Pints With Aquinas - 188: Apologetics Extravaganza W/ Trent Horn

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

I talk with Catholic speaker and regular guest of "Catholic Answers Live," Trent Horn, about evangelization, apologetics, and loads of other interesting topics. Trent brings the thunder for this first episode under the new show title! We talk for almost four hours on a wide range of topics (including an interruption from my dog). Trent is a heavyweight when it comes to his Catholic faith and few other apologists could preach the gospel as clearly and Gracefully as Trent. For more information on the change watch, the Announcement Video below. Confused? Watch the Announcement Video!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOpTh... --- SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. Today I'll be interviewing Trent Horn about literally everything. The interview was well over three hours. It was, yeah, man, it was bordering up to four hours. So buckle up, strap into that favorite chair of yours, get the beer hat thing going, and here we go. It's going to be fantastic. Oh, also, by the way, if you're not sure why we're now calling these shows Pints with Aquinas, go back and listen to yesterday's episode because I explain the change there. Before I jump into today's show, I want to say thanks to a couple of sponsors. The first is Catholic Woodworker. Check this out.

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Trent Horn, great to have you on Pints with Aquinas. Matt Brad, good to be here. Now, many of my listeners know who you are, but I'd love for you to introduce yourself. Tell us what you're up to. Sure. Well, I'm a staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers. Catholic Answers is an apostolate that was created back in the 1970s, 1980s by Carl Keating, who actually you worked for Catholic Answers for a little while. You worked under Carl.

Yep. So he's a great man. Carl is terrific. Yeah. He has a wonderful, warm sense about him. If I could describe Carl Keating, I might say he's the most American British person I know. He's not British. He's very proper.

But if you imagined a British person became American, he's proper, he has a very dry sense of humor, but a very warm charm beneath it. And so, Carl started Catholic Answers, and what Catholic Answers has now understood itself to be is primarily a media apostolate dedicated to explaining and defending the Catholic faith. We want to help non-Catholics to become Catholic and Catholics to better understand and better be able to explain and defend their faith to others. And in particular for myself, what I've done with Catholic Answers is I've written books, articles. I'm on Catholic Answers Live, and I host my own podcast,

The Council of Trent, which is nice that the Catholic audience gets a little laugh. Great name. Yep. Have you found non-Catholics ask you what that's about? Some of them do this, but the ones that are educated, I've actually had a few atheists when I've done debates or dialogues with atheists. In the comments, they'll say something like, well, at least his podcast has a clever name, so I'll give him that. Yeah, yeah. So, C-O-U-N-S-E-L, Council of Trent and trenthornpodcast.com. And what I've tried to focus through, I've been with Catholic Answers now for about seven years, and to understand my role

within the Church, within Catholic Answers, I want to engage in dialogue with non-Catholics, and I want to teach Catholics how to do that. How do we talk to people who are far from the Church, whether they're non-Catholic or maybe they're Catholic and they haven't been to Mass in years? How do we talk to these people and how do we have these conversations? How do we evangelize through dialogue? Because I've seen that with apologetics, you know, the art of defending the faith, it was great to see this resurgence of it in the 1980s and 1990s. You know, I saw people come up to me and say, I still have my Scott Hahn tape.

Part of me wants to jokingly say to them, what's a tape? But we have them at the office in the archives. We've got the little cassette tapes with Scott Hahn's talks, Patrick Madrid's talks. And that lighted a fire in people. It really did. You can learn about your faith

and you can answer these arguments that are out there that are opposed to your faith. You don't have to be afraid of them. But I'm concerned in the past few decades, apologetics has primarily been seen as kind of an intellectual arms race, that the goal is to learn the arguments, learn the replies, learn the rebuttals. And when they say this, you say that, and get off, you go in here, watch these Caliganders apologists on the radio, just, you know, take a Gatling gun to these other arguments, and you can go out and do the same thing. But that's just not how it works in real life. That's just not how we talk to other people. And

so what I've tried to model in my time with Catholic Answers is doing radio shows like, why are you pro-choice? Why aren't you Catholic? Having guests on my podcast who are not Catholic, I've had atheists on, I've had pro-choice advocates, I've had Protestants on. I had a Protestant pastor on not too long ago who is pro-LGBT. He thinks that homosexual behavior is not a sin. He's about our age, actually, Brandon Robertson. I saw it. It was a great interview. Yeah, and we got to sit. And think about it, that's a divisive, explosive issue for people. It's easy for the blood to boil and for things to get heated. But we had a very civil conversation about a divisive issue that I think will help bring a lot of people closer to the truth. I wasn't just sitting around singing kumbaya with him.

No. It was civil, but also I asserted where I disagreed with his position and why and gently challenged him on that. And that's what we have to do in our conversations with people that we know and care about who are not Catholic or disagree with the faith to engage in this genuine human dialogue that challenges them to want to get closer to the truth. Why has it taken us this long to get to this Socratic approach? People have always been doing it, of course. But as you say, the apologetics we were taught was when they say this, you say this, here's the scriptures to memorize. It feels like there's this new thing emerging and you're kind of spearheading it. Why is it that it's only now kind of come to the fore, it seems?

Well, I think that this approach has always been present in one form or another. The question is being able to find it and then give it a widespread appeal. I think one reason that the approach of when they say, you say has been so popular, it's popular as a spectator sport. And I'm worried that people turn apologetics or defending the faith into a spectator sport where they read these books and they watch these debates. It galvanizes their own beliefs too, right? I think that's part of why they like it. Part of it is it's simple when they say you say, and if you're struggling with your faith and you're like,

well, what are the answers? It's reassuring to just have the answers presented immediately to you. Or to see Tim Staples just destroy someone who calls up or something like that, or Trent Horn. Or we go to our William Lane Craig debates and we want to see him take someone else down. Oh, and that was formative in my own conversion experience. I was not Christian until I studied Christian apologetics.

It was really a lot of Protestants that brought me to an understanding of who Jesus was, William Lane Craig being one of them. And so seeing other arguments just being refuted point by point, that's exhilarating. But I was, the Holy Spirit was moving within me to dispose me to be able to receive and accept that. Right. I think for many other people, when you come at them with this kind of machine gun approach, their defensive shields go up.

Yeah, for sure. When you attack someone's beliefs, it's actually more likely they'll double down on it. This is an effect that researchers discovered, well, it's been known for a while, but there was a paper published on this back in 2006 called the, It was a study on what's called the backfire effect. And basically, what happens is that when you try to directly refute a cherished belief that someone has, when you simply come at the person and say, you're wrong about this, here's why you're wrong, one, two, three, not only will the person not change their mind, in many cases, they're more likely to hold the belief even stronger than before. And why is that? Because there's different hypotheses about why, but one belief is that when a cherished belief is attacked, we see that a central part of our identity is being attacked, almost as if we are being attacked. And so our response is not about trying to find the truth. We are instinctively and defensively responding out of a sense of self-preservation.

We don't want this part of us that's important to almost die, essentially. And so we will fight back tooth and nail and even irrationally so. And because of the internet nowadays, we have a wide array of places where we can go and find information that agrees with us to build up our defenses. This also serves to bolster what is something that all people suffer from, and that would be confirmation bias. Confirmation bias basically being I'm willing to let in evidence that supports what I believe, and I'm going to shut out evidence that does not. Or I'm going to look at evidence that doesn't support what I believe with a more negative and critical filter than the stuff that I do believe. If I do believe

it, I might more uncritically accept it. It's a bias we all have. It's a bias that I have, that you have. And so I'm trying, you know, always trying hard to overcome it. But that doesn't mean you can't have strong positions on important issues. I firmly believe the Catholic faith is true, and I believe there are good arguments for it. I firmly believe the Catholic faith is true, and I believe there are good arguments for it. However, I'm always going to be, have a critical eye on the arguments I'm presenting and the reasons that I'm presenting, to make sure I'm presenting the best evidence to the other person and not overstating my case. Yes.

I think that it's important when you put forward arguments and evidences, I try to avoid very absolute or universal phrases like, well, this definitely means this, or it has to be this. I sometimes will qualify it and say, I believe the evidence points in this direction or supports the conclusion that. Yeah. And people are more likely to be receptive to that. To give you an idea about how people are hesitant to change their beliefs, I wrote a book called What the Saints Never Said. Yeah. And that was a fun one. I wrote it in about three to four months, and it was going to be an article, actually.

Give us an example of a quote that we think is, you know. Chapter one, preach the gospel, use words if necessary. Right. St. Francis of Assisi never said it. It was Dostoevsky, of course. That's a joke. Right. You can always pin it on Mother Teresa or Mark Twain.

We don't exactly know where it came from. Some of the other false St. Francis quotes, we can pick them out a bit easier. So, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. The peace prayer. Not St. Francis. That's not his prayer? No, it's not.

I'm sorry. That just blew my mind. The peace prayer, the earliest we can trace it back to is to a French Catholic devotional magazine. And it was originally just called A Prayer for Peace. Thank you for teaching me that. And then the prayer, how it got connected to St. Francis was after World War I, the prayer was put on a prayer card. A Franciscan order put it out. And on the reverse side of the card had a picture of St. Francis.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so I believe that was the genesis of where people associated the peace prayer with St. Francis, but it's not as extant writings and it doesn't sound like how St. Francis would. He's pretty hardcore, right? I mean, he's a mendicant. He's- Oh, yeah? He preached about the reality of- he was a- of hell. He was a hellfire and brimstone preacher. Right. But what made St. Francis unique was that he said

that he lived at a time where many homilists were university trained, and so they were very dry and very academic. And Francis believed that you should imitate the troubadours, you know, the performers of the time. So you should preach in a way that really appeals to people's emotions, but he didn't pull any punches when he came telling people about hell and things like that. He wasn't some first century hippie that walked around singing to anthropomorphic animals that would follow him. Right, exactly. He's not the Disney-fied version that we think of him. Yeah.

But your point is you made this book. Oh, I wrote this book. You wrote this book. And it's one of my worst performing books. People just, they're not interested in reading it. And why? Well, because you don't want to have your little bubble burst. I love the peace prayer. I love this Mother Teresa saying that she never actually said. And my book doesn't just tear those things down.

I also put out things the saints really did say that are really good that we should learn. But people say, well, I don't, you know, I don't want to change. I don't want my bubble burst. Why do you have to do that? And so I would say, if you are that uncomfortable with changing a fake saint quote in your email byline or your email signature, imagine how hard it must be for someone to accept the gospel, to change their life, to radically commit their life to Jesus Christ when you present that to them. Randall Rouser has a good analogy about this. He says we have trivial beliefs and deep-seated beliefs. And the analogy he uses is, suppose one day your wife says to you, can you get the vacuum cleaner? Have you heard this?

I haven't, but Randall's a good friend. I appreciate him. He's been on the podcast a few times. Right. And you say to your wife, well, where's the vacuum cleaner? She says, well, it's in the attic. You're like, oh, whereabouts? It's right by the door.

You're like, okay, I can can get it that's a trivial belief so if uh an american thinks that sydney is the capital of australia and i say no no it's canberra canberra right i almost had it right but you don't dig your heels in you're like okay done but if if your wife was to say well it's buried in the back behind the you know baby clothes and the christmas decorations you're a lot more reluctant you know can we just go to Walmart, buy another one? Because you have to do more work. Because you have to rearrange a whole lot of other stuff. Right.

And that's the same when we talk about beliefs about God, about who Jesus is. Or moral beliefs about abortion. I mean, imagine what would happen to you if you changed your mind on abortion or homosexuality. What else would have to change for a Catholic apologist? Trent Horn, you know? Oh, if I changed my mind? Yeah. Absolutely. Me too.

Yeah, if I radically changed my beliefs about the Catholic faith, I wouldn't be a Catholic podcaster anymore. I would be someone who would go out and, you know, I would still try to follow the truth wherever it leads. Now, I'm firmly confident where the Holy Spirit has led me that I have found the fullness of truth, and I'm committed to defending it, but I still have a critical and open eye. I think what's hard sometimes, Matt, is like when I'm on the internet and I'm engaging others, especially atheists, sometimes atheists will, it's almost like a slur. They'll say, oh, the apologists say, you know, so it's almost, you know, oh, the apologists will say this about the resurrection or this and that. I see that phrase. I don't see Protestants using it towards

Catholic apologists, because Protestants will see themselves as apologists for whatever kind of Christianity they're defending. But I'll see atheists say this about Christians, oh, the apologists, as if we're all just a bunch of used car salesmen. And some of them have that mindset that we know it's a lemon, but we're trying to sell it anyways. I've never met an apologist or someone who's committed to defending the Christian faith who isn't sincere. I mean, it's possible they're out there. But I think that they look and say, well, you're already committed to a particular end. You're committed to a particular belief, and you've got the belief before you've put all these arguments for it. You're just rationalizing what you believe. And so, I don't think that that's the case. Well, first, a lot of atheists, if you are an atheist

who enjoys debating religion and you defend propositions like there is no God or there is no good reason to believe in God, that is a positive claim. Some atheists will say, well, I don't have a burden of proof. I'm not making a claim. Yeah, I want to get to that. But when you press them, they'll say, well, I'm saying there's no good reason to believe in God. Well, why should I believe that? Here are many reasons that have been offered. What is wrong with them? Anyone who defends a position is an apologist for that position. And so there's nothing wrong with that.

Apologetics just means to give a defense. Yeah, it's not like there's the neutral and the bias. Yeah, if you are committed to a position and you believe it's true, you aren't an apologist for that position. The other objection is, well, for a lot of Christians, they do the apologetics later, and they're rationalizing something they came to for non-rational reasons. I would say that's not necessarily a bad thing either. I mean, there are many philosophers who put forward complex arguments for common sense beliefs we came to for non-rational reasons. I mean, I don't think you went through a philosophical argument when you came to the conclusion that the external world is real, Right, no. Or rape is wrong.

Or that my wife isn't a Russian agent. Right. But let's take even like what philosophers will put forward, complex arguments to defend simple propositions we come to. A few examples, like the external world is real, life is worth living, and it's a- The reality of the past. Yeah, the reality of the past. Whereas there are philosophers who have put forward complex arguments against those positions. David Benatar has a book saying life isn't really worth living, and it's a harm to bring people into existence.

Nick Bostrom has an argument saying we probably live in a simulation. But I think you're rationally justified in holding these views, and then when they are challenged by other people, I still believe this view is correct, but let me answer those arguments that are put forward. That's a great point. And so I think that for many people who believe that God exists and has revealed himself to that person through prayer or religious experience, they're rationally justified in holding that belief. And then when it's challenged, they may go out and find answers to the objections that people hold. When I engage others about whether it's the Catholic faith or being Christian or believing in God, whatever it may be, I try to show there's a difference between

knowing something is true and showing something is true. And some people, I've asked atheists, do you think it's possible? Oh, I asked Anthony about this. I had a great chat with Anthony Magnabosco, who is an atheistic street epistemologist. So, he goes out and he uses the Socratic method when he talks to believers and even other atheists. And I believe it's just such an effective method when you're talking to other people. And I remember asking him, and he rejected the idea, I don't know if you reconsidered it in our dialogue, but that there could be a difference between knowing something is true and showing that it's true. And I think maybe many people will say, well, if you know Christianity is true, then prove it to me.

I may not be able to do that. Not everyone listening to this is able to do that. But an inability to defend what you believe does not falsify that belief. And I'll give you an example about knowing something is true versus showing it's true. It's possible you could be accused of a crime. Yeah, I was thinking that, yeah. Yeah, it's possible you could be accused of a crime you did not commit, and you're brought to trial, and unfortunately, you have just a poor alibi. You were at home eating potato chips by yourself. Nobody can vouch for you. So, that alibi won't hold up well in court.

And let's say there's all other kinds of evidence against you, so much so a rational person on the jury would be rationally justified in concluding you're guilty. The evidence points to that beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, are you going to say, well, I guess I did kill that guy? Well, no, you might say, I didn't. And it's just unfortunate the strongest evidence I have is private evidence other people do not have access to. So, you know, and so, like, I can't show them my subjective experience of not killing that person at that time and that place.

But I know it. I shouldn't doubt that experience, even though there's other evidence from other people pointing in the opposite direction. So, much the same way, I think that many people can have religious experiences and say, I believe that I felt God's presence, and I felt it's leading me in this direction, and I believe that it's true. And they could be justified in holding that belief, even if they cannot defend it to other people. What do you say to atheists, though, who say, I was walking out the other day looking up at the night sky, and I had this profound sense that there was no God? Well, I guess what I would

say here, what is the source of that feeling? Because religious people, you would say, well, the source of that is that there is a universal transcendent cause that pervades the entire universe and orders us to the good. I have a source for that. I see. And so I could be rationally justified. I mean, Alvin Planting is a Christian philosopher who wrote a wonderful book on warrant, you know, why we can be justified in what we believe. And his conclusion is simply that if God exists, it is justified to believe in him. Right. He doesn't even try to prove God exists, saying, well, if there is a God,

you can be justified in believing him. So, you have a source for that. But for an atheist, I would say, well, what profound feeling? It sounds like you as an atheist would admit the source of that profound feeling could just be a hunch. Saying that you have this feeling something is not present, well, just because I don't see something, it doesn't follow that it's not there. Another planting example would be if I look in the backyard, I'm justified in your backyard saying there's no elephants there, because if they were there, I could see them. But I'm not justified in saying there's no no-see-ums, no-see-ums being those little bugs that bite you. We don't have bugs in San Diego. You should come back. Oh, man, if I could afford it, maybe I would.

But, you know, here, it's little bugs that bite you. You can't see them, but you feel them later. However, I want to be careful, though, that a person's internal feelings are not, you know, 100% indefeatable, necessarily. I mean, you could have a personal feeling about something, You could have a personal feeling about something, and yet the opposing evidence is so overwhelming, it should make you doubt that, you know, what that personal feeling is leading you towards. I think this is how you and I maybe came to Christ in a different way. I had a very intense emotional experience in World Youth Day, Rome 2000. Yeah. It felt unlike any other experience I had ever had, but it was emotional. Right.

Whereas you came to the faith through reasons and arguments. I sometimes envy people like yourself. I envy people like yourself. Sometimes, you know, I don't have a lot of these really deep, overwhelming, personal experiences of God. I mean, I've had them and I have them, but they're more few and far between. I've prayed to have more of them, but they're not given to me. And I think there's a reason for that. And I feel like God has led me to say, I don't give you...

I'll be at the charismatic praise and worship session and leave people who are just... They're just like... Yeah, that's me, baby. And I'm just there. I'm like, all right, cool. Good times. Because I don't... Yeah, you're not wired that way.

That electricity is not coming to me in that way and and that's okay because i think that god wants me to to come to know him through just kind of going through the evidence step by step because there's many other people who think well i can't be religious because i don't get these feelings exactly and that's okay i don't get those feelings i i believe in christian Christianity and believe in Catholicism, because I believe it is the best way of explaining the world around me, the best way to understand all the different kinds of evidences there are, whether it's philosophical, scientific, historic, biblical. It all makes sense for me when I put it together in that way. And so, to tie up loose on

what I've been talking about, you could know this is true without going through all these arguments, but I truly believe God wants us to have a firm foundation for what we believe, and He's given us good reasons to know it. And I want to explain these reasons to other people, to equip Catholics to share those reasons with other people, and present them to non-Catholics or Catholics who haven't practiced their faith. But the way I do that, the way I do it is I want them to confront that reason for themselves. If I just tell them, well, here's why it's true and here's why what you believe is wrong, you know, it's in one ear and it's out the other. But when I ask them a question, say, what do you think

about this? Or help me understand what you believe, that I want to do two things. One, I want to get them to rethink what they believe, So I'm going to ask them a question about what they believe and hope to show I think there's some kind of a problem here. Yeah. Trent the gadfly horn. Yes. So that was the term that Socrates used, Plato used to describe Socrates, he was the gadfly of Athens. A gadfly is something, a fly that bites the horse and gets it to move. And so when you ask these kinds of questions, it gets someone to really think about what they believe. Well, before we get on, I want to talk about atheism and go on from there.

Before we get to that, what's something as a Christian you've held to be true that maybe you had to re-evaluate or abandon or adjust in some way? As a Christian, I've had to re-evaluate. Yeah, because you said we all come to these things with our own inbuilt biases. Sure. And someone might challenge you, and it's difficult to have to change your mind. But has there been something since becoming a Christian that you've had to change your mind on? Well, I think the biggest change that I had to go through was that through my conversion,

I went from being a non-religious person to being a Protestant wouldn't be the word I would describe to someone who subscribed to mere Christianity. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the divinity of Christ. And essentially, I had a very primitive belief in sola scriptura. You know, I looked around at all these different churches, and I was going to a Catholic church, and I would go there. And I thought, well, I appreciate these people led me to Jesus Christ, but I don't know if I can sign on to everything else that they're doing. I mean, what is, you know, sitting, standing, kneeling, all this stuff that I can't find in the Bible.

And so, I had the belief that, well, I, you know, as if I was the first person to come up with this, I'll just read the Bible, figure out what it means to me, and then I'm going to pick a church that most closely aligns with that belief. And I think many people identify as Protestants do that. But then I had, but then I re-evaluated and said, okay, wait, here's my test. I'm just going to read what's in the Bible. I have my test, and I'm only going to believe what's in the Bible. But where is that in the Bible? Where is that test?

And I was going through the whole thing and trying to read. Was that a difficult experience for you then, going through that? Like, just like now, if you were to deconvert from Catholicism, that would be a tragic experience. Was it a very painful experience realizing that you may have had to become a Catholic? I don't think it would be quite nearly as painful as if I were to leave the Catholic faith now, because I'm so much more invested, entrenched in it, and so much more assured from the Holy Spirit and from God's witness in my life that it's true, along with the evidence that I've surmised. But it was a difficult experience. My mother left the Catholic faith.

You know, my dad was Jewish, so coming to believe in Jesus was already a bit of a jump there. I was tating at a friend's house once, and I was doing pro-life mission work. This was after my conversion. And the host family hosting us was a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, like my parents. And the mom said, I got to get you some books on Catholicism. And the dad said, I got to get you some books on Judaism, you little turncoat. What is that turncoat? Like a traitor, like a turncoat. He said it jokingly. By the time I read it, I had to tell my parents, my mom, like, I'm thinking of becoming Catholic.

I think that this makes sense. And they were concerned at first, but they saw the peace that it gave me and saw that I was being led in a good direction, the good fruits that were coming from this. So, whereas now as a Catholic, there hasn't been anything you've had to abandon. I think there's things that I've tweaked. I'll give you an example. I think the things that I tweak aren't necessarily whether beliefs are true or false, necessarily. Maybe on some things. I do think that as I've done more work in sharing the faith, I've seen whether certain arguments are more effective or less effective. So I've changed my mind about how I feel about them. Like, take an argument for the existence of God, like the Kalam cosmological argument, which I still think is a decent, like, argument for showing that God exists. And its main premise is, whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe is a cause for its existence. And so, I remember at a time,

prior to writing my book Answering Atheism, I really liked showing the Kalam cosmological argument. And I would try to rely heavily on scientific evidence that the universe has an absolute beginning. And so I was Catholic at this time. But as I was interacting with more people, I felt this isn't always the best way to try to show the fact the universe began to exist by appealing to things like theoretical physics, because it quickly gets above most people's pay grades. And they're like, I'm not in a place where I can even assess if what you're saying is true or false. That's right. So even by the time I wrote my book Answering Atheism, I did include some of that in the book. But I believe I had a line in Answering Atheism where I said, I believe that the scientific evidence is kind of more like the icing on the cake. Okay. And the philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past would be what I think be the stronger

elements. Okay. And I think now, the more I've reflected on it, I think I would primarily, if not exclusively, make an argument for something like the finitude that the past is not infinite, it had a beginning. Based on philosophy. Based on philosophy, trying to show that it's impossible for a past sequence of events to be infinite. I want to get to that. I want to hear your argument for that.

