In this thought-provoking episode, we navigate the complexities surrounding the historical evolution of Christian doctrine with Dr. Leighton Flowers. Unpack the layers of Augustine's influence and the ongoing dialogue about free will versus divine determinism. This episode offers insights into the fractious debate among contemporary theologians and how Dr. Wilson's work brings new light to these age-old questions. Tune in to grasp how these debates shape modern-day theological perspectives.
SPEAKER 03 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Baba Neart Live. I'm the pastor of Denver Bible Church. Dr. Leighton Flowers has been on this program previously. You can hear that at kgov.com slash Leighton. And I could give you his credentials, which perhaps we'll do later, but audiences tend to zone out when you give a guest's resume. So let me just say this. Right now on YouTube, Dr. Flowers is hosting the hottest internet channel for talking about God, Soteriology 101. Dr. Leighton Flowers, welcome back to Bob and Yart Live.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you, Bob. I appreciate it so much. It's an honor to be here.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, there has been quite an uproar on the Internet over James White, who I debated years ago downtown Denver at the Brown Palace. James White versus an Oxford-educated theologian, Dr. Ken Wilson, and you're right in the middle of it. So a week ago, we did talk about this on the air, but for those who missed that, can you describe what the dust-up is, and then I have a series of questions for you about it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sure. Dr. Wilson was on our program, Soteriology 101, a couple of years ago. I guess it's maybe 18 months ago or so. And we did an interview about the early church fathers and his particular dissertation, which is Augustine's conversion from traditional free choice to non-free free will, which is another way of saying compatibilism.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. Go ahead. Not to interrupt, but you just said a mouthful for a radio audience. Augustine was converted from what to what? What?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, the name of his Oxford thesis is Augustine's conversion from traditional free choice to non-free free will. And what he's trying to say there in that title is that there was a conversion in Augustine's teaching when he first converted from Manichaeanism to into Christianity. He began to defend free will. He adopted what the early church had adopted with regard to man's responsibility in regard to the offer of the gospel. But over the course of his life, he had several different disputes, three major ones, the last of which was with the Pelagian controversy. And in that controversy, as often happens within debate, he was pushed to a further extreme than he had ever been before or the early church had ever been before. And that is to adopt a more deterministic way of salvation, which is more consistent with what we know as Calvinism today.
SPEAKER 03 :
So when Augustine went from free will to non-free free will, sounds like double talk to me. I'm just the talk show host.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, it's another way of talking about what Calvinists call compatibilism, which is the concept and idea that man's free will is somehow compatible with God's determining what we will. In my estimation, it is doublespeak as well. It's just not coherent in my estimation.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, there's a Knox Theological Seminary in Florida. It was founded, I believe, by D. James Kennedy and his professor of New Testament, Dr. Samuel Lamerson. He and I had a 10-round written debate about these topics years ago. And in the first round, I asked him if he believed in free will, and he said yes. So I was so thrilled then. We did a radio interview before round two. And I asked him, well, a man who commits a crime, do you believe that he was free to not commit that crime? And he said, oh, absolutely not. No, he had no such freedom. Dr. Lamerson, you just said you believe in free will. Well, yes, he has free will, but he's not free not to do what he does. He's not even free not to desire what he desires or to think what he thinks. It's all been decreed. That's right.
SPEAKER 02 :
What they're ultimately saying is they've redefined free will instead of it meaning what we all think of when we think of free will, the ability to do otherwise. In other words, if I accepted the gospel, I could have rejected the gospel, or if I rejected the gospel, I could have accepted the gospel. That's what we think of when we think free will. What the Calvinist has done, they've redefined it to mean doing what you want to do. And so if you do what you want, then that's considered to be free, and thus you're responsible for it. But the underlying presumption there is how do you want what you want? Well, your desires are decreed by God. In other words, God ultimately changes your nature to either make you want to receive the gospel or not. leaves your nature in the fallen condition, which he also decreed, by the way, to only reject the gospel. And so ultimately it's just determinism kind of clouded with an affirmation of a semi-freedom of the will, but it's not real freedom.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so really they've just punted from a free will to a free want, but like you just said, they believe that God has decreed their wants. And they could not, no person could want other than how they were decreed to want according to their theology. So compatibilist, also the term libertarian free will, to me these are like doubly redundant because your will is your ability to decide, and a free will is just sort of redundantly telling you what your will is, and to have libertarian free will That's doubly redundant, and we only have to do that because people are not being forthright about what they actually believe.
SPEAKER 02 :
Even in the political world, you have this happen where the word liberal, for example, becomes a bad word, and it can't get elected, so they change it to progressive or something of that nature. The same thing can happen in the theological world where a particular idea like determinism or something of that nature can become less popular. or denial of free will can become unpopular, and therefore you change the vernacular. And this is one of the reasons that Dr. Allen there at Southwestern says that Calvinists have the same vocabulary, but they have a very different dictionary. And they have defined some words very differently than what we typically think of them as, and sometimes it can get kind of confusing.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, so I'm writing that down, same vocabulary with a different dictionary. So the dispute then that arose between James White, who our audience knows of him real well, and Dr. Ken Wilson, he's newer on the scene to our audience. How did James White become aware of Ken Wilson's thesis?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, we asked him when he was on the program to possibly produce a kind of a layman's summary of the thesis so that more people could have access to it because he knows seven languages and he uses all the languages here in the thesis. And so it's impossible really to read through it unless you happen to know seven languages. And so we just asked him if he might consider producing a smaller volume, more of a summary for layman. And he did that within a few months, in fact.
SPEAKER 03 :
So that book, The Foundation of Augustinian Calvinism, that came after you interviewed Dr. Wilson?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we requested that he do that, and he was gracious enough to take his time and to publish that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow, thanks for doing that. That's going to be a huge resource for the body of Christ to find out where this popular theology, where and how it originated.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and his thesis is really not brand new information. Obviously, he quotes from a lot of other scholars, Augustinian scholars, who say virtually the same thing with regard to the transition. I think what he's bringing new to the table is that this transition didn't happen earlier as some scholars used to think. It actually happened during the Pelagius controversy, because some people try to argue that it's when he really began to study Romans that he transferred to this more compatibilistic, non-free-free will. But the truth is, it's not actually until later in his life that he really changed over when he was beginning to debate Pelagius.
SPEAKER 03 :
I don't recall at what point in his writing career Augustine wrote Confessions, and I read that decades ago. We recently took a quote from that and put it on our website at kgov.com slash Augustine or Augustine. And in there, he says, I mean, he admits to me it's the biggest confession in confessions. He says whenever he finds a difficulty in the Bible, especially in Paul's epistles, basically he says, I read them in light of Plato. I realized that whatever truth I had read in the Platonist, that's what I find in the Bible. And then he goes on to emphasize a Platonic philosophical claim. So I don't know, perhaps you do, Dr. Flowers, how early or late did Augustine write Confessions? But at least at that point, he was already looking to Greek philosophy for aid in interpreting the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Dr. Wilson suspects that he did not really transition his views until around 412, which would probably be after his writing of the Confessions. But still, he was a philosopher primarily. I mean, that's not to say he didn't do theological work. It's just prior to becoming a Christian, he was in the philosophical world. He was influenced by, as you already mentioned, Neoplatonic views, Stoicism, and then Manichaeanism for a good 10 years of his life. And they are philosophically more deterministic. Obviously, there's a lot of difference between even those three groups and very different than what we would know as Calvinism today. And so we're not trying to say that he brought in all of the weird Gnostic perspectives. We're just saying that the determinism within his philosophical training influenced how he interpreted Paul. And therefore, he introduced within the church for the very first time a more Calvinistic or compatibilistic view. reading of Romans 9 and other texts such as Ephesians 1 and the others that are hotly debated today.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow. So previously, more than a decade ago, we did a program. We've been on the air for 29 years, five days a week. We did a program based on the writings of Marston Forster, and they went through the first 300 years of the early church Christian writings. And they demonstrated, and we go through so many of the quotes on that program, and it's right online at kgov.com slash 300, that the early Christian leaders believed that human beings had a functional will and could respond freely or not to God's offer of salvation. And there was no such doctrine, nothing like irresistible grace, where God had to impose belief on someone. Right. When I listened to you and Dr. Ken Wilson in this dispute with James White, I was really excited to hear that really, for the most part, it's the first four centuries where the church was teaching, clearly teaching with one voice, free will.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's correct. And it's interesting you mentioned Marston and Forrester's work. I have it sitting right here next to me, God's Strategy in Human History, a great work. But the interesting thing about this is that you don't have to even look to scholars like Forrester and Marston who agree with us theologically. You can actually look at Reformed scholars. There are quotes from, for example, Herman Bavinck, who was a well-known Reformed scholar who explicitly teaches that the early church was believed in the freedom of the will and that they believed that you could accept the proffered grace of God. That's a quote there. They affirmed that you could accept or reject the proffered grace of God. And he even goes on to say the church's teaching did not include a doctrine of absolute predestination. and irresistible grace. And I provide quotes from not only John Calvin, but from Lorraine Bettner and Sam Storms, who is a modern-day theologian who works with John Piper's ministry, and others who are intellectually honest enough to admit what I think James White isn't willing to admit, and that is the first time we see anything even remotely resembling irresistible grace or this total inability from birth concept, it's found in Augustine's work.
SPEAKER 03 :
That video that you produced, and what a great job you did narrating it also, about the dispute between James White and Ken Wilson, it has these quotes from these highly respected Reformed Church historians, and they, beyond any doubt, they confirm Ken Wilson's thesis And Dr. James White, he's just thrashing and desperate, but he's just wrong, but he's clinging to something that I think the information age is spelling the end of an argument for Calvinists. I think they will not be able to maintain any longer... that they have recovered church history, that the early church fathers were teaching what they teach. In fact, they were not. Augustine's writings is what they emphasize in contradiction to the voice of the early church. So the argument isn't really, and Dr. Flowers, I believe I heard you say this in your live broadcast, which, was that on Sunday or Saturday? You did a great...
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you. Yeah, we recorded Friday, and then it came up on Saturday, correct?
SPEAKER 03 :
But this does show that the Calvinists who argue that they're the ones representing the teaching of the early church, that that is a false argument. That's not valid.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's true. And I think what you have to emphasize is how much influence this one person, Augustine, had on the entire church. A lot of people have underestimated this. And so we're not trying to say that Calvinists don't go straight to the Scripture and don't try to interpret the Scripture. We understand that there's influence that has been brought into the church that gives credence to this interpretation versus the original, I think, understanding of the Scriptures. And even R.C. Sproul, who obviously is a well-known Calvinist, he said this. He says, it has been said that all of Western theology is a footnote to the work of Augustine. This is because no other writer, with the exception of the biblical authors, has had more influence on Christendom. When Martin Luther and John Calvin were accused of teaching new doctrine, they pointed to Augustine as an example of one who had taught the things they were teaching. Right. had a huge impact on the direction of Western Christianity.
SPEAKER 03 :
And when that accusation was leveled at them for their predestination, irresistible grace-type teachings, and they said, no, this isn't a new teaching, and they point to Augustine, well, the same accusation then is leveled at Augustine in the 5th century AD. He's the one who introduced the new teaching, and they're just promoting the new teaching. not the original teaching on this topic.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's right. And a lot of people get confused in thinking that Martin Luther and John Calvin or Zwingli are the only ones who really reformed the church. And those are obviously the popular names, but there were others. Prior to Luther, there was men like, for example, Balthasar Hubmeier. who believed like you and I would with regard to soteriology. And he actually even went further than the reformers, believing in religious liberty, that we shouldn't try to convince the atheist or the pagan with sword and fire, but with patience and prayer like Jesus does. Because Jesus wants their salvation. We should be patient with them. like Jesus is. And so there were people like this. And then after the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon, though he started very much more in the camp of Luther with regard to sociology, you see a development in Melanchthon's work in his interpretation of Romans 9, which sounds a lot more like our interpretation of Romans 9 than the current Calvinist. And that's why you see Lutherans kind of go in a different direction than a lot of the Calvinists are today. And so don't mistake the Reformation as only being Calvinistic in its soteriology. I know we call that Reformed theology. But the truth is there were a lot of people involved in the reforming of the church that were not necessarily five-point Calvinists.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and there were practically wars going on between – The Calvinist type and the Arminian type reformers and entire communities and cities were on one side or the other of that dispute hundreds of years ago. Have you had Dr. Michael Brown on your program? We did.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, years ago we did have Dr. Brown on.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, yeah, he's awesome. He's been on this show, and I don't know why this just occurred to me, but we were – We were presenting from Martin Luther's writings his fierce anti-Semitism, his racism, which is absolutely horrific. And it's, of course, a different topic, but it's another reason I have to be disappointed in a man who should have been so great and continued so much that is false and even evil in the teachings of the Church. So could you tell me, do you know how James White found out about this? That part of the story I'm not aware of.
