Apologetics, Academia and Algorithms

0:00Hello and welcome to the Thinking Fellows podcast. My name is Kaelke Keech. I am joined by Anne Francisco and Bruce Hillman. And we're going to probably end up talking about AI in this episode. The never ending subject of our era, AI. So important that the Pope has had to write a whole encyclical about it. Every Christian podcast you know is talked about it at least once. Here we are talking about it for the second time. We'll talk about does it matter? It what degree does it affect Christians? We had just some phrases. We were shared a podcast at work about it in relation to the church and I heard some

1:01phrases that I think bother me and I curious how you guys think about this stuff like, you know, how can the church lead the way on AI and stuff like that? I'm not a fan of those kinds of constructions with basically anything. But we can talk about that. But before we do that, Adam has been on the move as he usually is in the summer. But even more on the move, you were just in England. Well, just like a week or two ago, right? Well, yeah, I mean, I got back a day and a half ago. So it was just there a few days. Oh my gosh. Really? That's when you got back. I think I got back. I landed back home about 30 hours ago. So I'm a little jet lagged. I've been up since 3 am. I thought you got back last week. No, no. Oh, wow. I'm a workhorse, bro. Yeah. So he moved to England before the beginning of August, not the first time you moved to England. But this time you were down in Cambridge doing some apologetics.

2:05And I thought I'd ask you. So what you were there with some other people from 1517 doing some presentations with the Discovery Institute, correct? Yeah. Was the other partnering organization, 1517, the Discovery Institute, to do like some actual serious and academic lectures on modern apologetic issues? So why don't you tell people like, my question would be, you know, what is a state of apologetics in 2026? What kinds of things were presented on? What was it like the main subject matter of the conference and who are the most interesting people there? Just give us a brief. What were you doing in Cambridge? Well, so it was Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture has a pretty large contingency of Christian thinkers on board. Discovery is, I don't know if they call themselves a non-sectarian organization, but they're, you know, they got a lot of different thinkers from David Berlinski, who's kind of an agonistic Jew to Steven C. Meyer who's a confessing Christian and so on.

3:09But there's, there's an interest at least in the Center for Science and Culture and on proper Christian apologetics. That is moving beyond just intelligent design. And by using the term adjust, I don't mean like it's nothing, right? But you're moving past the observation and interpretation of what it means when we look at nature that you see design in the cell and the universe and so on. To what we would call historical arguments for the fact that God was in Christ, you know, from the resurrection. They're interested in the arguments or looking at the question about how one could be confident in historical reliability, the Bible and so on. So the Discovery is the organization that ran this whole thing. It was called from Christ to the cosmos out two and a half weeks of like nine in the morning till nine at night programming in not every conceivable topic under the sun, they pretty much left no stone and turn in terms of apologetic topics.

4:13And you know, they had a number of speakers from like John Lennox, you know, the he's all over the YouTubes or what have you great Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist to Peter Williams, who's a New Testament scholar. I don't know that he's as famous here in the US, but in England, he's like one of the guys, if you got a documentary on the early church or New Testament, Peter Williams is one of the guys you call and Titus Kennedy and archaeologist Steven C. Meyer did a bulk of the lectures, but we also have 1570. We sponsored and I don't know, I mean, it's certainly sponsored, but also helped make this thing happen with video,ography and so on. Chad Bird gave a number or a few lectures on especially Messianic themes and the Old Testament fulfilled Messianic prophecy. I gave a talk on the uniqueness of Christianity among the world religions where I don't

5:19know if it's for the first time, but I think it might be Franz Piper has quoted in a lecture in Cambridge University as well as genetics. Yeah, as well as John work Montgomery. I also did a panel on the problem of evil and I'm trying to remember other things too. Then Kurt gave a great job on explaining the Orthodox doctrine of election in Christ and predestination and those sorts of things. We had some, we were wrapping there as well as sponsoring the whole thing. Yeah, it was great. It was also some of you, if you've been following the news, you know that England and Europe, I think, is going through the hottest summer. I don't know if it's on record, but one of the hottest summers on record. Yeah, and they don't do AC there, typically. So, as mentioned to you before you hit record, that on my talk, I had a sport coat on and

6:20there's beads of sweat dripping off my face because it was the hottest day of the year, it was three o'clock in the afternoon and there was no AC on this second story, second floor library, the web library at Jesus College in Cambridge. So, it was intense. I mean, it sort of made the brought back some nostalgia about sitting in lectures at Oxford where it's like a scholar whose their world is wrapped up in this. It's not that they're impractical people or anything like that, but this is their vocation and there you are digging deep on, on issues. So Tim McGrew, you might recognize him, he and his wife Lydia have done a tremendous amount of work on in Christian politics. He put forward an argument for the resurrection, 40 minutes, I guess. I want to say using a disjunctive syllogism, which I had forgotten what a disjunctive syllogism is, but then when you put it up there on the board, it's like, oh, no, I remember what that thing is. It was basically, you know, A or B, if not A, then B kind of stuff, right?

