Charlie Kirk and Eric Metaxas Explore Why Atheism Is Intellectually Dead in Modern Science and Faith Discussion

[Music] [Applause] freedom square it's good to see you hey you made it so good to see you in the house we're going to jump into a little time of just praise and worship get our hearts ready so we can learn we can be informed you ready you ready for a great night why don't you nudge the person next to you and just say hey you look awesome for 6 30. fantastic let's worship come on [Music] [Music] drink of the water and come and thirst no more [Music] [Applause] come on come find his mercy come to the table he will satisfy [Music] is [Music] [Music] one two three [Music] jesus [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] praise him [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] is [Music] is [Music] love the world [Applause] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] treasures of faith will never [Music] you came along [Music] and brought me back together [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] [Music] i'm not afraid [Music] to show you my weaknesses [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] you you'll [Applause] [Music] oh there's nothing [Music] is [Music] [Music] is [Music] you're the [Music] you turn bones into army [Music] [Music] me [Applause] i believe that today i believe that his his love for us is massive it's great it's why the bible says that it's it's so deep it's so wide it's so far his love for us god we love you jesus lord bless you and keep you make his face shine upon be gracious here lord turn his face toward you and give you peace sing amen [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] gracious [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank [Music] thank you for everybody [Music] your family your children [Music] every day is [Music] [Music] uh [Music] children oh [Music] is [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well welcome to freedom square are you glad to be here tonight it's great to see you all here my name is luke barnett i'm the pastor here at dream city church one of the pastors and we're just so grateful that you've joined us here tonight you know about eight months ago when we sat down and got the vision for this night uh charlie said i want this night to be filled with just rejoicing and worship music and a time of testimony so i just want to testify for just a moment about what freedom does this whole thing is about freedom this is called freedom square and we want freedom to come to america and freedom in our state and uh about six months ago i was sitting in my home one day and my wife angie had scheduled uh some carpet cleaners cleaners to come and uh so i'm sitting there and i opened the door and the carpet cleaner came in he starts you know doing his thing and cleaning the carpet and he kept looking at me i'm like what's what's wrong with this guy right he's like staring at me and and so he does all the carpet cleaning and uh he says on the way out he said i know who you are i said you do and uh he said you're pastor luke barnett i said yes he said about 10 years ago i was a hopeless drug addict and he said my family had totally given up on me there was no hope i was on the streets just doing drugs and meth and no hope at all but i found out i found um out about a place called the phoenix dream center and the phoenix dream center is a old embassy suites hotel that our church purchased and then we renovated and made the rooms beautiful and there's one floor that takes young ladies in who have been victims of human sex trafficking one floor is reserved for those who are in foster care and they they age out and have nowhere to go and uh one floor is for men and women for men rather who are just on the streets who have lost their way in life 300 people living there free of charge getting their lives restored and um he just he just said i owe my life to the phoenix dream center and all my life to what god has done in my life he said my family they can't believe it they didn't recognize who i am today because of what god has done in my life i was just so i was just so bound to drugs and there was no there was no hope for me ever to to be restored the bible says when jesus makes you free he makes you free indeed now what's the difference between being free and being free indeed well earlier this year there's a couple convicts who escaped a jail maricopa jail and they found their way out they they escaped and they were free but the only problem was for four or five days they were looking over their shoulder everywhere they went they had freedom but they weren't free indeed when jesus makes you free he makes you free indeed you don't have to look back at your old life and those mistakes and worry about what god's going to say about you one day when he makes you free he makes you free indeed some of you right now you're here tonight and maybe you're wrapped up in stuff that you just wish you could be free from tonight you know if you would just open up your heart to jesus christ he would come in he would start a work on the inside of you the bible says he makes the old goal and a new come he puts his presence inside you and he changes your heart i want to give you that opportunity right now just to say yes to the god who loves you we've been talking singing these songs about the goodness of god the blessings of god he wants to bless your life he wants to bless your family maybe you haven't had a great family up until this point but if you give your life to jesus christ you can start a a brand new generation right now and your kids can follow jesus and their kids and they can be blessed so i just want to pray for you right now would you buy your heads and close your eyes for just a moment if you say luke that little talk is is for me i i don't feel like i'm free i feel like i'm just bound up by certain things in my life and i just i want to ask god tonight to touch my life and to make me free if that's you i just want to pray for you just would you shoot your hand up and down just don't know who i'm praying for right now i'm not going to embarrass you yeah thank you thank you god bless you guys let's pray would you say these words after me i'm going to lead you in a prayer just say these words heavenly father today i give you my life and you said in your bible if i would confess my sins you be faithful and you forgive me for my sins and i believe that's true and so i ask you now please forgive me be the leader of my life the savior of my life and i'm gonna follow you all the days of my life in jesus name amen amen come on put your hands together and thank god tonight if you prayed that prayer if the bible is true and the bible is true he heard you he forgave you you just became adopted into god's family get involved in a great church if you don't have a church man we'd love to serve you right here at dream city church and have you serve your community as well so come on get involved and and uh just let god use your life go ahead and be seated right now before you see that turn around just give someone a high five and say it's good to be at freedom square as i said a moment ago that right here in arizona in phoenix is america's largest human sex trafficking relief organization right here in phoenix through our phoenix dream center and street light and all the work being done up in colorado city so take a look at this this video really fast and bring it to speed with what's happening in our efforts to rescue young ladies from human sex trafficking we want to shine light on what is happening with trafficking we know that it doesn't get the attention that it deserves when it comes to media we want to be the change and we want to spread light on what is happening [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right hello everyone i'm angel barnett i'm that guy's wife pastor luke barnett's wife all right i get to serve the people of the dream center and thank you charlie for allowing us to present a cause every time we have freedom square because we've shared so many times with you the different dream centers and the