Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Joe Folley and Glen Scrivener Go Head to Head on Morality, Evil, Consciousness and More || SLP612

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Joe Folley and Glen Scrivener Go Head to Head on Morality, Evil, Consciousness and More || SLP612 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:06
SPEAKER_01: Well, hello and welcome back to the Speak Life Podcast.
0:09
SPEAKER_01: My name is Thomas Thurrogood, media producer at Speak Life.
0:13
SPEAKER_01: And today we have something a bit different.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: This is a conversation that Glenn Scrivener recorded with Joe Folly.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: Joe Folly is an agnostic philosopher.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: He runs the highly popular YouTube channel Unsolicited Advice.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: Do go and check that out on YouTube.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: And Joe and Glenn actually had a debate back in January at Camford School on the question: can we be good without God?
0:41
SPEAKER_01: And if you want to listen to that, that's episode 562 of the Speak Life podcast.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: But this time, Joe came down to the Speak Life Studios in Eastbourne very kindly.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: And we recorded this conversation between him and Glenn in All Souls Church.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: Beautiful setting to have this conversation.
1:01
SPEAKER_01: So thank you very much to All Souls.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: And if you'd like to see what it looks like, do go and check out the YouTube video on our channel.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: In this conversation, Glenn and Joe get into all sorts of big questions, in particular, the questions that are hardest for both Christians and atheists to answer.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: They talk about the problem of divine hiddenness, the problem of suffering, Tom Holland's Dominion thesis, groundings for our ethics, and they also reference the recent Charlie Kirk assassination and responses to that, getting into all sorts of complex issues, but it's a very cordial and respectful conversation.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: I found it really fruitful to sit in on, and I hope that will be the case for you too.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm really excited to share it with you.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: So without further ado, you will hear a short preview for what's to come in the conversation, and then we will just let it play out in its entirety.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: You know, you can go onto TikTok and you can find any number of people who said yay murder in terms of Telly Kirk was assassinated.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: I on the other hand do cheer when bad things happen to bad people.
2:09
SPEAKER_02: Have they done something wrong to say yay murder on an ethical emotivist footing?
2:15
SPEAKER_03: For an ethical emotivist, the question doesn't make sense because they would say that there's not a truth of valuable content there.
2:21
SPEAKER_03: I don't know where I fall on that.
2:22
SPEAKER_03: I actually have a lot of sympathies with some kind of moralist framework.
2:26
SPEAKER_03: There is something really nice about being able to say something is right or wrong.
2:30
SPEAKER_03: I think that theism is one way to get there.
2:32
SPEAKER_03: I don't think it's necessarily the only way to get there.
2:34
SPEAKER_03: Tom Allen's thesis is not that Christianity was given to humanity fully formed.
2:39
SPEAKER_03: What's the difference between a flowering of Christian doctrine or a corruption of Christian doctrine?
2:44
SPEAKER_03: How do we know whether we're taking backward steps in the name of Jesus?
2:47
SPEAKER_03: Because that seems to me to be like that that seems like a real worry.
2:51
SPEAKER_02: Joe Folly, we only ever meet in very grand locations.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: We last met at uh the very salubrious Canford School for a debate.
3:01
SPEAKER_02: I played the Christian You were the agnostic and remain agnostic uh by conviction.
3:06
SPEAKER_02: Our topic was can we be moral without God?
3:10
SPEAKER_02: Something like that.
3:11
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, is there goodness without God or something similar?
3:13
SPEAKER_02: Without God.
3:14
SPEAKER_02: Uh and I thought it'd be a great opportunity for us to have a friendly conversation about the most difficult questions that get posed to us from the other side.
3:24
SPEAKER_02: And I thought I could go first and sort of confess to you some of the questions that I find most difficult when an atheist or an agnostic asks me, and then we can press into questions that I think uh naturalists struggle with.
3:37
SPEAKER_02: Um but to begin with, let's think about the hiddenness of God.
3:41
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
3:42
SPEAKER_02: Um can you can you characterize for us the hiddenness of God as uh such a problem that uh yeah, Christians will really feel the bite of the question.
3:52
SPEAKER_03: So uh the kind of divine hiddenness problems is sometimes known, uh, comes from a thinker called JL Schellenberg.
3:59
SPEAKER_03: And uh he puts this forward uh as kind of an analogous problem to the problem of evil.
4:04
SPEAKER_03: So he effectively he draw he's drawing upon the idea of an all-loving God.
4:09
SPEAKER_03: So if you don't think that God is all-loving, then it's just not a problem at all.
4:13
SPEAKER_03: He uh effectively argues that if God is all-loving and desires a relationship with us, and he would desire a relationship with us were he all-loving, as part of kind of cons the the constituents of or of of being all-loving is desiring a relationship with with every being.
4:31
SPEAKER_03: And if that were the case, well, a very plausible precondition for having a relationship with a person is them knowing that you're there, right?
4:40
SPEAKER_03: Like it's you know, it sounds very strange to say out loud because it it seems so obvious, right?
4:44
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I couldn't be meaningfully said to have a relationship with someone if my entire connection with them consisted of me hiding in cupboards around their house or something like that.
4:54
SPEAKER_03: You know, I mean we we would quite rightly say that's a very strange sort of sort of relationship and not a relationship at all.
4:59
SPEAKER_03: In fact, I'm doing something a bit a bit odd there.
5:02
SPEAKER_03: Um nonetheless, what Schellenberg says is that, well, for the non-believer, and especially what he says he calls the non-resistant non-believer.
5:11
SPEAKER_03: So not the person who says something like, well, you know, even if God exists, I would reject him, or something like that.
5:17
SPEAKER_03: Because, you know, then plausibly you could come up with all sorts of reasons why, well, you know, um uh God could not want to enter into relationship with those people because of, say, something like, you could very plausibly uh come up with an argument, and people have, um, to say something like, well, in that case, it wouldn't make sense.
5:33
SPEAKER_03: It wouldn't be the loving thing for God to try and enter into relationship with that person because they wouldn't want it, and also because if God is the ground of all goodness, then uh implicitly rejecting it through ignorance might make you less morally culpable than explicitly rejecting it through uh rebellion or something like that.
5:49
SPEAKER_03: You know, the the diff you know the difference between a kind of Miltonian Satan kind of act knowing that God exists and uh striving to escape him or overcome him, um, versus you know, someone who just innocently doesn't know that God exists.
6:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, that that that might plausibly make someone less morally culpable and thus and it's actually a kind thing that God is God might be doing there.
6:11
SPEAKER_03: So Schellenberg's argument largely focuses on non-resistant non-believers, so people who don't, you know, are not opposed to the idea of of there being a God, uh either epistemically or emotionally, but uh to whom God has not presented himself.
6:26
SPEAKER_03: And you know, you you can frame the problem in a number of ways, right?
6:28
SPEAKER_03: So perhaps one of the most uh striking ways of phrasing this problem is to talk about uh the geographical uh spread of different faiths.
6:39
SPEAKER_03: So one way you could I think uh a guy called Stephen Mateson has put put it like this more recently, um, which is that imagine that uh you know, we know that for any particular religion it has noticeable geographical bounds.
6:54
SPEAKER_03: So you you could do this with Islam, you could do this with Christianity, you could do this with particular sects of Christianity, right?
6:59
SPEAKER_03: So if you if you're born in Rome, you're much more likely to be a Catholic uh than if you're born in Moscow or St.
7:05
SPEAKER_03: Petersburg or Berlin.
7:06
SPEAKER_03: You know, the the the faith, even within faiths, is is geographically unevenly distributed.
7:13
SPEAKER_03: And Mateson says, well, it's sort of not on the face of it, it seems very implausible that people's resistance to God would be so unevenly distributed, right?
7:23
SPEAKER_03: Like for instance, you know, people in Sweden have one of the highest rates of non-belief in the world.
7:28
SPEAKER_03: Do we just think that it is of the constitution of a Swede that they are they are less likely to be open to a relationship with God?
7:36
SPEAKER_03: Are they less deserving by virtue of their birth or something like that?
7:39
SPEAKER_03: So that's one way of of maybe bringing this um bringing this uh discussion down to down to earth would be to use this kind of demographic uh spread.
7:48
SPEAKER_02: Um Let's think about the demographics in in a second, because I I think you can go further pressing into those demographics because I think Swedes have gone through a process of kind of post-Christianity, and those in Berlin have gone through a process of post-Christianity in in lots of ways that are interesting, which we which we might get to.
8:05
SPEAKER_02: But you you began by saying this is not a problem if God is not good.
8:10
SPEAKER_02: And I think I think that's that's kind of where I sit with the the hiddenness issue.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't want to solve the problem so much as to give you grounds for actually asking the question with the kind of seriousness that I that I think we do naturally ask the question.
8:25
SPEAKER_02: Um I don't want heaven to be empty because I I want you to be able to shake your fist, right?
8:30
SPEAKER_02: Right.
8:30
SPEAKER_02: And if if there's a if there's a sense of where are you, um that does sound quite resonant with scripture.
8:38
SPEAKER_02: It does sound quite resonant with the sorts of things that uh you know that the teacher in Ecclesiastes, you know, might might uh say or the psalmist might say in the in in the middle of the Bible.
8:47
SPEAKER_02: And so I think my first move with with the hiddenness of God is not to try and solve the problem.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: And this is this is similar to actually the the problem of evil that I want to get to as well.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, I want people to be able to have a problem with evil, and I don't think people sufficiently have a problem with evil, and and really I want to invite them to Jesus to have that problem.
9:06
SPEAKER_02: I think the same thing with with hiddenness.
9:08
SPEAKER_02: I think the felt absence of God is such a problem that I almost think it it would be an illegitimate solution to this problem to say, ah, but there's X, Y, and Z.
9:20
SPEAKER_02: And when you add X, Y, and Z together, it outbalances, you know.
9:23
SPEAKER_02: And so therefore it is entirely justified, and there's no real problem with hiddenness.
9:27
SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
9:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think one of the one of the interesting angles uh you can take on hiddenness, which is actually something that I haven't seen many people do, but I think it's a really a fruitful line of inquiry for thought on this, which is that divine hiddenness doesn't just occur for non-believers.
9:41
SPEAKER_03: Um although he doesn't press this point in quite the way that I'm going to, uh the uh Michael Rea has published a paper and he uses the example of um Mother Teresa, who you know, I think we can all agree believed in God.
