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Glen Debated Michael Shermer || SLP545 · The Speak Life Podcast

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• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: Hello and welcome back to the Speak Life Podcast, episode 545.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Thomas Thurrogood, media producer at Speak Life.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: And today you are going to hear our director, Glenn Scrivener, reflecting on a recent debate that he had with Michael Shermer.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: That was for the premiere unbelievable channel, which Glenn has been on before.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: You might remember his debate with Matt Dillahunty, or more recently, his debate with Bart Ehrman.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: But this time he was debating Michael Shermer about morality and are there objective moral values?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: And if so, what is the foundation for those?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: The debate went out on the Unbelievable channel on the 25th of October.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: You can check out the full thing on their YouTube channel or listen to it via their podcast.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: But in this episode, you will hear Glenn playing some clips from the debate and sharing his reflections.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: But I hope it might be useful to you in thinking through some of these issues and perhaps conversations with friends about, yeah, where do human rights come from?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: That sort of thing.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: So without further ado, I will hand straight over to Glenn Scrivener.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_08: Hello, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_08: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_08: Is there such a thing as goodness?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_08: Goodness with a capital G?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_08: And if so, says who?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_08: And what right do they have to say it?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_08: What reasons might they have for saying it?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_08: And if there are reasons for them to say it, then maybe we don't need that authority figure.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_08: Maybe goodness just exists as a free floating thing out there in the ether waiting to be discovered.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_08: All these thoughts are very ancient ones.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_08: Socrates had a dialogue with Euthyphro a little under two and a half thousand years ago, in which Plato, writing the part of Socrates, says this, is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_08: To put it another way, does God recognize goodness as this external thing and then call it good?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_08: Or is it just the case that whatever God says, I guess that's what we call goodness?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_08: And of course, if you go down either one of those routes, you're left with one kind of a problem.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_08: So if you think that there is this goodness thing over there and God says, Oh, I quite like that, then God himself does not seem to be the source of being and goodness.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_08: There seems to be this other thing called goodness outside of himself, and such a god seems to be a servant of this other thing called the good.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_08: But if on the other hand, goodness is simply whatever God says it is, then that just seems to be incredibly arbitrary and perhaps quite scary, uh, especially when you think that Euthyphro and Socrates were debating about the Greek gods, uh whose humanistic concern uh was questionable at times, let's put it that way.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_08: Um so this Euthyphro dilemma uh has really echoed down through the centuries, and it's a really interesting question for a Platonist to wrestle with.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_08: I think it's a fascinating question for Christians to wrestle with.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_08: It's also a question for you to wrestle with if you're an atheist.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_08: Uh everybody has to deal with a source of being and life, whether it's the gods, for Euthyphro, or whether it's the triune god, in the Christian's case, or if it's simply naturalistic processes like evolution.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_08: Uh everybody conceives of a source of life and being, and everybody has to deal with a moral universe, and how we put together that source of life and what we call goodness, that's a dilemma that everybody faces.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_08: The Platonist faces it, the Christian faces it, the Muslim faces it, the Hindu faces it, and the atheist faces it.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_08: And my point in this video is even if you're an atheist, you still have to answer Socrates' question to Euthyphro.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_08: We all have to solve the Euthyphro dilemma, and I want to put it to you that Christianity has unique and satisfying resources for solving this dilemma.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, what's made me think of all this is I I was doing a debate uh just last week with Dr.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_08: Michael Shermer.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_08: He is the founder of Skeptic magazine, and we had a great back and forth on the topic of the great morality debate, secularism versus Christianity.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_08: And uh I really enjoyed my my time with uh Dr.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_08: I read uh quite a number of uh his articles.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_08: I read um uh his book, The Moral Ark, which in many ways is kind of the mirror image of my book, The Air We Breathe.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_08: I wrote The Air We Breathe in 2022 about how Christianity has informed our moral sensibilities.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_08: He wrote the book The Moral Arc in 2015 about how enlightenment rationalism has informed our moral sensibilities.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_08: And so we had we had a great back and forth uh on Friday.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_08: And what I really appreciate about Dr.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer is uh about how much we can agree on.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, he is uh a moral realist.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_08: He really believes in goodness with a capital G.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_08: He put it like this in his opening remarks.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I am committed to uh the principle of universal realism.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: There is a reality out there, and we can know something about it, although I also uh accept fallibilism.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: That is to say, none of us are omniscient or omnipotent.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not God, and neither are you.