No.1 Christianity Expert: The Truth About Christianity! The Case For Jesus (Historian's Proof)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/55db37f6bef0b3d6

Am I going to hell?
Yes.
But here's the thing, everybody is going to hell.
And it's not because they don't believe in God.
And look, I'm a historian and a theologian, so I study ancient biblical manuscripts, and if you truly understand what this book is saying, I don't want you to experience that. This is not a place I want to go. So what do I do about that?
It's not about trying to ear my way into heaven. It's not about checking off I read the Bible this many times. I didn't lie, I didn't steal, I didn't cheat. Like it's none of that. But here's the problem. Unfortunately, we bought the lie that we are the sum of our actions, where we're chasing after things that aren't going to give us what we actually need.
Which is also why we live in a world that is lacking in purpose and meaning. But the part that I've always struggled with is that the answer being religion as an antidote to that feeling. Because I require a really high standard of evidence because of the way that I am.
Well, I think not only can it provide an antidote, it can provide the antidote. And I'll explain why. But how can we trust human accounts of these things? And then how do you take people who agree that there's clearly something missing to believing that what's written in the Bible is the thing that should guide my life. But also Do you have any doubt?
Oh of course. Especially when there are times of struggle and pain and suffering. Like the whole Epstein thing right now. We are seeing examples of Trive.
So there are moments where I think, how could there be a good God?
However, from my investigation, I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that there is actual evidence for the existence of God, the historical reliability of the Bible, and the philosophical explanations for meaning and purpose. And what is that? First we have
That is some of the most persuasive evidence one can receive.
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Whisley.
I have this fascinating uh graph in front of me here.
Allez.
shows several things that I find to be really, really interesting. One of them is that as of twenty twenty four.
The decline
of religion has started to level off. And actually
increase a little bit. And now sixty three percent of US adults identify
As Christian.
Which is roughly.
A hundred and sixty million people. In twenty twenty five, Bible sales hit a twenty one year high.
in the United States with nineteen million units sold.
Weekly Bible reading amongst US adults has increased to forty-two percent, which is up twelve percent since twenty twenty four.
And in twenty twenty four, Christian and gospel music streams in the US increased by roughly
twenty percent, according to the Washington Times. Wesley, what is
Going on in society if we zoom out.
I think we're in a unique
Bob.
Where we found ourselves in
A time frame where
We're connected.
More than ever.
We've kind of come out of a period of time where
The new atheism is very, very popular.
You had
Dawkins, Daniel.
Uh Daniel Dennett.
Sam Harris.
Uh, Christopher Hitchens, and they made a big impact in the early two thousands. I think we should probably just give some color to what new atheism is. Sure, yeah.
Um I've actually got a graph here which I'll throw up on the screen which shows the rise and then the the fall of new atheism. Yeah. I was
Pulled in by new atheism.
And that meant that I and again, I should probably preface my beliefs because people are gonna want to know what my bias is when I'm asking questions. I grew up in a very Christian household up until the age of eighteen. I then became agnostic slash atheist when I start consuming a lot of this stuff from Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and all of these people. And then I find myself at a point now where I'm just open minded and curious.
But I have lots of questions. Yeah, you had these individuals who were writing these
very influential works. But I sometimes wonder whether the new atheism movement worked a lot more effectively in print than it did in actual real life. Like in terms of the practicality of
The application of the things that were being talked about.
Especially in regards to meaning.
If you apply ideas like you being a
product of time plus matter of its chance.
What does that actually give you in terms of the ultimate identity questions? And so I think I think that's
true in a lot of circumstances where you have these seeds that are planted.
And they grow.
And they produce
trees that produce fruit that are kind of hard to digest.
In their actual application. And along with that
We have a world that's
Very complex. We're more connected than we ever
have been I don't know if we're truly
We were ever truly meant to know as much information as we do, especially about
Things that are going.
on around the world.
And
Things that are hard.
To
To comprehend. And so what I think that all kind of adds up to is people asking.
questions about okay, I'm here.
I'm
Right now trying to figure out what's going on.
How do I
Actually
find out the answers these questions that just go beyond the here and the now.
that I'm experiencing. This is what um individuals like James K. Smith call the dynamics of disenchantment.
Where
People are struggling with these transcendent questions.
Questions that are metaphysical.
That go beyond just the here and the now in the world.
Why is the three pounds of grey matter
in my brain able to comprehend the complexities of the universe.
How do I how do I
Come up with a solution to that problem.
So I think that's part of it. I think it's kind of moving on in a world that just
Is probably more messy than it's ever been.
lot of countries the UK, Europe.
Canada.
America, all of these Western countries.
They
They were founded on these Judeo Christian
Ethics.
Uh
foundations that come from
The old and the new testament, that's what we call the the Bible.
And
A lot of people kind of attempted to divorce.
The
Religious aspect from the societies.
And
Societies became less and less
Overtly.
Religious in those natures.
And then a lot of people saw that their parents
We're no longer going to church.
Like the Bible wasn't part of
kind of the household.
Any longer.
And I talk to a lot of young people who look at that and they say
In almost like a rebellion against their parents.
They're now interested in that.

Disassociating from religion.
And now
I wonder if there's
Part of a rebellion in kind of
looking back and trying to
Reclaim.
I think in part as well.
This younger generation, Gen Zs and I guess to some extent as also millennials,
Have been told to live
more individualistic lives, and that's really been glamorized, like be your own boss. And now we work remotely and stand on your own two feet. And
We're even seeing people getting into sort of relationships later and later in their lives and having less children. So they're more it appears
People are more unanched.
than they've ever been. And that was to some degree glamorized. Um but it also appears that when we are unanched, when we don't have responsibilities, or we're not

Mental health.
Issues um are quick are quick to follow.
Yeah. And for this generation they're suffering the most with those types of mental health issues. And then one would assert that they would therefore be searching more for
Answ to some of these existential questions. Expressive individualism.
I think it rose. That's the kind of the terminology in sociolog.
In the sociological literature that they refer to in.
But I I think you touched on a good point in that, like as we've removed God
Part of the intellectual light enlightenment.
was that
We would move away from
The shackles of religiosity and the concept of
a creator. And that would
Lead us into a Utopia.
And I think the more and more we've removed that from society.
That hasn't decreased our levels of anxiety and depression.
And meaning.
I I think it increased it.
Yeah, and especially
celebrity worship, social media, building a following of your own, like sort of low key narcissism.
has made us more and more and more and more important. And that seems to correlate with worse and worse and worse
mental health when you start to
Become more individualistic and think more and more about yourself.
And self importance versus others and
Bigger picture. Mm-hmm. I think we are created for community.
I think we are as human beings
A creature that is created for community. Ultimately, by cards on the table as a Christian, because I believe we are created in the image of a God who exists in a set of living, loving relationships.
Like that's what the Trinity is.
When we talk about
That idea.
Within Christian theology.
God exists in
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And so being created in the image of God
Part of that is you are created for relationship. And so in a society that's continually removing us, you know, you need to be an influencer. You're influencing everybody else.
Mm-hmm.
We're not created to be lone wolves.
We're lone rangers. We're created to live amongst community.
And have
That be something that
Likewise gives us fulfillment.
People who

