0:00
This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:24
I'm your host Kyle Thompson, let's get into it.
0:26
All right, guys.
0:27
We've got a special return guest on the podcast today.
0:29
My name is Justin Briarley.
0:30
So he's the former host of the Unbelievable Radio Show and podcast on premiere Christian
0:34
radio in the UK.
0:35
He's authored several books.
0:37
One of the books we named the book of the year a couple of years back.
0:39
So it's the surprising rebirth of belief in God, why new atheism grew old and secular
0:43
thinkers are considering Christianity again.
0:46
And we're talking today a lot about his new book, which is why I'm still a Christian after
0:49
two decades of conversations with skeptics and atheists.
0:52
The reason I believe, which is actually a really re-release of an old book called Unbelievable.
0:56
And this guy's been on the podcast a bunch.
0:58
He's been on this as his fifth appearance.
0:59
So he was on 543, 498, 322 and all the way back on 189.
1:04
So we're very, very thrilled to have him here to talk to the audience.
1:07
But in this particular podcast, we talk at the beginning about really the surprising rebirth
1:12
of Christianity, this potential, this question I've been posing to a lot of people about.
1:15
Are we about to see a big time awakening?
1:18
Then we talk about faith in the UK.
1:19
He gave me an absolutely mind-blowing stat there at the beginning of the podcast about
1:25
what faith is doing and how that's looking in the UK and the direction that's going.
1:30
But then we also talked about the issues they're having in the UK with Islam, with a lot of
1:34
the Muslims that have immigrated to that country, some legally, some not, and how they've not
1:38
assimilated to the Western culture and how that's causing a lot of issues there.
1:41
But then throughout this conversation, we do dig into a lot of other things.
1:44
We talk about this incongruity that's growing between these secular atheist women, highly
1:51
college-educated women, and then these men that are being drawn more back towards the
1:55
faith but are a little bit more blue collar, perhaps not going to college and some of the
1:58
issues that that's creating.
1:59
But then we get into the actual book we talk about, okay, you're taking off your moderator
2:03
hat and then you're putting on your Christian apologist hat, how are you able to go back
2:06
and forth with those different things?
2:08
But then we get into, okay, what are atheists doing when they're trying to find quote-unquote
2:12
meaning in the world?
2:13
Like, how are they able to do that?
2:15
Okay, what about when atheists bring up the problem of evil, the problem of human suffering?
2:19
Like how do people respond to that?
2:21
But then also just they're trying to dispense with this Jesus person as if he didn't even
2:25
exist in history, but even if they acknowledge that he existed in history, okay, they want
2:28
to turn him into something else.
2:30
So not Jesus to save you're more like Jesus the guru or Jesus the person in my own image,
2:35
not in the image of God type of a thing.
2:37
And then we talk towards the end about deconstruction and reconstruction, how that's caused some
2:41
issues because a lot of people will deconstruct their faith with no intentions of actually
2:45
reconstructing it.
2:46
We get into some of the stuff that he's going to be working on for the very near future,
2:49
but as always, I really, really enjoy my time with Justin.
2:51
So I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
2:53
So without further ado, let's get into it.
2:56
Justin Briarley, I got to tell you right from the beginning here, okay?
3:00
There are very few things and very few people on this planet that I would not only wake
3:04
up early for, but miss my workout for.
3:08
And that's for you, Justin Briarley, because it is early here in the United States of America.
3:12
Normally if I'm up this early, it's because there are weights that need to be moved.
3:15
Do you feel loved?
3:16
Cause you should.
3:17
You feel very loved.
3:18
I do.
3:19
I feel so honored that you have skipped your regular regime in order to make this particular
3:24
time of the day here in the UK with me.
3:26
Thank you, Kyle.
3:27
And I think it's because I'm feeling like extra celebratory, because this is your fifth
3:32
appearance on on dotted life of man's podcast.
3:35
Now, you know, there are restaurants where if you buy like four sub sandwiches, you get
3:38
the fifth one free or you get four slushies, you get the fifth one free.
3:42
I feel like what struck me this morning is this is bingo, right?
3:45
Because in bingo, you got to get five in a row or whatever.
3:48
And so I've got a celebratory tea, which feels very appropriate, considering I'm talking
3:53
to an Englishman to the you as well, cheers.
3:56
But man, five appearances on the show.
3:58
What's wrong with you?
3:59
Like you couldn't get it all out in the first four?
4:01
I don't know.
4:02
You keep very kindly inviting me back.
4:05
Is this unusual for you to have a guest on this many times on the show?
4:09
I think, you know, aside from the people that we have on every month, I think it's
4:13
like you and John Eldridge.
4:15
I think I've been on here like five times, maybe John's been on six or Holly McKay's been
4:19
on a bunch of times too.
4:20
But yeah, this, this is rare air that you're in right now.
4:23
I feel absolutely, not only have you foregone your normal training regime, I'm in the company
4:29
of some amazing people there.
4:30
So thank you so much.
4:32
You are.
4:33
I am weaker, but my audience is better for it.
4:35
So let's go and launch in.
4:36
And I guess what we need to do from the beginning is because again, the first time you're on
4:39
the show, you're still doing the unbelievable podcast.
4:42
You have since no longer been doing the unbelievable podcast you've been doing.
4:45
Some other things.
4:46
Obviously, we're going to get into your new old book here in just a second.
4:49
But when the world are you doing now, I'm sure you're gainfully employed, making content.
4:53
So what are you doing?
4:54
I am keeping myself busy.
4:56
So since moving on from the unbelievable show, I, a big focus of my time has been something
5:01
called the surprising rebirth of belief in God, and I'm pretty sure that's what I came
5:04
on last time to talk about the book and the podcast series.
5:07
I came on last time because you were the book of the year for that year and so we snuck
5:11
you back onto the show for it.
5:13
Yeah.
5:14
Well, thank you so much.
5:15
It was so kind of you to have me on.
5:16
But the surprising rebirth of belief in God just for those who maybe don't recall the
5:20
last conversation is my thesis that we're seeing a renewal of interest in Christian faith in
5:25
the West after a long period in which the new atheists kind of dominated the scene.
5:31
I think we're starting to see the growth of a new conversation on faith from secular intellectuals
5:36
like Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, iron herciali and others, who are kind of like creating
5:42
this really interesting wave of new interest in the value of faith.
5:46
And I think we're starting to see that represented now in the way that just Gen Z are becoming
5:52
more and more interested in spiritual matters, taking faith seriously.
5:56
There's some extraordinary statistics coming out about the return, especially of young
5:59
men to church, which are obviously interesting for this podcast.
6:03
And so yeah, I'm quite interested in galvanized, hopeful, optimistic.
6:09
And so I've been trying to just chart that really, both through the book that came out
6:12
18 months ago, but also the ongoing podcast documentary series, the surprising rebirth
6:17
of belief in God.
6:19
Well, with everything that you've put your hands on, and obviously I know I joke around
6:22
a lot, but this is full sincerity here.
6:24
You do a fantastic job.
6:26
You're obviously you think through the things before you present them.
6:30
And I'm still always, when I think of an example of being a true middleman of a conversation,
6:37
I always think of unbelievable first because of how you comported yourself during a lot
6:41
of those debates, some of them were just obnoxious, not because of you, but especially the person
6:46
that had more of the atheistic view, it's like, these are just terrible people.
6:49
It's like, I don't understand why you're not just ganging up on these individuals, but
6:52
it's because you're a lot nicer than I am.
6:54
But I do want to ask you, it's a derivative of what you just described, but I've been
6:57
asking a lot of people, I asked John Eldridge this, I've asked a lot of people recently
7:01
on the show about this, but it does seem like there's, you're calling it a rebirth, but it
7:07
seems like there's a coming capital A awakening.
7:10
So we had the the Asbury quote unquote revival a couple of years back.
7:14
It felt like to me, it was just like an artificially long worship service, but hey, I wasn't there.
7:18
What can I say?
7:20
But you do mention Ayon Hershey Ali, you mentioned Jordan Peterson, you mentioned Richard Dawkins
7:25
saying he's at least a cultural Christian.
7:28
You have Wes Huff going on the Joe Rogan experience and in an instant, he became the most famous
7:32
Christian apologist alive today because of the, the, you know, the wide birth that he's
7:39
given by Joe Rogan's fame and how huge the Joe Rogan experience is.
7:43
And yes, Bible sales soaring young men saying, man, Andrew Tate, so frickin loser, like,
7:50
I don't want to listen to this guy, he doesn't have anything for me.
7:53
Let's see what the Bible has to say.
7:56
You say rebirth, I say potential awakening.
7:59
What say you to that?
8:00
Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're looking at.
8:02
I think there are two different descriptions of the same thing.
8:06
I think the young man piece is particularly interesting and it's just something that I
8:10
was noticing even when I wrote the book that obviously a lot of the people being attracted
8:15
to these new secular intellectuals talking about the value of faith, people like Peterson
8:20
and others have been a lot of young men, you know, undoubtedly.
8:24
And I think that's because, and I think you've identified this as well, Kyle, there's been
8:27
a kind of male identity crisis brewing in the West for a short time.
