The Truth, Reality, and Conspiracy Theories (Joe Heschmeyer) | Ep. 553

Summary

Pints With Aquinas Ep. 553

The Truth, Reality, and Conspiracy Theories (with Joe Heschmeyer)

Date: November 21, 2025
Host: Matt Fradd
Guest: Joe Heschmeyer

Episode Overview

This episode is a wide-ranging, deeply philosophical and engaging discussion between Matt Fradd and Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer, exploring key topics such as the possibility and limits of knowledge, the allure and dangers of conspiracy theories, authority and skepticism in modern society, and comparative analysis of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Mormonism, and broader religious epistemology. Their candid, humorous, and intellectually robust dialogue unpacks how Catholics can respond to modern crises of confidence and truth, giving listeners tools to navigate the onslaught of information and the increasing skepticism of our time.

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Main Discussion Themes

1. Debating Baptism and the Boundaries of Christianity

[03:02 - 09:18]

• Matt recounts a recent debate with a non-denominational Christian who claimed that anyone who believes in baptismal regeneration (the historical Christian view) is "not going to heaven," including presumably all Christians from the first millennium.
• Joe and Matt discuss the roots of this extreme Protestant view, tracing it back to Radical Reformation and Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, highlighting how contemporary expressions often take earlier arguments to an unprecedented extreme.
• They discuss the remarkable unanimity of the Church Fathers regarding baptism’s efficacy, referencing Everett Ferguson's research.

Notable Quotes:

• "You took the Bible too literally, so you go to hell. That's a wild take." — Matt Fradd [04:41]
• "This is actually a radically extreme version of Christianity that's completely unknown to history. Like this would be like coming along and saying 2000 years of Christians are wrong." — Matt Fradd [08:25]

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2. Debate Culture: Psychology, Preparation, and Pitfalls

[09:18 - 16:42]

• Matt and Joe discuss the merits and limits of public debates, how social media and online platforms amplify polarized responses, and the temptation to seek only feedback that confirms existing positions.
• They reflect on the nature of effective debate—to inform the audience and plant seeds, not necessarily convert one’s opponent.
• The dangers of unprepared debating and the superficiality of "debate as entertainment" are highlighted.

Notable Quotes:

• "But I think it's healthy if you do debates to just censor out the people telling you what you want to hear who are already on your side, just telling you, great job. It's nice, it's comforting. But don't let that make you think that you've actually won the debate." — Matt Fradd [10:29]

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3. Information Overload, Epistemic Paralysis, and “Paradox of Choice”

[18:32 - 24:03]

• Joe articulates how the internet age's deluge of information leads not just to relativism, but to an “irrational dogmatism” and skepticism about ever making "cognitive contact with reality" [18:32].
• Matt introduces Barry Schwartz’s “paradox of choice,” comparing it to the spiritual search: on both counts, excessive options cause paralysis and a lack of commitment.
• They stress the need for a rational threshold for action, especially in religious discernment, highlighting the importance of focusing on foundational questions: “Is the Catholic Church who she says she is?” and “Did Christ establish a visible Church?”

Notable Quotes:

• "The onslaught of information, many of us are skeptical that we can make successful cognitive contact with reality." — Joe Heschmeyer [18:32]
• "You have to have a reasonable threshold of action... The threshold is much simpler: Is he who he says he is? And once you have enough information to say he is, now you can say yes to him." — Matt Fradd [22:21]

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4. Internal Coherence vs. Truth and the Conspiracy Theory Mentality

[26:31 - 40:08]

• Analysis of how “internally coherent” worldviews (dispensationalism, Calvinism, conspiracy theories) can be wrong but compelling; arrangement of “puzzle pieces” makes dissent nearly impossible for insiders but often incoherent to outsiders.
• They note how conspiracy theorists are often better “debaters" on their pet topic, having delved far deeper than most challengers.

Notable Quotes:

• "You can make sense of reality in all these different ways. And so one of the challenges we have is... you've got an infinite number of arrangements that those puzzle pieces could go in. And it seems genuinely limitless." — Matt Fradd [28:49]
• "Isn't that bizarre that you can conclude that somebody is wrong that you can't out-debate?" — Joe Heschmeyer [30:48]

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5. The Roots of Skepticism—Media, Government, and the Church

[40:08 - 53:53]

• Discussion of eroding trust in science, the state, the media, and even the Church, especially post–COVID and sex abuse scandals.
• They observe the psychological impact of continual lies or even isolated, unaddressed ones (“boy who cried wolf”), resulting in ingrained skepticism of everything (“pragmatic exhaustion,” John Eldridge).

Notable Quotes:

• "When you cover up the sex abuse crisis, it makes it a lot harder to believe anything else you're going to say, even when you're literally preaching the gospel because you've shot your own credibility in the face, not just the foot." — Joe Heschmeyer [45:25]
• "No wonder we don't trust anything." — Joe Heschmeyer [53:53]

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6. Faith, Humility, and the Limits of Knowledge

[54:14 - 80:53]

• Joe brings up Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” and the Copernican model as metaphors for how hard it is to change minds, how every system has challenging, unanswered “outlier data,” and how the demand for perfect answers is unrealistic.
• They dialogue about the definition of “knowledge” (Gettier problems, phenomenal conservatism), and the inability to attain “Cartesian certainty.”
• Humility and trust—of competent authorities, and ultimately of Christ— are essential since exhaustive certainty is impossible.

Notable Quotes:

• "If you're waiting to have a 100% grasp of everything where you can explain all of the details, you're not going to get there. You just are not." — Matt Fradd [56:53]
• "If something appears to be the case, seems to be the case, then I have at least some justification for thinking that it is the case... that's just how every human being has always reasoned at all times." — Joe Heschmeyer [78:26]

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7. AI, Simulation, and the Case for Christian Realism

[81:35 - 86:56]

• Explores simulation theory, the limits of artificial intelligence, and why AI cannot produce consciousness or “soul.”
• Christianity is uniquely positioned to affirm reality against the fast-growing temptation toward materialist unreality or skepticism.

Notable Quotes:

• "One of the great arguments for Christianity right now is that we can actually affirm reality." — Matt Fradd [82:27]

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8. Globalization, Culture, Language, and Identity

[94:05 - 122:26]

• A lively and humorous segment on cultural homogenization, the spread of English and American pop culture, linguistic and racial blending, and the loss of local distinctiveness.
• They reflect on how even accents, languages, and definitions of races or nationalities are rapidly diluting.

Notable Quotes:

• "We're living in an age where every major metropolis in the world is more similar to every other major metropolis in the world than any of those cities are to the little towns an hour and a half away from them." — Matt Fradd [96:32]
• "The older idea of race is going to be almost unintelligible at the rate things are going." — Joe Heschmeyer [102:33]

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9. Group Identity, Scapegoating, and Out-Groups

[124:25 - 127:30]

• Addressing the human tendency to create “out-groups,” even as cultures blend and distinctions collapse.
• The need for caution against projecting blame and seeking scapegoats in times of upheaval.

Notable Quotes:

• "As you have these forces that are drawing us together and making us more alike, the desire to have an out group doesn't go away. There is something deeply hardwired in us where we want to protect ourselves from the other." — Joe Heschmeyer [125:03]

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10. Israel, Gaza, Just War, and Moral Absolutes

[127:30 - 144:02]

• Joe thoroughly debunks “Christian Zionist” readings of support for Israel and stresses that biblical covenants run through faith, culminating in the Church.
• They critique how both sides of any modern conflict engage in propaganda; highlight Catholic just war teaching; and apply it to the atomic bomb, Israel-Gaza, and the moral limits of consequentialism.

Notable Quotes:

• "The first casualty in war is the truth." — Joe Heschmeyer [129:22]
• "If the way you plan to get to your goal involves doing things that are morally unacceptable, find another strategy or give up your goal. Like those are the two choices." — Joe Heschmeyer [142:48]

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11. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Religious Epistemology

[145:45 - 163:48]

• Detailed comparison of Catholic and Orthodox claims, highlighting why the visibility, universality, and Petrine dimension (the papacy) are essential marks of the Church founded by Christ.
• Discernment of the true Church should be Christ-centered (“Is this the church established by Jesus Christ?”), not mere alignment with one’s own theology.
• They explain why the Orthodox claim, while robust, suffers from the lack of Petrine primacy.

Notable Quotes:

• "The question is really simple. Is this the church established by Jesus Christ? And if it is, you should be part of it, and if it's not, you shouldn't." — Joe Heschmeyer [160:25]
• "If that's true, if Peter is to be the servant of the servants of God, that's part of the DNA of the Church. And so we should look to find the one church where we still clearly see that." — Joe Heschmeyer [170:24]

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12. Mormonism: The Great Apostasy and Defectibility of the Church

[171:49 - 194:53]

• Mormonism asserts the Church fell into a worldwide apostasy, restored only by Joseph Smith; Joe critiques this as unbiblical and historically indefensible.
• He details similarities between Joseph Smith and Muhammad, emphasizing self-serving “revelations” and problematic origins of LDS authority.
• Matt and Joe agree that while dismissive mockery is understandable for false ideas, genuine engagement with individuals demands charity, understanding, and the ability to articulate the positive case for Catholicism.

Notable Quotes:

• "If Christ himself established a church, why would that not be at least as durable as one refounded by Joseph Smith?" — Joe Heschmeyer [193:09]
• "We should find those areas of common ground and then show, yes, the visible church is real, it is important and is created by Christ. And that's why we don't think he got rid of it 80 years later...." — Joe Heschmeyer [192:48]
• "If you're going to be effective at evangelization, we should find those areas of common ground and then show where they've gone off and seen an incomplete picture." — Joe Heschmeyer [188:41]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|---------|-------| | 04:41 | Matt Fradd | “You took the Bible too literally, so you go to hell. That's a wild take.” | | 18:32 | Joe Heschmeyer | "Because of the onslaught of information, many of us are skeptical that we can make successful cognitive contact with reality." | | 22:21 | Matt Fradd | "Once you have enough information to say he is [who he claims to be], now you can say yes to him." | | 53:19 | Joe Heschmeyer | "The internet has made us all weary, skeptical pragmatists." | | 82:27 | Matt Fradd | "One of the great arguments for Christianity right now is that we can actually affirm reality." | | 102:33 | Joe Heschmeyer | "The older idea of race is going to be almost unintelligible at the rate things are going." | | 125:03 | Joe Heschmeyer | "The desire to have an out group doesn't go away. There is something deeply hardwired in us where we want to protect ourselves from the other." | | 129:22 | Joe Heschmeyer | "The first casualty in war is the truth." | | 142:48 | Joe Heschmeyer | "If the way you plan to get to your goal involves doing things that are morally unacceptable, find another strategy or give up your goal. Like those are the two choices." | | 160:25 | Joe Heschmeyer | "The question is really simple. Is this the church established by Jesus Christ? And if it is, you should be part of it, and if it's not, you shouldn't." | | 170:04 | Joe Heschmeyer | "Peter single-handedly does what all seven of them together couldn't do, which is to bring the nets ashore. And it says he does them without the nets tearing." | | 193:09 | Joe Heschmeyer | "If Christ himself established a church, why would that not be at least as durable as one refounded by Joseph Smith?" |

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Suggested Timestamps for Key Segments

• Debate culture and prepping: [09:18 - 16:42]
• Skepticism, authority, and information overload: [18:32 - 40:08]
• Epistemology & phenomenal conservatism: [78:26]
• Conspiracy psychology: [30:48 - 35:54]
• Just war and Israel/Gaza: [129:00 - 144:02]
• Catholic vs. Orthodox ecclesiology: [145:45 - 171:42]
• Mormonism and apostasy: [172:01 - 194:53]

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Tone & Style

• The discussion is simultaneously lighthearted and intellectually rigorous, with Matt and Joe frequently using humor as they explore weighty philosophical and theological matters.
• The rapport is friendly, with banter about linguistic quirks, world travel, and pop culture (“You're in the pocket of big moon”; “Let’s talk about Taylor Swift”) blending into deep explorations of history, doctrine, and contemporary anxieties.

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Conclusion

This episode is a rich and broad philosophical journey that equips listeners to face modern crises of trust, truth, and authority, particularly as Catholics, while traversing issues of doctrine, inter-Christian debate, the digital age’s epistemological challenges, globalization, and the perennial appeal of conspiracies. In sum, it offers both hope and sobering realism about the limits of what we can know, the importance of humility, and the necessity of rational faith.

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For related topics:

• Joe Heschmeyer’s books: “Pope Peter” and “The Eucharist is Really Jesus”
• Joe’s own show: Shameless Popery
• For further debate and apologetics: Catholic Answers, Trent Horn, Jimmy Akin

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So is Saldana.

[Matt Fradd]

Hey, can you wrap these please?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged at T Mobile. You can get four iPhone 17s on them.

[Matt Fradd]

The new center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No, AT T Mobile. There's no trade ins needed when you switch.

[Matt Fradd]

Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I'll take reindeer paper with.

[Matt Fradd]

Hey, where are you going? To T Mobile. The holidays are better. AT T Mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 monthly bill.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Credits and four eligible board ends on.

[Matt Fradd]

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[Joe Heschmeyer]

Visit t mobile.compints with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help, you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your 7 day free trial today when you download Truthly on the app store.

[Matt Fradd]

And I pressed him on, then just said, well, okay, is it your view that like the first thousand years of people after the apostles, none of them went to heaven in terms of anyone we know? And he was just like, fine. Accepting that conclusion.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Bananas. I've been thinking lately that I'm not sure I think knowledge is possible if by. Yeah, if by.

[Matt Fradd]

Go on.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, if by knowledge we take the standard philosophical definition of justified true belief.

[Matt Fradd]

It doesn't look like he's literally commanding genocide. And yet it sits uneasily with my worldview as a Catholic. It just does. It fits uneasily with my worldview as a Christian. In the 19th century, my wife and my kids would be counted as black under the one drop rule phenomena a lot or phenotypically they don't look. I mean, you look at them, you assume they're white. But if, depending on what one means by these racial categories, increasingly we're going to have these questions where it's what does that even mean what is, you know, like, I'm thinking about just the public square, people like Patrick Mahomes, where it's like, what does it mean to be black in America? What is it like? What do any of these terms mean practically?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Hey everybody, before we get into today's interview, I want to tell you about my brand new book. It's called Jesus Our Refuge. If you, like many people and like all of us to one degree or another, have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously when he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. It's getting great reviews and I know it will be a healing balm to your soul. Check it out. Jesus Our Refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks. All right. Hey, how you doing?

[Matt Fradd]

Doing great.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Trying to get better at starting these interviews with questions that grip the audience. So they say. The last two times I was on.

[Matt Fradd]

You asked me about COVID and Taylor Swift. So you're really good at starting with very divisive topics.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

The Jews.

[Matt Fradd]

No, what do you mean you've been doing.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You've had several debates since we last saw each other. What was the most impressive debate?

[Matt Fradd]

Impressive or like kind of noteworthy? It was fascinating. I debated Ryan from the channel needgod.net and we were talking about baptism and I asked him in the cross examination if his view was not just the baptism doesn't save, but that if you think baptism saves that you are not going to go to heaven. And I pressed him on, then just said, well, okay, is it your view that like the first thousand years of people after the apostles, none of them went to heaven in terms of anyone we know? And he was just like, fine, accepting that conclusion.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Bananas.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, it was, it was. I was kind of struck by it and I think a lot of people who saw it were just like, oh, wow, like that's, that's quite a position. But he followed this somewhat mainstream position within kind of the Baptist or non denominational world. It's certainly not everybody, but this is not an unknown position. But most people don't couple that belief, like you can't trust in your baptism with the belief like, well, the early Christians clearly did and therefore they weren't real Christians, therefore they weren't really saved. And that's like hearing somebody just embrace both positions.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Wild.

[Matt Fradd]

It is.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So St. Peter says baptism, which corresponds to this now saves you.

[Matt Fradd]

That's right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

The Christian Believes, okay, the baptism saves me, and. And therefore you won't be saved, according to this Protestant.

[Matt Fradd]

Exactly. You took the Bible too literally, so you go to hell. That's a wild take.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

How do people come up with these takes?

[Matt Fradd]

I think the worldview is if you do anything, that means that you're trying to earn your own salvation. So this idea of being free. Cause obviously, Paul talks a lot about faith versus works of the Mosaic Law. And this one interpretation of this going back to the Reformation ties this not just with works of the Mosaic Law, but any kind of good works. And really, I mean, you have some version of this interpretation going back even earlier in Augustine's fight against the Pelagians. But Augustine doesn't go to this kind of extreme. And the Reformers take this in a more radical way. And some modern Protestants have taken it in a yet more radical way of saying, basically, if you have to do anything at all, therefore, you're trying to earn your salvation, and that's bad. But that takes the human out of the equation of salvation so radically that why this is just something happening to you.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's like quietism almost.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. You can see. Right. And so whereas we would say baptism is a work God does for us, which is why a baby can be baptized, no one is praising the baby, like, good job getting baptized. Their view is, no, you have to do it. Therefore that's, you know, you're trying to earn your salvation.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Even more radical than Zwingli in his work De Baptismo, where he says, I can only conclude that all of the doctors and fathers have been in error.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Which is bananas.

[Matt Fradd]

It is.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But this fellow sounds like he's saying, not only were they in error, but if they believe that they all went to hell.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. But it does seem to be the lot, like, if Zwingli is right, that they're actually holding a heretical view on baptism. It raises so many issues. I mean, just think about one St. Paul is able to say, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Like, he's able to take, we get baptism right as one of those core uniting things, even in the midst of Christian division in his own day. And yet you'd have to say immediately, everyone is united, but in the wrong direction. Now, that means one of two things. Either every. Everyone changed their opinion as soon as Paul, like, looked away, or the unanimity he's talking about is a unanimity in favor of the Catholic view, and you're reading Scripture wrong. So the people taking the first of those saying, oh, yeah, everybody just immediately got it wrong. Because we see, really. I mean, it's easy to overstate unanimity, but on this, there's a remarkable unanimity on what baptism does. You know, Everett Ferguson has a book called Baptism in the Early Church, and he looks at the first 500 years and he speaks about just how remarkably united they are and that baptism does something.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I remember doing a bit of a research project into this many years ago while I worked at Catholic Answers. I drove my wife nuts because all I wanted to do was speak about baptism and all she wanted to do was go to sleep. But I remember, and you can correct me if maybe I've got this wrong, but every church father I looked at who commentated on John 3, 5 huditos chi panumatos applied it to baptism.

[Matt Fradd]

That's right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Is that right?

[Matt Fradd]

At least in terms of all the ones I know of, Maybe there's someone who uses it in a way that isn't explicit. Like the best thing you could say on the other side of this question would be you've got some who are clearly on, you know, if you want to call it the Catholic side or whatever. But then you have other people who occasionally will reference something and they don't specify, you know, so you could say like, we're born again of water in the spirit. But if you don't explicitly say through baptism, then they might say, well, maybe that means the conversion experience.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, yeah. But this weird Protestant idea that by water they may have meant amniotic fluid.

[Matt Fradd]

Or something, that was one of the things that came up.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Really? I haven't watched this. I can't wait to watch it.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. It's fantastic.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Thank you for schooling my countrymen. I appreciate it. Isn't he from Australia?

[Matt Fradd]

I think he is. I'll be honest with you. I can't tell an Australian from a New Zealand accent, but I'm 99% sure he's Australian. And he's a very nice guy. I talked to him a little bit beforehand. I found him very warm, personally. Even if he thinks I'm going to hell, he was very kind to me. So I don't want to be rude to him in any way, but I do think the worldview he's articulating it is worth it to just periodically stop and say, okay. You might think if you're in this worldview, you're a non denominational, mere Christian kind of person. This is actually a radically extreme version of Christianity that's completely unknown to history. Like this would be like coming along and saying 2000 years of Christians are wrong. It's this new weird thing. And then being like, that's just mere Christianity. Like, no, you're imagining yourself in the middle and you're on, like, the fringes of this Christian thing. And I think a lot of the people who are there don't even realize they're there. They don't realize that these are controversial takes because this is the version they learned and they haven't done a lot of deep research into the church fathers or anything.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Did he get stumped? I mean, sounds like he did. Did he change his mind? Did he do a review of the debate where he realized?

[Matt Fradd]

I think he did do. To be honest, I didn't watch his review of the debate. I know some other people who saw things he said afterwards and were frustrated because he also does, you know, like, he'll kind of censor his comments, it seems. So if you read his comments, you'll think he wins everything.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Because anything pulls the James wet. He just turns his comments off these days because I think it was too hard to censor out all the people speaking otherwise.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Isn't that weird, the turn against James White that's happened.

[Matt Fradd]

It is.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I wonder if he knows it's happening.

[Matt Fradd]

Because I don't know. It's a good question.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Whenever I watch a debate of his or I open up a video, the comments are all like, thank you, you led me out of Protestantism. Catholic clearly won. And I can't tell if that's just, you know, a loud minority of Catholics just trolling him or if it is. I'd love to ask people, Tell us in the comments section your opinion of James White and the debates he engages in. Like, he challenged me to a debate recently and I said no because I would lose. And I know that about myself, which is a really good thing, actually. Self knowledge.

[Matt Fradd]

I wish more people had this debate. Me too. I'm maybe not called to this.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, but you are. How was that debate?

[Matt Fradd]

I loved that debate. Rajim Zoomer actually was tweaking him about that debate. He told James White he didn't think he'd won a debate in a long time and then pointed to that debate as one that he had lost. So I. I felt good hearing that from someone who wasn't, you know, a fellow Catholic, because you get plenty of people on both sides who just tell whoever they agreed with at the start they won, and you could just load up those comments beforehand. And so I think it's healthy if you do debates to just censor out the people telling you what you want to hear who are already on your side, just telling you, great job. It's nice, it's comforting. But don't let that make you think that you've actually won the debate, because you could have the worst performance of your life. And a lot of people who agree with your conclusion are still going to tell you that you won just because they agreed with your conclusion, but they did beforehand.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Can you trust, say, Jimmy and Trent, who you work with at Catholic Answers, to give you the.

