Book tv is on location in las vegas at the freedom fest Libertarian Convention where we talk with others here and now we want to introduce you to one. This is hyrum lewis who teaches at byu in idaho. Heres his cover of his book there is a god. I want to start with those last words. In the last days. What are you referencing . Yes, im referencing a specific faith tradition. Theres a lot of work in apologetics coming out they had gotten aggressive in the 21st century. Who are the new atheists . Used to talk about the four horsemen. Richard [inaudible] wrote a book and sam harris and Christopher Hitchens just passed on and [inaudible] they call them the four horsemen of the easiest apocalypse. They are aggressive and angry. Its much more lets live in i cant believe but if you want to believe that your business and its probably good for you but the new atheists will have none of this. They will say i dont believe in i will mak sure no one else please either and i will crusade to try to distort everyones faith. And so, part of it is plain the new atheists but im not talking about the last days or the latterday saints. Im trying to broaden the scope of apologetics so you have catholic tradition going back to st. Thomas aquinas in which they make the topical arguments for the existence of god and im sure youre familiar with the ontological argument and a whole range of things then you have the protestant tradition which focuses on the text with Martin Luther taught this idea of solar script torah, the bible is the ultimate authority. They want to go back and look at the text itself and find evidences for belief within the text with eyewitnesses to jesus resurrection. There are traditions left out of the apologetics conversation. For instance, quakers or latterday saints or strange congregationalism in which we focus on revelation and direct experience with god. I dont necessarily mean a man with a long white beard going up to a mountain to receive the Ten Commandments or talking to a burden burning bush but the vast majority of people you talk to it is a party with. Dot they will not say well, i read st. Thomas aquinas and was convinced. You probably will not even say i read the bible and the textual evidences was so strong but what they will say is moments of quiet contemplation for a moment of prayer moments of ritual or any major pride event like the birth of a child i felt the presence of the divine. The new atheists will not tell you that and feel free to cut me off anytime you want, peter they will now tell you those feelings dont count and that only empirical experience counts as knowledge and if youre talking about feelings then simply illegitimate the funny things about this is that in and of itself is not an empirical statement but its only empirical if its knowledge that comes to the senses. If that empirical knowledge only counts than it self refuting. Like going to a webpage and webpages saying dont believe anything you read on the internet. Its selfcontradictory. One of the great philosophers of the 20th century, norman klein, but this out in an argument called the two documents of empiricism. He said that he started out that theres a lot to agree with these atheists that you cant believe everything is not interrelated and then later on said its resting on dogma and a faith assumption. If you believe that only empirical knowledge counts you taking that as an act of faith because you have no reason to believe. And the second thing is that the atheists might say was a hallucination . These feelings are having is your brain tricking you and they will use evolutionary psychology to say over the course of millions of years your brain has evolved not portrait but for survival. Feeling that there is got some survival value way back when. Now weve gone beyond that and now we know better now we can look back and say it may have had use dozens of years ago but now we can move beyond that and now can simply organize this from the trick that it is and stop believing in god this is selfdefeating too. Why should we believe [inaudible] and why is that a picture . They want to invoke tricks to explain away every religious experience. They dont have an answer for that either. The third thing they might say is you say field feelings arent empirical and they are but when i say revelation of talking a lot not just the experiences of god but your experience of being a self and a conscious human being is not empirical and you dont see that under a microscope with you look into a microscope and say that my mind the fact that you love your wife or your children is not an empirical experience but of subjective experience. I see it these are relevant tory experiences. We are here at freedom bassinet yet you have free will and that youre a freak conscious being that in and of itself is a revelatory knowledge and not something you get to science. In fact, science does not believe in free will by and large. The most important things in life, love, freedom, morality, these are not amenable to science. The atheists willay is when you feel joy and love your children if i look at your brain under some Imaging Technology i will see certain parts of the brain light up there for that lighting up isnt empirical and therefore it is scientific. Hey e falling prey t the vuum policy if you took them back in the 1970s, mr. Rogers was on tv, you brought someone from a primitive part of the world who never seen electricity or television before and show them mr. Rogers on the tv that they might go to the back of the tv and again they the tubes were lighting up. Their conclusion what event the vacuum tubes are causing the picture. This is a false assumption. The program on the tv has been broadcast from thousands of miles away from studios. The tubes are merely the receptors. Thats the relationship between the brain and the mind. The brain is merely the receptor of the mind. There also filing the basic thing you look learn if you go to the statistics 101 is causation and they see a correlation between the state and a mental state and say the brain state is causing the mental state. They need to go take statistics 11. When mr. Rogers would show the events that he was doing the first think they would say is how did you get out . How did you get out of the tv can be assumed like the atheists that you are caused by your brain to assume the tv was causing mr. Rogers. The atheists need to realize you are not your brain and mind is not your brain and the tv is not mr. Rogers. Professor lewis you spent time with darwin and origin of the species in your book. Sure. I think Charles Darwin was one of the greatest intellectuals of all time and im a big believer of evolution. We dont