SPEAKER 02 :
According to his own testimony, he just talked about how people were tweeting so much about this new book that Wilson had put out, the smaller version of it, and that he got a copy of that smaller version and began to critique it publicly. And part of the problem with that was that in the preface of the book that he produced, Ken actually anticipated that if scholars wanted to critique this, that they should do so with the scholarly version, not the layman's version, because it's not produced for critique. It's produced for information. And so that's how it started. And he was complaining that it cost $100. And so Ken Wilson, out of his own pocket, because he doesn't own the rights to the book, He bought it and sent it to James so that he could actually critique the scholarly work for himself. That's kind of how the debate began.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, these university-published texts. We just interviewed a theologian trained at Cambridge, now at St. Andrews, Dr. Ryan Mullins. And yeah, and these books, they all cost $100 or so, and the authors get about $1 every time one is sold. So James Why accuses Ken Wilson of not being qualified. to discuss these issues. And that was really bizarre to hear. Can you share with us Ken Wilson's credentials and this disagreement about whether scholars have actually done what Augustine asked them to do? He said, please read my works in order so folks can see how his ideas changed over time. And Ken Wilson has done that. So what's with James White saying Ken Wilson is not qualified?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, this is what ad hominem attacks are. Ad hominem are a way to avoid actually answering the argument. Ad hominem means literally to the man. And so instead of talking about the argument that the person's making, I can discredit the person that's making the argument. And it's really hard to do with a orthopedic hand surgeon who knows seven language who has an Oxford degree. But that doesn't stop James White from trying, at least. I think he knows that's not going to hold much water, which is one of the reasons I think he's spent so many hours, I think 15 over the last month, hours trying to critique Ken Wilson's work. And he does get some arguments in there, but he just doesn't. He sprinkles it with a lot of ad hominem and rhetorical kinds of debate fallacies that you have to kind of weed through in order to find the factual arguments that he's making or the biblical arguments that he's making. And sometimes that's difficult to kind of weed through directly. James is a little bit rough around the edges. I mean, he is an apologist and so he's, he debates for a living. And so that can cause your, your, your skin to get a little tough possibly. And maybe, uh, he'd be a little bit more cantankerous than some of us like, but, um, or it could cause your skin to get a little thin too.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think we see both happening. Uh, The point you're making is good, though, and it's a danger for talk show hosts, too. And for 30 years, I've had to remember when I go home to see my wife and kids, okay, turn off the talk show mode. Don't bring that home. But King David, he was a warrior. He killed people. He did it all the time. Started with Goliath, and then when he perceived he had a problem, he sure saw it backward. But He killed somebody because that's what he was used to doing. And I think you're making a very good point about James White. You debate everybody, you fight all the time, and it's difficult to remember where the boundaries should be of polite, civil, respectful disagreement.
SPEAKER 02 :
He often accuses me of being imbalanced because I don't debate other world religions. And I would just push back and just say, could it be that imbalance could also come from debating too much and not being involved in evangelism as my major livelihood, my career is as a director of evangelism for Texas Baptists. And so I don't spend my livelihood or my work debating other Christians or other worldviews. I spend my livelihood debating. You know, sharing the gospel and doing evangelism. And that, I think, brings a proper balance to how we should address these issues.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is a weird one. So if you haven't debated Zoroastrianism, you're not qualified really to have what? A ministry? I don't know.
SPEAKER 02 :
It's more of the ad hominem approach where I can focus on Leighton's shortcomings versus Leighton's arguments. And this is when we just push back and say, okay, if a more qualified person made the same argument, how would you answer it then? Because you're avoiding the argument.
SPEAKER 03 :
I'm thrilled that you mentioned you have Morstan and Forster's book there, God's Strategy in Human History. I read that back before 1991 was our first radio broadcast, so back in the 80s. And they note in there, I'd love to read this quote from Oxford professor of historical theology, Alistair McGrath. And this is exactly what you have been teaching, and I wouldn't be surprised if you have quoted this, but the pre-Augustinian theological tradition. So what Christian leaders and writers believed and taught before Augustine. The pre-Augustinian theological tradition is practically of one voice in asserting the freedom of the human will And Dr. Flowers, he's an Augustinian sympathizer, Alistair McGrath, but he recognizes that Augustine taught something different than the Christian church did for the centuries before him.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, Ken Wilson quotes over 80 scholars, none of which would consider themselves theologically necessarily in our camp. He purposely goes for scholars who are outside his tradition and outside his camp so that they can't – in other words, you can't blame it on bias. And James White has quoted how many scholars in support of what he's saying? Zero. Zero. And how many scholars from the opposite camp?
SPEAKER 03 :
Zero. When you have testimony contrary to interest, that tends to be the most reliable testimony. No matter what discipline you're in, if you're evaluating scientific data or it's a criminal case or historically or theologically, testimony contrary to interest is usually the most honest observation. And when you have a multitude of Calvinist-leaning, reformed theologians historians saying well you know what the early church didn't teach what we teach That's authoritative. And I think that even James White, I think, here's a prediction, that James White will stop making this argument anew. I'm not saying he'll do what we have called on him publicly to do, which is apologize to Dr. Wilson and retract his video, that very egregious video. That's what he should do. And I'm not saying he will. I wish he would. I pray that he does. But I'm saying he's not going to introduce this argument publicly. anew, afresh for the rest of his career. That's my prediction.
SPEAKER 02 :
I can imagine if he gets into a live debate that he's going to try to undermine the credentials of Dr. Wilson. I don't think that he has any grounds to do that, and hopefully he'll go that route.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, but my prediction is the bigger question. I don't think he's going to A fresh anew, like on a new day, a new argument, a new opponent. I don't think he's going to make this argument that the early church really agreed with the Calvinists. If you read between the lines and look at the tea leaves. I don't think he's going to continue that argument. Do you think he will? I know we're just guessing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, he's already on record saying that the epistle of Mothates to Diognetus was a monergist. I mean, he said, this is a second-century monergist. He said it really firmly right into the camera. Right, yes. And so he has already made that audacious claim going against all these other scholars that somehow Clement, because he speaks at the number of the lect, and somehow Mothates— which just means disciple in Greek. We don't know who the name of the person is, but that early epistle, that he's claiming both of them seem to have a more Calvinistic reading or belief simply because they refer to a couple of passages. Again, I think he's reading them much like he misreads Paul, and he takes certain passages out of their context to make them say something they don't. And of course, we go over this in several broadcasts there at our website.
SPEAKER 03 :
Dr. Leighton Flowers, your heart clearly is not just in debating theology, but in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. You were named the Director of Evangelism and Apologetics for Texas Baptist. That's just awesome. So there are so many people who are not Baptists. People ask me, Bob— What denomination are you? We're non-denominational for the most part. But I say, but we're closest to Baptist for all the big denominations. But thank you. There are so many people who are not Baptist who greatly appreciate your work. It's really awesome. There's another book, I think a groundbreaking book, written by an assistant professor at Liberty University, Dr. Richard Holland. He's an Arminian. His book is called God, Time, and the Incarnation. I just wanted to let you know about that book. You might be interested to interview Dr. Holland, but I think you will love him and love his work.
SPEAKER 02 :
I'm writing down that name right now. Thank you for the reference.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you're welcome, Dr. Richard Holland. So the best way for listeners to keep in touch with your work, is it Soteriology 101?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, sir. That's the best place to go for this information. Of course, if you're interested more in my work in evangelism, texasbaptist.org, if you want to go there.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Leighton Flowers. What an honor to have you back on.
SPEAKER 02 :
My pleasure. God bless.
SPEAKER 03 :
So we are absolutely out of time. That was a great joy. Our website, kgov.com. You could click on the store and you will find Bible seminars on these very topics. And we teach verse by verse through so many of the books of the Bible. There's so much there to enjoy. As always, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So this is Bob Enyart. May God bless you. Join Colorado Right to Life in the fight against abortion. Head over to CRTL.org to make a donation and abolish abortion in the state of Colorado.
Join us as we dive deep into the climate change debate with expert Mark Morano. Explore the real causes behind the recent wildfires in California and unravel the myths surrounding climate emergencies. With insights from renowned reports and debunking common misconceptions, this episode challenges the mainstream narrative on climate change's role in natural disasters. Mark discusses the political landscape of climate policies, addressing how human influence, rather than climate change, is a major player in natural disasters. He highlights the importance of understanding the actual data trends in climate science and cautions against the alarming headlines often propagated by the media. As we examine the historical context of climate variations, we learn that many claims, like those of the hottest years on record, are statistically manipulated for political gain. Furthermore, we explore President Trump's significant actions regarding the Paris Climate Agreement and the broader implications of climate politics in America. From insights into Trump's enduring commitment to an America-first agenda to the ideological battles within the political sphere, this episode provides a comprehensive look at the stakes involved in the ongoing climate debate.
SPEAKER 05 :
Is climate change responsible for the LA fires? Was it a good idea for President Trump to take us out of the Paris Climate Agreement? Stay tuned for one of the world's foremost experts and best-selling authors on the ongoing climate debate that affects all of us in many ways real and imagined.
SPEAKER 04 :
Intelligent Design and DNA
SPEAKER 03 :
Explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 04 :
Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 05 :
Joining us to answer these questions is none other than Mark Morano of Climate Depot. That's climatedepot.org. Welcome to Real Science Radio, Mr. Morano.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you, Fred. Thank you, Doug. Happy to be here. It's climatedepot.com.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, .com. Gotcha. climatedepot.com. Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, I should have caught that, Mr. Morano, because I've used your material for years. Just a fountainhead of good climate information at ClimateDepot.com. Amazing. So glad to have you on. Thank you. By the way, Mr. Morano has appeared on numerous TV shows, including Fox News, CNN, if that's worth mentioning. He was with Bill Nye, the fake science guy. And so, Mark... Is climate change responsible for the fires in Los Angeles?
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow. Great question. If you ask Governor Newsom, absolutely. He wants to blame this all on climate change. If you ask the mayor of Los Angeles, absolutely. But here's the thing. You know, if you look at even the United Nations is forced to concede, even the National Climate Assessment under Joe Biden's administration was forced to concede that extreme weather events, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, are either no trend or declining trends on climate timescales of 30, 50, 100 years. So you can always find an extreme weather event if you say like Southwest California or the coast of Florida or this region of Australia. Your chance of winning the lottery, very low. The chance of someone somewhere winning the lottery is very high. So what the media does is with all the extreme weather, including wildfires, shows it all like it's happening, unprecedented, we've never seen it, all nonsense. You know, the same way if you believe more and more people are winning the lottery and everyone's winning and you can see the winners that are featured on TV and look at this, we're covering it. In the case of wildfires, among all the extreme weather events I mentioned, they're probably the least climate influenced. And what I mean by that is they are the most man, human policy influenced on terms of the ground. And I'll get to that in a second. But before I get to just that influence of wildfires is that wildfires themselves are in these UN and all these reports with the extreme weather events, wildfires are down dramatically over the last hundred years. You can go back to 1920s, and this is both globally and in the United States. Precipitous drop, like 80% drop in the incidence and severity. One thing we've learned to do is deal with wildfires as we've developed. Now, What happened in California, in general with wildfires, you're dealing with land use, water diversion, trees, forestry practices, shrub management, emergency response, training of emergency response, early warning systems. Nothing I just mentioned has to do with climate change. So what happened in California, and we have it documented now, 45 minutes. delay for the first fire, which was crucial. We have now the top U.S. Geological Survey scientist came out two weeks ago and said this is not a climate change fire. And it was actually citing a study from 2001 showing that almost 100% of the fires are started by humans. So this was not sparked by lightning. And also California had Record precipitation in recent days. So the idea that it was all dried out and just ready to go isn't accurate either. So that's the situation. This is not a climate change fire. It is a man-made disaster. It is man-made by the misplaced priorities of California. Water diversions, blowing up dams, worried about endangered species, trying to return California to a Garden of Eden. We're not going to develop. Any of these lands, we're going to keep them pristine and pre-human settlement. Well, you have a lot of human settlement, and what happens is you end up screwing the humans there.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's so true. There are too many humans settling outside of houses in California. The homeless is a huge problem. And just to prove the point that you just made, in San Diego County just a couple days ago, three fires broke out in the middle of the night. Winds were up in the 60 to 100 mile an hour range, but the firemen put the fires out immediately because San Diego County is not Los Angeles.
