← I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
Top 10 Ways Reality Supports the Christian Worldview + Proof of a Propaganda War
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Ladies and gentlemen, when you make a case for Christianity, as Christianity being the true worldview, realize the proper way to make a case is to make a cumulative case, if you have the time. Obviously, quite frequently you don't. But the reason I'm saying this is so, because so often people will pick out a problem, a perceived evidence against Christianity, but ignore all of the other evidence for Christianity. And so what I want to do is just briefly mention 10 aspects of reality that support the Christian worldview and are best explained by the Christian worldview. Because no matter what particular worldview you have, whether you're an atheist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a New Ager, whatever, you're Jewish, you got your own religion, you just kind of make up your own worldview, whatever your worldview is, you have to be able to explain at least these 10 things. I'm going to mention 10. There's more, but I'm just going to focus in on 10 and just mention them very briefly. We'll unpack them a little bit, but we'll mention them very briefly. And then I want to draw some implications from that. The first thing that we all need to explain, regardless of what we believe about reality, is we need to explain the creation of the universe because the universe was created. Even atheists are admitting that now that space, time and matter had a beginning out of nothing. Now, as I've said many times, if that fact is true, and it appears to be, that whatever created space, time and matter must transcend space, time and matter. In other words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create. Because to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation, someone had to make a choice. And only persons can make choices. Persons with minds, which is the next attribute you get. From what we call the cosmological argument, the cause would also have to be intelligent. So from the fact that space, time and matter had a beginning, it would seem that the cause must be at least spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, and intelligent. Now, when I ask people, when you think about a cause that's spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal and intelligent, who do you think of? Well, of course, God. But then you can ask the question, how do you know it's the Christian God? And the answer is, we don't. Unless you get more evidence. Because no one single argument from, say, science, the beginning of the universe, the design of the universe, the design of life, any of those arguments, they don't get you all the way to Jesus. That could be Allah or some other theistic or deistic God. But if you do look at the evidence for the resurrection and you realize the evidence for the resurrection is very good, and Jesus did in fact predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead, then you can go back and say that the same being who walked out of the tomb 1993 years ago is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing. In other words, when you get evidence from history regarding Jesus, you can then go back to the creation of the universe and say, oh, Jesus is the one that created all things in his nature as God, because he is the second person of the eternal Trinity. And as the book of Colossians tells us that Jesus created all things. So Jesus is the one, the spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent being that created all things. But you don't know that from just a cosmological argument. So you got to explain the creation of the universe, regardless of what worldview you have. You also have to explain the fine tuning of the universe. Why is the universe so incredibly fine tuned in three basic levels? It's fine tuned at the initial conditions. You know, if you were to change the expansion rate, as Stephen Hawking put it, by one part in a thousand million million a second after the creation event, the Big Bang, the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies. So from the very beginning, the universe is tweaked, it's fine tuned, the expansion rate is fine tuned. Change that, nothing exists. Now, what's the best explanation for that? It seems to me the same mind that created space, time and matter is the same mind that caused the expansion rate to be perfect from the instant of creation. It's not an evolutionary argument. You can't say, well, maybe the expansion rate evolved to that particular point by some chance. No, no, no. It didn't evolve, it didn't change. It started right where it needed to be from the very beginning. That's one level of fine tuning. The other level of fine tuning are the constants of nature and even the natural laws themselves. For example, if the strong nuclear force was different compared to the gravitational force or the gravitational force different from the strong nuclear force by one part in one to the 40th power, we wouldn't exist. What's one part in 10 to the 40th power? That's one part in one with 40 zeros following it. You say, frank, I can't get my head around that number. I know. Neither can I. So let me give you an illustration. Take the entire North American continent from Central America all the way to Greenland, the 51st state, and stack hidden dimes all the way to the moon. That's 238,000 miles. And do that on a billion other North American continents, stack them in dimes all the way to the moon, and then take those billion North American continents stacked in dimes all the way to the moon, take