The Ben Shapiro Show - Edward Feser | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 17

00:00:00.000 When you unpack this idea of the human intellect, you'll find that what's highest in us, namely our capacity for thought, survives the death of the body.

00:00:15.000 So we are here on today's Sunday special with Edward Fazer.

00:00:18.000 He's the author of a book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God.

00:00:20.000 So we're going to make him prove God to us in just a second.

00:00:23.000 But first, let's talk about your public Wi-Fi.

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00:00:39.000 There are government agencies like the NSA that monitor the entire internet, and you never know what's happening with that information.

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00:01:30.000 Alright, so we are here, as I say, with Edward Fazer, and this is his book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God.

00:01:34.000 It's not his only book, he's written a bevy of them.

00:01:37.000 Professor Fraser, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:01:38.000 I really appreciate it.

00:01:39.000 Great to be here.

00:01:39.000 So, let's talk a little bit about what brought you to this point in your life.

00:01:44.000 Because your story is not quite, you grew up a religious person and then just started writing about religion.

00:01:49.000 That's kind of my story.

00:01:50.000 But you came at this from a very different perspective, writing about Aristotle and Aquinas.

00:01:55.000 How did you get from where you were, which was an atheist, to the point where you were writing about religion for a living, basically?

00:02:00.000 Well, you know, I was brought up Catholic and I fell away from the church when I was a teenager.

00:02:06.000 And by the time I got early in my college years, I became an atheist.

00:02:09.000 I was an atheist for about 10 years, roughly the decade of the 1990s.

00:02:12.000 And during the last part of my decade as an atheist, I was a graduate student.

00:02:17.000 I was given courses to teach while a grad student, introduction to philosophy courses.

00:02:21.000 I got a chance to teach a philosophy religion course.

00:02:24.000 And so you want to teach students material that they're going to be interested in, especially since a lot of these kids will never take another philosophy course.

00:02:30.000 So you don't want to focus on topics that are too technical and abstract.

00:02:33.000 You want to focus on topics that anybody would be interested in, whether or not they're interested in philosophy.

00:02:37.000 So I thought, well,

00:02:39.000 Looking at the arguments for God's existence would be a good topic to go with, so I did that.

00:02:43.000 But it got boring teaching them the way that they're so often taught, which is basically you line the arguments up, and you trot out some of the stock objections, and then conclude that the arguments are really kind of silly and lame, and why would anybody have believed this?

00:02:55.000 Let's move on to something else.

00:02:56.000 It was boring.

00:02:57.000 So I thought, well, I wanted to make it interesting to the students, make it understandable to them why anybody would ever have believed these arguments in the first place, and turn it into a real philosophical debate.

00:03:07.000 So that got me, that was one of several things that got me to revisit the arguments, and to go back into the literature, and to read what Aquinas had actually said, and what Leibniz had actually said, and what Aristotle had actually said, and what their contemporary defenders were saying, so that I could understand the arguments better as a way of presenting them in the classroom, so that you had a real horse race there, even though I always ended up at the end of the section.

00:03:31.000 Concluding the arguments didn't work.

00:03:33.000 At least I could make it a real debate.

00:03:35.000 As time went on and I got deeper into the arguments, I started to see gradually that, well, first of all, a lot of the objections that were trotted out, I realized, were aimed at caricatures.

00:03:44.000 They were aimed at straw men. 0.99

00:03:45.000 They weren't really attacking what Aquinas or Leibniz or whoever had actually said.

00:03:48.000 So I thought, well, that's interesting, right?

00:03:51.000 And gradually I went from that to thinking, well actually, so these arguments aren't as bad as they are usually presented as being, and as I always take them to be.

00:03:58.000 And I went from that to thinking, as time went on, this occurred over the course of a few years, during the late 90s, to thinking, well actually these arguments are kind of interesting.

00:04:07.000 They're philosophically interesting.

00:04:08.000 They raise some interesting puzzles and offer some answers.

00:04:11.000 Gradually that morphed in turn into the idea that, you know, these arguments are actually kind of challenging.

00:04:16.000 They're very serious arguments.

00:04:18.000 And eventually I concluded, you know what, these arguments were right all along and I'd been wrong.

00:04:22.000 And that took several years for that to happen.

00:04:25.000 But it was basically in the course of teaching other people the arguments and trying to get them to understand them.

00:04:31.000 And when I went through my education as a philosopher in graduate school, we were always taught something that

00:04:38.000 Philosophy department's hammer on, I think it's a very good lesson.

00:04:41.000 Always try to see what could be said for an idea even though you might disagree with it.

00:04:45.000 Try to get yourself into the mind of someone who thinks different than you do.

00:04:50.000 And doing that actually led me to change my mind on this particular topic.

00:04:54.000 So, what led you to atheism in the first place?

00:04:56.000 What was it that made you drop away from the church?

00:04:58.000 Basically, it's a common story where you start to study philosophy, and especially if you're coming at it from a religious point of view, or at least a point of view that takes the existence of God and other religious ideas for granted.

00:05:09.000 And then you encounter skeptical writers like Nietzsche or David Hume or Bertrand Russell or someone like that.

00:05:15.000 You're very impressed by that because you hadn't heard it before.

00:05:17.000 You didn't realize there were people who were presenting these objections.

00:05:19.000 So, you're very impressed by it.

00:05:21.000 You're usually a teenager anyway, so you're open to hearing the language of rebellion.

00:05:25.000 You're open to hearing the idea that what your parents taught you and what society takes for granted is all wrong.

00:05:30.000 So I would say that was part of the attraction.

00:05:33.000 That I was hearing that stuff for the first time, it was exciting, it was different, I was drawn to it for that reason.

00:05:38.000 It also happened to be a very prominent attitude, a very prevalent attitude in academic philosophy today.

00:05:43.000 That the traditional arguments are no good.

00:05:44.000 So you kind of go along with that as well.

00:05:47.000 Academic philosophers are not always as independent as they like to think they are as far as critical thinking is concerned.

00:05:52.000 They often are quite willing to go along with whatever the consensus of the profession might happen to be.

00:05:56.000 So your book is Five Proofs of the Existence of God and I want to go through some of them with you because I think that, you know,

00:06:02.000 Like, as you say, most people, when they think about God, they think about, you know, whatever their parents told them about when they were kids, and they haven't really taken a serious look at, okay, why would people think God exists other than my parents think God exists and I like beautiful sunsets.

00:06:14.000 So what is the actual philosophical grounding for the idea that there might, in fact, be a God?

00:06:19.000 So, which of these proofs is your favorite?

00:06:21.000 And if you could explicate it for us, that'd be great.

00:06:23.000 Yeah, probably my favorite is the first one in the book, which I label the Aristotelian proof.

00:06:28.000 And as you can guess from that label, it goes back to Aristotle.

00:06:31.000 And it is important to emphasize, as I do in the book, none of these arguments I put forward in the book are new.

00:06:36.000 They're not original with me.

00:06:37.000 The formulations I give, the way I present them, might be novel.

00:06:41.000 But the basic idea, the basic nerve of each proof goes back, in most cases, centuries, even millennia.

00:06:47.000 The case of Aristotle's argument, at least 2,300 years, if not more, because you even see an earlier version of that in Plato.

00:06:53.000 So, if you want me to present, you know, a simplified version of the argument.

