Hawkins elegantly exposes the cracks in materialist dogma, yet his leap from the hard problem of consciousness to a personal deity feels more like a poetic retreat into idealism than a rigorous logical necessity. It is a sophisticated exercise in metaphysical gap-filling that prioritizes human intuition over empirical restraint.
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It's very hard, it seems, to account for consciousness within a purely material world because consciousness just seems to be a completely different kind of thing to matter. If you understand matter as being something independent of mind, something that operates in purely lawike mechanical kinds of ways. And at some point recently, in the last couple of years, I think the neuroscientist admitted defeat, paid the amount of money that it was to David Charas. And this was this sort of great philosopher beat scientist sort of moment.
>> You can't trust your mind as a mere byproduct of evolution to truthfully lead you to the conclusion that evolution is true. So I think then if he's attacking only a particular metaphysics that takes evolution to be the full story of the emergence of human reasoning, then I'd agree with him.
Believing in resurrection is not an aberration. It's a natural outworking of how things are. Imagine Richard Dawkins and I sit down and we're discussing ontology, which is the question of what exists. I get my pad of paper, he gets his, we start writing down the things we think exists. And for a while, we're just perfectly set. Oh yeah, I think chairs exist. So do you. I think atoms exist, so do you. I think blah blah blah blah blah. And then he puts his pen down and I go, "Hang on a minute. I'm going to add on demons. I'm going to add on angels. I'm going to add on heaven. I'm going to add on the Holy Spirit or whatever." And then the idea is, well, we agree about so much and now we're just disagreeing about these extra things.
I think that's that is if if that is the way in which you set up the question, I think you're whatever you're proving there is some kind of idol. It's some kind of something that is less than God. It has to just be an idea. It has to be a concept.
I feel like if we were to start from just um establishing what you see as being problematic or limited in explanation within materialism as a jumping off point and then well if there's an explanatory gap from materialism to reality as it is then where are people going from there?
Because that's what I'm seeing a lot on my end is that more and more people seem to be open to idealism or pansychism or whatever the case might be and it kind of feels like the wild west. I'm talking at a lay personal level. I know philosophers, it's it's a different thing. But the sense that I get from being in like Tik Tok live streams or just talking to uh friends or online communities and that type of thing is that uh people seem quite open to something else be beyond matter or some kind of higher power or force or something. And I think that that intuition or instinct is interesting.
And I also think that it from my assessment it seems to be um a cultural moment that we're in right now where something is shifting. So there are there are sort of several different reasons why the materialist or what's now more typically called physicalist sort of metaphysics is sort of coming apart. So on the one hand there's the stuff coming out of philosophy of mind uh which is that it's very hard it seems to account for consciousness uh within a purely material world. Um because consciousness just seems to be a completely different kind of thing to matter. If we understand matter as being something independent of mind, something that operates in purely lawike mechanical kinds of ways, there's lots of features of conscious experience that just are very hard to fit into that uh way of understanding the world. So, I'm happy to talk about that. That's one area um where there's been a lot of sort of fruitful discussion about how then to account for consciousness.
Now, you can look this up. I'm not exactly too sure when it was, but a number of years ago, um, and and this may have been what's caused this sort of tipping point to occur now. A number of years ago, there was a bet placed between a very famous, I think maybe even prize-winning um neuroscientist and David Charmers, who was a philosopher who who was um famously sort of put forward what's called the hard problem of consciousness. Actually, it's a problem that had been known about for a long time, but he kind of marketed it well and made it kind of famous, which is how do you go from a material description of the world to say why there is also consciousness happening as well. Now, they had a bet.
The neuroscientist sort of said we'll we'll have nailed consciousness within a certain period of time. And Charma says no, you can't. In principle, it's impossible from a neuroscientific point of view to account for it. And at some point recently in the last couple of years I think the neuroscientist admitted defeat uh paid the amount of money that it was to David Charas and this was this sort of great philosopher beat scientist sort of moment uh and then and then uh the the neuroscientist now starts to research consciousness quite quite quite a bit recognizing that it's his own thing. So there's that question how do we account for consciousness within a material world?
Now from talking to uh academics that work in this area, from what I understand is that the the purely reductive project there is not very fashionable anymore and that a lot of the kind of the cool kids um are working on something like pansychism. So pansychism is the idea that well you can't account for consciousness within a material world.
So there needs to be consciousness there already in matter. So the kind of basic view is that uh you don't just have the kind of fundamental properties that quantum physics talks about, quantum mechanics talks about like charge, mass, spin and so on. You also have this extra property, this extra thing called consciousness that is in there from the beginning. It's been there since uh since the big bang in matter and it's only our kind of lived form of consciousness is when these consciousness properties sort of arrange themselves in the right kind of way in life forms. Now I think that in some ways in my opinion it's sort of the death rattle of of the physicalist program. Uh and it's it's it's coming at things from the wrong way. It's basically saying our general view of the world is correct. A materious world that operates according to laws and principles and it evolves along these with these sorts of principles in this process. Um and you know consciousness does the same. It starts off in these sort of proto forms and and now it has sort of become more complex as the as the game goes on. Um but it firstly I I don't think there there are lots of problems philosophically about how that could work just in the philosophy of mind program to do with well how do these properties add up to become uh what we experience as conscious inner life. Um but also it doesn't I think explain the other two reasons why um the physicalist program is uh not enough which I haven't talked about yet but I will in a minute.
One is about how we could know anything about the world. So this is question about how our mind and the world interact in knowledge and secondly where meaning and values and things come from as well because because basically pansyism is just physics supplemented or with with this added notion of consciousness tacked on tacked onto it.
I just want to get clarity on one thing that you said because as I was looking as I have been looking into pansychism, it does seem like just adding the property of like a mental property into matter, but in that sense it almost still feels materialistic or physicalist in nature, but just we're gonna tag on this new property or this new attribute called consciousness. But we're still working off of the assumption that like the vast majority of everything that exists is material in nature. It in a in a sense it doesn't seem to address the distin the original problem uh which if I understand it right is not only a problem of mind emerging from matter but it is a problem of what seems to be the fundamentally different kind of thing that consciousness is from matter. So if that's the if that if I get that part right then how is simply applying consciousness sort of buttering it over the entire bread a solution to that distinctiveness >> I think so so traditionally if if you think there's there is such a thing as matter and you think there is also such a thing as mind uh if you go back to say daycart the answer was well these are just two different substances in the world you have mental stuff and you have material stuff and then the question is how do they interact uh why do we have these two different substances? Is there any way to get a sort of the unity of the whole uh of reality that way? So I think pansychism tries to avoid two substances by basically saying there's one underlying substance. You could call that matter but in some ways it could you could say it's neither matter nor mus something neutral but it has material properties or physical properties of charge, mass and spin but it also has mental properties. this other kind of property that's irreducible to the physical properties which we're going to call consciousness or something of that sort.
So you now have a kind of property that's sort of inbuilt into the extended material world that you then have to explain how the sort of simple kind of that property that exists in electrons and so on kind of gather together to become consciousness of the sort we know and love. But the reason why you don't want to typically say there are two different kinds of substances is to avoid some of the problems that I mentioned that people have with the the dual substances point of view. But you still basically have uh property dualism. There are different there are two different kinds of properties physical um and mental.
>> Does this actually help with uh qualia or or or the idea that I'm having a firsterson experience? I I'm basically having a human experience as are you and in some sense the distinctiveness of both of our experiences like would pansychism posit that the entire system is having its own first person exper like aren't we somehow clearly different than the chairs that we're sitting in and the tables that are in front of us and and if you're going to say no we're we're only different by degree or something And I I I don't feel that I understand like are we saying that the table is also having a first person experience or how how would how would on pan psychism you still parse out what I would call like personhood or agency or um not just like consciousness in this abstract quantum realm like oh we saw something vibrate and we think that it's conscious but but oh that that is a human agent and that is the chair that they're sitting on and we can see that those are different categories of things. Would pan psychism say actually no the differentiation there is an illusion they're the same kind of thing fundamentally the human and the chair that they're sitting on or or maybe I'm missing the point entirely how would you kind of explain like agency and personhood on pansyus I think the idea is instead of talking in terms of agency uh then the idea is um there is something that it is like there's something it is like to be Brandon there's something it is like to be a bat there is but then there is also something it is like to be an electron.
Um and then the idea is that this sort of idea of something it is like to be uh we can get sort of more complex forms of conscious experience that would involve things like agency ultimately um something like uh the capacity for reasoning and reflection.
by making this sort of very basic simplistic notion of what it's like to be um more and more complex through some kind of account of how that could work.
>> To me, that seems almost like a different emergent problem. Like it's it's not a problem of emergence from matter to mind, but it's a problem of something if you say at the most basic level is the same, but it's so like we are so different than the chairs that we're sitting on that I at least have a lot of questions about how we could emerge from the same type of substance as as the chairs. But that's just my that just that's just me. I'm curious.
You're you I'm pushing you on pansychism. You're not a pansychist. Why are you not a pansyist? and and kind of where do we go from here as we're kind of uh narrowing down from materialism into your actual view which I'm very curious about.
>> Okay, fantastic. Thank you. And I'm happy to talk about it. I will say one thing a little bit what you just said before on pansyism though. I suppose the the thought is that yes I am very different to the chair but then presumably I'm also very different to an ant in terms of my conscious experience.
I'm certainly very different to blue green algae or simple cell organisms and so on. But if you have a kind of uh reality a sort of objective independent world first way of understanding everything and you think you have a good enough story in evolutionary theory and cosmology to go from sort of the singularity of the big bang right up to now you you continue with that story but you just add in not only the increasing complexification of matter that leads to human bodies but you tell have to tell a similar story with with the consciousness property such that these basic consciousness properties through evolution and so on complexify to become the kind of uh experience we have. But still it seems to me that if you have what what what I would call a bottomup ontology. So if if you think that reality is fundamentally bits of matter, particles or something of that sort that gather together in more and more complex structures, there still is the question of how can these very basic rudimentary um bits of electron consciousness and proton consciousness become the kind of uni unified experience that that we have uh certainly as humans but even other kind of animal life forms. So that is a problem with kind of bottomup panchism.
Um I'm not familiar with it's obviously a problem that that anyone working there is very aware of. Um there are no doubt attempted solutions to that problem. I haven't massively looked into it because of the the reason that you said for me um this is a way of trying to avoid what I think is the complete revolution of the way of of understanding reality which is not to begin from the outside and then try to explain the inner world as if there's some kind of out there objective world that we have to understand our own subjective experience in terms of but to flip things the other way round and to interpret the world in terms of um starting from a kind of inside out from from a position of the ultimate reality of conscious experience um in its most broad complex um form. So it involves agency right off the bat. It involves our sense experience. But actually my kind of idealism and I'll explain what idealism is in a minute is a broad kind. So it involves thought, it involves feeling, it involves emotions, it also involves moral conscience and everything like that. Idealism is the view that reality is ultimately mental or spirit in nature. So people used to say spirit, Hegel, and so on. Um now people tend to talk in terms of the mental, but but they're very similar.
