S2S Author Interview: "The False Equation" by Ryan Roth

This is Strength to Strength Books, and today we're excited to announce that we are publishing a new book, and the title of that book is "The False Equation: Challenging the Claim that Secularism Equals Rationality and Tolerance," by Ryan Roth. And Ryan, we welcome you here to this interview this afternoon.

And as I understand, Ryan, this is your first book that you're publishing, is that right? That's right. It's my first nonfiction book. That's correct. Okay, your first nonfiction book. And we got introduced to Ryan through Sam Bear, who they met at a conference and struck it up off a good conversation, and through that he came to us and said, "Hey, I have a book that I'd love to publish with you all." And we've had a lot of interaction since that time, and so now we're ready to push this book out and get it on the shelves. And so we're very excited. We think there's a lot of—lots of truth here and some very applicable material.

And the description of Ryan's book goes like this: "Secular humanists are quick to take credit for the advancements of rationality, scientific investigation, and the cultural and political progress that ensues. But should they? In this book, Ryan Roth explores the worldview of those who codified the rational and scientific processes, and exposes that the attribution of progress to secular humanism is actually an entirely false equation."

And Ryan has poured himself into writing and into researching this book, and his bio is this: "While Ryan Roth is an author of fiction, poetry, and a playwright, he is powerfully driven to biblical apologetics and contending for the faith. In his career, Ryan has worked as a historical researcher and, more recently, in the social sciences.

His fascination with religion, history, philosophy, and politics energizes the themes in his writings." Ryan lives in Royal Alberta, Canada, with his wife and four children. Again, Ryan, it's good to have you here and part of this interview this afternoon, and of course we're excited to be publishing this book and providing it to our audience.

And also joining us is Merle Birkholder. And Merle has been helping us out on the book side. Merle actually wrote the foreword to this book and has compiled a number of really good questions to kind of put Ryan maybe on the spot. I don't know.

We'll see. And so, Merle, why don't you just launch right in, and let's get started.

Okay, well, thank you, Bryant. And Ryan, nice to be here with you today and discuss the book. I enjoyed reading it, and so I'm looking forward to this discussion. And yeah, your subtitle is "Challenging the Claim that Secularism Equals Rationality and Tolerance." I'm just wondering, is that the purpose statement of the book, and is that why you wrote the book? Maybe just some comments on your purpose for writing the book and what you were hoping to accomplish through it.

Yeah, thank you so much for that. Thank you for writing the foreword and for these questions. Yeah, my purpose for the book was that I had been publicly educated, and in the process of that, I was educated with a narrative that the times in history where real innovation launched and made cultural impacts were times where secularism increased. And that was a correlant: as we saw secularism increase, so we saw increases in rationality, we saw increases in scientific investigation, in innovation, and in social and cultural tolerance. And there's been many of us who, through the years, have challenged that in our own personal beliefs, in the way that we might educate our children. We say, "Okay, well, our interpretation is different."

And so we have this discussion with people, and we say, "You know, we interpret it differently." This book is an investigation of that claim in a deeper way. And do you remember in the early 2000s, I'm sure you'll recall the rise of New Atheism and, you know, the Richard Dawkins and the Christopher Hitchens and that sort of thing?

Yeah. And the thing that made New Atheism—New Atheism as opposed to Old Atheism—was, you know, like, off the top of your head, what would you say was sort of the difference between New and Old Atheism? You know, typically people would say probably something along the lines of the hostility with which New Atheism came out against religion. It wasn't a matter of disagreeing with religion; it was a matter of trying to get rid of it. They were trying to marginalize religion into the corners. And their belief came with a claim, and that claim was: because secularism had caused these periods of innovation and freedom and that sort of thing, that if the society would finally just overthrow its religious roots and the archaic belief systems that went with that, that we would see society progress in a new and beautiful way.

That it would really accelerate our progress into the future, and we would see more innovation, more rationality, more tolerance. With this claim that religion causes intolerance, that it causes division, that it causes small-mindedness, that it challenges human reason.

Well, it's been about 20 years now, and I think that there was a massive cultural shift in that direction. I think the New Atheists, in some ways, were very successful in their campaign in getting people to become more self-censoring about their religion, more ashamed of it publicly, and more compartmentalized in how they express their religious convictions. And I think that, in a lot of ways, we saw it in Canada. I think that it's been represented in various different places in the Western sort of culture. And I think that they were very successful in making this push to be sort of a turning point, where we actually saw culture move in a more secular direction. And so the results are in.

