James White on NT History with an Atheist

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00:04

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

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

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

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

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Welcome to Apologetics Live. We're here to answer your questions and challenges about God and the

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Scroll down till you see the StreamYard icon and join us. And just remember,

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I don't know is a perfectly good answer. So we are going to jump into a discussion earlier.

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There's no other of my co -hosts with me, but this is just for folks to remember a couple episodes back while Dr.

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Jason Lyle was on. We had someone, a gentleman by the name of Jordan from Reason to Doubt Podcast, and he came in and we had some discussion and he wanted to have a further discussion on the

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New Testament documents and some of the views of whether they're, well,

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I guess whether they were just copies of other pagan documents or whether they really should be considered written by God.

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So we decided we would have him come back in. We figured out a time and now is the time.

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And with this, I decided to ask because I know someone that's far better, though I love textual criticism, someone who's far better than me by far to come in, and that is

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Dr. James White. So let me first bring in Dr. White. How are you doing, sir?

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I'm old. Are we allowed to announce what birthday you just recently had?

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Yeah, I just turned 60. So we're pushing my bedtime here.

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So if I start yawning and nodding off toward the end, it's just the way it is.

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You know, they don't make Geritol anymore. I was hoping by the time I got to this age that they'd have perfected that, but they don't even have it anymore.

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So for folks that may not be familiar with who you are and the ministry that you're part of, if you could introduce yourself for folks.

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I'm just a strange Scottish guy. I've had the opportunities over the years doing some pretty amazing things.

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Alpha and Omega Ministries will celebrate 40 years next year. I've been married for more than 40 years, got five grandkids,

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I've taught literally all over the world, currently Professor of Church History and Apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

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I've taught for the old Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, Greek, Hebrew, Systematic Theology, Church History, that kind of stuff.

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All sorts of topics in apologetics, and I've done a few debates, 178 of them so far.

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And we just scheduled one for, I'll actually be doing two debates on my next road trip in February.

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One's on gay marriage, well, it's technically what is marriage with a very, very deconstructed progressive type guy, and that'll be in Houston.

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And then doing a King James only, I'm actually going to take the positive and say the

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Legacy Standard Bible is superior to the King James Version, and why not?

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We haven't done one like that before, so yeah. So done a few debates around the world, and that's probably what

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I'm best known for, but anyway. Well, and one of those debates, which is a good plug -in, will be at the

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Open Air Theology Conference that you and I will both be speaking at, put on by Jeffrey Rice.

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So I'm anticipating lots of nice Bibles to peruse.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got a few, Jeffrey Rice, here's my

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Tyndale Great New Testament that Jeffrey did for me, and so maybe that'll come in handy this evening, who knows?

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Yeah, I will admit that on that trip, my wife is not coming, but my wallet is,

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I think. I think that's going to be helpful until I get home.

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And let me also bring in Jordan from Reason to Doubt. Jordan, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me.

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Give you a chance to introduce yourself, though I know that some folks who were in the previous episode may know who you are, but we probably have new people listening now, so let you introduce yourself.

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Sure. My name's Jordan. I run a podcast named Reason to Doubt with my friend Jared, who's a former theologian, and I'm an engineer, just an eager amateur when it comes to history, but yeah, we publish every

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Thursday on topics of skepticism. Now I am wondering, just curious,

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Jordan, would you be willing to use my pronouns throughout the show? My pronouns are God exists.

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If you'd like me to, my pronouns are he, him. I'll use whatever pronouns you prefer. Those are unusual, but I'm happy to use however you want to identify.

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Well, actually, the pronoun that I chose when this stuff came up, and I know you and I had some discussion on this on the last show with things like this, but when in New York, I do a lot of open air evangelism, and people would challenge folks with using the wrong pronoun,

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I have always said for now, I forget how many years now, that I've had my phone programmed, that my pronoun is your majesty.

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And so when people tell me I have to use a different pronoun, I let them know my pronoun is your majesty, and they have to bow when they say it.

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Well, the bowing part is different. Well, no one's been willing to acknowledge me by my pronoun.

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So I've said, okay, well, folks aren't going to recognize my pronoun. I feel I don't need to, you know, recognize anyone else's.

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Sounds like a pretty disingenuous way to use pronouns, but Rob... Well, I like, I try to get my wife to call me your majesty.

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Sometimes it actually works. So let's get into the discussion that we had. Now you had, for folks who may not have paid attention from the last episode when

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Jason was on, you came in, there was some discussion you had with, where you and your co -host on your podcast are both two men that claim to have, you claimed, and we discussed this last time, but you claimed that you were

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Christians that have walked away or deconstructed, deconverted from the faith.

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And for you, a big part of it was the view you have on the New Testament.

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You want to talk further about that. Sure. I mean, what led to my deconversion was a lack of evidence

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I perceived for God, and that is related, it started with, you know,

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I was a young creationist, and so being away from that by the scientific evidence, but of course it didn't end there.

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So what do you see as lacking with the New Testament? Well, the

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New Testament is a collection of historical documents written in the first century, and while I think we can get good historical information from them,

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I don't think they are sufficient to justify a belief in the supernatural, and they aren't sufficient to justify believing their own supernatural claims.

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And so unless you come to them basically already convinced of the case, because you're Christian or whatever,

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I don't think, unless you come at that preconception, then I don't think the evidence is sufficient. It's interesting you say that, because I came from, personally, just me personally,

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I came from a position where I didn't believe in the New Testament. It was prophecy, looking at prophecies that convinced me that the

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New Testament had to have been written by God. But being

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Jewish and having a view that Jesus Christ is Hitler's God, I wasn't looking for Christ. So is there some specific things that you would say, because you're making the claim that it's not supernatural.

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What would you expect, I guess, let me ask it that way, what would you expect if there is something for supernatural?

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In the New Testament, specifically, well, it's hard to say what

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I would expect. I can talk about what would convince me, I guess. I suppose if there were claims in there or a piece of information that would be impossible or implausible, at least, to arrive by natural means, like,

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I don't know if we found some advanced rocket physics or something like that, or,

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I don't know, basically an observation. My standard for believing in the supernatural is no different in the

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New Testament with any other kind of claim. I need it, I just go with whatever the most parsimonious explanation is for the evidence.

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And so if the most parsimonious explanation for the evidence of the New Testament was the supernatural, then that's what

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I go with, but I don't think it is. So would you accept, then, the

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Old Testament is supernatural? No. I'm an atheist, I don't think, I don't believe in anything supernatural.

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And yet there's plenty of things that we know in the Old Testament from some of the oldest books that are scientifically true long before they were discovered in science.

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Such as? That would fit your, well, such as the evaporation of water into the sky, into air, in coming down in clouds in the form of rain.

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That's described in scripture. That rainfall happens? So I mean, that's sort of like the, you know, the scenario you gave.

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So if you could quote a verse, I'd be happy to look at it, but typically the kind of things

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I hear when I hear these kinds of claims are things like the stretching out of the heavens when it comes to the

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Big Bang, for example. And the folks, I can't remember their name right now, the organization, they talk about kind of explaining the

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Bible with the lens of science. And so they'll point to the verse where God is stretching out the heavens as saying that's alluding to the

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Big Bang, which it certainly could fit, but one wouldn't get the Big Bang from that terminology, if that makes sense.

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You can read it back into it, but it wouldn't uniquely get you there. And so it's not surprising to me that there are some phrases that we can feed modern understandings into, you know, but that doesn't mean that they had some kind of access to supernatural information.

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Okay. So I'm going to, I have to do some looking. It's somewhere in Job, after Job 38, don't have the exact verse offhand, but so let me ask this.

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You got into a discussion on some of your podcasts about where New Testament, you were, well in one case, you were actually in one of your podcasts that you were on someone else's, you were actually debating it, that Jesus is a, was a physical, you know, did actually live.

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So at least there was that, but your arguments that you had against the

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New Testament, you were basically comparing them saying, there were some things you were saying that they just weren't, they were, we didn't have copies of them, originals that we, we don't really know what was there.

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You were comparing it to pagan, you know, some of the, the pagan documents and that's, and that's where I thought you wanted to focus in on.

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I thought we were going to be talking about the resurrection, but I'm happy to go whatever direction you want. You can talk about the resurrection, yeah,

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I mean, you had said New Testament history, so go ahead, if you want to talk about the resurrection, that'd be even better.

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Yeah. Basically, I do think that Jesus historically existed as a person. I think the evidence for Jesus' existence is quite good.

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And I actually spend a fair amount of time on my podcast recently, especially criticizing my fellow atheists who

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I think they made a big mistake by buying into Jesus' method. I don't think it's well supported by the evidence.

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So I'm happy to go with whatever the evidence tells me. But I think the point with paganism, it's not that I think that the

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New Testament authors like copied pagans when they were writing their scripture or anything like that. It's just that pagan sources also make miracle claims.

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It's not uncommon for sources in antiquity to put miracles on the lips of many, many people.

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And so the mere fact that a claim was made about a miracle doesn't set the New Testament apart.

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And so. I'd need more than that, there was a claim made by several people or even believed by several people because ancient people believed in miracles.

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So. And that goes for the resurrection just as much as it goes for healing lepers or feeding the five thousand or whatever miracle you choose to pick.

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So, James, let me let me ask you, do we have any historical evidence for the resurrection?

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I've just been listening to the to the setup, to the discussion, and it sounds like what

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I'm hearing is I need naturalistic evidence of the supernatural. So I need some kind of I'm just really wondering about the epistemology of all of this and whether there can even be any evidence given that would meet the the criteria that is being laid laid out.

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So when you say, well, you know, I just don't see any reason to believe the supernatural claims of the

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New Testament. I would not view the New Testament alone. The New Testament writers didn't view it that way.

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So the first thing that Jesus does after the resurrection is speak to the disciples.

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And in fact, he rebukes them for having been slow to believe the prophecies, the fact that from Moses through all of the all of the prophets, they spoke of Jesus.

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That's the first thing he says to them. So you look at the preaching of the early church and again, it's focused upon what we know.

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There isn't any question about the fact that what you have in Daniel, what you have in Isaiah, what you have in Jeremiah are written hundreds of years prior to the birth of Christ.

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We now, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, have clear documentation of those documents existing prior to Christ.

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So the idea that they were written afterwards to sort of fill in the you know, we'll write the prophecies to fit what happened or something along those lines, that's common as it once was, has now gone by the wayside with the discovery of the

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Dead Sea Scrolls and other earlier documents along those lines. So we have this, this is a,

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I grabbed the wrong one there, but this is, yes, it's two books, but we believe it's one revelation.

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And so the fulfillment, which you were talking about, Andrew, in your own conversion, the fulfillment of the prophecies from, even if you go with Deutero -Isaiah or something like that, that are hundreds of years prior to the time of Christ, the idea of bringing these things together in some fashion requires you to allege that the

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New Testament writers are making all of the fulfillment up. And the problem is that the the story of the

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New Testament and the way that it's written, well,

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I think it's fascinating, I don't know if any of you remember the, what year was it?

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I actually wrote a book about it. There it is. Back in, and you know, you're getting old there,

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James, when you when you're having to look for the titles of your own books. Wow, this was 2007? That's why.

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OK, back in back in 2007. You had the

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Talpiot Tomb story, the story that the guy that did

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Avatar was involved with it, and the whole idea of they had found

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Jesus' family tomb and bone boxes and and they tied it together with Gnostic mythology and all the rest of this stuff and announced on Good Morning America and all this kind of stuff.

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I wrote that little book in response to it in about 17 days, as I recall.

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And in that in the process of that, one of the things that I was really struck by was if the

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New Testament authors were trying to make this stuff up, and I did listen to some webcasts and that that was being said, was that, well, yeah, the prophecy stuff, you just you ransack the

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Old Testament, you come up with something here, you come up something there, then you write the New Testament as fulfilling these things.

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The problem with that kind of theory and that kind of thinking. Is the nature of the

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New Testament books. It was fascinating to look at the the patronyms, for example, that have been cataloged by the

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Israeli authorities, the names that people used at that at that time and how it tracks perfectly with what you have in the

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Gospels. Someone living over in Rome trying to write this stuff up wouldn't have known that.

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They wouldn't have known how many porticos, you know, in Solomon's temple and you know, in the portico there and in the temple.

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And they wouldn't have known about what the pool of Siloam looked like. They wouldn't have any of that kind of information which flows so easily.

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But then they certainly wouldn't have known the most common names used amongst the

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Jewish people that time. And yet, because of the research that has been done and the cataloging of these things, you can't dig anywhere in Israel.

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When I was there in 2018, when I visited the synagogue that Jesus would have clearly taught in in Migdal, they were building a hotel and they ran into the synagogue where they're building a hotel.

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So they had to build the hotel above and over it and leave it there. That's what they have to do in Israel all the time.

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So they've been collecting all of this information. And must be the most boring stuff on the planet to do.

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But once you have it all entered into computers and stuff like that, lo and behold, the frequency of names and the kinds of names that you have in the four gospels, not the

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Gnostic gospels, not anything that comes in the second century, but the four gospels that come from Israel in the middle of the first century happen to match perfectly with what we've found archaeologically as the common names of that time.

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And so these are the individuals then that then go out and they are saying, look, here's the prophecies.

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These are the here's from the Psalter, here's from Isaiah, here's from et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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And they were written hundreds and hundreds of years beforehand, and no one disputed that they were written hundreds and hundreds of years beforehand.

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And so you have fulfilled prophecy from documents that are contemporaneous with the events themselves.

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It is interesting, I noticed in one of the webcasts I listened to.

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When you when you put the gospels toward the end of the first century. And I was I love asking people to do that, you know, why do you do that, what's what's your evidence of that?

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And when you dig far enough, what you discover is, well, you know, Jesus talks about the destruction of Jerusalem.

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There can't be prophecy. So it had to have been written after the destruction of Jerusalem. And yet that was one of the clearest arguments, the early church of the of the fact that Jesus was truly a prophet.

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So before you prophesy, before we get into the dating of the gospels, I just want to make sure I'm tracking your argument so far.

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It sounds like what you said was the authors of the New Testament used the correct frequency of names.

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So the names they use about matches up with what the names would have likely been at the time. And because because they did that, they are reliable sources for the prophetic portions.

