Joe and Joe from The Frontline are joined with Dr. E. Michael Jones to discuss his most recent book Logos Rising, A History of Ultimate Reality. Logos Rising describes the tragic and yet ultimately triumphant progress of Logos in human history, from the beginning of everything, to the emergence of the concept, to the Democratic primary of 2020. 

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Hello again everyone and welcome back to the front line with Joe and Joe.

Joe Pesillo as always joined by Joe Resinello.

And once more dear brothers and sisters, let us go into the breach on the Veritas Catholic Network 1350 on your AM dial serving the New York metropolitan area.

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And, and today, we are very pleased and honored to be welcoming back to the show, Dr.

Jones, a little bit of an introduction for the Veritas audience.

Michael Jones is the founder and managing editor of Culture Wars magazine.

He has spent the last 40 years as a prolific writer, having written numerous books, including Slaughter of Cities, Barron Medal, Libido Dominandi and the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.

We're discussing today his latest work, Logos Rising.

We're going to get into the reasons why this book is so important and why particularly as Catholics, we need to understand the philosophical underpinnings of our faith.

And you're going to you're going to love the conversation.

And you're definitely going to want to go out and buy the book.

Jones, welcome back to the frontline with Joe and Joe.

because all good things start with a prayer and

name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen.

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, never was it known that anyone who sought your help or sought your intercession was left unaided.

come, before you we stand, sinless, born and sorrowful.

Again, we're going to be talking about Logos Rising.

In your book, you start off with a strong argument against atheism, particularly you address the 4 Horsemen.

For those who don't know who the 4 Horsemen are, it's Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Please explain the incoherence of the atheist argument from a philosophical point of view and talk to our listeners about the turtles all the way down idea.

Yeah, for you about 10 years ago, the 4 atheists were forced to be reckoned with.

And basically, their entire argument was based on logical fallacy.

Biology, Darwinism is basically the operating system of atheism in our day.

It's probably the prime philosophical ideology in our day and it's incoherent.

It's incoherent, excuse me, because if you knew the history of philosophy, you knew that there was a man by the name of Parmenides.

And he said that, that which is cannot come from that which is not.

This was the beginning of a movement in human history where people started to understand, waking up from the effects of the fall and the collapse of civilization and starting to understand the implications of logos, which is the Greek word for reason, which found this culmination when St.

John took that Greek language, it took that Greek philosophy.

And he said, in the beginning, there was Logos.

There was never a time when there wasn't some type of rationality out there.

And The atheists simply turned the bad metaphysics into an attack on God, an attack on the logical underpinning of the universe.

Well, they said basically something can come from nothing.

If you reduce it to its basics, something can come from nothing.

If there were ever nothing, there could never be something.

So first of all, they can't talk about the beginning of everything because that's totally in Korea.

But they can't talk about their own particular evolutionary development either.

So Dawkins, who's probably the smartest of this group of people, says, well, it seems complicated if you try to go from 1 big step to another.

So if you try to go from an amoeba to a monkey, that's a big step, but let's take it gradually, little steps at a time.

Problem here is that every little step is exactly as the same as the big step, because in every little step you're going from non-existence to existence.

Now he tries to cover this up by saying, well, how about a wing?

Wouldn't 49% of a wing be better than no wing at all?

Richard, as soon as you say a wing, you're already talking about what you're trying to prove.

Christopher Hitchens does the same thing with the eye.

It's always a kind of sleight of hand here.

Basically, he talks about some organism with light sensitive cells.

Well, wait a minute, light sensitive cells, they can either see in which case it's already an eye or they can't see, in which case you're never gonna get there because there's no way to go from non-existence to existence.

This is a metaphysical flaw at the heart of Darwinism, at the heart of atheism.

And what you see at this point is that atheism is not a philosophical problem, it's a psychological problem.

And Paul Witts, the philosopher, psychologist from NYU, wrote a book about this, about the relationship between atheism and father deprivation.

That's precisely the case with Christopher Hitchens.

This means that when you're talking with people who are atheists, you have to switch gears and stop talking about philosophy and start talking about psychology and start talking about the problems that led you to that situation.

Now, what Dawkins was proposing was, in some sense, what you're talking about with turtles all the way down.

So you can't have an infinite number of little changes because each of those little changes goes from non-being to being and that's impossible you can't do that.

Okay, Aristotle figured this out he said how do you go from non-being to being well it's in there in potencia it's in potential so obviously there is change Parmenides couldn't explain change but Aristotle said because look the acorn has the oak in potencia in there.

And so that solves the whole problem with change that Parmenides could not solve.

The problem with atheism is that it's bad, bad philosophy.

And the whole point of Locust Rising is to reintroduce a whole generation of people, probably 2 generations who never got philosophy courses in college, who nobody understands this anymore.

And when nobody understands this, the bullies take over.

And that's we're talking about people like the 4 atheists there.

Let's just get into something you just touched on.

Why do you think modern philosophy has taken this route?

I mean, you're you you were in academia, Joe and I went to Catholic schools, we had to take I had to take 6 credits of philosophy core in a Catholic school.

