Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Dr Nathan Hawkins: The Folly of Atheism, The Necessity of Faith || SLP598

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Dr Nathan Hawkins: The Folly of Atheism, The Necessity of Faith || SLP598 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_04: I think it might have been um George Orwell that says some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_04: You can say yes to the scientific method, but you recognize the sense scientific method is not better on it.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_04: Scientific method is only a good way of making sense of a very small part, in my opinion, of the human experience, which is which is the part that's associated with what we can see, touch, taste, and feel.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: But it doesn't get anything to do with our conscience, our value system, agency, free will, consciousness, I mean all these other things.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: If you have a world view or a method that will only allow you to believe certain things within this very restrictive form of evidence and method, you end up with something that I would reject because it's not intellectually satisfying.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Nathan Hawkins is a philosopher lecturing at Cambridge.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: He writes their tutors and also has a wonderful YouTube channel called Nathan Hawkins.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Do subscribe to that channel.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're not already, why don't you subscribe to Speak Life?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: We'd love to see you on future videos.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: In this conversation, Nathan and I are going to talk about absolutely everything: goodness, truth, beauty, love, morality, consciousness, freedom, the hiddenness of God, the problem of suffering.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: We really do talk about everything, but we begin when I ask him the question about faith and reason.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is faith a delusion?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Nathan Hawkins, you are a philosopher who is also a believer, as it happens.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but sometimes people pit faith and uh knowledge against one another.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so Richard Dawkins uh has famously said, faith is belief without evidence and reason.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Coincidentally, that's also the definition of delusion.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, or Sam Harris, one of the other uh horsemen of the New Atheism, said, Faith is generally nothing more than the permission religious people give one another to believe things strongly without evidence.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: How would you go about uh explaining what faith is?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, well, I think that both of those quotes show that both Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris don't know the ground that they're standing on.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_04: By that I mean that any kind of way of making sense of the world, any kind of way of saying what counts as evidence, how we can rationally go from one thing to another, requires something like faith.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_04: And so any kind of claim made by like the sort that Dawkins and Harris had done is assuming a certain way of evaluating evidence, a certain way of what counts as evidence for things.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_04: But the root assumptions that underlie the theory have no evidence for them either.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_04: So Dawkins and Harris have no sort of they have to take faith positions.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so things without evidence to get the whole thing going.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because for you, the root assumptions is much closer to what you're thinking of as faith.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I think those root assumptions, in a way, then I'd want to say to uh Dawkins and Harris that they're right, that faith is believing things without evidence because it's too fundamental to be evidenced.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_04: Because if if I if I say I believe this and I provide this evidence for you, to convince you of the thing I'm trying to convince you on the basis of that evidence, you have to already believe the evidence, the truths of the evidence.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_04: And you're saying, well, I believe what you're saying on the basis of the fact.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_04: I recognize these other things over here to be true already.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_04: But what that means is then you're basically saying the thing I've proved truth depends on the truth of this evidence that I've marshalled.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_04: So you end up with believing something on the basis of something else.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not a foundational bedrock deep belief.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: And belief in God is so fundamental, it's so central, it has to be the starting point from which you make sense of everything else.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_04: It's the basis upon which you try to make sense of the world.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: In that sense, it's more like um it's more like the scientific method itself than it is like any one piece of data that the scientific method might might unearth.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, correct.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_04: And I think then in that case, you can say yes to the scientific method, but you recognize the scientific method is not bedrock.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_04: Scientific method is only a good way of making sense of a very small part, in my opinion, of the human experience, which is which is the part that's associated with what we can see, touch, taste, and feel to a degree, although actually it's now so abstract and so governed by mathematics, it's very removed from the world that we see, touch, taste, and feel.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_04: But it doesn't get anything to do with all the other aspects of human experience, uh, our conscience, our value system, um, our capacity, uh agency, free will, consciousness, I mean, all these other things.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_04: If you have a world view or a method that will only allow you to believe certain things within this very restricted form of uh evidence and method, you end up with something that I would reject because it's not intellectually satisfying.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_04: And so so that root thing is is what's intellectually satisfying.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and I guess why a Dawkins and a Harris might be satisfied with that as a way of seeing the world, they've got it, they they are believers in this sense of they've got a root understanding of the world.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it has satisfied them, and I guess it's satisfied a lot of Westerners, um, perhaps because it's it's been very successful at a certain slice of reality.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's been very successful at putting iPhones in our pocket and putting men on the moon.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and therefore, like what what is the what is the route from the success of science to the the the totalizing of the scientific worldview?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: How how has that happened?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I don't know if Harris and Dawkins are actually satisfied with the stripped-down uh version of reality that you've mentioned.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, to be honest, I haven't really followed their stuff, but from the little bits I picked up, I think Harris still tries to get some kind of objective ethics in there.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_04: Um, he's a moral realist from what I understand.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: Now, presumably, if you could turn around, and what's the evidence for that?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: His evidence is not going to be anything to do with the scientific method.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_04: He's gonna have to rely on philosophy, he's gonna have to rely on some sorts of different principles, presumably.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he does use the language you've got you've got to bootstrap yourself up to a certain sort of moral intuition that that you know pa pain is worse than pleasure and and and that sort of thing.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting, even in his language about it, he does seem to um bring in these unjustified, unevided foundations for his worldview in order to get to the moral realism that he really wanted.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_04: Right, exactly.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_04: So what he needs to now then have is another faith move um to act as the basis upon which he now wants to uh supplement his purely scientistic worldview to be able to still make room for for ethics.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I think you will have to do something like that.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, for me, certainly when I come at things from a philosophical point of view, um I would say that my theism is is based mainly in that I don't think any satisfactory conception of the world, any satisfactory metaphysical view of the world, um, can be based on anything that doesn't involve something like uh subjective experience in an objective mode.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_04: And and for me then that is that is about as much as close as you can get to the idea of God talking purely metaphysically.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Subjective experience in an objective mode.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that the the yeah, the one objectivity is God's subjectivity.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, explain to me more of what do you mean there.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, okay, so this is quite um this is this is linked to to uh to my my my position as an idealist.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um in that I think I mean so my PhD thesis was on the nature of truth, and I think truth is actually the foundational uh aspect of thought, not being.