Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. He provides the journey towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take this first step towards the brighter future you deserve. In our second weekly compilation, we re investigating the various methods and practices that humans use to conceptualize God. This investigation leads us down the path of exploring meaning and wonder. What does it mean to live as though God exists? Why does walking inside a great cathedral render us speechless? What is the relationship between these experiences and God? And why does God exist? In this episode, we explore how we as a society hold these values in such high regard? In Season 4 Episode 57 of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, we ll explore the connection between God and our values and values. God and the values we hold in high regard. by exploring God s existence and the value we place in the creation of the world by examining God s relationship with us, and how we can be found in God s creation and how they can be taught and understood by us in the Bible and our relationship with God s design in our lives by the Bible and in our practices and practices by our culture why we should live as if God exists and what we should be better at living as though He exists. and why God is a God in existence or doesn t exist so that we can move towards the greatest good And so on and so we can have a better life and so on this life Why we should we live a life that is better than that which is better for us and more like that what we would be better? and how we should move towards a better future? in this episode explores God s likeness to God
00:08:38.060It's to relearn. And I mean this deeply in the Buddhist sense of sati, to remember what it is to fall in love with reality, to fall in love with being.
00:08:48.080And if that's what you're saying is the...
00:08:50.080You think that's what Sam Harris is striving for in his spirituality?
00:08:55.320Well, it's not a throwaway answer. It's like, what's he up to exactly?
00:09:59.100The claim is nihilistic or my claim about that is nihilistic or both?
00:10:04.880The claim that power is a fundamental reality is an attempt to assuage the wounding of nihilism, but it is fundamentally mistaken in its endeavor.
00:10:43.240Thinking psychologically, again, about Christianity, and I know that Christianity is an extension of other metaphysical forms of thought that predate it, but it looked to me like, and some of those were derived from Mesopotamia, and some of them were derived from Greece, and some of them were derived from Judaism and other sources,
00:11:06.800but they all seemed to me to be part of the conversation that human beings have been having amongst themselves for thousands of years about what the nature of the ideal human being is.
00:11:18.840And now I see these cathedrals, these works of art in architecture that took a tremendous amount of labor, produce a dome-like structure that represents the sky, and you see Christ as logos spread out on the sky as a transcendent force.
00:11:35.680And you ask yourself, well, what exactly is that signifying?
00:11:40.760And the answer is at least the proposition of a kind of ideal that's associated with, let's say, universal love and truth in speech.
00:11:51.160That's the logos summed up in two phrases.
00:11:54.340And if there's no metaphysical reality there at all, there's still this imaginative enterprise that characterizes the entire human imaginative effort, cultural effort, to posit a transcendent ideal that we would live in relationship to.
00:12:14.880And I just don't see that case being made very strongly, and I can't really understand why, because isn't it rather obvious that at least part of what Christianity has been is the attempt by thousands of people over thousands of years to specify the nature of an ideal?
00:12:30.880Certainly, I would say that the fact that these principles actually work is proof of their being true accounts of what the nature of the real is.
00:12:52.040Well, let's approach this from a couple of different angles, Jordan.
00:12:54.680And, you know, the first is, one of the things that I profoundly believe is that, you know, these young people seeking deeper answers and, you know, however much they may be flailing about, you know, it's not their fault that many, perhaps most of the institutions they will encounter will betray that which is deepest in them.
00:13:19.700We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll denigrate, we'll tell them, no, none of this thing, none of these things that you're seeking are really real.
00:13:26.440I mean, I think, you know, I've been talking, thinking a lot over the years about architecture, and what is going on in brutalist architecture.
00:13:34.560And, and it really does seem to me that in brutalist architecture, I mean, to live in relation to brutalist architecture, it is as if you had a parent that said, you know, you're nothing, you're nothing, you'll never amount to any, I mean, of course, there are terrible people, terrible to say people actually, there are people in these situations who live with, with such dysfunctional lack of love and antagonism.
