Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Pat Flynn on Why You Should (Re-)Consider Religion

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Politics and religion—the two taboo topics you’re never supposed to bring up on a first date. Podcasting is similar. Unless your show is explicitly on either of these subjects, as soon as you even comment on them, the “stay in your lane” comments and emails start flying. Well, I’ve never been one for orthodoxy, so here we are, with yet another deviation from the usual fitness content—a discussion with my friend and fellow podcaster and author Pat Flynn on religion, and specifically why us moderns should care about it more, not less. In case you’re not familiar with Pat, he’s a fitness expert known for his kettlebell prowess, a podcaster, and author with several books to his name, including his most recent How to Think About God, which is an illuminating, philosophical look at faith. Pat’s also a philosopher by training who has made the spiritual trek from atheism to catholicism, so he has not only read widely and thought deeply about this stuff, he also understands what it’s like to be all over the spectrum on the many issues that religion touches. In this episode, Pat and I discuss . . . Whether having religious beliefs is inherently good The personal and societal benefits of religion and why you should care Child molestation and cover-ups in the Catholic church Why God permits evil to exist and whether we have an obligation to fight it The principle of illumination and Pascal's wager And more . . . So, whether you’re religious or not, if you’re committed to flourishing to the best of your ability, and certainly if you’ve enjoyed other episodes I’ve done with Pat Flynn, I think you’ll like this one. Press play and let me know your thoughts! 12:37 - Do you think religion in general is good? Do you think having some kind of religion is better than having none? 17:39 - Do you think religion has benefits on a societal and personal level? 38:26 - What if islam becomes the number one religion in the world? What does that mean? 40:40 - What does indefectibility mean? 52:25 - What are your thoughts on what’s happening with child molestation inside the catholic religion? 1:03:38 - Do you think we have an imperative to fight evil? 1:11:29 - Have you ever thought that maybe one day the religion you believe in might be wrong? Would you give up that religion if you knew it was wrong? 1:17:26 - How can you determine for yourself what religion is true to you without becoming a professional philosopher? 1:21:17 - What if you’re wrong? 1:32:57 - Where are some good resources for people who want to know more about catholicism? --- Mentioned on the show Shop Legion Supplements Here: https://legionathletics.com/shop/ Articles and Docs Pat Mentioned: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AAPQ9UAoKjN6kItIozrPggVqXkg156mfDuJhZd3Hdqk/edit https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3671693/ --- Want free workout and meal plans? Download my science-based diet and training templates for men and women: https://legionathletics.com/text-sign-up/

Hello, my lovely listener. I'm Mike Matthews. This is Muscle for Life. Welcome to a new episode, and thank you for joining me today to talk about religion, one of the two taboo topics you are never supposed to bring up on a first date, right? And podcasting is similar, actually, because unless your show is explicitly about either of those subjects, as soon as you even comment on them, the stay in your lane comments and emails start flying. And I've never been one for orthodoxy and I don't care what people think I should or shouldn't talk about. So here we are with yet another deviation from the usual fitness content. This is a discussion with my friend and fellow podcaster and author Pat Flynn on religion and specifically why us moderns

should care about religion more in this horrific year of 2020 and not less. At least that is Pat's position. And I don't disagree. I am not a very religious person, as you will hear me explain in this episode. That said, I certainly have religious beliefs and I do think that religion matters both personally and socially. And I think it's a very interesting subject because it is so uniquely human and it is so deeply ingrained in our nature. And the implications are great. If one religion or another is more or less correct about their basic suppositions, then what could be more important than discovering the answers to some of life's biggest questions, right? Now, in case you are not familiar with today's guest, Pat, he is a fitness expert known for

his kettlebell prowess. That's how he pays the bills. He's also a podcaster and he is an author with several books to his name, including his most recent, How to Think About God, which I read and enjoyed. I found it an illuminating and philosophical look at religion and faith. And the reason Pat wrote that book is he is also a philosopher by training. That's what he studied in school. And he's somebody who has made the spiritual track from atheism to Catholicism. So he has not only read widely and thought deeply about this stuff, he also understands what it's like to be all over the spectrum on the many issues that religion touches. And in this episode, Pat and I go all over the place. We talk about whether having religious beliefs is good or not.

We talk about the personal and social benefits of religion and why you should care. Again, that's Pat's position in particular. We even talk about child molestation and the cover-ups that have occurred in the Catholic Church. Yes, we do go there. We talk about evil and I ask an obvious question, which is if God is all-knowing and all-loving and good, why does so much evil exist? And should we do anything about it or is that just God's will? We get into the principle of illumination and Pascal's wager and more. So whether you are religious or not, if you are committed to flourishing to the best of your ability in your life, and certainly if you have also enjoyed some of the other episodes I've done with Pat, I think you're going to like this one. Also, if you like

what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company, Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. And we're on top because every ingredient and dose in every product is backed by peer reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends, for example, and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. So that means no artificial sweeteners, no artificial food dyes, which may not be as dangerous as some people would have you believe, but there is good evidence to suggest that having many servings of artificial sweeteners in particular every day for long periods of time

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supplements that work, please do consider supporting Legion so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like this. Mr. Flynn is back. Back for another conversation with the legendary Mike Matthews. Thanks for having me on again, man. At least I'm a legend in my own mind. That's what my mom says at least. Right. The self-advertised legend works for me too, right? Self-styled. So here we are to talk about certainly one of your favorite subjects and something that I haven't spoken much about actually outside of our first of this ongoing series of non-fitness things. And the reason being is I'm not a particularly religious person. It's

not a big part of my identity. I'm certainly not anti-religion. I'm actually very pro-religion. But in my day-to-day life, so much of my time is consumed with the things that everybody knows that I'm doing, like recording podcasts, work, and some time for working out, and some time for reading, and pretty much all of my reading, I read on a genre rotation and most of it has to do with work. Or I guess you could say self-development, but I don't read self-help books because there was a point where they just, it became unproductive. I was just running into a lot of the same ideas rehashed with

80% filler, like new filler, basically new stories, new anecdotes, same principles. Yeah. Just a different flavor of mental lollipop. I get it. Exactly. It's a good analogy for it. And so I have a list that I call just be smarter of books. So there's a lot of stuff in there that is, and it sounds pretentious, but maybe it's a little bit more intellectual or a little bit, it takes more time to get through. It's denser, but I find that ultimately more rewarding because of how many lollipops I've already eaten in the past. And religion is actually not in the rotation. I did spend quite a bit of time reading about religion in general and specifics of different religions and came to some conclusions at that time. And since then have mostly just focused on the worldly affairs of my life. Sets and reps. I get it. Yeah, exactly. That's all that really matters is how big are your biceps? You know, whatever comes in the afterlife, I just want to

be jacked for it. Okay. You want to look good going in, right? Regardless of where you end up, as long as you look the part, right? Yep. Yep. So this should be an interesting discussion for me. And you have spoken about in our previous discussions, religion has come up here and there. I'm sure most people know that you were once an atheist and now you are a Catholic and you went through quite a, I guess, a journey, a spiritual journey, because those are pretty polar opposites. Certainly. Yeah. No, I was just going to say, well, first I want to make a remark. I think if you aren't interested in religion properly understood or the religious questions, there's probably something wrong, right? I mean, like. I would agree with that.

I have some evidence of this in the sense that if you sit down, you have good conversations with people. They always veer, if not to the religious, at least the broadly philosophical, the deeper questions of life, right? So, you know, I am a philosopher by training. So in one sense, I was always interested in the biggest philosophical questions, which we can get into. And by initially considering them, I became an atheist and we can kind of outline the journey there if we feel that it's relevant, which it probably is. And then by consistently, and I would say more thoroughly trying to answer those questions, I gradually began to change to the point where I eventually became Catholic. But I have always,

always, always been interested in the biggest questions of life. You know, why is there something rather than nothing? Why am I here? Is there any purpose? Is there any meaning? I seem to perceive a realm of kind of moral values and duties. Is there any real binding force to that? Is that just some type of massive delusion? Is there life after death? Am I just a purely material being? Is there any immaterial aspects about me? What does it even mean to be material? Like all these big questions I've always been immensely interested in. I think most people in some sense are, and I don't know if this is the case for you, Mike, but when I started doing more philosophically and themed or religiously themed episodes on my podcast, regardless of

where people were coming from, because I have people who follow me who are sort of hardcore atheists to hardcore Catholics, right? Or Christians or even other religions. I've had people email me from all over the world. It is the religious and philosophy-based episodes that get the most attention, like consistently. So whatever other interests people have in sets and reps, and I think that's great. You know, I love getting a pump like the next dude. It's great, right? There's some, like, if you aren't interested in this stuff, like there's got to be something wrong, right? There's some, like, if you aren't interested in this stuff, like there's gotta be something wrong, right? Like where you've undergone some like severe repression or indoctrination because the human mind, I would argue, has a natural bent towards just wanting to know. Why the sets and reps?

Yeah. Like, like everything about everything, if you will, is one of my favorite philosophers, Bernard Lonergan puts it like, we want to know everything about everything we do. And of course this is most obvious in children who just just constantly ask, why, why, why, why, why? To the point where the parents get annoyed and they try to quiet their children, right? Finally, you just go, I don't know. I don't know, man. Your hands up, right? So really what a philosopher is, and to a large extent a theologian as well, is somebody who just goes back to those otherwise very childish questions, the simplest but the most profound questions, and just tries to take them very seriously again and really tries to answer them. I think that's one of the best ways to think about philosophy, right? Going back to all those questions that

you were told to stop asking when you were a kid and realizing that those were the right questions to ask. And now it's time to pursue those. Yeah, that's well put. And I agree. And I'm similar to you in that regard. I'm not as educated as you are in philosophy or religion, but I probably know more than the average person because I have spent a lot more time reading philosophical works than religious works. reading has been dictated by my work goals. And, you know, because whenever I'd come up against what would be a perceived ceiling of competence or something in my work, some problem situation I wanted to solve or some opportunity I wanted to make the most of, I would turn to books and people who were credible sources and ideally people who have done what I wanted to do multiple times. And so I'd just go read about, okay, well, I don't want to reinvent wheels if I don't have to, let me just go find

best practices. And as you know, when it comes to building a business, there's an infinite amount of work to do and an infinite amount of problems to solve and opportunities to try to take advantage of. And so that has dictated a lot of my study time. I do enjoy it as well. I mean, I like reading about business and leadership and work and success and marketing. When I was younger and didn't have a business is when I indulged in non-commercial reading the most, I guess. But I do very much care about these things and I do think they are very important. And I also think they're very practical, which is what we're going to get into, in that they're meaningful in a very immediate way. It's not just mental masturbation if it is done correctly, I think.

