← I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
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- [00:03]
Frank Turek
Ladies and gentlemen, I suppose this happens almost to every generation, but when I grew up and went to high school in the 1970s, some of my friends would try and get fake IDs so they could go out and drink. And I was never a troublemaker. As a kid, it didn't appeal to me at all. But they wanted to get a fake id because at the time, I want to say that the drinking agent determines time was 18. And some kids in, you know, 16, 17 could pass for that. So they get these fake IDs, these New Jersey fake IDs, so they go to a bar and so they could drink and they could get into trouble. And that can happen to us today when we. We adopt an id, an identity for ourselves that really is fake, we don't tend to flourish. We tend to hurt ourselves and hurt others. And that's the subject of a brand new book that my guest Abdu Murray has written. It's called Fake id and it deals with two major issues. Major issues. Deals with a lot of issues, but the fake ID that people get with regard to gender, ideology, and also the encroachment of AI that causes us to sometimes wonder if what we're actually seeing is real. And Abdu just wrote this book, it comes out February 3rd. Actually, that was yesterday. If you're listening to this on Tuesday. Actually, no, it's today. Today's February 3rd. If you listen to this on Tuesday, the book's Fake ID How Identity Ideology and Artificial Intelligence Are Collapsing Reality and what to Do About It. We discussed this in the last podcast, how it's Collapsing Reality. We'll do a little bit more of that and then we're going to talk about what we can do about it. And Abdu, by the way, it's great having you on the show again. I didn't give you the round of applause last time, but here he is, the great Abdi Murray. By the way, if you say anything wrong here, Abdu, you're going to hear this wrong. And if it turns out to be not a good show, you're going to.
- [02:07]
Charlie Kirk
Hear this at the end.
- [02:08]
Abdu Murray
You're fired.
- [02:08]
Frank Turek
All right, so let's just jump in and talk a little bit. Let's start with the image of God, if we can, because if we have a healthy idea of the fact that we're made in the image of God and we follow that, we'll probably improve our chances of flourishing. But if we sort of deny who we are, we're going to have trouble. I know theologians debate what it really means, what The Bible really means by saying human beings are made in the image of God. How do you take the image of God? How do you define it?
- [02:45]
Abdu Murray
Yeah, and while I don't try to settle all those debates, there are some. Some centralities I think that people think about when they think about what it means to be made in the image of God. And one of those things is not capabilities, but capacities. And the reason why I want to stay away from capabilities like our ability to be inspired and create and think is that there are people through traumatic brain injuries or they're in comas or the preborn, all various states of human beings who don't have the capabilities that others might have. Which doesn't mean they either bear God's image less or don't bear it at all. That isn't the issue. It's more about capacities. It's about this idea of we are the kind of creature that is made to be inspired, to be able to create things and to think counterfactually, to look at the world and say this, there isn't this thing yet. I can invent that and have this creative spark in us. But that is the capacity, not necessarily the capability that's important. The other part of it, to me too, is the inherent relationality. And this is the part I center around in the book, because this is the part, I think, that will speak to the current form of reality collapse and why it's so destructive. The Christian idea of God, of who God is, is that God is a trinitarian God. He's one God in three persons. He's one what and three who's. So there's one nature to what God is. He's a divine being. But he has three centers of consciousness. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And while all are co equal and co eternal, they are distinct in their center of consciousness. So that the Father eternally loves the Son, and the Son eternally loves the Spirit, and the Spirit eternally loves the Father and the Son. And so God defines relationality in virtue of him being the uncreated being, and everything else flows from Him. So he is the being that is inherently relational. And so it wouldn't surprise me then that if anything bears God's image, it would be an inherently relational thing. And that's what we are. We are inherently relational beings. We have the capacity for relationship and creativity to better not only the world around us, but to worship that God who made us. And so I think that's at least part of what it means to be made in the image of God. And I think that when you unpack, it actually helps us to provide an anchor and a solid anchor to be able to ride out the cultural tsunamis that try to tell us what our identities are seemingly moment by moment, so that we never know what they really are. And this idea which I think can be proven is actually that which can give us the anchor.
