In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson presents a speech he gave at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. The main point of the speech is something he has spent years grappling with: the relationship between ethics, how we navigate the world, and the problem of perception, and navigational problems that come up as we explore the world. In this speech, he asks the question: Why does the Bible have a plot? And why does it matter so much to us? And what does it have in common with the rest of the world? Dr. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety provides a roadmap 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 Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression & Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Thanks for listening, and Happy Manifesting! - The Jordan Peterson Podcast Team Music: "In Need of a Savior (feat. Andrea Thomas) by Fountains of Wayne (ft. John Singleton) Words and Music by Ian Dorsch (Mr. Lavelle ( ) (Solo Version) by Suneaters (Mrs. Michaela Peterson) - "Outro Music: "I'm Your Words" by Scott Holmes (Mr.) and "Outtro Music: How I Used To See The Stars" by Ian McKellen (Mrs.) by Jeff Perla (Mrs., & Mr. ) - , "A Little Girl (Mrs.'s Song: "Solo" by Mr. & Mrs. ? & Ms. John) and , "I'll Figure it Out How To Say It Out" by Ms. & , & Other Things by Mrs. (Mr., ) - "The Sound of Music by Haley (featuring Ms. Babbitt by Haley & Ms., & Other Words . -- (Mrs ) , , and Ms. ( ) - ( ) , "The Best Thing ( ) ( ) & ( ), Michaela ( ) -- is a tribute to our dear friend, )
00:00:01.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.000Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.000We 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.
00:00:19.000With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.000He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.000If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.000Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.000Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:52.000Welcome to episode 251 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.
00:01:00.000This episode is a speech Dad gave at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio.
00:01:06.000The main point of the speech is something Dad spent years grappling with.
00:01:10.000The relationship between ethics, how we navigate the world, and the problem of perception,
00:01:16.000and navigational problems that come up as we explore the world.
00:01:38.000About a month and a half ago, I went to the Museum of the Bible in Washington.
00:01:46.000And that was pretty interesting. It's a really good museum. If you ever go to Washington, I would highly recommend it for what that's worth.
00:01:56.000It's very carefully done. Very comprehensive. And it struck me while I was going through the museum, that although in one sense it was a museum of the Bible, in possibly a deeper sense, but possibly not,
00:02:14.000it was a museum of the book. They'd set up the museum so you walk through the history of the Bible chronologically, you can walk through a variety of different ways in the museum, but that's one of the pathways through the museum.
00:02:32.000And so, it was a history of a technology, you know, and the technology is the technology of the book.
00:02:40.000And in some sense, one of the things I really realized that the museum brought home for me was that all books grew out of the, in some profound sense, particularly in the West, all books grew out of the Bible.
00:02:56.000And so, that's interesting to me. It's interesting to me partly because we seem to have a lot of trouble in our culture now agreeing on what might constitute a valid canon of books.
00:03:10.000I mean, part of what the humanities offered, certainly part of what religious tradition offered, was a canonical book.
00:03:17.000I mean, Judaism has a canonical book, and Christianity has a canonical book, and Islam has a canonical book, and all the major Abrahamic religions have agreed that, in some sense, the followers of those religions are people of the book.
00:03:31.000And that's quite a remarkable proposition, first of all, because it isn't obvious that you would consider a book the most fundamental element of your culture.
00:03:46.000You know, it might be more obvious that you might consider a city a more fundamental element, or a dynasty, or, you know, something overtly political.
00:03:55.000But that isn't what a huge portion of the world has decided. We seem to have decided that, no, we're founded on a book.
00:04:04.000And we have some dispute about just exactly what that book is and what it means, but the fact that we've at least agreed that it's a book, that's something.
00:04:17.000And I don't know what it is exactly, and that's partly what I want to investigate tonight.
00:04:23.000Now, the Bible, in its various forms, isn't exactly a book. It's a library of books, right?
