The Eric Metaxas Show - Stephen Meyer (Encore continued)

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute continues his exploration of ideas found in his book, "The Return of the God Hypothesis," at the recent Socrates in the City event where Meyer showed that the universe had a beginning and is “finely tuned.” (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. The Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey, folks. You're listening to a special edition of the Airman Taxis Show. We are airing my recent Socrates in the City conversation with Dr. Stephen Meyer. He then proceeded to explain that he was really moved to a point of thinking. deeply about religious faith because whereas the evidence was pointing unequivocally in one direction,

he didn't want it to be so. And then he began to, he explained that he began to think about, well, what is it about me that doesn't want this to be so? I've always prided myself on my objectivity. It was a very compelling story. In the very next panel, there was a similar intellectual conversion announced by a leading origin of life researcher who worked on this problem of abiogenesis named Dean Kenyon. and Kenyon announced on the panel, he also surprised people by sitting on the side with the the theists and explained, he argued that the discovery of the information bearing properties of DNA, everything that Crick had anticipated,

suggests that what he called the natural theological question should now be reopened by the philosophers. In other words, we may as scientists be looking at evidence for the existence of God in the inner workings of the cell. And so I'm, you know, 27 years. I'm kind of blown away at this. It was clear to me that the the theist seemed to have the intellectual initiative in the discussion, that the people defending chemical evolutionary theory had nothing to offer except promissory notes

that maybe we'll figure it out down the road. So I got really seized with this. I was working with doing digital signal processing of seismic data, which was an early form of information technology, and the thought that the discovery of information inside cells was the holy grail of the origin of life problem, just absolutely seized me. I got really fascinated with that.

I met another scientist who was on the panel that day named Charles Thaxton, who had written a recent book called The Mystery of Life's Origin. He happened to be living in Dallas. I started having long conversations with him after work. A year later, I was off to grad school and realized, I want to work on this origin of life problem. People came to see faith as being at odds with science, rationality as being at odds with religious faith.

and this becomes kind of baked into the way people think, including Einstein and Sandige, and everybody seems to know that that's a fact. It's the all, I call the all reasonable people agree phenomenon. We have that all over the place in the academic culture. Exactly. But out of the 19th century, all reasonable people seem to agree that science undermines belief in God

and supports a kind of materialistic worldview, which then becomes the backdrop, the background assumption that people approach. in doing science. You may remember that quote from Richard Lewington in the New York Review of Books, where he said, you know, we stand for science in spite of some of its most

counterintuitive constructs and some of its absurd formulations. And he's talking about things like probably the multiverse and things like that. But we stand for it because we cannot let a divine foot in the door, he said. It was very explicit about the idea that science has to presuppose materialism

and only in the way. invoke materialistic explanations at all costs. Well, that's why I was bringing this up, because I thought to myself, so that's where we are, and it's where we've been, you know, since the 19th century. The idea is that we have forgotten that it was Christian faith that led to what we call modern science and the scientific revolution. There's no debating that. You don't have to like it.

It could make you grumpy. but it is history. There's no way around it. And non-Christians have written about it. You quote them... Joseph Needham. In your book? Yeah.

of many of the leading historians of Herbert Butterfield, leading historians and historians of science in the 20th century, really rediscovered this in the wake of that conflict historiography, the idea that science and religion are at odds. And they highlighted a number of factors, but there were presuppositions that came out of a Judeo-Christian worldview in particular. Our friends in the Muslim world also had contributed to science as well, but out of the Abrahamic faith, but particularly in the period of the scientific revolution, ideas coming out of the Hebrew Bible that were being rediscovered by the reformers and a strain of thought in late medieval Catholicism kind of combined to make this scientific revolution possible. What kind of presuppositions? Things like the intelligibility of nature.

