← I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
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Ladies and gentlemen, are miracles illogical to believe in? Is the Christian faith illogical? I mean, if God exists and Jesus rose from the dead, why doesn't Jesus just appear to everybody and just settle all of these questions about who is the true God? Why just rely on a small group of people from the ancient past 2,000 years ago to tell us all of this is true? Well, I got a email from our sort of our resident skeptic. His name is Mike. He writes in quite a bit. He listens to the show. I'm blessed that he listens. He is a believer in God, but not necessarily a believer in Jesus. And our last show where I went through 10 aspects of reality that support Christianity, he wrote back and he said, frank, I always enjoy when you dive into reasons and logic, why Christianity is true? A few questions or observations. He writes this. He says, if we humans were the ultimate purpose of creation, made in the Creator's image, is it logical that the process would evolve over 13.8 billion years and result in a currently known universe of 93 billion light years across, just to wind up with us? If human history gives overwhelming evidence to the finality of death, is it logical to believe that Jesus and the numerous others who rose from the dead in the Bible before him, including the many saints raised at the moment of Jesus's death in Matthew 27, are true accounts? And based on all evidence of human procreation, is it logical to believe that Jesus was divinely impregnated like Hercules and numerous other deities in a variety of ancient religions? Or does the claim that the Creator is all powerful and can choose to violate all the laws of physics, logic and reason whenever he chooses, conveniently explain these occurrences? And if that's true, and the Creator is also, as claimed, all merciful, is it logical that he would have to have his son die on a cross, rise from the dead, and be witnessed by an extremely small number of folks afterward? If his purpose was to forgive all of humanity for the original sin he scarred, guard their souls with, and all their own sinfulness, a person can believe in a spaceless, timeless, immaterial creator and also in the impact of Jesus on the world without believing all the biblical belief requirements that come along with devout Christianity and contradict observational science, which the Creator gave us the intellect to do. Mike also then goes on with some concerns about the points I was making with regard to do not let propaganda poison your perspective. But let me just start with his questions here. When he says, if we humans were the ultimate purpose of creation, made in The Creator's image. Is it logical that a process would evolve over 13.8 billion years and result in a currently known universe 93 billion light years across, just to wind up with us? Well, I don't think you're using the word logical here in the true meaning of logical, Mike. I think you're probably using it in maybe to mean is it rational to believe not logical because we're not violating any laws of logic to say that a universe was created and it's so many years old and it arrived at us. That doesn't violate any known rules of logic. But I, I think what you mean by that, is it rational or is it reasonable to believe this? So I'll, I'll assume that's what you mean. It, it, it certainly doesn't violate logic. Maybe you mean expected. I'm guessing here, but I, I, I don't think you're meaning it in a formal sense. Well, let's just say you mean, is it, is it reasonable to assume this is how we got here? Well, first of all, by what standard are you saying that it's unreasonable to believe this? You seem to be assuming a couple of things. You seem to be assuming that the process would evolve over 13.8 billion years. I assume you're talking about the evolutionary process. I've written extensively on this and others with a higher pedigree than I have as well, that the theory of macroevolution has so many problems with it that it's probably not true. In fact, I would say that it's almost certainly not true because the evidence does not support it. And I've been through this on this program many times, but I'll just briefly mention some of the evidence against it. The acronym LIFE is helpful here, that there are, there's the L stands for limited ability to change. I mean, we can't even change dogs into some other kind of creature. Using our intelligence through breeding, breeding always results in obvious limits to change. And if we can't use our minds to change different species into completely different species, and of course species is disputed, what exactly is a species? It might be better to use the term kinds. In any event, when we use our logic, our minds, our intellect, we bump up against genetic limits. And so if using all our intelligence we bump up to genetic limits, why do we expect a non intelligent process to break these genetic limits? And by the way, this is even true with E. Coli bacteria. These E. Coli bacteria, these have very short lifespans. And when you experiment on E. Coli bacteria, you still wind up with E. Coli bacteria. But when you experiment on it, as I think Richard, I want to say it's Lenski, I might have that name wrong. He did this, I believe at Penn State for many years. When he started, he started with E. Coli bacteria, he ended with E. Coli bacteria and he didn't get a new life form. And that would equate to about a million years of so called human evolution due to the short lifespans of E. Coli bacteria. So the L does not appear, the limited genetic change does not appear to favor an unintelligent process like macroevolution. The I stands for irreducible complexity. You can't get around irreducible complexity in a gradual fashion. All the parts of a, of a living thing and particularly these little machines that live within us have to be in place all at once, otherwise you don't have any function. So irreducible complexity I think pretty much defeats this idea of a gradual non intelligent process. And just about everything about us is irreducibly complex. And Michael Behe has written extensively on this. The F in life stands for the fossil record. It does not comport with gradualism. It shows immediate, without fossil precursor explosions of body types. The Cambrian explosion is one example. And the E stands for epigenetic information, which is showing you that you can't. Epigenetic information is say the