Is apologetics too triumphalist? Too complicated? Too biased? In this episode Trent and Jimmy talk about where apologetics can go wrong and how we can fix the practice of this important tool of theology.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
So I took a little bit of a break from my social media fast. I know but who of us keeps our Lent and fast perfectly? But I think it was for a good reason. So welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. The reason I took my fast from social media… And now that Lent is over, I will tell you I’m not going to be on social media very much. I will be there, but I want to really roll back the amount of time that I spend there, because I saw that it can just turn into a giant time suck and my time to use to build the kingdom of God is just more valuable, yours is more valuable. But there are still elements of social media that are helpful. One of those is to get ideas and insights from people for episodes. And here’s what I did. I was thinking about apologetics and I had seen online some people getting into threads and discussions where they are critical of apologetics or apologists.
Trent Horn:
So I just went out there on my platforms and said, “Hey, what’s wrong with apologetics?” Either what’s wrong with it or if you think apologetics is great, but it loses its way sometimes. It’s like we’re not fully living up to the role of providing a rational defense for the Christian faith or the Catholic faith, where are we falling short and where can we improve? So I put that out there on Twitter, on Facebook and got a lot of great replies. And I decided to invite on the show today, a friend of mine, he is the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, Mr. Jimmy Akin. He’s the author of several books, The Drama of Salvation, 365 Days To Become a Better Apologist. That is not the title, but it is escaping me at the moment.
Jimmy Akin:
A Daily Defense.
Trent Horn:
Daily Defense, that’s the subtitle, right? Something like that.
Jimmy Akin:
A Daily Defense 365 Days Plus One To Becoming a Better Apologist.
Trent Horn:
I got 80% of the title, 78%. I’m willing to give my-
Jimmy Akin:
Hey, that is a B minus.
Trent Horn:
That’s a B except if you’re in the plus minus system I think I got a D probably, which I always never liked. But he is a great apologist. I’ve learned a lot from Jimmy. And so I thought he would be great to come on the show, especially since Jimmy is kind of the Dean of our Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. You can check that out at schoolofapologetics.com. And he has a course that is kind of our flagship course at the School of Apologetics. And I’m not even going to try to say it because I’m probably going to mess that title up too. What is the course you’re teaching there?
Jimmy Akin:
It’s an introduction to apologetics and it’s just called Beginning Apologetics.
Trent Horn:
Right. So Beginning Apologetics and you cover some of the stuff about what apologetics is, how to do it well, how to not do it as well. So what I’d like to do Jimmy, is I want to share with you… I took all these different responses from people and kind of condensed them into seven common attitudes when it comes to what’s wrong with apologetics. So before I share that with you, what have you seen, I guess, in your own personal journey as an apologist when it comes to trying to get better just at, I guess, the practice of apologetics itself?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, so I’ve been doing this professionally since the 1990s and even a little bit earlier than that on a non-professional basis. My academic training is in Analytic Philosophy. And when I became a Christian, as I was studying philosophy, I naturally gravitated towards apologetics and defense of the faith and so forth. And so I’ve kind of been around the block a few times and seeing how apologetics gets done well and badly and I’ve seen shifts over the course of the decades particularly in Catholic apologetics. After the second Vatican Council in the 1960s, apologetics in the Catholic world kind of went into eclipse. There was a big desire to be ecumenical and to be positive. And those are both good things, but they were done to the exclusion of traditional apologetics. Apologetics was perceived as somehow counter to the spirit of accuminism.
Jimmy Akin:
It was thought to be inherently triumphalistic. And so it was really diminished and very much went into eclipse. Then in the 19… It actually started in the late 1970s, but where it really came to prominence was in the 1980s. Karl Keating with Catholic Answers jump-started apologetics in the English speaking world and helped bring it back to a degree of awareness. And at this point in history, there was still a lot of rather intense anti Catholicism, particularly in some segments of the Protestant community. And you had fundamentalists who were very, very anti-Catholic people like Jimmy Swaggart and so forth, and Jack Chick and people like that. And for years, because Catholic people hadn’t really had apologetics available to them, they’d been taking it on the chin for all these years with people peppering them with objections and so forth that they didn’t know how to respond to.
Jimmy Akin:
And so when apologetics came back, there was kind a, “Hey, yeah, we can do this. We’ve got arguments on our side.” And apologists were really kind of feeling their oats for a while. And that led to, I would say, some mistakes tonally in terms of some stuff that was triumphalistic and that was unnecessarily arrogant.
Trent Horn:
Well, you’re kind of explorers in a new field and everyone who kind of explores uncharted areas, there’s going to be missteps.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. And it was in part fueled by just the exuberance of saying, “Hey, we can do this. We can defend ourselves.” And I will confess that I was not immune to this. I was a new Catholic and I was caught up in the same ethos. And as a result, when I go back and I read my early stuff, I cringe. And periodically when I’m writing a book, let’s say, and I’m using some old material and I’m heavily revising it to get the attitude out of it, I say to myself, I’m paying for my apologetic sense.
Trent Horn:
What’s hard for me, Jimmy, is I feel like I am in the midst of them right now because I feel the same way. I mean, I’ve been at Catholic Answers now for about, in 2022 actually, it’ll have been 10 years and I can’t believe it’s going to be going on a decade now. I go back to my first work, my first few years and I’m like, ah, let’s revise that. But then I know eventually I’m going to get to your position like in 20 years or so, and look back on what I’m doing right at this moment, I’m like, oh. But the problem is the only way out is through. You just have to do it and learn from it.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, as it has been said in other areas, the only way to get really good at something is to be really bad for a long time.
Trent Horn:
Right. Absolutely.
Jimmy Akin:
It’s just part of a growth maturation process.
Trent Horn:
So what we want to do is we want to take the pain out of it a little bit from people so that we can highlight where apologetics has done badly so it can be done goodly, I mean, better. So it can be done better. Let’s talk about these badly-
Jimmy Akin:
Goodly is a perfectly cramular word.
Trent Horn:
I appreciate your verbosity, Mr. Akin. I appreciate it. Here’s the first one and it really touches into what we’ve already kind of discussed. And I think I put it as objection number one, because I think it is like the biggest problem with apologetics. And that is this, it leads to triumphalism and an arrogance that pushes people away from the faith. That the problem with apologetics, or I think a lot of people will say just apologists, is that this triumphalist arrogant attitude. We always joke with apologetics. Apologetics is not apologizing for your faith, but it’s also not making the other guy sorry he asked you why you’re Catholic. And I think that latter one is kind of the triumphalist sin. What do you think?