00:13:58.040This is the way that there's the home life that they, that some people terribly have, but I'm using this as an example, because I think what brutalist architecture does is it declares to the whole world and to you that you are, there is no truth, there is no beauty, you are nothing, accept it.
00:14:14.260It's just a concrete, annihilating force.
00:14:20.740And, and, and, and, and you see this culture of repudiation.
00:14:24.220I mean, here in, in, in, not here, you're in Canada, I'm in the States and in Savannah now, but you know, the, the Chateau Laurier, I think I misspoke recently, called it the Frontenac, which is in Quebec, but in Ottawa, you know, the Chateau Laurier, there's been a, a desire to expand this sort of beautiful sort of neo-Gothic building.
00:14:41.320Um, and it went through six rounds of approval to finally, uh, be, uh, to make, uh, a set of plans that would meet the local architectural, uh, uh, or review board, whatever it was.
00:14:54.220And I thought, well, it can't be that bad, you know, it's gone through that.
00:14:57.080And I mean, this structure is abhorrent.
00:15:00.220It looks like a, a cross between a, uh, uh, a Verizon server firm and an American penitentiary.
00:15:06.880I mean, it is just a, it is a declaration that there, that there is no higher order at all.
00:15:13.340You know, in Edinburgh, they're tearing all those out, eh?
00:15:15.920There is, Edinburgh is an unbelievably beautiful, beautiful city.
00:15:19.640The, the whole central mile of it, square mile essentially, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
00:15:25.920And it's marred by random placements of 1970s brutalist architecture.
00:15:45.040You know, what's really interesting about a cathedral with, let's say, Christ as Pantocrator on the ceiling is spread, spread against the ceiling.
00:15:52.780It's that it's not the state that's portrayed up there, right?
00:15:57.220It's not a, it's not a map of the country.
00:16:37.260And I think part of that, too, is maybe, you know, I learned from Jung that as soon as you posit an ideal, you also specify a judge.
00:16:44.720And the more, the higher the ideal, the more severe the judgment because of your distance from the ideal.
00:16:51.920And so part of what we're seeing, too, might be a rebellion against the awful requirements of that ideal.
00:17:00.700But that doesn't justify, that doesn't justify the rebellion.
00:17:04.160Because if it's really the ideal, then if you don't act it out, you fail to act it out at your peril.
00:17:11.120And then we need to have a serious conversation about the metaphysical, about the practical implications of the idea of this ideal.
00:17:19.680I mean, if we've had this conversation about the transcendent individual as the ideal against which we should all be judged and to which we should strive to emulate, is there any relationship between that ideal and the structure of reality itself?
00:17:37.500Because that's the hundred dollar question, so to speak.
00:17:41.920You know, we have a human ideal, and you could say, merely psychologically, maybe even merely biologically, that that's something we originated, that's part of our biological nature, that's expressed in this ideal.
00:18:08.100We are that which reflects being itself, or perhaps even makes it possible.
00:18:12.500It's not that obvious what our role is.
00:18:14.820It might not be so trivial, despite our mortality.
00:18:20.280Well, I would say that not only it is as you say, but we can know it to be as you say.
00:18:26.560I mean, this is what the whole history, in some sense, of literature and philosophy and theology is about, is a, and I want to insist on this, it is a rational grappling with these questions, realities, and indeed truths.
00:18:46.640I want to come back to something in a minute, but just on this topic, you know, one way into this is to reflect on the, the fact that, that reality is not zero sum.
00:19:01.140That, of course, we know this economically, you were talking, Jordan, a minute ago about, you know, free, you know, the, the voluntary exchange of, of, of regulated, that is to say, a contractually governed marketplace, that, that in this exchange, you know, it's not, it's a zero sum.
00:19:40.880I mean, you know, how can it be that in a conversation I can be wrong and be shown to be wrong and that be a net gain for me?
00:19:49.820I mean, you know, I, the whole, the whole point of free dialogue is that we can learn from, we can learn in our not knowing, that the conversation is not zero sum, that even in the, in our, in our, we know this in terms of forgiveness, that even our betrayals of beautiful things can become deepening engagements with what we have betrayed, if we have the humility to see it.
