“The Holocaust Wasn’t ‘Wrong’? A Supreme Court Judge Said That…” ft. Dr. Barry Arrington
“The Holocaust Wasn’t ‘Wrong’? A Supreme Court Judge Said That…” ft. Dr. Barry Arrington
What if the foundation of human rights isn’t as solid as we think?
In this powerful episode of The Science Dilemma Podcast, Allan CP sits down with Dr. Barry Arrington — a seasoned constitutional attorney, author of Unforgetting God, and a key figure in high-profile legal battles — to tackle one of the most unsettling questions in modern philosophy and law: Can we call the Holocaust objectively wrong if we remove God from the equation?
Arrington argues that materialism — the belief that nothing exists except particles in motion — is dismantling justice, morality, and human dignity. Drawing from his decades of courtroom experience and personal encounters with tragedies like Columbine, he reveals how our culture’s drift from a God-centered worldview is reshaping laws, eroding the meaning of “justice,” and opening the door to moral chaos.
This conversation dives into:
- Why a federal judge claimed Americans can’t say the Holocaust was “objectively wrong” — and why that matters.
- How critical theory’s oppressor-vs-oppressed narrative grows naturally out of a materialist worldview.
- The shocking North Korea story that proves “you gotta serve somebody.”
- Why rights must either come from God or government — there’s no middle ground.
- How atheistic materialism undermines the Constitution, natural law, and even free will.
- A legal defense for transcendent morality and why Western civil rights movements were rooted in biblical thought.
- How Unforgetting God calls both Christians and skeptics to evaluate the evidence for faith.
If you’ve ever wondered whether justice, morality, and human rights can survive without God, or if you’re seeking clarity on how faith and law intersect in today’s culture wars, this episode will challenge and equip you.
Chapters:
00:00 – Opening & Cold-Open Clip: “Every North Korean Wears the Kim Family Pin”
00:18 – Intro: Can a Culture Survive if It Forgets God?
01:00 – Meet Dr. Barry Arrington: Attorney, Author, and Defender of Rights
02:30 – What Is Materialism and Why It’s Destroying Justice
03:45 – Columbine Case & Materialism in the Courtroom
05:15 – Where Do Rights Come From: God vs. Government
06:35 – Senator vs. Witness Over ‘Rights From God’ — A Viral Moment
08:20 – The Supreme Court Judge Who Said the Holocaust Wasn’t ‘Wrong’
10:05 – MLK Jr., Augustine, Aquinas & Natural Law in Civil Rights
12:10 – Power vs. Justice: Why Materialism Reduces Everything to Oppressor vs. Oppressed
14:00 – Lawless Laws: When Morality Disappears from the Constitution
15:07 – “You Gotta Serve Somebody”: The Bob Dylan Principle Explained
16:40 – North Korea’s Devotion to the Kim Family: A Modern Idol Story
20:13 – Making the Case for Christianity as the Only Logical Choice
24:06 – Francis Bacon’s Warning: Deeper Study Brings You Back to God
26:45 – Darwin, Intelligent Design, and the Atheist Engine of Evolution
30:55 – The Problem of Evil: Why a Good God Allows Suffering
33:58 – Job’s Story & Trusting God Amid Suffering
37:48 – Call to Action: Evaluate the Evidence & Make a Choice
39:26 – Closing Thoughts & Invitation to Read Unforgetting God
Call to Action:
Get Dr. Barry Arrington’s book Unforgetting God for a deeper dive into how materialism shapes culture and why Christianity offers the only lasting foundation for human dignity and justice.
👉 If you enjoy this conversation, please follow, rate, and share the podcast to help others discover the evidence that challenges materialism and strengthens faith.
Transcript
The people of North Korea really do think that the Kim family is divine. Every single house in North Korea will have an image of the Kim family on a wall somewhere. Every single person that you meet on the street will have a lapel pen featuring a member of the Kim family.
