109. Islam, Secularism, and Modern Apologetics with Inspiring Philosophy

Happy New Years, Chump Nation!

We haven't forgotten about the Crusades, trust us. 

But we wanted to bring in the new year with a good friend of ours, the mind behind Inspiring Philosophy, Mike Jones. 

We walk through his insights on the current state of Islam, whether secularism is working out for the Western world, and how apologetics can still work in 2026.

It's a good time! We promise you'll enjoy it. Thank you again to Mike and the Inspiring Philosophy team for all the sweet work that you do. 

Thank you so much for listening, we love you guys! 

Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/chumphistory

Transcript

Simple Simon (00:00.868)
Hey everybody, welcome to Church History for Chumps. My name is John Simon and I am here with the Doctor of Thuganomics, Mr. Thomas Duhuel. I'm here with from parts unknown, Taylor Treadway and the man, the myth and the legend behind inspiring philosophy, Michael Jones. Michael, thank you so much. Yeah, this is, I almost wanted to blitz through the other people, the other guys just to be like, and Michael Jones is here guys.

GOBBA GOOL (00:10.24)
I can't wait.

GOBBA GOOL (00:20.706)
Give it up for Michael Jones, everybody.

Tom Bombadil (00:20.845)
Welcome, Michael.

Simple Simon (00:29.466)
For inspiring, yeah, check this out. Yeah, Thomas, whatever, but check this out. Yeah. Of course, man. Yeah, yeah. So Thomas, Taylor, I think you guys should probably say something to acknowledge.

Michael Jones (00:34.064)
Thanks for having me. Yeah, happy to be here.

GOBBA GOOL (00:42.638)
I'm happy to be here.

Tom Bombadil (00:43.757)
No, we're glad to have you. I've always called you Mike. Do you prefer Michael or Mike? I've never bothered to ask you. Okay, all right.

Michael Jones (00:52.556)
care don't never really care no no

GOBBA GOOL (00:53.166)
Do you prefer Big Mike?

Simple Simon (00:56.154)
Did you ever go through that journey where like, you like, you know, I went through a time when people, kids called me Johnny for a while and then I kind of aged into John. Maybe I'll go back to Jonathan when I'm in my 50s. Like were you ever anything but Mike or Michael? Okay, yeah, keeping it straight. I get that. What?

Michael Jones (01:13.345)
I really know.

GOBBA GOOL (01:15.886)
Okay, hold on. Is your real name Jonathan Simon? Oh, dude. I I was about to say,

Michael Jones (01:17.156)
Yeah.

Simple Simon (01:20.15)
No, no, it's not.

Here's the thing dude, I'm always open for a good rebranding and maybe there's a time that Jonathan Simon needs to emerge for the first time ever. I don't know.

GOBBA GOOL (01:33.122)
No, you can't just add to your name.

Simple Simon (01:35.918)
Maybe that'll be my grand reentry back into ministry. Ladies and gentlemen, Pastor Jonathan Simon for the first time.

GOBBA GOOL (01:38.925)
Yeah.

GOBBA GOOL (01:42.872)
Give it up for Jonathan Simon. Okay, I have to ask Michael a question. you have, like there's a billion YouTube videos on the Council of Nicaea and you have like the OG one. it's like a decade old at this point, isn't it? It's made you hundreds of millions of dollars.

Michael Jones (01:45.668)
you

Simple Simon (01:45.776)
Yeah, all right.

Please.

Michael Jones (01:56.644)
Mmm.

Michael Jones (02:06.261)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Simple Simon (02:11.502)
my gosh, yeah.

Michael Jones (02:11.94)
Yeah, sure, I wish.

GOBBA GOOL (02:13.678)
So like what led that to, what led you to start asking those questions that apparently other people weren't asking?

Michael Jones (02:25.24)
I mean, you just hear so many stupid things online. You eventually have to start combating it. I mean, a lot of that stuff is just sort of like known to me early on, because I just love to study history. Like even as a kid in high school, I just would read history books. So when I started hearing crap about the Council of Nicaea and they're like putting the Bible together there, I'm like, wait a minute, I remember that. Let me go check.

GOBBA GOOL (02:45.998)
I don't know.

Michael Jones (02:47.172)
And it's like, yeah, they didn't. Like, what are you talking about? you just hear all these myths about the past and if you're a history buff, you go, wait a minute, what? So I mean, like, you know, lot of that stuff was just like, I'm hearing the crazy conspiracies for the first time and going, yeah, someone needs to point out this is just stupid because people are actually falling for this.

GOBBA GOOL (03:09.3)
OK, OK. So you had already.

Tom Bombadil (03:10.895)
Is that around the time that you started your channel, Mike?

Michael Jones (03:15.232)
yeah, about a year before that, I give or take. I can't remember exact date, but it was around that time, yeah. I started at the end of 2011.

Tom Bombadil (03:19.993)
Okay.

So for our listeners who aren't aware, Mike is the host and creator of Inspiring Philosophy, which is a really, really large YouTube, I would call it a ministry. I don't know if that's how you think of it, but it's a...

Michael Jones (03:35.424)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, we definitely are. We're registered nonprofit now, so yes.

Tom Bombadil (03:40.311)
Okay, cool, cool. He's got really, really good apologetics and philosophical content, as you might surmise from the name. And it's influenced a lot of the public conversation. can find Mike doing, recently you've been doing a lot of live debating, I've noticed.

Simple Simon (03:40.686)
wow, okay, that's amazing.

Michael Jones (04:00.06)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, we've been doing some live call-in shows with Muslims getting them to come in and just try to defend Islam That's been it's been going very well But yeah, yeah, it's been that's basically been Very successful. We've had a lot of Muslims come in and we've using something called the Islamic dilemma on them showing that Islam is false and then you know, it's not all of them I mean, but you know one out of every ten I think maybe one out of every 20 or starting to walk away from Islam

Simple Simon (04:28.89)
Wow, that's amazing. Yeah.

Michael Jones (04:29.028)
with that problem. So yeah, it's been really good.

Tom Bombadil (04:33.391)
Just, can you give us that in like a nutshell? What's the Islamic dilemma?

Simple Simon (04:37.528)
Yeah, 20 words or less, 50 words or less.

Michael Jones (04:40.76)
Say that again.

Tom Bombadil (04:42.335)
kind of walk us through in a nutshell the Islamic Dilemma because I know that some people are going to want to know more about that.

Michael Jones (04:45.5)
yeah.

Yeah, it's really easy to learn. If you go through the Quran, you assume it says the Bible and the Christian scriptures have been corrupted. It doesn't actually. It says the exact opposite. It says it in dozens of places that the Quran is there to confirm our scriptures. And that's why we should believe in the Quran. Christians are supposed to judge by the Gospel. They're supposed to observe the Torah, the Gospel, and whatever has been revealed to them from their Lord. That's Surah 568.

So then you just ask a question, well wait a minute, the Quran and the Bible contradict. Okay, so if the Bible is the authoritative words of Allah, as the Quran says, and we're supposed to judge by it, then we can use the Bible to judge the Quran is false. But the other horn of the dilemma is if the Bible's been corrupted, then Islam is also false because the Quran is confirming corrupted scripture. So either way, Islam is false.

