WATCH: Lee Strobel Tells Tucker Carlson “Unbelievable” Guardian Angel Story!

Tucker Carlson: So, we’re told there’s no state religion in the West, certainly not in the United States, but in fact there is. It’s scientism. It’s the worship of science. It’s the belief, and all of us learn this at a young age, that everything around us, everything we experience can be measured by people in white coats. If it can’t be measured, it’s not real.

The problem with this religion is that our life, our daily experience contradicts it constantly. All of us are seeing, hearing, tasting, and feeling things that can’t be measured by science. But that doesn’t make them any less real. These are, by definition, supernatural. Supernatural experiences are a feature of everyone’s life, and if we’re honest, we’ll admit that.

What do they mean exactly? Lee Strobel was a reporter. He worked for the Chicago Tribune and then left and became a pastor. So he has religious faith but also a grounding in empiricism – the desire to prove things. He is the perfect person to write the book that he did about the supernatural: dreams, mystical dreams, near-death experiences, miracles, ghosts. We sat down with him to hear just how common these experiences are and what they mean.

Tucker Carlson: Lee Strobel, you’ve written a book. I don’t do a lot of book interviews, but couldn’t resist this one. It’s titled “Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World,” right? I think a lot of us sense or know on some level – in fact, I think everybody knows on some level – that there is a world that science can’t measure or quantify. There are things that we can’t explain, but they are no less real for our inability to explain them. So, let’s go through the list.

Lee Strobel: By the way, I was an atheist. I’m trained in journalism and law, so I’m always looking for corroboration. I’m looking for evidence. I’m looking for facts. You’re right – I think there’s an intuitive sense that most people have that there’s something beyond what we can see, touch, and put in a test tube. Eight out of ten Americans believe that.

But how do we know? What is the evidence? That’s what I try to get into in the book. How can we be sure through corroborated evidence that indeed there are such things as miracles, near-death experiences, deathbed encounters, mystical dreams, and things like that?

Tucker Carlson: Atheism is the leap of imagination. It’s hard to be an atheist. I admire them in a way, though I feel sorry for them. Anyway, okay, angels. What’s an angel? Fascinating.

Lee Strobel: Angels are created by God before humankind was created. They are spirit beings, so they aren’t omniscient like God. They’re not omnipresent like God. They don’t age because there’s no physical body. They don’t marry for the same reason. They’re very intelligent and very smart. According to the Bible, they are to serve not only God but also his people.

Tucker Carlson: The Christian Bible, with the Hebrew Old Testament, makes reference to these. Is there any culture in the world that doesn’t believe in some form of angel?

Lee Strobel: It’s pretty universal. Virtually every culture, all the way to the Maya and the Canaanites, has some idea of angelic beings. What’s interesting about the Christian interpretation of angels is that in the book of Hebrews in the Bible it says we should anticipate the possibility that we would encounter an angel. It says sometimes when you’re providing hospitality to someone, unbeknownst to you, it’s an angel. So there’s an anticipation that perhaps there could be angelic encounters.

In the book, I look at cases in which we have angelic encounters – people actually encountering an angel. I’ll give you an example. There was a missionary named John G. Paton from Scotland who went to an island in the South Pacific to be a Christian missionary. He and his wife were living in a cottage there. He was talking about Jesus, but the local tribespeople didn’t quite like that. One day a mob came to burn down their house and kill him. They saw this mob forming, and he and his wife were in their house. They started to pray: “God, protect us. Help us. They’re going to kill us. They’re going to burn our house down. What do we do?” They prayed all night long. By dawn, the mob began to dissipate.

A year later, he led the head of that mob to faith in Jesus Christ. They were having a conversation and John said to him, “By the way, do you remember that day when you all came to burn down our house and kill us? Why didn’t you do it?” The man said, “Well, who were all those men you had there?” John replied, “I don’t know of any men. It was just my wife and me.” The man said, “No, no, no. Your house was surrounded by these muscular men in white garments with drawn swords. There was no way we could have hurt you that night.” What is the explanation for that? It could very well have been an angelic encounter – that God sent angels to protect him. There are multiple cases like that.

Tucker Carlson: Give me another.

Lee Strobel: I had an encounter myself when I was twelve years old. It was the only dream I remember as a child, more of a vision than a dream. An angel appeared to me and began extolling heaven, how beautiful and wonderful heaven is. I looked at him offhandedly and said, “Well, I’m going to go there someday.” He looked at me and said, “How do you know?” I was shocked. How do I know? I started to kind of stumble around to justify my goodness. I said, “Well, I obey my parents pretty much and I get good grades in school and my friends like me,” and I’m trying to justify why I would get into heaven. He looked at me and he said, “That doesn’t matter.” A chill went through my spine. How could this not matter? He said, “Someday you’ll understand.” Then he disappeared.

I kind of wrote it off as being a bad pizza and ultimately became an atheist. But sixteen years later, my wife brought me to a church and I heard the gospel for the first time – that salvation, that the doors of heaven are not flung open based on how nice you are to your parents or how good grades you get in school. It’s based on the grace of God. It’s not something we earn; it’s a free gift of God’s grace. I heard that message for the first time and my mind flashed back to that dream. I thought, wait a minute, that’s what he was trying to tell me back then.

Tucker Carlson: Had you thought a lot about that dream?

Lee Strobel: It would come to me every once in a while. I’d think about it. I’d just suppress it as a bad pizza, you know. But then I thought there’s two forms of corroboration there. Number one, that angel told me something when I was twelve years old that I did not already know – that salvation is by grace. Secondly, he made a prediction that someday I would understand, and it came true sixteen years later. I think that may have been an angelic encounter that I had. I can’t prove it, but that corroboration tells me maybe it really was.

We see cases like this around the world. There are more than 200 references to angels in the Bible. So there’s lots of evidence that indeed this is part of God’s creation.

Tucker Carlson: I’ve been to church. I don’t know that I’ve, probably the wrong kind of church, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone refer to angels. Funny you say that, because I was giving a talk the other day and I said, you know, I’ve been a Christian now since November 8, 1981. I have never heard a sermon on the topic of angels, ever. Ever. Why?

Lee Strobel: I don’t know. And so in this book, I delve into it and learn some new things. For instance, do we have a guardian angel? There are two passages in the Bible that suggest maybe we do. In one passage, Jesus is talking to a group and there are some children there, and he said, “Do not despise these little ones because their angels see the face of God every day in heaven.” Who are their angels? Then in another passage, Peter, when he escapes from prison, goes to a home where some Christians had gathered. He knocks on the door and the servant says, “Who’s there?” He says, “Peter,” and she recognizes his voice. She calls out to the other people and says, “Hey, Peter’s here.” They say, “He can’t be here. He’s in prison. It must be his angel.” Based on those two passages, there are Christians who believe that we have an angel assigned to us. In fact, in the Orthodox Christian tradition, they believe an angel is assigned to you at the time you’re baptized. Some Christians deny that, but it could be.

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Another thing I learned in my investigation of angels: I don’t think it’s appropriate to pray to angels. I don’t believe we’re taught to do that. I think there’s a slippery slope if you pray to angels that it might slip into worship of angels, which would be blasphemous. But there’s nothing wrong with praying to God about angels. Martin Luther, in the Small Catechism, has a prayer that says, “Lord, send your holy angels to protect me from the evil one.” So I never used to do this, but I now make part of my prayer that God would send angels to protect me and my family, my ministry, my grandchildren. I think that’s totally appropriate to do.

Tucker Carlson: We’re going to get to demons in a second, but you used the phrase “the evil one.” The foundational Christian prayer is what we call the Lord’s Prayer, handed down by Jesus himself, right? At the end of it, after we seek forgiveness and forgive those who’ve sinned against us, we say, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil,” is the way that most Americans learn the prayer. But there’s another interpretation that says, “Deliver us from the evil one.”