00:04:29.000It's a collection of books, but it's an interesting collection of books, to say the least, because, despite the fact that it's a library, so a collection of books,
00:04:37.000it also has a narrative theme that runs through it, right? It has a beginning, and a middle, and an end.
00:04:43.000And it has a plot, strangely enough. And I say strangely, because, how did it get plotted, exactly?
00:04:52.000You know, I mean, obviously, believers believe that it's the word of God, and fair enough, you know.
00:04:59.000But that's not a very detailed explanation, right? It's a religious interpretation, but it's shallow in some sense.
00:05:12.000It lacks detail. It still doesn't explain, in any fundamentally compelling sense, how the narrative God organized across time.
00:05:24.000And you say, well, it's the Spirit of God working through the multitude of people who aggregated the Bible and transmitted it.
00:05:31.000And fair enough. It's still not a deep enough level of understanding to make me feel that when I, for what that's worth,
00:05:40.000when I encounter that explanation, that it's been thoroughly explained. And, you know, that's not a criticism, precisely.
00:05:47.000Anything that's complex is susceptible to ever increasingly deep explanations, you know.
00:05:53.000In some sense, if something's deep, you never get to the bottom of it, and all explanations are insufficient.
00:05:58.000But I think it's a remarkable fact, speaking psychologically and historically, that there's a book at the basis of our culture.
00:06:06.000And that's how we define the culture, as based on the book, and that it's a collection of books.
00:06:12.000And that the collection was aggregated so that a plot emerges from it.
00:06:17.000And Christians take that idea one step further, in some sense, because they assume that not only is the Old Testament a library of books that has a plot,
00:06:28.000but that implicit in that book is the New Testament. It's somehow there a priori before the events actually unfold.
00:06:37.000And that's an extremely bizarre and interesting idea. And it's very difficult to know what to make of it.
00:06:43.000So I was thinking these things when I was going through the museum. And I was thinking about the idea of the canon,
00:06:50.000and about the idea of fiction and truth, and about the idea of literary depth, all of those things.
00:06:56.000Trying to make sense out of them. Partly because, as I said, we now seem to have reached an impasse in our culture
00:07:04.000about what can be validly considered canonical. And part of the way this came about, I have to take a detour through the history of ideas,
00:07:12.000is that it was discovered in a variety of different disciplines after the Second World War.
00:07:24.000Really, I would say, starting in the 60s. That the problem of perception was a much more intractable problem
00:07:32.000than anybody had heretofore suspected. And so that emerged partly in the field of artificial intelligence,
00:07:40.000when the first artificial intelligence researchers who were interested in robotics tried to make machines that could operate in the real world,
00:07:48.000like animals could, or like people could, to build robots. The idea, to begin with, was that,
00:07:56.000the difficult part would be programming the robot to operate in the environment.
00:08:00.000The easy part would be getting the robot to perceive the environment. Because, after all, there it is.
00:08:04.000You just have to look, and everything's self-evident. And it turned out that that wasn't the case at all.
00:08:12.000And this was reflective of a philosophical problem that had been recognized by David Hume sometime earlier,
00:08:18.000which is the problem of the relationship between what is and what ought to be.
00:08:22.000David Hume believed that there was an unbridgeable gap between the factual world and the ethical world, in some sense.
00:08:28.000That you never had enough facts at your disposal to compute your trajectory into the future with any degree of certainty.
00:08:36.000And I think that that's been proven true beyond a shadow of a doubt, as a consequence of recent investigations,
00:08:42.000which have demonstrated not least that, what one of the problems is that, and this is associated with the problem of perception,
00:08:49.000is that there's an infinite number of facts. And so, how do you guide, how do you guide your actions in light of the facts,
00:08:57.000when there are endless facts about absolutely everything, absolutely everywhere all the time?
00:09:06.000Which facts do you attend to, to guide yourself forward? Which facts do you prioritize? And which do you ignore?