9:54
SPEAKER_03: Uh sort of I don't think that's too controversial.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
9:56
SPEAKER_03: And yet writes in her diaries that, you know, she feels this, you know, it's it's not just um it's not just for her a feeling of absence, it's a feeling of abandonment, you know, because she felt this very close spiritual connection to to God in her youth, and then it seemed to go away.
10:13
SPEAKER_03: And we can think about this, you know, drawing from uh like pure research studies, not not just into kind of non-believers, but into believers as well.
10:22
SPEAKER_03: Um the not every believer has a reported spiritual experience with with God uh in the way that you might like.
10:30
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's certainly you know, not I'm not talking about anything as dramatic as like the kind of Christian mystic tradition, but even just a kind of felt presence, you know, uh even apart from from anything kind of uh in detail theologically.
10:43
SPEAKER_03: And you know, this this kind of made me think about it doesn't seem like the problem of divine hiddenness is just a problem for non-belief.
10:50
SPEAKER_03: It seems like one of the other plausible prerequisites for all lovingness and desiring a relationship with people is that you develop that relationship.
10:58
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's not just a it's not just a kind of one and done thing.
11:03
SPEAKER_03: Right.
11:03
SPEAKER_03: And this I I think is uh yeah, another angle that you can take on divine hiddenness is to say something like, well, it's not just that God permits seemingly non-resistant non-belief, and of course, you know, it's perfectly open to for people to say something like, Well, you know, how do you know that you're non-resistant, that kind of thing.
11:17
SPEAKER_03: And I think that um there are arguments we can delve down that line.
11:22
SPEAKER_03: But nonetheless, I think I think this other this other issue with people who are fervent believers, nonetheless coming up spiritually dry or or you know, spiritually silent, uh, I think is is at least as much of a theological problem.
11:38
SPEAKER_03: And you know, you could you could expand that outwards to say, you know, like even if you think that no atheist is um non-resistantly uh uh non-believing, right?
11:48
SPEAKER_03: Presumably a Christian is less likely to say that about a Muslim, for example.
11:54
SPEAKER_03: Like let's let's just assume for for the sake of this of this thought experiment that um that Christianity is is true.
12:00
SPEAKER_03: In which case it seems like there's this, you know, uh I think it's oh you know, over a billion people who have already shown themselves to be willing to believe in a monotheistic deity and submit their will to his divine commands.
12:14
SPEAKER_03: And yet, if we're assuming that Christianity is true, these people are seem both very non-resistant to this idea and also are kind of being left high and dry.
12:24
SPEAKER_03: And we could even, you know, stretch this into interdenominational disputes, right?
12:30
SPEAKER_03: Uh say take something like the kind of Catholic tradition of venerating Mary.
12:33
SPEAKER_03: Um I once said worshiping Mary, and my Catholic friend was not happy with that, which is fair enough.
12:38
SPEAKER_03: But the the you know, the the um the this idea of veneration um is something that a lot of uh non-Catholics take issue with, um Especially in the in the kind of Protestant tradition.
12:48
SPEAKER_03: If that was a major theological if that was a major theological issue, well, I don't think that most Catholics would say about most Protestants, or vice versa, that these people are resistant to God.
12:59
SPEAKER_03: You know, these are these are people who've already agreed to submit themselves to God's will.
13:04
SPEAKER_03: So if if there are these matters of supreme theological significance, then it it stands to question why wouldn't God just step in to resolve them?
13:12
SPEAKER_03: You know, this this doesn't seem like it's a it doesn't seem like anyone's acting in bad faith, or at least, you know, not for the most part.
13:17
SPEAKER_02: So What do you think Schellenberg would say if I just said to him, um, you're having an experience of God right now?
13:24
SPEAKER_02: Or if I say to you, like, what what what do you think this is?
13:28
SPEAKER_02: You know, here we are.
13:29
SPEAKER_02: We are these lightning strikes of magic meat.
13:31
SPEAKER_02: I'm a center of personal consciousness, you're a center of personal consciousness, we're having a conversation that uses reason, reason, rhetoric, emotion, all these immaterial kinds of capacities and realities.
13:43
SPEAKER_02: Um, you you you bring that alongside the scriptures that say, in God we live and move and have our being.
13:50
SPEAKER_02: Why why isn't this a divine experience?
13:54
SPEAKER_02: And why why isn't this a quite profound and remarkable divine experience?
13:59
SPEAKER_03: I suppose one thing that I I worry about with conceiving of God merely as kind of being itself, you know, not not necessarily in the kind of Thomas sense, but in this kind of like, you know, every experience we have is infused with the divine.
14:11
SPEAKER_03: I suppose my issue with that is that uh it seems to make it seems to really make God something kind of trivial seeming, if that makes sense.
14:21
SPEAKER_03: Like as in you know, one of the one of the things that I think is is most interesting about all forms of theism is that God isn't just a force or isn't isn't just a being, he's also an agent and a person.
14:37
SPEAKER_03: And that to me seems like probably one of the most underratedly radical things about um theism as a belief system.
14:44
SPEAKER_03: You know, we in in the modern age we get quite fixated on questions of materialism or non-materialism, but there are there have been plenty of non-materialist atheists.
14:54
SPEAKER_03: Right.
14:54
SPEAKER_03: Um I I don't know they've been materialist Christians.
14:57
SPEAKER_03: I heard that m a lot of Mormons are apparently materialist Christians or materialist theists.
15:00
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if that's true.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: And they're so convinced that we must be risen again in order to have conscious activity that we could we go to sleep.
15:09
SPEAKER_02: So you know, perhaps there are some materialist Christians.
15:12
SPEAKER_03: Um and I think that we forget that, for example, one of the things that um separates theism from doctrines like Platonism or even certain forms of Neoplatonism is that God is personal.
15:24
SPEAKER_03: And for me, that's the most radical and the most difficult pill to swallow regarding theistic belief.
15:32
SPEAKER_03: I'm actually not massively opposed to the idea that there might be non-physical things or non-physical properties.
15:37
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
15:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm not-I'm certainly not opposed to that a priori.
15:40
SPEAKER_03: You know, I think that you know we're hopefully gonna talk a bit about naturalism.
15:45
SPEAKER_03: And um, within naturalism, there's tends to be a divide between methodological naturalism and substance naturalism.
15:52
SPEAKER_03: Substance naturalism is much more along the lines of physicalism and materialism, whereas methodological naturalism is a commitment to the methodology of trying trying to explain things using a series of methods that we tend to broadly associate with scientific inquiry, though obviously not uniquely so.
16:07
SPEAKER_03: And there's nothing in methodological naturalism that commits you to substantive now or substance naturalism.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: So it's probably makes it probably makes it harder to um to acknowledge non-material forces if if if that if that is your one uh m method of of inquiry.
16:28
SPEAKER_03: The thing that strikes me that separates theism from these, I think, much more philosophically modest doctrines is that theism entails a person.
16:36
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
16:37
SPEAKER_03: That's that's really I don't know.
16:39
SPEAKER_03: I feel like again, because we're so caught up in the kind of materialism, non-materialism stuff, we forget how radical that is.
16:44
SPEAKER_03: You know, that that's Yeah, yeah.
16:46
SPEAKER_02: I often forget as a as a Christian that when Paul quotes um Epimenides, who is the poet who says, in him we live and move and have our being, the him originally was Zeus, right?
16:57
SPEAKER_02: A very personable, well, not a very personable, but uh certainly a personal deity.
17:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, one who you wouldn't let babysit your kids, let's say.
17:05
SPEAKER_02: But um he was yeah, he was not trying to depersonalize um our our experience of God everywhere present in all things.
17:16
SPEAKER_02: And so but that that's what I mean about I think we're all always having a divine experience in the same way that I think, you know, Hamlet might ask, where is Shakespeare?
17:29
SPEAKER_02: Um and in one sense the answer is, well, Shakespeare is everywhere, and in other sense is Shakespeare is nowhere that you can point to.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: The Christian and very personalist um extra to that is that, you know, William Shakespeare somehow incarnates into his own story and is written and is somebody who can be understood by Hamlet and encountered by Hamlet in that in that kind of personal way.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: So I think one of my first moves with the with the Hiddenness of God is just to say, well, let's figure out what we mean by a divine encounter.
18:00
SPEAKER_02: Secondly, I do want to think about non-resistant non-belief, because I think I'm resistant all the time.
18:09
SPEAKER_02: You know, and as you're saying, you know, it's it's it's a problem for for believers as as well as non-believers.
18:13
SPEAKER_02: Um but I I think every time I hold a grudge, every time there's unforgiveness nurtured in my heart, every time I yell at my kids, right, every time I'm impatient, every every time I'm not walking the way of Jesus, I think that genuinely costs me in terms of my experience of Jesus in the moment.
18:35
SPEAKER_02: And and so if it's possible for me as a paid-up Christian, professional Christian, professional God botherer.
18:42
SPEAKER_02: If it's if it's possible for my resistance of God costing me a you know a certainly a sense of the personal nearness of this God, um, surely that scales to everybody else.
18:54
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that there's there is a a a tradition of argument well Schellenberg's book wasn't that long ago, but like as far as the tradition goes, um, and this response does date well before Schellenberg, this idea that uh sin, you know, however you want to construe that has a kind of epistemic effect.
19:10
SPEAKER_02: You know, you are the noetic effects of sin.
19:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:14
SPEAKER_03: The um this idea that you are less likely and less able to forge a relationship with God if you are in sin.
19:21
SPEAKER_03: I think that um I think that the one of the difficulties I have with that particular response is that I think that obviously, you know, we've we've all encountered um very sinful believers, and you know, uh inasmuch as I suppose that in a s to a certain extent it's it's impossible to encounter an unbeliever who isn't sinful in as much as unbelief is a sin.
19:41
SPEAKER_03: But um if we're kind of but if we if we're saying that their unbelief is the thing that makes them sinful, then we're kind of we end up in a circle.
19:47
SPEAKER_03: So one potential issue with the um the explanation of sin as a kind of universal um way of solving the problem of divine hiddenness is that we will end up saying things like, well, Swedes are uniquely sinful, in a sort of in a way, and you know, we it doesn't seem like moral character is always is is indicative very, very closely with the religious faith.