Jimmy Akin:
So I think you’ve raised a very good distinction. There’s a difference between apologetics and apologists. Now, if someone says apologetics as an enterprise is inherently flawed apart from the individual apologists, if it’s apologetics itself, that’s inherently flawed, then I think you’re going to have a problem among other things with scripture, because scripture contains apologetics. And if you recognize scripture as the inspired word of God, you’re going to have to say, okay, well, scripture is the inspired word of God, it’s written by the Holy Spirit, therefore these apologetic arguments in scripture are authored by the Holy Spirit. And they may be conditioned by their time and culture and things like that. That’s fine because the Holy Spirit needed to communicate with people of that time and culture, but still, this is the Holy Spirit talking. And so if you say apologetics is inherently flawed, it’s really an indictment of the work of the Holy Spirit.
Jimmy Akin:
So I think we have to say if we’re faithful Christians, that apologetics is a fundamentally legitimate enterprise. It’s not inherently flawed. It’s something that can be done badly due to human weakness and ignorance. But the problem is with the humans, not with the enterprise itself. And so if you then move to the question of, well, okay, what about individual apologists in our day, is there triumphalism out there? Yes. Is there arrogance out there? Yes. And this doesn’t apply just to Catholic apologists. This applies to people of every perspective and not just in religion, because apologetics is simply the study of how to defend a position. And if you look at people and whatever position they’re defending, because humans are frail and sinful and limited in their knowledge, you do find a triumphalistic attitude and at times an arrogant attitude from people of every perspectives, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jewish people, Muslims, atheists, everybody is subject to the same human weaknesses.
Jimmy Akin:
And so if we were to pretend that there’s no triumphalism and no arrogance out there, then to quote St. John, we would deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. So those are real things that need to be watched out for. And I’ve come to appreciate that more and more as the years and now decades have gone by. I really try. I don’t always succeed, but I really try to practice the golden rule in apologetics. If I wouldn’t want my viewpoint treated a certain way, then I don’t want to treat other people’s viewpoints that way. So I want to treat… I want to act as an apologist in a way that shows the same respect for other people’s viewpoints that I would want shown to my viewpoints. And that includes not just the presentation of facts and arguments, but also the manner of delivery. I think very much about, okay, this word I’m about to use, would I want an equivalent word used about my position? Is there a pejorative insulting or down pudding aspect to this word?
Jimmy Akin:
And if there is, I try to find another way to say it that is kinder. And this is something I’ve really tried to internalize and I think it is the best piece of advice I can give to apologists in terms of presentation method is follow the golden rule. Think about what you’re saying from the other person’s perspective. And if you’re not following the golden rule, find a way to fix it.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And I think this happens a lot, Jimmy, especially among contemporary Catholic apologists. I think it can happen a lot among people who are used to only speaking to other people who agree with them. Like if you do podcasts or do other enterprises like this, where your audience are just people who agree with you, or the only time you engage other people is on snippets on Twitter, I find this to be not as common among you. Like when I try very hard and you do the same, like engaging people, like having actual face-to-face either virtually or in-person dialogues with people who disagree. I know you had a great one with a Protestant apologist, Steve Greg, not too long ago, but people who when you can engage the other side and sit down with them for an hour or several hours and talk to them, I mean, there’s always exceptions for sure, but I think you naturally develop these skills.
Trent Horn:
So I think that when you talk about these things, one thing that’s helpful is imagine the people you’re talking about, whether they’re atheists or anyone else, are there with you while you’re talking about them. Like they’re amongst your audience. Like whenever I give a talk at a parish and if it’s talking Protestantism, I’ll say something like, by the way, I know some of our Protestant brothers and sisters may be here tonight, welcome. It shows you have an open mind. I’m grateful you’re here. And maybe we can chat a little bit later and just make that acknowledgement whether it’s live or in-person to understand they’re not just the other who is out there, they’re people.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. And an important thing to bear in mind, something to watch out for in applying this technique is to not fall into the tough love trap, because there is a tendency sometimes to say, oh, in order to get people to the truth, you sometimes need to use tough love and express things harshly. And okay, that’s not entirely false, but it’s usually false. And usually when someone is telling themselves, “I’m giving these people tough love,” what they’re really doing on a psychological level is, “I want to vent my frustration and aggression towards these people. And I’m using tough love as an excuse.” There is a place for real bluntness and tough love, but it is not the norm. And if you find yourself regularly appealing to tough love, it’s probably a justification for bad behavior.
Trent Horn:
Amen to that. So I think it’s Colossians 4:6, season your words with salt so you may know how to speak to everyone. And Ephesians 4:15, to speak the truth in love. Let’s go to the second attitude, which kind of relates to this. Apologetics cares more about winning arguments than winning people. It can sometimes feel opposed to evangelism, your thoughts.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, I think it’s true that people can get caught up in the moment and be more concerned about winning an argument than winning a soul. That’s certainly true. That can happen. It doesn’t automatically happen. And the remedy for that is to get a sub routine running in the back of your brain that is looking out for the long-term and is not just focused on the ins and outs of the present argument, where you’re thinking further into the future and keeping the primary goal, which is helping a person or a group of people in mind. And so you need to multitask, you need to think not just about the details of a particular discussion that’s going on, but you need to think longer term at the same time. In terms of apologetics being opposed to evangelization, well, that can happen but the two enterprises are meant to work together.
Jimmy Akin:
We have to be clear, first of all, on what we mean by evangelization, because a lot of people have kind of a sloppy idea of evangelization that really doesn’t correspond to the biblical reality. The biblical reality of what evangelization is, is announcing the good news of God and his kingdom and Jesus Christ. Just telling people about God, his kingdom and Jesus Christ. If you’re not doing those things, you’re not doing evangelization, not in the biblical sense. And if you do those things, if you tell people about God, his kingdom and his son, then people are going to have questions, and they’re going to have objections, and they’re going to want evidence for this gospel that you’re presenting to them. And as soon as you start to address those issues, you’re doing apologetics.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So apologetics is a discipline that’s meant to be in the service of evangelization. So the two go together by nature, and you can focus on one to the extent that it eclipses the other. I mean, I could go out as an evangelist and just tell people constantly about God and never answer any of their questions and never give them any evidence.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, okay, that’s not the right way to do evangelization. In the same way, I could do apologetics in such a way that doesn’t actually move people towards accepting the gospel and that’s doing apologetics badly. So really the two enterprises are meant to go together and need to be done in a way that supports each other.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I think that the idea about winning arguments and winning people, I think people sometimes think that they create like a false dilemma. It’s like, well, I can do both. And in many cases to win over a person, I need to win the argument. But arguments, we sometimes treat them as like zero sum games. It’s like, well, if I won the argument, that means you lost, and you’re the loser, and I’m going to own you because of it. And that’s not the right attitude to have. I remember once I was on a plane and people ask you, “So what do you do?” And you get the question like hundreds and hundreds of times like, “Okay, well… I decided to be kind of cheeky and I said, “Well, I design smart weapons.”
