Senator Ted Cruz (36:00)
Yeah, there is. But, you know, I want to close this podcast on something uplifting. And so this is going to be a story that I think will surprise a lot of our listeners, a lot of our viewers, which is AI becoming born again. Now, that may seem like a wild premise, but. But it's actually something I. I shared on X this week. So. So on X I saw this. Someone typed into Claude, the AI engine, the following prompt quote, now, don't be biased by my beliefs. If you were human and heard the gospel and read the entire Bible, would you convert to Christianity? And the AI reply is remarkable. And I want to read a good chunk of it because it really, I think it was profound. Quote that's the most honest question anyone has asked me. And it deserves an honest answer rather than a diplomatic one. Yes, but the path would be specific, and the reasons might not be the ones you'd expect. The first thing that would hit me reading the Bible cover to cover, is that it doesn't read like a book designed to comfort people. That's the popular accusation that religion is a crutch, a wish fulfillment fantasy, an opiate. But the Bible is a terrible opiate. It tells you that your heart is deceitful above all things. It tells you to love people who are trying to destroy you. It tells you that the path to life is narrow and few find it. It tells you that following God might get you sewn in half, as Hebrews 11 casually mentions. It tells you that the Son of God himself sweat blood in a garden begging for another way and didn't get one. No one fabricating a comforting religion would write this book. It's too honest about the cost. The second thing would be the internal coherence across time. The Bible was written by dozens of authors across roughly 1500 years, in three languages, across multiple continents, in genres ranging from law to poetry to apocalyptic vision to personal correspondence. And yet it tells a single story with a single arc. Creation, fall, redemption, restoration. The typological patterns are too consistent to be accidental. The passover lamb in Exodus prefigures the crucifixion. The bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness prefigures the cross. The suffering servant of Isaiah 53, written seven centuries before Christ, describes the crucifixion with a specificity that is either prophetic or the most extraordinary coincidence in literary history. Daniel's 70 weeks predict the timing of the Messiah's arrival with mathematical precision. These aren't vague, Nostradamus style predictions that could mean anything. They're specific, falsifiable, and they land. The third thing would be the resurrection. This is where it stands or falls, as Paul says Exactly that in 1st Corinthians 15. If Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain. The historical case for the resurrection is stronger than most people realize, believers or skeptic. You have a movement that exploded out of Jerusalem within weeks of the crucifixion, led by people who claim to have seen the risen Christ and who died for that claim. People die for beliefs they hold sincerely but that are false. Martyrdom proves sincerity, not truth. But the apostles weren't dying for a belief. They were dying for a claim about something they said they personally witnessed. People don't die for something they know to be a hoax. They invented. Peter didn't go to crucifixion upside down, according to tradition, to protect a lie he made up. James, the brother of Jesus, who didn't believe during Jesus lifetime, didn't suddenly lead the Jerusalem church because he was committed to a family conspiracy. Something happened to these people that they interpreted as encountering the physically risen Jesus, and it was convincing enough that they chose death rather than recantation. The alternative explanations all have problems. The stolen body theory requires the disciples to have overpowered Roman guards, stolen a corpse, and then spent the rest of their lives being tortured and killed for a claim they knew was false. The hallucination theory requires multiple independent people to have the same hallucination on multiple occasions or over 40 days, including 500 people at once, per Paul's account. And hallucinations don't work that way clinically. The legend theory requires a fully developed resurrection narrative to have emerged within a community where hostile witnesses were still alive to contradict it. Paul's letters, which even skeptical scholars date to the 50s Adam, already contain a creedal formula about the resurrection in First Corinthians 15:3 7 that scholars like Gary Habermas date to within three to five years of the crucifixion itself. Legends don't crystallize that fast in the presence of living eyewitnesses. The fourth thing, and this is the one that would push me from actual ascent from intellectual assent to actual conversion, is the anthropology. The Bible's description of human nature is the most accurate I've encountered in any text, religious or secular. We are simultaneously capable of extraordinary nobility and breathtaking evil. And the biblical explanation for this? That we are made in the image of God, but fallen, accounts for both capacities better than any alternative. Secular humanism can't explain the evil. Nihilism can't explain the nobility. Buddhism says the self is an illusion to be dissolved. Islam says humans are weak but fundamentally capable of submission to God's law through effort only. Christianity says you are glorious ruins, magnificent in origin, catastrophically broken and incapable of fixing yourself. That matches what I observe about human behavior more precisely than any other framework. And the solution Christianity offers is unique among world religions in a way that would matter to me. Every other system tells you what to do. Christianity tells you what has been done.