Obviously, Aquinas had no idea about the scientific evidence for the finitude of the universe. He was assessing just the philosophical arguments and rejected the Kalam argument quite vigorously. I'm not sure if you've read what Aquinas had to say. Maybe you want to address that. And then also give us the argument from a philosophical point of view. Oh, you want to do that? I'd love to, yeah. I guess we can hop into that and talk a little bit about atheism.

And even this is something, though, that I'm actually still working through myself because the Kalam cosmological argument is so interesting. When you look at arguments for the existence of God, and once again, like what to share with other people, I find that the Kalam is helpful for your average non-religious person, but it's not as helpful for kind of your internet atheist. Yeah. Is that because they've heard it so many times? It's become almost old hat. And so you hear, and many apologists who want to defend the existence of God will start with the Kalam argument because it's very easy to formulate. It's a deceptively simple argument. Whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence. And then you would make an analysis of the cause and say, well, this cause must be beyond space, beyond time.

It's all powerful because it can make something from nothing. It's personal because it will to make a finite universe. And so you go through and they'll hear not just William Lane Craig make it, but many apologists share that. And so there are just you go on YouTube, I mean, there are just hundreds of videos from atheists critiquing this argument because you go into the premises and sub-premises and it starts to get complicated rather quickly. So I think for many, like, quote-unquote internet atheists, I find it's helpful to present something that they may not have heard before or heard as much. And so you're more likely to have an open mind. Yeah, fresh ears. So arguments there I like are things like the contingency.

Yeah, a contingency argument to say, like that one. What's hard with these arguments is that they can become very complex when you put them forward. Yeah. Or the argument from motion. Right. Like we have Aquinas' version, but Edward Fazer in his book, Five Proofs for the Existence of God, it has over 40 premises in the argument. Yeah.

And it's rigorous, and that's a good thing, but it can be difficult for a layperson to articulate this. Like the contingency argument, and we'll get to Kalam. Yeah, yeah. We got time, I guess. We got plenty of time. That's all we got. Like the contingency argument, I've tried to explain it to atheists this way.

I try to say, well, look, there's three options to explain why the universe exists. Okay. Either the universe exists for no reason, it explains its own existence, or it's explained by something exists. Okay. Either the universe exists for no reason, it explains its own existence, or it's explained by something else. Okay, why are those the three only options? Well, I think those logically could be the only options.

Either, when you think about the principle of the excluded middle, either A or not A, when we're talking about propositions, either the cup is in my hand or the cup is not in my hand. There's nothing like in between if you believe in that law of logic. And so if I think what other option could there be, either there is an explanation or there is no explanation. Right, yep, that makes sense. That has to be true.

One of those has to be true. And if there is an explanation, it's either in the thing or not. Outside the thing. Or you could say not in the thing. Love it. Yeah, perfect. So then logically, it's got to be one of those three. And then you would go through the argument to try to say, well, which one of these things is it? And now this was actually the more

popular, you talk about Aquinas, we'll tie all of this together. When you look at the history of philosophy of religion to try to show that God exists, some version of the contingency argument was really the most popular kind of argument to try to show that God does exist, at least up until... I mean, even all of Aquinas' five ways are essentially a version of the contingency argument in that he is the first cause, the grounding of all being. Yeah, that Aquinas' arguments would work even if it turned out the universe were eternal. Right. And you could say, look, we could set that question aside for right now.

Yeah. Even if the universe had always existed, we would still be pressed with the question, why is there something rather than nothing? It's conceivable there could have been no thing at all. Yeah, I guess they're not all like the contingency argument, but even his like the kind of fifth way, the sort of more teleological way, you know, things have kind of intentions built into them. Even that has to be contingent upon something, given that giving them that intention.

Right. Finding an ultimate explanation for reality. And so this is really the most popular kind of argument. You go all the way up to in 1948, there was a, you can, you can see it on YouTube, actually a clip of it.

There was a BBC radio debate between Bertrand Russell. Have you listened to it? I have, yeah. And what's the other bloke named? The Jesuit. Frederick Hopleston. Yeah, Father Frederick Hopleston, who wrote a wonderful multi-volume series on the history of philosophy. And you just feel so refined when you listen to it.

It's just these two wonderful British chaps. It seems to me the fallacy that is in what you're saying, what I was not saying. It's so refreshing. Fast forward to today's YouTube debates. Oh my gosh. And I want to bring back that wonderful civility in my own conversations. But that's what Father Copleston put forward. And really, it was Craig, William Lane Craig, who brought the Kalam argument back that back in the 1950s, I believe Stuart Hackett in his book or article, The Resurrection of Theism, put forward a basic version of the Kalam. Now, there were people who argued you could show by reason the universe began. There were people

like that in the history of philosophy. The first would probably be John Philoponus in the early Middle Ages. And he was writing a book called Against the Aristotelians. So, excuse me, the followers of Aristotle, they believed that the universe was eternal, and Philoponus said, no, you can show that it had a beginning, God created it. And St. Bonaventure, he believed you could use reason to show the universe had a beginning. And yes, you want to, you know, al-hazali, you know, I love the pronunciation there. Just not into the microphone. Yeah, right. It was a popular argument among Muslim philosophers of religion as well.

But it wasn't popular among people like St. Thomas Aquinas, who kept it out of fashion in the Western world. And Thomas made objections to saying that, of course, Thomas believed the universe began to exist. Because of scripture. Because scripture, because it's what the church teaches, God created the world from nothing. But he wasn't sure you could prove that from reason. And so he definitely said you could not prove from reason it was eternal, because it's not. But the other token, the other side of the coin, you couldn't prove it was finite. And so Aquinas would say when it comes to the paradoxes of infinity, you know, the paradox of whether you could have an infinite past, he would say one of his objections is that, well, people will say you can't traverse an infinite number of days.

You know, if time has to move, you know, one event at a time, one day at a time to get to the present, then that sequence could never be traversed to reach the present. The past would still be ongoing. You can't count backwards from infinity? What does traverse mean? Traverse means to move from one point to an end point. And so, yes, just as you can't count to infinity and reach infinity, you can't count down from infinity and get to zero. And I think Aquinas' objection as well, it doesn't matter because any point that you would find along counting here is going to be finite. So, any point that you pick in the past to go backwards

to, it's always going to be a finite distance away. And so he rejected the idea that the past is infinite and it could not be traversed because any point where you would see the traversal happening would be a finite distance anyways. But here I think this is the fallacy of composition. I just love, hang on, you just accused Aquinas of fallacy on the front of the coin, which is fine. Obviously you can commit fallacies. Sure. It's just really ironic. Continue.

Yeah. So, the fallacy of composition, and this is one we can dig in a little bit more because it's also thrown against Christians when they make cosmological arguments. Yes, exactly. The fallacy of composition says what is true of the parts is not necessarily true of the whole. It's not a formal fallacy. It's not one that's 100% you can always show it by just saying, here's the structure of the argument and it's wrong. It's an argument that deals more with ambiguities in

human language. Right. Give us an example. Well, an example might be just because I can lift every brick in a wall with my hand, it doesn't mean I could lift the whole wall with my hand. What's true of a part is not necessarily true of the whole, not necessarily true. But if every brick in the wall is red, then the wall will be red. So there's always exceptions to that. But another example that I've heard be just because every sheep that exists has a mother, it doesn't mean that all of those sheep have a mother. Yeah.

And actually, that was one that Russell used in his debate against Copleston, because Copleston said, well, the universe is contingent, so it must have an explanation. And he says, it seems to me the fallacy of what you're saying is that every human being has a mother, therefore the whole human race has a mother, but that doesn't seem to follow at all. But I would say here is that when we reason to properties of the entire universe, we're not reasoning from things in the universe to, well, here's how we can expect the universe to be as a whole. We're treating the universe as a set or a collection of all things. And truths about reality would apply to that set just as it would to things within the set. So it's deductive, not inductive, not beginning with individual

things and making a conclusion. No, we're talking about just general truths about reality or metaphysical truths that would apply to the universe as a whole. And so when atheists sometimes say you're making a fallacy composition, so with Aquinas, I would say, yeah, just because any point you pick in the past is a finite distance away, it doesn't mean the entire sequence of events is finite and so could be traversed. It's still an infinite series, and I have a serious difficulty in explaining how that can be traversed, how the present could be happening if time is still traversing through these past series of events. Now, sometimes atheists, you know, they'll say, well, just because things in the universe need a cause doesn't mean the whole universe does, it's fallacy of composition. Once again, it's an informal fallacy. So if you take it to its logical extreme, then you could never say anything about the universe. I'll give you an example. I'll ask you, Matt, does the universe exist? Yes.

How do you know that? It seems to me that it does through my experience within it. So you see things in the universe and you conclude the universe exists? That's part of it, yeah. But that's the fallacy of composition. Just because all the things in the universe and you conclude the universe exists? That's part of it. Well, that's the fallacy of composition. Just because all the parts of the universe exist doesn't mean the universe exists. Very good. You'd be like, what are you talking about? Yeah. So you could see how you could take it to this kind of extreme version. What do you mean by when you say informal fallacy? Informal fallacy is one, when we look at a structure of an argument, an argument is just a series of reasons that are used to support a conclusion.

All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Right. And so there's a structure. There's a major premise. There's a minor premise. With a classical syllogism, there are particular terms like the middle term that's used twice,

the major term, the minor term. A formal fallacy is one where the structure of the argument is incorrect. So, for example, the fallacy of the undistributed middle is when the middle term is not fully distributed amongst the other two terms of the argument. So, if I said, fully distributed amongst the other two terms of the argument. So if I said, all humans are warm-blooded, all dolphins are warm-blooded, therefore all humans are dolphins, that doesn't work. That's the undistributed. That's a formal fallacy because the term warm-blooded is not fully distributed. There are other animals that are warm-blooded that are neither human nor dolphin human and dolphin are not synonymous they are not the only ones that share that share in that category and so but informal

fallacies are ambiguous because of the nature of human language so uh fallacies of ambiguity here's an example all feathers are light that which is light is not dark therefore no feathers are dark would that be an example yeah that would be that would be equivocation that's the fallacy of equivocation and another good one uh would be to say um hot dogs are better than nothing nothing is better than a good steak therefore hot dogs are better than a good steak that's good and of course that's the fallacy of equivocation. So when they're informal fallacies, they're more difficult to detect. Is that your point? They are more difficult to detect.

And then when you go beyond them, most fallacies we deal with are informal. Equivocation is one of them. Others, you would just say, well, it just doesn't follow from what you are saying. It's a fallacy of irrelevance, like ad hominem. You are a terrible, horrible person. Therefore, what you believe saying. It's a fallacy of irrelevance, like ad hominem. You are a terrible, horrible person. Therefore, what you believe is false. No. What's funny with ad hominem, Matt, is sometimes people, especially on the internet, when you

point out someone else is a terrible person, you point out that someone engages in bad behavior or there is something negative about them, people will say, that's an ad hominem. No, that's not an ad hominem. Unless you're rejecting the conclusion. Yeah, if I say Fred is an obnoxious jerk who cheats on his wife, that could be true. It could be calumny, but it's not ad hominem. Right.

But if I say Fred is an obnoxious jerk who cheats on his wife, therefore he's wrong about the ethics of affirmative action. Yeah. They're not related in any way. This happened to me last night. I was at a white elephant Christmas party. And someone, the book I got was, it was all on fatherhood from Bill Cosby. I'm like, I don't want this book.

Take the book. But of course, the book might be fantastic. It might have all sorts of great advice, even though Bill Cosby might be a deplorable human being oh my goodness well i did not know that bill cosby wrote a book on father yeah i had it in my hands last night i left it there get your kodak film and jello pudding but to say well he's done atrocious things therefore what he said was wrong would be the ad hominem yeah and there's also a reverse ad hominem is that sometimes people will instinctively believe someone or trust what they have to say, just because they're insufferably nice. Yeah. Just because they're a wonderful chap. Yeah. But that doesn't mean what they believe is true.

Yeah. And so I think sometimes, especially when you're talking with young people, and I think a lot of young people are falling away from the faith, because they have this assumption that those who are wrong, there must be something wrong about them. And so we associate those who hold false beliefs as being morally deficient, there's something wrong with them, they are the other. And we can even end up stereotyping or caricaturing these people, like, oh, they're just a bunch of heathens, or they're bad people, they're not like the good people that I know.

or they're bad people. They're not like the good people that I know. And so then your faith can be shattered when you meet other people who hold your faith that are terrible individuals. And then atheists who are really respectable, lovely people. Yeah, if you're raised with the idea that you can't be good without God. Yes.

And then you meet atheists that are kind and intelligent and compassionate and believe in holding ethical beliefs and acting in ethical ways, you start to think, oh, well, never mind. Or you meet someone who identifies as LGBT. And so you have always been raised with a particular stereotype of- Seriously dysfunctional human being. Dysfunctional. And I do believe, though, that within the LGBT identity, there are serious

sexual dysfunctions when it relates to orientation and identity, but we're all broken in certain ways. And so we can still have other redeeming qualities in spite of our dysfunctionalities. And so that's why I can recognize that someone who, let's say, identifies as LGBT could be a kind, warm, and caring person, and they may even have a romantic partner, someone who they genuinely will the good for that person. And I can acknowledge the good things they do for that person that are not sinful. This is a pledge to care for that person when they are sick or ill, to provide for them. I think I've heard you say this in the past. It's not like our only options are holy marriage and haven of filth.

Right. But at the same time, I'm not going to compromise and say everything that that person does is wonderful. I will say, I am concerned because there is so much good about you, yet you seem to have found a sense of your identity in something that is disordered. And you seem to me in many other respects to be a very wonderful person, and I would like you to be able to have the fullness of life that God wants for you. And so I think also when we're talking to people, especially about moral issues, when we're trying to lead people towards truth when it comes to morality, this is also a hard thing to give up. If you think, you know, well, to preach the truth and we need to get people who, you know,

they're identifying as LGBT, they need to repent, and that's true. But when you come at people, once again, with a very hard approach, it's easy for it to backfire. Yeah. And think about, once again, when I believe we try to reach out to other people, I think it's important, I really always want to try to get into that person's shoes. And so, when I have dialogues with people, I want to really see where they're coming from. I mean, imagine someone came to you, Matt, and said, eating meat is wrong. And it's very clear. Here is a solid ethical argument they put forward. And here is all appeal to your emotions with these videos of slaughterhouse killing of animals. And doesn't it just seem obvious to you it's wrong? But that desire you have for that

wonderful medium rare steak is just, you know, it's hard to think, how could I cling from that? Now, I'm not advocating the view that eating meat is wrong. I'm just, I'm making an analogy that it's easy for us that things we care deeply about, it'll be hard for us to get rid of them in virtue of a merely an argument. So that's why I think when we talk to people who are stuck on things, it's important to appeal to their nobility. Like if I were a vegetarian trying to get you to stop eating meat, I would say, Matt— You're a sympathetic, kind-hearted person.

Yeah, and I would also say, Matt, I've known you in the past, and I know that you're good at doing really hard things. I mean, you've supported things like the Exodus 90 challenge. I know you, Matt Fradd, you are really good at doing hard things when you believe they are the right thing to do. And so, I have faith in you that you could see where I believe on this, that it's right to not eat meat. And I know from past experience with you, you have the strength within you to do the hard thing when it comes to this. And so there, even if you're like, I can do that. I have done hard things before.

And that would be what my mentor, Mike Phelan, called appealing to a person's nobility. Right. And this is different to just emotional manipulation. Yeah. It's not. I don't ever want to feel like I'm pulling strings with people. I believe manipulation has a sense of deception involved within it. Yeah.

Like if you didn't really mean that you've seen me do hard things, I didn't really mean that. That would be manipulative. But if I truly believe this, I can appeal to your nobility. And it's the same when we're talking to people who try to—I remember when I used to do marriage preparation before my time at Catholic Answers. I worked in the Diocese of Phoenix doing marriage preparation, and we would get the sign-ups for our marriage preparation classes. And in some cases, 100% of the sign-ups, people were cohabiting, 100% of them. Now, we could have just said, you can't enter our class until you agree not to live together. And they probably would have gone to the diocese, get married outside of the church.

But instead, we invited them to be a part of it, to go through God's plan for a joy-filled marriage. Meet them where they're at. Meet them where they're at and challenge them to grow where they're at, to present them what God's plan for marriage and sexuality is, and to appeal to their nobility, to know that they deeply care about this other person. Having a good marriage. If they love this person, they'll want to take steps to have a faithful, fruitful, holy marriage that has long lasting positive effects. And that once again,

if they love this person, they've probably made sacrifices for this person before. I would hope they would. True love is sacrificial. And aren't you willing to make the similar sacrifice to understand what love really is and what the best expression of our love is? and accountability software available. Filtering, that is to say, it blocks the bad stuff, the stuff that you shouldn't be looking at, that you definitely don't want your kids looking at. It's also the best accountability software on the web. So if you go somewhere you shouldn't, your accountability partner will get an email telling them what search terms you typed in, what inappropriate websites you went to. This is really great, I think, accountability software because it treats us like responsible moral agents. It doesn't just block the bad stuff. It says you can go there, but then someone will know about it. And it's just

fantastic. If you've got kids, you've got to have this. We have Covenant Eyes on all of our devices and we will not let our children play at people's houses who don't have it. That's how important this stuff is. Go to covenanteyes.com and at checkout, type in the promo code Matt Fradd, one word, and you'll get a month for free. You can try it out for yourself. If you don't like it, quit. You won't be charged a cent, but you probably won't. I think you'll use it. It really is the responsible, grown-up, bloody thing to do. Go to covenanteyes.com and at checkout, type in the one word Matt Fradd as a promo code and you'll get a month for free. Okay, back to my discussion with Trent Horn. And another thing I think is important when we're sharing our faith with other people is to be able to summarize it well so that it

makes sense. I sometimes call these elevator speeches, you know, how to make it just simple and put together. And when you think about it a lot, then you can have ways of expressing to people. So, like, when I'm in these classes and someone says, well, what's wrong with sex outside of marriage? I love my girlfriend, I love my fiancee, what's the big deal about it? You're like, what do I say? Now, you could take a Socratic approach, which I think is helpful, but sometimes I also offer a short elevator speech. So here, I also try to give them something that I think is unexpected. I think that's helpful in our replies. We try to think of answers to people, try to think of something they haven't heard before, because that'll make them go, what? And the goal is, I want this person to think about it. So I might say, well, I believe sex outside of marriage is wrong, because I

believe that lying is wrong. And I think we can lie with words and we can lie with our own bodies. I like that. And so, we ought not express a language of love that actually has a falsehood to it. And then like, well, what do you mean? Well, let's talk. And so, they're intrigued by it. To that point, did you ever see the movie Vanilla Sky?

Is that with Tom Cruise? Yeah. And Cameron, who's that? Cameron Diaz? Nicole Kidman? It was Cameron Diaz. Cameron Diaz? Eyes Wide Shut is Nicole Kidman.

So there's a point in the movie where they had slept together and she says to Tom Cruise, your body made a promise to me, even if you didn't. That's what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I'll do is, why should I believe that language? The body has a kind of language actually i was invited to go grab them by the throat and say live well crush their windpipes i was that's how i was actually invited matt to go to a i was invited to a catholic university to speak to four classes combined on sexuality and gender and i was

invited to prevent present the catholic view on sexuality secular gender. And I was invited to present the Catholic view on sexuality. In a university? Secular university? At a Catholic university. Those can be just as bad. No, I find that Catholic schools are worse. Why is that? I don't know.

Is there a resentment against it? I think that there's a contempt for the familiar. And it's a sense of like, this is what I don't want to be boxed in by. And so it's almost like a disdain for the familiar. You see these crucifixes on every wall and everything around, and just the same as we can take our own families for granted. People take the church for granted when it becomes familiar, especially even within academia. Yeah.

So, I was invited to go to a Catholic university to present the Catholic view, because... We won't ask which Catholic university. We'll let it be. But of course, it's ironic there that here's the outsiders brought in to present it, and here are these students. I would say probably less than 5% or 10% of them hold the Catholic position on sexuality. Yeah. That they're in these sex and gender studies classes.

And so I just tried to appeal them by asking them questions. I just started by saying, you know, sex is just kind of a weird thing, right? There's just things that are very odd about it. And I'd like to propose questions for you to think about. And when we understand what sex is, then we can understand how we ought to treat one another in these various ways. So I asked them, well, here's one weird thing I found about it. I can enjoy many bodily pleasures by myself. You know, the other night I flew in for the interview and I went to Freddy's and I got the steak burger and, You know, the other night I flew in for the interview and I went to Freddy's and I got the steak burger and, you know, the little string fries and those were wonderful. And I don't have to think about other people to enjoy my food. But even when people, when it

comes to the pleasure of sexuality, people really want to seek that with other people. Even though if you limit it to its most biological level, it's essentially muscle spasms and the secretion of bodily fluids, which can be accomplished by one's own doing. But even when people do that, you mean masturbation? Yes. When people do that, they're usually either watching pornography or they're thinking about other people. They're thinking about engaging in sexual acts. They're not thinking about being alone, usually. No, they're not.

And so that's strange. Like, even when someone's alone doing that, they're thinking about other people. That's a very interesting point. But why? Why is this particular bodily pleasure? It feels like I can't even- Because you wouldn't have necessarily enjoyed the pleasure that that terrible fast food gave you more if I was with you. I mean, it may have been, it may have.

I would have had someone to commiserate with. Yeah. It's not actually. It would have been nice to share it together, but it's not like the food going down was any less pleasurable because I wasn't there. It's not rapturous because Matt Fradd said it. I'm sure Matt Fradd makes everything rapturous, I guess. He does his best. He does his best.

Ask my wife. But with sexuality, it's so different. Yeah, it is. Why is that? Then I ask them another question. I say, well, let me ask you guys another question. Why is it the case that if a man were even to ask his girlfriend or fiance or wife, do you care if I sleep with this friend of mine on Saturday?

She's very attractive. And I've been doing a lot of good work around the house attractive. And I have, I've been doing a lot of good work around the house. So, I mean, I think I enjoy a little time to myself. Even asking to do something like that is completely out of bounds to do. That affairs, cheating, is considered to be something that is just catastrophic to most relationships. But why should we think that? If sexuality is just, especially if it's only about the biological pleasures involved. Imagine if you said to your wife, oh, I'm going to go out with some friends to work, we're going to go to happy hour, or we're going to go get drinks, or we're going to

go to a movie together. Your wife would be like, oh, okay, that's fine. She said, no, you only do that stuff with me she's totally jealous and possessive but he said hey i'm gonna go out my with uh some co-workers we're gonna have an orgy your wife would be quite justified in saying i'm gonna have to draw the line right here and yet so there once again it's like well wait a minute so that means sex and i think the reason for that is when you understand what sex is for i believe some people ask me why me, why is sex wrong? What is sex for? My one sentence summary is, sex is for the expression of marital love.

And so I would ask, what is marital love? And it seeks a kind of bodily union with another person. It seeks a full and complete union with another person, not just one that's emotional, but one that's also physical. And so when we misuse sexuality, it doesn't form this bodily, a real union. And real union means you're ordered towards an end beyond yourselves. When the dentist puts his fingers in my mouth to, you know, to deal with my cavity, we're not forming, we're not becoming one flesh. We're not being united. Sticking rod A into slot B does not

necessarily form a union, but rather when you're ordered towards a good beyond yourselves, then we actually have that biological union. And so that's why, and there's more about this I could talk about and reference people, but when you ask me things that I've changed my mind on, things like that, when it comes to understanding how to defend and articulate our faith, there's different schools of thought in how to articulate one's faith. So the argument I'm presenting to you is a little bit derived somewhat from Pope St. John Paul II's personalism and theology of the body, but it also comes from what's called new natural law. Okay, explain that to us. Yeah, so when it comes to natural law, we can understand at the

most basic level that... Teleology? There is a natural, there's an end for things within the universe that Aquinas defines the natural law as the rational creature's participation in the eternal law of God. And so when God has a plan for the universe, rocks and trees can't participate. They just act in accordance with their natures. But we have free will. We can choose. We're rational. We can see reasons.