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we're all flawed, uh, so we could be wrong.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't say that we can know the truth about reality with, you know, a capital T and a capital R.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but we can approach approach it, you know, in an asymptotic curve in a Bayesian kind of probabilities, this is likely to be true or likely to be false, or we're not certain to some probabilities.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then I apply that uh universal realism to moral realism.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are absolute rights and wrongs, uh, you know, not in every sphere of human action, but many of them.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm not a cultural relativist, I'm not a moral relativist.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of my secular and atheist friends are.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I'm kind of pushing back against that notion um that there are no moral truths or objective moral realities.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I make that defense there.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's my position.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_08: Very good.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_08: And Dr.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_08: Sherma is in print saying whether or not there is a God, moral truths exist in the form of objective, universal values that can be discovered through observation and inference, just like any other phenomena of the natural and human world.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_08: And he really does mean that in a in a quite literal sense.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_08: He he speaks of human rights existing in the same way that gravity exists.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_08: It's out there, it's ready to be discovered.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_08: And just as Isaac Newton discovered gravity because it was already there, then we discovered human rights.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_08: He thinks the Enlightenment discovered it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_08: Uh I I think it's Christianity that gave us that language around human rights.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_08: But I I guess both he and I believe that there's such a thing as human rights.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_08: Um and, you know, he he says at one point, it is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that are really out there, so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_08: Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits, given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_08: Scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_08: So he believes in moral realism, he believes in human rights, he believes in the value of the individual, um, he thinks it's derived by science, which I don't think he gets it from science.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_08: I think he assumes the value of the individual for some classical liberal reasons, um, which are very much to do with Christianization, but he believes in the individual, he believes in human rights, he believes in do unto others, he calls it reciprocal altruism, but uh he believes in love your neighbor uh and in the widening of the moral sphere that is inherent in loving your neighbor.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_08: He calls it the expanding circle, and he considers it to come from uh the ethicist Peter Singer and others.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_08: Um, I think it's come from Jesus, but he believes what the Reverend Dr.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_08: Martin Luther King Jr.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_08: believed, and the Reverend Theodore Parker believed a hundred years earlier.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_08: Theodore Parker was an abolitionist preacher, Reverend Martin Luther King was a civil rights preacher.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_08: But they both said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_08: Apparently the universe is a moral place, and apparently history is heading towards justice.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_08: That is the kind of universe that we live in, and I just rejoice that Dr.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer has those kinds of beliefs.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_08: He's not like Matt Delahunty, who uh is an atheist and anti-theist who I debated a few years ago on unbelievable.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think human lives have incredible value.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think they have any intrinsic value.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think the universe cares at all about human life.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: They have value because they have value to us.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_08: So Matt Dillahunte, the atheist, the anti-theist, uh, he does not believe in the same sorts of things that Michael Shermer does.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_08: He doesn't believe in intrinsic human value and uh those kinds of human rights that are objective facts of the universe.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_08: Um Michael Shermer does believe in those sorts of things, but he doesn't believe in God, and he doesn't think you need God in order to believe these sorts of things.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_08: And uh so Vince Vitaly uh says quite rightly to Michael Shermer, um, you seem to have arrived at an objective moral system and you haven't needed God.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_08: Am I right about that?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's really helpful.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_04: You know, and you know, if God did exist, uh say a bit more about why that wouldn't change your approach.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_04: Because a lot of people might think, well, okay, you think God doesn't exist, so you find a way to understand morality which is apart from God.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_04: But if God existed, then surely he would be the ground of morality.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_04: But you sort of push push against that.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_04: Explain that for us.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I just don't see what it adds to the equation.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: If something is uh wrong, it's morally wrong, say slavery or child molestation or whatever, um, it's it's really wrong, whether there's a God or not.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And and if there's a God that says, you know, that's okay to do it, it's still wrong.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so what are the reasons?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is you know what what what what I want to know is why why should we uh endorse this or condemn that?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so you know, if God is um instructing us on what's right and wrong um based on these reasons, why not just give us the reasons?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_08: Great.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_08: So you see how we're in the vicinity of the Euthyphro dilemma, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_08: If there is such a thing as goodness, um why do we need the gods or a gods to tell us what that goodness is?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_08: It seems like goodness is already a thing.