Judeo-Christian values lie at the heart and soul of western civilization itself, and they lie behind much of the Enlightenment values that we ourselves tend to value as even secular people. They provide a logical framework that allows for the flourishing of human freedom, and a social fabric that provides a foundation for the free market economy, free speech, and free thought. And if you want to have a free country, you have to have an alternative moral system in which individuals don t matter as much as the sort of collective will that individuals ought to be grounds dust. And responsibility has to be added to those values, because individualism, without any sort of teaching in your moral debt owed to others, ends with hedonism and anarchy, and it ends in societal collapse and anarchy. So if you need a balance between virtue and liberty, you need Judeo Christian values. And without that balance, there will be anarchy and chaos, and that is what we all need to be fighting for. - John Gray John Gray is an American academic, philosopher, writer, and political philosopher. His work has been widely anthologized, and he is a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Atlantic. His latest book, The New Republic, is out now, and is available for purchase on Amazon Prime, wherever you get your copy of the Hardcover edition of Hardcover. Hardcover is also available in hardcover, $99.99.00, including Audible and Audible, $49.99, and will be available on Audible.99 paperback $99, plus Audible UK, Audible has a limited edition of Audible Audible membership, and Kindle, which will be shipping in paperback, too.99 europiano, and VHS, and so you can get a copy of The Audible Projeepers, too? and so on, too, will be delivered in Kindle, and the Audible Connections, and other places you can access all of those things. . Thank you for listening to John Gray's book, John Gray, John's book is available in paperback and paperback $49 US$49.95, plus shipping plans, other places I'll get $50, and you get $5,000, and all of these other things will get a lifetime of these things, you can become an ad-free deal, and more, you'll get a 7-day shipping plan?
00:00:00.000judeo-christian values lie at the heart and soul of western civilization itself And they lie at the heart and soul of a lot of the Enlightenment values that we ourselves tend to value as even secular people.
00:00:24.000The very basis of the notion that human beings have intrinsic worth and intrinsic quality.
00:00:28.000That is a notion that cannot be discovered from science.
00:00:30.000It's not something that you can pick up just by looking at a science textbook.
00:00:33.000After all, we're just an agglomeration of cells and an agglomeration of various firing synapses.
00:00:38.000The idea that human beings have inherent value, that's something that springs from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:00:42.000The idea that we're all equal before God, that we have all equal rights before God, that again comes from the ideas in Genesis.
00:00:48.000The idea that as human beings we are created as individuals made in the likeness of God and therefore we have to value the rights of other human beings.
00:00:56.000The moral strictures of the Ten Commandments.
00:00:58.000These are all the things that provide the grounding for a social fabric that allows for freedom to flourish.
00:01:03.000Now, there are a lot of people who attack Judeo-Christian values because they believe that Judeo-Christian values is too exclusive, that Judeo-Christian values is rooted in faith as opposed to in logic.
00:01:12.000But the reality of the situation is that everybody's moral framework is rooted in certain assumptions.
00:01:17.000The question of how we are to live a moral life is rife with questions about how we ought to view human beings and their place in the world.
00:01:25.000If you believe in the sort of scientific materialist worldview that says that human beings are basically just material wandering through space with the illusion of free will, it's very difficult to make a moral case for why you should act in a certain way, why you should act as though you have free will, why you should act in the interest of others as opposed to in your own interest.
00:01:43.000If, however, you believe that there is a moral standard that stands above and beyond you, that you were created with a soul, Something that exists beyond death.
00:01:50.000If you believe in Judeo-Christian values, in other words, that provides the logical framework that allows for the flourishing of human freedom.
00:01:55.000Now that doesn't mean that every religion-based society is going to end in human freedom.
00:01:59.000Very often, religion, just like any other force in human history, can be used for tyranny.
00:02:09.000Where religious authorities get to declare what you can and cannot do.
00:02:12.000But the true purpose of Judeo-Christian values is to determine your place in a universe that is governed by rules, that is discernible by human reason, human intellect.
00:02:22.000This is rife in Judeo-Christian theology, ranging from Maimonides in Judaism to Aquinas in Catholicism.
00:02:29.000To the great Protestant theologians as well.
00:02:32.000The fact of the matter remains that if you want to have a free country, you have to have a social fabric that is supported by these moral ideas.
00:02:38.000This is why the French Revolution was a failure.
00:02:41.000Because the French Revolution tried to create a secular morality without the framework of Judeo-Christian morals.
00:02:46.000And it turns out that it is very easy to discard the individual in that math.
00:02:50.000It's incredibly easy to say the individual doesn't matter as much as the collective.
00:02:52.000This was the logic that was used by Robespierre and, by the way, by Karl Marx.
00:02:56.000It is easy to say that an alternative moral system in which individuals don't matter as much as the sort of collective will that individuals ought to be grounds dust.
00:03:06.000The values that you believe in the values of free markets, the values of free exchange and free speech and free thought, the value being treated as an individual.
00:03:13.000Again, that is rooted in the belief that you were made as an individual by God in God's image.
00:03:18.000And those values have to be promulgated.
00:03:21.000And responsibility has to be added to those values, because individualism, without any sort of teaching in your moral debt owed to others, ends with hedonism, and it ends with narcissism, and it ends with societal collapse and anarchy.
00:03:33.000So if you want that balance between responsibility And freedom.
00:03:36.000If you want the balance between virtue and liberty, you need Judeo-Christian values.
00:03:40.000One of the saddest things that we've seen in modern society is people rebelling against churches, people saying the church is bad, people actively fighting against church, suggesting the church is the great oppressor, and that as soon as we get rid of church, that things will move in a far better direction.