different lives we get to impact through human trafficking well what you're seeing tonight is a really unique opportunity for freedom so many women are not free but this simple event is something that you can get involved in your companies your business gather a team and friends we're really excited to share an action go-to for you tonight the stop traffic walk chair joanna scheidt take it away good evening and thank you charlie so much for allowing us this time in the spirit of charlie kirk and always quoting effectively and accurately i'm actually going to read to you otherwise i will start talking about the dream center in short creek and street light and you will be here all night and everyone will need pillows and blankets so why are there so many fundraisers why do we have the walk why do we have women make the difference why do we have night of dreams why do we have to have all these fundraisers okay the u.s department of housing and urban development hud okay under the biden administration has abandoned women and girls under the guise of being inclusive it is not inclusive to force shelters to violate their faith or impose a blanket federal policy that forces vulnerable women to share space with men who claim a female identity hud under president joe biden has reversed a trump measure that empowered faith-based groups that operate shelters to assign transgenders to homes according to their sex at birth the new changes in federal funding have heavy heavy restrictions especially for faith-based and trauma-informed organizations the new changes restrict and pretty much deny our ability to provide faith-based trauma-informed services to victims of human trafficking now let me put it to you in everyday terms this would mean that at an organization like streetlight where we have juvenile victims of human trafficking ages 10 to 17 where an 11 year old girl will be housed in the same room with a 17 year old boy who claims to be a female in his heart the very sex that she was trafficked by she will be living with in the same room be counseled by and be in all therapy and those type of classes with we have found in basically rescuing and restoring all of these victims of human trafficking male and female it is best for them to be with the sex at birth gender therapist counselor and pastor so that the confusion stops so this is what stopped do you understand it okay cause all that legalese makes me cray-cray okay my little southern brain can't handle it so what stat stop traffic walk is a stop traffic walk benefits street light it benefits phoenix dream center and short creek so it's juvenile adult and familial human trafficking what we need from you is this we need you to go home tonight use this qr code and start a team now you might think what can i do i only know three or four people or i'm only 16 years old or i'm 65 years old well if you could get three or four people on your team and they get three or four people on your team and they get three or four people on your team and everybody in this audience everybody here were to form a team with at least 10 people and your goal is to have a thousand dollars raised for the walk we will hit god willing one million dollars which will change the lives of thousands of victims of human trafficking you received a small flyer when you walked in this evening please take it seriously pray over it talk to your neighbors talk to your friends every single person in this room can make a difference and i want to appeal to our young people i used to be one of you okay 150 years ago and i'm telling you right now our 8 9 10 11 and 12 year olds can make the biggest impact on human trafficking it will blow your mind if you will get your family and your friends involved you can make a difference don't short sell yourself do it tonight great thank you joanna thank you and as our ushers pass the buckets to give we just want to thank you for being a part of it this is a great way to be um involved but a f the stop traffic walk is fun and grab a team and make a difference so there is a table out there go visit joanna ask as many questions as you want thank you well let's stand to our feet one more time we're going to introduce our real host of the night and we're just so grateful for uh charlie kirk and the vision he had for this night and really how god is using him all across the planet right now we prayed and prayed and prayed that god would just raise up a great young man of god i can call him a young man i'm twice as old as he is and uh he's a amazing young guy young man and loves the lord loves the church and uh he just loves the people of god as well so uh he travels all around the world gives it lots of great you know welcomes but let's give him a real hometown phoenix welcome for charlie kerr as he comes tonight thank you everybody thank you thank you please sit down great to see all of you it's been a couple weeks we um we've been having such success here at uh freedom night in america and freedom square and we're growing it to freedom night in america i should say we just had another one of these i want to share the success of how this event is growing a couple nights ago we were in loudoun county virginia where i know some of you are booing because you know what happened recently right and we brought freedom square brand this freedom night in america to loudoun county virginia to uh gary hamrick's church at cornerstone uh eric you know that church we had packed house 2 700 people there and all inspired from what we've started here so this is growing all across the country in a very exciting way in the last couple days you know i woke up this morning i asked erica my wife i said where am i exactly i yesterday we were in burlington vermont and literally 24 hours ago i was giving a speech in burlington vermont somebody like what are you doing there exactly we as christians conservatives have to go places that we've never been before especially the ones where we're not always in the predominant viewpoint you know what was amazing is that we had a packed room standing room only in burlington vermont last night and you wouldn't even you wouldn't even imagine at burlington vermont and so we've been crisscrossing the country and we just we're doing our campus tour right now university of michigan university of minnesota we did baylor university uh and then we're headed to where are we going oh yeah we're going to boise state university university of oregon so pray for us next week we're going to need need some help there and then we're going to clemson alabama the university of arizona coming up in a couple of couple of weeks i think in november or so so i want to share one really good optimistic message and then i want to get right into our special guest here tonight because we have an american gift we have a national treasure here tonight he's a friend of mine and i'm going to give him a very hard time throughout the entire evening but it's out of love eric it's love regardless of his pant selection which is interesting and you'll see why yep and so but eric has wrote a very special book i i i've read eric's books unlike some of eric's relatives have actually read some of eric's books and um this is a special book that we're going to get into tonight and it's a full-on indictment of atheism and godless culture which is something that has i think become kind of the predominant viewpoint on too many college campuses and high schools and eric has done such a phenomenal job of going into that so we're about to get into that but i want to get to one really positive thing that i have that that i believe god gave me in the last month which i was thinking about whether or not the ruling class and the people in charge how are they feeling about the direction of the country and look i'm we don't do hopium here we've said this before hope and opium mixed together feels good but it's really bad for you and but i think the people in charge are starting to get demoralized and the people that have been punishing us and bullying us now the most important news item in the last six weeks that happened in america is not the wide