00:20:17.640And so then, you know, I think, you know, that leads one to, you know, what, geez, you can go back, you can go at the level of subatomic particles in physics.
00:20:28.520I had a pleasure of talking with Freeman Dyson before he died.
00:20:32.100And, you know, Dyson will say very clearly that against the determinists, you know, some of the rational optimists are pretty religiously determinist in their, in their worldview, you know, and they want to marshal modern science as, as, as saying that their determinism is what science teaches.
00:20:49.460But that, you know, Dyson, who was a subatomic physicist at the highest level, you know, expressly said the opposite.
00:20:57.560He said that the electron, that, you know, you, the, essentially, he says that the electron is free, that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, that at the very most detailed level of subatomic particles, things are not determinist.
00:21:13.420And the reason I want to go all the way down to that level is because you can go down to the lowest level of resolution, then you can back up to that, to the, to the higher level, and see that there is a non-zero-sum nature to what is real.
00:21:28.160And then you have to ask yourself, is it good to live in relation to, to what is true, or should I live in a delusion?
00:21:40.320And we say, well, it's better to live in relation to what's true than to live in relation to a delusion.
00:21:44.680And, and, and, and then you say, well, what would it mean then for me to live in relation to this, this positive sum, this essential reciprocity, which I think is really what the Christian view of the Trinity is about.
00:21:58.160This essential reciprocity, which is the bedrock of all reality.
00:22:02.260What would it mean to live in relation to that?
00:22:03.960What would it mean to, to, to, to remember that?
00:22:06.440And, you know, one can approach that in any number of different ways, but certainly that is what, what prayer is.
00:22:12.860That is what all spiritual exercises are.
00:22:15.360That's what perhaps walking in nature can be.
00:22:17.640That's what, what any kind of meditative activity, intellectual or physical, is a recollecting of the self in the deepest way to what,
00:22:29.460And I know you've written, for example, about, about gratitude.
00:22:32.580And I love your words about gratitude because it's an inversion of the burden.
00:22:39.100It's not that it all comes down to us, but actually just the opposite.
00:22:42.800That we, we place ourselves in the hands of the eternal reciprocity that gathers us up and puts us back together.
00:22:57.880And I think that this, frankly, is, is a deeply rational standpoint that can be shown to be, despite my not making it very articulately here today, shown to be true in economics, in physics, in biology, in sociology, and certainly in all of the higher order spheres of human knowing.
00:23:19.980This is the nature of what, of what we are and, and what the world is.
00:23:27.440And this is where, you know, your, your, your, your image of the Pantocrator, you know, I think this comes back to this because, because what fundamentally is going on there is that, you know, the logos is in us.
00:23:41.740That's why, when you talk about the divine significance of truth and speech, that, you know, we are made to understand ourselves in relation to the whole.
00:23:51.720That is an intrinsic human need and an intrinsic human ability.
00:23:56.780And, and, and I think that, you know, this is where, you know, you know, my life is about trying to, in whatever small way I can, you know, open, if the, if the nihilists darken the horizon and close off in the way that brutalist architecture does, close off what we're allowed to become and understand ourselves as, then I think the work of our time is to open it back up.
00:24:17.360And, and, and, and that is really what the humanities are fundamentally about.
00:24:22.300You can go back to, you know, one of the things I despise about the current structure of the academy is it acts as though, you know, these things are just for the few.
00:24:30.360But, you know, you think about, you know, Homer.
00:24:32.340I mean, Homer was the mode of educating the Greeks for, you know, a thousand years.
00:24:36.280The Pantheon was right there on the highest hill where everyone could see it.
00:24:42.100You know, J.S. Bach, perhaps the greatest musician who ever lived, was a parish church musician.
00:24:47.720Anyone, I presume, could walk in the doors and listen to his, to his, to his, to his cantatas.
00:24:52.500I mean, Dickens, when Dickens wrote, I've heard recently, people would line the docks to wait to see what, what was the next, you know, what was the next installment of Dickens.
