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Hello, everybody. I'm talking today to Dr. Jack Symes. He's a public philosopher and researcher at Durham University. He's also known as a podcaster, the panpsychist,
Philosophy Podcast, which is one of the UK's most popular higher education programs.
He's also the editor of the Talking About Philosophy book series. So he's written and edited a couple of books on the philosophy of consciousness and then books that describe the concept of God and also the morality of the God that's being, what will you say, portrayed. That doesn't mean that Dr. Symes is a religious believer, by the way. And the discussion that we had that you'll watch
What would you say? What did we delve into? Conceptualizations of consciousness. Also, we discussed what do we have in the popular culture now with regards to the arguments between the atheists and the believers, let's say. Well, we have an argument about
perhaps whether or not God exists. There's an argument underneath that, which is, well, what exactly do you mean? Who is this God that you're discussing? How is he characterized? And is that characterization reasonable on the theist or the atheist side? That's what we delved into. You know, before you can have an argument about belief, you have to specify what it is that you're actually talking about. Now, one of the things we
alluded to, let's say, in the conversation was the fact that the God that's criticized by the atheist types, the materialist reductionist atheist types, is somewhat of a straw man and a parody God, and that that's not helpful because if we want to get to the bottom of things, we have to make sure that we're actually arguing about
the right thing, let's say, rather than to reduce it to a kind of foolishness that can be easily dispensed with. Well, that would be fine if you could make that reduction properly, but it's not fine at all if you have to reduce it without knowing what you're talking about. And that actually happens to be the case for much of the argumentation that's put forth by the atheists, is the God they're dispensing with is not the God that's portrayed in the relevant work.
So, anyways, we walked through that kind of differentiation. And so, what's happening in the world right now, in the West in particular, there's a crisis of belief. What we believe fundamentally is up for grabs. Well, there's an ongoing intellectual conversation about how to re-specify that. And this conversation was part of that. So, to the degree that you're interested in participating in that and understanding it, then, well, this is the conversation for you.
Well, so you have three books: one on consciousness, two on God, one associated more with existence itself, and the other, I think it's the newest one, Defeating the Evil God Challenge. Maybe we'll start with consciousness. So tell me a bit, and everybody who's watching and listening, how you approach the problem and how you conceptualize it. Let's talk about that. I've done a fair bit of reading,
on the topic of consciousness. So I'm very curious to hear your take on it.
Well, what I thought was interesting, Jordan, is this interview you did with Elon Musk recently. He actually expressed a view that's pretty close to mine. He explained how in the beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, there was just hydrogen and all these physical processes evolve over time. Somewhere in that picture, consciousness must come into it. He raised this question. He said, "Well, is it everywhere or is it nowhere?"
Consciousness is that feeling you get when you see your parents at the school gate, or that drop in your stomach when you realize you've said something you shouldn't perhaps. And that process of thinking one plus one equals two, those are all conscious experiences and they make up the fabric of our worlds. And just to understand the
The value of that. Try and imagine your life without consciousness. It would be a meaningless wasteland, as the philosopher Gregory Miller puts it. So there's nothing more valuable to us, and as George Orwell said,
It's difficult to see what's on the end of your nose. It's a constant struggle. So that thing, the person watching this or you hearing my voice now, these are all conscious experiences and they don't seem to be captured in the language of mathematics and geometry, i.e. the language of physics. Galileo put consciousness outside of the picture when it comes to physical science in order for science to make all the incredible advances that it has.
And so our question is: where does consciousness fit into the scientific picture of the world that, on the whole, people seem to be accepting in Western societies? My view is that you should put consciousness at the bottom, that consciousness
has to be there from the beginning. You need some rudimentary consciousness for evolution by natural selection to play with. In the same way you need some physical properties to make eyes and ears, you need conscious properties or particles to make the kinds of interesting consciousness that you and me enjoy. So are you coming at this primarily from a philosophical perspective? And to what degree is your viewpoint informed, for example, by biology and neuroscience?
I'd say my view is 100% philosophical, but it goes on the basis of the things that are missing in neuroscience and biology. Neuroscience and biology are the wrong sort of
methods of understanding consciousness. You can't scan someone's brain and see where the colour red is. It's not going to come up. It's a different kind of thing. It's a private experience that isn't available to third-person observation. So anyone who thinks that neuroscience or biology is going to tell us
consciousness comes from just doesn't understand what science is. Science can't tell us about the inner nature of what particles are; it tells us what particles do. This is known as the easy problem of consciousness, right? The easy problems are the problems of trying to map out
what David Chalmers calls the neural correlates of consciousness. So I give you a sharp punch to the chest, right? And your brain lights up in a certain way. And so I can go like, that part of your brain gives rise to these experiences, but it still doesn't tell me where consciousness itself comes from. So that's what's always going to be missing from biology and neuroscience. And the hard problem of consciousness as Chalmers formulates it? He gives it in two words, explain consciousness.
So, okay, so let me ask you a couple of questions about that, because I've thought for a long time that the formulators of the hard problem of consciousness are actually wildly optimistic, in a sense, because I don't really think they are tackling the hard problem of consciousness. I think the hard problem of consciousness is distinguishing consciousness from being itself.
I have a hard time distinguishing consciousness from being. And it's also quite difficult in some ways to distinguish consciousness from intelligence. So let me delve into that on the consciousness side a little bit to begin with. So I've spent a lot of time studying comparative mythology and also binding that analysis
with my knowledge of neuroscience. And so I don't want to generate interpretations of cosmogonic narratives that are, what, run in contradiction to what I know on the neurobiological side. And I like that way of triangulating, so to speak, because it seems to me the probability that
Ancient mythology and modern neuroscience will come to the same conclusions by chance is very low because they're so disparate in terms of their mechanisms of generating knowledge. So in the typical cosmogonic myth, which seems to involve consciousness, you have three mechanisms.
fundamental attributes of being and becoming. You have something that's equivalent, it's usually represented by a paternal figure, a figure of order, a father, a figure of light. Those are all symbolic associations. And it represents something like an extant structure of interpretation.
And then there's something to be interpreted, which is like a field of possibility. That's usually represented as chaos, or it's often represented as feminine. It's represented as the night. It has a terrible aspect and a positive aspect because out of potential comes everything good and everything terrible. And then you have an active mediary.
agent that's an intermediary. And in the Christian conception, that's the logos, for example. The logos is the active principle that mediates between the forces of order and chaos. And this conceptualization makes a lot of sense to me phenomenologically. And I think it actually maps on quite well to the neuroscience. But the reason I'm giving you this lengthy
exposition as part of this question is because it's relevant to this issue of separating consciousness from being. So I don't see how you can separate consciousness from being even in principle, because I don't understand what it would mean, and you alluded to this, what it would mean for there to be a reality without awareness.
Now that doesn't mean I understand anything about what awareness is, but I don't think it's distinguishable from the problem of being itself. Well, I think you're in very good company. Bertrand Russell thought this, Darwin thought this,
Philip Goff, Galen Strawson, Miriel Bahari, there are a lot of people who share this view that you can't separate consciousness from being. And that being as a whole, whether that's cosmos, existence, God the divine as a whole, has to have the property of consciousness. And I suppose that is slightly separate from intelligence.
in the sense that I can imagine some large language model being intelligent. Let's say on the physicalist worldview, you could imagine some insects being intelligent in the way that it responds to its environment without being conscious. That's conceivably. I don't think that's the case in the world as it is, but you can conceive of such a thing. So you can pull them apart conceptually.
But what I think is interesting is this seems to me to tie into what I understand to be your wider view. And I think perhaps it would be good to just get that on the table so you can see the comparisons there. I find it a little bit difficult to follow some of the language you're using there. So excuse me if I oversimplify this for the sake of trying to keep it clear in my mind.
It seems to me that your view consists of essentially three broad propositions. Those propositions are something like: one,
When we perceive the world and act in the world, we're making value judgments. Like the reason I see you now is because I value this conversation, right? Rather than seeing some other thing out of the infinite ways I could see the room before me. The second is that you think these values exist on a great chain of being, on Jacob's ladder. They emanate the form of the good or they lead to an Anselmian conception of the divine or something like this.