You have to go to Notre Dame University to figure this out.

Lombas makes a rebound in 1879 with the resurgence of Thomism.

Pope Leo XIII issues his encyclical Eterni Patris, which makes Thomism the official philosophy of the Catholic Church.

Notre Dame University adopted that document in 1953 and they, Thomas and the official philosopher of Notre Dame University, tried to position itself as the premier Catholic university in the United States because of that fact.

Come here, you'll get a great training in philosophy.

A lot of it was simply manuals rather than getting to the actual text, a lot of bad teaching.

But the real reason was basically 2 men, Theodore Hesburgh and Ernie McMullen, the Irish physicist he hired to run the philosophy department, and they decided that they were going to kill Thomism.

This was 1 of the great rebirths of Logos in history, beginning with Eterni Patris.

Eterni Patris caught on in France with Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Gary Goulagange, Fr.

They saw America as the great hope for the resurgence of philosophy.

Maritain tried to get a position at the University of Chicago, the anti-Catholics under John Dewey made that impossible.

And so Notre Dame became the place and Notre Dame, the leadership in Notre Dame strangled it.

And if you go back to that period of time, I'm talking about the late 60s, Time Magazine is talking about this.

Shouldn't we have a more scientific, shouldn't we be more pluralistic?

This was all the attempt to destroy Thomism and they succeeded.

And I'm saying, Ernie McMullin succeeded in strangling Logos in its cradle in America by wrecking the philosophy department at Notre Dame.

And Notre Dame had a leading position among Catholic colleges and universities, and it spread throughout there.

And now you've got Catholic colleges turning out philosophical ignoramuses, unfortunately.

You're listening to the Frontline with Joe and Joe, Joe Pesillo and Joe Resenillo.

Michael Jones on your show, you are way in the breach.

And we're here on the Veritas Catholic Network.

I think what we're getting, you know, at least from the way Joe and I see it, either on the 1 end with your Catholic, everything is personal piety.

On the other end, you got your Protestants and your evangelicals who say, well, we don't need philosophy, we have scripture.

And it doesn't seem like anybody wants to bother too much with these these these major questions and and let's get into it a little bit.

John obviously before then God revealed the Logos to the Greeks.

What are they excluded somehow from God's plan?

No, God, the Holy Spirit revealed the Logos to the Greeks.

Talk about how the Greeks, the different philosophical ideas they were throwing around in ancient Greece, which led them to the discovery of Logos, which then later on, of course, John puts front and center in his gospel.

There was a collapse of civilization around 1200 BC.

No writing collapsed, civilization collapsed, and then slowly about 400 years after that it started to make a return.

And 1 of the returns was the Iliad and the Odyssey got written down, finally written down, written form, but also in the latest on the coast of the eastern coast of the Aegean Sea, which is Greek colonies basically in the Persian Empire.

These 2 ideas came together and you started to have people who were trying to figure out, let's see if we can figure out the universe.

There seems to be a unity here, and so Thales, the first philosopher says, yeah, it's water.

Well, water is important, that's true, especially if you live on the coast, But there are problems here.

And then so an examiner tried to come and said, no, it's air.

And if you use the word air, it's spirit.

The problem here is that you're handicapped because you're trying to think in physical terms about something which is not physical, which is a reason.

Heraclitus is living, probably was a Persian citizen, living there at the intersection of the Greek and the Persian worlds.

The Persian religion is Zoroastrianism, is based on fire, a kind of worship of fire.

And so Heraclitus said, yeah, it's fire because fire is energy.

A candle flame is always changing, it's always the same.

And then finally Heraclitus says, it's like locusts.

And this is the emergence of a kind of intellectual term that is now independent of any physical entity.

And so the human race has now broken with picture thinking.

And that launched this idea into the world.

The culmination of that, as I said, was St.

God did not abandon the human race after the fall.

There was still a plan going on, it's going to be a long hard slog, but there's, God is still there and part of the preparation is Greek philosophy, absolutely no question.

And I'm saying the Hebrews had a history without philosophy, the Greeks had philosophy without history, and St.

Now I'm saying in this book that the reason John wrote this gospel is because you couldn't preach to the Jews anymore, That was over.

The Jews had expelled Paul from the synagogue.

Greek is the lingua franca for the entire world at this point.

And not only that, I'm going to dispense with all these Hebrew genealogies.

The Greeks don't know who these people were.

So what's the point of talking about them?

Tracing Jesus back to this guy, David, so on and so forth.

Let's begin with a philosophical, a metaphysical discussion that the Greeks can understand, that the whole world can understand because it's basically based on reason.

And so what you have is a revision of Genesis.

Genesis says, in the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

Paul says, in the beginning, there was logos.

This is for a specifically Greek audience and I think he had St.

Paul tried to talk about Jesus Christ to a group of philosophers and he gave the wrong speech.

He gave the emphasis speech where they were all idol worshipers.

And he said, you know, this man, he died.

And the Greek said, ah, okay, well, we'll talk about this some other time.

And I think he said, now we have to have a sound philosophical foundation for the gospel so that we can preach to the entire world, people who never heard of Jewish prophets or anything like that.

