Coming up, I'm going to discuss an important question that came right out of the TPUSA conference.

Who is an American?

Frank Turek, the Christian apologist and speaker, joins me.

We're going to talk about Charlie Kirk.

We're going to talk about the relationships of men and women.

We're also going to.

Talk about the true meaning of Jesus and of Christmas.

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I've been not all but some excerpts of the TPUSA The Turning Point Annual Conference, and I'd like to comment not so much on the conference as a whole, which covers a very vast territory, lots of speakers from JD Vance, Nicki, Minaj Tucker and Bannon, and the Ben Shapiro and the vek Ramaswami and many many others.

But I want to focus in on two issues raised at the conference.

Vive's talk about who is an American and also some comments from Tucker about Islam.

Maybe I'll start with Tucker first, because it's kind of interesting, isn't it.

Tucker's focus has very much been on the influence of Israel and America.

We don't want to be captive to a foreign government.

Are America first, and we don't need these other burdens and alliances with places like Israel.

And one might expect that Tucker would then consistently say, and this is also true about Islam, we don't want Islamic influence in America.

We don't want Islamic infiltration of America.

We don't need to be making quote alliances with these Islamic countries.

They have their own goals of an Islamic society, of Sharia law in some cases of the Caliphate.

We certainly don't believe that they put our interests first, and so we might be better to be uncontaminated by either the Jews or the Muslims.

And yet this is not in fact Tucker's position.

He is set elsewhere we should be allying with Katar.

He says they would be a much better ally with than Israel.

And so what we see here is that the critique of Israel seems almost automatically to give way to a kind of positive defense of Qatar.

Qatar here as a kind of stand in for Islam and a TPUSA.

Tucker fulminates against sort of anti Islamic sentiment.

He goes, why are we picking on the Muslims?

He goes, why are we going after people for their bloodline?

This is his word, bloodline.

Now, I don't know a single person alive who is going after Muslims for their bloodline.

No one is making an ethnic or racial critique of the Muslims.

People are going after Muslims because of what they do and in some cases what they believe, and in other cases what they profess, and in other cases what they threaten.

So it is the actions of these Islamic radicals that is the prime driving force for what Tucker seems to regard as quote Islamophobia.

And it's particularly odd it seems to me right in the aftermath of this Bondai Beach attack, which was a terrible attack on a small country.

Australia is a large country physically, but a small country in population, and so it almost seems like every major Western country is experiencing kind of its own nine to eleven.

Of course, we had it on September eleven, two thousand and one.

Israel had its nine to eleven on October seventh.

Now, in a sense, you could say Australia has had its nine to eleven.

And here is Tucker calling for us to worry about getting too harsh with the Muslims, speaking out against the Muslims and against Islamic influence, which Tucker is I think falsely portraying as some kind of racist critique of their quote Bloodline.

Now, on a much higher level and more interesting intellectually, Vivek Ramaswami raised the issue of who is an American.

And one could say that there are two positions in this debate, Vivek position and the heritage American position.

And I want to contrast these two to make a kind of middle position that I think is the right way to think about all this.

So one position, the position associated with Vivek.

He didn't exactly say this, but this is how he is understood to be speaking, is that to be an American, it is a matter of creed, it's a matter of belief, it's a matter of subscribing to American principles, embracing the Constitution and intellectually affirming the American way of life.

You could say that being American is like in the mind.

And I myself have written somewhat in this mode before, made the point for example, and this is the point Reagan also made in his own way.

You can go to France, live there for a long time.

You can't become a Frenchman.

You can go to India, live there for a long time, you can't become Indian.

But you can come to America and become an American.

You become an American not as a function of birth or blood, but as a function of embracing certain ideals.

Now, the counter argument to all that is pretty simple, and that is America is not just an idea.

It is an idea, but it's also an actual place, and it's a place that has a history, and it has people who came here sometimes going back a very long time ago, four hundred years ago, if you want to go back to the Mayflower or the first settlers, certainly two hundred and fifty years ago, if you go back to the founding.

So people came here and they shaped America, but they were also shaped by America.

And we have in America all these American kind of folk ways, and that those also defied what it means to be an American.

It's not just a matter of subscribing to certain ideas.

In fact, think of it this way.

Let's take a guy who's living right now, or let's take let's take India.

They're probably twenty five million Indians right now in India who like America.