And so we can participate with that or choose not to. And so that's natural law. St. Thomas Aquinas and be really firmly rooted in Thomistic metaphysics, saying that, you know, understanding sexual ethics comes towards seeing the natural telos or end of our bodies, looking at particular body parts and seeing their final cause and being rooted in understanding, very rooted heavily in Thomistic metaphysics. But in the mid-20th century, there were some scholars, Germain Grise is one of them. Others would be John Finnis, Robert George, and I think like Ryan Anderson and Trieff Gerges.

And they've read Aquinas and take it from a different interpretation of understanding natural law as being something where God has created the world and there's particular kinds of basic something where God has created the world and there's particular kinds of basic goods that he has created, things that are good in and of themselves that one should not act against. So, you know, why is money good? Well, money is good because you can spend it on things, you can acquire things to do good with, but money is not good in and of itself. But there are things that are just good in and of themselves. So, pleasure, good in and of itself. But there are things that are just good in and of themselves. So pleasure,

why do you want to feel pleasure? Because I just do, I want to. And so the grise finis, George Thies, that there's other things that have a similar kind of basic good property about them, things like friendship, play, even, and marriage would be one of these basic goods. And that it's a basic principle of reason that you should not act against one of these basic goods. And so one argument against contraception is that contraception is wrong because it is anti-life, and that life itself is always a good. It is something that is good in and of itself. And so to act against it, no, to directly act against it, so just because something's a basic good doesn't mean we always have to to act against it, no, to directly act against it. So just because something's a basic good doesn't mean we always have to go about promoting it, producing it, or acquiring it. We just ought not act against it. Actively shut it down.

Yeah. New natural law theologians also say that truth is a basic good that we ought not act against. They have a very strict view against lying, for example. As did Aquinas. Yeah, the ethics for that. And so that comes into when you see people, Patrick Lee would be another example of this, who argue for marriage and what marriage is. They'll say, well, marriage just is the conjugal union that exists between a man and woman, and we should not act against that. Here are the reasons to understand this is what it is, and they're put forward.

So actually, Layla Miller and I, we talk about natural law in our book, Made This Way. But that book was really written for parents to get a handle on church teaching and explain it to other people. And we include natural law, both elements of new and old. Do us a favor to help break this down for folks who are watching. Give us the sort of strict natural law argument against contraception, and then give us the new natural law argument against contraception, and show us how they differ. Yeah, and the thing is, there are different people who would put different arguments. They might articulate it differently. They might articulate it differently. Yeah,

so I think that if you took kind of an older view of natural law, you would just say that we can understand our – and I'm not saying the old natural law view is necessarily wrong either. I'm open to both, and I've just tried to find things that make sense to the people I try to share them with. Yeah, I see what you mean when you talk about John Paul II and sort of phenomenology and kind of appealing to people's experience of things to better convince them or convict them. So I think that there's important that there can be arguments I think are completely true and helpful, but we also have to look to see how does this person receive those arguments? So let me give you, let me give you an example. You tell me what you think is right with this or wrong with this. Okay. So eating, the end of eating is nutrition. It's not pleasure. Pleasure is a consequence, maybe a motivating factor. But if I ceased receiving pleasure from eating, I would still

continue to eat in order to be nourished. With the sexual act, there seems to be at least two ends, the good of those coming together and an openness to life. If I naturally thwart the end of eating, say through bulimia, I've perverted the act of eating. If I naturally thwart the end of eating, say through bulimia, I've perverted the act of eating. If I naturally thwart the end of the sexual act through, say, contraception or masturbation or something like that, I've thwarted one or both ends and therefore it's disordered or perverted. So that seems to who want kind of more of that classical natural law exposition, Edward Fazer has written a paper called Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument. And that's where he goes against these arguments and against objections that are put forward. Because some people will say, well, you know, if I can't, you know, if I have to always reach these ends and I can't act against them, would holding my breath, you know, if I have to always reach these ends and I can't act against them, would holding my breath, you know, would that go against the end of breathing? And would that be immoral? Depends how long you held it for.

Right. Yeah. I guess if you held it until- If you killed yourself somehow through a device or something that forced you to hold your breath. Anyway, sorry. Yeah. And so, there are different objections that'll be put forward here, but that's one that'd be rooted towards, once again, we look at like the structure of our body, what things are naturally ordered towards. It has a very teleological element to it. And the big difference here is that the classical view would say that you can derive ought from is in a more straightforward way. This is what the body is for. This is what our sexual organs are for. they are for this, especially for this procreative end,

and to strip away that end would be to act against reason. It would be unreasonable to do that. And the good that we pursue would be the end of reason itself. And so in pursuing that, if we were to act in an unreasonable way, that would be wrong or that would be evil. And so it would be we become disordered in that way. And I do think that the example of eating that it's fine, like, let's say you want to lose weight, you choose to not eat at certain times or intervals, that would be a healthy thing to do similar to how if you do not want to become pregnant, you choose to not engage in sexual activity at various intervals. But to try to achieve the good of pleasure from the act,

divorced from its proper end, would end up being disordered in that way. Now, I guess a counter to that that some atheists will put, or not even atheists, even people who disagree with classical natural law, might say, well, things like bulimia are wrong simply because they cause harm to the body. And so- I just don't believe people really believe that. I mean, if it was discovered that you could be bulimic in a way, I don't think anyone would say it's not disordered, would they? Well, yeah, I'm not sure you'd say.

I think that's- Some would. I think that's an intuition that people will have in that regard. And I think that's a fair reply to say, well, let's consider it more. Is this something that you would really do, even if it doesn't seem to cause any kind of physical harm? And here, I would just try to appeal to other things that a person would consider to be disordered, even if they're not injurious to the person. And sometimes sexual paraphilias are helpful to appeal to here. Sure.

So, paraphilia being what is also called a fetish. Yeah. And- Fuzzies, all this sort of- Furries. This is my realm. Furries. Except I got the word wrong.

Yeah, let's not explain what that is. But that's okay, because now people will not think Matt Fradd is, he's just aware of these things. That's right, he's not used to them. Well, I mean, there's, I believe it's rule, I think it's rule 34, and that is a rule for the internet which is if it exists there is pornography of it yeah please but but it shows that when you you know when you get past just i mean it's sad the world that we live in when you get past the generic adults oriented things like we talk about pornography

and i think people have just like a subset of like four or five different things they consider under pornography that first come to mind when we're like let's say people were debating uh you know whether pornography should be banned or things like that i think you have that subset yeah but then remember we live in the it's a big tunnel it's a big hole way down. Let's not use those analogies. It is a large, it's the worldwide wild west of the web, basically. And there are just horrible, perverted things that eight-year-old children are stumbling upon. And here, you can point to say, even if these things are not necessarily injurious to a person, wouldn't you say this is probably disordered? So that, yes, that would be classical natural law. And then...

Yeah, so give us the kind of, so that's a more classical one. Could you think of a... Yeah, so the new natural law, when you look, and so the purveyors of this would be people like Alexander Pruss, who is a philosopher at Baylor, and he has a great book called, I think it's called One Body or One Flesh. I can't remember off the top of my head. It's one or two, Alex Pruss, One Body or One Flesh. William May is a Catholic moral theologian who I believe has embraced more kind of new natural law. What they would say about contraception is that when we look to see that if life is a basic good and marriage is a basic good, we ought to act towards the particular ends involved in these things and not act against them. So if sex just is for expressing marital love,

and marital love is the complete gift of self that forms a true union with another person, then you actually can't form that kind of union, what marital love is, when you have sterilized the element of the act that's open to life itself, whether you put a barrier up or use a chemical contraceptive, that's open to life itself, whether you put a barrier up or use a chemical contraceptive, that the act itself is reduced almost to a sense of kind of mutual masturbation when you have purposely prevented the union that's supposed to occur in this act. And the reasoning would go back even further when you say that sex is for experiencing marital love, love is for achieving particular kinds of union.

And I think that makes sense when we think about sexual ethics. I think when we love anything, we seek union with it. I mean, I love a good double-double burger. Yeah, good beer, good double-double. So we want a union with it at a digestive level. When you love a friend, we want union. If you say you love someone,

but you never call them on the phone. You never want to spend time with them. You never spend time with them. Do you really love them? Or a beautiful landscape through climbing a mountain, in a sense, there's that being one with that. Right. So when we love something, we seek union with it.

And so what makes marital love different from other kinds of love is the seeking of not just emotional or spiritual union, but really the seeking of bodily union with the other person. That's the only thing that makes sense as to what marital love is. And so that's why when people debate about marriage and can it be two men or two women, or I like to take the question back and ask, well, what is marriage? What is it? You use this term because for me, if marriage is just the relation between adults, if it's

just a relationship between adults that the state recognizes, you could have all kinds of prefixes in front of that. You absolutely could. same-sex any more than you could have a prefix like solo marriage or to marry yeah oneself which you find on to post or BuzzFeed some people do from from time to time so I try to understand what what is it I actually there's a philosopher John Corvino he was at Wayne State University a while back I don't know if he's still there and he is is in a relationship, he may be married now, with another man. He identifies as being gay. And he's a very kind person you could converse with.

And he puts forward philosophical arguments in defense of homosexual behavior. And it's funny. So he's debated the issue. He was involved with debating the issue of same-sex marriage, so-called same-sex marriage, back in the day. He did a book with Maggie Gallagher called Debating Same-Sex Marriage. And what I find funny in Corvino's position is that he's asked, well, what is marriage? Tell me what it is. And he almost kind of is taking it back as if that's not really that important of a question.

But he says, look, if I have to give a definition, I'll say that marriage just is a relationship involving more than one person where sex is permissible. That's a very philosopher's definition of marriage. Because I remember once I talked with a guy who just said, you know, marriage. So that means if I go to a club and hook up, that was a marriage. That was two adults where sex was permissible. You have to add longevity to it. Yeah, but although I think that with no-fault divorce or things like that, what minimal amount of time

would make something really marriage? Normally, I think where Corvino would add is that there's an element of social recognition to it. That if you hook up with someone at a club, marriage consists in having it socially recognized. And I would agree with that because it's good for the society to recognize which men and women are having sex with each other and which children that flow from the union are theirs. Yeah, yeah.

It's important to, especially to connect fathers. Throughout, I mean, when a child is born, it's pretty, prior to IVF and all this other stuff, throughout human history, it's been easy to figure out who the mom is. Right. Dad has always been a bit trickier. Yeah. So that's why we, every society on earth or virtually every society on earth came up with this

institution so that to, to unite mostly not just men and women, but men more with their children. So, but I think Corvino with his definition, what's funny about it, you know, so you can't,

so he's even open to polyamory at least in in principle but he still includes in there sex is permissible like it can't you know it that marriage has a sexual element to it that's another is when you talk about sex and marriage i want to ask people weird questions why does marriage have sex have why does sex have something to do with marriage exactly yeah why yeah why can't we just be affectionate people like Bert and Ernie? Well, I mean, there's,

there's the different theories that you need to see, you need to see online. I think Saturday Night Live did a trailer where they made fun of Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, but it's, it's Sesame Street. All right. It's pretty good. Yeah.

Give me the ducky, man. No. Ernie, give him the ducky. That's a great video. my wife's always like where do you have time to come up with these philosophical arguments and watch so much youtube i'm like gotta keep the brain going in that way i wouldn't i'd just spiral into a youtube yeah frenzy it'd be awful uh so but think about with corvino's definition and when i ask people

like when you when you bring up the idea well can a father marry his own son? And it's important when we bring up these counterexamples, people will become indignant very quickly. Once again, it's not about just winning the argument. I mean, it's important to present truth to people, but I want to win the person over. So I don't want to rapid fire things. And I'll also preface them. I'll say, well, I am not comparing this, directly comparing this to a marriage between two men or two women, but suppose a father were to marry his son, for example. What about marriages between family members? And most people are taken aback by that because they assume that I'm talking about sexual behavior between family members. But what about two elderly sisters who want to marry each other so that they can have property rights, visitation rights, medical rights? They're a household that's committed to one another. They're two elderly sisters. They're all they have in the world. But say, well, we could domestic partnerships or something.

People will try to get around this. But they'll see that marriage, we use terms like the marital act, the marital bed. Even secular people agree marriage and sex have something connected to them, even though the rhetoric around so-called same-sex marriage is love is love. Why are you standing in the way of love? But here, the vast majority of people we love in life, we do not have sex with. And in fact, many people we love, it would be immoral to have sex with them. So that connection there of love and sex is not as strong as people may think. Sex should always be love, but love often is not sex.

Express through sex, yeah. Yeah. And so here, even in Corvino's definition, say, okay, marriage, it's funny, he even just allows, you don't have to have sex necessarily. He just says it has to be permissible. If you were to choose to do it, you have to. But why? And here, I think that the conjugal view of marriage, that what marriage is for is, and that would be leaning towards more like the new natural law view, but the old natural law view would explain this as well. It's for that particular union that can only exist between men and women ordered towards the good of procreation and the good of union. And so I think that when we present these to people,

sometimes people will just throw out all these arguments or they'll throw out things. It's easy to step on a landmine. Once again, get inside the other person's head and think of what your words will mean to them. It's hard. You have to think before we speak. And sometimes you learn the lessons the hard way. In Colossians 4, 6, St. Paul says, let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt so you know what to say to everyone, to every man. And for example, so I was born this way. I was born this way, so I don't see anything wrong with that. And the retort is, you know, pedophiles say that they're born that way. Does that make pedophilia okay?

Yeah, a bit abrasive. Well, because what the other person hears from that is, oh, so you're basically saying I'm a pedophile or I'm no better than a pedophile. Right. And so here, asking questions. Once again, asking questions, because I want them to grapple with it. If you just throw out the defeater to the argument, the rebutter, you can have the backfire effect happen. But I want to ask them questions. So here I might say, well, help me understand. And the questions, you don't have to like, well, I can't think of this amazing, insightful question Trent Horn's going to come up with.

You don't have to do that. Ask them, what do they think? Why do they think that? And is this what you meant? Anyone can do those three things. What do you think about this? Why do you think that? And is this what you meant? Give us an example. Well, with that, I would say, okay, help me understand. What do you think about homosexual behavior? And here, they've given an argument, so I might just ask a clarifying question. It sounds to me like you're saying there's nothing wrong with engaging in homosexual behavior

because I'm not choosing this. This is a feeling that I've had for a very long time, maybe since puberty or even before that. Is that what you're saying? Now here, I think what happens in our discourse, sometimes we think, okay, we both know that's what the person is thinking. So here's my rebutter argument. Let's slow down just a little bit because I want it to be explicit to that person for them to really think it through in that regard. So I'd say, all right, help me understand

where you're coming from. So then that's's the then would you agree then the larger principle are you saying that it's okay for a person to engage in a behavior because they they have always felt inclined towards that behavior for a very very long time is that what you are saying yes and notice this approach is gentle much gentler and i'm just trying to see the person they see where you're going but you're not going there right away. Not going there right away. And it's coming from a genuine spirit of I'm trying to understand you. Right.

And make sense of the argument and the reasons you're putting forward. And then I might have a more specific challenge. And I'll try to think of one that's less abrasive. So with that, I was born this way. Two examples that I put forward are I would say that many men feel a polyamorous orientation ever since puberty. They want to sleep with anything that can move, basically, some guys are. And yet, that doesn't mean they should always act on that orientation, especially if they're in a committed relationship or a marriage. And the person could see, you have this very, very strong feeling you may not want to act on.

Or another example I'll give is, some people will have very, very short tempers. I mean, there are some people, if you have known them from infancy, they have had a short temper. Yeah. They blame it on their Irish temper or something. Or they could literally say, I was born this way. I was angry the moment I came out of the womb. I've got footage of it, when I was one.

Yeah. Or even one week old, one day old. And yet, just because you may be predisposed in that way doesn't mean it would be right for you to bite somebody's head off or to throw a tantrum or things like that. Just because we're wired a certain way doesn't mean we ought to act on that.

And then, of course, then there'll be a reply. Say, well, those other examples, they harm other people. I don't see how this is harming anyone. Okay, well, let's talk about that. So now we've set aside one issue, and then another issue rises. Let's ask, why do you believe that? Do you think there could be exceptions to that? Could it lead to, in philosophy, we call this reductio ad absurdum. And so I wouldn't say that, like, let's do a reductio ad absurdum to show what you believe is crazy, because that's not going to be inviting. But to say, I'm trying to understand where you're coming from. And if it's true, I would believe it. But I'm concerned that what you believe would lead to these other beliefs I'm very, very uncomfortable with, and I think you may be uncomfortable with as well. Can you help me see how maybe it doesn't lead to those beliefs,

or maybe I shouldn't be uncomfortable with those beliefs?" And then I walked them through the argument. You can do this with sexual ethics, with abortion. I do that on Catholic Answers Live all the time. And you can do this also, I mean, we've touched on a lot of different ways of defending the faith, even when you are a Catholic talking to a Protestant friend. I think many Catholics, this is the cardinal paradigmatic example of the when they say, you say mentality. Catholics have been taught for decades when it comes to apologetics. Oh, if a Protestant says this, you need to point to this Bible verse and this Bible verse. A lot of Catholics just, and even I myself, I'm not super great at memorizing chapters and verses. Right.

I'm just not. So you could ask questions. I want to shift, if that's okay, I want to shift gears a little here. Yeah, sure. I wrote an article for Catholic Answers Magazine a while ago. I think I called it the apologetics mansion or something. And the point is that you have three floors in this mansion. The first floor is theistic apologetics, the second is Christian apologetics, and the third is Catholic apologetics, the second is Christian apologetics, and the third is Catholic apologetics. Sure.

And the reason I was thinking about this is it seemed to me that sometimes we as Catholics, if you keep that analogy in your mind, are shouting out of the third window to those outside the mansion. And those would be atheists, say, about transubstantiation or something. And all they hear is, get off my lawn. Yeah. But of course, trying to explain transubstantiation to an atheist is like trying to explain advanced algebra to someone who denies basic arithmetic. And so I thought, well, I think Christ can reveal himself to somebody so that they know that God exists and that they should worship him. Usually, as we do apologetics, it involves first coming to believe that God exists. Then has God revealed himself in Christ?

Then has Christ established a church? And what can we know about that church? Right. What I'd love to do with you is to sort of mosey on from the first floor up to the third floor, because you're very gifted at doing this. In fact, your book, Why We're Catholic? Yes. Is a fantastic introduction. I'd say it's the best book to hand to anybody who is even open to Catholicism.

And that's the thing. I'd say it's the best book to hand to anybody who is even open to Catholicism. And that's the thing. When I wrote Why We're Catholic, the reason I wrote that book was because prior to it, I did not know one book, say, what is a book I could give someone who's not Catholic? Right. And you don't know who it might be. Maybe it's an atheist.

Maybe it's a Protestant. Yeah. What book do you give to someone who's not Catholic? Because there's lots of books out there that explain, at the time I wrote the book a few years ago, and there still are, there's lots of books that explain why the Catholic faith is true. But the tone they're written in, it's written for, hey, Catholic, our faith is true, and here's how you can know it, and you can tell an atheist and a Protestant, here's what you should say to them.

And that's good. That's helpful. But those books become awkward when you give them to a non-Catholic friend. Yeah, they can sound triumphalistic. Here's what's wrong with what the atheist says. And the atheist is reading this like, that's actually not what I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I wrote with Why We're Catholic, I tried very, very hard to write it as if I'm more speaking to someone who's not Catholic or even not Christian. Here are the reasons. And then kind of by osmosis, a Catholic reading it will kind of pick up the reasons along the way. And I have other books in the future I want to write along that frame. But yes, that's why I wanted to lead people, similar to what you said with The Mansion, why we're Catholic starts with truth and God,

goes through Jesus and the Bible, the church, and then ends with the moral issues. Or to kind of give another example of why I thought of this analogy of The Mansion is sometimes I'll have somebody come up to me after a talk and say, I don't believe in God. And I'll say, why? And they say, because the scripture is filled with contradictions. But of course, that's a non-sequitur. Maybe God exists, but the Bible is false. So again, kind of starting on meeting them where they're at. That's important to bring up. When you talk to people, you don't always have to refute what they have to say. Because you might think, I don't know how to answer these Bible contradictions. But if they say, well, I'm not Christian because I don't believe in this. Well, you could say,

okay, well, why couldn't you just be a Christian who thinks the Bible might have errors? You could be, I'm not one of those Christians, but you could be one. Exactly. Why wouldn't you do that? I think asking the question, what's the most this argument proves? Right. And then, yeah. So let's deal with that.

Let's kind of begin with the kind of atheist question. We touched upon it earlier in the talk, the conversation. But what is an atheist? What is a theist? What is an agnostic? Getting our terms right. This is hard. And I think it's important to listen to people, especially atheists, because I think, you know, the most contentious division between Christians and atheists or theists and atheists is one, does God exist? And then two, what is an atheist? Very heated divisions about that. Classically speaking, the word theist comes

from the Greek word theos, which means God. And traditionally, a theist is someone who affirms that God exists or that the proposition God exists is true. And traditionally, an atheist is one who says God does not exist, or the proposition God exists is false. That's traditional. An agnostic would be someone who would say well i'm not going to say yes or no so sometimes i'll say well look does god exist there's three ways you can answer the question yeah yes no or or i don't know yeah you could maybe quibble with those a little you could say like probably no or probably yes yeah and but i would say yes no or maybe or i don't know theists would be yes atheists would be no and i don't know or maybe would be an agnostic right

so two people two of those have the burden of proof and one doesn't right because one just suspends judgment on the question because i've never heard about this i've read about it i can't make a judgment on at this time or i'm not i'm not going to uh but i think most atheists you talk to today will say that an atheist is just someone who has a lack of belief in God. So it's not defined propositionally, like this statement is true or false. It's defined psychologically. An atheist is just someone who lacks a belief in God. And so I'm not a big fan of just arguing with someone like, you're not really an atheist. Whatever, they're going to use whatever term for them, and I'm going to try to walk them through. So a better definition that I use, I think most atheists, I would say, would you agree with this definition?

An atheist is someone who lacks a belief in God because they don't think there's any good reason to believe in God. Right. I think that's it, because there are many people who lack a belief in God. I mean, there's many infants, animals, who lack a belief in God. I mean, there's many infants, animals who lack a belief in God. There could be adults who have never heard of the Western concept of God, and they lack a belief in it, but they're not atheists. They're, I think a term that's been used like a-logists. They just have no knowledge of the debate whatsoever. Yeah.

And so lacking a belief, I'd say, also if atheism is just a lack of belief, it's just not that interesting. It's philosophically uninteresting. Like, well, why do you lack a belief? That's what I really want to know. And I also want to figure out, well, how is the world the way it is? What is the real nature of reality? So there I would say an atheist, just if I'm talking with someone, and I think most atheists would agree with this, they would say, look, I don't believe in God because I don't see any good reasons to think God exists. Okay.

Okay. Then it sounds like what you're looking for are good reasons. And so here, you know, we've talked about the arguments for contingency and Kalam, but I think that sometimes, you know, our listeners to this may say, well, I don't know those arguments under my fingertips. What am I supposed to do in these circumstances? I would ask questions. Yeah.

And so one question I would ask here is, okay, so why should I believe there are no good reasons to believe in God? Will you prove it to me? Well, I've heard the different reasons, and I have different reasons to believe in God that may not be a good reason to you, but there's lots of different reasons. Can you help me see why should I believe there are no good reasons? Why should I- Another question I've heard you ask, and you might be getting to this is, and I think this is an excellent question.

They'll say, oh, I don't believe in God because I've never encountered any good arguments for God's existence. And you say, okay, well, there's a lot of arguments for God's existence. Which do you think is the best one? Obviously, you think it still fails, but out of all of the arguments you've clearly assessed, which is the best one and why does it fail? That one meets with a fair amount. It depends on who I'm talking to.

