This is hyrum lewis who teaches at dy you in idaho and heres the cover of his book, there is a god how to respond to atheism in the last days. I want to start with those last words. In the last days, what are you referencing . Referencing a specific faith tradition. Theres a lot of work coming out, the new atheist has been aggressive in the 21st century. Host who are the new atheists . Guest they talked about the four horseman. Sam harris, Christopher Hitchens passed on and daniel bennett, call them the force and of the atheist apocalypse. They are aggressive and angry. The old idea of the 20th century was much more live and let live. The idea that i cant believe but if you want to believe that is your business. I dont believe and im going to make sure nobody else believes it and im on a crusade to destroy faith. Part of it is the apocalyptic talking about the last trying to broaden the scope of apologetics. A catholic tradition goes back to st. Thomas aquinas that they make philosophical arguments for the existence of god. Im sure youre familiar with these arguments, a whole range of things. Then a protestant tradition which focuses on the text. The bible is the ultimate authority but the protestant tradition wants to go back and look at the text itself and find evidence for belief within the text of eyewitnesses for jesuss resurrection. There are traditions being left out of the apologetic conversation. For instance society called quakers or latter day saints, we focus on direct experience with god and revelation. When i say revelation i dont mean a man with a long white beard going up the mountain to receive Ten Commandments or to talk to a burning bush but something more direct and every day. The vast majority of people, why do you believe in god . They are probably not going to say i read st. Thomas aquinas. I read the bible and text what i probably say is in moments of quiet contemplation or prayer or ritual or at a major life event like the birth of a child i felt the presence of the divine. What new is used will tell you now, is these feelings dont count. Only empirical experience counts as knowledge. If you are talking about feelings it simply is illegitimate. Funny thing about this is that in and of itself is not an empirical statement. If you say only knowledge that comes through the senses. If only empirical knowledge counts than saying only a pinnacle knowledge counts itself is self refuting like somebody going to a webpage and saying dont believe anything you read on the internet. It is selfcontradictory. A great philosopher of the 20th century pointed this out in arguments called the empiricism one of the articles of the 20th century. To agree with atheists that you cant believe anything that is not data related and later said it is resting on a faith assumption. If you believe only empirical knowledge counts you are taking it as an act of faith and have no reason to believe. The second thing, the atheist might say it is a hallucination, the feelings youre having is your brain tricking you and psychology says over the course of millions of years, your brain falls not for truth but survival and there was a survival value way back then but now we got beyond that. May have had some use thousands of years ago but now we can move beyond that and simply recognize the evolutionary trick that it is and stop believing in god. This is selfdefeating too. Our brains trickle so why should we believe the findings of society . The atheist wants to invoke tricks to ask wayne every religious experience away but if your brain is tricking deception then wise into tricking us dont have an answer to that either. The third thing, you say these feelings are not empirical but they are. When i say revelation im talking about a lot. Your experience of being a conscious human being is not empirical. You dont look into a microscope and say there is my mind. The fact that you love your wife or children is not empirical experience but a subjective experience. As i see it the the revelatory experiences. We are at freedom fest. The idea you have free will, free conscious being that in and of itself is a revelatory knowledge. Scientists dont believe in free will, it is an evolutionary illusion too. Love, freedom, ultimate values, with the atheist will say is when you feel joy or love for your children, if i look at your brain under an Imaging Technology i will see parts of the brain light up, therefore that lighting up is empirical and therefore it is scientific. My response is falling prey to the vacuum tube fallacy. If you took somebody back in the 1970s, Mister Rogers on tv and brought somebody from a primitive part of the world who had never seen electricity or television before and showed them Mister Rogers on the tv they might go to the back of the tv and the vacuum tubes lighting up. Their conclusion would be vacuum tubes are causing the picture but this is a false assumption. The program is being broadcast from thousands of miles away. The vacuum tubes are the receptors and that is the relationship between the brain and the mind, the brain is merely the receptor of the mind. They are violating the atheist argument that if you go to a statistics 101 class, correlation is not causation but they see a correlation between a brain state and a mental state and they say the brain state is causing the mental state. They didnt take statistics 101. The first question you get from kids when he shows up at events is the first thing they say is how did you get out of the tv . They assume like the atheist that you are caused by your brain, assuming the tv was causing Mister Rogers. The atheist need to realize you are not your brain, your mind is not your brain, vacuum tubes