They subscribe to the American dream, they believe in the American Constitution.

But does that automatically quote make them American.

Would be automatically a good idea to bring those twenty five million people here, because they're just as American as everybody else.

And conversely, let's take an American who lives here now, and let's say that he generally he's an American.

He eats apple pie and celebrates the fourth of July.

But let's say he disagrees with some elements of the Constitution.

He thinks that the Constitution could use some helpful amendments.

He's not sure the founders were right about everything.

He in that sense, does not subscribe to the principle of America.

And yet here he is, his family has been here for generations.

Is he less of an American than those Indian guys in India?

One would be reluctant to say that.

And therefore it seems to me that we need a kind of middleway to think about this problem.

And the middle way.

Is simply this.

Yes, America is, to a larger degree than any other culture, a credal nation.

It is open in principle to people from all over the world.

And yet becoming an American is not something that happens merely by subscribing to ideas.

It happens over time by living here, being here, being part of the culture, assimilating, but in some ways also having your own impact on shaping the culture, becoming part of those American folk ways, and being at home in those folk ways, so that ultimately America becomes a club that you don't just quote want to join.

You don't just subscribe to its charter or its founding principles.

You actually do become a member of the club.

You do live by its rules.

I mean, think of a normal club.

You're a member not just because you agreed with the charter, but it's because you swim in the pool and you play racquetball, and you go to the annual banquet, and you're part of the sort of living culture of that society.

If you look at my own example, this.

Is what happened to me.

I would say that I became a believer in American ideals long before I became an American.

I subscribed to those ideals.

I was excited about becoming an American.

I took the oath of citizenship in nineteen ninety one, and I was assimilated to a considerable degree because I'd been in the country then over a decade.

But I would say I'm not as assimilated.

I wasn't as assimilated then as I am now.

So for me, becoming a full part of the folk ways of America has been something a lifelong project.

It takes time because there is a period you can't deny when you are somewhat intermediate between the old culture that you left and the new America that you are part of.

You are not no man's land where're you cease to be fully Indian, but you're not fully American.

So this is the reality of the immigrants journey.

And so I want to say that I think that Vivek is right to be celebrating the creedal aspect of the American dream.

And yet there is a lot of truth in the idea that being an American isn't just an idea.

It is more than that, it is also a lived experience.

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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a friend and a really smart guy who has been sort of sharing the stage over the years with me and others in the field of Christian apologetics.

It's Frank Turek.

He is the president of cross examine dot org.

He's a dynamic speaker, award winning author who's traveled around the country making the case for Christ and for Christianity.

You can follow him on Exit Doctor d R.

Frank Turek, t u ri e K.

The website is cross Examined dot org.

Frank, Welcome.

I've been looking forward to this and thank you, thank you very much for joining me.

I want to begin by asking you for some post mortem or some analysis of the big TPUSA event that is just either concluded or wrapping up.

I've been watching excerpts of the various presentations and what is your take on how what the atmosphere was like this year in the aftermath, of course of Charlie's tragic dav Yeah.

Well, thank you, Denesh, and blessings to you this Christmas.

One thing that nobody can deny tp USA is the fact.

That they know how to run events.

To Nesh, this organation is one of the finest, the finest I've ever witnessed, especially when it comes to events.

It was phenomenal, like they all are.

Despite the fact that staff has been in mourning for three and a half months rightfully so.

Erica, despite the fact she's being slandered and accused without evidence, is steady as a rock.

Even though it's behind the scenes she's in.

It's been brutal.

You can only imagine.

Denesh.

Let me just say the event was wonderfully done.

And as conservatives, we can disagree over things and argue them out and you probably saw some of that going on.

Although let me say this, and I think of course you would agree that you Hatred is not a conservative value, and neither are slanderous conspiracy theories that have no evidence behind them.

These are not things we want to conserve.

These are things that we should reject.

And Jesus and Bible writers describe Satan as a murderer, liar, thelanderer.

And accuser.

In the past three and a half months, we had a murder, and since then we've had slander, accusations and lies.

This is straight from the pit of hell.

But despite that, TPUSA is going strong and they know how to bring people together.

And I thought Vice President Vance yesterday was very firm and what he said and pointed out that the conservatives are the future of this nation, as they should be.

We need to conserve what is right, true and good.

