The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 215. The Problem with Atheism

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00:00:53.940 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:56.180 In this week's compilation episode, we explore what happens when the religious instinct gets brushed aside and what fills that void instead,

00:01:05.280 and whether that's contributing to the breakdown of a society founded on the Abrahamic tradition.

00:01:11.120 Nietzsche has his famous God quote,

00:01:13.440 God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

00:01:16.800 How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

00:01:20.300 What was holiest and mightiest has bled to death under our knives.

00:01:23.700 Who will wipe this blood off?

00:01:26.100 What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

00:01:28.700 What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we invent?

00:01:32.800 Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?

00:01:36.400 Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

00:01:40.180 The voices in this compilation may be very familiar,

00:01:43.840 since some of them also featured in the Conceptualization of Gods series.

00:01:47.820 You're about to hear from the whole spectrum through Jonathan Pajot and Matthew Petrusik,

00:01:53.240 to Stephen Fry and Lawrence Krauss, and more.

00:01:56.320 I hope you're enjoying these compilations.

00:01:57.960 You know, the number of people that have become Christian because of you is hilarious.

00:02:17.820 Sorry, it's not hilarious, but it's just kind of this strange thing,

00:02:21.540 because you kind of stand outside, and you're looking at the door,

00:02:25.360 and you're looking at the church, and you're saying,

00:02:26.920 hey, this isn't not so bad.

00:02:28.380 You know, look at this.

00:02:29.100 What is going on here?

00:02:30.560 Like, what is this about?

00:02:32.200 And then, because of that...

00:02:33.620 No, it's also, do you think you've got something better?

00:02:36.700 You know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day when we were walking,

00:02:40.640 because as I said, I walk about 10 miles a day right now,

00:02:43.800 trying to keep myself under control.

00:02:47.040 And, you know, he was raised a communist in Poland,

00:02:51.100 and then an atheist, and...

00:02:55.360 He was complaining.

00:02:56.540 I think this is what he told me,

00:02:58.440 that he was complaining to his parents at one point

00:03:00.440 about a religious wedding that they were going to,

00:03:04.540 despite not believing.

00:03:06.620 And he said as he got older, he realized he had nothing to replace that with.

00:03:10.840 It's like, okay, throw it out.

00:03:12.900 Fine.

00:03:13.560 Okay, now where are you?

00:03:14.780 Well, you're just as bad off as you were before,

00:03:17.120 but you also don't have that beautiful thing.

00:03:19.640 Yeah.

00:03:19.760 It's like, what would happen if we dispensed with Christmas?

00:03:21.980 Well, if it's logical, it's a good thing to ask Sam Harris in The New Atheist.

00:03:28.260 It's like, let's get rid of Christmas.

00:03:30.660 Or we could say we could make it entirely secular,

00:03:32.940 but then it would just disappear.

00:03:35.040 But you know that's not what's going to happen,

00:03:37.000 because religion is inevitable,

00:03:38.400 and we're seeing it coming back in very strange ways.

00:03:42.420 It's going to be a weird, woke, identitarian religion,

00:03:46.420 which is going to come back.

00:03:48.320 That's why-

00:03:49.040 And primitive, you know, part of it's going to be intent,

00:03:52.640 doesn't matter.

00:03:54.080 Yeah.

00:03:54.380 Can you believe that?

00:03:55.820 Yeah.

00:03:56.200 So it's a scary thing.

00:03:58.100 You could say that that's one of the failures of The New Atheists,

00:04:01.420 is that they partly led to the new woke phenomenon,

00:04:06.720 because they didn't realize that you can't get rid of religion.

00:04:12.000 You can't get rid of rituals.

00:04:13.560 You can't get rid of the problems and opportunities of identity.

00:04:17.380 All of these things are going to come back.

00:04:19.920 If you try to just, if you try to brush them aside,

00:04:22.240 then they're going to come back in very weird ways.

00:04:24.580 And without you realizing what's going on,

00:04:27.060 you'll have people kneeling to a shrine of a man who was killed by police

00:04:30.880 and putting a halo on his head and, you know,

00:04:33.720 and self-mortifying themselves and doing all kinds of insane things

00:04:37.520 that look to you insane, but that you need to understand

00:04:40.740 it's just this religious impulse gone off the rails.

00:04:46.840 Yes.

00:04:47.540 And then the question is, what's the right place for it?

00:04:50.360 That's right.

00:04:50.820 You know, I've thought in my, I suppose it's a form of comedy

00:04:55.180 that Catholicism is as sane as people get.

00:05:01.060 You know, it's Baroque, right?

00:05:02.780 And it's gothic, not Baroque.

00:05:06.140 It's gothic.

00:05:06.960 It's dark.

00:05:07.820 It has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror film.

00:05:15.220 And I'm not being, I'm not being,

00:05:16.800 I'm not saying something denigrating by that.

00:05:19.140 I mean, it's part of its strange mystery.

00:05:21.760 And all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more

00:05:25.760 insane without it than they are with it.

00:05:27.840 And it's a container for that religious impulse.

00:05:31.760 And that impulse is to the, to the good.

00:05:35.540 Yeah.

00:05:36.180 And, and, and the image of the, of the crucified Christ,

00:05:40.460 and also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together.

00:05:45.840 Right.

00:05:46.300 It's like, if you think of the symbolism of communion,

00:05:48.840 you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most

00:05:53.040 transgressive, all of it comes together.

00:05:55.620 That's worth unpacking that.

00:05:57.520 It's ritual cannibalism in the service of God.

00:06:00.960 Yeah.

00:06:02.220 Yeah.

00:06:02.680 And it, but it's also, it's also seen as a, as a normal,

00:06:06.740 like meal of communion.

00:06:08.500 And it's an also seen as a, as a sexual union,

00:06:13.520 because there's a relationship,

00:06:16.040 there's a notion in which then in the altar and in that moment of communion,

00:06:20.040 there's the joining of heaven and earth, you know,

00:06:21.840 the raise up the chalice and there's this joining, which is,

00:06:25.000 which is this image of this,

00:06:26.380 the sexual union between God and the soul between God and his church.

00:06:29.940 And so all of it, it just jammed into this, into,

00:06:33.580 into this ritual as a, as a kind of center of reality would call it.

00:06:38.420 And so, like you said, if you get rid of that,

00:06:40.580 then you're going to have all kinds of strange factitious versions of it that

00:06:44.780 are going to pop up and are going to try to replace it.

00:06:47.720 And it's leading to the fragmentation of our world and to the breakdown of the

00:06:51.760 West, for sure.

00:06:53.080 We make religious the next thing on the hierarchy.

00:06:56.500 If we don't give to what is religious, it's proper place.

00:06:59.400 And I think the new atheists are beginning to realize this.

00:07:02.100 It's like, Oh, look at that.

00:07:03.560 We didn't eradicate the religious spirit.

00:07:05.280 We can't.

00:07:06.360 It just moves somewhere and becomes pathologized by its association with that.

00:07:11.600 This is Tillich's critique of ideology.

00:07:14.240 I thought, well,

00:07:15.520 of ideology because I think ideology is a form of idolatry,

00:07:18.840 but this is Tillich's critique of idolatry, which is precise.

00:07:22.840 We cannot,

00:07:23.680 and I think you've said things along this discussion that point to this.

00:07:27.380 We cannot,

00:07:28.740 we cannot abandon our ultimate concern, right?

00:07:32.200 That's his, that's his way of understanding.

00:07:33.460 Yes, that's right.

00:07:34.160 We can't.

00:07:35.020 No, we can't.

00:07:35.520 So this isn't a negative discussion.

00:07:37.240 This isn't a negative definition of God either,

00:07:39.620 because to,

00:07:41.320 to get back to your negative theology point,

00:07:43.160 I've been concentrating in my thought recently on the positive attributes of God.

00:07:47.540 And so like to drive towards unity in the motivational hierarchy.

