What is the "New Apologetic?" #emilioramos #newapologetic #presup #transhumanism #eschatology

Revealed Apologetics

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:01

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics.

00:04

I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today I have a special guest with me, Emilio Ramos.

00:10

Emilio, I have to say Emilio, so I don't say Amelia on accident.

00:15

Although it is 2023, so I'm just kidding.

00:20

Emilio Ramos is going to introduce himself in just a few moments.

00:24

I'm super excited about this topic that we're gonna be discussing today.

00:29

But real quick, just by way of update, this has been, actually, Emilio, you're the first interview in a long time since I've been very busy.

00:38

So I haven't been live in a while, so I appreciate you being here for this live discussion.

00:44

But for folks who want a little bit of an update, I do have a couple of speaking engagements coming up.

00:49

I'll be speaking up at a classical Christian school in Pennsylvania.

00:53

I think it's called the Lagos School, and I'll be speaking with the parents and the faculty there about the importance of incorporating apologetics in the classroom and in the home.

01:01

So prayers for that would be greatly appreciated.

01:04

November, I'm going to be flying out to Kansas to speak at an apologetics conference there.

01:11

And later on in January, I'll be in upstate New York.

01:14

So I've got a couple of things going on, and so just wanted to throw that out there if anyone was interested in what I was up to.

01:21

If you are looking for a speaker or a workshop apologetics-related thing, you guys can reach out to me at revealedapologetics at gmail.com, or you can reach out to me on my website, revealedapologetics.com.

01:32

So that's all in terms of updates.

01:35

And so without further ado, Emilio, why don't you introduce yourself to my audience, and then we can jump right into our discussion.

01:43

Oh, absolutely.

01:44

Hey, it's great to be with you again, Eli.

01:46

It's been too long, and I've always appreciated what you're doing on your channel and your apologetics and stuff like that.

01:52

I love it.

01:53

Excited about what you're doing, and certainly support what you're doing.

01:57

So I'm glad to be back.

01:58

But yeah, I have a ministry called Red Grace Media, and people can go to redgracemedia.com or Red Grace Media YouTube to see our weekly YouTube show that airs every Sunday at seven o'clock.

02:11

Also, I host a podcast as well called Christ in Kingdom, and they can get that pretty much everywhere where podcasts are found.

02:20

I'm also the pastor of City View Church in Frisco, Texas.

02:25

City View Church in Frisco, Texas, a new church plant for me, and excited about that endeavor.

02:31

And so yeah, just been in Texas since 2007 pastoring, and the Lord has been faithful through all of life's twists and turns, and looking forward to what the Lord has in store next, and certainly excited about our subject today.

02:50

So it's good to be with you guys.

02:52

Awesome.

02:53

Well, folks who listen to this channel really love presuppositional apologetics.

02:56

If you guys love presuppositional apologetics, you should go to Emilio Ramos' channel.

03:01

He does have presuppositional apologetic-related stuff on there along with a bunch of other things.

03:07

He's basically a black belt in presupp and a grandmaster in evangelism.

03:11

So definitely check out his stuff there.

03:15

He's also got a couple of debates out there in the internet somewhere.

03:19

I know you debated a while back, Tom Jump.

03:23

Tom Jump.

03:24

That's right.

03:25

Unfortunately, the audio wasn't good, but you did a follow-up episode explaining and doing a commentary on the debate, and I thought that was excellent.

03:33

So folks might wanna check that out.

03:36

All right, so Emilio is always two steps ahead of me.

03:39

When I'm wondering, hey, man, you know, systematic theology, man, how's your theological? Oh, systematic theology.

03:46

I'm studying biblical theology.

03:48

Oh, my bad.

03:50

Hey, any new thing on presuppositional apologetics or anything? No, no, no.

03:54

We're doing new apologetics now.

03:55

So I'm like, oh my goodness.

03:57

So by the time I catch on, he's two steps ahead.

03:59

I don't even know what the new apologetic is all about.

04:02

I just recently learned about it.

04:04

And so apparently we're doing old apologetics.

04:06

He is ahead of the game, ahead of the curve.

04:09

And just real quick, so I kind of, before we kind of jump into the questions, Cornelius Van Til, as an apologist and philosopher, was ahead of his time.

04:21

He addressed issues that were around the corner that weren't yet prominent in his day.

04:27

And I think this is important in terms of our topic.

04:30

The new apologetic, the little of what I know about it, you are addressing topics, or you're bringing into focus issues that Christians need to be aware of and will become more prominent and important in the future.

04:40

Have I summarized that accurately, Emilio? Yeah, I think you have, actually.

04:47

Anytime you use the word new, you run the risk of being misunderstood, or you run the risk of being accused of trying to create something novel or something like that, as the old adage goes, if it's new, it's not true.

05:01

If it's true, it's not new.

05:02

Or if it's old, it's gold, the whole thing.

05:05

But yeah, so the new apologetics is exactly what you mentioned.

05:11

It's stuff that we need to get ready for, get geared up for, and stuff that really people aren't really talking very much about.

05:18

And so the Lord, in His mysterious providence, kind of led me down the path of looking into these things, much like I did decades ago when I was heavily invested in studying Islam, spent a couple decades studying Islam very intensely.

05:36

And I thought that Islam was sort of the darkest kind of worldview or world religion.

05:44

And what I found there was indeed spiritually dark.

05:48

But this new focus that I am kind of calling attention to, to me is far worse.

05:57

And so that's why it kind of got my attention, and it has kept my attention, so.

06:02

Right.

06:03

So why don't we just jump in then to kind of define what you mean.

06:07

Can you start by defining what you mean by new apologetics, and why is it relevant for Christians today? Yeah.

