Transcription
I'm going to have you debate our AI in a second. Let's do it, man. Frank is one of uh my mentors and friends and teachers and we've been uh studying together. Oh, yeah. Here in Phoenix. It's kind of our off season, right? So, it's a little different than an NFL player. I have two offseasons a year. So, my my on It's similar to you. You're on season what fall and spring. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm doing colleges, too. Just not as many as you, man. You're killing it. How many do you do? We try and do anywhere between 15 and 20 a year. You're doing you're doing 15. You're doing 25 a semester. Yeah, we do about 50 to 60 a year. Yeah. The pace is out is out of control. Yeah. But it's great.
And so, uh, just remind your audience, you do cross-examined. You have the best books out on Christian apologetics. Uh, that that's what my mom says. Yes. Well, she's right. That's right. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist is the big one. Stealing from God, why atheists need God to make their case. Those are the two biggies on apologetics. And so the you go to college campuses and you do similar type vibe that I do, open question, open mic, and your stuff has gone very viral throughout the years.
Before we dive into just some of the fun, because I'm going to have you debate our AI in a second. Let's do it, man. But before we do that, what are some of the changes today 2025 versus what you've heard from students 5 years ago and 10 years ago? Well, let's go back 15 years ago in in the heyday of the new atheists. We got so many questions from atheists and we got so much push back from atheists. But I'm going to schools now, Charlie, and the organizers are saying, "Hey, when you come and talk about the evidence for Christianity, could you spend more time on the New Testament than whether or not God exists?" Because we're having trouble finding a lot of atheists on campus. Okay? Atheism is waning. And the idea that there's at least some spiritual force out there is gaining strength. And now Christianity is being looked at from all areas as you know because people are now you know you know what's driving people to consider Christianity evil. There's too much evil in the world. Things are things are getting worse and worse and people are going there's got to be more to life than this. There's got to be some standard out there. Maybe I ought to look at Christianity again. And the work you're doing on college campuses is making people see Christianity as at least plausible. Yes. This guy Charlie Kirk is really sharp and he believes in Christianity. Maybe I ought to look at Christianity again cuz you're in the political world. Yes. That's right. Primarily. Yeah. Yeah. And so people are going, Charlie is one of the sharpest speakers I've seen and he is an evangelical Christian. Maybe he knows something I ought to look into. that that I I do hear that feedback a lot. By the way, the most promising thing that we receive uh freedom at charliekirk.com or emails or messaging on social media, we probably get a thousand a year. Charlie, I believe in God because of you. I go back to church. And that doesn't count the comments because the comments you don't know, they could be trolls or whatever, but we get thousands of comments. Charlie, I've strengthened my faith in God and Jesus and my life because of you. And that's awesome because that is a that's an ultimate purpose to what we do. It's not the sole purpose. I mean, we believe that once we instruct people of the civil law, then that will point people to Christ, but no, it's a very exciting moment. Would you say that I don't think atheism is dead? My friend Eric Mataxis, I think, gets a little bit ahead of himself, but it seems to be dying. Yeah, it's waning. Yes. And the difference between 15 years ago and now is people used to wonder if Christianity was true. Now they're asking, "Is Christianity good?" So the top three objections on a college campus that I get and I think you're getting too if you think about it. The top three objections to Christianity are morality, morality, and morality. And Charlie, we don't like judgment in our country, right? We want God to be, as CS Lewis put it, a benevolent old man who just wanted to look down and see that everybody was having a good time. Yeah. We want to be nicer than God. Right. Right. But God is a God of judge. He's infinitely just and he's infinitely loving. Which is funny because the campus group is very big on justice. That's their big I know. Yeah. But not really. That they they say they are. But that's why I always ask them, look, there's two things you can have in the afterlife. You can have either justice or grace. Does anybody here want justice in the afterlife? I don't want justice. I want grace. If I get justice, Charlie, I'm toast. An infinitely just being is going to judge me. He's got I I I haven't been infinitely just, so I deserve justice.