The idea is that reality is um fundamentally kind of personal in nature. So what that means is you don't end up in the dualist position to take up well there's matter and then there's mind you actually whereas the materialism of all rejected mind entirely and said well we can somehow explain what mind is just in terms of matter mind is nothing more than matter it's just the brain it's just organic organism processes of organism that somehow appears to be something different but it's not really it's fully reducible idealism reduces things the other way round the other way it says look matter isn't a fundamental thing it doesn't have any kind of independent existence of mind. That doesn't mean that there's no difference between me and a chair because a chair is just my what it means is that there's a difference between a subject or a or what I would call an a finite center of experience which is what we are as humans and the contents of that experience. So a chair is something that is the content of an experience of a mind or minds. It isn't something that's capable of independent existence from minds the way we sort of traditionally would understand matter to be.
>> I I wanted to just briefly note that I loved your conversation with Dr. Samir Varma. I thought that was fantastic. And he is a physicist materialist and yet the way that he talks about reality is such that the ultimate explanation for everything are quantum fields interacting with each other in a totally deterministic way all the way up to us. And I just wanted to note that because it reminds me a lot of the description that you just gave on pans psychism but with just a different flavoring but where if everything is one type of substance and it's just varying degrees of complexity or you know you could add in a Darwinian theory to explain how that happens or whatever but it I I think the description that you just gave sort of supports my view of pansychism which is yes it is different than materialism But it seems to make a similar case to that case that was made in your podcast with Dr. Varma where there's a there's a different kind of thing that across time becomes every kind of thing in varying degrees but there there at least seems to be some overlap there in terms of explanation.
Would you agree with that?
>> Yeah, I'd say there's a there's a lot in that. I think that um one of the ways in which I would diverge from pansychism is is what we've talked about which is that I think >> right >> pansychism still is attempting to explain the inside of our conscious experience in terms of things we take to be outside experience and objective even if they have certain properties. So they're still sort of taking the scientific story as the starting point and then trying to interpret who we are or our own subjective experience in how do we fit into this story that science is telling. So they're taking science in a very realist fashion. So that's one way whereas I want to sort of say let's not try to shoehorn consciousness or agency or subjective experience into a fundamentally objective theory of science. we start there and we interpret science as merely a subset or a or a way of describing a an aspect of human experience. So I I agree with the theories of physics, but I think they're merely there to explain uh some of the things we experience through our senses, but there's so much more to subjective experience than that.
So that's one area. The other area I think is something you're touching on right there which is that another assumption in that world view is that reality is ultimately a plurality that reality the true nature of reality is going on at the level of the very tiny at the level of the very small and that anything on the larger scales like a human body or human experience is nothing but kind of the sum total of what's happening at this this tiny this level of the very very tiny. Now that idea, it's really hard to shake. And sometimes we're not even aware that that's an assumption of how we're thinking. But the idealists and the idealist positions that that that I favor want to say that that is wrong.
No, if you want to understand reality, you have to begin at the level of the whole and you understand the the the parts of the whole in terms of their place within the whole as a system. Now, these are debates. I mean it depends how long we have to talk but these are debates that that was so crucial to what was happening in the 19th century with the emergence of these new sciences and it just seems like the importance of the questions of if everything is loose and separate as sort of the philosopher David Hume thought and picked up by the philosophers who trying to follow the scientific method.
Where does unity come from? Where does unity of thought come from? Where does unity of experience come from? Where does unity of the universe come from?
um that's very difficult to account for.
Um and actually that story is coming apart even in the physics world because we're now understanding things like entanglement and other features like this that make it very hard to >> think you bottom out and then you can construct upwards that way. No, I think I think these sort of >> posits of particles are are objects we get when we analyze what is going on at higher levels. And so you're talking about the debate I had with Sami Varmmer. So he it's because he started off by saying something like every physicist knows that all there is are quant the particles of standard model physics or something like that >> quantum fields interacting with each other >> could be quantum depends. Yeah. Quantum fields or or um or or fundamental particles depending on which which way you you interpret it.
>> Um well I don't think every physicist does know that. I think I think it's a working assumption of physics that that is they are the things in which you explain other things. But that's a very different thing to say that that's all there is. For example, a mathematician isn't going to explain things in terms of buses and trains. They're going to explain things in terms of numbers. But they would never think therefore everything is numbers. Um well some might but uh but typically you just you just take the the entities of your theory or the entities within that you use to explain things in your discipline as a discipline specific method or as a discipline specific thing. But there is this sort of for me entirely incorrect view that physics is sort of the queen of the sciences that explains everything and you know the other disciplines or other modes of understanding are kind of would eventually kind of come out in the wash once our physics has sort of reached its point of completion and that's that's an assumption I think it's an assumption that's coming apart. is an assumption that's very wrong. And incidentally, the best for me philosophers of science who are trying to answer this question are moving away from what we would call scientific realism, which is the idea that the things that exist are the things science talks about. Even they want to say science is special. Science is important. I'd agree with them. But it's important not because it tells you what the fundamental nature of reality is. But it's important because it has a codified method that is capable of self-improvement and getting closer to something that helps us in terms of technology and get things done. It's things that help us get things done more than >> give us insight into the ultimate nature of things.
>> So I interestingly also loved your conversation with uh Dr. Castro, who is, I believe, an analytic idealist.
>> Yeah. And so, and it didn't seem that you guys agreed on everything e either at all, although you're both types of idealists, but it seems like maybe here we should say, okay, if if everyone is questioning, if some people are trending toward um explanations of reality that are not uh reductive in a total physicalist, materialist sense, then what we've we've hit on pansychism, but what does the landscape look like in terms terms of idealism, types of idealism, what else is on the table right now? And how would you, I guess, sort of distinguish your view from some other models of idealism?
>> Okay, fantastic question. So, yeah, I mean, I'm a I'm I'm a fan of Castropre and what he's doing um because he's he's he's articulate. He's good at explaining things and he's developing a bit of a following in the public domain. And I think that's got to be a good thing, helping people realize there are alternative ways of interpreting reality.
Um, however, where I differ from him is that he still seems to be in the same kind of lane as pansychism in that his justification for his idealism is drawing still a lot from scientific theory. Um so he does say at some moments that he is what what I would call an anti-realist about science. In other words, he thinks that um the laws of science just explain the phenomenal world, the things that we experience. They don't tell you how things are independently of of the way we experience things.
But on the flip side, he still seems to interpret who we are drawing on evolutionary concepts and and things of that sort.
Uh so he's and he isn't asking what I take to be that the fundamental questions or at least if he is asking that I haven't encountered that and I think when we discussed some of those more fundamental questions he was seemed to me to be thinking on the fly a little bit. So for example the other things that I talked about that that could be motivations for ideal is not just uh how do we account for consciousness within the world from the objective standpoint but how do we make sense of our knowledge of the world how do we make sense of the nature of truth how do we make sense of the nature of ethics so for example for Castro he has an idealist framework in other words he thinks that reality is ultimately mind he calls it mind at large >> and that we are what he calls alters of mind at large. We're basically like um disassociated altars that is what used to be thought of as as as split personalities. We're kind of personalities of this mind at large interacting but part of this mind.
>> Um but that this mind is not metacognitive.
It's not like us. It doesn't have the capacity to reflect on itself. It doesn't have its own desires. It doesn't have its own will. So it's a very unlike a sort of a theistic idealism um which would have mind at large being a kind of a more advanced or superior kind of mind or person than we are. It's almost like a less advanced I mean he might dispute my terminology that way but but but it seems to he he does say it's not metacognitive. It's not able to reflect on its own experience and to kind of evaluate itself. It just does. He says mind at large is what it does what it does because it is what it is. So it's quite a mechanistic and and that's part of his his desire I think to still be a naturalist and a reductivist. So he's still taking up a lot of what I would call the normative that drives the values that science values. Let's explain everything in terms of a few things and let's keep everything kind of unfolding naturally.
Uh let's not import uh other things into it. Have have you ever heard him uh give an explanation for all like particular instantiations or or like personalities of a collective consciousness that exists. But if there isn't a I guess unifying source or or principle for that consciousness that we're sort of in the image of a a singular, you know, mind of God. And I'm just trying to understand how if that's wrong, basically he would say that's wrong. We're not um created after or created by or derived from or made in the image of a a god, a divine mind, but we we exist like collectively as that mind. I guess it's a question of of how how are we consistently the same thing or how I guess what what is like do you need a unifying principle? I don't know if that's the right the right term.
>> So, one of the problems I thought with with the idea that we are disassociated alters of mind at large >> and yet we have a met metacognitive reflective experience that mind at large doesn't have.
>> I said well that to me doesn't make sense because imagine a worm had a dissociative altar. I can't imagine that dissociated altar suddenly having mental capacities the worm didn't have. It doesn't seem to me as though a dissociated altar could be a kind of mental experience that's very different. So I quizzed him on this and it seemed as though if I were understanding his theory correctly, if I am fundamentally a me a mind uh and if that mind was produced or brought forth from mind at large, then my mind is actually not an offshoot of my parents' mind, but it's an offshoot of mind at large because his his explanation was >> that the reason why our minds have these additional features to them is because we have had to evolve. So our minds have kind of evolved due to the need to survive. Mind at large doesn't need to survive. It just is. It's the entirety of everything. So it hasn't had the evolutionary pressures to kind of evolve from a sort of you might think of a simple mind like a nute up to a more complex rational mind like we are. But we have had to because we're on the earth. But then I was saying how can the evolutionary story still make sense given that um I am an offshoot of mind at large not of my parents mind. It's not like my parents have a dissociated experience. He >> So, so to me, I still think that's a problem. He the answer he gave me in our interview was was um relatively metaphorical. He talked about my mind being a sort of spin-off of of my parents' mind that like Eddie's in a stream. There may be these other whirlpools that spin off. So he seemed to sort of suggest that there was some way in which I am an offshoot of my parents' mind which is how the evolutionary change in mind could occur because in the evolutionary account obviously you need sort of changes in the DNA to be passed on genetically through inheritance but if you're not telling the story at the level of bodies telling at the level of minds I still find it hard how is it that mind itself could evolve in a way independent >> of mind at large if the individual people are alters of mind at large. So he did give an answer. I I might not be remembering exactly correctly. I remember I didn't find it particularly satisfying, but we did move on. If people want to see how he responded to that, you could look at our first conversation. But but for me again, these these problems all emerge from Castro's kind of idealism because he's still putting sort of the the scientific story front and center. Um so he's still wanting to use evolution to explain other aspects or use he uses theories like Carl Fristston's theory about membranes to and so on to explain uh why our experiences are not of reality directly and and this I suppose was the core thing that I found um dissatisfying about the Castro's form of idealism. It was better than pans psychism I think um but it still was taking the s of science as the bedrock way of then trying to interpret things and I guess maybe the idealism that I favor is a little more revolutionary than that it wants to say let's not look to science to understand the deep nature of reality let's look let's have a different basis of our metaphysics let's look for a way of trying to understand reality that doesn't assume something like the scientific method which is a very new way way of doing philosophy.
