Unashamed with the Robertson Family - Ep 1414 | A Child’s Tragic Death Forces This Difficult Question About God

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

John Luke opens up about deconstructing his faith after years of hearing Christians use the Bible to defend conflicting ideas. Al and Christian wrestle with a local tragedy of a child’s unexpected death and the questions it raises about grief, justice, and God’s presence. The guys trace the rise of “my truth” back through the Enlightenment, naturalism, and the split between faith and reason, then consider whether artificial intelligence could be ushering in another massive shift in how people understand truth.  In this episode: Psalm 139; Acts 17; Daniel 3:17-18; Jeremiah 20; Isaiah 55:8-11; Isaiah 1:18; Genesis 22; Hebrews 11; John 1:1-14; Job 2:3; Job 42; John 9; Romans 1; Romans 10 Today’s conversation is about Lesson 9 of Theology 101: The Western Theological Tradition taught by various Hillsdale Professors. Take the course with us at no cost to you!  More about Theology 101: Examine the great questions of Western theology from the ancient Hebrews through today. The gift of speech, or reason, given by God to man, enables us to think about God and to worship Him.  This free online course pursues this purpose by examining the nature of God as revealed in the Bible, exploring the great theological questions and controversies of the early Christian church, studying the history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and much more.  We invite you to join us and explore the nature of the relationship between God and man, and how a proper understanding of this relationship can lead to a free and happy life. Sign up at ⁠http://unashamedforhillsdale.com/ Check out At Home with Phil Robertson, nearly 800 episodes of Phil's unfiltered wisdom, humor, and biblical truth, available for free for the first time! Get it on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and anywhere you listen to podcasts! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/at-home-with-phil-robertson/id1835224621 Listen to Not Yet Now with Zach Dasher on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or anywhere you get podcasts. Chapters 00:00 Facing the Comment Section 03:05 90s Nihilism & the Culture That Eroded Truth 06:20 How We Arrived at “My Truth” 11:10 Christian Wrestles With Unanswered Prayers 15:20 Al’s Four-Year Walk Away From God 18:45 Two Types of Crises of Faith 24:05 Could AI Spark a New Enlightenment? 31:20 Job, Suffering & the Limits of Human Reason 37:10 John Luke Rebuilds Faith After Deconstruction 42:40 Naturalism Pushed God Out of Universities 45:00 What Happens When Everything Becomes Subjective — Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am unashamed. What about you? Welcome to the Unashamed podcast. This is our Hillsdale episode Friday with Hillsdale. So don't forget, by the way, we are doing another giveaway for this course, The Algy One-on-One. We're going to pick one listener to come down to Western Road to watch a live recording of Unashamed. In fact, we have someone in studio today, I believe, that won the last one. Miranda is here with us. The mysterious Miranda is with us. The mysterious Miranda is with us. The reason we call our mysterious, Zach, is because we just got her first name initially. And so then we thought, well, what if all the Mirandas that listen think they're the winner? So the mysterious Miranda's here with her husband, Scott, who they're a wonderful couple from Texas. Okay. What part of Texas are they from?

They're from Cleveland, Texas, actually. Okay. Nothing wrong with that. We love Texas people. So we're going to pick one winner to come down. We're going to pay for travel and lodging for you and a guest up to $1,000 each. All you have to do is take the Theology One-on-One course with us. finish all the quizzes and send us your certificate of completion.

You can sign up for the course. It's absolutely free at unashamed for Hillsdale.com. And then you can upload your certificate at watchunashamed.com. And you'll be entered to win. You'll be entered into the drawing. So yeah, so let's get moving here. So Zach, we found a little bite with Miranda. And she said that you were really funny.

Yeah. Oh, well, that's awesome. I always liked her. Yeah. I really did. we uh it's a rare rare comment oh yeah

we don't use to hear about his humor yeah no I read the comments I love the comments and um you don't I really do I love most stuff you don't love the comment

I enjoy watching I enjoy people questioning you for calling Martin Luther Gay so you know we got to I think that was you know with comment you were kind of stir

you were trying to stir something up you were trying to get me canceled so is that uh John Luke's been watching the comments. Oh, I have, I was looking at the comments last night. I was going to send this to you all, but I just thought this is the funniest comment that Frank has ever said. Which is why I think this is why Frank keeps commenting because we keep shouting out on the podcast.

I want Frank to come down. I want Frank to win. Frank may win. So this was on our Hillsdale episode. So there's a few episodes ago for y'all. And Zach had said something apparently very meaningful. and everyone is like really hyping them up like coming you know so there's tons of comments like Zach you're so refreshing thank you Zach for sharing your faith there's just like all kinds of stuff

just get them on them yeah Zach is like wait what you're just going to get 48 minutes to but please continue I don't know what I think you get through all those good ones then we get to break most of your comments really stroke your egos I wonder if you can take the all capital truth. Thank you, Brad. You are the humbler. We cannot stroke Zach's ego. We need more.

