The scene is movie legend: Morpheus sits with Neo beside a fireplace while a storm rages outside, and tells him that the world he calls reality—what he sees when he looks out the window or turns on the television, when he goes to work—it’s all an illusion. If he takes the blue pill, Neo can remain comfortably in the illusion—you know, “The Matrix.” But if he takes the red pill, he will wake up to a very uncomfortable real world.

It’s a cool movie, but some scientists are entertaining an idea almost exactly like its premise. The “simulation hypothesis” proposes that the world around us, our bodies, and even our own minds might not be real. Instead, they could be the illusions of a sophisticated computer program created by a super-intelligent being or beings.

In fact, writing at NBC, Dan Falk quotes top scientists and philosophers who think that it’s not just possible, it’s likely. They think we could exist in some version of the Matrix. “If we are living in a simulation,” writes Oxford philosopher Nick Bostram, “then the cosmos we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence.” The world we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell, may not be “located at the fundamental level of reality.”

Before you laugh: This idea is surprisingly hard to disprove—at least on secular assumptions. One M.I.T. scientist and author of the book, “The Simulation Hypothesis,” recalls playing a virtual reality game and forgetting he was alone “in an empty room with a headset on.” The game was just so realistic, it became his reality.

If it’s that easy to get lost in a simulation we’ve designed with our limited technology—or so goes the thinking—what must it be like in a simulation designed by an advanced race? We could live our entire lives in such a simulation, and never know it.

And what would be the purpose of such a virtual-reality reality? The answer in the Matrix was sentient robotic overlords who kept us distracted so they could use humans to generate energy to survive. Believe it or not, some who seriously argue for the simulation hypothesis have similarly outlandish guesses as to the identity and intent of the programmers.

Some suggest a race of extraterrestrial beings running a kind of experiment on us. Rich Terrile of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory thinks the programmers could be us—that is, future, highly-advanced (read: further evolved) humans who have decided to create a simulation of an earlier stage of their own civilization.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that these advanced beings controlling our reality quickly get deified.

If the simulation hypothesis turns out to be true, says Terrile, that means “there’s a creator, an architect—someone who designed the world.” He even recognizes he’s wrapping ancient religious ideas—specifically Eastern Monism—in “mathematics and science rather than just faith.” But he’s fine with that.

Taking the simulation hypothesis seriously forces us to deal with serious questions. For instance, could our own minds and everything we know and love be mere created computer code designed to trick itself into believing it can think? And if all of this is a simulation, does anything matter at all?

According to Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb, such thinking could lead to massive social unrest. After all, if the world is just a computer program, it would “relieve us from being accountable for any of our actions.” And if our world is the creation of an advanced race, where did they come from? Much like the theory that says life on earth was seeded by extraterrestrials, the simulation hypothesis just moves the origin of intelligent life back a step. But it doesn’t ever explain it.

Of course, there’s a much more direct way of answering these ultimate questions. What if the improbable design of the universe, our planet, bodies, and minds were, in fact, created by an advanced Being, who instead of programming a supercomputer, called everything into existence by His Word. What if this Creator is a moral being, and so we are morally accountable to Him?

Apparently, for a few of the world’s top scientists, that’s just too much of a stretch… too unlikely, and who wants to be morally accountable anyway? And, so instead, they prefer The Matrix.

Here’s something you may not realize… officially speaking, the emerging generation are not “the millennials.” Anyone born after 1997 is part of the generation that has been dubbed, for reasons I’m not completely sure about, “Generation Z.”

The distinction is more than just one of different names. Millennials and Gen Z have been shaped by different experiences and ideas. Most Millennials can remember a time when the new sexual orthodoxy wasn’t orthodox, and people who opposed—or at least were ambivalent about it—weren’t called “bigots.”

This is much less true of “Generation Z,” who even before Obergefell, were being catechized in the new sexual orthodoxy at school and by mass culture.

Even more important—and distressing—is that members of “Generation Z” are leaving the church at an unprecedentedly high rate. Now, I confess that I feel a bit like the boy who cried “wolf” even saying that, given the overblown and often unsupported claims of the rates of young people from previous generations leaving the faith. It’s always been “bad”—not as bad as you’ve heard—but let me be clear: it’s worse for Gen Z.

And, I’d add, I have significant anecdotal evidence that older generations feel a greater generation gap between them and their Gen Z kids and grandkids.

All of this to say, we’ve got some serious thinking to do about how we can transmit the truths of the Gospel and the worldview that flows from it to Generation Z. To start with: what has worked for previous generations may not work for them.