00:06:56.000 So, basically, the Aristotelian argument starts from the fact that change occurs, right?

00:07:01.000 So, you know, the water in the cup here started out being really cold when it came from the fridge, and now it's kind of lukewarm, right?

00:07:08.000 That would be an example of change.

00:07:09.000 Or I move my hand through space, and so forth.

00:07:10.000 That's an example of change.

00:07:12.000 Aristotle argues that, on analysis, change always involves the actualization of a potential.

00:07:17.000 Something going from potential to actual.

00:07:19.000 My hand's potentially over there, now it's actually over there.

00:07:22.000 We're good to go.

00:07:43.000 If change involves going from potential to actual, we have to ask, how does that ever happen?

00:07:48.000 And his answer is that something can go from potential to actual only if there's already something there that's actual that makes that happen.

00:07:54.000 So to make that a little more concrete, my hand's actually right here.

00:07:57.000 It's potentially to the left, right?

00:07:59.000 And for it actually to become to the left, right, there has to be something already actual that makes that happen.

00:08:05.000 The firing of the nerves in my nervous system that causes the muscles to flex.

00:08:09.000 So, Aristotle proceeds to the conclusion that, well, whenever something goes from potential to actual, there's always something already actual that makes that happen.

00:08:17.000 And if that already actual thing goes from potential to actual, there's something already actual making that happen.

00:08:23.000 So we've got one thing being changed by another being changed by another, or one thing being actualized by another being actualized by another, and so forth.

00:08:29.000 And, crucial step in this argument, the most fundamental way in which this is true for Aristotle has to do with series of changers or causes that extend not backward in time into the past, but downward here and now you might say.

00:08:43.000 So my hand moves here and now because the motor neurons are firing here and now.

00:08:47.000 And those motor neurons are firing here and now because there are other neurons firing here and now.

00:08:51.000 And that's only possible because my nervous system is held in place, you might say, by its molecular structure and so forth.

00:08:57.000 So we have one level of reality here and now, actualized by another, actualized by another.

00:09:02.000 And Aristotle concludes that we would have a vicious regress if there weren't something at the bottom level, you might say, that actualizes everything else without having to be actualized.

00:09:10.000 Because it's already, as he puts it, purely actual.

00:09:14.000 It's moving other things or changing other things without itself being moved or changed.

00:09:18.000 It's a, what I call in the book, a purely actual actualizer or an unchanging changer or an unmoving mover.

00:09:24.000 And if there weren't such a thing operating here and now, not just something that knocks down the first domino back at the Big Bang, but here and now, then there wouldn't be change going on here and now.

00:09:33.000 That's the basic idea of the argument.

00:09:35.000 Okay, and what makes that thing God, per se?

00:09:39.000 Why couldn't it just be a thing?

00:09:41.000 What makes it all the things that we think of God as?

00:09:43.000 Well, the next stage of the argument, you see in Aristotle and in later Aristotelians like Thomas Aquinas, is to start unpacking what something would have to be like in order to fit this description of being an unmoved mover, a purely actual actualizer, to use my more technical language.

00:09:59.000 And one of the things they say is, well look, I mean, if change involves going from potential to actual, and this cause of things

00:10:06.000 It's purely actual.

00:10:07.000 It's got no potential.

00:10:07.000 It's already, as it were, fully actual.

00:10:10.000 Then it can't be capable of change.

00:10:12.000 It's not susceptible of change.

00:10:14.000 It's an unchanging changer.

00:10:16.000 But if it's unchanging, then it must be outside of time and space, because things that are in time and space are susceptible of change, they're capable of changing.

00:10:24.000 So if it's not capable of changing, it must be outside of time and space.

00:10:27.000 Material things, physical things, are also always changeable in theory.

00:10:31.000 They're always made up of parts, for example, that can be rearranged.

00:10:34.000 So if it's not changeable, it must not be a material thing either.

00:10:37.000 Furthermore, anytime we see any sort of power, you might say, manifest in the world, like the way I have the power to pick this cup up, or the way that an earthquake has the power to knock a boulder down a hill or what have you, that always involves the actualization of a potential.

00:10:51.000 So if we work back to something that actualizes every potential without being actualized, that means it's the source.

00:10:57.000 We're good to go.

00:11:21.000 So you get the whole battery of divine attributes that characterize God as traditionally conceived in both philosophy and in the monotheistic religions.

00:11:29.000 So there are two objections that I've seen leveraged particularly at this argument.

00:11:33.000 One objection is, why couldn't there just be a vicious regress?

00:11:36.000 What's the problem with vicious regress?

00:11:38.000 Okay, so it just keeps going back and back and back and back and there's no actual unmoved mover.

00:11:42.000 It's just a series of things that are contingent on one another.

00:11:45.000 Why couldn't that actually be a possibility?

00:11:47.000 Yeah.

00:11:47.000 Well, if you posit that, if you suppose that there's no beginning to the series, that there's no bottom level, better way to put it in my view, then you don't really have an explanation of what you started out with.

00:11:58.000 You just keep deferring the explanation.

00:12:00.000 It's like an endless series of IOUs that's never backed by actual money.

00:12:05.000 The idea being that if there weren't something that could actualize everything else or move everything else without itself being moved, then you wouldn't have the motion or change that you started out trying to explain, the movement of the hand,

00:12:16.000 Or the water-grown lukewarm, or whatever it might be.

00:12:20.000 And this is this idea that, why don't we just postulate that there's no explanation at all?

00:12:25.000 It's something we would never consider in any other context.

00:12:28.000 In chemistry class, you know, if there's some explosion because you mix two chemicals together that professor told you just not to goof around, he wouldn't take seriously for a moment if he said, who did that?

00:12:37.000 If he said, well, there's no explanation, it just happened, right?

00:12:39.000 Nobody would take that seriously in the context of science, in the context of everyday life.

00:12:43.000 The only place where people start trying to

00:12:45.000 Take seriously or pretend to take seriously the idea that there aren't really any explanations is when they're confronted with an argument for God's existence.

00:12:52.000 Suddenly they say, just throw up our hands and say there is no explanation.

00:12:56.000 But there's cognitive dissonance there because they wouldn't say that in any other context.

00:13:00.000 They couldn't coherently say that in any other context.

00:13:03.000 If you push forward consistently that basic idea that things must have explanations, you're going to be led unavoidably to the existence of an unmoved mover or uncaused cause.

00:13:11.000 And that argument that you're making about the sufficiency of reason actually is a separate argument that you have in the book.

00:13:16.000 You can make it a separate argument as I do in the book.

00:13:18.000 Right, the kind of principle of sufficient reason, as you mentioned, this Leibniz argument, I guess?

00:13:22.000 Yes.

00:13:23.000 That essentially, if there's a reason for everything, then there has to be kind of a core reason.

00:13:28.000 Yeah.

00:13:28.000 That's a pretty weak way of putting it, but that's sort of the essence of the argument.

00:13:32.000 Yeah, so Leibniz's argument, and I label it in the book the rationalist argument because Leibniz is one of the best known philosophers classified as a rationalist in the history of philosophy.

00:13:41.000 He's not the only one who presents this sort of argument.

00:13:44.000 It argues for God's existence in a way that avoids the kind of reasoning about the nature of cause and effect.

00:13:51.000 or reasoning about the nature of a physical object, or any of these other starting points that some of the other arguments begin with.