We need more comment. As if Zach doesn't get enough beatings from Jace on a regular basis. I'll trust me. My ego has been destroyed. I'm probably the most insecure person on the planet because of the way that I'm actually every once in a while I feel sorry for him and take up for it. I got an ego. I do I do have an ego.

But here's what you've got to know, Frank. Like, actually, like, flattery actually makes me nervous. Like, like, so I get, if someone flatters me, it actually makes me nervous. But I do have an ego. I think we all, we all probably struggle with a little ego, egotism. Egotistical. I can be egotistical. Wouldn't the two go hand in hand, though, like ego and flattery?

Probably so, but, you know, there's like a, it's more of a pragmatic thing. Because I've been burned by people before who have, like, like, They make you feel like you're awesome, but it's only to lay the hammer down. It doesn't really work for Zach because he has a very healthy dose of cynicism in his demeanor. I don't know if it's healthy, Al. You're right. Maybe it's unhealthy. And we discovered after we had the skillet guy on that he and Zach are like BFFs, John Cooper, because they both had this grip on the 90s.

and I didn't really know about all the cynicism of the 90s. I guess I missed it, having already been an adult. So apparently that birthed a lot more of that during that era, which I found that fascinating, Zach. I very much look forward to people here in that episode. Well, it's funny. You know, it's hilarious to think about the connection even with these last two episodes that we're going to be doing with Theology 101.

Because this was, look, I mean, that last episode. Did you laugh at my meme? I sent you? Yeah, I did laugh at that. Thank you. You know that I... I now call him Dr. Josie Wales. Well, I did think I thought this is, okay, this is pretty heavy.

Like, how is our audience going to, you know, go through this 55-minute lecture? Because it was not, that was not easy. Yeah. I mean, and I've read a lot of, I actually have read a lot of the people mentioned in it, you know, like Tillick and... I don't know if he mentioned Nietzsche, but I know he mentioned the Mani-Con. Yeah, he mentioned... Gierkegaard and I mean, he kind of goes through the history of Western philosophy. Yeah, it was a lot there.

But what's interesting is what John Cooper was talking about on the podcast was how they got the name of their band. And the name of their man is Skillet. And he's just like, yeah, it was like back in the 90s, it was just whatever. You just take something random. It was the nihilism of the 90s, the 90s, the 90s nihilism. Nothing matters, you know, just however random and just there is, no meaning to the world. And he says, so somebody said, hey, about y'all's band, like a, somebody put a bunch of people in a skillet and cooked up a band. I like that. And that's what they

named the band. And so we were talking about the 90, the Niles were the 90s, but, you know, Nietzsche was a nihist. And he was one of the philosophers that's credited kind of with the philosophy. So I think these two things, I do want to say this before we get into it, that these were, these were heavy episodes. I mean, they were, I think they were more academic than probably any of the rest that we've taken so far. But nobody arrived at their worldview in a vacuum. And so for me, understanding the history of how we arrived in our current cultural moment, this is important. And I think that like when you hear people talk about faith being a privatized thing, which we hear this all the time in our culture, right?

You have your truth. Have you ever heard, like, you know, here's something to say, here's my truth. Oh, yeah. And then they give, like, it's like their, like it's their own personalized version. And to Frank's point, I mean, you know, you know, what the Bible teaches is truth with a capital T. It's not a privatized truth. It's a universal truth. And so a lot of how we got there to this eroding of truth and making it privatized and subjective came out of these philosophies and these philosophers. So, yeah, hopefully over the next two episodes, we'll be able to unpack this and I hope that what we can do is maybe bring the lofty conversation kind of down. But I don't know.

What did you all think? Did you all think it was heavier? Maybe we can bring some enlightenment to the conversation. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Perfect segue. Good segue. Thank you.

I did. I want everybody to know, I printed off my seventh certificate. I thought I brought it, but I didn't. So I print mine off. The wallpaper continues. We've completed seven courses now after these two. And it was a challenge, Zach. it was a challenge for me.

Christian summed it up by sending a picture of Patrick, a slobbering Patrick from SpongeBob. And I think I was right there with him. And Zach was Kevin Bacon dancing. Yeah, exactly. Well, they knew I would like the content, so they were like, this is Zach's. But just to get us into it,