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Is that your logic? Because they because they did that, they are not written someplace outside of Israel.

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So in other words, they are contemporaneous. They are geographically contemporaneous and chronologically contemporaneous with the actual events of the

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New Testament. So there are very popular books out there. I've forgotten the author of one. It's getting older now.

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Trying to say that the Gospel of Mark, for example, was written in Rome and was a specific attempt to parallel some type of pagan writing and so on and so forth.

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None of that none of that fits the actual reality of the text of Mark.

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And this is evidence that no one we did not have this data until the past two decades at the most, when the antiquities authorities in Israel start publishing this data and putting together the computer databases that have all these bone boxes and the names and all the rest of the stuff that comes along with it.

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So the point is that these sources that the New Testament documents are contemporaneous and they are geographically connected to the area in which these events took place.

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And they are written by the people who then go out into the world and begin to proclaim that these events are given meaning by the fact that they are a fulfillment of what had been written hundreds of years before they came along.

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So it's not appropriate to just look at the New Testament and disconnect it from the

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Old Testament because they didn't do that. So I would agree that you don't have to look at the

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New Testament in a bubble. For instance, if I were persuaded in supernatural causation in the here and now because of a miracle or whatever, if for some reason

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I was persuaded of that, then that would certainly change my prior when it comes to supernatural things happening in the

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Bible. If I already am convinced that this worldview is correct and that the

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Christian God, or at least God in some sense, can do things, then that makes the supernatural events in the

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New Testament far more plausible. Right. That's fine. That hasn't happened yet. I don't rule out the possibility that it could, but it hasn't.

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So you're saying that miracles would have to be as prevalent today as they were at the time of the

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New Testament to believe in them? No, I'm saying that I'm happy to bring in other evidence and to interpret the

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New Testament in light of that new evidence. So if new evidence were found, if I were given evidence that convinced me that miracles do, in fact, happen or they are, in fact, like a thing that happens, whether in the past or now.

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Perhaps by a miracle happening now, I don't know, then because I already have that belief that miracles can happen, that makes the miracles happen in the

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New Testament more likely, in my estimation, because I don't like have to go from I don't have evidence sufficient to believe in miracles to believing in this specific miracle, if that makes sense.

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If I'm convinced that miracles are a thing that happens, it's less of a jump. And so I agree with you with the kind of broad point that you don't have to just look at the

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New Testament. However, I don't think that the fact that they use names, even if they did write them in in Israel, I mean,

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I don't I don't see how that gets you to these being reliable records of prophecy to the extent that that prophecy should persuade me that.

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The events occurred as written. Well, all I'm all I'm establishing is that these are works of antiquity, contemporaneous, timewise and geographically with the events they record.

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They're not written in in fulfillment of some parallel claim by some pagan someplace in Rome, et cetera, et cetera.

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And that those authors then. Are the ones who are claiming the fulfillment of the prophecies from hundreds of years earlier, which, again, has now been established.

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I mean, when you think about it, 150 years ago. None of that background material that I just presented.

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So the Qumran scrolls just recently, what, about 18 months, 24 months ago, the

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X -ray revelation of the Leviticus scroll, it was fossilized.

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They couldn't unroll it and they found a way to X -ray it and identify the the ink pigments and literally digitally unroll the scroll, which cannot be done physically, but they they've digitally unrolled it and they can read it.

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And it is identical to the text of Leviticus in the Masoretic tradition from a thousand years later, just like the

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Isaiah scroll was was identical as well. So we didn't have any of that. The oldest manuscripts we had of any of those works were from 900 years after Christ.

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And so much of the skeptical writing arose during the time period where we didn't have pre -Christian evidence of the

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Old Testament writings and hence the prophecies. We certainly did not have the evidence we have of the names that were used in Jerusalem in the first century and the parallel that has with the

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New Testament documents. So. The idea of skepticism has been around a long time, but but the evidence that I was just giving just simply as the foundation for going, these are historically reliable documents, we didn't have that.

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And so there were lots of people that said, well, I mean, just read Thomas Paine. You know, he just dismisses all of it out of hand.

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And to be honest with you is as long as a person wants to find a reason to dismiss out of hand, they will.

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It won't matter how much more information comes up. It doesn't matter to a lot of atheists today that we've only had access to the papyri of the

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New Testament for 100 years. And yet that has moved our knowledge of the New Testament back in some instances to within 50 years of the writings of the originals, which is far earlier than any other work of antiquity.

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In fact, Bart Ehrman admitted when I debated him in 2009 that we have far earlier attestation for the text of New Testament than for any other work of antiquity.

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That's a quote directly from him. So when you say contemporary, contemporaneous, chronologically, what do you mean?

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Like when when do you think the Gospels were written? Pliny, Suetonius, any of the any of the first century, early second century,

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Latin writers, Greek historians, whatever. That's that's what that's what Ehrman was talking about.

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When you're when you're talking about that time period, normally it's it's maybe 100

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BC to 100 AD fudge factor a little bit on each on each side. But that would be the documents considered to be contemporaneous.

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Our average earliest documents, earliest copies we have of those documents written at that time is 500 to 900 years after the originals.

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P52 is a fragment of John chapter 18, which can be dated as early as 125.

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So so by contemporary, you mean their first century is that or a little bit wider than that.

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But yeah, that same same general time period. Yes. But Jordan, if I if I could step in, because I don't want you to miss what.

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James was saying regarding the Isaiah scroll, for example, with the Dead Sea Scrolls before the

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Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Many of the more liberal theologians argued that with both the book of Daniel and Isaiah, two books that have very specific prophecy, people argued there was up to three

31:07

Isaiah's and several Daniels. In other words, the idea being that they could not have known the detail.

31:17

I mean, Daniel mentions Greece and Rome by name. Right. You have you have specific names of people that weren't going to be alive.

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You know, in scripture, and the argument was which kind of was the argument you were making on some of the podcasts you sent us, right, is that people were after the fact trying to say, well, this was prophecy, but it was done after the fact, predating it.

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And that's the importance of what James is saying with the Isaiah scroll, because what that does is predate, you know, a thousand years earlier to the earliest copy we had of Isaiah.

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Not one word changed. And now since we can date it before some of those events happened, you can't say it was written after the fact because we had something prior to it.

32:08

OK, perhaps I don't remember what I may have said in some other episodes. So just to be clear, when

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I said when I think of that, when I think of like the writings being written to the prophecy,

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I don't mean the prophecy being rewritten to match the events that occurred. I mean, that we have accounts written by people who had the prophecies in their hands.

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And so you at least can't rule out the possibility that they were written in with the understanding of the prophecies that they needed to fulfill.

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I don't even necessarily mean that the writers like lied in any sense, because I accept that the writers of the

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New Testament believe that Jesus was the Messiah. And so if they believe that Jesus was the Messiah and the Messiah had to be from Bethlehem, well, then

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Jesus was from Bethlehem. I don't think they were lying. That doesn't mean that they had special access to some like actual fact.

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But, you know, it just wasn't from Bethlehem. That's still a lie. So it's only when

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I say a lie. I mean, they would have to be intentionally saying a falsehood. They could be honestly mistaken, for example.

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And so I don't I'm not like saying that there was a conspiracy or something like that. It's the point

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I'm trying to make. I guess my question would be, how do you how do you get around the. The the fact that the miracles, the prophecies that we're talking about, you're saying,

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OK, a New Testament, you have these prophecies, so they're they're writing to make it look like he fulfilled those prophecies, however, like even we're talking

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Isaiah, how do you explain prophecies in Isaiah, Daniel and elsewhere that are so specific?

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And they end up in history, we look back at it in history and see

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Cyrus, who's named. And long before he was even a thought, you know, in his by his parents.

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How do you how do you explain that? And I hope you're not going to do a Matt Delahunty and say time machine, which is what his argument was.

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Yeah, he he actually said that he's he's Matt Delahunty said we can't exclude time travel.

34:13

Yeah. So to the best of my knowledge, I don't

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I'm not a scholar, so I'm happy to be corrected, but I don't know of a copy of Daniel with the prophecies in Daniel that are extremely specific from prior to the time when the prophecies take place, like the

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Cyrus thing. If they do, if there is a manuscript that named

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Cyrus as like the emperor of Persia before Cyrus was born. Great. But then let me know,

34:43

I guess. But I'm just looking for the most plausible explanation. Right. And so if you say here's a prophecy from 2000

34:50

BC and here's a book written in the first century CE and this book in the first century has prophecy fulfillment from the 2000, like I can either believe that it was a supernatural event that because it was like a divine fulfillment of prophecy, or I can believe that some humans wrote some words that matched words that were written before.

35:11

But the second one seems way more parsimonious, right? Like I don't have to bring in a god or deity or anything.

35:16

I can just like humans doing what humans do. That's all. That's all I need. There's there's there's one there is one problem with your theory, though, and it's common for people who don't study the transmission of texts over time.

35:28

But what you just posited was an interruption and a recension of the text, specifically of Isaiah.

35:37

You mentioned Daniel as well. But the Cyrus thing is is in Isaiah. I was just going off what

35:42

Andrew said. Yeah. The problem is once you start editing and inserting things, you end up with multiple streams of transmission with contradictory materials.

35:57

So let me give an example from the Old Testament, which is a little bit difficult to do because we're talking about the

36:02

Old Testament. We're talking about ancient, ancient, ancient material. And we have very few historical works that have come down to us from that far back that we can actually even talk about textual transmission.

36:17

But we can, for example, with Jeremiah, Jeremiah himself tells us that at one point the king took his prophecies and tore them up with a with a knife.

36:30

And what's interesting is the Isaiah scroll that was mentioned earlier from Qumran goes from 100

36:39

B .C. to 900 A .D. and there isn't there isn't any change in the transmission of the text over that time period.

36:47

But the Jeremiah has a very different textual history because it records the fact that it had a different textual history.

36:58

And so if you look at the Greek Septuagint rendering of Jeremiah, it's a third shorter than the

37:06

Masoretic text because we're told there was an interruption that the king destroyed one of the original scrolls of the prophecy.

37:18

And so the point is there is a disruption in Jeremiah and we see that. But you're positing a disruption,

37:25

Isaiah, we see nothing. I don't think you said you you you fundamentally asserted that the name of Cyrus was backtracked and put back into after the days of Cyrus into the text of of Isaiah.

37:44

Sorry, I that that's not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say is it seems more plausible to me that it was entirely written after that point or the part of it that includes that prophecy would be written after that point.

37:55

That seems to me to be on its face more plausible than some divine prediction. So so the naturalistic presupposition is there can't be prophecy.

38:04

So therefore, the entire story of Isaiah, which is before Cyrus, has to be transported after Cyrus.

38:11

So it's not that Cyrus's name was put in, but that everything before chapter 39 is a lie.

38:17

I'm not saying that prophecy is a priori impossible, but I'm saying that if I'm looking for the most parsimonious explanation, humans doing things that we know humans do is always going to be more parsimonious than some supernatural thing.

38:33

And so there can be no evidence of supernatural. Well, there could be. It would just it would just need to be such that positing human traits, the things that we know humans do all the time is not more likely.

38:47

Do you, Jordan, do you accept that supernatural things could happen? I I'm open to being persuaded the supernatural things could happen.

38:56

I don't I don't believe the supernatural actually exists, but I'm happy to be to update my knowledge in light of new evidence.

39:03

When you say you're open to being persuaded, but what by what evidence? So so you have you have so let's go back to Isaiah.

39:13

Now you go back to Isaiah. Who gives us, again, contemporary, contemporary information, historical information about what's going on 700 years before Christ.

39:30

And it again, we over the past century and a half have over and over again established the accuracy of place names, terminology used in regards to, for example, political leaders, things like that.

39:53

Isaiah is found to be accurate when there's evidence to look at. And so you have that.

40:02

And yet. The parsimonious explanation when you have prophetic fulfillment in Jesus is either this was written after the events like Cyrus or when we get into the fulfillment material in the

40:21

New Testament. Well, the New Testament writers had these and therefore.

40:28

Well, and there's we need to be honest as to what you're saying, they made up the

40:34

Jesus story to fill to fulfill the prophecies they had before them. Right, I don't want

40:40

I don't want to lie given to you. I don't want to apply deception because, again, I don't know that they were being deceptive, but I don't think that you can rule out that they wrote their narrative with the prophecies in mind such that the prophecies would be fulfilled in their narrative.

40:59

Yeah, but how could you how could you rule that out? Perhaps that's a better question. I guess I guess where I'm trying to understand is and maybe we're talking past each other because you're you're talking about prophecies in the fulfillment of them.

41:12

And it sounds like both James and I are talking about some prophecies that were when they were written.

41:20

Future, so so you have prophecies in Scripture, as I mentioned,

41:26

Daniel, I think four times, if I'm not mistaken, maybe three mentions Greece by name. A kingdom that added at the time of Daniel's writing.

41:35

And Greece wasn't a nation. I mean, there was there was there was an area, but it wasn't the kingdom that was described.

41:44

And yet describes exactly what ends up happening in history in the in the the next several empires that happened right after Daniel.

41:55

So as I understand it, and I'm not an expert in the Old Testament, but as I understand it, the scholarly consensus on the writing of Daniel was like second century

42:02

B .C., which Greece was certainly around by that point. So what you would need to do in order to substantiate your point is to show that Daniel was, in fact, written centuries before Greece was a nation and that it and then it referring to a future nation of Greece that it would have no way of knowing that might be more compelling.

42:20

But unless unless and until you can do that, then the more parsimonious explanation is always going to be.

42:26

That's where James is what James is doing. He's showing how, OK, here you have people who are writing the writing in contemporary times.

42:33

The archaeology matches with that. So the burden of proof then becomes on you to to say, well, they didn't write it at that time.

42:42

I'm sorry, but no, it doesn't. Well, absolutely. It does not. Again, there's there's no way once once you've adopted the epistemology of that is being adopted here, it doesn't matter what evidence is presented.

42:59

There will always be a way to say, well, you would have to show me a manuscript of Daniel that was written contemporaneously with when

43:12

Daniel claims to have actually live. And a lot of people

43:17

I watched a debate with Dan Barker yesterday or yesterday, and I've debated

43:27

Dan Barker and he's quite the interesting fellow, but he's an atheist head of the

43:32

Freedom from Religion Foundation. And it was just so frustrating to listen to this guy who claims to be so intelligent.

