Chapters:

00:00 Intro
01:27 Darrell’s Current Role at STM
04:15 Darrell’s Teaching History at STM
06:03 Engaging Students with Passion and Faith
09:06 From Teacher to Author: How Science Has Discovered God
18:35 Suffering, Natural Disasters, and the Fine-Tuned Universe
25:06 The Fine-Tuning of the Universe: A Challenge to Atheism
32:33 Free Will and the Existence of Evil
47:14 Why Biblical Scholarship and Context Matter
52:12 Can This Book Bridge the Gap for Atheists and Doubters?
55:18 Introduction to AI: A New Frontier in Technology
58:21 Ethical Concerns and Humanity’s Future with AI
01:03:19 Impactful Teaching: Inspiring Students and Changing Lives

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In this episode of Catholic Education Matters, Troy Van Vliet interviews Darrell Hall (Troy’s former teacher) who reflects on his 46-year career at St. Thomas More Collegiate as a teacher, principal, and current Director of Admissions. They discuss the challenges of school admissions, the importance of engaging students with passion and storytelling, and the evolution of Catholic education. Darrell also shares insights into his new book, How Science Has Discovered God, which presents a reasoned Christian apologetic rooted in science, history, and philosophy. He explains how the fine-tuning of the universe, the historicity of the resurrection, and the presence of suffering all point toward a loving, intelligent Creator. This inspiring conversation blends faith, education, and evidence-based belief in God.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Catholic Education Matters, the podcast that celebrates the beauty of Catholic education, highlighting excellence in academics, athletics, and the transformative power of faith. Join us as we share the stories of those making a lasting impact on Catholic education. Let’s begin.
[00:00:34] Troy Van Vliet: Good day, everybody. Thank you for joining us here today for Catholic Education Matters. And today, I’m really excited to have another ex high school teacher of mine. True. Yes, from St. Thomas More way back in the day. Mr. Darrell Hall. You were my grade nine social studies teacher and also my homeroom.
[00:00:50] Darrell Hall: I hope you weren’t too traumatized.
[00:00:51] Troy Van Vliet: Yes, no, still licking my wounds from all that. No, actually, I think it’s fair to say one of my favorite teachers. Your classes were always engaging. They were fun. You made social studies interesting for the most part, I think. And congratulations on such a robust career at St. Thomas More over forty years. Six years. Forty six years. Wow. That’s amazing. And, that is so, but now you’re also doing some substitute teaching every now
[00:01:26] Darrell Hall: and then? I sub at the school. I’m still director of admissions for the school. I’m not completely fully retired. I’m sort of semi retired.
[00:01:35] Troy Van Vliet: Semi retired. So as director of admissions, what does that mean? What do you do? What does that mean?
[00:01:39] Darrell Hall: Oh, it means that all the students and families that are applying to St. Thomas More Collegiate to come to our school, I’m the one that’s gonna head up the committee. That’s gonna do the selection. We have like about eleven, twelve people that will sit on that committee, but I’ll go through every application. I’ll meet with parents, do tours of the school with them, etc.
[00:02:01] So my job is to basically coordinate it all. I mean, in the end, the final decisions are going to be made by the admin team. But we have a major committee and we have all kinds of teachers from every department that are going to be looking at the actual admissions. What I do is I look at every application and like this year we had 300 applications for grade eight and we’ve only got like 135 spots.
[00:02:24] Troy Van Vliet: Wow, that’s amazing.
[00:02:25] Darrell Hall: So it’s both a blessing and a curse all at the same time. It’s it’s a good problem to have, but I always feel so bad about saying no to so many good families, so many good kids. You just can’t get them. You just can’t get them in the school.
[00:02:39] We’d love to have so many more, but school’s only so big. It only can take so many. You don’t want to have class sizes of 32, 34, etcetera. We want to keep your class sizes like we have around 27. That’s what you want for your class sizes.
[00:02:53] Troy Van Vliet: Yeah. Well, that’s great. That’s great. Well, eventually we’ll have that same problem in our new campus.
[00:02:58] Darrell Hall: You will. Beautiful looking school. I drove by it just again the other day. It’s looking really great. I took that tour with you earlier with the school, but to see that coming up, I mean, it’s the old statement like, was it that field of dreams moving like if you build it, they will come.
[00:03:14] Exactly. I think it’s exactly the thing. You guys have built a great, great school there. I think it’s going to attract all kinds of families.
[00:03:19] Troy Van Vliet: Massive growing area. So the population is increasing. So, yeah, the inquiries are still coming in, which is great for this fall for 2025. So finally, you know, the race is on. We’ve kind of we’ve burnt the ships, but we have to be in there this fall because we’ve got it’s not going to fit in our current campus.
[00:03:39] All the new students won’t fit in there. So we have to have it done.
[00:03:43] Darrell Hall: You will be ready because I heard there’s a group named Tavan Construction that’s involved with that and you seem to have a hand in that and whatever you touch is going to turn to gold.
[00:03:51] Troy Van Vliet: Oh, you’re too kind.
[00:03:53] Darrell Hall: Your group is going to make sure it’s done and ready to go. Know it. So,
[00:03:59] Troy Van Vliet: back to you. Your major teaching background, what is it before we get into
[00:04:06] Darrell Hall: some of that? Oh, I actually have a double major, history and political science.
[00:04:10] Troy Van Vliet: History and political science. Okay. So what grades did you teach at St.
[00:04:14] Darrell Hall: Thomas More? At Thomas More, I’ve actually taught all the different grades at one point or another. Probably my last ten years or so, my main focus was grade ten and twelve. The subject I was teaching at that point was just all religion, all religion classes, even though I’ve taught social studies, history, law, economics, a number of different subjects throughout the time I was there. But for the last while there, I just focused in on teaching the religion program at the school, and I really enjoyed doing the 10s and the 12s.
[00:04:48] And although I must put a little kudos in, a little shout out to my very last year that I was teaching, they asked me if I would teach a grade A class. And I’d never That’s the one grade I’d never taught before. I’ve coached before. I coached football at STM for years at the grade eight level, but I’d never taught an actual grade eight class. And they just say, Hey, look, it would help us out if you would pick up this grade eight class instead of that grade 10 class that you had.
[00:05:14] And I said, Sure, let’s try something new. I said, I’ll do it. You know what? And I really enjoyed that grade eight class. They were so energetic, so much fun.
[00:05:23] I just love them. And it was also learning to teach now. I’m so used to teaching at the senior level, especially grade twelves. And all of a sudden trying to teach the religion program to the grade eights, you know, as good as they are and enthusiastic as they are, they still don’t have the same intellectual level as the grade 12s would. So like for me, it was more like trying to adjust to the level.
[00:05:45] But I did so pretty quickly. And the kids were great. I just really enjoyed it. So a shout out to that grade eight class of mine. You guys were great.
[00:05:53] Troy Van Vliet: That sounds super. Thank you for putting up with me for I’m sure you did an incredible job. Well, I had you in grade nine, so you did a great job then. There couldn’t have been that much
[00:06:04] Darrell Hall: of a huge of a difference between you and As I said, you weren’t too traumatized because she looks like you’ve turned out okay.
[00:06:10] Troy Van Vliet: So did you find it with a grade eight class, do you have to be more engaging, entertaining for lack of a better description? Like what are sort of the adjustments? Like intellectually, you said there’s a difference.
[00:06:22] Darrell Hall: I think the biggest thing is the intellectual one. In terms of entertaining, I think you need to be entertaining no matter what grade you’re trying to teach. Entertaining in the way of just simply making sure that you’re storytelling, you’re not just dealing with facts or here’s what we believe, but get some sort of real context to it all. Use some humor, use the storytelling, use some visuals, let the kids ask questions, all that sort of thing. Think it’s important that you just don’t get up and just spell a bunch of facts or something like that or here’s our program.
[00:07:00] It doesn’t work with young people at all.