Simple Simon (05:40.976)
Hmm.

GOBBA GOOL (05:41.204)
It's a classic lose-lose situation.

Michael Jones (05:43.937)
Mm-hmm

Simple Simon (05:47.824)
Do you see the conversation about Islam becoming more more relevant, especially with all the hot button stuff we're seeing on the news these days? Do you feel like this is a conversation that Christians should be engaging more often?

Michael Jones (06:04.334)
yeah, it's the world's second largest religion. There's billions of people that identify as Muslim. Most missionaries don't go to the Islamic world because they'll die. So there's this giant mission field out there that has been untapped because of things like apostasy laws and blasphemy laws in Islam. But now we have the internet and we can start blasting anti-Islamic stuff into the Middle East, Christian content into the Middle East. And we're seeing...

Simple Simon (06:06.608)
Yeah, that's a good point.

Simple Simon (06:14.256)
Hmm.

Michael Jones (06:31.456)
a lot of fruit from that fruit that probably probably we haven't seen in past generations I you know I was doing a live on tik-tok a couple years ago and some guy called it and he's like yeah I live in Albania there's no churches nearby me but your videos help lead me to Christianity and now I don't know what to do because there's no churches where do I get baptized I mean so yeah it's a great mission field you can just pump dozens I mean hundreds of videos into the Islamic world and I think we're really starting to see the fruits of that now it's pretty great

Simple Simon (06:48.745)
my gosh.

Simple Simon (07:01.498)
That's amazing. That is really amazing. I think one of the things I've loved about our early church series was realizing that a lot of geographic parts of the world that we tend to assume are like very Muslim, like they've kind of always had this like Islamic flavor to them. Like when you go back to the history of the early church, you're like, no, this was like a stronghold of Christianity for a long time. Like Constantinople was huge.

Egypt was still one of some of the oldest churches in the world, even though they're now surrounded by mosques. So yeah, that's super fascinating. That's really, really cool.

Michael Jones (07:37.187)
Mm-hmm.

yeah, yeah, it's pretty great to finally be getting more stuff into that world. I hope it continues.

Tom Bombadil (07:48.239)
So I'd like to ask you more about... go ahead.

GOBBA GOOL (07:48.482)
Well, real quick, Tommy, real quick. We should plug everything before we keep diving in, right? So like, Mike, where can everybody find you?

Simple Simon (08:00.029)
yeah, that's fair.

Michael Jones (08:01.154)
Yeah, just inspiring philosophies to handle on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, all the same places. So... Yeah, that's true.

GOBBA GOOL (08:06.978)
He's got a website. can book Michael. He can fly out and just give a lecture to your kids for you if the price is right.

Tom Bombadil (08:17.059)
Hahaha.

Simple Simon (08:18.307)
Do you have any exciting events going on right now that like did you just write a book or I don't know are you doing a world's tour pretty soon? People need to buy tickets for?

GOBBA GOOL (08:25.71)
The World Tour.

Michael Jones (08:26.392)
Yeah No, no, not now I'm probably we're gonna try to do some more mission work outside of the US So we're there's talk of us going to Croatia to do some anti-islam stuff We'll definitely be in London in June to do some anti-islam stuff there And so yeah, you know because you know Islam is a bigger problem in Europe and we want to combat it more So we're gonna be doing that stuff over there and you know, yeah, it's very easy to tackle Islam

Simple Simon (08:38.789)
Yeah.

Simple Simon (08:42.736)
Mm-hmm.

GOBBA GOOL (08:42.776)
Wow.

Michael Jones (08:54.486)
It's a very easy religion to debunk once you learn a little bit about it. then so we're just gonna keep pushing that.

Simple Simon (09:00.144)
Sure, sure.

GOBBA GOOL (09:00.844)
What is the, do you have to take safety precautions now? Have you forgotten death threats?

Michael Jones (09:07.13)
yeah. for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, there's Yeah, when we're talking about going to Dearborn, not daily though now, some of the other anti-Islam guys get more than I do for sure. But I mean, like, you know, when we're talking about going to Dearborn, like in April, and we've already talked to people to do security for us there just as a precaution.

Simple Simon (09:07.728)
GOBBA GOOL (09:10.626)
Like a daily occurrence.

GOBBA GOOL (09:17.34)
good.

Simple Simon (09:28.016)
Wow.

GOBBA GOOL (09:29.452)
What's the crossover between Islam and Black Hebrew Israelites?

Michael Jones (09:37.32)
They both hate each other the Muslims and those guys. Yeah, for sure. Yeah black Hebrew Israelites are not Pro Islam in any way possible. They they think they are the real Israelites or not I mean everyone anyone with two brain cells can see that and so, you know, they don't really

GOBBA GOOL (09:39.947)
do they really? Okay.

Michael Jones (09:59.688)
like the Muslims. So the funny thing is, like I was talking to God Logic and he said, yeah, lot of the black Hebrew Israelite use my anti-Islam arguments on Muslims. I've seen them do it. And so they'll stealing from the Christian apologists. It's kind of funny.

Simple Simon (10:10.038)
hilarious. man, the enemy of my enemy is sometimes still my enemy.

GOBBA GOOL (10:11.564)
Ha ha.

Michael Jones (10:16.708)
Yeah.

GOBBA GOOL (10:16.984)
That's right. That's right. Well, sorry, Tommy. I cut you off, man. Tommy was going to ask that question.

Simple Simon (10:19.927)
man.

Tom Bombadil (10:22.955)
you're good. I wanted to hear more about kind of the origin of your channel and how it's evolved over the years, but I also wanted to give you the opportunity. I know that you usually play it a little close to the chest with just some of your personal details about your life. I don't know how much you've shared publicly, but just for our listeners who are getting to know you, tell us more about yourself.

Give us a little bio on Mike Jones and then maybe kind of lead into how you got going with your channel.

Michael Jones (10:58.114)
Yeah, I tend to keep my personal life out of this. But I mean, when I started on YouTube back in 2011, and I was just rather annoyed at how there was all this anti-Christian content being put out there, and there wasn't a lot of pro-Christian content. And the stuff that was out there was conspiracy theory nuts, or Young Earth Creationism, and I was like, there's gotta be something better.

Tom Bombadil (11:01.145)
No, that's fine.

Michael Jones (11:22.446)
than just watching a bunch of Christians debate the age of the earth all day. So I started putting out some stuff to try to like add to more intellectual aspects of Christianity.

GOBBA GOOL (11:31.968)
So that would have been at like the height of kind of secularism, right? Because you shifted as you shared already, your focus is as Islam right now. Do you think we've won, so to speak, like all the arguments are out there for people when it comes to secularism?

Michael Jones (11:52.12)
I mean, it depends on what you mean. Have we won in terms of collapsing secularism? Well, no, we're still fighting that. But we definitely have a strong intellectual front against them now and that it is making a lot of great advances. It's just, even people that are atheists are now coming out going, yeah, we need a more Christian society.

GOBBA GOOL (11:59.35)
No, no.

