Answering Secularism and Islam (with Inspiring Philosophy)

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 not coming, but especially seeing it in Europe. I think that someone like Richard Dawkins would much prefer a Christian country to a Muslim country and now Ru’s the idea that just like if you create a vacuum, something will fill the void and it’s often something you wouldn’t prefer. And you actually just came here straight from Dearborn. When I hear Dearborn, I’m like, “Oh, that’s an exciting place for young Christian apologists to be.

Michael Jones (00:11:42):

” Yeah. I just woke up this morning and Dearborn flew here. So it landed an hour or so ago. So yeah, just came straight from Dearborn. Myself, God Logic, David Wood, we were all up there with a bunch of friends of ours as well, like Reese’s answered apologetics, Elle and Eric. We were doing outreach. We were talking to Muslims on the streets. So we’d set up on a corner and we’d film it and we’d record stuff and we would invite Muslims to have conversations with us. And it went really well. I mean, we had a lot of really good conversations with Muslims there. Some people called the cops on us, but the cops came and they’re like, “Are you guys harassing anyone?” We’re like, “No. All right, you’re fine. Just do what you’re doing.”

Trent Horn (00:12:23):

Nice.

Michael Jones (00:12:24):

It was not what it was like 15 years ago when David Wood went there and they locked him up.

Trent Horn (00:12:29):

Oh, wow.

Michael Jones (00:12:29):

Yeah. So that happened to him. This was a lot more chill. People were just ready to have conversations. The cops were super cool. Everyone was really nice. Yeah, it was good for me in the sense that most of the Muslims I deal with online are nut job fringe people

Trent Horn (00:12:48):

That just- That’s true. I think that’s true of most belief systems.

Michael Jones (00:12:50):

Oh

Trent Horn (00:12:51):

Yeah. When I think about the people who are giving me the most grief right now, there’s people who represent Eastern Orthodoxy that are terminally online, they’re totally insane. But if I walked into an Eastern Orthodox parish, they would just probably be the most cool laid back people and never even heard of this stuff on the internet. Oh,

Michael Jones (00:13:07):

Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean-

Trent Horn (00:13:09):

And you’re probably similar with Muslims you talked to.

Michael Jones (00:13:11):

Oh yeah. Everyone there was super cool. There was a young Muslim yesterday. They came up to us and was like starstruck. He took photos with us and he just sat and asked us questions for like an hour.

Trent Horn (00:13:21):

So he’s familiar with the online work, but he’s not so sucked in that he’s just going to be a totally abrasive jerk. He’s genuinely interested.

Michael Jones (00:13:28):

Oh yeah, yeah. Now there were some people shouting out their cars at us. There was a car that pulled up at one point and was like looking at us. And then a cop came and started yelling something and we were like, “Oh, is he yelling at us?” But no, he got rid of the car for us that was just sort of like watching us

Trent Horn (00:13:44):

Strangely.

Michael Jones (00:13:45):

So I mean, there were some aggressive ones, but the majority of the ones we talked to, super chill, super nice, just ready to have a conversation about Islam and Christianity. We were outside an Islamic school at one point. We didn’t realize that’s where we were, but a bunch of kids came out, came over and started talking to us. They were interested in what we had to say. One took a photo of something I showed him on my phone like, yeah, there’s two different versions of the Quran here. He’s like, “All right, I want to go ask my Imam about that. ” So I mean, very good stuff.

Trent Horn (00:14:14):

What were your conversations with these Muslims? What did it tend to … When you talk with them, either here or in other conversations, what does it tend to gravitate around when you’re talking to them and you want to engage the question of Islam and Christianity? The

Michael Jones (00:14:26):

Quran. We always try to take it back there.

Trent Horn (00:14:28):

Okay.

Michael Jones (00:14:29):

And my experiences, and I would read a lot of reports of missionaries in the Muslim world from a hundred years ago or so, saying they’re not having a lot of success. And so I was looking, what are they doing? And well, they’re just preaching the gospel. Great. Yeah. But you got to break down the wall of Islam first because they are so caught up in the idea that Quran is from God, it’s perfect. So you got to attack that. You got to show all the contradictions in it. You got to run the Islamic dilemma, be like, “The Quran is confirming my scriptures.” Okay, well, my scriptures contradict the Quran. So if my scriptures are true, like the Quran claims, I got to reject Islam, but if they’re corrupted, why is the Quran confirming corrupted scriptures? So we ran that a lot and Muslims didn’t have good answers for us.

(00:15:14):

They just start telling us things the Quran doesn’t say, but it starts to break down that wall that maybe this isn’t from God and now I got to really defend this. And why do I have to spend so much time defending it when the Quran claims to be clear and perfect?

(00:15:29):

So I mean, you start breaking that down, then you can present the gospel to them and then they get far more interested. We’ve had a lot of success online with that approach.

Trent Horn (00:15:38):

That makes sense to me because when I engage people, I mean, I try to model for people a Socratic approach to apologetics. It’s something I’d done for a while. I really got my start doing that approach when I would engage in pro- life apologetics. This would be in the … I started doing this in university campuses around 2008, 2009, really got started actually in 2006. They visited my school at Arizona State University. We set up pro- life exhibits, we would dialogue with students. First, we talk about abortion, but then it would quickly spread to other topics. And my goal in asking the questions, and I still do this when I teach this method to Christians, is that in order for people to appreciate the good news of the gospel, they have to see bad news first. Good news doesn’t make sense without bad news. Yeah, it’s a good point.

(00:16:20):

And bad news has to be in the form of that the current thing you believe … So if Christianity is the true, the good, and the beautiful, then whatever you believe that’s not Christian, in some respect, it’s going to be bad, ugly, and/or false. Usually all three. And so it sounds like you see that missionaries to Islam make more progress. Hey, you can preach that Christianity is true, good, and beautiful, but they also believe that about Islam. So you got to put the cracks in there first. And do you think there’s a difference? We have a little bit of an advantage here because I know in Balboa Park, I used to live in San Diego. There are Muslims there who would do street evangelization. Oh,

Michael Jones (00:16:56):

They won’t even … I was just there like a month ago or so.

Trent Horn (00:16:59):

They talk to you or no?

Michael Jones (00:17:00):

No, they don’t want to talk to us.

Trent Horn (00:17:02):

I put an outreach. One of them is Sheik Uthman, and I wanted to engage him in a debate and I haven’t heard back.

Michael Jones (00:17:08):

Yeah. He’s too busy working on his track and field. He’s a great runner. Man, he’s like Usain Bolt, man. We call him Uthman Bolt sometimes.

Trent Horn (00:17:16):

He sees you in Easy’s running.

Michael Jones (00:17:18):

Man, he’s fast. I don’t get

Trent Horn (00:17:19):

It, man. He takes

Michael Jones (00:17:20):

Off. I don’t know what the problem is.

Trent Horn (00:17:22):

Well, I engaged him a while ago when I was doing some Muslim apologetics and I want to get into it more because part of me, I feel bad. I feel like, well, if I’ve already shown there’s no good reason to believe in the Quran, I feel like I’m almost exhausted it. What could I say? But there is so much more to say. The Islamic dilemma, I want to get into that more. But I remember mostly the arguments tend to be, well, Islam is true because the Quran is the word of God and it’s impossible for a human being to have created this, which is one of the weakest arguments ever. You know how

Michael Jones (00:17:53):

Easy it is to debunk? I believe it’s either Sahim Muslim or Sahi Abakari, but the number is like 402.

Trent Horn (00:17:59):

Yeah.

Michael Jones (00:18:00):

Right in there, it says that Umar said, this was one of the companions of the prophet said, “Allah agree with me in three things.” And then he said something and then Allah sent down a verse, just like what Umar said. So the Quran claims if this is not from God, produce something like it. Well, Umar did.

Trent Horn (00:18:17):

Yeah.

Michael Jones (00:18:17):

It’s in their own Hadith. Umar produced verses and then Allah sent down something to match it, the exact same thing that Umar said. So you throw that at them and then they have nothing because their own Hadith shows them that Umar met the challenge.

Trent Horn (00:18:31):

Okay. So just to recap this story, so the Hadith is a collection of oral traditions about Muhammad and then his successors. What

Michael Jones (00:18:37):

They said they’re

Trent Horn (00:18:38):

Sayings. Yeah. But these tend to be written 200, 300 years later. Yeah. Not terribly reliable. No. So in one of them, one of the companions of Muhammad does write something as beautiful as the Quran. So God basically has to play ketchup and say, “Oh yeah, yeah, I can do that too.”

Michael Jones (00:18:53):

Yeah. So I mean, when they say this is from God, how could you … No one can produce something like it. I mean, you could just be like, “Well, ChatGPT can do it, obviously.” But guess what? Umar did it. Yeah, it’s recorded. Your own source shows that someone did it, therefore this argument is trash and that stops them then in their tracks because they can debate about you having an AI do something for you. They can’t debate

Trent Horn (00:19:16):

That

Michael Jones (00:19:16):

Because that’s a hadith they have to accept.

