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PROOF: The God Conversation Has Changed || SLP515 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hello and thank you so much for downloading this brand new episode of the Speak Life Podcast, episode 515.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Thomas Thorogood, media producer at Speak Life, and in the episode you are about to hear, Glenn Scrivener, Speak Life Director, responds to a recent conversation that was released by Unheard.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: This conversation from Unheard Live was released on the 14th of May and features Justin Briley, host of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God podcast.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: It also features Elizabeth Oldfield, host of The Sacred, and Alex O'Connor, who used to be known as Cosmic Skeptic, but now his podcast is called Within Reason.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the topic of their discussion was Christian revival, fantasy or reality?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Is the tide turning against secularism in Britain and America?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a fascinating conversation, and you are about to hear Glenn reacting and responding to it.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'd just like to draw your attention again to the upcoming Speak Life Intensive from the 10th to the 14th of June, an opportunity to meet the Speak Life team, catch the vision, and learn the craft of captivating proclamation with seminars, tutorials, and hands-on practicals.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The theme is ancient and modern.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Tickets go fast, so go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash intensives to find out more and sign up.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you there.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Over to Glenn.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: We've chosen a very forgiving atheist on this.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I've got to ask, you know, do you do you feel like there is any chance if we get you back in ten years' time?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: You'd have a different answer to that question.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: God willing.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_06: I think God is really there.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_06: I think there is a logic of love in the universe that wants to meet us.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_05: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_05: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_05: Is there a surprising rebirth of belief in God?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_05: That is the thesis that Justin Briley has put forward in his book and in his podcast.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_05: He's come onto our channel to defend that thesis.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_05: At that time, I pushed back and said, is this a kind of intellectual revivalism that is not based in the facts?
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_05: But since then, Justin has started to see evidence for a surprising rebirth of belief in God.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_05: And in the last few months, I think I have started to see evidence for a surprising rebirth of at least the conversations about God.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_05: And now it is far more plausible to say I'm going to church, I'm praying, I'm reading the Bible, I'm leaning into the Christian thing.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_05: I'm not sure I believe it all yet, but I want to give it my best shot.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_05: I'm seeing that happen on a local level, I'm seeing that happen on a national level.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_05: Whether I'm seeing that on an international level, it's interesting.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_05: Even in Scotland, I think the spiritual climate might be different to England.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_05: And I think it's different in Australia, I think it's different in the United States.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_05: But in England, I think there is a greater plausibility for people saying, I'm gonna give church a shot.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_05: And so Unheard invited Justin Briley to defend his thesis.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_05: Freddie Sayers is the host.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_05: He is an agnostic, but he is a heterodox thinker, a dissident thinker.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_05: He's he's very good at entertaining new ideas and holding them in tension.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_05: He is a great host for this.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_05: He has invited also Elizabeth Oldfield, who is a Christian who has a book coming out called Fully Alive, Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_05: Um talk to us more about that.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_05: And then there's Alex O'Connor, who we've commented on many times on this channel.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_05: He used to go by the name Cosmic Skeptic.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_05: He now goes by his Christian name.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_05: Alex O'Connor is he on a little bit of a journey.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_05: We might get some insight into that in this conversation.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_05: First of all, Justin Briley lays out his thesis.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_05: His thesis is not that church attendance is going back up again.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_05: His thesis is not that the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S, those who say that they have no religion, it's his thesis is not that those numbers of people are shrinking.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_05: He doesn't really have data for this.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_05: He is noticing a mood in the God conversations that are surrounding him.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_05: And he's saying that in spite of the statistics of decline in church attendance, it is now more plausible to have God conversations.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_05: Here's him saying that.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_04: The only stats I quote in the book are the ones that are contrary to my thesis.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, we're there are actually, we know well that the decline in church going, the decline in religiosity, the rise of the so-called nuns, people who don't claim any religious affiliation.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_05: So he acknowledges that the numbers are diminishing and going in the wrong direction as far as Christians are concerned.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_04: However, so that's that's all out there.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_04: We can all see the statistics about church going in the West.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_04: And what I present in the book, at least, is essentially just a sense that actually that might not be the full story.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_04: That actually there's a sense in which there's a turning of the tide.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_04: Now, that doesn't mean that we're seeing a wave coming back at us, but I feel like something has changed and we might just be at the furthest end of that secularism before it comes back in.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_04: Now, having said that, since publishing the book last year, I have been increasingly bumping into what could turn out to be more than just anecdotes.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_04: There are, I feel, some definite trends that are being noticed, polls, surveys, and so on.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_05: He talks about, you know, statistics about men in Finland going back to church.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_05: There are there are baptisms in France, for instance, that that are seeing uh record highs in in recent times anyway.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_05: And on a local level, um, the the last two church leaders I have spoken to, both of them happen to be in a New Frontiers denomination, which is one of the three growing denominations in the United Kingdom.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_05: There's the Elam, Pentecostal Churches, New Frontiers, and FIEC churches.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_05: But the last two uh New Frontiers uh pastors that I spoke to have both talked about, especially young men being much more interested in faith.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_05: One of them has just run an alpha course where 26 people are putting themselves forward for baptism.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_05: Another has just baptized like 17 on Easter Sunday, and another 15 are now wanting to be baptized on the back of things.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_05: Our church, which you know doesn't see quite as many um numbers of baptisms as as that, but it is seeing more and more people putting themselves forward for baptism.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_05: I know that just on my street, there are a number of people who are starting to say, I guess the Bible has built the modern West.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_05: I don't know anything about the Bible.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_05: I'm taking myself off to church to figure out if this thing is true or not.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_05: And it's fascinating, they seem to be on the Tom Holland train, and they've never heard of Tom Holland.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_05: Which goes to show that maybe this movement is beyond certain figures.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_05: You don't have to have dominion on your shelf, you don't have to be listening to the rest of history podcasts, you don't have to be listening to debates on unheard.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_05: There's something in the cultural waters that's making it much more plausible to say, I don't know about the Bible, so I'm picking up the Bible.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_05: I've never tried praying before and I'm trying praying.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_05: I want to go to church, and so I'm j I've I'm just showing up.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_05: I'm seeing that a little bit, and Justin is seeing that a little bit, and in a sense, it's a case of the data is catching up to Justin's hypothesis.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_05: And one tiny piece of data um might be that we're having conversations like this, and the unheard is hosting conversations like this.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_05: Which makes you realise two things, and and one of them is that actually the new atheism was a publishing phenomenon, and the way that momentum builds in things is just, well, this publication is talking about it, so the other publications have to talk about it.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_05: This media outlet is talking about it, so the other media outlets have to talk about it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_05: This is the way that publishing phenomena happen, but even if it is just a publishing phenomena, then people talking about the plausibility of faith and getting back to church changes the sense of the plausibility of you showing up in church on a Sunday and giving it a shot.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_05: And and I think that is for the good.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_04: What I noticed happening anecdotally might be starting to be reflected in some of the actual.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the big one is the census, isn't it?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: If we're gonna be really kind of hardcore about it, that that is the regular survey of the whole UK population.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: The last census was just dismal reading for us, particularly the Church of England.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was literally under 1% for the youngest cohort.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it it it really felt like it's vanishing entirely.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Liz, you're also living in this world of talking to people, I suppose, in the avant-garde uh of the conversation.