going on?
4:43
Well, what is going on?
4:45
I, yeah, I know a lot of people were shocked when they heard that I was leaving the unbelievable
4:49
show.
4:50
I'd been on it for 17 and a half years.
4:52
I founded it.
4:53
So it was a very bittersweet parting, but the time had just come Kyle for me to move
4:57
on to some fresh projects.
4:59
I was, I needed, I wanted to sort of do more things in my own right and to be able to collaborate
5:05
with people outside of the structures of premier.
5:08
So I'm really glad to see the show continuing in new hands, but I'm trying some new things
5:14
and really enjoying it actually.
5:15
So yeah, that's where I'm at.
5:16
Well, let's talk about the new things.
5:17
I don't care about the old girl frame.
5:19
Let's talk about the new one.
5:20
What are the new things?
5:22
Well, one of the new things is that the book that we're going to be talking about, I'm
5:25
really excited about it, it's coming out in September and we've got, there's a whole
5:30
bunch of stuff I'm doing around it, not just kind of interviews like this.
5:33
I'm actually currently developing a podcast documentary series based on the book that
5:37
will release in September.
5:39
So that's really exciting.
5:40
If you enjoyed kind of the style of the kind of rise and fall of Mars Hill podcast or the
5:45
style of like the witch trials of JK Rowling, those kinds of documentary podcast series,
5:51
think of that kind of style of documentary footage and montage and so on, but telling
5:56
the story of the book really, which is the fall of new atheism and the growth of these
6:00
new secular thinkers who are asking interesting questions.
6:04
So that's really exciting, but I've been doing some new podcast ventures as well.
6:07
I'm co-hosting a new podcast called the Reenchanting podcast, which is filmed at Lambeth Palace
6:12
Library in London.
6:13
I've been doing some guest hosting for some other podcasts and yeah, and just lots of
6:18
interesting opportunities coming up that I'm really pleased about.
6:22
Well that is great.
6:23
Anything that we can do to assist with those, you just let me know.
6:26
But in addition to all that fun stuff here recently, I saw where you got to actually
6:31
baptize your daughter Grace and like, so for me, Justin, as a father, like I got a little
6:37
choked up because I've got a three year old and a one year old.
6:40
And my plan is if they accept Christ or sorry, Calvinist, if Christ snatches them up from
6:46
the depths or whatever, because they're dead already, whatever I'm supposed to say.
6:50
But like we're going to throw the biggest party because like in America, I don't know
6:54
how it is in the UK, but this is what happens when a kid gets baptized in America.
6:59
Oh, isn't that sweet?
7:01
That's so cute.
7:02
I bet her grandparents are really happy.
7:03
But when a college football game happens or when a, you know, a football game for you
7:07
guys over there, when your team scores a goal, it's just crazy apple plexig and people are
7:13
losing their minds.
7:14
We're throwing a party.
7:15
We're going to have a big baptism on the backyard.
7:17
We're going to have games.
7:18
We're going to go nuts.
7:19
We're going to shoot off fireworks.
7:21
But just as a father, being able to dunk your daughter full immersion guys, full immersion,
7:27
but being able to dunk her and bring her up into newness of life, tell me about that.
7:31
Well, it was a huge privilege, obviously.
7:33
I mean, in our tradition, interestingly, the full immersion isn't very common, actually,
7:39
but Grace and another young guy who was also being baptized the same day had said, would
7:45
there be an option?
7:46
So we wanted to make that an option for them.
7:48
And I was baptized by full immersion at a similar age to Grace myself.
7:52
So I kind of I knew how special that that is.
7:55
And so yeah, it was just wonderful to be able to do that and to do it in front of our whole
7:59
church family.
8:00
And yeah, so it was just, it was just fabulous and we just had a wonderful day.
8:05
We had a party afterwards, you know, we had lots of families and friends around.
8:08
We've made a real day of it.
8:10
So yeah, I was, I was super thrilled to be able to do that.
8:13
Well, congratulations to you and to Mrs. Briarly.
8:16
But now we need to, we need to get down to business here because the reason that you're
8:20
on here today is because of the new book that you've alluded to, the surprising rebirth
8:24
of belief in God.
8:26
Why new atheism grew old and secular thinkers are considering Christianity again.
8:31
Now, the last time you're on my show episode three, something or other, I'll put it in
8:34
the show notes that you give us a rundown of the book.
8:37
You kind of, well, I guess you alluded to the book on our last podcast, so you were kind
8:41
of working on it.
8:42
So now that it's out, because as of the release of this podcast, guys, you can go and buy
8:48
this.
8:49
It is in the show notes.
8:50
Go and pick it up.
8:51
Give us a very brief rundown of the book.
8:53
Why'd you write it?
8:54
You know, what are we supposed to get out of it?
8:56
And maybe even as well, and I think this is alluded to in the artwork, Matthew Arnold's
9:02
The Sea of Faith features kind of as a scaffolding of sorts for this book.
9:06
Yeah.
9:07
And so I guess what is the Sea of Faith and, you know, why drive that home is the thesis?
9:10
Just take us through all that.
9:12
Well, this all really began, actually, when I was having a conversation with a guy called
9:17
Douglas Murray, who's a kind of secular thinker here in the UK.
9:21
Yeah.
9:22
He's really interesting.
9:23
He's kind of a conservative political commentator, but he's a well-known journalist.
9:27
He's a deputator of a magazine called The Spectator.
9:30
And he came on for a discussion with N.T. Wright on one of our big conversations.
9:36
And he was remarking about the fact that even he describes himself as a Christian atheist
9:42
because he understands the fact that all of his values and ideals essentially have been
9:47
shaped by the Christian story.
9:49
And even though he doesn't believe in Christianity, he still kind of sees the way in which, you
9:53
know, he owes so much and the West owes so much to the Christian story.
9:58
And he remarked that he'd been even seeing some of his, you know, thinking friends converting
10:02
to Christianity and said, I wonder if that, you know, this might be a moment for the church
10:07
to be speaking into a more receptive crowd.
10:10
And then he referenced this poem by Matthew Arnold, a Victorian poet who wrote this well-known
10:16
poem called Dover Beach, which has this line in it about the melancholy long withdrawing
10:21
roar of the sea of faith.
10:23
And that's often been used as a metaphor, an image for people to talk about the way secularism
10:28
has come in, Christianity's gone out, and it's only accelerated since Victorian times.
10:34
But then he, Douglas Murray, talking about this, said something which I found fascinating,
10:38
obvious at one level, but I hadn't really thought of before, which is, well, the thing
10:42
about the sea of faith is it could come back in again, you know, that's the point of tides.
10:46
And just those words made me think, you know, maybe there's something in that because when
10:51
I see even a secular thinker like Douglas Murray acknowledging just how profoundly his
10:57
own worldview has been shaped by Christianity.
10:59
And when I hear increasingly as I was at the time of other secular thinkers like Jordan
11:04
Peterson and Tom Holland and a number of others, kind of saying, look, are we sure we can live
11:11
without something like the Christian story?
11:14
And when I also have been seeing really interesting stories of conversion, adult converts to
11:18
faith, I just started to wonder, well, maybe we are seeing the end of the kind of the atheist
11:24
thing.
11:25
Maybe we are seeing that movement starting to run out of steam and people realizing that
11:29
they need something bigger, they need something like the Christian story.
11:32
So the image as you've referenced on the front cover is of a kind of tide coming in.
11:38
And that in a sense, that poem by Matthew Arnold kind of anchors the story from the beginning.
11:44
And I wonder whether the tide is turning, whether it's we might be, even within our
11:48
generation, able to see the Christian story come flooding back in again.
11:53
So that's really the centerpiece of the book in that way.
11:57
Well, Justin, for anyone that spent any time on a coastline, you understand the imagery
12:01
very well.
12:02
I remember being in New Zealand and we were at a particular beach, I can't remember.
12:06
And I mean, there are these, this group of little girls that were walking, you know,
12:11
about like a quarter of a mile out where like an hour before, two hours before, like they
12:17
would have been in water that could have been potentially dangerous for them.
12:21
And it was just like, but depending upon what time of day you come to the coastline, you
12:25
might think that, oh, this is the line now or that's the line now.
12:28
But I mean, you do mention Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Tom Holland and a lot of others
12:32
throughout the book, but that there's a quote in the introduction that kind of, you know,
12:36
summarizes what you've said there.
12:37
But it's this notably in the past several years, the conversations have changed in tone
12:42
and substance quite dramatically.
12:43
We're talking about the unbelievable show that you were former host of the bombastic
12:47
debates between militant atheists and Christian apologists have been far less frequent to
12:52
my dismay.
12:53
But in their place have come increasing numbers of secular guests who are far more open to
12:58
the cultural and social value of Christianity, even if they are not believers themselves.
13:03
And so that that's absolutely happened.
13:06
The thing that I find interesting is there's a couple of things that come to mind with
13:10
that, Justin.
13:11
There's the GK Chesterton quote that I think you have in your book to where it's like,
13:14
you know, if you're an atheist, it's not that you believe in nothing.
13:17
It's that you believe in anything.
13:19
But also the new age, or I guess it's new age, but these new atheists kind of you have
13:24
the four horsemen, which would be what Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Miss and one, Hitchens.
13:30
But also guys like, was it Levi Krauss or whatever?
13:33
Just a awful human being, such a rude and all used nice language, because I'm talking
13:39
to a polite Englishman, but just an absolute jerk.
13:43
And that's entertaining for about seven seconds.
13:46
But then you're just like, I just don't like this person.
13:49
And so when you have a secular thinker like a Peterson or a Murray or Holland, it's all
13:54
almost more palatable because you think there's not just vitriol there, but there's probably
13:58
something behind what they're saying, right?
14:00
Yeah, exactly.
14:02
Yeah.
14:03
And I think that's right.
14:05
I had noticed, as you say, that the conversations have begun to change a lot in the last several
14:10
years of hosting the Unbelievable Show.
14:12
It was very much birthed in the heyday of the new atheism when people like Hitchens and
14:16
Dawkins and so on were riding high in the best seller charts.
14:19
You know, there were these atheist conferences and rallies going on.
14:22
We even had the closest thing to an atheist advertising campaign when we had this atheist
14:27
bus campaign with buses rolling around London saying there's probably no God, now stop worrying
14:33
and enjoy your life.
14:34
So in a way, you know, it's interesting you say that to your dismay, we weren't featuring
14:40
those kinds of debates quite so often.
14:42
And in a way, it was a great way of getting into the issues, you know, in the early days
14:46
of the show, because it was a very obvious kind of way of encountering something very
14:51
obviously anti-theistic, anti-Christianity and so on.
14:56
But having said all that, I think the show tended to follow the way in which the culture
15:01
was developing.
15:02
And I just noticed increasingly that those very, you know, dogmatic atheist voices were
15:08
just getting less airtime as time went on.
15:11
They were increasingly almost being seen as quasi-religious themselves because they were
15:15
so dogmatic and shrill and fundamentalist almost in their own claims about the world
15:20
and the universe.
15:21
And I think in all honesty, the problem was that they, you know, especially people, as
15:27
you mentioned, Lawrence Krauss, these kind of very sort of, you know, people who just
15:32
dismissed the God question out of hand almost categorically and wouldn't give it a second
15:38
thought.
15:39
I think most people realized that's not the way to engage one of the deepest questions
15:43
of our time.
15:44
And the reason why I think people like Jordan Peterson started to get a hearing over and
15:49
above the Dawkins and Harris's and Krauss's and so on was because people couldn't live
15:55
on the thin gruel of the atheist materialist story that Krauss and others were preaching.