Lee Strobel: That’s right. There is an embarrassment in American culture toward some of these supernatural phenomena. American Christians often want to be accepted and seen as normal by their neighbors. “Oh, yes, I go to church and yes, I believe in Jesus,” but you won’t catch them talking about angels or demons or miracles or any of this weird stuff. They want to be accepted as being normal by other people. So I think there’s a lot of people that just don’t delve into this. There’s a deemphasis in many churches and in many Christian lives. And yet Jesus clearly believed not only in angels, but he was an exorcist. Even skeptics will admit, according to the gospels, that Jesus was an exorcist. He believed in Satan and he believed in demons.

Tucker Carlson: It was one of the primary activities of his life on earth.

Lee Strobel: Exactly. Look at the Gospel of Mark. Half of his activity is related in some way to fighting demons. So as a Christian, we ought to believe and then consider what are the implications of this. If this is true, if there is a demonic realm, if there is an angelic realm, what are the implications to me today?

Tucker Carlson: I would put it another way. Are you aware of any society in the known history of the human race that didn’t believe there was a supernatural realm filled with good and evil?

Lee Strobel: It’s virtually universal. I can’t think of any culture that didn’t believe that, except postwar West.

Tucker Carlson: Drop the atom bomb, get rid of the supernatural, because we’re God now. But before then, I just think this was taken as a matter of course. If every society in known history reaches some version of the same conclusion, it suggests maybe there’s something there. Why would you come up with that?

Lee Strobel: It’s funny. People will say, “You need extraordinary evidence to prove an extraordinary claim,” which I don’t think is legitimate. I don’t think that stands up to scrutiny. But let’s take it on face value and say you need extraordinary evidence to prove an extraordinary claim. Well, the claim that there are demons is not an extraordinary claim because 95% of humanity through history has believed in it. So if you’re an atheist, the onus is on you. You must present the extraordinary evidence that the demonic does not exist.

Tucker Carlson: There are also moments in the life of every person who’s awake and not on fentanyl – maybe even people who are on fentanyl – where you know you’re being acted on by an outside force of some kind. You have no idea what it is. But there are moments when you’re much better than yourself, much more empathetic, and there are other moments where you’re seized by the desire to destroy for the sake of destruction, which doesn’t make any sense. There’s no evolutionary biological accounting for that. Why would you want to destroy something for no reason? The impulse to destroy is clearly the hallmark of evil, right?

Lee Strobel: It is. It’s consistent with the Christian teaching that the demonic realm exists, that it is intent on luring us away from God and luring us down a pathway that is dark and dangerous.

Tucker Carlson: But people feel that. You don’t have to be a Christian to have felt that. If you’re honest with yourself, there are moments where you’re like, “Why did I do that?”

Lee Strobel: Right. We do have cases where we have evidence that there is a demonic realm.

Tucker Carlson: All right, let me ask you one last angel question, because I’m trying to faithfully go in order, because you can judge a book by its cover. You said that angels in the New Testament and perhaps also in the Old Testament are described as present in our world. Yes, we will mistake angels for people. That’s predicted. Do you think that happens? If so, can you give us an example? And what would be the purpose of that?

Lee Strobel: It’s interesting. In the book of Hebrews, it says that we will do it unbeknownst to ourselves. In other words, the implication is that we will have angelic encounters but we won’t realize they’re angels. I think that does happen. I have a couple of cases in my book. One is a pastor who was driving his car in Ohio. He lost control of the car. He hit an electric transformer pole. The wires fell down on his car. The doors were jammed shut. The electricity was coursing through the car so much that the windshield started to melt. He’s trapped in the car and doesn’t know what to do. He begins to pray, “God, I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do.” A scruffy kind of guy comes walking up to the car, opens the door that was jammed, reaches in, lifts out this pastor, and takes him about fifty yards away from the car, which then explodes.

The man says to the pastor, “You’re going to be okay. You’re okay now. The police are on their way and I can’t be here when they get here. Just know that you’re okay.” He walked away and disappeared. The medics who came to the accident said they can’t explain how it was possible that somebody could have opened that car door and not been electrocuted and rescued this pastor. Yet it happened. The pastor says, “I believe it was an angel.” Maybe it could have been. How do you prove something like that? How do you explain it away naturally? How do you explain that he’s able to come, grip the car door, and open this car that had been jammed shut? I think the logical explanation, if you don’t rule out the supernatural at the outset, is that it was an angelic encounter.

Tucker Carlson: Amazing. But there are probably more subtle experiences, too, where you learn something, you encounter somebody out of nowhere who tells you something or who tests your compassion.

Lee Strobel: Very well could be. Even the incident I had seemed to, as an atheist – here I am in this church nearly thirty years old, hearing this and understanding the gospel – that encounter I had with an angel helped open my heart to the truth of the gospel. Of course, I had to spend two years of my life investigating it from a skeptical perspective to conclude that it really was true, but it did propel me down that road toward God.

Tucker Carlson: What are demons?

Lee Strobel: Demons are fallen angels. The Bible is a little bit vague on this, but apparently there was a time when Lucifer, whose name means “morning star,” was first among angels. He wanted to be worshiped. His pride resulted in him falling from the angelic realm, becoming Satan, whose name means “adversary.” A certain percentage of the angels accompanied him in this fall. This happened before the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden. We don’t know how many angels accompanied him, but there are a lot of angels. In Revelation 5 there’s a scene of Jesus on the throne being worshiped. If you do the math, it talks about a hundred million angels worshiping him at that time. So there are a lot of angels, and a percentage of them fell with Lucifer. He became Satan and angels became his minions.

Satan is limited in his power. He’s not omniscient like God. He’s not omnipresent like God. A guy was telling me there is probably never a time when you and Satan have both been in the same zip code because he’s only in one place at a time. He’s got things he’s doing. He’s probably never been in the same zip code as you, but his demons probably have. They carry out his will, which is to pull people away from God, to discourage people from finding God, and to drag as many people to hell with them as they can. His existence is sort of on a leash by God at this point. His ultimate destination in the lake of fire is already predicted, so he has no future, but he has influence and he has certain powers. He and the demons are very intuitive. You’ll think they know more than they know, and they go after people.

I tell the story in my book about a very prominent psychiatrist named Richard Gallagher, educated at an Ivy League university. I have a quote from the former president of the American Psychiatric Association calling him a man of the highest integrity and totally trained and prominent in his field. About twenty-five years ago he had two cats. They got along great. They slept together. They played together. Everything was fine until one night the cats started to attack each other viciously. They were trying to kill each other, clawing, snarling, biting. It was unbelievable. They pulled them apart, put them into separate rooms, and thought, “What in the world was that all about?”

At nine o’clock the next morning, the doorbell rings. It was a preset appointment. A Catholic priest was bringing by a woman to be examined by Dr. Gallagher. She claimed that she was a high priestess of a satanic cult. The priest wanted her to be examined to see if she was demonically possessed, just crazy, or what this was all about. At nine in the morning, the doorbell rings. Dr. Gallagher opens the door and here’s this woman who claims to be a high priestess of a satanic cult. She looks up at him, sneers, and says, “So, how’d you like those cats last night?” There is something going on.

That took him on a journey. As a psychiatrist who understands what mental illness is, he came to understand what demon possession and demon oppression are like. He spends the next twenty-five years as the go-to guy in the medical realm for exorcists of the Catholic faith and has witnessed amazing things that he documents. I quote him in the book: cases where we have a woman who, in front of eight eyewitnesses, levitates off a bed for thirty minutes; another case where people are speaking in Latin and other languages that they don’t know; people who are spontaneously bruised and clawed; a petite woman picking up a two-hundred-pound Lutheran deacon and throwing him across a room. These are things that go beyond psychiatry. He believes these are actual demonic possessions.

