The Eric Metaxas Show - David Wood

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

David Wood returns to the program to talk about the important topic of discussing the divinity of Jesus with people of the Muslim faith, using his own experience from his time in prison and college.

Today, Eric will interview a man with the head of a turkey. No joke. The rest of his body is perfectly normal, but his tiny turkey head is very unnerving. It's teeny weaning. And now, Eric Mataxis. Hey, the folks. Welcome to the Air Metaxis show. Here's what we like to do on this program.

We like to get great guests, but sometimes we cheat. Sometimes we just get the same guest that we had previously whom we know to be great, rather than risk going for somebody unknown. One of those guests, I'm thrilled to have with us again today. You will remember him from a few weeks back. David Wood is his name. He is many things. Self-proclaimed psychopath, I think, and Christian apologist.

I don't know which of those takes more guts to admit to. David Wood, welcome the program. How's going, Eric? It's going all right. In all seriousness, you know, when you said that last time about having grown up genuinely as a psychopath. It wasn't really clear to me if one can be healed of that or if it's something that you have to manage.

I mean, look, I've got stuff I manage and I'm not kidding, you know, but you, how do you put that? Because when you first shared, just in case people didn't watch the first video that we had, I mean, you had a mind-blowing background growing up. tremendous violence, bizarre stuff, and then you turned out to be who you are today. But do you still label yourself that way on any level? Yeah, I mean, I still have the common features of a psychopath. I don't have normal emotional reactions.

I don't have empathy. So when something bad happens to someone, I don't feel bad about it. I can do something about it. I can recognize that it's bad. But there's no feeling that's associated with it. So it's only at the level of feelings. In other words, you still can recognize when you need to do something or to reach out to somebody or something. But you're saying it's been learned as opposed to emotionally prompted.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, like guilt. I've never, I've done horrible things in my life. I've never once felt guilt in my life. So I have no, whatever you feel, if you do something bad, I don't feel it. But I can still recognize, wait a minute, that's a wrong thing to do. And I kind of have like substitutes. place. In other words, it's this is a situation where if I were functioning properly, I would feel guilt, but I don't. And therefore, I'm defective for not feeling guilt in this situation.

And so there's this, there's this recognition that I'm messed up in this way. And so it serves as kind of a replacement there. Okay. Let me ask you something. And if you don't want to talk about this, I could, I could understand. But in the last, in the last, um, episode together. You talked about trying to murder your father and pretty nearly succeeding, a really horrible, horrible episode. So two questions. The first is, were the two of you ever able to talk about that in the years after that?

because I know you know it's wrong and you know what happened and a lot of years have passed. But were you able ever to talk with him or your other family members about that? Yeah, I wrote him a long letter from prison basically starting at the beginning and how I ended up in that situation. So, yeah. And then he came to see me like a day later because he thought it was like a suicide letter because apparently people like confess their whole stories or something like that if they're going to commit suicide. So, yeah, he came in.

So then I asked you, did you commit suicide? No, I failed at that one, too. You did? Okay. So did you never feel then, I mean, it seems like you just said that you never felt guilt for trying to kill your father in terms of your emotions. Yeah, no, I got to a point,

and this was a little before, this was right before my conversion where it was how messed up am I that I don't feel bad over any of this like how do I view myself as some superior level of humanity when this is what I am and I have no bad you know I don't feel bad about any of the horrible things I do in what way is it better to be like me than to be like someone else wow but it's interesting when you say guilt and then you say sorrow on someone level you feel sorrow because to feel sorrow doesn't need to be necessarily emotional. It can be an intellectual thing. I guess I don't know where one ends and the other begins. So it's interesting

to me. Yeah. I don't know if I would classify anything as guilt or sorrow or whatever. But yeah, I do have intellectual recognitions that this is wrong and this needs to be modified and this needs to be fixed and so on. Well, listen, the one thing about you that's just remarkable is the way is the way your brain works and doesn't work, but the way that it works is spectacular. You're brilliant, and you have, you've gotten involved in reaching out to Muslims with the Christian faith. And that's something, I don't know that I've talked about much on this program. And you're someone who's done this a lot. And I would love to get into that with you. It seems to me that most people like me, know,

