In this episode Trent chats with Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy about atheism and Islam.
Michael’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/inspiringphilosophy
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Trent Horn (00:00:19):
Welcome everyone to the Council of Trent. My guest today is Michael Jones from Inspiring Philosophy. Michael, welcome to the Council of Trent.
Michael Jones (00:00:26):
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Trent Horn (00:00:27):
Absolutely. I have been following your work for a while, really impressed by it. But for some of our listeners who might not be as familiar, can you just run us through sort of your apologetic background and what you’ve been doing on YouTube the past few years?
Michael Jones (00:00:42):
Yeah, so I got on YouTube in 2011. So a long time ago and I’ve just been making various videos defending Christianity over the years. Was very shy at first. People don’t realize I didn’t show my face or name for five years.
Trent Horn (00:00:56):
Oh, wow.
Michael Jones (00:00:56):
Yeah. I was really trying hard not to.
Trent Horn (00:00:59):
Why didn’t you want to do that?
Michael Jones (00:01:01):
I’m introverted. Didn’t really want the public recognition, the public name, the public being the public sphere, but then God just kept pushing me in that direction.
Trent Horn (00:01:11):
I find the best apologists actually tend to be introverted. I’ll go and meet people. They’ll always be surprised. They’ll see people who will go out and do public talks. Or someone like you, they’ll see you do a public debate with a Muslim and it can get really spirited. And they might think that you’re just someone who’s just like, “Oh, I’ll just go out there and talk to everybody.” And then they actually meet you and you’re like, “That’s not who I am all the time.”
Michael Jones (00:01:34):
Yeah, I agree. Extroverts suck. I totally agree.
Trent Horn (00:01:38):
They get a bad rap, but there’s some good ones out there. My wife would be a shining example of that. That’s why I have friends. Contrary to people on the internet, by the way, I love when people take me out of context. I said in a previous debate that one of the reasons that I make friends, when you’re so introverted, you pour yourself into your work. I’m grateful I have a spouse that sets up, “Oh, we’re going to go out with this couple. Oh yeah, I should have remembered to do something like that, ” and go and meet people. Some people online twisted that into, “I’m only allowed to have the friends my wife chooses.” But I’m sure no one’s ever taken things you’ve said on the internet and grotesquely twisted them out of proportion. No,
Michael Jones (00:02:17):
Never. No one ever does that on the internet. No.
Trent Horn (00:02:21):
Who would you say kind of in your … So you’ve been doing this since 2011, and that’s long before. I remember I posted a video way back on my YouTube channel, it says started like 2006, back when I just got one because YouTube was new. I published a video. I responded to a guy who said, it was a viral video from like 2012, like Jesus, not religion. It was like some rap. I made my own rap and response. Oh God. Oh yeah. No, it’s cringe.
Michael Jones (00:02:51):
Now I have to go find this rap.
Trent Horn (00:02:54):
I wonder, I don’t think it’s on there. I think I’m going to have to resurrect it and bring it back because that would’ve been almost 15 years ago. But then I went dark and didn’t put anything really on there until like 2020. But it seems like you’ve been … So if you’ve been consistently on YouTube for like 15 years, what have you seen as kind of like a change in the presentation about Christianity, Christian apologetics? You talk about like early 2010s, now we’re in the mid 2020s. What are things you’ve seen as kind of like changed in the last 15 years?
Michael Jones (00:03:23):
Yeah, it’s become more of a confident, I guess, approach to apologetics. If you go back to 2011, 2012, we were just making videos like, “Hey, here’s why I think God exists.” We were very much on the defense, very much like being attacked by new atheists, secularists, that kind of movement. And I feel like within the past five years, we’ve really turned the tide and you’re getting more Christians that are more confident, they’re making apologetics, fun. People like God Logic, for example, are really good at that. So I feel like we’re more on the offensive now. We’re now trying to win back the culture and making a lot of progress. So I think in some ways it’s gotten better, in some ways it’s gotten worse.
Trent Horn (00:04:06):
I would agree with you that I think it is better if we’re not always on defense and timid. This idea like, “Hey, I’m sorry I’m putting my Christian beliefs out there, but here’s my four reasons why they’re true.” But even this idea of going on the offense without being offensive. I mean, I was raised during my conversion experience was really based on William Lynn Craig, JP Moreland, that sort of Biola apologetic where you do formal debates, here’s my arguments and proofs, very trying to make academics suitable for laypeople to understand it and maintain that sort of academic tone. And I think that’s still really important, but at the same time, it seemed like the new atheists or the liberals at Buzzfeed or things like that, they had the monopoly on snark and just trying to ridicule us. And do you think there is some benefit in us turning around and ridiculing non-Christian beliefs, secular beliefs, even beliefs of other religions, but ridiculing it in a way without just throwing Christian charity out the window.
Michael Jones (00:05:09):
Oh, absolutely. I mean, if we just take advice from the church fathers, I don’t think Jerome, St. Jerome, for example, was always nice. He was very snarky at times.
Trent Horn (00:05:18):
No, yeah. When you read, what is it? He wrote his reply Defending the Perpetual Virginity of Mary- That’s what I
Michael Jones (00:05:24):
Was
Trent Horn (00:05:25):
Thinking of. I think it was Jovinius and he just calls him like a block and he’s like, “How could you believe something so asinine like this? ” And just kind of goes through in that way. But it’s kind of interesting though, I think we see that rise and that sort of rhetoric among the fathers after Christianity becomes the established religion of the Roman Empire, whereas the tone is different. If you look, for example, at Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, if you look at the early Nicene fathers, well, especially if you look at, for example, Justin Martyr, his apology to the Roman Emperor, we’re actually pretty good for society. I know people are saying we’re cannibals, we’re not. And let me go through all of this. Do you think there might be a parallel here that in the 2010s, Christianity is still like belittled as something like, oh, once we get pure rationality, we’re going to have flying cars and the world’s going to be perfect and we just got to get rid of this Christian stuff.
