Conversations with an Atheist

It's fascinating to me how easily someone in one religion can find the fallacies and biases in another religion.

I think that what's fascinating... You're razor sharp on your criticism of Islam here.

Yeah. But what I find fascinating, Jeff, is that you recognize that with other religions, but you don't do it with your own.

Because I... That may be the case. I'm just saying. And there's that confirmation bias coming up again.

This is Apologetics Live. To answer your questions, your host from Striving for Eternity Ministries, Andrew Rappaport.

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We are going to be planning to have a conversation with an atheist. A few weeks ago, I was out, and Drew and Chris Hough and Justin Peters were discussing a argument for cessationism.

And in that, toward the end, a young man... Well, okay. I'm just old enough that everyone's a young man.

But a young man, Evan, came in, really, really articulate. And he had questions.

He had been following the program. And so I asked him. He had emailed me, and I reached out to him and said,

Hey, would you want to spend a fuller time? And so he should be in here soon.

I did email him earlier today to make sure he was coming in. He said, I'll see you soon.

We'll talk soon. So that will be... That'll be good. I don't know if Drew is...

Drew is backstage, but his camera's off. He is taking care of his kids. Oh, no, he's...

There he is. Howdy. All right. I'm having to refill...

That doesn't look like your normal drink of, you know, Fresca. I would like to see you fill that baby bottle with a

Fresca and drink it. There you go. You and everyone else, but it ain't happening.

Well, hey, Drew, thanks to you and Chris and Aaron filling in. I have been traveling a bit, and I should be home for a while,

I think. I said, I think. I know Thanksgiving will be gone.

I do have a debate coming up in Dallas, Texas.

While I'll be out there for doing a worldview week conference at a school there.

And on Wednesday, they set up a debate with an atheist. This is November 10th to 14th.

And so I'll have a debate. Originally, I asked for the debate topic to be, is secular humanism superior to Christianity?

And he agreed to that. And then I guess we ended up, he asked if we could change the topic to be, is

Christianity true? So that's kind of, I was like, okay, well, we could do either one.

I mean, I understand why when you debate people, they don't want to be on the defensive.

Get it? He wants to put me on the defensive. But in this one, I kind of think he lost before we even get started.

Because I don't know how he's going to explain something being true without God.

Just saying. Right. Yeah. That's one of those things, right?

Establishment of truth. Well, what is truth, right? And because we have to have an objective standard by which we measure truth claims.

And so you don't just get to make up truth. You don't get to make up a standard.

It has to. Are you saying that you can't have your truth and I can't have my truth?

Right? Yeah. Relativism doesn't exist. And we see this in the church as well.

Where people say, well, how you interpret the Bible, that's true for you.

But that's not true for me. Okay, well, if relativism is true, then we can't know anything. Correct.

Because there's no objective standard by which to measure your truth claims. It's kind of like when people tell me, well, the

Holy Spirit told me. And I go, oh, Holy Spirit just told me you're wrong. Yeah, he told me too.

So now how do we measure who's right or wrong? Yeah, I love the quick thinking.

I have a friend, Fred Zaspel, super fast thinker. But basically they were at a conference.

The topic of the conference was dealing with Roman seven. So there's two different views of Roman seven that people will interpret.

One is the view that Roman seven is dealing with Paul's conversion. I think that's the right view. The other is dealing with our sanctification.

And so those are two different views. And John Reisinger had a friend that was in the area, but nobody had been to conferences.

No one knew who he was. Fred Zaspel gets up to speak. And John Reisinger planned it.

And so his friend stands up just as Fred's about to speak. And he stands up and goes, God woke me up at 11 o 'clock last night and told me to come to this conference to say that John Reisinger's view of Roman seven is right.

You know, and Fred Zaspel, without missing a beat, turns and goes, that's funny because God woke me up at 11 .15

last night and said, I'm sending to you a false prophet. You know,

I mean, when you appeal, but I mean, that was in a joking way. But when people appeal like what God has said to me, well, you know, there's no way to, you know, it's the argument.

Well, since God, it's from God, therefore, it's authoritative and we can't speak against it.

I'm bringing in my higher authority. Yeah, from my higher authority. And the problem is, it's like, well, what do

I say to that? Other than no, he didn't. And then that's causes a whole other. Correct.

Correct. So Melissa is saying that you got a cool shirt on. Strange fire.

Um, Facebook user, Facebook user says Andrew kills me. LOL. Well, I don't know who

Facebook user is. I don't plan to kill anybody just for the record. But if you do want your name to show up,

Facebook user, unless that's actually your name, Facebook user. Well, Mr. User, you could go to ApologizeLive .com.

There is instructions on how to get your name to show up there. I knew it. I knew it.

It's always one of two people. It's either happy or it's Darren. And which one was it?

It's happy. It sounded like happy. Happy just doesn't follow instructions. That's I will see happy in February at the

Open Air Theology Conference on Calvinism. Looking forward to that one. I got to book tickets. I'm going to try to make it.

That'll be good. Everyone and hang out. Yeah. So, um, so let's see.

John is saying, uh, Andrew, I'm praying for Israel. Do you have family there? No, I do not anymore.

Uh, I don't have any family. I know that now I see Evan is backstage, but his camera's off. So I'm waiting for him to put it back on.

Okay. There we go. Evan. Welcome.

I see you had the camera on, then you took it off. So, you know, I'm, I'm doing all kinds of, uh, iniquitous behaviors back here.

So I didn't want you guys to see. I'm just kidding. It's a pleasure to meet you, Andrew. I mentioned to Drew last time.

I'm a big fan of you guys. I see you and I as kind of kindred spirits. I know you're, you're a

Jew from New Jersey originally. I'm a Jew from New York. So, uh, full Ashkenazi. Okay.

Good. Obviously we went different ways a little bit. Yeah, let's maybe, but we'll see where we both land in the end.

Maybe, uh, you'll come, you know, you'll come over. You know, you, you mentioned about doing things when you're off camera.

There used to be a feature on Google Hangouts that I really thought was pretty wrong.

And I'm glad that they don't have that here, but there was an ability. If you took your camera and turned it off, that the host could turn your camera on.

Yeah. Yeah. And so it was funny because I remember watching, you know, and someone turned someone's camera on and the guy was sound asleep.

Now I've heard stories of other things being done when people pop a camera on.

But do you remember the, uh, the Jeffrey Toobin affair on CNN? I don't.

Oh man. Drew, you remember that? Uh, I don't. He was a

CNN contributor. And during the pandemic, uh, apparently there was an incident where his webcam was on and he was.

And he didn't know. Okay. Yeah. CNN legal commentator.

I'm going to have to look that up now. Well, it became a verb. It kind of became a joke to Toobin means to, you know, yeah.

Okay. Well, so Evan, we wanted to give you the time tonight. I know that there's, we got someone, uh, whose name is homo, homophobic, homophonic.

It's, but, uh, so we'll, we'll at the, at the top of the hour, we'll bring him in and see what questions he has.

But first we wanted to, you know, let me just say this, Evan, uh, I listened to the show when you were in and, uh,

I, I was, uh, thoroughly impressed with the way you communicated, uh, your understanding of Christian theology.

I know that, I think it was Justin that said the same thing. I mean, you, you seem to have a better handle on Christian theology than, than many

Christians. Um, so, you know, kudos there.

I'm just going to test on, I think it might be, let me see. Yeah. So, uh, you're on your end.

I don't know what you're using for a microphone. Is it your laptop mic? Uh, it's a desktop computer.

What, is there some kind of feedback? No, there's an echo. So what, what usually when you're not speaking, so just when you're not speaking, hit the mute, that will take care of it.

I'll turn the volume down too. Let me know if this helps. Well, the thing is, is, and I'll, I'll do,

I'll test it this way. So what it is, is with, uh, certain microphones, the condenser mics, it, what they do is when they don't hear something, it kind of reaches out further and further and further to try to hear.

And so that's what it's doing. So yeah, if you just, when you're not speaking, just mute, um, and that'll be good.

So we wanted to devote the time to you and try to answer some questions that you, you had.

Um, so yeah, go ahead, shoot. Like, well, first, uh, Evan, it's really good to see you again.

I'm glad you're here. I'm going to drop backstage cause I got to deal with this little one. So hopefully, uh, later on I'll be able to pop back in.

Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, we'll, uh, he's backstage if, if, uh, we see a cute little baby, you know, we'll put that right on screen, you know?

So, so Evan, yeah, you, you had some great questions. I knew you came in toward the end of the show and didn't have a lot of time to, to get all your questions answered.

I don't know if two hours would still be enough, but, but, uh, yeah, so let's, you know, what, what are some of the big questions you have?

Well, let me start off by saying, well, I appreciate your critique of postmodernism at the beginning, cause I am not, uh, I'm not a postmodernist, so I like what you said there.

Um, and yeah, I suspect we'll get to a fraction of my questions. I just want to say I'm, I'm absolutely honored by the fact that this is your last broadcast before Reformation Day.

And I mentioned on the last broadcast that I'm a tremendous admirer of Martin Luther and of what the

Reformation stands for. And so the fact that, uh, I'm on for the broadcast prior to that is something of an honor.

It's not, uh, something I ever hear from atheists about the Reformation and its legacy.

Uh, certainly don't hear from Catholics and I shockingly don't hear it that much from Protestant Christians as well about the intellectual and theological progenitors of your, of your faith.

Um, and I know it's funny to hear from me, but I thought it was appropriate to say, um, so I just wanted to give a vindication of the

Reformation, even though I, uh, obviously don't agree with its ideological and theological fruits. Um, I can appreciate what it stands for.

And I think it, we are all living in the shadow of Martin Luther in some sense, and far too few people appreciate that.

Um, well, Martin Luther is actually in the shadow of John Huss, who's in the shadow of John Wycliffe.

Yeah. And I mentioned that last time and, you know, in some sense he's in the shadow of Peter Waldo and you can go back to the proto reformer several centuries.

I mean, these ideas go back to really the, to Paul in some sense. I mean, there was Augustine Calvinism.

Yeah. I mean, what really made the difference with Luther wasn't so much Luther as it was, you know,

Guggenheim, you know, it was the printing press that made the difference. Yeah. And that's, that's something that I've come across as I look at it, that, well, there's, there's,

I almost view it as a triumvirate. I mean, there's Luther, you have a man who has an ideological commitment, uh, to the point at which he's willing to die for it.

But you also have a nascent printing press that had been around since about the 15th century with Gutenberg, uh,

Huss didn't have that a century prior, which is why it was a regional reformation. So there's that.

And then there's also political reasons. And this, this may go into a kind of Marxist materialist analysis that some of the defenders of Luther, like Frederick, the wise, uh, may have not been committed to his theology, but they may have saw a benefit in the temporal realm for standing against Rome and being chief over their own realms.

Um, but as I leave, as I read Luther, I mean, the term that comes to my mind and it's sort of anachronistic is, is populism.

Um, so like looking at his writings and, uh, you know, prior to him, there's kind of this exaltation of monasticism, um, that kind of the, the highest calling for a

Christian is to be a monk or a nun. And what he's doing, it seems to me is to thoroughly infuse every aspect of Christian life, uh, with reverence for God and Christ.

And so it's not just the monk in the cloister, the nun in the convent living in self -denial who honors God. Um, you know, every, he says every time the farmer tills his field or the blacksmith forges a tool or the tradesman plies his trade, all these people are honoring

God in their daily toil, just as much as the monastics are. Uh, there's no special sanctity afforded for people like that.