- [05:38]
Frank Turek
I hear people saying, I just want to live my authentic self. Right, the authentic self. Now I've heard other people say I need to be saved from my authentic self because my authentic self is selfish and evil and wants what it wants when it wants it. Yeah, but, but our authentic self is that we're made in the image and likeness of God. And therefore we are beings that have eternity. And we will either live for eternity, either with our creator or separated from our creator that really is our authentic self. But a lot of times we want to deny that because we want to go our own way. And Paul of course talks about this in Romans, chapter one, that we suppress the truth and unrighteousness to go our own way. And this creates trouble because as you write in the book, the central sort of focus of the book, you say the central insight is when truth collapses, so does humanity. When truth collapses, so does humanity. Unpack that for us a little bit.
- [06:42]
Abdu Murray
Yeah, absolutely. Because think about what's going on here is that we used to have, and I got this a little bit from Mary Harrington, I once heard her say something similar to this at a conference in the uk. We used to have this thick, robust idea of what it meant to be human. We had this idea of the soul, so we were a body, which was a good thing, but we were also this transcendent thing that wasn't necessarily material. And there was a joining of the two things along the way. We despiritualized ourselves and over psychologized ourselves. And now we have this thinner version of what we are, and that's now the self. So we go from the thick idea of the soul to the thinner idea of the self. And in our identity obsessed world where everything is a matter of our feelings and our preferences because we're trying again to elevate ourselves to Godhood, we've shaved off what it means to be human even further. So now we have this paper thin, I think, unbiblical idea of identity. And now our identity is so thin that it's as thin as the bumper stickers we use to say who we are and we slap them on the back of our Subarus, you know, and therefore they can be changed and removed almost at will. And so we're constantly wondering who and what we are. So if you, if you remove that idea of truth and that truth is objective and it is knowable, not, not comprehensively knowable, only God knows everything, but it's, it's knowable to the, to the point where we can actually discover it. You get rid of that, well, then what it means to be human starts to collapse as well. And look, we're seeing that right now with this frayed idea of identity, this paper thin idea of identity. We go now to chatbots, to fall in love. I mean, people are falling in love with these artificial things and they're creating friends on various apps. You can get on your iPhone right now and on your Android right now, you can create a chatbot who won't judge you and will always affirm you and tell you how great you are and that you look pretty today and boy, you're a handsome lad, all that kind of stuff, and, and these people are falling in love with it. And that lack of relationship with something real is having a real detriment. I mean, the stories that are coming out and the lawsuits that are happening now where people are starting to sue the AI companies because people are committing suicide because the relationships aren't real and they're falling into more and more despair. And this is happening not only on individual basis, but, but on cultural bases as well, where young people are starting to get more and more in despair over this. And so, yes, when truth collapses and the idea of what you are collapses, naturally humanity is going to collapse because we don't know who we are anymore. We're going to drift this way and that way into, as Nietzsche said, an.
- [09:26]
Frank Turek
Infinite nothing you mention in the book. And again, the book is called Fake id, ladies and gentlemen, by my guest Abdoumairi. You mentioned in the book Abdu, that the more we get connected digitally, the less or the more lonely we are and the less valuable will you feel. Why is that? Why do we feel less valuable if most of our relationships are digital rather than person to person or person to God?
- [09:55]
Abdu Murray
Yeah. And I think that this goes right at the heart of the center of it is that you're seeing this. First of all, you're seeing studies on this where the more people interact with the LLMs like the Chachi and the Geminis and all this stuff, especially using the voice feature, the lonelier they get, the more lonely they get. And I think that one of the reasons is because we are built for that sense of relationship that our creator, who is a being who defines relationship, creates us for the authenticity of relationship. And so we're taking authentic relationships with people who, by the way, won't just affirm us because we want to be affirmed, who will have counter opinions, who will challenge us, a good friend who won't just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. But the LLMs won't do that. They'll tell you what you want to hear. And we, we recognize the artificiality of that.
- [10:42]
Frank Turek
Yeah, so does the YouTube. YouTube algorithm and the Netflix algorithm. And every algorithm online tells us what we want to hear, what we're already interested in, and it affirms everything we already believe. Hence the polarization. Part of the polarization in our country is because we're in echo chambers.