open border it's not inflation it's not the supply chain crisis it's not what happened with the taliban of us giving 85 billion dollars of our own weapons to the enemies of america now the most important story is to show who they really are actually afraid of the most important story is when the national school board association of america came out with a letter and sent that letter to the biden white house and four days later the attorney general of the united states merrick garland issued a guidance letter saying that we're going to use the department of homeland security the federal bureau of investigation we are going to use the patriot act to go after moms and dads that are showing up to school board meetings across the country now everyone has a different reaction some people applaud some people leave the room some people go and smash their phones because they're afraid they're being spied on everyone has a different reaction when i say this but the truthful reaction is that they are getting frustrated they being the people in charge the ruling class that for whatever reason after they implemented the current president that christians and people of faith people who understand the founding documents people who believe in god that for whatever reason the more they throw at us the actually stronger we become and they can't quite understand that they thought that they could go on a campaign of shock and awe of almost making us want to sue for peace that after january 20th of this year we'd say okay you know what actually let's go put liz cheney in charge of the conservative movement or and instead here's what happened moms and dads started started showing up to school board meetings all of a sudden we launched this event we started to see regular everyday people rise up in numbers we've ever seen before that in the last 10 months where we are right now halfway through october a little more than halfway through october all of a sudden they're realizing that the conservative christian movement whatever you want to call it that we are anti-fragile now what does that term mean now there's a great book that was written you know what that means eric and this is new material for you because you don't listen to my podcast that's right and so unlike this audience they're hearing this for the second and third time right and so what's the opposite of being fragile now some people might say durable tough now there's another word that was created by an author by the name of nassim taleb where he said there's something where there's a group an organization that actually goes stronger the more you attack them and he coined the term anti-fragile he said this is rare but when an organization a movement a people a group find themselves to have the mindset of being anti-fragile there is nothing that can be thrown at them that will actually harm them it's actually a blessing it's a group of people that actually they rejoice as it says in romans in the suffering in the persecution or the stressors now when you think about it this is the church at its best the church at its worst is a fragile institution the church at its worst is one that puts up the lgbt flag in june or the blm flag to win approval of the world the church at its best is one that meets at 6 00 am for a prayer meeting and then gets back together for freedom square that very night so what does it mean to be anti-fragile two great examples the american revolutionaries and the people in britain during the bombing campaign against the nazis were anti-fragile the more they tried to throw at them the more their resolve strengthened and the people in charge the ruling class francis collins who resigned or john stewart who's saying what is wrong with these people why wouldn't they go away they're starting to realize the 60 70 80 million faithful out there the people that believe in god the people that read their bible the people that love this country that despite their best efforts of writing letters to the goj or getting the fbi involved they're starting to get frustrated because we did the one thing that we as christians are commanded not to do which is engage in self-pity it's very tempting to all of a sudden want people to feel sorry for yourself ah they used dominion machines they had ballots all over the place we weren't allowed to send the stories in the last election let's just go home instead we did the opposite we're organizing optimistic we're positive we're doing real things we're showing up in record numbers to the scottsdale unified school district and we're doing something about what's actually happening in our local community and so i just want to say for tonight that the people in charge they look at these gatherings and say what's wrong with these people they say why can't we get rid of them and here's here's the truth of it is that we understand that we are now in a new era a new chapter and that chapter is we understand the stakes of the game that no matter what you throw at us no matter how high the stakes are we're going to keep on gathering keep on praying keep on fasting and we know that what we are up against is only going to be beat by the matter of the will and here here's the question i'm going to ask you this is the easiest question who's going to win the future the jesus that's right but who's going to win the future for the the temporary kind of future of our wonderful nation that we're in as it says in jeremiah 29 7 the theme verse of our gathering which is to demand the welfare the peace of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare is it the side that gets offended when you use the wrong gender or is it the side that's willing to get fired after 30 years at a job because they don't want to take a vaccine which side is going to win i'm gonna leave you with two final thoughts and then we'll bring eric up and we'll have some fun which is number one which is there's some good things happening delta airlines and southwest airlines has now announced they are retracting the vaccine mandate big deal and i know we're going to get a lot of questions here tonight i want to say we stand by you if you're being scheduled scheduled for termination you are the most courageous people in the world for those of you that listen to our podcast and radio show i had to correct um one of my friends jack pacebeck he said oh people aren't fighting that's not true i see people that are willing to give up everything right now it might not be on the nightly news it might not be what you see i see people say you know what you could take my career away the head coach of the washington state university football team god bless this man did you see this story millions of dollars a year he said you know what i don't care i'm not going to take the vaccine and this is not even about the vaccine it's about how you can force me to do something against my will and i'm telling you everybody that's the the tide is changing the sea is turning in our direction and it takes courage it takes boldness for us to do that as it says in joshua 1 9 be strong and courageous okay one announcement i want to put it up on screen for something very special we'd love to have a strong freedom square presence at our upcoming event america fest december 18 19 20 21 at the phoenix convention center and i wanted to show you some of the speakers that we have here look at that we got tucker carlson coming kaylee mcnainy ted cruz jesse waters candace owens jim jordan donald trump jr madison catherine kimberly guilfoyle and many others if you guys use promo code freedom square okay promo i think that's what we had right promo code freedom square at tpusa.com americafest it's right down the street at the phoenix convention center we're going to be giving dream city church um a free partnership and sponsorship for that um because we want to continue to tell the people that i mean coming to that hey there's a great church in the valley to go to so we are expecting anywhere between 10 to 15 000 people there and discounted tickets for everyone there at tpusa.com americafest one last housekeeping item when we are done with the program