all those dimes, put them in one humongous pile, mark one dime red, mix it in, blindfold a friend, throw them on the pile, ask him to pick one dime at random. The chance he would pick that one marked red Dime is one chance in 10 to the 40th power, is he going to pick that dime? No, of course not. That's the kind of faith you need to have as an atheist to say there's no designer behind the universe. You have to believe that he would pick that one dime. That's a faith position. That's not evidence. You're going against the evidence if you believe that. And there are dozens of these other parameters. And then the third level of fine tuning is sort of the local fine tuning in our solar system. You know, if the sun was a little bit closer, a little bit further away, we couldn't exist. If Jupiter wasn't where it was to attract most of the meteors to it rather than us, we could wouldn't exist. These kind of things, the gravitational strength of gravity on the Earth, the axial tilt 23 and a half degrees, the distance of the moon, all that has to be exactly what it is for us to exist here on Earth. So if you've got some sort of theory about why things are the way they are, you have to at least account for the fine tuning of the universe on those three levels. Also their creation of life. I'm not going to go into details here, but the bottom line is nobody has any possible idea of how life could come from non life without intelligence. And it's not just they don't have any possible idea, it's not just a God of the gaps argument to say some intelligence must be involved. But when you look at life, you realize intelligence is involved because it has a genetic code, the DNA code is, or the genome. And even the simplest life we know about is 1500 books long. Whenever you see a code, you know there's a decoder. Whenever you see a software, you know there's a software program. So we don't just lack a natural explanation for the creation of life. We have positive empirically verifiable evidence for an intelligent being. And that's just even the simplest life, it gets more complex after that. There's no such thing as simple life. I mean, 1500 books of a software program is not simple. But that's the simplest we know about. And number four, the creation of new life forms. I talk about that a lot in the book Stealing from God. I'm not going to go into detail here, but that appears to require intelligence as well because not only do you need more code to get new life forms, you can't mutate DNA and get new life forms because there are other aspects of a living thing that need to be modified that DNA doesn't modify. And this is why Darwinism is dead.
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Even.
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It was admitted 10 years ago out there in the UK when they had that Royal Society meeting where they all these Darwinists came together and said we need to find a new theory because this current theory doesn't work. You can't mutate DNA and get new body plants. Doesn't work. They haven't come up with a new naturalistic explanation because there isn't one. Because you always need intelligence to add new code and to change structures that can't be changed any other way than by intelligence. Number five, you have to explain consciousness and our ability to think. This is why some atheists like Daniel Dennett, the late Daniel Dennett, tried to say that consciousness is an illusion. One wonders if he was conscious when he said that. I mean, if his consciousness is an illusion, then his theory that consciousness is illusion is an illusion as well because it comes from an illusion. So no, consciousness is not an illusion. It just can't be explained by molecules bumping into one another. There's more to it than that which is better explained by a mind like God than anything else. And we'll get into more of this right after the break.
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Don't go anywhere.
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You're listening. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. With me, Frank Turek on the American Family Radio Network and other stations around the country website, cross examined.org, cross examination examined with a D on the end of it.org check it out. We're back after the break. Ladies and gentlemen, what do you have to explain regardless of what you believe about reality? If you're going to be someone who is intellectually trying to support your worldview, I'm suggesting Here at least 10 things you have to explain. There are more. But the 10 that we're going through in a, in a very quick way are the first five, we already mentioned the creation of the universe, fine tuning of the universe, the creation of life, the creation of new life forms, consciousness and our ability to think, by the way, consciousness and our ability to think is required for us to do science. And yet there are atheists out there claiming they're champions of science, but they have no way of explaining why we can do science to begin with. I mean, why can we do science? First of all, we have these minds that can ascertain truths outside of our skulls and get real data that tells us the truth about what's going on out there in the real world. Number two, the universe is rationally intelligible. In other words, not only can we detect what's going on, but what's going on is orderly and reliably orderly. I mean, why don't the laws of nature change every 10 minutes? Because there's a mind behind those laws. Laws come from lawgivers who not only created these laws, but sustains these laws. And of course, even the scriptures talk about this