And third is that
I believe you think something like this, and I'm eager to hear any clarifications, is that you see story or fiction and Scripture as tapping into the divine, tapping into truth or goodness, whatever that thing is that exists on top of Jacob's ladder. And to link to our discussion on consciousness and being there, that the greatest being or the fullness of being, the thing that sits on top of the ladder, must be conscious and must be
the totality of being. And again, that seems to run through the entire history of Christian philosophy and maybe philosophy more generally. So I wonder, do you think that captures it? Am I getting the bits and pieces in the right order there?
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Well, I think you've got the bits and pieces in the right order with regard to conceptualizations of the divine. I mean, let's take that apart a little bit because that's very much worth delving into. So, in principle, the postmodernists, their ethos is defined differently.
by so-called skepticism towards metanarratives, right? So their proposition, this was Lyotard, but it was shared. Well, it's one of the defining characteristics of the postmodern school, I would say, is that there's no overarching metanarrative, skepticism toward metanarratives. And that actually, I find that, what would you say? It's a puerile idea. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, you can tell me what you think about this technically, is that every...
perception and every action requires a unifying ideal. So, for example, if I want to lift a glass of water to my mouth, I'm sequencing, I'm unifying a tremendous number of unbelievably complex operations in order to do that. Now, it seems simple in some ways to my consciousness because I'm
I'm operating slightly above what I have automatized neurologically. And so I don't really have any conscious idea of the complexity of the molecules and the atoms and the cells and the muscles even that I'm using to move. But I'm unifying all those with regards to a value-oriented purpose. And that would be to quench my thirst. And then that would be nested in a higher order structure of values because I'm quenching my thirst, I presume, because I believe it's better not to quench
be thirsty, not to be in pain. I believe it's better to be alive than to be dead, et cetera. So even that micro-sensitivity
That unifying, that micro-unity of a given action unifies all sorts of things that are subordinate to it, but it also partakes in a higher unity. And what the postmodernists seem to be claiming is that you can just draw some arbitrary upper limit to that unity. And so then let's go there for a second. Okay, so there's no overarching metanarrative. This would be, I suppose, in some way skepticism about God itself.
There's no upper unity. Okay, so what's at the highest level then? Disunity? Like...
Nothing? Well, nothing is a stupid answer because if it's nothing you can't unify. And if it's disunity then really what you've done is you've developed a metaphysics of discord and disunity. And you also have done it arbitrarily. It's like, okay, so you admit to the existence of the uniting narrative that allows you to drink from a glass, but what, you don't admit to the uniting narrative that enables you to live in harmony with your wife?
Like, where do you draw the line exactly? And exactly is the issue. Like, you don't just get to say, well, there are micro-narratives and meta-narratives, and we don't believe in meta-narratives. It's like, first of all, there's not a qualitative distinction. So, like, what exactly are you talking about? And second, if there's no uniting meta-narrative, then what the hell do you think's at the top? Because it's either unity or discord.
or nothing, I suppose, and then you're in this nihilistic catastrophe that seems to do nothing but demoralize and cause and wreak havoc. So, okay, so you mentioned Jacob's Ladder. It's like, well, it seems to me that the monotheistic insistence is that all goods unify
towards something that brings everything together, which would include, it would include, but even transcend consciousness, right? Because God would be beyond consciousness, beyond unconsciousness. But certainly, one definition of God is what stands at the highest level of unity. Now,
Well, so let's, we can bandy that about a bit. Well, I wonder, just to ask you then, at the top of Jacob's ladder then, you take God to be there. You take God to be the thing on which all values hang on, slash the thing that grounds all other values. To be clear, are you happy to say that? To say, I believe in the existence of God as the greatest conceivable being, let's say?
Well, I think in some ways it's a matter of definition. I guess I would... It's a matter of definition, because before we can talk about whether or not God exists, we should have some sense of exactly what it is that we're talking about. In the moment, we're talking about the highest conceivable potential unity. But then I would also say, so it stands at the top, but it also stands in the top in a peculiar way. And this is definitely insisted upon in the Judeo-Christian canon, because...
God is inconceivable and ineffable. And so even if you do put him at the top, as you approach him, he recedes, and that capacity to recede is infinite. It's also not within the scope of conceptualization, right? I mean, the classic atheists, they perform a sort of sleight of hand and
their God is always the wise old man in the sky who's the superstitious obstacle to the progress of science. But that's not at all how God is conceptualized in the biblical corpus. I mean, God is put at the top of Jacob's ladder, but he's also ineffable and receding. Well, let's pick up on a few of those ideas then. The first thing I think that's worth
pointing out is, obviously, as you've said there, there are conceptions of God in which God is ineffable. And there's a big debate, as you know, there in philosophy of religion to the extent to which God is ineffable. Some people take God to be completely ineffable. You can't say anything positive about God. You can only say what God's not in this view. So God's not a pineapple. God's not an Adam Sandler movie. Thank God for that. And God's not this
this delicious beer to my side or anything like that. So I can say negative things about God, but I can't say anything positive because God's beyond my own descriptions.
But I think the majority of philosophers of religion agree that you can say some things about God. Descartes gives the example of trying to get your arms around a great mountain, and the great mountain is God. You can't understand God in his entirety, but you can pick up a few rocks. You can describe a few rocks and say, "Hey, this is the property of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, consciousness, being immutable, being unchanging, and the like."
So I think there are some things we can reasonably say that God must have as part of God's essence. On this question of God's essence, there are some things we can say about God's essence such as this.
And just finally on this, because I know that you know your Scripture very well. I don't know my Scripture certainly as well as you do. I'm more from the camp of perfect being theology. As you know, there are three major strands of theology and philosophy which all try and arrive at a different
or the same definition of God, really. Revelation theology looks at religious experience and scripture and tries to infer properties from God from Revelation. Creation theology looks at God's hand in the world and says, well, God must be powerful enough to create the world, good enough to give us the world, and knowledgeable enough to give us such a finely tuned universe. And then when we look at
other versions like perfect being theology. And this is the version I think is the most reflective of God
is that God, by definition, must be the greatest conceivable being. If there is a greater being than God, then the thing that you're talking about that isn't the greatest thing isn't God. God must have all great making properties, that is power, goodness, knowledge, and anything else we take to be intrinsically great at the top of Jacob's ladder. If God has those things, then it is worthy of the name God.
Okay, so with regards to the argument about ineffability, Mircea Eliade points out one of the consequences of a god that's too ineffable. So a god that you can't characterize. He's mapped out the death of god phenomenon across many cultures and over many times. And
What you often see happening when a culture emerges and begins to flourish is that there's a revelation at its beginning, interestingly enough, that has a certain amount of psychological and sociological energy and it unites people. It offers them a framework of meaning that quells their anxiety and also a goal or a destination that imbues them with positive emotion and that pulls a culture together. And then
It happens upon occasion that the pinnacle value that's posited by that culture comes under rational assault or perhaps falls prey to conflict with other religions and people start to doubt and the system decays, the death of God, let's say. Well, Eliade pointed out that a God that is so ineffable that nothing can be said about him tends to float off into darkness
what would you say, into the cosmic ether and lose his connection with humanity. And so I think it's better to think about it as in a hierarchical manner. And so here's one way that I've come to understand it that's both neuropsychological and mythological at the same time. So, you know, in the story of Exodus, Moses is compelled forward to take a position of leadership as a consequence of his encounter with the burning bush.
And the bush is a tree. It's the tree of life, and it's on fire because it's alive. And a burning bush is a representation of that which calls you forward.
That's a good way of thinking about it. Now, that takes concrete form in your life, right? So you might be attracted to a particular lover. You might be attracted to a particular profession or a particular book on a shelf when you walk into a library. It's like a light turns on and you're called forward to it like a moth. And then as you know, as you mature and you transform and the way that you look at the world changes,
the thing that compels your interest transforms. But then you could imagine something at the bottom of that, that's constant across all those transformations, that's like the spirit of calling per se, and it spirals you upwards in a developmental path, and it recedes as you move towards it. Now, that's one characterization of God, particularly in the Old Testament, is God is calling.