Michael Jones (12:14.782)
know, people like Douglas Murray or Sargon Avakad, the YouTuber, have said, yeah, maybe we do need more Christianity in society. Maybe we were wrong about all this. So you see people saying that kind of stuff. That is basically showing the fruits of secularism have never played out as people thought they were going to.

with Richard Dawkins claiming we'll be in an age of science and reason when we get rid of religion. And that just didn't happen. So yeah, think we are definitely making a lot of advances on there. I think secularism itself will destroy it. It destroys itself. Because you don't produce the birth rates. Secularists, atheists have to rely on high conversion rates to keep their movement going. And they're already a very small minority. And a lot of their apologists are getting burnt out, is from what I can tell. That's why you see them

GOBBA GOOL (12:47.886)
Yeah.

Michael Jones (13:02.468)
always start to gravitate into politics. You get these new big atheist bloggers or YouTubers, they go for a couple years and then they make some leftist political stuff and then they just start to do that full time because it gets more interaction and engagement. So it's just a reoccurring cycle. But lately the new faces of atheism have not got the traction that they were getting like when the new faces showed up 10, 15 years ago.

Simple Simon (13:05.103)
Hmm, interesting.

GOBBA GOOL (13:29.656)
So I mean, is Islam just kind of like your focus right now? Like paint a picture of where the field is, I guess. Like where the discussion is. Because you started in 2011. I remember that time period. Like we said, that was like height of secularism. And that's who you started making arguments against. where? Explain the shift and kind of how the plane has landed where it is today.

Michael Jones (13:35.767)
No, no.

Michael Jones (13:51.406)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (13:59.744)
yeah, the main focus of the channel is always defending Christianity and the Bible. That's always been the focus. That's gonna continue to be our main focus. Like we're working on a series right now defending the resurrection and all the evidence for it. We just did a big long series on defending the Gospels. The problem is is that...

when we attack Islam, that gets far more interaction. So people just see more of that stuff. It's kind of an interesting way that kind of works. So, I mean, our main focus is always gonna be making high quality videos defending Christianity, and we're still doing that. But we do live streams and shorts attacking Islam, and they're quick, you can hit out. I mean, doesn't, again, as I said, it doesn't take a lot to debunk Islam. It takes very little research.

Tom Bombadil (14:25.487)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (14:45.028)
I wish I was making that up. It's really, really easy to debunk. So you could do that stuff pretty quickly. So we can do a lot more of it. But again, sometimes the more detailed, like hard hitting videos take longer to put together and then they just get less engagement. But you know, we're gonna keep doing it anyway, because that's what we feel passionate about the most.

GOBBA GOOL (14:47.488)
Mmm.

Simple Simon (15:07.0)
Is there like, I mean, this is probably a really big question. I'm going to try to like frame in a way that makes it answerable. like, when you think of like this idea of debunking Islam, like is that something that your average Muslim is still going to kind of wrestle with and be like, well I, you know, you can disprove like, like logically you can put these pieces together, but if the average Muslim is not

basing their religious faith on their logic. Like, I don't know, like what kinds of barriers do you think there are in terms of like really penetrating that like one out of 20, one out of 10 person that you mentioned is actually gonna consider walking away from the faith?

Michael Jones (15:53.572)
When you deal with Muslims, they're very much everything is beneath the Quran. Logic, science, reason, you name it. It all is supposed to come after what the Quran says. So there's a great clip of some Muslim man saying, like, if we find something that contradicts Islam, we turn our brains off. He used the phrase, we turn our brains off. Like, that's just...

Tom Bombadil (16:15.449)
It's like independent fundamental Baptist, kind of same line.

Michael Jones (16:18.86)
Yeah, well we make fun of them. They're a minority in Christianity and they're not as bad as Muslims are. And the majority are gonna be in that mentality, like the traditional Sunni in like the Salafi movement. That's gonna be the majority. So.

GOBBA GOOL (16:19.063)
Yeah.

Michael Jones (16:34.626)
It's kind of scary to think about. So what you have to do is you have to attack the Quran. You can start showing problems in the Quran, it starts to get them out of it. And that's why I mentioned the Islamic dilemma earlier. It's very successful in getting them out. Because if they're seeing the Quran is confirming the Bible, which contradicts the Quran, it starts to mess with their brain. And they start to go, well, why did Allah not make this more clear? When he said, you know, the funny thing is like,

The Quran claims it's also clear in multiple places. It's kind of funny that it also does that on top of claiming it's confirming our scriptures. So you start to mess with them, you break that down and boom, next thing you know they're starting to question the whole foundation of Islam. You gotta break down that barrier before you get through to anything else. You can't even preach the gospel to them until you break down that barrier.

GOBBA GOOL (17:20.5)
So the Quran itself was written by Muhammad, right, in the sixth, seventh century.

Michael Jones (17:26.852)
there's different theories. So he didn't write anything. He didn't write anything. He was illiterate. He was illiterate. He claimed he got these revelations and he spoke them out. His followers memorized them and then after he died, they wrote them all down. And there's different theories. Like Stephen Shoemaker thinks that it probably took some pre-Islamic traditions. There's probably some truth in that. And then they combined them with what Muhammad was preaching. Some things may have been written down after. were not, didn't actually go back to the historical Muhammad.

Simple Simon (17:29.924)
He wasn't literate, right?

Michael Jones (17:56.598)
It's a whole mess really when you get into the critical scholarship surrounding the Quran.

GOBBA GOOL (17:59.042)
Well, so, because my next question was the hadiths though, what do they do with that? Because I know that they, those have a lot of, there's a bunch of them, right? And Muslims don't even agree on which hadiths to, are canon essentially. Correct me if I'm not phrasing that correctly.

Michael Jones (18:21.316)
Yeah, well the majority are going to be Sunni Muslims. You're talking about 85 % of Muslims. And they're going to accept the majority of what we know as the hadith. So there's like, think it's seven collections. And I mean, we're talking giant volumes. The Quran is not Muhammad's speech. Muslims believe the Quran is Allah's speech through Muhammad.

GOBBA GOOL (18:24.395)
Okay.

Tom Bombadil (18:47.577)
Hmm. Hmm.

Michael Jones (18:48.46)
The hadith are the sayings of the Prophet. So that's the difference. And the hadith are all collected in what is called the Sunnah. And these are different collections. have Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan al-Bada'ud, Sunan ibn Majah, all these different collections. San'an al-Sai. And then there's like a bunch of them which they'll say are Sahih. So I said there's Sahih al-Bukhari. So everything in al-Bukhari is Sahih.

There's Sahih Muslims, so everything in Muslim, the Muslim Hadith collection, is also Sahih. So Sunni Muslims have to affirm everything that's Sahih. Then there's another grade below that called Hassan, which is good. So some Hadith are just Hassan. They're good, but we can't completely and totally verify them. And then below that they'll say they're weak. And so yeah, you have different like that, but I mean the majority of them, they're gonna be very problematic.

like the fact that Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine, that's in so many Sahih hadith that they can't ignore that. They can't get away from

Simple Simon (19:52.944)
You mentioned this a little bit earlier. I'm curious what your response was, of course, without sharing any sensitive information. yeah, if you get a message from someone who's like, yeah, dude, I'm like shoulder deep in this very Islamic environment, but I am now interested in Christianity, but there's no churches nearby. It's not really safe for me to express that interest.