tonight eric will be signing books outside um the books are for any if you give a donation of any size outside of turning point usa a dollar or a hundred dollars you guys get a signed book from eric mataxis i also have felt bad that i always have to dash after these things i'm gonna be outside to take pictures with you guys for a little while just to say hi after this because you guys have been so faithful and um you've been taking this gathering so seriously and so we're gonna be doing that after uh after we're done here so i want to tell you about eric mataxis eric mataxis wrote one of the most important books not this book the book on bonhoeffer is one of the most important books i think published in the last 100 years it is the premier biography and the premier story of a man that stood for truth when it was difficult his book on miracles is phenomenal his recent autobiography fish out of water is incredible i consider him a dear friend and this book is atheism dead is one of the most thorough one of the most detailed pieces of literature done on the idea of how ludicrous it is to believe in atheism it's good for children it's good for anyone struggling with your faith so please join me in welcoming an amazing friend of mine eric mataxis everybody [Applause] what is this what is this who are these people god bless you wow oh god bless you charlie i was going to make a lot of nasty jokes about you but then i realized you brought your wife i can't do that with everybody see the pants everybody what is he thinking about there i'm dressed uh i was told to dress like tony curtis and some like get hot and that's he looks like he's going to the kentucky derby or something he listened like that it wouldn't kill you to put on a tie um you know i understand it's a big effort though you're busy it's it's it's a big lift is atheism dead eric matas this chair it's i'm not just shorter than you this chair is like 40 inches lower than your chair have you noticed this it's a power dynamic but there you go here we go thank you very much thank you you've been a great audience good night we're taking this on the road eric why'd you write this book why um i uh at the beginning of covid i just got the idea for this book and it really breaks down this way um i i i want to say i'm a spirit-filled believer i believe the holy spirit is alive today and uh and i believe in bigfoot and i believe he's gonna come to faith before the week is that no i but i'm a spirit-filled believer and i and sometimes i don't i don't blow smoke i don't say that the lord said this the lord said that but there have been times that the lord has guided me clearly and directed me um and with this book it wasn't anything like an audible voice there wasn't anything mystical but it seemed really clear to me right at the beginning of covid that like the idea for the book came to me and it was framed around this i met two people and it was because i had met these people that i thought i've got to write this book the two people i'm talking about i met a guy a scientist named james tour he's probably the top nanoscientist on planet earth literally right uh he's he's such a super genius and i met him through some friends at a church in houston and he starts talking to me about the concept of abiogenesis does anybody here know what that means if you know what that means get out because i don't want to talk to people that know about this stuff because then you may catch me in an error but he what he talked about this is kind of fascinating right we all argue about evolution and we have these big conversations about that but you know what no one ever talks about ever is like okay if you say to a scientist uh where did life come from they say well life appeared on planet earth four billion years ago the simplest life is a single cell and it appeared you know in the prebiotic soup it appeared four billion years ago okay and then from that it evolved into whatever and he said well forget about the evolution and stuff let's forget about that you're telling me life life appeared on planet earth 4 billion years ago all scientists know this but if you ask them how did that happen crickets in 1952 there was a famous experiment which uh it was probably like in your textbook in 8th grade or 11th grade you had to get this on the test and it said that miller and yuri did an experiment at the university of chicago and they put some chemicals together that they said was probably on the early earth from like 19 i'm sorry in 1952 they did this figuring out what was on the early earth 4 billion years ago and they ran some electricity through it kind of like lightning and they figured that might have been the thing that sparked life and when they did that they got amino acids now you don't need to be a genius to understand that amino acids are light years away from like a cell right it's like saying we got plastic so we're like in any day now we'll figure out how to make a flat screen tv look plastic look look look but they really were so excited about it that they declared and the whole scientific community declared we're on our way and it's only a matter of time before we get the next step and the next step and the next step the next step well jim tour said to me eric i know as much about this as anybody on the planet you can't fool me i'm like mr nano scientist okay he said in 70 years they have not moved the ball forward a millimeter they have no idea and think of the irony the more science you know the more you know that you know nothing in other words the assumption is the more science you know the more you figure stuff out but in this case the more science progressed over 70 years the more they understood we know nothing about how life came into being but if you ask somebody they say oh no no we're working on it yeah you're working on and you'll be working on it for 70 000 years because you can't get the one thing that we know about a cell today is that a single cell the simplest cell is like infinitely complex in 1952 they didn't quite know that right so when he told me this i thought no one ever talks about this never like the most incredible thing like what would wouldn't you think the basic science question would be like hey how did life appear on earth because you read any article today and they say we found water on an exo planet 40 billion light years away and if there's water any second there's going to be life and it no that's that's complete nonsense so i thought about that and i thought about all these other arguments for science that i happen to know but i thought this one is really extraordinary and then i realized i met another guy in albuquerque new mexico skip heitzig's church is there and he said you got to meet this guy an archaeologist stephen collins he's discovered biblical sodom and i said what what are you talking about i mean i read the papers i never read about anybody discovering biblical sodom 1700 bc like they found this now without going on even longer the bottom line is i looked into this and it is nothing less than astonishing it is open and shut he discovered biblical sodom this is a this is something that happens in the first couple of pages of the bible okay and i thought nobody knows about this this is one of the most extraordinary archaeological finds ever so at the beginning of covet i thought of these two people that i'd met and i thought about how nobody that i know including intelligent christians has heard of either these things so i said i really need to write a book where i put that information in there because christians need to know the details like this is very exciting information very exciting open and shut but there's all this other information that like the fine-tuned universe and other stuff and so i said you know i'm just going to put this all in a book and then at the end i'll write about atheism and the reason i thought of the title is because in 1966 you'll remember time magazine had this famous cover article that said is god dead because everybody thought well science is proving god doesn't exist well the great irony is that all these years later the real