very little about Islam. So just tell us your story of kind of how this began to happen for you and what you do, how you go about this. Well, I had a number of conversations with Muslims in prison. So there were other inmates who were Muslims and we'd have conversations. And I read one book on Islam while I was locked up that was answering Islam by Norm Geisler and Abdul-Salib. But apart from that, there was no real in-depth study. started really studying Islam when I got out and I was in college and I became best friends with a Muslim, Nabil Qureshi. And so just best friends with this guy were hanging out all the time. And our first real conversation, he expounded to me the glories of Islam and how Islam was proven to be true by

science and mathematics and history and logic. And there's just so much evidence that Muhammad is a true prophet, the Quran's been miraculously preserved. And Muhammad is the greatest man who ever lived. and he's just going hour after hour. Where were you in college at the time? Was this Old Dominion? Yeah, we were at Old Dominion University, but this discussion wasn't at Old Dominion. We were at another college on a trip,

and we were both on the speech and debating, and so we ended up at another college, and we ended up sharing a hotel room. Okay, now, hang on. Nabil Qureshi, for anybody who doesn't know, became a rather famous convert from Islam to Christianity, and he wrote a book, remind us of the title. He wrote three books.

Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus was his first book, and then he wrote no God but one, and then he wrote another book, Answering Jihad. And two of those were New York Times bestsellers, and so... Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, is the... the one that I remember. And I know, of course, he died tragically young,

but you were responsible, as we established in our last conversation together, for over the years leading him, rather, the word I'm looking for is rather intentionally and patiently over the years toward Jesus. So, but you just happened to meet each other. And what did it, what did you make of the fact originally that he was so confident as a Muslim intellectually? I mean, you were at that point a Christian. What did you make of that?

Because I think that those of us who know as little about Islam as I do, for example, just find that fascinating. That somebody as bright as Nabil could have been, you know, taken in by something like that. Well, the information that your average Muslim believes has been filtered for them by their leaders, by their scholars, and so on. And if you believe the information that you're given because you trust your leaders, it really seems like Islam is obviously true. They're told that they're all these scientific miracles. There's all this information packed into the Quran that couldn't be verified until today. because it's so scientifically brilliant. And they're told that Muhammad just had this perfect moral character.

He's perfect in every way. If he's perfect in every way, he obviously can't be lying or deceive or things like that. I want to get into the detail. So we're going to be right back, folks, talking to David Wood. He's with Acts 17 apologetics. We'll be right back. Now they only block sun. Hey, rain and snow.

Make like a Mr. Milk toast. You'll get shut out. Hey folks, they are from Taxashel. I'm talking to David Wood. He's with Acts17.org, an apologetics ministry. That's Acts 17.org. Okay, so David, you're talking about this experience of talking to Nabil Qureshi, who's, you know, he's a devout Muslim. You're meeting in college, and he's obviously very smart. You said that he was intellectually convinced of the truth of Islam. What is, you know, there are many people who listen to this program that are not Christians, and they feel toward the Christian faith the same way that you or I might feel toward what Nabil was saying about the Muslim faith.

Like, just because you're so confident about it doesn't mean that you're not wildly mistaken. Yeah, that's true. And so if you, you can basically raise kids to believe in just about anything. And the question is, do the claims that you're presenting them stand up to scrutiny? Because that's generally how we learn most of what we learn. I mean, you learn your ABCs because someone teaches them to you. Or you learn that Muhammad's a prophet because someone teaches that to you. And you tend to trust people when you're growing up.

You trust your parents and you trust your leaders at your mosque or your synagogue or your church or whatever. And you eventually get to an age where you're able to. to start looking into these things and questioning these things. And that's when there comes a time when, okay, I've been told that Muhammad is the greatest man who ever lived. How well does that stand up to history? I've been told that there are all these scientific miracles in the Quran. What happens if I actually look into these and see what's actually happening?

And so that's the process that Nabil and I were going through in our discussions. And long story short, he found out that a lot of the things that he had been told, about Islam were just factually incorrect, according to his own sources. And it was a longer process as far as actually becoming a Christian. But that's kind of when it starts with Muslims in that they're given all this information, all their lives. And there's like this light switch moment

when they start to realize, wait a minute, I've been told all my life, Muhammad was this, and yet I'm reading my own Muslim sources right now. And they're telling me the exact opposite of what been told. So maybe I can't simply trust what I've been told. Maybe I need to look into this for myself. And that's a kind of light switch moment where, wow, I've been trusting people who may have been misleading me. Now I really need to look into this more seriously. Okay. And of course, to be fair, many Christians have been through that same process.