00:07:52.320 That is so neoplatonic, Jordan.

00:07:54.400 I mean, my gosh, that is so neoplatonic.

00:07:57.440 Well, you know,

00:07:58.160 we were all unconscious avatars of great philosophers and some less unconscious than others,

00:08:04.100 but it's still there.

00:08:05.280 And so, but, but you can't,

00:08:07.620 you can't do away with that drive to unity.

00:08:09.540 And in some sense,

00:08:10.560 you also can't critique it because when we say the good,

00:08:13.680 we assume that there's a unity between goods.

00:08:15.940 I think, yeah, this is Plotinus's transmoral notion of the good.

00:08:19.520 And you and Jonathan talked about the transmoral notion that, that, that there's, right.

00:08:23.780 He says, look, any sort of moral or aesthetic goodness is ultimately based on the goodness of

00:08:28.660 being.

00:08:28.960 And he says, when do, when are we attributing being?

00:08:32.460 He says, we attribute being, the more we find that there's a oneness of something.

00:08:37.040 And when we understand we are, we are, we are bringing things.

00:08:40.080 So the, the, the, the knowledge is, is a process of oneness.

00:08:44.960 And, and, and, and what we're doing is we're conforming to the reality,

00:08:48.940 which being is a process of wanting.

00:08:51.880 And when those are at one, that is when the heart starts to become,

00:08:56.020 starts to rest from its suffering.

00:08:58.820 And I think there's something fundamentally right about that.

00:09:02.520 Can I ask you something?

00:09:03.540 Because I think I'm getting you.

00:09:04.980 And I, I, it, what I heard you, you're saying, it's like, let's take the metaphor of the idol

00:09:09.640 or, and the icon fused.

00:09:12.260 And if there isn't something beyond them, you can't actually pull them apart.

00:09:16.700 That's what I'm hearing you say.

00:09:18.180 Yes.

00:09:18.300 They collapse into one another.

00:09:19.820 Yes.

00:09:20.060 Look what happened with the deification of Stalin and Marx and Lenin and Mao.

00:09:25.260 That's not accidental.

00:09:26.500 It's inevitable.

00:09:27.080 And we have the, we have, we have the deification of celebrities and we have the deification of products

00:09:32.920 and we have the deification of ideologies.

00:09:35.720 Part of what Nietzsche predicted was that the death of God, what the death of God meant,

00:09:40.420 what he described and predicted was that the death of God meant the collapse of the highest unifying value.

00:09:47.540 Okay.

00:09:47.700 So it's become pretty evident to me that we literally perceive the world through a hierarchy of value.

00:09:54.120 And we certainly organize our social communities inside a hierarchy of value.

00:09:59.060 And there has to be something at the top to unite us.

00:10:01.640 Now, it isn't obvious what should be at the top.

00:10:03.620 In fact, it's so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images.

00:10:08.620 We're not philosophically astute enough to actually conceptualize it.

00:10:12.680 And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top.

00:10:17.400 Now, let's say it dies because it's God and it got too abstract.

00:10:21.100 Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, said that that happened many times in our history,

00:10:25.360 that the top value got so abstract it got disembodied and people didn't know what it was anymore,

00:10:30.280 or how to act it out or what it meant.

00:10:31.760 And so it floated away and then collapse into competing claims about what should be the highest value.

00:10:40.000 Well, let's say diversity, equity, compassion.

00:10:45.660 Well, why shouldn't compassion be the highest value?

00:10:48.260 Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing to argue about.

00:10:51.260 I think there's some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value, perhaps.

00:10:57.160 There's truth and beauty, many other issues.

00:11:00.020 Okay, so the highest value collapse, we're not united anymore.

00:11:03.660 Well, then we're motivated to argue about what the highest value should be.

00:11:07.380 And since it's about the highest value now, now I have an idea.

00:11:10.860 It's saving the environment.

00:11:11.980 That's the highest value.

00:11:13.000 Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal.

00:11:19.840 And so you threaten me psychologically, because that's where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance.

00:11:27.260 And so I'm not going to listen to your practical solutions either.

00:11:30.500 And then I haven't examined what other motivations I might have.

00:11:33.680 Like, well, this anti-capitalism issue, that's a terrible contamination for the environmentalist movement.

00:11:39.480 What Eliade had about the continual disappearance of God, because he looked at Nietzsche's pronouncement and said,

00:11:47.100 well, God has vanished into the stratosphere of abstraction many times throughout history.

00:11:51.580 This isn't a one-time only.

00:11:53.440 The danger of an abstract God that can't be represented is that he becomes so detached from human affairs that it's as if he's not there.

00:12:00.980 And so the Catholic Church maybe produces saints as intermediaries and priests to sort of link the absolute to the proximal.

00:12:07.920 But I wonder, too, is what happened with Brexit in the UK?

00:12:12.380 I mean, I thought of that in some sense as a Tower of Babel phenomenon, is that people felt that their representation in Europe was so abstract

00:12:20.860 that they were no longer connected to their land, to their town, to their community.

00:12:26.740 And so the distance between them and the central authority became too great.

00:12:31.620 And there was a longing for return to something like the concrete, which I had some sympathy for.

00:12:36.020 But it begs the question, too, is, like, maybe there's a rank order of identity.

00:12:41.160 And so you are a patriot to your land, but that's nested under an affiliation to something that's absolute,

00:12:50.220 that isn't associated with nationalism.

00:12:51.940 And I talked with Stephen Fry a little bit, for example, about the utility of having a monarch.

00:12:59.840 It's sort of analogous to that, is that the monarch is an abstract figure, but exists.

00:13:06.240 And you can have affiliation to her, like the prime minister does, and still be in charge of the state.

00:13:12.380 And it's like there's a hierarchy of identities, and the hierarchy has to be structured properly,

00:13:17.420 or the parts start to contain the whole in a way that's pathological.

00:13:23.340 Yes. Yes, I mean, I was just thinking as you were speaking that certainly the way a lot of the arguments

00:13:30.640 for thinking of one's love of country as a form of piety in the tradition of moral theology

00:13:37.580 start from the most intimate and the most immediate.

00:13:42.340 So it's love of parent, your biological parents.

00:13:47.700 You didn't choose your parents.

00:13:49.280 It's, as it were, you're thrown into this relationship with them,

00:13:52.400 but it's the most intimate relationship there is.

00:13:55.120 And similarly, the thought is that you owe your loyalty, your loves, your affections to your community,

00:14:00.520 and so on and so on in ever-expanding concentric circles.

00:14:04.980 But I think both Aquinas and somebody very different, somebody like David Hume later on in the 18th century,

00:14:11.580 stressed that there's, as it were, a kind of, there are diminishing returns as the concentric circles move outward.

00:14:19.300 And there's certainly a limit, and it's not, as it were, maybe not an ideal limit,

00:14:24.420 but it's simply a function of our finitude and our fragility and, in the Christian tradition, our fallenness,

00:14:31.400 that we can't, as it were, love every single human being.

00:14:34.300 We can't love humanity in the abstract, and nor can we love every single human being with the same sort of intensity.

00:14:42.940 So that might be a more positive way of thinking about why we ought to owe what Augustine calls our common objects of love,

00:14:50.540 or we treat our common objects of love as broadly proximate, but organized by the horizon of a kind of transcendent orientation towards the source of love,

00:15:03.480 which, of course, in the Christian tradition is God himself.

00:15:07.060 Jordan, I fully agree with you that we inhabit kind of a range of identities,

00:15:14.240 some more local, some more regional, national, global, and then religious.

00:15:20.540 And each thing we identify with gives a certain meaning to our lives and a certain significance.

00:15:29.140 Just wondering, in terms of your encounter with younger people,

00:15:34.920 at what point does religious identification begin to gain traction?

00:15:40.280 Well, I think there's a variety of answers to that.