GOBBA GOOL (19:53.325)
Mmm.

Simple Simon (20:22.34)
Guidance do you, guys, offer.

Michael Jones (20:25.732)
I mean the first thing we say is you got to get out of that community. If you're out of that, they will kill you. They have apostasy laws. It's very clear in Sahih al-Baqari, 6922, 6930, that if you leave Islam, you should be killed. So we say first you got to out that community. We've heard from ex-Muslims that were converted in the Middle East and then the church like...

converts them or like helps get them out of the country somewhere safe because they'll allow the Christian communities to exist in that country, but they can't convert anyone and if they do Then they're in trouble So they'll get him an underground church. Perhaps they'll get them out of the country Something like that and then somewhere safe is what we generally need to happen. So, you know, that's It's a really rough situation. That's probably why there's more ex-muslims than we know about

Tom Bombadil (21:02.105)
Hmm.

Simple Simon (21:04.356)
Yeah.

Simple Simon (21:14.832)
Sure, yeah.

Michael Jones (21:23.804)
I wouldn't say they're Christian, a lot of them are probably just, you not religious at all. But they claim to be Muslim so they don't die. I mean, that's really what's going on.

Simple Simon (21:32.644)
Yeah, yeah.

Tom Bombadil (21:32.686)
Hmm.

GOBBA GOOL (21:33.71)
So the Islam of the West, I'm guessing, is not your standard, fair Islam, know, where everyone, you know, is Habibi and they, you know, they eat bacon off to the side when no one's looking. And that's not typical. Like, that's what we see on our day-to-day interactions with Islam, but that's not the vast majority of the world.

Michael Jones (21:41.132)
No.

Michael Jones (22:02.468)
Yeah, mean so it's different like European Muslims can be a little more radical American Muslims tend to be the most liberal from what I have seen So which is much nicer a Lot of them come over here and they want the American dream. So to get the American dream they start to secularize and But I mean, there's a lot of radicals trying to change that now. We're trying to combat that

GOBBA GOOL (22:29.077)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (22:29.764)
So I mean, but then you know, you got a mix. mean people don't realize how fractured the Islamic world is It's not the way they portray to the outside world You got Sunnis fighting with Shias, but then in the Sunni community, which is the largest you have different sects each other I mean like you have like the more like Yeah, you have like the more like people that are would say like you just keep it religious So you're gonna find like the people ruling the UAE and they're gonna hate people like the Muslim Brotherhood

Simple Simon (22:38.736)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (22:58.798)
who want to make everything political. And then you have like the four major schools in Sunni Islam, you have the Salafi movement, you have the anti-Salafis that are still Sunni but don't like the Salafis. I mean, there's all sorts of fracturing and splintering in Islam. Meanwhile, I think the Christian world is actually becoming more united over the past 100 years. So I think the more Islam exists, the more it's splint and fracture. And the funny thing is like even in something like the Salafi movement, you have different Salafis who don't like each other. It's wild, man.

GOBBA GOOL (23:28.269)
Mmm.

Simple Simon (23:29.284)
Mike, where do the East Asian Muslims fit into the cultural movement? Because I think I've heard that the largest population of Muslims are actually outside of the Middle East. They're in places like Malaysia. So where do they fit in? Indonesia, that's it. Yeah, where do they fit into the global psyche of the religion?

Michael Jones (23:44.738)
Indonesia. Yeah.

Michael Jones (23:53.174)
I mean, there's just another wing of it all. know, like Indonesia is still gonna have a lot of the same Sharia, Sharia law aspects that we're gonna despise and hate. I don't know, it's, Indonesia's so big and vast and diverse, you can't really just categorize that entire area. It'd be nice, but no, it's a lot of diversity there in terms of belief as well.

Simple Simon (23:56.016)
Mm-hmm.

Simple Simon (24:02.384)
Mm-hmm.

GOBBA GOOL (24:18.903)
Dude, I had a youth kid who, he was his uncle. They were Malaysian immigrants and his uncle was killed outside of church by Islamic extremists. Which I didn't even, until that moment I didn't even know. You don't think of like Far East and think of Islam. Do you know how it spread over there, Mike?

Michael Jones (24:32.205)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Michael Jones (24:41.849)
Well...

with a sword. mean, let's be honest. I mean, Islam spread by the sword. That's how it started. It came out of Arabia in terms of conquest and early Muslims believed it was their duty and right to conquer the whole world under the banner of Islam. Everything must be subjugated to Islam. The last surah that was revealed is surah 9. The Quran is not in chronological order, which makes it rather annoying.

GOBBA GOOL (24:46.376)
man.

Mmm.

Michael Jones (25:14.104)
The last surah revealed was surah 9. And in that it says, Muhammad is commanded to fight those who do not believe in Allah on the last day nor comply with his will or comply with what Allah and his messenger have forbidden. Okay, that's us, because we're not gonna comply with Allah and his messenger. And it says that we have to be fought until we are, until we are, know, until we fully submit.

and pay the jizya, this is a tax that represents our submissive status. And so that's right there in Surah 929. So that's what Muslims shoot out of Arabia to do. They try to conquer, they go as far as they can, and they continue to do that. And of course over time they realize they couldn't keep spreading the way they thought they could, so they come up with different tactics. So you send Muslims into like an area like Britain.

GOBBA GOOL (25:51.309)
you

Michael Jones (26:08.004)
and you let them set up little satellite communities and then they start growing through birth rates and over a couple generations they start to become a clear strong minority and then they start demanding more stuff. We wanna blast the Muslim prayer every morning. We wanna force hijabs in this area. We wanna have our own ways and our own courts set up in this area, like Sharia law courts. And then they start, and then when they get enough power then a conquest begins. This is in it.

Tom Bombadil (26:36.163)
Mm.

Michael Jones (26:36.632)
the Muslim scholar Ibn Kathir, who, you know, one of the most revered scholars in the Islamic world is saying this is basically the strategy. When you're weak, you make treaties, you deal, but when you're the majority and you're strong, you fight and you conquer.

GOBBA GOOL (26:51.937)
Wow.

Simple Simon (26:53.573)
Yeah.

Tom Bombadil (26:54.487)
I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on a little bit more broader scene, but very similar. So John and I live in Arizona, and so we engage with Mormons really frequently. we see, I feel like there's a lot of similarities between Mormonism and Islam with, you know, the obvious differences, but their origin story seems really similar.

what you were saying about needing to kind of attack the source document seems similar. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the similarities in those two groups, but also the similarities in the apologetic approach, if there is a similarity. Because at this stage, I'm engaging with way more Mormons than I am Muslims.

Michael Jones (27:43.374)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (27:49.696)
yeah, for sure. There are similarities. There's a book called The American Mohammed, which is about Joseph Smith. I mean, they have similar origin stories. They claim that angels spoke to them and told them that they need to fix the world religions because they've become corrupt. And so they're gonna go around and do that. I think Joseph Smith actually claims the scriptures were corrupted, even though Mohammed didn't, so there's that. But I mean, very similar things. You have some alleged prophet.

