Pints With Aquinas - 217: Why People Become Atheists w/ Fr. James Brent, OP

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Today on Pints with Aquinas, I'm joined by Fr. James Brent, O.P. Fr. James is professor of philosophy at the Dominican House of Studies, and one of the most brilliant, articulate, and convincing people I’ve ever met. During this conversation, we dig into the philosophical soil in which atheism grows — particularly the materialist, mechanicist, nominalist, skeptic, and relativist worldviews so prevalent in our culture. We’ll tackle the BIG issues, like: • Why saying there is a God or there is no God represent two radically different worldviews • How atheism is, historically, a minority position, and what’s happened to change this minority position in modern times • Why true science is actually neutral about the question of God’s existence • Why it feels like you’re rejecting science when you reject materialism (HINT: You’re not!) • The five negative positions that constitute “big tent” Platonism, and why this list is invaluable in discussions with atheists... If you enjoy BIG conversations, then grab your notepad and pen because you’re really going to enjoy this episode! Learn more about the Thomistic Institute here: https://aquinas101.thomisticinstitute.org/ SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints  Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS  Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform  

Yes, g'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd and today I am joined around the bar table by Father James Brent, who is one of the most brilliant and articulate and convincing Dominicans, just people actually, that I've ever encountered. So he's a Dominican friar. Let's see here. He lives and teaches philosophy at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from St. Louis University, where he wrote on Thomas Aquinas on the rationality of faith. He was ordained a priest in 2010. He frequently gives lectures for the Thomistic Institute and often travels to give retreats for college students and young adults. He's also the promoter of the

Angelic Warfare confraternity for the Dominican province of St. Joseph. I'm going to put some links in the description below so that you can learn more from him. In particular, there was a specific talk that he gave, and it was because of that talk that I decided to engage with Father Brent. I'm going to have that below as well. You're just going to absolutely love this. Basically, we talk about the soil out of which atheists grow or atheism grows. We talk about materialism, mechanicism. I keep calling it mechanism. So I think I even spelt that wrong in the thing I put up in a minute, but mechanicism, nominalism, skepticism, relativism. We talk about these things and we talk about how there's a different way of looking at reality and that in order to be sort of a big tent Platonist, you have to be an anti-materialist, an anti-nominalist, etc.

And that that will actually dispose you to arguments for God's existence. Because if you ever had an argument with an atheist and you're like, man, I'm arguing, but I get the sense that I'm arguing not just against a proposition because God does not exist, but against a sort of matrix of beliefs. That's what we get into today. So there was some really heavy lifting philosophy in this. And I think you're going to, I'm quite convinced, especially if you're philosophically inclined and enjoy these kind of big conversations, you're going to very much enjoy this. So there you go. Hey, before we get started, can I just say that Strive has been really taking off.

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Here is my very interesting and fascinating, interesting, fascinating, one is higher than the other. I don't know. Episode with Father James Brandt. Father James Brandt, glad to have you on Planets of the Quietness again. Thanks for being with me. Thank you for having me. You gave a talk last year on Big Tent Platonism, and it was just so powerful for me.

content platonism and it was just so powerful for me and one of the reasons i knew it was powerful is i was actually pausing and writing down what you were saying in my notebook now a lot of people might just naturally do that when they listen to lectures i never do that but i just found this so gripping uh that i had to i had to listen to it we're going to put the link to that talk in the description below so that people can listen to it but I wanted to kind of have you on the show to flesh this out a little more. And one of the main things you were saying is, you know, when you're arguing with an atheist, it's not like you're merely trying to dislodge the proposition, does God exist? If you've ever spent time arguing with an atheist, you get the sense that you're dealing with this whole sort of matrix. There's a whole lot more going on under the surface. You might sort of say, this talk was about, and what I want to discuss in this

interview is the soil out of which modern atheism grows. And that's what we want to talk about today. That's right. It's a big, big phenomenon you're dealing with when you're dealing with atheism. Yeah. Happy to be here to speak with you about it. Yeah, it's sort of like, I mean, we have trivial beliefs, and then we have deep-seated beliefs. And I think all of us have found ourselves frustrated when we're discussing with somebody,

trying to get them to change their mind on something they consider very important, like abortion, you know? Because if I tried to convince them, no, Sydney is not the capital of australia it's canberra they would say oh okay and they wouldn't not that they wouldn't dig their heels in but if i say abortion is never justified they might and man i would too i i would i would very deep much dig my heels and if you were trying to convince me that that abortion was a good thing um because it's so wrapped up in my other kind of beliefs.

So could we just kind of talk about, yeah, you take it away. Sure. These beliefs like the existence of God and the humanity of the unborn, these kinds of beliefs engage our entire philosophy and our entire worldview in a way that say, entire philosophy and our entire worldview in a way that say, you know, what's the capital of Australia? That kind of question doesn't engage a person's total philosophy and total outlook on the world. But the difference between saying there is a God and saying there is no God, those two positions really represent or express two very different, radically different views or takes on the world as a whole. And atheism can only become a kind of widespread or popular view if a whole philosophy that goes with it and underlies it becomes popular. And that is what

has happened, I think, in the West. One of the points I make in the talk is that atheism is actually a very small minority position, historically speaking. Down through history, very, very, very, very, very few people have advanced atheism as a serious position, philosophically, or even at the popular level. The testimony of the nations and the common consensus of the peoples is that there is some ultimate cause or source of the universe and of the order in the universe and some ultimate source of the governance of the universe. And the idea that there is no God, that position, most people down through history would find that just totally ridiculously implausible. The testimony of nature is so powerful,

and the testimony of the human conscience is so powerful. But what has happened over the last several centuries is that a certain philosophy that goes with atheism has become popularized as well. And that's what makes atheism seem thinkable and conceivable and plausible. And that's what we're up against is not just a particular position, but a whole worldview. not just a particular position, but a whole worldview. Yeah, so you might say it's sort of like in the air we breathe, and it makes atheism almost like the natural outcome of a sort of normal individual in the United States of America than belief in God. That's right. It seems that way now, but we have to remember that this is historically an extremely minority position and that the situation we're in in North America and in Western Europe, where most people around

us are either agnostic or atheist, that's an extremely rare position historically. This is a really, we're in a gigantic anomaly. We need to remember that because we seem to ourselves like we're crazy because the world around us is sending this message, you're crazy for thinking this, you're crazy for thinking this, you're crazy for thinking this, when historically, it's quite the opposite. But wouldn't, I mean, I could see the atheist responding, well, the reason this has been a relatively small view, or a very, very small view when we take into account the history of mankind, is that we didn't have science, the natural science has developed in the way they are now. So as science has developed, the more we've understood about the world around us, the more we've pushed back the need for God. Those

