Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Shocking Moment: Tech Billionaire Reveals His Vision for Humanity || SLP596

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Shocking Moment: Tech Billionaire Reveals His Vision for Humanity || SLP596 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: When Peter Thiel was interviewed by Ross Dalthert, it got wild.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't exactly go like this with Michael Spicer as the spin doctor, but you get the idea.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_03: You prefer the human race to endure, right?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I do.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh you're hesitating.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I Yes?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I do.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I would talk! Say something.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: I would um This is a long hesitation.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is awful.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to say something.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Say anything too.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: Shouldn't the human race survive?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yes.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Fine, move on.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: But uh but uh Oh my chuffing days.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know Yeah, transhumanism.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don't know, penis into a vagina.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: We want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole, your whole body.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Get out.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Damage limitation.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: This conversation is utterly fascinating about our moment in history.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: In this video, we're gonna talk about power and sex and technology and AI and nature and grace and humanity and transhumanism, and we're gonna find that actually all the answers are in Genesis.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Ken Ham was right.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: The answers are in Genesis.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: But who is Peter Teal and who is Ross Dowthert?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Peter Thiel is a tech entrepreneur and an investor.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's a venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was the first outside investor in Facebook, and he has co-founded Palantir Technologies, which deals in data analysis and is used widely by the military.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: At Stanford University, where he studied, he met Rene Girard, who was a great influence on him, both philosophically and theologically, and he writes a lot about the apocalypse and antichrist.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Apocalypse is the doom that is coming, whether it's environmental collapse, whether it's nuclear catastrophe, whether it's AI catastrophe.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: But Peter Till says a lot of the ideas of catastrophe are trumpeted in our ears as an apocalypse, and then what is forwarded to us as a solution is antichrist.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And for Peter Till, the Antichrist is one world government.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: He is a libertarian, he doesn't like government.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: He thinks that big government is worse than the apocalypse.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It is antichrist.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's Peter Thiel.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: He is an investor, he's a tech entrepreneur, he's known for being a Christian, and he's worth about 20 billion.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Ross Dauphit is a confessional Christian, a Roman Catholic of a quite devout kind.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: He is the author of several books and a columnist for the New York Times.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what we're gonna do is have a look at this conversation, see how it got to the road crash that we witnessed in the beginning of this video.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna rewind and see how the car crash happened.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it happened because Ross Dauphit was asking Peter Thiel about AI and about the fact that many people who work in AI do not share a Christian faith.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a concern for Peter Thiel?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: But the world of AI is fit is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative, whatever word you want to call it, view of the technology than you're expressing here, right?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: And you you were mentioned earlier the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn't anymore.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a kind of mechanism for transhumanism, for transcendence of our mortal flesh.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Peter Thiel sees us as in a moment of stagnation.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We are not progressing in the ways that we did do up until the sort of 1980s, 1990s.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: From that moment, we have been a stagnant culture, and our one hope really has been AI.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if we don't have AI, we don't have anything.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So he's got this thesis about stagnation, but he also believes in a kind of a transhumanism.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Transhumanism is the belief that we can evolve beyond Homo sapiens into some other kind of intelligent life form that is so much transformed from what we are capable of as Homo sapiens, and transformed through science and technology, we are so much more transformed that we should not call ourselves Homo sapiens anymore.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should call ourselves homodaiists, that's what Yaval Noah Harari says.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Thiel is a Christian of some kind, he's also a transhumanist, as we'll see.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so Peter Teal both thinks that we are in this moment of stagnation, that AI isn't all that, but also that we should aim, through technology, including AI, to transcend our human limits, and perhaps therefore there won't be a place for the human race anymore.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the conversation goes, and this is why.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: But the world of AI is fit is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative, whatever word you want to call it, view of the technology than than you're expressing here, right?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: And you you were mentioned earlier the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn't anymore.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a kind of mechanism for transhumanism, for transcendence of our mortal flesh and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: And do you think that's just all kind of irrelevant fantasy?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_03: Or do you think it's just hype?