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_08: Um God just gets in the way, surely.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_08: Vince Vitale then summarizes Michael Sherma's position.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_08: So here we are orbiting around the Euthyphro dilemma, and Vince Vitale uh asks it to me directly.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: What does God add to our understanding of of morality?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_04: You know, there's this dilemma here where it seems like either he commands things uh arbitrarily or he's relying on some sort of reason outside of himself, or at least that's what Michael's kind of saying.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_04: So God is sort of superfluous, you know, either way.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_04: How would you approach the same question?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_08: So Vince Vitale has laid out that the two options, the the two horns of the dilemma, and and of course, if somebody does offer you these two dilemmas, um the the thing to do is to refuse the dilemma always.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_08: You know, as Gavin Ortland says about the Euthyphro dilemma, it's kind of like asking, which is the greatest sport, basketball or golf?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_08: And you're like, there are other options out there.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_08: Like it's not just these two options, but but let's think through these two options.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_08: If you say that God simply chooses what is already good, then there is this thing called goodness and you don't need God.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_08: Or, on the other hand, if you just say that whatever God says is good, then it seems like you've lost goodness, actually.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_08: All you've got is God, and his arbitrary whims become what morality is.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_08: Now the first thing I want to do in my response is point out that if there is a thing called goodness with a capital G, that's not really the sort of thing that a naturalist would believe in.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_08: If there is such a thing as this objective realm of moral facts and values, then that sounds incredibly supernatural, and I didn't think that Dr.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer was a supernaturalist.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_08: That's that's where I go first of all.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_08: Well, I guess you've got to ask what kind of reality we're actually living in, and if it's a reality that includes, as Dr.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer and myself both believe, it it includes things like matter, it it includes matter in motion, it includes, you know, particles and forces and that sort of thing.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_08: We both agree to that.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_08: We also both agree that reality includes things like minds, uh, which is a pretty extraordinary thing for reality to include, minds that can reflect on the fact on the fact that there are molecules in motion.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_08: Um so that that's a kind of an extraordinary thing to sort of take its place in the metaphysical furniture of this universe.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_08: You know, uh if you have the contents of the metaphysical furniture furniture of the universe, tick, uh we believe in matter, we believe in motion, we believe in minds, we also believe in maths.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_08: Um we we believe that there are sort of real abstract objects out there that are that are not material um and yet have a real kind of um reality to them.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_08: But we also seem to believe, and I and I really rejoice that Dr.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_08: Sherman and myself have such agreement that there are also such things as morals in this universe.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_08: Um but as soon as you've said that in addition to matter in motion, you've also got things like minds, you've also got things like maths, you've also got things like um music and beauty and all those sorts of things, and you've got these things called moral truths that are real, that are objective, that stand above us, that obligate us towards certain uh actions.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_08: Um as soon as you've said that, you you've said that we're living in a very theological sounding universe.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_08: We we're not living in a barren universe uh of mere physical forces.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_08: We're living in a universe of right and wrong.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_08: And if there are things that are wrong, um such as certain kinds of war, if there are things that are wrong, such as child sexual abuse, if there's certain things that are wrong, such as slavery, then I guess there's something that is right and right with a capital R.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_08: I mentioned those three things because those are three things that Michael Shermer uh raised as things in history that we used to think were okay and have developed a moral sense that they are wrong.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_08: So I'm I'm pushing into that.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_08: And I guess I would just say that it is um it is not accidental that it was that it is Christianity that has given us um our modern building blocks for understanding what just war is.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_08: Uh that's a thoroughly Christian idea.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_08: Augustine tracing things back to Romans 13 and elsewhere in the scriptures.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_08: Just war is a thoroughly Christian idea.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_08: The ending of child sexual exploitation, in other words, heterasty in the ancient world was uh a Christian contribution to the world, and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade was another Christian contribution to the world.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_08: And I don't think it's coincidental that it's people who believe in a theological universe who also bring that morality to bear on nature and start to come up with things like rights and humanism and abolitionism and um the dignity of the individual equality, all these sorts of things are foundationally theological moral presuppositions.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_08: And whether or not you have a god from Mount Sinai decreeing X, Y, or Z, um to grant that there are such things as human rights, let's say, is to grant that we are already in a thoroughly theological universe, and that is not what you would expect on naturalism, on the philosophy that all there is is matter in motion.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_08: So that's where I go.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_08: If you're gonna grant that there's a thing called goodness, goodness with a capital G, um, then you have already granted that in your universe um there are things that are not just matter in motion.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_08: Um there are these things called morals, um, which don't reduce easily to uh naturalistic forces.