00:09:14.000Because, obviously, you have to ignore most of them, because there's a near infinite number of facts,
00:09:18.000and you're not going to pay attention to all of them, because you can't. And so, how do you decide what not to pay attention to?
00:09:23.000And the answer is, you don't know. And that's the general answer, is, which we don't know.
00:09:29.000And it's exactly the same as the problem of perception, because when you look out the world, look out at the world,
00:09:35.000or hear the world, for that matter, or taste the world, any of those things, any sensory interaction with the world,
00:09:42.000is there's way more things to look at than you can possibly look at, and yet you do look at things, and you see.
00:09:50.000And then the question arises, how do we do that? And the answer is, we don't know.
00:09:56.000And it's such an intractable problem that we haven't been able to build machines that can do it.
00:10:01.000That's why we don't have general purpose robots. And, you know, I think the closest thing we've got to them,
00:10:06.000probably so far, are Elon Musk's self-driving cars, but you still don't really see those everywhere.
00:10:13.000Right? They cracked that problem 80%, maybe something like that, but that last 20% is not going to be so easy.
00:10:20.000And it's partly because, for example, you know, imagine that there's a navigation problem,
00:10:25.000that having a car propagate itself down the highway is a navigation problem.
00:10:30.000And you might think that's a technical problem, you need to know where the road is, the edges of the road and so forth,
00:10:36.000which isn't so easy because roads don't actually have defined edges, but that's one of many problems.
00:10:41.000And so we've had to put up a whole satellite system to map the roads in detail, and to feed that information into the cars,
00:10:48.000and the cars can compare where they are on the road to the satellite image.
00:10:51.000And they have to have very detailed perceptual knowledge of the world to operate.
00:10:56.000But then there's additional problems that have to do with navigation that aren't so obvious.
00:11:01.000For example, let's say you're driving down the road, and there's a mother and a child in a pram on one side of the road,
00:11:08.000and there's like three old women on the other side of the road, and you have to run over one set of them.
00:11:15.000And that actually turns out to be, in some real sense, a navigation problem, obviously.
00:11:21.000But just as obviously, it's an ethical problem.
00:13:03.000And does that mean that it's bias, per se, that's determining which facts that you interact with?
00:13:11.000So is all your action merely a consequence of your bias?
00:13:14.000And I would say that's one of the claims that the postmodern radicals make all the time.
00:13:18.000Is that your perception is nothing but your biases.
00:13:21.000Which is a pretty bloody dismal way of looking at the world.
00:13:24.000There's your bias and my bias, and there's no truth, and there's no ethic.
00:13:28.000There's just your bias and my bias, and which one should win?
00:13:31.000It's like, well, I guess we'll find out, won't we?
00:13:35.000Because there's no, well, there's no, there's no appreciation in that realm of philosophical inquiry for the notion that there is an ethic, like a fundamental ethic, that has some basis in, let's say some basis in reality.
00:13:54.000A transcendent ethic that's real, and certainly no appreciation that that ethic is something that people could mutually explore as a consequence of their goodwill and their honest discourse.
00:14:08.000They're deeply embedded in Western culture, and I think they're fundamental to the people of the book.
00:14:14.000They're particularly well developed, well, both in Judaism and Christianity.
00:14:18.000I don't know the development as well in the Islamic world.
00:14:21.000But, no, we do believe that, as believers, that people are of divine worth, and that they can exchange information honestly, and the information is actually about the world.
00:14:32.000And that there is such a thing as an ethic, and that ethic is related to the integral worth of each individual.
00:14:38.000And that worth manifests itself, let's say, in our capacity for honest speech, and that capacity for honest speech is in some real sense redemptive.
00:14:47.000And we do believe that, and that's part of the religious presuppositions in which our whole culture is embedded.
00:14:55.000I say religious in part because I think they're first principles, and maybe you could define what's truly religious as what is the first principle.