I thought in the next of the last lesson, Dr. Westblade, I thought really captured some great stuff. And you talked about enlightenment. I love the way, and I never heard anybody do this, but he was like, it's a, John Luce, now watching the episode, why we're doing it? Oh, let me just start it while we are doing it. That it was a little bit arrogant, you know,

just to make it seem like up until this point, nobody had any enlightenment? All of a sudden it's like, hey, we're enlightened. And so I think the age of reason was kind of the way he framed it was much better. And I loved the scriptural reference. take him long to get to it because he framed it in the higher picture of how we come to reason ourselves and can we can we even reason to God is it possible because he's God and we're not but then I thought the scriptural references were so powerful the first of being Psalm 139 and

you know typically we go to that we kind of go just to that one little text in there because it's such a great pro-life text you know I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made your works are wonderful I know all full well. But when you read the entire Psalm, which I did a couple of times this morning, I mean, it really is so rich David's perspective on God, but not just that God's beyond and this transcendent idea of God, but that he is reachable. He is findable. He does know us in such a way that he wants us to look for him and find him and connect with him. And so I just thought that was a beautiful sort of theme that ran through this whole lesson about the in the enlightenment period a lot of people moved away or moved into a camp that God is

unreachable but for when you look at it from a biblical lens you see that it's very attainable and that that's why he made us in his image to begin with so I just thought that was a powerful sort of arch negative arch narrative over the whole thing you know which is really good and I love that song what does that 17 say I mean kind of to you your point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's determined the exact times and places that all men should live so that they would seek him out and perhaps find him, though he's not far from each one of us. Right. So I think, I think that, you know, Paul's, you know, introduction to the Greco-Roman philosophers, who, by the way, I mean, Aristotle, obviously wasn't in that room at the Iriopagus of X-17,

but all of the platonic, you know, Plato, Socrates, if he was a real person, Aristotle, like, this is where these ideas were, incubated. And this was the hot spot. Paul's moving into that space. And he's bringing the gospel of Christ to the Greco-Roman world. And I think that that, Act 17, I just popped up when you were reading that, talking about that Psalm. Yeah. It's actually a great, another great text, if you really want to know biblically how we, how we wrestle with these things. But it is. I mean, it's hard. Is it faith? Is it reason? How do they work together? I mean, this is the, have been the dilemma of man, you know, forever. Have y'all ever thought about that, though?

Like, I mean, have you guys ever had, like, doubts in your faith or seasons of doubts or kind of what if you did, what was that like? Like, how do you know this is true? That's good. I feel like for me, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely plenty of times where you, you know, doubt certain things. And I think for me, I think the thing that I doubt is, you know, know, not necessarily the existence of God.

It kind of things like we've talked about on the podcast, but even like there's a young girl in town locally who contracted this super rare disease. I don't know if you've seen it or not, but she was swimming in a lake. And she's seven, she just turned eight, three days ago. She passed away yesterday. But it's this like rare brain-eating.

Amoeba. Yeah, Aniba. Like she was swimming in a lake 30 miles from here. and yeah, contracted it last week and then passed away two days ago. It has like a 97% fatality rate. I think there's only like a couple, I think only three cases maybe ever in Louisiana, like something crazy. So I think for me, the part that I, and if we want to get super theological,

and I think for me, the part I struggle with at times is especially being a parent and having my kids go through something. And it's almost like the, it's like the perspective, if like I zoomed, out. And I'm thinking about it from the standpoint of like, because, you know, symptoms start. This girl has, you know, she has fever and the kind of things progressed to where she kind of loses vision and then they take her to the hospital. And that's kind of how these things happen. But I think for me, the part that I wrestle with is at the beginning of things like this, right, she runs a fever. And then her parents are thinking, oh, let's give her Tylenol, right?

She's sick. She has a fever. She might have a cold. But while they're having these limited perspective of she's sick with a fever. It's like, no, she actually has a brain eating, you know, microscopic thing. So I think that's the part that I can sometimes struggle with with God and things of, you know, it's almost like that withholding element of things to where it's like, like, like, looking back, it's like, how awkward is it that I was like, you know, let's get a cold rag and give her Tylenol. But it's like she has a brain eating thing going on. So I think I can wrestle with those kind of parts of, you know, God's, you know, not even lack of

healing, but I think even like a revelation early on of things like that to where it's, it's just, it's, I don't know if that makes any sense, but those are things that I've, I mean, I've even, you know, thought those thoughts this week of just kind of wrestling through those, those things of, you know, this, this poor girl who was swimming with her family in a lake and contracted this thing. And yeah, it's just brutal. We all wish that she would have been healed. But I think even symptoms early on that's just, you know,

because obviously my kid, I mean, last night my daughter had a 103 fever because she's sick. And I was thinking about that last night of, man, this is what this family felt like early on. And let's just give her some Motrin or Tylenol. And then it's obviously things progress way worse. But, well, that really does speak to what he was talking about. Yeah. In the lecture and the idea that there's this supernatural force that we believe can, intervene into time and space.

But, you know, what prompts that? And why in one case does, you know, your child get out of their fever because it's just a bacteria or something? Yeah. And the other one doesn't. So those are huge questions in terms of if it's you and your family, your daughter, and how you deal with that and wonder. And, of course, his bigger point was, is he even capable of, I mean, would he even do it?