They're raised as Christians. And that at some point, they see something that doesn't seem right and they begin to look into it and they can fall away from the faith. People that I know have had that experience. So this is hard stuff figuring out what is right and what is wrong. So how did that work for you? In other words, you are now fully convinced that the Christian faith stands up in every way to any challenges we could make to it intellectually. But there's so many people, and I hope many people listening now that would say that's preposterous.

There's tons of things in Christian faith that couldn't possibly be true. Yeah, here's kind of the difference. If you take something like Islam and the arguments that are used to support Islam, so the supposed miraculous, perfect preservation of the Quran, which is basically the belief that every time someone sits down to copy the Quran, he is miraculously corrected by Allah so that it's, everything he copies is perfect. And it's total nonsense. Their manuscripts are filled with tens of thousands of variants and so on.

But it's a claim that Muslims are told, and your average Muslim on the street believes completely. If you spend all of five to ten minutes actually investigating that claim, you find out that it's false. If you, as a Muslim, believe that, you know, the Quran is filled with scientific miracles, well, the second you start actually going through and reading some of these, you find out that it's total nonsense.

It's propped up on complete fabrications. Compare that with Christianity. You would think, if you haven't investigated either Christianity or Islam, you would think that looking into something like the resurrection of Jesus, you're going to find the same thing. It's all just a bunch of nonsense. Instead, what you find is that all of the evidence actually confirms all of the details that Christians base their faith in the resurrection on.

you can still reject the miracle, but you can go across the board. You can go to atheist scholars, agnostic scholars, Jewish scholars, liberal Christian scholars, conservative Christian scholars, and you'll find them agreeing on certainly obvious facts like Jesus' death, but even the disciples' belief that Jesus had appeared to them in a variety of situations on a number of occasions risen from the dead. And so what happens is you start looking at these facts, and it's, wait a minute, You've got this dead guy and you've got all of these people who are going around later willing to go to their horrible bloody deaths because they're so confident that he had appeared to them risen from the dead. You start saying, well, what would actually explain that?

When someone dies for his faith today, you can say, okay, well, he believed something. He believed the message that he was told. These guys were not dying for something that they heard. They weren't dying for some message that they heard and they really believed the way a Christian or a Muslim might be willing to die. for his faith today. They were dying for something they claimed they saw. And so what explains what they saw? And you start going through the possible explanations and hallucinations don't work and the other explanations don't work. And kind of the only thing that worked, which is why I became a Christian is the only explanation that actually fits the evidence

that everyone agrees on is that he did appear to them. So what, what am I stuck with here? And it looks like a miracle. So that's kind of the difference. At the heart of Christianity, there lies something that actually looks like a miracle. And you just don't have that. I have to say that I wrote two books where I go through the evidence for the resurrection. And I'm not kidding when I say that I was myself astounded that the evidence leads to the belief that this actually happened. In other words, even if you don't believe it and you look at the evidence, you'd kind of be in trouble intellectually to come up with, well, then what did happen? And I already believed it because I'd been told.

But when you actually do look at the evidence, it is startling that there is evidence for the resurrection, that there's so much of it. What are some of the things that are taught in Islam that, you know, you find out could not have happened? Because there's so many things in the Bible, like, you know, an axe head floats. There are things that you could just say, hey, these are just fairy tales and it just got in there somehow. how am I supposed to believe that? What is there in Islam for, you know, for folks like me who know nothing of what's in Islam? Yeah. So in the case of the, you know, miracles and things like that, it's not so much that it couldn't happen.

It's that what evidence is there? And so Islam is very different in that you go to their earliest source, which is the Quran. The Quran repeatedly denies that Muhammad can perform miracles because over and over and over again in the Quran, it reports unbelievers challenging Muhammad. why don't you perform signs the way previous prophets did? And there's always an excuse. Well, because previous generations rejected the miracles and therefore no more miracles except the Quran.