8:32
And young men especially just don't know who they're supposed to be.
8:35
They get all these confusing messages from the culture.
8:37
And the problem is the kind of secular humanist narrative just failed to deliver any answers.
8:44
And so they've been looking for a kind of role models, basically.
8:48
Now, sadly, as you say, some of them are really bad.
8:51
They run into the Andru tapes and his vision of this kind of misogynistic, whoever sleeps
8:57
with the most women, a kind of version of reality is just the most awful thing.
9:01
It's a kind of pagan, a pre-Christian, really, view of power, men and women.
9:07
But then I think there have been some positive role models.
9:09
People like Jordan Peterson, who have kind of, whatever you think of where he lands on
9:13
the God question, he's certainly been opening the door to a lot of young men.
9:15
And I've met a lot of them who have come to faith, who have taken Christianity seriously
9:20
because of him.
9:21
So I'm thankful for him for that reason.
9:23
And so, yeah, I think it's really interesting now that we are seeing these first signs showing
9:29
up in the surveys in the polls that young men are starting to actually return to church.
9:34
Now, in the US, I saw that statistic showing that Gen Z men have overtaken women for the
9:40
first time in terms of church attendance, which is pretty extraordinary.
9:45
Here in the UK, we're about to have, at the time of recording, some extraordinary data
9:50
released, which maybe this may be the first time your audience are hearing about this.
9:54
But the Bible Society UK have been kind of tracking church going for a long time in the
9:59
UK.
10:00
They last did polls in 2018.
10:02
At that point, you know, really big sample survey, a very small proportion of young people
10:09
going to church, only 4% of young men said they went to church regularly.
10:14
They just did a new survey.
10:17
Last year, it's more than quadrupled the number of young men saying, and no one was expecting
10:23
that.
10:24
Nobody was expecting that.
10:25
But it just tallies with so much other data I'm hearing in other parts of Europe.
10:30
You've had Norway, you've had Finland, you've had Sweden all reporting rises in young people,
10:35
but especially young men starting to go to church.
10:37
You've had these stories of booms in the Eastern Orthodox church in traditional Catholicism.
10:42
Again, it's young people generally, but especially the young men seem to be coming back.
10:46
And I think it's because exactly as you said, they're looking for a better story.
10:50
And they've realized there's a better story than the Andrew Tate's.
10:54
There's a better story than the kind of liberal secular culture is offering me.
10:58
And it's the original story.
10:59
It's the Christian story.
11:00
Well, I was going to ask you about the faith numbers in the UK, but that is an absolutely
11:05
stunning revelation that we're coming.
11:08
I wonder, I don't want to dig too far into it because you don't like getting into topic
11:12
or two prickly, but with the rise of a lot of Muslims coming into the UK and some of
11:17
the issues that have been happening, at least on a street level in terms of the non assimilation
11:22
of certain cultures into another culture, perhaps has something to do with it.
11:26
But, you know, I don't mind prickly topics, honestly, you know, well, let's dig that
11:30
there's a little bit because over here, I seem to only be getting the bad stories of
11:36
non assimilation and, you know, what is it, the rape games and things like that.
11:42
Absolutely.
11:43
I come across this a lot with my US friends.
11:44
I think there's truth there.
11:46
Obviously, there are some serious issues with the way that the kind of multicultural project
11:51
has not worked out in large parts of the UK.
11:55
And absolutely, I would, you know, there's this odd thing that happened where the Muslim
12:01
rape gang thing kind of happens like the main focus on that was a few years ago now, but
12:06
it kind of came back into the public sphere, especially in the US when Elon Musk started
12:11
tweeting about it.
12:12
Now the reality is things were done.
12:15
People ended up in prison.
12:16
So it's not that, you know, this is just a crisis that got completely swept under the
12:20
carpet or anything like that.
12:22
But nonetheless, at the time, the reason why things justice took so long to be done for
12:27
a number of the girls who were being groomed and trafficked and raped in these awful gangs
12:32
was because there was a kind of political correctness where people, the authorities did
12:36
not want to rock the boat and they didn't want to appear to be Islamophobic and everything
12:41
else.
12:42
But what that did was it just fueled massive tensions within those often working class
12:46
communities, where the people on the ground could see exactly who the people were doing
12:50
this stuff.
12:51
And that is what has led to the unrest we saw last year.
12:54
You know, after the Southport murder of that tragedy of those young girls getting killed,
13:00
whatever you make of the rights and wrongs of what happened on the streets as people
13:03
came out to protest and so on, it's partly because the government has failed to adequately
13:11
address the concerns of a lot of people in the country.
13:14
So I think there's a problem.
13:16
Absolutely.
13:17
Now it may not be as bad sometimes as some of the press makes out.
13:20
When I walk down the street in London, I'm not living in Londonistan or whatever, you
13:24
know, it's not as bad as they claim sometimes.
13:28
But nevertheless yet, there's still absolutely a problem and fundamentally, no, I'm happy
13:32
to say that I do not think Islam, especially as practiced by a lot of Muslims, is as culturally
13:38
compatible, obviously, as Christianity is the faith that our civilization was founded
13:46
on.
13:47
That would be a controversial thing to say in a way, but sadly, you know, there are just
13:51
going to be instances where you see that coming to light in really visceral ways.
13:55
And those Muslim rape gangs have been one of the most awful manifestations of seeing that.
14:01
When I think you're right, and I appreciate you giving some detail on that from the ground
14:06
because something that I thought about, and I even taught Sunday school last weekend,
14:10
and it's kind of funny.
14:11
The running joke is when our Sunday school class gets a little bit too big, they make
14:14
sure I come in and speak, because I always speak on the prickly topics.
14:18
And it's just like, hey, we've got to think intellectually about these things.
14:22
We ought to be intellectually consistent, whether I'm talking about abortion or talking about
14:25
different things.
14:26
But I talked about Christian persecution.
14:28
I talked about the 70 Christians that were beheaded in the Congo by Muslim fundamentalists.
14:33
I talked about the ongoing crisis in Syria, where all Christian minorities, so Alawites,
14:41
Druze, Kurds, and especially Christians are being targeted by HTS and Al-Jalani and the
14:46
new regime there that took the place of another terrible regime with Assad.
14:53
But there is a fundamental incompatibility with Islam, Sharia law, and the West writ large.
15:03
And it felt like Matt Chandler was at the Act 29 Congress last year, and he talked about
15:08
how people treat their own sin.
15:09
They treat their sin like a baby lion, like a baby lion, so cute and cuddly.
15:14
And you know, my cut your finger, because the teeth are still kind of sharp, but it's
15:17
just cute and cuddly.
15:18
But you keep feeding it and caring for it and feeding it and caring for it.
15:21
And one day, it is reminded that it's an apex predator, and then it consumes you.
15:26
And that's what it kind of feels like has been happening in the UK.
15:30
It's been happening in Scotland and Ireland.
15:32
I don't recognize what's happening in Ireland.
15:35
If you look at people are saying within the next 30 to 40 years, Irish people will be
15:41
the minority in Ireland, right, within the next 30 to 40 years.
15:45
We see what's happening in Canada, and usually the worst parts of Canada are flushed down
15:48
into California and then spread out over the rest of America, seemingly how it goes.
15:53
But again, aside from people being scared of being called as homophobic, which if you
15:58
want to call me a name as homophobic, racist, bigoted, whatever, like, I think that's cute.
16:02
It's like, okay, what makes you think I would care what you think of me like, I'm not beholden
16:07
to you.
16:08
But gosh, there's a fundamental difference here that I think we need to talk about more,
16:12
especially Christians, you need to stop kind of tutting Islam and realize that it is a
16:17
demonic false religion that if you follow it and you believe in that, you don't get, you
16:22
don't go to heaven.
16:23
Like you don't believe in Jesus as deity, you know what I mean?
16:26
And I think we need to be absolutely upfront and honest that all religions are not the
16:29
same, not all religions have the same, obviously, beliefs for starters, but have the same cultural
16:35
outworking.
16:36
And you know, someone who's been very clear on this is Ayan Herseali, who we mentioned
16:40
earlier, who has, you know, her own story, if you like, of rejecting Islam because she
16:46
was grew up, you know, in a fundamentalist branch of it under the Muslim Brotherhood
16:50
in Somalia and thinking and kind of because of that kind of religious rejecting religion
16:55
as a whole was the most famous female atheist in the world for a number of years, alongside
16:59
Dawkins, Harris and Co.
17:01
But then of course, in just in the last couple of years, becoming a Christian, because she
17:04
realized, ah, not all religions are the same.
17:06
There's a fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam when it comes to the conception
17:11
of who God is.
17:12
And she came to realize that actually all the things she enjoyed about Western culture
17:16
were essentially products of the Christian revolution.
17:19
So I'm not going to sort of disagree with you that there are major differences, both
17:24
in the religion itself and the outworkings of that religion.
17:28
Now having said all that, where I would just push back a little bit is that I think some
17:33
of the solutions are not that are being offered are not good either.
17:36
So I don't want people embracing Islam, but I don't want them embracing the far right
17:41
either.
17:42
And there, there is a significant problem there because neither of these are Christian alternatives.