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_08: Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_08: What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_08: When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_08: Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_08: And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_08: If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_08: Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_08: Visit kingdom.bankslash speaklife.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_08: Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_08: Quite often the atheist who assumes that the universe boils down to matter in motion, um, they think that faith heads like myself, um, they just believe in magic on top of matter in motion.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_08: There's just matter in motion, and if there's any other kind of beliefs in the world, it must be this mysterious woo called magic, this voodoo that's out there.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_08: Um whereas actually what I think Christians are saying is let's pay attention to what reality is like.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_08: Yes, there's matter in motion, but there's also minds, and there's maths, and there's music, and there are metaphysical truths, and there there are morals, right?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_08: All sorts of M's, right?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_08: There are these realities that do not reduce to particles and forces, but to matter in motion.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_08: Morals is one of those things, and we just want to pay attention to the fact that there's goodness with a capital G.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_08: And if Dr.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer is going to grant that there's such a thing as goodness with a capital G, I think he has to grant that the universe is at least as theological as Plato thought that it was.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_08: Plato, who writes the dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro, he had this belief in the good as this sort of metaphysical realm that was impersonal itself.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_08: The good itself did not do good, but simply is goodness itself.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_08: I don't think it's ultimately a very uh s intellectually satisfying position, because goodness surely is a personal kind of a reality.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_08: Um, as Dr.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer says in our dialogue, it's hard to think of moral situations that don't involve persons.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_08: Um, if you're just on a desert island by yourself, or if there just is a desert island with no persons whatsoever, um, what happens on that desert island doesn't seem to be particularly moral.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_08: And even if you're just by yourself, it's hard to think of moral situations that you get into.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_08: Morality seems to involve persons and interpersonal relationships.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_08: We might get into that in just a second.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_08: Um, but Dr.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_08: Sherma seems committed, if he does believe in moral realism, to this idea of the good, which commits him to a universe that's at least as theological as Plato's and probably is not Bertrand Russell's universe.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_08: It probably isn't Richard Dawkins' universe.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_08: That at the bottom there is nothing, there's no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, as Dawkins has famously said.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_08: So the first thing I want to do is to point out to Dr.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer: if he says we don't need God because we've got goodness, I don't think you've evacuated your universe of the supernatural by simply getting rid of God and instead rushing into the void, left left by God, rushing into the God-shaped hole, comes the good.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_08: Um, the good who sounds remarkably like the God of the Bible.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_08: Now, in a moment, I'm going to deal with the pushback that often comes from the atheist, and the atheist will often say, Okay, well, if goodness is not a thing that's outside of God's, Christian, your problem is God just says it, and it is good by divine fiat.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_08: It's just utterly arbitrary, and maybe it's pretty scary that whatever God says goes.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_08: How do you deal with the arbitrariness of okay, if you can't divorce goodness from God's, and if it doesn't make sense to have a non-theological goodness that's just kind of out there floating in the ether, okay, well, but don't you then have the other problem?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_08: Haven't you got to travel the other road of the Euthyphro dilemma?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_08: I will deal with that in just a second, but before I deal with how Christians handle the the Euthyphro dilemma, I need to pose it back to my atheist friends.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_08: Because everybody has to answer the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_08: If you believe in goodness at all, then you need to coordinate what is this goodness and how does it relate to the source of life and being?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_08: Now, Christians have to answer that question, how does God relate to the good?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_08: And I will answer that question in just a second.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_08: But what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_08: How does an atheist deal with the Euthyphro dilemma because the atheist has to deal with the Euthyphro dilemma?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_08: Um remember how it was posed uh by Socrates to Euthyphro?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_08: He says, Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_08: To put it another way, does God call good things good because they are already good?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_08: Or is God calling something good that which makes it good?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_08: Okay?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_08: That is the version of the dilemma that Christians have to answer.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_08: Here's the version of the dilemma that atheists have to answer, okay?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_08: Does your source of life lead towards the good?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_08: Or is what your source of life leads to by definition good?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_08: I'll put it more specifically.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_08: Does evolution tend towards the good, or is something good because it is evolved?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_08: Right?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_08: D you see the dilemma?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_08: Does evolution tend towards the good, or is something good simply because evolution has tended towards it?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_08: Now, if you go for that latter option that we're just going to call something good because evolution has produced it, that leads to some pretty scary places.