Now, a true Christian cannot be demonically possessed because a true Christian is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. You can’t be indwelt by evil and good at the same time. So Christians cannot be possessed, but they can be oppressed. They can be hectored. They can be bothered. They can be attacked by demons. There are some amazing examples of that.

For Christians, the book of James says that if you rebuke Satan, he’ll go away. If you’re a Christian, you don’t have to be afraid that these demons are going to somehow possess you or kill you or whatever. Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world, the Bible says. So, the Bible says if you shun Satan, he has no choice. He’s got to leave you. For a Christian, you’re protected, but I fear for those who don’t have that kind of protection. There are cases of demon possession that, as Dr. Gallagher and others have documented, are corroborated in ways that I don’t think can be denied.

Tucker Carlson: How can you corroborate a supernatural event?

Lee Strobel: By looking at when there’s no naturalistic explanation for what occurs. So you have a woman, for instance, in front of eight eyewitnesses levitating off a bed for thirty minutes. I don’t know what the natural explanation for that would be. So I think it points toward something beyond that. For me, as I investigate, another area I investigate in the book is miracles. If you have solid documentation, medical documentation, if you have multiple eyewitnesses with no motive to deceive, if you have no natural explanation that can account for the phenomenon, and if it takes place in the context of prayer, then I think it’s logical to conclude that a miracle has taken place. There have been miracles published in peer-reviewed medical journals. I talk about one in the book.

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Tucker Carlson: Here’s a woman who was blind for twelve years with an incurable condition. She went to a school for the blind. She learned to read Braille. She walked with a white cane and she married a Baptist pastor. One night they’re getting ready to go to bed. She’s already in bed. He comes over to her and puts his hand on her shoulder and begins to cry. He begins to pray and says, “Lord, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can heal her right now and I pray that you do it tonight.” With that, she opened her eyes to perfect vision. She said, “I was blind when my husband prayed for me. He prayed. I opened my eyes. I can see. It’s a miracle.” That was researched by multiple medical researchers and published in a medical journal as a case study. What do you do with that?

Lee Strobel: It certainly points toward a supernatural event. There’s a woman with a Ph.D. from Harvard who’s a professor at Indiana University, a major secular university. She said she wanted to test whether miracles are possible. How can we scientifically test that? Here’s what she did. Miracles tend to cluster in places where the gospel is breaking in. We see them in China, in Mozambique, in Brazil – places where the gospel is taking root. So she sent a team of scientists to Mozambique. They went into the bush and said, “Bring us all your deaf and blind.” They brought all the people who were deaf, blind, or with severe hearing or vision problems. They tested them scientifically: what is your level of vision, what is your level of hearing? They got that scientifically established. Then immediately they were prayed for in the name of Jesus by people who tend to have a track record of God using them that way. Immediately after that, they’re tested again. They found improvement in virtually every case. The average improvement in visual acuity was tenfold. There was a woman named Martine. When they first encountered her, she could not hear the equivalent of a jackhammer next door. After ten minutes of prayer, she could hear normal conversations.

This team was flummoxed by this. Something is going on here. Virtually every person improved, some of them dramatically. They said, “Let’s see if we can replicate it.” So they went to another place where miracles are breaking out, Brazil. They did the same test. They got the same results. There was a woman in Brazil. She couldn’t see me holding up three fingers from nine feet away. After prayer for her healing, she could read the name tag of the person praying for her. This was published. It is a scientifically rigorous study published in a peer-reviewed secular medical journal, the Southern Medical Journal. I interviewed the scholar who did that study. I asked, “What do you make of this?” She said, “Something’s going on. We’re not playing on people’s emotions. This isn’t some televangelist trying to get people to send in their money. This isn’t people with a predisposition for anything. Something is going on.” I think she’s right. I think it’s miraculous.

Tucker Carlson: It sounds like it. And I think every person who’s awake has experienced something that doesn’t have a natural explanation.

Lee Strobel: I did a study. I hired a public opinion firm to do a scientifically accurate study of American adults. I asked the question, “Have you ever had one experience at least in your life that you can only explain away as being a miracle of God?” Thirty-eight percent of American adults said yes. Let’s say 99% of them are wrong. Let’s say they thought it was a miracle, but it was just a big coincidence. Let’s wipe out 99%. That would still mean there would be a million miracles in the United States alone. So many people have experienced something in their life that they can only attribute to being a miracle of God.

Tucker Carlson: When Jesus performed miracles – healing people, making the lame walk, fixing the man with the withered hand, even when he cast out demons from the man in the cemetery on the Sea of Galilee – the reaction he got from the religious authorities, the Pharisees, was that they hated it. Why is that?

Lee Strobel: They did not like Jesus. They did not like his message. They did not like who he was. You’d think they’d be happy that the lame man could walk after thirty years. At least they could say, “Good for you. That’s great. By the way, we don’t like this Jesus guy.” But no. They didn’t. They plotted to kill the man he healed and they did. There are a couple of references in the New Testament to Satan being the ruler of the earth.

Tucker Carlson: What does that mean?

Lee Strobel: It means that in this realm he, in many ways, has his way. In other words, he has access to influence people and point them away from the one true hope there is, which is God. He prowls about, as the Bible says, as a lion hoping to tear people apart spiritually.

Tucker Carlson: If that’s not true, then explain the First World War. There is no explanation even now, over a hundred years later, for why that war started. “Oh, Archduke Ferdinand got shot to death in Sarajevo.” Really? That’s not a real explanation. Why did Christian Europe commit suicide? There are many other wars and tragedies in all of our lives. That doesn’t make any sense. Clearly supernatural forces are acting on people.

Lee Strobel: I agree. So what I tried to do is say, “Okay, what evidence is there that there’s more than what we can see and touch?” I’m fascinated by this, because if this is true – if demons do exist – we ought to be heads up about it. The two biggest mistakes we can make about the demonic realm are: number one, to deny that they exist; and number two, to see a demon behind every bush and think they’re more powerful than they are. Both are problems. But I think the biggest problem in our culture is to deny that there is a demonic realm.

Tucker Carlson: Pretend like there isn’t. So what are the hallmarks of it then?

Lee Strobel: We see manifestations of it in ways that defy natural explanations. I think that’s probably the best way: disorder, distraction, chaos, violence, hate, division. If Satan were smart, which he is, would he go around the country and around the world trying to possess or bother average everyday people? Much more efficient to go to Hollywood and influence people there who are very influential in the entertainment industry. Let’s say he encourages them to create films and television shows that are funny and creative and fun. But there’s an underlying message that normalizes immoral activity. When we laugh, it opens us up to various possibilities. When we laugh our defenses come down. So I’m thinking of a funny TV show like “Friends,” for instance. Underlying that is a very ugly sexual ethic that normalizes multiple sexual partners – the kind of thing that Satan would love to inculcate into American culture. I think it’s much more efficient for Satan to influence movie-makers and TV-makers in Hollywood to create products that feed us stuff that, without us even realizing it, open us up to the occult or normalize immoral activity. It makes it normal. If Monica can do that on “Friends,” I can certainly have sex on the first date with this guy I meet.

Tucker Carlson: As a non-theological person, the way I try to figure out whether something is good or bad, because it is an open question very often, is: are the people doing it at peace and joyful and happy, or are they tormented? I know a lot of people in Hollywood, a lot of people I like. Not too many happy people. Some really tormented people for real: strings of wrecked relationships, kids who hate them, drug problems. There’s so much of that. Do you think that’s a fair way to assess?