00:15:45.120 One is that one pathway in is the diagnosis that the desire for deep meaning and also deep responsibility

00:15:54.260 is there and valid and in everyone, and to be encouraged and recognized.

00:16:02.100 So there's that.

00:16:03.260 And then there's a serious discussion about, I would say, about love and truth,

00:16:08.960 and the pragmatic utility of both, and both as expressions of faith.

00:16:16.920 You know, because you can't say, well, there's evidence that love, in the broadest sense,

00:16:21.860 is the most effective manner in which to orient yourself in the world.

00:16:25.380 You could make a counter case that it's power, for example.

00:16:28.440 And you can't prove that speaking the truth is for the best,

00:16:32.640 and partly that's because people get into trouble for speaking the truth all the time.

00:16:36.200 But you can say, you can stake your life on those two things and see what happens.

00:16:41.400 And that there's an adventure in that.

00:16:43.260 And that appeal to adventure, that's really attractive, especially to young men,

00:16:48.060 but to young people in general.

00:16:49.940 And then there's one other element, which is,

00:16:52.380 part of it has to be the removal of rational objections.

00:16:56.100 It's like, when I did my biblical lecture series,

00:16:58.920 I said I was going to stay psychological about it,

00:17:01.760 except when I had to become metaphysical because of the limitations of my knowledge.

00:17:06.440 And so I was trying to make sense of it.

00:17:08.620 It's like, how can you have a relationship with this book that makes sense?

00:17:14.200 So that you're not crucifying your reason, but using it alongside of you.

00:17:19.440 And so that it's not mere, let's say, superstitious foolishness with regards to your axiomatic presuppositions

00:17:26.560 of the form that the rational atheists criticize so, well, let's say so effectively.

00:17:31.740 So I, you know, I said, well, I brought reverence to the, to Genesis.

00:17:35.700 I said, this book's been around a long time, and there's possible,

00:17:38.840 there's the possibility that there's something in it that I,

00:17:41.040 that I don't understand that's appealed to people across history.

00:17:44.440 And let's approach it from that perspective and see what we can make of it.

00:17:48.760 And that, that seems to have proved extremely popular, like sort of unbelievably popular.

00:17:57.180 And so, so when you mentioned this desire for a deep desire,

00:18:02.440 in a sense for a sense, for a sense of being responsible.

00:18:06.180 Yeah, for seriousness.

00:18:07.700 And the truth, both of those connect to me, as it were,

00:18:11.880 something that is given an objective to which we are accountable.

00:18:15.420 And it reminds me of what your compatriot, Charles Taylor, once wrote in,

00:18:19.360 in his best, shortest book, I'm glad to say, the ethics of authenticity.

00:18:23.300 He said, reflecting on authenticity as being the kind of universal popular value we all recognize.

00:18:32.240 He said, authenticity only makes sense when there's a wider given horizon that gives it significance.

00:18:40.120 So, so choice only has significance within a context that gives it significance.

00:18:44.600 Otherwise, choice is caprice.

00:18:46.420 It's, it's whimsy.

00:18:47.560 It, it, it, it doesn't matter at all.

00:18:50.100 And so I suppose they, I mean, seeing, seeing this through Christian eyes, as I do,

00:18:56.080 what we have here is a recognition of the need for,

00:19:02.000 if you like, a given moral order within which we are, you know, we have freedom.

00:19:07.580 And, and the freedom is, is what makes us responsible and, and, um, um, makes our decisions

00:19:13.680 and choices really heavy with significance.

00:19:17.140 But there, there is something that is given and we didn't create it.

00:19:21.040 And, and a large part, not the only part, a large part of the affirmation of, of there

00:19:26.160 being one God is that there is not just a physical coherence to created reality, but

00:19:31.720 also a moral coherence.

00:19:32.820 And I wanted to make another comment too, about truth.

00:19:37.040 You know, Dr.

00:19:38.100 Kaiser, you mentioned that I engage in a moral reading of scripture, say, rather than a literalist

00:19:44.240 reading.

00:19:45.100 And maybe we should have a talk about that because it isn't easy to read a book like the

00:19:50.980 Bible literally because it's full of, of literal contradictions.

00:19:56.400 And it, whatever it is, especially the really archaic stories in, in Genesis, whatever it

00:20:02.640 is, it's not, it's not history the way we think of history.

00:20:08.020 And so that's hard for people.

00:20:11.320 It's hard for people to see how that might still be true.

00:20:15.540 If it's not literal, how can it be true?

00:20:18.080 And this is a discussion that I tried to have with Sam Harris a lot because the atheist types,

00:20:26.040 the rationalist types, there's something they miss.

00:20:28.440 And what they miss is that fiction isn't false.

00:20:33.640 It's not a lie, right?

00:20:35.720 It's not literal, but it's not a lie.

00:20:39.200 And great fiction is true, but it never happened.

00:20:43.020 So how can it be true?

00:20:44.440 And the answer to that is something like, well, there are patterns in things, deep patterns,

00:20:52.320 deep recurring patterns, you know, human nature, the fact that we're human, that, that the

00:20:58.560 humanity itself is a recurring pattern.

00:21:00.960 It has characteristic shape and great fiction describes the shape of that pattern.

00:21:09.280 And the greatest of fiction, the greater fiction becomes the more it is religious in nature.

00:21:14.340 And that's not even a claim about the nature of truth.

00:21:19.520 It's more a claim about the nature of experience.

00:21:22.500 You know, when we say something is profound, what we mean is that it's moving and that it

00:21:30.240 has a broad influence.

00:21:32.460 It's capable of having a broad influence on the way we think and see and act.

00:21:36.880 So if you read a profound book, like one of Dostoevsky's books, you could say of that book, and people

00:21:43.160 often do, that it changed my life when I read that book.

00:21:47.040 And a story that can change your life has a power that is best described as religious.

00:21:54.180 And so religious is a kind of experience in some sense, rather, in addition to a claim about

00:22:00.820 what constitutes truth.

00:22:02.800 And then those stories in Genesis, Cain and Abel, I think, and the story of Adam and Eve,

00:22:08.120 because those stories are so deep that it's almost unfathomable.

00:22:13.080 They get at the, at the most profound of patterns.

00:22:17.220 And so to say that they're literally true is actually to massively underestimate how true

00:22:23.320 they are.

00:22:24.800 Because you could tell me what you did this morning, and that would be literally true,

00:22:29.140 but like, who cares?

00:22:31.680 Whereas if you read the story of Adam and Eve, it's so true that it applies to everyone

00:22:37.580 always.

00:22:39.100 And mere literal truth can't do that.

00:22:41.720 And we don't have a good language as scientists, let's say, as psychologists, or even as citizens,

00:22:47.220 we don't have a good language for that kind of truth.

00:22:52.840 And so, well, I guess I'd like your thoughts about that idea.

00:22:59.720 Yeah, so the literal sense of scripture is sometimes misunderstood by people.

00:23:04.280 And I think that the right way to think of it, the literal sense of scripture is what the

00:23:07.520 original human author intended to convey to the original human audience.

00:23:12.800 And so if we're looking at Genesis, I think that we need to put Genesis back in its context.

00:23:16.560 If you read Genesis as if it is a contemporary textbook on science, I think what you're doing

00:23:22.940 is wrenching it out of its original context, and therefore you're bound to misread it.

00:23:28.620 And that's true of not just Genesis, it's really true of any work, that to understand

00:23:32.200 it, we need to understand its genre, and we need to understand its context.

00:23:35.900 So what is the original context of the Genesis story?

00:23:39.580 Well, the original context, it was written in terms of rival stories of creation, other

00:23:44.860 stories that were circulating in the ancient world, and it was meant to be an answer to

00:23:48.360 those.

00:23:49.020 And it uses poetry, it uses imagery, and that was what all those stories did.