16:00
It was too insubstantial, you know, science and reasonal, you know, it'll get you so far,
16:06
but it won't buy you a positive ethic for how to live your life.
16:09
And again, this is one of the stories I sketch out in the book is the way that the new atheists
16:13
once they'd agreed, God didn't exist and religion was bad for you.
16:16
They basically couldn't agree on anything else.
16:18
It completely unraveled because some were going off in this woke social justice direction
16:23
and that was where their movement had to go.
16:25
Others were like, no, no, we're just free thinkers.
16:27
We need to, you know, it's just about the science and the reason and the movement completely
16:32
fractured into, you know, what we now see as kind of the culture was.
16:36
And to that extent, it was just such an obvious example of the way in which, as you say, that
16:42
GK Chesten quote, people don't just believe in nothing.
16:46
They suddenly, they have to believe in something, you know, something will fill the God void.
16:50
And for some of them, it was sort of, you know, woke ideologies for others.
16:54
It was kind of this almost religious adherence to naturalism.
16:58
And in the end, I think the reason why people like Jordan Peterson became so popular and
17:03
successful was because it was only people like him who were actually scratching the itch
17:08
of like, well, how do I make sense of life in the absence of God?
17:12
Is there any way for me to live a meaningful life?
17:15
How do I get a sense of who I am?
17:17
What is my identity in the absence of some, you know, a cosmic story that can give me
17:22
some sense of identity?
17:24
And so that's why I think that, yeah, that basically the New Atheism kind of kind of
17:31
led to its own demise in a funny way, because, you know, having torn God down, they didn't
17:35
have anything to put in God's place.
17:37
And so people started looking elsewhere, you know, let me get you to pump your breaks.
17:41
All right, you're getting into all the good stuff from the book and don't worry.
17:43
We're going to get there, but I do appreciate that you very slightly corrected.
17:48
I said Levi Strauss.
17:49
I think I connected Lawrence Kraus and Levi Strauss and it came out Levi Kraus.
17:54
So I appreciate that.
17:55
That's fine.
17:56
That's fine.
17:57
But one thing that's interesting when we talk about Dawkins, I remember when the God delusion
18:01
came out, it gave skeptics and atheists kind of their holy book and we'll get more into,
18:06
you know, how these people act in a religious way.
18:09
But I remember destroying that book for somebody by asking a singular question because this
18:14
is a very smart guy.
18:15
He's on my back porch.
18:16
He's he's more liberal.
18:17
He's more secular than me.
18:19
That kind of thing, but he lives in Oklahoma and America.
18:21
So it's kind of sort of tangentially Christian, just by dent of birth kind of a thing.
18:25
But he was like, yeah, you know, man, all, you know, as kind of as I was reading through
18:30
this book, like all morality is, you know, relative and basically like all truth is relative
18:34
as well.
18:35
And I kind of, I know we're not allowed to say his name anymore, I Robbie Zacharias
18:39
to him.
18:40
I said, does your statement about truth being relative include itself or exclude itself?
18:45
And he just melted into a puddle of stupid and he was just like, Oh man, it was just
18:50
kind of you needed somebody to just, there's already the chink in the armor.
18:55
You just needed somebody to point at and be like, do you see that?
18:58
Do you see how ridiculous that is?
18:59
Yeah.
19:00
Now I want to get into chapter one of your book now.
19:02
I want to be cautious in how I set this up because the first chapter of your book is
19:06
called the rise and fall of new atheism.
19:09
Guys don't do this, but if you did, I'll give you a pass.
19:12
If you bought this book and only read the first chapter, it's worth the cost of the
19:17
entire book.
19:18
The first chapter is like a miniature masterclass on the rise and fall of new atheism.
19:25
And so again, don't do that.
19:27
Don't be dumb.
19:28
Don't read the first chapter and then move on with your life.
19:30
But like you could and you would still get some value out of it, but I'm going to circle
19:33
back to the red London bus advertisement that you talked about.
19:38
Everyone kind of remembers that's in these circles when that came out and you quoted
19:41
it perfectly there, but it's, there's probably no God.
19:45
Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
19:48
Now the use of one word in that, you know, little two sentence advertisement gave you
19:55
a hint as to the serious cracks in the new atheism foundation or chinks in the armor.
20:00
And that was the word probably, there's probably no God.
20:04
So talk to me a little bit about that advertisement, kind of what it did for people in the UK.
20:09
Cause I think it had the exact opposite effect or what they were hoping.
20:12
I think it did exactly that.
20:14
I think I think if, if the atheist movement were trying to kind of get people to forget
20:18
about God, well, the last way to do that is to basically create a bus campaign saying
20:23
there's probably no God cause all you're going to do is kind of remind people that there's
20:27
this God question hanging around.
20:29
And maybe I haven't really thought about that.
20:31
Oh, maybe, is there probably no God or maybe there is a God.
20:34
And, and, you know, the way I put it in the book is, you know, people didn't need any
20:38
encouragement in the UK to kind of think less about God, you know, it's, it's a bit like
20:44
asking a teenager to consider having a lie in on a Saturday morning.
20:48
You know, it kind of goes without saying that, that, that it's a given.
20:52
But so I think actually it really kind of introduced the God question by, by them running
20:57
this advertising campaign.
20:58
In fact, I know one or two Christians who put money into the campaign because they thought
21:02
it was such a great way of actually raising questions for people.
21:06
And, and, and it's so interesting looking back, you know, Philip Pullman, who's a well-known
21:10
atheist author, when I interviewed him at one point, he talked about that atheist bus campaign
21:15
and said that he thought, he thought it was the most ridiculous, banal, stupid thing that
21:21
his own group, the atheist could have done, because he saw the way that it actually, you
21:26
know, played into the debate.
21:27
And he also thought it was just a really dumb thing to say.
21:30
He thought that's, that's not the way you go about treating the biggest question people
21:34
can ask themselves about God.
21:36
So, so I, I was intrigued, you know, I thought that was just such an interesting moment in
21:41
our culture.
21:42
I think the equivalent moment in a way in the US was, was, I don't know if you remember
21:47
the reason rally in, I think of 2012 in Washington, DC, you know, tens of thousands of atheist
21:52
agnostics and skeptics turning out for what was described as, you know, the woodstock
21:56
for atheists with all these atheist speakers and musicians.
22:00
Is there a wamer sounding, you know, think that the woodstock for atheists like you nerds
22:05
get out of here, but keep going.
22:07
But yeah, but again, it was, it was a kind of high watermark, almost though, where, where,
22:12
you know, people were coming out and rallying for reason and all the rest of it.
22:15
But, but again, for me, it, it, it kind of said something about the movement that there
22:20
was this almost quasi religious element to it, you know, that people had to get together
22:24
and band together and sort of be told from the front, you know, this is what we believe.
22:29
So, you know, they were literally chanting stuff like science rules, you know, religion
22:33
rules.
22:34
And, and it was just kind of, for me, a, a kind of just such an interesting moment to,
22:39
to say this, this is where, where atheists feel they need to go at this point.
22:43
And it's got such a religious flavor that you wonder what the next step is going to be
22:47
for them.
22:48
Well, Justin, it was, it was vapid is what it was, and it's like when people are trying
22:52
to convince themselves of something, they do that stupid thing where they look in the
22:55
mirror and go, you can do it, you can accomplish it, you can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
22:59
And it's just like, have you tried doing it yet?
23:01
Because here you are doing these ohms to the mirror, but you're not actually doing anything.
23:05
So, so again, guys, that first chapter really gives you the rise and fall of new atheism,
23:10
you know, a, a highlight on the four horsemen, I can't do it justice with, with my questioning
23:15
there.
23:16
You just have to go and buy it.
23:17
But there's something interesting about what you said about like these rallies and we're
23:21
going to stand up and we're going to chant, we're going to say things that don't make
23:23
sense.
23:24
But if we say them loud enough and often enough, they're going to start to make sense.
23:27
But there's an underlying cowardice to, or there was at least an underlying cowardice
23:33
to this new atheism movement.
23:35
And I think it's most indicative of how we saw Richard Dawkins refusing to debate or avoiding
23:41
debate with a guy like William Lane Craig and how that's indicative of the cowardice
23:46
of people that think the way, that think that way, that they're just refusing serious debate
23:52
and in the intellectual merits of the Christian worldview because, well, this guy's bigoted.
23:57
Well, that's cute and it's kind of kitschy to just point at the other side and say, that
24:01
dude's a racist.
24:02
I'm not going to platform him.
24:03
But in actuality, it's that you're scared that he's smarter than you and he's going
24:08
to say something that you can't just wave your hand over.
24:11
So talk to me a little bit about that because I feel like I'm a bloodhound for cowardice
24:15
and I could just smell it on people.
24:17
It's just like you're reek of it.
24:18
And that's, you know, when I get into debates, I have to be very careful because when I smell
24:22
that, it's like, okay, I don't have to hit him now.
24:24
I'm just going to drag him into deep water and drown him later, but talk to me a little
24:27
bit about that.
24:28
Well, I think you put your finger on something that was at the center of why the new atheism
24:33
ultimately didn't stick around, why it didn't end up convincing people.
24:37
And I think because people recognize that it couldn't actually provide the intellectual
24:40
heft that its architects claimed it could.
24:43
So, you know, it was being championed by scientists and, you know, public thinkers and so on.
24:48
But when those public thinkers refused to debate the best Christian minds out there,
24:53
then that, of course, will give people pause for thought and wonder, well, what are they
24:56
hiding?
24:57
Well, you know, why can't Richard Dawkins step up and have a debate because he was happy
25:01
to kind of critique and, you know, knock over plenty of straw men.
25:04
He was happy to, you know, debate, you know, the guy running the Hell House in Colorado
25:09
on his TV show and that kind of thing.
25:11
But he consistently refused many engagements and opportunities to debate with William Lane
25:18
Craig.
25:19
I was involved in one of these particular moments.
25:22
So back in 2011, I was helping to host a tour that William Lane Craig came over to do a
25:27
number of debates and lectures, basically responding to the God delusion.
25:32
And there were some atheists who were willing to come out and debate him, and I had a lot
25:35
of respect for them.
25:36
But I remember when, you know, we were setting this up, we wanted to get Richard Dawkins.
25:41
He was the person we really needed.
25:44
So we went to his hometown, we went to Oxford, we booked a theatre, we said we're giving
25:50
you ample time to respond to this.
25:51
And he just came up with a litany of excuse for why he wouldn't do it.
25:56
You know, firstly, it was I own debate bishops and, you know, cardinals, and, you know, when
26:02
in fact he's debated plenty of other people.
26:04
And then it was, oh, it would look better on his CV than mine.
26:09
And I don't debate professional, you know, creationist, well, William Lane Craig isn't
26:13
a creationist.
26:14
Oh, I don't, you know, I don't debate people who are just professional debaters.
26:18
Well, he's not a professional debater.
26:19
He's a philosopher.
26:20
He's got plenty of peer reviewed, you know.
26:22
So all of these were really bad excuses, basically.
26:25
And we went to the extent actually, we were a bit naughty, we were a bit cheeky because
26:30
we, we ended up running our own bus campaign around Oxford.
26:33
And it was buses bearing the slogan, there's probably no dorkins, but find out at the
26:38
Sheldonian theatre on the date.
26:41
So, so, and we weren't expecting him to turn up, but we did leave this empty chair, this
26:46
symbolic empty chair, to say, look, if, if your premier spokesperson is willing to come
26:53
and fill this chair, then let's take atheism seriously.
26:56
But otherwise, you know, why should we give it, give it the time of day if he's not willing
27:00
to come out and debate?
27:01
So yeah, for me, I think that was, that was such an interesting moment.
