The Eric Metaxas Show - Dr. Gerson Moreno-Riaño Cornerstone University’s 12th president.

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Dr. Gerson Moreno-Riaño joins the program to discuss the state of education in America 

Welcome to the Eric Metaxas show. I shouldn't tell you this, but Eric hired someone who sounds just like him to host today's show. But since I'm the announcer, they told me, so I'm telling you, don't be fooled. The real Eric's in jail. Hey there, folks. At Socrates in the city, we're doing a new thing. It's called The Question of where we interview somebody. I'm not talking.

We just let them talk on an important question. and we've got a number of those. They're all like nine, ten minutes long. We're going to play one of those for you right now. Here it is. By religion, I mean a perspective on the world that assumes there exists some kind of supernatural reality that is responsible for ordering and creating the universe

is responsible for human life and that human beings can be and should be in some kind of relationship with both as a preparation for what awaits us after day. and in order to be good people and live virtuous lives in relationship with the truth about the universe while we're on planet Earth. So all of the big religious traditions, not just Christianity, but Islam and Hinduism and other faiths as well fall under this definition, but communism and Taylor Swiftism would not. Religious faith is not something that exists in a separate sphere

from reason. It's not something that in order to practice or believe in, you have to set aside reason, science, the entire modern way of knowing, that in fact reason is a foundation, a strong foundation for religious faith. That's not to say that you can fully reason your way into a relationship with God or into absolute certainty about the truth of revelation. The gift of faith is obviously a gift, and I'm not saying that reason alone suffices, but I think reason alone does suffice to tell you that if you are interested in religion, practicing a religion, going to church, pursuing God, pursuing the sacred, you were doing something sensible, practical, hard-headed, something that any serious human being given a finite life on earth should absolutely do.

I think to the extent that modern people have become less religious, I wouldn't say They've ceased to be religious entirely. It's a combination of a couple of different forces. One is an intellectual or ideological shift where people have gone from seeing religion and religious belief and scientific inquiry and technological inquiry as complementary, which is how, for instance, Galileo or Copernicus or Sir Isaac Duton would have seen them,

to seeing them as intention and basically saying you have to choose one or the other. You can have science and reason or you can have religion, God, and the Bible, but you can't have both. So that's sort of the intellectual side of things. But then on the practical side of things, I think modern people are rich, comfortable, easily distracted, distant from death and the realities of death, not always and everywhere, but to a much more substantial degree than at any point in the human past.

And I don't think if you read, let's say, the Old Testament or the New Testament, and all of their warnings and admonitions against the perils of wealth and comfort and luxury and distraction? I don't think if you read those warnings, you would be surprised that people in a wealthy, comfortable, and luxury in society would find it harder, not just to believe in God, but to sort of practice religion seriously and to take its demands and rigors seriously. It's easier to take a demanding religion seriously when life imposes lots and lots of demands on you. and it's harder to accept the burdens, the real burdens, that religious belief imposes on you when you're in a situation of fundamental comfort,

and those obligations seem unnecessarily hard. My case for the reasonability of religion doesn't rest on one single slam-dunk proof. It's not like you open Thomas Aquinas, find one of his arguments for the existence of God, and declare that it settles everything forever. I think that you can find the case for God, rather, in converging lines of argument that all seem to point in a similar direction

and that the idea of God makes sense of in a way that no other idea does. And so some of these are familiar, but they start with just the obvious presence of order and design and structure and mathematical beauty in the cosmos, which has always been one of the cases for God. But to that case, modern science has added a lot of evidence showing how carefully and precisely fine-tuned the universe is, how radically unlikely it is that this universe, a universe capable of having stars and planets and life itself would arise spontaneously or by chance without some kind of intentionality behind it. So that's something that is, I think, actually new, an argument for God that modern science has given us that we did not have before. So that's the first line,

design at the highest level of the cosmos. The second line starts with human experience, with our experience of consciousness, will, reason, selfhood, all of which are incredibly difficult to explain on materialist grounds alone. And this, too, is something that I think a lot of scientists and serious philosophers who are not themselves religious or not necessarily have come around to in the last few decades to acknowledge that there is what gets called a hard problem of consciousness

that isn't easily swept away, even with all the neuroscientific advances, and even with artificial intelligence, you can explain how you could get a machine that produces outputs like a human mind, but it's really hard to explain how you could have a machine that has the internal experience of the human mind.