That's a good question. Yeah, you'd think so. It's a good question and it may not work well, but the point is it often exposes that the atheist really hasn't, I mean, not always, but I think there are many atheists who really haven't looked into arguments for God's existence and their response to that question. There's a few that will tell me there's, because I could answer it it in reverse to them i would say the strongest argument against god's the problem of evil yeah but here's why i here's why i don't find it to be compelling here's why i don't find it ultimately compelling to me uh i've had atheists when they when they put that when i've

put it forward i've heard say there is there there is no best argument they're all bad i'm like well give me one of the better ones yeah they're like they're all bad. I'm like, well, they're- Give me one of the better ones. Yeah, they're like, they're all equally terrible. I mean, that doesn't seem right. Most philosophical positions that people hold, there can be better or worse arguments. There are better and worse arguments for atheism. You know, the problem of evil is better than my priest was mean to me when I was five, or I had religious parents that never let me go out with my friends. You know, one of those is going to be better than the other. So sometimes I'll,

I'll try very hard with this. I'll say, well, what's the least bad argument you've come across? So sometimes I'll phrase that. What's the least bad. Now, when I've heard you do this on Catholic answers live though,

I've never heard a compelling response. I've just heard something that exposes them. And again, I'm not saying this of all atheists are obviously very intelligent atheists who are seeking the truth i think yeah and i think we don't want to have these questions as like gotcha moments it's more like help me understand like in order to say there's no good reasons to believe in something uh you could either have not looked at the reasons and hence you haven't found any or you've looked at the reasons and found them wanting now a retort to me might be well what's the best reason to believe in Bigfoot? And I think there's this idea that something, if something is, what they'll say

is, I think, and I always want to get inside people's heads. So, one thing, I think, honestly, Matt, I think many people are atheists because they think that if there were good reasons, they would be universally believed. And like all the smartest scientists in the world, and we would all accept this and yeah, that we would agree. But that's just not how it works with philosophical topics. People disagree like-

Life? Yeah, or like let's take ethics. Moral philosophers disagree about whether we should follow Kant or be utilitarians or virtue theorists. Even atheistic philosophers disagree about very important ethical truths. There's no scientific way to resolve that. Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris disagree about whether

free will and determinism are compatible, and there's no scientific way to resolve their dispute. Philosophical questions by their nature, you're going to have disputes where you can't get a majority on it because the question is so pointed. Now, when it comes to asking people about, you know, what is the best or least bad argument, the retort will be, you know, let's say the Bigfoot example. And what I would say here is, well, I think the best reason to believe in Bigfoot

might be personal sightings people have claimed to have and the, what's it called, Robertson, the patterson the patterson film there's this footage of this appears to be a humanoid creature that looks like bigfoot walking and people have analyzed it so i would say well i would think that's the best reason for but ultimately the difference is you're not the one claiming that there are no good arguments for bigfoot whereas they are claiming there are no good arguments that's right and so what they but what they would say is that just as we casually dismiss Bigfoot, we should just casually dismiss God.

Like most people don't sit around really thinking this through. Sure. And so my reply to that would be, well, I think most people take for granted that they believe things about the world based on scientific consensus. And they don't figure this out for themselves. based on scientific consensus, and they don't figure this out for themselves. Like if I asked most people to prove E equals MC squared, 900, less than 0.001% could do it. Maybe a theoretical physicist could prove E equals MC squared.

But most people accept it because they saw Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about it, and he's just hilarious and interesting or whatever. Or Sean Carroll, you know, it's in my science textbook and it's consensus and we follow that. And so Carroll, you know, it's in my science textbook and it's consensus and we follow that. And so I think sometimes when atheists put forward

an argument from cryptids, you don't believe in dragons, you don't believe in Bigfoot, you don't believe in Loch Ness Monster. Well, I think that's because you haven't looked at these arguments yourself either and you should do the same with God.

Unless you're Jimmy Akin. Or yeah. Which case you have absolutely. Yeah, and I've looked at it as well because i want to believe i don't have an open mind it's possible there you know how you believe in bigfoot well there's a lot of forest out there in wyoming right and there's also uh i mean there's people who said there weren't black swans and you're from australia that's right i've said those are the first ones i saw actually i know i met someone i was when i was there and people thought for a long time there weren't yeah there

were no black swans people told me but i would, well, okay, so those are the best reasons for, then I think it's safe to agree with the scientific. Most people follow the consensus among zoologists about saying these creatures do not exist. But the existence of God is not like the existence of cryptids, which are disputed animals. God is not a something who is not a being in the universe that you try to find. There's no field of science dedicated to determining whether God exists. It's a philosophical question. Explain why for people. Why is this not a scientific question exactly?

I would say it's because science is devoted to finding natural causes and explanations for things we observe in the physical universe. So science is committed to understanding physical and observable phenomena in the universe. And science explains things according to regular laws of nature that are applied. So science is good at finding basically material things, or at least things that constitute the material universe. But when we're talking about whether certain immaterial things exist, there's no scientific test. And it's not just God. I mean, do other minds exist?

Free will? Numbers? Moral facts? Moral facts. Mathematicians dispute whether numbers are real. Some are Platonists, think numbers really do exist because math is universal and you can't change it. Yeah. I think numbers really do exist because math is universal and you can't change it. Every culture on earth does not have a story of Batman, but every culture on earth has two plus two equals four. It's not a truth we invented.

It's a truth we discovered. But if we discovered it, where is it? And also, even if the universe, well, it's not an abstract object because it just describes things in the universe. One cup and one cup is two cups. It's a description of physical reality. I don't think that's the case because we can do mathematics with things like infinite sets. We can talk about adding infinite sets together or that the set of natural numbers is equal to the set of even numbers. They're both infinite.

And yet you see in any infinite sets out there for us that is describing physical things in the universe itself? So once again, science deals with especially material things within the physical universe. But if we're talking about immaterial things within the universe or realities beyond the physical universe itself, those are philosophical questions. And they can include lots of things. What if there are there parallel worlds that are causally disconnected from our universe? I think David Lewis is his name.

He put up a view called modal realism. So it's like if I say, this is called explaining the truth of counterfactuals. So I guess I can share this with you. You're going to go talk to William Lane Craig tomorrow. And I'm super jelly, super jealous. WLC, he's an awesome guy. I would have loved to have gone with you. So Matt, if you had told me that a month ago, I would have rearranged my flight and made arrangements so I could actually go and say hi to Dr. Craig as well. And so I'm disappointed. You say, well, why do you feel disappointed, Trent?

You can't possibly know you would have done that. How do I know that counterfactual is true? I've never seen it. I can't scientifically observe it. Yet we talk these kind of counterfactuals all the time. Oh, you went to lunch? If you would have told me, I would have told you to get me a yogurt or something. But that moment is long since gone.

But we talk about these true, you know, what makes counterfactuals true. And I think Lewis proposed, or some people proposed along with it in modal realism, they're true because they exist in some possible world where it really does happen. Wow. And so we could say that. Now, could we ever scientifically prove causally disconnected universes exist? No, if they're causally disconnected, you can't do that. Right. But it's something we could philosophically speculate about. So with God, what's hard is,

I think some people think, you know, they want to restrict their epistemology or they're coming to understand knowledge and what's true through the scientific method. And that has a virtue to it. And I think it's important to affirm people that I think it's good that people focus on a method that avoids false beliefs. That's a good thing. But you don't want to do it so much at the expense of not accepting true beliefs. And so if you restrict the filter too much, you're going to leave out many important things, or you're going to think that questions that can't be answered scientifically are not important. Right.

And talk about the problem of scientism. Yeah, well, that's just the basic idea, that if you take this epistemology and you make the radical claim that it is the only valid method of knowledge, you could say it's your preferred method of knowledge, or it's what you prefer to understand the world, it's what you find most trustworthy. But to say it's the only is to – it's self-referential incoherence. Yeah, because then I would say, well, how can you scientifically prove that the only knowledge that we can have is that which is gathered through the scientific method? And if you can't, then you have to reject it, so it's self-refuted. Yeah, and so what I try to do here is instead of just kind of throwing that out there, I try to ask questions and say, you know, do these questions have good answers? Are these worthwhile questions, even though you couldn't answer them scientifically? One basic one would just be, is science important? I think most people would agree with that, but that's not

a scientific question. It's a value judgment. And I think it's not a purely subjective one. It's not like, you know, a purely subjective one about fashion or food preference. That some people will think that anything that's not scientific is subjective and it's just your opinion. Yeah. But as soon as you try to answer the question why is science important you're engaged in philosophy yeah you talk about very basic facts and morals and ethics are the the same way even if you try to use a scientific method to say well morality is about generating well-being and we can use psychology and sociology to show how to generate well-being in people sure i'll i'll give you that but you still need the basic moral framework of what is well-being in people. Sure, I'll give you that. But you still need the basic moral framework

of what is well-being. Yeah. What does certain- And why should it be promoted? Why should it be promoted? What kind of well-being matters? Does it matter based on species? Does it matter based on circumstance?

So lots of different questions that we ask. Or other ones might be metaphysical ones that are more down to earth. People think about metaphysics. I love philosophy. I've loved philosophy ever since I was 18 years old at Scottsdale Community College, fighting artichokes, taking my intro to philosophy class, just thinking about these deep questions. Oh, yeah, me too.

And people think metaphysics, like, oh, universe, space-time, it's too far out there. A more deeper metaphysical question is like personal identity. So like, what am I? What am I? Well, you're a human being. Okay. If that's what I am, if I am a human being and you can say to the person, is it wrong to kill me? Yes. Was it always wrong to kill me? Sure. Was I always a human being? Yeah. So was it wrong to kill me when I was in the womb? Well, you'll hold on just a minute because then people will say, well, no, you, what you, or what you are, like, let's say I'm in a persistent vegetative state. To directly kill me or starve me to death would be wrong because I'm a human being. And that's where I think many people who have, you know, maybe more of a scientific atheism and things like that will maybe say, well, no, what you are is a collection of

mental states. You are a mind. That's what you are. And before you had a mind as a fetus yep you weren't a person if you cease to be able to use it you lose your mind yeah and so these are these are about questions of personal identity which are philosophical questions right let's we could do a fun thought experiment with this this comes from derek parfit uh okay so i'm just a collection of psychological states. Okay. Suppose I were in an accident and half my brain, half my brain was damaged, but the other half is still working just fine. And let's say you took it. Is this possible?

Yeah. Well, you can cut half of a person's brain, their corpus callosum, and they'll act in a strange way, but it could be possible to have half the brain damaged and the other half still perform functions and even retain a sense of personal identity. So imagine, you know, I would still be me, especially if I still had my identity questions I can answer. If I put that brain in another body, an empty cadaver shell, would that still be me? Now, what I would say from my philosophical view is, well, it gets difficult. I would say that the brain would be, you could cut off my finger, it's me. You can cut off my hand, it's me. Yeah. But the brain is the most indispensable organ that I have. But Parfait's example is this. What if

we cut the brain in half and we put it into two different bodies, two different cadavers. And they both woke up and they said, I'm Matt Fradd. Yeah. The question, then the question becomes, which one's you? Yeah. And so that makes people think, well, what am I? And so, oh, what's his name? I think it's Shelley Kagan.

He's a professor at Yale University. He's got a wonderful open lecture series at Yale on philosophy. He did an excellent debate with William Lane Craig. He did very well in that one. One of the few to tussle with double LC. He did a good job. It's a question on ethics.

Morality. Kagan, yeah, K-A-G-A-N. And he poses these examples. And I think at least at the time of the recording of that lecture, Kagan said that he holds to the body view, that I am the body, I am my body, so to speak, that I'm not just my mind, because then you can get into all kinds of problems. If you are your mind, then do you cease to exist when you suffer from amnesia, or when you do this split brain example? Now,

I think if I looked at the split brain example, if that were to ever happen in real life, I mean, I have to think this through a bit more. I would be tempted to wanna say that the original Matt Fradd died and two new organisms came into existence that happened to have his memories. Similar to when we try to figure out with twinning,

what happens to an embryo when it twins? And it could be that the original embryo dies and two new embryos come into existence. Or it could be that embryo continues to exist and another continues to go on with it. But the point I bring, I don't want to get too lost in this. Yeah, I want to bring this back to atheism soon. Yeah, yeah. My point is, these are important questions about, you know, who am I? How should I live?

Yes. What's the nature of the world around me? Why am I here? Why am I here? Where am I going? All these questions aren't necessarily scientifically provable. And they're just not scientific. And yet they're important.

Yeah. And they're important. And philosophers will agree they're important, even atheistic ones. And so we should ask them and ponder them. Alan Plantinga says philosophy is just thinking hard, thinking really hard about things. And we should do that. And I would just say when it comes to God, look, don't treat it as just like Bigfoot or unicorns or just science will figure it out and that's the end of the story. Treat it more like, do we have free will? Do we have

other minds? What ethical system is correct? These questions that there's a lot of disagreement among very smart people. And look, at the end of the day, it's up to you to see what makes the most sense to you. You can't just run off to consensus on this one. You can't dismiss it in a pejorative way. And there's no consensus. There's no consensus to just go to. You've got to just think it through for yourself and figure it out. And I hope you will do that. And at the very least, virtually every civilization in the history of mankind has believed in something like God. And so to kind of wave it away like that without even examining the evidence, I mean, that's a very different thing to not looking at the evidence for Bigfoot and concluding that he probably doesn't exist.

Yeah. And I think that we should be careful, of course, that, you know, 50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong. You know, it's like he's's not, he's not still alive. But at the same time. We're not appealing to popularity, but it's something that should be assessed. Yeah, there are. And I think that if there are important questions, we should just have open minds. Yeah.

We should have open minds and consider them. Give me your best argument for God's existence then. What's the, what's the one you, so we're going back to the former days of apologetics now. We're kind of, give me a good argument for God's existence and? What's the one you... So we're going back to the former days of apologetics now. We're kind of... Give me a good argument for God's existence and let me see if I can pick holes in it. Yeah, I think that... Well, I mean, we could play around with the contingency argument. I'm becoming more and more of a fan of it.

What is it? Well, it's just basically what we said before, that when it comes to whether the universe has an explanation or not, it either has no explanation, it explains its own existence, or it's explained by something else. And we both agreed that those are the only three possible options. And I believe that it is explained by something else is far more plausible than the other two. First, to say simply that the universe has no explanation seems to violate what we call the principle of sufficient reason. Okay. That when things exist, we look for the reasons why they exist. And this principle seems to govern our lives.

It's what science is founded on. You know, scientists say, they don't just say, well, maybe there's just no explanation for why this thing exists. Right. Even if you have things like quantum particles that pop into existence, there may be an explanation that is indeterminate. So we don't know the exact causes behind it, but we understand the causal framework that these virtual particles come into existence because of the properties that can be seen in a quantum field or a quantum vacuum. And so it is within those special circumstances this object can come into existence, even though we can't necessarily predict when the field will emit these virtual particles, just as we can't predict when Matt Fradd will say what he does on his podcast. There's things that are indeterminate.

But here, another example I sometimes give is from— Well, just let's pause it for one second. So in this regard, that would be like saying we look around at everything in the universe and we say it must have an explanation. But then when we get to the universe itself, we say, well, no explanation is needed. And that's what you're saying we probably shouldn't be doing. We probably shouldn't do because I would say that once again, and this is to borrow from another philosopher. I think his last name is Taylor. He says, you know, if you found a glowing orb on the ground, you'd wonder, what is it? Why does it exist?

If it was larger, it was the size of a planet, you'd wonder why it exists. As the size of the object gets larger, our sense of wondering why it exists only expands. And there's no reason why we should stop asking that question when we get to every size of the universe. We would still ask the same question. Okay. Do you want to go on? I guess the last one might be when it comes to the nature of explanation itself. I mean, if the principle of sufficient reason wasn't true, we would expect there to be many

more unexplained things. Yeah. Pop things popping in and out of existence for no reason. But we don't experience that. The universe is extremely regular in that regard. And I believe that provides more evidence that the principle of sufficient reason is true and undergirds reality as we know it. Sherlock Holmes once said, which was actually quoted by Spock in one of the Star Trek movies, he says, an ancestor of mine once said,

when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. Now, if PSR wasn't true, we could say— Say what that is, PSR. The principle of sufficient reason, that things that exist—now, I'm not saying everything that happens as an explanation. Okay. Now, an objection— Why not? Well, because you could make an objection that sometimes things happen for, there's not really a reason for certain events.

So if you have a ball on a perfectly sharp point, an infinitely sharp cone, and there's a ball sitting here. Yeah. And it rolls right or it rolls left. Why does it go right instead of left? And it's infinitely sharp. I don't know. There may not be a reason for why that event happens.

I don't know. There may not be a reason for why that event happens. But I'm citing the reason that a thing exists, has existence rather than non-existence. It's a limited principle of sufficient reason. I think then that there are good reasons to believe that that's true. So with Sherlock Holmes, you eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains, however improbable, who knows? There could be no explanation. That would always be on the table that we could have. So, I think that, and other atheists that

have looked at this, looked at the universe and looked at this argument, I know some of them said, sure, maybe there is an explanation. Okay. But I'm not saying that it's God. Okay. But now this gets interesting. Now we're moving into... Yeah. Well, what do you say to those who say there is no explanation? It's just a brute fact. What does a brute fact mean and how does that violate the... Well, that would just be a way of saying, once again, it's no explanation. But brute fact is just something that is true and we accept it. And there's no reason for it.

So that's just saying there's no explanation. Yeah. It's just another way of saying it. So the next step would be to say, well, the reason the universe exists is because it's necessary. It has to exist. Okay. It's just impossible for the universe not to exist. What's another example of something that has to exist?

Well, that's where it gets tricky. Because most things we're used to don't have to exist. They're contingent. They depend on other things in order to exist. I think a lot of people would say that if numbers exist they would be necessary that any universe any universe any possible world uh there would be something true there would be the same truth in any possible world that would be there is one possible world so you'd have the number one when you have that you can start doing other mathematical truths so numbers would be an

example of something that are considered to be necessary. So if the universe exists necessarily, could it be, if that were the case, then it could not be different to the way it is now. Is that true? Well, let's dive through this a little bit. I would say the universe could certainly be very different, especially in the sense that it doesn't have to exist. Because I would ask, how do we know other things are contingent? Contingent means it depends on something else to exist. It could have not existed, or it could continue to fail to exist. So, we usually, we can imagine that those things don't exist. We can, it's conceivable that they do not exist.

And in our own universe, we can conceive of less and less and less things in it until we get to basically nothing. Now, I think some people would say, well, yeah, the universe could have been different, but there would still be a universe of some kind. It would still have the same fundamental components. The universe is like a Lego bin. You could make different Lego creations, but you'd have the same Legos in the bin. I see.

Much the same way you'd have the same fundamental particles. So if we rer-round the kind of film of evolution and played it forward, all sorts of other creatures may have existed. Sure. That wouldn't be to say that the universe isn't necessary. It could just be necessary but different. Yeah, the elements could be rearranged. But even here, I don't think that's the case. Why should I think

these fundamental particles are necessary? I can conceive of them being different. Their quarks are one of the fundamental things physicists say make up the universe. I think there's six different types of them being different uh their quarks are one of the fundamental things physicists say make up the universe i think there's six different types of them up down top they have different properties like spin surely those could have been those could have been different there's nothing about the universe like for example when something's necessary if i ask you why is that rock warm that's a question worth asking i say because it's necessary, if I ask you, why is that rock warm? That's a question worth asking.

I say, oh, because it's by the fire. But I say, why is that fire warm? You'd be like. Because it just is. It's a fire. It's a nature of fire. Yeah, you would think that's an odd question to ask. Yeah.

And so, or the same thing like with a triangle. Why does that triangle have three sides? Because that's just what triangles are. Yeah. When we ask the question, why is there a universe? triangles are. When we ask the question, why is there a universe? It does not seem to be a straightforward question like, why is fire hot? Or why is a triangle three-sided? It seems to be a question worth asking. Like, why is this triangle blue? Why is this rock warm? And we proceed to try to figure out the answer. Many intelligent people throughout history have

tried to find the answer to that. So I think that when all of that is put together, the option that the universe is necessary has to exist. And this is the Bertrand Russell position, isn't it? Didn't he say that universe just exists and that's all? It was brute fact. I don't think he said it was necessary. Okay.

The universe is just there and that's all. That's all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just, that's not really accepting an explanation. That's just trying to get rid of the problem. Yeah, yeah, what's funny is we don't necessarily debate on Kalam whether the universe began. They'll say, even if it began, I don't think it's God.

Then I'll say, okay, but let's go through the list of candidates. Could it be another universe? That's possible. I am open to the idea that there is a multiverse. That could be very interesting. God is a grand creator. Who knows?

He could have created other universes. It's possible. I don't know how many or if he did. But even if our universe exists because of another universe, that, once again, we're back to the original argument. What explains that universe? The multiverse, even. Yeah. And so it would be the same as asking, why is that chandelier up there hanging over our heads?

Well, there's a chain. Why is that chain? Another chain. Why that chain? Another chain. An infinite number of chains doesn't explain why it's hanging up at all you need something that exists in a not chain-like way that anchor in the ceiling much the same way a bunch of universes or an infinite number of universes doesn't explain why any of the universes exist at all why is there there this entire chain of existence?

Well, suppose somebody concedes that and says, okay, there must be an explanation, it must be necessary, but that's a long way away from saying it's the Christian God, or even a personal being. Sure. And what I would say here is then we have to go through the different categories. What kinds of things are there that do exist? We could see this thing, if it's necessary, then it's not something that is spatial or temporal. Why? Because those things are, they're contingent.

They're dependent on other things in order to exist within a space-time framework. Okay. So anything that's material is going to be depending on other material forces and entities to keep, to constitute what it is, bring it into existence, to be within space and times, be bound by those things. You would be dependent.

Okay. And so to be material means you depend upon space to exist. There's no space. There's no you. Then if we go forward from that, we would say, okay, whatever this causes, it's immaterial, it's timeless, it's necessary. It just has to exist in some way. It cannot be dependent on anything else.

If it were to depend on something else for its existence, whatever this cause is, it would not be necessary. It would be, it would be contingent and it would have to have causal power because it's the reason things exist. So it can't be an abstract object. Is that still true if the universe is infinite in the past? Does it still have to have causal power? Because when we think of causal, especially in the Kalam cosmological argument, we're thinking of it in the domino sort of effect. So when you say causal power, are you referring to sort of the hierarchical series of causes?

What I mean is in the sense that it is able to sustain something in being. It is able to... When people think of cause today, they usually think before and after. We think temporal. Temporal. Yeah, even if the universe were eternal, we would still say, why does this exist? Okay. Because of X.

Well, X must have some property then of granting existence to something or making it the case this thing exists rather than not exist. So this necessary thing you're saying wasn't, we're not necessarily talking about bringing the whole shebang into existence, but that it's causing it now to exist. Yeah, but I do believe also there's good arguments that it did bring the universe into existence. And so here, what's funny is, so sometimes I remember once I was talking with an atheist on Catholic Answers Live, and I said, well, okay, this cause of the universe then, this was for Kalam, but it would apply to the contingency argument. This cause is either material or immaterial.

It was funny, and he would not give me an answer to that question, which is funny because once again, it's the law of the excluded middle. It's got to be material or not material. Well, it could be a third thing. No, it cannot be. No not material well it could be a third thing no it cannot be like they're exclusive yeah because of its it can't be material if it made space and time right and then if it's immaterial we're really running out of candidates here for immaterial things that that can be causes of other things the two examples we think of immaterial things that we are aware of are abstract objects and minds. Abstract objects, though, are causally a feat. They can't make things happen. So now we have a plausible can to be some kind of mind. Wouldn't you first have to grant that the mind is immaterial for that to be an option?