And so the Quran keeps offering explanations as to why Muhammad can't perform miracles. But later Muslim sources, which start more than a century after the time of Muhammad, they start including all of these miracle stories. Muhammad's shooting water out of his fingers when people are thirsty and multiplying food. And there's all these miracle stories.

And you look at these and you say, wait a minute here, if these miracle stories were true, then the Quran makes no sense. Because when people are challenging Muhammad, hey, why can't you perform miracles that should have been, well, what are you talking about? I shot water out of my fingers the other day. What are you talking about here? So the later sources, which Muslims, your average Muslim believes that Muhammad performed all kinds of miracles because of these later stories, not realizing, wait, these later stories contradict your earliest source, which is the Quran. and therefore pretty obvious that these things were later fabrications because as Islam was going out and spreading, people still kept challenging the Muslims. Why didn't your guy perform miracles?

And they start coming up with these stories. And so you find lots of things like that where the story evolved over time, but you go back to the earlier accounts, and there's just no evidence there. But yeah, this is kind of the case with all of the claims, with the perfect preservation, the Quran, with the miracles, with Muhammad's perfect character. As soon as you start going back to your earliest sources,

looking at what they say, you get a very, very night and day difference picture of what happened compared to what Muslims believe today. So you debate a Muslim scholars fairly often. Is that right? I've been in, I think I've been in a little over 60 debates, maybe around 10 or a dozen of those were with non-Muslim, so with atheists and so on.

So probably around 50 debates with Muslims. And we've been doing live streams where we just invite any Muslim who wants to come on with us can join us live and defend his position. We just recently did five days in a row with Dr. Shweb Syed from India. And I gave him an hour and 20 minutes to defend his position. And he spent almost the entire time just attacking the Bible. And so we're doing that live. We're saying, hey, go ahead. Lay out the best you got, lay out your best criticisms,

and then we'll discuss them. We'll go through them and so on. So, yeah. So if people want to see this stuff, do they go to act 17.org? No, that's where I sort of store documents. My main place to go, if people want to watch any of this stuff, would be my YouTube channel, which is Act 17, Apologetics on YouTube. Or if you just type in David Wood on YouTube,

you'll get a bunch of mean, nasty stuff about me as well. but if you find my channel, you could go to recent live streams. I make shorter videos, but we also do live streams. Forgive me. We're at the end of a segment. We'll be right back with David Wood. So are you tired of being tired? Well, then it's time to get the tea. Hey, it's Lisa here to tell you about this all natural, all organic tea I've been drinking

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Thank you. Just yesterday morning, they let me know. Hey folks, I'm talking to David Wood. His ministry is called Acts 17 apologetics. You can check it out on YouTube. Tons of stuff there to see. So David, you talk to people and you referred to just yesterday or the other day talking to somebody for an hour and 20 minutes where he basically attacked the Bible.

What are some of the principal attacks that he made on the Bible? and how do you parry those attacks? Well, pretty standard stuff. So it will be look at, you know, the story of Lott having sex with his daughters, getting drunken, his daughter's having sex with them and stuff. So they'll point out all these, you know, immoral things in the Bible, where apparently not realizing that, hey, we agree that there are all kinds of immoral things. The Bible is recording things that it's not promoting.

It's recording, right? When it talks about someone, the war is going on or David, you know, having your eye killed and things like that, it's not saying, hey, these are good things to do and therefore everyone needs to do them. We say that these things are descriptive rather than prescriptive. It's describing things. This was a Muslim scholar? Yes. But it would strike me that a Muslim scholar would agree with that part of the Bible. In other words, that they say that that's part of their, you know, the campus.

of their faith as well. Is that not? Yeah, you're right on track as far as the major response. If an atheist were bringing these things up, then the response would be to show what role these things play in history and to explain how the revelation works and so on. When a Muslim is bringing these things up and saying, therefore, this can't be the word of God, the response is more along the lines of, wait a minute, your God and your prophet affirm the inspiration and the preservation and the authority of our book, you're condemning it. So you're condemning your own God and your own prophet for affirming our book that you just condemned.