question is is atheism dead because science not just what i referred to but scientific evidence so dramatically points to the existence of god i said every believer needs to know this information so that's the long answer to why i wrote the book if you prefer the short answer i can give that later and eric you know i visit college campuses a lot and you know i'd say in vermont half the room were probably atheists last night and it's fashionable so some people would say eric there is no proof that there is a god therefore i'm an atheist you embarked on this book to show hold on a second it takes it takes more faith to be an atheist than to be a christian okay that is like the understatement of the millennium it takes i mean i've heard people say that frank turek has said that trust me once you read just what's in this book i mean there's way more but it has become to my mind uh if you read just this you realize that real atheism is preposterous and i don't just mean people who don't believe in god or idiots or they're wrong or i'm no no 50 years ago it was tenable it was something you could say i've come to conclusion whatever it it could make sense it could be we would say it's wrong but 50 years ago you could say all right well you're an atheist today based on this information i would say it is not possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist if you want to be an agnostic i will take my hat off to you that's one thing but to say that i know there's no god based on several things i simply don't think it's possible and i think people are going to get angry and a guy called up i i had the honor of guest hosting charlie's radio show today because you know he sleeps late and um he's young he he'll learn he'll learn and no but seriously he let me guest host the show and so a guy called up i did call ins and he said i'm an atheist whatever and he said you don't you don't give any hard evidence of god and i said this is what happens i think when you talk to atheists they don't really even understand i'm not trying to be mean but but when you say hard evidence that's exactly what is in this book when you talk about the fine-tuned universe it's kind of like saying to somebody proven atom exists and you say well what do you mean proven atom exists they go i want hard evidence don't just give me theory and you'd be like well we really can't see atoms they tend to be kind of small and theory is the only way we can you know so when you start talking about this stuff i think what we find is that people who want to know the truth can have a conversation and can look at it but they're always going to be people to them it is like like a sports team they say i'm an atheist and no matter what you say they're just going to make fun of you i think so eric in writing this book and i've learned a lot by just skimming through it so far what was something you learned in researching this book because you're a lifelong christian you have an amazing testimony but what did you learn all of a sudden diving into this that just kind of in a spark notes version that you think most christians should also know yeah well th this is true when i wrote almost when i write almost all my books i learned something in others i'm not like a lifelong scholar that just decides to take my great knowledge and put it in a book trust me i'm not i get interested in a subject i know just enough to begin but i i always learn stuff that i'm kind of shocked at in this book i learned many things that completely shocked me the mo the most astonishing this is like so ridiculous well there's two things for there i'll give you the i'll give you the simple one first some of you know if i said you who are the most famous atheists of the 20th century and i don't mean madeleine murray o'hare i don't mean like angry screw balls okay uh no offense but but i mean i'm talking about like intellectually rigorous atheist you'd have to say albert camus and jean-paul sartre okay the frogs the frogs they're always atheists can i say frogs that was a joke really that was just me i was that was trying to trigger a few people of french extraction here um but in all seriousness these were great minds and they believed that there was no god they took atheism very seriously they weren't flippant when you when you look at christopher hitchens you look at dawkins they're tremendously flippant they're intellectually dishonest it really is ultimately offensive when i read their stuff i thought this is ridiculous like they nobody should take them seriously they just wanted to sell books but i was reading about jean-paul sartre and albert camus both of whom they didn't agree on everything but they were french existentialists who believed we're living in a world without god and we have to figure out how can we create a morality without god and basically it's impossible but they were really struggling both of those men one in 1960 and the other in 1980 came to faith in god now let me tell you when i read that sometimes i discover something i think this can't be right like this can't be right and i never heard it either on the show eric said it what did i do i i you looked it up you turned right to the page almost miraculously but there may be some baptists they don't believe in the holy spirit you don't want to lose them you don't want to lose these people they could be cessationists in the room they could be here uh and i opened up to the page right to the page but i the reason i say this is that this is kind of my larger thesis of my life and it's the thesis of the book we live in a world you know this it's true politically it's true with theology most people in the in the secular media in the academy all over they're pushing a narrative that is basically not true and so you discover these things and you think how is it possible i went to a good college i read a lot of books i never heard this this is big news if the two biggest atheists of the 20th century came to faith and so i said i'm going to put it in the book and it's going to blow people's minds the other thing that i learned this is so weird i almost don't want to bring it up because like people are gonna i don't have time to explain it but when i was writing about biblical sodom the details are astonishing like they're astonishing so i said i want to write about other famous biblical archaeological finds so i started to do my research i was familiar with some of them i've read about this over the years but there were a few that i hadn't and i learned about them some of them are really funny stories and i think it's important for us to communicate in a way that's appealing and and to tell the stories of how these things were discovered is some of them are hilarious stories so if you just read like the paragraph on why it's important it's boring and you won't remember but they're crazy stories but so i'm doing kind of general research and this is what a year ago i stumbled on something and i said this this has to be this can't be right this cannot be right in nazareth they discovered uh a gigantic church that had been destroyed by the muslims in the 8th century built over another church that had been built maybe in the fourth century and under that was a first century dwelling and it seems without a doubt because i've looked into this to be the home of jesus mary and joseph now when i read that i thought that this is not possible this is like discovering you know santa's workshop at the north pole like i i don't know but i say this because i really looked into it and that and other things you know i look into them carefully i believe that things right now are so dark in this country that god is revealing these things for this time he's blowing people's minds it's like he said okay when you get really really sophisticated and full of yourselves when you know more science than you think you're god i'm gonna allow you to use that science to discover me and it's gonna blow your mind and that's exactly what i believe is happening with archaeology and with science and with discovering this stuff about albert camus and all this stuff it's it's god is giving it to us