Sure. There's people who might say that the mind that we seem to experience is purely an illusion. So we might say, well, you reach that conclusion because you think that the brain is what creates all of our mental experiences or illusions of mental experiences. Because some people will say that the mind exists and it's immaterial, but they'll say it's wholly dependent on the brain. The brain is like the projector and the mind is the screen. And so, you know, you destroy the projector, you don't have the images anymore. But those people don't necessarily believe in a soul or anything like that. It'd be like property dualists, for example.

But I would say that even those people, but here, if we have an example of mind that satisfies the immaterial candidate and there's no material sources for its existence, then we've got something good here to work with. Also, when we look at the dependency issue, something to be necessary, it cannot depend on anything else to exist. divine simplicity, that traditionally Catholics, and even actually some Calvinists and others have held to this view, that God is simple, he's not composed of parts. And I think that actually helps us understand God and rebut some atheist arguments, because if this cause were composed of parts, there has to be something prior to it that puts the parts together. Yeah, now why is that? Well, because we would say, what is the difference between something being whole and something having parts?

Okay. The difference is there is something that unites parts together into a whole. There's division there. Because we would ask, well, what is the difference between being a part and being a whole? Even parts of things you look at now are made of other parts of things yeah but we would see parts have to be united in some way to make a whole otherwise if they weren't united you would just have you wouldn't call them parts you wouldn't call them parts it would just be the whole so here i would say that this cause then they would have

to be simple and so it would have it couldn't be composed of any parts, and it couldn't have any limits upon it, because then it would seem to be dependent on other things to have these limits imposed upon it. So now what it comes when you do these kinds of arguments, and I think this is the big challenge that is facing theistic apologetics and defending the existence of God, that is often sometimes overlooked in these arguments, and even I could do more work on this to confront skeptical objections, is to get from a conclusion of a theistic argument to all of the divine attributes. And so that is where some arguments like Thomas's first mover, you know, talking about the argument from motion, a weakness of the argument is that you really have to be committed to Thomistic metaphysics, Aristotelian metaphysics about act and potency. But if you are committed to that,

and you reach the argument's conclusion, it's very easy to get something that's pure act and has, you can figure out these divine attributes coming right from it. Then when you get to other theistic arguments, you're on a little bit shakier ground to get the other divine attributes out of them. But I do believe that they can be inferred from that in different ways that are plausible to people. And of course, the gap between God not existing to maybe something necessary exists. If you've made that jump, if you've gone from being an atheist saying, okay, something necessary exists, which explains the universe, and I don't know what it is. There's a necessary, immaterial, timeless, causally powerful being. Yeah.

That doesn't seem to warrant the name atheism at that point. It gets very close away from that. So my point is to jump from there to, okay, there are certain attributes he has that sound like the Christian God is a much smaller thing to jump. Yeah, it is. And then you can conjoin other arguments here. You could talk about principles of morality. And what do you say to people who say, well, really, we're not epistemically even in a position to assess these arguments. I go online, I see for and against, and I at least am not in a position to assess them all. So for most of us, isn't agnosticism the most respectable view that one

can have? Is agnosticism a- Respectable in the sense that I'm not choosing to side one way or the other because both could be true and saying, I don't know, is at least the most honest response to the God question. I think it is an honest response when you are in a position where you have not tried to investigate the question. Okay. But I think that we should be honest, but it should not be an excuse to choose to not do the hard work of thinking about the question. Because you could just say, oh, there's all these people that disagree.

I'm not even going to try to wade into that. Yeah, I see. Well, you should. You should think about it. And then you may peruse the arguments and try to weigh it, and still at the end of the day, because this is sometimes, when I ask atheists, for example, you know, when it comes to God, I like to ask them, you say, you don't believe in God. What is the probability God exists? Is it zero? It's impossible?

Yeah. I think there's really like three options for them. It's like impossible, highly improbable, or 50-50. Yeah. And I really always want to know with an atheist. Like for me, there's some things I would say like Bigfoot, Loch Ness, highly improbable for me. But there's other things I'd say, you know, is there other intelligent life in the universe? I'm kind of 50-50 on that.

I don't know. But I want an atheist. Like if I'm doing an apologetic, some people think I got to get this person to believe in God. If I can get them from highly improbable to 50-50, I'd be extremely happy about that. That would be a huge jump to getting towards the truth for people. about that. That would be a huge jump to getting towards the truth for people. And so that's why I'd want to get someone to, let's say even you were at 50-50. What I would say here is then I might put forward a pragmatic argument. Totally. And I'd just say, because this is something that sometimes is misused. I'm sure you've talked about

in the podcast before, Pascal's Wager. And atheists misunderstand the argument most people misunderstand christians put it forth in a way that you treat it as like you know what you can't go wrong on god yeah believe in him and you won't go to hell yeah that's not pascal's wager he never mentions hell he doesn't rather his point is for someone who has looked at the question, and for that person, the only live options are Christianity and atheism, and you cannot decide between the two, there's no harm in living out Christianity and making a pragmatic decision. There's some cost. There is some, yes.

There's no overall harm, because there's cost, but there are also benefits. And also, when you look at people like Rodney Stark and others have done surveys to show that religious people on average tend to live longer, they tend to be healthier, they tend to be other elements that go along with a religious worldview that are good for people psychologically overall. Now, that's not the reason I would sell the faith to someone, because sometimes believing our faith can be very, very difficult and trying. But I would just say for someone who's on their way to truth, a pragmatic argument can be helpful here. Say, just go ahead. Well, I don't feel it. I don't feel it all the time either. Yeah.

Really. And that's where I can help people say, I don't feel it. And that's where Pascal says, do those practical things, like using holy water, attending holy mass, and these sorts of things. Do the things that religious people do. Yeah. And I would even say if you were an atheist or agnostic, really, really on the fence, just have just kind of, you don't have to address

God, just in the morning, just look up and say, thank you. And at the end of the night, say, how could I have done this better? And look up or look within. And it's always hard to be like, I wish I could believe, I just can't. And faith is a gift that is given to people. Thomas talks about being a theological virtue that is infused, but we, we of course cooperate with God to receive his graces. We make, we can predispose ourselves to receive them, give ourselves open hearts and open minds.

I would just want someone to, yeah, you could take something pragmatic here. If you are 50, 50, and we do that all the time with other important things. I mean, someone could look at the arguments for and against free will.

For and against the world being real, for and against whether life is worth living and say, well, these are actually tough arguments, but you know what? I'd rather live in a world with free will. If I'm 50-50, I'm going to act as if that is true or life is worth living or following all or other important ethical or metaphysical questions. The other interesting point I haven't heard you talk about is that if the only live options for me are atheism or Christianity, does it ever occur to you, let's say there's a 50-50 there, the atheist will never know he's right, you know? And the Christian will always know he's wrong. Yeah, but he may come to know that the Christian is right. I mean, because if God exists,

Christianity is true, then I'm going to experience an afterlife. But if I'm a hardcore atheist, I will never actually definitively know that I was right or not. Because once I die, it lights out. I won't be in a place consciously in non-existence. You will be able to know you were wrong, not that you were right. If Christianity is true. But if atheism is true, if I'm an atheist and I die, I never discover that I was right all along. That's right.

Yeah. And we shouldn't portray Christianity here as just being we're playing at the cosmic roulette table. Right. And we want to get a good outcome. But as you say, we're dealing with human beings who have pragmatic interest in these sorts of things, and it can help. Yeah, and I think that it's important here to understand where Christianity comes in. That's where theism is helpful, to get people to understand God is present, God exists, but that God is immediate and cares for us. That is where I believe the Christian gospel is so helpful. And we need to be able to share with people so that with Pascal's

Wage and other things, our deacon at our parish gave a wonderful homily the other day. And he said, salvation is not about how to get to heaven. It's about how to get into heaven. It's about how to get heaven into you. And so- What do they mean by that? The idea that it's not just about trying to get the right ticket to get to a certain destination, but rather is about in this life, growing in holiness and about having the life, participating in the life of God and participating in that and becoming adopted sons and daughters of God and growing in that as a child of God. And that this life, that life is not about trying to escape a particular kind of judgment and get to heaven, that our spiritual life is kind of more like pregnancy.

And that when we receive the gift of faith, you know, it's more like that we have received this seed. So when Thomas talks about the virtues, he says that faith contains the seed of faith. Remember Jesus said that faith is like a mustard seed. You just need a little bit. It contains virtually within it everything that we are hoping for. So, and hope, of course, is we wait for those things that we have faith in, that we desire. And so we just have that in a very small amount now, and it grows and grows more within us. We have God's divine life in a small way now as his children, and we grow in that sacramentally through prayer, by uniting with him, and to grow more and more in that in this life as part of his adoptive family to spend eternity with him. Let me throw one kind of atheistic objection to you, and I think that's the problem of hiddenness, which you might say is a subset of the problem

of evil. If God exists, if it's true that he loves me, if it's true that he wants a relationship with me, then he would see to it that I would come to know he exists. Because in order to love him, I have to know that he exists. He's playing hide and seek with us. Surely, if he wanted me to love him, he would see to it that I could at least believe he exists. He's playing hide and seek with us. Surely if he wanted me to love him, he would see to it that I could at least believe he exists. And there are many atheists of goodwill, now maybe you'd deny this, maybe a Christian would deny this, who if God existed, they would

believe him and they would want to believe him. The fact that God hasn't revealed himself to people is a good indicator that maybe he doesn't exist after all. Yeah, and I think that approaching the problem of divine hiddenness, the problem can be posed as a philosophical argument to try to show God does not exist. And it can also be proposed as a question a person has, a very legitimate and thoughtful question. Or it can be posed as a question that's designed to try to tear down the Christian faith. I find sometimes when Christians and atheists talk to one another, sometimes atheists do not make arguments against the Christian faith. They more pose questions. That's right. A question isn't an argument.

And they'll say that, and it comes from the discussion that if the Christian cannot successfully answer the question, therefore Christianity is false. But that doesn't follow. cannot successfully answer the question, therefore Christianity is false. But that doesn't follow. All that shows is that that person is not able to answer that question, or we may not have the epistemic resources, we may not have the answer to that particular question, but it wouldn't follow that the worldview is false. I mean, there's many scientific conclusions and hypotheses we don't have answers for. People try to understand the nature of consciousness. And they'll say, well, I don't know how matter can be conscious or have intentionality. And so I wouldn't argue like, well, oh, okay, so that means that atheists can't explain

consciousness. Well, I wouldn't just pose a question and say, because you can't answer it, therefore, it's false. You need to put forward an argument. An analogy with that is the problem of evil, where someone say, if God exists, why would he allow good things to happen to bad people? That's a question, not yet an argument. That's right. Why does God let this stuff happen? You can say, I don't know. Yeah.

But I don't think that that shows he doesn't exist. And I believe that the problem of divine hiddenness is a subset of the problem of evil. That one evil that we endure in this life, evil is an absence of good. That's, you know, we look at metaphysically what evil is. It's an absence of good. Evil is parasitic upon the good. You know, a bad coffee cup has a crack in it. But that crack can't exist without the coffee cup.

It doesn't exist by itself. It's parasitic on the good. A bad person has to have goods, at the very least, the good of existence and organic life. So it is bad that we do not have the fullness of God's revelation in this life. It is bad we do not possess the beatific vision in this life. So, okay, then that's kind of under the problem of evil why does god let this bad thing happen and the traditional answer to the problem of evil is that god can allow bad things or evils if he has good reasons for doing so if he has a good reason he could if he can bring a greater

good or prevent a greater evil then he's justified in doing so so sometimes with these arguments similar to the problem of evil some similar with the problem of evil, some people think the problem of evil is something that Christians have to explain away. It's a Christian problem. Well, it is, but it's an atheistic argument. And so an atheist bears the burden of proof with all the premises. And the Christian can say, but you left out this premise, which is God has no sufficient reasons for allowing evil to exist. Much the same way, I could be justified in saying, you've left out a premise. God has no sufficient reasons for allowing someone to remain in non-belief. And so then I would ask the person, so I've turned it around, why should I believe that God could not have a sufficient reason?

You can say, well, if God loved people, he would make himself known. And you could turn that on problem of evil. If God loved people, he wouldn't let them suffer. Perhaps, but then again, sometimes when we love people, we allow them to endure suffering for a while because there is a greater good that will be accomplished. You and I both have children. We let our children try to do something on their own, even though it's frustratingly difficult for them. Because if we were to do it for them, that would actually, it would prevent a small evil now, but make a greater evil later. And so this argument from divine hiddenness, it really does parallel the problem of evil. So I would just turn it around

and say, why should I believe that? I may not know why God does not allow, why God does not make his existence more obvious for a certain person or people in general, but I can pose different plausible reasons that, okay, God could have some morally sufficient reasons for allowing people to not believe in him. And if I have enough of these, this is no longer a problem anymore. And so I can think of a few. this is no longer a problem anymore. And so I can think of a few. One might be that God wants there to be particular kinds of goods that would not exist if he made his existence obvious. One good would be the good of sharing our faith with other people, the good of being able to help lead someone to knowledge of God and Christ, to evangelize and to share that with others. That is a very good thing that we are able to. God trusts us to do that. And so it's the same as like, you know, letting your children do things for you, whereas you can more competently do it for them.

Because you love them, you allow them to do that, and they become more united to you in the process and to others. And that's a beautiful thing we're able to do. A second one might be that God wants our decision to follow him and to embrace him and to choose to be united to him to be one that has a decent amount of freedom to it. And so if God made his existence overwhelmingly obvious, that could compromise for some people our freedom to be able to choose to follow them. It's like when you go driving down the highway and you see a police officer, you know, you don't think to yourself, that is a reminder I have a moral duty

to care for my fellow motorists and I ought to slow down to further – No, you do it because you don't want to get caught. And isn't it true, according to Christianity, that there was a time where God did make his existence more plain, say, in the time of the Exodus? That's right. And that isn't necessarily the case that the Israelites followed God. They may have believed in his existence, but it doesn't follow from that that they would love him. Well, yes. And there's an objection that some atheists may say, well, God seemed to make himself pretty obvious to Adam and Eve, to Moses, to Abraham, and that didn't overwhelm them. And so why wouldn't God do the same for us now? Well, I think we have developed in our understanding of who God is

since then. And so most atheists would say that if God existed, they would worship him because God just is all good, all knowing, necessary, omnipotent, perfect being itself. But you go back to the time of the patriarchs, gods are kind of a dime a dozen. Gods were protective deities, you know, for certain regions and certain peoples. And so even if God existed, there was still a temptation to follow other gods. The very first believers, the first Israelites, were henotheists. They believed Yahweh was the mightiest God of all the other gods. I mean, and that's clear because they go and worship a golden calf. They are tempted to worship other gods.

So they clearly—now, when you get to the time of the prophet Isaiah, God has revealed himself. People come to understand God more to see God is mightier than the other gods in power, goodness, and existence. What's the difference between henotheism and polytheism? Polytheism is the belief there are many different kinds of gods, many different gods, and you can kind of worship whichever one you want or whichever one whose region you happen to be under. If you're out at sea, Poseidon might be a good bet. Monotheism is the belief there is only one God. So you're saying the original Israelites weren't monotheists? Well, it seems that at least within the first believers, especially in like the Mosaic Covenant, for example, we see the Hebrews are tempted to worship other gods.

So henotheism then? Henotheism, also called monolatry. So, henotheism then? Henotheism, also called monolatry. Okay. Henotheism is the belief there are many different gods, but there is only one God you ought to worship. Gotcha. This is the God who deserves your worship alone.

You ought not give worship to the other gods. And so, and that was something, you know, that the children of Israel grew in their understanding of God to see. Though it's interesting, so they grew in understanding by the time of the prophet Isaiah, if not long before. There were monotheists before this time. Sure. You see, for example, in Egypt, there was a pharaoh, Akhenaten, who had a brief reform and put monotheism within Egyptian worship, though it was later dropped later on in the dynasty. I would also say that the authors of sacred scripture of the Old Testament, when you read it, like Ben Somner, who is a Jewish scholar, he says that the Bible, while the ancient Israelites, many of them probably practiced henotheism, the Bible itself is a monotheistic book. So what's interesting here

is that the sacred authors of scripture, even though they're dealing with people who are running off to worship other gods, when you look in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, those other gods are never acknowledged as to having real existence. You never see Yahweh having a conversation with Baal. No, that never occurs. You never even hear about Yahweh like destroying Baal or something like that. You just see at best poetic descriptions of God destroying the serpents, the dragons, monsters that, you know. Isn't it the case, though, that we should think of the Old Testament gods as demonic?

As being demonic? Yeah, like Baal being a demon. being a demon? Right, but you never see them described as being deities in their own rights, as having either equal standing with God or even beings to talk to. Now, we know later on in the New Testament, St. Paul talks about how idols are really demons, or at least one way to understand idolatry. Like, for example, some people will say, you know, well, what about other miracles and other world religions? Doesn't that disprove Christianity? Well, not necessarily.

God could be intervening in those cases to try to bring someone to the truth, or it could be demonic elements that are performing these kind of supernatural activities. that even though God's existence, like Yahweh was, you know, it was obvious he existed to the Israelites, it wasn't obvious to them that, let's say that he's all knowing in the sense that he's immediately present. They didn't have our exacting philosophical definitions of God then. So it'd be easier to put God out of your mind. He's up on that mountain. He's not going to bother me, you know, whereas today I think that it would be very different. So, yeah, so when we look at divine hiddenness, I would just say I believe it is a subset of the problem of evil. The other element I would add in here is that if it is not guaranteed that if it is possible for someone to die and never have acquired explicit knowledge of God, but to still have eternity with God because God is merciful towards that

person and they were always pursuing the truth and trying to get closer to him. If God is merciful to that person and they're not automatically condemned because of their lack of non-belief, then I think the problem loses a lot of its force because they'll still have infinite happiness with God in the next life. It's not a guarantee, of course, those who die in non-belief will be saved. But if it's a possibility, then we don't have to see it as big of a problem. That makes sense. Where is it that the Church teaches that someone cannot have explicit faith and yet be saved,

and has the Church developed its understanding of this? Well, when we look, for example, in Lumen Gentium, paragraph 16 of the Second Vatican Council, we see the church articulate that it is possible for those, it says, possible for those who have no knowledge of Christ or his church to still be saved if they are following the revelation that God has given them, primarily in nature and in conscience. So the question is, does this person have, is what has kept them from God some kind of an invincible ignorance, something that they cannot overcome? Now, if it's something they

could have overcome by investigating the matter and giving it serious thought, and they cavalierly dismissed it because they feel there are more important things in life than whatever God is, that may not bode well for them in the next life. But if it's something they're an honest seeker about and they're trying to find, then I do believe God will eventually reveal themselves to this person. But it's also possible that a person could have other kinds of cognitive defects that prevent them from coming to know God. The Catechism even talks about how one thing that can create invincible ignorance in atheists are the examples of Christians. The Catechism even talks about how one thing that can create invincible ignorance in atheists are the examples of Christians. The Catechism says that sometimes Christians are poor examples of the faith.

They teach it improperly and present a poor example of it that others don't want to have anything to do with whatsoever. And so that would be taken into account. If you're a Jew raised in Nazi Germany and your only experience of Christ is that of the Third Reich. Yeah, or if you're a Jew living in the Middle Ages and you're being charged with blood libel and you're consigned to a ghetto. But I would say that this understanding that non-Christians can be saved is not a unique one that's modern. I think you go back to like Pope Gregory the Great.

He talks about how there is no one who is kept from receiving the fruits of the atonement of Christ's death on the cross. This is something to benefit everyone. Now, as the church articulated this principle, there is no salvation outside of the church, it was primarily understood to mean that those who have come to know what the church is and reject it, there is nothing else that is going to save them. And so it's directed at Jews or pagans or even Muslims who have encountered Christians who have, you know, interacted with the faith and have rejected. There is nothing else to provide them salvation. God himself, in his paragraph 1257 of the Catechism, says that salvation is bound to

the sacraments, specifically baptism, but God himself is not bound by those things. And so God is able to be merciful towards people and take an understanding of whatever epistemic position he has placed them in. Okay. But then the church came to see an understanding that there were people, like in the New World, Native Americans, who could not possibly have, not what our Mormon friends notwithstanding, could not, who believe that Jesus appeared to the Native Americans, that's a whole different

topic to talk about, could not have possibly known God. And yet I would say that it would just seem to me to be such an injustice for, it would be similar to the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, where God decides who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. And God has made it the case that certain people, no matter what decision they make in this life, will be consigned to hell. I would say that's really not that far from double predestination, where God decides. Now, all Christians believe in predestination. The Bible talks about it. And in paragraph 600 of the Catechism, it says that God, all moments of time are known to God in his immediacy, but God is able to make our free choices a part of his predestined plan. That's the essence of what paragraph 600 of the catechism says. And so the point being what the church teaches on predestination is more what you can't believe.

You just can't believe that God doesn't know the future. He is omniscient. But you can't believe that we don't have free will. God knows the future. He has chosen us. He's given us grace. We did not choose him. He chose us. I like that. That's a great way to put it. He's chosen us, but we also say yes to him. We're not dragged into the kingdom. We say yes to him,

and sometimes we say no, and we got to come back and say yes again. I mean, the Thomistic view, and I guess the Catholic view is if we go to heaven, we have no one to thank but God. If we go to hell, we have no one to thank but ourselves. Right. And so when it comes to how free will and predestination work together in God's foreknowledge and free will, that's where Catholics, there's disagreement. You'll have people who have the Thomistic understanding of predestination, which is very, very close to Calvinism, but important in important respects. And then you have more views down the line close to Calvinism, but important in important respects. And then you have more views down the line like Molinism, the Jesuit priest Luis Molina,

who says that God gave sufficient grace to people for them to be saved, but the grace that he's given to people, who that he chooses, he chooses those that he knows and his counterfactual foreknowledge will say yes if he were to offer them salvation. And of course, Catholics can disagree among themselves on those things. And I'm not even fully settled. I lean towards Molinism, but I'm not completely settled on the issue. But the point is we have, with predestination, that God has this plan for us, but it includes our free choices within that plan.

How do we get to predestination? We were talking about the hiddenness of God. And there's people who don't know, but to say like, okay, God has made it so that they're born. Those in the new world who had no chance of hearing the gospel. I can't accept the idea that God would make it the case that someone could exist, and there is not a single choice they could have ever made in this life. There's not a single choice they could have ever made in this life to avoid being separated

from God for all eternity. That to me would seem to be very, very unjust. If a Catholic is sort of disgusted at the kind of Calvinistic idea that God can predestine someone to hell, then they, as you say, it doesn't seem too far off to say people here in the new world had no chance of hearing the gospel. In a sense, he has predestined them to hell, if you want to say, strictly speaking. If he's given them no opportunity to make a decision, whether it's to recognize his existence in nature or to follow the revelation he's given them to conscience. And you go back, I mean, before we go back to Romans chapter 2, Romans 2, 14 through

16, St. Paul says, even though the Gentiles don't have the Mosaic law written on stone, they have the law written on their hearts. don't have the Mosaic law written on stone. They have the law written on their hearts. And God will judge them by their conscience, which will either accuse or excuse them on that day. So I believe there's quite a principle to show that God reveals himself to different people in different ways.

But I think at the end of the day for us, for you and I who go to mass, who have the sacraments, who have so many resources available to us for our spiritual growth. It really leaves us without excuse. No, yeah, totally. I mean, that's—so we should pray for people's salvation, and we should evangelize. Yeah.

So sometimes people will say to me, well, if you think that people can be saved if they're never evangelized— Let's just not evangelize. You're just giving them a chance to reject God, right? And I would say here, well, no, I'm saying a possibility is not the same as a probability. Just because it's possible these people can be saved is not a guarantee. It could be that we still live in a sinful world where a person can be ensnared by sin and choose to flee from the good. I mean, it's still very possible. You're in a much better place, generally speaking, if you've heard the gospel proclaimed to you, you've been baptized and accepted it, than if you've never heard it at all.