43:41

And yet his historiography was just laughable as if you could apply the historical standards we use today for how we record data and events and stuff like that to events that were thousands of years in the past, as if we have and we have such a tiny percentage of the information that was written down those days.

44:08

The vast majority of you know, we have found thousands of cuneiform tablets from Babylon.

44:14

Yeah, they've helped us a lot in figuring out what their dating system and stuff like that was. But in comparison to what was actually produced, it's a tiny, small fragment of what they actually did.

44:26

And so the idea, I guess the idea would be so if we actually found like just recently within the past couple of weeks, a professor in Israel claimed that they had found a inscription that gives the same information as found in,

44:50

I think it was First Kings chapter eight, something along those lines. It was one of the historical kings in Israel.

45:00

And it goes way back to 700, 600, 600, 700, 800 years before Christ.

45:08

And so we keep pushing that stuff back, but the skeptics don't care. Because you can you can always say, well, you know, it's sort of like it's sort of like when when

45:19

Bart Ehrman debated Dan Wallace 10, 12 years ago, actually, it was more than that.

45:28

And and said someone in the audience said, what would it take for you to believe that the Gospel of Mark was actually written by a contemporary of of Jesus?

45:38

And he said 10 notarized copies written within six months of the events.

45:47

Now, anybody who knows anything about history knows that that's not that's not a possibility.

45:54

It's not going to happen. No such things exist. And so if we did find.

46:00

Let's say we found at least a reference to Daniel. In the area around Babylon, would that make any difference to you or would we actually have to find a full manuscript or at least a partial manuscript that contains one of the references to Greece or to something along those lines?

46:25

You're you know, that's like that kind of hyper skepticism gets us all the way back to well,

46:30

I but I can't believe anything unless we find, you know, the actual 10 commandments, you know, the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Sinai or something.

46:40

So I think thereby characterizing as hyper skepticism, I think you're confusing the level of skepticism

46:46

I would have for something that's supernatural versus something that's natural. I certainly wouldn't have the same level because natural things happen all the time.

46:54

And so it's, for instance, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the idea that a conquering leader would do a thing that conquering leaders do is not a very unlikely thing.

47:06

Contrast that with the resurrection or a supernatural prediction that would require more evidence for me to believe because it's a it's a bigger departure from what normally happens.

47:17

Right. And so in the case of this thing with Daniel, I have two options, two broad options.

47:25

Either it was written prior to the events that is described and has some well prior such that the most plausible explanation is some kind of divine foreknowledge or any other explanation.

47:38

And that would include it was written later than it claimed to have been written. The divine foreknowledge part, the prophecy part was written into it at a later date, those sort of things.

47:49

And so you'd need to eliminate those more likely options in order for the less likely divine prophecy option to stand.

47:57

Now, I understand that the kind of evidence you would need to do that is unlikely to exist. And that sucks, but I can only go with what the most parsimonious explanation is of the evidence that I have.

48:08

And. I guess I'm kind of disagreeing, I'm going to go back to Isaiah scroll, because what you're laying out, we actually have evidence for.

48:19

So the thing you laid out was so these prophecies. Show them fulfilled in history and show it having been written prior to the events, that's what we have.

48:32

I didn't hear what I heard was there are some accurate things that have been confirmed by archaeology, and from that you infer that they were written.

48:42

Hundreds of years before Greece or whatever. Well, we have with Dead Sea Scrolls a copy of Isaiah prior to some of the events that he prophesied.

48:54

OK, I haven't seen it, so I have to take your word for it. If if in fact you have a copy of Isaiah that can be demonstrably written far in advance of a specific prophecy, then that would certainly be good evidence for prophecy.

49:11

I don't know if I'd have to look at it to know for sure whether that would convince me. I don't know. I'd have to look at it. So when you say specific prophecy, then you would not consider.

49:22

Issues like the virgin birth, a specific prophecy. So as I recall, the thing with Virgin, there was some issue with that, as I recall, there was a word that meant young woman originally, and when translated, it could mean virgin.

49:41

And you know all about it. You want to talk about it? Yeah. I mean, here's something for you to think about,

49:48

Jordan, with that, because I know you brought that up on one of the podcasts you're on. And this is something you may not know.

49:55

But when the rabbis took the Hebrew and translated it into Greek, that becomes more important at how the rabbis before the time of Christ that put together the spittuogen, how did they define it?

50:14

And they do not use a word for maiden. They use a different word for virgin.

50:20

I don't care if they wrote virgin in all caps in English. I would care if it was in English, but I'm being hyperbolic.

50:26

That doesn't prove that Mary was a virgin? Like that's not evidence of Mary's virginity?

50:32

And once again, the gospel writers who are saying Mary was a virgin had this prophecy in their hands when they were saying it.

50:39

So what's more likely? Again, if I haven't been shown that the supernatural is a thing that exists, then all

50:46

I can do is evaluate the evidence I have in light of that. And you're trying to use this story, this biblical story, whether Old or New Testament, as part of an argument to convince me the supernatural exists.

50:59

And so I can't start with the supernatural existing like you do. I have to start with not knowing that the supernatural exists.

51:05

And so and therefore epistemologically, there can be no evidence of any kind. It's not that there can be no evidence of any kind.

51:13

When we give you something specific, you go, well, that's not specific enough. And it's again, no matter how hard you try, you are starting with a particular presupposition as to what the nature of evidence can possibly be.

51:31

And I just I sort of have to push back from all of this and go from your worldview.

51:39

How do you even come to this position? You want me to exclude people can lie.

51:46

You want me to exclude people being mistaken. You want me to exclude people writing at a different time. You want me to just throw all that away because why?

51:53

Like, why should I throw all that away? Those are likely things we know happen. Like, I don't like people.

51:59

Why are you so blessed that no one's ever lied to you? Yeah, but that's the whole point.

52:06

No matter what evidence, no matter what evidence we can give you, you're going to say they're lying. That's it.

52:11

And I know that is a possibility. You have to look at it. But the fact of the matter is that is what you're saying when you say, well,

52:18

I don't I'm not going to accuse them of being deceptive if they are giving falsehood, if they are taking these prophecies and creating a historical narrative, even if they do it accurately.

52:31

Evidently, they can even do it, getting all the patronyms right. And they can they can describe Jerusalem perfectly.

52:37

So it had to be somebody that was living there, which means they're they're distributing this stuff amongst people who would have known this was a bunch of lies, which doesn't make a lick of sense.

52:45

But they can put all this stuff together and they can string it all together. And that's the parsimonious way of understanding it, because there cannot be anything supernatural.

52:59

So that's what you're telling me. No. Well, first of all, I saw in the chat, someone want to know what my pronouns are there, he him.

53:05

But you said, please, just answering their question. So you said about them, them publishing it in the lifetime of people who could have confirmed it.

53:15

Right, right. There seems to be this idea that first century Christians were super skeptics or super sleuths, and they'd get it, they'd get a story and they'd like rush to go confirm it.

53:27

But that's not what people do now. Like I've been I've been like, why would I expect that someone hearing a miracle claim in the first century would then go rush to confirm whether or not that miracle claim was true?

53:40

Like if someone claims that Jesus walked on water, for example, why would

53:45

I expect that the person hearing the story in the first century would be like, well, I'm not going to believe you until I go check. I'm going to go

53:50

Jerusalem and check like that's not because they didn't accept Jesus as the Messiah and therefore would be very quick to question any such claims to begin with.

54:03

Some people didn't accept Jesus the Messiah. Other people certainly did. And so the majority did not.

54:09

And my point was my point was that these claims were being made in Jerusalem where if if if this was all made up, if because remember the fulfillment that the ways that Jesus fulfilled these prophecies wasn't in just one place and it wasn't done privately.

54:29

In every instance, many of these things were very, very public, had many, many different contexts in which they were fulfilled.

54:36

And there were lots of people, absolutely the majority of people did not want those things to be true.

54:46

And so I'm not talking about just checking out miracle claims. I'm talking about the fact that the public proclamation of what

54:56

Jesus had done and his death. I mean, that was a public event.

55:03

The way in which it took place fits with how Romans executed people in that time period, in that place, and it happened before.

55:16

So if that was just all being made up, all somebody has to do is go, I didn't happen.

55:24

That was perfectly peaceful Passover celebration. What are you talking about? So your situation was fascinating.

55:31

What's really fascinating, and I just I just noticed this because I I did listen to a

55:37

I guess it's because of the season, a thing that you and your friend did on the birth narratives.

55:45

And what was fascinating is Tertullian and Justin Martyr.

55:53

Justin Martyr flourishes around 150, Tertullian 185, 190.

56:00

Both of them and their apologies, their and their and their apologetics. Made bold reference to their to their opponents saying, look at the

56:11

Roman annals, look at the archives that still existed at that time.

56:18

That would demonstrate the reality of events in Jesus's life in regards to individuals, where Jesus was, et cetera, et cetera.

56:26

They made reference to that kind of stuff in their day because the Romans were pretty good at keeping records of things like that.

56:34

Censuses and things like that. Fascinating that they would be able to do that.

56:40

We can't do that today because of our distance from that. But the point is they were putting these things in history.

56:47

That was my point, was that if they are publishing these these gospels.

56:55

In the lifetimes of people that could check it out in the area where the majority of people rejected the

57:01

Christian message. That would be crazy that that that just doesn't make any sense.

57:07

You have a much higher estimation of people's credulity than I do. So two things.

57:13

First of all, there are people right now today you can go find them who will confidently state that you can go that vaccines cause autism and you just go read this peer review journal that says it.

57:27

They'll declare that it's complete nonsense, but they'll declare it. It doesn't stop them from declaring it.

57:33

And I have people all the time. A good friend of mine named Titus said, here's the evidence that will convince you that miracles exist.

57:40

This person got raised from the dead. He gave me this story and I was like, OK, a doctor confirmed it. Do you know who this doctor is?

57:45

Is he actually a doctor? When did this happen? I asked all these questions. He had the the means to confirm the story in his hand using the device he gave me the story with, and he did zero effort whatsoever to confirm it.

57:57

So like the idea that first century people would be more credulous. I accept that some people, if it was being told in the first century, would be like, no,

58:04

I was there and that didn't happen. Sure. Then those people wouldn't be converted. Other people who didn't have that privilege knowledge might be converted.

58:11

And that's all that you need for religion to take hold. Fast forward a few years and suddenly a religion's there.

58:17

Like it's it that this sort of thing happens. Howie Selassie was praised as doing miracles while he was alive, actively denying that he did miracles.

58:26

And you know, and what and what religion today came from that? That is

58:32

Rastafarianism. Yeah. OK. All right. And do you do you do you see that changing the world in 2000 years?

58:39

Just just wondering. I don't. But who knows? Like, you know, that's what's going to happen between years and years.

58:45

But we're we're in a very different time than we were in the first century. Christianity had the the two.

58:52

We're very fortunate to get Paul, who had the innovation of proselytizing and exclusivity at the same time. Like it was it was genius.

58:58

Just just to point out a major difference in between the two, the two examples, and that is the central core of the

59:06

Christian proclamation in the Book of Acts is the fulfillment of prophecy. And remember something in every single one of those synagogues, whether they were in Israel or outside of Israel, sitting next to where the reader would read the scriptures, something called

59:25

Moses's seat. And there was a box in which the scrolls were kept. And those scrolls had been there all along.

59:32

And so nobody's going to be saying, well, you know, they've they've these have been altered to know they would.

59:39

You keep saying that the Old Testament was altered. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the New Testament was written with the

59:45

Old Testament in hand. It would be like this. You did say they could be. I didn't say they were altered in the first century.

59:51

That is not what I said. But you did say that the only way that Cyrus could end up in Isaiah is if it was written after.

59:58

I did not say that was the only way I said that is the most parsimonious explanation of the evidence we have.

01:00:04

That's the only way you'll accept. Look, I can't tell you what. Who won the World Cup? Argentina.

01:00:10

Right. Well, wouldn't you know it? 30 years ago, when I was seven, I wrote that Argentina was going to win the

01:00:15

World Cup. I gave the exact same time and I wrote the entire lineup. I wrote blow by blow fulfilled prophecy.

01:00:22

Right. Why not? Why not? I'm giving it to you right now. How dare you say that?

01:00:27

I mean, let me let me come on. I admit I tire of of that kind of thing.

01:00:34

Dan Barker does the same type of thing. What it does that shows such tremendous ignorance of the interconnection of Isaiah with Jeremiah, with Ezekiel, with the minor prophets.

01:00:49

You're talking about one thing, one event. You're not talking about things were written literally over hundreds and even a thousand years from different people who never met each other that come together in the fulfillment in the life of Christ.

01:01:05

And so I'm sorry. I was tremendously excited that Lionel Messi got his his

01:01:11

World Cup, and I think that's fantastic. But that example stinks. Look, the bottom line is you want me to accept with a complete lack of credulity, you want me to throw away every alternative natural explanation, regardless of how likely they are.

01:01:29

I simply cannot. OK, so so let me let's do let's take your let me step into your worldview for a moment here in a loop in your argument and and work with you.

01:01:38

See if this helps. We have 11 men that will get back to resurrection who who died.

01:01:47

I would love to get to the New Testament at some point who died, not denying that the resurrection happened.

01:01:54

Right. So what we have to believe is that these men knew Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

01:02:03

I mean, you're I'm assuming you're going to reject the 500 eyewitnesses. So let's stick to the 11.

01:02:11

So you're saying, well, what what do we know about people? Well, one thing that we know, and I know this from some of my background that I have done, is that it's really hard to keep a conspiracy going with multiple people involved because someone's going to break.

01:02:27

But it is even harder when someone is going to risk everything.

01:02:32

In other words, they're going to lose their money or they're going to lose their position or they're going to lose their life.

01:02:38

Yeah, I don't think it was a conspiracy. OK, so then the disciples. So what would be your argument that the disciples just hallucinated?

01:02:47

They thought they saw Jesus raised from the dead or that some of Jesus' later followers had an experience that convinced them that Jesus was risen from the dead, but they were mistaken.

