Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Alex O'Connor on Triggernometry - Meaning, Religion and Truth || SLP508

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Alex O'Connor on Triggernometry - Meaning, Religion and Truth || SLP508 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:08
SPEAKER_01: He said at the front.
0:09
SPEAKER_02: We've replaced the Imago Day, being made in the image of God, being created with a telot and a natural purpose, which is communion with the Almighty to you're an animal.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: That's probably at the basis of people getting a little bit thirsty for something with a bit more narrative.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: It's put it brilliantly.
0:24
SPEAKER_02: I think so much of what we think is emotion.
0:26
SPEAKER_02: Moralizing is emotion.
0:28
SPEAKER_02: Ethics is expression of emotion.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: So no such thing as freedom, no such thing as truth, no such thing as goodness.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: No wonder we have a meaning crisis.
0:36
SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including the meaning crisis.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what the meaning crisis is?
0:43
SPEAKER_01: It's a phrase that was developed by John Vivake, a professor at University of Toronto.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: But even if you don't know the phrase, you are living through it nevertheless.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: It's the idea that we are now living without a grand narrative that orients us in the world.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: We no longer have the story of Christianity, let's say, in the West, that used to tell us what was up and what was down, what was meaningful, and what was meaningless.
1:07
SPEAKER_01: And in the absence of such a grand story, we have sought to discover for ourselves meaning, and that has not gone well for us.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: We'll get into that by discussing a little conversation that happened between Alex O'Connor, aka Cosmic Skeptic, and the trigonometry guys.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: That's Francis Foster and Constantine Kisson.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: And it's an interesting kind of intersection of different audiences.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: And if you have a look at the comments on this video, you'll see that the Alex O'Connor audience is different from the trigonometry kind of audience.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: The Alex O'Connor fans don't seem to quite get Constantine Kisson and his forthrightness and his punchiness.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: And you can see how Alex O'Connor has generated a certain audience of atheists and anti-theists, but also vegans and co-travelers in the whole animal rights struggle.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: And you can imagine that Constantine and Francis would consider many of the people who follow Alex to be woke or woke adjacent.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: And while trigonometry tries not to be anti-woke, you could be forgiven for thinking, uh, if you looked at the channel and you looked at the topics of conversation on that channel, that a lot of it is anti-woke.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: And so it's an interesting intersection of different interests as they come together in this conversation.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: But what's fascinating is where they intersect.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: Though they are coming from different places, they agree that there is a meaning crisis and that the meaning crisis has come about via the death of God, so to speak.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: The institutional retreat of Christianity in the public sphere has meant that there is a contested public space in which we no longer know what the narrative is, what the story is.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: And this has led to meaninglessness.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: And that's a huge problem which both Alex O'Connor, from his point of view and uh the boys from trigonometry from their point of view, are trying to wrestle with.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: And I'm a Christian, and I just have been very fascinated by this conversation.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: And at times I find myself really agreeing with Alex, at times I find myself really agreeing with Constantin and Francis, and at times I find myself really disagreeing with both of them.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: And I I just think that this will be an interesting journey as we see what we can agree with and where the Christian story actually provides the answers that we're all looking for.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: The conversation uh has been running for about half an hour when it finally gets around to religion, and this is the way that Constantine raises the subject.
3:34
SPEAKER_03: We started on religion, and actually I think we should probably move on to religion because you what you asked was a question about religion and veganism, but actually, what I think we're dancing around is something we wanted to talk about anyway, which is I think we both have had Richard Dawkins on the show.
3:49
SPEAKER_03: Yes, and one of the uh threads of conversation, particularly in this space that we all kind of semi-inhabit with from different sides with different feet, etc., is essentially that um while some people can be new atheists and have a great life, and Richard Dawkins is clearly someone you know who enjoys his life and it is not devoid of meaning and blah blah blah blah blah.
4:17
SPEAKER_03: Human beings are a religious animal, and in the absence of actual religion, we will begin to seek others, which is one of the reasons to put it crudely, our society is so fed up right now.
4:30
SPEAKER_03: The death of God is why we are where we are, and it's all your and Richard's fault.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's one way of putting it.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, but isn't it interesting we are a religious animal, and what are we gonna do with the tendency that we all have as Homo sapiens?
4:43
SPEAKER_01: It's not just the case that religion is a part-time hobby for a few specialists at the fringes of society.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: It's a human universal in all societies, which means it must be adaptive, which means if we are homo sapiens, then it's not just that we are the wise men, which interestingly enough was how the Enlightenment wanted to characterize the species of humanity.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: We are those who have wisdom, those who have intelligence.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: That's a very enlightenment and quite a post-Christian way of considering the human animal.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, perhaps it would be better to call us homo adorans.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: We are those who love rather than simply those who have wisdom.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: And I think Constantine's language of we are religious animals puts us onto that truth.
5:30
SPEAKER_01: It's not simply that we are brains on sticks, it's that we are made for something greater and to orient ourselves to something greater is at the heart of what it means to be human.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: So, Richard Dawkins, and so Alex O'Connor, why have you stolen that from us?
5:44
SPEAKER_01: Why have you taken away something that is absolutely crucial to humanity?
5:50
SPEAKER_01: And I love the way that Alex kind of begins by answering, and he kind of says, Well, maybe you're exactly right in framing the problem in the way that you framed it, Constantine.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, maybe it is.
6:00
SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, look, there there's some compelling evidence to show that uh religious communities like I saw a study recently that that religious communities coped better with the COVID pandemic, for example.
6:14
SPEAKER_02: And there's evidence to show that people feel more fulfilled.
6:18
SPEAKER_02: Um I think I think even like in their sex life, if they're religious, you know.
6:23
SPEAKER_02: There's so many reasons why why there might be utility in in being religious.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: Alex here references a couple of studies about the utility of religion, but he could multiply that by thousands, genuinely by thousands.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: Uh I I could link you to meta-analyses of 3,000 plus studies on the utility of religion in society, or 850 studies in the well-being and mental health benefits that are conferred by religion.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: And in the vast majority of these cases, the research is done on Christian populations.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: When they say religion, by and large, they do mean Christianity.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: I could point you to any number of studies and meta-analyses.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: I could point you to Tyler Vanderweal, uh, who is a professor at Harvard, who's just come out with uh an over 1,000-page book about the benefits of religion to public health.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: It's called the Handbook of Religion and Health.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: I could point you to Brad Wilcox, who's a professor of sociology at University of Virginia.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: I could point you to atheists and agnostics like David Sloan Wilson or Jonathan Haidt.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: Again and again and again, the research comes in, and the research shows that those who are religious, and usually in the West, we mean by that Christian, but those who are religious have far better outcomes when it comes to even things like length of life and happiness of marriage and and all kinds of mental health well-being.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: The data is in religion is good for you.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: So it seems like Constantine's hypothesis that we are religious animals is borne out by the data.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: And then Alex makes the point that, well, of course it would be borne out in the data, because if we've evolved to be religious animals, then religion must confer some kind of survival advantage on us.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell There might be utility in in being religious, and and I suppose my answer to that is to say, well, of course, because if I don't believe that this is true, I have to account for why it exists.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: It wouldn't make i if you've got this thing that isn't true and is unambiguously harmful for society, then why the hell would it evolve?
8:22
SPEAKER_02: Of course it must be doing something, right?
8:23
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: Did you notice that he said if something is true, why the hell would it evolve?