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think people are trying to raise money by pretending that we're going to become build a machine god, right?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: Is it is it hype?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: Is it delusion?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: Is it something you worry about?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: You I think you would you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: Uh hesitating.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I Yes?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: I I would I would um This is a long hesitation.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is a long hesitation.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many questions in political.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: Should the human race survive?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: But uh but uh I I also would um I I I also would like us to to radically solve these problems.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Radically solve which problems?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: I I guess he's talking about, you know, do we have a cure for dementia?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Do we have a cure for cancer?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: We used to see incredible levels of progress in all kinds of walks of life.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now we've kind of put all our chips on AI, and Peter Thiel is not necessarily sure that that is the golden ticket, but he at least wants to transcend the human limits and the human problems that we struggle with.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when he's asked, should Homo sapiens survive, he's really hesitating to answer because he wants a Homo sapiens that is rid of cancer and rid of Alzheimer's and rid of dementia and rid of all these things that Homo sapiens have generally just shouldered as burdens.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: He thinks we can transcend that, and why he's hesitating is I think he would prefer no longer to be Homo sapiens if it means that you can bypass this valley of deep shadow.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think is one of the more profoundly anti-Christian stances that Peter Thiel takes.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Peter Teal confessionally identifies as a Christian.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's even the sort of Christian that believes in the resurrection.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Here he is in a former conversation affirming that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that um, well, I I I believe in the resurrection of Christ.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think that bodily resurrection.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Bodily resurrection of Christ.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's the central miracle.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And here he is in a conversation with Peter Robinson, affirming that he believes in God and that things will work out according to God's plan in the end.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think God will work it all out, no matter how bad the choices are we make.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in some sense, um, in the end, God will work it out.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: But he's not striking any of those notes in this conversation, and that's because he really wants to solve the problems inherent in Homo sapiens.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: But to eliminate those problems probably means eliminating Homo sapiens.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the dystopian vision that Ross Douthit is sensing here and pressing into.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: So here is Peter Thiel's case for transhumanism.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, transhumanism is this, you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: And um there's a critique of, let's say, the trans people in a sexual context, or I don't know, transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross dresses.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And a transsexual is someone where you change your penis into a vagina, and we can then debate how well those surgeries work.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: But um, we want more transformation than that.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: So transvestites pass over the customary kind of limits of what men wear and what women wear clothing-wise.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Transsexuals pass over a kind of a gender divide through surgery and hormone treatments.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Peter Thiel is not saying we might have taken a wrong turning here.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let's turn back to where the path once was.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: He's saying let's go further into transing.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: We've had transvesticism, we've had transsexualism.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: We need more trans, not less.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: We need a transformation of our very hearts and souls and bodies and minds.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: We need to transcend our very species.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go full trans, is the arguments that Peter Thiel is making here.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: The critique is not that it's weird and unnatural.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's, man, it's so pathetically little.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you okay, we're not we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole, your whole body.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: We want more trans, not less, so let's go fully transhumanist.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not just clothes, not just sex organs, but heart and soul and body and mind.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you notice?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is precisely what Jesus Christ offers.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is what Christianity is all about, that we might be raised up from the ways of Adam and brought into the ways of Christ, in which our mortal flesh is transformed, not transcended, transformed to be like Christ's physical body.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's the promise of Philippians chapter 3, verse 21, that our mortal bodies will be transformed to be like Christ's resurrection body.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not that we escape our bodies, but by the Spirit, our mortal bodies attain what they were meant to attain.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are, as 1 Corinthians 15 says, like seeds that go into the ground, but the point of the seed is to rise up again as the great tree.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, there is something so fitting about the transformation of our natural bodies to become more physical, more solid, more enduring, more embodied.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: We used to be acorns at the resurrection, we will be oaks.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, what transhumanism is aiming at is Christianity without Christ.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is Peter Thiel, a confessing Christian, going to say about how transhumanism and Christianity interact?