06:14

Yeah, in the new part, the new apologetics is really a point of emphasis.

06:18

It's not so much a new procedure.

06:21

I am Ventelian, I am presuppositional.

06:24

And in that regard, I'm committed to presuppositional apologetics and Reformed Covenantal apologetics, okay? And so that's not changing, and certainly not the foundations of that.

06:37

Even as we approach these new subjects, I still think it boils down to the big three things.

06:44

If somebody were to tell me, well, how do you explain Ventil? I'm probably more of a Ventil guy than a Bonson guy, but I would say there's kind of three A's of apologetics.

06:54

There's authority, awareness, and argument.

06:58

And so I would just say, when it comes to authority, we have to try to identify in a person's worldview, what is your ultimate worldview commitment? What's your ultimate authority within your worldview? And then of course, we're gonna ask whether or not people are consistent to that ultimate authority.

07:12

And then awareness, right? That's an easy way of talking about what Ventil discussed when he spoke about being epistemologically self-conscious.

07:21

And so we need to try to engage our unbelieving friends and opponents to try to discover if they themselves are epistemically self-aware.

07:32

And so awareness is always part of what we're doing.

07:35

And the last one, of course, is argument.

07:37

So authority, awareness, argument.

07:39

To me, that's an easy way to summarize pre-sub.

07:42

And argument, of course, is based on what Ventil called arguing by way of presupposition or pushing the antithesis.

07:51

And that is kind of where we get sort of down into the transcendentals of an indirect argument for the Christian faith.

07:58

And so that's not changing in the things that I'm talking about today.

08:03

What I'm talking about in The New Apologetics is a distinct focus of topics that while we've kind of, Eli, we've kind of come out of the 20th century where kind of in our generation, and I don't know when you got saved, but right around the 90s, we were just coming out of the kingdom of the cult kind of generation, Walter Martin, that whole thing.

08:28

Islam was making a big splash, and then 9-11 happened, and then Islam was kind of everywhere on everybody's radar.

08:35

We're talking about that.

08:36

At the same time, I think philosophically, we were discussing things like postmodernism and moral relativism and those sorts of humanistic enlightenment kind of concepts.

08:49

And of course, I would say that all of that, whether we're talking about philosophical relativism, existentialism, or whether we're talking about world religions, pseudo-Christian cults, whether Mormons or Jehovah Witnesses or whatever, and Roman Catholicism, my argument is to say we're always going to have those around.

09:11

There's no question about it.

09:12

We will always probably have to defend the tenacity of the Bible.

09:16

We'll always have to engage in some sort of comprehensive defense of textual criticism and the canonicity of the Bible and those kinds of things.

09:27

And I've done so much of that, Eli.

09:30

I've done a lot of that.

09:31

Remember taking Greek, we went all the way to textual criticism, and I remember being fascinated with the text tradition and reading Metzger and Ehrman and Courdeland and all these people.

09:44

And I was fascinated by the data of textual criticism.

09:48

And I think, like I said, we're always going to have to know sort of a bibliology to defend the Christian worldview.

09:58

But what's happening in the 21st century, not that it began in the 21st century, but what's happening in the 21st century are new and sort of unprecedented challenges to Christianity that I don't recall reading a whole lot about, studying a whole lot about, or being taught a lot about it early on in my apologetics sort of research.

10:24

But the topics that we need to discuss are issues like AI, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, which is basically the integration of biology with technology at different levels.

10:38

There's incipient forms, and then there's forms that go all the way to total sort of biosynthesis with technology.

10:46

And then that leads naturally to the next category, which is post-humanism and how this radical intrusion of technology is leading to post-humanist thought.

10:58

And that doesn't mean that, let's say the machines annihilate us, although that is kind of popular right now in the transhumanist community.

11:07

The AI community is raising awareness of how the machines are gonna kill us all, right? You might've heard headlines and Google executives that are saying these kinds of things, but post-humanist thought is also a philosophy.

11:22

And maybe we can talk about that.

11:23

But I wanna, if you could put a pin in that real quick, I wanna get into that next, but let's just to keep the audience up to date here.

11:30

So you're saying that in the 90s, you had the cults, you had Islam, 9-11, you had the new atheism.

11:36

So we're not tossing those in terms of the importance of it.

11:40

We need to still do those things, but then also be aware of some of these new challenges, right? And so the new challenges include some of the things that you mentioned.

11:50

Now, I guess my next question here is as you brought up transhumanism and post-humanism, what are the key aspects of transhumanism and post-humanism that Christians should be concerned about? Maybe define them and kind of identify for us the key concerns for the Christian in terms of an apologetics context.

12:10

I will do that.

12:12

Let me finish two items on the new apologetics, because it is transhumanism, post-humanism.

12:18

The other thing that we need to discuss is globalism and the key component that globalism represents in the mixture of all of this.

12:27

And then the last one is what I would call pagan spirituality and pagan sexuality.

12:33

And so that is emerging as an old thing.

12:38

That's nothing new, but what's new about it is sort of this incredible, a phonetic sort of energy behind what can only be called integral thought and integral thinking and represented by all sorts of different people.

12:55

But someone that's done a lot of work in that area, as you probably know, Eli, is Peter Jones.

13:02

My good friend, Peter Jones.

13:04

And I don't know if you've read Peter Jones's books, but if you haven't, you need to.

13:08

Everybody needs to.

13:09

Peter Jones is a retired apologist from Westminster, and he wrote among many of his books, but he wrote a book called The Other Worldview, where he shows the sort of influence of a pagan cosmology that is coming, and in a sense, Eastern paganism taking over the West.