- [10:58]
Abdu Murray
Yeah. And what's interesting to me is when you look at my fear about AI is not that the machines will become more human. That's not my fear. My fear is that the humans will become more machine like. Because what does AI do right now? What it does is it's a prediction machine. It takes all the statistics from everything you've done, what you've looked at, what you've watched, what you've clicked, yes to what you've reshared, what you've retweeted. It takes all of that, puts it through an algorithm and then feeds you more of it because it recognizes your patterns. So when you're watching YouTube and the thing on the side says you might like these videos, and you're like, why yes, YouTube, I might like those videos. And before you know it, you're in the YouTube black hole, as they say. Or Netflix says, you watch this movie, you might like this movie, and you click yes or no. You've told it something about your patterns. And so what ends up happening is we just click yes or no like a robot. That's what robots do. We don't think for ourselves anymore. We start to lose that sense of that we are creative. I mean, look, OpenAI, MIT and Microsoft came out with some information to their credit, by the way. They came out with some information recently. And it's in its nascency, it still needs to be developed, but that when people use LLMs like ChatGPT for example, for generative purposes, they use it to write their essays for them, or they do a lot of image generation through these things. They've shown that when we engage in that, we incur what they call cognitive debt. People are becoming less creative. They don't remember what it is what they created. They become less critical in their thinking and they lose their sense of judgment. That's interesting because you'd think that you would be free from all the tedium and let the AI do it so that you could be more creative and have better judgment. But we're losing it because we're using this digital thing to do all the hard work for us. We are path of least resistance creatures. This is part of, I think, the sin condition we find ourselves in. But what was also interesting was what they showed is that the more people interact with this stuff, especially the voice features, the lonelier they get. And I think the reason is because we deep down know that this is inauthentic. The authentic self we're trying to reach is inauthentically being reciprocated by this machine that neither knows nor cares about us and just tells us what we want to hear. And that's not real relationship and we recognize it. And so we sit alone in these rooms that are lit by smartphone screen blue and think that somehow in this dark room we're going to find the answers. And we only find loneliness more and more because we're starting to view ourselves not as in souled creatures, but as digital identities that can be downloaded and uploaded. Well, how do you possibly have a sense of your own personal value if you think you're no more complicated or beautiful or inherently valuable than a chatbot? Of course you're going to find yourself to feel that way. That's why you need a sense of the transcendent. Not as a convenient truth, but as an actual truth that happens to be quite convenient.
- [14:12]
Frank Turek
Yeah, I mean, I want to go back to authentic self for a second. If authentically we are just machines, we wouldn't know it because we don't have any free will to arrive at that conclusion. But let's just go with it. It's the big self defeating problem with atheism and materialism. We're just machines. And we reason to that point that we're just machines. No. Okay, but if we are just machines, then our authentic self is whatever programmed us to be what we are. So for example, if Ford makes a motor car and you're in Detroit right there, the motor car doesn't say I'm not a motor car, I'm a boat. Right? It is what it is. And if the user of the motor car tries to use it as a boat, he's going to be in trouble. All right, so the authentic self is what the designer said. It is not what the machine wants it to be because machines don't want anything. So if we're just machines, our authentic self is however we were programmed. If we're not machines, then we're soulish creatures made by a designer. Then again, our authentic self is not what we decide, it's what he has created us to be. What am I missing here?