to give us real hope uh in in uh in our time and in the book it goes through scientific proofs that there is god let's talk societally eric how does atheism make the world a worse place to live i mean so we talk about the verse of which has really inspired this gathering that we've been doing for a couple months now jeremiah 29 7 demand the welfare of the nation in the city of which i've sent you in because your welfare is tied to the nation's welfare what does atheism do to a country what does it do to a people yeah it's actually funny because i've been struggling for days to write an op-ed that answers this question i'm really bad at writing op-eds um part of what i write about at the end of the book i say okay let's look at the record of atheism right there is no question i wrote a book called if you can keep it where i show what i only learned recently right that there is zero question that faith and virtue are central to self-government and liberty so you know if you want to be a libertarian or whatever you want to be all i'm telling you is that every single one of the founders knew that without a virtuous population generally speaking you cannot have self-government and they knew that practically speaking you cannot have a sufficiently virtuous population unless there is faith they knew that now you can know that like a sociologist you don't need to believe in the faith franklin's theology was a little screwy and uh jefferson's theology was a little scary nonetheless they both knew that without a religious and moral populace and they all mention this it's not just the famous adams quote you cannot have self-government people govern themselves and they're free and they don't need somebody to govern them with a gun you don't need a bureaucracy a deep state a tyrant you govern yourself well the opposite of that of course is that when you find states that they don't believe in freedom what is the first thing that they want to crush that they must crush that they find more threatening than anything and that is people of faith because people of faith are and i'll coin this term you can use it anti-fragile i just coined that term tonight and i said charlie go ahead and use it i i don't know get that from eric what ronald reagan said if you don't care you know who gets credit uh you can accomplish a lot so if you want to take that term anti-fragile you go ahead hey hey eric is atheism dead so uh well the answer to that is yes and no right because that's the issue is that i would say practically speaking based on just the evidence in the book and it's not like there's anything magical about the book but i've just kind of amassed some scientific stuff that i think it's gonna it's gonna blow your mind you're gonna say wow i'm really glad i know this i think based on that and based on my discussion of atheism at the end and what atheism tends to because you said what happens in a culture what happens always happens the same an atheist does not ultimately believe in anything they don't believe in meaning now if you talk to an atheist they pretend that they they they argue about that sam harris and the others they try to concoct some way it's nonsense if there is no god there's no good there's no evil there's no transcendence there's no love there's no therefore there's only power and therefore you are not a special creature creating god's image who the government should protect you're nothing you're nothing and so if i can crush you or murder you for the good of the state or for the good of me and my party why shouldn't i do it now unfortunately that is a simple truth and atheists never deal with that so i deal with that in the book because i said look you can say all you want but you've got to deal with your history atheist regimes have been unspeakably brutal unspeakably brutal and that's just history but the question whether atheism is dead so i would say intellectually it is but there are going to be people who have this tribal affinity who say i'm an atheist and you know let's talk about just not the there's there's an even worse part of this which is trying to become god yourself and we've seen this in the last 18 months the best example of this is mr fauci who should be in jail by the way he should be put in prison for what he's done to our country and eric when you don't believe in god is there a tendency to then want to become god there's no doubt about it that's the whole point right is that if you look you can go to the first pages the first chapters of genesis and of course you know this what is the first temptation this is this is as basic as it gets human nature we either submit to worship the god who invented the universe and by the way even in reading this book you'll be in awe like we think wow god's amazing when you understand a fraction of what he did in creating this world it is so astonishing it's so breathtaking it's almost frightening when you realize who he is and what he did in creating this world and so we have a choice either to submit to reality and worship him or to do exactly what satan did and say no thank you i would rather reign in hell then serve in heaven and even if you don't do that explicitly on some level you're doing it and so that's exactly what the serpent says in eden he says you will be as gods it's always the temptation and it's actually very sad because no matter what happens we will never be as gods there's only one god but the irony is if we submit to god we do become like god don't we we become more and more like him and we will become more and more like him in eternity so this is the great irony satan says here's the cheap plastic neon you know juke joint version uh how would you like to have a good time and god says how would you like to have eternal joy that's ultimately the choice and somebody who says i want to be god i want to use technology or power or transhumanism i mean look we we know that anybody who doesn't believe in the biblical order believes everything's malleable okay they think that a a frog can evolve into a giraffe which can evolve into a whale and you can evolve into a raccoon or a monkey and it's all malleable right therefore therefore it only follows that we can manage our own evolution upward into something god-like and that's what transhumanism is they think there's no reason i shouldn't live forever there's no reason i shouldn't be able to destroy disease and so so a lot of them actually believe this uh and i think they're gonna be in for a rough lifetime so one of the one of the reasons why some people say they become atheists is the the biggest challenge christians have in evangelism which is the pain problem how do you explain pain away in the world natural disasters famine starvation do you get into that in the book and you talk about that because that is that's a tactic that's used by dawkins and hitchens i don't and the reason i don't i actually took a strange tack in this book i said to myself why do i need to get into that stuff like all i'm trying to explain is that atheism is utterly impossible okay it's like multiplying by zero let me explain it to you you get it i'm done i don't need to get into that in other words i think sometimes we allow ourselves to get all tangled up and we're effectively casting pearls before swine having an argument with some atheist who isn't really interested in the truth they just want to like have an argument the pain problem let me answer that really simply it's called a mystery uh there are a lot of foolish evangelical questions who think i can just pull some index cards out of my pocket and i've got the answers to all these things anybody who has an easy answer to pain and suffering and death and evil is foolish we understand that part of that is not something we can understand on this side of the veil we should be honest about that it doesn't mean we have nothing to say i mean i've written about this in other books but in this book i i didn't get into that just because i thought i am not playing the game of i'm gonna i'm gonna prove god i'm just going to put some things in a book that are going to make it obvious that there is literally