It's part of the analytic tradition, which is why it's calling analytic idealism. But that emerged in the late 19th, early 20th century as a project to sort of brush away some of the seemingly superstitious or religious uh elements in philosophy and try and ground philosophy in something uh respectable, bit more like science, um a bit more clear-cut in what's true and what's false, and get rid of any of this sort of speculative stuff. Whereas the certainly in Britain and and and in parts of America and um and other parts of the Commonwealth, the the kind of idealism there was um saying that these sciences are all great but but but metaphysics is prior to that. Uh these are only true within a small scope. Uh let's not suddenly shift allegiance to that. And then they had but then they still had a a rigorous methodology for how we understand reality. Um but it was quite different and and and and this really when you understand it ties into all sorts of debates that again it solves the knowledge question for me. It solves the nature of truth question. It solves morality. It solves so much. Um but it does mean well I'll tell you what it means just just a little bit of a a spoiler I suppose. It means that all of these other kinds of concepts that are assumed or bedrock or fundamental to the scientific explanation of the world. So things like the reality of time, the reality of causation, um how mathematics works to explain the regularity and descriptive regularity of the laws. All of that is seen as having to be interpreted itself in terms of our subjective experiences, experiences, agents, in terms of rationality in so rationality and feeling and agency are the starting points from which you explain what causation is, from which you explain what time is, from which you explain what truth is.
And then the stories of science and the truths of science sort of are quite far down the road of of how you understand reality. So the problem I think with with the castropian idealism is the same kind of problem that we have with materialism or with pansychism. They're starting from a point too far down the road and then they're trying to get back to the starting point. They're trying to get back to uh truth and knowledge and and consciousness from they're trying to draw that out of the scientific account.
Whereas I think we we need to interpret the scientific account and matter and everything else from um from something more fundamental which would be personal in nature.
This reminds me of Alvin Plantingga has a interesting thing about if evolution is optimizing for uh fitness and basically survival and you know sexual reproduction but not truth then the content of the thought inside of anything's mind could be true or not it doesn't matter so long as their behavior is working towards uh fitness that that is what evolution will select for he gives the example of a frog. As long as the frog shoots its tongue out and grabs the fly and brings it in, that behavior will be advantageous to the survival of that frog. But it could be thinking about Toltoy or it could be thinking about nothing. It doesn't matter. Or it could be thinking that the fly is actually a UFO. It it literally doesn't matter the truthfulness of the of the thought of the frog. The only thing that matters is the behavior. And I think that this kind of ties into what you're saying about what what is upstream and what is downstream. If we're meant to trust uh that our our minds are capable of bringing us to truth and if the reason that we're meant to trust that is because we're the byproduct of byproduct of evolution and and sort of that's been like we've adapted for that. We've adapted towards truth because it's helpful to survival.
I don't know your thoughts on this, but I thought his argument when I finally got it was really helpful in realizing actually there's nothing about evolution that's going to help us trust that our minds can bring us to truth.
>> In fact, you could even go one step further and say maybe poor ideas somehow are useful like illusions or delusions that somehow cause us to act in a way that is advantageous for survival. But maybe in in a sense we we must believe I mean now I'm stretching it further but we must believe untrue things in a sense that helps us sustain an illusion for that's good for our survival like there's no correlation between the two.
>> Okay. Yeah. Fantastic good thing to bring up. So this is a Plantinger is really just pointing to a long-standing debate over the nature of truth. What happened in the 19th century was was so radical and disruptive to the very way in which we understood everything. the way in which we understood the nature of the world. Um that the Bible is an authority in Genesis is being undermined by the fossil record, by dinosaur bones, by by uh textual criticism as well. We were starting to interpret the Bible differently, looking at who was the author, why did they say that, what were they their intent and so on. Uh and then evolutionary theory started to say we are not fallen creatures. We are risen creatures, right? There was no perfect bliss that we've fallen from. And actually everything that we are is just as a product of survival. Well, that made it was very obvious to people at the time that logic was under threat. Uh as because before we thought the reason we could understand the nature of reality like from Newton and these other sort of scientists is because God had given us reason as a gift that was related to his own mind and his own mind is was what created the world. But if you now thought that we didn't have a mind separate but that our mind had emerged and people are then wondering whether God even existed part of the death of God that Nichze later talks about. How do we make sense of truth? How do you make sense of some way of our mind connecting to a reality beyond it? So the pragmatist approach to truth came out saying that the problem isn't that we don't have any capacity to reach truth. We just have usefulness. The problem is that we think truth is anything except usefulness. All truth is is usefulness. So they would reject that view would reject the planting opposition by saying that there is no you're deluded to think there is something called truth that is separate from what would be useful or what could be justified for and so on. So you take the frog example.
The idea would be that um yeah sure if the frog believed that inside his tummy was the land of the flies and his job was to rescue those that had escaped and bring them back to bliss that would produce the behavior just as useful for the frog survival. So there's no fact of the matter as to which is true. But the thing is this also undermines science.
Like imagine >> imagine we take a Newtonian view of gravity as a force that attracts all objects. Obviously Einstein's view is slightly more sophisticated but let's stick with that. If I believed if I had a different if I had the alien theory of gravity instead which is that inside objects there exist these greedy aliens, little goblin aliens that love things.
And the more mass an object has, the more of these little goblins, invisible goblins live in it. and when they see any other mass, they run out and grab it and try and pull it into their houses.
Like I could flesh out the greedy goblin theory and it would give me exactly the same results as Newtonian force for example. So you could think then as far as the sums are concerned or the predictions are concerned again there's no separate truth to be had. And so so often philosophers to accept that and they'll say things like not only is there no nothing of called truth that's separate to usefulness. There's also nothing in terms of meaning separate to how that meaning would affect behavior.
That the only way I can understand what you mean is if I know how I could verify it, what could justify it, and how it affects your behavior. So I think that is the position you're brought to if you disagree with plan. If you sort of disagree with this idea of there being truth separate to usefulness. However, the idealist and going back to the same idealist that I like. The idealist that I like was sitting there saying truth is something separate to usefulness because usefulness is part of the domain of action. Truth is something to do with the domain of the intellect.
It's to do with understanding. It's to do with knowledge. And it doesn't just end up at usefulness. Here's partly why.
If truth is usefulness, you you pretty much struggle to maintain the objectivity of truth because >> because what's useful to you to believe and what's useful to me to believe could be different and they could be contradictory but then they end up being true. So for example, William James who was one of the early pragmatist and American um he admitted that truth was relative. It doesn't mean truth is subjective. It just means truth is relative. You could still be wrong, but you could be right in believing one thing and I could believe something contradictory. We're both true. So, for example, um it can be very use if you ask people how intelligent they think they are on a scale of 1 to 10, most people say something like seven, right?
>> Mhm.
>> That cannot be true. It cannot be the case that everyone is slightly above average or or or lots of people are slightly above average intelligence. But we all like to think of ourselves as slightly above average in most things.
And the psychologist will come and say, "Yeah, well, it's very useful to believe that you're slightly above average because if you didn't, you wouldn't bother trying hard. You wouldn't think well of yourself. That there are all these useful lies. If it's useful for everybody to think they're above average intelligence, then it must be true that everyone is slightly above average intelligence, which is if we're taking him from a mathematical point of view, that that that just is impossible, right? Or >> or or to your thing about the goblins inside of every planet, like there either are or are not actually goblins inside of every planet. And if you think that there are, and you're right, you're right. If you think that there aren't and there are, then you're wrong. Those are mutually exclusive truth claims that regardless of the utility of the belief and the implications of the theory as you parse it out mathematically as an alternative to Newtonian physics, there either literally are or are not goblins in the planet. And one of those is right.
>> Well, there is if you think that there is a a way of things in reality independent of the way we think about it >> or independent of the way we talk about it. But this is this is where you have these sorts of what I take of these three very different ways of interpreting the world. The two that we kind of have in play at the moment are the kind of what I think of as the realism which is the idea that there is this world out there of facts. Things are really thus and so >> whether or not we could ever know how they are.
>> This is this is linked to a view of truth called the correspondence theory of truth. The idea is that if I say there are goblins in matter, that's true if and only if in the world out there independently of how we talk and think about it, there really are some entities called goblins living in them or not.
Right? So that's a correspondence theory of truth and it's linked very much to this way of interpreting the world in the scientific way of the world is out there. It is the way it is and it's our job to replicate that in the way we talk and think. That's realism. The opposite one that's often in play now is the pragmatism one where they say, "No, look, the world doesn't have these facts out there. That's ridiculous. That's too that that takes the world to be too much framed by our language and our thinking.
The world just is itself. We have no access to this supposed world independently of the way we talk and think about it. The only way in which we interact with that world is through trying to do things. So when I try and act on my beliefs or my thoughts, it works or it fails. And that's all that there is. There is no additional story to be told. So scientific laws are true because they're useful because they allow us to build iPhones, allow us to do these things. Don't look for anything over and above usefulness. That is all truth is. So the planting position is saying that no, usefulness and truth are genuinely different notions or different normative things to aim at. If evolution was the only account you had, you can't get to anything more than usefulness or more than uh what is practical for survival.
So you shouldn't believe evolutionary theory uh because it's not true. That means evolutionary theory isn't true.
The flip side to it is thoroughgoing pragmatist will accept that. Just to be fair to Plenty, I believe his position was you can't be both a materialist um and believe in evolutionary theory as a legitimate conduit towards truth. I think that was his point. You can't hold both of those consistently and like you can't trust your mind as a mere byproduct of evolution to to uh truthfully lead you to the conclusion that evolution is true.
>> Okay. So I think then if he's if he's attacking only a particular metaphysics um that takes evolution to be the full story of the emergence of human reasoning then I'd agree with him. And this is linked with something that I I've actually have a video on my channel about which is the self-refuting arguments against causal determinism.
