Faith with reasons

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Additional support comes from WatersEdge Kingdom Capital, faith-based asset management for churches, schools and ministries backed by 80 years of experience, helping Christian institutions close the gap between beliefs and investments. Free alignment assessment available at watersedge.com/capital.

Mary Reichard (0:26)

You're listening to a special weekend edition of The World and Everything In It. I'm Mary Reichard. Today we're talking about an urgent question facing our culture. Can morality exist without God? Or are good and evil matters of personal opinion? My guest is Joel Alperson, assistant to Dennis Prager, a Jewish intellectual and conservative commentator who founded the media organization PragerU. Alperson assisted Prager on his latest book titled, If There Is No God, The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil. The book grew out of a series of lectures Prager delivered to teenagers over 30 years ago. Alperson helped to preserve and refine those lectures to demonstrate the rational foundation for Biblical morality.

Jews and Christians share a great deal. The Old Testament and adherence to particular values, known as Judeo-Christian values. Obviously, the most important thing to Christians is the divinity and saving grace of Jesus Christ. That is understood by my guest today. This interview, however, is about the origins of morality and how those common Judeo-Christian values improve societies.

In our conversation, we break down why logic alone falls short in securing the sanctity of human life, how Christians and Jews can make common cause on shared values, and how believers can articulate their convictions with confidence, reason, and clarity.

So Joel, you've known Dennis Prager for how long now?

Joel Alperson (2:06)

Forty-four years as of today.

Mary Reichard (2:09)

Forty-four years today, and we're recording this on September 24th. Okay, so I'm curious, why did you think his conversation from 30 years ago with a bunch of teenagers needed to be a book released now?

Joel Alperson (2:22)

So I contacted him on the 30th anniversary of the event. I said, Dennis, can you believe it was 30 years ago that you did this event that I organized? And he said, you have a transcript? And I said, yeah. And he says, well, send it to me. I'll post it on the website. I said, no. I said, it's too good.

You can't do that. You can't just give this away without having worked on it and developed it. So in any event, I did. I did not send it to him. I developed it myself into a book. I showed him several pages of it. And I said, we have to work on this and create a book out of this. And he was ambivalent, which meant it wasn't going to happen. So it's not as if he doesn't have other things he needs to do. So it wasn't as if he doesn't care about disseminating his ideas.

But without telling him, I further refined the book and shopped it out for publication. Without telling him and came back to him with the best book contract he'd ever gotten. And at that point, he couldn't say no. So unbeknownst to either of us, during that time, he became injured terribly. And I worked with him next to his hospital bed, standing next to his hospital bed to finish this book. And I'm proud to say that it made the New York Times Best Seller List twice.

Mary Reichard (3:36)

How twice? How does that work?

Joel Alperson (3:38)

Well, it's based on sales. So if the book sells well enough in another week, it can return to the best seller list again.

Mary Reichard (3:45)

Oh, I see. Okay. So that's the backstory of how the book came to be. And you've worked on a lot of other things with Dennis, but today we're going to focus on this particular book, If There Is No God. So in this book, Dennis argues that without God, judgments about what is good and what is evil really are just each individual's opinion.

So what is the argument to say a thoughtful atheist who thinks morality can have a firm foundation without any religion?

Joel Alperson (4:19)

What's your basis? I mean, is it Bob? Bob says, Bob says murder is bad, so all of us should not murder. Or is it common sense? I'll give you an argument. And I actually offered this argument that's used in the book. What's the argument against saying that people in their last year of life should be allowed to die?

Imagine the money that could be saved in society if, instead of putting people in palliative care, in various facilities that are massively expensive to maintain, we give them drugs that allow them to painlessly expire, and the countless billions of dollars every year that we save could go to fight cancer and HIV and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and all these other diseases and could benefit humanity in some really profound ways. What's the argument against that? That's common sense. That's logic. That's reason.