00:13:57.000 It just starts with the idea of explanation.

00:13:59.000 It starts with what is called the principle of sufficient reason.

00:14:02.000 The idea that for anything that exists, any fact about it,

00:14:07.000 Any event that occurs, there must be some reason sufficient or adequate to explain why it exists, why it occurred just the way it did rather than some other way and so forth.

00:14:17.000 Now, Leibniz would argue that this is a bedrock principle of human rationality.

00:14:22.000 It's presupposed in all scientific inquiry.

00:14:24.000 It's presupposed in all philosophical investigations including atheistic ones.

00:14:28.000 And as I argue in the book, if you try to deny it, you're ultimately led into incoherence.

00:14:32.000 So there's really no coherent way to deny it, whether you're an atheist or a theist.

00:14:37.000 But if you take that starting point seriously, the idea that things have explanations, they're intelligible, they can be made sense of, then you're unavoidably going to be led, Leibniz argues, to the existence of God understood as a necessary being.

00:14:51.000 And so he moves to this distinction between what he calls a necessary versus a contingent thing.

00:14:56.000 A contingent thing is something that it exists, but it didn't have to.

00:15:00.000 It could have been different.

00:15:01.000 So, we exist, but had my parents never met, I wouldn't be here.

00:15:04.000 Had your parents never met, you wouldn't be here, and so forth.

00:15:07.000 This situation, this interview exists, but had you never invited me, it wouldn't have occurred and so forth.

00:15:11.000 So all these things are contingent upon other things.

00:15:14.000 And as long as we're locked in the realm of contingent things, things that could have been otherwise, Leibniz argues, we don't have an ultimate explanation.

00:15:21.000 The ultimate explanation of why anything exists at all, why, for example, this universe exists at all rather than some alternative possible universe or any universe at all,

00:15:30.000 is if there's something that caused it that itself could not have been otherwise.

00:15:33.000 Something that exists in a necessary rather than a contingent way.

00:15:37.000 There's something in its nature where not only does it exist, but it could not have not existed.

00:15:41.000 If you don't have that, you don't have an ultimate explanation for anything.

00:15:45.000 That's the rationalist proof or the argument from the principle of sufficient reason.

00:15:49.000 So in a second, I'm going to ask you sort of the flip side of the argument I asked about in Infinite Regress.

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00:17:08.000 Okay, so back to the question.

00:17:10.000 So, the sort of flip side of the infinite regress question is, I guess, the Bertrand Russell question, which is, why don't we just hit a certain bare root fact?

00:17:18.000 Okay, fine.

00:17:19.000 There may not be an explanation for something, but this is just the way that it is.

00:17:24.000 Why do we always need an explanation for everything?

00:17:26.000 Why can't it be that there's rationality to a certain point, and then beyond that, that's it.

00:17:30.000 There's no place to go.

00:17:31.000 Yeah.

00:17:31.000 So, yeah, you mentioned Russell as someone who suggests this response.

00:17:37.000 Another one is a guy named J.L.

00:17:38.000 Mackey, who's another prominent academic atheist.

00:17:41.000 And their idea is that, well, the atheist can simply take the view that we have explanations for things down to the level of the fundamental laws of physics, whatever they turn out to be, the fundamental laws of nature.

00:17:53.000 But then we reach that level, we're at the level of what you refer to as brute facts, where a brute fact is one that

00:18:00.000 Not only is it the bottom level of explanation, but it itself has no explanation at all.

00:18:04.000 Not just, it's important to note what they mean by this.

00:18:06.000 They don't just mean something that has an explanation but we don't know it.

00:18:09.000 We're not smart enough to figure it out.

00:18:10.000 No, no, no.

00:18:10.000 What they have in mind is the idea of something that has no explanation.

00:18:15.000 It has no intelligibility.

00:18:16.000 You cannot make sense of it.

00:18:17.000 Even the most brilliant mind, in principle, even God's mind, if God existed and they think God doesn't exist, couldn't make sense of it because there's no sense to be made.

00:18:25.000 That's the idea of a brute fact.

00:18:26.000 Not just something that

00:18:27.000 We don't know the explanation of, but it has no explanation for intelligibility, no rhyme or reason whatsoever.

00:18:33.000 Now, I argue that that idea is ultimately incoherent, that you can't really make sense of the idea that we can explain what's going on in the world of our experience by reference to certain laws of nature, laws of chemistry and physics, and then you can explain those laws in terms of deeper laws of physics, and those in terms of yet deeper laws, but when you get to the deepest level of laws, you have an unintelligible brute fact, something that there is no rhyme or reason to.

00:18:56.000 That, I would argue, is like being a little pregnant. 0.65

00:18:58.000 It's, you know, you either have explanations all the way down or you don't.

00:19:02.000 There's no middle ground.

00:19:04.000 And I compare it to, you know, putting your books on a shelf because you don't want them to fall.

00:19:10.000 Put them neatly on a shelf.

00:19:12.000 Then you take the shelf.

00:19:13.000 What's going to support this?

00:19:14.000 And you put them on two brackets, right?

00:19:16.000 Okay.

00:19:17.000 Then you say, what's going to support the brackets?

00:19:18.000 And you put the brackets on these two rods, right?

00:19:21.000 And then you take, finally, those two rods, and instead of fastening them to the wall, you just let go of them, right?

00:19:26.000 They're going to take everything down with it, right?

00:19:29.000 The fact that the books are supported by the shelf and the shelf by the brackets and the brackets by the rods, none of that support is going to exist at all, unless there's something you can fasten them to, which holds all of that stuff up without itself being held up.

00:19:42.000 If there's nothing like that,

00:19:44.000 We're good to go.

00:19:59.000 And those laws in terms of deeper laws.

00:20:02.000 At each level, you're in a situation that's like the books on the shelf.

00:20:06.000 The support the lower levels give the higher levels is itself borrowed support.

00:20:12.000 And unless there's something to borrow it from, some bottom level of reality that can make everything else intelligible, but it doesn't need anything else to cause it, it's got its intelligibility or explanation built into it, then you've got nothing

00:20:26.000 For everything else in the chain to borrow support from.

00:20:29.000 The whole system is going to collapse.

00:20:30.000 Well, it seems like they're taking all the attributes of there is a logic to the universe that we can understand at least to a certain point but not beyond that and they're just not calling it God.

00:20:37.000 Well, that's right.

00:20:38.000 So that's a very good point because someone could hear the point I've just made and in response would say, okay, fair enough.

00:20:45.000 We can't say coherently

00:20:48.000 That the bottom level of laws has no explanation but is just a brute fact.

00:20:52.000 So why don't we say that that is the necessary being?

00:20:55.000 Maybe the fundamental laws of nature themselves exist in an absolutely necessary way they couldn't be otherwise.

00:21:00.000 So now we've got a complete explanation of everything that exists but it's an atheistic explanation because it's not God.

00:21:05.000 Okay.

00:21:06.000 That's kind of the response that you're throwing out there.

00:21:09.000 What I would say to that is, well,

00:21:11.000 Once you acknowledge that there's something that exists in an absolutely necessary way, it's not contingent on anything else, it's self-explanatory, then you need to ask, well, what follows from that?