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_04: So probably Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are gonna have something called a correspondence theory of truth.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_04: So they they believe that there are kind of facts out there, and that the a we we try to think if we think something that kind of matches onto those facts, then what we think is true.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_04: Um, if we think something that doesn't match onto the facts, then it's false.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_04: So then the idea is, well, if I have some claim in physics about Higgs bosons, then if that's true, then then it matches up to the real Higgs bosons out there in the world.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_04: Now, without having to get too technical, that's that I don't think that that philosophical view of truth really holds up.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um it hold doesn't hold up for a whole bunch of different reasons, but mainly because it doesn't seem as though we can have the idea of there being structure in the world, facts individual individualizable from each other in a way that doesn't rely again how we're thinking about them.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't rely on language or some kind of structured way of talking about them.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_04: So we can't really ever get to this sort of world that is structured outside of our thinking.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_04: Um now, for me, all the good philosophers realize that, and they're trying to come up with uh ways of nevertheless either justifying that kind of view or presenting something that doesn't lead into the something like Manuel can't put forward that that has a lot of mind involved with how things are structured.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, here's the other reason.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_04: The other reason is this.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_04: If I have a correspondence theory of truth, then I believe there's this world of facts out there, and if I think something that matches up, then it's true.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_04: Now the question is, but why what what why should I try to think true things?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh there's what difference does it make whether they happen to match up to some mind-independent world or not?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: Even though I can't even make coherent sense of the idea of a thought matching up to something totally unthought-like anyway.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you what I mean by that is if you have a pure correspondence theory of truth, you lose the normative aspect of truth, which is why should I believe true things and reject false things?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_04: Now, Dawkins and Harris in those quotes are making normative claims about faith.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_04: In other words, you shouldn't believe things on faith because you should believe according to the evidence.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_04: So there is a normative, in other words, there's an ought in our thinking.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_04: You ought to believe true things.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_04: So where does that ought come from?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it comes from understanding truth, not merely as a relation between a thought and the will, but as in something you should aim at.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_04: It's a goal to aim at.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_04: When you have it as a goal to aim at, it's self-standing, it's primitive.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_04: You don't need to then tell this extra story about matching up into the world.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_04: So for me, all a fact is, is a true thought.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_04: A thought that's true is what a fact is.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so when you do that, then you notice that reality is more about values, where the truth, which is what science aims at, which by the way, as we're on the subject, helps make sense of another huge puzzle, which is that if you think that truth is about your thought matching up to things in the world and how they're arranged, mathematical truths and logical truths become this complete mystery.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_04: Like, why is two plus two four?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well, is there some world out there where there's this number two floating around related as the other number two producing four?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_04: Do we do we translate truth in mathematics the same way and believe in this Plato space of abstract objects?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you don't need to, on my account.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_04: You just have truth as the primitive.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_04: Truth, truth in the world of our senses is to be justified and verified through senses.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_04: Truth in the world of mathematics, it just has a different basis of justification.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's justification is through proofing systems and reason rather than purely our our eyes and our sense data.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_04: But both of them are the truth, is the same.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: And truth is primitive, but it's also truth um that is sort of equiprimordially united to goodness as well, because you you keep on talking about the the the the oughtness, the directedness of of our thoughts as well.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um so when you start talking about some kind of primitive truth and goodness type thing, um, we're we're in God territory here.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Is is is that where you go?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_04: So you do you do end up there, but there's a couple of steps along the way.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_04: So the first step along the way, I would say, is this that we want to distinguish, I think, truth from goodness insofar as truth is the goal of thought and thinking.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_04: Goodness is the goal of action and doing.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_04: So um we have these different spheres of human experience.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_04: We have the the aesthetic sphere to do with feeling, and I include within that not only what we see, touch, taste, and feel, but also things like our emotional reaction to things, fear and pleasure and pain and so on.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and that you might think the the the the ideal feeling is is beauty, the ideal thought is truth, and the ideal act is goodness.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_04: Um and if we then take our thought life to be aimed or governed by truth and the rules concerning truth, which is where you get rationality and evidence and so on from, then what you're aiming at effectively is the ultimate thought.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_04: Um and what you're aiming at in your action is the ultimate act and in your feeling would be to align yourself with objective uh uh beauty.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_04: And so then I think if you recognize that these values are kind of idealizations or endpoints or the goal towards which we are drawn, so the ought is different in each of the domains.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_04: We can't necessarily always say ought is always about the good.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um for me, ought is about the value in that uh domain of human experience.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_04: So the the it is truth that is the ought of thinking, goodness the ought of acting, um, and beauty is the ought of of feeling.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: But every everything is ineradicably value laden.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um which again uh utterly undercuts the idea of a world of fact out there that sort of exists, uh awaiting for value to make make sense of it.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_04: Um Yeah, so the world of fact, the closest you get to the world of fact in my current thinking is is effectively the beliefs that God has.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um so so you're aiming to believe what God believes.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um that would be um that would be the closest.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_04: Now I I probably lean towards some of the things that um FH Bradley thinks, which is where truth actually then has to be a matter of degree.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_04: Um because I mean you put it in religious language, God's thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts, we're never going to really really capture them properly.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_04: And uh so so and actually at that point of God, he believes, and and I think he's right, that what you said before, which is then truth, beauty, and goodness actually all have to come together.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_04: You cannot think the perfectly true thought without also uh having reached there in terms of goodness.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_04: So F.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_04: H.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_04: Bradley talks about this as for your thinking to be fully true, it would have to become so detailed, so comprehensive, and so coherent that it would be indistinguishable from the world we feel and indistinguishable from the ultimate act as well.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_04: You so all three would become one.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it's very Trinitarian, I think, yeah, yeah, where he ends up, which which equals the absolute.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_04: And so he says thought is aiming in in his poetic language, thought is aiming at its own suicide.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_04: In thought, we're aiming to ascend so far in our comprehensive understanding, our complex and complete understanding, if we were to ever reach it, thought would no longer be thought.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_04: It would become undone in its union with the world of the will or acting and the world of of sensual experience.