Richard Dawkins Admits THIS about Christianity? | Pastor Reacts

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In Africa, especially, maybe Christianity is a better alternative, and it may be that it's no good trying to preach atheism in Africa.

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And Christianity might be a better alternative to that. G .K.

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Chesterton, who was a very religious man, said when people stop believing in God, they believe in anything.

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As Christians, we knew this, and the patterns are only predictable if you're a Christian. But they literally believe men can get pregnant.

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You guys, social media is the incubator for every conspiracy theory that you can possibly imagine. And it's just getting worse and worse.

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What is the cause of all of these things? My answer is... What did

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Richard Dawkins, famous atheist biologist and one of the four horsemen of New Atheism, just admit about atheism and his part in combating religion?

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Does he think New Atheism paved the way for the woke garbage that we're dealing with right now? Perhaps he's going to admit something in this video that you will not believe.

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Welcome back to another video here at Wise Disciple. My name is Nate, and I'm so glad that you're watching. As a former pastor and debate teacher,

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I react to cultural issues from a Christian perspective. And man, woke ideology is a humongous hot -button cultural issue right now.

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So what does it have to do with Richard Dawkins? Well, Peter Boghossian, who is an atheist professor, he sat with Dawkins, and they talked about the role that New Atheism had to play in ushering in woke -ism.

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Let's take a look together, and then stick with me to the end of the video, because I'm going to tell you what

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I think is the cause of not only woke -ism, but also conspiracy theories and just bad critical thinking in our society right now.

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The substitution hypothesis. Yes. So do you think, and I honestly do not know the answer to this question, do you think that as one religion fades, like default is the belief state for humans, they just have to believe something.

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And as the old religion fades, a new one has to come in? Yeah. Gullibility expands to fill the vacuum.

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Yeah. Precisely. I suppose that's right. I hadn't really thought of it before, but it sounds plausible to me.

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I think G .K. Chesterton, who was a very religious man, said when people stop believing in God, they believe in anything.

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And he was a very witty, clever man, although he was a devout Roman Catholic. What's fascinating to me is that these atheists can recognize and identify that human beings are wired, as they call it, to be believers.

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As Christians, we knew this. Two thousand years ago, we knew this. It's funny,

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I typically say every now and then that social scientists have finally been catching up to what the

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Bible has been saying about people all along. Romans 1 tracks this phenomenon. Claiming to be wise, right here, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal

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God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

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Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator.

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Folks know that there is a God. Why? Because his power, his nature has been clearly perceived.

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This is up here, verse 20, his invisible attributes, his power and his nature has been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.

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But notice, they don't stop honoring God and then just become atheists. They just replace worship of God with worship of other things.

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In Isaiah 43, verse 21, it says that God has a chosen people that he has made and formed for himself that they might declare his praise.

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This takes us right back to the original design in the Garden of Eden. We were created to be worshippers and if we're not going to worship

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God, we're going to worship something. We're going to worship ourselves, we're going to worship celebrities, ideologies, you name it.

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So good on Dawkins and Boghossian for seeing this. The question is, will they fully understand what they just said?

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And the analogy goes pretty deep. I think John McWhirter pointed out that there's a strong relationship between original sin in the

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Christian religion. Oh, that was me who pointed that out. You pointed it out. 2014, yeah. Okay. That was my article with James Lindsay.

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Privilege is the original sin. But yeah, go ahead. Good for you. So original sin being we're all born in sin.

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We all inherit the sin of Adam. Right. We white people inherit the sin of slavery. Right.

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And colonialism. And because we're white, we have to feel guilty for what our, not necessarily our ancestors, but people of the same color as us in past centuries did.

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So that's one analogy. Interesting connection. Let's take a look at that for a split second. For many contemporary left -situated activists, privilege occupies the same role in a religion of contemporary identity politics.

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There is no greater sin than having been born an able -bodied, straight white male who identifies as a man but isn't deeply sorry for this utterly unintentional state of affairs.

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Everybody is a sinner. Everybody is privileged. And both are the fall of man. Both have a stain upon everyone who, by virtue of existing, fall short of moral perfection.

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Both are a kind of disease that threatens society. Neither can be escaped. Both must be abhorred and demand redemption from the guilty.

