Speaker 1: Welcome to the gun Deput Podcast. I am your host, Trevor.
Speaker 1: My computer is acting a little weird. I know I
Speaker 1: shared this with you. I know you don't care, but
Speaker 1: how how can my brand new MacBook pro be this
Speaker 1: screwed up? Already? I'm hard on computers. Anyway, we're back. Sorry.
Speaker 1: We had a couple sort of odd episodes, just you know,
Speaker 1: sort of wanting to branch into new territories. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm starting to get really into history and things. I
Speaker 1: was I was reading this book about the Romanovs. I
Speaker 1: haven't thought about that since high school or whenever I
Speaker 1: last learned about the Bolsheviks. And it's just there is
Speaker 1: something about history that captivates me. Science, philosophy, history, theology.
Speaker 1: That is like the the tetra, the tetrahedron of fascination.
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of how to say trifecta
Speaker 1: of four, but I can only come up with tetrahedron. Anyway.
Speaker 1: So that said, you know, I'm not I don't know history.
Speaker 1: I'm not a historian, and so it's it's tough. You know,
Speaker 1: there's this thing that scientists do and I always appreciate
Speaker 1: people who will remind me of this point in a
Speaker 1: kind way, and that is we because we are an
Speaker 1: expert in a particular field, we tend to just assume
Speaker 1: we're experts, like we just adopt the role of expert,
Speaker 1: and so any anything that comes up, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm incredibly smart, let me share my opinions, Like surely
Speaker 1: everyone wants everyone wants to know what I think, and
Speaker 1: that is a very dangerous, very dangerous place to be.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to commit that well trodden mistake
Speaker 1: by branching into something new too soon. So with that
Speaker 1: in mind, we're going to stick to our bread and butter,
Speaker 1: which is sort of this this intersection between you know,
Speaker 1: my instinct is to say science, but it's not really
Speaker 1: science necessarily. It's it's really philosophy, just like an honest
Speaker 1: appraisal of what we can into it, what we what
Speaker 1: is obvious to us, what we can observe, and whether
Speaker 1: or not that supports a sort of common sense or
Speaker 1: intuitive whether or not the existence of God is sort
Speaker 1: of common sense or intuitive. And of course you guys
Speaker 1: know from the show that I think it is, and
Speaker 1: I think you can make increasingly complex scientific or theological
Speaker 1: or apologetic cases for why that's true. But sometimes I
Speaker 1: think just the simplest, the simplest things are the most effective.
Speaker 1: Now I can say something that's very simple in ninety
Speaker 1: nine out of one hundred people, because they're so bogged
Speaker 1: down in whatever wherever they're at in their journey, it
Speaker 1: may not really be compelling. But for that one person
Speaker 1: where it hits them right at the right time, I
Speaker 1: think just simple arguments can be incredibly powerful. I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the ones that William Lane Craig has been popularizing,
Speaker 1: repopularizing because it's an incredibly old argument. It's a medieval
Speaker 1: argument is the calom cosmological argument, and it just makes sense.
Speaker 1: You know, it's hey, we know it's intuitive to us.
Speaker 1: It's common sense that anything that has a beginning has
Speaker 1: a cause. This is true of all things. You can
Speaker 1: sort of trace things back to like approximate cause, but
Speaker 1: then depending on how you define cause, you kind of
Speaker 1: have to keep tracing things back further and further and further,
Speaker 1: and pretty soon you get back to the beginning of
Speaker 1: the universe. Well, if the universe as at the beginning,
Speaker 1: then it too has a cause. And when you start
Speaker 1: thinking about what could cause a universe, you start saying
Speaker 1: founding pretty uh uh, I will certainly not intuitive if
Speaker 1: you start sounding pretty like committed to an atheistic worldview,
Speaker 1: if you start saying things like, well there was no cause,
Speaker 1: or it's merely the cause is merely random. And the
Speaker 1: reason why that's not intuitive is the simpler solution clearly
Speaker 1: just seems like, well, there could be nothing, and yet
Speaker 1: there's something, and this something is incredibly complex, and it's
Speaker 1: incredibly complex in a world where the physical laws say
Speaker 1: it shouldn't be, you know, second law thermodynamics. But what's up, buddy,
Speaker 1: I'm recording what I know. I approved it. I approved
Speaker 1: it for you. I feel bad for you, dude, high lied.