We have this unique opportunity in history where we can look at what culture looks like sort of before and after this secular push. And we did not see a rise in innovation. We did not see a rise in tolerance. People are more divided now. It's become possibly a hate crime to even identify certain biological realities. There are certain things that I think would surprise the atheist of 20 years ago to see where the society went when they wrestled the reins away from theism. And it steered it off the cliff of madness and not into this more rational period. And so what this book does is it sort of explores the questions of, like, "Okay, well, why would that be?"

And what I demonstrate is this wasn't simply a predictable outcome. This was a necessary outcome. Any time this experiment will ever be run, the results will always be the same. And they have been run in the past. And in fact, when secularism has painted out this narrative that increases in secularity equate to innovation, rationality, that sort of thing, it's not been done so in terms of if the historical facts are laid out. It's not an interpretation in that way. It's a lie.

There were times in history where innovation increased, but those times had no secular impact with them. In times when secularism did increase, the direct impact of that was always an increase in absurdity. And so this book demonstrates that that narrative is a simple appropriation of what was actually theistic accomplishments and a stealing of that, and a false attribution of those things onto secularism. So when we look at this, we don't have to say, "Well, this is our interpretation and that's theirs." What we can say is, "No, in light of the historical facts, that is false, and secularism will not render an increase in rationality, in scientific innovation, or in tolerance. Those are theistic outputs."

Yeah, so that's good. You talk about the premise being false, and that, of course, feeds into the title of your book, "The False Equation," and you talk about—in the preface you talk about a film titled "Two Plus Two." And yeah, maybe we just want to talk about the story in that film and how that relates to your use of "The False Equation" in the book.

Sure, yeah. "The Two Plus Two" is a part of the overall idea in the film. So the film goes on to develop that the Two Plus Two is 2 plus 2 equals 5. And that little false equation there, as it's known culturally and in the film, the false equation 2 plus 2 equals 5, is sort of an excerpt out of George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984." That's where it really became famous. And so the film has a teacher teaching students that this equation 2 plus 2 equals 5, and the students are accepting it, all except one. This one student resists this equation. And it was fairly predictable. It was well done. I liked the film. To me, though, the point of the film was very straightforward and very evident, because this false equation should be understood by everybody to be a cultural shorthand for criticism of the abuses of atheistic totalitarianism.

And the reason why is because the "1984" book, that's the context in which this was popularized. And that was actually based on a true-life instance of that false equation being used by a real-life totalitarian regime to try to convince its citizens to affirm counter-realistic facts.

And so to me, it was perfectly self-evident, even though I didn't have the extensive background on this false equation that I have now from having looked into it and researched it to validate my assumptions and to see the whole background behind it.

At the time, it was just self-evident to me that this film was a criticism of atheistic totalitarianism. But the comment section, I was amazed to see how populated it was with comments relating to the idea of, "This is what religion does to you." And this false attribution, this misapplication of criticisms of atheistic totalitarianism onto religion was very astounding and troubling to me because it was so self-evident that how this should be interpreted. And that really became a focal point for this book, this idea that the swap of atheistic abuses versus theistic outputs and vice versa, this swap, that false equation became a focal point for that. So that I used that false equation of 2 plus 2 equals 5 to demonstrate that this is a consistent pattern that's been done through historical revisionism, where these—where the attributes of secularism are falsely equated with theism and vice versa.

So on the basis of that whole premise being wrong and being a falsehood, so how did we get to the point where the Western societies have moved to a secular humanistic worldview? Like, just explain the progression of that. And I get people tend to look for what's true and what's obviously true, but if where our society is at is based on a falsehood, like, how did that progression happen? And how did we get to where we are?

Yeah, and the simple answer is just historical revisionism. So in the Age of Enlightenment, the, you know, the both 1700s, 1600s, 1700s, that was where we first actually saw secularism advance onto the Western world stage as a major power. In the past, any rising up of secularism as a major historic—as a major contributing factor—was written in, written back into history. But that didn't start until after it did rise to prominence in the Age of Enlightenment.

