Sunday Special: IS ATHEISM DEAD? WITH ERIC METAXAS
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
191.53516
Summary
Today we are joined by the author of two of the best books of the past two years, Eric Metaxas, host of the show and host of The Show, to talk about the true story of the pilgrims and the miracle of thanksgiving.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
well ladies and gentlemen welcome aboard to the sunday edition human events sunday special today
00:00:15.840
we are joined with the great and you guys if you're not following this guy if you're not
00:00:20.200
reading his books if you're not following him on twitter you are absolutely missing out because
00:00:25.140
two of the best books that have come out really in the last two years are both penned by him folks
00:00:30.340
it's eric metaxas host of the eric metaxas show and these two great books number one is atheism dead
00:00:36.720
and then almost a companion book to that letter to the american church and i think it's sort of
00:00:42.740
it's uh it's asking the question and then providing the answer right and that's what you get with both
00:00:47.700
of those books eric thank you so much for joining us today it's great to be with you uh i have so
00:00:54.300
much i'm excited to talk about but i just want to say following you on social media has been a
00:00:59.460
tremendous blessing and encouragement to me and it's uh fun to get to talk to you in this longer
00:01:04.960
format no i appreciate it i absolutely do we should do more stuff together i know we did that one i
00:01:09.460
think we did an interview at uh at sass a couple years ago and i think that was yeah but you know
00:01:12.940
i was glad that we were able to uh make get our schedules to align even though i know it's thanksgiving
00:01:17.220
week and and everybody's trying to sneak out uh sneak out early and and uh get filled up with turkey
00:01:23.140
and all the good stuff do you guys do full thanksgiving do you do the whole nine yards
00:01:26.640
we don't believe in it i'm greek greeks don't have thanksgiving just kidding it's like we have greek
00:01:33.040
easter we have of course thanksgiving is uh it's as basic an american holiday uh and it's as wonderful
00:01:40.420
an american holiday as you could hope for so yeah we just uh wonderful family time and uh and i have to
00:01:48.700
say i don't know if you were planning to ask me about this but i've written about thanksgiving i
00:01:54.460
wrote a book called um if you can keep it about america about the american experiment and one of the
00:02:01.240
most undeniably extraordinary miracles in the history of the world as far as i'm concerned is
00:02:09.160
the story of squanto i wrote it as a children's book squanto and the miracle of thanksgiving but i tell
00:02:14.900
the story in my uh my book about america called if you can keep it the forgotten promise of american
00:02:21.600
liberty and it really is hard i mean i'm used to people who you know you present them with a clear
00:02:29.820
miracle and they go well that's weird coincidence or something but the story of thanksgiving and the
00:02:35.100
story of squanto when i finally discovered this as an adult i was so astonished i said i've got to
00:02:41.000
write a book about this i've got to tell the world about this and this happens to me often i discover
00:02:44.280
something i get so excited i think how could i possibly have not known this before i have to
00:02:49.640
tell everyone i know uh and the story of squanto is is one of those stories it seems to me to be
00:02:56.780
difficult not to see god's hand in the beginning uh of of what we now call america biggest and you
00:03:05.080
know we talked about we we kind of did a rush limbaugh tribute on on thursday and i i i recount recounted
00:03:11.780
you know sort of my telling of rushes as he always put it the true story of thanksgiving we got into
00:03:16.080
squanto and i think a lot of people don't realize that squanto himself was a christian convert they
00:03:20.700
have no idea about this it's completely glossed over it's you know these idiot pilgrims and these
00:03:26.420
stupid colonizer europeans come to the united states and they arrive in november that's stupid
00:03:31.720
and then new england that's even worse of all um and then they have no idea what they're doing and
00:03:36.840
the natives come and save the day and that's what thanksgiving's about right and that's what we're all
00:03:41.140
told in school and then you read the actual story and you find out that okay maybe there's a glimmer of
00:03:46.780
truth to it but actually the true story is not only far more expansive and more complex it's also a lot
00:03:52.880
more interesting and to your point it's fundamentally christian it just simply is well to me the crazy
00:04:00.980
part and it's always difficult to describe in in a short form but you have to understand in 1620
00:04:09.020
when the pilgrims landed it's somebody like it's sort of like landing on the moon like who's been here
00:04:14.380
no one no one ever comes here there are no ships back you know it was a really extraordinarily lonely
00:04:22.320
outpost the fact that they show up there they base half of them die and then as if on cue in a bad movie
00:04:32.600
out of the woods walks an indian from that air area who had lost his entire tribe that had been wiped
00:04:41.680
out he was the last of the patuxets and he speaks english right he's speaking their language somehow
00:04:49.460
in 1620 and he has nowhere to go and he offers himself to the pilgrims because he says i grew up
00:04:57.860
here where you have settled is where i grew up my people were here i grew up here as a child i know
00:05:02.100
everything there is to know about this area so they basically adopt him and he is in the words of
00:05:09.380
william bradford who wrote about it he says he was a special instrument sent of god and it seems
00:05:15.520
obvious i mean they were you talk about on their last legs they'd lost half of their number it's
00:05:20.800
inconceivable to us in the modern era to to lose half of of those you've come with to that that you
00:05:27.940
bury them you're dying you don't know how to do bradford's wife bradford's wife even died
00:05:32.540
and then out of the woods comes an indian from this area who happens to have been in london
00:05:40.180
more recently than they his story his backstory is insane it's just because they were and they had
00:05:46.200
come from from holland yeah point yeah so it the whole thing is just you if you don't see the hand
00:05:54.080
of god in it and again i'm only giving a few details it is absolutely crazy it's a miracle it's
00:06:00.180
the kind of a miracle that you know you pray you say god we need a miracle nothing but a miracle can
00:06:05.460