00:25:02.000And so what, what I think, you know, most fundamentally is that the, the antidote to the spiritual crisis, civilizational, cultural crisis we're living in is, is, is, is, is really fundamentally simple in it.
00:25:15.720At least it's what we can state it as.
00:25:17.540And that is to, to, to open the horizon again, to turn the lights back on.
00:25:22.440And what that means is to turn them on so that individuals can better come to understand themselves in relation to these higher order realities in the image of which they are made.
00:25:32.420And in relation to which their fundamental realization essentially depends.
00:25:37.000Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:25:43.440Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:25:45.480But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:25:51.160In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:25:56.140Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:26:05.620And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:26:08.820With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:26:16.200Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:28:22.240So we have, so there's critiques of, let's say, thought in relationship to the ideal.
00:28:34.380That Freudian critique of religious structure that it's infantile.
00:28:41.020And perhaps that's a consequence of the hypothesis of the divine afterlife that awaits us all.
00:28:47.700Freud regarded that as an infantile response to the reality of death.
00:28:51.140And then there's the Marxist criticism that religion only serves power and it's the opiate of the masses.
00:28:57.560But there's, I, it's striking to me how poorly the alternative position has been defended given its unbelievable power.
00:29:05.600I mean, look, we all seem to recognize within ourselves that we have moral culpability, as far as I can tell.
00:29:12.680Because I've never met anyone who hasn't tortured themselves to a tremendous degree as a consequence of their own perceived inadequacies in relationship to the ideal.
00:29:23.300I see that people take the deepest pleasure that's possible in life in the facilitation of the development of others.
00:29:31.040I don't believe that, I believe that's wisdom to notice that, to say, well, it isn't the, the service to my momentary desires for pleasure or even comfort for that matter, where I'm going to find the deepest significance.
00:29:49.400Life-sustaining significance that keeps me away from nihilistic hell and, and the desire to destroy and hurt.
00:29:56.680It's, it's, it's going to be something like service to the greater good and primarily in the form of, well, other people in their longest possible term interests.
00:30:07.440And that we have not only a divine responsibility to do that, but a divine capacity to do that, that if not manifested, cripples us spiritually and, and physically for that matter.
00:30:21.020And, and, I mean, I mean, the ultimate significance of that remains unknowable, but I don't see any logical flaws in the, in the, in the proposition.
00:30:32.620I mean, I looked at the manner in which the Mesopotamians built their savior, Marduk.
00:30:38.300Marduk has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words.
00:30:41.660The, the cosmos comes into being and disappears as a consequence of his utterances.
00:30:45.780And like, there's this sense emerging in Mesopotamia as the consequence of the aggregation of all these cultures, that the highest order being is extraordinarily attentive.
00:30:56.560Hence the all encircling eyes and is capable of the deepest and most profound speech.
00:31:03.400And that's not a realization that's in any means trivial, that the Mesopotamians had wars between all of their representations of their gods.
00:31:11.420And what they elevated to the highest position was this all seeing truth speaking capacity that also went forward and confronted chaos and built the world as a consequence.
00:31:23.120And the influence of that set of ideas or the derivation from the set, same set of ideas for the Jewish conception of Yahweh is quite clear.
00:31:32.220And you see the same thing emerging in Greece with, with the building of a pantheon of gods and the proposition that something occupies the apex, something Apollonian or something of that nature.
00:31:43.560And then you see that revolution take place with the dawn of Christianity and the insistence that there's something fundamental about consciousness and spoken and what's, and the spoken truth that is constitutive of reality.
00:32:02.420And you ask yourself, well, do you believe that?
00:32:05.040And the answer is, well, you treat people like you believe that because you hold them responsible for the consequences of their utterances and you judge their character on the basis of what they say and you, and on whether or not they act out what they say.
00:32:18.080And so we hold each other to these standards with everything that we do and we berate ourselves when we don't live up to them.
00:32:24.300And I don't understand how it is that we can be said not to believe it.
00:32:27.840Now, you know, there's the dogmatic element, the hypothesis, for example, that Christ is literally the son of God.