SPEAKER 01 :
I was in San Diego and that was actually non-woke run and there was no homeless people. I had a friend, I think it was Santa Monica or somewhere just recently, and they're like, I don't understand the big deal about California. The city was, there were no homeless, there was no graffiti, there was no drug use, there was no one. So I said, what city was it? I looked it up. I don't want to get partisan here, but it's just the idea. It's not a woke Democrat. The entire city council was 100% Republican. The mayor was 100% Republican. And I had people marveling like, well, California is not as bad as I heard. This city was beautiful. You know, it really is a mind virus, this idea of woke. It's not necessarily all Democrats. You have people like Michael Schellenberger, who ran for governor. He was a former Democrat. I mean, it's not I'm not making this partisan. It is an ideology, though.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, it's it's running sane people versus insane people makes a big difference. Absolutely.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, you know, maybe people do cause climate change. You know, wasn't there a Democratic donor that started the Yosemite fire a couple years ago? That's right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. And that was a whole thing they tried to blame on that. It turned out a lot of them are budding eco-terrorists. A lot of them are homeless that start these fires. And you have careless campers and hikers and that as well. But this is just, it's maddening to try to link any kind of climate change. There's so many scientists. I have a whole dissection of a chapter in my book, Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, just on wildfires. There's no there there. And it's amazing to see how desperate they are to blame this On climate change, Justin Trudeau did the same thing when they had the Canadian wildfires in 2003. One thing to understand about California is, and this was in the San Jose Mercury News a couple years ago, California droughts, which they always say, unprecedented droughts, no global droughts, no trend, declining trends. Centuries ago, 300 years ago, California had droughts much, much worse than anything they're experiencing today. So if you just look at anything from a geological perspective, if you go back to the first United Nations climate report, the medieval warm period was much warmer than current temperatures. And there was actually a systematic campaign. I worked for the U.S. Senate Environment Public Works Committee. We had a scientist come testify. that back in the 1990s, they said they basically, UN scientists reached out to each other and said, we have to get rid of the medieval warm period. How can we sell a climate crisis when it was warmer without SUVs and coal plants? And lo and behold, by 2001, they literally went back and erased the past. Now, and they made it so that the medieval war period was erased. And now you just had a flat line and suddenly the 20th century because of mankind's SUVs and our appliances that we went through the roof. This is how they play the game. And think of it like an accounting firm accused of financial fraud. They go, no, no, no. Believe me, we don't need anyone to go to jail. We're not going to dissolve. We hired a new accountant. We redid all the books. We have record profits now. We're doing great. No problem here. Nothing to see. Move along. That's what the UN did with temperature data.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, and you know, that that brings to mind a question I wanted to ask. How is it that 2024 is being sold as the warmest year ever?
SPEAKER 01 :
I have a whole chapter in my book on that. I worked in the U.S. Senate. We dealt with all this firsthand. This is statistical bulls**t. Now, just think for a second. Remember COVID, the case counts? They wanted to get everyone tested and they had all these ridiculous tests that even if you had no symptoms, somehow you were positive. And then, of course, the death rate if you died. We had coroners testifying from Colorado that motorcycle gunshot accident victims were listed as dying from COVID. The same kind of statistics. where they then tie that to mask mandates and lockdowns. We had one professor who actually said it brilliantly. Tying COVID lockdowns or mask mandates to COVID case counts is similar to tying them to phases of the moon. There's just no there there. What they've done in the same topic with the global average temperature. It's based on in part thermometer data, but in part on thermostats that don't exist and filling in the gaps and the statistical averaging, which sort of smooths everything out and they can literally adjust as they want to. Before I answer directly, I just wanted to say with this temperature data, thermometers didn't come on. online basically until 1870, 1880. When was that, historically speaking? That was at the end of the Little Ice Age when the New York Harbor was frozen over, the Thames River was frozen over, we had brutal cold. So thermometers coincidentally went online with a warm-up since the end of the Little Ice Age. So that's an important point to make. What they've done, and they began this around 2005, 2006, around the time of Al Gore's film and the UN report and the whole cap and trade and all that stuff is all weaponized. They've claimed that we've had the hottest year on record. Then we went for like 18 and a half years with no warming whatsoever, according to the data. And that freaked them out. So what did they do then? They did the same thing the UN did. They went back and adjusted the data and said, yeah, global warming pause no longer exists. What they've done with these hottest year declarations, they claim hottest year from year to year difference of hundreds of a degree Fahrenheit. That is within the margin of error for adjustments of tenths of a degree. It's a political way of saying basically the temperature hasn't changed much at all, but we're going to highlight these imperceptible statistical differences and claim it's an unprecedented climate emergency. It's bulls**t. Even the head of NASA, James Hansen, at one point said, these aren't really particularly important, but... scientifically, but they're important politically because the idea is they time them as well to these UN summits. And I just got back in November from Baku, Azerbaijan to the United Nations summit. 23 hours of traveling, by the way, to go. There's only about four dissenters there, four climate skeptics bothered to even show up.
SPEAKER 05 :
Do they cancel your carbon credit card? Do they cut you off?
SPEAKER 01 :
Actually, what they were doing was the first day of the conference, multiple speakers featured calling for the end of meat consumption, global meat taxes. So I did a series of videos that went viral at the UN summit in the restaurants and food court. They were serving hot dogs, chickens, beef, and the lines were huge. They had a vegan booth, and there were two people in it, this huge empty booth. So they weren't even following their own advice about meat consumption. It was a fraud.
SPEAKER 02 :
That's real reporting, Mr. Moreno. I saw that. That was brilliant. That was well done.
SPEAKER 01 :
On the ground, yeah. I've been to 21 out of the last 23 of these UN summits. And I'm going this year is going to be in Belim, Brazil, which is in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. So I may have to get some bug spray. Again, I've been there before for different conferences, and this is, I've done an Amazon documentary. Amazon pre-climate change was the exact same thing. 90% of the forest was intact. They claimed using computer models and all this nonsense, X amount of football fields a minute are disappearing from the Amazon. It's going to disappear. They had all the footage of like bulldozers and the sad animals. I interviewed the environmentalist down there who threw down the travel book saying, bull, this is back in the 90s. Bull. that's not happening and it turns out by 2005 the sting rainforest concert stopped with all the hollywood celebrities it's actually where i first met and interviewed donald trump was at a sting rainforest concert in 19 either 98 or 99 he just went as a new york you know yeah figure it wasn't really involved in the issue but he just showed up and i interviewed him as he's walking in but The gist of it is by 2005, the New York Times reported that the Amazon and rainforest in general were now becoming least endangered because of sustainable forestry practices. They can now log a forest and within five to seven years, you can't distinguish log forest from the original forest and plant and animal species. And because of big reason, people are leaving the jungle, moving to cities, they're going to urban areas. And so the jungle is reverting back. So that whole scare campaign that went for decades, faded away and was replaced in mass by climate change.
SPEAKER 05 :
So speaking of Trump, what's your thoughts on his withdrawal of the US from the Paris Climate Agreement?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, interesting. It's the greatest thing he could do, but he's got to do more than he did last time. What I don't want to see is a yin-yang. From Obama, Trump. Trump, Biden. Biden, Trump. We can't keep doing that. So there's a way out for this. First of all, it's fantastic. You know why you know it's good? Big oil. People always say, oh, I'm funded by big oil. My answer is, what oil company is going to want to fund me? I trash ExxonMobil. I trash all of the big ones because they're all in on the climate agenda. They all want carbon capture. They want government subsidies. Just today, it was Bloomberg. I think it was Reuters. News came out. All of the big oil is upset that Trump's pulling us out of the U.N.-Paris agreement. Why? Because they want a seat at the table. Yeah, no, the table needs to be upended. Oh, I don't want to sit at the table. But this just goes to show you, you know what else big oil wants? I went to the American Petroleum Institute meeting last week just as a... freak show to watch it and people, oh, you're an oil lobbyist. Believe me, they wouldn't give me a cent. I was actually treated rudely. People who I'd known for decades gave me like the brush off because they know I'm against their agenda. But their vice president of operations told me, well, we don't want a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, the greatest boondoggle in U.S. spending history. We need surgical repeals. Why? Because they're going to suck down the government teat of carbon capture. So, and of course, when Donald Trump 1.0, his first term, had Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, first action is to go up to the Arctic and sign a UN climate declaration. He's the one that urged Trump to stay in the UN Paris Agreement back then, and Trump got out. What Trump needs to do is, he's already withdrawn formally, but he needs now to submit the UN Paris Agreement to the United States Senate as a treaty. It should be rejected, and even the Democrats will have to reject it because it's not good for America. They've never been tested. And then it gets kicked out of the system. The next president can't just put us back in. They're going to have to have a Senate vote. This will get us out of the mess that the pathetic Republican President George H.W. Bush got us into in September 1992 when he flew down to the Rio Earth Summit a month or two months before losing to Bill Clinton. So the Republican Party would appear green and he signed the Rio Earth Summit Treaty, which led to the Change Network, which led to sustainable development. All of this usually starts with bad Republicans. And that's kind of redundant because other than Trump, they're pretty much all bad Republicans. Sorry. Don't expect anything from Speaker Johnson. He's a pathetic uniparty toady. If he wants to be the boy for Donald Trump and just take orders. Great. We'll take him. But don't let him off any kind of a leash. He will go straight uniparty every single time.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, and he's already proven that. Thank you for pointing that out.
SPEAKER 01 :
But I don't know about replacing him because you're going to replace him with the same crap anyway. If you can control the guy, I guess he can stay. Let's put it that way.
