Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I am your host, Trevor.
I was upstairs working on a research paper, a paper
I'm really excited about. I think this is going somewhere big.
I think this is going to the maybe the Journal
of the American Medical Association. That might be a little
bit optimistic. Most likely, what will happen is I'll send
it there and they'll kick it to one of their
sister journals. That's not quite as cool. But I think
it's going somewhere big Lancet. Maybe. How cool would that
be New England Journal of Medicine. Anyway, I'm sitting here,
I'm working, and I'm just kidding tired. It's it's kind
of tedium, you know, finding the citations and crafting the sentences.
I like to sort of I treat writing like a
like kind of sacred and I like it to sound good.
But I have to bottle that up because scientific writing
is completely different. It's a completely different animal. I argue
all the time with my collaborators about writing because they
like these boring, choppy sentences, and I just want to
talk about the fall of Rome in my research fame.
Once Galileo said, the job of the scientist is to
measure and to render measurable that which is not. And
they're like, no, how about we just say the risk
ratio is point eight and the P value is point
zero zero five. Anyway, so I was up there writing,
I was looking around. My wife is on a zoom call.
My daughter's face timing her friend, which I love that
that she's doing that. My son is just engrossed in
his favorite YouTube channel, which is bass Phishing Productions. I
love watching that show with him. But I was like,
everyone's content. So I walked over. I carried my computer
up to my wife and I whispered to her because
she's on a zoom call, and I said, hey, I
think I need a change of scenery. I think I'm
gonna go downstairs and work. And she looked at me, like,
don't you lie to me. I know what you're doing.
I know what you're really doing downstairs. You're gonna record
a podcast, call it Women's Intuition. She's right, it's here.
I just needed a break too much to ask. Anyway,
So we're gonna pick up where we left off. The
question from Alex O'Connor to Jonathan Pagot was what was
the serpent even doing in the garden. This is kind
of an obvious question, right, the one that rarely gets asked,
And I don't like that. I don't like the fragility
that a lot of Christians have when it comes to
theological questions. I think we have to be comfortable as
Christians saying like, well, frankly, either you can say I
don't know, or you can say I don't know. But
there are a lot of people who have studied this
topic deeply, so I guess I can look into it
or something like, I don't know if it really needs
to meet your understanding. You're human, temporary, fragile, and insignificant understanding,
but we should be able to talk about it, right,
And so that's what we're gonna do. And I think
we're picking up right now with Jonathan's answer, which will
undoubtedly beat thirty minutes long. So, oh my god, this
always happens. I hit play. The commercial starts right at
the climactic perfect I think we can No one can
argue I delivered that perfectly. It was going to be
high quality production, but no, it's a Vegas commercial. Oh no,
what is going on now? I won't even move on
it's I'm stuck in an infinite loop of commercial there's
no option to skip. Oh now, I'm going to add
from James Tallerico and Texas the Christian Democrat running for Senate,
they should just give up. Okay, here we go. We're back.
We're back. We're back.
Speaker 2: Baby, into that which is not cohesive is trying to
speak into that which is together. Right, So it's a
it's poisoned.
Speaker 3: And where where do you think this comes from? I mean,
this is maybe a good question to sort of interject here.
Why is the serpent in the garden? I mean, for
a biblical literalist, that's going to be a difficult question.
Why did God create a serpent? But you know, on
this sort of allegorical account, what is this? What does
this mean? We're sort of giving an account of the
creation of the world and of mankind by a loving
God who sort of creates human beings with a particular
intention for them in mind, but also creates this serpent
that's sort of slithering around and trying to sort of
knock them off course, why is that there in the
first place?
Speaker 2: So this the serpent is that for in order for
in order for something to exist just like good and bad.
You need an aspect of this of strangeness. You need
something which is the limit of of of being right
or the limit of influence. Maybe it's a good way
to understand it. So Adam names the animals. God says,
name the animals. He's naming the animals. There are some
things which escape his naming because he's not God. And
so the serpent is a natural aspect of the world.
Like you. You you encounter that all the time, right,
you encounter strangeness. You encounter things that are not properly named,
that don't have proper identity, and those those can I
say this, like, and the reason and what you want
to be able to do is to name that. And
you you want to be careful that it doesn't it
doesn't take over you, because the aspect of of the strange,
that which is not doesn't fit, and that that you
know it it's bigger than you. Right, it can eat you,
it can swallow you up because it's not because it's
it's it's outside. You could say, it's something like an
image of chaos. Right, So okay, so let's let's let's
let's let let's just I guess here here, let's let's
start from again. Let's start from the beginning. God creates
heaven and earth, He creates ordering, chaos. He he creates name, essence, purpose, identity,
and then potentiality and darkness and chaos, right, and then
in the scripture account he repeats that over and over
he does that. He keeps doing that. So he creates
something below, which is akin to very variation. And then
he creates something above, which is akin to order. And
he keeps doing that as he moves towards man. So
he creates heaven and earth, right, then he creates you know,
interesting levee. He creates the grass, and he creates stars, right,
and then he creates birds, and he creates fish. Then
he creates why do why do you said? You said
animals and wild animals? Like what kind of categorization is that?