You know, is it just a wind-up clock? That was the next lecture. Or was this lecture? I think it was later in this lecture. Yeah, it was the idea that got deism and all that. Just made a watch, put it on the shelf, and then just kind of left. So those are huge questions. And you asked about us personally,

Zach, I think in my case, I've never really questioned it from the level that Christian, I mean, I always think, man, this is terrible and I hate it for this family. Mine was more just the sort of the pull of lifestyle was my doubt. because I grew up in a non-Christian home, but blessed with Christian people that kind of took me under their wing. And so I got the stories. I got the teaching. I got really the faith implanted in me very early and then walked away from it, like just totally abandon it and abandoned God for like four years.

But I don't remember having doubts about it. I just desired something else more than I desired. him. But in my case, it was out of just complete desperation of realizing that the lifestyle was going to kill me, and then it led me back to God. And from that point forward, I've never questioned it. I've tried to have the same faith. I just, this last Sunday talked about Shadda Right Michiach and Badego in the fiery furnace. And the statement they made to Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel 3, 17, was incredible because they were like, and concerning this matter, Your Majesty, we're not really going to address it

because we know that our God will deliver us and then they said, but even if he doesn't, we're not going to listen to you. And so when you think about that, when you think about we're going into fire, like to be burned alive, and you're saying,

we know God's going to deliver us in the macro sense, but even if he doesn't, we're still this committed and bound to the idea. And when I read things like that, I'm thinking, wow, you know, I'm still working on. that sort of thing. And you hope you do, right?

Yeah, I don't ever doubt, like, existential, like, you know, creation and that, obviously, I believe that God created everything. And so I don't ever have, you know, doubts of God's, you know, is God real who created everything, who made me. It's more so those, yeah, those, like, when does he choose to intervene, you know, how, you know, accessible is he on a daily kind of thing? And it's even like, you know, Jeremiah, I think it's Jeremiah three when Jeremiah is, like, it's one of my favorite prayers. He's like, you deceived me and I was deceived.

And Matt Chandler talks about this idea of like being in a church group, like a house church thing and some random person shows up. And he's like, you just like that's this opening prayer. Like I was, you deceived me and I was deceived. Everyone would be like, what's wrong with this guy? But that idea of like. Who had him? Who had him say a prayer?

Well, me, sometimes like you do things. And then looking back, it's like, it's almost that feeling of awkwardness. It's like God allowed me to go do this thing knowing that that would never happen, right? I mean, I even felt like that with all the kit stuff in the summer. We had this big trip plan, and we met with the elders at our church and did this whole prayer group and prayed for protection for the event and everything. Then the next week after that, Kit had her choking thing. Then we never ended up going on the trip. Then it was one of those things looking back.

It was like, it's awkward, not even awkward, but it's like God knew that trip was never going to happen. But then yet we still had this whole. prayer thing for that, but it never ended up happening. So I think maybe that perspective for me has changed after becoming a parent in viewing God as the Father. And it's like doing these things

while at the same time he knows they're not going to happen, which so I don't know if that makes any sense, but I've wrestled that part of stuff. But never like bigger existential like is God real kind of thing. Yeah, I've had some of the more probably the bigger questions.

John Luke, you have too, right? That's what I was going to say. Mine was all existential. Yeah. Like, is God real? Is everything real? You know, like going down the whole line. I did the whole deconstruct, reconstruct.

Well, I did the whole deconstructionst thing. Then I reconstructed. Which doesn't happen often, apparently. It's like. Right. It's hard to, it's much harder to reconstruct. I was worried about John Nick for a little bit. At Sadie's wedding, we got in a pretty deep conversation out.

I don't know what phase you were at. I'm right here. That was my wedding, too. But you're not my, you're, you're married in. Yeah, but you're going to say. Yeah, but you're going to say. But for me, Sadie's always going to be primary because that's my, we were still on the clock.

We should have the same block. Okay. Okay, Christian. Well, it makes sense if I wasn't here. My only point is that I'm sitting right here. But continue. That happens to be all the time, but continue. Okay, well, let me rephrase that.

It doesn't bother me anymore. Christian and Sadie's wedding. Yeah, he was at Stey Robertson's, wedding. Yeah, yeah. I honestly didn't know you that well back then. So my reference point, I just transported myself back to the moment. And anyway, we were standing outside.

I get your point. Okay. Yeah, because when we said, where are you going? We didn't say we're going to Christian's wedding. We said we're going to Sadie's wedding. I get seven years ago, you thought that, but time has passed. I don't know where you were at them. I do remember we got in a really incredible conversation.

But I, because I don't always resonate with you, John, because I, I, I, I, I know you are like asking those same questions that I had asked as well. And I did have it. I mean, I had a major, I've shared it on this podcast before, like a major crisis of faith. And honestly, these two lectures is like this was the, this was my dilemma. There's a word introduced into this lecture that Jill gets mad every time I say it. But it is such an important word. It's called epistemology.