00:15:04.000Now, if you're thinking about it psychologically, there are, what would you say, there are phenomena, I suppose, that we regard as part of the realm of depth.
00:15:19.000What's deep in literature, and what's deep in philosophy.
00:15:21.000I would say, technically, that the realm of the religious is the realm of what's deepest, and what's deepest is first principles.
00:15:28.000And maybe you come to those first principles, maybe in some sense you have to abide by them as a consequence of faith.
00:15:35.000You know, you choose to live a certain way.
00:15:37.000You choose to live, for example, as if other people have worth, and you do too.
00:15:41.000And that that worth is absolute in some sense.
00:15:43.000And, you know, if you're an admirer of the natural rights tradition, well, you would claim that we derive our notion of natural rights from a deeper understanding that each of us is of fundamental and intrinsic worth.
00:15:57.000Which I think is pretty much akin to making the biblical claim that men and women are created in the image of God.
00:16:04.000If God is emblematic of what constitutes the highest worth, and we're made in that image, that means that we partake in what's of absolute worth.
00:16:15.000And then you decide, in some sense, to base your whole society on that presupposition.
00:16:21.000And it looks to me like societies that do accept that presupposition and move forward from that first principle produce the sorts of societies that people would rather live in if they had their choice.
00:16:35.000And societies that don't accept those first principles don't.
00:16:43.000Because when you ask a question like that, you have to ask the question of what are you willing to accept as proof.
00:16:50.000And, well, that's a very, very complicated problem.
00:16:54.000But it does seem to me that societies that presuppose intrinsic worth at the individual level, which is a very weird proposition given the radical differences in ability between people.
00:17:08.000It's much easier, in some sense, to see that highly successful people are much more worthwhile than people who are poverty-stricken and struggling.
00:17:16.000Or that people who are highly intelligent are worthwhile in a much more fundamental way than people who aren't.
00:17:20.000I mean, you could say that with regard to every individual difference and every talent.
00:17:24.000It's a much more natural way of thinking.
00:17:26.000The notion that we're all of intrinsic worth despite our variability, it's like, that's a hell of an idea.
00:17:33.000It's absolutely amazing to me that that idea ever obtained any purchase anywhere under any conditions.
00:17:40.000You know, we sort of think about it, in some sense, as self-evident now.
00:17:44.000Although it's subject to intense questioning at the moment.
00:17:47.000But that blinds us, I think, to just exactly how miraculous that idea really is and how unlikely it is.
00:17:54.000And yet it seems to be a fundamental necessity for the organization of the kind of social institutions
00:18:02.000that we would choose to inhabit if we had our choice.
00:18:11.000Back to the problem of perception and the biblical corpus.
00:18:14.000Well, the AI types discovered, much to their chagrin, that perceiving the world was unduly complicated.
00:18:23.000And so, the rubber hits the road in some sense as a consequence of those dilemmas that I just described with regards to self-driving automobiles.
00:18:34.000It's like, well, if it's one group of vulnerable people on one side of the road and another group of vulnerable people on the other side of the road
00:18:40.000and you have to run over one set, what do you do?
00:18:43.000And the answer is, well, we don't know. And we do compute that. And how do we compute that?
00:18:48.000We're going to have to figure that out. If we're going to build machines that are going to do that,
00:18:51.000they're going to have to be able to think ethically. And that'll mean we'll have to understand what it means to think ethically.
00:18:56.000And we don't understand that because it's really, really complicated.
00:19:00.000And so, the problem of perception arose to bedevil robotics. And it's certainly not a problem that we have solved,
00:19:08.000which is why we don't have general-purpose robots. Some researchers believe that that problem won't be solved in the absence of embodiment.
00:19:17.000That robotic intelligence has to be embodied before it can act in the world in any real sense,
00:19:23.000because perception is dependent on embodiment. And I think that's very interesting, especially in relationship,
00:19:30.000particularly to the Catholic emphasis on the resurrection of the body and the valuing of the body,
00:19:37.000as opposed to the mere spirit, you know, that the body is actually a necessary precondition even for perception,
00:19:42.000in some way that we didn't understand before the last 50 or 60 years.