SPEAKER 02 :
If anyone can, probably Donald Trump can now. So since... I remember with Obama, the seas were supposed to recede and the temperatures were supposed to decline. And somehow that did not happen. But somehow nobody blames Obama for that. Oddly enough, it still goes on. So can we expect or let me just put it this way. Do you expect. that Donald Trump actually has some sincere beliefs about the climate bamboozle and that he'll do something solid to disassemble it.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, absolutely. You can go back to the night. I think it was 1989 when he was on Oprah Winfrey. The core values of Donald Trump have always been America first against globalism. against this idea that we are going to be beholden to international bureaucrats. And the climate agenda just screams at Donald Trump's strengths. He does not want to be beholden to the World Health Organization, which declares climate change an existential threat to the World Economic Forum, to the United Nations. And he has every action he's taking is dismantling it. I'm just looking for permanence this time. He's got to have make it so that it's extremely difficult for the next president, should they be Republican or Democrat, to try to get us back into this. And that was the failing first time around Donald Trump's first term. He just didn't go far enough. He pulled us out of U.N. by the time we actually formally got out. There was like two weeks left or maybe there was like six weeks left. in his presidency. This time, again, he's got to do stuff with permanence, and it's hard. And I like what he's doing, you know, with trying to cut budgets, but, you know, a Republican Congress, I'd say last time around, Donald Trump had a one-third cut in the EPA budget. The first time he submitted it, it was dead on arrival in the Republican Congress. So the real problem Donald Trump's going to face is the uniparty, and it's Republicans and Democrats who don't want to, and I'll even go a shocking step further. And I have to be careful how I say this, but his three picks in climate energy, Chris Wright, who's an awesome CEO of Liberty Energy from Colorado for Energy Department, Doug Burgum for Interior, and Lee Zeldin for EPA. All three, under Senate questioning, caved and gave into the narrative of climate change. You know, climate's a problem. We need a global solution. And it was vomit-inspiring. And why? Because if we're going to defeat this climate scam once and for all, you've got to be able to go to the country club. You've got to be able to go to the cocktail parties. You've got to be able to go to the PTA meetings. You've got to be able to say it in school, at university. You've got to be able to say it in the grocery store aisles. You can't pay lip service because that means you're still supporting it intellectually and morally and everything else if you're afraid to say it. Which tells me, not so much Chris Wright, but Doug Burgum, personal friend of Bill Gates. Bill Gates was his first campaign contribution. He's a former Microsoft executive. He's praised Bill Gates' work publicly. He's all in on net zero. He loves carbon capture from North Dakota where he's a governor. Lee Zeldin is a very weak Republican on climate, New York Republican. He's on footage, a film, I believe it was Showtime, it's called Years of Living Dangerously, as caving in to the climate activists on camera in his office and joining the Republicans Coalition Climate Solutions Club. I'm not saying they won't work out, but what I'm saying is they have not renounced their past. They're very politically expedient. and they're going along right now and they're afraid they're thinking of their future viability within the uniparty that's what i say and that worries me because that tells me right off the bat epa and interior are not going to be that activist they're going to do the very minimum which is what you would expect among uniparty under trump and it brings me back to my main thesis is this is a time of great caution we should be celebrating and i am but I was a volunteer in Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980. My older brother worked on the campaign inaugural committee, and I would volunteer every Saturday doing Governor Reagan's audio clips. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. Anyway, throughout the 80s, I witnessed all these great allies of Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and it turned out none of them were conservative. None of them were like Ronald Reagan. They all proved themselves to be establishment, uniparty members. We are witnessing potentially that now. I've already mentioned three cabinet members, but I'll even go so far as to say J.D. Vance has to be watched. Five years ago, he was all in on the climate scam. He was all in on solar wind subsidies. He called Donald Trump Hitler not that long ago. Now, hey, he's all with it because it's popular and it raises money and everyone's happy. Vivek Ramaswamy, same way. I don't know if I trust him. Elon Musk, I've never really trusted, but I appreciate what he's done for free speech. So I'm just saying to people, Don't let the blinders take over. Donald Trump, I believe we can trust. Past that, I'm struggling to give you names of who we can trust.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, well, I'm encouraged to hear that we can trust Donald Trump to be against the climate hysteria.
SPEAKER 01 :
because he's been assassination attempts, because he's been FBI raids, because he's been threatened with jail. I truly believe the man's sincere. You can see it in the change in his behavior. He seems like he's matured and grown up. He's not the same Donald Trump as even six months ago. He just seems so commanding and presidential. It's like, wow. I mean, this is I like this new Donald Trump.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. So where, you know, this climate hysteria.
SPEAKER 01 :
Sorry, I got off track on a lot of different topics there. Oh, no problem. Good stuff.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. So, you know, you get this climate brainwashing that's happened. They start with our youth. Do you have any recommendations or anything we can do about it? Because, you know, everybody I know who's like under the age of 30 is like, oh, yeah, climate change. We've got to do something about it. You hear from everybody.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. And that's go back to his three top climate energy picks. Now you have your liberal professor, your second-grade teacher. Well, even Trump's nominees say climate's a problem that needs a global solution, and they're not deniers. So, of course we're going to teach the kids, even the Trump. That's what I'm saying. It's so corrosive to have these guys at the top of their game, terrified to stand up to the climate narrative. Anyway, having said all that, with kids. They're indoctrinated from kindergarten through college, and it's unbelievable insidious. It's permeated in the textbooks. It's permeated in all the Hollywood and the videos. It's permeated in the whole teen online culture, although there's been a great rise in recent skepticism on Instagram and these different social media platforms that TikTok and other things that kids can watch. So I think... It's shown that when you have a strong leader like Donald Trump, first of all, that calls it climate change scam and says it was invented to benefit China and we have all this fun. It has a huge impact. There was this whole idea that the young, it's been overstated, first of all, the impact of all that propaganda, because at some point you just tune it out. The exit polling showed that the climate youth that they were expecting to show up didn't show up for Kamala Harris. And that actually among that age group, it split pretty evenly. So there is no brainwashed, at least let me rephrase it. The extent of the brainwashed youth movement was nowhere near as much as we had feared or the other side had hoped because youth broke. And I think a lot of that was the UFC and Dana White and Joe Rogan getting a lot of the males and young men involved in the campaign. It's a great question. And I think parents, that's why I wrote the book, Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change. It's an A to Z compendium. And I actually have a whole chapter devoted to that. But there's also groups out there now that are doing alternative textbooks, or I shouldn't say textbook. They're alternative curriculum for parents, particularly for private school, homeschool, that stuff. It's not going to fly in almost every public school. Teachers unions aren't going to allow anything that challenges that. I've testified at the Common Core curriculums. In different states, most notably West Virginia, where they were going to say there's no dissent. We actually had small victories there where the state of West Virginia would only allow core curriculum to teach certain things and ban some other stuff they considered propaganda. So the biggest thing is parents have to be engaged in the education of their kids and scour those textbooks because they're usually just absolute drivel.
SPEAKER 05 :
I've heard you recommend. The best thing to do is take them out of the public schools.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, you can. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I mean, not anyone can afford private school. It's not practical always to do homeschooling, but it's.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I don't let anybody off that easy. No, my wife came from Japan. She didn't even speak English. We homeschooled all three of our kids. Not nearly as hard. You have no excuse to put your kids in the government schools. I'm sorry. I don't let anyone get by with that. And so and Mr. Moreno, I want to I appreciate the fact that you've given us. A yardstick. How can we judge this? And a stick. We need a yardstick and we need a stick and we need to keep these people in line. It's a scam. It's hysteria. It's communism dressed up in green. That's all. And the fact that we have a president that's willing to say that, hopefully that's a step in the right direction that we finally have some bureaucrats who he can drag along with him. And we appreciate you helping us understand how to recognize if what's happening is real or not.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, let me just say final thing is I wrote the book, The Great Reset, Global Leaks and the Permanent Lockdown. That was just two years ago, just came out. And the gist of it is this is the global community trying to ration our energy, ration our foods production. They're coming after particularly meat, high yield agriculture. They want to ration it, raise the price. due to the climate, and John Kerry said it was coming here to the U.S. Donald Trump stopped that. And then also our freedom of movement, France banning short-haul flights, CNN proposing carbon passports for our travel, the ban on gas-powered cars. This was the great reset. Food, transportation, energy, and of course our free speech. Donald Trump's election, it could be the most consequential election in our lifetime, surpassing Ronald Reagan or whatever, if you're on the left, maybe you were enamored with Bill Clinton or Obama. This is huge because we are fighting back on all of those fronts, particularly just free speech alone and national sovereignty. And it's unbelievable. I expect a cultural change. And that's what was disappointing about the three picks not standing up on climate. But within a couple of years, look at the 1970s versus 1980s and what Reagan was able to usher in. I think we're seeing the end of. Transgender cult, the critical race theory, diversity, equity, inclusion, and hopefully the climate as well. Culturally, I mean, I'm watching Saturday Night Live is doing unbelievable skits, making fun. They're doing lesbian jokes about Rachel Maddow. I mean, I don't think you would have seen that a month ago or two months ago. Stalking stuff. That's what I mean by cultural stuff. We might actually return to a culture that appreciates free speech and cancel culture can go away. So this is just huge is all I can say is Donald Trump's presidency. Let's just hope he continues to success and the pace at which he's been going. It's phenomenal.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, thank you for mentioning The Great Reset. I highly recommend that book to everybody. You've got quite a few books that really point to this issue of climate change hysteria, man-made climate change, and just how important it is for our listeners who are not aware of this. This is serious stuff. They want to control the steak dinner you have. Down in Florida, if you want to go on vacation, all of these things, they're a totalitarian worldview thing. And they want to control our lives and all in the name of climate change, man-made climate change that is based on a lot of fake science. You know, Mark, I'd love to have you on again sometime in the future. We can go into a little bit more detail on the science behind all of this. But I thought it was important for our listeners to find out just how serious this issue is. and how important it is to fight climate change. And Mark, you just don't know how greatly I appreciate what you've done. You're a tireless warrior for this. And now you've come on to our show, shared with our audience what's going on. And for decades now, you've been fighting this fake science of man-made climate change.
SPEAKER 01 :
So thank you very much. Thank you, Fred. Thank you, Doug. Thanks a lot.
SPEAKER 02 :
Absolutely. We'll keep in touch, Mr. Moreno. God bless you.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right.
SPEAKER 02 :
I'd love to come back.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thanks.