00:21:21.000 One of the things you're going to have to say about it, for example, is that if it exists in an absolutely necessary way, then it must be what I referred to earlier as a purely actual entity, something with no potentiality.

00:21:33.000 Wait a sec, we already noted earlier what follows from that.

00:21:35.000 It's going to be something that's outside of time and space, something that's not material, something that's all-powerful.

00:21:40.000 So on analysis, this so-called atheist ultimate explanation is itself going to turn out to have the divine attributes.

00:21:48.000 It's going to turn out to be God.

00:21:49.000 You really can't escape it.

00:21:51.000 And it only seems like you're getting to something other than God because you haven't really thought through the implications of what it is for something to exist in an absolutely necessary way.

00:21:59.000 And this is why when I was reading your books and I stumbled on the line that Aquinas says, and it's this thing that we call God, it occurred to me for the first time that as a religious person, you're taught that God is sort of the starting point of the argument, not the end point of the argument.

00:22:11.000 You're taught that everything, you're taught that God exists and then everything else comes from that.

00:22:16.000 And the way that you're arguing is basically, there is this thing that needs to exist and does exist, and we're calling that thing God.

00:22:22.000 So it's really not you're arguing from God's existence to everything else, you're sort of arguing from everything else back to God's existence.

00:22:28.000 Which is a more logical way of going about it.

00:22:30.000 So, with all of this said, if these arguments are plausible, why do you think it is that they're increasingly unpopular?

00:22:37.000 Levels of religious activity are going down in the West.

00:22:40.000 Levels of religious belief are going down in the West.

00:22:42.000 Is it just that people have never dealt with these arguments, or they decide that they're not interested in hearing the arguments because it's more fun to be atheist than not to be atheist?

00:22:50.000 Why is atheism gaining?

00:22:51.000 It's a little bit of both.

00:22:53.000 I would say, speaking from the perspective of an academic philosopher, a major part of the problem

00:22:58.000 We're good to go.

00:23:16.000 That's true even in philosophy itself and in different academic disciplines.

00:23:19.000 They've all got their sub-disciplines, and you could spend your whole life just studying the sub-disciplines.

00:23:23.000 Now, what follows from that is that you have fewer and fewer generalists in modern academic life.

00:23:29.000 In other words, people who try to look at the big picture.

00:23:31.000 If you're talking about an Aristotle, or to go back far fewer centuries, a Descartes, or even to go back 100 years, 150 years, the average philosopher or scientist in those days, for most of the history of Western thought up until about a century or so ago,

00:23:45.000 Could literally be a know-it-all.

00:23:47.000 You could still master all the different bodies of knowledge and you can know a lot about philosophy and a lot about physics and a lot about biology and all the rest.

00:23:54.000 Much harder to do that now.

00:23:56.000 So part of the problem is that you get people outside of philosophy but also even people within philosophy who simply don't know a whole lot about the kind of arguments that I talk about in the book.

00:24:07.000 They may know nothing more than whatever cliches were trotted out in their Introduction to Philosophy class when they were a freshman or a sophomore, and they heard some of the canned objections that were aimed at caricatures of Aquinas or Aristotle and Leibniz, and then they never looked back.

00:24:22.000 And then they repeat it to their own students when they teach an Introduction to Philosophy class, say.

00:24:26.000 So, part of the problem is just that.

00:24:28.000 It's lack of knowledge on the part of your average intellectual or your average academic because modern intellectual life has become so specialized and fragmented.

00:24:38.000 It's hard to know enough about the issue.

00:24:40.000 Unfortunately, ego prevents people from

00:24:44.000 Uh, refraining from talking about things they don't know about.

00:24:46.000 So you'll have someone like a Richard Dawkins, for example, who's undeniably a brilliant man, a very good writer and so forth.

00:24:52.000 He knows a lot about biology.

00:24:53.000 Unfortunately, he knows very little about philosophy and even less about theology.

00:24:58.000 But for some reason that doesn't keep him from pontificating on those subjects, right?

00:25:02.000 So he trots out the stock objections that he might have heard when he was an undergraduate.

00:25:06.000 And he doesn't bother to sort of do the research and so forth.

00:25:10.000 And so what happens is when someone with that degree of prominence repeats these same tiresome and tired objections, then that gives them new life.

00:25:19.000 Because people think, well, Richard Dawkins, he's a smart guy.

00:25:21.000 He's an Oxford professor.

00:25:22.000 He must know what he's talking about.

00:25:23.000 No, not necessarily.

00:25:24.000 But that gives a whole other generation of young people, students and so forth, the same erroneous ideas about the arguments.

00:25:31.000 And so they get perpetuated that way.

00:25:32.000 That's another part of the reason.

00:25:34.000 And one of the things about reading your books and talking about actual philosophic arguments for the existence of God is that after you read your books and then you go and you read somebody like Dawkins and he's talking about flying spaghetti monsters, you realize he's either deliberately missing the point or he's completely missing the point non-deliberately to be charitable to him.

00:25:50.000 That his argument doesn't actually correlate to anything that any religious person has ever seriously thought about these issues in any real way.

00:25:59.000 The thing about the religious argument that has always appealed to me is that it seems to me a better explanation for the life that we live than the scientific materialist argument.

00:26:06.000 And it seems to me that the argument that there is no God, it's very difficult to square with

00:26:13.000 Any sort of human meaning, any sort of free will, any sort of reason, all the various principles that so many people in the secularist world seem to base entire moral systems upon, are based on bricks that they've stolen from a house that they forcibly destroyed with a wrecking ball.

00:26:27.000 And this is sort of the case that I was making to Sam Harris when he was sitting here, is that he comes up with this entire moral system, but all of his values are based and predicated on the notion that human beings are inherently valuable, for example.

00:26:39.000 Where is he getting the notion that human beings are inherently valuable?

00:26:41.000 Why are human beings inherently valuable?

00:26:43.000 If you say reason, well, why is reason inherently more valuable than non-reason, considering it's just, I guess, an evolutionarily beneficial biological function?

00:26:51.000 It's sort of a neuronal order that works the best.

00:26:55.000 None of that makes a lot of sense to me.

00:26:57.000 What's your chief attack?

00:26:58.000 On sort of the atheistic philosophy.

00:27:00.000 Is it a utilitarian one that it just doesn't work?

00:27:02.000 Or is it that you think that there's a fundamental illogic to atheism itself?

00:27:06.000 Is there a... Steal man atheism for me.

00:27:08.000 If you're going to make the best argument you can for the atheist perspective, what does that look like?

00:27:12.000 Yeah.

00:27:13.000 Well, I can answer those two questions in tandem.

00:27:15.000 You know, the question, you know, how would I steal man atheism, right?

00:27:18.000 But also question what's wrong with it, because they're actually related in a way I want to explain.

00:27:23.000 What I would do if I were to try to make the best case for atheism that I could would be to push

00:27:28.000 As far as

00:27:46.000 and optimistic view of human reason.

00:27:49.000 And you push that through consistently, you're going to be a theist.

00:27:51.000 I mean, it's no accident that the arch-rationalists in the history of philosophy, the people who really pushed through this idea that the world is ultimately intelligible, we can make sense of it, they were all theists.

00:28:00.000 They all believed in God.

00:28:02.000 Leibniz, Descartes, people like that.

00:28:04.000 Even Spinoza, though his conception of God is an eccentric one, he's not an atheist.