For a biologist, that's a silly categorization, like why would
you show you've got some animals and wild animals?
Speaker 3: He's creating or right, But but what about like the
you know, the the you said the grass and the
stars or the birds and the fish. Why is it
that the birds a sort of order and the fish
are chaos?
Speaker 2: You know what I mean, because the the birds are
in the light and the fish are in the darkness.
You have to you really have to break your if
you want to under if your purpose is to understand
the story, like you have to break out of your
your your reduction is framed like. You just have to
break out of it. You have to place yourself in
the world as a being that experiences reality and is
it and has a has an order of being. Right,
So light comes from above, Right, patterns come from above.
The stars in the sky move in a regular fashion.
The things at the bottom here move in an irregular fashion.
There's some pattern to it, but it's not a clear pattern.
It's not it's not it's not a clockwork like pattern.
And sure, and and the birds, the birds sing. I know,
I know, you think that might sound stupid, But the
birds they make patterns akin to the heavens, and they
also live in the heavens, and therefore they they are
akin to spiritual beings, like in terms of the experience
of things that provide patterns from above, and then things
that are kind of hidden in the darkest below.
Speaker 1: All right, this is getting a little off the rails,
but I'm gonna give him I have a listen to
this yet. So I'm gonna give him. I'm gonna give
him a chance. And I appreciate that Alex has giving
him a chance too, because it's like, yeah, if the
story kind of doesn't make sense from our modern perspective,
so let's try to for a moment abandon our modern
perspective and then maybe the story will make sense. I
don't know so far. I would say, eh, you know,
I'm not sure, but let's give it. Let's give it
a chance.
Speaker 2: Right. And so the way that the categories of being
that are described are always related to the relationship between
meaning and chaos, Like I said, that's why God, that's
why the categories of of of mammals is like tame animals,
wild animals, and creepy crawlers underground. Those are the three
categories of animals. Like that's not that's not a biologist description.
But so then that structure like the structure of ordering chaos,
and that they joined order in the human because the
human God takes the dust and then puts air inside.
It's the first time in the whole text where he
actually puts heaven in earth. Until then it's like this
weird relationship of duality between order and chaos. They kind
of move.
Speaker 3: Closer and the bottom come together, and they come.
Speaker 2: Together in man and he gathers the earth together and
he blows air into it, and now you have a
living being.
Speaker 1: And so first of all, just say, if that's true,
you know, if this is the symbolism that the author
is trying to evoke, it's pretty amazing if it's true.
Now here's the thing. I don't know if you remember,
do you remember the Bible code. I remember my It
is either my dad or my stepmom. Someone was very
into this when I was like in high school, and
it was like you could use the Bible to make predictions,
and like there is these claims that you know, like
the Bible predicts September eleventh, and it predicts World War
two or whatever, and it I don't understand the details,
but it was pretty fantastical and there were elements of
it that were sort of compelling, and then there were
of it. There's parts of it where it was like
I don't know, and I think, if I'm remembering this correctly,
I should I should check stuff before I just say it.
But I'm telling you now, I think this is what
I recall is that someone demonstrated you can do the
exact same thing with Moby Dick. And the point was
that that the predictive capacity just came from the fact
that there's like a limitless number of characters in these
books and if you like are trying to predict things retroactively,
like you know, this thing happened, like you can sort
of extract like somehow this and it's kind of it's
kind of like a hypnosis, you know, a hypnotist, sorry,
or not a hypnotist. The guy a medium you know
on TV the people, is anyone out here having have
something to do with the legs? You know something. I'm
just picking up on something, something about legs And then
the lady raises her hand. Oh my my father just
fell and fractured his hip and he recently passed away
due to complications. Yes, that's it. That's exactly right, you
know what I mean. Like, so it's kind of like
that there is almost an element of that to this,
or there could be you know, there could be that
you're trying to find meaning in the symbolism. However, that said,
I some of this stuff actually is kind of I
would say it seems sort of credible, like this idea
that the Bible is sort of alternating between like order
and heavenly creatures and disorderly and disorderly and wild creatures.
And then at the end, after all of that, and
it's not just a creatures too, it's dividing the waters
from the waters and the heaven and the earth like
it's up down, up, down, uptown. And then finally at
the kind of the conclusion, it's like, and then we
took the heaven and the earth and we put them together,
and we made humans in our image, and this is
God speaking. There kind of seems like there might be
something to that, So I'm still on board. I'm not
giving up on Jonathan.
Speaker 2: That Then that structure gets repeated again in the text constantly.
Then in the garden is the same structure. You have
a tree and you have a serpent. A tree is
an image of order, like an image of structure. It's
a fractal, right, it's a fractal structure. And then you
have a snake, and a snake is an image of change.
It's an image of changes its skin. It's like it
can be in two places at the same time. It's shifty,
it's shrewd. It's an image of chaos, like the idea
that a snake is the image of chaos. I hope
you can see that this is something that is pretty universal,
like in every culture, this kind of giant sea serpent,
this Leviathan type slithering thing that that kind of moves
and shifts and coils itself and is an image of
a chaotic or strangeness of being, you know. And so
that's what they're in the garden. The garden is just
a microcosm of what was being said from the beginning.