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way, the the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this is these things don't go far enough.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like that transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: But how?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is absolutely a transformed heart and soul and mind and body, but the means is not the flesh.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the problem with transhumanism, that they are attempting to do by the flesh, i.e., by human power and effort, what can only be achieved by the Spirit.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that transhumanists are aiming at something that is offered in Christ does not make their project Christian unless the way in which they are aiming at it is via Christian means.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But this is going to disturb Ross Dauphert, who is himself a properly confessional Christian, a Roman Catholic Christian writing for the times.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what he says.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: But the other wait, wait.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: I sorry.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: I I generally agree with your what I think is your belief that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed and achieved and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So here is what Ross Douthit is affirming: science and technology can improve our human lot, and there can be progress hand in hand with science and technology, and that Christians, far from being threatened by the advance of science and technology, have been key proponents of technology.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let's think of the Cisturgian monks and the way in which their view of the dignity of humanity means that they will invent machines that save us from the drudgery of toil so that we can be freed to the enriching life of work and prayer.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Cistercian monks in the Middle Ages, they were innovating, using technology to serve the human person, to release humans from slavery so that we can do proper work and prayer.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's a properly Christian vision of how technology serves the human and serves God all in one.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Christians were also obviously at the forefront of the modern scientific revolution, and we give thanks for the advances in medical science that deliver us from the evils of certain disabilities and illnesses and that sort of thing.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: We can affirm all of that, but here's where Ross Dalth is going to go.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_03: But it still also seems like, yeah, the promise of Christianity in the end is you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God's grace, and the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh a dystopian character.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: A villain, in other words, one of the baddies, one of the bad guys.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And is Peter Thiel one of the bad guys?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's famous for being afraid of anti-Christ, but is Peter Thiel himself becoming anti-Christ, anti-the way of Christ, because he's trying to get the ends of Christ without the means of the Spirit.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And is he therefore anti-Christ?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's an issue that Ross Daltit raises with Peter Teal later in the interview.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: We'll jump ahead to a point in this interview where Dalfit asks Thiel, you worry about big government as an antichrist.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what about big tech?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that also a Leviathan-like threat?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And isn't it possible that your company, Palantir, Peter Thiel, is itself ushering in Antichrist?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: You're an investor in AI.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: You're, you know, you're deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance, in technologies of warfare and so on, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to sort of impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would be maybe be using the tools that you that you were that you were building, right?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: Like, wouldn't the Antichrist be like, great, you know, we're not going to have any more technological progress?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_03: But I really like what Palantir has done so far, right?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, isn't that a isn't that a concern?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: Wouldn't that be the, you know, the irony of history would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's very well put by Doutit.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it raises the question: what kind of Christianity is Peter Thiel forwarding?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is it an Orthodox Christianity?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a heretical Christianity?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Douthet asks Thiel back in the section that we're concerned about.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's let's let's articulate this.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: And you can have a heretical form of Christianity, right?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: That says something else.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: I And that's true from us, Daltet.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: There are there are many heretical forms of Christianity that want us to escape our human bonds, who see the body as a prison.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's Gnosticism in the early centuries, which took on a pretty Greek view of the body, that the body is something to be escaped from through knowledge, and that's what Gnosis is.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the Gnostics thought that truly spiritual humanity was through secret knowledge and through being inducted into the mysteries, you can escape this meat sack, this flesh prison, and ascend into heavenly reality.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And isn't it interesting that we are again flirting with a kind of Gnosticism?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that the secret knowledge is now AI rather than a mystery cult.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Is Peter Thiel Christian at all, or is he a heretical kind of a Christian?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is he like a Gnostic kind of a Christian?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: What does Peter Teal say?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I I think the word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh Interesting.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So Ross Dalfett had mentioned the word grace because he says grace is the means by which we attain the perfected heart, soul, mind, and body.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: It is a gift from the Spirit to raise us up into the way of Christ.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is not that we imitate Jesus and become this new person, it is a gift from the Spirit that we receive by faith.