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: But but yeah, perhaps there's a good news story of uh you you lose your you lose your truth in order to find it again.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: You lose your lose your life in order to find it again.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: You just try and get close.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and interestingly, some of what Jordan Peterson has been trying to do, and you know, there was there was that um very frustrating conversation.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think everybody was frustrated by um Peterson and and Dawkins coming together, and Alex O'Connor did his best to sort of mediate um this kind of clash.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: But but I think Peterson at his best is pointing the scientist to the fact that um you must have a value structure, you must see the world through a value structure.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Richard Dawkins, uh you're not actually dealing with the world of of pure facts.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have a hierarchy of value and you have to prioritize things, and there's too much data out there, and so you need to um see the world through through through the lenses of value, and the value value and fact are kind of integrated at the at the fundamental level.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then Dawkins uh and then Peterson is also saying to Dawkins, um the goal to land a rocket ship on the moon um it is also woven into the scientific enterprise.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's something goal-oriented uh about this, and and it's not it's not just sort of facts all the way down.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do you think Peterson um has been helpful at this moment in terms of in terms of pointing out some of where the new atheism has gone wrong?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I don't really follow Peterson.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_04: Um but from but just purely based on what you said, I think I think if I were Dawkins, I'd just push back and say, well, you're mixing up um here between how I think the world is constituted, which is facts, and then the bits of it that we're interested in or not.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_04: So here's an example.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_04: So you might think there's a fact of the matter about uh the number of blades of grass on Bertrand Russell's lawn in 1900, 2nd of January 1903.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_04: But you might think, who cares?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: No one's ever going to know that.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_04: There's no basis upon which we could ever have evidence for it.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_04: These are things called buried facts.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_04: Now, if you are a pragmatist about truth, which from conversations with others, maybe Peterson is, you sort of think about truth in terms of usefulness, then you'll say that there just is no truth about the number of blades of grass because it's utterly useless.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but I think someone like Dawkins, who's gonna have what we might call a realist understanding of facts, is gonna say, no, there is a fact, it's just for some reason inaccessible to us.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_04: And so he could still say there are a whole bunch of facts out there that are nothing to do with the goal orientation of science.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_04: Um, science tries to do things that have a purpose that are useful to, you know, curing cancer and so on, um, or whatever, or getting on the moon.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a fact of the matter about these other things out there.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, it was a very frustrating conversation.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: They often are, yeah, yeah.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: So tell me, um, you've mentioned quite a few things that we uh we lose if we have the the purely scientistic kind of view of the world.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of them was consciousness.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as an idealist, you'll you'll have a a very um robust um kind of r response to the, I guess, the Daniel Dennett of the world, who would say that uh consciousness is a a kind of a a trick that our our biology sort of plays on us.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it does it does seem to be a very non-intuitive position um to um to to speak of uh consciousness being an an illusion.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um how would you how would you talk to a Daniel Dennett uh about consciousness and and why you believe it to be not only true but but sort of primitive?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_04: Well I think that when you encounter somebody like Dennett who is who is um on an intellectual level far above, in my opinion, the other people you've mentioned is that he's aware of where of the consequences of his underlying assumptions.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_04: So I like Dennett, right?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_04: I like him because he shows you what the price of beginning where he begins.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um I'm not gonna say philosophy of mind is is a major speciality of mine, it's not, but I have read quite a bit, and and for me, every time I read Dennett, I'm thinking, yes, of course you have to deny consciousness if you start where you're starting from.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_04: And then have you heard of the phrase of one man's modus ponens is another modus tones?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Modus tones, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Explain for it, yeah.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_04: So the idea would be this Dennett says, given the the materialist or physicalist starting point, then consciousness is an illusion.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_04: And all I would say is consciousness is clearly not an illusion, therefore, yeah, yeah, we don't we don't have this physicalist stuff.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_04: That that disproves the physicalist assumptions.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I think so I find someone like Dennis a lot more um a lot more easy to converse with than somebody who doesn't recognize that the cost of buying into that world view is that you you have no place for consciousness.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_04: You might have a compatibilist free will that he defends, but but you don't get the other kind of free will that people really want either.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_04: And so someone like Dennett is great for opening up the Where it is.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_04: And from my understanding, from talking to people and academics working in this stuff, uh, he's done he's he's helped move the conversation away from that in recognizing that we actually do need to have a more generous conception of what there is and in how to account for science because we can't just lose consciousness.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_04: So this is where panpsychism and some of these other views starting to now gain dominance and standing.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: So is that where you take a conversation just more basically saying, come on, you you're the very starting point of your um of your denial of consciousness is a conscious thought.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um is it is it so sort of go to the go to the foundation, point, point to where Daniel Dennett is standing and and just sort of say, um, this is a performative contradiction.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_04: No, I don't think you can do that because he's going to interpret his performance again within his own framework.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_04: So every time you push that forward, he's going to say, but it's not really that's also the illusion.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_04: You're under the illusion that it that that that is what's going on.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I saw you did a video recently about uh Descartes.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um and so Descartes starts with the the thinking self.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I think you can if you if you're already starting from I am a subject and I am thinking, it's really hard to get to the outside world.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: Similarly, it's actually really hard to get to other thinking minds.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's hard for me to it's hard for him to get to God.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: He doesn't do that very successfully.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's hard to get to you, Glenn, being a thinking mind, you can fall into solipsism quite easily.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_04: Now, solipsism is a perfectly logically consistent, coherent view to take.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_04: So if you meet a solipsist, how do you convince them?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you can't, right?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_04: Because you're just a figment of their imagination.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_04: They can always interpret everything you're saying in terms of their own inner dialogue or whatever.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_04: So what you just have to at some point do David Lewis calls it the incredulous stare.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_04: You just really have to just sort of stare at them and think, and and there's nothing more, there's no argument.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_04: And that's that's all I could offer Daniels.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_04: I can offer them saying the incredulous dare.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_04: Really?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_04: Consciousness is an illusion, this entire thing.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_04: You know, see, science started off.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_04: And this is the interesting thing about science.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_04: Science started off as an attempt to explain the world that we experience.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_04: An attempt, it's supposed to be empirical, right?
