Change Your Brain Every Day - Where is God? With Rice Broocks

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

One of life’s most enduring (and confounding) questions is this: If there is a God in this world, why does he allow evil to happen? In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by Rice Broocks, author of “God’s Not Dead”, to discuss some of life’s most interesting questions, and weigh in with their own theories and discoveries.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. So we are still here with our friend, Dr. Rice Brooks, and he's the author of God's Not Dead. We're having an amazing time talking to him. He's so brilliant. And we want to go after this question this week of where is God? So sometimes it feels to me like, what are we doing? Like as a society,

as a country, as a people, what's going on? I mean, where is God, right? And I just want you to touch on that. So where's God when it hurts? Where is God when the world feels crazy? Where is God, you know, for people who don't believe? Yeah. Well, or even for people who do believe. Yeah, sometimes we, you know, sometimes we feel like, how does this make sense? When I hear that question, and again, we take the message of God's not dead, and I travel to campuses around the world and do a multimedia presentation. And we, students come come at the end,

we have Q and A. I normally have a physicist, which I highly recommend traveling with a physicist. It's like, you know, it's good to have that as a backup guy, you know, but anyway, but eventually beyond the scientific arguments or the philosophical arguments, it comes down to this question of why would God allow evil? If there is a God, then why would God allow such acts to happen? And so the first thing I do is, as a pastor, I stop and I want to know, is this personal? Is this something, has something happened to you? Because I don't want to be glib or give some philosophical answer. If you've lost your family or you've had some tragedy, it's like when you hear or you want to first of all know what trauma is going on here that has caused this

kind of reaction. But many times you get to, it's more of a theoretical question. People are mainly using that argument, not because they've personally suffered, but because they're kind of, they've got this thought that maybe this proves that God doesn't exist because there's evil. And now the short answer is simply this, and I'll, since we're in a, I'll do the fast break Los Angeles Laker offense here. If there is no God, there is no evil. You see, if we're, in other words, you can't even explain the world we live in without borrowing the biblical terms to make sense of it. In other words, if we're just animals, then when animals kill other animals, it's not a crime scene. Right.

It's like Geico. It's just what animals do. Right. You know, that's just what they do. And so why is it then in all of existence, here are these agents, humans, that are distinct. We have the ability to think, to not only think, but to think about thinking, metacognition. We can think about our thinking. And we've been given this ability to make a choice. So unlike

animal, which kind of acts out according to their DNA, I mean, if we're just acting out according to our DNA, then you wouldn't be morally responsible for DNA. I mean, if we're just acting out according to our DNA, then you wouldn't be morally responsible for that. That's just who we are, like we said. But because we are created in God's image and we have choices to make. So there is a choice. So what you see in the world today

are people acting out their choices. Now, God said, don't do it. God has said, God's against evil. He, he, he came to earth as a man in Christ to deal with it personally. So no one encountered the evil to deal with it. And then ultimately was the victim of it in Christ. So this is not a distant God sitting up like in Mount Olympus, casually looking over the banisters of eternity to kind of see how his lab experience is going. Well, he reminds me of a really good parent. For those of us who do believe, we sort of

have a spoiler alert of why all this is happening. But aside from that, when I look at the scripture, it's like, reminds me of a good parent. It's like, I'm not going to tell you you can't do it, but if you do it, these are the consequences. Well, but some of the people listening have been molested. So, you know, as a psychiatrist and a child psychiatrist, some people listening have really experienced evil. Yeah, evil. And awful things happen to them and the question comes if there's a loving god why did he allow that i think or i have a granddaughter who is handicapped and she's born with a very rare genetic deletion and even at the of seven, she's still not talking and she had wicked seizures.

And so, you know, many people go, if there is divine creation, that's not divine. So if I'm understanding you to make this, to make this, to sort of boil down what you're saying is without, without pain, we can't know joy without. So, I mean, it's almost like what you're saying is without pain, we can't know joy. Without, so, I mean, it's almost like what you're saying, I mean, way, way more intensely, way more in depth you're saying, if there were no evil, there would be no God. I mean, to some extent, we're almost saying without one, there's not the other. C.S. Lewis would say this, I know a line is crooked, but how do I know what a crooked line is? If I don't know what a straight line is.