Where I thought it would be a good place to start this discussion is, do you think that religion in general is good? Or is your position more that your religion is good? And by religion in general being quote unquote good, I mean at a societal level, which of course is just a reflection, a reflex of the individual, right? So is having religious beliefs of some kind, even if you think they are wrong, is that better than having none? Yeah, this is a really good, I think, place to start because it's something of, our culture is kind of turning towards this, right? So we're kind of just getting over this weird new atheism phase where there was this kind of hostile assault on religion, a very crude

assault. The new atheists never impressed me even when I was an atheist. They're just not very sophisticated when it comes to matters of metaphysics and religion in general. We can talk about some of those. I mean, people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett's kind of an exception because he actually is legitimate philosopher. He has some significant things to say and philosophy of mind, a little wacky. He's known as an eliminativist, but not getting too far off track here. there seems to be a cultural turn back towards religion, especially at least among young men. And, you know, there's certain figures here that are associated with this. Jordan Peterson might be one of them, where he seems to have been robbing

a lot of the new atheist enthusiasm and kind of turning people back towards a sort of general, but somewhat ambiguous view of religion in the sense that there's something more to this than I've previously admitted. Maybe I don't think it's true or any particular religion is true, but it seems to be useful to some extent. And it's just a very interesting kind of cultural dynamic that I've noticed, I think is a good starting point. Now to answer that question, I'm a philosopher, I'm after truth. So at the end of the day, the only reason I think you should be religious or part of any particular religion is because you think that it is true. I mean, I would not become Catholic unless I thought that the core claims of the Catholic

faith were true, which we can get into. Now, insofar as it is true and you're corresponding yourself to reality, I think it's probably going to be largely useful, right? To a great degree. And I think to the extent that people deviate from reality, whether they pick wrong religions, and I know it's, you know, politically incorrect to suggest that a religion can be wrong, but of course people can be wrong. People can be wrong about tons of things, math problems, philosophical conclusions, religious commitments. I think there's going to be detriment to that. So in a very

general sense, I think, yes, it's useful. But the more important question, the primary question to ask versus is it true? And is there any case we can make for it being true? Now, in a broad sense, I think there is this sort of naivete that some of the new atheists have when it comes to religion in the sense that they see themselves as pretty good people in a lot of ways they are, right? You know, they're not going around murdering, stealing, raping. but they think that just because that is okay for them individually, that society at large would be, you know, that would work, you know, like large scale atheism would work for society at large. And I think that's just extremely naive to assume something

like that. Now, at the same time, I want to resist reducing religion to just some type of useful device for trying to keep people from, you know, obscenely immoral practices, because I want to come back and really focus on, well, is it true? But it is, I think, just very naive to assume what might work on an individual or small basis is something we can extrapolate to the whole. That just doesn't seem like good reasoning to me at all. Now, the other thing is just how do we, and this is a very tricky thing, how do we define religion? This itself is an extremely difficult philosophical question. And it's something that philosophers of religion debate on quite immensely.

It's very difficult to really say, well, what religion actually is. You have definitions that range from the idea that it's just somebody's ultimate commitment in life. It's whatever somebody ascribes supreme importance to, if you will. And in that sense, everybody is religious. Somebody's got some ultimate commitment in life. It's whatever somebody ascribes supreme importance to, if you will. And in that sense, everybody is religious. Somebody's got some ultimate commitment. Atheism would be a religion by that definition. Right. Or maybe if you're an atheist, as some atheists are, atheism is legit. They evangelize it. They try to make other people atheists. It's very ironic at some points. I was never like that as an atheist. And it does make claims about the supernatural or paranormal.

It says that there is no such thing, right? It's still a claim about it. Right. Let's hang a lantern on that. I'd like to circle back to that. But, you know, football might be somebody's religion under that definition or politics or government. Social justice.

Right. Yeah. So equality, like our last discussion. So if you're thinking in terms of ultimate commitment, then you're not going to escape being religious. Now, some people say that's an inadequate definition of religion, you know, at least incorporate some elements of faith or worship or commitment to the supernatural. So the way I like to think about it is just like, just put the word religion aside, because that

could get us a little too tangled up, or at least swap religion with the idea of worldview. You know, what is reality, really, fundamentally, soup to nuts, and thinking in terms of worldview, and then we can go through a list of the ways different people perceive the world, of what their worldview is or attitude towards religion. Do you want to start with, I think these are all great avenues for us to explore, but do you want to start with, I'd just be curious just to hear your thoughts on the benefits, again, on a personal and societal level of religion, because you had mentioned that it has been trendy over the last couple of decades to denounce religion and renounce religion, especially quote-unquote

organized religion, whatever that's supposed to mean exactly, that maybe some types of religious beliefs are okay or spirituality is okay, but if it's an organized religion, it must be bad. And we were texting before we started this podcast about Nietzsche and some of his prophecies about what would happen when quote unquote God dies. And so to your point of wide, like wholesale atheism not working, I think we are seeing that firsthand. wholesale atheism not working. I think we are seeing that firsthand. And one of my working theories about that is that I do think that the materialists have it fundamentally wrong. I think that it is much more likely that there is a spiritual aspect to our existence and that we are probably not our bodies and that the death of our body is probably not the end of us. What exactly comes next would be maybe a whole nother discussion. So I think that people, by affirming that fundamental truth, what I think

is likely a fundamental truth, I may be wrong. I'm okay with being wrong. I don't take it personally, but these are just my beliefs based on my studies and experiences. By affirming that fundamental truth, I think it is empowering individually. And I could imagine what it would be like to not only not have, because that does fundamentally change your experience, really. If you think that something comes next, whether you're a Christian and you think you're going to be judged based on how you lived, maybe your beliefs are more Eastern in nature, maybe you believe in reincarnation, and that you're going to be stuck with yourself for eternity and you are going to inherit the world you leave behind. So sure, go shit on everything, shit on everyone. Consequently, you're going to shit on

yourself and then you're going to come back to a shittier world. That's fine if you want to do that. Come back as a socket ranch or a gardener's meet or something, right? Yeah. Or maybe you wind up in another body and maybe the cosmic justice comes from you individually and you're just going to have a shittier time around next because you feel you should be punished for it. You know what I mean? Yeah. There are actually called like when some of the kind of reductios for karma are called like karmic regress problems, right? That if you're committed to this idea of karmic justice, you're going to have that issue of ever getting the ball started. We can kind of circle back to that, but there's some interesting

philosophical objections to that worldview. I think I get your general thrust at this point. I'm sorry, finish your thought and then I'll chime in. Yeah, no problem. I was just thinking that maybe we start with an argument for religion, again, at an individual level for people who maybe are not very religious and in the sense of they don't think about it much, they don't practice any religion, maybe they were raised one way or another, and who would ask, why should I care? Individually and socially, why should religion be an important part of our lives? Yeah, why should you care? Well, I think the most obvious is that if God exists and he's a personal

God and there is some ultimate meaning to life, like it seems like the greatest tragedy, the greatest tragedy that could happen is for you to somehow miss that because you just were indifferent. You just didn't care. You know what I mean? So I don't know if that really needs any argument. I mean, that just seems self-evident to me, right? Like if there is some great objective meaning to life, some purpose that I'm meant to fulfill, and it's at least even remotely plausible, then I think that's worth at least even remotely plausible, then I think that's worth at least reading like five to 10 good books about, you know, like at the bare minimum, it would just seem an incredible tragedy to miss that. And of course,

that is the claim of at least the world's largest religion, which is Christianity and the single largest organized religion, if you want to use that term, Catholicism, right? That's absolutely the claim. Is Christianity larger than Islam? Collectively, it is. Yes. So Catholicism would be the single largest unified. I think it's somewhere around like 1.2 or 1.3 billion. Islam as a whole outnumbers Catholicism, but Christianity as a whole outnumbers Islam. So I mean, like, you know, and that itself is an interesting thing, right? It's like, if religion has no truth to it at all, then we're kind of in this kind of depressing position of saying, wow, the vast majority of people are just massively deluded, right? Well, and that goes all the way back to the

beginning of history then. Right. Yeah. Which new atheists have no problem saying, right? Like, of course they are. Of course, they're just massively deluded. And like, hey, that's not saying that religion is true. Maybe that's the case, but it is kind of depressing to think about it like that. You brought up materialism, right? It's so hard to get these conversations started because like Christianity, you brought Christianity, obviously Catholicism is way different than Southern Baptist. And so even within Christianity, you have massive differences in how we think about the nature of God, God's relationship to the world, who Jesus is, the nature of salvation, eschatology, all these are hugely different, right? Even within Christianity. So that itself complicates the conversation. But let's think about it like this.

So to get to Catholicism being true, I think there's kind of three things you have to affirm, right? You have to affirm that God exists, that he really did break into human history and reveal himself through this intriguing figure of Jesus Christ. And here's the point about organized religion, that he left us with a church. He didn't give us a book, right? That book didn't come until later. He gave us a church that was hierarchical, unified, and really had authority, an authority that is in some sense guided by God himself, right? And now that's a very particular claim, and we have to draw certain conceptual boundaries on what that means and what it doesn't. But if you want good answers, and this is a good philosophical and scientific question, you need to ask good questions,

right? So sometimes people get distracted by, I think, secondary issues without keeping the main things the main thing. I would say if you want to look into Catholicism, those are the three things you got to look into. You got to try and argue for God's existence. You got to argue for the historicity of Christ, specifically the resurrection, right? And you got to look at what he left us. And was it a book that people were supposed to just kind of take and that's it? This book is the sole kind of authority. That's kind of the Protestant paradigm. Or is it a church? Or is it really an organized, hierarchical, unified, visible institution, right? We can circle back to all of that, but I think it's just important to ask the right questions. Now let's come back to, I think, just attitudes of religion in general,

because I think this can help us maybe focus in on some other points. And I kind of span the spectrum here. So as you noted before, I know, I spend a lot of my kind of from early high school through college until, you know, not too long ago as an atheist. And an atheist is somebody who would say, they obviously don't, would say they don't hold to a religion, but they would say that there is no God, right? So they make a positive claim about something being absent from reality. So there is no God and there's not anything like God. Now, some atheists will play these weird games and say, no, that's not atheists. You know, atheism is just the lack of belief. Don't tell me what atheism means. And that's just a very weak

thing to say. You know, to me, atheism was interesting in the sense that it was trying to establish a worldview like materialism or physicalism or what have you. And there's many different schools of atheism as well. Just name two there, but there's more like platonic forms of atheism and stuff like that. I think at some point, atheism really just becomes theism light. But the atheism that was attractive to me would have been, yeah, physicalism, materialism. And what brought me out of that is that it's just explanatorily inadequate. It just cannot explain the data and experiences that we encounter in this world. It really is, I think, a waning worldview, a collapsing worldview. But generally, atheists do,

you know, they do have a burden of proof is what I'm saying. And that's a burden of proof. When I was an atheist, I would have tried to meet. I don't think I would have successfully done it. Whereas kind of moving across the scale, then we have agnostics, right? And this would be somebody who, you know, isn't religion, remains open to the possibility, but you know, they're just not convinced either way. They don't know. The agnostic is somebody who really kind of lacks the belief. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. I'm unsure. And of course you don't have a burden of proof as an agnostic because you're not really trying to push anything forward. So I went through a period of agnosticism as sort of my atheism collapsed. I just kind of naturally became an agnostic, right? And then I became interested in a position which is known as religious pluralism. And I think this is kind of the cultural attitude that we were

talking about before, Mike, where people, and there's kind of two branches of this, right? There's the kind of naive form of religious pluralism. And this is something you hear among the younger generation, which says, hey, look, dudes, all religion is the same thing. It's all essentially saying the same thing. So just pick whatever does it for you and go with that. And the reason that's really naive is just a five minute Google search will show you all the problems with that position. Religions make mutually conflicting claims, right? Even within Christianity, obviously some position is going to have to be wrong or it's all going to have to be wrong in some case, right? It's Christianity, obviously some position is going to have to be wrong or it's all going to have to be wrong in some case, right? It's going to be A or not A or compare different

religions. Some branches of Buddhism that I spent a lot of time looking into and studying are borderline nihilistic. They don't affirm really a transcendent or personal God. They don't really affirm an immortal soul that persists after death, whereas other religions obviously do claim those things. So it's either got to be one or the other, or they're both false, right? So the mutually conflicting claims in religion, they can't equally be sustained, right? It's just you get contradictions. Isn't religious pluralism, though, more just about tolerance of other religious beliefs and acknowledging that there's overlap? So that's where I'm going to go with the second one. So like, if you realize the problems, and that's why I call this the, and I'm not the only one who calls it this, this is the generally,

I guess, recognized way of looking at it of a naive religious pluralism of people who really do think that religion is kind of just, it's all the same. And it just kind of betrays a deep ignorance of them just never doing any homework on the matter. Whereas there's a more sophisticated view of religious pluralism. And this was the one that I was interested in. And there's certain thinkers that I was reading at the time, like Aldous Huxley, right? People are probably familiar with him. He has a book called The Perennial Philosophy. This is one of the first books I read on religious pluralism. John Hick would be another, he's the author of Evil and the God of Love, who'd be another sophisticated religious pluralist. And what they want to say is that all religions are false in one sense, but true in another.