20:15
SPEAKER_03: I think, you know, you might say it's it's it's slightly it's you know, I'm not saying there's no correlative relationship there.
20:19
SPEAKER_03: There very well might be, I'm I don't know.
20:21
SPEAKER_03: But it's certainly not so tightly tied that you can say the better a the less sinful a person is in their actions, the closer relationship they will have with God.
20:31
SPEAKER_02: No.
20:32
SPEAKER_03: I mean if nothing else, you know, Paul getting the the revelation on the Damascus Road is, you know, in the midst of his disobedience.
20:38
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
20:38
SPEAKER_03: So I I yeah it does at the very least seem like that it's not a knockdown solution.
20:42
SPEAKER_03: My form part of a patchwork of solutions, though.
20:44
SPEAKER_02: It's not a And there are intellectual sins, would you say?
20:47
SPEAKER_02: Like l intellectual m missteps.
20:51
SPEAKER_02: You you can uh there would be ways of failing to um go for the conclusion conclusion that your premises lead to that would have moral consequences, perhaps.
21:02
SPEAKER_02: You know, that I think like I don't think you have to be a Christian to think that um there are uh there are wrong ways of reasoning and um incorrect ways of looking at the world that you you m you might be stubbornly pursuing for purposes that maybe they're transparent to you, maybe they're not transparent to you, but will lead you away from the truth.
21:28
SPEAKER_02: So like um I don't think Swedes Sweden is really coming in for for quite a bashing here.
21:34
SPEAKER_02: But uh I I it is interesting to me that post-Christianity, um, if we're looking at the spread of geographical locations of religions, actually the spread of the kind of atheism that we're familiar with in the West is also geographically located and has some pretty contingent um sociological developments that have that have happened along the way.
21:57
SPEAKER_02: So Charles Taylor kind of talks about.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Um w he he begins his book, A Secular Age, by saying, why is it that in 1500 it's really difficult not to believe in God?
22:07
SPEAKER_02: And why is it in 2000 it's really difficult to believe in God?
22:11
SPEAKER_02: There is this kind of sense of the desacralization of truth.
22:17
SPEAKER_02: And once you once you step away from institutional author authorities, and then once you desacralize even things like sacraments, and then once it's just me and my Bible, and then well, you may as well just hold on to the principle of the Bible and jettison the whole thing, and then you may as well just hold on to the principles and jettison Christianity wholesale.
22:34
SPEAKER_02: And the Swede is where the Swede is, um, because of some patterns of thought that have gotten in ingrained.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: And it's this is not to to blame Sven himself for the position he finds himself in, but it is to say that the human element in this is really ineradicable, you know, and and and sh and that humans can earn not just morally but also intellectually and and in their very disposition towards reality.
23:02
SPEAKER_03: I think that one one potential route uh you could go down for for solving the divine hiddenness problem, or at least constructing a partial solution to it, is to say something like, you know, we've lost touch with our sensus divinitatus.
23:13
SPEAKER_03: You know, we've kind of in some way our way of thinking is now unnaturally corrupted from having this kind of intuitive understanding of God.
23:22
SPEAKER_03: And you know, it's within a Christian framework, there's no reason why you couldn't make that work.
23:28
SPEAKER_03: I think that one of the potential uh responses you'd come up with to that is to say something like, Look, yes, through a series of historically contingent factors that aren't Sven's fault, Sven has ended up in a situation whereby his sensus divinitatis is uh weak.
23:43
SPEAKER_03: You know, he can't he you know he can't look at the world and see God in the same way that you know um you know Aquinas or or Augustine would look at the world and just be like, God, God is writ on everything here.
23:55
SPEAKER_03: Right.
23:55
SPEAKER_03: Um Sven can no longer do that, a hypothetical Sven can no longer do that.
24:00
SPEAKER_03: But of course, that's not his fault, in the same way that you know, if that that's all to do with factors that were totally outside of his control and aren't necessarily indicative of his you know spiritual potential, um however we want to cash that term out.
24:14
SPEAKER_03: And so then I suppose the question from the the proponents of the divine hiddenness problem's perspective is to say something like, well, at some point, Sven uh say, you know, he he he reached an age of intellectual maturity where suddenly he was held he he could now be responsible for his own beliefs and actions.
24:32
SPEAKER_03: In, you know, we set that age at, you know, but at some point, right, we don't hold one-year-old morally responsible for their actions, but we do hold 16-year-olds, so somewhere along the line, a switch has been made.
24:43
SPEAKER_03: At that point, it seems like they're there, it seems like if we're saying that God is all-loving, there would have been a point where it makes sense for God to reach out and say, Look, man, you're you're you're in a certain context whereby uh the odds are are against you, but I'm intervening at this point where you've just entered the the age of responsibility for your beliefs and your actions, and I'm now giving I'm now you know throwing down the rope.
25:06
SPEAKER_03: And then it could be up to Sven to reject that.
25:08
SPEAKER_03: But I think what we find is that that moment, you know, if that if that moment happened, I think people would let us know.
25:14
SPEAKER_03: And uh I don't think it it does.
25:17
SPEAKER_02: And I think the I think the Christian sort of gospel, the the gospel story is that we are we are all that person scrabbling around as a mixture of sins of our own and complicity within wider structures of evil and systems that we've had nothing to do that are oppressing us.
25:39
SPEAKER_02: And then the Christian offer is Christ crucified.
25:43
SPEAKER_02: So what you've got there is the God who is God forsaken for you, which which is a a strange doctrine and central, central to Christianity, that that here comes Christ who cries out on the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
25:59
SPEAKER_02: One of the um deepest cries of dereliction from the Psalms, which God the Son takes onto his own lips to join us in Godforsaken agony, arms outstretched, to say, is this a vision of God that you can resonate with?
26:16
SPEAKER_02: Now I don't think that that in any way solves all the problems, but I I think if they're if we are to A, name the seriousness and the the reality of the problem of hiddenness, and B, if we are to have some kind of gesture towards a solution, it seems to me like the Jesus story grounds the problem as a as genuinely a problem, and our hearts go out to Sven and our hearts go out to because we are all Sven, right?
26:43
SPEAKER_02: We we are all in in that in that situation.
26:46
SPEAKER_02: But the kind the kind of God who might be an answer to that is the kind of God who joins you in God forsakenness.
26:53
SPEAKER_02: And that and that according to the New Testament, this is the greatest um depiction of God.
26:59
SPEAKER_02: This is the the the the the greatest divine revelation, you know, Christ is the image of the invisible God who makes peace by his blood shed on the cross, says Colossians chapter one.
27:07
SPEAKER_02: That that that man on the cross in the darkness crying out to a blackened heaven, if he's what God is, I think that kind of makes sense for me of as it certainly makes sense of why I feel the problem of divine hiddenness so much.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: And and at the end of the day, I don't have a solution to the thing, but I I I trust that guy, because I think that guy seems to know what he's talking about.
27:33
SPEAKER_03: I think one of the one I think an underrated way of approaching the divine hiddenness problem is to kind of broaden the meaning or interpretation of, you know, no one comes to the Father except through me.
27:46
SPEAKER_03: And say something like, Look, maybe the the relevant relationship there doesn't just need to be it couldn't it could be that it's not just belief, you know.
27:55
SPEAKER_03: Let's let's say, you know, for let's just say, okay, God is the ground of all goodness, and in as much as you're experiencing something good or pleasurable, um, except from a few contexts, uh, you are experiencing God in in this sense.
28:09
SPEAKER_03: Well then in that case, you can draw out this idea that okay, maybe you don't know consciously, you don't have like propositional knowledge of God in the same way that you would be you would have if you if you believed in in the one true faith, whatever you take that to be.
28:26
SPEAKER_03: But nonetheless, you are having a relationship through God in the same way that you might have in the same way that like uh a kind of actor playing Santa might have a relationship with with the the child that walks into their little shop at the shopping centre.
28:41
SPEAKER_03: Um the the child doesn't know the who the the true identity of Santa is in the same way that you know uh in this in this solution the non-believer wouldn't know the true cause behind their felt experience of goodness in the world.
28:54
SPEAKER_03: But nonetheless, just as the person in the Santa costume is the real cause behind uh the child's impression of Santa, uh God would be the real cause behind the partaking of goodness.
29:06
SPEAKER_03: And you know, um the uh one I suppose hiccup with that is that um plausibly, again, if we're if we're going with the all-loving framework, the uh the ultimate salvation would need to be open to all, regardless of whether they've encountered uh had a had a a personal divine encounter at all, or you know, if we're speaking in historical or geographic terms, have even come across the gospel.
29:32
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, you uh in order for this to be a complete solution, in my view, you'd need to incorporate it with something like the kind of anonymous Christians idea from Karl Rahner or Carl Rayner, I never quite know how to pronounce his name, whereby somebody can be a Christian without having propositional beliefs in the existence of God and in certain Christian doctrines, um which is interesting, but of course it's very controversial.
29:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean that certainly that that can be controversial.
29:56
SPEAKER_02: I think Matthew 25 is interesting where Jesus just sort of says to a whole bunch of people, um whatever you did for the least of these, you did you did for me, um, which is which is uh a suggest a suggestive um part of scripture.
30:11
SPEAKER_02: Let's think about um another big issue that Christians have to wrestle with, and um Schellenberg kind of uh calls the problem of divine hiddenness kind of a species of of kind of the problem of evil more generally.
30:24
SPEAKER_02: Um how are you going to ratchet up the uh the problem of evil for us Christians so that we feel it in all its force?
30:33
SPEAKER_03: I suppose I think that um the problem of evil it's one of those uh it's one of those kind of philosophical issues where it's unclear whether like making it more specific in the way that a lot of a lot of students of philosophy very much want to do with things is in some sense robbing it of the most important aspects.
30:52
SPEAKER_03: In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's illustration of the problem of evil is a child being torn apart by dogs because his wanting to get away from this idea of like, oh you know, if we have you know one trillion bad units and we have a sort of you know, it can be it can be very easy for this to get very abstract.
31:11
SPEAKER_03: So I think I think the way to make the problem salient is to reflect upon very, very gruesome examples of of this sort of thing.
31:18
SPEAKER_03: You know, the think about um you know, a kind of child dying of malaria um in in sub-Saharan Africa and sort of uh through no fault of their own, you know, that's the i in it's very difficult uh looking at something like that to to think, oh yeah, you know, that that child's soul is being really enriched.