That nature can be understood because the same rational intellect that made nature, made our minds and gave us the gift of rationality that would enable us to understand the reason that was built into the world. The idea of the order of nature. But also the idea that the order of nature

is contingent on the will of the creator, that it could have been different. I used to use a paintbrush to illustrate with my students. You've got 15 different kinds of paint They all do the same basic job, but they all are different in ways, and the one the painter uses is up to the painter's own choice. And so Newton discovered that gravity has an inverse square law, but it might have been an inverse cube law, or it may have been a strictly linear relationship or something else.

So there's an order there, but not an order that we can deduce from first principles, which is what your friends, the Greeks thought. And that's what I find so interesting. And again, I'm just familiar enough with this information. to be dangerous with people who don't know more than I do, right? Aristotel didn't believe in a personal god, and so you get all of these Aristotelians in late medieval world who have, they have an Aristotelian worldview, which pushes against the idea of a quirky personal god.

And so they insist that the planets have to be moving in circles, because circles are perfect, and we know that, but what if a quirky personal god said no i'm gonna i prefer ellipsis thank you very much yeah which he did and you're right the the greeks had this idea of the logos an impersonal logic and because it pervaded all of nature in their view then whatever was logical uh to seem logical to us must be the logic that's built into the world so it implied it allowed for a kind of reliance on armchair philosophizing when what was necessary was imperialized historical investigation. Robert Boyle was famous for saying, it's not the job of the natural philosopher,

which was what they called scientists at the time, to ask what God must have done, but instead to go and look and see what he actually did do. And that was the spirit of the scientific revolution. Let's go and look and see. Well, and the other part of it that brings in the faith is the humility to say that we may think we know what it is, but we know we're sinners. We know we get stuff. wrong, we're going to force ourselves to actually look. The great historian of science, Peter Harrison has emphasized this. This is a contribution of, in particular, the Reformation thinkers.

Because by emphasizing the depravity of man, ironically, they help make science possible. And the connection there is that, yes, we can understand the order and design and the rationality built into nature. But we're also prone to flights of fancy, jumping to conclusions that our, our our cognition is also affected by the fall. And so we have to check our ideas, our theoretical ideas against reality. And that also gave an impulse for empirical investigation.

And the whole program of experimentation. Right. It's called the scientific method. And it's kind of funny to me. When I discovered this, obviously, more recently than you, but it's astonishing how clear it is and how inextricably intertwined Christian faith is with science. So the fact that we're living in this world that pretends like Christians are somehow, you know, off, against science.

You know, not only is that not true, but exactly the opposite is true. Just to name one example that's to me particularly inspiring is the Principia that was the book about universal gravitation written by Newton, and the later theological epilogue called the General Scolium that he added to that, where he reflected on the idea that God was the unseen force that enforced this order behind everything, and the idea that in God all things are held together or consist. And also in that epilogue, he also made design arguments. This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets

could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. That's right in Newton. That's right in the general scolium to the Principia, arguably the greatest work of physics ever written, or one of the top three or four at the very least. It's incredible how deeply integrated the theological perspective was into the scientific work,

so much so that Rodney Stark, the historian of science from Baylor, who wrote the great book for the glory of God with Princeton Press, titled the book for the glory of God. For him, that... He realized, that that was the motivation of these early scientists. In case you haven't been paying attention,

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We did this a few months ago. It's a wonderful conversation with a brilliant person who is a friend. And we just wanted to air it on this program. So here it is. Socrates in the city with Dr. Stephen Meyer. I want to ask you more about the reaction to your book because it's just fascinating to me that someone like you, you put these books out there. And by God's grace, enough people see them and read them. They're not just out there and nobody sees them.

So there has been reaction. Some of it is respectful, like you mentioned Michael Shermer, but others have been. I think some people ultimately, they're just angry. because what you write is very compelling, and they kind of can't bear it. So they have to come up with something. So what has the reaction been? What are people like Lawrence Krauss or others saying,

or have they bothered to respond? Well, interestingly, that kind of angry reaction mainly occurs on my Facebook page. I don't know what, it just seems to attract trolls, you know. Yeah. But, well, interestingly, Kraus and I had an exchange in the journal Inference, edited by David Berlinski, about the fine-tuning issue. And Kraus actually, after having, we've had some, you know,

spirited debates in the past that have been a little spicy, but he paid me at least a backhanded compliment, saying that my knowledge of the physics was laudatory, he said. However, he disagreed about some things, and one of the things he argued was that the fine-tuning, this exquisite set of, this group of parameters that are exquisitely finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life against all odds, just one of them, the cosmological consonant, that forces the outward pushing force of the universe, is fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 90th power.