Simple Simon (28:15.536)
Thank

Michael Jones (28:16.706)
claiming he's got to fix the world religions because an angel told him and now he has to Have multiple wives. He has to have a child bride You know, he it's it's very very similar in terms of it. I mean one of the best ways to do that, I mean The way the movements began is similar, but the way they then progressed changes. Mormons were persecuted

I often wonder if like the Mormons had got more power would they have been more in like the conquest mode. I wonder about that sometimes. I mean there's no way to prove it but given the similarities about you know the similarities with how it starts in terms of with Islam you kind of have to wonder sometimes if they would have so different entirely in terms of that. I mean the way I would attack Islam is different than how I would attack Mormonism and that's because Mormons don't have the same mentality that

Muslims do, or like the Book of Mormon is the end all be all. They've definitely been watered down over the century and a half they've been around, well probably two centuries now, because of how much they've been attacked. I mean like the whole debacle over the Book of Abraham and the Pearl of Great Price has really been hard on them. So the best thing to do with them is just go to the Bible and show that the Bible doesn't teach Mormonism, it teaches Christianity.

I did this in Tucson recently. There were Mormons at a big festival back in October. I just went up and started talking to them. And I'm like, you you guys believe that Elohim or El is the Father and you believe Yahweh is the Son. But here's a verse in Numbers where it clearly says El is Yahweh. And here's a verse in Genesis 19 where it says there's two Yahwehs. So are there two sons? So you do that kind of stuff. You start to show them the problems.

GOBBA GOOL (30:08.97)
Yeah.

and

Michael Jones (30:12.804)
I found success in that area with Mormons, but I tend to deal more with Muslims online. They tend to be more loud, to put it nicely.

Tom Bombadil (30:24.025)
Yeah.

Simple Simon (30:24.816)
I think one of the interesting things about both Islam and Mormonism is just how they really do, it's a religion. I mean, and we would say this too for Christianity, that it's all encompassing. It takes over your life, it takes over your community. And that's a benefit, that's piece of everlasting life. But one of the things that I've wrestled with when talking to Muslims or with Mormons is like,

It's such a high task for them to even consider challenging the presuppositions that they were, that they were, that they've just built their entire life around. Like this would be losing family, losing community, but also just kind of losing a framework that they've been taught to operate out of their entire lives. Like that is, the roots run so deep for them.

Michael Jones (31:17.06)
Absolutely, and this is why, you know, Western society spreading its culture around the world has actually been very impactful in damaging Islam. Because when there's Western culture available, ex-Muslims have a place to go to. They can find new communities, especially in churches. It's been very helpful.

That has been very helpful in tearing that kind of stuff down. You have to remember also, the reason most people joined Islam was because you get to join conquests, plundering, amassing wealth and slaves. That's generally how Islam spread.

for its first 1300 years or so. There were many times when Muslims would take over regions, they didn't let Christians or Jews or Zoroastrians convert because they wanted to keep them subjugated and beneath. If they had too many Muslims, who were they going to tax? This happened, for example, in the Umid Caliphate a couple times. So you have those issues happening throughout the Islamic world where it's all about conquest, conquest, conquest. Right now, think about where the Muslim world is.

GOBBA GOOL (31:58.964)
Amen.

Michael Jones (32:25.294)
They don't have a caliphate. They're divided. They're fracturing. They don't have wealth. What are the reasons, the pragmatic reasons to be a Muslim? If you don't really believe in all this stuff, and there's so many intellectual problems, what's the reason to stay in Islam? I mean, what are the benefits? You see the Western world gets to listen to music, drink alcohol, enjoy pork, enjoy moderate clothing without having to

dressed like a tent all day. It looks a lot more appealing, I'd say. mean, who wants to dress like a seventh century Arabian, even if you're a man? It's kind of weird. mean, Muslims are taught you need to emulate the prophet in every way. The way he dressed, the way he looked, the way he walked. You have Muslims doing tutorials and videos showing you how to walk like the prophet. Like you should get your cadence down and stuff like that. And eventually you just kind of go, I don't want to live like that. This is ridiculous. And so...

GOBBA GOOL (33:18.935)
Hmm.

Michael Jones (33:24.58)
The more Western civilization is on top, the more Muslims will leave Islam because again, you combine the intellectual problems with the truth of Islam with the practical problems. There's no reason to stay a Muslim. If the Muslim world ever got power again and they started conquesting, you'd see more people come into Islam because that's their main motivating factor. They got people to come into Islam in the past was bringing them in to help conquer and subjugate.

GOBBA GOOL (33:53.474)
What's interesting is, you know, you say what's the reason. I think the main reason they have is only for the community. I talked with, for a while, I had a friend at the seminary. He got a different position and moved across the country, but he was from Egypt and he was Protestant from Egypt. And he told me, I mean, it's very much like in that part of the world, like you are born.

Michael Jones (34:02.273)
At this point, yeah.

GOBBA GOOL (34:22.345)
into something. You were born a Christian, so you are a Christian. You were born into something and like it stays that way. You don't marry outside your community. A lot of times you rarely do business outside. If you own a business you don't hire outside your community and so it's a very like your community is your community and there's nothing you can do to change that and so I it's like a trap for the Muslims.

Michael Jones (34:45.281)
Exactly.

Michael Jones (34:50.83)
it is, yeah. That's why a lot of them stay, is they need the community and family because if they leave they'll not only be excommunicated, they'll be, their lives will be threatened. We've seen this so many times. So it's just easier to stay, go through the motions. And a lot of, that's what happens to a lot of them when they come to the West. Sort of just stay and go through the motions. But a couple generations later, I mean, it's not gonna be the same. Because like, let's say you're a nominal Muslim. You're growing up in Britain. You wanna go to college.

GOBBA GOOL (34:52.013)
Okay.

GOBBA GOOL (34:59.98)
Right.

Michael Jones (35:20.45)
You also want to please your family so you're not going to drink alcohol in front of them. You're not going to eat pork. You're going to keep claiming you're a Muslim. But you're not going to raise your kids to be super strict adherents of the faith. And then their kids are not going to as well. I mean, the same thing can happen in Christianity. It has. And that's why we're trying to combat it and deal with that. But that is an issue. We could say in Christianity what we have is very, very different than what Islam has. A completely different system. The Muslim world...

Tom Bombadil (35:32.815)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (35:50.148)
is built on being a thriving, conquering community. The Quran says the Muslims are the best people that Allah has raised up. Jews and Christians are the worst of creatures. If Muslims are not superior, there's something wrong. Christianity is the opposite. We're told by Jesus we're gonna be persecuted and hated. If we're not being persecuted and hated, something in the general Christian mindset feels off and wrong actually.

Tom Bombadil (36:15.599)
Hmm.

Michael Jones (36:15.692)
We thrive in persecutions and sufferings. Historically, that's what has happened. So when Christianity starts to decline, these built-in mechanisms of the religion take over and we start to produce more apologists and evangelists and people defending the faith. And then we get ourselves back up in a majority or back up in authority. And then we feel off and then corruption happens and then the cycle repeats. So this kind of stuff happens. Islam is the exact opposite. It's not meant to be a religion.