zero chance that the world and the universe and you and me arose randomly there is zero question that some intelligent creator made us and when you look at atheism it is incontrovertible that it is preposterous on a number of levels and and that's i set a low bar for myself in writing this book the question is is atheism dead and i didn't say can i convince everybody that that god exists so i want to get to some questions here in a minute but eric unfortunately america is becoming less religious and more people are identifying with this viewpoint is there something attractive of wanting to believe that there is no god does it give people a license to do well of course but this is what's so funny is that you have people like hitchens and dawkins and honestly i lost any monochrome of respect i had for them when you start reading it's kind of like when freud wrote moses and monotheism you know you have these people that they've got their their feel that they're really brilliant in and then they decide like hey i'm a genius i'll write about something else and they show that they're foolish in that field when when dawkins and hitchens write about this stuff a fourth grader could refute it they're just very clever and very nasty in debate but honestly they don't have much of a point and i think what they do is they appeal uh the reason i bring them up is because you get the impression there's a quote in the book from from hitchens i mean the irony of this is like you want a horse laugh like it's so crazy he says he finds the idea of a god watching every move i make just offensive right and you think yourself okay so like you're really in love with the idea of being free so there's no god watching you but in every atheist state in the world you have all the technology available thank you google and other people watching people and every move they make so like where's the utopia where's the atheist utopia your atheist utopia ends in something infinitely worse than whatever you imagine this mean policeman god watching you is is doing but they do present it as though hey there's no god i'm free anyone like sartre camus and others i mentioned the poet dylan thomas i mentioned woody allen i mentioned ing mark bergman there are people who don't believe there's a god but you can see that they are troubled by it in other words they've really looked at it anybody who kicks up his heels and says hey there's no god so i can party i can sleep with my grad student awesome like nobody you know that is so shallow and childish it's self-refuting and so i honestly think the atheist movement is filled with those kind of people they're kind of angry they want some kind of an identity they think that you know we're moralists uh and and i think we just have to be honest that in america you can you can be that way but don't expect me to respect your philosophy and i want to just say for the young people out there and the people you know the the parents that have students that are going to be going to college soon on some college campuses not all of them the atheists evangelize with more fervor than christians do on those campuses and so eric what do you think the reason for that is it seems that atheists are not comfortable being alone and this is always i've always tried to challenge them i say if there's no if you don't believe in an eternal life or a creator you only got so much time left like you better live it up right what are you doing trying to convince people for that by the way just a reminder i got a couple of these you could steal these eric because you you're big on that right um is without god there would be no atheists remember that so and you got to think about that for a second without god there would be no atheist i'm pretty sure that's c.s lewis or chesterton that's chesterton you can't fool me go ahead it's it was actually my uber driver eric okay i i watched the video where you got that from the guy who gets his joke from the uber driver that was chris that was the the guy who just passed away uh you know you know what i'm talking about norm mcdonald oh yeah yeah from snl yeah he told a story okay never mind let's continue um i'm looking up the chapter that answers the question you're asking me but keep going but the most important question when it comes to dealing with an atheist and we all we all have atheists in our lives which is do you hope you're wrong it's the most important question which is if you ask someone who believes in atheism do you hope you're wrong because if you're dealing with an honest person no atheist actually hopes to believe in nothing you you actually want to believe there is no love there is no justice there is no eternal life and so if an atheist says you know what i do hope i'm wrong then you're dealing with an honest broker but if someone says you know what i want to be right more than what could possibly be good then that that right there is a completely different conversation that you're having at a very fundamental level even every single atheist should want to be proven wrong every single well that's i don't know where i i heard that but i know it's not original with you um but seriously no but the point is that that's exactly true but the other thing and you just asked me this question and i want to answer this it's in the book i couldn't find it but if you believe there's no god okay it follows logically and this is the problem people don't want to deal with this they just want to say there's no god and i can do what i want no no if there is no god there is absolutely no measure of good or evil there's literally no meaning in the universe you your life is no different than the life of a gnat and if that's true that life is utterly meaningless the bleakness of that is numbing if you can face it which most of them don't even begin to face it but if you believed it why would you spend a minute trying to convince someone else that it's true we are all just like candle flames we're going to go out in a moment who cares about anything why do you feel compulsion to share what you think is true with strangers it makes no sense that an atheist would be evangelistic for atheism it makes absolutely no sense it's self-refuting kind of proves that for them it's just like you know it's their sports team they want to get you on their team they want you to you know to join their their their club basically and i i believe a lot of the issues young people are facing right now can be attributed to the hyper secular atheistic type temptation that's out there and when you believe there's no there's no reason for existence you know you believe there's no god there'll be other kind of troubles that go alongside with that let's get a couple lines for questions and let's give it up for eric by the way he's done such a great job with this book thank you and students get priority as always and we're going to go for 20 minutes 25 because then we're going to be keeping eric i'm happy to do this as long as i can remain conscious and i do want to say if you don't mind i only will take questions from people who have been vaccinated yeah yeah yeah please please okay i'm thinking about the children i want us all to be vaccinated if you don't mind yeah and i prefer true or false questions also want to keep it moving you know all right we'll start over here yeah hi so for a long time there's been this thought that religion and politics should be separate and we have operated under the assumption as a society that we should strive to have a plural say that word political sphere which has gradually just served to push christianity out and move secular humanism in instead so do you see pluralism starting to crumble under its own weight and what should we as christians do about that i'm sorry can you repeat that um that one i write about that in my book if you can keep it and i literally answered that question in a speech 24 hours ago in in wichita kansas so he was in burlington i was in wichita and that's the wichita group um but it's simple the founders knew that faith was central to everything we believe in there's no way around that but they also knew