in Hebrews. The writer of Hebrews says that God sustains all things by his powerful word. He doesn't just create something and it leaves it, he sustains it. So you've got to be able to explain consciousness and our ability to think and the rational intelligibility. Intelligibility of the universe, which includes our ability to do science. Number six, you have to explain the laws of, of, of logic. Why do the laws of logic exist? They're not made of molecules. You know, the law of non contradiction, you're not going to find made of carbon or, or made of nitrogen or something. No, no. It is a immaterial reality grounded in a mind. This is why, of course, the great attorney who did such great work analyzing the illogic of some Darwinian theories, Philip Johnson, he was actually an attorney for many years at UC Berserkly. He, he said that our mind is made in the image of the great mind, and that great mind is the ground of all logic. I remember years ago I was at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and I'd gone through the evidence that God exists from the cosmological argument. And I said, as I said earlier, that the cause has to be at least spaceless, timeless and immaterial. And this atheist got up to the microphone and he said, can you name anything other than God that's spaceless, timeless and immaterial? And I said, yes, the laws of logic, they're spaceless, timeless and immaterial. He said, I would argue they don't exist then. And I said, I guess you're arguing they do exist. He said, no, I'm arguing they don't. He said, no, or I said, no, you're arguing they do exist. He said, how am I arguing they do exist? I said, because you're using them right now to contradict what I'm saying. You're saying that the laws of logic don't really exist, yet you're using the laws of logic to say that. And he eventually arrives at the conclusion that the laws of logic are really just human conventions, like we invent these laws. And I said to him, if that were the case, you and I couldn't communicate because if you had your own idea of what the laws of logic are and I had my own idea of what the laws of logic are, how could we communicate? Secondly, they're not just human conventions. In fact, I said, let me ask you this. Before there were any minds on the earth, was the statement there are no minds on the earth true? Well, he didn't like me asking him that, but he finally admitted yet would be true. Because the laws of logic are not created by human minds. They're not grounded in human minds. They're used by human minds, but they're grounded in another mind. So in a sense, he, he had an intuition that was correct, that the laws of logic are grounded in a mind. They're just not grounded in human minds. They're grounded in the mind of God because God is a mind. And so these laws that come from lawgivers allow us to communicate and allow us to think the laws of logic are the bridge between minds. I couldn't understand you, you couldn't understand me. Unless these laws existed and were universal and could be understood by everybody. Doesn't mean sometimes we get them wrong. It means that they really do exist. Just like we can sometimes get our math sums wrong. That doesn't mean the laws of math don't exist. They still exist and they're independent of our own minds. They're used by our minds, but they're not created by our minds. They ground they're grounded in the mind of God. And number seven is the laws of mathematics. And why can, why can reality be explained and described so well mathematically? Which is why Eugene Vigner at Atheistic scientist back in 1961, the year I was born, wrote a an article called the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics. From an Atheist perspective, it was unreasonable that math would would be able to describe the real world. Why can we go write an equation on a chalkboard somewhere. And that equation describes accurately what happens out there among the molecules. Again, Vigner had no real answer to this. It was a problem for atheism, but it seems the best explanation is this universe is set up on a mathematical basis by a mind. You can describe things mathematically, and it's not subjective, it's objective. You know, a proof is something that means it couldn't be any other way. 2 +2 equals 4 couldn't be anything else. It's an absolute truth and it's a proof. Not everything we believe is based on absolute proof. It couldn't be any other way. Even the resurrection of Jesus, not an absolute proof. It's possible Jesus didn't rise from the dead. That's possible. It's not possible that two plus two equals something other than four. Okay, now, we base most of our beliefs not on absolute proofs. We base them on, on probability, on inference to the best explanation. By the way, this is even true in science. No scientist can replicate every experiment that supports a particular scientific belief. He has. No scientist has the time, the inclination or the skill to do that. Most of what scientists believe, they believe on authority. Somebody else did it and proved it. I, I'll just, I'll just accept it. I can't replicate it. I, I don't have the expertise, the time, the knowledge. I'm just going to assume what they said is true. It's based on authority. And scientific theories, by the way, change all the time. There's scores of scientific theories that people thought were once true and they're no longer true. Science is tentative. New information comes in, and that's why it's always trying to correct itself. Well, it's not it because science doesn't do anything. Scientists try and correct themselves, unfortunately, sometimes their philosophical biases prevent them from