31:37
SPEAKER_03: Um you know, it's very difficult to imagine the higher plan that this could be a part of.
31:42
SPEAKER_03: And I think that my like hot take about the problem of evil is that I think that the best solution was and still remains in the book of Job, which is to sort of say, you know, man, like how how how the hell would you know whether whether um this is gonna be within God's plan or without God's plan?
32:02
SPEAKER_03: And and you know, the I'm always very um taken with with slightly more sceptical forms of theism because it strikes me that if there is uh an omnipotent, omniscient power that has created the world, they're going to be so beyond me.
32:19
SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm gonna really struggle to fathom their reasoning behind anything.
32:23
SPEAKER_03: You know, and and um you could also give this response to the problem of divine hiddenness, right?
32:27
SPEAKER_03: You can say something like, Look, I don't know why God has chosen to unevenly distribute faith, and I don't know why you know the Holy Spirit has gifted some people faith and and not others, and I don't know why there's demographic um unevenness in in the belief of beliefs of different religions, and whatever one is true, it's gonna have quite a lot to do with geography.
32:48
SPEAKER_03: You can come up with lots of individual solutions to that.
32:50
SPEAKER_03: You can come up with a molinus solution of saying, well, God has just put the souls that are likely to believe in him in the bodies of people within these particular geographical locations, and he's put the ones that would be resistant far away from their opportunity to hear the gospel.
33:05
SPEAKER_03: But I think that potentially the strongest response to both is to sort of bite the bullet and potentially sit with attention and say something, look, I I I don't know what God's plan is for hiding the hiding himself from so many people and also allowing so much evil to occur in the world.
33:24
SPEAKER_03: But I also shouldn't expect to be able to understand this.
33:28
SPEAKER_03: That would be really odd on the face of it.
33:30
SPEAKER_03: You know, in the same way that um I somebody used the example of an ant crawling across a copy of of the complete works of Shakespeare, which is something that I just saw happen in my garden.
33:38
SPEAKER_03: That's a really good analogy.
33:40
SPEAKER_03: If you know, it's not just that the ant can't understand the words, it doesn't know that they're words.
33:46
SPEAKER_03: Like it doesn't even know the right question to ask.
33:48
SPEAKER_03: And I suspect that if God existed, many of our questions and problems with his existence would just be unfathomable in this way.
34:00
SPEAKER_03: I don't even know how we go about with in my finitude attempting to contemplate and suss out the mind of an infinite being.
34:06
SPEAKER_03: So that's that's kind of that's kind of my general response to to things like that.
34:10
SPEAKER_02: I think you're absolutely right to point to Job.
34:12
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this epic poem, w was it the first um scripture written down that's been you know collected together in the canon of scripture?
34:20
SPEAKER_02: Um it's certainly very ancient, certainly the very, you know, the the names that it calls various peoples like the Chaldeans, it speaks to it being very, very old.
34:30
SPEAKER_02: And so it's isn't it so apt that perhaps the first thing written down that scripture is is the wrestling with the the greatest issue that we all have to face, which is suffering.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: But what you've got is a a man in righteousness in a garden, because you know the land of us is a wooded place in in um Job chapter one, and then it's actually very rare in scripture to sort of see Satan or hear him, and yet there's this sort of audible kind of conversation in which things develop, and then there's a fall from this wooded place where this man has animals under him, and you're you're thinking in sort of Eden terms, you're thinking in very Genesis terms, and down we fall into uh horrendous suffering, and it only gets worse because his friends come, and his friends spend seven days uh silent, and it's the best thing they ever do.
35:20
SPEAKER_02: Um, and then they start to try and explain the problem of evil to him, and so and it largely boils down to Job.
35:27
SPEAKER_02: If you were righteous, good things would happen.
35:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, clearly bad things have happened, you're unrighteous.
35:31
SPEAKER_02: And and Job just tends to be this story in which Job is trying to insist on his innocence, not not his sinlessness, but his innocence.
35:38
SPEAKER_02: I really haven't brought this on myself, um, and I really am suffering.
35:43
SPEAKER_02: And and that there's the tension at the heart of all things.
35:46
SPEAKER_02: Twenty times Job asks for why, doesn't get a response, and then at the end the Lord shows up and he does this whole where were you?
35:54
SPEAKER_02: when I stretched out the the constellations, where where were you?
35:57
SPEAKER_02: Just tell me if you know.
35:58
SPEAKER_02: And he's kind of sarcastic to this guy who's just kind of been through the mill in incredible ways.
36:03
SPEAKER_02: So the the there is the God who shows up in Job is the God who answers him out of the storm, out of the whirlwind, and basically makes makes your point that that's you are unfit to do the cost-benefit analysis, and then restores him to double what he had at the beginning.
36:23
SPEAKER_02: And so, in a sense, Job is telling the story of scripture and for and and and you know, he Job is manfallen, but then sort of you get this resurrection up to twice what there was.
36:36
SPEAKER_02: Um, but what what what I always think of when I think of Job and and that speech that the Lord makes out of the whirlwind, the the whole where were you thing, we are not able to do the cost-benefit analysis for all sorts of reasons.
36:50
SPEAKER_02: But I think in the gospel, you kind of get there is one person who is able to do the cost-benefit analysis.
36:56
SPEAKER_02: So the book of Hebrews says that Jesus, for the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame.
37:04
SPEAKER_02: So if if the cross is all the suffering of this world burnt down onto a single person, um Jesus, God the Son, embraces that thinking it's worth it for the resurrection that that's to come.
37:18
SPEAKER_02: So in miniature, in the individual, you have Jesus saying, Okay, I'm going to do the cost-benefit analysis.
37:24
SPEAKER_02: The cost of creation is all this evil.
37:28
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to take on that burden because I do think it's worth it in the end.
37:31
SPEAKER_02: And he kind of he makes the cost-benefit analysis.
37:34
SPEAKER_02: And again, I don't want to solve the problem of evil, but I want to gesture towards the person that I think I can trust in the midst of it.
37:41
SPEAKER_02: Does that make sense?
37:42
SPEAKER_03: So kind of, I suppose, you know, similar to Job eventually trusting God in the Old Testament.
37:48
SPEAKER_03: That's sort of I mean, I something I always think is it's a bit of a side tag on I suppose, but something I always think is very interesting is the kind of mystery left hanging in the air at the end of Job, where there there is this refusal to explain why God might forsake seemingly good people, actually stands in quite a lot of contrast to quite a lot of the rest of the Old Testament, where often it is made quite explicit why the Israelites are being punished for something.
38:10
SPEAKER_03: It's like, well, it's because they did this, and that really annoyed God.
38:15
SPEAKER_03: You know, I'm sure that there are some very clever biblical scholars that have worked on this, but it just it's something that always strikes me, um, reading Job in connection with the rest of the Old Testament, just how much of a contrast that is.
38:27
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's almost like uh partly because I much prefer the Job answer.
38:32
SPEAKER_03: I think I don't know, uh there's something quite satisfying about that.
38:34
SPEAKER_03: I think for the reasons I've I've given about, you know, of course we would be unable to fathom an infinite being.
38:40
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, to a certain extent, uh Jesus being able to to be the only person to be able to make this analysis make sense within that framework, right?
38:47
SPEAKER_03: Because uh according to the gospels, he is God.
38:50
SPEAKER_03: And that would be in which case, yes, that that that kind of follows that of course he would be able to reason out the problem of evil, but they'll probably just be incommunicable to the rest of us.
38:59
SPEAKER_03: I suppose the thing about the thing about both of these this solution to both the divine hiddenness problem and the problem of evil is that unless you're already a believer, they can seem quite unsatisfying because they're all conditional on a prior belief in God.
39:13
SPEAKER_03: It's like, well, if God did exist and was infinite, we would expect his behavior to be pretty inscrutable.
39:18
SPEAKER_03: The only other the only other worry that I I have with this, and actually there's a paper I was reading on this the other day, actually in connection with the fine-tuning arguments by a guy called uh Miles Donahue, who has a YouTube channel as well, which is very good.
39:29
SPEAKER_03: Um always like it when academics have YouTube channels.
39:32
SPEAKER_03: Um he points out that if you go too far down the skeptical theism route, you make too much of God unfathomable, you end up undermining your basis for a lot of arguments that you use in favor of God.
39:46
SPEAKER_03: So, for example, if you make God's moral reasoning too unfathomable, it becomes more difficult to make God the ground for goodness.
39:54
SPEAKER_03: And if you make God's general, like practical reasoning too unfathomable, it becomes very difficult to argue for fine-tuning because one of the pillars of fine-tuning, at least plausibly, is that God is motivated to set up the universe in such a way that life would be created.
40:07
SPEAKER_03: And if you lean too far into the unfathomability of God, you lose the ability to make that argument.
40:15
SPEAKER_03: So I I I like the Job response.
40:17
SPEAKER_03: Um, but then again, I quite like sceptical theism.
40:18
SPEAKER_03: So I don't know so so that that that might just be my my biases showing.
40:23
SPEAKER_03: I think that the problem for although the the tension within Christianity, and and indeed any kind of uh non any kind of theism that doesn't that doesn't have this like quite extreme skeptical component is that God has got to be fathomable in a lot of ways.
40:40
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
40:40
SPEAKER_03: And you know, and the primary medium that that's done is through scripture.
40:44
SPEAKER_03: But at the same time, he needs to be unfathomable enough that we can allow for these Job style answers to things where tension is held.
40:52
SPEAKER_02: Yes, interesting.
40:52
SPEAKER_02: As as you said about the ant going across the collected works of Shakespeare, I I sort of I sort of backed off from that.
41:00
SPEAKER_02: As that that seems a little too incommunicable to me.
41:03
SPEAKER_02: Because well, precisely because within Christian theology, the the the the bottom line is that God and Christ are one, right?
41:12
SPEAKER_02: And so if if you have life on planet earth and life in the midst of suffering as so incommunicable with with the divine, you've actually committed a heresy because you've you've divided, you've divided father and son, then they're no longer one being.
41:24
SPEAKER_02: So um, yes, my thoughts are higher than your thoughts, is sort of the the Isaiah 55 thing.
41:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, but yes, you could you can be you you can put God in too much of a different category.
41:34
SPEAKER_02: That's that's really interesting.