00:19:47.000So, anyways, when this problem arose in the AI world, it simultaneously arose in, of all places, well, in psychology,
00:20:01.000in relationship to the problem of perception, which psychologists are still beetling away trying to solve,
00:20:06.000with some success. But more particularly, it arose in the humanities departments, especially in, in departments that were associated,
00:20:16.000concentrating on literary criticism. Because the literary critics, especially the French, the postmodernist types,
00:20:22.000came to a similar realization at some point, I'm condensing a lot of work here, but their basic proposition was,
00:20:31.000well, how do you know when you've landed on the proper interpretation of a text? And the answer is, well, we don't know.
00:20:40.000Well, so you take a text like Hamlet, and you get a hundred students to write an essay about, you know, a particular stanza,
00:20:49.000a set of stanzas, a soliloquy, and a hundred of them have a hundred different opinions. So, well, like, which opinion is right?
00:20:58.000And if none of them are right, well, does the text mean anything? If there can be a hundred different interpretations
00:21:05.000of only one tiny section of the text, and you can't decide which interpretation is the right interpretation,
00:21:11.000how do you know there's any interpretation at all? And so, how do you know the text is meaningful in any real sense,
00:21:17.000if you can't even agree on what the meaning is? And you can certainly see how that problem bedevils something like Biblical criticism,
00:21:23.000because Biblical stories are susceptible to a very large number of interpretations. That's for sure.
00:21:30.000And so, if you can't agree on the interpretation, well, how do you even know that there's anything of any meaning there at all?
00:21:37.000It's like, hey, we seem to have been able to manage it. We seem to have come to some consensus about what constitutes,
00:21:44.000let's say, quality, high-quality literature, rather than low-quality literature. We seem to remember the high-quality literature,
00:21:51.000perhaps, and to transmit it, and we don't remember the low-quality literature. At least that's what the humanities types would suggest.
00:21:57.000And something like that winnowing, historical winnowing, seemed to be at work as we aggregated the stories that became the Biblical corpus as well.
00:22:07.000Right? These were picked out from a wider variety of other ancient stories and made canonical for reasons that we don't understand.
00:22:18.000All sorts of decisions were made about which books to include and which books not to include and what order to include them in.
00:22:25.000And that's a mysterious process. We seem to have done it. And we've had wars about it, too, because it's a complicated problem.
00:22:34.000So the postmodernists then thought, hey, well, here's a problem. If we can't agree on what text, what a given text means, just one text or even a paragraph from a text,
00:22:47.000how can we agree on what the canonical texts are?
00:22:51.000Because if it's problematic to interpret one fraction of a story, it's way more problematic to put a whole sequence of stories together,
00:23:00.000maybe that would be the classic books of the Western tradition, let's say, and say, those books and not others.
00:23:06.000It's like, well, who says? And why those books? Exactly. And what's your motive for putting those books together?
00:23:14.000And that's where things got even more peculiar because I think it was perfectly reasonable of the postmodernists in some sense to say,
00:23:21.000well, how do we decide what the meaning of a text is? We don't know. How do we decide which books should be canonical? We don't know.
00:23:29.000But then to take the next step, which was, well, your motives for aggregating these texts are suspect.
00:23:38.000And it looks to us, this is where the Marxist twist came in, extraordinarily and appropriately, in my estimation,
00:23:46.000is that it's nothing but your will to power that aggregated those texts. Right?
00:23:51.000The reason there's a Western canon is because the idea that there is a Western canon supports the domination of the West.
00:23:58.000And it was that drive to domination that was the spirit that aggregated the texts to begin with and that justifies their choice as canonical.
00:24:07.000And that's your support for that canon is either your conscious participation in that, let's call it structure of oppression,
00:24:17.000or the manifestation of the same will to oppression operating within you.