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_05: Elizabeth and her family live in Christian community that is a very thick community, that is a very intentional community, uh, in which they really believe in formation and they really believe in hospitality.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's important context for all that Liz says.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Do you share Justin's diagnosis?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_06: To an extent, I would say there is a definite shifting in the spiritual landscape.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_06: When I I worked on religion programming for the BBC, and then I ran a religion think tank, and the uh analysis about where we were a decade ago, I think, has uh was true and is no longer true.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_06: The social permission to talk about metaphysical yearnings, to explore spirituality, to be actively looking for sources of meaning and belonging, ways to steady ourselves in a turbulent world, has changed radically.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_06: You are much less likely now to get sneered at, to get shouted down, even if you say you go to church.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_06: I think interest in spirituality, driven by frankly climate anxiety, by the breaking down of our generational trust, the covenant of life paths, the way economics has changed, the way it's hard to root.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_06: There's all these multiplicity of factors that are leaving, I think, more people than 10 years ago thinking, okay, how do I live?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_06: What does this look like?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_06: What does wisdom look like?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_06: It may not be that I can do the, you know, get a nice job, find a partner, buy a house, climb the thing.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_06: Normally the midlife crisis kicks in once you've done those things for previous generations.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_06: It's kicking in much earlier now because they're not accessible to them.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_05: I see that too.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_05: Justin began his talk by thinking about Matthew Arnold's Sea of Faith.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_05: So 1851, Matthew Arnold writes a poem called On Dover Beach, in which the the tide is out, and he says the tide on the sea of faith is out.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_05: It's had it's had a long, withdrawing, melancholy roar.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_05: And we are at low tide, he said in 1851, which interestingly there was a census done in 1851.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_05: And in that census, church going was at an all-time high water mark.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_05: Half of England was in church, actually, in 1851.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_05: Still, Matthew Handold thought it was low tide.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_05: Well, how low is low tide now?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, when in some cohorts uh membership of the Church of England is uh below 1%.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_05: Um So the tide is very definitely out, but the tide is out on all sorts of things.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_05: Institutional trust is is tanking on all sorts of things.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_05: Low tide trust in church goes together with low tide trust in everything.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_05: And one thing that low tide does is it exposes foundations and it makes you see, it makes you see the shaping power and influence of the sea, because the sea has shaped that landscape.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_05: And at low tide you see the shaping influence of Christianity down through the years, and a book like Tom Holland's Dominion comes into its own when it's released in 2019.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_05: I think it was if it was released in 1999, it would have been just one more very dismissible book talking about the impact of Christianity.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_05: It's when you see it's low tide and the absence of Christianity makes you feel that absence.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_05: That actually a a thesis like Dominion makes sense.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_05: Low tide makes you see the power and shaping influence of the sea, and it also makes you see what's ancient and what's beneath.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_05: And without the tide of faith buoying you up, I think there's a lot of people who are recognizing that life on planet Earth is incredibly difficult and it's impossible to live without a higher sense of meaning and purpose.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_05: And so low tide is making people question their foundations and making them wonder whether they can make that journey back to church.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_05: And Elizabeth's really got her ear to the ground for what low tide spirituality looks like in the world.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_06: There's the rise in psychedelics, absolutely enormous, I think, for changing the spiritual landscape and really changing how people think about what might be here.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_06: You know, what what is the world?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_06: What is um it's really for a lot of people that come to our little communities, just they're losing faith in materialism.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_06: They're losing faith in a kind of naturalistic nar narrating of what the world is.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_06: So huge, yes, spiritual openness.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_05: Notice that she said a materialist narrating of what the world is, because materialism presents itself as though it's just the facts, ma'am, just the facts, and yet it is not.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_05: It is a story about who we are and where we've come from.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_05: Unfortunately, it's a terrible story, it's incredibly slow-paced.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_05: Nothing much happens.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_05: And there are no characters at the end of the day.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_05: If we all if our psych psychologist boils down to biology, which boils down to chemistry, which boils down to physics, not only is it an incredibly slow-paced plot, there are no characters at the end of the day.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_05: And yet we cannot live without stories.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_05: And the materialist story, terrible though it is, is the story that captures us.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and it has been found wanting by so many people.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_05: And therefore, if we've lost the old story and the new story is not doing it for us, what are we left with?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_05: Well, Freddie says.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_06: Huge metaphysical midlife crisis at all ages.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_06: And I think we do see that Gen Z are much more likely to say that religion has got stuff to teach us about ethics.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_06: Like, I think there is an openness.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_06: The bit that I don't think has yet joined the dots is I don't think the church is knows what on earth to do with those people, is quite hunkered down and high anxiety itself in a lot of institutional crisis.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_06: A lot of Christians are uh not able to meet those questions with curiosity and openness and listening because of this kind of destabilized state that a lot of them in themselves, and I think there is um this huge values gap over sexuality, absolutely enormous.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_06: And we see that driving a lot of the institutional pain and conflict at the moment.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_06: And for most of the people that are coming to this sense of okay, maybe I'm looking actually, maybe what I'm looking for is less of an individualized spiritual path and more of the like whisper it old school religion, jumping that gap, becoming part of an institution that might hold a radically different view on sexuality from yourself is a really big question mark.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_05: She has named it all.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_05: That's that's exactly it.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_05: And and that is the big barrier that a lot of people um want to, or perhaps don't want to, cross over uh the 1960s and the sexual revolution.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_05: Um, this this is a a big thing.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_05: Elizabeth has surveyed the landscape of low-tide spirituality um very well there.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_05: So there's a hunger for spiritual things, but as Freddie throws to Alex.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: The suggestion is almost that the the market should be there for a Christian revival, but it's possible that the the punters who might otherwise be going to church are going to places like your YouTube channel.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you have nearly a million followers.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: We've just been together at a uh sort of talking festival, basically in Dissident Dialogues in New York.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_05: Dissident Dialogues is where Ion Hersey Allee had a conversation with Richard Dawkins, which Freddie says moderated.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_05: We haven't yet seen the tapes of this, and we can't wait.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_05: Don't worry, we will definitely be responding to that video when it's out.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_05: But Alex O'Connor was also there.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: Alex was spent most of the day just just talking.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was quite remarkable to see walking around the crowd, and at every stage he had about 10 to 15 young men mainly who were kind of gathered around him waiting for you to carry on talking.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was like one of those uh etchings of kind of Socrates uh walking around the agora.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds a bit like Jesus, actually.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Well, well, followed by a group of young men as a child.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: An atheist capitalizing on a kind of m misplaced Christian yearning.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm an atheist, but so are most of the people that we're talking about.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: This is the thing.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_03: Uh of course, it's not really cool to be an atheist anymore.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: When new atheism springs up, which is essentially a publishing phenomenon, by the way, nothing more.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: There's this sort of what is it that's new about new atheism?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's disbelief in God with all of the political stuff.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: It sort of is indebted to 9-11 for its existence, for example.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: It probably wouldn't spring up without that.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people, the the biggest thing that I think people get wrong about this is they talk about it as if it's some kind of new phenomenon, this uh meaning crisis.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_03: Like the panel that you moderated, the discussion I had with John Viveki was finding meaning in a secular age, which is quite a strange thing to say.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: As if this struggle to find meaning, this chasm of meaning is something new.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's as if it weren't the case that scripture itself is littered with examples of people desperately yearning for God, and the perhaps the most concise and original formulation of nihilism that can be found in written texts is in Ecclesiastes.