It's harder, as you know, Denesh, to build things than it is to tear them down.

What the left wants to do is tear things down.

What we want to do is build.

So let's pray we can continue to do that.

Frank, those were some very you know, stern and firm words from you about division, about slander, about anti Semitism.

Let me ask you this, do you think that the you're very close to TPUSA.

You were up there on stage, I was at the funeral for Charlie, and you gave a I mean a marvelous and I would say almost inspired call to call to faith, called for people to accept Jesus Christ.

But do you think that these kind of two key principles one is, let's call it the the anti anti Semitic principle, and the other one is the kind of anti vicious slander principle.

Do you think that those are institutionally ensconced to TPUSA, that the organization as a whole is firmly behind those two principles.

I think yes, that.

The folks at TPUSA obviously are against you hatred.

That was Charlie's term, by the way, because anti Semitism is too broad.

But this idea of jew.

Hatred is something that I think Charlie certainly he coined the phrase jew hatred.

There's no place for it because technically everybody's a semi including the Palestinians, you know.

I mean, what it means now is jew hatred essentially, But just just to be very clear.

On the other hand, though, there is a very firm commitment to free speech, and so that's why Erica decided that she was not going to disinvite somebody that her husband invited, even though her husband may have disagreed with a certain speaker on certain things.

It's better to.

Air all that out, let us debate those as intelligent human beings and see where the truth falls.

And so that's what they decided to do.

And I support that.

And I don't work for TPUs say I'm not an employee.

I'm just I was just a friend of Charlie.

I'm a friend of Erica and a friend of so many of the people there.

Frank, let me ask you this.

There was such a hopeful mood even though Charlie's memorial was such are in a way an event of morning, but it was also oddly enough and maybe appropriately enough, a celebration, a celebration of Charlie's life and what he stood for, and also a lot of very explicit sort of calls to revival.

I was struck by, you know, a procession of figures from the cabinet and from the administration talking in very explicit terms about Jesus and about revival.

Do you think that that mood of revival is coming?

Is it here?

Some people say, you know, it's been kind of soiled by this acrimonious division on the right.

How do you read our cultural moment today in the aftermath of Charlie's assassination.

Yeah, that's a great question, and I don't have really strong survey data on this, other than to say that even before Charlie was murdered, Bible sales were up, and they're up even more since Charlie's murder.

Also that church attendance is up and that younger people are moving in that direction.

Whether that continues or not, I'm not a prophet.

I don't know.

I pray it continues to happen.

We've seen at our campus events.

We've done several campus events, and we in fact, we did one right one week after Charlie's murder.

Not that I wanted to do it, but Charlie would have wanted us to do it, So we went ahead with the events and we edited other events.

I've seen a shift on campus in my own events DNESH from more skeptical questions about Christianity to more evangelical questions.

What I mean by that is people saying how do I bring my non Christian roommate to Jesus rather than questions that are skeptical of Christianity.

I've had far more people eagerly express a desire to bring more people to christ.

So that's a good sign.

Have you noticed strength on the in this Christian revival that there is a little bit of a kind of fork in the road between the men, the young men, and the young women.

And I asked this because I'm picking this up really more off of social media, but not so much in counseling or in spiritual presentations.

But I get the impression that the men are pushing more toward orthodoxy, more toward a kind of rigorous and disciplined type of Christianity in a way, more doctrinal, more theological, more anchored in history, and and young women, by contrast, are of in the Evangelical Church very much in the spirit of accepting this, accepting Jesus into my life.

It seems to me, and I think you and I know this over the years, that you actually need elements of both.

Yes, you need knowledge of history, you need you need theology that goes beyond the personal relationship.

And how do you see this sort of gender gap, if I can call it that, inside of the young people's Christian world.

Interesting question, Denesh, What I have seen and what Charlie was concerned about just before he died.

And I know this because I was with him for the three last three days of his life.

On Monday night, September eighth, he and I were together.

We were preparing.

I was trying to help him prepare for the college tour, and that's why I was with him when he was murdered.

But the tune I night prior to that, on the eighth, we went on one of our walk We would have these sessions where we would during the day get together in an office somewhere and try and refine our answers to the most difficult questions related to Christianity or even politics.

And after those office sessions, he'd say, hey, after I put Gigi and Mack to bed, why don't we go on a walk.

So at night we'd go on these walks, always with an armed bodyguard.