00:32:35.280And I mean, my knowledge runs out very, very rapidly when speculating about such things.
00:32:39.900But I'm certainly, certainly seems to me that Christianity has at least been a very long conversation about what the nature of the good is and that that's spilled out into the humanities and, and underlies our culture.
00:32:52.740And that, that, that, that, that has very little to do with the expression of power.
00:32:57.940It's, it's the, it's not the right lens through which to view things.
00:33:05.300And I think it appeals to envy and the desire to tear down.
00:33:09.480Well, well, I, I, I, I, I, I think, think that the, well, two things I would say just very quickly, Jordan.
00:33:20.620The first is that, you know, we have immense resources in the, in our own past and in the past of every culture.
00:33:28.360I mean, one of the things I love about your work is how syncretistic it is, you know, here you've moved in the last five minutes, you know, moved from Marduk to, you know, the Pantocrater to, to the Greeks and, and good on you for doing it.
00:33:42.500I mean, that's, that's, I think I want to say that you say people have not been good at making the counter argument.
00:33:51.100Uh, well, um, uh, you've been very, very good at making the counter argument and, uh, the millions of people who've had their lives, uh, touched and ennobled and deepened, uh, by, uh, by, um, taking seriously the things you point towards, uh, are proof of that.
00:34:13.260Um, I, you know, I think relative to our spiritual cultural crisis, uh, we should not pretend that we don't have resources.
00:34:23.980I mean, it's as if, uh, it's as if, you know, the situation is, is if you were to, to give young people, uh, uh, the challenge of building something beautiful.
00:34:35.980And if you were to, if you were to say, well, you're absolutely not allowed to look at or have any knowledge of any previous building, well, the results are not going to be very good, but as soon as you say, and you can go back to Palladio and Vitruvius and look at all these models and discover all of the things that they give you.
00:34:57.220And so I, I, what I want to, I want to drive towards a kind of, uh, optimism, not rooted in, in kind of, uh, you know, silly blindness about the depth of our problems, but rather, uh, in, in the, the, the nature of what is most real and the whole treasure house of, of tools.
00:35:20.800It's like, it's like, we have these spotlights from the, from the past to help us understand ourselves and the, the, the, the, the, the world around us in philosophy and religion and literature and architecture and art and, in, in art and painting and music.
00:35:34.960I mean, for God's sakes, I mean, we we've got, we've got an unspeakable treasure house here and, and the, it may be that as we dig into that, we see that we uncover ourselves more and understand ourselves more, uh, adequately.
00:35:55.880You know, I want to, one example, you know, for example, I think, uh, one thing that is, is, uh, uh, I live in the, in, in beautiful, in a very beautiful city in, in historic Savannah and I'm live on the edge of a, just absolutely a stunning civic space, uh, park called Forsyth park.
00:36:13.840I hope you can come and see it someday.
00:36:16.040There's a beautiful fountain in the middle of it.
00:36:18.100And it has these, these, these, these oak trees, these live oaks that were planted by people long dead.
00:36:24.120Now these oaks of, you know, one to two to even 300 years, uh, old.
00:36:30.300And I not infrequently see, uh, young couples coming to stand in front of one of the biggest, the biggest oak inside the park proper to, uh, to get married.
00:36:45.340You know, they stand there with the justice of the peace and, uh, exchange simple vows.
00:36:50.640And I think we have to ask ourselves what in the hell is going on there?
00:36:55.780And it seems to me, you know, very beautiful and in a way, very simple.
00:37:01.500It's that they wish that their vows, they're aspiring to be to each other in some way as the oak tree, as able to live up to the, um, the love that they are called to.
00:37:20.560And they want to instantiate that, uh, by, uh, by associating.
00:37:26.680Well, that's why they return to the garden and the tree in the center.
00:38:02.360And, and the reason that, that people are leaving is because that adventure isn't being put before them.
00:38:09.360It's like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that, but that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.
00:38:16.980So, yes, I, I wish you'd preach to our people because I think you're absolutely right about that.
00:38:27.540That's what, that's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint.