you know, rise to the top are wrong by any stretch.
But
In a society where we're alone together.
Because
We are
Sitting behind computer screens.
And we're talking to
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in some cases, but
But we're secluded.
I think that that does something to
Our souls because we were made to be
In relationship.
with other people.
I
Agree with
Everything you've said as it relates to the sort of crisis of meaning in society. And I also agree with many of your reasons as to why that's occurred.
The part that I've always struggled with is then
The answer being
Christianity, or any other religion.
I I agree with, you know, so many of the things you've said, but then I f my brain has
I think
In especially after the age of eighteen, when I started reading about all this new atheist stuff and these questions of
evil and am I going to hell and
all these other things. I've not been able to get there.
Mm. But I'm having this conversation with you today because
I am open minded.
And although I've got like qu difficult questions to ask
I'm in pursuit of the truth. Not any particular
ideology or answer.
So how do you take someone like me
Who agrees that there's clearly something missing, who believes that there's something transcendent. It could be a crazy thing to assume that this is it, I I think.
Yeah. How do you take them from this position?
Two
believing that what's written in this book in front of me, the Bible, yeah, is
The thing that should guide my life. Right.
Because I I like again, I say that I was gonna say this again, but like
I think I require a really high standard of evidence because of the way that I am.
Yeah.
You know, I think there's a historical case for it, which I'm very much invested in because
My training formally is in historiography. I study
ancient biblical manuscripts and they're kind of
reliability.
And fidelity over the last
couple of millennia.
So looking at some of those manuscripts that actually can trace back to
The actual time frame of Jesus and answering questions like is what we have now what the original authors wrote back then. So I think there's a historical
Yeah.
And I in my own personal investigation.
Genuinely think that the evidence, the publicly available evidence
Gets us back to
Not only the time frame of Jesus, but to early eyewitness testimony that proclaims that
This first century Jewish
itinerant rabbi who was walking the dusty streets of first century
Made these claims.
And then there is sufficient evidence to say that
He predicted his own death and resurrection and did it.
How do I know?
Jesus Christ was real. And then how do I know what's written in that book?
Is
Real versus just some guys thousands of years ago.
Made a book.
Yeah, so that is a question of historical reliability. So there are a a couple of different ways we could go about it.
First we have four biographical accounts of Jesus' life, which is very unusual.
So we call them the gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Um, those aren't actually our earliest source material for the life of Jesus. That comes in the person of Paul.
Paul is actually writing before the gospel accounts.
And he is uh someone who was hostile originally to the Christian message.
And he's persecuting Christians.
He comes along and he has this radical conversion experience.
When he's traveling to Damascus.
Where he says he's he's literally thrown off a horse.
God's voice and it's Jesus and he says, Paul, why are you persecuting me?
And then he writes these things.
about his experience and and then ultimately goes and connects with
The individuals who are
We call the disciples who are like this this close
Jesus community and connects with them.
So he's our earliest source, but then you have these gospel accounts, these these biographies. And the gospels are interesting.
Because they fit within the historical framework of
Ancient Greco Roman biography.
So let me give you an example.
The most well known person in Jesus' day was the Emperor.
His name is Tiberius.
Tiberius has four biographical accounts that are written about him.
Valeus Patriculus, Cassiodio.
Seutonius and Tacitus. So th this is the four guys, okay.
And
What's interesting in t s sort of a comparative analysis of Jesus and those people
is that they're all writing around the same time period.
So the biographies are coming from the first century.
For
Jesus.
They're coming in this time period where you have an early eyewitness testimony.
For
The Emperor for the most well known person in the ancient world.
All of the sources except for
Uh, the latest piterculus are coming from the second century.
Mm-hmm.
Velas Patriculus is coming from the first century, he's very close to the source, but he's a pay propagandist. So even though he's the earliest, he's the least
Reliable.
And
For the gospels, that comes around in the fourth century.
So
There's a comparison with the source material for someone like Jesus, even though
We really shouldn't have anything about him.
Because he's he's kind of a nobody from nowhere.
In terms of the Roman Empire and the grand scheme of things.
But we have a phenomenal amount of source information for his life.
I mean, this is one of the things I discovered when I went through that new atheist phase was that
Really
Everybody kind of agrees that there was a guy
Call Jesus from Nazareth.
And that he was a real historical person. Mm-hmm. I guess the part in dispute was whether
things like his resurrection actually happened, or whether he was just a spiritual back then, like we have spiritual leaders today.
I think one of the one of the things that I w got really stuck on when I was reading about
Jesus in the Bible was there appears to be quite a significant gap between
His life, his death.
And then the writings that go into the Bible.
And for me in my head I was like, Well if you know
If something happened in my life fifty years ago, I mean I'm only thirty three, but if something happened fifty years ago, I would not be able to recount it. Frankly, I can't recount what happened last week accurately. Right. Let alone like decades ago.
You've h you must have heard this argument before. Yes.
Wha how do you how do you square the circle here?
So there are a few things going on. First, we live in a hyperliterate culture.
We are writing everything down.
The ancient world was far less of a literate culture. They were an oral culture.
These stories would have been passed.
in large groups at at at
uh time frames, especially if we're talking about
The biographical material of Jesus is actually written in a closer time frame than the majority of anyone else in the gap. It's it's about forty to sixty years.
So I really wanna
I I imagine there's some people listening that have probably never read the Bible. And I really want to explain to them like what this book is in the simplest terms. Can I I can open your Bible? Yeah, of course, yeah.
So
Is there is there like chapters in here? Yeah. So the Bible is, though we now have it in one book, is
Sixty six books written over a period of about sixteen hundred years on three different continents by close to forty different authors in three different languages.
So I've just opened your Bible. Yeah.
And
There's one section that says the Old Testament. There's another section section that says the New Testament. Mm-hmm. What
Am I looking at?
Like is this
God's words is this a bunch of people's stories that have been compiled together. What is the Old Testament? What's the New Testament? What's the difference? Yeah. So the Old Testament is the Hebrew scriptures. So that's the scriptures of the Jewish people.
Okay. So that is uh you know, it starts in what's referred to as the Torah.
Which are the first five books or the five books of Moses.
And then that goes in a time frame all the way up to
the period of the Persians.
So that's a certain time frame. Yes. And they've gone and collected books from that time frame, with writings from that time frame. Yeah. So the ancient Jewish people
And remember all of these books
they would have circulated as independent writings. Okay. So th we start to see things like this.
happen in the fourth century. Prior to that, everything's in independent scrolls.
So there's an understanding when even you get them all sort of put in one unit that would have contained
The scriptures, the word of God, more so than like this is the word of God.
The reason why
I am
unapologetic and very open about my total naivety is because often in these conversations
You end up kinda preaching to the choir. Sure. If you know what I mean. And there's a huge amount of people, especially younger people, that went through that new atheist movement, were maybe born in the two thousands that are now twenty six years old. Right. But have never read the Bible, have never even opened one, have no idea what it is. They just think it's this kind of like book of stories. Yeah. But
These uh the first um you called these books, I was thinking of them like chapters.
The first one in the Old Testament is Genesis.
Who wrote Genesis? Was that a guy or was that
So the idea is in Christianity
the terminology is what's called verbal plenary inspiration. So verbal
It's spoken.
Plenary, it's like written down and then it inspired. So there are human authors to all these books. Okay. So humans wrote these chapters. They were inspired by God. So yes. So the understanding so in the Bible itself.
Peter says that men
Spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
So there is a
There's a historical context to all of these.
Like the history of this period of time.
And where does Jesus show up?
Jesus is the New Testament.
If someone's never read the Old Testament.
What is that?
About.
It's a bunch of different things. It's there's a whole bunch of uh genres of literature. So some of it is history.
Some of it is poetry.
Some of it is what's called wisdom literature.
And who decided that these it looks like there's I don't know, that looks like there's about forty books in the Old Testament. Thirty nine books that are in the Old Testament. Who decided that those were gonna be part of the Old Testament? Because I'm sure that there was lots of other writings at the time that could have been
Included. Yeah. So by the time that Jesus is around, there's approximately an agreement of what is
Considered scripture.
By the Jews themselves. So the Jews decided books to put in.
Yes. So you have conversations by individuals like there's a guy named Josephus.
who is writing at the end of the first century.
Part of what he argues is that
The Jewish people don't have
kind of an innumerable number of rel religious texts, like the Greeks do.
They have a specific number, and he uses his terminology that they were laid up in the temple.
So
The idea is that, you know, these are the books, they're housed in the temple.
And they're a set number. And he gives
the number of the same number of letters alphabet.
twenty two. So you usually see this twenty two or twenty-three number.
But
They group them differently.
And
He gives an argument that
One of the reasons that they're
The you we can
find a timeline for what the Jews consider scripture is he says, There's nothing written before Moses, and there's not nothing written after the time of Artizerxes, which is the Persian Empire.
So the book of Esther in the Bible is is that time period.
So though there are
writings after that, there's this agreement that
Yeah.
The voice of God in say the prophets giving a thus sayeth the Lord statement.
Like communicating messages to the people of Israel.
has ceased.
But
The Jewish canon, though there's like a closing of it.
There's a soft closing.
There's an idea that there's going to be a new covenant. God's make gonna make new pro promises
With his people.
And so there are going to be more writings.
Okay, so my understanding of that is that
He made the case that God is no longer communicating with people.
To write these books. At least that there was a stop point.
At Malachi.
So it's sometimes referred to as the four hundred years of silence for that reason.
From the point of Jesus' death.
W what book from the New Testament is written
Lost and how big is that gap?
That's a debate.
Okay, what's the debate?
So the debate so the the there's a it's a question if John's gospel
is written before seven AD or after seventy A D. And if it's written after seventy A D, it's written in the nineties. So it's written
Pretty far afterwards. How many years?
So if Jesus dies in thirty three
Okay, it's about sixty Yeah.
Okay.
Fine.
Yeah. So is it a a at minimum I I think
Like
Ninety nine percent of
Historians, biblical scholars, classicists.
would argue that the twenty seven books of the New Testament are written in the first century.
And so in that sense they're in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses to a certain degree.
Mm-hmm.
And there's evidence even within
some of the gospels where you have these names thrown out.
Kind of randomly.
And
Part of the thinking of that is that
This is like
Citing your sources.
At one point.
When Jesus is carrying the cross.
To Galgotha?
He
kind of stumbles and they get another person to carry his cross for a little bit.
And that person is Joseph of Aramathea.
Well one of the gospel's names
one of Joseph of Arimathea's son by name.
And the thinking is that
This is probably someone who's well known within the early Jesus community.
And the purpose of naming that person randomly.
is to say
He's actually
Well known. Go ask him.
I mean, logically there's quite a risk of Chinese whispers to some degree.
As you were speaking, I was trying to think about things that I experienced when I was younger. Like with my like grandmother before she passed away. And I was trying to like accurately recount those memories. Yeah.
I was thinking of like going to a house and then
I remember one day she gave me some money.
But I can't remember what she gave it to me for, and I can't remember how much she gave me, unless she put it in a card. And this was only like hmm
Twenty years ago. Yeah.
And so if I was to write about that today
I would be filling in some some gaps. Especially
Especially
This is the other thing that I always struggled with is like
Especially in a world where we didn't understand science.
Now my grandmother like put it in a card and it was like I opened it and
The way she did it was often as a surprise. So in a world where I like didn't understand physics or science, I might have concluded that my mother
My grandmother did something like magical.
Mm-hmm. You know, at a time when we didn't understand anything about like really m much about the nature of the universe and planets and the solar system and physics.
So I is that a risk that some of the things that have been transmuted by God into this book in front of me
are prone to Chinese whispers and or just like a lack of understanding about the nature of the world, like the resurrection, for example. Yeah. So this is uh this is in my field referred to as mythological drift. So how do we
factor in.
making sure that mythological drift doesn't happen. I think there are a couple things related to what you said. First off, I think I would be careful in trying to ascribe
the ancient world as being pre scientific and therefore largely, say, ignorant.
I mean, even when the angel comes to Mary in the gospel story and says, You're gonna be with child, Mary's objection to the angel is the scientific one.
I haven't
met the minimum requirements of how babies are made. Therefore
I can't be pregnant.
Right. So the she's not dumb, right? She's not just
at at face value, accepting that, you know, well, I believe in angels and so, you know, this kind of magic thing can happen.
She's still objecting scientifically, even though she might not have the terminology to understand.
like the complexities of childbirth embryology and all of that.
So I would say, you know, this is what uh the writer C. S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery.
That he says we know we need to be careful of.
Not to ascribe the ancient world as being
more ignorant and stupid than
And
You know, just because we are a product of the Enlightenment and we understand scientific things now.
The second thing is I think that the Chinese Whispers or the telephone game or whatever you call it is a good
Is a good kind of case study.
I think where it falls short is that
If you play the telephone game, if you play Chinese whispers.
There are rules in order to corrupt the message.
So you have to whisper.
Can only say it once.
You have to do it one person to one person.
In an oral culture
You would have been hearing these stories constantly.
So when some of these stories are told, they're being told within a lifetime where there could have been
Individuals who say
the story of the feeding of the five thousand.
That's a lot of people.
So there's a lot of witnesses to this particular event.
So if you're writing this down.
There's an aspect of
There are people out there who could verify
what is being said, at least orally, not necessarily like lit literarily.
Likewise.
What we have in the gospel accounts, particularly after Jesus' death.

proclaiming his resurrection, they go back to Jerusalem, which is the scene of the crime.
So they go back to the exact place where Jesus was crucified and start telling people he was risen from the dead.
If there is some aspect of say
disingenuousness in making up a story.
Don't go back to the place where everybody could have seen that thing happen.
To that degree.
Right, so in in one sense, Chinese whispers is
is a faulty analogy in that it's less like one person whispering into another's ear, and more like
A hundred people in a room all saying
communicating the thing verbally and then getting the other people to repeat it back to them.
And then corroborating.
With

Of what's going on.
Yeah, I think
Yeah.
I think your point in in the story of your your grandmother and you know the the
The letter N is a good one.
You know, how do we remember?
Things.
Do you remember nine eleven?
Yes, I do.
Yes, and I was in the
The UK at the time.
Could you tell me

what you were doing on nine eleven compared to your grandmother and the letter.
Yes, I could, yeah.
I remember coming home from school and like watching it on the screen and my and my dad having it on the screen and I was still just looking at the screen. Yeah, me too. So whereas I couldn't tell you much of what
else happened during
An average day in that year, I could tell you.
What happened.
on September eleventh, two thousand one.
And that's because of the nature of what was going on.
And I think when we're talking about the gospel stories in particular.
First you have
What I genuinely believe are eyewitness accounts from
At least the source information.
coming from a group who would have heard Jesus
B.
Preaching these things multiple times in multiple different settings.
Probably likely. I'm myself as an itinerant.
I have given the same talk on a particular subject quite a few times. Yeah. And I joke with my wife that she could give my talk on the historical reliability of the Bible.
Herself, you know, if I'm sick, I'll just send my wife, right? Cause she's heard it so many times.
I think that's the case that's going on with the disciples.
There's an aspect of they would have heard
Say the beatitudes.
Yeah.
Most likely more than once.
is the case because that's just the nature of not just itinerate speaking, but
even traveling rabbis in in the ancient world.
And then you have this event that is
kind of earth shattering in terms of
their narrative of who they are.
They've been travelling with this rabbi.
For three years straight.
They've been hearing his teaching.
They've been seeing
Miracles, at least that are recorded in the gospels.
Pretty phenomenal things.
And then he gets taken.
And he's murdered publicly.
And they think it's over.
They think, you know, there are other Messianic movements in the ancient world.
Most of which
You and I aren't hearing on a regular basis because
When those individuals die, their movement dies with them.
And so that's what they think is happening.
Right. So they think okay.
We're done.