It just repeats the structure. And so in the garden
you have the same structure as the beginning of genesis,
of heaven and Earth coming together. So now you have
this relationship between this tree, this tree which is structure,
and the snake, which is chaos. And what God says
is don't take that which is above for yourself, like
don't take it with your own will. You can't do
not eat of it. And what's implied, and I know
this will sound annoying because it's implied only if you understand,
if you see the whole text together, like the whole
Bible is speaking to each other what's implied is that
God will give them the fruit later. Okay, the Third Fathers,
they say that that God had planned to give them
the truth of and the Rabbi say, if they had
only waited until Sabbath, like they would have, they would
have received the fruit. It was only that they should
not take it in willful pull ourselves. Yeah, in self causation, right,
that's the problem. The whole A lot of the text
is about causation.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like God causes Adam. Adam causes the animals to
some extent because he names them, so his role is
to his name from above and to But now it's like, no,
I'm going to take a name from myself, but I'm
going to take I'm going to take this thing from
heaven that's above me. Think about the tree going up
into the heavens, that the apple is above. I'm gonna
grab it above and I'm going to bring it down
to me, you know, and then I'll be like God.
I'm gonna make myself like God. Uh. And that's that's
the problem in the story, you know. And the the
like I said, many of the traditions say, because the
tradition is is even in the text. It's hilarious because
you know, the serpent says, eat the fruit and you'll
be like God. This the text already says they're like God.
The text says, they're creating the image of God. And
so what is he actually doing. He's this, it's a
it's a nice trick. He's like, if you eat the fruit,
you'll be like God. And it's like, well, they were
already like God.
Speaker 3: And maybe they get something does change the right sorry,
go ahead, yeah, so something something does change, right like that,
their eyes are opened. They realize that the naked that's important.
Did you skip that? Yeah, that's's right. That the sort
of the nakedness, the sort of the introduction of shame.
It seems into.
Speaker 2: Notice that they're They notice that they're different. That's the
best way to understand it. They realize that they have
to hide themselves from each other. And so now before
they were together, they didn't they were one. Made a
good way to understand it. They were one in love.
Like I know it sounds sappy to say that, but
they were united with God. To the extent that.
Speaker 1: I'm digging this, am I crazy?
Speaker 2: This?
Speaker 1: This this is so it's so much easier to like
accept that this is just an incredibly complicated and symbolic
story than to accept like that this literally happened this way.
And again, I'm not even saying I don't think it happened.
I'm just saying I think that there's a lot of symbolic,
lot of symbolism. It's like a it's like a way
of carrying a large amount of data into the future,
you know, like we we have this story today because
of the way it was written. If it was written
in the way it literally happened, I just I don't
think anyone would be able to No human would be
able to contend with it. It would get destroyed, it
wouldn't be carried on. Like whatever this event was, like,
it had to be told this way, to be written
this way. It was written in a way that it
just appealed to our innate sense of story, in a
way that it was transmitted orally and then written in
a written form for thousands of years, and yet somehow
still contains the actual story in this strange way. You know,
it's like a ZIP file you take a thousand uh
you know, I do this all the time on my computer,
Like I have a thousand MRI images. There's no way
I could possibly transmit them digitally because it's like one
hundred or you know, five hundred gigabytes of data and
I'm trying to put it in an email. You know,
I can compress it and then it can be extracted
and decoded later in a different place by someone else.
And it's it's kind of like, that's sort of what
happened in a cool way. You know. Maybe maybe I mean,
maybe I'm just reading into it too much. But if
I have to pick between this literally happened or this
is like a symbolic representation of what happened, I'm going
to pick the latter.
Speaker 2: That's well, they were united with each other to the
extent that that's possible, you know, while remaining separate. So
it's like multiplicity and unity was was was balanced. And
so now they eat the fruit of good and bad,
and now they fall into bad. So now they start
to see that they're different from the other as an opponent,
and so they hide themselves. They keep secrets now from
each other, and then they hide themselves from God. They
keep secrets from God, and so that's death. They already
started dying as soon as they ate the fruit. They
started dying because they started to move into separation from unity.
They move from a body into multiplicity. So think about
like anything like a sports team or a company you know,
that has multiplicity towards unity, like where all these people
were kind of a team and working together towards the purpose.
And so because that we have this nice dance aspect
to what we're doing. But then if if we fall
into suspicion, then now I see my team member as
my enemy. So now I hide things from them, Now
I blame them, and now we're blaming each other and
where we've forgotten, like they're even the reason why we're
we're together towards this purpose.
Speaker 1: And you know what, there's a weird way that this
actually kind of is the natural reading of the text.
I know, and I know it's crazy to say, but
you know when you read it, there is almost you
feel it in the rhythm of the story. You feel like,
you know, because Adam blames Eve immediately, you know, she
told me to. And they're naked and they're aware, and
they hide themselves and they hide from God, and God's like,
why are you hiding?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: And it's because I heard you and I was naked.
Who told you you were naked? Did you eat of
the tree? I told you not to eat of? And
there's it's just this immediate just like disarray. You know,
it's this great story there everyone is one and they're
in the presence of God and they're in the garden,
and yeah, there is chaos and disorder. There are the
creepy things, and there is the serpent. But they are
united and they are following God's will. But then they don't.