They're false in like whatever particular details or the particular claims they make, especially if they're claiming to really kind of possess the fullness of the truth. That's wrong, but they all true in another sense that they're all hinting at a really transcendent aspect of reality, whatever it is. You know, we can't really fully grasp it, but these religions, even though they're wrong in their particular details, they can be helpful guides. They can be useful as you put it, Mike. I think this is kind of tying into your position to help us become, say, less egotistical, more moral, and suit us for whatever this life to come might be. So they're all wrong in one sense, but they're all also kind

of right in another sense. Couldn't they be right in some ways and wrong in other ways? Like, oh, okay, it gets this correct, but this is incorrect very specifically. Like for example, okay, let's say there is a supreme creator of everything. That's correct. However, he is, or she, or whatever the gender might be, isn't directly involved in human affairs, for example. Yeah, a deist versus a more theist position. But there's still, though, you know, that would be a detail of, let's say, Catholicism. Okay, well, it gets it right that there is a supreme creator here, but gets it wrong in that this person is not involved in our life in any meaningful way.

Right, yeah. So that's what a deist might say, right? And I think you're right there, Mike. And this is the problem with religious pluralism of even the more sophisticated sort. At the end of the day, you're going to have to just roll up your sleeves and look at the claims and parse them out. And that's what I did, right? I'm like, I kind of want to know, right? Like, where are they right? Where are they wrong? And, you know, I wound up where I did in the sense that, okay, yeah, the Catholic church makes very specific claims. It makes claims about God, about God's nature, God's relationship to the world. For me, I found that those claims corresponded very strongly to what I believe we can know about God through philosophical argument alone. So that was like a very interesting point of convergence for me. It's like, okay, the Catholic church says this about God and natural theology or

philosophical reasoning also says that. So there's like a very interesting harmony or compatibility there. Whereas other religions say things about God. I'll give you an example, right? So under the kind of umbrella of theism, you have kind of monotheism, which is the great Abrahamic traditions are monotheistic. Certain branches of Hinduism are monotheistic. But you also have pantheism, which you also find in Hinduism and other religions. And pantheism is the idea that God just sort of is the universe, right?

Whereas monotheism would say, no, the universe, whatever else that is, it's a created thing. It's a contingent thing. It's a changing thing. It's a cause thing. God transcends the universe. So in monotheism, the universe is a creature. It's not to be worshipped, right? You'd be just as well off worshipping a toaster as the universe if monotheism is right.

Whereas pantheism would say that the universe is God and maybe we're all God in a sense. Now, I think pantheism is false and I think it's false through philosophical reasoning alone. I have that little ebook I know that you read, Mike, that attempts to demonstrate. How to think about God for anybody listening who wants to. I would say anybody who likes this discussion would almost certainly like the book. It's a pretty quick read. It's maybe 50 or 60 pages. You do have to take your time with it because there's no filler. It just cuts straight to the point. And it is a long, logical argument for the existence of God. So I did find myself having to go back sometimes because you might be at conclusion number 22 and you're referring back to number five. I'm like, shit, what was that again? Okay, let me look. Oh, that's right. Okay. And follow back through.

But again, it's a pretty quick read and I found it interesting. I think you did a good job. And again, I'm speaking from, I would say, more of a place of ignorance as far as metaphysics goes, but I generally am pretty good at finding holes in things and asking good questions, I think. And it has served me well, at least in the areas that I have put the time into teaching myself. And so I thought you did a good job. Well, thank you. Good, sir. I really appreciate that. And I did subject, so a little background on that. It was a lot of sort of the work that different pieces of work that I produced in my master's program. I decided to kind of compile it, synthesize it and try to

make it more accessible for people who might not be trained philosophers. And so I, you know, I wanted to make it and keep it rigorous, but also, you know, as accessible as possible. So I try to do as much handholding as I can without diluting it. So your feedback is appreciated. That is very helpful. So back to the original claim, right? So like, just grant me it, right? Maybe you don't think that you can reason deductively to God's existence. I think you can, but just let's say if you could, right? And it gives you a certain conception of God, right? A God that is radically transcendent, eternal, immutable, sort of omni-tributed in terms of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, so forth, pure actuality, non-composence, so forth, pure actuality,

non-composite, absolutely simple, right? Well, what philosophy can do is it can kind of just hack away religious options. So in a sense, you can say, okay, if this is true and I can know this through reason, then any religion that doesn't correspond with this, it's kind of off the table as an option in a sense. And any religion that does correspond with this or is compatible, maybe I can further consider that. So what I found myself doing is being interested in the world religions and coming from a philosophical background.

I just wanted to see, you know, what religions can match up to what reason can give us. And I started finding that I was consistently checking boxes off on Christianity more and more and found myself departing from the other traditions that are pantheistic or you don't really find many live polytheists out there anymore. And a lot of versions of polytheism when you really unpack them are actually pantheistic or monotheistic anyways. And at the end of the day, what I found the problems with religious pluralism to be was that you could just make a very strong case. And as the evidence was compounding, for what's called religious particularism, right? And that is that one religion, whatever you think that is,

Christianity or Islam, might actually be true, might actually get it right. That's religious particularism. And I want to be careful how I say this. So like, you know, when I say that I believe that Catholicism is true, which I do, it doesn't mean that other religions are wrong all the way through. The Catholic Church would obviously mean that other religions are wrong all the way through. The Catholic Church would obviously acknowledge that many religions get many things right, especially as they're perfectly compatible or converge on the Catholic Church. But the Catholic Church would say that the fullness of the truth, if you will, that the really and truly correct worldview is this one, that this is right, these particular claims, right? That not just that God exists, but he really did reveal himself, that he broke into history, and he left us a church.

And it's a church that is still here 2,000 years later, right? Which itself is, I think, a pretty remarkable piece of evidence that just any one institution could last so long is at least intriguing. And that was something that struck me as a skeptic. Whatever else you want to think about the Catholic Church, the fact that it has been around as long as it has, that it has outlasted any other quote unquote merely human institution is whatever else you want to think about it. It's definitely interesting, right? Like there's something very odd about that. That's not something that we would normally expect given the way that we see institutions, nations just rise and fall. But this one, for whatever reason, seems to be extremely sticky. Judaism, though, and Islam could make the same claim, right?

Well, here's the interesting thing. We have to be very careful here because Catholicism is really one single unified body. Judaism in its current form, rabbinical Judaism, is something that emerged sort of after Christianity. So you had the collapse of the temple, right? Second Temple Judaism really did kind of die away. And same thing with Islam, you know, it's kind of very fractured in some ways, more like Protestantism. But Catholicism also predicts, you know, in its worldview, that there will be, you know, to the end of time, the Jewish people. So that's not something that counts against Catholicism. That's actually something that we would expect if Catholicism were true. However, it doesn't work the other way around. If Judaism were true, you have a very big mystery of why the Catholic church is still here. And why is that? I mean, I don't want to

get off on a long tangent. I'm just curious. I don't know too much. I'm familiar with some of the Talmudic teachings and I'm just not too well-versed. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty simple. At the end of the day, if you're Jewish, you just don't accept the revelation or the Messiahship, if you will, of Jesus. So that's like, if that's not true, then it's just a really weird thing that the Catholic church would have persisted this long, right? It's just, you would think that he would have died out like any other, and this is something people would need to realize, like any other people who claim to be the messiah and were executed and all their followers just dispersed. They're like, oh, I guess that's not

our dude, right? And they just went back to doing their thing, right? But there was something very particular and very strange about Christianity in the sense that it totally transformed the world, and it's still here. The other way to think about it, right, is when you're kind of comparing Catholicism and Judaism, the Catholic Church would accept, you know, again, there's obviously different branches of Judaism. You have conservative, you have orthodox, you have more liberal, right? But, you know, the Catholic Church accepts the Old Testament and accepts Jewish revelation. It just has the New Testament and the new revelation. So it's not like going to have issues with the Jewish miracle accounts or stuff like that,

right? But if you're Jewish, you do have to have issues with Catholic revelation. Now, of course, the Catholic Church rejects Muhammad. I think there's good reasons to do that. I think that the historical credibility of Islam is abysmally bad. I think it is in no way comparable to the origin of Christianity. And this is one of those things where you have to really just roll up your sleeves and look at the historical details and evaluate the claims. Nevertheless, though, the ideas have survived for a long time now. And him as a figure as a jesus-like figure that has also continued and islam is growing i mean it's projected that i believe by 2100 islam will be the might be 2070 or 2100 islam is going to be the biggest religion in the world just given current demographic

trends i understand in terms of being fractured into different sects, but they all do have things they agree on. There are just things they disagree on, and I guess they fight over them. But fundamentally, they agree on what they would say are the most important, or at least the most essential things, which would be Allah and how our relationship should be to their conception of God and so forth. Right, yeah. So a few things with regard to Islam. One is, I think, that their philosophical conceptions of God are not just wrong, but immoral, right? So they hold to, you know, what would be known as a voluntarist conception of God. And that's the idea that God's, without

getting too technical in-house debates, that God's will is somehow above his intellect, right? That God is essentially incoherent or irrational, that he could change his mind at any time. Catholicism holds that God is perfectly, he's perfect, he's immutable, he's perfectly rational. If God wills something, he owes it in order to himself an injustice that he's going to finish what he wills, right? And I think that there are decisive philosophical arguments for the Catholic position over the Islamic position. So I think there's philosophical defeaters of Islam, as well as historical defeaters as well. But if Islam is on the rise, and if it does become the dominant religion in the world, what does that mean?