That's like, that's so insane that it's almost funny even if you start, breaking down what that means, so we'll skip that. Well, let me give you, I have a visual illustration I've been holding back to share with you. All right. So to get the fine tuning of the cosmological constant right would be equivalent to having a blind person floating in free space looking for one marked elementary particle, but not just one in our universe, but in 10 billion universes our size. That's how lucky the person article we're talking.

A quark or an electron. Yeah. So there's 10 to the 80th of them. So you're looking for one in the universe. One. In this universe. But no, not this universe. We have to include 10 others to get the odds right, the ratio.

How many universes? 10 billion. 10 billion universes. Because we got 10 to the 80th elementary particles in our universe, but there's, the fine-tuning is 10 to the 90th. There's 10 orders of magnitude more acute than that. So that's just one parameter. In other words, good luck.

Yeah. So there's lots of these fine-tuning. parameters that are independently set. But Steve, this is what science says. In other words, science says, was it Stephen Wiener, Winer? Weinberg. Weinberg? Right.

He was the one that said, these are the odds. That the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant is this. It's breathtaking. So I'll tell you, Krause's counter-argument. I'm arguing, like Luke Barnes and other

Polkinghorn, many physicists have argued fine-tuning points to a fine-tuner. Krause's response is to say, well, not so fast. Instead, it's just as possible that life could have evolved to match the fine-tuning parameters that were already there instead of the fine-tuning parameters being set in advance to make it possible for life. Okay, that sounds like he's totally blowing smoke.

I mean, honestly, it sounds like preposterous. I'll tell you why. If you're talking about small things, like whether life is carbon-based or silicon-based, or it's like, okay, you can have a conversation. But when you're talking about the existence of the universe with planets and stars and so on and so forth, you couldn't have any possibility of life. Well, that's the rub. It's a response that could possibly be true.

It could be that life evolved in accord with the constraints of the fine-tuning parameters. But the problem is, we can't even get basic chemistry or anything more than a black hole unless some of these parameters are set just right from the very beginning. I mean, that's what I'm saying. So let's say you have, no, if things weren't perfect, perfectly fine-tuned,

you do not have stars, which are creating elements, and you don't have any of that. So how in the world can somebody like Lawrence Crowell, make a statement, this kind of blind statement, he knows that. Well, I did press him on this. That might be why I got the backhanded compliment, I'm not sure.

But, I mean, it's a really, it's an interesting question in physics. If that cosmological constant isn't fine-tuned just right. If the universe is blowing up too fast, we get a heat death, too slow, we get a big crunch. If you get either of those cases, we don't get rocky planets

and galaxies, and even basic chemistry going. If the mass of the quark isn't fine-tuned within very narrow tolerances, it's this Goldilocks universe idea that the physicists are talking about, that all these parameters are set just right. If they were a little bit different, no life. In the case of

the mass of the quark, we wouldn't get any atoms heavier than helium. You can't make anything out of hydrogen and helium alone. You've got to have the more, the atoms with larger atomic structure. You've got to have carbon and oxygen and thing like that to make anything interesting. So,

So the evolution of life, the origin and evolution of life depends on prior fine-tuning. You can't get to, you got to have chemistry before you can talk about life. You've got to have a planet where you can put it. All those things only happen if you first get fine-tuning. So I think Krauss's argument is clever. It could possibly be true in some possible universe, but it's not true in ours. I just have to believe these guys are too smart to really believe. I mean, I just, you know, I don't have the patience that you do.