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is by grace that we are raised up in this way.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so Peter Thiel now is mentioning the word nature.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, nature and grace is the way that medieval theologians had been speaking for a millennium about the way in which heaven and earth actually relate.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Nature is from below, and grace comes down from beyond.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the kind of thing that the Bible is actually speaking about from the very beginning.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Thiel says, in the Old Testament, there's no such thing as the word nature.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's lots of words in the Old Testament that aren't words.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Things like the word religion is not found in the Old Testament either.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Is the concept there?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, the concept is there.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what you do have in the Old Testament, from verse 1, you have in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is this union of grace and nature.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And taking center stage with the earth at his feet and heaven above him is Adam, man.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so really quite stunning vision.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: The heavens are not disorderly, there are not many godlets fighting it out, and the earth is not this body of a dead monster, as in so many of the ancient Near Eastern texts.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: The heavens are orderly, and the earth to begin with is wild potential.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: And who is going to bring out the potential of earth?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Man.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Adam.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Adam in Hebrew is the word for man.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's also taken from the word Adama for ground.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: He is earthman.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: He's a dirtbag, Adam.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: But he stands at the top of nature, at the top of the earth, as the one who is going to bring order out of the wildness of the earth.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Notice that in Genesis chapter 2, Adam is made into a gardener, and he is made into one who names the animals.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: There is already progress.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's already progress in Genesis chapter 1.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: We go from very simple things, day one, two, three, to far more complicated things, day four, five, six.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the culmination of that progress is man who stands atop the world.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he, as God's image, will do what God does, bring order out of chaos.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he is commissioned in chapter two to bring some of the wild potential of the world into greater order, into God's purposes.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of chapter two, we have the creation of Eve, and he goes down into a death-like sleep, his side is pierced, and out of the violence that is done to the man, the bride is formed, he's raised up, she's raised up, and they're brought together for consummation and singing.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is a proclamation of the gospel right there in Genesis chapter 2.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Ephesians 5 calls it.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Paul calls it in the New Testament.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is the gospel that the man, through death and through the piercing of his side, his bride is formed.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: They are raised up, they're brought together, and this is the consummation for which all of heaven and earth is made.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is a direction to nature, actually, but that direction is through death and resurrection, out will come something even greater than there was before, but it is still in utter continuity with what was there before.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Nature is not static in the Old Testament or the New Testament.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Nature is not static in Christianity, but it is also not a free-for-all, which I think is what Peter Thiel would like.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Thiel would like there to be no such thing as nature, so that by grace, or really by human will and effort and technology, we can remake ourselves any which way we like, and we don't have to honor anything given in nature.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Thiel says there's no such thing as nature in the Old Testament, which is a highly questionable and b highly convenient for him because he doesn't want there to be such a thing as a constraint on the nature of humanity, because he wants to be able to remake humanity into something else.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: But let's keep going with Peter.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you if you you know, um and that there is you know, there is a word in which a sense in which the the way I understand uh you know the uh you know the Judeo-Christian inspiration is it is it is it is it is about transcending nature, it is about overcoming things, and you know, and the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen, and that that's uh the natural thing in a Christian sense is that um you're messed up.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's true, but um, you know, there's some ways that uh, you know, with God's help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so for Peter Thiel, what we're left with in the Old Testament is that we are just fallen, and then we, through God's help, are meant to ameliorate our condition and somehow overcome some of the effects of the fall.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really what's going on in Genesis.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, okay, there is progress in the Bible, but there are illegitimate ways of transcending the problems of the fall.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Genesis gives us the one way we are meant to unite heaven and earth, and three ways that humanity have illegitimately tried to unite heaven and earth and achieve God's ends without God.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Simply trying to solve.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Problems does not make you a Christian, there are all sorts of ways of solving problems that make those problems worse.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Thiel knows this.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: He's known for his doctrine of the Antichrist, which he thinks of as one world government.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: One world government is going to come in as an illegitimate solution to an apocalyptic danger that is out there.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Peter Thiel is worried that if we talk so much about climate catastrophe, we talk so much about AI catastrophe, we talk so much about nuclear catastrophe, that somebody will come in and they'll say, oh no, it's terrible.