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You know, this reminds me of something Vodie Bauckham said in Fault Lines. Fault Lines is Bauckham's book on critical theory and the

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Christian response. Actually, check this out. The anti -racist movement has many of the hallmarks of a cult, including staying close enough to the

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Bible to avoid immediate detection, and hiding the fact that it has a new theology and a new glossary of terms that diverge ever so slightly from Christian orthodoxy.

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At least at first. In classic cult fashion, they borrow from the familiar and accepted, then infuse it with new meaning.

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In the same manner, this new body of divinity comes complete with its own cosmology. Right? CRT. Original sin.

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Right? Racism. Law. Anti -racism. Gospel. Racial reconciliation. Martyrs.

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Priests. Means of atonement. New birth. Liturgy. Canon. Theologians. And catechism.

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In case you're wondering about its soteriology, there isn't one. Anti -racism offers no salvation, only perpetual penance in an effort to battle an incurable disease.

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Exactly. Woke ideology, believe it or not, tracks along predictable patterns of human behavior.

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And the patterns are only predictable if you're a Christian. Why? Well, because we understand the plight of the human condition.

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It's actually one of the fundamental components of the gospel message. The, well, transubstantiation. Right. Which is, in the

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Catholic religion, you know, the wine literally turns to blood.

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Where literally doesn't quite mean literally. It means what Aristotle called the accidentals stay wine, but the true substance of the wine becomes blood.

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So, when somebody stands up and says, I am a woman, although they've got a male body.

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Right. That's transubstantiation. In the accidentals, they still have a penis and they still have

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Y chromosome. But in the true substance, they have become female.

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So, that's where the word transubstantiation comes from. The transubstance. Yeah. And there's a very strong analogy to transubstantiation in transsexualism.

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Oh, tell me more. How so? Well, the wine becomes blood when the priest simply declares that it is.

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And a male person becomes female when he declares himself to be female. And in the

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Aristotelian terms, the substance has changed. Right.

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The substance of wine has changed to blood. The substance of maleness has changed to femaleness. But the accidentals, the incidentals are what are regarded by Catholics as trivial and by trans people as trivial.

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So, they really believe that they have become the other sex. Yeah. So, two things here.

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One, I think Dawkins is pressing this religious illustration way too far. I think the starting points from somebody who is trans, which is much more relativistic and postmodern in nature, is completely different from the starting point of the

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Christian who is commanded by Christ to participate in the Eucharist. Of course,

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Catholics have their view of transubstantiation. I'm not a Catholic.

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So, having said that, as far as I know, these are just different things. As a matter of fact, again, not

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Catholic, so my Catholic audience can help me here. Catholics are not taking the bread and wine and surgically altering them to physically resemble

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Jesus, right? Not sure about that, though. I'm kidding. Sorry.

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That's the first thing. Number two, notice, Boghossian asked Dawkins about the substitution hypothesis.

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This was the beginning of the conversation. Substitution hypothesis is simply—it just refers to people who leave organized religion and jump into other belief systems.

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You know, when one religion fades, another one rises up to take its place. But wait a second.

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Didn't Dawkins have a hand in that? Didn't the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism bring some of that on? Shouldn't Dawkins acknowledge his role in this?

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He's not saying anything right now to indicate his culpability, but will he at some point?

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Let's find out. Remarkable how obvious it is that those are delusions. I mean, it's crystal clear to anybody not caught in the orbit of the ideology that that is a delusion.

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Yes. They get around it by this word gender, which is separate from sex.

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There are some who I think even think their sex has changed. Correct. And others who think that—they admit that their sex hasn't changed, but their gender has.

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Yeah. So, I guess I have two questions. One is, it seems to me that there are degrees of delusion that one can have.

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So, if we accept that, like there are certain things that are—like if I told you everybody, you know, those books are really aliens from another planet and they've come down.

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Okay, that's another level of delusion. And so, I often think—this is the thing that's been causing me to think about this.

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I'm utterly incredulous at the sheer madness that people believe now. In a way that I was not incredulous, you know, in 2010 or 2001.

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So, let's take a look at—somebody walked on water.

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This guy named Jesus, he walked on water. You know, this is an intervention in the space -time continuum by a supernatural being, and it caused this individual to walk on water.