It just sounds so silly that they are saying things like this. You, I mean, I just think that it's looking so bad for their worldview that they're getting desperate, that they're coming up with stuff. What you mentioned Francis Crick, he, I guess it must have been around 1970, 73 or... Well, first in 73 and then in 81. Well, when he talks about directed panspermia,

it's so ridiculous. Talk a little bit about that. You're asking somebody, hey, how did life form? How did life come into being? And this super genius scientist says, well, we don't know. But then he says,

but we think maybe it came from someplace else. And just ended up here. And you think, that's not the question. The question is, how did it come? This has been formulated as a somewhat serious proposal by several scientists. Crick did write about it in a technical paper, I think it was 73, and then in his little book, Life itself. It was published in a journal called Icarus.

That's exactly right. Very aptly named. Yeah. And then in 81, he wrote this little book, Life itself, where he floated this idea that, that he said getting all the conditions just right on planet Earth are so improbable that it's almost equivalent to something like a miracle. And so then he said, so maybe it didn't happen here.

And maybe it happened somewhere else that life arose in some other prebiotic soup on some other planet where the conditions were more favorable and it evolved to a sophisticated intelligent form of life that then ceded life to planet Earth. He later kind of regretted that and pulled back a little bit and said, I'm not going to, because it was ridiculed a bit, and he said, I'm not going to speculate it on the original life problem anymore. Dawkins then did in the film with Ben Stein in 2008. I think he later regretted it as well,

but he suggested that maybe there was a signature of intelligence in the cell. Ben Stein got him to admit that neither he nor anyone else knew how life had first arisen from the prebiotic chemical state. And then he said, and then Dawkins said, well, or Stein said, what do you think the odds are that intelligent design played some role? And he said, well, it could be, but it would have to have happened in the following way, that there was an alien intelligence. Okay, so what do we make of all that?

Obviously, there's a problem with that in that if you have an alien intelligence seeding life on Earth, that that alien intelligence itself has to evolve, which means that someplace along the line, you've got to generate genetic information for building the first cell that could get that evolutionary process going. So they haven't kicked the can down the road. They've kicked the problem out into space without answering it. But I guess what fascinates me is just it strikes me as deeply dishonest. It's like somebody brings in a dessert, right?

And I say, wow, that's an amazing dessert. Who made that? And they say, oh, no one made it. It just exists. It just kind of came into being. And you'd say, well, that's ridiculous. Look at the dessert. It's obvious that someone made that.

And then they would kind of go, uh, uh, yeah, yeah. I think somebody down the road made it. I think somebody down the road. That doesn't really answer the question. She was making for the trades on the outside. My Pillow is having their biggest sheet sale of the year. You've all helped build my pillow into the amazing company it is today. Now Mike Lindell, Inventor and CEO wants to give back exclusively to his listeners.

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That's MyPillow.com promo code, Eric. Folks, you listen to the Eric Metaxis show, but we are playing a recent conversation I had at Socrates in the city with Dr. Stephen Meyer. Check it out. If you are bound or constrained by a materialistic world outlook, such that you think that everything came about by undirected materialistic processes,

then something like the panspermia idea or the multiverse may be your best option. With the multiverse, we have the same kind of problem where the fine-tuning, is incredibly improbable. There's no way it would happen by undirected processes in our universe. So serious physicists have posited the existence of other universes and such a large multiplicity of other universes

that eventually a universe like ours would, they say, have to arise. But then as you dig deeper into this, you discover there's a problem. And that is that if these other universes were just causally all disconnected from one another, then something that happens in Andromeda universe or universe X isn't going to affect anything in our universe, including whatever process it was that set the fine-tuning. So in virtue of that, they propose universe-generating mechanisms that underlie all the universes that could be spitting out universes

here, hither and yon, such that they could then portray our universe as a kind of lucky winner in a giant cosmic lottery. And that's where it all kind of falls apart, because it turns out that even in theory, the universe-generating mechanisms that have been proposed, some based on something called string theory, and another one based on something called inflationary cosmology,

these other universe-generating mechanisms themselves depend on prior, unexplained, fine-tuning. And we're right back to where we started, without any explanation for where the fine-tuning came from. And yet in our experience, we know that finely-tuned French recipes or radio dials or computer code always comes from an intelligent agent, as does information. So these features that are tripping up the materialists