Lee Strobel: I think it is logical that if Satan were to try to influence a culture in a mass way, that’s a logical way he would do it. And, by the way, look at all the dysfunction we see in that community. It does seem to match up.

Tucker Carlson: So if evil is acting through you, you are harmed too.

Lee Strobel: Generally, yes. You’re going to be someone who’s trying to influence others. You may not realize the full implications, but it destroys you. It certainly seems to.

Tucker Carlson: If I were trying to subvert and destroy, I would go after religious leaders.

Lee Strobel: Yes.

Tucker Carlson: I’d have them molest kids or get freaky sex lives or steal money from the church. I’ve always noticed that the leadership of Christian churches, just numerically, are way more likely to be screwed up than the people in the pews. Do you know what I mean? You see these sex scandals with pastors and you’re like, “How many people who are going to church every Sunday have sex lives like that? Probably not very many.” But a pretty high percentage of pastors. I feel like that is outside influence.

Lee Strobel: Look at teachers too. Teachers are people young kids look up to. You can imagine when you were in kindergarten or first grade, you looked up to your teachers.

Tucker Carlson: Not one time. There’s not one teacher I liked. I never felt it was an authoritarian situation. From kindergarten until I left college, there was not one day where I respected or liked any of them. Not a single one.

Lee Strobel: That’s interesting. I happened to go to public school growing up, and back then in the fifties and sixties most of the teachers were Christians. I had some wonderful teachers that taught me great lessons about life.

Tucker Carlson: You grew up in a better America than I did. In Southern California in the seventies, I thought they were all buffoons and freaks. I wasn’t taking orders from them. I really disliked them.

Lee Strobel: That’s funny. But if you want to lead people astray, you subvert their leaders.

Tucker Carlson: Yes. Just put yourself in Satan’s place. How are you going to impact the maximum number of people? You’re going to go after leaders. You’re going to go after religious leaders. You’re going to go after children. You’re going to influence them at a young age. We see all of that.

Lee Strobel: Could it be that some people have received some assistance from demonic influences in terms of achieving what they’ve achieved?

Tucker Carlson: How many political leaders you know are happy? How many happy political leaders have you met?

Lee Strobel: Not a lot I trust, put it that way.

Tucker Carlson: They’re tormented, sweaty and nervous, and afraid. Don’t you think those are signs?

Lee Strobel: I do. If Satan’s going to go after children, what is all this stuff about libraries doing children’s readings and drag shows to little kids? Why would that happen? Because if you can capture the mind of a child very young, it can influence them for the rest of their life.

Tucker Carlson: It happens because we put up with it. A healthy society wouldn’t put up with that for five minutes. They’d drive them out of the temple immediately with a whip.

Lee Strobel: That’s true.

Tucker Carlson: You believe that demons roam the earth. How do you protect yourself?

Lee Strobel: The Bible talks about the full armor of God in Ephesians. In the book, I have a half a chapter that looks at ways we can protect ourselves. I think the key number one way is to be knowledgeable about scripture. If the Bible is really from God, then that is the plumb line of truth. If it’s the plumb line, we can measure everything against it. If we’re tempted by something that violates that plumb line, then we can be assured that’s not from God. I think being familiar with the teachings of the Bible helps us deter any attempts by Satan to lead us down a path that’s clearly not biblical. I think that’s probably the number one way. I think prayer is important. Honestly, as an evangelist who wants to drag as many people to heaven with me as I can – that’s my life goal now as a former atheist – I will say the best way to protect yourself is to come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. If you are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, you can’t be possessed by Satan. And you can tell Satan to flee. The Bible says he will flee.

Tucker Carlson: What is the Holy Spirit?

Lee Strobel: God is one what and three who’s. The Bible teaches there is one God. But it also teaches that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. So we have one what – God – and three persons. The Holy Spirit, being disembodied, comes into the life of someone when they repent of their sin and receive forgiveness through Christ. John 1:12 says, “But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name.”

Tucker Carlson: In practical terms, what happens when the Holy Spirit comes into you?

Lee Strobel: The Holy Spirit indwells you. Now you’ve got a plumb line inside of you, so to speak, and you recognize things you didn’t see before. I’m sure you see things in your life now as a Christian that you didn’t before you were a Christian. You say, “Why did I even do that? Why was I messing with that?” I certainly have those examples, because now being indwelt by the Holy Spirit as a follower of Jesus, I have that plumb line to tell me what’s godly and what’s not. It aids our conscience in understanding that. Being indwelt by the Holy Spirit means we cannot be possessed by Satan as we see these demon possessions. Those are increasing in number. The Catholic Church has added a whole bunch of people who are trained in exorcisms. In charismatic ministries, there are deliverance ministries. I think we’re seeing an increase in demonic activity and in demons hectoring, harassing, oppressing, and possessing people.

Tucker Carlson: Are there certain places – physical places – on earth that are more demonic than others? Are there places where you feel the hair on your arm go up?

Lee Strobel: Yes. Think of Haiti. I’ve been to Haiti and felt that. I have a good friend who has a ministry in Haiti. It’s a place that has opened itself up to the demonic through human sacrifice, through voodoo, through all these things. It is a place where you palpably feel evil. I’ve been in remote parts of India and felt the same thing in many places. I think there are pockets around the globe where Satan has a stronghold. I would think that physical places like Haiti are examples of that. I’ve been in some places in the United States where I felt that strongly. I lived in a house once as a child where part of the house felt so wrong. Every person who lived in the house knew that. That could be an occultic thing.

Tucker Carlson: What’s a mystical dream?

Lee Strobel: Mystical dreams are fascinating. We’ve seen more Muslims become Christians in the last couple of decades than in the previous 1,400 years since Muhammad. It’s been estimated that a quarter to a third of them, before they became Christian, had a Jesus dream. What’s interesting about that is that these are corroborated dreams. Let me explain. First, a devout Muslim has no incentive to have a dream as a product of their subconscious mind about Jesus – the Jesus of Christianity – because it might lead them into apostasy. It might lead to a death sentence in certain countries. There’s no incentive for a devout Muslim to have a dream about Jesus. Yet we are seeing this all over the Middle East – in closed countries and oppressive countries where Christians are persecuted.

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People are not going to sleep as Muslims, having a dream about Jesus, and waking up as Christians. That’s not how it works. There is always something that points to a phenomenon or a person outside the dream that corroborates the dream. Let me give you an example. There was a woman named Noor in Cairo, a mother of eight, a devout Muslim. She goes to sleep. She has a dream in which Jesus visits her. It’s unlike any dream she’s ever had. She feels the love and grace and beauty of Jesus in such a profound way. She said, “Here I am, a woman in the presence of a man for the first time in my life, and I didn’t feel shame. I felt love.” She’s overwhelmed by this. They’re walking along a lakeshore. She says, “Jesus, why do you appear to me? I’m just a poor mother of eight in Cairo.” Jesus said, “My friend will tell you tomorrow.” She said, “Who’s your friend?” Jesus gestures to a man she didn’t even realize was walking with them along the lakeshore because she was so mesmerized by Jesus. He said, “My friend will tell you tomorrow.” She wakes up the next day, goes to the crowded marketplace in Cairo on a Friday afternoon, and she sees the man from her dream. She goes up to him and says, “You’re the one. Who are you?” He says, “Did you have a dream about Jesus last night?” Yes. It turned out he was an underground church planter. He didn’t want to go to the crowded marketplace in Cairo on a Friday afternoon – it’s chaotic – but he felt God had an assignment for him. So he went that day. Noor encounters him from the dream. He pulls her aside, opens the Bible, and shares the gospel with her. That’s the external corroboration I’m talking about. It’s not just something that takes place in your subconscious mind. There is an external factor to it.