Allan CP (:Welcome back to the Science Salomo, my name is Allen and I have a question for you today. Can a culture survive if it forgets God? Today's guest, Barry Arrington, is an author and an attorney. He argues that materialism, this idea that nothing exists but particles of motion, is inevitably destroying justice, morality, and even our basic human rights. From Columbine to the US courts, Barry has seen firsthand what happens when we forget. ⁓
God. Today we're unpacking his new book, Unforgetting God and why the evidence overwhelmingly points to Christianity as the only hope for truth and freedom. Well, thank you very so much for joining us today on the Science Level Podcast. Thank you. So one of the things that I definitely want to do is highlight ⁓ who you are. And so I just would love for you to present yourself to our audience so that they could get to know you as well as what you've worked on.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Thank you for having me today.
yer. I've been a lawyer since:that there is no immaterial force, ⁓ spirits, spiritual forces are unreal. God is unreal. Doesn't have any effect on the universe. In particular, I represented some of the families of the children that were killed at Columbine, where the shooters were very dyed in the wool materialists who based their actions ⁓ self-consciously on the materialist and Darwinian views.
And so over the years, I have tried to sort out why is our culture deteriorating in this way. And it came to me one day that this, this idea that there is no God, that, that there is only particles and emotion. If you take it seriously, the consequences just kind of follow naturally. So they're not, they're not illogical. It's just that their premises are wrong. If that makes sense.
Allan CP (:Totally. so, I mean, with what you do as a attorney, you probably see that so often how the impact of materialism has on culture, as well as the negative impacts on culture and people.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Exactly. just last week, last Friday, I filed a case in which my client is a four foot 11 woman. ⁓ and the state of Colorado has decided that it's going to lock her in a cell with a man. And so not just any man, a man that's in prison for killing his wife with an, an, knife. we are challenging that, under the constitution.
But the point is that Colorado and its leaders are basically in a materialist mode. They're saying that there is no fixed reality. God did not make them men and women that you could just change at will. ⁓ This is just another manifestation of the same ⁓ spirit, if you will, of materialism.
Allan CP (:Yeah, think Bill Dembski had shared some of what you've done and he is a huge fan of yours and so he said you guys really need to talk to
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Operation
club. I gotta share it.
Allan CP (:And then after you and I spoke, I was able to get to looking through the book and I really do appreciate the way that you have formatted the argument for Christianity and how you explain from a scientific standpoint how God is the answer. So could you take us through maybe some of the flow of the book so that people that are listening as they're interested
they'd be able to see, yeah, I really gotta read this.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Okay, well thank you for the opportunity. So in Unforgetting God, it flows from ⁓ why is materialism important? How did it come about? ⁓ What does it mean? And then in this next chapter, I talk about the definition of materialism, ⁓ its implications for ⁓ our worldview. And then the next two chapters, chapters three and four, really kind of focus on my ⁓
president, vice president in:⁓ you've got two options there. They, the rights come from God or they come from government. And he said, well, you're, you're only religious fundamentalist types. At least he implied believe our rights come from God. Well, no, if you read the declaration of independence, what does it say? We are endowed by not government, not the Congress, not the Supreme court. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Allan CP (:Can we pause there real quick? Sure. ⁓ So, yeah, I was excited for you to talk about this because there's a reason that we try to change laws when it doesn't align with our human rights and the rights that were given to us by God. And so what do materialist attorneys and these others that are the lawmakers or law enforcers, how are they even interpreting any of this if they believe that it comes from government, yet we're often telling government
Hey, we need to change this law because it's not aligned with what we believe our rights are.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:That's an excellent question. And the answer is not well. So there really are two and only two choices here. Either our rights ⁓ transcend any particular government, any particular person. And if they do transcend, if there is a transcendent moral order, if you will, from which our rights are derived, that implies that God created our rights. there's no, you know, when you got two guys or two cultures or two women,
who's the judge between them? Only someone who's above both of them can judge between them. And that person can only be God, right? Or ⁓ there's the view that there really is no ⁓ judging between cultures or people who say one thing is right and one thing is wrong. I use Richard Posner, a judge out of the Seventh Circuit as an example of this view. He said, as Americans cannot say the Holocaust was wrong.
flat out, wrong, objectively wrong, full stop. The only thing we can say is by our lights, the Holocaust was right or was wrong rather. who are we to say whether it's really objectively wrong because there's no way to judge that. That is a man who was sitting in the second highest court of the land, the seventh circuit court of appeals out of Chicago.