00:24:22.000And that's sort of where we're at now in our culture, because that's the accusation.
00:24:30.000And I'm not very fond of that idea, partly because although I do agree that we don't know how we make sense out of things.
00:24:38.000We don't know. But that doesn't, that lack of knowledge, that ignorance is where it should have stopped in some sense.
00:24:45.000There should have been an investigation there. It's okay, we don't understand this.
00:24:48.000We shouldn't have leapt to a, like a quasi-Marxist determination that said, oh, well, it's all will to power.
00:24:55.000It's all the desire to dominate. Right? And because that's, well, first of all, really, you're so sure of that, are you?
00:25:02.000What makes you so sure of that, that it's will to power that's the organizing principle, let's say, for society as such?
00:25:10.000You really believe that? Does that work in your personal relationships?
00:25:13.000Is that how you conduct yourself with your wife or your husband? It's domination all the way.
00:25:17.000And same with your friends. It's domination. And when you go out, you know, you have a business.
00:25:22.000And, of course, if you're radically left, you assume businesses are oppressive structures to begin with,
00:25:27.000because you're jealous and stupid. And, well, and because, and also, because sometimes they are, you know,
00:25:34.000because structures do warp and bend, and they can tilt towards oppression and tyranny,
00:25:39.000and human structures are susceptible to that. But that's a deviation, as far as I'm concerned,
00:25:44.000from the, certainly, I would say, from the norm, but certainly from what's optimal.
00:25:50.000And is it your relationship with, between husband and wife is governed by nothing but power?
00:25:55.000That's sort of the patriarchal oppression theory of marriage theory.
00:25:59.000It's like, well, women have always been dominated by men. That's the historical reality.
00:26:03.000It's like, really, that's your story for the entire corpus of the cooperation and competition
00:26:09.000between men and women since the beginning of time.
00:26:11.000It's essentially domination and nothing else. That's how it works, is it?
00:26:15.000It's like, I don't think there's a bloody shred of evidence for that, by the way,
00:26:19.000because I've looked at the principles that appear to underlie the establishment and maintenance of stable social institutions
00:26:28.000at the micro level, so let's say within the confines of an intimate relationship,
00:26:32.000and among friends, and among business partners, and among, well, political entities for that matter.
00:26:38.000And it looks to me like all the evidence suggests that it's something a lot more akin to reciprocal altruism
00:26:44.000and honest trade than it is akin to domination by power, because it's just not stable.
00:26:50.000You know, if you're around people who do nothing but exploit you, are you going to participate in that voluntarily?
00:26:55.000Are you going to do your best in a situation like that?
00:26:57.000Or are you going to fight it in small ways and large and bring it to its knees?
00:27:01.000And I think, I really do believe the answer to that's quite clear.
00:30:23.000In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:30:27.000It's a fundamental right. Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:30:32.000you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:30:37.000And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:30:40.000With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:30:48.000Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:30:51.000Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:30:56.000That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
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00:33:51.000And it seems straightforward enough, so I don't even know why it would be questionable.
00:33:55.000A text is relevant, important, vital, valued, if it had a tremendous effect on other texts.
00:34:03.000And so maybe you write a book of genius like right now today, but it's not going to be canonical because it hasn't had the time to wend its influence through the entire corpus of texts that constitutes the culture.
00:34:15.000And so we could say, well, maybe a corpus of texts does constitute the culture.
00:34:24.000One is we do it in an embodied manner because we have emotions and we have motivations and they're built into us.
00:34:32.000And part of the reason that we can understand each other is because we have the same motivations and emotions.
00:34:37.000And so we can make reference to them without having to explain them.
00:34:41.000I don't have to explain what anger means to you.
00:34:43.000I don't have to explain what jealousy means.
00:34:45.000I might have to specify the conditions under which they arose and we could have an interesting discussion about whether that's relevant or not.