Trent Horn:
And they said, “What?” I say, “Yeah. I design weapons that destroy false arguments without hurting the people who make them.” And so I think that that’s the goal, like in 2nd Corinthians chapter 10, Paul says that we have weapons capable of destroying fortresses, we destroy arguments. But the key here is how you do that without hurting. The idea is you want to win the argument so that you can help the person and always keep like a distinction between the two.
Jimmy Akin:
Your story reminded me of one that I heard Tony Campolo give once. Tony Campolo is an evangelical author and he has more than one career, so to speak. And he would say, if I’m on an airplane and I want to talk to someone, if I’m interested in speaking to someone, if I’m open to conversation and they say, “What do you do?” I’ll say, “I’m a sociologist.” And they’ll say, “Oh, how interesting.” And we’ll be off on this conversation. If I don’t want to talk to someone on the airplane and they ask, “What do you do?” I’ll say, “I’m a Baptist apologist.” And that ends the conversation right there.
Trent Horn:
Right. You always want to drop fully.
Jimmy Akin:
Usually.
Trent Horn:
Right. Usually, but you never know. All right, here’s the next one. Most people aren’t moved by arguments. They care about authenticity and holiness more than arguments. So this objection kind of goes more at apologetics as a field saying, well, nobody cares about arguments. They just want authenticity and holiness, says this argument. You can already start to see the problems here.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, so there’s a bigger element of truth here than you might suspect. People really are moved by what you could call pre rational things by motives that aren’t based on reasoning things out in a rigorous linear way.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And also everybody has an existing set of beliefs and convictions, what are sometimes called your priors, your prior beliefs. And in order to update those priors, sometimes people are open to evidence and argument, and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the thing that opens them to looking at a question anew are things like authenticity and holiness. If they see that somebody that is presenting a viewpoint that’s different than theirs is sincere and of goodwill and win some, then they’ll be more likely to listen to what that person has to say than if that person seems insincere or to have ulterior motives or to not be a person of goodwill.
Jimmy Akin:
And so I think that human psychology is complex enough that people are motivated by factors other than argument, but it would be a mistake to say that they’re not, or are never motivated by argument. Now, sometimes they’re not willing to listen to an argument. They’re not willing to listen to evidence. And in that person’s case, that’s not the right strategy to approach them. If I have someone who is just not willing to give serious consideration to some evidence I would present to them, then I shouldn’t waste my time trying to present that evidence to them. Instead, I should do things that would help them be more open in the future like maybe just being their friend instead of immediately arguing about apologetics, just being their friend.
Jimmy Akin:
And once they see that I’m a sincere person and I’m a person of goodwill and I like them, and I want to help them, then they may be more open to evidence. So I think it’s a mix here. I think that human psychology is pretty complex in this regard, but it would be a mistake say that, oh, people are never open to argument and therefore you should never present them with argument.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
That’s clearly false.
Trent Horn:
Right. And that’s I think my problem with this objection is I’ve heard some people say, well, if we just… I’ve heard, somebody will say, I’m just going to focus on corporal works of mercy and social justice and that’s what really moves people. It’s like, well, you are correct. And so I think that authenticity, holiness, living the faith, like what we might see in the letter of St. James is advice. I would say that that is necessary, but it’s not sufficient at least as a universal rule that… Because the problem is also like 2000 years ago, the Christian witness of virtuous living, I think it was the epistle of Diognetus to Methetes, it was one of them talking about how Christians they’re so different for their behavior, that they don’t share the marriage bed with other people. They always care for the poor.
Trent Horn:
Christian behaviors being so radically different and against the darkness of paganism in ancient Rome. But in 2000 years, Christianity has changed culture itself so that this idea of equality and how truism that even many people who are not Christian at all can adopt these ideas and live very virtuously. So the problem is even if you’re a very authentic and holy person, there are other non-Christians who exhibits similar levels of authenticity and virtue. We also have to be able to share reasons as to why our Christian virtue is distinct in virtue of its Christian faith. I don’t know what you think of that.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, I agree. I also think that if you’re out doing corporal works of mercy, let’s say you’re volunteering in a soup kitchen, that’s great. That’s wonderful. And if you never tell the people you’re serving about Jesus, then you’re meeting their material needs, and that’s wonderful, but you’re not meeting their spiritual needs. If you really want to serve the person’s long-term interests, which are spiritual in nature, because it deals with their eternal destiny, then you need to not just do one, but do both. And it can be this is kind of the flip side temptation, or it’s a flip side temptation of one that apologists often have, whereas apologists can be really focused on the short-term like I want to win this argument and not on the longterm what’s good for this person’s soul. The same exact thing can happen when you’re doing corporal works of mercy, because it’s like, I want to get this person fed that’s really important.
Jimmy Akin:
And it is. It’s also not what’s the most important thing in the long-term, which is the person’s soul. And it can be challenging to tell people about Jesus and we can be intimidated in our culture. Because of the way it has turned its back on the Christian faith, it can be scary to tell people about Jesus. And so it can be an easy fallback to say I’m preaching the gospel just by putting soup in bowls. No, you’re not. You’re putting soup in bowls. If you want to preach the gospel by that act, you have to somehow associate the gospel with the act. Just like apologists can be tempted to be arrogant on the pretext of tough love, people who are doing works of mercy, which need to be done, can similarly fall into a trap of, okay, this is what really needs to be done so I’m not going to look at the longer term of what’s important for this person. Or I’m going to convince myself that, oh, just by putting soup in bowls, I’m somehow helping this person with their souls and in a way am not.
Trent Horn:
It’s the apocryphal St. Francis era. The apocryphal quote preach the gospel, use words if necessary, which I thoroughly debunked, by the way, in my book, What the Saints Never Said, if you all want to be able to go and check that out. Because St. Francis never said that he was a preacher, he used all kinds of words to help people to share the gospel. We have to do the same, but in a loving way. Here’s the next, apologetics reduces the faith to arguments and it kind of de-spiritualizes it. Once again, I think this is another distinction between apologetics and apologists probably.
Jimmy Akin:
Well yeah, so there are apologists who try to prove too much and they don’t leave room for faith. And this is true. Again, this is not just true of Catholic apologists, this is true of people for every position where they’ll try to squeeze more out of the evidence than is actually there. An example of this, that Christian apologists, both Protestant and Catholics can fall prey to is thinking that we can prove the Trinity by natural reason alone. That is not possible.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Richard Swinburne tried to do that. He’s an Orthodox philosopher. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Right. So it’s not possible to prove the Trinity by reason alone, we need divine revelation for that. Another one is to think that we can completely explain the mystery of the Trinity by rational analysis. And that’s not possible either because it transcends our ability to fully comprehend. Another is that we can just totally defang the problem of evil and eliminate mystery from why there’s evil in the world and why God allows it. And we really can’t do that. We can explain how it can be rational for God to allow evil in principle but if you think that you can explain why in any single particular case God allowed evil right here, you’re not able to do that. So there can be apologists who will try to prove too much. Some of them are kind of unique to Catholic apologists.