Speaker 1: I have money. I told my son he's discovered Minecraft
Speaker 1: add ons. We just finished playing like How to Train
Speaker 1: Your Dragon Minecraft add on. Anyway, he wanted to buy
Speaker 1: something else. I told him I was out of money,
Speaker 1: but I approved it. Yeah, feels pretty good. Feels pretty
Speaker 1: good spending two dollars on your son on a Minecraft
Speaker 1: add on. My kids are lucky that my parents never
Speaker 1: would have done that. So I'm like, I'm living out
Speaker 1: my revenge in a way that benefits my son. Anyway,
Speaker 1: what was I talking to about Oh, honestly, don't remember
Speaker 1: something about Colomb's cosmological arguments. Oh yeah, here we are.
Speaker 1: We find ourselves in this strangely ordered universe that seems
Speaker 1: fine tuned for life. Now, fine tuned can mean different things.
Speaker 1: You know. You could argue that we don't really know
Speaker 1: how fine to the universe is. But clearly there's many
Speaker 1: potential combinations of constants physical constants that would lead to
Speaker 1: no universe or universe that does not support life. And
Speaker 1: yet here we are, and we know things tend to
Speaker 1: decay towards chaos, but yet here we are in a
Speaker 1: very incredibly ordered world, incredibly ordered, and the natural state
Speaker 1: of things seems like chaos. But yet we kind of
Speaker 1: claw order out of chaos, which is a central religious theme.
Speaker 1: And so I don't know, it just seems kind of
Speaker 1: intuitive to say, well, yeah, maybe maybe there's a reason
Speaker 1: for all this, you know, and you don't even have
Speaker 1: to take it that far. It's like maybe maybe something
Speaker 1: or someone made this or toppled that first domino in
Speaker 1: that long chain of causal events. It's just really hard
Speaker 1: to imagine a universe where there is no first cause.
Speaker 1: And of course there's a million other things we talk
Speaker 1: about on the show that sort of support this idea.
Speaker 1: So I came across this interview this is with Ross,
Speaker 1: do that do that? I didn't realize this guy was
Speaker 1: like not liked like people don't. People tend not to
Speaker 1: like him. People call him the most annoying guy at
Speaker 1: the New York Times. But it's funny because I think
Speaker 1: he's pretty interesting. He interviewed bart Erman, which is a
Speaker 1: you know, atheist New Testament scholar. They has a lot
Speaker 1: of animosity towards the Christian religion, does tons of interviews,
Speaker 1: writes good book. I mean, I would say much more
Speaker 1: reserved books, you know, because there's there are works of scholarships,
Speaker 1: so it's not quite as emotional. He actually does a
Speaker 1: pretty good job of separating the two. But when he's
Speaker 1: just doing a casual interview, he yeah, he's has a
Speaker 1: lot of animosity towards Christendom. And I thought he did
Speaker 1: a great job interview. And I was surprised to learn
Speaker 1: that he was Catholic. He objected in places, but he
Speaker 1: didn't overstate his case like many Christian apologists will do.