An experience that then in turn has enabled us to understand the highest levels of the cosmos, to penetrate the great mysteries, map our own genetic code, to split the atom, to essentially do what would have seemed to our ancestors like godlike things. And I think that's the idea, of human beings being made in the image of God

comes from that connection between our consciousness and its capabilities at the lower level of the universe and the evidence for order and design at the higher level. Our minds seem to participate in some way in whatever larger mind created the whole. And then the final converging line is just the resilience and persistence

of religious experience, meaning everything from mystical encounters to healing miracles, to near-death experiences and more, all of which have not gone away under secular conditions. There's some evidence, in fact, that they may have actually increased. They fall upon the non-religious as well as the religious. You don't have to be a religious person to have a religious experience.

This is not at all what sort of atheists and materialists in, say, the 18th century would have predicted. There was a large expectation that once you stopped making everyone read the Bible and stopped having established churches and sort of swept away all the supposed mythology of Christianity, people would stop claiming to have encountered God or had a prophetic dream, or encountered the divine on the threshold of death, or been healed after prayer. But none of that has gone away. All of it has persisted. And I think it adds a third line of convergence that the idea of God makes sense of. You have evidence for structure.

You have evidence that our minds can participate in and understand that structure. And you have evidence in religious experience that whoever is responsible for that structure is interested in talking to and guiding and communicating with us. So you've looked at this evidence and you say, okay, there might be a god, but where do I go next? I think first of all, you should assume that if there is a god, he's probably not out to get you, right? So a lot of people look at the incredible diversity of religions in the world and say, oh, you know, there are 127 different options. How could I possibly pick one? How could I possibly know which one is true? And I think it's safe to assume that whatever the truest revelation of God's purposes is, it's not confined to one

small five-person cult somewhere in the Aleutian Islands that you're never going to encounter in your life. I think if God is real and if he has intentions and plans for human life, It's totally reasonable to just start with the big religious traditions, the ones that have been around for a long time, that have shaped whole civilizations, that have endured through cultural change, economic change, theological controversy, right? And to say, I should probably be a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or Hindu

before you start worrying about sort of the deep particularities of doctrine and dogma. And if you've done that, I think that actually narrows the choice in a reasonable way, and you can proceed to doing things like reading the scriptures of the major religions, reading about their origin stories, seeing how you find the story of Muhammad versus the story of Jesus versus the story of the Buddha. I don't think that that is at all an impossible personal or intellectual project for someone to embark on, and I think we do it all the time in non-religious walks of life. People choose their political perspective based on this kind of general engagement with different ideologies and worldviews. I think that you can do the same for

religion. But I would add one other thing. If God is not out to get you, it's also okay to look for indicators of the divine leading you just directly in your own life. A major retail chain just canceled a massive order leaving My Pillo with an overstock of the classic My Pills, and this is your gain, because for a limited time, my Pillo's offering their entire classic collection at true wholesale prices. Get a standard MyPillow for just 1798. Want more? Upgrade to queen size for only 2298 or king size for 2498. Snag body pillows for 2998 and versatile multi-use pillows for just 998. Give your bet a whole new pillow set only while supplies last. Visit MyPillow.com today. Use promo code Eric or call 800-9783057 to score these amazing deals while they're in stock. Plus when your order totals $75 or more, you'll receive $100 in

free digital gifts, no strings attached. That's right. Premium pillows at unbeatable prices and bonus gifts to top it off. Don't wait. Head to MyPillow.com today or call 800-978-3057. Now don't forget to use promo code Eric to grab your standard My Pillow for only 1798 only while supplies last. Hey there, folks, as promised I have as my guest right now, the president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gerson, Moreno Riano. Did I get it? Did I get it? You got it. You got it. I got it. Welcome to the program. You've been on here before. I thought we should start with me making an announcement that, I mean, I feel very honored by this. I get a little embarrassed. But you as the president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids have made me a president's distinguished senior fellow at Cornerstone.