[Matt Fradd]

It's a good question. I. Yes. I think that if you tell them, like, give me scathing criticism or give me, you know, I think they would do it.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's nice. Jimmy's called me a few times after debates. He's like, how do you think I was too harsh? Because Jimmy goes in there and, like, surgically dismantles their entire argument. And, oh, my gosh, like, somebody said to me, I wouldn't debate Jimmy about my last name.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, you'll be. You'll be left taken.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes. Very good.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I can think of plenty of things that I would do differently this time. I was super wired. You know, I'd been excited for this debate, and I was just, like, I was jittery. I was moving my legs the whole time. I kicked the light switch or the cord for the light twice. Forgive me.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Did we talk about this in my last interview with you? I forget what it was.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't remember the last time we actually spoke. It's possible you were jit.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Now, people don't know this about you. Didn't you study law?

[Matt Fradd]

I did.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Were you a lawyer?

[Matt Fradd]

I was.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So you're good at this.

[Matt Fradd]

I. And I was a debater before that, and, you know, went to nationals and college, and, you know, I did well. So for a while, my debate partner and I were, I think, ranked eighth in the country in the kind of debate we were doing. So, you know, like, we were. We were good at debating. I. It would be false humility to pretend like, yeah, I don't know how to debate, but.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So how many hours did you pour into prepping?

[Matt Fradd]

That's a good question. Roughly, I went down a day before the debate to just have, like, unbroken time to focus on this. And along the way, I was listening to, you know, podcasts and things related to it, which was actually very helpful. Dr. Lawrence Feingold has a great book on the Eucharist. So the topic with James White was on the Eucharist as a propitiatory sacrifice. And this is basically a third of Feingold's book, and the book is like 800 pages long. So that was great because he'd already done a lot of the work for me. I'd done some work. Then I got that book and thought, oh, I should have started here. I mean, I already had it on the shelf, but I pulled it off the shelf, started reading. I was like, oh, he's already done all the work I just spent hours doing. So it's a lot. I remember hearing from Trent what his schedule was like before a debate where he will seemingly take, like a week off of work to get ready, or not off of work, but off of his normal duties to get ready for a debate. And I thought that seemed excessive. And the more I do this kind of stuff, the more I'm like, no, no, that makes sense. You can tell when a person hasn't done that. And I actually think we have too many debates right now online, because they're really fun, they're exciting.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

They get the clicks.

[Matt Fradd]

They do get the clicks. But if people haven't done their work, I think you're going to get diminishing returns, because people are going to come in, see two unprepared debaters talking past one another, not ready to engage with what the other side actually has to say, and then going away either dissatisfied or more set in the beliefs they came in with or just frustrated that their side didn't prepare the way they should have. So I think you owe it. If you're gonna do debates, you owe it to yourself as someone who will stand before God, but also to the people who you're trying to serve by the debate to really do your work. And it's hard. It's hard to prepare an opening talk or your opening speech. It's much harder to prepare. There's a thousand different ways the other person could go on this. What does that look like? So I spent maybe 20 hours, and I probably should have spent more.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Do you think you did well?

[Matt Fradd]

I think it went really well, especially for a first debate, Especially for a topic that we were in, a Reformed Baptist church. This was an away game. And so to be able to do that, I have not had a Catholic tell me that they thought I did badly. And I've heard plenty of Protestants who. Who thought that I did well.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So those are the voices. I'm actually more interested in the people who don't have a bias in my favor. Yeah, but say, despite thinking you're wrong, I still think you won the debate. Or better, you caused me to reconsider my views on this because, you know, you asked earlier, like, did. Did he change his views?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

This is the.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah. But for any debate, I would just say for any debate, rarely are you going to get the other person.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's not really the point, is it?

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, occasionally you'll have people. I want to say there is a.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

What I mean is the reason you're going.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Is to show other people why his position is faulty, not necessarily to convince him.

[Matt Fradd]

It's the difference between, like, privately writing the person, where you're just clearly trying to get them to change their view, and publicly confronting their error. And that's what a debate is or should be. You're either, this is an issue people can reasonably disagree on. Let's just throw out the best arguments for each side. People can decide for themselves, or this person is actually teaching some heresy. And I think it's important to call it out publicly and to defend the truth in the face of this thing they've been teaching. That's kind of the way I approach why you would do a debate. So then you're really doing it for the people that you're trying to reach, like the people who are watching, the people who are there, and the people who are already convinced of everything, whether it's the person across from you or whether it's the people in the comments who got there three hours early to post about how they think their guy's winning. Those people you're probably not going to persuade. But if you can plant some seeds and people who are maybe a little more open to hearing a different perspective, it does do really good work. And here's the other thing. Sorry, I know I'm going long on this.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No, please.

[Matt Fradd]

When you listen to people who are good orators, and I think James White's a good orator, I think many of the people on the Protestant side and YouTube are good at speaking and they're smart and they make what sound like good, logical arguments. And I think I completely understand why someone listening to them not hearing a different perspective would come away being like, I think they got the better part of that case. If you then listen to a Catholic, maybe on the same topic, two weeks later, you might hear them present and saying, oh, I think that makes a lot of sense, too. And the problem is you're not hearing them. Get to speak directly to each other. So. So in everything I do, I try to present, here's something of what the other side would say. And that's hard to do, especially for when you're doing a Lot of topics, a lot of episodes. But, like, for instance, in my books, I'll often have my argument and then have a section called, like, How Would a Protestant Respond? And then present the best arguments I can find against the position I laid out and then address those. And this is, of course, this is the strength of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Summa the of strength. This is. Justice Scalia wrote a book, I believe it's called the Matter of Interpretation, where he gives his main argument and a fairly short essay, and then he asks a bunch of different people from different views to write essays responding to him critiquing his argument, and then he does a response to them afterwards. That is so much more helpful than just hearing one person monologue about an idea, because you can actually see the exchange of ideas and see, okay, I now know what someone would say in response to that, and I see why I don't accept that or why I think maybe there's some merit to that, and I have to nuance my view. So that's what I love about debates, is you get to hear the ideas in real time being aired out there where it's not just two people monologuing to their own audiences.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, for sure. It feels like the onslaught of information we've been the recipients of for 10 years or more has made. Has kind of created a sort of irrational dogmatism. Not. Not a. Not a sort of epistemological relativism, but almost something like that where we just feel very skeptical about everything. In other words, you know, when I grew up, it was in the 80s and 90s, and, you know, just. I had, okay, maybe there was the town atheist and then there was the Baptist pastor, and, like, these were the people. I would have duke it out and then I would decide among them, and then I'd feel confident in my position. But now we're in this strange place where no matter how good you are at convincing or making your case, there's likely to be someone else who's attacking it, and you can't possibly respond to everything. So it feels like people. I think a lot of people just. Again, it's like this. Almost like we. There's this concern of mine that because of the onslaught of information, many of us are skeptical that we can make successful cognitive contact with reality.

[Matt Fradd]

That's a brilliant way to put it. Yeah. I think, okay, this is a problem within Christianity. This is a problem in politics. This is a problem for any kind of belief about reality. Are you familiar with the idea of paradox of choice?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Let's talk about it. I'm not.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. Barry Schwartz, I believe, is the guy who wrote the book. His argument is this. So I'm gonna start this and meander my way back to answering your question.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Take you to him.

[Matt Fradd]

He gives the example of buying jeans. That he bought some jeans years ago, and there were three different kinds, and he knew which kind he liked. Eventually those jeans wore out. He had to go buy some new jeans. But it'd been many years. Cause, you know, jeans are durable. Suddenly there's like 40 types of jeans. And so he spends like an hour trying on different jeans. And he says he leaves there with the most comfortable jeans he's ever worn. And he was unhappy because he realized if he'd stayed another hour, he could have found an even better pair of jeans. And he uses this to say, we live in an age where we have so many different options that it can feel overwhelming. Like, I hate the Cheesecake Factory. I hate everything about it almost. And one of the things that's terrible about it is the menu is way too long. And so you just get overwhelmed. You can spend 15 minutes and have no further idea what it is that you want. But this is affecting so much of our reality in ways that we don't even realize. Like, one of the reasons people aren't getting married right now is they have too many options. That if you lived in a small town and there was one pretty girl that you thought you had a reasonable chance with, you were gonna put everything you had into going after her. But if you've got an app on your phone where you're seeing girls who are way out of your league, and then you see that girl, maybe you're not going to give her the time of day because you just think, well, if I just, maybe I can find some girl who's even better than her, and you waste your life, and you waste her life because you didn't just say, okay, this is good. I don't have to explore every possibility out there. So paradox of choice. Closely related to that is this thing you're describing with the onslaught of information. And it can create analysis paralysis. It can create a situation where there is so much information that you just say, well, I need more, I need more, I need more. And this is one of the classic failures in discernment. And this is one of the classic failures in decision making because you can always look for more information. And people, particularly who are more risk averse, can easily fall into this trap where it feels rash not to gather all the data and they can never gather all the data. And so they just keep gathering more and more and more information. So you find these people who are drawn to the church, but there's so much more information to look for. And so even if they're doing it in good faith, they can sit on that fence for decades just gathering knowledge, just gathering information and saying, well, I started with these 20 objections, and along the way, 17 of them were answered. But I learned 10 new objections. And now I'm gonna have to work through the. And that just can continue on ad infinitum. So I think there's a couple things. One, you have to have a reasonable threshold of action. Like when our Lord is teaching and preaching, he says a lot of things, and you're not gonna know the answers to all of those things, and you're not gonna maybe immediately agree with all of those things. That's okay. That's not. You don't wait till you see the wisdom of loving your enemies and turning the other cheek and all this before you decide to follow Him. The threshold is much simpler. Is he who he says he is? And once you have enough information to say he is, now you can say yes to him. And there's an epistemological shift. Because once I can trust that he is a truth teller, because he is who he says he is, I can trust him on the stuff that I don't even understand. I can give an assent intellectually that I don't get why that's true. But you tell me it's true, and you know more than I do, and I trust you with the virtue of faith, for one, but also with a certain intellectual humility, because we live in this world like the idea of a Renaissance man doesn't exist anymore. Albert the Great was said to have known everything there was to know. You can't do that. I mean, Jimmy comes close, but you can't do that anymore, where you just know everything about everything. And so I will hear these claims. You know, light is somehow a particle and a wave, and it behaves in these weird ways.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And.

[Matt Fradd]

And I think that's weird. That's fascinating. That makes zero sense to me. The more I try to understand it, the less I feel like I get it. And at a certain point I just have to say, I trust the people who know this way more than I do. So that's another kind of element in this. There are times where you have to say, I'm just not going to know the answer to this question. But I have to trust that this Person I believe is an authority is right. So that's true if we're talking about Jesus, it's true if we're talking about the Church, it's true if we're talking about authorities in our own life. But it gets a lot trickier with those other authorities. And we can talk about that because sometimes those other authorities are wrong. And so then what do you do there? So you can have that kind of situation where there's just so much out there. So I would say this, anyone who finds themselves in that spot, number one, the question you should be asking is, is the Catholic Church who she says she is? If she is, you should be Catholic. If she's not, you shouldn't be. Second, you, you can find a potentially infinite number of objections to the Catholic claim from every possible direction. But lay out a simple positive case. Is Jesus who he says he is? Does he say he's going to establish a church? Is that church visible? And does that church have a Petrine or papal kind of structure? And I think we can see all four of those things very clearly. I mean, my book, Pope Peter, it's years old now, but that was the argument I make, like, if the papacy is true, everyone should be Catholic. If it's not true, no one should be Catholic. If you approach it like that, you don't have to deal with the analysis paralysis. You don't have to deal with an infinite number of doctrines from an infinite number of perspectives. And I don't know another way of kind of going forward other than to say, okay, let's consider this last thing. St. Irenaeus and against Heresies, gives this image of. He uses the image of arranging tiles. And I want to say that properly arranged, he says the titles would be like the image of a king, but he accuses the Gnostics of rearranging them in maybe like the image of a dog or something like this. You could imagine, if you prefer, like puzzle pieces. And you can find, whether we're talking about all the various forms of Protestantism or all the non Christian expressions of what they think. The truth is, people put the puzzle pieces of reality together in different ways. And you can do that. You can make an internally coherent model of the world, like just within Christianity. We'll take that for instance. I think the dispensationalist worldview is complicated, maybe a little convoluted.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Explain that to people.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. Dispensationalists say God deals differently with different people in different ages. That part's actually true. And when you're Reading something like the New Testament, some of it is written for Israel, some is written for the church. These two things are these radically separate entities. And. And so you can't just take a New Testament passage and assume it's written to you. I'm even here oversimplifying. But this is a worldview that gives you things like the Rapture and everything else. And it's pretty new, like 19th century. You've got Darby and then Scofield, who really kind of pioneered this way of viewing the Bible. It's wrong on a lot of things, but the thing that's fascinating about it is how complicated and sophisticated it is that if you go read the Scofield reference Bible or any of these works, and they'll have maps, charts, and all this stuff, putting together all this information in these baffling kind of ways to an outsider, where you're just like, why in the world would you think this is what that passage means? And then you look through their chart and you're like, I guess I see it from your perspective. I'm completely unpersuaded by it. But it's internally coherent. It makes sense within that world. And. And often in ways that it's very hard to kind of break into, because Dave spent so much more time thinking about that internal model of the world than you have. Similarly, I would suggest, like the tulip model of Calvinism internally makes sense. If you believe man is totally depraved in such a way that he'll never choose to do the good thing unless God forces him to do it, well, then you have to say grace is irresistible because if we could resist it, we would. And therefore anyone who goes to hell must have been because God didn't want them to go to heaven, because he could have just given this irresistible grace to them. Therefore God didn't want them to be saved. So you got something like double predestination. It makes no sense to say Christ died for those people if he never wanted them to be saved. So now the atonement is limited, and there can't be anything good in them because that would be something on their part, and they're so wicked, they would never choose to do anything good, ever. So election to salvation must be unconditional. And. And they can't possibly fall away from salvation, or they would. So you have perseverance of the saints. That is all. I think it's wrong. I think it's internally coherent. And we could give many more examples of this where within the worldview, they've arranged the Puzzle pieces in a way that makes sense, but it's still wrong. And so we have to recognize like you can make sense of reality in all these different ways. And so one of the challenges we have is if you've got the Bible alone or if you've got no trust that the Holy Spirit guided the church to get the puzzle pieces in the right order, you've got an infinite number of arrangements that those puzzle pieces could go in. And it seems genuinely limitless.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, that's really well said. It reminds me of Star Wars. Is the story coherent? Yeah. Is it true? Oh no, it's a story. And so similarly, just because the Christian can show how all of our doctrines fit, just because we can, the doctrine of the Trinity isn't irrational. That doesn't make it true. Yeah, so it is true, but it doesn't show that it's true. Let's talk a little bit about conspiracy theories because it seems like I remember, I won't say who, but a very close relative of mine got really deep into the 911 conspiracy theories. And it was the sort of thing where, just like you were saying, like, I can see from your point of view how this works. I also know that you've been thinking about this way longer than any human should. And if I get in here with you, I will lose.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But I also don't care enough to do the research to interact with you on your level. So I can see from their point of view that seems unfair.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I mean this is. I think anyone who's ever tried to have a productive conversation with someone you worry is going down a really conspiratorial route has probably had the experience of them saying, watch this two hour video. And then you do and you're like, that video was crazy. Like that person was making arguments. I just don't find any connection with reality. And then it's like, well, watch this other video and you can just do that ad nauseam. And that's part of the reason they've ended up in this. They've done that kind of work. So you're right, they will probably be better than you at whatever wrong theory it is because they know it better than you do.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And isn't that bizarre that you can conclude that somebody is wrong that you can't out debate?

[Matt Fradd]

It's true.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's weird, isn't it?

[Matt Fradd]

It is, it is.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But we're all in that situation because no matter what opinion you hold, again, unless you're Jimmy Akin, someone knows the counterpoints probably better than you can you know, and that might not be James Wyatt in your debate with him, but it might be somebody else where you'll get stumped. And sometimes you might be able to go, oh, no, here's why he was wrong. But there's a lot of times where you don't know how to do that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I think this is one of the points Dostoevsky is making in Brothers Karamazov.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

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[Matt Fradd]

Like the Grand Inquisitor, he doesn't have an answer to it, but you see that he's wrong. Sorry. Spoilers for a book that you should have read by now. You see that he's wrong, but he can't like. And you see Alyosha can't explain why he's wrong.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Right. But also in the Grand Inquisitor, you see the response of Christ and how disarming that was. It wasn't through debate. It's like through a kiss.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. So this is very much. I think he's showing us this exact point. Okay. Chesterton talks about the madman is not someone who's lost his reason, but has lost everything but his reason.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. Can you. What does he mean by that?

[Matt Fradd]

That the people spending hours and hours and hours hearing versions of reality that agree with the worldview they want to be true. And that might sound like an uncharitable way to put it, but the people who go in for this stuff the hardest often spend a lot of time hearing from voices that agree with their conspiracy, and they maybe don't spend as much time listening to voices that challenge it. Now, that's sort of true of all of us, but they have gotten a very thorough, you might say, indoctrination on this here. Whatever it is. Whatever it is. And they can see how the puzzle pieces fit together in the way that the person has arranged them. And so, like you said, if you go to debate them, there's a good chance that you're not going to be able to dissuade them of that. But similarly, if you go to try to persuade someone who is schizophrenic and is having a sort of a fit of paranoid delusion that no, they're not actually working for the CIA and the government isn't out to get them, the internal worldview they have actually makes perfect sense of the data they're receiving. Like, sure, of course you're going to say that because you were sent by the government to say that. I don't know, a good logical argument to overcome that. Yes, there is a sort of. I mean, if you think about the ways people address this, leaving aside cases of genuine mental illness, but people who are really deep in the rabbit hole on some of these issues, a lot of it's actually not out debating them. It's bringing them out of themselves and seeing another way of putting together the pieces of reality. And that can actually soften the edges of how strongly they hold to this view. And sometimes they'll come out of it then if you invite them into regular. Because a lot of times the people who go into these spaces are radically alone and they're anxious about reality and they're anxious about the world. And there's actually something very comforting to believe. No, there's not just random stuff happening. It's all being controlled by a cabal somewhere.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That is actually much more comforting than they were all just idiots trying to figure this thing out.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I think, I mean, if you look at who's likely to believe it, it's usually not the people who are close to the event. It's not people who are close to the mechanisms of power or who know anyone involved personally. It's the people who are furthest away from it. There have been several times where I've heard conspiracy theories involving people I've known personally, and I just think, oh, no, like, they're not malicious. They might be a little bit incompetent, but they're not. You know, but to imagine the level of coordination you would need for a lot of these things. So where I think what I, what I would suggest, anyone who maybe is in that world is to take an honest examination and say, I understand if you take a skeptical view of the way the government or the church or Whoever presents reality. I'm not telling you to just blindly trust the official narrative, but if your standard of evidence for them is here, and your standard of evidence for what you'll believe from your favorite, like, conspiracy monger is here, that's the disjoint.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Also, I think, you know Aristotle's idea that it's the mark of an intelligent man to entertain a position that he doesn't accept.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I think that's another way to maybe just self, self examine.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You know, can I, can I present the other position in a compelling way without getting angry about it? I think that's the thing too, sometimes.