00:23:54.680 And the poetry and the imagery, I would not set that against truth, as if on the one hand

00:23:59.260 you have truth, on the other hand you have poetry, imagery, and story.

00:24:01.900 I think that one kind of truth is scientific truth, the empirically verifiable, but I think

00:24:07.540 it's too narrow to say, well, the only kind of truth is the empirically verifiable.

00:24:12.220 I think truth actually is broader.

00:24:14.540 And in fact, that claim that the truth is empirically verifiable, that's the only kind

00:24:19.880 of truth, that is itself a self-defeating statement, right?

00:24:23.900 There's no empirical evidence that the only way to get the truth is through the empirical

00:24:28.540 method.

00:24:28.940 So if we put Genesis back in its context, what do we see?

00:24:32.020 Well, we see it is a story telling us about, in contrast to the other stories, the other

00:24:37.480 stories in the ancient world were stories in which there were multiple gods, they engaged

00:24:43.000 in a warfare and violence.

00:24:44.860 So you think of the Greek myths sort of like this, where Zeus overthrows his father and there's

00:24:49.020 all this violence.

00:24:50.480 And Genesis is meant to answer these other ancient myths.

00:24:54.860 And it's saying things like, there's only one God, there's not multiple.

00:24:59.900 Secondly, that creation is not a matter of violence, but that creation is reasonable speech.

00:25:06.320 And this was something that you talked about in your lecture, which really struck me because

00:25:09.940 I obviously had read that story before, but I never really thought of it that, well, creation

00:25:14.740 arises, right?

00:25:16.860 God says, let there be light and there was light.

00:25:20.260 And what is reasonable speech?

00:25:21.700 Reasonable speech is orderly, right?

00:25:24.960 The difference between, you know, random sounds you make and reasonable speech is that there's

00:25:28.560 a kind of order to it.

00:25:29.800 So if creation arises from reasonable speech and the creation itself is ordered, it's intelligible.

00:25:36.280 It makes sense.

00:25:37.080 And that gives rise centuries and centuries later, that belief that creation is orderly

00:25:42.500 and makes sense gives rise centuries later to science.

00:25:45.800 But to read Genesis as if it's failed science makes about as much sense as to read Genesis

00:25:51.260 as if it's, you know, for or against iPhones.

00:25:55.560 I mean, imagine somebody reading Genesis and they're like, well, is this, should I buy an

00:25:57.880 iPhone or not?

00:25:58.360 I'm not going to read Genesis to determine this.

00:26:00.200 Well, clearly the original author of Genesis wasn't addressing that.

00:26:03.840 And the original author of Genesis wasn't addressing for or against evolution.

00:26:08.800 So I think that these readers who want to make it for or against evolution are just utterly

00:26:14.600 misreading and taking the story out of its original context and therefore necessarily

00:26:20.640 providing a really bad reading of Genesis.

00:26:23.720 There's also a really important theological point to make here as well.

00:26:27.680 And that's, I could put it philosophically, what's the condition for the possibility of something

00:26:33.140 being literal in the first place?

00:26:36.440 What's the condition for the possibility both of it being recognized, spoken, and then apprehended?

00:26:43.840 There's a certain court of orderliness that's necessarily presupposed in the act of knowing

00:26:49.160 and in the act of communicating that knowledge that itself, as Chris said, can't be empirically

00:26:55.460 verified.

00:26:56.180 So when we as Catholics say that, recognize from the New Testament that Jesus is the truth,

00:27:04.500 that would include in a literal historical sense, but also the condition for the possibility

00:27:09.440 of anything being intelligible and literally understood and communicated at all.

00:27:15.880 So I think one of the frustrations I find in contemporary debates on these questions is that secularism

00:27:22.620 oftentimes isolates and identifies the literal, the empirical, as if this is just a freestanding

00:27:27.620 epistemic platform that belongs to them.

00:27:30.800 And everybody has to compete in order to be on their territory.

00:27:35.480 And I just don't think that's philosophically the case.

00:27:37.640 It presupposes a lot of things that they can't give an account for.

00:27:41.300 Yeah, I mean, so, so one more little, yep, please go ahead.

00:27:45.980 No, I just was just going to add one thing.

00:27:47.660 So imagine somebody was reading Shakespeare's sonnet 18, right?

00:27:51.640 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

00:27:53.440 Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

00:27:55.600 Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May and summer's lease hath all too short a date.

00:28:01.040 So imagine somebody reads that and they're like, okay, Shakespeare's a meteorologist.

00:28:05.580 He's a weatherman.

00:28:06.400 And I'm going to look up in the almanac to see if May had rough winds.

00:28:09.600 And then it turns out there's no rough winds in May.

00:28:11.940 Oh, Shakespeare, you're about it, you know, telling us about the weather.

00:28:15.300 Well, I think that's obviously a radical misunderstanding of Shakespeare.

00:28:19.180 He's not trying to tell us the weather and then failing to tell us the weather.

00:28:22.720 And so I think Genesis is not trying and failing to give us scientific truths.

00:28:27.300 It's just doing something totally different.

00:28:29.020 And that's part of the reason I appreciated your lectures is that you highlighted the reality

00:28:34.680 that the author of Genesis is trying not to,

00:28:38.020 is trying to communicate very important truths, but not truths that are in the scientific discourse.

00:28:45.760 They're true, but not scientific truths.

00:28:48.200 The problem with the empirical approach, the problem with totalizing it,

00:28:55.160 is that the empirical approach tends to be mostly descriptions of things and the way they interact

00:29:02.940 and the way they can be manipulated.

00:29:04.540 And that's fine, but it doesn't tell you, doesn't provide any real insight into how to live,

00:29:11.500 how to act, how to take your next step, how to produce a hierarchy of values,

00:29:17.560 and how to determine what's most important and what's least important.

00:29:21.500 And all of that is also so difficult that we actually don't know how to do it completely explicitly,

00:29:29.820 which is why we need poetry and drama and literature.

00:29:33.260 We need that whole domain.

00:29:34.600 So we could call that the literary domain.

00:29:36.600 And then I think you could consider it, this might be an empirical proposition,

00:29:41.840 is that the religious domain is at the base of the literary domain,

00:29:48.960 and as literature gets deeper, it becomes more and more like religious writing.

00:29:54.760 And so that, by definition, in some sense, and I've swiped this in part, I would say, from Jung,

00:30:00.880 is almost by definition that the sense of profound engagement that the most profound literature produces

00:30:08.800 is what constitutes the religious.

00:30:12.680 And that's a domain of experience.

00:30:15.220 You know, when you're captivated in a movie theater, when you're captivated by a story,

00:30:19.380 when you're taken outside yourself, none of that has anything to do with logical argumentation.

00:30:24.760 It's a whole different issue.

00:30:26.660 And to me, it's tied very, very deeply to our ability to imitate and mimic.

00:30:33.100 And so we're really good at that, way better than any other animal.

00:30:36.440 Like language is mimicry.

00:30:38.120 We use the same words.

00:30:39.840 And so we're mimicking each other.

00:30:41.760 But I can't mimic every person separately.

00:30:45.860 I have to extract out from each person some essence of being that's admirable.

00:30:51.720 And I do that person after person, and I try to imitate that.

00:30:56.140 And then that core thing that's admirable that I imitate, that's, as far as I'm concerned,

00:31:02.320 that's psychologically equivalent to Christ.

00:31:05.940 Whatever else Christ is, Christ is, that's why he's sometimes described as the king of kings.

00:31:12.160 It's like if the king is the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy, and then you look at all hierarchies,

00:31:17.780 and you take the thing that's at the top of all hierarchies of value,

00:31:21.820 then that figure, when you see reflections of that figure anywhere, it produces awe and respect.

00:31:29.900 And that's because that pattern constitutes the appropriate way to act,

00:31:34.460 just as when you see the opposite of that pattern, which might be, in its most fundamental essence,

00:31:39.800 satanic or demonic.