I don't, you know, so think about it like this. If you're thinking in terms of hypothesis testing or worldview testing, I think this is a good way to think of it in terms of a general abductive argument, right? So say like, if Catholicism is true, or if Christianity in general is true, or Islam is true, you know, what would I expect? And would I not expect? And we'll kind of go through the list here, because some things you might have a fair amount of explanatory power in some sense, and you might be able to predict some things, and you might be able to accommodate some data, but what best accommodates all the data, if we're going to talk about like inference to the best explanation. So let's just kind of go through a general list here. I think this is a really

helpful way to kind of back out of the weeds and just think about it from say 10,000 feet up, right? So first off, we have to include other worldviews aside from these three. So like even, you know, even atheism. And the first thing I would say is just, you know, kind of broadly between atheistic and theistic, I think theism is plainly and obviously superior. I think God is the best and simplest explanation of an enormous range of our data and experiences. You know, God is the best explanation of why any contingent thing exists instead of nothing. God is the best explanation of why the universe began to exist some 13.8 billion years ago, according to, you know, the best of modern cosmology. God is the best explanation of why the universe

is fine-tuned for the emergence of intelligent, interactive life, all of which is even needed for evolution to occur. God is the best explanation for a perception of a really objective realm of moral values and obligations. God is the best explanation of why consciousness is not reducible to mere physical processes alone. That's a really difficult problem for materialists. It's known as the hard problem of consciousness and philosophy of mind. God is the best explanation for just the general order, stability, intelligibility of the universe, the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world. God is the best explanation for near-death experiences, mystical experiences, religious

experiences. I think God is the best explanation for the historical data and evidence that we can use to support the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I think God is the best explanation for the sheer endurance, not only of the Catholic Church, but this is an important point to contrast it with Islam, but the indefectibility of the Catholic Church on her essential teachings of faith, morals, sacraments, and unity, right, which you don't have in other religions. What does that mean, indefectibility? Like, yeah, so the Catholic Church teaches in defectibility. And in defectibility means, you know, and this comes kind of from the biblical promise that the gates of hell will not prevail

against the church that Christ founded. And that's something that Catholicism predicts, that the church will never defect on her essential teachings of faith, right, the core deposits of faith, things like the Trinity, the hypostatic union, things that we believe are definely revealed. It won't teach these things in error. It won't change these teachings, the moral life and the sacramental life. Now, this is something that's empirically testable. And this is something that I found very, at first, disturbing about the Catholic Church, because I couldn't explain it. But then it actually ultimately led me to becoming Catholic, is that not only do you have the endurance of the Catholic church over 2000 years, but you have consistency of Catholic teaching on these huge issues that have never

changed, never changed. Even when all the opportunity was ripe for them to change, even when there were very corrupt people in the church, which has certainly happened, very corrupt popes, every incentive for change on these teachings was there, but somehow they didn't change. Now, that's something I would expect if Catholicism were true. That's something I would never expect if Catholicism were not true. Why? Because many teachings have changed. You don't have to read much about the history of Christianity in the Catholic Church to find examples of major changes that have occurred throughout the history. But if you were to change the fundamental beliefs of the organization, you of course are going to unravel it, which I mean, we could look

at that if we were cynical and say, yeah, it's not in anyone who has power in that organization and wants to maintain power and maybe who wants to acquire more power, it would be a mistake to undermine the foundations. You know, like, why would you want to do that? See, I would expect the opposite. So let me make a few differentiations here that are critically important for Catholicism, at least. One is that the church teaches that, yeah, indefectible in faith, morals, and sacraments, right? So you can look at any of those historically and you'll see nothing but consistency. There are changes in what might be called disciplines or prudential judgments or things like that. So here's how the church says that we should fast, for example, that will change. And that has changed as culture has evolved,

but the church has never changed her teachings on say the real presence of the Eucharist or the Trinity or things like that. And some of these things are really hard to accept. For example, like there'd be cultural times. I'll give you a great example. This was something that really struck me at first. And it's going to be, I'm almost hesitant to present this because it's so unpopular of a Catholic teaching, birth control, right? The church has always taught that there is moral content to the sexual act, right? That we should always be open to life because the sexual act is naturally ordered towards both unity and procreation. So deliberately frustrating the sexual act is something akin to like bulimia, right? This is a really bad thing to do.

Now, this is something the church has always taught, just as the church has always taught against abortion on the moral realm. Now, you know, the first Christian denomination to change on the birth control issue, as all the cultural pressures were pushing in, was the Anglican church. And as soon as the Anglican church collapsed, virtually all the rest of Christianity collapsed on this. They all changed, right? They all changed. And everybody was expecting the Catholic Church to change. Now, if you want to maintain power and you want to maintain popularity and you want to keep people in the pews, as all the culture is moving towards birth control, it seems like you would have every incentive to just, quote unquote, keep up with the times. But what happens? You get this papal encyclical. quote, keep up with the times. But what happens? You get this papal encyclical. Everybody's thinking kind of at the time, great, the Catholic church is going to change. And she doesn't. She

upholds the teaching that she always has. And you find this again and again and again throughout history. Now, before I became a natural law theorist in moral philosophy and before I was convinced of the Catholic church, this was something that I looked at the Catholic church and said, wow, it's really outdated. Like, my gosh, get up with the times. But then as I went deeper, I realized actually this is right. What the Catholic church teaches us on this is actually correct. Once we understand what the sexual act is ordered towards, what sexual flourishing is all of this, right? But this speaks to an, at least some evidential weight, the truth to the Catholic Church and

what we're talking about. I think that would be a good example of what indefectibility is. Whereas, yeah, the Catholic Church can change prudential teachings like tonsure or fasting or certain disciplines, but it cannot and has not ever changed the essential teachings like that on faith, morals, or sacraments. And that's also kind of a cool thing because in that sense, Catholicism is falsifiable. If the Pope got up and declared ex cathedra, for example, in the Pope's full defined authority that the church no longer believes in the Trinity, for example, I would have a serious issue. I would have a serious issue still thinking that Catholicism were true, right? That would be something that I think would just outright refute the Catholic hypothesis. But that's never happened. And that's

something that I think is considerable evidential weight in its favor, in an ironic way, was initially off-putting to me, but then as I considered it deeper, actually led me in the direction of the Catholic Church, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. No, I understand what you're saying. What about Pope Francis, his talk? And this isn't a gotcha question. I'm actually curious because I don't know how this fits in. I'm just curious with, there's talk, what was it? It was allowing women to become deacons, I think, or allowing women to join the clergy. Where does that rank in this? No, no, it has not changed. No, no. If it were to change. Yeah. So if women ever became, and here we are on like all the like culturally unpopular things, I'm trying to make Catholicism attractive, right? But it says, but that's another,

I think that speaks to its truth. Like if, if something weren't counter-cultural in today's messed up culture, I would immediately have a problem with it. But yeah, no, I mean, women cannot be priests. Pope John Paul II affirmed this. So if that changed, which it has not, then that would be a serious issue, right? Because that's something that's always, now deacons are different, right? So they wanted to do a kind of historical investigation to see if there's ever been like an order of female deacons. And that seems to be undecided, but the priesthood is very clearly defined that that cannot change. Now it's also important, just, we should probably back up to the more general conversation before like diving into the Catholic weeds, right? That papal infallibility is very restricted claim, right?

It doesn't mean that the Pope's going to be able to predict the baseball game or the weather or something like that. That's not the right way to view the Pope. Papal infallibility is just understanding that the church is naturally hierarchical, that it does have an earthly representative, a prime minister, if you will, and that God just protects the church from going into error formally on these essential matters, right? That God just won't let the Pope teach formally and with full authority on something that

is wrong against the core deposit of faith. If the Pope makes like some offhanded comments on like an airplane interview, that's not within the realm of papal infallibility or if he just kind of like ventures his opinions on economics, none of that. Or social justice. I mean, a lot of what I see coming from France, as I just disagree with fundamentally, if he is commenting basically on anything related to world affairs. And here's the other thing I'll say about that, right? Is to remember that the Pope is not in the American political sphere, but he's always filtered through American political media.

So the best way to read the Pope is to go to the primary sources always. And this is true for left wing or right wing. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking about direct quotes. I mean, unless you're saying they're, they're actually making. Yeah, but they're often as media does, as you know, Mike often pulls things like drastically out of context, right. To spin and, and both sides of the political spectrum love to try and pull the Pope into their political argument whenever they can. Sure. But some things don't need context. Some things, they just mean what they mean. You know what I mean? You don't need to have any other context to understand, I guess, attach too much importance to these things. But if I were to do a Google search, I could give you some examples where there are things you would certainly disagree with. You'd be like, nope, nope, nope,

nope, nope. Just no to that. Look, Popes are not infallible in that sense, right? They can be wrong on everyday matters, right? Yeah. Right. History tells us that. I mean,es are not infallible in that sense, right? They can be wrong on everyday matters, right? Yeah. Right. History tells us that. I mean, look at the Medici popes and how much of a joke some of them were. It was laughable. Right. And you had some truly morally depraved popes like that. And but that's kind of the funny thing in the sense that they had every incentive or reason to change church teaching, especially on like sexual stuff. But they never did. And you have to you have to at least wonder, well, why is that the case? Now to Pope Francis, I'll just say this, right? So let's take his remarks, you know, conservatives sometimes get upset. And I don't

think I have to defend myself too much. You know, if you listen to our previous conversations, I'm about as conservative as it gets, right? But conservatives sometimes get upset, you know, that he'll like critique capitalism, but you have to understand he's critiquing capitalism in a way that is definitely not a way a Marxist would critique capitalism, right? And the church has always taught and affirmed that we want a capitalism that is, if you will, founded upon a very sound moral fabric, right? And that there are legitimate critiques to make of capitalism if the culture is stuck in vice, right? It's not a virtuous culture in many ways. But the church has always given an endorsement.

The church has spoken out strongly against socialism in many papal encyclicals. It was doing it before it was, quote unquote, popular to do so, right? The church was very early to condemn socialism. This was another thing that was attractive to me as denying fundamental human rights, right? So there's some really great papal encyclicals on this, making strong, not just economic or prudential arguments against socialism, but moral, moral arguments which need to be focused on. So it's just, I think it's just important that even though I might, yeah, sometimes disagree on certain offhand statements that the Pope would

make, even when he's making critiques of capitalism or this or that, they sometimes are stretched or presented by the media in a way that's just not the right perspective on it. But all of that is probably way far into the weeds. It might not be relevant to our overall conversation. That could be an interesting follow-up episode on capitalism in particular, because as much as I like capitalism for everything it has done in the way of lifting people out of poverty and giving people freedom to find meaning in their work and to provide for their family and so forth. I do think that it's just the best economic system that we've got. And I do think it is, to use a social justice-y term, problematic in many ways. I do agree. I just don't think communism is the solution.

And neither does the church. It condemns communism, right? So, yeah. Of course, of course. No, I don't mean that as a kind of backhanded comment on the church. Not at all. I was just commenting that I would agree with some of the critiques from leftists about capitalism, but I certainly do not agree about their proposed solution. Yeah. And I think that that's so honest, you know, because as you know, as we've talked about before, I had a bit of a libertarian phase. And the one thing that always struck me as odd about libertarians is like the idea that the market could never do any wrong. And I guess it's so preposterously false. Of course it could.