Jimmy Akin:
Like I think some apologists in dealing with Marian issues, for example, and they’re wanting to respond to requests from Protestants to where is that in scripture and that can lead them to over crank particular passages of scripture and try to get things out of those passages that you really can’t because the truth is that the church’s Marian teachings are not strictly based in scripture. They also receive input from tradition. And it requires the intervention of the magisterium to distinguish authentic traditions from inauthentic ones, what really comes from the apostles and what doesn’t. And so if you let yourself get boxed in to thinking, I have to prove everything, or I have to be able to give an argument for something from scripture alone, then you’re going to end up over cranking scripture at times. And the same thing happens in the Protestant community.
Jimmy Akin:
In the Protestant community, there are often battles about what’s the proper mode of baptism and you will have people straining the texts of the New Testament to try to figure out, okay, is it immersion? Is it pouring? Could it be both? And you’ll have big battles over subtle shades of meaning and really people are over cranking the text. The fact is the New Testament never tells us the mode of baptism because it’s written to people who are already baptized and who already know how it works. The New Testament presupposes that we’re looking to the practice of the church to tell us what the mode of baptism is. And if we go outside the New Testament and look at other first century documents like the Didache, it indicates there was more than one mode of baptism in the first century. So this tendency to over crank scripture passages is something that Christians of various perspectives are liable to.
Trent Horn:
I think this also goes to a tip for being a better apologist. I remember my book Persuasive Pro-life I had a rule in there called make your evidence bulletproof in that when you go out, when you share evidence for a position, you don’t want to overplay your hand or you always want to be minimal with the evidence and saying like, look, I can make a very strong case from even this minimal amount of evidence that other even my critics will grant. It’s like when you’re building a bridge. It’s like if you’re building a bridge, you want the strongest materials. Even if it’s like, well, if I just use this really thin piece of board, I can get all the way over there with a few pieces of board. I’d rather have a lot of strong pieces than a few thin flimsy ones, if that makes sense.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. I use the term bulletproofing in regard to apologetics too. And I talk about that in my intro to apologetics course. And I’ve written about it elsewhere. The basic idea, at least as I conceive it, is you want to strip away all of the weak stuff, because people will be more convinced by a smaller number of strong things than a larger number of things that are not as strong. I’ve seen books like 500 Reasons Why This is True. Okay, nobody’s going to listen to 500 reasons before their eyes glaze over.
Trent Horn:
There’s a book called a 100 Reasons The Earth is Flat, I think.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, people of various perspectives are prone to this.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Throw it all out there.
Jimmy Akin:
But people have limited attention spans. And if you try to just do a central core info dump on them, they’re going to stop caring and they’re going to start being annoyed that you’re wasting their time. It’s better to just give people a small number of arguments that are very powerful rather than try to overwhelm them with a bunch of stuff that is not as powerful. In part, because if you give them the not powerful stuff, they’re going to focus on that if they disagree with you. If I give someone a knockdown argument for a position they disagree with and a weak argument for the position they disagree with, they’re going to focus on the weak argument and say, “Hey, this argument you’ve given me here is weak.” Instead of focusing on the stronger one. And if I want them to consider the stronger one, that means that’s all I should give them. I shouldn’t give them the weaker stuff.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yeah. Three arguments that are 30% effective each don’t equal an argument that’s 90% effective. By adding them together, it doesn’t get stronger. The person just gets more annoyed you haven’t gotten to better evidence. Let’s go to the next one, dealing with, I guess, apologetic methods. One complaint about apologetics is it’s too complicated and full of jargon. No one can learn everything you need to know in order to do apologetics that some people… I didn’t see this objection a lot. I did see it. And I’ve heard some people say they just kind of tune out. Like I don’t even want to learn apologetics, it just seems so complicated. What can we do to overcome that concern?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, I think that it’s a question of how deep into apologetics you want to go and that’s if you want to do apologetics professionally, you’re going to need to go into it in deeper way. If you just want to do it in a kind of light way, which is very much needed, then you don’t need to go into some of the depths. It’s like other fields. I mean, everybody needs to have a certain knowledge of healthcare like wash your hands before you eat and take an aspirin when you got a headache or whatever, basic self care stuff like that for you and your family, not everyone needs to become a research doctor at a major medical institution. But we do also need research doctors at major medical institutions. So there’s a role for everybody on this back trap.
Trent Horn:
You took my analogy right out of my head, Jimmy.
Jimmy Akin:
Oh, really?
Trent Horn:
Right out of my head, I was thinking like okay, someone who feels like I can’t do apologetics it’s like someone’s sick. It’s like you don’t have to learn everything a doctor knows, you could just learn, hey, here’s what I know to help you get better but if that’s not enough, here’s this doctor who knows a lot more, maybe you should go and see him. So it’s like, here’s what I know and if that’s insufficient, Jimmy Akin wrote a book on this, or Trent Horn wrote a book on this. The same thing like we understand we have limited, minimal knowledge just to interact people in day to day, if we need expertise, then just learn how to point people to the experts.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. And so the fact I took this out of your head is that evidence that psychic powers exist.
Trent Horn:
I could also be evidence of the law of large numbers. If there’s lots of people in the world, they’ll probably think similar things, especially if they do apologetics in a similar way. But I bet on Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, you’ve got a podcast soon or in past about remote viewing and psychics.
Jimmy Akin:
Oh yeah, we cover those issues fairly regularly. In terms of the jargon aspect that you mentioned, I think this is a problem and we can, again, sketch a kind of medical parallel. I heard it once said that if you’re talking to your doctor and you’ve got a problem, and the doctor says it’s idiopathic, run. Because idiopathic means we don’t know what causes it. And if your doctor is hiding behind jargon like idiopathic, instead of saying, we just don’t know, then you want a different doctor who’s going to communicate with you in a forthright way.
Trent Horn:
I love ambiguous jargon in fields. I love archeologists who find an object that they can’t recognize they say, well, it probably had ritual significance.
Jimmy Akin:
Yes. That’s the classic. Ritual significance and they see like these female figurines from the paleolithic era and they’ll say, oh, these must have ritual significance. They’re goddess things. Well, maybe they are, or maybe they’re a child’s dolls or maybe they’re porn. Think about what people do with similar things today, it was probably the same then.