7:23And went through all the options on whether or not using Bayesian probability calculus of the resurrection. And I mean, it was incredible. I mean, if it was air conditioned, it would have been like five stars. I'll give it a 4.9999 stars because it was so stinkin' hot. Yeah, I was there for a week. The whole thing was 18, 17 or 18 days. Yeah. I don't know. I could tell you more, but I don't want to take up too much stuff. No, no, no. I mean, I think that's exciting. I think it's good. You asked about the state of apologetics. Yeah. I'm curious about it, and I'll tell you why, because I have accidentally trained my YouTube algorithm probably by clicking, probably by the clickbait of atheists working on me and raging me. To now, like, some of my afternoons, I basically spend watching anti-Christian apologetic material, which is weird to say that. But like, the atheists' agnostics are on like full, like, hey, we need a apologetic of

8:27our own so that people believe in nothing, which is always fun. And, you know, so I've been interacting with some of that, and a lot of what they do now, because of content creation, is basically play clips of Christian apologists. I'm going to put that in air quotes, apologists. They basically find evangelicals who make reels in apologetic style, right? Or recycling kind of old apologetics, terriol without really engaging with the facts, shall we say. And then these people will dung on it. They'll be like, oh, man, look at these Christian apologists have always been stupid. They don't even know how to read the Bible. That's kind of stuff. And I'm curious with that, how in a real, like a genuinely academic apologetic setting, what that kind of means today. Like how does this interact with the internet? Do you get a sense that some of these world's best apologists or thinkers on particular subjects are engaging not with just ideas that are important to them or excite them or give them

9:35research purpose, but are actually part of the apologetic attack, like the anti-Christian attack that's happening specifically to people today? Well, let me, so you're asking, like, are these like academic apologetic people? Are they useful to you and I who now are basically probably attacked through our phones or have Christianity doubted in like short form online or even long form online content regularly? Does this, do you think this provides something for like a trickle down? What's called a trickle down apologetics? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's my quick answer, absolutely. I mean, you could look at this stuff. Like let's say you were able to go back in time a couple of days ago and sort of like be a bug on the wall and listen and you could be cynical and say, oh, these are just a bunch of nerds doing nerd stuff thinking theoretically abstractly. They're doing that though because that's the environment they're lecturing in.

10:39I also know like, for example, Tim McGrew was there and he is, you know, he and his wife, they're, they're, I think they're both philosophers and PhDs and philosophy and so on and they gave a lecture in Bayesian probability calculus, right? That's intimidating stuff for guys like me who don't have a, you know, a macro. A macro? Yeah, who kind of just gave up on math a while ago and now it doesn't need math because he's got a phone. And AI. Yeah, but he's, you know, he makes it, he made it very understandable. And then you watch him mix it up with people during Q&A or out on the street as you're heading to lunch and stuff and you're like, oh, they can not only can these guys fly with the, you know, the intellectual gods, if you will, they can also, they're also men and women on the street too. So it kind of helped me like I've been a little sour and cynical towards higher ed and that

11:45whole sort of academic enterprise. I get, I get these sort of things because I mostly because I, I think about some of the damage higher ed has done like socially, politically and so on. But the ones who are doing the real work, I mean, they're super beneficial because they're in locations where that's their job is to think really clearly and seriously about things. And it does, I like the phrase, the way you put it, Caleb, it does have a trickle down effect. And so, yeah, you know, I was talking with somebody there about the lady there who was, we were talking about Christian universities and just how in Christian universities, you don't, yeah, there's like some, some who kind of not that this is like the measure, but they make a name for themselves for their scholarship, right? But it's pretty few and far between and it's not because there's some sort of plot against Christian scholars. And just that in Christian institutions, there is a Mark Nol demonstrated this what 20 some odd years ago, there is kind of a suspicion towards intellectuals in the intellectual life.

12:48But I think there is a real vocation. We ought to acknowledge the vocation of intellectual and thank God for those people. I agree. I saw something last week. I actually did a video related to it a little bit. I didn't do exactly this last week. So if you go check out the YouTube channel, you would pick up on that. I was trying to deal with this issue a little bit. But about the evangelical tendency, which would be the vast majority of like Christian colleges in the United States, the Bible college, as with discovery and student event, right? A lot of these that are trying to be effective are trying to be non sectarian, right? As many Christians as possible served kind of situation affected by the idea of a relationship not religion and actually how anti intellectual on purpose certain schools of thought in the evangelical realm are because Christianity is about a personal experience at the end of

13:48the day, not about thinking. And so even a kind of new anti-apologetic mindset, we're like, you know, they're favorite people like CS Lewis could pass. But you know, new, new apologists don't because, oh, you're trying to convince people into the faith or, you know, not head not. It's kind of like, you know how we have, we have identified for a long time that there's like an anti-doctrinal side to this that like even some Lutherans have said, hey, we need to adapt. Like it's you guys are thinking it's kind of like the old piotism. You're using your head, not your heart too much. That is applied, I think, to academia today. And part of it is the fear or the danger that like you're either an academic or you are in the faith. As you were saying, the damage that colleges have done or the perception that kids go to college and they'll come back without the faith. Yeah. I think that, you know, I wonder if that that sort of view or disposition is something that just gets inflated by little snippets on social media and so on about intellectuals and whatnot.