are things that based on our own experience are always generated by minds, by intelligent agents. And for that reason, I think they give a very strong signal of design. I guess I wonder where this is headed. In other words, you've written a number of, you know, I can say, important, well-received books. you're not the only one people are writing about these things

and it strikes me as somebody who doesn't have a PhD in science or even the philosophy of science as a layman it strikes me that the end of this monopoly in a sense that this ideological monopoly

is at hand and the only question is what are folks going to do about it? And you're talking a little bit about some of them are kind of scrambling and coming up with really, really crazy ideas based on, let's be honest, it's one thing to say there are problems with it. But let's go before that.

And let's just say there's also zero scientific evidence for these propositions. It's complete flights of things. flights of fancy. So there's a desperation. So are you seeing, is there an openness among some, I think you touched on it earlier, who are beginning to think differently, like fundamentally differently about these questions? I think, no question. I think you put your finger on something, a really interesting intellectual phenomenon, which is that scientific atheism, which seems such a juggernaut, even 15 years ago with the publication of all those books,

now I think is starting to get really weird. Because the scientific atheists are forced to hypotheses like the multiverse or the simulation hypothesis or the universe from nothing idea or the alien designer idea. This is the extent to which people committed to a materialistic worldview must go in order to make some sense of semblance of the data.

But the theories are getting really convoluted and exotic and transparently, in some cases, transparently absurd. But Alan Sandage, like literally 40 years ago, and he was the astronomer that you mentioned earlier who became a Christian, but he was onto this, like literally 40 years ago. He was saying that some of these hypotheses and some of these conversations, they struck him. as ridiculous, that they were blowing smoke, that they were just using kind of, you know, entree new terminology.

And again, that's sort of 40 years ago. So I guess I just wonder. We sometimes call it word salad, where you just obscure the fact that you don't know with a lot of jargon. Well, I mean, the term multiverse theory, directed panspermia. Like, it's like something out of a Dr. Seuss book or something.

It's just kind of you come up with a really crazy theory and then you give it some name and then you tell everybody, well, we're going to talk about this now, okay? But if you have some common sense, you say that doesn't make sense. It seems like you're really stretching. So I guess what I'm wondering is what would it take? What we're really talking about, Stephen, is what would it take to shift a paradigm? This is a deep paradigm. A lot of people have everything invested in this. Careers, everything, billions of dollars.

What does it take? It's not an easy thing. Well, to your earlier question, I think we are seeing significant intellectual conversions. The story of my book is, over the last 100 years, a story of many conversions. Einstein's away from strict materialism. Hoyle to a sort of quasi-theism. Dean Kenyon from Origin of Life leading figure to proponent of intelligent design. In recent years, the paleontologist, Gunter Beckley,

the very prominent German paleontologist who embraced the theory of intelligent design. And many other examples I could give. But I think in the history of science, you see major paradigm shifts, there are shifts in research program and focus coming as a rising generation comes on the scenes and says, hey, there's some interesting, important questions

that aren't being addressed by the old guard. There's a new way of looking at things. And I think that's starting to happen. And look at my life, I'm a... Hey, folks, you're listening to a special edition of the Air for Taxis Show. We are airing my recent Socrates in the City conversation with Dr. Stephen Meyer. We don't have a ton of time left. I wanted to ask you, I don't know if you can sum these up,

but the philosopher and humanist James Croft offered what you described as an aggressive critique of your book on philosophical grounds. I'm just curious. What was that? Oh, it was an interesting debate. because I was actually on a vacation at a little cabin, and people in Britain that I knew told me they'd set up an interesting conversation about my book with a philosopher who was interested.

In person. Well, by Zoom. Everything was Zoom in the COVID days. So I got on, and I was in a rustic old sweatshirt and jacket and thought it was just an informal. Well, this philosopher had come loaded forbearer with PowerPoints. Who are these friends that set this up for you?