00:03:56.000A lot of the collapse in meaning that's taken place in American life, a lot of the violence that we see in our streets, a lot of the suffering that we see, is directly implicated in the destruction of churches, in the destruction of synagogues, in the destruction of organized religion, in which so many people found community, faith in their neighbors, a belief that the people who lived around them were good and decent human beings, and thus deserving of the same freedoms that they themselves were worthy of.
00:04:17.000If you want an overarching government structure cramming down one rule from above, all you have to do is dissolve the social fabric that is rooted in Judeo-Christian values.
00:04:24.000Alrighty, coming up, You're going to hear me talk about these issues and many more with the late Ravi Zacharias, as well as Michael Shermer, as well as William Lane Craig.
00:04:33.000I really hope that you enjoy the episode of The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
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00:05:39.000This week on the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special, we've moved into the summer off season and we're bringing you our best moments from the last two years of shows.
00:05:46.000We'll listen to guests from my show and hear their unique perspectives surrounding a topic.
00:05:50.000And I'll also be sharing some reflections on each of the guests and their episodes.
00:05:53.000In this episode, we're focusing on the Judeo-Christian values that Western civilization has been built on and the dialogue I've had with guests about these values.
00:06:02.000I'd also like to take a moment to honor and remember Ravi Zacharias.
00:06:06.000Ravi recently passed away after a fight against cancer.
00:06:08.000I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with him about a year ago in episode 60.
00:06:12.000Ravi was a Christian teacher with a 48-year long career preaching in over 70 countries, authoring over 30 books in which he argued for the existence of God and the case for Christianity by connecting faith with reason and focusing on the logical case for theism.
00:06:24.000His ministry's motto is Helping the Thinker Believe, Helping the Believer Think.
00:06:28.000His latest book is Seeing Jesus from the East, a fresh look at history's most influential figure, which was released since we've talked.
00:06:35.000Ravi touched the lives of millions of people.
00:06:36.000His memory will not soon be forgotten as the work of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries continues on.
00:06:42.000I would have loved to talk many more hours about religion, philosophy, and God with Ravi, but I do feel a deep gratitude to have had the privilege to meet and connect with him through this show.
00:06:50.000It was really fantastic to talk to Ravi.
00:06:51.000He was one of the most requested people around the office.
00:06:54.000People around the office just loved his work.
00:06:55.000This was also one of our most popular episodes and one of the most requested.
00:06:58.000What a charming and delightful and urbane and humane individual Ravi Zacharias was.
00:07:03.000In our interview, listen to Ravi distinguish the Judeo-Christian worldview from all other worldviews.
00:07:07.000One of the issues that now comes up routinely, and I saw it with my book, I know that you've experienced it as well, is if you mention Judeo-Christian civilization, if you mention Western civilization, there's a whole school of thought if you mention Western civilization, there's a whole school of thought out there now that this is effectively just a form of racism, that this is a form of white supremacy, which comes, I think, as an ironic accusation toward both you and toward
00:07:35.000But that attempt to paint Even the term Judeo-Christian civilization is inherently exclusive.
00:07:44.000Do you think that that reflects any accuracy?
00:07:47.000In other words, what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian worldview from some of the other religious worldviews?
00:07:52.000You mentioned early on that when you have debates with folks or discussions with folks who are of other monotheistic faiths, that those tend to be some of the hardest conversations.
00:08:02.000Where do you think that the Judeo-Christian worldview diverges from some of the other faiths with which you've discussed?
00:08:08.000You know, I think we're also paying the penalty of our flaws.
00:08:14.000Historically, the church has made huge blunders.
00:08:17.000You point out some of this in your book as well.
00:08:22.000What it really showed, and even the way they handled scientific progress at times, which was not well done, it actually ends up proving the depravity of man.
00:08:31.000It doesn't prove who Jesus is, what the Bible actually teaches, but it proves what we become as human beings when we give to ourselves power over everybody else.
00:08:41.000So I say we have to own up our mistakes.
00:08:45.000But we have no more mistakes made than those who are of a counter-perspective.
00:08:50.000Which are the two most rogue regimes in the world today?
00:08:55.000If you go back to the 20th century, more people were killed in communist countries than any democratic, capitalistic system put together, and you know that well.
00:09:06.000You put the slaughter of people between China and Russia alone, and then you bring in Vietnam and Cambodia.
00:09:13.000I was in Vietnam in the 70s, not as a fighter, but as working with the chaplains.
00:09:20.000I was in Vietnam a few weeks ago, and they themselves talk about what is being done to them under this heavily atheistic regime.
00:09:28.000The fact of the matter is to point this finger against those of a Judeo-Christian worldview shows a prejudice that is not in keeping with history.
00:09:36.000Why is it people come to the shores of this country?
00:09:44.000It came through going through the hoops.
00:09:46.000It came through answering questions because we saw some ethical norms here and less corruption in the political process than from whence my brother and I were coming.
00:09:58.000And the fact of the matter is people don't realize it was the bequest.
00:10:03.000Of that Judeo-Christian framework, when China, before this particular one, was quite demagogic, was starting to send their scholars over to here, you talk to almost any Chinese at that time, you know what he would say?
00:10:18.000Why is this country so ethically driven and has the values of human life contrary to mine?
00:10:25.000When Tocqueville came, whom you mentioned too, what did he say?
00:10:30.000We are now throwing out that which engendered our values, and now we think we can have values Without that foundation, yes, mistakes have been made, but greater mistakes have been made by those who denied the existence of God.
00:10:50.000The only difference is whether you believe in the real God or end up deifying ourselves.
00:10:55.000Okay, now, what about the other perspectives, especially the pantheistic worldviews?
00:11:01.000One famous Indian politician just recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that we give freedom to whatever you want to believe, and go on and on.