correct things because they've ruled out, say, intelligent causes before they look at the evidence. So there's no way they're going to consider that one other type of cause. For them, it always has to be a natural cause. Which means if intelligent causes are actually causing things, they're never going to arrive at the truth, because philosophically they've ruled that out. So the point here is, is that mathematics and why reality can be explained mathematically are best explained by a mind like God, not necessarily the Christian God. But again, if we find that Jesus rose from the dead, we can reason back and say, oh, it is the Christian God. Number eight of the ten aspects of reality that have to be explained, regardless of what your worldview is, is the Moral law, the fact that there are certain things that are absolutely right and other things that are absolutely wrong. It's objectively wrong to murder people. It's objectively right to love them. If that's the case, if there's a moral law out there, there's got to be a moral law giver. If there's a standard beyond ourselves that we're obligated to obey, that standard can only be God's nature. If God doesn't exist, everything else is just a matter of opinion. It's just your opinion against somebody else's. Yet we all know these objective moral obligations do exist. It's not just my opinion that murder's wrong. It's really wrong because there's a standard beyond us. And that standard has created human beings in his image. And there's a purpose to life. And it would be wrong to frustrate that purpose by murdering somebody. So if the moral law exists, then there's got to be a moral law giver, by the way, embedded in this number eight here. The moral law is also the existence of evil. You have to explain why evil exists regardless of what you believe. Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. The number nine aspect of reality that you have to explain is Old Testament prophecy, particularly the more specific ones like Isaiah 53 or Daniel 9 or Isaiah 9. You have to explain these. Or Micah 5:2, you have to explain how these people that wrote these texts down long before Jesus came accurately explain or accurately predict Jesus hundreds of years in advance. And number 10, the 10th aspect of reality you have to explain is the unparalleled character and life of Jesus, including the evidence for his resurrection from the dead that make him the most influential human being of all time. How do you explain Jesus is the most influential human being of all time if he didn't rise from the dead? How does this itinerant preacher from a remote area of the Roman Empire from 2000 years ago, who was crucified as a criminal on a cross. How does this guy become the most influential human being in history unless something very dramatic happened? How do you explain that? In fact, some. I know this is a very, very, very, very small minority of people say Jesus never existed. Now think about that, ladies. If Jesus never existed, why is he the most influential human being of all time? Do you think that 2,000 years from now the people, if the universe still exists, then probably not. But if it does, do you think that 2,000 years from now, the people living 2,000 years from now are going to say that a fictional character like Luke Skywalker is the most influential human being in history. Do you think they're going to be duped like that? That they're going to say, oh yeah, Luke was a real guy and we follow him more than anybody else? Nobody's going to think that's going to happen yet. Why would you think it would? It would happen with Jesus. No, it, it's not. It's not a plausible way to argue. It's. It's not plausible that Jesus never existed or that nothing miraculous or nothing stupendous happened with Jesus for him to be the most influential human being in history. So what do you've got to explain, regardless of your worldview? You got to explain the creation of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the creation of life, the creation of new life forms, consciousness in your ability to think, which includes our ability to do science. You got to explain the laws of logic and the rational intelligibility of the universe, which also helps us do science. You've got to explain the laws of mathematics and why reality is described mathematically so accurately. You got to explain the moral law, including objective moral values, obligations and the existence of evil. You've got to explain Old Testament prophecy, and you've got to explain the unparalleled character of Jesus, including the evidence for his resurrection from the dead and him becoming the most influential human being in all of history. What's the implication of all this? I'll explain it right after the break. You're listening to I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. With me, Frank Turek on the American Family Radio Network and other stations around the country. We're also on YouTube. Check out us on YouTube. YouTube Cross exam in two words. Lots of videos up there. See you right after the break.