Right? And that's reasonably well mappable, I would say, onto the neurological systems that mediate positive emotion. Because...
The positive emotion systems do call you forward. They fill you with hope. They fill you with enthusiasm, which is a word derived from the phrase for being possessed by God. But, you know, you can kind of understand that behind all the things that call, approximately, is the spirit that calls transcendentally. And you could think of the essence of that spirit as a...
closer approximation of the divine. That's not a full characterization of the divine, because in the Old Testament, for example, you also have God as the voice of conscience, which is quite different. That's more of a restrictive definition
or impulse, so to speak. This is good though because I think that these things that are in Scripture, whether Scripture's revealing truths or it's revealing moral truths and the like, whether it's revealing symbols, I take your view to be they're reflecting the divine. As Schopenhauer would put it, Schopenhauer's view of aesthetics was that when we're having an aesthetic experience,
it taps into the rhythm of what he called the will. So you're tapping into the form of aesthetic beauty, which I think your view is sort of similar to there in terms of scripture. There's certainly parallels at least. But what I think is interesting from a
philosophical point of view is, and I think for people more generally, is whether these events are concrete in the sense that they're historical events. And second, whether or not you do take this God to be a perfect being, like the God of Anselm, the God of Aquinas, the God of Augustine, like the classical conception of God. Because I think there are a lot of Christians out there at the moment that are holding you up and saying, look,
Christianity's back. Here's Jordan Peterson saying he's a Christian. And here's him talking about scripture. Like, new atheism's dead. And here we are with the resurrection of Christianity. But I don't think you're the type of Christian which they have traditionally had in mind, for sure. My colleague at Durham University, Philip Goff, is
He's either coming out, or maybe I'm going to be coming out for him here as a heretical Christian. He thinks you don't have to believe in a perfect God, and you don't have to believe that the Christ event was a real event in order to be a Christian. There is a middle way between God and atheism, and that's my view as an agnostic as well. There is a middle way. It's just different to perhaps yours and Philip Goff's. I wonder
Would you be happy to be characterized in that middle ground and finding new radical solutions to what's been a very partisan debate between theists and atheists? Well, I don't think that characterization is quite accurate, although I think not in its details, but I think perhaps there's elements of the gist that are accurate. I mean, I suppose, would you say,
You could say philosophically that I'm an existential Christian. Maybe that's a reasonable way of putting it. In that I think that what... I believe that the Judeo-Christian ethos is not an ethos of, what would you say, a propositional belief.
The propositional belief is a surface, and it's necessary, but only insofar as it's in accordance with something deeper. Just like your words should be in accordance with your actions, but your actions are the fundament. Now, the words shouldn't contradict that. And I'm not saying that words are trivial, because they're not, but
But the commitment to faith that's demanded by Christianity is an existential commitment. And what that means, it's an all-in commitment. And that's a definition. I mean, Christianity is actually an outline of an all-in commitment. It's a representation of that. And so, now, with regards to God being perfect, well, in some sense, for me, that's a moot point, in a way, partly because
With this Jacob's Ladder conception, it's enough for me to know that no matter how high I continue to climb, there won't be an upper limit. I mean, you know, hell is being characterized as a bottomless pit. And part of the reason for that existentially is because things, no matter how bad things get, and they can get very, very bad, you can make them worse. There's something you can do to make them worse. But I also think that that's true on the positive side, which is that if you
follow your calling, let's say, and abide by your conscience. There's no limit to the upward trek. And I guess I would say that we've conceptualized belief improperly in our culture, and because of that, we're caught in a dilemma between the Enlightenment rationalists and the Christians, because we have a propositional dispute. But I would say, let's talk about calling for a minute. So,
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These are three fascinating points. I think we're into the detail and where things are perhaps different between your views and the, let's call them the analytic philosophers of religion, the people who are in the universities thinking about this question in detail. I think
There are three things there, right? The first is that you said there that you can climb Jacob's ladder, but you'll go on forever. You'll never reach it. There are two ways of interpreting that statement. The one is that you, Jordan Peterson, and me, Jack Syams, can climb the ladder towards intrinsic goods, but perhaps we'll never reach what we might consider perfection, i.e. reaching the fulfillment of goodness, knowledge, power. We'll always be striving.
But I don't think you can make a second claim, which would be that the ladder itself goes on forever. Because ultimately, I think you need something to ground or hang up those values onto. You need an intrinsic good at the end, a fulfillment of what is taken to be good. So I think those two things can be consistent. And you need one that's understandable.
I completely agree you need one understandable. But in terms of the idea of God as perfection, again, this is just a side point of information. What's interesting is that Eugene Nagasawa and Catherine Rogers, two brilliant philosophers of religion, have claimed there has never been a philosopher of religion who has argued for anything less than a perfectly good God.
And that's phenomenal. That's changing, as I mentioned a second ago. Maybe Goff fits into this view with a God of limited powers or the God which, to go back to our earlier part of the discussion, a God whose consciousness underlies our world but is constrained by the laws of physics, let's say. There is a greater being than that, and it's a being that's not confined to the laws of physics. So we're in a really interesting part of philosophy and religion at the moment in our culture where that's changing. But the third point, and I think
this distinction shows the difference perhaps between your thinking and my thinking on this. Let's take that statement
"I believe in God." For me, that can be taken in two ways, the focus being on "believe." Either, "I believe in God" like "I believe in humanity." When I say that, I don't mean like there's a thing called humanity. I mean, there's a thing which I'm putting my hope in. There's something that I trust, i.e. humanity. But obviously, there's a second way of taking that statement, which is, "I believe that this thing exists," like the concept of humanity or God. And so when you say you're an existentialist,
believer in God, I think you probably fall into that first category that you take the leap of faith towards God. You trust God. You put your belief in God in that way. Rather than making the propositional claim, there is some concrete entity that
is satisfied and is true and described in the proposition there is a perfect being who's conscious, powerful, good, and the like. Do you think that's a fair characterization of the distinction? Well, I have a hard time understanding exactly how to get to the second without thoroughly dispensing with the first or thoroughly arranging the first properly. So let me respond to that in a way that also addresses another issue that you brought up. So
You said, with regards to Jacob's Ladder, and I described this like infinite upward climb, let's say, at least of human beings. You said, well, there has to be something at the top. So let me describe for a moment how I think that's dealt with, at least in part, in the combined Old Testament and New Testament canons. And I'll make reference, I think, primarily to the concept of the Logos. So there's an insistence in Christianity that
And Christ himself makes this claim that he's the embodiment of the prophet and the laws. And this is a very interesting claim technically, because what you have in the Old Testament, and you already alluded to this, is a series of characterizations of God. It's not all the Old Testament is, but the narrative part of it is a sequence of characterizations of God. It's sort of like there's a human being in this situation,
And this is what God appears like to him or her. And then there's a human being in this situation, and this is how God appears to him or her. And so, the God of the Tower of Babel is characterized in a different manner than the God in the story of the flood. There's an underlying insistence that these are all manifestations of the same transcendent reality. But the characterizations differ. Now, there's a pattern across those characterizations.
Now, Christ's claim is that he's the physical embodiment of that pattern. And it's an extremely interesting claim. I have a very difficult time dispensing with it, let's say, on rational grounds. And this is an answer to the definition of what's at the pinnacle, at least insofar as that might be comprehensible by human beings. Because
Christ, like Job, is the mortal man who says yes to existence in the most radical possible manner.
And so, to understand that, you have to take apart in some sense what that radical acceptance would mean if it was truly radical. And what it would mean is something like what was initially outlined in the story of Job. So, Job is a good man by God's own testimony, and God essentially turns him over to the powers of evil so that they can have their way with him. And his
historical precedent for that idea because Cain invites in Lucifer to have his way with him. This is something that happens in the Old Testament canon, but in the case of Job, Job doesn't invite Satan in. God basically sicks Satan on him, and then everything that can possibly happen that's terrible to a person happens to Job.