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_08: In the clip you're about to hear, Justin Briley asks Richard Dawkins about whether rape is wrong, wrong with a capital W.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_08: And what he does here is he does a Euthyphro dilemma on Richard Dawkins.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_08: You see, it is entirely right to put the dilemma to all people, to the Platonists as well as the Christians, as well as the atheists.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_08: And here we have audio of Justin Briley asking this question.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_08: We'll go over it a couple of times.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_07: When you make a value judgment, don't you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say there there is the reason this is good is because it's good and you don't have any um way to stand on that state.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_07: But my value judgment itself could come from my evolutionary problem, stem.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_07: So therefore it's it's just as random in a sense as any product of evolution.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_07: Well you could you could say that, um, but it it doesn't in any case, nothing about it uh makes it more probable that there is anything supernatural.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, but but ultimately your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, you could say that.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_08: You could say that.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_08: That that was a masterful example of using Euthyphro uh very fruitfully, I think.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_08: Um everybody has to answer Euthyphro.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_08: Atheists have to answer Euthyphro as well.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_08: Let's go back over and see the way in which um Justin Brile was kind of allowing Richard Dawkins to go down either one of the paths or the other of the paths of the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_08: Let's go over it again.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_07: When you make a value judgment, don't you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say So this is what we normally want to do.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_08: We we would normally want to say that there's something that's good.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_08: Like rape rape is wrong, and it doesn't matter what culture you're in, right?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_08: And and it doesn't matter if it's good for the survival of the species.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_08: And every other species has forced sex, right?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_08: And if we are simply DNA replicators, what is it that is wrong about rape, right?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_08: And we but we we have this sense, don't we, that that rape is wrong and wrong with a capital W, even if it helps you survive and pass on your genes.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_08: Is there a goodness that is there a goodness that is outside of the evolutionary scheme?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_08: And of course Richard Dawkins is not going to want to say that because that sounds very theological to him.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_07: The reason this is good is because it's good, and you don't have any um way to stand on that statement.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_07: My value judgment itself could come from my evolutionary path.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_08: My value statement itself comes from my evolutionary past.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_08: So it is not that evolution selects what is good, it is what evolution selects is goodness, right?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_08: It's not that evolution tends towards this goodness that stands outside of the evolutionary scheme.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_08: It's that my evolved sense of goodness is itself shaped by evolutionary processes such that my creator is determining what is good, and my creator is the evolutionary process, right?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_08: So Dawkins has decided not to go with there's a goodness outside of his creator, evolution.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_08: Instead, his creator is what determines what is good.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_08: And that leaves you with the question of arbitrariness.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_08: Is it simply that what is good is actually just utilitarian, it's actually just pragmatic, it's it's actually just helpful for the flourishing of the species, which is not really what we tend to think of when we think of goodness.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_08: Goodness seems to lose its moral quality at that point and just be a pragmatic thing about helping me to survive.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_08: So that's the horn of the dilemma that Justin Briley wants to get Richard Dawkins onto, and I think pretty successfully here.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_07: So therefore it's it's just as random in a sense as any product of evolution.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_07: Well, you could you could say that, uh, but it it doesn't in any case, nothing about it uh makes it more probable that there is anything supernatural.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_08: Nothing about it makes it more probable that there's anything supernatural.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_08: Well, o only if you absolutely deny that there's such a thing as goodness.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_08: If if you do think that there's such a thing as goodness, and maybe evolution selects towards this thing called goodness, well, that's a pretty supernatural thing, okay?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_08: So maybe some of this conversation does make an atheist rethink and imagine themselves to be at least a Platonist, if not a Christian, right?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_08: Because they start to think that there's goodness with a capital G.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_08: But Richard Dawkins doesn't want to go down that route, and so he just thinks what whatever goodness is, it's just what the evolutionary process has selected for.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_08: But then, having gotten rid of the supernatural, we end up in this entirely arbitrary and morally obscene situation.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_08: And Justin Briley does a brilliant job of just exposing how obscene, how morally repugnant this position is with the final word.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, but but ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, you could say that.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_08: None of this is an argument for the supernatural, thinks Richard Dawkins.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_08: I I think that 45 seconds is a very good argument for the supernatural.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_08: It's a very good argument for the kind of supernatural that Jesus reveals, as we'll see.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, but it's not just Richard Dawkins.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_08: In my debate with Matt Dillahunte, I tried to get him to say, is there such a thing as goodness?