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Something must be done.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Look, this is something.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the something that will be offered as the solution to that problem will be some kind of one world government.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And as a libertarian, he does not like one world government.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: As a libertarian, he fears that there are some solutions to the problems that end up being worse than the problems itself.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, Peter Teal, I'll grant you that principle, but let's apply that principle to this.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: There are problems to the human condition, but some of our solutions end up worse than the problem itself.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: With heaven and earth kind of torn asunder, sort of God and man at enmity with one another in Genesis, there are three falls actually.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: There are three ways that humanity tries to get a heavenly result, but not by a heavenly means.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Firstly, in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve grasp at the fruit and use their power of choice to take from God what they thought God was holding out on them.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: That is to use power to achieve the ends of uniting heaven and earth.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: The second fall happens really in Genesis chapter 6, where the sons of God go to the daughters of men, and there is an illegitimate union of heaven and earth.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that illegitimate use of sex as your transcendent is the epitome of evil that is identified by God in Genesis 6 as worthy of a global judgment.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: Power in Genesis 3, sex in Genesis 6, and then in Genesis 11, this technology is this false way of humans trying to unite themselves with the heavens.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: They will build a tower with its head in the heavens, they say in Genesis chapter 11.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: And they use the very best technology to hand, and they bake the bricks and they build their tower.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so through tech, they're going to unite heaven and earth.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis doesn't really have one fall.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of scholars have noticed that there are kind of three falls in Genesis.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: There is the first couple who, through their exercise of choice, power, you might say, there is that fall in Genesis 3.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: That use of power becomes violent in Genesis chapter 4, as Cain kills Abel, and that choice, that power, that force leads to violence.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then in Genesis 6, you've got that kind of fall.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in Genesis 11, you've got a very different kind of a fall.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: But what we are witnessing in Genesis is all these illegitimate unions of heaven and earth.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they use power and sex and technology in order to get to what they think would be a godly end.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not a godly means, and they all end up utterly scattered.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Just as a little aside with AI, every time somebody says that artificial general intelligence will get to such a level that we will transcend humanity, just remember Genesis chapter 11.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Just remember that humans get scattered when they get proud like that.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Always happens.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: But remember how I said there were three illegitimate unions of heaven and earth in Genesis, but one legitimate union.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: What is the one legitimate union?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's right there in Genesis chapter 3.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: The seed of the woman would crush Antichrist, would crush evil, even though he himself would be struck.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's Genesis chapter 3, verse 15.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: As a sheer gift from heaven, the Son of God would join the human race.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that gets right to the heart of God has a nature.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: It is a nature of overflowing love, but we also have a nature.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it is a nature that God himself would take in the incarnation so that Jesus would shoulder our burdens as man and for man.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: He would be struck on the cross, he would go through that deep shadow of death, but he would pass our humanity through the furnace of affliction, through the furnace of judgment, and bring it out the other side, glorified, he would bring it through perfected.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Though his heel would be struck, yet he would crush evil and have the victory.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: There is an overcoming of all the evils and the burdens that humanity have had to shoulder since Adam.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: There is an overcoming of it.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the overcoming does not come from our side, it comes from God's side, who takes our side and takes our nature, not to destroy our nature, but to perfect our nature through suffering.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: The first Adam had a nature, and that nature was like a pencil sketch of this ruler who has dominion over the world to improve it.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the pencil sketch is fulfilled and was always intended to be fulfilled by the oil painting who is Christ.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: He is the one who truly has dominion over the earth.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: But he has dominion over the earth as God and man, which means there is such a thing as nature.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: There is the nature of God and there is the nature of man.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we are free to do a lot of things in this world and to solve a lot of problems in this world, but we are not free to remake God's nature, and we are not free to remake our nature.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: But Peter Seal wants to throw off the shackles of nature, and he thinks that actually there is no such thing as nature, really.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: We've only got this unfortunate fallen state.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: And God says we can just improve ourselves, can't we?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if we can improve ourselves, then of course we can have crutches to help us when we break our leg, and of course we can have eyeglasses if we're short-sighted.