00:28:08.000 He's a pantheist, but that's very different from atheism.

00:28:10.000 So I would say that

00:28:12.000 If you're going to avoid theism, you really have to take a view that the power of human reason is extremely limited.

00:28:19.000 You have to take a very pessimistic view of human reason.

00:28:22.000 And you see that kind of view in Nietzsche.

00:28:24.000 You see that kind of view in David Hume.

00:28:27.000 You see that even in some of his moods, in Bertrand Russell, though in others of his moods he's more optimistic.

00:28:32.000 But I think that's the more consistent view that you're going to have to take.

00:28:35.000 What you're not going to have is this kind of rosy, if we just got rid of religion everything would be wonderful, kind of idea that you get in someone like Richard Dawkins.

00:28:42.000 So I would say that if you're going to steel man atheism, you're going to have to swallow the consequence

00:28:48.000 I think so.

00:29:07.000 David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, had exactly that kind of modesty about the possibility of scientific knowledge.

00:29:12.000 So that's what I would say is, you know, if I wanted to be, if I wanted to sort of give the atheist advice as to where to go to make his position as defensible as possible, and as little open to the sort of objections I would raise, that's the direction I would go.

00:29:25.000 But that brings me to what the main problem, I think, with atheism, is with atheism, which is that ultimately you can't make that position work.

00:29:32.000 It's ultimately a self-defeating position.

00:29:34.000 If you ultimately take the view

00:29:36.000 That nature is not intelligible, that we can't make sense of the view.

00:29:40.000 It makes sense of the world.

00:29:42.000 You're ultimately undermining the power of human reason to such an extent that it takes down any argument you can give for any conclusion, including any argument you can give for atheism.

00:29:51.000 So I ultimately don't think atheism is a coherent or consistent position.

00:29:54.000 And that's what I think is the main problem with it.

00:29:56.000 It has all kinds of practical downsides as well, but those are less fundamental than the fact that it's just false and it's not rationally defensible.

00:30:04.000 Well, this is also the argument that Harris has made in reverse.

00:30:10.000 He'll make the argument, essentially, that while atheism may not be tenable in terms of supporting things like free will, you have to act that way anyway.

00:30:18.000 There's a certain level of whistling past the graveyard that

00:30:21.000 I feel like you get from some atheists where, yes, we can change the world if we just get rid of religion, and yes, we can have rational discussions.

00:30:28.000 And I just keep thinking, where are you getting the tools to do all of these things?

00:30:31.000 I mean, you are basically a ball of meat wandering aimlessly through the universe, randomly firing neurons, and yet I'm supposed to believe that we can construct entire moral systems, change our lives for the better, and make civilization a rosy, wonderful place.

00:30:42.000 I was reading E.O.

00:30:44.000 Wilson in his sociobiological theories, and he

00:30:49.000 Gets almost to the verge of what you're talking about, where he basically says that everything is an outgrowth of evolution and biology.

00:30:55.000 And then at the very last instant, he sort of veers away from it, because he realizes that the conclusion is just too depressing and self-defeating, which is that every change that has ever occurred was bound to happen.

00:31:03.000 It was not, it was not willed.

00:31:05.000 There's no possibility for actual change.

00:31:06.000 You almost end up in this sort of human-xenos paradox, where change is occurring all around you, but it can't actually be occurring all around you.

00:31:13.000 Well, I think that guys like Harris are probably misled by the fact

00:31:21.000 Status as nice guys, right?

00:31:23.000 As evidence that it's possible to have a moral world, say, even if morality is an illusion.

00:31:29.000 So someone like Harris might think, well, I'm a nice guy.

00:31:32.000 I'm not, you know, I wouldn't murder and steal and kill and so forth.

00:31:34.000 And some of my atheist friends are like that, right?

00:31:36.000 And that would be true even if it turned out that morality is an illusion.

00:31:41.000 Even if it turned out that free will is an illusion.

00:31:44.000 Therefore, you could have a society in which belief that morality and free will were illusions was widespread.

00:31:52.000 That doesn't follow.

00:31:53.000 It's very naive to think that what might be true of the individual person here or there could be true at the level of mass society.

00:32:00.000 Where everybody just took it for granted that free will was an illusion, morality was an illusion, but a useful illusion, right?

00:32:07.000 It would be irresistible to cut corners where you could get away with it.

00:32:10.000 Because it's just an illusion after all anyway, right?

00:32:12.000 So I think there's a kind of sociological naivete behind this idea that, you know,

00:32:17.000 Morality could still work even if we all just agreed it was false and agreed not to talk about it very much.

00:32:22.000 Okay, so we'll get to more on that in just one second.

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00:33:30.000 Okay, so let's talk about the construction of morality.

00:33:33.000 So now we've talked about the construction of arguments that support the existence of God, but where atheists usually go is once you've started arguing that the spaghetti monster argument isn't particularly

00:33:43.000 We're good to go.

00:34:04.000 Well, I think it's neither.

00:34:26.000 What I mean by that is this, that atheists often suppose that the traditional defenders of God's existence, a Thomas Aquinas or an Aristotle or a Leibniz or what have you, are committed to the idea that religion and morality are related in the following way.

00:34:40.000 That morality is essentially a matter of

00:34:43.000 God arbitrarily giving certain commands, right?

00:34:45.000 Don't murder, don't steal.

00:34:47.000 And that if you ask, well, why?

00:34:48.000 Because I said so, right?

00:34:50.000 That God just arbitrarily stipulates that certain things are wrong.

00:34:53.000 And that if you believe that there's a link between religion and morality, that must be what you mean.

00:34:57.000 That's not what thinkers like that meant by that.

00:35:00.000 If you look at something like Thomas Aquinas, and here his ideas are, as they so often are, grounded in Aristotle.

00:35:08.000 Morality is fundamentally grounded in human nature.

00:35:11.000 This is the idea of morality as natural law.

00:35:13.000 Now, there is a link to religion, but it's not as direct as atheists often suppose.

00:35:17.000 It's more indirect.

00:35:18.000 The idea is that what's good or bad for something is determined by its nature.

00:35:22.000 That things by their nature have certain

00:35:25.000 Thanks for watching.

00:35:43.000 has to realize certain ends or goals.

00:35:45.000 It's got to sink roots into the ground to give it stability and to take in water.

00:35:48.000 It's got to grow bark to protect it from the elements and insects.

00:35:51.000 If it doesn't realize those goals, you might say, it's not going to be a very good tree.

00:35:55.000 It's not going to flourish as a good specimen of a tree.

00:35:58.000 Same thing with the squirrel.

00:35:59.000 It's going to flourish as that kind of animal, as a squirrel.

00:36:02.000 It's got to gather its nuts and acorns for the winter.

00:36:04.000 It's got to scamper about and evade predators and so forth. 0.98

00:36:06.000 If it fails to do those things, it's not going to flourish as a squirrel.

00:36:09.000 Now, human beings are like that too.

00:36:11.000 We have certain ends we have to pursue, certain goals we have to realize or reach, if we're going to flourish as the kinds of things that we are.

00:36:18.000 For example, human beings are rational animals.

00:36:20.000 Unlike other animals, we've got intellects.

00:36:22.000 We've got rationality and free choice.

00:36:25.000 So we need to learn things about the world.

00:36:27.000 We need to study.

