Collision w/ Jeff Durbin: Rhett McLaughlin and Deconstruction

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This is a portion of our show Collision. Jeff responds to Rhett McLaughlin from Rhett & Link and Christian Deconstruction. Collision is exclusively available on All-Access at https://apologiastudios.com/shows/collision. To watch the full 35 minute response follow the link and check it out. We release a new episode every week. Be sure to like, share, and comment on this video. You can get more at http://apologiastudios.com : You can partner with us by signing up for All Access. When you do you make everything we do possible and you also get exclusive content like Collision, The Aftershow, Ask Me Anything w/ Jeff Durbin and The Academy, etc. You can also sign up for a free account to receive access to Bahnsen U. We are re-mastering all the audio and video from the Greg L. Bahnsen PH.D catalogue of resources. This is a seminary education at the highest level for free. #ApologiaStudios Follow us on social media here: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ApologiaStudios/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apologiastudios/?hl=en Check out our online store here: https://shop.apologiastudios.com/

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What's up everybody. I am Pastor Jeff Durbin with another episode of Collision. Today we're talking about somebody that I have spent so much time watching.
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I used to love Rhett and Link and Good Mythical Morning, watched them with my family and now he has, uh, uh, deconverted and, uh, fallen into apostasy.
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And so we're going to talk about some of his comments. Here we go. All right.
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So this is Rhett from Rhett and Link and Good Mythical Morning. Have to say that, uh, my family absolutely loved.
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Watching Good Mythical Morning on YouTube. It was so much fun. It was so well produced and I just really love those guys.
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And so of course when I heard that they had both, uh, deconstructed or deconverted, um,
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I was saddened to hear that and, uh, it's good to engage with us. So I will say this, um, given some of the comments that Rhett makes here near the end of this, this
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Tik Tok video or this Instagram video, uh, he says, I could be wrong.
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And, uh, I would like to personally invite Rhett to a conversation to explore this conversation and how do we know anything at all?
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What's the foundation for truth? And so hopefully, uh, someone gets this, this video to Rhett and we can have a respectful and a loving, uh, dialogue about these things because, um,
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I think it'd be a good conversation to have. And it's an important conversation to have, uh, given this, this whole topic of deconstruction and deconversion.
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And so here we go. Hey, did you know that Christians who deconstruct have abandoned the authority of God and made themselves their own authority, essentially becoming their own
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God? You may have heard that before. Uh, I definitely have because I used to think it and I used to say it.
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That is until I deconstructed. So this is important because this conversation, uh,
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I think has to come out of just the personal realm and get down to the nitty gritty of, of foundations.
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And how do we know anything at all? And it, it actually, it is true. Um, from an epistemological standpoint, in terms of how do you know something, uh, that word epistemology, don't get thrown by it.
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Uh, it's a big word, just means a theory of knowledge. How do you know something? And everybody has a theory of knowledge, whether it's conscious or unconscious, you have a theory of knowledge.
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How do you know something to be true? Was it because your parents told you, is that the ultimate authority? Is it because you observed it and you tested it yourself?
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Um, how do you know anything at all? And this question that he's asking here, uh, is an important one.
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And it is in fact true, whether we like it or not, that when you deconstruct and you, uh, deconvert and you move away from the authority of scripture, that you are abandoning the authority of God, the authoritative self -attesting revelation of God for some other authority, some other ultimate.
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And so this is what I would say to Rhett. I'd say, Rhett, the question of ultimates is really an unavoidable question.
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And so if you've abandoned the authoritative ultimacy of the word of God and his self -disclosure, his revelation, you have abandoned the authority of God to become yourself, the authority or the ultimate, the determiner of truth, potentially.
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Now you can have somebody that says, no, I don't believe the authority of God. I reject that.
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I reject the self -disclosure of God. I reject his revelation. I reject his claims.
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And so I'm going to go with some other ultimate over here of how I actually know something is true. Now that could be different for a lot of people.
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It could just be themselves. Like I'm the determiner of truth. That's how
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I feel. It's what I experienced. It's what I think is the truth. That person could just switch
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God for themselves as the ultimate authority. They're the determiner of what's actually true. And there are people like that.
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People like that everywhere, that they've become the source of what is actually true.
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They determine through their experience, their feelings, their emotions, whatever the case may be, they're the determiner.