Trent Horn (00:19:18):

Sheik Uthman is funny though because that was like the main miracle that I had seen or presented that the Quran itself is a miracle. Muhammad didn’t do any miracles. I mean, there’s some recorded in the Hadith, but they’re way too late to have any historical attestation to them. But one that I was surprised that Sheikh Uthman would put on his videos was the claim that Muhammad split the moon. And just like I wanted to debate him on that so bad because the evidence for it is just so legendary and different than what we have for the resurrection, but I never heard back.

Michael Jones (00:19:50):

The funny thing is like they’ll say the gospels were written too late. They’re 40 years after Jesus. And then they’re like, “But are these collections written?”

Trent Horn (00:19:58):

Hundreds.

Michael Jones (00:19:58):

Hundreds of years later, you’re good to go guys. You can trust them. But the funny thing is that also contradicts the Quran because the Quran in numerous places like Subra 29, I believe it’s like 50 to 51, the Pagans are coming to Muhammad and goes, why won’t his Lord give him a sign? And Allah replies, signs are only with Allah. Muhammad’s only sent as a warner or as a messenger.

Trent Horn (00:20:23):

Yes.

Michael Jones (00:20:24):

Okay. If he’s only a messenger, he is not a miracle worker. And that’s Allah’s response to why he’s not doing any miracles. So it seems as though when they started to spread around and they encountered Christians, they started to make up Hadith that Muhammad did miracles-

Trent Horn (00:20:39):

To catch up. Yeah.

Michael Jones (00:20:40):

Yeah, hundreds of years later. But the earliest source to Quran doesn’t report Muhammad doing miracles. In fact, it strongly suggests, and I mean very strongly that he’s not doing any.

Trent Horn (00:20:50):

Right. Yeah, he doesn’t do that. He specifically, when challenged on that, doesn’t do it. And here in lies, we have the problem that Muhammad then just becomes a prophet, someone who points to God either to Allah or to previous prophets. But one of them he points back to is Jesus and that gets us to the Islamic dilemma. So we’re supposed to read the Karamasis to believe it. Muhammad doesn’t do any miracles. Okay, but then what about the prophet before him, the actual prophet, Jesus, that he does miracles and then he rises from the dead. The Quran says to believe in Jesus, but then we know from history, we know from what the New Testament says that Jesus claimed to be God rose from the dead, which contradicts what the Quran claims, even the claim by the Quran that Jesus was never crucified, hence the dilemma.

(00:21:38):

So is there more that needs to be unpacked? So that’s essentially the Islamic dilemma, it would go like this, that if the Quran is true, then Christianity is true. The New Testament is true and so the Quran is false or if the Quran is false, then Islam is false.

Michael Jones (00:21:53):

Yeah. It’s very clear that Quran says things like in Surah 5:68 that, “Oh, people of the book, you have nothing to stand on unless you observe the Torah, the gospel, and what has been revealed to you from your Lord.” Sewer 2:41, that you believe in Muhammad because we’re confirming your scriptures. Same with Surah 4:47. I mean, this is all over the place. We went through and counted. We found about 123 verses of the Quran that speak positively of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, pointing people to them. In fact, like Seward 29 tells Muslims they’re to believe in our scriptures.

Trent Horn (00:22:26):

It

Michael Jones (00:22:26):

Says, say to the people of the book, we believe in what has been revealed to us and what has been revealed to you, our God and your God has won.

Trent Horn (00:22:33):

Yeah.

Michael Jones (00:22:34):

So that’s a huge problem because we just go to the Bible and it’s like, this contradicts everything the Quran is saying, but your Quran is pointing us to it, therefore we need to reject the Quran if this is from God as the Quran claims. It creates a paradox. And so I mean, you bring that up to them and then they have to start making excuses for the Quran. They’re like, well, it meant this. It didn’t mean that it’s confirming your scriptures. It meant it was partially confirming. So then I go, what about Surah 11: one? It says these are the verses of the Quran, these verses are well perfected and then fully explained.

Trent Horn (00:23:08):

And that would be the problem because I think a Muslim Apologist might say, well, of course, yes, the Quran, which they’ll say has been perfectly preserved, points back to the Bible, which is imperfectly preserved and all the parts in it that contradict the Quran happen to be Christian interpolations or legends. It’s not the true original parts of the Bible. Is that one way they try to get around the dilemma?

Michael Jones (00:23:29):

Oh yeah. But I mean, just think about it. If the Quran is well perfected and perfectly explained and it’s clear as Sewer 12: one says, they can’t get around that because the Quran should say that when it says it’s confirming our scriptures over and over, I mean so many verses. Okay, it should explain that because the Quran claims that it’s going to do that. So therefore when they come along and they say, “Well, the Quran meant something different.” Too bad, you’ve just accidentally admitted the Quran is not clear, its verses are not perfected and fully explained. So congratulations, you just debunked Islam again.

Trent Horn (00:24:07):

Okay. So you don’t even have to go the route of saying, “Well, no, this stuff is historically irreliable.” You’re saying in taking this route, you’re going to have to deny what the Quran actually says. You’ve radically reinterpreted it to try to save the argument.

Michael Jones (00:24:18):

Absolutely. Yeah. And

Trent Horn (00:24:19):

Do you think part of this comes from the fact that the Quran, its early formulation was probably partially due to Muhammad or his companions just having like an incomplete knowledge of Christianity in the first place?

Michael Jones (00:24:32):

Oh yeah. Yeah. He was clearly some illiterate guy. I think he thought he was a prophet and so because he thought he was a prophet, he just assumed that, well, whatever I say is going to be in line with those scriptures because Allah is not going to let me down that thing that tacked him in the cave. So he just started preaching stuff. He’d hear stories from the Jews and Christians. He liked some, he didn’t like others. He included what he liked, that

Trent Horn (00:24:57):

Kind

Michael Jones (00:24:57):

Of stuff. And so he made a huge error that we can now use to debunk Islam.

Trent Horn (00:25:03):

Because he recited this over a period of many years. So it was not like trying to say, oh, that he just got this all in one sitting from an angel allegedly in a cave and then just gave it. This was given over a long period of time, which would be easy for someone to fabricate, meld together, and yeah, just incorporate things that he had heard from Christian missionaries or misheard, like thinking, for example, that God’s son is his literal son or that God is wed to marry or some of the other things that are in there that clearly seem to speak of someone who’s only familiar with misapprehensions of Christianity. Oh

Michael Jones (00:25:40):

Yeah. And he probably heard stuff from gnostic Christians.

Trent Horn (00:25:43):

That’s

Michael Jones (00:25:43):

Why we know the Quran talks about denying the crucifixion according to mainstream Sunni Islam. So I mean, he’s probably hearing … We know he’s getting stuff from the infancy gospel of Thomas, the second targem of Esther. He’s hearing stories. And so sometimes he’ll just like … And so there’s places in the Quran where it talks about the people of the book distorting the scriptures with their tongues. So that’s interesting. So it seems as though Muhammad heard stories he liked and he included it. If he didn’t like it, well, it’s because you’re distorting that with your tongue. That’s not what it says. And that’s pretty clear in one place, like Seward seven: 157, where he says,” They know I’m in their scriptures.

Trent Horn (00:26:23):

The

Michael Jones (00:26:24):

Tour and the gospel mentioned me, the unlettered prophet, but they won’t tell you because they’re hiding it from you.

Trent Horn (00:26:30):

“It’s interesting the way the approach you take, especially in the street evangelization, it’s sort of like the mirror image of when I see Sheikh Uthman and other Muslim apologists when I watch their videos, like when they go to Baba Park, they’ll find an unsuspecting Christian and they’ll just say,” Hey, the Bible has all these contradictions in it and the Christian can’t explain the contradictions and then they try to pivot and say, therefore, and hey, look, God has won. We’ve got a simple belief system. You should go with Islam. “That’s always my favorite approach because they just get someone in a moment of confusion and then leap over having to give evidence for their claim and just say,” We believe that God is one. Muhammad is prophet. Isn’t that way better than your Trinity and Bible contradictions? “And so it’s interesting, they take a similar approach.

(00:27:12):

Do you see a lot of the more effective rhetorical Muslims kind of do that? They’ll just attack Christianity, create doubt, leapfrog over into Islam.

Michael Jones (00:27:20):

Absolutely. And as soon as they do that, the simple way is to go, ” Why are you pointing out all these contradictions in the Bible you just debunked Islam?

Trent Horn (00:27:27):

“Right.

Michael Jones (00:27:28):

“Because the Quran confirms this. So why would Allah confirm a book that’s filled with so many contradictions? What are you doing?” So you immediately turn it on them, they’ve got no idea what to do.