- [15:21]
Abdu Murray
Yeah, and. Well, there's nothing to be missed here other than the fact that the reason why it seems so obvious. And I don't want to sound self superior and triumphalistic about this, but you and I operate from a biblical paradigm, which I think can be proven true. So how do I know I'm made in God's image? I know for several reasons. But one of those reasons is that Jesus said so and then he died and rose again. And guys who rise from the dead tend to have credibility. So when he said that, I believe him. So that's one of the many reasons why I believe that. But we operate from that paradigm. Whereas the world, I think, especially a confused world, has been told these two contradictory things, that you are a machine and you're God. And they bounce between those two things almost interchangeably. But you can't do that for too long. After a while, your mind craves congruence. It craves actual truth and correspondence to reality. And so what ends up happening is that anxiety ensues, which is no accident. Then why, with the advent of the smartphone and the advent of social media, where we don't have authentic selves, we are curated selves with the filters and all the stuff we put into these things. We only post the good parts of our life, we never post the authentic parts of our life. That's the irony. We're going for the authentic self and all we do is see the inauthentic digital self over and over again. So is it any wonder then that when boys are swimming in pornography that they come to see women as objects to satisfy a base desire? And is it any wonder then that women see themselves as commodities because they have to digitally enhance themselves, because if they don't, they're gonna get made fun of or, or not get the likes that they would get on social media? Jonathan Haidt points this out in his book the Anxious Generation, that you can see a one to one correspondence between the way those things rose, the digital self rose, and the inauthenticity with which we are struggling is causing all kinds of devaluation of people, including and especially young women. So yeah, you and I are operating from a perspective where we believe we're made in God's image that the word person actually means something. It doesn't just mean human machine, as opposed to a ape machine or a shark machine. We believe in personhood. And this goes back to the Trinity, by the way, too frank. I think about the beauty of the Bible and this is something that I am frequently in awe of, especially considering that I once was an enemy of the Scriptures and I thought this was a book that no one should believe. It's a corrupt book. The more I look at it, the more in awe of its majesty and its language. I look at the word. For example, when the Scriptures talk about God being one in three persons, that word person in Latin is Persona, and in Greek it's prosopon. Now, those words before the Christian advent, before Christianity burst on the scene, those words didn't mean human, they meant mask. So an actor put on a Persona when he was acting or she was acting in a play. So it was an artificial construct. It didn't mean anything specific. So a person didn't have rights. A person wasn't equal to other people. You had to earn your citizenship and your equality by virtue of property and what you did in military service, whatever it was. But being a person didn't make you an actual valuable human being. But it was the Christian theologians who were looking at this, the data they see in the Bible about God being one in three, and they said, what are these three? Well, they're Personas, they're persons. And suddenly this word person went from being artificial to being authentic. And then that word person got infused with the idea of eternal value. And so when we refer to human beings as persons, we have the trinitarian understanding to thank for the idea that human persons actually have intrinsic and infinite value identities. What is that? That's a thing you put on a card, like you said, and you can get a fake one, but you can't get a fake personhood. Your personhood is what it is, like you said before. And I think that when we discover those things in the Christian faith that I think are provable and useful, I think we can find a way out.
- [19:48]
Frank Turek
Of this mess you talk about in the book.
- [19:50]
Charlie Kirk
Again, friends, the book is called Fake.
- [19:53]
Frank Turek
ID by my guest, Abdu Murray. There's a very revealing headline in the book. It begins on page 35 under reality collapse. I'm just going to read the headline and then I want you to explain what happened here, Abdu, if you could, to us, because this will help us see that even our sources of truth are often politicized in order to get an authentic self, in order to follow whatever they want to follow. It's not really their authentic self, but they want to follow what they want to follow. And it can cause us some confusion. Here's the headline. Lead psychologists at Tavistock, which by the.
- [20:36]
Charlie Kirk
Way, is a gender clinic in the uk.
- [20:38]
Frank Turek
Lead psychologist at Tavistock, former home to world's most controversial gender clinic, pleads guilty to pedophile charge but avoids jail. All right, this is found on not the Babylon Bee, but a site owned by the Babylon Be called Not the be. This is a true story, not a satirical story, but. But unpack what happens here and how that impacts what we can trust and what we can't trust from the major media.