Not everything. Not everything. But it's a close approximation. And Job's response, Job has two responses. Like, he's so tortured that his wife says to him, there's nothing left for you to do except shake your fist at the sky, curse God, and die. And she has reason, viewing his misery, to make that claim. And part of the claim, and this would be relevant to the discussion we will have about notions of the evil God, it's like Job is pushed past
what you might regard as reasonable mortal limits. But he does two things that are extremely interesting. He refuses under great duress to lose faith in the essential nature of his being. So he says to his friends and to God, he says, look, I'm not a perfect man. I have the imperfections of a good man, but that doesn't mean that I'm
deserving of the existential catastrophe that has visited me. It isn't a mere cause and effect consequence, there's an arbitrariness about it. And so I don't lose faith in myself as a being, no matter what happens to me, but I also simultaneously don't lose faith in the divine itself, even though all the evidence in front of me at the moment suggests that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and perhaps even unforgivable, and it's evil.
Now, what happens in the Christian story, in the Passion, is that that story of Job is magnified across virtually all conceivable dimensions, so that Christ is the archetypal figure who faces the worst life has to offer by definition, but also throws himself fully open to that. And so, you might say, well,
That's what it means to take—that he takes the sins of the world unto himself. So imagine that the proper pattern of being for a human being is radical, open-armed acceptance of fate. Not just acceptance, but welcoming. But then imagine—because the insistence there, it's a very interesting idea, is that the more radical you are in that willingness,
the more what the Old Testament thinkers characterized as the Spirit of God is likely to dwell within you and walk with you through your trials. And I can tell you as a clinician, I can't see a flaw in that argument because one of the things we've learned in the clinical realm is that if you encourage people to face the terrible things that they're
tempted to avoid, that their character develops radically and they become much stronger. And that's been discovered across all the fields of clinical endeavor. I think this might be the point where we find some interesting disagreement. I think we've been getting along like brothers so far, but those brothers might turn out to be Cain and Abel when I give a couple of clarifications here. It seems like your argument there is one of
putting faith in the divine, in believing in, in the sense I gave a moment ago, to trust and place your hope into something. In God, in this example, despite evidence to the contrary, you might think, or despite punishment from a God who claims they are perfectly good. And that seems like an existential claim, and I believe it is an existential claim. But you put them the other way around a moment ago. You said, I can't imagine the first idea of belief I gave you.
I can't imagine the second idea of belief I gave you without the first, i.e. you thought that without believing in, putting in the trust or the hope in something, then you couldn't have the latter. But I think it's the other way around. I think you need to know that this thing exists before you put your belief or hope in it.
And so you could think of an example, right? Like, I believe in Santa Claus. I believe that Santa Claus will punish naughty children and be good to the good children, the children on his nice list. And you might think that's a reasonable thing to say, I believe in, but it's not. There is such a thing called Santa Claus that exists. So it seems like you do need the latter there. Now, I have a couple of problems. Might be this, eh?
Well, that might be a dance.
there's no, and the proposition that God exists is true. You don't say that one. So I don't think you're welcome on God's dance floor, let's say. Well, I have a hard time with what people who ask that question. People ask that question as if the statement exists is self-evident. It's weird, eh? Because when you're putting together a statement and one of the
objects of the statement or the subjects of the statement is the ineffable unity of all things. You just can't cram another word in there like exists without introducing an equal mystery because you're trying to make an equation, right? Does God have the properties of something that exists? It's like, well, you already have an implicit notion of what
existence constitutes. It's part and parcel of the structure that's enabling you to ask that question. And I don't know what your theology of existence means. So when you say to me, I don't mean you specifically, but I could mean you too, it's like, does God exist? It's like, well, what's your conception of exist? I mean, that's what we're bandying about to some degree, right? It's the thing that's at the top of Jacob's ladder. Okay, well, that's not the same thing as a table.
It's a different kind of existence. There is something which is in the world, physical or non-physical, that fits that description. You might have a Wittgensteinian idea from the Tractatus, although it's outdated, that my language literally maps onto something that exists in...
In reality, it doesn't need to be a physical entity. I can speak of conceptual entities like sets and numbers and the like. I can speak of things that I can conceive of existing non-physically like souls and angels and God. So there are discussions to be had there and an interesting one perhaps in terms of what we mean by exist. Why do we say that Harry Potter does not exist but that God does exist?
If we don't know what the word exists means, like there is something though, call it exist or call it, I don't know, the gist, like give it whatever label you want. There is something that separates Harry Potter from God in the view of the Christian. They're not the same sorts of things.
And I think that's important. Now, we can have a discussion about what that thing is, but I don't think we need to examine every tree to make our way out of the forest. We know generally what we mean by exist. I've said that God is the perfect being, and we both have a broad idea of what that might be. And to believe, we've pulled apart together two types of belief, to believe in and to believe that proposition's true. So,
On believing in God, trust and faith, Job's leap of faith, and yours as well, perhaps, is that it doesn't seem like that's consistent with an authentic existence in which one accepts the truth. I believe that one of your rules in your successful book is tell the truth and at least don't lie. And perhaps that starts with getting your own house in order first, that when you look in the mirror, you should tell yourself what's true and not believe in things.
that you don't know are true. Because if you don't know they're true, then you should suspend judgment on those things. And that's strongly my view. I'm an agnostic about being agnostic, and I'm almost sure of it. Because I think there are very strong arguments for traditional theism. I think there are very strong arguments for atheism as well. But ultimately, because I don't have enough evidence for one side or the other, I think the authentic and perhaps
cold, dark, and I suppose empty universe I find myself in is one where I'm striving to find that meaning, find responsibility, and find value. And that's a difficult task psychologically. And certainly with the Christian view you developed a moment ago, you get certainty, right? You get the ultimate cosmic purpose. You get strong, objective moral values.
you get this story of the world in which you sit neatly in the place. Now, just to talk about this for a moment, because I think this is a really interesting point, is that
Those who are agnostic, like myself, or who are atheists, they often say things like, oh, I feel so small in comparison to the rest of the cosmos. My life seems so insignificant and meaningless. And you sort of go, well, if you were as big as the world or as big as the sun or as big as the universe, would that make your life more meaningful? And they sort of go, no, it wouldn't change it. So size doesn't seem to matter. And then you think,
Well, maybe it's because I only live for 80 years, if I'm lucky. And compared to the four and a half billion years of our world and the 13.8 of the universe, it seems like my life's meaningless in that context. And you go again, like, imagine you lived for 800,000 years or 8 million years. Does that give your life more meaning? It seems like it doesn't.
Now, despite what my ex-girlfriend might tell you, it seems that size and how long you last isn't what's valuable in the context of meaning and purpose.
The thing that's meaningful and the thing that we cry out for as agnostics or atheists is what Albert Camus referred to, as you know, as the absurd. We call out for meaning from a universe that's indifferent to us. As the philosopher Michael Hauskeller tells us, this version of the absurd threatens to rob us of our sanity. "Here be lions and dragons. Here be cold and dark and emptiness.
And that's uncomfortable, right? That you don't belong here or it isn't obvious that you belong here. But I think if we're going to tell ourselves the truth, that search for meaning in a world that doesn't obviously present us meaning is the world that we need to embrace if we're going to live honestly and authentically.
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Well, I can tell you what made itself manifest as evidence for me. So the first thing, I'll sort of put a prodroma on this account. And so you know that in the Christian passion, Christ faces youthful, unjust death at the hands of his own people under the thumb of a tyrant, let's say. And that's not...
the sum of the injustice of his death, but in some ways that's the essence. And that's a pretty rough account of mortal limitation. But that's not the whole story, because the other encounter that is part and parcel of the Christian passion
is the harrowing of hell. And that's a more mythologized account, let's say, but it has equal existential significance because the essence of the Christian passion is the transcendent story of the eternal serpent. That's a good way of thinking about it, is that what Christ is encountering is not only the limitations of mortality, but the actuality of evil. Okay, so now,
And then you might say as well, and you could say this from a clinical perspective, that it's not possible to live in the world and be complete and grounded and upward striving in the best possible manner without contending with the issue of evil. You have to contend with your mortality, but that's not enough. And it might be that contending with the problem of evil is a deeper problem than contending with the problem of mortality. And that's saying a lot, because the former's no joke. Okay, so...