structure of a being, not its DNA, not its software, but more of its hardware. You can mutate DNA from now till doomsday. You'll never get a new structure, you'll never get this new epigenetic information. And you can't modify epigenetic information by modifying DNA. This is why 10 years ago the Royal Society in London came together. These astute philosophers and scientists, many of them are Darwinists. They got together in November of 2016 and they had a conference questioning the theory of macroevolution because they realized the current theory doesn't work. You can't mutate DNA and get a new body plan. It doesn't work experimentally, it doesn't work. You'll kill the creature if you try and mutate the DNA at the embryonic stage, which is when you would need to do it to get a new body plan. It's called a, it's, it's, it's lethal to the creature to try and mutate its epigenetic or I should say it's, it's embryonic information. So it's not the Christians that have come out and said macroevolution doesn't work, it's the Darwinists themselves. Who've been saying that for at least the past 10 years. Michael Behe, who wrote a book in 2020, said, there's so many papers or books that have been written since the turn of the century about evolution and none of them, none of them think the Darwinian mechanism is the right mechanism to get new life forms. So Darwinism is dead. They're looking for a new theory. The best evidence shows that there's intelligence behind this. There's evidence for intelligence, not just evidence that says, well, we don't know a natural cause. No, there appears to be a need for intelligence. Especially when you look at the software code that DNA is. Everywhere I see a software code, I know there's got to be a programmer somewhere there's a program, there's got to be a programmer. If there's a message, there's got to be a mind. And so there's not. We don't just lack a natural explanation for new life forms. We have positive, empirically verifiable evidence for an intelligence. So your assumption here that we evolve by this process, I don't, I don't think fits with the facts. But let's just say even if evolution were to be true, that doesn't get rid of the need for God. And Mike, you do believe in God, so you're probably not going to argue me, argue with me over this point that you do believe in a creator. But for those that don't believe in a creator, the very laws that drive evolution, if it's driven by natural laws themselves, need a creator. Laws come from lawgivers and they need to be sustained. They don't just exist reasonously. As the great agnostic cosmologist Paul Davies said, these natural laws don't just exist without reason. There's got to be a mind behind them. Now Davies didn't think it was God, but he's looking for some sort of mine behind the universe. Laws come from lawgivers. Why are the laws so fine tuned? Why are they so precise? Why are they so directed? Why don't they change every 10 minutes? You know, laws of nature don't change, but the laws of nature that affect material things, material things change all the time, but the laws that affect material things don't change. Why not? There's some kind of mind behind all this. And I would also say, Mike, your point about it being so big, 93 billion light years across is exactly what the Bible talks about. Not with that specific number, but it says the heavens declare the glory of God and it says in Psalm 103. That God's love exceeds the height of the heavens above the Earth. As I've said many times on this program, different estimates exist for the number of stars in the universe. The most conservative estimate is that the number of stars in the universe are about equivalent to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on all the Earth. Researchers at the University of Hawaii said their estimate was the number of stars in the universe. These are stars, ladies and gentlemen, not just. Not planets, there's more planets than stars, but just stars. The number of stars in the universe are equivalent to. Estimate it again. The number of grains of sand on all the beaches on all the earth times 100,000. Yeah. Now you know why the Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God. That when you look to the heavens, you realize this effect has to have an amazing cause, a very powerful cause. And that cause is what we mean when we call God. God. He is the cause. In fact, if you don't like the word God, just suspend that term. That's not his name, by the way. His name is not God. That's just a word we use to really describe the source and sustainer of all things. Who is the source and sustainer of all things? Just ponder that for a minute. Who is the source of the universe and the sustainer of the universe? Who is the source of you and the sustainer of you? Who is the source of the stars and the planets and the sustainer of the stars and the planets? Who is the source and sustainer and the sustainer of the natural laws that govern the universe? Who is the source and sustainer of logic, the laws of logic, the laws of mathematics, the laws of morality? Who is the source and sustainer of all of this? Whoever that is. That's what we mean by God. And by the way, no matter how old the universe is, you still need a cause. Time doesn't change the need for a cause. Some Christians believe the universe is young. Others believe it, believe it, it's very old. Regardless, you need a cause. Whether it's young or old. No matter how far back you go, you're going to need a cause. And if space, time and matter had a beginning, as even atheists are admitting, whatever created space, time and matter must transcend space, time and matter. As we talked about on the last program, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal and intelligent. At least from what we call the cosmological argument that the universe had a beginning, so it must have had a beginner. Now also, Mike, you seem to say that this, it's not logical to believe that it would just wind up with us. I think it's not logical to believe a natural process would wind up with us. Yeah, exactly. There's gotta be some mind behind this. And who's to say we are alone? We might not be alone. Even atheists though atheist scientists that I've read don't think there's other life out there. But there could be. Quite obviously there's a lot of stars and a lot of planets. But in our limited exploration, we haven't found a planet like Earth out there that has the right qualities, the right attributes, which is