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: This is such a great point.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: This isn't a new thing.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: Like what's what's actually new here?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, okay, Richard Dawkins published his God Delusion in 2006, and since then people are getting more depressed.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: Young people are finding it difficult to foster meaningful uh conversations with each other and and have communion with each other, and they're staying indoors and isolated, they're not getting together because they're not going to church.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: What also happened in 2007?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: The invention of the iPhone.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: We have all these conversations about finding meaning in a secular age.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: What about finding meaning in the technological age?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: No, that would be a weird event to put on.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_05: Sure, I completely agree that the the the smartphone and technology and social media and the AI are incredible technological shocks that we are not ready for and that we are handling poorly.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_05: Interestingly, in Jonathan Heidt's kind of data, uh, he seems to say that actually the most religious communities are surviving those tech shocks best.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_05: So that that's one thing to throw in here.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: But I think we're probably far more uh depressed and nihilistic because of because of that, because of social media addiction, because of being confronted daily by thousands of people with completely conflicting worldviews that make you think, well, of course I can't be right about this.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: You can go to church now, but when you go to church, you realize that when you come home, you're going to listen to people halfway across the world who've just been to their equivalent of church and been taught something totally different.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: Being confronted with that on a daily basis probably has something to do with our inability to believe in God.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: So we talk about figures like Douglas Murray, like Tom Holland, uh, like um Jordan Peterson.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: These are people that you talk about in your book, Justin.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: None of these people will explicitly say that they believe in God, you know?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: And those that do, like I am Hersey Ali, have said explicitly that the reason they do so is because they've you were there as well in at the event that they uh that where I just spoke to Richard Dawkins.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: And Dawkins, and she gave a very moving account.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: It was almost comical the way that she sort of talks about her incredible story of depression and suicidality and manages to crawl out of it by praying.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: And then Richard Dawkins has to go, Yes, but do you believe in the virgin birth?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like you know, that's that's the important thing.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like I that was that was that was very tough to respond to.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's pretty strange, but Ian said, I choose to believe it.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: She said, I'm so moved by the personal aspect that I just choose to believe that what they're saying is true.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people tell me that I have a God-shaped whole.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: It seems to me that maybe I has a whole-shaped god, right?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: Like there's it's no surprise to me that this is what's happening.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: A whole-shaped god.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_05: So she has a need for meaning, and so she has constructed a god that is the plug for that, and and the contours of that god has been determined by her ache for more rather than what's actually there.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, Ion herself doesn't talk in those terms.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_05: Um her therapist said to her, if you could construct a god, which god would you construct?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_05: And she f discovered that in that process she was describing Jesus Christ.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_05: And so she thought at that point, I need to be dealing with the God who was before me, rather than a God that I uh have constructed for myself.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_05: But it's a it's a good point.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_05: If we're constantly talking about the God-shaped whole, um, we might just use God for instrumental purposes, and then all God becomes is some salve to the meaning crisis, rather than God.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_05: So um yeah, that's that's an interesting point, Alex.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, people are gonna be sort of like depressed and nihilistic for a while after something like the technological revolution.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe also new atheism is partly responsible for that.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, for a while it's it's kind of cool, you know?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, there's no meaning, it's all just molecules and motions.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: Like, do you do you perceive your mother with that worldview?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: Do you observe, though, the same thing that these guys have been talking about?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, rather than okay, we can have a discussion about new atheism, but what about the past few years?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: You said it's no longer cool to be so atheist.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I noticed when we did our panel at that same conversation, you quoted from C.S.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, which surprised your atheist fan base that were out there in the audience to see you.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, regardless of the kind of deep truths of it, do you observe at least as this kind of cultural phenomenon that religion is in?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: Religion is, I think, like Liz said, is just less condemnable than it was ten years ago.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: Because we were in the midst of, as I say, a publishing phenomenon where people were sort of talking about it casually in the pub.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: If you turn on like Fox News, people were debating evolution in schools.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: Now they're talking about school bathrooms, right?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's it's very commonplace to go into a pub.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: We could walk down to the Westminster Arms around the corner, and you probably find people talking about woke culture, gender ideology, this kind of stuff.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: People are just talking about it at the pub in a way that they're not talking about religion anymore.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: And that means that the only people who are left to talk about religion are people who are reflecting on it properly.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's not just part of the sort of cultural zeitge.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: So who's left to talk about it?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_03: People who've put enough thought into it to recognise that it's too simplistic to just say, oh, that's stupid, you know, you must be an idiot to believe in that stuff.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: But the thought
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_05: Leaders trickle down in terms of how everyone else starts to talk about it.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_05: So that that does have an effect, I think, in how everybody else starts talking about religion, I would say.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't necessarily mean that people have sort of shifted their opinion.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: If you went into Westminster Arms and said, I know no one's talking about this, but what do you all think about Christianity?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: They probably say, Oh, you know, I don't d don't believe in any of that kind of stuff.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: I think the same thing would probably be the case.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's just that less people are talking about it now.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_05: I don't think that's true.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_05: I I I think when Russell Brown with six six and a half million awakening wonders on YouTube gets baptized and they do mere Christianity as the book club for his supporters.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I I think this is changing some of the conversation that's happening.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_05: And and sort of anecdotally, I'm I'm noticing in my church and in my town, I'm noticing in the other churches that I visit, there there are more such people who are more likely to give church a shot and to start talking about those big issues.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_05: But maybe that's just anecdote.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_04: I disagree.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_04: I think I think there has been a genuine shift in general openness to supernatural claims in that sense.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_04: So I think A, it is easier to talk without embarrassment about religion.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_04: I think it was much harder in the heyday of new atheists because it was just you know, the cool kids were the Sam Harrises and the Dawkins and so on.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: And I just feel like, yeah, partly because of the influence of some of those people you've mentioned, Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, and others, who have just sort of said, A, the new atheists really overreached, and B, uh, it turns out we all basically need religion at some level.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_04: We're all kind of intrinsically religious.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_04: And C, it turns out, despite everything the new atheists said, Christianity's done an awful lot of good for us, and they've just kind of helped to remind people of sort of some of the fundamental things that Christianity gave the West.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_04: And I just think that has actually had quite a significant impact.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_04: Because these aren't, these are people with very large platforms.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_04: And I think you do get a trickle down, even into the pub, of people saying, Oh, you know, I just listened to Joe Rogan say it's about time we had Jesus back, or whatever.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_04: Now, it it's not necessarily high-level intellectual thesis, but it's just it's just a change in the way people are willing to talk about things.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_04: And even Ian Hersei Ali, I think, her saying, I just choose to believe it now.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think that's her surrendering her intellectual faculties.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's her saying, I've discovered something that is actu that does it does not compete with my intellectual uh you know, faculties, but it is it comes in alongside it, and I realize that it doesn't have to be this either-or any longer.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_05: So this will become the absolute heart of this conversation.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_05: Um can you choose to believe something and can you can you take Ayan's path with any kind of credibility?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_05: Can you choose to believe in the virgin birth?