17:46
And when I, my only worry is when I see certain far right types, kind of effectively doing
17:52
a kind of demonization of Islam, ah, kind of putting all the ills of society on, on one
17:58
group of people, I think, no, that's, that isn't the Christ-like thing to do either.
18:01
We've got to find the Christ-like answer to this, which is calling people to the vision
18:06
of Jesus to, and, and, and, and that has to transcend kind of these, these kind of sub-Christian
18:12
kind of ways of, of trying to, to answer this problem.
18:14
Well, that, that's actually a very interesting topic.
18:17
Eventually, we will get to the book, but this is all very interesting to, to start out.
18:21
So you say far right, I don't know what you mean, ah, in, in terms of how the UK views
18:26
far right because when, if I were to say far right, what I don't mean is someone who voted
18:31
for Trump and what I don't mean is someone who is very conservative because I'm a very
18:35
conservative person.
18:36
And that's not why I mean it is, so we're on the same page.
18:38
So what, what I mean are like accelerationists, which I just had a guy on who was a 28 year
18:45
FBI undercover guy, he infiltrated the KKK, biker gangs, accelerationists, white supremacists,
18:50
groups that would vote for anybody that would lead to the destruction of society so that
18:55
it can be rebuilt in the image of the great white man.
18:59
And I'm like, yeah, whatever that is, you lunatic stay out there in the bushes.
19:03
I don't want y'all anywhere near the levers of power.
19:06
So, so it's similar when you say far right.
19:09
Yeah, I, I, I, exactly.
19:11
And I think there are genuinely far right parties, you know, parties like the AFD in Germany,
19:16
which are, you know, to all intents and purposes kind of very have very much neo Nazi kind
19:22
of leanings, you know, the problem is that we're at a time when people are more prepared
19:28
to listen to those and it's because of the failings on the left is I think that the reason
19:34
for the rise of that type of far right is precisely because the left pushed its agenda
19:38
so far and didn't adequately.
19:40
And so people kind of get pushed to the other extreme.
19:43
So, and the problem is, as Christians, we've got to be very wary and wise about not simply
19:47
surrendering to either extreme, but saying, no, Jesus calls us to something better.
19:52
So I think that's just my danger, you know, the thing that I want to kind of point out
19:55
is that I share a lot of the concerns that you're talking about here, but it's so, it's
20:02
so easy for Christians sometimes to be captured by, you know, when I see kind of some of the
20:06
vile stuff going around on X, purportedly from Christians that's just pure anti-Semitic,
20:12
purely racist, pure, you know, I just think, you know, something's captured so many people
20:17
and they're just being dragged to the other extreme and that's not going to help anyone
20:21
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That's mountain tough.com promo code Kyle when it goes back to some we were talking about
22:44
earlier.
22:45
So I do want to circle back to the people I feel like Andrew Tate is kind of the extreme
22:48
version.
22:49
So I think Ben Shapiro had probably the best take on Andrew Tate, which is he's great at
22:54
describing a problem, but his prescriptions are horrible, right?
22:57
And so because he's kind of playing a character in a way, I think Andrew Tate created this
23:02
persona and it kind of overtook him, right?
23:05
It was his own little personal line that this Andrew Tate character, the glasses and the
23:09
pimping and then he started actually doing those things and it's like, oh, he's actually
23:12
just a terrible person that's devoid of any type of moral code, but you have young men
23:18
that try the super pimp sex with everybody, you know, side and that's vapid and then they
23:24
also have tried the in cell thing and voluntary sell a bit where they're just going to sit
23:28
around with their friends and they just hate women and they hate the government and blah,
23:30
blah, that type of thing.
23:31
Well, that's not very fruitful either.
23:33
But then what we've seen in America, I don't know if you've seen these statistics, the breakdown
23:37
of the Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump election in terms of who won what Donald Trump did
23:43
exceedingly well with Latinos, with black people, with, you know, college educated and
23:49
non-college educated white men, like he just won in all these different categories, but
23:53
the number one category where he got absolutely trounced was college educated white women.
23:59
So liberal left leaning women and we were talking, I think it was like 30 point gap or
24:04
something there.
24:06
And so Justin, there's this thing where it's way more women in college than men.
24:12
Women don't want to marry down, right?
24:15
You know, men will marry down if you think of this in, you know, a clinical psychologist
24:19
type of a way or a sociological type of way.
24:21
So you have these women that are chasing the career and chasing the corner office and chasing
24:25
the business and all those different things.
24:27
And they're looking out on the dating pool and it's a bunch of just, you know, it's more
24:30
blue collar type guys guys that just want to make a good living and maybe they didn't
24:34
finish college or something like that.
24:36
And so it's causing more of these women to, you know, to use a pejorative to become cat
24:40
ladies.
24:41
They're like, they're just going to, you know, I've heard of women getting their tubes tied
24:45
because they're like, I don't want to get impregnated by any one of these losers.
24:48
But I definitely want to have as much random sex as possible because that's somehow liberating.
24:53
And I feel like we're running into an issue to where hopefully these young men that are
24:57
coming back to faith, I don't know, can convince the majority of women in the population that
25:03
Hey, what you're doing is, is it's not going to be beneficial for you in the long run.
25:07
I just don't know how to counsel these young men aside from, Hey, if you brush your teeth
25:11
and show up to your job on time, you're about 10 miles ahead of some of your peers.
25:15
You know what I mean?
25:16
I mean, my hope, honestly, Kyle, is that both men and women will find Jesus because,
25:21
you know, there's I, I'm really glad about the men who are coming back to faith and finding
25:28
that, yeah, there's way more to life than the Andrew Tate version, and who are starting
25:34
to kind of dig deep, if you like, and yeah, that may be coming back to more conservative
25:38
values around life and so on. And I, you know, you know, that the polls have been showing
25:43
this massive divergence between young men and young women when it comes to their political
25:46
values and so on, young women remaining very progressive young men, very more conservative.
25:51
Now, the question is, will, will the young women, will women follow suit? Okay, what
25:55
would it take in a sense for that to happen? I'm not sure what I'm not that interested
26:00
in, I suppose, is just a purely conservative project thing, though. I want people to come
26:05
to Christ and that's got to happen across both men and women. If women, you know, in
26:11
those kind of secular elites are essentially looking down on men and saying, I don't want
26:16
to be with a man if he holds those values or whatever, then yeah, that's not good either.
26:22
Because, you know, that is essentially someone who's living under a certain form of idolatry,
26:28
just as men who are, you know, captivated by, you know, take and, you know, be idolatrous
26:33
in their own way. We all need Jesus, basically, is what I'm saying. And my hope is that whatever
26:39
this swingback towards faith is among young men, it shouldn't be at the expense of women
26:43
is because the vision that Jesus gives us is of men and women flourishing together. You
26:48
know, Jesus was an absolute inspiration to those male, male disciples, but he was also
26:53
incredibly broke down the barriers that existed between men and women as well in all kinds
26:58
of phenomenal ways. He allowed women to become truly who they're supposed to be in him.
27:03
So for me, it can't be about splitting them. It can't be some false dichotomy between men
27:08
and women. It's got to be both together.
27:10
All right, very good. Well, I think we've wax poetic about enough other subjects. We
27:14
need to get into the point of today's call or today's interview because you have a new
27:18
book out. It's called Why I'm Still a Christian. I don't have it in front of me, so you're
27:21
gonna have to wave it in front of the camera. Boom, there it is. Why I'm still a Christian
27:24
after two decades of conversations with skeptics and atheists, the reason I believe. So this
27:29
is a revised and updated edition of your 2017 book called Unbelievable. And so I believe
27:34
we had you back on to have talk about that book, I think, you know, back in 2017 or 2018.
27:40
So why the revised edition? Why the updated edition? Why now?
27:43
Well, I just think that we're more in need than ever of a confident case for faith because
27:49
in a way, the surprising rebirth book was laying out this thesis that people are waking
27:54
up to the value of faith again. But when they do that, they're gonna have all kinds
27:58
of questions. They're gonna come with all of their objections, potentially, that they
28:01
heard about Christianity. But I think we're living in this moment where we've got an incredible
28:05
opportunity to share faith with people who perhaps haven't taken it seriously up till
28:11
now. So really, what I've tried to do with the new book Why I'm Still a Christian is
28:15
just to kind of explain why I'm still a Christian, because I have spent, you know, the best part
28:19
of 20 years now, hosting dialogues between atheists and skeptics, hearing from both sides
28:24
of the table. And I've came out of that actually more convinced, more confident in the Christian
28:31
faith than it was when I began. That's one to say there aren't any questions or mysteries
28:35
and all the rest of it. But what I discovered was when you put Christianity next to any
28:39
other worldview, be it atheism, Islam, Buddhism, whatever, it actually stands up intellectually.
28:45
It's a more coherent, more compelling vision of reality for all kinds of reasons. And so
28:50
I tried to kind of distill some of the core reasons why I think Christianity makes sense,
28:55
why I'm still a Christian, and help people answer some of those common objections like
29:00
the problem of suffering. You know, what about hell? All of those kinds of issues. I've tried
29:04
to do that in a book that's readable, that's based on a lot of the stories, the interactions
29:08
I've had with guests on both sides of the table over the years. And hopefully the kind
29:13
of thing that can give a Christian a sense of confidence in their faith, but they could
29:18
also give to a friend who's asking about faith. And maybe might help them on their journey
29:23
as well.
