- Welcome back everyone to the front line with Joe and Joe. Joe Bessilow and Joe Ressinull, you're exactly right, Joe. - We work for the man upstairs as you do. - You're setting me up quite well. You just gave me an alley youth. - The greatest revolutionary act to commit right now is to open your mouth and speak the truth. - Whether you're an academic or you're a regular guy, you have to be fearless. - And once more, dear brothers and sisters, let us go into the breach. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello again everyone and welcome back to the front line with Joe and Joe, Joe Bessilow, as always joined by Joe Ressinull, and once more, dear brothers and sisters, let us go into the breach on the Veritas Catholic Radio Network, 1350 on your AM dial 103.9 on your FM dial, spreading the truth of the Catholic faith to the New York City Metropolitan area. Please download the app, share it with your friends, and wherever you see Joe and I on social media, particularly Rumble and Facebook, but also X and YouTube certainly before YouTube drops the hammer on us. Hey, like, subscribe, share, do all that fun stuff. So today we're welcoming back to the program, Frank Cronin. We're gonna have one of those conversations that Joe and I love to have. We love all of our conversations, but there's certain topics we really like to get into, especially with somebody who is a scholar and an intellectual like Frank Cronin. I know he's not gonna like that, I call them those two things. However, that's the way Joe and I see him. And we're gonna be discussing really, when you think about it, when Joe say, Joe and I say you're going into the breach, the topic of this conversation is truth in modern times. And the reason why we have Frank Cronin on the show is 'cause over at the Catholic Exchange, Frank has written a series of five articles on truth in modern times. And if you wanna talk about a taboo subject, I mean, if you say the word truth in certain circles, you're considered, I don't know, all sorts of deplorable names they wanna call you, simply 'cause you use the word truth. Well, we're all Catholic Christians here, okay? We believe the truth is not only a concept that we have to seek, but also a person in the person of Jesus Christ. So no, truth is not a taboo subject for us. In fact, we love going after the truth, and that's what we're gonna be doing with Frank Cronin here today at the front line with Joe and Joe. Frank Cronin, for those of you who are not familiar, are studied on a graduate level in education at Harvard, we'll forgive him for that. And at the University of Connecticut and leadership at Columbia University, and in theology at Regent University and Holy Apostles College and Seminary. He also writes from the National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report. As I mentioned, Catholic Exchange. He's appeared on EWTN's "Women of Grace," twice on EWTN's "Journey Home," with Marcus Grody following his 2007 reversion to the Catholic faith from atheism and evangelical Protestantism. His book, "The World According to God, The Whole Truth About Life and Living," came out in 2020, is available at Sophia Institute Press. So, and we encourage everyone to go on Sophia Institute Press and buy the book. I'm sure you can buy it in other places. So, Frank Cronin, our brother, welcome back to the front line with Joe and Joe. - Pleasure to be with you guys again. - Absolutely. And Frank, I wanna say this, just, you know, Joe and I are trying not just to strengthen the brethren as much as we need to be strengthened, okay? And it's one of the reasons why we do this show. But there's a, I'm so more impressed with you because of the fact that you are a highly educated man and you were an atheist. You are a non-believer. I have one of my dear friends I pray for every day. He was Catholic, very intelligent guy. He's Catholic, he's no longer Catholic or he considers himself not to be an atheist. There's been some hardcore atheists that have come back to the Catholic church or have come into the Catholic church, okay? And you're one of them. You went from a place of unbelief, disbelief, however you wanna call it, back to the Catholic church. And I, for one, I know I could speak for Joe. I'm incredibly impressed with that. And that's what I'm so happy that we're having this conversation. So we're gonna get into that a little bit more. Let me hand it over to Joe so we can get started. - Frank, we always start with a prayer to our lady in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. Remember almost gracious Virgin Mary. Never was it known that anyone who sought your help or sought your intercession was left unaided. Spire of this confidence. We fly into you, a virgin, a virgin's our mother. To you, we come for you. We stand sinful and sorrowful. My mother, the word in car and I despise, not a petitions, but in your clemency here and answer the same, then. Name it. (indistinct) Frank, before we get into the subject at hand, I kinda wanna just touch on something that Joe said. You went to Harvard. When you were at Harvard, you were an atheist. You also went to Columbia. Sadly, these schools, which specifically Harvard and Yale were divinity schools. Now we're not there anymore. The ideas that are coming out of a lot of these schools, which frankly shape the world because most of these people run everything. When you were there, what did you see? Obviously you weren't on the Catholic page, but I'm interested because I think one of the ideas of the Jesuits was to basically leave a mark on the most influential. That's very important. I like that strategy. It's kind of like an inverse George Soros strategy. You gotta influence the influential 'cause they're the ones that are gonna touch people. Sadly, you got these schools, super smart people, and they're getting influenced by crazy people in plain English. They're crazy. What was your take on it? How do we change that? 