Stone University. So first of all, I want to say that and say how excited I am and to say thank you to you and the Cornerstone community for giving me that honor. Knowing what I know about you and Cornerstone, it means a lot to me. Eric, thank you. That's humbling. And we're just so grateful that you're with us. Grateful for your work. I think I've shared this with you before. I'm just so grateful for your leadership, your courage and the significant questions you bring before the country and church. in the Christian community for us to think about and goading us, right, to be faithful to Christ and the gospel in a Christian worldview. So I'm just thrilled that you're a distinguished senior or fellow here at Cornerstone. Look forward to all you're going to do on our campus with our students in the community. A lot of excitement about that. And I'm thrilled to be a partner with you, Eric. Well, you know something, as you're talking, people are probably already thinking

this. But in case they're not, let me say this. Ladies and gentlemen, who are listening to to this program, what does it say about Cornerstone University that they would want me to be affiliated with them? You don't see Wheaton College or Yale University inviting me to be affiliated with them. Why is that and why is it that Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids would do that? It tells you about the values of Cornerstone University. And we've talked about this many times on the program and Grissela. son, I've spoken to you about it privately, but one of the dismaying things of our time is to see so-called Christian universities be very, very fearful, in some cases, really cowardly about

addressing the vital issues that concern every American and certainly evangelical Christians in the country, and instead of being leaders or followers. And so the fact that you guys at Cornerstone, and there's just a handful of colleges in the country, ladies and gentlemen, and you probably know what they are, Liberty, you know, Grand Canyon. There's just a handful of Christian colleges that are really being brave. And at the top of the list, Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids. So I am, I'm happy to say that maybe Gerson, that leads us into a conversation about, you know, higher education or the concept of higher education for the public good. I mean, whenever anybody hears that I went to Yale University, I have to say to them,

excuse me, let me be real clear. I'm not proud of that. Yale University is at the top of the list of a place that once upon a time was proudly Christian a long, long, long time ago. And they slid and slid and slid and slid. And they are the opposite of that. Whatever the opposite of that is, that's what they are today. Harvard is the same, Columbia, all of these elite institutions. But it's even sadder when institutions that more recently were proudly on the side of truth

and the good, the true, the beautiful, and holding up the name of Jesus bravely, prophetically, where they have slid. I mentioned Wheaton. There are others. we know that Biola hired Ed Stetzer recently. I mean, I'm always horrified because I have friends in all these places. And so when we're talking about higher education for the public good, I mean, you are the president of Cornerstone. What does that mean to you and what has happened to this idea in recent times? Eric, thank you.

And thank you for all your kind words and comments. You know, you have to go back and you know, you have to go back. you're an expert. And you have to go back and look at the founding of our country, even before then, and the purpose of higher education at the very founding. And it was always to train ministers for the gospel, right, for churches, for ministry, and to connect the beauty of Christianity and the gospel in the biblical worldview theology to the work they were doing to serve the public good, to serve the country, to serve communities. And so Christ and the gospel was at the very core of higher education as early to 1600s in our country when you begin to trace how that how

universities have drifted from that founding moral purpose and vision it's terrifying and there are a lot of reasons for it and when I think through one of the big things is that we have begun as universities many universities have begun to champion freedom over truth right they've begun to champion prestige and the prestige of the academy which is always a more moving target over faithfulness and fidelity to Christ in the gospel. And it began to champion, I would say, what Paul says, the wisdom of the world over the wisdom of the gospel and the wisdom of Christ. And if I were to summarize it, it would be in those three ways that's happened

throughout American history. Even evangelical and Christian University have begun to do the same thing. It seems as we want the respect of the academy. Again, a moving target, but whatever that is, Many wanted more than they want fidelity to Christ and fidelity to the scriptures. And I think that's at the core of this question, the prestige issue, the respect issue that the academy would give and that sometimes academics long for, right, to be affirmed, to be told you're one of us. Your scholarship is as good as ours, whatever those things may mean. And I think that's part of it. The other part of it, I think, is that the intellect, when it is not hardest by the gospel and by Christ, becomes full of hubris and destructive. It's just one of the great cardinal sin of academia is hubris, it's pride.

And unless the intellect is brought to under the yoke of Christ, right, of Christ, the king of king and Lord of Lords and the true beautiful good, what happens is the intellect can drift quickly and rapidly away. And I think that's part of what's happened as well. That's the history of civilizations, right? Humbrous. Right? Yeah. Well, I mean, what's so interesting to me is because I'm writing this book on the American Revolution and part of my research, you know, I'm studying the Puritans, the 17th century.