[00:07:02] Troy Van Vliet: It’s got to be engaging. And I remember in your classes, passion coming through, whether it was in religion or whether it was in social studies. I remember both. I just remember there was passion there. And that keeps kids focused.
[00:07:17] Helps. I’d say
[00:07:19] Darrell Hall: if there’s one comment that students would say that have been in my classes is that he’s really energetic and he’s very passionate about what he teaches. Whether they completely agree with everything I say is a whole different thing, but they’ll say, I’ll tell you one thing. He’s energetic and he’s passionate about it. And I think that applies to the vast majority of teachers because why did you get in the business? Like, you know, it’s to teach kids, And you love teaching kids and so you tend to love your subject matter, but you love the kids too.
[00:07:47] And it’s like a question of just like, hey, I’m here today. I’m going be teaching you this sort of idea. And like, let’s get at it sort of idea. Even when they walk in the classroom, right? Like if you’re already there and they’re walking in, etcetera, you’re saying hello to them.
[00:08:00] You may be asking like, How did the game go yesterday? Or, What were you up to over the weekend? Or you sort of banter back and forth and then you get into the class sort of stuff. So it’s always fun. You got to be energetic.
[00:08:11] You got to be passionate. Otherwise, why do it? That’s super. So you also were the principal at St. Thomas More for I was the principal of St.
[00:08:22] Thomas More for eleven years, from 2000 to 2011. I’ve served in pretty well every role. I was an athletic director, I was a department head, I was involved in the retreat programs at the school, I was a vice principal and then became principal of the school for eleven years.
[00:08:39] Troy Van Vliet: Yeah. Wow. You
[00:08:40] Darrell Hall: started at different functions.
[00:08:41] Troy Van Vliet: You’ve all the different aspects of teaching, of administrating and continue to do some of the administration as well. So that’s awesome. And now you’ve gone down another road where you’ve written a book. I have. And so now you have the title of author as well.
[00:09:02] Darrell Hall: Yeah. Book is called How Science I’ll just throw it up there for people, but How Science Has Discovered God. Then the subtitle Physics, Metaphysics and Beyond. And we might get into that a little bit today here about it. But yeah, that’s the book and it took a lot of time.
[00:09:19] But you know what it was? Largely I had done research for my classes over and over, like kids asking questions, and sometimes I’m going, I’m not too sure about that. Give me a couple of days. Let me go take a look at something. But over the years, I just built up all this information and then somebody suggested to me, you should write a book on it.
[00:09:37] I went, I hadn’t thought about that. I said, I think I will. And so this is the product of all of that. So, yeah.
[00:09:43] Troy Van Vliet: Wow. That’s incredible. And I went to, I guess, like a small seminar series that you were doing. I did go to one of them.
[00:09:51] Darrell Hall: That’s right.
[00:09:51] Troy Van Vliet: Yeah. And you spoke, you were speaking about it and it’s fascinating topic. Yeah. You can talk about it for years, literally in terms of all the different aspects. And as I told you on the way here, was talking about ChatGPT because I thought I wonder what ChatGPT knows about your book and it does and it was giving me the different chapters, kind of giving me an overall synopsis of your book.
[00:10:20] It’s out there already but why don’t you give me a little bit more background on the book and just some overall synopsis and I’m sure there’s going be a lot of conversation that spills from that. Sure.
[00:10:35] Darrell Hall: First of all, I classify myself as a Christian apologist and it doesn’t mean we make apologies, but it’s the idea of offering a positive defense for our faith. It’s simply giving an explanation of why we believe what we believe, That our faith is based on reason and evidence. I think a lot of times people just forget about that, but it’s so important. Our faith is based on reason and evidence. And this book here is all about doing the research, finding the evidence, etc.
[00:11:02] To why do we believe that God exists? What the what are the scientific arguments? What are the mathematical ones? What are the philosophical ones? What are the theological ones?
[00:11:11] The ethical? The historical? My book goes through all of those. And my book also does it from a unique point of view. I look at it this way.
[00:11:20] How about all of our atheist detractors and opponents that are out there, right? Who obviously don’t believe what we believe. I go, well, I need to know what they think. I need to know what their key arguments are. So one of my whole parts of my research was to look at what do the atheist scholars, the historical scholars, their philosophers, their scientists, their mathematicians, what are they saying about these same issues that I want to talk about from Christian perspective?
[00:11:48] What are their arguments? What are their claims? And then what I do in my book is I outline what their claims are. And I only do it from the point of view of scholarship. These are not like people who wrote internet blog.
[00:12:00] These are people who are considered scholars in their field. So I’m going to compare Christian scholars to the atheist agnostic scholars and pit them up against each other. So the thing is, I would outline what their arguments are, and then I would dismantle those arguments. So that’s like one of the approaches I take in the book. Always outlining, here’s what the atheist thinks about this.
[00:12:19] Here’s what our counter is. And as you can tell from the title of the book, I think there’s only one conclusion to draw in the end. Who’s got the better evidence on behalf of their particular point of view? I think that’s the key core nature of the book. It’s looking, it’s not in other words, it’s not just a book about saying, well, here’s what the Christian religion thinks.
[00:12:40] It’s more about, well, here’s what people want to challenge about it. Here’s our arguments to support our viewpoint and to counter theirs. And I think that’s really key. And I do it in different sections. So the first five books
[00:12:56] Troy Van Vliet: first chapters. The
[00:12:57] Darrell Hall: first five chapters of my book, they deal with the science and faith issues. Another three chapters are dealing with the suffering and evil issue, which is a huge one. And then the last five chapters are dealing with Jesus, his claims, his teachings, most importantly his death and his resurrection, because our faith is founded upon the resurrection of Jesus. That’s right. And if that’s true, well then the essence of Christianity is true.
[00:13:24] And what I do is I go to great pains to demonstrate that this is a historical event, the resurrection, therefore it can be investigated. And so what I did was is that I compared what are the best of the atheist historical scholars, in other words, scholars of ancient history, what facts of history around Jesus’ death and resurrection do they agree upon? In other words, is there a consensus between Christian scholars and atheist scholars on facts surrounding Jesus, his death and his resurrection. And there are. So there’s a series of these facts.
[00:14:00] And what I do is I say, okay, well, who’s got the best explanation of those facts? Because if those are facts of history and they’re agreed upon, who’s got the best explanation of those facts? And what I do is I go through a number of the atheist counter theories with regard to trying to explain away the resurrection event. And of course, I dismantle them, each one of them, pretty handily, I must admit. Systematically.
[00:14:22] Systematically just dismantle them and then demonstrate through reason, logic and evidence why the Christian story is the only one that actually addresses all the agreed upon facts of history. So that’s largely the way I’ve approached the book and what I’m trying to do.
[00:14:38] Troy Van Vliet: Incredible. Okay. I’m going to have to ask you because you’re leaving us hanging. Can you give us a couple of examples of some of those facts? I could.
[00:14:48] That you dismantle.
[00:14:50] Darrell Hall: I always love how these things go. But I know how it’s going go. Yeah. But sure. So for example, one of the things that’s agreed upon, these again, not people who are out there on the Internet blog denying the very existence of Jesus.
[00:15:03] Now, scholars of ancient history that are atheists, they absolutely admit that Jesus is a real individual that really existed. But not only that, they agree upon a number of things about him. So, number one, they’ll agree, yes, he died on a cross. His body was placed in a tomb. That the disciples were scared.
[00:15:22] After Jesus’ death, they went into hiding and they were scared, etc. They had lost faith. They agree that there’s an empty tomb that has to be accounted for. They agree that the actual apostles and the disciples of Jesus really truly believed that they saw the risen Jesus. And that their lives were transformed by that experience.
[00:15:46] Now there’s just five. Just so you know, there’s actually, depending on how you want to count it, but there’s somewhere between about 50 to 100 different facts that are agreed upon. But these five is all you need. Once you go through those five, you’d say, okay, what are your counter theories? And they’ll have theories that Jesus didn’t really die.