'Cause if you ask me, that needs to be adjusted. - Well, one of the things, when I went to Harvard, I was by then an evangelical Protestant 'cause I went for a doctoral year of study, which is usually their way of like, do we want this guy to do his full doctrine here? Because of my Christianity, I think that's why I wasn't accepted into the full doctoral program, which then I went down to Columbia and did some work there and ran into the same problem. By the time I was at Columbia, I was right in that kind of a number of between Protestantism and Catholicism, but the guy who needed to pick up my dissertation who was the dean of the department refused to do so, because my dissertation that I had been working on for maybe about a couple of years, we would have to write longer and longer papers to show we're doing the research. It was about Christian moral leadership and then finally Catholic moral leadership. And so having been in those very influential places, you do what you can do, but a lot of times the outcome is almost a foregone conclusion because even if you were to persuade or open the mind of one or two of them to some degree, the overall culture at those schools, despite their academic prowess, was very much anti-Christian, anti-Catholic, very much a modern idea where perception is reality beyond the nature of physical science. And so that's right where Christianity, particularly Catholic Christianity separates because what we say is that there's truth to be known through reason and through revelation as well as the hard sciences. - You know, it's- - No, absolutely. - I just want to just also, I'm reading Larry Chapp's book, Confessions of what's it called? A Catholic Worker and he got a PhD at Fordham. I'm not picking on Fordham, but he wrote something. He began his dissertation. I think he completed it on Hans von Balthasar and the person who was in charge of it was kind of down on him and kind of persuading him not to go down that road. These schools are supposed to have intellectual freedom. I mean, like, if you want to write about something, you should be able to write about it. Like, and then if you want to defend it, then defend it. Like, I don't understand that. Like, I really just don't understand that. Like, that's at a Catholic school. Now, you know, I'm not versed in, you know, about, I can even- - Von Balthasar, yeah. - Yeah, I can't even say his name. That would probably read his books. But the point is like, you know, like, what is that? Like, I mean, like, really. - Well, but academic freedom at those institutions tends to be fairly well-proscribed, right? It isn't like you can do anything. It has to be rigorous. It has to be intellectual, but it also has to fit the paradigm. And on some measure, well, and this is their idea of, we're giving you freedom, but not for that. I remember I applied or looked into applying at Harvard Divinity School. And one of the questions I ran into from an admissions counselor was, well, have you taken courses on where religion's in it? To that point, I have taken apologetics courses. So I offered that and she's snickered on the phone. This is an admissions counselor, meaning you can't come here if you actually have conclusions that you have the truth. I mean, that shouldn't say that all in, but that's what that meant, is that the idea of apologetics would be the defense of the faith, and in that course, we studied a number of world religions, but it was from the standpoint of defense and explaining why they're not. And that's part of their thing. Like any answer is the right answer, so long as you don't insist on it being a right answer for any other person other than yourself. Well, that's the way it all works. Well, let's stay there. Well, let's stay there. We're talking, if you're just joining us here, at the front line with Joe and Joe in the Veritas Catholic Radio Network, Truth in Modern Times, Frank Cronin's joining us, because Frank has a series of five articles on the Catholic Exchange. Please go on Catholic Exchange and go and read them. This is part of our, this is part of our arsenal, because see Catholics have been doing philosophy for a lot longer than these people at Harvard and Yale, and the rest of these other places, all right, have been doing philosophy for much longer. And we have the heavyweights of human history, like Augustine and Aquinas and many, many others. So let's stay there on Truth, Frank. Let's, so we're talking about truth, right? You just got done saying, you could say it, you know, you believe in something to be true, but don't you dare, through scholarship and rigorous argument and evidence, don't you dare suggest that you're gonna actually argue that it's objective truth? You see, here's where I want you to go, Frank. When it comes to truth, then please educate our audience and anybody listening, okay. The claim that there is no truth is a, it is logically incoherent. It implodes on itself, because the person asserting that there is no truth is asserting it is an absolute truth, as an objective truth. Please address that and anywhere else you wanna go, because I'm tired of hearing that I can't defend the Catholic faith through argument and rigorous scholarship and everything else, because everything is relative. That's a, that's a hunk of BS. If you ask Joe and Joe, Frank, I'm throwing it over to you. - Well, I mean, you're exactly right. It's, they're breaking the law of non-contradiction, right? You can't assert something and have that be based on a contradiction, and that's the contradiction. The problem is, is for most of the modern world, they don't believe reason. They believe reason is more manipulative than capable of proof. So they would just blow that right off out of hand and feel no real compulsion to defend it, because you're just citing what you think is logic, but it's just really rhetoric, which means that that's the use of reason to persuade rather than proof. What we would say is that, well, actually reason can prove things. We could see it in mathematics, right? It can prove logic. Logic is pervades mathematics. You use reason in science. You can't, there is, and this is real, this is probably the key mistake that the modern world makes, is they take science for a methodology for finding truth. It's certainly a methodology for finding truth about things physical, because that's what science can experiment with, physical things. But the problem is, is that you cannot do science without reason. The development of a hypothesis requires reason. The selection of experimental methods requires reason. Analyzing the data requires reason. Reasons all over the place. Well, from a physical reality, that's all there is to the world. How do you explain reason? Where did that come from? And for me, that's always like the, the strongest apologetic argument, I think, for the existence of God, given our modern presuppositions, the things we believe in without thinking them through. It's like, well, for one, you can't do science without reason. So if you're gonna talk about the existence of God, or even the meaning in the universe, or the possibility of meaning, you're really looking at like, okay, science is a way of gaining information about the physical reality, but really everything is based on reason, right? Like, if you're gonna make an argument, you have to use logic. If you're gonna do science, you have to use logic in the development of your hypothesis. So science isn't really a bottom line way of knowing. Science is built on reason. And this is where it becomes apologetic, because what you have is an intangible order to thought that had to be put there. These are rational laws that every one of us uses constantly throughout the day when we're trying to understand and explain things we know reason matters. Well, reason for me at least, most of the time is the best way and the most significant and commonplace