Yeah, right, right. And it was a lets you and him fight conversation. So anyway, he had a number of technical objections. The main one was the idea that you couldn't really infer the activity of a designing intelligence in the past unless you had knowledge that there was such a being, you already had knowledge that there was such a being there. And there is a sensible, there's something sensible behind that objection,

because when we infer or when we retrodict the action of a cause in the past, it's helpful if we know both that the cause in question has the power to produce the effect we're trying to explain, but that we have independent knowledge that the cause, the causal agent or entity was actually present. We have both those things that we can feel very solid. Well, that would be nice. Be nice. But you don't. But you can't always do that.

it out. But there's also a way to circumvent this, and this happened to be one of the key elements of my PhD, is that in the case that you know that there's only one known cause of a given effect, if it's true that when there's smoke, there's always fire, you can infer fire definitively, even if you don't have independent knowledge of the fire, if you just see the smoke wafting up over the hillside. Okay, so when the cause that you're trying to infer is a necessary cause. It's the only known cause of the effect. You can make very definitive, retrodictive inferences from the effect back to cause. And so he posed this as an objection to the argument from information in DNA

and said, well, you don't have independent knowledge of a designer. I said, we don't need to. Because in this case, there's only one known cause of the production of large amounts of digital information, and that is an intelligent mind. And then I used a little illustration to get the point across. I said, imagine you went to Antarctica, and you were assuming like, all other archaeologists that there never been life, there'd never been any life on the planet, or on that continent. But then, you know, you got deep onto an ice cave and got deeper in,

and there was, you know, you got all the way to the rock. And lo and behold, there were inscriptions on there, dating from, you know, two million years ago, what would you now infer? Well, you didn't have any independent knowledge that there were, that Antarctica had ever been inhabited. But if you have informational inscriptions, carved into the rock, you're going to have to change your opinion.

So, why? Because information is a distinctive diagnostic of intelligent activity. There's only one known cause of the production of information. So that's what our little argument was about. James was an interesting guy. He was a secular humanist clergyman at a congregation in, I think, St. Louis.

He'd done a Harvard PhD in philosophy, British-born. So we had a lot in common, except that we were on opposite sides of the issue. You also mentioned Roger Penrose's new cosmological model, and some people have been posing it as a challenge to the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Can you explain what I just said? It's one of the things that was raised in opposition to the argument of the book is that there are some newer cosmological models than the ones that I addressed in the book.

I addressed the Big Bang, the steady state, the oscillating model, and probably the hottest topic in theoretical physics and cosmology is this idea of quantum cosmology, and I had three chapters on that at the end. It's the Krauss universe came from nothing idea, and let's not get into it. It's heavy. But the newer thing that came up was something from Sir Roger Penrose

called the cyclical conformal cosmology, big words. But it's a variant off of the earlier oscillating, universe idea. The oscillating universe had the universe expanding in the present time, in the forward direction of time, but eventually recalapsing and then bouncing and recalapsing and bouncing an infinite number of time. So it was a way of explaining the observation that the universe is currently expanding, but still holding on to an infinite universe. And the problem with that idea was a number of problems. One, is there not enough matter to cause a recalapse, But number two, even if there were subsequent bounces,

each time the universe expands, the energy of expansion is sort of creating greater entropy or disorder in the universe. And so with each cycle, there's less energy available to do work. And so it would be like a bouncing ball. Eventually, even if you had a cycle of expansions and contractions, the ball would eventually damp out and you'd run out of steam. And since we don't live in a universe like that,

you can infer that the universe hasn't been around an infinitely long time. I mean, ultimately, this is fun, at least for me, because you see, in a way, you see these patterns, right? You see people desperately looking for ways around what you can't get around, and they are very intelligent and creative. But at the end of the day, you've got this problem called reality, created by, you know, the Lord of hosts. And you just keep bumping up against it.

So it's sort of funny to see where we are now and who is willing to kind of face it and who isn't. I'm not as literary as you are, Eric, but I did have one line in my book that I thought, well, that's pretty literary, where I was telling the story about Einstein and his fiddling with the cosmological constant to portray the universe as static.