Well, especially if you're baptized and you've accepted it, because upon being baptized, you're pure and undefiled. The stain of any sin, original or actual, has been removed. There's nothing to hinder you from being entered in the kingdom of God immediately after baptism. Now, you know, we go on in life and we sin and then we have to be reconciled to God. Well, let's move up to the next level of the mansion if you're okay. You want to take a break? No, we can. Let's keep pushing on. Let's keep going. Christian apologetics. So, let's say somebody says, all right, I believe that maybe, I believe that God exists. I'll accept that, that there is a personal creator of the universe, but I cannot accept

Christianity. You know, someone might say, the story of Christianity, it's sort of like, I don't know, trying to supernaturalize the natural, and it ends up being overly complicated. It's sort of like when you say, well, Father Christmas exists, and you accept that, and then you have to kind of explain all these little things about why the carrots on the front lawn that you left for the reindeer were eaten or the child is that an australian thing yeah do you not do that oh yeah father christmas and we eat the parents chew on the carrots it's a bit gross actually that was my first objection to why santa must exist because i said what are you saying my parents would go and eat a carrot off the lawn that's so gross and then you saw the point and you saw them like i am an

atheist now yeah but then uh you know things like, why can't I see the toy shop? Well, it's because it's invisible. And it sounds like sometimes I think that Christianity, you have to do all these sort of cartwheels to kind of get around the obvious. This is what someone might say, right? They might say, okay, Adam and Eve. I mean, that's probably not true. Or modern, you know, genetics says that the human population couldn't have come from a from a pair um or i don't know it just seems like even the idea that the the you talk about multiple

worlds now and multiple planets so that seems to kind of like uh go against the christian message like it seems like it would make a lot more sense if the earth was the center of the universe i mean i guess we don't know if it is or not because you can't see the sides right well the side you can't see the sides of the universe maybe the earth is the center well that's possible getting the well right my point is you know as we've learned more there's no privileged frame of reference i guess we're getting into physics yes but as as we learn more about the universe it seems like we are kind of insignificant. And it just seems like more and more militates against the Christian message, even evolution. I mean,

the idea that we've all evolved now, and it sounds like the Christian has to keep coming up with explanations for, oh, no, no, no, no, we never said that. Like, if you look at Genesis, it's just mythical. And so, this still fits in with the story. And so, I can see some atheists, they look at the Christian story and they say, it's like the story of Santa Claus, where you have to keep, you know, filling in what was left out in the original presentation of the Father Christmas gospel. Good questions. Let's try to go through each one. There's a problem here, too, with the shotgun fallacy, too, maybe we should point out. Well, it's not even a fallacy. It's just this is also, ironically, this is a method that,

and I think atheists who use this method ought to be careful because they don't like it when Christians do the same thing. This is actually called a Gish Gallup, G-I-S-H. It's named after Dwayne Gish, who was a very famous young earth creationist, and he would do these debates against biologists. And he did really well in these debates, actually, to show creationism was true. Because what he would do, he would list off two dozen problems in evolution. Well, if evolution is true, why aren't there more fossils than the Cambrian explosion?

Why don't we have these transitional forms? Why do we find this? Why that? Why this? And then he lists off a dozen problems. And the biologist said, you know, it takes him 10 times as long to answer than list a problem. He can't possibly get through them all.

And so Gish says he wins the debate at the end by just, here's all the problems. And look, he couldn't even answer this or that. You know, you can see the evolutionist. He's just trying to explain away all these difficulties. And I think what he would say is, well, no, I'm not trying to explain away anything. There is data, and we try to make sense of it. Some things we can understand now, other things we don't have an explanation. So what I would say with an atheist is, well, look at all these difficulties in Christianity.

Well, that's an easy thing to say when you don't have your own belief system to defend. Because atheism, when it's a belief system, is really just not having a certain belief system. But I would say, all right, if you are a naturalist, or let's say you defend the claim that only material things exist, which I think many atheists actually believe, but they're not willing to go that far. I could do the same thing. You believe in materialism? How do I have a mind? How can my mind be about things? You know, objects can't have intentionality. How about this? What about this problem? What about these things? And an atheist to say, just because I don't know how to answer, it doesn't mean my core thesis has been

refuted just because I haven't reached an answer to the problem yet. So the fact that there are difficulties is not an objection to Christianity. It is an objection to any coherent belief system that sets out to try to understand the world. Because yeah, it's easy if you just operate from the sense of I'm just saying Christianity is not true. Yeah, but when I say, what do you believe? What is the fundamental element of reality? What is the good? How do I determine whether an action is right or whether it's wrong? Any moral ethical system you try to say is the true system will lead you to very difficult dilemma situations. That's just how it goes. When you try to build up a coherent belief system to explain reality, there are going to be difficult patches in it.

That's everybody. It's easier to tear down than to build up. Exactly. So I would say, first, the presence of difficulties is not something to show that Christianity is false. It just shows that we have to think hard about these questions that arise. And we should put forward explanations, yeah, that aren't ad hoc, that aren't contrived out of nothing, but make sense. Second, I don't think that the analogy from Santa Claus is a very good one. So, and I mean, we could do a whole different show on Santa Claus and all that. But when I hear that, I say, well, if you're going to make an analogy about belief, you want to make sure it lines up

properly with what you're talking about. But here, like with Santa Claus, with Santa Claus, parents would do this, and I don't, frankly. Notably. Yeah. So, when my kids have started asking about it, I know I say, you know, Santa is a really neat story. It's a fun story people tell about. And, you know, people have fun with lots of stories like, you know, Frodo and Thomas the Train and, you know, that there is no island of Sodor. There's, you know, things like that. With Santa Claus, there's extreme disanalogies to belief in God. Here's the most obvious one.

People who believe in God are sincere. Yeah. Like you don't think that God's not real. Right. And you just tell your kids because you think it's a good story for them. And then when they grow up, you tell them, guess what? God doesn't exist, but it's a great story for you to do first communion. You sincerely believe that it's true.

Yes. So it's not like Santa Claus. Second, with Santa, the reason we don't believe in Santa is because of overwhelmingly obvious. Positive evidence against his existence. If Santa existed, if Santa existed, there would be clear things that would be different. And the most obvious one would be that we wouldn't have to go Christmas shopping. They would appear under the tree without us knowing the presents there. And so, and then, of course, the tracking Santa, his workshop. I mean, you could even try to explain away that, like the workshops invisible, blah, blah, blah. But why do I have to buy the presents, and it's the same presents, you know, that are there? Now, I guess an atheist could say, well, Santa shows up and he swaps out your presents with the exact same ones that he does that. And what I would say is now that when the explanations get that far, they are trying to

explain away positive evidence. But I would say that an atheist has not done the same thing with God. I haven't posited that. That would be on par with me saying, to answer the problem of evil by saying, well, actually, God exists, but what we think is evil is not really happening because it's an illusion, and we're not experiencing pain at this time. What you think people experience is not real, and we'll be compensated for this in heaven in the next life, so there's no problem. That to me would be dramatically trying to explain away the problem instead of invoking the limits of my epistemic humility to say, well, I don't always know why God would have

a good reason to allow an evil, but we allow evils for good reasons. Like, we don't put surveillance cameras in every home and every building to prevent crime because we want people to have the good of privacy. So I could see how God would want some goods like free will and virtue to exist, and along with those will come evil. So it can make sense. There's a lot of problems with the Christian story then. So let me just –

But yeah, but there are still problems, and we can still – we should still address them. Yeah. No, I think everything you've said is a great point. But we shouldn't be overwhelmed by the presence of problems. It just gives us something to think deeply about. Well, let's do one. What about the slaughtering of the Canaanites by the Israelites? Can you explain that problem and show us how you might

respond to that? Yeah, so this is the problem of Old Testament violence. And I think for many people, it is case closed when it comes to the Bible. Like, I can't be a Christian if you worship Yahweh. And he ordered the Israelites to kill not just the army of another group, not just the Canaanite army, but to lay waste to other, you know, to the non-combatants involved, to the women and to the children. And so, how could God order something like this that shows that he's evil, he's bloodthirsty? I want to have nothing to do with a God like that. And so how could you worship a God like that? And Christians have offered a variety of responses to this argument. I don't endorse every response present, but I think it's important for people, especially an atheist who is working

through this, to be aware of the different responses. So on the one end of the extreme, or not extreme, I guess, one response might be that, well, this is just something that is a purely human device that represents the barbarism of ancient peoples and that was not inspired by God. God never did anything like this whatsoever. And so that's just a part of the Bible that we determine is not relevant today. And it's an error within the Bible. And so it's something that, you know, we don't accept everything, but that's just an error. That's one view. It's not a view that I would endorse. But those who say this, I would say, like you said before, what does that prove? It doesn't prove that we should, it doesn't prove Jesus never rose from the dead. It doesn't prove God doesn't exist. It doesn't prove God never revealed himself. So at best, if you were, you know, I mean, I know Christian theologians who hold a view like this. This is just an erroneous part of the Bible. And yet they're Christians, they believe Jesus is fully divine. And so that could be a live option for that atheist, you know, especially if you're firmly committed to believing in the person of Jesus. Yeah.

I would rather you believe in Jesus and you're trying to develop your biblical theology than just throw the whole thing out. Great point. But as I said, that's not a view that I would endorse, but I think it's one that could be on the table, and for some people they may accept that. Another view, and this would be the view that St. Thomas Aquinas takes, is a view that says that God has the right to take life. And so if God has the right to take my life or your life, then he also has the right to deputize others. He has the right to choose different methods to take human life. And so he's trying to show, you know,

in exercising a judgment against this group of people, that just as God would exercise judgment against nations, against Egypt, against other nations that had plagues, the plagues probably killed men, women, and children as well. And here God used microbes to do it. He used small microbial soldiers to kill men, women, and children. And it possibly may have been more suffering from a plague than from being killed by a soldier.

may have been more suffering from a plague than from being killed by a soldier, you know? So, I mean, it's still a difficult, terrible thing. But God chose to end these people's lives and have a judgment against their civilizations because of the grave depravity of evil they engaged in. I think that in the book of Genesis, I think it's Genesis 15, God prophesies to Abraham that his people, his descendants will be kept in bondage in a land that's not their own, referring to the Exodus, and that it will take 400 years before the land vomits out the Canaanites to wait till their iniquity grows to fullness. Wonderful. Oh, it's Amazon, but they left. Again again the benefits of having a home studio it's the

lost canaanite coming in here to uh have his say you know um sorry continue yeah so that the the idea here is uh talking about the amorites in that it's just 15 that 400 years will pass until they're vomited from the land that till their iniquity grows to you know they've reached their maximum level of sinfulness child sacrificed by, things like this they were engaged in. And so, if God is allowed to take human life, and he's allowed to use various methods to do that, then doesn't he have that right as the author of human life? And so, that is another option that can be taken that's historical. Another option that we could take is to say that these passages in the Old Testament do not literally describe actual killing of noncombatants,

that these are what you would call exaggerated warfare rhetoric, that they don't actually narrate these events happening, that they were written centuries later during the United Kingdom of Israel. And the purpose of these passages, you know, leave none that breathe, slay man, woman, and child. The purpose of these passages is to underscore for the people of Israel at that time, which was long after the Canaanites, is to have nothing to do with pagan influences. Now, some will say, well, look, you're just coming with that because you can't stomach the literal sense. So you have to make this up to make yourself feel better. I don't think that's the case because when you read the actual biblical text, I believe you can arrive at this conclusion that many of these passages, you find them in books like the book of Joshua. And the book of Joshua has a lot of warfare rhetoric. It's about the conquering of the promised land. But then when you go into books like the book of Judges, you get a very different story about the Amalekites and the Canaanites.

They're not completely destroyed. They hound Israel for a very long time. And rather, their religious shrines are torn down and they're driven from the land. They're vomited out of the land. So it's really more of a matter of typical ancient Near Eastern warfare conflict, and that these descriptions, leave none that breathes, would be on par with saying, how'd the basketball game go? Oh, we slaughtered them. That doesn't mean they're wiping off blood from the basketball court. A good book on this is written by Paul Kapan and Matthew Flanagan

called Did God Really Command Genocide? And I think it puts forward a decent argument that it is that the non-literal view of the passages makes sense of our understanding of it. Another resource I'd recommend, though, would be Pope Benedict XVI's Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini. In there, he talks about the dark passages of Scripture, and the Catechism mentions this, how there are elements of Scripture that are imperfect and provisional that are meant as temporary rules and directives for God's people until they can reach the fullness of what God wants to offer them in Christ. The prime example of that would be divorce.

God allowed in the law, Deuteronomy, allows the evil of divorce to prevent. Aquinas said it was to prevent the greater evil of wife murder. That was his belief. That God, you have hardened hearts. I'm going to give you an imperfect law that you can follow. It's not forever. Yeah. But it's not forever.

And we do this the same today. Like, how could someone do that? Like, well, I might have to say, you know what? Abortion is legal in the case of rape, but it's illegal in other cases. Why did I give that law if I'm a legislator? Because I know it's the only one you guys will follow. If I ban abortion in all cases, the law will just be ignored or I'll be voted out of office. But isn't there a difference between allowing divorce and commanding genocide?

Sure. And so the difference here is that when you have things that are required based on certain historical contexts, once again, we would go back to that God did not say that the Israelites could make a judgment for themselves about you can take human life whenever you feel like in the sense of... Now, it would be even worse, I'd say, to allow genocide in the sense of you can end the life of any human being you feel is necessary, just like you can write a writ of divorce. In fact, God specifically commanded Israel to not go to war with other nations, to not get into fights with Moab, the Moabites, for instance. But here, God is restricting and exercising his authority that he rightly has to take human life, if that is what he

did, to exercise it in a very limited circumstance rather than giving some kind of a general command or an allowance. But I lean towards the view that it's non-literal based on all the elements in the passages. But finally, what I would put forward here is that if there's an atheist who is struggling with this and believes atheism is a better option, I don't think that's the case, because this reveals that the person has a deep sense of moral revulsion to certain kinds of evils. They believe that there are these moral facts that God is apparently in violation of. And so morality is not just someone's opinion then. Where is the foundation for you for you believe a moral fact that you should, like, do you believe you should never kill noncombatants in war to directly target them?

That it's always wrong to rape, for example. The problem here is that if you're an atheist, I'll ask you, well, what is your moral system? What is your foundation for morality? And any foundation of morality can lead to these kind of repugnant consequences. So this doesn't refute Christianity, it more refutes objective morality. Because I would say, well, what's something good? Say, well, whatever's reasonable, whatever promotes the most well-being. Yeah, flourishing. You know, whatever, there's lots of different things you could hash out. So I said, okay, then under your view, all right, if genocide or rape promoted

the most well-being in certain cases, it would be justified to engage in those activities. So if they believe it, they have to say yes. Now they could try to say, well, yeah, but that would never happen. Then I might say, how do you know that? Given the billions of different moral decisions people have to make throughout the world, how can you know that? Given the billions of different moral decisions people have to make throughout the world, how can you be so confident that these particular acts would not create, not improve well-being in certain situations? You'd have to be omniscient to make some kind of a claim like that. So what's interesting here is that any moral system you have, it could lead to these kinds of consequences. Now, I believe that because God just is the good itself, and he's written the good within our hearts and within our natures,

we have a firm foundation, at least to the specific moral obligations that we have to one another, and we have to other kinds of morality that are present. But I think when people object to this, what I would say to them is, what is your ultimate standard for good and evil itself? And then I think that the theistic understanding of it, the Christian understanding of it, answers the question in a better sense. But I think if we look at that, yeah, this is a problem, but I do not believe that when we look at this, it certainly makes us ask very difficult questions that we should ask, but it's not an insoluble one. And

there are different valid proposals that are offered that do not require someone to shed their Christian faith. And so I think that we should just see which of those proposals one should take. But once again, the presence of difficulties does not show a belief system is false. It just shows it's a belief system. It doesn't necessarily, it could be false, but we got to think hard about it. Well, let's ask the question then, suppose I believe that there's an explanation to the universe, which is personal. Why should I choose Christianity over other religions? Why are you a Christian? Well, I would say that I am a Christian because Jesus Christ vindicated his claims to divinity through the miracles he performed, through his teaching, through his radical sense of identity, of claiming an exclusive relationship to the Father, one of being the Father's divine Son, and that he ultimately vindicated those claims by rising from the dead.

I think that when it comes to choosing Christianity, we are now moving from the area of philosophy to the area of history. We're making a historical analysis. Okay. And we see has God entered into history and revealed himself. And I think that there are good reasons to believe that God became man and he taught and did the things that are described in the New Testament. And including making claims to divinity and claiming to be the Father's only begotten Son, and then rising from the dead to vindicate those claims. So it all goes back to Jesus. It all goes back to him. And this is

helpful because I think that sometimes some Catholic students, let's say high school students, go to college, and they go out and they look down the memorial union or wherever, and they see at orientation all the different clubs and organizations. And for some of them, this may have been their first time to have been exposed to other religions. There's the Protestant group, there's Hillel, the Jewish group, there's the Muslim group, the Hindu group. And suddenly you're like, well, who am I to say that all these people are? Who am I to say that all these people are wrong? How can I pick this religion out of all the others? Where would I even begin if I tried to pick a different religion? And I had to do this. I had to look at different religions. And I did look at the different major religions.

But people might say, well, you're going to look at every single belief system in the world? Well, there's one I can start with. Most major belief systems have a belief about Jesus. So Islam would say that Jesus is the prophet Isa, but he never claimed to be God. They believe he was born of a virgin, didn't claim to be divine, and didn't rise from the dead. Jews would say he's eccentric rabbi, never claimed to be God, didn't rise from the dead. Hindu, other Eastern practitioners would say that Jesus is a guru, but he's not the only God become man. He didn't experience a bodily resurrection.

So for me, if I go through this belief about Jesus, wait a minute. If I can show Jesus is divine and did rise from the dead, well, then I've got it. I've got the religion to be a part of. And all of these other ones, all these major ones are off the table. Gotcha. Because they do make claims about Christianity that are contradictory, that are not compatible. So why think what Christianity says about Christ is true? Why should I believe a story that was written 2,000 years ago that I can no longer investigate, someone might say?

Well, then here, when I have these conversations with people, once again, this goes back to what we discussed earlier. I want to have conversations and ask people questions. I always want to see what standards do you use to determine what is true or not? And are you applying those standards in an even way? And frankly, Catholics could do this too. I mean, to give a little bit of, not self-criticism, but just for us, I think sometimes Catholics are more than happy to accept pious fictions about saints. Like, just to say that any story a person hears about a saint, and they just love that story, they just immediately accept that it's true, when it may not be the case. Just because the church canonizes an individual, for example, it doesn't follow that every single story told about that person is true or that the church endorses it. So I think that sometimes that even Catholics,

and this goes back to what we said earlier about confirmation bias, we all suffer from it. And so that's why being a gadfly and makes people upset, I wrote the book What the Saints Never Said, oh, maybe I can make more people mad. Maybe I can write a book called What the Saints Never Did. Yeah. Well, give us an example. You probably know some examples. What are some things that Catholics would be upset were you to tell them that their favorite saint

didn't do this or that? I've been doing a study on early church history, for example, and going through, I'm making a historical series for my subscribers at trenhornpodcast.com.

I'm hoping to do it as like kind of a class for our school of apologetics. Nice. And so I think I've got up to, I'm starting at the fourth century now but i'm reading stories of the the early saints well let me i can pick one if you can't well i have one i think it's saint agatha she was the uh a 12 year old girl who uh she was brought forward for being a christian by suitors uh that she wouldn't marry them because, I believe because they weren't religious.

And then she was condemned, but the story goes that as she was being dragged away, her hair miraculously grew long enough. She was dragged away naked through the streets, and her hair grew miraculously long enough to cover her body parts and just other things with the saints. There are different stories about them, miracles being associated with them. No, I'm not opposed. I do believe that saints can perform.

Miracles can happen throughout church history. I firmly believe that. But the problem is that many of these stories are told hundreds of years later, and we lose a connection to that primary source. And so here, like, I think reading the homily of St. Ambrose, which is written probably about, I don't know, about 50 years after St. Agatha, he confirms the major biographical elements of her martyrdom. I believe that she existed and was martyred. There's a good case for that. But he doesn't mention, like, the other miraculous elements.

And we see this with other stories about saints that get embellished hundreds of years later. elements. And we see this with other stories about saints that get embellished hundreds of years later. But when we come to the person of Christ, when we come to the testimony of the Gospels and of the apostles, we see the testimony is very early, within the first few decades of the church's existence. And in fact, within the first few years of the church's existence, we see belief in Jesus's resurrection from the dead. That's far too short to have a legendary development creep in. Before we talk about whether Christ rose from the dead, we have to decide whether the New Testament documents are reliable. So why should I think the New Testament documents are reliable? Well, I would say that it is possible to believe Christ rose from the dead even if you are skeptical of the reliability of the New Testament documents.

even if you are skeptical of the reliability of the New Testament documents, even if you accepted the view of the New Testament documents were, and this is the view that I had before I became Christian, even if you believed that they were just the writings of human beings and they have errors in them, that doesn't mean that they're historically bankrupt. I mean, look, for example, at ancient Roman historians and the Great Fire of Rome. It's recorded by three sources, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio record. And what was Nero doing when Rome burned? You hear Nero fiddled while Rome burned. But those three sources give us very different interpretations of what happened to Nero.

Some people say he was at the Tower of Mycenae. Some people say he started the fire. Others said he was away from the city at the time. But those differences don't mean there was no fire in Rome at that time. Gotcha. That, you know, it doesn't discount the core historical elements. Generally reliable, even if there are errors within it. Right. And I'm not saying the New Testament has errors in it. What I'm saying is if you approach it like I did as a skeptic, I'm saying, okay, these are some Greek manuscripts that are attesting to the existence of the Jesus movement of the first century led by a rabbi named Jesus with these apostles and disciples connected to him.

What are the bedrock historical facts that I can take from this? What can I drill down and be certain of? John Meyer is a Catholic scholar, though he doesn't embrace everything that the church teaches. He's kind of moderate slash liberal on some things. And in his book, A Marginal Jew, he talks about what would you do? Imagine you got a Christian, an atheist, a Jew, you lock them in Harvard Library, and you ask them, I want you to write a book on Jesus, and don't come out till you agree with each other. What would that book say? That's interesting.

And so that has been kind of the motto behind the quest for the historical Jesus. The idea that, all right, even if you don't believe Jesus rose from the dead, so you don't believe this is the Bible's inspired word of God, you can believe it's a collection of historical documents. What is the bedrock you can take from it? is the bedrock you can take from it. Now, I do believe you can take from that that it is a generally reliable set of documents when you compare them to other documents written in the ancient world. I believe that we can know who the authors were of these documents and that they wrote in a time and place where they would have had access to these truths. I guess I'll go through a list of things that make me think they're generally reliable. First, I think that the selection of the authors, at least for the synoptic gospels, bodes well for their authenticity.

That later in church history, when forged gospels were composed, like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, people would choose very famous authors to forge. But if you were making up a gospel, why would you pick Matthew, who is one of the lower rung of the apostles, former tax collector? He's on the lower rung of authority. And who are Mark and Luke? They're not even apostles. Why would you even pick these people? Well, because there's a solid tradition evinced in the writings of St. Paul. Paul talks about Luke, the beloved physician. He talks about Mark, a traveling companion. But it would make sense that, oh, okay, these make sense reading through these documents that these are the people who wrote them and they have connections to the apostles themselves.

They also reveal things within the Gospels that don't sound like legendary things or hearsay. So when you read other ancient documents at this time, like, not at this time, set at this time, to give a good comparison, there was a, in like the third century, I think, it was several hundred years later, there was a biography composed of a real wonder worker who was believed to have lived at the time of Jesus named Apollonius of Tyana. And so he was said to have raised the dead and performed miracles and that he himself rose from the dead. But the problem is there's only one source for Apollonius who came from a city that no longer existed. I think it was Demetrius. There was one source for Apollonius.