And epistemology is just like a branch, kind of a branch of philosophy, I guess you could say that it's just a word that means how do we know, how do we know what we know? Like, how do we know, how can we actually know these things to be true? And that was my big dilemma because I was working, you know, when me and Jill first got married, I went to work for a company called Wyatt Pharmaceuticals. I was selling pharmaceutical products and then went to work for it. Yeah. I was a drug dealer. I was. It ended up with a company called Genentech out of San Francisco. And this, I mean, this company, like, when I tell you, like, what they were doing and genetic medicine, it's incredible. And, you know, I'd go to these meetings and be around all these brilliant scientists. And everybody kind of was coming at this from a atheistic worldview. Most people I was interacting with. I was a Christian. And, yeah, I didn't really have a lot of reasons to believe what I believe to be true. It was just I was always talking. taught this. And so then when you're interacting with people on that level and they're kind of

challenging you, it can be super disruptive. And then this is what happened. My dad debated a guy on the campus of ULM. I may have told this story on here. I can't remember. But he debated that the guy I think was Joseph. I can't remember his last name. But he was a student. And they were having the debate on some of some, the guy was an atheist. Obviously my dad was a believer. So they're having this debate and it just shook me to the core. And mainly because I just didn't have a reason to believe what I hoped to be true. And so the way that I understood faith was that it was the opposite of reason. And this is what I grew up thinking.

Like faith was what you believe when you have no reason to believe is true. Then you take the leap of faith. You know, it's a blind faith. It's blind. It's a leap into the unknown. and that nearly destroyed me. And I will tell you, it's not biblical. It's actually not what the Bible teaches.

But a lot of that, like that mentality, which we would now, a term that got brought up in the 10th lecture was called postmodernism or like relativism or existentialism, whatever you want to call it. But it's this idea that faith is unknowable and the reason alone is what can take you there. So the philosophers, that's what they're kind of getting at. And you know, and you got to keep this in mind, too, that the Enlightenment, the age of reason, did not happen in a vacuum either. And I think this is why it's so important to have this discussion now, because the reason why the Enlightenment even happened in the first place was because you had major advancements in technology that the world had never seen. For the first time, you had the invention of the printing press.

so you could actually print materials now and the common man could get like, like could actually read for themselves. And you had things like the microscope, the telescope, you had instruments for testing things. All this advancement and technology happened that's coincided with the age of reason. And so in the past, people, they had to just rely on the clergy. They had to rely on the monarchy. They had to rely on the people that were in authority to tell them how the world really was. Well, now all of a sudden, information is being, you know, from their perspective, is being exchanged at a rapid pace.

And the reason why I think that's important is because I actually think we're in the beginning phases of a new revolution, of a new way. Like, we're in the equivalent of the printing press with AI. Information is being traded so rapidly that we need to ask these questions. And I think we're going to probably go through another enlightenment of some sort. And the church needs to have a response for this. We will because the Holy Spirit runs the church. But that's what's going on here. So I don't know.

That epistemology thing, that honestly sat at the core of a lot of what I've studied over the last probably 20 years. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be in either war. I wouldn't you sign up and take the course with us for free at unashamed for Hillsdale.com. I like that. He went to Isaiah 55, which I thought was really good because he described that it sort of became an either-or camp to what Zach was just describing. And was it martyr and somebody else?

Terturian? Yeah, Terturian. So it was, and I read you the text, the first two verses are one camp, the Tertullian camp. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways, my ways, as the heavens are higher than earth. So are my ways higher than yours.

and my thoughts, then your thoughts. This is God to man. And so if you just stop right there, the idea is he's unreachable. He's too far. He's too transcendent. But then you read the next two verses, as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth

and make it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater. So is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it, which is the idea is all this from God was made. We were made for him so that he can connect. He can flourish.

He can have purpose in our lives. And so then that was the idea of the other end of it, which was martyr, which was the idea of just reason and freedom are available for all, which is true. But then somewhere the idea is that they're both true because he is above. He is beyond our way of trying to explain him. You know, only he can explain himself. And yet we do receive and we do have a relationship. And we do have a capacity to reason.

I love the, there were a couple of texts. Well, he mentioned Isaiah 118, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, they should be white as snow. Think about that. Even way back in Isaiah, he's saying that we can reason to the idea of forgiveness of sins, that Isaiah said that. And then you look at the story in Genesis 22's at where Abraham was called to sacrifice Isaac. The Hebrew writer says in Hebrews 11, he reasoned to the resurrection that God could raise today.

So we do have the divine capacity to connect to things that are way beyond our ability to understand. How would we understand? Well, you're created with rational faculties. Right. So when you think about which is the ability to reason, you think, well, okay, if I look at my DNA, And I just draw my blood, look at my DNA, and you go to an ape, and you draw their DNA, and you look at it under microscope, then we're like 98% the same. But yet we're very different. Like humans, human beings are doing, like, we're doing things very differently than the ape community.