And then I said, but the heavens talked back. And the evidence became what determined the outcome of the theorizing. And I think, in a sense, the heavens, the digital code, the fine-tuning of the universe, the planetary fine-tuning, all the anthropic biological parameters that our colleague Michael Denton is writing,

about, I mean, there's so much evidence that's pointing towards a purposive universe that was designed and created by a purpose of intelligence. It does get hard to ignore it. So say that again, the heavens? The heavens talked back, I said. The heavens talked back. And that's original with you. Well, well done, Stephen Meyer. Come on. Come on. Easy come and easy go. Hey there, folks. Welcome back. I'm excited. right now. You know that on this program we're doing a fundraiser for food for the poor. But I said, you know, I want to bring

somebody on who's part of the Salem Radio Network, who's part of the brass. My friend Tom Tratup, he's the vice president of News and Talk programming. But Tom, you have a relationship with food for the poor. You understand why I'm going out on a limb and asking my listeners to reach into their pockets for God's purposes. So I wanted you to help us understand it in a way that I can't really myself communicate successfully. So what do you know about this that I wouldn't know? Well, first off, thank you for having me on the show.

I'm here in the I'm in the fortress of Metaxus. We've got the Mike Flag. We've got the travel bag. You know, we're here pushing the Eric Mattaxas. show every time we get. Now, by the way, if you go to Metaxistock.com, ladies and gentlemen, you have access to all this swag, all this incredible product. If you go to Metaxestock.com, you'll see it. But we want you to go to Metaxistock.com, at least today in part, to click on the banner to help people who are suffering. That's right. Because of evil men around

the world, there's suffering. And if you go to Metaxistock.com, you'll click on the banner. But go ahead, Tom, trot up, and tell us more. Well, thank you, Eric. You know, Food for the Poor is a nonprofit organization. They're based in Coconut Creek, Florida. We've worked with them for over a dozen years, and they helped the poorest of the poor in 17 nations here in the Western Hemisphere. And I've traveled with them to Guatemala, to Haiti, to a number of other countries with them and actually seen their work on the ground. They're absolutely the best in the business. Their overhead is the smallest in the business. So every dollar you give really goes directly to help the poor. We've expanded because

of the war in Ukraine. And regardless of what people think, and I've heard the debates back and forth, some of our talk show hosts when we started the campaign, we're like, why do I want to get any money for people that are refugees in Ukraine when we're paying $7 a gallon for gas here in California? Well, it's true. America's got problems and we all have to pay the light bill and we all have, you know, personal issues. But when you think about the children who have been displaced, there are over 500,000 Ukrainian children who've been separated from their parents. Usually the dad had to stay behind in order to fight in the war. So they were just with their mom, but now they've been separated from their moms. And if you had a 12-year-old child, either your child or your

grandchild and they were alone in a scary place, a bomb shelter, or in a foreign country where somebody's playing host to them, you would want people, just like the men and women listening to the Eric Metax's show and watching you right now to open up your hearts and your wallets and help. And the fact is that because of food for the poor's donations, they already have a ton of food donated through themselves and their ministry partners. One dollar. $1 delivers four meals to refugees in Ukraine. $2 delivers eight. You know, you do the math.

You can figure it out. A $10 or $20 contribution, $100,000 would be fabulous. Thank you very much. But we're here simply to ask you to think a little bit outside yourself. So many things going on in the world that are scary and crazy like the Mar-a-Lago raid that you've been talking about, Eric. I know it's a tough time for a lot of people in this economy, but we are asking you to maybe dig deep, think a little bit outside yourself. We've all done it.

I've been on trips with food for the poor, and as I said, seen them up close and personal. When you call Eric's number, which is 844-863-4673, or to make it easier, it's 844-863, hope, because you're giving hope to these children overseas, you're really being the hands and feet of Jesus, as we're called to. Eric was wise to mention that. We're called to help the poorest of the poor,

and there's nobody who does it better than food for the poor.