Chaos speaks to Eve and Eve chooses. He doesn't grab
her hand and push it up to the fruit. Eve
chooses to enact her will, which is indirect opposition to
God's will, and she dies and it just sets this
chain of events of chaos and disorder. It's there is
kind of a way where as crazy and symbolic and
like mumbo jumbo philosophical mumbo jumbo, it's like, no, this
actually kind of is the story. It's pretty cool. I
like this. I'm into it.
Speaker 2: That spells death. That's death. That means that now you
won't accomplish the purpose of what you're doing.
Speaker 3: So talk to me about the fairness of this. Because
when God comes back to them and they're hiding because
they're naked. God says, well, who told you were naked?
You know?
Speaker 2: Did you?
Speaker 3: Did you do what I told you not to do?
And Adam says, oh, it was Eve, she made me
do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, just to give you a heads up. So this
video is like segmented up into chapters. So we just
finished the chapter which was titled what was the Serpent
Doing in the Garden? This chapter is was it Fair
for Eve to be punished? And it's another seven minutes,
so that probably probably will be all we do. So
we'll probably do a part three and maybe even a
part four of this. And but the next part is
the part that got replayed the most, so it's probably
the most interesting, and that is the big problem with
the dot dot Dot doesn't say so maybe we'll try
to do two more chapters. But here we go. We'll
start was it fair for Eve? To be punished?
Speaker 3: And God goes to Eve and Eve says, oh, it's
the serpent. The serpent deceived me. And then God says
to the serpent, because you have done this, and then
punishes the serpent as if sort of accepting eve charge
that it was the serpent.
Speaker 2: Who did this.
Speaker 3: Eve charges that the serpent deceived her, and it seems
on this reading that that's what's actually happened. If indeed
the serpent is the evil one, the chaotic one who's
sort of bringing in something that shouldn't be there. It's
not like the serpent says, tell what Eve, you know,
do this? Do this super evil thing, do this bad thing?
Be be a bit naughty. The serpent deceives her by saying,
this is the thing you should do.
Speaker 2: You know, this is this is this is.
Speaker 3: What this is like you want like you could be
like God exactly and so and so again. I sort
of understand that as a as a modern person sort
of writing an essentially fictional account of the sort of
mythological origins of the way we think about the world,
this sort of warning of like wanting to be like
God seeming like a good thing until you get it. Like, yeah, interesting,
nice moral point in all, But when you're looking at
this story as a sort of more fleshed out narrative
for Eve to be deceived into doing this and then
be suffering what seems to be like a positively inflicted
punishment as a result, and also if this is some
broad story about the way that sort of sin sort
of enters the world and what it is to be
connected to God or separated from God, or like to
be mortal or not to be mortal. It seems so
strange that the punishment that God instills is something so
sort of specific and physical, like you're going to You're
going to scream a bunch in childbirth.
Speaker 2: Now, well, the punishment is perfect for what it is
that I'm trying to explain to you. It's it's not
even a punishment it is. God doesn't say I'm going
to punish you. God just says, this is what's going
to happen. He says, now that you've.
Speaker 3: I will make your your your pains in child but
bearing very severe. You know, with painful labor, you will
give birth to your children. Your desire will be for
your husband, and he will rule over you. It seems
like God is sort of ordaining this this system. Now
now man will rule over you.
Speaker 2: So the way the way to understand, especially the way
to understand curses and blessings in the scripture, there are
two aspects of it right. One aspect is God is
making it so. But God is also making it so
because that's actually the nature of the world. It's like,
this is actually God. The world has a certain structure
and a certain function, and if you do certain things,
then certain things happen. Right. It's like I could say,
I could say, for example, to you, I could say,
if you if you start taking Heroin, this is what's
going to happen. And then you start taking Heroin and
I say, well, I told you that's what's going to happen.
Now it's going to happen, and then you have the
consequences of your action.
Speaker 3: But if it was if it was something like, Okay,
I told you not to take Heroin, Alex, and now
that you have taken Heroin, I'm going to greatly increase
your pains. I'm going to make things difficult for you.
I'm going to lock you in a room and send
you to rehab. There's a sense okay, rehab. It's a
good example there, because like if I lock you in
a room to sort of make you a cold turkey
and give a proin, that's a sense in which I
could say, Look, what I was basically saying is that
if you take Heroin, this is what's going to happen
to you, and that's kind of true, but it's still
true that I'm the one who's doing that to them.
Maybe it's for their own good, maybe it's what they need,
maybe it's what they deserve, like who knows, But it
doesn't seem like it's just some like natural result of
eating this fruit that Adam and Eves sort of you know,
suddenly find themselves fooling away from the garden of eden.
Is like God finds them, says, hold on, what have
you done? And then banishes them.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the curses together. It's look at the
three curses because they're actually just they're just repetitions of
the of each other. Like each curse is actually has
the same structure, and it's one is applied to the serpent,
when is applied to man, and is applied to one
is by to woman and was applied to man. But
it has the same structure, and it's the structure of death.