14:56Let me, this is related, I think. Alistair McKidrick, who's a professor of theology at the London School of Theology, who is one of these guys you listen to him. I went up to him after, at the end, he was the MC from, I think, most of not all the program. I went up to him at the end, I said, if I could figure out how I could move here for, I guess, a fourth time to England as you for a couple of years, could I just study biblical theology with you kind of as a joke, right? Not as a joke, but I mean, I would really like to sit at his feet because this guy is genocidal revelation without looking at a text. He's sort of like maybe it's like a road to a maya sort of thing. He just like is able to just sort of open up the scriptures from memory and not just like quoting proof text, but like he's, he's dealing nuances of verbs and, you know,

15:56and you're like, whoa. And anyway, he mentioned in his lecture something that I guess I've, Bruce, you can weigh in on this because I bet you've probably come across this in the book of Acts, which gives us, you know, it's the earliest example of early apostolic preaching. You don't find once in the book of Acts the word love, any version of the word love, right? And his point was that the preaching that apostles was not about the abstract love of God or something like that. It was about Jesus in the resurrection. Yeah, that was it. That was just going to say that the necessity that the Messiah or the Christ had to suffer and die, it was persuasive. It was apologetic. So while, yeah, I mean, you could argue that the early apostolic preaching, the character of early Christianity is what we would today maybe call deeply intellectual. You know, they're quoting the Old Testament. Their Paul's like quoting stoic and epicurean philosophers on Mars Hill.

16:59And so it's really strange when Christians sort of just sort of turn their noses up that it's sort of any sort of perceived intellectual approach to Christianity. Now, to be sure, intellectuals can go through far, right? There can be these, I guess, these ivory tower Christians who, I mean, that's what C.S. Lewis was kind of reacting against, right? When he's translating theology as he put it, you know, this inability of some or unwillingness of some intellectual vocations to also make it clear for the general population. Well, I think that has funny enough happened today almost exclusively on the progressive side of Christianity, which is to say like, like if you, if you engage in religious studies or theology, Old and New Testament studies academically and you go get a Master's or a PhD today, 99% of thesis are absolute meaningless trash.

17:59Okay. They're ununderstandable. They're using language that the normal person wouldn't use, but not because they're researching anything substantial. Like, but because they're making up a thesis that fits with progressive academia, you'll hear about like the equity of borders and the application to peoples, migrant peoples in the Old Testament. It's a meaningless, completely meaningless thesis. I wouldn't consider that stuff serious scholarship to be honest. Sure. Sure. So, I mean, okay. They're people who play the game, but I'm talking about, like, so we're going back to this reference, this conversation I had with this lady on the intellectual, the vocation of an intellectual. We were talking about how interesting it is that if you want to read something on, let's say, feminism from a Christian perspective, there's a couple good Catholic authors, female Catholic authors on it, you know, who can mix it up at North to Dhamm or one of them

19:02is and just wax eloquent and use all the idiosyncratic language that they're academy, but also can write so that you read this book, like I'm thinking about Abigail Favoli. In her book, The Genesis of Gender, which is a remarkable overview and argument for, you know, the phrase she uses because she's Catholic, sacramentality, the body and so on. And so when I think talking about, like, intellectual, I'm talking about people like that, these, like, leaders, not just the slop that people put together so they can get letters behind their name because they get a, maybe a little bump up in the payscale, but like, a real serious PhDs or academic, you know, masters who are actually wanting to make contributions in the field, whatever field they're in, and, you know, are basically kind of leaders in the field. I'm not talking about the slop that you're, there is a lot, like you said, there's a, I don't know if it's 99% but there's a lot of slop out there. I have a friend who, I think for work is probably at the Luther Congress that's been gathering

20:05in Denmark right now and he's been sending me another friend, the paper topics. The bits of thing in on. And let's just say, you know, 80% of it is hallucinated pet projects of people that somebody puts a Luther's name in front of. That's basically. And then, but done so in a way that, you know, you wouldn't understand the language they're in. They're like peacocks, they're starting their stuff. Uh-huh. Exactly. So I'm going to get attention, I guess. I would say it's hard to, there's just different presuppositions that play here too and trying to judge different theses because like when I went to Drew, they definitely, I mean, they had a statute of slayer mucker in the main entrance. And so, you know, they're coming out of a tradition where religious experience, not textual criticism even is really the, the name of the game they're playing. So I have a hard time sometimes like complaining about the rules when they're very overt about

21:09the game they're playing. So in that world, that's the game. It's not the world that I think is in line with sort of the way the scholarship should operate because it's so influenced by a theory, you know, with a big T and coming out of that religious experience, you know, not directly, well, directly, but it's not like they love slayer mucker and they're trying to reproduce which slayer mucker did, but they are able to trace the fact that, you know, they're, they're a way of playing the game kind of goes back there. And I think that's an important context too, because like Adam was saying earlier, some people, you know, have a lot of critique for Christians doing intellectual work or for the Discovery Institute or whatever else, but you have to sort of like hear everybody in the context of their overt presuppositions that they are saying they have and then judge their arguments based off of those like, are they good arguments? And I feel like, well, I don't believe they're presuppositions.