Trent Horn (00:27:37):

Okay. So the Islamic dilemma works not only as an offensive measure against Islam, it’s a defensive measure against attacks from Muslims on things like the reliability of scripture.

Michael Jones (00:27:49):

Exactly.

Trent Horn (00:27:50):

I like it. I like it.

Michael Jones (00:27:51):

When I debate Muslims on this and they want to debate is Islam versus Christianity true, I always say like, “Listen, we can have that debate. There’s no way you can win this. ” You either are going to come away saying both religions are false or that one of the religions is false and it’s going to be Christianity because if you attack the Bible,

Trent Horn (00:28:08):

Which

Michael Jones (00:28:08):

You have to do, that shows Islam is false because your Quran confirms my Bible. Sorry.

Trent Horn (00:28:14):

I thought about that. I was approached for one of these big debate festivals. They wanted me to come and do a debate with a Muslim and he wanted to do the debate on Islam versus Christianity. And I was a bit hesitant in doing it that way. So I proposed a counter offer to him saying, let’s do two debates. Is Islam true? Is Christianity true? I think you should be the

Michael Jones (00:28:36):

First one.

Trent Horn (00:28:37):

Perfect. And throw the dilemma in there. Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m familiar with the dilemma, but I’m not as seasoned in deploying it. So I think I might want to spend some time with that before I pit both of them together. Because part of me, for me, the reason I wanted to separate them was I don’t want to do an Islam versus Christianity debate and get on my back foot going up against, here’s a million contradictions and the Trinity doesn’t make sense when I guess I could sidestep all of that by just throwing the Islamic dilemma in there.

Michael Jones (00:29:03):

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Trent Horn (00:29:04):

And

Michael Jones (00:29:05):

Here’s another cool dilemma for them that we came up with. So if the Bible predicts a future Gentile prophet, Islam is false. If it doesn’t predict a future Gentile prophet, Islam is false. So think about it, think about it. The Quran says we can find Muhammad in the Torah and the gospel. It’s Seward 61: six says that Jesus spoke of someone named Akhamed coming after him. Okay, here’s the problem with that. Okay, so if Muhammad or if there’s no future prophet in our Bible, Islam is false because it claims that he’s in there. But if the Bible does predict a future Gentile prophet, Islam is still false because prophecies in the Bible, as you know, are theologically indexed. You can’t divorce them from their theology. So any prophet the Bible predicts has to be in line with what the Bible teaches. And if anyone comes along and contradicts the Bible, they have to be a false prophet

Trent Horn (00:29:59):

By

Michael Jones (00:29:59):

Definition what the Bible teaches. So if there’s a future Gentile prophet, which I don’t think the Bible speaks of, but let’s just say the Muslims are right and there is. Okay, Islam is still false because that means either he hasn’t come yet or it was Muhammad, but the early Muslims corrupted his message so much that he was originally a Trinitarian Christian and they changed everything. So I mean either way Islam is false still. So it’s one of those things the Quran demands they find Muhammad in our scriptures. But by doing that, they’re going to show Islam as false because of this biblical prophet dilemma.

Trent Horn (00:30:29):

Right, exactly. Some of the other things I’ve seen you debate though, you’ve debated, you engage things like the Quran about the truth of Islam. You’ve also done debates about whether Islam is good for society. And in particular, you’re one of the only ones I’ve seen that have debated the issue of child marriage.

Michael Jones (00:30:49):

Oh yeah.

Trent Horn (00:30:50):

How did you want to get into that hornet’s

Michael Jones (00:30:52):

Nest? I didn’t. So the whole backstory, I was at a debate con event and David Wood got up there to debate some guy named Kenny, who’s a Muslim on age of Aisha. And I was sitting next to an atheist, holy

Trent Horn (00:31:03):

Collab. And I want to hear about that because I’ve interacted with him before. Was it Thomas right? Thomas Brosburg? Yeah, Thomas Russbrook. Yeah. For those who don’t know, Aisha was the underage wife of the prophet Muhammad. They were wed, was she like six?

Michael Jones (00:31:20):

When she was six and they consummated the marriage when she was nine.

Trent Horn (00:31:23):

Right. So wet at six, consummated at nine. Just a backstory people who are listening know who Aisha is. So you’re at the conference sitting next to Holy Kool-Aid. They’re doing this debate on Aisha.

Michael Jones (00:31:31):

Yeah. And him and I are just like bonding over this, I guess would be the best word to use. We’re just like, we cannot believe what we’re hearing.

Trent Horn (00:31:38):

Oh, and for our listeners who don’t know, once again, I love when Apollo just talk shop because we’re all like, “Oh, it’s Coley Kool-Aid.” And people are like, “Where’s Kool-Aid? The Kool-Aid man was there.” He just burst through the brick wall and he was there. Holy Kool-Aid, Thomas Westbrook is kind of a new, part of the brand of the new atheist YouTubers has been around for a while. One of the first videos I did on my channel was him and Bible contradictions. So you’re there, you’re bonding with this atheist critical YouTuber over look at what Islam is doing.

Michael Jones (00:32:03):

Yeah. And Kenny’s up there going like, “Hey, she may not have been nine. She could have been 12.” And we’re like, “Oh my gosh.” After that, I made a couple Twitter posts about how horrible Islam was and I hinted that maybe I’ll attack it more, but then I forgot. But then about six months later, some Muslim apologist named Daniel Akikichu posted on his YouTube, “I challenged you to debate me on a child marriage should happen today.”

Trent Horn (00:32:27):

Oh boy.

Michael Jones (00:32:28):

Now at the time my daughter was like

Trent Horn (00:32:29):

…

Michael Jones (00:32:30):

Yeah.

Trent Horn (00:32:31):

Okay. You want to debate that?

Michael Jones (00:32:33):

At the time my daughter was

Trent Horn (00:32:34):

Like- Because it’s not just the Quran, it’s rampant in the Muslim world because of Muhammad’s example.

Michael Jones (00:32:39):

Yeah. So I read that post and my daughter was like six or seven at the time. And a primal instinct awoken me and I’m like, “It’s game time.” And I read so much on child marriage. I read the history of it all, studies on all the harmic causes and went down to the debate and I got him to admit in the debate that in Islam, it’d be permissible to sleep within 11 month old if she’s married off by your parents. And it just exposed how horrible this religion is.

Trent Horn (00:33:08):

Because his idea of when is someone at the age of marriage. So his idea of the age of marriage is just strictly biological development. And you brought forward a great counter reply to that being precocious puberty because he’ll just say, “Well, look, if your body is capable of bearing children and having children, why wouldn’t God have made you ready for marriage?” And that happens for 11, 12 year old people. But there are cases, I think the world’s youngest pregnant … The youngest pregnancy, I think the girl was like five, is in Peru. She gave birth to this child, and then I think as she was raised, she basically told that it was treated like a brother-sister relationship until the child was a lot older to find out. But there have been five-year-olds that have given birth. And so for him, it’s like, is that morally acceptable under Islam?

(00:34:03):

And he had to say, yeah.

Michael Jones (00:34:04):

It’s worse than that because he agreed

Trent Horn (00:34:07):

That

Michael Jones (00:34:07):

You could sleep with a girl before she got her first period. If

Trent Horn (00:34:11):

She’s

Michael Jones (00:34:11):

Just showing signs of puberty, it’s okay. And so he had to admit that. And that’s why he admitted that if a girl who has precocious puberty at 11 months, it’d be okay. And that’s Islam. That’s

Trent Horn (00:34:24):

Why

Michael Jones (00:34:25):

We fight so hard against it.

Trent Horn (00:34:26):

Yeah. And that’s what people need to see. And it makes me mad too. And I think this is something where we can get kind of more of the, not aggressive, but more of the … This might be a place, it’s kind of a weird way to bring in the atheist YouTubers and the atheist critics because among them, among the atheists, you can kind of separate them into the ones who are just kind of more centrist or libertarian minded and those who are just hardcore like liberals because the hardcore liberal atheists won’t want to say anything negative about Islam because of their … I say it’s because of their racist anti-racism because they basically put it this way. In the history of the world, it’s the white people that make things bad and the brown people are perpetual victims. They say, “Oh, and Islam is a bunch of brown people, therefore Muslims couldn’t be bad,” which is of course racist because most Muslims do not live in the Middle East.

(00:35:21):

And this is idea that you’re going to equate this entire religion. It’s a religion, not an ethnicity, which is already there. They’re off on a racist foot here. It was kind of like when I saw … Oh, I guess the difference there would be like back in 2014, there was a debate between on real time with Bill Maher, with Sam Harris and Ben Affleck. And Sam Harris would be an example of an atheist we could even ally with who sees like, yeah, Islam is worse than Christianity and it’s really dangerous. We need to do something. And Harris was saying this on the show and Ben Aflac was saying, “You’re an Islamophobe.” How can you just say anything bad about Islam when it’s the more well-read atheists who can say, “No, there’s a difference. Christianity and Islam are not the same thing and Christianity certainly is not worse than Islam.” You’d much rather, and that’s where Dawkins and the others are seeing this now, they would rather live in a Christian society than a Muslim society.