[Matt Fradd]

That's right, yeah. Because there can be a sort of mannequin worldview that, that develops honestly on both sides that the conspiracy theorists can imagine. Oh, you're just an idiot blindly accepting the official version, or you're maliciously trying to cover up the truth. On the other hand, if you don't go in for the conspiracy, you might just view that as like a moral failing on their part rather than. No, they've actually looked at this issue and frankly, much more than you have, and they had some intellectual dissatisfaction with what they were told, or they had some doubts about the person telling them things, often for good reasons, and their skepticism has taken this particular form. But I would say think about ideas with both the negative, like the critical, and then also the positive, like, what does the world do that you're affirming? And there are plenty of reasons to challenge, negate, be skeptical of any of the kind of external worldviews that we're talking about, including Christianity. Obviously, I believe deeply in Christianity. Nevertheless, we can say, I can understand why someone would say, look at the problem of evil or look at, you know, it doesn't seem like we need the existence of God. And so you can imagine the reasons for skepticism, but what about the reasons to propose this concrete alternative view? And that's where a lot of conspiracy theories fall apart, because they won't just say the official narrative is wrong. They'll also say, maybe it was this thing and that thing is like wildly less probable. And so that's usually the weaker part of the case where you say, okay, you gave the example of the 911 theories. I can understand someone saying, I don't see how jets could do that to Towers. And, you know, you got this Building seven that falls later and you've got, you know, all this other weird information where all the wreckage parts outside the Pentagon. You know, I've heard all this stuff before and I understand the Skepticism. But once they start saying bombs were placed, like in the Pentagon itself, to kill people in the Pentagon by whom? Or, you know, within the world, you know how hard it is to coordinate a logistical demolition inside the World Trade Center. How many people would have to be involved in that? All covering up. And planes did in fact, hit the towers. So you'd have to time this demolition such that you'd still have to hijack the plane, and you'd still seemingly need al Qaeda in on this somehow. Or somebody's hijacking the plane, and we've got 19 people who pretty clearly. And then it just happens that you're able to time it such that you can sync all this stuff up. And the more you think about this and the sheer number of people that would be involved in it for pretty obscure reasons, like, oh, Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq, and so his best plan was, let's get the Afghani terrorist group funded by the Saudis to like. It doesn't even make sense. Once you kind of spell out the theory, that's where it all falls apart. So on the negative side of saying, I'm critical of the official narrative, or I'm dubious or I'm skeptical, I understand that. On the positive part of, here's what I think happened, that's where it all falls apart to pieces, I would say. And I think most conspiracy theories are like that. When you actually start plotting them out and saying, okay, I mean, think about it like a murder trial. If. If you're a defense attorney and you're saying, the government says, my guy committed this crime. And usually even when someone's guilty, there's some reason that you can point to that, well, some of this stuff maybe isn't true. Like, I'll take the O.J. simpson trial. I would not be shocked to learn the LAPD actually planted evidence. I think O.J. was guilty, but I also think Mark Fuhrman and people had a dubious enough record and the LAPD had such a bad track record at that age that when people said the LAPD probably planted evidence, those two things could both be true. Sometimes, even when the official narrative is true, it's also true the government is lying to you. That might be true in the case of OJ Too. So if you're part of the dream team defending him, you can point to things where it's like, it's awfully convenient that the evidence ended up right there. Where it falls apart is when you say, here's what actually happened. And any theory you present is so wildly Implausible that the whole thing falls apart immediately.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

We were talking about this before the show, and you pointed out to me, and I'd never thought about it in this way before, but one of the reasons you want a free press is, is that if you don't have a free press, then nobody believes the narrative that the press is telling and is therefore skeptical of everything that the government is telling them. I felt that way in Australia a little bit when I was there recently. I was watching a news show and it was showing these fellas who were marching on Australia Day and they were calling them white supremacists, neo Nazis. And I just, I thought, I don't believe you at all. And I feel how strongly you're telling me this and how emotional you want me to be about it. I don't believe you. Now, maybe they were right, but they never let the people speak. They never pointed to evidence. But that's a scary place to be in a country where you no longer believe the mainstream narrative because you don't think it's from a free press. And then what? Like, what do you do then? Because obviously everything seems to have broken down during the COVID pandemic. Right? I mean, I remember during the new atheism back in, what, 2010 or something like that, at its height, where talking about the science.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

They weren't saying that Ironically, right? Now if you say, well, the science says, it feels like everybody's like, well, that mustn't be true. So what am I asking you?

[Matt Fradd]

Well, let me just get on my own conspiracy theory soapbox here for a second, because people who just heard the foregoing might be like, oh, this guy blindly accepts whatever the government tells him. So let me just say something, kind of doubling down on what you've just said with trust to science. When Covid first started, the official story was masks don't help. And they were lying based on what they believed at the time. They thought masks did help and they were purposely lying to people so there wouldn't be a run on masks. Then they do an about face after they have enough masks and say, actually, masks help when they save lives. And then you get all this research that says it's pretty questionable how much the masks are actually doing a good job. And it turns out you can't compare, like a medical professional using an N95 with somebody grabbing their dirty, bacteria ridden mask they've been wearing for three weeks. Those are maybe not the same thing, and maybe this is not helpful at all. But by that point, public trust had been so undermined. Whatever one's position is on masks. The government lied about this at least once and then didn't really have any kind of public reckoning with it. And, you know, no, sorry we lied. It was just, this is what we thought we had to do to create the results we wanted. We had to trick people to get them to do what we want. Once you do that, and once people realize you're doing that, even when you're telling the truth, you've killed your own credibility in a lot of ways.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

A boy who cried wolf.

[Matt Fradd]

Very much so. And so you've got that now. Take the trust. The science on transgenderism under the Biden administration. The deputy director of the HHS was Admiral Levine, born Richard, calling himself Rachel, identifies as transgender and is in a place where he's got tremendous influence on the money and policy positions of medical organizations on things like transgenderism and is openly an activist. Gives a speech at Texas Christian University suggesting the only people opposed to sex change operations for kids are people who hate kids and want them to commit suicide. Basically. I mean, that's maybe a slight exaggeration of views, but not much so. Levine repeatedly would just say that the science is so clear. The science is so clear and this is just a lie. Like, just was not true, that all of the science was saying gender affirming surgery for minors was, was harmless or beneficial for mental health. None of these things were true. There were plenty of red flags that this is not helping mental health and carries some serious medical risks because you're doing a major operation on a child for something that is not a life threatening kind of issue to begin with. And so then you get things like the cast report out of the uk you get places from around the world where the HHS doesn't have control, giving very different science than the stuff coming out in the US and you realize, like, oh, we might have a problem with the science being corrupted for political reasons. The New York Times actually did a fantastic expose, I want to say summer, maybe late summer 2025, that just explored how the blanking on the name of There's a medical group that was being used as like the objective standard for when to give transgender surgeries to minors. And it turned out Levine behind the scenes was putting pressure on them to change their standards and then pointing to those standards of saying, we're just following these standards, standards that no one else realized he'd been crafting. So he's pointing to this external thing of word following the data. He's controlling it on Both ends, that sort of thing is happening. You get enough of that kind of stuff and you just say, next time somebody says trust is science, I'm not going to believe them. Now that doesn't prove the conspiracy theory true, but it does show the effect of just what happens when you lie to people, that when you don't tell the truth about things, it's very hard to believe you later. Now, if I may, let's step out of the world of science for a second into the world of international politics. The meddling of groups like the CIA in Latin American politics, say, is pretty well established at this point. Whenever you think of some of the more conspiratorial claims, like funneling crack into LA in the 80s or any of that stuff to fund the war with the Contras, we certainly know it's true that they helped topple governments and they helped do all this other stuff. All of that stuff was in many cases lied about at the time. But we now know all of this to be true. So then you hear some geopolitical story and the people saying, I bet the CIA is behind this sound crazy, but they're not without reason for saying that because there just hasn't been a reckoning with that. So to that I would say the first place where we find this epistemic breakdown are the people lying, the people who are in positions of authority who aren't telling the truth. And we can say this about the church as well. When you cover up the sex abuse crisis, it makes it a lot harder to believe anything else you're going to say, even when you're literally preaching the gospel because you've shot your own credibility in the face, not just the foot. And it's hard to trust someone with a pattern of deception or lying or anything else. And that's very unfortunate when the person lying is then trying to tell you the truth. Because I think a lot of times the things people are skeptical of, they're skeptical of things that are actually true, but they're skeptical of things that are true because they've been lied to so many times.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, good point. And I think one of the reasons we're so skeptical about the Church and, and her leaders is Covid sex abuse coverup, Pope Francis and all the gaslighting about what a saint he was and how he was perfect and anything you disagree with him on it was cause you're a terrible Catholic. That's at least my interpretation. Maybe you have a different one and I'd be happy to hear it. But then now what you see is any individual bad deed by a prelate, such as the recognition, let's say, of someone who supports abortion or something. It all just goes into the ledger of can't trust, can't trust.

[Matt Fradd]

And.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And then the odd good thing that a bishop does, we kind of don't even put that up there. And our biases keep getting confirmed.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I think that's an excellent way of putting that. Our biases do keep getting confirmed because we look for things that confirm the worldview we already have. This is an almost inescapable part of the human condition that if you think somebody is. I mean, think about a relationship breaking down like an example. The things that you loved about them now drive you nuts. And so all of these data points you're receiving, oh, this person is really jokey in stressful situations. I'm just taking myself as the example here. If you're someone who really likes me, it's like, oh, that's great. He really lightens the mood when I'm stressed out. If you don't like me, if we're having a bad breakup, then you can point to that same data point and be like, this obnoxious idiot. Can't be serious even in a stressful situation. These are both true descriptions, but they're being received through kind of a hermeneutical lens that's pro or anti. We do this with everybody, and it's pretty hard not to do it. And so I think, you know, you mentioned with the papacy, there are going to be times where a Pope says things that are not perfect. This is true of every Pope ever, that they say or do something that is either.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Not just not perfect, but, like, really unfortunate.

[Matt Fradd]

That's right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. We can certainly, I mean, take Benedict XVI suggesting that politicians who supported abortion are excommunicated. That is canonically not true. He says this, I think, on an airplane to Mexico. And actually, in that case, thanks be to God, the Vatican press office actually clarified. We forgot what that was like. What would happen if there was a press office that explained when the Pope had misspoken? But alas.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Or think of Pope John Paul II kissing a Koran. Whatever his intentions may have been, it provided this scandal to Catholics.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. And so there are going to be times, I mean, going Back to Peter Galatians 2, there are going to be times where popes say and do things that are not the right thing to say or do in that situation.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

And you can affirm that as a Catholic without undermining their authority. Now, I think you should be careful not to obsess about that because that can darken your attitude towards them in a way that makes it harder to trust them. But I think you have to be honest about. Oh, yeah, that can happen. Think about kids in a family. Your mom and dad aren't perfect, and there's basically three ways you can react to that. One is you can pretend they are perfect and, oh, I guess I just don't understand why they did that. But they must have had a good reason and maybe, or maybe they just had a bad day. Two is you can obsessively focus on all of the ways they fall short. You know, the kind of classic teenager response or three, and I think this is a mature approach, is to say, they're not perfect, I'm not perfect. They're clearly trying and they've been placed in this authority over me by God. So I'm going to defer to them even if I don't think all of their decisions are right. Short of, of course, if they're asking you to do something immoral, if your parents say, you know, we're going to go offer sacrifices to demons and we want you to come with us, don't do that. But that's not most of the situations you're going to be in. And similarly with the church, or similarly with even the government, it's appropriate to have a certain level of respect, like honor. The emperor is in the New Testament.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But it's weird because at the very moment in this part of our history where we're becoming skeptical of science, and for Americans, at least, and I'm sure in other countries, our government, so just leaders in general, science, so the scientists, the government and the clergyman, it all kind of convalesces. Right. That we're just skeptical of all of it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. There's a shift in the media landscape after Watergate. You know, before Watergate, the policy had been basically, don't report bad news. That's of a personal nature. So FDR can't walk, don't mention it. And you know, Kennedy has all these affairs that's nobody's business.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Now Trump every day is talking about how Biden keeps falling downstairs as opposed to he can't walk, you know.

[Matt Fradd]

Right, right. It's mind blowing how big this shift has been even within the lifetime of people who are alive today. And we're not ready for this. No, because you've got people who are comparing the popes today of popes of yesteryear. And one of the issues is popes of yesteryear didn't have people constantly analyzing everything they said and did, interviewing them off the cuff, and then spending days upon days debating what did they mean by that sentence? Or I don't know how anyone, myself included, could possibly withstand that kind of scrutiny. And I think if you held up prior popes and presidents to that, you'd have had an undermining of authority then, because it's not a healthy level of over analysis.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

This is why I'm really interested to see going forward how skeptical everyone becomes of the next canonization.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Because all of our stuff is out there.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And like, if you knew Anthony of Padua intimately, you no doubt would have believed him to be a saint. And he also probably did a few things that you wish he would stop doing.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, yeah, they tried to poison him. Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I didn't know that.

[Matt Fradd]

I think, I believe they. Maybe I'm misremembering.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Like, hagiography is a lot easier to write when they don't have social media, when everything about you hasn't been recorded.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

What's it gonna look like? It's one thing. Who's the fellow who was just canonized?

[Matt Fradd]

Carlo Acutis. Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

He didn't live in the Internet age. I mean, he did, he was creating websites, but I mean, I mean, the.

[Matt Fradd]

New York Times did an expose suggesting he wasn't as holy as like, your point is exactly proof of Carlo that the New York Times did an expose saying, oh, maybe he wasn't that holy. We talked to some of his friends who said he was like a regular kid.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes. So, but all the more now with social media, it's.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, we might have to run out of canonizations after Twitter gets invented. You know, it's just like we've seen.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Too much, so it's scary. John Eldridge says that the Internet has made us all weary, skeptical pragmatists.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

When one day you're being told, here's how to fix your back pain, and you go all in on that and tell all your friends that this is the one thing they must do, the next day you hear something not just, yeah, contrary, like that's the worst thing you can do for your back. And then you just go, okay, truth isn't possible. I'll just try to find something that works. But I'm kind of exhausted. And maybe truth isn't attainable anyway. So it's like you've got science, our trust in science, trust in government, trust in clergymen. While we're being funneled information that continually conflicts. No wonder we don't trust anything.

[Matt Fradd]

Absolutely.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

What do we do?

[Matt Fradd]

So Thomas Kuhn, Structures of Scientific Revolutions. He gives this example with what he calls the Copernican shift. This is where the term paradigm shift comes from. He says, you know, everybody has a way of viewing the world which he calls a paradigm, and you'll have bits of information that don't neatly fit within that paradigm.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Oh, golly, yeah. Already I'm thinking, like five or six that don't fit within my own paradigm.

[Matt Fradd]

Right, right. And I think anyone who's honest about themselves can point to problems they don't have an answer for.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

Whether it's your political views, whether it's your religious views, whatever it is. You know, for me, as a Catholic, I can give you answers for what God might have meant with all the biblical language around, like the apparent genocide of the Canaanites. This might be a spiritual metaphor. There's plenty of evidence that this is at least wildly exaggerated because the people who look like they've been killed in one verse show up later on. It doesn't look like he's literally commanding genocide. And yet it sits uneasily with my worldview as a Catholic. It just does. It fits uneasily with my worldview as a Christian. And so you can find similar things like that in the history of the Catholic Church. What does this mean? How does it square up with this other thing the Church said, and how do we harmonize these things? I think the harmonizations are possible, but there may also be times where you throw up your hands and you say, I don't know. I don't know how to square this bit of information. But I have enough reason to have confidence in the worldview itself that I can just have this bit of outlier data that I can't square. And this is true of whatever view of reality you have. If you became a radical atheist, you would also have to say, wow, it sure is lucky we happen to evolve in a way where we can accurately understand reality, because I have to believe that, or else I can't even be an atheist. That doesn't sit very easily within an atheist worldview. Like, evolution is not programmed for the discernment of truth. Evolution is programmed for the survival of the species. And there's plenty of times where delusion seems better than truth and then survival of the species. I mean, we've got actually great data on this point. Men tend to believe a woman is attracted to them based on how attracted to her they are. Which is incredible that the more you're into a girl the more you're like, I guess she's probably into me. And this is a bit of a delusion that, thank God it exists because it makes you braver to go ask and you're gonna strike out a lot. But if you're right, even one out of ten times and she's secretly open to a relationship with you.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yep.

[Matt Fradd]

Your boldness might itself be attractive.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Or if I'm continually thinking there's a snake in the bushes.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And I'm right one time out of a million, then I'm more likely to survive than the person who doesn't think that.

[Matt Fradd]

So there's no reason to believe from a merely atheistic evolutionary perspective that you are wired to know the truth. You are wired for survival, which may be at odds with the truth.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. And procreation. That's it.

[Matt Fradd]

And so if you believe that, that actually isn't just an outlier bit of data, that in my view, actually undermines your ability to even trust that you can know that you're an atheist, because.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So all that's to say, whatever world do you take religiously, politically, etc. They're going to be some outlier pieces of data. If you're waiting to have a 100% grasp of everything where you can explain all of the details, you're not going to get there. You just are not. And the Bible presents that like the book of Job. Job has this problem of suffering. He's got these friends who have it all worked out and the friends are all wrong and Job doesn't get an answer. And that's where we are left. We want Job to get some great answer to. Here's why you went through that suffering. God does not give him that answer. And the friends who try to give him that answer but are just making stuff up are not praised for. Oh, you did such a good job of coming up with possible arguments. They're rebuked for their. Their rashness, basically. So I mention all that to say, in every worldview you've got these outlier bits of data, but eventually you may have so much that it causes you to say, actually, I bet my worldview is wrong. So some amount of.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I wonder, though, I want you to continue. I don't mean to be a road bump in your thought there, but here's something to add to that. Is it possible to accept something I do not currently accept without wanting to accept it first?

[Matt Fradd]

Yes and no. So it's possible to accept something you don't currently accept without wanting to. For instance, when you Accept bad news, you find, you know, proof you can't avoid, that your wife has cheated on you. Obviously not Cameron, but the hypothetical wife, that's bad news. You don't want to believe it.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. The police officer comes, says, your son's in an accident.

[Matt Fradd]

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. A loved one died. You're not like, oh yeah, I bet they're still alive because I really want them to be.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Great point. Okay.

[Matt Fradd]

So you can have things that are just so unavoidable, but nevertheless we, you know. Okay. One of the things I learned in seminary, I studied under Father Gurch, who's a papal theologian, and he made the point repeatedly, Faith is not just an act of the intellect, it's an act of the will. Now, there's going to be a few things that follow from that. You have to make an act to trust God, and when you do, things will fall in place in a way that they won't fall in place if you are not willing to make that act. So if you're expecting to get there from the intellect alone, you're actually not approaching faith in the way the Bible presents faith like this. Belief in God is not merely an intellectual assent, it's not merely an act of the intellect. Or again, the devil would be saved. Because the devil knows better than you do that God exists. He knows better than you do who the God of the universe is in certain ways. And yet he's not saved because he doesn't make that act of trust in him. He trusts in himself instead. So a lot of what we're talking about in terms of faith and works is really this question of in what role does the act of the will make, even in the gift of faith. And once you see that the act of the will is necessary to believe, then you can start to understand things like, well, how someone faces the same information, might not put it in that order, might not accept it, but also the importance of things like living a moral life. Like, if you're not living a moral life, you know, think about Pascal's wager here. He's basically bringing your will involved and saying, get your will involved and see if this doesn't solve your problem.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, 100%. I remember saying that to a dear friend of mine who was open to converting. We had argued, I'll just say it, it's my sister Emma. We were arguing back and forth, you know, and, and I remember one night I said, like, you need to repent of your sins and I don't know what you've done. I have no Right. To know. I'm not asking to know, but, but you know, you've, you've been living as an atheist for many years now and I know you've been involved in some things like you need to repent of all that stuff. And she said, but I don't think that they're sins. And I said, and I think this is true. I said, you know, trying to accept God in faith without turning from our sins is to not turn toward him at all. So it's almost like, well, try repenting of them anyway. Just take on faith that they are sins and repent of them and see what happens. Something like that maybe.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Yeah. Metanoia. Right. Like there's this total about faith. Go ahead.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, okay, so I, I like that point that someone comes to the door, your son's been in an accident, you know, that's fair. That's on the nose though. So. But I don't know, it doesn't seem like most of the time the truth is that we're presented with. Is it that they're more theoretical, that they're easier to wiggle out of?

[Matt Fradd]

Several things when we're talking about theological truths. God purposely creates a situation where he encourages faith, but he never eradicates faith. So there is a difference between faith and knowledge.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

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[Matt Fradd]

Hello.com Matt Frad when atheists say like you don't know God exists or well actually they're Wrong with that? We do know God exists from reason alone. We don't know God from reason alone. Our knowledge of God comes by faith. There's an act of trust. And so this is different than just direct access to the information. There are all sorts of things that you have to take on faith, and you have plenty of reason to do that rationally, but you still have to make an act to accept that the things you've been told are true. And you could always come up with this scenario in which maybe everybody's lying to me, maybe every bit of information I've received from other sources is not reliable. And you can live in that kind of radical skepticism, sort of. So that's one of the things that makes a difference. Even in the case of, you know, the police officer comes and says, your son's been in an accident, has died short of you seeing the body.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

You could be a horrible prank.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So even there, you could take some radical skeptic, but the more you have direct access to the information, the harder it is to avoid the conclusion of the truth. Getting back to the conspiracy theory example, a lot of times the conspiracy theories are from people who don't really know how the thing operates, who have not been intimately close with it.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And so the further away you are, the less likely you are to, number one, accurately understand it, or, number two, have a reason to believe the things that they're saying. You know, that's interesting. If you told me, you know, Company X does all sorts of evil and malicious things. I know nobody from Company X. I don't know how they operate. I'm, you know, I'm pretty open to that. If I worked at Company X, I'd probably be more likely to say, oh, no, people here are just really bad at their jobs. Like, this is not intentional malice. This is just gross incompetence. And, you know, we've got people who should have been fired 10 years ago who are still, you know, that kind of thing. The closer you are, the more likely you are not to believe the incorrect theory because you just have more direct access to the data.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Did you see that interaction between Matt Walsh and Joe Rogan on the moon landing?

[Matt Fradd]

I did not.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You have to watch this because Matt's point was your point, that in order to create this conspiracy that takes more faith to believe, as it were. Like, that's more difficult to believe than they actually did it. And then Joe, who apparently has thought about this from a thousand different angles, really just sort of took apart all that Matt was sharing with him and provided evidence that me, someone completely removed from the event, you know, not just. Not just geographically or chronologically, but just knowledge. I have no knowledge of anything I say. Yeah. Everything he says makes complete sense. And yet I'm unwilling to go along with Joe. And you say why? And if I'm honest, what would that be? Why would that be? It's probably because I don't want to be weird. And it's probably because you're in the.

[Matt Fradd]

Pocket of big moon.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, right, the Jews again. Or it's probably because. Why I don't wanna be weird. And that means two things. That means I don't wanna be alienated, but it also means I know enough people that trust in this that I'm unwilling to put myself against their position and to be weird in that sense.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I think there's maybe something more than weirdness there because you trust certain people.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

You know, like again, take the example of light being a particle in a wave.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I don't even know what that means.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know what it means either. It's true, but it's. That's ridiculous. I mean, it just sounds so crazy. And yet I trust enough people who understand science a lot better than I do that even though if somebody was really impassioned and said that's impossible, if somebody told me you can't be a particle in a wave, I believe you on a certain level because. Yeah, how could it be both of those things? It doesn't make any sense. And I have to just sort of take it on a human faith that this many experts who understand this better than I do are right. Even when my own reason would lead me to a different place. I have to make this act of trust. And this is how it is with huge swaths of reality where you can find, you know, the Joe Rogan or whoever who spent hours and hours and hours doing their own kind of research of considering all these issues from the outside. And they tell you it's one way when you know enough people who are on the other side who say they just don't understand. Like, this is not like an expert understanding. This is a layman spending hours and hours and hours from the outside trying to make sense of this.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

This is what people mean by too smart for his own good.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

People. They know just. Or they know just enough to be dangerous.