proof of the existence of God. How do you get an intangible order to everything in the universe and in the human mind and in science and then say that everything in the universe is on matter, energy, time and space. It doesn't work. - Well, Richard Dawkins tries to make that work. Let me stay there for a second, Frank Growner, 'cause he's the most outspoken atheist of the last 30 years. He claims to be the smartest guy in the room. I'm sure we all have to agree with that, right? Richard Dawkins is the smartest guy in the room. But like you said, he has made such, again, I'm sorry to be cruel, Joe Ross, you know, don't get mad at me. I won't curse, I promise, okay? But he has made some of the most boneheaded statements that a five-year-old, or let me be more generous, a child of the age of reason. Let's say eight-year-old can say, well, that's not true, such as the universe could create itself out of nothing by pure chance, okay, through natural selection. I know Hawking said that, but Richard Dawkins believes that too. Richard Dawkins also believes that we don't need metaphysics, which is what you're talking about, Frank. We talk about reason in first principles, okay? Richard Dawkins says we don't need metaphysics. We have physics when a, when a Jamaal like me or Joe Russinello says, you know, there seems to be a lot of order out there in the universe. You know why I know? Because I can look through a telescope and I can see that there's order all over the place. There's laws that govern the universe, knows everything's orderly, everything kind of moves, you know, in a certain way, according to certain laws, right? Well, according to Richard Dawkins, well, it just appears ordered. It's not really ordered. I mean, this is the type of idiocy you're dealing with. Frank Cronin, you're talking about apologetics, show 'em sorry to be long winded. No, no. You're talking about apologetics, you're talking about arguing for reason. The atheist used to argue for reason. They say we don't need religion. We have reason, but now according to you, and I believe you a thousand percent, they want to deny reason too. Frank, where am I wrong? Well, I mean, this is where the change, and this is one of the things I did pick up at Harvard, was the, at orientation, we had a few different speakers and they used the word modernity, which I had never heard before. And I have a pretty good vocabulary. It was like, okay, I heard of that from four different teachers six times in two hours. I really ought to pay attention to this. And so that's what I did, is I spent my time taking my classes, but I also made, I would spend time with professors in philosophy because they would tell me about modernity. Well, modernity really is, it goes back to Descartes, and it's the change from reason to science, right? It's shifts the boundary of how we know. And this is why a lot of times, the very things you're talking about, I'm gonna use a fancy technical term, epistemology. Epistemology is in philosophy, your theory of knowing or how you can know. And that's what modernity is. It inverted and twisted epistemology now, and this is what we're talking about with Dawkins, your very point, is that he believes that the only way we can know anything is if you can demonstrate it physically, right? Therefore, that leaves him open everything else's speculative because we can only know what we can see physically and manipulate that way. And that's true, except for the only part, because the bottom line is that you can't even know what you know about the physical universe without reason being present in and through all of your observations. You can see things and not make sense of those unless you have reason. And this is where the scientific guys like him make the mistake. They look at scientists the only way to know and not understand that science is a composite way of knowing. You manipulate physical things and you follow the thought process, the logic in what you observe. So it's constantly reason-based. And then the question is for guys like Dawkins says, well, okay, once you can get him to see that, well, then explain to me how reason gets there. Why is it so ordered? And that goes back to your point too about the existence and the order and the tuning of the universe, right? We even have the tuning. That was Roger Penrose looked at, that just how finely tuned the universe had to be and did a probability equation to figure out how could it possibly get this way? And it was a number so small that they had more zeroes than there were molecules in the universe. It was that small. This couldn't have happened by accident, right? And Dawkins knows that. If he isn't, he's not as educated as you should 'cause I'm just a knucklehead from Connecticut. And I know that. - Well, listen, you're a lot more, Frank Cronin is joining us here in the front line with Joe and Joe, Joe Piscilla, Joe Riss and all the way in the breach. Frank Cronin, we're talking about a series of five articles that he wrote in Catholic exchange, truth in modern times. Frank, I'm gotta be honest with you. I'm, you're a much more charitable man than me. I think the Dawson, Dawkins and many others, I think they deliberately, they know these things. They're not stupid people. They're not. Richard Dawkins is a smart guy. You wanna know something about zoology? Go talk to him. He knows a lot. And I'm not as charitable as you. I don't think he makes a mistake. I think he, I think all the modern atheists from it, Harris, Hitchens, when he was alive, him, Daniel Dennett and all of them. I think they just hate God. I really do. And so I'm not so charitable as you. I think they hate God. They try to convince others that God doesn't exist. And if you're doing what you say, Frank Cronin, which is, let's say, for I'm gonna take apologetics and seeking truth, all right, through philosophy, first principles, metaphysics, okay? And seeking that truth, they need to, they need to slap you down. Because if you search for truth, you're going to find God. It's just that simple. - Right. Well, but again, this is where they can, on some level, they're motivated, I think is along the lines of what you're doing because they're in, they're the cops. They are the culturally dominant elite, right? They're deciding everything. So you start messing with that. You're not only opening the door for truth, but you're also shifting the boundaries of power and stuff and prestige. So these guys have a lot at stake. This is just truth logically. I mean, Richard Dawkins is, like you would say, one of the smartest guys in the planet, he's more notable than most scientists are. So he's got a lot to lose. - Yeah. - And in fairness to him, okay, that's fine. But just look at what you're doing scientifically. Just look at that. That's what you have to do. And for me, I mean, I used to be an existential atheist for 15 years, from the time I was like 17 to 30, 30, 35, somewhere