Speaker 1: And so I thought it was great. I thought it
Speaker 1: was interesting. He sort of became well known to me
Speaker 1: when he interviewed Peter Teel. Peter Teele the the the
Speaker 1: billionaire homosexual conservative who is building the Beast Systems. He's
Speaker 1: a large shareholder in Pallentier. He's a one of or
Speaker 1: the founder. After he's sold PayPal with Elon Musk, and
Speaker 1: Elon Musk put his thirty million into SpaceX Solar City
Speaker 1: in Tesla, and Peter Teal put his money into Teal
Speaker 1: Capital and Pallenteer and has been working on enslaving humanity
Speaker 1: ever since. Anyway, so Ross asked him, should they're having
Speaker 1: this crazy discussion about the Antichrist. Peter Teel's like obsessed
Speaker 1: with the Antichrist. He he's come up. He's just sort
Speaker 1: of invented his own like theolog theology around who the
Speaker 1: Antichrist is or what he is. And he sort of
Speaker 1: sees the Antichrist as like anti technological sentiment, right, like
Speaker 1: people who don't basically people who aren't like falling over
Speaker 1: themselves to help Palenteer, you know, build lethal drones that
Speaker 1: could kill people onto man. Anyone who sees that as
Speaker 1: like not good is actually it kind of embodies this
Speaker 1: anti Christ spirit. And so they're just going on about this,
Speaker 1: and Ross is appropriately skeptical, I thought, And finally he goes,
Speaker 1: do you think humanity should endure? And Peter Teel, being
Speaker 1: just an odd guy, took like way too long to answer,
Speaker 1: and Ross goes, that should be an easy answer, like
Speaker 1: he paused so long that Ross is like looking around,
Speaker 1: he's doing like the Jim Helper thing, or he like
Speaker 1: looks at the camera like what breaks the fourth wall, goes,
Speaker 1: you know, surely you should be able to answer that question,
Speaker 1: and finally he's like, yeah, yeah, I think humanity should
Speaker 1: endure anyway. So that's how I first heard about Ross.
Speaker 1: So I was excited to see that he is being
Speaker 1: interviewed by our buddy everybody's favorite guy, Alex O'Connor, And
Speaker 1: it's how I thought it was fascinating. Now I'm listening
Speaker 1: to this and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is
Speaker 1: my this is how I this is my viewpoint. Like
Speaker 1: I'm I have personal interests in theology and the different
Speaker 1: you know, learning about the different denominations and all the details.
Speaker 1: But really, the one thing I'm sure of and the
Speaker 1: thing I'd like to get back to on the show
Speaker 1: is just that, you know, God must be real you know,
Speaker 1: it's it. I think it would be irrational to think otherwise,
Speaker 1: and that I think that is the way the culture
Speaker 1: is moving now. Most people, I don't think are very
Speaker 1: like I don't think they take it much beyond that,
Speaker 1: but I think that's something most of us, or maybe
Speaker 1: I'm just speaking for myself, art like becoming increased seemingly
Speaker 1: confident in him, and so I really I really liked
Speaker 1: his viewpoint. And we'll play this in a minute. I'm
Speaker 1: really nervous my computer's gonna do that thing where the
Speaker 1: audio is like wraw again, So hopefully that doesn't that
Speaker 1: doesn't happen. But anyway, I love the episode. I'm sitting here,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about how great this is, and then I
Speaker 1: make the mistake of reading the comments. And I've never
Speaker 1: seen because Alex O'Connor's audience is probably mostly agnostic, but
Speaker 1: he'll he'll talk to William Lane Craig and everyone's like,
Speaker 1: great combo, very interesting, you know, I disagree, but still
Speaker 1: very interesting with this guy. They were like brutal. They
Speaker 1: were talking about this is the worst interview. This should
Speaker 1: not be on the internet. And I'm curious, like, well,
Speaker 1: do you guys have any sense and email me, guys,
Speaker 1: I view book at gmail dot com. Do you have
Speaker 1: any sense why that would be. It really doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense to me because in my opinion, like he was
Speaker 1: not like number one, I thought the interview was interesting,
Speaker 1: but number two there's like it's very mild, Like he's
Speaker 1: not really making like a crazy case. The book is
Speaker 1: you know, I forget the title, but he's basically trying
Speaker 1: to make the case that you're obliged to believe in God,
Speaker 1: like the rational view is to believe that God is
Speaker 1: real at this point, like this is where we're at
Speaker 1: in our society, which I agree. I agree, So I
Speaker 1: was loving it in the dude, the comments, the comments
Speaker 1: were absolutely brutal. So I'm just closing a few. I'm
Speaker 1: closing our studio, I'm closing my Python internal development environments,
Speaker 1: I'm closing my MRI viewers hoping that we can hit
Speaker 1: play on this bad boy. So we'll get started right now.
Speaker 1: The title of the video is Religion is Obligation.
Speaker 2: Dalfit.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to
Speaker 2: be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In the introduction of your book, Believe, which I promise
Speaker 3: I would waive you say that religious belief is not
Speaker 3: just an option but an obligation.