Thankfully, two of the best thinkers and communicators I know have jumpstarted the conversation. Sean McDowell and Colson Center Senior Fellow J. Warner Wallace have just published a book, So the Next Generation Will Know: Preparing Young Christians for a Challenging World.

Both writers are already well-known for their ability to make the case for the reasonableness of Christian truth and morality. And while there is some of this in their new book, it isn’t the primary focus. The focus is on what they call a “biblical way forward” to confronting the challenges posed by GenZ’s lack and/or loss of faith.

This “way forward” starts with taking into account the interplay between truth and relationships. As they put it, “doing a better job of teaching truth and making the case for Christianity” is “only part of the answer.”

To the “reasonable explanations” that we must offer young people, we also have to add “authentic relationships.” And that can be harder than we think.

First, there’s a strong temptation to emphasize the relationship part over the truth part. We can be so desperate to preserve the relationship that we’ll hesitate to speak the truth in love for risk of offending the person. For example, I do not know of a single biblical or theological authority who has changed their mind on any of the contemporary sexual issues of our day, who didn’t have a son, daughter, or close family member struggling with one of those letters of the acronym.

On the other hand, these kinds of authentic relationships take work, time, and patience. We can’t pre-empt the relationship part and think our job is done. McDowell’s and Wallace’s “way forward” requires taking this to heart. We must be willing to invest the time necessary and build the trust necessary to get at what the next generation is really thinking and feeling. That’s why this book about transmitting a Christian worldview to the next generation includes a section on something as important—and yet as simple as—eating together.

This book is a necessary read for parents, grandparents, pastors, educators—anyone invested in the faith of Gen Z.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast we present Mama Maggie Gobran, this year’s winner of the Colson Center’s William Wilberforce Award

Recognized for her decades of work among the poorest of the poor in Cairo’s garbage slums, Mama Maggie tells us what makes a true hero of the faith.

• Register for our next short course, with Andrew Walker, Jay Richards, Andrew Bomberger, and Sandra Glahn
• August 6, 13, 20, and 27

Most people don’t know this, but early feminists—including suffragette Susan B. Anthony—were deeply opposed to abortion. A surprisingly honest Saturday Night Live sketch from a couple of years ago captured the shock of a group of progressive young ladies, who when they meet Anthony are shocked to learn her less-than-progressive views on a woman’s so-called right to choose.

Even more, Anthony and other early feminists clearly stated why they opposed abortion. Besides calling it murder, they argued that abortion allows men to use women to satisfy their appetites, and then throw them aside. In an 1875 speech entitled “Social Purity,” Anthony put abortion alongside “breach of promise, divorce, adultery, bigamy, seduction, rape...wife murders...[and] infanticides” as evils perpetrated by men against women and children.

In an 1869 article in Anthony’s newspaper, an anonymous author (who most assume is Anthony herself), condemned abortion in no uncertain terms, laying it primarily at the feet of men: “No matter the motive,” she wrote, “[whether] love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”

Times have changed. What was once a feminist argument against abortion has become a talking point for it. A recent editorial in the Huffington Post entitled “Access to Abortion Changes Cis Men’s Lives Too” makes exactly such a claim. For those who aren’t up-to-speed on gender-theory lingo, “Cis” is short for “Cisgender,” which just means non-trans and non-gay. Why that word even exists is another story.

In the HuffPo piece, Emma Gray argues that abortion is good for straight men, because it allows them to get rid of an unplanned child and get on with their educations and careers. She tells the stories of males (I cannot call them “men”) who say that “forced parenthood” would have been a disaster for them. She remarks how lucky they were to live in states where their girlfriends could just visit an abortion clinic, so they could dispose of the child and move on to more important things. As one pro-abortion journalist she approvingly quotes tweeted: “Behind millions of successful men is an abortion they don’t regret getting with their partner.”

Gray goes on: “...carrying an unintended pregnancy to term can mean giving up on professional and educational dreams. It can mean sacrificing financial stability. It can mean being tied to the wrong relationship forever....”

And then she quotes these fathers who—along with their partners—chose abortion over responsibility: “Access to abortion changed my life,” said one. Another said, “Anytime I am able to think about my career on a...normal trajectory and the fact that I was able to finish school...I can almost always tie it back to [the abortion].” “If your girlfriend breaks her leg,” said another, “you want to take her to the doctor instead of let it be a lingering issue that she has to deal with for the rest of her life.”

Wow. What a hero.

Apparently, for this man and the Huffington Post, a baby is like a broken bone, and abortion is the splint that can get unwilling parents’ lives back on track. Of course, the life of the innocent child killed in the name of convenience will never get back on track.