are not the television program. Host you spend a lot of time with darwinian origin of species in your book. Guest Charles Darwin was one of the greatest intellects of all time. Im a big believer in evolution. We dont talk about scientific facts but evolution is as close as you can get to a scientific fact in science which i have no problem with evolution. It is a terrible thing when religious apologist tether themselves to opposing evolution. My god is great enough he can create however he wants. If he wants to create of illusionary processes i have no problem with that. We understand god by looking at the workings of corks and atomic particles, we can understand god by looking at the process by which he created. Darwinism is more controversial than evolution. Evolution is wellestablished with weather variation in selection which is the darwinian mechanism through which naturalists scientists claim evolution happens whether that can account for all biological complexity is another question and there are people who say it needs some kind of help and they call them selves intelligent design scientists. I dont, intelligent design scientists but philosophers. Im okay with teaching that in school as a philosophy but i dont think it should be put in competition with darwin. Science as we define it is a search for material causes. Once we jump out and say therefore god did it we are jumping out of science itself and that should be reserved for a course on theology or philosophy. If they want to have a preparatory part of the class, talking about evolution and talk about this later but is there a case to be made for an intelligent designer behind this process . I have no problem with that but setting it up as either or, evolution or intelligent design is a huge intellectual and strategic mistake and brings justification of charges of being antiintellectual. I read stephen myerss stuff and see what David Berlinski has done, may or may not be persuasive but in trying to fight the battle of darwinism or design is an error. Host is darwinism or evolution in moral as opposed to man . s man naturally moral . Guest darwinism is amoral. Some say it is immoral. Darwin said my theory is survival of the fittest. Your genes preserve themselves, Richard Dawkins is one of the great philosophers of history who has been arguing for preservation, for preservation happens on the gene level and because of that you have these selfish genes trying to replicate themselves and he says the selfish gene, being selfish is your natural state. I dont think that is true because we evolved to cooperate. We have cooperative genes. I could have called my book the cooperative gene because we are cooperating and we are selfish. Look at every characteristic humans have, capacity for love and hate, selfishness and selflessness. The inclination to create natural inclinations. You can find evidence in darwinism or make up stories to explain how these traits came about. We can get our morals from evolution is bizarre because everything we do comes from evolution. Doctor shermer, Michael Shermer of skeptic magazine wrote an article most atheist disagree with. Host he is an atheist. Guest he says we can derive art from is, you can look at the way the world is in the way humans actually behave and conclude that is how we should behave. It is the case that we humans strive to survive and flourish and something is moral. My answer to that it is the case that humans commit genocide and star wars and murder and rape and kill. To say therefore we should do those things is preposterous. The way you put it is right. Evolution is amoral. We have to introduce morality from outside the Natural World and thats a great argument for god and i have a chapter in my book called the good delusion. Richard dawkins rose theres a delusion of god. Every argument you make you can make the same argument against the existence of good. You cant believe in god because you feel god, the only way you know right and wrong is to feel it. If i havent wish and about what is moral why cant i have intuitions about the creator of the universe. Host hyrum lewis, you talk about the physicist max planck in your book. Why . Guest he was one of the inventors of quantum theory, one of the great theories of all time. He was a practicing christian. There is this bizarre idea. I cant believe anyone believes it. That there is a war between science and religion. It is simply preposterous. If you look at every great scientist throughout history including darwin. They have been religious believers. Isaac newton, werner heisenberg, galileo, kepler, copernicus, go through the rollcall of great scientist throughout history every single one of them has been a religious believer. There is no war, it has been ridiculously the only time a war comes up is when people step outside their boundaries when religious people try to make, run into problems or when you have scientists making religious claims. Science is the realm of the empirical and repeatable. Religion is the realm scientists are incapable of saying anything about ultimate matters. Religion on the other hand is not generally concerned with approximate matters. Max planck is an example of a it belies the theres a war between science and religion. Books written by atheists, they say along came science and it displaced religion with the alignment. It is preposterous, religion didnt go anywhere. They dont know their history. The Founding Fathers were enlightened men of science, not of religion but why is it either or . These ridiculous false binaries. One of them is are you left or are you right . Neither and both. Theres plenty to agree with the left and on the right. Why do we have to stop everything . Something at freedom fest, there is this binary do you believe in capitalism or do you want to help the poor . Societies that have the most wellbeing for the poor are the most capitalist. Atheists bought into a false binary, do you believe in science or do you believe in religion . The history of science shows that is a ridiculous formulation. America has gotten more religious as it has gotten more scientific. John butler at yale, all the great historians have shown as science has increased in america religion has increased with it. The past 20 years, this is a brief moment. Host why do you think that is . Guest 9 11 did something to a lot of people. What made the new atheism hold they saw islamic terrorists perpetrate these attacks and say religion causes violence so they started writing books saying god is not great. A lot of people bought into their argument, religion is bad. It is that association. This is bad reasoning. They should know better. Atheists claim the mantle of science and it has become unscientific when it comes to religion. If i were to say to you democrats are bad because i knew one bad democrat or smoking doesnt kill people because my father lived to be 90. That is ridiculous. That is anecdotal evidence, not eta. When it comes to the value of religion these atheists rely entirely on anecdotal evidence. To say god is not greatest telling stories about look at this religious person or this pedophile, what they never want to do is engage Scientific Evidence. The Scientific Evidence is devastating for their case. Anytime you have actual scientific polls or social scientists controlling for other variables in western societies the religious score higher on every agreed measure of morality and wellbeing you can imagine, study after study, thousands showing religious people live longer, religious people give more to charity, religious people are more educated believe it or not. Religious people adopt more children. There is higher social capital. The crime rate is lower. Go down the list of things we are trying to promote. Democrats and republicans and everybody, you find those things are better because of religion and religious believers jesus said the salt of the earth. You try to destroy religion. It is immoral by their own criteria. Michael shermer says something is immoral if it hurts flourishing. Get what promotes flourishing . Religious belief make society better. It reduces crime, reduces depression, increases economic wellbeing and he is trying to destroy flourishing, hes doing something immoral by his own terms. I like Michael Shermer and his debunking of ufos and Holocaust Denial but when he goes after religion he is doing something that is immoral even by his own criteria. Host how is stalin . Guest great example. If you want to go anecdotal there are the anecdotes. Prior to the 20th century you have atheists all the time when they want to tell their anecdotes or their stories they want to go to the middle ages and talk with inquisition and they want to talk about witchhunts, the salem witch hunts and they say look at the things religious people were doing, religion is bad. That is anecdotal evidence because there is no control group. If a racist came up to you and said black people are more violent than white people you would say what is your evidence . Before the year 1500 and in africa black people committed all the crimes, they committed all the oppression, all of the rapes and thefts all done by black people. Your answer would be there were no white people. It is a silly thing to say. That sweaty theists do. Look at the terrible things religious people in the middle ages, the terrible thing religious people were doing, i dont see atheists doing that, there were no atheists. We dont have a control group until the 20th century when there are sufficient numbers and specifically openly atheist regimes when we can actually Say Something meaningful about atheists and once you do that if you want to compare the atheist violence and religious believer violence the atheists when in a landslide. Biggest mass murder of all times was an atheist, stalin, probably the second greatest massacre of all time, poll part, per capita the greatest murderer of all time is an atheist and they are doing so in the name of material ideology so this idea, if you want to play the anecdote game the atheists will lose that one. I like to look at social Scientific Data which shows atheists are worse off but if you look at chairman mao, chairman dawkins tries to wiggle out of this, they are not really atheists. Really . They said they were atheists. Stalin believed. Atheists try to do it both ways. Atheism is not a religion. They say you say everybody has faith, atheists have faith, youre wrong, atheism is not a faith. It is a nonbelieve in god. Michael shermer says it is nonbelieve in god, not a religion. I dont believe in the flying spaghetti monster. That is not a religion. Im not a high priest of the flying spaghetti monster religion. Atheism is not a religion so if you say stalin was not an atheist, wrong. You just said atheist is nonbelieve in god, stalin is an atheist, he is an atheist. Pol pot does not believe in god, he is an atheist. All these terrible tyrants were atheists by their own definition and cant wiggle out of it. If you want to look at the consequences of religious belief, the wickedness done by atheists is overwhelming. Doesnt mean atheists are bad people. Im not saying anything about atheists, doctor shermer is a good guy, Richard Dawkins is probably compassionate and uses money for charitable causes and they can be good people. We are talking on average, the broad scope. Host throughout your book there is a god how to respond