It's a structure of revolution, and it's the structure of
the process of death. You could say, the problem of death. Oka. Okay,
so he starts with actually the first thing, the first
thing to understand is the end of it. The end
of it is the key because the end, says curses
the ground, because he said, sorry, the end is from sweat,
from dust you have come, and to dust you have returned.
You will return that. That's it. He's saying, Remember that
dust thing. Remember the elements that have nothing to do
with each other, that aren't connected in unity. That's where
you come from. Now you're going to return to that disunity.
You're gonna break apart into multiplicity that is not related
to each other. Okay, And so the first thing he
says is to the serpent, he says, right, you are
going to be on the ground and you're going to
eat dust. So obviously it's related to the dust that
is in the end of the curse. Right, he's saying,
there's a connection between the two. He's saying. So he's saying,
now you are going to only eat that which has
no identity with each other. You are only the only
thing that you will feed on are things that are
not connected to each other. You will now be only
say chaos that serves chaos instead of the way that
chaos in the in the in the Genesis structure, chaos
is somehow is the potential for being right. It's basically
that out of which being comes. And so now he's saying, no,
you are going to only be chaos. You are going
to eat chaos. And and you're going to say, be
the identity of chaos is a good way to say.
And then what you're going to do is you're going
to continue this revolutionary trope. You're going to bite at
the heel of man. And now because of that, man
has to impose order on you. He's going to crush
your head. Now you've got the beginning of civilization right there.
It's like, now order becomes something like a form of
tyranny or a form of imposition of a of a
of a force on chaos. And so that's the beginning
of that, right, It's like, right there in that image
you see the beginning of what we'll later call civilization.
And so the serpent comes and bites at the heel
the man has to crush it. The next one, the
next one is, oh, Eve, you are the agent of multiplicity, right,
that's what Jorna was trying to bring about. You are
the agent of multiplicity of Adam. You are that which
multiplies Adam. But now you will do it in suffering.
Now the production of multiplicity will not be towards unity,
will not be towards cohesion. It will be towards pain.
It will be towards suffering. It will move multiplicity into suffering.
And then the same structure is gonna happen. You're gonna
desire for your husband and he's gonna crush you. That's
what's coming, right. It's like you will have that movement
towards a revolutionary movement, or that movement of desire to
get what your husband has, and he will rule over you.
And then the third one is the same thing, the
same structure. He says, Now the ground is cursed. It's
going to produce opposition. It's going to produce thorns that
are that are going to oppose to you. And you're
gonna have to work, and you're gonna have to impose
your will on the earth in order for it to
produce fruit to you. And so and then all of that.
Speaker 1: God is kind of cool, huh. I know, cool is
a wholly inadequate word, but it is kind of like,
I guess, you know, maybe you could accuse me of
giving Jonathan too much leeway with this interpretation, but I
don't know. It does kind of seem like the curse was, Hey,
you want to exercise your will. You want to do
things the way you want to do them. You know,
I gave you free will, so I'm glad. I was
hoping you would defer to mine of your own volition. Right,
this is God, right, I'm playing the role of God
right now. You know, I was hoping you choose to
follow my will on your own, but you didn't. And
that's okay. But what comes with that is you got
to make it happen. It's up to you now, you know.
It is kind of a mirrors like a benevolent father,
which is like, okay, hey, you want to do it
your way. Okay, you know this is how it's gonna be.
And it's not vindictive. I mean, you could interpret it
as vindictive every teenage boy does. Right, It's like, okay,
you're on your own, you know now. But but fortunately
we aren't really on our own, as we'll learn in
the Bible, like he is still a beneflent father. He
just is allowing us to just mess up, you know,
and learn and come on, like, let's say, heaven is real.
Are you not gonna look back at this time and
realize that you learned a lot. Some people won't. Some
people learned to hate creation, but others won't. Others will
learn to love the good parts, others will learn to
hate the bad parts. And I think you can do both.
But ultimately, I think you will have learned something right
about yourself, about being about God, about what you want?
You know, Like, is that is joy and love and compassion?
Is that better than pride and envy and lust and wrath?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Are you willing to give the one up? Even though
there's benefits? Like who who doesn't love some righteous indignation
and some competition and some envy and some lust and desires.
It's they're the passions, you know. Let's not act like
they're just these things are all inherently unappealing, Like, let's
be real. We desire them, We have a strong desire
for them. And so in life do we learn like, hey,
it's not worth it. I think that is a pretty
cool way of looking at it. I don't know, I
like this. I keep saying that over and over. I do,
but I do. It's nice. It's nice to hear a
Christian deploying like deep intellectual curiosity and what you might
call philosophy to theological issues. You know, imagine having this
conversation at the Zipline Jesus swimming pool back to some place.
You know, I'm being hard on them, but you know
the light show Zipline Jesus and the band and Jonathan
Bajoe gets up there. All right, guys, listen, listen, we
got to talk about the anyway. It's just different strokes
for different folks, I suppose.
Speaker 2: So basically it's it's like order is going to increase
because you're gonna have to impose it on chaos before that.
The sense is that order is naming, Order is is inviting.