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Students across America are more open to the truth of Christianity than ever before. And Dr. Frank Turek is taking the powerful evidence for God to campuses like UC Berkeley, the University of Georgia, Ohio State and Alabama, reaching thousands in person and millions more online. But every event now requires costly security to keep students safe. And Cross Examine never charges students to attend. That's why we urgently need your support. The culture is dark, but hearts are open. Help keep the light of truth shining by donating today@crossexamine.org that's cross examine with a D on the end dot org.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Lord willing, I, Frank Turek, will be up at Evangel Community Church way up on the Upper Peninsula in Michigan on the 22nd of February. Then the 23rd, we're doing Michigan Tech. And the 24th, we're doing Northern Michigan University. That last one's in Marquette, Michigan, way, way up there. Lord willing, we won't be frozen, but if you're anywhere up in that area, love to see you. And those events will be live streamed. We're just in the middle of our, in the middle of our Change My Mind tour among college campuses. We're going to do almost 15 of them this semester, Lord willing. So check us out online for more about that. Okay, before the break, we were talking about all of these 10 aspects of reality that regardless of what worldview you have, you have to be able to explain. Now, why am I bringing this, this up? Well, overall, it's the apologetic way of moving forward with the evidence for Christianity. But secondly, I want to point out that what this means is that data that you get, or let me say, counter arguments that you get to Christianity have to be judged in the context of the larger truths that you already know. In other words, don't let the things you don't know cause you to doubt the things you do know. So for example, suppose somebody comes up to you and says, well, I can't believe in God because God's too hidden. He would be more overt if he truly existed. Okay, you might have some arguments to counter that, all right, which we do. I don't have time to get into them now. But the hiddenness of God, even if it's unexplained, does not negate the bigger arguments or the bigger truths you already know. You already know. The best explanation, it seems, for the creation of the universe is God. The fine tuning of the universe, the creation of first life, creation of subsequent life forms, rationality, consciousness, the moral law, Old Testament prophecy, Jesus rising from that, all those aren't suddenly vanquished by one argument or one objection to Christianity. You've got to look at it all in context. Or if somebody says, I can't believe in a good God because this particular evil occurred, well, we have an entire chapter in the book Stealing from God on why does God allow evil. But even if you don't know any of those answers, just because you can't explain a particular evil doesn't Negate the other 10 things I've already mentioned. You still, even if you say, well, this evil somehow disproves God, does that outweigh all the evidence that God does exist? The creation of the universe, fine tuning the universe, creation, etc like I just mentioned? No, you've got to take this all in context because you can't take one little pinpoint piece of data and, and have that overpower all the other data that is good. It doesn't negate all that other data. And in fact, every worldview has mysteries. Every worldview has things that we don't have all the answers to that we can't completely explain. Every worldview has this. Atheism has more than any. They can't explain any of this stuff, none of it. And yet they're, they're, they congratulate themselves on being reasonable. What reason wouldn't even exist if we're just molecules in motion, if we're just molecular machines, if we're just moist robots, why would you believe anything you think? But you can believe things you think, and if you can believe things you think, that's an effect. You've got to be able to explain the cause of that effect. It's not molecules. We already know that. No, the better explanation is you have a mind that's made in the image of the great mind, and you have the free will to follow the evidence where it leads. So don't let pinpoint data or pinpoint objections cause you to, to abandon your entire worldview. And this, by the way, is true on some issues that are going on in our culture right now. And in fact, there's a lot going on with regard to politics right now and what's going on with regard to immigration. We've talked a little bit about this on previous shows, but it just struck me recently that too often we tend to take singular incidents or anecdotal stories or images we see online or short videos we see online to cause us to draw a hasty generalization that a particular claim is either true or false. Like, for example, if you were to say, let's go back to what I was just talking about, the hiddenness of God, we say, okay, that's a problem. You know, we can't explain why God is so hidden. Or at least I don't know the answer why God is so hidden. So therefore there's no God. That would be a hasty generalization. Why? Because the best evidence is, is that God does exist from those other 10 things I already mentioned. So you don't just take the hiddenness of God in isolation and ignore all the evidence that God does exist. You've got to look at the whole picture and come to a more reasonable conclusion based on all the evidence, not just one snapshot. And too often, I think people are taking, are making hasty generalizations about entire groups of people from small pieces of evidence that might not even be true. In other words, you can't extrapolate single incidents into a higher. Into an entire population. We've seen some of this with regard to the ICE situation in Minnesota. And by the way, the reason those events are going on in Minnesota or have been going on in Minnesota is not because ICE is doing something unusual in Minnesota. It's because the govern, the governor and the mayor and the DA are doing stuff unusual in Minnesota. Why don't we have.
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Why don't.
