PHILLIPS: So do you have questions about God? The author of “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God But Were Afraid to Ask” joins us next on LIVE FROM. We’re going to take your e-mails questions, too. Some of these are doozies. We can’t wait to see what he says.
Stay with us.
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KEIRA PHILLIPS: ‘Tis the season to celebrate, be with loved ones and reflect back on the year. It also has many of us thinking about God. Why do we need him? Who is he? Why does he let bad things happen, especially during the holidays?
Well, a new book takes questions like these and offers some insight, sometimes humorous, about this serious and many times complex subject. It’s called “Everything You Wanted To Know About God, But Were Afraid To Ask.”
Author Eric Metaxas joins me live from New York. Eric, great to see you.
ERIC METAXAS, AUTHOR: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
PHILLIPS: Well, why did you write the book?
METAXAS: I wrote the book because it didn’t exist. I had this kind of conversion experience about 17 years ago. God came into my life in a big way. And I realized that I wanted to tell people, I wanted to share this faith that I had with friends.
And I was looking around for books that I could just sort of give to them, and I didn’t find anything that seemed to sum up the Christian faith, the Bible, whatever — in a way that was not confrontational, strange, awkward.
Like I wanted something that kind of had some humor in it and that could kind of open up the conversation as opposed to just shut it down and pretend to have all the answers. And I’ll be honest with you. For years, I just kept looking for that book, and finally I thought, maybe I’ll take a crack at writing it and I actually did.
PHILLIPS: Well, you bring up a good point. There’s a lot of books out there that just makes it sound so simple and so easy, a very black and — you know, you lay the questions out and these answers are very black and white. But you really — you tackle so many questions that a lot of people ask but you — I like how you throw in history and examples, I mean, going all the way back to the 1700s.
METAXAS: Yes.
PHILLIPS: And, of course, I’m going to ask you about some of that in a minute. But I want to — do you mind, because we solicited e-mails yesterday, and because of the breaking news, obviously, we had to roll in to today. But we continue to get more and more. Can I throw some of these questions out at you?
METAXAS: Throw away.
PHILLIPS: OK, here we go.
METAXAS: I mean, fire away.
PHILLIPS: Now, here’s a big one. This probably would take you six hours to answer. But Rick from California wants to know, “Where did God come from?”
METAXAS: You know, a lot of people are asking that question. Actually, this is one of these things — I think part of why I wrote this book is because I want people to understand that it’s OK to not know the answers. Like, there’s certain things, like that one, where the first answer to that question is to say, there’s a mystery there.
With our finite human minds, we can’t give like a three sentence answer and say, OK, let me tell you where God came from. Boom. We really don’t know. The point is that — we know that God always existed, that God is outside of time.
But we’re inside time, so it’s pretty much impossible for us to understand what that means to be outside of time. So the real answer to that is we don’t know. It’s a mystery.
PHILLIPS: And that of course leads into Mike from New Hampshire. He says, “can you point to any scientifically, repeatable, verifiable proof of God’s existence?”
METAXAS: Proof of God’s existence — well, not — I get into this in my book, like what do we mean by proof? The fact of the matter is, like brilliant people like Isaac Newton, even Albert Einstein, to some extent — but all kinds of brilliant people have believed in the existence of God, the God of the Bible.
But you can’t reduce God to something that you could prove in a lab. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use our minds to sort of intellectually, logically, try to discern the difference between sort of pie in the sky nonsense and truth.
And I really think it’s important, especially, you know, people who want to know what does the Bible say. We should challenge faith with hard questions, because it should be able to take the hard questions.
If God is God, he’s the God of all truth, not just the God of spiritual truth or religious truth. And so I think that it’s important that we have a dialogue between science and faith because, frankly, I think faith can take it.
PHILLIPS: Yes, you bring up a good point. Albert Einstein, you mentioned him. He had this amazing relationship with Gandhi. Could you just imagine sitting down with the two of them and talking about God, religion, how everything started?
METAXAS: I just want to know what they would eat.
PHILLIPS: That’s a good question too.
METAXAS: Yes, I’ll put that in the next book.
PHILLIPS: There you go. That will be the next one, what would they eat if they were talking about God. Steve wants to know, “if God is real, why would it allow people to deal with tragedies like AIDS, cancer, and human bondage without doing something to intervene?”
METAXAS: Not to mention the transit strike …
PHILLIPS: Yes.
METAXAS: … because I walked here. Well, actually, that’s — you know, honestly, that’s the big question. That’s the one question that almost everybody would put first. When you say to them, ask anything you want about God, and that’s my first question.
