Listening In preview - Vishal Mangalwadi

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next, an excerpt from Listening In.

This week, host Warren Smith visits with Christian author and apologist, Vishal Mangalwadi. In this excerpt of their conversation, Mangalwadi speaks to how the Bible is responsible for the fundamental rights declared in the founding documents of this country. Here’s Warren Smith.

WARREN SMITH: The Bible made possible all, or the vast majority, of the great achievements of the West. You talk about the Bible, it’s teaching us: the importance of the word, covenants, of our loving our neighbors as ourselves, and so on, caused there to be great breakthroughs in technology, agriculture, medicine, the legal arena and the economy. Can you say a little more about that?

VISHAL MANGALWADI: Well, it is amazing that people don’t realize that your belief that you exist as a person different than a robot is because of the Bible. There is no logical way to prove that you exist as a permanent individual soul, self-thinking subject. 

Descartes tried to prove that: “I think therefore I am.” But David Hume and other philosophers quickly pointed out the fallacy that when you doubt that God exists, what you’re proving is that the doubting exists. 

So all the rationalists who decided that, well, uh, the infant knowledge of truth comes to us through our senses, eyes and ears, and uh, touch and smell and taste. Well, we can’t see, smell, touch, uh, taste your soul, yourself, your person. So yes, thinking exists. Doubting exists. 

It’s like a computer, a robot who can play chess and beat you in chess. Uh, answer lots of your questions. Do, solve mathematical problems. Thinking is existing in a robot. Is he a person? Does it self exist? Not this is, uh, to say that every human person is endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. So you are a person different than a robot because you have a self or a soul that’s foundation to believing that human beings have unique dignity and rights and that all human beings are created equal. 

If we are not created in God’s image, then did we evolve equal? Obviously we didn’t. So every high school student in public high schools in America no longer believes that all men are created, let alone created equal. So the very foundation of the Declaration of Independence—that people are all created equal, all are made in God’s image, all have unique dignity and inalienable rights. These foundational assumptions come from the Bible.

EICHER: That’s Vishal Mangalwadi talking to Warren Smith. To hear their complete conversation, look for Listening In wherever you get your podcasts.

(Photo/Vishal Mangalwadi)

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