13:32

And that's sort of his field of expertise.

13:35

What I'm saying is that that pagan cosmology tethered to globalism is part of the overarching transhumanist, posthumanist idea in what we will use as the big umbrella, what I call the futurist idea or the futurist dream.

13:55

And so that's really important.

13:57

So now that I've kind of got those items out on the list or out in front of us, let me go back to what you asked me in terms of key components to transhumanism, for example, right? Well, transhumanism, according to one of the leading transhumanists is by the name of Max Moore, is to say that transhumanism is fundamentally a philosophy.

14:20

It is a philosophy of technology.

14:23

It's a philosophy of life.

14:25

And in that sense, brother, it's a worldview issue because this philosophy, to no one's surprise, is rooted in the presupposition of the foundations of evolutionary humanism.

14:40

That's what it is.

14:42

And because it is such, the difference between the classic struggle that we've had with evolution, Darwinian evolution, and even modern conceptions of evolution, is that the name of the game today for leading engineers, scientists, mathematicians, robotics experts, developers, and transhumanists the world over, AI experts and whatnot, is that we're no longer in the stage of evolution.

15:12

We're no longer quote unquote in biological evolution so much as we are now in a self-evolutionary model.

15:22

Matter of fact, one transhumanist wrote an article basically telling evolution, thank you so much, we'll take it from here.

15:30

So what is that difference then? So we have evolution in general, kind of the biological theory of evolution, and then the evolution of man in terms of like self.

15:40

We're evolving into, how do you separate those two? It seems like they're.

15:43

Well no, evolution, the distinction is that in the classical categories of evolution, we are in a sense passively undergoing evolution, watching evolution happen, survival of the fittest and all of that, where in today's conversation, we are self-evolving.

16:02

In other words, we will produce the next stages of evolution, we will fabricate them, we will manufacture them.

16:09

We will as a species self-evolve, self-advance.

16:14

We will take ourselves to the next level of whatever stages of evolution.

16:22

Of course, they're talking about evolution, but you know, whatever next stage of humanity is in front of us, that will take place not by natural selection and natural processes, but it will take place through an artificial, self-injected advancement of humanity to humanity 2.0.

16:43

So it will happen through our technology.

16:46

We will, through technology, change the way, change what it means to be human because of our reliance upon technology and what we can do with it.

16:56

Is that what you're trying to say? Yeah, absolutely.

16:58

And so it touches on not just evolution, but of course it touches on anthropology.

17:04

And so I have a whole list of reasons why this whole conversation, Eli, is a worldview issue and in that way, it is an apologetics issue.

17:14

It's not that these ideas are brand new, but it's that what we are witnessing is a new and unprecedented sort of a coalescing of these ideas, these old, many of them pagan, but that we, through our own efforts, our own technology, our own innovation, insight, and wisdom, and knowledge, we will advance ourselves forward to the next stage of whatever we're gonna be.

17:42

And there's no monolithic view on this, by the way, but one thing I wanna say is that this new transhumanist worldview, philosophy as Max Moore calls it, is ultimately anti-fundamentalist.

17:58

There is no fundamental concrete reality anymore for them because nothing is to be regarded as sacred.

18:09

Everything is in a state of self-evolution now.

18:13

We will change the basic structure of everything, including human nature.

18:20

And so that touches upon the question that you asked, defining what humanity is, or what is man? And of course, biblical Christianity has the answers to all of this, but this is why it's important in the different things that I listed.

18:38

This is why it's important to talk about paganism, because within a pagan cosmology, it's open to this concept of enlightenment, and awareness, and universal consciousness, and Jungian, sort of a Jungian archetypal system of reality where we basically are part of a collective unconscious, as he said.

19:02

We all belong to sort of this pantheistic, panantheistic sort of psyche where we become, as a species, self-aware.

19:13

And they want us to partake of that sort of universal self-awareness, ultimately, through technology, and that's where the post-humanism also comes in.

19:23

Now, okay, so when we talk about technology, we talk about AI, and virtual reality, and things like that, where does the Christian put the line in the sand? I mean, all of those things, I mean, everything that we develop technologically has had kind of a negative side, like, oh, the internet, uh-oh, you know, it's the end of the world, it's coming soon.

19:45

Like, where do we draw the line between technology is very, very useful, and there can be awesome things done with technology, versus, but it could also be used for this whole agenda that you're speaking about, this kind of self-realization, this self-imposed evolution.

20:02

How do we draw the line between proper use of technology and proper advancement? Because we don't wanna digress, we want to make progress.

20:12

I mean, I would imagine you would hold to that, right? We should move towards progress technologically, but what does that look like in terms of holding a balance? Yeah, those are the same questions that everyone's asking, including the transhumanist community.

20:26

Where is the line? Where do we, at some point, need sort of a healthy Luddite kind of view? I don't know if you're familiar with the Luddite movement, right, in the 1800s, but Ned Ludd was this almost mythical figure that united English weavers that were weaving baskets and things like that, and the Industrial Revolution came in and replaced all of these people, their families, their communities, everything, basically displaced them by creating machines that can do it a lot faster.

20:59

Helio, I ask this question genuinely, not just like a point to move the discussion.

21:04

I love technology, like I'm a techie guy.

21:07

I love my little gadgets, and even asking ChatGPT a question is like, yeah, make me a quick outline.

21:15

They're super helpful.

21:17

So I really am interested in how you see where the line should be drawn.

21:22

Well, I think kind of all of the transhumanist authors that I read, which are all the leading guys in all of their fields, whether it's Ray Kurzweil, whether it is Damien Broderick, Max Moore, Vita Natasha Moore, Werner Vinge, I mean, all of these guys, and you get to know that there's a huge sort of community out there, too numerous to even name.