In fact, the ape community is doing the exact same thing that they were doing since the creation of apes. You know, like, they haven't advanced at all. I mean, they're not, but look at humanity. Like, we've actually advanced in our ability to create things. And so, and the reason why, what separates us from, one of the things that separates us from the animal community is that we have rational faculties. This is part of what I think it needs to be made in the image of God is that we have the ability to reason. We have creative capabilities. We have the ability to communicate, which all is, all this is kind of centered in our rational.

faculties, I think where the Enlightenment gets off with guys like David Hume and some of the ones that were mentioned in here, is that rationalism, which is essentially that man beginning with himself tries to make meaning of the world. That's the problem. If you take rational, rational faculties to the extreme, and you say, well, we can actually begin with ourselves, and now we can make meaning of the world. Well, you're actually not going to make meaning of the world, and you're going to end up in a circular reasoning you're going to end up in absurdity and so you we I think the idea and Kant was trying to get at this although I'm not a big con I'm not a Kantian guy but like what Kant was trying to get to is a push back against that he was said no there's there's a realm up here

that has to descend to you you know before you can make sense of the world and I think he was probably I mean he was right on that part of his philosophy but that's they're trying to figure that out right do I make meaning of the world by getting beginning with my myself or kind of what Christian was talking about earlier, the word they used was deism, that God just winds up the clock and he's not really involved. He just winds it up and just lets it go. Like he just kind of let's he just lets it go and he's back watching the whole thing. Or is God involved in the world? And if God's involved in the world, how much has God involved in the world?

Why does he not answer all the prayers? Why does he answer some? Why does he seem like he's silent something? And they're trying to hold all this up in tandem. And they typically what we're going to do is we're either going to go to one side of the other and the way that plays out is we're going to be hyper-spiritual. Everything that exists is just a spiritual world, or we're going to be hyper-materialist,

all that exists is the material world. And I love the answer that he gives. I do think it is the answer that John one passage, that in the beginning was the word, the word was God, the word was God, and the word became flesh. Christianity alone is an incarnated faith. It stands alone because it's both spirit and body,

and you don't have to choose between the two. It's faith and reason. And someone said in the lecture that Jesus was the embodiment of reason, which I thought was a great way to look at that. Because it is, I mean, the incarnation did change everything because the God of the cosmos becomes flesh. And all of a sudden we can see and hear. And it reminded me, you know, the word reason is used five times in the book of Job.

And it goes back to what you were talking about earlier with the little girl, the idea of suffering and trying to figure that out. because that's the whole book of Job, right? I mean, the whole thing is that. It's interesting because the first time it's used is in Job 2, 3, by God to Satan. Remember the little conversation going on in the other realm? Job 2? Yeah, and he says, you incited me to afflict Joe for no reason.

God said that. You know, so he said it first. And then four more times later, Job says it in some of his speeches with his friends because he's like, I don't know the reason. I don't know the reason. I don't know the reason. He just keeps saying it over and over and over again. He can't reason to it because they were under the assumption that of the gods,

that's what the friends were, that it was only appeasement. So you did something to displease God and therefore you're suffering as a result. And they even said awful things. They said what one of them said, one of the dopey friends said, your kids were killed for the penalty of their sin. It was like they deserve. to have that roof fall on their heads. I mean, the thing about that, that's your friend that's there to encourage you.

And he's like piling on the whole situation. And then you have God show up in this like tornado at the end. And he like gives all these like, I'm God and you're not speech. And Job had such an interesting response in Joe 42. He said, I realize I've spoken beyond what I know after listening to you. I don't know what I thought I knew. And then he said something really awesome that really, speaks to that. He said, I had heard about you, but now I see you. And I've always thought that was a

powerful thing because when it comes to suffering and what you described, you can only understand something once you go through it. And all of us go through different things. We don't know. And there's a time when you can see something that you couldn't have seen at the beginning. And that's what happens in Job. And that's really kind of, to me, the whole point of the story. Some things are beyond reason. But even through those, we wind up. seeing God. It's like that question in John 9 when they asked Jesus, who's sinned? The parents or the son that he was born blind. He said, neither. The man was born blind so that we might see the glory of God. So that's how we, that's the only way you can get through things like that,

is, is realizing that the alternative is it's all random. I lost my kid. I have no hope now and I'll live the rest of my life in despair. Or I see something eventually beyond that. But you can't just push somebody across. But you can't, but you can't begin with yourself. Exactly. Because if you begin with yourself to make meaning of the world, then now you all of a sudden you're bearing the weight of reality on you. So I don't think it's all, we do have God-given rational faculties, but you're not discovering God.

I mean, he has to reveal himself first. Yeah, that's good. And so I think that's Paul's teaching in Romans, you know, the things about God, the Bible says that they've been like his invisible attributes have been clearly perceived by what has been made. So God actually reveals himself

through creation. And even the gospel itself, you know, the more specific things about God also come through a type of revelation because when you get to Romans 10, he says the only way that somebody is going to hear about the good news of Jesus is as if somebody tells them.