Trent Horn:
Right. So with the jargon though, it’s like having a doctor… I feel like with apologetics, I’m concerned about some apologists who feel like they need to use jargon to impress people or make it seem like they know the stuff but if you can do it in a non jargon way, it’s like, I don’t think a doctor is less of a doctor because he tells me about my uncle’s heart attack instead of my uncle’s myocardial infarction. It’s like just speak to me with terms that get the basic gist of what you’re talking about.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. This is something… I’ll tell a personal story on myself here. So growing up, my role model was Mr. Spock. And when I was in college, I was studying analytic philosophy, which is a pretty heady discipline and it does involve a lot of jargon. But I had a girlfriend and I was trying to impress her and I was trying to appear smart. And so I was using a bunch of jargon around her. And at one point she turned to me and in a moment of vulnerability, she said, “Do you think I’m stupid?” Because that was the impression I was giving her that she was stupid because she couldn’t keep up with all of this jargon I was using. And I was mortified. It was a life-changing moment. I’ve never forgotten it because that was not my intention. I was not trying to make her feel stupid. I was trying to show her something admirable about me, that I could do this, but it had the opposite effect.
Jimmy Akin:
And I said to myself right then and there, I’m going to stop this. I’m going to orient the way I talk. I’m going to craft the way I talk in such a way that I can be understood by as many people as possible and I will censor myself. Every day when I’m writing or speaking and I catch myself using a word that I could make simpler and still communicate the same meaning, I will revise it. And in fact, you heard me do it just a minute ago, because I said to myself I’m going to orient the way I speak and then I realized, I can say that more simply, I’m going to craft the way I speak. And so I have this sub-routine running in my brain all the time, how can I say this in a way that accurately communicates it in a way that regular folks can understand where you don’t need a super big vocabulary? And I think that’s something that apologists really need to do. I do see a lot of jargon in use that is… And again, it’s not just apologetics, people in every field have their jargon.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Jimmy Akin:
But I see communicators in every field not explaining things as well as they could to a broad audience. And I think, as Catholic apologists, we really need to learn to communicate in a simpler way as possible.
Trent Horn:
This reminds me when I wrote my book-
Jimmy Akin:
Without sacrificing meaning.
Trent Horn:
Right. Of course. And this reminds me of when I wrote Why We’re Catholic, that book took a while, not because of the arguments because it’s not a high level argument book. It’s a book meant for everybody. But what took a long time in writing Why We’re Catholic was I just wordsmith the heck out of it to get it to be essentially at an eighth grade reading level or higher? I remember once I was telling a story and in my original draft I was writing and I said, I replied as nonchalantly as possible. And then I go back and I do backspace replied in as relaxed a tone as possible. Just simple. I mean, I just don’t need… I mean, someone could keep reading and get what I was saying, but the more mental energy they have to use to tolerate the jargon, that’s unnecessary, I don’t want to do that for people.
Trent Horn:
And I think in the same way the concern, I think, for apologists who use jargon is, well, I’m worried the other experts will look down on me or they’ll do the nerdy actually, well, actually it’s… And for me it’s like, well, I’d rather be understood by the 95, 98% of people I’m speaking to. And if the 2% of the experts want to nitpick, I’ll reply to them privately, or I might put something in a footnote or an end note or an addendum just for them to say, “Yes, I thought of the…” I did this in my book, Hard Sayings on Bible difficulties. There’s a lot of end notes in there where I expected people would say that. It’s in the end notes for you, but for the regular reader, I don’t want to bog them down in this stuff, if that makes sense.
Jimmy Akin:
Oh yeah. And sometimes people who are more in on the jargon world will criticize you. I had an incident recently where I was critiquing an argument. And the gentleman I was critiquing, who’s a younger guy, who is a philosophy guy and he came back and responded by saying, “Well, you didn’t put my argument in a certain logical form and attack one of its premises.” And then he had a version of his argument that he had written out in symbolic logic. And it’s like, okay, dude, I was doing symbolic logic back in the 1990s. I’m not even sure you were alive then. Well, I can do the symbolic logic game, but I am talking to people on the internet and 99 plus percent of them are not going to sit still for a symbolic logic presentation. So consider the audience I was speaking to and how I was trying to serve their needs.
Trent Horn:
Right. It’s like apologists who in their books seem to be written for a lay audience include large amounts of the Greek New Testament.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Not even transliterated, Jimmy, but in the original Greek.
Jimmy Akin:
And Hebrew and this is one of the thing… This is kind of a pet peeve of mine among apologists, both Catholic and Protestant is they’ll frequently drop in the original languages when it’s not necessary. And sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes you do need to know what the word in Greek is and talk about its meaning or what the tense is and talk about its meaning. But a lot of times people will, so who were the brothers of Jesus? Well, the Greek word for brother is adelfos and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Actually, that’s irrelevant. You can make the point. You can just say… You don’t have to mention that the word is adelfos. You can just say the Greek word for brother had a range of meanings just like the English word for brother does. In English, a brother can be a full brother, a half-brother a stepbrother, an adopted brother. It got a range of meanings and the same thing was true here.
Jimmy Akin:
And frequently, not always, obviously, but frequently when I see a popular level apologists making a point about the Greek or the Hebrew and especially what the grammar means, what this tense means, they’re wrong. They don’t really understand the grammar as well as they think they do. They’ll be trying to get implications out of the perfect tense or-
Trent Horn:
It perfects you.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. It does and that’s not what it means. Or the aorist tense that they just don’t have but it’s-
Trent Horn:
That kind of goes back to over cranking the evidence.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So I always want to make sure. But my big thing though is especially just so off-putting. For me personally, well, frankly, unless it is an academic monograph, I don’t see the reason to put the original script in. You could always transliterate it.
Jimmy Akin:
Sure. Yes. There’s no need to use the Greek alphabet-
Trent Horn:
You’re right.
Jimmy Akin:
… in a non scholarly text.
Trent Horn:
And I’ve seen that. I’ve seen some apologists paragraphs just to show they’re like, congratulations, you can read the original, it’s not transliterated. Unless you’re writing to other professors, you’re just once again, trying to show people you’re smart, but you’re making them feel not smart. And that’s not helpful.
Jimmy Akin:
And from a linguistics perspective, it’s not that much of an accomplishment. It’s a little bit like, okay, great, you’ve learned the Greek alphabet. That’s baby easy Greek alphabet for speakers who natively read a Latin alphabet. Now do Cuneiform.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yeah, exactly. We’ll get our Sumerian tablets out here soon. Let’s see. Here’s the next one. I’ve got two more here. Apologetics is a bunch of canned answers. Apologists, they don’t take on the real tough objections, but they just defend their prior assumptions. Some thoughts for myself before I get your thoughts. First, I don’t think it’s bad to defend what you previously knew. I remember there was a critique of the atheistic philosopher, Bertrand Russell. That Russell said Aquinas was not a real philosopher because he was defending stuff he learned as a kid about Catholicism to which one critic of Russell said, yeah, well, Russell defended realism and mathematics and that kind of formal logic and kind of logic, but he learned one plus one equals two when he was a kid, but he still defended formal logic systems as an adult, as a philosopher.