Saying that there's no way to judge that the Holocaust was objectively wrong. are the options. ⁓ And so, also quote, you know, Martin Luther King lived in the time of the Martin Luther King Jr. Lived in the time of the Jim Crow laws. And the issue that you talk about was very relevant to him because people asked him, well, this is the law. Who are you to judge the law? What's this idea of legal progress?
Allan CP (:So that's scary.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:towards a goal, ⁓ a better moral alignment. And he said in his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, a law that transcends God's law, the natural law, is no law at all. And he cited Augustine and he cited Aquinas. And so this natural law tradition that we have in our country runs very, very deep. And the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s
was very much based in a natural law conception of our rights.
Allan CP (:Why is it, do they not see the contradiction in, like the philosophical or mental contradiction of both advocating for the people that they believe are the vulnerable, yet saying that the law is the ultimate right giver? Because it's almost like a disconnect.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:You put your finger right on the question, right? ⁓ If you believe in materialism, you believe that the only thing in the universe is particles in motion and that there is no transcendent moral order, ⁓ then what does that say about human beings? It says that we are meat robots, that we have no free will, have ⁓ no, ⁓ that morality is ⁓ a,
adaptation from our evolutionary past. It's not something that's real. And so what happens if you apply that to our legal institutions? And the critical theory really does kind of have this right. If you accept those premises, what that means is that all human relationships, every single one of them, whether in politics or in law,
or in media or anything else, all human relationships ultimately devolve into power gains. there are the people who have the power and people who don't have the power. They're often called the oppressor and the oppressed. And if you accept those premises, that's true. If there is no transcendent moral order, there's only power and those who have it and those who don't. Now the question that you ask is, well, who did we side who to?
back. mean, which dog are we going to have our money on in this dog race? And the answer is there is no good reason that every preference for any group over another group is inherently subjective and arbitrary. of course, ⁓ you say, they're choosing the weak and the downtrodden and the marginalized as people to advance their interests.
we have been in the West for:Before our culture was infused with the Christian worldview, women were objects, people were objects, babies were left on the road, unwanted babies were left on the side of the road, ⁓ slaves were just sexual playthings of their masters. It wasn't considered immoral. That's just the way things were.
Allan CP (:Yeah, wow. And so when I know that I paused you kind of on where do rights come from and then you have lawless laws that also the same concept. ⁓
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Very
much the same concept. here, I talk about mainly constitutional law and the federal courts, which I've practiced in over the years. And so you've got the constitution and it's a written text. Well, what binds judges to that written text? What tells them you have to follow the written text and it
says something things, some things, and it doesn't say other things and you are bound by what it says. Well, it turns out that at the Supreme Court level, the only thing that binds the judges is their moral commitment to the democratic integrity of law under our constitution. And here we are right back again. If they have a materialist worldview,
where morality doesn't really exist. It's only ⁓ a stories that particularly clever hairless apes have evolved to tell one another. And you think I'm exaggerating, I'm absolutely not. One of the most famous justices in history, Oliver Wimlittle Holmes Jr. said this very thing, morality does not exist. That law is only the powerful telling the not powerful what to do.
And so if you're a Supreme Court justice who believes that, you have no objective moral obligation to apply the Constitution as written. I say in the book, if you are a materialist, you believe that the Constitution is just so many scratchings that clever hairless apes made on parchment. And who cares what the clever hairless apes 200 years ago said?