8:28
SPEAKER_01: And he's got this interesting kind of interplay between utility and truthfulness.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: And I wonder whether atheists are able at the end of the day to have a separate category for truth up here and utility down here.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: Um, whether at the end of the day you're able to say that something is true even if it is maladaptive to survival, if survival is the thing that is driving our species and all survival and life on the planet, then it seems like whatever truth is, it's this kind of fairy tale thing, if it is not geared towards survival.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: Um so Alex is setting up the issue really, really well and saying, of course we are religious animals, the data shows it, and the logic of evolution would lead you to expect that, of course, populations that are more religious survive better and outcompete other potential societies that might not have the that religious dimension to them.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: So he's setting up the problem that he has, which is a very open-handed and fair thing for Alex to do and to set up the problem for himself and to say, um, religion confers all these benefits, and it's hard to account for why this would be the case if it were not true.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: So he's he's making the case difficult for himself, and and here's how he goes on.
9:48
SPEAKER_02: And of course the corollary of that is that by murdering God, um yeah, we we sort of, you know, the the the streets are covered in blood, and um people are sort of trying to erect false idols out of the DNA, and they end up with, you know, as you would probably see it, wokeism, as some would see it, you know, Christian nationalism.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: Um sorry, not Christian nationalism, because that's a form of religion, but but nationalism, let's say secular nationalism.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: So maybe in the absence of God we'll go very left uh into a kind of totalitolerance and an authoritarian kind of wokeness that will clamp down on us, or maybe we'll swing hard right and we'll go to a kind of nationalism.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: Interesting, he sort of said Christian nationalism and then corrected himself and thought, no, if we're post-Christian, it won't be Christian nationalism, it'll just be nationalism, which reminds me of Ross Duthat's tweet from uh 2016, you know, the columnist from the New York Times.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: He says, if you do not like the religious right, you're gonna hate the post-religious right.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot of truth to that.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: If you do not like uh the religious right, you're gonna you're gonna hate post-religious right.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: If you hate Christian nationalism, you're gonna really fear post-Christian nationalism.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: And so Alex is kind of saying, with the death of God, maybe we're gonna like go hard left, left, my left, maybe we're gonna go hard right.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, where are we gonna go?
11:11
SPEAKER_01: And he doesn't really have an answer.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: Which I I think is it's so refreshing to hear him kind of say, I don't know what the answer to this is.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: What he thinks is not true, I take it, is God, right?
11:24
SPEAKER_01: Um I I think he takes his analysis as true leading up to this statement.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't think God is true, and so that leaves him with the question.
11:33
SPEAKER_02: I don't have much more to say on this apart from asking what do you want me to do here?
11:39
SPEAKER_02: And I I'm not exactly asking you, because I don't think either of you are religious, I'm not sure.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you're agnostic or Christians, I I don't know, but somebody says, Well, look, you know, if we remove religion from our society, things go downhill.
11:52
SPEAKER_02: Okay, what do you want me to do?
11:53
SPEAKER_02: I I don't think this is true.
11:54
SPEAKER_02: Do I do I just sort of lie to my children?
11:57
SPEAKER_01: This is fascinating because he's basically z saying back to Constantine and Francis, you don't know what to do, do you?
12:05
SPEAKER_01: And then Alex is like, No, I don't know what to do.
12:07
SPEAKER_01: What should we do in the absence of a religion which Alex does not think is true?
12:13
SPEAKER_01: Am I meant to pass on some an untruth to my children?
12:17
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is bringing into play all those questions about, well, what is this thing called truth if it is not aimed towards the survival of the species?
12:27
SPEAKER_01: Can we really have this luxury commodity called truth that is not actually geared towards the necessities of survival?
12:34
SPEAKER_01: Why on earth would we have evolved such a thing as truth, as this luxury commodity which does not itself contribute to the survival of the species?
12:45
SPEAKER_01: He set up the problem.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: He said, Look, the survival of the species would take us in this direction.
12:49
SPEAKER_01: We're religious animals seeking transcendence.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: So maybe that would tell you, Alex, that you should teach your kids about God.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: But he's like, I'm not gonna do that because there's this thing, there's this thing called truth.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: Now, in a second, we're gonna jump to the end of this interview and we're gonna see what Alex actually thinks about truth.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a great contradiction here in what Alex says.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: But in this portion of the conversation, he's saying there's this capital T truth, and I'm not gonna go against conscience, and I'm not gonna go against truth, I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna be a hypocrite, I'm not gonna pass on some kind of acknowledgement of God in the culture and to the next generation, because I don't think it's true, and truth with a capital T is my highest goal.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that fits with what he says later, but that's his position here.
13:40
SPEAKER_02: I just bring them up to believe something that I don't think is the case because I think it's gonna be beneficial for society, like maybe, but what does that look like?
13:48
SPEAKER_02: You know?
13:49
SPEAKER_02: And and and people say, well, why don't you just sort of act as if you're religious?
13:53
SPEAKER_02: You know?
13:54
SPEAKER_02: Um and Jordan Peterson says that people do this all the time.
13:57
SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's true.
13:58
SPEAKER_02: I think sure you can act like you're religious in the sense that you can go to church on Christmas.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: Um cool, you can sort of I don't know, t take part in your in your local religious community affairs and stuff.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: Now I don't think that Alex is getting Jordan Peterson right at this point.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: I don't think Jordan Peterson thinks that by and large we navigate the world via reason and evidence, and every now and again we might need to make a religious sacrifice over here.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: It seems to me that Peterson would say that value, a value structure is how we see the world, and you can't really navigate the world according to simple reason, simple evidence, simple logic, just the facts, ma'am.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: None of us navigate the world via reason and evidence.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: We are always seeing things through a value structure that cannot be in the moment proved.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: And what do you call that?
14:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, you might as well call that faith.
14:47
SPEAKER_01: Um I think that's the sort of thing that Jordan Peterson might say to Alex O'Connor, but let me step out of Jordan Peterson's shoes and just stand in my own shoes and say what I would say to Alex O'Connor.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: Every single moment of every day you're exercising faith.
15:00
SPEAKER_01: And not just, you know, I trust that the manufacturer of this seat followed health and safety rules and so it will not collapse beneath me, and I trust that the bus driver who drove me here, you know, had passed his test, and that's, you know.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: I I'm not talking about simply that.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about treating every single human being as though they are made in the image of God.
15:23
SPEAKER_01: Or you might want to secularize that and say that they have inviolable worth and dignity and and that they are equal to everyone else, no matter whether they're male or female, rich or poor, gay or straight, whatever class they are, whatever ethnicity they are.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: We're all equal, right?
15:37
SPEAKER_01: And and I go through the seven values of the air we breathe, in which I talk about the moral intuitions that we all take for granted.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: It's like the air we breathe.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: We believe in equality and compassion and consent and enlightenment, science, freedom, progress.
15:52
SPEAKER_01: We believe in all these things.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: And we cannot get through a day without exercising faith in probably all seven of them.
15:58
SPEAKER_01: But you cannot logically demonstrate any of these things.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: You genuinely can't.
16:04
SPEAKER_01: I can't show you equality under laboratory conditions.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: I can't tell you why compassion ought to be this superordinate value that that orders the ways that you treat all people.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: I I don't have the studies to show you that beyond some kind of reciprocal altruism, very kind of limited pro-social behavior.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: But but you and I and Alex, we we believe in a kind of a compassion that goes well beyond simple pro-social behavior and the struggle for survival.
16:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, you can't prove any of these things.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: And the idea that we are simply clever chimps who have inviolable human rights, that is just absolute cognitive dissonance at the heart of the West.
16:46
SPEAKER_01: And it's the heart, it's at the heart of every secular humanist, whoever wants to name the name secular humanism.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: I always want to say to such people like when you break apart those two words, you're confronted with two different kinds of realities.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: There's the secular, and for the purposes of this definition, the secular is just going to be the non-religious, and there's the humanism, and and humanism is all those seven values of compassion and equality and progress and freedom and all that, all that great stuff.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: But the the non-religious view of the world is that we are biological survival machines clinging to an insignificant rock, hurtling through a meaningless universe towards eternal extinction, but we ought to be kind to one another.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: But we ought to treat one another with inviolable worth and dignity.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: But no human should ever be the property of another human being.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: And the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: What do you call all those things?