41:36
SPEAKER_02: One one final thing before we think about maybe consciousness for a second, but um I think yeah, there there is a case in which you kind of need to assume the Christian story to to to have these kinds of conversations.
41:49
SPEAKER_02: But one pushback on that would be I think in order to have a true problem with evil, you probably need to have something like theism, wouldn't you?
41:58
SPEAKER_02: Like like w without just shrugging your shoulders and just saying it is what it is.
42:02
SPEAKER_03: I think that I think you can you can set up the problem of evil as like an internal problem.
42:06
SPEAKER_03: So you can say something like, um, if I buy into the moral precepts of Christianity, then this problem arises.
42:14
SPEAKER_03: So it's not I think that um but I I think something that the you're sort of getting at is that is that the the emotional bite of I know I can only describe it as the the justification for the tone of indignation in which the problem is often put because you know, well exactly, you know, the the there you need to have some kind of grounding for for your morality.
42:33
SPEAKER_03: Uh you know, you can say and the problem of grounding morality is is sort of its its own thing.
42:38
SPEAKER_03: And again, I think that one of the benefits potentially of theism as as a as an idea is that you get your morality from a kind of commander who can then enforce it in both a kind of physical and a and a normative way.
42:55
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, one of the one of the one of the alternative ways of of grounding uh some kind of moral realism, say, is is to turn to something like Plato or or Neoplatonism and to talk about the one or the form of the good or something like that, which is a kind of, you know, coming back to what we're saying about the the radical nature of the person part of of theism, doesn't have that.
43:16
SPEAKER_03: And as a result, is to a certain extent a much easier pill to swallow, especially outside of the the kind of entrenched lines of the materialism versus non-materialism debate, which ha just hasn't historically been as big of a thing.
43:29
SPEAKER_03: However, one of the one of the strengths of of a theistic grounding to morality is that you are you are given a command by someone who, you know, to put it bluntly, can then enforce it.
43:40
SPEAKER_03: There's uh one of the potential issues you might have with this kind of impersonal, platonic grounding, you know, grounding uh goodness in the form of the good is to say something like, Why should I care?
43:51
SPEAKER_03: Like, you know, there's this non causal, uh inanimate, non physical object somewhere.
43:56
SPEAKER_03: Like, what does that have to do with me?
43:58
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:58
SPEAKER_03: In a way that it becomes much more difficult.
44:00
SPEAKER_03: Difficult to do in a theistic context.
44:03
SPEAKER_03: Though at the same time, I think that you can push that argument to points where I find most Christians would find uncomfortable.
44:11
SPEAKER_03: There's a there's this like uh I don't think I think a lot there there's this deeply reactionary um kind of reacting against the French Revolution.
44:21
SPEAKER_03: Um, a Christian thinker called Joseph de Maestra, kind of he was an ultramonacist Catholic, and he uh uh he was a Savoyard and he had to flee Savoy because of the French Revolution basically spent his the rest of his life writing these uh passages that will morally challenge you, especially with a well-modern sensibility, deeply kind of anti-uh democratic and that kind of thing.
44:43
SPEAKER_03: And but one of the one of the most interesting arguments, he's also one of these theologians that's really obsessed with the Old Testament, and New Testament doesn't get as much of a look at.
44:50
SPEAKER_03: Um but one of his arguments that he makes for following God's command is you know, what are you gonna do instead?
44:58
SPEAKER_03: You can't leave the building.
45:00
SPEAKER_03: It's the building is existence.
45:02
SPEAKER_03: So play ball or prepare to face the consequences of not playing ball.
45:07
SPEAKER_03: When I bring that argument up, because it's it's a remarkably candid argument from and I think part of it is that is that uh Meister is much more uh comfortable with potentially some of potentially s some of the some theistic arguments that are morally a bit less palatable to modern sensibilities.
45:28
SPEAKER_03: But the reason I bring this up is because most Christians I know don't want to go that far.
45:33
SPEAKER_03: They don't want to say that God, that the ultimately God's moral, the or the benefits of having God grounding morality ultimately bottoms out at this you know practical principle of God is so much more powerful than you.
45:45
SPEAKER_03: You don't want to go to hell, do you?
45:46
SPEAKER_03: That just sounds like it sucks.
45:47
SPEAKER_03: Because that kind of seems like a slightly coercive basis.
45:49
SPEAKER_02: Arbitrary as well, yeah.
45:51
SPEAKER_03: You know, and I suppose it doesn't have to mean it doesn't mean that you know God's commands are arbitrary.
45:54
SPEAKER_03: You know, they he he could still it could still be that they're grounded in his nature, yeah.
45:58
SPEAKER_03: And that you know, he couldn't change them in the same way that we could change our minds.
46:02
SPEAKER_03: But it does, however, you know, it does mean that the motivating force behind uh following God's commands it no longer comes from the fact that they're good.
46:10
SPEAKER_03: It comes from the raw power behind them.
46:14
SPEAKER_03: On the other hand, you know, so we kind of want to it it seems to me that we want to fall somewhere in between these two, most people at least want to fall somewhere in between these two camps.
46:24
SPEAKER_03: They don't want God's power to stem uh just from or sorry, God's the motivating power behind God's goodness to just reduce to eventually raw metaphysical power devoid of any ethical content.
46:36
SPEAKER_03: But at the same time, there is this issue of, well, does goodness by itself motivate?
46:42
SPEAKER_03: Uh as, you know, and if if goodness by itself could motivate, well then what is God doing here that the platonic inanimate form of the good isn't doing?
46:52
SPEAKER_03: And I know I it's an interesting tension, not something that I've I've I've in any way solved or but but I I just find that a really interesting um uh tugging in two different directions.
47:02
SPEAKER_02: We got into this to some degree at at Canford School.
47:06
SPEAKER_02: Um there was a question a little bit around the Euthyphro dilemma.
47:10
SPEAKER_02: Um, is something good because the gods say that it is good?
47:14
SPEAKER_02: Um or what's the what's the alternative?
47:17
SPEAKER_02: Is something good because the gods say that it is good, or is God's goodness an arbitrary thing?
47:23
SPEAKER_02: Like like have you been?
47:24
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, is it is something good because God says it's good, or does God say something's good because it is good at some kind of price?
47:32
SPEAKER_02: And if it's and if it's that second thing, then it seems like there's a standard of goodness outside of God, in which case you don't need, you know, God for goodness.
47:40
SPEAKER_02: Um or if God is just you know randomly saying, okay, good, good, not good, not good, it it sounds yeah, it's it sounds utterly so God is either useless or arbitrary, you know, it in in the in the kind of euthyphro dilemma.
47:54
SPEAKER_02: And we we sort of got into this in in in Q ⁇ A because I I think the doctrine of the Trinity is is is quite a card up the sleeve that the Christian has that the Platonist doesn't.
48:06
SPEAKER_02: In that, um, you've got the divine life as a multipersonal life of other-centered love, which describes what goodness is in the New Testament.
48:18
SPEAKER_02: You know, goodness is love, you love God, you love neighbor.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: Apparently, among the persons of the Trinity, that's been going on for all eternity.
48:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, the Son has been loving God and neighbor in the spirit um the entire time.
48:31
SPEAKER_02: So you've got a community of liberty and equality and fraternity, you've got a you've got a com you've got an ethical community that is goodness himself because God is this goodness because God is love.
48:43
SPEAKER_02: And it seems to me like you've you've therefore got a personal grounding for morality, who yes, God is very, very powerful.
48:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, but but it is not um it is not pure threat that is motivating at that at that point.
48:59
SPEAKER_02: And then you've got the you know the New Testament 1 John 4, God is love.
49:02
SPEAKER_02: Those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.
49:05
SPEAKER_02: That seems to me to be a kind of an ethical vision that really when first first actually Jews, you know, prior to the writing of the New Testament and then Christians sort of afterwards were kind of evangelizing a whole bunch of of Platonists and kind of saying, You've got this form of the good.
49:22
SPEAKER_02: Allow me to introduce you to God.
49:26
SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, you know, we we end up, I mean, something like um Augustine's kind of stuff going on in the mind of God.
49:32
SPEAKER_03: It's it's not too far from Neoplatonism.
49:34
SPEAKER_03: It's kind of you you get this kind of Platinus-esque Neoplatonist framework, and it just you know gets incorporated into this mind of God, um which is is very interesting.
49:45
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell But hyperpersonal with with a training.
49:47
SPEAKER_02: Well that's a trend view.
49:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this this it seems to me that effectively we end up with knowing that something is good, like just the proposition X is good by itself isn't the same thing as you should do X.
50:04
SPEAKER_03: It's like that there's something there's some because you should do X is motivational.
50:09
SPEAKER_03: It's like it's not it's it's got you know normativity to it.
50:12
SPEAKER_03: It's not simply a kind of dead, a dead property that we're you know, slapping on something.
50:18
SPEAKER_02: And uh In the same way that beauty is not just beauty, but it calls forth wonder.
50:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.
50:23
SPEAKER_03: As in as an Yeah, the the the interesting thing about um about normative statements and moral statements is that they are they're not merely descriptions, they're also prescribing something.
50:35
SPEAKER_03: And that that shouldness is is is something that I would argue that pretty much every moral system needs to bridge in some way.
50:43
SPEAKER_03: For instance, you know, even saying God by his nature is good, it still doesn't that still doesn't get you some get you to the motivation, that kind of normativity, the you shouldness of that we want out of a moral system.
50:57
SPEAKER_03: And to a certain extent, I think that you know, theism, like atheism or any kind of non-theism also has to do this work.
51:04
SPEAKER_03: And it's a hard work.
51:05
SPEAKER_03: And arguably I think theism gets there much more easily.
51:07
SPEAKER_03: I I think partly because um you have the interpersonal nature, not just you know, between the Trinity, but also between you and God, right?
51:15
SPEAKER_03: Right.
51:15
SPEAKER_03: There's some there's somebody making a command that that yeah intuitively gets you a bit closer to you should than um thanks.
51:23
SPEAKER_02: It's an I thou relation as well rather than the I.
51:26
SPEAKER_02: Oh Carl Martin Buber.
51:27
SPEAKER_02: That's yeah, yeah.
51:30
SPEAKER_03: Oh man, that's uh I need to reread.
51:32
SPEAKER_03: Right.
51:33
SPEAKER_02: So let's before we do consciousness, let's do it in a different order.