29:24
Well, and so it's actually talked about that because this is you in a way, at least maybe
29:29
to the, to the audience, you're taking off your moderator hat, you're setting that down
29:33
and you're putting on the apologist hat. And so talk a little bit about that because those
29:37
are like two different muscles. That's not just like, Hey, I'm going to turn it up a
29:40
little bit here and turn it down a little bit there. It's like two different things entirely.
29:44
Absolutely. And for years, you know, I have been that moderator in the middle of the Christian
29:49
and the atheist going at it. And one of the most frequent comments I had from people when
29:53
I was hosting those shows was, you know, very often non-Christian, who started listening.
29:58
They said, well, for a few weeks, I listened and I couldn't actually tell where you stood
30:01
Justin. I did wasn't sure if you were even a Christian. Now obviously I am a Christian,
30:05
but I think it was important whenever I do and I continue to host, you know, discussions
30:10
and debates, it's important actually to be a kind of as neutral as you can be so that
30:15
you can just let the guests do the talking and bring out the best from both sides. I think
30:19
that's, that's to respect, you know, and, and to bring out the best from both, both people.
30:24
But, you know, at the point where people started asking me, well, why, why are you still a
30:27
Christian after all these years of talking with some of the best known atheists in the
30:31
world, you know, sitting out with Dawkins and Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, you know,
30:36
and I thought, well, actually maybe it is time to, to put it all down in a book form.
30:39
And that is very different. Because as you say, you're no longer in neutral mode, you're
30:43
in making the case persuasion mode. And that's what I'm doing very consciously here. And
30:49
it's been kind of fun, I'll admit, because increasingly in the last few years, I've
30:53
much more sat more often in the seat of the Christian often in debates, you know, against
30:58
people like the atheist, youtuber, Alex O'Connor, or opposite, you know, other people, rationality
31:04
rules and other well-known atheist, youtuber. And, and it's been very different being the
31:08
person making the case from being the neutral moderator. I've kind of enjoyed it. It puts
31:13
me on the spot. And I think I've learned some of the best ways of doing that from being
31:16
in the moderator seat. So it's, it's quite a different experience though.
31:20
It's funny because as I was reading through the book, I'm like, okay, how good would I
31:24
be at doing the opposite? So how good would I be at becoming the neutral moderator? And
31:28
I would be atrocious. I feel like I would be terrible because I'm like, I'm an intellectually
31:31
honest guy, but I'm obviously really passionate. I don't mind a fight. And so it's like, all
31:35
right, let's, let's get in there and kind of figure it out. But it seems like you can
31:37
take the hat on and off pretty well. So I do want to get into some of the things in
31:41
the book and obviously we won't be going over with everything in the book. But guys, the
31:44
book is in the show notes. If you're listening to this on time, it is out now go into the
31:47
show notes and you can pick up a copy of it. But the first thing I guess I want to talk
31:51
about is, and this wasn't at the very beginning of your book, but it's atheists that are finding
31:57
meaning in being an atheist, because that's something that's confusing. As a Christian,
32:01
there's a lot of things that that atheists think they're just confused that Christians
32:04
would believe in X, Y and Z or X, Y and Z to your UK audience. But you know, over here,
32:10
I look at an atheist and I'm like, okay, so you think you're a highly evolved champ that
32:15
figure it out, you know, language, pants and fire. And you know, just you used to be a
32:21
champ and used to be goo and then used to be like, start us before that, like, okay,
32:26
what is all this for then? Like, what is love to you? Like, why would you be altruistic?
32:31
Like, why would you help an old lady across the street type of thing? But talk to me a
32:35
little bit about what you've discovered and kind of where you've landed on atheists that
32:38
are just desperately trying to find some sort of meaning in this world.
32:42
One of the things I try to do throughout the book is to compare and contrast the atheist
32:46
worldview, the naturalist worldview against a Christian worldview. And I think this is
32:49
one of the key areas where there's just a huge difference. And it's far harder, I think,
32:54
on a purely atheist naturalist worldview to find meaning to talk in realistic terms about
32:59
purpose, about beauty, truth, right and wrong. All of those concepts, I think, kind of get
33:06
dissolved by the naturalist, physicalist, materialist worldview, call it what you want.
33:12
Because basically all you're dealing with in the end in that worldview is matter in motion,
33:17
you know, the physical forces of the universe, energy, space. That's the fundamental constituents
33:24
of everything. So anything that comes out of that is just a kind of byproduct, really.
33:29
It's not the core thing. And so when an atheist says, Hey, I believe in meaning, I want to
33:36
say, well, what do you mean by that? What kind of meaning do you have as an atheist?
33:41
Because presumably you don't believe there's an overarching meaning to the universe. We
33:46
weren't meant to be here. And they'll say, No, no, yeah, we're not meant to be here.
33:49
We are kind of, in that sense, kind of accidental byproduct of kind of the forces of. But they
33:56
often what they often say to me, Carl, is I can create my own meaning. Okay, I can sort
34:01
of, you know, have meaning with a small M rather than a capital M. This was in fact the
34:06
way that the the sadly passed away just last year, but the atheist philosopher, Michael
34:10
Ruse often talked when I brought him on the show, he said, I can know I accept, I can't
34:16
have meaning with a capital M Justin, but I can have this small M meaning. The problem
34:20
is, and he was challenged on this really well by another Christian thinker called Andy
34:24
Bannister is that an atheist might be able to say, Well, this is my personal meaning,
34:30
you know, maybe it's to be kind to people, walk old ladies across the road, you know,
34:34
enjoy art, whatever. Okay, that's great. But what if another person says, that's that's
34:40
great. That's your version of meaning. Well, my version of meaning is to ruthlessly get
34:44
everything that I want in life and enslave dominate. Okay, and there are people who can
34:51
do that the Genghis Khan's of this world. Okay, that was their meaning. Okay, so how
34:56
do you judge between your meaning and their meaning? If we're all just basically holding
35:01
on to our own little versions of meaning, and the problem is we can't. If there's no
35:06
overarching meaning, then all you've got is a lot of stories that just disagree with each
35:10
other. And in the end, what will happen is just whoever's the strongest will will win
35:16
out. Okay. And that has been the history of the world a lot of the time. So it's very
35:20
difficult, I think, to hold on to a kind of any sense of an objective sense of meaning
35:25
in the world, if you don't believe in overarching meaning. And I think that's that's fundamentally
35:30
where where the so and this is why so many atheists, this has been the turning point for
35:35
them when they realized I can't have an objective belief even in something like right and wrong
35:40
morality, you know, C.S. Lewis famously went from being an atheist to being a theist, because
35:46
he realized, I can't talk about right and wrong without there being some objective standard
35:51
of justice in the universe. Otherwise, it's just my personal opinions. And it's everyone's
35:54
personal opinions. And he realized if I do believe in right and wrong, I do believe in
35:59
justice. So there must be a moral law giver. There must be a standard of justice beyond
36:03
me. So that was the the argument that took him and has actually taken a lot of the people
36:07
to the point of believing in God. And I think it's a very powerful argument.
36:11
Well, and Justin, you know, these people are there, they seem to be slaves to objective
36:17
facts. They're like, just give me the facts. Give me the science. If I can't put God, you
36:22
know, to beaker and heat him up with a Bunsen burner, then you know, I don't want to believe
36:25
it. And it's like, okay, you only want to believe in certain categories of facts, right? And
36:29
also categorically, they'll dispel with miracles. But it's like, you believe in the ultimate
36:34
miracle, which is that time, space and matter had a timeless, spaceless and immaterial beginning.
36:39
What in the world are you talking about? Right? And if there's a big bang, couldn't there
36:43
be a big banger? Is that even possible? And then they don't really want to go there?
36:46
But you mentioned CS Lewis and we both share a tremendous fondness of CS Lewis. You have
36:51
a quote from your book that he said it's his words reminded me again of CS Lewis who responded
36:56
to the charge that belief in heaven is a form of escapism by saying, quote, if you read
37:01
history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just
37:06
those who thought most of the next unquote. And so that is one charge that you'll get
37:11
from atheists is like, Oh, well, you know, because the atheists are the ones that care
37:15
about the planet, right? The atheists are the ones that care about the lease of these.
37:20
But it's like, it's like performative empathy as opposed to legitimate sympathy because
37:24
you can be empathetic and not actually do anything. But if you're actually sympathetic,
37:27
it's like, I feel bad for you. And let's fix it. Right? It's the meme that Doug Wilson
37:31
brought about my show recently where you have a husband and wife talking, the wife has like
37:36
a cleaver in her head. And she's like, I have this splitting headache. And her husband's
37:40
like, honey, I'm so sorry, I have a splitting headache. I really think if we got that cleaver
37:44
out of your head that it would make you feel better. And she goes, I don't want to talk
37:47
about the cleaver. Right? It's like, there's a difference between the performative empathy
37:51
and then the actual sympathy. So talk to me a little bit about about Christians and how
37:55
we care for this world, the people in it versus atheists trying to find that as some
37:59
meaning.