something that appears to be at least unique about our Earth. It's one of the arguments for fine tuning. Not only is the universe fine tuned, but our Earth and solar system appears to be fine tuned for us to have life here. And we haven't found anything that is like our Earth to have the kind of carbon based life that we have. But if there is other life out there, that wouldn't affect Christianity either way. All right, Mike goes on to say, if human history gives overwhelming evidence to the finality of death, is it illogical to believe that Jesus and the numerous others who rose from the dead in the Bible before him, including the many saints raised at the moment of death in Matthew 27, are true accounts? Again, Mike, I don't think you're using logical here in the formal sense, so I'm going to assume you mean is it rational to believe. It's not the right word to say logical. It's not rational to believe that this could happen by natural law. But that's exactly the point. A miracle requires a divine intervention. The finality of death is necessary to make a resurrection a miracle. I mean, if people popped up from the dead routinely, then the resurrection of Christ would mean nothing. I mean, imagine you go to somebody and go, hey, Jesus rose from the dead to prove he was God. And the guy goes, so what? Uncle Leroy just rose from the dead two weeks ago, Now I got to give the inheritance back? No, you go. Look, miracles have to be rare if they're going to get our attention. And the only way you can identify a miracle is against the backdrop of natural events, natural laws that do the same thing over and over again. If these natural laws were not so consistent, and if most people who died didn't stay dead, a miracle would never be detected by a resurrection again. If resurrections occurred routinely, they would be like natural laws to us. So Jesus's resurrection means nothing. If resurrections are Very, very common. They have to be very, very rare. And so, yes, the finality of death is something that makes the resurrection of Jesus special. And isn't it interesting that when you look at Jesus life, that when he does miracles, he does miracles in the areas of life that are problematic for us. And they're essentially four areas or four aspects to this reality that are problematic for us. Sin, Sin hurts us, natural laws hurt us, natural disasters, sickness hurts us, and the ultimate problem is death. Notice that when Jesus does miracles, he does miracles in those four areas. He's sinless, he has power over nature. You know, he can calm the storm, he can walk on water, he can turn water into wine, he has power over sickness, he can heal people, and he has power over death. He can resurrect people and resurrect himself. In other words, Jesus, Jesus's miracles aren't these random like card trick miracles or card trick magic tricks. They're, they're essentially saying, demonstrating by what he does that he is our Savior. We need to be saved from sin, we need to be saved from natural disasters, we need to be saved from sickness, we need to be saved from death. And so he comes along and he shows he has the power over sin and the power over natural disasters, the power over sickness and the power over death. So natural laws are required for us to even detect a miracle. And a miracle has to be rare to get, to get our attention and have some sort of evidentiary value. All right, Mike goes on to say, and based on all the evidence of human procreation, is it logical to believe that Jesus was divinely impregnated like Hercules and numerous other deities and a variety of other religions? Again, logic, not the right word here. You probably mean rational. It's not even a violation of rationality. If you mean is it probable to believe in such a thing absent God, or is it reasonable to believe in something absent God? No, it's not. You're absolutely right, but we're not talking about absent God, miracles. We can't de supernaturalize miracles and say, well, you can't believe this because the natural laws don't do this. Well, that's exactly the point. Of course, natural laws don't do that. That's why it's a miracle. So logic's not the right word. It's not a violation of logic that God could exist and intervene to overpower natural laws that he created. And he could use that as a confirmation that he's working through someone. And this is what miracles are often used for in The Bible. The miracle confirms the message. The sign confirms the sermon. Why should people believe? Well, let me back up for a second. If you look at the Bible in terms of miracles, people think miracles are happening routinely in the Bible. Actually, they're not. If you take the entire Bible. Well, let's just take it from Abraham, just to make the math easy. Let's just go from Abraham to Jesus. That's about 2,000 years. How many miracles are there in the Bible? Approximately? What would you guess the number is about 250, depending upon how you count them. Some of them are bunched up, but generally about 250. Let's just take it from Abraham to Jesus. If you have 250 miracles over 2,000 years, how often do you get a miracle? Who can do the math here? Homeschoolers jump right in. Yeah, the homeschoolers have it right. You get a miracle every eight years because 250 into 2000 is eight. But the miracles, first of all, does that sound like a lot? You're having a miracle happen every eight years? No, it's not a lot. Okay, but do they happen in that sort of rhythm? Do they happen every eight years? No, they happen in periods of time where God is confirming new revelation. Now, sometimes there are exceptions to this, where God is just doing miracles outside of these times. But when he's doing miracles through people, they're bunched around three significant people that need new confirmation. So the people around this person would believe that this guy speaks for God. The first is around Moses. Moses does miracles. So the people around Moses say, hey, this guy speaks for God. The second period is around Elijah and Elisha. Okay? It's the period of the kings, so people will know they speak for God. And the third period is around Jesus and the apostles. There are periods of hundreds of years where no miracles are done. Even that. The scriptures talk about that. You know, God's miraculous power was rare in these years. God is doing miracles in those times to confirm new revelation through these new prophets. So the people at the time would know these people truly speak for God. So they occur in