00:11:09.000Well, that's very noble, if that is the case.
00:11:13.000But then we should revisit that and talk about, should we be making anti-conversion laws then, if we make anybody give people the freedom to believe?
00:11:21.000Why then are we barricading Anybody who wants to choose otherwise.
00:11:24.000So we have to think these things through.
00:11:27.000And so what I say is we ought to give people the freedom to believe or to disbelieve.
00:11:32.000And we ought not to have a theocracy, because dictating religious belief is the best way to kill that belief, as Europe finally evicted, you know, the priest and the king, as it were.
00:11:44.000So I believe you give the freedom to believe, and the biggest place we need to be given this privilege is in our academic institutions.
00:11:54.000If universities would open their door to intelligent dialogue with our differences, I believe things will change.
00:12:02.000It is the fact that they have blocked out a prejudicial description of what the Judeo-Christian worldview is all about.
00:12:19.000Now when relativism holds sway, we are bringing everybody out of the woodwork and what they did 20, 30, 40 years ago because we just want to see them in jail.
00:12:26.000It just goes to show you that what you said earlier, we all have our absolutes.
00:12:30.000We only bring them out when it serves our own purposes.
00:12:34.000It is not the Judeo-Christian worldview that is to blame.
00:12:37.000It is the way some people use their belief that I think engenders this kind of prejudicial reaction.
00:12:45.000So given the fact that we do live in this immensely prosperous time, this immensely free time, you know, the case that I make and continue to make is that these are all outgrowths of a 3500 year process of history combined with reason and that you end up, this is basically when you, when you Continue to put pressure on a piece of coal, eventually you get a diamond.
00:13:06.000And that is effectively what has happened with our civilization.
00:13:10.000So why then are we watching the rise of prosperity over the course of the last couple centuries alongside the rise of secularism across the last couple of centuries?
00:13:19.000Well, I think, you know, Anthony Kronman from Yale wrote that excellent book called The End of Secularism, and he was punning on the word end, meaning both its terminal point and its purpose.
00:13:30.000And he said that the whole secular way of experiment was not properly communicated in the whole existential experience.
00:13:40.000It wasn't lived out properly, and so it blew the whole thing.
00:13:44.000Secular society is the logical way to actually try to build government, but the freedom to give dissenting voices their view is essential if secularism is to be a logical way of following.
00:14:02.000Otherwise, if you're anti-God, anti-theistic, then you have actually Blocked the freedom to express.
00:14:11.000I think you so well point out what Locke had talked about, you know, the whole idea of how we are endowed by our Creator with these rights.
00:14:28.000But what we need is the freedom to discuss and interact.
00:14:33.000You know, Ben, the most common question we are asked when we are on campus, and I have 90 fellow apologists on our team, we cover the globe, 12, 13, 14-year-olds come up to the microphone and talk about the struggle with suicide.
00:14:50.000Can somebody here tell me what my life actually means?
00:14:54.000Why I should keep from taking my life?
00:14:56.000Secularism doesn't give you the answer because secularism is born out of the idea of saeculum, just this worldly.
00:15:05.000But if a secularistic framework becomes to an antitheistic framework, then it's no longer a legitimate secularism, it is an antitheistic framework of thinking.
00:15:15.000And that, to my way of thinking, is not what secularism is all about.
00:15:20.000We have to have the absence of a theocracy, but the absence of a theocracy doesn't mean the presence of an antitheistic-ocracy of whatever comes in its place.
00:15:41.000I'm 73 now, 53 years later, and I look at what's happening.
00:15:45.000If our children are to grow up in a country of respect and civility, I believe we have to go back to the values of the Judea Christian worldview, view, which give to us the sacredness of our origin and the sacredness of our relationships and the sacredness of my neighbor's property and the sacredness of time from everything of value that I am given by God.
00:16:41.000From episode six of the Sunday special, one of our very first guests was one of my favorites, Michael Shermer.
00:16:46.000We'll get to his interview in just a moment.
00:16:48.000But first, it is just a simple fact that if you are not protecting your data online, companies and bad actors are probably gonna go after it.
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00:16:59.000It doesn't matter what mode you use, how many times you clear that browsing history, your ISP can still see every single website you've ever visited.
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00:17:09.000They may be selling exactly the data you are trying to hide.
00:17:11.000It doesn't matter if you get your internet from Verizon or Comcast.
00:18:22.000I definitely appreciate Michael talking about Judeo-Christian values with me as somebody who really gets the importance of morality and individual liberty, but doesn't agree that these things are rooted in Athens and Sinai.
00:18:32.000Listen to us debate when and how the perspective of the human individual enters history and what morality you can and can't achieve from pure reason alone.
00:18:40.000This is one of the great puzzles of human history is number one, why this perspective on the human individual only arose in the 17th century.
00:18:52.000If this is ingrained in human beings, that the individual is a value and that we have to work with one another, then why only in a certain place in a certain time did it arise?
00:19:00.000Was it a spontaneous combustion of human thought in the 17th and 18th centuries?
00:19:05.000Or was this something that has deeper roots?
00:19:06.000I obviously would argue this has deeper roots going all the way back to Sinai and Athens.
00:19:12.000Yeah, so I think there's a tension there always between the individual and the group, and then how do we get beyond the small tribes.
00:19:19.000A tribal size of about 150 plus or minus, a few dozen, where everybody knows each other or related to each other.
00:19:25.000So evolutionary psych can get us all the way out to that.
00:19:28.000Now, beyond that, we need politics, economics, culture, history, and so on.
00:19:34.000And so the one model I use is, I call this the Indugoo effect.