SPEAKER 05 :
All righty, so for Mark Burano and my co-host Doug McBurney, I'm Fred Williams of Real Science Radio. May God bless you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Can't explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
In this engaging installment of Theology Thursday, Pastor Bob Enyart challenges listeners to discern the pervasive clichés that have crept into Christian teaching. The conversation shifts toward understanding the rightful place of judgment and forgiveness in our lives as believers. With a focus on cultivating meaningful relationships and spiritual growth, this episode encourages you to reflect on the key teachings of Christianity and how they apply to our contemporary church environment.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I'm Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
SPEAKER 01 :
Please turn to the epistle to the Hebrews chapter 5 verse 12. Now as we go on assuming we get into the next chapter before the end of this lesson will introduce the subject of eternal security it's called the endurance, perseverance of the saints, whether or not you could lose your salvation. That, of course, is a topic that interests many Christians. It's very controversial. At Denver Bible Church, we teach that under the law, you had to endure to the end to be saved, but under grace, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. So that there are many Bible verses that teach both. Some people think, well, the Bible would only teach one. Well, there are two covenants for God's two covenant peoples, and God teaches different things for his different covenant peoples. So we think that that's the reason why so many people have their proof texts showing, say, you can lose your salvation, and then their problem texts, the ones that seem to say you can't, and then they have to fight one set or the other. We think both sets are true. that'll come up in a little bit now I'd like to reread the last few verses were were up to Hebrews 512 but to give us the context speaking of Jesus in verse 9 having been perfected and we saw last week that Plato was horribly wrong when he claimed, without any kind of defense, he just asserted that anything perfect cannot change, and one of the many examples you can give to refute that is the baby Jesus, the holy child. As with any baby, Jesus changed enormously, certainly his physical body, and he was perfect. Adam and Eve were perfect. The Garden of Eden was perfect, yet they changed tremendously. So, having been perfected, he, Jesus, became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. called by God as high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. And notice that to all who obey him. We'll get into that idea as we get into chapter 6 with the question of eternal security. Is it possible to lose your salvation? What if someone puts their trust in Christ, becomes identified with him as a member of the body of Christ, and then stops obeying him? What happens then? verse 11, of whom, speaking of Melchizedek, of whom we have much to say, and we'll get to that in chapter 7, and hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. So this is where we left off last week, and that's quite an insult, right? You wouldn't want that said of you. I wouldn't want it said of me, but easily it could be said of us. It's so common that that human beings become dull of hearing. Now, what might be a symptom of someone who has become dull of hearing? How do you know? How do you know if you or I, if we are dull of hearing? Well, one symptom would be if you notice yourself or someone else putting one ear towards something, sort of half paying attention, half and then concluding that, well, that's too confusing, or criticizing the speaker instead of my own inattention. Oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. That's too confusing. It's whatever. That's an example or a symptom of being dull of hearing. It's like, please, don't bore me any further. But what's being presented might be important, true, even fascinating but it could come across as boring if somebody's not investing themselves in trying to understand what's being said but now what if something really is boring or false or unimportant and somebody's going on and on and on about something that's not important well of course that happens and so then when listeners tune out it's the fault of the speaker of course when his or her message is boring or unimportant, and it's also good that the listeners tune out if the material is false. If it's just downright false, you tune in to the radio, or you pop in a teaching tape or a podcast, and you're listening, and you could discern that what's being said is not true, well, then it might... dull your hearing very quickly, and that'd be the fault of the speaker. So as with all conflicts, there are two sides to the matter. In this case, though, here in Hebrews, it is the hearers that are being reprimanded, appropriately so, we know, because this is part of God's Word, and God's Word is inspired, so they're at fault. I think in the days that we live in, when we could be intensely entertained at any moment. Isn't that true? At any moment, merely by pushing a button on a remote control or sliding in a DVD or turning on a podcast, entertainment easily could hit us like in a maximum way because it's all recorded and because of technology. And so it's easy to get addicted to things that produce adrenaline, whereas a Bible study probably doesn't produce as much adrenaline as, say, a Tolkien story made for a major motion picture. There's a huge difference. And you could entertain yourself with the one and so end up being lax on the other. So... we need to pray and ask god for the strength to focus on what is important and especially on what is important to him and then also to have healthy relationships with family and friends lord god help me to focus on what is important to those i love because if i'm only interested in what's important to me then i'm not going to have good relationships And I won't have a good relationship with God if I'm only interested in what's important to me. So March for Life is coming up. Somebody's going to pray for good weather. There's bad weather. Then they're upset. Their prayer didn't work. Why did God let it rain on our event? And so they're focusing on what's important to them and not to others. That is especially to God. Regarding being dull of hearing, sometimes the Apostle Paul, we can tell from reading the New Testament and others in the Bible, undoubtedly even the Lord, Paul would give Bible studies that lasted for hours. Remember in Acts, there was a guy named Eutychus. And he was listening in an upper window. The home was full. And Paul was going on and on. He's getting ready to leave the next day. So he doesn't want to leave any moment to waste. So he's going to keep teaching as much as he can. So it's midnight now. The guy falls asleep, falls out of the window, down, and to his death, gets killed. So, as we've often said, if there are no casualties, it's not a Bible study. That story is in Acts chapter 20. And you read it, and you see Paul speaks to midnight. Here's this crisis. Paul then, with God empowering him, restores this man to life. And then he continues talking until daybreak. So... we need to focus focus on the text focus on what's important focus on the strategy focus on our relationships so that we can apply the mind that God has given us to make wise decisions and take proper actions so verse 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers. Now, who ought to be teachers? Only a few people? No, those who are reading this, if they've been believers for a while, then they ought to be teachers. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God. And you have come to need milk and not solid food. So everyone should become a teacher eventually. The purpose of being nurtured spiritually, intellectually, is not just to fill up, but then to share what we've learned with other people. Friday night, some of us went to Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship, and Peter here was there, and he brought his friends, telling them about what's important, so that we receive not only from God for our own edification, but then we can impart to others what we've learned. And one of the things, we heard a creationist expert on astronomy speak about planets, and And it was to the glory of God. It was very exciting. And so it's so important not to view our own edification as an end in and of itself. But I learn so that I can share with others the truth about the Lord. So because those reading this, the book of Hebrews, because they have not learned They need to start over again with the basics. But that's sad for these people because they should be mature by now. And they have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone, verse 13, for everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. So there is something beautiful about coming back to the foot of the cross. We become Christians at that moment when we realize that Jesus Christ is real. He died on the cross. He loves us. He was raised from the dead so we could have eternal life if only we trust in him. And then we could get busy with our lives and even with Christian ministry and lose that first love. So there is a real fundamental way in which returning to the basics is so important when it involves our relationship. Return to your first love, as Jesus said in the book of Revelation to some believers who had left their first love. So return to your first love. But when it comes to matters of theology, doctrine, the scriptures, it's sad if we've gone five years, 10, 20, 30, and really don't know much. Then that's unfortunate. Is everyone called to be a theologian? No, definitely not. And there are people who are theologians, they study Greek and Hebrew, they study theology, and a theologian might be a man or a woman, but either way, they might be married to a spouse who's busy providing, earning a living, or taking care of the kids, or taking care of the house. And so the spouse is not going to be able to take the time to become proficient at the various intricacies of doctrine when that's not their profession. And so in a body that As with the body of Christ, there are many members. The members have different gifts. But it doesn't mean, therefore, that, well, I don't need to know about the Bible because I'm not called to be a theologian. That would be an overreaction in a bad direction. And so some of us easily get all head knowledge, and our Christian life is not experiential, it's only head knowledge. Others have intense experiential Christian living, but not the knowledge of the Word of God. So both are errors. And we ask God to help us to be whole and well-rounded, to live the Christian life, to experience it, that our emotions themselves might be honoring to God. I'm not self-indulgent. I don't get carried away. But I honor God in the way I have empathy for other people, in the way I've learned to love Him, the way I love my kids and my family, my friends. So I serve God with my emotions also, not only my actions, not only my mind, but as a whole person. And so we need to be able to become spiritually mature, including and understanding God's word, regardless of what part of the body of Christ we're in or that we make up. But that doesn't mean that one person will be as proficient as another. Of course not. Now, This here was a sad state of affairs, that these believers were so immature that the analogy is made to an infant who cannot eat solid food, but they can only drink milk, that's it. So then today, if they were that bad then, I think you can make a case that we're worse off today. that today forget milk the body of Christ is lactose intolerant they can't handle the milk and I'll give some examples we could think of Christian cliches which are only popular because we are lactose intolerant as a body we cannot handle even the simple truths as a result While the Bible is set aside, there are cliches that are paramount, that no one dare challenge any of the cliches. And they are, don't judge anyone ever at any time for any reason. Even though Jesus said, don't judge you hypocrite, first stop committing the same sin, then you can judge your neighbor. Then you can judge your brother. But we stop where Hillary Clinton stops. Don't judge. That's it. As though we're an absolute. So that's an example of being lactose intolerant. There's an entire book in the Bible called Judges. What are the judges? The evil people? No. They're the good people. Jesus commanded us to judge with righteous judgment. Paul says we are going to judge on Judgment Day. We'll judge the angels, the fallen angels. We will judge the world. Christ commits judgment into the hands of the saints. And he says, if we're going to judge angels in the world, shouldn't we be able to judge even the least matters? I'm embarrassed about you guys, he writes to the Corinthians, because you're not judging. Start judging. We have the mind of Christ. He who is spiritual judges all things. So that's the other side of the coin. And that's the side that's ignored because the body has become lactose intolerant. If you think you can't judge people selling drugs to kids on a playground, well then you're pretty much setting yourself up to be thwarted in any kind of spiritual or emotional growth. You're not gonna be able to grow if you think you can't judge. And it set yourself up for being a hypocrite because in my perspective, the most judgmental Christians are the ones who say they can't judge. Intensely judgmental. Not against homosexuals or child killers, but against those who would rebuke homosexuals and child killers and atheists and so on. Another of the clichés is to forgive everyone. That forgiveness is an absolute. And if that were true, that means that repentance is superfluous. It's not necessary. And if we forgive everyone, we're teaching the world that God will forgive everyone without repentance. Whereas Jesus said, if someone sins against you, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, Luke 17.3. If he repents. So we could throw that out too, because that doesn't fit in with the cliche that the body of Christ has accepted, because we've set aside the Bible for these easy, super-spiritual rules that which contradict the scriptures, but they make us feel good. Sort of makes us feel self-righteous. Takes me out of the battle. Hey, I can't judge anybody. Besides, I forgive them anyway. Well, what do you forgive them for? You can only forgive someone that you've judged to be wrong. So the cliches tend to contradict themselves. Does that make sense? How can you forgive someone if you don't think they're wrong? And how could you think they're wrong if you can't judge them? So judge not and forgive everyone is a contradict, where truth doesn't contradict. Truth is non-contradictory. All sins are equal. That's a cliche. Makes it easy, right? If somebody is apathetic about killing unborn children, and then, hey, that's the same as stealing a Tic-Tac. And so what's the difference, really? And I hear that kind of thing on Christian radio. So all sins are equal. That's what the Bible says, right? The Bible says, all sins are equal, thus saith the Lord. No. Jesus said some people have the greater sin. In fact, that guy there, he has a lesser sin than these guys, because to whom much is given, they're more accountable. And so you have a whole... a whole chunk of the teaching of the Bible that shows that some sins are far more grievous to God than other sins. That's why there's a judgment day. Judgment day is not to determine who's going to go to heaven, who's going to go to hell. That's determined when somebody dies. And when they die, then they're separated. Those who go to hell, they die and they go to Sheol, to Hades. The believer dies and he goes to be with the Lord. So Judgment Day is not to decide your eternal residence, but Judgment Day, Jesus said, some will be punished intensely, others will be punished less so, and it will depend on many factors. So if you sin and you're not forgiven by Christ, you'll suffer for that sin. But what if you teach others to commit the same sin you did? Then you'll suffer worse. And these are all fundamental principles of scripture that are contradicted by the cliches. But the cliches go unchallenged. And one reason is because they take the Christians out of the spiritual battle. And the Christians no longer are a challenge. So if you have a large church, and the church is sort of uninvested from the battle that's raging around it, for example, with our godless public schools, So giving your child a godless education, I believe, is inherently sinful. It's inherently wrong. So you have a big church, a megachurch, thousands of members. How many send their kids to public schools? Well, a lot. So if the pastor stands up and says it's a sin to send your kids to public school, then what happens? Those people all leave, and then you can't meet your budget, and you have 20 people on staff and property, eight acres and building. So what happens is the kind of thing that goes for doctrine today is really superficial cliches that are false. And all sins are equal, so it really doesn't matter. Even if it's wrong to put your kids in public school, who are you to judge and forgive everyone? So what does it matter? And pretty soon, the only thing that matters is tithing, putting it in, but not taking it out. And if you're not supposed to judge, then when the plate comes by and you took out, would the church that says don't judge, would they somehow all of a sudden find a backbone and be very critical? Say, we're not going to tolerate that. Well, why not? Don't judge. Forgive. So you can very quickly find out where people stand when it comes to money quite often. Sort of follow the money. Don't call anyone a fool. The Bible does frequently. Jesus, David, Paul, they call people fools. But you can't call anybody a fool. That's more important than do not commit adultery. More important. Hate the sin, love the sinner. We paraphrase that, hate the gin, love the dinner. When God sends people to hell for all of eternity, is he sending their sin or is he sending the sinner? Who goes to hell? Is it the sinner or the sinner? It's the sinner. It's not their skin that gets judged. It's not the finger that pulls the trigger that kills an innocent person. It's not the action that gets judged. It's the sinner. And so hate the sin, love the sinner. Of course, God loves the whole world. But he also hates those who shed innocent blood. He hates those who sow dissension unnecessarily. So God can hate and love at the same time, and we can too. We can hate the person who kills the innocent, but love them enough to share with them that they need God, and Jesus Christ will forgive them. So you could do both. You could hate the perversion, the homosexual who is trying to undermine the truth of God, but love him enough to share the gospel with him. You could do both. And the Bible calls on us to do both. that God has a plan for your life. So, you know, what car do I have to buy? What job do I take? Who do I marry? So, God told me to marry this person, and everybody's so happy, and then a year later, there's a divorce. And what happened? God told me to divorce this person? No, it's just we make claims and we attribute our own decisions to God as though God is the one who got me into this mess. And why? And that's common in prison if you have a jail ministry. Everybody who's in jail because of their own sin and decisions and actions say, why did God do this to me? God has a plan for my life. This is part of his plan for me. Why? Why? Why does he have nicer plans for other people and my life is miserable? You see how it's a victim mentality. It's not biblical. God's plan for our lives is very general. It's an umbrella plan. It is that we would love him, serve him, become conformed to the image of Christ, love and serve our family and our friends. That's God's plan for my life. Now, which car I buy, the myriad of decisions I make day to day, every year, God is not micromanaging my life. As our kids become adults, we don't want them to call us and ask every decision they make, should I do this? Should I do this? Should I do that? What should I do on every decision? Because then they would never grow up and mature. So God, he doesn't want to make every decision for us. He's given us a mind, faculties, so that if we honor him, we could make decisions that are good. They don't have to be the perfect decision. Like, am I hiring the perfect person? That's no such thing. That's a make-believe thing. Am I marrying the perfect person? Am I buying the perfect car? That's all make-believe. Right? God gave Adam Eve, and they fell into terrible sin. So, what? If God would have given Adam someone else, then... It's not God, if only God will show me the right person to marry, then my life will be great. That's false. There's only one person for me to marry in God's perfect plan. If I find that person, then everything will be great. Is that true? Well, what if you find the wrong person? You marry, some guy marries the wrong woman, right? She was supposed to marry another guy. Now that poor slob, his life is ruined. Because some other guy he never even met married a woman he never met that he was supposed to marry. So now he's stuck with second best. Isn't that absurd? And then just within a few iterations of that, everyone in the world has married the wrong person, everybody. But if we have no free will, if we have no will, and everybody has to marry whoever God picked, then God is picking all these people and it's a catastrophe because divorce is epidemic. So all these superstitious ways of trying to simplify the Christian life, they're all cliches that are so popular because we're lactose intolerant. The body of Christ can no longer even handle the milk. Forget the meat, we can't handle the milk. So it's easier to get someone who's an unbeliever and bring them to the Lord and then build them up than it is to take a Christian who's already been ruined by 20 years of teaching and try to help them to grow. If they want to grow on their own and come along, great, but you can't force feed to someone who's an adult. God does not change in any way. The utter immutability, of course, that's not true. God the Son humbled himself, became flesh, took on the sin of the world. The Father poured out his wrath on the Son. All those were terrible changes, important changes, but terrible. God became nicer in the New Testament. Old Testament, he was mean. New Testament, he's nice. And that contradicts the God cannot change attitude. cliche. So cliches tend to contradict each other.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, this is Nicole McBurney jumping into the broadcast. We are out of time for today, so be sure to come back next Thursday to hear the rest of this study. To find other resources and Bible studies, be sure to go to kgov.com. That's kgov.com.