01:02:56

It doesn't necessarily have to be all 11. We don't have good historical records of all 11 or that of their martyrdoms, for that matter.

01:03:03

Most of the accounts come from centuries later. But for some of them, we do have good records. And so, you know, if you have a few people who become convinced, whether it's through a bereavement hallucination or some other event,

01:03:15

I am willing to accept that the original followers of Jesus believe that Jesus had been risen from the dead.

01:03:21

I think they were wrong. So how did they all I mean, how did they have the same hallucination?

01:03:29

I didn't say they had the same hallucination. I don't think that's required. I think that you could explain what we have with one or two post bereavement bereavement hallucinations like post -death hallucinations from people who close them.

01:03:43

I'm not saying that is necessarily what happened. I'm saying that is a thing that would that we know happens that would explain the evidence we have.

01:03:50

If someone, some of Jesus' close followers, perhaps Peter or James, I don't know, somebody and somebody who was close to Jesus in some way had a hallucination that convinced them that he was alive.

01:04:01

People have hallucinations like that right now, even if they don't believe in the supernatural at all. Atheists have these kind of hallucinations.

01:04:07

And so if they were convinced via this visionary experience that Jesus has been risen from the dead, now they're convinced.

01:04:15

And so far as they're concerned, it's true. So they people. Are mistaken, right?

01:04:22

That happens. Let me ask this. Do you believe. Julius Caesar reigned was killed, you know, by his his friends.

01:04:34

Do you believe the accounts that we have of Julius Caesar? Sure. I think it's reasonable.

01:04:40

OK. And what do you base that on? I base that on historians primarily who tell me so.

01:04:47

But as I understand it, there are accounts of Julius Caesar's life. Some of them penned by his own hand.

01:04:55

There's coinage. The flow of history also requires this to be plausible.

01:05:01

Many different kinds of evidence. So so you're saying it's plausible that the events of Julius Caesar happened as as recorded by historians and as we see in archaeological evidence and things like that.

01:05:16

I'm sure, like all accounts are written with some kind of bias, so I'm not sure

01:05:21

I'd I'd commit to saying everything happened exactly as recorded, like if you like exactly, you know, but the broad strokes of Julius Caesar reigned and he was killed at the end of it.

01:05:31

He conquered Gaul, that sort of thing. Yeah, I think that it's reasonable concluding to those things. The reason

01:05:36

I'm asking that is because that's exactly what James gave you at the like an hour ago when we started this discussion was historical documents and archaeology that support the documents that show that the the events that we'd have would be from history the same way and far more.

01:05:58

We have far more documentation that and, you know, James already mentioned this to you,

01:06:05

Jordan, right? There's far more evidence far closer to its writing for the events of the

01:06:13

New Testament than there are for Julius Caesar. So why is it that you doubt the events written about Jesus?

01:06:20

So two things. I dispute that we have better evidence for Jesus than Julius Caesar. I mean, we have some of Julius Caesar's writings from his own hand.

01:06:26

We have contemporary accounts and we have more archaeological evidence, which isn't surprising.

01:06:32

Did you see Julius Caesar write it with his own hand? Or you just know. So are you trying to assert that Julius Caesar's Gallic words were not written by Julius Caesar?

01:06:40

Is that what I'm just trying to apply your same criteria for the New Testament to Julius Caesar right now?

01:06:47

I mean, you just accepted it was Julius Caesar. Wouldn't you have to have the same evidence that you're claiming we have to have for the

01:06:55

New Testament? We have coins that were minted at the time that also corroborate the accounts in the

01:07:00

Gallic Wars. That is an account that he wrote it. So it is not the same to take something like that and say the life of a dictator making war on a neighbor and to say that that has equal prior probability to someone being risen from the dead.

01:07:24

If Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars said that, oh, by the way, while I was doing all this, I miraculously restored a man's leg.

01:07:31

It was cut off. And I prayed to the gods and with by my power, I restored it. I would not believe that Julius Caesar did that.

01:07:39

Like. Do you not understand why a supernatural claim requires more evidence than a natural one?

01:07:47

Well, you're trying to apply a natural argument for the supernatural.

01:07:54

And so what I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to get see if you'll be consistent. Right. Both. We have a historical documents.

01:08:03

Right. You're you're saying that one is either written with a bias to try to prove something supernatural.

01:08:12

Right. Or that what is the makes the most sense is that someone wrote something in years later it to predate something to make it seem like it was supernatural.

01:08:26

But now all I'm trying to do is apply the same logic to Julius Caesar. And I think that to to say that we don't have more evidence for the

01:08:37

New Testament documents than Julius Caesar. And Jordan, I don't mean this to be offensive, but it shows you can't just say with all due respect and then say whatever you want.

01:08:50

But please go ahead. No, I'm saying it. It look, as I said in the beginning,

01:08:55

Dr. White knows far more about textual criticism than I do. So there's areas that he

01:09:01

I would be ignorant in what he knows. But and so in the same sense, I'm saying there's areas

01:09:07

I think you'd be ignorant in even what I would know and what he knows here. And that's that's what

01:09:12

I think you're displaying. And I know I'm not saying I'm not saying that because I know if you call someone ignorant, people think it's trying to be mean.

01:09:19

I'm not trying to be mean. I'm saying that when you look at the mass of volumes of New Testament manuscripts that we have of historical documents outside of the

01:09:32

New Testament, the how close you get in the writings of these books from New Testament manuscripts to their original events.

01:09:43

I mean, remember, you know, you you had people that claim that John, the gospel of John is written much later for the same reason that they're they're trying to say, well,

01:09:53

Jesus never claimed to be God. And that developed over time. And then, you know,

01:09:58

Dr. White mentioned earlier, you know, we find a copy of John. I mean, it's only a credit card size, but a copy of John.

01:10:07

I feel like you're arguing against someone who isn't me. So let me just be completely clear. I think even though we don't have the original autographs, we can have a pretty good idea of what the original autographs were.

01:10:16

I think that the gospel we have not perfectly, but I think that you can get a pretty we are pretty close to what was originally written.

01:10:24

I accept that. That's not a problem for me. So you accept that the gospels are accurate eyewitness testimony?

01:10:33

No, I don't think they were written by eyewitnesses. OK, and I don't can't remember if I recommended

01:10:41

Cold Case Christianity to you last time. Yes, I've read it. So, I mean, there you have someone who's an expert in eyewitness testimony.

01:10:49

Yes, but he's not a historian. The historians, by and large, disagree with him. There's a lot of good reasons to think that they weren't eyewitnesses.

01:10:57

For example, if we look at Matthew, who is alleged to be an eyewitness, right? Mark, Mark and Luke weren't eyewitnesses even by their own test, even by tradition, right?

01:11:06

So set those aside. Matthew and John, perhaps Matthew copies most of Mark in his own.

01:11:13

A lot of times word for word. So just to start, just for starters, it seems implausible that an eyewitness would need to copy verbatim the remarks of a non eyewitness about stories that he was literally standing there for.

01:11:26

That seems weird for me. Matthew, the authors, the people they are supposed to be.

01:11:32

Matthew and John were probably illiterate, so it's unlikely they would write because they wouldn't have been literate.

01:11:38

Literacy in the first century in Palestine was about three percent. And a tax collector would be illiterate. Yes. So that's that's pretty amazing that a tax collector would be illiterate.

01:11:50

Not sure how I'm not sure I filled out his forms, but cool. All right. So so the the in the first century literacy was very low.

01:11:58

OK, I know. I know. You know, I've sort of sat back here. You know, you don't have a clue what the literacy rate was.

01:12:07

And neither does Bart Ehrman or anybody else who writes all the books, because you weren't there. You have no idea.

01:12:13

We go into the matter is the Jewish people were a people of the book. That's right.

01:12:18

They were to teach their children from the Torah. That was what made them the people that they were.

01:12:27

OK, so so you're assuming you're assuming American priority.

01:12:33

You're assuming Matthew and dependents solely because, well, there's whole sections that are almost word for word.

01:12:40

Well, yeah, I have lots of encyclopedias that I have a bunch of books on the subject of the

01:12:48

Battle of Midway. And wow, they must have been copying from each other or they're both describing the same battle.

01:12:54

And therefore, that explains the similarities. Why? How come the differences that between Matthew and Luke and Matthew?

01:13:02

Why is it, for example, that Mark is almost always a much fuller account of events in Jesus's life than Matthew is?

01:13:14

If it's just the shortest gospel by far, but it does. Mark is the shortest gospel, right?

01:13:20

It's the most concise. But you made several points there. So let's start with the literacy thing.

01:13:28

Are you trying to assert that Israel out like contrary to all the rest of the ancient world had literacy rates on par with the modern world?

01:13:37

I never said anything like it. I'm trying to understand what you're saying. I will.

01:13:43

And I'll give you the I'll give you history. Go look at anywhere where Christianity entered into an area.

01:13:49

Why? Because literacy rose because people were to read the

01:13:54

Bible. And so literacy did rise in areas where Christianity came in.

01:14:00

Just as the same as literacy would be higher in an area where you have a nation of people that are focused on reading

01:14:08

God's word. OK, and so so you don't understand the context that we're dealing with here.

01:14:15

These are farmers who are trying to or are scrabbling every day to put enough food on the table to not starve to death.

01:14:23

And there is nothing in their life that writing a book would be helpful in the pursuit of them not starving to death.

01:14:29

There's some neat assumptions there. So so, you know, like there was a middle class in Israel and not everyone in the middle class is struggling and starving.

01:14:39

And they have time to teach their children, which was a command from the oldest book of some of the oldest books of the

01:14:46

Bible. The vast majority of people in first century Palestine were farmers, just like the vast majority of people everywhere, because.

01:14:53

And so farmers, farmers don't know how to read. In the ancient world, no, not by and large.

01:14:59

But I'm talking again. Again, it's see, see, I've stood in the synagogue in Migdal.

01:15:05

I've seen the seat of Moses, I've seen where the scrolls were. It doesn't matter because you've got you've got a you've got a picture of what things need to be so that Matthew can't

01:15:18

Matthew can't be an eyewitness. Matthew can't be one of the disciples. We've got to push these these gospels as far down the road as possible.

01:15:28

And there's there's. I, you know, initially when Andrew had talked to me, he had said, well, the questions are going to be on, you know, the text, the

01:15:38

New Testament, as far as its accuracy and stuff like that. It doesn't seem like that is actually what your objection is.

01:15:47

You I'm not hearing much in the way of conspiracy theories, even though they were a conspiracy theory.

01:15:53

The idea of the obviously, I would say the idea of the gospel writers.

01:16:02

Making this story up. And creating fulfillment narratives creates just massive, massive historical problems that doesn't actually explain anything.

01:16:18

And it is a conspiracy theory of itself. It's not a conspiracy theory. And it's not hype.

01:16:23

It's not a hypothesis that Christians made up things about God. We have tons of apocryphal gospels from the second, third century onwards where like I assume you don't think those are accurate.

01:16:33

So clearly the idea that someone to write a gospel with stuff that wasn't true. It's not crazy, right? Like, do you think the gospel of Thomas is why?

01:16:41

Which is why they are universally rejected. Right. OK, so you can you can sarcastically raise your voice if you want.

01:16:49

But that doesn't change the point. The point you just said is it is implausible that they would make this up.

01:16:54

And I'm showing you Christians did this. They did the thing you're saying is implausible. They weren't

01:17:00

Christians. They did it. And the people you're talking about, what are the dates of these gospels again?

01:17:06

Well, hold on before you answer that for the audience, because this is part of what we do on this show is we teach people how to do apologetics.

01:17:14

Now, folks, I want you to notice what Jordan did there. And you can go back and listen. Did James White raise his voice?

01:17:22

No, but he was accused of doing that. Now, what does that do to the psyche? Well, that that makes it sound like, oh, you're raising your voice.

01:17:30

You're out of control. And meanwhile, it was Jordan who started to as he did that. He started going up a little bit.

01:17:36

Not much. He wasn't raising his voice yelling. But Andrew, you can gaslight me if you want. I'm not gaslighting.

01:17:41

Everybody can just look at the video. We can just set that aside. It doesn't matter. I'll tell you what, one minute, 17, one hour, 17 minutes.

01:17:50

I'll throw the audio into the into at the end. I'll check it. And next week, I'll let folks know if there was any change in Dr.

01:17:59

Because we can we can actually test this. Really? So good. Go look at the tone of his voice, which is what

01:18:04

I was referring to. The tone of his voice, not his volume, the tone. So if the tone of his voice, you know what?

01:18:10

If the tone of his voice didn't change at all, I will donate a billion dollars. I will donate every dollar

01:18:15

I have to his church. Who cares? I agree. Who cares? My point.

01:18:20

My point. My point very clearly was that we have seen over and over again.

01:18:27

It doesn't matter what the evidence is. There is there is an overarching like when we talk about Matthew.

01:18:38

You can't even interact fairly with the idea that if you're a tax collector, you have to write reports to Rome.

01:18:52

And so we have all sorts of papyri that have been discovered that are relevant to censuses, taxes, everything else.

01:19:03

You had to be able to write. I'm not talking about writing books for Barnes and Noble.

01:19:10

You had to be able to write. And the people of Israel were the people of the book.

01:19:16

They were to memorize. Every single Jewish person had the Shema memorized.

01:19:22

Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Echad. They knew what that was.

01:19:27

And they gathered every Sabbath in the synagogue and people brought out the scrolls.

01:19:36

Remember the story when Jesus goes in? When Jesus goes in, he.

01:19:42

Is given the scroll to read when Paul and Silas, when they were on their missionary journeys, they were invited into the synagogues, the scrolls were central.

01:19:55

The scriptures were central, vitally important. That's that's straight up evidence.

01:20:02

So I would say to you, don't simply dismiss the idea that Matthew is an eyewitness based upon some theory that, well,

01:20:11

I read a scholar that said most people back then, all they were doing is digging dirt out of the ground. He was a tax collector.

01:20:18

What? And you'd also have to understand synagogue life at that time because the synagogue was the central thing, central location where it is basically the marketplace where all the activity would happen for a town.