17:38
SPEAKER_01: They are not the results of scientific experimentation or logical deduction.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: Okay, they are faith statements.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: You live by faith every moment.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: And so when Jordan Peterson says we are religious and we we live into these religious values, and when I say that the air we breathe has all these moral intuitions, I'm putting a question mark above the very heart of Alex's vision of the world, which is that we are by and large truthful people who navigate our lives according to the facts, and every now and again we're called on to make certain sacrifices, and maybe religion will help us for that.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: No, it's it's not like that at all.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: Woven into the warp and wolf of your everyday life are beliefs, and those beliefs are incredibly Christian-ish.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: And I guess you have to read the book, The Here We Breathe, um, to kind of get my my argument in full, but that that's kind of the argument.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: The argument is not that every now and again you might need to take a leap of faith, every now and again you might need to take a sacrifice or believe in some kind of higher power.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: Woven into your life already are beliefs that you cannot prove or demonstrate logically.
18:51
SPEAKER_01: Woven into your life are faith positions that are incredibly Christ-like because we are living in the world that Jesus built.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: His revolution has been, in the words of Tom Holland, the most disruptive, the most enduring, the most influential revolution in human history.
19:05
SPEAKER_01: We're living in that world, and we cannot help but breathe that kind of air.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: And so it is simply not the case that in order to be a religious person, you need to do this completely other alien thing called religion, called Christianity, called church.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, it is to own the Christian assumptions and intuitions that you already have and to nurture them in community.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: And and the way you nurture them in community is not by making so many grand sacrifices in the scheme of things.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: The way you nurture them in community is at a very granular level, as Constantine will actually remind Alex in just a second.
19:47
SPEAKER_02: But when it comes to actually having to make an essentially religious sacrifice, like a real sacrifice, if you have to sort of put your life on the line for essentially a religious principle.
19:57
SPEAKER_02: Let's say you were just sort of pretending to be a Christian, you're just acting like a Christian, and suddenly there's a there's a political invasion, a different religion sort of is taking over the country, and they come to you, they hold a gun to your head, and they say, say that Jesus is not God or I'll shoot you.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: Right.
20:10
SPEAKER_01: And so for Alex, it's like Christianity is this peripheral thing, and you're getting unhappily in your life, and it's only really about whether you make a declaration that Jesus is Lord or not, and then the rest of your life is is just lived in this neutral space, and then imagine that somebody else has a gun to your head saying, Okay, stop stop calling Jesus Lord.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: Say they say that Jesus isn't Lord, and that's the sort of the switch that flicks you between Christian and this other religion.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: Like religion for him in this scenario is totally divorced from everyday life, but it's not, absolutely not.
20:44
SPEAKER_01: Christianity is woven into the structure of Western society, but also I believe that this is just Jesus' world, and that on every country on planet Earth, there is the general revelation of a God who is revealed in Jesus, and that to live in this world in any way that's oriented to truth is to live in this world oriented towards Jesus in one way, shape, or form.
21:09
SPEAKER_01: And therefore, it's just not the case that we we live largely neutral lives, and every now and again you're forced to consider whether Jesus is Lord or not.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: It's it's woven in far more.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: And I think Constantine has this so so beautifully.
21:23
SPEAKER_02: In that moment, you're not going to pretend to be a Christian for the social utility, you're just gonna throw it out immediately.
21:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but that's not what people mean when they say act like you're a Christian.
21:31
SPEAKER_03: I don't think going to church is actually what they mean either.
21:33
SPEAKER_03: What they mean, so for example, we Going to church would help them.
21:37
SPEAKER_03: Very much.
21:38
SPEAKER_03: Every time we have a meal here at the studio, we say grace, right?
21:41
SPEAKER_03: No, I don't think anyone here is religious.
21:42
SPEAKER_03: Well, no one who eats here is religious.
21:45
SPEAKER_03: Um, the woman editing this is religious.
21:48
SPEAKER_03: I know her.
21:50
SPEAKER_03: And so she's left this bit in in in the video.
21:52
SPEAKER_03: So she's upset with all three of us.
21:55
SPEAKER_03: No.
21:55
SPEAKER_03: Um so what I think they mean is there are certain practices, uh Around religion that will make your life better.
22:03
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
22:03
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's definitely true.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: And they will they will nurture the beliefs that you exercise minute by minute, whether you're whether you ever set foot inside a church or not, you're exercising Christian-ish belief.
22:13
SPEAKER_01: But you need to nurture that faith because there's there's the whole natural side of you, right?
22:19
SPEAKER_01: There's there's the humanist side of you, there's also the secular side of you, the non-religious side of you, that just wants to treat not only yourself but everybody else as just clever chimpanzees who are competing with you in the struggle for survival, right?
22:30
SPEAKER_01: And so you need to nurture that, you need to spend time inhabiting that story, the story that that gives you the equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: You need to inhabit that world, surrender to that story, and do so intentionally and communally and sacramentally.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: And so actually going to church is right at the heart of living that good life.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: And interest interestingly, Constantine's like, well, I don't go to church, but we basically recreate church in our own little community, and we break bread together and pray.
23:04
SPEAKER_01: Like, what do you call that?
23:05
SPEAKER_01: Like, in the absence of church, you have to reinvent church, okay?
23:09
SPEAKER_01: Which again just goes to the point that we are ineradicably religious.
23:13
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
23:13
SPEAKER_03: The constant practicing of gratitude, the fact that you're not the center of the universe, the connection with the transcendent or the divine, the the recognition that other people are as equal and equally important in the world as you are.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: Which you can't prove.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: Like you can't prove that at all.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: And actually, to try to prove that would be unconscionably wicked.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: Like I I'm gonna design an experiment and we're gonna see what the value of all people are.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: Well, how are you gonna like what metrics are you are you gonna use?
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's your standard for for how valuable every human being?
23:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, like economically productive?
23:49
SPEAKER_01: Like, is it just they're taller, they're stronger, they're faster, smarter, better looking, or equally good looking?
23:57
SPEAKER_01: Like, like as soon as you compare any two people by any one metric, you're gonna discover their inequality, their differences.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: In what supernatural realm does equality exist that you're going to bequeath it to every single individual on planet Earth?
24:11
SPEAKER_01: It's an incredibly religious thing.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: Um and that's why you need to lean into the practices of having an open table where everybody shares, no matter who you are, right?
24:24
SPEAKER_01: That that we are all, whether male or female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, we are one in Christ Jesus, which is Galatians 3, verse 28.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: Like, and you need to practice that and you need to lean into that.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: And Constantine is exactly right.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: And the granularity of faith for Constantine is exactly right.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: Like, things like humility, things like gratitude, things like equality, things like seeing yourself as as not the central character in the play.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: Well, these are practices that you need to lean into, and the only way you're going to see yourself as not the ideal character in the story is to submit to a story in which there is another hero who has gone on his hero's journey, and you play a role in his grander story, rather than I am the central character and I try to make everybody else a bit player in my grand drama, right?
25:17
SPEAKER_01: That's naturally how you and I tick.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: We need to lean into a different story.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: And do you know a different story in which ultimate reality is also humble?
25:28
SPEAKER_01: In which ultimate reality is gracious such that we might give thanks, in which ultimate reality goes on the hero's journey for us.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: There is no other story.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: It's Jesus or nothing at this at this stage, right?
25:45
SPEAKER_01: Where else do we get the idea of divine humility, of a divine hero's journey who enters into the void on our behalf to give us the happily ever after and and to who creates a community of utter equals, right?
25:59
SPEAKER_01: Where else are you gonna find this?
26:01
SPEAKER_01: It's e even as we're dancing around this and calling it religion, it's a very Jesus-y religion, if you ask me.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: Uh the serving of others.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: Service.
26:10
SPEAKER_01: Service.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: Where are you gonna get a divinity who serves?