And so, uh, it really is revolutionary in that way. Um, and, and so I see that as kind of symbolic and we're kind of the inheritors of that.

Uh, but we have little understanding and appreciation for it, even Christians, I think. Um, but like when he stands before worms and here

I stand, I can do no other. I think he's, he's laying the groundwork for modern liberalism, small

L liberalism, you know, our, our sense of individual consciousness. And, and, uh, it's kind of maybe not a direct path, but I think a path from that to the scientific revolution, to the enlightenment, to the

American founding and to the world in which we find ourselves for better or worse today. Um, so I just wanted to give that shout out to Martin Luther here.

Um, but yeah, Andrew, since you mentioned, uh, you guys alluded to moral relativism at the beginning,

I think like any good discussion between a Christian and an atheist that probably talking morals is a good place to start.

Sure. And I know it's kind of a cookie cutter thing, but, you know, I know you obviously get your morality from the

Bible. Um, I will say a lot of things that are, are politically incorrect and I don't,

I'm not going to be vulgar or anything, but a lot of these things that I'll say will have leftists clutching their pearls,

I'm sure. Um, but also some things that, that you may not love. Um, but I think an interesting place to start is, is probably the issue of slavery, which

I think is illustrative, um, cause we think of it today as an abomination.

Um, and I hear both Christians and atheists say that slavery has always been an abomination.

I think that's a little facile. I mean, it's easy to look back on history and condemn our ancestors sitting in our air conditioning.

Um, and so I think obviously slavery is wrong today. We would all agree with that, but was it wrong in biblical times?

I mean, in a strange way, I've heard Christians kind of defend the biblical model of slavery based on the economic conditions.

It was actually the best possible worlds. I mean, it's better for someone to be in servitude than to be dead and unable to feed himself.

Um, but I find it strange that Christians will defend the biblical model of slavery while also kind of laying a claim to moral absolutism, uh, because that to me, this speaks moral relativism.

If you're able to look back in history and say that slavery in biblical times was acceptable because otherwise people would starve.

So if they're in servitude, that's better than the alternative. Uh, I, I consider myself a moral relativist and I affirmed that position, but I don't see how you can lay claim to moral absolutism and agree with that position that slavery was proper at one time, but it's wrong now.

Okay. First, let me just correct one thing that you said just off the bat, and we don't get our, our morals from the

Bible. We get our morals from the nature of God, and that's a major difference.

Um, so why is lying wrong? Because God's not a liar. Not because the

Bible says we shouldn't lie, right? It's, it goes back to the nature of God and that becomes an important thing because as we're discussing morality being absolute and universal, we, and immaterial, those are three elements of it.

Well, we get that from the nature of God because God is absolute and God is universal and God is immaterial.

So we would, when we talk of morality, it has to get, come from a standard that's absolute.

Otherwise, like we said in the beginning, we'd talk past each other, but slavery, let me ask you this, how are you defining slavery?

Uh, the ownership of another person. I think broadly we can get more in depth on that, but it's a simple overview.

Um, let me, just out of curiosity, what's your views on abortion? Um, yeah, that's a tough one.

I, I, I think I like the old Democrat position, not the one they have now, but kind of safe, rare and legal.

Um, I think it's abominable. Um, I think there may be certain circumstances where I wouldn't necessarily find it morally objectionable.

Um, I don't think the Roe framework was terrible. I mean, I think beyond the first trimester to me, you're talking about something viable.

I, I don't agree with that, but I, in the first trimester, I think under the circumstances, I wouldn't necessarily find it objectionable.

Okay. So now let me ask you this, and this is why I asked that question. What would then be the difference between this is my body and this is my property?

Uh, well, bodily autonomy is speaking to one's sovereignty over his own body.

Uh, a property is something extrinsic to the body. So I own my clothing, I own my, my goods, but I don't own my heart.

I don't own my, my woman doesn't own her womb. Um, in some sense she does, but there's obviously a distinction between bodily functions and extrinsic.

Yeah, but there's another being in there. I mean, you, you have, you have a human being with a separate DNA. You could have a separate gender, could be a separate blood type, right?

So it's, abortion is an ownership issue. The difference between abortion and slavery is abortion properly carried out always ends in death where slavery didn't.

So both are actually an ownership issue. That's what, that's why I brought that up. And the reason I did was to just see when we speak of morality and say, well, the, you know,

Christians would be wrong for saying slavery is always wrong, but the Bible talks about slavery, the, the issue of what's the view of slavery, how, how do we define it?

Because if we're going to say, well, it's an, it's ownership, well, then abortion's ownership. And we should, we should be against that as well.

Now you're taking a different position in many, most will say, yes, abortion up until the ninth, you know, month, even beyond, uh, and then they say, it's wrong to say you own another human being.

So sure. But I, yeah, I mean, there's a distinction to be made there. I think too, that even other theological traditions,

I think the Muslims believe in soulment doesn't occur at conception, but it occurs at some point during the pregnancy.

So the question ultimately becomes when is that a life? Well, when it's autonomy.

Yeah. When does a spirit, the immaterial part of human beings come into the body.

Right. And so this is kind of off topic from what you did, but I'll just try to answer this for folks.

There's three views that, that we'd have, and we being human beings, you either have the view that when creation began,

God creates, and he created all the souls that were going to be created.

This would be some modern Judaism would believe this, the more liberal Judaism, Mormonism and others that believe that all the souls were created.

They're up in heaven. They're just waiting to come down to be put into a body. The, the other view would be that God at some point after conception or at conception gives, creates a spirit and puts it inside of the human body growing in the womb.

Now with that, if you hold to that one, you could argue, and some people try to is to say, well, that happens at birth.

So it's not a child. It's not a human, and it doesn't have an image or a part of them until birth.

The, and, and so the, the problem I see with that argument is based out of the, the

Hebrew in Genesis one, where it says there that God rested on the seventh day from Bara, from creating out of nothing.

And if he's creating a new soul, then he hasn't fully rested because he's still creating.

And that's why I hold to the third view that God must have in creation in the procreation of man and woman created the process that would create a immaterial part of a human being.

And that then would be at conception, right? And again, there's ways we can look in the Bible to say why, you know, the

Bible supports conception. But so those are the three views. Now, if you're an atheist and saying that there is no

God, then you're, you end up having to deny actually the immaterial part of man in the first place, because we're just chemical reactions.

And that has a whole slew of other problems. So, but to the question of slavery, so you, you said you define slavery as ownership, right?

So when we look at the Bible's view of humans, they weren't treated as ownership.

They weren't property. How would we argue that? Well, when you look in Leviticus, where it talks about the slave laws, you have a case where if I have a cattle and he comes onto your property, you keep him.

I have a slave that comes onto your property, you know, you're sorry.

If my cattle goes onto your property, you return them. If my slave goes onto your property, you don't return them.

And the reason for that is because the cattle is my property. So you return my property to me.

But a human being is not. The other thing that most people will say against slavery is the fact that, you know, the servitude, they're not paid, but in the

Bible, they were paid a half day's wages. So the slavery, much of the slavery was, and the best illustration

I have used for to describe slavery is if you understand

Japanese culture, like in the 80s, where you had companies that owned everything.

So if you, if you and I worked for a company, they buy our clothes, our house, pay for education, our cars, utilities, food, everything's paid for by the company.

And the idea behind that was so that we would have a desire to work hard for the company because the better the company does, the better we do.

Yeah, it's like it's a zaibatsu, I think you're talking about. But I mean, the distinction is that a slave doesn't have the opportunity to leave the servitude of his master, whereas a

Japanese employee in a zaibatsu, in theory, does. In theory, right? Because if they do, they leave everything behind.

Correct. Well, but so the distinction that you're making, I mean, would you would obviously say that 19th century

American chattel slavery was categorically wrong, right? Yeah, I would even say, I would even say that Roman slavery in the time of Christ was wrong.

Even though we see Paul writing, you know, about slaves to obey their masters, accepting the culture that they're in, not he didn't say, you know, overthrow it.

But I mean, slavery is not new. Slavery has been around in every generation.

I mean, we have it today. I mean, here's one of the things I find interesting is people who are often argue against slavery are also in favor of pornography.

And the reason I find that interesting is because much of the pornography is dealing with slavery. It's human trafficking, people that are kidnapped, forced into that, not all of it, but a lot of it.

And, you know, people don't talk enough about that slavery, which is occurring today in America.

America is the number one country with human trafficking. But when we look at that, that's a slavery.

And so I would say I'd be against both. But the slavery in the

Bible, much of what it is, is an emphasis on the responsibility of the master to take care of someone else's needs.

Right. To provide for them to, you know, because in any culture, you're going to have people who are going to be able to manage things, manage property or not.

And you take let's take Mao in China. Right. Mao comes in and says, oh, it's not fair that, you know, there's so many peasants working the lands.

We should just give the land to the peasants so that they can own land so that they can have it for themselves, knowing full well that much of them, many of them wouldn't know how to take care of the land.

They don't know how to manage it. They know how to do what they're told. But once given freedom, they didn't know what to do with it.

Right. This is what's interesting, Andrew, is that, you know, you're talking almost in gradations.

I mean, slavery is not a binary, right? It's not just slavery or not slavery. And so to me, I mean, that sort of bespeaks a kind of moral relativism, which

I agree with. I mean, I think there is I don't think there's a line of what slavery a lot of people will define, you know, involuntary servitude in prisons as a kind of slavery.

I mean, you know, you don't have bodily autonomy. There's a lot of ways we can define slavery and to, you know, categorically condemn it as easy, but to identify what we would actually characterize as slavery is much more difficult.

But it sounds like from what you're saying, I mean, if it's about meeting someone's needs, particularly people in a hand to mouth, subsistence society in which people are, for the most part, incapable of providing for their own, it's justifiable.

But, you know, an antebellum slave owner in the South would make the same case. Do you think that, let's say, a plantation owner in 1850 should have freed his slaves, even though having done so, perhaps they weren't capable of living on their own?

I mean, would that have been a justifiable thing to do, knowing that they were not able to take care of themselves?

I mean, servitude was, in a sense, a better condition for them in terms of their ability. Yeah, because if he frees his slave,

I mean, they just get, depending where they are, they just get captured and put back into slavery, especially if they're in the

South. Have you ever read the book, 12 Years a Slave? I saw the film.

Okay, so I read the book. So maybe the film has it right or wrong,

I don't know. They're not always as accurate from the book. But, you know, one of the things he had said was he was kidnapped.

He was from the North. He was born free. For folks who don't know the story, back when slavery was legal in the

South, here's someone from, I believe, New York, but he played music. He went down to Washington, just on the border where slavery is legal and not legal, doing a concert with friends.

I think most of them were white. But something happened. He wasn't feeling well.

He ends up being kidnapped. He's trying to explain that he's free.

He's not a slave. And they just start beating him. And they take him South to where now, as he gets into the

Deep South, like, you know, there's nowhere for him to run. He can't argue. He can't make his case.

Now, after 12 years, he was set free. Someone recognized him or came to get him.

But the point of it was the first slave owner that he worked for, he said if that was slavery, he wouldn't have thought it so bad.

And what was it? He had a Christian man. And though that, unfortunately for him, was not much of his tenure, he ended up doing very well under that man.

So in those conditions, did he have the freedom to go and do what he wanted?