When I started my investigations 40 years ago or more, I was obsessed particularly with the problem of evil, and mostly from a psychological perspective. And the question for me, in a nutshell, I suppose, was, what's it like to be an Auschwitz camp guard who enjoys his work?
And that's not a question that people usually ask because they don't conceive of themselves as the sorts of beings who could do that, much less enjoy it. And that always struck me as dangerously naive. Anyways, the consequence of investigating that question was that I became, for whatever it's worth, unshakably convinced that evil was a reality. And maybe in some ways, like an undeniable and fundamental reality, something akin to the reality of pain.
Now, what that did for me was highlight out something that was the reverse of that by implication. Because if you can imagine hell and its darkest reaches, you can posit the existence of something that's antithetical to that.
Now, it's always been more difficult for me to conceptualize what might be the essence of good than it is to conceptualize the essence of evil. I actually think it's easier in some ways to put your finger on evil. But once you do that, there's an implication that immediately emerges, which is, well,
There's some pathway to hell, obviously, since we can create it on Earth and have done that repeatedly in our own private lives, say, and sociologically and politically. That strongly implies that there's a pathway in the other direction towards something that's the opposite. And that's been much more difficult to flesh out. But for me, like that was the...
existential grounding of my belief in something approximating a transcendent good. At least the transcendent good is the pathway away from, let's say, the worst excesses of Auschwitz.
This is good because I'm with you on this. I think, again, the majority of philosophers think that there is something called evil, but maybe they use different ways of describing it. It's interesting you described evil as pain there, but at the same time, we can cash out pain in terms of higher-order goods that that pain gives rise to. I take the injection, so I'm immune from X, Y, and Z, and the pain was worth it. It wasn't a gratuitous
or a necessary bit of pain. So it's not evil in that sense. Likewise, when it comes to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, the pain and the suffering of the individuals who died at the hands of these weapons or of these regimes
were themselves the victims of what they might conceive to be as evil or as gratuitous suffering. But the Christian says something, well, they've said it for a long time, right? That there are theodicies and defenses that one can give on behalf of God to get God off the hook there. That it's greater to have free will and do these things than not. And people like Richard Swinburne, the popular philosopher of religion defending Christianity,
He defends things like the Holocaust and defends the dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And that's a real bitter pill for a lot of atheists and agnostics to swallow. I do think that these defenses and theodicies collectively can respond to the argument from evil, the evidential version that is.
But there is a new version, there are several new versions of the problem of evil that are coming out recently. And I think the most dangerous of all of them is what Eugene Nagasawa, a Christian himself, describes as the systemic problem of evil. And he says,
A perfectly good God, the challenge goes, would not gear the system, rig the rules to give rise to life as evolution by natural selection. That's not a system that God would put in place. It necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures, and there is no way of getting consciousness and intelligent life without them.
Ultimately, he says that actually that problem's a big problem for atheists as well, because he thinks atheists like Richard Dawkins are what he calls existential optimists. They think the world is on the whole a good place, and they're happy and pleased to be alive. Yet the same person is happy to run the problem of evil against theists, but maintain their own optimism. So he thinks that
If you're an atheist, you can't be an optimist and you must be a pessimist. But if you're a theist and you've got strong arguments for theism, belief in God, then you can appeal to this broader metaphysics, kingdom of heaven, God's ultimate plan and the like. And so the theist, he thinks, has the better hand against the atheist. But ultimately, I think that argument works against him. And Eugene's a philosophical hero of mine, so I don't say it lightly. But
You know what they say, to borrow from Aristotle, Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. I think he actually shoots himself in the foot because I don't think it's reasonable to believe in a perfectly good God and evolution by natural selection at the same time.
There is questions to be asked there about, and this goes back to the start of our conversation and working as part of the Inner Experience Project at Durham University, we look at the conscious experiences of all things we consider to have capacities for subjective experience. And the question is, can these non-human animals experience pain and suffering in any way, shape, or form that we can? And I think most of us think that's the case.
90% of people in the UK. It's the simplest biological explanation. Otherwise, you have to posit that the systems in animals that are akin to ours and very, very akin operate in some qualitatively different manner. And that's not a useful Occam's razor hypothesis. Animals obviously experience pain. Look, from my perspective...
The proper position with regards to especially complex animal existence is that you assume continuity until you can demonstrate discontinuity. That's the simplest explanation. Now, you said a bunch of things there that were interesting, so let me respond to a couple of them. So in the story of Job again,
Job has every reason to shake his fist at God and die, to claim, in some sense, what the antinatalists claim, to claim that existence, like Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, claims that the existential situation that characterizes reality is so dismal in its essence that it would be better if the whole thing was just brought to a halt. That consciousness itself, even being, is not...
is a reprehensible exercise in light of the suffering that's ultimately generated. Now, for Goethe, that was Mephistopheles speaking. And that's very interesting because, of course, Mephistopheles isn't one of the world's most positive characters. And so you might say, "Well, and by the way, Mephistopheles was a great hero to Karl Marx." And Mephistopheles does make this argument, and that's the spirit he stands for, is the adversary of being itself.
Being is so rife with suffering that it's inexcusable in its essence. And in some sense, that's the impetus to suicide. And it's understandable. Now, one of the ways that I've dealt with that, let's say, psychologically and conceptually, is to, I suppose it's a by their fruits you will know them argument.
My sense is that if you take the seeds that grow from that, or the fruit that grows from those seeds, that those fruits are bitter and evil. That if you adopt the antinatalist perspective, and look, it's perfectly obvious why it's justifiable, because the world is saturated in suffering.
And it isn't obvious to me that there's a way of balancing the evidence, so to speak, to decide on which side of the scales you would choose.
place your conclusion. Partly because how the hell do you weight the evidence? You know, Dostoevsky's... go ahead. This is great. This is an interesting point of agreement. And I'd like to have seen this come out in your discussion with Musk because I think he pointed to a form of agnosticism to begin with. And then when talking about antinatalism, he said something along the lines of, "It's obviously ridiculous to think that the world is just suffering."
To paraphrase the late, great Dan Dennett, he said that we should only begin to criticise our opponents after we express their ideas in such a way that they go, "Oh, I wish I put it like that. That's great." I don't think the antinatalist says everything is suffering, as you pointed out there. They say the world has more suffering than it does happiness, that all happiness and
Pleasure is bracketed in suffering and pain. This is the Buddhist idea, the Schopenhauerian idea, the views of David Benatar and David Pierce, the negative utilitarians who want to eliminate suffering. And that means, and I asked David Pierce this, a transhumanist, I asked him once,
well, if you're a negative utilitarian and you think the moral goal is to remove suffering, why don't you just blow up the world? Why don't you just give us drugs that make us feel nothing? And he said, well, I don't think I'm going to get voted in if I say I'm going to blow up the world, but I certainly would like to do it. You've got to admire the honesty there, right? Maybe he should start telling a few politicians lies to get himself to what he takes to be the moral end. But ultimately, though, I think you're exactly right that...
The problem with trying to quantify, measure the amounts of good and evil that's in the world is a hopeless project. You mentioned evil God a moment ago. There's this popular challenge in philosophy of religion that says, look at all the good and evil in the world. Who's to say that God is good rather than evil? And that's the essence of that challenge. And it works because
It's really hard to quantify these things, especially when you're not just counting pains, pleasures, happinesses and the like, but you're also seeing what goods and bads they ultimately lead to. You can play that game all day long. But there's one thing that the anti-antinatalist has up their sleeve.