38:00
I think the key thing for me and that that quote you gave from CS Lewis about, you know,
38:05
it's precisely those who thought the most about the next world that made the most difference
38:09
in this world is it's kind of been brought out by, you know, historians like Tom Holland
38:14
who I mentioned earlier, who've pointed out that atheist secular folk who maybe are doing
38:19
a great job, you know, they're really invested in morality and good causes and social justice
38:23
and everything else. They're not doing that because of their atheism, that atheism itself
38:29
really doesn't inspire anything. And, and in a way, arguably has even inspired some of
38:35
the worst atrocities in the world, you know, is when people kind of completely abandon
38:39
belief in God and the kind of belief in in the sacredness of life that you often get
38:46
the, the pole pots and the, you know, starlings and those atheist regimes that really did just
38:52
decide without God, all things are possible.
38:56
What happens though is that in my experience, when I do meet very moral, upright, the upstanding
39:01
atheists who say, well, I'm just here to care about the planet and I don't care about heaven
39:06
or hell or anything else, I want to say to them, you didn't get those beliefs, those
39:13
that moral character from your atheism, you got it from Christianity. That's the realities.
39:18
You are a very Christian atheist, because you live in a fundamentally a culture, a western
39:24
culture that has been completely shaped by the Judeo-Christian story of reality. And
39:29
this was something that, you know, again, Douglas Murray, interesting sort of cultural
39:33
critic, not a Christian, but who when I've interviewed him on a couple of occasions has
39:38
always referred himself to me as a Christian atheist because he gets it. He knows that
39:42
his belief in dignity, morality, the way we should live our lives does not come from
39:47
his atheism. It comes from the Christian culture in which he was growing up. Now, most, probably
39:53
his most atheist and secularists have kind of forgotten the founding story. And so they're
39:58
still kind of running basically on the operating system without realizing that's fundamentally
40:03
what drives their beliefs. And that's why C.S. Lewis says, if you're looking for the
40:08
people who've done the most to create the kind of culture of freedom, prosperity, equality,
40:16
human rights, go and look at the Christians. They're the ones who did it historically.
40:21
They were the ones who created all the institutions because of their belief in a God of justice
40:27
and human dignity and equality because we're all made in the image of God. So that for
40:30
me is really important. And the question is, can you hold on to that stuff if you lose
40:34
the Christian story? I don't think you can. And I think that's what a lot of people like
40:37
Tom Holland have been pointing out. And it's why, you know, I'm all for my atheist friends,
40:42
being good people, but I want to kind of get them to pull on that thread a bit more and
40:47
say, why do you believe in this stuff? It's not because of your atheism. It's actually,
40:52
because you're kind of subliminally channeling Christianity in the end. And none of this stuff
40:58
makes any sense if there isn't a God, it's all just whistling in the wind in the end if
41:02
there's no God who can actually sustain these beliefs. So so yeah, it's really important.
41:09
Well, and Frank Turks said it with the stealing from God book and the things he said there,
41:14
it's like, okay, you're stealing the morality of God and using it. You're placing it over
41:18
the top of your worldview. You just don't really want to change and give your life over
41:21
to somebody that's going to have a moral standard for you, that person being Jesus. And so it
41:24
kind of changes things. But typically, when you start getting atheist Justin to start pulling
41:29
on the thread. And this is happening seemingly faster now than it used to used to take them
41:34
along kind of circuitous route to get to the same place. But basically it's chapter seven
41:38
of your book, which is the atheist's greatest objection, which is the problem of suffering
41:42
or the problem of evil or any of these types of things colloquially, we just call it, you
41:46
know, bad things happening to good people, even though they don't like when you ask them,
41:49
what do you mean by bad? What do you mean by good? And those types of things. But atheists
41:53
just seem to shoot right there even even seekers, Justin, people that are fervent seekers,
41:58
right? People that are just on this faith journey, they're trying to reckon with, okay,
42:02
I get it. But you know, a tsunami happens and it wipes out, you know, hundreds of thousands
42:07
of people what in the world like God was just sitting there during the Holocaust, like allowing
42:11
that to happen. I mean, Joe Rogan has pushed back on all Christians that have been on
42:14
a show. It's like God was watching that and it was like, this is okay. This is good. This
42:18
was part of God's will. And it's a huge stumbling block for believers and non believers, frankly.
42:24
So talk a little bit more about that, the greatest of all objections. It is just the
42:28
biggest one. It's the oldest one, you know, the book of Job, arguably, you know, the
42:32
oldest book in the Bible. That's the foundational question. Why would God allow bad things that
42:38
happen to good people? And it's not easy. And I don't want to kind of just give pat answers
42:43
and pretend that there are easy answers to these things. I want to sit with those difficulties
42:48
and those kind of things you just mentioned to me. And when we, it comes time to have
42:52
the conversation with someone who's got those kinds of objections, I want to, I want to
42:57
very carefully tease out perhaps not just those big issues, Holocaust, tsunamis, whatever,
43:03
but maybe what's firing these questions in their own life? Because more often than not,
43:06
you'll find there's some perceived injustice or tragic episode in someone's own life that
43:12
has caused them to question whether there can be a good God. Okay. Now, the first thing
43:18
I want to say is sometimes a kind of apologetic answer is not necessarily the first thing
43:23
someone needs. Maybe they actually just need your love in that instance. They need you
43:29
to get alongside them, weep with them, grieve with them. And, but if the time does come
43:35
for kind of looking at this at a more intellectual level and trying to offer some kind of an
43:39
answer to someone in that place, I would say there's a few places you can go. The first
43:43
one is to say that getting rid of God does not solve the problem of evil and suffering.
43:48
It just turns a mystery into meaninglessness. Okay. If you, if you just say, well, there
43:54
is no God, then all you're left with is a world in which, you know, stuff happens and
44:01
there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no kind of purpose behind it. You, you're left
44:06
with the world that Dawkins describes of blind pitiless indifference. Okay. Now, maybe you'd
44:11
rather have that than have God, but I don't think it's actually going to help anyone.
44:15
Just simply saying it's all random. It's all pointless. It just leads to nihilism, frankly.
44:20
So I would say you haven't really helped by getting rid of God at a practical level. Secondly,
44:26
you still run into this problem. You without God, you can't even say that this is evil.
44:32
This is wrong. This shouldn't be this way because there is no standard of good or evil
44:35
right or wrong.
44:36
Exactly. You kind of need God to even make the criticism of God. Okay. And that's the
44:44
irony of the whole thing. You can't, it's very difficult to escape this trap if you like.
44:50
And then I simply want to sit someone down and say, can you think of any instances where
44:55
something bad happened to you, but actually in the long run, it, it turned out to be for
45:00
your benefit, okay? Where something happened that at the time seemed like really down a bit
45:06
in hindsight. I've got friends whose second child was born with Down syndrome. And that
45:14
was a huge kind of thing for them that they were not expecting that. It was a complete
45:18
surprise at the point of birth. It led to a lot of difficulty in their life, frankly.
45:25
Things that they had to reorganize their lives in all kinds of complicated ways to make space
45:30
for this child and their special needs. But they would not swap the life they have for
45:34
anything because that child has actually brought them so much joy. They've learned so many
45:39
things they could never have learned if they didn't have a child with Down syndrome. Now
45:43
that's not to take away from the real difficulties and challenges of life. But that's just one
45:49
very simple example of where someone found something that was difficult, painful actually
45:54
was something they learned something from. Now zoom out to a perspective we can never
46:00
understand, but God's perspective. Isn't it just far, far, far more likely that a God
46:06
who is so far beyond our understanding, our limitations, time, space itself, that God
46:12
could have purposes that we simply cannot grasp, that even in the midst of the most terrible
46:17
things you can see, tsunamis, holocaust, that may still be some kind of purpose. I think
46:24
we simply cannot rule God out on the basis that, well, if I was God, I would do a better
46:31
job. We're not in the position of God. We've got to have some what the philosophy is called
46:35
epistemic humility, okay? We cannot know that there may be some kind of circumstances that
46:42
even with all the awfulness we see, God still may have a bigger purpose. Coming back down
46:48
just to the everyday level of being a Christian, I'd say for me that ultimate purpose is kind
46:55
of represented in the person of Jesus Christ, because the whole story really, the Christian
47:00
story culminates in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And it's this idea that God turns
47:05
a tragedy, the most awful, unjust event possible, the most perfect human being, being put to
47:11
death, being humiliated, betrayed, experiencing the most awful torture, yet somehow God redeems
47:20
and restores all of that for our benefit. And my faith as a Christian is that whatever
47:24
awfulness we see in the world, the person of Jesus, his example, his death and his resurrection
47:29
are the kind of the, the, the lens through which we have to understand life that somehow
47:35
in his grace, God is going to redeem everything, everything will ultimately. And that is, that
47:42
is faith that can't, you know, I have to be a Christian to believe that. But I think it's
47:46
the only source of hope we have and for many people, it's the only thing they can hold
47:49
on to the idea that God came and he knows what it's like to suffer because he's been
47:52
there, he's walked in our shoes, he died on a cross. That is, that is the ultimate thing
47:57
I would hold out to someone who's in that place is saying, God knows what it feels like
48:01
and it may not make sense. A lot of it, you know, it's really difficult to make sense
48:05
of, but actually it's the one thing that will actually give you hope that, that this crazy
48:09
world could actually make sense in the earth. I just think Jesus has to be at the center
48:13
of any kind of apologetic like that.