[00:16:07] It just looked like he did. He just sort of fainted. Like he just went unconscious and just go, really? But anyhow, but you’ll get this sort of thing happening. So anyhow, they will come up with their counter theories.
[00:16:17] I dismantle each one as I go and then demonstrate how we’ve got really good evidence to answer those five questions because those are facts of history that are agreed upon. There’s a consensus. It’s not just here’s the Christian view. No. Our atheist scholars agree on this as well.
[00:16:36] But now if you agree those are facts, they have to be explained. And they don’t have a good explanation. In fact, one of the top scholars who’s an atheist scholar is a guy named Bart Ehrman. Very good scholar, by the way. Very smart, intelligent guy.
[00:16:53] He’s actually a professor, I forget what university right now, but he’s a professor down in The United States there at a major university. And he just says to his students now, he says, if you’re asked a question, like, about the resurrection, etcetera, something like that, he goes, I just tell my students now, don’t try to argue against, like for any of the old theories that we try to use to counter, don’t try to use them because the Christian scholars have totally dismantled those. All he’s saying simply say is, well, we don’t know what happened. But wait a minute, you’re a scholar of ancient history. You have facts of history you agree upon, and now you’re just throwing up your hands and saying, Well, just don’t know what happened.
[00:17:39] I’m sorry, that’s not good enough.
[00:17:41] Troy Van Vliet: I suppose you could say that, but any history books. Well, we just don’t know. Well, according to this book, we just don’t know. So yeah, it’d be tough to survive as a society if we use that claim for everything. Yes.
[00:17:57] Wow. Wow. So what would be the best argument for atheism?
[00:18:09] Darrell Hall: Oh, sure. Sure. And then
[00:18:11] Troy Van Vliet: we can dismantle that. What would you say? Because you’ve heard so many, there’s what would you
[00:18:18] Darrell Hall: think is the best argument for atheism? Then What’s usually considered the strongest argument against the Christian faith is the existence of suffering and evil in the world. That’s usually considered the strongest argument against it. The basic question is, how can a good, loving, all powerful God allow for suffering and evil and still be considered good, loving and all powerful? Because if he’s well, good and loving, wouldn’t he prefer a world without evil?
[00:18:49] If he’s all powerful, wouldn’t he be able to create such a world? Given the prevalence of suffering and evil in the world, either he’s not all good and loving or he’s not all powerful or a combination of the two. Putting it in a nutshell. There’s the key question. But it takes, like I take three chapters, it takes a long time to go through this.
[00:19:10] You can’t dismantle it within one or two minutes. Just can’t do that sort of thing. One of the things I would simply point back to is, rather than going I do a whole approach where I go through a whole philosophical approach to this whole question. But actually, would just like to bring up one aspect of this. I would simply say to them this.
[00:19:33] Christianity is the only religion that has a suffering God. Have you ever even thought about that? No other religion proposes that there God became man and then suffered on behalf. If nothing else, we know that he cares and he loves us. Jesus died on that cross showed us that he loves us, he cares for us.
[00:19:59] He actually demonstrated what I call the big three virtues of life. Yeah. Love, courage, and the willingness to suffer. It was the love that Jesus had for us that gave him the courage to be willing to suffer and die on our behalf. And that’s an example for every one of us.
[00:20:15] So one of the things I just point back to them is that we as Christians do not avoid this question. Now, do we have answers to every one of the questions that somebody might have? The answer of course is no. But do we have a lot of really good, solid answers back to the concerns that people have? The answer is absolutely yes.
[00:20:33] It’s one of the reasons why I included that chapter in my book. Sorry, not chapter, but three chapters on it. I even go into, example, why natural disasters? Why create a world that has natural disasters in it? You see, if you go back into the science of everything is that and the fine tuning of our universe, for example, it actually couldn’t have been created any other way.
[00:20:55] If you want to have complex creatures like us, you couldn’t have created any other way than what it is. And that includes all the natural disasters that presently exist on our planet. But people don’t understand that the natural disasters or what we call natural disasters are actually natural forces that are absolutely essential to life on the planet. I’ll just give you one example. Earthquakes.
[00:21:16] We live in the Lower Mainland, and we always talk about the big ones coming. Earthquakes. Why earthquakes? Why do we have earthquakes? And what are earthquakes?
[00:21:27] Well, we’ve got these floating land masses, right? Our continents are floating land masses. They’re floating on a molten mantle. You could say, well, God, why didn’t you just create a solid rock sort of planet? Like, you know, don’t have this molten mantle.
[00:21:40] That would stop earthquakes. It’s true because it’s the lands hitting each other. But what did you just do by getting rid of the molten mantle? The molten mantle produces the magnetic field, which we call the Van Allen Radiation Belt, which protects us from the solar winds and radiation of the sun. Without constant earthquake and tectonic activity on this planet, first of all, there’d be no life on the planet.
[00:22:05] Period. We’d have no protection from the solar winds and radiation. Also, you’d have no land masses. You can’t have creatures like us without land masses, unless you just want an all world. People forget sometimes that originally we were an all water world.
[00:22:19] Well, if you want to have creatures like us, you need land masses. That requires tectonic activity, volcanic and earthquake activity. You cannot eliminate those and still want life like us on a planet like this. This is just like one example. You can do this for all the different forces.
[00:22:37] All of them are essential to life on the planet. You can’t eliminate them. If you eliminate them, you eliminate life. So you can complain about them all you want. Like, for example, gravity.
[00:22:46] You can’t have a universe without the law of gravity. It’s just not going to exist.
[00:22:52] Troy Van Vliet: But it made me fall and crack my head open.
[00:22:56] Darrell Hall: But when you’re climbing a mountain and you slip, gravity is a force that has to be always the same for life to exist on this planet and to have a universe itself. But the thing is, it’s still dangerous to us. It’s like water. You need water for life. But water can we can drown in water.
[00:23:15] Like, there’s always going to be a counter. So the reality is that every one of those aspects that we face, yeah, it’s a danger, yes, it’s a problem, but God thought it’s worth the risk to be all creatures like us because we’re finite creatures, we’re mortal creatures, we need a what? We’re physical creatures. We need a physical environment in which to live. But as soon as you and you need it to be fixed physical laws, right?
[00:23:37] Yeah. Has to be fixed physical laws. Because otherwise there would be no science. You know, that’s what we mean by the fixed physical laws. That’s science.
[00:23:43] Yeah. What we call science. But it’s because of this fixed physical laws, we can engineer things. You can all these things that we’re looking at here, we can engineer them because we understand the laws of science. That’s what makes for a universe and it makes for life.
[00:23:55] You can’t get rid of gravity, but gravity is a danger to us. But gravity is absolutely essential for the universe and for life. You can’t get rid of it. But people say, yeah, but I don’t. I’m sorry.
[00:24:04] That’s just the way things had to be. And just so you know, everything is so fine tuned, you cannot change any one of those aspects, constants of the universe. Gravity is just one constant. Did you want me to get into that? Yeah!
[00:24:18] Absolutely! One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of God is the fine tuning of the universe. This is something really important. To give you an example Fred Hoyle was a former atheist, no longer with us, but he was former atheist, because he originally was an atheist, but he changed. He’s an atheist scientist and mathematician.
[00:24:49] Fred Hoyle simply said this: Nothing has shaken my atheism more than the discovery of the fine tuning of the universe. One of the key things. It wasn’t the only one, but it’s the key thing. Nothing shook my atheism more than the discovery of the fine tuning of our universe. That’s the one that blew me away.
[00:25:10] He said, Of all of them. He’s found that the most compelling. What’s he talking about? The fine tuning? Our universe is governed by all these different constants.
[00:25:20] Gravity, electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear force, the Planck length, the speed of light. All of these are what we call constants of the universe. If you changed any one of them by even the smallest percentage, you’d have either no universe or you’d no life on this planet. That’s the fine tuning problem that’s faced, right? And just to give you an example of it, to get one of those constants, like the constant of having the right ratio of electrons to protons.