00:38:31.920A saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to Christ.
00:38:35.800Now, press that to be conformed to Christ means you're willing to go into the dysfunction of the world, to bear its pain and to bear to it, the ever greater divine mercy and love.
00:38:48.160Now fill in the blank, Francis of Assisi.
00:38:50.300Mother Teresa, maybe in our time, like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who's a living saint?
00:39:00.180And she bore the suffering of, of, of the world, literally picking up the dying and, and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering.
00:39:10.240And, and she, she took on herself the wounds of Jesus.
00:39:13.720But then think of like, you know, the smile of Mother Teresa.
00:39:16.340She brought to that place the ever greater, more super abundant mercy of, of Christ.
00:39:24.560I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of heroic.
00:39:27.420Mom, look, I can tell you one thing I've experienced.
00:39:29.380This is, this is really something to see.
00:39:32.060I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially with a day or two in between and to, to large audiences, three to 10,000 all the time, something like that.
00:39:42.240And I always paid attention to the audience singly because I was always talking to one person at a time, but also on mass, you know, to see, to hear.
00:39:52.560Because if, if, if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there's silence.
00:40:02.400And sometimes that silence can be dramatic.
00:40:04.740And that's why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop.
00:40:07.360It's no one's moving because their attention is 100% gripped by whatever just happened.
00:40:13.840And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility.
00:40:26.380And people that, and I thought, I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now they say happiness or they say rights or they say privileges or, or, or they say reward or something like that.
00:40:42.260They don't say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry and carry and care for that matter and stumble forward.
00:40:49.940And I've seen people cut those ideas and put them on t-shirts and, and play with them.
00:40:55.620And, and so it's not that the church is asking too little of its people.
00:41:02.000I'm recommending that we remember that, that meaning in life.
00:41:06.760And this is also something I'm doing empirical work on, right?
00:41:09.620That meaning in life is mostly bound right at the non-propositional level.
00:41:13.900And it does feed into things like sacredness.
00:41:16.400I think reverence is the proper virtue of all reverence is the virtue that helps us appropriate.
00:41:22.520Well, reverence means it is hold, is hold in ritual and is hold as a marker or as a, as a pointer for ritual emulation.
00:41:32.660I think it's, I think that's embodiment.
00:41:35.220That's, and that's the, that's the pulling in of that personality into the self.
00:41:40.260But I think what awe, see awe is really interesting because awe, because you can measure this.
00:41:45.740Awe is one of the few instances where people's sense of self and egocentrism is, is shrunk and they, but they find it a positive experience and they want it to continue.
00:42:16.560So imagine this, you, we, you already admitted, so to speak, that we're, you know, canonic representations of the central animating spirit of the ages.
00:42:26.520And that speaks from our unconscious because it's, it's embodied within us.
00:42:32.140And then it finds its, it's finds its grip on us in, in awe, in admiration.
00:47:21.300And that instinct to admire and experience awe facilitates that mimicry, and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior.
00:47:37.640Okay, so, and then, what does, what, that makes of the religious domain something real, as far as I'm concerned.
00:47:55.300Are they, like, cocaine hyper-stimulates the psychomotor stimulant system.
00:47:59.900Well, does psychedelics hyper-stimulate the imitation awe system?
00:48:04.540And is that an illusion, or is it, in fact, a revelation of something deeper?
00:48:13.240Yeah, to circle back to the ontological question.
00:48:17.560So, just recently, I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave.
00:48:23.640Now, so, Francis Collins, you may recognize, is director of the National Institutes on Health.
00:48:29.820And he was also the director of the Human Genome Project.
00:48:37.820So, he's as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have.
00:48:44.560And yet, he's an absolutely confirmed Christian.
00:48:50.220And so, he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of, I think he called it harmonization, of a scientific and religious worldview.
00:49:03.340But he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God.
00:49:09.660And one of them is what would be his claim, and it's an interesting claim, and you could argue it.
00:49:18.960But the existence of moral law, that there is an absolute moral law.