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Okay, that's clearly a delusion. If somebody believes in it, if someone accepts that as true.

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And then you have— How is that clearly a delusion? Because this phenomena has—it's just something that you don't see every day.

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So therefore, because I don't see this phenomena, because I've never seen this phenomena, therefore it can never have happened in history?

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Not even one time? I've spoken about this in previous videos, but, you know, the so -called laws of physics are not violated by miracles.

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That's not my understanding of miracles. That's not how a lot of Christians understand miracles. If we understand miracles to be a disruption of the regular process of physical laws, and this disruption is by an agent, then that disruption, what we would call a miracle, is not a violation of physical laws themselves.

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In other words, if I—I've used this illustration before—if my iPhone begins to fall to the ground, and I decide at the very last second to catch it before it hits the ground,

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I've not somehow violated the physics of gravity. I've simply disrupted the ultimate outcome of the effects of gravity on my iPhone with my own actions as a free agent.

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If God exists, and he is spirit, as the Bible teaches, then his decision to engage with the physical world is not a violation of the laws of physics.

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In other words, the universe is not a closed system. That's just an assumption that materialists have right at the outset.

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I don't know Boghossian very well. You know, he has not articulated, you know, his view on that or why he objects to that.

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It just seems like this is the starting point for a lot of folks, right? Dawkins, certainly.

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Boghossian, who knows. But it seems like the starting point is, well, number one, the universe is a closed system.

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And number two, you know, God does not exist. And so then, therefore, all these statements about the impossibility of miracles happens.

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The belief that man can get pregnant. That, to me, seems like a significantly more profound delusion.

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Or am I wrong? Doesn't it come from the postmodern belief that feelings are more important than facts?

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Yeah, standpoint of epistemology. I guess they could just say that it's the redefinition of the word.

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But they literally believe man can get pregnant. And the thing that I've been thinking about is, kind of goes back to Plato.

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That's absolutely correct, by the way. Woke ideology is predicated on a relativistic framework, which is very postmodern in flavor.

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I mean, critical theory, right? And postmodernism are philosophical bedbuddies. In other words, in order to say that language, for example, is power, which we hear very often in woke, critical theory conversations, stuff like that.

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To say that is to stand on top of some assumptions. One of them is the notion that reality is socially and linguistically constructed.

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That's why defining the word gender in a unique way is so important to the movement.

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And language is the tool for this kind of construction. So that sounds like Derrida.

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That sounds like Foucault. That's Lyotard. That's Baudrillard. Baudrillard is the philosopher that The Matrix was based on.

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It was based on his ideas. I did a couple of videos on that. You can check it out. You should check it out. I actually enjoyed

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The Matrix. But wait a sec. How does relativism and postmodernism play into the substitution hypothesis?

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I thought that the suggestion was that woke ideologues somehow rose up out of the ashes of religion.

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More specifically, Christianity, right? Well, Christianity has never been friendly to postmodernism. As a matter of fact, postmodern

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Christianity, if you try to squash these two categories together, leads to all these

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TikTok theologians that we've been reacting to lately. Did you see that last video I did? I mean, yikes.

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I'm actually curious to see the actual connections there when it comes to substitution hypothesis. Is there data that shows woke ideologues were actually ex -Christians or something, you know?

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Or is the connection much more loose? If you believe in what God is doing here at this channel, I want you to join me.

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Wise Disciple is now live on Patreon accepting membership. So go ahead and go over to Patreon and look up Wise Disciple here.

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What I'm praying for is that Wise Disciple becomes a community where we can start making a difference in our homes, in our churches, and neighborhoods for the kingdom of God.

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We are in the beginning. We're going to start out like a mustard seed. It's going to start very small. This can get as big as you want it with our own conventions, our own events, perhaps a debate community, but it all starts with you.

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This is exciting. I'm excited. And I'll see you all on Patreon. Is it better to let people believe benign delusions?

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I mean, in an ideal world, people would proportion their confidence in a belief to the evidence they have for the belief.

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But humanity is sloppy and messy. And the thing that I've been thinking about recently is, if it's true that there are degrees of delusion, and if it's true, and I don't know if it's true, that there's a substitution hypothesis, then should rational people step out of the way or not encourage people to believe things that are false?