save us you know and out of the woods walks an indian speaking english kings who has nowhere to
00:06:11.940
go he grew up where they were all of his people had died from smallpox or whatever brought by traitors
00:06:17.560
a few years earlier he had been away obviously uh because he'd been kidnapped uh um by uh some
00:06:25.960
traitors some years before taken to spain taken to england i mean the whole thing is just one of the
00:06:33.080
most miraculous stories so i wrote it as i said in a children's book and i talk about it every year on
00:06:37.360
my radio program but i also put it in my book if you can keep it because i said every american needs
00:06:42.980
to know that at our beginning is a story so undeniably miraculous and think about this the peace between
00:06:52.300
these native americans and the pilgrims you know that's not the story we always hear we always hear but
00:06:56.980
the enmity and the killing there was not just peace but it's beautiful the harmony between them that
00:07:04.020
began and then because of squanto they kind of broker this treaty that lasts for 50 years of peace
00:07:11.780
with the surrounding indians i mean the whole thing is amazing and beautiful and it's perfectly right that
00:07:16.880
we celebrate thanksgiving as we do but i thought that's at the heart of it and i would be bold enough
00:07:21.760
to say god is at the heart of it he made this happen and it's beautiful and we need to to see
00:07:27.680
it for what it is well and eric that's kind of what i wanted to get into over the course of this
00:07:32.280
is this question of if god has been there since the beginning of the united states and and we're both
00:07:39.220
christians but but you look that church attendance is down you look at uh the generations out there are
00:07:46.520
becoming less and less pious reverent shall we say that our our society and our culture has become
00:07:53.240
far far more secularized and clearly when this program of liberalism and social liberalism cultural
00:08:01.720
liberalism was enacted on the united states the very first target the very first pillar of society the
00:08:07.580
very first institution that was targeted wasn't the schools it wasn't the the government it wasn't
00:08:13.080
certainly wasn't the police they're on to police now right you know they kind of go back and forth on
00:08:16.440
that but the very first one was the church and not necessarily the church directly but the role of
00:08:21.500
the church in the public square and i think that and it does and i think people don't understand the
00:08:29.440
you know so the the title of your book is atheism dead um is a play off of the the nietzsche uh title
00:08:36.940
god is dead but i also don't think that people realize what nietzsche was describing when he actually
00:08:41.760
said that because the idea wasn't necessarily that he thought that god was dead it was that he could
00:08:47.320
he could kind of see down the down the road he could see on the horizon that because of the rise of
00:08:53.580
darwin because of the rise of uh originalism and social um uh uh natural selection theory as opposed
00:09:02.960
to creationism the role of the church the role of theology all of this was being eroded in his time
00:09:07.940
and so his he was looking forward to see okay well if we remove some of those underpinnings and some
00:09:13.280
of those moral guardrails from society what's to become of us well um there's a lot there first of
00:09:22.480
all um i want to say that the title of my book is atheism dead ostensibly i get it from time magazine's
00:09:31.840
1966 cover article that says is god dead and of course they're getting it from nietzsche right the
00:09:38.300
point is that the powers that be in america in the mid-60s felt now is the time to introduce this
00:09:47.480
unbelievable bummer of an idea that we're alone in the universe there is no god there's nothing special
00:09:53.500
about us we just evolved out of primordial suit by accident life has no meaning and let's just go on
00:09:59.280
let's go on with our lives you know we'll use alcohol and like sports events to distract us from
00:10:04.560
the bleakness right so in 1966 time magazine comes out with this article is god dead and there's real
00:10:11.920
temerity in them putting this in the middle of america's living rooms this incredibly bleak idea
00:10:18.180
which most people know is preposterous you know the idea that there's no god it really makes very
00:10:24.240
little sense but the elites you know based on some of the stuff you mentioned darwin freud number of
00:10:29.480
other things they kind of thought well we've sort of figured it out we figured it out and it's it's
00:10:33.500
time to introduce these ideas and the the subject of my book which is is atheism dead is basically
00:10:41.440
that science since about the 60s has done exactly the opposite of what they said was going to happen
00:10:51.440
in other words they kept saying the more science progresses the less we're going to need god the
00:10:56.980
more we're going to see how everything works uh without god well exactly the opposite happened
00:11:02.800
the more we learned from science this is in the last decade since we've been alive the more we see
00:11:08.660
that the universe uh and this planet and each of us and cells everything has the earmarks of
00:11:16.780
astonishing fine-tuning calibration that doesn't seem even conceivably possible through chance through
00:11:26.200
natural processes and so as i've done my reading on this over the years i finally said i have to put
00:11:31.160
this in a book because most christians don't even know that the evidence for god from science is
00:11:37.520
mind-blowing there's no way to overstate it jack it is mind-blowing evidence evidence for god
00:11:44.980
evidence for god from science folks we are coming up on our first break so we're going to hold you
00:11:50.440
right there what a teaser right the evidence from science of god as we come back i expect we might
00:11:56.340
be talking about dna just a little bit uh going into the next segment but folks stay right there
00:12:02.020
because we are going to be we are so blessed to be joined by eric metaxas today and he's breaking
00:12:06.780
all this down for us stay tuned as human events sunday special continues
00:12:10.360
and we're back here we are talking today with eric metaxas the author of pretty much everything
00:12:18.580
out there that you've read and seen lately he's also involved in a bunch of movies and
00:12:22.220
children's books we might talk about that a little bit right now we where we left you was
00:12:25.820
the evidence from science for god eric what are you talking about because we all know that that
00:12:31.980
science disproves god this is a primitive uh primordial upper paeolithic belief and really
