Speaker 1: What do you think are some of the biggest stumbling
blocks today for religious belief in this century? Because I
think a lot of people would talk before we went
to break about, you know, politics or faith being the
handmaid into politics.
Speaker 2: But what do you think is that stumbling.
Speaker 1: Block for folks today when they're looking at their own
approach to religious belief.
Speaker 3: Well, we were just talking about one, right, the extent
to which religion and politics seem entangled, and people feel,
you know, particularly right now, if you're not conservative or
right wing, people feel like conservative Christianity is coded.
Speaker 4: As right wing. And there's that issue.
Speaker 3: Although frankly, I think a lot of issues in the
Republican coalition right now are also linked to the decline
of religion right, and that a lot of things that
liberals and anti Trump people dislike about Trump era conservatism
are not about religion run amock, but about sort of
secularization and taking root even in the more religious coalition.
I mean, the other I think the argument that inevitably
comes up the most about religion as a stumbling block
is just the problem of evil, right and the idea
that it's just really really hard, at least for some
people to believe in the kind of God that Christianity
especially preaches, right, which is not just some kind of
creator of the universe, but a God who is good
in a way we can understand, right, who's not beyond
good and evil, but who is good, who cares about us,
Who is you know, who is involved in our life,
and that you know, there's a lot of suffering in
the world. It's a lot of bad things that happen,
from the extremes of you know, war and famine and
disaster to the personal, like everyone has tragedies in their
life that seem too difficult to bear in like things
that a.
Speaker 4: Good God would would not permit.
Speaker 3: You know, people have been arguing about that issue going
on ten thousand years or so. Right, It's not an
issue you resolve in a book or on a podcast.
The things I'd say about that, though, are one that first,
there's an extent to which that argument is already contained
within the old religious traditions themselves. Right, if you read
the Bible, if you read the Old Testament and the
New Testament both, like from Abraham to Job to Jesus
in the garden of Gainthtsemane, people are always questioning God's
purposes and arguing with God and feeling uncertain about what
God is doing in their life and whether God is
actually good in the way that we humans want God
to be good. Right, And I tend to think that
what religion offers to people who struggle with that problem
is an invitation to join the wrestling right to say, look,
there are good reasons to think there's probably a God.
There are good reasons to question God's purposes in specific ways.
Our traditions allow you to have both of those things,
to say, Look, we want to be in relationship to God,
but we also, like job, want to be able to say, God,
I don't know why this is happening. I have some
uncertainties and some doubts, and that you're not giving up
on that by becoming religious.
Speaker 4: The other point I would make is that.
Speaker 3: You know, we live in an incredibly rich and comfortable
society relative to all of human history. We still suffer,
we still die, we still have terrible diseases, terrible tragedies
befall us. But we really have escaped some forms of
suffering that we're kind of basic to human experience for
a very long time. And it's almost as if as
suffering has gone down, We've become more offended by it.
Speaker 4: Right, It's like people are like, well, you.
Speaker 3: Know, we have conquered certain forms of disease, we live
longer lives, we do all these things, and so the
suffering that remains feels more unbeare It's like, how could
God permit this?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Whereas if you go to societies that have shorter life
expectancies and more suffering, or even to places within our
own society I mentioned earlier my experience with chronic illness. Right,
if you go into the world and people have struggled
with chronic illnesses, lots and lots of people in those
societies are not saying I'm suffering so much, therefore I'm
an atheist. Right, They're saying I'm suffering so much, therefore
I need God's help even more.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Again, that's not a proof of God's existence. Maybe it's
just a crutch. Maybe people are deluding themselves. You can
think that, but you should have some respect for that reality. Right,
That great suffering often coexists with greater faith. An absence
of suffering often coexists with a sense, oh, no one
could possibly bear suffering.
Speaker 4: God could never ask people to suffer in this way.
Speaker 3: But when people actually do suffer, they don't necessarily have
that reaction. They actually can find their faith and their
relationship with God's strengthen.
Speaker 4: So mystery there important.