Allan CP (:Yeah, no, that makes sense just because what you had said earlier about like the power versus the those without power ⁓ When it comes to law when it comes to your field, we're looking for justice And and and that justice it goes further than just who has power who doesn't and we just are partial to whoever benefits us the most but really we want justice for what is truly right and then That that just goes to what you're saying that moralism transcends the law and
Dr. Barry Arrington (:That's exactly right. From a Christian worldview, a theistic worldview, from a critical legal theories worldview, the word justice, meaningless, is just a word that the clever hellish apes play in their power games.
Allan CP (:Wow. And then so in the book, Unforgetting God, you then go into, you're going to have to serve somebody. I'd love to dive into that. Yeah.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:that you're to have to serve somebody. That is a lyric from a famous Bob Dylan song. And the fact of the matter is every single one of us understands that we have a longing, if you will, to serve a greater good. Now, the direction of that service is the key, right? As Christians, ⁓ we understand that that longing is
properly directed to God and the moral order that he has established. Well, if you don't believe in God, as GK Cheperson famously said, although it's widely alluded to him, if you don't believe in God, it's not that you don't believe in anything, it's you'll believe in anything, right? And so everybody still has that
urge to serve somebody ⁓ and it's compelling and so they come up with other religions. For example, I say in the book that climate ⁓ crisis mania is basically a kind of a religion. ⁓ The transgender cult is kind of a religion. The critical theory is kind of a religion. These are all materialist religions.
Allan CP (:Yeah, totally. Could you share some of your experience? I saw like the North Korea story. Sure.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:And this is a perfect illustration of you got to serve somebody. I opened chapter five with it in several years ago, many years ago, I was on a mission trip in North Korea. Although we obviously didn't characterize it as a mission trip while we were there. was kind of, we characterize it as a humanitarian aid trip and we were visiting a collective farm there and we ultimately. ⁓
We made a collection, we came up with a bunch of well, not a bunch of money, know, several thousand dollars to buy this farm a tractor because they had no mechanized equipment. And so we were trying to have a relationship with them and basically the evangelical was personal at that, the evangelism was personal at that point. And we hoped that ultimately the wall would fall as it had in Eastern Europe and that we would be able to hit the ground running
to these same people and evangelize them on a scriptural basis. Of course, sadly that never happened. But in the book, I tell a story about one of my trips ⁓ and in it, I was in a border station between North Korea and China. And it was a hot summer day and I was standing there and there was this massive wall-sized mural.
of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, the dear leader and the great leader. This was before the current leader came to power. And it was a day, as I said, and there was a fan blowing at this mural. And through my translator, I said to the guard standing there, said, well, why do you have a fan blowing at the wall? And the answer just stunned me. He said, the dear leader and the great leader must be kept cool.
And so here is the most militantly atheist country, probably in the history of the world where you can be killed for bringing Bibles across the border. And this guy is, is, is essentially genuflecturing before these images, like a medieval monk, genuflecting before an icon.
Allan CP (:Wow. And how did that translate to you in that moment? Like what were your thoughts, emotions? I can imagine that was just that it must have thrown you off like so much.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:It was very confusing because I knew ⁓ that North Korea was not just mildly atheist, it was militantly, violently atheist. And yet, ⁓ and so I did some research after I got back, and this is not an isolated event. The people of North Korea really do think that the Kim family is divine. If you some of those... ⁓
The images that come back every single house in North Korea will have an image of the Kim family on a wall somewhere. Every single person that you meet on the street will have a lapel pin ⁓ featuring ⁓ a member of the Kim family. they generate that as it's it's again, perfect example of Chester's son's dictum. If you don't believe in God, it's not that you believe in nothing. It's you'll believe in anything. And the anything that the people of North Korea.
have adopted is the divinity of the Kim family.
Allan CP (:So then with that chapter, I mean perfectly following it, you then make the case for Christianity.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Right. And so that, that is kind of the core of the book is that the first five chapters point out the need for choosing. You know, I say, look, you got a choice. Either God exists or he doesn't. If he doesn't exist, you can't have it both ways. If everything is reducible to particles in motion, that means there is no objective morality.