We'd walk through the streets of Phoenix.

We would talk about difficult issues, and that night we talked about three issues Islam, the Resurrection, and you know, the truth of Christianity.

And then another issue that was really on his heart was what you just mentioned, and that is this kind of gender gap.

But in the context of the fact that the surveys after the last election, Denesh you may have seen, showed that Trump voting me their number one priority in life was to get married and have kids.

Trump voting women, that was number five or six, Paris voting women it was twelve out of thirteen.

And Charlie was trying to figure out that night as we're walking, how can I try and get my own generation to accept and want to get married and have children.

What can I do?

And he was lamenting the fact that he didn't think many women would listen to him because he's a man.

What does he know that kind of thing?

Right?

And we were trying to figure out could we raise up more women to actually give that message that more people would follow, more women would follow and want to get married and have kids, because we don't do that in everything else is academic when it comes to our nation, if we don't replace our own people, if we don't replace Christian with Christians and bring Christians up from childhood, we're going to be overcome by either the left or the far right, the eighth of the Muslims, who are going to take away our freedom of religion.

We didn't have an answer that night, Denesh, but thirty hours later, when Charlie was murdered, one very small silver lining that may have come out of it is that a prominent mom was put in the spotlight and her name is Erica Kirk.

So we're hoping that Erica can help move that generation to accept marriage, embrace marriage and childbearing.

Let me frame, Frank if I made the issue as I see it, and that is that there seems to be a yearning on the part of both young men and women, and these are sort of right of center young men and women to have it the way that not even their parents had it, but maybe the parents and their great grandparents had it.

In other words, they want a restoration of what I loosely call the traditional.

Way of life.

But of course, in older generations people didn't sort of prepare for that.

The culture in a sense was catered to that people naturally grew into that.

You didn't have to have discussions about the family.

I'm sure that this is probably true of your grandfather and mine.

They kind of naturally assumed the roles that they took on.

Tradition in this sense did not need a defense.

But we're now in an odd position where a lot of that has been eroded in our society.

And so a young woman might say, all right, well, you know what, I want a traditional man, but they're just not a lot of those traditional men to be found.

And then conversely the men say, well, I would like to find a traditional woman, but given the way that our culture is, there are very few of those to be found.

And so both sides are in a sense fining for something that's not easy to find.

That's true, And of course the question I want to ask is where are you looking?

You're not going to probably find that person at a bar.

Okay, you might find them in church, that might be the place you might want to go, or there are online services that can help you find that person.

I know because my middle son found his wife online and they dinesh, they're a ninety nine percent match, and they've been married now for let's see, nine years, and they have three beautiful kids.

So it can work online.

It can.

But you're right there are It's been said before that you can ask somebody this question if they're looking for a spouse, are you becoming the kind of person the person you're looking for is looking for?

Because if not, why do you expect to get that kind of person?

If you're not working on yourself, if you're not the kind of person that the kind of person you're looking for would be attracted to, why do you think you're going to get that person?

No?

I think that's beautifully and in fact, profoundly put.

And what it does is it gives everybody, certainly all young people, a project to work on, which is themselves, because it's so easy to be my project is I'm going to fix someone else?

Uh.

And what you're saying is, all right, you know what, Let's do some individual rehabilitation and as we make ourselves better, we'll we'll find the right people to be matched up to.

Right and you know, Charlie was so good at pointing that out.

I mean, how many times have you heard him say things like, man, what are you doing?

How much you how much you can drink?

Is not something that's going to attract the kind of woman you want to You you're playing video games all night?

You think that's going to be the kind of person a woman wants to marry.

You can't hold down a job.

Is that the kind of person that a woman would like to have as a provider?

You need to work on yourself before you're going to be attractive to somebody else.

And the same, you know, can be true with the ladies.

How are you dressing?

You know, if you dress too provocatively, you're going to get a lot of attention, but not the kind of attention you want.

You want somebody that is.

Going to if you want to attract a good man, You're not going to necessarily attract a good man by looking like you should be walking on forty second Street, if you know what I mean?

Oh No, totally, I totally do.

I think also, as I think about it, there's an important economic factor here, and I don't just in the fact that so many working class jobs got decimated over the last generation or so, jobs being outsourced and so on.