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then of course we can use anesthetic if we want to have surgeries, right?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if we can have brain surgeries, why can't we have a neuralink that's put into our brains?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: And surely these are just incremental upgradings of the human species, and surely God has nothing to say about any of this because there's no such thing as a human nature, right?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And yet Peter Teal says he believes in the resurrection of Christ.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is human nature.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: The second Adam stood on this earth, and as a human, he was a seed.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: In John chapter 12, Jesus says that he is going to go down into the ground and be raised up again, and he is still continuous with the seed that he was.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: He still bears the same scars of his crucifixion, but he passes those through the furnace of judgment and out the other side into a glorified humanity.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: He does not leave behind Homo sapiens.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: He does not leave behind his human nature.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there is forevermore a man at the right hand of the Father.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity has a future.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Ross Douthit's question can be answered in the affirmative without hesitation.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: There is a future for the human race.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: God's.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: God has taken humanity to himself for all time.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Woe betide anyone who wants to cast it off.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the reasons why people want to cast it off is because they don't want to go through the valley of deep shadow in order to get to the feasting joy at the end.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to be a seed that dies and goes into the ground and rises again.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: They want to bypass that route through technology.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: They want Easter Sunday morning, but they don't want the scars of Golgotha that got us there.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which means there is some pain, there are some burdens, there is some weakness that is not to be cast off, but is to be embraced in the way of Christ.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: I thank God for modern medicine and all that it helps us with.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: But that modern medicine is to help us be more human.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And to be more human is to be more Christ-like, and therefore to embrace certain burdens on behalf of others.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let me take the course of chemotherapy to survive so that I can help my kids.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is to use technology in the way of the cross.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: But there is a way of using technology in the way of Babel, which means as these questions of humanity and what is a human arise, let us be more and more Christ-like.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't just mean the goal of resurrection, it also means the means, the way.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that way is the cross.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And look, the final word on this must go to C.S.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: He has obviously written the book on the abolition of man.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Does humanity have a future?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Should we want humanity to have a future?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: C.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man 80 Years Ago, and he talked about even then our Babel-like tendencies to, through technology, try to escape Earth, try to escape nature in these Babel-like ways.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we, through science and technology, will try to transcend our limits, try to transcend nature towards some greater goal.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it would lead to the abolition of man, the abolition of humanity, says C.S.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: And in a statement that is worth tattooing on the inside of our eyelids so that we never forget it.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: He said, What we call man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men, with nature as its instrument.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are givens to this world.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: The nature of God and the nature of man.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we can know these things in the God man, who is a gift to us, to invite us into his transcendence, into his glory, into his immortality.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Outside of him, you will not find greater freedom or greater life outside of his givens.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Outside of Christ, you will only have power plays.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: You won't have man transcending nature.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: You will just have man using nature against other men.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: Beware the power plays.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Beware the transhumanists.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, embrace Christ and embrace the way of Christ.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Down into suffering and up into greater joy.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: Through the valley of deep shadow and out into glory, through cross and into resurrection.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a fascinating conversation between Peter Thiel and Ross Dalthert.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: I thought Ross Dalthit did a superb job of being dogged and then of letting Peter Thiel have enough rope to hang himself at times.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can go and check it out on Interesting Times with Ross Dalthit.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's called AI, Mars and Immortality.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Are we dreaming big enough?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: But this has been my take on power, sex, technology, nature, grace, and why all the answers are in Genesis.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, all the answers are in Christ, actually.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to find out more about Christ, the second Adam, who goes down and brings us up to offer us true immortality, go to 321course.com.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's our online course.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's totally free.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can get in with an email and a password, and you're all set, and you'll see life according to Jesus.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: And why not subscribe to the channel so we can catch you on the next one?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: God bless.