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_05: Can you choose to become a Christian like that simply because you feel a meaning crisis, or because you see the political threat of Islam and woke ideology in China and Iran?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_05: And um is that enough to make you just say, all right, I believe the creed now.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_05: I b I believe in the virgin birth, I believe in the resurrection.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_05: How do you make that leap it is thought of?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_05: It is thought of as a leap from being a rational person to being a believing person.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_05: And the rest of this conversation, there are some wonderful moments, especially from Elizabeth Oldfield, about how that is not actually a leap and how actually going to church and praying is precisely the thing that makes Christianity plausible.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_05: It's not the thing you do once you've found Christianity plausible for rational reasons, it's the thing that becomes rationally plausible as you pray, as you go to church, as you read scripture.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_05: But Freddie's gonna reflect on Ayan Hersey Ali's journey.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, with in Ayane's case, what's interesting is that her first essay that she wrote here on heard was sounded more political.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: It was a kind of sense that the West as a collective society is without moral foundations, and if we're going to find a way to rejuvenate, we need to rediscover Christianity.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then her subsequent accounts of it, which she started talking to me, and then I thought particularly a few weeks ago, were much more personal, where she talked about having bit had a really, really terrible period and how it helped her get out of it.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: So she is the kind of fusion of the political Christian and the faithful spiritual Christian.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: Can we really separate those two things, do you think?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, the this question of more political Christianity or or a sort of pragmatic decision to resurrect Christianity because we're so we seem to be screwed without it, versus actually engendering kind of authentic spiritual revival in in individuals.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_06: I wouldn't see it in such binary terms as that.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_06: I think what we're seeing is the falling away of the myth that we make decisions based on arguments at all, really.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_06: I think there's very good evidence that we're gonna.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_05: Notice Alex O'Connor nodding, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_05: I mean I mean he's a radical emotivist, so like he he goes all the way with this.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_05: He he he doesn't even think that there's such a thing as as truth at the end of the day.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_05: It's just that the law of logical non non-contradiction just can't be held in our minds.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_05: We just go boo to that, we go yuck to that, we just we just emotionally reject logical fallacies.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_05: And and actually what comes first is our um our emotions.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_05: What comes first is our desire.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_05: So Alex is gonna go way down the track uh with what uh Elizabeth is is saying here.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_05: But what Elizabeth is saying here is that we are heart-driven creatures, right?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_05: And that our reason is so often rationalizing rather than rational.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_06: There's very good evidence that we come to our conclusions about things based on the relationships that we're in and the people that we trust and the stories that make sense to us.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_05: Say that again.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_06: There's very good evidence that we come to our conclusions about things based on the relationships that we're in and the people that we trust and the stories that make sense to us.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_05: The relationships that we're in, the people that we trust, the stories that make sense to us.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_05: This is the plausibility structures.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_05: We did a video here last week on plausibility structures, uh the ways in which we start to believe things.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_05: It's not so much that we think our way into a new way of living, it's that we live our way into a new way of thinking.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_05: That's what Elizabeth is on about here.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_06: The idea that Christians or atheists or anyone in between is going, right, what makes what where's the logic here?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_06: Let me just plot this on a spreadsheet.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, that's where I'm gonna, that's the path I'm gonna use to lead my life, it's just bullsh.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_06: And Christians, I think, bought that lie for a while and decided if we can just, if we can just meet these arguments, if we can just come up with a cosmology, if we can just make this neat and tidy and palatable for this very thin, narrow definition of reason, then we'll be able to sway persuade people.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_06: There are possibly some people whose formation means they think in maths, essentially, who might need that.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_06: Most of us don't.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_06: People who have had a broad attention to the world, who are, I think, trying to live wisely and deeply, know that our decisions are made, and these deepest decisions about who to love, these things that define our lives, the things that we say at our funerals are existential and emotional and embodied and relational.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, say that again.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_06: Are existential and emotional and embodied and relational.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_05: Existential, emotional, embodied, relational.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_05: Ah, she's on fire, Elizabeth.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_06: And so the sort of new nonsense, new atheist moment, and I include some Christians in there, has ebbed.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_06: And what you're left with is the truer thing.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_06: That we as humans actually, most of us, long for unconditional love.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_06: And we long for, we long to be seen, and we long to be known, and we long for a deep intimacy, and we long for our lives to mean something, and we long to be part of a story bigger than ourselves.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_06: And that's hard to find on your own.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_06: And and even if you are going because you're like, okay, it's not working politically, it's even if you're going because you're like, okay, we can't base morality without this, even if you're going because you've decided that the anti-Muslim rhetoric, which I find very troubling, is right, eventually, if it's going to be anything real to you, you have to drop down to that level.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_06: And you see I and Hersey Ali doing that in a way that I think is so courageous and so humanizing and so vulnerable.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_06: And I am grateful for it.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_05: So good.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_05: That's so good.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, just listen to that on repeat again and again and again.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_05: She mentioned a lot about the the biggest choices we have are about who to love, and there's something very Augustinian about that.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_05: You know, the North African theologian from uh fourth-fifth century.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_05: Um ordering our loves is wise living.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_05: Disordered loves is exactly what's wrong with human beings.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_05: We we love things, but we love the wrong things, or we love the right things in the wrong proportion, and we have disordered loves, and that's what's going wrong in your life, it's what's going wrong in my life.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_05: Properly ordered loves is what makes us wise, and therefore that wisdom is the grid through which we will actually rationally understand the world.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_05: And and we cannot by ourselves simply you know rationally make decisions according to evidence without actually being embodied, without actually being in community, without uh without actually figuring out the livability of what it is that we're talking about.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_05: It's an existential issue, she says, as well as embodied and that's relational.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_05: Um and so it is not simply the case that most of us most of the time live these rational lives individually choosing the good because of our intellect, and then we make the dis the decision, oh perhaps I need to go to church.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_05: It's go to church.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_05: If you don't believe in God, go to church and figure it out.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_05: If you don't believe in God, pray and figure it out.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_05: If you don't believe in God, submit yourself to the scriptures, surrender to that story.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_05: It's not a case of first figure out whether you can be a person who assents to all the items of the creed and then you know find out the opening times on Sunday mornings.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_05: It doesn't work like that.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_05: Christianity doesn't work like that because life doesn't work like that, because you don't work like that.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_05: We are heart-driven creatures.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_05: How is Freddie going to respond to this?