Join us as we delve into the provocative views of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who confronts materialist orthodoxy by proposing a world where consciousness is as widespread as life itself. This episode covers Sheldrake's critiques of the atheistic perspectives common among scientists, his belief in a spiritually infused universe, and the remarkable influence of psychic phenomena in both humans and animals. Discover how his unique ideas defy conventional scientific dogmas and offer a broad, embracing vision of nature.
SPEAKER 05 :
Please stay tuned for the conclusion of our interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his theories on everything from dog intuition to a conscious sun and stars to the mind's influence on health.
SPEAKER 02 :
and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin' it real
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you've had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that's what I'd expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that Average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle. Every day there's a new puzzle. Millions of people do it. Is it getting easier to do in the evening compared with the morning? Well, we don't know yet, but there's a student looking into this here in Britain at the moment, and she's going to measure the first, when it's first published in New Zealand, then it sweeps around the world with the day and the last people doing it in Hawaii. So she's getting the scores from New Zealand and Hawaii, which would be right to an extended day to see what's going on. Now, this also applies to crystals. If you make a new chemical and crystallize it for the first time, it may take a long time to crystallize. But if you keep making the same chemical, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world as a new habit develops. And that seems to be what happens. Chemists find that new compounds often get easier to crystallize. So these are all examples of morphic resonance.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, and I want to jump in real quick. Dr. Sheldrake, the examples you just gave, they seem to terrify materialists. I watched your debate with Michael Shermer, and at the very early stages of the debate, as soon as you mentioned anything... I can't remember the exact phrase, but you mentioned something immaterial, and Michael Shermer immediately crossed his arms, and pretty much for the rest of the debate, he sat in this defensive cross-armed position, and I've read a number of the criticisms of your experiments online, and it seems to me that there is some measure of actual hysterical fear on the part of materialists whenever you get into mentioning things like this that cause them to attack your methods. Rather scrupulously, I must say. They do attack your methods rather scrupulously. What do you think is the source of the fear that is obvious in their hearts and in their eyes when they're confronted with this idea that there may be things outside of the material universe that are worthy of consideration?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, some materialists have made materialism into their worldview. It is a kind of religion for them. It's an anti-religion. I mean, it's an atheist worldview. And if you look at the actual personal history of many materialists, they're people who themselves or whose parents or grandparents have rejected a religious worldview, usually Christian, sometimes Jewish. But Christianity is the religion that generates the largest number of atheists. Islam isn't so atheist-generating as Christianity. Christianity is like a kind of engine for generating atheism. Now there's an interesting concept that we should look into. That is profound. Well, I think it's a very important fact, and we need to recognize it. You see, I think what happens with materialists is that they've personally rejected Christianity or Judaism for various reasons. I mean, Oliver Sacks, the Jewish neurologist, was a militant atheist. He rejected Judaism because he was gay. And when he was a teenager, His Jewish family told him that God was against everyone who was gay, and he was utterly condemned for being gay. So he decided he was against God. And so, if God was against him because he was gay. So he found a ready basis for that in materialist atheism, putting his faith in science. Some people reject Christianity because, you know, for a variety of reasons, they've had oppressive puritanical upbringings, etc. And if they take up materialism, then it provides them with an alternative worldview that seems to explain everything with no afterlife. So no need to be, if you've been brought up to be afraid of hell, then you don't need to be afraid of hell anymore because there's no such thing as any afterlife. If you've been brought up to feel guilty about sex, no need to feel guilty about sex. But above all, the big payoff for materialists is the feeling that if they become materialists, they're smarter than everyone else. They've seen through the dogmas of religion. They've seen through these childish beliefs that have held back humanity for centuries. They've seen through all that, and they've risen above it. And basically, their stance is they're smarter. So materialism is very important for them because it justifies their atheism and their self-satisfaction at being smarter than everyone else. And what happens, why I get a lot of flak, is that, you know, I'm a scientist, I've studied at Cambridge, I've studied at Harvard, I got a PhD, I've published papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. And they can't dismiss me as being someone who's just ignorant and stupid, who doesn't know these things, who hasn't studied science. So I get under their skin. And then what I'm basically doing is trying to point out, as in my book, The Science Delusion, called Science Set Free in the US, the ten dogmas of materialism, which are part of their belief system. actually are not very well supported by science. They're not supported by science at all. It is a dogmatic belief system. And they're very, very resistant to that being pointed out because basically their whole sense of personal identity would collapse without it. So it does trigger off anxiety, anger, fear, because it is essentially a dogmatic belief system. They like to portray religious people as dogmatic believers and taking everything on faith and authority, but actually nowhere is that more true in the modern world than among materialist atheists. Most of them actually don't know very much science, and when they say they put their trust in science, basically they put their trust in what the high priests of science tell them, They haven't personally gone to the Large Hadron Collider and conducted experiments or personally sequenced DNA or personally analyzed genes or anything. They've just taken the whole lot on faith. So I think that is the real reason they get so upset and angry and why they're so immune to evidence. I mean, in the debate with Michael Shermer, he showed not the slightest interest in evidence for anything that went against his point of view. He just thought it must be rubbish.
SPEAKER 05 :
yeah yeah so instead they do things like ban your talk on ted tv i mean was that i guess that really was banned i know you can watch it it was uh we've played clips of it before well they tried banning it but um they the thing is that you can't really ban anything nowadays and when word got out they were planning to ban it people cloned the talk and put it up all over the internet
SPEAKER 01 :
Actually, they did me a good turn. You see, I think Providence works through atheists as well as through Christians and believers. And, you know, before my talk had been planned, it had about 30,000 views. It's now had about 8 million in various formats on different websites. By far the most successful thing I've ever done in terms of exposure. And that would not have happened without a helping hand from the militant atheists.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well said, well said.
SPEAKER 04 :
It goes back to the truism that God's Word never returns void. And God's Word, whether the atheists want it to or not, God's Word does govern everything to a certain degree. Now, you had mentioned earlier, when I asked you about spiritual versus physical things, It seemed like you implied that spiritual is necessarily separate from nature. Is that your belief? Can you clarify that? Is the spiritual necessarily separate from the natural?
SPEAKER 01 :
No, actually I think the spiritual underlies the whole of nature. As I was saying, I think the energy in nature is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see God as sustaining the whole universe from moment to moment, underlying all reality, not just setting up a universe in the first place, pressing a start button, and then having it all go on automatically like a machine. I think that God is sustaining all things. So in that sense, the Spirit of God pervades all nature all the time. But as we experience the spiritual, I think we experience it through our consciousness. And I think we experience our consciousness is not the same as the material activity of our body. It's obviously permeates the body and depends on it. But the distinction I really make, which I think is important, is between the bodily, the psychic and the spiritual. You know, because when St. Paul says, the natural man knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God, the natural man in Greek is anthropos psychikos, the psychic man or the ensouled man. And I think there's a realm of the psychic. which includes telepathy, premonitions, and what some might call the sixth sense, which is part of animal nature as well as human nature. I've done a lot of research, as you know, with psychic dogs, as in dogs that know when their owners are coming home. And I think the psychic level is to do with survival abilities and skills. I think wolves know what other wolves are doing when they're miles away. It's part of the way they coordinate the social group. Dogs become part of a human family and pick up our intentions, our thoughts. I don't think these are spiritual powers. I think they're to do, they're like the senses. I mean, smell, taste, touch, vision. I think they're like a kind of invisible sense, like a sixth sense, which, like everything in nature, has a spiritual underpinning, but it's not in itself spiritual. So I think I distinguish between psychic and spiritual. Now, this is one area where I run into problems with our friends, the materialists, because they don't believe in psychic phenomena. They don't think telepathy and things are possible. They don't think dogs can possibly pick up their owner's intentions and so on. And the reason they're so down on psychic phenomena is they think that if you let in any invisible influence at all, then God's going to come back through the back door. And so they feel they have to deny all these psychic phenomena. I spend a certain amount of time speaking to skeptic groups. If they invite me, I accept their invitation. I go and address them, you know, atheist organizations. And one of my messages to them is you don't need to be afraid of telepathy and psychic powers because these are part of nature. They're natural, not supernatural, normal, not paranormal. They're just something science hasn't dealt with yet, but they're part of nature. Whereas spiritual things are somewhat more different. They're about choice. They're about the most fundamental choices we make. They're about morality. They're about our connection with the divine, our openness to God and the influence of God. And they're not quite the same as totally survival instinct level. This is something of a different level of consciousness. So, I think all of them, everything is ultimately pervaded by the spirit. But I think there's a distinction between body, psyche, and spirit in our own lives, which is important to recognize.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, that's interesting. So, this gives me a better picture of this morphic resonance. And you've got… Isn't there evidence, for example, of like dogs who kind of react when their owner's on the way home? So there is evidence. It's not just a thought and an idea. And one of the things about science is a hard currency of science is predictions. And I love that you're doing that test with that dog. Werbel? Is that the name of it?
SPEAKER 01 :
I don't play it. W-O-R-B-L-E.
SPEAKER 05 :
Werbel, yes. Okay. And, you know, I will have to say anecdotally, it's not working on my dad. He's still terrible at those games, no matter what time of day it is. But, wow, that's really interesting. And I know you've even talked about... And I know this is going to be foreign to a lot of people, but maybe even the sun and the stars, they have a consciousness about them. And that somehow plays into this morphic resonance, that there's a third element. It's not just matter and energy, that somehow there's an interaction. And I'm curious, because I've heard you talk about that. Would you believe that that's kind of tied together electrons with a magnetic force? Because, you know, that's what plasma cosmology does. thinks that magnetic forces are not considered enough by the secular standard cosmology.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think that somehow, in a way we don't understand yet, that electromagnetic fields are a kind of interface with consciousness. Our brains are mainly electromagnetic in the way they work, and somehow our minds interact with our brains. No one knows how. But I think that if we take the view that what interfaces with our bodies and brains is this electromagnetic activity, then the Sun has vastly more complex electromagnetic activity than we do. I mean, solar flares, sunspots, 11-year cycles, all these NASA space probes and space observatories monitoring solar weather. It's changing all the time. And I think the mind of the Sun could interface with these electromagnetic fields which are basically within plasma. The Sun's made of plasma. And I think the Sun and the other stars may be conscious beings. I don't think that consciousness is confined to brains. And, you know, one of the things materialists believe is that the whole universe is completely unconscious, except in human and perhaps a few animal brains, the light bulb of consciousness is switched on for unknown reasons. That's the materialist worldview. And they have an awful problem explaining why anything's conscious at all. That's why it's called the hard problem, the very existence of human consciousness. But in the past, people thought consciousness was much more widespread in nature, that nature was alive. In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted. It was taught in medieval universities that nature was alive. Animals are called animals because they have a soul. Anima is the Latin for soul, built into our language. So they didn't believe they had an immortal soul like humans, but they thought they had a soul that organized their bodies and their instincts. And so I think that the stars and nature are all a reflection of an ultimate conscious source of all things, which I think of as God. And there's no reason why consciousness should just be confined to human brains. That's why I'm exploring the idea that sound is conscious, because I think from a scientific point of view, this is an open question. It's not because it's a dogma of religious belief or anything like that. It's not part of my religious faith that it's conscious or not conscious. It's an open question. And I think it's the kind of thing scientists should look at.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it's a fun topic to consider. It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility in God's created nature. I love how you referred basically to Hebrews 1, 3, that God upholds all things by the word of His power, so He's upholding all things now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes. You know, it's a question, I'm afraid, that is off-limits. for materialist scientists. It simply can't be looked into because, as you said earlier, it would threaten their entire worldview. You said something earlier that could be construed by Christians and Jews to be a threatening statement. You mentioned a fellow who rejected Judaism because he was taught by his family that God is against everyone who's gay, and he decided since he was gay that he was going to be against God. And I could go like this and start to get a little bit defensive, but of course... You know, we all understand that God's not against any man. He's not against anyone. He's for everyone. God recommends against certain behaviors for obvious reasons, and God wants what's good for all of us. But I don't feel the kind of the knee-jerk need to defend every aspect of God against any question at any time. The way I saw Michael Shermer respond to your question implications that there was something beyond the material. Michael Shermer said, first of all, he said, I'm not God, you're not God. And he said, there's an objective reality. I don't know what it is, and you don't either. Dr. Sheldrake, I think that's an overstatement.