It's linked with the similar kind of thing. It's like if we are capable of knowing evolutionary theory is true then we have to be the sort of thing that couldn't have merely evolved because um similarly if we're the sort of thing that don't can't have free will we can't genuinely deliberate and distinguish truth from falsity and reason equally we can't reach truth. This is this was again was a debate that played out is logic just psychology. If you're an evolution, if you if you interpret our existence in purely evolutionary terms, you only have psychology. You don't have logic because logic is just ways in which we think, which is just psychology. We just happen to think that way. We've evolved to think that way.
There's nothing eternal or ultimately objective about logic even, right? It's just how we happen to think. So um if you take the evolutionary story to be the only account and everything to do with our inner life has been geared purely for survival. Yes. Truth, reason, logic, these things kind of drop away.
Yeah. But you can bite the bullet. As I'm saying, you can go fullblown pragmatist. You might not you wouldn't be a materialist strictly speaking. You just say, "Well, I don't know what the ultimate nature of reality is." And it's not the job of science or anything like that to tell you what the ultimate nature of reality is. It's just the job of science to come up with descriptions that if we act upon them, we do better.
We manage to >> build better technology, keep away diseases, produce more food. So basically, you take that evolutionary story right through to our reasoning processes. Our reasoning processes should be evaluated again purely in terms of how useful they are, how much they contribute to survival, but not how much they kind of match up to some reality ultimately independent of human practice.
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>> Pansyism is an improvement on materialism. It recognizes that consciousness is not reducible to matter. So, it's taking consciousness much more seriously. uh idealism is better than pans psychism because it starts already at the whole in some sense of conscious experience. It doesn't think that conscious experience is just simple things connected together in the right kind of way to be complex is taking the unity of conscious experience seriously.
Um, pragmatism I like in as much as it rejects the idea that there is a reality out there that is independent of the way we think about it, independent of the way we talk about it. I don't think that's the case. I think that the world um is um at least the world interacts with us in the terms that we bring to it. So it talks back to us in the concepts that we have. It talks back to us in the language that we can understand. And I think that is part of I mean if I go to go more sort of theological language is part of the grace of God that he is able to to get down on our level and communicate with us in ways that we can understand. But the ultimate nature of reality is not structured in the way in which we currently think or talk about it.
Ultimate reality is of a form that just would blows our understanding and the categories of our understanding completely. And you can say that without any kind of particularly high theology.
I think um I think that's really been clear since K can't that and and it's also part of where I think some sort of progressive politics actually goes right. I mean I have a lot to disagree with that but it's right that reality isn't neatly given and structured and parcled up.
uh we do play an active role in structuring and categorizing reality.
Okay, so they're all the different things that I like but where I think they're all impoverished to some degree. So let's put pragmatism to the side. Let's talk about the realist interpretations of all sorts including the castropian one. I would say they all take the realm of thought, the theories of thought and what we say about thought to to be the gateway um of understanding what there is. So in other words, uh if something is true, then it exists.
um if I cannot make sense of something, if something doesn't fit within my rational way of interpreting things, then it doesn't exist. In other words, anything that cannot be accounted for within my theory, therefore does not exist. The kind of idealism I think the main advantage of idealism is that you're saying reality is more than thought.
It's more than can be thought.
That there are things that by their very nature transcend thought and can only be known in other ways. If you're an idealist, there's a pretty good account of how this is. Um, philosophers are already familiar with different kinds of knowledge. They'll talk about knowledge by acquaintance, which is I can have a knowledge of you, Brandon, through our interaction. I have knowledge of my wife and that that knowledge we have through acquaintance goes beyond all the facts that I might be able to list about you or about my wife. So it's a form of knowledge that is not uh conceptual descriptive. It's not purely propositional, right? It's not >> would it be right to call it experiential?
So uh I mean the idealism that I that I would defend is going to say reality is is experience. Yeah. And we'd have different modes of experience. Not all experience is rational. Not all experience is cognitive. Not all experience is is thought. There is another kind of encounter, another kind of knowledge we can have which is knowledge by acquaintance. This is very linked to our aesthetic experience of the world. You you can't you cannot know I I think you can know about reality through doing art through doing beauty seeeking activities right um through our emotions I'm not Ben Shapiro saying facts don't care about your feelings in as though as though everything that's real is is what we can describe in terms of facts and that feelings are irrelevant. I don't think they are. I I think that we have if you deny our aesthetic the aesthetic dimension of human experience you are denying a major part of what there really is. So that has to be accounted for. So there's the aesthetic dimension. There's also our moral dimension or the dimension that we have as agents as willing beings. Not merely thinking beings, not merely feeling beings but also willing beings. when you try to entirely account for agency in a rational way as though it reduces just to our intellectual categories, it's very very difficult. Um >> you you get a shell. You you get something if you're doing it properly.
You get something, but it's a shell. So >> um I famously defend free will in a few videos on my channel and and I do put forward a theory of free will, but I don't think that theory fully captures free will. the same way I don't think our scientific theories of time capture time. They >> famously can't capture the flow of time for example.
>> Um so there are aspects to our willing dimension that are not and moral dimension that cannot be captured in a theory. So then I think it's a mistake to try and recapture morality or recapture aesthetics within a scientific account. Science should just say look this is not my domain. Okay. I'm just trying to explain an aspect that is it's not even a whole of thought. The whole of thought is contained in truth and you have mathematics and logic. They're not scientifically explainable. They're rational. Science is using those things to interpret our sense experience. The things that come to our eyes, nose, and and so on.
>> I I listened to this uh between uh two folks. I I'll get their name in a second here. Um and they the the one person said, "Okay, you could know all imagine someone is born in in uh a blank white room and then they're just given, you know, a book that gives them all of the information about an apple. So they they know every thing to know about an apple, but they've never seen an apple. And so they were arguing that at the that when they actually see the apple, there's something that they now know about the apple that they didn't know even though they knew every other thing about the apple other than actually seeing the apple for themselves. And I think that's what you're saying.
>> I think that's a version of what's called the Mary argument by Jackson. Um so he was arguing that there must be more facts than there are physical facts. And he imagines Mary, top-notch scientist in a black and white room. She knows everything about light waves, everything about the visual system, knows everything there. All the physical facts that there are, she learns and knows.
>> And then the idea is she leaves the room at some point and encounters a red rose >> and says, "Ah, that's what red looks like."
>> So the idea is that she knows everything about red, its wavelength. She has the entire scientific story. She knows all the physical facts, but that when she sees the flower, Jackson's conclusion was that she learns a new fact. She learns the fact of what red looks like.
Now, this is a something you learn in under a philosophy degree when you're doing philosophy of mind, which is the question of does that mean there are non-physical facts?
I think the best answer is actually to say no, it doesn't show that. What it shows that is that there are forms of knowledge that are not knowledge of facts. Right.
>> Well, yeah. That's what I was trying to connect between what you were saying and that. Yeah.
>> Exactly.
>> She she she now has a different kind of knowledge. She has knowledge of by acquaintance. Knowledge of of by connecting by being acquainted with redness. That's not knowledge about redness which the kind of thing she knew before the intellectual stuff could be.
It's it's an a felt experience of red nisters she's encountered. Um but it does show that there are more kinds of knowledge than you get through science.
So that does I think say that we need a deeper account of the world.
>> The counter that was given in this it wasn't really a debate. It was a it was a kind of a back and forth discussion podcast. The counter that was given was ultimately that type of knowledge that you're describing is a type of like a brain state. And if Mary, let's say, was able to manifest that brain state within the room, she would then even if it's a hallucination or something, she would then have the same type of knowledge as actually seeing the apple or the rose in the real world. So that uh input or stimuli is simply triggering the thing that we're now calling a new type of knowledge. But if you could get it apart from that stimuli, you'd still have the same thing, which I found to be maybe putting the cart before the horse a little bit in terms of the assumption of the ultimate thing being the brain state and not the interaction of the person with the environment. But I was curious how you might respond to that.
>> Okay. Okay. I haven't heard that before, but I can see what's being said. So, the idea would be that if she knew everything, she would know what brain state um coincided with red experiences and she could artificially stimulate that in herself and would undergo that experience. So, yeah, first of all, that would only be the case if you're effectively assuming physicalism. But if if if the dialectics of the argument are that physicalism is um can't sustain this idea, then the physicist could reply with that. Well, if physicalism is true, then she should should be able to do that. However, it depends how we're understanding the idea of knowledge. Presumably that red experience that she gets um is that knowledge of a fact.
She already knew what the brain state was, but now she knows that brain state is correlated with this and so the this thing is that doesn't see either that is nothing more than the physical fact that that is which is the brain state but she already knew that she already knew what the brain state was. So what extra knowledge has she gained then? It seems it's still whether there's a real rose there that triggered that brain state going on and her new knowledge or whether there wasn't it was artificially as a machine with electrodes to me doesn't make any difference as far as a thought experiment goes. It's still trying to trigger that idea that there is a kind of knowledge that you can only get through experiencing it firsthand, not through experiencing it as a subject rather than through experiencing it through an objective description. You can describe a brain state. It's a picture of a brain state, but it's not the same thing. So, I don't I think that any of these sort of thought experiments are designed to really pump the intuition that subjective experience can be broader than what we could objectively describe or we could objectively know. So, >> and you're saying even if even if your subjective experience was tricked, that doesn't matter whe whether there's a a fake rose or some other stimuli that's tricking the subjective experience. The fact that it is experiencing something that is very much perceptually like a red rose gets to the same point that you're making regardless.
>> Yeah. And you got to remember, I'm an idealist. I don't really think that there is a material red rose there anyway when we see red roses walking down the street. Right. So, so I I don't think you need to say there has to be some causal relation between the rose and the red experience. Now, what I'm all I'm saying is um and I think the thought experiment does quite a good job of showing is that we there are aspects of our experience that give us information or knowledge that are not reducible to a description or reducible to a fact that we might express in language or we might codify within a theory. Now, I will change tack a little bit. So there's those philosophical answers which are good but there's also a lot of evidence in um in terms of um child psychology about this too. I mean the the thought is that um infants and babies they don't experience the world cognitively. They don't experience a difference between themselves and their mother. They don't divide the world up into objects uh like a hand or a fist.
because their language hasn't yet developed. They they experience the ultimate unity of all things before they categorize and divide it up. And that that's something that comes later. And it when they do that, then they begin to what we call model the world. So here's a really good example of how this plays out. At a certain age, you give a you give a little baby uh say a rattle.