At that point, secularists like David Hume and Voltaire started to gain some traction and started to really make a cultural impact. And at some point, after making a big enough impact on intellectual—intellectualism, on academia, at some point they were able to market themselves as being the sort of champions of reason and science. And to the victor go the spoils. You know, the saying that history is written by the victors does have some truth to it. And in this case, it was an intellectual battle of paradigms. Because at the same time that the secularists were making a big impact in the Age of Enlightenment, the historical narrative from the secularist perspective is that there was a synthesized worldview that rose up and advanced the sort of secular ideals that had been rising up first sort of among the ancient Greeks, and then that was quashed by the medieval Church, and then again in the Renaissance, and then the Enlightenment philosophers sort of picked up the banner from there and started running with it.

And that's when we started to see all these major advancements. And so they're attributed with, you know, democratic ideals. They're attributed with, you know, freedom and scientific innovation and rational thought and those sort of things, and really championing those things. However, at the time, there was a schism in Enlightenment thinkers between the radical Enlightenment thinkers, who were sort of the new thinkers, Rousseau and Spinoza, and then there was another camp of thinkers who were much more moderate and who were much more linked to traditionalism and wanted to make accommodation for religious thought. And so it's not that there was one synthesized school of thought in the Enlightenment. There were actually two competing schools, both of whom were trying to elicit the same results.

They were both trying to increase flourishing, human flourishing. They wanted an increase in knowledge. They wanted an increase in happiness. They wanted an increase in cohesiveness and social cohesiveness. And they were both trying to achieve those goals. But as we chronicle in the book, only one of those two camps was, you know, at all successful in doing so. The other one led directly into bloodshed and tyranny. And so it's interesting that it's despite the fact that the bloodshed and tyranny was the new radical—was the product of the new radical secularist portion of that—they were more successful at convincing society that there had been this synthesized, unified push, that the bloodshed was just sort of an overreaction in some ways.

But still, they were able to take credit for the entire—for all of the benefits of the entire movement. And in being successful in that and convincing society that they had made these progresses, they were then able to successfully look back and develop a narrative to say, "And look, this was always coming." You know, we were having these opportunities where as long as we could get religion out of the way long enough, we could make these good impacts, and we will continue to do so.

And so it was a very deliberate process of historical revisionism that came after the point that they had successfully managed to market themselves as the producers of these good social outcomes. Yeah, I like that, just that point of, you know, the violence being kind of dismissed as well. That was sort of a fringe thing or kind of, you know, a side issue. And the new atheists would do the same thing with Mao and Stalin and don't really claim the end result of an atheistic society in modern times either.

Yeah, they do a very successful marketing thing with Mao and Stalin as well, which is the exact sort of thing that they did with the Greeks in a positive light or with the French Revolution in a negative light, which is always just to define themselves as the victors.

They start out with—they have a circular reasoning where they say, "Religion leads to intolerance. So if we see times of intolerance or we see institutions of intolerance, we know that those are religious institutions." And so we've heard the new atheists say things like this. Well, but Stalin was actually acting like a religious state because his state was totalitarianism. So since religion is totalitarianism and since his state was totalitarianism, therefore his state was religious. And, you know— They go in the same basket, yeah. Yeah, and so, yeah, it's just a very circular way of reasoning where they just win by definition.

So what are some of the differences between the way biblical theists have used "The False Equation" and the way secularists have used "The False Equation"? Yeah, this was really interesting to me, looking back into the rich history of this 2 plus 2 equals 5. I, you know, I'm being introduced to it through this little short film that has this, you know, reference to 1984. And when I looked into it, it has this long centuries-old history, starting where I could find it with Descartes, where he would run mental experiments where he would say, "Irrespective of what we may not know or what we try to know or what we think we know, it seems rational that we can always say that 2 plus 3 equals 5."

So he was using this sort of progenitor to "The False Equation," which has the same impact. It's this true equation. If we can say that 2 plus 3 will always equal 5, or if that a square will always have four sides, then we know that there are certain unquestioning absolute truths. And, you know, he starts to pick that apart a little bit and do some thought experiments and everything, but he does land back on that place where if this is the case, then we have a certain basis for understanding that the world has objective truths, and we have a certain amount of access to those truths. We can understand them to a certain degree. And so this makes perfect sense in what's called the anthropic principle, this idea that the universe was made by an intelligence, and it made humanity as well.