22:10Okay, fair enough, but they've already told you what they are and they're making an argument based off the fact that they've accepted those presuppositions. So the scholarship to me then has to be judged off of, okay, so if these are your presuppositions, are you being a good scholar with them or are you not? And what I have found in my anecdotal experience is actually people don't know how to make a good argument. There used to be a free course from Oxford, a podcast course. I don't know if it's still available, but the teacher was a Talbot. I think it was Marie Talbot. And it's a, it's a course for it's for anybody, but it's how to judge and how to make good arguments. And that's her scholarship. Listen to it years ago and it's fantastic. And once you hear it, it'll change the way that you hear anybody else's argument. There's another one part somewhere in that lecture because she doesn't in front of a live audience. What's actually a course, the free course podcast course, where she critiques arguments

23:13from like Dawkins and stuff about the existence of God. And she clearly says like, I'm not taking a position on the question of the existence of the argumentation. And she pointed out how poor his argument was in this one area, but the audience had a really hard time following her. She had to keep deconstructing them and what they were saying because they were so emotionally connected to some of the things that Dawkins was saying. And they realized, well, wait, if I reject that, it encroaches on my presuppositions. And I don't want to give those up yet. And it was really kind of a fascinating thing to watch or just, no, no, you, like, this is a bad argument. It's not about whether the argument is true or false yet. We haven't gotten there. It's just that the argument isn't valid. It's an invalid argument because it doesn't follow the logical rules that you would need to follow the main arts. Anyway, I'm plugging that course. If it's still available, if you can find it somewhere, I think it's my retalbit, Oxford. If you just look up how to have an argument or something like that, it'll come up.

24:17Yeah, it just point, Bruce. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to assume that everybody's playing your game. And, you know, if you're stuck in sort of the, not stuck, if you're, if your environment, your whole life is spent in like one particular arena, and then you hop in, you're looking at assessing something from a different arena, you know, at the very least, maybe, I mean, I'm not an eighth commandment dropper all the time, but, you know, you ought to put the best construction on it and take the argument for what it's, what it is, and light of the, you know, the context in which that argument is being made. I think Caleb was talking about some of the weird language, like the weird, but jargon out there. Like jargon that is intended to make you appear smart or well studied, that if you're familiar, you will realize is jargon. It's not, you know, it's not actually intended to help anybody to

25:20increase understanding, to advance the subject matter. It's, can I advance my own interests and my potentially my academic or teaching or whatever career? I think it's a way for scholars to show other scholars that they are a droit at the skill of language use because that's something you acquire with reading and writing. And so it's, let me show you I'm worthy, but I agree with you that it gets to the point where I mean, for example, because I did a lot of work in postmodernism, where when you actually ask even your own professor, I don't understand what this person is saying here. Yeah. And they will admit to you, we don't know either, but that's kind of the, you know, there's this sense of like a misplaced humility where it's like, but this person obviously is so much smarter than me, so we just have to struggle with what they're saying. Or in some cases, it was, well, that's the whole

26:23point of postmodern writing is that it avoids closure and avoids, you know, saying something. So directly that it itself doesn't want to play the same game of making direct statements. It wants to kind of lead you to a certain conclusion without saying it through. So they have all these ways of trying to get around it, but yeah, at times it's just frustrating, right? Because the average person, intelligent person in the room, like other students and scholars who you might be reading a text with, they're embarrassed to say, I don't know what's going on here. I'll give you one little antidote from my experience, which I'm not too me on horn here, but this is just a true story. So we had to read some postmodern literature. And in this particular graduate course, we had to then log during the week we had to log in to like a, it was our black poor thing. It was the online discussion group that the professor had set up. And we had to, we had to put an hour and a week on that discussion thing because it logged your time. And I finally just said, I just going to admit, like, I have no idea what this person's talking about.

27:26And so I just put it out there. And then everybody else started saying, yeah, we don't actually understand this text either. We don't really understand this text either. And then we started getting into a conversation about the relativism and stuff in postmodernism. And the professor got so frustrated by this conversation that she actually canceled the upcoming lecture topic and changed it to deal with the issues that we had been bringing up in the discussion board. So I think sometimes it's the case with like this flowery language and hard jargon that you pay to play and you're afraid not to the culture creates a necessity for it, which is unfortunate, right? And then students don't want to look stupid. So they try to play the game. And then it just perpetuates it. But then again, it happens with some real good scars to like, does anyone read David Bentley heart? DB eight. Yeah. That guy, I think chat GPT or Claude wouldn't even know some of the vocabulary

28:27uses. I mean, I'm highly impressed with his vocabulary, but I think it gets in the way a lot of times too in what he's trying to say. But yeah, I don't have any book on that shelf, including Derrida and some of the other ones who I have more like circles with underlines, which is the way when I read a book, I'm like, I have to look up that word. And David Bentley heart, so they're all just circles and underlines. There's no idea what this is. I think it was, I did I hear it or read it over when I was over there or down as Caleb put it correctly. So I might add down in Cambridge, Richard Feyman, who, you know, what cosmologists physicists, whatever, I think Nobel prize winner maybe said, if you can't explain something clearly, you don't quite understand it. You know, and that's the, that's the sense I get with with a lot of graduate students that I've had over the years where they, you know, they, it's almost like they'll you not just graduate undergraduates too or just others