Markets are generally efficient. They'll, you know, they'll give the culture what it wants. But if the culture wants really bad things, right, the market's gonna, the market's gonna accelerate that. Just look at the pornography industry, right? It is absolutely vicious and disgusting. So I think an honest person will find the Catholic Church's position on this. And even most of Pope Francis's remarks, very appropriate, very nuanced, very careful. But the thing is, it's just like in our American political climate,

we always interpret things kind of through our political lens. That's kind of what I'm getting at. So in the sense that like, if we see anybody critiquing capitalism in America, we automatically assume that they must just be like a far left socialist. You know what I mean? True. And we, and, and, you know, like, yeah. And like in our country, that's, you know,

that's kind of, that's kind of what goes on, right? Because we're so politically divided and we do tend to kind of like fall into pretty predictable camps. But that's not how people put the Pope aside. That's just not how people, you know, all around the world necessarily see things, right? I agree. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you is the

leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. So if we're talking about issues of morality, we should talk about the child molestation issues. How does that factor into everything you're talking about? And what are your personal thoughts on that? Because of course, just somebody, it's not hard for you to understand somebody saying like, I'm not going to have anything to do with a group that has that kind of problem. And especially with the coverups that are just as bad as the actions themselves. And I believe I saw, I believe it was somebody very high up in the church. I think they were being represented as like the right-hand man of the Pope who was implicated in helping cover this stuff up. Well, the big one was the recent bus

was that he was a creep was McCarrick. Yeah. So let me say a few things about this stuff up? Well, the big one was the recent bust was that he was a creep, was McCarrick. Yeah. So let me say a few things about this, right? Because this is for many people, the big elephant in the room, and it obviously deserves to be addressed. And I'll say a few things. One is we're just kind of going through a very odd cultural moment of pedophilia in institutions. And the Catholic Church is in no way unique to this, right? Anyone who's familiar with the statistics will realize that this is something that has plagued virtually all religious institutions, certainly Hollywood. It does seem to be uniquely Catholic though right now for talking about religion, at least in terms of what we know about. Well, so here's what I'll say. And let me be very clear before we get into

the weeds of this. And I might be wrong. Again, don't take these things as personal attacks. This is really just me shooting from the hip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me be very clear, right? That if I'm going to talk about this, I want to be careful and nuanced, but I'm in no way defending it, right? So the first thing to say is that Catholics are deeply embarrassed and horrified by what all this is going on. And it's especially frustrating for two reasons. One, it's just so grotesque, right? If there's anything that makes me want to support a death penalty, it's a sexual abuse of children, right? But it's also something that just makes it really difficult to have a conversation about

what I think is the truth of religion. So in one sense, because it's just always that kind of barrier to entry. And I just, I want to say I appreciate that because it was something that me and my wife, so my wife, let me give a little background here. As I was kind of moving in on the Catholic church. And I was talking to my wife about this. My wife was never religious. She was never baptized. She grew up in a completely atheist agnostic home and just kind of put this in more of a personal context. You know, I kind of made her an atheist too. You know, she was kind of agnostic or spiritual, but not religious for a

while. But then, you know, I was moving, you know, I think progressing on some of these issues. And I said, Hey, you know, I think there, you know, I think progressing on some of these issues. And I said, hey, you know, there might be more than the Christianity that I originally considered. And the first thing was to say, okay, you know, I'll hear what you had to say, but no way in hell am I ever becoming Catholic, right? And this would be like, I'm never bringing our kids to a Catholic church. So this is something like that we dealt with too, right? So I just, I don't want to make it seem like this is some peculiar thing for people.

We had this. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a reasonable knee jerk reaction. Right. Yeah. It was totally reasonable. Especially when you have kids, you're like, yeah, it's just, that's the worst thing that you could imagine. Let me just say how much I relate to this and sympathize with it. Right. So the first thing I say, if you're concerned about that, the Catholic church put in safeguards in the early two

thousands that have proved enormously effective. Statistically, the Catholic church is like the safest institution that your kids could be in at this point. And many other institutions have mimicked these safeguards known as the Dallas Charter. And people can fact check me and look at the statistics on that for themselves. So that's just like an initial concern. Then I think that that can be dealt with just, you know, from by looking at the data. When you say that, though, I mean, there have been high profile, what was it in Pennsylvania, hundreds, a ring of hundreds? Yeah. And let me bring that up. The grand jury report, I was just going to mention that. But what people don't realize about the grand jury report are a couple of things. I'm going to be

off a little bit on some of the stats because it's just been a while since I looked at it, but it's something like this, right? It's something that reports that the vast majority of these cases, the vast, vast majority of these cases, right? And again, all disgusting, all deserving of condemnation. I'm not making excuses for it. I'm just explaining what it is. And I can't emphasize that enough. It happened between the 60s and 80s. They're not new. That's the mistake that people make. They're not novel cases. They're older. The vast majority, somewhere between the 60s and 80s, scooch the years wherever I might just not be remembering correctly. And the majority of cases were not actually pedophilia. You know, this is such like an annoying thing to talk about because it's so gross. But the majority of cases of abuse were really just older men with younger men, like older predatory people preying on seminarians. Which are what, like teenagers? Yeah, well, like 18, 19 and above.

Right. And it's still totally think that that's abusive and wrong in every level, but it's just important to realize that there's just like popular level misconceptions versus what the data and stats actually are, right? So the misconceptions is that it's like just a pedophile thing, but that's not the case. And that the grand jury report is like all these new cases when they're actually very old, they're just like coming to public awareness right now, right? Again, doesn't excuse any of it. It's just trying to get some clarity on this. No, these are relevant details. I mean, I don't think you have to apologize for just giving the specifics. I understand why it's awkward, but I think they're relevant.

Yeah. And the thing I want to emphasize about it is that it's kind of one of those things that Catholicism predicts in a way, in a kind of a sick way. And here's what I mean by that, right? So we're committed to the supernatural and Catholicism is committed to the idea that we're not the only rational beings apart from God. There are other supernatural entities and some of them are good and some of them are exceedingly evil. And that these evil beings, right? Demons as they're called, they want not only our destruction, but they want the destruction of the church. And the Catholic church has always affirmed spiritual warfare. Now, what could be a better move if we're just speaking frankly of the devil than this pedophilia scandal of the catholic church like what could be more

destructive more undermining of what the devil would want than this i guess depends what kind of powers he has there could be much more direct ways. I mean, this is very circuitous. But if you read into the gory details of some of these cases, which I have, Mike, if I'm being honest, there's an evil there that I don't think can be explained just by human depravity. I think there is an evil there. In the context of history, really? That sounds like a stretch. Right. No, in the context of some of these abuse cases, there is an evil there that is so depraved, so gory, I don't even want to go into the details, that I don't think can be explained apart from the

demonic. I just, I really don't. I mean, you have abuse cases, and here I am supposed to be talking about what I think is the right worldview, but this is, I just want to have an honest conversation because I don't like when Catholic leaders beat around this question. That annoys me. I think it's something that needs to be talked about and discussed openly and honestly and addressed. And in one sense, I kind of almost want to go deeper into it. I mean, there are cases where the abuse is just mixed with demonic, satanic sacrilege. And again, I don't even want to get into details because they're so grotesque.

But if you read the grand jury report, you'll find some of these, right? Now, initially, you might think, yeah, that seems like that if this is supposed to be the true religion, we wouldn't expect something like this. But I want to kind of back up for a minute, because that's kind of one of the arguments against God in general. It's the problem of evil, right? If God exists and he's all good, like you say, why is there so much nastiness in the world? Why was there the Holocaust? Why is there pedophilia? All of this, all this terrible stuff. I don't have the list of people. People know.

And also why, if this is his church, why there? Why not keep that the beacon of light? Right. So let's start general and then we'll get specific. And I'll tell you why the problem of evil never really even struck me as an atheist. When I was an atheist, I would have certain arguments against God. I would say, you know, maybe God isn't, he's just not necessary, or we can explain everything we need to explain without God. And I ultimately moved away from that, but I was never even really very impressed with the problem of evil. Which I agree. I think it's pretty facile. It's not very sophisticated. It's a very sophomoric way of looking. Right. But for a lot of people, it's very powerful. It does make an impact. So I want to spend some time on this and tie it in, if you don't mind, if that's okay.

So evil means something really bad has happened. Like this is the way that things shouldn't be. Right. And that's a very interesting claim. So to even make sense of evil, to still have it be meaningful, at least meaningful in the sense that we might want to argue against God, we're committed to some kind of moral standard, right? We really are, right? If we drop a moral standard, then evil becomes a meaningless term. Maybe it's preference, but who cares? We have preferences about blueberry yogurt and stuff like that. When we say something is bad, we mean something objective. This is the way that something shouldn't be. Yeah. It's different than saying, I don't like that.

Right. Yeah. There's a big difference. And people get this intuitively between saying, no, I really don't like blueberry yogurt versus I really hate rape, right? There's a big difference there. So let's think about it this way, because I think while the problem of evil is superficially in tension with God, I think when you think about it deeper, it only makes sense if God exists, because what worldview gives you a moral standard or guarantees you a moral standard? Or we can ask it like this, what worldview would we more probably expect a moral standard? Now on classical theism, we hold that God just is subsistent goodness itself, right? That God is the form of the good, if you will, on Plato's view, just

more concrete than Plato would have thought about it somewhat. So a moral standard is guaranteed on classical theism, right? Do we have that same type of probability on atheism? Well, no, not hardly. In fact, many atheists are nihilists because they realize, well, look, if at the bottom of reality is just this kind of fundamental physical stuff, this amoral physical stuff, particles or physical symbols, how are you ever going to get a moral standard out of that? And not just a moral standard, right? How would you ever get this qualitative inversion of the amoral into this perfect moral standard? You can't even really forget about being practically achievable. It doesn't even seem theoretically possible. But then we also need moral communities, beings that are capable of reasoning, that can reflect

on the way things ought to be and conform their lives to it. Now, what worldview better predicts that? Well, on theism, we have God, who is subsistent goodness itself, who would, I think, for very plausible reasons, see the value in creating moral communities and could easily bring them about, right? So fits very well in that worldview. Now, why God would allow or permit evil? That's another question. But evil requires a moral standard and moral communities. And what I'm arguing is that is exceedingly more probable on a theistic worldview rather than an atheistic worldview. So while the problem of evil may initially want to kind of pull you away from God, I think when you think about it deeper, it actually points to God's existence, if that makes sense. And then really what the issues of

bad popes or pedophilia, these are just specific instances of the problem of evil in the Catholic church. It's the same general problem, but it's a specific problem. So yeah, the first thing you have to accept is that God or the existence of God and the existence of evil are not mutually exclusive. Right. There's no contradiction there, right? There's nothing contradictory because we can say that the idea of there being mysteries is not surprising with God, right? So just because I don't see a reason for a particular evil doesn't mean that I see there is no reason for a particular evil. And I'll be honest, I look around all the time. I don't see what the reason is for many bad things happening.