26:13
SPEAKER_01: You're describing Jesus, okay?
26:16
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is at the heart of your church, Constantine.
26:20
SPEAKER_01: Constantine, you you're praying, you're breaking bread with others, you're practicing gratitude, you're considering everybody equal.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: You're trying to take yourself out of your own ego and into a story in which somebody else is the hero who's gone on the hero's journey, in which service is supreme.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: It's Jesus you're talking about.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: You are you are describing Jesus there.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, but whenever it's anonymized, you're never actually going to be leaning in in the way that you're made to lean in to this.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: Because whilever it's anonymized, um, you will start to look at yourself doing these practices.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: And uh, aren't I wiser than the average bear having generated this church, having generated this communal practice, having generated these prayers, if you're not submitting to something that's already there, and there is something already there, it's called Christianity, with but without submitting to that thing that's already there, actually the humility starts to be undercut, right?
27:24
SPEAKER_01: And the gratitude starts to be undercut because you're not naming the one you try to thank.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, you to thank, you need to thank someone, right?
27:33
SPEAKER_01: It needs to be brought out of the realm of anonymity.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: And at that stage, I'm gonna say, yeah, go to church.
27:41
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, teach your kids to go to church and bring your family to church.
27:45
SPEAKER_01: I am I am gonna say that, but I I think I'm not just saying that because there's a rule somewhere in the Bible that says you gotta go to church.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: I am saying that because of everything that you've said, Constantine.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: You've you've said we are religious animals and we need to practice this gratitude and all that all that great stuff.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: Um all of that seems to me to be pointing in one direction, which is go to church.
28:05
SPEAKER_03: All of these things are practices that most religions have developed in one way or another.
28:10
SPEAKER_01: So Hinduism um does not believe in equality at all, right?
28:15
SPEAKER_01: Um now the Buddha rejected the caste system, and so he found Hinduism to be too unequal for him, and and so he, you know, he did his own thing and and and Buddhism emerged as a result.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: Um but you can look around at the various religions in the world, and they won't all teach the exact same thing.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: And I fear that it is a little bit colonialist to look around the world and kind of look at every religion and basically say, yeah, but they're basically like Christianity, aren't they?
28:45
SPEAKER_01: Um No, let let them be their own thing and and allow them the integrity to be authentically what they are.
28:52
SPEAKER_01: I think the sort of thing that that Constantine is describing certainly fits really, really badly on atheism.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: It fits much better uh in a lot of different cultures in the world.
29:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I would I would say that it finds its true home within Christianity.
29:10
SPEAKER_03: That a secular person is unlikely to get themselves into because they're not natural to human beings.
29:15
SPEAKER_03: It's not natural to put other people ahead of yourself, it's not natural um to practice gratitude.
29:21
SPEAKER_03: Most people, particularly in our society, don't, right?
29:24
SPEAKER_01: I love that because I'm I'm always saying you you might think you don't believe in the supernatural, but every time you believe in compassion, let's say, you are believing in something that is supernatural because the natural world is survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest.
29:37
SPEAKER_01: So so what is it that will make you believe in the supernatural?
29:40
SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess the supernatural is to believe that the the fittest was sacrificed for we the weakest, so that we the weakest might survive and not only survive but thrive and pass on a compassion revolution, aka this is Christianity I'm talking about.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: But as soon as you talk about compassion in those terms, you're talking about something that is supernatural.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: And and I've seen people who thought that they could never believe in supernatural entities, and then they are awoken to the fact that every day they exercise faith in the supernatural.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: And as you pull at that thread, you might just find that there is someone at the other end who is compassion on legs.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: You might find someone who is a divine servant.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: You might find Jesus Christ at the other end of that.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Hi folks, it's Thomas Thoroughgood here, media producer at Speak Life.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: You might recognise my voice as the guy who does the filler bits on the podcast.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: It's part of my job to think of how we can include you more in the work of Speak Life and bring you behind the scenes, if you will.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: And so we have a very exciting thing called the Speak Life Discord server.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: It's an online platform where you can interact with other Speak Life supporters and the Speak Life team.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: We have bonus content, creative theological discussion, and lots of fun along the way.
30:54
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30:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay, back to the podcast.
31:04
SPEAKER_03: So I think what people mean when they say act as if you are religious is adopt some of the kind of the best things about religion.
31:13
SPEAKER_03: And it is an interim answer, by the way, because you mentioned children.
31:16
SPEAKER_03: Once you have children, it becomes very difficult.
31:18
SPEAKER_03: It's hard to explain to a five-year-old why they should do something without, you know, the bearded man in the sky, which I know religious people will get upset with me about because it's an unfair character, but I use it exactly for that part.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: He was on this very channel, and uh I pulled him up on the bearded man.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: The old man in the sky.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: If somebody ever says to me they don't believe in God, my next question is, well, which God don't you believe in?
31:42
SPEAKER_01: And they end up describing some kind of distant individual high on power, low on personality.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: You can check out my interview with Constantine back last year.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: But Constantine has raised the issue of children and how are we going to pass on these practices of gratitude to the next generation.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: Alex has got a great question about this.
31:59
SPEAKER_02: Not to mention talking about things like death.
32:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
32:02
SPEAKER_02: Um I mean, I don't know.
32:03
SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't have children.
32:04
SPEAKER_02: I know that you do.
32:06
SPEAKER_02: If if if if you think, as you seem to be implying, being religious might have some societal benefit and some personal benefit, and that being an atheist might lead to being, you know, more self-serving and and and less sacrificial and this kind of thing.
32:22
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I are you gonna raise your child as a theist?
32:26
SPEAKER_02: Are you are you gonna teach them that God exists?
32:27
SPEAKER_03: Are you gonna take them to Sunday school?
32:29
SPEAKER_03: I don't think I'm gonna teach them either, actually.
32:31
SPEAKER_03: Uh I think I'm gonna I'm going to let them discover their own way of relating to that thing that does exist.
32:37
SPEAKER_03: Whether it's not that it's God that exists, but there is a there is a connection that binds all people, all human beings together in some way, and we all feel it.
32:45
SPEAKER_03: Uh, and the spiritual within us is part of that.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: I got two issues with this.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: The first one is um Constantine seems to have a kind of a freedom narrative that's very strong for him.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't want to, he doesn't want to go to church.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: He said that when he was on the on the channel.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: Um he said uh you're not gonna find people my age coming to church.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, which I thought was funny because I I think I'm pretty much the same age as Constantine.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: And I think probably the median age of of our church is uh quite a bit younger than Constantin is.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: But he's putting words to what a lot of modern people feel about church, which is don't pin me down, man.
33:19
SPEAKER_01: And just the other day, Jordan Peterson said exactly the same thing.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: When somebody was trying to pin him down to why don't you go to church, Jordan?
33:26
SPEAKER_01: He said this.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: What is stopping you from embracing the faith of your wife?
33:33
SPEAKER_05: You mean all those pesky Catholics?
33:38
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if anything is stopping me.
33:41
SPEAKER_03: What's holding you back?
33:42
SPEAKER_05: I don't think anything's holding me back.
33:45
SPEAKER_05: Everybody's got the room.
34:16
SPEAKER_05: Why is that?
34:18
SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
34:19
SPEAKER_05: That's how it is.
34:21
SPEAKER_01: So surrendering to that bigger thing, we might name all the psychological benefits of it, but it's another existential issue, whether we will actually submit to Jesus Christ, whether we will actually bow the knee, whether we will actually surrender to the story in the way that the story demands to be surrendered to.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: And so my first issue with Constantine here is He's letting the freedom narrative be too dominant here.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: And if you allow freedom to be at the top of your hierarchy of values, you'll only end up being lost.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
34:55
SPEAKER_01: Freedom is not found by simply being independent.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: Freedom is found within the dependencies that you were made for.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: So my first issue is with Constantine saying, I don't want to take my kid to church, I'm not gonna go to church, because I think he's got the freedom thing going on.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: My second problem with what he's saying here is that to anonymize the spirit that holds us all together and to imagine that that is some kind of supra religious force, that vital force that connects all things, if that isn't Jesus himself, um, I'm a little worried because there's all sorts of people who've spoken about the vitality that is just within nature and that we all just naturally participate in and we want to be vitalists, don't we?