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, Alex, do you I mean, what Liz is almost talking about is is a retreat of rationality, in effect.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I don't know.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_05: That's a kind of Oh my goodness, look at the look on Elizabeth's face.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_05: It's a retreat of rationality, says Freddie Sayers.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_05: And she's like, No, I'm not saying that.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_05: I'm giving you the context in which rationality truly functions.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_05: Rationality is always woven together with our loves and with a greater story and with community and with embodiment and with existential questions.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_05: She's not saying let's get rid of rationality so that we can do the community thing.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_05: She's saying that rationality happens within community.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_05: So, as Freddie says, that's a retreat of rationality.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_05: Look at oh, I love that look on Elizabeth's face.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_05: That's a picture.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I don't know.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: As a kind of as a as a sort of as a as a single organizing principle, it does feel you were talking about the post-9-11 period.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_05: She's like, whoa, that's not what I'm saying.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_05: But I I think that misunderstanding, that miscommunication right there is the heart of where we need to focus at the moment.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_05: And Elizabeth's going to return to this, and she's going to do a great 60 seconds that I think if Freddie Sayers could could get what Elizabeth is saying at this moment, he will realise she's not saying be irrational in order to be embodied and in community and order your loves.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_05: She's saying that those things are the context in which you can finally, and for the first time, be actually rational.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_05: But anyway, that that misunderstanding is really interesting.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_05: So what's Alex gonna say to this?
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: There was this the politics was also very kind of rational.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_06: There was this sense of can I just say a proper immediate broadening of the definition of rationality, is what I would say.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, along with some of the some of the groaners, I think that might have been an unfair characteristic uh characterization of what was just said.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_03: I think I basically agree in that there is an inappropriateness in bringing questions of essentially empiricism and maths into questions of meaning and narrative.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's as inappropriate as me walking into a science lab where somebody's trying to figure out how many molecules are in this glass in front of me, and me saying, I can help you with that, here's a nice poem.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_03: It would be ridiculous and ludicrous.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's just as silly when somebody like Ine Hersyile Lee is telling the story of her life and about her relationship with God.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: And in Christianity, belief in God is not so much belief in an entity as relationship with a person, right?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's what it's supposed to be about.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's just as inappropriate to walk into there and say, Well, I can help you with that, here's some science.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where you end up with a Richard Dawkins and a sort of an inability to get anywhere in conversation.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you were there, I don't know if you'll agree with this.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_05: So, like, I I do think a poet helps a scientist, because without the sense of wonder at what it is that you're studying, you you don't do science, and science cannot happen.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_05: And and without a sense of the harmony of nature, you can't do science.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_05: Without a sense of story and narrative, and and a sense of the integration of these focal points of attention, without integrating these points of data that you're empirically studying, um, you're you're not going to be able to do science.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_05: You're not going to be able to come up with a hypothesis.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_05: And actually, creativity is going to help the scientist.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_05: And so the so the idea that the poet and the scientist are doing very radically different things and they are non-overlapping magisteria, um, as Carl Sagan might put it.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_05: No, I no, I don't think that works either.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_05: There there is a much closer integration of these things.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure it will be available soon, and there are clips online.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: It was a wonderful conversation, but the thing that was wonderful about it was to see these two, not just two opinions, but two ways of approaching the world just come together and clash.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: And you basically get to decide, not necessarily who you think is right, but whose approach you prefer.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I do think I agree with the one thing I definitely agree with is that this non-propositional, this narrative, this this almost poetic approach to these questions is beginning to win out.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's what's definitely changing.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_03: The problem is that that doesn't give you the belief in God always.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, for someone like Ian, she's able to just sort of choose to believe it.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: And to be clear, I'm very happy for her.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_03: I'm envious of her.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_03: I wish I could do that for myself.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: I find myself unable.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um but one thing that's been not meant to be.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: You wish you could do what?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: To just choose to believe this stuff.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_03: I think it'd be wonderful.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_03: You would choose to be a Christian if you're.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think anybody who at least the kind of Christianity that that I understand, or the Christianity that I that I've uh sort of read through the person of Jesus, for example, I think anybody who says that they don't want it to be true, that they wouldn't worship that God even if he existed, that new atheist line, just doesn't know what they're talking about, or is talking about a different kind of Christianity or a different kind of God.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_05: If you don't think things have changed, just play that last 30 seconds on a loop.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_05: Um things have changed when Alex O'Connor says stuff like that.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_03: An important thing though that I think hasn't been mentioned yet is that this is well, I suppose you would just kind of mention it there, is the political dimension here.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: So much of this, like you say, Ian's original article for Unheard was a political essay.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_03: It was lambasting, woke culture, Islamism, uh a few other things, like uh China, Russia, this kind of stuff.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: It was a political essay.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_05: Aaron Powell There are also personal aspects to even that first article, and certainly uh predating that first article was her ARC uh conference uh panel discussion where she spoke about this, and again spoke about it in personal terms too.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I do think that a lot of this revival, if there is such a thing, is actually a political revival, a sort of protest against uh secular liberalism that people are beginning to see as failing.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I Ayan said to Richard Dawkins, atheism doesn't give you anything.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: This is the problem, it doesn't give you anything to live on.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_03: And Dawkins says, well, we have rational secular humanism.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_03: As if putting rational before what you find, you know, aesthetically most pleasing, it turns it into an ethical theory.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: Ayane says, look, it's not working, Richard.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's just, it's obviously this isn't working for people.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_03: And Dawkins says, Oh, we've just got to try harder.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_03: Which I think is I think is incredibly naive.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it's doing the trick.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_03: So in response to this.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: Well, uh without without sort of having to say that he might be wrong about that, I suppose not much.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: But I just think he's wrong in what he means.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_03: I think he's wrong about that.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think that secular humanism is going to get you very far.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: That's why you have this weird, you know, uh you said secularism earlier, Justin, and it's like people often complaint secularism and atheism, but it's it's funny how while atheism might not decline, I think secularism might.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_03: You might end up with a bunch of atheists who still want to live under a sort of Christian society, which is a quite strange phenomenon.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_05: It's not that strange.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_05: Under Christendom, there are a whole bunch of people who would never even dare pray to God.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_05: They they lived under Christendom.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, Mart Martin Luther um didn't pray to God until he was ordained as priest and had to, in the liturgy of his first mass, had to pray to God, and and and he was absolutely petrified.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_05: Um under Christendom, there's all sorts of like personal private beliefs that you can you can kind of have.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_05: And actually, you know, secularism, or the secular, rather, the secular is a gift of Christendom to the world.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_05: And um Alex is is right about secularism and atheism are not the same thing at all.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_05: And he's right that right now we are in a moment that is post-secular, right?
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_05: Um is it true that we're post-Christian in a limited sense?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, in the West.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_05: Um is it true that we're post-secular?
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's even more true.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_05: Um but what are we gonna do about that politically?