- [21:09]
Abdu Murray
Yeah, and this goes right to the idea of reality collapse. And what I call this is collapse by concealment is that I went to look. So I found this headline because I was looking for something else, frankly. And then there's this headline that not the BE puts out there. And I'm looking, are there any other stories? Because, you know, like a responsible researcher, I don't just take one source and say, well, that must be true because this one source that I happen to like says it. I want to verify it. And while not the B is quite reliable, I want to make sure that it is in fact corroborated. And to my shock, almost no one else was talking about this, except for I found one article reporting it in the Daily Mail. Now, this is remarkable and remarkably irresponsible because the Tavistock is the world's most controversial gender clinic, which had the world's most controversial gender clinic, in fact, that Tavistock withheld information when Hillary Kass was doing her study on the efficacy of gender affirming care as a part of the NIH study. So the National Institutes of Health in UK was saying, are these things actually effective? And she found that no, there's no evidence for that. The Tavistock withheld information from her on purpose and other gender affirming clinics did the same thing. So there's this concealment, right? So. So you'd think that because people were saying, hey, look, is this damaging children? Is this hurting children? Well, there's this little inconvenient fact that one of the heads at the Tavistock, the lead psychologist, was convicted of pedophile charges. So you think that that would blow up the Internet and everybody of this interest, this matter of public concern, would be on everyone's lips and on everyone's headlines. But no, it took not the bee to break the story like, and not even break the story. They're the only ones who talked about it, almost. So to me, that is another form of reality collapse. It's not just that you'll use AI and it will blind you from what it means to be human, or you'll succumb to a gender ideology and you'll lose the sense of what it means to be human that way. There's two things converging here. The reason why we didn't see it is because the algorithms didn't show it to us. And the reason why they didn't show it to us is because whether it was the mainstream media or it was the power brokers of the digital world didn't want you to know it. And so you didn't. So you can do your searches on your various LLMs and your search engines and you might not find a whole lot. Even though it's out there. You won't find a whole lot because the machines are actually being run by human beings who have their own biases and their own agendas and their own sin to have, to have to contend with, and they're just as post truth as anything else. So if we think we're going to trust technology because technology is somehow this cold, dispassionate, unbiased thing, remember, it's run by and fed by passionate, very biased human beings.
- [24:09]
Frank Turek
You also point out in the book that you, you reviewed the movie Barbie a few years ago and, and you asked AI to evaluate something you said, and I came back to you and said, your tone isn't good. We're not going to do it.
- [24:26]
Charlie Kirk
Something like that.
- [24:27]
Abdu Murray
Right, yeah. So, so glad you brought that up because. So I wrote a piece critiquing the Barbie movie back when the Barbenheimer thing was everything, you know, And I critiqued the book from a biblical perspective. Sorry, the movie from a biblical perspective, because the whole point of the, at least part of the point was to poke fun at the Adam and Eve creation story because, you know, Ken, the Ken doll was created after Barbie, but created for Barbie. And so to put the shoe on the other foot, to show, you know, humanity just how misogynistic that is, they had Barbie created first. Whereas in the Bible, Adam is created first and then Eve is created for Adam. Meaning that Eve is derivative. Well, I point out that even the movie, the Barbie movie itself, does the opposite. It actually proves the biblical narrative because when Ken is saying to Barbie, I was made second. There is no Ken without Barbie. Barbee says, you have your own value it doesn't matter what order you were made in. That's exactly the biblical message. So nice try to try to unseat the Bible from its authority. So I wrote that. So I was curious. I said a minute. It's published in Fox News. I was curious to say, okay, AI, this is before Copilot was the new thing that Microsoft's doing. They had this other version of it. And I said, okay, hey, critique the Barbie movie from a biblical narrative from biblical perspective, especially its attempt to upend the Bible's Adam and Eve narrative. And it came back and I quote it in the book saying, I'm sorry, I can't do that. I don't like your tone. Essentially, people love the Barbie movie and they would be offended by what you're. What you would want to say. Please choose a different tone or a different topic.
- [26:14]
Frank Turek
Well, there it is. There it is. What you said earlier, I guess it was the previous show, you said this, that it's not that we're necessarily denying truth all the time, but we think our feelings are more important than the truth.
- [26:24]
Abdu Murray
Yeah.
- [26:25]
Frank Turek
So, Abdu, you're not. We don't like your tone. You may be right about the Barbie movie and how it aligns certain areas with the Bible, but we don't like it and we don't like your tone, so we're not gonna help you.
- [26:35]
Abdu Murray
Well, the interesting thing too about that, Frank, was this is I submitted the piece to Fox News. It hadn't been published yet, so the LLM did not know that I was going to publicly talk about this. So what it was doing was telling me what I should privately think. It wasn't saying you might offend people with your published piece. It was saying, abdu, I don't want you to think like this, so I'm gonna steer you away from it.