And it's so fascinating to me that no sooner, you know, do the Pilgrims come over in 1620 and Winthrop and the others in 1630 to found Massachusetts Bay Colony, they believe, and this is so fascinating, they believe that in order for the faith to thrive, in order for people to thrive, education has to be central. They have to educate people to understand what does it mean to be a good citizen? What does the Bible teach? We have to be educated. And it's interesting because we think of these as like enlightenment values, but in fact, they're biblical values. And it's also this idea that we're not afraid of freedom.

We're not afraid to teach that people can take those ideas and run with them. We have to trust that if we do our job, enough people will get it. And the antithesis of that, of course, which they saw as, you know, in the corrupt established churches of Europe, the idea that we don't want the people to know too much. We'll tell them what to think. And they saw that, you know, they would have called it popery or whatever. But the point is the concept of people being stuck in this kind of feudal system where they don't know too much. The founders of this nation, that generation in the 17th century, he said the most

important thing is education. So they founded Harvard. Folks, think about this, in the 1630s. Think about this. They come over on a boat in 1630 to Boston. Four years later, they found Harvard because they say this is vital that we educate our people to understand these kinds of things. And there were grammar schools everywhere. It was utterly central, and that was a Christian vision. It was a Protestant Christian vision in the 17th century, and that was the whole point. Yale was founded for that. In fact, every single one of the Ivy Leagues, except for Cornell, were founded as explicitly Christian, absolutely explicitly Christian. So that's kind of where we started, and we've seen all kinds of drift and all kinds of drift, and now we're at a point where places like Wheaton have

drifted and it's sad. And a lot of the institutions we thought of as Christian have drifted. Christianity today, you know, has gone to the devil and the Episcopal Church. We've talked about that on this program. I mean, it's kind of fascinating to watch this. So when I see somebody holding the line bravely, as you guys are doing at Cornerstone University, and folks, this is not a commercial for Cornerstone, but since we're introducing the concept here, I just, I just want to say, you know, I feel like this is, the question today is who's willing to fight the battles, who's willing to stand, and the very fact, Gerson, that you and Cornerstone would want to be affiliated with me.

I just have to say, it seems crazy, but in this day and age, that's kind of brave. It's kind of a big thing. And that's why I'm so humbled by it. We're going to go to a break, but I want to say that, you know, to folks, if you're not familiar, with Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, avail yourself of this thing that I call the internet. And you can look it up. But we need to know where we could send our kids or grandkids

where they're not going to get polluted. And right now, most of the colleges that I would have recommended 10 or 15 years ago, I would not. Most of the Christian colleges, I would not. Okay, we'll be right back. Folks, don't go away. That's not you know I couldn't sleep, wouldn't sleep,

tossing. And turning about. Folks, welcome back. I have as my guest today, the president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His name is Gerson Moreno Riyanio. I give myself a big pat on the back, Gerson. Every time I mention to say your beautiful name, Gerson Moreno Rianio. Thank you, Eric.

Okay. Hallelujah. Okay, so seriously, though, you, we were talking about higher education, and you mentioned in the first of the first of the world, break, how Donald Trump is questioning the orthodoxy. Talk about that, because this is, Trump's bravery on this is very big. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you one simple example. Just a few weeks back, I had the opportunity to be in Washington, D.C. I met with a number of senior leaders in the Department of Education to talk about higher ed and some of the things we're doing,

Cornerstone. It was fascinating to me what some of the things they shared with me or, or, and said, one of them, they said, you know, you're one of the first presidents that's come to meet with us who has not come to complain and to ask for more. I just want to stop there and say that, right? You're not asking us for more reasons. There's more money. You're not complaining about anything. I said, no, I'm here actually to share some solutions with you that we have that I think it would be great for the country. But that made me think deeply about the, what I call sort of the entitlement of higher education in America.

I mean, it is an industry that's significantly subsidized, right? I mean, it really is billions of dollars. And yet we have very challenging issues before us as a nation in terms of how we fund higher ed, how we deliver it, what the value of it really is. Is it truly helping or hurting the country? Those are questions that Donald Trump has introduced it before. It would have been in any theme. I would never talk about it.