He did not. You know, in that sense, I always wondered what would happen if he would have just told that man that he really was free.

You know, something interesting, too. I know you've had some things to say about him. But Doug Wilson, he wrote a book about 20 years ago that was incredibly controversial about Southern slavery.

Oh, wait, wait. Does he ever write something that's not controversial? I don't think he's capable of writing something that's not.

But, you know, then this is kind of what I was saying, that I may say things that will make leftists bristle.

But I think we get a cartoon depiction of even antebellum chattel slavery in that it was just a parade of horribles.

And, you know, their gradation, like you're saying, I mean, they were benevolent slave owners. I mean, the institution can be evil, but not every instantiation of it was correct.

And, you know, it's possible that some people better off in that condition. I mean, that sounds like a horrific thing to say to our liberal

Western minds. But I, you know, that to me is self -evidently true. Yeah.

I mean, look, what is it that, you know, they blamed DeSantis, but it was actually a

Black guy that wrote the curriculum in Florida that said that the slaves learned a trade.

Right. And well, W .E .B. DuBois wrote Up From Slavery. And, you know, the idea, I think the passage that was controversial in the

DeSantis curriculum was something like, you know, slaves learned a trade from slavery. I mean, this is the whole thesis of W .E

.B. DuBois was that, you know, Black people thrive despite slavery, not necessarily because of it, but, you know. Despite it.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the same thing about Jews. I mean, this is what we could say about Jews throughout history. Well, this is what we could say about prisons.

I mean, the whole idea of prison reform, it's the idea that you get there and they teach you skills. Now, I mean,

I think they've gotten away from that, but that was part of the argument was teach people skills so when they get out, they would be more productive to the culture.

You know, and so. And I made a mistake there. It's Booker T. Washington, not

DuBois. I was reading DuBois recently, but it was Booker T. Washington. Someone just reminded me in the private chat there. And so Dee said this, and this getting back to the thing that I was saying, there's different types of slavery.

Which kind are we talking about? And that's the reason I asked you for the definition, because if it's ownership,

I'm going to agree. I don't believe that you can own another human being. I don't think that we see that in the

Bible as the description. And so, you know, what we see described in the

Bible, slavery was generally the means of employment.

I mean, you go through history, and it's hard, I think it's hard for us as Americans to really grasp the way the rest of the world has lived through the centuries, when you really think about it, because we have such freedoms that they never had.

And we cannot conceive what it would be like to not have them. And so you always had cultures where you had a king or a group of people that are the elite, and they're in charge.

They're the nobles, and then the peasants. And yeah, you'll always have like the socialist

Marxist groups that they'll say, oh, see, we're for the peasants. But when you actually see that played out, what happens? They just use the peasants.

So they could be the one. They use the peasants to replace the leader class with themselves, you know, and then they start, you know, oppressing the masses that they were telling the masses, you're being oppressed, and you need us.

And then they become the oppressors. Yeah, well, there's a natural human tendency towards that. I think you may call it total depravity.

Yeah, I would. Yeah, well, and that sort of circles back to what I was talking about with Luther. I think Luther in this kind of as a proto -populist was speaking to the plight of the common man and the idea of individual consciousness, even among the peasantry.

But I would like to, and we can certainly come back to slavery and ask this back. But transitioning to something on a related note,

I think there are passages in the Old Testament in particular, and you know the passages, you know, 1

Samuel 15, 3, Numbers 31, the extermination of the Amalekites and the

Midianites, I think in those two passages. That speak of exterminating men, women, and children and those kinds of things.

I've read Paul Copan on this. I think he's probably one of the most prominent modern authors who speaks about this in defense of it.

I'm not really convinced by what he says. I understand, and again, I'm coming at this from a perspective of moral relativism, that a lot of like when you see, we take the women, well, what's the alternative?

I mean, if you exterminate all the men in combat, you know, what do you leave the women to fend for themselves? And so there's a sense in which

Israel is being benevolent by, you know, requiring the women to be married to men.

And so they're not, you know, it's not a campaign of genocide necessarily. And under the circumstances, you can't in the ancient world operate a prison camp with modern amenities.

I mean, it's just, you know, there's no capability for that. There's no capacity for it in that society.

And so, you know, as a moral relativist, I look at that and I say, you know, I can't, it's a fine line to say

I justify that, but I understand under the circumstances in the ancient world, these practices make some kind of sense.

It's easy to sit here and condemn them, you know, but you can't, an ancient army can't just capture thousands of men who are against your people and just put them in a prison camp and look over them and treat them, you know.

Well, more than that, more than that, it's not just that you're going to put them in a prison camp. How are you going to assimilate them in?

Because when you think of America, America was called a melting pot, right?

The whole idea was that people would come to America, assimilate to the American culture. I mean, that's changing now because everyone wants to come in but not change their culture.

But the idea is you would assimilate to the one culture. But when you think about it, the

Americans are, there's no one, like most

Americans have their roots somewhere else, you know, for me, Russia and Romania. And so that everybody came to America.

Now there's Native Americans and they, you know, date back further.

But eventually they, I mean, they at one point came from somewhere else. So the whole idea is we have a different mindset.

We can't understand these cultures where being whatever tribe they are is everything.

Right? So you kill all the men, the whole idea of that, and this isn't only with Israel.

I mean, the countries, many countries would do it to wipe out their enemies, just you'd kill them all off so that they don't uprise and come back because there's always the, you know, there's always the,

I mean, that's why in Israel they had certain areas, you know, in each of the towns where if you killed someone by accident, you could flee to for protection.

The idea was that, okay, the accidents happen, but what's the whole thing with it is if you leave the town, whoever's the next of kin can kill you.

And, you know, that was the rule. So you had to stay in that, you know, in that town until the high priest died.

That offered you the protection. But the idea there is that the knowledge that people will take revenge.

Right? Certainly. But so let me ask you this, Andrew. Would you agree with this statement that the campaigns undertaken by,

I think it was Joshua, well, I guess it was Samuel in 1 Samuel 15, 3, Numbers 31 against the

Midianites, that those were justifiable then, but analogous sorts of campaigns would not be justifiable today?

Well, one distinction that I think that I would make is that when we look at the

Bible, often we see God sending prophets, sending warning messages to these countries before wiping them out.

And so there is a difference there that we don't have today. We don't have God sending warnings.

Even with when you mentioned Joshua, I know you're in Samuel, but you mentioned

Joshua. And even there, I mean, what happened? They knew the God of Israel.

They knew what happened when the waters parted and they went through dry land. And that's why

Rahab, I mean, she even says it like they come to town and she sees the spot and she says, like, okay,

I know what your God's going to do. So there was warnings given.

And so Israel in this case was used as God's arm of judgment on these people.

Now, there was a time that guess what? Israel was under God's judgment by Babylon and Assyria.

So God used Assyria to come and wipe out Jewish people. I never hear anybody complain about that when

God uses them to wipe out whole

Jewish populations and move them all over the world. Yeah, this is kind of goes to another topic.

We're kind of meandering, so I apologize. Hey, I said we want to try to answer your question. So yeah,

I like the natural flow of it. But yeah, no reading. So reading Amos four. I don't know if you ever read

Amos four. It's rather never. I've never read that. I mean, I've read the entire

Bible cover to cover. I know you have. I don't know if you recall. It's where God says,

I gave you cleanness of teeth. He's talking about all the curses that he visited upon early people.

And I think a lot of Christians today shy away from the idea that natural disasters or manmade disasters are because of God's curse.

I think most Christians are uncomfortable saying that, but it's quite clear reading the scripture when I bring up Amos four, there's other passages that are analogous to that that clearly speak to God visiting these things upon people for their misdeeds.

Yeah, I mean, it's because of the curse that, you know, it goes back to Adam and what he did in the garden that we're suffering all these natural disasters.

We see that in Romans chapter eight, where it says the entire universe is groaning. So the entire universe is feeling the effects of sin entering into God's creation.

So in one sense, you know, is God behind that? Well, obviously, yeah, because he allowed he allows it to happen.

But it is because of sin. So, yeah,

I would have, I mean, I don't have a problem saying that. But you wouldn't identify discrete modern events and disasters and attribute them to the wrath of God.

No, I would attribute them to the sin entering into the universe, right?

It's the effect of sin, the curse of sin. That's just naturally that that's now the natural state is that there's going to be these disasters.

Okay. And that includes because I know, you know, I'm familiar with the theodicies, and it's always I know it's always a difficult one to address natural evil.

I mean, it's easy to attribute man's evil, but it's a little bit more difficult to understand why

God would visit an earthquake or a tsunami upon a place. Yeah. And so let's think about this for a second, take a step back, right?

Because you made a distinction for appeal to pick up and the human evil versus natural evil.

Humans have an ability that God gives us to make choices, and therefore we can make good and bad choices.

We have an immaterial part of us that has a morality. Nature doesn't have that. Nature is not doing something evil.

It's just happening. And that's that would be the difference. We could when an earthquake happens, what is it that we say makes it evil?

It's the effect on us, right? And so if I mean, if there was no

God, it wouldn't be evil because I mean, evil there wouldn't be such a thing as evil.

It's just you have chemical reactions that occur. And they're just chemical reactions.

They wouldn't be good or evil, right? You can say the same thing with natural disasters.

Are they intrinsically evil? Are they only evil because they kill men? Is an earthquake that creates a seismic shift in the geology of the planet in some unpopulated place?

Is that an evil act? Yeah, I would not say it's an evil act. It has consequences.

But I mean, an evil act would require a mind, right? And I mean, an earthquake doesn't have a mind.

So no, I wouldn't say it's an evil act. We speak of it as evil because we don't like the consequences of it.

But that doesn't make it evil. So and let me define how

I would define evil. Evil is the absence of good and goods defined by the nature of God.

So nature is working within the way God created it and after the curse, the effects of it.

But it's not making choices in that. It's natural reactions.

The fact that we call it evil shows that we're different than nature. We're different than animals, because we have an image.

You're a part of us that can make, can reason. Yeah, well,

I don't know if I'd agree there, but I'm sure we'll circle back to that. I just wanted to wrap up this discussion about those passages of the

Bible. Those sort of things. Before you do, let me let the audience know, this is not unusual, folks, for two

Jewish men to just be going off on tangent. This is the way Jewish people have discussions.

Some would say debates. It's usually a sharpening of iron, you know, iron sharpening iron, where it's

OK, you say this. Let's test that. Let's poke at this. Because what's good with it is it just helps each of us in our thinking and our processing in the development of arguments.

So what may seem like meandering is actually not unusual, probably for either one of us.

That's right. Yeah. And speaking of that, I think that was that Proverbs. I like the Chris Arnzen show. I'm a fan of his as well.

Iron sharpens iron. But on those passages, I don't know if you've read Copan.

He has a book. I think it is God, a moral monster that I read. Yeah, I have not. I have it. I have not read it. One of the things that he says in that book, and I've heard him say elsewhere, is that these populations that are said to have been exterminated in some portions of the

Bible, in fact, weren't because they reappear elsewhere. So it might say we wipe them out. And that's just kind of the language that we would use hyperbole to say, you know, we totally eliminated the opponent, but then they reemerge.

And so, in fact, they weren't wiped out. And to me, I find that to be interesting.

I understand where the justification is coming from, that he doesn't want to say, well, God commanded genocide. He's saying, well,

God was using hyperbole. But doesn't that strike you as the language of men? I mean, does it strike you that a

God would use that sort of language or that a man would use that sort of language, that we completely kick their butts to use a clean expression?