- [27:01]
Frank Turek
We don't like your authentic self. Your authentic self is to say what you just said, and we don't like it. You see, ladies and gentlemen, this authentic self stuff is really damaging because first of all, you were made by a creator and that is your identity. And then you can take a next step. You're not just made in his image, but you can actually become a child of God by trusting in Jesus. That's John, chapter one, verse 12. You're made in his image. You don't create your own identity because just like. Just like a created thing can't decide what it's going to be at, in essence, you can't just decide. I mean, you could decide your vocation, those kind of Things, don't get me wrong, but your core identity is given to you by your creator. You're not your own creator. And until we realize that people are going to get hurt, people are not going to flourish. There's going to be conflict, there's going to be polarization. And Abdu uncovers all that in the book Fake id How identity ideology and artificial intelligence are collapsing reality and what you can do about it. I'm going to ask him in just a minute what we can do about it. Give us a few ideas other than getting the book, what can we do about it. But I want to mention that the Change My Mind College tour starts February 10th. That's next week at Elon. February 11th, NC State, February 12th, Northern Florida University in Jacksonville. They'll all be live streamed but if you're in the area, everybody is welcome. Then a couple of weeks later we'll be up at Michigan Technical University on the 23rd and then Northern Michigan University on the 24th of February. Much more coming up in the months following. I have plenty of time for Q and A. I think I'm going to probably do some different evidence in every one of these sessions and then go to Q A just to. It's hard for me to cover the entire. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist in one session. So I'll probably spread it out a bit. But I hope to see you there. It'll also be live stream, so check it out. Let me go back to you Abdu, the book Fake id. We've got these dual, these, these dual cultural phenomenon going on now.
- [29:17]
Charlie Kirk
One is the identity crisis and the other is AI. And again as you mentioned earlier, AI is not good or bad.
- [29:23]
Frank Turek
It's, it's, it's amoral. It's what we do with it that's good or bad. Give us some practical ideas on how to navigate this culture we're in right now with regard to those two things, identity and AI.
- [29:37]
Abdu Murray
Yeah, and I think that the practical is actually the first step is the practical part is the theological part. And I'm not saying it to become a theologian or PhD in theology to actually deal with this, but is to recognize that there is a, an in understanding of what it means to be human that has a transcendent value to it that isn't based on whatever the current fad actually is. And so you look at the data and you see that the more we dive into the malleability of this pipers thin idea of identity, the more we need something thick and weighty and anchor like which is the image of God. And so to explore that idea and to really look at we are transcendent beings. And I go into the arguments in the book as to why that is. The second thing I think you can do is one, I actually have a tool that I've created called the Spot the Truth Spot the Lie tool. You can go to our website embracethetruth.org and you can email us and we'll send you the tool where we go critical steps in the ways you can look at media or AI stuff or any agenda driven thing headlines and ask yourself how do I know what the truth behind this actually is? It's a critical thinking tool where we go through six fundamental steps to uncover whether something's a fake, a deep fake, whether it's a fake headline and what the source actually is and how you can evaluate those things. In fact, there's actually good websites where you can take a look even fake images and you can reverse engineer them to find out if they're fake or not. We have some good stuff out there as well. But ultimately I think that the real way to the real practical way here is to understand the foundations for the truths that have stood the test of time for 2000 years in the Christian faith. Not only the historical and the scientific truths, but the theological and ultimately the personal and existential ones. I think that's how we can get there as well. I just want to end with one other thing. If I could just say this in terms of understanding this whole thing. The reason there's a crisis is not because weak people are running around and having their evil intentions sort of spreading. Although that's possibly true with some folks, there's a lot of people who are hurting who have succumbed to these ideologies and these cultural ways because they've been told these two competing claims, which both can't be true. You're a machine and you're God and they're in the middle of the anxiety of that. And so there is this intense sense of feeling about what does it mean to be human and where am I going and what is all this about? Now we've used the phrase and this is true, by the way, I fully affirmed the phrase. Facts don't care about your feelings. In other words, your feelings don't dictate what the facts are. The facts are what the facts are. Your feelings are irrelevant about what they are. I 100% affirm that. However, I will say this, that if we're going to not only navigate these cultural waters, but help other people to navigate them. People who have real identity issues, whether they are actual gender dysphoria, which is quite rare, but they have some version of an anxiety that causes them to not know who they are, they're going through anguish. People are immersed in a digital world where they feel lonely, they're going through anguish. So their feelings are actually important. They don't dictate reality. And that's the point, is that if you let them use their feelings to dictate reality, they'll get worse. So facts don't care about your feelings in the sense that they don't change. But as a Christian, I believe that Jesus is the seminal fact. If God is the source of all being, if God is the uncaused cause, then every fact that exists exists because of Him. And that fact, the seminal fact of all reality, who is God, cares deeply about your feelings. In fact, he cares so deeply about your feelings that he won't let you persist in them to the state where they hurt you. He wants you to see the truth. And so while facts don't change because of your feelings, the ultimate fact cares deeply about conforming your feelings to the truth.