So the story is they're hiding in this upper room.
And they're scared.
In fact, it's the women who take on the responsibility of like going and figuring things out, which
In terms of uh the time period is actually an embarrassing
Fact.
Because
of the kind of cultural dynamics of what's going on.
And so
You have the disciples who think it's over.
What is it that
Has
Eleven scared disciples, because one of them, Judas, goes and he kills himself, and
Eleven scared disciples hiding in an upper room thinking that's it, we're done.
We might as well, you know.
Peter, James, and John might as well just go back to being fishermen.
Because
That's all she wrote.
To then
having the boldness to go out and actually proclaim this message ultimately to
the level of persecution and hardship that they endure.
For the rest of their lives.
Well, it's that
The Rabbi then shows up.
Alive again.
And so at minimum I think what we can say is that
This is a pretty drastic event that takes place in their life.
It's a comparative to a nine eleven event for them.
And so in terms of like the memory imprint.
that they are experiencing.
For
The murder of their
Rabbi.
Their teacher.
And then something
happening.
Where
They then go
For the rest of their lives.
The martyrdom stories are a little bit tricky in terms of their historical reliability. I think a few of them
We can say did happen.
Yeah.
A lot of them.
is kind of up in the air.
But at minimum they suffered persecution.
So the story in the Bible is that
He was
Killed uh on the cross, murdered on the cross, and then he was put into a tomb.
And then
Who saw him?
Come out of the tomb.
So nobody physically sees him come out of the tomb.
But
The women go to the tomb.
In the morning.
And on the third day.
And the tomb is empty.
And so there are
Four accounts, right? And I think it's interesting also that we have four accounts that kind of give different angles on the stories.
They're not
It's not as if they got together and they corroborated and all gave the same story.
The fact is that we have four accounts that kind of capitalize on different angles.
Which
The differentiation in detail
I think actually gives credibility to
The
the reliability of it. Because if they're all telling the same thing, you could argue that they
got together and they colluded.
They don't do that.
In fact, they they touch on different aspects.
of the story.
Are these people saying that they saw him walk out? Are they saying that they just saw it empty? What is the claims being made about his resurrection from these witnesses? Yeah, so the tomb is empty.
Tom is at the tomb. And so it's interesting in in one of the accounts, um Mary's at the tomb.
And she
actually talks to Jesus, but she confuses him with a gardener.
Yeah.
I think it's it's interesting that
She doesn't confuse
Confuse the gardener with Jesus.
She's
Jesus with the gardener. Like she thinks that
that this person she's talking to isn't Jesus, she doesn't recognize him at first.
And she she asked him, you know.
What happened?
Why is the tomb opened?
Where did the body go?
And then there's also an account of an angel appearing and saying, Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He's not here, he's risen.
And then they go back to the disciples, who are
Yeah.
Hiding in this upper room. Mary says, you know
I I've I met Jesus the tomb's empty, I've met Jesus. Jesus is not in the
The tomb he's risen and
Some of them don't even believe her.
They think she's crazy.
Now
We don't have like an eyewitness account.
Uh
The tomb being open.
And this is actually an embarrassing fact in the ancient world.
So some of those other gospels that I mentioned earlier.
That are written later on.
Thomas, Judas, Mary, Peter.
There's one of them, the Gospel of Peter.
Which is actually trying to remedy this fact.
That
Women are the first eyewitnesses to the empty tomb.
Which is a which is an embarrassing fact in the ancient world.
If that's not true.
If they made it up.
It seems very unlikely that
They would have done that.
Because
Women are not considered good eye witnesses in either Greco Roman or unfortunately Jewish society in this time period.
So the gospel of Peter
tries to remedy the situation by having all of the right people
in the right place at the right time. It has the Jewish and the Roman officials camping out in front of the tomb.
when it actually happens, and then has this recounted the story of
The the literally the stone moving, Jesus coming out.
All these things.
Now we know it's not
historically reliable, we know
That because of when it was written.
We also know that on the eve of Passover
the priests would not be camping out in front of a dead body. It's just historically
Um anachronistic.
But it is
An account of
A literary source later on that is embarrassed by what we find in here.
About the biographical
Information.
Of the empty tomb.
So is it just
two women that said they met Jesus in some form after his death, Mary being one of them, which was his mother.
No. He's married.
Mary, so there are a number of Marys in in the New Testament. Um, this was Mary Magdalene. Okay.
Yeah, who who was like a a close associate. Okay, like a friend.
Yeah. Okay. So friend and then was there is it just her that says she saw him
There was a group of them. A group of Yeah, of the women.
Okay. S and they were separate when they saw him. They weren't they were on their own.
They were together. So one of the gospel only mentions Mary.
I believe it's the gospel of John.
But like I said before, it implies that there are more because she says
We don't know where they put the body.
Okay. So
Though that account only
Has her
Recounting?
Mm.
It implies that there are others and then the other gospels have
m more women that are going to the gym.
As a percentage, what degree of certainty do you have that he was resurrected and that um he was who he said he was?'Cause I agree with you that this character clearly existed. Like Jesus clearly existed. I personally believe that he was
He was killed, probably on a cross. But then you get to this point of resurrection, which you have to then believe in something supernatural. Yeah.
So what's the probability you'd have assigned to it? I d I if it was like likely, unlikely, very likely.
They're all likely.
Because I think that
What?
the gospel authors are doing is communicating truth.
And I don't
Ultimately see
An overabundance of reason why they would write what they wrote.
Other than
Actually recounting a story of what took place.
I grew up in a place called Plymouth.
I was born in Africa.
And in my local park there was this big poster on the wall about
The white lady.
I'll put it up on the screen. It's like a big
legend in our city, it's this park, and everybody says that they see this white lady in the park that was killed and actually there's a big board explaining her life. But it's all just accounts of people that say they've seen her. You have things like the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland as well, where there's been one thousand five hundred sightings of this big monster in the river.
And even up until recent times, two thousand twenty five, there was a surge of sightings.
of the locked nest monster called the Black Mass in in in s in the bay.
Um and that started in
five hundred and sixty five A D So one of the things that I've always sort of struggled with when
I think about humans saying they saw something, is we still today have sightings of UFOs and Loch Ness monsters and white ladies in parks that become
Legend and actually with the Lockness Monster.
It's pretty interesting that
Even today there are
sightings all the time of this monster that lives in the river.
You both agree that there's no monster in the river.
But there's something going on. There's something in human nature where
We do have like a proclivity to
Engage in.
supernatural sightings and then once we've heard it once, we then reinforce that we've seen it too.
And even as like a young man, I mean maybe you believe this, but like
I
believed that there was a woman that would stand on the landing of my home and it would like wake me up.
And I would run in
And tell my parents that the lady stood on the landing again.
If you're watching this, I think that was actually a lady.
But I you know what I'm getting at is like how do how can we trust human accounts of these things when clearly humans have an ability to make
Make things up that aren't real in some situations. Sure.
Part of the answer to the question is
One of the evidences for Jesus' resurrection is the fact that you and I, Steven, are still talking about it almost two thousand years later. He was like why are we still talking about well, I we can't prove it.
It wasn't it didn't happen. So we're always gonna talk about it. There's there's never gonna be I mean unless
Something happens. Right. The difference is that there are these other messianic moves movements that happened in the ancient world.
And so uh like uh Simon Barjora.
The reason why we're not talking about Simon Bargiora as a messianic figure is because he died and his movement died with him.
And his disciples didn't go out and then proclaim
His continued message.
Until
Like to their own detriment.
So
I would say a few things. I would say liars make poor martyrs.
In that you will die for something
You believe is true.
But
The chances of you dying for something you know is not true.
Are less likely.
So if we're talking about the disciples.
And especially
If
Th what they're getting for this particular proclamation.
Is
They're being ostracized.
From their own communities.
pagan, Gentile communities, and the Jewish communities. Cause remember there was a persecution on both sides.
Because it was
At a certain point in time.
continuing to say that Jesus was the Messiah and on top of that that he was
God himself.
was not very popular within the early Jesus communities.
There's a complexity to the fact that
People usually lie.
Cult leaders usually do things for
Prominence.
Or money.
Or sex.
Or influence.
The interesting thing about the early disciples is they get none of that.
In fact, they almost get the complete opposite of that.
In that Jesus says
you're going to be persecuted. You're going to be put in front of tribune tribunals and you're going to be interrogated.
And that's exactly what happens.
And they know that there is
There's a danger to this because we have in the book of Acts
which is the book after the gospels. We have a recounting of the first martyr of Stephen.
I think of like someone like Martin Luther King or Gandhi as being, you know, leaders from history that
Appear to be from what I've understood.
very selfless and actually realised that they were all gonna die. I'll never forget the speech actually where
Martin Luther King says, I've been to the mountaintop. He was a very religious man, very Christian man, and says, I've been to the mountaintop. You guys get them, but I don't get them with you. Right. And then
from the information I had, he died very, very shortly thereafter. And as he's saying, I don't get there with you, he's he's emotional in his face. You see him crying. The video is the was very con
Persuasive of the Christianity, by the way. Um and then he's pulled off stage and then he's shot there after. Feels like a man that knew he wasn't gonna
Live much longer, but was willing to put his cause ahead of
um his own mortality and um
I guess Jesus was doing the same.
In a certain regard, in terms of the disciples though, I think like if they know this isn't true
If they know that there's this kind of
This has been mythological drift, if things have been exaggerated.
Uh why then
Especially experiencing that persecution, seeing their friends die in that kind of setting.
Do they continue to
go on and do it. I think they definitely believed it was true. Yes. I think at minimum, whatever's going on, they like you you look at some of these
uh secular historians and they look at the data and they say whatever's going on, the disciples believe something happened. Yeah. And so the I just think that the explanations
Ah, the alternatives of that actually happening.
are insufficient in so far as how they actually explain the data.
Do you have any doubt?
Oh, of course. Okay.
So you have at least even one percent doubt. Oh, definitely. And I think especially when there are times of things that are far more existential than historical.
When times of like struggle and pain and suffering
And I look at the world and I look at how.
messy it is.
Children who die young.
People who are abused, all of these things.
I there are moments where I think
How how could there be a good God?
I mean I'm not immune to doubt.
Um I and and the interesting thing that I find about the Bible is that the Bible is very open.
to the God of the Bible being
Open to us coming to him with our doubts.
Mm.
Poetic literature, if you want to call it that.
Are sometimes referred to as the lament or the complaint songs.
It's things like Psalm twenty two, My God, my God, why have you forsaken?
Why are you so far from me?
I like I cry out by day.
And I hear no answer.
And I think
What's interesting that I find with the Bible is its transparency in saying we're going to struggle.
Yeah, there's this really great story in the Gospel of John.
Well, this is it's in a couple of the instances of the gospels where
John the Baptist
Who's like Jesus' cousin and good friend.
He's been in prison because he's been speaking out against Herod.
He's been being a little bit too verbal politically, and so he gets taken.
And he's in prison, and though he's the one that baptizes and said, you know, behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, when he's in prison,
He doubts.
And he sends his disciples over to Jesus to ask.
Are you the Messiah? Are you the one we're waiting for? Or should we we we be waiting for another?
Now in that interaction, Jesus actually says
John the Baptist
is the greatest of all men born of women.
Which is basically everybody, right?
And yet
In that very same setting.
John the Baptist is
Doubting.
That Jesus is who he says he is, because he's experiencing pain.
And suffering.
On that point of um
you seeing you know horrific things happening in the world and then having
Doubt. I think for me, that was one of the persuasive arguments of the like new atheist movement that I became a part of when I was like eighteen years old, which was I think Richard Dawkins had said about
You know, if God is all loving, then why would he let
A
year old kid in Africa have their eyeball eaten out from the inside by a parasite. Yeah. Like if I if if I could intervene with that, because you know the assertion is that God is omnipotent, all powerful, and omniscient, all present. Yeah. If I could intervene with that
As a human, I would stop that.
And so if God is omnipowerful.
Omnipotent, right? All powerful and
omnipresent knows everything and is everywhere, then why wouldn't he intervene with the baby having its eyeball eaten out from the inside? Yeah.
It's it's a good point. And I think if there is an objection that is
Truly
impactful on Christianity.
Uh in the atheist corner. It is the problem of evil.
And always has been.
Because it's far more of an emotional and existential question than it is an intellectual question. Now part of the problem with it is that if we're talking about evil with a capital E, we're implying that there's a good with a capital G.
And so I think we do run into an issue when saying
that evil exists, or implying that good exists, and if we're implying that good exists, or implying that there's a moral law to adhere to
To call it.
The good good and the evil evil, and if there's a more law then there has to be a more law giver.
And that's where we come into issues with
Is this
Subjective.
Or is this objective? I think the atheist movement would argue that that moral good is virtue of
What helps me to survive.
So like
Watching a small child suffer in such a way
If I didn't feel anything bad about that.
Yeah. Then I wouldn't have the wiring for survival because I wouldn't have the proclivity to defend
A suffering child. If I don't have that, then I probably don't reproduce and I don't pass on my genes and then I'm
selected out of existence. So
That pain I feel when I see a child suffering is a function of my
evolutionary m mechanics should make me more likely to survive. And anyone that didn't have that wouldn't have survived and wouldn't be here now. Sure. So evolution therefore is the answer.
I think that
might suffice in certain instances. However, it's still sort of smuggling in moral categories into a biological explanation. So part of, I mean you read Richard Dawkins, you read River Out of Eden, and he has that section where he talks about, you know, we shouldn't expect to see any rhyme or reason
Good or bad.
DNA neither knows nor cares, DNA just is and we dance to its music.
And there's an aspect of Dawkins himself in that volume, at least at that time when he wrote it, articulating that
At the end of it all.
There is no such thing as action you can't call that parasite in that

Boys I
Evil.
You can say I don't like it.
But to to import this
moral category of evil is actually to import an idea. And this is actually what Dawkins was criticized by by individuals like
John Gray.
The philosopher who taught at the London School of Economics, and he says, you know, you're a really great biologist.
But then you want to impart actual intrinsic value to people.
And if you're looking at a simple
Selfish DNA perspective.
You can't actually ascribe that.
Because your DNA, your selfish DNA, exists to carry on its
Selfish D.
And so in one sense, that child.
has no bearing on you. Now it might have like a
a protective mechanism where you want to figure out why the child got the parasite. And so you try to avoid that in order to not get the parasite yourself.
But
Science.
can't actually give you an explanation for
what the moral implications are in that instance. Let me give you an example. I think I understand the point there. Yes. Um it's essentially asserting that like why does that child matter to me because my DNA should just be trying to take care of itself. And I guess
In biology, there's um
I don't always know who my child is, but also from an evolutionary perspective
If we were raised in communities and tribes.
We
took care of all of our ch the children. Sure.
in in the surroundings. I would take care of my brother's children and he would take care of mine therefore.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well and again that goes back to the point of survival, which means that I'm more likely to survive if I take care of like my community.
Sort of.
You you read something like uh The Origin of Species, though.
Like like
Uh.
Darwin himself
When he's articulating the survival of the fittest.
There is an aspect of
You shouldn't take care of those people.
Because they're actually bringing
the genetic gene pool down.
So we see even in like the eugenics movement.
pulling a lot from individuals like
Darwin.
In order to validate the fact
That
In order to carry on your selfish DNA, this idea of taking care of the marginalized and those with on the fringes of society and those who are the the lesser thans, is is not evolutionary advantageous.
Because survival of the fittest implies that the fittest should survive.
And these are obviously not the fittest.
It's actually a Judeo Christian ethic in the understanding of everybody
having equal value
that we should be taking care of people because they have intrinsic value, not extrinsic value.
That allows us to then even import an idea of taking care of those.
Who are not necessarily
specifically related to me and mine.
And it comes back to okay, where are we grounding this objectivity?
N.