Is he speaking to men? Well, the scriptures are,

I mean, what is it, 2 Timothy 3, 16? All the scriptures are for teaching.

Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, it's, but the idea is he's writing to men.

How are you going to communicate to men? Using illustrations and things that men would understand, right?

So let me get to some of the comments that we have. Drew's been starring some of these, so we could.

So Jason Cave says, sin is the root of all evil in men.

And that's true. I would say that, you know, with Chris Hough, he's saying, you absolutely could say that some of the disasters we're seeing could very well be an expression of his judgment,

God's judgment and wrath. And it could be. I don't, you know, there are things that God is going to do to bring about what he's looking to do, that maybe he is going to do things.

You know, I remember being asked once, why would God allow the Holocaust? And my answer was the state of Israel.

I mean, and I mean, people don't realize this, but there was no Palestinian state.

It was the land was owned by the UK. And in the early like 1914, 1915 is when there started to be discussion of creating a state of Israel where Israelis started to return to the land and were petitioning the

UK to give them the land for to be their own state. And so it goes way back before 1948.

And it had been a back and forth. And, you know, many Arabs from what we now call Jordan were moving in there as well to try to prevent it from being an

Israel state. And so what happened after the Holocaust? That is what pushed the

UK over the edge and the United Nations to create a state of Israel. Yeah, well, you know,

I understand particularly as a Calvinist that you have this sort of theological commitment to seeing everything through this teleological lens.

Did I say I was a Calvinist? Well, I know you I know you I know you don't say it, Andrew, but a man a man can be judged by those with whom he keeps company.

But but no, and I understand Calvinism pretty well, I think, you know, not a caricature view, but you see everything is teleological.

I mean, God is foreordained this to come to pass for a reason. And so you can look at everything evil in the world, and that's

God's will. And he's bringing it for good, like what Joseph in Genesis, you meant it for evil, but I meant it for good.

And so in some sense, you read everything like that. It's just it's a tough pill for me to swallow to say that that genocide was necessary to precipitate.

I mean, particularly in this context to precipitate the Jewish return to Israel was already underway.

Let me give you two doctrines you may not be as familiar with. And not saying because I mean, you're familiar with a ton of Christian doctrine.

So, you know, and you read a bunch of Christian literature. So but but even a lot of Christians are don't speak so much about it.

There's two doctrines that are really kind of the same in in in some aspect, doctrine of superintending and the doctrine called doctrine of concurrence.

The doctrine of superintending is the idea that God works through human beings to carry out his intentions.

So the writing of scripture, Paul writes the book of Romans, but it's exactly as God intended it to be.

So God works through Paul to to bring about something good. The doctrine of concurrence is kind of the opposite in the sense where when we do something that's evil,

God can use even an evil act like Joseph's brother selling him into slavery. God can take that act and use it for his glory.

So I'm not saying that God was the one behind the Holocaust. He's just using that to bring about his glory.

But that sounds like an open theist position. I mean, if he's not the one behind it, that's the open theist say that, you know,

God is obviously finite and limited in his power. But, you know, men make their decisions and God acts within time and space to make the best of their decisions.

Well, yeah, the difference with open theism is two areas,

God's omniscience and God's eternality, because what they do is they say God doesn't know all things.

I say God does know all things. And the reason God knows all things is also because he's eternal.

So everything's that he's he's outside of time. So everything's like an eternal now for him.

Yeah. And I don't know if you've read some of the open theists, I think Greg Boyd's one of them, Dale Tuggy, actually make the position that they can maintain omniscience by saying that the category of all things that can be known does not include future events.

And so, you know, in that view, obviously, God is operating within time, but they still will say God is omniscient because he knows all things that can be known.

The future cannot be known. Yeah. And that's the problem right there, because now they don't have a God who's eternal.

Right. So so anytime and we've we've addressed some of Greg Boyd's stuff on this show before, but what we end up seeing is whenever we talk theology,

I argue where we start is on the attributes of God. Okay.

The reason for that is when we look at the attributes of God and we understand them rightly from Scripture, our theology is going to fit with those attributes.

And if it messes with the nature of God, then it's wrong. And so my big reason why

I'd be against open theism is you don't have a God that's eternal. Because he doesn't know the future.

Right. And so he either is not omniscient or if you're going to do like Greg Boyd is trying to argue, he's not eternal.

They're messing with one of the two, and they kind of have no choice but to mess with one of the two. Well, they would say you're messing with omnibenevolence.

No, because because because I'm being really clear with the doctrine of superintending. Now, here's the thing.

If I was to ask Greg Boyd or, you know, most open theists who wrote

Romans, they'll say Paul. And I've said and if I ask it a second time, they'll realize what I'm saying.

They'll say, well, God, well, which one you see what their argument is, is their argument ignores how

God works in other areas that he can actually work through human beings to bring about what he desires to have happen.

And yet it be the choices of the human beings. So I'm not. And this is where there's a distinction with with the way

I word things and the way I think about it, because I'm not saying it's an either or. It's not either humans choose or God forces.

It's it's humans choose as God intends. But that's so that's interesting.

I didn't think you believed in mechanical dictation theory or anything. But so if you're saying, you know, obviously,

God's the author. Your book, what do what do we believe? Can I say God authored your book?

No, your name on the cover. No, you can't, because it's not inspired. Um, but in some sense,

I get, you know, Paul is inspired to write the epistles. But, you know, God is the author of of everything in some sense, right?

In some sense, we might be able to say that, except for evil, right? Because that's outside of his nature.

That's the that's opposition to his nature. Well, there's a quote in Isaiah where he says, I make the light and the dark, right?

Yeah. And there's some who will try to say, well, see, based in the King James, where it says he creates evil, the idea that he watches over it.

But it's the thing is that those passages are trying to point out that he's in control of all things, that he's sovereign.

Right. And so one of the things that we make a mistake often is that we take the

Bible and we read something kind of like we were doing earlier with slavery to kind of swing back to that.

People take the slavery. They read it in the Bible. But what do they do? They're reading into it the cattle slavery that we're familiar with.

And so they read that into the Bible and say, see, the Bible's wrong. But that's not the slavery they had back then.

And the view of slavery was different than we would have it today because they didn't live in countries where they had freedoms like we have.

I mean, that it really didn't exist very often. When you say things like that, that it was different because that was the time in which they lived.

I'm completely on board with that. But I'm a moral relativist, and it strikes me as difficult for you to maintain a moral absolutism while also saying that people's behaviors are contextually determined by the cultures in which they find themselves.

Well, I'm saying it's hard for us to what we have a tendency to do is to read into the

Bible our own culture, not understanding their culture. The issue with the slavery goes back to the issue of ownership, which

I'm saying the Bible doesn't teach. Right. And so I would say I view the slavery of the

Old Testament as an employment system. And the onus was on the employers or masters to take care of the employees or slaves.

Someone's correcting. I said, I guess I said cattle. They said, I think they're cognate.

They come from the same Latin word. So, yeah, but I mean, when we think about it, the doctrine of superintending is really important to understand, because what that is, is to say that God works through us.

Do we make the choice? Yes, we do. But the choice we make is exactly as God intended it to be so that God gets all the credit for it.

That's how he's still sovereign. And yet he didn't force it upon us. So why doesn't he get the credit for the evil acts, too?

Well, some would say he does. I mean, some will try to argue that from passages, like I said, in the

King James, where it says he created evil. That's the idea of it is he is sovereign over that.

He allows that, though. And that's now the doctrine of concurrence. Okay, so they're kind of two sides of the same coin, right?

When we do good, God gets the credit because he worked through us to do the good, because that's in his nature.

But when we go against his nature, he can still take that and use that for his good as well.

But it doesn't mean he's intending that to be. Gotcha.

Okay. And I know you're not going to admit that you're a Calvinist, but... You know, I'll explain why.

Because it depends on people's definition of Calvinism. I mean, what I just explained puts me in both camps and puts me out of both camps, right?

Depending on your definition. If when we speak of Calvinism, I'll oversimplify it, but it's either

God chooses us to be regenerated or we choose to be regenerated.

Like, either it's who chooses becomes the thing. And I'm going to say the answer is yes.

It's both. It's, did I choose Christ? Yes. But I didn't choose it all in of myself.

It's because God was working through me that the choice that I made was what

God intended me to do, so he gets all the credit. So he had to do something, but it's a simultaneous act.

Yeah, the secular analog to that would be compatibilism, and I think we are probably on the same page there. You know,

I've come to respect the reformed tradition, and I think looking back in history, what really interests me,

I mean, you have Catholics, Mendel, Le Maître, who had fantastic scientific achievements.

I think, I don't know if you're familiar with Max Weber, kind of the father of sociology. He authored this book in the early 20th century called

The Protestant Work Ethic, and it's become a kind of an idea, it's like politically incorrect now, but caught on in the early 20th century.

It could more accurately be called the Calvinist work ethic, and I think the idea, and it makes a lot of sense to me, is that if you think that your actions are in some sense determined through a theological lens,

I think that affects your behavior in a really pro -social way, because from a Catholic view, for example, there's sort of like a divine scoreboard, right?

I could do a good deed, but then, you know, I can maybe sin later, and then

I can atone for it, but on a reformed view, if you sin, that's a reflection that you're possibly a reprobate, and so I think it compels people, and this is what

Weber was getting at, is that believing in that, I think, compels people to act in a way to show that they're approved.

I know I love Justin Peters' Didache podcast, and his intro says, we're studying the scriptures to show that we're approved, and so you're not seeing yourself as the author of your actions, but you're seeing your actions as a reflection of your ultimate destiny, and I think that's powerful.

I think that really does compel Protestant Christians, and Calvinists in particular, to act in more moral ways.

Yeah, and I'm trying to look up, I was trying to look something up for you, and then

Mozilla's Firefox accounts, like I'm not even using Firefox, so I don't know what this is doing, but the thing that I was looking up, trying to look up, is there was an article that, where they did several studies, to your exact point.

They took people that truly believed there is no God, you know, they're secular humanists, and they took people that were religious, and they examined their work ethics, and their conclusion, even though they were not religious, their conclusion was that believing in an afterlife is important for society.

They actually said, and I wanted to look up the conclusion, because it's basically,

I'm going to have to paraphrase it, but it was something like, we know God doesn't exist, but for society's sake, basically, we have to pretend, because what they noticed was, if you really don't believe there's an afterlife, if you don't believe you're accountable to God, people will lie, they'll cheat, they'll steal, they do whatever they can get away with, but when people believe that they're accountable to a

God, that there is an afterlife, then they act differently, because they know they're accountable, and so the conclusion was, and this is why, when

I do debate people on the topic, and this is why I always ask people for the topic of secular humanism's spirit of Christianity, because it's one where that study shows it's not true.

Now, Drew's backstage saying he's got a question, but he knows how to put himself in here. I don't want to be rude and just interrupt.

I mean, I wouldn't want to be rude and just push you backstage. Oh. Oh, darn.

You know, it's funny, because I keep taking... By the way, I got my cessationist mug here.