But I think also with the oncoming march of AI, artificial intelligence and robotics, it could be that we are looking at a future in which intelligent machines are doing more and more things for us and the you know the fact that for countless generations human beings have gotten, and particularly men, that sense of accomplishment from providing for a family, you know, putting a roof over your family's head and putting braces on your kid's teeth.

And we might be coming to the dawn of an era in which that changes, maybe in ways that you and I can't fully foresee.

I know that your domain is far more the spiritual than the political or the economic.

But is this something that you think about and that worries you at all?

Oh, it worries me some.

But I can tell you what will never go out of fashion or will never not get you a job, and that is being someone that has a work ethic.

If you have a work ethic, you can do almost anything.

And there's always going to be a job market for somebody with a strong work ethic.

And too often we see people trying to avoid work rather than to do work.

And one thing that Charlie was so good at was pointing out that when people join TPUSA, this isn't a nine to five job.

This is something where we're going to ask you to commit to go above and beyond.

Sometimes you're going to have to work weekends.

Now, obviously we want you to take care of your family as well, but there's going to be times that this is more of a commitment to something bigger than yourself.

It's not just you're not just doing something so you can make a living.

You're doing something because there's a higher purpose.

It's bigger than you, Charlie would always say.

And so I think that someone who has a really good work ethic is always going to have a paycheck coming in.

You'll find a way to take care of your family if you have a work ethic.

If you don't, it's not bright.

It's not a bright future for you.

I mean, Frank, that's a very interesting way to look at it.

You're saying it's not even so much the particular skill, because a particular skill.

Can become outdated.

Hey I used to be a farmer, but now we have tractors and so on.

But you're saying, keep that discipline of being willing to work.

And I would add one thing to that myself, which is something that I found has always stood me in good stead.

Always be willing to learn.

Other words, try to cultivate that appetite for learning, whether it's learning on the technic level, whether it's learning about how the world works, whether it's history, whether it's learning about human nature.

And now, of course, the nice thing I think is that we've got resources at our fingertips like GROCK and chat GPT, and there's an ocean of information available to to keep that lifelong learning and uh, and that I think will stand will stand us all in all in good Stead.

Let's just in the few minutes we have left, h Frank, let me ask you about here.

We are just a few days from Christmas, and I want you to put on your apologetic hat uh and talk about the the importance of Jesus.

But but do it in a way that's sort of not not not a church sermon per se.

If you were talking to a secular guy and he goes, what difference did Jesus make?

What what's the significance of Jesus in the world?

The shortest Yeah, the shortest answer I can give is Jesus is the answer to the problem of evil, And people say.

Well, what do you mean.

Yeah, there would be no.

Reason for Jesus to add humanity to his deity and come to earth unless we had committed some kind of offense against God.

If we had never sinned, there'd be no reason for a sacrifice to come into this world to save us from the punishment we deserve for that sin.

So people always.

Say, well, well, there can't be a good God because there's too much evil in the world.

First of all, you wouldn't even know what evil was unless you knew what good was, and you wouldn't know what good was unless you knew what God was.

Because God's nature is what we mean by the standard of good, and evil is just a privation or a lack or a degradation of that standard of good.

So evil doesn't disprove God.

Evil may prove there's a devil out there, but there would be no such thing as evil unless there was good, and there'd be no such thing as good unless God existed.

So Jesus came into this world to take evil upon himself.

So in infinitely just God wouldn't have to put evil on us, or wouldn't have to put the punishment for evil on us, because he's not only infinitely just, he's also infinitely loving.

He has to punish sin otherwise he's not infinitely just.

But he doesn't want to punish us for our sin because he's also infinitely loving.

So what does he do instead?

He puts that punishment on himself.

He adds humanity to his deity and comes to earth, and Christmas is just the story of him coming into this universe to do that, and Easter, of course, is the culmination and the proof of who he was when he actually did take that punishment upon himself.

And then by trusting in him, we're not only forgiven, but we're given his righteousness.

So the evil that I saw firsthand with Charlie's murder reminded me of why Jesus had to come.

He had to come to take evil upon himself so he wouldn't have to put it upon us.

It almost seems, Frank, like you're reframing the conundrum.

And what I mean by that is that the real conundrum a puzzle, is not why do we have evil in the world or why would God allow it.

The really profound conundrum is how to reconcile divine justice or judgment with divine mercy.

In other words, only God would be smart enough to figure out.