21:50

We know some of the kind of the poster boys for technology today, like Elon Musk and people like that, but they're all asking these questions about when does technology cross the line? When does technology, which is a really good thing, technology has the ability to save lives.

22:07

Technology has the ability to lead to incredible medical and medicinal innovation and breakthrough technology that saves millions of lives on a daily basis.

22:20

But there is, as I have sort of concluded in the midst of this whole field, Eli, there is an idol called progress.

22:29

And it's almost as if everyone is bowing to the idol of progress and that anything progress-wise is good.

22:38

And the problem is, is that as many of the leading experts in this field have identified, we're getting very quickly to the place where technology is gonna go from being helpful to being dangerous.

22:57

And once we sort of delve into a certain threshold of artificial intelligence, especially if you would, the mind inside the machines, once we get to a certain threshold of intelligence, whether it's AGI or ASI, I don't think we'll reach ASI, but just so you know, maybe I can just explain it real quick, Eli, but artificial intelligence today is known as ANI, artificial narrow intelligence.

23:27

That means that intelligence is very limited.

23:30

It can do very specific tasks.

23:32

It may do tasks so advanced, even though they're narrow and specific, it could beat you at chess.

23:40

It could beat you at board games like Go, the Chinese game that recently just happened in recent years where the number one chess player or Go player in China was beat by an AI system, causing him to quit playing Go forever because he saw no reason to keep playing a game that he, in comparison to the artificial intelligence, he didn't, I mean, there was no comparison.

24:11

And so he quit the game altogether.

24:14

And that brings up sort of a small sort of sample size of incipient forms of post-humanism, how that technology sort of saps the vitality of humanity in many ways.

24:29

We're gonna see this very soon in our own lives.

24:32

But isn't that not just the development of technology, but isn't that by choice? It's people who choose to, okay, well, AI beat me in this game, so that's it.

24:45

I guess there's no point.

24:46

It's like, well, not everyone has to make that choice, right, isn't it gonna be dealing with how people respond to it, not necessarily that these things are being developed.

24:56

I don't see a sliding scale of moving from one point to another point.

25:01

I think we are already at the point where technology can be used either for good or for bad.

25:07

It's just not the technology itself, it's the people making the decisions.

25:12

Am I missing something? Quite right.

25:15

Remember, the same basic fundamental materials that were used to build the Tower of Babel were used to build the temple.

25:23

It's brick and mortar, it's sand, it's stone, right? It's engineering.

25:28

And there's nothing wrong with that.

25:29

But if you take the same basic elements to create a pagan temple, it's evil in it of, you know, you have done something quite evil with it, right? Right.

25:40

So we can use silicon for our advantage, but the problem is, is that today, because of the advent of artificial intelligence, we're kind of now staring down the barrel of technology so advanced that it's no longer, do you want to keep playing chess? It's, we don't really need any more chess players.

26:05

It's not about, do you want to keep editing a podcast? We don't really need any more editors.

26:12

It's not because you don't wanna keep being an artist.

26:16

But there's really no need for artists anymore.

26:20

Right now, to give you an example, what's becoming trendy in Hollywood is they're feeding artificially generated software to create scripts for films.

26:33

They take that artificially generated script, a human being had nothing to do with it, basically, and then they take the script that the machine gave them and they act it out in a Hollywood set.

26:46

That's why the Star Wars didn't go well, man.

26:49

That's why it's all looking so fake now, right? So we're talking about displacement of humanity.

26:58

According to some experts, in the next 15 years, that quick, we could be looking at 30 to 40% of the jobs lost to AI and robots.

27:13

That's according to some experts.

27:15

I can give you statistics where, in warehouses, 600 people are reduced to 60.

27:24

And we can say, oh, well, that's okay, but they'll just go out and get a different kind of job and maybe even a better job.

27:31

Yeah, but the real smart people in this area, they're saying, we're gonna have a crisis on our hand pretty soon where there's not gonna be enough people to go around doing that anymore.

27:44

And so one guy who people know, his name is Yuval Noah Harari.

27:50

Yuval Noah Harari is a globalist thinker.

27:53

He is a tech enthusiast, and he's also a tech alarmist to some degree.

27:59

He is both supporting the idea of radical technologies, but he's also warning of the adverse effects if it gets out of control.

28:08

But Yuval Noah Harari says that in the future, probably, according to him, these are the actual words he uses in a book that was endorsed by an American president, okay, where he talks about what will we do with all the masses of useless people.

28:24

And he says, I have an idea.

28:26

They will mostly be playing video games in VR and on psychedelic drugs.

28:32

What else are they gonna do? That is not a- You called it.

28:37

Look, one of the listeners said it before you even uttered it.

28:39

Yeah, there you go.

28:40

It's not sarcasm.

28:42

It's actual, these are people actually thinking out loud.

28:47

And right now, we're still in sort of the early stages, Eli, where you and I and everybody else can kind of sit around and poke fun at this, and we can talk about how silly it is and how Terminator-type fiction it is, right? But I believe by 2030, we're gonna get a dose of reality for the first time when, in my opinion, if sort of the hard dates and projections are somewhat right, and they appear to be right, we're gonna start seeing implantable technology everywhere.

29:26

That's already happening in places like the Netherlands and the UK and different places where they're having implantable parties where people get together, 100, 200, and they get a computer chip implanted in their hands, and it works on NFC technology where you can check out at the counter and you can open up your smart house, and some of them will help unlock the door of your car.