Oh, nice. Brett, quit. I keep taking the baby into the playroom, and he keeps getting up and running back in here, but yeah, so I do have a question for Evan on the terms of moral relativism, so when you say moral relativism, are you talking about the idea that in some instances, certain things are okay, right, and it depends on kind of maybe the society we're in, the culture we're in, so like talking about slavery, right, it's bad in antebellum slavery in the antebellum south, but in terms of some other stipulation where that, you know, this is a person's only option for survival, that would be okay, right, and so there could be many aspects, right, society, if society says, well, this is a good thing, then it's okay, right, is that kind of in terms of relativism, things one place might find as morally atrocious, and then another society might find as perfectly acceptable?

I think that characterization you just made, yes, I think earlier what it sounded like you were talking about was utilitarianism, the idea that something could be good because it bears good fruit, you know, versus deontological ethics, where something is categorically evil, even, you know, the trolley problem, it's always wrong to kill someone, even if it could save 20 people, that's distinctive, but yes,

I think, yeah, that it goes to culture, and I think there are some, you know, in my view, much of this is intrinsic, it's the product of evolution, much of our morality, but there is a wide variation, and you just have to look through history, and look across cultures, even today, although the world is much more homogenized today than it was in past centuries, to see that people have very different values, and a lot of things that we take for granted as being right, and proper, and moral are not the case everywhere, and certainly have not been the case historically.

Okay, yeah, because, I mean, you kind of touched on it there, but as far as what

I think your view would be to my question is, when we get into terms of, right, the

Holocaust, right, where the German society said, exterminating Jews is a good and moral thing, but yet we would look at that, and we would say, absolutely not, that is atrocious, that is a wicked evil, that must be eradicated, not the people, right, so in terms of relativism, you know, how do we, how would we justify by saying, by saying, no, this is flat out, this is an absolute moral issue, it's absolutely wrong, whereas I would,

I think the moral relative view kind of has to say to this society that has deemed it a good thing, like, how do we come in and say, no, this is absolutely wrong?

Well, it can be right in that society, but nevertheless, it may be merited for us to impose it, I mean,

I'm not saying that there's, that moral superiority doesn't exist, I'm just saying, you know, my commitment is just to the statement that certain groups of people think that things that we find morally abhorrent are not, and so in that society,

I think all my commitment to relativism would be to say that, yes, there are, in fact, people in Germany who thought that was the good thing to do.

I think we can come to a commitment to basic humanity and respect for human dignity and individual rights without invoking a god, and I think that's really been the story of the past couple of centuries, and I think we're right to do that and impose that on other people, even if we don't appeal to a god, and even if it's right in that society, we can still recognize that it's immoral, broadly speaking, based on human experience, and that's been true historically, too,

Drew, I mean, that's been true throughout Christian history, I mean, you know, and Andrew was saying earlier, you know, most people are ignorant of societies in which people lived centuries ago,

I mean, if you read about the Thirty Years' War, you read about the sack of Magdeburg and what the Catholic League did to Protestants in that city in 1631,

I mean, you just go back through history and it's just atrocity after atrocity, and it seems irrelevant whether or not those societies had a commitment to a theology,

I mean, you know, a lot of Christians bring up, well, the 20th century was the bloodiest century, the 20th century was the bloodiest century because of the technology that was brought to bear, but I mean, if the

Saracens in the 11th century had access to nuclear bombs, they wouldn't have said that these were wrong to use, in fact, they may have been more adamant about using them against their opponents, so I don't think the straying from theological commitments has made people less moral in any sense.

Yeah, and also, I mean, the fact is there's more people now, so it's going to affect it too, right?

Well, so that does kind of lead into another thing that you said about morality being something that has come about through evolution, right?

I believe that we can grow more moral as we evolve as a society, and so that kind of made me think about what's known as information theory, and Jason Lyle has discussed information theory, where you have an organism that has information, right, but that information has to come from somewhere, and what we don't see is we don't see organisms that add new information, we see organisms lose information, which is how we get different breeds of dogs or different types of cats, they're losing information, but they're not gaining information, so if morality has come about through evolution, how are we gaining that information if we never see instances where organisms gain information?

Well, a couple thoughts on that. The first one is that there are primitive moral systems that can be seen in lesser apes,

I mean, this has been observed in chimpanzees that there is kind of a proto -morality among them and other mammals, but the other point being, and I think this is actually gets to an interesting point, because I think sometimes evolution is caricatured, and I hear

Christian say this a lot, is that, well, how can you be moral if it's just survival of the fittest, you're just doing everything you can to maximize your own survival, how can you develop a moral system?

And I think there's this misunderstanding that evolution is only individually functional, whereas evolution operates in a collective sense, where it comes to benefit a group of organisms to cooperate, and so they develop a tendency to cooperate, because the ones that are unable to will die out, and so that's what

I see in the history of the development of primates. In terms of information theory, I mean, that's a little bit beyond my expertise, but...

Yeah, mine too, which is why I referenced Dr. Lyle. Yeah, I really like him, by the way, he's an absolute pleasure to listen to and seems like a lovely guy.

Yeah, he is. All right, Andrew, I'll turn it back over to you, that was the only thoughts that I had. Yeah, and I'm trying to see, for some reason, the tool that I use,

Pocket, to tag this stuff, I can't get it on the computer,

I guess they changed and they're now part of, got what out maybe by Firefox or something, so, but all right,

I will try looking back at that. Let me get to some of the things that Drew starred here.

So, Dee had said, both believers and the unbeliever die in disaster.

The question is what happens to them after they die. So, the idea here being is, when we look at this, you know, when you're saying it's evil, well, who's dying in those?

Well, both believers and unbelievers, and scripture talks about that, right? It rains on the just and the unjust. So, you know, it's not like, oh, only bad people die in disasters.

No, everyone's affected by that. Melissa said, this has been a good discussion,

Dufar. I think she meant so far, but I guess we're gonna have to try, for Melissa's sake, to make it continue to be a good discussion.

Okay, one last one he has here. Seamus says, I'm thinking, no, sorry,

I'm thankful for the disasters in my life. My life would have been so much worse without them. I think he's referring to personal disasters, not necessarily as you're using them, natural disasters, so.

Yeah, that's interesting, because that's one of the theodicies that's often used, is that adversity strengthens people, and that is obviously self -evidently true, and we can all attest to that in our own lives, but that doesn't account for, you know, the child who starves to death at four years old, who isn't strengthened by his struggles.

So, you know, maybe one explanation for some of the evil we find in the world, but it's far from satisfactory.

Yeah, and here's one that I just saw, I'll put up, was lost but now found, says, it's a different slavery.

They forgave debt and released the slaves after the seventh year, and that's true. That's part of the issue there.

Now, with that... Is that the jubilee? Yeah, that'd be the jubilee, and there's a distinction there, though, is that God gave rules for that, for the

Hebrews toward other Hebrews, okay? If they took over a country, like took over a land, and in warfare killed off all the men, they take the women, they're not allowed to release them, because in that culture, the women would have no means of caring for themselves.

So, they had a responsibility for that person's entire life to take care of them.

And so, there is a distinction being made between the, you know, I just want to be careful for folks who would be like, oh, well, see, it's not the same slavery, because they were all freed after the seventh year.

No, they weren't all freed. Some would have to remain in that state for their care.

And so, again, it gets back to the issue of the responsibility of the owner, not the work of the slave.

So, there's a difference. Andrew, I don't know if you've used this before, but I hear Christians commonly cite

Galatians 3 .28, I believe, which is before Christ, there is no, neither slave nor free.

And I think, I just, this is an iron sharpens iron moment. I think that's a terrible verse to use, because Christ also, or Paul also says there, there's neither male nor female.

So, if you're saying that that verse speaks to the immorality of slavery, then you also would have to say that it speaks to the immorality of a gender binary.

And I don't think that's what you want to say. I think if you read all of Galatians 3, he's talking about salvation. Correct. Yeah. So, again, we're faced with the fact that you're understanding the

Bible better than many Christians. So, I mean, there's many that maybe should be put to shame that you're understanding so clearly what people misuse.

But you're right. When you look at any passage, you have to look at the context. The context is dealing with salvation, meaning that whether you're free or you're a slave, whether you're a man or you're a woman, right, whether you're

Jewish or a Gentile. And why those three? Because those are three distinctions that people would make to say this category of people are better than that category of people.

Men are better than women. That's what they believed in that society. And throughout time, we've seen that system.

Free is better than slave. Jews are better than Greeks.

The whole idea is, no, there isn't one better than the other. We all come to Christ the same way.

Yeah. And that's something I do love about the gospel is this kind of, again, we don't contextualize this historically, but it really was quite radical, the claims that it was making in the first century milieu.

And I think that's really something to be appreciated. So yeah, we can get to something else here.

I have a lot to talk to you about, of course. Well, hey, you know, you can always come back, right? Yeah, I know.

And I'll be glad to. I hope we can make this a regular thing. Last time I talked a little bit about Christology because I am fascinated by that.

And actually, you know what, this gets to something interesting, Andrew, is that my understanding is that you think the laws of logic come from the mind of God, right?

The nature of God. Okay. And do you think that's true of the law of identity?

Well, that would be one of the laws of logic. Do you see why that might be an issue if you believe in the

Trinity? Not sure how. I guess the Trinity, I mean, and you've seen the diagrams where it says,

God is the father, God is the son, but the son is not the father. And so the law of identity says that an object is itself.

It's not itself. And so if something is one thing, it can't also be something else. And so it seems to me that the law of identity is violated by the

Trinity. Okay. But if you were to say, if you're applying it both to either to personhood versus beinghood, then yeah, you'd have an issue.

But that's the whole distinction, right? It's an apples to oranges. You have three persons in one being, not three beings, right?

Or one person. So when you have that, if you're going to look at the diagram, the diagram is defining the personhood and their identity is godhood.

And yet they do have their own distinct personhood.

So help me understand the operation of how the laws of logic are a reflection of God.

How is love, non -contradiction, excluded middle, how are those a reflection of God's being? Well, how are those are in light of the identity?

Well, identity too, but all three of them, I mean, how are all three of them reflective of God? Okay. Well, the easiest would be,

I mean, non -contradiction would be that God doesn't contradict himself, right?

The law of the excluded middle is just if God says something, that's true.

So there wouldn't be a third option in that case. He's not giving an either or, he just says this is, right?

But the identity one, the father identifies as the father, he doesn't identify as the son.

And that's what that diagram is trying to point out. So I'm not sure if I'm illustrating it or explaining it well, but I don't see a distinction there because you have three separate persons who identify as their own person.

And I think what you're trying to say, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think what you're trying to say is because you have three persons that also identify as one

God, that there's an identity crisis there. Well, I wouldn't necessarily call it an identity crisis.

I mean, I understand the distinction on the Trinity. It's difficult for me to see that when you say the personhood versus being distinction, notwithstanding when you say it's a reflection of God's identity.

I mean, and the Trinity in itself is distinctive of Christianity. Jews, Muslims don't believe in that.

And so I just, I would think that if the laws of logic are reflective of the nature of God, that we would see some kind of reflection of the

Trinity in the laws of logic. And I don't see where that exists. Well, I'm just thinking with what you had said.

So the Trinity, I would argue, is a Jewish concept, but not of Rabbinic Judaism.

I would say Biblical Judaism would have had the concept not fleshed out like we do today, but then again, even the disciples didn't have it fleshed out like we do today.

The Trinity is a solution to a problem. The problem is that when we look through both

Old and New Testament, we see three persons who have the names of deity, do the works of deity, have the attributes of deity, and yet they're separate and distinct from each other.