00:12:38.500
all religions just kind of yeah evolved from the same the same false beliefs of our ancestors you
00:12:44.260
know the creation story is passed down it's gilgamesh it's this rehashed over and over yeah that's all
00:12:49.460
that's all religion is right and kindu those incredible characters listen i want to tell you
00:12:56.300
it's only the reason i have hope and i when i say this this is not pollyanna hope this is not false
00:13:01.760
optimism i have genuine hope because part of the madness that has been unleashed on this nation in
00:13:09.520
the last few years whether it's a election fraud the confusion of covid the authoritarian lockdowns and
00:13:16.580
in other words the madness that has been unleashed really only underscores that we've all been operating
00:13:25.220
under a paradigm that's nonsense right we all kind of act like well we think there's no god and most
00:13:32.040
of the elites don't believe there's a god and we're going to try to soldier on without god and there's no
00:13:37.980
truth and there's no you know and you start don't don't bury the lead there because i think what you
00:13:42.980
just said is very insightful because i really do believe that all of this started when the first thing
00:13:49.400
started to seep in and i remember noticing this was there's not your truth there's excuse me there's
00:13:55.680
not the truth there's your truth and there's my truth that's your truth and that's my truth there's
00:14:00.320
no objective truth because if there's no objective truth and there's no objective reality if there's no
00:14:03.600
objective reality and there is no reality if there's no objective reality then there are no standards if
00:14:07.460
there are no standards then there's only relativism and this is this that totally blows all of that out of
00:14:14.760
the water because if you believe in objective truth if you believe in objective reality then
00:14:19.900
it's actually very hard to get away from an objective uh at either creator or at least a
00:14:25.840
singular point of origin which is kind of the same thing under under a different definition
00:14:31.440
no that's it that's exactly right and again there's a lot here but just to sum it up
00:14:35.660
let's put it this way um i realized that as things have become more and more unhinged
00:14:42.620
uh many many people are kind of waking up and they're looking around they're thinking
00:14:46.860
none of this makes any sense five minutes ago somebody decided there's like 57 genders and
00:14:52.560
i'm supposed to go along with that uh suddenly having a border is a controversial idea uh that's
00:15:01.880
weird everywhere i turn you know these kind of basic things are being challenged and i so i think
00:15:07.560
people are sort of waking up and saying you know what um i'm not buying this i i really uh you know
00:15:14.400
i'm a nice person i don't like to argue but this seems flat out crazy and it all stems it's essentially
00:15:22.440
the fruit of many decades of this idea that you know we can live apart from god and i think ironically
00:15:31.500
jack this is to me the huge irony is that the evidence for god just as everything seems insane
00:15:38.240
the evidence for god has become just unbelievably powerful there's no way i can underscore it and
00:15:45.240
when i ask the question the title of my book is is atheism dead i happen to have a copy right here
00:15:50.700
uh but the thing is the thing is that when i ask that question i don't have any doubt that if you are
00:15:58.320
intellectually honest you have to conclude you must conclude atheism is preposterous now you have
00:16:06.340
questions about the bible you have questions about christianity or you have questions about faith that's
00:16:11.200
great we can talk about your questions the thesis that there is no god the evidence from science in our
00:16:18.260
in the last few decades has become so overwhelming the only thing you can do is ignore it or look away
00:16:25.080
or just say leave me alone i don't want to there's a there's a good uh cartoon of that that i saw
00:16:29.280
recently by the way where it said uh they said well how come you aren't an atheist and they said well i
00:16:33.840
don't have enough faith for that oh no but i mean it's actually it it becomes i should say that the
00:16:40.980
book the book is atheism dead the first part is science and faith and i and i give evidence from
00:16:46.620
science and i know there are even people listening now thinking what evidence from science what evidence
00:16:50.460
could there be get into it let's get into that where i want to get into that now so i want to say the
00:16:54.220
first part is that the second part is evidence from archaeology that points to the bible as history
00:17:01.120
not as a bunch of folk myths uh but but as history that archaeology just like science keeps pointing
00:17:06.820
to a creator that it's inevitable archaeology continually points to the bible as history and
00:17:12.560
then the third part of the book i deal with atheism itself as a philosophy and basically say just as
00:17:18.580
enough time has passed that we can look at the science enough time has passed that we can look at
00:17:22.160
archaeology enough time has passed that we can look at atheism and say how's that going how was how's
00:17:28.580
that been going for people who have tried to live out this philosophy which was you know it was like
00:17:34.020
really sexy in 1920 but like how's that going 100 years later so i look at these different things
00:17:40.200
and i'm telling you when i say i myself was astonished at how open and shut it becomes it's like having a
00:17:47.720
discussion on so do we think the earth is flat can we discuss that i don't want to be controversial
00:17:52.540
what do you think you'd laugh you'd just say well we've kind of we don't we don't talk about that like
00:17:58.060
we know we don't think the earth is not flat we now know that it's not flat that's how i feel about
00:18:05.160
the existence of god so to to start with the science there's three things that i write about in
00:18:10.100
the science part number one is the evidence for the big bang which we forget how controversial that was
00:18:14.980
in the course of the 20th century most uh atheistic uh scientists were just outraged by the evidence
00:18:24.060
pointing to an expanding universe which obviously came from a single point at some point in the past
00:18:31.180
dramatically disturbing evidence and so you have these people that just said
00:18:35.980
we'll do anything uh to argue for a steady state universe because especially by the way
00:18:42.040
especially because of course the the belgian cosmologist who who really was is credited
00:18:48.200