This intelligence was orderly and creative. And so in creating humans and the whole world, we have very good reason to suppose that the universe is orderly and structured and that our faculties are truth-discerning, that we're able to see and understand that order and to follow it. So as theists, we have perfectly good reasons to suppose that there's objective truth, that that objective truth is orderly and that we can understand it.

As atheists, as we'll see with the use of the developing use of "The False Equation," they have no such safeguards. Atheists believe that nothing exploded into an orderly everything and that we are nothing more than the chance byproduct of matter in motion, and that the unguided natural forces of natural selection and random mutation pushed this space dust around until it was assembled roughly human-wise. And so our consciousness is nothing more than a byproduct of space dust in motion. It's determined to be this way. It's just moving around. So our faculties should not be truth-discerning. They weren't developed with any kind of discernment or deliberation. The entire universe wasn't deliberately designed. It wasn't intelligently designed so that all we are is space dust that has the delusion of thinking we might understand things.

That's no safeguard to believing in any kind of truth-discerning abilities, nor even in there being any kind of truth to discern. And so you see that really pattern itself from Descartes onwards, where theists will continue to use either the progenitor of "The False Equation" in the simple equation, where they'll say 2 plus 2 equals 4. And even if you think it means 5, it doesn't. No matter how good you think your reasons are, it simply doesn't because they're objective truths that cannot be questioned. Whereas theists or atheists, no matter how much it may intuitively seem like if all you have is the physical world, then you're going to believe the sort of empirical measures of that world more than anything else.

That's actually not the case since they don't have any of those safeguards. So you actually start to see the only times that theists use "The False Equation" is to try to demonstrate the mathematic—the power, predictive capacity of math, and the objective truth behind it. And while atheists try to use it to whittle away confidence in the idea of objectivity. And so we first see it advance on the historical stage in an atheistic form on a propaganda poster that the Soviet Union put out in response to five-year plans that it was trying to push onto the people. So the Soviet Union had captured all these farms from the farmers, assumed it as state assets, forced the farmers to work it, and said, "We have these five-year plans that we want you to fulfill for us."

And then they come out with a poster that says, "Okay, 2 plus 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers equals 5," meaning we're going to shorten this five-year plan to a four-year plan, and if you work hard enough, you're going to make it happen. When George Orwell saw that, he was so alarmed, he said, "This scares me more than bombs." And this was a man who had been involved in actual military combat. He went to fight on behalf of the communists and was very disillusioned by what he saw. And when he saw this sign, he was like, "This is radical anti-realism." The attempt of a government to try to force its populace to affirm counterfactual statements is the most terrifying thing I can think of.

And this sort of became the origin of his dystopian 1984. He used that as the focal point for writing that book. And we see that continue on into modern times when speakers like Professor Lawrence Krause, the new atheist, he was on a debate stage and wore a shirt that says 2 plus 2 equals 5 for extremely high values of 2. We see this continued effort to whittle away trust in simple, verifiable facts by atheists, even while they're trying to claim that they were the authors and champions of rationality, of math. And then they immediately, once they're given the opportunity, try to undermine the foundations of those very things.

That's really fascinating, just thinking about the whole to do away with absolute truth, and which we as Bible-believing people kind of champion as there is objective truth, and yeah, there are things that are true. And so to get rid of that, to kind of buy into, well, there isn't logic and rationality, like, how did we get to the place where secularism becomes overtly hostile to logic and rationality, even while science kind of says, "Well, we're the people who are thinking, and we're the serious thinkers," and yet how did that happen? Like, how did we get to the place where secularism is hostile to logic and rationality? Yeah, and again, because God is truth, right? That's a precept in the Bible.

God is truth. They must get to that point. It's an inevitability. Ultimately, their ultimate goal has to steer away from the landing point if their number one objective is to not land on God and God is truth. It leads them to have to course-correct away from where truth actually is if they have a pre-commitment to believing that religion is in some way hostile. So they either have to convert or land on the path that will actually bring them to the truth, right? And so this was, again, a very concerted effort from the Enlightenment period onwards when secularism finally did gain a cultural foothold. It was a very deliberate effort to try to craft a worldview that was coherent and cohesive without having absolute truth, some sort of objective reality at the back of it.