00:31:41.200 It's something that's ultimately evil.

00:31:42.880 That produces revulsion and terror.

00:31:45.840 And that's all instinctual.

00:31:49.540 It's not in the domain of rationality precisely.

00:31:52.720 It's way, way deeper than that.

00:31:54.220 And then there's another problem that the atheists have never come to terms with, I believe.

00:32:03.400 And you guys tell me what you think of this, is that if what is properly rendered unto God

00:32:13.600 is rendered unto Caesar, then Caesar becomes inflated to God.

00:32:20.400 And when that happens, all hell breaks loose.

00:32:24.680 That's the genesis of totalitarianism.

00:32:27.420 That's subservience to an idol.

00:32:30.720 And so, and this is a case I think the church needs to make, particularly the Catholic church,

00:32:36.480 in the most strenuous of ways, is that if we don't segregate off the religious instinct

00:32:42.540 and give it its proper attention and do, which I suppose you do in part with ritual and church attendance

00:32:49.500 and so forth, then every single thing we do starts to become inappropriately contaminated

00:32:55.040 with religious longing.

00:32:57.000 And that's why you see the rise of extremely powerful political ideologies

00:33:01.140 and the division of people, you know, for trivial reasons into moral camps.

00:33:06.580 It's that religious instinct hasn't got a grounding and it's searching for something to attach itself to

00:33:13.380 and it picks up second-rate substitutes.

00:33:16.540 You know, people like Dawkins, they seem to think that if we all just abandoned our religious superstitions,

00:33:23.060 we'd all become, you know, rationalists like, well, like Isaac Duton,

00:33:28.540 who was an alchemist and not a rationalist, by the way, that great genius.

00:33:33.040 And so, one of the things I think that the Catholic church in particular isn't doing a very good job of

00:33:40.900 is warning people how dangerous it is to lose the proper theater of expression for our religious instincts.

00:33:52.100 They don't go away.

00:33:53.780 They just get perverted and they show up all sorts of places they shouldn't.

00:33:58.720 That's terrible.

00:34:00.140 That's not good.

00:34:00.840 Yeah, that theme is one that Augustine talks about in The City of God.

00:34:09.400 He talks about two loves and he talks about the love of God and it creates a certain city, a certain organization.

00:34:18.100 And if you don't love God, if God is not your ultimate love, well, you're going to love something.

00:34:22.880 So, it could be power.

00:34:24.400 It could be pleasure.

00:34:25.940 It could be money.

00:34:26.800 It could be status.

00:34:27.760 But Augustine thought that if you love, say, power the most, well, what that's going to do is it's going to shape you

00:34:34.700 and ultimately distort not only you but also your relationships and your society.

00:34:39.800 So, the Christian view is that ultimately God is perfect truth, love, and beauty.

00:34:45.200 And so, not only is it the case that worshiping, anything other than that, is going to fail to give God what's due to God.

00:34:52.940 And that's what religion, in a sense, is about.

00:34:54.840 It's a binding of oneself to God, giving to God what's due.

00:34:58.280 But also, it ends up making the person ultimately unhappy.

00:35:05.060 So, you can't think about this even from a psychological perspective that people like Martin Seligman would say things like,

00:35:12.000 love is at the core of human flourishing.

00:35:15.580 And if we don't have that, if I love money or power more than I love God and more than I love my friends

00:35:22.560 and more than I love my family, well, that's going to deprive me of the source of my flourishing.

00:35:29.920 I'm going to end up harming myself and characteristically also harming others when I love power or money or whatever too much.

00:35:38.200 And so, yeah, for Augustine, at least, this is a perennial temptation to replace God with something else.

00:35:45.200 That's perhaps the warning at the end of Genesis with the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel.

00:35:53.420 You know, because the Tower of Babel is people get together and they try to build an edifice that's absolute in some sense, right?

00:36:03.880 It's a building that's under the control.

00:36:07.120 It's an edifice that's of human manufacture and it becomes larger and larger and larger and then it devolves into a kind of chaos.

00:36:16.200 And so, with the flood story, with Noah and the flood, that's one form of danger that emerges as a consequence of deviation from the proper path,

00:36:27.480 let's say, orientation towards whatever the highest good is.

00:36:30.300 And the Tower of Babel is a secondary one that has more to do with the danger of egotistical human construction.

00:36:38.000 And it is something like the worship of these idols.

00:36:40.480 So, imagine, we can think about this technically and psychologically in some sense,

00:36:44.960 is that in order to act, you have to presume that that to which you're moving is more important than where you are, right?

00:36:52.160 So, you make a value judgment.

00:36:54.460 Moving in this direction is appropriate.

00:36:57.120 And then you have to move in a lot of directions over the course of your life.

00:37:00.520 And, you know, maybe you search for friendship and you search for love and you search for money and you search for power and so forth.

00:37:08.440 And if there's nothing integrating all that, then you're pulled in all sorts of directions, right?

00:37:13.460 It's like devils pulling you apart because you don't know what's more important than what.

00:37:19.780 And that's very, very confusing and off-putting.

00:37:22.360 And if the wrong thing takes control, then you get demented and bent.

00:37:26.500 And so, what you see in Christianity is this struggle over thousands of years to specify the thing that should be at the top of the hierarchy.

00:37:36.940 And one of the things that really opened my eyes to the depth of these works was this strange proclamation that the word that existed at the beginning of time that brought creation into being was the same as Christ.

00:37:55.780 Which is an unbelievably bizarre proposition.

00:37:59.200 I mean, I'm not speaking about it precisely religiously.

00:38:01.900 I'm thinking about it more conceptually.

00:38:03.500 It's like the people who had that revelation or intuition are making the presupposition that there's something about the emergence of reality into conscious being.

00:38:19.780 Like, because reality without consciousness doesn't really seem to exist, right?

00:38:23.940 So, when we talk about reality, we always presuppose a conscious viewer.

00:38:28.300 And that the conscious viewer that makes order out of chaos is most appropriately the perfect being that's manifested in the figure of Christ.

00:38:40.780 And so that we participate in that process in some sense to the degree that we're attempting to embody that mode of being.

00:38:50.020 And so I know that's, you know, that's going out there in some sense, but it struck me as such a brilliant idea that it was hard to account for.

00:39:02.500 I don't know if I've made myself clear with that.

00:39:04.920 Well, I think it cuts in many different ways at the same time, but it also cuts directly to the previous question that you asked about the right domain of religious expression.

00:39:17.000 And in a sense, it solves that problem.

00:39:20.680 Why?

00:39:20.900 Well, if Jesus Christ is the Logos, on the one hand, that means that there is a Logos, there is a truth, there is a way of existence that is real, which gives us a standard to be able to identify false ways of being, both individually but also important politically.

00:39:36.580 So it establishes a groundwork for there to be an intrinsic limiting principle, politically speaking and morally speaking, to life.

00:39:45.200 And that is, there is a truth of the matter.

00:39:47.440 And if you're not to live according to the truth, you're deviating from it.

00:39:50.880 So that establishes a kind of ground and ceiling for the proper expression of what it means to live morally, individually, and also political power as well.

00:40:00.360 You only have right political power insofar as it conforms to the truth.

00:40:04.900 But the Logos is also Christ.

00:40:07.440 That means Christ is also the person, the historical person that, as Catholics, we believe is literally real and literally raised from the dead.

00:40:16.980 And that shows that the political life is not the sum totality of life.

00:40:20.740 The moral life isn't even the sum totality of life.

00:40:23.000 The sum totality of life is love in relationship with God who has made himself incarnate.

00:40:28.920 So on the one hand, you have the foundation of truth to structure and limit human life, and then its ultimate transcendent telos or purpose.

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00:43:26.180 Taking apart Genesis like that was really revelatory to me, but I differed from the Atheist because I approached the text with reverence and ignorance and humility,

00:43:38.980 believing that I was nothing in comparison to what it contained.