27:05
And I've got a friend, Peter Byron, who today is a Christian, partly because Richard Dawkins
27:11
didn't turn up to debate William Lane Craig.
27:13
And he was very influenced by dorkins as a young man, as a student.
27:18
He became an atheist, but it was because he saw that the new atheists weren't giving
27:24
satisfactory answers as he started to discover good Christian apologetics.
27:28
He realized that the strength of these arguments is nothing like what I thought it was.
27:32
And when he saw people like dorkins ducking actually debating the real tough nuts, he eventually
27:38
came to faith himself, and it was partly because, you know, he was, he was really disappointed
27:43
by the new atheists and their empty kind of intellectual promises, you know, yeah, very
27:49
empty.
27:50
And I thought Hitchens was the worst at this because he was able to hide behind that accent,
27:55
I think.
27:56
So he was very, he was very sarcastic, and he had a great accent.
28:00
But if he had no comedic timing, and if he spoke like he was from Mississippi here in
28:05
America, everyone would have been like, this guy's a moron, like he's not saying anything.
28:09
It's like a general manager for a professional sports team, when they're asked direct questions
28:14
or like a, you know, a representative for the media for a political figure.
28:19
They're saying words, but they're not, they're not saying anything.
28:23
Like words are coming out of their face hole, but it's not leading to any type of an answer.
28:27
And so that's what it kind of felt like to me, it was just very, very unsatisfying on
28:31
an intellectual level.
28:32
I mean, Chris for Hitchens, you know, he was a brilliant rhetorician.
28:36
He was great at doing polemics, and that's really what most of his books are.
28:40
But he didn't have good arguments.
28:43
And the fact is that you only have to really actually start to pull them apart, the logic
28:47
of them to see that, you know, even the title of his book, God is not great.
28:52
Why religion poisons everything?
28:54
It's so ridiculously overstated.
28:56
I mean, it hardly needs saying that, of course, religion doesn't poison everything.
28:59
And, you know, and, and so, I mean, I've got to say that I've got a soft spot for Hitchens.
29:05
He died, you know, quite early on in 2011.
29:08
And of all the new atheists, actually, Hitchens was, I think, the most likable because he
29:13
kind of, he kind of knew he was doing it for a fact.
29:17
He knew that he was kind of, you know, going out there and saying overblown things.
29:21
And, and he, but he actually got on, of all of them, I'd say he actually developed the
29:24
most sincere relationships with the Christians that he was opposite.
29:27
So I don't know if you saw the, yeah, people like Francis Collins, he, he became friends
29:33
with, I mean, there's a great documentary of his kind of time spent with Doug Wilson.
29:37
And when they were kind of going back and forth and they developed quite a good friendship.
29:41
And there are, I've heard numerous other stories.
29:43
And I think he was kind of one of those people who, you know, my hope is that that he may
29:49
be even, you know, wavered a little bit in his atheism.
29:54
He was one of the people as well who really disliked when Dawkins and others were suggesting
30:00
that the atheist movement should rename itself to brights because he said that's so patronizing.
30:06
And he, he recognized at least that there would be plenty of bright religious people.
30:11
You know, he wasn't going to go so far as to say, no, you know, everybody whose religious
30:15
is a complete moron.
30:17
So, so I do have a kind of, I actually like Christopher Hitchens of all of them.
30:21
I think he was the most human at one level, but he still had bad arguments.
30:24
That's, that's fair to say.
30:26
So he was your favorite of the four horsemen, who's your least favorite?
30:31
Good question.
30:33
Maybe, maybe Sam Harris, just because he never returned my calls, I tried to get him on my
30:38
show a number of times.
30:39
And well, I think I didn't have the cash that would take to get Sam Harris out of bed in
30:44
the morning.
30:45
To be fair to Dawkins, he came on the show a couple of times and we had some good interactions.
30:50
Then it also came on the show and, and so they were at least willing at some point, you know,
30:56
to kind of interact with some Christians, which, which was a good thing.
30:59
But yeah, Harris, I never, I never got a hold of well, Harris would be my least favorite
31:04
as well.
31:05
But for a different reason, because I never contacted him, but I remember it was at some
31:08
point inside the book where you mentioned Sam Harris and I literally wrote this guy is
31:13
a fool in, in the margins, because when I hear him speak, he's clearly smart, but he's
31:18
so foolish and when you read through scripture and you hear about people that are, there
31:22
are simple people that just can't understand because of their simple mindedness, but then
31:27
you also have people that are foolish where they can reason, they can reckon, but they
31:31
just come to the wrong conclusions, but they're so vociferous and, you know, dogmatic and crazy
31:37
about those, those conclusions that they draw where they seem smart to high minded other
31:43
liberal secular people, but they're actually, again, not saying anything.
31:46
Now, I don't want to ask your question on this, I just want to read this quote because
31:50
again, I want to let the book kind of speak for itself, but it's kind of to the whole
31:54
idea of new atheism or just, I guess atheism in general being in and of itself a religion.
31:59
So here's a quote from the book that I loved.
32:02
There were the high priests, the four horsemen and the sacred texts they had written science
32:06
was their object of worship and naturalism, the belief that all that exists can be explained
32:11
by matter and motion and the blind forces of nature was their creed.
32:15
They gathered regularly to celebrate their beliefs, to praise the wonder of science and
32:19
to hear their leaders preach against those who believed in other gospel.
32:22
Atheists who questioned the strict materialist orthodoxy or even lost their faith altogether
32:27
were heretics and rounded on with unswerving zeal.
32:32
There's no way that in this interview, Justin, you could say it better than you said it right
32:36
there in that little paragraph, so I'm not even going to let you try.
32:39
We're going to move right on to something that I think part of your book, Justin, is it almost
32:44
didn't feel like you wrote it and I know you did, because you were a little bit harsher
32:48
than what I've been used to over these last several years of you being kind of the nice
32:53
polite guy in the middle of these debates and not trying to be to one side or the other.
32:58
But it was so delicious in the first chapter of your book when you described the cannibalism
33:04
of new atheism because of political wokeness, right?
33:08
So just so we have our terms, so wokeness is a higher consciousness of perceived injustice.
33:16
It's that type of idea, but it was that thing that everybody thought would just be a good
33:22
marriage with new atheism that kind of led to the beginning and the continuation of its
33:26
downfall.
33:27
So talk to us a little bit about that.
33:29
Well, in a funny way, I think the atheist movement, the new atheist movement, experienced
33:33
a kind of a #MeToo moment earlier than Hollywood did, basically. So if you again go back to
33:38
around 2011, I think it was, there's this moment which I think kind of was the beginning
33:42
of the unraveling of new atheism and it's called, it was called Elevator Gate, any controversial
33:48
moment, it has Gate tacked onto it these days.
33:51
And this took place at an atheist conference in Dublin and one of the speakers was a young
33:57
atheist vlogger called Rebecca Watson, who went under the pseudonym Skepchick.
34:02
And she had just delivered a talk at this conference about the problem misogyny in the
34:07
atheist movement and the fact that it was dominated by white patriarchal men and the
34:12
kind of issues she had seen among delegates and generally the way that women were treated
34:17
in the movement and so on.
34:18
So she'd done this.
34:19
Richard Hawkins was one of the other speakers and had been on a panel.
34:23
They then, she and the other speakers were kind of up till the early hours of the morning,
34:27
sort of drinking at the bar.
34:29
She went back to a hotel room as she got in the elevator, one of the other guests at
34:33
the conference got in and basically propositioned her, said, would you like to come to my room
34:36
for coffee?
34:37
We all know what that's code for.
34:38
Anyway, she said, no thanks and kind of left it there and was off.
34:43
Anyway, she then sort of talked about this on her YouTube channel afterwards and said,
34:47
you know, this is the problem.
34:48
I'd literally just done a talk on this and then here I am, a woman by myself in a foreign
34:55
country getting propositioned in an elevator, you know, this is a problem, guys.
35:00
Now that might have been the end of it, except that Richard Dawkins then weighed in.
35:04
He posted a very kind of sarcastic and inflammatory kind of piece about this on an atheist blog
35:12
called Dear Muslima, in which he very sarcastically referenced the idea, oh, from a kind of, it
35:18
was in the voice of a Muslim woman saying, oh, forget about all the problems I'm having
35:22
with having my hands chopped off by religious extremists.
35:26
Think of our poor American sisters being propositioned for coffee and elevators.
35:29
It was this kind of very heavily sardonic sarcastic sort of thing.
35:33
Anyway, he was basically critiquing Rebecca Watson saying, get over it, you know, there's
35:37
not a problem.
35:39
And this just poured gasoline on this issue.
35:43
Suddenly everyone was talking about elevator gate and you had the Rebecca Watson side and
35:49
all the folks who were coming behind her and saying, isn't it terrible?
35:52
We've got, you know, such a problem with misogyny and patriarchy in the atheist movement.
35:56
Others coming in on Richard Dawkins side saying, this is ridiculous.
36:00
We just need to have a common sense about this and everything else.
36:03
And this then just spiraled into more and more issues.
36:05
Okay.
36:06
So, you know, to, and the one that eventually, of course, the big juggernaut that came in
36:11
was transgender.
36:14
And so, a few years later, you're getting Richard Dawkins of all people being stripped
36:20
of his award by the American Humanist Association.
36:25
Having been given this award several years earlier, they took it away from him because
36:28
of comments he'd made about transgender on Twitter.
36:31
So basically, as a biologist, he was questioning the biological realities of transgender and
36:37
so on.
36:39
And I was seeing this happening in all kinds of ways to the extent that, you know, certain
36:44
atheist leaders could no longer share a stage together at some of these atheist conferences.
36:48
Atheist conferences were literally getting canceled because the people wouldn't be willing
36:53
to appear on a stage because you're in that movement and I'm in this movement and we can't,
36:57
you know, talk to each other anymore.
37:01
So the whole thing, yeah, just started to kind of unravel in that way.
37:05
There was a movement, you know, on the kind of more social justice-oriented side, there
37:09
were those who wanted to become atheism plus was what they were calling it, you know.
37:13
So it was not just a commitment to atheism, but a commitment to feminism, LGBT rights,
37:19
anti-racism, and so on.
37:21
And then you had those who just thought that was the worst idea imaginable because all
37:24
we need is science and reason.
37:26
We don't need all this politically correct stuff.
37:28
And once they got into those debates, you know, the venom they had for each other far
37:33
out weighed anything they had for their Christian counterparts.
37:35
So this all really spelled the end of the line for this new atheist movement because it did
37:41
just kind of, as much as it wasn't answering the questions in the culture, as I said earlier,
37:45
it was really also unraveling internally a lot of the time.
37:49
It couldn't have happened to a better group of people.
37:51
I just got to be honest.
37:53
I just love watching them chase their tales and fight each other.
37:56
It's just absolutely delicious.
37:58
Now here we are a half hour in and I'm still in chapter one.
38:02
I got one question left about chapter one.
38:04
We got six more chapters we got to cover, but I want to read this quote here because
38:08
I think it encapsulated something that isn't talked about enough.
38:11
So here we go.
38:12
By the time new atheism swung into view in the 2000s, there were precious few churches
38:17
prepared to equip their members for the onslaught of skepticism it brought.
38:21
They might have been able to offer uplifting worship songs and an inspiring sermon series
38:25
on living your best life now, but fewer in the position to offer a philosophical defense
38:31
of God's existence or to defend the historicity of the Bible.
38:35
There were notable exceptions, of course, but by and large, the Western church was caught
38:39
on the back foot.
38:40
Yes, a men double triple stamp.
38:42
I absolutely agree with that.
38:44
Again, undaunted life is here to equip men to push back darkness, though all those words
38:49
are meaningful.