So how do we describe that? It took great men of God who sat and thought about it, and really what it took was, and most of our theology does come from this, is it took someone to say something that wasn't true.

You needed a heretic to force people to address the issues and think of how do we answer this?

How do we look at what Scripture says and provide a solution to this? And that's why our theology continues to be more and more precise.

It shouldn't change, just become more and more precise, and that's what I think the Trinity is.

I think it's just a more precise view of who God is. Yeah, no, and on that point, I think a lot of people don't know this, but Augustine formulated his doctrines of grace, or what you could call

Augustinian Calvinism, which obviously is a little anachronistic, but he kind of came up with the same idea.

I think Calvin in the Institutes quotes Augustine on every other page or something, but Augustine formulated his doctrines in response to Pelagius, and so it does seem that a lot of these things come out of misinterpretations.

So do you think, on that note, do you think that there are other doctrines and understandings of God that may emerge in the future, that we have less than perfect understanding that we may refine in future centuries?

So I was going to disagree until you said refine. So it's not that we'll discover.

I don't think there's anything new under the sun. I don't think we're going to discover. I think that we're going to refine things and become more and more precise, and I'll also say that with that precision, precision, we're going to be wrong.

I mean, the more precise we try to be, the more error that can creep in, because we are human, and we're taking

God's Word, and there's certain elements where—and we've discussed this even here tonight,

Evan—the fact that what people tend to do is they take a passage, and they don't put it in its cultural context, they don't put it in its grammatical context, they don't put it in its historical context, they don't do that, and then they read it with a 21st century mindset, and then they come to wrong conclusions.

That's, I mean, this is why I hold to the view of interpretation the way

I do, that we're going to interpret every passage of the Bible using the same rules of harmoneutics, now that those rules do kind of change as it does with whether—if you're reading

Shakespeare versus the New York Times, they're both literature, but you're going to use different rules to those because there's a different genre, and so each genre does have its own set of rules, but what we have to do with it is put it in its context, understand it, what it meant at that time, what did the author mean by what he wrote, what did people who read it or heard it, how did they understand it, because that was the first audience, right?

And so we have to do the work to do that, and I think a lot of people make a mistake and don't do that.

Right, but you know, and that speaks to one of the Protestant distinctives is the perspicuity of the scripture, and it seems that it's not perspicuous to everyone.

Well, I think what it is, I believe you have people who say—well, a couple things, but let me just start.

There's some people who say, well, the Bible's different, and so the Bible has to be interpreted spiritually, and we have a different harmoneutic for it, and therefore we have to take what we're seeing and interpret it in light of covenants, right?

Or some theological system, and you know, you take the

Catholic Church that you had once the, you know, once all of Rome has decided you're now

Christian, whether you like it or not. Well, you had people that suddenly realized, hey, you want to get in the favor of the emperor, go be a, you know, a priest, you know, be a pastor, you're going to get in his good favor, and they were now running the church but not believing it, and so what are they doing?

Well, they're going to reinterpret things that they don't like to fit what they do like, and that's because they're not looking for the clarity of scripture.

They're looking to create a moral system because they're not coming to Christ for what Christ did on the cross for them.

They're coming to Christ to use Christ to benefit themselves, right?

And so they're going to change the harmoneutic, and that's why I think Martin Luther had such a difficulty with some things, because he could not get away from his

Roman Catholic harmoneutic. It's the only thing he knew, and that made it really hard to walk away and do something different, right?

Right, but at the same time, those who stray too far from the Catholic church, you would diverge from as well, because you'd argue like the

Anabaptists, the Radical Reformation, the Socinians, you know, many of these groups that denied the Trinity because they thought the

Trinity was a holdover from Catholic doctrine, because the Catholics affirmed that as well, and so they would make the same case that you are, in some sense, beholden to the

Catholic interpretation of the gospel for the first millennium and a half. Well, I guess the problem was that the doctrine of the

Trinity existed before the Catholic church, so I would disagree, you know, because what we think of as the

Catholic church today really wasn't finalized until like Pope Innocent in like 1000

AD or something, right? So he's the one that really gave us what we think of as the

Catholic church today, and so it was still being formed up until there, it kept changing and morphing, but it's not the

Catholic church that we think of, right? It had a different historical context. Let me ask you this.

You mentioned you like the gospel, and I know, you know,

Drew talked about this with you last time you came on, but I want to do something different. I know that you came on, you heard the gospel being presented to you.

I would like to see if you could explain what the Christian gospel message is, because you seem to have a really good understanding of Christianity, obviously well read, and this is obviously the most important issue, you know, for us to discuss, and I want to see how you would explain the

Christian gospel. Yeah, so I would look at probably 1 Corinthians 15, but that Jesus Christ entered the world to save sinners.

He bore our sin in a substitutionary atonement that anyone who believes on him will have everlasting life.

I think that's kind of it in a nutshell. Okay, so when you say saved,

I just want to dig deeper with it, right? Be more precise with it. So when you say saved, what do we save from?

Well, Romans 6 .23 says the wages of sin is death, and so I think we're saved from eternal damnation to which we are otherwise destined without the atoning work of Christ on the cross.

Okay, we're also saved from the wrath of God, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So, okay, so that's where we're saved from.

So it's not, it's, it's, is there anything we could do to, you know, to get right with God?

No, it's a work of God in our hearts. We can't do anything to merit salvation.

Christ has already paid for that on the cross, and so we need to believe in him. And I know that there's an interesting distinction as to whether or not belief is a work, which to me,

I don't think that it is, but yeah, you just, if you, if you believe in Christ and repent, then you'll be saved.

You don't have to do anything apart from that. Yeah, I mean, you did, you presented a gospel message that I would probably argue, you know, if we look at the broad sense of church, probably more than half,

I'd go 60, 70, 80 percent wouldn't be able to articulate it that well, and, and you don't believe in Christ.

So quite interesting. Let me ask, I mean, you, what is your interest in studying

Christianity? I mean, you've, you're, you're obviously well -read not just in Christianity, but what's your interest with it?

Well, I mentioned this last time, but I don't think I fully explicated it, but, you know,

I like to know what my neighbors believe, but I also see that obviously Christianity is, is really the heart of Western civilization.

I mean, this is, this is the ideology that has led to the world in which we find ourselves, and it has so many implications for our lives and our culture, and by and large,

I think most people don't even recognize how detached they are from that, but even well still maintaining many of the commitments that arose from Christian theology, and so I like to get to the bedrock of why we find ourselves where we do, why we believe the things that we do, why we have the commitments that we do, and I think most of that is born of, of Christian faith, and in particular the

Protestant tradition. So do you, I mean, do you believe that, do you believe that when you die you're going to face

God? No, I don't. Okay, because do you believe that you don't believe

God exists, right? Correct. Okay, how, how would you explain then the, the, the creation of the universe, right?

If we look at the creation of the universe, there's three ways we could view the creation, right?

If we take a step back, there's, it's either that the universe always existed, it's, it's eternal, it's, it never had a beginning, or it had a beginning, and so if it had a beginning, we have two other options.

Either it created itself, or someone or something created it.

Now, I don't know if you could think of a fourth option, but those are the only three

I could think of, right? Either it always existed, it created itself, something or someone created it.

Yeah, well, you know, this is something that cosmologists have wrestled with for centuries, but that, you know, the idea goes back to Aristotle with the prime mover, and, you know, so it's, it's an old idea, but I've always felt that your explanation of the universe is, doesn't simplify that problem, because I understand the doctrine of the aseity of God, but it seems to me that a

God capable of creating the universe itself would have to have a more complex creator, so I just don't find it satisfactory.

You can say maybe, maybe God did do it, but then you're not ultimately getting to what the origin of God was.

Well, there's got to, well, and you already brought up, right, that there's got to be an uncaused cause, right?

I mean, so if you go back at some point, because the universe,

I mean, Einstein was able to give the proofs that the universe had a beginning, so it couldn't always existed.

We already talked about laws of logics that, you know, if the universe would existed to create itself, it'd first have to exist, so that violates the law of non -contradiction, right?

Because if it doesn't exist, it can't exist to create itself.

So, I mean, the only one we're left with is someone or something created it. Yeah, and I don't necessarily dispute that.

I don't know enough about cosmology to really opine, but I think you make a compelling case that someone or something did create it, but even so, even if I accept that as true, that by no means would get me to Christianity, it wouldn't get me to monotheism even.

I didn't jump there right away. We're just, you know, starting one step at a time, right?

I mean, the reason being is, you know, as it says in, you know, Romans 1 and, you know,

Psalm 19, when we look at creation, that reveals that there's a creator, right?

Because someone did all this. Well, yeah, John Calvin has called it sensus divinitatis, that we all have a fundamental understanding of the existence of a

God. And, yeah, Paul says this is something similar to Romans 1 about how all men are made aware of the existence of God.

I mean, to me, that's just projecting. I mean, I think, you know, Calvin felt that God was everywhere.

The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning has a line where she says, every common bush is a fire with God.

And so if you come from that perspective, you can find God everywhere. You can find God in nature. But I don't, and I don't see how even doing so necessarily gets you to a

Christian belief, and it certainly didn't get Einstein to a Christian belief either. Yeah, well, so let me appeal to your conscience then.

You know, we look at God's law. You know, have you ever broken any of God's law?

I mean, have you ever lied or stolen anything? Yeah, yeah, I love the Ray Comfort thing. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so if you're familiar with Ray, right, you know, right, the argument is, okay, if you and I are liars and we're thieves, do you recognize that as being wrong?

I don't think lying is necessarily wrong. You know, the common example that's brought up, if you have a Jew in your attic, would you lie to the

Nazis about it? You know, I think it's on a spectrum. I don't think lying itself is intrinsically immoral.

Yeah, so I am what's referred to as a non -conforming absolutist when it comes to ethics.

But that means I would say, yes, it is wrong to lie to the, but see, now

I'm going to appeal to something you brought up earlier, the logical fallacy of the excluded middle, because the argument is that there's only two options.

You tell them you're hiding Jews, or you lie to them you're hiding Jews. But there's a ton of other options, like yelling at the officer, asking, how dare you ask me such a thing?

What makes you think that? But if you're saying that, I mean, are there, there's still, it's still only binary whether or not lying is immoral.

Oh, I'm saying, I'm saying lying is immoral, always. And the reason being is because God's not a liar, because to tell a lie is to go against the nature of God.

And therefore, I would say, yes, it's always wrong. But in this, in when we give these scenarios, there's always a third option, right?

And so I can appeal to a third option in those. I don't have to appeal to either you lie or you tell the truth.

I can deflect. So do you, do you think it would be, it would be appropriate for a man to live his life?

It would be better for a man to live his life without ever lying full stop. If we could, sure.

Well, I bet that, yeah. And then, you know, it's the kind of like, you know, my girlfriend asks, how do I look in this dress?

And I, you know, you look terrible. I, you know, you don't have an answer either, right?

You don't have to answer, but I mean, have, have you ever asked someone a question and they ask you, do you really want the answer to that?

And, and then, you know, you basically know the answer or you assume the answer. Well, but would you want to disabuse a child of his belief in Santa Claus because of your commitment to honesty?

Say that again? Would you disabuse a child of his belief in Santa Claus because you're so committed to honesty?

Yeah, I did that with two of my kids. Okay. Well, but there are other things

I'm sure that you. In fact, I got in trouble for doing that with my, my niece and she, she was, her mother's

Jewish. So, and she got upset for me saying that the

Easter bunny isn't real. Although you're a mute, you're muted.