Listen, when you do, these have these human beings, and they're choosing all the way back to the Garden of Eden to go their own way instead of God's way, which is probably a pretty good definition of sin right there.

That how do you save these people from the inevitable judgment and that they're bringing on themselves.

And I think what you're saying is Jesus is an answer to that.

Problem, certainly, and that is the problem.

In fact, you wrote a book almost twenty years ago called What's so Great about Christianity?

You know what's so great about Christianity?

Christianity is the only religious worldview where the problem of evil is solved, and it's solved by grace, not by works.

In other words, you don't work your way to God.

That's what every other religion tries to do.

God works his way to you by coming to earth and taking the punishment you deserve on himself, and then by trusting in him, you're not only forgiven, but you're given his righteousness.

If you don't want that, then God's not going to force you into Heaven against your will.

He'll remain separated from you, because that's the ultimate, the ultimate response or place that evil goes.

It goes to a place called hell.

That's where people that want to continue to do evil are quarantine, so they don't interfere with the people that no longer want to do it.

And as we close out Frank, this in a way creates an even bigger puzzle because, as you say, the other religions, you've got this strenuous discipline that has to be cultivated.

You've got to pursue this elaborate regime of laws and rules and this and that, all in the hope of kind of ascending upward toward God.

You're saying that the Christian answer is breadtakingly simple.

God will actually do the work.

You don't have to do it.

God's going to do it.

In fact, you can't do it, and all you have to do is receive this free gift of salvation, which raises the very simple question, what do you think is the root psychological motivation for people who still say that's too much, I'm not going to do even that you're giving me a gift.

It's not just a gift of something, it's a gift of everything.

But I don't want it.

Why would anyone say that.

Well, it's pride number one.

Right.

I can get there on my own.

I don't need you to help me.

And I think many In many cases, Danesh, it's that people are on a happiness quest, not.

A truth quest.

In other words, I ask unbelievers, not just on college campuses, but personally, this question.

If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?

And in a majority of cases, Danesh, if people are honest, they'll say no, because it's not a head problem, it's a hard problem.

They want to do their own thing.

They don't want God to exist because they want to be God over their own lives.

And so you might ask that question over a Christmas meal, or maybe after the meal's over.

You may not want to ruin the meal, but you know to have somebody there is not a Christian.

Hey have a question for you, just curious if it was really true that Jesus came into this world and died for our sins, and by trusting in him you're not only forgiven, but given his righteousness.

Would you become a Christian.

I mean, if that was really true, would you follow Jesus and see what they say?

I mean, it's a very it's a very riveting question for any skeptic or atheist.

And I think that's because and you and I have debated our share of these guys, and in general they their public pose is always that of the baffled truth seeker, right like, oh my gosh, I'm looking out of the heavens, I'm trying to see God.

I really don't see the guy.

And if I did.

But what you're saying is that pose it to them as a hypothetical.

They may not find your proof satisfactory, But say, listen, if I can sit you down, show you the appropriate evidence, photographs, whatever you want, and to your complete satisfaction, established without a shadow of a doubt, that Christianity is true and that Jesus died for your sins, would you go down on your knee?

Is an accepted And what you're saying is that's gonna really be the question that gets them to think about their true motives.

Right.

That is, I might not say beyond a shadow of a doubt, I might say beyond a reasonable doubts yeah, yeah, because you know it could be that you and I are both Ai avatars, right Dan, I mean you can't misprove that, right, So beyond a reasonable doubt, if it were really true, if you came to realize it was true, beyond a reasonable doubt, would you follow Jesus.

And it's kind of like marriage.

You might find somebody who would be a good wife or a good spouse, but that doesn't mean you're going to ask her to be your spouse.

Right.

You have to go from just believing that something's true to trusting in that person, whether it's Jesus or whether it's a spouse.

And that's a step of the will, not not just a step of the mind.

And this is why John, who writes the biography we call the Gospel John in the last verse of the I want to say it's the twentieth chapter, I'm paraphrasing it.

Right after doubting Thomas, John tells you why he's writing the book.

He says this, these things were written down, these miracles were written down so that you may know that Jesus is the savior, and by believing in him, you may have life in his name.

In other words, he's giving the evidence in the first half of the verse.

Here are the signs.

He's the savior, But it's up to you whether you believe in him.