29:50

Tesla recently did a 100-person test in Michigan for a smart key that is surgically inserted into your hand where you open up your Tesla, you start your Tesla, and according to Elon Musk, they're getting ready to scale this.

30:09

So when you buy a Tesla and you check out in the finance office, one of the options apparently pretty soon is gonna be are you gonna get implantable technology to go with your Tesla? I mean, so fast forward in the next several years here, we're gonna start seeing implantables everywhere.

30:28

If people don't know, last year, Elon Musk got FDA approval for Neuralink to put a brain chip in your head, okay? Last month, I believe it was September, maybe late August, they started actually the preliminary stages for human trials to start putting brain chips in your head which are called BMIs, brain-machine interface technology that goes in your skull, okay? I watched a two-hour presentation by Tesla where they actually showed on a dummy, but they showed how they're gonna perform the surgery.

31:10

I watched the entire thing explained in highly scientific and medical terminology.

31:19

I mean, they're not playing around.

31:22

They want to put a computer chip in your head.

31:27

And the risky thing here, Eli, is that as a reformed guy, as a Calvinist reformed guy, we run the risk of sounding like Tim LaHaye or some kind of cartoonish type of eschatology alarmism and stuff like that.

31:46

The problem is the books.

31:53

When I started getting into this, Eli, I took out a library card from SMU, I tell people this, and I started running out the leading transhumanist literature by all the experts.

32:06

As you do bibliology and you look at the different experts and who they're quoting and where, it led me down this entire research trail.

32:17

And I got to some of the absolute leading experts in this field and they are not messing around.

32:25

This is not a game.

32:26

This is not a joke.

32:28

And one of the reasons you know that for certain is because if you do what I did and you follow the money and you actually trace where the money is going today, Google is not gonna spend billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars on messing around.

32:47

And neither is Apple and neither is MIT and neither is Amazon and Neuralink and Synchron and Neurexis and these companies.

32:56

They're not doing that.

32:58

They're investing because they have concluded for good or for bad, implantable technology in a transhumanist worldview is the future.

33:08

And what we will see, in my opinion, and I hope I'm wrong, I really do hope I'm wrong, that within the next five years, if not a lot sooner than that, we will be in a CBDC system.

33:21

We're gonna be inside of a central banking digital asset digital currency system that is gonna be connected to a digital ID.

33:33

I mean, and you know, when I've spent all this time on apologetics, what I'm saying is that not only is there new technology coming, but there's a new worldview coming.

33:46

And I think, you know, right now, if you go to a college campus, I bet you can identify with this, Eli, but you talk to young people today, you know how many young people today tell me as I'm doing apologetics, let's say on the sidewalk, that they've adopted the simulation philosophy that we probably are not here, we're just a simulation that has been simulated by higher levels of intelligences and it reduces humanity down to computation.

34:15

I mean, that's everywhere today.

34:18

And it's not just in colleges and universities, it's in the highest level of these scientific books and robotics books and transhumanist books that are being produced.

34:32

God is nowhere.

34:34

So what people need to understand, I can show you a stack of books this big of the books I'm talking about.

34:38

God is nowhere in the picture.

34:41

God is not a factor.

34:42

They do not care about God.

34:44

They don't acknowledge God other than to mock God or to, you know, some kind of cheap reference to God and religion and spirituality and things like that.

34:55

But it is absolutely fundamentally atheistic.

34:59

But even more so than that, in my opinion, it's pagan.

35:02

It's 100% pagan.

35:03

It's a pseudo spirituality.

35:05

And that spirituality, as I have been able to identify it, has everything to do with implantable technology, hive mind technology, where they don't just wanna connect you to a computer chip in your head and to wifi in your home.

35:19

They wanna connect you neurologically to a central networking system, a hive mind, that will then connect this to everything else, everyone else instantaneously.

35:32

Again, I wish this was not true.

35:35

But deep mind in Google, that's what they're working on.

35:40

Now, if I could jump in.

35:41

So you mentioned a pagan connection.

35:44

I wanna explore that a little bit.

35:45

What you mean by pagan cosmology and how this relates to all of this sort of stuff? Because you're right, I think it's very important.

35:51

I think we can disconnect technology and the things that are important to our immediate experience, right? Our tech, our gadgets.

35:59

And we forget we can detach that from the fact that all of that is done within the context of a worldview in terms of where we're going, why do we have these things? And it asks those more deeper questions about what is.

36:11

Now, I wanna explore a little bit the pagan connection.

36:16

But I was thinking in terms of what you were talking about, how technology will replace a lot of the jobs.

36:21

Now, throughout society, we understand the importance of the middle class.

36:26

Do you think that the development of technology will increase wealth? So you'll have the wealthier class getting wealthier, the lower class getting poorer, and a removal, almost a removal of the middle class, which would be occupying many of the jobs that now technology is replacing.

36:46

Do you see that in terms of a financial issue, in terms of global economics and things like that? You know, I can't make any of those projections, and so I just let the experts speak for themselves.

36:58

Okay.

36:59

Ray Kurzweil, in his books, especially in his book, which was a groundbreaking book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in that book, he absolutely predicts a two-class system, literally a digital caste system of putting people in various technological classes, and based on their access to radical technologies, especially life-extending technologies, which is something he's really kind of focused in on.

37:27

Yuval Noah Harari, same thing.

37:29

He explicitly references a two-class caste system of that technology is gonna produce, the haves and the have-nots, and it's all going to be regulated by who has the latest kind of tech.

37:45

And so, yeah, these are the kind of things that they are acknowledging.

37:50

These are the kind of things that they are looking to stave off.

37:54

That's what they say.