00:43:43.320 You thought that there were truths available through transformation, not just through information.

00:43:48.180 Well, what are we, stupid? Are we stupid?

00:43:50.940 Is that why we were guided by this book for so many thousands of years and preserved it?

00:43:54.940 Is it because we're stupid?

00:43:56.740 Yeah.

00:43:57.020 I don't think so.

00:43:58.080 Yeah, I think—

00:43:58.620 So maybe that means there's something I don't know about it.

00:44:00.920 It's power, we're all stupid.

00:44:02.720 Either I'm stupid, which is highly probable, or we're all stupid, which is not so highly probable.

00:44:07.500 I think—well, I mean, as I've said, I think one of my deepest criticisms of the New Atheist is precisely the fact—I think I have a lot of criticisms of theism, too, because of the way it has bound itself.

00:44:23.020 I mean, current theism, it has bound itself to a Cartesian conception of modernity and reality.

00:44:30.280 And that's why—

00:44:31.080 Go into that.

00:44:31.640 Go into that.

00:44:33.260 Well—

00:44:33.580 I want to talk to you about dogma and spirit a bit.

00:44:36.120 Okay, well—

00:44:36.400 But let's leave that.

00:44:37.020 Go into what you just said.

00:44:38.380 Okay, so I'm going to put a—I'm going to say a thing and put a pin in it, because we're still trying to do the four Ps of knowing.

00:44:43.200 But the New Atheists lose the three other Ps, and they lose—they look for scientific knowledge in the Bible, not paying attention to how it cultivates wisdom.

00:44:55.200 And the fact—

00:44:56.060 Right, and not knowing that there's any difference between scientific knowledge and knowledge.

00:44:59.480 This is what I talked about with Stephen Fry recently, because Stephen, who's allied with the atheists, knows that there's such a thing as wisdom, which is why he pursues and embodies myth.

00:45:09.960 But he's annoyed at the Church because of its dogma, and he confuses the Church with its dogma.

00:45:16.680 Exactly.

00:45:17.240 You know, I'm also going to say a few positive things about dogma.

00:45:20.760 Dogma is the map.

00:45:22.020 I think dogma is—you know, in signal detection theory, I think dogma is the inescapable need to set the criterion.

00:45:30.000 At some point, you can't—like, in signal detection theory, you have to set the criterion.

00:45:35.280 And all you do to set the criterion—this sounds like Pascal—is you assess the relevance of the risks, because if you—well, I'll gather more information.

00:45:42.680 But then you have to set the criterion for that.

00:45:44.680 Yes, yes, exactly.

00:45:45.240 Right, again and again, and at some point—

00:45:47.240 Yes, that's right, that's right.

00:45:49.080 But you—

00:45:49.720 Okay, so the criterion we're talking about is the worship of that ultimate spirit.

00:45:55.080 Well—

00:45:55.600 That's the setting of the criteria.

00:45:57.320 And there's a dogma—there's an element in which dogma serves that.

00:46:00.420 So we can't just—because Fry says, well, I like the spirit, but not the dogma.

00:46:04.520 It's like, no, because—no, because you have to make a decision.

00:46:08.560 That's your point.

00:46:09.860 Okay, that's right.

00:46:10.800 And in every act, there's a decision.

00:46:12.760 So in every act, there's a worship of the dogma, because you set the criterion.

00:46:16.780 Right, but you set the criterion, but that's not the same thing as making the connection.

00:46:20.200 Don't forget that credo is later, and I say should always be in service to religio.

00:46:26.840 Religio, which means to bind.

00:46:28.780 That's that connectedness we've been talking about throughout.

00:46:31.840 And the point about setting the criterion—and this is like a William James thing to say—

00:46:36.940 The point of setting the criterion is to get as reliable a continuity of religio as you possibly can.

00:46:43.180 And when credo goes from giving your heart to I assert, we stop making credo—we stop conceiving of credo in a way that sees it intricately in service of religio.

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00:48:20.200 This episode was sponsored by Headspace.

00:48:22.960 I've been using Headspace for maybe three years, four years.

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00:49:46.040 One of the things that I've been so delighted by is my observation that there's a tremendous hunger for serious conversation, public hunger for it.

00:49:56.040 And when I have engaged in my lectures, I'm always extending myself to my limits of thought.

00:50:04.400 Like, that's what the lecture is.

00:50:05.640 It's an attempt to go past what I think.

00:50:08.160 And there's absolutely no doubt that everyone in the audience is on board with that.

00:50:16.640 I mean, it was the case when I debated Sam Harris, for example, that discussion, which, you know, was as technically complex as Sam and I could make it.

00:50:25.060 And, you know, and that might not be as philosophically complex as the absolute ideal, but it wasn't dumbed down by any stretch of the imagination.

00:50:32.800 And there's just, there was, there's no reason that that, if you spoon feed that material, it catches no one.

00:50:44.740 And I can tell you this, those new atheists, so Sam and Hitchens and Dawkins, those guys, they were good evangelizers.

00:50:53.480 I mean, for their position, I deal with young people all the time.

00:50:56.580 Yeah, and they didn't dumb it down either.

00:50:57.540 They didn't dumb it down.

00:50:59.320 They had the two things I talked about.

00:51:00.780 They were intelligent and they were passionately committed to it.

00:51:04.280 But every day on the internet, when I go into these comm boxes, I hear the phraseologies from Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris.

00:51:11.540 A lot of young people read them.

00:51:13.780 They didn't hug them into atheism.

00:51:16.020 They argued them into atheism.

00:51:17.440 So I've been telling our people, we got to stop trying to hug people back into the faith.

00:51:22.020 We have to argue them back into the faith.

00:51:23.800 We have to make it compelling.

00:51:24.960 And the problem with the atheists is that they don't have, the best they can offer is something like a materialistic utopia.

00:51:32.660 And I've got nothing against that.

00:51:34.500 I've been talking to people like Bjorn Lomberg and who lay out this vision of an increasingly wealthy world where absolute poverty is a thing of the past.

00:51:48.560 And where people can take the levels of health that are more or less taken for granted in the West, for granted everywhere in the world through a process of incremental economic improvement.

00:51:58.760 And, you know, more power to that, I think.

00:52:01.860 But I also know that that isn't a sufficient story.

00:52:07.200 There's a kind of despair that goes along with material security because the adventure is drained out of it.

00:52:15.520 And Dostoevsky touches on this.

00:52:17.160 And this is where I really learned this when I first encountered this idea.

00:52:20.140 You know, Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground says, look, this is something you have to understand.

00:52:27.040 If you gave people everything they need so that they had nothing to do but eat cakes and and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, if they were so happy that nothing but bubbles of bliss would appear on the surface of the water that they were in, they would smash it all to pieces just so that something adventurous and unique could happen.

00:52:48.280 And so, like, there has to be a call to a higher order of spiritual being, let's say, or psychological being that accompanies that materialism or it's or we won't even accept it.

00:52:59.520 It'll kill us.

00:53:00.120 No, absolutely.

00:53:00.760 It'll kill.

00:53:01.180 It'll smother us.

00:53:02.300 It's got to be the call to sanctity.

00:53:04.240 And the call to sanctity is a call to love.

00:53:07.300 And they're Dostoevsky, you know, love is harsh and dreadful.

00:53:11.040 It's not a cute little emotion or it's not a it's not a sentiment.

00:53:14.780 Real love is harsh and dreadful because it means going into the place where people are suffering and becoming another Christ and bearing the burdens of the world.

00:53:24.680 That's serious business.

00:53:26.640 Love is is something awful about it, you know, but when you summon someone.

00:53:30.700 There's also something awful about the judgment, you know, because if you love someone, you also hold them to a standard.

00:53:36.060 Yeah, you will.

00:53:37.160 They're good.