Susan B. Anthony and other early feminists decried abortion as a way for men to dodge responsibility. Today, abortion supporters see male irresponsibility as a positive good, no matter who dies in the process. By doing so, they’ve liberated men, but not women. They’ve enslaved women to male lusts, and given men a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.

What kind of a self-centered worldview puts a father’s dreams ahead of a child’s life? As Susan B. Anthony would have argued, it’s not a worldview that anybody who believes in women’s rights should ever embrace.

For the past five years, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, has conducted a survey of U.S. adults measuring what it calls the “accelerating acceptance” of LGBT people. Up till now, they’ve used these survey results to drive home the “right sight of history” narrative that seems so effective for the movement.

The survey asks people to describe how they feel about being around LGBT people, from “very comfortable” to “very uncomfortable,” in seven hypothetical situations, such as having gay people at their place of worship, or learning that a family member is transgender, to name just two.  As you might expect, until recently, the survey has shown an increased acceptance of LGBT people, but the results for 2018 are in, and GLAAD isn’t happy about them.

While the overall results among all adults “remained stable,” the survey showed that people between the ages of 18 and 34 “are becoming increasingly ‘uncomfortable’ with at least some of the hypotheticals.” If that’s not what you expected from Millennials and “Generation Z,” you’re not alone. As GLAAD’s press release put it, “The younger generation has traditionally been thought of as a beacon of progressive values.”

Though “the idea of ‘equal rights’ is largely supported by Americans . . . “legal equality,” said a GLAAD spokesperson “is not the same as acceptance… Acceptance cannot be legislated.”

Of course, the question of the hour is, why would younger Americans be increasingly uncomfortable with this movement that is supposed to be historically inevitable? Well I’d suggest, to borrow a phrase, it might have something to do with “overplaying your hand.”

The political, legal, and cultural victories of the past decade have led many LGBT activists and allies to believe that the kind of complete “acceptance” GLAAD is after was not only inevitable but imminent. So much so, they became impatient not only with people who overtly disagreed with them, but even with those who were a little ambivalent or expressed a “live and let live” attitude. Their attitude could be summed up in the words of the German poet Goethe: “To tolerate means to insult.”

I can think of at least a few ways in which this intolerance of anything less than full celebration has taken form. One is the consistent bullying by LGBTQ advocates of perceived foes. Young people dislike bullies. And Jack Phillips has been bullied. Barronelle Stutzman has been bullied. Any student who dares open their mouths in support of traditional sexual morality or gender norms, or even questions any extreme of the movement on any “woke” campus knows what it means to be bullied.

Then there’s how much the whole movement has changed since the “T”s and the “Q’s” have joined the acronym and taken it over. I think this is an especially relevant point given that it’s young women who are the most likely to be uncomfortable with LGBTQ situations. I can imagine plenty of young women resisting the unfairness of biological men competing against women in sports, for example, or the appropriation of scholarship dollars and business start-up grants designated for women going to men. And the more this happens, the more uncomfortable young women will be.

And here’s another reason: Back when it was just an LGB movement, we were told that what happens in the privacy of one’s bedroom is no one else’s business. Those days are long gone. Today, “tolerance” means supporting “drag queen story hours” at public libraries for children. And the demands don’t stop there. In a recent article in Medium, an author insisted that anyone who won’t date or sleep with a transgendered person is a “transphobe.”

We often say that “politics is downstream from culture.” In this case, the water flows both ways. Popular culture played a huge role in transforming the way Americans think about LGBT issues, which led to political and legal changes. But now, LGBT politics could be leading some people to rethink how they think about these issues in the first place.

And that makes GLAAD unhappy.

John Stonestreet and Warren Smith reflect on the life and influence of Christian apologist extraordinaire Norman Geisler.

They also discuss President Trump's 4th of July speech, the gross historical reinterpretation of the Stonewall riots (largely credited with being the launch of the LGBT movement), Sean McDowell's and J. Warner Wallace's new book, "So the Next Generation Will Know," and the crisis at our Southern border.

• Joe Carter, The Gospel Coalition, June 30, 2019

• Warren Cole Smith, BreakPoint.org, June 28, 2019

• Sean McDowell, J. Warner Wallace, 2019

America’s founders believed that the freedom to express political and religious opinions, even unpopular ones, was central to self-government. Still, the freedom of speech, like all freedoms, has its limits. We can’t just shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, for example.

Antifa, a group of leftist radicals, believes differently. Any ideas other than their own are not only wrong, they’re dangerous and must be shut down by, and I quote, “any means necessary.”