They're playing with it and they drop it. They just cry. They just come because as soon as they don't see the rattle or feel the rattle, they as far as they're concerned, it no longer exists. it's just gone. They're only aware of their immediate experiences, their immediate surrounds. They don't know the concept of time or before and after any of that stuff. But then at a certain point, you give that same baby a rattle. They're rattling it and they drop it. They don't cry. They they bend and look look over the pram. Where did it go?
>> Mhm.
>> That's when they're now recognizing there's a world beyond the limits of their immediate experience and they're modeling what that world would be like in thought. And then they're tracking what happens to things out of their immediate experience within the model they have of the world in their thinking. And they use that model of the world to direct their activity and help them predict what they will see when they look over the pram or maybe I'll see the rattle and maybe I'll be able to reach for it. So what what that shows and this is the idealists that I like really draw on this. They say we there are different aspects of our experience.
We have a kind of raw un unmediated experience of the world that we get through our sense perception but also through our sense of fear, our pains, our pleasures that these are all an immediate encounter with reality before it gets structured by our concepts, by our language, by our thinking.
>> The reason we don't take that immediate experience to be the whole of reality is because we encounter its bounds. We encount we there's something to that that's unstable. This is what FH Bradley said even in the 19th century. There's something about that's unstable. We recognize its finitude and that there is a world beyond our immediate experience.
But how do we get to that world beyond our immediate felt experience? He says through thought. We abstract features of this experience and we use that to build and construct conceptually the idea of a world beyond what we're immediately perceiving. To do that, we need to introduce concepts like time, concepts like space, concepts like causation, how things relate to others that we use to structure and conceptualize a world beyond our experience and then we use that as a model of how things are to direct our experience and to direct our understanding and and that that's where language comes, that's where thought comes, etc. Now what I think the error is with the realism position that we're talking about is once they've got this world of thought they say that's the whole world. They deny the the original experience that felt experience from which it came and they're trying to get this consciousness this what I'd take to be the primal primordial part of what it is to be a conscious living being.
They're kind of trying to fit that into the world of thought. But it's not. It's the grounds from which thought arises.
the grounds from which our concepts and ideas come. Here's where it is to be to me the most erroneous.
You look at philosophy of mathematics.
Look at the work of Frager and some of those people in the again 19th century.
Sorry that um the recognition is that there is there is nothing in the world that is quantity. Okay. If I give you a pack of car a deck of cards, I give you a deck of cards put in your hand and I say how many things?
You don't know. Depends. There are 52.
50. If you say cards, how many cars? 52.
How many suits? Four. How many decks?
One. How many jokers? Two or whatever.
Right? You cannot give me a quantity until you have a concept, what's called a sort concept, >> which gives you instructions about how to count, what things to count, and how to count how many there are. So Frager's insight is that quantity is a property of concepts.
It's not a property of the world itself.
>> It's a property of the concepts that we use to divide and structure the world.
So it's what he calls a second order.
>> A second order concept.
>> Okay. So that's the case. If quantity is actually a feature of our thinking about the world, you're going somewhere really weird. If you then say things like all we have in our scientific theories is mathematics. Everything is just numbers.
You go simulation theory. It's all just bits of information. You're already way down the track. No, we encounter the world qualitatively, not quantitatively.
We encounter the qualities of the world.
The the sense, the touches, the taste, the feelings, the stuff that Castro actually does a good job at talking about, right?
>> The reality is ultimately qualitative.
The quantity is that emerges from our structured way of trying to reach beyond immediate experience to model the world.
>> Mhm.
>> But where Bradley goes is he says reality cannot be nearly the felt experience because it's too finite. It's too limited. Thought allows us to transcend the bounds. But it does so at the cost of detail. It does so at the cost of importing structure and relations into reality that there aren't actually there. It has to use concepts that are contradictory in nature like time and space. And he has these very interesting arguments for why these are contradictory notions even though they're useful. So he says there must be some level at which reality is able to rejoin the realm of feeling and the realm of thought and he thinks the realm of valition and he calls that the absolute the absolute experience which for him is um kind of the consumation of truth, beauty and goodness. So that's that's my idealism. It's not one that just says it's all about action and activity. Nor is it just about consciousness being added to our purely descriptive theory of the world. It's one that takes our personal engagement with the world and saying reality must be a bit like what I experience but fully fleshed out in in in its infinite form. And for me we encounter where thought in its infinite form would be in the norm of truth.
we encounter where uh reality is an action in the norm of goodness and feeling in the norm of beauty. So I think we encounter the absolute in the values of our aspects of experience and and that would then link to my theology as well.
>> So you mentioned Bradley and that name might not necessarily mean anything to to the viewer. So who who is this Bradley that you're talking about? Yeah, Bradley is somebody I encountered early on in my PhD when I was looking at um whether reality should ultimately be treated as one or as a plurality. Uh a debate was going on in the contemporary literature drawing on scientific conceptions of entanglement and some other logical technical arguments. But I was very dissatisfied with it uh because it seemed to be presupposing a lot about how this question should be answered.
And I came across Bradley as a monist who again thought reality is ultimately one and and I was pretty hooked. So he was the most eminent philosopher in Britain at the time sort of mid to late 19th century. He his his his mentor he's at Oxford. uh his mentor was a chap called TH Green who sadly died in his 40s I think it was um who was making some strong gain grounds in sort of trying to make sense of what was the evangelical way of interpreting the world at the time it's an Anglican evangelicalism was a little bit different to the American evangelicalism >> um but trying to make sense of that and a commitment to the reality of ethics the reality of these sorts of given the new understanding of humans that's coming out of the sciences. So given evolutionary theory um and the emergence of psychology as a discipline treating us as nonrational this sort of stuff. So Bradley was part of that movement called British idealism and they drew some of the idealism from Germany uh but rejected Hegel's main view which was that reality and thought are one. So this is the stuff I've just been talking about. Really, what I learned from Bradley is that you cannot interpret reality without taking seriously the fact that we are subjects that are our perspective and our situatedness.
You you can't jump out to matter and try and get back consciousness or will or morality. So you start with that. but also recognizing human experience is broader than just thought and he was psychologically versed. And so for me he was weaving together all these ideas.
Now he so he his book appearance and reality is his main metaphysical work but he also had a two volume work on logic. He has a book on ethics because of this because he's interpreting reality in terms of system what he calls system ultimately a unity that things work together and somehow come together he was the main philosopher he was recognized as the champion of this of the British idealist movement very influential and basically what happened was GE Moore at Cambridge and Bertrand Russell decided that they were going to take him down basically um so they had debates um Russell and more were trying to rid philosophy of idealism as a as a starting position. Russell was attacking Bradley on the monism plurism thing.
Russell was developing logical atomism which is the idea that everything can be explained from the tiniest bits logically. He was arguing that reality itself must be a plurality that the things Bradley couldn't account for. Um he wrote Pink Hippia Mathematica as well which is again looking for the uh mathematical and logical foundations of mathematics and so he's involved in a very analytic technical philosophy project emulating science starting with the tiny bits explaining everything in those terms so he's attacking Bradley's monism gmore attacks his idealism uh trying to put in place a kind of a materialism arguing that idealism is contradictory Now philosopher the the the kind of the legend goes that Russell and Moore beat Bradley intellectually that sort of and and that from Russell and Mo's new way of doing philosophy analytic philosophy was born they're seen as a sort of founders of the analytic philosophy movement um however when people more recently have gone and looked at the arguments it's absolutely not clear at all that Bradley was bested intellectually there series of things that meant that Bradley's influence waned. So one was the world wars meant that the German foundations um of Bradley's metaphysics was seen as suspect. It was seen as somehow >> involved with the ways in which uh Germany had >> gone about its it his business. Um Bradley was not that mathematical and his form of logic was sort of falling behind the new mathematical way of that that seemed to promise a lot. It seemed to promise that we can explain reality through logical systems. There was a movement in Vienna that had a British offshoot as well that was saying metaphysics is itself meaningless, pointless. We shouldn't do metaphysics at all. So metaphysics is the idea of trying to make sense of reality um with the with reason, >> not just with experiment and so on.
>> Mhm.
>> Um so there's a collection of these things that kind of meant that way was going out of fashion. And there was also just this, I think, enthusiasm about where atheism could take us as well.
That we could actually we didn't need God anymore. We needed to sort of come of age and and recognize ourselves, stare in the face, our animal nature and the situatedness of everything. And >> I mean, there's a lot going on in in Western culture, right? And I think so Bradley was trying to rest was trying to harmonize uh religious sentiment and conviction of the reality of things like meaning and value and sentience and will and truth but accepting where science what sciences were telling us but trying to place scientific truths within a context that saw them as part of a broader understanding of reality and who we are and our place within it.
Saying yes to it. So he would have totally rejected the sort of religion versus science wars. He would have completely rejected that way of framing it. He would have completely rejected if we have time to go into it the way in which apologetics is done. Now I mean that's why that's why I don't go into the normal apologetic sides of things.
For him it's about how do we understand the fundamental nature of things? How does that relate to truth? How does that relate to goodness? How does that relate to our experience of it? How does that ultimately relate to the satisfaction we are seeking when we try to make sense of the world? So all of these ideas are so much more I think foundational than issues over who was the first cause and blah blah blah blah blah blah or whatever. when you kind of gave that that description that I guess you got largely from Bradley of sort of there being a a exterior sort of ultimate thing that is true like truth, goodness, beauty that these are not accidental, arbitrary or are merely a matter of individual perception, but that they are real and sort of out there like like they're they're act they're actually there. Um, if I heard you right, uh, that is putting to that is putting language to the question I was fumbling at earlier where if you just have all of these disassociated people but no no unifying thing uh that that we're all partaking in like like I didn't make up this internal thing that I'm calling good and you make up your internal thing that you're calling good.
uh why would those two things have any relationship to each other?
h how do we possibly measure which one is more or less right etc etc and that would I think also go for truth and also go for beauty um if if we're going to talk about beauty as well and so but the way that you articulated that um I guess there being a source or or or a fountain head that in a sense we're all drinking from in our human experience that seems from my non-f philosopher puny perspective to make better sense of the human experience. And when you were saying that reality seems more fundamentally personal than it does uh than than not, that that if I if I remember correctly was your preferred way of talking about the question of philosophy, what is ultimately reality rather than does God exist or not? Is I believe you said it does it seem more like the kind of thing that is fundamentally personal or not if I heard you right. But I I kind of want to lead you into that uh describing the difference there.