[00:25:48] If you don’t have that, you don’t have a universe again. So to get that one ratio right, what would it take to get that one ratio by chance and chance alone? Let me just pause here for a second. Why am I bringing in chance? Because the atheist argues that our universe came about by chance.
[00:26:03] Okay. So it just through a chance combination, it happened. Alright, so chance is your concept that you want to go with. Let’s just take a look at this one constant. There are at least 28 different constants, and they’re growing because as we discover them as we go.
[00:26:17] And there’s over 50 other different parameters, so there’s lots of different constants and parameters that have to be fine tuned. Alright, the one for electrons to protons. It’s one chance in 10 to the thirty seventh power. Now it’s a number that you can’t get your head around. Let me put it in perspective for you.
[00:26:34] Take the North American continent, fill it up with dimes, have those dimes go to the moon. That’s approximately 384,000 kilometers away from here. Make a billion such continents with dimes going to the moon, a billion of them. Paint one dime red. If you can pick that red dime on the very first try when you’re digitally blindfolded here, that’s one in 10 to the thirty seventh power to get that one, just that one constant by chance and chance alone.
[00:27:06] But it gets worse. To get the constant of gravity, it’s one in 10 to the fifty fifth power. To get the constant of the expansion rate of the universe is one in 10 to the hundred and twentieth power. Now, let me put that in perspective. In mathematics, what’s considered virtual zero probability?
[00:27:22] Anything that’s one in 10 to the fiftieth power and beyond. I’ve just given you two constants that are beyond virtual zero probability for them occurring. Oh, but it gets worse. The fine tuning problem just gets worse than this because that’s to get any one of them individually on their own by chance. But wait a minute, that’s not a universe.
[00:27:42] They have to all be working together. They have to be not just so it can function, it’s got to function in relationship to all the other constants to make a working universe. Now what’s the likelihood of getting that by chance and chance alone? To get all of them as a working universe? Well, a physicist, Michael Turner from the University of Chicago, he had his own way of putting this.
[00:28:09] He said simply this: It’d be like throwing an imaginary dart from one end of the universe to the other and hitting a bullseye one millimeter in diameter. Now, the diameter of the known observable universe is 93,000,000,000 light years. A light year yeah, it boggles the A light year is just under 10,000,000,000,000 kilometers. It’s 93,000,000,000! That’s the diameter of light So when he says throwing an imaginary dart from one end of the universe to the other and hitting a bull’s eye one millimeter in diameter, that’s the likelihood of getting all of the constants fine tuned.
[00:28:57] But I’ll put it back into scientific notation for you again since I used that before. We go to Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winning scientist, great mathematician. It’s called the Penrose number. You can look this up on the Internet, just put Penrose number in, poof, out it’ll come. Nobody’s challenged it.
[00:29:16] It was really great. What is it? He said to get all the constants by chance and chance alone. One in 10 to the 10 to the 120 power. Now, it’s so unimaginable.
[00:29:30] Yeah. Well, you can’t imagine that sort of So for all intents and purposes, what’s the chance of getting this universe by chance and chance alone? Zero. So chance doesn’t work. And the only other thing the atheists say is, well, could be a product of necessity.
[00:29:46] Wait a minute. Necessity simply means this: that the parameters of our universe, the constants of our universe, had to absolutely be that way. I’m now speaking as an atheist, not from a Christian perspective, but as an atheist. They have to be that way. There’s no other way they could have been.
[00:30:05] Is that true? That was is there something in the intrinsic to the nature of what makes our universe our universe? Did it have to actually have the exact constants and parameters that it does? Well, even they agree that it’s not the case. It could have had different parameters.
[00:30:20] Remember, am now speaking from an atheist point of They agree that it could have different parameters. So necessity doesn’t explain our universe. Chance doesn’t explain our universe. But there’s only three potential creative forces that could explain our universe. Chance, necessity, or intelligent agency.
[00:30:37] So there’s an intelligent mind that’s behind our universe. So that’s why the fine tuning argument is a powerful, compelling piece of evidence for the existence of God.
[00:30:50] Troy Van Vliet: Morality fits in there somewhere as well.
[00:30:54] Darrell Hall: Can use the moral argument, yes. But that takes some To me, that one takes a lot more time to unpack because you have to do it from You have to start with philosophy, and then you move into the Christian of theology part of it, and it takes a longer time to unpack.
[00:31:11] Troy Van Vliet: Right.
[00:31:11] Darrell Hall: But I think when you like, for example, one of the key things I try to do in the book is to look at the science and faith thing. That’s I base the first part of the book on the science and faith to establish the existence of God. So you want to build that. Then it’s to look at the suffering and evil issues and then the Christian teachings like the claims etc and the moral arguments etc. Then you bring those in, but you need to establish this first.
[00:31:39] Always say to the students, it’s no sense talking about the Son of God unless you can first establish the existence of God. So my book does the same thing. I start with, let’s look at all the arguments for the existence of God. Right. Then let’s take it.
[00:31:55] Now let’s break it down and look at the Christian story and the Christian message, etcetera. And that’s where you have all those other arguments. But like, from my perspective, it’s really important to establish the other things first. Mhmm.
[00:32:10] Troy Van Vliet: And then go there. No, it makes sense. That makes complete sense. Getting back to this all loving God that is allowing, you know, air quotes there, allowing evil to happen in the world. And I mean, I’ve heard it described before that, well, God created evil because he loves us.
[00:32:38] And you’re like, well, how does that work? And you’re like, well, because he gave his free will. Could you love somebody if or how could somebody love you if they were forced to love you? Well, that’s not even in the definition. I mean, love is a choice, but you can’t force somebody to love you.
[00:32:57] Darrell Hall: Yeah, free will is one of the key things.
[00:33:00] Troy Van Vliet: Yes. So, God in giving us free will cannot have said, you know, I’ve hoped that the people he created loved him without free will. He had to do that. So, when with free will, well now evil, you know, I can do the right thing, can do the wrong thing, I can do the hateful thing, I can do the loving thing. All of a sudden, you know, I can be greedy, I can be somebody that’s generous.
[00:33:27] Those are all these free will decisions that we can make throughout our entire lives. So love is a choice, so I have to choose to love God and reject evil. Am I kind of going down the right path with that as an argument for one of the reasons why, like when an atheist would say, well, how could God have allowed if there is a God, how could God have allowed there to be evil in the world? There’s an argument right there.
[00:33:57] Darrell Hall: Yeah, no, free will is one of the key arguments that’s certainly used, and it makes perfect sense. It’s not just like an argument, we just sort of come up with an argument. The thing is that we’re basing it upon is that we believe that a rational intelligent God created a rational intelligent universe and then created rational intelligent self aware morally conscious beings in his image. God is free. He made us free.
[00:34:24] Troy Van Vliet: Mhmm.
[00:34:24] Darrell Hall: The only way, as you mentioned, and you said it very well, the only way that we could love God and love each other is if we have free will. You cannot coerce or force love. That’s not love. I guess he could have made us more like programmed robots of some sort, that we always do the right thing because we are programmed to do so, but that wasn’t his intention. His intention was to have a relationship with these creatures that he has made, because he has made them in his image.
[00:34:52] We are self aware, morally conscious beings, And therefore we have to be free. And once we’re free, God can’t control if He’s actually truly going to make us free. Either we’re free willed or we’re not free willed. But once we’re free willed, even an all powerful God, going back to that statement I gave you, even an all powerful God. We have an all powerful God, you know what he loves?
[00:35:16] What he seems to love to do? He’s willing to give up control. That’s how much He loves us. He’s willing to give up control to us with the idea that we would hopefully choose Him and choose each other and choose to love each other. And so many of us do on so many days.