There have been societies that have attempted to do it in like a might is right.
Aspect?
And and you ground the objectivity of
what we say is right in a society that says
This is better for the most amount.
of individuals within a particular community.
I think about um Yvel
No uh
Yeah, Harare. In his book Sapiens, where he says that the real defining trait of
our species versus other species was our ability to collaborate and basically scratch each other's backs.
And that that meant that we had um evolutionary advantages because
If we could work together in a big group and we could believe in stories and we believe in money and
uh prison and governments, et cetera.
we could band together and take on the lion or band together and take on the elephant or whatever. And it's actually that and in part
There you have like I need to take care of you.
You need to take care of me.
And we're gonna reciprocate that altruism.
Uh and increase our survival chances.
So
Again, that might explain why I I care about that kid.
Um
Because the species that didn't
Uh-huh.
they would never have been able to band together and take on the elephant.
Yes.
I think it's largely
Our modern perspective living in a society where
We are
Uh starting on second base already.
With our moral perspectives.
Right. We have inherited all of these moral categories because of our Judeo Christian ethic.
If you look at basically every society prior to this, or even societies in the east.
That's not
A given.
Right, that's not an assumption.
Especially in societies that have, say, uh understandings of karmic cycles.
Whether that's in like Buddhism or Hinduism, the idea of altruism is actually can be categorized as an evil.
Because
In the cycle of Samsara of birth, life, death, and rebirth.
You are actually the
Your lot in this life.
is due to your wrongdoing in the last life. So in helping someone like that
you are actually inhibiting them from being reincarnated better on the other side.
So an idea like altruism doesn't exist within that eastern society. And if you look in the ancient world, let's pick on the Babylonians.
The Babylonians, if they were to read Dawkins's River out of Eden, would basically say, Yeah.
Exactly.
Right. So they have this creation story. It's called the Enuma Leash.
And it's this big battle of the gods.
And it's uh it's an origin story.
To an attempt to explain why everything is here.
But the conclusion of it is basically
You are a product of
A big battle.
And a mistake.
Right.
The one God loses and
You
Everything around you.
The earth, the sky.
It's just the remains of the gods that lost.
So
Meaning, value, purpose.
Really, ultimately.
You're just the product of time plus matter plus chance as well. It's just framed within a religious perspective.
Whereas Dawkins frames it in a natural materialistic perspective.
So
Where do we get
The categories
To even say that we should be taking.
Care of the
People
In
Communities
Outside of
our specific community.
Because in some cultures they have the ethic of love thy neighbor, but in others it's eat thy neighbor.
And so the question is, which society do you want to pick? And you're saying that that came from Judeo Christian values. Yes. I would agree, yeah. I would agree that. I think I'm trying to
Understand if
It's innate in us.
From a god.
what's good and evil, or whether it's, you know, we we all s subscribe to a culture that was
Yeah, the foundation of that was these
Christian values.
And um
Yeah, which one is it?
Yeah, well that's it.
mm, two thousand or three thousand years ago when Jesus came to be and we had these books, did that just influence them?
Yeah. Well I think ultimately there's an aspect of our conscience that's imprinted on us that we
We
Understand ethics to some degree or another.
But the framework to actually find
the objectivity of that ethic.
is found in the revelation of
specific revelation in scripture.
Do you believe in evolution?
I don't.
You don't believe it's true. No.
I am
open to the fact that I don't think that a belief in evolution undermines Christianity in any way.
However
I'm and prefacing this by saying I'm not a scientist.
I'm an advocate for intelligent design.
And I would
Basically.
Hunt.
The
complex conversations of evolutionary biology.
to individuals who are far more study than me, like
Steven Meyer and Jonathan McClatchy and John Torres and uh
uh Douglas Axe and those individuals who have studied it.
At the exact same time, though, it also depends on what you mean by evolution.
Right. So like adaptation.
Genetically is a thing.
I guess so I'm saying, do you believe that we evolved from
Very simple.
Organisms.
No.
And the argument for that would be, you know, I share
Ninety eight percent of the same DNA is like a chimpanzee. Sure. And we have these fossil records which seem to show
a progression over time. Yeah. You don't believe that's true. No, I don't.
But at the exact same time I think, you know, there are individuals within the Christian faith intelligent
People who do and have no problem with understanding of a theistic evolutionary model.
However
I think
In the effort of survival of the fittest.
I still think that you're starting
A few miles down the road.
In answering the question of the arrival of the fittest.
How do minds come from mindless matter?
How does everything come from nothing?
How
To
How do we answer those questions?
And I think that's why you can use the evolutionary model as an explanation of how God has actually
Created.
Right.
The biology of the situation.
But
I think the bigger question is
the cosmological questions.
How did this all get going?
You know, the big bang
What was the big banger?
How did that first ball
Get rolling.
And then why?
Can you and I, Steven, sit here
And like I said before, have the three pounds of gray matter in my head.
Kind of.
Uh
Ruminate over these
very complex questions.
You know, I c I think it was on the Galapagos Islands. I'm probably gonnacher this, but I'll I'll do my very best.
The sailors went to an island.
They left a bird there, they came back fifty years later, the the bird's beak had grown to be very, very long.
Because the prey on that island that it was eating
were in in hull, so they needed longer beats. So it kinda shows us that
If you leave
an animal in an environment, it will adapt and it's you know, it will select out.
The the short beaked birds.
For the long beaked birds.
And just in that short period of time you can see that it's like, you know, it's becoming a different
type of animal. And if you extrapolate that out over
a long, long period of time, almost an inconceivable amount of time, you know, maybe hundreds of millions of years.
One can understand why like me and the chimpanzee
There are similarities in how we look.
Um, and there are ninety-nine percent similar like ninety eight percent similarities in my DNA and a chimpan chimpanzee's DNA. So one would argue that we are
We have a common ancestor.
Yeah. It's like very compelling evidence to me. Sure. I mean it's the transitions going from
as a chimpanzee type thing, right?'Cause we're obviously not arguing that
That we were
A chimpanzee is a chimpanzee exists today. But that yeah, that hominid, whatever that hominid was.
What is the transitionary
fossil explanation, whatever that goes from
The monkey
to the human being.
And
I don't really think we have an answer for that in terms of
Consciousness questions.
Like why what makes
Our ability to reason.
And
Think and contemplate different than
All of the other things.
species in the animal kingdom.
And how do we go if we're arguing that
You know, everything comes from
Single cell organisms.
I guess you could
Have a
If we want to call it a time of the gaps explanation.
You know, just just add lots of millions of years and it solves this issue. I don't know if I am completely
Satisfied with that answer?
If'cause obviously there's adaptation.
But
You know, if you're looking at whether there's the Dodo Bird example or Darwin's finches, right, where the beaks are different. Um
You're still getting
Beak birds.
And we've never seen one species turn into a completely different species.

fill the gap with is that
It's just a matter of time.
So, you know, with the birds' example it's for like fifty years or something or
Decades. Right. But when we think about
Earth potentially being like four or five billion years old. Yeah.
I think it's almost c inconceivable what can happen over such a long period of time.
Like it's conceivable that if me and you
went to different parts of planet Earth and lived in two completely different environments.
And then we came back five billion years later.
And there was no medicine and no factors helping us to survive that.
Yeah, we would have branched
Gone in two different directions completely.
And you, you know, your ancestors who were living in the jungle might be
S n nine foot. And actually what was
Useful for survival where I lived.

Two foot tall.
Right.
And then we wouldn't be able to reproduce, which kinda makes us different species now. Like that's I mean, that's sounds conceivable for me.
Over four like four point five billion years.
Seems conceivable that I'd I'm going to do.
Right.
We both agree on adaptation. Mm-hmm.
Like small adaptations.
But then if you expand the time horizon, those small adaptations become massive.
Yeah, I mean ultimately, no matter which way you want to swing it, I think the adding millions of years is the explanation is a little bit too convenient. But
I think at the end of the day, you're still looking at the complexity in nature.
that points to a design.
of something that is
is amazing.
And
The the question of okay, how do we
Dawkins is
You know.
famous for saying that that it it has the illusion of
design to it, right? There's not not actually a design to it. It's just the illusion of design.
But
I think you know if we actually
Look at
When
Darwin was writing.
They thought
The smaller you got, the simpler it.
God.
And now we know that the smaller you get, in fact, the more complex
You get. As in the more you zoom into design. Like the brain. Yeah. Our understanding of science has grown exponentially even from Darwin's day. And there's an aspect of
like Darwinian evolution that is is has moved on into what we would now call like Neo Darwinian.
evolutionary theory.
And you look at um individuals like I mentioned Steven Meyer before, and he even uh
has questioned some of these things.
about the
Explanations that
Or
working as givens for evolutionary theory. I still don't think it gets us back to
Okay, then why do we have
Purpose.
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Where do you think we came from? Like where do you think I came from or my ancestors came from? Do you think they were put on earth as humans? Do you believe in the Adam and Eve story? Do you think there was some kind of evolution? W and when did you think this when do you think this happened?
So
I know that the world is at least thirty five years old.

Uh, I don't think it's an answer that the Bible is actually attempting to
Address in terms of the age of the earth.
I don't see any reason not to, because I don't think that the creation story in Genesis chapter one is necessarily
An attempt to sh
Reveal the mechanisms of how God
Did that exactly.
'Cause the sort of scientific consensus says that it's roughly four point five billion years old.
The earth. Yeah.
And microbes and single celled organisms are estimated to have appeared
three point five to four billion years ago, almost as soon as Earth cooled enough to have liquid water.
Sure. Yeah, and and I'm I'm fine with that actually. I don't I don't think I have to adhere to
Neo do Neo Darwinian evolution in order to actually believe that the world is old.
I think
I would adhere to an
Intelligent design thesis?
But what does that mean?
Essentially that the the world around us is intelligently designed, not necessarily in that it it came through processes of evolution. Once again, I'm not a scientist. I d I genuinely do believe that there was a historical Adam and Eve.
And that those were the first people.
Okay. Now what did they look like?
I don't know.
I think they they probably lived a long, long time ago. And I don't know if
the breakdown of Genesis chapter one and the like seven days of creation are actually attempting to articulate
seven twenty four hour days. They could be
Yeah. I just don't think that's the point.
But you do believe that humans were put here as humans.
And you believe that the other animals were put here in their
In some kind of early form.
Yes.
And then you also believe in adaptation of those species. And going back to like talking about trying to explain these things scientifically, I
I always find like we can explore the answer scientifically, but that's only gonna get us so far, especially when we're discussing meaning and purpose questions. So let me give you uh a little bit of a story.
that a friend of mine, Glenn Scribner, uh likes to uh articulate in uh this parable that he tells that he calls Betty the Botanist. So yeah, Betty the Botanist, and she's been uh looking
Uh
A plant.
Sample.
in her lap.
She's been spending all weekend looking at this plant sample.
She's been uh you know investigating it and doing all of these tests on it.
All weekend.
And
Jerry the lab assistant.
Comes in on Monday.
And
Betty looks at Jerry and says.
Jerry, thank you for the botanic botanical specimen.
The you left me on the weekend. Thank you for this botanical specimen. I've been doing all of these tests. I've been looking at the components of it and
the complexity of the biology and there are pharmacological implications that I've extrapolated from its various biological components, and we can use these to cure diseases. There's so many things. Thank you so much for the botanical specimen.
And Jerry says
Betty.
It was february fourteenth.
On the weekend.
That was a long stem rose.
Do you know what I left for you?
Do you know what the implication of
The
Botanical specimen.
As you're calling it.
was for what I was trying to communicate to you.
Now did Betty the Botanist understand
The long stem rose.
In one way.
She understood it more than most.
Because she had
Done all of the tests and run through all of the different ways that she could extrapolate what that
Thing was.
But what
Jerry was trying to actually illustrate
was something that went beyond that. It was a love gift.
He was trying to communicate something that went beyond the simple biology and and Betty could

I couldn't get that from the data.
I I couldn't have
Extrapolated.
The implications of it being a love gift.
And in that
So far as it being a parable.
We can look at all of the scientific explanations.
But
There's something that goes beyond the simple data in terms of meaning and purpose and desire.
Identity questions.
That go
far beyond that, right? Like we can look I could tell you the different chemical components that make up the page.
and the ink and like the size of the paper and its transparency and all of that.
I could say
You know, Steven, what is this? And you could go into all of this explanation about how paper is made and the pulp and how we extrapolate it and eventually put it together in the binding and
And I could say okay, yeah, but
This is
A Bible.
Th this is meant to communicate something to you.
Now what is the explanation for this? One explanation could be
the chemical and and you know scientific components that make up the Bible. Another explanation could be
This is a religious text that's actually trying to communicate something to you.
And so I think in the scientific data.
All of that is obviously important.
Right.
Like
There's this great quote by C. S. Lewis where he says that
Men
We're scientific.
Because they expected laws in nature.
And so they looked for the legislator.
And you look, you read individuals like Francis Bacon who came up with the the scientific method, and they're inherently religious, right? They almost articulate what they're doing in their scientific endeavor as an act of worship.
Because if the exploration of the creative world points to a creator.
Then
That can be an act of understanding who and why we're here.
In terms of the scientific questions, I'm very interested in them.
Especially as a non scientist. They fascinate me.
But in terms of the meaning questions.
I think
I would err on the side of caution of
Attempting to be Betty the Botanist.
And sometimes I read individuals like Dawkins.
And I'm I'm hearing Betty the botanists.
Extrapolate.
And define the botanical specimen.
I think part of the reason why the new atheist movement that I again was captured by
was not sufficient.
Is because
As you say, it didn't
It didn't fill some kind of gap.
And and much of the gap I think for a lot of people is okay, so i if if I believe in the science and or in that argument and the atheist argument, or I believe in the Bible.
I still need a
I don't want to like
Yeah, but so what? Like what's the point of this? Even even in the example of evolution, I but why am I evolving?
Mm.
Why why am I trying to survive? Yeah. A means to what end? Okay, I'm trying to s have more kids, but then why are my kids trying to have more kids? What's the point?
Right. And you just keep hitting this wall of like okay, yeah, but what's the point? What's the point? Am I meant to do something? Is it is there a mission for me? Right. And I think that question is one that I think about.
Uh sometimes which is
No matter what I believe, like what is the point?
And I think that's why the Bible is such
An amazing explanation for that.
Because
In a world
that tell you ultimately that you're a product of time plus matter plus chance.
The Bible looks at you, Steven, and says you're created with meaning and purpose and intention. You bear the image of God.
So there's something that is actually screaming from
Your
Biology
About who you are.
That goes beyond the fact that you're not just
A physical specimen sitting in front of me.
Right.
You have a mind.
And that mind is
Maybe your brain?
We're not even sure about that, right? So what makes Steven Steven?
You're not not your body.
And that's why I mean there's this inherent
conversation within Christianity about the fact that our hope is not a spiritual one.
The end result is the resurrection, right? The reason why Jesus rose from the dead
Is
Scripture calls him the first fruit. So we're all gonna be resurrected.
There's going to be a new heaven and a new earth, and that's the promise of
Christianity, is it. So that's the point. Yes. The point of this life
According to the Bible is that I get to go to this place called heaven.
So it's a both and. So when G when Jesus' disciples ask him how to pray.
He says
You know, it gives them the Lord's Prayer.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
So it's not just about, you know, I'm gonna die and my spirit's gonna go to somewhere else and you know, that's the whole goal.
It's to bring heaven here.
as well. What we do matters.
Because you're a human being, you're not a human
Doing
And so what you do here
And who you are here.
actually has an implication.
To to who and what?
To everything.
You should work.
Put here.
To be stewards of
Creation.
Of each other.
To be examples of
Image bearers of God.
Like your life has intrinsic meaning.
Internal meaning, yeah. Internal meaning.
More than just what you can contribute.
Right. So that would be extrinsic. Your ability to give back to society, your ability to uh contribute to the advancement of
scientific, technological, you know, fill in the gap.
You have value that goes beyond that.
Right. This is why we fight for people.
Everywhere.
And that's I think why
Injustice something like injustice bothers us so much.
And why evil bothers us so much.
Do you know the chimpanzee that has like ninety eight percent the same DNA as me?
Yeah.
Do they have the same intrinsic meaning?
You know, even my dog. I'm like, Does my dog
have that same.
Intrinsic meaning and is my dog gonna go to heaven?
I think scripture tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know.
There have been individuals throughout church history who have articulated that. I mean f St Francis of Assisi was big on animals going to heaven.
Uh C. S. Lewis was big on animals going to heaven.
Um, in fact when he wrote The Last Battle, you know, the last series in his Line The Witch and the Wardrobe.
Books.
There are animals in heaven. I mean if there's a new earth
I think there are gonna be animals.
I don't know if they're gonna be the same.
Animals that existed on this side.
But I also
I have no idea.
But I think there's something different.
Because I think you have a soul.
And you think my dog doesn't have a soul. I don't know, but I don't think he has the same kind of
spiritual component that you are endowed with in the same way.
How do we know?
Like how do we n how do I know that? You know these chimpanzees, they're pretty smart. I was watching one touch them a touch screen the other day and solving problems. And I was thinking, is it not is there not like an element of
I don't know, human arrogance to think that these other creatures like the big the whales, they're so unbelievably smart. They don't have a soul. They work together in packs, they love, they have kids, they seem to pursue things.
Yeah.
I mean I think that's a testimony to kind of the general
reflection of God's good creation. At the same time, we describe when you're just repeating something, we're cry we we use adjectives like
A Bing.
We understand that there's an aspect of like if you train
The monkey to push the button.
He's gonna push the button. If you
Give the elephant the paintbrush.
And kinda you know
w c convince it to paint itself, it's gonna paint itself. But if you
If you can train the elephant to paint the Mona Lisa, is it really going to understand?
But it's painted in the same way that Michelangelo understands it.
Da Vinci.
Who painted the Mona Lisa? Now I'm getting myself into trouble. Whoever painted the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci.
There's something about
the value and what is being put in there.
That is
Different.
So do you believe that me and you
are born with a particular mission and meaning on this planet.
Or do you think we have to go and find that particular meaning or mission?
Hm. That's a great question.
Uh I think