(00:36:14):

And I think, I’m sure it gives some of your thoughts on this. I think part of it, and this deals also with doing apologetics with Islam, like Christianity, we had to fight tooth and nail the last 300 years against the enlightenment, against hume, against German higher form criticism. Christianities had to be battle tested now. We can’t just be like, “Well, the Bible says it so it’s true.” We’ve had to do form criticism, historical criticism, in- depth philosophy, but I feel like in a lot of other places around the world, Islam is really unchanged in like 500 years and it’s incapable when it’s met with these challenges, it just wants to use either legal or physical violence to just meet the challenges. So no, we’re not going to deal with that.

Michael Jones (00:37:04):

I mean, that’s kind of good news though. Christianity is battle tested and we’re still here and we’re still the world’s largest religion. Islam is now for the first time being battle tested and it’s collapsing. Yeah,

Trent Horn (00:37:14):

Because it was sheltered. It’s basically like this sheltered kid who never had to fight for himself, always had bigger governments and cultures fighting for it. And now it’s like, oh, now you’re here in the Western world, the marketplace of ideas in YouTube and you’ve got nothing. Well,

Michael Jones (00:37:29):

I mean, look what the numbers come, the poll numbers coming out of places like Tunisia, Iran, Turkey.

Trent Horn (00:37:34):

Yeah.

Michael Jones (00:37:34):

Young people are leaving Islam. Some polls have shown 24 to 26% of youth are leaving Islam and the internet is killing it. It’s not battle tested and they have a lot of catching up to do and they can’t because there’s so many problems in Islam. It’s

Trent Horn (00:37:50):

Not

Michael Jones (00:37:51):

Going to be a good future. It’s not going to be this giant religion they think it is. So there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors being put up right now to try to pretend everything’s okay, but the Sheikhs and Imams are sounding the alarms at their conferences talking about 24% of Muslim youth leaving Islam, for example. So

Trent Horn (00:38:09):

I

Michael Jones (00:38:10):

Mean-

Trent Horn (00:38:10):

You even noticed when you went to Dearborn, it’s different now than when you were there 15 years ago.

Michael Jones (00:38:14):

Yeah. And

Trent Horn (00:38:14):

Do you think Matt might be a part of it?

Michael Jones (00:38:16):

I think so, yeah. I mean, I saw a lot of people walking around without hijabs. I mean, I saw a lot of Muslims and Hijabs for sure, but I saw a lot of secular people. We met a lot of ex- Muslim Christians there. Some friends of mine went to a church. There was a lot of ex- Muslims there. So I mean, sometimes I hope what’s happening is what God is doing is he brought a bunch of Muslims into the world because he knows within a few generations they’ll assimilate and deconvert and that’s going to help attack the religion because you have Muslim apologists like Zakur Nike sounding the alarm saying, “Hey, Muslims, we should be moving to Muslim dominant countries and preserve our culture.” Why are you saying that?

Trent Horn (00:38:55):

They’re in retreat. Yeah.

Michael Jones (00:38:56):

Why are you saying come home? What are you worried about all of a sudden?

Trent Horn (00:38:59):

So

Michael Jones (00:38:59):

It’s kind of weird that they think they’re going to take over, but now they’re saying, “Guys, guys, we should be in majority Muslim countries. Come on. What are you doing over there?”

Trent Horn (00:39:07):

Because then you see when the questions are asked, they can’t be answered. I want to circle back on the child marriage issue, because I could see a Muslim apologist will … I think one of the classic moves they’ll do to get around it, they’ll say, “Well, you as a Christian, you believe the Virgin Mary was a minor.” Maybe you debate the age. How is that any different? So how do you respond to that objection? Yeah. So

Michael Jones (00:39:29):

The Catholic encyclopedia says that the sources on Mary’s age are unreliable. So that’s to be the proto-evangelium of James. And it says that she was married to Joseph when she was 12, but it wasn’t like a normal marriage he was given to this 90-year-old man in the story to protect her virginity

Trent Horn (00:39:46):

And

Michael Jones (00:39:46):

Then she doesn’t even get pregnant until the age of 16.

Trent Horn (00:39:50):

So

Michael Jones (00:39:50):

They ignore that. But if you actually look at research and the time of Palestine at that time, so Amram Troper, Michael Satlo had pointed out that girls on average, Jewish girls on average in that time period were marrying between their late teens to early 20s. Earliest is like mid-teens.

Trent Horn (00:40:06):

Compare

Michael Jones (00:40:07):

That with the Jews in Babylon, they’re marrying young teens.

Trent Horn (00:40:09):

But

Michael Jones (00:40:10):

I mean, okay, then Mary was probably late teens to early 20s based on that research. The wider Roman Empire was doing similar practices. It’s almost like people knew that you’d wait for the hips to fully widen before you should expect a girl to bear children. It’s like they kind of figured that out on their own. And so what were people doing throughout history? They weren’t marrying nine year olds or 12 year olds. That was not normal. The normal thing we see in research coming from people like Keith Hopkins, Brent Shaw, Kim Phillips and the other authors I cited, prior to the modern age, girls were marrying late teens to early 20s on average.

Trent Horn (00:40:46):

Okay. So it’s interesting that if you just look, you could say, look, you’re trying to say that your cultural view that it’s okay to marry even nine and 10 year olds, that was not the norm in the Christian world or even in the Jewish world. And it’s funny, even if they try to go to the oldest sources to say that Mary was young, 11 or 12 years old, those same sources say that she was a pledged virgin, and this would be what now we as Catholics call a Josephite marriage. It’s one to protect her perpetual virginity. So if you take the Catholic approach, there’s no intercourse happening there. If you take more of a Protestant approach, you could say, “Oh, well, she could be late teens or early 20s.” And so there’s no problem there.

Michael Jones (00:41:23):

That’s

Trent Horn (00:41:24):

What

Michael Jones (00:41:24):

The data shows. So I mean, yeah, either approach is fine. It’s not comparable to the horrible thing that Muhammad did to Aisha.

Trent Horn (00:41:30):

Yeah. To be wed at six and then to consummate nine or 10 years old, this is now rampant in the Muslim world. And it’s not just that though. The other thing that really shocked me that I wasn’t aware of until a few months ago was looking at the rates of cousin marriage in the Muslim world. I don’t know how much you’ve looked into that, but showing that that is actually really unique. And even in countries, it’s not just a regional issue because you’ll go to the region, you’ll see that Christians engage in it far less than Muslims engage in marrying first cousins because they want to create these kind of tribal clan arrangements, even though that’s highly dysfunctional. Oh,

Michael Jones (00:42:10):

Thank God for the Catholic church outlawing cousin marriage all those centuries ago.

Trent Horn (00:42:14):

Dude, rock on here. Well, I remember actually looking at the canonical impediments for cousin marriage. They used to be a lot stricter. So it used to be a lot stricter that you couldn’t even marry like your second or third cousin. So I remember looking at a graph created around, I think it was around the latter in council in 12:15 showing what was appropriate and it gets really far out there. I think where we’re at now is basically the line is drawn at first cousin and it could only be allowed if you got like a dispensation from a bishop, but otherwise it’s drawn there. What in pedigree and genealogical terms you would call the fourth degree when it comes to separation. But yeah, and that’s really interesting when you look at, if you did a comparison between medieval Catholicism, medieval Islam, medieval Catholicism is very strict about, no, we would like to keep sexual unions outside of close-knit families and Islam, it’s very, very different in creating these dynamics, leading that dysfunction.

(00:43:17):

You know

Michael Jones (00:43:17):

Why that is?

Trent Horn (00:43:18):

Why is that?

Michael Jones (00:43:18):

Muhammad married one of his first cousins, married

Trent Horn (00:43:21):

To his daughter, first

Michael Jones (00:43:23):

Cousins.

Trent Horn (00:43:23):

If Muhammad did it, why can’t I? I guess that’s the problem.

Michael Jones (00:43:27):

Yeah, that’s

Trent Horn (00:43:27):

The problem. If your prophet, the person who’s … Your creed is a Muslim, there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. That is your central thing you believe is this guy, then you have to … Because it’s not even like with Mormons and Joseph Smith that there, although they have the loophole of like continuing revelation, once polygamy was outlawed, it turns out God doesn’t want us to do it anymore.