Speaker 2: What does that mean. It means that there are enough
Speaker 2: reasons sort of in front of us that don't require
Speaker 2: insanely complicated philosophical arguments or personal mystical experiences to think
Speaker 2: that the universe exists for a reason, that it is
Speaker 2: a fashioned or created thing rather than a accidental or
Speaker 2: entirely contingent thing, and that human life has some sort
Speaker 2: of cosmic purpose within that framework. And I take that
Speaker 2: to be sort of the jumping off point for religious
Speaker 2: exploration to interest and belief. So in sort of a
Speaker 2: minimal Yeah, it's a minimal claim. In a way, it's
Speaker 2: a maximal claim if you find it preposterous, But it's
Speaker 2: not a claim that you know, everyone is obliged to
Speaker 2: do X or Y or z or fully fulfill the
Speaker 2: dictates of a particular church. But being interested in religion,
Speaker 2: I think there's more than enough out there and before
Speaker 2: your eyes to make that intellectually obligatory.
Speaker 3: As in, you think that when you do take a
Speaker 3: look at this evidence, there's enough there that to dismiss
Speaker 3: it and to believe in this alternate view that you
Speaker 3: talked about the sort of accidental contingent existence becomes a
Speaker 3: full on mistake. In other words, do you sort of
Speaker 3: grant any credence to the agnostic? And I mean, like
Speaker 3: the informed agnostic who isn't just someone who hasn't looked
Speaker 3: into it, you.
Speaker 2: Mean someone hypothetically who hosts a podcast on which he's
Speaker 2: constantly theologians and philosophers on. I mean, I'm, you know,
Speaker 2: not to personalize things at the outset, but you know,
Speaker 2: I think I think that the agnostic who is exploring
Speaker 2: religion and engaged in religious arguments is probably clearing the
Speaker 2: bar at the outset. And then the question becomes, at
Speaker 2: what point does that become kind of a you know,
Speaker 2: a hamster wheel that you trap yourself in.
Speaker 1: A bit, man, I feel like this is my shrink
Speaker 1: talking to me. I would love that. What do you
Speaker 1: love if everyone watched this and was just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. You know, clearly the world is mysterious, and
Speaker 1: clearly there's not going to come a day where we've
Speaker 1: just explained everything. Like something A popular argument that people
Speaker 1: make less now, but that was very popular amongst like
Speaker 1: the rational atheist books, was this idea that you know,
Speaker 1: people making arguments for God especially if they're scientific arguments,
Speaker 1: but making arguments for God or making a God of
Speaker 1: the gaps argument, and so, you know, the the specter,
Speaker 1: is that really the right use of that word, because
Speaker 1: spectrum means ghosts, but I'm not sure if I mean spectrum.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna go with spectrum. Okay. The spectrum
Speaker 1: of possible things that can be explained by science is
Speaker 1: ever increasing, right, and uh, and therefore whatever remains is
Speaker 1: attributed to God by those you know, few people, those
Speaker 1: few superstitious science deniers that insist there's a God. You know,
Speaker 1: the things that God explained shrinks. Actually, though, I think
Speaker 1: what I think, what we're all becoming becoming more aware of,
Speaker 1: is that science does not explain things. It describes them.
Speaker 1: And so again, the map in the terrain metaphor, you know,
Speaker 1: the map of California is not California. It's a useful
Speaker 1: predictive model. It is a guide. It allows you to
Speaker 1: make predictions, it informs you, but it is not the thing.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't make a perfect map of California
Speaker 1: and go, oh, we've explained California. We've explained what it
Speaker 1: is and where it comes from. That's that's a category
Speaker 1: air and so increasingly that's the case. And I've seen
Speaker 1: this happen in the last few years. I think it
Speaker 1: turns the whole dynamic on its head. Science has been
Speaker 1: trying to become better and better at measuring things and
Speaker 1: making better and better theories and predictive models that explain things.