And they've been working on that project ever since. And so that's something that's very interesting and important to understand about the Age of Enlightenment, as it's called, is that it wasn't the scientific revolution, as they often try to shoehorn into that period. The scientific revolution happened much beforehand. It really started—you could, you know, put it at any different points, but Copernicus would be a really good starting point. And then it ran into very recent modern times, if not to today. I'd say that it's being currently whittled down by that very pervasive secularist idea that there is no absolute truth, and that's been eating away at the scientific method ever since, as have other insidious ideas that have worked their way into the project of scientific exploration.

And so this has been something that they've been trying to do, trying to create a model that replaces the model of God. Napoleon famously had an atheistic—some sort of scholar working on something for him, and he asked him, "Okay, but what about God in this hypothesis that you have?" And the response was, "I have no need of that hypothesis." And, you know, how accurate that is is irrelevant. That is the basis behind which secularism operates all of its projects.

So the secular—or the Age of Enlightenment—should be not known as, or should not be understood to be part of the scientific revolution. This was a moral and cultural revolution. This was an attempt to explain away how we can have a universe that's orderly, how we can have humankind that has faculties that are truth-discerning, how we can have some kind of a moral landscape, how we can even define things like happiness or human flourishing, and how we can steer those things according to the agendas of secular humanism. And so that's been basically their sole project. And so they've become very successful at marketing what they have very, very little backing for since they have taken the legs right out from underneath anything that would give you any objective foundation for these things, rendering them ultimately all completely arbitrary.

Yeah, you referenced Plato there, and, you know, part of the revisionism is just the secular humanist claim that the Greek philosophers were secular humanists. But in your book, you write about how that's not accurate. Just explain how they have kind of appropriated the Greek philosophers as, or claimed them as their own when it's not really true.

Yeah, so the Greek philosophers were powerfully religious, powerfully so. Plato being an excellent example, an even better one being Pythagoras. People know the Pythagorean theorem. It's used today. You know, there's this incredulity when you look at secular sources and they look back and say, like, "Oh, yeah, you know what? We have to affirm that there was some religion going on, you know, during this time. There was some religion going on." You know, this Pythagoras guy, you know, he was kind of a religious guy. Well, he wasn't kind of a religious guy. He was a cult leader. You know, he actually led a monastic order. And his impact on writers like Plato, who are very much claimed by the secularists as one of these sort of proto-secularists-in-training, sort of a thing, Pythagoras's impact, and specifically his religious impact on Plato, is very well documented.

And Plato becomes increasingly impacted by specifically the metaphysical implications of Pythagoreanism. And he leans heavily into so much of this that a lot of Christianity has been later criticized by secularists as being sort of warmed over Platonism, meeting the Jewish world. And so it's interesting that we both seem to get this claim from the secularists that on one hand, Christianity is just a product of Platonism meeting Judaism, and on the other hand, that he was a secularist that didn't have much to do with religion. Like, the two can't be true at the same time, right?

And so with all of the major Greek thinkers that we have any significant evidence about, we see powerful connections between their exploration of the physical and the metaphysical combined. The explanation for this that we get from the secularists is, "Well, but they trusted in human faculties. And human faculties are the stuff of humanism. If you believe in the divine doing everything for you, that's leaning into religion. If you believe that you have the capacity to see things, understand them, move towards them with your own strength, then that's humanism, so that's secularism rising." Well, again, punting back to the anthropic principle, we actually have no reason to suppose that the trust in human faculties should be at all something that secularists should take credit for.

And that is a religious output. It makes sense within a religious worldview. And we see that very much in tune with the thinking of the Greek philosophers of the day. They have metaphysical thought experiments. They recognize a reflection between the physical and the metaphysical and an interaction with it. Their worldview was entirely incompatible with a secularist worldview. So it's not that they were leaning away from their religiousness by leaning into the belief in their faculties. They simply didn't affirm the idea that a departure from believing in mythology and nothing more and no ability to use your senses, they simply disaffirmed that as a departure from religious values. And in fact, what I see when I read the Greek philosophers, the more they were given the opportunity to explore not just the physical world, but the metaphysical world, the further from the sort of ancient mythology they sort of leaned, and more towards the precepts that we would understand to be true of monotheism.