like to talk about scientific facts but evolution is as close as you can get to [inaudible] in science. It has been a terrible thing when religious apologetics tether themselves to opposing evolution my god is good enough that he can great however he wants. If you wanted to grate to the evolutionary process i have no problem with that and im thrilled with that. The same way we understand god by looking at the movement of the planets and the workings of court and atomic particles we can understand god by looking for what he created. Darwinism is more controversial than evolution. Ablution is wellestablished but whether or not variations selections to the darwinian mechanism through which naturalists claim or scientist claim that evolution happened whether that can account for all biological complexity is another question and there are people who say it needs some help and they call themselves intelligent design scientist. I dont call them intelligent design scientist but i call them intelligent design philosophers. Im okay with teaching at the school as a philosophy but they should not be in competition with darwinism but its a search for material causes and once we jump out and say and therefore god did it it seems like were jumping out of science itself and that should be reserved for a course on theology or on philosophy. If you want to preparatory part of the class they will talk about the theory of evolution and will get to the other stuff later but is there case to be made for intelligent design behind this process . That would be fine and i have no problem with it. Or evolution amoral as opposed to man and is man naturally moral . Guest it is amoral is the way i would have put it. They preserve themselves and one of the great philosophers of history who have been arguing for a preservation that happens on the gene level and because of that you had been trying to replicate themselves and therefore the selfish gene is your natural state. They both cooperate if you look at every characteristic human beings have caught the capacity for love and hate and selfishness, the capacity for selflessness, capacity for kindness and cruelty. The inclination to destroy, the inclination to create committees ar, these areall natural inclinu can find evidence in darwinism or make up stories to explain how these traits came about. So to say we can get them from evolution is just bizarre because everything we do comes from evolution. So, hes written an article that most disagree with by the way. Host and hes an atheist. Guest correct. We can derive and look at the way the world is the way he peoe actually behave and common good but thats how we should behave so he says it is the case that we strive to survive and flourish and therefore something is moral if it promotes surviving and flourishing. My answer to that is it is the case so we start wars and murder and rape and kill to save thereforsaytherefore we should e things is preposterous we have to introduce morality from outside of the world and thats a great argument that would be the main argument for god and i have a chapter in my book called the good delusion. They said there is a delusion of god. Every argument you make you can make the same argument. He says you cant, the only way you know its right and wrong it is if i can have intuition about what is moral about the creator of the universe they never offered an answer on that. Host you talk about the physicist. Guest one of the great series of all time he was a practicing christian. There is a bizarre war between science and religion that is preposterous. If you look at every scientist in history including darwin, they have been disbelievers. There is no war. Its ridiculous. The only time a war comes out is when you have people step out of their boundaries and you have religious people trying to make scientific statements to turn the book into an spurt. Or when you have scientists making religious claims. So it is the realm of the empirical and the repeatable. Science is on capable of saying anything about the ultimate matters. Religion on the other hand isnt generally so heres what i explain. They say along came science and its displaced religion its just preposterous. Religion didnt go anywhere they just dont know their history. They were enlightened. Why is it an either or. You just see these being trumpeted about in our society and it is ridiculous. One of them is, i get this all the time, are you left or right. Neither and both. Theres plenty to agree with on the left and right like they have to stop everything. Something people at freedom fest will agree on is even in capitalism or do you want to help the poor, the societies that have the most health and wellbeing are the most capital. Unfortunately they were both binary, too. Host do you believe in science or religion . Guest most dont know this america has gotten more religious as its gotten scientific. All of the great historians of American Religion have shown as science has increased in america, religion has increased right along with it. We have seen the rise. Religion causes violence and they started writing these books saying god is not great, so a lot of people bought into the argument and said religion caused violence on 9 11 and religion is bad. Its that association. This is bad reasoning. And they should know better. Its unscientific when it comes to religion if they were to say to you democrats are bad because i knew one bad democrat, or if i were to say smoking doesnt kill people because my father smoked and lookeand left behind becomed thats ridiculous that is what we would call anecdotal evidence and when it comes to the value of religion, they rely him tiredly on anecdotal evidence. Christopher hitchens book god is not great is telling tories about which person did this past. But they never want to do is go into the Scientific Evidence because it is devastating. Every time you have actual scientific polls controlling other variables in western societies, the religious score higher on every agreedupon measure you could imagine and study after study there are literally thousands showing religious people live longer and give more to charity. Religious people are more educated to believe it or not. That religious people adopt more children, but theres higher social capital. But the primary is over, just go down the list of things we are trying to promote and we can agree democrats, republicans, everybody, that would be good and you find those things are better because of religion. And religious believers are making Society Better. Michael shermer says again and again if it hurts Human Flourishing religious belief make Society Better it reduces crime and increases