(00:06:26):
But then now 15 years later, people realize, oh, when you take it away, you get craziness. Maybe the Christians were right all along.
Michael Jones (00:06:32):
Oh, that’s exactly what happened. I mean, you go back, the new atheists were just, they were such a minority. They still are a minority, but they were dominating the culture. Everything was about that. Hollywood, the media, academia was all promoting this secularist nonsense. And then it seems like within the past 10 years, a lot of them kind of woke up and were like, some of them, not all, but some of them kind of like, “Well, maybe we went too far. Maybe we do want a Christian culture.”
Trent Horn (00:06:56):
Well, you look at Richard Dawkins. He’s saying like, “Well, I consider myself a cultural Christian.” Well, what are you talking about? Do you wrote a book called The God Delusion?
Michael Jones (00:07:04):
Yeah, it’s wild. But I mean, there’s a video I saw of him. I can’t remember. It was a while back, but he’s walking around Britain and he’s just dumbfounded as to why there’s so many metaphysics, like psychic shops around Britain. He’s like, “This is not what he was expecting.” But I mean, I think this kind of is what happens. When you remove Christianity from the West, people kind of reverted to modern paganism. They’re in the horoscopes, they’re into metaphysic shops and they’re going to psychics because people are going to crave spirituality. They’re not going to get it from Christianity. They’re going to revert back to their pagan ways. And that’s what a lot of this new age stuff is doing, but it’s going to be bad because we’re also seeing declining birth rates. So the secularist culture cannot even produce another generation to replace them.
(00:07:52):
They
Trent Horn (00:07:52):
Just
Michael Jones (00:07:52):
Are going to die out. So it’s like, you guys can’t even build a culture for one generation,
Trent Horn (00:08:00):
What are you doing? Well, you can’t maintain that idea of ritual, generational continuity. People all throughout history, time, place, and culture have had things that mark coming of age, different important elements, milestones of life. Christianity has that built into it because God created the fabric of reality itself. But I think that is interesting when you talk about how we have this kind of modern paganism. It reminds me of how you’ll have Hollywood actors and actresses. People in Hollywood will make fun of Christianity like, “Oh, Christianity is so stupid and all these myths.” And then those same people will join Scientology. That is the one that … Or I think it was Isaac Hayes on South Park. He would rip into Christianity all the time and then as soon as they made fun of Scientology, he quit. He’s like, “You shouldn’t be making fun of religion.” I’m like, “You make fun of what I believe.” You think that the reason you’re stressed out is because a bunch of dead aliens are thrown in a volcano 45 million years ago that traveled here on a big spaceship or something.
(00:09:03):
Are you always just boggled that people will reject Christianity and then they’ll go for the wildest stuff?
Michael Jones (00:09:08):
Well, yeah, I try to avoid that in myself, first of all. I don’t want to be like, “Haha, Islam is silly. You guys go kiss a stone. That’s silly.” I
Trent Horn (00:09:17):
Try.
Michael Jones (00:09:18):
I’m not perfect, but I try to avoid that because that’s not an argument as to why it’s wrong. That’s not an argument as to why Scientology is wrong. They believe weird things.
Trent Horn (00:09:25):
The question is, what is the evidence? Something you believe could sound very strange. Yeah.
Michael Jones (00:09:30):
Things
Trent Horn (00:09:30):
I believe as a Catholic sounds strange to people.
Michael Jones (00:09:32):
But I think what people do is they tend to forget that when you’re like a Scientologist like Isaac, you’re going to be like, “Well, this is what I know to be true or
Trent Horn (00:09:40):
What
Michael Jones (00:09:41):
I think to be true.” And when you hear something, other than that, like Christianity, your psychology starts to reject it and disgust receptors can start to light up and you start to make fun of it and mock it. And we got to work on that. But I think that’s what a lot of those Hollywood people are doing. But
Trent Horn (00:09:56):
I think what’s important and what you do with your channel, what I try to do with my channel is, okay, we all believe things that are odd. Even at the most basic fundamental level saying, while we are human organisms, we’re human animals, nearly everybody agrees we’re not like any other animal or organism on earth. We have different moral status, different sense of intrinsic dignity. So we all believe things that are odd. How do we explain those odd things?
Michael Jones (00:10:21):
What I’d like to do is it’s like try to explain quantum mechanics to somebody in the 1800s. They would look at you like a new age woo-woo nut job. Yeah, particles can be on the other side of the universe and instantly transfer and there’s no particle there before you look at it. It’s just a wave function. They would have locked you up for being a crazy person. So I mean, sometimes reality is weird. We just reject it, but we got to go on the evidence. And just it seems like a lot of people in general don’t do that. It’s just
Trent Horn (00:10:49):
Easier
Michael Jones (00:10:49):
To mock things that you don’t believe in because it’s easier for your brain psychology.
Trent Horn (00:10:53):
Let’s talk a bit about, you were saying about Muslims not caricaturing beliefs. I think something else you’d probably notice, especially even with Richard Dawkins and atheism in Europe, is he’ll go around and he’ll see, oh, there’s all these psychic shops, things like that. But also you would see this robust rise of Islam, especially in Europe, not as much here in the US, but that doesn’t mean it’s... Read more on Catholic.com