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's supposed to explain the the things around us, the objects and the ways in which they interact, but it's become so abstracted, so theory-laden, so mathematized.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_04: And now people are talking about simulation theory, they're talking about all this sort of other stuff, and you can only interpret things according to the numbers.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_04: And what that to me shows is that, well, we've lost, we've lost, we've started to detach this whole thing from reality, the reality that confronts us.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what I hope philosophy can do.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_04: Philosophy can sort of bring us back to realizing okay, where you end up when you take this science has the answers to everything road is you end up denying everything that makes you human.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so no wonder now we're happy to think of Chat GPT as having rights, or like or like AI or consciousness being the same as human, because we've become so utterly divorced from from human experience and what makes uh what makes that special, but we're now, I think, um, open to believing a whole load of nonsense.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's I think it might have been um George Orwell that says you know, some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_04: And and I think I think I'd want to say that about Danit's claim of consciousness being an illusion.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's one kind of scary thing to think, oh, is Alexa alive?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's um orders of magnitude more scary to think, oh, are we all robots?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that's kind of almost the lie that we swallowed first in order to be able to um worry that that AI might be conscious, is that yeah, we're we're probably just computers.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so consciousness is one thing um that is just this ineradicable primitive um foundation to to our lives, very obviously.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: You've mentioned um morality as well.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um you also briefly mentioned um freedom and free will.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um how would you how would you begin to have a conversation with somebody who says um we don't have free will?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: So for instance, um Alex O'Connor um will will commonly say things like um you only ever do anything because you're forced to do it, um or because you you want to do it, but then you can't if you're forced to do it, you didn't choose that.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to do it, you actually can't change your wants.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: So in neither case are you free.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Ergo, uh, we do not have free will.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: I you've got a fantastic video about it on your on your channel, so yeah.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: Give us some of the some of the wisdom of that.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so that's an argument that I think he gets from Schopenhauer.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and it's an argument against free will from the internal perspective, from the subjective perspective, where we have wants, and these seem to be the motivations for action.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_04: Now, my video does attack this idea first, and I think most people sort of stopped watching my video after 15-20 minutes because they think that I don't touch stuff to do with neuroscience, stuff to do with causation, and so on.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_04: Now, the argument you just presented to me has nothing to do with causation.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's actually to do with how we might explain action.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_04: Now, a very primitive theory of so that's all I'm addressing.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_04: So anyone that thinks I'm ignoring science or causation, that's a different that's a different argument.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: We could I could ask that question next, but yeah, let's do what's deliberately.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, that's fine.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's fine.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_04: So I think that um a very simplistic notion of um explaining action can be in terms of beliefs and drives.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_04: Beliefs and desires usually think rather than wants.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_04: Why did you do it?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_04: We have to add belief in for a start.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um suppose I've got some water here, not much left.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um suppose I drink the water.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_04: You can't just say you can't explain that purely in terms of the fact that I wanted some water, I was thirsty.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_04: Because if I believed that this had been poisoned, I wouldn't drink it.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_04: So I have to also believe that this is water, I have to believe that it will quench my thirst.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_04: That combines my desire to quench my thirst, and then explain drinking it, right?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not all explained by wants, it's explained by beliefs, and now you've got to ask where do those beliefs come from?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_04: And that straight away takes you to the rational realm.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: So that's one thing.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_04: Secondly, you can have a want for something, and that won't give you what's called a contrastive explanation.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_04: So I might want to make lots of money, um, which I don't, otherwise I wouldn't be a philosopher.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_04: All right, I might want to understand the universe, right?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_04: I might want to understand the universe.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_04: That might explain, you can say that explains why you're a philosopher, but it doesn't explain why I'm a philosopher rather than, say, a theologian or rather than a theoretical physicist.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_04: That requires other things to do with what I think is the best way to go, or maybe I was unsure about which to do and I went through a deliberative process.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_04: So you have to explain a lot more about what's going on in the process of decision making and argue that they're all either forced or determined.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_04: That's a much harder thing to do than this very quick, sloppy, in my opinion, argument presented there, um, Chopinov via O'Connor.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_04: But then you have the all the other stuff, and there's a huge literature of this in academia about the notion of weakness of will and strength of will, that we can want something and believe something will get it and yet not do it.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_04: Or we can be tempted in the old religious language.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_04: We could be tempted, we could recognize the right thing to do and that we want to do it, and yet we don't.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_04: And that's called weakness of will.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_04: And it's quite hard to make sense of that within a framework of explanation that only has a very simple idea of where you either wanted to or you were forced to.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: That's it.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um, now, where the explanation goes from here can get quite technical.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_04: There are ways to do it.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_04: Um, if they watch my video, I do point to some papers in it.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_04: I guess at this stage, with the length of time we have, Glenn, all I'm gonna say is that this stuff has been talked about a lot.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_04: And that very simplistic open and shut case uh as is presented on YouTube is is is barely scratching the surface of what you would need to do to say, therefore no free will.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_04: You know, this thing that we all assume we have and live with every day, clearly bunker because of this tiny argument.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_04: It's just not gonna work.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: So point point us to that though.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's let's let's do a kind of a really, really, we don't have free will.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's let's imagine the thought experiments in which it is it is true that we do not have free will.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: What what would we lose?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think first of all, something that people don't realize is that if we didn't have free will, right?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_04: If um and and this is something Alex says in other places too.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_04: He sort of says that, and I think he's Ham Harris says it as well.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: Well, if I introspect about my thought life and my actions, um, they all just seem like things happening to me.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_04: These thoughts just pop into my head, they go from here to here to here.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um I'm not involved with any of that process.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_04: I'm a purely passive observer when I introspect.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think I mean on the one hand, that just seems to be false based on my own introspection, but equally it's it provides what philosophers call a distinction without a difference.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_04: So we can distinguish between some aspects of our inner life and our actions, and O'Connor admits it too.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_04: We experience sometimes we do things that feel forced, right?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_04: The doctor hits my knee with a hammer and my leg just goes, right?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_04: Other times it doesn't feel forced.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_04: I just move my leg like that and I feel like I'm involved with it.