GOBBA GOOL (36:20.383)
Mm-hmm.

GOBBA GOOL (36:39.701)
Yep

Michael Jones (36:44.856)
that is ever supposed to be not superior, on top, dominating, conquering, subjugating. The past 100 years have been very, very hard for the Muslim collective psyche because their caliphate is gone, they're not conquering. They're told in their earlier sources, like the Quran and the Hadith, this is what they're supposed to be doing. And they're not. So it's starting to get to them. It's starting to bother them. And that's why we're seeing resurgence of people in the Muslim world say,

We need to get super religious, super traditional, and then Allah will start blessing us again. It ain't happening, so I don't know what they're gonna do.

Simple Simon (37:18.057)
That is really interesting. I don't think I've ever heard that observation before that the reason you have a lot of Muslims either watering down their approach to faith, leaving it all together or becoming mega, mega radical is because of they're just, they're having kind of an identity crisis, like as a collective, which is really, really fascinating.

Michael Jones (37:37.528)
They are.

Michael Jones (37:42.104)
Mm-hmm.

Simple Simon (37:43.332)
I have a question. I love all of this talk on Islam. I want to ask a question about just like broader apologetics too. So we mentioned a little bit kind of talking about the, you know, kind of Richard Dawkins spot in the spot in the, you know, his 15 years of fame or whatever. Like when I think about apologetics, like I feel like conversations I've had with non-believers from like when I was in high school 15 years ago to now.

have really shifted in tone. Do you feel as like someone who's been running the apologetics game for a long time, do you feel like the itch is starting to change for your average non-Christian secular person and what does that look like?

Michael Jones (38:25.476)
Mm-hmm.

What do mean by itch? mean, can you elaborate on that?

Simple Simon (38:31.064)
Yeah, it's like maybe just the thing that's most likely to keep them from converting or the thing that keeps them happily secular, non-religious, etc.

Michael Jones (38:44.664)
yeah, mean, secularism is collapsing. Let's just go through the histories. Like you have this, you 9-11, you have the new atheists come about, blame everything on religion, and they say, well, if we just get rid of religion, we'll enter an age of science and reason and be so advanced and wonderful and everyone will be so happy. Well, that didn't happen. What actually happened was is that secularism is an ideology for elites, not for your average person, because...

GOBBA GOOL (39:09.843)
Mmm. that's all right. Wow.

Simple Simon (39:11.706)
spittin', spittin', spittin'.

Michael Jones (39:15.94)
Well think about it, if you are a secular person and you're an elite, let's say you're in media, let's say you're in academia, you have purpose, you have meaning, you're one of the influencers over society, you have power to wield. But if you're like the grocery store clerk, if you're like working at a gas station, what are you living for? Secularism offers hedonism. Go watch your porn, go play your video games and then die and just get all the pleasure you can out of life.

You know, there's no purpose or meaning offered. So the average person is gonna look at that and they may be excited about it at first as they were. Yeah, I wonder if this age of science and reason will be great. Everything will be wonderful. And then it doesn't happen and you see you're being left behind in the society. Society feels like it's advancing. You see all your favorite influencers doing all these cool things and you're still working at the local gas station or the local Target or the local Starbucks. You got your gender studies degree and it didn't get you anywhere. You didn't get to become one of them.

So you start to go, what's my meaning and purpose? Humans need meaning and purpose. mean, tell the poorest people of the world, the people who picked trash out of Africa to survive. Tell them, hey, you're just a collection of cells and, you know, give yourself a couple decades, enjoy what you have and then you'll die in a few years. Or tell them that the creator of the universe became human and died so you can live for eternity with him. Which one do you think is going to give that the poorest of the poor?

Tom Bombadil (40:26.575)
Bye.

Michael Jones (40:41.27)
more meaning, more purpose, more reason to live and want to do good. That's the problem with secularism. It doesn't offer anything. It doesn't replace what people need. So over the past five years or so, we've seen a lot of young men especially start to embrace traditional Christianity. They're filling up Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian churches. A lot of them are gravitating towards the, yeah.

GOBBA GOOL (41:06.603)
Naptist.

Simple Simon (41:07.76)
not Baptist.

Michael Jones (41:09.86)
Well, why is that? They want ritual. They want tradition. They want to hold to something that's sacred and old because secularism doesn't have that. And they're being raised by secular parents without anything to really hold on to to give them value and meaning. And so that's where they're going. They're trying to find that clinging to.

GOBBA GOOL (41:13.505)
That's tradition. Yep.

Michael Jones (41:31.264)
That's why I'm not too worried about secularism in the long run, because it's just going to destroy itself. People are now being raised by secular parents, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and they're going, what am I alive for, just to watch porn and play video games? There's got to be more, and humanity craves that. They crave purpose and meaning. The first cities were built around temples for reasons. People want more out of reality than just eating and sleeping and reproducing.

Tom Bombadil (41:53.487)
Mm-hmm.

GOBBA GOOL (41:53.933)
you

Michael Jones (41:59.236)
And so that's what Christianity offers. It's the best ideology that humanity has ever had in terms of giving purpose and meaning for creating change, for creating real lasting progress and change in reality. And so that's what people are turning to and we need to be there to make sure they embrace it because we don't want the Muslims to come in and do that for us.

Tom Bombadil (42:21.298)
Mm-hmm.

Simple Simon (42:21.456)
Well, dude, it's almost like you could say that secularism is going through this, a similar kind of identity crisis that Islam is going through, where it's realizing that all of the energy they've been putting into these, all of these false promises are coming up empty. And so on the one hand, have secular people or formerly secular people who are embracing religion and becoming Christ followers, which is a beautiful thing. And then you have others who are like, no, we just need to really

put a vice grip on our political views, on our actions and radicalism, or even like the Black Pill Gen Z kids who are just like, life is pointless, just indulge as much as you possibly can, because there's no value. Like there's people on the far one area who are going head over heels into really dangerous stuff. And then you've got those who are finally like, maybe this Jesus thing has got some value to it.

Michael Jones (43:16.078)
yeah, yeah, need to, this is a time for the church to step up and if we do, we'll create the fourth great awakening. I hope it happens, because we need that. The problem is, you have new agers trying to step in and fill that gap, you have Muslims trying to step in and fill that gap, and you have secularists, some of the secularists still trying to maintain their grip on their masses. But I think, I'm optimistic about the future at this point, as long as we do the hard nitty gritty work and really just get in there and do it.

Simple Simon (43:21.967)
Mmm.

GOBBA GOOL (43:23.199)
Mmm.

Michael Jones (43:41.718)
I think we could really start a new awakening if we start pushing it. And we won't know if we're successful for good 20 or 30 years, so we better get to work now. That's my mentality.

Tom Bombadil (43:50.191)
Yeah, that's good word. I'm curious about in your work, I've noticed that you have more of an eye towards church history than other apologetics platforms that I've seen, which is one of the reasons why we felt some kinship with you. You have quite a bit of church history content that's just specifically

focused on church history. think one of my favorites that I saw was you taking on the myth of Sergius and Bacchus being homosexual lovers. so I've seen you do that kind of work, but growing up, you know, all of the apologetics kind of influencers at the time really before social media, whether it was the big ones when I was growing up were

Michael Jones (44:30.788)
Gay lovers, yeah.