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Why doesn't I have this problems in, say, Tampa or in Miami or, Or Dallas or, you know, because the local authorities in those communities in those red states are doing. Are cooperating with ice. If, if there's an illegal immigrant who is in custody for a criminal offense, they just hand them over to ice. And so ICE doesn't need to go into the community and find them in Minnesota. They're releasing them into the community. And so then ice, who has a warrant for these people, has to go find them. And that's where all the conflict occurs. So what we can't do is just take one incident and extrapolate that to the entire, say, ICE force, just like you couldn't do the same one incident and extrapolate it to, say, the entire police force. I remember right after, right after George Floyd, I was talking to somebody who was trying to make the case that, you know, most of law enforcement is corrupt and, you know, you can't trust any of them, and, you know, they're killing people everywhere. And I, I said to this woman, I said, this is right after George Floyd. I said, how many, let's say, unarmed black men were killed nationwide by police in 2019? This is back right after George Floyd. Well, 2019 is right before George Floyd, but we're talking about this in, like, in 2020 or 2021. And she said, oh, thousands. You know what the answer was? Nine. Nine. And I think the figure at the time for whites was like, 19. And unarmed is. Is. Is a. Is sometimes hard to define because, yeah, he may not have had a gun or a knife, but he had a brick or something, you know, and, and maybe sometimes police did shoot someone unarmed who shouldn't have been shot. In that case, they ought to be prosecuted. But the idea that when you saw something terrible like George Floyd that you need to ex. You can extrapolate that one incident without data to the entire nationwide group of people that call themselves police is clearly illegitimate. You don't extrapolate single incidents to entire populations. That's an illegitimate way to Reason. It's called a hasty generalization and logic. And by the way, I can do this in the other direction too. Politically, in recent years, there's been several shootings carried out by people who were trans or associated with trans people. We think of the trans person that shot up that school in Nashville a couple years ago. And then in August, last August in Minneapolis, the Annunciation Church. That very overt display of satanic activity, by the way, we talked about it on this program before. And then right after that, Charlie's murder. All allegedly anyway, all carried out by trans individuals or people associated with trans individuals. Now, it would be completely irresponsible for anyone to then say, because of those three singular incidents, all trans people are murderers. That's not the way this works. In order for you to know the propensity of a group that claimed to be trans are murderers, you would need complete data, or you would need accurate, statistically significant survey data with confidence intervals to try and estimate the number of, say, trans people who are murderers. But you don't take it from individual incidents. That's not fair. It's like you go to the doctor and the doctor commits malpractice. Does that mean that you can say that all doctors commit malpractice? Or you go to a restaurant, you get a bad meal. Does that. Is that evidence that all restaurants serve bad meals? No, of course. This is silly. Yet why do we. Why do we do this? When it comes to these controversial issues surrounding law enforcement, we. We seem to lose our minds. We seem to be. We seem to be in some cases, susceptible to propaganda. And then to jump from a propaganda piece or even a piece that might really literally be true, that some ICE agent or some cop did something that really was wrong, we. We tend to jump to then say the entire group of ICE agents or the entire group of police are somehow guilty. That's not right. It's not fair. It's not true. You need to look at the evidence. Or it'd be like saying, oh, my neighbor's a Christian and he's a jerk. He's a hypocrite.
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All.
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All Christians are hypocrites and jerks. False. Well, all Christians are hypocrites because we're fallen. But maybe not to the extent of your neighbor. Or it'd be like me saying, because Mao, Stalin and Paul Pot were such awful people as atheists, all atheists are awful people. No faults. You know, you guys get this, right? This is basic logic, but we don't teach logic anymore. We, instead of teaching kids how to think. We teach them what to feel. And that can be dangerous. And I'm going to prove to you right after the break that propaganda is very prevalent right now, particularly with this issue of immigration. We're going to show you several examples from my friend Josh Howerton. I can't say it any better than my friend Josh Howerton, pastor down in, down in Lake Point. I'm going to show you some of this and then we'll make a few more comments. You're listening to I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. With me, Frank Turek on the American Family Radio Network. Don't forget next week we're going to be up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Check our website, cross examine.org for more. Also check our app, the Cross Examined App. Two words in the App Store. It's got a lot of great Q and A on there that can help you when you're conversing with people. All right, great having you here. See you in just a couple of minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, how do you know what tends to be true of a whole group? You don't take isolated incidences and then extrapolate them to the whole group. You need better data than that. And if you don't think that the Internet is a place of propaganda, where people maybe on both sides are trying to shade things their own way, you're not paying attention. My friend Josh Howerton went through with painstaking detail about a dozen of these propaganda pieces that you've seen out there, particularly with regard to ICE interacting with people. And I can't do it any better than he does. So I'm just going to show you this. You got to really watch this on YouTube to see it. But here he is, Pastor Josh Howerton. Check this out.