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Because I would never do that. And I think that's grossly unethical. But there are certain delusions that are better for people to believe in mass than others.

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Yes. So if you've got to believe in a delusion, if there's something, some law that says there's a certain quotient of deludedness that everybody's got to have.

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And some are more harmless than others. Correct. I mean,

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I sort of feel this a little bit about Islam and Christianity, that Islam is such an evil at the moment, or Islamism is such an evil at the moment, that in Africa, especially, maybe

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Christianity is a better alternative. And it may be that it's no good trying to preach atheism in Africa.

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And Christianity might be a better alternative. I think Ayaan Hirsi Ali has suggested something similar to that.

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Let's just let that sit for a moment. This is probably the closest to a compliment that Dawkins will ever give

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Christianity that we're ever going to see in our lifetime. He just said,

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Christianity is a better alternative to atheism in certain parts of the world.

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Good night, everybody. I think I just want to end the video right here. I'm just joking.

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So I actually have a theory as to what has caused this phenomena that Boghossian is talking about, where so many people are caught up in not just in LGBT ideologies, but critical theory, even conspiracy theory type stuff.

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You know, we never landed on the moon. The earth is flat. 9 -11 was an inside job. Stuff like that.

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Have you noticed the proliferation of these kinds of beliefs? It's not a coincidence that this has exploded.

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At least that's how it seems to me, right? Right now, in this time right now, where the internet is available more easily than it's ever been, and when this one feature of society has been almost thoroughly destroyed.

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So I'm going to talk about this more in a moment. I just want to see if they bring it up. One of the last times

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I saw you, I did a talk in Kamloops, Canada. Yes. And it was about deprogramming jihadis.

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One of the things that they do when they deprogram jihadis is they don't use atheism or Christianity. They use more benign interpretations of the

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Quran. So I no longer think it's true.

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I used to think it's true. If people just stopped believing this silliness, all of a sudden we'd have a flourishing of rational human beings that engage each other and proportion their beliefs to the evidence.

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But the last decade has shown that that's monstrously false. In fact, the last decade has shown that we now have wide -scale institutional capture of our institutions, particularly our academic institutions.

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I'm specifically referring to the United States, but I'm also referring to here. We went to Goldsmiths and did some videos the other day and places where the ideology has seeped in.

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And I've been thinking about how do you create a prophylactic to prevent an institution from succumbing to what's morally fashionable, to succumbing to the new religion?

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So you're on the board of the University of Austin. I'm a founding faculty at the University of Austin. Today, the issues are free speech and open inquiry, which are under attack.

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But maybe tomorrow it's something that we can't even think about, right? Maybe we, I mean, who knows what it's going to be. So is there a way that you can, you know, subspecie eternitatis, or is there a way that you can,

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I don't know what it would be like, write something into the mission statement? Or what can you do to prevent an ideology from having a domino effect and just taking over whole -scale institutions?

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Well, if you're right about the substitution hypothesis, that's a very pessimistic conclusion. I don't know that I am.

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No, my whole life has been devoted to the idea that you simply argue in favor of evidence -based beliefs.

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And I suppose I'd take a rather sort of take it or leave it attitude. I mean, this is what the evidence shows.

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Why don't you believe it? But if you're right about the substitution hypothesis, then

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I'm rather inclined to give up. I mean, I don't know how to cope with that. I used to think that the one thing that would make me want to die would be if I found myself in a world where I was surrounded by people who no longer believed in evidence and believed in something else other than -

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Evidence as defined by who, though? Dawkins and, you know, empiricists?

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Or evidence more traditionally defined? Uh, what are we talking about here? Somehow felt contempt for evidence.

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And I hope we're not approaching that now. I don't - I mean, none of my friends are like that.

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Yeah, I was thinking about that, like, uh, talking about death. It's like an old - I've been thinking about my own death.

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But I wouldn't want someone to be kind to me on my deathbed because they thought that if they weren't kind to me, they were going to go to hell.

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I would want someone to be kind to me because they wanted to be kind. Yes. Right? Yes. And so, even this idea that there's this place where people burn or something, like,

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I want people to be motivated not by something external to themselves like a reward for being nice.