God of the gaps arguments, right, those gaps have been just closing up the more we've learned about the universe, right? So we now believe in evolution, we now are pretty sure that, you know, we are sure that the earth revolves around the sun, that the earth isn't necessarily the center of the universe. So maybe... A couple of things to say in response. First of all, as soon as you say that the reason why we can be atheistic now is because of science, what you've, in a sense, confirmed my point, that there's a larger picture of reality that goes with the appearance of a plausible kind of atheism. And to the extent that the science embodies a larger worldview or philosophy,

which we'll get into, that's what makes the atheism seem plausible. Okay. But it turns out that science itself is basically neutral about the question. It's over-interpretations of the science and philosophies that go with it that make the atheism seem plausible. And further, I guess the last point would be that at least someone like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and Plato, they did not depend on God or the gaps kind of argumentation. That's actually more of like a 19th century sort of apologetic move that's made among

English speaking apologists. The great philosophical and metaphysical thinkers of the Western world never really used those kinds of arguments. They had much more sophisticated and deeper kinds of arguments that made appeal to not particular phenomena that are unexplained by science, but general features of the cosmos, which are still very much with us and still very much unexplained by scientific reasoning. And in fact, the science takes a lot of these things for granted and just doesn't question them.

Okay, fair enough. Well, then let's talk about what is within the soil, as it were, that's kind of producing atheists, or what is it within the air, especially these five things that you talked about in your talk that I want to get to. So there's a philosopher's study of movement down through history called Platonism. And it's an important philosophy. And the question is, what is this? What is Platonism? We want to get a grip on that. And we need to take seriously the importance of Platonism because it was the philosophy that the fathers of the church used very largely when they turned to Scripture to interpret the Scriptures. They found in Platonism, the fathers of the church used very largely when they turned to scripture to interpret the

scriptures. They found in Platonism, the fathers of the church did, a kind of ally in making the case that the world is a place of ultimate intelligibility. It's a place of the logos, says the prologue of the Gospel of John said. And Plato believed that as well. And he developed a philosophy over and against a movement in his day that's called sophistry. The sophists were basically politicians and rhetoricians who were willing to use language for purposes other than the communication of truth. Don't we see that today?

Yeah, well, that's yeah, it's always been there, but it's really dominant today. And they were willing to use language specifically in order to control and persuade the masses of people to go along with their agenda. And Plato had basically a war going on with the sophists, and so did Aristotle. And one of the basic motives for that was Plato thought that sophistry was responsible for the death of Socrates. So Greek philosophy is born out of, or at least Athenian philosophy, is born out of, or at least Athenian philosophy with Plato and Aristotle, is born out of an anti-Sophist kind of stance. And they were able to largely identify the positions that the Sophists held and think in response to that, and to elaborate positions that are opposite of sophistry,

and that basically make the world out to be an intelligible place. So what we could do then is ask, well, what are these positions that the sophists held, and what are the Platonistic kind of responses? So there's a philosopher by the name of Lloyd Gerson, who studied this. He's a historian of philosophy, and he studied this with great care, and he has laid out five positions, five negative positions, that constitute a very large-scale kind of Platonism. He calls it Ur-Platonism, or sometimes Big Tent Platonism. And these five negative positions carve out like a space. You can conceive of it as a circle. And inside this circle, you actually have lots of different views about the world. But these five different

negative positions sort of constitute the circle. And that's what I found was that this list is extremely helpful in illuminating like the anti-theistic philosophies of all times, really. And it illuminates the anti-theistic philosophies of today. illuminates the anti-theistic philosophies of today. And I love the way... I love the way either he put it or you put it, that in order to be within this big tent Platonism, there's basically five things you have to reject. And I like that, because usually Christians are spending time

talking about what they accept, and the atheists are telling you what they reject. Whereas here, it's almost like we're flipping the tables, and you have to be against these five things in order to get into this tent. So what are those five things? Okay, so the first thing is anti-materialism. Anti-materialism.

So materialism is the view that the world is nothing but physical bodies and the properties of physical bodies. Or if you want to use the language of David Armstrong, who was a materialist philosopher in the 1970s and a rather prominent one, reality is nothing but a spatio-temporal matrix. And what exists are the entities recognized by physics. That would be a contemporary definition of materialism.

A more ancient definition would be there exists nothing but matter and void, void being empty space. Can you think of any modern atheists who reject materialism while remaining atheists? I cannot think of any off the bat. Yeah, I can't think of any off the bat. It seems like the two really go together. Anything else to say on materialism before we move to the next one? Well, I just want to make one point. Anyone who's worked or studied in the universities knows just how widespread materialism is. It seems to be the dominant philosophy at play in the universities today, not only in the sciences, but in philosophy, in psychology,

and in a lot of just across the board. So to turn against materialism in our day, really, really, really, really seems like you're turning against science. But you're not necessarily turning against science. In fact, I know a number of Catholic scientists, even priests who are scientists, who know quite well that the science works and goes well just fine, even if you hold that there exists a God, there exists angels and demons. None of the scientific results or methodologies need to be rejected if you hold the existence of God and deny materialism. But the atheists often try to say science somehow proves that materialism is

true. And that is what we challenge. It just doesn't seem to, it doesn't. That's where the controversy is. So earlier when you said science makes it seem plausible that there is no god we have the science to explain everything it's very easy to just run science and materialism together as if they were the same claims or the same view of the world whereas in fact science is a very large-scale discipline and a very large-scale research enterprise that can cohere with a view of the world that's not materialist okay yeah so that's that i just want to make that that point um a person doesn't need to be a materialist in order to be a scientist and a working scientist and a good scientist.

Okay, so the second view that Gerson talks about is anti-mechanicism. So in order to be inside the big tent, you need to reject mechanistic views of the world. Okay? Or mechanistic explanations. Yeah, what is... Yeah, what is that? What is mechanism? Okay, so a canna sism rather so there's Gerson's way of defining it And then I'll give you

My way of thinking about it. He says that Mechanicism anti-mechanism is to say this it's false that the only explanations of the world are those available To the materialist. Okay. Okay. In other words, we can appeal to non-material causes to explain things. We can appeal to non-material causes to explain things. And sometimes we need to appeal to non-material causes to explain things.