Michael Jones (00:43:52):

Well, a lot of ancient cultures preferred cousin marriage because you kept wealth in the family, so that just happened. Muhammad comes along, he’s supposed to be the excellent moral example for humanity. Shocker, the Quran gets that wrong, obviously, but so they see Muhammad doing it. He married some of his daughters off to first cousins. So okay, it’s good. Let’s just keep doing it. Christianity comes on the scene and says, no, this is not good. We need to stop this. Thank God for that. And what happens? Cousin marriage, long-term cousin marriage like generations is associated with lowering IQ. Studies have shown this. So over time, the Muslim community is collectively lowering their IQ. The Christian community is collectively raising the IQ. Gee, I wonder who’s going to be leading human civilization in the coming

Trent Horn (00:44:37):

Generations. Yeah. Well, it’s no surprise. The institution of the university arises in medieval Europe. Things like advancing in medical knowledge, for example. I mean, it’s not like- On that point,

Michael Jones (00:44:51):

On that point, something really interesting the Catholic church did that’s kind of cool.

Trent Horn (00:44:54):

I always like to hear that.

Michael Jones (00:44:56):

Yeah. This comes from Toby Huff. He wrote a book called The Rise of Early Modern Science. He’s trying to figure out why science didn’t arise in the Islamic world when they had the golden age and came out of Europe. He says it came from a lot of Christian doctrines and ideas. So one of them was getting rid of taboos. So pagans, Jews, Muslims, stayed away from pig and dead bodies a lot. Christians venerated the sites of tombs of saints. They were fine going near dead bodies and pig.

Trent Horn (00:45:23):

And we keep relics. We’ll keep the parts of deceased saints in churches

Michael Jones (00:45:28):

Even. Yeah. So that removed the taboo to go near pig in dead body. And early Europeans started dissecting pigs and they moved to dead bodies. So the Muslim world couldn’t advance because they had these taboos, these restrictions on pig going near dead bodies. That was removed from Christianity. It allowed to make incredible medical advances in science that the Islamic world couldn’t bypass. They got stuck because of their Islamic tradition. They made some, but they couldn’t really progress. Christianity gave the medical community the playing field they needed to really make advances.

Trent Horn (00:46:02):

And we allowed film franchises like Airbud to happen because we’re not freaked out by dogs. We get to have our little canine friends, but that’s the thing, because even in Michigan, there’s still a taboo about dogs being unclean and people will bully you if you have a dog in a Muslim neighborhood, right?

Michael Jones (00:46:20):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s wild. I mean, dogs are a man’s best friend. What’s the problem? Muhammad didn’t like dogs.

Trent Horn (00:46:26):

And it goes right back to that. The surgery thing is interesting because I think it was actually during the Black Plague. It was the Pope’s personal physician, Guy to Shaliak. I don’t know. He has a wonderful French name, but starts with Guy. But he was one of the pioneers in surgery because he was involved in doing work on early cadavers. So yeah, I think that’s interesting there when you bring that up because it’s not just Christianity either. I wanted to look into this because people will often do the whole thing like, Christians cause the dark ages. I want to do a-

Michael Jones (00:47:00):

Yeah.

Trent Horn (00:47:00):

Historians

Michael Jones (00:47:01):

Don’t even use that term

Trent Horn (00:47:02):

Anymore. Yeah, because the dark ages, it comes from an early Renaissance term trying to disparage the time of Christendom when they would say, no, that’s silly. We have Karolinjian minuscule. So we have better handwriting to preserve knowledge. You have medieval technology that’s created. But what’s interesting is that it’s not just the Muslim world. We see it stagnates in its development. You think about also even like in China or Japan, that it is something really unique to the Christian worldview of wanting to investigate the world and be able to create these kind of advances.

Michael Jones (00:47:37):

I did a video called How Christianity Created Science. I went through like a dozen features within Christianity that gave rise to modern science and I didn’t make them up. I just quoted several historians saying, look, listen, I got this from the experts here, but it’s like removing taboos, the belief and being the image of God helped to advance science because if God is reasonable and he made a reasonable world, then we can use our reason. But also Christianity has something called the fall of humanity.

Trent Horn (00:48:07):

So

Michael Jones (00:48:07):

Yeah, we have reason, it’s good, but it’s marred from the fall. Therefore, we have to do repeated experimentations to verify results. Lo and behold, Christianity was crucial for giving rise to the scientific method because of that.

Trent Horn (00:48:20):

Okay. So we can’t just take things at face value. We have to do experiments, we have to prove them in order to satisfy the fact that our intellect is darkened a little bit by sin. So we have to do a bit more to establish these truths about the world.

Michael Jones (00:48:33):

Yeah. And so the ancient Greek philosophers that did natural philosophy, like what we would call protoscience, they looked at like working with your hands as like demeaning work. So they’re not going to build machines, they’re not going to do experiments, but Jesus was a carpenter. Paul was a tent maker. So the Christian, natural philosophers, scientists that came later were fine working with their hands. It took a while for that to really set in, but they started to realize, if Jesus and Paul were doing this, we can work with our hands too. We can build things. We can go out and test things in the dirt. So it, again, removed the taboo, I guess, around that whole kind of work kind of thing and made it meaningful work. So again, another way Christianity helped advance science.

Trent Horn (00:49:16):

Yeah. What other projects you’re working on now? Are there any other fields or areas of study that you want to get into more? Because you’ve covered a lot in your own channel. You’ve done a lot of biblical apologetics, a lot of responses to critical scholars, people like … How can the name escape me? Our favorite Mormon friend.

Michael Jones (00:49:38):

Dan McClellan.

Trent Horn (00:49:38):

Dan McClellan. Yeah. And I’ve had a response to McClellan too.

Michael Jones (00:49:43):

Yeah. He

Trent Horn (00:49:43):

Has

Michael Jones (00:49:43):

Me blocked on all platforms.

Trent Horn (00:49:45):

Really?

Michael Jones (00:49:45):

Yep.

Trent Horn (00:49:46):

The guy whose motto is, all right, let’s hear it, doesn’t want to hear it. I

Michael Jones (00:49:50):

Used his own tactics against him. He got mad and he blocked me and said I was engaging in bad faith. Oh, really? You don’t say. Gee. Gee, I wonder why that is. You think that? Okay.

Trent Horn (00:50:01):

Yeah. I think it’s always a paramount rule on the internet that you shouldn’t only dish it out if you can take it.

Michael Jones (00:50:09):

Exactly.

Trent Horn (00:50:09):

If you don’t like people … It’s one thing to be just a scholar who’s just trying to get out there and you’re not an abrasive person, you don’t want to deal with abrasive people. But if you’re going to be abrasive and snarky, you got to … And that kind of circles back into that. I know McClellan has that tone that is reminiscent of kind of how the new atheist would talk, but he can actually cite scholarships so it sounds more impressive. He’s

Michael Jones (00:50:34):

Very smart.

Trent Horn (00:50:35):

Yeah. But the idea is that, but now we’re not willing to just sit around and just take the punishment anymore. And I think one of the things that’s difficult that I wanted to bring up, I should have brought up a little bit more on my reply to McClellan is that you’ll have these … I hate this divide between the scholars and the apologists, the idea that it’s like there’s scholars of the Bible, but it’s usually just far left or humanistic atheists or agnostics, hypercritical, oftentimes of an ax to grind against Christianity or religion, but they’re the scholars. They’re the dispassionate, impartial scholars. And you and I are the used cars salesmen apologists and we’re country bumpkins that don’t know what’s in these big old fancy books published by Oxford University Press or all the- That’s

Michael Jones (00:51:28):

Great. That’s exactly how the Sadducees and Pharisees looked at Jesus.

Trent Horn (00:51:32):

Yeah, that’s right. And that’s what they said about John and Peter. How can these ungrammatoid, these unlettered men, what could they know? Or they were surprised by learning because they were unlettered. They hadn’t gone to fancy Jewish school.

Michael Jones (00:51:44):

Listen, a lot of them have a very ivory tower mentality and I don’t care. But I think also there’s a lot of really good conservative scholars that just people don’t know about. When I did a series debunking the documentary hypothesis, for those who don’t know, it’s the idea that the five books of Moses were originally four sources or three, depending on who you ask, J, E, P, and D. And then people stitched them together. So I did this big long series debunking that and there’s so many good books I found that just proponents of the documentary hypothesis didn’t even know existed for

Trent Horn (00:52:17):

All

Michael Jones (00:52:18):

I know or never addressed.

Trent Horn (00:52:19):

Yeah. There’s a good one on that. Before Abraham Was by Kikawada and Quinn, and that’s an older one actually that has really good elements challenging saying, but wait a minute, you say that it’s divided up into the Yahwess Eloise priestly and the Deuteronomic sources and it’s just four or five different authors, but you can identify overarching narratives all throughout the sources that you wouldn’t expect if it was multiple authors doing it.