00:19:37.000So in Jack Nicholson's movie about Schmidt, You know, he's a retired insurance guy, and he's late night watching, and there's one of these infomercials about adopting a little kid, Ndugu in this case, and he gives money to little Ndugu, and the whole narrative plot is around that.
00:19:53.000He doesn't know Ndugu from anybody, but they show him the picture of little Ndugu, and here he is with his soccer ball and his brother and sister, and here's their little hut they live in, and five dollars a day will give them, so on.
00:20:04.000And now if you show a picture of 10,000 starving kids in Kenya, I'm not giving any money or I'll give a dollar or whatever, but you show me little Ndugu.
00:20:11.000So really it's kind of tricking our brain into making little Ndugu an honorary member of our tribe, my family, my friend.
00:20:20.000We care about people we know or can identify with.
00:20:22.000So to get beyond that, First of all, you have to get people to care about other people by identifying them as individuals that are like me.
00:20:29.000So that sort of principle of interchangeable perspectives, that could be me, there but for the grace of, in your case, God.
00:20:40.000Well, beyond getting people to truly care, just having a large society with the rule of laws and democracy where we at least feel like we have some say.
00:20:50.000But more importantly, I think free trade is one of these things where as long as you and I are both profiting from some kind of exchange we have, I have no desire to kill you and maybe I'll even start to like you a little bit because you're doing something for me.
00:21:02.000So we know Government, you know, sort of liberal democracies and free trade are these things that provide trust in a society among strangers such that I can go to the Starbucks, somebody waiting for me to wait on me.
00:21:48.000Is it that we're just looking at a single sample size?
00:21:50.000Why is it that only in Western Europe at a particular time, at a particular place in history, do we get this vision of individual rights that flowers out and then starts encompassing broader and broader groups of people?
00:22:03.000Again, if this was embedded in human capacity from the very beginning, then why does it only happen as the outgrowth of one particular culture?
00:22:11.000So you see where I'm going with this, right?
00:22:14.000So, well, I think Pinker tries to answer that, and the good social scientist that he is, this is a tangled web of correlations and intercausal variables that are going up and down, and it's really hard to answer.
00:22:26.000I mean, you get a number of things going on.
00:22:28.000You know, the Industrial Revolution, free trade is coming, you know, double entry, bookkeeping, and all these things that kind of drive prosperity to go up, which enhances a bunch of other things.
00:22:38.000So we can afford better governance and so on.
00:22:40.000Then we have better educational systems.
00:22:43.000Also, literacy rates start to go up around the same time.
00:22:45.000Do you think any of this has to do with the Judeo-Christian system that is undergirding all of this?
00:22:53.000Just the Western idea that the Judeo-Christian is sort of founding helps push it along.
00:23:00.000Yes, I know we can go back to maybe the 13th century or 14th century and the first humanists in the 15th century, long before the Enlightenment.
00:23:23.000But the idea that the individual is what counts and we're going to protect the individual's rights You know, like the Bill of Rights, for example, is a perfect example.
00:23:31.000It's not the group, it's the individual.
00:23:33.000In fact, these rights are there to protect you from being considered a member of a group that we feel we can discriminate against.
00:23:49.000Again, I've had conversations with, you know, you and Sam Harris, and we're coming at it from a completely different angle as far as the impact of God in all of this.
00:23:56.000Jonah Goldberg suggests that this is the miracle.
00:23:58.000And one of my great objections to Jonah Goldberg's terminology in that is that I'm not sure that the miracle happened in 1650.
00:24:04.000I think the miracle happened a lot earlier and that that was the enzyme, the catalyst that led to this great outpouring of human freedom.
00:24:28.000So for me, I can espouse those values in a particular way, starting from the premise that there's a certain absolute morality that was established by God.
00:24:37.000This is where the God question comes in.
00:24:38.000And so I'm wondering, without that absolute morality, How do we get to that point where we can convince people?
00:24:45.000I just started reading Jonah's new book, The Suicide of the West, which is a weird title, because it's much more of an uplift.
00:24:50.000At least the first half is very uplifting, like the miracle.
00:25:03.000And the reason that, to me, is good, not just because I'm an atheist, but that it shouldn't matter what religion you are or In a sense, it doesn't really matter what the roots are, although it's intellectually interesting.
00:25:42.000And at some point, if you go back far enough, you're gonna, I think, argue there's a supernatural intervention into the system that says this is what's right or wrong.
00:25:51.000But my question would be, how do you know?
00:25:53.000Because we know from biblical scholars that the Bible is something of a wiki.
00:26:13.000And so this is, as you know, a Youth of Rose dilemma that if these moral principles are out there in some kind of You know, platonic space floating around up there.
00:26:23.000Are they right or wrong because God said so?
00:26:33.000I know I've watched your debate with interview slash debate with Dennis Prager and on Dave Rubin's show specifically about this.
00:26:39.000I'm not somebody who disagrees that you can In fact, Judaism basically says that.
00:26:47.000Judaism essentially says that there are certain principles where if you were born in a wilderness, you would still be held accountable for failing to abide by those principles, and those do include murder, right?
00:26:55.000So murder is wrong whether you believe in God, whether you were born in a barn, it doesn't matter, right?
00:26:59.000There are certain things you can intuit.
00:27:01.000But some of the higher order morality that we're talking about, the value of individuals, or how far you extend the tribe, I'm not sure that that stuff can be done simply through pure reason.
00:27:10.000I'm skeptical of that specifically because I think that what we tend to do in the West is we tend to say everything that was good was Enlightenment thinking and everything that was bad was counter-Enlightenment thinking.
00:27:18.000So this is my criticism of Steven Pinker's new book on the Enlightenment is that what Steven does is he writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and never mentions the French Revolution.