bunches. They're not actually occurring all the time. So the idea that God could do miracles if he exists is obviously not a problem. If God exists, he can do miracles. And the greatest miracle in the Bible is not any of the things we just talked about. The greatest miracle in the Bible is the first verse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. If that verse is true, every other verse is at least possible. You can't rule it Out. Because God can create the universe out of nothing. He can do whatever he wants. It's not logically impossible. Inside the universe, he can raise the dead. He can walk on water, he can turn water into wine, he can part the Red Sea, he can make axe heads float in water. He can impregnate somebody supernaturally. Which is the point that Mike was pointing out. He was saying, well, is it logical to believe this? Not by natural law, no. But if God wants to impregnate Mary in a supernatural way. So Jesus does not have the sin nature. Apparently the sin nature's passed through the Father because Jesus did not have a sin nature. Mary was his biological mother, but his biological father was the Holy Spirit in the sense that he was divinely. Or Mary was divinely impregnated by the Holy Spirit. And by the way. Oh, sorry. Mike goes on to say this. Or does the claim that the Creator is all powerful and can choose to violate all laws of physics, logic and reason whenever he chooses conveniently explain these occurrences? Okay, I would argue, Mike, that God cannot violate the laws of logic because his nature is the ground of the laws of logic and reason. He can't violate the laws of mathematics either. He can't make two plus two equals five. When we say God is all powerful, we don't mean that he has the power to do anything that we can conceive. It means he has the power to do what he can do in accord with his nature. I mean, even God can't create a one ended stick or a married bachelor. I know some guys try, but no, they're still married. Even though they may say they're bachelors. God can't create a three or a five sided triangle. He can't create a square circle. He can't create an honest, honest politician. There are some things that are just too hard for God. Okay, they would violate his nature. But physics is not. The physical laws that we have are not based on his nature. The physical laws could have been different. Now it turns out the laws that we have are so fine tuned that given other parameters about our universe, if you change any of these, we wouldn't exist. But the point is, is that those laws aren't based on God's nature, but the laws of logic, the laws of mathematics, the laws of morality are based on God's n nature. And if he could violate those laws, then he wouldn't be the ground of them. The buck has to stop somewhere and it stops with God. But, but can violate. Can, can God violate the laws of physics? What do you mean by violate? Are these laws things that we can't overpower? It's not a violation of the laws of physics to overpower the laws of physics. I mean, we overpower the laws of physics all the time. If you try and dunk a basketball, you're overpowering the law of gravity. When you fly a plane, you're overpowering the law of gravity, or you're using the natural laws. You're using certain laws to overpower other laws. You create lift over a wing. You're using them in the context of natural laws, but you're overpowering the law of gravity to do so. If we can overpower the law of gravity, can the being that created and sustains those laws overpower them? Of course. So it's overpowering the laws. It's not violating the laws. Benedict Spinoza back in the 1600s, tried to say that miracles were impossible because they violate the laws of physics. Well, the laws of physics. That's assuming the laws of physics. He's. He's assuming what he's trying to prove. He's trying to say that the laws of physics cannot be violated. Therefore the laws of physics cannot be violated. That's an assumption. And it's not violating the laws of physics. It's overpowering the laws of physics. And we do that all the time. If we can do it with our finite power, can a being with infinite power do it? Yes, of course. Mike goes on to say, and if that's true, and the Creator is also, as claimed, all merciful, is it logical that he would have his son die on a cross, rise from the dead, and be witnessed by an extremely small number of folks afterward? If his purpose was to forgive all humanity for the original sin he scarred their souls with and all their own sinfulness? Now your snarkiness is coming out a little bit here. Mike scarred their souls. He didn't scar anybody's soul. Adam and Eve are ultimate ancestors, were the ones that made the choice to change our natures by disobeying God. But God always knew that they would do that, and he had a plan to redeem them. So original sin is not from God, but from Adam. And Jesus is the second Adam who succeeded where the first Adam failed. Adam is our federal head. I should say this is a theological term. He's our federal head. And so where Adam fails, Jesus succeeds. Jesus can save all of us because Adam is the one that condemned all of us. And so as the second Adam, Jesus's sacrifice applies to all of us who want It. But God is not going to force anybody into heaven against their will. That would be unloving of him. So he separates himself. That's ultimately what hell is, from those who do not want him. By the way, Jesus is also the true Israel. Where Israel failed, Jesus succeeded. In fact, if you look into the Old Testament, and we're doing this in our TV series that we're filming now, the next one will be March 2nd. The one we had planned for February 2nd got snowed out in Charlotte, so we couldn't do it. But we're pointing out typology from the Old Testament. We're pointing out that characters like Isaac and Moses and David and Jonah and several others and Joseph, these are all types of Christ, and they had characteristics in their lives that foreshadow what Jesus had in his life. But Jesus is the perfect antitype. Whereas people like Isaac and Moses and Joseph and David and Jonah and others were all fallible human beings who were not perfect like Jesus. Jesus succeeds even where they failed, although there are aspects of their lives which foreshadow and are typical of what we might say was Jesus's. What. What Jesus's life was about. That Jesus had certain characteristics that these characteristics in the Old Testament have. You know, Isaac is a sacrifice. Jesus is a