35:38
SPEAKER_01: Um That is a really scary kind of ideology, actually, because I don't want to submit myself to any power that is not Jesus, because only Jesus, I think, has proven himself to be worthy of exercising power because he exercises his authority in order to serve.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't dominate, he loves and liberates.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: And so the spirit who binds together all living things, if that is not Jesus, and if that is just some kind of generic vanilla force within nature, I'm worried because nature doesn't teach you equality, nature doesn't teach you compassion, nature doesn't teach you freedom, nature doesn't teach you gratitude, nature doesn't teach it service, nature doesn't teach you any of these things that Constantine has just been saying are so vital for us.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: So let's not be vitalists and let not let's not just have an anonymous kind of supra religious force binding us all together.
36:38
SPEAKER_01: I think we do need Jesus himself to bind us all together.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: So those are my those are my two problems with what he said so far.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: I think we we need not to be so concerned with freedom that we don't actually go to church and and actually submit to the thing that's already there.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: And we need to name the force that binds all things.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: The force that binds all things is Jesus.
36:56
SPEAKER_03: Do you code that as the bearded man in the sky caricature, or do you code that as spirituality or whatever?
37:04
SPEAKER_03: It's up to you.
37:04
SPEAKER_03: But that thing exists.
37:05
SPEAKER_03: There's no there's no pretending otherwise.
37:07
SPEAKER_02: But that notice that's essentially what secular society does on a societal level.
37:13
SPEAKER_02: A secular society is not like an atheist society.
37:17
SPEAKER_02: It's it's not like um it's not like like sort of communist Russia that's actively persecuting religious ideology.
37:24
SPEAKER_02: It just says, hands off, we say, look, I'm just gonna leave it up to you.
37:27
SPEAKER_02: You can explore this religion, that religion, you know.
37:29
SPEAKER_02: We just hope that there's some kind of unifying spirit, that we're all just gonna come together and get along, even though we're all exploring our own ideas.
37:36
SPEAKER_02: And that's the thing that people are pointing to as and uh are saying it's disastrous.
37:39
SPEAKER_01: I think Alex is both right and wrong here.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: He is absolutely right that secularism is not the same as atheism at all, um, largely because secularism came out of Christianity, okay?
37:48
SPEAKER_01: It's it's a Christian worldview that says um the religious dimension is something that is vertically taken care of by Jesus, and through his once and for all sacrifice, he clears a space so that horizontally and in our own lifespans there is a secular sphere, and we don't need to constantly be trying to connect ourselves to the heavenly realities and make ourselves good people.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: You don't you don't make yourself a good person.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: Jesus has done all that, and you don't propitiate all the gods and godlets out there, and and you don't have to make sacrifices everywhere in order to kind of negotiate with life.
38:22
SPEAKER_01: Jesus has done it all, and he has cleared a secular space in which you can get on and live your life.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: What I disagree with about Alex is that the secular sphere in that Christian sense is not that I can have one religion or another religion because all religions are the same in the end, aren't they?
38:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean we know that's not the case.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: We we know that within fundamentalist Islam, it's very difficult, and isn't it tricky, if you've got a lot of fundamentalist Muslims who want Sharia courts to enforce Sharia law as a paralegal institution off to one side, and then you've got to figure out, well, how does that relate to our court system and our our judiciary?
38:59
SPEAKER_01: Secularism is under threat at that stage from different religious truth claims, and and so what we have come to know as the secular has always existed within a Christian framework, and it is very much up for debate whether you can have secularism without Christianity.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: Because suddenly, if you have no Christianity arbitrating about what that secular sphere is and what values are actually going to operate in that secular sphere, then it's not going to be policed and you're going to have ideology after ideology contesting that space, and the turf wars are going to get brutal.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: Whether it's Islam or whether it's the successor ideology, you know, woke ideology as Constantine might might call it, or or whatever it is, there'll be all sorts of people trying to claim that secular turf because that sense of the secular has come from a Christian notion.
39:54
SPEAKER_01: It hasn't come from the notion that there's some kind of neutral space that we can all just inhabit.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: There is no such thing as neutrality.
40:01
SPEAKER_01: We are religious animals.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: If you like the secular, then you really ought to want Christianity to flourish because it's Christianity that allows you to have the secular.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: That's that's what I'd say to Alex at that point.
40:12
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no.
40:13
SPEAKER_03: They're pointing to Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and all these other people who continually uh attacked religion as as a thing that should exist, right?
40:23
SPEAKER_03: God is not gray and all of this other stuff, Hitchens book and etc.
40:28
SPEAKER_03: They were people who this is my issue with with new atheists, and it's when I lost interest.
40:32
SPEAKER_03: I wrote a whole thing about that called the atheist illusion on my substack.
40:36
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
40:37
SPEAKER_03: It's not that people shouldn't question religion, it's the the denigration of religion.
40:42
SPEAKER_03: Has that been beneficial?
40:43
SPEAKER_03: And that's where I started to lose my faith in in atheism.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: That's a good point by Constantine.
40:49
SPEAKER_01: Just saying, look, the new atheism seems to be so anti-religious that that surely hasn't been good for society, right?
40:56
SPEAKER_01: A little later in the interview, Francis asks this question about the meaning crisis.
41:01
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell And looking at the younger generation, do you think they're suffering through a lack of spirituality, or are they replacing it with something else?
41:10
SPEAKER_04: We've spoken about wokeism, but is there something else that's bubbling under the surface?
41:14
SPEAKER_02: Well, people are suffering from a lack of meaning.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting way for Alex to put it.
41:18
SPEAKER_01: They're suffering from a lack of meaning.
41:21
SPEAKER_01: Um that communicates to me at least, and and I I know his kind of ethical framework.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: Um, he's a radical emotivist.
41:29
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't think that there is objective good and evil, but rather we have very strong emotions about good and evil.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: And instead of saying that murder is wrong, basically we all just say boo to murder.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: Um and that actually his ethical framework is whatever actually increases happiness and minimizes pain is the good path to take.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: So I I do find it interesting he says we're suffering from a lack of meaning, as though meaning is not really the thing we're after, but minimizing pain and and maximizing happiness is.
42:01
SPEAKER_02: Meaning is peop people always ask about meaning and purpose.
42:06
SPEAKER_02: And it and and there's that that really tired joke about what meaning means.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: But it's not a joke.
42:11
SPEAKER_02: Like what what are we what are we talking about here?
42:13
SPEAKER_02: Like it's such an intuitive question that people ask all the time.
42:16
SPEAKER_02: What's the meaning of life?
42:17
SPEAKER_02: What what the hell are you looking for?
42:18
SPEAKER_02: Like, what do you mean by meaning?
42:20
SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
42:21
SPEAKER_02: What's the answer?
42:21
SPEAKER_02: And I I the best I can come up with is something like a a non-contingent reason to act.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: So like a reason to act or to be that isn't dependent on something else.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: I think Alex will run into problems with this because really he is a determinist.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: He does not believe in free will.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: So actually, everything is determined.
42:39
SPEAKER_01: And nothing is contingent in his universe.
42:43
SPEAKER_01: You know what contingent is that there are things that are contingent, they could be otherwise, there are things that are necessary, they could not be otherwise.
42:49
SPEAKER_01: Um, Alice doesn't believe in contingency at all at the macro level.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: The story he's telling of the world is of an entirely closed system in which everything grinds along according to physical necessity.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: In that sense, everything unfolds non-contingently.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: Does that mean life is more meaningful, right?