01:20:32

And they would they would have to be there on a regular basis. So whether they are farming or not, the the synagogue was central to the life of any

01:20:42

Jewish town. So do you think that that is this is the study of scripture? Do you think medieval

01:20:48

Christian peasants were, by and large, literate? No. Why not? Same same arguments apply.

01:20:54

Their entire lives revolved around Christianity. Like they were people of the book. The scripture is an important revelation.

01:21:01

They had to go to church. That's utterly bogus. Utterly and completely bogus.

01:21:07

It feels like you're holding a different standard. The synagogue had the scrolls right there within it.

01:21:15

Have you ever been to have you ever been to an ancient synagogue? Yes or no. I have not. But I believe you that the scrolls were there.

01:21:21

It doesn't matter. OK, so you've got the seat of Moses. You've got the box next to it. Medieval peasants would not have access to copies of the scriptures.

01:21:33

OK, they wouldn't have it. And you're talking about a much larger period, much larger space of geographically, much, much more spread out.

01:21:44

Israel is incredibly small. I was stunned the first time I went there at how small

01:21:50

Israel actually is. And so you have the people, they're speaking a similar language.

01:21:57

They have all the same type of of customs and everything else.

01:22:03

And it's all wrapped around the scripture. That is not the same thing as people from all sorts of different tribes and all sorts of different languages and all sorts of different backgrounds all across Europe during the during a period where you no longer have the access to production of the scrolls that the

01:22:25

Jewish people had practiced for hundreds and hundreds of years. Again, I'm sorry.

01:22:30

Trying to draw that parallel. Completely bogus. You have no evidence for any of the things you're saying.

01:22:36

What you're saying is I'm asserting that because these are people that had scrolls in their in their synagogues, therefore they could read them.

01:22:44

And you want the audience to believe. I am saying I'm saying that the Jewish people as a whole had a higher literacy rate than those who did not have that central focus upon a written text that they had.

01:23:01

And that Matthew, as a tax collector, would have had a much higher probability of being literate.

01:23:12

Let's say Matthew was literate. There are different degrees of literacy. Being able to write some sums is not the same as being able to write a book.

01:23:19

People today in America who can read cannot write books. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

01:23:25

Not good books anyway. And so what you what you want people to believe is that Israel and Israel alone of the ancient world had a had a huge, hugely inflated literacy rate compared to all of their contemporaries.

01:23:40

I didn't say Israel and Israel alone, as you know. And secondly, if all this is if the best you've got is

01:23:47

Matthew can't be an eyewitness because Matthew couldn't have written a book. That is really sad.

01:23:54

OK, so here's the thing. When you say that I have not been able to actually present my evidence. I'll say one thing and you'll say that's the only thing you have.

01:24:01

Then I'll say one thing. Oh, that's the only thing you have. Like, come on, let's be charitable interlocutors here for a second. You know,

01:24:07

I don't hang my entire hopes on Matthew as an eyewitness on the on the fact that literacy rates in Palestine were likely low.

01:24:15

That is one piece that is not the only piece. There's also the fact that there's the

01:24:20

Gospels themselves were anonymous and there was no name attached to them until depending on when you date them, 50 years or more after they were written.

01:24:29

And that one of the first people for Matthew in particular, since we're talking, Matthew was

01:24:34

Papias via Eusebius and Papias. The description he gives of Matthew doesn't match the

01:24:39

Matthew we have. And so it's unclear whether Papias was even talking about our Matthew. And so we don't get attestation of the traditional authorship for many, many decades after the books existed.

01:24:51

And so that's also Matthew tells the story of Matthew. It doesn't matter what the name doesn't matter what the name is.

01:24:59

The man, the man, the man is clearly involved in as he's called as a disciple.

01:25:07

From an occupation that would have most likely made him a literate person, not only that, but the individual writing the

01:25:18

Gospel of Matthew. Now, you're talking about, well, what about was there a

01:25:24

Hebrew Matthew or was there the Gospel of Matthew that we possess today was known by pretty much every single early writer that we have outside the

01:25:37

New Testament. So it is ancient. It is first century. I agree.

01:25:44

OK, so it is first century. Yeah, sure. So I think I've said that a few times. OK, so why do you put it toward the end of the first century?

01:25:52

So I'm not a scholar. I'm happy to go with the consensus of critical scholars.

01:25:59

But if you want to say it's year 50, fine. Like for the purposes of conversation, that doesn't bother me at all.

01:26:04

Sure. I will put it wherever you want. It doesn't matter for the purpose of this, probably.

01:26:11

But what the point I was making there was that the attestation of authorship, since the book itself doesn't say who the author is, the the attestation of its authorship is second century and like latter half of second century.

01:26:23

If you don't include papias, which I'm not sure why you should. Well, the fourfold gospel is is known from from the earliest sources that we have.

01:26:33

So that's not really an issue. And in fact, it's fascinating to me. There's a there's clear evidence of the circulation of the heart of the gospel stories before the writing of the gospels, and it's found in Paul.

01:26:53

A lot of people aren't aren't aware of this, but when Paul writes to the Corinthians and he's answering various questions to the

01:27:03

Corinthians and so we the Pauline literature, we can date really, really well in the 50s.

01:27:11

When he's answering various questions, he says at one point. I, the

01:27:19

Lord says, and then he gives a part of Jesus's teaching on the nature of marriage. And then the next question

01:27:27

Jesus didn't address in our gospels. And so Paul says,

01:27:33

I, not the Lord, say this. Paul knew what the extent of Jesus's teaching on the subject of marriage was as reflected in his answers that he gives to the

01:27:46

Corinthians in the 50s, in the in the early 50s, probably around 51, 52.

01:27:52

So that body of of teaching is already out there.

01:27:58

It's already being it is so clearly known even before it's codification by Matthew and Luke and Mark and John, I guess, and then sort of in some instances that he can make reference to it in his writing to the

01:28:18

Corinthians and expect them to know what his reference was. So that that says to me, we are talking again about very, very early materials.

01:28:32

And that's why it's the best explanation I've ever heard for Luke Axe is that this was, in essence, an amicus brief.

01:28:43

It was Luke's recording of the origin of the Christian movement and then the spread of the

01:28:49

Christian church. So that's Luke and then Axe for Paul's trial in Rome, which is normally dated somewhere around.

01:28:59

Well, it's before Nero, so before Nero fritzes out, let's put it that way.

01:29:07

So you're talking before the the end of the 60s, the end of the 50s, early, early 60s.

01:29:15

Um, if if that's the case, then we have multiple lines.

01:29:23

Matthew's writing for a different group. That's a big if, though, what that it was an amicus brief for his trial.

01:29:31

I mean, I'm not sure how you're you're getting to that particular conclusion. As I said, it's best best explanation

01:29:37

I've ever seen as to why it ends where it ends. Do you know where it ends? Why don't you tell the tell me in the audience?

01:29:42

I know, but let's make sure, you know. It would completely explain why, even though Paul had expressed in his epistles a desire to go, for example, to the to the

01:29:57

West, why it breaks off with Paul still in custody. And the outcome of the accusations is not is not known.

01:30:10

You that that has led to all sorts of speculation about a second imprisonment and a and a release and all the rest of this kind of stuff that we simply don't know.

01:30:22

But it would make sense if that was the function of Luke Axe. And what that would do is that would put

01:30:30

Luke Axe in a completely different context than Matthew. Matthew's writing to different people for a different purpose.

01:30:37

And in fact, Matthew's writing to a Jewish audience. And it would make a lot of sense for him to have written all these things for a

01:30:46

Jewish audience and for distribution amongst a Jewish audience before the destruction of the temple, because that's where you have the instructions, which, interestingly enough,

01:30:55

Christians followed. That when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, flee to the mountains.

01:31:01

And Christians did. And that's why there is very little Christian loss of life in the mountains in 87.

01:31:09

Case of an invading army. Isn't that crazy? But I wouldn't need a special direction to do that.

01:31:15

I'm sorry. What did the Jews do? So the

01:31:21

Jews thought it was the apocalypse. And so they went out and fought and died. Not very well advised.

01:31:27

OK, so I don't they didn't follow Jesus's advice, did they? If you look at insurgencies around the world,

01:31:33

I mean, mountains are a great place to go in case of war. But neither here nor there. This was in the context of trying to establish that these were eyewitness accounts.

01:31:41

And I was talking about... I've missed something. What was the whole point about the

01:31:46

New Testament that we were supposed to start at 90 minutes ago that I've sort of missed what it was?

01:31:54

Is it that you don't believe that the disciples were illiterate?

01:32:00

Is it just the Gospels? I'm sort of not sure what it is.

01:32:06

I don't think that the resurrection of Jesus is a well -established historical fact. I don't think the

01:32:12

Gospels themselves are sufficient to establish that as historical fact. I don't think that the supernatural elements of the

01:32:20

Gospels are good history or that we could know it historically, if that makes sense. So the epistles don't mean anything to you, even though they're actually probably earlier than...

01:32:35

The epistles I agree were written earlier. I don't think that the supernatural events described by the

01:32:43

Bible, and specifically for this conversation, the New Testament, are well -established history or can be established historical from the sources we have.

01:32:52

Right. And I would completely agree with you, because if you are defining the sources of information as being solely naturalistic history that cannot speak to any type of existence in the supernatural, that's a major duh.

01:33:12

But that takes us back to the presuppositions that I keep pointing to, and that is, given your worldview,

01:33:22

I'm not even sure why you care. I don't know if you're a

01:33:28

Trekkie or not, but there was one particular episode of The Next Generation I thought was great, because there was this little teeny tiny life form that described humans as ugly bags of mostly water.

01:33:42

Yep, good episode. It was a great episode. And so if that's the case,

01:33:50

I'm not sure why we're even having this conversation, because if we are nothing but ugly bags of mostly water, none of this has any purpose when it's all over with.

01:34:03

And so I'm not even sure why you would care whether I believe this or not. I know why I care whether you believe it or not, but I don't know why an ugly bag of mostly water, and maybe some bags of mostly water look better than others, would even invest the kind of time you do in your webcast.

01:34:23

What is accomplished by that? Well, a few things. First of all, I have to do something to fill the time before I embrace the void.

01:34:30

But secondly, I value truth. I think that... Why? I prefer to know true things and not false things.

01:34:39

I prefer to hold... Yes, I prefer. I would prefer to hold true beliefs and not false beliefs.

01:34:44

I think that's valuable. It brings value to me. And so that's something that I care about, and so it's something

01:34:50

I pursue. And if I'm wrong, I would like to know, particularly about this question, because it has tremendous import if I am wrong.

01:34:58

So yeah, I try to engage with things as honestly as I can and come to the best conclusion I can with the evidence

01:35:03

I have. You keep assuming it. Let me just be real clear here.

01:35:13

Everything you just said, you use terms like value, you choose you would rather know truth than falsehood.

01:35:22

So you're assuming that there is truth and falsehood that can be known. There's objective reality that as an ugly bag of mostly water, you can actually know truth in comparison to other ugly bags of mostly water who do not have the right to their own truth, which these days is really a dangerous position to take, by the way, because we're living in a post -truth society where my truth is the truth, and you can't question that.

01:35:50

The whole pronoun thing had something to do with that. But truth is that which comports with reality, is what I mean when I say truth.

01:35:56

As you as an ugly bag of mostly water know reality?

01:36:01

As adjudicated by predictive power is usually a good way to get through it. And again, the foundations, maybe you're not aware of it or whatever, but the foundations of everything you're saying, you keep borrowing from the

01:36:19

Christian worldview to prop these things up. I'm not sure if you're aware of that, but I can't help remember, because you look a little bit like him, except he had...

01:36:33

I met this guy named Eric. I was speaking at a college in Chicago.

01:36:40

And you look like you're 20s somewhere. Oh, thank you. I'm 37.

01:36:46

I appreciate that. Okay, good. All right. So you were about 16 or 15 when this happened.

01:36:54

I was speaking at a college, and I did not know that they had done this to me.

01:37:02

It was December in Chicago. So it was, well, sort of like it is right now, really, really cold.

01:37:10

And they had put out a flyer that said, how did they put it?

01:37:17

Stump, they called it Stump the Chump. Do you like to argue? Free pizza. Now, on a college campus, all you had to do is put free pizza on it, and everything else was pretty much over with at that point.

01:37:29

This guy came walking in, and sadly, I can't remember, he either had red hair and was dressed in all blue, or he had blue hair and was dressed in all red.

01:37:41

I can't remember which one of the two it was now. His name was Eric, and he was a sophomore philosophy student.

01:37:50

And obviously, he immediately started, we started going back and forth, and people listened, but they wanted pizza.

01:37:57

They really, really didn't care much about epistemology. So after we broke up, he and I kept talking.

01:38:05

And I just talked to him for a long time, listened to him. And eventually, he made the statement, and it was similar to what you just said.

01:38:12

He made the statement. He said, well, I know I should do better. And you had said,

01:38:18

I want to know truth, and I gain value from that. And here's what

01:38:23

I said to Eric, and it's basically what I would say to you as well. And that is, you're a thief.

01:38:33

You're stealing from God's world to hold yours together. Now, I forgot to tell you a part of the story that's important.

01:38:41

He did have a jacket with him. It was a real nice leather jacket, which in Chicago in December is probably a good thing to have.

01:38:50

And at one point, he had said, I'm not even sure my jacket exists.

01:38:59

And I said to him, look, you're borrowing from my worldview to hold yours together.

01:39:04

And I'll show you exactly how that works. When you walk out of this room, you're going to take your jacket with you, because it's freezing cold out there.

01:39:14

And when you walk out, you're not going to walk down the middle of the road, because you know the laws of physics.

01:39:20

And you know that if you run into a car or a car runs into you, you're going to die. So you're going to walk on the sidewalk. And if you get into a vehicle, you're going to drive on the right -hand side, not the left -hand side, because you know that there are certain non -negotiable things that you have to live with in this world, even though you say you can't necessarily explain why they are that way.

01:39:43

And I said, my prayer for you is that every time you borrow from my

01:39:48

God's world to hold yours together, he's going to convict you of the fact that you're stealing from him.

01:39:54

And he looked at me. Now, remember, he's a sophomore philosophy student. And he said, no one's ever talked to me like that.