Tucker Carlson: One of the miracles there, at least two in the story you just told, is that the pastor felt the call to go to the marketplace on a Friday and he obeyed.

Lee Strobel: Exactly.

Tucker Carlson: Have you had that experience in your life, where you just feel like you’re being told to do something and you obediently do it?

Lee Strobel: Oh yeah. As a new Christian, I remember I felt a really strong urging – I believe it was from God – to empty our bank account and send an anonymous cashier’s check to a woman in our church. Send it anonymously and do it on a Friday. My wife and I both prayed about it. We were both feeling this. It’s odd, but we felt it was legit. So we emptied the bank account. It was only five hundred dollars, but for us that was all back then. We sent this check.

Tucker Carlson: Did you know the woman?

Lee Strobel: We knew her. She was a nice woman. She had come to faith. She actually had a lot of negative experiences with Christians growing up, but she ended up coming to faith through a debate on Christianity we did in our church between an atheist and a Christian. I knew who she was. On Monday morning, she calls me out of the blue. She’s crying. She says, “Lee, I don’t know what to do.” I said, “What? What’s going on?” She said, “My car broke down over the weekend. They say it’s going to cost five hundred dollars to fix my car. I don’t have five hundred dollars. I’m going to lose my car. I’m going to lose my job because I have to have my car for the job. Would you pray for me that I would get this five hundred dollars somehow?” I said, “Absolutely, I’ll pray for you. Let’s pray.” And sure enough, that afternoon she gets this anonymous five hundred dollar check. Two forms of corroboration. I never told her. She only knew because I’m telling you now. She doesn’t know unless she’s listening.

Tucker Carlson: What year was that?

Lee Strobel: That was probably 1987. So yeah, I think things like that do happen, where God influences you. I try to be open. I try to, when I pray, leave time at the end of the prayer and say, “God, I’m just going to be quiet for a while. If there’s anything you want to tell me, anything you need to alert me to, any way you want to lead me, I’m just going to be quiet and listen.” Usually there’s nothing. That day there was five hundred dollars. But normally I don’t feel anything that specific. It’s okay, because what’s important is saying, “I’m open, God, to anything you want me to do. I’m open to it.” The Bible says, “Test the spirits.” So if I’m feeling something, I want to test it to make sure it’s scriptural, because God’s not going to tell me to poison my neighbor. It’s going to be consistent with scripture. I want to leave myself that opportunity to open myself up and say, “God, I’m listening.” And just pause for a while and see if there’s something. On that day, there was something. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while something will take place like that.

Tucker Carlson: So you believe there has been an uptick in mystical dreams. Definitely in the Middle East. In Cairo, there’s often an ad in the newspaper that says, “Call this number and we’ll tell you about the man in white you met in your dream last night.” There are so many of these. I interviewed Tom Doyle, who is the world’s leading expert on this, for my book. Tom said, “Lee, I could pick up the phone right now and call Syria, Iraq, or Iran and I’ll give you five more stories. They are so common.” He gave me one from my church in Houston, Texas.

There was a woman who was born in the Middle East in a closed country where you can’t share the gospel legally. She had a dream when she was about sixteen years old. She said it was unlike any dream she ever had because it was like a projector was projecting an image of Jesus. It influenced her, but she didn’t know what to do with it. She said, “I was having problems with my life. I called out for help.” That happened. She ended up marrying a Muslim gentleman who was transferred to Houston, Texas because of the oil industry. She moved near our church and had another dream. In this dream she’s up to her waist in a body of water and there’s a man with her with a book that’s open and the man is weeping. She’s thinking, “What does that mean? What is that supposed to be about?” A neighbor of hers goes to our church and she invited her to come to Easter services at our church because her husband was out of town. She came to Easter services. She’s sitting on the aisle waiting for the service to begin. She sees the man who was with her in the pond with the book. She said, “That’s the guy.” His name is Allan. Allan is our pastor of baptism. He comes over. They introduce her. She ends up receiving Jesus Christ as her forgiver and leader. She becomes a Christian and learns about baptism. Allan takes her to the pond on our property where we baptize new believers. With her water up to her waist and with Allan with a Bible open and weeping at the joy, he baptizes her in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There’s a case in my own church like that.

Tucker Carlson: What did her husband say when he got home?

Lee Strobel: He doesn’t know to this day. He doesn’t know because she can’t tell him. She said he would – who knows what he would do. She can’t. She keeps a Bible hidden and doesn’t go to church because she can’t. It’s sad. She knew nothing about baptism. What kind of mystical dream is that? You’re standing up to your waist in water with a guy with a book who’s crying. What is that all about?

Tucker Carlson: How do you tell the difference between a conventional dream and a mystical dream? Or are all dreams mystical? We don’t know what dreams are, just for the record, as a matter of science. No one’s ever been able to explain what that is.

Lee Strobel: God is in control of all, so in a sense everything is spiritual. God rules and so forth. So in a sense any dream is spiritual. To me, a mystical dream is one that has strong spiritual overtones and there’s no natural explanation to say this could come from your subconscious mind. I think sometimes people will write off a dream as being something that came from their subconscious. Maybe you saw something on television you didn’t even realize was there and it was in your subconscious. But when you have examples like the ones I gave, that doesn’t make sense.

I’ll give you another example. There was a guy named Omar. Omar grew up in a refugee camp in the Middle East. He hated Jewish people. His life goal was to murder as many Jews as he could. He wanted to join Hamas. This is about a dozen years ago. He wanted to join Hamas. He made arrangements to meet with some leaders of Hamas. He’s walking down the road toward that meeting and he’s blocked by a vision of Jesus who stops him and says, “Omar, this is not the plan I have for your life. I want you to turn around. I want you to go home. This is not what I want for your life.” It freaks him out. He turns around and goes home. That afternoon, an American family was moving into the apartment across the hall. He goes over there and says, “I just had this vision of Jesus telling me that.” He explains the vision. He says, “As a Christian, can you tell me what it means?” The Christian man opens the Bible and shares the gospel with him. Omar not only becomes a Christian, but today he is an underground church planter in the Middle East. Omar is not his real name, by the way. There you have again external corroboration. The vision he had pointed him toward somebody else who then explained the gospel. That tells me this is more than a subconscious manifestation of something in our heads.

Tucker Carlson: Visions are something we associate with hallucinogenic drugs. What about the visions produced by ayahuasca and LSD?

Lee Strobel: There are what I would call naturalistic visions – visions caused by things that we can determine are natural, medically natural, like chemicals. I’ll give you an example. In 2011 I had a condition called hyponatremia. Hyponatremia is a severe drop in your blood sodium level, and it causes your brain to expand in your head. There’s no room for your brain to expand very much, so you have hallucinations. I almost died as a result. I had hallucinations. I saw demons. I saw weird things. Do I believe they were from God? No. Do I believe they were from Satan? No. Do I believe they were demons? No. I think they were a product of the medical problem I had, of my sodium dropping so low.

Tucker Carlson: How long did this go on and where were you when you saw these visions?

Lee Strobel: I was at home. I finally fell unconscious. They called the paramedics. I woke up in the emergency room. The doctor looked down at me and said, “You’re one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying.” Then I went unconscious again. They had to raise the sodium level very carefully because twenty-five percent of people with this condition end up mentally or physically disabled. They had to raise it gently, so I was in the hospital about a week as they slowly raised it. Do I think those were mystical? Do I think I really saw a demon? Probably not. I think that was a medically induced phenomenon. I don’t have any external corroboration, other than to say it was low sodium – known to cause hallucinations – and I had hallucinations. I think there are medical things that can cause that. There are drugs that can cause hallucinations. God is overall, but as a skeptic, I’m always looking for those cases where we have evidence that it’s true beyond the experience itself.