And that's to say that existence itself is intrinsically good. Existence and being sit at the top of Jacob's ladder. That given the choice, and take John Rawls, you mentioned Marx, let's use another lefty looking political figure in political theory. John Rawls said,
Imagine you're behind this veil of ignorance and you've got to create the world. We can change this a bit for the purposes of our discussion. Now, you're given the choice whether to bring in life and conscious beings or not. You don't know how much happiness, pain, pleasure,
They're going to experience how much suffering they're going to experience when they're in the world. And he asks, well, we're asking on behalf of rules, would you bring things into being still, not knowing how much happiness and suffering they'd experience? I think we'd all say yes still. I think there is no person that I know of anyway that legitimately defends the intrinsic difference.
disvalue of life. Even David Benatar, the most prominent antinatalist, doesn't think that life is intrinsically bad. He thinks that the suffering and pain in the world overrides the intrinsic goodness of the world. And I think that is ultimately something that goes in the antinatalist's favor. So, okay. So the
I guess my first response to that question to you as well is that it isn't obvious to me that the axis of happiness and suffering is the right axis of evaluation. We seem to believe that it's self-evident that it's, let's say, something approximating pleasure versus pain. But that is not the only, what would you say, those aren't the only interpretive frameworks that are excessive.
So, I'll give you an example, a biblical example, which I think deals with this point extremely well. And so, the first great hero of the biblical text is Abraham. And you could think of Abraham as the expression of Seth, who's the third son of Abraham.
of Adam and Eve, right? So you have the battle between Cain and Abel. Abel dies and Seth is his replacement. If you were searching for the spirit of Seth, it would be Abraham. Okay, so here's what happens to Abraham. It's very, very interesting. So we're presented with Abraham at the start of his story, but he's an old man already. And he's a man who's lived a life that hasn't been characterized by suffering.
So he has the socialist paradise at hand, in a sense, because Abraham is the child of wealthy parents. And there's not a lot of biographical information in the text, but what we do know is that
Whatever Abraham wanted, he got. And that that was sufficiently, like Buddha, before Buddha is struck down by knowledge of death and mortality. Abraham's in the same situation. It's sort of, it's the situation of childhood paradise. That's a good way of thinking about it, unconscious childhood paradise. Now, God comes to Abraham in a very specific form.
And God comes to Abraham as the voice that compels him to leave his security and voyage into the world. And that's precisely the instruction is that Abraham is to leave his kin and the security of his wealthy father's dwelling and to go out into the terrible world. And it is a terrible world because Abraham has sinned.
a very cataclysmic adventure. War, tyranny, famine, sexual conflict, deep sexual immortality, the requirement for profound sacrifice. Like Abraham has a life and it's not hedonic.
Okay, so then you might say, well, if the solution to life's conundrums isn't pleasure as opposed to pain, because that's what Abraham has to begin with, what exactly is on offer? Okay, so God makes Abraham a deal. This is the covenant, by the way. He makes him a very specific deal. He says, if you hearken to the voice that compels you outward, that takes you from your zone of comfort, you think about that as the voice of adventure, four things will happen to you. You'll become a blessing to yourself.
So that's a good deal, right? So you're not living in misery. Now, your life isn't pleasure and the absence of pain. Now it's characterized as something approximating a blessing. You'll do that in a way that will make your name validly renowned among your fellows. You will do that in a manner that enables you to establish a dynasty of permanence
and you'll do it in a way that's a blessing to everyone else. Now, imagine for a second, tell me what you think about this, because there's a real technical claim here. So, you know, children have to move beyond the zone of comfort provided to them by their parents. They have to move out into the terrible world. All right, so, and there's an instinct that compels them forward that encouraging parents admire and foster.
Go out now that parents know that their children are going to be hurt by the world, but they want to make them competent Now what God offers in the Abrahamic story isn't pleasure and it's certainly not the absence of pain It's something like it's something like noble romantic adventure and that's way different That's a way different vision and it's it's an interesting vision even if you think about fiction and entertainment because the entertainment forms that people prefer are
aren't representations of the absence of pain or of hedonic gratification. They're almost always representations of romantic adventure. And so I'll just add one more thing to that because it also addresses something else you pointed out. And this is the idea that God wouldn't produce a world where evil could reign in the manner that it does. But I would say I'm not so sure about that because
there's a serious insistence in the biblical text, for example, that what human beings have to do is vital and real. Yeah. Right? It's not some sideshow. And what that implies is that if you do things correctly, there will be spectacularly positive consequences, let's say, and maybe unimaginably spectacular consequences. But if you do things wrong, like
There's no bottom to the abyss. Now, that's a very demanding world. But I don't know, you know, like you think about your own kids, like you want to set a challenge in front of them. And if you wanted to challenge someone to be everything they could be, if they were everything they could be, then would the challenge have those archetypal poles of hell and heaven? I mean, that is how the world appears to be constituted.
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This is good. I think ultimately, though, all of those points are sound within a theistic framework which we already need to have, right? If God exists or if it's reasonable to take the leap of faith and believe in God,
then it's reasonable to think that God has a plan for you and that your life is meaningful despite the pain and the suffering you experience. There is value to Diedrich Bonhoeffer's life when he said... Or in consequence, not despite even, right? Yeah, in consequence, good. Well, could be, you know. Yeah, so it seems like a meaningful and fulfilling life
is probably more important than having hedonistic pleasures for the Abrahamic believer. I believe that's completely the right way of thinking about it.
But it's a very different thing for the agnostic or the secular philosopher who can't appeal to cosmic meaning. You have the benefit of cashing out all of these other things in God's ultimate plan and your ultimate destiny, but the agnostic doesn't get that. I mean, you can have things that are like that, right? You can have an Aristotelian view where fulfilling your natural end is what's good. Martha Nussbaum defends a version of this in a book
Justice for Animals, which I've just finished. And she says, you know, there are creatures all over the world that want to reproduce and play and grow and all of these things. She says, thwarting those ends would be bad. Even if you snuck up and gave them the bullet in the back
of the head and they didn't know you're about to kill them and they didn't suffer, it would still be bad because the dog buried his bone yesterday and can't get it tomorrow and you're taking that thing away from that entity. That can't be understood within a framework of hedonistic utilitarianism such as that defended by Peter Singer. The hedonistic utilitarian wants to say that
the things that I am fulfilled in doing, the purpose that I reach, has to create more happiness and pleasure for entities as a whole than it does pain and suffering. It has to cash out at that. So I think within this Abrahamic view that you've developed there, which seems to be your view, is that meaning and purpose is more important than hedonistic pleasure and happiness. But for the agnostic and the atheist,
I think we've got a bit more of a challenge on our hands. We need to find a ground for that morality. Okay, well, the thing is, I actually think that that's... I think that that's...
Not only possible, but inevitable in a sense, you know? So what's the quote by Christ? Is that I am the truth. I am the way and the truth and the life. I believe no one comes to the Father except through me. That's a technical description in a sense. I think, well, okay, so you could take that apart and let's do that for a moment.
And so the way is a pathway forward. It's a road. And so the best possible road leads to the best possible destination. And part of what you perceive, literally what you perceive...
is a road. Like, we see pathways. We see pathways, we see tools, we see obstacles, we see friends, we see foes, but what we see is a pathway. Okay, now the question is, what's the pathway? Now, we described it earlier in terms of Jacob's Ladder, and that's a reasonable way of conceptualizing, but then you might say, well, how do you find the golden pathway? And this would be a question for atheists and agnostics as well. And one answer to that is, you tell the truth.