sacrifice. Moses is a lawgiver. Jesus is a lawgiver. Joseph is saving his. His. His family and saving his people. Jesus saves his people. There's so many more parallels than this. I'm just highlighting a few of them. Right. Jonah preaches to the Gentiles. Jesus preached to the Gentiles. Jesus or David defeats the Satan figure, Goliath. Jesus defeats the ultimate Satan. There's so many parallels. We go through this in the program. But the point here is, is that human beings made the decision to sin and then God immediately put into place a rescue plan. The first prophecy for that is Genesis 3:15. You can go back and read how God is going to bring a Redeemer through the line of Eve and that Redeemer is going to save the whole world. And Mike then points out, well, why would God just appear to a small number of folks in the first century with regard to the resurrection? And this deals with an issue called divine hiddenness, which we covered in a podcast back last March. We'll put in the show notes called Three Big Reasons why God May choose to Hide Himself. And I say may choose to hide himself because some of it is speculation. Could God be more overt? Of course he could. He could show. Show himself to everyone. Might he have reasons for not showing himself to everyone. Yes, that's what that podcast talks about. So if you, you want more on that Mike or others, check the show notes here for that podcast. Jesus has to give us enough distance. God has to give us enough distance so as to not to overpower our free will. God wants children, not hostages. Yes, we have to know that God exists. But if he's too overt with us, and I'm getting into some of what we talk about in the Divine Hiddenness program, I won't complete the thought here. But if he's too overt, then we sort of lose some of our freedom. And so God revealed himself to a small group of people who then demonstrated by what they did after that pain with their own lives to point out that, yes, this actually is true. And then he sent his Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin. And you can either respond and receive what the Holy Spirit is saying, or you can reject it. Look, most people throughout the history of the world didn't have the kind of evidence we have now, the kind of historical evidence for Jesus, but they did have the Holy Spirit. God saves people primarily not through evidence, but through. Well, let me put it another way, not through the kind of historical evidence that we have. The Holy Spirit is still evidence because you're reasoning from effect to cause. If you have the witness of the Holy Spirit, that, that, that after you seek the Creator. Because everyone knows there's a Creator through natural revelation, through creation and conscience. Everybody knows there's got to be a Creator out there. And this Creator is also moral because we have a conscience and we know we haven't lived up to that moral, moral standard. Everybody knows there's some sort of Creator out there. Now we may suppress the truth and want to go our own way. And most of the time, in my experience anyway, when I'm dealing with people on a college campus, it's not a matter of evidence. It's not a matter of, do I have enough evidence for the existence of God. It's more a matter of resistance. People don't want God to exist. That's why I asked them, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian? And many of them will say, no, it's not a matter of evidence. For most people, it's a volitional choice to say, I don't want what Jesus is offering because I want to go my own way. Fine, you can do that. You have the free will to do that. And then God will ultimately complete, give you up to your own desires by separating himself from you in a place called hell. So everybody knows there's a God from natural revelation. In fact, to put it in a more simple way, God has two basic revelations. He has his works, that's the world, that's conscience, that's things we see around us. And then he has his word, his works and his word. Everybody has his works. Everybody can look around and see there's got to be some sort of creator who's moral out there. But his word was revealed to people throughout the the area around Israel and even people outside of Israel. When you start talking about the New Testament and those people wrote down what we now have and when you look back into the historical evidence surrounding them, which is what we do in our book, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, you can see that it makes a lot of sense to believe that what they wrote down actually occurred. Now obviously we don't have time to go into that in this podcast. But then Mike, you go on to say this. A person can believe in a spaceless, timeless, immaterial creator, as I know you do, which is great, and also in the impact of Jesus on the world without believing in all the biblical belief requirements that come along with devout Christianity and contradict observational science, which the Creator gives us the intellect to do. I'd like to know what you mean by contradict observational science. By the way, science would be impossible unless this was a cause and effect universe established and fine tuned by a mind who keeps these laws of nature going in the direction they're going. But I'd like to know what observational science contradicts with Christianity. Some may say, well, the age of the universe, we already talked about that on this program. So I don't think the Bible actually affirms a definite age to the universe. I think the age of the universe is left indeterminate, as I've talked about on this program before. And observational science, Are you referring to the age of the universe? Are you referring to something else? You're referring to evolution. I don't think evolution macroevolution is true, is for the reasons I mentioned earlier and many other reasons. But to say that you can believe in Jesus impact on the world without believing in all the biblical belief requirements. My question would be, well, why not? Why wouldn't you believe in the biblical belief requirements that come along with devout Christianity? Do they contradict something in your own conscience or your own moral standard? Or you say observational science, what is it? What's the problem? I just don't have enough faith, blind faith, to believe that Jesus impact on the world, as you put it, Mike, could have occurred without something dramatic like the resurrection happening. I mean, why has Jesus's impact on the world been so