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_05: That's what Alex goes on to talk about.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_03: But that means that this is tied up with a political uh a political revival of ideas against people who are uh people are getting fed up with um with you know what they what they perceive as a liberal elite.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_03: They're getting annoyed about that, they're upset about mass immigration, and so they start sort of uh trying to find an ideology which is going to be able to protest that.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_03: So you mentioned Douglas Murray, for example, and how he sort of likes Christianity and sort of is Christian adjacent.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I have to ask, why do you think that's the case?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think it's because he sat in a room and prayed and felt something moving within him, or do you think it's because he's not very happy about the way the country's going?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_03: Or it's both.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, he he was a very late deconversion from Christianity.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, he he was a Christian into his twenties before he deconverted in the heyday of the new atheism.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_05: Um so it's it's not either or for for Douglas Murray either.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: And if that's the case, I don't think he does describe himself as a Christian.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, he's not a Christian.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_05: But the reason why he He does describe himself as a Christian atheist a number of times.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_05: And whether that's just a kind of a provocative um statement um or whether it's something very heartfelt, he he has certainly described himself as a Christian atheist.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_05: As this thing that was was kind of burst asunder in the Enlightenment, and how do we weave it back together?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_05: Elizabeth uh says some really interesting things, Justin says some really interesting things, and then it circles back to Alex.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_05: And Alex, using a story, interestingly, addresses this issue of fact and value and putting them back together again in a way that I think is really helpful, and it seems to have been really helpful for Freddie Sayers himself.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_05: So let's have a look at how how Alex wants to put together the fact and the value.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: And the mistake that that makes, this is this is crucial to me, is thinking that scientific laws somehow explain the universe instead of just describing them.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_03: It'll be as though we discovered uh a book of Shakespeare's sonnets and said, How did that get there?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_03: And we say, I don't know.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I start studying it, and I say, Well, look, I've I've just discovered like you know it follows this rhythm, da da da da da da da da.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm going to call that iambic pentameter, the law of iambic pantameter, how interesting.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: And I've also discovered this law that at the end of a sentence there's usually a little dot.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_03: That's the you know the law of punctuation, and how after that there are two types of letters, and the big letter comes next.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_03: All these laws that I'm discovering.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: And someone says, Well, where did the book come from?
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: And you say, Well, I mean, I don't know, we haven't answered that yet, but look at how much progress we've made in uncovering the laws of literacy.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: Surely one day this will this will come to explain the origins of the literary laws themselves and the origin of the book.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's a category error, it's a total mistake.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_05: That is so good.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_05: And and he's interestingly, he's made the point by telling a story, right, and giving the analogy, and he takes you into the law of literature and he makes you see the absurdity of thinking that simply having explained laws of punctuation, you have explained the origin of the book or the meaning of the words.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_05: In the same way, in the scientific method, just because you've explained various laws by which nature tends to operate, um, that does not tell you the origin of the world, nor does it tell you the meaning of the world.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_05: And to imagine that exhaustively describing the laws of this world goes any distance towards describing the ontology, where this thing has come from and its teleology, what it's intended for, um, is just a non starter.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_05: And and actually, Alex does a brilliant job of of just saying that that fact and value actually kind of come together and and they are not um they are not.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_05: Opposed to one another.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_05: They are not non-overlapping magisteria, but they are woven together.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_05: And I I think it just does a brilliant job here.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_02: Those questions are not almost for scientific things.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: We could almost come from a Christian trying to put science in its box.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: We've we've chosen a very forgiving atheist on this.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: An atheist who practically sounds like he believes in God.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I've got to ask, you know, do you do you feel like there is any chance if we get you back in ten years' time, you'd have a different answer to that question.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: God willing.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_05: Notice everyone else is laughing and clapping, but to begin with, Alex isn't.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_05: And there's a sense in which obviously like he definitely plays that like for laughs to to some degree, but he also means it.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_05: Um when you see his heartfelt explanations of of divine hiddenness, and he he talks very movingly at times, of you know, he he lived with Christians and he went to church and he's prayed and he's read scripture, and he has sought for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and nothing, nada.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_05: And like he he speaks very movingly and powerfully in though in those moments.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_05: And so I I think when he says God willing, there it's not just a joke.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_05: I think he does feel like perhaps God is playing hide and seek with him.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_05: I I wonder if on some level he he feels like if the God of the Bible is real, then he seems to be hiding himself from me.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_05: So I guess I need him to make the next move.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_05: Um, is is basically what he's saying there.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_05: But uh yeah, no, the room the room really warms to him.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_05: And I think in ten years he might well be a Christian.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_05: And I've I've been saying that on this channel for for ages.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_05: Now before we finish, I just want to take you to two other places in this video.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_05: You should definitely check out the whole thing.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_05: It's an hour and sixteen minutes and it's wonderful.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_05: It's uh called Christian Revival Fantasy or Reality on the Unheard Channel.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_05: But I don't want to give the impression that Alex O'Connor was purely pro-Christian throughout uh the whole conversation.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_05: Um, Alex does really well at noticing where a crowd is and taking the opposing position.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_05: He's quite contrarian in in that sense.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_05: And so with Freddie asking him questions, he ends up being quite pro-Christian.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_05: But when the audience, some of whom are more believers, uh ask questions, he ends up being a lot more sort of pro-skeptical.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_05: And uh and so I don't want to give the impression that uh Alex is just completely going along with uh Justin Briley's thesis, he's not.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_05: And the sticking point seems to be Alex doesn't really like the Tom Holland thesis.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_05: He doesn't like the thesis that Christianity has built the modern world and we should be thankful for uh the blessings that Christianity has given to the world.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_05: And when Justin Briley mentions the Tom Holland thesis as regards Ion Hersey Ali, that kind of rubs Alex up a little bit the wrong way.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_05: And at the 43-minute mark, if you want to have a look, uh here's how Alex responds to that.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_04: She has very much been converted by the Tom Holland thesis that anything that we hold as these civic secular virtues and values come from Christianity ultimately.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_04: They don't, they didn't come out of the ether, they didn't come from science and reason and the enlightenment, they came from a much more ancient source.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_04: Well, this is where we may have at least some level of I need to say something atheist here.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: And even if this is atheists, this is this is the big this is the big sticking point that I have in these conversations.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_03: I'm always very, very friendly and open to the ideas that are being discussed until somebody likes to say that, you know, Western civilization characterized by freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, you know, um, uh characterized by a capitalist economy, uh characterized and celebrated for its abolition of slavery and its and its uh modern social justice movements, the the rights of women, the rights of homosexuals.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_03: And we're told that these come from an essentially Christian basis as if these things do not run completely anathema, each one of them, to what's actually written in the Christian scripture.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_05: He's really woken up at that point.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: He's even reaching for language like anathema.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: You can't be talking about what's written in the scripture.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_03: You can't say that Paul writes that he suffers not a woman to teach and also usurp authority over a man.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_03: Rather, she should remain silent for women, uh, for Adam was formed first, then Eve.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: Or that he writes that it's disgraceful for a woman to speak in church and she should go home and ask her husband if she has a question, which Paul probably didn't actually write, but that's just another problem with Christianity, that that ended up in the New Testament can't be.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_03: But like, then turn around and say, oh, but you know, the social justice movement, the women's rights, this is all sort of essentially Christian in essence.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: No, this seems to run anathema to what Paul is saying.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_03: The Old Testament giving explicit not just instructions but permission as well on exactly how to own and buy slaves, sometimes implicitly at least, as sexual slaves, and then say that the abolitionist movement was essentially Christian in origin, as if Christianity was screaming out in its ethics for the abolition of slavery, and it just took people like over a thousand years to work that out, after, and during those thousand years, referring explicitly to the Bible in order to justify slavery, and it just so happens to coincide with the Enlightenment that people realize that that's what God was sort of going after all along.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: I I think it's kind of, as I've said before, it's not just wrong, but also potentially offensive, at least, to the people who've established these kinds of moral improvements against the very kind of religious authoritarianism that we're now being told as responsible for those ideas in the first place.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_05: I love Alex.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_05: That was Tosh, though.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_05: That was absolute Tosh.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_05: Um was not the Enlightenment that overturned slavery.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_05: Oh my goodness.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_05: If we waited for Enlightenment rationalists to abolish slavery, we would still be waiting.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_05: Um it was a profoundly, like every scholar of abolitionism will tell you, it was a profoundly religious um movement.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_05: And and the only other way that people try to escape it being Christian preachers, especially Quakers and Evangelicals, um, driving the abolitionist movement.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_05: The only alternative thesis to that really was just is is just kind of an economic one.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_05: People don't really say it was the it was the Enlightenment that actually overturned slavery.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_05: It wasn't the enlightenment, it wasn't in any way, shape, or form Enlightenment rationalists who were ending slavery.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_05: Now, Alex can very well bring up the utter hypocrisy of Christian slave owners, and and um that is indeed a hypocrisy, and it's vile and it's and it's awful, and there was very much two-way traffic in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_05: Christians, yes, there were abolitionists and there were slaveholders, there's very much two-way traffic in those 300 years, and that that is uh really painful, and that is a real stain on the church's history, but there was two-way traffic in those 300 years.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_05: Every other century, in every other civilization, there's only one-way traffic, and guess which direction the traffic is going in?