You know, faith comes some hearing the word and it goes through this progression of like, well, how are they going to hear if nobody tells them? And how are they, how are they, how are somebody not going to, how somebody going to tell them if nobody sends them? And it's like, blessed are those who, you know, who bring the gospel. So the idea of the how that works is faith is actually a response to revelation. And it's not anti-rational. I would say it's more than rationality. It's not anti-reason. It is more than reason. But it's not. And it's not irrational.

And I think what happened coming out of the Enlightenment, you have like a progression of philosophers. Kant being one of them, because you know that they had that, there's two terms, the numinal and the phenomenal world. And so Khan actually takes the field of knowledge and he splits it in half.

And basically, that's where we get our modern language like, well, my faith is this. It's a private belief. You know, my truth is this. Or values, you know, values are in the, they're in a subjective realm. That's true for, I have my own personal views on that.

Well, my personal view, well, the, the scripture doesn't say that Jesus Christ is Lord for you personally. No, he's either Lord of all or he's not Lord at all. And so the claim is there is an objective truth that is true for all of us and binding to all of us, irrespective and independent of any of our perceptions. there is a reality and God reveals that reality. So faith then comes in as I receive revelation and I say, God, I believe you. I mean, that is the Bible, but that's the war, right?

Yeah, my, during my, you know, crisis of faith, I would call it, it really had less to do with my own personal doubt in the reasons for God, but more so my doubt in the authority, of the people who are teaching me. So one of my favorite parts of this lecture was when we was talking about the Middle Ages and it was saying people in the Middle Ages came to know, really could only know

God or Jesus or the Bible through the authority of the church because they couldn't read. And then there was this expansion of material for people to read with the printing press, with just greater writing, greater access to knowledge. and they started kind of doing their own independent reasoning and some left and some, you know, came closer to God.

For me, it was kind of like that of I, through high school, I grew up in church, was always in church building, but then through high school, I started with the dynasty, I started speaking a lot and traveling a lot and going to a bunch of different churches. And there was several years where I was in a church building that was not my own, that I was listening to a sermon or a pastor in doing worship, sometimes like three nights a week where I was, I mean, all kinds of faith.

I mean, I was Baptist events, non-denominational events, Pentecostal events, Catholic events, Church of Christ. Like, it was all, I was hearing from all kinds of people in all kinds of circumstances. And what I started to hear were the contradictory. between them and I would hear things people take strong stances on their own biblical take that I thought just like wasn't a good reason for it and that started kind of to develop cracks and like oh what is real like I was thinking about if you're listening with kids in the car I'm about to say something about Christmas so so mute mute it for like a minute and if you're an

adult that still moves with your parents. Yeah. Sorry, that was me. Okay. So I was thinking about a cousin when she was eight and her parents told her that Santa wasn't real. She, like, her immediate thought was like, San's not real like, what about the Easter bunny? What about the tooth fairy? What about, you know, what about God?

And for me, it was kind of that same, like, thinking of like, okay, I've heard, I told, I took a whole class in high school and in college about the earth being 6,000 years old. And then I start reading science textbooks and doing my research. I'm like, okay, it's clearly not. Like the earth isn't flat. The earth isn't 6,000 years old. Like the earth's not the center of the universe. Earth isn't the center of the universe.

The galaxy, yeah. Right. Yeah. There's clearly other things going on here. Okay, well, if that's not true, then what about, you know, then is. the resurrection true. You know, and it's even more things like that, like hearing things like, you know, the Bible, you know, is, you know, the, like, truth. We need to, like, follow the Bible, but then people using, or even historically, people are using, you know, passages from the Old

Testament to, like, justify slavery or passages in the New Testament to justify misogyny or sexism or whatever. And I started thinking like, okay, people who I'm seeing as authority are using the Bible to believe whatever they want to believe and not giving good reasons for their belief. Like, is this like all true? And so that was more of the deconstruction of like, what do I actually believe? And kind of what I came to was it wasn't that I didn't believe in God. It was that my view of God and who he was supposed to. host to be as a all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing being wasn't the actual, wasn't actually who he was. Like, I had a poor perception of him.

And when I felt like, I felt like the Holy Spirit actually led me in that, in that crisis to study more and actually come to know, have a personal relationship with Jesus instead of like a relationship with this like philosophical omnipotent, omnipotent. present, God. And then when I started seeing God as someone who is interacting in my life and in the life and in everyone's life all through history, so I'm saying, okay, this makes sense. Like, I see the reasoning. And even in my own experience, like, I've, being in prayer every day and reading scripture and being in community, like I see that working in my life and I see how my life would be different without God. And I'm saying like, okay, bottom line, it works. Like, I think, that really is God. And hearing about miracles that I've heard of or experiencing being prayed for and experiencing like change in my life, it's like I could say, an atheist would say,

or a materials would say like, oh, that's all natural. Like there's some kind of, all miracles are, you know, there's a natural explanation for them in some sense. Or religion is good for people and it changes their life. That doesn't mean that God is real. It just means. that religion works. Like, you can come up with natural explanations for, you know, anything. But to me, it actually just makes more sense that there is a spiritual being working in life and that there's an unseen forces happening in the world to me makes more sense than that there's a natural explanation for everything.