great if he was not resurrected? We talk about this in I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. And also in the book Hollywood Heroes. In fact, let me find this. All right, I found it. This is in the book Hollywood Heroes, how your favorite movies reveal God. And what I'm about to read here is actually a sermon, a short sermon, like a minute long, two minutes long, called one solitary life from about a hundred years ago. And this is obviously about Jesus. Here's what it says. He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant. He grew up in another village where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was 30. Then for three years, he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a home. He didn't go to college. He never lived in a big city. He never traveled 200 miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only 33 years old when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends went, his friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his garments, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend. 20 centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. I am well within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together have not affected the life of man on earth as much as that one solitary life. Look, I don't have enough faith to believe that this one solitary life from a remote ancient village in a remote part of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago could be the most influential life of all time. Un the resurrection is true. And of course, if the resurrection is true, then Christianity is true. And for those out there who conclude that the entire story of Jesus is fiction, is it reasonable to conclude that a legendary figure could become the center of the human race? I mean, would such a person, such a skeptic today think that it's probable that 2000 years from right now, if the world is still here, it probably won't be. But if. If 2000 years from right now, a fictional character such as, say, Sam in the Lord of the Rings or Luke Skywalker in Star wars will have become the most influential human being in history. Look, I don't have enough faith to believe that. Instead, it seems to me that only a real person could become history's M.O. most influential figure. And we talk about this in Hollywood. Heroes that the fictional heroes in the top movie franchises of the past 50 years, including Sam and Lord of the Rings and. And Iron man and Batman and Wonder Woman and Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. All of these characters, they're all modeled after the ultimate hero, Jesus of Nazareth. How could he be the ultimate hero, the most influential human being in all of history, if he just died on a Roman cross in a remote part of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago and that was it? He wouldn't be so, Mike, I think that you bring up some good questions, but at the end of the day, I think that these answers I'd offered here, I hope you would consider and realize that you already believe in a spaceless, timeless, immaterial creator who is also moral, because you have the moral law written upon you. If you want to talk about is it logical or is it reasonable, or should we expect. Should we expect that kind of being to want to reach out to us if he is moral and loving? And the answer, I think, is yes. But he's not going to reach out to us in a way that's going to violate our free will. And he has to reach out to us if he's going to save us from ourselves. Because if he's infinitely just, and he is, then he has to punish all injustice because he's infinitely just. But since he's also infinitely loving, he doesn't want to punish our injustice. We've all been unjust, quite obviously. And so what he'll do is he'll punish an innocent substitute in our place so he can remain just and still justify us. But where is he going to find an innocent substitute? Not in any one of us. We're all fallen. Since Adam, we're all fallen. So we need a savior. So what does he do? He adds humanity to his deity. He comes to Earth. He allows the creatures that rebelled against him to torture and kill him so he could take our punishment upon himself. And then by trusting in him, you're not only forgiven, but you're given his righteousness. That's the story of Christianity. That's the ultimate hero who comes to save his creatures from evil. He comes to do it, but he's not going to save people who do not want to be saved. He is not going to force people into his presence against their will. And by the way, as we point out in Hollywood Heroes, you can't invent. You can't invent the Jesus figure. Even without the resurrection, you can't invent this guy. He's so real, yet he's also, he's also sinless. I mean, how do you make a real guy sinless like Jesus? You know, how does he have all this amazing authority but also humbleness at the same time and it be genuine? How does he have this confidence, yet he's so approachable? How does he befuddle all these people with these questions and they just walk away going, we don't know what to say to this guy. He has qualities that if you tried to fictionalize him, it just wouldn't work. And C.S. lewis points that out quite a bit. And as I say, we cover this in more detail in Hollywood Heroes. If you want to go further on this topic, before I get to some more of what Mike has said, let me just mention that the college tour rolls on the Change My Mind tour. This Sunday, Lord willing, I'll be way up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at Evangel Community church in Houghton, Michigan. Two services in the morning, that's the 22nd, I think it's going to be eight degrees. I'll be, I'll bring my Mount Everest expedition jacket. And then the next two nights, I'll be at Michigan Tech the first night, that's in the same town of Houghton, Michigan. That's Monday the 23rd. And then on the 24th, the next night will be down, down, not far down, but Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan. All of that is free, but you have to go to our website. You might have to register for those, I'm not sure. But go to our website, you click on events, you'll see our college tour going on there. We had great, three great events last week. Thankfully, they were all sold out in terms of registration and most seats were full, although some people register and they don't come. But they were pretty much full houses at Elon, at NC State and at the University of North Florida. But we're going to