• 31:49
  unknown: Yeah.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_04: Now, if you say that both of them are on the par, everything is just stuff happening to you, or thoughts popping into your head, where does this conceptual difference come from?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_04: We distinguish between things being forced or our involvement in.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: We distinguish things, thoughts popping into my head.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_04: I have thoughts popping into my head for sure.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_04: If I think of my friend from school, I remember that conversation we had automatically.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_04: Or then I straight away think of that time he threw his bike and it broke apart and everything.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_04: I don't purposefully go through a rational process of then thinking about that or following a train of thought that I'm involved in.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_04: These things just happen.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_04: But other times I am involved in the process.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_04: If I'm doing a maths problem or I'm playing a game of chess, I feel like I'm controlling the where my thoughts go and where my attention is and where my focus is.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_04: So we experience the difference.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_04: So if you say there is no difference, why do we have the idea of the difference?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_04: What is it that makes the difference between these two?
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_04: And you get the same thing when you talk about rationality.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_04: People will come to all sorts of conclusions on the basis of flimsy evidence or irrationality.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but then other times people are carefully thinking things through.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_04: And we want to say there's a difference between that.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_04: One is how we ought to think, the other is not.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_04: And again, um, to to say that there needs to be something to do with our action involved with it to give that value difference.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: So rationality starts to go out the window.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if if all my thoughts are basically like the the the reflex of my of my knee going up.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there's no sense of deliberation, but just a uh one one thought tumbling into another, tumbling into another, tumbling into another.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: We've we've kind of lost rationality at that point.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: We've kind of lost the philosophy that the philosopher um who denies free will is relying on.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I guess we we we lose morality as as well.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh certainly the the kind of morality that we have tended to take for granted um for centuries at least.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, absolutely.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_04: I I think that um I mean they're all philosophers are always extremely good at um coming up with ways to reintroduce things that seem undercut by their views in in modified form.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_04: So there are going to be ways you can make sense of morality without having any kind of agency involved.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_04: But it's certainly not an obvious one, and I think that you just don't need to do it.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_04: I think that agency stands in its own two feet.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_04: Why?
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_04: Because, as I said to you, my way of doing philosophy is uh a view of the world that has no place of free will is dissatisfying.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_04: Free will is a datum of human experience that must be explained.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_04: If any metaphysical theory cannot have room for agency, so much the worse for the theory.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna do the same thing I did with Dennett and do the modus tolerance thing back.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, this is the view, the world, therefore, no free will.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna say, free will, therefore, that's not the way the world is.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_04: There must be more going on than you're saying.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_04: And then you get morality, I think, um, where, as I'd mentioned, is where where the your agency is aligned with the ideal agency.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_04: And that's a very religious notion.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_04: Is your will aligned with God's will?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_04: Similar things like that.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_04: I'm I'm not posit presenting different kinds of stuff.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_04: I'm saying there's thought and then there's the ultimate objective thought, God's there's action, and then there's the ultimate or will, there's the ultimate will, and so on.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so I think everything becomes really easy to explain, or at least easier.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_04: When you do this.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: When when you start with what what was your term about the subjective objective thing?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you when you end up recognizing that if you want to have uh value or directedness in in human in in the human experience, you want to distinguishing right and wrong thought, right and wrong action, right and wrong feeling.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_04: Then um the the the the most obvious, and that's why I think religion seems so obvious so long, is to assume that you're aiming at something of the same sort.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and so he sets the standard for thought.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_04: He sets the standard for will.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so on.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: And everyone needs to have a standard, but and and so we're just saying, yeah, the the stopping point for all of that of goodness, truth, and beauty is God.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um does the atheist then say, well, where where did that come from?
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_04: Or like so well it's not just it's not just the stopping point, it's the it's the kind of grounds from which everything follows.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's the center around which everything else orbits.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's it's the goal, it's the end point, it's the uh it's the the the the telos.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_04: I mean the alpha of the main.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: How then, I mean this this is quite a shift of gears, but but how then um I I think Alex O'Connor is probably uh quite well known for for denials of free will.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: He's also quite well known for talking about the hiddenness of God, um, which which I th I think is kind of um it's kind of the apologetic question of our of our age in lots of different ways.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um perhaps it's a subset of of the suffering question, which has always been um the the issue that I guess a believer has to has to wrestle with.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um but how is it that especially you're coming from an idealist point of view, like especially um we live and move and have our being in this inescapable reality that is goodness, truth, and beauty.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how is it that God feels so distant from us?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I'm not an apologist for a whole bunch of different reasons, uh, and these are some of them.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_04: I think that I have so I haven't thought about this specific issue.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_04: I have Max Baker Heitch is someone that you probably know, and I he's written a whole book on divine hiddenness.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_04: So without having read it, I could probably safely recommend that.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_04: But to me, I don't I don't think about God as hidden.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_04: In some ways, I think that any demonstration where we could point and go, oh look, there he is over there.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_04: It's gonna be some kind of idol, right?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_04: It's gonna be some kind of specific manifestation of something that is prone to take our focus away from the ways in which God is also imminent in all things.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so I I haven't be I suppose I haven't really looked at that problem because I've never felt the force of it.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_04: Ironically, I've never felt the force of the of the problem of evil either.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me more, tell me more.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think it's because I just I just think the entire way it's set up is bizarre.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um it's not like it's not like a Christian has their way of interpreting the world, fully fleshed out Christian view, and then someone says, hang on a minute, there's suffering.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_04: And the Christian goes, oh my goodness, there's suffering?