01:40:02

And my response was, I'm sorry. We should have gotten to it earlier. Now, I don't know what happened with Eric, but I've thought of him a lot over the years.

01:40:12

I can guarantee you by now, he probably does not wear all red or blue clothes. And his hair is probably not all red or blue either.

01:40:20

That tends to pass with time. But the point is that when

01:40:26

I hear you and I applaud you, I want to know truth. There is no way you can explain that from your worldview, from where mankind comes from.

01:40:39

Why should you care about truth? What you should care about is getting as much of your genotype into the next generation as possible, because that's the only way you're going to have any kind of lasting impact on the future if you even care about that.

01:40:57

Why not just... Sorry to take care of that. Okay, there you go.

01:41:03

I mean, we can talk presuppositionalism if you want, if we're done talking New Testament. I mean...

01:41:10

It's all part of the same thing. So I've heard the whole you're stealing from our worldview thing.

01:41:19

I don't find any of that compelling. I don't see why I need to subscribe to your worldview in order to... I do agree that I have to have certain baseline assumptions or certain...

01:41:28

Eventually you're going to get to some kind of axiomatic belief somewhere, right? You dig far enough. And so I reject hard solipsism, just...

01:41:38

I can't prove that it's not true, but I've got no real reason to believe it is. And for anyone who in the audience may not know, solipsism is the idea that I can't know that I'm not a brain in a vat or whatever.

01:41:49

That's the sort of thing. And so I agree, I can't know that, but I just go on with life as if I weren't.

01:41:55

And assuming that the reality that I experience is in some sense real, everything else seems to follow from there.

01:42:02

So I'm not sure why I'm stealing from anyone's worldview to just deal with reality as I encounter it. Okay. So you said you've got four kids.

01:42:12

Great. And I'm not going to ask what you all are doing on Sunday.

01:42:20

Well, no, we're celebrating Christmas on the 27th. They'll be with their mom, but... Oh, okay.

01:42:27

That... Celebrating Christmas. Okay, we won't get into that either. That's a little bit of a different subject.

01:42:33

But I am... You haven't laid out, but I can only assume what the entirety of your worldview has become or what your assertions are.

01:42:50

But your statements assume the ascribing of value that would transcend what a thoroughly secular worldview could provide you.

01:43:05

That's... And I'm not talking... I'm just simply talking fundamental, basic issues here.

01:43:11

You said that you value these things, that you want to be able to do these things.

01:43:17

And I just go, did that just simply happen? Is that just a random thing?

01:43:26

Do you know who Dan Barker is? Yes. Okay. When I debated him at the

01:43:32

University of Illinois, like 2004, something like that. Do you know what else...

01:43:38

Now, see, I've known Dan since the 1980s. And so we go way, way back.

01:43:45

And so I knew that he was a concert level pianist. So he even gave me one of his

01:43:53

CDs as a result. And he's very, very good. The one time

01:43:59

I said something to Dan during our debate that I think he actually stopped and listened to me was when

01:44:05

I said, Dan, given your worldview, will your music be beautiful the day after you die?

01:44:18

And so I would ask you, I don't know if you're a musician. Are you a musician?

01:44:24

Sadly, no. But an engineer, right? I'm an engineer.

01:44:30

Yes. Okay. Well, you know what? I'm very thankful for engineers. Every time that I...

01:44:37

I used to fly in 2019, I flew 165 ,000 miles around the world, doing all sorts of teaching all over the place.

01:44:44

And I was really thankful for good engineers. Well, I work for a bank now. So don't be too thankful.

01:44:51

Okay. Are you trying to ruin this? An engineer working for a bank?

01:44:57

You've sold your soul. Right?

01:45:03

Okay. The point being, I would assume there are some things you've done in your life that you are proud of what you have produced.

01:45:10

And you would actually think that there is value and beauty to it. And I just simply go, in a truly secular worldview, isn't that fictional?

01:45:26

Because once... Maybe you can answer, because Dan didn't answer me. Would his music be beautiful the day after he died?

01:45:38

So I would think that that's like a value statement, whether something is beautiful or not. Of course, I know philosophers argue over objective beauty or whatever.

01:45:45

But if beauty comes from the minds of agents, if it's a value that I'm putting onto it, then it would be exactly as beautiful as the people who still exist think it is.

01:45:58

I, not existing at that point, would no longer have an opinion in the matter. You know, you have four kids.

01:46:08

I have five grandkids. And one thing I can tell you for certain, when

01:46:15

I look... My daughter just had a little boy a few months ago.

01:46:21

Congratulations. So her older daughter's oldest is now 13.

01:46:28

So 13, 10, and 7. When I watch them caring for a young little ransom, that's his name,

01:46:37

I see beauty there that is not a value attribution of my mind that will cease functioning long before theirs in the natural course of events.

01:46:51

Anyways, I believe that when I look at them holding him,

01:46:57

I'm seeing the same beauty that I can see in paintings from the

01:47:03

Renaissance period. Of mothers and children and grandchildren.

01:47:09

Inscriptions going all the way back to the first, second, third centuries.

01:47:17

That has been beautiful and will always be beautiful. And that reality is where you interface with God's world.

01:47:31

And you can't avoid it. And I appreciate the fact that you want to know truth.

01:47:37

I simply suggest to you that that desire to know truth does not come from a long line of genetic mutations.

01:47:50

I really do. I mean, it seems like it probably does. Because if we weren't very interested in what was true, we probably wouldn't have survived very long.

01:47:57

If we just held terribly false beliefs left, right, and center, we'd probably get eaten by a lion somewhere along the way.

01:48:07

On basic things of survival, yeah. But I'm not talking about just basic things of survival.

01:48:16

And neither are you. Because you would not value and treat your children the way

01:48:23

I bet you do if it was just simply a matter of basic survival. Well, I'd separate my own moral and ethical framework from the evolutionary history that led to me.

01:48:38

You know, so I don't subscribe to social Darwinism or anything like that, of course.

01:48:46

But I just don't see anything that I do. Why not? Because I don't want to live in that world. It seems pretty awful.

01:48:53

Because you don't want to. Yeah, because I don't want to. Because I think that we are all better off by reducing harm and increasing well -being.

01:49:01

That's the world I want to live in. That's the world having empathy I would like for other people. So yeah, but again,

01:49:09

I don't see anything intrinsic in my worldview that I must steal from anyone else's. I'm just dealing with the universe

01:49:15

I see to the best of my ability. Again, ugly bags of mostly water don't have any basis for doing something to the best of their ability.

01:49:28

And this one does. There you go. But don't you see what you're doing?

01:49:34

You're literally saying, I'm going to act on the basis of what

01:49:40

I want. But when I look at evidence in regards to antiquity and events in antiquity that could influence the very value of my life and my future,

01:49:54

I'm going to use a different standard there. I'm going to hold them to naturalistic stuff.

01:50:00

But when I come to how I live, I want to do this. I want to see beauty there. I want to see value there.

01:50:06

And that's how I'm going to live. And I'm just simply suggesting to you that there's a massive chasm.

01:50:13

And just as I said to Eric, my hope for you is that you will see that that chasm can be filled and needs to be filled and should be filled in a consistent fashion.

01:50:29

And it's not some parsimonious naturalism that's going to do it because you're missing the big picture at that point.

01:50:37

So I'm talking like an old man now. And we're not doing what we were supposed to be doing with the

01:50:45

New Testament. Let me do this because I do have a bunch of comments here that we could rip through.

01:50:51

But here's the thing, Andrew. I rode my bike in.

01:50:57

And you got to ride your bike home. And I got to ride my bike home. And it's going to get colder and colder as time goes by.

01:51:07

And like I said, if you have to drop and we go a little bit longer with Jordan, that's fine.

01:51:14

But what I do have to get in, what I do have to get in for folks is our sponsor.

01:51:20

That's always good to do. Usually, we have folks that are asking for the sponsors.

01:51:27

But folks, the program is sponsored by MyPillow. So if you would like to get a good night's sleep, which

01:51:33

Dr. White's going to need after his bike ride home, to get a good

01:51:39

American -made MyPillow, just go to MyPillow .com. Use promo code SFE. That is how you'll get the discounts.

01:51:46

And they know that you heard about them from us. Also, Lagos Bible software.

01:51:54

So if folks are looking to upgrade or get Lagos for the first time, go to Lagos .com slash

01:52:01

SFE to get Lagos. And if we have the partnership with them that if you are getting

01:52:08

Lagos through that or upgrading, we offer five free books that they have.

01:52:14

So those are available there. So we do have a bunch of things.

01:52:21

I know you're going to need to get going, Dr. White. But let me see if I have some...

01:52:27

There were some specific questions for you that came in. Maybe not necessarily related to this. But someone asked,

01:52:33

Dr. White, I would like to know if there is, besides the Forgotten Trinity, any of your other books available to purchase in Spanish?

01:52:46

Yeah, you know, I just... The Spanish version just came out not too long ago.

01:52:53

I am not a thousand percent sure on that. I know that the

01:52:59

Roman Catholic controversy might be available in Spanish. I know it's available in Polish. But, you know, those books are owned by Bethany House slash

01:53:11

Baker. And so a lot of it's just dependent upon whether someone comes along and volunteers to do the translation.

01:53:17

So I should have better knowledge of exactly what all my books are available in linguistically, but I honestly don't know.

01:53:26

Okay, so let me throw this out. If someone is interested in volunteering to translate those, is there someone they could get a hold of that you know of?

01:53:34

Just call Rich. Honestly, it's amazing how many people have volunteered to do that. And never do it.

01:53:39

And never follow through with it. Or when they did, the people that they needed to contact were the people at Bethany House.

01:53:46

That's why I do have Russian... Like, I have a Russian translation of the... Whatever Christian needs to know about the

01:53:53

Quran and stuff like that. But that's because people just went ahead and did the work.

01:53:58

Because it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It really is. Yeah. Okay, so...

01:54:06

All right, this one I just had to throw up. It said, you brought a gun. Dr. White to a sword fight,

01:54:13

Andrew. And I think I see behind Dr. White a sword. I'm the one with the gun.

01:54:19

He's the one with the sword. This is a Scottish claymore. I'm Scottish. And I'll be interested if anyone recognizes this one.

01:54:30

That's a real... Well, it's... It looks like a gladius, but I can't see it too close.

01:54:38

You're really, really... That is the sword from Gladiator. Where Maximus...

01:54:44

So the cavalry. In the cavalry charge at the beginning. And he leaves it...

01:54:50

He chops a guy's head off and leaves it in the tree. One of the greatest movies ever made.

01:54:57

I'm glad that we can agree together on that reality. Because I'm not a big movie guy.

01:55:06

But I saw Star Wars original in 1977 11 times in the theater.

01:55:14

I couldn't even drive yet. My sister had to drive me to see it. That's how long ago that was. And then the next movie

01:55:20

I saw multiple, multiple times was Gladiator seven times in the theater. And I tied that this year.

01:55:29

Guess what movie I saw seven years... Seven times in the movie theater this year. I really hope you're gonna say

01:55:34

Elf. I'll bet you Jordan could get this one.

01:55:40

You know, I honestly have no idea. Really? Really? I'm gonna say Top Gun.

01:55:46

Top Gun Maverick. Top Gun Maverick. I should have known that. Top Gun Maverick. Yes, yes. That was worth seeing seven times in the theater.

01:55:55

It really, really was. Partly just because I'm about the same age as that guy. And if he can keep doing that kind of stuff,

01:56:02

I guess I can keep peddling my bike. And try to make it to whatever the next goal

01:56:09

I have is without dying on that thing. I have ridden over 156 ,000 miles on a bike.

01:56:16

And I do not include tonight because mine is a battery -assisted bike.

01:56:21

So those miles don't count. I've done 156 ,000 by plain old myself.

01:56:27

Yeah, well, in another month, I'll be... I'm not a biker. I'm a runner. I run about a half marathon a day.

01:56:34

Wow. Yeah, yeah. I can't run anymore. Yeah, well, I still can. So, but I will be...

01:56:40

My dad got one of the assisted bikes. Yeah. But he still has his old bike.

01:56:45

So I'll be down by him. And we're going to go for a ride. Now, he usually goes at least 25 to 40 miles a day.

01:56:55

And so with the assisted bike, and I'm going to take the non -assisted bike. Having not been a bike rider,

01:57:04

I did tell my daughter, I need my bike back. My kids borrowed my bike.

01:57:09

And I'm like, I need this back because I need to start practicing biking just for this.

01:57:17

I swore off running after the army. I'll never do it again. So good for you. Yeah, I can understand that.

01:57:24

I can understand that. So I'm trying to look for any quick ones that are directed toward you, James. But Daniel said at one point,

01:57:31

I think James and Andrew hit on the point, there's almost nothing that will convince someone of something supernatural because there is an unending number of natural possibilities.

01:57:47

And I think that's one of the things that... I really think, Jordan, the big thing is that I was trying to show is that you have a...

01:58:00

And I think James tried to bring this out a number of times. When we're talking the supernatural, you're trying to apply a natural explanation.

01:58:13

Logically, it's a category error. We can never... You're looking for a way to prove the supernatural from the natural.

01:58:22

It's just the wrong category. I can only operate with the evidence

01:58:29

I have. And I don't have any good evidence that the supernatural exists. I don't know if you think that's a category error.

01:58:38

Okay. But I have to be convinced that this is true. I mean, you're convinced for some reason,

01:58:44

I'm sure. I don't have access to your reasons. But if I... I don't know how to say it other than I have to be convinced with evidence.

01:58:56

What else should I do? Well, Jordan, I hope you don't mind. I will pray for you.

01:59:02

And I'll be honest with you. I pray that... And this is gonna...

01:59:10

Evidence, all that stuff is wonderful and grand. And we've talked a lot about it. But the fact of the matter is you have to have a context in which to interpret evidence.

01:59:21

And I'm just hoping and praying that as you look at your children, as you see the beauty of a sunset, that there'll be grace and mercy extended to you.

01:59:34

And that maybe there'll be an opportunity for future conversations to clear up maybe some of the other issues that would stand in the way.

01:59:42

But I appreciate the conversation. I hope that none of any of the sharp conversation was offensive in an unnecessary fashion.