continue that at Michigan Tech in Northern Michigan this coming week. And then what do we have after that coming up? We're going to be a little bit further down the road. Let's see this is going to be March 11th. We'll be at Christopher Newport University. I believe that's up in Virginia. And then after that, we're going to be at Colorado Mesa on the 24th of March. And then Utah Valley University. That's where Charlie was murdered. We can't let the Satan win. We've got to plant a flag there. That's going to be on the 26th. Keep that in mind. And please pray for these events, if you would. And then there's several more coming up after that. We've got 12 or 15 of them this semester, so keep an eye on the calendar and thanks for your prayers in that regard. All right, let me go back to Mike. He has one other objection. He says, also you're concerned for generalizations regarding critiques of ice. These are the people operating in Minnesota and elsewhere to deport illegal immigrants. He says, also your concern for generalizations regarding critiques of ice supported by your LifePoint Pastor. That's Josh Howerton rattling off examples of erroneous reporting from social media is half right. Let me stop right here. No, Mike, it's all right. There's no half right. What Josh uncovered was those were all issues of propaganda. They were false reporting. But anyway, Mike goes on. First off, anyone can find all manner of BS on social media to support whatever your misguided position may be. Exactly, Mike, that's my point. But the problem is you can't generalize from anecdotal data to whole groups. That's called prejudice. You can't just pick one incidence or scattered incidents of ICE agents or police officers or even trans shooters and apply them to the entire group. That's not the way this works. That's not the way you get good data on the entire group. To get data on the entire group, as I mentioned in that podcast, you have to survey the entire group or get a statistically significant sample of that group. Group a random sample, and then you only have confidence intervals to figure out whether or not these characteristics apply to the whole group. You've seen this in polling, right? Especially when there's presidential polls. You know, so and so is up 2 points. Confidence interval at 95% is. Is 3 percentage points. Oh, that's within the margin of error. You know, this is all what statisticians do to try and figure out if they can apply a particular characteristic from survey data to an entire group. But what you can't do is you can't take isolated incidents and apply them to the whole group. That is not the way this works. That's not good social science research. That's propaganda. Even if it turns out to be true, that's not the way you arrive at the truth. All right, so just to reiterate, you can't generalize some anecdotal data to whole groups. And it's not half right. It's completely right, because Josh Howerton was not saying that everything you see on the Internet is propaganda. He was simply saying those dozen or so clips that had gone viral using erroneous data were propaganda. Every one of the examples that other people were using to generalize about ICE were false. And by the way, it's doubly wrong. Not only can't you generalize from anecdotal examples to the whole, but the people who are doing so with ICE are using false anecdotal examples. They're not even true. So their examples are propaganda. Now, it's very difficult to get good data on law enforcement and particularly ice. ICE is a, is a, is another. Is another category of law enforcement that even my friend J. Warner Wallace said they're not trained the same way police officers are trained. Like, for example, he was saying, and I may have mentioned this last podcast, that they don't really do traffic stops. That's not really their role. So a police officer would never approach a car like that. One ICE officer approached Renee Goode, like, directly. They'd always come from behind, and they wouldn't be in front of the car either, because they're trained that way. But ICE people are not trained that way. So part of the problem here is that they're not necessarily trained to engage with traffic and that kind of thing, which is what led to that awful incident. But the truth of the matter is, if Renee Goode had not been obstructing the road and had not tried to speed away, she never would have been hurt. And the other guy, his name Alex Peretti, I believe, if I have the last name correctly, he never would have been hurt either if he wasn't obstructing valid law enforcement. Now, there needs to be an investigation into what happened there, and I think there is one going on, because if those agents did do something wrong, they ought to be prosecuted. But the whole incident was precipitated by Alex Peretti getting in the way of a valid law enforcement engagement. It's fine to protest. It's not fine to obstruct law enforcement. Mike goes on to say, second, you didn't mention the generalization begun by Trump when he announced his candidacy in 2015. Of course I didn't mention it had nothing to do with the point I was making. But he goes on to say, there are murderers, criminals, rapists, and a few maybe fine people, and numerous times later, that south and Central American countries were emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending the worst of the worst to us. Let me echo what my friend, My friend Rob Schneider said, the guy I went to Berkeley with and has become a friend. Rob's a comedian. He has this bit where he says, I'm starting to think Somalia is not sending us their best. Well, I don't know about Central America, south and Central America, as you mentioned here, Mike. It's hard to get good data on this. Would these countries admit that they're emptying their prisons? I don't know. But do you realize that according to congressional testimony from about a month ago, more than three quarters of Somalian families in Minnesota who have been in the United States for at least 10 years are on welfare? More than three quarters. They're on welfare. Is that. Are those the kind of people that we do want to admit into our country who are going to be living off the system? Is. Is they're not assimilating, apparently. And I don't know how many of them are legal. I don't know how many of them are illegal. But the idea here is, is that every nation, according to the way God set it up, too, every nation has the authority to have borders. Borders are all over the Bible. They're