Tucker Carlson: There are certain forms of what we refer to as mental illness. Clearly there are forms of mental illness. But there are certain people who have visions that are very unpleasant and that bear an almost precise resemblance to the demonic possession described in the New Testament.

Lee Strobel: They may be demonic. I don’t know. I’d have to evaluate each one. These are broad brushes. But yes, it’s fair to conclude that maybe not everything the shrink tells you is mental illness. They can never describe where it comes from or how to fix it. They have no idea. They know nothing, to be clear. But it is fair to assume that maybe some of that is spiritual. I think it very well could be. I would look at all the factors involved. Where we have external corroboration like people left with scratches or bruises that cannot be explained, where we have levitation, where we have people speaking in a language they don’t know spontaneously – speaking Latin – things like that, then that is the external corroboration to me that there’s something demonic going on. It doesn’t mean it couldn’t be demonic without those signs, but those are the cases I’m more comfortable concluding are demonic when I’ve got that kind of external corroboration.

Tucker Carlson: Speaking in languages you don’t know is also described in the Acts of the Apostles as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, of God indwelling.

Lee Strobel: That’s right. There are other languages people speak. But not when they’re spitting at clergy who are trying to exorcise them. That could be a sign.

Tucker Carlson: What about glossolalia? What about speaking in tongues?

Lee Strobel: That is a spiritual gift. There are Christians who believe that those gifts have ended with the apostolic age and are no longer applicable. There are other Christians who believe they are still active. I believe they are still active. I’ve met Christians who speak in other tongues and others who interpret that. So I believe it’s a gift that still takes place. I have not experienced that personally. But I know credible people who do and have experienced it. There are other Christians who say, “No, no, no. That ended with the apostles.” That’s one of those side issues theologically that when we get to heaven, we can raise our hands and ask God, “Hey, what about that speaking in tongues thing?”

Tucker Carlson: I know that there is a debate over it. I have no idea what I think about it, but it is true as a factual matter that there are people who, seized by some unseen force, begin speaking in languages they have never learned.

Lee Strobel: Yes. Often this is not a language other people speak or have ever spoken. It’s a spiritual language. But then there’s someone – and this is a good corroboration – someone who can interpret that and understand this language even though it is a spiritual language. It’s not Latin or Greek. It’s a spiritual language, and someone else is able to hear and interpret what is being said.

Tucker Carlson: I’ve got to take you down one other back alley here. Both the Hebrews and the early Christians wrote extensively about the concept of a name – God’s name. “Hallowed be your name.” The name of God. The name of Jesus. What does that mean exactly? Why the name?

Lee Strobel: It means a couple of things. To do things in the name of God – Yahweh – is to do something consistent with how God is leading you and how the scriptures would suggest that you act. In other words, to act in God’s name is to do something consistent with his character. So if I do something charitable to my personal loss and yet to someone else who’s in great need, I do that in God’s name. I do that because this is what the Bible teaches me: that I should be generous and helpful toward people who are hurting. Names can, in scripture, have various implications. You look at the name of Jesus being called Immanuel. He was never called Immanuel, but it was his name. What that means in the ancient language is that he is God with us. That’s what Immanuel means. That was the name given to Jesus, but it wasn’t the name he was called. It was a name associated with Jesus. Names have all kinds of implications in ancient Judaism and early Christianity.

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Tucker Carlson: It sure seems that way. Now we just name people according to what we see on television. But observant Jews do not spell out the name of God. They leave the vowels out because the name is itself holy – just the name.

Lee Strobel: That’s right. They would talk around the name. There’s a verse in Luke 15 where it says that there is rejoicing in heaven whenever a person becomes a Christian. It’s a way of saying there’s rejoicing in heaven without saying the name of God rejoicing. It talks around that a bit. There’s a hesitation and in fact something you didn’t want to do in the ancient Jewish world is use the name of God. That was forbidden.

Tucker Carlson: Near-death experiences. What’s a near-death experience?

Lee Strobel: A near-death experience is when a person is clinically dead – that is, generally, no brain waves, no respiration, no heartbeat. They’re clinically dead. Yet they’re going to be revived, so they are dead for a period of time but they’re not permanently dead. The body will be revived at some point. By the measurements of science, they’re dead. The Bible says that when a person dies, their spirit separates from their body. This is what we see in a near-death experience. This is evidence for the soul. The physical body is clinically dead. There’s no sign of life in the body. They’re still working on you.

Tucker Carlson: Has there ever been a culture that we’re aware of in the entire span of human history that did not believe in the soul?

Lee Strobel: They all did.

Tucker Carlson: They thought that people were meat puppets.

Lee Strobel: I quote experts in the book that talk about that – that every civilization believed in the spirit, a soul, that continues to live on after we die.

Tucker Carlson: Our leaders don’t believe that.

Lee Strobel: That’s not only tragic, it’s dangerous because if you believe we are only our brain, we’re only neurons firing, that means we have no free will. Seriously, you’re saying we don’t have free will? How do you punish someone for doing something wrong if they really didn’t have free will? It also means we have no inherent rights. We have no right and wrong. Does a rock have a right? No. Exactly.

Tucker Carlson: Maybe that should be the acid test for leadership. If you don’t believe human beings have souls – if that’s not the basis of the way you understand other people – you can have no power in our society. Is that fair?

Lee Strobel: I like that. I never thought of that before, but I certainly wouldn’t trust a person morally if they believed only that we are. I wouldn’t give them a driver’s license. It’s scary. You don’t think other people have souls? You’re a psychopath.

Tucker Carlson: I have an interview in my book with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in neuroscience who says the evidence is so persuasive that yes indeed we do have a soul. Neuroscientists confirm it. What’s interesting is that we have cases where people are clinically dead. Their spirit separates from their body and they see or hear things that would have been impossible for them to see or hear if their spirit had not actually separated from their body. This is confirmation that the soul exists.

Lee Strobel: Let me give you some examples. There’s a woman named Maria. She was dying in a hospital in London, England. She said she was conscious the whole time. They were working on her body trying to bring her back. She said her spirit floated out of her body. She met a divine being. But mainly she was looking down from the ceiling of the hospital room at the resuscitation efforts. She’s watching them trying to revive her body. At some point the reviving works and the spirit returns to the body. She says, “By the way, see the ceiling fan here in this room? There’s a red sticker on top of one of the blades of the ceiling fan.” You couldn’t see it from the room because it’s on the top of one of the blades, but she saw it because from her perspective near the ceiling she was looking down. They got a ladder, went up there. Sure enough, on the top of this blade there’s the sticker exactly as she described. That tells me she really did have an out-of-body experience just as the Bible describes.

We have a young girl, she was eight or nine years old. She drowned in a swimming pool at a YMCA. Horrible. Her brain had swelled. She had no respiration, no heartbeat. She was clinically dead. They brought her to the hospital to keep her body alive mechanically until they decided what to do. They continued to try to revive her. Three days later, she was revived with no brain damage. She said, “By the way, I was conscious the whole time.” The doctors were skeptical. They handed her a piece of paper and a crayon. They said, “Draw the emergency room where we took you when you were dead.” She picks up the crayon and draws the emergency room exactly as it appears. Then she said, “By the way, one night when my parents visited me in the hospital, I followed them home. I watched as my mom was making chicken soup with rice on the stove and my dad was sitting in a certain chair and looking in a certain direction. My brother was playing with a G.I. Joe Jeep in his bedroom, and these are the clothes they were wearing.” Everything was exactly correct. How do you explain that if she didn’t have an authentic out-of-body experience while she was clinically dead?