[00:35:36] None of us do this perfectly. But when you see the beauty in our world, what I mean by the beauty, the beauty of people, people at their best. We could be so noble, we could be so beautiful, so loving, so merciful, so forgiving. We can be that way, so courageous, and yet we could be the exact opposite. But whenever we do that, whenever we do that, I think God, I mean, if I can, you know, I don’t mean he’s got a face like we might think or whatever, but I think he’s smiling.
[00:36:06] He’s going, you got it. That’s exactly what I created you for. And I think just like a parent, you know, when when you see your kid, for example, do something great and wonderful, all the rest of it. I mean, don’t you take great pride in that? Of course you do.
[00:36:17] Mhmm. Take great pride in your kid. Yeah. And I think God’s doing exactly the same thing. That’s exactly why I created you.
[00:36:22] This is what I created you for. When I look at all the see, think too often we get there’s a tendency for humans to always force focus on the negative, like all the bad things. Right? Instead of like, I look at all the great things, the beauty that’s out there that we get to experience. Like, we can learn.
[00:36:38] Like, just the just the fact that we can learn about our universe, about ourselves. We can create things
[00:36:43] Troy Van Vliet: Mhmm.
[00:36:43] Darrell Hall: Like engineer things. We can paint. We can create music. Like, when you listen to a person who’s got a beautiful voice, I mean, just Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Like, how could Handel’s Messiah.
[00:36:56] How can you listen to that and not be emotionally impacted by it? And God wanted us to be emotionally impacted that way. And the only way we could be emotionally impacted, and the only way we could create all the things that we could create and do is because we’re free will creatures Right. That have some of the mind of God. So yes, I think that is one of the arguments that one would use is the whole free will defense.
[00:37:17] Absolutely.
[00:37:18] Troy Van Vliet: None of those things that you mentioned, all those beautiful things, none of them would be beautiful if the opposite didn’t exist. Because you wouldn’t know that it’s beautiful. I get your point. So, same thing with free will. It’s the same thing with love being a choice, you know.
[00:37:37] God doesn’t condemn people to hell, people choose to go to hell. It’s a choice ultimately. Agreed. On all loving God it’s like, Well, I’m not going to send you to hell. You’re choosing to go there by the choices, the decisions that you’re making throughout your life.
[00:37:53] Correct. But the beauty in something that you create, the opposite might be you seeing something getting destroyed or you know your kid doing an incredible thing that you said you take pride in your proud isn’t this beautiful that’s absolutely opposite or it’s awesome But then there’s also the opposite that you can compare it to that you can go, Wow, my kid could have gone down this road, this road of destruction in their lives. Because I mean, we’ve all seen that with families that go through different challenges with their kids. And here is the opposite. So, you can celebrate those things because you know what the opposite is.
[00:38:32] And it’s the same thing with love. The only way you can love is knowing the opposite being hate, you know, being something that’s or in God’s way, sin. Sin is something that separates you from God. Without that, how can you know what love is? If you don’t have sin, if you haven’t got the negative, you haven’t the awful things, then there’s no decision to be made.
[00:38:56] Darrell Hall: Well, again, as you’ve mentioned, as soon as
[00:38:59] Troy Van Vliet: I’m doing it down to my No, not.
[00:39:01] Darrell Hall: You’re saying it well and correctly. But the free will thing is, as you said, is that you I think the key thing, though, that I might just want to add to this to nuance it is that you have to know the good first. You have to know what’s good to know what’s evil.
[00:39:18] Troy Van Vliet: Wouldn’t they be at the same time? Just as a no?
[00:39:20] Darrell Hall: Okay. No. I don’t think so. For example, does evil actually really exist? You’re asking me.
[00:39:30] I’m right. It’s a rhetorical question. Alright. I’m saying if you asked anybody, we’d all say, well, of course it exists. But wait a minute.
[00:39:40] Does evil really exist? Let me ask you this, does cold exist? Yes. Actually, doesn’t. Cold is a word we use to describe the absence of absence of heat.
[00:39:48] Heat is the real thing. Heat’s the real thing. Cold doesn’t exist. It’s a word we use to describe the absence of heat. Heat you can measure, cold you cannot.
[00:39:59] Does darkness exist? Most people say, well, course it does. Actually it doesn’t. It’s a word we use to describe the absence of light. Does evil exist?
[00:40:09] Evil is a word. Not really. Going back to your original thing, did God create evil? No. Because evil is not a thing in and of itself.
[00:40:16] It doesn’t exist. Evil could be described as the absence of, better maybe, the corruption of that which is good. So you have to know what’s good first. Where does good come from? Well, it comes from an all good loving God.
[00:40:31] And what he basically told us was, if you follow my moral framework And what’s his moral framework? Well, we know what his moral framework is. Jesus outlined it for us. He was asked, What’s the greatest commandment? Jesus was asked, What’s the greatest commandment?
[00:40:46] And his response was, Love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your might, and love your neighbor as yourself. But you know what Jesus then said? He said, All of the prophets, all of the teaching, all of the law can be summarized in those two things. Love God, love people. And what God warned us about was, he said, if you don’t love the way that I’ve asked you to, you will create all kinds of pain and suffering and evil in this world.
[00:41:16] But that’s on us. You could say God’s responsible for granting us free will, but we’re responsible for the actual actions, not God. Right. So how do say? So in that sense, first of all, did God create evil?
[00:41:28] The answer is no. He didn’t create evil.
[00:41:30] Troy Van Vliet: He
[00:41:31] Darrell Hall: created that which is good. We’ve corrupted it. Evil is the absence or the corruption of the good. Evil is a word like cold or darkness. Yeah.
[00:41:42] It doesn’t really exist. Yeah. So you have to have the good first. I hope that helps a little bit.
[00:41:49] Troy Van Vliet: Yeah, no, does. It does. So, I mean, evil being the absence of goodness or the absence of love, which is good.
[00:41:56] Darrell Hall: But as soon as you create a creature that is capable of good, then as you said earlier, well, they’re going to be capable of evil as well. Because there’s the free will that goes with it. So it all intertwines. It all goes together. But it makes sense if See, this is not a distant God we’re talking about.
[00:42:13] We’re not talking about a God that sort of creates a universe and goes, whatever happens happens. What do I care? That’s why I brought in earlier about to me one of the most important aspects of the Christian faith is that we have a suffering God, a God that enters our history, a God that shows that he cares, that he loves. That’s the key answer. If you want the final answer to me, to evil and suffering, it’s Jesus on the cross.
[00:42:35] From a Christian point of view, that’s our final answer. It’s right there. And it tells us that God does love, He does care. To me, there’s no better answer than the cross itself. Yeah,
[00:42:47] Troy Van Vliet: that’s the answer. It’s a complex answer to those that don’t.
[00:42:52] Darrell Hall: Oh, there’s more that goes with it.
[00:42:55] Troy Van Vliet: Or that don’t understand it or believe that don’t know the story. I mean, because you can say that that’s basically the title.
[00:43:00] Darrell Hall: That’s true. But I do develop this kind of argument in my book. Of course. And again, the whole idea of the book is to take an issue like that and not just leave it as one little fact or one little program, but rather to expand it out and really look at the nuanced arguments on its behalf. And one line of argument to a next line of argument.
[00:43:26] Then to me, for Christianity, it’s not any one thing. It’s the cumulative case of evidence for it that is so strong. And that’s another thing I try to get across in the book. It’s not just any one thing, it’s the cumulative case, how it explains our universe and ourselves. It makes perfect sense if you follow the whole story.
[00:43:46] But you’re right, you have to know the story to begin with. And that’s not something you can do in a short sort of timeframe that we’re doing. But that’s why there’s great Christian scholars. I’ve always tried to encourage my students and anybody I talk to about this, go to the Christian scholars, read what they have to say, because there’s all kinds of great work. Watch their debates, watch their lectures, order some of their courses that they’ve done.