Speaker 1: But the thing is they don't actually explain it. And
Speaker 1: we've talked about that at length. So let's just get
Speaker 1: back to the interview.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I do think that the the convinced atheist is
Speaker 2: working against the preponderance of the evidence, and the person
Speaker 2: who says there's nothing here of interest, you know, in
Speaker 2: the same way. So yeah, the sort of the religiously
Speaker 2: interested agnostic is at least, you know, at least on
Speaker 2: the right path. Yeah, surely.
Speaker 3: Well, when talking about reasons to believe in God, you
Speaker 3: do sort of have this wealth of opportunity because there
Speaker 3: are arguments everywhere you look. I have sometimes said that
Speaker 3: I feel like the best argument for God might be
Speaker 3: the argument for God's existence. From the number of arguments
Speaker 3: for God's existence, It's just so funny that anywhere you
Speaker 3: look you can construct some kind of syllogism. Right, But
Speaker 3: in the book, it seems like you kind of really
Speaker 3: focus on two things as pertains to natural thel.
Speaker 1: I thought I might explain the word syllogism, because that's
Speaker 1: not really a word you hear every day, and I'm
Speaker 1: actually not sure I'll do a great job, but I'll
Speaker 1: try Jatgybda if you must know the best explanation. But
Speaker 1: my sense of the word syllogism is that it's a
Speaker 1: way of making an argument that gets you to agree
Speaker 1: with one thing, like there's something that is clearly true,
Speaker 1: and then therefore this other like subordinate argument must also
Speaker 1: be true. I think the klom cosmological argument is actually
Speaker 1: probably a syllogriism. I'm not sure, but you know, hey,
Speaker 1: the universe has a beginning, right, And until recently, basically
Speaker 1: everyone would say right, and you say, well, everything that
Speaker 1: has a beginning has a cause, right, right? And then
Speaker 1: you say okay, and then here comes your minor premise,
Speaker 1: your subordinate premise, which is, therefore the universe has a cause,
Speaker 1: a cause of agent. My son's mad at me for
Speaker 1: not buying him a second minecraft to add on, See,
Speaker 1: this is what happens. This is what happens. You think
Speaker 1: you're doing the right thing. You give in, you spend
Speaker 1: the four dollars. So he's now drumming right next to me,
Speaker 1: and he knows he's doing it on purpose. But I'm
Speaker 1: gonna stay strong. I'm not going to give in. I should, actually,
Speaker 1: you know what, I should go play with them. Let's
Speaker 1: listen to a few more menaces and we'll wrap.
Speaker 3: This up, one of them being the orderliness and apparent
Speaker 3: design of the universe, and the other being consciousness. I'm
Speaker 3: more interested in the second, generally, but both of these
Speaker 3: are important to me, and I suppose I kind of
Speaker 3: wanted to probe your reasons for thinking that these are
Speaker 3: meaningful cases, and then also why it leads to the
Speaker 3: particular conclusion that you've given them. I suppose maybe it
Speaker 3: might be good to start with the mind stuff, just
Speaker 3: because that's what I'm interested in. Consciousness is clearly a mystery,
Speaker 3: and I think that when you speak to most atheists
Speaker 3: you might rub up against a kind of materialist emergentist. Oh,
Speaker 3: consciousness is just something science hasn't explained. It will get
Speaker 3: there one day. I'm not like that. I think consciousness
Speaker 3: needs to be taken seriously.
Speaker 1: I think that, thank goodness, is there anything worse than
Speaker 1: an emergencyst What did he call them? Someone who thinks
Speaker 1: that consciousness is an emergent property of some physical system
Speaker 1: in the brain. This is It's crazy to me how
Speaker 1: many neuroscientists feel this way. You know, I'm in the field,
Speaker 1: but I'm not in the consciousness field. You know, I
Speaker 1: do neuroscience research. We don't you know, the type of
Speaker 1: research I do does not really butt up against this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. But from the limited insight I've had
Speaker 1: working in the field, it is shocking to me how
Speaker 1: philosophically ignorant neuroscientists tend to be. It's like, it's like
Speaker 1: if you just I don't know how to explain it,
Speaker 1: but you just like you're so immersed, You're so deep
Speaker 1: in the weeds of your field that you like can't
Speaker 1: see out of the weeds. Like you think you think
Speaker 1: the complexity is a solution to everything. But that's that
Speaker 1: is that is what do they call it? Like, you know,
Speaker 1: when it does not compute what's the word I'm looking for?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, this is gonna this is this is
Speaker 1: gonna drive me crazy, Like not a syntax air but
Speaker 1: a non sequitur. Oh my gosh, it just is comp
Speaker 1: it's a category air, it's a non sequitur, and they're
Speaker 1: just so deep in the specific like nuances of their
Speaker 1: field they can't like come up for breath. So I'm
Speaker 1: very I'm very relieved to hear that. And we knew
Speaker 1: this that that Alex does not share this emergent property view,
Speaker 1: which is completely ridiculous.