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_05: It's in the direction of slavery.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_05: So to point out that Christians um have been hypocrites on slavery is indeed true and it's necessary at times.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_05: But to point out that actually Christians were the ones driving the abolition of the slave trade is just fact.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_05: It's just a fact.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_05: Now you might want to go back to the Bible and think, well, how do I deal with Old Testament texts like that?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_05: That is an intramural Christian discussion.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_05: Um but very much the Christians who were ending slavery thought that they were doing so for biblical reasons, and they they happened to read the Bible in an emancipatory way and thought that that was the faithful way of reading the Bible.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_05: I happen to think it's the faithful way of reading the Bible.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_05: There might be unfaithful ways of reading the Bible in which you find justification for slavery, and and indeed that that had been the case.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_05: But Christianity didn't just abolish the you know the slave trade uh in the 19th century.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, in Christendom, in Latin Christendom, slavery absolutely dissolved away because every member of the household was baptized into the household, and they all took the sacraments, and the idea that there were second-class citizens at that spiritual level had to be abolished, and you can make the argument that it was that it was purely economics, you can make the argument that it was plagues that were r you know running through Europe that smashed the social system and and and got rid of slavery.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_05: You can't deny that there were spiritual aspects to it, and in in none of these cases is slavery abolished by enlightened rationalists.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_05: That didn't happen in the medieval period in North and Western Europe where slavery did melt away.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_05: It wasn't the rationalists who did it then or the enlightenment, and it certainly wasn't rationalists or enlightened people who did that in the in the 19th century.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_05: It was Christians for Christian reasons doing this.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_05: And I don't think you can deny that Christianity has done things like, you know, invent charities in the way that we think of charities, and invent schools and hospices in the way that we think of it, invent, you know, education for all in the way that we think of it, not just as sort of madrasses in spiritual instruction, but but as uh a broad classical education in the way that we've kind of thought of it, the invention of universities and of parliaments and of human rights, and the abolition of pederasty, and the abolition of infanticide, and the abolition of blood sports, and the abolition of the slave trade.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_05: These are monumental, monumental ethical, moral improvements, which I think Alex would have to agree, are improvements in civilization.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_05: And I I would guess, I mean, I I don't I don't know what his alternative hypothesis is for who invented charities and education for all and hospices and hospitals and the abolition of pederasty and the abolition of blood sports and the abolition of infanticide and the abolition of the slave trade.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_05: What's his alternative hypothesis that rationalists didn't rationalists didn't do it?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_05: Enlightenment people didn't do it.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_05: Now, was there an unconscionably long period before, you know, the the abolition of the slave trade?
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_05: Um but scripture itself talks about the yeast works its way through the batch of dough slowly, the mustard seed grows into the mustard tree very slowly, and that that is far too long a period for for most of us.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_05: We we feel like abolitionism should have should have been a movement of the fourth century or the or the first century.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_05: Um but politics didn't work like that, okay?
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_05: And human civilizations don't work like that.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_05: And certainly, like, is is it not uh an immense shame on all of us that something like marital rape, if we're going to talk about like men and women, the equality of the sexes, something like marital rape was only outlawed in the 1970s, when 1900 years earlier the Apostle Paul outlawed it in the church, right?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_05: It should only be by mutual consent, says the Apostle Paul in one 1 Corinthians 7.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_05: In in scripture, it was already there, and it takes 1900 years before it it winds up on English statute books, and that that's an unconscionably long period of time.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_05: And and he might mention you know uh scriptures about women preaching in church, but you know, he he fails to mention the the rest of the scriptures, and there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor gentile, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_05: And he might at that stage say, well, it took them a they they took their darned time in you know putting those scriptural truths into effect.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_05: And he might want to say that look, it was enlightenment scholars that were provoking the church into making them more equitable, making them more compassionate, making them more progressive.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_05: Those Enlightenment scholars were already assuming profoundly Christian things.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_05: You don't get this rights-based kind of liberal order coming from John Locke without him explicitly basing that itself on scriptural truths.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_05: Okay?
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_05: And and even people who might want to be more consciously divorcing themselves from the scriptures, someone like uh John Stuart Mill, because he you know mentions about freedom of speech and all that all that kind of stuff.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_05: Liberty, according to Mill, is only consciable on some profoundly Christian presuppositions about humans being individuals and possessors of rights, which is a profoundly Christian thing to think.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_05: And the genealogy of ideas that gives you a John Stuart Mill or that gives you a John Locke is very nakedly a Christian genealogy of ideas, right?