in there. I was, I used to think it was comical. There was too much fun. All Christians and they're going to talk to you. This was like shooting fish in a barrel because most of them were like Protestants. They'd bring out scriptures like, you don't have an argument there. Your scripture is revelation. We're skipping a couple of steps here and it used to be fun until I was forced. My wife became a born-again Christian two weeks before we got married. Now I have a question I have to deal with 'cause I'm not, I know that bringing God into the midst of a relationship is no small thing. And I wasn't really down with that. And I even told her on a wedding day. It's like, if this becomes a big issue, I'm out of here at six months. And I was being very honest and straightforward about that wasn't anger or anything. So it does matter, but those guys have a lot more at stake than I would have. And it took me five and a half years to come to the realization that there's a God and Jesus was God. - Well Frank, I'm going to hand it over, I'm going to hand it over to Joe Russinello, but that's why we love having you on the show and people like you because if they don't want to argue, see I'm tired of Evangelicals arguing with them. I want Catholics like you debating them and many, many others 'cause if you're not going to debate us then we're just going to keep calling you to the carpet through podcast and radio shows and everything else. Joe Russinello. - I'm going to give a tangible example and kind of blow that out a little bit. You know, the term primacy of conscience, I'm primacy of science is thrown around until it's not convenient and I'll give you the concrete example. Changing the sex of a child can't do it, can't do it. Science tells you that. In fact, science used to tell you that until the politics manhandled the science and pushed them in a corner. Science used to tell you that. So now you have adults who have embraced a religion which is a woke ideology, it's their religion and some of them actually have listened to their 10 year old and allowed this 10 year old to dictate the gender of themselves and the adults go along with it. Now this takes place. 20 years from now, I'm absolutely convinced that society is going to look back at this period and say this was horrendous. Similarly, how we look at lobotomies which at one point were performed in America. We don't do that anymore. Although if you look at some of the ideas that are being thrown around, you would think that lobotomies are still actively being practiced, but they're not. But let me get back to what I'm saying. So you have these people who are doing this to children. Do you actually think some will, but most won't, will admit to themselves and to others that I destroyed my child? I bring this up because they're going to double down and triple down on it and carry it to the end because of what you're saying. I am not going to turn my world upside down, call it truth, call it whatever because I've built my life on a lie. And that is why people like Dawkins and others, when you present facts to them, they're irrefutable, it's irrefutable. If there's an objective score being kept, you cannot keep the score, you lose, but I'm not going to change. I'm not going to turn my life upside down because I've built it on garbage. And too many people do. And that's why we get these type of arguments. They make no sense. You could be the smartest person going. You could be a janitor in plain English and you could present some of these facts. Like there are two genders. You could be a caveman and you know that there are two genders. People look you straight in the face and tell you there's 57 of them. We have the president of the United States who goes on CNN and says there's-- - He says there's at least three. - Which is the most ridiculous statement I have ever heard of from a person in such a position. It's moronic. Talk about that because I don't think it has anything to do with truth. I think it's self-preservation, Frank. I'm not willing either. I'm preserving my power base. I'm preserving my wealth. I'm preserving whatever. But I'm not going to turn my life upside down. Call it truth, call it whatever for anybody. What do you think? - Well, great measure. I agree with most of those criticism. What I would say is, is the problem is, is that if it's science only, then the only thing that we can know know is the behavior and nature of the physical universe, right? That's all we can know, which moves everything over into person. Anything beyond that is perception, right? It's not fact, it can't even be verified. So perception is king. And that's what leads to a lot of the very things you're talking about, is my perception is reality beyond the physical biochemistry of being. Anything else is just perception. And because it's perception, that's where you can get those, what seem to be a contradiction between science. There's two genders, and now there's whatever, however many there are, right? Those are all based on perception, because they believe that beyond the hard sciences, everything else is a matter of perception. That's why the mean, the word philosophy has come to mean your point of view, not truth, right? Philosophy, pre-day carton in particular, but even pre-1960, meant that you had an assertion of truth to there, that philosophy was a pathway to truth, regardless of what conclusion you come to. Well, since the 60s or since the 50s, I mean, in a broad cultural sense, that has become not the case. Your philosophy is your perception, and who am I to criticize you about your perception? Because we know there's no truth to philosophy, so if we're not talking hard science, or the applications of science, everything else is a matter of perception, and you and I and Joe would all disagree with that. We would say, no, if philosophy can get you to truth, because philosophy is built on the use of the logic, they don't see it. Science is the only way to know, because they overlook the nature of reason in science, and beyond science, when we're talking about things that aren't part of the physical universe, about matters of ethics, and morals, and truth, and so on, those are matters that are actually more easily addressed with reason than they are even with science, because science is confined to the physical realm. And so that's where they come up with this stuff, and because they're not willing to look at their huge and cataclysmic epistemological mistakes, right? Their theory of knowing is off. It touches everything, and it has to, and it's not 'cause they're crazy, it's just that if there's no way to know what you have knowing wrong, you have everything else wrong, 'cause everything else is downstream from how you know. - Frank, let's take a quick break here at the Veritas Catholic Radio Network, 1350 on your AM Dial 103.9 on your FM Dial. Frank Cronin joining us here. Please go and read