Speaker 3: Consciousness is probably more ubiquitous and foundational, and people typically
Speaker 3: give it credit for But I want to know why
Speaker 3: it is that you think that the mystery of consciousness
Speaker 3: and the experience of you consciousness points to something more.
Speaker 2: Like God, cocaine and morphine. It was dispensed like candy
Speaker 2: and that.
Speaker 1: Commercial. Sorry that sounds exciting.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure which point should come first, actually, but
Speaker 2: I would say you start with the mystery itself, right,
Speaker 2: And I mean one of the questions that sort of
Speaker 2: attends religious debate is, you know, does the supernatural exist?
Speaker 2: Meaning right to do? And there's a million ways to
Speaker 2: define the supernatural that we're not going to resolve here today,
Speaker 2: but I'm trying, I try in the book to work
Speaker 2: with kind of you know, folk definitions, common sense definitions,
Speaker 2: right and there it would just mean does something exist
Speaker 2: that does not appear to be simply contained in a
Speaker 2: materialist description of the world and consciousness is when you
Speaker 2: get into those arguments, people sort of move quickly to
Speaker 2: you know, do ghosts exist? Do miracles exist? Near death experiences?
Speaker 2: Are those real? And I talk a talk about those
Speaker 2: things in the book. Those are also important to my argument.
Speaker 2: But my basic view is that you know, there's a
Speaker 2: form of supernatural experience. That is, it's easy to miss
Speaker 2: it because it's right here in front of our eyes.
Speaker 2: Like you and I are in a particular way having
Speaker 2: supernatural experiences already right now, just in communicating with one another.
Speaker 2: We are sort of sharing thoughts hopefully, you know, depending
Speaker 2: on how the conversation goes. That are very very difficult
Speaker 2: to reduce to physical descriptions of sound waves traveling from
Speaker 2: my mouth to your ears and back and forth. Very
Speaker 2: difficult to reduce to brain mapping and neurons firing, even
Speaker 2: if you can sort of reduce them to localities and say, oh,
Speaker 2: this part of the conversation.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if this guy's steal in my stuff
Speaker 1: or if I'm stealing his.
Speaker 2: But I like it activates that part of Alex's brain
Speaker 2: and so on this really profound as you yourself, I
Speaker 2: think would agree difficult to bridge philosophical chasm between the
Speaker 2: materialist description and what seems to happen to human beings
Speaker 2: in conscious experience. And I think that alone sort of
Speaker 2: at the very least sets up a question, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, in a way what you could say one
Speaker 2: of the first religious questions is what is primary mind
Speaker 2: or matter? Right? And we have access to both, and
Speaker 2: modern science and all its great achievements are founded on
Speaker 2: prioritizing the study of matter and what matter does and
Speaker 2: how matter interacts. And it's been a tremendously fruitful project.
Speaker 2: But the fruits of that project have not contained within
Speaker 2: them an explanation of mind. And everything that we expeliens
Speaker 2: about matter, physicality, touching your knee, touching the table, drinking water,
Speaker 2: anything else is itself processed and experienced through mind. Yes, right,
Speaker 2: So I think that's that's a decent starting place for
Speaker 2: saying it's at least possible that mind is as fundamental
Speaker 2: to the universe as as matter. And then you sort
Speaker 2: of move from there. There's a few different directions you
Speaker 2: might move, right. One direction might be to take the
Speaker 2: kind of panpsychist perspective, which is probably what you're gesturing
Speaker 2: at by saying you think consciousness may be all over
Speaker 2: the place, right, Yeah, the dryads who were hewn is
Speaker 2: this real wood or fake? Anyway? If dryads were harmed
Speaker 2: in the making of this, of this object, they might
Speaker 2: be listening to us right now, right. I think if you.