00:27:27.000He writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and he never recognizes that Rousseau was a member of the Enlightenment caste.
00:27:33.000He didn't call himself counter-Enlightenment.
00:27:36.000That the French Revolution was happening at the same time as the American Revolution, essentially, in the broad scheme of things, that there's a whole line of thought, including communism and Nazism, that considered itself over-rational.
00:27:48.000If you actually look back to the foundations of Marx, Marx is talking about imposing the reason of humanity on the economic system as a whole.
00:27:54.000So pure reason, I'm not sure can get you there, is the argument that I'm making.
00:27:58.000Well, first of the French Revolution, in The Better Angels, Steve talks about Burke and Burkean conservatism.
00:28:07.000And Burke was in favor of the American Revolution against the French Revolution.
00:28:12.000Because in the American Revolution, you had a balance between, we want to overthrow the systems that are not working, but retain the ones that are still good.
00:28:20.000Because those are long, hard-fought traditions that work pretty well.
00:28:24.000Now, unfortunately, slavery got thrown in there, but we eventually got rid of that.
00:28:28.000The French Revolution was like, let's just blow the whole thing up and start over, including a new calendar.
00:28:35.000But they did actually have a cult of reason, right?
00:28:36.000They actually took the Notre Dame Cathedral and they actually put an idol to reason in the Notre Dame Cathedral and they had a cult of it.
00:28:43.000So I guess my contention is that If you're going to make the argument that it's self-evident, these principles eventually are self-evident, I don't think in the absence of... The Burkean argument is, in essence, a religious argument.
00:28:54.000There is a bunch of stuff that was passed down to us by our forebears, and we have the capacity, through reason, to evaluate whether we still think that the evidence is on the side of particular rules, or whether these rules have been misapplied.
00:29:04.000But you have to acknowledge the value of what has been handed down, as opposed to the tabula rasa reason, which might be mandated by the social science Approach that is now being taken up by a lot of folks, people with whom I have great discussions.
00:29:19.000But whenever I read Sam Harris's books and he says that, you know, throw religion out the window and we can come up with better than that.
00:29:25.000As I said to him when I was talking to him, well, you grew up five miles from me and we share a lot of the same principles.
00:29:29.000So I'm happy to have that discussion with you.
00:29:31.000But if you'd grown up in a society that had a different tradition, I have a feeling you'd be arguing something very different and so would I.
00:29:38.000One, I think Pinker makes the point that most of these are counter-Enlightenment Romanticist traditions.
00:29:45.000The blood and soil of the Nazis, for example, that it's the race that counts and so on.
00:29:52.000Now, you may make rational arguments about that and say, I'm using reason, but your reasoning is wrong.
00:29:58.000And so we can say we're both using reason and these arguments are better than those arguments.
00:30:03.000So I think those are the two points about that.
00:30:07.000Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but I think that the question there about the misuse of reason would be this.
00:30:12.000Is that your pattern of reasoning is wrong or that your premises are wrong?
00:30:16.000If your pattern of reasoning is wrong, then we can all spot the flaw in the reasoning and say, OK, here's where you went wrong.
00:30:21.000But if the premises were wrong, then we're back into my argument, which is that the culture you inherit is a deeply impactful thing on whether you believe in individual rights in the first place.
00:30:31.000So I guess what I'm trying to get you to, and maybe I'm trying to argue you into it, is acknowledging that Judeo-Christian values are at the very least utilitarian.
00:30:39.000Even if you don't agree with the source of them, you agree that the legacy that begins with Judaism and through Christianity in the Christian world, that is a necessary, not a contingent part of history.
00:30:52.000But how do you deal with then all the bad side of the Judeo-Christian tradition before the Enlightenment?
00:30:58.000You know, the Inquisition, the witch hunts.
00:31:00.000So the way that I deal with that is what I say is that the Bible was given to a specific group of people.
00:31:04.000If I were to give you a written document right now, I'd have to speak the language that you and I were speaking.
00:31:08.000I couldn't use terminology that you didn't know.
00:31:10.000I couldn't give you rules that were so deeply radical that they would run counter to anything that you could possibly believe.
00:31:16.000So, for example, when Maimonides talks about sacrifices, you know, these animal sacrifices that seem really barbaric to us now, what Maimonides is arguing in the 12th century is CE, right, about a document written presumably by Jewish tradition 2,000 years earlier.
00:31:30.000He's arguing that if you're going to try and convince people away from sacrifice, you have to first change the nature of the sacrifice.
00:31:36.000You can't just abolish something that people think is completely dependent and necessary.
00:31:41.000And then over the course of time, there are certain parts of the Bible that speak to eternal human nature, right?
00:31:47.000So, for example, this is what Judaism and Christianity would say is true about sexual matters, is that human beings are the same regardless of where they are, they always have the same sexual nature, that is non-changing.
00:31:57.000But what is changing is the necessity to slaughter animals, for example.
00:32:02.000Or what is changing is the evidence basis for witness testimony.
00:32:23.000So to me, it feels like modern thinkers looking back at ancient texts saying, well, when Jesus said this in Mark 3, 27, he really meant women should have the vote.
00:32:43.000To me, this principle of interchangeable perspectives, that is, if we're going to set up a society, I can't know which group I'm going to be in, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and I as an individual can't convince you to treat me nice just because I'm me and you're not me.
00:33:01.000And I have a privileged position just because I'm me.
00:33:06.000And it's metallic derivatives, as Pinker calls them.
00:33:10.000And I like that idea because I think the basis of that is in this kind of evolutionary model of Myself, as genes, drive me to just want to hoard all the resources, but you're making the same calculation, so we have to come to some agreement.
00:33:25.000One way to do that is for me to put myself in your position.