That means there is no free will that everything is determined by pure physical forces. And it really is the case. This is, this is my surprise. You critical theory is not only correct. is absolutely logically compelled. If you accept their premise that there is no God and materialism is true. so everything does in fact. Revolve or devolve into.
power relationships, the oppressed and the oppressor. As you pointed out earlier,
Allan CP (:for the prey or the yeah
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Yes,
the prey or the preyed upon. As you pointed out earlier, the critical theorist preference for advancing the interest of the oppressed is purely subjective. There's nothing objectively correct about that. you might, some might just as well advance the interest of the oppressors. You say, well, that's crazy talk, Barry. No, isn't. Anybody who has read Nietzsche
understands that's where materialism ultimately go. Nietzsche's philosophy was the most natural condition of man and therefore what we should push is that the strong should dominate the weak. He hated Christianity because it was the slave morality.
Allan CP (:Yeah, it's really interesting how they borrow from Christianity to then substantiate their claim or their position. And so you'll borrow what we believe is Imago Dei, that everyone is made in the image of God, therefore everyone has a right to live, has a right for justice, for mercy, for grace and all these things. And then they'll borrow that yet function as materialists. And so it's, yeah, it's confusing and interesting all at the same time.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:That's
exactly right. I often say that materialism, everybody acts as if morality actually exists, that it's an objective thing. If you hurt, if someone hurts you, well, that's wrong. and, but if you're a materialist, you can never say that it's objectively wrong. If you're a materialist, you can say things like Richard Posner said, I mean, literally said, you know, the Holocaust wasn't my cup of tea.
But who am I to judge the National Socialist's deep preferences? Right? Wow. And so that's what I'm calling people to do. In chapter five, I say you've got a choice. You can believe that's actually true or you can believe that there is a God who has established a transcendent moral order and that he loves you. He's revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. You've got to choose. As Pascal says, we have
He called it a wager. We're betting on one of the other of these being true. And, and, and people, I'm calling on people to evaluate which is more likely. And then the following two chapters, I talk about how the choice of accepting a God generally, and then accepting the God of Christianity in particularly is the overwhelmingly more logical choice, the choice that's
that's supported by the evidence far more than any other ⁓ choice.
Allan CP (:On your journey of creating this book and even as an attorney, ⁓ what have you seen as the most compelling resources that you, like you're probably your favorite top three that you're like, man, when I read that or when I ran across this article, I mean, it spoke to me.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Sure.
And so in terms of, there an intelligence behind the universe? Yeah. Some books that I have read over the years were especially compelling to me. For example, when I was in the early nineties, a book came out, Darwin on trial by Philip Johnson. And that was kind of my first real introduction into the intelligent design movement.
where he demonstrated that Darwinistic evolution is really not ⁓ strongly supported by the evidence. It is a logical deduction from materialist premises. And if that's where you start with, if you start with the assumption, the a priori assumption that materialism is true, well, something like Darwinism is necessarily compelled as a matter of logic.
And so that helped me start. And then ⁓ other intelligent design books I read along the way were ⁓ Behe's Darwin's Black Box, where he talked about how ⁓ biological structures are irreducibly complex and can't be built on a stepwise fashion as Darwinism predicts. Bill Dembski has been a profound influence.
on my life in his books. He's got several of them, and particularly the design inference, where he talked about how ⁓ if you have two things, ⁓ a very, very low probability of an event happening, and that event is ⁓ specified that you can deduce design. And then I go into that in the book. Steve Meyer, his books, ⁓ The Return of the God, this is Darwin's ⁓ doubt.
signature in the cell. There's so many intelligent design books out there. And in terms of the Christian apologetic, Doug Rutice's ⁓ apologetics ⁓ is, if you want to have the fundamentals of apologetics down, there's, you can go, ⁓ you can't hardly do better. ⁓ Josh McDowell and now ⁓ his son,
Allan CP (:Sean Mcdowell.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Evidence
that demands a verdict that had a profound impact on me. my two chapters sketch these arguments, but it also gives people citations to these more in depth resource resources if they want to follow them.