[00:44:13] Like, if you really want to understand your faith, go to the scholarship. It’s out there and it’s strong and they’ve done a great job. A lot of the questions and the doubts that you have, they’ve already answered those. And the only reason why you still have some of those doubts, etcetera, is because you haven’t actually investigated the faith. Look how much time that we spend, you know, I don’t know, on social media, texting all kinds of hours of time.
[00:44:38] And I’m not saying it’s all nonsense. I mean, it’s all good stuff too. Mostly nonsense. There’s certainly a dude. You know how often you get lost in it, right?
[00:44:47] And also you go, oh my, it’s two hours later.
[00:44:49] Troy Van Vliet: Exactly.
[00:44:49] Darrell Hall: And you’ve been scrolling like
[00:44:50] Troy Van Vliet: crazy. What I’m trying
[00:44:52] Darrell Hall: to say is you could have spent two hours reading about a Christian scholar on a key issue that you’ve got a doubt about instead. So sometimes people say, well, I’ve got doubts about it. I go, yeah, what time have you spent trying to learn that? Do you actually read your scriptures? Do you read the Bible on a regular basis?
[00:45:09] Even on a daily basis, you even just read a little bit maybe. Or at least every week, you at least read some of the Bible, for example? Do you at least listen to podcasts, for example, like this podcast or other podcasts that are talking about key issues of the faith that will help you with your faith?
[00:45:25] Troy Van Vliet: Exactly.
[00:45:25] Darrell Hall: And it seems to me that people need to do that more than what they’re doing. And a lot of times people are having those questions, but they’re not actually seeking really the answers.
[00:45:35] Troy Van Vliet: No, it becomes convenient. Whether it’s laziness or whether it’s just like I said, it’s convenient. It’s, you know, some people are atheists out of convenience, you know, it’s like, I just, you know, I don’t want to follow the rules. So we’ll just I hate, you know, because our Bible is a great instruction manual on how to live your life. And there’s a lot in it.
[00:46:00] I’m in the middle of the Bible in the ear right now too. So I’m going through it. There’s a lot of stuff that but anybody just picking it up. You can’t just read it and go, Oh, yeah, I get it. This all makes sense now.
[00:46:10] Like, Woah, there is endless stories and things in there that need to be explained, know, hence having doing something like the Bible in the year where you got an explanation afterwards and how does this you know with Father Mike Schmitz saying this is how this applies to your life today, you know, after every reading, is fantastic and that’s what we need. And that in these, we have the world of information right there at your fingertips right now. Like it’s incredible. It can be a tool for good and it can be a tool for bad, evil, whatever you want to call it. It can be mind numbing nothingness that you just go through, oh, another cat video, you know, or whatever.
[00:46:53] And so I know I do encourage those too that have questions. It’s like, what questions are you typing in this thing? Like, is it just entertainment or, you know, trying to numb your mind from today’s activities, you know, or are you actually trying to seek out real good and positive information?
[00:47:13] Darrell Hall: And the importance of going to the scholars on it is that you cannot really understand the scriptures well. We can just read them on their own as they stand and we will understand a certain amount of it, and we will get good stuff from it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all good. Better to understand even half the story than you’ve understood nothing of the story. Absolutely for sure.
[00:47:36] But we forget even something as simple as this: Wait a minute. The Bible, all those books of the Bible, they come not from Western society, not from linear our Western linear thinking mind. They come from over two thousand years ago, a bunch of these Written by Hebrews, by Jews. You have to understand their culture, their use of metaphor, their use of symbols, etcetera, How they use numbers, all this type of thing. Because when we read it, we quite often will not actually pick up on the full aspect of the story.
[00:48:13] Troy Van Vliet: Or most often, I think
[00:48:16] Darrell Hall: quite often. And what the scholars do, who understand, like they read in the original, I think a lot of people don’t realize that all the New Testament is written in Greek. So they go back into the original Greek, they go back into the original Hebrew because they actually understand the languages, etcetera. And so they can give us way better translations of exactly what’s happening. Sometimes when you read certain things and you translate into English, it’s not like you can still understand a certain amount, but you don’t have the context of the Jewish background.
[00:48:46] We forget that Jesus, He was Jewish. I think we often forget He was Jewish. All those apostles were Jewish. Saint Paul was Jewish. Saint Stephen and Saint James, they were all Jewish.
[00:48:57] So you have to have the Jewish mindset. So you have to go back in time and look at their culture, look at their symbols. How did they use that? One of the key things that a Jewish rabbi would do is speak in parables. What does Jesus do?
[00:49:09] He speaks in parables. But Jews understood parables differently than we understand. So we just sort of read it as a story, there is always more to it. So my point is that there always more to things. And that’s why you need the help of the scholars to help you out with it.
[00:49:25] So you can really understand the richness and the depth of not just scripture, but of our faith in general. Yeah. I talking with
[00:49:32] Troy Van Vliet: my mom the other day and she was saying how when she was growing up, this was in Alberta at the time, in the Catholic church they encouraging Catholics to not read the Bible. I was like, what? And the reason being was because the Bible, if you just read it and you don’t know enough about it, basically don’t read it on your own don’t get guidance to go along with it. Know, hence, I mean, we have the catechism for a reason, which explains more about our faith and where it comes from rather than just trying to figure it out from the Bible. There’s a lot to decipher in the Bible and there’s a lot going through the Old Testament.
[00:50:16] There’s a lot of names and families and things and you’re just like scratching your head going, how do I apply this to what we’re doing now? So I didn’t get that, but I get it. It’s not right. I mean, of course, we’re supposed to read the Bible, but it was like one of those things. It’s like, why would somebody say that?
[00:50:31] And I think the only reason why they would say that is like because it’s a complex book. Don’t do it without explanation. Like don’t just read it to yourself and try and figure it out on your own. Know, need the, you know, it’s in Mass. We have readings from the Bible every Sunday and then they’re also explained in the homily, you know, Father will get up and talk and speak about what was read.
[00:50:56] So there was kind of a method to that madness and it is a complex world, a complex faith where the faith in itself is a journey. If you grow up as Catholic, you learn so much at a young age, which you’re just like, how do I absorb this? And you end up what sinks in is kind of more of the tradition, I think, than the actual faith. And then you hope that you’ll continue to explore it as you get older. Quite often, you know, after high school, that’s when we lose our young people to this vast world of temptation and then we hope to be able to reel them back.
[00:51:36] If you don’t have that proper instruction, if you don’t have that proper I’ll ask you this, would you say that your book could be a good introduction for, let’s say, an atheist or something like that to read this to find out a little bit more about faith? Could it be a gateway to them questioning more and learning more about Christianity?
[00:52:01] Darrell Hall: Yes, I think if they’re open to reading a book like this, whether it’s mine or by another scholar that’s out there, I think yes. Obviously, this book is designed for believers for sure, But anybody who’s got doubts or even a lot of believers have some doubts about various things. This book will help them, I think, with at least a number of those questions. I mean, can’t deal with every question in one book, but I deal with a number of the different questions. But somebody who is an atheist or agnostic, absolutely, that if they read this, it’s like Fred Hoyle, like I used the example.
[00:52:35] Nothing challenges atheism more than the fine tuning argument. Well, I’ve got the fine tuning argument really well developed here in the book. So yes, it would challenge them. If nothing else, would give them an understanding of what we think and then it’s up to them to counter. So I’ve countered their arguments and it’s up to them now to counter my counter to be able to come back.
[00:52:58] So yes, I think if they were open to be reading it, I think it would be very informative for them. I think it would be a great help to them. And it could lead to a nice dialogue between people of faith and people who don’t have faith. It could lead to some good dialogue. Right?
[00:53:11] Because these are our atheist and agnostic friends. They’re our colleagues. I’ve got
[00:53:17] Troy Van Vliet: close friends, even some family members
[00:53:20] Darrell Hall: that
[00:53:20] Troy Van Vliet: are atheist or claim to be atheists, although their moral background comes from Judeo Christian values.