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Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So - What a horrifically reductionistic and incomplete view of the

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Judeo -Christian ethic. I mean, I suppose this is a critique that is not waged merely at Christians, but also the

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Jews, you know? The bottom line is, God teaches us to be a certain kind of person, and it's not a nice person.

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It's a loving person. Jesus was asked, what is the greatest commandment? And he said, you shall love the

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Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

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As a matter of fact, take a look at this. So, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

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On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets, okay?

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The law and the prophets is shorthand for the whole collection of the Old Testament teachings, all right? And in other words, the whole

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Old Testament really testifies to loving God and loving people. This is not an actor pretending to love because they're afraid they're going to burn.

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That's not love. It's genuine love by a transformed heart, and the transformation comes out of abiding in Christ.

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So that when someone is on their deathbed, which, look, I've stood next to the dying in hospitals as a pastor.

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I've stood there and prayed with their loved ones. I've prayed with them. We can do that. We can love genuinely.

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That's what's really going on with the Christian. It's not act like you're a kind person or burn.

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That's not what we're doing. So, I don't know. I mean, so this is what, okay, so this is one of the things that I've learned from thinking about this stuff for,

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I don't know, over a quarter century. And I'd love— By the way, I'm waiting for the answer to the question.

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Like I said, I have a theory, and I'm going to give it to you in just a moment. So stick with me. I'm just waiting to see if they're going to say what

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I'm going to say. To hear what you think about it. I think, so we go around the country.

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We go around the world. We now go around the world, and we set these lines up. They're lines of tape on sidewalks.

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I don't know if you've seen me do this or not. And strongly disagree, disagree, slightly disagree, neutral.

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It's like this tablecloth here. Slightly agree, agree, strongly agree. And then we'll ask people a question.

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Like, should there be—trans women should be in women's sports. Or whatever, whatever it is.

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And one of the things that I've learned— And then we say, five, four, three, two, one, go. And they walk to a line.

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And then I do street epistemology on them. I ask them why they believe it, what it would take them to change their mind.

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Sometimes people change, sometimes people don't. But here's what I've learned about this. And here's what I've learned, a key lesson in my intellectual life, from the

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New Atheist Movement and from speaking to literally tens of thousands of people, prisons, everything.

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Is that people will go to a line, not based upon the evidence they have for the line.

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But they'll go to the line because they think that's the line that they should be standing on that makes them a good person.

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Yes, and it may be the line that is compatible with their political tribe or religious tribe.

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I think Steven Pinker, in his latest book, has evidence that when we make our political judgment, we,

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I mean humanity, yeah, it tends to be not based on evidence, but tends to be based upon tribal loyalty.

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And that's a very depressing conclusion. And by the way, well, okay, yeah.

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But wait, if earlier, everyone acknowledged that people are wired to be religious, right?

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The way that I said it was, you know, we're all created to be worshippers. Then what

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Pinker pointed out cannot come as a shock though, right? I mean, maybe it's depressing, but this can't be a surprise to Dawkins, right?

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It's been depressing me about my being sort of anti -woke and anti -the militant trans lobby, is that people think

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I must be right wing. And I've never been right wing. I've voted left all my life.

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And I mean, I detest Donald Trump, for example. But there are people out there on Twitter, especially who think that because I detest

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Donald Trump, therefore I must be an apologist for trans wokeism or vice versa.

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Yeah, so let's talk about that. I think that that is an intentional tactic of people.

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I think that that is what woke people use. People who have had their cognitions hijacked to this ideology.

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And I think it's very easy to write you off entirely if they say, oh, Richard Dawkins, he's just a right wing extremist.

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You know, Pinker, he's a right wing extremist, although he's the second largest donor to the

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Democrats and Hillary Clinton at Harvard or whoever it is. I've never voted for a Republican candidate in my whole life.

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I'm constantly getting that I'm on the right. But I think it's a tactic, both because they don't have to do the intellectual work to rebut the arguments.

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So they can just a priori say that's not true. And it's a tactic because the left wing media won't have me on, for example.

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So left wing media won't. It has a kind of allergy to any self -criticism. So then I'll go on the right wing media and the people on the left will say, well, look,

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Boghossian's a right winger. Well, no, I'm only going on the right because I'm more than happy.

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Rachel Maddow, nobody's ever invited me. I've actually invited myself and they won't have me. So I think it's a kind of strategy to not do the intellectual work to rebut the position because it's harder.