Trent Horn:
Just because you learn something in a non rational way or in a way that’s like via testimony, for example, it doesn’t mean it’s bad that you use reasons to defend it later. I guess another example I give on that is most of us learned about the Holocaust because our middle school teacher or our parents told us about it, not because we went and did historical investigation. We took it on testimony, but I might need to learn the arguments if I meet up with a Holocaust denier or something like that. So that might be, I guess, my thought about if it’s a prior assumption, so what?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So obviously what Bertrand Russell was doing in that quote would have been an ad hominem based on the genetic fallacy. So he’s kind of slamming St. Thomas Aquinas based on the origin of the ideas that St. Thomas had. But as his critic points out, we all have things that we have prior beliefs and we tend to defend those prior beliefs. And that’s true of Bertrand Russell’s just like it’s true of anybody. What can happen is you can have people from a perspective who are so committed to an existing viewpoint that they’re not willing to seriously think through objections to that viewpoint, and that can happen. It can happen with Catholic apologists. It can happen with non-Catholic apologists. It can happen with atheists. Everybody can be so committed to a position that they are not willing, at least at the moment, to think through seriously objections to that.
Jimmy Akin:
And that’s part of human nature and it has to be and can be checked. So one of the things that I try to do in interacting with other viewpoints is look for the common ground first. I try to figure out because nobody’s position on virtually anything is a 100% unreasonable and obviously false. If it were, people wouldn’t even adopt that position. There has to be some set of things that make it understandable why people would have a particular position and why it’s rational for them to do that. And there’s likely an element of truth in whatever their position is. So I try to think about, well, what would they say in favor of their position? What evidence would they cite? And also how much of it could I agree with? And that has a number of good effects. One of them is by recognizing upfront how much common ground we have, I recognize what we don’t need to argue about.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Also if I articulate that to them, I show them that I’m a person of goodwill, who’s willing to think through their position from their point of view. And I have a better grasp of where the disagreements are and that can focus my attention on those. And it may turn out there aren’t any disagreements of substance. Sometimes it’s a matter of semantics or a matter of emphasis. It’s not a matter of substance that you’re disagreeing on. And so there are just a lot of benefits to taking this think through the position from the other person’s viewpoint, make the best case you could if you were in their shoes. And I see various apologists, I am thinking of one particular evangelical apologist, who I think basically never does this. He reads or studies other people’s positions, only looking for ammunition not trying to understand the other people’s beliefs from an inside perspective. He never adopts the inside perspective to try to figure things out and what people really mean. He just has a superficial I’m looking for ammunition I can use against them approach.
Trent Horn:
I also want to talk about the stock answers objection that I think you’ll say, oh, it’s the same old canned answers, stock answers. I think there’s an element of truth in this when you are confronted with popular level apologists who only read secondary literature such as those who promote themselves as apologists, but have only read other apologists and have not read opposing critics or just experts in the fields they’re trying to talk about. Like if you’re doing biblical apologetics, they only read other apologists secondary works, not ancient historians, archeologists, linguists, other Biblical commentaries, things like that, so that their answers can get very power stock because they don’t have the resources to go deeper.
Trent Horn:
So I believe that is a legitimate concern to recognize your limits. And also when you’re looking into a field, you’ll have to go to the experts in those fields in order to go deeper, not just reading what other apologists have written, but at the same time I think this objection can be misguided in that, well, when I am addressing people, most people want answers. 95% of people, the average lay people, they just need the beginning treatments on the issues. And in many of the venues I speak in whether it’s radio or popular level books, I just don’t have a lot of opportunities to get to the nitty gritty because my audience is nowhere near that area yet. I don’t know what you think about that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Well, I think that there is an element of truth here. Now, sometimes the stock answer is the best one. I mean, there’s a reason that certain answers rise to the top and get repeated. And sometimes the reason is that’s the best one. And so there are certain questions that I know if I get asked on the radio, they’re not the interesting questions for me. But it’s like, okay, here comes this question again. Let’s hit the hot key, run the macro, here’s the answer.
Trent Horn:
It’s like we need to have the hall of… Like there’s the hall of presidents, it’s like you turn into like the hall of apologists. It’s like, well-
Jimmy Akin:
Electrotonic Trent Horn. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Basically. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So sometimes the stock answer is a stock answer because it’s the best one. Other times though, I do see instances where apologists are not seriously intellectually engaging the question and they are just repeating something that they have previously said. And this is going to be very frustrating for the person who asks the question, a classic example, I see of this. And I recently wrote about this at jimmyakin.com, so you could search this if you want, is why would God create a person knowing that person is going to go to hell. And it’s not unique to Catholics obviously, but in watching people answer this question, I tend to see one of a couple of things happening. One of them is they will instead of directly addressing the question of why would God do this, they will either just say it’s a mystery or they will spend a lot of time talking around the issue about issues like free will and predestination and stuff like that that are kind of on the fringe of the question, but not at the core of the question.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And they kind of hope that that’ll be enough and then they stop, but they’ve never actually answered the question.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And so that is both of those strategies of just saying now, if it’s true that you don’t know the answer and you think it’s just a mystery, well, then you have to say that. And that’s fine. And preferably say that straight up and don’t spend a 1000 words getting to that point.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And that’s a fair answer to just say, I don’t know. I think it’s a mystery. But if you think you can shed some light upon it, so it’s not simply a mystery, okay, fine. But actually try to answer the question. Don’t just talk around it by gesturing to freewill and stuff like that.
Trent Horn:
Well, it’s kind of parallel to what you brought up earlier about apologists who try to defang the problem of evil. Essentially the question you’re broaching, why would God create someone who goes to hell is sort of a soteriological… Jargon alert people. It’s a salvation problem of evil. So we might call it in jargon is soteriological problem of evil. It’s a salvation focused problem of evil related to the question of hell. And I think you could approach it with the same kind of avenue you would for the problem of evil in general, which is we should not ignore the mysterious elements nor is it wise merely to punch to them, but then try to, as you do in your article, which I read, which is a good article, raise plausible explanations for people to see if… And I think that’s actually something else I’ve learned a lot from you and I’ve tried to incorporate in my own work is that often what I think what we as apologists should do when it comes to difficult questions is we can present people with a range of plausible answers and they can pick what they want to eat.
Trent Horn:
It’s like I gave a talk recently for an institute on biblical studies on the problem of the slaughter of the Canaanites, where you have passages in scripture which seemed to describe God ordering the Israelites to kill men, women, and children among the Canaanites. So in the talk I gave, well, here’s three plausible ways to look at it. You’re kind of free to pick which of the three. And I think you think apologists need to focus more on presenting, here are the range of answers people can choose versus, here’s the answer when it is open to debate.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. If there is a range of possible responses, then an apologist should present the range. Assuming that the person has the attention span, they’re not like, okay, someone asks, I’m sitting by someone they’re going to get off the bus in five minutes and I need to confine my answer to a limited amount of time. But assuming you’ve got the time and space to elaborate on something, yeah, I think we shouldn’t be more definite than we need to be. We can show how there are a variety of perspectives on how to answer this and here are some of the ones that have been worked out and maybe you can even think of another. But one way or another, there are multiple solutions to this. And so we can have confidence on that basis that this is solvable.