That's what I'm trying to say. So let let me i'll try to make a simple statement the existence of evil doesn't point to the absence of absence of god from the world but from his absence from our lives so here is god is basically his word is clear about the things that you would say are evil to not do that the punishment that we will ultimately stand and account for so whoever committed something is not getting away with it maybe they think they get away with it in this life but there will be an accountability accountability and that's kind of hard for some people to get it get their head around but the bottom line is that one day we will all stand before the ultimate audit if you will do you fear fear an IRS audit? Well, guess what? There's one coming. So I think that the fact that there is this, the real reason is what's wrong with us?

When writing this book, I was in the home of a man named Francis Collins. And Dr. Collins, he's the head of the NIH, or has been, and was the head of the Human Genome Project. He kind of broke down the DNA molecule and taught us how to read it. So within the human molecule, within the DNA is this long sentence. I mean, really, it's 3 billion letters long, the information inside of us. If you got a text from somebody that you knew they sat on their phone, you know that they could never do a pocket text and do a complete sentence. What about 13 billion letters long? So when you know as a scientist and as a doctor that that genetic code,

that the environment, that choices, other people's choices, can actually have an impact on our genes. If my science gets off because you're the scientist, I'm not. So we are living in a world that's been damaged by evil. You scanned my brain today, and I'd had a car accident and you knew it. I didn't, I could have not told you that. And you could have said something happened. Well, if you scan the soul, there's something wrong. This proclivity, this brokenness inside of us. 2010, the largest oil disaster in American history. the BP oil disaster off the Gulf of Mexico,

200,000 gallons of oil dumping into the Gulf for 89 straight days. You could try to clean up the mess, but ultimately you had to stop evil. You had to stop, I'm giving my punchline away. You had to stop the thing at its source. And this is what the gospel says. The gospel says that God didn't stay at a distance,

but became a man in Christ. He lived the life we should have lived, meaning he lived morally perfect, broke religious laws, but never broke the moral law. He died to death. We should have died in our place. Three days later, he rose from the dead, which that gave the validation of who he is. You can, a lot of people, I met, I met two people at Berkeley, California out there and one day they told me one said he was Moses, the other said he was Jesus. Now, I mean, I met a woman on the plane that told me she was God. And I looked at her, I said, if you're God, I got a lot of questions for you. So just claiming you're God doesn't make you God. So Jesus's claims could have just been like one of those I mentioned, but his resurrection validated it.

But what the gospel, the good news of Christianity is that the gospel can go to that source of evil within the human heart and deal with evil and injustice at its source. That's why atheism doesn't take away the pain when people react to pain with skepticism or I'm gonna just say goodbye to God. I say atheism doesn't take away the pain. It just takes away the hope.

Or one woman who had seen both. Say that again. I like that. Atheism doesn't take away the pain. It just takes away the hope. It just takes away the hope. That's powerful. I hate to rush.

I feel myself rushing because I know the shortness of time. I interviewed a woman on Christian television who the next day Dr. Phil did who had seen both of her parents shot and both eventually died. One died on the spot. The other died later. The man was put away, got out in 20 years. But 20 years after basically a double murder murder he's released and this woman gave him a bible and i mean can you imagine you see is like a seven-year-old your parents shot

in front of you you identify the murderer the assailant uh and she said to me, she said, I was mad at God. She said, but I needed God more than I needed to be mad at him. So when we look at a world with pain, when we look at people that do bad things, God's not the one that did it. God's the one that's not only saying don't do it. There's so many. In fact, the fact that things get exposed, the fact that we can be healed. It's like when you looked at me and said, hey, you've had a brain injury here through your wreck, but I got good news for you.

You can get better. I mean, there's no better sound than someone saying you can get well. And that's really what Jesus said. You can be well. I'm not the author of that. I didn't, that was not my will, but I have come to give you hope and to give you healing. So I hope that's a great, it was great. Where is God? Stay with us. We're going to explore this further. Use the code podcast 10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to

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