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_04: I would never have thought there'd be any suffering based on my worldview.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_04: Well, no, a suffering is is part of the entire way in which you interpret the world.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_04: We have a God who suffers.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_04: And I think I think that then changes things.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you have a God who suffers with us and in us in some sense, in us.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_04: So it's very different to sort of some distant, transcendent God completely immune to all suffering punishing people, right?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_04: So, I mean, I know there's a lot more to be said than that, and I also am aware that it is the biggest stumbling block to to so many people, even even very, very thoughtful people and idealists like David Bentley Hart, um, just sort of shrug their shoulders and say, I have no answer to this.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um now you can ask, I think, a potentially better question, which is that well, why is there why did Christ need suffering?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_04: Why is there suffering at all?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and again, I think that where I would probably end up having to go, although I haven't thought about this so much, would be something to do with where Leibniz goes in terms of every kind of evil is in some sense necessary to a greater good.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_04: Now, what that greater good is probably involves something to do with free will and agency in the sort of free will defense, and something to do with uh coming to know uh as well, so that that when all is said and done, we will recognize it.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_04: But of course, it's easy, and I can actually get away with that in my metaphysics because I can say that that ultimate thought at the point in which it will make sense is the suicide of thought.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_04: You've then been able to grasp the whole.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_04: And this is actually what Bradley does.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, Bradley points towards ways in which suffering can actually enhance pleasure.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um, he talks about you know, kind of the bit of pain you get in your muscles off during workout and this sort of stuff.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_04: Very trite example, but he's saying that obviously these are not incompatible.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_04: There are ways in which suffering can be redeemed, kind of taken up into something that transforms its nature.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_04: And so he just doesn't see any kind of logical philosophical problem with their being suffering in a an ultimately necessarily good world.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_04: Now, that what I've just given you now is the totally inappropriate and wrong response to give to somebody who's actually suffering, right?
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_04: So this is purely a philosophical move, and as I said, one I have fully fleshed out, but something along those lines.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: But both your answer to the the hiddenness um question and and to the this suffering question, I guess, begins with the question, which God are we talking about here?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um if on the hiddenness question we're thinking about God as though he's the abominable snowman or a Yeti or a flying teapot or orbiting Saturn or something, a an object within this world who could so easily be an idol.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: We need to think about which God we're talking about in the same way as we talk about suffering.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: We need to think about which which God are we talking about, and I guess uh within Christianity we're talking about uh yeah, the suffering and rising Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, um and and therefore the the very shape in which we we we look at the world um is is is shaped by this very particular but transcendent and universal God, um, who is the starting point, who is more like the the more like the scientific um method than he is like a the a a datum in the world.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'd love to ask you this this question about why it is that so much apologetics can get stuck here, because I I think both the person asking the question and the Christian apologist answering the question Um can mistreat who God is.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, okay, yeah, huge.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_04: So I think that part of the issue is that if you think that theism, atheism is about how you'd answer the question of does God exist, you're on the wrong foot, right?
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_04: Because as soon as you say does God exist, you're in the territory of is there some entity in the world that we could say exists?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_04: And then what happens is uh I don't know if you've read Graham Oppey's book.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_04: I haven't read Graham Oppey's book, Defend Defending Atheism, Arguing for Atheism.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_04: But he gave a talk at a group I was a part of at Cambridge.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and he sets out his stool and he says, Well, here's how you decide the question.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_04: You come up with your theory of the world that includes God, you come up with your theory of the world that doesn't include God, and then you just compare theories, do this theory choice thing.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_04: So he's acting like a perfectly normal scientist.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_04: And he says, How do you judge these two theories of the world?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you judge them based on the sort of things I said.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_04: How powerful.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_04: Is your theory?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_04: How simple is it?
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_04: Does it have more entities than you need?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_04: And when he compares the two theories, he says the atheistic theory can do everything you need it to do.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't need God.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_04: Therefore, we don't need God.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_04: Now, sometimes the apologist buys into that framework as to how we should.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we do need God because we need a first cause.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_04: Or we do need God because of fine-tuning.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_04: Or we do need to God is not a vestigial organ.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_04: He's not like the appendix.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: The appendix does some really important stuff over here.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_04: It's not you, it's not that you need God to make your theory work.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and for a long time, I think it's been realized that since people started to take a good look at the ontological argument, which is, for the sake of your listeners, a way of trying to prove God's existence from the concept of God.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_04: The correct answer to say is that existence is not a predicate.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um so because you can't interpret things that way.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_04: You have to just uh sort of uh you have your thoughts.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_04: Existence actually is derivative of truth, in my opinion.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_04: The question is about truth, you read your existence off from that.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um so how then should we be arguing?
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_04: I think the way we should be arguing, and this puts the atheist on the same footing as the theist, is that let's you tell me how you understand the world, and let's and that there can be and you see some kind of agreement as to how this works.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_04: And as I said, for me it's about how intellectually satisfying is it?
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I have to say, Glenn, that is the reason we all believe what we believe, ultimately.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's ultimately is our way of interpreting the world one we can get along with, or does it eat does it get us, does it get us an outside?
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_04: I'm constantly wrestling with this stuff, right?
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_04: Other people are just happy to go along their merry way.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_04: Fine.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_04: There's nothing particularly higher about the intellectual life or the intellectual pursuit, I don't think.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_04: Philosophy is not some ultimate pursuit.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_04: If you're wired that way, like I am, you're gonna have to pursue it properly and intellectually, I think.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_04: But ultimately, yeah, Dennett at least says he's satisfied with thinking he's his consciousness is an illusion.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I don't know if I believe him or not, but let's say I do.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so when you then have a view of the world that is satisfying, and it can only be satisfying if it's coherent.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_04: Contradiction is not satisfying.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_04: It is comprehensive.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_04: Does it explain a lot?
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_04: Is it coherent?