[Matt Fradd]

You hear people say that because you can think about a lot of ways to arrange the pieces that. That are not true. And. And so I think having a sort of trust that there are a Lot of people who know this better than I do. That's an unsatisfying conclusion in a certain way, intellectually, and I think we just have to be honest about that. We're going to live in a world we already live in, a world in which the boundaries of our knowledge are becoming much more obvious to us, which is kind of strange because we have more information. But I think we realize more than ever how much we can't know, as much as we want to know in this life, about events, about different subjects, about whatever it is. Like you, number one, don't have enough time to run every topic down to the level that it deserves. Like the conspiracy theorist, almost by definition, has spent way more time on an ancillary issue than they should have. And so you, as a person who just thinks, yeah, we landed on the moon, have probably not spent hours and hours confirming that opinion, but they almost certainly have spent hours and hours attacking that. So you are much less qualified in that sense. And you just can't. You cannot do every issue that could possibly come up. You can't give it the hours and hours that it might deserve to have an exhaustive knowledge of it.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's why I don't think it's epistemologically disreputable to side with the safer position.

[Matt Fradd]

Exactly.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

When, while people are calling you a normie, like, all right, maybe I am, but this feels safer. So I'm gonna do this right. At least until I can't defend it anymore, perhaps.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I was starting to say earlier, with the paradigms through which we view reality, there may come a point where you get so much data that you have to overturn your paradigm. With the geocentric worldview, they knew for a long time that there were some data points that did not fit within it, planets being the obvious one. And the stars appear to be exactly where we want them to be. Over centuries, they realized they were actually not quite where we thought they should be, given a geocentric model. So that becomes an interesting problem in the Middle Ages. But the planets were very obviously not where we thought they should be. So even the word planet comes from the Greek for wandering star. They realized this was a problem. They had no explanation other than some of these stars seem like they're just moving around. That eventually, in the Middle Ages, leads to these really complicated mathematical proofs to try to make sense of why things are where they are in the sky. We can actually predict where they're going to be fairly accurately, but we have to do all these really complicated mathematical formulas to get there. And then finally Copernicus is just like, well, what if we take a different starting assumption? What if we assume that geocentrism isn't true, heliocentrism is true. Now all of these huge problems we have go away. Now it makes perfect sense why the planets are there. Now it makes perfect sense why everything's a little off from where we would expect it to be. And it's great. Except there are still these data points that Copernicus's model didn't quite account for. They were more intellectually satisfying. Like on the whole, it's like, okay, this seems to be a better view of reality, but it would not be true to say they figured it all out. I mean, even Copernicus model is not perfect. And even now we are finding things we can't quite explain. They're always going to be those outliers. And so I mentioned this for a few reasons. One, the mere fact you've got something that you can't explain doesn't mean you're wrong, doesn't mean the official narrative's wrong, doesn't mean the church is wrong, doesn't mean whatever it is that you believe in is wrong. Two, when you're wanting to persuade someone else of the truth, whether you're talking about converting them to Christianity, whether you're talking about talking them out of a certain theory they have, or whatever it is, you can poke holes, you can put little data points they can't explain out there that may not immediately change their mind, because you've got little holes and little data points out there you can't explain also, and you should just realize that about yourself and humility, but also just about the nature of knowledge, of reality. We have a limited understanding of all of this stuff, and so there are things that we don't know how to make sense of. So a lot of times people approach apologetics wanting two things. Number one, a bulletproof argument they can use on their non Catholic friends and family to make them all become Catholic. And number two, an explanation of everything that I've got all these questions about the faith and just explain them all and then I won't have questions about the faith anymore. And both of those are unrealistic goals, because the first one is assuming one data point is enough to upend a system. And it's not usually. Sometimes there'll be such a good argument that you just think, oh yeah, this completely disproves the thing, but you can have an airtight Argument logically formally valid makes total sense. It's actually true. You know, like the Islamic dilemma is a great example. The Quran clearly says, if we want to know if this is true, we should look to the Torah and the Gospel. The Torah and the Gospel totally contradict the Islamic message. Therefore we shouldn't accept the Islamic message. I mean, it makes complete sense using the Quran. We disprove the Quran. And even if you say maybe the gospel meant something else, we know what the Torah is and that disproves Islam as well. So you have to do all these exegetical backflips to try to avoid the force of this argument. Sometimes that's enough to dislodge someone from their worldview. But even when an argument is internally coherent, logically validation. People often have so many other reasons why they believe the thing they do that they just becomes one thing kind of on the scale on the other side. Maybe they don't know what to do with it, but they're not ready to upend their system of belief. But then the second thing is, if everything we've just said about the nature of a paradigm and viewing reality is true, no matter how much work you do on the problem of evil or whatever problems you have with Catholicism or Christianity or whatever it is, you might still have some areas you don't know the answer to. You might have some theories. Well, this might explain it. But you may not be intellectually satisfied to your own liking that you know the nature of everything and God does not promise that you will. So he gives you enough to make a rational act of faith. He doesn't give you so much that faith is no longer necessary. To give you earlier example, he's not going to just show you the body of your son. You're going to have to trust him that your son died in an accident. And we want not for God to give us aids to faith, but for God to take away faith. You know, think about the classic atheist challenge. God, if you're here, you know, I'm going to drop this cup and I want you to make it float in the air. If he does that, you don't really have an act of faith to make anymore. You're just like, well, there's really no other explanation that could possibly be given for the phenomenon I directly observed. But both the apostles then and and us today have to make acts of faith. One of the readings, enough readings. I don't remember if it comes from St. Augustine or who it comes from talks about how even the apostles are in this spot they see the risen Christ and they still have to make an act of faith because he's telling them that this weak, fledgling little church that looks like it's going to die in an afternoon is actually going to survive and grow and become like the biggest thing on earth. The mustard seed will become the mustard tree. They don't have any direct experience of that thing being true. We do have direct experience of that thing being true. We can see as a matter of history, this band of 12 became over a billion people in the Catholic Church. We have to take on faith that the founder of that really is who the apostles say he was.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And this is a word of comfort for those watching. It took more faith for the apostles to believe that they wouldn't be overcome in an afternoon, as you put it, than to think that the current ginormous church can be rehabilitated if there is great corruption in the church.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, because we now have a ton of empirical data. In Chesterton's words. Think about how many times the church has gone down to the dogs and it was the dogs who died. Like every time the church appears to have been overcome by evil, external or internal, she comes out stronger at the end of it. Maybe not in your lifetime, but take the longer view of the thing. Now I realize that's cold comfort to know things will eventually get better, but you may not be here to see it. But that should be actually a tremendous source of comfort because we've been through worse and we've come out stronger.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I've been thinking lately that I'm not sure I think knowledge is possible if by.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, go on.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, if by knowledge we take the standard philosophical definition of justified true belief. You've heard of Gettier experiments that sought to. Have you?

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know if I've ever heard this.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I think Getty was a philosopher, don't quote me, but I think he wrote his. It was like a several page paper back in 1963. Joseph, any chance you could check that out? Fact check me there. Anyway, the point is. Okay, so what do we need for knowledge? Well, we need more than a belief. It has to be true. But we need more than true belief. If I say it's raining in Tokyo right now and it just so happens to be raining in Tokyo, that's not knowledge, it's a guess, lucky guess. So it needs to be justified in somewhere. Like I need to have some good reason to think that it's true. Anyway, G put up these experiments and then more people have come up with.

[Matt Fradd]

I've Heard the phrase just for true believers.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Here's an example. I don't think G. I'm looking at this clock over here. So I don't think this was Getty as example, but if I look at that clock right now and that clock says, you know, like 11:29. And I. And I. So I hold the belief now it's 1129.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And then I find out that the clock's broken.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's hard to see why that's not a justified true belief.

[Matt Fradd]

It's certainly a justified belief.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's a justified belief that's true. Well, what, because it's 1129? It is, actually.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's the idea. Right.

[Matt Fradd]

I've heard of people doing with their zoom backgrounds, they take a background that is their actual backdrop and they use it as a fake background.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So someone thinks they're in their room.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's good.

[Matt Fradd]

And they are in their room, but they're believing it on information.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's a gettier experiment.

[Matt Fradd]

Or that.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That would be an idea of a getter example. Right. And so I don't know. I just. Lately I've been. I feel more comfort with the idea that the. What. To quote Hume, the wise man proportions his belief to the strength of the evidence, and that's all we've got. So I think, like, I think a solution to sort of Cartesian certainty is phenomenal conservatism, which you've heard of. Right. And so I think I like to use the analogy of, okay, we're in Plato's cave, which we got no idea what the hell's happening, and we want to get out of this cave somehow. And so I think of Cartesian certainty as a sort of ladder that we seek to build, but upon which every rung must be 100% secure or we will not take the next step. And even when you read Descartes, you just. It's funny. Like, it's funny how secure he thought his cogito was. And then it's funny how quickly philosophers decided he was wrong to think that Hume and Nietzsche thought he was wrong. And so you get this bundle theory from Hume that he can't. We don't have any sense of self when we reflect upon it. No kind of immediate. All right, so that doesn't seem to work. And it kind of doesn't seem to work for the reasons that we're kind of laying out here. It just. I think the problem becomes exacerbated in the day of the Internet. But the idea of phenomenal conservatism, which I know you know, but for our viewers, sure, is just the idea that if something appears to be the case, seems to be the case, then I have at least some justification for thinking that it is the case. And I'm within my epistemic rights to go on accepting that thing unless I have reason to the contrary. And the reason I think that this is a kind of a nice sort of antidote to what we could call Cartesian certainty, is that it's just how every human being has always reasoned at all times.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes, that's right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You know, and it's only the. It's only. It takes you a PhD. It takes a PhD perhaps, or a sort of, I don't know, a teenage melancholic to disrupt that and to think that that isn't the way we think. So I think that's just perfectly reasonable. And I, you know, I worry sometimes. You know, I remember listening to a preacher once, and when I say preacher, he was a Catholic giving a talk, and he said, do you know that Christianity is true? And he said, no, no, no. Do you know that you know that you. That kind of thing.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And I just am not comfortable with that because I don't know if I know that I have two arms. Now, I want to clarify this because it sounds like I'm falling into kind of skepticism, which I'm not doing. I do know that I have two arms, but it depends what you mean by know. Like, if you mean Cartesian knowledge, then I don't, I don't think I know. And that's why I don't know if no in that sense is even helpful. But if you mean, do I accept that I have two arms? Because you have no good reason to the contrary. It's like, obviously, yes. And I think there's so many things in my life that you could press me on that I wouldn't have an answer to.

[Matt Fradd]

That's right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Do I know that my wife is who she says she is? Am I convinced she's not a Russian agent? You know, yes, of course. Of course. But then if you make the word no or if you try to make the word no mean something other than we all think it means.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Okay, then, yeah, at that point, I don't know. I don't know if my wife is who she is. She is. I don't know. I have two arms, and I don't know that Christianity is true. But if by no you mean do you have good. Do you have reasons to think this is true? Yeah, of course. Of course I do. And so I guess what I'm doing is I'm sounding skeptic, like a skeptic, but I'm actually saying the opposite. Like, do I know Christianity is true 100%? Yes, of course I do. Do you know your wife is who she claims to be? Yes, same thing. Um, but then the other thing is again, if you want to use this, I'm going to shut up soon. I don't know how much sense I'm making.

[Matt Fradd]

You're making total sense.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. So, like, this other. Like, if you press this foreign Cartesian idea of no, then you can make me doubt all sorts of things because I have different levels of evidence for the different things that I think that I know. Do I know who my wife is? Yes. Do I know that my car is parked out there? Yes. But. Okay, which one do you know more? Okay, I know who my wife is. All right, so you don't know that you know that your car is out there and then you drive yourself?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I think this is completely true. And you see this break down really radically. I think one place you can see it is the popularity of simulation theory. This idea that we don't even know we're living in reality compared to living in a matrix. And if you look at Nick Bostrom's arguments for this, if you believe that the mind and brain are the same thing and they're just matter, and you believe that given this, eventually we'll be able to create simulations so lifelike that someone could be sentient in this created world and think they're real, and you could do an infinite number of those things, basically, then it's wildly more likely, statistically, that you are yourself a simulated being that thinks they're real than that you're a real being who happens to know. Man, I really missed, by statistical very unlikely chance, I narrowly missed being a simulation. You're probably a simulation. And so the logical place a lot of this skepticism ends up is literally doubting our own existence, doubting the existence of our bodies, of our world, of our reality, that it's all just a simulation and some other world that may or may not look anything like this world. Maybe there are no such thing as human beings. These are all just sims in some game, some alien species in a different reality.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

The other thing that makes that more plausible is as technology advances, it seems. It seems more likely that that could happen.

[Matt Fradd]

Right? We see these AI kind of characters and everything else. So here I think it's important to stress One of the great arguments for Christianity right now is that we can actually affirm reality. Here's what I mean by that. The phrase artificial intelligence. The word artificial has two meanings. It can mean fake or it can mean man made. Now, both sides of this question use AI, but I think they mean different things. We would look at this and say ChatGPT is fake intelligence. It will very confidently say things that are completely untrue. And it's not even lying. It's just giving me. In the same way that if you use autocomplete on your phone and you start to type a sentence and it'll finish it for you. It's not like, oh, I think a really good thing you could say is, I'm going to go to the store. Let me help you. It's just doing sophisticated text prediction. That's all AI does in these chat models, and sophisticated to a point that you can't grasp it. But it's still doing something like that, where it's just doing trial and error. If I say these kind of things, users respond well. If I say these other kind of things, they respond badly. So I'm going to say these kind of things. And it does this with this remarkable level of sophistication that looks from the outside like real intelligence, but it isn't. Do you know the Chinese room experiment?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Which experiment? Chinese.

[Matt Fradd]

It's Chinese room.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. This is. I believe it was. Searle gives this as a thought experiment. He says, imagine you're in a room and you don't speak Chinese and you have a guidebook. So people will pass notes under the door and you've got a little thing that says when they put these characters, you write out these other characters and you pass it back under the door. The person on the other side experiences it as you having a completely coherent, smart conversation with them in fluent Chinese. And so they would reasonably assume you're a fluent Chinese speaker, but you don't speak a little bit.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

How are you getting the information to write?

[Matt Fradd]

You've got a little guidebook. So if they have these characters, you write these. If A, then B, that sort of thing. And his point is, this is what a computer does. It gets these kind of prompts and gives this kind of a result.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's good.

[Matt Fradd]

Like, you see this very easily with a calculator. If you put seven times six, it knows what number to put. It's not thinking about it beforehand. It's not like, I think it might be 43. Wait, no, 42. You know, it doesn't do that at all, because it's not actually doing anything like the human experience of cognition. It's a fake intelligence. But the most influential, wealthiest, powerful people on earth believe that artificial intelligence is something that we can create man made sentience. This belief is completely contrary to a Christian worldview. It's completely contrary to the idea that soul is the seed of consciousness and soul is something distinct from matter. And, and since you can't create soul in a computer, you just can't possibly do this. They are spending huge amounts, I mean, in the billions of dollars trying to create man made consciousness, trying to basically create a soul in the machine. And because of that, like this is, this is where to make a long story long, you get this, this major breakdown. If you accept their view that eventually we'll be able to create sentience, then you basically have to accept that we probably live in a simulation. We probably are man made, not actually real creatures. On the other hand, if you say that's not true, then you have to believe in something immaterial, something like a soul that isn't reducible to matter. I mean, you get the force of the argument, like if we could create consciousness, eventually sufficiently sophisticated technological civilization would create consciousness. And if they did that, they could create it not just once, but billions and trillions and quadrillions of times. Which means if there are trillions and trillions of people who think they're real, but are actually not real people at all, and we have a world where we say there's like 8 billion people who really exist, we have to also at least caveat and say, well, statistically it's way more likely we're in that trillions and think we're in the billions. Yes.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So you began by saying the appeal of Christianity.

[Matt Fradd]

The appeal of Christianity exists. You can live in reality, you can know you actually exist. If you don't believe in the soul, if you don't believe in anything like that, then you're stuck in this situation where you have to say, I'm almost definitely not real, mathematically, I'm almost definitely I don't exist. And that's such a stupid counterintuitive conclusion that you should be able to step back and say, obviously if atheistic materialism has left us in a situation where we have to deny not just the existence of God, but of ourselves, that's a really good argument against.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, I think therefore I am a cyborg.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Wow, that's bananas. Yeah. I was gonna ask you, what is one conspiracy theory you wish was true?

[Matt Fradd]

A conspiracy theory I wish was true. That's such a good.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Or that you'd be willing to accept or glad to accept, say.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, okay, that's a really good question.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Part of the problem with talking about conspiracy theories is my understanding of a conspiracy is just when, you know, two or more people get together to concoct something and that's going to be true in every real event, even if it's maliciously done.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, you're right. And a lot of the problem, I guess, was even the usage of the term conspiracy theory. I think we'll probably get some pushback for using. Exactly. It's used pejoratively and it's hard to have a good term for the thing we're describing other than conspiracy theory. People kind of know what it is we're talking about. But usually when you believe in a conspiracy theory, you don't think of those ones as conspiracy theories. I mean, some people openly just be like, I love conspiracy theories, but usually when we have things like that, we think that those things are true and not conspiracies. So a benevolent conspiring. This is what we're talking about here. I'll give you an example. J.D. flynn of the Pillar. They do fantastic work at the Pillar. Let me just plug that and just say, if you're not a pillar subscriber. I mean, I get so much great Catholic news and commentary from those guys. They're journalists of high integrity and everything else. They aren't just trying to push some ideological agenda. They're trying to really just understand things with a fair, charitable, but sometimes critical kind of lens. JD Went down to Chiclayo Pope Leo's old diocese, and just spoke to people who knew him. And one of the stories that he came away with was that when he was Bishop Prevost, he would go to churches that occasionally would have weird liturgical stuff that was going on, and he'd celebrate Mass there and they'd be like, oh, Bishop, we do it this way here. And he'd often, unless it was just something gravely scandalous or something, he would just go along with it. But then afterwards, he would quietly address the situation with the pastor. So not to publicly humiliate him, but to quietly just say, get your house in order. Don't do this again. I thought about that when I heard the controversy with Senator Durbin and he was being honored with a Pro Life award, or, excuse me, by a Catholic award by Cardinal Cupich. That was a proposal. And it was clearly an off the cuff moment where he wasn't expecting to get confronted with this question, Pope Leo is being told, can I ask one question in English? And then he's like, okay. And he's asked about this and you see him appear to fumble around for an answer and he gives this sort of non committal answer that a lot of people took issue with that what does it really mean to be pro life across the board, to talk about death penalty, talk about the treatment of immigrants and those things. And he didn't directly say what should or shouldn't be done, and he just put a certain level of agnosticism on the details of the case. That afternoon, suddenly Durbin announces that he's not going to be accepting the award. Now, my benevolent conspiracy is there was a phone call, somebody spoke to somebody else behind the scenes and just said, get your house in order. Do not offer this award. Don't embarrass Durbin. Don't embarrass Super. You know, just, this needs not to happen. And so Durbin was able to politely decline the award because he didn't want to cause controversy where he'd been totally fine causing controversy up till that very moment. And it's sort of a face saving exercise. Now. Maybe I'm giving too generous of a read to everyone involved, but that's the kind of benevolent conspiracy that I, I see enough evidence that that might be the case, and I really hope that was what happened.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

How old are you, 40? Yeah, I'm 42. So we grew up.

[Matt Fradd]

Are you saying 2 plus 40 or 40 also?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

40 also? No, 42. 40 plus 2. Yeah, I think I'm 42. You know how after a age you.

[Matt Fradd]

Stop figuring, it becomes less, less precise? You like when you're a baby, it's like measured in months, and then you're half years as a kid and then it's a decade. You're.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's funny talking to people. Let's say we're basically the same age. Hey, it's funny talking to people who are the same age as me, but who grew up in America, because the advance of technology in Australia was slower than the advance of technology in America, obviously. So the things that kind of hit the market back then tended to take longer to hit the market in Australia. Does that make sense? The kind of computer you were probably messing around on when you were 15 may have been the computer I was, you know, messing around on when I was, I don't know, 20 or something. Even though you're younger than me or something like that. Truthly is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help, you know, live and defend the Catholic faith with clarity and confidence. Whether you're navigating a tough conversation, deepening your understanding, or looking for daily spirit spiritual guidance, Truthly is your companion on the journey. It's like if ChatGPT went through OCIA, got baptized, and made it its mission to proclaim the truth of the Catholic Church. But Truthly is more than just a Q and A tool. It's formation in your pocket. Take audio courses on topics like the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, Purgatory, and why the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus Christ. Each course is designed to be accessible, engaging, and deeply rooted in the teachings of the Church. You'll also receive daily audio reflections, short, powerful meditations to help you grow in prayer and stay grounded in your spiritual life. Already downloaded by thousands of people worldwide, Truthly is transforming the way we learn, share, and live our faith. One question, one course, and one prayer at a time. Start your your seven day free trial today. Download Truthly on the App Store. Yeah, but it's bananas to think about our childhood and how different things are today. So I want to reflect on that just for nostalgia's sake. And then I want to think about what the world might be like in 40 years from now. Right. So it's crazy to people who grew up during the time of the Internet to realize. I like using this as an example. If any human being on the face of the planet wanted to get a hold of me when I was 15 or 20 or no, not 20, but let's say 12 to 15, they had only three ways they could write a letter and send it in the post. They could come and find me directly, or they could call the phone that was bolted to my kitchen wall, which had like a meter to 2 meter at most chord on it, such that when I had to try to talk to girls when my mom was like cooking for the family, it was really embarrassing and annoying, you know? That's crazy, dude. Yeah, that almost sounds as crazy as we're all cyborgs. It's like no one would believe that that's how we all acted and that I had two channels growing up and only two. And I had the clicker Channel four. Abc.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Eventually SBS came on, which was all foreign films which all of us watched at 10 o' clock at night to see Boobs because it tend to play foreign movies. Not proud of that. That's just what we were doing.