Tom Bombadil (44:48.429)
Sean McDowell and William Lane Craig and I know that they each have pretty large ministries still but I've seen those guys speak live, I've read their material and I feel like I don't see a whole lot of attention paid towards church history in their content. They do a good job with like the...

Michael Jones (45:08.942)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Bombadil (45:14.093)
Lane Craig especially with the philosophical arguments and Sean McDowell with defending the Gospels, you know, the historicity of the Bible, those sorts of things. But I don't see much attention paid to church history. I think that part of that is because they are in the very evangelical kind of wing of apologetics. But I'd be just curious to hear your thoughts on the...

integration of church history in apologetics work.

Michael Jones (45:45.74)
I mean, it's an essential thing to do. It's necessary. mean, how can we do apologetics if we don't know our own history? Because if you don't know history, you're doomed to repeat it. If you don't know the problems you've already faced and how we overcome them, we're not gonna be equipped to deal with current problems and how to maneuver them.

So I think that's a complete and total necessary thing to doing any sort of evangelism or apologetics. We must know where we came from, why we're doing it, how we got here. That's all history. So going through church history is very, very important. To give like an example, mean like people today will look and go, it's so bad, Christianity is declining, we're not gonna make it. We're gonna be gone in 10 years, the beast is gonna rise up and everyone's gonna be eating bugs and pods and.

Hold up, mean, Christianity survived the Neuronian persecution, survived the Diocletian persecution, survived all these persecutions. If any time Christianity was not going to make it, it would have been under Nero. When that was, we were just getting started, there were so few and they were being killed and slaughtered left and right. And we survived. So I think we'll survive today when there are billions of people who call themselves Christian. Just take a step back, think about the context. And that doesn't mean we don't need to worry.

we still need a lot of work to do, because our work will not be done until everyone on earth is Christian. Obviously, we don't use coercion or conquest, we use peaceful means, but I mean, we're gonna keep doing that work, and we can get there much faster if we dive in and do it, and knowing church history, how evangelism has worked in the past is gonna help us to do that in the future.

GOBBA GOOL (47:28.013)
mean, the historical aspect also, I feel like is important for the arguments. I know Wes Huff is, he might be the biggest guy right now that does a lot of historical work. But you know, like I love your guys' sweater, by the way. You guys can go order on Inspiring Philosophy. It says Christmas is not pagan and it's a beautiful Christmas sweater. You can order it for next year.

Michael Jones (47:38.969)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (47:45.953)
Hehehehe

Michael Jones (47:54.499)
Mm-hmm.

GOBBA GOOL (47:54.646)
I saw Wes Huff's video on that. mean, in the whole, like that argument is a historical argument. And so like, like because people are trying to, you know, taint the tradition. And I think there's a lot of that. History is super, super important and I hope it becomes more popular. I think things like your view count on your Nicaea video proves that people.

Michael Jones (48:01.732)
Yeah.

GOBBA GOOL (48:20.543)
are asking questions, because was it Zeitgeist that had said that original lie about, they put together the Bible at Nicaea, and now, you know, someone's...

Simple Simon (48:24.24)
Dude... That-

Michael Jones (48:30.934)
man, it was around before that. was all over the place. mean like, it's just a reoccurring myth. It goes back to people like Voltaire. Voltaire was making that argument. That I mean the Council of Nicaea put together the Bible.

Tom Bombadil (48:36.803)
than she could.

GOBBA GOOL (48:39.885)
Mmm.

Tom Bombadil (48:40.335)
Hmm... Well...

Michael Jones (48:44.772)
And it was even made before him, for example. I think it started off as a joke. I mean, this stuff has been around for a while. Think of things like the idea that Christianity is anti-science. We've heard this our whole life. Complete nonsense. Like John Hilbron has noted the Catholic Church is probably the one institution that gave the most to the study of astronomy in all of human history. He's not an apologist for the Catholic Church by any stretch of the imagination.

these really, really big myths that have just been repeated over time and people just believe they're true. Because if you keep hearing it from multiple places, your brain just tends to assume it's true. Because, well, why would I, you know, the criterion of multiple attestation. If I hear it from this person, that person, well, they're corroborating stories so they must be true. And so we hear that often. And then when someone like myself comes along and says, no, the Council of Nicaea didn't create the Bible, I'm the odd man out to them.

because no, they've heard it from all these other people who they may know and trust more than some loser on the internet. So they're gonna go with that. And so it takes a while to combat these myths.

GOBBA GOOL (49:53.568)
Yeah, and now that the workload on you, when you're just the one standing up and sharing the truth, the workload on you is much stronger or much heavier.

Michael Jones (50:03.14)
Yeah, well, think of it like this, though. mean, like, I started in 2013, 2014. I started telling people Christmas isn't pagan. There's no evidence of it. Every comment was against me. Everyone was saying I was wrong. Christian, non-Christian. Next year I did it. There was like one or two guys going, you actually know, you might be right about this. Next year a little more. Now, 2026, just the past Christmas season.

Tom Bombadil (50:15.191)
Yeah.

Michael Jones (50:30.488)
When I would post stuff, or when anyone would post stuff, the majority of the comments are saying they're wrong. Someone comes and says Christmas is pagan, I can go to the comments and I can see there's at least a strong presence of people saying this is wrong. So we're combating that now. And on my posts, when I make, most people are going, yeah, we know Christmas isn't pagan, so we're making progress. I mean, so you can combat this stuff, it just takes time and effort and showing people the facts over and over again.

Simple Simon (50:44.816)
Hmm.

Simple Simon (50:55.076)
Yeah. Mike, what's your take on the kind of the ecosystem of Christian content creation that's happening right now? It seems like there are a lot of cool dudes making a lot of stuff, but there's also like, I don't know, TikTok has been a big way for folks like yourself, but also a lot of creators to kind of enter this space of talking about Christian ideas, theology, church history. What's your, what's your kind of take on,

GOBBA GOOL (51:21.581)
And I have a follow up question after that.

Michael Jones (51:25.316)
Yeah, I think it's good. I think we need more of it. I think it's a good start, but I want a lot more Christian content creators. People that just do reaction videos. think that's a good place for all Christians to start. Just do a reaction video to something and debunk it. Put it out there. If more people do that, the really, really good ones are gonna rise to the top, and that might be you. So get out there and start doing some work, and you never know. You might be one day at a conference with me speaking. So just start doing that kind of stuff.

Simple Simon (51:52.836)
Nice. Nice, nice.

GOBBA GOOL (51:54.062)
My follow-up question is, so at ETS, were you at ETS this year? okay. Well, maybe next year I'll say hi if we see each other. So one of the things that I noticed was I talked with some of the YouTube community guys, because a bunch of them go to it, which I think is great, which shows that they are very much interested in the academic side, except...

Michael Jones (52:00.782)
Yeah, I was walking around, you know.