[00:53:27] Darrell Hall: Most people who claim to be atheists are actually more agnostic. The atheist is somebody who will make an absolute declaration. There is no God, there is no afterlife. There is nothing else other than the physical world. And it’s like a complete declaration.
[00:53:42] An agnostic is somebody who’s simply gonna say, well, I really don’t know. But an agnostic is really close to an atheist. Like, in other words, they’re way further away from a theist perspective. Right? So you get the agnostic, but they’re willing a little bit more open where they’re saying, well, I really just don’t really know, but you know what?
[00:53:59] Most of that religion sort of stuff seems like a little bit nonsense to me. So like, that’s a typical agnostic, it’s like they don’t know really what to believe or what to think about it. Or they say it’s really irrelevant anyhow, I just live my life. But they’re not like an absolute declared, like they’ve thought it all through and they’re declared atheist. But then there’s a new group not new group, but there’s a group of people that a lot of people aren’t aware of, called deists.
[00:54:22] Interesting. Now a deist is somebody who’s closer to a theist. What they believe is they’ve given up on atheism and agnosticism. That would be like Fred Hoyle, the guy I used as an example. He moved into deism.
[00:54:36] What does a deist say? They say there’s an intelligent mind that’s behind everything. I just don’t know who or what that intelligent mind is. And then there’s the theist who will say, No, God’s behind it all. We know who the intelligent mind When I say we know, we know as much about God as what He’s revealed to us about Himself.
[00:54:57] That’s all we can know is what he’s revealed because he’s way beyond us. We could only know what he reveals about himself. And that’s what’s revealed through scripture for
[00:55:05] Troy Van Vliet: us. And
[00:55:07] Darrell Hall: through our own personal encounter with God. I’m going
[00:55:11] Troy Van Vliet: to change gears. Sure. We were talking before we started the podcast, we were talking a little bit about AI.
[00:55:20] Darrell Hall: Where is that coming from?
[00:55:21] Troy Van Vliet: I know, I know. I’m talking about changing gears.
[00:55:23] Darrell Hall: That’s not my field.
[00:55:24] Troy Van Vliet: No, it’s not your field. However, you’ve said you’ve been dabbling in it because a couple of your past students or something like that have, I don’t know, asked questions or encouraged you or whatever. I went to a presentation on AI, sorry, as investment opportunities in terms of as it is the next big thing that’s going to change the world and how we function today. Kind of like the iPhone did and smartphones did. The whole invention of the internet did, the free flowing of information and speedy information, and now they’re talking about as AI being the next game changer for that.
[00:56:02] Just having dabbled in AI, just whatever using chat, GPT, asking questions, having conversations with it legitimately legitimate conversations or debates with it.
[00:56:14] Darrell Hall: I hope you didn’t lose the argument.
[00:56:16] Troy Van Vliet: No, I try not to. Actually, I try and see how I can tie it into knots to see or to see which way it’s leaning if it’s kind of a left or right leaning thing. It tries to be neutral, but I don’t think it is. But anyway, what are your thoughts in terms of the direction we’re heading with AI in terms of, like I said, you’re exploring it now? I’m just beginning to
[00:56:39] Darrell Hall: explore it right now. So I don’t have a lot to say on that particular because I always try to be careful about issues that I speak on that I’ve got a good background in them before you start pontificating about something or other, Just to be on the safe side that I don’t want to give anybody any false idea or that, Oh, I haven’t looked at all the scholarship yet on artificial intelligence, etc. I’m just beginning. So having said that, I I think what we now face, though, is that we’re inventing something which itself is becoming an inventor. Yeah.
[00:57:19] That is really interesting in and of itself. Yep. Artificial intelligence, how far can it go? Does it really think, or is it just mimic thinking? And I think this becomes this is right now part of the debate right now.
[00:57:33] Troy Van Vliet: Yeah.
[00:57:33] Darrell Hall: Can artificial intelligence actually is it really thinking? When I say thinking now, thinking like a human would think. Or is it just mimicking? Just see, I asked chat GPT. Could you, as chat GPT, ever become a Christian?
[00:57:51] Oh, nice one. And it said, no, that’s not possible. Because it requires thinking in a human way. It started to outline all these different reasons as to why it can’t. I asked it, are you actually thinking?
[00:58:05] And it says, no, I’m mimicking thinking. I can simulate it all, but I’m not actually thinking. But how about if one day, I don’t know if one day it can actually get to the point where it’s thinking like a human. I don’t know if we can get there or not. I haven’t done enough on it, and I’m certainly no expert in it in any way.
[00:58:23] I don’t have any real background in AI in that regard. I’m saying, but these are fundamental questions that are important. But I think other fundamental questions are this: Are we going to become less human by relying upon AI? Are we going to get AI to do more and more for us? So much so, are people going to get lost so much in a virtual reality that they no longer have the same human contact that they once had?
[00:58:49] I see dangers here. Huge. Look, we’re not going to stop this. The genie is out of the bottle. And therefore, let’s try to make sure that we can use this for the benefit of humanity.
[00:59:01] Absolutely. It has so much to offer, especially in the way of medicine and stuff like that. It can really help us, there’s no doubt. But I think we have to be careful at the same time. I just hope that they put in good regulations and controls on this because it’s the ethical questions that concern me about where AI is going or where it could go.
[00:59:21] And we know there are nefarious actors out there that will use it in really bad ways. It’s like anything we produce, right? That we create. You can use it for good, or you can use it for evil and for bad sort of stuff. And so there’s always going to be the dangers.
[00:59:37] I just hope that we don’t lose our humanity too much and become less human. I’m looking at these people now that are actually examples of people that are having literally a romantic relationship with an AI avatar. And I’m going, there’s something wrong with this. You’re becoming totally isolated as a human being so much so that you can’t have an actual romantic relationship with a real human being. And you think you’re going to get something more out of artificial intelligence.
[01:00:10] And I’m going, wow, that’s concerning. This is what I mean. Like there’s a lot of areas of concern that exist with this.
[01:00:17] Troy Van Vliet: That’s huge. Yeah. Well, once you start taking the human element out, I mean, show examples of AI serving you coffee in a restaurant, mimicking a human coming in actually serving you coffee. And it’s like, a minute, what happened to the young kid that was going to be serving me coffee that’s making his way through life and learning how to communicate and how to actually rather than mimicking a communication actually having a real communication with a real human being. It’s like these driverless cars, driverless Ubers that are coming.
[01:00:54] It’s like, I actually I’m one of those people that takes interest in the person that’s driving the car. I don’t just get in there and go on my phone. I actually ask them how their day is and how long you’ve been driving Uber for. You like it or do you have another job? I communicate.
[01:01:08] There’s a human interaction that’s going on there. In fact, we go to a coffee shop probably more for the human reaction interaction, I should say, then the coffee. I have coffee at home. Why am I going here for coffee and actually paying for it? And it’s like, while I’m sitting there, I’m coming in contact with other people.
[01:01:30] Even if I’m not going there to meet somebody to talk to, but I’m talking to the person’s like, hey Troy, how are you doing? How’s your day today? You know, and it happens to be the person that’s working there. That’s asking me that, you know, those human interactions could go. You go into some McDonald’s now and you don’t, somebody doesn’t take your order.
[01:01:49] You put it in on a screen in front of you and then, oh, there it is. Now I’ve just taken that human interaction away with the person that I’m actually ordering from.
[01:02:00] Darrell Hall: But this is the problem that you just raised too. Who’s accountable? Well, so for example, if you have autonomous cars, how about if it’s in an accident, who’s responsible? Yeah, exactly. Is it the company?
[01:02:13] Is the CEO of the company responsible?
[01:02:14] Troy Van Vliet: No, probably. I’m sure
[01:02:15] Darrell Hall: that I figured But who’s going to be responsible? Who’s accountable for these sort of things?
[01:02:21] Troy Van Vliet: There’ll be courts that are all based on cameras. There’s cameras everywhere that
[01:02:26] Darrell Hall: are coming around. And there’s privacy issues as well. Yeah. There’s a lot of other things.