Oh yeah. Sorry. I was going to say, I know where that comes from because growing up as a Jewish kid, I always, I was always resentful that everyone else gets

Santa Claus. And so I was, I was eager to tell them all, no, that, that, that's not real. Oh yeah. Okay.

So maybe you had, okay, this is so bad. I get my, I got myself in such trouble. I remember like kindergarten, maybe it was like kindergarten, first grade, something like that.

It was right before Christmas. And I remember this girl, we're sitting in line, waiting to get lunch.

And she's, she's like saying how excited she is. Santa's going to come. And I'm like, there's no such thing as Santa Claus. And she's like, yes, he comes.

I put cookies out and he eats them and he brings me presents. And, and, and I literally, I don't know why

I said it, but I just go, it's your parents. They're lying to you. And so she went home and I guess she told her parents that, you know, there's student in schools, you know, next day

I see her first thing in the morning in, in homeroom and she's crying and she's like, so upset with me.

And I'm like, like, what did I do? And she goes, I talked to my parents about what you said. They were lying to me.

I decided right then and there, I wasn't lying to my kids. Well, I can respect that, but okay.

So do you think with lying being a moral, do you think a father, a Christian father, not you, but another one telling his children that Santa Claus isn't real or Santa Claus is real, you know, playing into that is, is that immoral?

So I think there is a, we have to be careful when we say of it, you know, when we speak of lying, there are things where, you know, you throw a surprise for people.

Right. Is it lying? Is it deceiving when you're pretending? Yeah, it is. And, and some people would justify and say, well, it's, it's for a good cause.

But now the question is, how do you define a good cause? Right. So some people will say, well, you're, you're telling the kids about Santa Claus.

It's not to harm them. It's not to protect that because much, much of what we think about when we speak of lying is those things we say to protect our pride, right?

Telling your kid about Santa Claus isn't protecting my pride. It's trying to, it's really what it's doing, trying to give your children this feeling of, of that you had growing up, right?

It's like when I became a Christian, I'd have all these Christians that tell me I needed a Christmas tree. And I always said the same thing.

If you can give me a reason why I need a Christmas tree, other than the fact that you grew up with one,

I'll get one. And no one has ever been able to answer that question. And my response usually is, well,

I think you need to have a menorah and do eight days of lighting candles and singing in Hebrew. You know, that's the reality is like, what's, what's nostalgic to me may not be nostalgic to you.

Right. Well, and even that's true with, you know, my example of my girlfriend asked if she looks good in the dress.

Um, and I don't want to say, well, it looks like you could lose a few pounds. That's also not a protection of pride.

Um, no, it's, it's, it's, you're, you're, you're trying, you, it is in the sense you're trying to, you don't want her to look, to think bad of you.

Right. So it is a protection of self. So you're muted again.

Yeah, but no, no, I'm a lawyer. So I get paid to lie. Um, so that's how some people would characterize it.

But yeah, no, I mean, and it is, it is not a morally binary issue. I mean, like you said, you know, you can present things in a selective way.

Um, the question is omission lying is presented. Yeah. I would say omission is lying. I would say half truths, you know, cause what's the goal you're, you're, you're doing that for the purpose of, of deceiving.

You know, I, I, I remember there was a guy, he was, he, he said things and everything he said individually was true.

He just shifted time, like the timelines of things. Like he says, he says this, and then take something that happened years later and puts them together as if they were the same event.

That's deceiving. Right. What's the purpose? The purpose is to deceive. So, um, what, what is it that I just see that, uh, drew highlighted from his, it's from Chris Hough.

Tell them, tell them about the real St. Nick slapping heretics. Yeah. Chris cracks me up.

Okay. Kids, you're, you're four or five years old. Let's sit down and talk about the real St. Nicholas. Someone tells me they're not going to be as interested in that story,

Chris. So, so you know that, and the reason that I, you know, the appeal to the conscience is we started off about morality and we know that there's evil, but if there is no

God and we're just a bag of chemical reactions, where does evil come from then?

Well, I think evil is kind of a loaded term that I think comes with theological baggage.

Um, but you know, I, I take it as meaning something not conducive to human flourishing.

Um, you know, when you end someone's life, that's not conducive to human flourishing. Um, I think that's pretty self -evidently evil.

I was like, I was telling you before. Let's let's examine that. So do you think go back to 1936, if you could have killed

Hitler, would that have caused human flourishing? Uh, yeah.

I mean, you know, you can ask the hypothetical. Would I have done that? Yeah, I probably would have. We don't know. How would you have done it? It's the, the idea being is we, when we speak of human flourishing, we don't know what will, we don't know the future.

Right. So saying, well, killing someone prevents human flourishing. Well, if you had killed Hitler, there would have been, you know, 11 million people that would have lived longer.

Right. And this is why I, you know, I'm not a consequentialist in my ethics, because I think exactly what you're saying that, uh, that, you know, you can only determine the righteousness of an action by looking at its effects in retrospect, that tells you nothing about what to do in the future.

You know, if I go out on the street and kill a random person, I could say, well, he was going to, you know, he was going to be a serial killer in 10 years.

You know, no one would buy that. So obviously, you know, when you use the, the, uh, hypothetical about going back in time,

I mean, that's a little bit loaded because you're, you're imagining that you already know what the consequences are going to be. Well, even if you didn't, right.

So, so there were three attempts on Hitler's life and had any of them succeeded, you know, then there, there would have been more human flourishing of some people.

Well, maybe, maybe not. I mean, we don't know. You know? Um, so that, that's the thing is that that's why you, if you have to have sort of a deontological commitment to certain principles, because you don't know what the future holds, but one of those principles

I think has to be, um, you know, avoiding suffering, avoiding the unwarranted termination of human life.

Well, let me ask you this is the act of rape always wrong? Yes. Okay.

What makes it wrong? Uh, it's a violation of bodily autonomy. Okay. Um, the, you know,

I always use this example. I think it was, uh, in Jersey, there was a dentist.

I forget how many women he did this to, but basically he would put women under and, and what we would say rape, but they didn't even know they were raped.

And the interesting thing is one woman who, you know, she was pregnant. She realized that, you know, she did the, the, the figuring out she didn't believe that she was, you know, miraculous birth there.

Uh, she figured it had to have been this dentist because that's the only time she was unconscious. And so she got a paternity test.

Yep. That's right. He's the father. Uh, and then afterwards, other women came forward and started getting paternity tests.

And the interesting thing is they ended up realizing that some of these women didn't, they didn't have the

PST from the rape until they found out afterwards.

Sure. Yeah. Using that, you know, you could justify raping someone who's mentally retarded or something like that, but this is why it's, it's a multifactorial analysis ethics and morality.

It's a sticky wicket, but part of it is at the least to incentivize or disincentivize future behavior.

So if we say, well, that rape was okay because you know, those particular women didn't suffer the psychological consequences that most rape victims do.

Uh, therefore we're not going to punish him. Uh, we also have to look at how that's going to affect behavior going forward.

And we have to categorically condemn certain actions, uh, irrespective of whether or not they, they diverge from the standard.

I mean, there was that famous incident of a cannibal in Germany 20 years ago who found a man online, uh, who wanted to be killed and eaten.

And the man obliged him and he murdered him. And he actually had him like sign a consent form and killed him and ate him.

And he's still, uh, incarcerated as he should be, uh, you know, because he didn't violate that man's will.

That man was perfectly willing to participate, but there are other reasons that we have for punishing someone like that.

Um, and there are other social incentives that we play. That's why I asked the act itself, right?

I'm not asking the results of it. Well, there's a concept in law. Um, it's called, uh,

Malum in say versus Malum prohibitive. So there are two kinds of laws Malum prohibitive, meaning it's bad because it's prohibited versus it's intrinsically bad.

So like, you know, not paying my taxes is not Malum in say it's Malum prohibitive, but rape would be

Malum and say, so we recognize that there are certain offenses that violate human dignity, um, that are intrinsically disordered.

Um, and there are other, other things that are wrong just because they're prohibited. Uh, and so there is a distinction there even in law apart from when we say it's always wrong, that's an absolute.

And so if there has to be an absolute standard, then that's all, that's the point of it, right?

Because I'm see, I'm, I can answer and say, it's because God's not a rapist that rape is wrong, the act of rape.

And so we need an absolute standard. And so the reason I'm getting, I'm trying to get to that is that the idea that you and I both, even if, if you don't want, you don't want to recognize it, we both know that there's right and wrong, but that's an immaterial thing.

So we, we, we have to have an immaterial and the absolute and a universal standard.

And it's got to come from some thing or person or mind that is those three things, right?

Well, I want to get back to something you said there, because if you're using your, your touchstone is what would God do?

And that's, you know, I realize that's not exactly what you're saying, but you said rape is wrong because God's not a rapist. I don't want to get too personal,

Andrew, but I know you're probably sexually attracted to your wife. God is not sexually attracted to any women. So is it, is it wrong for that?

Because that's not a reflection of God. It's the, the issue is, is it going against God's nature?

And so if God created, if God created us to be married, he instituted marriage and instituted sexual relations within marriage, then that is within his, within what he has prescribed, right?

That's in accords with his nature because he created it for that. Now, when we have sex outside of marriage, that's, that is against what he has, he said, what he has prescribed, even though, yeah, he doesn't get married and he doesn't have sexual relations, but he, he's prescribed what is within his, his nature, right?

He's the source of absolute right and wrong. And so there's, and there's going to be some things that are, we get from the nature

God, something like this. Now we're going to get from your, this would be where we get it, you know, as you said, from, from the

Bible, there's things where it's not directly to his nature as much as it is what he has prescribed from his nature.

So it's not, you know, in the sense, in this sense with rape, he's not a rapist.

So he's, and he's not a liar. That's what makes those wrong. But then there's things that are, he's going to prescribe, and I'm going to say things that it would be, it would be wrong for the nation of Israel at the time in the old

Testament to do things that we could do today, such as eating kosher, you know, what we eat and all the, all the holiness laws, the kosher laws.

I would say that now that we've, you know, they were there to keep Israel separate from the other nations, once the

Messiah has come, that the need for that law is no longer there. And if it's not there, now that prescription changes.

Does that mean God's nature changed? No. It's that he, there are cases where he gives a covenant relationship for a group of people.

And, and so there's universal laws, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not murder.

Those are universal. Those are for all people, all times. But then there's laws that were given to the nation of Israel, to the church, and specific to those groups.

And, and so you're going to have things like that. Right. Yeah. And, and yeah, the scriptures say

God doesn't change. Although I think you would probably agree that God's behavior in the New Testament is a little bit different than that of the

Old Testament. I, I, I won't say his behavior is different.

I'll say that the covenant relationship he has is different. So he's, he works differently with the covenant people he's, he's, he enters into covenant with.

So for example, in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit would not indwell everybody, but yet Ezekiel 36 would say that that is what the new covenant is looking forward to.

And what we'd see in the New Testament, Holy Spirit indwells the believer. Well, now he's dealing differently with believers between old and new because now he's indwelling the

New Testament believer, which he didn't do in the past, so that they don't need a priest, but they are a priest because they don't, they have direct communion with God.

Ezekiel 36 has the heart of stone thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. I know you guys like that one.