38:50
We're equipping who men to do what push back darkness?
38:54
What is dark?
38:55
Well, churches aren't even describing that because they're putting together these TED
38:59
talk sermon series is sprinkling a little bit of scripture over the top of it so they
39:03
can keep their tax exempt status and they're calling it church.
39:07
It's like the smoke machines are great.
39:09
The light shows fantastic 74 people on stage where only five microphones are turned on
39:14
and everybody's dancing, having a good time.
39:16
Okay, whatever, whatever you're into.
39:18
But when you have somebody ask a simple question, like how can we, you know, a Joe Rogan saying
39:23
something like, well, we can't even trust the Bible because the council of Nicaea basically
39:27
made up the canon.
39:29
And, you know, it's been translated so many times and we don't have the original.
39:31
So we can't trust the Bible anyway.
39:33
And if you're a Christian and you're just like, I guess that sounds good.
39:37
It's like, okay, part of it is your fault because your own stupidity is your fault and
39:42
your responsibility to overcome it.
39:45
But you're also pointing out a great thing here, Justin, which is churches weren't focused
39:48
on discipleship.
39:49
They were focused on growth.
39:50
They were focused on planning another campus or another, you know, it's basically like McDonald's.
39:55
They're just planning franchises all over the place.
39:58
And so you have these growth minded pastors that are more like CEOs.
40:02
They don't even have elderboards.
40:03
They have a board of directors.
40:05
And they're just trying to plant as many of these, you know, McDonald's as possible.
40:09
And so you have this inch deep and, you know, a mile wide, you know, theology in these people.
40:14
And you're absolutely right.
40:15
They were caught on the back foot.
40:17
So so talk to me a little bit more about that.
40:18
Yeah.
40:19
Well, I think you've said a lot of it there.
40:21
And I think the problem was that I think the church in a way had bought into the kind
40:26
of experiential post modern kind of trend that was going on in culture generally anyway,
40:32
which was kind of moving away from a more kind of intellectual engagement with issues.
40:36
But the problem was that, you know, it was also drawing away as it did that from the intellectual
40:42
side of its tradition, because it was the church that founded the universities.
40:46
You know, you go to Oxford University, it's got a Christian motto, you know, people forget
40:51
that that it was Christians who started the scientific revolution.
40:55
It was Christians who were the philosophers and the sages and the heavyweight intellects.
41:00
And and yeah, we arrived at a position in the 21st century where, you know, people associated,
41:06
yes, sadly, Christianity with a kind of Joel Osteen level of kind of engagement.
41:10
Now it's not that there aren't good theologians and apologists and people.
41:15
And obviously you had some of those people like Lewis and Chesterton and so on in the
41:18
20th century who did help to kind of bring back something of that intellectual tradition.
41:23
But yeah, unfortunately, I think the church had gone down a road of kind of experiential
41:27
fulfilment and it had lost that sort of catacizing sort of know what you believe and why you
41:36
believe it kind of imperative that was there from the beginning of the early church.
41:40
And and the good thing is that the new atheism did at least give them a kick up the bottom
41:46
to say, hang on a minute, something's gone wrong here.
41:50
It was by being presented with a really hard, you know, questioning sort of approach from
41:56
the new atheists that led to a lot of Christians suddenly reengaging with that theological apologetic
42:02
historical tradition.
42:03
And why I think you then saw, you know, happily the proliferation of a number of new apologetics
42:08
ministries.
42:09
I mean, as I said, my own show to some extent was responding to the new atheism.
42:12
And so to that degree, it was a godsend that actually forced us to pick up our theology
42:18
books again and put down the tambourines and guitars for a little while.
42:21
Yeah, the, the new atheist kind of picked the scab that most Christians didn't even know
42:25
was there.
42:26
They didn't even know they got wounded.
42:27
And yet here they are getting picked out and they're like, wait a minute.
42:30
And so I think it's good that we're on our front foot, as opposed to our back foot now.
42:34
So here we go.
42:35
We've made it chapter two.
42:36
So the new conversation on God, I only have one question about chapter two.
42:40
It's not because there's not good stuff in there.
42:42
It's because I knew this would happen.
42:44
We'd get halfway through our time and I would still be in chapter one.
42:46
So let me read this quote to you, a generation of young men searching for significance and
42:51
unsure of their identity have latched onto him being Jordan Peterson as a surrogate father,
42:57
father figure to help them find their way in life jaded by the unfulfilled promises of
43:02
Dawkins, Hitchens and the new atheist intellectuals.
43:05
They believe that perhaps it is Peterson who has the words of life.
43:08
And this is a little bit later on the same page.
43:11
No wonder so many Christian leaders have taken notice of Peterson and his overtures towards
43:16
Christian faith.
43:17
Young males are precisely the demographic, most absent in churches.
43:22
So here's the thing.
43:23
I know a lot of pastors individually that love Jordan Peterson and they're, they're cautious
43:27
of his theology, they're, they're, they're being intellectually consistent that this man
43:32
is still secular, that he's not put his faith in Christ, however you want to couch it.
43:37
But he is speaking to young males in a way that they have either not tried to or have
43:42
tried to and been super unsuccessful.
43:45
And again, Jordan Peterson did a, a video that I did a full breakdown of, you know, it was
43:50
a message to the American church, right?
43:53
Like what do you, how are y'all getting this so wrong?
43:56
But he was explaining to these pastors, your churches might as well have blinking neon
44:01
signs saying men, we don't have you in mind men.
44:04
We don't care about you men.
44:05
We don't need you.
44:06
And then they're shocked when the men don't show up to volunteer when the men aren't engaged,
44:11
and they're not discipling their children or catechizing their children or taking advantage
44:16
of discipleship opportunities.
44:18
So talk to me a little bit more about people specifically like Jordan Peterson, that they
44:22
didn't just recognize it, but they put their finger on the pulse of that and they're speaking
44:26
into it.
44:27
Yeah.
44:28
And, and I think, I think there's just trying so well with what you've been trying to do,
44:32
obviously, on, on your show, Kyle, which is that I think Jordan Peterson connected with
44:37
young men because he kind of recognized that young men are unique, men generally are different
44:43
to women.
44:44
And he wasn't afraid of saying that, you know, he was coming at it, obviously, from a kind
44:47
of psychological perspective.
44:49
It wasn't so much, you know, a spiritual sort of side of things, but, but even just a
44:53
purely psychological level, he was saying stuff that was just made sense that suddenly, you
44:58
know, a lot of young men realized, yeah, I am different.
45:00
There are things that fire me.
45:02
There's a kind of a sense of, you know, purpose and meaning that, you know, what speaks to
45:07
me in ways that it won't speak to other people.
45:10
And to that extent, I think that's why they were flocking to him because he was kind of
45:14
just pointing out kind of fairly obvious things and giving them a kind of a reason for getting
45:18
up in the morning and giving them that sense of purpose and who they were kind of made
45:24
to be.
45:25
And I found that sort of refreshing because I thought, you know, yeah, maybe, maybe in
45:31
a lot of the churches that we haven't been able to reach men because we've sort of,
45:36
for whatever reasons, you know, probably the best of intentions, we've turned churches
45:40
into places where men, as you say, don't feel like it speaks to me that I have to be a different
45:45
kind of person when I walk into church than I am, you know, when I live my everyday life.
45:49
And to that extent, I think there are a lot of lessons that, you know, that people, preachers
45:55
could take from John Peterson, but I think perhaps most significantly was that he was
46:01
willing to go deep, you know, he didn't do these kind of puff piece type, you know,
46:08
sermons that so often are the kind of stuff that you get.
46:11
He was like, you know, doing like two hour lectures on the book of Exodus.
46:16
It was like he took seriously the fact that we are intellectual people that we need to
46:24
make sense of life and that they, you know, that we have to dig deep sometimes to understand
46:28
who we are and why we're here and that kind of thing.
46:30
Now, I think he was asking the right questions.
46:32
I don't think he was coming up with all the right answers because at the end of the day,
46:35
as you say, he wasn't, he, he, I think he's kind of sometimes seems to be teetering on
46:40
the edge of Christianity, but it's a kind of his own very sort of unique Jungian sort of
46:45
version of the way he approaches those questions.
46:48
Right.
46:49
So it was kind of encouraged that he was obviously that there were enough young men out there
46:55
who were willing to kind of walk through the door that he was opening for them in terms
46:59
of taking Christianity seriously again.
47:01
Well, and we'll get way more into that in chapter four in recovering the Bible.
47:06
But you talk about something that has really been a key for us, which is most churches
47:12
make men feel like they have to check their nuts at the door.
47:14
Whereas Jordan Peterson is like, nah, hey, let's gird our loins here.
47:18
Let's get ready for battle.
47:19
Like let's like, when he says things like, you don't, you need to be a monster.
47:25
Like when he explains meekness, he's like, no, no, no, meek is a, that's a bit bridled
47:30
horse.
47:31
It's a war horse.
47:32
Like you don't take away the war horse's ability to go to war, like just so you can
47:36
write it.
47:37
You just make sure that it's listening to you and to your guidance.
47:40
And if you're meeked to Christ, imagine how much better you could be than a guy that's
47:45
just passively sitting on his couch, playing video games and watching porn and going to
47:49
church every now and then and calling it good and checking the box.
47:53
And that's more of a cultural Christianity problem that I would say that we have here
47:57
in America because we're not exactly post-Christian, like, you know, maybe the UK or Canada by
48:02
now.
48:03
But that's another reason like men are attracted to strength in other men.
48:08
That's why 18 year olds will fight and die for a general that they believe in.
48:12
You don't have to go back too far in history to see those types of things happening, you
48:16
know, the modern global war on terrorism, there's some jaded ideas there.
48:20
But I mean, just go back to World War II and the people that would just get fired up by
48:23
their general, like it's an incredible thing to see.
48:26
So to move on to chapter three, the chapter is called shaped by the Christian story.
48:30
And again, guys, we're just barely scratching the surface on all this.
48:33
It's not a long book, but it's super, super deep.
48:36
But there was a concept in there, and I don't know if you named Frank Turic necessarily,
48:41
but it's how atheists will steal from God in order to give you their views on morality
48:47
and justice.
48:48
And so I want to read a short quote from chapter three here, for the sake of brevity, I will
48:54
sketch out just two key moral beliefs in our Western culture, the development of which
48:58
were profoundly influenced by Christianity.
49:01
First, our belief in human dignity and equality.
49:05
And second, the belief in our duty to protect the weakest in society.
49:09
Now in the book, you obviously go into a lot of detail on those two things.
49:14
But why specifically did you pick the belief in human dignity and equality, and then also
49:19
the belief in our duty to protect the weakest in society as a, as a club, you know, by which
49:24
to, you know, bash these atheists over the head with.
49:27
Well, I think I'd chosen because they are two kind of qualities that no secular atheist
49:33
person would ever, probably in our culture, disagree with.
49:36
Well, of course, we're supposed to treat every human with dignity.
49:39
That's why we call ourselves humanists, right?
49:41
Of course, we believe in equality.
49:43
That's why, you know, we, we believe in equal rights.
49:46
And of course, we believe in compassion and kindness and, you know, our duty to, to,
49:50
you know, be kind to the vulnerable.
49:52
But the problem is, you know, as Frank Turick and others have pointed out, you can't get
49:57
those values on a purely atheistic worldview that there was, there's nothing in the universe.
50:03
There's nothing in our DNA.
50:04
There's nothing that science can tell you.
50:06
There's nothing that pure reason can tell you that tells you that you should treat every
50:10
other human being the way that you would expect to be treated yourself.
50:14
That comes from a different place.
50:15
That's a theological belief.