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Now listen, I'm about to waterboard you with this. If you do not believe you're in the middle of a propaganda war. I love you and you can be as mad at me as you want. You're wrong. Okay, so listen, I'm going to rapid fire these. Here we go, right here. Number one, no, this is not a picture of an eight year old girl who died in ICE custody under the Trump administration's office heartless dictatorship. It happened in 2023 as reported by the New York Times under the Biden administration. But now it's getting millions of views and being labeled as happening. Now, number two, no, this is not a photo of a five year old put in a cage because of the current administration calls people illegal. Nope. Snopes reports after millions of views, it was discovered that was a photo taken at a protest staged in front of Dallas City Hall. The parents brought the kid to the protest. He was in the cage for about 30 seconds and he cried because he couldn't figure out how to get out. Number three. No, this is not a video of ICE agents, quote, unquote, drive by macing people for no reason. That went mega viral. I watched the entire video myself. They were throwing things at law enforcement vehicles and the guy maced the guy that was throwing things at law enforcement vehicles. Number four. No, this is not a picture of woman whose hand was shot off by ICE agents firing rounds at mourners as was claimed, and it got millions of views. Nope. She was rioting and obstructing law enforcement. And as you can see right here, she picked up a flashbang before it detonated and injured her own hand. Blew part of it off. Next one. No, this is not a picture of a five year old boy arrested by ice. As reported, the boy's father abandoned him while he was fleeing arrest. That is a picture of ICE agents following protocol and not leaving a five year old alone in freezing weather out on the street. Next one. No, this is not a picture of a baby that was tear gassed by ICE while his parents were on their way to a basketball game. Go to that. Next picture. You can literally see Nvidia that was uncovered later. His parents lied. They're on video at a violent protest and they left their baby alone in a car for 45 minutes at a riot that they helped cause and they forced tear gas to be deployed. Next one. This is not a picture of an innocent restaurant worker being arrested by heartless ICE agents. As you can see right here. It is a picture of an illegal child rapist who fled into a restaurant to avoid arrest and seems to have a knife in his hand. If you look closely. Next one. This is not a picture of ICE ripping a disabled woman from her car while she was screaming that she was trying to get to the doctor as was claimed and seen by millions of people. I watched the entire video. She was intentionally obstructing ICE officers by blocking a road. She was asked by four different ICE officers to move. She did not comply and so they were forced to remove her from her vehicle. Next one. This is not a picture of a mother whose son was gunned down for no reason by quote, unquote, racist ICE officers. Nope. Actually it was discovered this kid was firing an AR style rifle into the air into the middle, in the middle of an apartment complex. He was asked to stop by law enforcement who self identified as law enforcement. And not only did he not comply, he is reported as turning his firearm on the ICE agent and firing a shot in the agent's direction. In fact, the kid's dad admitted in a video interview that I watched that his son was doing something illegal with a gun and he knew that it was illegal. Next one. No, that is not an innocent man. This. This right here it is. That was. There was not an innocent man that was shot for no reason by ICE agents in Arizona. Next one. Actually, even the Associated Press reports the guy was firing rounds at law enforcement helicopters and law enforce individuals and they returned defensive fire. Next one. No, this is not a picture of a federal agent, quote, unquote, terrorizing an innocent observer by pointing a gun at his face. Nope. If you go watch the video, I took these screenshots. The guy was obstructing law enforcement on purpose. He initiated contact with the law enforcement agent and pulled the gun, tried, tried to pull it out of his hands. Then the muzzle of what appears to be a gun briefly flashes in front of his face because he pulled it out of the agent's hands and it was pepper spray. It was not a rifle. Next one. No, this is not a New Yorker article about a quote, unquote, innocent Jamaican US Citizen who is shackled and deported for no reason. Whoopsie daisy. He had multiple felonies, including armed robbery and murder, I repeat, murder. So his citizenship was revoked and law enforcement was carrying out the warrant for his arrest. Next one. No, this is making the rounds again. No, the current administration's deportations are not, quote, unquote, unprecedented. On the COVID of Time magazine. That's what it says, actually. I'm gonna read you some stats. Bill Clinton deported 12.3 million people. Bush deported 10.3 million people. Obama deported 3 million people. Biden deported 4.4 million people. So far, through both of his terms combined, Trump has deported a total of an estimated 2.5 million people, less than all these others. You may be asking the question, well, then why am I hearing so much about it? Why am I hearing about it more? Because you're in a propaganda war, that's why. Let's keep going. Next one. No, ICE is not the, quote, unquote, American Gestapo, as will probably surprise many people who are not as aware. The leader of ICE is that guy on the right. His name is Tom Homan. He served in the exact same position under Barack Obama. This is Barack Obama giving Tom Homan a distinguished Service Medal in 2015 for deporting more people than he has during the current administration. Now, listen, I could literally go on and on and on. Listen to me. Is this blanket approval of everything that every ICE agent does and everything the administration does? No, it isn't. Are you in a propaganda war? Yes, you are in a propaganda war. And it's designed. Listen, it's just. Think, think. Don't feel your way through things. Think your way