But I think we can all look back on our lives and realize that there have been times when, you know, even if somewhat small, where something bad happened to us that really did deliver some greater good. It's like the very general Augustinian to mystic response is like God will allow evil to the extent that he can bring some greater good out of it. And then there's, you know, a lot of deep questions there between, cause there's different types of evils and suffering, right? You have kind of natural evils, but we're specifically talking about moral evil, right? Like the evil that humans, rational beings commit. And there's different ways of thinking about that. But on the most general sense. Do you think that we have an imperative to fight evil that we're supposed to do something about it? Because. Well, yes, right. Yeah, absolutely. And the Catholic church would say we do. Because I could see someone thinking, well, if it's all God's plan and we just don't understand

the bigger picture and what looks like evil to us is really just, it's a little bit of destruction that's going to result in a lot of construction. It's breaking a few eggs to make an omelet. Why should we try to stop it? Wouldn't that be interfering with? So first off, there's a couple of ways of thinking about this. One is that God tells us that we have to fight evil, right? We have divine commands. We also understand in our basic flourishing, if we just think philosophically, that in order to really flourish and be virtuous people, part of that will require that we fight evil because it's in the order of justice, the virtue of justice, right? So to flourish individually is going to require a fighting against injustices and evils. And it's also

just very clearly that God hates sin. So he doesn't want us, and this is very Catholic, right? This is very important. He doesn't want sin to happen. He doesn't want evil to happen, but in the order of creative liberty, he allows it because he respects the freedom of his creatures, right? He respects the freedom of his creatures. I've just done a whole series of podcasts on this because there's a lot of difficult philosophical questions here. But he could have left that out of the operating system if he wanted to, I guess. Surely he could have, right? And that's something we don't want to deny. But it's something that he decided to create in this order of providence where we could independently fail. That's the

way to think about it, right? Because in a sense, all goodness comes from God because all being comes from God. But we, as fallible free creatures, can independently fail. We can not consider things that we could have considered, the moral rule, for example, and we can fail independently of what we could have done. And that's when sin and evil is introduced into the world. That's a very rough sketch of what's known as the privation account of evil, right? God doesn't want that. He doesn't prefer that. So that's the first thing to be clear. We're talking Catholic theology, and there's not something that's introduced into the world, right? There's not something that's creative. It's a failure to consider something we could have, the moral rule in any

particular situation. And we make a judgment, we act, and there's a privation. There's something missing that should have been there, a non-consideration of the rule, if you will. So we're actually kind of introducing nonsense into the world as free creatures in this sense. So that's important, right? So God isn't the cause of evil. He permits it, but he isn't the cause of it because there's nothing that is made, right? Now there's positive actions to evil.

So for example, when I, let me make a concrete example here. So say that I want money, right? Nothing bad about wanting money in and of itself, right? Catholic Church certainly doesn't have anything against making money. But say that I make money, my focus, I know it's bad. I do know it's bad to kill people, right? I do. That's something I know habitually.

But Mike, I see that you got some money on you and I really want that money. I decide that I'm going to take it from you. And I don't consider the moral rule of not killing somebody to acquire wealth, right? And I think we'd all agree that that's a real moral rule. The act of my acquiring money has failed to consider something that should have applied to it, which is the respect for your personhood. For example, the respect for your person. Now here's the tricky part, right? I want people to think about this. Now everything positive in that act, my existence, you know, God giving me being to pull the trigger, the bullet, the bullet, you, all that is caused by God, right? God maintains all that in existence, right? And that's something

we can't deny. But the act itself, the privation, the thing missing that should have been there, that was on me. It's that privation, that original negatio of not considering the thing that I could have considered, then making the judgment and acting with the consideration of the rule, not applying to the act where it should have been considered is something that's missing from reality that should have been there. I introduced that. And then God just permits it to happen in a sense. So we do have God's permission of sin. But of course, all that would be by design. Like if God were deciding the rules of this game he is about to create, of course, that would have to be consciously decided upon because it could

have been set up many other ways. Well, that's thinking of God in the wrong way. So God's eternal, right? It's not like God thinks three, two, one before the big bang, here's how everything's going to work out, right? So God's eternality is such that every, this is might going to take us too far afield, but it is important to understand that everything is just sort of present to God and his eternal reference frame as it occurs to us in our temporal reference frame. So think of it like this, imagine if an author could think an entire book all at once and is present to every page of that book simultaneously. But he is the author of the book, though, is the key. It's not just a book that appeared. It came about via an act of creation, unless you're saying that the act of creation was

chaotic and kind of random and it just came out the way it came out. No, but he does allow us to be real actors in it, if you will, and will permit certain things. Now, we do maintain a robust providence because you might worry, well, what does that mean that God has no control to keep Mike Matthews in existence? Well, of course not, right? Because God can cause a tremor in my hand. He can cause a bullet to miss your heart by a couple inches like he did Pope John Paul II at his assassination attempt, right? So there's a million, there's an infinite number of ways that God can maintain control, even if he gives us created liberty to introduce certain elements of nonsense. But to your original point, we have a strong moral obligation to fight evil personally by reflection on the natural law of what causes us to flourish, by what the Catholic church

teaches, by what God has divinely revealed. And because God permits sin, and even though we don't see all the reasons of or all the greater goods that God will draw out of that doesn't mean that he wants sin, but he is powerful enough that he can turn that evil to goodness. Right. And that's, that's kind of the story of the atonement, the resurrection, right? Like he turns our sin, all this depravity, takes it onto himself on the cross. And so like the most horrendous evil assumes it like literal deicide, right? Where, you know, all the followers at the time felt like this is the worst thing that could ever happen, right? This is terrible. And then what does it do? It somehow turns into, in a very paradoxical way, a very mysterious way, but also a very beautiful way, the source of our

salvation. That's the kind of wonderful but beautiful paradox of God's providence, right? Doesn't want it, doesn't want that to happen, but can work with it, if you will. And it certainly doesn't, to hedge your concern, which is a real concern, it does not alleviate us from committing evil. We commit evil, we incur moral guilt, and we'll have to deal with that. So if somebody's got that attitude, yeah, you want to drop that attitude right now, because that's the wrong way to go about life. And if nothing else, it simply will not work. You're going to live a very miserable existence, and then you're going to find out what happens next, I guess. God is going to allow. That's God's prerogative. All we know is that from our limited perspective, this is our prerogative. We need to go about alleviating suffering, fighting against evil,

fighting against injustice. So it's a legitimate concern. I'm actually glad you brought that one up because it's one I haven't heard in a while, but I could see how that might be off-putting to somebody. And it should be, right? That's wrong. It's completely wrong. So if that was the worldview, I would reject it too. That's a legitimate thing, but it's not. So yeah, we've kind of gone off in the weeds here a little bit. I think we did touch on it in the first discussion we had along these lines, but that was some time ago. Chances are at least a fair number of people listening now didn't hear that. I have another question for you. This is something that it may not be generally

true. It just, it has, it happened often enough where I just kind of filed it in the seems to be true folder. And that is, can you say that you've worked hard to come to the position that you are in now and that you have educated yourself and you've thought about these things and you have observed reality as it is now and as it was, but ultimately you might be wrong and you will find out one way or another when you die, maybe there's nothing else. And I would say in that sense, I would be wrong. Maybe it's just blackness and that's the end of Pat and the end of Mike and everything that we ever were is just poof, oblivion. Or maybe something else happens. And the reason I ask that is in my discussions that I've had with Christians who I would say rigorous Christians, not zealous, but rigorous, people like you, that seems to be, is that not acceptable in Catholicism or other forms of Christianity to say, look, I really do believe in this, but I may be wrong?

Yeah. You know what? I want to address this, right? So we all have doubts. I think it's very insincere if you hear somebody say they don't have doubts on any end of the spectrum. Like when people who are atheists, they don't have any doubts. They like that just strikes me as just either being massively deluded or not honest with yourself.

I mean, I have doubts all the time and, you know, I return to the reasons I return to prayer and kind of shore myself up and say, yeah, I really do. I really do think I'm not deluded. I think this is true, but yeah, doubt is a real, it's a real thing. It's, and it's something again, that the church teaches. I mean, Israel means wrestling with God. I mean, look, as much as I don't think that the problem of evil is a good philosophical argument against God. I mean, it hits me in the gut all the time, man. I mean, when these evil things go in the world, inside or outside of the church, it causes me to doubt. It does. And we are, we're rational animals, but we're deeply emotional as well. So one way that I think

might be helpful to think about this, so I just want to affirm that, like, yeah, we all have doubts. Yeah, no, it's a genuine question because the last time i had this conversation with someone they wouldn't say that it was that there are absolutely no doubts ever and it is absolutely true there is no chance i'm like that must be nice i've never been there i don't think he was telling the truth he's a bit of a strange guy i don't think he was being honest but that's why I'm asking. I remember asking, I didn't even get an answer. Like, am I asking you to like offend some fundamental proposition of what it means to be? No, I mean, like, look at so many of the saints, man. I mean, they've been great inspiration to me. They have went through immense periods of struggle and doubt. And like, that's kind of like the cool part of their story. I think this is just utterly human in a sense. So yeah, I just want to affirm

that, be totally honest. Yeah, we all struggle. And I will say that the problem of evil is the one that hits me the hardest. We all suffer tremendously. So if you want to know what really gets me in the gut, it's that one, right? Because we live with it and it's just unavoidable. And that resonates with me to some degree in that there's also the bigger picture that I've thought about of why are we reduced to this level of existence? Why is this the game that we humans are stuck in, which ultimately comes down to cheating and crushing and killing each other over resources or just ideas? Why are we not united in conquering the stars? And I don't mean this to be blasphemous,

but does God not have... Has he not seen Star Wars? That would be so much more fun. Come on. Yeah, no, I know what you're saying. Let me come at this from a couple angles. And this is really good stuff. One is the idea like, shoot, if I were God, I wouldn't have done it like this. I would have done things completely differently. Right. Yeah, I would have done things completely... How much fun would we have? I would be massively dishonest if I didn't say that I often feel that way. Like, if I were God, here's how I would have done it. But I have to constantly remind myself, I'm definitely not God.

Right. Right. I'm definitely not. There's two things I want to talk about. One is I want to talk about a principle of illumination, for lack of a better word. Also, Pascal's wager. Famous kind of fun thing we could talk about a little bit here. The principle of illumination is this.

There's a lot of mystery in the world. A lot of, you know, why didn't God do it like Star Wars? Why did this bad thing happen? Blah, blah, blah, right? Just there's a lot of things we just don't have the answer to, right? And, you know, at least in this life, we may never have the answer to. But here's what I would say. There are some things we do know, or at least can know, I think very confidently. And we should always take what we do know to bring illumination to what we don't know. So I would argue, and if you want, Mike, maybe we could do a whole episode on this or people can go look at my ebook or any other books or things that I would point to on this, that we can, through philosophical reasoning alone, demonstrate not just God's existence, but God's goodness.

And we can know that with great clarity, right? It does surprise us that there are nasty things that happen in the world, but just because I don't see the reasons for them or why God didn't make like Star Wars, I can take what I know to shine light on what I don't know. And at least it can make me feel a little bit better and give me a little bit more confidence, right? So I can know that because God is all powerful and all good and all wise, that even if I don't see reasons for things, there must be reasons and they must be good reasons. And that might be as far as I can go. And you know what? That's fine. That's enough for me in a lot of cases. It doesn't mean that things don't bother me. It doesn't mean I don't have doubt, but I returned to that principle

frequently. Take what is clear and use it to shine light on what is ambiguous or opaque. Because as you said, like, I don't know why God didn't make things like Star Wars. Certainly he could have. Or at least delete the pedophiles. Come on, let's start there. Right. Yeah. Why or why God didn't set certain boundaries to evil? Why does he let it go above a certain threshold? I don't know. I don't. I just don't know. All I know is the things that I've worked through. And I think that those principles of illumination can at least give us enough assurance to have a good hope, a good A good hope and that we don't need to be constantly rattled by those things or by any mysteries that we don't completely understand. They don't need to, you, I just can't make up my mind, right? Like I read the arguments for Christianity or Catholicism or God, and I read the arguments against it.