And then these other realizations, revelations, let's say, come to you. You could say you tell the truth in relationship to the upward aim. That's another useful way of conceptualizing it. And so I don't think that that realization is out of reach for the atheists or the agnostics unless they proclaim verbally
procedurally, no, that's no, no, that's not the right word, verbally, let's say, explicitly, that this higher order transcendent reality that transcends even being is off the table. It's like,
What happens if you do nothing but pursue the truth? Well, the biblical promise is that the revelation of the fundamental structure of reality comes to you. That's what happens to Moses, by the way, because see, Moses is willing to go off the beaten path to pursue what compels him forward. That's the key to the transformation of his life, because before he encounters the burning bush,
He's just a shepherd. Now, that's not nothing, right? He's an adult. He's married. He's taken on responsibility. But it's his willingness to engage in the pursuit of the transcendent. This is what happens to Jacob, too, because Jacob's a pretty miserable character at the beginning of his story. He's a liar, a mama's boy, a coward, a cheat. But he decides that, and this is when he has that great dream, he decides that he's going to leave that behind and
and aim upward and make the sacrifices that are necessary. And so I think that pathway, I think that's an inevitable pathway for people too, because the problem the atheists have in a sense and the agnostics is, well,
If you don't have a purpose, if you didn't have a purpose for what you were doing, you wouldn't do it. And so then you might say, well, I have micro purposes. Well, and they have to suffice because that's the best I can manage. But the problem with that is that micro purposes are fragmented and they're not very motivating. So like it's not a it's not a stable solution.
And that brings us back to the unity problem that we described at the beginning. Well, I remember you saying this to my friend Sue Blackmore in a debate you had with her once. And you said, "I don't even think you're an atheist, Sue, because you need this ladder of values," let's say, to paraphrase you. "You need this chain of motivations to do these things."
I raised this with a friend recently, I was discussing it, and they said, well, I've been getting up and getting dressed every day since 1998, and I don't believe in the system of values. And then you sort of push them and you start to realise that what they're doing is they're not doing what we might call a Humean track of moral motivation or motivation for action. So a Humean view would say that we're
acting in accordance with our desires and reason is the slave to our desires. And that might give you a few micro motivations in your environment. Take the example of good. I desire to be good. So I see someone in the street and I give to them charitably or something.
But then you've got non-Humian views which you are motivated by reasons. And I think that's the best place for this view that you develop in terms of pushing towards the divine or the realisation of the intrinsic good.
that if you are motivated by reasons, you can't keep going on forever with your reasons. There needs to be an end to that reason, the Truth with a capital T. So I think there are different frameworks of them, and both might be true at the same time. Well, I think both are true at the same time, right? That we are guided by reason and we're guided by our desires. So maybe you don't have too much of a problem with that one. Well, I would say to some degree that
You're alluding to the fact that in the absence of a formal structure of integrated belief in a fundamental unity, let's say, a monotheistic belief, that people are still motivated. And then you made allusion to the fact that those motivations can take, you might say, they take instinctual form. And that's a reasonable way of construing it. I would say that many of the pagan gods are representations of the instincts that drive motivation and perception.
But what I think that means is that if you look at someone who has a propositional framework in hand that dispenses with the divine unity, there's an implicit God hidden inside their motivational structure that's not explicated. I don't think they need that. Well, they don't need it. I'm saying it's there whether they need it or not. It's part and parcel.
No, as in like, it might not be there, even if they do or don't need it. Like, I think you can have a view in which you're just acting on the basis of your desires, and there is no further end. Like, we've got instrumental reasons, right? I act in such a way because it's instrumental to this good.
And I think that can stop pretty quickly if the thing in front of you is just fulfilling your desire. But then if it's reasons, you need something at the end. Look, I think I've got no dispute whatsoever with that. I would only point out this, and you can think about this neurodevelopmentally in a way. So the motivational situation that a two-year-old finds him or herself in is a sequence of short-term things.
perceptual frames that are motivated by instinct.
And each of those frames, when they emerge, seeks for its relatively immediate and self-serving satisfaction. Two-year-olds aren't really capable of integrated social behavior. And they can manage. They live. They're alive. They can operate in the world. It has to be in an abounded environment. But the price that's paid for that, and this is what Christ refers to when he talks about a house that's divided against itself, is that if you're motivated by...
a welter of chaotic short-term instrumental drives, so to speak, that's going to produce, the Buddhists know that, that's going to produce a complex of suffering in consequence of that, even though there'll be times when the gratification occurs. But I would also say, this is also, so that's an incoherent
Motivational structure, if you iterate it across time and you think about it socially, it doesn't function well by its own definitions. It causes pain. But there's another thing that's interesting too, which is that you can take these fragmentary motivations, let's say lust and hunger, for example, desire for status, those would be good ones because they're very primordial.
their interactions do produce a developmental impulse that is something akin to movement towards a monotheistic unity. That's what motivates maturity. So, for example, as a two-year-old turns into a three-year-old, the two-year-old starts to become able to integrate his motivational desires and emotions with those of a
a friend, a play partner. And so you see that those underlying motivations, they're not inhibited by society. They merge into something that's integrated across time and people. And that is a movement towards something like a monotheistic unity. And so even these people that are fractionated in their motivation and pursuing a fragmentary hedonism, under that, in a way, there's still a unifying force that's
attempting to spiral them up Jacob's ladder, insofar as they're social at all or future-oriented at all. Good. Okay, there's a few interesting points here that I want to pick up on. First, just to end on, to piggyback off the point you raised there, is that I think that's generally a sensible view, and I can see that working out in the broader scheme of things. But I think ultimately there's still a problem there of
Like, why one Jacob's ladder or something like this? If we've got multiple things that we value intrinsically, I don't see why that would have to end in a monotheistic belief rather than something like Plato's realm of the forms where you've got a form for justice, a form for, let's call it,
order, let's say there's a form of the good as well, there's a form of power. Why not say that you've got multiple of these, several of these entities rather than the god of classical theism? And I think this again is an interesting point of agreement here is that the agnostic, I think, although they're agnostic
about the existence of God or several gods. And I take that what to be theism or atheism. Theism to believe in one God or many and atheism to say there is no God and not many. Agnosticism I define as rejecting that either of those views has the answer or is highly reasonable.
But you can be non-agnostic about a bunch of other things, right? You can be non-agnostic about how many corners a triangle has, or whether kicking dogs and children is bad, or whether Jonah Hill should direct any more films. The answers to those questions are pretty clear still for the agnostic.
That means we can perhaps form ourselves a patchwork blanket to keep us warm in the cold indifference of the universe. So I can draw from Plato's forms and have this view which you've worked out there in terms of
chain of reasons and why I act in the world. I see that to be completely compatible with agnosticism. So my question to put to you is why your view rather than agnosticism beyond the leap of faith, which seems to be something which is... That maps perfectly on to how we started the conversation with regards to, say, skepticism of uniting metanarratives.
Because you're making an argument that's analogous to that, the patchwork quilt argument. And I would say there's two reasons for that that are technical. One is that if you have a plethora of competing values, the competition in itself engenders anxiety. And that's well mapped neurophysiologically. You could say in a sense that anxiety is actually an index of disunity.
And so the price you pay for the patchwork is the consequence of
the multitude of values that you have competing. They're going to compete. There'll be situations where they go head to head. It's very stressful. Conflicts of duty, even. Like, it can be a good against an evil, but it could be two goods against one another. And then you have to mediate between them, or you're trapped between them in a place where you can't make a decision. Very existentially demanding. And then I would also say that the same applies on the positive emotion side, is that
the more union there is behind the aim that unites, the more positive value there is in movement towards that aim. And so the price you pay for the patchwork is that you're not as formidable as you would be if that patchwork was arranged into a hierarchy with something uniting all those values across your own being, across the social world, and across time.
And so, and I'm not saying that that's not possible. People do live that way. And you could also say that perhaps the world is constituted that way, but the price for that is disunity, a certain degree of hopelessness, and a complexity. Now, that doesn't prove that things resolve into a union. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just pointing out what the price is. Now, and I would also say, to return to another theme that we developed, that
One of the things that the Christian passion does as a story is provide that framework of unity. Now, then you might say, well, why would you prefer it? I would say you'd prefer it—now, that's a tough one—
I think the reason that you prefer it is because it's deeper. And then you might say, "Well, who cares?" And the answer is, well, when you're going to be in the most existentially demanding situations in your life, right? So where you're making decisions of mortal import, let's say, or decisions between good and evil, like decisions that really matter, you're going to need something deep on your side, or you're going to face the consequences of your disunity and foolishness.