Speaker 1: This is he's sort of mocking it. And I do too,
Speaker 1: you know, but this is what Mike Weist, who we
Speaker 1: had on the show, is brilliant, brilliant nerves scientists do
Speaker 1: an amazing consciousness research for him. Pan psychism was the answer,
Speaker 1: you know, and there's maybe a version of that that
Speaker 1: is true. A lot of these words are difficult to define,
Speaker 1: you know. If this is an information universe, which we
Speaker 1: sort of think it is, there's a degree to which,
Speaker 1: like all information might be quote unquote on the spectrum
Speaker 1: of consciousness, however, clearly not as conscious as you or I.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's tough to say the panpsychism thing.
Speaker 1: To me, it's tough to wrap your head around. But hey,
Speaker 1: who knows.
Speaker 2: Make the panpsychis move and say that consciousness is sort
Speaker 2: of a widespread property that already takes you in a
Speaker 2: religious direction, because then it becomes very unlikely that you
Speaker 2: and I are instantiation of consciousness is the highest and
Speaker 2: most powerful and most important in the universe. Not impossible, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but it seems it seems a bit unlikely. So even
Speaker 2: I would say it's a very swift movement from panpsychism
Speaker 2: to pantheism. Right. And then you're already in the terrain
Speaker 2: not of Western Christianity, but of you know, certain Eastern
Speaker 2: religions and so on, Right, And you could get from
Speaker 2: there to Christianity through various modifications. You could be a
Speaker 2: pan andtheist, and then the next thing you know, you're
Speaker 2: you know, you're saying the Hill Mary or something.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So that's one movement you could make. Another movement is
Speaker 2: through the highly provisional but also highly suggestive things that
Speaker 2: we observe in the you know, the weird zones of
Speaker 2: modern science, right in quantum physics in particular, right in
Speaker 2: the apparent evidence that is highly contested and debatable, but
Speaker 2: sort of there nonetheless, right, that there is some kind
Speaker 2: of interaction between consciousness and matter where the observer the
Speaker 2: sort of perception, measurement and sort of conscious awareness seems
Speaker 2: to collapse contingencies into actualities, right, which is certainly not
Speaker 2: something that scientists in eighteen forty seven or eighteen seventy
Speaker 2: seven would have confidently expected, and very smart scientists have
Speaker 2: been trying to wrestle their way out of that interpretation.
Speaker 2: But that's there. It's interesting, and again, it is the
Speaker 2: kind of thing you would expect if mind were sort
Speaker 2: of important, primary and meaningful. And it connects you again
Speaker 2: to religion and religious arguments in various ways. The simplest
Speaker 2: way would be to say, well, you know, the kind
Speaker 2: of interactions that our minds have with matter that sort
Speaker 2: of take possibility and create actuality are perhaps analogous to
Speaker 2: the larger way in which God sustains the cosmos at
Speaker 2: any given moment. Right, that all of these actus rualities
Speaker 2: are made actual by by the mind of God, right,
Speaker 2: which takes you to a form of classical theism. So
Speaker 2: that's another line you could follow, and then the last one.
Speaker 2: There are more, but one that I think is this
Speaker 2: argument appeals to me, although it doesn't appeal to everyone,
Speaker 2: and lots of people.
Speaker 1: I actually I like this argument that's coming up, So
Speaker 1: let's just listen to it, and then we'll rapible.
Speaker 2: Find it sort of hard to follow, not hard to follow,
Speaker 2: but don't find it intuitive and think that I make
Speaker 2: too much of it. But I think it's very notable
Speaker 2: that there appears to be this very strong connection between
Speaker 2: the capacities of our consciousness and the overall structure of
Speaker 2: the universe.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned, you know, arguments from design and so on, right,
Speaker 2: which I'm sure very very familiar to your audience, maybe
Speaker 2: tediously familiar.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But what's interesting is not just that we have certain
Speaker 2: evidences that the universe is fine tuned in various ways
Speaker 2: or structured in various ways to allow for the emergence
Speaker 2: of stars, planets, and ultimately human life. That sort of.