These are more than words. Just ask Quillette journalist Andy Ngo, a conservative, who has been documenting Antifa violence for a while now. This past weekend, in Portland, he was recording an Antifa mob as they “protested” another rally held by a right-wing group called “The Proud Boys.” Protesting is as American as apple pie. It’s especially common in Portland. But if you’re wearing a ski mask and holding a baseball bat, protester might not be the right word for you.

Antifa knew in advance that Ngo would be there, and he expressed concern for his own safety on social media before going. His concerns turned out to be valid. He was pelted with milkshakes, sprayed with silly string, then punched and kicked to the point that he was bleeding and had to go to the emergency room.

The media coverage, to put it lightly, was odd. CBS described the event only as a clash between Antifa and right-wing groups. The only mention of Ngo was that he claimed on Twitter to have been attacked. Never mind the fact that a journalist from the Portland Oregonian had filmed it.

Left-wing blogger Jesse Signal rightly called the attack insane, listing and documenting other journalists also physically assaulted by Antifa. But many others of the Punderati on the Left debated whether or not Ngo had it coming to him, and whether his politics made him an acceptable target for violence.

Despite their name, Antifa is not ultimately driven by their opposition to fascism. What they consider to be fascism is fully informed by a far-left worldview, including far-left ideologies like socialism, communism, and anarchy. These are ideologies which tend to see opponents not only as wrong, but as obstacles to their utopian fantasies.

The recent Portland “protest” and assault—actually assaults, because there were others—are just the latest in a long string of riots with Antifa at their center. During the Trump Inauguration, 230 so-called “protesters” were arrested for smashing windows and starting fires. In February of 2017 at Berkeley, Antifa demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails to halt a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos. The same month, the Portland city council was forced to shut down a public forum after Antifa threatened violence. In August of that year, Antifa members, trying to disrupt a free speech rally in Boston, threw urine-filled projectiles at police.

Given this history of violence, you’d think Portland authorities would have been better prepared. Mayor Ted Wheeler has come under fire for not containing the violence. In fact, the Portland Police Association has called on the mayor to “remove the handcuffs from our officers and let them stop the violence through strong and swift enforcement action.”

Now how exactly the mayor has handcuffed the Portland police, I don’t know, but let’s hope and pray he will take the necessary steps to preserve order and the safety of his citizens. If he can’t or won’t, he should step down.

In the same way, a truly free media can’t have it both ways. Criticizing President Trump for saying the media is “the enemy of the people” is absolutely justified, but staying mum when one of your own is beaten in the streets by Antifa, just because he is conservative, is absolutely not.

Good for folks like Jake Tapper, who tweeted: “Antifa regularly attacks journalists. It is reprehensible.” And good for CNN for allowing Ngo to tell what happened to him, on air.

As I said two years ago, people on both sides of the political aisle who disagree on nearly everything can still agree that the right to peacefully assemble, to debate and protest is a foundation of our Republic, and that political violence has no place in our country, whether it’s from the left or the right.

Words matter. Definitions matter. Christians, of all people, should understand how much words and definitions, especially today, are being used to either affirm or deny reality, and even shape our view of reality.

George Orwell, of course, understood the power of words. In fact, he so masterfully captured the notion in his novel 1984, that today the intentional misuse of words is named after him: “Orwellian.” Think of abortion, for example: Is “abortion” an issue of “reproductive rights” or is it the “taking of an innocent life”?

Not every new use of words is intentional malpractice, of course. Words often change over time as our culture changes. Sometimes words will change because the culture has changed. Sometimes culture changes because words have changed.

Either way, imagine how much a word or a phrase might have changed over 250 years.

The word “happiness,” for example, is part of the most memorable line in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Anyone who understands just how much the word “happiness” has changed, can also understand why the American experiment seems to be coming apart at the seams these days.

Dictionary.com offers a common definition of “happiness”: “pleasure; contentment; joy.”

In an age where radical individual autonomy and disordered passions are combined with nearly unlimited technological and financial resources, an unalienable right to pursue whatever make us “happy” in that sense is basically a downward spiral into the moral abyss.  What’s there to stop us from intoxicating ourselves into mindless distractions, eliminating consequences of our behavior – like unborn babies – that interfere with our freedom, or even ending our own lives when we think we can no longer be happy?

But what if I told you the founding fathers had a different definition of happiness? That’s the case Carli Conklin makes in her new book, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History.

In the eighteenth century, happiness “refer[red] to man’s ability to know the law of nature,” Conklin says, “and … to choose to pursue a life of virtue or, in other words, a life lived in harmony with those natural law principles.”