50:17
That's something about, you know, something else.
50:19
And one of the key people I kind of mentioned in this chapter, who's been pointing this
50:22
out to the secularists, to the humanists, is himself a secular person.
50:26
He's a historian called Tom Holland.
50:29
He's been on my show several times doing some fantastic debates, both with kind of people
50:33
who are quite sympathetic to him, like NT Wright, but also he had this dramatic clash
50:37
with an atheist philosopher called AC Grayling on one of my big conversations.
50:41
But Tom Holland is one of those modern people who grew up just assuming that, yeah, of course,
50:46
any cultured civilization believes in things like human rights, equality, dignity, and so
50:50
on.
50:51
But discovered when he actually started researching the ancient world, because he became a best-selling
50:56
popular historian, that the world of the Greeks and Romans was radically different
51:01
to his world, and that the things they took for granted were completely different to the
51:06
things he took for granted.
51:07
In their world, you know, the use of slaves for any kind of sexual, you know, use that
51:14
the master wanted was completely a given.
51:17
There was no question about that.
51:19
The idea of consent did not exist in that culture.
51:23
And likewise, human life, it was just far, far cheaper.
51:27
You could kill your slaves if you, you know, were dissatisfied with their work.
51:32
You could leave children out for wild animals if you didn't want them.
51:35
That was just part of the assumed culture.
51:38
There was no sense that we had a duty to protect the vulnerable if widows and orphans existed.
51:45
Too bad for them, you know, unless they could find, you know, workers' prostitutes or be
51:49
sold into slavery themselves or something, society had no debt to them.
51:54
So all of these assumptions that he'd held as just being normal, he realized we're not
51:58
normal.
51:59
In fact, the vast majority of the ancient world would have regarded these values he held as
52:03
completely weird.
52:05
And he realized the reason they were weird is because they came from Christianity.
52:08
And he basically came to the conclusion that even though I'm not a Christian, in almost
52:13
every way I am a Christian, because everything I believe about the way the world should be
52:18
is basically came from the Christian revolution 2000 years ago.
52:22
Now, again, he's one of these interesting characters who, and I sketch this out in the
52:26
chapter, who's kind of seemed to be teetering on the edge of Christianity because he wants
52:30
it to be true.
52:31
He knows he doesn't want to live in a world where atheism is true, because he can't make
52:36
sense of this real deep belief he has in human value and equality and dignity.
52:42
And he knows it came from Christianity.
52:44
The question is, can he get to the point where he really believes the Christian story
52:49
is true?
52:50
My argument simply is the reason Christianity works so well is because it is true, okay?
52:56
That actually that's, it's not, sometimes the psychologist, the Peterson's, they kind
53:02
of like to flip it around and they say, you know, it works, therefore, we can kind of
53:06
think of it as true.
53:07
And I would say no, it's true, and that's why it works, okay?
53:13
You don't have to kind of, you know, split those two things apart.
53:18
Things generally work because they're true, you know, and so, so, so that's, that's my
53:22
simple plea to, to, to many of these secular intellectuals is they, you know, just follow
53:27
the evidence where it leads basically if it works brilliantly, there's a reason for that.
53:32
When you're teeing up a quote from chapter four, your book, which is rediscovering the
53:36
Bible.
53:37
Now this is the longest quote I'm going to read for the day, maybe the last one.
53:40
So if you're tired of hearing me read out loud, good, good.
53:43
This is, we've made it to this point.
53:44
Stick with me.
53:45
Here we go, Peterson goes as far as to say that the Bible itself functions as the definitive
53:50
texts out of which all their texts and thoughts in the Western world flow.
53:55
As he puts it, it isn't that the Bible is true, it's that the Bible is the precondition
54:00
for the manifestation of truth, which makes it way more true than just true.
54:06
That means a modern Westerner can no more dismiss the Bible than someone standing on
54:10
the 25th floor of a high rise apartment can dismiss the foundation of their building on
54:14
the basis that it seems far away.
54:17
Peterson, height and Murray, that's Jordan Peterson, Jonathan, height and Douglas Murray,
54:21
all approach the Bible as secular intellectuals with a growing admiration for its foundational
54:25
contribution to our shared culture and human experience.
54:29
That alone might be enough to send many back to the Bible to explore it as a psychologically
54:34
profound and symbolically rich example of wisdom literature.
54:38
Yet, once again, in my opinion, the thinkers are still only halfway there.
54:44
So you've talked about that at length at this point, Justin, same thing with Tom Holland,
54:48
same thing with a lot of people that you talk about.
54:50
So this kind of gets into the weeds theologically a little bit, but it seems weird that they
54:57
would acknowledge the truth of Christianity and the truth of its practical application,
55:03
but not the truth that 2000 years ago, a Middle Eastern Jewish carpenter in his 30s lived
55:10
in ministry for three years died at the behest of the Jewish Sanhedrin at the hands of the
55:15
Romans on a cross and three days later rose again and then a bunch of people died attesting
55:19
to not what they read in a book, but for what they saw, right?
55:24
And so for these for these men, what what is it?
55:27
Because again, I'm not picking on Calvinist, but they would say, well, maybe they're just
55:30
not elect.
55:31
So let's just throw our hands up and not give a crap, but it's like, what is it for these
55:35
men?
55:36
Like what's it going to take for them to stop as you would call it teetering?
55:38
Well, I mean, the interesting thing is here, you know, maybe putting putting a Calvinist
55:44
hat on, there might be a purpose that God has in these being people outside the church
55:49
who are speaking into it to a crowd that the church often struggles to reach.
55:55
Oh, it would be like a prophet?
55:57
Like an old?
55:58
Yeah.
55:59
Exactly.
56:00
Profits from outside the church is a good way of putting it.
56:02
And I think I think there's to some extent, you know, the fact that I think Jordan Peterson
56:08
probably might not have drawn such an audience.
56:10
Tom Holland might not get such an audience Douglas Murray night.
56:13
If they weren't kind of, if they were already seen as Christians, if they were seen as,
56:17
you know, oh, these guys are just, you know, preaching from that song book.
56:20
So I think in an odd way, there's almost a value actually in an unexpected voice saying
56:26
to people, you should take Christianity seriously.
56:29
Okay.
56:30
Because now of course I would love them to become Christians because I think that's the
56:33
best choice anyone can ever make for themselves.
56:36
But I still think there's actually a value in having their voice outside the church in
56:39
an ironic way.
56:40
Now what is it that will take them over the line?
56:43
I think that is down to each individual person.
56:45
There's going to be all kinds of, in my experience, there are all kinds of not just intellectual
56:49
but emotional and spiritual issues that are often stopping people from kind of making
56:53
that journey.
56:54
I did have the opportunity to actually ask a bit cheekily Douglas Murray that this question
56:59
in one of the shows I did with him.
57:01
And the basis of it, as I say, he recognizes that to a degree, all of his values and his,
57:07
you know, and so on, stem from Christianity, he kind of had a kind of Christian faith up
57:13
to his early twenties and it kind of then got pulled, the rug got pulled from under him
57:17
by a kind of some intellectual arguments.
57:19
He kind of got started reading some of the 19th century biblical critics and the Germans
57:24
and so on who were doing that thing of basically undermining the historicity of the Bible basically.
57:29
And I think Douglas Murray basically needs to read some more recent scholarship, which
57:34
I think has absolutely demolished that strain of theology because I think there are so many
57:40
good scholars now who are showing the ways in which we can trust the Bible and I tried
57:45
to just give a little flavor of that in the book.
57:48
But when I asked him, like, what would it take for you to believe Douglas?
57:51
He said to me, I think I'd need to hear a voice, he said.
57:55
And so basically he's looking for kind of some kind of supernatural sign of, you know,
58:00
divine intervention.
58:02
And I finished the chapter because he'd recognized, you know, he'd talked, you know, at length
58:06
about the way he saw the Bible as fundamental to Western culture and everything else.
58:11
And I said, well, look, could God have spoken in any clearer voice than a book which has
58:15
spoken to generations of people over thousands of years in all cultures and brings together
58:24
voices from disparate cultures, places, and times in this one unified story that has this
58:30
extraordinary impact upon the whole of the world.
58:33
That might be the voice of God that you're looking for, you know, because you could imagine
58:38
that just hearing a voice in your head, well, that might just be my imagination.
58:42
That might just be what I ate for dinner last night.
58:47
But if you say you found this book that seems to have had this effect on the world that
58:52
no other book, no other piece of literature has ever had, well, maybe that's the voice
58:57
of God that you're looking for.
58:58
So I just think sometimes there needs to be just a gear shift, an intellectual gear shift
59:02
where people realize, look, the reason I find this so compelling is that there's something
59:07
real behind it.
59:08
There's something true behind it.
59:09
It's a frustrating thing because you can't make someone do that.
59:12
But I hope that in writing the book, it will help others who might find themselves in a
59:16
similar situation realize there's every reason to now trust this thing and not to kind of
59:22
hold it at arm's length any longer.
59:25
And they're not alone in thinking that.
59:26
And you know, I've given Calvinist the one too so far.
59:29
So let me throw you a bone here.
59:31
The story that just if flummoxes me, there's your $10 word of the day is the ascension.
59:39
When the ascension of Jesus is described in the New Testament in the Gospels, it's also
59:44
described that and people still didn't believe at that point.
59:49
What else do you need to see?
59:51
So again, I know you can't say his name publicly because he's like whatever that, you know,
59:55
the bad guy and Harry Potter is you can't say his name out loud, but Ravi Zacharias would
59:58
talk about people that are just like, give me a sign.
1:00:01
He's like, these are the people that will get a million signs and then demand one million
1:00:06
in one.
1:00:07
They need another sign another sign.
1:00:09
So that's a good argument for something like election and having no basically free will
1:00:15
or you couldn't possibly stand to deny the gospel because it's like if people saw Jesus
1:00:20
ascend after he was resurrected and they still didn't believe, I just can't believe people
1:00:26
are that stupid.
1:00:27
I just can't believe that people could look at that and say nothing.
1:00:30
Well, I think as I say, there's going to be all kinds of issues that are going on in
1:00:34
the background and another story I tell in the book is a very memorable moment in the
1:00:39
show.
1:00:40
I was hosting between a Christian astrophysicist Hugh Ross and a well-known atheist scientist
1:00:45
called Peter Atkins and Peter Atkins is like the most dyed in the wool atheist that you
1:00:50
could meet.
1:00:51
I mean, almost to the extent that whenever I featured him on the show, many atheists have
1:00:55
written in and said, please don't put that guy in a case, he doesn't speak for me.
1:00:59
But he's kind of he just super dismissive of any kind of argument.
1:01:03
Something that comes his way, oh, it's all just lazy thinking poppycock.
1:01:07
So anyway, we got to the end of this discussion on whether there's any evidence for God as
1:01:11
the origin of the laws of the universe.
1:01:14
And he had just, you know, battered all of the reasoning that Hugh Ross had given away
1:01:18
without really offering any counter-argument, just saying, oh, you know, it's just lazy
1:01:22
thinking.
1:01:23
So I eventually kind of got frustrated and I said, look, Peter, is there any kind of evidence
1:01:28
that could convince you that God exists?
1:01:30
And I gave him a couple examples, so, you know, what if Jesus appeared to you in the room
1:01:34
right now and said, time to come home, Peter.
1:01:37
And he said to me, well, I could be having some kind of brain malfunction.
1:01:41
And I said, okay, well, what about if the stars lined up in the sky and said, it's me,
1:01:45
God, Peter, believe in me, and said, well, it should be more likely that it was advanced
1:01:50
alien technology.
1:01:52
And I said, well, at this point, it seems like there's no evidence that could convince
1:01:58
you.