Okay. You want to give us an example other than free will? Or does that take us far afield? I don't want to derail you here. Well, I mean, I think what a standard Platonist would have in mind would be you need the forms to explain things, like the separated form, existing separately from things in the world in order to explain, for example, mathematical knowledge. Okay. And how do you explain the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is an eternal truth? Sometimes Platonist philosophers will appeal to a form,

various quantitative forms, to account for the truth of that proposition. That seems so abstract for non-philosopher types. I could see someone saying, what does it even mean? Are you saying that, like, two plus two equaled four when there were no minds to think it? But what does that mean? Plato would have thought yes. So whether there was a time when there were no minds to think it would be, he would probably deny that. Plato would.

He would probably deny that. Plato would. But that's the kind of realism he held, is that, yeah, these things are made true by eternal forms that are separate from matter. That was Plato's view. Now, Aristotle doesn't go in for that. But inside the big tent, the basic point is that there are entities

we can appeal to, like forms, to explain various things and features of things in the world um now amongst us just soul would be one okay so human beings have an immaterial soul that accounts for abstract thought it accounts for free will it accounts for free will, it accounts for the afterlife, and those sorts of things. So when we, yeah, those would be two examples. So does mechanicism naturally flow from materialism? Because if the world is merely matter, then the only way to explain it is in a material way, is that what we're saying a little bit more specific than that that's why i think it's helpful to bring in uh talk of aristotle's four causes you

have the material cause efficient cause formal cause and final cause it seems to me that what is essential to mechanicism is attempting to explain all things in terms of material causes and efficient causes. Yes, yes. And it goes with the denial of, it often goes with the denial of formal causes. Yeah, yeah. So the mechanistic universe is kind of a pointless universe, meaning there's not purposes or ends written into things themselves. And we can explain everything just using the material parts and forces that are at work

explaining them. Somebody asked me the other day what I think one of the fundamental gaps is in a child's education, and this is one of the things I pointed to, this idea of the formal and final cause of the human person. Like, what am I? What am I for? And it seems like the world says to us, well, look in the mirror, look inside yourself. I guess one step up from that would be to look to the natural world. And then finally, the way we would want to say it, the more accurate view is like, what has God revealed to us about who we are? But if we don't even know who we are or what we're for, or if what we think we are is just sort of, yeah, meat. Without a formal cause of a human being or the final cause, without knowing that, we are fundamentally disoriented.

or the final cause, without knowing that, we are fundamentally disoriented. And what you end up with is a view that the purpose of life has no purpose except what you and I give it. That's right. We are the authors, ultimately, of our purpose, ourselves, our identity, and our purpose. And so without realizing it, you've put your finger on one of the biggest issues of the time like I don't know if you've heard of the Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood versus Casey yes yes it was Justice Anthony I think who made that quote yeah if you've heard of the mystery clause where it says basically each person at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own conception of existence.

Well, that. Yeah. Well, a lot of people, lawyers that I've talked to say that that principle more or less undermines the rule of law, because anyone can define their own concepts of existence pretty much any way they want. lest there is a formal cause and a final cause of a human being to sort of specify what a human being is and what we are for, at least in general, then each individual is left literally to project his own meaning onto the world or give his own life meaning. And I had professors in graduate school who were atheist professors, and they would say exactly that, that basically life has no objective, intrinsic purpose. We just each come up with our own individual projects, and that's what life is for. I think it was one of the Second Vatican Council documents, correct me if I'm wrong, that said when God is forgotten, the human person becomes unintelligible. documents, correct me if I'm wrong, that say when God is forgotten, the human person becomes unintelligible. Yeah, that's right. And the best that they can do is say, we each individually

sort of fashion ourselves into whatever we want to be. So in that sense, is transgenderism just like an inevitable outcome of this mechanistic, mechanical way of viewing the world? I think so, because basically, well, there's more involved in the transgenderism than just that. But basically, if you just say, look, we're just clogs in a machine world. And if we're just clogs in a machine world, nonetheless, I have this inner life and an intentional life. There's nothing in the machine world that accounts for my existence, tells me what I am, or lays down a purpose or specifies a purpose for our lives. So we each come up with our own. We have to each come up with our own project and sense of purpose. And then why should we be constrained by categories like male, female or any other category?

So I'm afraid that transgenderism is just really the beginning of a kind of fluidity where you can say anything you want about yourself or and no one could possibly object to you. I know it sounds like the kind of slippery slope fallacy, but I think we're onto something here. You know, like if I can define myself in any way I want to, then I imagine if we keep going down this road, like people are already kind of beginning to say, well, I identify as an African-American, or I identify as a bald eagle.

And if you're going to object to that, then you're using the same logic that I use when I object to a man who says he's now become a woman. Right. So that's exactly right. And basically, these are the implications of saying there's no formal cause and no final cause. We're just explaining everything in terms of efficient causes and material causes and that's it a human being is clearly there's more to us and more to our lives than that so when we're trying to make sense of like the rest of our lives uh we have to basically where can you go you can't go to nature and the world around us in order to understand what we are. So it has to come out from your own sort of psychological state.

You come up with your own intentions and your intentions determine your project. Yeah, I'm thinking, I can't help but think of Seinfeld, which is a terribly funny show in many ways, but precisely because I think those of us who watch it, most of us believe that there is meaning. And so you're kind of like watching a show about nothing, about the lives of people who are acting as if nothing matters.

But increasingly, it's like we're all kind of Jerry and George and Elaine, and it's not actually funny anymore. It's just miserable and bland and monotonous. Right. I think that's right. Well, let's go to the third one then. We've had materialism, mechanicism. I think the third one was nominalism. Yeah, anti-nominalism.

Help us understand that. What is nominalism? So Plato and Aristotle both held that there is, when we ask the question, what is something? What is a dog? What is a cat? What is justice? What is beauty?