Tucker Carlson: That is affirmation that near-death experiences do point toward a spirit, a soul that separates from our body at the time of death. Interesting. And yet there are many people on their deathbed who are in terror and horrified. Can you describe that and what it is?

Lee Strobel: We have this in near-death experiences and in deathbed visions – people who are about to die have a glimpse, I believe, of a hellish experience to come, and they are frightened beyond belief. They are scared beyond words. I’ll give you an example of a near-death vision where this happened. There’s a man named Howard Storm. He was an atheist. He was a professor of art at a secular university, chairman of the art department. He was visiting France and he died of a heart attack. He was in a French hospital. He’s dead, but he said later, “I was conscious the whole time.” It was a near-death experience. His spirit had separated from his body. There were some people in the hallway saying, “Howard, we’ve been waiting for you. Come with us. Come with us.” So he does. He’s walking down the hallway with these people. It goes on and on and on, and it gets darker and darker. Then they’re becoming abusive. They’re saying, “Come on, come on. Why are you so slow?” Then they start to attack him. He said no horror movie can ever capture the horror of what they did to him. He was absolutely mauled. He said he was roadkill. He called out to Jesus and said, “Jesus, rescue me.” This white orb comes and brings him and rescues him. His body is revived. His spirit returns to his body. This was such a profound experience that he not only renounced his atheism, he not only quit his tenured position as chairman of the art department at a secular university, he not only became a Christian – he went to seminary, became a pastor, and today he’s a pastor of a little church in Kentucky or Oklahoma somewhere. That’s how transformative this experience was. There are multiple cases of people having horrific experiences. One study of near-death experiences said twenty-four percent had negative experiences, not positive.

Tucker Carlson: That doesn’t feel like a good sign.

Lee Strobel: No. To me, it’s affirmation that what the Bible tells us is true: there is a heaven and there is a hell. Every society ever has thought that. I think everyone intuitively knows that.

Tucker Carlson: I’ve never had a near-death experience, but the one time I thought I was going to die many years ago – in a plane crash – I was filled with sadness. I had no peace at all, only regret. I didn’t take that as a warm and fuzzy experience at all. I really felt sad about it, so I did take that as an indication I should change the way I was living, and I did. It was literally awesome. So I think that there’s something real there.

Lee Strobel: There is. It does seem like a crime to deprive people of that with drugs. I’d encourage people: next time you have a big family get-together, ask people, “Do we have any family stories about deathbed visions or near-death experiences?” I bet you’ll find, “Oh, Uncle Bob had this experience. Cousin Jim had that experience.” I was having dinner with seven people in Oklahoma City. Four of them had relatives who had pre-death visions. I’m not surprised. It’s incredibly common.

Tucker Carlson: I’ve never asked that question at a dinner party, but I have asked, “Has anyone seen a ghost?” One hundred percent of the time, there’s someone at the table who has. What is that?

Lee Strobel: I have a chapter on ghosts and psychics in the book. The technical definition of a ghost is someone who dies but refuses to go into the afterlife. Their spirit refuses to go into the next life. I don’t see that in the Bible, so I don’t think that ghosts per se are from God. I think most likely an apparition that we interpret as being a ghost is most likely a demonic apparition.

Tucker Carlson: People feel that. They feel ghosts have a bad rep.

Lee Strobel: Yes. No one is summoning ghosts. It’s not like Casper, who’s going to bring you some flowers. Generally, people are anti-ghost. Ghost stories and being ghosted both have negative connotations. So I don’t think that surprises anyone. I do talk about ghosts and about psychics and the tricks that they use to convince people that they’re psychic.

Tucker Carlson: Are you pro-psychic?

Lee Strobel: I’m anti-psychic.

Tucker Carlson: Why?

Lee Strobel: Because the Bible says do not consult mediums. Do not consult psychics. Multiple places in scripture say do not do it. Among the ancient Hebrews, that was a death penalty offense. It was. It’s not something we want to mess with. I think there’s a reason for that. I think it’s because it opens the door to the demonic. You’re trying to consult the dead. You’re trying to find out something apart from what God might reveal through a psychic, through a medium who supposedly has occultic wherewithal. It’s dangerous. I talk in the book about the tricks they use – cold readings, warm readings, hot readings – where people who want to fool you into thinking they know more about you than they do will employ those and you’ll think, “Oh my gosh, this person knows all about me.” No, they don’t. They’re just very clever people who are able to read certain things about you.

Tucker Carlson: Of course there are a lot of flimflams and gypsy tricks. But it’s also true in the Bible that they’re taken seriously. That’s why it’s a death penalty offense – not because it’s fake, but because it’s real.

Lee Strobel: There’s a case in contemporary times when President Carter was president. A two-engine aircraft crashed in Africa. The United States government was trying to find it. I don’t know why, but they wanted to find that aircraft. They had satellites repositioned, looking for it. They could not find the wreckage of this airplane. Stansfield Turner, who was the head of the CIA, consulted a medium, a psychic in California. She went into a trance and gave the longitude and latitude of where to find the plane. They went, they reoriented the satellites, and boom: there was the wreckage of the plane just as she had said. What do you do with that? That tells me she was in connection with something. If the Bible says don’t be connecting with psychics, don’t – it was probably demonic. Why would she do that? Because now she has credibility. Now the next time they want to know something, they’ll go to that woman in California. She told them where that plane was. She seems to have these abilities to know the future, to know things that we don’t know. Now she has credibility. I think that was a way for Satan to give her credibility so that we’d be fooled into thinking we could take advantage of her. Best not to play with that stuff. It’s best to stay away from it.

Tucker Carlson: So contacting dead relatives through a medium, Ouija boards, all that stuff – scary, bad.

Lee Strobel: Yes.

Tucker Carlson: On the other hand, I know a lot of decent, God-fearing people who have said, “I really feel like I was contacted by a dead relative, a dead loved one.”

Lee Strobel: That’s interesting. I have a couple cases in the book of that which seemingly are corroborated. What do you do with that? One of the reasons I’m skeptical is because when Jesus was talking in Luke 16 about the rich man who died and the beggar who died, he talked about a gulf between the living and the dead. That concerns me. The Bible has a couple of examples of the dead coming back. Elijah came back in the transfiguration. That’s one example. There’s another example in the Old Testament when Saul went to a medium and a dead person came back. Not because of the power of the medium – she was surprised it happened – but through the power of God he allowed that dead person to come back. So there are a couple of precedents in scripture of dead people coming back. The question is: how do we interpret experiences today?

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One reason I’m skeptical is that when people have contact with these dead people, these are people who lived ungodly lives. Yet they say, “Everything’s fine. I’m fine. Just take care of the family. Tell everybody I love them. I’m good. Don’t worry about me.” That’s the general message people get. What does that say to someone who is thinking about what they need to do to live a life that will bring them to heaven and to God? “Well, Uncle Tom came and told me he’s fine. He never came to faith in Jesus. He was a bad guy. And yet he says he’s fine in the afterlife.” Wouldn’t that be something that a demon might want to imitate, to send a false message? I think maybe. I guess I’m giving you two answers. One is that there is some biblical precedent for the dead coming back, but I think they may be one-offs. I’m not sure. I think there would be a good motive for Satan to counterfeit that. It says Satan can appear as an angel of light, as a counterfeit. He can fool us into thinking he’s something he’s not. Would that be to his advantage? I think it could be. So I’m not quite sure where I’m at.

Tucker Carlson: Are UFOs – what we call UFOs – spiritual entities? Could they be?