00:49:24.400Well, look, you know, I looked at Jack Panksepp's work, you know, and he shows that you see complex morality emerging rats in play.
00:49:31.920Play, iterated play, which is a crucial issue, right?
00:49:34.600What pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions?
00:49:41.240Well, you know, you hear all these postmodern critiques, say, of hierarchical structure because of its predication on power.
00:49:50.600I think, no, no, corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power.
00:49:54.760Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal, on reciprocity, on productive reciprocity.
00:50:01.240You know, I was talking to this Jocko Willink, who was the commander of Fallujah 20 years ago, and he's a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically and mentally, for that matter.
00:50:17.420He talked about his Navy SEAL training, and, you know, he said, well, we were taught it was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us.
00:50:25.640It wasn't like every powerful, clambering ape for himself.
00:50:32.060In these intensely competitive hierarchies, which would be, you'd think, as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible, power is not the guiding ethos.
00:50:42.280And he said quite clearly, no, your men won't attend to you unless it's reciprocal.
00:50:46.860They have to know you have their backs.
00:50:49.800And he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team.
00:51:07.100So, what am I getting at in relationship to your last point?
00:51:10.300This religious, this emergent ethic, this natural law.
00:51:17.040Okay, so imagine now, hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle, if they're to be stable and productive across long spans of time.
00:51:24.400And a pattern, that pattern emerges cross-culturally.
00:51:27.580It's reciprocal productivity, something like that.
00:52:23.700Yeah, well, I think, as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what moral law is.
00:52:37.520And from that standpoint, if you're willing to go that route, then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true and informative.
00:56:25.320Well, it becomes something with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.
00:56:34.240And so, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective.
00:56:39.940And the critic, my critic, this particular critic that I've been reading, said, well, that doesn't differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods.
00:56:54.160And, of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion.
00:57:02.840But the difference, and C.S. Lewis pointed this out as well, the difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that there's a representation of, there's a historical representation of his existence as well.
00:57:21.060Now, you can debate whether or not that's genuine.
00:57:24.720You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible objective evidence for that.
00:57:29.460But it doesn't matter in some sense because, well, it does.
00:57:33.020But there's a sense in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story.
00:57:37.420And so, what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth.
00:57:43.900And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things.
00:57:47.660The problem is, is I probably believe that.
00:58:48.760But I still don't know what to make of it.
00:58:50.400It's too, partly because it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe.
00:58:57.140I don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.
00:59:01.780This critic said that the mere psychologization of Christ was insufficient.
00:59:10.120Because, and you made the same case, in some sense, that it doesn't make sense unless the narrative and the objective world truly touch.
00:59:19.300And I think you could debate that, because I think that there's some utility.
00:59:23.980There could argue to be some utility in a secular version of the hero myth.
00:59:28.900You know, that the best way to cope with existence is to tell the truth and to face what you don't know forthrightly.
00:59:38.260And that will enable you to orient yourself within our finite and bounded existence that ends with our death more properly, more accurately, more advisedly than any other route.
00:59:51.600I've seen people from Orthodox priests to, you know, the most Protestant you can imagine, recognize in the way that you represent reality, something that has value.
01:00:05.780Something that has value because you are manifesting that pattern.
01:00:12.560But I think that if we take seriously this, the problem, the relationship between attention, psyche, and the way the world reveals itself to us, then it scales up.
01:00:31.900And it also scales up in terms of, because one of the things that you talk about, like looking up to the star and looking up to the highest thing you can look at and then aiming towards that, you know.
01:00:46.460Once again, one of the things that that does is that the first thing you do is actually where it's a form, it's attention.
01:00:54.940The people won't like the word worship.
01:00:56.220It's a form of reverence, a form of veneration.
01:01:13.120And so that's why, let's say, the religious version of this has to move towards the highest possible aim and also one that we can do together.
01:01:23.940Because like the lower aims, like you could call them something like lower gods, let's say, or angels or whatever you want to call them.
01:01:29.120Like these lower aims, they have value, but they're all fragmented.
01:01:33.420But for this to stack up, we need to be able to look towards the same image.