Order is right. God calls the earth and says, bring forth,
and then God is naming things. And so order is
this beautiful almost like dance of meaning, where there's a
balance between like God just gives the identities and people
recognize them in particip debating them. Now it's like no, no, no, Now,
order is going to be forced. Now, order is going
to be imposed from from from above. And that's the
consequence of death. Is that is that? And so whether
you like it or not, like whether you think okay,
it's unfair, it sucks or whatever, like that's our experience
that's how that's our experience of the world. Our experience
of the world is that when chaos increases, we're in
danger of fragmenting into dust. So you're in a you're
in a company, and now people are starting to act
against each other. They're starting to pull the blanket, they're
starting to be corrupt, they're starting to steal money. And
therefore the danger the company is going to split into dust.
It's going to stop, it's going to stop existing. So
what do we do. We make rules and then we
impose them.
Speaker 1: God, this is our experience. I love that. Like it
or not, this is the way our our existence works.
I mean, even even the process of life, like on
a biological level, mirrors the You know, we have all
of these disparate cells with unique wills, and there is
some forceet just forces them to heal. And it says, no,
you're a muscle cell, you know your bone. Oh you
want to go scavenge for nutrients. Too bad, You're now
a mucous producing cell in the lining of this stomach. Yeah,
we know you all have the same DNA, but no,
this is what you are. You do not have an identity, right,
And then as you h just changes. This is what
cancer is. Cancer is the reversal of that process. It's
it's Eve choosing. Now I'm really stretching it, but Eve
choosing to exert her own will. Right, It's each cell says, wait,
maybe I'm not a bone cell. Maybe I'm my own thing.
And what do you do if you're your own thing?
You go out, you spread, you reproduce, you consume, and
all disease is really like a departure from this like
collective identity, or at least a failure to live up
to your role and your potential. And that's death. And
you return to dust. From dust. You came to dust,
you will return.
Speaker 2: We find ways of ejecting people, We figure out how
to fire people. We have processes to reprimand things that
go against the purpose of the company. So that's what's
been set up here.
Speaker 3: That sounds a little bit like punishment reprimanding. I know
you're sort of speaking analogically that, but but I mean,
for example, the pain.
Speaker 1: And sorry I was just going to say the metaphor
here would be the immune system. You know, that's the hammer.
You want to be your own thing. You're dead and
we're hammers. This is this is the fractal all things.
He's using corporations and institutions as the metaphor, but it's
all things.
Speaker 3: It's very cool just where you live in alex Yeah,
so you said, this is what I understand. I totally
understand why somebody who lives in this world would write
the Genesis account, right, I totally get why somebody who
finds themselves in a world of misaligned desires and suffering
and childbirth and all this kind of stuff, pain and childbirth.
Speaker 1: I mean, God, this is the right question to ask.
You've got to give it to the guy. Okay, you've
sold me, right, You've sold me that this is a rich,
unbelievably poetic description of the human experience. Did it happen.
Speaker 3: Would write this account that tries to encompass this sort
of deep psychological feeling that we have about our unfittedness
to the world and our desire that the world be
a way that it isn't, and that there's sort of
a our sort of upset about our knowledge of our
own mortality. I mean, I could say the thing that
makes human being special is that they know they're going
to die in a way that a cat probably doesn't know.
It's going to die.
Speaker 2: Who knows.
Speaker 3: I'm not a biologist, but whatever, let's say that's the case.
I could say, okay, so the genesis account, because we
find ourselves in the world where we're the only creatures
who know we're going to die. Speaking really crudely here,
I write this story because obviously the stories of comes
up out of you know, this this tradition of thinking
which will encompass, you know, a depth of thought that
it's impossible for a single person to author. But you'll
see what I'm saying that this story emerges that well,
this knowledge of good and evil, the thing that enters
the world is mortality. Maybe it's got something to do
with the fact that I'm trying to tell the story
of how humans came to be the only ones that
knew they were going to die. And once we learned
that we were going to die, we suddenly became a
lot more scared and a lot more you know, like
our nakedness, because we recognize that we were sort of
exposed to the elements. And now we're going to have
to fight with each other and toil with each other,
and we're going to have to sort of, you know,
get property rights and all of this kind of stuff,
because if we don't, we're going to.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to preempt Jonathan's answer by saying, like
I don't. I don't think Jonathan really can have an
answer to this question. Now, if he does, awesome, But
the truth is, like if he did, if he had
like a very compelling answer to this question, like then
there would be no debate, you know, Like I think
it's just enough to say, like, we don't fit in
this world. We all know that the fact that we
know that, or have the ability to think that, points
to our uniqueness. And here's a story that perfectly captures
this like unbelievable philosophical metaphor and like and that's just
that one story, and their story after story after story
in thousands of pages, and there's a fulfillment of these
stories in the form of a man who claims to
be sent from the Father in heaven and he's crucified,
is reborn. Pretty pretty cool story, bro, you know what
I mean. So it's like, yeah, I mean, I don't
think we can really expect Jonathan to be like, well, actually,
I've been digging in an Ethiopia or Iraq, and I
did find direct I found direct evidence that this literally
and actually happened, you know, or even metaphorically happened. Like
it's an impossible it's you ask too much, Alex. But
we'll see what he says. Die.