51:36
SPEAKER_02: Let's let's talk about um some issues that come up in conversations with agnostics and atheists, and and if you're a pure naturalist, it seems to me much more difficult to say this is wrong with a capital W, right?
51:51
SPEAKER_02: Um if you are, you know, if you're a Richard Dawkins style um atheist, then what's that famous phrase he said um the universe has the precise properties we should expect if there is at the bottom of the universe no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, um, which is beautifully written and um and resonates with us in all in all sorts of ways because because of the hiddenness of God and the problem of evil.
52:17
SPEAKER_02: You know, he he's just described that, but then what he what that fails to describe is the wrongness of it that we look at when we see such a thing.
52:25
SPEAKER_02: And you know, C.S.
52:25
SPEAKER_02: Lewis would um on his journey from atheism to Christianity, he goes through his theistic couple of years between 1929 and 1931, in which it really is the it's the ability to call wrong wrong with a capital W because there's something right with a capital R.
52:43
SPEAKER_02: And he just sort of makes that that wonderful sort of analogy.
52:46
SPEAKER_02: If there was a world in which there was no such thing as a straight line, then you also would not have such a thing as a crooked line.
52:52
SPEAKER_02: What is crooked if it if there is no straight by which to judge it?
52:55
SPEAKER_02: And what is the child dying of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa?
53:02
SPEAKER_02: What why not shrug our shoulders and say it is what it is?
53:06
SPEAKER_02: And surely one of the good things about inviting people to become a Christian, I would say, is you can you can take that with real moral seriousness and call it evil with a capital E.
53:18
SPEAKER_02: Now, there are all kinds of atheistic responses to that, some of them naturalistic, some of them not.
53:24
SPEAKER_02: Um where do you where does your mind go when the problem of of of objective moral value comes up?
53:30
SPEAKER_03: I I suppose something I go back and forth on.
53:33
SPEAKER_03: I sometimes um I occasionally drift very into uh the work of a Kantian scholar called Christine Causgaard, who's uh essentially makes the argument that because I implicitly, when I act, I kind of value my own reflective agency.
53:47
SPEAKER_03: I am therefore bound by consistency to value, consistency to value the reflective agency of others.
53:51
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I think that for me, again, coming back to this kind of the the gap that lies between any moral system and its kind of motivational properties.
54:02
SPEAKER_03: I think you know, somebody could, in theory, and I always, you know, I use Milton's Satan because it's he's somebody that does it and he's you know literary figure that that people have kind of are a bit more familiar with.
54:13
SPEAKER_03: He is Milton Satan in purely the descriptive things that he believes, he's a Christian, as in he he knows, you know, even knows about the sun before anyone else.
54:23
SPEAKER_03: And um and yet knowing the good and knowing all of that, he still chooses not to be motivated by it.
54:31
SPEAKER_03: And it strikes me that I say that that that kind of problem exists for Milton Satan, also exists for for everyone else.
54:37
SPEAKER_03: I I think that in any moral system we do end up at this at this kind of bridging problem whereby we have a description of what we think is is capital E evil and capital G good, and then we need to somehow get that inside us.
54:49
SPEAKER_03: And I think that one of the underrated strengths of um some non-realist or kind of anti-realist uh accounts of morality, things like um emotivism, just got all kind of a broad kind of emotivism, at the very least, incorporating an emotive component into our analysis of morality is that it makes moral states and moral statements inherently motivational, because just affects are motivational, right?
55:16
SPEAKER_03: Emotions are motivational.
55:17
SPEAKER_03: These are the kind of things that compel us to action in a way that propositions by themselves don't.
55:22
SPEAKER_03: So one of the one of the problems that you can raise, you know, not just with with theistic moralism, just any kind of moral realism, is that we end up in a situation whereby you can say, This is good and I don't care.
55:33
SPEAKER_03: Which is like, not many people would say that, right?
55:36
SPEAKER_03: But that's not a problem that that is, you know, one of the one of the underrated strengths of an anti-realist accounter morality is that that that isn't a problem.
55:43
SPEAKER_03: You know, if you're a if you're an emotivist, it never makes sense to say that's good and I don't care, or that, you know, th these two are bound together.
55:54
SPEAKER_03: What I think, you know, obviously the best of both worlds is to have both, right?
55:57
SPEAKER_02: What I fail to see in emotivism is the ability to say that if if you say yay murder on an emotivist kind of footing, am I able to say that the that you have done something wrong?
56:10
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, exactly.
56:11
SPEAKER_03: And that's that's the thing where I think that, you know, when when I when I say that um that I think that theists could nick a bit of machinery from motivism, I think that they can add it to the to the trick.
56:20
SPEAKER_02: And that's the Tom Holland discussion.
56:22
SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, I think I think I'm sorry, I think I think it's more like I think that, you know, they they can add that emotional content to the kind of moral realist framework.
56:28
SPEAKER_03: And actually you end up you end up with something that can get around quite a lot of the the more standard problems that people have with moral realism.
56:34
SPEAKER_03: It's actually kind of uh what I think is a real potential strength of theism there.
56:37
SPEAKER_03: Um I think that I think that Yeah, I I think that is that's a real difficulty for for moral anti-realism, right?
56:44
SPEAKER_03: Is that you can't say um this person has booed something or yayed something and they are wrong or or right in that.
56:54
SPEAKER_02: There's no over lunch we had the conversation, didn't we, about you know, you can go onto TikTok and you can find any number of of people who said yay murder in terms of Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and we we sort of talked about how um yeah, a lot of people are nutpicking um in terms of you know finding people who celebrate murder in a way that we find deeply uncomfortable.
57:14
SPEAKER_02: Um Have they done something wrong to say yay murder on an ethical emotivist footing?
57:22
SPEAKER_03: I on a on ethical emotivist footing, like the the for an ethical emotivist, the question like doesn't make sense because they would say that there's no there's no like truth of valuable content there.
57:31
SPEAKER_03: I don't know where I fall on that.
57:32
SPEAKER_03: I actually have a lot of um sympathies with either kind of on some kind of moral realist framework.
57:40
SPEAKER_03: There is something really nice about being able to say something is is right or wrong.
57:44
SPEAKER_03: And I think that I think that theism is one way to get there.
57:47
SPEAKER_03: And I've explained you know before that, I don't think it's necessarily the only way to get there.
57:50
SPEAKER_03: I think that you know you can end up coming up with a with a kind of a sort of epistemic framework whereby you see things that are wrong.
58:01
SPEAKER_03: And also, you know, you uh one of the things that um that that I'm always surprised is actually just just how little ground level moral disagreement there often is between people.
58:12
SPEAKER_03: So um A.J.
58:13
SPEAKER_03: Eyre talks about this quite a lot, um, although I I I don't think I'd go quite as far as he does.
58:19
SPEAKER_03: Oftentimes when people are having what at first seems like a moral disagreement, there's often they're often having a factual disagreement.
58:26
SPEAKER_03: So I think we can very much overstate the amount to which people do in fact morally disagree.
58:30
SPEAKER_03: So like a really good, even with very, very contentious topics.
58:33
SPEAKER_03: So a very, you know, one example would be something like abortion, right?
58:37
SPEAKER_03: When people disagree on abortion, it strikes me that quite a lot of the time they're disagreeing on the descriptive question of whether a fetus is a person.
58:44
SPEAKER_03: And that's like that's not a that's not that's not a moral disagreement, strictly speaking, that's a that's a descriptive disagreement.
58:51
SPEAKER_03: And it doesn't make, you know, people are gonna be very heated about descriptive disagreements.
58:55
SPEAKER_03: However, it strikes me that you know the again, the the kind of when a when a a Christian um opposes abortion on the basis that a fetus has a soul and is thus a person, they're opposing it on on a descriptive basis.
59:09
SPEAKER_03: If anyone learnt or kind of or kind of had it revealed to them uh und indisputably and veraccibly, or whatever, whatever the right word is there.
59:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, that that that that a fetus had a soul and was a person with moral worth, they would I imagine they would change their tune, regardless of what they're uh because I I don't think that actually there actually is an enormous amount of hardcore moral disagreement.
59:36
SPEAKER_03: There is some, don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that it's like it's impossible or anything like that.
59:40
SPEAKER_03: But I do think that so I'm just moving that because I'll knock it over.
59:43
SPEAKER_03: The um but I am suggesting that we can we can begin to overstate the amount of sheer moral discrimination.
59:48
SPEAKER_03: However, you know, bringing it to the to the Tom Holland thing.
59:50
SPEAKER_03: I think that as you broaden your time horizon, you do find a lot more moral disagreement, right?
59:57
SPEAKER_03: It's it's much easier to find moral disagreement over time than it is um like like disgenuine, like ground level moral disagreement over time than it is uh between people within a society.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_03: And that's partly just because we're all raised in similar context, right?
1:00:09
SPEAKER_03: This might bring us onto the dominion of the.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right, right.
1:00:13
SPEAKER_02: Over I mean, something like Infanticide seems so obviously wrong to us.
1:00:19
SPEAKER_02: Um an AJ Air might say, okay, you can have a conversation about a two-week-old baby who's disabled and you know the their parents in Alexandria in the first century are trying to decide whether to keep the child or not.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_02: Are they having a a descriptive battle?
1:00:35
SPEAKER_02: Well, th they're also whether or not that child has a soul, and you want to put it in transcendent terms or not.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_02: I I think it's probably impossible to divorce the descriptive fact of this is a member of the of the species Homo sapien from this is an inviolable sphere of worth and dignity that that we we dare not extinguish.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_02: Um I doubt that the that the descriptive and the value-based can be can be divorced so easily.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_03: Hmm.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_03: That's interesting.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think that I think you're actually on something there, inasmuch as a lot of our descriptions seem to be, especially in a in a in a sacred context, partly because I think that almost definitionally I think the sacred is is the melding of the descriptive and the prescriptive, right?
1:01:23
SPEAKER_03: Something like soul.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_03: It's impossible to talk about a soul divorced from implications of moral worth.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_03: Like it it it in some sense it seems very strange to say this person has a soul and like morally that's neither here nor there.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_03: Like that that's it's kind of strange.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_03: It's like what what part of our part of our theistic language is is kind of just run through with with moral content.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_03: And um one of the reasons why I think that my kind of um one of the reasons why I think religion can be so motivating from a moral standpoint is because I think that not only you know it it's not it's not just that it provides a kind of moral realist grounding at a kind of dry philosophical level.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_03: Because I think, you know, if you were to ask most people why they think something's right and wrong, I I I I I highly doubt that they will say something like, well, you know, I I think that ultimately I'm moral realist about things.