They started to affirm concepts like a maximally great God, as opposed to simply a pantheon of gods that were fighting over, you know, a territory that's just a rehash of some other form that it always existed in. We see this unmoved mover concept that Aristotle talks about. These are far more in concert with the monotheistic God, which is, again, kind of the reason that the secularists also accuse Christianity of being an invention of Platoism, is because they were moving in a direction of sophistication of their understanding of theology. They had a ways to go. They didn't have the revelation. But just from what they could figure, we do see Romans 1:20 coming to pass, where the things that were seen, the visible things, were starting to translate into the understanding of the invisible attributes of God.

And we were seeing that come to pass. And so, yeah, again, the claim of secularism over a pagan group of devout religious thinkers as their own is just entirely incompatible with the truth.

Yeah, and that's good. That's an excellent explanation of just the religious beliefs of the Greek philosophers. But then the next stage is kind of this humanists will say, "Well, but the Catholic Church suppressed science, and it was—" But you make the case that religious piety actually preserved non-eroded reason. So how—talk about that period, the medieval times, and just the role of religious piety in preserving reason. Yeah. Yeah, and this is a great example for the secularists, like, as a superficial example, right? It superficially looks good for them because right off the hop, we tend to agree with them. We say, "Yes, the medieval Church, the medieval Catholic Church, was very much a suppressor of innovation, of progress, of, you know, it was a totalitarian force."

And we agree with that right off the hop. Where we disagree is that the medieval Church was itself motivated by religious sentiments, which was not the case. The medieval Church was appropriated by the Roman state. With the collapse of the Roman state, the only place that it survived in was through Roman Catholicism. But it very much did survive through Roman Catholicism.

In the collapse of the empire as a strictly political entity, that wasn't like a—they just—the walls of Rome collapsed, and then there was no more Rome, and then a Church popped up sort of pointing at it. That just wasn't at all what happened. There was a progression of the Roman state, being a pagan state, persecuting Christians mercilessly. And that went on for quite some time until Christianity grew to a point where it simply couldn't be persecuted any further. And this is an oversimplification. I go into more detail in the book about the specific levers that were pulled and the edicts that were issued and that sort of thing. But in the long run, what happened was that Christianity grew too big to be suppressed any further.

So instead of fighting it, the Roman state appropriated it. And then it became the official Church of the Roman state. And many people have this sort of idea that, you know, Constantine and the assuming of the Church as the official Church was a good thing for Christianity, but it was a terrible thing, and that was the result of a thousand-year reign of a tyrannical state that pointed towards Christianity as its inspiration. But this state pre-existed Christianity. Before that, it was a pagan state that persecuted Christians. Afterwards, it was a Christian state that persecuted pagans. So the problem isn't that there was religion involved. The problem was that there was a state that put itself in the place of legislating based on the morality of a religious institution that it pointed towards.

And this is par for the course. This was normal at the time. Christianity was the new thing to the world stage here. But it's perfectly normal for a state to have a king and a priest. It's perfectly normal for a state to insist that its citizenry simply have the—simply go along with the legislative morality of the state.

But that's not, of course, the design of Christianity. When Jesus came to show the truth about where we should be going, he was challenging this idea that authorities should be in a position to legislate that form of morality. And that was something that a few thinkers within the walls of the Catholic Church throughout the whole thousand-year reign, you can see that there were certain people that, despite the insistence of the Church to lock down certain concepts, there were always those who preserved the thinking of the ancient Greek philosophers and the belief in some kind of moral freedom. I call this the moral liberty principle in my book. The idea that people should be free to explore ideas and to explore whether they be metaphysical or physical.

This is what I call the moral liberty principle. And that, I believe, is what leads to the innovation. And you always had people within the walls of the Church, whether it was in the earliest period, Augustine of Hippo, but then moving forward, Albertus Magnus was an important one. Then there was Thomas Aquinas. And there was a number of people that we show in the book in between. There were always people who were translating, who were opining, who were trying to expand on the works of Plato, on ancient texts, on, you know, go beyond just what was dictated by the Catholic Church and continue this exploration. And it was, again, the Church that overthrew the tyranny of the Catholic Church, the true Church, that overthrew the tyranny of the Catholic Church at the end, as much as it's accredited with this rise of neopaganism in the Renaissance.