And so it isn't exactly a hedonistic argument. It's more like there will be situations in your life that are so challenging that you better have what's highest walking with you, because otherwise you'll suffer immensely. You'll degenerate, but you could also easily become a passive or an active agent of evil. And that's worse.
Okay, this is good. So there are two things there, right? There seems to be one which there's going to be conflict in the agnostics patchwork blanket, let's say, and the competing values of these different systems they draw together might end up competing. I'm not sure about that. Maybe we can come back to that with an example. But I think what's really interesting and what reveals our difference in the types of philosophy that we're doing is that
you're saying that there is a pragmatic benefit, let's say, to believing in a God in terms of your flourishing. You and everyone else. Yeah, let's say you're an agnostic and you're an existentialist. You don't think that the life has any obvious meaning, and this is my view again, is that it
might be the case, yeah, that you experience existential dread. I feel this most mornings, right? Every morning, I personally wake up and you kind of check in with yourself as the sun comes in. I sort of think, like, am I happy and pleased to be alive? Or do I feel that dread today? And I sort of go, like, some days it's good, and some days I feel like that emptiness of the ultimate purpose of things. Now, I wouldn't trade that, right? And this is something which
Well, Simone de Beauvoir gives this great bit in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter where she says, "I was in Paris one day and I returned to my apartment and I just started screaming and I tore up the carpet and I was terrified that one day my life would come to an end. The thing I was more scared of was that this feeling would arise again, the fear that I might die.
And I get that, right? I think a lot of people who don't believe in God do experience that. But we should believe things because they're true and not because they make us feel good. It might be the case that theism increases well-being, that theism helps people flourish, that society needs some kind of religion to get along. Maybe those things are true. Maybe truth isn't the thing we should be guided by.
But as an agnostic, I find myself guided more by truth than feeling good about things, I suppose. And I think perhaps you would like the truth to correspond to the religion as well. But I think it's missing that extra bit of reason. Think about that word rational, proportionate. Are my reasons proportionate to my belief? And I think you were saying earlier, you need to take that extra step without the reason like Job.
But I think by definition, Job's faith is irrational, right? That he takes the leap despite the lack of evidence, despite evidence of the contrary. It's pre-rational. It's pre-rational. How would you say it's pre-rational? It's...
You need a stance within which your rationality makes itself manifest. The stance itself is bounded. And the mythological response to your query, including, I would say, the aspect that brought in the issue of existential dread, is the stance is this—
It's not this. It's not the stance of a prey animal. It's not the stance of someone paralyzed by anxiety. And you said, you made reference to waking up in the morning, you know, and balancing, in a sense, the happiness with the pain. See, I actually think it's the wrong framework. And so I don't think the problem can be solved within that framework at all. It has to be solved. It's something like solution within the framework of the ultimately solution.
What an infinitely painful and rewarding adventure. And so in some sense, the hedonistic and the painful become irrelevant. And I'm not saying they're meaningless because that would be foolish and it could easily be cruel, but it's not the right frame. The right frame is the frame that Job takes, which is, I could say this to you, for example, this would be derived from the morality in the book of Job. It is morally incumbent upon you to manifest a courageous faith.
And that's a pre-rational decision. But we already admitted, both you and I already admitted, that you can't weigh up the evidence. First of all, you're not in possession of the evidence, which is also something that God tells Job. And Job admits. It's like, I don't have the evidence at hand. Okay, so you're fragile and mortal and prone to evil, and you don't have the evidence at hand. Okay, so what stance do you take? Well, the stance that Job takes is,
I will be a faithful scout of the formidable future, no matter what hell comes my way. And it's a very interesting stance because Job, and he does this very explicitly, his claim is, I am not to lose faith in myself or the ultimate spirit of reality, no matter what happens to me.
And the interesting thing about that, and this isn't the reason for it, but it is a consequence, is that that is a stance that does in fact maximize flourishing. But that's not the justification for it.
Right? And you pointed that out correctly. This isn't an argument from hedonism or even, I guess, the argument that it's the pathway that is least likely to lead to hell. That's kind of a variant of the hedonistic argument, except reversed, right? Is that any alternative pathway tends to degenerate into the most abysmal suffering you can possibly imagine. And I do believe that that's true in the final analysis. Now, that's a bit of a hedonistic argument, but
But it's only one of the elements of the argument. Good. I think this is important because you say that it's still relevant, the suffering, the happiness, the pleasure, the pain. The hedonism is still relevant even if
we have meaning and purpose. But suppose God decided that our purpose and meaning was to ensure the process of evolution continued with all of its blood and glory, and we'd stuff animals into factory farms and slaughter them and torture them forever. You'd go like,
okay, that's not the kind of meaning that I was thinking about God, right? I didn't think that's what constituted a meaningful existence. I thought my meaning would correspond to my happiness and pleasure. Like they can't be completely opposed. Yeah, I don't think that's right. No, they can't. But I don't think that's right. I think the Abrahamic vision is more existentially accurate and also more desirable. See, Dostoevsky kind of knew this. When he
when he laid out his objection to reductionist rationalism in Notes from Underground, one of the things he pointed out about human beings, this was his fundamental critique of socialist utopianism, and it's kind of an Abrahamic critique. He said, look, if you gave people the opportunity to live a life devoid of, let's say, anxiety and pain, so that they had nothing to do, this is basically his words, but
eat cakes, sit in bubbling pools of hot water, and busy themselves with the continuity of the species, that human beings were constituted such that the first thing they would do is take a mallet to the utopia and destroy it, just so that something interesting and adventurous would happen. Smash the tables. Exactly. The hypothesis is, and this is the Abrahamic hypothesis, is we're not built for
hedonistic infantilism. That whatever the world's about, it's not about pain and pleasure. Not that they're irrelevant, because that's not a reasonable thing to propose, but that that's not the issue. And that higher unity is something like the intermingling of pleasure and pain. Think about it this way, man. When you think about your life and you
You wake up in the morning and you're just trying to justify your miserable existence to yourself and your memory wanders down the pathways of your life and you remember some event that befell you where you disciplined yourself and you strove against remarkable odds and you suffered along the way, but you accomplished the aim and you take refuge in that memory. And that isn't a memory of the absence of pain. Quite frankly,
Quite the contrary. And it also might be that the antithesis of pain is something like the willingness to undergo it voluntarily. And that's certainly what's represented by the crucifixion. And so it's an embrace even of what's negative. It's certainly not a replacement of suffering with pain.
with like hedonic gratification. And certainly not the eradication of suffering. Now maybe you don't like that world and you know, but there's a problem there too. This is the problem Job faces. It's like, that you can not like the world, but that doesn't mean that you can, what would you say? It isn't obvious that you have the capability or the right to stand in opposition to its moral order.
So now you can debate that, obviously. We mentioned, again, this concept of an evil god earlier on. You find this in the literature, trying to run this parody argument against the existence of a good god quite a lot. Okay, so I'm going to hang on one sec. We have to do something here because we're running out of time. So what I would recommend is this. I wanted to get to the...
to the meat of your new book. Now, we have another half an hour on The Daily Wire. Let's delve into the issue of the good versus evil God that's come up in philosophical discussion, if that's okay. Because that'll be a good, that'll be a great thing for us to do just for half an hour. You can walk us through that. So everybody, for everybody who's watching and listening, that is what we'll do on The Daily Wire's side. So if you want to join us there,
please feel welcome to do that. And you can throw some support the Daily Wire way too, if you're inclined to do that. And they're good advocates for, well, this kind of discussion, which they help bring to everyone, you know, gratis, which is...
I think, quite a remarkable offering. So, in any case, let's do that. And so, we'll close this off. We did a fair bit of wandering around theological and conceptual territory. We laid a nice groundwork for the next part of this. So, as I said, everybody, if you're watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire side. Thank you very much for the discussion and for sharing it with everyone who's watching and listening. And we'll continue in a couple of minutes. And as I said, everybody, join us.
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