48:16
Well, sometimes you'll see left-wing atheists in the streets, rioting over something and
48:20
they'll be screaming, no justice, no peace, no justice, no peace. I would actually like
48:24
to co-op that a little bit because if a little girl is kidnapped, raped and then murdered
48:31
and you can't find any, oh, how could a good God allow something so heinous like that
48:37
to happen? Well, in an atheistic worldview, there will be no justice for that person and
48:43
you will have no peace with what have happened. And also that little girl will also not no
48:48
peace because guess what? She was just a highly evolved chimp that ran into the wrong chimp
48:53
at the wrong time. And I was like, is that a better story? I mean, I know we're not allowed
48:56
to say his name. He's like Voldemort now, but Ravi Zacharias, origin, meaning morality
49:00
destiny, origin, where did everything come from meaning? Why is everything here? Morality?
49:05
What's the difference between good and evil destiny? Where do you go when you die? You're
49:08
telling me that's the story you want to go with secular atheists is that hey, chimp just
49:13
took out another champ, no biggie, but I'm going to be mad about it somehow. And it does
49:17
wrap up into the person and work of Jesus. And I've just been frankly shocked. And you
49:22
talked about this in the book. That's why I'm bringing it up at the number of intellectually
49:27
sound people that will throw out one of literally the most ignorant comments, one of the dumbest
49:33
things you could possibly say, which is like, ah, but we don't even know that this Jesus
49:37
guy was even a real person. And yet this person believes everything they read about Alexander
49:41
the Great. They believe that Julie sees across the Rubicon. I'm glad you use that example
49:45
in the books. I use that example all the time. It's like you believe that he crossed the
49:48
Rubicon, but there's way more out of stations of Jesus being a real Middle Eastern Jewish
49:54
carpenter that lived and kind of had this three year ministry, even from people that
49:59
didn't follow him. You could you could get it from Josephus or Tacitus or Pliny the Younger
50:03
or any of these types of people attested to the fact that yeah, this dude existed. And
50:08
yeah, he was killed on a Roman cross at the behest of the Jewish Sanhedrin. But help me
50:13
understand the popularity of the Jesus didn't exist theory. Yeah, because I feel like it's
50:19
the same people that, you know, they'll go down the multiverse track and they'll go,
50:23
they want to go to all these crazy places as opposed to just acknowledging, okay, this
50:26
guy probably existed. Okay, he definitely existed. I just don't believe he's God, and
50:30
I don't want to worship him. Yeah, I totally feel the frustration there because whenever
50:35
I bump into the kind of the ultra skeptical Jesus mythicism stuff which just floats around
50:40
online is not taken seriously in actual academic circles, but nonetheless has been very influential.
50:46
It's just I just scratched my head because it's just so against the actual prevailing
50:51
scholarship. And I think if I'm absolutely honest, it does come from a very subjective
50:59
personal bias against Christianity. That's it's it's it's not hard to detect when you
51:05
go to the sites where this Jesus mythicism stuff prevails, it's obviously being run by
51:10
very anti religious types, even, you know, a kind of non Christian Bible scholar like
51:15
Bart airman who's very critical of aspects of, you know, evangelical Christianity. He wrote
51:22
a whole book basically on the evidence for Jesus Christ, because he was running into
51:24
some so much of this Jesus mythicism stuff. And he just said, this is ridiculous. And
51:27
when I interviewed him about it, he said, it's it's easy to see it's coming from people
51:31
who basically don't want there to be a God don't like Christianity. So they think, well,
51:36
if we can just eliminate this Jesus character kind of job done. The problem is you can't
51:40
eliminate Jesus if you take Jesus out of the first century, there's a whole bunch of things
51:44
you cannot explain, including the rise of the early church. And all kinds of other things.
51:51
I really appreciate you mentioned where's her earlier on Joe Rogan. I mean, what a fantastic
51:56
job he did. Just have kind of opened Joe Rogan's eyes and therefore the eyes of literally
51:59
millions of listeners to just the basic good provenance of the New Testament and how reliable
52:07
that document is how it just stands head and shoulders above other equivalent literature
52:11
of its time that you do not have to put your brain in the bin to be a Christian. It makes
52:16
sense to believe this person, Jesus Christ of Nazareth walked and taught. Now, the question
52:21
is, we know he died. That's again, absolutely certain historical factors as certain as you
52:27
can be of any ancient historical fact. The question is, did he rise again? Okay. And that's
52:32
kind of for me, you know, I devote a whole chapter to that in the book because that's
52:36
an interesting question. And it raises that whole question of, well, is that can you talk
52:40
about that as historical, a miracles be part of history? And my view is, well, they can
52:47
if they're the best explanation for the facts. And if you're kind of just at least slightly
52:52
open to the possibility of the miraculous, maybe there's one particular miracle that
52:56
has defined our world that has defined the history of our world that might just be true.
53:00
And I think Jesus's resurrection is one of those examples. So for me, I'm delighted
53:06
like you to see that Jesus' mythicist stuff kind of now taking a back seat. I just haven't
53:12
seen that floating around nearly as much in popular circles as it did maybe in the heyday
53:16
of New Atheists. It's so refreshing to see a Wes Huff talking on Joe Rogan and to see
53:23
some of this good scholarship finally getting into the mainstream again.
53:27
Yeah, whenever I had Wes Huff on my show after all that, I told him from the very beginning
53:33
of that conversation, Joe Rogan's his posture was very different because he's been very
53:39
dismissive of Christianity. He's one of those people that would just ask people, Hey, do
53:43
you think Jesus actually exists? Do you think Jesus was a real guy? And so he was kind of
53:46
in a low key way pushing the mythicism of this Jesus character. And again, on that particular
53:52
episode, every time Wes tried to nail him down, Joe would kind of open it up to all these
53:56
ethereal philosophies and things like that. But there's some things going on behind the
53:59
scenes that are very interesting. That'll be it'll be fun to see how that comes out in
54:03
the future. But then you'll have people just know, okay, okay, okay. Middle Eastern Jewish
54:07
construction worker named Jesus from Bethlehem. Great. Okay, he existed. But let's just change
54:15
him a little bit or in the book you talk about how let's just reinvent Jesus and kind of make
54:19
him not savior, but let's make him these other things. So I'm going to read a quote from the
54:23
book here. Jesus is unquestionably the most influential character in history to the extent
54:28
that we measure history in the epics before and after his life. But the time gap since
54:33
he lived has led to all kinds of conjecture about who he really was conjuring a Christ
54:38
in our own image has become a common phenomenon. Believers of different stripes have variously
54:43
cast him as a socialist revolutionary pacifist or a rainbow figure ready for a scrap with
54:48
any liberal theologian who crosses his path. And there are plenty of non Christian interpretations
54:53
out there too. And then you give a list of kind of the most common ones, Jesus, the guru,
54:58
Jesus, the zealot, and even Jesus, the husband. So this goes back to some of the, I guess you
55:02
can call scholarship that undergirded Dan Browns, the Da Vinci code and things like that, which
55:06
I never really understood why people got mad at the Da Vinci code. It's like it's a fiction
55:09
book like it's not a historical document like chill out everybody is just just for your
55:12
entertainment. If it becomes your theology, then that's dangerous. But just talk to us
55:16
a little bit about the reinvention of Jesus in our own image or in an image of somebody
55:21
that we can tolerate more than somebody that demands our entire life and worship.
55:25
Yeah. And I think this has been an ongoing thing. People have always been fascinated
55:30
with the person of Jesus because he's been such an influential character. And so you
55:34
get constant reinterpretations and dramas and things, you know, that are trying to re reimagine
55:40
Jesus and so on. And the Da Vinci code, yeah, was definitely one of those moments when a
55:46
lot of people kind of bought into this whole thing. And I think because it was sort of
55:52
a crossover between fact and fiction, a lot of people got taken in, didn't they? I mean,
55:58
the funny thing is I briefly mentioned this in the book, but the whole Jesus, the husband
56:03
thing that was going into that kind of had this moment in the press when this scholar
56:08
called Karen King announced sort of news to the media that she had got hold of papyrus
56:14
very early, that talks about Jesus having a wife and so on. He'd been a married man.