But now under his administration and a broader conversation, the question is, is what's the real value? Is it really advancing the public good? Or is it really actually hurting the country and hurting the country and hurting to citizen. Listen, it has been hurting the country for all of our lifetimes. I mean, when I went to Yale in the 80s, I was amazed at how anti-Americanism, anti-Christian worldview was everywhere. I go in as a working class kid. You know, I was raised. We go to church on Sundays. We love America. And I'm confronted with this is, you know, one of the elite institutions in the land. And this was there. And then I realized William F. Buckley in 1950 or 51, publishes his book, God and Man at Yale,

talking about the Yale of the 40s, which was infiltrated by communist thinking, by atheistic thinking. This is in the 40s. So this has been in the academy for decades and decades. And there is no doubt, if you send your kid to one of these elite institutions today, they will be brainwashed. And so, you know, my friend Charlie Kirk has said college is a scam, and I agree with him. In other words, unless you send your kid to one of these places, obviously I think of Cornerstone as one of these few places that you're going to get a real education, why are you doing it? To get a diploma, to get a credential, it's become utterly meaningless. These places are Marxist indoctrination camps, and they have ceased to, I mean, if you want to know

how you can have a ruling class that all thinks the way President Obama thinks and Samantha Powers and Susan Rice and that whole class into the military, General Millie and on and on and on and Comey and Clapper, they all think a certain way. And most of them have come out of these elite institutions. It's become part of elite culture. And it is deeply hostile to the values of most Americans. So we're in a bizarre place. And I guess my question to you is when I hear that Donald Trump is threatening to take away the funding, I think, why is he threatening? Why doesn't he just take it away? Because the fact that they're getting taxpayer dollars, I mean, why should a steamfitter who's working hard every week pay his taxes to go to subsidize Harvard?

I don't get that. Well, you know, I think the general public, Christian or non, have realized that there's something significantly wrong with higher ed. The service show it. The majority on both sides of the aisle, it's headed in the wrong direction. And so I think people understand there's something fundamentally flawed with the sit with higher end and what it's doing, right? It's really in some ways common sense to many, many people. The president has introduced a conversation. The question, there's something wrong, which is shifted, which should remove funding, threaten it, re-regulated, you know, all the things that he needs to do. They're thinking about doing a number of innovative things for the fall as well to, to help universities break free from

some of the accreditation shackles there are on schools. So this would have been unheard of years ago. But think about this, Eric, all these institutions, whether they're the top 10% IVE league or not, are the ones who are educating and training the Christian faculty and a Christian universities, right? That's a very significant challenge. So that any Christian university, when they go to higher faculty, they're hiring them the product of those universities. right and in those faculty you're right are antagonistic I remember during my doctoral program one of the senior faculty came to me my years I was writing my dissertation and said this quote how can someone

as smart as you believe in something as dumb as Christianity that was this question to me now I opened the door for me to share the gospel with him which I did but that thinking is pervasive in higher ed about Christians and Christianity in the gospel and unless a student who is working through that system to become a faculty member, right? Learns on his or her own or goes through a training to think through what does it mean to be a Christian, fill in the blank, sociologists, political scientists, biologists, chemists, whatever it is. How do I think about this as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus, right? How do I think about that? How do I think about teaching and research in that way, being faithful to Christ and being excellent in my discipline? How do I do that? If that is not done,

what happens is that Christian universities and hired people based on credentials, on degrees, right? On their, you know, repertoire. And they don't always think through those issues. And then you have a significant problem at the universities because faculty then began to drift the institution away from its mission-centric gospel morons.

And we've seen this over and over and over again, folks. We'll be right back. We're talking to the president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Welcome back. I'm talking to the president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gerson, Moreno, Riano. And we are, we're talking about education, basically. And I think, I want to ask you, Gerson, if I may. I find that you said this two segments ago. People are always looking for approval. When you're talking about the kind of the ruling classes, the educated classes, the accredited classes, the accredited classes, They want the awards.