The chief end of man.
Is
To know God.
And glorify him.
Insofar as Jesus is asked, What is the greatest commandment of the law?
And Jesus uses
Two examples. He quotes from
You know, two different passages in the old Testament and he says, Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
And love your neighbor as yourself.
I m ultimately, I think we always want some sort of a grandios.
Purpose.
And we want the calling of like Moses.
Wanna go out in the bush.
Or s we wanna go out in the desert and find a burning bush.
And have that calling on our lives.
Th I don't think that's wrong.
But I think
Утимали, а перпис то ли файф.
to who we were created to be.
in being image bearers of God and being faithful in
Loving God.
with everything that we have. So that like
The Jewish
phraseology of loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It's kind of a stand in for
Your entire being.
Yeah.
Love God with that by what you do.
By what you say.
By how you live.
But I do unto others.

Them doing to you.
Right, that's the golden rule.
But if you look at other religions, it's almost always framed in the negative.
Don't do unto others what you don't want done to you.
So there's a difference between
На фейс.
And building someone a hospital.
So the meaning of our lives is to love.
Our creator.
At the most fundamental level.
At the basic level.
And to understand how that expresses in everyday life. So Martin Luther, the German Protestant reformer.
He said the
The faithful Christian
Um shoemaker.
Doesn't glorify God by sewing little crosses into the shoes.
But by making really good quality shoes.
And so
There's an aspect of God has endowed us, right? We're creating God's image.
We create.
as an aspect of an outpouring of
That which we are created to be.
And we
We do that well.
You know, the proverb says, Whatever your hand um finds to do, do it with all its might.
And the idea is
You know, y you have the capability to do incredible things.
And the reason why you have that capability is because you bear the image of a creator.
Who like I said before
lives in a set of living loving relationships.
And so that God actually didn't need to create you, me, anything.
Right. So God is not
Better off or worse off if we love him or worship him or believe in him.
You he really isn't.
He has existed in a
In love.
in relationship.
And yet, the story of the Bible is that God chooses to create.
out of an outpouring of his love.
Knowing even that
We are going to rebel against him.
We are going to sin.
I do wrong against
How he has actually created us to be.
and still desires to have that relationship.
And if we
Docent.
If I sin in my life, do I go to hell?

You
You don't

I mean the answer to that is yes and no, but the
Am I going to hell?
Are you going to hell? Steven Bartlett. Steven Bartlett going to hell. This is the clip that they're gonna put online, right? West says Steven Bartlett is going to hell. I mean, here's the thing. Everybody is going to hell.
Everybody.
Here's how I've said it in the past, right? The Bible is very clear.
All good people go to heaven.
But Jesus said
No one is good but God alone.
So if all good people go to heaven
And no one is gonna book out alone.
Only God is in heaven.
So do you believe that there is a a how
And heaven as we
Sort of typically understand it.
A place that is great to go to after we die.
And a place that is very hot.
Places that's very hot. I mean there's a lot of imagery of um like fire and weeping and gnashing of teeth. I think a lot of that uh is
kind of reflective and allegorical more than it's like a a physical tangible.
Thing that is.
You know, most of our perceptions of hell are largely shaped by
depictions in the Middle Ages of Dante's Inferno and that kind of thing, right?
I think it's more so that
you will experience the full weight of
the separation from God's goodness. Not necessarily a separation from God,'cause I think
God's punishment and his wrath are going to be felt there.
But
If we're talking about like a good place, bad place.
In the very simplest of terms, yes.
But heaven isn't full of good people.
Heaven is full of people who understand they are not good enough.
And so I mentioned that like justice mercy thing.
Justice is fulfilled on Jesus.
So because justice is fulfilled now.
Mercy, which is not getting what we do deserve, is able to be given to those who put their trust in Jesus.
So if I don't believe in Jesus and I don't believe in
The Bible.
Good.
Life.
I'm nice to people, I'm charitable.
Try and be kind wherever I can be.
Yeah.
And I don't believe in God.
Am I going to
Hell or heaven as it relates to the scriptures.
Well I don't think if you're living your life
Rejecting God.
God is not gonna force you into his presence.
So you m I'm not gonna go into heaven.
I'm not gonna go to heaven then.
No.
Where am I gonna go?
Well, you would you would go to hell.
So
So if I don't believe
in the Bible Jesus and God, then I'm going to go to hell.
Yes, insofar as if
Heaven is a place for those who have submitted their lives to Jesus, who are living the identity of what they're created to be.
And said, Your will be done, God.
Yeah.
Hell is a place where God says
You rejected me.
Your will be done.
I'm going to
I'm going to give you what you want.
in that I'm gonna remove my grace and mercy from you and you are going to experience
truly what you desire in
being
Separated from me and my goodness and my grace. And what is that place like according to the scripture?
Give me a give me a depiction in my mind of what hell might that be like for me. Yeah, I mean it's not a good place. It's not a nice place. It's a place that
No matter what's going on
If you
Uh
a believer if you if you truly understand what this book is saying seriously I think it should motivate you to want to desire
Стівен Барлет, а й де зайю.
to have a personal relationship with your creator.
Because I don't want you.
Two
Experience whatever
Hell yeah.
I I I desire for you to be in perfect
relationship with your God.
Not necessarily because I want you to get a get out of hell free card, but because I actually think that
In living how God created you to be
In accepting.
Living out the image that you bear.
You're going to find the meaning and perpass.
That you ultimately

In a desire for
I think it's about eight I think it's eight according to Gallup, it's eighteen percent of Americans don't believe
In a god.
Now to get into heaven.
Mm-hmm.
As it's described in the Bible.
Do I just need to say I believe in God? Or do I have to have some sort of active commitment and evidence in my life that I am
Living my life in line with
God's
Yeah, teachings.
I think ultimately
Salvation, right? Salvation implies you're being saved from something. Right. The good news is good news because the bad news is bad.
And the bad news is very bad. I was looking at what the Bible says about hell and it in um Revelations it says it's a lake of fire, in Mark it says it's unquenchable fire.
Matthew it says.
Eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
Yeah.
Uh in Matthew again it says.
Outer darkness where there will be weeping and
Mashing of teeth. Yes.
They will be shut out from the presence of the Lord, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and torment, eternal punishment, the smoke of their torment rises forever.
This is not a place I want to go. No.
No.
And I think I think the urgency of the Christian message is
The bad news is really bad.
And that's what makes the good news so good.
Jesus
Has taken on.
That hell.
On your behalf.
And it goes beyond simply a believing.
Right.
It's not just about saying the right words.
It's not just
A an incantation.
You are not saved by what you do.
Right, you're saved by works, it's just Jesus's.
Jesus lived the life you couldn't?
And made the sacrifice.
You can't.
on your behalf in order to establish that right relationship.
with God. So that's where grace comes into the picture. Justice is getting what you do deserve.
Mercy is not getting what you do deserve.
Grace is getting what you don't deserve.
So
In so far as Christ on the cross
Fulfill the justice.
Of his holy law.
Mercy is enacted and you don't get that punishment.
By putting your faith and trust in Jesus as your Lord and your Savior as your creator.
You don't get that punishment.
And now
You get grace.
Which is
Not we are owed.
But you are adopted as a child of the most high.
So
Of the
eighteen percent of people that say
They don't believe in a God, they are almost certainly going to hell.
According to scripture.
Well, so James, the book of James in the Bible, who's actually the um
The uh
half brother of Jesus. Um, he writes a book and he says
You believe that God is one.
He says great.
So do the demons.
So the point is
Like if anybody knows and believes in God.
It's the demons. It's his Satan.
Right? So so what's the difference there?
The difference is there.
Is that
There's a relational component of
When we in the in sort of the Christianese Christian terminology, when I say Jesus is your Lord and your savior, what I mean is that he has rescued you, saved you from the penalties of sin and death.
But then the Lord component is that now you have submitted your life to him.
in obedience and
Repentance. Now repentance is kind of another religious word that
Maybe it's not always fully understood.
Repentance is the changing understanding of the way you live.
You understand.
That the things that you used to do
That are wrong.
Are not the things that are
either what you should do or again going to give you fulfillment.
And you stop doing those.
Not because God is a cosmic kill join. He doesn't want you to feel
the goodness of those things, but because those things are actually harmful to you.
They are hurting you.
And they are
creating a separation of the relationship between you and God. There's gonna be a very small number of people that actually live in such a way that are fully repented and have accepted the Lord as their savior, right?
There's only rough I think it was thirty percent of people actually go to church.
Uh somewhat frequently. And uh
the other s sort of fifty six percent seldom or never go, but they're not really really active in their belief.
They probably haven't repented.
So it would appear to me that a very small percentage of people are actually qualifying for the kingdom of heaven as it's described in the Bible.
The miracle of this is that your salvation is received, not achieved. And so
Once again.
it's it's not about like brownie points. It's not about checking off, you know, oh I read the Bible this many times, I went to church this many times. I you know, I didn't lie, I didn't steal, I didn't cheat, I didn't
Um
Because we still exist in this beautiful yet broken world, and because
We live in a world that is marred by
The brokenness of the fall.
Of our first parents, Adam and Eve, making that decision to rebel against God. And because of that, now the the creation itself has been affected.
It's not about
trying to earn my way into heaven.
So
Is it a very small percentage of people who are actually repenting?
Maybe
But
What of those
What of that percentage?
Is
Attempt who
fully understands
It's interesting the word that we translate as repentance is the Greek word metanoia. It means change your mind.
And so there's an aspect of
It's not just about the doing.
It's an understanding. It's a component of
I don't want to do these things.
Even when I do them.
I I don't I don't want to lie anymore.
Like, I see the harm that that causes and the brokenness that it creates.
And so
Even if I'm still
Breaking the law.
Of God.
So in the book of James that I mentioned, uh there's this part where James says if you break one
rule in the law. You it's as if you broken them all.
And I've sometimes used this illustration of it's like you're hanging off a cliff
Uh on a linked chain.
Right. If you cut any of those links.
You're gonna
F
Right.
It's no longer holding you.
That's kind of the the thinking that I think James is getting at when he writes that.
So you reference the original sin, which is Adam and Eve taking the apple. Mm-hmm.
Or fruit.
God made Adam and Eve, he's omnipotent, omnicient. He when he made them he knew they were gonna take the apple. Mm.
But he made them anyway. Mm-hmm.
So that sounds like a setup.
I you could read it as a setup. I think more so what's going on. I think what what's
Which the
What strikes me as more amazing is that God did it anyways and he didn't hit the restart button.
And then he knew that when he made them that it would result in this
Thousands and thousands of year p years of people worshiping him.
I think you'd think I was a bad person. Like if I made something knowing that it was gonna make a mistake and that mistake would result in people
Worshiping me for the next forever. Sure.
You you'd say I did this.
To get you to worship me. Sure.
And to basically