What is truth? There is in reality a form or an essence which gives us the answer to those questions. answer to those questions. Okay. So if you, if I ask you, what is truth? There is in reality a form or an essence that makes an answer to that question to be true. So if I say truth is the adequation of, of mind and reality. Okay. There's a, there's a form of truth that makes that very statement to be true. Okay. Or if I say, um, what is virtue? And you say, virtue is a habit of the soul by which a person chooses rightly. There's a form or an essence of virtue in reality that makes that answer to be true. Okay. And likewise, another term for form or essence is nature, the natures of things. So dogs have a certain nature. Cats have a certain nature. If you feed a dog food to a cat

or cat food to a dog, it doesn't go well. It's not, it doesn't comport with their nature. comport with their nature. If you, you know, fire and human nature don't mix very well. We are burned and just destroyed by fire. So we have a nature or a form. Okay. Now, one of the points that has been a disputed question down through history is, are there common natures? So do you, Matt,

and I have the same human nature? Is there the same form there in you and in me? And a classic, there's been lots of philosophical disputes about that, but inside the big tent platonist school, Inside the big tent Platonist school, the answer is yes. There's a common form, a common nature that's held by all the members of a certain kind. So all human beings on the face of the earth have the same nature. We have a common human nature. We might have individual differences like hair you know, hair color or height or weight or whatever, or nationality or language groups, but our human nature, fundamentally what we are, is the same, okay? So that's an important piece of backdrop, okay? The nominalist is someone who denies that and says individual things do not

have strictly common natures. Each individual is uniquely situated in space and time. It's totally individual and unique. That's how Lloyd Gerson puts it. Is the reason for that that you have to appeal to a third thing? Like if you and I are the only human beings that exist in the universe, and we want to say that we share something in common, we're talking about something independent of ourselves. And that would be the form. And then you'd have to say, well, where is that?

Is there a metaphysical address to that? Is that related in us? Yeah, so help us understand that. Right, that's one of related in us? Yes, help us understand that. Right, that's one of the big questions. So Plato held that exactly that. There must be a third thing over and above you and me individually, called the form of man, that we both participate in. Aristotle denied that this form of human nature exists over and above you and me.

And he thought the same form that's in you is in me, and it exists nowhere else except in you and in me. And we can think this form as one thing only because we abstract the form from the individuals as we experience them. So first we experience multiple individuals of a common mind has the ability to detect and conceive of this common form. And it exists universally in our minds and individually in the things themselves. individually in the things themselves So if you keep an account of a common human nature without positing a third thing over and above The individual the form has no address so to speak except in the individuals, but it's one in the same form Okay So if not if nominalism is true what happens to the the dictionary? What do we say about a tree?

How do we define tree? Can we define tree if nominalism is true? There's many different kinds of nominalism, but nominalists acknowledge that they're a particular thing, and they do have qualities or properties. And we can empirically detect their qualities and properties and these qualities or properties are more or less similar to each other gotcha and then based on similarities that things have with one another we can classify we can classify

things and we have common words or nomen is the latin word for name or uh term and so we have things have terms in common they have names in common based on similarities that they have with one another but strictly speaking there's no common nature or form between them so what's the problem with that what's the problem with that? What's the problem with that? I'm thinking of a strictly Aristotelian way of coming to know the world. I bump into a thing that's a tree. I bump into another thing that looks similar, has similar attributes. I use words to classify them because they share similar attributes. Why isn't that enough? Why do I have to appeal to tree-ness per se? One of the fundamental intuitions that human beings have is that we exist in a world of different kinds of things. And there's multiple different kinds of things around us.

So the nominalist world is a world without different kinds of things. Okay. That sounds like strange right up the bat because we're like, wait a second, what do you mean there are different kinds of things? Or there's two ways to put it. One is you can't classify things into common kinds, like natural kinds, uh, because they're all just discrete individuals or each individual thing is a totally unique kind but they don't really say that either okay um so what do you do with the the the experience that we have which is uh we exist in a world where there's many individuals but they come in kinds so cats are somehow the same kind of thing dogs are somehow the same kind of thing. Dogs are somehow the same kind of thing. And those are different kinds of things than, say, glass and silver and gold. What do you do with

that intuition that things come in different kinds? The nominalist has to just say, well, there's just these similarities, and that's pretty much about it. In a way, though, I could see someone objecting and saying, really, what the nominalist and the, what's the alternative to the nominalist? The universalist or the person who believes in natures, common natures? Yeah, the friend of the forms, someone who believes in forms, yeah. In a way, it sounds like they're just both saying the same thing. So you've got the friend of the form saying, I look around me and I categorize things based on their attributes. The nominalist is doing the same thing, isn't he? Not really. So someone who holds that things have forms holds that there's a principle that makes each thing to be what it is.

Okay. So there's something that makes you to be human and there's something that makes me to be human. Okay. Uh, and you and I have a common human nature and based on that common human nature, uh, there are certain things that we have in common, for example, common things that we deserve, right? Ways that we should treat each other. We have common purposes, et cetera. For the nominalists, you and I don't have a common human nature. So we can't say that, yeah, we have a name in common. We call you a human.

We call me a human because we have a few similar features but we're not fundamentally the same kind of thing so you and i do not belong to the same species so is human rights just a sort of useful fiction for the nominalist it's very very hard for a nominalist to justify a kind of account of human rights. They need to appeal to something other than nature. So on the view that we have the same common nature, we can spell out an account of, say, human rights or common deserts, things that we deserve under justice.

For a nominalist, justifying those things is much more difficult. That's why later on we're going to get to relativism, which is the next point in the big templatinism, because it really, really seems like from the nominalism follows a kind of relativism. And one of the big projects in modern philosophy hasn't been an attempt to escape relativism, given the mechanistic, nominalistic understanding of the world that they have. As we wrap up on this point then, help us, is it just our intuition that we live in a

world of different sorts of things that is our best argument for the forms? Or could you help us us give us maybe a... There's multiple arguments. Could you show us why? Could you give us, I know in the time we have available, give us an argument why nominalism is false then? So here's one argument that comes from Plato and Aristotle. Now they're just articulating the basic intuitions, but when something changes, let's say you have water on the stove, okay? The water, it's got a certain nature or form. Now, it can change temperatures. It's going to have

accidental properties or features. So its temperature will be accidental. It can start out cold and become hot, but it remains water the whole time. Do you agree with that? It remains water. It starts out cold. It becomes hot when you boil it. Yes, I agree. I can see anybody acknowledging that things seem to have accidental properties. They might use different language, but something can be what it is and change in certain ways and remain what it is. Okay, now hold on a on a second you just said something it is like there's what it is and then there's its accidental properties yes right yep but as soon as you say there's a what it is

you mean like a constitutive what it is yeah like a like a it would just it just seems kind of intuitive that there's something that stands under the the. Yeah. Yeah. The nominalist will say that's not, there is no something that stands under there. So then as I age and lose hair. It's all accidents all the way around. It's like turtles all the way down. It's accidents all the way down, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And you and I just have a few common accidents that are similar. We can't even say common. We have some similar accidents on the basis of which we have, we use the same word, but you and I are not the same kind of thing. Here, let me give you another thing that might make it more, make it clear. Aristotle points out the significance of what we call substantial change.