>> Yeah. So it it does I think in some ways it's helpful to come to this question having done my best to articulate bits about my view in that the question does God exist? If that's the way you think, if you think that's the most important question there is, that that's the way to um approach the difference between theism and atheism, I think you are severely underappreciating the gravity of what's at stake. Okay? If you think it's whether God exists, it's really not much different to whether you think um aliens exist or the Higs Bosan exists or something of that sort. You you have the idea that reality is parcled up into objects and properties or entities and properties and so on and is there this entity God in reality?
Um but and the way that that is played out um if you look at for example Graeme Opy's arguments for atheism it's and it seems to be the framework within which those people engage with that stuff I mean I don't know William Lane Craig too much but certainly if I look at like calam argument bits and pieces like this they seem again to suggest we have a theory of the world that we all agree on pretty much do we need to also add in some extra entity called God for that theory to work, right? So we we all know that everything that has a beginning has a cause and we we all agree that the universe has a beginning. So that means the universe must have a cause as well, even by your theory. So that cause is gone. So for me, that already assumes causation is real and it's a thing out there that connects events. It assumes that time is real. uh it already assumes all these other concepts that you're taking to be fundamental and fully agreed upon before you even get to the god question.
>> Whereas if you if you think no reality if if the question is instead what is the deep nature of things? What is the ultimate nature of everything? And if you think everything is ultimately more like a person but as Bradley would say super personal spirit in all its sent the complexity of sentience that we experience in fragments and bits and pieces the entire way in which you understand causation the entire way in which you understand time is thereby transformed.
So, for example, often the way the debate is set out, this is an this is an example I sometimes use is imagine Richard Dawkins and I sit down and we're discussing ontology, which is the question of what exists. I get my pad of paper, he gets his, we start writing down the things we think exists. And for a while, we're just perfectly. Oh, yeah. I think chairs exist. So do you. I think Adams exist.
So do you. I think blah blah blah blah blah. And then he puts his pen down and I go, "Hang on a minute. I'm going to add on demons. I'm going to add on angels. I'm going to add on heaven. I'm going to add on the Holy Spirit or whatever. And then the idea is well, we agree about so much and now we're just disagreeing about these extra things.
I think that's that is if if that is the way in which you set up the question, I think you're whatever you're proving there is some kind of idol. It's some kind of something that is less than God. It has to just be an idea. It has to be a concept. Whereas I think the question is how do we relate to reality as a whole?
Do we relate to reality as though it's something that we are in relationship with here? Am I in relationship with the created world? Am I in relationship with my own felt experience with um with my understanding of the world? Do I think the world is talking back to me, drawing me on to pursue truth for the sake of understanding? draw me on into behaving in be more and more aligned in ways of the good and to try and align my feelings to approve that which is beautiful and and so on. Am I experiencing God speaking to me in my very aesthetic life? Speaking to me as I pursue understanding, speaking to me as I try to live lead a life that to me is a posture that's taken towards is it's the starting point from which I understand everything else. It's not an entity to make my existing theory work.
So for example, let's take causation.
I have a my view on causation. It's it's a relatively mainstream view. It's an agency theory of causation. What it is for one thing to cause another is for the first thing to be a good strategy.
It's a good strategy to bring that about if you intend to produce the effect. Um I mean I got a lot of reasons why that's it's non-mechanistic. It's an agencybased theory of causation.
Now so my argument would be causation itself does not make sense unless you think agency is fundamental to the world at large. If you think that you already have agency written into the foundation of all things. you already have something that is far more like God than you do the idea of some finger that knocks over the first domino to set off a chain reaction of causes to bring about the universe or something. So for for me the the question of God is is the first question. It doesn't pop out the end of what you already accept. It it's too revolutionary for that. It's too kind of foundational fundamental. So so I go to metaphysics. I go to trying to better interpret everything else in light of what I feel to be the deepest nature of things. Where do we feel the deepest nature of things? I think the reason I use words like truth, beauty, and goodness is because I think beauty calls to us. There's something so authoritative and powerful about a piece of music that just lifts you out of your situation, calms your spirit, trans takes you up to the transcendent, and wraps you in a warm blanket. um truth.
You have these aha moments. Suddenly everything clicks. Your understanding sparks and lights and it's like that tastes good. My mind is satisfied by that. That >> shoots you all off in a whole bunch of other different directions. It's is a wonderful experience. How could truth itself >> rooted in understanding not be transcendent? And then of course, yeah, >> that means I have what's called a degree theoretic notion of truth. Saying things like reality is fundamentally truth, beauty, and goodness is way more true than saying than the truth that there are, I don't know, 173 books on my shelf. I mean, that >> true, but it's not satisfying intellectually much. I mean, a bit, right? And then the same with goodness.
Goodness is the value of living, the value of action. We as we align our lives with with the good in a moral dimension, we encounter some kind of satisfaction that transcends. We recognize these things are more real than the passing finitude of our current experience. The these are the ways in which we touch on what is most real, what is most fundamental. So to reduce that to some kind of concept that makes your theory work or something like that, um it doesn't really do it for me. And so, and this is getting back to to Bradley. So, so Bradley thought that because truth is part of what we're trying to understand when we do metaphysics, we have to be part trying to explain the nature of truth.
Clearly, what determines a good metaphysical theory from a bad metaphysical theory is not truth, right?
Because truth is part of what we're trying to do. So, he says, what is it we're trying to do when we're trying to understand reality? He thinks we are looking for intellectual satisfaction.
So the ultimate judge of any metaphysical theory has to be how satisfying is it intellectually. Um that doesn't deny that he obviously part of that is affirming the objectivity of truth which we've talked about. But that objectivity isn't that we say things that match up to some structured way the world is. No, these are true because they are beautiful and good. It's where truth combines with these other things and and and draws us on and and brings life to our understanding and and so on.
>> I could imagine someone just positing uh truth, goodness, and beauty in their abstraction as ultimate reality.
Ultimate reality is just this thing called goodness, this thing called beauty, this thing called truth. And what do you think of John 1? And and what do you mean by what do you think the logos is? And what do you and is that actually cogent that it that the logos beca put on flesh and dwelt among us? And this this whole idea of uh I like the way you put it. You said u something along the lines of why would history be the one discipline or or modality that is on kind of a Petersonian view that is like omitted from the conversation of what is deep, meaningful and true. And so, um, as I'm you were kind of starting to poke at the like the trinitarian view and how that kind of comports with this idea or at least maybe maybe we might disagree, but it it could be interesting, I think, to head in that direction because as I hear what you're saying, just to put my cards on the table, I think absolutely yes. Like reality is truthfilled, beautyfilled, and goodness. Not just because we perceive it as such or or we make that up or arbitrarily manifest that, but because that is baked into reality itself, but I would and I I don't know if we would agree here or not, but it'd be fun if we don't actually because I I would draw a distinction between the creation and the creator. And I would say that to borrow the language from the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the whole world is charged with the grandeur of God and it shines and it shines out like shining from shook foil.
I would say yes to that. Um, but I would still draw a distinction between I would say, you know, this cup isn't divine.
Um, the table isn't divine. The whole system in a sense isn't divine. But it but it is all um declaring something that is true, good and beautiful about ultimate reality himself. I would say >> truth, beauty, and goodness could just be these abstract things. um like isn't there more to the story than that? Well, I think that if you're interpreting this into the way Plato does, which is the idea that there's this world of the forms out there, there is the form of the good, the form of the beautiful, the form of the true, just as there's a form of the perfect circle, the form of redness itself, and so on. Then I would I would emphatically reject that. This is not a plato platonic kind of idea for exactly the reasons that I've been talking about. To say that is to fall back into this idea that reality is ultimately thought. Right? Plato's realm of the forms is a purely intellectual realm. These are intellectual entities.
Now, if I'm doing metaphysics, as Bradley would put forward, I am trying to explain reality to you using language. I'm trying to communicate thoughts to you and I'm trying to say the most true things that I can. But part of me doing this is to say but don't confuse what I am saying as a description for what the thing ultimately is because my whole point is that reality outstrips what can be described and what could be thought. So by calling it truth I've also been strongly trying to say that truth is that which draws us beyond when we try to think about things. It's the norm.
It's the value. It's what we are aiming at when we think >> which I have to give a name to. So I've called it truth and I think that's the best name we've got. Right? But really what I mean by truth is >> that which makes inquiry worth it. That which distinguishes good thinking from bad thinking. That which distinguishes error from truth. I mean >> it's it's a living force that we experience as the center around which all thinking orbits. It's the thing we posit to make sense of inquiry itself.
Similarly with goodness that is the thing that we are aiming at in our activity in our doing. I mean it might not be you might aim to to accumulate as much money as you want but I would say that that if you're living in a way that's not aiming at the good it is fundamentally dissatisfying to the to the nature of our well the spirit basically that which drives and animates us in our activity.
Similarly with beauty. So these are not abstract entities. Abstract entities are not real for that purpose. They are instead experienced as the norms and the drives and the values of every sphere of of human activity. Okay. So that's that one. I think um you talked about the difference between the creation and the created. So I would say yes and no. So I think that from our perspective, the world that we experience as finite centers is not God because it's finite and it's limited. So I've been using words like uh of course there are falsities. There are things we think that are not true. There are things that we do that are not good. There are things we feel that are not beautiful.
But in as much as they lack those things, they equally lack reality. And that's really just a claim about an affirmation about what the ultimate nature of things is. And that is experienced in terms of what we take to be the norms. So to be I think and this is now getting into areas that are a little bit outside of philosophy and I'm interpreting some of my Christian faith and some of the theology that I know from my philosophical lens. I'm >> going to be admit that, right? I am not coming at this as a theologian or as a biblical scholar. I'm coming at this I mean I'm familiar with my Bible but but but I'm thinking philosophically.
The notion of heaven for example I think is like our notion of the ultimate nature of reality. Heaven is a place of pure truth, beauty and goodness. Right?
And I think affirming that heaven is real is a way of affirming that that mode of being is more the true nature of things than this passing world of temp temporality that's passing away and everything in it is passing away. Uh and we're looking for God's kingdom to come and invade the earth and to become fully manifest. It's in seed form at the moment. I mean so much of the relig religious language talks this way. You talk about a fall that there was a perfection from which we've fallen and so on. That is the way I understand things. When I'm talking about the ultimate nature of reality, I'm talking about the way in which things ought to be.
That's the way they're norms. We recognize that our current existence and the world that we encounter is not perfect. But the the so that's the no bit. Creator and creator being differently. The yes bit is saying that however in some sense the world that we're encountering isn't nothing. It's not completely unreal. So it must h find its place ultimately in that completion or that consumation when all is said and done and so on. So every act must in some sense find its place in a redemptive way. So I don't think I don't think God is in the business of cutting things out. I think he's in the business of redeeming everything that all things are redeemed. This isn't universalism. Don't don't take get me saying things I'm not I'm not saying.