37:55

They're trying to figure out how can we, even through legislation, how can we avoid some of the sort of horrific proposals that are out there that might happen if we don't think self-consciously about this? There is one leading transhumanist.

38:15

His name is Hans Marvich.

38:18

The last that I knew, he was teaching at Carnegie.

38:21

He's a robotics expert.

38:24

And Hans Marvich, I like, you probably like this too, Eli, but when you're doing apologetics, you wanna read your opponent or whatever, and you want someone who's really consistent.

38:34

You want someone that goes all the way with their worldview, right? So if it's a Muslim guy, you want a guy that fully, fully defends real Islam, right? And the same thing with everybody else.

38:46

Well, I think Hans Marvich is radically consistent because according to him, transhumanism will lead to post-humanism through robotics.

38:57

And robotics will be the thing that will be the next step of evolution.

39:02

It will not be humans.

39:04

And so for Hans Marvich, what he envisions in the near future, because if you're a student of history, like even if you read church history, you'll turn the page on your church history book, and the next thing you know, you've leapt forward like 200, 300 years, right? And church history, you just read the centuries so fast.

39:24

Well, yeah, according to guys like Marvich, in the next 100, 200 years, if that, robots will leave us behind.

39:37

And he even goes so far as to say that we, as human beings, we have to be prepared to see them off into the future as they leave us behind in the dustbin of history.

39:49

I mean, this is how they talk, that by the time the futurist dream is realized, human beings, comparative to the super intelligence that they envision, we will be like less than bacteria to the robotic hyper super intelligent entities that we will create.

40:10

What do you mean by that? I mean, is it? Because they will- I'm thinking in terms of like these intelligent, I'm thinking like droids from Star Wars.

40:18

Are you talking about like these robots, like humanoid robots are gonna leave us in the dust by the time we become, or is it like a central computer system? I'm like, what are you talking about in terms of leaving us behind? It's not what I'm talking about, it's what they're talking about.

40:34

Well, yeah.

40:35

I'm trying to document what they're talking about.

40:37

But yes, you're essentially right.

40:40

They believe that super intelligent robots who are so vastly superior to us in their intelligence, they no longer need humans at all.

40:53

That they are now, they become in a sense sort of autonomous, self-sufficient.

41:01

It will get to the point very quickly where only AI, according to Yuval Noah Harari, will understand the global economy, for example, and many experts believe it already is that, that only AI can interpret the economy at this point.

41:17

And eventually, in terms of the data, definitely by 2030, all machines, let's say a $1,000 laptop, is gonna know all human and machine-generated literature on planet Earth, all of it, and whatever else is coming out.

41:36

They'll have it instantaneously.

41:41

According to Ray Kurzweil, he believes by 2030, if not sooner, machines are gonna be given personhood, and they will claim consciousness.

41:53

That's what they're saying, that's what they're preparing for.

41:58

And I've seen these people speak on this issue where they're already calling for giving super intelligent, or intelligent robots personhood and things like that.

42:11

Now, what is that going to do to worldview? What is that gonna do to a person's worldview where you have to, in society, respect a robot as equal as a person, as a human being? Remind me of that movie with Will Smith, the iRobot.

42:26

Was it the iRobot movie? That was exactly the themes that it was touching on.

42:31

I mean, you're right, this all sounds like kooky, quacky kind of stuff, but that's normally how these things start, right? Well, there aren't these things, because there has never been anything like this.

42:43

I don't subscribe to the idea that what we're facing in the 21st century is just another, you know, we've seen this kind of stuff before.

42:52

We've never seen this stuff before.

42:53

So that takes the wind out of my question here.

42:56

I have a question here.

42:57

I'm known to do that.

42:59

You know, I was kind of like, all right, I can't ask this.

43:01

I'm gonna ask it anyway, just to see if it's a good question at all that you can maybe speak to.

43:08

Are there any historical precedents or parallels in Christian history that can shed light on how Christians have engaged with similar challenges in the past? Obviously, I mean, technology is, we have what they would have in the past never have even dreamed of, but is there anything in history that we could see as a comparison where the church confronted something new and it presented a challenge that the church had never faced before? Well, I think this is one of the reasons why globalism and paganism are crucial, okay? Because the globalist element to all of this means that all of this technology is gonna operate upon a socioeconomic global system that is increasingly becoming one.

43:55

So what happens in an ultra-intelligent future, fast forward 100 years from today, let's say, right? What happens in that ultra-intelligent future is that the world gets a lot, lot, lot, lot smaller.

44:08

And so we're entering into almost non-polarity where we're not gonna have China over there, Russia over here, the US over here, but sort of behind the veil, it's all gonna be so integratedly one that there will be this globalist sort of identity.

44:29

And I'm amillennial, but I can tell you, and I don't know even how much time we have left, Eli, but when it comes to formulating a response, one of the ways that I think we do that is to, okay, what are the key doctrines we need to be prepared for, okay? And one of the key doctrines that I think we need to be prepared with is eschatology.

44:55

In these books, what you find is eschatological language and nothing short of it.

45:01

Yes.

45:02

In the transhumanist reader, for example, you're gonna hear about an Edenic world, a new creation.

45:08

These are the words they use.

45:09

These are the words in the book.

45:10

So they're using religious language to think about where they think the world is going.

45:15

Yeah, new heavens, new earth.

45:17

They talk about humanity 2.0.

45:20

They speak about glorification.

45:22

They speak about deification.

45:24

They speak about, they talk about immortality, okay? They even speak about digital resurrections where we will eventually, once we fully map out the brain and fully understand the brain and all of its complexities, and according to some, they're getting close, where you'll be able to, before you die, basically take your thoughts and your mind and put it onto a disc, for lack of a better term, put it on some sort of hard drive and upload it to some network or some robot or something like that that will sort of perpetuate your existence in this life.