43:10
SPEAKER_01: Because everything is non-contingent?
43:12
SPEAKER_01: Everything is necessary.
43:13
SPEAKER_01: Everything is determined.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, there are higher causes to everything that you do.
43:18
SPEAKER_01: Of course there are higher causes to everything that you do.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: But the buck the buck doesn't stop with you as a choosing individual.
43:25
SPEAKER_01: The buck stops with a closed system that grinds along with natural necessity.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, but that doesn't make my life more meaningful, I don't think.
43:35
SPEAKER_01: I don't think Alex's view of meaning makes a lot of sense, actually.
43:39
SPEAKER_01: What would I say is meaning?
43:41
SPEAKER_01: What is meaning?
43:42
SPEAKER_01: Meaning is the greater story into which you can plug your life that makes sense of it.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: There is a satisfying story that even when little old you is a tiny bit player in it, it Draws the strands of your life, of your choices, of your activity and your passivity, and it draws it into a greater story.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh that that makes cognitive sense, that gives you a sense of satisfaction, that this part and your part in the greater story serves a greater purpose, right?
44:27
SPEAKER_01: It's something that is given, it is something that already exists because the great story already exists, and it's something that is able to sweep up not only the things that you do, which was at the heart of Alex's definition, but also the things that you don't do, because most of my life I'm not active in.
44:43
SPEAKER_01: You know, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans, as John Lennon said.
44:48
SPEAKER_01: I am passive in most of my life.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: And I think we can understand that actually it's not just my actions that can be meaningful, it's also the things that happen to me that can be meaningful.
45:00
SPEAKER_01: The word passion is taken from the same word as we get passive from, and it's also the word that's associated with um suffering, like compassion and empathy.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, all these are are kind of in in a cluster of meanings in which suffering is something that happens to me, but I believe that even in the passivity of suffering, it can be meaningful.
45:25
SPEAKER_01: I can even have a meaningful death.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing more passive than dying.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: Dying is something that happens to you.
45:31
SPEAKER_01: And and yet you can have a meaningful death, can't you?
45:34
SPEAKER_01: And so Alex's definition is all about your activities and having a non-contingent reason for your activities.
45:41
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that makes sense within his own system.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's a particularly satisfying definition for anybody, but uh, I think there's a story that exists that, if you are plugged into it, gives incredible cosmic significance to even you as a bit player, and even to the parts of your life in which you are just suffering, in which you are just passive.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: Um, there is a story that is maximally great, because the greatest figure, Christ, descended to the deepest depth, hell, in order to have the greatest effect on the world for the longest duration, eternity.
46:17
SPEAKER_01: It is a maximally great story.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: It is an unimprovable story, it's a limit story.
46:21
SPEAKER_01: You could not have a greater story, and therefore you could not have a greater sense of meaning, purpose, and significance than to surrender yourself to this story, plug yourself by faith into Jesus and be a part of his greater story.
46:36
SPEAKER_01: That is where meaning comes from.
46:38
SPEAKER_01: And so no wonder when Christianity is in the rearview mirror, our sense of meaning and purpose is is declining massively.
46:47
SPEAKER_01: And our mental health uh statistics are just absolutely tanking.
46:51
SPEAKER_01: Deaths of despair are through the roof.
46:53
SPEAKER_01: Um it's no wonder when we've seen the death of this God.
46:58
SPEAKER_01: This God is the one who can give the most meaning, the most significance.
47:02
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell And bear in mind, some people say, Well, I just don't have any any purpose.
47:07
SPEAKER_02: Probably they they mean like no objective purpose that should be um prescribed.
47:12
SPEAKER_02: But you must have something that is ultimately motivating you, otherwise you wouldn't be doing anything.
47:16
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell But the ultimate thing that's motivating you within the closed system of Alex's world is just natural necessity grinding along.
47:25
SPEAKER_01: Um and we really are cogs in that machine, um, which doesn't give us a very satisfying sense of purpose, I wouldn't have thought.
47:32
SPEAKER_02: And so what the what the religious will often do is say that whatever that thing is, that's God.
47:37
SPEAKER_02: And so Peterson defines God as whatever's at the top of your value hierarchy.
47:42
SPEAKER_02: That's just his definition of divine.
47:44
SPEAKER_02: He says, you know, you're writing an essay, why to get a good grade, why to get a good job, why to provide for your family, why yeah, and and if you keep going down, whatever you you bottom out in is God.
47:54
SPEAKER_02: Now the the point that he makes, and I think the reason he then says, you know, famously, oh, you think you're an atheist, or you don't act like one, you're not really an atheist, kind of thing.
48:02
SPEAKER_02: Is because he correctly identifies that everybody has to have the sumum bonum, everybody has that first uh motivating reason.
48:11
SPEAKER_02: So everyone's going to have one no matter what.
48:13
SPEAKER_02: And I think that the the sort of nihilism and confusion that people experience is that before they were told what it was.
48:19
SPEAKER_02: They were told, even if you don't recognize it, the thing motivating you is God.
48:24
SPEAKER_02: Um whereas now it's unclear.
48:26
SPEAKER_02: And people who are struggling with meaning, I think, are sort of going on a journey of trying to discover what that thing is.
48:35
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes they find that they don't like it.
48:36
SPEAKER_02: Because if you're an atheist materialist, you realize that ultimately the thing that's motivating me is my genetics and my crude bodily desires.
48:44
SPEAKER_01: Which is what Alex thinks.
48:46
SPEAKER_01: Genuinely, that is what Alex thinks.
48:48
SPEAKER_02: And you can explain morality, the reason that morals exists is because of reciprocal altruism or because we share genes with each other, and that's why it evolved.
48:56
SPEAKER_02: But ultimately you break it down.
48:58
SPEAKER_02: Well, what's the ultimate motivation?
48:59
SPEAKER_02: Well, because I've got genes inside me that are dictating that I do particular things.
49:04
SPEAKER_01: Which is exactly what Alex thinks.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: It's exactly what Alex thinks.
49:07
SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll we'll see that in just a second.
49:09
SPEAKER_02: That is the sum and bonum.
49:10
SPEAKER_02: And we've we've replaced, you know, the Amago Dei, being made in the image of God, being created with a telos and a natural purpose, which is communion with the Almighty to you're an animal.
49:23
SPEAKER_02: And that's not a nice realization, and I think that's probably at the basis of people getting a little bit um thirsty for something with a bit more narrative, let's say.
49:33
SPEAKER_01: He's put it brilliantly.
49:35
SPEAKER_01: He has put brilliantly uh the problem that he cannot solve, and he's named what the meaning crisis is uh better than anyone I've I've heard do it, really, at that point.
49:45
SPEAKER_01: Let's go to the end of this interview because always on trigonometry they ask their guest, what should we be talking about that we're not talking about at the moment?
49:53
SPEAKER_01: And Francis asks him that question, and Alex just comes out with what his vision of reality is like, and I I think it's exactly as dystopian as he describes it just now.
50:06
SPEAKER_04: Final question is always the same, and you've you've actually mentioned it at the start, ruining the reveal, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
50:15
SPEAKER_02: Okay, well, so there's there's that, but but because I'll you know I want to give you something else.
50:19
SPEAKER_02: Um I think the extent to which emotions are at play in what we think is rational decision making.
50:33
SPEAKER_02: Everybody recognizes this to some degree.
50:35
SPEAKER_02: Everybody recognises that oh, you're you're actually you know being more emotional than you realize.
50:39
SPEAKER_02: But I I mean like really specifically.
50:40
SPEAKER_02: I I recently spoke to Robert Sapolsky.
50:42
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've had him on the show.
50:44
SPEAKER_02: He just wrote a book about uh why there's no free will, which um which I agree with, I don't think there is.
50:49
SPEAKER_01: Offhand comment.
50:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't believe that there is such a thing as free will.
50:52
SPEAKER_01: Why is there a meaning crisis?
50:54
SPEAKER_01: Um well apparently nothing you do changes anything.
50:58
SPEAKER_01: And that's just a little offhand comment.
51:01
SPEAKER_01: But let's let's zero in on what Alex is saying, because I I can agree that actually we are not as rationalistic as the Enlightenment thought that we were.
51:12
SPEAKER_01: And waking up to the fact that our heart makes up our mind for us is a really important thing.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: And it's it's something that the new atheism got completely wrong.
51:23
SPEAKER_01: And I'm very glad that Alex is kind of waking up to the fact that rationality does not rule.
51:30
SPEAKER_01: Now, Alex also has a podcast that's called Within Reason, and he might want to rethink um, he might want to rethink that title.
51:37
SPEAKER_01: He used to be known as Cosmic Skeptic, he now goes by his Christian name, Alex O'Connor, and now he's got this podcast called Within Reason, but I wonder whether he wants to rethink the reason side of things, because it turns out Alex is a radical emotivist that actually um everything boils down to our emotions about things, our cognitive states about things.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: And rationality does not rule.
52:04
SPEAKER_02: And as part of discussing that, he talked about this so-called hungry judge phenomenon.
52:07
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've come across this.
52:09
SPEAKER_01: Do you know the hungry judge phenomenon?
52:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh they did studies on judges, and they were far harsher in their sentences when they were further away from having eaten.
52:18
SPEAKER_01: The hungrier they are, the the more rough justice they kind of dish out.
52:23
SPEAKER_01: And the more satiated they are, the more compassionate they are.
52:26
SPEAKER_01: And that is a study that sits well with a radical emotivist, somebody who thinks that actually what's going on in the world is not about objective good and evil, nor about objective truth and falsehood, and certainly not about objective beauty and ugliness.
52:40
SPEAKER_01: But we're basically just emotionally reacting to the world, and we might want to clothe our emotional reactions in the language of reason or in the language of objective truth, or in the language of objective goodness, or of objective beauty.
52:55
SPEAKER_01: At the end of the day, it's just your gut, really.
52:58
SPEAKER_02: There was this large-scale study done about um uh parole boards, and they were trying to figure out what's the biggest predictive factor as to whether a judge grants parole or not, and they found that the biggest predictive factor is how long it had been since the judge had eaten a meal.
53:18
SPEAKER_02: Now that's really that's really like cool and funny, and like, oh, what an interesting anecdote.
53:23
SPEAKER_02: People go to prison or get their freedom based on whether or not a judge is hungry.
53:31
SPEAKER_01: People's freedom is taken away, uh says the guy who doesn't believe in free will.
53:34
SPEAKER_01: But you know, okay, that that's a cheap shot.
53:37
SPEAKER_01: But okay, so he is noticing that absolutely our our gut-level intuitions are ruling us far more than we imagine this to be the case.
53:49
SPEAKER_01: And I I think the great study on this was Jonathan Haidt's book from uh over ten years ago now, The Righteous Mind.
53:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, we think of ourselves as brain-led, as rationality-led.
53:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, but actually, our mind and our rationality is a lot more like a rider of an elephant that is uh not a very tame elephant.
54:08
SPEAKER_01: And the rider might be barking orders at the elephant, but if the elephant wants to go down into the ditch, the elephant's gonna go down into the ditch.
54:14
SPEAKER_01: And and the rider is not really in charge of things.
54:18
SPEAKER_01: And really, our gut instincts and our intuitions and our emotions are the elephant that's kind of in charge of the rider, however much we want to pretend that the rider is in charge.
54:30
SPEAKER_01: And and this kind of gels with so much that that the Bible says.
54:33
SPEAKER_01: And so a phrase we're often using here at Speak Life is from Ashley Null.
54:36
SPEAKER_01: He says, What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies, right?
54:40
SPEAKER_01: We're heart-leg creatures, we choose what our hearts want to do, and the mind does play a role, but largely the mind comes along to rationalize what you already wanted.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: Your emotions play this huge role.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't think it's just gut intuition all the way down, and Jonathan Haidt doesn't think it's gut intuition all the way down.
54:57
SPEAKER_01: The problem with saying it's gut intuition all the way down is that you lose any sense of there being truth.
55:01
SPEAKER_01: But if there's not such a thing as capital T truth, then Alex, why not submit yourself to the utility of Christianity for the survival of the species?
55:12
SPEAKER_01: And that's as true as true can be anyway, right?
55:15
SPEAKER_01: If you know, and so submitting yourself to a story that is a better story, like the Christian story is a maximally great story, and the deterministic story is a terrible story.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: So wh why don't you just submit yourself to something that is better and like throw yourself into community until you really do feel like service is divine and compassion is supernatural.
55:34
SPEAKER_01: Why not throw yourself into into that story and let your feelings catch up with you on on that level?
55:41
SPEAKER_01: But we can't really believe in radical emotivism to that degree because at that point we've traded away all kinds of rationality.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think you would then be able to trust the kind of mind that came up with radical emotivism.
55:56
SPEAKER_01: Our minds need to be tracking truth as well as just serving our primal instincts.
56:01
SPEAKER_01: And if they're not tracking truth, then really we we should discount all rational discourse, including rational discourse about radical emotivism.
56:10
SPEAKER_01: You see what I mean?
56:11
SPEAKER_01: It's it's this undermining thing.
56:13
SPEAKER_01: But Alex's atheism really is that undermining.
56:17
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't think that there is such a thing as freedom.
56:20
SPEAKER_01: He also doesn't think that there's such a thing as truth.
56:23
SPEAKER_01: And he gets really radical about this.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look.
56:26
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's my contention that this happens.
56:28
SPEAKER_01: He caught himself.
56:29
SPEAKER_01: And I think, or it's my contention.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: Is it a rational contention or is it just a gut level instinct?
56:36
SPEAKER_01: I think.
56:37
SPEAKER_01: Can we really do away with language of think?
56:39
SPEAKER_01: A radical emotivist says whenever we say think, we actually just mean feel.
56:44
SPEAKER_01: So is this is this what you think?
56:46
SPEAKER_01: Is this your contention?
56:47
SPEAKER_01: Is it a rational contention?
56:48
SPEAKER_01: But you know, what what do you think?
56:50
SPEAKER_01: But this happens all the time.
56:52
SPEAKER_02: We are essentially emotive creatures, that things we think are plain, simple, propositional truths are not.
56:58
SPEAKER_02: People recognize this to some degree.
56:59
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I was hangry, oh, you need to sleep on it.
57:02
SPEAKER_02: They recognize that sometimes, you know, the the the way that your emotive state is can affect how you're reasoning.
57:07
SPEAKER_02: I I think it's like emotion through and through.
57:10
SPEAKER_01: I think it is heart-driven.
57:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think the heart is not subrational either.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: And the heart can be informed by the word from beyond it, and can be conquered by the word and can be reshaped by the word, such that we can be renewed by the word, and our minds can be renewed, and and there can be um a certain level of rationality.
57:35
SPEAKER_01: I think the danger of going full radical emotivist, just like uh Alex says he does, is that you you then undercut your very ability to be a radical emotivist, because that's a thought, right?
57:49
SPEAKER_01: That that that is a thought, and and it is a theory that seeks to explain things rationally.
57:55
SPEAKER_01: Um and I don't think Alex actually behaves like a radical emotivist, especially when he says, I don't want to teach my children about Christianity because I don't think it's true.
58:05
SPEAKER_01: Well, do you remember he said that?
58:07
SPEAKER_01: He said Christianity isn't true, so what what do you want me to do about the meaning crisis?
58:11
SPEAKER_01: I can't just say things that are untrue.
58:13
SPEAKER_01: I've got to be true to my thing called truth, right?
58:16
SPEAKER_01: Well, apparently not.