00:33:28.000How would I feel if I were Ben and I was doing this to him?
00:33:33.000So I think religions discovered certain eternal truths about human nature long before there was the Enlightenment or modern Western culture at all.
00:33:45.000I don't know how, maybe by accident or just trial and error, at some point you're going to figure out... Or maybe!
00:33:56.000It's like the point Jordan Peterson makes about novelists having deep insights into human nature.
00:34:02.000I think that's right, and there's a whole branch of evolutionary psych that does evolutionary literature.
00:34:07.000Like when Shakespeare and Jane Austen write about their characters, they're really getting it right about how people behave, their sexual nature, power structures, hierarchy, the kinds of things that drive conflict in human relationships.
00:34:20.000They figured it out long before there was anything even called psychology.
00:34:26.000So I do think religions get it right a lot of the time just because they're 2,000 years, 4,000 years of observations that get written down.
00:34:38.000And then what we do is go back and pick and choose the ones that seem right.
00:34:41.000And the other ones, like capital punishment for X, Y, and Z, we don't practice that anymore.
00:34:59.000Finally, I had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. William Lane Craig in our 50th episode.
00:35:03.000Dr. Craig is a professor, philosopher, theologian.
00:35:05.000He's written over 30 books, including the bestseller, En Garde, Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision.
00:35:10.000These books are really fascinating, really compelling investigations of the conflicts and the confluence between faith and reason.
00:35:17.000Check out his books and also check out his podcast, Reasonable Faith, where he covers apologetics.
00:35:22.000Like me, Dr. Craig spends a lot of time speaking on college campuses.
00:35:25.000He also frequently debates atheists on the existence of God.
00:35:28.000So I've actually read a lot of Dr. William Lane Craig's work, and he is a really interesting human being, just on a very personal level, has a really interesting story, and really a creative thinker.
00:35:39.000He sort of picks the apples off the tree.
00:35:42.000You can listen to us discuss how Christianity seems to be losing its place as a cultural influence in the United States, where this supposed gap between reason and faith came from, and how to defend biblical thinking from critics who say it's backwards.
00:35:53.000We're living in an increasingly secular age, where people, by polling numbers, seculars are now, by polling numbers, the largest religious constituency in America, Why do you think we're seeing such a decline in religious belief in the West right now?
00:36:12.000I think what's happening is not so much increasing secularization, Ben, as the collapse of the old mainline Christian denominations, like the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, and so forth.
00:36:29.000And as a result, there is an increasing polarization in American society.
00:36:35.000People are evacuating the middle and going either to the secular end or to the evangelical end.
00:36:44.000Evangelicals are maintaining their percentage of the American population, keeping up with the population growth.
00:36:51.000But the impression of increasing secularization exists because the middle is emptying out, and these old-line denominations are collapsing.
00:37:01.000Why do you think they are collapsing in on themselves?
00:37:03.000And we're seeing it in Judaism as well, that the old conservative Jews and Reform Jews, they're kind of dying away, and you're getting the modern Orthodox movement even moving toward more Orthodoxy.
00:37:12.000Why do you think that's happening right now?
00:37:14.000That's very interesting, and I think it's a reflection of the fact that People who are just nominally religious, in a sense, come to the realization that they don't really believe this.
00:37:27.000And so, why should you get up in the dark and the cold on a Sunday morning to go worship somebody you don't really think is there?
00:37:36.000And so, as a result, those who have been simply nominal in their beliefs, I think, are increasingly recognizing that, in fact, they're secular.
00:37:47.000And the unfortunate byproduct of this is that Christianity has lost its place of cultural influence in the United States as this middle mainline denomination empties out.
00:38:03.000And it's my hope that in coming decades, increasingly, these evangelical Well, Friedrich Nietzsche declared the death of God back in the late 19th century, and it took a while for that to become a reality in the United States.
00:38:17.000that was once held by the mainline denominations.
00:38:20.000Well, Friedrich Nietzsche declared the death of God back in the late 19th century, and it took a while for that to become a reality in the United States.
00:38:27.000As far as occupying any significant portion of the public mind, we're still significantly more religious than Europe.
00:38:42.000Considering we have a civilization built on Judeo-Christian values, we're incredibly prosperous, incredibly free, and yet we seem to be moving away from a lot of the religious beliefs upon which our society is based.
00:38:52.000Well, I think in Europe and in Canada, it's the lingering shadow of the Enlightenment that swept away the...
00:39:03.000The church, along with the monarchy, because these two were aligned and resulted in a deep disaffection with Christianity, which was seen to be aligned with the old order.
00:39:15.000In the United States, I think it's hard to underestimate the influence of the Vietnam War.
00:39:23.000That war tore this culture in two and resulted, I think, in the alienation of many, many young people from the values and the beliefs of their elders.
00:39:37.000And I suspect we're still living with the results of that.
00:39:41.000There's sort of a mainstream discomfort with religion that we see these days.
00:39:45.000Religious believers are seen as sort of anachronistic.
00:39:48.000If you say that you believe in the Bible or the God of the Bible, then you're seen as somewhat of a fool these days.
00:39:53.000As somebody who speaks on college campuses a lot, and I speak in purely secular forms about politics, whenever I'm asked about religion, it's always phrased in a...
00:40:04.000Why would you believe all that old stuff?
00:40:06.000Well, your work has been based on the idea that faith is in fact backed by reason and that the presence of God is a reasonable assumption to make about the universe.
00:40:13.000Why do you think that, first of all, there's that gap that occurred, that breach that occurred between reason and faith that two were considered to be mutual buttressing and supportive of one another for centuries?
00:40:25.000Well, I do think that this is confined to certain disciplines at the university, particularly the soft sciences and the social sciences.