They want the this, they want the that. And it's my belief that all of those awards and all of that kind of accreditation has become meaningless. If somebody gives me the Nobel Prize, I would say, this is worthless. They gave this to President Obama five minutes after he was inaugurated because he was a black guy who, what, promised hope? They gave him the Nobel Prize. They gave the Pulitzer Prize to Walter Durante in the 1930s. for his reportage in the New York Times, where he's basically propping up Stalin

who murdered millions of people. They gave him the Pulitzer Prize. What is a Pulitzer Prize worth? We're living in a day and age when a Harvard degree, these things, they seem to mean nothing. And we still have, I guess, these educated classes that are,

they're running after this. I mean, I'm just fascinated that, you know, to say that I write for the New York Times used to mean something. The New York Times has become propaganda. It's, to me, it's a joke. So all of these things, I guess what I'm saying is that you have to have courage to leave

these things aside. But if you're still running after a Harvard degree or a Yale degree because it has some cachet, I think, first of all, I want to say that cachet is gone. And that if you hire somebody who's gone to one of these places, you know you're probably hiring a pretty ignorant, woke person who's just going to cause you trouble in your organization. but a lot of people, including Christians, they don't have that courage. They still are somehow worshipping what we would call things of the world, the accreditation of the world. They want the approval of the world.

And the drift toward the left is so dramatic that even a lot of Christian colleges, they're afraid to speak out against Darwinian evolution, which is just a joke. I mean, if you want to talk about the subject, we can get into the subject. But the idea that we're going to accept Darwinian evolution after all we have seen, we're not going to talk about intelligent design. But you have a lot of people, even in science departments in Christian universities, they're afraid to go there. Yeah, I tell you, I mean, part of it, again, is the desire to be affirmed,

to be recognized, to be told, you know, you're great and you're smart and you're intelligent and that you belong to the cadre of the intellectuals, right, in the academy. I think that drives a lot of what happens. and, you know, I'm mindful of what Christ tells us, and, you know, Paul writes about Christ in Philippians, too. He made himself of no reputation, right? I mean, he pursued with complete courage, what was right, true, beautiful, and good what the father had sent for him to do. I think that's a very important example for us, no matter what we do in the academy and other industries. We have to, through the grace and power of God, do what is true, what is good, what is right? Whether it's recognized or not recognized, right? Whether we're heralded or not. whether it's symbolized or not, it doesn't really matter. You know, we will stand before the Lord, God of the universe, to give an account. And I think that's what we have to focus on and remind ourselves as a discipline. We have to remind ourselves daily throughout our day.

That's why we're here to bring honor and glory to God, which means you do what is beautiful, true, and good. You love him. You love your neighbor rightly done. That's what the ultimate, you know, telos is here. It's not the degree, the recognition. I got published here or there or how much it got published, any of those things. It's really true, beautiful, and good in the centrality of the gospel. And that's what we're trying to foster at Cornerstone, I will tell you.

Again, it's a beautiful opportunity and it's a heart opportunity. Our missions to educate influencers in the world for Jesus Christ. And we've asked ourselves at Cornerston this question in the last several years to be faithful to that mission, we have to ensure that Christ is the greatest influence around our campus, in our hearts, in our thinking, right, in our teaching, right? I remember years ago, a colleague of mine was a sociologist, said to me, I'm a sociologist first and a Christian second, right? And I forget, she said this to me. It made me think deeply about, wow, how do we, you know, how do we raise our disciplines and our callings or the things we love more highly than Jesus?

Why would we do that? And how do we keep ourselves from do that? But that poll is significant, Eric, it's real. And whether it's in the academy or in other industry, that pull of putting other things before the Lord and Christ in our profession is a real thing. To me, it kind of taps into what I've been writing about and talking about the last few years. And my last book is called Religinalist Christianity. There's this idea of religiousness, religiosity, that they're really confusing true Christianity with this religiosity or this theological thing. If you are a Christian, folks, truth is your number one. So when you say I'm a sociologist or a scientist, whatever that, your number one value as a

Christian is truth. So you're going to be the best scientist because of that. You're going to be brave because you're following the facts. You're following the truth. But there are people that have relegated their faith to this kind of religious corner. I keep saying this over and over and over again. So for somebody to say, I'm a sociologist first and a Christian second means that they don't understand the values of Christian faith.