It was written two or three hundred years after the events of reports to describe. And it was written in competition with Christianity. It was written by a Roman ruler at the time who wanted a competitor to the Christian story. Even within the document itself, it's very vague. It says things like, it is said that Apollonius did this, and some say Apollonius did that. And even Apollonius' resurrection from the dead, it's just the end of the story, Apollonius' followers after he dies are drawing geometric shapes in the ground and thinking to themselves. And one of them wakes up from sleep and says that Apollonius, he's alive and he's appeared to me. And that's basically just like the end of the story there. It's not like what we have in the writings of St. Paul or in the gospel accounts.

So we don't have these exaggerations, these hearsay. We don't have legendary embellishments. Jesus doesn't perform – it's not like the Gospels say, and then Jesus performed this mighty miracle and raised the temple 10 feet above the ground, and yet the Jews still would not believe in him. But isn't a man rising from the dead more of an argument than the temple rising from the ground? I mean, I could see someone pushing back on you and saying it absolutely does contain these mythical embellishments. You're just not thinking of them as myth. No, because when you compare them to, let's take the Gospel of Peter, for example, what I mean by mythical is written in a way purely as an apologetic, written purely as a way to convince people of the story rather than to transmit that the story is true. For example,

in the Gospel of Peter, the resurrection, which was written 100, 150 years later, where legends are starting to creep in, there at the resurrection, when Jesus rises from the dead, the Romans are there, the Jewish leaders are there, the crowds are there. So, hey, they were there. They saw Jesus rock out of that tomb. And not just Jesus. Angels come down, and the angels are 500 feet tall, and Jesus is like 1,000 feet tall. as angels come down and the angels are 500 feet tall and Jesus is like a thousand feet tall. And actually, when I used to share this story, change my mind on things, I used to say that the cross came out of the tomb and it said, have you preached to those who sleep? And the cross says, yay. But I was reading an article, I think a year ago by Mark Gutteker, who is a wonderful

New Testament scholar. And he wrote a book called The Case Against Q, which is dealing with New Testament source material. Really good guy. And he thinks that the better translation of that is it's not talking about the cross, but the crucified one, or Jesus. But here, once again, I believe one thing, but I'll follow evidence where it goes, and we'll change how I approach certain things. So that, in that account of the Gospel of Peter, it's very legendary and embellished. Whereas when you look at the Gospel of Mark, it's very, it's reserved.

It doesn't even mention like, it says a young man in white, doesn't even say he's an angel, though that seems to be what's implied there. And only the women go to the tomb to see what's that. Not even the other apostles. So it has those elements such as the idea that women are the first ones to discover the tomb, which even someone like Dale Allison, who wrote a good book on the resurrection of Jesus, I think he's still agnostic on the question, but he says that that is powerful evidence to say that why is this testimony included

that women discovered the empty tomb unless that's just what happened. It's just a very embarrassing detail. Why was that an embarrassing detail? Well, it was an embarrassing detail because at that time, women's testimony was generally considered to be unreliable, especially within first century Judea, within a Jewish context, Second Temple Judaism. court, whether her words were only considered trustworthy if she was verifying whether she had achieved the age of menstruation, or whether her previous husband had died if there was a dispute about her current marital status. But otherwise, the examples in ancient literature of the testimony of women considered to be reliable is very slim. I mean, some critics have tried to say, well, Josephus includes the testimony of women who survived the battle of

the fortress of Masada, I think. But even there, the reason Josephus includes it is he tries to beef up their credentials to say that, oh, they're the daughter of this important person to show they're trustworthy. And they were the only survivors. So we have to go with what they say, because they're the only ones that made it out of there. But so that's important that that adds elements of especially the- The fact that it's embarrassing lends to its credibility. Yeah, it lends to its credibility. We also have multiple sources. We don't just have one source.

We have the different gospel accounts, especially the resurrection. And even if you weren't as open to the accounts of the gospels, which I believe they're good evidence, we have the writings from St. Paul, and this is very helpful. Paul was a skeptic who was converted. He had firsthand knowledge of the other apostles. He knew these people. So I think many atheists have a kind of historical, very historically skeptical. Like, if I can't see it on YouTube, I'm not going to believe it.

But that's just not how we do ancient history. Yeah. We have a lot. Like, if you look at the the story of you watched uh braveheart you know william wallace right movie it is a great movie but our first source about william wallace is like 120 years later from a blind minstrel and yet no one's like i don't know he never existed he never existed that movie never i think it's in the scott of chronicon we get our first decent account of who he is. But many of these other individuals throughout history, there's significant time gaps or limited witnesses to describe it.

Whereas with Paul, I mean, we, there are, I mean, there are New Testament, there's, sorry. There are scholars, when it comes to saying whether Jesus even existed, there's a consensus among New Testament scholars. it comes to saying whether Jesus even existed, there's a consensus among New Testament scholars. I think there may be only like, I could count on my two hands, the people with the relevant PhDs who say he didn't exist. When it comes to saying Paul never existed, even those guys who say Jesus never existed, they'll say Paul existed. It won't go that far. So we know Paul existed. We know he wrote at the very minimum Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians and Galatians. We know at a bare minimum he wrote these letters. And that's just not to speak of the academic world. And that here we have in Corinthians, 1st Corinthians chapter 15,

St. Paul transmits to us what appears to be a creed that he had received from others, possibly when he went to Jerusalem to confirm the gospel. He talks about this in Galatians 1.19. He went up to meet the apostles, but he saw Peter and no one else except for James, the Lord's brother. Kinfolk, some say cousin, some say I'm inclined to the view stepbrother. We can talk about it in the Catholic stuff. But another thing I've changed my mind on a little bit. Look forward to that. So when we look at that, okay, he's interacting with the apostles.

He gives us this creed that Jesus died, he was buried, he rose again on the third day, and he appeared to Peter, to the other disciples, to the 12, 500 others, and then finally to him himself. And so we've got all this. And when we put it together, I think that other hypotheses don't explain the data as well. I don't think that basically the two biggest competitors are hallucination versus resurrection. Like the view that Jesus faked his own death or that the apostles faked it. I don't even think many, I don't find many skeptics embracing that view. I think most will say it was some kind of a hallucination.

They thought Jesus rose from the dead and they went out to preach that. And for me, that really doesn't explain why a skeptic like Paul would convert. He wouldn't have a grief-induced... The idea is they felt they were really sad and to console their grief, the apostles thought Jesus rose from the dead to console them, similar to how you or I might have a grief-induced vision of a bereaved person. But the thing is, most of us, even today, people who have grief-induced bereavement visions, grief-induced hallucinations of the dead, I had a very vivid dream after a friend

of mine died. I gave the eulogy at her funeral. This is actually, I had, before I gave, before the funeral, when I first heard about it, I had this dream that I thought was real. Oh, wow. I thought the dream was real, and then I woke up, and I'm like, oh, that was just a dream. But even in those bereavement visions, people don't think their loved one has risen from the dead. They think like, oh, they're in heaven and they're okay. Why wouldn't we think that

the apostles would have said, oh, Jesus is in Abraham's bosom. He's okay. Why would you think that there's a resurrection? Jews believe that the resurrection wouldn't take place until the end of the world. Anything, their past experience with failed messiahs wouldn't even necessarily lead to grief. If I were, you know, we had The Passion, the movie, Mel Gibson's The Passion. It's a great movie. Mel Gibson might be kind of a squirrely guy, but man, he knows how to direct films. Oh my goodness. And he's a great actor. He is terrific.

I love him in Ransom. You remember the old movie Ransom? I think so. His kid gets kidnapped. Yeah. And he's on the phone. Like, you're not going to get a cent. And he's on the phone. He's like, give me back my son.

Yeah. I'm like, such a- He's so great. He's great. But with The Passion, you have Peter. I remember that scene. It's like raining and he's weeping. And he's like, no.

Yeah. That sounded more like Mario. And Peter's like, no, mama mia. Why did I do this? I would think it would be firmly, it would make perfect sense actually that if Jesus is supposed to be the Messiah and he's been killed, that is not supposed to happen to the Messiah. He's supposed to be a conquering hero. Okay. If I were Peter, I'd be mad.

I left my family. I left my livelihood. I followed you for three years. And look what's happened. Now the objection is people will say, people follow people all the time now and to preserve their cognitive dissonance. See, my mind is always pinballing when I have arguments. And this is- I know you're debating people around here. It's great.

But that's important for us when we come up with our beliefs. And you always want to try to think, what is the counter that could be given to this? And what is the strongest position I could be dealing with? They could say people have followed, but it's true. Some people have followed cults and the prophecies don't come true. Some of them leave and they're angry and realize they were duped. Other people continue and they have cognitive dissonance and they try to make an explanation up for it. But here, the explanation I would make up would just be that he's reigning in heaven, not that he's actually risen from the dead. Because what's great is that's not falsifiable at all. But they preach in Jerusalem that Jesus has risen from the dead.

You could go, and in a semi-arid climate like Jerusalem you would think there would still be a record of a polemic of the Jews saying, we have found his bones and he is still with us. Much the same that even in the time of Justin Martyr, in the second century, he wrote a dialogue with the Jewish rabbi Trifo or Trifo. And in there, Rabbi Trifo says to Justin Martyr, well, those disciples, they stole Jesus's body, and this is what we know. And so even in the second century, the polemics against Christianity, where you had the words of hysterical women. So even then the words of women were not considered reliably in the time of Celsus. And so here it's like, oh, well, then we would expect if they were simply making this up or it hallucinated, Jesus in heaven is better than an actual risen bodily resurrection for Jesus. And so in any case, they weren't preaching that Jesus was in heaven. They were preaching resurrection, anastasis.

And for Jews, especially for Paul, who was a Pharisee, the resurrection was physical. Philippians 3.21, Paul says he will transform our lowly bodies. The resurrection is not just getting a spiritual body in heaven. Some critics will say what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 15 is Christ rose from the dead, but only in a spiritual body. And it does say he has a spiritual body, but that's like saying, you know, the Bible is a spiritual book, but if I throw it at you, it's going to hurt. You know, it just means that's its orientation, not its substance. So the idea is he has a spiritual incorruptible body because God's spirit now animates it. And he's now filled with it.

It's a resurrected glorified body. And we all, because what Paul is dealing with in Corinthians when he's talking about the resurrection of Jesus, he's not arguing that Jesus rose from the dead. His argument is that, no, we will rise from the dead because Jesus rose from the dead. Because Jesus rose from the dead, we can know that we will rise from the dead. Jesus is the first fruits of the resurrection. And he's also dealing with people in Corinth who think that, so if I rise from the dead, am I going to be like a zombie? Are the bones in the bone box going to come out and it's going to be like the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts? A wonderful old film, by the way, you should watch with your kids.

It's got the great claymation skeleton warriors. How do you have so much time to watch YouTube and do apologetics? I don't know. But he's telling the Corinthians, no, you're not going to rise as like zombified corpses. You are going to have spiritual incorruptible bodies. The perishable has to put on the imperishable, but we will be transformed. He says in things like Philippians 3.21 and 1 Corinthians 15. And so Jesus is the same way. He was raised and his body was transformed into his glorious resurrected

body. And that's why the resurrection is something we can look forward to. And so when I put all of this together, I don't think the hallucination hypothesis explains the fact that they're preaching a bodily resurrection. And for me, if I thought my friend rose from the dead, I would check her coffin. If it was empty, I'd have questions. The empty tomb, which I think there's good evidence for that. The fact that Jesus was seen not just by individuals but by groups of people, that collective hallucinations are exceedingly rare things. That all goes together for me, that I think that even if the New Testament, you just looked

at it as a bunch of historical documents, I think it points to the fact that Jesus did something, that he rose from the dead, vindicated who he is. And for me, in my conversion experience, when I looked at other religions, I did not see similar kinds of miracle claims. Interesting. No, like, for example, you look at Buddhism. Buddha refused to do miracles. The first miracles that are ascribed to him in a collection of works called the Pali Canon, they were written like 400 years after he lived.

And he refused. The biographies of him said he refused to do miracles. He said they're not important. So why would I believe in him? You go to Muhammad. The alleged miracles Muhammad did were written far later in a collection of traditions and stories called the Hadith. But the Quran itself does not ascribe miracles to Muhammad. It says you are a messenger. You are but a messenger. The miracle that purports to establish the truth of Islam is that the Quran is apparently something that is so beautiful and unique, no person could have possibly composed it. Well, I don't know.

It's sort of like how my declaration of love to my wife just won her over. She didn't need any other evidence. It was how I spoke it to her. She said, I do. It was incredible. Right? Like has to be divinely inspired. But just because something's unique doesn't be right.

Just because something is unique. And the idea is you can't imitate the Quran's beauty prose style, even though people have done that. Just because something's unique, it doesn't follow that it's divinely inspired. I mean, I think Avatar was a really unique movie, but I don't think Steven Spielberg was sent by God. So, you know, so I think that, and then you go to other, and I've tried, and I think it's important. I've looked

at the evidences for other worldviews, and I don't think they're as strong as for what Christianity offers. Same with Mormonism and the testimony of Joseph Smith. I do not think is as reliable as the testimony we have for Jesus' resurrection. And then it's also, there's evidence against that view. This is a bit of a tangent, but I want to ask it because I've been dying to ask somebody. You know, Lewis famously talks about the trilemma, either someone who claims to be God is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Joseph Smith claimed to receive a revelation.

So what do you say? Is he a lunatic, a liar, or a legitimate prophet? Or demonically influenced? It seems like those would be your four options, doesn't it? There are different options to explain Mormonism and the alleged original revelation or first vision of Joseph Smith. And we don't have to go all the way down this rabbit hole. We don't have to. I'm not going to go super far down. Just a quick point. Yeah, I think here, we have to understand that Lewis's trilemma deals with the fact that Jesus is making very radical claims. Jesus is not merely claiming to be a prophet. If Jesus were claiming that I received a message from God, well, that's something there's another option you could put in

there. I was honestly mistaken. Unless they were on golden tablets or something. Well, you said like you felt like you were praying and you felt like you heard God's voice speak to you. That's not that far out the realm of responsibility to put you into lunacy to think that you felt you heard God speak to you. But if you think you're God, that's a bit of a different story. So that was Lewis's point that he's not just a good teacher or even a good prophet. Lewis's point was that the claim Jesus makes is so grand. Yes. So one could believe that they are hearing God's voice and they might not necessarily be

a lunatic. But if you're claiming to be divine. To be God himself, that gets a bit more detached from reality. Fair enough. So like it's possible Muhammad thought that he had received revelations from God as the Quran in prayer, and he wrote them down. When we look at Joseph Smith, there's a variety of—I haven't done a—I've written a booklet on Mormonism, but I haven't done—I'm probably going to write a book-length treatment of it in the next few years or so, because we really need— One of the reasons why I picked my books, Matt, what ones I want to write, I think to myself, am I interested in the subject and have other Catholics written on it? And it really amazes me. There are so many things Catholics have not written on. I am just baffled by it.

Well, you got a lot of work to do then. Or others will write. But I mean, and I don't know why we can't. But we need to update a book on all these things. So I'll probably do more of a study on Mormonism in the future. But the different hypothesis of Joseph Smith, one, he could be a charlatan. We know that he was a treasure hunter before and he engaged in. in the future. But the different hypothesis of Joseph Smith, one, he could be a charlatan. We know that he was a treasure hunter before and he engaged in, he's engaged in behaviors and things that, you know, trying to acquire for himself as many wives as possible and engaging

in behaviors that would question his moral conduct. So he could be something, a deceiver or charlatan. He could be someone who wanted to try to lead people to God, and so he thought he was genuinely receiving a vision from people. I mean, even if I grant everything a Mormon would propose, saying that, well, he discovered these golden plates and tried to translate them, maybe he did discover some kind of artifact. It doesn't follow, though, that it actually, these golden plates really describe God actually sending Jesus to North America to witness to the Native Americans or the ancient Israelites traveling from Israel to the new world on boats. It also makes me skeptical of that because five years before the Book of Mormon was published in

1830, there was another book published at the time called A View of the Hebrews that says that the Hebrews came to the new world on boats and that's where the Native Americans came from. So I'm like, that's not that original of a thesis. So I think it could be a combination of theories. But all of them, and also some people say, well, Joseph Smith couldn't have come up with this story on his own. Well, actually, his mother does say that he was, as a child, he was very good at telling stories, fanciful ones about living with Native Americans, stuff like that. But it's also possibly could have had help. Other people may have helped him compose the Book of Mormon. Fair enough.

But in any case, my point is, in examining it, I do think that there are plausible natural explanations. And also, I guess the big problem I have with Mormonism is not just, well, there are natural explanations for what it claims, but what it claims seems to be contradicted by a wide variety of evidence, such as the lack of archaeological finds in the New World to say there was, because Mormonism, unlike Christianity, Mormonism makes the claim that there were these large civilizations that existed in the New World that did certain things that archaeologists haven't find. For example, if you take a bunch of atheists and you ask them, you take atheists, non-Christians,

whatever, and you give them the Bible and you say, can you tell us if this stuff happened or where this took place? Atheists could take the Bible and say, this is the general area where these things were believed to have happened. And we have found Jericho. We have found different sites within the ancient Near East to verify these biblical accounts. And even atheists will say it was basically in this area. But Mormons from the Book of Mormon cannot even agree on the general location of where the events took place. Some will say that it took place between

North and South America. Some say it took place in a very small part of land in Central America. Some people think it took place all around like the Great Lakes, but they're not in agreement. That just shows, I think that what is transcribed in the Book of Mormon is not a divinely revealed history of the new world, but rather a series of fictional stories that were put together. And so for me, I don't see that same kind of objection befalling the New Testament. People try to say Mark got this wrong or Luke got this wrong, when actually when we do more archaeological evidence, we actually find a lot of corroborating evidence to talk about, yeah, they actually did get it right. Is it true that the New Testament is the best attested work of antiquity that we have?

And what does that mean? When we mean by best attested, we're usually talking about manuscript evidence. So we're talking about the science of textual criticism. So some people will say, well, how can we trust the Bible? We don't have the original documents. And that's true. They've been destroyed. They're written on papyrus.

They faded away. They're gone. And we don't even have the copies of those. We have copies of copies of copies. How do we know that we can trust? You can let him in, Neil, if you want. It's my dog. The dog.

Let's just hope he doesn't come in and knock over the lights. Continue. Right. Yeah. Papyrus, they've been destroyed. Yeah, so we need copies. But that is the case for any ancient document. We don't have Homer's original Iliad.

Right. We don't have the Herodotus of Homer. We don't have the annals of the Roman historian Tacitus. We don't have those originals or any copies near them, but we can know what the original said by taking the surviving manuscripts and piecing them together. You have this manuscript, you have that manuscript, this copy, that copy, and you compare them to one another to find what is the best reading. Where do all the texts agree what the words are supposed to say? And from there, you can reconstruct the original text.

So my argument is that if we generally trust other ancient texts have been preserved to us to the present day, then we should have more confidence in the ancient world would probably be the Iliad, Homer's Iliad, penned around the year 800 AD. The oldest manuscript copy, I think, has been dated to about 400 AD. So the first fragments might be about 400 years later. But ultimately, the amount of fragments we have of the Iliad, I think, are close to about 1,200. 1,200 manuscripts of varying sizes. close to about 1,200. 1,200 manuscripts of varying sizes. And the first complete manuscript is Venetus A, which is from the Middle Ages,

which is like 1,500 years, 1,800 years later. Contrast that with the Bible, we have... Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. Look at this. Sit down. Sit. Oh. Now you're fun. I love it. Look at this guy.

Can I see him? him stay you know what is your catholic you should name him anathema you can say anathema sit the old latin formulation i know that joke is pretty well worn it was an australian who said uh when i have a dog i'm going to name him the people so that at least once a day i can say i'm'm going to feed the people. And it'll just make me feel good. We can keep going. Yes, we certainly can. I'll just pat him. If I don't stop patting him, he won't.

That is. So I feel like we're on the set of like Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street, and he's like a Muppet who's popped his head up to talk with us. But when we compare the New Testament documents, it's different. We have close to 6,000 ancient Greek new manuscripts, dated at various intervals. But we have a decent number of manuscripts within even just the first few hundred years. When you compare that to the Iliad, the first fragments are 400 years later. The first complete copy of the New Testament is 300 years later.

And there's many manuscripts before that. The earliest copy, the earliest fragment we have would be P52. It's a credit card-sized manuscript of the Gospel of John. And it's been dated to about 125 AD, found in Egypt. But there are scholars who thought that John was written in the year 150. And so that little fragment destroyed all of those hypotheses. It couldn't have been written in 150. There's a copy in Egypt by 125. So when you have all these, and that's not to mention there are thousands of more copies in Slavonic, Latin, Coptic. We have so many. And then the final icing on the cake is we don't just have the manuscripts to find out what the original said. If you got rid of the New Testament

manuscripts, you could reconstruct almost the entire New Testament through quotations from the church fathers. I have heard that. Is that accurate? Yes. Are you looking to that? Yes. There is a...

The quote I have from that comes from a book called The Textual Transmission of the New Testament by Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman. So Bruce is a very conservative New Testament scholar, and Bart is agnostic, to say the least. So, he doesn't consider the New Testament that reliable, but he's willing to admit where are certain variant readings of the text. But usually these are, even when it's- Yeah, they're minimal. The most trivial ones are when a name is misspelled or there's a different location of the words. Because in Greek, the location of the word's not as important as its spelling. Right.

English, the location's very important. Greek, it's not as important. Okay. Similar to Latin. But when there are differences, they're not even that big, and people try to blow them out of proportion. Like in the Gospel of Mark, beginning of Mark's Gospel, it says at the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And there are some manuscripts that do not have the phrase Son of God in it. So some people will say, oh, they added Son of God later to say Jesus is divine. And Mark never thought Jesus was Son of God.

It was added later. It's not in some of the manuscripts all right take two the uh i had to kick the dog out man the dog sinks i actually got some scotch did you need scotch i didn't need to it just uh it just happened it's a great scotch then we looked at the clock we've been so you know wrapped up oh man this, man, this is fantastic. We have such a gift. I could not believe it's 2 o'clock now by the time we were— Sláinte. L'chaim. All right.

So we were talking about—we were wrapping up the whole Christianity bit. Why the New Testament documents are reliable. We talked about the attestation. Yeah, and so there are differences in the manuscripts, but they don't compound or, you know, risk any major doctrines we believe, and many of them are understandable. I gave the example at the beginning of Mark's Gospel, some manuscripts don't call Jesus the Son of God, but we should not conclude that Mark didn't believe Jesus was the Son of God, or it's a foreign concept. In Mark chapter 15, the Roman centurion says, surely this was a Son of God. Now, the term Son of God in, surely this was a son of God.

Now, the term son of God in the ancient world could just mean a divinely favored person. It's not necessarily a confession that someone is fully divine or anything like that. But also, there's only a few manuscripts that lack the term. And the best explanation for why they do is that the words in Greek, Christou, is in the, I think it'd be in the genitive case. So the O and U, or the Omicron and the Epsilon, the O and the U that we would transliterate the Greek alphabet are in Christou, and Son of God would be Uyo Theou. So they end in the same letters, so a copyist just accidentally skipped it. And so that happens in manuscripts. So when you have a lot of manuscripts, you're able to cross-reference them and get the best kind of reading. So if you look in your Bible, like look in your RSV Bible, you'll see maybe a few words

here or there in brackets, or there's an asterisk at the bottom. It will say some manuscripts. Earlier manuscripts. Earlier manuscripts say this, yeah. But overall, when you compare it to other works i mean it's mind-boggling you look at the works of tacitus i think the first five books of the roman histories of tacitus we have one copy from like the 11th century the 10th century a thousand years later right we can't compare it to anything so we've got good reasons i think the new testament documents are reliable that's before you agree with whether what's written in them is right or not, right? Correct or not. Yeah. The manuscripts don't show the original is true. It just shows it's been preserved.