00:34:52.000But I don't have to tell you what they are.
00:34:54.000You're like me enough so that we can assume that.
00:34:56.000And so that's part of the ground for our fundamental understanding, our shared embodiment.
00:35:02.000We're very similar as embodied creatures.
00:35:04.000And we're even similar enough to animals that we can more or less understand complex animals for the same reason.
00:35:09.000You know, you know when a dog wants to play if you have any sense and you know anything about dogs.
00:35:14.000The dog bounces around in a playful way and you think, dog wants to play.
00:35:19.000And, you know, and the reason you know that is because you want to play too.
00:35:22.000And so you don't have to talk to the dog to establish that.
00:40:38.000And so even when you have an accurate history of World War II, it's obviously an unbelievably selective history.
00:40:46.000And there's a point of some sort to the history which the whole historical enterprise, in some sense, coalesces around.
00:40:55.000You don't want to read a history book without a point.
00:40:58.000The point seems to define the investigation.
00:41:01.000The story, in some sense, appears to define the investigation.
00:41:06.000I mean, generally, the histories we have of World War II, the point around which they aggregate is that what Hitler did was wrong.
00:41:15.000So there's an ethic, an a priori ethic, in some real sense, that defines the frame within which the events are interpreted, even so they can be aggregated.
00:41:26.000Because you might think, well, the most relevant events, the most relevant events of World War II are those that are the closest to Hitler's evil.
00:43:32.000Again, because compared to what exactly?
00:43:35.000And, you know, I've spoken with a lot of people who are dubious about religious claims.
00:43:41.000And fair enough, because they're difficult to understand and can be misused in all sorts of ways.
00:43:46.000But the idea that there's some relationship between our notion of intrinsic worth and our capacity to be the bearers of the honest speech that redeems seems to me to be a pretty bloody solid proposition.
00:44:00.000It's certainly what you hope for from the people that you have around you that you love and who you want to be of service to and vice versa.
00:44:08.000You hope that they tell you the truth in some manner that combines justice and mercy in some tolerable manner that still illuminates you.
00:44:22.000You're bloody fortunate if you've got that.
00:44:24.000And I think you do search for that in every relationship unless you become bitter and cynical.
00:44:29.000And, you know, that's its own set of problems.
00:44:31.000And it's not like anybody necessarily wants to go there.
00:44:34.000So I don't think we'll bother with that, exploring that tonight.
00:44:38.000And so I've been more and more thinking of this as a definition of what constitutes religious truth.
00:44:47.000So I think we have to look at the world.
00:44:50.000I think the structure we look at the world through has to be a structure of ethics.
00:46:35.000Our eyes have even evolved to do that.
00:46:37.000Our eyes have whites around the iris so that you can see where people point them.
00:46:42.000Because it's that important to know what people think is important.
00:46:46.000We see the world through a structure of value.
00:46:48.000And I think that a huge part of that structure of value is actually derived from the entire set of texts.
00:46:55.000The entire set of texts and their interrelationship that have the biblical corpus at their base.
00:47:01.000And so it seems to me that you, I think you can make a pretty damn strong case, maybe on scientific grounds, that you can't see the world except through the lens of the Bible.
00:47:13.000Like literally, you actually can't see it.
00:47:16.000Now, if it's not the Bible, might be some other corpus of texts, but it might be.
00:47:33.000We either stabilize our hierarchies of value in some way that we agree upon mutually, or we fight.
00:47:39.000That's, or we're unbelievably chaotic and confused, and that'll just produce fighting in any case.
00:47:44.000And so, we have this structure of texts built from the bottom up.
00:47:48.000It's predicated on the biblical narratives.
00:47:51.000And the texts exist in relationship to those underlying narratives, and derive a fair bit of their meaning from the meaning of the underlying narratives, and vice versa.
00:48:05.000And so then, the biblical, is it possible that biblical truth is the sort of truth that is the precondition for truth?