The Renaissance period was largely a cultural revolution, similar to the Age of Enlightenment. What fractured the stranglehold of the Catholic Church as a political entity was, of course, the Protestant Reformation, which happened in lockstep with the Renaissance. So the Renaissance period can be looked at as having three important impacts that should be understood as divisible. The Renaissance, which is this cultural and artistic revolution, but at the same time, the Protestant Reformation, and then also the scientific revolution that really started up in the late medieval period and started to really amp up and was facilitated by the Protestant Reformation. So the cure for the stranglehold of religion in the state was not less religion. It was the removal of religion from the state.

So yeah, talk a little bit more about that whole connection between the scientific revolution and the Reformation, and just kind of the implementation, maybe, of the moral liberty principle, kind of. Yeah, just talk a little more about how that—why that really is—how the moral liberty principle came into play in the Renaissance and the Reformation happening at the same time.

Sure, yeah. So as the Reformation started to gain steam, one of the major outputs of it, of course, with the development of the Gutenberg Press, was the increase in literacy, because the Protestant value was not that there would be an institution that would dictate truths from on high, but that every individual was morally responsible for understanding their duties to God, and that the Bible was the path to doing so. And so with that came a powerful principle of the value of literacy.

And not only the value of literacy, but also the value of reading and discerning truths for yourself. And so once again, we see that with the pursuit of metaphysical truths, then there's the logical cascade down to the pursuit of physical truths, right? So as people were free to read and understand and discern and explore, that is the rise of that moral liberty principle again, when you're allowed to criticize the dictates of a pre-existing power structure. And that's what the Reformation enabled. And as people did that, then we really saw that instead of just being a few individuals in the shadowy corners of, you know, a monastery in the medieval time, this was something that started to open up for whole countries.

And then this exploration really took off. And with that, the scientific revelation was finally loosed to make major advancements in a much bigger capacity. And that is essentially the moral liberty principle at play, the—what I call the counter to that principle—is the Roman legacy. Once again, not that Rome invented this. This was par for the course. But we really saw it in Rome, especially with the appropriation of the Christian Church, where when a state takes a religion and says, "We will dictate these morals, and you cannot question them," that's when we see the quashing of innovation, of freedom, of rational thought. And

this was a predictable and consistent outcome, that every time the state comes up and starts to mandate blasphemy legislation, we see these things crush. So the common denominator here is not religion. Religion away from the state creates flourishing. Religion with the state stifling. But you remove the religion—yeah, thank you. Did you have something to add to that, Brian? I just said amen.

Oh, yes. Yes, because when you remove religion right out of the state, you still have the common denominator of the state, right? So the oppressive part inherently is not some belief in the metaphysical, which is ultimately what religion is reducible to. You know, you have Buddhists who believe that things are just basically physical, but there's a sort of mystical property behind it, and they have no capacity to legislate accordingly. Those are religious people as well, right? Religion can take many forms. It can be weaponized. It can be aggressive. For the most part, though, what we found is the more the religion was removed out of the state, the more totalitarian the state becomes. And the clearer it is that religion, actually, irrespective of how violent that religion may be or how tolerant that religion may be to violence, it still usually has some mitigating factors.

When once removed from a state that then has absolutely no boundaries, that no matter how tolerant a religion may be to violence, it still becomes a mitigating factor to state violence. So as much as I am very much in favor of a secular government—and by this, I don't mean secular humanist as in atheist, but I mean secular as in agnostic to religion, right, a state that acts in an agnostic capacity—I would still choose a theocracy over an atheistic totalitarianism, because a theocracy does have some boundaries after which it starts to fall into corruption. There is no concept of corruption in an atheistic state because it simply has no moral platform upon which there's no objective foundation that it's eventually held against to mitigate any of its atrocities.

Yeah, I think, for me, one of the big takeaways from the book was exactly what you're talking about, just the moral liberty principle and how the problem is not religion. The problem is authoritarianism. And so that, if—yeah, that just makes a lot of sense to me and just really helps me to kind of have some way of thinking in regards to the accusations, "Well, religion is the problem, and it's always suppressed science," and so on. But no, it wasn't religion. It was authoritarianism, and it was that merging of the state and Church that led to that. So then that brings to the role of the state. And then you also have a discussion in your book about the differences between the French and the American revolutions and what they were grounded in.