You

GOBBA GOOL (52:22.569)
I don't know if I'm true in this observation. It doesn't seem like they value the formal education as much. And I'm just wondering, is there like a pedagogical shift happening before our eyes where maybe I don't really care if there's an ATS accreditation slap to this. I don't care about a master's degree. Cause I just have, I just have like all information available to me so I can just do the work on my own.

Tom Bombadil (52:47.823)
Hmm.

Michael Jones (52:48.066)
I hope so. I really, really hope so. A couple years ago I may not have said that, but the more I do this stuff, the more I think there's a lot of elitism in academia. There's a lot of like scholars who just like, you know, snub their nose at you with this ivory tower mentality if you don't have a degree.

GOBBA GOOL (53:05.41)
Right?

Michael Jones (53:06.766)
And the funny thing is a lot of them will talk about subjects they don't have degrees in, but I mean, you can't talk about any subject if you don't have a degree. It's really kind of a weird double standard they have. But so, I mean, I hope that happens. And again, I think we're learning. We don't need that stuff. And academia also does a lot of policing of ideas that they don't want in or out. But now the internet is, we're spreading these ideas more and more and more, and they can't do anything to stop us.

So I think this is a good thing in a lot of ways because we want more of a free market of ideas so the good ones rise to the top. Academia has put a lot of restrictions on that, preventing that from happening. So I mean, there's a reason Max Planck once said, science advances one funeral at a time. What he meant was, there was a really powerful, influential scientist, he'd die. He would push his ideas out, you could never challenge them, but then when he would die, young people could come around and start.

GOBBA GOOL (53:31.297)
Yeah.

GOBBA GOOL (53:48.961)
Yeah

Michael Jones (53:59.62)
trying new stuff. And then the cycle repeats. Now it's gonna repeat a lot quicker because I could put out a video arguing like the Pentateuch predates David and that is laughed at in academia. It's absolutely laughed at. But there's a lot of evidence that they don't ever deal with that shows the Pentateuch is quite ancient. That it probably is, at least the main core of it predates David and Saul probably.

Tom Bombadil (54:20.419)
Hmm.

Michael Jones (54:30.026)
If that's the case, mean, more and more people will now hear those arguments. They'll get in academia. They'll start pushing him subtly and eventually, you know, that maybe they'll make a paradigm change. But we need more of that because I could not publish a paper at for SPL, for example, on why I think the Pentateuch is pre-David. Even if I had like two PhDs in biblical studies or something.

GOBBA GOOL (54:41.119)
Mmm. Yeah.

GOBBA GOOL (54:56.513)
Right.

Michael Jones (54:57.662)
They would never allow it because that's not what they allow. They've already decided that's wrong. They don't care about evidence. They wouldn't show that. I sound very cynical, I get it. But this is the pushback I get from people. Anytime I bring this kind of stuff up. Well, academia has already decided that's wrong. What about this evidence? Well, they've already decided it's wrong, so shut up. No, I won't.

Simple Simon (55:13.369)
Interesting.

Tom Bombadil (55:18.479)
I think there's a really interesting kind of inverse that can happen too, where people in your line of work can kind of bridge the gap between what's going on at the scholarly level and bringing it to the popular level. I think a lot of what we do with our podcast is doing that as well. I think a good example of that that I ran across recently was when I was reading Peter Lightheart's Defending Constantine.

Michael Jones (55:37.027)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (55:46.34)
That's a great book.

Tom Bombadil (55:47.565)
Yeah, the whole reason why he wrote that book is that the scholarly consensus had changed on Constantine in a positive direction for Constantine, but there had been so much kind of like bad press over the years that the popular consensus hadn't shifted and the general kind of average conception of who Constantine was, was living in the past. And so he wrote that book to help do that shift. Now that book is still pretty thick and it's no YouTube short.

And so I think that the work that you're doing and that others are doing in your field can help bridge some of those gaps in a really impactful way.

Michael Jones (56:18.084)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Jones (56:30.574)
Yeah, well I took that book and a couple other ones and I made a video called the top 10 myths about Constantine and put it out there. So what I do is I take a lot of that kind of scholarly work and make it into like digestible videos for people.

Tom Bombadil (56:37.049)
There you go.

Simple Simon (56:41.85)
That's awesome. Yeah. Mike, we have a segment that we like to do with all of our guests called 10 words or less, where we're going to ask you a question that might make you want to say more than 10 words, but you have to limit your response 10 words. Since we appreciate you so much, I'm going to extend it to 15 words or less. And we'll use this to kind of close this out since we're running out of time. So I've got three questions for you. You've got 15 words to answer them. Taylor, you're the math whiz, so you get to count. So Mike, first question.

Michael Jones (56:55.94)
Okay.

Okay.

Tom Bombadil (56:58.894)
You

GOBBA GOOL (57:07.693)
Dude, what?

Simple Simon (57:11.344)
How will you respond to someone who thinks that fake hundred dollar gospel tracts is a valuable way to do apologetics?

Michael Jones (57:27.3)
Probably that, just stare at him for real? You think that's gonna work? Real quick, how is that going to make disciples? How?

GOBBA GOOL (57:29.183)
Zero. We're at zero words.

Simple Simon (57:39.856)
That's good. That was good. Now this, I mean, this is why he's a professional man. Like he knows, this man knows what he's doing. Okay. Great, great, great, great answer. Next one. You're talking to an atheist who says, well, how can God be all powerful if he can't make a two-sided triangle?

GOBBA GOOL (57:41.089)
Dude, he did it in half, less than half of his allotted words. I know.

Tom Bombadil (57:41.967)
going to make this. Yeah, that's seven.

Michael Jones (58:06.766)
God can do anything that's logically possible.

That's not logically possible.

Simple Simon (58:14.512)
All right, yeah, man. You, I'll just say you're crushing this so more than our average guests. They do awful. And if you want to know, look at when Taylor did it one time.

GOBBA GOOL (58:14.913)
He got 11. Nice mic.

Tom Bombadil (58:16.815)
All right.

Michael Jones (58:19.972)
you

Michael Jones (58:24.196)
Well, that's because that's my job is to make things concise and put it out there for people, you know, that's

GOBBA GOOL (58:25.673)
Simple Simon (58:29.784)
You're just you're crushing it. All right. Well, here's here's the last one. I'm really excited about this one. Was Ray Comfort onto something with the whole banana argument?

GOBBA GOOL (58:29.91)
Yeah.

Michael Jones (58:41.72)
Haha, no, he doesn't understand cultivation.

Tom Bombadil (58:45.391)
He even used haha. That was great.

Simple Simon (58:50.424)
man, that was awesome. Thank you. Okay. Shoot. Well, dude, thank you so much for coming on. This was a excellent, excellent conversation. We super appreciate it. Yeah. Listeners, thank you guys so much for tagging along. Again, if you want to look for anything by Mike and his team, it's inspiring philosophy on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, wherever you can follow them. Check out their website if you're interested in.

GOBBA GOOL (58:51.905)
Wow.

GOBBA GOOL (58:59.063)
Seriously.

Simple Simon (59:19.322)
booking Mike for anything. Be sure to follow us on our socials and thanks for listening you guys.

GOBBA GOOL (59:25.889)
Bye bye.

Tom Bombadil (59:27.417)
God Bless You.