Uh, well that one and Jeremiah 29, 29 following are the two that you end up seeing, uh, the, the description of the new covenant, which is what we would see what were the covenant we're in now.

So, so, I mean, I, I'm curious to see, you know, in the, in the few minutes we have left, I mean, what, what really holds you back?

You've studied, you understand, um, like, what is it that holds you back?

Okay. I think, I think the most, the most powerful argument against any one religion to me is, and I kind of thought of this before I read about it.

It's called formally the argument from inconsistent revelation. I would call it something like the argument from multiplicity or plurality or something like that.

But the fact that every group of people independent from one another has developed such divergent ideas about God and many of them have developed

God. And you may say, well, that speaks to a, an intrinsic desire toward a deity.

Um, but the fact that every, every group of people has developed very different ideas, um, to me bespeaks the fact that none of them are true.

I know I've listened to Bruggen Kate who would say, well, you know, cause there's counterfeit money.

Does that mean there's not real money? Um, and, and that kind of rings hollow to me. And so the analogy I would use is if you went to a country and you landed and you were told the national currency is dollars.

And then you go to another town and they tell you, no, the national currency is euros. And you keep going from town to town and you're told there's a different national currency.

I would think that you would, it would at least be reasonable to conclude that there is no national currency, despite the fact that all these different groups lay claim to there being a national currency.

Um, so that to me, I, it's very difficult to commit to any one religion in light of the circumstances around the world and historically.

All right. So let me, let me appeal to that. So how many religions do you think there are in the world? Uh, probably hundreds.

I mean, it depends if you count sects, but at least a couple dozen major ones. I'm going to argue for two.

God's religion and man's religion, right? Correct. Right. And so, so the reason you see such distinction in man's religion is because the focus is not on what

God is doing or what God has done. I should say it's, it's focused on, on man trying to do something to earn that righteousness.

And so the reason you have differences is because you end up having human beings that are trying to gather a following.

So they gotta be different from that guy. I mean, if you, you know, the, the founding of Mormonism, right? Joseph Smith goes, he was, he was told all these others were wrong.

He's the one, right? It's always someone that says they're the only ones, you know, same with Muhammad. And you know, it's, it's like all these others are wrong, but listen to me, right?

Where Christianity is the, the only religion in the entire world that's, if you look at all the religions, it's the only one that says you can't work your way.

You can't do any works. There's nothing. It's not about what you do. It's the only one that can, can rectify a

God that's both just and merciful because justice and mercy are mutually exclusive, right?

If the law said that if you slap me in the face, I must slap you back with equal weight.

Well, I can slap you with equal weight. That's justice. I could not slap you. That's mercy.

But if I tap you, it's neither, right? And so it's only because in, in Christianity, and it's based on a person,

Jesus Christ, him being fully God and fully man, as fully God, he can pay an eternal fine for all people.

He's because his nature is eternal. You see, it's based on who he is. This is what makes

Christianity unique from every world religion. Right. And yeah, it seems to me that you're arguing that Christianity is unique, conceited, but that doesn't speak to the veracity of it.

I mean, there, Hinduism is unique in a lot of senses. Judaism is unique. But not in the most important one.

How do we get right with God? Well, and I don't know enough about the other theological traditions necessarily, but I don't think that's a question that is unaddressed by every other religion in the world.

No, they are all addressed. And that's the whole thing. They're all addressed with that. We do things to earn

God's righteousness, right? Catholicism will say it's faith plus works. Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism we know of today is doing

Torah. Islam will say do one good deed counts for 10 bad deeds. I mean, every one of them, even

Hinduism, Buddhism, the things you do in this life can affect the next life. It's all about works, which is why they're all a system of morality where Christianity is based on that because Jesus Christ, God himself came to earth and died on a cross, paid the fine that we owe, the justice is served because the full weight is paid.

And if that full weight is eternity, well, only an eternal being can pay that.

But now that it's paid, now he can offer mercy. And so it's the only religion that can resolve that because of who

Jesus is. It's the only one that says that humans can't do anything. We can't earn it.

And one thing we know about people, we're always going to praise ourselves, like that's how we could tell the difference between a divine and a man -made religion.

But you're kind of begging the question there because you're saying that, well, Christianity doesn't require us to do anything and that proves it's

God, but I don't know what, I mean, from my perspective as an outsider, why maybe that is what God wants. Maybe God does want us to do things.

I mean, that certainly seems reasonable, but does it bother you to think that if Andrew Rappaport were born centuries earlier in another place, you would never have arrived at these conclusions.

I mean, doesn't that make you, do you pause to think that maybe this is at least in part influenced by my cultural milieu?

No, no. And you should know that. I mean, my cultural milieu is, I mean, I knew that when

I became a Christian, my parents were going to, I would be dead to them. And, and when they did find out two years later,

I mean, I hid it from them, but when they found out they did go casket shopping. So it was my culture.

I, you know, I was raised where everybody I knew was Jewish. I mean, I was in a, you know,

I was in Hebrew school all week and all my friends were Jewish. I, you know, I knew nothing about Christ, nor did

I want to. I mean, Christ, to me, Jesus Christ was Hitler's God. So you still grew up in the

United States? Yeah. You grew up in a Christian country. I mean, if you had grown up in a...

Well, many would argue with that. They would say it's not a Christian country. I would say it was based on, you know,

Christian Judeo values. But I think the issue is, is that, you know,

I wasn't, I wasn't knowledgeable on who Christ was, and I was raised having a hatred for Christ.

So I don't, I wouldn't say that it's because, you know, I was raised, like I was raised somewhere else.

But to your question that you did ask, I mean, it humbles me to think that God would, would save me. It humbles me to think, you know, like the

Psalmist says, what is man that you're mindful of him? You know, it, it, it humbles me that he'd have anything to do with me, because I don't deserve it.

And I, no, and I do respect that about you, but I would suggest that you, and I think you would have to agree with this, that you are exceptional in that sense, is that most people maintain the religion of their fathers, probably an overwhelming majority of people.

Yeah. I mean, I think that you, you have that for many religions except Christianity, right?

Christianity is the one where you see the most people that would, you know, that would walk away. And I, I would argue the reason is because every other system is a system of morality and control, and Christianity is not.

Again, it's, it's what makes it unique. So, so let me, I know, I know it's top of the hour.

I've thoroughly enjoyed this. I hope that you will come back because I think, I mean, some great questions, and, you know, maybe, maybe what we could do is get some, you know, get, you mentioned

Jason Lyle and some others. Well, maybe we can do some things where we have some others come in here and, you know, answer some of your more specific questions toward some, some different topics.

So, you and I could talk offline and see, you know, set some things up like that. It might be really neat. But I am amazed with your understanding of Christianity.

And, you know, I'll do as, you know, just like Drew did, you know, I want to appeal to you. I want to appeal to your conscience.

I, I would be remiss if I didn't challenge you to consider, you know, where you spend eternity, because it is, it is the most important decision we make on, on life.

You know, we know we're going to die one day, you know.

But, but what, what we do with Christ is, is everything. And, you know,

I don't know, you know, I know you're from a Jewish background. I don't know how religious you were growing up. But, you know, you know, so I know for some, it's very offensive, but I, I don't think it would be for you.

You, you have a very good understanding of Christianity. You obviously read quite a bit on Christianity and on other areas.

And so I, first off, I commend you. Your, your accuracy with Christianity is, is really commendable.

And I just, I, I, you know, I've been praying for you, and I'll continue praying for you. Here, I should put this comment up that Drew starred, because this was really funny.

Melissa said this, can you imagine how awesome it would be if Evan got saved?

He definitely has the beginnings of a reformed beard. So that will, but I do,

I do pray that you, you, you know, it's not just an intellectual discussion. I mean, my interest in, in it is answering your questions, but ultimately it's not an evidence issue that you have.

It's, it's a sin issue. It's sin that holds us back from getting right with God. And so, and, and, you know, as we said, right,

God's got to work through you in that, but, but, and I pray that he does. And, you know,

I pray that you think about, you know, really meditate on where you'd spend eternity. And the fact that we break, you and I both break

God's law. I mean, you're maybe more moral than me, but it doesn't change the fact that we both broke

God's law. So, yeah. I really appreciate you having me on. I'm humbled by, by what you said.

And I do really strive to understand your faith, even if I don't agree with it. And I certainly don't mock it.

And I have a tremendous amount of respect for you and Justin and Drew and Chris and everyone. And I would be honored to speak with Jason Lyle or anyone else.

And I would be honored to come back on at all if you would have me, because I do have a lot more to ask you. Yeah, yeah, no, we could.

I mean, we could definitely do that. And so, you know, we could talk, we could talk offline and email and all, but I do, you know,

I think for the audience, you know, understand that this is, you know, you're, for Jewish people, we were trained to debate, right?

Just, I don't know about your family, but just sitting around a kitchen table at dinner, you know, my father would make us debate one another and not for any emotional things.

And I hope that came through for folks is you don't see Evan and I yelling at each other, fighting with, you know, calling each other names.

It's an iron sharpening iron experience. Yeah. This is why I argue that everybody, you know, why are so many lawyers

Jewish? It's the only profession we can get paid to do what we were raised to do. I mean,

I got with three lawyers in my family, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a profession where you get paid to debate.

I mean, hey, so but, but I, you know,

I hope that this has been helpful for, for people to just see. And, you know but I really do appreciate you coming on.

I appreciate you the diligence in how you approach this.

I mean, I, I find it that very few people do what you've done.

What I know that I've done when I wrote my book, what do they believe is to actually understand someone else's position from their position and articulate it accurately and be able to go to people that believe it.

And they're like, yes, you, you understand this. And so we'd love to have you back on.

And you know, we, we could definitely talk about trying to get some, some other folks to answer some questions you have.

And you know, cause, cause I think, I think it's good. I hope it's been helpful for folks, but I mean, most of all,

I do pray that you would, you'd repent. You're changing in thinking from trusting self to trust in Christ.

It's the most important thing. Well, absolutely. And we'll see. I'm not, my mind isn't close to that,

I will say. So any, anything is possible. But I, yeah, and I appreciate your audience too.

They're very, they're very humble and kind. And that's what I expected. And they certainly meet my expectations in that respect and are very

Aaronic and as Christians should act. So thank you very much, Andrew. And thank you very much to your audience.

Thank you, Evan. So, so with that next week, I will be back now and that may surprise people.

I'll be back for two weeks back to back. Yeah, that's the plan. I won't be here for Thanksgiving.

I'll say that one, but I don't have, I'll talk with Drew. We don't have a specific topic yet for next week, but we'll,

I'm sure come up with something. I have something in, in that I'm going to run by Drew. I think

I found a 30 minute video someone sent me. And I think after I send it to Drew, I have a feeling we'll discuss it.

It had to do with the topic of the cessation of gifts or maybe continuation of gifts.

But we'll see. I think that if I send this to Drew, we're going to, Drew's backstage.

So he's, he's probably, he's not on camera, but he's probably like going, oh no, what Andrew, what's Andrew going to send me? I think it'll trigger him.

I'm just saying, there he is. He's back on camera. So I'll try to trigger you with a video and I'll see if you want to respond to it with me.

Well, you know what happens whenever we do that, we never get more than a couple minutes into the video for the whole show.

Well, okay. I will admit that this video, I think it was the eight second mark when

I caught him in a fallacy. So he's pretty right out of the gate, but we'll see. So we may do that next week.

So until then, just strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. And we will see you next time.