Michael Jones (00:52:42):

Oh, absolutely. So I mean, I put that out there and so when I put out the first video, I announced on Twitter, I’m posting the first video and I saw a bunch of the atheists that are always citing the scholars lose their minds and they’re tagging their favorite critical scholar. “I expect a full response to this. “And I was like, ” Okay, okay, let’s see what happens. “I uploaded it. Then I checked Twitter, dead silence for two weeks, and I finally got a call from one of them going, ” Yeah, it was actually a really good video. We don’t really know what we’re going to do about it. I mean, you made some good points. “I’m like, ” Thank you. That was very honest.

Trent Horn (00:53:14):

“Because the problem is a lot of these atheist apologists, and that’s what they are. They are apologists. They’re no better than … Well, you have, for example, you’ll have Christian, traditionalists, fundamentalists, whatever you want to call them, that will only mine the farthest to the right scholarship they can find to defend things like young earth creationism, for example. So they’ll just mine from this very narrow strand of scholarship and say,” Oh, this is what scholars are saying. “It’s like, ” Well, no, it’s not. “But these atheist apologists at the other end of the spectrum, they do the same thing. It’s like, well, look what the scholars are saying. Scholars, you’re quoting Robert Price. You’re quoting Richard Carrier. You’re the left of the left, the fringe of the fringe when there’s a whole element of scholars in the middle who will say,” Yeah, this is a workable hypothesis.This can account for the data that this Christian is saying.

Michael Jones (00:54:07):

“Oh yeah, you got to do that. But I mean, sometimes apologists got to do stuff … I heard from a scholar he really liked what we did because we were replying to this guy called Dennis McDonald. Dennis

Trent Horn (00:54:19):

McDonald’s- The homeric parallels between the gospels.

Michael Jones (00:54:22):

Yeah. He thinks the

Trent Horn (00:54:22):

Gospels

Michael Jones (00:54:23):

Are myth based off of Homer.

Trent Horn (00:54:24):

Well, Odysseus was on a boat and Jesus was on a boat. It’s basically plagiarizing Homer.

Michael Jones (00:54:32):

If anyone’s watching you think we are exaggerating-

Trent Horn (00:54:34):

Go read it. Kind of

Michael Jones (00:54:35):

What he does. Go read it. So a friend of mine, I’m sure you know him, Steven Boice.

Trent Horn (00:54:41):

Yes. Well, yes. Steven has the channel facts. He was previously baptist in his theology, then became Anglican. We had a debate on justification by faith alone, and now just recently he’s entered the Catholic Church and he was here at my conference here in Dallas. But prior to entering the Catholic faith, and he’s still intent on doing this, lots of great work on antiquity and Christian apologetics. So what’d you have with Steven?

Michael Jones (00:55:04):

Yeah. So I brought him on the channel to pretend to be somebody, not Dennis McDonald, but I believe it was Donald McDennis. And he played a Southern scholar who was going to explain to you the Civil War was a myth based off of Homer really. Right.

Trent Horn (00:55:21):

And

Michael Jones (00:55:21):

We demonstrated very clearly that Abraham Lincoln was just Agamenmon. George McClellan was Achilles. Yeah. Stonewall Jackson. Oh no, Stonewall Jackson was Achilles. No, just getting confused now. Yeah. Stonewall Jackson was Hector.

Trent Horn (00:55:36):

Yeah.

Michael Jones (00:55:36):

Achilles was George McClellan. And we just went through and we showed all these parallels. We had entire charts, like 16 points of just parallels. But the point was like, listen, if we can do this, that’s what Dennis McDonald is doing. You guys see this is not a coherent argument. There’s a lot of problems here. You just can’t find parallels and think you did something.

Trent Horn (00:55:56):

Yeah. So back in the 1960s, there was an article by Samuel Sandmel dealing with parallels and it called this phenomena parallelo mania. And that’s the problem. This goes back to the people in the early 20th century, you had a lot of scholars of religion saying, oh, well, we can easily explain Christianity as being wholly derived from mystery religion cults, Greco-Roman mystery religions. Oh,

Michael Jones (00:56:22):

The cool thing, we got Odysseus to be Ulysses because it’s the same name. It’s the

Trent Horn (00:56:27):

Same name. Yeah. It’s just spelled in different ways. It worked

Michael Jones (00:56:30):

So perfectly

Trent Horn (00:56:31):

Because

Michael Jones (00:56:31):

He even sailed ships down the Mississippi just like Odyssey.

Trent Horn (00:56:35):

Yeah. And so what they’ll try to do is say, oh, mythra and you look at these other attists of Forgia and it’s derived from that. And so that’s where you had the very first mythesis in the early 20th. I mean, you had some French guys, maybe a hundred years earlier, but that’s where you get people like Remsburg, John Remsburg, who has that famous list of here’s a hundred authors that never mentioned Jesus. And I’m like, that’s dumb. They also don’t mention Christians in the first century, but we know they were Christians. So it’s an absolutely dumb argument. And this is trying to make its way in the early 20th century, but by the latter half of the 20th century, it’s just dead because New Testament scholarship sees know the New Testament story is rooted in Judaism. It is not rooted in mystery religions. They cannot explain all the data that we have here, but they were just so obsessed with trying to find these parallels that are just surface level.

Michael Jones (00:57:27):

Oh yeah. Yeah. And I debated somebody on that a while back on capturing Christianity. I forget his name. He was a mythesis, but I mean, yeah, I brought up a lot of that stuff. I mean, you’re just finding parallels and running wild with it. This is much better explained as coming out of Second Temple Judaism.

Trent Horn (00:57:43):

Yeah. It reminds, I think the most bonkers one that even goes beyond the Jesus mythesis is Joseph Atwill’s Caesars Messiah. Yeah. I don’t know. Have you ever done any work on that? It’s the wildest of the wild, I think.

Michael Jones (00:57:59):

I mean, it’s so silly, but I mean,

Trent Horn (00:58:02):

Again- But if you’ll get taken in by this, his YouTube video’s got a million, two million views. I’m like, “What’s going on? “

Michael Jones (00:58:06):

It’s so silly, not because it’s weird. It’s silly because it doesn’t meet the facts. The Romans invented Christianity. Why?

Trent Horn (00:58:15):

They invented Christianity so that it would be easier for them to subjugate Jews by creating a Messiah who is a pacifist, except they also created a religion that inculcates civil disobedience and rejection of the Roman gods.

Michael Jones (00:58:34):

Yeah. It doesn’t make any-

Trent Horn (00:58:35):

So yes, you’re right. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Michael Jones (00:58:37):

And the gospels, the Romans killed the Messiah. So how’s that … The Jews are now going to adopt this religion. There’s so many problems, but I mean, even mysticists are like, “I’m not that crazy.” I mean, come on.

Trent Horn (00:58:48):

That’s one thing I love. Even like I was reading Robert Price’s review of Caesar’s Messiah. And then even Richard Carrier, who he and I debated, oh gosh, I think it was 12 years ago. Yeah, I just

Michael Jones (00:58:58):

Debated him a couple months ago.

Trent Horn (00:58:59):

Oh, how is that? How’s Richard doing?

Michael Jones (00:59:02):

Well, we debated on does God exist.

Trent Horn (00:59:05):

Oh, what was his favorite attack this time to put forward atheism?

Michael Jones (00:59:09):

Well, I read a bunch of his articles and know that he actually argues the universe comes from nothing, not a Lawrence Krause nothing.

Trent Horn (00:59:15):

Like actual nothing. An

Michael Jones (00:59:16):

Actual nothing. And he says, “Because there’s no laws when there’s nothing, so anything can happen.” Yeah, I know. So I grilled

Trent Horn (00:59:24):

Him- The case he didn’t get the reaction shot. Then we’ll edit it later if we need it.

Michael Jones (00:59:29):

So I grilled him through the open dialogue on this whole and he’s like, so yeah, the universe came from nothing, but it’s more like just a dot. It’s a dot with one property. No, it’s more like a bubble with two properties. So it’s not nothing, it’s something, but it’s also nothing, but it also can create everything on its own, but it’s not God. It can’t be a mine, but it can do anything it wants. And so that was fun, but he just

Trent Horn (00:59:51):

Couldn’t- I love this idea that, oh, well, something could come from nothing because in a state of absolute nothing, there’s no law prevent Penting something coming from nothing, as if that is how laws of nature work. Laws of nature are not these invisible police officers telling matter what to do. Well, traditional Christian understanding even would be that, and this coheres with modern scientific descriptions of laws that laws are ways of approximating how things in the universe behave. But even that modern science would say, “Well, there’s no law that tells the rocket the phone it has to drop.” It’s just like that’s just what they tend to do. And we observe this regularity and then we make this wonderful non-scientific assumption of that regularity in all times and places. But not the idea like, “Oh, well, there’s a law mandating it goes. And there’s another law saying something can’t come from nothing.” No, if there were absolute nothing, then you couldn’t predicate anything.