Trent Horn:
Here’s the last one, problem with apologetics, it’s not diverse. It’s just a bunch of white men and many of them tend to be conservative in their politics, which can be off-putting. So the objection is at least among… I’ve seen this more with Catholic apologetics, so you could apply it to Christian apologetics in general frankly, actually to a lot of religious apologetics including with atheism and things like that, a lot of white men, it doesn’t seem very diverse, what are your thoughts on that?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, so I think that the apologetics field would be well-served to have a greater gender and ethnic diversity of people working in the field. Now, I think there actually is more of that than a lot of people may be aware of because people tend to run in certain circles and they’re only aware of certain people, but I get contacted from people all over the world from people in Asia, from people in India, from people in Africa, from people in Latin America who are in apologetic discussions in their own area And they ask me, how would you answer this question? And I send them a reply. So there is apologetics going on globally that people may just not be aware of. I think that here in America it would be great to have greater diversity of gender and ethnicity among prominent apologists, professionals working in the field.
Jimmy Akin:
I think among Catholic apologists, it’s going to be constrained by the demographics of the American Catholic church. And historically, most American Catholics have been white. So most American Catholic apologists are probably going to be white. There’s a growing number of non-white Catholics in America. And I would expect a growing number of nonwhite Catholic apologists in America. And I think that’s great. In terms of gender, well, actually Catholic answers has had a lot of female apologists over the course of time. Mother Miriam, who back then was known as Rosalind Moss. She was an apologist with us for years before she went into religious life. Peggy Frye, Michelle Arnold, there have been others, but apologetics tends to skew masculine. And I think that’s not due to sexism or anything like that. I think it’s just partly because of the inherent average psychological characteristics of men and women.
Jimmy Akin:
Men are built for combat in a way that women are not. Men have more upper body mass. They tend to be more aggressive and more risk tolerant and willing to fight because evolutionarily that was their function. They were the primary, not the only, but the primary defense of early human communities. And so historically warfare has skewed masculine. Well, apologetics is sort of intellectual combat. And thus a male temperament is going to result in more males going into that field. It’s kind of like if you look at sports, if you look at contact sports, like American football, that skews male. There are female football players, but as a whole, American style football skews male whereas gymnastics skews female and things like basketball or baseball in the middle are somewhere in the middle.
Trent Horn:
Right. And also you can see in other professions that I don’t think people would say it’s sexist that men are underrepresented in fields like elementary education, for example. There aren’t a lot of male kindergarten teachers. So it doesn’t mean there can’t be a great male kindergarten teacher for our firm, much the same way with apologetics, there are a lot of male apologists, but there are female apologists who are very good. For example, when I do debates on abortion, the only person that I trust to fill in for me for an abortion debate when I’m not there is Stephanie Gray Connors and she’s-
Jimmy Akin:
Oh Trent, I’m crushed.
Trent Horn:
If you want to… You’re always on the deck there for sure. Well, I know you haven’t done as many debates recently. I thought you’ve thought debates might be like… I know there’s a lot of time involved.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, there can be a lot of time involved. Also I’m not that big on travel, whereas you’re going places to travel.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, sure thing. But now that we’re all on Zoom, it’s like, well, I’ll put you out there as well. But to raise the point, Stephanie is great and she’s a wonderful female apologist. So I actively would love to see more ethnicities, especially also more women to add their unique perspective. Jimmy, some women who are learning to be an apologist, I’ve given them free access to the School of Apologetics, because I want more female apologists out there, but I think there’s the demographic question. It shows up both in what someone is naturally ordered towards what they desire but that also plays into that. I’ve known women, I’ve said to them like, “Oh, you should do apologetics full time, or maybe work for Catholic Answers.” And they’d rather be at home and homeschool and raise children. And that’s great for them to choose that as well.
Trent Horn:
And I think that we shouldn’t cry sexism when we just see men and women acting according to what they may innately prefer. But I do think, and that’s why I love the School of Apologetics, what we do at Catholic Answers, we should equip a broad number of people from all walks of life and demographics to go out and defend the faith. And so I would like to see it get more diverse. And then I’ve always said, by the way, to people online, social media and the comment section of this YouTube video, if you know people apologists that I or Jimmy haven’t heard of yet, they’re out in their local community doing great work, especially if they come from an underrepresented community among professional apologists, let us know. I’d love to review what they’re doing and maybe give them some tips and help out and introduce them to people in other venues. I’m sure you feel the same way.
Jimmy Akin:
I do. At the same time, I’d like to address an aspect. Now, you said these are attitudes that you encountered. They’re not direct quotations from any particular person, but the way this attitude is phrased is apologetics is not diverse. It’s just a bunch of white men. Okay. Anytime you find yourself dismissing what another group is saying or doing, because they are just a bunch of Xs and you can fill in the X with anything you want, that’s a problematic attitude whether it’s they’re just a bunch of men or they’re just a bunch of women, or they’re just a bunch of whites, or they’re just a bunch of blacks, or they’re just a bunch of Indians or whatever it may be. Any of these sentiments are problematic because God doesn’t share them. God doesn’t care of what your skin color is or what your gender is.
Jimmy Akin:
God made men and women. God made people with light skin tones. He made people with dark skin tones. He made people with intermediate skin tones. He may have made people with chloroplasts and green skin on other planets for all I know. But God does not care about your skin color any more than he cares about your hair color or your eye color. God made them all. We are all God’s children. And if you are dismissing people as just a bunch of Xs, whatever X may be, God doesn’t share that view. He loves those children as much as he loves you. You’re his child. And we should love each other as God’s children. And so this kind of dismissing other people and what they say or do on the basis of superficial characteristics is deeply problematic and contrary to the spirit of universal love that Christ preached.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I would say that it would only have force if they’re just a bunch of white men, if apologist as a whole had some kind of a rule where they only wanted white men to do apologetics. And even among Catholic apologists with whom I disagree on a wide variety of things, I don’t know anyone with a sizable platform who believes only white men ought to do apologetics. But I mean, you and I both-
Jimmy Akin:
I don’t know anyone who says that.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I don’t. And finally on the political element, men tend to be conservative in their politics. This can be off-putting. I will say, Jimmy, you have a rep online of being… Did you ever do Dungeons and Dragons like the alignment chart?