all over common sense. You have borders in your home. You have a lock on your door. You have a password on your bank account. Right? You have a password on your phone. We have borders everywhere. It's not because we hate the people outside. It's because we love the people inside. Borders are necessary. And every country, just like every home, has the authority to admit who they want to admit and who they don't. Can you imagine if somebody decided they were going to squat in your home and you said, you need to leave, and they said, no, I'm not going to leave. And by the way, I'm going to live off you, you'd go, what? No, this isn't right. This is. I'm not. I'm not even helping you. If I allow you to stay here and live off of my generosity, you need to get out. Get out and become independent and get a job. As Paul said, he who doesn't work doesn't eat. You're not helping people by allowing them to be dependent on others. You want to encourage them to actually work for themselves. That's True freedom. That's true independence. You don't help people by enabling them to feed off the system. Now we re realized there may be people that can't work. That's another thing. I'm talking about people that are able bodied to work. You're not helping them by allowing them to live off the system. So anyway, Mike goes on to say so that massive generalization has been out there and supported by right wing social media ever since this, in spite of the statistical evidence that illegal immigrants have have violent and property crime rates dramatically lower than American citizens and even lower than legal immigrants. I'd like to know your source, Mike. I didn't see any source. Tell me where that is. The source I've seen is that only 5 to 7% of the people who are being rounded up have criminal records. Okay, I don't know if that's true or not, but let's say it's true. That's that low. Do you really think that 5 to 7% of Americans have criminal records? Do you think one out of every, say 18 to 20 people that you run into has a criminal record? That's a pretty high number. And by the way, just to be absolutely clear about this, anybody that comes across the border already is a criminal. It's against federal code. You may not like that law. If you don't like it, you can work to change it. But that's just the fact. So this idea that whether or not the administration is rounding up people who are have committed additional crimes other than the crime of coming into the country, that's really a moot point because any country has the, the right to deport people who are in the country illegally, whether they've committed additional crimes or not. Now I personally think it makes more sense, as Trump and others have been saying, let's go after the worst first. Whether they're actually able to do that or not, I don't know. I do know this, that most of the things that you see in Minneapolis or have seen it's kind of died down recently has, has been because the sanctuary states or cities have released people from prison who are illegal immigrants because they won't hand them over to ICE to be deported. And then ICE has to go out into the community and track these people down. And that's where you're seeing the confrontation between many of these paid protesters and ice. That's where all this controversy comes from. You're not hearing about this from, from other cities, you're hearing about this from these sanctuary cities because these governments are not Actually doing their number one priority, and that is to punish wrongdoers and protect innocent people from evil. That's the basic role of government. If you don't have that, if your government isn't doing that, they're not carrying out their primary responsibility. You need a government to protect innocent people from evil, and you need to punish wrongdoers in order to do that. If you're letting wrongdoers out because you have some sort of political disagreement with the president, that is not a legitimate use of your power, of your office. If you need. If you have a political disagreement, then work it out lawfully. Do not allow people who are illegal and particularly people have committed crimes. That's why you're in, they're in your jails to begin with. Do not let them go. Go because you have some sort of political disagreement. You're. You're actually doing the opposite of what your oath of office should have caused you to do. You should be protecting innocent people from evil and punishing wrongdoers, not letting them go. So in any event, the main point here is that we cannot allow our perspectives to be poisoned by propaganda from either side, okay? You can't allow isolated incidents to cause you to apply that kind of event or that kind of characteristic to the entire group. No more than it's legitimate to say that all people who identify as trans are shooters, because we seem to be having a trans shooting almost every week now. But that doesn't mean that everybody identifies as trans. It has that characteristic. You can't do that. You can't apply individual data to entire groups. And by the way, even if you have good survey data, you can't apply that survey data into individuals. You can't say that because, say 47% of such and such a group use alcohol, that if you find somebody on the street, that that person you find is one of those 47%. You don't know that. Only if the thing says 100% of the people do this can you say, ah, I know you do this as well. All right? So it works both ways. You can't apply individual incidents to entire groups, and you can't apply characteristics of a group to individuals within that group without asking them directly. Unless it's a hundred percent. All right? This is just good reason, good logic. It's the kind of stuff that we don't teach anymore in school. We don't teach logic. We don't teach kids how to think. We teach them what to feel. And that's basically what social media is, what to feel. It's stuff taken out of context. You get your entire worldview from a 13 second video. No, you can't do that. There's a lot more to it. Investigate it before you make a decision like that. All right, friends, miracles. To sum this all up, miracles are not against logic. They're not illogical. If God exists, miracles are possible. And the evidence shows that God does exist. So if God. God wants to do a miracle, he can. The only question is, has he? And for that, you got to look at the evidence. All right. Great being with you, friends. Lord willing, we'll see you here next time. God bless.