29:29who send me their writing to editor or critique or whatever I'm like, I don't know that you actually know these words. I think you're just sort of like picked up on these patterns of words from the literature you read. And so I mean, Rod, you still always say what can be said can be said clearly or something like that, you know, and that was always sort of a, if you read Rod, Rod could mix it up with the best of them, right? But he was really insistent on being clear when he spoke using plain language when you're doing this stuff amidst the general populist. And there are some scholars. I think Bruce, when you're talking about postmodern literature, I don't know that she's considered a postmodernist. She's a feminist kind of Judith Butler. You're ready. Oh, yeah, she just read a lot of Butler. Yep. Oh my goodness. You know, I mean, do you ever hear talk though? Like in an interview or something? She's incredibly clear. Is it really? Or she can't write it? Yeah. Oh my goodness.

30:29And but I think sometimes to the jargon also acts as a sort of insurance policy, right? Because if you can't, if you have to be very clear, you can be critiqued, right? You can say, well, I don't agree with that. Whereas if you're kind of like opaque and, and yeah, you get what I didn't misty, you know, you say, well, I didn't really mean that or I didn't really say that or on your audience, right? Like there's sometimes where being really clear or succinct means that you leave like some counter arguments out where you don't cover every, every, you don't flip every stone of a particular thing. And that always ends up pretty funny too. I would say this is the nature of like some of the writing we do for 1517. It tends to be short, right? It can be short and excellent. It can be clear. It can be distilled information. At least that's what I've been told to try to do, right? You do something that's, you know, 1200 words, but it's not meaningless. So you're taking things you know a lot more about and you're making them short and accessible.

31:34And then you'll get somebody go, well, you didn't talk about this. You know, you didn't, you didn't address this argument against this thing. And you know, at the end of the day, that's the risk you take with like clarity and brevity is, is that, but I think those kinds of critiques you have to just be willing to like slough off. So if you're going to go do, as Adam was saying, at these 45 minute presentations, lots of people could give and maybe reply, a what if or what about this? In some conferences, I don't know if you guys did this. That's what like, you'll have response papers, right? Which then give people an opportunity to maybe uncover things they didn't talk about in the particular lecture or something like that. But you just got to be willing to do that. Like just risk it that you're not going to uncover every stone for the sake of clarity at the time and be able to answer questions and have a deeper conversation with somebody, not every piece of writing or podcast or lecture you give has to be like the total sum of of every every part of that subject matter. You can't do it anyway because anytime you write

32:38clearly, you're saying something and whatever you're saying, there is a counter to it. There's no, there's no thing you can say that there's no counter to. It doesn't mean it's equally, it doesn't mean it's equally plausible. I'll say something Bruce. All badgers are unmarried males. Are you do know that for those who don't know, that's one of the more famous statements that's often used in a lot of philosophical debates as a start to talk to you. They say nothing. They say nothing. Everybody knows the definitions. Well, now this episode's been about this, which is good. This is fine actually. So I'll just keep going this way. I guess we'll leave the AI thing for we have interesting things. Yeah, I think so. At the state of apologetics today. Because I got some more to add.

33:39Okay, you got more to add because as like I told you, here's the subject matters. I think are hitting heavy today at them. So you can tell me where you think things are at. So I think higher criticism via ancient Near East studies is back with a vengeance, like a ripping vengeance with primarily the goal to just discredit or uncover the fact that Christians, most Christians today, I'm going to put out most do not understand the relationship between the old and New Testament and the interpretive work of the New Testament and Christian believers onto the Old Testament. So similar to the article I send you a couple of weeks ago. Are you sorry, just clarity quick? Are you saying that's the assertion, but that that's not true or that's the assertion, but you also think that's true. I think that's true. But the ancient Near East people aren't making that assertion. They're operating with the assumption that that's true. So all I have to do is show

34:41things like, now the Old Testament doesn't say that or they would have had no preconceived notion of Jesus Christ. So this is all ridiculous and stupid. Or hey, every prophecy in the Old Testament was fulfilled in the Old Testament in various ways or places. Right. Like God was making promises to these people. So all these ones that you think Christ fulfills, yeah, right. So it was fulfilled earlier. It was meant to be a thing like out of Egypt, I called my son, yeah, Joseph was already a thing, guys. Like you're not Jesus. Jesus is reinterpreting this or I just did one out of Isaiah 7 like for the blog. Like no, no, no, that was that was fulfilled during the thing. So you're getting a lot of that or hey, Christian Bible translations manipulate the Old Testament with the Septuagint or with Christian interpretation of particular things. That's super popular. Christians don't know who Yahweh is. Yahweh is created deity that we can find in the archaeological record. Yada, yada, yada. Okay. The Canaanites and the Israelites all became one people worshiping group like classic

35:42ancient Near East study stuff that's been around for a hundred years, making a huge resurgence on unsuspecting Christians who have no idea what's going on here. That one's big. I would say a refined materialism is coming back not like the New Atheists, but basically a type of scientism has made a return that is basically saying you can never prove God ever because the presupposition of a God is that he is beyond the material world. And so and all we have for discovering anything is the material senses and the material world. And any personal or spiritual or emotional experiences are unverifiable, unknowable. So you can have all your scientific arguments for God, but ultimately they're all God of the gaps because you're just saying this thing that seems to have purpose must have the explanation of God. And what we're saying is that's just God