his articles, which is what this conversation is about. Truth in modern times. Frank, we're gonna go to a break, and then we're gonna come back with one of the things that I just don't understand. I know you're doing it, many others are doing it. When they make the statement such as, well, the only knowledge we can absolutely know is any knowledge that can be scientifically verified. And when you just, like again, like the eight-year-old, who annoying kid in the room who says, "Can you scientifically improve that statement?" Hummin' a Hummin' a Hummin' a Hummin' and they turn it to Ralph Graham then 'cause they don't know what to say. Can you scientifically prove that very statement that you said and they can't? We're going to a break, we'll be right back with Frank Cronin'. (upbeat music) - Catholic Radio works, and now we have it here in Connecticut and New York. It's been seen around the country that there's no better tool for evangelization. Where there's Catholic Radio, the folks who listen deep in their faith, families are strengthened, parishes and communities flourish. So, let people know you're listening to Veritas, tell your friends to tune in, and let's make an impact here for Jesus and his church. This is Steve Lee for Veritas Catholic Network. - Welcome back everyone to the front line with Joe and Joe, Joe and Joe, Joe and Joe are in L.O. We are way, way, way in the breach of the Veritas Catholic Radio Network. We're the good friend of the show, Frank Cronin'. We love having him on. Series of articles in Catholic Exchange, which is, Frank, correct me if I'm real. Catholic Exchange is an arm of Sophia Institute Press, correct? - Yes, yes it is. - Okay, and Frank's got a series, Frank's got a lot of articles floating around, and you should, Frank, do you have a website or places where people can mine all the things that you've written? - Actually, I don't, I'm kind of lame and a 70 year old guy around that, but at Catholic World Report, you can just type my name in and the articles there, the Catholic National Catholic Register, and probably I've been writing, I've probably written about 60 articles, 56 the articles for Catholic Exchange, and I think most of those are still up, so you can just get them that way. - And listen, we would encourage everybody out there who's listening to us. One of the ways we equip ourselves in this culture war and what we know as Catholics to primarily be a spiritual battle, well, we have tools, we have weapons, knowledge is one of them, hate to break it to you, you gotta know what you're talking about. That's why we have Frank on the show, Joe Russinello. - Frank, you claim that the existence of God is a matter of fact. I mean, that is a bold, bold statement, 'cause there's a lot of people who would disagree with that. Why is that the case and what's your evidence? - Well, I mean, the question of God, he either is or he isn't, right, even the scientific materialists recognize that that's a factual claim. It's not perception. And the fact that you know that most people wouldn't agree with that assertion is the point we were making just before the break, is that perception is king, right? If I believe in God, and this is where we think of, if I believe in God, then therefore God exists, well, not really, logically that doesn't work. He has to exist before you can believe and/or know that he exists. That's a very Catholic way of working at knowledge and getting to truth, right? You use your intellect first, and when your intellect reveals the answer, then you believe, right? This is why a lot of evangelical Protestants kind of skip that stuff because they begin with faith, right? They believe God rather than know that God exists. And a lot of times that's even how they couch their term. Did you come to faith as opposed to did you come to truth? And a more implicitly Catholic way would be to go, well, does God exist? And logically, maybe even scientifically, but certainly logically, the existence of God has to be a matter of fact, because if you say he is, and I say he is, we both cannot be right. And that little question that you have here is a great way of encapsulating our modern problem, because most people would say, I believe in God, and therefore he is, as opposed to know, he is, therefore I believe in that story. That's what makes some of what we do. So different and out of the box and countercultural, because we've come to believe that belief in God is a matter of will, not of intellect. And if you're gonna say God exists to you, you have to have evidence, what's your evidence, right? And that's a fair question whether you're an atheist or a believer to ask, so what's the evidence for God? - Frank, I wanna explore this from a Catholic lens for a moment. - Sure. - Padre Pio, the man has holes in his hand for 50 years, 50, and then two weeks before he dies, they disappear. And I can remember like reading people who questioned that, and they basically said, "Will you in your mind made that happen?" And he scoffed at it clearly. Like it's in like you willed the holes in your hands, because it was irrefutable, it's evidence. You're looking at a man who has holes in his hand. You have eyes, you could see that. I'll use another example. When you go to confession, when I go to confession, I feel better. It's not a figment of my imagination. I feel a weight was taken from me. I feel that. Just like if you told me after I ate a big meal, you're not full. I'd be like, "Frank, you know, I am full. It's real, it's a feeling." Well, it's the same thing. A confession, it's more than just like talking to someone. I could talk to both of you. And, but I don't get the same feeling as if I-- - You're not gonna feel better after talking to me for an hour or two. - Yeah, I definitely do. But in terms of if I did something bad, it's a difference. So that's a tangible, if you ask me that's evidence, if you sit before the Blessed Sacrament, there's tangible peace in that room. It really is, you could perceive it. So if you ask me that's evidence, that's evidence, it's not a figment of your mind. You're not like making this up. Talk about that 'cause if you ask me that is evidence that points to God in the here and now. I mean, Padre Pio has passed. However, his body didn't decay. You can go and see this man. His body didn't decay. Is that evidence, that to me is kind of scientific. It should be dust. He died in 1969. Talk about that 'cause again, the world refuses to look there. When in fact, okay, please. - Well, again, that's the scientific paradigm or at least the common understanding of it, right? I mean, that's the point. And when you point to physical evidence, which you're siding with Padre Pio and so on, well, what do you do with that, right? And most atheists, I would bet, would just walk away scratching the head, but I don't know, some kind of physical anomaly we haven't figured out or gotten to yet, you know? Nobody's