What do you have to say? And this is an AI generated one, but I hear this all the time. This is helps me kind of remember about the the Bible. And I I think I know your answer to this and I I've read a couple books about this, but that all that the story of the Old Testament closely resembles Canaanite and Mesopotamian deities that the Old Testament has like a lot of similarities for such as the story of Moses or the creation story or a flood story. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. there. Well, every ancient uh culture has a flood story. Sure. Now, what do you think the reason for that is? Because there was a flood. There's a flood, right? Everybody had some sort of story related to it. But if you look at the story of Moses, for example, you don't find parallels that are that all that close. And if you do, it doesn't necessarily mean that Moses copied what what what's unique about the Israelites is that they are told to be separate from their neighbors. That's one reason they're pushing out the Canaanites. Holy separate, right? The last thing they want to do is borrow from the people that you that they're trying to separate from. In fact, what happens to them is when they do get too intermingled with the Canaanites, God judges them and continues to say, "You're playing the harlot. You're going with Bal. You're go you're you're going with all these other deities and you should be worshiping me." So, he judges them. And so without getting into too much detail though, I is there any credence to this idea that the Bible was copied regionally between other River Valley River Valley civilization mythologies. I have not necessarily heard that objection, but I can tell you from Bill Maher said that on our show, remember, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's here's the problem. If you look at the archaeologies, let's just look at the archaeology. Yeah. Let's go back to Joshua and Jericho. The evidence from Jericho shows that oddly the walls fell down and out. There's no other city that has ever been discovered where the walls have fallen straight down and out. When you take over a city, you go inward. You crush the wall. You knock it down and the walls go inward. Here we find in the dirt there in Jericho that the walls fell out just like the Bible says. Yeah, there's there's a lot of that. And and there are when we just did a 22 one-hour lesson series on the top top archaeological discoveries of the Bible, Charlie, um we discovered over 107 I think it was 107 people in the Bible that have been found in the dirt and about 75 of them were from the Old Testament and many of the events of the Old Testament have corroborated data in the dirt. How would somebody writing the the Old Testament, say a thousand years after Joshua, 1406 BC, know that the walls fell down and out? How would he know that? He wouldn't. In fact, you know how many, you know, how many places are named in the book of Joshua? What is it, 24 chapters in the book of Joshua? There's over 350 named places in the book of Joshua. Just in the book of Joshua, it it works out to something like 13 places a chapter. More more than that even. I can't remember the exact number, but it's a it's crazy how many place locations. And many of these place locations have been discovered. This is not an invented storyline that was put into writing a thousand years later. Moses and editors later, there are editors that came after Moses, like they put his death in Deuteronomy. They wrote this down at the time.
So here's a question of morality. It's the problem of divine command theory. I've heard this question only once. Is something good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good? Uifro dilemma from one of uh Plato's writings. Socrates says this and it's supposed to put the believer in God in a dilemma. If you're going to say God is the source of morality, does he look up at a standard beyond him and say, "Oh, that's good. I'll do that. If so, why you need God? We can do that, right? Yeah. I don't think it's much of a dilemma though. I maybe I'm over I think the answer to both is yes. You are correct. Here's why it's not a dilemma. Why is it not a dilemma? Because God himself is his essence is good. That's it. Am I right? Yeah. He's the standard. He doesn't have to look up. He's not arbitrary. He is the standard. So, it's easily answered. And yet, atheists online still think this is a good one. What am I missing about that, though? You're not missing anything. It's It's a false dilemma. A true dilemma is A or non A. A false dilemma is A or B. Maybe there's a C. Maybe there's a third option. And in this case, there is. God is the standard. His nature is the moral standard. The buck has to stop somewhere. It stops with God's nature.
So I asked AI. This is kind of goes to show how good of a teacher you are. Like the best intellectually rigorous questions. And like I can answer most of these honestly and I don't do this profession. I mean I do somewhat of this, but that you're like a super professional on this. And so that's what my mom says. I I'll read this one. If God, this is from AI. If God desires all people to be saved and know the truth, why does he remain hidden or silent to sincere seekers who never experience divine rel re revelation or compelling reason of belief? Everybody experiences divine revelation because God has written two books. Yes, he's he's written through men what we call the scriptures, the Bible, but he's also written the book of nature. In other words, we could say God's God has the book of his words and the book of his works. And everybody has the book of his works. Everybody knows there's a creator God who's moral because of the creation and the moral law written on the heart. And the way we know God is we know God by his effects. So if there's a creation, that's the effect. We reason back to a cause, a creator. If there's design in the universe, that's the effect. Or we reason back to a cause of designer. If there's a moral law written on the heart, that's the effect. We reason back to a cause of moral lawgiver. So there's nobody in the world who doesn't know that there's a creator God who's moral. And we haven't lived up to that standard. There are people who've never heard of the solution to our moral problem. That's Jesus. But everybody knows that there's a creator moral God. And the Bible indicates that if you seek, take a step toward that, the works that he's provided, he will get you the word so you can be saved.