And can feel like dueling experts, which I understand that can be difficult. I can give many examples of that, but there are many discussions can get to a point where you just no longer can follow because of even how technical it becomes, you know? Yeah. And I'm just not qualified enough, right? And let's be honest, most people aren't professional philosophers of religion. They're just, they're probably not going to be able to dive into the deep technical weeds of a lot of this stuff. So what do you do? What do you do? What do you do if you're just like in that position of 50-50, right? Like maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Well, this is where Pascal's wager kicks in and we got to articulate this kind of carefully because it's often misunderstood, right? But Pascal's wager is something that only

applies in a certain circumstance, right? So the crude version is like, you should just be a Christian because you'll just have so much to gain and nothing to lose. Yeah, it doesn't cost anything. So why not? It doesn't cost anything. But that's wrong. That's wrong. Pascal's wager doesn't alleviate argumentation, thinking, reasoning, and investigation. It just doesn't do that, right? It's something that kicks in after you've done the arguments and you say, okay, and you find yourself in a particular situation and something like split between atheism and Christianity, for example. Like I've looked into Islam, that doesn't seem right to me, but if I had to say it's one of two things, it's Christianity or atheism. As John Henry Newman once said, who himself was a Catholic convert, he says, there's two roads in

life, one to Rome and one to atheism. Right. And that's kind of the position I was in. Right. I really was. Right. I want you to kind of really, I think, work through it. But say you're not sure. Well, then Pascal's wager will say something like this. It will say it then becomes prudent to begin a life of religious seeking, Not belief, not belief, right? That's another mistake, right? Because you can't just get yourself to believe something you're not convinced of. Like, how would you even do that, right? I can't just believe that I have a pile of macaroni.

Self-suggestion. You just say it every day. I wouldn't know how to believe that I have macaroni and cheese in my hands right now. I just can't believe that because I have no evidence, right? I have no reason to believe that. So you can't just like, plus it would be insincere, right? So that's not Pascal's wager. What Pascal's wager says in its best contemporary formulations is that it would be prudent to begin a life of religious seeking. And because in that sense, you have a potential

infinite amount to gain with virtually nothing to lose. And let me unpack that and we can talk about it. What does that mean? Well, it means that if you start a life of religious living, and this will tie back into your point, we actually have great sociological research now to show that people who live a generally religious and spiritual life are just across the board, healthier, happier, et cetera, right? Less anxiety, less depression, more sense of meaning in life, less chance of suicide, less chance of disease. There's been great systematic studies on this. So just on the natural end, and I think this speaks to your original question. And there's the familial impact as well. That goes beyond the

individual now. And then that goes into the society because I would say the sinew of society and really of civilization, at least as Western civilization is the family. Yeah. So this is funny because it actually ties back to your original question. Like, and this wasn't something like we didn't have all the sociological data back in Pascal's day. So he didn't have this, right? So when the wager was originally formulated, he might say, well, okay, you might miss out on some things on this side of the world, right? You know, vicious behavior, you know, sins that might be fun, but actually the best data we have now on this is completely opposite. No, you actually will be happier overall if you're a spiritual

and religious person. And it's, it's very good. It's very good data and research there. I'll send a study, Mike, so you can link it in the show notes if people want to see this. So on a purely natural level, we have a case to begin a life of religious seeking. And you can do it totally authentically. You don't have to say you believe, but maybe you start going to church and maybe you pray agnostic prayers, right? And this is what I did at one point. I said, the agnostic prayer is this. God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul. It sounds kind of funny, but you can be totally authentic.

You don't have to dupe yourself, right? The waiting pool. Right. You start hanging out with more religious people, hanging around religious communities. You just begin a life of seeking. And then, of course, if it turns out that it is true ultimately, well, then you've done something supremely good, right? You saw it the highest meaning of life, tried to have a real friendship and intimacy with God, which Catholics claim is the purpose of life. And you've avoided missing the greatest

meaning of life. So on both the natural end and the supernatural end, you have pretty much everything to gain and virtually nothing to lose. The risk, however, and you might be already getting to this. So I'm sorry if I'm cutting in too early here, but I guess a counter argument could be, well, it carries a risk then yeah, if you're wrong and I'm Catholic and Islam is true, it might be pretty bad news for me, right? But I'm quite confident that Islam is false, right? So yeah, I just want to emphasize it doesn't do away with the rational investigation. And that's why I said it's only going to apply if you find yourself in a position of saying- Striving toward the truth, like you had said earlier in the podcast. Right, right, right. And if you're unsure, then yeah, go check that out, right? But then say you are wrong. Well, what have you really lost? Well, you led a life that the research shows probably made you happier overall in the natural life, strove for virtue. And then in the end, it's nothing. Worse would be if, well, let's say Islam were right or, you know, actually I should know this,

but again, it's been a long time right or, you know, actually, I should know this, but again, it's been a long time since I spent much time reading up on religion, but I don't remember the Jewish conception of afterlife and what happens to non-Jews, let alone good and bad non-Jews. But, and you could probably comment on that quickly, but my point being, if one of these other faiths that explicitly, and Christianity does as well, right, explicitly prescribes punishment to people who do not believe the right idea, well, you might live a good life following the quote-unquote wrong ideas, but you're going to suffer eternally for it. That's the basic idea, right? Right, yeah, yeah. So I'll just give an example, right?

There's certain denominations of Protestantism that think, as a Catholic, I'm going to hell. Really? Isn't it the other way around, too, though, where you believe that? No, no, no, no, that is not, that's a misunderstanding. The church doesn't. Oh, I was under the impression that Catholics generally despise Protestants even more than atheists and think that. Well, certainly, no, I certainly don't despise anybody. I really try to fulfill my Christian obligation of loving everybody, honestly. I think that Protestantism is wrong. I think that at the end of the day, if you investigate all the relevant data for

Christianity, for me, it's Catholicism or bust, honestly. And it really kind of came down to that because Protestantism is committed to things like sola scriptura, you know, by scripture alone. And I think there's a million problems with that. I mean, first off is no book is self-interpreting, you know, and that's why we have so many different denominations of Protestantism because they all claim to have the right interpretation of a text that obviously doesn't interpret itself. So it seems like we need some type of living authority to help us with that, which the church does. You're speaking there ultimately to the pope? Yeah, the magisterium of the Catholic Church. And the hierarchy.

The hierarchy, right? Yeah. So it just seems like almost an a priori desiderato that if God were to reveal himself, he would give us something like Catholicism to make like, you know, if he's going to go through, I don't want to say all this trouble, cause it's not trouble for God, but like, why would he reveal himself and then leave people so desperately confused with a book that, you know, it didn't even exist at first. So like, what do you do with,

for people who didn't even have the Bible until the church formalized the canon? Well, I mean, that begs the question though, why then have all these different sects? And I mean, that confuses people. Well, I don't think you should. I think you should be Catholic. Why have it set up that way? I think that's a problem of evil, right? One of those questions. It's one of the problem of evil, right? For sure. Yeah. It just seems like, yeah, that's something that shouldn't be, but unfortunately is. God has his reasons. I'll ask

him hopefully someday. I have a list, Mike. I have a big list, right? But yeah, so I mean, I want to be charitable to my Protestant friends. I think the core commitments of Protestantism like Sola Scriptura are just a complete non-starter and exercise in viciously circular reasoning. I don't think you can even get it off the ground, but they would, some Protestants, not all, some not all Protestants, there's very many different branches of Protestants that would think that I'm going to hell as a Catholic. Catholic church teaches that although Christ binds know, Christ binds himself to the sacraments and the sacramentality of the church, he's not bound by the sacraments.

So God's grace can be obviously operative outside the church. So the Catholic church holds that, you know, if somebody is sincerely following their conscience and the conscience being the aboriginal voice of God, they're sincerely seeking God and through no fault of their own, right, that they didn't become Catholic. We can totally hope that at the end of the day, they're safe. Oh, that's interesting. That was going to be one of my questions. And this is something I've posed to this previous person I actually had mentioned who I discussed some of the things about. So, although I'm not Christian, I'm not closed to any of the things that you're talking about. And I've already kind of explained my position. I'm not a religious. It's just not

a major part of my identity or my life right now. However, if you look at my actions and I, and I pose this to this other guy who was attacking me for my position, right? I was saying, well, and I don't take it personally. I don't care. But I was like, you know, if you look at my actions though, I'm a better Christian than you are in terms of how I live. Now I understand what's put the beliefs aside for a second. And I just showed him a little list live. Now, I understand, let's put the beliefs aside for a second. And I just showed him a little list. I mean, I've given about 10% of my income to charity for years now. I can honestly say I have no vices. I don't even look at porn, right? I don't drink alcohol. Good, man. It's time for men to men up. Oh, I've spoken about this. Honestly,

be a man and stop looking at porn. It's such a childish thing. And look, I used to look at it too, right? So I'm not speaking for a high horse, but it's just, it's something that I came around to. I'm like, wow, this really is a completely vicious thing. And it fuels an obscenely vicious industry, right? So sorry, Mike, I just wanted to- Oh no, it's terrible. It's terrible. Anybody listening, if you want to hear my thoughts on porn and why I stopped, I might've talked a little bit about how I stopped, although there isn't a great story there. It's more just, I came to the point where it was so at odds with my principles. I felt guilty and it wasn't guilty to anyone, even though my wife at the time was my girlfriend. I mean, she didn't like it obviously, and she wasn't going to break up with me over it. Go figure. Yeah. But she wasn't going to break up with me over it, but it did hurt her feelings. And so

I did feel bad about that, but it got to a point where I felt bad more about what it was doing. I mean, there are the individual effects, but there are the social, like it really should just be banned, especially in kids, right? So- Serious psychological effects as well. So yeah, so I get your point and I acknowledge it and I concede it. As you might've understood where I was going with what my proposition to this other guy was, if you look at my actions, I'm not a saint, I'm not perfect. I do mess up, but I really do try to live a moral, ethical life. And I try to not only flourish myself, but help anyone who's

in contact with me flourish. And I don't always get it right. And sometimes I do things that I shouldn't do, but in the scheme of things, I'm a pretty upright person. And this person I was speaking to is not a bad person, but in that way, really not comparable. And so my question to him was, does it really make sense that simply because I don't affirm this belief, if I live this way my entire life and really bring a lot of good into the world, that I should go to hell forever for it? Right, right. Yeah. And I would say, if that's somebody's conception of God and religion, and they're an atheist for that reason, well, shoot, I reject that too, right? We're on the same page, right? There's just certain,

I think, morally repugnant things that, and this is again, one reason why I'm Catholic, right? Because I couldn't accept certain Protestant views that just seemed that deeply repugnant things that, and this is again, why one reason why I'm Catholic, right? Because I couldn't accept certain Protestant views that just seemed that deeply repugnant. So that would be more of a Protestant idea, not a Catholic idea. Right. So yeah, let me try and articulate it carefully because like, don't get me wrong, right? Like Catholics believe that everybody should become Catholic because we believe that the Catholic church has all the gifts that Christ wants to share with all of us, right? Sure. All the help, the liturgy, the sacraments, the intimacy of the relationship with God, the gifts that Christ gave, he gave to his church.