done it and they won't let us examine the body. You gotta, gotta, gotta. So you can see how that could, they could do that. That's why back in, what was it, I think the early '80s, they did the Shroud of Turin analysis. They put together a whole big, long thing about that. And several of the guys on the committee, which I ended up talking to on several occasions back then, when I was curious about God, they said, well, you know, I was a scientist by scientist. That's what I went as and I brought the scientific paradigm. He said, and by looking at that, there's no way that this happens in the real world. This would require some miraculous event in order for this to happen. And he did it by, back then, was kind of high-end tech, that they looked at the shading and the whole thing on this, and it was a holographic impression of the body of a man, with all the scars and wounds that Jesus had. So it can be done, but a lot of times, when we offer counter-evidence, they will fall back on their inherent skepticism about anything beyond physical science, and that's where they hide out. What happens is and I may be overgeneralizing from my own experience a singular point, like the point about the Shroud, that wasn't enough to convince me, but it was enough to make me look fairly and skeptically at the evidence for God. And that was saying, Joe, if I may, one thing I would say, Frank, is this. This is where I'm at, okay? And it speaks to what we're talking about. You could comment on it if you want, but I just want to throw it out there, okay? I don't believe one bit that it requires not one drop of faith on my part to believe in the existence of God. I believe that based on science and reason, that science tells us in the beginning, there was nothing. And you could see this, by the way, with the new atheist argument, because now they're trying to redefine nothing. Lawrence Kraus, Dan Barker, people like that. Well, it was empty space. Sorry, fellas, empty space is something. It was a really small particle. Sorry, fellas, a really small particle is something. You can't redefine nothing. Whether you have a PhD on your wall, or you are a server in a restaurant, or a busboy in a restaurant, okay, you can't redefine what nothing is. And in the beginning, there was nothing. God is required to bring the universe into existence. Now, I know that's a very simple way of stating many of the classic arguments that have been made. I don't feel like it requires faith on my part. One bit to believe in the existence of God. I think when Richard Dawkins told a group of his sycophantic followers that if you meet anybody who believes in God, mock them to their face, dude, you're the one that needs to be mocked. Because you actually think the universe can come into existence, and pre-exist itself, and all these logical incoherent, logically incoherent statements that they make. Listen, you want to question me about the real presence of Jesus Christ in the universe? Yes, in the Eucharist? Yes, that requires faith. If you want to question me about the perpetual virginity of the blessed mother, yes, that requires faith. You want to question me on the resurrection? Yes, that requires faith. Believing in a creator God? When we know the universe before the universe existed, there was nothing, that one's easy, Frank. Sorry, brother, that one's easy. I'd love a comment for you. That one's an easy one for me. Well, and it is, but the problem is, I mean, this is the dilemma of evangelization, right? You can give them the article, make that point, rather. You know, to them. And then the people that you're with walk away, okay, the evening's over, whatever. It's like, does that haunt them? Does that eventually, I mean, as a person who used to be an atheist, nobody ever really gave me any argument that forced me to think much. You know, they would cite scripture, which is you're already citing the other side of defense. I can't go there. We can't have a revelation of God until I know that there is one. On the other hand, when I began to do some reading about that, about the existence of God that was downstream from Mrs. Cronin becoming a Christian at our wedding. Well, now you got my attention, you know, because like for one, I would ask her and she had the dumbest of answers. It's like, how do you know? And she goes, I don't know, Cronin, I just know. And that that was like lame. It's like, well, that's not someplace I can go, right? Like she had, for her, it was a spiritual thing before it was theological or philosophical or factual thing. For me, it was the other way around. I couldn't get that spiritual, that mystical component until I knew that he was there. But I had a part in my life that forced me to at least think about that fairly regularly. 'Cause this is the woman I love, the best human being I've ever met. And suddenly she's like, she's off the rails. What the heck? What happened to her? You know, and so that's why it took me five and a half years 'cause I was busy getting a degree in working and working and so on, but I had a reason beyond me to haunt me. And I think we're a lot of folks, and this is why bringing up logic and making a clean, logical case like you're talking about is a good thing. And then, and this is where I think the science thing or the science only thing, when you unpack that whole floor, that can open up a can of worms. I've seen that with people that I've talked with. It's like, you know, okay, they follow the logic. Only one of us can be right, right? The existence of God is not a question of belief. It's a matter of fact, either he is or he is not. That's a logical dichotomy that cannot, they both cannot simultaneously be true. And they can't be true by perception, right? That can't be based on my personal perception. Okay, so then we start talking, for me, I generally go to, I'll play an awakening. We'll talk about the nature of science. And it looks, it's really a backdoor play, but that's the play, right? Like undermine their false idea of what science does and can do. And put it on a grounding on logic instead, and try to maneuver that way is coming in the backdoor. But all of a sudden they begin to see that reason can, you know, here you have science this. And then mathematics, that's almost entirely reason. You can see people start scratching their head metaphorically, but with that, when I talk with them, you know, again, you keep closing the deal in three hours. You know, this is one of those things where you throw it, you can throw it, you read the room or read the person and throw them like you think they can. You know, they can handle and that intrigues them. You know, and you play the long game. - Well, that's the thing. It's a long time I handed it over to Joe Frank Cronin, joining us here at the front line with Joe and Joe. It's a long game. We have to remember our job, but we're not converting anybody. Holy Spirit does the