So it's more along those lines where, and some people are like, well, why are you using their stuff to avoid defending your own? It's more along the lines of, you know, if I were to argue that, let's say I argue that Jesus rose from the dead to an atheist. And the atheist says, that's nonsense because miracles are impossible. Well, my response there would be some sort of defense of the, possibility of miracles, defense of the existence of God, something like that. If a Muslim said to me, well, the resurrection is ridiculous because miracles don't occur. My response is not going to be to give

a defense of the philosophical possibility of miracles. It's going to be, you're a Muslim. What are you talking about? If you want to leave Islam and become an agnostic or an atheist and then come back with that objection, by all means do so. But right now, your own beliefs block this criticism. And that's sort of the same thing. If your God and your prophet affirm the inspiration and the preservation and the authority of both the Torah and the gospel. And your book says no one can ever change Allah's words and that Allah revealed these texts, then the moment you start attacking them, hey, wait a minute, you're attacking your own God and your own prophet here. I mean, it sounds to me like, you know, because the gospel is affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus,

the Muslims are in a pickle, like right out of the starting gate and that their faith rests. on an intellectual hodgepodge that's so messy. So what accounts for the appeal of Islam? In other words, how is it possible that things like that can be waved away by so many people so easily? Yeah, it's, I mean, if you think about it, it's really inescapable. The Quran affirms texts that contradict Islam, right? So there are only two possibilities. Either we have, either we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, or we don't.

We've got something that's corrupt or something else. If we have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false because Islam contradicts our book. If we don't have the inspired, preserved, authoritative word of God, Islam is false. Because it says, Islam says we have the inspired, preserved authoritative word of God. So either way, Islam is false. You'd think this people would recognize this problem. But the early Muslims who started to recognize this, that the Quran is affirming texts that contradict the Quran, they're basically in a position where you can't come out and say, oh, I guess Islam is wrong. you get your head chopped off.

So it just became ingrained in Islam over the centuries. Nope. Their books have been corrupted, even though the Quran denies that anyone could corrupt these books, and they'll just say it over and over and over again. And you have to keep putting the sources, their own sources, in front of them, showing them, look, your own sources contradict what you're telling us right now.

You're saying the Bible has been corrupted. Your own God says it can't corrupt. It can't be corrupted. Your own book says, And people want to look up the references, Surah 18, verse 27, Surah 6, verse 115, both of those say, in the context of talking about the books of Allah, no one can change his words.

And so no one can change the words of Allah that he is revealed. And yet every Muslim is walking up saying, yep, Allah revealed the Torah in the gospel, but they were corrupted. So they're contradicting their own books. And so it just takes a while to get them out of this. Well, there must be many Muslim scholars or scholarly imams who know what you're talking about. How do you suppose they get around it?

What do they do to get around this? Well, we don't have to get hypothetical here. We know exactly what they say. Their arguments are absolutely horrible. They go to these verses of the Quran, which when you read them in context or you read them in the context of the historical background, can't possibly be talking about the corruption of the Bible,

and they'll say it does anyway because the alternative is that Islam is false. So they'll go to verses of the Quran, and the verses will not will not be saying anything about the corruption of, let's say, the gospel, and they'll say it is anyway. So the strongest verse they had is sort of two, verse 79. That's the verse that supposedly says the Bible's been corrupted. I did a video going through 26 reasons.

It can't possibly refer to the corruption of the text, and they'll still say it does anyway. So it's just a sad situation. I'm assuming that you've seen a lot of people come to Christian faith as a result. of your ministry, of your knowledge of both faiths. So when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about that. Folks, I'm talking to David Wood. The website, Acts 17, the numbers, 17. Acts17.org.

We'll be right back. Hey, Albin. Hey, Eric. Can I tell you about Relief Factor? Please. No, actually, I mean, can I tell you about it? Okay, you may. I may.

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Folks, I'm talking to David Wood, the website, acts17.org. So, David, you must over the years have seen, Many Muslims come to faith in Christ. Talk about that a little bit, because I'm fascinated. Yeah, so lots. One or two before Nabil and then Nabil became a Christian, and then, yeah, there was a time probably four or five years ago when I was sort of skimming my comments on YouTube during the morning. I'd go through my comments and take pictures of the people who said they were leaving Islam,

and it was between one and three a day, people who were saying they were leaving Islam. And sometimes they become atheists, right? Sometimes they just say, wow, I've been, you know, I don't trust religion anymore after it did this to me. So sometimes they became, they would become atheist. But a lot of times they don't distrust everything. They still believe in God. They still believe in Jesus. And so those tend to become Christians.