So it's one thing for water to change temperature and continue to be water. But it's another thing for water to just cease to exist altogether. So if you grant that, some changes that water can go through, it can somehow persevere as water or purge as water. And other times the water just disappears as water. That suggests that there's like a difference between it being water and it being these other properties or features that may have.

Being hot, being cold, being solid, being liquid. Okay. Yeah, that's, being solid, being liquid. Okay? Yeah, that's good. Keep going. Sorry. So Aristotle notices that you can have substantial changes without, you can have accidental changes without substantial changes, but sometimes there's substantial changes themselves. The question is, can a nominalist have that as well? Or is every single change a substantial change? That's one of the things you were getting at. In order to avoid the position that every change is a substantial change, you need to posit there's a difference between the substantial form that a thing has and various qualities or accidents that it has.

But that's precisely the distinction. They don't think so. So what's the difference between a living man and then a man who gets hit by a truck and is dead on the highway? I guess it's either a substantial change that's not terribly more significant, at least metaphysically, than if I was to pull a hair out of my head, or it's another example of a particular accidental change? That's a very good question. Someone who belongs to the Big Tent Platonist school will say, there's a form, a human nature,

and the form and the matter have separated and there's a substantial change there. The human being no longer is. The human being no longer is. The nominalist would, I don't, I mean, they could say any one of a number of things about that. They'd say there's a change there, but they would just say the changes are, the number of features that have changed is so great that we don't even call it the same thing anymore. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. But it's just just it's really just a change of features that's it so what do you want to do if you do you know atheists who are not normalists

um again i know as we talked about this is like a matrix this is like a web of things that are sort of they're very similar you know once you deny the immaterial... It gets tricky because there are contemporary philosophers, and they are atheists, who want to maintain that there are essences of things, that there are natures. And there's some of the things that motivate them, and this goes back to your question about arguments in favor of forms or natures and arguments against nominalism. or natures and arguments against nominalism, it seems like there are features that things have that cannot be explained exclusively by their parts, their physical parts and the laws of constitution and the scientific laws that govern the activity of those parts. So there is what some contemporary philosophers call emergent properties. there is what some contemporary philosophers call emergent properties okay and the the fact of emergent properties which are properties that belongs belong to things as a whole but cannot be accounted for exclusively by their parts that moves some contemporary philosophers to say there

are essences okay or things have natures and so there are essences, okay? Or things have natures. And so there are contemporary philosophers who are atheists, who are somewhat skeptical of the mechanistic and nominalistic sort of view of the world and are moving away from it. So that movement is out there. We should acknowledge that.

But I would say that on a popular level when you're arguing with people on the popular level or even still with a lot of people inside the universities materialism and nominalism just go together with the

atheism I heard recently somebody try to define a woman as a human being who menstruates. And this kind of gets to kind of what we're talking about, I think, as far as this nominalist worldview. Like, there isn't such thing as woman. Well, this is a good example. What you could end up with is, does that make a woman to be a different species or a different natural kind than man, than males, right? So what you end up with is, you could end up with, there's multiple different species, so to speak, of human beings. Okay, let's, I could talk about this all day.

Yeah, we could. Yeah, I love it. Let's move on to the next one we've talked about anti-materialism anti-mechanism and again all these antis are what you need to you know be in agreement with to be in big tent platonism anti-relativism what do we mean by that okay so relativism according to lloyd gerson's definition it, is the view that the true is what appears true to me or to my group. Right. The true is what appears true. So we often hear people talking about what's true for you and what's true for me,

or say this is true for you and it's not true for you. Or they'll say, I'm just speaking my truth. Yeah, this is my truth, that's your truth, that kind of thing. That is relativism. So he gives a little bit more of an abstract definition that for the relativist, the true is what appears true to me or to my group or to you or to your group. Anti-relativism, then, is going to be the claim it's false, that what appears true to me is what is true, or that the true is what appears true to me or to my group. So that's false. In other words, it's a breaking of the identification between what is true and what seems true to me or to you.

Whereas the relativist is basically someone who identifies those two things. Okay. So the tendency to identify what is true and what appears to be so, that goes way back in the history of human thought. Okay. Augustine addressed this, didn't he? The kind of incoherence of epistemological relativism. Yeah, he did address that in a number of different times and enough for different places. He sure did, yeah. So even though it seems like a new idea

or a kind of trendy thing, and it is trendy. It's ridiculous. Well, it seems trendy, but it's one of the principal views of the sophists. I mean, the sophists really held this position. And so Plato really identified this as one of the touchstones of sophistry and denies this. So there is a truth prior to and independently of you, me, what we think, the way the world is or the way we experience it, and the truth is what it is, and we are capable of accessing it.

That's the next position we'll get to about skepticism. But before you can say anything about that, you first have to say the truth is what it is prior to and independently of what you and i uh think it is reality is there and it is what it is um and people can have all kinds of different and incompatible views about the world and the way the world is but but that doesn't change the world. It is what it is in itself. Now, this sounds like something that the modern atheist would be in lockstep agreement with, even more so than most undergraduates today, or those who would be proponents of feminism or critical race theory. You atheist says, yeah, reality exists, and God

does not exist, and you wanting it to exist doesn't change that. So wouldn't you say in a way that in some ways they're absolutists like we are? So it depends on who you are talking to. There's a variety of positions they can take. Let's draw a distinction between two kinds of relativism. One kind of relativism is about morality. That's probably the one we run into more common. You have your moral views. I have my moral views. So there's what you think, there's the truth for you, the truth truth for me that was right for you and what's right for me and they just it is what it is and um there's and that's that's the moral relativism then there's epistemological relativism which is basically holds that this relativism

extends not only to morality but but to all claims whatsoever. Okay. So even about science. Okay. There's your scientific view and my science. What you think is the case, what I think is the case. Science is just as relative as anything else. There's what scientists hold in one age.

There's what they hold in another. And there's what's true for scientists in the past. There's what's true for scientists today. So it was true for people in the past that geocentrism uh is the case the earth is at the center of the universe but today that's no longer true for us so a person could try to do it in terms of science as well and there are some philosophers who try to be relativist this philosophers who try to be relativist this radically okay like all the way across the board what i have found is that in the contemporary scene um there are a lot of atheists who are very anti-relativist about science science tells us the truth it tells us the way the world actually is. But in other areas, like what's the purpose of life, they're quite relative. You have your purpose, I have mine.