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It's hard to rebut the position. So, you know, we've been talking about the trans thing and the main problem.

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Well, yeah, I think it is the main problem I have is I don't think children under 18 can consent to, you know,

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Lupron or surgery or what Abigail Schreier calls irreversible damage. And I just spoke to Helen Joyce about this.

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There's an open antagonism to reason and evidence. And to borrow a

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Turner phrase, their cognitions have been colonized, right? They've been colonized by an exogenous ideology.

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And this is, I think, a difference between faith and the new religion.

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So with one of the old religions, ultimately, when you start asking people questions and you've done this more than anybody, you start asking people questions about why they believe.

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Once you've cleared through all the nonsense, they're going to say faith. That's just once all the historical stuff falls and the testimony falls and whatever it is falls, they're going to say faith.

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The problem is that anybody who is a little knowledgeable about wokeism or whatever term we want to use, they will do one of a few things.

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They'll refer to a bestselling author, Ta -Nehisi Coates, Ibram X.

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Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, etc. So they'll refer to that.

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Or if they're knowledgeable and they're an academic, they'll talk about literature, peer -reviewed literature.

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And that peer -reviewed literature has been, what I've written about before, it's been idea laundered. So you get a bunch of people who are ideologues together who already start with their conclusion first and they work backward from the conclusion, the exact opposite of science.

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So they start with their conclusion first, trans women or women, for example, or whatever the conclusion is.

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They get together with other people who have the similar beliefs.

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They make a journal. It goes - This is gold. I hope you're leaning in and paying close attention and taking notes.

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There's a moral impulse. It gets idea laundered and it comes out as a fact. So those people, nobody who buys into the ideology will ever use the word faith.

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Because they have authors and they have kind of high priests of the ideology who have either written books about this, so they'll reference a book.

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But the books themselves, they're predicated on nothing. They're completely made up.

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The whole thing is made up. And so they don't need faith for that. So I love this characterization.

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I think this is 100 % spot on. And I didn't interrupt it because I want us all to really hear it and wrestle with it.

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This is how the game is played on the academic level when it comes to woke ideology. I hope you all heard that.

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So good for Boghossian. The question that I have for both of these gentlemen is, how do you know that you're immune from this human predilection towards faith, right?

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From this human predilection towards worship, how do you know that rational epistemology is not the god that you have faith in?

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If the attitude is, oh, you know, look at all these other superstitious type people that are prone to this sort of thing, then please explain how you're the exception to the rule.

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And if the answer is because science, okay, great. But science is not big enough to account for the belief system that materialists have.

32:45

Materialism is a philosophical position. It is not a scientific one. And so I'm curious if we're all bemoaning the fact that people are prone to faith and belief and, you know, substitution hypothesis is a real thing, how are

32:58

Dawkins and Boghossian immune from this? I'm just curious. I mean, it's a more intractable problem than someone just saying, yeah,

33:07

I believe this guy walked on water. And after you ask them 20 questions or Socratic questions or so, they say, well, it's my faith.

33:14

I believe it in my heart. Well, these folks aren't operating that way. I mean, they're operating in the way that they have these strong moral impulses and they feel things very deeply about social justice or the way the correct way we've been horrifically treated people in the past.

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There's no question. But there is something different about, and this is why I think, this is why

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I think that the one of the primary dangers we face now is the wholesale capture of the academy, because the academy is giving these people jobs for life.

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They're not allowing dissonant voices to come in. They're pumping out utter mad, I mean, complete madness.

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It's what we try to do in the Sokol Square thing to try to take the robes off, show that the emperor has no clothes.

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But in traditional religions, it just doesn't have that sophistication.

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It doesn't have that imprimatur of institutional legitimacy that you get from what we have now with organizational capture.

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Okay, I just heard a phrase that touches on what I think is one of the fundamental problems here.

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What I think explains what's going on in our culture right now, and it's institutional legitimacy.

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I'm going to let Dawkins finish this one last point, and then I'm going to explain everything. Please stick with me here. I hope not in science departments, although unfortunately

34:36

I do think there's some evidence for capture in science journals. Yeah, for sure. Jerry's been writing about that.