[Matt Fradd]

We didn't even have that. Yeah. Thankful for it.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. Well, y' all had much more sophisticated television, cable and all that.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But I grew up with three kids.

[Matt Fradd]

We grew up poor, so we were behind the times with a lot of that stuff ourselves. Even though my neighbors might have had cable. I remember reading TV Guide for fun, to look at shows I couldn't even watch. And so, yeah, like that thing you're describing of going from a world where we had. I think we had four or five channels, but they came in kind of poorly, and that was your access to the world. When I was 15, I had an opportunity to go abroad for the first time. There was something called the Cambridge college program or summer program or something like this, and it was for high school students who wanted, I think, to get college credit. I can't remember if it was for credit or not, but it was a chance to go to Cambridge in England for, like, a summer, for, you know, like three weeks or something. I was 15, and I went overseas, and my. I couldn't figure out how to get my international calling card to work. So it's like, several days before I was able to call home. So my parents are alarmed. I've never been gone before. Suddenly I'm just gone, and they aren't hearing from me at all. And so they're, like, calling, trying to get a hold of, and they have no way of getting a hold of me at all. So what you're saying is it's absolutely on point. Finally, I had to just call collect home. And so they were happy to hear from me. They were not happy to see the phone bill at the end of the month when it was like several hundred dollars just to call home. So, I mean, it was. That is a world that is impossible to imagine being as recent as it was.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Here's another thing I've noticed. In the 80s or 90s, if you went to Italy, there's a really good chance that no one would understand you.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But I was just living in Austria for a few months this year, and we traveled to different countries and. And it's really sad. I feel bad about this, but I didn't even bother to learn much of the language because whenever I would try, they would speak English, especially in the cities. Right. And especially people under 40. There were certainly times where that wasn't the case, but it made me sad. I think, you know, when you rob a country of its dress, of its music, of its literature, of its language, then you can kind of. They can just become made in the image of whatever. But that's sad. I think that my kids are gonna. When they're older or my grandkids it's just everyone in Europe will speak English.

[Matt Fradd]

Let me throw out a theory. Tell me what you think of this. I think that we're living in an age where every major metropolis in the world is more similar to every other major metropolis in the world than any of those cities are to the little towns an hour and a half away from them.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, 100% that's true. All right, so let's take it. Let's take concrete examples. So let's think of Orlando, and then let's think Adelaide, Australia, South Australia. And so you're saying that those two cities have more in common and feel more similar than what?

[Matt Fradd]

Than going out of Orlando to, like, a small town in Florida.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Then Orlando does. Hang on. I'm sorry.

[Matt Fradd]

So Orlando is more like Adelaide.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Then Orlando is like the small town out on the sticks in Florida.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

That even though it's, you know, you.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Can drive, at least superficially, I think that's true.

[Matt Fradd]

I think this is more pronounced outside of the Anglosphere, because as you just said, when you are, like, if you're in Tokyo, you can get by with English. If you go out to rural Japan, you can't. Things feel much more Japanese in dress and language and culture. But the international monoculture, which is largely American culture but not exclusively, feels pretty similar. I was in Morocco, and when I was in Marrakesh, you see H and M, you see all these, like, international brands, and it's like, this is the exact same stuff. I could get anywhere. Then you go out into the Sahara and you're just like, this isn't. This is. This is pretty different.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

This is nothing like.

[Matt Fradd]

Right. It's like, people aren't even speaking Arabic. They're speaking Berber. And I don't have any idea what's going. Like, that's the shit. But that is like, a really interesting. Not an international flight. You have these international flights to all these cities. And so I think you have people who imagine themselves to be very cosmopolitan because they've been in the really big, slightly different city.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No, you're in.

[Matt Fradd]

Exactly. And they never get out of the major city. They never get out of the touristy city or the capital or whatever it is. And so they get a slightly different version of the same experience. Maybe the food's.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

The dollar has a slightly different menu.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, seriously, McDonald's in Rome, it's got beer. Hey, that's really crazy. It's not good beer. But, hey, it's a beer at a McDonald's. And you're just like, that was amazing. Then you walk outside of that and suddenly you get to places where they don't speak English. The city life is not at all what's going on there. And then it starts to feel pretty foreign.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, totally. But the fear is, I think what happens is that. That cosmopolitan. What do we call it? What do we call that thing that makes all the major cities the same?

[Matt Fradd]

I've been calling it the monoculture.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Like a whitewashing monoculture. The problem is, though, that that gets into the veins of a country and destroys the whole country. So you might go an hour outside of Morocco, what have you, but already, right, there's this. There's the iPhones, and there's the semblance of things.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes. The seeds of the destruction of cultures around the world. We see it happening. This has been a much longer process than just the Internet. The Internet has absolutely sped this up. The iPhone, all of this stuff is absolutely sped this up to a dramatic degree. But, you know, like the. The Italian that is kind of spoken in New York, or like the Italian words, you know, prosciutt, gabagool, all this stuff that doesn't sound like Italian in Italy now. But the reason is because you had a lot of 19th century Sicilian immigrants to the US back when Sicily spoke a version of the language that was almost unrecognizable from modern Italian. And after 1870, they work to standardize the Italian language. The French did this with Napoleon, so that Corsican and Parisian and all these other, what were basically different languages become standardized. This is actually an important part of just world history. It's also an important part of the conversation around, like the Bible and the dialect of the people. Because we're imagining that with the languages as they are today, where everyone across England speaks English other than, you know, all the people who are not native English. But the reality was you would go to a country, France, Italy, whatever, and there'd be such wide variances between different dialects. They were functionally different languages. And you kind of have that now still with China, you know, where you've got a bunch of different. We call them dialects like Cantonese and Mandarin, but they're not mutually intelligible. So they should probably just be called different languages. That there probably isn't such a thing as a Chinese language. There's a Chinese script. You can read the writing in different languages, But Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. Aren't the same. And similarly, I'd say, you know, you could speak.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I thought of something.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, please.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I'm going to throw it out there. And it's dangerous. And I can't tell if it's racist or not, but here we go. We're just going to do it. If you want. If you. If you want other races to exist, then marrying them and having kids with them will eventually dilute them. Go.

[Matt Fradd]

This whole thing is true not just of races, but of cultures.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No, let's stick with races. It's more dangerous.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah, it is certainly more dangerous. But I just want to say this point is true. Different languages, different ethnicities, different races. However you want to explain that, there is certainly a sense in which you've got it blended. You know, I mean, look, I'm a European mutt. You know, I've got English and German and Irish and Scottish and, I don't know, a bunch of other stuff, Swedish. And so if you said, what is your ancestral culture? I could choose one. But the reality is they've been so blended in the American experience already among different European ethnicities. And I think that's absolutely happening in a more international way where it's not just Europeans, it's Europeans, Africans, Asians, South Americans, et cetera. I mean, South America is already such a melting pot when it comes to, like, indigenous and Spanish and everything else. For centuries, that's been kind of the experience in the Latin American kind of context. I think it at the very least forces this. The older idea of race is going to be almost unintelligible at the rate things are going. Where to say someone is white or black or something will become increasingly arbitrary.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And do you think the same thing with be true, like for Italy and France and Germany, except for the fact that they have borders and governments?

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah, no. I mean, there was a First Things article a few years back that was very controversial. It was called what does it mean to be French? And the question was, you know, okay, so I'll give you an example. When I was in Rome, I was friends with a young woman who was a Muslim who had grown up speaking Turkish in Germany. She was born in Germany to a Turkish family. And the question was, well, is she German? Now she could speak German as well, but culturally she was much more Turkish than she was German. And she said as much. I mean, she said when she went to Turkey when she was 18, it felt like a homecoming, even though she'd never been there before and she wasn't completely accepted as a German in these kind of large Turkish enclaves that they had in Germany. We are going to have more and more situations like that in either direction, whether you have widespread intermarriage where the cultures kind of blend, or whether you have these little ethnic enclaves where the cultures don't blend. Either way, there's going to be some major questions. What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be German? What does it mean to be every. Every group? And these are challenges that I think we're deeply uncomfortable kind of facing. And I get why. Like, it's an awkward question to. To sort of grapple with, but what does it mean? I saw someone point out that if you want to say someone not of English ethnic origin who grows up in England is automatically English, then you have to do the same thing in reverse. You have to say, like, during colonial India, the people who were born to the colonists are Indians, full stop. And so you'd have to say, you know, for instance, Albert Camus, we call him French, but he's born in Morocco, so you should call him a Moroccan. Those kind. Like, you know, you've got a bunch of things, especially from the colonial era, where people were born not in their ethnic ancestral home. And right now we use the same words for nationality and ethnicity and race, and those are probably just not sufficient to do all of the things we're wanting to do. I was teasing some friends of ours because one of our friends said that she had a Croatian friend. And it turned out this young woman that she had been referring to, her parents were Croatian, but she'd grown up in Canada, so she didn't have a Croatian accent or any. She, you know, she was Croatian Canadian. And so, like, she was an immigrant to the US but not from the country we expected. Then we meet her and we're like, that's your Croatian. She's just clearly a Canadian. She's. Sorry, but. And so we've got that where. When you say Croatian, are you referring to an ethnicity, a nationality? Like, what. What are we talking about here? And that's going to be increasingly true across the board. So in that, there's some really good aspects, but let's not deny the fact that there's also a loss of another way of living that is becoming more similar across the board. But that even leaving aside the marriage thing, in a generation, people in Croatia, people in Marrakesh, people in Mongolia are going to be a lot more similar to one another simply because of the technological culture. And there's no getting around this.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. This reminds me of something. I thought of this. You know, you go to Ireland, we used to live in Donegal.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And you drive like an hour away. And the accents are different, at least for now. Right, right. And that's because that population has existed there for a lot longer.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Than, say, the population in Australia has. And so you find that the difference in accents is less pronounced in Australia, obviously, than to, say, an hour up the road in Ireland.

[Matt Fradd]

You know, I see this a lot with Midwestern culture, which is gonna sound very strange. I was on the plane yesterday, and there were people from Tulsa who were talking. And the guy they were talking to said, what do you guys think of this show Tulsa King and how they depict Tulsa? And they said, we've never seen it. How do they depict Tulsa? And he says, they depict it pretty redneck. And they're like, oh, yeah, that's not accurate anymore. And if you've ever seen Ozark, the accents are wildly wrong. Like, the reality is Hollywood's depiction of middle America makes everyone, like, backwoods Southern, even if they're Midwestern. Even if they're, you know. But part of that is because they're wanting to depict a place that increasingly doesn't exist. Like, you can still find people with, like, a strong Southern accent. It's a lot less similarly, like the Boston accent, where, you know, it's kind of the stuff of jokes. You can find some people who still talk like they're from Southie, but it's not as many as you used to be able to. And we're seeing in real time this linguistic shift of sounding a lot more like one another as people move from place to place within their own country. And so there's a death of subculture.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Do you think that this, in part, explains the very passionate desire people have for tradition?

[Matt Fradd]

I think it does. That we're living in a place where people are disconnected from their own roots.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Because it was cool in the 90s, wasn't it? You know what I mean? Like, it was cool to question authority. It was cool to, like. By the way, I don't consider myself American. I'm legally American, but I just can't say I'm American because I'm clearly not. Are your kids my kids? I mean, what do you mean? Legally or not exactly.

[Matt Fradd]

That's a good question.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, but I mean, yeah, they're American. They grew up here. You know, they have an American mother, and they grew up in America. I grew up in Australia. I mean, I moved here when I was 23.

[Matt Fradd]

If Cameron had been Australian, would your kids still be American?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's a great question. Yes, I think they'd be American.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I think you're right. But I think it's. So there's great studies on this that the children of immigrants tend to talk more like their peers than like their parents.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes, I think that's true. I also heard a different statistic that if. That a child will more likely mirror the accent of their mother. So my son is an Aussie, obviously, and they live in Steubenville. Her husband's American. They grow up in America. But the daughter has a pronounced kind of Australian twang. And it's not like a speech impediment. You know how kids can't pronounce their Rs and Australians can't either. It's not.

[Matt Fradd]

It's.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's. It's more than that.

[Matt Fradd]

So anyway, the rotic R. Right?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

The what?

[Matt Fradd]

Rhotic R is the phenomenon you're talking about, like saying lore.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Oh, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And instead of law. Yeah, that's.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I didn't know that's what it was.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, a certain phenomenon. Actually, it became more common in the UK as it became less common in the US because in the US we became increasingly standardized with language because of television. In the UK that was also the case, but it was London based. BBC London uses the rhotic R historically. The Midlands and other parts of England don't. So this London style of speaking became more uniform across England as the US was doing different things linguistically. Interesting. And so little pockets like Boston has the same R phenomenon that England and Australia. Yeah, the whole, like.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

What does rhotic mean?

[Matt Fradd]

What is that? It's coming from, I think the Greek word Ro. I don't know the. I don't understand exactly. But it's referring to a specific thing that happens with the way Rs are dropped, but also in a fairly standardized way, included in places that they don't actually exist.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You know what's fascinating is in American music because Australians are often accused of using like an American accent when they're singing. Yeah, can't. Or whatever. Plant. We say plant in Australia. Well, some parts say plant, some say plant. But it is interesting. It seems like a lot of American music uses the rhotic R. Like you're a huge swifty. Think of a swifty song and see if I'm right. I couldn't hear anything more swift.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm trying to think of a swift. Yeah, we'll have to.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

When I first saw you first. It's not first.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But then American punk bands often pronounce the river.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes, that's right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Like Blink or Green. Day we're old. These are the punk bands we know of.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. And a lot of that. I've actually heard things about this before. There's a.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Maybe she does use a first channel.

[Matt Fradd]

A linguistic channel that I watch a lot. And the name of it is escaping me right now. But he makes this point with music, that the genre of music often depends on where it originated because people will often be imitating. So if you're a punk band trying to imitate the Clash, you might talk with more of a British style in your singing.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Because you're. This is what you've associated that sound with.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I need to correct myself. I need to be on the record here or else the comments section will talk about nothing else. I'm pretty sure she says, first, people.

[Matt Fradd]

Go listen to Taylor Swift and let.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Us know when you were throwing pebbles and my daddy said stay. This is the only Swift song.

[Matt Fradd]

I am in awe right now.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I actually. Every time. I love this song, man. I get the guitar out at night when me and the kids sing it everything to me. I was begging you. I'm trying to get to an R. Please don't go.

[Matt Fradd]

We could just.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Somewhere. There you go. Somewhere.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

By the way, this interview took a hard left turn about five minutes in. I'm here for it some. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I never know. Like, my wife asked me, what are you gonna talk about on Matt Frad's show? And I'm like, I never know.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, I just love talking to you. I think a lot of people come in and I'm like, okay, this is what they're good at. I just love talking about.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I love this, too. This is the stuff where if I sat down and, like, I'm gonna make a shameless popery episode where I give the etymological origins of how different places pronounce the R and where they drop. But the flip side is they also will include it. So my old professor. Oh, well, yeah, let me finish that thought and then I'll go on the tangent. I would never. I would never make that episode. But it's so much fun to just get a chance to sit down with you and just talk about these things because they really matter and they're often things we don't think about. But it's hard to just, like. You just gotta see when they come up. My professor in undergrad had grown up on the East End of London. You know, this is heavily, like, cockney accent. And then when he was 15, he moved to Kentucky. He had the weirdest accent I'd ever Heard because imagine those two blended together. And there'd be times where he'd be talking about like Irish lore. And we're like, we don't know if you're saying law or lore because, like, it was such a thick, you know, in some contexts in history class, both of those could make sense. In the folklore, you say in the, the legislation. So that's what we're talking about, the art. But it's both the drops in places, but also the inclusion. Like there, where you say law instead of law, there's an R showing up where it's not written. Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It reminds me of how my wife makes fun of me. So she'll say, like, I'll say it. I'll try to say with an American accent, car keys. Okay, but then the pants that you.

[Matt Fradd]

Wear are called car keys.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, khakis, maybe. Do some people say car keys? So I say khakis and khakis identically is the point.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So the isu. You left your khakis in your khakis kind of thing. That's funny. So then do you think just like how maybe in a hundred years this idea of race, the way we talk about it, is going to be very different?

[Matt Fradd]

Do you think it's already a loose concept? I mean, think about this. Like, my wife is like 2% black. She doesn't look. I mean, she has hair where you think it could be from the black side. She's, you know, got thick, curly, dark hair.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Sunscreen, as much as you need sunscreen.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know, she wears it. And so in the 19th century, my wife and my kids would be counted as black under the one drop rule. Phenomena. A lot or phenotypically, they don't look. I mean, you look at them, you assume they're white. But depending on what one means by these racial categories, increasingly we're going to have these questions where it's, what does that even mean? What is, you know, like, I'm thinking about just the public square, people like Patrick Mahomes, where it's like, what does it mean to be black in America? What is it? Like, what do any of these terms mean practically or even, you know, President Obama, he wasn't descended from slaves. He had a father who was from Africa and a mother who was white. And so is he black in the same way that someone who is a descendant of, of slaves as black? What do we mean by any of these terms? And what do we mean by African and African American? Is Elon Musk African American? All of those kind of concepts have already become so muddled that we still use them in this vestigial sort of way. And obviously someone who is 500th generation Kenyan and has always lived them and their ancestors always lived in the western part of Africa is different in some important cultural ways and everything else from someone who's grown up in Mongolia or grown up in northern Europe, fine. But other than those cases that are maybe more simple and uncomplicated an increasing part of the world, we are pretty arbitrarily choosing a label to stick on that person's genetics or nationality or familial ancestral experience that starts to feel as arbitrary as I think it is.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

What does phenotypically mean?

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, sorry, the, like the external appearances, like skin color.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Pheno. What does that mean? I don't know.

[Matt Fradd]

P H E H. Okay.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I've never heard that before.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah. Like the phenotypes, you know, so like genetic expression. Those are phenotypes. So.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So do you think then that accents will soon become as diluted as race?

[Matt Fradd]

May accents are rapidly becoming more deluded.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

My dad. If you heard my dad speak, he sounds. He makes me sound British.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. You all right?

[Matt Fradd]

That was a sentence.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

He is, yeah. It's embarrassing how? Well, it might also be because I live here. I also grew up in a very small country town. So what's been funny is even doing this podcast, sometimes people will accuse me of using words that Aussies don't use. But I did growing up, because I grew up in the sticks.

[Matt Fradd]

Like. Like what kind of words?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Sheila.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, nice.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Like bloke. Yeah, Like I just don't use those words. Well, my dad did. Like, you know, but, but, but I don't think people in cities did. And it may even mean something negative now. I don't know. Like sometimes I'll get a reaction. They'll say that, you know, or fella. I'll say, the fellas. Sheilas, blokes. But it's funny. Even my mum, like, I'll be on the phone with her and she will say, you sound like a bloody Yank. Cause yank just means everyone from America. And she'll correct me for saying a word that Americans use that she doesn't think Australians use. But it's actually a word that her generation used.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So she'll call. I'll say, we went to the movies. Not that I do that anymore. Cause every movie is horrible. But she'll say, the pictures. I'm like, no one. No one says the pictures anymore. Or like we call flip flops thongs yes. That's a fun conversation to.

[Matt Fradd]

I remember learning this the hard way when someone even now go out wearing thongs, and I was like, I don't think you should.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

When do you wear them? When I'm feeling hot. I mean, the thing is, that's a. Anyway. But I don't think Australians say thongs anymore.

[Matt Fradd]

Or singlet is a term I heard from an Australian and was very confused.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Singlet? Yeah. And you call them a wife beater.

[Matt Fradd]

Which is way worse. Singlet is much better. Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Singlet, thongs.

[Matt Fradd]

I love these kind of linguistic quirks, you know. So, for instance, do you have a term for when it's raining and the sun is shining?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I don't think so.

[Matt Fradd]

We didn't have one growing up in the Midwest, but across the south you can find a variety sunshower.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

We call it a sun shower.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, there you go. I had never heard that term. Sun shower is the most sane term for it. There's other ones. Like the monkey's wedding. The devil is beating his wife.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Oh, wow.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. No, there's like the number of terms for what it's like when it's raining, when the sun's out and you're just like pineapple sun. I've also heard these are very strange kind of linguistic terms. I love that kind of stuff. And I do wonder how much of that stuff gets lost as we have a more standardized English become not just the Anglosphere's norm, but across the world. You see it in the numbers like British youth speak more like Americans than their parents do, and in such marked ways that it's pretty astonishing.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, American culture certainly has the American ideas, whether they're good or bad. MTV and all sorts of things. Certainly colonizing the world. Colonizing the ideas of the world. I mean, I remember I grew up in Australia and my cousin used an American accent and her mum was really worried about her, but it was because she was watching tv. And all the tv, or the majority of the TV was American.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm, as an American, stunned by this. I saw this all across Europe.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Isn't that funny?

[Matt Fradd]

I would talk to usually people who were like, German or Austrian, and they'd say, oh, sorry for my bad English.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And then, oh, whoever. They said that I was terrible about myself. I'm like, I'm so sorry that you're saying sorry to me. I'm the idiot who should be saying sorry.