46:08

See, now that touches on- This is what they're talking about.

46:10

That touches on anthropology, of course, and the issues of the soul, because I don't think thinking occurs in the brain.

46:17

I think thinking occurs in the mind and there's corresponding physical and chemical, neurological activity in the brain.

46:24

So I wouldn't even know if, I don't even know if that's ontologically possible unless thinking does in fact happen in the brain in some way, which I don't think is the case given my anthropology.

46:36

I make a distinction between mind and brain.

46:38

We have a reasonable soul, right? So I mean, without the body and soul sort of together, we're not fully human like we ought to be.

46:47

And as Paul says, we don't want to be disembodied, right? But certainly the soul without the body still can think.

46:55

It's still conscious.

46:57

So yes, it touches anthropology, which is another one of my key doctrines that we need to go from eschatology and how does man actually advance into the future? And then we need to go into the image of God.

47:11

What is the image of God? What is unique about humanity if not the image of God? See, for these people, they don't believe in the image of God.

47:22

And so in one sense, there is nothing unique about people other than that this is the stage of evolution that computation has brought us.

47:30

Now, let me tell you something, Eli.

47:32

When you read these books, I can point out several books that start in the exact same way, ironically.

47:41

And many of these books are separated by decades.

47:43

They begin, whether it's Eric Schmidt or Ray Kurzweil or Yuval Noah Harari or Yaqay Adelie or some of these other people where they recount the whole history of the world going back from the evolutionary origins down to modern day.

47:58

And what they do that for is they want you to adopt a particular worldview on the way as they tell you the story.

48:08

And by the time they're done telling you the story, you have been reduced to computation.

48:15

All you are is data.

48:18

And so Yuval Noah Harari says, everything that has a technological problem has a technological solution.

48:27

And in his book, Homo Deus, God-man, basically, becoming gods, Harari says, you don't need to wait for the resurrection of Jesus for eternal life.

48:42

A few geeks in the lab can do it.

48:46

And this is the blasphemous worldview that is pouring out of these globalist kind of thinkers.

48:56

And what's scary for the Christian church, Eli, is that right now when you think of things like globalism and digital ID and this kind of stuff, you're immediately put in the category of conspiracy theory.

49:10

The problem is that that firewall is going away.

49:18

And as these things become more and more and more mainstream, it's my opinion, and I hope I'm wrong, but it's my opinion, Eli, that in the next five to 10 years, this is pretty much all we're gonna be talking about.

49:35

So we're at 49 minutes, and I think you're scaring everyone.

49:42

So before we get to the top of the hour, I apologize, I didn't tell you how long we usually go, like around an hour, in light of everything, what you just said, okay, you talked about what are the new challenges and what we haven't touched on is how on earth do we respond to this? So maybe the last 10 minutes, you can go into how does the Christian engage with these new issues from a consistently biblical perspective, a presuppositional perspective, what might a conversation look like when we are trying to combat these ideas? Because obviously we're not gonna fight these ideas with physical force.

50:25

We wanna engage the world with the gospel.

50:27

How do we do that in this new situation? Well, obviously that's the golden question right there.

50:35

I just spoke at one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in America, and the hundreds of people that came, obviously, naturally, like you, they couldn't wait to get to the end to ask the question, now what? What's the response and what do we do, right? And brother, like in this episode, I have barely scratched the surface.

50:56

We have barely, we have not even scratched the surface of the surface.

51:01

And so what I tend to give people as a response is I give them a few passages of Scripture, and I give them a few doctrines that we need to be really prepared to really, really understand and really defend and really cling to.

51:20

The passages of Scripture, what I just kinda emphasize to people is Genesis 1, verses 26 and 28 through 28, the image of God, we have to, we must understand what the image of God is and its relationship to eschatology because that's fundamental.

51:39

And I'm sorry, I won't have the time probably here to flesh all that out.

51:43

Number two, Genesis chapter 11, verses one through six, in the Tower of Babel, because I think if you ask me, has there ever been anything like this before, the thing I would point you to the closest is gonna be the Tower of Babel because I think there you saw sort of a pagan world united in innovation, advancement, the whole language of advancement, the gateway of heaven being on top, the ziggurat structure that would take humanity to the next stage, all gathered together in one technological effort to build something.

52:18

That primitive, primitive idea, I think is analogous to what we're seeing even in our modern and complex world.

52:28

And I'll come back to that.

52:30

The next passage is gonna be Matthew chapter 28, verse 20, when Jesus says, behold, I am with you to the end of the age.

52:39

I think what's gonna happen, Eli, is that we as believers are gonna be called upon, and this is where Christians did not wanna hear what I had to say so much, but it's grown folk talk.

52:55

We have to be prepared to suffer.

52:58

We can legislate, we can activate, we can be activists, we can vote, we can spend money, we can donate, we can protest, we can civilly disobey, but at some point, we must be prepared to embrace our Christian pilgrim identity, that this is not our world.

53:26

This is not our kingdom down here.

53:28

And this might fly in the face of post-millennialism or whatever, but I just think the reason I go to Matthew 28, Eli, is because when Jesus says, behold, I'm with you forever, even to the end of the age, I'm with you always, he says, we're going to have to believe that Jesus is within us, in the room with us, that he is with us in this moment and that he will not leave us, no matter what it costs us.

53:59

And then the last thing, we're reformed, and so we believe in the decree of God.