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_04: So a lot of these things are part of what makes a good scientific theory, but there's more than that.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_04: It's ultimately a simple theory or elegance and so on, because they we find them satisfying.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_04: Aesthetic and pragmatic concerns, right?
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_04: So once you then have this intellectually satisfying theory of the world, I would say is is that conception of the world more like a person or more like a machine?
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_04: And if you think that bedrock or the deep if you think the deep nature of things is personal in nature, you're a theist.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_04: If you think the deep nature of things is mechanical in nature, or human personal, nothing greater than a human, then you are, I would say, atheist.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_04: And that seems quite if you look at the the real atheistic thinkers, they either sort of elevate the human, uh the sub the human subject as the ultimate constructor of reality, uh, that which forms and creates reality is the human subject, or you think of it as some brute fact machine that clunks and whirrs and tinkers on its merry way, yeah, and then try and ignore other questions about fine-tuning and so on.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_04: Or you say, no, we need to have something that's like a person, but not us, but above us, that commands our that that has intrinsically something in its nature that means we're we should be directed toward it.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_04: For me, theism is a posture that we take towards the world, it's a posture we take that is the foundation upon which we think, the foundation upon which we act, the foundation upon which we experience the world.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um and can we fill out that theism a little bit, for speaking as a Christian here?
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: But the just the the very idea that I as a human am uh corresponding to this God, and intended to correspond to this God, um uh seems to me to um uh to be a very particular form of theism in which humanity is is in God's image, as it were, and intended for that life.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh we've already mentioned uh concepts of the Trinity, which um certainly is very resonant with the goodness, truth, and beauty um triad that we've been that we've been discussing.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um is it fruitful to kind of to to fill in the picture of theism at this point?
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_04: So I think it is, yeah.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and I think where you're heading is the right way to go.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um and incidentally, and again, I will be fully open and honest, these are quite nascent ideas at the moment for me, but that is how I understand the fall uh primarily, is that we recognize that there is something in us that is made in the image of reality writ large.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_04: Reality is a whole in its deepest, most fundamental nature, but we also recognize our finitude, our failing, and our falling short of those ideals.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_04: That is the experience of the fall that we each and every one of us experience, our sin consciousness, um, and and our our separation from one another, our separation from the world in which we live.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_04: And if you look at, again, I'm throwing a lot of different threads of thought here, but if you look at uh the develop infant development psychologically, there are these stages in which we experience a full, a separation from our mother, a separation from the world around us that's not in control, the distinction between subject and object.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_04: There's a certain point in which the infant recognizes their selfhood, it's got the mirror phase.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, then there's a point a little bit later when they recognize themselves as an agent, but they don't have to be bossed around by their desires and feelings, that they can say no and gain a certain control and mastery.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_04: Each of these is a way in which we experience a separation from other things around us.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_04: And so we each kind of experience a fall.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_04: Now, if we interpret then the creative show in the county, I'm not saying it's the only way to interpret it.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I'll leave the his history and the historians and so on.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_04: But conceptually, I'm a philosopher, so I'm ensuring the concepts.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_04: It seems as though it's a very good fit for understanding the creation of consciousness, the creation of each one of our consciousness, the creation of each one of our experiences.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_04: So we start off experiencing the world as this whole, undifferentiated, the tovu vavuhu, the world without form and chaotic.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_04: And slowly we start to distinguish light from dark, we start to distinguish space here from over there, you know, the above and the beneath, and then the accessible and the inaccessible and so and the difference in objects and and eight and and animals and things of that sort.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_04: So uh yeah, I think that you want if you want to flesh out the philosophy, um once you have that overarching metaphysical view that I put forward where value is into the ground floor of our conception of reality, and you recognize that those values are aspects of our human experience, but unbounded, not finite, not limited, and that which commands our focus and our direction, we all feel a draw towards these things, um then I think it does quite naturally fit at least certain ways of interpreting Christian doctrine.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, uh how does that work in your own life?
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, we've we've had a largely philosophical conversation that's that's kind of uh moved into apologetics and theology.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I I guess these sorts of questions for you growing up were sort of, you know, don't think, just believe seems to be have been um a lot of the the messages that you were receiving kind of kind of growing up.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: But you now seem to be in a in a very mature place with your philosophy and theology and faith kind of all kind of cohering.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: So how how do you now think about philosophy and its usefulness for the Christian?
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I've for me, I I I won't necessarily say philosophy is for everyone.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_04: Um I think um, as I've said to you personally, I think I had a certain grace for it that I went through a specific experience that I felt um God had me more than I had God, and so my philosophical journey was more a way of trying to understand what I knew I already believed, but didn't understand and couldn't make sense of yet.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_04: Now, I'd been told a certain way of making sense of it.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_04: I'd been told you've had this experience, that's because Jesus died for you to pay for your sins.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_04: And if you believe in him and confess in your mouth, you'll go to heaven.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_04: Now, here you go.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_04: Here's a little pamphlet that explains it.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_04: Go onto the streets and tap people on the shoulder and try and convince them.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_04: Now, the problem was is I wasn't convinced.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_04: That that didn't make sense of everything for me.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's very hard to then talk to people about something that you don't really understand yourself at all.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_04: So I have found that the philosophical journey I've been on has given me a couple of things.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_04: First of all, it's helped me understand more how I how I interpret God and how he interacts with my life.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_04: Secondly, it's given me a different linguistic tool set.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I don't we've touched on some religious themes, mentioned about the fallen things, but it's not like I've talked to you about sin, I've not talked to you about sacrifice and atonement.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_04: I'm trying to present a theistic worldview without uh theistic language, without requiring a certain biblical understanding.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_04: Now, I actually think that is what we as Christians should be doing.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, Paul, you look at Paul, he was a Pharisee, he had a Jewish way of understanding the world, he has a conversion experience, uh, recognizes Jesus as the risen Lord, he is Messiah, he has to now reconfigure his entire way of thinking about the world, given who he now recognizes as Messiah.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_04: And he goes to Antioch, I think, and sort of hides away for a few years and converses with the disciples before his gospel sort of comes out, starting with Galatians.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_04: Now, what is Paul doing?