This is the other one. We spend a lot of time on this, but let me just repeat it and I want you to answer it as you would a student. How can we trust scripture as morally authoritative when it regulates slavery, commands genocidal warfare like 1st Samuel 15, and inor enforces harsh penalties for non-crimes by modern standards without undermining the concept of God's moral perfection. I would ask the person again by what moral standard are you saying that you're appealing to a Christian standard. Yeah, you are. Secondly, we've already dealt with those before on this program that slavery was not the kind of slavery we had. Kind of bankruptcy law, right? It was a kind of bankruptcy law. The genocidal warfare. It wasn't genocide. It was soc. Now, why do I say that? Because God wiped out the Israelites for doing the same kind of things. In other words, it wasn't ethnicity God was worried about. It was it was the ethics like after the golden calf after the Sure. He he wipes them out, right? How many times does God judge Israel for the evil they've done repeatedly? A lot. And our mutual friend Dennis Prager puts it this way. He said, "One of the reasons I know the Old Testament, the least flattering telling of No, it's true. It's the least flattering telling of an ancient people." Yeah. Yeah. That's it. You know it. Yeah. They would never invent such an embarrassing history of themselves. They keep getting dopes slapped by their own god. And and Charlie, you don't see this. Like if you go to if you go to Egypt, all of the monuments in Egypt are propaganda monu mon monuments to how good the pharaoh is. They don't include any negative behavior. But when you read the Old Testament, this is the history of the Jews. They get the gold medal in sin every time.
Here's one that I think is important. Again, this one is I I could answer this one. Answer it. Go ahead. Take it. Given the discrepancies between gospel resurrection accounts and the lack of external corroboration, how do you defend the resurrection as a historical event without begging the question? Well, first of all, the discrepancies are a feature, not a bug. The fact that there are discrepancies means that it's probably true because if you were trying to lie, every single account would be exactly the same, right? It's exactly like we know this whenever there's, you know, car accident or something in the parking lot here. Yeah. or even like, you know, something happens here and there's a little controversy at the Turning Point campus or an event. I bring three people in and I get a generalized telling, but I realize like, oh, okay, got it. Was what what mile what mile hour do you think they were going? What was this? What was the color of the car? You know, eventually you get towards that. So, I think it's a feature, not a bug. And then there were a lot of external corroboration. I mean, there's Josephus, right? Yes. There um there's other Roman historians. Also, the Talmud talks about Jesus, not the resurrection, but they said that people believed in the resurrection. So, how how did I do? You did excellently. Okay. Yeah. What else am I missing? Beautiful. Well, let me let me give another example for our listeners and viewers. It might be this. Do you realize that the eyewitnesses of the Titanic, the survivors disagreed on how the Titanic sank? Well, I imagine because we actually didn't know how the Titanic sank for quite some time, right? Because it happened largely below the surface. That's right. And some said it went downhole. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you meant Okay. No, no, this is a good illustration of what you were saying. Some said it went downhole. Others said it broke in two when it went down. What should we conclude from that, Charlie? Well, we should conclude that uh it did go down. That's it. That's And that the water was cold. That's right. No. And that everyone agrees there was a resurrection, but they also all agreed that there were female witnesses at the resurrection. Very embarrassing. No. Embarrassing. And by the way, multi-gospel. That's right. Every gospel says it. So, but then also the discrepancies play against a unosspel central cannon. They do. What is the right term? Well, the term that there was a shared can a Q document they will say. Yes. Then they all Yeah. Well, obviously what we're finding in the New Testament, well, maybe not obvious for everybody is that we have multiple independent sources of certain events. And uh when you have that, you realize this isn't just one source. This is several sources. And it may be a problem for people who have a Bible under one binding. They go, "Oh, this is just one book. It's one source." No, it's not. These documents were written down in the New Testament, written down by eight or nine authors, depending upon who wrote Hebrews. And they were written at different times in different places by people who were not in contact with one another all the time. So I don't think that I don't That's a pretty weak one. That's the best G AI could do. Yeah.
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