36:44of the gaps. The must doesn't have to be anything. So that one's back with vengeance as well. And then I would say sort of just like a pluralism, Adam, like a general we've talked about this before too, spiritual but not religious. All religions are true. You couldn't actually pick out Christianity. And if it was true, if any of these particular ones were true, that God has a lot to answer for with the problem of evil and such. So that I would say those three are back. So what's the state of apologetics in regards to like the big three are back and hitting harder than ever in 2026? Well, the middle one, I'll start there. I mean, they spent a good week on that or at least related kind of topic. And I would say, you know, maybe we've talked about it in this show, but if you've got a read, Steven C. Meyers returned to the God hypothesis. You know, where it's so you've got the, let's just call it the problem of the big bang. You know, this scientific discovery, if you will,

37:47that the universe is not eternal, but it's temporal that it had a beginning. And then stuff related to that, like the fine tuning, like things had to be just right for the universe to take the shape that it's in to sustain life and whatnot. And you've got things like the intricate design, coding in DNA, you need to take a real micrological example. You've got explosions of or injections of information, coding in the fossil record. And other things like that, how do you explain that? Just think like information. We have zero coded information. We have zero material evidence that's that stuff just arises uncaused. We have zero material evidence that something comes in pops into existence uncaused. So, you know, you could say with the scientists, yeah, sure,

38:51science deals with material natural causation and natural things. It describes the world we live in. But if the scientist then goes on and says, and the best world view or ontological assumption behind that is that that's all that exists. They're moving beyond science, right? Yes. They're engaging in a philosophy or a presupposition that they are put into the corner of just saying, we must assume or must operate under the fact that this presupposition is the best. Mostly, I would find because they say, I don't want to operate under the other one, which is that there's a nod. That's the thing that Stephen Meyer illustrates very well in the book is that that presupposition doesn't work. Yeah. That the best, if you will, to use, I know you love this term, Caleb. Look at all the different types of world views and their ability to account for the facts we just talked about. There's a whole bunch more, of course. It would be a theistic world view.

39:54So sorry. This sort of refine, I think you call it refine materialism. Yeah, you can find that there. But Meyer would argue, and I think this stuff gets exaggerated on the interwebs, the social media. Among the scientific, I don't know what would be called the scientific establishment. I think, you know, here's some anecdotal experience. We have at my church there's some people that work at the Fermi Labs, you know, federal lab. And they'll tell you that, yeah, everybody goes to work every day and they get into their labs and whatnot. They do their their work following the rules of science. They don't know percentages, but most of those people, a lot of those people are Christian believers. They just don't need to bring it into the laboratory because they're just doing science. It's when they go beyond science. That's where the fight is. And I don't know that I think the hardcore materials have just been given way too much air time. I just don't know that Meyer would say that we're kind of on the verge of a maybe a scientific revolution where the

40:56presuppositions are going to change. And maybe that's why there's this new sort of like injection of materialism because they realize that it just doesn't explain things. I saw an atheist actually put it in a really, it was very honest, a very good way, which was that the materialists problem is that they can they can describe what a thing does, but they can never describe what a thing is fundamentally. And that they always get down to the mechanics of of does. And that now that they're in the realm of quantum mechanics and particles that we thought were the foundations of the of the universe and everything I can't even really be understood what an electron is or what it does even changes upon observation, not observation, all of the intricacies of this. Believe them having to just say, well, if you assume it operates like this, you can do the math in that works, but it leaves them in the realm of not having any

42:00meaning, explanation, origin, things like that. So so their confidence when somebody like that then applies that to the origins of the universe or I'm a materialist makes a claim like it's just not reasonable that it could be a God because I couldn't observe him that they are sneaking a presupposition in there that sounds sophisticated but isn't. Yeah, just dive a little a little deeper into that. So how do they account for the cause of the big bang or the origins of the universe or however you want to frame it? You know what the most reasonable hypothesis is out there? Multiverse theory. Yes, or multiple hypotheses. And of which they'll all acknowledge there's zero material evidence of that. So not you I think when it comes to these sorts of questions, the internet's the worst place to go. Your algorithm workplace to go for. I think Christians just have to be careful like it's not that I think it's a smart place to go and you're going to get all

43:04the answers, but it's a place everybody already is and sometimes they have no choice because of the way scrolling works on all of these platforms of being hit with these like eventually a Christian who spends her down Instagram or TikTok or YouTube and you know when they're sitting on the toilet at work or they're waiting for the bus or they're just doom scrolling whatever you want to call it you know every hundredth one is going to be potentially something that's like and Christian so know what they're talking about you know and it could be from this angle it could be from one of these other ones and so more than ever today somebody might be engaged in anti-Christian narratives that sound very sophisticated and well thought out without choosing to do that at all not because they went to college and they sat in a class on religion not because they're sitting in a biology lecture not because they went to a museum that's like a dinosaur museum or something just sitting