with coming up with this theory turns out to be a priest you're you're a sharp cookie jack go to the
00:18:53.420
head of the class honestly that's one of the things i write about this in in the book obviously there's a
00:18:58.460
number of people in the 1920s and lemaitre was the was the belgian priest who along with a few others
00:19:06.740
they just said look there's no doubt like this is not our opinion the evidence we now know and this
00:19:14.580
is again einstein blew it when around 1911 12 he's coming up with his equations he sees an expanding
00:19:21.600
universe but einstein himself the greatest scientist you know apart from maybe newton was so insecure
00:19:27.860
that he said that this can't be right i can't admit this this looks like if the universe is expanding
00:19:34.800
that there was a point from which it expanded which means there was a point at which the universe
00:19:38.580
didn't exist that feels too religious i'm going to bury that so einstein buries it and then it's
00:19:44.420
lemaitre and uh their names are escaping me now but but they basically over the decades following say
00:19:51.420
sorry there is no doubt einstein you got it right the first time you shouldn't have buried it well and
00:19:56.860
everybody remembers the the astronomer who confirmed its name was hubble was hubble was the one that and
00:20:01.720
we named the telescope after him he's the one who confirms it and it he becomes the one that said
00:20:05.440
yeah lemaitre and the expanding universe a single point it's that all of the calculations that this
00:20:11.460
catholic priest was was back in belgium was making using the instruments available to him and at the
00:20:17.240
time and i want to say that was um you know really in like sort of the 1930s 40s 20s right um this all
00:20:23.980
comes up and what they call it the the hubble the hubble constant right and it and it just goes and
00:20:28.140
confirms everything what makes it funny to me though is how people were writhing away from this
00:20:33.700
idea because it clearly implies a creator a god maybe not the god of the bible exactly but it's it
00:20:39.580
was so disturbing that this controversy continues well into the 1960s and beyond where there were
00:20:46.480
people still saying no no no we don't like this idea this implies that there's a god now again that's
00:20:53.240
the most basic thing and i develop there are a number of chapters in the beginning of the book where i deal
00:20:57.200
with the big bang honestly it's a fascinating fascinating story which i hadn't been as familiar
00:21:02.580
with so i had to write about it but the second and probably most compelling argument for god
00:21:08.080
is what we call the fine-tuned universe and this is just there is no way to get out of this the more
00:21:16.620
science has learned i mean think how ironic this is the more science has looked at things the more we
00:21:22.900
have the ability now to say you know what um we have telescopes so powerful we can see things we
00:21:29.940
couldn't see a number of years ago we have microscopes so powerful we can see things we couldn't see and as
00:21:34.700
we examine things we see levels of fine tuning we could have before assumed oh it just happened
00:21:42.300
but now we look at it and it's kind of like finding a watch on the beach or finding a laptop in the sand
00:21:46.860
you you wouldn't say well look what the wind and the waves have created you'd say wow from a distance
00:21:53.360
it looked like a rock when i look up close there's a keyboard and oh my goodness what you know or maybe
00:21:59.880
like i don't know like a like a coronavirus that just happens to be perfectly adapted to infect humans
00:22:06.000
and jump from one to i'm you know just just i mentioned that at random completely around we're not
00:22:09.820
going to be controversial jack you and i we don't we don't get into controversy no that's so special we
00:22:15.160
never go there but the fact of the matter is logic sometimes tells you this is an open and shut case
00:22:21.480
this was created but the levels of fine tuning as science has progressed in since this you know uh
00:22:30.700
kind of cavalier arrogant statement time magazine is god dead since then science has progressed and
00:22:36.120
it's like a year doesn't go by a month doesn't go by that we don't discover more elements of fine
00:22:40.680
tuning and this is on every single level we're talking about from the laws of physics which were
00:22:46.820
uh you know created 13.8 billion years ago in the first moment of the big bang the laws of physics are
00:22:53.680
set in stone forever we know that if any of those laws of physics were even you know slightly different
00:23:00.920
by 0.00001 there would be no universe much less earth or people like nothing no us none of it when
00:23:09.060
you look at the the solar system um when you look at why certain planets are here and why the earth is
00:23:15.080
the the one that always kills me is that the size of the earth i mean growing up watching star trek you
00:23:20.040
think like any planet anywhere could have life you know it's going to have like blue people with horns or
00:23:25.000
it's going to have this or that and you start realizing well now that we know now that science
00:23:29.620
has progressed we now know without any doubt you don't need to be a christian to know this any
00:23:34.280
scientist knows that if this earth were ever so slightly bigger like a couple of percent bigger
00:23:40.440
there would be no possibility of us having an atmosphere to support life like two three percent
00:23:46.440
bigger if it was two or three percent smaller there is zero possibility of it holding an atmosphere
00:23:53.720
like that now this is science this is not some you know christian doctrine this is what science
00:23:58.520
says that the the size of the earth just happens to be perfect and that's just like one factor
00:24:06.440
everywhere you look the size of the moon the distance of the moon it goes on it the more you look the
00:24:12.120
more you just think this seems like it was designed and and the more i look the more it seems it was designed
00:24:18.360
so i said i've got to do a kind of like a a soup to nuts survey course of fine tuning in this book
00:24:25.080
you could read dozens of books on the subject but i said most people aren't really familiar with this
00:24:30.280
i'm not a scientist let me just give the basics but everywhere you look you see evidence of fine
00:24:36.840
tuning that's just insane though another one that i love is the um the planet jupiter okay the planet
00:24:43.400
jupiter is for our cosmic filtration system okay you know about this stuff so don't don't spoil it
00:24:50.600
for the people at home 400 million miles away there's this pinprick of light sometimes you can
00:24:57.240