Speaker 3: And it's this knowledge of death entering the world that
totally ruined things for us. And that's what's trying to
be encompassed in the Genesis story. Like I could sort
of come up with a story like this and it
would actually make sense because, like you just said, a
moment ago, I could say, look, man, this is just
the world you live in, and this is a narrative
attempt to capture that. The problem in the Christian tradition
for me is that Genesis can't just be an attempt
to sort of describe ay the world as you find
it and offer a sort of a narrative account of
our psychological feelings towards the world. It has to also
say that this character, this Lord God, is the intentional
creator of this system. He had reasons to make things
the way that they are. You know, the fact that
a knowledge of good and evil will lead to increased
pain and childbirth, for example, seems something contingent, right when
you are God, When you're the creator of the universe.
It seems like it didn't have to be that way.
And so you know, when you say, well, that's just
the world you're in, I agree, But I'm not the
one who believes that there's a god who sort of
ordains that things be that way. You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I mean, I kind of see what you're saying, but
not really in the sense that in the sense that
first off, First off, that the text is how can
I say the text is a description of what happened.
It's not just someone who sat around and made up,
you know, this story. I don't think anybody made up
this story. It's not a scientific description. It's not a
it's not in any ways the type of description that
modern people like. But it is a description of it
is I think it is a description of an event.
It's not an event in the in the banal sense,
because it's in some ways a meta event, but it
is it is a description of something that that happened.
And how can I say this? It's like, there is
no other way for the world to exist besides the
relationship between unity and multiplicity, because it is the very
core of how identities function. And so identities, the one
of the identity is made up of the multiple of
its parts, and that's actually the very the very source
of how something exists. And so to give a story
that gives really it's giving a metaphysics. It's giving a
manner in which the world exists. Right, the relationship between
between unity and name and meaning and spirit, all of
these things, and the relationship between multiplicity and death and chaos,
variation change, that's what the story is talking about. And
so it isn't an arbitrary god that just arbitrary to
decide the world functions that way. There is no other
world you can conceive of besides the world that is
being described in Genesis. I'd like to hear of another
world that is not made up of the joining of
unity and multiplicity, in which if multiplicity is given free reign,
then it will annul the unity and will lead to.
Speaker 1: Oops. I need to use duck duck go like a
listener recommended. Apparently there's no commercials on duc dot go.
Can that be real? I don't know. I need to try.
Speaker 2: Here we go like it needs a breakdown of identity.
Speaker 3: So tell me help me understand this. What's wrong with
the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, trees that they're
eating of, maybe even still the tree of knowledge of
good and evil that they can't eat from that if
they eat of it, you know everything's going to go wrong.
But there's no serpent. Now, I now you say that
there needs to be this element of the chaotic and
the and the strange as sort of the boundary of
of I can't remember exactly how you described it before,
but but just sort of crudely here, like help me understand,
and maybe you'll feel like you're repeating yourself here. I'm
sorry if you do. But this, this, this picture of
the Garden of Eden, I'm sort of imagining I'm doing
my big Renaissance painting, and I've got Adam and I've
got Eve, and I've got the grass and the trees,
and God's there somewhere, and there's just no serpent. And
the serpent just never gets introduced, it's never created, and
everyone lives happily ever after. You know, what, what's what's?
Speaker 2: What's? I get?
Speaker 3: Maybe that's not the world we find ourselves in. But
why why.
Speaker 1: Didn't Well I just to kind of play to be
an advocate here, I guess in this case, God's advocate,
not the devil's advocate. I don't know, I kind of
feel like you need both, right, I mean, what's the
value in not? It's like it's like again I'd made
this comment before, but like, what's the more noble? You know,
maybe this is a bad example, so but what's more noble?
A man who doesn't cheat on his wife because he's
out of shape and unemployed and a jerk and a scumbag. Like,
do we at the end of his marriage say, what
what a what a tremendous moral man, what a what
a moral figure? He never once cheated on his beautiful wife? Right,
you know what I mean. Let's say it's this beautiful
woman who also cooks and cleans and and has a
high income job, and you're just looking at this husband
who's just an absolute slob and dirt bag and scumbag
and every other way, except he doesn't cheat on his wife. Like,
I don't know, Like, is that is that impressive? You know?
Not that not that we're going for impressive here when
it comes to existence. But but contrast that with the
with a successful man who who is good looking and
is uh, there's a lot of female interest in him,
and he is loyal to his wife, Like to me,
that's somehow more valuable. Like certainly from I would think
from the woman's perspective, right, and so from God's perspective,
I almost kind of think the same thing, Like if
you just make these creatures who have no choice but
to live in harmony with you, it's it's kind of
it's kind of like building a robot wife, Like wouldn't
you rather a woman choose to love you than to
make a soulless slave. It's kind of a version of
the free will argument.
Speaker 2: I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess it's like, you, you know, can we really
choose God if there is no other choice, if there
is not chaos and disorder for us to embrace? I
mean what, it's kind of crazy, like you'll hear you'll
hear atheists kind of make the claim that like that
go where God's slaves, and it's like, no, the God
you want, the God who just you know, makes pops
humans into existence and we don't have the ability to
make bad choices, that that's a slave, Like that would
be God making a slave. God didn't make that. And
now you're complaining. Now you're complaining about it again. It's
like the petulant teenager who crashes the car and it's like, well, well,
why did you even let me drive the car? You know,
you know what I mean, Like you can imagine, you
can imagine some scenario where it's like, oh my gosh,
it's like no, I mean, you can't have it both ways,
but you know you want freedom. This is the cost,
not just that it's it's not that it's not.