SPEAKER 01 :
What do you think? Well, I think it would be definitely true to say that no one understands the whole of reality, including the mind of God, the whole of nature, etc. We're limited humans, and obviously, by definition, our minds are human minds with a limited power of understanding. So I think that confession of ignorance is reasonable for anyone. So I don't have a problem with that. I think the idea that there's an objective reality to which science has unique access is questionable because scientists are humans. And as some physicists have pointed out, Our theories about nature are theories in human minds. And the so-called laws of nature are not out there. You don't actually run into a law of nature when you're sort of looking through a telescope. You don't see Newton's laws or Maxwell's equations. These are invisible things which are accessed only through minds. And so for scientists to understand nature, they can only do so through their minds. So the very idea of objective nature relies on human minds to formulate that very idea. So I think that the idea that somehow nature is totally independent of all minds and all consciousness is an illusion that materialists have created and they themselves are the first to say they believe in science and reason and reason itself implies mind. So if you're going to have mind in nature and mind in underlying nature which makes it comprehensible, their belief that it's comprehensible through mathematical laws implies that underlying nature is something mind-like. And it can only be appreciated through minds. And they're very proud of their own minds and how smart they are. So it's actually to think of it as objective out there with no consciousness is not what science is actually telling us. True. And not what Schirmer could possibly believe, given that he's a devotee of science and reason.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes, and that's why the statement struck me as disingenuous. I'm not God, you're not God, that's not an overstatement. That's true. I don't necessarily believe that Michael Schirmer believes that he's not God. But I also believe it's an overstatement to say... that we don't know what reality is. I think we do know what reality is, and I think that Michael Shermer's statement that he doesn't know is simply a revelation of the fact that he doesn't know God. And so, Dr. Sheldrake, I don't want to imply that I absolutely understand everything about nature, but because I do know who God is, I can say that I do know what reality is and I know that it will all be explained to me. The things I don't understand will be explained at some point. Michael Shermer does not have that touchstone. Michael Shermer and other materialists do not have that touchstone in their mind and in their heart and not even in their psyche. And so, anyway, that seems to me to be the source of some of the inherent fear that you seem to strike into their heart.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it certainly doesn't help, the fact that I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Christian. I mean, that arouses tremendous prejudice in a lot of scientists, just to start with. And it doesn't help that I have unorthodox theories, and it doesn't help that I think there's evidence for telepathy in dogs and people and so on. None of that helps. But it doesn't help with dogmatic scientists. But the interesting thing is that a lot of dogmatic scientists, when I'm talking to them alone in the evening and stuff, become much less dogmatic. A lot of them are frightened of not agreeing with the party line when they're at work. But when they get home, many of them have had psychic experiences, some have had spiritual experiences, some have had near-death experiences, some have dogs waiting for them when they get home from the laboratory. The fact is that most dogmatic materialists Some are really dogmatic. I mean, Michael Sherman's made a living out of it, and Richard Dawkins, it's his whole public persona. But we recently did a survey, the Scientific and Medical Network in Britain recently did a survey of scientific, medical, and engineering professionals in Britain, France, and Germany, working scientists, and asked them, we had it done by a professional public opinion survey organization, How many of them are atheists? It's about 25%. Quite a lot compared with the normal population, but it's certainly not the majority. About 20% more describe themselves as non-religious agnostics. 45% describe themselves as atheists or non-religious. about 45% have described themselves as religious or spiritual or spiritual but not religious or spiritual and religious. So about 45%, about 10% didn't say or didn't know or whatever, but about equal numbers were sort of non-religious and spiritually bleak religious. And the atheists are certainly not a majority, even within Europe, where atheism is much more predominant than it is in the United States. And I know from my own experience of giving talks in scientific institutions that after the talk, one after another, people come up to me and they look both ways to make sure no one's listening. And then they say, you know, I'm really interested in what you say. I agree with a lot of what you say. I've had these experiences myself, but I can't tell my colleagues because they're all so straight. And after three or four have done this, I said, well, actually, you're not alone. I said, there's at least three or four other people in your institute who think like you do. They said, well, how do you know? And I said, because they've just told me, him and her and him. And what I say to them is, you know, your life would be so much more fun if you come out of the closet. Spiritually-minded scientists who've had psychic or spiritual experiences are quite common, and they behaved like gays did in the 1950s. You know, they were all in the closet, I think they couldn't possibly admit it. So my slogan to them really is, you know, come out of the closet, and you'll find that if you talk freely in your laboratory tea room or with friends after work and stuff... you'll find a lot of them who actually agree with you. So right now, people who do have these views are hiding them from their colleagues. Another metaphor for this is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. You know, in the last days of communism, how many people in the Soviet Union really believed in communism? I mean, there were certainly some, but the majority didn't. But they didn't become outright dissidents because then they'd be locked up in psychiatric institutes or sent to Siberia. So they pretended to go along with it. You know, party congresses, they dutifully clap at the right moments and stuff. I think that within the world of science, it's rather like that at the moment. I think there's this materialist orthodoxy, which is held in place by inertia and by fear, but which is not actually sincerely believed in by most scientists. And if you include among most scientists, Indians and South Americans... There are more scientists in India than there are in the United States. I lived and worked in India. I hardly ever met an atheist in India. Most of the scientists, my colleagues, were devout Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Jains or Christians.
SPEAKER 03 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That's Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That's what I'm talking about
Delve into a thought-provoking discussion on the boundaries between science and spirituality as Dr. Rupert Sheldrake questions materialism's resistance to the existence of non-physical phenomena. Listen as he argues that consciousness might be embedded not only in human brains but possibly in stars, electromagnetic fields, and the cosmos at large. Engage with his insights into how this perspective could reshape our understanding of reality, offering a profound connection between the physical and spiritual realms.
SPEAKER 05 :
Please stay tuned for the conclusion of our interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his theories on everything from dog intuition to a conscious sun and stars to the mind's influence on health.
SPEAKER 02 :
and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin' it real
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you've had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that's what I'd expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that Average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle. Every day there's a new puzzle. Millions of people do it. Is it getting easier to do in the evening compared with the morning? Well, we don't know yet, but there's a student looking into this here in Britain at the moment, and she's going to measure the first, when it's first published in New Zealand, then it sweeps around the world with the day and the last people doing it in Hawaii. So she's getting the scores from New Zealand and Hawaii, which would be right to an extended day to see what's going on. Now, this also applies to crystals. If you make a new chemical and crystallize it for the first time, it may take a long time to crystallize. But if you keep making the same chemical, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world as a new habit develops. And that seems to be what happens. Chemists find that new compounds often get easier to crystallize. So these are all examples of morphic resonance.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, and I want to jump in real quick. Dr. Sheldrake, the examples you just gave, they seem to terrify materialists. I watched your debate with Michael Shermer, and at the very early stages of the debate, as soon as you mentioned anything... I can't remember the exact phrase, but you mentioned something immaterial, and Michael Shermer immediately crossed his arms, and pretty much for the rest of the debate, he sat in this defensive cross-armed position, and I've read a number of the criticisms of your experiments online, and it seems to me that there is some measure of actual hysterical fear on the part of materialists whenever you get into mentioning things like this that cause them to attack your methods. Rather scrupulously, I must say. They do attack your methods rather scrupulously. What do you think is the source of the fear that is obvious in their hearts and in their eyes when they're confronted with this idea that there may be things outside of the material universe that are worthy of consideration?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, some materialists have made materialism into their worldview. It is a kind of religion for them. It's an anti-religion. I mean, it's an atheist worldview. And if you look at the actual personal history of many materialists, they're people who themselves or whose parents or grandparents have rejected a religious worldview, usually Christian, sometimes Jewish. But Christianity is the religion that generates the largest number of atheists. Islam isn't so atheist-generating as Christianity. Christianity is like a kind of engine for generating atheism. Now there's an interesting concept that we should look into. That is profound. Well, I think it's a very important fact, and we need to recognize it. You see, I think what happens with materialists is that they've personally rejected Christianity or Judaism for various reasons. I mean, Oliver Sacks, the Jewish neurologist, was a militant atheist. He rejected Judaism because he was gay. And when he was a teenager, His Jewish family told him that God was against everyone who was gay, and he was utterly condemned for being gay. So he decided he was against God. And so, if God was against him because he was gay. So he found a ready basis for that in materialist atheism, putting his faith in science. Some people reject Christianity because, you know, for a variety of reasons, they've had oppressive puritanical upbringings, etc. And if they take up materialism, then it provides them with an alternative worldview that seems to explain everything with no afterlife. So no need to be, if you've been brought up to be afraid of hell, then you don't need to be afraid of hell anymore because there's no such thing as any afterlife. If you've been brought up to feel guilty about sex, no need to feel guilty about sex. But above all, the big payoff for materialists is the feeling that if they become materialists, they're smarter than everyone else. They've seen through the dogmas of religion. They've seen through these childish beliefs that have held back humanity for centuries. They've seen through all that, and they've risen above it. And basically, their stance is they're smarter. So materialism is very important for them because it justifies their atheism and their self-satisfaction at being smarter than everyone else. And what happens, why I get a lot of flak, is that, you know, I'm a scientist, I've studied at Cambridge, I've studied at Harvard, I got a PhD, I've published papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. And they can't dismiss me as being someone who's just ignorant and stupid, who doesn't know these things, who hasn't studied science. So I get under their skin. And then what I'm basically doing is trying to point out, as in my book, The Science Delusion, called Science Set Free in the US, the ten dogmas of materialism, which are part of their belief system. actually are not very well supported by science. They're not supported by science at all. It is a dogmatic belief system. And they're very, very resistant to that being pointed out because basically their whole sense of personal identity would collapse without it. So it does trigger off anxiety, anger, fear, because it is essentially a dogmatic belief system. They like to portray religious people as dogmatic believers and taking everything on faith and authority, but actually nowhere is that more true in the modern world than among materialist atheists. Most of them actually don't know very much science, and when they say they put their trust in science, basically they put their trust in what the high priests of science tell them, They haven't personally gone to the Large Hadron Collider and conducted experiments or personally sequenced DNA or personally analyzed genes or anything. They've just taken the whole lot on faith. So I think that is the real reason they get so upset and angry and why they're so immune to evidence. I mean, in the debate with Michael Shermer, he showed not the slightest interest in evidence for anything that went against his point of view. He just thought it must be rubbish.
SPEAKER 05 :
yeah yeah so instead they do things like ban your talk on ted tv i mean was that i guess that really was banned i know you can watch it it was uh we've played clips of it before well they tried banning it but um they the thing is that you can't really ban anything nowadays and when word got out they were planning to ban it people cloned the talk and put it up all over the internet
SPEAKER 01 :
Actually, they did me a good turn. You see, I think Providence works through atheists as well as through Christians and believers. And, you know, before my talk had been planned, it had about 30,000 views. It's now had about 8 million in various formats on different websites. By far the most successful thing I've ever done in terms of exposure. And that would not have happened without a helping hand from the militant atheists.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well said, well said.