to atheism in the last days you address the lds church. Are you a member . Guest yes, the church recently tried to get people to not use the term mormon. Host where did that term come from . Guest we have a book of mormon, people took the name of that book, the name stuck. The book of mormon says this is the church of jesus christ, not the church of a profit. You call a church by the name of a profit youre calling the wrong thing. It is a mistake to call it the mormon church. It is slightly insulting because it goes against religious precepts. Why is the church pushing us to talk about the church of jesus christ of latter day saints . Live in a moment in World History when things have gotten too soundbitey, we are too much in love with short soundbites instead of flashing things out. We need more to stop. You see it all the time in cable news, people shouting left wing, rightwing, fascist, commie, instead of saying tell me what you believe, and giving longer answers. Calling the church of jesus christ of latterday saints forces them to say im not going to use a soundbite. I am going to explain. Jesus christ, that is name of your church, we consider jesus christ our lord and savior, latter day saints, what does that mean . We believe in a restoration of the pure truth that jesus died during his lifetime which is something thomas jefferson, Roger Williams and defenders of religious freedom have championed. My book was written to make an apologetic case for there is a god how to respond to atheism in the last days, to include more religious traditions and the lds religious tradition is the one that is primarily religious believers of all stripes, or people doubting the existence of god, the arguments are not exclusive to latter day saints. Host what and where did you teach and how did you get interested . Guest great question. I teach in idaho, the smaller school. Brigham Young University in utah which people now because of the football theme. I teach there, it is south of Yellowstone National park, one of the most Beautiful Spots in the country. I shouldnt say this because im trying to keep it moving. I have had physicians at stanford university, i love it there. How did i get to apologetics . I should say by digression. I didnt mean to make this a major part of my study. During graduate school if you are reading intellectual history youre reading the atheist because they dominate the conversation, your reading karl marx and Sigmund Freud and the critical theorists, your reading atheist fingers nonstop. They were the big guns. What i would do is as i am reading and discussing these things i would an itch i had to scratch. Ernest hemingway said it is like an exorcism. You have demons in your head you have to get rid of. I found that was true. I couldnt move on until i had written things down so i have these ideas of what i thought was a bad argument and i would write them down and keep a file and eventually i started saying i wonder if i could organize this into something bigger. Over a few months i started putting things around, my brother said you want to turn that into a book, the polishing and the rewriting is the most important part of the writing process. Got it in book form and had a friend who published it for me and there it is so this, what i teach at brigham Young University and idaho is us history, i teach a course on american civics, film history, i have taught asian history. You get a variety of topics which is fun. Dont teach religious matters. It was something that was important enough to me that my own Spiritual Development and the conclusions i came to that i thought could be helpful for other people. Host what is an apologetic . Guest a term out of the middle ages. It sounds worse than it is, sounds like you are apologizing for something but in ancient languages, apologetic today means i am so sorry. You say apologetic, you are apologizing for your faith, sorry i believe, let me explain i am sorry. Apologetics mean defense of the faith. When we talk apologetics for christianity, people who speak out in favor of christianity coming in favor of christian religion, in favor of beliefs in god against people who would attack it. There are so many attacks that have gotten pronounced in the 21stcentury, we need solid apologetics to answer those attacks because they are not very good at that. We dont have people standing up to them. The part of my book im not proud of his it is a little bit hostile. It can get chippy sometimes. That is unintentional. And atheists believe like intellectual bullies, richard document said my faith is, quote, frankly bonkers. This is insulting. If i respond in kind i dont think it is the right thing to do but my readers can forgive a little bit. Perhaps it is understandable if i said respond with a strong tone at times because the atheists are so aggressive and so bullying and so rude. Maybe theres a place to stand up to the boules. Host hyrum lewis is the author of this book there is a god how to respond to atheism in the last days. For a monthly callin program in depth. She will answer your question on topics such as consumerism. Freemarket capitalism. Today and tomorrow the former National SecurityAgency Contractor discusses has a exposing of the u. S. Program. We visit rapid city south dakota to tour the sites. That is all airing this weekend on cspan two book tv. Check your Program Guide for the complete schedule. We kicked up the weekend with mary grace on the workhorse behind Large Tech Companies like amazon and uber. Welcome everybody. Thank you very much for coming. I am a faculty member in the economic department. The purpose of the task force is to engage and confront the sense that the labor market