00:40:38.000Those who were disaffected by the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution went into anthropology, sociology, women's studies, literature, religious studies, and so forth.
00:40:51.000But in the hard sciences and in my discipline, philosophy, I think, frankly, there's a renaissance of theistic belief.
00:41:00.000And there is a virtual revolution going on in Anglo-American philosophy right now, where Christian philosophers represent a significant and respected voice in the philosophical community.
00:41:15.000So, I find there's tremendous interest on university campuses.
00:41:19.000In these topics, when I debate a secularist on our university campuses, we will have hundreds and sometimes thousands of students attend these debates.
00:41:33.000And the discussions are always rational, respectful, deliberative.
00:41:38.000And so my experience is that there is tremendous interest in our culture and in the university age group in hearing a rational, fair discussion of issues related to religious belief.
00:41:56.000One of the things I think that's happened in the religious community is you see people who are brought up in religious homes and they're taught the stories of the Bible, they're never taught any deeper philosophy or theology that attaches to that.
00:42:06.000So they have sort of a children's eyes view of what God is and how to think about God, sort of think of God still as the old man in the sky who's controlling things.
00:42:16.000What, in your opinion, is the most reasonable proof of God?
00:42:19.000What have you found to be the most convincing proof of God's existence?
00:42:21.000Well, I think that those are two questions.
00:42:24.000For me, my favorite argument for the existence of God that I find the most compelling is a version of the cosmological argument, which goes like this.
00:42:38.000Something can't just come into being from nothing.
00:42:40.000Secondly, the universe began to exist.
00:42:43.000I think we have both good philosophical arguments and scientific evidence for the finitude of the past, from which it follows.
00:42:50.000Third, therefore, the universe has a cause.
00:42:54.000And when you do a conceptual analysis of what it is to be a cause of the universe, You arrive at a being which is an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful personal creator of the universe.
00:43:10.000So for me, that is a very convincing argument for God.
00:43:16.000But I find that with university students, that's not the most convincing argument.
00:43:21.000You can ignore philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past or scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe.
00:43:29.000But the argument that they find I think the most compelling is what I call the moral argument.
00:44:02.000Now, this is an argument which is impossible, I think, to ignore because every day you get up You answer by how you treat other people, whether you regard them as having intrinsic moral value or whether they are mere means to be used for your ends.
00:44:22.000And so this argument, I find, tends to be the most convincing for people.
00:44:28.000The other argument that is brought up an enormous amount is the supposed backwardness of the Bible itself and biblical morality.
00:44:34.000This happens largely with regard to, for example, homosexual marriage.
00:44:39.000It's been brought up with regard to abortion, which I think is more, again, easily disposable, because I think there's a solid secular argument in favor of the protection of human life.
00:44:48.000But homosexual marriage is the one that most often comes up.
00:44:51.000You also hear arguments that the Bible permits slavery.
00:44:54.000So if the Bible is so wonderful, then why are there all these weird sections of the Bible where it talks about wiping peoples from the earth, where it talks about enslaving other human beings?
00:45:03.000Some things that we would certainly consider moral evils today are contemplated by the Bible and not banned by the Bible.
00:45:37.000So, if a man got himself into a situation where he couldn't pay his debts, He could keep his family together and retain his self-respect by selling himself as an indentured servant to his creditor until he could work off his debts, and then he would have to be set free.
00:45:57.000After seven years, he had to be set free in any case.
00:46:01.000So this was really a form of indentured servanthood.
00:46:04.000It wasn't slavery as we think of that term.
00:46:08.000This was actually an anti-poverty program.
00:46:11.000And in some respects, I think it's better than what we have in modern Western culture, which destroys families, ruins people's self-respect because they're not working.
00:46:25.000Whereas in ancient Israel, a man retained his self-respect, he worked for an income, he paid his debts, he kept his family together.
00:46:33.000And to call that slavery is just a gross misrepresentation.
00:46:37.000Now, the first thing you mentioned, I forgot.
00:46:43.000With respect to some of these other moral questions, I think we need to remember the first premise of the moral argument.
00:46:53.000If there is no God, Then there are no objective moral values and duties.
00:46:59.000Everything is socioculturally relative.
00:47:03.000So who's to say that the moral values of a society that discriminates against people and oppresses people is worse than one which is liberal and tolerant?
00:47:14.000We just sort of assume that the liberal values are the ones that would be objective, when in fact they're just as relativistic As any of the other ones on atheism.
00:47:27.000So, if we need God to be the anchor point for objective moral values and duties, we cannot escape the question, when thinking of moral right and wrong, well, what does God think of this?
00:47:42.000And if God proscribes something, it seems to me that's entirely within his right.
00:47:50.000If God were to say, thou shalt not eat beans, or thou shalt not eat pork, that would be our moral duty.
00:48:00.000That is his prerogative as the moral lawgiver and the supreme good.
00:48:05.000And so if God says, my plan for human sexuality is heterosexual marriage, that's his prerogative.
00:48:13.000And there is no basis for calling that, I think, into question.
00:48:17.000So let's talk about the evolution of morality, and I want to go back to slavery for just a second.
00:48:20.000So it is true that Hebrew enslavement, the Jewish enslavement of others is really more indentured servitude, and there's a whole section in, I believe it's Numbers or Leviticus, I think it's Leviticus maybe, where it speaks specifically about the slave who doesn't want to leave and you're supposed to pierce his ear on the door post as a punishment for him not wanting to leave and all of this.
00:48:39.000But by the same token, So enslavement of people who are not inside the Israelite, inside the Jewish kind of tradition, that's not proscribed.
00:48:51.000So the idea of war captives is obviously taken into account and not banned.