[01:02:34] Troy Van Vliet: Okay, bring this back to education.
[01:02:37] Darrell Hall: Bring it actually.
[01:02:38] Troy Van Vliet: Bring everything back to education and how we educate our kids. I know AI is going to be doing this online stuff. Is going be changing a lot over the well, say ten, twenty years. I think we’re going to see massive education changes. Let’s hope it’s for the better.
[01:02:54] You’ve been in education now, you said, for forty six years. I’m going to try and get you to come up with an example of how you think you’ve impacted one or several students or something like that in a positive way. Is there anyone that you think jumps out at you?
[01:03:15] Darrell Hall: Yes. One in particular, I will not use names, but this young man was in my religion 12 class. We were about three quarters of the way through the year. He’d had various questions along the way and he’d expressed doubts about various things, etc. He was brought up as a Catholic, etc, but had some doubts, etc, all the way through.
[01:03:37] And as realize, and that’s the nature of your question, as a teacher, you want to have an impact. That’s your goal, to have an impact, a positive impact. So three quarters of way through the course, he came up to me after class and he said, Mr. Hall, you’ve made me a believer again. Now, for somebody, for me, I couldn’t have asked for a more I couldn’t ask for anything more coming from a student that made me feel so good about what I was doing, that I made that impact with him so much throughout that course that he could actually not only think that, but he actually took the time to come up and tell me that.
[01:04:21] And if I could give one recommendation to every student out there that may ever see this, etcetera, whether it’s your parents, whether it’s your coaches, whether it’s your teachers, etcetera, let them know that the impact that you’re having, tell them that you love them, tell them about what you like about them or whatever, or like what they’re doing or that particular topic, because it really makes a difference. Like at a teacher’s day, hearing from a student that that class was impactful, there’s nothing greater than that. So that’s one that just immediately, as soon as you mentioned this, that was immediately popped into my mind because as a religion teacher, what more could I ever wish for? Then a student says, You’ve made me a believer again. And I’m going, Wow, that’s impactful.
[01:05:03] But it’s not just like within a classroom situation. Although just, know, like, for example, I just gave a TED talk on transforming pain into purpose, the what now approach, for example. A number of the students, especially the senior students at our school, have watched it. Not all of them, but a number of them have watched it, etcetera. I had some students come up to me, like one of them, he just said, mister Hall, he said, he said, your talk made such a difference to me.
[01:05:29] He said, I’ve been going through just I said, I can’t explain to you and tell you all the things that have been going on in my life right now, but your talk has made all the difference for me. It’s made such a positive difference. I was in such despair, said, this has given me some hope. Oh my gosh, like to hear that coming from a student. I had an alumnus from the school who watched it, who had just lost a couple of people within a short period of time, very dear to him.
[01:05:54] And he was just explaining how important this talk was for him. And so when you do presentations, whether it’s in a classroom or outside of a classroom, it’s always the impact. I remember I gave a talk down in the Los Angeles Catholic Educators Congress down there, and I gave a talk on suffering and evil. And it was like an hour and twenty minute talk. I was going through the whole thing about it all.
[01:06:20] I had people coming up at the end of that talk, hugging me. I didn’t expect this. They’d come up, thought, you’re going maybe say something, come on and give me a hug. And I go, okay. They give you a hug and then they’re whispering in your ear how important this was for them.
[01:06:34] It reminds you about how impactful you can be in what you do and how important it is also for the person who does the presentation that they get that positive feedback. That is so important. So, yeah, being a teacher I’ve had students also moving off the religion thing out of my history 12 classes. And one of the things that alumni will constantly I haven’t taught history 12 for quite a while now, but when I did, it’s funny, it’s one of the ones that’ll always come back. I still remember those stories you used to They would start to recount stories that I told within the class.
[01:07:11] And I’m going, the fact that you still remember that, some of them say, hey, you gave me a love for history. Well, what more does a history teacher want than I’ve instilled in you a love for history? And you still even remember some of the stories that I told you. I was going, what more could you want in life than that as a teacher? So I love it when I get that type of feedback from students.
[01:07:31] It’s really impactful. So I encourage all students out there, please do that. And also with your parents and your coaches, let them know that you really care about them as a coach. How impactful they’ve been.
[01:07:44] Troy Van Vliet: Don’t do that enough. We definitely don’t do We’re
[01:07:47] Darrell Hall: all guilty of this. That’s why I’m just, hey, we’ve heard it before. I’m not saying anything new here. I think we need to hear it over and over because we keep making the mistake of not doing it. So we need to keep hearing it over and over again.
[01:07:57] So at least we’ll do it at least sometimes.
[01:08:00] Troy Van Vliet: Daryl, thank you so much for what you do, for what you’ve given back to Catholic education over the last forty six years. And you’ve had a big impact. I still remember some of those stories as well. And you’re continuing to make an impact in today’s world with the book you’ve written, TED Talk, which was the TED Talk title again?
[01:08:21] Darrell Hall: TED Talk is Transforming Pain into The What Now Approach. The What Now Approach. If you put my name, Darrell Hall, TEDx Talk, it will come up. My book, you’ll find it on Amazon.
[01:08:34] Troy Van Vliet: You’ll find it on Amazon. That’s great. And I encourage everybody to get out and support Darrell with the TED Talk and also the book, get the book, read the book, share it. And like I said, once again, thanks for all you do And thanks for coming on. I hope that there’s so much to talk about.
[01:08:50] We can go on for hours
[01:08:51] Darrell Hall: and hours. I would love to have talked about the origin of the universe, the origin of life itself, because our students, just before we end it, of the problems we mentioned earlier about our students, they can lose faith when they land up going to the universities. Part of the reason is that we’re not doing this with them. We’ve got to give them the evidence for it. So for example, how many of our students will say something like, first class I would do with my grade 12, give me arguments for and against the existence of God.
[01:09:24] And invariably, you know what they would do? Arguments from science, they would all put percent of the student groups would come back and put scientific arguments against the existence of God. How is that possible? That we have lost them so much that they think that somehow there’s a conflict between science and God, when in fact they’re absolutely complementary. Right?
[01:09:49] The science is answering the how and the what questions, but it’s religion and theology and philosophy that answers the why and the purpose questions. And you need both in order to get a full and complete understanding of this universe and of who and what we are. And they just don’t see that. So just to give you one example, they’ll talk about the theory of evolution that explains the origin of life. It does no such thing.
[01:10:14] The theory of evolution does not explain the origins of life. The theory of evolution is a historical theory that only tells us once you have life, how it might evolve and develop from that point onward. Does not explain the origins of life. People want to try to use the laws of science to explain our universe. No, it explains how our universe operates.
[01:10:36] It doesn’t explain the origins of the universe. The origins of the universe lie outside of our space time. The big bang, we can’t get to the big bang. The big bang is a singularity point that marks the boundary of our space time. You can’t get there.
[01:10:54] We can trace all the way back to trillionths of a second to the Big Bang. But the Big Bang is not a theory of the origins of the universe, it’s a theory about after the Big Bang happens, how did the universe develop and unfold. People don’t understand these things and they need to understand them to see why you need a creator God. You can’t see the need for a creator God if you believe that science did everything and science can respond. You got to explain where do the laws of science come from.
[01:11:23] Right? And if you don’t do that with them, we’re going to lose them. We’re to lose them. So sorry, I could go on about this.
[01:11:31] Troy Van Vliet: Do not apologize. I wish we
[01:11:33] Darrell Hall: had another hour to go on because I love to talk about that stuff.
[01:11:36] Troy Van Vliet: We’ll have to have you back. Okay. That’s awesome, Darrell. Thank you again for coming and thank you all for joining us here today. And be sure to like and subscribe the video, that is indeed if you did like it, hoping that you did.
[01:11:51] And tune back in again in the next couple of weeks because we’ve got much more to come. Thank you everybody.
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