00:36:28.000 We need to investigate the world.

00:36:29.000 We need to do things like science and philosophy, or we're not going to flourish as the kinds of things that we are.

00:36:34.000 Now, just as it's a matter of objective fact,

00:36:37.000 That a tree that fails to sink roots is a bad tree in the sense of a bad specimen, a defective specimen of a tree.

00:36:44.000 And the squirrel that fails to gather acorns and nuts and so forth is a defective or bad specimen of being a squirrel.

00:36:49.000 So too, a human being that fails to realize the ends or goals that are built into our nature is a bad specimen of a human being.

00:36:57.000 Now, you'll notice that I didn't make any reference to God there, right?

00:37:01.000 I just made reference to human nature.

00:37:03.000 What I did at least presuppose, however, is that there really is, in the nature of things, objectively, something that's there, we discover, we don't just make it up, there really are purposes or goals in nature.

00:37:15.000 That's something that modern atheism rejects, alongside its rejection of God, the idea that there really is any purpose.

00:37:22.000 We're good.

00:37:52.000 That's very different from showing that it doesn't exist.

00:37:55.000 But once you have that in place, I would argue that you could show that there must really be such things in nature as final cause.

00:38:00.000 Then you've got the foundation for a system of ethics that doesn't have to make reference to scripture, and it doesn't have to make reference to some arbitrary divine command, but just to human nature.

00:38:11.000 Now, scripture and divine commands are related to all that.

00:38:13.000 They get worked into that as well in a whole system of religious ethics.

00:38:16.000 But that would be the starting point or foundation.

00:38:18.000 So what's the argument for final causes?

00:38:19.000 What's the scientific argument for final causes?

00:38:22.000 Because it seems pretty evident to...

00:38:26.000 The Sam Harris's of the world that, as you say, there are no final causes.

00:38:29.000 They're just brute facts.

00:38:30.000 The world is made up of them.

00:38:31.000 Then our minds kind of place those causes on the brute facts in order to make sense of the world.

00:38:36.000 What's the best argument in favor of the idea that you can discover the normative from the descriptive, basically?

00:38:41.000 What I would say is there are several arguments, some of them more technical than others, that you give for the existence of final cause or purpose in the natural world.

00:38:47.000 But probably the one that's easiest to understand for the non-philosophers is the idea that if there is no final cause or purpose built into nature at all, if the whole idea of final cause or purpose is an illusion, then that means that human reason itself has no final cause or purpose.

00:39:04.000 It doesn't aim or point at anything.

00:39:07.000 But if that's the case, then the human mind, the human intellect doesn't aim or point at truth as its final cause or goal either.

00:39:14.000 If that's the case, if the human intellect, if the human mind, if human reason isn't really for anything, it doesn't have the attainment of truth,

00:39:22.000 As its final cause or goal.

00:39:24.000 Because there are no final causes or goals.

00:39:26.000 That means there really is no such thing objectively as a difference between good reasoning and bad reasoning.

00:39:31.000 Between good arguments and logical fallacies.

00:39:34.000 It's all ultimately just a matter of power.

00:39:37.000 Of imposing your will on others.

00:39:39.000 Now, I would say you can't really make coherent sense of that.

00:39:43.000 Even to give an argument for that claim, you need to presuppose that the argument's a good one, not an argument that commits a fallacy.

00:39:49.000 Even someone who wants to deny that there's a difference between good and bad arguments is going to have to give you an argument for that, and therefore presuppose that there is such a difference.

00:39:56.000 But if there is... Did you make an evolutionary claim on that?

00:39:58.000 Could you theoretically make an evolutionary claim to counter that?

00:40:00.000 So you say, you're right, there's no such thing as good reason or bad reason, there's just reason that works.

00:40:04.000 Right.

00:40:04.000 And I've heard Harris actually make this argument.

00:40:06.000 Yeah.

00:40:06.000 He made it on stage with me.

00:40:07.000 He basically said that, yes, I love reason, but it's because reason is useful, right?

00:40:11.000 It's not because reason searches for truth, even though he does believe in objective truth, which I've never really understood.

00:40:15.000 He says that reason basically allows you to convince the most numbers of people, because your brain basically is like a lock.

00:40:21.000 When you come up with a reasonable combination, somebody's brain basically unlocks, and now they're on your side.

00:40:26.000 Could you make the argument in favor of good reason, not on the basis of it's aiming at truth and then truth is the objective, but convincing people is the objective because then you are evolutionarily a winner, basically.

00:40:38.000 Yeah.

00:40:39.000 Well, there are two problems with that, depending on how someone like Harris would cash out that claim, right?

00:40:44.000 If he wants to say that natural selection could explain why the human mind really aims at truth,

00:40:50.000 I would say it doesn't and can't explain that because all natural selection favors is fitness, being well adapted to the environment, passing your genes on to the next generation.

00:40:58.000 And there's no necessary link between that and truth.

00:41:01.000 It could turn out, for all we know, that sometimes it's more adaptive to believe falsehoods.

00:41:06.000 If that's the case, then natural selection wouldn't favor

00:41:09.000 Intellects or minds that attain truth.

00:41:12.000 We just favor intellects or minds that allow you to have greater survival.

00:41:14.000 And they actually make that argument in the context of religion, right?

00:41:16.000 They say religion is expandable and just because religion is really popular doesn't mean that it's true.

00:41:21.000 It's just that it's a byproduct of minds that are evolutionarily fit.

00:41:23.000 That's right.

00:41:24.000 So if they're going to say that about religion, they're going to say, yeah, a tendency toward religion is hardwired into us because it has certain fitness.

00:41:30.000 Characteristics, but it's not true.

00:41:33.000 Well, there's no reason not to extend that to human reason in general, in which case you've got a self-undermining position.

00:41:39.000 So if he's going to say that natural selection explains our capacity for truth, I would say that natural selection by its very nature could do no such thing.

00:41:46.000 It's just not in that business of explaining that kind of thing.

00:41:48.000 If instead he says, oh no, I'm not trying to explain how natural selection favors truth.

00:41:52.000 I'm just trying to say that human reason must be a useful instrument because it has survived the process of natural selection.

00:41:59.000 Okay, if he says that, then he's back with the skeptical position that I already criticized a few moments ago, which is that he's basically conceding that there is objectively no difference between good and bad reasoning.

00:42:09.000 There's just reasoning that wins the mob over and reasoning that doesn't.

00:42:13.000 But in that case, he couldn't present his own position as the more true or rational position.

00:42:17.000 He's going to end up with a self-undermining, self-defeating position.

00:42:21.000 Okay, so what happens to reason to connect it with any sort of moral principle?

00:42:25.000 Let's say we assume that the Aristotelian version of the nature of man is right, that basically our nature is to be a rational animal, and that in order for us to pursue our telos, we have to be as rational as possible, or at least pursue rational ends.

00:42:40.000 How does that connect to morality?

00:42:41.000 Because one of the things that we saw between the 19th and 20th centuries is a lot of people who thought that they were being as purely rational as possible, who then proceeded to kill tens of millions of human beings.

00:42:49.000 So how do we get from now, so we've gotten from God to reason as an end, I guess, and so how do we get from there to anything that looks like a moral system?

00:42:59.000 Yeah.

00:42:59.000 Well, I mean, what you see in the kind of systems of thought that you're describing there is a kind of incoherent or bastardized version of reason.