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_08: Is there such a thing as all members of the human family are worthy of all provision and protection?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_08: Um, but Matt Dillahunte did not want to agree to that.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_08: Do you would you agree with that?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_08: All human all members of the human family, no matter what their achievements, no matter what their attributes, all members of the human family are worthy of all provision and protection.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: I have no idea.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_08: Mm-hmm.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_08: That's a problem.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_08: That is a problem.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_08: And when Justin Briley raised the issue of the Nazis, we got into this back and forth about designing a society that is only trying to maximize well-being, only try to maximize our sort of survival in Darwinian terms.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_08: Dillahunty very much did not want to believe in goodness with a capital G, it was all down to well-being on the evolutionary scheme, and so the conversation unfolded like this.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_08: And if well-being is is the metric that we're using, and if Hitler could say, Oh, we are so much better off without the disabled, you have no idea.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_08: You know, we're we're soaring our industry, our numbers are through the roof, our well-being is is yeah, is doing incredibly well once we eliminate the the sick, the weak, the handicapped.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_08: Um is he right at that point?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's when you go through and you talk about what data are you looking at to define well-being?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because what data?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_08: You're having that conversation about the data.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_08: Because he's because he's just told you I've eliminated the handicap.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_08: No, no, okay.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_08: But it's happening right now.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_08: Okay, that the there is a Down syndrome population, for instance, that's being eliminated globally right now.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_08: And we're having a conversation about it.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_08: Okay, and I I think it's better to have a conversation than to blow people up and all that sort of stuff.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_08: But um it's it's a very live issue.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_08: It's not just the Godwin's rule.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just going with the example.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: You say Hitler comes to me and says you wouldn't believe how much better our society is off now that we're eliminating these people.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: Then you have to go back and look at it and say, okay, what have you lost?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: Is your society better?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: And are you just looking at the short term?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: Did you in fact how do you know that you didn't lose a cure for disease?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: How do you know that you're not worse off because it has fundamentally changed your psyche?
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: How do you know that you're not worse off because you've lost art, because you you've you've lost human connection?
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just See, this is one of the problems that you could point out to people that are going down there.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well-being is not just what's my financial problem.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_06: Were lives worth something even if they didn't produce a cure for cancer or great works of art, even if they just sat around and consumed all the resources that all the able-bodied people were doing.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_06: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: If somebody sat around and did nothing but consume, uh I I don't know how you could consider that in as adding value.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: You have to point to something where they're adding value to society.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_08: So they have to achieve, they have to add value.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_08: But they don't have value.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: So this is what I'm saying when I say that there's no intrinsic value to it.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_08: Aaron Powell So it's obvious which way Matt Delahunty and Richard Dawkins go on the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_08: They don't believe in value outside the evolutionary process as something to which the process tends.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_08: Instead, they say that value is whatever the process produces.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_08: And therefore, people do not have value.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_08: They must demonstrate value.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_08: And they must demonstrate value in Darwinian terms, which is not only arbitrary but morally grotesque, I think.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_08: Now, good news, Dr.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_08: Michael Shermer does think that there's such a thing as value.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_08: He thinks it's like gravity, it's out there, it's waiting to be um discovered.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_08: And we'll we'll think about that in a second video that I'm gonna do as a response to my debate with Dr.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_08: But Dr.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_08: Shermer is on the other horn of the dilemma.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_08: He does think that there is goodness that is out there that is not reducible.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_08: I hope he thinks that it's not reducible simply uh to survival of the fittest.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_08: Um but if that's true, I would say that he already believes in a very theological universe.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_08: I mentioned about the metaphysical furniture list of the universe, all the things that this universe contains, including matter in motion, but also minds and morals and maths and um all this rich theological supernatural stuff that exists in the universe.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_08: And I think a lot of atheists misunderstand Christians.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_08: They think that we're saying that we live in a world of matter in motion, but there's a Moses figure on high, and he just dictates from Mount Sinai that murder is wrong and lying is wrong, and you've got to, you know, hop on one foot on Tuesdays, or like, and that it's all equally arbitrary.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_08: But the Christian position is not that you need the IKEA furniture manual in order to assemble the furniture.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_08: I fully believe that Michael Shermer can put together from first principles that he's probably borrowed from Christianity, but I think he can take from Christianity some first principles and come up with an ethical system that sounds remarkably like Christianity.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_08: I he can totally do that in the same way that you can assemble that Ikea dining table without any reference to the manual.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_08: You might not even know that a that a manual exists.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_08: And you might even assemble that table in record time, and you didn't even need to use all the nuts and bolts that the other guys have to use, right?
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_08: Um and it kind of does the job, okay?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_08: That is the way that Christians see non-Christian ethicists.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_08: They're putting together the same bits of furniture that we all have to hand.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_08: And and sometimes they might do a job that's that's better than what the Christian does, and they've got the manual, right?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_08: But the fact that you made a dining table because you looked over your shoulder and you saw my dining table and you just copied it, the fact that you made that dining table without having a manual is no argument against the existence of IKEA or the existence of furniture, or of the need to have a raised flat surface to dine on, okay?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_08: Um we live in a universe in which there are moral facts that are out there, there are real values that are out there, and we don't think that you need the manual, we don't think you need the Bible in order to discover these things, okay?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_08: But you do need IKEA, you do need God, you do need the concept of a dining table, right?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_08: And so Christians would say to atheists, um, you also live in a metaphysical universe.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_08: You live in a world of real moral facts and values, and that should tell you something about the world.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_08: It should tell you that we don't just live in a universe of matter in motion.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_08: We have minds and maths and morals and all kinds of supernatural stuff.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_08: And the last thing you should be is a naturalist.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_08: It's really the last thing you should be.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_08: But then, you know, may maybe you should be a Platonist, right?