1:01:59
I mean, I said, I mean, can you think of anything?
1:02:02
And he said, no, I really can't think of anything.
1:02:04
And the point is, at this point, he's so wedded to his atheist materialism, he will filter
1:02:09
everything through that worldview.
1:02:11
So there's no possibility of you could give him arguments until you're blue in the face.
1:02:16
It's not going to move him one eye odor.
1:02:18
So what does Peter Atkins need?
1:02:19
He needs a change of heart.
1:02:20
He needs something else.
1:02:21
It's not just more evidence, it's not just more arguments.
1:02:24
So I think you're right.
1:02:25
I think there's a point at which there is something about the human heart, and it's
1:02:30
only a divine move of God that will do something in that person's life.
1:02:35
So that is the point you get to.
1:02:38
And I'm not here to kind of judge exactly where all these secular thinkers are on their
1:02:42
journey.
1:02:44
Who knows what circumstances are needed to actually get them across the line?
1:02:48
Very often, in my experience, as I'm sure it is in yours, Kyle, it's often some life
1:02:52
event that happens to someone that finally gives them what they need to be able to fall
1:02:57
into the arms of God.
1:02:58
So for me, we have to wait sometimes for people to make that journey for themselves.
1:03:03
Well, just not exactly why you're here.
1:03:05
You're here to judge all of these secular people.
1:03:07
That's why you're on the show today.
1:03:08
But no, like you do point that out in the book, and don't worry, guys, I'm not going
1:03:11
to read the quote, but there's a quote where you talk about these people, they've gotten
1:03:14
to where they need to get to intellectually, but there's a heart change that's required.
1:03:19
It's reminiscent of when Stephen Meyer was on the Joe Rogan experience here recently.
1:03:24
And I wasn't terribly enthused with how he performed.
1:03:28
I guess you could say on that podcast, I think he kind of punted on the biblical and erancy
1:03:32
questions and things like that, which, okay, whatever he he was in the moment, who might
1:03:37
be super critical.
1:03:38
But he was basically like, look, there are things that I can't explain intellectually
1:03:43
that happened to me and through me, that is super individual, so I would never try to
1:03:49
argue someone into the faith based on something that I experienced individually.
1:03:54
And like, I thought that that was a healthy answer, not an intellectually satisfying one,
1:03:58
but healthy nonetheless.
1:04:00
Now, chapter five, you get really into science.
1:04:03
It's called the alternative story of science.
1:04:07
Around chapter five is when I started to realize that the surprising rebirth of belief in God
1:04:11
is very similar to is atheism dead by Eric Metaxas.
1:04:15
Now that book is, is, you know, not as accessible as your book, but it's still required reading
1:04:22
in my opinion.
1:04:23
But there was a heading in that chapter that I loved.
1:04:26
It was sciences, neutral scientists are not.
1:04:30
And so you have these scientists that for whatever reason get a pass and we just pretend
1:04:35
like, oh, well, they're just scientists and they're just going to operate based on, you
1:04:38
know, the best types of motives and all of that.
1:04:41
But the problem is, is when these scientists that we've given this unearned moral superiority
1:04:46
to are trying to derive, ought from is, we're just skipping over the entire time where their
1:04:54
worldview doesn't give us that and we're allowing them to have this foundation from
1:04:58
which they can't argue upon because there is no foundation.
1:05:03
So talk to me a little bit about that, you know, science is neutral, but scientists are
1:05:07
clear.
1:05:08
And, and you only have to do a little research into the history of science to realize that
1:05:12
that so much of it is about the personalities of the scientists, okay, theories often didn't
1:05:18
get a hearing because scientists of the time were so invested in their own theory and it's
1:05:23
only once you get to the funerals of those scientists that an Albert Einstein can come
1:05:27
in with, you know, quantum relativity and that can sort of take over from the Newtonian
1:05:30
mechanics and so on.
1:05:32
So it's a very human activity and it's sometimes cast as somehow being completely objective
1:05:36
and everything else, but it's as human as the people who are doing it at the end of
1:05:40
the day.
1:05:41
And likewise, when scientists make pronouncements on God, they are speaking from their own flawed
1:05:48
human biases.
1:05:49
They are not speaking from science because science itself really won't tell you where
1:05:54
you know, it'll give you some evidence that you might put into a philosophical argument
1:05:58
for whether God exists, but it's not the kind of the arbiter on those kinds of questions.
1:06:02
It's good for some things, but it's not going to tell you why you're here, what value is.
1:06:07
And likewise, you know, I cringe whenever I hear scientists kind of making moral pronouncements
1:06:13
about, you know, that are somehow tied to science because the fact is you can use science
1:06:17
to feed the poor or you can use it to build an atomic bomb, but it, you know, it's neutral
1:06:23
in that sense.
1:06:24
It's the humans who put the value in as to what you're going to do with it.
1:06:27
And to that extent and science itself won't tell you what the good thing is to do.
1:06:32
That's where you need something else.
1:06:33
And in my view, you know, the Christian story is the best example of how to build a flourishing
1:06:38
world and how to use science to its best effect in that way.
1:06:43
So yeah, it's just kind of it's just at the very outset, really, of the book of that chapter.
1:06:47
I wanted to make clear that exactly as you said, science can tell you the way things
1:06:52
are that is, if you like, but they can't, but it won't tell you the way things ought to be.
1:06:57
I mean, I've got a little TikTok video that went that went viral a little while ago where
1:07:02
I talk about I have a cake in front of me that my wife has baked and I kind of do a
1:07:06
little skit where I'm a scientist and I'm saying I can tell you everything about this
1:07:10
cake.
1:07:11
You know, I can tell you it's chemical composition, the exact ratio of flour, eggs and sugar,
1:07:15
what it does to the synapses in my brain when I eat a slice and all of that.
1:07:19
And I say, but if you ask me why the cake is here, that I can't answer as a scientist.
1:07:26
How would you find out?
1:07:27
You'd have to ask the person who made it.
1:07:29
You'd have to ask my wife.
1:07:30
And it's the same with us, with the universe.
1:07:33
Science is great at picking it apart, looking at all the bits and pieces that make up.
1:07:37
But it's not going to answer the question why you're here.
1:07:40
It's not going to answer the question why the universe is here.
1:07:42
You have to go and ask the maker.
1:07:43
So for me, it's a simple point, but I think it's one a lot of people miss because they
1:07:47
think that science is this complete answer to everything and it just isn't.
1:07:52
Well, the next time I come over to the UK, I would like to ask your wife, you know, why
1:07:56
she made the cake because I want to have some.
1:07:59
I love cake.
1:08:00
And so I would love to have some of your wife's cake.
1:08:02
She is a great cake maker.
1:08:04
I'm very lucky in that respect.
1:08:05
Well, I'll be the judge of that, Justin, like just don't don't you worry about.
1:08:08
I'll figure that out.
1:08:10
But you know, you talk about in the book too, like you talked about the example of boiling
1:08:13
water.
1:08:14
Why is there boiling water inside the kettle?
1:08:17
You can explain it scientifically, but it can't explain that.
1:08:21
Hey, you just wanted some tea and I'm reminded, I'm going to butcher the quote, but it was
1:08:25
someone that said when the scientists finally reach, you know, the peak, they'll realize
1:08:31
that the theologians have been there for centuries already.
1:08:34
And so I again, I don't know who that that quote is attributed to, but that that comes
1:08:38
to mind.
1:08:40
Now I was going to, I decided that I wasn't going to ask this question, but I just can't
1:08:44
help myself.
1:08:45
I have to ask it.
1:08:46
But if you don't mind, please be brief and that's for my favor because I'm just going
1:08:50
to get in trouble.
1:08:51
Okay.
1:08:52
Okay.
1:08:53
So one of the least interesting topics in all of Christendom to me is young earth versus
1:08:59
old earth.
1:09:00
I could not care less about how old the earth is.
1:09:04
I don't care.
1:09:06
And I think it's because it's not actually knowable and provable in any way shape or form.
1:09:12
So why am I going to listen to three hours of debates between this nerd versus that nerd
1:09:17
trying to prove that this is exactly why it is.
1:09:20
But the reason I bring that up is I feel like young earth people, the zealots of young earth,
1:09:26
the people that have no intellectual space for any other explanation other than seven
1:09:31
literal 24 hour days as we understand 24 hour days, 6,000 years of the age of the earth,
1:09:36
all that kind of stuff.
1:09:38
Those people don't, they're not doing themselves favors, you know, when it comes to the debate
1:09:45
between science and faith, because they seem to be drawing a line between science and faith
1:09:50
and saying, it's all about the Bible.
1:09:52
And if you don't read the Bible, literally you're a moron.
1:09:54
And the problem is the Bible, there's lots of different types of writings.
1:09:59
Obviously, there's prophetic writings, there's wisdom literature, there's history, there's
1:10:04
allegory, there's apocalyptic, there's poetry, there's all of that.
1:10:08
And so if you read the entire Bible, literally, you're going to think that Jesus was a vine.
1:10:13
You're going to think that he's a door that you get to walk through, right?
1:10:17
And so the young earth thing, I just, I find it intellectually unstimulating because why
1:10:22
would God give us all the tools by which to gauge his creation only to like pull the rug
1:10:28
out from underneath us and be like, huh, gotcha.
1:10:30
It's only 6,000 years old.
1:10:32
Trust me.
1:10:33
Can I get what I'm saying?
1:10:34
Yeah.
1:10:35
No, I feel very, very similar about that.
1:10:37
I'm not a young earth creationist myself, and I'm really excited about the fact that
1:10:43
actually our best science points in the direction of God.
1:10:46
When you look at big bang cosmology, when you look at the fine tuning of the universe
1:10:49
for life, and the problem is with the young earth perspective is it wipes out that apologetic,
1:10:56
which I think is a great shame because you have to insist on a 6,000 year old universe.
1:11:00
And that essentially we're kind of have been duped in some way or mistaken about the age
1:11:05
of the universe and everything else.
1:11:08
So yeah, I just agree with you there.
1:11:11
I also agree that those early chapters of Genesis, I respect my friends who take a different
1:11:16
view from me on that, but I don't think we're meant to read them in a kind of as a scientific
1:11:20
textbook.
1:11:21
That's not what they've been written to us for.
1:11:23
And to that extent, I've always agreed with that view held by many of the church fathers
1:11:28
that God's given us a book of revelation in scripture, and we meant to encounter Jesus
1:11:32
through that.
1:11:33
And he's given us another book of revelation in nature, and we're meant to understand that
1:11:37
God reveals himself through that as well.
1:11:39
And I think science is pointing towards God, our best science towards God rather than away
1:11:43
from God.
1:11:44
Okay, let's run away from that before people start showing up with pitchforks and torches.
1:11:48
So let's get into chapter six.
1:11:50
That's mind, meaning and the material is this is my favorite quote of the book.
1:11:55
Okay.
1:11:56
So here we go.
1:11:57
The books are themselves the result of an undirected predetermined process that boils
1:12:02
down to the movements of the atoms in our head.
1:12:05
Then how can we claim to have base those beliefs on reason and evidence?
1:12:11
That's the boom.
1:12:12
Shaka Laka, NBA jam.
1:12:13
Like that's the dunk right there.
1:12:15
That's the mic drop moment.
1:12:16
Yeah.
1:12:17
That is the mic drop moment.
1:12:18
I've heard similar quotes from other people as well.
1:12:20
It's like, if we're just the random spontaneous, you know, sparking of synapses, then how can
1:12:27
we trust ourselves?