see it in the night sky 400 million my son loves by the way almost every night when um when it's a
00:25:02.680
clear sky we'll go out there and he's four years old but we do we always do if the planets are visible
00:25:07.160
i'll say which one is that which one is that and we'll do jupiter venus uh mars if it's visible
00:25:12.200
saturn i take it you don't live in manhattan like i do because i do not live in manhattan no
00:25:16.360
we can't see nothing we can't see nothing from here but you might think it's really just gunshots
00:25:21.400
going off this this one this one pinprick of light jupiter okay we now know and you already know
00:25:30.120
this but if it weren't there 400 million miles away we couldn't be here and you think that seems
00:25:36.680
ridiculous what does that pinprick of light in the sky have to do with it well it just so happens that
00:25:41.480
it's so massive and it has so much gravity that it pulls away all of the asteroids and the meteors
00:25:46.920
that would otherwise strike earth and make life impossible and again you think jupiter
00:25:53.800
saturn like they need to be there they need to be the size they are and they need to be there and
00:25:59.000
again this is the tip of the iceberg the more you look the more levels of fine tuning you you discover
00:26:03.800
and it is so open and shut it's so crazy that you realize that if you want to be an atheist
00:26:11.240
don't read this stuff because your atheist that's exactly right will evaporate in a millisecond you
00:26:16.440
cannot be we're we're up on our we're up on our break hold it right there because i gotta ask you in
00:26:22.040
the next segment about dna a language written into cells i thought only intelligent beings could come
00:26:29.480
up with language how does that make any sense hold it right there eric mitax will be right back human
00:26:33.320
events sunday special and we're back we're talking about the solar system we're talking about the
00:26:39.080
the cosmic filtration system that is jupiter why don't the asteroids hit us because they hit jupiter
00:26:43.800
first it's what it's there for the comet seem to hit jupiter they seem to be attracted to it
00:26:47.480
it seems like it doesn't make sense it's an awfully awful big coincidence and as steve bannon likes to
00:26:52.840
say there are no conspiracies but there are coincidences and so when when we look at the
00:26:57.960
system the solar system the way that it is we look at the laws of physics the way that they are that
00:27:01.720
literally if any of them were shifted in any such way if the earth were just a little bit further
00:27:07.080
from the sun or a little bit closer to the sun we need to be burning up or we'd be completely frozen
00:27:12.440
we're in what's called the goldilocks zone our bodies our cells wouldn't be able to function if
00:27:17.000
gravity on planet earth wasn't this way and so when we look at all of these things
00:27:23.160
and we're talking here with eric metaxas you know eric one of the things that just blows my mind the
00:27:28.200
more i think about it is dna and the fact that we have essentially what something that even when the
00:27:35.480
dna was originally discovered you wouldn't necessarily put it in these terms but we have a
00:27:39.400
computer code we have a computer code that's written into our cells that's written into the cells of all
00:27:44.760
living things on earth we all have it yet every computer code that's out there every programmer
00:27:50.360
you know we always say learn to code when somebody loses their job you know we talk about twitter and
00:27:54.280
elon musk is going to hire the best coders why would we have a code in our living cells why would we have
00:28:03.560
essentially a language in our living cells that randomly came up by itself i mean there's that whole
00:28:11.720
theory of the tornado hitting the junkyard but i don't quite think that darwin's theories or that
00:28:17.640
pure evolution can really explain this for us why is there a language in the cells of my body
00:28:22.600
why to be an atheism you know you said it requires too much faith you have to be utterly willful
00:28:28.760
to be an atheist you basically in in effect you cannot be an atheist what you can say is i hate god so
00:28:34.520
much that i won't admit that i believe he exists that's where you have to go because i mean look
00:28:41.880
there's so much evidence in my book from science that i didn't even go into the dna and i didn't
00:28:48.920
even get into the evolution stuff because there is so much other evidence that i thought other people
00:28:52.920
are unfamiliar with i said we need to know that the evidence for god from science is at this point
00:28:59.080
open and shut like we solved the case it's over we know there is no way conceivable it's not even
00:29:09.240
conceivable that everything emerged randomly when you talk about dna that's the most dramatic example
00:29:16.040
when you talk about a single cell that's what got me starting to to write the book actually i met a
00:29:21.240
a nanoscientist he's a dear friend james tour at rice university in houston he starts telling me about
00:29:27.720
the theory that we all grew up with it was on the test growing up that in in 1952 some scientists
00:29:34.200
at the university of chicago ran some electricity you know to simulate lightning through some
00:29:40.040
prebiotic soup so there's no life right a little yeah through it and they get amino acids and they
00:29:46.280
lose their minds like we're on our way amino acids and then next thing you know we're gonna have
00:29:50.920
proteins next thing you know like we're on our way to figure out how life evolved randomly right and what
00:29:56.360
this friend james tour says to me it's a couple years ago he says eric it's been 70 years they
00:30:03.400
haven't moved that ball forward one millimeter in fact the more we have learned from science the ball
00:30:11.000
has basically like zipped off to the other side of the universe there's no we now know that the idea
00:30:17.240
that this sequence that starts with amino acids but it's like forget it the more we know about what
00:30:22.680
constitutes a single cell the simplest form of life if you say to a scientist hey how did life
00:30:28.760
emerge they say oh four billion years ago on earth single-celled life emerged they say you'd say great
00:30:34.840
right great tell me tell me how did that happen they they have no idea they will blow smoke and james tour
00:30:41.480
is calling him on it he's done these youtube videos i just interviewed him for socrates in the city
00:30:45.720
uh on this subject because he hasn't written a book about it it is mind bending jack it is like it's the
00:30:52.200
greatest evidence for god that exists and no one ever talks about it so that's really what made me