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_05: It it it genuinely is.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_05: But I wonder whether Alex doesn't like the Tom Holland thesis largely because of the way it can be used.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_05: It can be used in a triumphalist manner.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_05: It can be used as Christians saying, hey, we've always got it right and everybody else is wrong.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_05: And and that would be completely inappropriate.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_05: There are lots of times where people outside of the church have held Christians to properly Christian standards and have rebuked the church for not being Christian enough, and for that we should thank them.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_05: And there have many times been people outside of the church who have not only behaved better than those inside the church, but who have held up values that are better than the values currently espoused by certain members of the church.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_05: And that is absolutely true, and and this should not be used as any kind of triumphalism.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_05: Um the worst people when it comes to slavery are Christians because we should have known better.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_05: The worst people when it comes to the equality of the sexes, for instance, are Christians because we should have known better.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_05: But the worst perpetrators when it comes to sexual abuse are Christians, not because the numbers are greater within the church, but because we ought to know better.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_05: And if if Alex can can hold our feet to the flames in that regard, then we should thank him for doing it.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_05: But I do think that the Tom Holland thesis holds.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_05: And to say that enlightenment rationalism ended the slave trade, I'm afraid, is is is nonsense.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_05: But that's uh one thing just to round out um where Alex is coming from on things, the things that he can agree with, the things that he can't agree with.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_05: Now let me just finish by giving a little compilation of Elizabeth Oldfield's greatest hits from the rest of the video, because I think she just absolutely uh nails it again and again when she's asked about how do we weave together fact and value, um, she's going to talk about formation in community.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_05: And it's just such a needed word for us.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_06: My commitment to Christianity is is both based on a sense of experience of the love of God, and it feels to me, and I have looked other places, like the place most likely to help me become the kind of person the world needs, especially in this moment.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_06: You know, we to go back to the question about civic morality, the underlying anthropology is very faulty.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_06: They're like, if we just take off all the restrictions, we'll just make good choices, leave us alone, we know how to tell the truth, we know how to lay down our lives to our friends, we know how to resist the impulses in us which are always craving more comfort, more convenience, more consumer crap, which is what's got us into this mess.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_06: We need collective formation.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_06: We need to immerse ourselves in communities of moral formation that call us to be better than we are.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_06: And I think there's no accident that if that pathway is also moving us to love beyond us, that will meet us on this path, that doesn't have to be true or useful.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_06: It can be true and useful, it can be true and helpful.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_06: But I don't see Christianity as a crutch.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_06: I don't see this as a distraction from the woes of the world at its best, and I really need to say it is not always at its best.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_06: There is lots that's indefensible, including a lot of Christians, including me.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_06: Like living this stuff is hard, and we are hypocrites to our bones.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_06: But that makes sense within my anthropology.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_06: That makes sense within my actual understanding of sin, which is a very controversial word that I'm trying to rehabilitate.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_06: I think if we have any hope of rising to the challenges of this moment, we have to learn how to be becoming more together.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_06: And little individual pathways that secularism says, go self-actualise.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_06: There's good stuff there, right?
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_06: There's wisdom, there's great podcasts, there's great books.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_06: It's not that there's nothing to learn to meditate, it's not that it's nothing to do some psychedelics or do some therapy.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_06: These are all great things.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_06: I don't think they're enough.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_06: I don't think they give us the strength of formation that we need to resist the stories that are always shaping us towards our worse selves.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_02: But it's still it's still a pragmatic argument you're making, isn't it, ultimately?
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what Richard Dawkins was posing to Ian Hirsiali a couple of weeks ago.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's the stumbling block that a lot of people just can't get beyond, which is fine, even if it might make society better, might make us as individuals more fulfilled and all the rest of it.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_02: If you have to believe a series of things which you know to be rationally not true, people don't want to do that.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_06: So I don't think these are two separate things.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_06: I think in the practice of the rituals and the communities and the practices, those are modes of attention.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_06: They shape us.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_06: They that you have had Ian McGillchrist here all the time.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_06: There'll be lots of people here who know the work of Ian McGilchrist who.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_05: So Ian McGilchrist talks in his book about the master and his emissary, about the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, which in pop psychology is generally about kind of more artistic things and uh more big picture.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_05: Left brain is more logical, analytical, kind of to the point.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_05: And that the master is the right side of the brain, and the the emissary is the left-hand side of the brain that sort of goes out into the world and and sort of grasps the the details.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_05: And Western society has been incredibly left-brained, incredibly just logical and analytical, and just the facts, ma'am.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_05: And Ian McGilchrist is talking, we need that integration.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_05: And Liz is talking about the integration that we need as well.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_06: Talks about the different modes of attention of our brain hemispheres.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_06: We live in a left hemispheric world.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_06: It has trained us to see certain things.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_06: The way you pay attention changes what you are able to see.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_06: Ritualized, communal, emotional, embodied forms of practice literally make it easier for you to see what is really there.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_06: I think God is really there.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_06: I think there is a logic of love in the universe that wants to meet us.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_06: But if you have to start with, I can't get on board with that, I don't know how to make sense of the metaphysics.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_06: But like Pascal, I'm just gonna go to church and see what happens.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_06: Those things actually come together into a beautiful union.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_05: Oh, glorious.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, and that and and that's it, and that's the that's the Christian position.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_05: There is a there is a glorious unity between the Master and his emissary.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_05: Isn't it interesting that the Son of the Father is the one who is sent, the emissary of the Father, who Christ comes and very particularly, the scandal of particularity, theologians call it, you know, takes flesh and dies for us and rises again to lead us to the Father again.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_05: And there there is a unity in the Father-Son union by the Spirit.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_05: There is a unity in God, there's a unity woven into creation.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_05: We've split ourselves apart into fact and value, and the Freddy Sayers of this world are saying we live in logic.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_05: Can we ever make a leap of faith to this other realm of faith?
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_05: And what Elizabeth's saying, what Christians are saying, is no, you live in a storied universe.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_05: There is a logic of love, there is a father-son love in the Holy Spirit.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_05: There is there there is a warp and woof to creation.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_05: And continually looking logically alone at this world is is to have the limited view of reality.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_05: And to be drawn into church, to be drawn into community, to be drawn into the story of scripture, to pray, is to submit yourself to the way reality actually is.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_05: There is a logic of love behind everything.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_05: And you don't need to understand every aspect of the creed before you go to church.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_05: You go to church because you don't believe the creed.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_05: You pray because you you're not a hundred percent sure about God, right?
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_05: You submit yourself to the scriptures, not because in advance you already think they're inerrant.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_05: You submit yourself to the scriptures as the skeptic, as the dry one, as the apathetic one.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_05: You might even submit yourself to the scriptures as as somebody somebody of antipathy, and y and yet you submit yourself into that story, into that logic of love, and you be you find yourself being formed in community, being formed existentially, being formed in embodied practices, being formed sacramentally.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_05: And your beliefs are not the end result of you climbing a ladder of logic.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_05: You find yourself believing in the community of faith.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_05: You don't think yourself into a new way of life.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_05: You live yourself into a new way of thinking.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_05: So come to church.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_05: That's really what Elizabeth's saying, what's what Justin's saying.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_05: It's what I'm saying, it's what we're saying here at Speak Life.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_05: Um, submit yourself into this story, and you will start to find yourself believing.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, if you want a way of doing that, one way of doing that would be to do our 321 course.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_05: Go to 321course.com and you can have a look at our panoramic vision for who is God, what is the world, who are you.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_05: It's life according to Jesus, and there are all sorts of ways there of getting connected into community, community online and community in person, because we'd love to see you live your way into these truths and recognize that they really are true.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_05: We'll see you again on the next one.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_05: Bye bye.