Can I
I'm a create. Like logically, that's like hold, no? Like what's wrong with that, logically?
Well, I think
I think you could read it like that.
Uh, I think ultimately and this might sound like a cop out to some, but maybe God knows something we don't. Maybe yeah.
And uh that he has reasons for allowing evil that maybe we don't understand and can't comprehend because he is God.
There's an interesting thing in both the book of Revelation and in one of the letters of Peter where it basically says, From uh before the foundation of the world was laid,
The Lamb was slain.
So Jesus
was crucified. That the cross that whole
bringing back people in unity and relationship with God via this act.
of the only innocent person who ever lived being murdered on a cross, right? A great act of evil accomplishing
A lot of good.
Once again.
Not the way I would do it if I was God, right? There's all sorts of things that we think
You know, if I was God I'd do it like this.
Um, thank goodness I'm not God.
Uh, I would get a whole lot of things wrong.
You wouldn't want to live in that world.
But I think what's interesting is that

Cross was not a contingency plan.
The cross was the plan all the way along.
And so God
Is glorified
in that act. And I think part of it is what I was saying before. If God is
Love. If love is the greatest ethics.
And the greatest ethic is expressed.
In
The greatest
Example.
Which is self sacrifice.
Then God is actually communicating the greatest ethic in the greatest possible way.
In what we see.
in the gospel message of how
He accomplishes.
The unification with his people.
For
the goodness and glory.
of who he is.
And do I understand all the complexities and mysteries that go
In conjunction with that? No.
But
I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.
That
The historial and the філософіко кейс.
For
The existence of God and then that God specifically being the God that is articulated in the Bible is true.
And on that basis
I
I'm willing.
Two
Submit my life.
Because of both the evidence and because I've actually seen
my own life change radically. So you're your friend.
Right. You say like you've seen
An actual
experiential change in that person's life. Oh yeah. No my so my friend um
I talked about him anonymously on here, but he then
Clipped it, post it on his Instagram and said
Steven's talking about me. Okay. And he's he's like doing some interviews and stuff now. So I feel more comfortable talking about him more publicly. But yeah, my friend who was going through a little bit of a crisis of meaning in his life was living in Dubai in this penthouse apartment, single, kind of alone, remote working, all those kinds of you know, very individualistic lifestyle, successful in a material sense.
All of a sudden
turned to Christianity, flew to America, got baptized, and is now
Christian.
Yeah. And would I say he is happier than before? A hundred percent.
What I say I am very glad he
Became Christian.
One hundred percent.
Would I say that I believe his future's gonna be better because he's not a Christian, one hundred percent.
That's a lot of a hundred percent. No, but it's true. It's objectively true. Like I even speak to Well we've been friends for s decades and
All of us feel the same way. Right. And we don't even have to agree with what he believes to think actually he's
It's helped him. Well, and in that, I don't think that the I think there's an objectivity to the actual evidence that I evaluate in terms of the historical reliability of the Bible and the philosophical explanations for meaning and purpose and morality, how we ground those, the scientific data of a universe that looks
Like it's fine tuned and has
intelligence designed into it.
But the subjectivity of
How I understand my life and have seen it change radically.
And
W what you see in your friend is not inconsequential.
No, it's not.
And it testifies to something, і testifies to a hope.
That even
In
Scripture in first Peter three.
Peter, writing to the dispersed church in the ancient world.
Has this
In the context of persecution.
says, but in your hearts revere Christ as Lord, always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have.
But do so with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience.
So that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ will be ashamed of their slander.
And there's this implication
That
Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who
ask you for an argument for the existence of God? No, that's not what he says.
He says
To give the reason for the hope that you have.
Your friend.
Is communicating a hope?
That you took notice of.
And I think
That is literally the word to give an answer that we translate as to give an answer or defense or reason in many English Bible translations.
Is the Greek word apologia.
To give an apologetic, to give a defense.
And
Scripturally.
Scripture does
call us to love the Lord our God with all of our mind. And I think there's an aspect of God. If I my friend Tim Barnett works for actually Stand to Reason, which is Greg Coco's organization. You had Greg, Greg in in in your uh panel discussion recently. My friend Tim says, if you want to know the mind of God, you better start by using your own.
And so in that way, I think we can worship God through that. You know, there's a component of God.
has endowed us with intelligence, and we can use that.
to speak to the things that he is actually
Created.
And the evidence for that.
But at the exact same time.
The hope of the life changed.
Of
to use, you know, Jesus' own language in
John Three.
Being born again.
I think also communicates something that is genuinely profound.
I
Agree.
And I
I would assert that maybe if he had converted to pretty much
Any of the major religions he would have experienced the same.
transformative upside. And when you look at people that
Do convert to other religions in outside of Christianity.
they do experience a great sense of meaning and community and
all the things that come with it that gives them that sense of belonging and maybe calms their anxieties and their worries and their nihilism.
to a point where they can live a bit more of a content life.
So is it is that evidence of Christianity or is that just evidence that we're all in search of meaning in a world that's increasingly nihilistic and individualistic and says that
There's nothing other than as you say, like time, space, matter, et cetera.
No, that's a great point. I don't think it's arbitrary.
I think, you know, there's an aspect of religiosity that is always going to be a net positive for society, no matter what that religion is, because I think it's going to give an aspect of purpose and identity to people. At the exact same time, I don't think it's just the subjective
point of view, right? This is why I think it's very dangerous when I
go out so I used to work for a m a ministry organization that worked on university campuses.
And we would go and we would talk with students and uh I f
too many times to count, would hear a student ask another student, Why do you believe in Christianity? And they would then proceed in articulating how they became a Christian.
Mm-hmm.
Right. That's not the actually the question they asked. They asked, why do you believe it's true? And you answered with,
How you
kind of got into this group.
If they had ran into a Buddhist
They said, Why do you believe Buddhism is true? And you say, you know, well, I just met these really great people on campus and they invited me over for karma discussions and pizza, and and it's radically changed my life, and I, you know, follow the noble truths and the the the path of the Buddha and it it's changed my life.
When you give them that story.
Now I don't
I don't want
People hear me saying that
Giving your testimony is not.
A good thing to do.
I just think there's a time and a place where
Mm
Could have been any situation. It sounds convenient.
You could have run into a Muslim or a Mormon or a Buddhist or a Hindu.
And
Th just stumbled into those conversations.
And that's where I think
Answering why I believe it's true.
is more than just
That it's no less than that.
But it's more than that.
Because I believe that the multivalent argument for
The truthfulness of the capital T of Christianity.
Has
Historical backing?
And a philosophical backing, and scientific backing.
And psychological backing.
And all of those things. And I bet your friend would say it too.
Oh yeah. I bet he would. Yeah. And in one sense, my
goal is to adhere to truth of the capital T.
Even above my allegiance to Jesus.
Now I believe Jesus is the truth with a capital T, so I I don't think that there's a conflict of interest there.
But
I
I want to follow what's
True.
Because even if it's a convenient lie, it's still a lie and I don't want to live my life.
For a lie.

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And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.
And on that point, one of the things that really convinced me when I was a uh
when I was going through my little atheism phase was this this geography argument, which I'm sure you've heard a million times.
If I'd been born in Saudi Arabia, I'd probably be a Muslim. If I'd been born in Is India, I'd probably be Hindu. So it seems like
The religion you believe entirely depends on where you were born.
Not on necessarily what is true.
And therefore, if we go back to this point about how
I remember thinking at like nineteen years old. Oh my God, like
Actually where you're born is determining whether you go to this fiery eternal suffering or not. And that's not fair. So this must
We'll be
Not true.
Yeah. I mean I was born in Pakistan.
So I was born in a majority Muslim country and I'm not.
Muslim. Now you could argue my parents weren't Muslims, but I know tons of people who were.
My colleague Steve
who is our Alberta director at Apoletics Canada.
He was born in Korea.
and went to a s school setting that was Buddhist.
But but the I mean the the numbers are the numbers, like
You're like ninety five percent. I don't know what the numbers are, but I know it's over a ninety percent likely to be
the religion of that territory if you take a on a religion at all.
Um just by where you were born. And that doesn't fit I remember thinking very clearly at nineteen years old, this doesn't feel fair.
Sure.
to determine who gets into hell or heaven, which is like my parents and where they they conceived me or whatever. Sure. I mean in one sense you don't want fair.
Because fair is you going to hell.
Um and the the gospel message is not fair, right? So so
The actual gospel message is not about fairness.
Because
Fairness is
I get the just penalty for what I do.
Right. And that's where the whole concept of mercy and grace are so
They're so central to the Christian message.
Is
Buddhism and Hinduism are based on fairness.
Solely.
Based on fairness.
The cycle of samsara of life, death, birth, and rebirth.
The karmic cycles, that's fair.
Uh in one sense
Вот год домані, вінка.
becomes flesh.
steps into humanity and actually experiences pain and hurt and suffering and death.
In a way that makes
The God of the Bible unique.
And actually experiential to what you and I go through when we have those struggles and doubts.
He then
takes on the punishment that we deserve.
And the fairness
Is
Not actually
What?
is then given.
Because the fairness is
West half.
getting what he actually deserves for the weight and the penalty of
His cosmic rebellion.
in choosing a life that is
is against and away from God.
I'm unclear.
Okay. So if I was if I had Moroccan parents, my probability of being Muslim is like ninety nine percent. Sure.
Um and if I was born in Morocco.
That would that would kinda set me up to go to hell, theoretically.
Yes, in so far as
You're either your taking on your sin.
Yeah.
And that's the punishment. Or
Christ is taking on your sin.
And then you are then
Covered in
His intercession.
Okay.
But it's not about believing or not believing.
Yeah, which you explained earlier. Yeah. Which was which was useful for me'cause that
That that gave me a new understanding that I didn't have previously.
Um the other thing I think a lot about or I thought a lot about was prayer. So this was really compelling to me when I was younger, which was
You know, I would
I would hear these stories of horrific things that had happened in the world. If you think about what happened in Nazi Germany, and I'd hear that the people there were, you know, very religious and praying, and it didn't seem to change
the odds of their fate. And when you look at hospital stats of Christians versus non Christians
Generally.
Praying doesn't seem to be impacting outcome.
Mm.
So therefore I concluded as like a nineteen year old that maybe print doesn't work.
And why people doing it when
It doesn't seem to historically have w worked.
What is the
What is your perspective? Does praying work? If if my child is sick and I start praying, is is that gonna help?
I mean it also kind of begs the question of what we think prayer is.
Is prayer
Incantations.
To placate God.
What does that mean?
Like
Is God a genie.
Right. So I say the right prayers and uh he gives me what u what I want.
Yeah.
Now there are some religious systems that that is kind of what prayer is. Is is, you know, th th that's all the agricultural deities of the ancient near East. Like you
You say the right things and you give the right sacrifices and the the the hope is that, you know, the gods would accept that and then they
Then
You know, in the reciprocal nature of that. They give you good crops.
I think prayer in Christianity is a give and take in that it's a relational thing.
It's God desiring
To have communication with you. If you read the psalms, a lot of which are prayers.
Uh even, you know, I mentioned the Lament Psalms. Like it's David or whoever the psalmist coming to God and saying, I don't get it.
I'm hurting. I'm broken. I'm alone. I don't feel you.
There's an aspect of the relational component of prayer.
Now prayer is not.
Just that, right? Prayer is
You know, asking is is supplications is is
Committing your desires to God because you believe that God can actually work in the universe and do things.
And that's kinda what the Bible the Bible says. It says Pour out your hearts to him, call him and and
Come to me and I will answer you in in Jeremiah.
And it also says
Ask and it will be given to you in Matthew.
Yeah, seeking you will find.
There's a little bit of a trickiness in coal mining because the context could mean prayer, the context could mean, you know, the the salvific act of God, you know, uh knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Like if you if you're actually seeking God and you're doing that with an open heart and an open mind.
God is going to say, you know.
Yes, I'm I'm entering into your life. I'm doing
I'm revealing myself to you. Now God can answer yes, God can answer no, and God can answer wait.
Those are all answers to prayer.
Do you think God answers prayers?
Yes.
And is there a certain type of prayer
He might answer.
You know,'cause if I lose my keys, oh please help me find my keys. I assume he might not answer that one. But is there a certain type of prayer you think God answers?
I don't think it's I don't think it's a magical formula. Okay.
I think you know
The thing that we see within Christianity.
Is that is that
Prayer is
the a relational aspect. Like there are
So when when the disciples I mentioned earlier, they asked Jesus, How should we pray? and he gives the Lord's Prayer, in some ways
That's less of a prescription.
you know, say these words in the right way. Because even Jesus says, you know, d don't babble like the pagans do. Um
But there's an aspect of
Our Father who art in heaven, like a recognition of who God is.
Holy be your name.
Right.
Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as heaven as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
But there's a you know
Give us the provision.
That we need.