As a believer, I have that question. And what I find interesting about some of these questions is people who are atheist, people who are agnostics or people who are devout believers all have the same question. They say how can we have this good God, who is full of love, who allows this evil and suffering?
So first of all, I want to acknowledge that it’s a great question. And I don’t think you ever really get that question answered. Personally, I find that the first answer, again, is like, we don’t really know. But we do know — what do we know? We know that God loves us and he’s with us when we’re suffering.
So I think that the idea of God being sort of behind the clouds and ignoring us while we’re suffering is something we need to disabuse ourselves of. He’s a God who’s with us in our suffering and our pain basically.
And I also think it’s important to say that the way the world is today isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, whether you believe in the fall literally — you guys were talking about creationism before. Whether you believe in that literally or figuratively, the point is that the world isn’t the way it was meant to be.
God created this perfect world and things are broken and now we have evil and suffering. And part of that comes from free will, which I get into in the book. Obviously we don’t have time to go into that, but that’s a question which takes several pages to kind of frame.
PHILLIPS: Chapter 18, “Jesus is more than a moral.”
METAXAS: I’m not hearing anything. I don’t know if …
PHILLIPS: Did we lose you?
METAXAS: … my feed has gone dead here.
PHILLIPS: Can you hear me, Eric? We’ll try and get that fixed. Should we take a quick break? What do you think? All right. We’ll take a quick break. All right. We’ll try and get connected with Eric Metaxas again.
We’re talking about his book here, “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About God, But Were Afraid To Ask.”
As we work on that, we’re going to take you to a quick break. You know, Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, right? But do these guys know about the song, about the most famous reindeer of all?
(MUSIC) PHILLIPS: Oh, yes they do, but I bet you didn’t know how a cowboy and a songwriter made Rudolph a living legend. We’ve got the scoop, straight ahead of LIVE FROM.
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PHILLIPS: We were talking about the book “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God but Were Afraid to Ask,” with Eric Metaxas. We got connected with him again back in New York. Sorry about that, Eric. Took a little break, had a little “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” singing and now we’re back talking about God.
METAXAS: I enjoyed the Rudolph segment, by the way.
PHILLIPS: Good, thank you very much. Our writers have been working hard on those segments. We were taking a number of questions from e-mail, but — and obviously there’s a number of questions here in the book I wanted to ask you about.
You brought up neat little pieces of history, things about people, just being in the news, I never knew about. And in this one section — I think it was chapter — 17, when you are talking about — no, I think it was chapter 18.
METAXAS: But it was a chapter?
PHILLIPS: There it is. “Jesus: More than a Moral Teacher and Great Role Model.” You actually talk about Buzz Aldrin. Tell me about this story, how he actually wanted to take communion during his transmission back to Earth.
METAXAS: And he did take communion on the moon. It’s something I wanted to put, sort of weird interesting stuff like this into the book. It’s all Q & A. There’s certain little tidbits of history I wanted in there as well, just because people don’t know about them. People find it really interesting.
One of the most amazing things I discovered was that Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, he knew he was doing something that was one of the most epochal moments in human history and wanted to do something significant.
At the time, 1969, he consulted with his pastor and he decided his pastor would bless the wine and the wafer, wine and bread, and he would take it to the moon and when they landed, when The Eagle landed, before they got out of the capsule, he would take communion and read from scripture. And he did that.
Because Madeline Murray O’Hare, sort of a famous atheist, had sued NASA over transmitting something around — I guess it was Apollo 8 — from Genesis at Christmas a couple years before, they decided they could not air this publicly. So he did it privately.
Before he and Neil Armstrong got out of the capsule, he took communion and read from scripture. It’s an amazing story. That’s why I put it in the book. It’s true. I actually met Buzz Aldrin and asked him about it and he said it’s true.
PHILLIPS: Wow. All right. Chapter — another little piece of history, Chapter 14. “How Can Anyone Take The Bible Seriously?” You start right off talking about 1785 and William Wilberforce.
METAXAS: William Wilberforce is a hero of mine. He’s another one of these people that not too many people not about. If it weren’t for William Wilberforce, our history as Americans would be different. He became a Christian very seriously at the end of the 18th century.
The first thing he knew when he became a Christian, was slavery is wrong. And in the British Empire, the end of the 19th century, 18th century, that was not something you could say. But he said it and he felt convicted by the bible and by God to say slavery is wrong —
PHILLIPS: Eric, forgive me, we have to go to the NTSB presser on that Miami plane crash. We want to listen…