There's what you think the purpose of life is. There's what I think the purpose of life is. And there's no common answer to that question. Yeah. So it's subtle, and there's distinctions we need to draw. But you're right. A lot of the atheistic professors I have met and talked to and run into and worked with, they are kind of, they are realists or anti-relativists about science and math.

But apart from science and math, it's a very, it's an open question. Things can go different ways. What is interesting is that on one hand, you have people like Richard Dawkins saying that God does not exist, but he might say that reality is there. But when it comes to morality, he'd probably be more relativistic but he comes off you know he he sounds like an old testament prophet when he wants to talk about things that he thinks are morally reprehensible like racism presumably like uh uh you know

unjust treatment of of homosexuals. And we would agree with him on these things, but he doesn't seem to have an ontological basis to make these assertions. Right. I don't know what to say about that, except to say modern philosophers have been looking for the last several hundred years

for a criterion of morality that's sort of independent independent of uh scientific accounts of reality so utilitarianism yeah or communism uh yeah uh the jury is still out on that and it seems to me that if there's a moral position that has become common among atheists, it's some kind of individual preference. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. What we're trying to do, what we need to do is maximize the satisfaction of everyone's individual preferences. Yeah. Just stay out of the way, basically. Right. That's the best society we could build. The problem is that, uh, well, there's many problems with that, but one of the big problems is that with that is that many people's individual preferences require grave injustices to be committed against other people. So you could think of the treatment of people

towards the end of life, you know. You could easily justify euthanasia on the grounds that while we have a finite number, a finite amount of medical resources to go around, in order to satisfy the individual preferences of the largest number of people, we need to distribute the individual preferences of the largest number of people, we need to distribute the health care resources across the board. And so if you're old, sick and unlikely to recover, we should just not, you know, spend health care or expend health care resources on you.

And you should just, you know. Yeah, I don't know if I don't know if that's necessarily true. Yeah, I don't know if that's necessarily true. I mean, the atheists I encounter would sort of be against people imposing on their free will or whatever it is we have. Basically, stay out of my way, let me do what I want, can do what you want. So it seems to me that the atheist would say that, no, we're not going to snuff people out at the end of life. But if a person at the end of life wishes to be snuffed out, then again, you shouldn't stand in his way. So how is that not consistent? Well, there's two things you're asking for. One is an argument as to why people shouldn't be snuffed out at the end of life, either by doing it to themselves or by doing it to other people. In other words, you're asking for an argument for why suicide is wrong.

Well, I guess I'm not really, we could leave that to one side. I guess what I'm trying to focus on is it seems there is a sort of consistency in the atheist who says that morality basically means don't get in my way and I won't get in your way. And that I don't think that atheist would claim that we should just let people die at the end of life, but they would say that if they wanted to die, then they could and that doesn't interrupt that moral theory that we shouldn't get in each other's way. So if a person wants to kill themselves,

let them and then my moral theory is still consistent. Does that make sense? A couple of things to say about that. Yeah, I know which principle you're talking about. It's something like, you can do anything you want as long as you don't harm someone else. Yeah, harm someone else's autonomy. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of things to say. First of all, I know very well that... Sorry, I've got to interrupt just real quick.

Not harm. Harm's the wrong way of putting it. And I think they would say that because harm can be legitimate. So I think what they would say is you don't interfere with another person's autonomy. So if I want to be killed, then you trying to prevent that is you interfering with my autonomy, though I am going to be harmed and wish to be. Speaker 2 Yes. It's just there's a number of things to say in response to that. One is that. The individual, each individual is, in fact, embedded in an environment.

And in fact, there's like, say, a finite number of resources available in the health care system. And if you're going to make a claim that each individual has like an intrinsic right to health care or something like that, it's hard to do so on grounds of individual preference utilitarianism. utilitarianism. So if we're trying to maximize people's individual preferences across the board, it might very well be that in order to maximize the satisfaction of their individual preferences of a huge number of people, we have to simply let other people go. That's the basic point. And then now if an individual like an atheist wants to come along and say, well, you don't have a right to do that to me. The answer is, how do you justify any kind of rights claim on the basis of an individual preference utilitarianism? That would be one of the arguments we could make in response. So what we have in the background here is a question of how does any kind of utilitarian position account for rights talk at all? That's a big philosophical question.

That's the question I have in mind. Yeah. But we've kind of digressed onto a specific topic. Yeah, sorry. About the distribution of healthcare. Yeah. So we were talking about anti-relativism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Truth exists and we can know it. Yeah. Now we can't know it perfectly. Right. I think it was Thomas who famously said we can't even know the nature of a fly. Yeah, that's right. He has the view that the natures of things beneath man and the natures of things above man cannot be known perfectly. We cannot comprehend

those natures or essences of things. But we definitely can have knowledge of some and important truths, necessary truths. OK, the point you were making earlier was that there are atheists who will deny the relativist position. That's that's true. OK, I think there are atheists who are anti relativists and you can find movements and groups out there for atheists who are against this or that injustice and in various ways. And they'll claim these things are unjust and we can oppose them. I had professors in graduate school who were atheists, but were what we could call intuitionists. And they held that we have certain intuitions,

that some things are always wrong, and we can hold those intuitions and engage in moral argumentation based on those intuitions. So they would be moral intuitionists, and that's a position that's out there now. But intuitionism doesn't seem to be satisfying to a lot of philosophers because it doesn't give you really a criterion of good and evil, right and wrong. It doesn't explain why certain actions are good and evil, right and wrong. It just says, well, we have these intuitions and we just go with it.

And there's difficulties with that. Intuitions change. They seem to be subject to conditioning in various ways, et cetera. Just a quick story. I remember I was doing ministry in Ireland, and a young man came up to me and a fellow retreat leader and said, it was a fine day, thank you, but I don't believe in God. And we asked him why. And he said, I don't believe in absolute truth. And my retreat leader looked at him and said, are you absolutely sure about that? And I'm not lying when I said he almost fell over.

Like he actually stepped back a couple and something in his brain broke. Yeah. Yeah, he engaged in the philosophical reflection that Plato and Aristotle sort of triggered in people, and it's been pointed out by a lot of philosophers down through history that any kind of hardcore relativism is inevitably going to be self-defeating. Right. Like if you say, well, there is no absolute truth or, you know, that kind of thing, it's going to be self-defeating. Right. Right. OK, that leads us to the final one, anti-skepticism. Yeah. So skepticism, as Lloyd Gerson understands it, is the view that knowledge is impossible.