Jimmy Akin:
Oh yeah.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So lawful good lawful evil. I thought about actually doing that among apologists. I might send it to you for fun. I’m working on one right now. I’ll send it to you for fun. Like on there you’re like in the true neutral category. Everyone online is like apologists are just a bunch of Republicans except for Jimmy Akin. He’s great. He just does his doctor who and does apologetics and he’s just awesome. So I mean, in that, I think you have done a good job of making yourself accessible and not succumbing to a trap of trying to opine on any subject under the sun, because you have an audience to make your feel broad.
Trent Horn:
I have opined a bit more on other subjects and I have to discern how wide I want to. Because I also write on economic theory since I did my book on socialism. And I make a calculated risk about what I want to opine on or not. But I think after being off social media, my commentary on a lot of things will start to diminish, but it won’t be restricted to just a few narrow topics. But I think you might be able to add some thought on apologist speaking beyond the bounds, I guess.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. It’s a temptation that you see that, I mean, it really is a human temptation to speak outside your area of expertise. And if you give a person a platform, I mean, everybody loves to opinionate or opine, I should say, on all kinds of different things. And if you give a person a platform and they’re not disciplined about it, about, okay, what’s my brand? What am I trying to do here? They’ll just opine a way, they’ll give opinions on all kinds of stuff. You see this like with Hollywood celebrities. Okay, their field of expertise is acting or stunts or whatever it may be. It’s not politics and it’s not science. But they have this human tendency they just want to speak their mind on these things and they want to look good to other people and they want to say things that are going to be attractive to their peers and signal how virtuous they are. And that’s a human tendency that everybody’s got.
Jimmy Akin:
And I’ve got that too as a result because I’m a human being, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding. And over the course of the years, I have discerned that what my real mission is, is to help bring people closer to God. And in order to do that, I want to be able to speak to as many people as possible. And that means that I’m going to restrain myself from commenting publicly on things that are off mission and that would turn people away. And politics is one of those things. Now, I’ll talk about moral principles and I’ll talk about church teaching, but I try to be as neutral as possible on political subjects in how I present myself to the public, because I want to be able to minister to people on all sides of the spectrum.
Jimmy Akin:
And I know, given how partisan things in the United States are right now, it’s not like back in the ’50s look for example, where you could have, okay, that person’s Democrat or Republican, but they’re still a good person and I respect them. Okay. That happens vastly less today. And so I don’t neatly fit into any particular political mold and I don’t want to identify as… And I don’t want to be put neatly into any political mold. If someone says, oh, he’s just a liberal, okay, then nobody conservative going to listen to me or if someone says, oh, he’s just a conservative, then nobody liberal is going to listen to me. Now, people can kind of tell by listening to me over the course of time where I have some sympathies and I’ve got more sympathies than others on certain positions, but I don’t want that to get in the way of the mission, which is helping people get closer to God.
Jimmy Akin:
If you listen to Mysterious World and actually Mysterious World is part of the broader mission too because I’m showing that Catholics can be interested in all kinds of stuff. And a lot of people listen to Mysterious World for the mysteries, but then we’ve got the faith perspective in every single episode.
Trent Horn:
That’s why we do free for all Fridays on Counsel of Trent, a similar reason.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. But if you listen to how I present political matters on Mysterious World, I try to be very fair-minded and neutral. If you listen to my episode on the great reset, I’m talking about, well, socialists aren’t happy with the Davos Conference for this and capitalists aren’t happy with the Davos Conference for this reason. And I’m not really passing judgment between those two sides. Recently, I did an episode on a… And very few people know about this, but in 1934, there was an actual fascist coup plot in the United States to install a fascist government here. And in order to talk about that, I had to define what fascism was and that’s notoriously thorny.
Jimmy Akin:
A lot of political scientists today have said this has basically just become an insult word. It doesn’t have objective meaning anymore. But in 1934, what it meant was people who liked what Benito Mussolini was doing. So I just said, okay, here was the situation, you had the great depression going on. Mussolini seemed to be doing some good stuff in Italy. Some people thought he had the right idea and they were fascists. And so anyone is a fascist in our sense for this episode if they just thought Mussolini’s policies were good.
Trent Horn:
At least he got the trains running on time.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, that’s one of the kinds of arguments. Similarly, I did another story about a coup that occurred in 1945 in Japan to capture the emperor and force him to continue the war. And I tried to, in going through the coup plotters minds, explain why they were trying to do this. I tried to understand the coup plotters minds from their perspective. Even though they’re in a completely different political world than I am. So I really try to be as fair as possible and as sympathetic as possible. I obviously have my own convictions and they’re strong ones, but I don’t want to get off mission in going too deep into those waters.
Trent Horn:
Well, Jimmy Akin, true neutral. Trent Horn, maybe he’s chaotic good on the alignment.
Jimmy Akin:
On the alignment chart, I think it would be a debate between lawful neutral or lawful good and neutral good because I don’t know skew-
Trent Horn:
Right. If you did the original Dungeons and Dragons line up there.
Jimmy Akin:
The politically true neutral. Yeah. That’s a reasonable description.
Trent Horn:
So I guess, yeah, I should make one politically. Yeah, I guess I would put it… If it was like I replace good… I’m not saying replace good and evil with conservative liberal. I’m not saying one is good, the other is evil people, but I’m saying if you just put it as a spectrum-
Jimmy Akin:
You should look at Jerry Cornell’s chart on this. He has got a four-fold kind of a quadrant chart where one of the spectrums is degree of government control and I forget the other spectrum but his might be useful for that.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I’ll have to check that out. Well, we went longer than I thought, but it was super good. So I would just recommend people. I guess our overarching theme that comes from this, what’s wrong with apologetics is just when apologists seem to lack empathy. The more empathy you have with others, you better understand their arguments, understand where they’re coming from, understand their criticisms of your own arguments, and then you can do apologetics better. So that’s my 15 second summary of a delightful one hour conversation. Mr. Jimmy Akin, where can people find out more about your work, especially your course. If you want to get really good at apologetics, check out Beginning Apologetics. Well, Jimmy, you can tell us more about all that and everything you’re doing.
Jimmy Akin:
So obviously you and I both work for Catholic Answers, the website for which is catholic.com. If you want to go directly to the School of Apologetics, it’s schoolofapologetics.com. If you want to learn more about me, you can go to jimmyakin.com and you can find links there to all of my podcasts, including Mysterious World.
Trent Horn:
All right. Thank you very much, Jimmy. And thank you all for listening. Be sure to check out schoolofapologetics.com. Of course, Jimmy has a course there. I’ve got some courses there. Lots more content being uploaded there and be sure to click subscribe. Thank you for watching this if you’re watching it on YouTube. Be sure to also go and rate the podcast on iTunes or Google Play, and don’t forget to support us at trenthornpodcast.com. So thank you all so much. I hope you have a very blessed day.
Speaker 1:
If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit trenthornpodcast.com.