And forgive us our

As we forgive those who sin against us.
That's an interesting one.
'Cause we're asking God to forgive us like we forgive others. So which can be dangerous sometimes, right? Maybe I don't wanna pray that all the time.
For yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever, Amen.
So
In some ways, is that God telling us is that Jesus telling us how to pray exactly?
I don't think that's not a part of it, but I also think you know there's an aspect of it.
Recognize who God is. Recognize who you are.
Mm-hmm.
You know, do ask for provision. Do ask for things that you need and you even that you want.
And
Recognize that we want
This reality as earth.
On earth as it is in heaven. You know, there's components of what Jesus is saying in
That go beyond simply like a wrote prayer.
in some kind of incantation or
you know, list of you say the the right things in the right way and you know, then God is gonna
And that that's what
Ancient Greco Roman paganism was like.
And Prayer even if you aren't
religious has a
Basis in neuroscience that says it's really good for our well being.
Neuroscience research shows that prayer activates brain networks for attention, emotional regulation, and social connection while reducing stress. And when they do brain ECG scans, they find
People are more calm and focused when they're in states of prayer and they have greater resilience over time.
Which is
I mean reason enough.
To have some form of active prayer.
Regardless of that.
I I'm really interested in w how you think about everything that's going on with technology at the moment.
We're living in a very interesting time. It's kinda like we're trying to summon the gods.
Myself.
We're we're creating this form of intelligence that
You know, people are developing a relationship with
And are speaking to every day. And we've made it on silicon chips and using these things called GPUs.
And it's called artificial intelligence. Are you concerned?
By the direction of travel in this direction.
that we're now seeking guidance and comfort and
All of these things from
A I instead of
This book in front of us.
I think there's aspects where I have
Concerns.
I mean my my colleagues, um Andy Steiger and Steve Kim
uh are are more invested in these questions, I think, th than I am. My my
uh colleague Andy, he did his PhD at Aberdeen in the question of
philosophical anthropology. What does it mean to be human? And he he
investigated a lot into the questions of things like AI, and my colleague Steve is kind of looking into things that relate to transhumanism.
I mien these are these are relevant questions to who we are. I'm not convinced.
that the intelligence part of AI outweighs the artificial.
I don't see
AI
Thinking.
I see there being
An aspect of the coding.
That
AI will regurgitate.
But
I don't
I'm not convinced that AI will ever say become conscious.
I think it will fake the touring test.
In that it will
Kind of
attempt to convince us that it is cognizant cognizant of its own existence. But I I don't I don't know if that's actually possible.
And
I think there's something about the inness of
Of consciousness.
That we don't really know.
Right, we don't really know what consciousness is.
There's all sorts of weird explanations of
Why like is your brain
Your
Who you are?
Not really, right? It's not not.
We don't really have, I think, entirely sufficient answers to these questions, but at the exact same time
I think it makes sense that if we are creating God's image
There's an aspect of we want to create in our image.
And there's gonna be that outpouring of
the creation of something new and amazing and advancing in our understanding and knowledge.
This is kinda sets people up t for this whole simulation theory argument where they say
The
If you imagine any rate of improvement on our current reality,
People are already making virtual reality worlds. If you you can go on so many different programs now and type in
I wanna go to uh the the top of Mount Everest and there's a village there. And then you can experience that in three dimensions. You can put on a headset and go to top of Mount Everest and there's this rendered village there. If you m imagine any rate of improvement, even one percent a year.
In this technology.
Eventually, whether it's in five hundred years.
Or ten thousand years.
You get to a point.
Where it's almost indistinguishable from this experience that me and you are having today in the real world. And so the simulation theory posits
The
Again, you just think about how long technology's been here. It's like fifty years ago we didn't have computers like this. We didn't even have like the iPhone or phones. That's just fifty years. Yeah.
Imagine billions of years and a rate of improvement, you get to something indistinguishable from this. And it's conceivable that me and you with computers will run simulations. We'll make things like the sims and video games and GTA six, although that's taken forever.
And with an improvement of technology at any rate
Those worlds will feel real.
theoretically to the characters within them.
Mm-hmm.
So simulation theory posit that actually this is what
our lives are. There was an a civilization at some point in the cosmic universe that got to that point of technological sophistication.
They ran a bunch of different simulations.
on a computer or whatever their technology was, and this is one such world we're living in right now.
Mm. And that is actually our God. It could be some four year old alien that had a
Laptop.
Right.
Ten gazillion years ago.
And the big bang was the day that he started the simulation.
Yeah.
Almost like it was intelligently designed.
Right. Yeah. But actually this is like this is
I
I think they're probably
Is some kind of God.
I just don't know what what it is. Sure. So I don't know whether it's the one in in the book that you have in front of me here, whether it's the one that they believe in the Muslim religion.
Or whether it's like a four year old kid on his laptop that was messing around in a technologically sophisticated universe.
Ten billion years ago. Right.
Uh.
I think there's something bigger than I am.
Right.
And I think, you know, the the simulation theory I don't think really solves the issue because it just kinda punts the can down the road in that
It's still
Avoids the question of
What
What is that?
How did we get here and
What is the ultimate explanation for everything?
So probabilistically is
in the world around us, in what we see with like our relational characteristics and everything, is it
possible that we live in a simulation.
I think it yes, it is.
I think probabilistically though
with how
the description of
creation and the human condition and what we see within history, I think, personally,
The God of the Bible is the most reasonable explanation.
Especially when we're comparing it to other religious worldviews.
I think the simulation theory is an interesting one, or you know, the string theory, multiple universes. I just think that those are almost like.
We're
Walking around the question.
We're circling around the question and it's not actually answering.
We still need a God.
Yeah, and then you know, even in the example I gave of a four year old messing around on his laptop ten billion years ago in a technologically advanced civilization.
I then my brain a few seconds later asked, Well what was
The point of
His life. Yeah.
And who created him?
And I could say the same about God, I guess.
Like the God of the Christian Bible. Like who create why who is this God? Like who created this God? Did someone create this God? Or is this just
Has he always been there? Right. I mean, philosophically it's a category error.
Because all things that are
Have a beginning.

Philosophically, the God of the Bible.
is a d a an entity that ontologically didn't have a beginning.
So
If we're talking about an unmoved mover.
Right. In the kind of Aristotelian.
categories of of philosophy.
God didn't have a creator because God is the author of creation.
Okay.
It's kinda like asking what does blue smell like?
And God I should think of as like a
You know, in the Bible and these well, not in the Bible, but
In depictions of God, it's like a a guy with a beard. Yeah. No.
Or it's like some like mystical force that's kind of like a a white light. Right.
No, I I think I mean
Those are attempts probably inadequately to express
aspects of how we would visually
communicate who God is, I think that probably misses the mark more than it
Actually gets at what?
You know.
what and who God is.
I don't know if there's a
There's a proper way that could
give a physical
attribution and description of God other than Jesus.
Who
Is God incarnate?
Right. Could you think of a
A more powerful
A more amazing example of
of a god than one who actually enters into his creation.
I don't know.
My fiancee says that God is love.
Yeah.
She says that a lot. My sensor tends to be bright as well.
Nice.
in the first time she says something that I don't believe, I tend to assume it's not true for a while. But then it tends to be proven to be true within a year. So when she said to me that God is love, I really thought deeply about it. I thought maybe she's right, maybe
Love is God.
I mean that's from the Bible.
God is love. The thing grammatically that's interesting about that when John writes that in his epistle is grammatically in the Greek, it's phrased in a way that God is love, but love is not God.
Right.
So you can't deify
The
V what love is.
When I you know when you love your fiance, that isn't God.
That's the
An inefficient
description of what we know God to be.
So God is love, but love is not God.
And in that sense, going back to what I was saying.
Said a few times now, you know.
W what the Bible is saying when it says God is love is that that is the ultimate character.
Of who God is.
In that love is this highest value.
It is that which we
You know.
hold as the
Example ethic of
What we want.
We want to be live.
Right to be loved.
And not known.
Is
Mm-hmm.
Very insufficient.
And to be known but not loved.
Is
What we all fear.
But I think what we find in the Bible is a God who both loves and knows us.
And I think that's where the God who is love
Who creates us and calls us to love him.
With all of our soul.
Overmind.
All of our strength.
That
Properly.
kind of fulfills what I think we mean when we say God is love.
There is a a deep crisis of meaning in
the world, especially in, you know, the Western world, three in five American adults between eighteen and twenty five years old.
said that their life lacked meaning and purpose, with fifty percent of the same group saying their poor mental health was linked to not knowing what to do.
with my life.
And a lack of purpose is significantly s associated with many of the mental health and illnesses like depression and anxiety. And as of April twenty twenty five, the overall prevalence of depression in US teenagers and adults has increased by sixty percent.
over the last decade according to the C C D C and tragically, globally, more than almost a million people die due to suicide every year.
And it's the third leading cause of death.
among fifteen to twenty nine year olds, according to the World Health Organization.
What are we getting wrong?
I think we're looking for our purpose and our meaning and things that are ultimately not going to
Give the value.
That
those things actually require.
So it's not a matter of
If we worship, it's a matter of what we worship.
And worship if worship is
You know, giving our all to something.
I think
There's a lot of things within society.
That are going to tell us
that our identity is going to be fulfilled in
Money.
Or
It's gonna be filled in.
Relationships.
Or accolades or
All of these aspects are ultimately gonna fall short.
In giving us actual purpose and meaning.
And if they're not grounded in
Actually giving us value, right? Your friend is a as far as I understand is a good example of that, right? You know, we can achieve all of these things.
You hear athletes and actors and
of famous people talk about all the wealth, all the like celebrity status they could possibly desire.
and could be incompletely empty.

Fulfilled list.
And I think
That's because
We're
We're chasing after
Things that aren't going to give us
what we actually need.
Right there.
Facsimiles.
And cheap reproductions of what actually
Can give give us meaning and purpose.
And that's because we are created to be in relationship with our God.
And that is where we will find our true identity. That's what's gonna give us the motivation to actually get up in the morning. Like your friend, you saying, you know, you couldn't get up in the morning.
Hi finds not just
A motivational value.
in the Christian faith. He finds actually meaning and purpose in the Christian faith.
That
Getting up in the morning has
a purpose that goes beyond the here and the now.
And they can affect.
All of the people around him.
Now he can
Pursue
his entrepreneurial activities or his relationships or even his finances.
For the glory of God, and then that gives it.
an ontological meaning that goes beyond the simple
basics of
Kind of.
what secular materialism has to offer.
Young men in particular are struggling in their own unique ways.
And is is that in part in your view because they are
worshiping the w wrong role models in life.
I think it could be.
Men often find we find our identity in the things that we do.
Right. Th the well we he we hear about this in that
Unfortunately, we've bought the lie that we are the sum of our actions. This is why when people lose their jobs, right when they get let go of their careers, they have identity crises.
Because if we believe that we are the sum of our actions
We can put a lot of stock in something that is ultimately
going to lead us.
Like empty.
Um same thing with relationships.
Right, you'd watch any rom-com.
What is it almost always about?
Lonely guy.
Lonely girl.
They meet each other.
Fall in love.
At the end everything works out and now now their identity is fulfilled. Well
I mean
All you have to do is to get married to know that that's not going to fulfill every desire and need you have.
Right. I love my wife.
I love my marriage. It's one of the best things that I've ever done.
But
If I put all of my eggs in that basket
It
It's it could very well and almost certainly will lead me.
A stray.
Especially if that falls apart, especially when there are times of hardship and struggle.
So
I think
You are more than the sum of your actions.
because you have value that goes beyond that. And it's actually living out that value that can give you the meaning and the purpose that you're finding. But men in particular, we find value in what we do.
I think women although I don't want to speak.
No, too broadly.
I think speaking generalities.
Women find a lot of identity in
Relational values?
In
the relationships that they have with their friends or their significant others, men often find
Value in
Like what they're able to contribute to.
Physically.
And so
Especially
In a world where
You know, economic crisis is a thing, or work complications with with things like technology removing a lot of occupations. I th I think that can be a gen genuine hardship. Yeah, I was just looking at the
some research on PubMed and it says exactly that. It says in a recent qualitative analysis in the United States of suicide notes, majority male sample, the authors identified themes that
differed by gender. Yeah. Such as men more often referring to financial hardship, et cetera.
Which can imply feelings of failure and worthlessness tied to traditional roles. In contrast, women's notes were more about lowered self worth and in interpersonal relationships.
Mm-hmm.
So if that does hold and and we're implying now that
Sometimes it's to do with a a feeling of worthlessness.
For men.
Are you saying that
Christianity can provide something
That is an antidote to that feeling.
I think not only can it provide an antidote, it can provide the antidote.
What would you say to anyone that's listening right now that feels a little bit lost in their life?
I would say that
You have purpose.
And you have meaning.
More than what society
Tells you.
is going to give you.
That meaning and purpose.
And that there's a God
Who loves you?
And he loves you so much.
That he stepped out of eternity.
and in the humanity.
And he lived the perfect life that you couldn't.
In order to
Establish
And
Create the union.
Of the relationship with God.
that you're actually seeking.
And what would you s tell them step one would be?
To go in that direction.
Well,
I would say, you know.
push into something like
Read the Bible.
I'd say open the gospel of
Matthew.
Open the gospel of John.
And
And start reading.
and find out who this Jesus guy is.
You know investigate that.
question why that is significant, why that matters.
Because
the person and character of Jesus
Goes beyond simply
And historical character. I think Jesus was a genuine historical character. He's no less than that, but he's also so much more than that. And in discovering who he is,
In relation to who you are.
That's gonna change your life.
Are you noticing that people are asking you
certain questions about Christianity or religion.
Or any of the adjacent subjects more now than they were ten years ago? Like are there certain themes or topics that are more front of mind for people these days?
Yeah, I think we've we've gone through a shift where when I kinda started in this endeavor of what I'm doing now.
This kind of crescendoed in the last
A year and a bit.
Um when I started out, I think people were asking a lot more, is God real?
And is this true?
And I think now people are asking, Is God good?
And I think it's because it's part and parcel of this meeting crisis thing. I also think that there have been some major
moral issues. I mean the whole Epstein thing right now, I think is a testament to that. We are seeing examples of true evil.
And I think that bothers people.
And in a world where we
Can
rationalize subjectivizing evil.
We understand.
That is heinous.
And if that is evil with a capital E
Where's the G the good with a capital G?
O CS Lewis, who I've quoted a few times. He said
uh in his um the problem of pain and suffering in that book that he wrote that uh one of his objections