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_08: Like here's here's how Plato um dealt with the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_08: He was writing Socrates' part for him, and Plato essentially thought that there was a an abstract realm of of morals called the good.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_08: Now the good was impersonal, and yet the good was this moral realm.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_08: And I I don't think that is intellectually satisfying to think of goodness in an abstract sense that is non-personal, goodness that does not itself do good, and yet simply is a value by which we judge other things to be good.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_08: Interestingly, when Jews and Christians came across Platonists, you can see this in the writings of Philo or of Justin Martyr, they they kind of came across these platonists and they thought, um, hey guys, you know how you believe in this goodness that is above all the squabbling deities and Zeus and all that lot.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_08: You know how you you recognize that those squabbling deities are not good, really.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_08: And that there must be a goodness that is high above them.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_08: Well, can I introduce you to God?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_08: Because God is goodness.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_08: And and here is the solution to the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_08: Plato had his own kind of solution to the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, it's it's not that God chooses things because they are good, it's that God chooses things because he is good.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_08: And for Plato, it's hard, I think, for him to escape from the arbitrariness of that position.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_08: But the dilemma is not hard for Christians because think of the kind of God we are talking about.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_08: We are talking about Father, Son, and Spirit bound together in love.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_08: God is love, and love is the good life, right?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_08: What is the good life according to the Bible?
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_08: Love, God, and love neighbor.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_08: Okay.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_08: So for all eternity, Christians have been saying the Father has been loving the Son in the joy of the Spirit.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_08: The Spirit has been the bond of peace between the Son and the Father.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_08: There is a life of goodness.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_08: There is such a thing as ultimate goodness, because God is love.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_08: God is not just loving.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_08: Love is not just something God does, and goodness is not just something that God chooses.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_08: Goodness is something that God is because God is love.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_08: And that's non-arbitrary.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_08: Because in the life of the Trinity, you already have a life of reciprocal love.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_08: You already have a life of liberty, equality, and fraternity, right?
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_08: Um it is no surprise that the French Revolution took up liberty, equality, and fraternity uh when for 1700 years Christian theologians had been thinking about the nature of persons and the individual and the good life and self-giving love as the highest virtue.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_08: Um the life of liberty, equality, and fraternity is the life of father, son, and spirit.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_08: In eternity, in eternity, there has been this sense of the person of father, son, and spirit.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_08: The the distinction of the persons, that's the liberty, the equality of the persons, and the the fraternity, the communion of the persons.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_08: In the bond of the spirit, there is a life of love.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_08: Now maybe you're thinking, okay, that is an improvement on Plato because this is a personal realm of goodness.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_08: Um, and so that that is an improvement on Plato.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_08: But then how does this realm of goodness connect with human affairs?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_08: And of course, that's the doctrine of the incarnation, like in Christianity, the Son of the Father filled with the Spirit, he has always been loving God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving his neighbor the spirit as himself.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_08: And he comes and he earths himself into our humanity to live out the good life in our flesh, in our history.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_08: The life of goodness actually connects to our history and to our humanity because Christ the Son became our brother, and in the bond of the Spirit, he lived out the good life in our midst, in our name, on our behalf.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_08: He took our badness where it needs to go on the cross, and he raised up our nature all the way to the right hand of the Father.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_08: There is a connection between the goodness and us, and that connection is called Jesus.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_08: And Christians say when you look at him, especially him on the cross, you are seeing goodness at its ultimate.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_08: Now here's the thing with the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_08: At some point you reach an ultimate goodness.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_08: At some point you reach a stopping point where you say, That's good, and then somebody says, Why is it good?
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_08: And you might say, Well, oh, that's good because i it's an expression of love thy neighbor.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_08: And then you say, Well, why is that good?
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_08: And you might say, Well, that's good because we're a pro-social species and we wouldn't get anywhere without that.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_08: Well, well, why is the human species good, right?
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_08: And at that point you might say, Well, I I guess that's good because, well, God the Son chose to become a human, right?