1:12:28
Because you'll have these, these high-minded scientists, you know, again, they'll go on
1:12:31
something like the Joe Rogan experience and they'll just kind of ha ha ha, they'll laugh
1:12:35
about all these silly simpletons that believe in this spaghetti monster in the sky that
1:12:39
wants them, wants to be worshiped.
1:12:41
But it's like you're arguing against yourself.
1:12:45
It's literally sawing off the limb that you're sitting on.
1:12:48
So talk to be a little bit more about that quote.
1:12:51
I mean, one of the remarkable things that I've noticed, especially with the new atheists
1:12:55
is they've really gone hard for this kind of determinist view of reality.
1:12:59
This idea that the universe is basically just a clockwork thing where every physical cause
1:13:05
can be explained by a previous physical cause.
1:13:08
Now the problem with this is that it is, it like completely undercuts their position because
1:13:14
at the same time, they're saying, we believe you need to, you know, base all your thinking
1:13:19
on the best evidence, you know, you've got to reason yourself into your positions.
1:13:22
It's no good simply believing things without evidence.
1:13:25
But the problem is that the view that we live in a deterministic universe, where every single
1:13:30
thing, including all of your thoughts, feelings and actions have been completely predetermined
1:13:35
from the beginning of time by an inexorable physical process that you had absolutely no
1:13:40
control over, because that's what determinism is.
1:13:44
That cannot logically consist with the idea that you decide the things you believe in based
1:13:51
on a process of reason and evidence, okay?
1:13:54
Those two things are completely incompatible because if, if what's actually happening at
1:13:57
a chemical level at an atomic level is just physical processes in a kind of domino effect,
1:14:04
this happened, that happened, that happened.
1:14:06
There's no truth or falsity about any of that.
1:14:08
There's no reasoning that takes place.
1:14:09
All that's happening is chemistry, chemicals, stuff that eventually ends up in new saying
1:14:15
I'm an atheist, but it wasn't a reasoning process that got you there.
1:14:20
And so there is this fundamental inconsistency that astounds me actually that so few atheists
1:14:26
realize it, who preach this kind of determinism that we live in, this completely closed system,
1:14:31
this universe, whereas every single thing can be determined just by the atoms and electrons
1:14:35
doing their thing.
1:14:36
And yet believe they've got the freedom to make up their mind about whether there's a
1:14:40
God or not, you didn't, if you believe the first thing, then you can't believe the second
1:14:44
thing.
1:14:45
But of course, that means you can't believe anything because it was all given to you like
1:14:49
the universe decided what you would believe from the moment it came into being basically.
1:14:55
So it's something that because it's a little bit more of a technical philosophical thing
1:15:01
to get your head around, not that many people engage with, but there have been very good
1:15:05
people like C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinger who have developed this as what someone has
1:15:09
called the argument for God from reason.
1:15:12
And I think it's really worth pressing home because for me, it is a huge inconsistency
1:15:17
in the atheist worldview that they will insist that we live in this deterministic universe
1:15:21
of purely material cause and effect and yet try to have their cake and eat it by saying,
1:15:27
but I believe you need to be a completely rational person and everything else.
1:15:29
I mean, and that's without even touching things like morality, right or wrong, you know, all
1:15:35
of those also disappear in a deterministic universe.
1:15:38
So any atheist who says who kind of rails against religion for the awful things that it's done
1:15:42
and tells you how you should live your life, they have absolutely no ground to stand.
1:15:47
And if they believe we're living in a deterministic universe, cause you had absolutely no choice
1:15:51
in the matter.
1:15:52
If you were going to be Hitler, you were always going to be Hitler.
1:15:54
If you were going to be the most wonderful, life-giving, compassionate person, again,
1:16:00
it wasn't you.
1:16:01
It was the universe.
1:16:02
It was the atoms and electrons doing their thing.
1:16:04
No one has any cause for feeling good about themselves or bad about themselves.
1:16:09
It just is what happens on that atheist perspective.
1:16:12
So for me, yeah, it's something I get quite passionate about, but it's just this massive
1:16:17
contradiction in the worldview as far as I can see.
1:16:20
Well, and also since you brought up Hitler, I guess I'm allowed to talk about him now because
1:16:24
that's another name that shall not be named.
1:16:26
What is the bad guy from Harry Potter?
1:16:28
I can't, I can't understand the reference.
1:16:29
Who's the guy who can't say his name?
1:16:31
Voldemort.
1:16:32
That's what you get when you don't read the books or watch the movie.
1:16:34
Sorry, kids.
1:16:35
I don't know who Voldemort is.
1:16:36
But the thing about it too is if you take their worldview of determinism to its logical
1:16:41
conclusion, you should be, this sounds so crazy.
1:16:44
Someone's going to clip this out later and, you know, take it out of context, but you
1:16:48
should be ecstatic that Hitler killed six million Jews.
1:16:52
You should be ecstatic because he was the superior chimp and he took out all of the inferior
1:17:01
chimps.
1:17:02
He was the dominant alpha chimp that got a bunch of other chimps to take advantage of
1:17:07
these lesser than chimps.
1:17:09
Like, again, you should think that that was a great thing because guess what, all the,
1:17:15
you know, gay people that they killed, all the Jews, all the people at Down syndrome,
1:17:19
all the people that were in the infirmaries, he got rid of all that bad DNA, right?
1:17:24
Like, that's, that's the, that is the worldview in the nutshell.
1:17:29
It is a Nazi-esque type of worldview.
1:17:31
So I'm going to jump as far away from what I just said, so again, so nobody clicks it
1:17:35
out later.
1:17:36
Let's get into the last chapter as we start to round-ish towards a close here.
1:17:40
The last chapter is the surprising rebirth of belief in God, the same namesake as the
1:17:45
book itself.
1:17:46
And in that chapter, you talk about a term that was coined by Sky Jathani.
1:17:51
I think it's how they say their last name, but it's the danger of the rise of what they
1:17:56
call the evangelical industrial complex.
1:17:59
So that's obviously a play on words with the military industrial complex, which we're
1:18:03
all becoming more aware of, but it's this idea of celebrity pastors, basically not really
1:18:10
holding hands of widows in the hospital, but doing things for TikTok or for Instagram,
1:18:17
big money churches, all the scandals therein, making decisions based on growth and not Christ.
1:18:25
As I mentioned earlier, these pastors that are more like CEOs at the head of a board of
1:18:30
directors, as opposed to a senior pastor at the head of an elder board at the head of
1:18:35
a church type of a thing, why is the evangelical industrial complex actually hurting people's
1:18:42
belief in God or really the rebirth of belief in God?
1:18:46
Yeah, I mean, that chapter, I only sort of briefly do a couple of paragraphs, but my concern
1:18:53
there was to point out the fact that if we are seeing this potential kind of incoming
1:18:57
tide of people looking for meaning, looking for purpose, and maybe considering the Christian
1:19:02
worldview again, will the church be ready to receive them?
1:19:05
And my worry is that, particularly in the evangelical church in the West, it's been going
1:19:10
through a time of reckoning, which suggests that it's not in a good fit place to do that,
1:19:14
because we have been seeing, sadly, a lot of these celebrity pastors, scandals, fools
1:19:18
from grace, and generally, the evangelical church kind of get really not keeping its
1:19:23
on the main thing, which is about bringing people into this hope, this new life with
1:19:28
Christ, but about, as you say, kind of being more concerned with growth metrics and everything
1:19:33
else and sort of, in some ways, kind of copying some of the standards of the world.
1:19:38
And I think, I think in a way, the fact that we have gone through this painful period where
1:19:43
we've seen the collapse of certain ministries because of some of the scandals that have
1:19:46
been going on, it's, we need to learn the lessons from that.
1:19:49
We need to see that, actually, sometimes God's purposes will be done in spite of us, rather
1:19:55
than because of us, that God doesn't necessarily need our particular version of church in order
1:20:00
to see people come to him.
1:20:02
And it might be that something else is going to come up if the church is no longer, if
1:20:06
certain parts of the church no longer fit for purpose, then the gates of hell will not prevail.
1:20:11
It's just that God will be raising up a different kind of church, a different people.
1:20:15
So I just think we're in one of those moments where, probably, we're going to find out,
1:20:20
and there'll be a kind of, yeah, the tears and the wheat will kind of be separated.
1:20:26
There's going to be some ministries, some churches, which I think are going to be cast
1:20:30
into the fire because they're not following Christ, they're not actually doing that faithful
1:20:34
thing of just preaching the gospel and bringing people through.
1:20:39
They're more concerned with, yeah, the celebrity stuff, the kind of the growth stuff and everything
1:20:43
else.
1:20:44
But there actually, there is going to be still a container.
1:20:49
There has always been a container.
1:20:50
The church has gone through many periods of change, certain forms of church dying off,
1:20:55
new forms of church coming up and being re-energized.
1:20:58
And I think we're in the middle of one of those kind of revolutions in the church.
1:21:02
And I firmly believe that God will get his way, that there will be, you know, when people
1:21:08
are ready to come back to the Christian story, they'll find a church that's waiting for them
1:21:11
to be able to be that story, that family again for them.
1:21:15
It just might not be the church that we've been trying to build in lots of parts of the
1:21:19
West.
1:21:21
And I don't reserve my, you know, judgment here just for those evangelical subculture
1:21:26
things.
1:21:27
I think there's lots of the mainstream church which is already dying on its feet because
1:21:30
it's forgotten the gospel because it's not actually doing what it was supposed to do.
1:21:36
And likewise, if that's no longer fit for purpose, it will wither on the vine.
1:21:40
It will, you know, it'll go away.
1:21:42
And whatever the next thing is that God has, we'll come up in its place.
1:21:47
One of the interesting things just to stick with this for a moment is when I have spoken
1:21:52
to some of these secular intellectuals who seem drawn to the Christian story, the one
1:21:57
thing they've often said to me is, you're not going to persuade me to come to church
1:22:01
if it's just a warmed over version of the secular world that I already existed in.
1:22:05
Okay.
1:22:06
I want, if I was going to convert, I'd want the real thing.
1:22:09
Okay.
1:22:10
I want the proper doctrine.
1:22:12
I don't want some kind of dumb down diluted kind of let's just apologize for all the weird
1:22:18
aspects of Christianity version of Christianity because I can get that in the world that,
1:22:22
you know, it's hardly worth converting if that's all I'm getting.
1:22:25
So I just think that's a real, really important for churches to recognize that they're kind
1:22:29
of lowering the bar isn't going to get more people into the church.
1:22:33
You'll just make the church look more like the world.
1:22:35
And then people will be like, well, I can get what you're offering, you know, but the
1:22:39
golf club or by going to a Coldplay concert, I don't need, I don't need it from church.
1:22:44
So I think that's a really important message to, you know, the way I put it in the book
1:22:47
is keep Christianity weird because actually we are weird and we need to be weird because
1:22:52
otherwise we won't stand out from from what's already offer.
1:22:55
Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about next.
1:22:57
But you know, we've talked about Ravi Voldemort, Hitler, and young earth creationists, all things
1:23:03
you're not allowed to bring up.
1:23:04
So I'm going to bring up another thing, you're not allowed to bring up COVID.
1:23:06
Well, COVID did with a lot of ministry ministries rather in churches is it created a dividing
1:23:12
line?
1:23:13
Is your church squishy or is it not?
1:23:16
And in my particular community, the church I was going to is a church that's been around
1:23:20
for 30 years, and it's just kind of slowly grown, slowly grown, slowly grown during
1:23:25
COVID though.
1:23:26
And in the months after explosive growth, part of that is to do with a addition of built
1:23:32
on to the church, but there were two huge ministries in our area to enormous churches.
1:23:38
One is a large church in America, live church and another one called Henderson Hills.