(01:00:51):

There’s no subject.

Michael Jones (01:00:52):

There’s absolutely nothing. There’s no laws.

Trent Horn (01:00:53):

There’s no laws at all.

Michael Jones (01:00:54):

So what are you talking about? There’s nothing that can happen

Trent Horn (01:00:58):

Because

Michael Jones (01:00:58):

There’s nothing.

Trent Horn (01:00:59):

There can’t be any causal descriptions of any kind. Yeah.

Michael Jones (01:01:01):

So I just grilled them on that for a good 10, 15 minutes

Trent Horn (01:01:04):

And

Michael Jones (01:01:04):

The audience just left confused going, “Yeah, I think God exists.” I mean, because it’s either

Trent Horn (01:01:10):

You- Is this the alternative we’re going to go with? Really?

Michael Jones (01:01:12):

Yeah. You believe that a mind created everything or magic nothing created everything. What’s more likely? I mean, at the end of the day. So this is what I mean. I think the New Atheist movement is kind of dying if that’s what they’re … Yeah,

Trent Horn (01:01:24):

At least that’s what’s left over. The snarky kind of new atheism. I think though, maybe you can give me some thoughts on this. I worry though that we’re still really trudging through a sort of nihilistic, post-Christian, ironic Gen Z landscape.

Michael Jones (01:01:42):

Yeah, it’s still there.

Trent Horn (01:01:43):

And so I think that we have a lot of work to do in that. Do you think we have a lot of work doing that area?

Michael Jones (01:01:47):

Absolutely. This is why I was on the streets in Dearborn just talking to people. It’s not just about winning the people on top. Sometimes winning the people on the bottom is better because they might be the next president, non-senator.

Trent Horn (01:02:03):

Do you mean by people on the top or bottom? Are you talking about just average laypeople versus the experts?

Michael Jones (01:02:08):

Yeah.

Trent Horn (01:02:09):

Yeah. So just getting the regular guy on the street.

Michael Jones (01:02:11):

Yeah. I mean, I was watching Muslim apologists and they’re like, “We really just got to go after the people at top. We got to win over the celebrities. We got to win over the politicians.” And I’m like, “It’s not what Jesus did.” Jesus he went to Peter and he’s like, “Peter, I got great stuff you’re going to do. ” And he changed the world through Jesus. So I mean, sometimes it’s good to talk to just the average person on the streets and be like, “Hey, you ever thought about this? ” And then if they convert, they could do amazing things. It’s God loves to use

Trent Horn (01:02:41):

The

Michael Jones (01:02:41):

Week to humble the strong. And so we have to remember that. And so I think when we’re dealing with Gen Z, we got to go out and witness to them. We cannot let them fall behind. They are our primary ministry field right now, it seems.

Trent Horn (01:02:52):

Yeah. And I worry also this idea that, oh, we’ll just go after the influencers, the people who are at the top, whether it’s in academics or Hollywood or sports or fame. I worry then if Christianity, and I am seeing this in some areas, that these influential people become Christian. A lot of them become Catholic now, as if that’s the hip thing. I really worry Christianity was never meant to be a fad. There was even an article I think in, it was like the New York Post, or I think it might’ve been The New Yorker saying, “The hottest club in town right now is the Catholic church.” And I’m like, “Oh, it sends my cringe level up to 9,000.” I’m just like, “Oh no, that’s not … ” If you see it as like, “Oh, this is the cool thing, smells and bells, people are Catholic or they’re Orthodox.” It’s just like, no, Christianity is this enduring thing even when it is hated and despised.

(01:03:47):

And there are many cultures around the world and still today where it’s hated and despised, but that’s where you should be because that’s where the truth is. So I guess I worry that if you go … It’s fine if someone influential converts, praise me to God, but I think you’re onto something and you say, no, we have to build from the ground up.

Michael Jones (01:04:06):

Yeah. Well, I think the best thing to do is just to ignore that, honestly, just ignore it. I mean, we are the cool place. I mean, that’s just the truth and

Trent Horn (01:04:14):

I’m

Michael Jones (01:04:14):

Not going to-

Trent Horn (01:04:15):

But if you’re cool, you don’t have to say you’re cool.

Michael Jones (01:04:16):

Right. I mean, so just ignore it. I mean, I

Trent Horn (01:04:18):

Don’t think

Michael Jones (01:04:19):

We should say … I mean, it is kind of cringey, but let’s just … Okay, whatever. You guys do your thing, you think we’re cool now, but you’re not going to think we’re cool in a couple years. We’re going to keep

Trent Horn (01:04:26):

Doing our thing. We’re going to still being here.

Michael Jones (01:04:28):

And we’re still going to know we’re the cool place when

Trent Horn (01:04:30):

You

Michael Jones (01:04:30):

Move on to the next fad. And I think if we capitalize on this moment like that, it’ll bring more people into the church.

Trent Horn (01:04:37):

But

Michael Jones (01:04:37):

We need to just realize we shouldn’t give into either extreme like, “Yeah, we’re the cool place. Come, we’re going to have pizza all the time and we’re just going to really cater to you. ” No, we’re going to keep catering to Christ as we have been doing what he wants, but we also shouldn’t go in the opposite direction and like, “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want to be this cool thing out there.” No, we just know we are at the

Trent Horn (01:04:58):

End of the day. We know we are. All right. My last question for you, are you going to let people know what denomination you are?

Michael Jones (01:05:05):

You have to guess.

Trent Horn (01:05:07):

Hold on. I’m getting real strong Amish vibes.

Michael Jones (01:05:12):

How did you know?

Trent Horn (01:05:13):

Amish men tonight. You got to let it grow out a little bit more, but you’ll be there. Have you found … It is interesting. I’ve seen some apologists now leaning more into defending their explicit theological tradition, but that’s never been your focus and it’s not going to be your focus anytime soon.

Michael Jones (01:05:32):

No, I think we need to focus on unity. If we just united as Protestant Catholic Orthodox, I think we could do so many good things. If we could just be a united front and stop squabbling over these little things for now. I mean, if denominational disputes could be talk over a beer, not fighting on Twitter, I mean, could you imagine the work we could get done? I mean, but it’s just, I don’t know. So that’s why I keep my denomination private, what church I attend. I’ve only said I attend a high church.

Trent Horn (01:06:05):

Okay. So that’s one clue.

Michael Jones (01:06:06):

That’s the only clue I’ve given. It’s a high church, whatever that means. So people tell me they know what that means.

Trent Horn (01:06:12):

Okay. Nordic Catholic church that preaches in Norwegian.

Michael Jones (01:06:17):

I’m so close, yes.

Trent Horn (01:06:19):

Almost.

Michael Jones (01:06:19):

Yes.

Trent Horn (01:06:20):

It is a very high European church speaking some kind of Eastern European language for its vernacular. Yeah. I agree with you. Well, I think that as a Catholic apologist, I do believe Catholicism is the fullness of what God’s revealed, and I’m going to share that with people. But at the same time, my heart, I’ve said this often, I think I hope it kind of becomes a new motto for me. My goal is to reach the most number of people who are the furthest away from

Michael Jones (01:06:44):

Christ. That’s

Trent Horn (01:06:46):

Good. Yeah. That is what I really want to do. So when I got started doing this, the first book I ever wrote was Answering Atheism, and the second book was Persuasive Pro-Life. And so it’s like, especially when it comes to moral issues, I’ve gotten in that a lot. Secularism, I would love to get into Islam a lot more and engage that.

Michael Jones (01:07:02):

Yeah. Well, I mean, think about it. I mean, if some of these people that are getting into inter-denomination fights

Trent Horn (01:07:10):

Took

Michael Jones (01:07:11):

That energy and just focused it on Muslims, you’d see so many seas plants and we’d see a huge harvest in a few years, but are you really going to … I get that these are important issues between Christians.

Trent Horn (01:07:24):

But it shouldn’t be all we’re doing. It should be a portion. And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do here on the channel, that a portion of what I do are these denominational claims, Catholicism, and that is important. But yeah, I want to reach people with Jesus. I want to get into Islam. I get a little nervous. I mean, I never want to get out ahead of my skis or I talk about something I don’t know. So I looked into Arabic a little bit. How important do you think that is in doing Muslim apologetics or is it going to overrated if you need to knowver? It’s overrated.

Michael Jones (01:07:55):

They use that as a smoke and mirror to say-

Trent Horn (01:07:57):

Well, you don’t understand it because you can’t speak Arabic.

Michael Jones (01:07:59):

Yeah, it’s a big smoke and mirror. And then the reply is, well, I guess Allah was defishing because he couldn’t make a book that could be translated well. Is that what you’re saying?