56:21
There was a whole investigation that was sort of reported in the Atlantic magazine in which
56:26
it turned out she had been the victim of a huge hoax. And in fact, this they had this
56:33
she'd kind of announced this before it had gone proper scholarly. And it turned out
56:37
this was a forgery. And it was the problem is people kind of love to jump on these theories
56:44
and they and it's because they're often don't find as as interesting or titillating the kind
56:51
of conventional view that Jesus was who he said he was was someone who led this group
56:56
of people who was yes, a celibate man, someone who was an itinerant rabbi, but who claimed
57:04
of himself that he was the fulfillment of the promises of Israel's Messiah, who got himself
57:09
crucified by the Romans and whose followers after his death shortly after his death started
57:14
to claim that he had risen from the dead. That's kind of that story is kind of so familiar
57:18
in some ways that people kind of think, Oh, well, maybe there's a more interesting version
57:22
of it. But the reality is that story is the reason it's been the kind of the relatively
57:28
on controversial orthodox story is because it's the best attested story. It's the one
57:32
that actually comes. It's the one that the earliest manuscripts are test to all of these
57:38
other versions of Jesus tend to come from much later, apocryphal gospels written a long
57:44
time from the events that they purport to be describing by people who didn't know the
57:49
characters who weren't part of the community and so on. And one of the most fascinating
57:53
things I talk about this in the chapter on the evidence for Jesus is that modern scholarship
57:57
just keeps putting us closer and closer in touch with the original community friends
58:04
followers of Jesus so that we can very very confidently talk about eyewitness testimony
58:10
in the gospels. You hardly ever get that in ancient history. Most things are written many
58:16
years after the events by people who weren't sort of there at the time. Whereas people
58:21
like Richard Borkham, the New Testament scholar, he's shown that when you do the when you look
58:26
at the gospels and you do a tally of the names that exist there, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, these
58:32
kinds of names. And then you go and tally it against the data we have from Jewish burial
58:38
sites of that era. They tally up perfectly. How often those names appear is perfectly
58:46
in line with how often we find them in the historical evidence we have. And that just
58:51
goes to show this cannot have been written later. These accounts were by people who were
58:56
around at the time. You don't get that detail right if you're writing these at a later time
59:00
in a different place. And that's some of the most exciting things about modern scholarship.
59:05
It's actually some people think, Oh, the more we know, the less reason we have to believe
59:09
it's the opposite. The more we're discovering the more we're digging up stuff in Israel,
59:14
the more that we're kind of getting our hands on all of these manuscripts, comparing them
59:17
against each other. The more they say, actually, this stuff really happened. People who knew
59:22
about it were writing about it at the time. I just it might be the nerd in me coming out
59:26
called, but I find that very interesting and exciting. Well, you don't have to be a nerd
59:30
to read Bocums, Jesus and the eyewitnesses and just be absolutely gobsmacked at what
59:35
you see there. Cause West Huff said the same thing about, okay, these other supposed gospels
59:40
that came later that were attributed to people that were there in Jesus's time. The names
59:45
used there did not match with the names that were common at the time. And so, you know,
59:50
we did something funny on the forging table recently. We looked at everybody's name.
59:53
Well, the name Kyle is really, really, really unpopular right now, probably my fault. But
59:57
back in the day, it was super popular used to be a top 10. And so if you write a modern
1:00:02
day novel with a bunch of Kyle's and it's going to be like, all right, that's a little
1:00:04
bit weird. But also we want those things to be true. It's so clear again, Joe Rogan again.
1:00:10
He wants the gospel of Judas to be true. He wants the gospel of Mary to be true. He wants
1:00:16
the gospel of Peter to be true. He wants some of these things to be true because it's more
1:00:19
exciting to him that that's real. The same thing conspiracy theorists is the conspiracy
1:00:24
is always more exciting than the boring old truth. And sometimes conspiracies are real.
1:00:29
But guess what? Every year that we have more archeological data come out, the Bible would
1:00:34
get less and less relevant if in fact it were true that all this was made up. But I talked
1:00:40
to Titus Kennedy, who's a Christian archeologist and they're looking at different things. They
1:00:44
just keep confirming what the Bible has said. And they just keep finding things that say,
1:00:49
actually this people group did operate in this area of the world and they did exist. And King
1:00:54
David was a real person and all this stuff that we kind of get into. And it kind of lends
1:00:58
itself to something you alluded to, I believe so earlier, the minimal facts approach to
1:01:02
where it's like, okay, if we can just take out some of the philosophical meanderings and
1:01:07
just get to the minimal facts, it could help us. So I want to read from the book here.
1:01:11
In fact, I believe that the case for the resurrection is stronger today than ever before. You just
1:01:16
got through saying that a new generation of biblical scholars have been examining a fresh
1:01:19
the evidence for the claim that lies at the center of the Christian faith, leading this
1:01:23
field, our New Testament historians Gary Habermas and Michael Lacona, authors of the case for
1:01:29
the resurrection of Jesus who have jointly proposed a new way of making the argument,
1:01:33
the minimal facts approach and then the facts that they lay out are one, Jesus died by crucifixion,
1:01:39
two, the empty tomb, three, people reportedly meeting the risen Christ for the conversion
1:01:44
of skeptics and five, the explosive growth of the Christian church. Now, we've kind of
1:01:49
hit on a lot of those, at least tangentially in this conversation, but if you are a skeptic
1:01:54
atheist or, you know, a scholar or historian of some kind, those are the minimal facts that
1:02:00
you have to dispense with and you can't just dispense with one of them and the whole house
1:02:03
of cards comes crumbling down. You have to find a way to dispense with all of them. And
1:02:08
when you approach the argument that way, it becomes much more compelling. What's it?
1:02:12
Yeah, you put it really well and what I often find when I'm talking, especially to non-Christian
1:02:16
audiences, I was speaking at University College London just last week, that people are often
1:02:23
surprised because they think of the Bible as just a theological text, a kind of religious
1:02:28
rule book, that kind of thing. But actually, the Bible can be kind of handled in a very
1:02:33
different way, especially the New Testament, just as a book of kind of historical documents,
1:02:37
these are letters, these are biographies, these is wisdom literature that was written
1:02:43
down, okay, for a particular community at a particular time. And they are packed with
1:02:48
historical information and that people kind of don't realize this. You're dealing with
1:02:53
historical gold here. And so what the minimal facts is doing is saying, look, we're not
1:02:57
asking you to see the Bible as the inspired word of God or anything like that. Just treating
1:03:03
it purely as a historical document, we can get a lot of information out this that is kind of
1:03:08
uncontroversial in historical circles. So whether you are a believing or non-believing scholar of
1:03:13
the ancient world, here's what the majority of them agree on. And it's exactly those are five
1:03:18
facts, there are others that could be added, but those are five facts that Jesus died by Roman
1:03:22
crucifixion, that a group of his female followers discovered an empty tomb, that people claimed that
1:03:27
they have met, there is in Christ, that skeptics were converted and the explosion of the growth of
1:03:32
the early church. And the question is, you know, if those are kind of relatively uncontroversial
1:03:37
historical facts that we can just get from the data and from the extra biblical data as well,
1:03:42
that the vast majority of historians, both Christian and non-Christian agree on,
1:03:47
well, what's the best explanation? And the thing is you can come up, you can try and come up with
1:03:52
a naturalistic hypothesis, maybe the disciples stole the body, you know, maybe the disciples kind
1:03:58
of made off of the body, there may be the Romans made off with the body, maybe it was hallucinations,
1:04:03
maybe, you know, all kinds of things. The problem is when you run them through that filter, if you
1:04:06
like, of those minimal facts, none of them really make sense of all the evidence. The one that really,
1:04:11
the explanation that really does make sense of all the evidence happens to be the explanation that
1:04:15
they gave at the time that Jesus had risen from the dead. So unless you've got some kind of a priori
1:04:21
reason to kind of discount the miraculous, then you should take that seriously. Okay, you should
1:04:27
just be willing to look at the actual explanation that was given at the time, because these people
1:04:31
had no sort of imperative, no kind of real reason to make this up. They went on to be persecuted,
1:04:40
beaten, and often killed because of their belief in the risen Jesus. Their Jewish theology,
1:04:46
it was in stark contrast to this idea of a Messiah who was raised in time. The fact that they had
1:04:53
women at the tomb as the first discussions of the empty tomb, if you were trying to make up a
1:04:58
story to convince people at the time, that was about the worst way you could go about doing it.
1:05:01
So all of these things seem to suggest there's something really happened, something, yeah, and
1:05:06
let's take the explanation they gave seriously, just at a historical level. And I think that just
1:05:13
sometimes opens the door for people to realize, yeah, maybe I should actually kind of think,
1:05:18
you know, I shouldn't just assume these were just peasants who just had all these crazy,
1:05:24
you know, fanciful religious ideas. Maybe there's something actually historical at the core of this
1:05:29
that I need to investigate. One one that I would add to the minimal facts approach was,
1:05:35
you know, certainly the persecution of early Christians. But when you have his apostles, right,
1:05:41
all of them except John and Judas, but all of them died a martyr's death. And we have no reporting
1:05:50
whatsoever that they said, I was just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. We made it up. We stole
1:05:53
the body. We buried it in another place. No one ever found it. You know, we beat up the Roman
1:05:57
soldiers and you know, it kind of just worked out to our benefit. We thought we would get,
1:06:00
you know, monies and honeys for doing all this. Nope. We don't see any of that anywhere.