1:02:11
SPEAKER_03: And you know, as a result, I get I get down to, you know, when I when I get when it gets down to what I believe in moral truths and moral falsies, I think they tend to say they tend to have something like a narrative, yeah.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_03: Um that is is at least in a very kind of practical causal sense, you know, linear causal sense, grounding their actions.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_03: And uh one of the things that I that I think that, you know, I think this actually goes quite underexplored, especially in our kind of popular discussions.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_03: One of the th one of the advantages that that a religious belief has over this sort of much drier uh Platonic story or just any kind of propositional, merely propositional story about how we might gr might ground moral truths, is that there's a a narrative component to religion.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_03: Um you know, you you can think there's a narrative component whether you think that narrative is is reflects something historical or not, right?
1:03:00
SPEAKER_03: It just has a narrative component.
1:03:01
SPEAKER_03: And that I think um is is very morally motivating.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_02: Well, we are storied creatures and we we cannot do without an a narrative structure.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_02: I I think the um I think we still do talk about souls just in a secular frame.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_02: You know, I I think we when we talk about human rights, we're kind of talking about the Amago Day, you know, that that Latin phrase that's um and and this this is this is I think one of the things that Tom Holland says, and let's let's let's get on to Tom Holland now, that um when we start to talk about you know 1776, and we hold these truths to be self-evident, that um uh we've been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that we've been given the this this equality, that that kind of stuff.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_02: The the language of self-evident is to secularize an already religious discourse in which to state that somebody is a member of the human family is already to state that they uh they belong to us and that we are they're part of our moral community, such that the divorce of the descriptive from the prescriptive is well Charles Taylor would kind of you know point to various kind of theological developments within medieval Christendom and and and lots of people would would point out the difference between the nominalists and the and the realists and and these sorts of things that that I think both Platonists and Christians have constantly um have not have not been have they've been realists and they've not been able to divorce the descriptive from the prescriptive, you know, in ways that having divorced the descriptive from the prescriptive, it's given us a lot of power, and we've we've traded we've traded meaning for power in the modern world, and the scientific method is kind of based on this sort of nominalist view of the world that we can we can kind of become masters of nature and let's let's just put to one side the theological and the moral and let's treat the world like it's a machine, and it's been profoundly um successful from one point of view.
1:05:11
SPEAKER_02: It's also left us unable to kind of reweave what what has been burst asunder in in lots of ways.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_02: And I I think a lot of our modern secular attempts to speak in a in in a register of human rights and that kind of thing, is to try and layer on top a Christian-ish or a rel a religious kind of um layer to what we fundamentally claim to be, which is just materialists.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_03: I I think that part of it is is just that humans I think it that it's I I even if you were to pick like a psychopath, I think you would struggle to find me non-valuing humans.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_02: It it's just very difficult to which humans.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's what I mean.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, no, and I and I think narrow or obviously broad, depending on what culture.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_03: Is that we we have like it's it's basically impossible to go out go out in the world and not end up valuing things.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_03: And then you know, part of but part of the this kind of scope of any kind of value discussion is that it doesn't just govern me.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_03: I also, if I value it, you know, in this kind of thick sense, I also want other people to value it as well.
1:06:17
SPEAKER_03: It's like like values are kind of weird in that way.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:06:20
SPEAKER_03: We want them that we want them to spread.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_03: And in order to but if you want an idea to spread, you have to have some kind of justification for it.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_03: You have to you have to appeal to to shared ground um underneath.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_03: And I think that that's part of why it's why um when we have our moral discussions, we want to to appeal to like I think it's very difficult to have um any kind of moral discussion, uh, especially when you're, you know, especially when you're trying to unify large groups of people around something that doesn't appeal to some kind of idea of the sacred, broadly construed, or uh some kind of grand unifying narrative.
1:06:57
SPEAKER_03: Because that that that is something that everyone that's a kind of a thing in which everyone will, or if they come to believe it, the moral the moral content will just kind of naturally fall out of that.
1:07:07
SPEAKER_03: It's narrative like stories are are funny like that.
1:07:09
SPEAKER_03: It's it's a very odd like for example, you know, propositionally, take something, you know, the Amaga Day we're just talking about it, you know.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_03: Propositionally, being made in the image of God, like if I was just say, oh, you know, this this X is made in the image of God.
1:07:22
SPEAKER_03: Well, I nothing moral follows from that, but narratively, quite a lot follows from that.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's it's there's you know, uh one of the the one of the interesting things about uh doctrinal and and moral development over time is that you have a lot of this kind of thing going on, whereby we're not like explicitly deriving conclusions from prior propositions.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_03: There's something like a much looser kind of derivation going on.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_03: And I'd be interested to just explore what that is.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_03: It's something that it's something that Dominion kind of alerted me to a bit.
1:07:53
SPEAKER_03: You know, what Dominion is is as much about the It's as much about the change of Christianity as it is about the um the kind of the idea that you know Tom Owen's thesis is is not that uh Christianity was given to humanity fully formed and then descended from a high exactly evolutionary.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's it's evolutionary, it's it's at basis a kind of morally relative story, you know.
1:08:23
SPEAKER_03: And um and I think that that explicating that process of how we get from you know uh uh certain ideas like M.R.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_03: God to then the idea of equality is is its own question.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_03: It's an interesting question because it's not a logical derivation.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_03: You know, the I think one of the one of the interesting uh apologetic knots, I suppose, for for wanting to use a kind of Dominion-esque thesis uh for apologetic purposes is that it's very difficult to know like in hindsight it seems like the pro-abolitionists were obviously right in their interpretation of scripture, and the pro-slavery advocates were obviously wrong.
1:09:06
SPEAKER_03: That that seems pretty intuitive, you know.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_03: You can cite individual verses against it, um uh against the kind of pro-abolitionist interpretation, but broadly, like it it seems very obvious, partly because of the way that we're taught the Bible now.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_03: You know, it's a when I was at Sunday school, you know, we we would read bits of the Bible and and uh you know you you get the gist that this would be an anti-slavery doctrine, you know.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_03: But uh clearly it was not obvious it was not obvious for people at the time.
1:09:30
SPEAKER_03: They they had heated disagreements about this, even where they had little to no kind of material investment or or material investment in the abolition of slavery.
1:09:39
SPEAKER_03: So something that uh it seems to me that the kind of uh apologetic usage of of Dominion would need would be a set of criteria kind of laid down in advance that would allow us to tell what's the difference between a flowering of Christian doctrine or a corruption of Christian doctrine.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_03: So, like, you know, one of the one of the less pleasant things that that that Tom Holland talks about in Dominion is is this idea that you know the kind of I don't mean universalism in the theological sense, but I can't think of a better word for it.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, the the universal applicability of Christian doctrine, the idea that anyone can become a Christian has been used for like unsavory things.
1:10:16
SPEAKER_03: You know, we think about like a lot of a lot of you know, um, persecution of Jewish people has been justified on that basis, historically, especially in the medieval period.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_03: And you know, Dominion in no way shies away from that.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_03: Right.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_03: That in hindsight seems like a corruption.
1:10:30
SPEAKER_03: But of course, it wasn't obviously a corruption to people at the time.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_03: So that's what I mean when I say it seems like we need a criteria that allows us to say, uh again, if we if we want to use Dominion for apologetic purposes, that the abolitionists were flowering of Christian doctrine and the pro-slavery were corruptions of Christian doctrine.
1:10:47
SPEAKER_03: And you know, when someone uh says Christianity is open to everyone, that's a flowering Christian doctrine.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_03: And when someone says you're gonna be Christian or I'm gonna stab you, that that's a corruption of Christian doctrine.
1:10:59
SPEAKER_03: And then, you know, because we can apply this to a whole series of other questions.
1:11:02
SPEAKER_03: I was I mean, one of the most obvious is is like theological Christian universalism, right?
1:11:07
SPEAKER_03: Like that's someone like um you know, a lot of a lot of the like some Maximus the Confessor, I know people debate whether he's universalist, but on a universalist interpretation, you know, he's taking certain ideas about God being all-loving that are that are kind of in embedded in scripture, and he's saying, well, what would be what would be the kind of intuitive and philosophical consequences of this?
1:11:26
SPEAKER_03: And he ends up with a with universalists, you know, the idea that eventually everyone, believer or non-believer, will find themselves reconciled with God.
1:11:33
SPEAKER_03: Because that's one of the only ways that that he, at least on a universalist reading of St.
1:11:37
SPEAKER_03: Maximus the Confessor, that's one of the only ways that he could have reconciled this idea, you know, that he just thinks it's a car.
1:11:44
SPEAKER_03: And you know, that that that's not a that's you know that's up in the you know, I know universalists, but I also know people who are very vehemently not universalists, and I, you know, the non-universal position is much more popular.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_03: What when we have we still like saying theological and moral development in out of scripture is an ongoing thing.
1:12:01
SPEAKER_03: So we I think we need something a bit less historical and a bit more philosophical and theological for how we're gonna tell which of these are developments and which of these are corruptions.
1:12:11
SPEAKER_02: And I th and I I think Tom has been feeling his way on this in in lots of different ways.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_02: It was only literally this year was the first time I heard him talk about what he thinks might be genuinely post-Christian developments.
1:12:24
SPEAKER_02: So it it took in, you know, so I guess Dominion came out in 2019.
1:12:27
SPEAKER_02: It took until 2025 for me to hear him say that not everything is a flower of Christianity.
1:12:33
SPEAKER_02: Um and so the you know, the the week in Parliament um in which both euthanasia was was passed and some forms of abortion up to term were passed in in a single week.
1:12:44
SPEAKER_02: And uh in in an interview, he sort of said, you know, I I think we're starting to see um certainly those things are forwarded in Christian clothing because it's about health care and it's about equality and it's about compassion.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_02: Um but once once you um once you go against the image of God and the sanctity of life in those sorts of senses, he says, I think we're we can safely say we're we're beyond um Christianity into something post-Christian at that point.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_02: So I'm I'm glad that he sort of draws the line somewhere because I I think one of the one of the um criticisms of the Dominion thesis is just everything's Christian.