Speaker 1: That's the Job period that you talk about, you know,
with Job and the story of Job, which you bring
out to a larger narrative where the central question becomes, well,
why would any God allow this kind of suffering? Why
would any God allow man's inhumanity to man? Why would
any God permit the horrible things that happen to women
and to gay people, to.
Speaker 2: Whatever, you know, the areas of diseases.
Speaker 1: As you know that we've combated all of these other diseases,
but yet still you still have people who suffer particular
ailments and illnesses and folks come back. Well, if there's
a God, why does he permit that? If he loves
us so much, why does he allow so much pain?
Speaker 2: How do you deal with that.
Speaker 4: If the person themselves is suffering.
Speaker 3: In the Book of Job, God criticizes the friends of
Job who show up and are like, hey, Job, stop complaining.
You know God's charge, Everything works out right. God, God,
you know, rebukes Job too in a way, but also says,
Job is closer to the truth than his than his
glib friend.
Speaker 4: So it's really yeah. So the first thing is you
are glib.
Speaker 3: Right, if someone is suffering, you don't say, ah, here's
my complex theological scheme that explains, you.
Speaker 4: Know, why this is okay?
Speaker 2: Why you say? Look?
Speaker 3: No, the point, you know, the religious person is obliged
to essentially just.
Speaker 4: Enter into their neighbors suffering and help them. Right.
Speaker 3: But that but that then takes you and I will this.
This is sort of a Christian pitch right in the
In the New Testament, the New Testament presents an answer
to the problem of suffering. The answer it presents is
not a complex proof explaining why God suffers excuse me,
why God lets us suffer? It's an account of how
God himself entered into our suffering and shared it in
a profound, humiliating and brutal way.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: And again, that's not a proof, that's not you know,
it's not a sort of here's the five points that
explain why this particular level of suffering is acceptable, right,
I mean, that's part of the issue. Like, I think
a lot of people can accept that God would allow
some kind of suffering, right, we have free will. You know,
the world is here to do something for us and
to us, right, so it makes sense that it would
not be just like a constant, blissed out experience. People
accept that. It's more that the level of suffering seems
like too much. Okay, So the New Testament says, okay,
you know, maybe you feel that way, but God himself
has undergone this suffering too. God himself is offering a
kind of solidarity with all of human suffering on the cross.
And that may not be completely satisfying, but it is
a response. I think that's worth reckoning. That the way
you can tell that God is good is not that
God has done away with suffering, but that God has
shared it.
Speaker 2: How does faith and science reconcile each other?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think faith justifies science that science and
you know, if you go back to the dawn of
the modern scientific project, most of the scientists from you know,
Galileo and Copernicus to Newton and others, some of them
are heterodox Christians. They're not all like orthodox and so on,
but they tended to believe that the reason you could
be confident that science worked was that there was a
mind behind the cosmos. The cosmos was not just random,
It was not just accidental. That human minds were made
in the image of the divine mind, and that's why
human minds could understand how the whole thing worked, right,
And I think you know, that perspective has been vindicated
by hundreds of years of scientific progress. Again and again
it's turned out that, hey, guess what the human mind
is capable of understanding at level after level of complexity
after complexity, splitting the atom, rewriting our own genetic code,
doing all of these kinds of things that I don't
think you would predict necessarily on materialist grounds that like
some you know, over ambitious, jumped up ape that evolved
a certain toolkit, this toolkit that was made for survival,
you know, in the savannah or whatever, also lets you
understand quantum physics, right, Like, maybe, but it seems more
likely that that would be the case if the whole
system had a mind behind it in the first place.
So I think, again, this is not a dispositive one
hundred percent proof, but I think the whole modern scientific
project makes more sense if you ground it in a
basic religious perspective on the world that there probably is
that mind is probably mind comes before matter, not the
other around. And then you know then and that the
the science, the fact that it all works is a
testament to the principles of order and intentionality that religion
takes for granted. Whereas again, a hard materialism and you know,
not all forms of atheism, I don't take this form,
but a hard materialism that says, you know, our mind
is just matter in motion, that consciousness is just sort
of an illusion, like the sort of along for the ride.