01:59:55

And I appreciate the time we spent. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

02:00:00

Okay, thanks. Andrew, I leave you in Andrew's good hands.

02:00:06

But I gotta jet. You gotta jet. Well, hey, let me give you one last question from Dr. Ed Romine.

02:00:15

Not just Ed anymore. He's now a doctor. Yes, I know. He's Dr. Spurgeon.

02:00:20

Yeah, he is. I'm still plugging my way through his dissertation. But he's asking, are you still coming to Utah in April?

02:00:29

Wanna do Chili's? Jeff Durbin and I are debating two agnostic ethicists on whether morality is possible without God on April 1st at the

02:00:39

University of Utah. So unless there is a massive, and there could be, a snowstorm.

02:00:48

Because I got hit with a blizzard in April in Utah last year. Yes, I will be there,

02:00:56

Lord willing. And so we'll see him. We'll see him then. We'll try to do

02:01:01

Chili's. And I can try to disabuse him of his love of Thomas while we're at it.

02:01:09

There you go. Well, thanks for coming on. Thank both of you guys. I appreciate it. You know, the thing we got,

02:01:18

I marked about like 30 questions and comments to try to get through that we had throughout.

02:01:26

But I do wanna just thank each of you for coming in. I think it was a good, lively discussion.

02:01:31

I hope that, Jordan, we will be praying for you. You know, I know you disagree with the worldview we hold to.

02:01:40

But I can tell you that there's a, you know, and I think you understand where this is coming from, as was already expressed by James to you, is, you know, we care about your soul.

02:01:52

We care where you spend eternity. And, you know, we, you know, I said this the last time you were on the show, you know, having discussions, debates, you know, having the disagreements, all that is meaningless to where you're gonna spend eternity.

02:02:08

And I'll end my conversation with you the same way I did last time, is pleading with you to repent.

02:02:15

You know the gospel message. You've heard it. But to plead with you to repent and come to Christ.

02:02:25

So any last comments you wanna make, Jordan? I would love to not die.

02:02:32

I super don't wanna cease existing. So it'd be awesome if I could be convinced that that's not gonna happen.

02:02:39

Yeah, and if anybody's interested in more skepticism, you can come check out my channel. I'm happy to stay and answer more questions or we can end, whatever.

02:02:45

But again, I appreciate your time. Yeah, why don't we stick around? As you guys continue on, I need to go.

02:02:52

Thanks for coming in, James. All right. God bless, guys. We'll see you later. All right.

02:02:58

So let's see if we could tackle some of these. A lot of them were geared toward you. So let's see.

02:03:06

Someone is saying the name of your... This was early on. Name of the guest and the title of his cast.

02:03:11

So I threw that up so you get another chance to promote it. Yeah, so my name is

02:03:16

Jordan. And I run the Reason to Doubt podcast on YouTube primarily. If you search for Reason to Doubt, like just the words, and you find a hip -hop channel, that's not us.

02:03:28

Keep going. And we publish every Thursday. That's really funny because my other podcast that I do is

02:03:35

The Rap Report. And it's rap with two Ps. The very first episode,

02:03:42

I got an email. This has nothing to do with rap music. So I renamed it

02:03:48

Andrew Rap Report's Rap Report so people get it. Okay. So this very first comment that came in was from, well, you.

02:03:55

You were like, LOL, Dr. James White and quote, an atheist unquote.

02:04:00

I guess I don't rate a name and title yet. It was not offensive.

02:04:06

It was, I don't know your last name. I didn't have it in there. And my audience wouldn't have recognized your name.

02:04:16

And so that's why I did that. So let's see.

02:04:24

All right, so Stephen had said this. And now I'm just going to try and get these in order.

02:04:32

But a big problem I see is that the atheist seems to be deciding the criteria for what is acceptable evidence, real evidence for the resurrection doesn't work like that.

02:04:46

He continually said the evidence doesn't show this or that, but what is the evidence he is looking at?

02:04:55

So what evidence are you looking for? That's a good question. So when I say evidence, I mean some observation or argument or something that makes one hypothesis or one explanation more likely relative to all others.

02:05:10

And that includes their prior probability. And so when I'm talking about the resurrection,

02:05:15

I'm including the prior probability of supernatural events and those sort of things. And then the evidence I'm looking at for this specific conversation is the historical record in the

02:05:23

New Testament and its attestation, the contextual knowledge of history, that sort of thing.

02:05:30

Okay, just to get both sides represented, here is atheism actually. Said technically those pronouns should be his majesty, his majesty, his majesty, or majesties, not your majesty.

02:05:46

So, you know, he's saying pronouns are not in third person. Yeah, and plus you usually do like the one and then like the possessive, like the plural.

02:05:56

Yeah, but I can make my pronoun anything I want it to be. It's my pronoun. But they, them for individuals is plural.

02:06:05

So that kind of throws that out. It's perfectly normal to refer to individuals with they, them, even outside of the whole pronoun conversation.

02:06:15

Let's see, this is someone, an old time, we haven't seen metal minister in a long time.

02:06:20

He was actually speaking to Theology Zone, so I don't remember that. But he said, to be fair, we believe that Mark, Luke, and John are all using

02:06:29

Matthew as a blueprint for their own works. Now, I'm just going to, now this was kind of interesting, metal minister, and I'm trying to remember,

02:06:41

I don't think he's, you know, I'm trying to remember who he is. But most of the, at least the liberal scholars say that Mark is the blueprint.

02:06:53

I don't actually think there is a blueprint. I think that they're all eyewitness testimony, and so they're recording what they've seen.

02:07:01

I do believe Matthew was written first. I think that that would be more fitting with the fact that he was writing to a

02:07:08

Jewish audience, so that would have been written probably earlier. Mithian priority is not unheard of in scholarly circles.

02:07:18

Markian priority is certainly the most popular view by far, but there is a minority that argues for Mithian priority.

02:07:25

Let's see, Jamie Hall just said, okay, yeah, this one you probably won't answer, I'll answer. Jamie said, why did the

02:07:31

Jews take Isaiah out of the Old Testament? They didn't. What I think,

02:07:37

Jamie, you might be referring to is many people, and this is so in synagogue, today, if you go to synagogue, there's a, every

02:07:49

Sabbath, you'll have a Torah reading and a Haftarah reading, okay?

02:07:54

So you go through the entire five books of Moses once a year, and then everything after those five books, you go through.

02:08:03

So in that, you're going through large sections, you're skipping sections, and what is often skipped is

02:08:09

Isaiah 53. That is not in the regular monthly, weekly readings.

02:08:15

And so it's not that Isaiah was taken out of the Bible, I'm assuming what you're referring to is that Isaiah 53 is not in the synagogue readings.

02:08:25

But in every Masoretic text that I have, Isaiah is there, including

02:08:30

Isaiah 53. All right, this one was just from Facebook user. This was from a quote that you made,

02:08:39

Jordan. Humans doing things that humans do. Please define, simply like you're just using this as a backdoor escape dealing with the implications of your position.

02:08:51

So by that, I meant humans are mistaken, humans lie, humans are genuinely incorrect, and so when

02:09:00

I say humans doing the things that humans do, when I'm looking at any kind of observation, those are possibilities

02:09:06

I have to consider as explanations, right? And so, and that's not true of just the

02:09:11

New Testament, that's any kind of claim that's being made. You'd have to eliminate the most probable things before the less probable things are left, if that makes sense.

02:09:24

You know, okay, but one of the things that I tried pointing out,

02:09:29

I know you're going to disagree with me, is I don't think you're using the same standard for Julius Caesar as you are the

02:09:36

New Testament. I, so, I think the prior probability piece is what's important here.

02:09:43

The prior probability for the claims, and prior probability just means like the probability before we looked at any evidence, just how on the face of it likely a claim is.

02:09:51

So for example, the prior probability that you had breakfast this morning is quite high because that's something people do. So the prior probability of non -supernatural claims that are very typical of history about Caesar are, that's higher than the prior probability that somebody got risen from the dead or that there's a miracle.

02:10:12

I mean, surely... But see, here's the thing. You were saying that the

02:10:19

New Testament, you're rejecting the reliability in the New Testament that you're, you know, with things that are, even with things not supernatural.

02:10:29

So you're, you're, so I think the super, the, the gospels do transmit some reliable history.

02:10:35

I think you can get like a lot of facts about Jesus' life from them with some scrutiny. I mean, you just have to examine them as historical documents written in history, if that makes sense.

02:10:46

So I, I don't necessarily think that they record word for word, but I certainly think you can learn things like the manner of Jesus' death, the likely reason why he was killed, being accused of calling himself the

02:10:59

King of the Jews, that he made a disturbance at the temple. You know, I think you can get a lot of good historical facts from the gospels.

02:11:07

Okay. I might disagree with some of it, but I'm, I also want to try to end in next 20 minutes if we can.

02:11:17

So let me see. Okay, so here was a, and this is someone more from your side,

02:11:22

I don't recognize the name, but you'll, you'll have to provide evidence, he was referring to me, just you're off to a bad start when you're claiming

02:11:34

Greece didn't exist when it did. If I said it didn't exist, then

02:11:41

I would have been wrong. I think what I said is it didn't exist as a major empire or world power at that time, which it was not.

02:11:50

And neither was Rome, which was also mentioned. They, they did exist, and I think

02:11:56

I even said that, that they existed, but they were very small and not a political player. And how you would explain

02:12:03

Daniel knowing that Greece, Greece itself as named, would end up having one leader that at his death would split to four, that's, that's pretty specific to name the country by name and name exactly what's going to happen with the kingdom after, you know, and he names four kingdoms.

02:12:27

Now granted Babylon, that's a given, he's living in that time. He mentions

02:12:33

Medo -Persians without, well, he doesn't mention them by name, but mentions two nations that come together, some specifics there, mentions

02:12:41

Greece and Rome by name, mentions exactly how things are going to happen with them. There's a lot of detail there that, you know,

02:12:50

I, you know, I guess, Jordan, you're going to say that it was either written much later after the events happened or written in, and I'm going to say that the burden of proof then is on you to, to prove that either of those cases are true.

02:13:07

The whole, the whole thing is, and this is really what I think sums up the whole discussion tonight, is your presupposition that, and I know you're saying you're open to supernatural, but I think you clearly displayed you're really not, because anything that would question that, you look for a way, you, it's a logical fallacy called confirmation bias.

02:13:33

You look for a way to explain away any evidence that disagrees with the, your starting point, really.

02:13:41

So I don't think that's an example of confirmation bias. What I'm doing is I'm going with what is the most parsimonious, plausible explanation.

02:13:48

And so you, we all agree the natural world exists. You know, you and I both agree we live in some kind of world that most of the time is governed by laws of physics, et cetera, et cetera.

02:13:57

And you want to add a supernatural layer on top of that. That is the thing I need evidence for.

02:14:02

And so it's not, I'm, I'm open to the supernatural, but if there is any evidence and you have a supernatural explanation and a natural explanation and say the evidence for the two are equal,

02:14:14

I'm going to go with a natural explanation because it's natural, because it doesn't require me to add a supernatural layer to reality.

02:14:19

That's right. And so, so that is, that's always going to lead you to explaining away the supernatural every time.

02:14:25

Then that's a problem with the supernatural as a model? No. If no, because you don't want to duplicate entities beyond necessity.

02:14:31

You want the most parsimonious, simplest explanation. If I can explain things without a supernatural, that is going to be simpler.

02:14:36

So the simplest explanation is the supernatural because the, the books were written.

02:14:43

They've, there's nothing that to attest, nothing that was tested that Daniel was written later until the last couple hundred years.

02:14:54

No one made the claim. Everybody accepted Daniel's writing at the time that he's writing before those events.

02:15:03

So the burden of proof is on you to say that the supernatural is not the most, the simplest explanation.

02:15:10

So you're ignoring the prior probability of the supernatural and you can't just ignore that. You're just smuggling in the supernatural as if it were established.

02:15:18

And that's just not the case, at least not for me. Well, see, and that's the whole thing. You're, you're, you're asking, so that, this is the whole thing.

02:15:24

You're saying you want to prove the supernatural. But every time that you see the proof, what you're doing is saying, well, we have to reject that because we have to, we, we can't start with accepting supernatural.

02:15:34

But that's the thing you're looking to prove. No. So, okay. Imagine that I said

02:15:40

I hit every green light on the way to work and it can either be because I got lucky and just happened to have good timing or a shadow government is really monitoring my, my movements and changed every green light on the way.

02:15:52

Both of them explain the evidence, but one of them is what is more parsimonious. I don't have to conjecture a shadow government for one model.

02:15:59

I'm not saying that the supernatural is as ridiculous as a shadow government. All I'm saying is that you are asking me to add another piece that is not necessary to explain any evidence and you don't get that for free.

02:16:10

Yeah. But here's the thing. That's the piece you're saying you want proof for. Right. In order to posit this new thing, you need to have evidence that we should bring in this new thing and not just explain it with the things we already have.

02:16:24

What you're doing is when evidence is presented, you're explaining it away with a naturalistic solution.

02:16:31

That is confirmation bias. No, it's not. No, it's not. That's using that if we have, it's like if I have a general relativity is a good model.

02:16:41

And if something works and it's explicable by general relativity, I don't invoke Pixies because general relativity explains it.

02:16:48

I don't need to invoke Pixies, right? That is something we'd both agree would be ridiculous. By the same time, it's not because I'm biased against Pixies.

02:16:54

It's because we already have a natural explanation that explains this, and I don't need to invoke them. Likewise, if I have a natural explanation for a thing, then

02:17:02

I have no cause to go add on a supernatural to it. Okay. So you'll never be able to prove what you say you're open to because every time you're going to come to, you're going to look for a way to find a natural answer.

02:17:18

If there were unambiguous evidence of a supernatural, I'd accept it. That's what I need. If there isn't unambiguous evidence for a supernatural, then,

02:17:28

I mean, even if a supernatural is true, but there's no evidence for it, then

02:17:33

I would be irrational to believe in it. Well, the reality is what you're,

02:17:42

I mean, and I know you don't think you're doing it, but you are. You're, you are taking, every time we're giving you something, if you have a document that names by name, gives specifics, years, hundreds of years before the events, there is no natural explanation for that.