And so it was between one and three a day, comments I was getting, it was too time-consuming. so I stopped doing that. I would guess that it would be much more now. But sometimes I'll look down in the comments of a particular video I posted and say 10 or 12 comments saying, hey, I left Islam after watching these videos. And so it's really just, this is the best time in all of history. This is the best time in all of history for people who want to reach Muslims with the gospel.

There's never been a better time. I mean, 14 centuries of Christians, you had Christians over here and you had Muslims over there. And if you wanted to go reach Muslims with the gospel, you had a good chance of getting your head chopped off. Whereas now you have tons of Muslims in the West, but you also have the technology that, I mean, anyone who's watching right now can talk to a Muslim in Saudi Arabia on Facebook using your phone.

I mean, 14 centuries of Christians who wanted to reach Muslims with the gospel couldn't have dreamed of these kinds of opportunities. And that's why it's so effective right now to be using technology to be exposing some of the claims of Islam. and to be sharing facts about Christianity. How many viewers do you get typically on some of your videos? It can be millions of a video really takes off, usually probably 40 to 50,000 views in the first day of a video.

And then it kind of depends on where it goes from there. That is so extraordinary and so encouraging. Well, I don't imagine that there are too many people who are as effective as you are at doing what you do. So I would say that folks can use your videos and send them around. And that's one of the reasons I want to have you. You want to encourage people to find your videos on YouTube Acts, 17 apologetics being the channel, and to send them around because I've always said that the more we talk about these things, when people tell you to shut up and don't talk about something,

you know they're hiding something. And that we've had a lot of guests on talking about things that other people won't talk about because I thought, are we afraid of the truth? If we're afraid of the truth, maybe we've got a problem. You know, but it is wonderful to hear. I would imagine that as a result of your success in this area, your life has been threatened. Yeah, pretty, pretty regular. Actually, it's interesting.

It's not as much now as it used to be. I used to get death threats pretty much every day. And it wouldn't just be about, it wouldn't just be towards me. It would be, you know, there would obviously be the, hey, we're going to saw your head off. Hey, we're going to kill you. Hey, we're going to slaughter you. It would also be, hey, we're going to rape your wife and kill her in front of you. We're going to rape your mother.

We're going to slaughter your kids. That's how you know they're worshipping the one true God when they go there, right? Right away, you're thinking, you know what? I may have made a mistake. That's pretty gruesome. Why do you think this has gone downhill somewhat? Well, I mean, that's part of the religion. Muhammad ordered his followers to execute people for making fun of him.

And so if you are criticizing Islam, if you're exposing things, there is this natural tendency to sort of lash out in the way that Muhammad would have. But it's really a means of control. In a Muslim country, I would be charged with blasphemy and I would be thrown in prison and executed in a place like Pakistan. In the West, you can't do that. And so you have to rely on threats and intimidation to try and achieve the same goal. And it does work. I've seen people, I've seen people go into ministry to Muslims saying, man, I really have a heart and a passion for reaching Muslims. And then six months later, they're not touching it anymore. And I say, what happened? like, I can't deal with this.

Because, so the idea is, if you heap enough abuse and threats on people, you can actually control their behavior. There are other people who use this method. I was just going to say, this is what the cultural Marxists in today's left are doing, BLM and Antifa and others is that they, they know that if they are vicious, vicious, vicious, vicious, vicious, eventually most people will say, I can't deal with this. I don't want to deal with this. So I'll just shut up and go along with the program.

Unfortunately, the Nazis also use that. So it doesn't really have too many antecedents that we can admire. I guess, you know, you say in countries like the United States, we had a guest on Elizabeth Sabadich Wolf who was teaching something in that you're familiar with her. She was in Austria and she was just giving a course. Somebody asked her to give a course on Islam and she talked about Muhammad, you know, taking as a bride a nine-year-old, I guess. Is that correct?