01:01:39.760We need to look towards the same aim, and that will bind us together.
01:01:44.260And so we don't, we don't also, then we don't also end up being just kind of individuals who have the weight of the world on our shoulders.
01:01:53.500We're a communion of people who are submitted to, aiming towards worshipping the same point.
01:02:01.780Yeah, and I believe that that's necessary.
01:02:03.480And I've had some profound experiences, which I can't really relate here, that of the necessity for that community is that this, whatever our fundamental moral load is, immense though it is, crushing though it is even, requires the participation of others.
01:02:28.760So even if you were the perfect you, you would need other people to be along with you.
01:02:36.340It's a collective enterprise, even though it's an individualistic, even though it requires the perfection, it requires as much perfection as is possible at the individual level.
01:02:51.100We all need help to aim as high, the highest aim requires communal endeavor.
01:02:55.840Yeah, and it's also because it actually is the way that everything works, you know.
01:03:02.040It's like the chair aiming to be a chair is a constitutive of parts which are joined together towards a same goal and therefore hold together as a being and manifest the chairness of the chair.
01:03:17.580You have all these feelings, all these contradicting things inside you, and you need, by aiming up towards, you know, the, I mean, I believe that the image of Christ, let's say, by aiming towards the image of Christ, you constitute your being into that being that's able to attend, to sacrifice, to love.
01:03:52.660Or if things get really out of hand, you're aiming at something opposite, and you don't want to be doing that.
01:03:58.340But, and this is a matter of definition in some sense, and it's actually not impossible to understand, is that you aim at something better, generally speaking.
01:04:08.580I mean, maybe you're out to cause pain, but forget about that.
01:04:40.960And then, but then there seems to be something too convenient about C.S. Lewis's insistence that that also had to manifest itself concretely in reality at one point in history.
01:04:54.540And I'm not, like, I, I, I don't understand why I should believe that.
01:05:08.660And I don't, I tend not to believe things without a why.
01:05:16.040And, and I, there's, there's a hurdle there that I, that, that, well, that I waver on constantly because, well, I already said that you're, when you think these things through, at least my experience has been, if you think them through sufficiently, you end up with the choice between impossible alternatives.
01:05:35.840But it, it has to do, one of the ways to see it maybe is, is it has to do with the recognizing of the goodness of the world or the goodness of creation.
01:05:46.740That, that the world is capable of manifesting these patterns, right?
01:05:53.440So if you want to understand, for example, the big conflict between the early Gnostics and the Christians, that's what it was all about.
01:05:59.560Because the Gnostics basically wanted a disincarnated Christ.
01:06:03.820They were saying, you know, and they have viewed the world as utterly fallen, as having no value, having to be escaped, having to be fled in every way.
01:06:13.580Whereas Christianity posits that it's a non-dual, it's a non-dual proposition.
01:06:19.720It's saying it's, it all comes together.
01:06:29.320And so it has to come down at every level.
01:06:32.000And not only does it have to come down into the person of Christ who's incarnated, but that person has to go down, down into death, to the very bottom of the world, you know, to the belly of the Leviathan, and then come back up.
01:06:44.960And so the whole world is declared as, once again, declared as being capable of participating in this good.
01:06:54.520And so, and so you could say, well, maybe, maybe it wasn't that one.
01:06:57.640Maybe it wasn't, you know, it's like, why would it be that particular, particular place where it happened?
01:07:06.140I mean, that's where, that's the, there is no other story like that story that we have.
01:07:11.480And, and so once you recognize that this is part of the declaration, that the world does embody these patterns, that it leads to this, it leads to the, the, this, this story of, of, of a man who embodied them absolutely.
01:07:28.140And is bringing us in him to also embody them in a way that will transform us, you know, like the, the, the ultimate goal of, of orthodox vision of Christianity is, is theosis.
01:07:40.540It's to become God, to become God through, through transformation and participation in God.
01:07:47.700So that's the final goal of everything is to become participant in the divine.
01:07:58.140So that's the final goal of everything is to become participant in the divine.