through things. It's 2020. Again, it's a propaganda war. It is designed to galvanize the public against law enforcement, just like they did in 2020. What's. Why is this happening? It's a midterm election year. Like, man, just, like, actually stop and think for a second. So listen, man, Christians ought to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time. Okay? So Christians are commanded to love all people, including illegal immigrants. In fact, I'll just say this, man. I've seen some comments, like people taking shots at me where they'll be like, hey, man, you guys have Lake Point and Espanol. Do you know that all of them are legal? Or they'll be like, hey, man, you guys have a. I'll just say this. We have a food pantry that serves, like, almost a million meals per year out of Lake Point. I guarantee an enormous number of them are not legal residents of the United States. I don't care, because I'm going to let the government do their job, and then the church and individual Christians, we're going to do our job, and we bless God in those things. So, absolutely, man. If somebody walks into my church and says, hey, man, will you disciple me? My answer is yes. And if somebody's hungry and they walk up to my church and they want food, my answer is, we are Christians. We feed hungry people. Yep. We want to help and bless you. So Christians are commanded to love all people, including illegal immigrants. God commands all people, including illegal immigrants, to obey just laws, including border laws that should not be controversial. And it is not wrong for a nation to enforce the laws it's had on the books for over five decades. But listen, man, what you got to understand right now, and 10 toes down, you can. You can comment to your heart's content on my Instagram page. Ten toes down, you are 100% in a propaganda war right now. And Christians have to become people who wait, learn, and reflect instead of just emotionally reacting and getting caught up in mass hysteria. Why? Proverbs 18:17. Whoever states his case first seems right until another comes and examines him. You, my friends, are in the middle of a propaganda war, period.
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That's Josh Howerton, ladies and gentlemen. He has a great podcast called the Live Free Podcast, Senior pastor of Lake Point Church down near Dallas. And to summarize this, don't let propaganda poison your perspective, because that's often what does. Whether you're talking about an issue like immigration or you're talking about an issue like the truth of Christianity, because you might have one piece, what you think is counter evidence to the truth. If you generalize that one piece, which may be good or may be bad evidence, and then generalize that and apply it to the whole, you're going to get an illegitimate conclusion. Just like if you were to say, well, I can't explain this one thing about Christianity, so all this evidence we have for Christianity, I'm going to throw out the window and say Christianity isn't true. That's not the way good reason works and it's not the way fair people work. When they see one piece of evidence, they don't even really know if it's true, it's propaganda, or is it true. If they see one particular person operate in a poor or negative way, for them to then generalize that behavior on the entire population from which that person comes is illegitimate. You need better evidence than that. You need to look at the whole. In fact, Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, just the other day, I don't have time to play it now, maybe put it in the show notes. He was asked by a reporter, you know, the Pope said that, you know, we ought not to have borders. Or he said something like deportation, can't do that. And Mike Johnson goes into this eloquent explanation of how Scripture has different commands to different people for different reasons. He has different commands to individuals, different commands to the church, different commands to the government, different different commands to the different institutions that he has set up, different commands to the family. And he goes on to say, yes, we're to welcome the sojourner, but that doesn't mean that the government has to welcome the sojourner. If the sojourner is in our country, as Josh Howerton just said, we're going to treat them well as individuals and as the church. But the government has a different role. The government's role is to protect innocent people from evil and punish wrongdoers. That's what it's supposed to do. And if you confuse commands to government with commands to individuals, you're not going to have a civilization. The government can't turn the other cheek. The government can't decide that it's going to overlook offenses all the time. If it does do that, you're not going to have justice and you're not going to have a civilization. The government's primary command is to punish wrongdoers and protect innocent people from evil. That's what law enforcement is supposed to do. Most of the time it does that well. Sometimes it doesn't do it well. When it doesn't do it well, we don't extrapolate those bad apples on the whole group. Just like you wouldn't want to be tarred with bad accusations that you actually did not commit because somebody in your group has. You need better evidence than that. And don't let what you don't know cause you to doubt what you do know. All right, Much more in the next podcast. Great being with you. Those of you listening on the American Family Radio Now Network, you won't hear the next one there or on other radio stations that you hear us. You need to go to the I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist podcast because we do two a week and you only hear one of them on radio. So check that out there. Don't forget Upper Peninsula, Michigan next week. Check out our website for more. See you next time. God bless.
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Dr. Frank Turek is bringing powerful evidence for God to campuses like UC Berkeley, the University of Georgia, and Ohio State, reaching thousands in person and millions online. But each event now requires costly security. Your gift helps the light of truth pierce the darkness. Give today@crossexamined.org.