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Or somebody could say, well, no, okay. It's not, it's not the Bible. It's not
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God's self -revelation. That's not ultimate for me anymore. It's this group over here.
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They're going to tell me, you know, people that are, you know, entangled in the cults, they do that.
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So like, for example, we just use a radical example of say like someone like David Koresh and the branch
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Davidians you know, they claim to believe the Bible, but in reality, the ultimate authority for them was the prophet was
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David Koresh. It was him. He was the one that told them what the Bible said. It was his interpretation.
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He was the prophet or the voice of God. He was the Messiah for them. And so he was the ultimate.
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And so whatever David says that these are the words of God, these are ultimate. How do
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I know? Because David says, and there are people, whether it's Mormonism, whether it's the
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Watchtower Bible on Track Society, whether it's Jehovah's Witnesses, it's the organization, it's the prophet.
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That's the ultimate. And even in those cases, they've got the Bible running alongside. They've got that there, but they will say something like, well, it's not clear enough.
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You know, maybe it's been mistranslated or it's been distorted through time. And so I can't really know what that says.
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There's no perspicuity, no clarity there for me. And so I'll go with the modern day prophet and modern day revelation.
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And the prophet is the ultimate. It's whatever he says. It's a question of epistemology.
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How do you know? And so people will do that. They'll say, well, it's, it's my modern day prophet, or someone from a more secular perspective or humanist perspective could say, well, okay, no,
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I'm not going with a religious leadership. I'm not going with the prophet or the apostle or the organization.
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I'm going to go with what society has determined. Society has determined that this is right.
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You know, you can have even moral systems of how someone knows something to be true. And they'll say, well, I don't want to believe the Bible. But what
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I'll say is whatever we've determined in our conversation to work out for the greatest happiness of the most people like a utilitarian standard.
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Somebody could say, that's how we know something is actually moral or ethical. It's because we'll sort of have a conversation and say like what works out for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.
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And whatever this convention says that's what we'll know is actually true.
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So it's interesting. It's, it's, it's not like well, we've abandoned the
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Bible now. And so that means that now we're in this realm of actually being able to discover truth and we're not bound by ultimates like we were before.
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No, actually Rhett will disclose here in a moment that actually what he's doing is he's switching the ultimacy of God's self -attesting revelation for the experts, which he admits are not infallible.
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And he admits that the experts could be wrong. But for him now he's saying, it's not God's word that's going to be the ultimate for me.
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It's not that standard of truth. It's I'm going with the experts over here. And even though they're fallible and their opinions change over time, these are my new ultimates, at least for now.
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But he's humble enough to admit later on in the video that he could actually be wrong. I may have put it a little less harshly and said something like you're leaning on your own understanding instead of leaning on God.
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But the implication was clear. These people who deconstructed were pridefully trusting themselves rather than trusting
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God. And that was a good assessment to make. Um, I mean, in reality, as much as you would want to avoid the implications of it, um, that's actually what's going on because let's think about the scenario here.
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We have God who claims to be the only God. That's what scripture teaches from beginning to end. He's the only true and living
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God. He's the creator of all things. He creates everything in existence. Nothing's been made except through him.
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And Jesus claims to be God in human flesh. There's none before God. There's none after God and God makes claims that he's spoken and he speaks with authority and he speaks as the one who is the very foundation of truth.
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That's what God says. Okay. That's the claim of God in scripture. And so if you are saying, okay, no,
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I reject that then you are in fact rejecting the authority of God and leaning on your own understanding.
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So whether we like the implications or not of that, that is in fact what we're doing when we deconstruct and we deconvert, we are saying no, not
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God's authority, no, not God's word and his revelation. It's my understanding.
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I'll interpret the world. I don't care what God claims about the world. I will interpret the world.
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And we shouldn't be ashamed to say that. I mean, that's, that is, that is a matter of fact, that's what we're actually doing.
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Oh, of course. I see things differently now. I don't speak for everyone who's deconstructed or is deconstructing, but I do think that it's helpful because there's so much talk about it to hear from somebody who's sort of been through the process.
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Because I think we can all understand one another a little bit better. My deconstruction didn't start with the decision to lean on my own understanding.