1:06:05
We see that these men, in a lot of cases, they welcomed the death that was coming to them. The
1:06:10
only thing they lamented is they didn't have more time to evangelize, right? And so it's like,
1:06:15
you got to explain that because as people said, a lot of people have died for lies because people
1:06:19
were like, no one dies for a lie. No, they die for lies all the time. What do you think of these
1:06:22
people that are blowing themselves up with suicide? Vests are doing, they're dying for a lie. But
1:06:26
you don't die for a lie that you know is a lie. You don't do that. That doesn't make any sense.
1:06:31
Like you have to be three quarters of a fruitcake to be thinking in a way that allows you to
1:06:36
allow yourself to be killed for something that you know not to be true. So we're running out of time
1:06:40
a little bit here. So toward the end of book, yeah, time's flown on this conversation. It's been
1:06:45
fantastic. But you do get into deconstruction and reconstruction. So obviously I've talked to a lot
1:06:50
of people in the show, Lisa Childers, Sean Cooper, different, different folks about the issues with
1:06:54
deconstruction. And you talk about this in the book, most of the time deconstruction doesn't
1:07:00
lead to reconstruction. They're not tearing down to see what's left to build up. When I go and speak
1:07:06
someplace, Justin, this is what I tell the people before I get there, I go just just a warning,
1:07:11
in case people don't know me, my style is burn it down and walk away. Because I don't live in you
1:07:17
know, armpit, Ohio, or wherever'sville, Minnesota, I get to go back home, right? Y'all have to stay
1:07:23
here with these people. It's my job to burn off the dead wood, just so we can see what's left
1:07:30
so that y'all can build some people up. There's probably gonna be some people that come to Christ,
1:07:34
there's gonna be some people that redirect their life back towards Christ, all of that type of thing.
1:07:38
But we don't really see that with deconstruction. People are deconstructing for the sake of
1:07:42
deconstructing. And then they just find this kind of squishy milieu of psychological psychobabble,
1:07:49
and you know, moral therapeutic deism, and they just stay there. They're like, ah, this is fine enough.
1:07:54
And so talk to us a little bit about this process, because you go into a lot of detail in the book,
1:07:57
so we'll leave it for people to read in the book about these people that are deconstructing,
1:08:00
and they're not doing anything with the rubble. Yeah, absolutely. And this is kind of, you know,
1:08:05
a fresh chapter that I've really wanted to add into this new book, because the construction has
1:08:12
been a bit of a buzzword in recent years. And there were all of those stories, you know,
1:08:16
a few years ago, certainly of worship leaders and Christian leaders deconstructing, losing their
1:08:20
faith and so on. The thing is, I guess this has always happened at some level. It may be just that
1:08:25
we hear more about it now in the age of social media. But I think that, and in a sense, it's
1:08:32
been an ongoing thing, especially at the beginning of the turn of the 20th century, there was a real
1:08:37
kind of liberal Protestant move to kind of deconstruct Jesus, can we really know, etc. You know,
1:08:44
it's interesting when you read the biographies of, for instance, Billy Graham, you know, he had
1:08:48
friends in seminary who were going off in that direction, but he kind of very purposefully chose
1:08:53
to say, no, I'm going to, despite everything I'm hearing in academia, I'm going to kind of
1:08:58
stand on this idea that Jesus really existed, and his death and resurrection really are the
1:09:03
linchpin of history. And I think he was justified in the end for doing that because actually the
1:09:07
scholarship has now just completely gone against, as we were saying earlier, a lot of that kind of
1:09:13
deconstruction schliermacher kind of higher form criticism that kind of dominated the academy
1:09:17
for a while. It's just a lot of that's just been completely discredited now. So, so I think,
1:09:22
you know, there's there's a kind of intellectual grounds now for saying actually, there's a reason
1:09:27
why we can believe that the Christian story is true. Now, a lot of the deconstruction, though,
1:09:31
isn't happening really in the end, I think, because of those kinds of intellectual concerns
1:09:36
that may have kind of dominated the academy in it's more kind of people often, I think, who
1:09:42
don't like a certain kind of cultural form of Christianity, right? It might be a particularly
1:09:47
politicised form, it might be something where it's challenging certain aspects of lifestyle,
1:09:53
that they don't want to be challenged, you know, so there's kind of all kinds of motivations going on
1:09:59
in in that deconstruction journey. And for some people, they do go on this journey and they kind of,
1:10:04
it leaves all the pieces scattered on the floor, it literally deconstructs their faith. And what I
1:10:08
want to say to those people is, you don't haven't really gained anything by just leaving everything
1:10:14
on the floor. If all you're doing effectively is swapping one belief system for another belief
1:10:20
system, which arguably is just as untested and unquestioned, you know, which is just kind of
1:10:25
liberal secularism, okay, I don't think you've really thought through what you're stepping into,
1:10:32
because that's got all kinds of implications for it as well. And I don't think it's working out
1:10:37
very well in the culture. I think it's important to say, look, I've maybe I've got questions about my
1:10:43
faith, maybe I do the hard work of actually then, I think, trying to reconstruct something. And I've
1:10:49
I've always found that the people who really go on that journey, commit themselves to it,
1:10:55
they can actually it actually is a really healthy thing. The deconstruction is often a pathway to
1:11:00
them actually reconstructing something much more healthy, more nuanced, a stronger form of Christianity
1:11:06
than they had before. They're unlikely to come back to the thing they left. Okay, and that and
1:11:10
that might be important, you know, we all at some level kind of grow mature in our faith. The problem
1:11:15
is if you just smash it all up, deconstruct it and leave it there, I don't think that's a satisfactory
1:11:21
place to end up with. And I've I've watched a lot of people now who kind of arguably kind of went
1:11:27
through a very trendy deconstruction phase, you know, maybe five, 10 years ago. And I look at where
1:11:34
they're at now and I'm like, I don't think it's worked out very well, honestly, I don't see that this
1:11:40
kind of life you've now embraced has actually is actually giving, you know, is actually fulfilling
1:11:46
you. Maybe it's time to go back to the story. And I find a lot of people doing that now. And so
1:11:51
maybe I need to if I've got intellectual problems, maybe it turns out, I was kind of putting all the
1:11:56
weight on the wrong thing. Originally, maybe if I had some very childish or sort of unbiblical
1:12:05
version of Christianity that I was kind of being indoctrinated into that actually I need to shed
1:12:09
in order to get something that's more grounded in history and an intellectual thing. Maybe you've
1:12:14
you've had some bad versions of Christianity forced it on you. Well, don't imagine that's all that
1:12:19
Christianity is your very particular version that you you were given as a child or growing up when
1:12:26
whatever Christianity is much bigger than that. You know, I sometimes think it's one to take a step
1:12:31
back and look at the way in which Christianity manifests in all kinds of different places around
1:12:34
the world. And yet somehow it has this coherence and ability to adapt to every time in place. So,
1:12:40
so, so just I just want to encourage the deconstructionists. If you're finding that the deconstruction
1:12:45
thing isn't working out, give Christianity a second look, you might be surprised to find
1:12:49
there's a way of putting the pieces back together. And I tell the stories of a couple of people who
1:12:54
have done just that in the book. When I think it's important when you're talking to somebody who's
1:12:58
struggling with their faith or they're an atheist, it's like, Hey, can you describe this
1:13:02
God that you don't believe in? Because I may not believe in him either. Because, you know,
1:13:06
it's how you said it's, you know, the things that they're describing describing are probably this
1:13:10
cultural colloquial caricature of what God is. And you know, he's he's zoos in the clouds throwing
1:13:16
lightning bolts down. It's like, Okay, well, I don't really believe in that guy either. So,
1:13:20
we can kind of dispense with that. And then we can kind of work our way towards truth. But
1:13:23
Justin, we've gotten everywhere in this conversation. I'm really, really thrilled with how it turned
1:13:27
out. But that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:13:30
I would. I just want to say, thank you for the conversation. If you want more from my work,
1:13:36
my podcasts, the books, JustinBriley.com is a good place to go. But just wherever you find books,
1:13:42
why I'm still a Christian is out now. And I hope you enjoy it. Well, Justin, keep doing cool stuff.
1:13:46
And we'll have you back on here. I don't even know what we'll do for a celebration for a sixth time
1:13:51
on the show. But I guess we'll figure it out when we get there. We'll talk soon.
1:13:53
Awesome. Thanks, Kyle.
1:13:54
There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed the fifth appearance of Justin Briarley on
1:13:58
undaunted life of man's podcast. But before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost
1:14:02
at undaunted life. Our mission is equipment to push back darkness with content that for just
1:14:05
spiritual mental and physical resilience. Two links for you today. I've got a link to where
1:14:08
you can buy the copy of his new book there on Amazon and also a link to his website.
1:14:13
Thank you for listening to this podcast. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe,
1:14:17
rate and leave us a positive five star review. If you want me to come speak live at your event
1:14:20
or on your podcast, just shoot me an email to info@undaunted.life. That's i-n-f-o @undaunted.life.
1:14:27
Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else,
1:14:30
including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way. Just go to www.undaunted.life.
1:14:35
And as always, we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing us to use their music for our
1:14:39
content. The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua, which is off their self-titled debut
1:14:43
album on Face Down Records. The links are in the description. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:14:48
Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience,
1:14:54
keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:15:18
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