00:53:37.640 Right.

00:53:37.980 And that means holding to a standard.

00:53:39.700 I see you as a border figure.

00:53:41.060 You're you've got one foot in the rationalist, human, rationalist, humanist, atheist, empiricist world firmly planted.

00:53:50.940 But then there's the artist in you, which is a major part of your personality and and and and obviously a part that's incredibly productive and very well received.

00:54:01.580 And that has an intellectual and and as well, the that domain, that second domain that you occupy isn't formalized.

00:54:13.840 The investigation of that isn't formalized as well by the atheist community.

00:54:17.860 You're right.

00:54:18.540 They lose what's there and they don't value it properly.

00:54:22.700 And they and that's a that's a problem, like with Dawkins, for example, I get letters from lots of people, lots and lots of people and lots of them are nihilistic.

00:54:34.180 And because they're nihilistic, they're suicidal.

00:54:37.700 I had a friend.

00:54:38.700 I went for a walk with him the other week and he was a communist atheist when he was a kid.

00:54:42.640 He grew up in Poland and he had criticized his family for celebrating Christmas because it was irrational.

00:54:47.880 And then he realized at one point he said, I could kill Christmas and we just have another week weekend that wouldn't actually.

00:54:57.500 Right. Right.

00:54:58.160 Because, right.

00:54:59.180 There's a magic there that that rationalism can destroy.

00:55:03.780 Yeah. And and and I have exactly that problem politically with the royal family, which on the face of it is, of course, preposterous,

00:55:13.140 more preposterous, even than Christmas and religion is the idea that we still have a royal family.

00:55:20.540 But you have a royal family ceremony and ritual and symbolism is I look at America and I think if only Donald Trump and and now Biden,

00:55:30.120 if every week they had to walk up the hill and go into a mansion in Washington and there was Uncle Sam in the top hat and striped trousers,

00:55:39.120 a living embodiment of their nation, more important than they were.

00:55:44.140 That's the key. He, Uncle Sam, is America.

00:55:47.640 The president is a fly by night politician voted for by less than half the population.

00:55:52.680 And he has to bow in front of this personification of his country every week.

00:55:58.900 And that personification, Uncle Sam can't tell him what to do.

00:56:02.140 Uncle Sam can't say, no, pass this act and don't pass that act and free these people, give them a pardon.

00:56:07.620 And all he can do is say, tell me, young fellow, what you done this week?

00:56:11.500 And he'll bow and say, well, Uncle Sam, say, oh, you think that's the right thing for my country?

00:56:16.420 Well, that's what a constitutional monarchy is.

00:56:19.360 And of course, it's absurd.

00:56:21.880 But the fact that Churchill and Thatcher and everyone had to bow every week in front of this.

00:56:27.680 There's something.

00:56:28.560 There's something.

00:56:29.260 And also, empirically, look at the happiest countries in the world.

00:56:35.640 That's all you need to do.

00:56:37.200 And they happen to be constitutional monarchies.

00:56:39.840 Norway, Sweden, Benelux, Japan.

00:56:43.000 They're always right up there on the list.

00:56:45.420 Now, it may be that we can't find the causal link between the constitutional monarchy,

00:56:49.360 but it might just be something to do with that.

00:56:52.180 And that's it's a way of answering your question in the same with religion is that I can see the absurdities of the claims of many religions.

00:57:01.900 And I can see the history of the wickedness and oppression and suppression, particularly in my own instance, you know, being gay, growing up gay.

00:57:10.320 And there's a long history of religion in particular being intolerant.

00:57:13.980 And to this day, even this Pope Francis, whom I had some hopes for, seems to be beginning to add to an ancient slander and nonsensical attitude towards sexuality, which is extremely annoying and upsetting.

00:57:29.000 But, you know, I kind of that doesn't mean I throw the whole baby out with the bathwater.

00:57:34.020 I can see, in the same way that I don't believe in Greek mythology, in actual fact, I don't believe that on Olympus, Zeus lived there with his wife Hera.

00:57:45.440 But I do believe Hermes and Hera and Zeus live within us.

00:57:49.160 There is a Hermes inside me.

00:57:50.760 There is a trickster, a liar, a joker, a cute, funny side, as well as a harmonic Apollonian and a bestial Dionysian side, which is appetitive and addictive and frenzied.

00:58:05.520 And I see the value and the truth in those religious manifestations, those principles, those elements of my character and the character of the human family.

00:58:18.340 So you might say that in a place where there is no fourth branch of government, the president, the executive, tends to take on the symbolic weight of the king.

00:58:28.180 Yeah.

00:58:29.060 Okay. We agree on that. That's possible anyways.

00:58:31.420 Absolutely. I think it's one of the problems of American politics. Yeah.

00:58:34.280 Okay. And now I would say that's also related to the problem of the separation of church and state.

00:58:38.900 And one of the things the West seems to have got right is the idea that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's.

00:58:46.980 Well, it's an analogous idea. That's okay. You don't, don't, I'll just continue where I'm going.

00:58:53.080 I need that to be described more, but okay. Yeah.

00:58:54.820 Yep. Yep. Yeah. Well, imagine there's a practical necessity for the separation of the religious impulse from the political impulse.

00:59:02.100 But imagine that there's a psychological necessity for that too.

00:59:05.020 Okay. And then if, if there aren't domains specified out for the different domains of, of, of practical thought, political, economic, religious, then they contaminate each other.

00:59:17.580 And what happens is you don't get rid of the, rid of the religion. You contaminate the politics with it.

00:59:23.980 Okay. And so I've been watching what's been happening to Richard Dawkins, for example.

00:59:28.640 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And now Richard's idea. And, and, and I had, I'm an admirer of Dawkins, but he can think, you know, I mean, he's brilliant and I've read his books.

00:59:38.720 I understand what he's doing and why, and I get his argument. I think it's incomplete for reasons we could get into and probably will, but I think there's something missing there.

00:59:48.820 And then it's playing out is that when you, when you remove the religious sphere and, and you confuse it with superstition, or you fail to discriminate between the valid elements of it and the superstitious elements, you don't get rid of the religious impulse.

01:00:05.300 It goes somewhere else. And I think we're, if you're saying it's going into secular religiosity now, I, well, what do you think? I agree. I mean, what does it look like to you?

01:00:14.700 No, that's, I, I said that I've written a P I've written on it. And I, I, that was my argument is that, is that we're seeing many of the aspects of religion being manifest in, in secular arguments.

01:00:25.600 As someone pointed out, the only difference being in many, unlike at least the Christian religion, there's no possibility of absolution, which is.

01:00:33.540 Yeah. Yeah. But that's not funny. Right. That's seriously not funny.

01:00:37.540 I know. I know. I agree with you.

01:00:38.880 I know it's seriously not funny. Believe me, I know it very well.

01:00:41.180 I know you do. I know. But, but that also points out what a remarkable achievement, the idea of absolution is, because it's like the presumption of innocence.

01:00:49.080 Those two things are, those are miraculous.

01:00:51.980 Yeah. Well, I agree.

01:00:53.600 Miraculous constructs of thought, constructs of thought.

01:00:55.860 I agree. And I, I, I, you know, I would argue that religion on the whole has not been a good thing for people.

01:01:03.640 Okay. That's the first argument, but, but in order to, but we shouldn't realize,

01:01:07.320 we have to realize that in order that it does serve an evolutionary purpose, if you want to call it purpose, it's there because it, it has, it has served, it has survived all of societies because it does, it meets some human needs in one way or another.

01:01:23.120 And therefore we have to ask what needs does it satisfy and realize what they are and how can we, how can we provide them without the fairy tales?

01:01:33.020 Yes. So I guess we definitely do have to ask that question.

01:01:37.080 The problem with the new atheists is not so much their atheism, it's their a priori commitment to the doctrine of metaphysical naturalism, which is roughly the idea that all truths are scientific truths or reducible to scientific truths.