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And honestly, it felt a lot like the opposite of that. When I was a Christian, I spent a lot of time making sure that what
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I believed was true. And that usually meant going to sources that had arguments that supported what
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I already believed. Something to be said here, very important is that Rhett hasn't actually been able to shake his
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Christianity loose completely yet. And it goes to this very point that he's making here.
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When I was a Christian, I actually wanted to make sure that everything I believed was true.
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And it's interesting because from an epistemological standpoint, you can only really believe that consistently and act in that way.
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If you have the word of God as your foundation, because only Christians have an answer as to why we need to, we must, we ought to believe things that are actually true.
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So this desire to believe things that are actually true is something that actually can only be grounded in and justified through a
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Christian worldview. It's very important. Rhett hasn't been able to shake his
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Christianity loose. This whole desire to like believe things that are actually true, objectively true.
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That's something that comes only with a Christian view of reality, only a Christian view of epistemology, only a
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Christian view of metaphysics or ontology, only a Christian view of ethics, because the
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Christian worldview says that God is the truth. God's made the world where his creatures, when he speaks, it's the truth.
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God cannot lie. We must believe things that are not lies, uh, that are actually the truth.
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And just one example here in terms of historic Christian orthodoxy and what the
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Christian worldview gives to you in first Corinthians chapter 15, the apostle Paul, who once was an antagonist toward the
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Christian faith. He says that he tried to destroy the Christian church. He says at a time when hostile witnesses could have been brought forth against the
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Christian faith in terms of the resurrection of Jesus witnesses that could have said, no,
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I know where his body's at. I know where his tomb is at. They could have been brought forward. This is what
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Paul says during that time period. First Corinthians 15 verse 12. He says, now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead, but if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even
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Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, listen to this, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain.
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We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ whom he did not raise.
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If it's true that the dead are not raised. And so listen to what Paul is saying there in the first century, he goes on to say like, look,
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Jesus appeared to all these eyewitnesses. And at one time, you know, over 500 eyewitnesses at once, some of them are still alive today.
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If you don't believe me, go ask them. That's what he says. Um, but in this case, he's actually saying, no, no, actually listen, if Jesus isn't actually raised from the dead, then our faith is in vain and we're liars.
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And that's not what we believe as Christians. We can't live that way. We need to believe something that's actually the truth.
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The Christian faith absolutely opposes believing things that are not true. And it's interesting here because Rhett is in this stage where he's deconstructed and deconverted.
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But as I said, he hasn't been able to shake the Christian foundations loose in terms of this caring about what's actually true.
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And here's what I mean by that. You can have this same conversation about truth with the nihilist.
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Nothing is ultimate. Nothing is absolute in nihilism. Nothing matters.
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Nothing is ultimate. You can have this conversation about something as objective and ultimate and meaningful and purposed with a naturalistic materialist who believes in the neo -Darwinian micromutational macro evolutionary model.
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And you could say, is there any real meaning or any real purpose? I mean, in terms of even ethical absolutes, are there any ethical absolutes with Darwinian micromutation evolution?
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Are there any ethical absolutes for people who are descendants of bacteria and honest ethicists with that perspective?
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And they don't have to be honest, but they've said over and over again, no, this is just more how we cooperate together.
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None of these things are really absolutely wrong. You know, there is no good, there is no evil, blind, pitiless indifference.
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Those sorts of statements are made. And so it's interesting because Rhett, you know, is here arguing like, we've got to believe what's true.
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I'm searching for the truth. It's like, yeah, Rhett, you believe that because you were, you were in the Christian faith. And you've got to decide whether you want ultimate truth to exist.
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If you want that, Rhett, you can only have that with Jesus and the biblical worldview and the word of God.
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Because if you really actually seek out the implications of the other worldviews you're diving into, you'll see that there, there's no ultimacy.
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There's no authority, no ultimate authority. There's no real objective standards and there's no meaningful pursuit of truth.
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Say in one example, naturalistic materialism. I mean, if we're the descendants of fish in a purposeless, unguided universe, what's the point of looking for things that are absolutely true or absolutely ethically necessary or any moral odds?
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They're not there. And so Rhett in abandoning Jesus, he's abandoned the pursuit of truth, a meaningful pursuit of truth.
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Hey, what's up guys? This is Pastor Jeff Durbin. Thank you for watching Collision. We wanted to provide a solid resource to help you to respond to anything coming into collision with the
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