00:48:55.000So certain things are banned in the Bible, certain things are not banned.
00:48:58.000Now the way that biblical believers have practiced over time is that very early in the church's history, they're already starting to eliminate slavery, although not for people who are captured.
00:49:06.000And then over time, the West is the first place to eliminate slavery altogether, specifically citing the sections of the Bible that talk about human freedom and the innate value of every human being.
00:49:16.000So is that an evolution of morality or is that a realization of a fundamental principle that was originally given to people who couldn't necessarily understand the full extent of the principle?
00:49:27.000Oh, I think it's the latter, and I love the way you put it.
00:49:33.000Jesus said something very much like this with respect to Old Testament regulations on divorce.
00:49:40.000They asked him whether or not it was lawful to divorce a woman for any reason, and Jesus said, Moses allowed you to write a certificate of divorce, but it was not so from the beginning.
00:49:53.000And he cites then the creation story of Genesis of Adam and Eve and said, what God has put together, let not man put asunder.
00:50:04.000So what Jesus was saying there was that the law of Moses was a temporary prescription accommodating the hardness of heart of the people at the time, but it didn't represent the perfect will of God for human marriage, which was grounded in the creation story.
00:50:24.000So, how exactly do we determine when we have moved beyond the biblical text in terms of the evolution of that morality?
00:50:31.000When are we fulfilling a broader goal that was held back by temporary constraints, and when are we moving utterly beyond it?
00:50:40.000And again, here I'm thinking of same-sex marriage.
00:50:42.000So, when it comes to same-sex marriage, the argument is now being made by people in liberal churches Yeah, I think that's clearly false.
00:50:49.000Pete Buttigieg, who's running for president, that basically Jesus was seeking equal respect for everyone.
00:50:57.000And the prescriptions on homosexuality were really more, and homosexual activity were not eternal precepts, but were really attempting to crack down on the promiscuity of the time, or they were temporary expedients.
00:51:13.000When you look at these regulations, both in the Old Testament, and then they're repeated, in the New Testament, in the strongest terms in Romans chapter 1, there's no doubt that Paul is thinking of this as a moral law that has abiding significance.
00:51:32.000And it's grounded again, I think, in the creation story, that God has created human sexuality, sexualities created man and woman in such a way that the fulfillment of that relationship will take place within the safety and security of a heterosexual marriage.
00:51:56.000And that outside of that, sexual activity is not to be indulged in.
00:52:01.000And this is a law that God has given us for our good.
00:52:06.000So I do not think that this is capable of simply being relativized to time and culture.
00:52:12.000So, when you argue with students, when you talk with students and discuss with them, what do you find is the best way to approach them when it comes to the precepts of traditional Judeo-Christian morality?
00:52:22.000Do you come at it from the natural law perspective, or do you come at it from the biblical perspective?
00:52:28.000I guess I share with them the moral argument that I shared earlier in our interview.
00:52:34.000This moral argument is very powerful with students because, on the one hand, they've been taught relativism.
00:52:42.000They are scared to death of imposing their values on someone else.
00:52:48.000So it seems right to them that if God does not exist, that objective moral values don't exist.
00:52:53.000They think they're subjective, person-dependent, and relative.
00:52:58.000But then secondly, the premise also seems true to them that objective moral values do exist.
00:53:04.000They think it's objectively wrong to impose your moral values on someone else.
00:53:09.000And the values of tolerance, open-mindedness, and love have been deeply ingrained to them.
00:53:15.000And so they believe both of the premises, but have just never connected the dots to see what logically follows from it.
00:53:23.000And this can lead to some bizarre conversations.
00:53:27.000I remember with one fellow, when we would talk about premise one, he would agree with it and deny two.
00:53:33.000So when we talk about premise two, he'd agree with that and then deny one.
00:53:36.000And so we went back and forth, back and forth, with this poor fellow flailing to try to escape the logical conclusions of what he himself So I find approaching it through this moral argument is the best way.
00:53:52.000One of the things that's been fascinating to watch is people broadly accepting the efficacy of the precepts of religion without accepting the underlying truth of religion.
00:54:01.000So here I would Point to my friend Jordan Peterson who talks a lot about the practices of basically what are religious practices.
00:54:10.000The idea of make your room, do the moral thing, duty.
00:54:13.000But he doesn't talk in specifically religious terms, he speaks in Jungian terms.
00:54:16.000He talks about the idea of deeper precepts that are embedded in myth, which is really embedded in the human psyche.
00:54:22.000He doesn't make the kind of truth of religion argument.
00:54:25.000He instead makes the, if you want to get ahead, you're going to have to do this stuff argument.
00:54:28.000If you want to be happy, you're going to have to do this stuff argument.
00:54:31.000And that has tremendous cultural appeal.
00:54:38.000I think it's beneficial, but it's not enough.
00:54:42.000When I had a dialogue in Toronto last year with Jordan Peterson, rather than attack his position, what I tried to do was to be invitational and say, look, you and I both affirm the objectivity of moral values and meaning in life.
00:55:00.000I want to offer you a grounding for those values that we both hold dear.
00:55:06.000Because for him, as you say, Ben, they're just sort of floating in the air.
00:55:09.000They don't have any metaphysical ground in his worldview.
00:55:14.000So he's got the right values and meaning by and large, but he has no basis for them.
00:55:20.000And I'm still hopeful that he will come to embrace God as an objective metaphysical reality who will provide a basis for those values and meaning in life.
00:55:36.000Thanks for joining us this week, gang, in our discussion about Judeo-Christian values.
00:55:39.000Leave us a note in the comments and let us know which topics you'd like to see us cover in our future reviews of these Sunday specials.