And yeah, talk to us a little bit about that. Sure. So the American and French revolutions were, again, sort of predictable byproducts once you start to get these corrections sat in our understanding that the historical revisionism is not the truth. And so once you see secularism rise up and in cultural prominence in the Enlightenment period, but you also have a competing worldview that's more traditional, that's a little bit more balanced, and it wants to make accommodation for religion. And so each one of those inspired a revolution. And in fact, the American Revolution was the first. And it was based on more measured principles of the writings, mostly of John Locke. And John Locke was somebody who was very cognizant that the Bible had wisdom in it.

He studied it. He tried to incorporate biblical precepts in his writings. And when we see the American Revolution play out, for any of the atrocities that did occur, once again, we can say, "Okay, we can hold the American Revolution against a high standard and say we have problems, we have criticisms," right? But for the most part, it was a battle between combatants, between armed combatants from England and from the United States, fighting over a political system, and eventually holding to more or less the precepts that they said that they wanted or the goals that they said that they wanted to accomplish. When the American Revolution was fought, it was fought more or less according to those goals.

And once they had secured the outcome they want, they penned the Constitution to say, "Okay, we're going to safeguard that which we have captured because we wanted to get this far and no further." And so in some ways, you can look at it and say, "Okay, blood was shed. There was tragedy. There was loss. And I'm sure we can all make cases for abuse." But in a broad sense, it still stayed sort of within the parameters that it was seeking to achieve. It achieved its outcomes and went no further.

With the French Revolution, the entire project was bloody vengeance. It was excused by some of these new radical secularist thinkers and largely cherry-picked. There was nobody that was saying, you know, "Kill all the women and children." But by starting to write, "Okay, we want to challenge these old institutions. We want to make no quarter or accommodation for existing power structures," it was really the basis for what we know as, like, social justice today, where it wasn't based on any kind of objective moral standard of, "Okay, we want to get to this point, but we're still tempered and mitigated by what we understand to be objectively the parameters that we have to stay within." It was simply a long-oppressed mob that had put up with too much for too long and then was given no boundaries.

And so by the time they broke out with the permission of saying, "We can disassemble pre-existing power structures, including morals," then there was no stopping it. And this will always be the predictable and even inevitable outcome of, you know, whether it's through the French Revolution or through Marxism or through any kind of new manifestation of that, when you take a disenfranchised, oppressed mob that's bloodthirsty and you loose them on the populace, it is never going to have a measured outcome that's going to have a positive result in the end. And that's exactly what did happen. So those two competing worldviews in the Enlightenment period had those two manifestations, one of which was measured and came to ultimately some form of positive conclusion.

The other was unmitigated and resulted in the tyranny of the reign of terror and ultimately of Napoleon and ultimately, I argue, of Marxism and ultimately of Pol Pot and Stalin and Mao Zedong and all of the other regimes that followed a similar pattern where it was, "We remove the objective truth, and we're still going to somehow establish heaven on earth."

Well, that just doesn't make sense as a project.

And then we come—that brings us to our current times and is how both the far right fascism and the far left communism both are authoritarian. And it's kind of—you talk about—in your book, you talk about the horseshoe theory and how it kind of comes around to authoritarianism. And then today we see, in our society, we see the secular socialist authoritarianism. And yeah, just talk about how that—how secular socialism becomes authoritarian and how that is kind of a revival of the Roman legacy and the same thing that existed in the Roman times.

Sure. I think that Marx was an excellent example of somebody who sort of summarized the philosophers of the secular philosophers coming out of the Age and the Enlightenment. He took a lot of their concerns, and he codified them, and he came up with, you know, Marxism is far and away the most successful of the models that came out of that sort of secular idea of trying to map out a go-forward with according to secular presuppositions. And what he did was to develop, you know, everybody's heard of Marxism. Very few people actually dive into it and understand it very well. And it's quite simple in a lot of its—in a lot of its larger brush strokes.

So ultimately, what Marx was driving towards, even though at the time he was seeing this split between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, right, the haves and the have-nots being divided strictly down a sort of economic line, his response to all of social ills was to take a dialectic view, as he borrowed. But basically, what that means is that he looked at the world as being completely material and saying, "We should not try to understand this material world of ours according to any kind of abstract ideal, some objective truth. The only way that we can learn anything is the same way that we would learn scientifically." And so Marxism is actually also called scientific socialism. It has therefore replaced pretty much all other forms of socialism.