OK, so anti-skepticism is the view that knowledge is possible. And it's a complex sort of phenomenon, skepticism is, because a person can be more or less skeptical about different things. So we could talk about like a universal or absolute skepticism. It's impossible for anyone to know anything. Or you can talk about a very specific kind of skepticism, such that someone might say it's impossible to know anything in matters of morality or in matters of religion. And it seems to me that that last kind of skepticism is very, very widespread.

It's impossible to know anything in matters of religion. I think a pretty common view now is that there's just different religious views out there, and reason can't say which views are true and which views are false. No one really knows. No one can really say. So that kind of skepticism is pretty common. What characterizes Big Ten Platonism is a rejection of all skepticisms.

So knowledge is possible in general and in particular domains, especially and particularly in morality and in matters of religion, insofar as we can know that God exists by the light of reason. OK, now, Plato himself seems to have been a little bit skeptical or maybe a lot skeptical about sensory knowledge. OK, and Aristotle was not skeptical about sensory knowledge. Okay. And Aristotle was not skeptical about sensory knowledge. So there's a dispute, I guess you could say, even within the Big Tenth Placeness School, about sensory knowledge in particular. But I don't know if that's essential to the whole thing.

The key thing is the claim that human beings are capable of genuine knowledge. See, the skept thing is the claim that human beings are capable of genuine knowledge see the skeptics in the ancient world basically held that we can't have any knowledge what we have are appearances or opinions opinions being kind of beliefs based on appearances and we can only conduct our lives and we should conduct our lives according to these opinions based on appearances. But what what's actually the truth? No one really knows or no one can know. That's skepticism. And Platonism is opposed to that and wants to claim that human beings are capable of knowing truth. capable of knowing truth. Not all the truth, like you said earlier, we can't be omniscient,

but we can know a lot of the truth, and the most important truth, especially about God and about moral principles. Okay, so this is really excellent. I mean, we began this discussion by saying that when you argue with an atheist, it feels like you're arguing against a kind of web of ideas. And it feels like we've kind of teased those ideas out today. And that if somebody could come to deny materialism, mechanicism, nominalism, relativism, skepticism, that they're in a much better place to then accept Christianity. But if they're holding on to those views, they can't. Those five views, materialism, mechanicism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism, make it very, very, very difficult to fathom a first principle and an ultimate kind of truth.

See, one of the further things that Lloyd Gerson says is that there are other there are some things, positive things that big tent Platonism has in common. And one of the positive principles that it has that all big all people within the big tent hold in common is that the many are to be explained in terms of the one. So we live in a world with many things in it, and in order to explain the many, we want to trace the many things back to one particular explanatory factor. So why is there heat on the earth? There's one cause. There's the sun. OK, there's many sunny days or many bright days, but one cause the sun.

OK, many things need the many living things need one thing, which is water to grow. OK, so when you've got many different things, you want to explain it in terms of one. There's many different letters on a page that someone's writing. There's one cause, which is the author who writes those words out on the page. So the many are to be explained in terms of the one. And so one of the positions that big tent platonists really reject is atomism where the world is ultimately explained in terms of you know a multitude of particular atoms kind of floating around in the void they say no actually a better explanation is that the many things in the world the diversity diversity of things in the world, is better explained by a single mind.

One mind accounts for the many things better than a multitude of atoms. It's simpler. Much simpler, isn't it, really, the worldview? Right. Right. So our intuitions about the principle of simplicity and other kinds of principles like that are really related to this big principle in the big template in some school that the many are single kind of unified explanation of the world. You would just be content in what we might call, you'd be content in an irreducible diversity. We're absolutely not.

Socially, a lot of people just say, look, there's just a multitude of atoms. That's just where we're at. There's a multitude of different just say, look, there's just a multitude of atoms. That's just where we're at. There's a multitude of different races, genders, individuals, personalities, preferences. And that's just the way the world is, like brute, irreducible diversity. And that's the ultimate sort of truth about things, the ground, and that's just the world we live in. And anybody to tell about is problematic yeah um i'm just this i'm just thinking about this now um it would seem though for the for

the thought for the thoughtful person if that's not too disparaging that that i i want to know not just particular truths but i want to know truth so i'm i'm i'm pushing pushing back the the dark of ignorance not in order to know this or that particular thing because once i come to know this or that particular thing my mind may rest on it for a moment but then i'm dissatisfied and seek to push out you know my my push through my ignorance more and more um now so if we cannot come to know truth itself, isn't that a good argument? Yeah, so if we can't, but if that were the case, if we couldn't come to know truth itself, wouldn't that just show that the intellect was sort of, what do you say, futile? Yes, and I would want to suggest to you that that very position is what characterizes a lot of people outside the big tent.

So the Nietzschean understanding, for example, of the human person is that the intellect is not for the sake of knowing truth. It's basically for the sake of gaining power and trying to organize the world a certain way or something like that. And that truth claims are a mask for the will to power. So what happens is that reason becomes reduced to techne, becomes reduced to the application of power to the world in order to organize it in a certain way. But you're right. Your basic point is right, Matt, that like it seems like intelligence itself is the movement from the many things given to us and experienced to one thing that accounts for and explains it all. And if you don't do that, you've somehow given up on the project of reason itself. And I think a lot of people in our society

have given up on that. That in a way is what post-modernism is, or post-post-modernism, however you describe it. People are just no longer seeking any kind of ultimate explanatory principle. I suppose for the modernist, though, they would respond to what we just said about the intellect. They would say, well, the intellect is like the appetite, right? So the appetite desires this or that particular thing and then is satisfied for a moment. But that doesn't prove that there is one piece of food that will satisfy my appetite forever. And so the intellect's like that. It's just for survival. I come to know this or that thing. You got it. Without, I don't know how familiar you are with the sophists, but that was exactly their account of human being.