Lee Strobel: I don’t know. I didn’t get into UFOs in the book. It’s a fascinating topic. Maybe I’ll do another book on that. So I didn’t research it thoroughly. Having said that, it would not be an affront to my faith if indeed we found intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The Bible doesn’t say that we are unique in that way. But could they be spiritual? Yes. Could be. I don’t know. I’m just not as knowledgeable on that to give a strong opinion.

Tucker Carlson: Last question. Miracles. What is a miracle?

Lee Strobel: A miracle is an event brought about by the power of God that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history. A lot of skeptics will say, “I don’t believe in miracles because you can’t violate the laws of nature.” By definition, a miracle is impossible. We haven’t even settled on the laws of nature. Here’s how I answer: I have this glass of water here. If I were to drop it, the law of gravity would say it would hit the floor. But if I drop it and you reach in and grab it before it hits the floor, you’re not violating the law of gravity. You’re not overturning the law of gravity. You’re just intervening. That’s what a miracle is: God intervening temporarily into his creation. He brought it about, so of course he could intervene.

Tucker Carlson: To the extent we can know that something is so unusual it couldn’t have happened accidentally.

Lee Strobel: Can I give you an example?

Tucker Carlson: Please do.

Lee Strobel: This is one I personally investigated and has been widely documented. A woman named Barbara was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with multiple sclerosis as a teenager. It’s progressive. She got worse and worse. Multiple hospitalizations. The doctors said, “Look,” and her parents said, “Look, next time she gets pneumonia, which she would get on a regular basis, we’re just going to let her die because we’re just postponing the inevitable.” She’s on her deathbed. She hadn’t walked in seven years, so her muscles had atrophied. Her fingers were curled up like a pretzel; her fingers were touching her wrists. Her feet were permanently extended. One lung was collapsed; the other lung was half-full. She had a tube in her throat that went to oxygen canisters in the garage. She was in hospice at home so she could breathe. She had lost control of urination and bowels. She had lost her eyesight – all she saw were gray shapes. She’s dying.

Some people said, “Wait a minute. Let’s call WMBI, the Christian radio station at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and ask people on the radio show to pray for poor Barbara. She’s dying.” They did. We documented that at least four hundred and fifty people began praying for Barbara because they wrote letters to Barbara saying, “I’m praying for you,” to encourage her.

It’s Pentecost Sunday, 1981. She is in her bedroom. Her aunt and two girlfriends are reading her some of these encouraging letters from people praying for her. From the corner of the room where nobody was, she heard the voice of God. The voice said, “My child, get up and walk.” She hadn’t walked in seven years. She had no muscle tone in her legs. She pulled out the tube so she could talk and said, “I don’t know what you’re going to think of this, but God just told me to get up and walk. Go find my parents. I want them to be here.” They ran out, but she couldn’t wait. She jumped out of bed. She said, “The first thing I noticed: my feet were flat on the floor. They hadn’t been flat for years. They had been rigidly extended, but they were flat on the floor. Second thing I noticed: my hands had opened up like flowers, and they hadn’t opened up in years. The third thing I noticed: I could see. Wouldn’t you think that would be the first thing I noticed? That was actually the third thing I noticed.” She was instantaneously completely healed of multiple sclerosis. Her mother came running in, fell to her knees and grabbed her calves and said, “Your muscle tone has come back.” It was Pentecost Sunday. There was a service at their church, Wheaton Wesleyan Church. They went. She’s dancing, literally dancing around the house with her father. They go to church. They’re in the back. The pastor gets up and says, “Does anybody have any announcements?” Barbara comes walking down the center aisle. People freaked out because they hadn’t seen her except in a wheelchair for seven years. They began singing spontaneously “Amazing Grace.” “I once was blind and now I see.” Totally healed. She goes the next day to one of her doctors. He said later, “I saw her walking down the hallway toward my office. My first thought was, oh, she died and that’s a ghost. This is medically impossible.” And it is medically impossible. She was instantaneously, totally healed of multiple sclerosis. She ended up marrying a pastor from that little Wesleyan church in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I got to know her. Sweetest woman. She just recently died in Florida. This happened in 1981. She lived perfectly healthy all these years. She just died a few months ago.

Tucker Carlson: What do you do with that? That’s a challenge to the most basic understanding of everything. If she’s on her deathbed from MS, which is a well-studied disease, you would think that Harvard Medical School would cease operations until they figured out what that was.

Lee Strobel: You know why? I mentioned to my doctor. He said it’d be interesting to know because there’s plaque that develops in the brain in multiple sclerosis. It would be interesting to know: did that plaque disappear? I said, which is the greater miracle – that the plaque would disappear, or that God would totally heal her with the plaque still there? I don’t know which is greater. There were two doctors who wrote about it in their books. They wrote books and in them they talked about her case. So two of her physicians actually wrote about it in their books.

Tucker Carlson: And it’s not the only one.

Lee Strobel: We don’t have much time. I’ll give you a real quick one. There’s a kid who was born and kept vomiting. Couldn’t keep down food. Vomiting. They realized this baby has what’s called gastroparesis, which is a paralysis of the stomach. It’s an incurable condition. It happens from time to time. You can’t live that way. They operated and put tubes in so that the food would go directly into the small intestine. He lived that way for fifteen or sixteen years. There were restrictions on what he could eat. It was uncomfortable, but at least he was alive. They bring him one day to a church. They asked the pastor, “Would you pray for him?” The pastor puts his hand on his shoulder, begins to pray. The kid said later, “I felt an electric shock go through me at the time he was praying,” and he was instantly healed of gastroparesis. There has never been a documented case of anyone ever healed of gastroparesis, a paralyzed stomach. He was totally normal. They went in. They took the tubes out, and today he’s totally healthy. He’s a business guy, doing great. I just emailed with him the other day. That again was researched by multiple medical researchers and published as a case study in a medical journal.

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Tucker Carlson: That is an incredible story. The girl being cured of MS is an incredible story. Everything you’ve said is amazing. But so many of the things you said are also instantly recognizable to everyone listening, whatever their religious faith or lack of faith, as things that do happen. Actually, it’s real. We all know that there are things that happen to us and people we know well and love that are outside the ability of science to explain; they are supernatural. Why do we keep ignoring it?

Lee Strobel: I think it goes back to what I said earlier. We’re embarrassed sometimes by the supernatural. We’re worried that people are going to think we’re nuts. But if it’s real – and it clearly is real – then it puts everything else into perspective. When you take it seriously, when you look at it – if you grow up in a culture that tells you none of it’s real and yet it’s super obvious that it is in some general sense – then why don’t people talk about it all the time? I think the fact that I’ve been a Christian since November 8, 1981 and I’ve never heard a sermon on the topic of angels in my life tells you something. We shy away because we want to be accepted as normal. I get out of bed on Sunday to sit in a church where they’re pretending that nothing they say is true. If you believe in Jesus, you’ve got to believe in angels. You’ve got to believe in demons. You’ve got to believe in Satan. You’ve got to believe in heaven. You’ve got to believe in hell. Because if you believe in Jesus, he taught on all those things. How could you not?

Tucker Carlson: I agree. How could you not? If 40% of Americans have had an experience that they can only attribute to a miracle of God, that means the other 60% probably know one of those 40%. We kind of say, “What do we do with that?” I think what we ought to do is look for that which is corroborated and which is consistent with what we trust to be true, which for me are the Christian scriptures.

If you just fight against distraction consistently for a day or two – if you notice, that’s it, you just notice stuff – if you do that as an exercise, literally for forty-eight hours, you will experience the supernatural.

Lee Strobel: I think you’re right. It’s hard to do that.

Tucker Carlson: Lee Strobel, thank you.

Lee Strobel: I enjoyed it. Wonderful. Great to meet you.