54:07

We believe, and the last passage is Revelation 17, 17, which if you have not looked at that in a while, Eli, you may want to look at it again, because if my eschatology on millennialism is correct, and Revelation 17 through 18 is a description of a future antichrist system to some degree, and I believe it is, even as it develops throughout the course of church history in an inner advental period leading up to the parousia judgment, the second coming and the judgment of God, that Revelation 17, 17 tells us that God has put within the hearts of the mighty men of this earth to have one purpose and to execute his purpose by having a common purpose until all the words of God are fulfilled.

55:05

And the very least that I could deduce from that passage is that as we move forward to the eschaton proper, expect to see a world with an increasing one purpose of a globalist and now seemingly, unless something drastically changes in world history, which I don't believe it will, an increasingly globalist slash technocratic system.

55:34

And I think that unless we start thinking about these things, Eli, we are not prepared for what's coming in the next couple decades, let alone in the next century.

55:46

Yeah, and completely apart from the apologetic application, I think theologically, one of the ways, I think you touched on it just briefly there, one of the ways that we could confront this is simply to trust in God's sovereignty, be faithful in the midst of it, even if there is, and I'm not saying that there isn't an apologetic argument or application or something that we can speak directly to these issues.

56:09

I'm saying that as Christians, we need to be trusting in God's purposes as these new challenges arise.

56:19

It's our turn to confront these new challenges, whereas the church had to confront new challenges in the days past.

56:28

So God is sovereign, God is in control, and that's one of the great comforts I have as a Calvinist myself.

56:34

Now, I am post-millennial.

56:39

I haven't studied amillennialism in a long time, so maybe I can get a show on where we can talk about that, but be that as it may, regardless of one's eschatology, these are issues that we are facing, and so we need to face them in a united front, in a united trust in God, continually proclaiming the gospel and knowing those categories, kind of the biblical anthropology, what does it mean to be an image-bearer, and make that part of our presentation of the gospel, right? That God has called us, he's defined us to be a certain way, and that we should fight against these ideas that are going against what God has revealed in his word.

57:18

So I think those are all super important things to focus on.

57:22

Now, we're at the top of the hour, Emilio.

57:25

Is there any closing or summary points you'd like to bring across that maybe we didn't have time to get through or anything like that? Well, no, you're post-millennial, I'm amillennial, but we believe that God has a decree, and that's what Revelation 17 is saying, is that God's decree is the purpose through which everything has to be seen, and for which everything is moving.

57:51

And it's a comfort to me that, like Babel, people will build the system until God says enough, and for believers, like it or not, we're participating in the Babylonian system until we can't participate in it anymore, until it becomes so radically pagan and cosmologically impossible for us to participate in the market that we'll know.

58:21

We will know when it's time, as believers, where we simply can't be part of this anymore, and where we say, like the apostles, you do what seems right to you, but we have to obey God rather than man, and it's really that simple.

58:38

I do not believe we're gonna form some kind of breakaway civilization.

58:42

We're gonna raise up an army of engineers that are gonna produce a competing AI to compete with China and Russia and Israel and the UK and America, the various centers where all this is happening.

58:56

I don't think that's gonna happen, but I do think that in the midst of whatever is about to transpire, I do believe that God's purpose is the one purpose that is actually unfolding.

59:07

That becomes critical, to know that all these futurists are predicting possible outcomes, possible futures, possible developments for the 21st century, okay? But we know there's actually only one future ordained.

59:24

That's it, and so we can go to bed at night and rest completely easy, knowing God is never going to allow humanity to develop an AI God that will melt all of our brains at night when we sleep or something like that, and wipe us all off the face of the earth.

59:44

We know that God has a plan, he has a purpose.

59:46

He's creating a new humanity in Christ Jesus, and we know that his purpose and his kingdom will come in all of its fullness and that he will triumph over all of his enemies, even transhumanism.

01:00:00

And we may debate on when and how that all happens, but we know it's going to happen.

01:00:06

And so we just pray that as believers that above everything, that the Lord in the midst of these kinds of things, that he'll keep us faithful and he'll grant us discernment.

01:00:16

If people want, they can go to either redgracemedia.com or they can go to my channel and look on the playlist.

01:00:22

I did about 10 hours of the new apologetics where people can see edited videos where I interact with some of this material.

01:00:29

And I highly recommend people do that because you had expressed that this is what you're in right now, and that's where the best stuff comes out.

01:00:38

When you're thinking about it and you're making the videos, it's fresh in your mind.

01:00:41

If you want to go into a deep dive in these issues, please check out those videos.

01:00:45

And he's got a lot of great resources at Red Grace Media, his YouTube channel.

01:00:51

Well, unfortunately, I wish we can go longer.

01:00:54

I have to wake up early as I have a road trip tomorrow, but brother, I appreciate everything you've done in the past, everything you're doing now.

01:01:01

And it's very encouraging to see that you are going in these directions and covering these topics that not every Christian and Christian apologist necessarily has the time to go into.

01:01:12

And so I really appreciate your wisdom and knowledge and study in this area.

01:01:16

I'm gonna go back and listen to this again.

01:01:18

What I've concluded so far is the machines are coming.

01:01:21

We need to be ready.

01:01:22

So, but Jesus and his people win in the end.

01:01:27

So that's good.

01:01:28

We have the Trump card there.

01:01:31

So, amen.

01:01:32

But thank you very much.

01:01:33

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening in.

01:01:36

I'll let you guys know beforehand when I go back on, I will be having my friend, Jeremiah Nortier, I think I said that correctly, on.

01:01:45

We're going to be doing a response video to some criticisms from atheists on the presuppositional method.

01:01:52

So you won't wanna miss that.

01:01:54

And that's it.

01:01:56

So until next time, guys, take care and God bless.

01:01:58

Bye-bye.