00:43:06.000 I mean, on the one hand, they, in the name of rationality,

00:43:09.000 They favor things like a centrally planned economy, and so I assume you're referring to communism and Maoism and Stalinism as manifestations of that and so forth.

00:43:18.000 But my argument is that if you follow through consistently the idea that reason really has its end, truth, the attainment of truth, you're going to be committed to final cause, to purposes built into nature.

00:43:31.000 Before you know it, you're going to have to accept a natural law conception of morality, which tells us that

00:43:37.000 The things that are good or bad for us as human beings are there in the nature of things.

00:43:41.000 They're there for us to discover and not to invent, right?

00:43:44.000 And that means that there are absolute limits on the power of any state, any government, say, to manipulate human beings according to its whims and so forth.

00:43:52.000 It's going to have to submit itself to the dictates of the natural law, and therefore it's not going to be a totalitarian state.

00:44:00.000 So, you can't consistently, in the name of reason,

00:44:05.000 End up with a kind of totalitarian or status system.

00:44:08.000 I think there's a contradiction lurking in that very idea when you unpack it.

00:44:12.000 And that may be a contradiction between Plato and Aristotle because in Plato's Republic he basically argues that theoretically you could have the rule of reason from the top that looks essentially like a tyranny and Aristotle is a lot more divided on the question of the power of government it seems.

00:44:25.000 Yeah, that raises questions about how to interpret Plato.

00:44:28.000 Is Plato serious about that?

00:44:29.000 Correct.

00:44:29.000 But even Plato, though, you know, one of the things that's interesting about Plato's Republic, which I think people often don't pay careful enough attention to, is that what seems like a totalitarian society, sort of rigidly regimented society, right?

00:44:45.000 That applies primarily to the guardian class, not to the mass of human beings, right?

00:44:49.000 It's only the small elite that has to live this very austere, military, sort of totalitarian lifestyle.

00:44:55.000 And they have to do it in Plato precisely that it's not attractive, right?

00:44:59.000 For Plato, you have to guarantee that being a ruler in his utopian society is as unattractive as possible to anybody but those with the purest motives.

00:45:10.000 Modern totalitarian states were anything but like that, right?

00:45:13.000 They weren't like that at all.

00:45:14.000 Having said that, Aristotle is definitely more down-to-earth thinker than Plato.

00:45:19.000 Even Plato later in his career moved away from this rather sort of strange utopian model that he presented in the Republic.

00:45:26.000 But Aristotle is much more the philosopher of common sense.

00:45:29.000 So the argument that I've made, and I'm making an upcoming book on some of these topics, is that

00:45:35.000 With all the glorification of Aristotle, all the glorification of human reason, there still does need to be an admixture with essentially one revealed truth.

00:45:43.000 Not necessarily everything that's in the Bible is necessary to supply the basis for natural rights as we understand them, but you do need basically one verse, and that is that man is made in the image of God.

00:45:54.000 You do need the idea that every human being is imbued with a certain level of rights by nature of their very existence.

00:46:01.000 Do you think that exists in the ancients in the same way?

00:46:04.000 Because it seems, you know, obviously Plato and Aristotle were okay with slavery.

00:46:08.000 There's a pretty solid regimentation of human beings into people who are fitted for one class versus people who are fitted for another class.

00:46:14.000 Do you think that we need that sort of biblical admixture?

00:46:15.000 Or do you think that it could have been, over time, evolved from the Greek position purely?

00:46:20.000 I think we do need that biblical admixture.

00:46:22.000 I don't think it could have evolved.

00:46:23.000 You do see in Aristotle something like an echo of the idea that human beings are made in God's image in this sense.

00:46:29.000 That he thinks that rationality, which every human being has some degree of, is the divine spark in us.

00:46:35.000 It's what is most God-like.

00:46:38.000 But beyond that...

00:46:39.000 It doesn't have, in Aristotle, a lot of practical application to the life of the average person.

00:46:45.000 This idea that absolutely every human being has a certain dignity and an eternal destiny, and so forth, and is specially loved by God, right?

00:46:53.000 You certainly don't have that in Aristotle.

00:46:55.000 In Aristotle, the unmoved mover, God, contemplates one thing, himself.

00:47:00.000 Because nothing else is worth contemplating, right?

00:47:02.000 But you don't see that idea in the philosophers influenced by the Bible, by Maimonides in Judaism, by Thomas Aquinas in Christianity.

00:47:11.000 You have this idea of the dignity of the individual human being and the eternal destiny of the individual human being that really is something that biblical religion introduces.

00:47:22.000 And I think it is absolutely necessary.

00:47:24.000 That's its origin.

00:47:25.000 I mean, even liberalism, which still uses the language of human dignity, it really is a kind of heresy, you might say, of biblical religion.

00:47:33.000 What I mean by that is something that grew out of biblical religion and then chucked away its origins and supposes that you can maintain this idea of human dignity without the biblical source of it.

00:47:43.000 And I would say, ultimately, that's incoherent.

00:47:45.000 So, now we're in the realm of more traditional religion, as a lot of religious people feel.

00:47:50.000 The talk about immortality and the value of each human being made in the image of God and all the rest of this.

00:47:56.000 What do you think is the best proof for a soul?

00:47:57.000 This is one I've personally had a tough time with, because the truth is that the Old Testament isn't big, it's big on the idea that there's a soul, because it says right in Genesis that God breathes breath into Adam and all of this.

00:48:07.000 But there's nothing in the Old Testament that explicitly references the idea of an afterlife, for example.

00:48:12.000 So what's the rational case?

00:48:14.000 I know that you've discussed this before.

00:48:16.000 What's the rational case for the idea of a soul?

00:48:19.000 What exactly is a soul?

00:48:20.000 Is there a rational case for an afterlife?

00:48:23.000 Or is that just something that we've made up to comfort ourselves?

00:48:25.000 I would say that

00:48:27.000 The arguments for immortality that I think are the most impressive, and actually these are arguments that, for whatever reason, end up being a little bit philosophically more technical than the arguments for God's existence, or at least it's a little bit harder to state them in a non-technical way.

00:48:43.000 But the arguments that I have in mind focus on what's unique about the human intellect, the human power of rationality, which other animals don't have.

00:48:51.000 Other animals are clever in certain ways.

00:48:53.000 They can hunt prey and they can solve certain problems.

00:48:58.000 But what they don't have is the idea to grasp abstract ideas, abstract concepts, the sort of thing that we express in language, in distinctively human language.

00:49:07.000 That's the difference in human beings.

00:49:10.000 That entails, when you unpack it, and this is something that Plato argues, Aristotle argues this as well, Thomas Aquinas argues this as well, when you unpack this idea of the human intellect, you'll find that it's a power in us, it's a capacity that's not material.

00:49:24.000 That is to say, it's not entirely grounded in bodily processes, not even neural processes, processes in the brain.

00:49:32.000 Now, they don't deny, Aristotle and Aquinas certainly would not deny, that brain activity is part of what's going on when we think.

00:49:39.000 But they would argue that can't be the whole story.

00:49:42.000 That what matter by itself will not give you is the kind of meaning that you have in a human thought, or in a sentence that you write in a human language that expresses a human thought.

00:49:53.000 That's a non-physical or immaterial aspect to human nature.