44:08in their living room no choice their own confronted with an assault on Christianity often from a scholar being interviewed by a podcaster because that's what everything is nowadays and the presuppositions I think that the thing I notice the most is that they will spit a bunch of facts that are probably relatively true and then in between those presuppositions mixed in that the listener cannot pick up on unless they're trained to hear those types of presuppositions and things like that and so it leaves them at the hands of going oh my gosh is this an expert he's being interviewed by this show that's got 20 million followers he's it said he was a professor at Oxford and he's saying this and oh my gosh I can't even think about this you know like so that's where I think it's important I kind of wonder like what's the ability to say get a sophisticated scientific argument against

45:09materialism like like Dr. Meyer here into a similar thing we're randomly that's popping up on somebody's phone yeah Bruce had something to say just two things one and maybe it's just my way of thinking about this word but I actually think the arguments and science and such are highly sophisticated that they're not simple at all and that that's part of their appeal is that they have the appearance of being something beyond most people's grass I mean people graphs the basics of it but like they're not John Lennox sitting in a room doing the math for physics so they have to sort of trust the authority figures and there's a sense or a belief that whatever the scientist is actually saying is just a watered-down version of something that's probably so specialized and sophisticated that the normal person isn't going to be able to grasp I mean anyone who goes to the doctor and sees the medical charts in the wall

46:10immediately starts to see this so they came and pronounce half the stuff in your own body so I it's against depends on how you use the word so but I think and look this is maybe controversial I've kind of been coming to this conclusion over the last few years but I think what everybody's after both the Christian the non-Christian materialists and the non-materialists or the spiritualists everyone are framed that what they're really after a certainty and they're they're both packaging it as something that they have so the Christian is offering certainty the Jews offering certainty the Muslims offering certainty the scientists is offering certainty they may not use that exact phrase but that's essentially in the in the competing marketplace of ideas that's what they're offering and I think that the person who has to make a judgment on what they're going to believe between this marketplace of ideas and worldviews and belief systems that's what they're out to buy is certainty and one of the sort of intoxicating things about science is that it seems to offer an

47:17objective certainty that faiths don't and so I think more often than not the arguments that the atheist scientists for will just use them to make it simpler that the atheist scientists are making for the worldview are crouched in a deeper emotional sense of this allows me to be more certain and faith does not and so it's not even really about the issues and I think when you start to get into the quantum realm and look I don't understand talk about sophistication I don't understand the quantum realm but I also saw recently a maybe sort of viral video of the professor from Yale I think it was who opens the list gone viral recently he opened the lecture on quantum physics saying he doesn't know at all what he's about to be talking about and the people he's referencing as experts don't know what they're talking about and so if the kids don't know what he's talking about it's okay and also everything that they are talking about will change by time they're done talking about it so we're just going to talk about what we don't know and it was an interesting

48:19opening point of the lecture but I will say one thing I think we can say with some kind of confidence is that when you get at the quantum level right so the very small level the Newtonian physical model falls apart significantly and we don't know why and the scientific method is struggling I'm not going to say it doesn't work in the quantum level that's not true but it's certainly struggling to figure out how do you observe these things I mean basically you have to extrapolate from the math as I understand it and come up with theories on how these things are happening and we know they're happening we know like electrons are doing things they shouldn't do at a quantum level they're supposedly air quotes communicating with each other in a way we don't know how they're communicating there's issues with time like Adam said there's multiverse theories causation theories consciousness all of this stuff is now being debated in science and science is

49:21being forced to be in some ways less materialistic it has to become a little more metaphysical or a little more philosophical and that's the challenge right because science is kind of built itself up as being this observational material-based certainty and now you get in the quantum realm and you're having these material things operate in ways that material things don't operate in because they're not working in Newtonian physical ways and then you're dealing with things like consciousness which isn't material at all and then if you throw in philosophy which I think we should you can go about this can be traced all the way back to Plato but you can find it in John Locke significantly and then you can find it a little bit in Sigmund Freud but this whole idea of like science cannot justify or prove that the exterior world exists and that we're not a brain in a vet or in a matrix or in a computer and that sounds silly right but it's been a philosophical problem for thousands of years for a reason is that if you're looking to prove that the existence

50:24you're experiencing is real there's evidence that the experience might not be real such as optical illusions or dreams you know how do I was a Laoza said you know am I a butterfly my man dreaming of being a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming of being a man how do you objectively prove that that's philosophy's question how do you objectively prove that you're not a brain in a vet when there's evidence that your sensory experience lies to you all the time that's the great philosophical debate at least one of them goes all the way back to Plato and the allegory the cave and science must assume an exterior world yes and I think with people here this they roll their eyes and they go this is just you know stupid philosophy but actually it's logic it's simply applying logic at a very deep level and saying where do you start where do you start with your belief system where you just go I'm going to assume this I'm going to assume this has to be true because I can't actually prove it but I'll close with just I think that the drug everybody is after is certainty and I I don't want