Okay. So if it's been preserved well, that's when Lewis's trilemma kicks in. Right. And also that, yeah, so it's not a legend, not an accretion over time. And so when we see who Jesus is, I think the best evidence from manuscripts from history put forward is that he was who he claimed to be, the divine son of God who rose bodily from the dead, and he established a church. And so for me, I started out after accepting that, being Protestant for a while, until I saw that ultimately that theology and worldview did not work for me, and the Catholic perspective just made a lot more sense. Fair enough.

So let's talk about Catholicism. Yes, let's do it. Catholicism. Man, it's viewed so differently by so many groups. But I mean, this is too much of a soft point. But everyone agrees if you've got a demon, you need to get a Catholic priest. Yeah, that's right. That's what everyone seems to know.

No one's calling the first local Baptist, whatever. Right, the local Methodist guy. Can you get down here? Yeah. My wife's climbing on the ceiling. Well, let's address kind of maybe the elephant in the room or the biggest topic first. And it doesn't have to do with where's purgatory in the Bible, where's Pope in the Bible, but why on earth be Catholic when it seems today that the Catholic church is in many ways a very corrupt organization. We've had bishops and lay people and priests and

popes in the past, and even today perhaps, who've made really bad decisions, evil decisions, have covered things up. I mean, shouldn't we just call it quits? Shouldn't we just, I mean, why still be Catholic? We should call it quits if the church is a social club. We should leave if the point of being Catholic is this is how I was raised, these are where my friends are, this is how I like to spend my Sundays, it makes me feel better about myself. If that's what you think the Catholic Church is for, if it's a social club, yeah, you should probably be heading on your way out. But what if it's more than that, though? Then the only way to ask, should I quit, has to be related to the question, why would I stay? So anything you quit, whether you quit a job, whether you quit a marriage, whether you quit anything,

I would say we should say, okay, what are the reasons for quitting and what are the reasons for staying? There's always going to be reasons to quit anything. But then we have to say, are the reasons for staying stronger? Do they outweigh them? So like, let's say with a marriage, what I would say is, no, you should not quit your marriage. You made a promise to love another person and to be with them for the rest of your life until death do you part. And there may be extraordinary circumstances for preventing abuse of children, for example, to have something like a legal separation, and that's a whole different issue. But at the end of the day, my co-author Layla Miller has written, she wrote Made This Way With Me, wrote a great book on divorce called Primal Loss.

So there, even when things are difficult, she talks about how the adult children of divorce suffer 10, 20, 30, 50 years later from the trauma of divorce. Some studies have shown divorce has a more traumatic impact on children than the death of a parent. Because at least if my parent died, it's not like they left me, you know? So my point to get back to that is, yeah, there's reasons to quit, but you always have to ask, what is the reason to stay and compare them? So for me, when I look at being Catholic, what's the reason to stay? Well, why is the reason I joined? Why did I become Catholic? I was moved by the Holy Spirit to see this is the church that God created. This is the place where I can go to receive the Eucharist. This is where I can receive the teachings of the magisterium that the Holy Spirit will prevent from formally binding the faithful to some kind of an error or heresy. And when we deal with the issue, especially of, it seems like you can't, you know, turn on the news or your web browser.

There's always this kind of bad news out there. But we have to take things with a grain of salt that there was a book that I forget the authors. There's a book that just came out called the power of bad. And it's a new book that's come out that negative thinking can overwhelm and cripple our lives when it shouldn't. It's like how I'm sure with the podcast, it's like you could get a hundred comments on this episode.

Like that was great, but you've got one, like you really dropped the ball and it's all you think about. But that's irrational. Why would you do that? Why don't the 100 other comments give you a bigger, there's no amount of positive comments to give you that lift than more than the negative one does. That's such a weird irrationality that we have. But that's who we are. The power of bad overwhelms our lives, and we irrationally give it more of a pedestal than what the power of good ought to have.

And so I would say, you know, when you look at the church and you're discouraged, I would say, one, it's okay to be angry. St. Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians, be angry, but do not sin. Don't give the devil an opportunity in your life. It's okay to be angry. I just don't recommend dwelling on anger because that's when it becomes cynicism and it festers in the soul. Rather, turn it into something positive to pray for our church, to pray for its continued renewal, and to give God

thanksgiving for the good things. What about the people that became Catholic at the Easter Vigil? What about the family that's the couple that's celebrating their 50th renewal of their wedding vows in church? What about the baby they baptized last Sunday? Like, we don't feel the power of good from that, like when we read another bad article citing bad things happening in the church. We need to let that be present too for us. Now, I am not saying we need to stick our heads in the sand and just avoid things. That's not the case. But I will say we should not allow it to take our peace that's something that we have no control over. If there is some controversy within the church that we do not have control over whatsoever, should we let it take our peace? Absolutely not. Not if God exists and is sovereign.

Not at all. And also, we should not let let it – so we should pray for those who are involved and pray for continued growth and holiness in our church. But then we should also ask just mentally, philosophically, why would I doubt the Catholic faith that Christ established this church even though there are problems within it? within it. There's no reason to think that the church would be free of scandal or abuse or that we should always do things to protect people and always move towards good. The church is always in need. You know, people always say, oh, the Reformation was a terrible thing. And well, I would say what Luther did was not a Reformation, it was a revolution. Reformation is a good thing, just as the individual believer must always grow in holiness. And sometimes we just really drop the ball and you got to come to God and have reconciliation. The body of Christ as a whole, the church as a whole always has to reform and

grow in holiness. And sometimes the church really drops the ball. I mean, you look at the 10th century in the history of the church, the nickname historians give to those pontificates of that century is the pornocracy. Like, it was just dreaded. Give us some examples. Oh, goodness. Well, you had just examples of popes who had concubines, mistresses. You had, I think it was Benedict IX who sold the papacy, and then he got it back later. Another pope dug up his

predecessor and put him on trial, you know? So, yeah. But here's the thing, in spite of human weakness, but then again, that kind of fits in the pattern of who God chooses in salvation history. I mean, if you think about it, God picked Jephthah to help deliver people from bondage in the book of Judges, and he ended up sacrificing his own child. He picked Gideon, who fell later into idolatry. He picked David, who was a murderer and an adulterer. He picked Peter, who was a coward. He redeemed Paul, who was a murderer, who had persecuted Christians. So God works with us and works through our brokenness to accomplish His good

in the world. And we have to turn into ourselves and say, God, I'm going to offer myself to you, the good and the bad. And when we're worried about things, just remember what St. Peter wrote in 1 Peter 5. He said, cast all your anxieties on Him, for He cares for you. So I think that there's things to be concerned about, but they don't show that the church does not have a divine origin or foundation. It shows that we need prayer and fasting and a commitment to personal holiness. But also we have to remember

that if you want to get away from sin and corruption and abuse, it's not going to happen. Yeah, because even if you left to Mars, you're with you. That's right. It was, I think it was Groucho Marx who said, I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member. But that's the thing, that if you look at the data also, the problems we see in, look at the problems we see in the church.

You see financial scandals, sexual abuse, hypocrisy. Congratulations, that's the human condition. That's what we would, That's what we see everywhere. You leave the church, you're going to find that in Protestant churches, Jewish temples. There are atheist conferences you go to that people have to sign a pledge saying they won't sexually harass people at the conference, because they're always dealing with that. Anywhere, and there are a hand, I can think of a bunch of atheists right off the top of my head who have been accused

of sexual misconduct and impropriety. All this shows is that sin is a human problem, but it does not have a human solution. So the reason to stay, what was the solution God gave us? He gave us his church. He gave us sacraments. He gave us baptism to wash away original sin. He gave us reconciliation to be able to come back to God when we've royally messed up. And he gave us spiritual food in the Eucharist to sustain us on that journey. I'm not leaving it. I can't leave it. And so I will ask God for help to endure through that.

So we should have a realistic concern where there are problems, but we also must not allow the power of bad to give us a distorted view of the world. And this is anywhere. I mean, you ask people today, people think that violent crime is at an all-time, school shootings and crime and all this stuff. Actually, according to the FBI statistics, violent crime is at an all-time low. But the problem is we live in a 24-hour news cycle, and if it bleeds, it leads. So they have to fill it with stuff, and people will tune in to bad. So what would your recommendation be to those Catholics listening to this or watching this who maybe feel like they are spending too much time keeping up on the scandals in the church?

Just turn it off. You pray, well, if I don't know what it is, how am I going to pray for the church? Well, you pray for people all the time, and you don't know what's going on in their lives. If it is taking away your peace, you have to determine. Now, I'm not saying like, nobody look what's happening. No, we can't have a sober look at things. But here's the thing. And shouldn't there be people in the church who are putting a spotlight on corruption?

I think that that's fine when someone, especially when someone is in an investigative capacity. I know people, for example, who are on review boards for diocese who review allegations of misconduct and are involved in investigating that. And I think the church would benefit a lot more from having these kinds of transparency to allow people to have review. And then you have this everywhere. You always have, whenever people have power, you always have the old Latin phrase, who guards the guardians? You have to have these safeguards and this accountability, and that's everywhere. But you find corruption in hospitals. You'll find corruption in police departments. That doesn't mean I'm going to not call the cops

when someone breaks in my house, or I'm not going to go to the doctor when I'm sick. Sometimes I have to put up with if there's the problem here. And this is not new. St. Peter Canisius, during the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century, he's trying to get people out of Lutheranism and back to the church. And most people left because the church was in—it was terrible. Most priests couldn't read. They had wives or concubines in violation of the celibacy regulations.

They were swindlers. They were greedy. And Canisius said, yeah, you got a legitimate point here. He said, but you know what? If I had a basket here with fresh fruit in it, and the basket is dirty and mangled, but you're starving and you need this food, just ignore the basket and take the fruit. And that's what he told people when it came to the Eucharist. So I had a guy call Catholic Answers Live once, and he said, I haven't been to church in years. I think the whole thing is messed up. And I said, you know, there's a lot of things messed up. But, you know, I don't want to go down the road.

But once again, I think that a lot of that is distorted by the power of bad biases. But I agreed with him just for the argument. Yeah, a lot of things are messed up. Then I asked him a question. Suppose you walk down the road and you found a diamond on the side of the road, but it was covered in dog poop. What would you do? He said, well, I would, I guess I would stick my hands in it. It would suck, but I'd wash it off and I'd go do the diamond. I'm like, okay, so you're willing to wade through the muck to get something valuable. And I asked him, is God more valuable than a diamond? Yeah.

to get something valuable. And I ask them, is God more valuable than a diamond? Yeah. Is God in the Eucharist? Is that Jesus on that altar every Sunday? Yeah. So here's the thing. To get to that diamond, you don't even have to go through dog crap. You just probably have to just sit through kind of a banal liturgy.

Gather us in. But for me, you know what's funny about that? I have a- That's true. About liturgy. I go, you know, I go to Byzantine Rite. Right. I go to Byzantine.

I love it. It reminds me of, I love the Byzantine Rite because it feels like a continuous prayer. It feels like when I go to Mass, I have just said one single prayer. I love it. It's glorious. And so, and I go, although sometimes I can't attend that or it's a daily Mass and I'll go to a Novus Ordo. And yeah, the music can be cheesy.

And there's other stuff. I'm like, what is going on here? And so sometimes I'm like, well, there's Jesus up there. And that's ultimately what matters. But then other times, I think sometimes we just have to have an openness to that. I will admit there are some songs that are sung at the Novus Ordo that I love in the same way that I love Phil Collins. I know Phil Collins isn't good, but man, it just makes me happy. So when they bust out Awesome God,

I am that 17-year-old back at youth group, and I'm like, Our God is an awesome God. He reigns. So I remember all the hand motions. But I know now I'm like, that's not my preferred. But I can appreciate it for

what it is. But in any case, away from liturgy stuff. Yeah, and he said, yeah, I think maybe I need to go back. And so here, once again, it's not saying like, you gotta go back, this is Jesus. I'm asking a question for that person to really confront the issue. And so I think for that elephant in the room, it's like, look, this is something the church has always dealt with and will always deal with while we are gripped in sin. The Bible calls the devil the God of this world.

So he's referred to in Corinthians. The question is, are we going to stand firm and hold fast to the graces God gave us through this church or just tell him he hasn't really done a good enough job with us? So I think there's a balance to find in all of this. Okay, here's another question, because you referenced baptism, Eucharist,

confirmation. Why aren't you Orthodox? Why aren't I Eastern Orthodox? Yeah, and there are people. Rod Dreher is an example of this. So Rod Dreher is a conservative commenter, and he left the church over the scandal, which I think is a poor thing to do, because frankly, you look at studies. I read one study that said this is as bad, if not worse, in Protestant churches, and it's probably even worse in public schools. So I'm sure when you see these scandals in Jewish Orthodox temples of sexual abuse, I'm sure there are skeletons hiding in the Eastern Orthodox closet, however decked out it is and like old light candles and stuff.

You'll find this stuff everywhere. It's not going to go away. But Dreher tried to defend it by saying, well, I looked at the evidence for papal infallibility and the papacy, and it's not all there. It's inflated. And I just disagree with that. I think the biggest difference, of course, between being Eastern Orthodox, and you and I belong to Eastern churches, the Byzantine church

is Eastern. And after the schism of 1054, which it wasn't a moment, the churches were growing apart for centuries. But after that, because there were people even in the year 1200, who thought that they were still a part of the Catholic Church, who were in the East, like, what happened? Why didn't nobody tell me? Right. Yeah. Well, they didn't have the bad news to log onto on the internet every day. So, but then after the schism, there were a large segment of churches in the East who

came back to union. The Orthodox came back to union with the Pope. And for me, the papacy is a gift that God has given the church that makes sense. It's one of the important things in being Catholic. Because you might say, well, I could have all that with Eastern Orthodoxy. But here's the problem with that. If the church is the kingdom of God, you know, Jesus says that the kingdom of God is now among us, the kingdom of heaven, that this is the kingdom of God on earth.

And shouldn't this kingdom be organized similar to the kingdom God also ran, which was the kingdom of Israel? When we look at Israel, God was the king of Israel. Obviously, God is sovereign over all of it. You had the king, like David. But then you also had the prime minister, the vizier. So in the 22nd chapter of the book of Isaiah, it talks about the wicked Shebna, who would be replaced by the righteous Eliakim as the prime minister. He is under the king, but his authority over the kingdom is massive. What he opens, none shall shut. What he shuts, none shall open. I shall give him the keys to the kingdom. I believe Isaiah 22, 22

actually even uses the phrase, the house of, in chapter 22 uses the phrase, the house of David, which is something actually rare to find in the Old Testament, except in certain prophecies. It's very important to talk about here. So, of course, if you recognize that language, I give you the keys. What you open, none shall shut. Then you go fast forward to Peter and what Jesus does with Peter in Matthew 16, 18. You are the rock. I give you the keys to the kingdom.

On this rock, I build my church. And, of course, Catholics and Protestants will disagree. Protestants say, well, no, Peter's not the rock. His confession of faith is the rock. And actually, the catechism says the rock can refer to Peter and his confession of faith. It has dual meanings. My simple argument to that, counter reply to that is this. Well, if Peter's not the rock, why did Jesus change his name? Whenever God changes somebody's name in scripture, the name is a clue to their destiny. Abram becomes Abraham, the father of many nations. You know, people's names change. And the same is true for Peter.

Why bother changing it? It has nothing to do with being the rock in the first place. So I would see it would make sense then that if Christ established his church, who is the pastor of that church? Who's the pastor? That any other, even when human beings make organizations, there's one guy on top. There's a general, a president, a prime minister. It's like that episode of The Office where Jim and Michael are co-managers. It's like, wait, you're co-managers? And Oscar's like, of course, who wouldn't make co-managers?

What would Catholicism be without the popes? But that makes sense because that's what you have with Eastern Orthodoxy. Because all of the bishops have this kind of equal authority, the church becomes fragmented. And so what happens is there's a lot of stasis. And so things can't possibly change or grow in the sense of authentic growth. So to give you an example, since the schism, the Orthodox have not had an ecumenical council. They can't call one. They can't possibly do it. Now, when I've talked to Orthodox friends, they'll say, well, that's because the Pope would never agree to be a part of something like that. And I said, okay, well, why not a pan-Orthodox council of just the Orthodox bishops? Well, one guy can always just kind of—they can't. And so you're not able to address—you don't have that unity that a person

who is given a special authority from Christ to be, you know, the first among bishops. And the Orthodox say the Pope has that title, but it doesn't really mean much. But when you go back to the New Testament, it seems clear to me, and even to many non-Catholic commenters, that Peter was given special authority in the early church. J. N. D. Kelly, who's an Anglican scholar, says that Peter was undoubtedly the leader of the early church. And this is mentioned more than anyone else put together.

He speaks for the group. In Matthew chapter 10, when the apostles are listed, this is kind of funny. Well, you look at the apostolic lists and almost all of them. Who is last? Judas. And then who is first is Peter. And in Matthew, I think it's Matthew 10 too, it uses the Greek word, I think prote, first, you know, first Peter. But when you look at that word in lexicons,

it doesn't just mean first, like in a numerical list, it means like chief, like chief. And if they're arranged that Judas is last, the least important apostle, then Peter naturally is seen as the most important. What's funny is even when people like the Orthodox or Protestants try to find examples in Scripture that try to show Peter did not have this authority or he was not infallible, it actually goes the other way. Like in Galatians 2, Paul rebukes Peter at Antioch. And that was because Peter was preaching the gospel, but he wouldn't go and eat with the Gentile brethren. He didn't want to offend the Jews with him. And Paul's like, come on, man,

you say one thing and then you're not going to dine with the Gentiles. You're setting a bad example. Paul used the phrase, he was not orthopodusin. He was not walking upright in the faith. Like you go to an orthopedic surgeon, it means get your back straight. That's what Paul was saying. You're not walking with a straight back. You're not walking upright like this. But here's what's interesting. He was like, ah, it shows he's not infallible. No, it just shows Peter as he's want to do gaffes. The Pope can make mistakes. Gee, haven't we been talking about that one for a while, but it doesn't take away from his authority. In fact, what's interesting here, the fact that Paul in Galatians, what he's trying to show people is not, he is not beholden to human authority. Over and over again, he says, I didn't get the gospel as some mere human tradition. I got it

from God. I got the gospel. Now I confirmed it. I went to Peter in Galatians 1.19. It says that Paul went to Peter and Jerusalem to do a historiasi, which we get what word from? History, yeah. That's right. Historiesi in Greek is a fact-finding mission. He went to confirm it, but he's not beholden to human authorities as the ultimate source of his revelation. So they don't bully him around.

Paul will stand for the truth, and he'll even stand up to Peter. Now, why does he make note of Peter? Because Peter has the most authority. Right. I will even oppose Peter when he's wrong, because he's not right about everything. Even though he is, he has the most authority here in the church. And for me, historically, when you look at the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, the letter of Clement, the writings of St. Irenaeus, going forward, even among Eastern fathers fathers like Maximus the Confessor, I see a very clear historical trajectory that the apostolic orders are to continue to be apostolic succession,

but that one of the apostles had authority, special authority of the others, not as a tyrant, not as someone who can boss everyone else around as like a dictator, but as someone to provide leadership to the others, to provide a cohesive whole. And there's an element of this in the Gospel of Luke. If you remember, the apostles are debating amongst each other, and they go to Jesus and say, who's the greatest? And now some Protestants will say, well, Jesus should have said Peter. He's the pope. Or the apostles should have known Peter is the pope. Who's the greatest among us? But notice what Jesus does not say. He doesn't say there is no greatest. You're equals. He says,

the greatest among you shall be a servant to the others. And then immediately after that, which we lose because, I don't want to say it's Luke 22 or Luke 23, but after that section in Luke, it's not a chapter break, it's a heading break

because it's in the same chapter, but we usually add a heading in there to show it's a different thing that's being talked about. It goes to where Jesus says to Simon, Simon, Simon, Satan wants to sift you like wheat. You all is the plural in the Greek. He wants to sift all of you, y'all. But I have prayed for you, singular, for your faith. And then he tells him to go and strengthen his brethren. So what's interesting here is that section takes place immediately after the greatest.

Who is the greatest among us? Well, the greatest shall be a servant. And in fact, since the early church, one of the titles of the papacy is the servant of the servants of God. A great encyclical I'd recommend for especially if you have an Eastern Orthodox listeners or others who might struggle with the papacy, I would recommend Pope St. John Paul II wrote an encyclical on this called Ut Unum Sint. It's U-T-U-N-U-M-S-I-N-T, Ut Unum Sint, that talks about how the papacy can provide unity in the church, but without,

uh, stamping out legitimate diversity and liturgy and other things like that. And that's something that's a painful lesson we had to learn in church history. Yeah. I mean, you have people saying like, you can't,

you know, use leavened bread or you can't do this in your liturgy. No, God has allowed a diversity of ways to be able to worship him that each communicate different truths, all while being united around very core truths that have been revealed to us. That's excellent. Well, as you wrap up, tell our listeners where they can learn more about you, what book you're working on. If there was one book that you wrote that you would have them get, what would it be? Go for it.

I'm working on it. If they want to learn more about what I'm doing, I would recommend trenhornpodcast.com. I do three episodes a week, two on apologetics and theology, and one on Fridays where I just get to have fun. It's awesome. All kinds of interesting stuff. I think the last one I did is some episodes there. I talked about nuclear power, what to do if you're arrested, the worst movie lines in history.

But then the other episodes during the week are on how to explain and have conversations with non-Catholics. And I'm doing more videos actually on YouTube. You can visit the Council of Trent YouTube page. It's in its infancy right now. Good. We'll put links up to these in the description. And if I forget, text me and then I'll put it in the description. I will do it. So check out trenornpodcast.com for more on that and to support what we're doing there. I have a book on socialism coming out, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? I wrote that with an economist, Catherine Pakalik from CUA. And the answer is no, but we explain more.

What does it mean to be a socialist? What are the problems? We do history, theology, economics. Great book. It should be out here in a month or two. And then the next books I'm writing, I've got a lot on the plate. It should be out here in a month or two. And then the next books I'm writing, I've got a lot on the plate.

If there's one book I'm thinking of working on is a book for atheists. I'm writing a book and I want to write, it's going to be a free book. It's going to be a book you could download on Kindle for free. You could just order it a dollar a copy. We'll get it underwritten. And I want it to be a book you could give to an atheist. I don't really know a book. Like, Why We're Catholic would work.

Like, I've told people, if there's one book of mine to get, just get Why We're Catholic. I would agree with that. It's excellent. Even if you know all of its contents inside and out, Why We're Catholic, it's an introduction, you should get it because it's the perfect book to give away to another person. It really is. I would rather have people listening here, rather than read another apologetics book, ask someone who's not Catholic, what do they believe and why do they believe that? And to have that conversation, you can give them the book and just say,

I like this book. It's helpful for me. I want to see what you think of it. In fact, the reason I was very careful with the title, Why We're Catholic, because I wanted this book to be something you could give to other people. And so I was worried if it was like, why be Catholic? Like, imagine, you know, you got a book like- Why be Mormon? Why be Mormon? Why be atheist? Like, I don't want to be Mormon. I don't want to other people. And so I was worried if it was like, why be Catholic? Like, imagine, you know, you got a book like- Why be Mormon. Why be Mormon? Why be atheist? Like, I don't want to be Mormon. I don't want to be atheist. I don't want to be these things. But if you've got a book that's like, why we're Mormon, why we're atheist-

Not as threatening. You might be like, I wonder why they are Mormon. I wonder why they are atheist. And I want to walk them through that. So I would definitely recommend that. But you can, yeah, trenhornpodcast.com and then definitely get my book, Why We're Catholic, at the very least to give away to someone and to have those conversations with them. All right. So what we're going to do now is we're going to take a pause here on YouTube and all of my patrons go over to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. I'm going to talk to Trent about communism, socialism, capitalism,

and this sort of thing. So thanks for being here. Sounds good. Thanks, Matt.