But the values of Christian faith are what enable you to be good in whatever discipline you're in. So to say somehow that, you know, it's the values of science. Who do you think invented science? Where do we get the idea that there is a knowable universe that can be discoverable? This comes out of our fundamental beliefs as a Christian. So that's a fascinating concept that somebody would have said that to you. Yeah, and it was a Christian university where I was working, right? And so I learned from that moment on that any time you bring in,

in faculty or staff, the university, it's really important to discern where are you on the Christian worldview and your commitment to Jesus and truth and how central is that to what you do and how have you worked that out? And it's also really important for universities to develop their faculty and your staff. It's a continual thing to develop in that area. Jesus Christ is supreme. Colossus 116 and 17. The supremacy of Jesus Christ has to be evident in all that we do. It's a high calling. It's a high bar that only by God's grace can we achieve. and through effort, right? And so universities have a tremendous responsibility

to educate their faculty well, develop them well, train them well, hold them accountable in the space because they will be shaping hearts and minds in the classroom. And so that, I've told this to faculty for years, that's some of the most important work that we do. Research is beautiful, scholarship is beautiful, but that intersection between my mind and my heart and the heart and mind of my students is absolutely pivotal.

And if we fail there, we fail as an institution. Well, that to me really is at the heart of it. We come back. I want to talk to you about truth, lying, and what that means to us as Christians in the academy. And we can talk about what happened at Harvard in the last year. Unbelievable. We'll be right back.

I'm talking to Gerson Moreno Riano, otherwise known as the president of Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So Gerson, you know, just before we went to the break, I was thinking of Claudine Gay, who was the president of Harvard University, who, you know, it's one of these things. You can't even believe it. She basically lost her job because of a plagiarism scandal. In other words, you talk about, you know, we're teaching our kids at Cornerstone about, character and values and faith. And you realize that without that, you cannot even have a university.

I mean, if people are lying and using AI or using whatever, they're just cheating. If they don't get that, everything breaks down. And the head of the arguably the top institution of higher learning in America, at least used to be, is taken out because of a plagiarism scandal. What message does that send to everybody down the line, including to the undergraduates, the cynicism to find out that the one person that you're supposed to look to as the model is guilty of the most basic and egregious errors? And then to compound it that the corrupt system looked the other way. Why? Because she was a black woman. A black woman.

Oh, that's like so sacred. you know, we need to have this kind of diversity. And so we don't want somebody like that to be tagged as a plagiarist. So we're going to look the other way. And I know friends who looked into this kind of stuff, Christopher Rufo and others, they said that this scandal is so deep. It's all through the academy. Plagiarism, lying, looking the other way, corruption. It's just unbelievable. So unless you restore these basics, what are you sending your kids into? Yeah, I mean, I will tell you that today it's so easy with AI and so many technologies and so many things to play fast and loose with truth and beauty and goodness and boundaries and morality, right? It's almost as if many in any industry and throttages, I think there are no boundaries.

This stuff is all conventional, right? It doesn't really matter. There are no rules to anything. It's made up by somebody and therefore, you know, you can eliminate the borders and the guardrails. And, you know, it's a foolish, as you know, it's a foolish proposition. The minute you begin to explore that and really drill down into it, it falls apart. It's destructive to human life, to civilization, to families, the communities, to a country. So that the importance of doing two things.

One, upholding the beauty of what is true, good, and right, and those principles, number one. And number two, being able to educate students to learn what it means to grow and to have discipline and to correction and have correction and redirect, right? So that because oftentimes you look at heroes of the past, and this is what the left will do, as you know, they'll point out their glaring errors and say, you know, because they were like this, these principles are false. They can't be valid. You have to reject everything because of the human sin or wickedness or poor rational decisions that made on and on. And that continues throughout our educational system, K-12, and higher ed. So you throw everything away because of human error or human sin.

And part of what we have to learn to educate our students is to say, look, these principles are objectively true and beautiful and good, regardless of whether people follow them or not or how perfectly they follow them. Okay. So let's separate those two things. Let's talk about human error and sin and redemption and the need for salvation and correction. But that's a separate question to simply say the principles don't exist because none of us ever follow them. So they must be wrong, right? There must be something false. Yeah, there's no such thing as truth.

That's the problem, folks. You have to believe there is such a thing as truth. God is real. There's such a thing as the good. There's such a thing as evil. We're going to have to leave it there. Gerson, just a joy to have you on. We'll talk to you whenever we get a chance.

God bless you, my friend. Eric, likewise to you, and look forward to seeing you still on our campus, Eric. Thanks so much.