SPEAKER 04 :
It goes back to the truism that God's Word never returns void. And God's Word, whether the atheists want it to or not, God's Word does govern everything to a certain degree. Now, you had mentioned earlier, when I asked you about spiritual versus physical things, It seemed like you implied that spiritual is necessarily separate from nature. Is that your belief? Can you clarify that? Is the spiritual necessarily separate from the natural?
SPEAKER 01 :
No, actually I think the spiritual underlies the whole of nature. As I was saying, I think the energy in nature is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see God as sustaining the whole universe from moment to moment, underlying all reality, not just setting up a universe in the first place, pressing a start button, and then having it all go on automatically like a machine. I think that God is sustaining all things. So in that sense, the Spirit of God pervades all nature all the time. But as we experience the spiritual, I think we experience it through our consciousness. And I think we experience our consciousness is not the same as the material activity of our body. It's obviously permeates the body and depends on it. But the distinction I really make, which I think is important, is between the bodily, the psychic and the spiritual. You know, because when St. Paul says, the natural man knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God, the natural man in Greek is anthropos psychikos, the psychic man or the ensouled man. And I think there's a realm of the psychic. which includes telepathy, premonitions, and what some might call the sixth sense, which is part of animal nature as well as human nature. I've done a lot of research, as you know, with psychic dogs, as in dogs that know when their owners are coming home. And I think the psychic level is to do with survival abilities and skills. I think wolves know what other wolves are doing when they're miles away. It's part of the way they coordinate the social group. Dogs become part of a human family and pick up our intentions, our thoughts. I don't think these are spiritual powers. I think they're to do, they're like the senses. I mean, smell, taste, touch, vision. I think they're like a kind of invisible sense, like a sixth sense, which, like everything in nature, has a spiritual underpinning, but it's not in itself spiritual. So I think I distinguish between psychic and spiritual. Now, this is one area where I run into problems with our friends, the materialists, because they don't believe in psychic phenomena. They don't think telepathy and things are possible. They don't think dogs can possibly pick up their owner's intentions and so on. And the reason they're so down on psychic phenomena is they think that if you let in any invisible influence at all, then God's going to come back through the back door. And so they feel they have to deny all these psychic phenomena. I spend a certain amount of time speaking to skeptic groups. If they invite me, I accept their invitation. I go and address them, you know, atheist organizations. And one of my messages to them is you don't need to be afraid of telepathy and psychic powers because these are part of nature. They're natural, not supernatural, normal, not paranormal. They're just something science hasn't dealt with yet, but they're part of nature. Whereas spiritual things are somewhat more different. They're about choice. They're about the most fundamental choices we make. They're about morality. They're about our connection with the divine, our openness to God and the influence of God. And they're not quite the same as totally survival instinct level. This is something of a different level of consciousness. So, I think all of them, everything is ultimately pervaded by the spirit. But I think there's a distinction between body, psyche, and spirit in our own lives, which is important to recognize.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, that's interesting. So, this gives me a better picture of this morphic resonance. And you've got… Isn't there evidence, for example, of like dogs who kind of react when their owner's on the way home? So there is evidence. It's not just a thought and an idea. And one of the things about science is a hard currency of science is predictions. And I love that you're doing that test with that dog. Werbel? Is that the name of it?
SPEAKER 01 :
I don't play it. W-O-R-B-L-E.
SPEAKER 05 :
Werbel, yes. Okay. And, you know, I will have to say anecdotally, it's not working on my dad. He's still terrible at those games, no matter what time of day it is. But, wow, that's really interesting. And I know you've even talked about... And I know this is going to be foreign to a lot of people, but maybe even the sun and the stars, they have a consciousness about them. And that somehow plays into this morphic resonance, that there's a third element. It's not just matter and energy, that somehow there's an interaction. And I'm curious, because I've heard you talk about that. Would you believe that that's kind of tied together electrons with a magnetic force? Because, you know, that's what plasma cosmology does. thinks that magnetic forces are not considered enough by the secular standard cosmology.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think that somehow, in a way we don't understand yet, that electromagnetic fields are a kind of interface with consciousness. Our brains are mainly electromagnetic in the way they work, and somehow our minds interact with our brains. No one knows how. But I think that if we take the view that what interfaces with our bodies and brains is this electromagnetic activity, then the Sun has vastly more complex electromagnetic activity than we do. I mean, solar flares, sunspots, 11-year cycles, all these NASA space probes and space observatories monitoring solar weather. It's changing all the time. And I think the mind of the Sun could interface with these electromagnetic fields which are basically within plasma. The Sun's made of plasma. And I think the Sun and the other stars may be conscious beings. I don't think that consciousness is confined to brains. And, you know, one of the things materialists believe is that the whole universe is completely unconscious, except in human and perhaps a few animal brains, the light bulb of consciousness is switched on for unknown reasons. That's the materialist worldview. And they have an awful problem explaining why anything's conscious at all. That's why it's called the hard problem, the very existence of human consciousness. But in the past, people thought consciousness was much more widespread in nature, that nature was alive. In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted. It was taught in medieval universities that nature was alive. Animals are called animals because they have a soul. Anima is the Latin for soul, built into our language. So they didn't believe they had an immortal soul like humans, but they thought they had a soul that organized their bodies and their instincts. And so I think that the stars and nature are all a reflection of an ultimate conscious source of all things, which I think of as God. And there's no reason why consciousness should just be confined to human brains. That's why I'm exploring the idea that sound is conscious, because I think from a scientific point of view, this is an open question. It's not because it's a dogma of religious belief or anything like that. It's not part of my religious faith that it's conscious or not conscious. It's an open question. And I think it's the kind of thing scientists should look at.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it's a fun topic to consider. It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility in God's created nature. I love how you referred basically to Hebrews 1, 3, that God upholds all things by the word of His power, so He's upholding all things now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes. You know, it's a question, I'm afraid, that is off-limits. for materialist scientists. It simply can't be looked into because, as you said earlier, it would threaten their entire worldview. You said something earlier that could be construed by Christians and Jews to be a threatening statement. You mentioned a fellow who rejected Judaism because he was taught by his family that God is against everyone who's gay, and he decided since he was gay that he was going to be against God. And I could go like this and start to get a little bit defensive, but of course... You know, we all understand that God's not against any man. He's not against anyone. He's for everyone. God recommends against certain behaviors for obvious reasons, and God wants what's good for all of us. But I don't feel the kind of the knee-jerk need to defend every aspect of God against any question at any time. The way I saw Michael Shermer respond to your question implications that there was something beyond the material. Michael Shermer said, first of all, he said, I'm not God, you're not God. And he said, there's an objective reality. I don't know what it is, and you don't either. Dr. Sheldrake, I think that's an overstatement.
SPEAKER 01 :
What do you think? Well, I think it would be definitely true to say that no one understands the whole of reality, including the mind of God, the whole of nature, etc. We're limited humans, and obviously, by definition, our minds are human minds with a limited power of understanding. So I think that confession of ignorance is reasonable for anyone. So I don't have a problem with that. I think the idea that there's an objective reality to which science has unique access is questionable because scientists are humans. And as some physicists have pointed out, Our theories about nature are theories in human minds. And the so-called laws of nature are not out there. You don't actually run into a law of nature when you're sort of looking through a telescope. You don't see Newton's laws or Maxwell's equations. These are invisible things which are accessed only through minds. And so for scientists to understand nature, they can only do so through their minds. So the very idea of objective nature relies on human minds to formulate that very idea. So I think that the idea that somehow nature is totally independent of all minds and all consciousness is an illusion that materialists have created and they themselves are the first to say they believe in science and reason and reason itself implies mind. So if you're going to have mind in nature and mind in underlying nature which makes it comprehensible, their belief that it's comprehensible through mathematical laws implies that underlying nature is something mind-like. And it can only be appreciated through minds. And they're very proud of their own minds and how smart they are. So it's actually to think of it as objective out there with no consciousness is not what science is actually telling us. True. And not what Schirmer could possibly believe, given that he's a devotee of science and reason.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes, and that's why the statement struck me as disingenuous. I'm not God, you're not God, that's not an overstatement. That's true. I don't necessarily believe that Michael Schirmer believes that he's not God. But I also believe it's an overstatement to say... that we don't know what reality is. I think we do know what reality is, and I think that Michael Shermer's statement that he doesn't know is simply a revelation of the fact that he doesn't know God. And so, Dr. Sheldrake, I don't want to imply that I absolutely understand everything about nature, but because I do know who God is, I can say that I do know what reality is and I know that it will all be explained to me. The things I don't understand will be explained at some point. Michael Shermer does not have that touchstone. Michael Shermer and other materialists do not have that touchstone in their mind and in their heart and not even in their psyche. And so, anyway, that seems to me to be the source of some of the inherent fear that you seem to strike into their heart.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it certainly doesn't help, the fact that I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Christian. I mean, that arouses tremendous prejudice in a lot of scientists, just to start with. And it doesn't help that I have unorthodox theories, and it doesn't help that I think there's evidence for telepathy in dogs and people and so on. None of that helps. But it doesn't help with dogmatic scientists. But the interesting thing is that a lot of dogmatic scientists, when I'm talking to them alone in the evening and stuff, become much less dogmatic. A lot of them are frightened of not agreeing with the party line when they're at work. But when they get home, many of them have had psychic experiences, some have had spiritual experiences, some have had near-death experiences, some have dogs waiting for them when they get home from the laboratory. The fact is that most dogmatic materialists Some are really dogmatic. I mean, Michael Sherman's made a living out of it, and Richard Dawkins, it's his whole public persona. But we recently did a survey, the Scientific and Medical Network in Britain recently did a survey of scientific, medical, and engineering professionals in Britain, France, and Germany, working scientists, and asked them, we had it done by a professional public opinion survey organization, How many of them are atheists? It's about 25%. Quite a lot compared with the normal population, but it's certainly not the majority. About 20% more describe themselves as non-religious agnostics. 45% describe themselves as atheists or non-religious. about 45% have described themselves as religious or spiritual or spiritual but not religious or spiritual and religious. So about 45%, about 10% didn't say or didn't know or whatever, but about equal numbers were sort of non-religious and spiritually bleak religious. And the atheists are certainly not a majority, even within Europe, where atheism is much more predominant than it is in the United States. And I know from my own experience of giving talks in scientific institutions that after the talk, one after another, people come up to me and they look both ways to make sure no one's listening. And then they say, you know, I'm really interested in what you say. I agree with a lot of what you say. I've had these experiences myself, but I can't tell my colleagues because they're all so straight. And after three or four have done this, I said, well, actually, you're not alone. I said, there's at least three or four other people in your institute who think like you do. They said, well, how do you know? And I said, because they've just told me, him and her and him. And what I say to them is, you know, your life would be so much more fun if you come out of the closet. Spiritually-minded scientists who've had psychic or spiritual experiences are quite common, and they behaved like gays did in the 1950s. You know, they were all in the closet, I think they couldn't possibly admit it. So my slogan to them really is, you know, come out of the closet, and you'll find that if you talk freely in your laboratory tea room or with friends after work and stuff... you'll find a lot of them who actually agree with you. So right now, people who do have these views are hiding them from their colleagues. Another metaphor for this is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. You know, in the last days of communism, how many people in the Soviet Union really believed in communism? I mean, there were certainly some, but the majority didn't. But they didn't become outright dissidents because then they'd be locked up in psychiatric institutes or sent to Siberia. So they pretended to go along with it. You know, party congresses, they dutifully clap at the right moments and stuff. I think that within the world of science, it's rather like that at the moment. I think there's this materialist orthodoxy, which is held in place by inertia and by fear, but which is not actually sincerely believed in by most scientists. And if you include among most scientists, Indians and South Americans... There are more scientists in India than there are in the United States. I lived and worked in India. I hardly ever met an atheist in India. Most of the scientists, my colleagues, were devout Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Jains or Christians.
SPEAKER 03 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That's Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That's what I'm talking about