00:30:56.600
write my book is atheism dead because i said this is the most dramatic example from science that you
00:31:04.040
you want to ask a scientist the most basic question life how did that begin they have no idea in fact
00:31:10.600
it's worse than they have no idea they know that they don't know and they're blowing smoke and they're
00:31:15.480
they're taking a lot of funding also um you'll you'll also find some well that you get you get
00:31:20.120
the uh you get the alien spore theory some people will throw the stuff out there and say well what
00:31:24.600
does that mean because they try to get away from from saying you know from discussing god or even
00:31:29.560
intelligent design right by itself they will say well uh aliens came and seeded life on earth and
00:31:37.960
that's where it came from they don't see where the aliens come from where the aliens come from
00:31:43.080
i actually write about this in the book i'm not kidding in the book it's atheism that i deal with
00:31:46.920
exactly what you said because it's actually like comedy it's like saying like who baked the cake who
00:31:51.800
baked the cake and they say well costello somebody brought it down the hill carrying it in a pan and
00:31:56.680
you're like well we don't care we want to know who baked it did someone bake it uh and like we can't
00:32:01.400
talk about that we just know that it probably was delivered by some stranger it's so it's so funny
00:32:06.680
actually anyway so the first part of the book is science the second part of the book is archaeology
00:32:11.960
and the evidence from archaeology is equally mind-blowing it seems like every day they
00:32:17.160
discover something in the sands of the middle east like they go oh we never thought that we'd find an
00:32:22.600
actual seal from king hezekiah here it is you know everywhere you look you find evidence and the
00:32:29.400
biggest one and i wrote about it in the book is the discovery of biblical sodom sodom and gomorrah i i
00:32:35.080
found me that is the one of the end-all be-all discoveries and it's really only been in in
00:32:42.120
recent times that you know and i think they discovered the site in the 70s and they've
00:32:45.800
been trying to debunk it ever since no this was this is a uh this was uh sorry it was around 2000 this
00:32:53.400
is a new we don't we don't have time to go into this but i'm telling you it was literally because of
00:32:59.080
james tour uh in houston on the science thing and because of dr stephen collins in albuquerque who
00:33:06.440
discovered biblical sodom in the early 2000s the level of detail of of what he can tell you in fact
00:33:14.600
an article was written in nature magazine about a year and a half ago peer-reviewed nature magazine
00:33:19.800
20 scientists wrote about it again it's open and shut it is mind i i posted that article everywhere when
00:33:27.800
it popped i posted again we just got back from uh the holy land and so listeners of the podcast will
00:33:32.520
remember that when we were there we we spoke about this at length because we we essentially drove right
00:33:36.440
past it and we did a we did an episode talking about uh this this very fact that you you've gotten
00:33:42.520
you've got a city that's exactly where the bible says it would be that shows the evidence of exactly
00:33:48.360
what the bible says happened to sodom right east of abraham's tent and the word exactly isn't even good
00:33:53.640
enough like it's so it's not even good enough that it's scary precise and it's so so precise
00:33:59.560
it's scary it's the first few pages of the bible we're not talking about something you know two
00:34:03.480
thousand years ago we're talking something about 1700 bc it seems mythic that we could never discover
00:34:09.480
it they have discovered every detail i mean it is that is one of the reasons i wrote the book
00:34:15.640
the book is atheism dead exists because of dr stephen collins whom i met in albuquerque and because
00:34:21.320
of dr james tour who i met in houston one gave me the science one gave me the archaeology and those
00:34:27.000
pieces of information are so huge i said i need to write about that and that and everything else
00:34:31.720
you know eric of course of course what by the way and and and if well if you follow me on twitter you
00:34:35.560
know you know my followers can be a little bit of a rambunctious bunch every once in a while and so
00:34:40.280
of course uh you know half the people that um you know when i shared about this oh my gosh this this
00:34:45.160
proves a you know one of the key stories of the bible this is something that we can obviously show that
00:34:49.160
can prove and then the other half of the of the uh of of the responses were all like lord it's time
00:34:54.520
again i have a list we have we have a list of cities that uh uh that we need you to take care of you
00:35:01.800
know but uh we'll put a few uh i was gonna say it's hard not to go there in this in this day and age
00:35:07.560
uh i i'm not going to mention san francisco by name but no i would never bring up san francisco like
00:35:12.680
that there it might slip out it might not publicly not on a program like this but probably
00:35:18.040
no absolutely not this is a christian show well this okay so the third by the way and and and i
00:35:23.400
want to put this out there for for for folks if you're out there and i know look i've got i've got
00:35:27.880
you know listeners and and people in the audience who uh you might be atheist you might be agnostic
00:35:32.200
you might be secular you might be someone who had a bad experience with uh with the church or uh with
00:35:36.680
your with organized religion writ large and you know we're we we pray for you we love you but what
00:35:43.640
we're doing is offering something other than sort of your your regular just angry nasty oh god is
00:35:49.720
terrible and those priests are just trying to take your money and uh you know force you to live in
00:35:54.840
a certain way to give them power that you know actually it seems that some of the stuff that these
00:35:58.920
guys were talking about might actually be based in reality and i think that if we are going to be
00:36:03.480
open-minded and discuss these things we should and we should take time on these programs here on
00:36:08.440
a sunday to actually delve into this because look even even myself as a believer as an adult and
00:36:13.240
someone who has kids i'm raising them to be believers that you know i hope i hope i'm teaching
00:36:18.360
the right thing you know i'm not not teaching them something that's going to make them nuts
00:36:22.760
well ultimately we're talking about reality i don't want to convert somebody to my way of thinking i
00:36:30.280
want to convert people to reality i myself want to be converted to reality if there's something i believe