01:01:51.500 And it's, and it's a non-starter, the far more interesting golden thread that you talked about earlier, that sometimes known as the perennial philosophy.

01:02:00.080 Yes, exactly that.

01:02:01.140 Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, is, is, is the thought that, that being, uh, capital B being is, is the, the fundamental metaphysical question.

01:02:12.980 And once you start approaching deep philosophical problems in that way, then you do start to see a remarkable convergence between Abrahamic monotheism, uh, uh, Vedanta and Upanishads, the question of whether Brahman and Atman are one, that is say being and mind and the self self are one.

01:02:32.680 Uh, we see it, uh, uh, uh, those, those sorts of questions are, are, are, uh, are, are also not particular to religious systems.

01:02:41.300 So think of somebody like Heidegger, you know, Heidegger is supposed to have spawned the kind of the great atheistic tendencies in 20th century existentialist and phenomenological philosophy.

01:02:51.780 He says the fundamental question is why is there something rather than nothing?

01:02:56.840 Absolutely.

01:02:57.220 Why being?

01:02:57.680 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:02:59.260 So, okay, so, so there's the metaphysical, so part of what this hinges on is the metaphysical status of consciousness and, and, and you can make a case that that's equivalent to, to this question is, well, what, I mean, David Chalmers, who's maybe the most, the most well-known cognitive scientist studying consciousness, you know, he's, he, he, he has one set of the hard question, you know, the hard question about consciousness.

01:03:24.340 But for me, the hard question is the question of being itself, because I can't distinguish between being and awareness.

01:03:31.780 You can think, well, there's an objective world without subjectivity.

01:03:34.380 It's like, well, try to think that through and see how far you get.

01:03:37.060 It just, you just run into problem after problem with it.

01:03:40.720 And, and I mean, there's technical problems at the level of physics as well, but there's certainly metaphysical problems.

01:03:46.000 And so, so then the question is, well, what is the, what is the cosmological significance of consciousness?

01:03:53.280 And, and that, that's a central question, right?

01:03:55.700 Maybe that's the central question.

01:03:57.180 And when I look at the inside of a Christian cathedral, and I see the logos spread out against the sky, because that's what the dome is, it's affiliated with the sun.

01:04:07.140 And there's this proposition that consciousness is what engenders reality itself, and that we partake in that.

01:04:13.780 And, and let's say we abandon that notion.

01:04:15.640 It's like, okay, well, then do you have any dignity as an individual?

01:04:19.060 And then we get into the postmodern question is, well, are you there as an individual at all?

01:04:23.740 Are you just, this is part of the identity issue, are you just one of your immutable physiological characteristics, right?

01:04:30.580 Your sex, your gender, your race, that's matter, man.

01:04:34.200 And there's no individual soul there.

01:04:36.360 Well, why can't I just reduce you to that?

01:04:38.700 What are you going to use as an argument?

01:04:41.640 Well, just a, just a very quick thought, if I may, I don't, I don't want to sort of keep butting in too much, but a very good line for Dawkins and others to remember, and you should remind him of it if he comes on your podcast, is that metaphysics always buries its undertakers.

01:04:59.120 That is to say, every time there's an attempt to say, we can, all of that mumbo jumbo that was being talked about by those clever philosophers or those stupid religionists, that's all, that's all gone now.

01:05:12.660 That's, that's a warning sign.

01:05:14.180 It's a sign that there's actually total, total confusion and all sorts of kind of, kind of fragmentation and the, the, the, the quest for meaning and the quest for the answer to, to the, the question of the meaning of, uh.

01:05:26.120 Is that the abandonment of the perennial philosophy?

01:05:29.700 It's an attempt, certainly to, to reject it.

01:05:32.660 Uh, and, um, I mean, if you look in, say, Vedantic systems, you look, look, look in Indian philosophy, there were materialists, um, uh, there, there was a school of materialism, but it was, but it was, it was a relatively small and short-lived, um, uh, belief system.

01:05:48.320 You see materialism in the, uh, Greco-Roman world, you see it in Democritus, Democritus is atomism, you see it in Epicurus, of course, um, but it is, it is, it is, it is a minority report, uh, there is, it's a quite a, it's a strange superstition in, in ancient thought.

01:06:07.000 Well, we took it apart a bit, James, because you mentioned earlier that among, I think it was cognitive scientists that you were discussing, that discussion of panpsychism has become non-heretical, because there's notion that there's a mystery in matter.

01:06:22.580 See, it isn't materialism in, in, in, exactly, that's the fault, perhaps, perhaps it's, it's deterministic clockwork materialism that's essentially Newtonian, and, and we know that's not right, I mean, it's proximally right, but, but, but, but beyond that, it's not right.

01:06:40.600 Matter is very deep mystery, and I can't see how you can get rid of the problem of consciousness by positing a materialist substrate when there's no way that you can get rid of the metaphysics of matter.

01:06:51.340 Very quickly, I mean, you mentioned David Chalmers, as you say, this brilliant young philosopher who in 1994 published his PhD thesis, The Conscious Mind, which brought back in, onto the table, that what he called the hard problem of consciousness, uh, and he parsed that in different ways, that there's something absolutely irreducible about qualitative experience, but the problem that then opens up, that he, that then I think leads him towards taking panpsychism very, very seriously.

01:07:21.020 This is just really in the last 10 years, I think, is the idea, well, okay, we've got consciousness, it's a hard problem, we just can't get rid of it.

01:07:28.860 And yet, we can't get rid of matter either, we can't get rid of the, the truths of the physical sciences, and we, but we can't work out how on earth these fit together.

01:07:38.020 They couldn't be laws of nature, they couldn't be psychoanalytic or psychological laws, the laws of thought are fundamentally different from the laws of nature.

01:07:46.880 So, how do we fit these two together?

01:07:50.500 And panpsychism at that point, though it might seem crazy to the person on the street, suddenly starts to seem quite an attractive, an attractive account of the nature of ultimate reality.

01:08:01.180 And I suppose, just as a quick footnote to that, once you're there, materialism, Dawkinsian materialism is Dickensian and long gone, and the dialogue between the perennial philosophy and Anglophone philosophy of panpsychists is back on.

01:08:23.980 So, elaborate on that, that's what stopped me exactly, because now I'm trying to figure out, well, there's this, we should define panpsychism again for the audience, but then, okay, so what sort of dialogue does that open up as far as you're concerned?

01:08:37.280 Well, my view is that panpsychists, it's early days, and at least in its modern contemporary iteration, I think you can say that Aristotle, if you read the De Anaba, Aristotle's Treatise on the Soul, there's soul all over the place, the plants have a nutritive soul, animals have a perceptual soul, and human animals have both of those and a rational soul.

01:09:00.480 So, as it were, all of organic life is minded.

01:09:04.020 If you move to the basic framework of Abrahamic monotheism, then, look, it follows very naturally that if you've got an axiomatic commitment to mind at the bottom of the universe, as it were, the creator is a minded being, is ideal, is not material, and everything, all of reality distinct from God is created,

01:09:29.940 and including, and including, as it were, space-time, then the idea that the universe as we discover it, as we come upon it, is shot through with mind, is legible to the minded inquiry that happens when cognitive scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of the brain, it's suddenly you've got an isomorphism there.

01:09:53.200 And I think the breakdown of Christianity is going to continue.

01:09:57.340 Like, I'm not, I don't have short-term hope for, let's say, the situation, but I do believe that there are, that there are seeds which are kind of being planted, and there are people who are getting ready and will bear fruit.

01:10:13.920 So, it's been just, it's been amazing, I have to say.

01:10:16.980 And thanks for that, by the way.

01:10:22.100 I hope, I guess you're welcome, to the degree that I had something to do with it.

01:10:27.620 Thank you.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 06, 2022

215. The Problem with Atheism

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