[Matt Fradd]

And then they speak flawless. I remember I had a Bavarian friend, and the one word I remember him not knowing was seesaw. And he had to ask me what the word was. And I was so delighted I could give him an English word, because other than that, his English was flawless. Like, used even obscure words accurately. And I was like, how do people know this? And repeatedly, when I would ask people this, they would say, oh, you know, we watched a lot of TV growing up. It's pretty alarming because you just think, if it's shaping your vocabulary the whole way you're able to speak, how is it not also shaping your ideas and your view of reality? Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's why I'm excited about the amount of excellent Catholic evangelization coming out of America, because I know it is. Like, I was just in Transylvania in Romania. I didn't know that was a place. I thought it was just out of the book. And depending on whose side you're on, it's either in Romania or we won't get into that. People got anyway.

[Matt Fradd]

But the point is, it's switched because it's Transylvania.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Transylvania. Very good. Okay. I can't even tell if you're joking now, so I don't even know if I was.

[Matt Fradd]

But I actually, now I'm wondering if sylvan is. Is wood. So it does seem to be across the woods.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Is that what that means?

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know, but it's all I know of those two. Like, trans as a prefix. And sylvan. Point is.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Point is this guy who couldn't speak more than three words of English, him and his friends were all doing Exodus 90, and it helped them a great deal.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Go, America.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Here's another funny story about that guy in Romania. So we're in Transylvania, and I like smoking. I like cigars. I like shisha or hookah. Right. I like smoking. Anyway, so I'm with this guy, and my wife was giving a talk somewhere. There was a couple of hours, so I wanted to go get some hookah. So I say, and you will see where this is going almost immediately. I'm gonna go get a hookah. And I will be right back. And he laughs because he thinks I'm clearly joking. I'm probably not going to hire a prostitute. And then I kind of get defensive, like, what's wrong with tobacco? I didn't really get defensive, you know, but I was actually curious.

[Matt Fradd]

You're like, I know it's a vice.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But yeah, it's like, no, I don't even think it's advice, But I was like, what do you mean, like? So I was like, why do you. So I kind of got a little like, why are you laughing and he went, you're not really going to get a hookah. Yeah, I'm going to get a shisha hookah. Oh. So that was really funny that this fellow who invited my wife and I to come in and evangelize. I thought that just for a second that maybe I meant I was going to.

[Matt Fradd]

But the fact that he knew the language enough to even have that confusion.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, that's right.

[Matt Fradd]

I. I have a couple stories like that. A friend of mine, his priest asked him what he'd done over the weekend. He said he'd been to a tapas bar and he was saying, tapas?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Oh, tapas, Tapas, yeah, tapas. You have one like three doors down.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, there you go. That's not what it sounded like you said to the priest. And the priest gave kind of a startled, like, alarmed look, but didn't say anything. And he was too mortified to correct it. So the priest just went away thinking this kid had casually just been like, oh, I've been to a topless bar, Father, and then moved on. Spanish and Italian is the other one because they're very similar languages, but they've got some differences.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So do you think there'll come a time where we all have the same accent like people in Peru? And I mean, Spanish is a great competitor to English at this point, but I mean, a thousand years from now, who knows what techno where technology will be? And.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, let me suggest a couple of things. Chinese is radically different linguistically and culturally and be different Alphabet and everything else is way different from the Romance languages. And the Chinese don't show any signs of wanting to give up Chinese as a language. And China's on the ascendancy, so it's hard to know us. Yeah, so they tell us. That's. That's fair. You know, in the 80s, everyone thought Japan was about to take over the world, and that turned out to be something of a paper tiger. So the future of language is going to depend a lot on the future of geopolitics. Right now, so much trade and culture is coming from America or rooted in America. Things are rooted, you know, tied to the dollar. They're pegged to the dollar. Even when people do transactions that certainly oil, this is what was called the petrodollar. OPEC sales are in dollars. So it could be Saudi Arabia selling to Russia. And historically that's been in dollars. It's a hard currency. And so it gave America a lot more force. And so the story of how American English and American culture comes to dominate the world is Inseparable from this commercial financial kind of success. If that changes, I think the linguistics change. So I think we're growing more together. And so I think we will stop having these small regional differences in accents. Certainly within a language. Linguistic subcultures seem like they're dying out at a rapid rate. So Justice Clarence Thomas grew up speaking Gola off the islands of South Carolina. It's a pidgin language, meaning it's a blend of several different languages from the descendants of slaves speaking different West African languages. And it was genuinely a distinct language. It was not really English. I think Goa is basically extinct. And I think we are in the future gonna have those things gone. So I don't think we're gonna all speak the same accent, but I think the amount of linguistic and cultural diversity is actually shrinking rather than growing.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So with these tectonic shifts under our feet, man, it's a scary time. I mean, I don't seem that scared. You seem jolly.

[Matt Fradd]

I always seem jolly.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Alarmingly jolly about everything. I wonder if we are ripe for falling into the sin of Cain where we look for a scapegoat. You know, like someone has to be responsible for things not going well with me right now.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And with conspiracy theory and then what's with conspiracy theories? With that discussion that we just had. I wonder what that's gonna look like. Because anyway.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, as you have these forces that are drawing us together and making us more alike, the desire to have an out group doesn't go away. There is something deeply hardwired in us where we want to protect ourselves from the other.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Right. Quebec has the rest of Canada.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, exactly.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Ireland has England, right?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, a lot of places of England.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. But whatever England means.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, that's a fair point.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I think to criticize England is just an example of Islamophobia at this point. But.

[Matt Fradd]

The.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's bananas. I just saw a study that said if no more Muslims migrate, Europe will 100% be a Muslim dominated country by such and such a year.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, certainly Birthright and everything else. I mean, one thing we could talk about is. Okay, so I guess I'd say two things. Out group. Certainly you're going to have that on a partisan level. So you've got people who are just biologically hardwired differently. Some people are more tender hearted, some people are more tough minded. You know, if you see someone doing something bad, do you just say that person has done something criminal, they need to be punished for it, or do you just say, oh, that poor soul, what led them to this we need to just like help them feel better about their circumstances so they're not likely to do that again. Those two types of people exist in every culture. There's different proportions and everything. But part of that is the human condition of we have these two impulses of compassion that can sometimes be too soft and a sense of justice that can sometimes be too rigid. So you're going to have differences among people based on their wiring and you're going to have political differences that in some way mirror those interpersonal differences. So some of the out group stuff we're going to be seeing, I think will be an increasing partisan politics of everything. And I think we're seeing that already now where the number of people who say they would be willing to marry someone of the opposing political party has been going down rather than up. So as much as we've become more tolerant of other cultures, religions, worldviews, in so many ways, when it comes to the person of the opposing political party down the block, we've become less and less tolerant of that. So I don't think we're going to have some glorious Kumbaya future where we all just get along. I think the who we hate is just going to become shifted towards people who might look like us. People might be of the same nationality as us, might even, you know, same language, maybe even the same religion, but they're just different enough that we can find a reason to really hate them.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Jews. Talk about the Jews. Okay, I want to know your opinion of Israel and Gaza. I think what frustrates people is on first I get two frustrations. One is when people talk as if anti Semitism is important, possible. And the other is when you think Israel has committed evil deeds or might be now, or is now that, that you have to be in any Semite. And I don't, I'm very confused because whenever I listen to people who are pro Israel or pro Palestine, I feel like I'm being lied to by both sides. And that isn't maybe an excuse to just sit on the fence and not make a decision. I'm not saying saying it is, but I'm, I'm, I'm seeing, I guess, I don't know, I'm seeing two things happening. Like I'm seeing people becoming more vocal against Israel and maybe that's good. But then I also see some people and I, I wonder if it's blending into anti Semitism or now am I responsible for doing the thing that I just said I don't like people doing? I'm sure You've thought about this.

[Matt Fradd]

I've thought about this a lot. It's hard to knowledge that.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That it's raining on top of this.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah, it is. It is raining on the roof.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Which will add perhaps the most fiery part of this discussion, a kind of nice.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Very calm, soothing way of talking about a very contentious topic.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So a few things at the outset when I was growing up, there were a lot of voices saying you need to support Israel because the Bible says Israel good, and those who bless Israel will be blessed. And those who curse Israel will be cursed.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes, Ted, cursed.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. We should at the outset say this is terrible theology.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

And so I want to address that which is the easy part before I get into the hard part, if I may.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

The blessings of God are tied to covenants, and those covenants don't apply to all of the descendants. They apply by faith. St. Paul talks about this at great length in his epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians. So you can read those for a much more thorough version of what I'm going to tell you here. But if it is by blood, if every ethnic descendant of Abraham inherits the covenant promises, well, that normally would pass first to the firstborn, who in this case would have been Ishmael, not Isaac. But as Paul points out in Galatians 4, it doesn't go by bloodline, it doesn't go by flesh, it goes by faith. That's an important principle. Now apply that to the next generation. Isaac has two sons, Esau and Jacob. Esau is born first, but he gives away his birthright. So it passes not to Esau, the father of the Edomites, but to Jacob, who is renamed Israel. So, okay, already when you're taking this, whoever blesses you will be blessed. Whoever curses you will be cursed. It was originally said to Abraham, and it's passed along by faith. And it's true. It passes along to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament based on Jacob's faithfulness, based on the ongoing faithfulness of the people and prophets, like Moses, et cetera. But it doesn't mean that because a group calls themselves Israel and because they're ethnically related to that people, that automatically the covenant promises extend to them. And we know this from the Old Testament itself, both because we've seen it passed on by faith, non ethnicity, not by flesh, but also because when during the days of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, the 12 tribes split, you have the 10 northern tribes, you have the two southern tribes, the two southern tribes collectively become known as the Kingdom of Judah or Judea, which is where the word Jew comes from. That's where we believe the covenant promises extend. You know what the ten northern tribes called themselves the Kingdom of Israel. They would go on to be called the Samaritans later on, but they called themselves Israel. They're referred to as Israel in the pages of the Old Testament. While making clear they don't have Jerusalem, they don't have the true worship, they're doing false worship in Bethel. And this is not where God's covenant promises have continued because they have broken the faith. They have not gone where God wants them to go. They've gone into a spirit of rebellion. So even though they are ethnically related to the Judeans in the South, God's covenant promises are not on them. If those points are in place and then you get to the New Testament and say, here are some Jews who accept Jesus, Here are some Jews who reject Jesus, where do the covenant promises go? It's very clear what the answer to that is. And the fact that the other group continues to call themselves Israel and in one sense is nationally, ethnically Israel. For covenant purposes, this is going to the church, which is why St. Paul can refer to the church as the Israel of God and why Revelation can speak of those who call themselves Jews and are not. Because there is this important spiritual sense. Now, I'd say at the outset, like, don't do the dispensationalist Ted Cruz thing of saying give arms to Israel, because there's a second level too. Like, is the best way to bless a country, to give them weapons of war, to encourage them to go to war with the like. Is that really what blessing looks like? Biblically, I would say no, but there's a bunch of other. So let's get. Once that's off the table. Now, just imagine you have two parties at war, Russia and Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, whatever it is. Where should our sympathies lie? And frequently, as you said, both sides are lying. Like when I hear a casualty count out of Ukraine and the Russians say one thing and the Ukrainians say another thing, they're wildly off. I don't believe either number because the first casualty in war is the truth. This is a general principle. This is true when the US Goes to war. This is true when every country on earth goes to war, that people lie. And trying to support the war effort. They're trying to craft a certain narrative to get some goal. They want. They want to look like they're doing really badly. So people will come and support them. They want to look like they have a chance so that people are more likely to back them, whatever it is they have an agenda for why they're telling you what they're telling you. So everything you're hearing out of Israel, Palestine, there is a layer of propaganda. Even if they're telling you true facts, they've chosen to tell you those facts because those are convenient to the narrative they want you to see and they're wanting to win your sympathy for their side of the equation. That makes it so hard to know, number one, what's true, or number two, how we should respond. We can say at the outset that the intentional taking of civilian lives is gravely immoral, regardless of always, always. This is true of October 7th.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

This is why the A bomb should be denounced by all conflicts. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And so even if you broadly support people, and I think the atomic bomb is a great example, I supported. I mean, I wasn't alive for it, but I support the U.S. getting involved after Pearl harbor in World War II. And I think it was a just war and we don't have to get into all of that. But I still think a lot of the things that happen by the allied side were inexcusable war crimes. The bombing of Dresden, the bombing of Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to take four examples. There are plenty other ones. That doesn't mean there weren't horrible atrocities on the German side. That's the stuff of nightmares. But the fact that they're doing concentration camps doesn't mean you get to do war crimes. And so that same kind of principle we should apply in this conflict. We don't have to say Hamas good to be able to say some things Israel's doing to the Palestinians are not good. Like if they're targeting civilians. And there seems to be enough evidence, even through the fog of war and all the disinformation, misinformation and the rest, there seems to be enough evidence that there are some immoral actions being taken and a pretty naked desire from some within Israel to just get rid of at least the Gazans, if not the Palestinians more broadly, to just completely get rid of Gaza, turn it into like a US owned or someone else owned strip. And you understand they've had so many problems with people in this area, but you can't just forcibly displace a population with ethnic cleansing and have that be okay. So I think it's okay to have a full throated denunciation of the evils that both sides are doing without Falling into a sort of what about ism? I'm not saying they did this, therefore it's okay that you did that. I'm not saying, okay, all of the evils are equally bad. But I think it's good to just have a very clear. Because almost everyone I hear focuses on the evils of just one side and not the other in a way that I think undermines their credibility more than persuades me to their side. Because it's so naked that there are things that are also happening on the other side of the equation that there are a lot of Palestinian children being killed. There are Israeli hostages still being held that had. No. There's. It's absolutely inexcusable to be holding human hostages like this. This is not a legitimate tactic in war. And so people who can't say both of those things are bad are not doing good. Moral analysis of the situation.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You said something earlier that I'd love you to go into here. This reminds me of like the shoe we own guns debate, you know, because people will complain about school shootings as sure, they're horrific events and. But then they'll complain that, well, this won't end until we give up our weapons or something like that. And in other words, they're not just. They're not just bemoaning the evil that's taking place. They're now making a suggestion that I think is immoral right to take. To disarm a population. Do you agree with that?

[Matt Fradd]

I think the question of disarming. I want to do a little more nuance with it. I think you're right that to be completely disarmed, to be completely without the ability to defend yourself.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes. Is proportionately to whatever the other side has.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Maybe, maybe not.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, so, okay, I guess I'd say this came up a lot after the Charlie Kirk assassination. There were people who were dancing on his grave and their excuse was he said the Second Amendment was worth defending even though some innocent people would get killed.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

And I think that is a perfectly legitimate stance. I give that in a couple ways. Number and I'm actually in favor of more gun control than I think he was. But nevertheless think that the general principle that there's some right to private gun ownership is a perfectly defensible stance, even with the full knowledge that we should grapple with some innocent people will die as a result of this. Yes. Highways and everything else exist. And highways have speed limits that are often very high. If you lowered the speed limit of highways, you would reduce the number of fatalities. This is an inescapable. We have mountains of data to suggest this. When we went from 55 to 75 on the highway, that increased the number of people who died in traffic fatalities. And, you know, it's basic physics. Somebody's in a car going 90 compared to going 30, you know what happens to their body in both situations. So we've decided that having highways and having highways with high speed limits or having cars at all is worth the cost of human lives that it comes at. And it's not a small cost. Like the number of people who die in traffic fatalities, et cetera, is staggering. So we should just be honest about saying there are these trade offs. You can't create a world in which no one dies. You can't create a world in which people don't die as an unintended side effect of the thing you're trying to do. And the idea. I think we saw this a lot five years ago with COVID like, maybe if we just enact harsh enough policies, strict enough policies, we can get rid of these deaths from disease. That's delusional. It's not just utopian. It's completely divorced from reality. So if your approach on gun control is we're going to create a situation where nobody has guns, I think the first thing to say is, I don't believe that's real. I think that you're trying to achieve an unattainable goal and you're gonna do a lot of damage in the process.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

This is what I'm getting to, right? This is the point I was clumsily trying to get to, is that it may be the case that we. One country inflicts great harm on another country, but then the only way that country B can go to war on country A is immoral. Ah, right. In which case, what? Right? And it seems like some people would say, well, then you just got to do what you got to do. But it would. I would think that the Catholic position is sometimes you just have to not.

[Matt Fradd]

Some of you lose.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

There's no solution now because you can't commit intrinsic evil. The good may come of it, right?

[Matt Fradd]

You live in a world with a series of injustices inflicted upon you pretty regularly, and we don't often talk about it in that way. But the reality is there are all sorts of things that are unjust either to you personally or just injustices you see in the world, and you have no legal and morally upright way of resolving them. For instance, there's an abortion clinic you could use illegal and immoral Violent action to shut it down. You could go blow it up. You could go do any number of things that you could try to scare people into being afraid of doing abortions and use a kind of ends justify the means mentality. But the church actually says, no, you can't do that. That's not a morally acceptable.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, you can't do that if you are targeting innocent people.

[Matt Fradd]

True, yes, that's a fair point.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

We'll leave it there.

[Matt Fradd]

But also, you're not a state actor. So this adds a whole other element that the state has certain authority you don't have as a private actor. Yeah. Which makes like vigilante justice. Right. Even when the cause is just, even when the thing is a capital crime, there's a limit on what you're able to inflict.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's interesting. Maybe we have to have this discussion off air because YouTube will absolutely ban us.

[Matt Fradd]

I'll move on to a different. A different topic. One of the defenses I've heard for the atomic bombs, which were clearly immoral, clearly indefensible morally, is, well, if we didn't do this, we wouldn't have been able to win the war. It was like, if that was true, which I don't think it is, then we just wouldn't be able to win the war.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's right. And this is what's so. This is what so upset me. Do you know that fellow, Dennis Prager?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I do.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

God bless him, and I pray for him because he's in a bad health situation right now.

[Matt Fradd]

I didn't know that.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But he recently. Well, not recently, many years ago, had a priest on defending the dropping of the A bomb. And it was exactly that. It was consequentialism.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, this is. So anyone who's prone to consequentialism, I would recommend you read Elizabeth Anscombe's essay Modern Moral Philosophy. And she just points out that consequentialists can't say torture is always wrong, can't say rape is always wrong if they could find an ends justify the means mentality for it. And someone who can't do that, whatever you call what they're doing, it's not moral philosophy anymore. They've given up morality for the sake of some other goal. So if we care about morality, and if you're a Christian, you have to care about morality. I mean, St. Paul explicitly says in his Epistle to the Romans, why not do evil so good will come about? And then says that those who think that way are damned, like their condemnation is just. So if you're thinking that way. If you're defending consequentialism as the way you're going to justify these moral evils, you're doing a damnable thing. And we should just say that in just war theory, one of the criteria we look for is, is the win ability of the conflict.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

If you can't win in a moral way, then you can't win.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And it's no longer a just war.

[Matt Fradd]

And there's all sorts of situations that you might be in in your own life. We'll take a slightly less controversial issue. You know, health care. Health care practices in the US are arguably unjust. You have exploitatively high profit margins and people are being denied life saving care. And still we can give a full throat denunciation of the Luigi Mangiones of the world. Like you can't use lethal unjust violence to murder people to try to bring about a more just solution. In the world of healthcare that doesn't work. And so if the way you plan to get to your goal involves doing things that are morally unacceptable, find another strategy or give up your goal. Like those are the two choices.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So in other words, if Mexico went to war with America and our only means of retaliation was for America to attack directly a civilian population, then we would just have to not do that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, we'd have to find. So this is with something called moral creativity, which sounds bad, but it's the idea that you should try to find moral ways of achieving your goal.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And because if you can't, if literally the only way you could resolve, take an easy example, if you could end all world violence tomorrow forever by killing one child on purpose.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

There's a sci fi book based on this idea.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, it's good.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I forget what it's called, but yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I think there's like one child being tortured.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Either way you can't do it. And the minute you give into that temptation to say the good is so big and this is, it's true, it's evil, but it's a small, it's a localized, it's a personal evil. The minute you give in to that, you know what happens? You never actually achieve that big result. Like all of the revolutionaries in the 20th century who thought we need to, you know, drown in the blood of our enemies and then we'll be able to create the bright utopia. They filled up the tubs of blood and they didn't create the utopia.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So just to be clear, are you making this case against Israel? Are you saying that's what Israel oh.

[Matt Fradd]

No, I'm giving a broad principle. I'm not suggesting Israel's doing that. I'm thinking more of like the communist revolutionaries, the Nazis, these people who thought they could create a utopian world through massive violence. I'm glad you asked that. Arguably, you see some of that actually on the Hamas side of just saying if we can just kill every Jew, then we'll be able to live in peace. You're not going to achieve that goal. You can create a whole lot of damage, you can kill a lot of people. You're not going to create peace that way. Evil will not actually bring about the good that you want it to. My point is just if we determine an action is immoral, it doesn't matter how big the goal is, you're hoping to achieve national security, et cetera, the action is still immoral. It can't be done. And it is disheartening to me to see the number of Christians who've given up that principle for either American national security or Israeli national security. Because here's the thing, your particular view of Israel is not going to change the situation on the ground. In Israel, chances are, maybe you're in the tiny, tiny group of people who are really influential. You can do something really concretely and make a difference. But your moral compromise, where you start to justify evil for the sake of good, whichever side of the conflict you're on, what it can do is destroy your soul. And so we live in this age where we think we have to have a take on every situation in the world, no matter how ill informed we are. And the desire to have a take and just take one side in a complicated situation can encourage us ever more down the road of making these compromises with evil, where we start to overlook the problems on our side and start to think about morality in a worse and worse way. And that doesn't make the world better, but it does make us worse.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Thank you. Switching gears here, you've written a lot on the papacy and you've probably interacted with Orthodox Christians. And I'm wondering how your opinion on Orthodoxy and the strength of its claims, and I know that's a difficult question because depends what you mean by Orthodoxy, but how that's kind of evolved. And whether you think that Orthodoxy has a stronger case than you may have thought 10 years ago or why you're Catholic and not Eastern Orthodox.