Allan CP (:I love that because sometimes, you know, the lay person just needs someone to piece it all together for them into a book, you know, and then later maybe do a deeper dive on all of these in isolation. But one of the things I really enjoyed was where you talked about what Francis Bacon had said and I'll just read it real quick. So I think this is in chapter one where, I mean, chapter six, the case of Christianity, the first page of it.
is why I said one. Bacon was a devout Christian, but he understood that superficial knowledge of philosophy, which included natural philosophy at the time, would incline the mind of a man to atheism, but a deeper understanding would bring him back to God. Bacon famously believed ⁓ in a two-book approach approaching to knowledge. He wrote, let no man think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well-studied in the book of God's word or in the book of God's works.
I thought that that was powerful. Like something that I often hear from the scientists that we have on and what I'm hearing from you today is the more you study, the less likely you will be an atheist. If you are truly studying from not from the logical conclusions of a materialist, but if you're genuinely just looking at the evidence.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:That's exactly right. And Phil Johnson's book was so powerful for me for this very reason. Phil Johnson, well, for one thing, he's another lawyer, so I love that. And Phil in his book, he said, well, why does a lawyer have to say about all this stuff? And he said, a lawyer's forte is using language precisely, examining unspoken assumptions and examining the logic behind arguments. That's what we do.
⁓ and, he, and he applied those, those legal skills to this origins movement. And, and it really did have a profound impact on me because I came through the secular, ⁓ education system and I was pounded and pounded and pounded by materialism and Darwinism. ⁓ and the evidence.
If you don't have anyone giving you the other side of it, and this is what think, you know, Bacon's talking about, if you have only so much of the evidence, well, maybe that does kind of sound, why do we need a God? Right? ⁓ Will Prothine said the Darwinist evolution is the greatest engine for atheism ever invented. And he's probably right about that because people are only given half the story. But then when you realize.
that the evidence is not so quiet, so powerful as you thought it was, but there's another side of the story and that it is mainly compelled by a logical deduction from materialism, ⁓ a religious view, if you will. And then you start going back the other way.
Allan CP (:Yeah.
Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you say that. One of my questions for you on the side of the attorney is you have some attorneys that are so good at arguing and coming up with different things is that if they're biased or they're emotionally charged, then they'll be really good at creating an argument even though they don't fully agree with it consciously. ⁓ But then if you're going to be truthful about it, you would then do what you do, which is saying, hey, we're going to take emotions and just
look at the evidence without the emotional charge. ⁓ And then yeah, I mean, it sounds so true. If you have somebody looking at the evidence in the way that you guys do and being able to see the, I think you had said like unspoken bias or motives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. man, I love that. So this is
Dr. Barry Arrington (:particularly true in ⁓ what's called the theodicy, what you talk about in the book. If there is a loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God, why do bad things happen? And especially why do bad things happen to good people? The problem of evil, I go into it in quite a bit of depth in the book because it's a powerful objection. It turns out,
Allan CP (:The problem of evil. Yeah, yeah
Dr. Barry Arrington (:that the logical argument from evil is not a very powerful argument at all because if you actually examine the evidence, there may be reasons, providing for the existence of free will for loving God to give creatures a choice, which includes the choice to do bad, right? So the logic of it doesn't hold up.
Allan CP (:Yeah.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:but what about what's called the evidentiary problem for evil that, that, well, maybe there is a God, but, but, how do we know he's good if he lets people suffer, especially children? ⁓ and that argument is fundamentally an emotional argument. Yes. ⁓ It is a very powerful argument. Why does God let this happen? And it's not a surprise to Christians.
Christians understand that this is an issue. And how do I know? Because you just look at the book, especially the book of Job. And Job was going, why? Why did you let me do this? This happened to me. And God, God comes to Job and he does not explain himself. He says, I am God. Just look around and see what I've created. Look at my creative power. you, you have a choice, Joe.