- [33:37]
Frank Turek
And you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. As we said in the first program, if the truth will set you free.
- [33:43]
Charlie Kirk
And you don't have the truth, it means you're in bondage.
- [33:47]
Frank Turek
We also said in the first program, and this is in the book Fake ID as well, by my guest Abdoumairi, quote, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away unquote. And philosophically, that's the distinction that so many people miss, the distinction between epistemology and ontology. Ontology is the study of the thing that exists, and epistemology is the study of how do you know the thing that exists, exists. Those are two different things. And too often we conflate those two and we say, well, I think I know what I am epistemologically. But you're not evaluating what you really are accurately. So there's a distinction between how you know something and the thing you're trying to know. And what Abdu is saying to us here and in the book Fake ID is you have an identity already. You're made in the image of God. As Christians, we know that makes you valuable. But it's not enough to be united with the Creator because He's not going to force you into his presence against your will. You're not only made in the image of God, but you can become a child of God by repenting of your sins and trusting in what he has done on the cross to take your punishment upon himself. Tell people about that, Abdu, before we go.
- [35:09]
Abdu Murray
Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the things I resisted the most because I wanted to cling to my identity of being a Muslim as opposed to what the truth actually was. So when anyone struggles with this, I understand. I get it. I get why identity matters more than truth, because there's a price to pay. But what I want to tell you is that I have incurred debts because of my sin. And anyone listening to this or watching this knows that you don't need me to prove to you that you have fallen short. You already know. But there is one who has no debts of his own to pay, who was God in the flesh, God incarnate. So he's perfect and has no debts of his own to pay. And he decides because of his love for you that he is going to pay your debts for you. And if you will accept his gift of payment, then you can be free of those debts and you won't have to pay it. You will never be separated from Him. You will have eternal bliss and your true fundamental identity, that soul that you are, will be so thick with glory that we will have the same glorified body that Jesus has. A body that was so thick and so weighty that the locked door that separated him from his disciples was like smoke to him. He could walk right through it, the most real thing there is. So if you want to find out what it means to be really real, truly real, truly weighty, truly authentic, then you need to embrace Jesus. Because when he pays your debt and he rose from the dead to prove he could do it, you will have a resurrected body as well. What better news is there than that? AI can't give it to you, and the ideologies of this world cannot give it to you. Only the Gospel can give that to you.
- [36:49]
Charlie Kirk
Amen to that.
- [36:50]
Frank Turek
And pick up Abdu's book, Fake how identity ideology and artificial intelligence are collapsing reality and what you can do about it. Abdul also has a website, embracethetruth.org, tell us just briefly before we go, Abdu, what kind of work you do. And I don't know if you can relate a story you mentioned offline before we go, with regard to mit. If you can't reveal that, then don't. But you just spoke at mit. You speak at colleges, universities, that kind of thing. So tell us a little bit about your ministry.
- [37:17]
Abdu Murray
Yeah, absolutely. So the mission of embrace the truth. And thanks, Frank, for letting me do it. The mission of embrace the truth is to offer the credibility of the gospel to every questioner we encounter. And the idea here is that we don't answer questions, we answer people. The Apostle Paul says in Colossians 4, 6 is that let your speech be gracious, always seasoned with salt, so you may know how you ought to answer each person. Not each ideology, not each question, not each controversy, each person. Because questions, controversies and ideologies don't need answers. But people do need answers. And they use their questions, controversies and ideologies to get them. But ultimately you're answering people. And so that's what we try to do on the university settings. We try to go to places that are hostile to the gospel or the gospel isn't necessarily welcome and offer the credibility of the gospel, hopefully with gentleness and with respect, but always answering people before we answer a question. Because if you answer a person, their question gets thrown in and that's always a bonus. But if you answer questions, you might not answer the actual person directly. So that's what we do. And we try to try to accomplish all over the world. Thank God he gives us this opportunity. But yeah, we try to go where the gospel is not always welcome.