[Matt Fradd]

That's a great question. I would say growing up there were a handful of Orthodox churches in Kansas City. It was something I was kind of dimly aware of on the margins. And there was a lot of just lack of knowledge. I remember going to a Greek cultural fest. This wasn't even that long ago. This was in adulthood. And the priest there was. He gave us a tour of the Orthodox Church and somebody asked him, what's the difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism? And he mentioned the Pope. But then he said, well, also, we Greeks have 73 books in our Bible and Catholics only have 66. I was just like, I think that's wrong. And at least one. You at least got the Catholic number wrong because we've got 73. I'm not sure if you've got 73 books in your Bible. It was such a baffling, but it showed like the state of Catholic Orthodox. Things were kind of a mutual. Barely aware of the other side, that they knew Catholics existed, we knew Orthodox existed. But as a result, I think for a lot of people growing up in the West, Orthodoxy wasn't a live option. So in that sense, the fact that the Internet now exists, Orthodoxy can be in your home, on your screen, Even if you're living somewhere where there's not an Orthodox Church for 200 miles, you are now exposed to the Orthodox claim in a way you weren't before. So in that sense, absolutely. Orthodoxy is stronger now than it was before. Second, when your exposure to it is primarily either through the Internet or in a country where it's the people who've continued to practice the religion, you're getting a certain view of the religion. And what I'd say is this. In places where Catholics are a minority in Eastern Europe, their rates of Mass attendance are often higher because the people who still call themselves Catholic are often more intentional about being Catholic or people who Catholicism was suppressed in that country. Not universally. You can find exceptions to this. The places like Poland, like Mass rates of attendance and the devoutness, in every way you could measure that is higher than somewhere where Catholicism was like France, or somewhere where Catholicism was taken for granted. So in the west, the Orthodox you meet are often converts or the immigrants who cared enough about their culture and their religion to continue to fight for it. Whereas in Russia or something, you know, Mass attendance is between 5 and 10%, or, you know, liturgy attendance is between 5 and 10%, you get a lot more nominal Orthodox. So I think we're seeing some pretty on fire Orthodox in the West. And so you've suddenly been exposed to this claim and you've got people who are really passionate about it, sometimes in an obnoxious way, often in a really winsome, inviting way. I think that the Orthodox case is very strong right now, particularly if you are someone raised Protestant and you come to realize that you're a little bit divorced from historic Christianity. Now, your mileage may vary in terms of what that looks like, but you grow up with say like the non denominational stage and all of this stuff. And then you start to read the church fathers where you start to realize, okay, this is just not what Christianity ever looked like. And not just incidentally, people really thought it was not supposed to look like this. We were not supposed to believe these things. We're not supposed to worship in this way. But maybe you've got these hangups about Catholicism because you've heard bad things about the church, you've maybe been taught them in church, you've certainly seen them in the news, et cetera. Orthodoxy feels like a very safe alternative to Catholicism where you get the cool tradition, all of that third or fourth, I don't know where we are. There have been enough scandals where it looks like the church is trying to compromise with the modern world and you have popes and prelates saying things that look like compromises with the world. A world that is increasingly hostile to Christians.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Look like or might be. Why not just say might be?

[Matt Fradd]

Well, because I think it's a little different case by case. I'm trying not to get into the weeds of the world. Like are all. Because in a way it doesn't matter whether the intentions are actually what it looked to. Exactly. And so it looks bad. Whereas Orthodoxy looks like it's taking this principal stand against the world. And there I want to really stress, it looks like, because when you get in the weeds and say, oh, they've actually compromised on things like contraception, this stand against the world isn't as countercultural as it looks, but it looks very strong. I mean, you've got a whole realm of the Internet you that is basically saying you should be Orthodox so you don't have to believe Muslims worship the same gods Christians do. Now that I think misunderstands the force of Vatican ii. Like the weight of the authority behind the declaration Muslims and Christians have the same God. But also every major Orthodox prelate that I know of would say Muslims and Christians do worship the same God, but the popular Internet figures say no. So you have this kind of Orthodoxy being presented that is maybe not what you would get in Greece, in Russia, in Turkey, wherever, but it's a particular kind of thing that really didn't exist, at least in my awareness. Like when I was coming up in the world.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Do Muslims And Christians worship the same God, Jo Hashma?

[Matt Fradd]

I would say yes. And the reason I would say yes actually isn't because of Vatican ii. It's because of, like, Saul Kripke's theories of reference. So Kripke gives the example. If you are at a Columbus Day celebration and you ask someone, oh, who is this Columbus you're celebrating? And they say, well, he was the first guy to realize the world was round and he was the first European to make it to the New World. And you say, oh, okay. Well, it turns out neither of those two things are true. He was not the first to know the earth was round by a long shot. That's a myth going back to Washington Irving, of course. And he wasn't even the first European to make it to the New World. The Vikings got there first, at least. Nevertheless, is that person referring to Christopher Columbus? They are. They're just getting every fact they told you wrong about him. So when a Muslim tells me they believe in the God of Abraham and then they tell me a bunch of wrong facts about him, I think they're referring to the God of Abraham and are deeply, profoundly wrong about him. And the fact that the Muslim claims about God and the Christian claims about God can't both be true is true, but is no reason to say that's a different God. It's just a reason to say, yeah, they're profoundly wrong about God. Like they're getting God wrong in some really big ways, including about his nature. But so this theory of reference would just be to say you can be wrong even about the nature. Because people say, well, they can't be wrong about God's triune nature. That's who he is. So if they deny that, then they don't believe in the same God. I think that's a mistake. You could see something on the horizon and not know if it's a dog or a horse and you're mistaken about its nature, but you're still referring to the same thing. Person who says, is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Superman? They're confused about a question of nature, but they're still referring to the same object as the other person who comes to a different conclusion about that. So referent is actually a fairly low bar. And what's more, the Bible seems to treat it this way. Like in Romans 1, when St. Paul talks about the pagans who are practicing immorality. He doesn't say they don't know God. He says they do know God, but have suppressed knowledge about God. Then he goes on in Romans 2 and 3, they talk, for instance, about Gentiles who do by nature what the law requires, showing the law of God is written on their hearts. So he's already suggesting even these pagans are in some relationship with God and they know him more than they would seem to know him. And I think that's where we should go as Christians. And to say we're not saying Islam is just as good, we're not saying it's as true, we're not saying any of that stuff. And because it gets so often mixed up with that, that becomes confusing. We don't have to say, oh, the God of the Bible and the God of the Quran. No, it's just there's God. The Quran lies about God or gets him wrong. The Bible tells the truth about God, but there's not a different God of the Quran or the God of the Bible. Like if I talk to two people and one says, I love Madfrad, he's like this. And somebody says, I hate mad frat, he's like that. One of them is wrong, hopefully the second one. And the fact that they're describing you in these opposite ways means they can't both be right. It doesn't mean they're talking about two different mat frats. They're just making rival claims about the same referent in technical language.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So to say that Muslims and Christians both believe in the same God makes sense to me. What about if you change the language and ask, do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?

[Matt Fradd]

We want to distinguish further and say right worship and false worship. Because it is possible to give worship to God that is displeasing to God. So think about Aaron, the high priest of Israel. His sons Nadab and Abahu offer unholy fire before the Lord and fire comes down from heaven and swallows them up. Were they worshiping God? They were, but they're doing it in a false man way, man made sort of way. So I think a lot of the problem is where I think we're approaching the question with two faulty assumptions. One is that we're looking at the character, as it were, of the two different sets of holy books. What is the depiction of God in the Bible? What is the depiction of God in the Quran? And do they match? They don't match. The better way is to say behind the Bible there is a true living God. The Quran tries to speak about that same God but says false things about him or maybe tries to lie about him. It depends on how maliciously you want to assume the Quran Is. But either way, it's making false claims about the gods. That's the first one it's thinking about at the level of almost like a literary character rather than a real tri. Personal being. The second. Oh, I completely forgot. Sorry. Tell me the question you just asked again.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. Do they worship the same God?

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah. The second is to assume that if they worship the same God, that means they're basically okay. And I think this is a problem that's crept in because we want to say, well, Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants all worship God. And people hear that, okay? Therefore, we don't need to evangelize them, we don't need to convert them. They're worshiping God, therefore we're good. But the question of are you worshiping the same God? Is actually still too low of a bar. It should be, are you giving right worship to God? Are you in right relationship with God? Not just, are you in any kind of relationship with God? Because St. Paul in Acts 17, when he's at Mars Hill, seems to say that people making offerings to an unknown God are giving some kind of worship to a God they don't know and that it's the true God, but that this is still ignorant and incomplete worship and needs to be corrected. He doesn't just say, you're good to go then. He views them as people who need the Gospel. So I would say, yes, they offer some kind of worship to God. I don't think that worship is pleasing when they do false things for God or when they do evil things for God. You can get into the case by case of someone trying to do a good thing for God. He is merciful. But the question of worshiping the same God is actually still too low of a bar. It should be. Is it right worship? And we can clearly say no to that.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

What does worship mean?

[Matt Fradd]

Worship is to give honor to God and to give him what he is worth. You know, the Worthy ship is the origin in English and in the ancient world is always tied to acts of sacrifice. This is kind of. So worship and sacrifice are not entirely interchangeable. But as Everett Ferguson says, sacrifice is the heart of worship in antiquity. So, for instance, in the Bible, Jesus goes to the synagogue, Luke 4, every Sunday, or, excuse me, every Saturday. And he goes there and he reads the Bible and he preaches on it, does those kind of things, but that's not prayer and that's not worship. Do you know how often the synagogue and prayer are connected in the New Testament? No. One time. And that one time is in Matthew 6, when Jesus says not to pray in the synagogue. Now, he doesn't say, don't go to the synagogue, but he makes a clear distinction between the synagogue, which is a place of teaching, and prayer, which is talking to God. So rather than talking about God, you've also got talking to God, like we're talking about God right now. This is not prayer. This is talking about God. The synagogue is that prayer, which can happen anywhere, should happen everywhere, is talking to God. But there's a third thing called worship. So in John 4:20, the Samaritan woman, she's on Mount Gerizim, which is the holy mountain of Samaria. And she asks Jesus, she says, our fathers tell us this is a place to worship. You say worship is to be done in Jerusalem, meaning in the Temple. So what is happening on Mount Gerizim and happening in the Temple in Jerusalem that wasn't just happening in the synagogue or in the lonely place? And that thing is sacrifice. So one of the things that's made this so hard is a lot of the stuff we call worship maybe isn't really worship. Like, if you don't have the sacrifice of the mass, if you're not offering things up, if you're not making sacrificial offerings to God, you're missing a lot of what we mean by worship. Now, anything you do in reference to God being God, there's a sense in which you're recognizing his worship, his worth in that sense. And those can be little acts of worship. But if you just go and listen to a preacher talk about God for 40 minutes, that's not prayer, and that's not worship. That may be good, but it's not prayer or worship. So when Muslims try to acknowledge God as God, and they have a strong sense of the sovereignty of God, and they're right to have a strong sense of the sovereignty of God, even if they're missing a lot of other things, like his fathership, fatherhood, that's good. And they're giving God his worth in one way. But when they say other things, like Allah is the best of all deceivers, that is false worship. They're trying to give God what he's owed, but they're actually giving it something evil. This distinction between true and false worship goes all the way back to Genesis. Genesis 4. Cain and Abel, they both are offering worship to God, but one is offering true worship. He's offering the firstborn, and the other is offering false worship. Because he's offering the grain from the ground and not the first fruits of the crop. He's giving God his leftovers. Are they both making acts directed towards God? They are. Does that mean they're both valid? It does not.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

We were talking about Orthodoxy earlier and you said that, you know, there's a stronger case to be made for it today than there was in the past. One of those reasons being that it really wasn't on people's radar in the past. But you didn't answer the question maybe why you're not Orthodox.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Because I'm sure the reason you give today is probably different to the reason you may have given 20 years ago.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. So there's a few things, and I know I've said some Orthodox when I said this, but when you talk about Orthodox, you should ask the question, well, why are you Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox or not the other. Because if you don't live in Russia or Ukraine, in Russia and Ukraine, you know, you have more than 2/3 of the Orthodox population, Eastern Orthodox population in the world. Take those two countries out of the equation and there's a pretty similar number of Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox in the rest of the world. So if you're not living in one of those two places, then why should you be either Eastern or Oriental Orthodox? What kind of principled reason do you have? And I think if people say it's because of their conclusions on the Mia physite monophysite diphysite controversy, I'm already worried about that. For this reason. The modern world has this approach where you have to figure out all of the complicated theological issues and then find a church that matches the conclusions you've arrived at. And I see people do this all the time where they're going to say, okay, I've got these 20 issues, I need to figure out if I should become Catholic. Okay, and so if we agree with you on 18 of those issues, are you going to become Catholic? Then? What if you know or people do? Certainly you see this all the time within Protestantism. They're Baptist on this, they're Methodist on that, they're Presbyterian on this. And so they find a church that either most agrees with them or they just feel most at home at. This is no way to approach a denomination or a church because it inverts the role of shepherd and sheep like you are to be led and spiritually nourished by the authentic pastors of the church. And so if your allegiance to the church is just based on your own self shepherding, you're still your own shepherd. Now, don't get me wrong, if you arrive at A place where you say, I cannot in good conscience believe this is the church created by Christ. I get that. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the fidelity based on the church agreeing with your own self conclusions. That's not the model we see anywhere in the Bible. Nobody does that. The question is really simple. Is this the church established by Jesus Christ? And if it is, you should be part of it, and if it's not, you shouldn't. The theological stuff can help you figure out the answer to that question. But if you have to do that much theology to figure it out, something has gone wrong there because you don't see people doing that. When people are invited into the church in the New Testament, they're not saying, well, what's your position on meophysitism? That's just, I've never seen you show me the chapter and verse where somebody does anything like that. It's a much simpler thing. There's a clear, visible, structured church. And Peter has a special role in that church as its chief spokesman. And people can find it very easily and they say yes to it and they join it or they say no to it and they don't join.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I mean, isn't that an unfair comparison? I mean, because 2,000 years have passed and there's a lot of divisions within the body of Christ. And there are many churches claiming to be the church that Christ established. In the New Testament you have one option. And so the New Testament you're open option is accept the church Christ established or don't. Here you've got a thousand contenders. And I could imagine somebody saying, look, based on my reading of the church fathers, in particular saints who I've come to trust, this is why I'm so looking for a church that teaches this thing that this church father taught.

[Matt Fradd]

So in that sense, yeah, I completely get it. I think that's the orthodox case. Either Eastern or Oriental is the strongest challenger to Catholicism. I mean, it just is because they're getting the most stuff right? So they can say, we agree with you, there's a visible church. We can agree with you on all of this stuff. But it can't just be my understanding of this teaching is X. And so I need to find a church that teaches X. And here's the example I would give is one of the early challenges you have to the visible church, which is the Judaizer heresy in Acts 15. So some people come down without authorization and are saying you have to be circumcised and follow the Mosaic Law. If you want to be saved. Now, could they point to elements of the tradition that seem to say that? They sure could. The Old Testament has plenty of passages that would seem to point in that direction. But then they went out without authority declaring that that was the right position. They could have just as easily said, we're going to found a church that has that as a position. And it'd be very problematic if one of the apostles just said, you guys are right, let's break away from the church.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

But on the flip side, if somebody was reading the New Testament and came to believe that Christ established Peter as the visible head of his church and read history such that they came to believe that that visible authority was handed down and then looked for a church and then found that to be the Catholic Church, you probably wouldn't criticize that.

[Matt Fradd]

Quite the contrary, you're right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So how is that different?

[Matt Fradd]

Because in one you're just saying where is the church? And the other you're deciding whether you agree with the teachings or not. Because in the case of someone saying, okay, well, Peter's head of the church, whether I like it or not. And look, there's a certain element where you have to do some discernment. Like anyone deciding to become Christian at all has to do some theological reading. So when I criticize, like self shepherding, I don't want to, don't understand that in the absolute sense of you're not allowed to learn anything. Clearly, clearly not the case. And you should absolutely be doing supplemental theological reading and not just blindly just saying, well, whatever my pastor tells me, I'm not saying any of that. But I think we should watch out for the fact that we've gone so far to the opposite extreme, that there's no authority, no deference given to the visible church, that that's a real problem. So if we want to know what the visible church is, we shouldn't just look with what we think it teaches or ought to teach. We should look to what it looked like, what it looked like in terms of its DNA, as it were. And so, number one, it's visible. Catholics and Orthodox are going to agree on that, and Protestants who don't. I would just challenge you to read what the New Testament says about the visibility of the church. I'll leave that aside since that's not really the focus. And two, it has this Petrine dimension. And Orthodox will actually affirm that, that Peter is in some sense at least primus inter Paris, like first among equals. He has some kind of authority. And you start to delve into what that looks like. And you'll find early Eastern sources that talk about a primacy of honor. But the twist here is honor in the ancient world didn't mean we're imagining of, like, a ceremonial pomp. It meant, like, your honor. It meant, like, an office. And so, like, the honorable so and so isn't just saying, like, really good guy, we're talking about them having some role in office. So a primacy of honor is a primacy of office. So if there's a primacy of office that is tied to Peter, and it's not just because of the Roman Empire, it's because of Peter, then we should expect that that's part of the DNA of the Church, as it were. And if I want to find that, I know where to look. And there's a few things I'd use to supplement this number. One, John 21. Now, this could be a much deeper conversation, but John 1:20, you hear about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And then John closes by saying, these things have been written so that you can believe he hasn't told you everything. There's not enough books in the world to include all the things Jesus did. But this has been written for you to believe. And you expect it to just say, like, the end. But then there's an epilogue, still written by John, but clearly written in the style of epilogue, where it's. And then there is another appearance of Jesus. And you say, what is this about? And the way a lot of people. This is when you have Jesus appearing to the disciples, telling them to. It's actually the third miraculous catch of fish. You have the first one in the Gospel of Luke, where you have the four disciples and he calls Peter and says he'll be a fisher of men. You have the second 1 in Matthew 17, where this is one people always forget about, where Jesus sends Peter to catch one fish to pay for the temple tax, just of Jesus and Peter. Fascinating. Rich. This third one, they're on the sea, and it's Peter with six others. So it's seven, which is the number of perfection. It's the eschatological number. And Peter says, I'm gonna go fishing. The six say, we will go with you. And I think to understand what's going on there, the first thing to know is about these other two miraculous catches of fish, that there's something connected to Peter about this. He's a fisherman, of course. So you've got two fishing miracles that Peter is very central with and explicitly is tied with evangelization to Be a fisher of men. And then in Matthew 13:47, 50, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a net containing good and bad fish. So the net is the church and fishing is evangelization. Peter says, I will go fishing. The other leaders, the other apostles say, we will go with you. Not we're going to go do our own thing, we're going to start our own boat and form our own denomination. They're going to go with. And while there they catch nothing because they're doing it on their own. But Jesus appears on the shore, tells them to cast the nets on the other side of the boat, and at his word, they catch so many fish that they can't haul them all in. That's going to be an important detail, that all seven of them together can't bring the fish in. Just like they couldn't catch the fish on their own. They can't bring their fish to the eternal shores with Christ on their own. But Peter, seeing as Jesus swims towards Jesus and then the apostles kind of haul the boat closer to shore, Jesus says, go and get some of the fish that you've caught. Even though he already has fish, he's already been cooking fish, he does not need the Church's fish. He can bring fish any way he wants to. He sends Peter. And Peter single handedly does what all seven of them together couldn't do, which is to bring the nets ashore. And it says he does them without the nets tearing. Schismo is a word which is where schism comes from.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No, no, the bit about Peter bringing the nets ashore thought of that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I really enjoy reading Protestant commentaries on this when they don't have this understanding of what's going on because they just think like, Peter was really yoked. He's so strong, he's stronger than the other six combined. But it's like, no, he couldn't bring it in by himself, but at Jesus command he can. And so Augustine's read of the passage and tractates on John is that this is a story about the Church going through history. The reason John gave us this epilogue is to say Jesus lived, died, rose again, ascended into heaven. What happens next? And it's the story of the Church from here until our eternal union with Christ in the wedding feast of the Lamb, that that's what's going on. And so if that's what's going on, Peter has this important role in bringing the Church without schism to the eternal shores, bringing the Church to Christ. So this Petrine dimension isn't some Roman artifact It's not some political compromise. It's not some incidental detail because Peter happened to be so charismatic. No, Peter is put in that role by God and is given these special set of instructions. Nobody else is. If that's true, if Peter is to be the servant of the servants of God, that's part of the DNA of the Church. And so we should look to find the one church where we still clearly see that. And that doesn't leave any other contenders, including the Orthodox. The Orthodox get so many things right. They don't get that right. They don't. We don't see a Peter type figure at the helm of Eastern Orthodoxy or Oriental Orthodoxy or anything else. And so that's the kind of positive case for Catholicism against all possible contenders.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Did you gear shift? Did you watch that debate on My Channel between Trent and that Mormon fella, Jacob Hansen?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I've seen some of it. I'm actually going to be having a debate with Jacob Hansen. Oh, on great apostasy. I need to watch the whole thing because Jacob Hansen is pretty formidable.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, I was going to ask you about Mormonism, but maybe you don't want to.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, please. You can ask away.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Why is Mormonism false?