So it's really something that we do have the Great Commission, right, to evangelize. Now, but to your point, I think there's probably a lot of atheists and a lot of Protestants and probably a lot of Muslims and a lot of Buddhists who are in many ways a better person than I am. I mean, I'm still, I think, a pretty depraved person. I used to be far worse. So I think in this question, you just have to compare apples to apples. I would be hesitant to compare myself to anybody else of any religious background, but I can tell you for certainly I am a million times better now being Catholic than I was before. I mean, my list of perversions and vices before I became religious was enormous. And I you know, I was 26. I was had kids. I was a pretty crap father, if I'm being honest. You know, I was mostly just trying to get away from my family a lot. I saw them as distractions. I had a little yellow Porsche that I drove around, you know, trying to impress people and looked at porn and like all this, all this stuff that I look back on with honestly a great

amount of shame and embarrassment. If I'm being frank, I can relate to that. I had a similar face. I had a Porsche as well at one time. It wasn't yellow. It was white. I had the GT four dog. Would you have, I had the GTS. Mine was even cooler, right? But how, yeah, yeah, it was, it was, but how sad my existence was. No, I mean, I look back on that and it is cringe. I cringe at myself. Yeah. And so, And the Catholic church is also very clear. There's a heresy of Pelagianism. I didn't make myself better. At the end of the day, I just stopped resisting God, right? It's letting God into your life. So in one sense, you can very easily imagine somebody who might be, quote unquote, well, I just want to say any religion, right? But they're living a life of

vice. They really are resisting God in some sense. So they're not in a state of grace where you might have somebody who, through no fault of their own, never came into contact with the gospel or the Catholic church, but acted in accordance with their conscience as best as they heard the call of God in their life, didn't resist the spirit's call, so to speak, and try to live a virtuous life, really try to sincerely seek truth. The Catholic church says, absolutely, we can hope that that person is saved. Because even though God binds himself to the sacraments or Catholics to sacraments, he isn't bound by them. Now, what the Catholic church does say exclusively is that if you are saved,

you are saved through the Catholic church at the end of the day, right? Because it's just true. But just because you are outside of the Catholic church doesn't mean that you can't be saved through it necessarily. That's in Vatican II. That's a teaching. Now, at the same time, if you think it might be true and you're sincerely seeking and looking into it, you should look into it. You should become Catholic, right? No, that's understandable. Then it becomes a point of what? Is it cowardice? Is it disingenuous? Yeah, because at the end of the day, are you really just kind of rejecting God? And the idea of hell, the Catholic catechism's definition of

hell is it's a definitive self-exclusion from God. So there's a kind of absurdity to it, right? It's not this caricatured cartoonish idea that God just kind of sends you to some place because you didn't verbally profess some statement of belief and boils your legs in molten sulfur for a hundred billion calendar years. Again, if you reject Christianity because of that, I reject that view of Christianity too. We're on the same page, right? That is what I believe. The Catholic church says that whatever else hell is, you know, there's positions in Catholic theology that are very wide on this, right? The church doesn't formally teach like on some of these things. There's areas of great debate within Catholicism, but you have people who are called like hopeful universalists. And at the end of the day,

God does manage to bring everyone freely to himself. Now we shouldn't confidently assume that, but we could hope for it. Now, some of my more traditionally minded Catholic friends, I'm very traditionally minded. Believe me, I am. I go to Latin mass. It's very beautiful. I affirm all the teachings of the church, might push back on me on that, but that's something I find quite attractive. It seems right to me on a proper metaphysical and theological understanding, at least the possibility of it. Now, at the same time, I want to say, I think there's good reasons to become Catholic. And I think that this is true. And if you really are seeking, take a look at the very least, it's worth a serious investigation or even reinvestigation. Cause like you said, Mike, sometimes people take an initial look earlier in life, as I certainly did, rejected it, and then

later on come back and this is what happened to me, realized, oh, I sort of rejected a caricature in a way, or I rejected a very superficial understanding. But then maybe I should have another look and see if there's more to it. And for people who want to do that, where would you point them? What are good resources? who want to do that, where would you point them? What are good resources? Yeah. So those three questions, right? Does God exist? Is Jesus God, right? And what Mark sat off? Well, the resurrection, that's the claim of Christianity, right? St. Paul says like, look, if Christ wasn't raised, if this miracle didn't happen, then it's a joke. Our faith is in vain, right? So that's the kind of interesting thing about Christianity is it makes a very strong

historical claim, which you can see if there's any evidence to bear that out or not. And then you kind of look at, well, did Christ give us the church or did he give us a book or what? So I would break it into those three categories and depending on where you're stuck, because people will be at different positions. Maybe you believe in God, but you don't think that the second one is right. Maybe you think the second one is right, but you don't think the third one is right. So it really depends. I actually have a Google doc that I put together because so many people have reached out to me over the years. I just call it a link of books that might make you Catholic. And I have books in every one of those categories. So I have the philosophical books for classical theism. I have the books from the historians that really try to show that there's a very credible, plausible case to be made historically for the resurrection, which kind of fits nicely. Like once you already have the prior worldview of theism, the resurrection, it almost kind of makes sense, right? It's almost like, okay, maybe I wouldn't predict it. It would happen exactly like that, but this accords well with a God of love, right?

And then books on early church history, what it looked like and arguments for Catholicism in particular. So I would say if people want to have a look, we can link that Google doc. I'd be happy to share it. Yeah. Send it over to me. I'll put it in the show notes. This has been fun, man. I appreciate the pushback. I mean, it's, it's, I hope I've been. Yeah, I think you did very well. And like I told you before we started recording, I hadn't put too much thought into what I wanted to ask you because I figured it also would be better if it was more based specifically on where you wanted to go. Of course, my intention being just to make for good discussion and try to anticipate maybe some of the thoughts that people listening who aren't coming into it at your position would

think of. And I found it enjoyable and hopefully I came up with some good questions and didn't ask anything too offensive. I know maybe not to you, but you know. Nothing's off limits, you know, at least not for me. And I appreciate this. I mean, I have these conversations frequently on my podcast and I always get a flood of emails and also on Instagram, which has been very interesting. Every time after our conversation, Mike, specifically after our conversations on your podcast, my Instagram inbox starts to receive a lot of messages again from often young men. I'm not surprised that I think Nietzsche predicted that, right? We had made a comment of that earlier. We didn't get to talking about that, but the state of masculinity in particular is in a very precarious place right now. And I think it

ties back into some of the points you were making regarding purpose and how religion can really give a mantle of purpose that covers every aspect of life. And if you take that away, I mean, I can imagine myself, again, even though I'm not, like I've said, I'm not a very religious person. It's not a strong part of my identity. I do have ideas of things that I think are probably correct. If I had to put a lot of money on it, I would actually be willing to make the bet. So I guess that says something, right? That's how Pascal was living in the real betting time, right? He's like, oh, you betting fools out there. Here's a bet you should be making. Yeah. It's referred to as Pascal's Gambit as well, right?

You know, when you read the Ponce's Pascal stuff, it's really a collection of notes. I might recommend one more good book. Actually, I don't have this in the Google Doc. I'll have to put it in there. It's called Taking Pascal's Wager by Dr. Michael Rhoda, a professional philosopher. That's a really good one. I feel like I've come across that book. It sounds very familiar. I would grab it because he's a philosopher of religion. So he's somebody who is very aware of the contemporary debate and the literature. It's a cool book because he gives a summary of the arguments and evidence, obviously in favor of Christianity, but then

gives a very robust contemporary formulation of how Pascal's Wager applies. So if that intrigues somebody, I would definitely recommend his book. It's called Taking Pascal's Wager. Great. Well, anyways, with young men, I'm not surprised that they gravitate toward these discussions. I mean, I get a lot of great feedback as well. And I'm thinking back over our discussions is often from men for whatever reason. I do get some women reaching out as well, but it's more often men. Well, you're right. We are in a masculinity crisis. I mean, where are the men? Where are the men? Right. And even in religion, like religion is when understood it is and should be a manly thing. Like, honestly, what do you mean by that? Right. Because you're called to a life of virtue. This needs to be our next podcast. Actually, let's do it on masculinity. Absolutely. Right. You're going to stop looking at porn like a teenager. like a teenager. I know you're probably not a fan of Jordan Peterson and I'm not particularly a fan of his anymore. I liked a lot of what he was doing in the beginning. However, I do agree with some of

his, I wouldn't even say his ideas or ideas he curated and he collected. And one of them being one of the most fundamental, maybe imperatives of living. And this certainly applies to men, probably applies to women as well, but certainly applies to men. And we see men running from it. The Peter Pan syndrome is to take on as much burden and as much responsibility as you can to have as big of a sphere of influence as you can, right? Yeah. No. So, you know, I actually think, you know, on a very general level, a lot of what Peterson says, I think is very important and needed and good. And it's funny because I've had so many people come to my podcast and actually say that they've reconsidered religion or have become religious because of Peterson, who isn't explicitly religious, but he seems to be like serving as a bridge for people.

That's the criticism that I've heard though from, again, I have a Catholic friend who despises him. Fox Day despises him partially because they don't like that in his biblical lecture series, he took the Bible and read it. Well, he's a young Ian, right? So he's looking at it from a very psychological standpoint. Yeah. Yeah. He's saying, let's put aside the religion of it and let's look at it more through the lens of psychology and what's true about it in that regard. And a couple of, again, people I've spoken to, Christians, Catholics didn't like that. Well, actually, you know, to shed some light on that, check out the conversation,

anybody listening between him and Bishop Robert Barron, Catholic Bishop. And I think they'll find that very interesting because they have a very fruitful exchange. And, you know, Catholics are certainly not, they shouldn't be opposed to, you know, there being deep psychological significance in the Bible. It's just not an either or, right? Sure. Yeah. I tried to make that argument to, again, this guy I was talking with also like, shouldn't, I mean, he's bringing a lot of people to religion. Shouldn't you be happy? I mean, your church is benefiting from his work, even if he's not saying the exact things that you think he should say. Again, I will probably disagree with him on a number of particular philosophical,

metaphysical points, but generally I see him as an important cultural warrior right now. I really do. Well, that's going to be our next one. Masculinity. I think that'll be a fun discussion. Beautiful, man. These are always a blast, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on and I hope people get something out of it and you can certainly let me know. Reach out. Reach out on Instagram. Reach out on Instagram, chroniclesofstrength.com. Pat Flynn at chroniclesofstrength.com is my email. PatFlynnatChroniclesOfStrength.com. Pat Flynn at ChroniclesOfStrength.com is my email.

I can always promise a charitable exchange. I'm always not immediate or responsive on social media, but I do try to get back to as many people as I can. And my podcast, if anyone's interested, is The Pat Flynn Show. Every Friday, we do called Philosophy Friday. So if you like the philosophical stuff, you'll probably dig that. And then every Sunday, I do Sunday School, and that's more on theology. And then throughout the week, I talk to people like the legendary Mike, you'll probably dig that. And then every Sunday I do Sunday school and that's more on theology. And then throughout the week, I talk to people like the legendary Mike Matthews here on fitness stuff.

And so it's a pretty eclectic podcast, but there's something there probably for just about everyone. Yeah. Yeah. And how to think about God would be, I think, a book that anybody still listening and especially if they're at the edge of their seat, then go grab Pat's book, How to Think About God. I think that's a great place to start. They should be probably top. It probably is top on the list of your Google Doc. It's not. I wasn't that self-aggrandizing. Of course I put it in there.

I know, I know, but it's short and I think it does some great stage setting, my opinion. But yeah, good stuff, man. I appreciate the recommendation. I really do. Yeah. And I look forward to our next one. man. I appreciate the recommendation. I really do. Yeah. And I look forward to our next one. All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from? Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to

the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and whatever app you're using to listen and you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself, and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.