conversion. Our job is to let God use us and talk like we're talking right now. Plant those seeds. All right, I'll give you a seed. You don't have to comment down, I'm gonna throw it over to Joe, but a simple one along the lines that we're saying, I said to one of my atheist friends, we've gotten into this conversation a little bit. We were at work, so it's kind of difficult. You don't want to get into those conversations at work. But I said, dude, listen, I believe in two fundamentally tenable positions. Number one, God created the universe out of nothing. Okay, God, and that is completely defensible. And the other one is based on history and other factors. I believe that three days after he was crucified and was dead, actually dead, Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. I believe everything else, and I'm gonna hand it over to Joe Frank, everything else to me is downstream from that. Everything else is easy. Belief in the Blessed Mother, in the church, in all of it, okay. If I believe those two things, and I could show those two things and demonstrate them with reason and logic, okay. I know that with my friend that I said that to, he had that look on his face like, oh crap. Maybe I shouldn't go deeper into this conversation. Joe Restinello. - I'm gonna take what you said, Joe, and put it through a more of a Catholic lens and bring it back to Genesis. You basically show that there had to be a creator from nothing, nothing. Something had to make that spark. Okay, and I think that's a logical idea, and I think if you're being honest with yourself, many people could say, okay, I'll give you that. I'll give you that. But now let's take it to the Catholic way of thinking. As Catholics, we believe in absolute truth. Two plus two is four. It's four everywhere. Benedict talked about that as in Pope Benedict. He talked about the dictatorship of relativism, which is basically going on today. It's pervasive all over the world. And this takes us to Genesis, where there is a creator, and maybe I could agree with you there. But then here's the rub. The creator says, you have everything. Except you can't decide what's right and wrong. I do. The tree of knowledge of what? Good and evil, and I'm the creator, and I determine it, and you don't, because you're the creation. Wrong. I determine what's right and wrong. I'll buy your argument, Joe Pacillo. I like the idea that there's a God. But listen, man, what works for you doesn't work for me. I have my truth, you have your truth. That's how it rolls. It's that rub. It's the sin of Adam and Eve. It's the don't eat the apple. Why? Because I'm God, and I'm telling you not to. I determine what's right and wrong. Because I'm God. No, no, no, no. I'm God. I'm God. That's what society's still saying. Talk about that, Frank, because I think that's the rub. I think you give really good evidence, and I think an honest person could say, you know how I'll give you that? I'll give you that. There is a guy up in the sky, and he turned the lights on. But that tree thing, I'm out. I'm out. I still want that apple. I still want that apple. Go ahead, Frank. Well, you know, what we want and what we're supposed to want are often two different things, right? That's part of the problem. And that's kind of what both of you are kind of coming to. On the other hand, and this is one of those things, this is why I think your reason is so, like the fundamental way to know beyond existence, right? Because in order to understand that the existence of everything is proof of God, is a logical move, right? Like, that's very rational. And rightfully so. The same thing with Joe and the moral question. Okay, so like we have a God who not only created the physical universe, because we can prove that. That's your point, Joe. But also a God who created an order to the mind that's irrefutable, and we use it constantly, and we have to attribute that because it's intangible, not to physical realities, but to a being that is not physical. How could you get the order of mind any other way, right? And that order of mind having a stab (indistinct) or the order in the intelligence. We can't get that from nothing, right? Just, that's the argument for existence as well. Well, that goes back to the tree question too. Like, here's a God who's ordered our mind. And not only did he order our mind, but he wants to order our disposition too. And that's where it goes to the tree in the garden, right? Like, I have this for you too. These are truths for you too. And of course we run into the adult or the human thing of like, I want to do what I want to do. That's fine, if you're picking and choosing, but we also know that if those things were done to you, that's a problem, right? Like, because if you want to do what you want to do, suppose I want to wrap in the mouth 'cause they think you're a jerk. Is that okay? No. So, you know, there's a lot, logic to morality is my universe. It's, and to make an argument for even the non-existence of God, right? With logic. Well, like you're using tools you haven't paid for. You know, you haven't paid for the use of reason intellectually, if you're an atheist. You need to be able to show me how you can get reason out of an atheistic point of view. And this is, I wrote an article probably about two years ago called "Shoplifting Atheists" because they're constantly using tools they haven't paid for intellectually. The scientists are using tools. That's great, but you haven't explained reason. You don't get to use that without explanation. You don't get to do science. You don't even get to build a case for anything because a case for anything requires an implicit use of logic. And you're not paying for that. You haven't explained that. And the minute you try and explain the idea of a logic and reason and deduction and induction and science, it's like, you're really, that's God. These are all intangible things. Where'd that come from? Who put that there? To sound like Abbott and Castello. No, how did that come? Come about. Now, all of a sudden, they're on the defensive. How do I explain an intangible order to the universe? That is the basis for all the science that I'm trying to push the other way or all the morality I'm trying to somehow vindicate and explain because perception is king. It doesn't work. - Frank, you said one thing. Frank Cronin joining us here at the front line with Joe and Joe, you said many things. But you said one thing that Joe and I hammer on this show all the time. Put them under defensive, man. I don't know, we're Roman Catholic men. I'm gonna go back to it one more time. We have to hold the positive of faith. We have the philosophical tradition. Okay, what are we defending? Make them defend their ridiculous arguments. That's why we're glad you're on the show and we love having you on the show 'cause we're talking about truth in modern times and that is available at Catholic Exchange. That's a series