00:36:34.840
that's not true i don't want to believe it and that's what amazes me is that if you posit the
00:36:40.040
idea that there's a god who created the universe the evidence of him and the evidence of his creation
00:36:45.480
it is increasingly astonishing in these last days as things are going loony we are seeing more and
00:36:52.360
more evidence for god making him more and more difficult to deny him and you know at the end of
00:36:57.640
the book i talk about the witness of beauty i really think that part of what makes god so amazing is that
00:37:07.240
when you take him out the idea of beauty of being moved by something of weeping at something beautiful
00:37:13.720
none of that makes sense no god is what gives everything beauty and meaning and to live a life
00:37:21.160
really believing that there is no god we're here alone we're just a concatenation of atoms and stuff
00:37:26.360
it doesn't make sense on any human level and again i make the case at the end of the book where we are eric
00:37:32.440
hold on a second hard break coming back final segment here human event sunday
00:37:39.320
and we're back we're talking with eric metaxas is atheism dead and so so eric you know this is great
00:37:44.440
right this is great for christians out there for uh for for churchgoers out there so if atheism is
00:37:49.240
dead then that means the church must must just be killing it right now pews full uh you know everybody's
00:37:55.080
believing again crosses up on every yard i mean that's what's going on right now in the u.s right i mean
00:38:00.040
this is just a it's it's it's a fait accompli right well that's what's so funny funny sad horrifying
00:38:07.000
i think part of the reason god gives us so much evidence you know and again the reason i wrote the
00:38:13.000
book is atheism dead as i said as things go crazy god is giving us more evidence to bolster us to
00:38:19.160
encourage us that believing in me is not crazy not believing in me is crazy the problem and i know we're
00:38:27.720
going to segue to the book that i just wrote my brand new book it's called letter to the american
00:38:32.120
church because effectively i wrote a book about dietrich bonhoeffer a german pastor who spoke out against
00:38:42.280
the nazis was killed by the nazis an amazing christian hero who spoke up for the jews um and
00:38:49.240
he was instrumental in my conversion experience because i remember thinking i if that's christianity
00:38:53.640
i could be interested in that that's a hero um my thesis in the new book letter to the american
00:39:00.200
church is that the silence of the church in germany because bonhoeffer tried to get the church to wake
00:39:05.640
up and to stand and to be heroic and to live out their faith speak up for the jews speak against the
00:39:10.680
nazis who were dramatically atheistic don't let anybody tell you anything different um he failed
00:39:17.560
the church in germany was silent in the face of evil and the silence of the german church and
00:39:22.920
their excuse like we don't want to be political we're just going to stick to theology that led
00:39:28.440
to satanic evil on a level that we can hardly dream of it's so sick we don't even want to think about
00:39:33.960
what happened well if you're if you i've always said this by the way that a pure atheist would always
00:39:38.600
be obsessed with with eugenics right because if you don't believe that there is any uh that that there
00:39:44.760
is only the here and now then you'd be obsessed with the here and now and that's why i say things
00:39:48.600
like the climate cult or woke ism that these these are essentially pagan religions uh because what
00:39:54.680
you've done is you've created your own religion your own theology uh equity diversity uh these these
00:40:00.520
you know climate gaia these which actually right is an old religion itself that you're you're erecting
00:40:05.560
new religions you're not actually focused on the fact that all there is a here and now but you
00:40:09.720
take a group like that that the national socialists of germany that yeah absolutely they were
00:40:14.200
focused on atheism because all they believed in was eugenics well the horror though of course is
00:40:19.400
that the church in germany had the ability to speak against what was going on they chose not to
00:40:25.560
effectively and the thesis of my book letter to the american church is that the american church today
00:40:32.920
the catholic church the evangelical church of which i am mostly a member um has been utterly silent in
00:40:41.400
the face of evil today and it is now leading to the triumph of evil just as it was in germany in the
00:40:51.480
30s and just as they were blind to it because let's not think that they they saw it coming they didn't
00:40:56.280
see it coming they never dreamt that their silence but eric shouldn't the church be inclusive shouldn't
00:41:02.600
the church just you know uh christ loves us as we are and and isn't one of the biggest christian values
00:41:09.640
that christ teaches us tolerance uh actually no i can detect i can detect your tremendous sarcasm
00:41:17.000
jack and it's why i love you i want to say that we are seeing the silence of christian leaders and
00:41:23.400
i'm speaking mostly about you know evangelical leaders but they they give exactly and again this
00:41:28.600
is the subject of the book letter to the american church they give exactly the same excuses for their
00:41:33.240
silence that the german leaders gave for their silence they had these theologically fussy excuses
00:41:41.720
for not speaking up for not standing up for not being heroic uh their excuses were things like well
00:41:48.840
romans 13 says we're not supposed to be political uh you know we're just going to stick to our theology
00:41:54.040
let me tell you the atheist chinese communist party loves those kind of christians keep your feet in
00:42:02.520
that building uh all over nazi germany romans 13 constantly well that's that's the point and and
00:42:08.840
basically it's not right romans 13 is not the whole bible it's it's been right exactly if you are any
00:42:15.240
kind of a person of faith you will speak against evil you'll speak against every kind of evil you'll speak
00:42:21.160
fearlessly because you're supposed to believe you claim to believe that god defeated death on the
00:42:27.960
cross and therefore you don't even fear death you fear god in in the sense that you you fear what he
00:42:34.200
thinks about what you're talking about and not talking about you don't kind of worry about what
00:42:38.120
your neighbors are going to think you're going to speak the truth knowing it's going to bless people
00:42:42.360
but christian leaders have been dramatically silent in our time exactly jack exactly uh you know which