Yeah, Muhammad married Aisha when she was six or seven, and he consummated the marriage when she was nine. So he had sex with her when she was a nine-year-old girl. He was 54 years old. Huh. That's quite an age difference there, David. Okay, so you're saying that we know that Muhammad had sex with a nine-year-old. Now, when this person, Elizabeth Sabatish Wolf talked about this, she used the term, pedophilia, and I don't know how else one characterizes sex between 50-somethings with nine-year-olds

in any other way, but she was severely prosecuted in Austria and by the EU, I believe, because she refused to recant the word. In other words, it was that word that people found offensive. So we're finding a lot of this happening in the West. So it seems to me that you're you're kind of stalwart, more stalwart than many. Yeah, so in that case, in the case of Europe, it's now a situation where doesn't matter whether what you're saying is true. It's are, is a certain group offended by it. And if it's offensive, well, you just can't say it.

You're charged with like hurting their feelings and causing unrest by hurting their feelings and so on. So yeah, it's a, it's a pretty, pretty rough situation. But yeah, if Islam is really hell-bent on controlling people through threats and insults, well, this is a situation where being a psychopath actually comes in handy because it doesn't work. That's funny. I wish I could become a psychopath at least temporarily because it's a wonderful thing to see you out there doing what you're doing. We're going to go to another break.

We'll be back with David Wood. One store's away. Folks talking to David Wood, David, we've just scratched the surface of all these things. So we want to have you back as soon as possible. Let me ask you this. We've just got less than four minutes here. If you're talking to an atheist about the Christian faith and they say what you believe is absolutely preposterous, what is your three and a half minute response to that kind of a mentality?

Well, if I mean, if I'm talking to an atheist, I would start by asking some questions about how various things happen because the atheists really don't seem to apply the same level of skepticism to their own beliefs. I mean, if you believe that universe explode by whatever means, you know, the universe explode, whether you believe in the multiverse that came before it or something like that, and then it just so happens to have the right laws of nature and so on for life when it's massively improbable and you believe that life formed on its own and that human consciousness, arose through natural processes. You've got a series of miracles. And so I don't think you're in a position to just be dismissive of Christians or Muslims or anyone, right? I mean, you believe some stuff that flies in the face of everything we know. Everything we've ever learned through science tells us where information comes from. And the information that's packed into your cells is vastly more sophisticated. You have vastly more sophisticated information.

storage systems, then these books, this computer, anything, right? So to just say, well, you know, I have the beliefs that are grounded in, you know, reason and you guys have these superstitious, silly beliefs. So I would spend some time on that and then try to get the atheist to realize, do you realize why I would, do you at least realize why I would think that this requires an intelligent designer? Do you at least understand why I would think that the universe requires a cause, based on cause and effect and get them to realize that, hey, maybe I shouldn't just be saying all these people are stupid and then to kind of take it from there. So what's more reasonable here? Intelligence or non-intelligence. What's more reasonable here, cause or no cause? And then, you know,

eventually get into a case for miracles, things like that. Well, and you're talking about things. I mean, I've talked about this quite a bit myself and I'm working on a book that deals with this, but that it is the science of the last 50 or 60 years that points to the idea of a God beyond space and time, an intelligent designer. In other words, you could have made these claims, you know, that some of these atheists make in 1890, and it would be much harder to challenge them.

But the science has day by day, year by year, pointed in the opposite direction, which is, of course, at least ironic. Yeah, I mean, I believe that, Christians now have better evidence for their core claims about the existence of God and the resurrection than we've ever had. You might have had better evidence for the resurrection if you were there. But as far as historical evidence for the resurrection, scientific and philosophical evidence for the existence of God, we have stronger evidence now than we've ever had.

What's happened is that people have gone almost insane with their level of skepticism in terms of beliefs that they don't want to entertain. All they do is they raise their skepticism up to level. 10. But when their own claims are being investigated, they lower their level of skepticism down to one. And so you can shift your level of skepticism to come up with any system you want, right? Anything I don't want to believe, I'm going to be level 10 skepticism, anything I want to believe, I'm going to lower it to the drops to the floor. And that's kind of where I see things right now. I really do think we're at a point in history when atheism looks at. preposterous. You can say anything you like, you can criticize the Bible all day long,

but the idea that there is absolutely no intelligent creator, no God, I think is a preposterous conclusion. You can come to any other conclusion you want, but I guess I'm simply agreeing with you. I'm so sorry we're out of time, David, we will endeavor to have you back as soon as possible. Thanks for what you do, and thanks for your time today. Really appreciate it. All right. Catch y'all next time.