Speaker 2: The world that we find ourselves in in a in
a in a kind of banal mythological way, it's it's
not the world we find in ourselves in in the
sense that when we analyze the manner in which the
world functions, we come to the we come to the
a conclusion. Abstractly, that's similar to the problem of the
the of the Garden of Eden, which is that, like
I said, I live in a world where I notice
that things move away from their good into a breakdown,
and that causes pain, and it causes suffering, and in
some way it is the definition of suffering. Where the
definition of suffering is when is when you are now
being caused by the outside and no longer caused by
the purpose that you have right to suffer something is
to is to basically give up causality to to to externalities.
And so it's like, that's actually how the That's like,
that's like that's how the world works. And so okay,
that's why. That's why I struggle to to fantasize about
a world where that's not the world, like of a
world where things don't. So, so a good example, like
a simple how can I say It's like a simple example.
To understand this is to understand that things change. Right, So,
in order for things to change, this structure has to
be part of it. Like you can't avoid it. You know,
for things to be able to change, you need there
to be externalities which can affect the unity, right, so
the unity will adjust itself to externalities, right, the unity
will and at some point the externalities are so big
that then you basically and I takes it over. Right.
So it's like I'm try let me, let me. So
let's say you do something a certain way, right, You're
I don't know, you make food a certain way, and
you have a certain process that you use to make food,
and then all of a sudden you realize, oh if
I do you know, It's like it takes me three
hours to make food, and so that's a problem. It's
like it's a puzzle. And so now I change the
way that I make food in order to write to
and so. But then you can imagine externalities that are
so big, like an earthquake, and now I can't make
food anymore. And so it's like, that's that's what that's
the that's the world that the Genesis story is describing,
and and the reality of chaos to order that the
world that it's describing. And so I don't see. I
don't see how we could live in another world. You're
invited to join field.
Speaker 1: I think we'll wrap up there, you know, is kind
of awkward and fumbling as the metaphor was. I agree,
I agree, I agree one hundred percent. You need you need.
The state of any system needs to be able to
move up and down. It needs to be able to oscillate.
Otherwise it's on a system. It's just a state. You know,
it's it's static, it's incapable of being dynamic. And maybe
that's what existence is. And so it's our drop to
try to trend towards the right direction, which would be
God's will. I think that is one way of looking
at existence. Plenty of other ways, but you know, I
kind of get into this a little bit in the book,
God's I View. Search it on Amazon, think we're up
to like twenty three reviews and they're all five stars.
Please please Lord, no one go out there and be
a jerk and ruin that. For me. It's one bright
spot of no criticism in my life. My other book
has tons of one star reviews and essays written about
it on the shroud of turn, but I have this one,
you know, and I get pure review all the time
on my research papers, and there's red ink everywhere that
you suck, grant reviewers that you suck, what are you doing?
But there's this one isolated beacon on a hill, which
is my book, God's I View, with twenty three five
star reviews, and please don't move that for me anyway.
In the book, we do kind of get into this
idea about entropy and that, you know, the order from
chaos idea is entropy. I mean, it's a poetic description
of what entropy is and how you know you can't
you can't just build a system with zero entropy, otherwise
what is it? It's not a system. It's a state,
and so you need dynamism in the system, and to
do that, entropy needs to be able to oscillate, go
up and down. And so, you know, could the serpent
just represent this fact? And that it's all our job
as entities capable of being influenced by our own will
and by external wills and externalities to try to trend
towards the optimum. You know, it's hard for me to
imagine a world that's not like that. Like Jonathan said,
he can't fantasize about a world where that's not the case.
And an atheist can say, well, surely all powerful God
could just do that, But I don't know. I think
that kind of violates the rule of non contradiction. Like
I you know, I don't think God can make a
rock so heavy that he cannot move it, right. I
think some things just are because to be anything else,
to be contradictory self contradictory. Anyway, we're playing armchair philosopher today.
This was fun. I should probably get back to work.
I see the emails piling up. People want things from me.
I need to write, I need to revise, I need
to pull all the poetry out of my research paper
so that it can get accepted somewhere official. So that's
what I'll be doing today. Big news, Big news. We
do have a guest joining us later this week, a paleontologist.
It's confirmed. Who knows. He could come listen to the
show and decide that it's not in his career interest
to come speak with us, But I don't think so.
I think. I think we're going to have a great
conversation about evolution and about where science and theology overlap,
where they converge, where they diverge, where there is misinformation,
where mainstream evolutionary biology gets things right, and where it
gets things wrong. And it'll be interesting to hear his
perspective because he is a Christian. He's a Christian, and
he's a paleontologist, So we'll be interesting. I'm excited. Who knows,
who knows? What we will encounter could be very cool.
So check that out. That will be Friday. Today is Tuesday,
so that's a few days away. I'll probably record another
part three of this unless I hear from somebody that
you're over it all right, So we'll just keep listening
to this video until it's done. I hope you guys
are doing good out there. Stay safe than God bless