- [38:27]
Frank Turek
Can you tell us about MIT or no?
- [38:29]
Abdu Murray
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I can give you general details about it. Is that I just got back from mit and because of the snow that pummeled the New England area, especially Boston and also the Detroit area, getting there was quite the chore. I thought for sure we're never going to make it. The flights after they got canceled and rebooked and recanceled and I had to change airlines and all that stuff, the costs were becoming incredible exorbitant. And I thought, you know what? I'll just skip this one. I can't go this time. But something impelled me to know this is something worth fighting to go do. I've done it before, and the guys over there are great people to work with. I thought, I'm going to still make it. I'm going to stick it out. And I got there. By the skin of my teeth, I got there. It was just a half an hour before the event even started. And I walked in and I gave a talk, followed by Q and A. And at the second to last question of the night, a young lady stood up. I won't give too many details about her story, but she was from a Muslim country and her mom was murdered. And she felt incredible anguish because of the whole thing and was struggling with anger at God, anger at people, all kinds of issues like that. And she asked me the question about how does my faith help me? And the reason why that was remarkable, Frank, is because I am, as a former Muslim as well, someone who. We didn't talk about it in this show, but we talked about it in the previous one. I lost my dad to murder 16 months ago. And I thought to myself, and I said this to her, how amazing is it, how amazing is it that you come from a country where you, a few years ago, couldn't even go to a university to ask a question like this and express any form of anger, frustration or doubt without being stoned to death, yet God has placed you here in this particular place, in this particular room, talking to a former Muslim like me who's gone through the horror of, of having someone they love murdered and wrestling with those issues so that we can talk about this here. And Acts 17 says that God has placed every person where they ought to live or where they ought to be so that they might stumble around looking for God, though he's not far from any one of them. And so God has placed you in this room. And I asked people in the room, I said, Christians and non Christians alike, can we just spend a moment to marinate in the cosmic improbability of this happening this way, where this person, this person made in God's image, is experiencing this particular problem from her particular background, asking me, with the same background and the same issue to deal with, are able to talk about this in this way. Only the grand designer, only the one who builds the roads and makes the roadmaps, could have brought us together. It was a palpable. My answer wasn't as consequential as just the sheer fact that she asked the question right. That is, to me, that just got to work in an amazing way.
- [41:45]
Charlie Kirk
There's always a ripple effect, ladies and gentlemen. Every good and bad thing that happens, ripples forward to affect trillions of other events and billions of people. And so a ripple that came out of the murder of Abdu's father went forward to MIT that night. And there's been ripples, of course, from Charlie's death as well. Actually a tsunami from Charlie's death. And there's never been a most. Let me put it another way. There's never been an event like his memorial service where there were over 200,000 people live and 100 million people watching online. Every politician and friends of Charlie preaching the gospel, almost every politician, at least they're all mentioned in Jesus. That's never happened in history before. It's the biggest event in history, propagating the gospel because of Charlie's murder. And now as of November, the number's higher now, but as of November, 1.2 billion people across the world saw some of that memorial service.
- [42:58]
Abdu Murray
Wow.
- [42:59]
Charlie Kirk
And if Charlie were here today, he'd say, of course I didn't want to die and leave Erica and the kids, but I see the tsunami that has come from this for eternity. And that's what it's about. It's about eternity because nothing matters ultimately unless there is an eternity. And there is. And that's what the evidence shows. Abdu, thanks for being with us. And thanks for this great new book.
- [43:23]
Frank Turek
Fake ID came out today, February 3rd.
- [43:25]
Charlie Kirk
Ladies and gentlemen, for listen to this on February 3rd. So go pick it up. It will help you navigate this culture that is awfully confused.
- [43:34]
Frank Turek
And you can be an imager of God by being an ambassador for God.
- [43:40]
Charlie Kirk
By revealing the truth. And this book will help you do that.
- [43:43]
Frank Turek
All right, folks, great being with you.
- [43:44]
Charlie Kirk
We'll see you here next time, Lord willing. God bless.