51:31to sound like an old apologist because I have slightly different use of this words and maybe they did but I think we'd all be better off if we talked about faith in our worldviews and confidence in our worldviews and assurance in our worldviews and less about certainty in our worldviews I'm just more and more skeptical that certainty is the right thing to be seeking but I do think you can have assurance and I do think that you can have confidence and I do think you can have plausibility but I'm too so critic to think that you can have certainty well I think Bruce the thing I would add or tack on to that is that the scientist deals in probabilities constantly right the method even has probabilities and assumes many things like you just said the material world and in substitute of being able to say explain what a thing is just says you have to operate with certain assumptions so a famous one in Newtonian is gravity right they can describe what we don't really know what it is

52:37still by the way but go ahead yeah exactly and so but if you just assume it is a particular thing and operate with the mathematics that it's a particular thing or we'll always be doing a particular thing the math works out and you can calculate and you can live based on those things and basically what they're telling you is if you just have faith then the math will work right if you just presuppose or condition or work with these assumptions it'll work they're often not willing to do the same thing when it comes to scientific arguments for the existence of God as Adam has given brief versions of here or like I don't think those documents thesis well they're not scientific arguments for God but they're essentially saying that the presupposition of science that there can only be the material is shown false even by its own methodology or the ends of its own methodology and that what you have are presuppositions at play from scientists who are materialists and they

53:42have a materialist presupposition but it leaves them as you were saying Bruce with no certainty well and is it even a presupposition or is it just a mandate for science yeah I mean that's that's all it can do right I mean I'm is anyone disagreeing with that like it's if it tries to answer the question of the origin of the universe or if there's a God or any of that kind of stuff how would it have the tools to do that it can't observe it can't repeat it can I mean making a hypothesis of science you know if you're really following the scientific methods you need observations so you're automatically limited to some type of material something even if that observations through math of course philosophers debate math too which is always fun like his math reel it can get pretty crazy out there but this is the thing for me that's just frustrating is is that science is even sort of allowed to play the game that philosophy and theology should be doing I just I never really understand I don't understand why real scientists even want to play it

54:44in the guise of science like they want to dress it up and make it be and do something that it can't be and do it's like transgendered science I don't think it's usually it's usually not to put people's motivations but it usually then comes back to some other problem like your same person which is more of a a personal or spiritual or faith problem something like the problem of evil or a disagreeable ethics of religion or the conditioning in the universe where a God should have made himself now all of these kinds of responses come in and then I think science or materialism becomes a way to cope with the difficulties of that for certain people don't you think most people who are attracted to science are attracted to science because of the beauty of the clarity and the certainty that comes from it I mean that this is an adotal of course because there's lots of different people who do go into science for lots of different reasons but it's just my experience

55:45has been when you talk to a really passionate scientist they love that they can help people and that they can you know advance humanity because science is so certain you know like like we can know if we do this we're going to get that if we had this chemical to that this reaction is going to happen if we do this in space this is going to happen if we can build a machine to go into space and survive in space because we know it's going to happen in space like it's all this kind of and there's so much in life that isn't that way but because there are constants in the material universe of course those constants can be observed and then could they're constant right so you can work with and around them not against them necessarily but you can work around them or or find ways to problem solve so it makes sense to be that many people who go into science would be attracted to materialism and therefore would confuse that the materialism is the same science itself science relies on materialism but materialism is a separate world but there's a lot of Christian scientists who are not pure materialists but I think a lot of scientists assume materialism is

56:46the same as science and I would say it's not it's it's a presupposition that is required for scientific investigation but it's not so it's required for science but it's not the same as science I mean to put it in a really simple way science cannot prove that there is only the material because it is the subject limited to studying the material yeah and I guess what I'm saying is the only thing you can prove is something that's Cartesian and mathematical because it exists in a material way where it can be measured and it can respond and react but I'm saying that's the danger of certainty is that most things like how do you know your your spouse loves you with certainty full certainty no doubt absolutely no doubt you can't prove that to yourself you can believe it you can believe it with all your heart but that doesn't make it certain in any objective sense it just means ultra-confidence so I just think the certainty chase is what

57:53gets a lot of people in trouble because they don't know what to trade certainty for was I mean I have to doubt everything like Socrates no but there's there's a humility we need to hold with the things that we know and I think science doesn't believe that as a general discipline and I have a problem with that if that's true so Adam to close us out you said these were recorded these lectures in England yeah published we'll share when they're published but do you know is that through 1517 through discovery institute how will people be able to get that where should they be looking out well discovery is going to be doing all that okay and I don't know how they're going to package it or make it available but they're going to give you know like Chad's lectures he can use you know okay retains the rights to that all mine and but I think it's when we were talking about this going back maybe a year ago and they're planning the course I think can't promise that it was going to be kind of a package for like a group study and apologetics that would be quite

58:57comprehensive so it could be a really really great resource here in the future and when it's available if it's available that way though it it's not 1517 property I'd you know I'll certainly be encouraging people to watch it okay great it's not like our academy courses that are intentionally short and very user friendly you know for like bio will study type hour classes for you know just a broad cross-section of people this is going to be the deeper dive and more university style lectures so they're longer and so on okay well we'll make sure to put those in the show notes as they come out it sounds like with the people at 1517 who had the rights to republish as well we'll let you know when at least those I think will be available directly through 1517 and then we will we'll share the information to where you can find them at the discovery institute once it's live thank you very much for listening to this episode of the thinking fellows podcast we hope you enjoyed it don't

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