What I'm saying is that good ultimately evil is not is is is doesn't exist. Right? Because >> deprivation or deprivation, >> right? So at the end of this all things will be recognized within the context of the whole as playing a role in the ultimate goodness of all things.
>> Every false every error >> will find its place. Uh and this is the way Bradley tries to explain things like the problem of evil and the problem of error. He recognizes that these are problems with this very kind of positive optimistic view of the ultimate nature of reality. And what he points to is he says there's nothing illogical or incoherent about the idea of suffering contributing to pleasure. So you work out, you get sore in your muscles, that kind of makes you feel even better, right? That's a >> minor example, but that it shows that it's not impossible for pain and suffering to actually when seen in the context of the whole recognized to find its place.
>> Or a flu shot.
>> Flu shot, right? There's all these different ways. So I think in that sense I don't I can't really make sense of there being anything >> independent entirely independent of God because then it would have to be a substance. Therefore it be capable of maintaining its own existence. It would have to be its own engine of its own being. And I I think that God must ultimately be the grounds and the source from which everything finds its place.
Even though within that we can recognize um the a distinction between the more real and the less real, the more true and the less true and so on.
>> Just for clarity sake because I think I'm tracking with you but what would be the difference between God and heaven on your view?
>> Um I've not really thought about it. Um I think obviously the the heaven isn't usually taken or understood in personal terms. It's usually understood in terms of space of interaction.
>> But there are there is also language in heaven that sort of talks about God pervading the entire place. You know there is no sun. Everything's >> illuminated by the glory of God and so on. I believe, and Bradley doesn't, by the way, but I do believe in the continuation of conscious experience after death, >> but that there's very little to work with on what that's like other than from a Christian perspective, looking at Christ after the resurrection and so on.
>> Mhm. For me, heaven is about a I interpret heaven in the same way as an affirmation of the ultimate justice, beauty, truth, and goodness woven into reality. So I take I take heaven >> to be saying that the finitude of our experience on earth cannot be the whole story.
>> Mhm. Otherwise reality is not just reality is not beautiful. So it's the and and actually when you look at the the when heaven and the notion of the afterlife arose in Jewish thinking it was exactly for this reason right it was because there were faithful devout Jews that in in service to to to the law got viciously slaughtered and uh def um and uh desecrated by by by the Greeks I think it was. And so they're like, "This can't be the end for these righteous Jews. God must see justice done. They must be resurrected." And because the good don't always get what they deserve.
So So I think I interpret heaven not in a scientific way. Well, it must be some literal real place or realm that it may be, but I don't see why. I don't think that's the reason it was originally talked about. I think that heaven affirming the existence of heaven and in its reality over this world is affirming the greater reality of the kinds of things I'm talking about. But I think >> but would you would you agree though that there like I guess what I'm getting at and if this is where we disagree then then there's nothing wrong with that.
we're allowed, you know, but I I think it's important to understand.
Um, so on one hand, you have the the caricature of God as this ma like grandfatherly character with a white beard in the sky sitting on a cloud, which we're both totally rejecting.
We're saying like that's the materialist problem. You know, the classic leelas builds the system of the solar system and goes there's no god in it. You know, that type of an idea that we're both totally rejecting and saying that's a that's a straw man. And that's silly.
That's not what that's not what anybody means by God. Um, on the other hand, I think that there is a potential mistake of um blurring the lines between uh like heaven and God or earth and God because I would agree with you. Heaven is a is would be a place where the the perfect is made real. Like the goodness is is fully instantiated whereas now it's part like it things are not quite as they ought to be. the same with beauty and the same with truth.
Everything in that arena is as it ought to be is is as it um as we would hope that it would be. But I don't think that my view is I don't believe that like heaven um I don't believe that space-time matter and energy are eternal and I don't believe that heaven created them.
I think heaven in some sense I agree with you. I don't know exactly but in some sense is forthcoming but I think that in terms of a grounding for these things that you're talking about truth goodness and beauty there has to be some uh I I basically define or understand God as that the source the architect the the personality who is who is goodness is truth is beauty but is also so personal. He's not the same thing as heaven. He's not the same thing as uh like he's not embedded into matter like pansychism would say. Consciousness is is embedded into or or it's a he's not a property of the material world. Um I also don't think that he's merely the construct that we use to sort of drape over top of mental proper like in an idealism sense. I think that he's an actual um like he has a will. He has um a heart. not not a physical heart, but he he actually um the way that we are different from the the chair that we're sitting on is is telling us something about what he is like. We we have agency, we have personality, we have we perceive beauty, goodness, truth. I think all of the things that are human unique on a biblical worldview are the things that we can look to as clues to what he's like. We're in his image.
we're a certain way. He's more so that way. He he's more he he is a greater uh not just a bigger human but he but we are derivative of his nature. So and I would say and tell me if you this is all feel free to you know it'll be fun. Um all in a way that is unique.
That's I guess that's the point I want to make. My my view is that is that humans are uniquely in his image and the things that we could look to and say it's weird that the tables aren't having this conversation about reality and we are that I think is a clue to what God is like. And I so emphasizing the the idea really of personhood. That that's the main point I'm trying to uh that I want to posit here is I believe it's very important that we that we understand God is personal and therefore relatable because I think the whole enchilada with the whole human experiment and the reason that anything exists other than him at all is in order for that relationship to take place that we're created in such a way that we can actually relate to him like you said we have reason but he has re revelation and reason and revelation are supposed to They're they're designed to connect together so that we're propelled into the truth himself. That's what I believe. But what do you think?
>> So, first of all, remember I don't think there is a chair.
>> I don't I don't think that when you talk about creation or the world. Um I don't maybe we're using thinking about different things. I'm not thinking about just plants, trees, and buildings, right? I'm thinking about the sum total of human experience. It involves will.
It involves aesthetic experience and so on. So I think that God is that which we experience as the norm within every sphere. Right? Um so the degree to which I try to understand the world then I the the world of my senses so that that the restricted idea of the world that we get in science then I'm encountering God as my understanding grows and as I encounter truth that's encountering God intellectually encounter God aesthetically as I gaze and wonder at the beauty in in a in a flower and so on.
>> Okay. So, so God is in. So, so for me, the world that God created is not the material world or what we're used to calling the material world. I would interpret the and there are lots of reasons for this. I would interpret the Genesis account as the creation of consciousness as well.
>> It's a creation that we each individually experience uh as infants coming into the world. If you look at >> things get structured, they initially are chaotic. Some of the stuff I talked about how our experience grows out.
Okay. So then what is heaven? heaven. If you're talking about heaven as a landscape >> that has trees and rivers and stuff. So, if we're taking the kind of pictorial language in Ezekiel and Revelation and so on as though it's like this world but shinier and more gold, right?
That is not God, right? Because that's only an idealized vision of a fragment of human experience, what we perceive through our five senses.
>> Mhm. Um, but look at look at some of the language you get in the Bible. Look at the Lord's prayer, right?
Our Father in heaven, holy is your name.
Very different. Your your your nature is far above ours. Um, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So if we're taking heaven to be not merely a beautiful landscape, we're also taking it to be the place where the gap between will and reality is closed.
>> So we experience our will as I want something. You only will for things that are not already actual that are not manifest in reality. And you try to realize that bring that into reality by doing things you are trying to connect.
So heaven is the place where that gap between what is willed and what is is closed.
>> Would you agree that there's also a a character in that prayer called in that case the language uses father who who is the one who possesses the will that is that is playing itself out in that way where the gap is closed. But the father has a will that is being done in a clo in a closed gap way in a in heaven. Or would you or would you want to erase the father out of the prayer?
>> Not erasing the father out of the prayer. Um I think well look I think there are there are also just different understandings of heaven and esquetology and everything playing in here. I suppose I would lean more towards the idea of not heaven being a separate realm to the earth, but but the the prayer that heaven becomes manifest on the the new heavens and the new earth, right? Where those gaps are healed up, the gaps between what God wills and what is. So if we're understanding so our father I think this is a this is an appeal to recognizing us as made in his image as the s god as the source from which we have come uh recognizing therefore that it is our our purpose to to become more and more like him and then the prayer is therefore for God's space for that place where god's nature is p manifest more purely his glory is more evident His will is more done to become manifest in the earth. That's the way I understand the idea of the kingdom being here in seed form. And we are seeking for that to become fully manifest.
And when I say remember on earth, I don't mean in this material world blah blah. I just mean that within the human experience and the divine experience that that gap is closed that God's it's really the language of asking for the holy spirit as the seed form of god within the s within the human heart to grow and manifest so that we are become manifest that image of god through taking on his attributes and so on. Um, so I don't really I'm still trying to think whether we agree or or disagree.
>> I I essentially understand John 1 to be saying that there is this um that God is I I think it's Aquinus says God is always previous. He's always prior. So there's this um I am that I am. His his existence is equal to his essence. God and at a certain point in time he uh enters into like he comes to planet earth basically in in the in the body of in in the form of Jesus and in that sense sort of the the logos which is I think we would agree about that but actually um puts on flesh is the language puts on flesh and walks among us and elsewhere in scripture Um it said that he is the image of the invisible god which I I think that's a really brilliant idea. He he in his sort of human p perceptual form where he is actually speaking uh Aramaic in a way that can be understood.
He's on he's on earth. He's on a horizontal plane, you know, uh, and he's giving us the clearest picture of what God is like, which I think for one, just briefly, ties into what you're saying about goodness, truth, and beauty in a really powerful way because he is the ultimate human in those areas clearly.
But I think the reason for that is that he's the um he's not just another person in the image of the source or in the image of God but he is the source actually instantiating himself into into what is secondary to himself whether we talk a materialist will call it what right so like does the William Lane Craig like it's it's matter is secondary he and you might say no like uh in an idealist sense like the would you say that there is anything secondary Or do you think it's all like do you have in your view a state or a time when there is God apart from any other thing like apart from any um what would normally be called creation?
>> I think I agree with your intuition about the prior but I I interpret prior not as in previous in time but prior as in more fundamental, more basic, more real. Um so and and so really then the entire position I've been putting forward to you is saying that yeah truth is something to which our intellect has fallen from and we're trying to get back to it. It is prior. It's the grounds from which from which we have come from which we have fallen and so we we're seeking to get back to it. So I think >> I think I probably agree with you but you know would probably describe it in other terms.
>> Okay. Okay.
>> John one.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I want to hear John one.
Yeah. Let's go there. So I would say yeah I think John one is is fascinating.