02:18:04

That's an assumption. You are asserting that it happened hundreds of years before the events. That is something that you...

02:18:09

No, no, no. That's a history. See, you're, you're, see, this is the whole thing. You're denying the historical events.

02:18:17

You're saying, oh, well, that was written much later or it was added in. You're finding a way to explain it.

02:18:23

But the reality is that the history has to be denied for your argument.

02:18:32

No, I'm, all I'm saying is that up with the evidence we have, it is more plausible that it was written after the fact than that there was a divine supernatural entity that involved it.

02:18:41

It's more plausible if you deny supernatural. Which is the thing that you're trying to demonstrate to me.

02:18:47

Correct. So like, if you want me to add a new entity, you have to purchase that entity with evidence.

02:18:53

That's how you, that's how you make, that's how observations work. You can't reject the evidence and say, well, that's just not history.

02:19:00

You can't say it was written later. That, that is, that is breaking the rules to, to be,

02:19:07

I mean, that is what confirmation bias is. No, it is a more plausible alternative explanation for the evidence that we have that does not require the layer you're trying to purchase.

02:19:17

And what makes it more plausible is that you deny the supernatural. Because, so you are positing an additional entity.

02:19:25

We have the natural, you want to add the supernatural. When you want to add something, you are positing a new thing that new, you necessarily reduce your prior probability.

02:19:35

That is how Bayesian probabilities work. You, you are doing it. When you add a new assumption, you're doing it.

02:19:41

So the assumption has to pay for itself with evidence. Okay. Do you believe that we are just a bag of chemical reactions?

02:19:48

Yes. Okay, so there's, there's no immaterial part of us, right? I don't think so, no.

02:19:54

Okay. And yet you believe that people can be born biologically male and identify as female, correct?

02:20:03

I believe that gender identity is not necessarily mapped on to biological phenotypes.

02:20:09

Yes. So biologically, someone could be male, but they could identify as female. Biologically, someone could have markers that you would typically identify as male, but that not be their gender identity.

02:20:21

Yes. Yeah. So in other words, they're appealing to something other than biology, other than the chemical reactions.

02:20:27

No, they're appealing to a different part. They're appealing to not just like whether or not they have gen, the genitalia that's the right shape, but there's...

02:20:35

I wasn't talking genitalia. I was talking DNA. Sure. They have XY chromosomes, but they...

02:20:41

I mean, we can look at bone structure. We can look at a lot of things that define... Dan went over this before. I'm not going to do better than Dan did.

02:20:47

So just, if you want to see why biology isn't that simple, go talk to Dan. But basically it's not as simple as has this gene therefore is male or, and therefore it maps perfectly on the gender identity.

02:20:58

Okay. I'm not saying like I'm appealing to some supernatural whatever. I just don't think biology and human behavior is as simple as you're saying it is.

02:21:07

Okay. So I'll change gears since Ed is asking this question, but Ed said the question that he has for you is, do you love your children?

02:21:17

And if so, why and how? I love my children very much. Why? Well, that's a very deep question.

02:21:25

Part of it is evolutionary imperative. When I first met my first child right out the womb,

02:21:30

I was immediately like, I will jump in front of a train for you. Like person I just met. Why?

02:21:36

Because that's evolution, baby. And how? I mean, humans have emotions.

02:21:41

There's nothing mysterious about that. So we see plenty of people that don't jump in front of trains for their children.

02:21:49

Therefore, it's not evolution. So taking what you did with the New Testament, the most natural response is to say, no, it's not evolution.

02:21:59

Has nothing to do with evolution. No, evolution wouldn't predict that it would have the same impact in the same way for every member of a species.

02:22:06

And so like that, that's just not a prediction of evolutionary theory. There's going to be variation within a bag of chemicals.

02:22:13

We should have the chemical reaction. And yet humans are the only ones to act that way, really, in the animal kingdom.

02:22:21

That's just false. I mean, animals show maternal instincts and paternal instincts for their children and offspring all up and down the animal kingdom.

02:22:30

Like not all of them, but many, many do, particularly among social primates. Look how chimpanzees or bonobos, you want to talk to Gutsick Gibbon about that.

02:22:38

That is definitely not true. We can't ask them. We can't talk to them and see what their emotional state is.

02:22:45

That's right, because they're animals and we're not. And we're both animals, but they're acting in a way that would suggest that they have these same instincts.

02:22:53

Yes, but the difference is they don't have a consciousness. And we do. And that's a material part of us that you can't explain.

02:23:00

That is your assertion. So you can explain consciousness? No, your assertion is that it's immaterial.

02:23:07

I'm not persuaded that it necessarily is. It seems like the mind and brain are one thing. I don't know for sure.

02:23:15

I'm not going to solve the hard problem of consciousness here on this podcast. The most naturalistic explanation, though, is that there's an immaterial part of you.

02:23:23

That's not the most naturalistic explanation. There's no scientific proof of it. You can't prove that scientifically.

02:23:30

I mean, so... So in the DNA, we have a self -consciousness.

02:23:37

So the evidence we have is inconclusive. We don't know everything there is to know about consciousness, but it is at least suggestive.

02:23:46

Once you say that, okay, with your naturalistic explanation for the supernatural, you have to throw that out because you can't explain that naturally.

02:23:58

We don't have any way of explaining that naturally. So the more natural way is to say there's something immaterial.

02:24:04

That's nonsense. I know that's your argument. I agree with you. It is nonsense.

02:24:13

Your argument that you've made for two hours and applied it to something else, and you say it's nonsense. I believe that you think it's that.

02:24:22

I think an objective observer would say that you're not using my reasoning correctly.

02:24:28

I believe that you think you are. All right. Well, I hope that...

02:24:35

I mean, you're welcome to come back and we continue the discussion, but I think that your appeal to our worldview while denying our worldview displays a little of what the psalmist says when he says, the fool says in his heart there is no

02:24:54

God. Because you use your God -given ability to reason to deny the God that gave you that ability to reason.

02:25:01

Well, I would quote one of our founding fathers and say that I refuse to accept that the

02:25:07

God who endowed me with reason intended me to forgo its use. I am using the reason that you say God gave me to come to the best conclusion

02:25:14

I can with the evidence I have. If God doesn't like that conclusion, then I humbly submit he has it within his power to give me the evidence that would persuade me.

02:25:22

He knows what evidence that would be, and he has his power to give it to me. If he doesn't want to, that's his prerogative. But he knows what it would do it, right?

02:25:30

And he made it to you. That's the reality. Clearly he hasn't. He has not, because I'm not convinced.

02:25:35

No, no, he has. You just suppress that in unrighteousness. That's the difference. So that argument is so self -defeating, it's comical, because I am not convinced.

02:25:45

And you can believe I'm lying. You can believe that I'm - I didn't say you're lying. Okay. I said you're suppressing the truth.

02:25:51

It's very different. The only thing I can be certain of is the content of my own mind. And I'll point out that it is the one thing you don't have access to.

02:26:01

You are telling me that you know better what's in my brain than I do. No, no, no. It's nonsense. You know,

02:26:07

God knows better what's in your brain than you do, because he's all -knowing.

02:26:12

And he's the one that said, all I'm doing is quoting him. The reality, though, is you've proven it tonight that every time you've been given evidence, you suppressed it.

02:26:23

And you give him what's now for it. You haven't given me evidence in the sense that you have given me something that makes your explanation more likely relative to other explanations.

02:26:33

Not a single thing - Exactly, but why? Why? Because there are alternative natural explanations.

02:26:40

Because you're looking for the alternatives. That's the thing. And you want me not to? You're never going to find - Why should

02:26:45

I not do that? Why should I not? Because you're never going to find truth when you're going to sit there and say, let me find a way to explain away truth.

02:26:53

It's like saying, I come into a criminal scene, see a murder, and I'm going to go,

02:27:02

OK, well, I know that this had to been done by a woman.

02:27:07

And there's no evidence for it. I just decided. It's like I went into a crime scene, and you say,

02:27:13

I say, elves did it. And I'm like, why would elves do it? We have people. That's what the situation is.

02:27:19

Moreover, you want me to believe in your version of the supernatural. But there's Muslim versions. There's Hindu versions.

02:27:25

There's pagan versions. There's all kinds of versions of the supernatural, many of which are contradictory. You want me to apply a special level of evidence for you that I do not apply to everyone else.

02:27:36

Yeah, and so let's - I'll end with this. But Dan Cardinal said, what arguments are being made here doesn't apply to Joseph Smith and Mormonism.

02:27:47

There was a whole big discussion going back because of his comment here. But we can look at Mormonism, for example, and see why there's not evidence.

02:27:58

Why? You have zero archaeological evidence for any of the claims in the

02:28:03

Book of Mormon. There's not a single - there's nothing here in the Americas to support it. There's mathematically, and I've actually written a program to show this.

02:28:16

When you look at the death rate in the Book of Mormon, compared to the death - you have a birth and death rate that as we have more people, it continues exponentially to grow, both birth and death.

02:28:31

So at the time of the 1800s, death rates in war would be much higher than they were hundreds of years, thousands of years before them in the time that it was claimed for the

02:28:44

Book of Mormon. For the death rate that you'd have in the Book of Mormon, you have to have a birth rate that's about 15 times the normal birth rate.

02:28:54

Now that's something that's unusual. So you look at it - now you don't just reject it on one thing. You look at this and say there's no history for it.

02:29:02

There's no archaeology for it. Mathematically, it doesn't work. And yet Joseph Smith died for it.

02:29:10

Actually, no, he didn't. He died in violence. No, no. If you know about his death, even by the church's own history of the church, he was not a martyr.

02:29:23

He was in jail for criminal offense and someone smuggled a gun in and he was killed because he was trying to shoot.

02:29:32

He was in a gun battle. It wasn't that he died for what he believed in. He was just trying to get out of the situation.

02:29:39

Without his beliefs getting him in that sort of hot water, I would contend he probably wouldn't have been in that situation to begin with.

02:29:45

By any rational person, his beliefs led him to bad things, and yet he persisted.

02:29:51

Well, because he was getting power, money, women. He was getting something from that.

02:29:58

He didn't give those things up. Unlike the disciples that lost those things. I 100 % agree,

02:30:04

Andrew. Yes. And that's the difference with the disciples. They weren't gaining something from it.

02:30:10

So you concede then that there is a reason why someone would persist in something they know is false, that there could possibly be a reason for that.

02:30:17

I said that hours ago. Many Christians... Disciples. Because the disciples didn't have the power or the prestige, the money, the girl.

02:30:27

They didn't have any of that. They weren't getting any of that. So there's no benefit to the lie. That's the difference.

02:30:34

Now, I don't think they were lying. Many Christians assert that there is no possible explanation for martyrdom other than it being the truth.

02:30:41

I'm simply pointing out that clearly that is not a logical possibility. But I don't think they were lying, to be clear.

02:30:47

Joseph Smith wasn't a martyr. There's a difference there. He was shot in a gun battle, in a jailhouse.

02:30:59

And that's not a martyr. Okay. So there's a difference when you compare those.

02:31:07

But I did say I wanted to end it in half an hour. I'm going to try to keep to that. You're welcome.

02:31:12

Look, this show, I guess when we had, it was just you and James and no one else came in.

02:31:20

I guess you both were intimidating. And so, but look, you're always welcome.

02:31:26

And this show, it's an open show Thursday nights. Anyone can come and ask anything. So if you want to discuss more, you're welcome to come back.

02:31:34

And I do want to say before I end, because I wanted to say this. I want at least my audience to, well, even if maybe your audience as well, to understand that what

02:31:45

Jordan did is, he's coming in here, knowing he's talking to two people.

02:31:51

And I've tried to, I ended up trying to stay out of it more. But there's still parts where I jumped in, where this is something that's more difficult to do.

02:31:59

It's difficult. You can feel ganged up on. You could, that's something that can happen, right?

02:32:07

I try not to let that happen. But I want folks to know that when you're in, anytime someone's in that situation, you have to give a little bit of preference or deference to the person that's alone, that could feel ganged up.

02:32:24

So I want this to be a thing where, the reason I'm saying that is, I made the comment about, your comment about James's voice, and we'll measure it.

02:32:37

But the same point is - What was his tone? Well, you said, we'll check.

02:32:43

I think you said volume, but you know. What I am telling you, I was speaking about was his tone.

02:32:49

Okay. Well, the thing, so here's the thing that I'm trying to end with and point to, is folks need to be,

02:32:59

I'm trying to think the best word, but I'll just say the same words, give deference for Jordan's state, that the pressure he's in, in a situation where there's two people to one.

02:33:13

So we need to understand that when in that situation, people can act a little, can be more defensive.

02:33:22

And so I just, we want to be fair here and point that out as well. So let me just see real quick.

02:33:31

I just saw Dan put up a comment. Andrew, I was referring to the history of the origins of the

02:33:38

Mormon church. Okay. Yeah, I mean, as far as the history of the Mormon church, again, you know, here you have a known con man.

02:33:46

I mean, there's no one that doubts that. Even Mormons know that that's part of his history.

02:33:52

They just think he changed. You know, but I do want to thank you for coming in, Jordan. I hope it was helpful for folks.

02:34:01

You know, I hope that folks see the differences in the ways that we could discuss these things.

02:34:08

And I hope that everybody learned something. But the most important thing that I hope, Jordan, that you and some of those that are from your camp would learn is really to repent.

02:34:21

And I know you've heard it before. But to me, that's the most important thing for you is just to, you know, stop suppressing your faith.

02:34:30

And to repent and come to Christ. That's my prayer for you. All right.

02:34:36

And with that, folks, next week, if we do a show, we may not, but if we do a show next week, the plan is to be doing a show that will be just an open

02:34:46

Q &A on the 21st.

02:34:52

Sorry, on the 5th. I was looking at the wrong date. On January 5th, we will be doing a show on biblical prophecies.

02:35:01

So maybe Jordan's going to want to come back. Somebody who wants to challenge my testimony on the view of biblical prophecies.

02:35:11

On January 26th, we'll be joined by John Harris from Conversations That Matter talking about Tim Keller.

02:35:20

If you're familiar with him, and we're going to talk about some of his beliefs. So that is what's coming up in the next few shows.

02:35:28

And I just want to remind everyone to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.