Trent Horn (01:08:07):

Yeah, because we don’t do that for … I mean, we talk about when people get into the nitty gritty of the New Testament, well, you do need to talk about the Greek here or there, but it’s not our go- to if you don’t like it to say, “Well, you started-“

Michael Jones (01:08:17):

And there’s Quran lexicons online now. So when I’m doing live streams, live Colin shows with Muslims, I got a Quran lexicon right there. It was one of the tabs ready to go. If they want to start bringing up Arabic, I just, let me check. “Oh, your scholars say you’re wrong. Okay.

Trent Horn (01:08:31):

“Yeah, there you go. So yeah, I definitely want to get involved in that. And I definitely want to encourage more of my listeners, especially my Catholic listeners, Catholic influencers who work in my field a lot more, especially because we may not notice Islam as much in America unless you live in a place where a lot of Muslims have congregated like Dearborn Michigan or something like that. But globally, especially … I mean, my goodness, the greatest threat to Christian existence globally is violent manifestations of Islam, hands down. And the

Michael Jones (01:09:07):

Studies show it. I mean, so there’s a paper by Davis Brown. He also wrote a book called War and Religion in a Secular Age. He just shows the data shows Islam is linked to violence. Whereas Christianity negatively linked to violence. Okay.

Trent Horn (01:09:20):

So where you have higher concentrations of Christians, violence goes down.

Michael Jones (01:09:23):

Yeah. And violence goes up. And there’s another book called The Price of Freedom Denied. Same thing with authoritarianism and persecution. Islam goes up, Christianity goes down.

Trent Horn (01:09:32):

The easy thing there is just compare the first 300 years of Islam and the first 300 years of Christianity.

Michael Jones (01:09:38):

Exactly.

Trent Horn (01:09:38):

So

Michael Jones (01:09:39):

We’re not just saying Islam is violent. The data shows Islam

Trent Horn (01:09:42):

Is violent. I was reading an article on CNN, I remember many years ago, and it showed a map of terrorist attacks around the world. And the title was like the year religion became violent or how religion targets people around the world. And then I go through the list of, and it was like 20, 20 of them, and it was 20 out of 20. It was Islam. 20 out of 20. And yet it’s religion is the problem when everyone involved was a member of some kind of Muslim sect.

Michael Jones (01:10:13):

Oh yeah, absolutely. Islam is linked to violence. The Quran is very much on the offensive, and if you read it, always attacking the pagans, attacking the Jews. It teaches Muslims to be on the offense, whereas Christianity often teaches us to be on the defense.

Trent Horn (01:10:25):

Turn the other cheek.

Michael Jones (01:10:26):

Yeah. So-

Trent Horn (01:10:27):

Put away your sword.

Michael Jones (01:10:28):

Exactly. So they’re very much already primed for that. And then because Islam is also very political, that spills over into their politics and then it spills over into their war efforts.

Trent Horn (01:10:38):

Whereas we say, give to Caesar what is Caesars, give to God what is God’s.

Michael Jones (01:10:42):

Yeah. Islam lacks the separation of church and state, which Christianity developed, which also helped to give rise to science.

Trent Horn (01:10:49):

Oh, okay. How do you put that together?

Michael Jones (01:10:51):

So the historian Edward Grant pointed out that when Christianity came up with the separation of church and state, it developed the idea we have different institutions. You have some people work in politics, you have some people work in religion, but they don’t have to be doing the same thing.

Trent Horn (01:11:04):

Yeah. Okay. Well,

Michael Jones (01:11:06):

So therefore it allowed science to become its own institution and flourish. Whereas in Islam, everything is under the religious scholars and their leadership. So science is only as useful as much as it helps Islam, as Toby Huff points out. Therefore, it couldn’t go further. Christianity, because it had the separation of church and state, gave it the grounds it needed to develop and do its own thing.

Trent Horn (01:11:27):

Yeah. I’d also direct our listeners. There’s a great historian of science that does work on this name’s Ronald Numbers. I

Michael Jones (01:11:34):

Read him a ton. Yeah. He’s

Trent Horn (01:11:36):

Got

Michael Jones (01:11:36):

Great books.

Trent Horn (01:11:36):

Ronald Numbers, like the myth of the myth of religion war on. So just look up Ronald Numbers, History of Science. Yeah.

Michael Jones (01:11:44):

A good book he has is called Galileo Goes to Jail

Trent Horn (01:11:47):

And Other

Michael Jones (01:11:47):

Myths.

Trent Horn (01:11:47):

Another myth. That’s something. Galileo goes to jail on other myths. So definitely look him up because it’s interesting. I think a lot of the caricatures, this is what I love. Secular liberals will create caricatures of Christianity and attack it, to which I’ll say, what you’re describing is not Christianity, it’s Islam. And yet you won’t attack the real thing that exists that does the bad things. Even The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, oh, this dystopian regime that’s going to imprison women and treat women like Chattel. This is Islam. It’s not Christianity.You’re literally describing like, oh, they have to wear these red coats and bonnets around their heads over there go, “That’s Islam.” It’s just the Nikab and the hijab, but you won’t criticize, but you’ll somehow think that Christians are the one behind this sort of fever dream.

Michael Jones (01:12:35):

It’s a delusion that Satan throws on people,

Trent Horn (01:12:38):

I swear. He does. He does. Well, let me, to pull it all together, where would you recommend if some of our listeners, they would like to learn more about how to respond to Islam, whether it’s your channel or other resources, what are some things you would recommend for kind of getting started?

Michael Jones (01:12:52):

Check out Nabil Quresh’s book, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. It’s a really good book.

Trent Horn (01:12:57):

Sadly, he passed away a few years ago. He was very young. He had this dramatic conversion from Islam to Christianity. He was very young too. I’m very blessed he at least wrote that book before he passed away.

Michael Jones (01:13:07):

Yeah. A lot of the good stuff to combat Islam is going to be online. So my channel, Inspiring Philosophy. You also have David Woods Channel, Apologetics Roadshow. You have God Logic. He’s incredible in debating Muslims. If you want to learn how to debate Muslims, just watch him do it. Some smaller channels as well, like The Warden I, he’s a great channel, Jai and DOC. So JAI and DOC,

Trent Horn (01:13:31):

That’s

Michael Jones (01:13:32):

That channel. You have Eric, your brother in Christ, Elle as well, his wife. So I mean, there’s lots of really good stuff out there now just online, ready to be taken. Pastate prophet, another great guy as well. So we’re putting out a lot of new stuff like myself and my coworker Than, we’re developing new arguments to attack Islam. We’re working on one, like the logical problem of the Quran using the logical problem of the Trinity, but the logical problem of the Quran. Similar things.

Trent Horn (01:14:03):

I like it.

Michael Jones (01:14:03):

We’ve got new dilemmas we’re throwing at Muslims, problems in the Quran. So I mean, yeah, we’re putting out a lot of new cutting edge stuff to attack this religion and get Muslims out of there before it’s too late.

Trent Horn (01:14:15):

I want to jump in on this. I’m excited. It reminds me of how 15 years ago I was seeing, it was Protestants who were spearheading anti-Atheism arguments and dealing with the new atheists. Catholics were kind of late to that. I feel like- Better life than

Michael Jones (01:14:31):

Ever.

Trent Horn (01:14:32):

Exactly. And now I want to encourage my other Catholic influencers to do so in a way that is scholarly. And while engaging Muslims who can be thorny and prickly people does not … I know there’s some people, there are some Catholics and Orthodox who engage with Islam, but they fall to the same aggressive tactics of Muslims, and that’s what I don’t want to see us turn into.

Michael Jones (01:14:56):

And take this stuff that’s already out there.

Trent Horn (01:14:59):

Don’t reinvent the wheels, get it.

Michael Jones (01:15:00):

Don’t be like, “Well, IP already did that kind of video. I got to do something unique.” No, just do the stuff we did because the more we talk about it, the more we’ll see it. So if you want to do a video on the biblical prophet dilemma or the Islamic dilemma, do it. We’re not going to be like-

Trent Horn (01:15:14):

I get emails all the time from people saying, “Can I re-share your video? Can I take this from your book and put it in a video? Is that okay?” I’m like, “Is that okay, man? Go. Get going. ” Go.

Michael Jones (01:15:21):

Yeah. Yeah. Translate it. Yeah, I get all that stuff too. Yeah.

Trent Horn (01:15:23):

Just

Michael Jones (01:15:23):

Do it.

Trent Horn (01:15:24):

Just go. We need more out there. Alrighty. So inspiring philosophy, we’ll link to your channel in the description below. Thank you. And definitely key of all your good work.

Michael Jones (01:15:32):

Thanks. All

Trent Horn (01:15:33):

Right. And thank you guys for watching and I hope you all have … Oh, well, actually, if you’d liked us to keep having great conversations like this, please go and support us at trendhornpodcast.com, little us $5 a month. That allows us to have these great guests on to engage in these conversations, trendhornpodcast.com. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.