It falls into self contradiction pretty easily. And again this
is not a novel point, right, but it's like, how
how how can how can you fully trust your reason
and capacities about the world if you think that reason
is kind of just an illusion stapled out chemical reactions?
Speaker 4: Right, I think.
Speaker 3: You you end up having more confidence in in science
if you think there's some kind of God then if
you don't.
Speaker 2: So last point for o Lechischout.
Speaker 1: Your faith journey that led you to convert to Catholicism
was influenced by C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis Chesterston Tolkien.
Speaker 1: What advice would you give to someone starting that spiritual
journey today for themselves?
Speaker 2: We can throw in your book now.
Speaker 3: Ordered believe why everyone should be religious the only book
you need. I mean again, I think it. As I
said at the beginning, I think in part it depends
on temperament, Like who you are, right, there are some
people for whom any kind of faith journey is going
to be primarily experiential. It's going to be about finding
a place or community where you feel like you are
in touch in some way with ultimate reality. And then
there are other people who kind of people I'm writing for,
who I think want religion to make logical sense.
Speaker 4: Don't want it to just.
Speaker 3: Be about like you know, experience and being beyond reason.
Speaker 4: They want it to make They want to make sense.
I think that's a reasonable request for those people.
Speaker 3: I think a good starting place would be to read
two authors who I cite in the book. One is
a philosopher who's not a religious believer named Thomas Nagel,
who has a book called Mine and Cosmos that again
is a non believer's critique of the sort of hard.
Speaker 4: Atheist materialist conception.
Speaker 3: Right. Nagel isn't sure that there's a God, but he thinks,
clearly mind our minds are not explained by just by
just you know, sort of material science alone, and then
I would read that in tandem with an Eastern Orthodox
thinker and writer named David Bentley Hart who has a
number of books. But I think the simplest place to
start is a book called The Experience of God. I
think if you read Nagel and Heart together and you
know they're kind of they can be hard going, but
they're not super long books. I think you get a
pretty clear sense of what is the critique of atheism,
what is the critique of materialism, and why you should
think that that mind is actually a supernatural phenomenon, not
just a natural one. And I think for at least
some people getting over that hurdle excepting that actually, you
know the self, the mind is not just You're not
just your brain and your body, or you are partially
your brain and your body, but you're something more. I
think that's a useful and important first step towards a
religious perspective on the world. I would also recommend those
books are more about like consciousness at the level of
sort of physics and the evidence for design in the
architecture of the universe. There's a book by a physicist
named Stephen Barr who came out about fifteen or twenty
years ago, but I think it's still the best straightforward introduction.
It's called something like Ancient Physics and Modern Faith. And
if you're interested in questions of the structure of the universe,
why it seems fine tuned, what the different theories for
why that might be are, how the religious theory stacks
up against alternatives.
Speaker 4: I think that's a good place to start.
Speaker 3: My book is intended to be a kind of gateway
into some of these more sophisticated arguments, So certainly you
should start with Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious? Available
on Amazon dot Com and other final but I think
the footnotes of the book, if you're interested in the
intellectual arguments, can take you a bit further than just
my newspaper columnist arguments alone.
Speaker 1: Now, but it's more than that, folks, trust me, And
I want to leave you all with a passage from
the book because I thought it was in some ways
really kind of reflective as the way people come at
the faith journey trying to figure out, you know, Muhammad
versus Jesus versus Buddha versus. You know, you don't need
to engage with every single person who has ever claimed
Divinity or read every single putatively holy text. Instead, you
can assume that the wisdom of the human past and
the workings of Providence have elevated a smaller set of
figures and texts for a reason, and try to encounter
several of them seriously as a reader and a student
of history and a person open to direct experience of
the Divine. That's it right, Open yourself up and the
Divine will speak to you, and you will come to
understand exactly what that is for you. And I appreciate
that about believe why everyone should be religious.