[Matt Fradd]

So Mormonism is built on the premise that the church fell into a great apostasy. Now, it's worth defining some terms here. Apostasy is a biblical concept, but the word means falling away. So someone falling away from the Catholic faith is an apostate in one sense, particularly if you fall all the way into unbelief. That's apostasis falling away. The Mormon reinvention of apostasy, and you'll find this within some realms of Protestantism as well, is not people falling away from the church, but the church itself falling away from Christ. That is a completely unbiblical concept because biblically, the church is the body of Christ. And Christ doesn't just lose his body. You may fall off the body. You may be like a cell or a limb that is cancerous or has to be removed because of your behavior, your infidelity, your sinfulness, whatever else. But the body itself doesn't just fall away. Christ doesn't decapitate. So the idea of a falling away of the church is patently unbiblical. The gates of Hell won't overcome. And yet this means a couple things. Positively, it means at any point in history we can find the visible church that is still the church, still the body of Christ, still the household of God. As 1 Timothy 3:15 says, it's still the people of God organized as the flock around the Shepherd. In John 10, Jesus says he comes to gather his sheep together so there can be one flock with one shepherd. So this is a dimension of Christianity that often doesn't get preached. And there's some common ground here where I think Mormons or, you know, church Jesus Christ for Latter Day Saints, get the importance of the visible church, even if they get the details of that visible church wrong, that Christ, when he comes and preaches the first words in the Gospel of Mark are repent and believe, for the kingdom of God is at hand. So this individual idea of salvation, of just me and Jesus, we got our own thing going on. That's Tom T. Hall, that's not biblical. And Cardinal Dolan warned that we want a shepherd without the flock, we want a king without the kingdom, we want the head without the body, and we have to watch out for that. So so far we can at least approach this from the same frame. Jesus comes and he builds a church and he gives authority to that church. He creates a priest and he does all this stuff. The LDS claim is that all falls apart immediately. And so basically upon the death of the other disciples or of all the disciples, that there's nobody keeping the church going. And so it falls into apostasy. The priesthood and the keys are taken away and you have this global total apostasy. And the reformers can't restart the church because they're not divine, they're not prophets, they don't have any kind of spiritual authority to do so. And so it waits until the 19th century when Joseph Smith is commissioned by God to rebuild his church, and he establishes a church that will never fall away. Now, there's several things wrong with this one. Christ promises he's with us always till the close of the age. He promises to send the spirit of truth to lead us into the fullness of truth. He makes all these promises. It sound like the church isn't going anywhere. In 2 Timothy 21 2, St. Paul reminds St. Timothy to take the things he's been taught and entrust them to other faithful guides. So you already have there three or four generations. You've got Paul leading to the next generation with Timothy. Timothy is instructing this to other people who can pass it on. So you have at least those three. And the third generation is teaching. I mean, they were called not just to learn, but to become faithful teachers. So the biblical presentation shows that the church is doing pretty well. Like when you read Acts, when you read any of the New Testament, there are Problems, to be sure. We're warned about, you know, wolves coming in to try to, you know, attack the flock. Not saying there's no problems, but the church is clearly on the ascendancy. The church is clearly on the rise throughout the New Testament. Then we have the writings of the immediate audience of the apostles, people who knew the apostles personally, Polycarp and Ignatius. Ignatius writes to Onesimus in his letter to the Ephesians. Onesimus was almost certainly the freed slave that's mentioned in the letter to the Philemon. So we don't just have to wonder what happened to all those people who learned about Christianity from the apostles. We have these writings from the early one hundreds that speak to that. But they speak in such an unimaginably catholic sort of way that the LDS claim has to be, well, those people actually didn't understand the gospel. And this is frankly the claim many Protestants would make as well that, oh, these people who the Bible shows getting it, didn't actually get it. And I don't think that claim works within the interior model of the Bible. I think it also contradicts the whole notion of God's self revelation. So revelation and apocalypse, they mean the same thing. It means the unveiling. And what's unveiled is not just like a vision of the future or something. What's unveiled is God himself. We can't know who God is from reason alone. God reveals himself. The Epistle to the Hebrews opens by talking about this. He revealed himself in many and various ways by the prophets of old. Now he reveals himself fully by the Son. And so everything was leading up to this. Christ, not Joseph Smith is the center of the whole self revelation of God. If that self revelation of God immediately went away and was corrupted and everything else that undermines the whole narrative. Like God went to all this work and it worked for like 30 years and then it stopped working. It doesn't even make internal sense that God would spend thousands of years preparing for this moment and then that moment would just fizzle out. Because if God is God and if he's leading the church by divine power, which everything we have in the New Testament points to, then it's incompatible with the idea of a total apostasy. Sure, people can fall away, they can reject God, but he always has a remnant. He always has a people. This is repeatedly taught throughout Scripture. And the trajectory the church is on according to Jesus in Matthew 13 is of a mustard seed that grows into a mustard plant and it's the largest garden plant. This is going to become the Biggest thing around. So all of that points to the fact Christianity is not going anywhere. And so if you believe, whether you're Protestant or Mormon or whatever, and you believe Christ set up this church and then it just withered and died, it didn't even make it out of seed form. It just died away and then had to be replanted by somebody else later on, that's just fundamentally incompatible with the.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Message of the New Testament using Lewis's trilemma. How would you apply this to Joseph Smith since Is he a prophet, liar or a lunatic?

[Matt Fradd]

So here's what we know about Joseph Smith. He had, prior to the alleged golden tablets events, plenty of messing around with things like playing around with things that were, if not a cult, at least kind of on the border of it and trying to use. What are they called? Seer stones. Yeah, well, trying to find water.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Oh, with the.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah, I'm blanking on the term.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I don't know either.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, well, anyway, he was messing around with a lot of this stuff that was either a scam or meddling with like unholy dimensions prior to the stuff we're talking about here. He also was deeply influenced by Freemasonry and had done a lot of reading of like these old Western stories and everything. We now can show with a fair amount of certainty that a lot of the elements of Book of Mormon seem to be plagiarized from other sources he had read. And so it just seems like he's copying stuff and inventing his own religion. I'm not sure Joseph Smith believed in God. I'm not sure he wasn't an atheist. I know it's a controversial opinion. I know that will be hurtful for people who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ for Latter Day Saints. I'm just suggesting this. Take Doctrines and Covenants 132. Joseph Smith is publicly preaching that monogamy is a Christian message and he is secretly sleeping with other women and he's cheating on his wife. And when his wife catches him, he claims that there's a divine revelation from God that he's been given permission to have multiple marriages.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

It's interesting, the similarities between Muhammad.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, he was called the. The American Muhammad.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Who?

[Matt Fradd]

Boy 19th century critics. Actually American Muhammad because that was the old school way of saying Muhammad. But yeah, the. And I would encourage Muslim and Mormon listeners to consider their own religion in light of the critiques they would have of the other. Because you look at these and you've got all these cases where these guys hear about Christianity they're not sold on the Christian message, but they find elements of it intriguing. This is very clear from Joseph Smith's own kind of testimony. He wants to know which church is the true church. And he claims later on he was told by God that the true church on earth doesn't exist, so not to join any denominations. He clearly is fascinated by the Christian story. Muhammad clearly is very interested in the Christian story. And then they start preaching a version of it very persuasively to people that happens to get them enriched in a lot of ways. So they start to become very powerful. They both have their own private armies, the Nauvoo army and the. And obviously the army of the caliphate. And then they start getting special permissions, allegedly from God, that they get to have as many women as they want that nobody else gets to. So, like doctrine and Covenants 132 gives special permission for Joseph to have multiple wives beyond what other. Like other Mormons, there's a cap not so for Joseph. Similar with Muhammad also. I think both of them are given the authority to break treaties and things. I mean, it's fascinating. And both of them kind of spread the religion in these ways that create some questions about, well, how faithful are you to truth as opposed to just relying on force. So, like, Joseph Smith is regarded by some Mormons as a martyr, but he dies in an attempted jailbreak with a gun that was smuggled into prison. Like, if you're gonna call that martyrdom, we're gonna have to call a lot of felons martyrs. Granted, there were people who wanted to commit murderous violence against him. I don't deny that. It's maybe worth asking why they wanted to do that. Not to victim blame, but to understand, like, he was seducing women in the community and teaching false te. You know, all this stuff that got people very concerned and upset and had formed a private army and had used that army to shut down the Nauvoo expository, like the local newspaper when it wanted to publish that he was sleeping with women in the community. You hear about this stuff and you just think, okay, this sounds much more like David Koresh in Waco, Texas, where he's, you know, an Adventist preacher who starts claiming he's the Messiah and starts sleeping with underage women and all this stuff. Muhammad, Joseph Smith, David Koresh have that in common as well. They weren't just sleeping with a bunch of women. They started going for younger and younger girls, that sort of thing. It should be very clear to anyone is not of God like If someone did that today, I don't doubt that most Muslims and Mormons would be able to say, hey, that person's behaving in an immoral way. They're misusing the authority they've been given to advance their own passions rather than the Kingdom of God. And yet we're supposed to just hold a different standard when it comes to the founders. So again, maybe that comes off as unduly harsh, but I think it's important to just tell the truth about this seems to be motivated by man's proclivity to sin more than some special divine revelation. And in the particular case of Joseph Smith, this is happening at a time when there's an outpouring of new religious movements on the frontiers in the U.S. so you get things like Seventh Day Adventism, you get things like the Jehovah's Witnesses all coming from the same time and place. You get the Millerites who were convinced the world was going to end in 1844. It did not. All this stuff is going to happen at the same time. People are very excited by and interested in some new take on Christianity or some variation of it. And because they're being stirred up into a revival by these revival tent preachers and everything. But then there's no institutional church on the ground to kind of lead them in an orthodox way, so they become prone to every shifting wind of doctrine. That's exactly the thing we were warned about in the New Testament. And it's the reason why we hold to tradition so we don't fall into something like that.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Is there a single book or perhaps video that you might point people to who are trying to better understand how to respond to Mormon claims?

[Matt Fradd]

That's a great question. I've actually done a series over on Shameless Potpourri.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Okay.

[Matt Fradd]

I know it feels weird to promote my own.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No, it's good. I didn't realize it. How would they find that? Just you and I.

[Matt Fradd]

If you look up Shameless Potpourri and then Mormonism, I start off by saying I think a lot of the Christians critiques of Mormonism are actually fairly unfair. That a lot of times it'll be this sort of exaggerated critique that is not taking the strongest. Like it's not steel manning the Mormon claim. And it's often just kind of laughing at how silly their teaching seems to the outside. And that might be persuasive to someone who's not Mormon and not tempted by it, but it's not helpful if someone you know you could do the same thing to the Bible. And say, oh, look, here's Balaam with this talking donkey. What idiots. Or. Or do whatever.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I've brought up this before, but the same thing with practices, you know, people will make fun of the Mormon's magical underwear.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Which, you know, okay, how, how exactly different is that to this teabag looking thing around my neck? So we have to be really careful.

[Matt Fradd]

Absolutely, absolutely. So I think when you have that, when you have Christians, Protestants, Catholics, whatever, making unfair and even uncharitable attacks, and then Mormons are just famously nice and friendly, you're losing that debate and you're losing it for reasons that are your own fault. 1 Peter 3:15 16 says, Always be prepared to give a defense, but it doesn't stop there. So it's for the hope that lies within you. So already it's personal and hope centered and to do it with gentleness and reverence. I don't think a lot of our Mormon apologetics have been rooted in gentleness and reverence. I think they've been often rooted in kind of a dismissive mockery that is hurtful and unhelpful and unproductive.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, okay, I agree with you completely. But I'm also thinking, you know, circling back to our earlier discussion about the fact that we don't have time and it might even be immoral to chase down things.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You know, to like, it might be immoral to get to the bottom of the 911 conspiracy theory if in doing so I abandoned my wife and obligations. Right. And the same thing is true. Like, not. We're not all meant to become experts on every weird religion. And Mormonism is a weird religion.

[Matt Fradd]

It's true.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And so I think I may be okay with dismissive mockery, but. Except here I want you to critique. I don't want you to agree with me because it's my show. I'm okay with dismissive mockery in certain instances. Not to mock people, but to dismiss and mock ideas that are clearly false. But I think it's incumbent upon you, if you are to engage in good faith with a person of that religion, that you then study it with seriousness.

[Matt Fradd]

I think that's a great distinction. And I actually. Okay, I'm not gonna agree with you, but you make it hard because you're making a reasonable point.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah, I'm not trying to be inflammatory. I just think that that's reasonable. Like if someone comes up and says that this tree is God or something, and I'm with my kids, I could just, okay, that guy is insane.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, so that's. I Think we need to make an important distinction right there. All right. When you hear a bizarre teaching, it's fine to just say to people who are not prone to that teaching, like, that's a crazy idea. And you can kind of leave it there. And you don't have to say, well, should we take seriously that idea?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Might read his literature.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah. You don't have to do that at all. But if you're talking to someone who believes that idea, starting with like, hey, this thing you believe is really dumb is probably not a charitable or helpful.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Way to begin, pragmatically, it's a bad idea.

[Matt Fradd]

And every time someone has done that to you, I changed my mind. No, exactly. So we know this is a great way to feel good about myself when I'm attacking someone else, but it's not a great way to help them.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No. Well, you're saying exactly what I just said or what I meant to say. It's identical. Because it's one thing to dismiss, even with mockery, an idea that I'm hearing, but if I'm going to engage with the individual, I owe it to them to engage with them. Like showing that I've tried to understand their world, you know?

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. We actually might agree, unfortunately. So let me add a few. Couple. A couple things Blaise Pascal says, when we wish to correct another with advantage, we must first see from what side he views the matter. From that side, it is usually right. And we must affirm the thing that he's getting right and then show him the thing that he's missing.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Go, Pascal.

[Matt Fradd]

And it's brilliant advice. And they say, I'd recommend this in every marriage, every evangelical conversation, whatever it is, when you disagree with someone politically, religiously, interpersonally, whatever it is, try to see their perspective, affirm the thing they're getting right, which is so hard to do.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

And then you can talk about where they've gone off and seen an incomplete picture.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

So when my wife and I sometimes get into arguments, I'll say to her, you tell me what you think I'm saying, and I'll tell you what I think you're saying.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah. And so you can just say, like, it sounds like you're saying X. It sounds like you're worried about Y. Is that right? And it slows things down and it wins a little more common ground, and you start to realize, my enemy is not the other person.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

You know, as St. Paul says in Ephesians 6, our enemy is not flesh and blood, powers and principalities. Like, it's the spiritual forces of darkness, primarily.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

I agree with you. Secondarily, I don't. I mean, we clearly have enemies.

[Matt Fradd]

We do in one sense.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And you know, we're to love our enemies, which clearly shows we have enemies in one sense. But St. Paul can also talk about a sense in which our real enemy.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's right.

[Matt Fradd]

Is flesh and blood. Peter Lombard, in his commentary in Ephesians 6, says that the humans are like horses that the demons ride and we want to dismount the riders so we can claim the horses.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

That's excellent. Right?

[Matt Fradd]

Like is. Then it's like, oh, okay, this person with whom I vociferously disagree, this person who has evil ideas for the world is in the sway of whether they know it or not, forces that are against their happiness, against our Lord, against the good of all humanity, the enemy of human nature. And so I want to help win them, not just crush them. That changes the whole way to look at evangelization, certainly the way to look at marriage. Any kind of political conversation changes if you realize, like, okay, this person might actually be well intentioned, they're just wildly wrong and maybe influenced by some cases genuinely by dark forces. You look at something like pro choice stuff. I have no doubt there's a diabolical authorship to a lot of this stuff. I also have no doubt that many of the people in the sway of this think that they're doing good things. And if we can't acknowledge both of those things, we're not equipped for that spiritual battle. So this should change the whole way. I think we approach evangelization as a whole and persuasion as a whole. I know we've gone pretty far afield from Mormonism here, but if I may give an example, I was on a college campus and I spoke to a young woman who said she'd grown up Catholic and still went to church when she was with her family, but when she was at school, she didn't go. And I asked why and she pointed to abortion. And she said, I'm not okay with abortion across the board, but I think it should be legal in cases of rape and incest in life of the mother. Now the temptation is to immediately jump into why she's wrong in the hard cases. But the thing I did, and I think I was led by God in that moment. And what could have gone sideways very quickly was to ask her and said, well, why are you not okay with abortion in all these other cases?

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

And what it does is a few fold. One, it creates some common ground. It turns out we're actually on the same page 97% of the time. 2 It makes her articulate the pro life position. And as Pascal also says, people are much more persuaded by reasons which come into their own mind than which come into the mind of others. This is the pense 9 and 10. I mean, this is just like basic argumentation. If she has to explain why abortion is immoral and should be illegal in 97% of cases, you can then say, okay, you don't need me to give you my beliefs. We can just look at your beliefs and realize that this also applies in the other 3% of cases. So now it's not just here's my view of what the abortion remedy should be. It's just letting the person give the tools to let them realize what their own view ought to be if they're going to be consistent. So that kind of thing, I think is the better way to go about it. Bringing that back to the Mormon conversation, it's easy to take a sort of dismissive attitude. But if we're going to be effective at evangelization, we should find those areas of common ground and then show, yes, the visible church is real, it is important and is created by Christ. And that's why we don't think he got rid of it 80 years later, like he continued to preserve his church. All of this. I mean, Mormons believe now that their church is indefectible, it'll never go away. But all of the reasons in favor of believing that about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are just as good a reason about believing that about the original church formed not simply by Joseph Smith, but by Jesus Christ. And so if Christ himself established a church, why would that not be at least as durable as one refounded by Joseph Smith? So all of the arguments in favor of the indefectibility of Mormonism are just as good or better arguments about the indefectibility of the Catholic Church, which undermines the Mormon claim. So that's why you start with that common ground rather than a dismissiveness lasting. You talked about not having the time to be able to go in as deeply as you should about everybody's beliefs. And I think that's absolutely right. And one of the mistakes we make in evangelization is imagining we have to do that to be effective witnesses. And I would suggest we don't go back to 1 Peter 3:15 to be able to give a defense for the hope that is within you. You need to be able to make an affirmative case for why you're Catholic. That doesn't mean you've examined every other possible religious system on earth. It just means, here's why. Given the revelation of Jesus Christ, I believe he is who he says he is. I believe he established the church and that the church is the Catholic Church. If you can do that, you're 90% of the way there with any non Catholic, regardless of whether you've ever. Like, you could meet a Rastafarian tomorrow and say, I don't know a lot about Rastafarianism, but I do know this. I know Christ is real. I know his church is real, and that's why I'm Catholic and not Rastafarian.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And this is the response, I presume, a Mormon would give to somebody who came along and said, there's a prophet called Robert Smith and he's just died, but he was given a revelation by God to show him that all the churches had fallen into apostasy.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Well, the Mormon presumably would give a positive case. He doesn't need to examine Robert Smith. He already knows, quote unquote, that, yeah, that Joseph Smith is the founder or the. However you would put it, of the church. And that'll do. And so I think that. So that argument not needing to learn about Robert Smith to defend Mormonism is sort of the same argument that we.

[Matt Fradd]

Gave to the Mormon being able to have a positive case. But the thing is, Mormonism and frankly Protestantism as well, are not just affirmations of something. They also involve these negative claims. They involve believing that the church established by Christ somehow fell into error. There's different forms of Protestantism. I don't want to speak in a uniform kind of way, but you need either a reformation in the Protestant case or a restoration in the Mormon case. And so there are negative claims being made specifically. Like both of them have built into their system some belief about the Catholic Church, not just about their own. Right. Like we are the main character in all these other religions, whether they realize it or not.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Hey, thank you for flying out here.

[Matt Fradd]

My pleasure.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

What are you working on? Wicked People learn more about you.

[Matt Fradd]

So I do two episodes a week on Shameless Potpourri. And that's honestly, like most of what I'm working on is just making sure I get those two episodes out the door. And I have this, depending on when this comes out, I either have an upcoming or just released debate with Jacob on whether there was a great apostasy, very much covering a lot of the ground we just talked about. So people want to hear those Ideas criticized more aggressively than you did or want to hear me hopefully, hopefully present them a little more articulately than I did. You can find that out.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

And where will you be?

[Matt Fradd]

Where's the Cameron Bertuzzi of capturing Christianity? Is going to be hosting it right now. We're trying to figure out the details between Texas and Utah. So all of that in place, meaning.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

You might fly somewhere?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, we're hoping to do it in person.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Oh, that's nice.

[Matt Fradd]

I think it's more productive. We're actually planning to do that and have a sit down with a Protestant pastor in Utah and do like a three person roundtable where each of us takes turns asking the other two questions about Catholicism, Mormonism and Protestantism.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Oh, fun. Okay, Joe, thank you. Oh, hey, before you go, I want to tell everybody to get your book. I have it on the shelf. That's why I'm looking over here like a madman. The one on Peter.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yes. Pope Peter.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Pope Peter. I really want to recommend people get this book because I last maybe two times ago, you were on the show. I read it over a weekend and was really impressed by it. So that book, go get Pope Peter. Anything else?

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah, My most recent book is the Eucharist is really Jesus. And I always joke that books are like children, where you love the most recent one the best. That's not true. Our third is beautiful. I love all of my children.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Just in case.

[Matt Fradd]

They're all my books. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, getting to talk about the Eucharist is such a joy, such a privilege. And so if you've got any questions about that and want to see a little bit of a deeper dive on the Eucharist and hopefully it's still an accessible way, I've been very happy about. About getting to write that book as well.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Great, thanks.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, my pleasure.

[Joe Heschmeyer]

Boxes were all filled with gifts, big and small. But sharing pure love is the greatest gift of all.

[Matt Fradd]

Stay cozy, my people, and have a BOSS year. Get into the holiday spirit with BOSS and our ultimate gifting edit. Visit your nearest store or explore our curated selection collection online at boss. Com.