58:17
SPEAKER_01: Apparently he doesn't think truth with a capital T exists like that.
58:21
SPEAKER_01: At which point I want to go back to that part of the conversation and say, well, so why not?
58:26
SPEAKER_01: Why not just submit yourself to the thing that actually the studies say improves society?
58:31
SPEAKER_01: Oh no, because it's not true.
58:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, okay, well, what what is true?
58:34
SPEAKER_02: I think so much of what we think is emotion, moralizing is emotion, ethics is expression of emotion.
58:41
SPEAKER_01: Ethics is an expression of emotion.
58:42
SPEAKER_01: So both good so so no such thing as freedom, no such thing as truth, no such thing as goodness.
58:50
SPEAKER_02: Even like you know uh when you when you consider your your basic philosophical premises, I've I've sometimes argued in the past that we can emotivize all of philosophy.
59:02
SPEAKER_02: I mean, why can't P be true and false at the same time?
59:04
SPEAKER_02: Why is the law of non-contradiction, fundamental logical law?
59:07
SPEAKER_02: Why does it hold?
59:08
SPEAKER_02: Well, because when you try to consider P being true and false at the same time, your brain just goes, no.
59:14
SPEAKER_02: Just goes, boo, just goes, I don't like it.
59:16
SPEAKER_01: All of philosophy, all of logic is apparently just emotivist.
59:21
SPEAKER_01: It's not true though.
59:22
SPEAKER_01: I I can say that P and not P are both true in the same way at the same time.
59:28
SPEAKER_01: Um and my my brain doesn't do anything, actually.
59:32
SPEAKER_01: Right.
59:33
SPEAKER_01: Um and actually there are cultures that that do not enshrine the law of non-contradiction, like in the same way that those in the tradition of Aristotle have.
59:42
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
59:43
SPEAKER_01: There are lots of cultures that that haven't really been that bothered about the law of non-contradiction.
59:48
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if you've spoken to people in your life, but people can very much hold two absolutely contradictory ideas in their head all the time.
59:57
SPEAKER_01: They they say it's called cognitive dissonance, but most of the time it does not feel dissonant to us.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_01: Most of the time, our our brain does not say boo, does not say no, does not say yuck.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_01: But I think we still feel, ha, I think we still feel, I think we still feel that if one person uh believes in the law of non-contradiction, another people person doesn't believe in the law of non-contradiction, that there still might be a a position above those two people that can point to one of them being more right than the other.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_01: Okay, certainly um all of thought in the Western tradition is based on that, and to say that all of it is just reduced to emotivism um is is basically to throw out kind of philosophy.
1:00:43
SPEAKER_01: So all of philosophizing, it's all emotivism, all of goodness, all of truth, all of freedom.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: We've traded away it all.
1:00:53
SPEAKER_01: And Alex at the end of all things says, yeah, there was a story in which you are made in God's image and you were destined for communion with the Almighty forever.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_01: There is a story in which the highest figure descended to the deepest depth to have the greatest impact on the most number of people for the longest duration.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_01: There is a maximally great story, and we've traded that for no freedom, no truth, no goodness, no philosophy, no logic.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_01: Um and we simply derive meaning from doing what is non-contingent, from doing what is, in other words, necessary, from doing whatever is determined, right?
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: Um no wonder we have a meaning crisis.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_01: I think Alex has been brilliant at describing what the meaning crisis is and where it's come from, but in terms of a solution to it, um, I don't think Alex has it.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_01: I think Constantine and Francis are very much wanting to answer that meaning crisis, and they've got their practices going on.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_01: They've got kind of like a mini anonymous church thing going on.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_01: There's a great bit that we haven't gotten to in this interview.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_01: Do go and watch it on the trigonometry channel where Constantin and Francis kind of talk about, oh, but you can make your own meaning, can't you?
1:02:15
SPEAKER_01: And Alex brilliantly sort of says, no, you can't make up your own meaning.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_02: You need you need purpose, and that purpose, as I say, everybody has a purpose, but if you recognize that the purpose is something essentially trivial and something that's outside of your control, then I I suppose the motivation starts to fade away.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_02: Which is why God was a good one, because God, you know, God being the same thing as love and the same thing as beauty entails that you can do things like helping other people and you can say that it's in the service of God.
1:02:41
SPEAKER_02: Whereas now you have to sort of rationalize it as, yes, ultimately the reason I'm doing it is in the service of my own genes and my own self.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_02: Um that just doesn't have the same sort of romance.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but you that's because you don't have to stop at the the the at that particular point.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_03: So once you've got to the point where you go, well, I'm just I'm here to reproduce, that's all I'm here, that's all my purpose that I have, then you're free, actually.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_03: And then you can create whatever purpose you want.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_03: There is meaning you can create for yourself, even if the realization you have is the ultimate meaning is to reproduce your genes.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure that you can create your own meaning in a fundamental sense.
1:03:16
SPEAKER_02: I'm always suspicious of this concept.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_02: I think everything you've just said already presupposes an underlying value judgment.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_01: Because if your friend comes to you and he's a heart surgeon and he could save a thousand lives, but instead he wants to count every blade of grass in Hyde Park, um, and he trades in that life for this life because he's chosen to and he's free to, and nobody can tell him what to do, right?
1:03:38
SPEAKER_01: Um and that's as meaningful as that.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_01: No one would think that counting every blade of grass at Hyde Park is as meaningful as being a heart surgeon.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_01: Nobody thinks that.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: And if that person was your friend, you would say, no, that is that is not meaningful, that is meaningful.
1:03:52
SPEAKER_01: You can't just make up your own meaning.
1:03:54
SPEAKER_01: You can't.
1:03:55
SPEAKER_01: You can't just invent your own meaning.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_01: You have to discover a meaning that's already there.
1:04:00
SPEAKER_01: Alex absolutely wins that part of the debate.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: So where have we got to?
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: We've got to the idea that meaning has to already be there.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: You cannot invent it, it needs to be discovered.
1:04:12
SPEAKER_01: And so there's this prior thing, this prior story in which service is our highest ideal and compassion is supernatural, in which you're not the center of the universe, but you can play a bit role in someone else's hero's journey.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_01: You've got to have this sense in which you know what, you're not a cog in a machine, but you're a a player in a play, and it's a great story, and it's headed somewhere wonderful.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_01: And at the heart of this story, there is service, there is sacrifice, there is humility, there is grace, there is something to be grateful to, there's someone to give thanks to.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_01: It's Jesus, right?
1:05:01
SPEAKER_01: It's Jesus.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_01: And no wonder there is a meaning crisis.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_01: And Alex, for his own reasons, doesn't want to submit to that Christian story.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_01: And Constantine and Francis, they don't want to submit to the story in that sort of way.
1:05:16
SPEAKER_01: Jordan Peterson wants to do his own thing.
1:05:19
SPEAKER_01: He always remains at the fringes of things, he says.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_01: But there is this story, and it it it's true, and it's good, it's beautiful, it's compelling.
1:05:31
SPEAKER_01: You will find in this story freedom, you will find in this story hope, you will find in this story purpose and significance.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: You can suffer well in this story even when you're not active, even when you're utterly passive, you can suffer well, you can even die well in this story and still have meaning and purpose and significance and hope.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_01: It's the ultimate story.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_01: You won't find a better one.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_01: And if you want to find out about Jesus Christ, why don't you do 321 now?
1:05:59
SPEAKER_01: It's our online course where you can look at life according to Jesus.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_01: You can binge it in a couple of hours, you can do it over eight sessions.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of extra bonus material you can do.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_01: You can join us in a chat community and ask me any question that you've got about Jesus and God and faith and life and meaning and purpose.
1:06:18
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1:06:20
SPEAKER_01: They have answers in Jesus.
1:06:22
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1:06:23
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1:06:26
SPEAKER_01: See ya.