That was the great turning point in human history.

And at this point, either your God was the plan or the train left the station without you.

I mean, clearly philosophy is relevant when you're speaking about God.

And I agree with you, you have to have an understanding of that.

I knew a teacher in philosophy in Calcutta, India.

He would argue the existence of God without using the term.

And I think that's what you're talking about.

I think when you take away philosophy from a theology, you're missing that.

How is it so important and how is it linked?

The idea that philosophy points to the absolute truth that is God?

Well, what we have now is a truncated idea of philosophy based on science.

It's called positivism, whatever you want to call it, but basically they're saying the physical sciences became so powerful in the 19th century that basically everyone said, well, we have to model everything we do on physics.

You want to read that story, read Barron Meadow.

It's a whole story, history of basically screwing up economics, which you think it's making it into pseudophysics.

If you talk Aristotle, when he talks about metaphysics, he calls it first philosophy and he calls it theology because in metaphysics, you talk about God because you have to talk about God because you can't talk about a beginning unless you talk about God.

So I had this experience in India myself.

I'm in a school in Delhi, 16 year olds, English class.

Hindu boy stands up and he says, can you prove the existence of God?

Because India is a place where you have 33 million gods and that doesn't make any sense and you can talk to any kid there and he will basically admit that doesn't make any sense.

You can't have 33 million gods and so he wants to know can you bring science and religion together?

I went from the temple of Ganesh, where you the chubby little guy with the elephant standing in line, and you offer him some type of thing, offering, and then they give you something back, and you whisper your prayers into a big silver mouse, and that silver mouse runs off to Krishna, and then you get what you want.

And I went from there to the Nehru Science Center, same city.

And there's, you're waiting to get in and there's a mural of the history of the universe.

Guess what the first, the beginning of the history of the universe is?

And so you've got these poor Indians with a completely irrational religion and a completely irrational science when it comes to metaphysics.

Well, that's not going to be nourishing to anybody.

So I had to prove the existence of God to this kid.

There is something, therefore there was never nothing.

This something cannot bring itself into existence because to do that it would have to exist before it existed.

Therefore, something else brought it into existence and that something is what all men call God.

Now, you want to talk about the stupidest statement in the history of philosophy.

It was made by 1 of those 4 atheists, the only philosopher among the groups, Daniel Dennett, who said, "'The universe created itself out of nothing or something very small.

That has got to be the stupidest statement that anyone ever made about anything philosophical.

The universe cannot bring itself into existence because it would have to exist before it existed.

So now that we've cleared that out of the way, we can talk about the fact that metaphysics talks about God in a way that is mandatory for every rational creature.

It's mandatory to believe in God, otherwise you're a fool.

Now, it's not mandatory to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, you accept that by faith, but this is a big step in the right direction and I am making progress in India because you've got over a billion and a half people in a completely confused state.

So an Indian comes to me and over the internet, you know, I said, there's no logos in India.

It's sitting on 4 elephants and the elephant's standing on a turtle.

It's called turtles all the way down, but that's the infinite regress that we already talked about.

Okay, because he couldn't answer that, he became a Catholic.

After 6 months, he threw up his hands and said, this is impossible.

And he went to Japan because at least you could talk to the Japanese because they understood something about the universe.

This is a way of talking to people all over the world about the most fundamental issue we all face, namely the relationship between God and creation.

You know something, you said something very interesting.

And that Indian gentleman was honest with himself and he clearly came to the realization that something came from God.

Clearly, people rationalize this, particularly very smart people, because it's something that we can't completely understand.

God is a mystery even to the smartest people.

Like I think a very funny statement, a friend of mine once said, if you can't lie to yourself, who could you lie to?

The atheist like lies to himself Because what you just said is completely linear and logical.

How could you not conclude that something has to come from something and that something is God?

Well, you're talking about the wrong book right now.

You want to know why people are atheists?

Read Degenerate Moderns, because in the intellectual life, there are 2 choices.

Either you conform your desires to the truth or you conform the truth to your desires.

And so it was all the sucks and ends and means we've talked about.

The reason all my friends are communist is because Marxism allows you to have sex with anybody you want because there's no meaning in the world.

You have a desire and you want to fulfill that desire, you know it's wrong.

So therefore you're going to question the whole order of the universe in order to make sure you can do what you want to do.

Now, this is not just personal biographies of modern figures.

Wilhelm Schmitt, the great divine word anthropologist said that all primitive cultures are monotheistic.

That polytheism is a sign of decadence, it always comes in later.

Well, because you want to do something and you know God doesn't want you to do it.

So okay I really have this desire to sleep with my neighbor's wife.

Well maybe I can pray to someone else and at this point you have polytheism because you're praying to demons.

That's what you're praying to And so you have a whole demon-based culture.

And I'm not trying to argue against the faith of these primitive people.

I'm not trying to say that because they probably don't understand what they're doing.

They came into, if you're talking about India, This came into existence millennia ago.

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Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality - Dr. E Michael Jones | THE FRONTLINE WITH JOE & JOE