There's so much evil and chaos in this world.
He said, But what was I comparing that to?
A man does not call a line crooked unless he knows what a straight line looks like.
Right. The reason you understand that there's rot.
Is because you understand.
But something that's healthy.
Yes.
And so there's an objective
Standard.
That needs to be weighed.
Buy these things.
More than ever.
We're seeing things that really
Speak to
The justice questions?
In terms of the meaning questions?
And that
has really interested me.
As someone who was a I'm a historian, right? So I'm interested in the questions about I do things like read Greek and Coptic most of the time, right?
But
I've been challenge to think more about.
the philosophical questions because I think we live in an age where
I'm really encouraged by
people looking at injustice. There's a lump in our throat. And I think there's a lump in our throat because Jesus put it there.
I think um
AI is gonna have a big impact on your work.
Yeah. And in ways that might not be super obvious. I think one of the ways is that
If all the COs are true.
when they say that AI is gonna cause massive job displacement. And even the CEOs that are building the technology have sat here and told me that there's gonna be massive job displa displacement. There's gonna be a crisis of meaning people get huge amount of work from the things that they do in their lives and they're not gonna be able to do those things.
In the same way, necessarily.
Sixty percent of Americans say they're
They're worried that
AI will take away the thing that gives them their meaning.
Well, I think we're just at the footsteps of the
Yeah.
crisis of meaning in this regard.
Yeah.
And that's gonna mean that a lot of people, you know.
I can't struggle a lot.
That concerns me.
I mean I think that's what I'm more worried about with AI. I'm not worried about AI taking over the world.
I I'm not worried about, you know, um AI replacing us or something like that.
Uh.
Uh if I'm worried about AI, it's that.
It's the the pain and suffering that it can cause for people who have bought into the lie and
That
This
some of their identity is in what they can contribute and do.
And how
The Christian worldview speaks into that. How can I think Christianly
About a society where there could very well be
Mass.
Identity.
crises because of unemployment.
Or because
You know, the the years ago we were telling truck drivers learn to code.
Well now coders are being replaced by AI systems, right?
AI can code better than the coders. So
Spotify said yesterday they that none of their engineers have written a line of code since December.
I thought wow, fucking hell like that. Yeah. And my car drives itself here in uh in America.
I I sat here with the other day with the CO of Uber and he said to me they have nine million
drivers' careers.
And within
X number of years.
They will have to do it.
None.
Mm-hmm.
He said the unique thing is the the speed of the d the change is gonna cause the problems.
Because we had the industrial revolution, we had time to tr you know
transfer to other lines of employment, et cetera.
But the speed in which there's gonna be a displacement is um is gonna cause the issues.
And I wonder what's gonna happen. I mean a lot of people are, you know, they're gonna be in search of meaning and I guess that'll
That will push some people towards Christianity and other religions, but
Not everybody,'cause you said you know, as you say.
When our identities are pulled away from us in such a way.
Some people turn to the bottle.
Right. Or um you know, causes mental health situations. So
I mean humanity has
a very unique knack to
Em it.
Mm-hmm. And figure things out.
Now is there going to be uh, you know, a a lo period in between when that job crisis happens?
Maybe.
But uh
I think
I think humanity
What figure
things out. I just I just don't know if that will be
Before all of
You know, it hits the fan.
What was the first domino that fell for you that made you go on this?
This journey.
Of
Becoming an is it the term Christian apologist? Yeah.
What does that even mean, Christian Apologist? So I mentioned first Peter three, fifteen, right?
But in your heart to revere Christ's Lord, always be prepared to give an answer. So that is that apologia. So we take the Greek word apologia and we stick an English suffix on the end, and we have this field to study this discipline, apologetics. What does that mean? You're you're explaining the Bible. Giving reasons. Yeah. Giving answers. So apologetics is as complicated as
Uh arguments
philosophically and scientifically for the existence of God and the historical reliability of the Bible, and as simple as
If someone asked me why Jesus, that's an apologetic question, insofar as it's giving an answer.
I was looking at some of these photos of you as a young man.
I wondered how much
The situation in these photos had an impact on
Who you came to be and what you

I'll put these photos on the screen for anybody.
Yeah. But um this is a
A young boy in a wheelchair. Yep.
And in a hospital bed that looks to be
Paralyzed. Yep.
Yeah, when I was eleven years old, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that left me paralyzed from the waist down.
So you at ten you were fine, you were normal. Yeah. And at eleven, suddenly you were paralyzed from the waist down. Yes. So I had the flu
And my body's immune system, instead of attacking the flu, attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord. So the myelin sheath.
And caused inflammation, cutting off the communication for my brain to my legs.
And a lot of people that get that.
Disease never walk again.
It's complicated. Uh so
the so is it called acute transverse myelitis.
Although I've been told recently that there there's a change in the name of the the diagnosis.
But
Essentially
Transverse myelitis is not all that rare.
But acute that acute
In in terms of the like quick.
Yes, I've it.
I had
Fallen asleep, a nap.
Sure.
probably no more than thirty minutes. And when I woke up I was paralyzed. So it was the the quickness of the actual damage that was done to my spinal cord that was
the catalyst for in the diagnosis saying that
the chances of me walking again were were very
Low.
But within a month you were walking again. Yeah. One month to the day.
So
In fact the anniversary.
twenty three year anniversary was recently,'cause it was in February eighth.
Um
I woke up on a Saturday morning, got out of bed, and walked over to my wheelchair.
Did this change your perspective on
God, Christianity, religion.
It did in some ways. I mean I don't I don't know how it couldn't.
Uh a definitely to have medical professionals tell me
You're
probably gonna be a paraplegia for the rest of your life.
Like this is what you need to kind of accept and and get used to, too, the exact same medical professionals.
you know, the um pediatric neurologists
Saying we don't know why you're walking.
That
had to have an impact on me.
In that I think I I truly believe I was healed.
In that it was the doctors who used the word miracle.
Because they said that they they
Couldn't
Medically explain.
why there was no more damage on my spinal cord, why I was walking
With
Like
not even any like atrophy or anything.
However.
I still needed to figure some of the more intellectual questions out of my head when I was a teenager.
So it wasn't just that this happened and explained a lot.
Because I was open to the possibility of this being a fluke.
Uh there being
a completely randomness to this.
And so when I was a teenager I investigated a lot.
You know.
To the best of my ability as a seventeen year old.
in trying to answer some of the more meaning questions about I know what my parents raised me to believe.
But if I believe it's simply because they
Told me to be able to do it.
It's not the worst.
Reason?
But it's also not the best reason. So that's is the first time that I
Uh read the Quran cover to cover.
I was looking into things like the Book of Mormon and the Bakabit. I was just curious. That's when, you know, reading Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett
Not in any type of crisis.
faith crisis way, but I was I was investigating.
So you believe in the supernatural. Mm-hmm.
Do you believe that we can speak to the dead?
No.
You don't believe that? No.
Well I should I should preface that.
It depends what you mean by speaking to the dead.
I think it's
Possible.
We have examples of it in the Bible.
Um
Saul
Gets
A medium.
to call up the spirit of Samuel.
Do you believe mediums are
Telling the truth when they say that they're contacting people in the afterlife. I think that there's a possibility of engaging the supernatural world, which is dangerous.
And
I think there's a very fuzzy line between
Mediums who are
Con artists.
And people who are act actually engaged in something that is dabbling in the supernatural.
I say this in part because I I've I've heard people say that
you know, their partner's passed away and then they've

Their partner has left them signs.
Do do you believe in this kind of thing? I don't think so. Not in those ways. I I think when people are dead, they're dead.
Um but I think there are aspects of the supernatural world.

have an impact on this world in a way that
If people can be distracted and misled to think
that they are contacting dead relatives, then that is otherwise going to
uh prevent them from pursuing what they should be as image bearers of God.
So you think it's demonic?
I think it can be.
I don't think it's always. I think in emotionally
Vulnerable states, we are willing to adhere to all sorts of things.
And there's a um
There's a sensitivity that I want to communicate around that.
Because I think people especially in the uh
in the periods of the deaths of loved ones often want to
Look for
Validation in
their past away loved ones
Leaving something or communicating or
And also that we want to believe when we lose people we love that they are somewhere better, that they are in a good place.

the things that I struggled with earlier when we're talking about hell, which is
If such a small percentage of people are making it to hell by
Whatever measure of acceptance.

Then that would mean that like my grandmother
He wasn't
Necessarily
A devout religious person or a Christian or sh hadn't repented.
is currently in hell and that's a hard
Thought to take that she is.
in such a awful place now.
Yeah. And this all this this would obviously make people not want to experience that.
dissonance and therefore reject religion and say, Well no, my gr I I c if I accept the Bible, then I have to accept my grandmother is currently
Funning and how.
Right.
And so I'm gonna reject the Bible as much easier than
Excepting that my grandmother's suffering right now.
Right.
I mean ultimately that's a um
I
I wouldn't do it that way, therefore it's not true.
Sorry, what you mean? Well, I don't think that
God should send my grandmother to hell.
Yeah. Therefore
I'm going to conclude that it's not true based on that type of Now at the end of the day

Does God communicate with people in ways that go beyond
my understanding. I've talked to enough Muslims in the Muslim world who've had dreams about Jesus.
to know that something goes on. Like I don't understand sometimes what
What happens.
on the deathbed between an individual and
Their maker.
So it's not my place to say that they are burning in hell or whatever, you know, the descriptive language you want to use.
'Cause I it's it's between them and God.
At the exact same time.
Апарфне Ворков Крайст
I'm going to hell.
So and I I genuinely believe that.
Is that apart from the in breaking of God into my life.
In part and parcel by things like this.
But also by like showing me
and allowing me to investigate these things and wrestle through questions and
putting people in places in my life that have sh formed me and shaped me and allowed me to look at the evidence and have conversations and be honest and transparent and
Those are the things that have led me down a road to say, you know, I'm convinced.
I'm convinced that this is true.
Experientially, that it is intellectually
robust and that it is experientially
Perfect.
For me and for
So many other people.
Your friend included.
What's the most important thing?
That we haven't talked about that we should have talked about, Wesley.
for the people that are listening. When I I would assume they're very curious people, some of them are religious, some of them aren't.
What is the most important thing that we should close on in your view?
Part of my academic study is that I do what's called papyrology and paleography.
So I make facsimiles of manuscripts, ancient manuscripts, um particularly biblical manuscripts. So this is a biblical manuscript, right? P forty six. It's a late second
Or third century.
Page from a collection of Paul's epistles.
So
Paul from the Bible. Paul from the Bible.
He wrote this. Well so he wrote that and then a scribe in the second century copied it down. So this is I made this. So this is genuine interest from papyrus. I'm only right on one side so you could see
kind of how the papyrus is put together. And then I got you a I got you a nice Bible. But I have put a bookmark.
in the page where that passage is.
Wh why why did you pick that particular passage? Well, why don't you open it up and read it?
So it it's it's on the little inscription.
No that I have there.
Uh Romans
twelve.
Title. Oh yeah, twelve, eleven, twelve.
So it says rejoice in hope.
Be patient in tribulation.
P.
Constant in prayer.
contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you.
Bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those
You rejoice.
Weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another.
Do not be
Horty.
But associate with the lowly.
Never be wise in your own sight.
Repay no one evil for evil.
but give thought to do what is honourable in the sight of all.
If possible.
So far as it depends on you.
Live peaceably.
With all.
Beloved.
Never avenge.
Yourself.
But leave it.
To the wrath of God.
For it is written.
Vengeance is mine.
I will repay, says the Lord.
To the contrary.
If your enemy is hungry, feed him.
If he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
For by so doing you will keep burning coals on his head.
Do not be overcome by evil.
But overcome evil with good.
So hopefully that's a good passage.
To be a little bit more.
Think about.
And then there's the box for it. Thank you so much. This is so beautiful.
Wesley, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is what is one risk
That you should be taking in your life.
But aren't currently.
Where I am in my life, I feel like so many things have happened so quickly.
That
There's like an aspect of unpredictability and I I'm just a little bit my wife and I were talking last night and it was like
We need to embrace what's happening right now, but from a year from now, if it's all gone.
That's totally okay.
Mm-hmm.
And and and we're fine with that, whether that's you know, financially or with social media or or opportunity or
And maybe the risk is
pushing into that and th and and saying like
No, maybe there's an aspect of that. Yes, I think it's wise.
to keep that in calibration.
And understand that if this goes away tomorrow.
I'm content.
Because
This is
Beyond what I've
I'm in a room sitting with Stephen Bartlett.
I I'm gonna rinse that with you. So th there's an there's an aspect of that which is is completely mind blowing.
To me, especially
West Hof from a year ago.

But
Maybe not selling myself short and thinking that
You know
These opportunities are
opportunities to
Invest in others in ways that people have invested in me over this last year.
What do you mean by that? You mean it's with some of the things that I've I've been very
uh graciously able to experience in in giving other people opportunity to
Maybe
push into trying to
Make
An impact.
in their space. Oh okay. It's encouraging them. Pulling people up the ladder.
Yeah. But you've been able to climb. Yeah.
Paying it forward.

Yeah. This is so, so cool.
Well I'm I'm very thankful for you.
Willing to have me on. So thank you. No, thank you. You you're such a great
Communicator and um
You're so
Finely balanced in
In your ability to
deeply understand everything you're talking about from a historical perspective.
To be in the pursuit of truth, as you kind of said, irrespective of where that one might lead somebody.
But then you have the gift of Yeah.
The gift of communication.
Incredibly engaging person, good intentions, good man, so
I was very very you know, very, very glad we had this conversation and very much looking forward to it for a very long time. So I'm glad you said yes. I was asking my team for
Maybe I know.
Maybe nine months to to get in contact with you. Well, I apologise because it had no a few times. No, it's okay. It's okay. But um I'm really, really appreciative of it, Wesley, and I hope to have this conversation again sometime soon. Yeah, that'd be great.
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