Speaker 1: I'm lowering my Of course, we get the commercial, the
Speaker 1: political James tallerco for Texas commercial right in the middle
Speaker 1: of his point. Here we go.
Speaker 2: Skip perhaps evidence of power reaching down, but then the
Speaker 2: power of our consciousness also reaches back up. We have
Speaker 2: been able, at step after step and level after level
Speaker 2: to understand and fathom the larger structure in which we
Speaker 2: find ourselves. And you could say, from an evolutionary perspective, well,
Speaker 2: that's just what you'd expect, because we evolve reason to
Speaker 2: dodge panthers. Reason is very useful to predict when we're
Speaker 2: predators are going to attack us, and then it turns
Speaker 2: out also to be useful for figuring out how to
Speaker 2: split the atom and you know, figure out Newton and
Speaker 2: Einstein as laws and everything else. And that's where, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's where sort of this disagreement that I don't always
Speaker 2: get over with people lies. I don't think there's any
Speaker 2: necessary reason at all why you would.
Speaker 1: I have to say, under the current conception of evolution,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to square that. And I know
Speaker 1: people will be like, oh, come on, you know, clearly
Speaker 1: being able to split the atom is advantageous, and it's like,
Speaker 1: is it you know? I mean, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: just listen. Obviously, all creatures sort of find their evolutionary niche, right,
Speaker 1: because you can't. You can't just do a straight up
Speaker 1: argument from reproductive success because in that case, like ants
Speaker 1: would be the most successful, it's it's your your ability
Speaker 1: to thrive within a niche. And certainly we've carved out
Speaker 1: a niche for us, but it's just hard to imagine
Speaker 1: the selective pressures that would move us from whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: the proposed common ancestor is with chimpanzees, to being able
Speaker 1: to fathom and contemplate the scale of the universe, of
Speaker 1: the little Aputian biological world, and the sub atomic quantum
Speaker 1: nature of reality, which is, you know, just Begger's belief,
Speaker 1: and the infinite you know, nearly infinite let's say, scale
Speaker 1: of time and space. It it's hard to square. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying you can't make an argument. I know,
Speaker 1: I know you can. It's just to me it seems
Speaker 1: much less intuitive than just presuming that this place was made.
Speaker 1: You know, the system we find ourselves was made, and
Speaker 1: if it has a beg that's reasonable. But I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, even if it doesn't have a beginning, to me,
Speaker 1: it seems reasonable because there is still just the sense
Speaker 1: of like, it doesn't this doesn't need to be here,
Speaker 1: you know, it doesn't need to be here, and yet
Speaker 1: it is. And so the instinct is like why. And
Speaker 1: people think I'm saying why, like why, you know, why
Speaker 1: are we here? That's not what I mean. Like, clearly,
Speaker 1: the natural state is nothingness. You know, all things, all
Speaker 1: things move towards nothingness in the absence of mind or
Speaker 1: maybe you could say life. But certainly mind. This is
Speaker 1: this is entropy, this is what happens yet here we are.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that would be particularly compelling to
Speaker 1: a scientist or not, but it just strikes me as intuitive.
Speaker 1: So I agree with the title of this episode. Religion
Speaker 1: is an obligation and not an obligation to be born.
Speaker 1: You know, it isn't It isn't a responsibility. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think you could argue it is, but that's not
Speaker 1: what he's arguing. He's arguing you are obliged by your
Speaker 1: faculties of reason to think that, yeah, this this thing
Speaker 1: we're in, there must be something behind it. There must
Speaker 1: be something which underlies it. There must be a first cause,
Speaker 1: there must be a legislator behind the fundamental laws of
Speaker 1: this universe. So I think we'll wrap up there. Email
Speaker 1: me at God's view Book at gmail dot com. We
Speaker 1: might continue this interview. We'll see, we'll see what else
Speaker 1: comes out in the next couple of days. And until then,
Speaker 1: stay safe out there and God bless