1:23:42
There was some different things happening at those churches and droves of families left
1:23:48
those churches to come to the church that I go to faith Bible.
1:23:51
And that's not hey, faith Bible is the best right at the top of the podium.
1:23:54
But I think COVID revealed some unhealth and some squishiness in the ideologies and theologies
1:24:01
of these ministries and these ministers in particular.
1:24:04
And people were like, wait a minute, like, I got kids here and like, maybe even if I don't
1:24:10
believe it, like, I think we got to go somewhere where there's a little bit more depth.
1:24:14
And we're kind of the, we're the, we're the Bible church, if you will, like it's, it's
1:24:18
repository preaching.
1:24:19
It's not exciting by any stretch of the imagination, but it's deep, like we're not being entertained,
1:24:24
we're being fed.
1:24:25
And so it's a little bit different there.
1:24:27
And I do want to talk about the thing you mentioned in your last chapter, which is keep
1:24:31
Christianity weird.
1:24:34
And we talked about this a little bit last time, and to be honest, I didn't like your
1:24:36
answer.
1:24:37
And so that's why I'm bringing it up again.
1:24:39
And so part of the thing of being weird, Justin, is not taking our cues from culture about
1:24:45
how we should act.
1:24:47
And so the last time you're on the show, we talked about trans pronoun hospitality, as
1:24:51
it's called, and how a biological male sitting before you, they are demanding that you use
1:24:57
female pronouns.
1:24:58
And you go, okay, I don't want to, I don't want to offend you.
1:25:01
So I'll just use pronouns.
1:25:02
I will lie so that you feel better.
1:25:06
Part of the thing about being weird is saying, I'm so sorry, I can't do that for you.
1:25:11
Like if someone claims they're a toaster, I'm not going to shove bread up their rear end.
1:25:15
Like I'm going to be like, no, this is not hospitable for me to treat you like a toaster
1:25:20
in the same way.
1:25:21
It's not hospitable of me to treat you as a woman and to refer to you as such.
1:25:26
So that's a specific example, but I would have broadened it out a little bit.
1:25:31
How can we keep Christianity weird if we're just playing secular songs at church, doing
1:25:37
the TED talks that everyone's used to, using made up nonsense pronouns, putting litter
1:25:42
boxes in our bathrooms for the furries that come through the door?
1:25:45
Like where do we draw the line, Justin?
1:25:48
I think it's going to be different for different people, isn't it?
1:25:51
Because so much of this is kind of culturally instantiated.
1:25:55
And I agree that actually there is a point where you have to tell the truth, where you
1:25:59
have to sort of be upfront with people and say, look, the more loving thing is to give
1:26:06
you what I believe is actually the truth in this matter.
1:26:09
My only concern here, Kyle, is that it's so easy, I think, for the church to get drawn
1:26:14
into a kind of the culture war and just become another kind of clanging symbol in what is
1:26:20
just this constant battle now between the left and right and so on.
1:26:24
And while I think the church should take a stance for truth, because it needs to be clear
1:26:28
on where it stands on issues, and you have to do that.
1:26:32
At the same time, it should also not be just playing by the rules of the culture, which
1:26:38
is just about this polarization and basically building up your barricades against the other
1:26:45
side and doing everything you can to demolish them.
1:26:48
Because the person I want to follow is not Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, it's Jesus,
1:26:53
okay, it's like, I want to see how did Jesus deal with people?
1:26:58
And he basically spent a lot of time with the people who were on the margins, who were
1:27:03
the kind of considered to be unfit or whatever by the religious authorities.
1:27:09
But no one who came into the presence of Jesus left the same as they'd arrived, okay?
1:27:14
He transformed everyone.
1:27:16
So there was this grace, and there was this truth, and that is what Christianity is, it's
1:27:20
grace and truth.
1:27:21
So I think we'd have to have churches where we can sit down and break bread with someone
1:27:25
we may disagree with, if they're transgender or whatever, that we don't simply treat them
1:27:29
as someone beyond the pale, who we are just going to treat as some kind of enemy outsider.
1:27:37
Jesus asks more of us than that.
1:27:39
He says, no, sit down with them and treat them as a brother or sister, treat them as
1:27:44
a human being, someone made in my image.
1:27:46
And that, I just think that you've got so much more chance of transformation happening
1:27:51
when that happens.
1:27:52
So it's not that I disagree with you, because I think you do have to preach truth.
1:27:57
But the way Jesus did it was different to the way our culture does it.
1:28:01
And I just think that the church needs to look and feel different to the culture in
1:28:05
that way.
1:28:07
So I like some things that you just said, I don't like it.
1:28:10
So let me draw the line.
1:28:12
I'm glad you brought up Ben Shapiro because I've listened to Ben Shapiro for years.
1:28:15
I think he's ridiculously smart.
1:28:18
Sometimes though, he gets me fired up to go dunk on the libs, like that's kind of the
1:28:22
idea.
1:28:23
Like I'm going to own the libs and it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
1:28:26
I'm not a conservative Christian.
1:28:28
I'm a Christian conservative Christian comes first.
1:28:31
Good.
1:28:32
But the thing that I see whenever I look at Jesus's life is he was very forward about
1:28:36
pointing out people's sin, but and here's the other thing that's interesting.
1:28:41
People love to say that Jesus hung out with sinners.
1:28:44
It's the exact opposite sinners hung out with Jesus.
1:28:47
Like they wanted to be around this guy and they didn't know why exactly and call the Holy
1:28:54
Spirit, call it indigestion.
1:28:55
They were just pulled in.
1:28:56
They liked me.
1:28:57
They just couldn't help themselves.
1:28:59
And so it's like how I guess that the needle that we all have to thread Justin is how can
1:29:06
we be so attractive to non-believers while also not selling ourselves down the river just
1:29:12
to get a few paths on the head by people on Twitter.
1:29:14
Absolutely.
1:29:15
I couldn't agree more.
1:29:16
And I think that that is where the rubber hits the road and it's where you have to kind
1:29:20
of, you know, say, look, there's some things I'm not prepared to do just for the sake
1:29:25
of appearing politically correct and you'll because in the end I don't think I don't think
1:29:30
just playing the rule by the rules of the culture will actually actually in the end get
1:29:35
you Christ followers.
1:29:38
I think what we're called to do is to be radical in the people we're willing to be
1:29:44
around and to kind of say I'm not going to just, you know, exclude you because you are
1:29:51
a Republican or a Democrat or whoever.
1:29:54
But actually we're going to sit down and we're going to talk and I'm going to show you grace.
1:29:58
So the church has to be this place of grace.
1:30:00
I think cancel culture is one of the worst things I think about this, you know, in our
1:30:06
present culture and the church has to be a place where we can own our mistakes and have
1:30:11
a fresh start.
1:30:13
And that's about actually allowing people the grace to kind of be who they are, not
1:30:19
coming, you know, as perfect ready-made Christians, but where we'll sit down and we'll try and
1:30:24
go on this journey together.
1:30:26
And it's really difficult, you know, because it is much easier to just kind of own the
1:30:30
libs and do that kind of way of engaging the culture.
1:30:34
It's much easier and kind of you feel better about yourself.
1:30:37
It's much more difficult, I think, to do the genuine let's actually take the Jesus approach
1:30:42
to this who wasn't willing to just, you know, be defined by the left or the right of his
1:30:49
day.
1:30:50
You know, he walked his own unique path and, you know, changed the world because of it.
1:30:53
And I just think we've got to take that harder path.
1:30:56
We can't just be lazy and just, you know, do it the way the world does it.
1:31:01
I will tell you, it is way more fun to own the libs than it is to sit down over coffee.
1:31:05
I will just admit that I'm man enough to admit that, but, you know, where we're over our
1:31:09
bargained amount of time, so we'll make this the last question of the day.
1:31:12
We need to put a bow on this interview and a bow on the new book.
1:31:15
But this is going to come as a shock to people that have listened to our three conversations
1:31:19
and we're an hour and a half in now.
1:31:21
You're a fairly optimistic guy, I'm a fairly pessimistic guy.
1:31:24
But for a pessimist like me, why are you so optimistic about the future of Christianity?
1:31:32
Because of Jesus, really, I just think we've got the best thing in the universe on our side.
1:31:38
And however bad it looks right now, however, you know, awful, the culture looks, whatever
1:31:44
the statistics tell us about church decline and the rise of the nuns.
1:31:48
I, you know, maybe it's the Calvinist again coming out of me.
1:31:50
But I just think God's in control and actually there will be, we are seeing one little moment
1:31:56
of a much bigger picture.
1:31:59
And there's always been, you know, as Chesterton said, Christianity has died a thousand deaths,
1:32:05
but it has always risen again because it has a God who knew his way out of the grave.
1:32:08
And I think I'm just kind of pointing the ways in which I think we might be seeing God
1:32:13
walking out of the grave again in our culture.
1:32:15
And I'm optimistic in that sense because I think, you know, we, yeah, if it's just down
1:32:20
to us, if we, if the atheist story is true, and we're all just basically floating around
1:32:25
as meat sacks in a meaningless universe, then, yeah, there's really no reason to be optimistic.
1:32:29
We're probably going to blow ourselves up or, you know, you know, explode each other
1:32:35
on Twitter or something.
1:32:37
But thank God that is not the story of reality.
1:32:40
That is not the truth about the way the universe is.
1:32:42
We have a God who, who created us for a purpose.
1:32:46
We're in a mess.
1:32:47
It's always been that way, but God, the great thing about this story is that God rescues
1:32:50
people from their messes and, and I believe that's going to happen in our generation,
1:32:54
too.
1:32:55
Well, Justin, you're a pro.
1:32:57
We talked about a lot.
1:32:58
We didn't talk about it all, but we talked about a lot.
1:33:00
But that's all for me.
1:33:01
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:33:04
Only that if you want to get hold of the book, you can go to my website, Justinbriley.com.
1:33:08
I'll even send you a signed copy if you want it with my own personal signature on it.
1:33:13
So do go there if you want to get hold of the book.
1:33:17
Also perhaps by the time the show lands, we'll, we'll, we're going to be putting out a special
1:33:21
podcast as well based on the book.
1:33:23
So if you like your podcast, do, do check out the surprising rebirth of belief in God.
1:33:27
But thank you for having me on.
1:33:29
Absolutely.
1:33:30
If that does come out by then, make sure to give me the link.
1:33:32
We'll put that in the show notes.
1:33:34
Justin Briley, thank you for coming back on a Daunted Life of Man's podcast.
1:33:37
It's been an absolute pleasure.
1:33:38
Thanks, Kyle.
1:33:39
There you go, guys.
1:33:40
I hope you enjoyed the third appearance of Justin Briley on our show.
1:33:43
But before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
1:33:46
Adam Don to life or mission as a quipping man to push back darkness with content that forges
1:33:50
spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
1:33:53
So the links I've got for you today, I've got a link to Justin's website where you can
1:33:55
check out all the things he's doing and get a copy of the book.
1:33:58
If you don't like shopping there, I've also got a link for Amazon so you can pick it up
1:34:01
there.
1:34:02
Again, the surprising rebirth of belief in God, it is out now.
1:34:06
Thank you guys for listening to this episode.
1:34:08
Wherever you listening to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five star view.
1:34:11
If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, you shoot me an email
1:34:15
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1:34:17
That's I N F O at and on to not life, follow us on Instagram and likes on Facebook and
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check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content
1:34:24
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1:34:25
Just go to www.undontin.life.
1:34:28
Also we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing us to use their music for our content.
1:34:32
The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua, which is off their self titled debut album
1:34:37
on face down records.
1:34:38
The links are in the description.
1:34:40
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
1:34:42
Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
1:34:48
Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:35:08
Thanks for watching.