ancrying ans depression, increases economic wellbeing. Hes doing something by his own terms. Now i like skeptic magazine and the debunking of ufos and holocaust denial. But when he i hes going after privilege and hes doing something immoral. Host great example if you want to go anecdotal, so, prior to that atheists all the time when they want to tell their anecdotes or their stories, they want to go to the middle ages and talk about the inquisition. They want to talk about the religious war, about the state of the witchhunt. Look at these things religious people were doing. That doesnt even rise to the level of anecdotal evidence because there is no control group. If someone came up to you and said what people are inherently more violent than white people, you could say before the year 1500 in africa, black people said it all the time, they committed all of the oppression, the assaults, the deaths of. Its a silly thing to say. And thats exactly what the atheists do. You look they are doing in the middle ages, all the things that religious people were doing i dont see atheists doing this stuff. Its a silly thing to say so take that all and throw it in the garbage. We dont have a control group until the 20th century and that is with members of atheists and specifically openly atheist regimes. When we could actually Say Something meaningful and once you do that, if you want to compare the atheists violence and religious believer violence, the atheists win by a landslide. The biggest mass murder was the chairman who was an atheist, stalin probably the second greatest mass murderer of all time but also an atheist. Per capita the greatest murder of all times, hes an atheist and a leading regime doing so in the name of the material ideology. So, the idea if you want to play the anecdote game they will lose that one also. I like to look at the Scientific Data but if you want to look at somebody like chairman mao, he tries to wiggle his way out of this. They are not really atheist. They said they were. They were not really atheists because stalin believed in the marxist ideology which was a kind of religion. They try to have it both ways. You hear them say all the time atheist isnt a religion. Sometimes i have to correct them. You are right, doctor lewis. You say that their faith i say im wrong. Fullstop not a religion there is evidence and thats not a religion. It in itself is not a religion. You just said that they do not believe in god. Fullstop hes an atheist. All of these terrible tyrants were atheist by the definition and they cant wiggle out of it so when you want to look at the consequences of that religious beliefs, the wickedness is just overwhelming it doesnt mean that they are bad people. She is a good guy and probably compassionate you address the church, what is that and are you a member . Guest yes, good question. They try to get people to use the term because we have a sacred group of scripture so people used it as an epitaph and then the name kind of stuck. If you are calling the church by the name of the prophet are calling it the wrong thing. So it is a mistake to call them the mormon church. Its slightly insulting because it goes against religious precepts. Now why is the church at this moment callingsy saints . I think it is because we live in a moment of World History certainly American History when things have gotten to soundbite. We are too much in love with short soundbites and instead of flushing things out, we need it to stop. We see it all the time in cable news and so forth. Tell me what you think you believe and give me longer answers. Calling it the church of latterday saints forces them to say im not going to use the soundbite, im going to explain. What does that mean, we believe in the last days of frustration which is something incidentally thomas jefferson, Roger Williams and the defenders of that religious freedom have championed this idea of the restoration of the religious truths, so my book was written to make the apologetic case it is written to try to include more religious traditions within the conversation and the traditions but i think religious believers of all stripes are people that are golfing buddies whatever the traditions i think they could profit only arguments that are not exclusive to the latterday saints. Host when did you teach and how did you get interested in this . Guest great question. Its a Smaller School i teach there and its just south of Yellowstone National park. I shouldnt say this because im trying to keep it small, we like the smalltown. I didnt mean to make this a major part of my study. During graduate school you are reading the atheist. Using the kind of things they say you write because it is like an exorcism. I found out that was true. I couldnt move on until i had written things down. So i had these ideas of what i thought were bad argument and i would write them down and just kind of kept the file and eventually i started to think what if i can organize this into something bigger and over the course of a few months i started putting things around and they said you ought to do that in a book and it was of course the most important part of the writing process. I got it in the book form and they published it for me and there it is. So what i teach at the university, idaho is u. S. History, i teach a course on american civics, film history, ive taught asian history in the past in a Smaller Department you get a variety of topics which is kind of fun but dont teach religious matters, so this is a side thing for me but something important enough to me in my own Spiritual Development and i thought they could be helpful for other people. Today it means im so sorry. It is as if you are apologizing for your faith. It simply means defense of the faiths we talk about apologetics for christianity, people who speak out in favor of christianity, in favor of christian religion and beliefs in god against those people who would attack us and since there are so many its gotten so much more than the 21st century. We need solid apologetics because they are not very good at the system its just we dont have people standing up to them. Part of my book i am not proud of it is a little bit hostile it can get a little bit something i need to work on. But the 80 guests behave like intellectual bullies. Richard dawkins said it is frankly bonkers. If i respond in kind sometimes mighty readers can forgive a little but perhaps it is understandable that i respond with a little bit of a strong tone because they are so aggressive and maybe theres a place to stand up to the intellectuals. Host the author of the book there is a god help to respond to atheism in the last religious beliefs. The good evening,