00:42:50.200
example i love to use for this i say um john the baptist didn't speak up against herod because he
00:42:59.240
hated him he spoke up about herod's infidelity and his sin because he loved the truth that that's
00:43:07.480
exactly right and that's what god expects his people to do when people claim to have faith right um
00:43:14.680
you you know there's a scripture my the title of the book letter to the american church the new book
00:43:19.640
which is a very short book i was going to title it faith without works is dead which is from the
00:43:26.760
gospel of jane we're from the epistle of james faith without works is dead if you claim to be a believer
00:43:33.960
let me tell you according to the scripture if you are not living out this faith you claim to have
00:43:40.600
perhaps you don't have any faith that should scare you you can't just say well i believe it's an
00:43:46.440
intellectual thing not according to the bible according to the bible if you do not live out
00:43:51.480
your faith self-sacrificially in a way that's obvious to every demon in the neighborhood that's
00:43:57.400
obvious to god that's obvious to your neighbors to your friends to your enemies if you're not living
00:44:02.280
out your faith maybe you don't have faith and i really think that that's what happened in germany
00:44:07.720
is that they basically said look we don't want any trouble we don't want to get political we're just
00:44:11.960
going to keep our mouths shut and god is saying through bonhoeffer i raised you up for this hour
00:44:20.440
to be a bulwark of truth and courage in the face of evil and you would be silent that is going to
00:44:27.320
bring hell on earth and it did but letter to the american church i'm basically saying that this warning
00:44:32.760
applies to us today american church leaders have been silent in the face of evil you name it okay
00:44:38.760
whatever whether we're talking about the transgender lunacy which is harming young people destroying
00:44:43.720
their lives whether we're talking about uh vaccines or we're talking about corruption in government i
00:44:50.120
mean it doesn't even matter what we're talking about when people say well that's political i don't
00:44:53.240
want to talk about that god requires us to speak against evil the slave trade was political and my hero
00:44:59.400
william wilberforce because of his christian faith spoke against the slave trade he said this is an
00:45:05.080
abomination and as a politician talk about being political he said we've got to go to war against
00:45:10.760
this evil and by god's grace they defeated the slave trade and by the way not to to step on it but
00:45:17.080
but i hope folks know that the william wilberforce movie uh came about because of your work it was based
00:45:22.600
on your work and telling this story this amazing story that it was the christian west that ended the
00:45:31.400
practice at least the formal legal practice of slavery with this practice that had existed since
00:45:36.360
the dawn of civilism the dawn of time that had always been around yet it's it's this christian
00:45:41.800
westerner who steps up and says look i know we're all making money off of it but we don't want to do
00:45:45.800
this anymore because it's wrong whenever but this is i guess the reason i wrote the book uh in in a way
00:45:51.240
this is the new book letter to the american church is because i said wherever i go if i speak about
00:45:55.560
bonhoeffer and how he spoke bravely against the nazis and this the evil that they did to the jews we all
00:46:00.920
cheer and we go like if i was there i would have been right there with him when when i talk about
00:46:04.600
william wilberforce and his heroism because of his christian faith speaking against slavery
00:46:10.040
we all cheer we say i would have been right there with him well the fact of the matter is no you
00:46:14.760
wouldn't if you're being silent now on every single one of these issues critical race theory you being
00:46:21.640
quiet about marxism about about cultural marxism and critical race theory are you being silent about
00:46:28.120
transgender are you being silent about corruption in government about people destroying the nation
00:46:34.600
about marxism uh cultural marxism infiltrating wokeism the highest levels of our government
00:46:41.960
you're being silent about that don't you understand human beings lives are going to be destroyed
00:46:46.360
because of your silence and if you claim to be a christian and you think that squares with your
00:46:52.200
keeping your mouth shut you don't know what it is to have faith and i wrote this book really uh in
00:46:57.960
the desperate hope that people who could be swayed um would be swayed to say to them listen folks i know
00:47:05.240
nobody wants to stick their neck out and get in trouble nobody wants to get cancelled but if the
00:47:08.680
church would rise as one if people who believe in these things would rise up first of all you'll see
00:47:13.000
the church grow dramatically because there's a hunger in this country for people to speak the truth
00:47:19.160
people just want moral leadership they want moral leadership and clarity that's the only thing they
00:47:24.520
want that is eric we're we're in our final minute where can people go to follow you gain access to
00:47:29.160
your work your writings folks in my audience if you don't know eric all right i hope you do but where
00:47:33.560
can they go i'm all over social media if you could just spell my name eric metaxas i'm on uh twitter
00:47:39.720
truth social uh every everywhere you want to look uh my website is eric metaxas.com i have a newsletter
00:47:46.440
where i send out all the interviews i do on my radio program we have a socrates in the city event
00:47:51.160
coming up december 6th right here in new york city so if you just can spell my name you can find me i
00:47:57.000
hope you do and jack i'm really grateful for you and for your voice and uh it's wonderful to be uh
00:48:04.040
with you on this program and i i'm already looking forward to seeing you uh in phoenix uh in the middle
00:48:09.080
of next month thank you that's right at america fest gotta throw the promo in for charlie out there
00:48:14.120
that's right eric and i will be there america fest go to amfest.com if you're listening to this
00:48:19.480
during uh your black friday slash thanksgiving weekend we have a sale that's going on right now
00:48:24.920
so make sure you get your tickets amfest.com come see myself jack posobiec eric metaxas charlie
00:48:30.440
steve bannon tucker carlson candace owens kaylee mcenny temple literally everyone's going to be there
00:48:35.560
so you better to amfest.com i'll see you there ladies and gentlemen as always you have my permission