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_08: And then you might say, Well, why, why is that good?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_08: And the Christian says, Well, that's good because this is what God is like.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_08: God is love of the other.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_08: And his life is a life of self-giving, and he has elected to love humanity in this kind of way.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_08: And at some point you say, but why is that good?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_08: But why, but why, but why?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_08: And at some at some point, everybody hits a stopping point.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_08: Everybody, if you're dealing with ultimate goodness, you get to the ultimate.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_08: After a lot of why questions, you get to an ultimate being.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_08: And for Christians, the ultimate being is the triune God, who is revealed in Christ with his arms outstretched to the world, praying, Father forgive, loving his enemies, pouring out his own blood.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_08: This is what goodness is.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_08: And if you ask me why is that good, at some point I'm just gonna have to say, Will you take another look?
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_08: Will you will you just look again?
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_08: Can't you see that this is ultimate goodness?
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_08: Everybody, if you if you have any kind of concept of good, if you even have a concept that one thing is better than another thing, then you've actually got some kind of pole star that you're you're judging things by.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_08: You've actually got some kind of highest ideal.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_08: But then what is highest?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_08: And why is it highest?
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_08: And I tell you, with Jesus Christ, you haven't got a higher transcendent goodness.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_08: You have in Jesus goodness himself.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_08: And really that's the bottom line.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_08: That's where we get to, right at the end of the debate.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_08: Uh Vince Vitali asks me.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_08: If there is no God at all, am I still gonna stick to goodness, the good?
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_08: Am I still gonna be so interested in objective moral values if it turns out that we are living in an atheist universe?
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_08: Um I hadn't expected him to ask me that question, and uh here's here's what I came up with.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_04: Glenn, if i if somehow you you received compelling evidence that God didn't exist, how would you rethink your approach?
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_08: Um I was asked a similar question by a a Muslim um who who said, you know, what what if it's Allah and it's not Jesus?
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_08: And um and I and I said to I said to him, just give give me hell with Jesus, because uh hell with Jesus would be heaven for me.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_08: Um and and and maybe if it's a godless universe, um I I think I want to go down with Jesus, if you see what I mean.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_08: I think I I think I want to go down with the one who says uh love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, turn the other cheek.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_08: The one who says, put away your sword, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_08: I want to go with the one who spread his arms to the world and bled his own heart's blood even for his enemies, praying, Father, forgive.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_08: I think that's the most divine thing this world has ever seen.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_08: I think that vision of deity is what has birthed the greatest sociological phenomenon the world has ever seen, um, that has given us a rights revolution and has given us equality and compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress that has given us abolition of the slave trade and all these other things that we've we've kind of talked about.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_08: I think that vision is divine.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_08: Um, and if you tell me there's no such thing as divinity, um I will tell you no, it's Jesus, it's Jesus or bust for me.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_08: So I'll I'll I'll go down with him, I say.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I think he is goodness himself.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_08: And uh if you don't see him to be self-evidently divine, um I I don't know what else to do but to point you back to him and point you back to him and point you back to him.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_08: And if you want to take a fresh look at Jesus, we've got just a thing for you.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_08: It's called 321, go to 321course.com and do it over eight sessions or binge it in a couple of hours.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_08: We want to show you Jesus' vision for God, the world, and you.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_08: We want you to see that Jesus is goodness himself.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_08: And I pray that after eight sessions, you'll see what I see and what billions see around the world and down through history, that Jesus is Lord, that God is good, that God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_08: That's fundamentally the answer to the Euthyphro dilemma.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_08: It's actually the gospel of Jesus Christ.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_08: And if you know Jesus, I hope that you can use 321 as something that you can share with others, and if you don't yet know him, uh then please do check him out.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_08: There's no one like Jesus.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_08: Well, if you've gotten this far in the video, please do give it a like, give it a share around the place, and subscribe to us so that we can catch you on the next one.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_08: Thanks so much.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there we go.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_03: Great as always to have you with us.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_03: I was in Edinburgh at the weekend, and it was a real encouragement to meet some listeners of the Speak Life Podcast.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the time we make these resources and we don't always know where they go, so it's really encouraging to hear that people have been listening and finding it helpful in thinking through these issues from a Christian perspective.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's what we try to do on the Speak Life Podcast.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_03: See all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_03: Do subscribe to the Speak Life Podcast on your podcatcher of choice if you'd like to be the first to know when we bring out new episodes.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_03: And you're always welcome to write into the show.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_03: My email is thomas at speaklife.org.uk, and I do sometimes read some of those emails out on the show if you're okay with that.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, it's always great to hear from listeners.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thanks for listening, and we will be back soon.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_03: God bless.