of five articles that Frank has written and you should go and see all his articles there, National Catholic Register, Catholic World Report. Frank is a treasure. Frank, I'm not just saying that 'cause you're our friend. Frank's a treasure. He's given us by writing these things down. He's giving us the equipment and the tools that we need to really engage people on the intellectual level so that they can make that leap of required faith in, let's say, Catholic teaching in Jesus Christ, the Word, the Logos, incarnate, okay? But we're giving them the intellectual heft to be able to do that. I did wanna get into this. Joe, actually, I'm gonna hand it over to you 'cause I think I know where you're going. We have time, I did wanna talk about love. I don't know where you're going, but go ahead. - Actually, I wanna talk about that 'cause that's important, right? I was just gonna ask that. Our Lord says I am the way, the truth, and the life. He didn't say I'm the custom. We know we're talking about truth here, but God is love. He's love. And I think it's important to understand that because what is true love? People say love is love, this, that, and the other thing. No, God is love. How do we link what true love is to the truth? An all-loving God. Many people will say, I can remember seeing an interview. I'm not picking on him. I'm just gonna use what he said, Robert De Niro in the actor studio. He said, God has a lot of things to explain. Really, Bob? God has things to explain. Like, if I was on that stage, I think I would have passed out like after that's, 'cause when I listened to that statement, but if you step back, a lot of people feel that way. - Yeah. - 'Cause God is love, love and truth are the same. You can't take one without the other. Explore that because ultimately, the truth may not turn you around, but love does. - Well, I mean, there's a lot of different paths to getting someone to understand and to encounter God. I mean, I think you're exactly right. We make a distinction between love and truth so we could drill down on them, but real, and this is where sometimes we forget, or even in our own thinking, that you're only half done. Now that you've explained those, now you gotta put them back together again, right? You have to put them in, how does love inform truth and truth inform love, and how does that all work together? Well, that's the point. I mean, and this is where I've at least been my experience in evangelism of like, I have a lot easier time explaining the idea of love, right? Or the experience of love. On the other hand, love is a little more complicated and people tend to hear that like they do many things that we've talked about so far through the ears of a modern perspective. And they hear when they think of love, they think merely of emotion. And it's love, while that's part of it, it's way more than that. That comes with morality and beauty and when we can see things, we see it behaviorally. That's a beautiful act of love or an act of an altruistic act or like an act that can kill you, right? Like an act of love performed by like our, a lot of our service members or first responders. We don't think of that as love, but they're actually putting their life on the line for somebody else. You can't get bigger than that, you know, even if it's momentary, even if it's, you know, you just ran into the burning building and came out with the baby. That's an act of deep and profound love. It's also an act of deep and profound morality. It's also an act of deep and profound philosophy, that all of those things. And so many of the things in the modern world we really treasure, we haven't looked close enough to that. And this is because of the scientific paradigm that it blinds us to that or distorts that. And it pushes that into some kind of personal relativism or some kind of emotional thing, right? Like that's why some of the things you were talking about earlier, Joe, about going to confession and feeling a weight off. You know, like people can give that same description and they come out of their therapists 45-minute session with their therapists. But there's a profound difference between the two because philosophically and epistemologically, cosmologically, even morally, they're not bringing it all together. And that's the way these things inform one another. We tend to separate them, particularly the physical reality and everything else is moral. This is why love, we think love is mostly emotion without thinking that through. And when we do think it through, we understand the profundity of it, but we don't stay in there because it doesn't have any, if all we have is biochemistry, so love is, you can't tie those things together. You can't bring together the physical and the intangible. It just does, it's hard to do for a modern person. And that's why it's all about feelings rather than the truth of feelings. We have feelings all the time, but it's not always proportionate to what's going on. Sometimes we have a lack of it, sometimes we have too much of it. Sometimes we misperceive things, mostly. - Frank, we gotta, unfortunately, we have to end it there. I do wanna end with this though. When you see how Hollywood and their slickness, they try to get a lot of these ideas into their movies. In the scene between Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino and the devil's advocate, the climactic scene at the end, Keanu Reeves asks, and then obviously Pacino's the devil, and Pacino says, Keanu Reeves asks him, he says, what about love? He goes, overrated, biochemically, no different than consuming large quantities of chocolate. Now people might laugh at that, but that is the modern conception of love. Love is something that might be going on subjectively. Go have some Hershey bars, and he'll get the same damn feeling. Frank Cronin, it's always a pleasure having you on the show. Unfortunately, we're running at a time, but we would encourage all of our audience members to please go and read Frank's articles on the Catholic Exchange on this very topic, truth in modern times, five articles. Frank Cronin, as always our friend. You're welcome back on the front line with Joe and Joe any time, brother, thank you so much. Pleasure, great time again, guys. - Thanks a lot, Frank, and thank you all out there for joining us in the Veritas Catholic Radio Network. 1350 on your AM dial 103.9 on your FM dial, spreading the truth of the Catholic faith to the New York City Metropolitan Area. Download the app, share it with your friends, and wherever you see Joe and I on social media, primarily Facebook, Rumble, but also X and YouTube. Like, subscribe, share, share this conversation. This is a great conversation with Frank Cronin, and do all that fun stuff for us. Help us out, and remember, until the next time, that our conversation is your conversation, and that conversation is going on everywhere. We'll talk to you soon. (dramatic music)