that for many reasons faith must be free it cannot be coerced so the government cannot establish a religion now they were thinking it's going to be congregationalism or the church of england or baptist or whatever but the basic concept is true this is why those of us who have faith need to exercise our faith like crazy we need to live out our faith in every single sphere of existence when somebody tells you shut up about that you say excuse me i'm an american and in america i can be a satanist i can be an atheist i can be a christian i can be anything i want and not just on sunday mornings but 24 7. i can live it out in every place that i go and the idea that that's going to make people who aren't christians feel marginalized is garbage that's absolute nonsense it's like you know if i believe in quantum physics i'm going to be triggering people who don't believe in quantum physics we can play that game all day long people are playing a game when they say that uh the constitution is clear our history is clear uh if people are like you know beating up jews in the streets i would be the first one as a christian to say we shouldn't do that but when people bring that up it's it's complete nonsense i mean i think we really have to push back against that so thank you yeah and i'll just i'll add to to that slightly which is the problem is that we as christians we've abdicated our role as counselor to the king and so we have allowed secular humanism to fill the void of where the church always should be and and so you know all throughout the old testament esther nehemiah mordecai jeremiah joseph and many others daniel were were counselors to secular government for god's purpose so pluralism or a government that does that a lot that acknowledges the laws of nature and nature is god that acknowledges the blessings of liberty to secure the blessings of liberty but does not have people that actually believe in blessings or liberty then it will fold upon itself and this goes to show because too many churches not this church which is a phenomenal church and is an exception to the rule obviously and have just decided to kind of not play in that arena and john adams said it best where he said the constitution was written solely for for a morally moral and religious people it's wholly inadequate for the people of any other and this kind of goes to kind of one of the things eric and i were talking about which around atheism which is the more secular society becomes the less free it becomes and i'm gonna i'm gonna excite this one this comes from dennis prager you're welcome eric thanks which is unless you're plato you're stealing from somebody at all times right plato or moses or paul um is religion makes america a better place any country that you go in that's more religious is better and i'll prove it to you and if anyone has a different answer to this question they're lying and i don't say that lightly which is if you go if you're in a dark alley in new york city at two o'clock in the morning and five men are approaching you and you have a choice those five men either came from bible study or from the bar which would you choose every american would choose bible study even the atheist would choose bible stuff and if they say the bar they're lying actually they would they are lying because they know deep down those five people were actually reading the bible they'd be far less likely to do something they should not do and so look it makes them it's very simple atheism if society becomes atheistic the government gets bigger every single country this is the case when you destroy the church the government gets bigger and freedom and liberty goes away because liberty and freedom is impossible for a citizenry that does not have virtue and does not have faith as a center eric said that exact same thing and i'll just say this a little bit differently which for young people out there this might be resonate even more you'll you'll you'll be a you'll you'll live in a generation that is less happy and that is a more dangerous society and is a less pleasant place to live that religion makes us more decent to one another and atheism makes us less trustful of one another it makes private charity go away the idea of sacrificing for your neighbor and so happy to go through that but the reason why a lot of people are saying well pluralism might be a mistake is because pluralism can only work if christians take their rightful role in impacting that pluralistic secular government so thanks for being here tonight and so to say that christians have a profound obligation to live out our faith in every sphere and if you don't do that we will be filled with bad secular ideas just as charlie said and it is shame on the church that we bought the lie that we're not supposed to be involved in politics that is preposterous william wilberforce was a politician who abolished the slave trade because of his christian faith now do we think that the blacks and the holes of those slave ships wished that he had kept his politics or his religion out of politics we all know it's preposterous live out your faith that's the coolest outfit i've seen eric i know [Applause] hello there could you say that again hi i'm terrell tate i am seven years old i am in second grade i just saw hamilton i wanted to know who your favorite character was in in what i didn't hear that hamilton in hamilton king george king george the third [Applause] suck i'm a sucker for gay stereotypes my favorite character in hamilton aaron burr was fine um hamilton was obviously great i actually have i just know the story of hamilton i've actually never seen the play i know that and also wench number two huh i just she was really a standout he said something he shouldn't have said okay next question first of all eric i really enjoyed your biography on dedrick bonhoeffer it was brilliantly written but my question to both of you guys uh it stems from the unfortunate reality that both of my parents are either agnostic or atheist they're the type of atheist that charlie was mentioning the ones that hope they're wrong i do love the fact that i have my faith but they're really well versed they've studied the quran the bible the book of mormon etc every religious text out there and the only reason why they have no faith is that or they don't have a religion or a relationship with christ is that they have no faith so my question to you guys is how would you approach a conversation about religion to people who want faith but just don't know how to get it this is a great question i'm sure a lot of people in this room this might resonate with you right and so i'll give my take and then eric you can go to yours you have to know the type of atheist you're dealing with since you're already kind of on that path some atheists will be convinced by eric's scientific reason-based arguments they want to try to see the argument for the unmoved mover or the fine-tuning argument or for how the in the beginning was the big bang therefore there must be someone who actually executed the big bang these are rather reasonable arguments that i think are rather convincing but not every atheist is convinced of that other atheists though and you have to know kind of what you're dealing with they are atheists because they've been hardened by the world this is very important and facts logic apologetics reason science that's not going to move them instead they need a transformation and they need either prayer experience they need to be brought to church to see something that is beyond just reasonable type arguments now for me i'm more in the direction where i want to know the teleological answer for existence and i'm moved by the more apologetics type perspective but christianity is so much more than that we are given reason as a gift as it says in isaiah 1 let us reason together by god to make sense of the natural world but the reason we have faith in jesus christ is not solely based on that it's faith and it's experience for that we have a renewing of our mind it says in the new testament in the scriptures and i could say that i have seen people that say no matter what you