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Yes, that's right. In Scientific American and Nature. But I think the capture of universities is maybe true of departments of sociology and anthropology, perhaps humanities.

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But I hope not all. Okay, that was an unsatisfying answer.

35:07

Okay, look, here are my thoughts. Okay, let's put the pieces together. What is to blame?

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What is the reason for this phenomenon that Dawkins and Boghossian are complaining about, which is this rampant, free -for -all kinds of strains of beliefs, and it's like something that we've never seen before.

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I mean, you guys, social media is the incubator for every conspiracy theory that you can possibly imagine, and it's just getting worse and worse.

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What is the cause of all of these things? My answer is the breakdown of trust.

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The breakdown of trust in our society has caused the proliferation of all kinds of weird beliefs.

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We do not trust institutions anymore, guys. We do not trust mainstream media anymore. A lot of folks certainly don't trust the church, and I'm not saying the church is exempt from all criticism here.

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We don't trust our history books. We don't trust universities. We certainly do not trust politicians.

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We have lost so much trust. We're actually right back to the conditions of the late 1960s.

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Which is interesting. William Lane Craig reminded me of that the last time that I was talking to him. And this breakdown of trust alongside the growth of the internet has caused folks to become horrific critical thinkers.

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And look, I'm not blaming the internet completely. I'm just saying that the internet has turned information into fast food.

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Whereas once upon a time, if you wanted to know something, you had to travel all the way to your local library, rent a book, well, first find it, then rent it out, go home, read it slowly, right?

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Take notes or whatever. Or enroll in university and study particular subjects in order to learn and become proficient in these areas, right?

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That's not what we do now. Now we just go to YouTube. And in the same amount of time it takes to microwave popcorn, we try to get a grasp on issues that should rightly take a good chunk of your life understanding.

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This has had an effect on us all. Simple sources of authority with regard to knowledge and epistemology no longer exist.

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And now the sources of authority are people with a nice camera and a microphone online, like me.

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And here we are, we're all talking about 9 ,000 different things, but from 9 ,000 different perspectives and assumptions.

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And then what happens? Basic foundational knowledge gets lost and basic principles of critical thinking are no longer taught, at least not to enough people.

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And that leads to exactly what we're seeing today. Conspiracy theories abound. Postmodern views of the world abound.

37:45

Gender theory, critical theory runs right through our society like a virus, and we don't have the antibodies to stop it.

37:51

This is a huge mess. So if that's the problem, what's the solution? I don't know if I have the full answer to that yet.

37:58

I feel like I'm just verbally processing with you all right now. I'd love to get your thoughts. What is the solution?

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I can tell you this much, and I can tell you what I've begun to do to answer this question.

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I created a YouTube channel, guys. I'm looking around and I'm noticing this problem, and so I decided, shoot, if the people are spending so much time online and on social media specifically, let's go to the people.

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And we can, one video at a time, one post at a time, provide not only the truth, but also solid principles of good critical thinking, and in my case, theology.

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That is one of, I'm sure, one of the ways to answer this problem.

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I think Peter Boghossian knows this. That's why he's on YouTube, you know? Jordan Peterson knows this.

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That's why he's on YouTube. I think Dawkins just started his own YouTube channel. In one sense, we need to bring truth to where people are.

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There needs to be a lot more Christian YouTubers out in this space, guys, because my circle is very small.

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Maybe your circle is actually a lot bigger. If you have the ability and the capacity, and you have something to give folks in terms of high -value content that will fight for truth in our society, then by all means, you need to get your voice out there.

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Be heard. I'll help you. I don't know. My circles are kind of small, but I'll help you as much as possible. Bless others with the knowledge that God has given you.

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Why? Because you love God, and because you love people. Amen? All right, now it's your turn to tell me. What do you think, right?

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What is the cause of woke belief? Is it because we are all wired to worship, right?

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Let me know in the comments below. What is your solution to this problem? I would love to hear what you have to think about that.

39:39

Throw that all down in the comments. Let's have a discussion about this. I actually now come to think of it. I have another answer to this big question, and I gave it at the end of my last

39:49

Peter Boghossian video on did new atheists turn America woke? I want you to check that out, and I want you to check out my answer.

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I'll leave a link for that in the notes below. Anyway, thank you for watching this video, and I'll see you on the next one.