1:13:20
SPEAKER_03: Which I'm not, you know, I'm I'm not opposed to the idea that everything is Christian in the mere sense that you know obviously we it has an intellectual genealogy.
1:13:27
SPEAKER_03: Yes, you know, as in as in genealogically I'm I'm I'm I'm quite happy for for us to say but but also not much theologically interesting hangs on that, right?
1:13:35
SPEAKER_03: Like it's just it's just it's just restating the idea that Christianity's been the most dominant intellectual tradition for the past 2,000 years.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:13:44
SPEAKER_03: Of course that's gonna have an impact, right?
1:13:46
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:13:47
SPEAKER_02: So I th I I think he's he's kind of drawing a line more more seriously.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_02: And and what's interesting is I I think that some of his thesis, I think um you could there's a telling of the Dominion story that's quite pro-Catholic in that, well, modern atheism is just the end Sven in Sweden is Sven because of the Protestants, don't you know?
1:14:11
SPEAKER_02: You know, like Luther and then the Lutherans and and then you know um waves of Reformation um do away with the accoutrements, that the you know, the the accretions of Christendom, and you're left without God with secular humanism.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_02: And that's so there's a sort of a pro-Catholic telling of the Dominion story.
1:14:28
SPEAKER_02: I think there's also an argument that there's quite a Protestant argument to be made along the lines that you're you're gesturing towards that something's got to stand above Christendom and judge it.
1:14:39
SPEAKER_02: And and say, you know, not not every development and twist and turn of the Western story is by by by nature of the case Christian.
1:14:48
SPEAKER_02: That would be like you know, drawing your target around the the arrow once it's fallen.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_02: Um and and I think the the Protestant within me um says, Yeah, yeah, I think at its best that's what Protestantism is trying to do by putting Scripture above the church as as something that judges it and can say yay and and nay to to various twists and turns in in Christian history, then the then the Catholic comes back and says, Well, well, like scripture um interpreted how.
1:15:18
SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, I mean I think that the um any kind of thesis of moral development, it seems like it has to do two things at the same time.
1:15:26
SPEAKER_03: If you're if you're a kind of if you're looking for moral development along moral realist lines, which I'm kind of assuming is is is going to be the Christian point of view, the on the one hand, you have to have the idea that these moral truths eternally were there.
1:15:40
SPEAKER_03: And on the other hand, you've got to say, well, it took us a long time to tease them out.
1:15:46
SPEAKER_03: You know, that's something that that that a moral anti-realist, or just like any, you know, even you know, more um modest, re uh more modest cognitivist positions like um uh like like uh moral relativist could could respond to this quite easily.
1:16:00
SPEAKER_03: You know, that kind of that change over time is something that on the face of it, the the moralist would have a bit of trouble with.
1:16:07
SPEAKER_03: This idea of the flowering off the fundamentals of a pre-existing moral truth is one way to get around that.
1:16:13
SPEAKER_03: At the same time, you know, there are two dangers here.
1:16:16
SPEAKER_03: One is that we just like retrofit our idea of what good moral development is to the moral change that has happened to happen.
1:16:24
SPEAKER_03: And the other is that you get rid of one of potentially the core philosophical strengths of moral realism, which is that the moral truths have always been there and will always be there.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_03: You know, you can't moral develop your way too much, or else, you know, you've you've got to have accelerator and breaks in your in your moral realist picture of moral development.
1:16:41
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
1:16:41
SPEAKER_03: Um and I think this, you know, this this flowering method is one of the reasons why this flowering metaphor I think is so popular and also is is quite a strong one, but it can't the metaphor can't be load-bearing.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_03: We have to we have to at some point get down to brass tacks and say, well, at what point, at what point do we say this is the process by which moral development occurs?
1:17:00
SPEAKER_03: Um, and here's how we can predict the next step.
1:17:03
SPEAKER_02: And here's how we would know it was a misstep.
1:17:05
SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah, yeah.
1:17:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:17:07
SPEAKER_02: Well, like I'm I'm not a moral realist in the abstract.
1:17:10
SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm a Christian in the concrete, in terms of and and I do see development within the Bible.
1:17:14
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we've already talked about just the infuriating, baffling, bemusing patience of God that Job certainly um was rubbing up against and and shaking his fist at, and we all understand that God takes his time uh in the Bible.
1:17:29
SPEAKER_02: And and that there does seem to be, if you take Matthew 19 as paradigmatic, which which I do, that um Jesus was asked a question about divorce, and he was like, Well, well, Moses gave you laws because your hearts were hard.
1:17:39
SPEAKER_02: This is a non-ideal situation in the Old Testament.
1:17:42
SPEAKER_02: God says he hates divorce, which actually my divorced friends really resonate with because they they hate the the situation that they've gotten themselves in for, and and and they they recognize that when when God says that he is naming a kind of catastrophe that he does not like, and yet he legislates it and and he regulates it in this non-ideal way, and then Jesus says, But I'm I'm restoring you back to this Genesis 1 and 2 reality and in the beginning and that kind of thing.
1:18:11
SPEAKER_02: And and I so I I think there's a shape within scripture.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_02: I think there's a patience to God, I think there's the prediction of Jesus that you know his way would work like yeast through dough, or like a mustard seed turns into the greatest tree, even though there are thorns and even though there are birds pecking at things and and all that kind of stuff.
1:18:30
SPEAKER_02: And I would also say I don't think um the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the only expression of what the Amago Day might look like.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_02: Uh i it it's it's I'm glad of it, and I can see and I can see how in the contingent reality of a post-war situation, this is the sort of document that you would author, and I can see why the person who drafted it said it was it uh we we've achieved the Christian morality without the poppycock.
1:19:00
SPEAKER_02: Um I can see why people would say that I wouldn't say that it is the Platonic ideal of what God has always intended in terms of these things.
1:19:10
SPEAKER_03: So do you expect there to be many further developments?
1:19:13
SPEAKER_03: As in, like, do you think that there are there are aspects of the eternal moral truth that we have just yet to discover?
1:19:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but and and I think we will discover those as they butt up against historically contingent realities.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_02: So I I think slavery kind of dissolved away within Christendom until the the founding of the new world, and then our technology outpaced our morality massively, and suddenly we enriched ourselves um off the back of indigenous peoples, and it was it was a horror show for centuries and centuries, and then some Christianity kind of kicked back in and and came to some kind of arrangement, and and I think that historical contingency and technological shocks and um prosperity shocks.
1:19:59
SPEAKER_02: So I can foresee though, like AI, what are we going to do with AI?
1:20:03
SPEAKER_02: Here's another massive tech shock.
1:20:06
SPEAKER_02: I think the very same doctrine of the image of God will prove itself to be indispensable as we try and figure out what is a human and how should we treat humans, um, how should we forward ourselves in the world with I thou relations rather than just, you know, it won't just be I-it relations with our with our machines, it'll be it-it relations as if machines get on and run the world.
1:20:29
SPEAKER_02: Again, I I think a return to the source in scripture is a return to a storied reality that that has progress kind of written into it.
1:20:40
SPEAKER_02: And I think we will get new flowerings and and and different applications of ancient truths that will be, in some senses, better than what we experience in the year 2025.
1:20:51
SPEAKER_02: And in other senses, I think we can take a heck of a lot of backward steps along the way, and we might even take some backward steps in the name of Jesus.
1:20:59
SPEAKER_02: That that has definitely happened in Christian history and it'll it'll be a mess.
1:21:03
SPEAKER_03: And how do we know whether we're taking backward steps in the name of Jesus?
1:21:06
SPEAKER_03: Because that seems to me to be like that that seems like a real worry, right?
1:21:10
SPEAKER_02: Like and and again, as you know, my my Protestant instinct is is um how am I able to hold this movement to account in Scripture?
1:21:20
SPEAKER_02: And in particular, the centerpiece of Scripture, which which again is it's it's not simply proof texts taken from the Bible, it's not even a philosophy synthesized from truths in the Bible, it's a narrative with Jesus at the center.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_02: And at the end of the day, all I've got is a is a man on a cross crying out in Godforsaken agony, with his arms outstretched to the whole world praying Father forgive.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_02: And I think if it looks like that, yay.
1:21:49
SPEAKER_02: If it doesn't look like that, boo.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_02: And maybe that's just my uh my anti-realist uh emotivist coming out there.
1:21:56
SPEAKER_03: Well, that's interesting.
1:21:56
SPEAKER_03: I know it's and I I I think it's it's very this kind of melding of of of you know, uh I think moralists sometimes uh forget that actually the emotive the emotive part is is is is important, even if you st even if you're still a cognitivist, you still think there are moral truths and moral falsities.
1:22:10
SPEAKER_03: Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to moral anti-realism.
1:22:13
SPEAKER_03: I mean here we are.
1:22:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, here we are in a church and we're just surrounded by images of Christ and you know, there's there's a there's a table up there in which you know bread is torn apart and wine is poured out, in which we're embodied, in which we sing songs, in which we gr you know give one another a sign of peace during the and and and I have great faith that the Jesus story will continue to be the great nourishing source of moral progress along the way, but I think there'll be a lot of twists and turns and wrong turns.
1:22:48
SPEAKER_02: Joe Folly, it's been fantastic having you.
1:22:51
SPEAKER_03: Oh, thank you so much for the chat.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_03: Where can people find you?
1:22:54
SPEAKER_03: Oh, um I've got a YouTube channel, it's called Unsolicited Advice, and I've got a Substack, which is just under my name, I think.
1:23:01
SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
1:23:02
SPEAKER_01: Joe Folly, thank you so much.
1:23:03
SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you for having me.
1:23:07
SPEAKER_01: Well, there we go, Glenn Scrivener and Joe Folly conversing about some of the biggest questions that human beings could possibly ask.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_01: That was a lot of fun to record.
1:23:17
SPEAKER_01: Thanks again to Joe for coming down to Eastbourne, we really appreciate it.
1:23:21
SPEAKER_01: Do go and check out his channel Unsolicited Advice if you haven't done so already.
1:23:26
SPEAKER_01: And uh, why not let us know what you thought of this conversation?
1:23:29
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1:23:33
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1:23:44
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1:23:46
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1:23:54
SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for listening.
1:23:55
SPEAKER_01: God bless, and goodbye.