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_04: Paul has got a particular worldview and he's now trying to make sense of how does Jesus fit, how does that get transformed given this new piece of information?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_04: Now, he's talking to obviously Gentiles, he has to connect that with the Gentile way of seeing in the world, other parts of our Bible are connecting with the Jewish way of seeing the world and trying to bring them onto that next stage of understanding.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_04: We are not dealing with the world in either of those senses, really, that think like first-century people, either Gentile or Jewish.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_04: We're talking to scientifically educated uh people, um, or at least people who've imbibed that kind of culture.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_04: So, what we need to do is to say understand how people think, and that's whether it's the scientistic types or Gen Z progressivists who think everything's constructed.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_04: We need to understand how they see the world and say, what difference does Jesus make?
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_04: How should you, how should your mind be transformed given this new truth?
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_04: So we're trying to get that faith position.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_04: And I honestly think that my now, looking back on my early Christianity, I don't know if I thought like a Christian.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_04: I think I had a pretty standard view of the world with these bits tacked on.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_04: And this is the stuff that Dawkins thinks, right?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_04: Dawkins seems to think that he and I believe in the same things.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_04: We believe in tables and chairs and atoms and blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_04: But I just have a whole load of more things on my list, angels and demons and heaven and blah, blah, blah.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_04: And he goes, but that's also nonsense.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_04: No, Richard Dawkins and I don't have a common opinion about anything, right?
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_04: He sees table as wood and four stick.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_04: So I see it as something with a use, something that plays a part in life, and so on.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_04: You know, so the entire way in which he makes sense of everything is different.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but you have to figure out how to talk to people for these things to slowly make sense.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it can be a slow process.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and you can be misunderstood and then uh thank the Lord for grace.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: But in that sense, philosophy has helped you Christianize you know, love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's like philosophy has helped you Christianize rather than the fear was that philosophy would take you away from Christianity.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's it was it's helped you be more thoroughgoing.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_04: Well, because not only has it helped it's helped Christianize every single aspect of life.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_04: So previously, there was certainly this idea that you know, there's some people who just get regular jobs and they'll work in an office or they'll be a fireman, and those should then put more money in the offering on the Sunday, or they should, they should volunteer for stuff and get involved with church and do some ministry.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_04: And then there are those that are called to full-time ministry who really, you know, and so on.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_04: Like that entire compartmentalized way of seeing things, I think that was may have been a product of the 90s, maybe it's still prevalent in some churches, um, or the and the early 2000s.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_04: But for me, that entire thing's gone.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you uh you see God everywhere.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_04: God is infused with everything, He's at work in the world, uh, He's at work in people who may have no confession of faith.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, all of that stuff.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_04: Now I look at the Bible and I think, how on earth did I think you can neatly divide people into the lost and the found and and the saved and the unsaved, when so many of the religious people in the Bible, clearly not with the program, and so many people who are rat bags are used by God.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, Nebuchadnezzar and all these other types.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I think I think that recognizing God in every act that's good directed, whether it's changing my daughter's nappy, uh you know, whether it's having this conversation with you, it's all done in service to God.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, there's no higher or lower in that.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_04: Thinking, there is something in and of itself about trying to understand truth.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_04: Science is a godly pursuit, right?
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, avoid the hubris, avoid the the all and end all side of it, but the pursuit of truth and understanding is a God-given pursuit, right?
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_04: Truth itself.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, there is there is purpose to that intellectual discovery.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_04: And um in the arts as well, in the aesthetic, we haven't talked about the aesthetic so much, but that's the other domain, you know.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um, there is nothing better about science as a way of approaching reality and thought than the arts and the aesthetic.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so what you have is you end up with this, I think, on the one hand, a humility, a recognition that every single person is engaged in a relationship with God because they're engaged with reality.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_04: They're human, they're living, they're engaging with the world around them.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_04: The world around them is infused utterly with God.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_04: The idea of there being people who have totally lost from God, disconnected from God, have no relationship with them at all, and we go in with this message, and that somehow restores their relationship.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_04: No, every everybody, you can't avoid God, right?
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_04: You're smacking into him in every single way, in every single way.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_04: David's saying, How can I I can't go to hell and avoid you God?
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that's and I cannot flee from your thoughts, which is an ideal yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_04: So you you you you can't escape it, but and that is wonderful.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and for me, has has added meaning galore to to life, and um, then you get all those wonderful things of joy and peace and things.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_04: Not always, but yeah, yeah.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: Some of that stuff.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if that has wet people's appetite, I hope it has, uh, for Nathan's channel.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: People should definitely go and uh subscribe immediately, forthwith, to Nathan Hawkins, and they will find all sorts of videos about all the stuff that we have been uh talking about and so much more.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there's also other ways that people can kind of engage with you.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how how how can people keep up with you, Nathan?
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_04: Well, if they go to my page, they'll see there's an email list there um that they should subscribe to because I'm planning on releasing courses that are gonna go into depth about why we have free will.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we didn't touch on it, but causation is often used as an idea to undermine um other views of the world that are theistic in my view.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm gonna go into causation, and it's all the latest stuff uh from contemporary philosophy, um, drawn a lot from the Cambridge curriculum and also my other reading.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_04: So to do that, I'm really trying to get this way of thinking uh out more broadly.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_04: Uh not always tying it to the uh you'll see actually behind me I've got Jesus uh rocking out uh on my list.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_04: I don't normally have Jesus back there uh because because because I'm not usually quite so full frontal with my Christianity.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_04: Um but but yes, there's gonna be lots of good stuff and more plans, so they should connect that.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_04: Well my email list on my channel.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: On your channel.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: So uh go right now.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh run, do not walk, and uh and subscribe to Nathan Hawkins and catch up with him there.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's been an absolute privilege.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Nathan Hawkins, thank you so much.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you very much.