I want you to sign up and take the course with us for free at unashamed for Hillsdale.com. Yeah, your experience is interesting because it's kind of mirrors what I would, I would, I would, I've always argued that part of the reason why we even had the kind of the naturalistic worldview emerged during the Enlightenment, primarily I think in the German universities, but they became overwhelmingly naturalistic. And by naturalistic, I just mean that up until this point in history, the predominant worldview was that the universe was an open system. And that just means that God could get in and out. He could make miracles happen, whatever. I mean, it wasn't, everything didn't have to be explained through like the natural sciences.

And the way that you could articulate that would be like, you know, you've seen when people take the dominoes and they make a whole like thing out of them and they hit one and they all like fall down. Like that's kind of the method that I would say came in with naturalism is the way we would indulge ourselves in the sciences is that we would look at a domino that had fallen and we would examine it. It's wonder why this thing's on the ground. Oh, there's another one on top of it. And through the scientific method, you would determine that the reason why this one fell was because another one hit it and made it fall. What made that one fall? And so you're just looking for what's called the uniformity of natural causes and everything.

And so the world eventually became predominantly naturalistic in the universities. And they kind of got rid of God. They said, oh, our system's closed. nothing, God doesn't get in, nothing gets in and nothing gets out. Everything that happens happens as a result of a prior state of physical events. It's just, it's science. Everything is science. I think the reason why the universities went that way, and you could argue that started

in the departments of science, and then it moved into philosophy later. But I think the, and then it moved into theology after that. I think the reason why it happened was because of the church's response to scientific discovery. You think about Galileo and Copernicus, as you mentioned now, like the church persecuted them as heretics because they discovered that, oh, wait, the Earth's not the center of the universe, actually. And so then the church comes after them for a true scientific discovery. And so I think that's what had. Then there's a separation. And then what happened is when you have the printing press,

you have all this that now people can get access to information in real time, they don't need to go to the Catholic Church for information anymore. They can, man, they got a pamphlet right in front of them that somebody printed. Benjamin Franklin printed a pamphlet, you know, talked about his printing press. But I think that's the, so your story is kind of similar of how you got there. The problem with naturalism. Oh, so what happened, though, is, and I think this was kind of where we got to where we're at today, is when the philosophers started looking at that, and they said, wait a second, if the world is naturalistic, naturalism is how we should interpret reality.

We like where you're going with this, scientist, but there is two problems that you have, and the two problems that you have is, one, we don't matter. That's nihilism. That's the niche. You know, we don't matter, because if all that exists is the material. a world and all I am is a collection of atoms. All you are is a collection of atoms. I'm no more valuable than this coffee mug. We're just atoms colliding. It's all it is. Everything that happens is physical. There is no value in human life nihilism. And then the other problem is, in the epistemology problem, you can't know anything to be true because your own thought processes are just chemical reactions.

There is no freedom of will. There is no, none of that. And what the what the philosophers did, a lot of the ones that were mentioned in this, in this lecture, Emmanuel Kant, Hegel was not mentioned, Kierkegaard was mentioned, Descartes was mentioned. What the philosophers did is they collectively, over time, developed a system where they said, you know, we're just going to get rid of reason altogether. We're just going to, we're going to divide the field of knowledge into two categories, an objective and a subjective realm. and we're going to put the things like faith, values, meaning, all that. Those will be subjective categories. True for you, not true for me categories. And then we'll put scientific facts and mathematical equations.

That'll be our objective reality. And that worked for a while, but as we've seen in the last five years, even that's gone. I mean, gender, for example, your gender is not real. That's biology, but nope, you determine it for yourself. Mathematics are now a byproduct of the person. patriarchy and everything now is subjective and you can't hold a world together like that. I think it was highlighted, Zach, by a little thing called COVID-19 that shows you about something that supposedly is objective that became very subjective, depending on who's in charge.

So we're out of time, but we'll pick it up because, man, there's a lot more to be said that we didn't get to. So we'll pick it up in our last lecture for Theology 101 next time on that. Unashamed for Hillsdale. Take the course with us. Unashamedfor Hillsdale.com. Join us every Friday for Unashamed Academy powered by Hillsdale College. Make sure to go to Unashamed for Hillsdale.com and sign up. It's no calls to you. That's Unashamed for Hillsdale.com. And don't miss an episode of the Unashamed podcast by subscribing on YouTube. And be sure to click the little bell and choose all notifications to watch every episode.