Because you can know something's true and not assent to it.

You can know, for example, a man can't become a woman, but you might not assent to that because you have another desire on your part.

Well, and not only that, but I think also that I mean, using your example of asking someone to marry you, even if you have full information about that person, let's say that somehow you could gain encyclopedic knowledge of that person, you still don't know what the next thirty years of your life of forty years of your life are.

Going to be with them.

And so there is that element despite having all the available knowledge of as you say, setting out in the journey, getting in the boat, picking up the oars and taking it from there.

I mean that is, I suppose kind of what the Bible means by a leap of faith, you're leaping into the boat.

Well, by the way, that's why you need a vowe at marriage, denesh right, you don't need a vow when you're all lovey dovey.

You need a vow when you wake up in the morning after twenty years and you look over and you go, you again.

Why did it have to be you again?

Right?

I mean that's when you need the vow.

You don't need the vowe when everything's going great.

That's And by the way, marriage, as you know, as an illustration of our ultimate, our ultimate marriage to Jesus.

In fact, somebody put it this way.

You can sum up the Bible in five words.

G Jesus wants to marry you.

That's essentially why Jesus comes to earth.

He wants to redeem you.

He wants to take your sin upon himself and then make you an air of his kingdom, adopt you into his kingdom.

And some people don't want that, danesh.

They want to create their own kingdom here on earth that they know is going to end at some point, and they think that's a better thing for them.

Okay, God's not going to force him into heaven against their will.

If they don't want Jesus now, they're not going to want him in eternity.

Yeah.

Yeah, very interesting, guys.

I've been talking to the one and only Frank Turrek.

The website is cross Examined dot org.

Follow him on x at doctor Dr Frank Turek.

Frank, very interesting conversation, and thank you so much for joining me.

Merry Christmas to you.

You as well, Dnesh.

Merry Christmas, God bless you.

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I want to talk today, drawing on my book Life After Death.

The evidence about freewill and the importance of free will is that it shows us that if it exists, it means that there is a part of us that is outside or beyond the laws of nature.

Remember, the argument against free will is that nature is a closed system.

Everything is the product of being caused by something else, and that means that our minds are caused in the same way by the physical motions of atoms and neurons and our nervous system and so on.

So even if we think we have free will, we don't actually know what's going on inside of our heads, and so it could be or it seems to be.

And the argument is made by skeptics and others free.

Will is an illusion.

Now I want to answer that argument or address it.

By drawing on an argument from the philosopher Immanual Kant.

And the argument is so surprising and interesting and unexpected that, in my opinion, it has never been refuted.

In fact, it's never even been seriously challenged.

It is so obviously correct and true, and it so firmly establishes the reality of free will that even though I've searched for effective refutations, they end up being nothing more than a repetition of the materialist argument I just gave you, even though Kant shows the limitations and indeed the falsehood.

In the end of that particular argument.

Now, generally the people who try to establish free will take a very easy route.

They rely essentially on the argument of non contradiction.

They go, hey, you're trying to convince me that there's no free will.

But just by the fact that you're trying to convince me of that, that presumes that I have free will, and in fact you have free will as well.

Because you're choosing to make this argument, you could easily have made the opposite argument that there is free will, but you've chosen to make, based on evidence, the argument that there's no free will.

So this is the.

Kind of traditional and I would say easy way to try to tackle the problem, but Kant goes in a different direction.

This is how he argues.

He says, let's begin with the observation that morality and morality here refers to choosing between right and wrong.

Morality really refers to the rules of right and wrong.

Let's call it the Ten Commandments.

That's a pretty good surrogate for morality.

But we're making moral decisions all the time.

Our lives are inconceivable without it.

We actually call people who are incapable of exercising any sort of moral judgment, we call those people psychopaths.

And so morality concess is real.

It's part of our world.

We observe it, we are part of it, we do it, we identify people who don't do it.

So morality is real, and what he means by real it is as real as anything else in the world.

Yeah, over there, I can look and see there's a highway.

I can look up in the sky and see there's the sun.

The sun is real, and it can be verified by observing.

It can be observed, and morality can be examined and juries, for example, all the time make judgments about is this person acting in a moral way or not.

So Kant goes on to say, morality is so real, it's so obvious that everything we do presumes the existence of morality.

Let's say you say to someone you should have told the truth the guy's lying to you.