This is exactly what Chuck Colson said back in 2010:

Our founding fathers understood the pursuit of happiness to mean the pursuit of a virtuous life. Happiness comes from a life well-lived, a life rooted in truth that orders our desires and pleasure. That is what every man and woman has an inalienable right to pursue.

Over at Public Discourse, Justin Dwyer adds an important point on the pursuit of happiness and The Declaration of Independence: that both are incomprehensible outside of the Declaration’s theological framework.

“Yes,” Dwyer says, “Jefferson and some of the principal Founders . . . held unorthodox religious beliefs. Nonetheless, all of these men publicly and privately affirmed a shared natural theology: that there is a Creator who has imbued the world with discernible natural laws, physical and moral, and who governs the affairs of men with his sustaining and intervening providence.”

I know this is intellectual heavy lifting for a day set aside for parades, cookouts, and fireworks. But the concept of true happiness is crucial not only for our nation, but also for the body of Christ.

In that same 2010 commentary, Chuck lamented a Barna survey that revealed “more than half of evangelicals agreed with the statement: ‘The purpose of life is enjoyment and personal fulfillment.’”

“Come on!” Chuck said. “If the last 50 years taught us anything, it’s that consumerism and . . . the pursuit of unbridled pleasure . . . do not lead to happiness, but instead to personal and societal misery… The goal is not pleasure; it is righteous living, decency, honor, doing good—in short, living a virtuous life.”

Amen. And Happy 4th of July.

Imagine you’re a college student, and your professor claims that science has disproved the idea of God, of the soul, of ultimate meaning, and of truth. What do you say to that professor?

The best answer is that his claim itself is not scientific. It’s a claim of a worldview called materialism, which says that everything that exists is the product of matter, energy, and purposeless processes. New atheist authors like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have spent years hawking materialism as science, and they’ve deceived a lot of people.

In response, a group of scientists, philosophers, and theologians have named the worldview mistake for what it is, and are now offering an exciting alternative: that the world is instead filled with meaning, mind, and design, and countless other things that cannot be reduced to raw physical materials.

The Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture has distilled the best arguments against materialism and for the God behind creation into a series of punchy, information-packed videos. They’re short—just a few minutes each—and were made to grab students’ attention, challenging them with thoughts materialists don’t want them thinking.

“Science Uprising” uses a fun, Internet “hacktivist” vibe complete with Guy Fawkes mask to show how deeply-entrenched materialism is, and how challenging this dogma could get you into academic trouble. But as the experts interviewed in each episode agree, we must challenge materialism, because it runs contrary to everything we know about ourselves and the world in which we live.

The first episode confronts the claim famously made by Carl Sagan—that “the cosmos is all that is, ever was, or ever will be.” We see clips of new atheists denying the existence of meaning and purpose and claiming that humanity is nothing but atoms. In response, experts in intelligent design like Jay Richards and Michael Egnor point to all the things we know are real that aren’t made of matter—things like joy, sorrow, right, wrong, truth, beauty, justice, and even our own sense of self.

What’s more, science itself isn’t made of matter. As Oxford Mathematician John Lennox explained at our recent Wilberforce Weekend, the claim that 'whatever science can’t study isn’t real' is self-refuting. Science, after all, can’t study itself. It’s based on a set of non-material assumptions—like the reality of the material world, the accuracy of our five senses, the existence of math and logic, and the predictability of the laws of nature. None of these are made of matter; yet without them, science is impossible.

Episode two tackles the materialist claim that we’re nothing but machines made out of meat. Over and over, new atheists have told us that human consciousness is an illusion created by chemical reactions in our brains. But there are powerful arguments that we are more than our gray matter. My favorite is that if our thoughts are nothing but hydrogen and sodium reacting, then there’s no reason to trust the thoughts of materialists in the first place!

“Science Uprising” also catches up with Stephen Meyer, who covers the problem DNA poses to materialism—specifically to Neo-Darwinism. All life is based on information, and information not only transcends matter, it always comes from a mind.

Episode four covers the improbable fine-tuning of the universe and solar system. While atheists like Lawrence Krauss and Bill Nye claim we’re just “a speck orbiting another speck in the middle of specklessness,” a world-renowned physicist and engineer at NASA begs to differ, citing the near-miraculous coincidences that produced a world as hospitable for life as ours is—a world which—as one of them notes, looks as if it expected us.

This series is a must watch for students, especially, but really for anyone ready to unmask the worldview currently masquerading as “settled” science.

Come to BreakPoint.org for a link to watch “Science Uprising.” You can forward these free videos to friends, family, pastors, and even materialist professors.