What you have there is you have first of all the logos the Greek logos which has always been linked with the idea of language and thought and structure and the idea of the logos was all things are made through him. Now before we get to the personal Jesus Christ which comes later the logos I think is very much tied in with the sort of theism that I'm presenting and it's very much tied in with the >> forms of experience I was talking about as well that we have this raw encounter with the world that isn't structured.
It's this um linked actually to Genesis I think 1:1 the Tobover with the void and waste before with the spirit hovering over the water.
>> You get this idea of this sort of chaotic unformed >> sort of being right but then and then the word comes separating light from darkness separating land from sky sky from from beneath from the waters and then and then the land from the sea and so on. So >> the logos and the word comes in to separate and categorize this is here and this is here and set the limits and no further and so on.
So the logos is that which structures some kind of underlying raw being. And that's exactly the metaphysics I'm talking to you about. We have these two modes of experience of the world. So that which structures is linguistic is intellectual. It's knowable. That's the logos, the word logic and word all tied in that Greek notion. Now what John is saying is that that structural manifestation of the underlying nature of being that we recognize as being that which frames all that is has manifest in a personal form in the life of a particular individual in history.
So so far in our whole conversation I have not been arguing for Christianity.
I've just been arguing for a metaphysical view that would be I would link with theism.
>> Christianity is is a is an additional thing. It's a it's a claim a historical claim about the nature of a particular person that we would say is the ideal or potentially perfect I don't know exactly how you might use that word manifestation of the deep nature of the universe in human form. I think that's what John is getting at. Now, as a Christian, I'm going to affirm that. And what that means then is that this breaks the platonic abstractness of the good. We can recognize the good in our own life and how it manifests in our own life. And as we're driven to live a certain way that we that is morally satisfying and claims an authority in our moral life. I think that's what we experience in a real account of morality.
>> But what is that like? Well, we now have a manifestation of what the good looks like lived in human flesh within the finite confines of of a body of flesh and blood in Jesus Christ. And so, Christianity affirms if you want to know what good looks like in the push and pull and the nitty-gritty and the complexity of a life lived on lived here among us, Jesus is the representation.
So my trinity is that God the father or God transcendent is the is kind of the God I've been talking about most of the time right that we experience in the values in the whole of our experience. Jesus Christ is God encountered among us in the public nature um as an entity that we can relate to and engage with that is one on a similar sort of level to us as humans as well. And then the Holy Spirit is the encounter with God we find within ourselves as that which can be tr the transformative power of those values to enable us to to to become transformed in our in our thinking in our feeling in our action. And so in some ways I think getting back to the early conversation heaven is when our felt world has been fully taken over Holy Spirit so that we feel heaven as well. So heaven is part of our felt experience or God is part of our felt experience as if it's from outside in the same way we encounter truth and and goodness as well. So last thing you mentioned about Peterson. Um so I think what I said to you was and this might help make sense of why I wouldn't wholeheartedly say oh no creation is one thing, God is another. Um Peterson said in this interview once he was asked like do do you think there was a resurrection or do you think the resurrection was true and he said something like I think the resurrection is like more true than true or like when the deepest truth you >> death and resurrection is a part of natural life cycles it's a part of psychology it's a part of all these sorts of things and I think the interviewer was a bit frustrated and says something like yeah but what I want to ask you is if you could go back in time you're staring at the tomb and you in Israel at the time, would you see a body walk out? Right? In other words, is it historically true or literally true as people say? And Peterson is sort of >> at that time anyway was sort of hedging a bit. And as an idealist, I'd want to say what's so special about history?
Like I don't I think it's the materialist or scientific intuition that thinks reality is where the world is at.
It's in the sequence of events through time. It's in how the laws interact.
That's reality. Our way of thinking about it is layered on top and a point of thinking is to kind of match that reality and that's truth. Everything else is poetry or something and it's the idealist is rejecting that entire way of thinking. Reality is not at what plays out in history. Reality is in the experience we have of the world both in idealized ways and in the reality we encounter. In that case, if we are finding death and resurrection as the fundamental way in which we have to in understand and interpret everything, if we're finding it here, there, and everywhere in all of our thinking, why wouldn't you find it in history?
You'd expect to find it in history as well. It's just another domain of understanding or another domain of reality. And if what if you do that and you think, well, since we're finding death and resurrection everywhere else, maybe we should look to see if it happened in history. As soon as you do that, there's a pretty good candidate, right?
um which would be Jesus Christ. So I I think that this way of thinking makes Christianity a kind of a well duh or a kind of a really natural step to take.
And then what you're thinking is given that I have this intellectual way of understanding the deep nature of things and given that if I want to see how that might what that might look like like in a lived out human person if I'm going to try and copy that. Oh, there's this guy Jesus of Nazareth that loads of people say is what it looks like to live in perfect harmony with the deep nature of things. And that's what I think his miracles manifest. It show he can control the waves and control the mountain because he is what we would say in philosophy a particular that instantiates the universal values. is the whole intellectual ideas manifest in a particular concrete person right that we can interact with and engage so he then demonstrates to us what goodness looks like what a life of beauty looks like a life of truth looks like and then that's where Christianity comes in and you can christoologgically then understand what goodness truth and beauty are via understanding what they looked like or were manifest in the person Jesus Christ that's what I think John's getting at um in John 1 that the the go that the the log ghost the way of understanding categories and that the appeals to the intellect took on flesh and dwelt among us and that enabled us to get a grip on the nature of the invisible God. It was God made manifest in the flesh. Yeah, I think I think those views can come apart. You could take the theistic metaphysics bit separate to the Christianity bit. But as I say, I think I think the Christianity follows quite naturally in that worldview and it certainly helped me make sense of my Christianity as well.
>> One reason I really have enjoyed this conversation and talking with you is that um your knowledge of sort of the philosophical terrain from the 19th century forward I think is really helpful for people to uh to to sort of see what is on the table. And then as we've kind of gotten into ultimately like the incarnation of ultimate reality in the person of Jesus, um I just hope for someone maybe listening to this whole thing that that the context and the groundwork and all of this that you've laid um is at least helpful in the sense of explaining how that is a far more plausible concept in light of this whole conversation than it is if you again assume just a physicalist model of the universe and then there's this one guy this one time who died and then came back to life. I mean, give me a break.
That that's absurd, right? And so I I hope that this is at least helpful in terms of kind of putting every putting proper weight to the different schools of thought that exist. And then um and I think you've done a phenomenal job of kind of walking down that path of philosophy over the last I guess maybe 150 years or so. Um, and like I said, there's a lot more that we could unpack from here. Uh, but any any last thoughts or any anything um I I guess that you want to add at the closing here.
>> Yeah. Well, if I could be rude, I'll make a little pitch for where people can go to great more.
>> No, please.
>> Yeah. So, I mean, I have a I have a YouTube channel. I I talk about some of this stuff on there. I don't usually go quite so heavy on the theism side. I I keep things generally philosophical. So, that's just Dr. Nathan Hawkins. So you can use my name. What I am trying to do though is if there are people who want to understand this stuff more deeply and rigorously um I've got a Patreon page that you can find where I am monthly doing conversations on particular articles or papers um that people can join in discussions and ask me questions and we could hash this out a bit more as well as I'm trying to build a bit of a community.
So, for example, um, next month we're looking at an article by FH Bradley entitled faith, where he's trying to explain what he thinks faith is more broadly than just religious faith, but how faith works in all areas of thinking. So, I mean, if that sort of stuff sounds uh interesting to anybody, I'd suggest do that. It'd be great to to have you with us, and I'd appreciate your support as well. Um, but otherwise, it is quite hard to find this stuff. Um, I mean, I would recommend reading some of the the British idealist thinkers, but it's hardgoing. I mean, it's it's was written a long time ago. It's not that familiar. You need a lot of background to it, and I'm still trying to unpack a lot of it. Um, but it I can just say that it has been transformative to my own faith and and what you said at the end, I think, is really a big part of it that I' I've always been a Christian. I've always believed, but I didn't understand what it was that I believed. It was really just something that I couldn't let go of more correctly. I think it was something that had a hold of me, but I was seeking to understand it. And I think when I started to reinterpret and understand how we make sense of everything in a way that's historically grounded, rigorously intellectual, then things like believing in resurrection is not an aberration. It's a natural outworking of how things are.
Um, and that is incredibly rich and powerful. And you'd said early on, I think it's our culture is hungry for something like this. It's hungry for something where we can place values, moral values um, and meaning in at the ground floor of our way of in understanding everything. And to do that, I think you've got to you've got to you've got to be idealist. Idealism for me is the only metaphysics on the table that could at all support the weight of what we need supported right um and in a way that I think contributes to a religious outlook because my religious outlook before was basically materialist basically a materialist conception of the world and then I believe but when I die I disappear to this other place right whereas I think I think if rigorous metaphysical view can kind of integrate then it transforms the way in which you understand the religious account as well. Um so yeah that was that would be my last thoughts >> brief briefly put when you say that there's like a pattern of death and resurrection and that's the norm and then why would history be the exception to the rule? Why are we privileging history as something that doesn't get uh to participate in that uh you know that thing that Jordan Peterson is referencing. Uh what what are other examples of that or in case someone's like what do you mean death and resurrection is nowhere? there's no such a thing anywhere and it's not um it's nothing at all like it does it it doesn't exist like how would you like I I guess what do you mean when you say not not only does this exist were in history in this one case but it exists all over the place at at different levels what what are we talking about there >> so I have to say this is something that Peterson was talking about to do I think with Yungian psychology that that the that the concepts of death and rebirth and resurrection are all over the place.
Um I mean so so I'm not I mean I'm I'm the concept guy, right? Um so >> so I will um what I would say is that I mean obviously it appears in seed time and harvest and the rhythms of nature and uh our own experience of having children and so on. So it is a part of that. Um but my my pitch I think from my metaphysics for um for taking there to be a manifestation in the world would be more along the lines of what John one is getting at which is that there's debates could you think there could be a color for example that exists as a form that there is some pluress but nothing has that color I don't think so I don't think it makes any sense to think there can be these universals that are nowhere manifested in a particular >> if that's the case and if I'm affirming the ultimate nature of truth beauty and goodness and I'm affirming the ultimate unity of reality because I'm a modest then I have to say there exists a unity of truth beauty and goodness that's a universal idea that applies generally to the whole of reality so I think it must also appear in particular form in reality and if I'm saying that's also best understood as personal but more it's the transcendent personal as that which draws me in my finite fa fallen failed experience and I'm saying it goes beyond that is infinite in nature is perfected and it's fully unified and at one with the world and all that is well if that's part that that means that I should look for a particularization of that and then Jesus would be a good candidate for that >> got it okay that's awesome
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