What you mean is that the guy could.

Tell the truth.

If he couldn't tell the truth, then makes no sense to say you should have told the truth.

Or let's say that you tell your child don't cheat on the exam, Well, that means that your child is capable of not cheating.

You're telling your child that because you know that they are in a position not to do that.

And so this is where Kant is going with this.

He says that when we use the world ought you ought to do this, that presumes.

The idea of can.

If you ought to do something, you can do it, because otherwise the term art makes no sense at all.

In fact, every time you become upset or indignant with somebody else because they did a certain thing, your behavior only makes sense if they could have done something else.

And this also applies, by the way, to yourself.

If you ever like regret or you have remorse, none of that is even comprehensible.

If you don't have freedom, you're sorry for what you did.

Therefore it has to be the case that you could have done otherwise.

And so what cond is saying that if this is true, then it means that humans, at least to some degree and on some occasions.

Do have free choice.

So this is the argument in a nutshell.

But what is really startling and important Here are the implications of the argument, which I will spell out in this way.

Let's go back to what I said a couple of days ago about the scientist Laplace.

So Laplace says to Napoleon that since we are just material objects in a lawful universe, free will is impossible.

But like all arguments, is argument depends on the strength of the premise.

It's the if.

If this is so, then that follows.

So, if the premise is valid and the reasoning is sound, the conclusion is inevitably true.

But conversely, if the conclusion is false, then we have to re examine the premise, and we have to re examine the premise, because if the conclusion is false and the reasoning is sound, the premise must be false.

So now we've seen, with the help of Kant, that free will exists and therefore it follows contra laplace that we are not merely material objects in a lawful universe.

The startling conclusion from Kant is that there's a part of human nature that transcendentally operates outside the physical laws that govern material things.

So the implications here is that there are aspects of our humanity that are not subject to the material restrictions of the world.

And so summing up, we have now found two central features of human nature, the first one consciousness, the second one free will, that are irreducible to matter and appear to be somewhat independent of it.

Consciousness and free will have no natural explanation, and they seem to function outside the bounds of physical law itself.

Now I'm using this discussion to set up my next chapter which I'm just going to introduce, which is called very appropriately out of this World Philosophy discovers the Afterlife, And I'm going to use this premise.

By the way, the opening quote of this chapter is from Ludwig Wittgenstein in his book called the Tractatus.

He says the sense of the world must lie outside the world.

The seemingly paradoxical statement because you think that the sense of something comes from the thing itself.

The sense of a car rises from the car.

The sense of the sky arises from my experience of the sky.

But Wittgenstein is saying Wittgenstein that this is not applicable to the world as a whole.

The true sense of the world, as you reflect on it, comes from outside the world.

So I'm going to draw on the most villas, a powerful philosophy of the last two centuries, to identify an internal realm that is beyond physical law.

I'm going to show that this realm is required not only by Western but also Eastern ideas of immortality.

I'm going to show that there's an eternal part of us that inhabits this realm, inhabits it even now, and will sort of join it when we die.

Strangely, my guide for this journey is not going to be is going to be an atheist, namely the philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer.

And just as Virgil was sort of Dante's spiritual guide, taking him through hell and purgatory in heaven, Schopenhauer is going to be our intellectual guide, showing us the way to the world beyond science and beyond our senses.

Now, the remarkable thing about Schopenhauer is that he was an atheist who I think believed in life after death.

It may seem kind of shocking, but if you think about it, there's actually nothing inherently inconsistent about it.

The question of whether there is a God and the question of whether there is an afterlife are two separate questions.

Admittedly in Christianity they're linked.

It's God who in a sense creates heaven.

It's God who creates hell, and so the divine creator and the afterlife are inextricably linked.

But we can separate these two issues out like conceptually, this is not a book or an investigation proving God.

I've looked at that subject in my other books What's So Great About Christianity and also a subsequent book on God and Suffering, But here we're just focused on life after death.

And so remarkably we can take as our guide an atheist, but an atheist, by the way, who is grounded in the mainstream of Western and European philosophy.

In fact, Schopenhauer was a kantient, and so we're going to kind of begin with Kant but then go beyond Kant, and we're going to look and see how it is possible by the way, not using the Bible, not using divine revelation, proceeding on the basis of reason alone to make a philosophical journey to discover the truth about life after death.

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