00:49:58.000 Now, if that's the case,

00:50:00.000 Then because it's the case, when human beings die, what happens is we lose our bodily capacities.

00:50:07.000 We walk and we talk.

00:50:08.000 Those things depend on bodily organs like arms and legs and mouths and so forth.

00:50:13.000 We digest food.

00:50:13.000 That depends on a bodily capacity.

00:50:16.000 Bodily organs like having a stomach.

00:50:17.000 We see and hear.

00:50:18.000 That depends on bodily organs like eyes and ears.

00:50:21.000 Those things are gone.

00:50:22.000 But at least part of what we do, even when we're alive, namely thinking, namely abstract thought of the sort that even the least

00:50:31.000 That's something that for Plato and for Aristotle and for Thomas Aquinas is not a physical or material power of human nature.

00:50:41.000 It's something that we do even when we're alive that is immaterial.

00:50:45.000 And so that aspect of us does not go out of existence at death.

00:50:49.000 It carries on beyond death.

00:50:51.000 And that's the foundation in these writers for an argument for the immortality of the human soul.

00:50:56.000 That there's an aspect of human nature, what's highest in us, namely our capacity for thought, that survives the death of the body.

00:51:04.000 So, even without a brain, even without any ability to function in the physical world, there is something else, but we can't quite define what exactly that is?

00:51:13.000 I don't want to say we can't define, I think we can define.

00:51:16.000 I think I would say, I mean the short answer would be that it's the human intellect, the human mind that survives the death of the body and that cannot be entirely explained in terms of or reduced to brain activity.

00:51:28.000 Here you start to see a divergence between thinkers and the tradition I'm talking about.

00:51:33.000 So for a writer like Plato, or Rene Descartes, father of modern philosophy, for them, not only is the human mind the highest part of our nature, but that's really definitive of us.

00:51:43.000 What we are essentially is thinking things, and the body is just a vehicle we temporarily walk around in, or it's even a prison for Plato.

00:51:51.000 So death is a kind of liberation.

00:51:53.000 But for Aristotle and for Thomas Aquinas, that's not the case.

00:51:57.000 For them, even though we're not entirely bodily, there's an aspect of us, namely our intellects, our minds, that's not reducible to bodily behavior.

00:52:05.000 Nevertheless...

00:52:07.000 Our bodily activity is still part of us.

00:52:10.000 And so death is not a liberation.

00:52:12.000 Death is really, what I like to call it, in Aquinas' thinking, death is like a full body amputation.

00:52:18.000 That's something, that's bad.

00:52:19.000 You want your body back.

00:52:21.000 That's why you need, in the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, you need a resurrection from the dead.

00:52:25.000 Now that's where, for Aquinas, philosophy has to give way to theology.

00:52:29.000 He thinks philosophy can demonstrate that the human soul is immortal.

00:52:33.000 But what it can't demonstrate is that

00:52:36.000 We could ever get our bodies back.

00:52:38.000 That would require special divine intervention, and that that's even a possibility requires divine revelation to know about.

00:52:43.000 It requires biblical revelation to know about.

00:52:46.000 That's where theology picks up the baton from philosophy.

00:52:49.000 When it comes to the intellect, the mind that survives death, does that have any impact whether we're talking about somebody who is a baby, who has an undeveloped brain, or does it matter if your brain is developed?

00:53:01.000 The way we normally think of intellect and mind is obviously

00:53:04.000 Well, what, um...

00:53:33.000 What followers of Aquinas argue is that in the case of a baby or a fetus or what have you, it's not that they don't have intellects or souls, they do have them.

00:53:42.000 But what they don't have is intellects or souls that are developed.

00:53:45.000 Because for Aquinas, though the intellect is not a physical thing, it's an incorporeal or non-material aspect of human nature.

00:53:52.000 Nevertheless, the five senses and brain activity are its normal mode for acquiring information.

00:53:58.000 It would be otherwise like a computer that's kicked off the internet because the modem's not working, right?

00:54:02.000 So, the fetus or the small child, the baby that's just been born, is basically like a computer that's just been connected to the internet.

00:54:11.000 It's downloading information, but not a whole lot has been downloaded onto it yet.

00:54:15.000 But, nevertheless, just as a computer still exists, whether or not it's connected to the internet, whether or not it's got a modem, in the same way, the unborn child, the fetus, or the newborn infant still has a soul, still has an intellect, but it's one that has not yet developed.

00:54:30.000 So, it's not that the fetus or the child is potentially a human being, or potentially something with a soul or an intellect.

00:54:37.000 No.

00:54:38.000 It's something that actually has an intellect, actually has a soul, but intellects and souls that have not yet attained their potentials.

00:54:43.000 That's a different idea.

00:54:44.000 Okay, so with all of this said, I mean, we've gotten pretty abstruse here.

00:54:48.000 I've tried to bring it down to the point where I can understand it at least.

00:54:51.000 And with all that said, one of the things that's pretty obvious is that we as a civilization have sort of lost our way in terms of these fundamental Western values.

00:54:59.000 Because all of this is the basis for a Western civilization that actually believes in human rights and individual rights and women's rights and all the things that we actually care about in the West.

00:55:08.000 Can this stuff be re-inculcated?

00:55:10.000 Have we lost it?

00:55:12.000 Have we lost it because we lost the philosophical roots or because we were seduced by the excesses of materialism around us?

00:55:19.000 What do you think happened to Western civilization?

00:55:22.000 Because all these ideas are not new to you, they're obviously not new to me.

00:55:26.000 I got them from you, many of them, and then you got them from people who are a bunch older.

00:55:29.000 So what exactly happened that it feels like very few people in the West are even familiar with these ideas?

00:55:34.000 I wouldn't reduce it to one factor, but as I put it in my book, The Last Superstition, which came out about 10 years, it's the 10th anniversary now of that book.

00:55:41.000 It's been out for about 10 years.

00:55:44.000 At least on the philosophical side of things, the intellectual or academic side of things, I think the greatest mistake, I think the way I put it in the book was that the single greatest mistake ever made in the history of Western thought was abandoning Aristotle.

00:55:55.000 And more generally classical philosophy.

00:55:57.000 Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, the whole medieval and ancient tradition on which western civilization has been founded.

00:56:06.000 That's its intellectual foundation.

00:56:08.000 And that provides the foundation for these arguments for the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God, and the natural law conception of morality that we've been talking about.

00:56:17.000 We're good to go.

00:56:34.000 As that idea that all that stuff is old hat, we need to chuck it out and get rid of it, took root in the intelligentsia and started to permeate the thinking of academics and intellectuals and writers and so on and so forth.

00:56:46.000 That, I think, is at least the intellectual or theoretical side of the modern problem.

00:56:54.000 Now, there are all kinds of other factors as well.

00:56:57.000 But I would say that that, at least at the level of philosophy, that is the main problem.

00:57:02.000 Okay, so I have one more question for you, and it's the biggest one, which is, what is the purpose of life, and how do we attain it?

00:57:08.000 So we'll do that in one second, but first, if you actually want to hear Professor Fazer's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

00:57:15.000 Subscribe, head over to dailywire.com, and then click subscribe, which helps us bring you the show.

00:57:19.000 Great to be here, thank you.

00:57:27.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zangaro, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

00:57:41.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:57:44.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 02, 2018

Edward Feser | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 17

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