You could trust me or not. Joe obviously decided to trust God. He could not understand why God would have let these things happen. Not because he was bad, but because he was good. But he trusted God and God restored him. And we are called to do the same thing when bad things happen and we can't figure it out. Thousands of years after Job, we are still called.
to understand that God exists. That's obvious. you look around, the whole universe declares that a God exists. The universe didn't create itself. Therefore, it points to something beyond itself. There's so many other evidences for the existence of God. The totality of the evidence overwhelmingly points to the existence of God. Given that, when these bad things happen, do we
Trust God or not. That's the choice that we have.
Allan CP (:I appreciate what you just said because it speaks volumes to what does this evidence actually say? like ⁓ the problem of evil, it is a problem. It is something that we desire to understand, but evil existing does not negate a good God existing. It just rises the problem of we don't understand why a good God can exist and he can allow evil.
The existence of evil doesn't remove the likelihood of God being who He is.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:That's exactly right. again, Job never understood. Job never, I mean, you look at the book of Job, the end you expect, okay, God's gonna explain what happened, why he did this. No, that's not. Job was just called upon to know that God exists and to trust in him, know that he's good, even though these bad things had happened to him. And nobody ⁓ dismisses the fact that the argument from evil is a powerful,
emotional argument and it trips a lot of people up. I get it. I get it. ⁓ And just saying you got to trust God doesn't necessarily ⁓ help these people. the point of my book and the point of ⁓ the, ⁓ it doesn't help them get over their grief is what I mean to say. The point of my book is that as you said, it does not necessarily negate the existence of God.
especially when you consider all the other evidence. That's one of the things that I talk about in my book. There's not one just point of evidence that we focus on to the exclusion of everything else. Yeah, the existence of evil. I don't understand that ⁓ fully. I understand it partially as we've talked about. The ⁓ philosophers have explained that evil can exist even in the presence of a good God.
If he wants free will to exist, for example, I don't understand it fully. And in particular, I don't understand concrete examples of it. No one lamenting the loss of a child wants you to stand there and tell and give them an apologetic for, for why their child died. But nevertheless, we can know that a good God exists.
Allan CP (:Totally.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:even when bad things happen. And we just have to, we hang on to that faith and there is an irreducible element of faith to everything, every worldview, just including the materialist worldview. They don't know for a certainty that their worldview is true. Do I know for an absolute apodotic certainty that God exists? No, I don't. We are called to have faith.
And what does that mean? Well, what do you have faith against? Doubt. And you cannot have faith unless it's possible to have doubt. Paul says this in Romans chapter eight. If you see it, there's no reason to have faith for it, right? But if we have faith in that that we do not see, then we wait for it patiently.
Allan CP (:And so your book, kind of ⁓ tying it all up, has a call to action. And so I'd love for you to give that to our audience, your call to action for them, as well as my call to action for everybody listening is to go ahead and get Unforgetting God written by Barry Arrington. And it will put the link in the description so that they can go ahead and get the Amazon either Kindle or physical book. But what would be your call to action from a practical standpoint?
Dr. Barry Arrington (:So in the book, I make a call to action. And that's just not just for Christians. And I hope that it's a book is, is helpful to Christians as an apologetic to help them build up their faith and answer these objections. But it's also a call to materialists, ⁓ open-minded materialists. It's a call to evaluate the evidence and make a choice. And I believe I've made a compelling case in the book.
that the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence is towards the existence of God and also towards the empty tomb and that God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ who is our only hope. But I also say, you know what? You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you do resolve that materialism is true, then don't be telling me that
There are objective norms that are self-evident because that's obviously false under a materialist worldview. You've got to accept the bad with the conclusions that you make. And I say, it is impossible. No sane person can live his day-to-day life as if materialism is true.
Which means that if you are a materialist you have to live your life as if your most deeply held metaphysical beliefs are false Yeah, think about that
Allan CP (:Thank you so much, Barry. This has been a pleasure. I genuinely have enjoyed this conversation. As well, I bet everybody else will. To everyone listening, make sure to check out Unforgetting God.
Dr. Barry Arrington (:Well, thanks for having me.