I won't say human nature. We should call it human customers, human psychology or something. Their view is that a human being is basically appetite and power. And we use power in order to satisfy our appetites. That's more or less what human life is all about, if we can say that. And human reason is just simply part of our power apparatus for arranging the world in a certain way to satisfy our appetites. Like we were saying, and it seems to me that the individual preference utilitarianism that we were talking about earlier is kind of back to that position. It's like, there's a whole bunch of human beings. We have our individual appetites and preferences, and we're going to apply our power to satisfy those preferences as much as we can across the scale. But whether

there's a criteria of good or evil, right and wrong in themselves, we're just not going to think about that or worry about that or go there. This is the criterion of good and evil, right and wrong. If there is any, satisfy your appetite as much as possible. So now to a point you were making earlier about contemporary atheists, a lot of them have staked their atheism on science. And even contemporary science operates, it seems, according to this ancient principle, the many are to be explained by the one. So even if you were to say all the things in nature

can be explained by the four fundamental forces, that's pretty unsatisfying to a lot of contemporary scientists. And they're convinced there's got to be some one thing underlying that's responsible or that accounts for the four fundamental forces themselves. One equation that somehow unifies all things. And that's kind of what they're looking for in the dream of a so-called theory of everything. They're looking for one thing in nature that accounts for everything in nature. Oh, man. And the reason they're on that quest is, well, because they're human beings and because they have reason.

And they're trying to explain the many in terms of the one. They just think that the one thing that explains it all is inside of nature itself okay whereas plato and aristotle thought that there was one well aristotle is a complex thing here but um aristotle thought that mind uh really is what explains everything ultimately. And the contemporary physicists are trying to explain everything in terms of one thing that's not mind. Some ultimate force or energy or mass energy or some strings or whatever it may be. The question is, how do you do that?

And that's what the quest is for, the one thing that explains everything. Yeah. Why not? Yeah, keep going. No, go ahead. Well, I wanted to kind of shift gears a little. So if you had more to say,

I wanted to begin to ask like how we, you know, if this is the soil in which we're all sort of born if you want to use that analogy how do we avoid it can we avoid it how do we help our children avoid it because presumably this this sort of false understanding of reality uh you know it's in disney movies right it's in the things that we consider basically okay to give to our kids. I mean, you know, I could see someone, including myself, being like, okay, I'm open to the bunker now. I'm going to begin digging it, and we're going to hang out in it and just listen to Thomistic Institute talks and read the Bible.

So what is a parent to do in this stage? I guess here's what I think. One of the things that Lloyd Gerson says is that these five positions, these five negative positions, they amount to what he calls a comprehensive anti-naturalism. I love it. So the real thing that the Big Tent Platonists are pushing against is what we call naturalism, which could easily be summarized as the view that nature is all there is. Okay? Nature is all there is. So I think that we need to understand that we are, as a Catholic Church and as Christians generally,

we are locked in a war with naturalism. And naturalism has been gaining ground for the last many centuries, seven centuries or so. It's just been increasingly gaining ground more and more and more. And the rise of contemporary science, the rise of modern science, has gone hand in hand with an increasingly more naturalistic way of looking at all things and interpreting all things. And so what we need to do is first ourselves become aware of the encroachment of naturalism

in everything that we do, in politics, in medicine, all over the place. It's just becoming increasingly more naturalistic. And we need to consciously push back against the naturalism. And I'm not the only person who has said this. There have been many statements by popes, especially down, especially in the late 19th and early 20th century, talking about the rise of naturalism and the spread of naturalism all through society and the need to oppose naturalism at every level. And to tell you the truth, this was one of the motives of Pope Leo XIII when he proposed a Terranipatris and gave up Thomas Aquinas, was he gave Thomas, he proposed the studies and the relaunching of Thomistic philosophy and theology. He was concerned with the rise of naturalism, and he says in other encyclicals

that one of the great remedies to the spread of naturalism is Christian philosophy, or as he understood it, the study of Thomas Quiney. So if you could give advice to the man or woman out there who's got a few young kids or a few older kids, and they're like, gosh, I'm not as brilliant as Father James. I don't have time. not as brilliant as Father James, I don't have time. Even if I am as brilliant, I don't have the bloody time to be kind of delving into these philosophy books and understanding Platonism and Aristotelianism. What sort of advice would you give them? It's not that complicated to say things like,

there's more to the world than nature. There's more to reality than meets the eye. There is such a thing as good and evil, right and wrong and it's not just relative to each individual those are things that any parent can and should say to their children from an early age and good literature can kind of help the mind begin to grasp these deeper realities. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is lying the witch in the wardrobe, right? There's more to reality than meets the eye.

That's right. And talking about God, talking about angels and demons, that helps to rule out the naturalism early on, okay? Because you realize, wait a second, there's a whole domain of reality that's immaterial. There's the realm of God, the angels and demons. But also what we need to talk about again is our immortal souls. It's very, very, very rare for Catholics. It is even online. Devout Catholics, faithful Catholics to use the expression immortal souls.

You and I have immortal souls and we need to use the expression immortal souls. You and I have immortal souls. And we need to use that expression, use that word. Why have we backed away from our own vocabulary? We've absorbed the kind of naturalism and the vocabulary from the world around us. We have our own vocabulary that comes from out of our tradition. And we should use that in our discourse with one another. And even if parents who are teaching their children about themselves and about life and about the world, they should say to their children very directly, you have an immortal soul. And keep saying it.

You have an immortal soul. you have a spiritual soul you are not just chemicals you are more than chemical and there are people in our world who say you're just chemicals in a void that's not true i think if you go after the materialism, you go after the big plank in the whole thing. But then also to say there's a common human nature. All human beings on the face of the earth have the same human nature. And that's the basis for saying that there are universal human rights. You can say that to your children. that there are universal human rights. You can say that to your children.

You don't need to be a philosopher or a sophisticated academic in order to say something like that. And if we just say these things, that will make a difference. And then honestly, I agree that we need to be saying these things, and I love just how you put that. We don't have to be overly complicated. You can say these things, say them repeatedly. But I imagine, too, our children will kind of pick up on these truths, probably, maybe not more, but in how we live.

And I'm not saying one over the other. It's a false dichotomy to say, live your faith, don't teach it. We have to do both. But if I'm taking my children to confession, you know, once a month, and I'm telling them to recall their sins, if I'm taking them to receive Holy Eucharist, if I'm praying with them at night, then this is going to instill that as well, you know. Absolutely. Fathers, in particular, have a very special role to play here. There's been studies about this, and when fathers in the home express their faith,

and especially through deeds like prayer or leading family prayer, leading the rosary, things like that, it makes a huge difference and a major impact on children. So something as simple as a father picking up the rosary can really clear out a lot of this error really right that this is a woman's thing or that yeah or it can clear out the philosophical errors right like yeah let's say there is no god it's all just matter there's no immortal souls everything is relative no father picks up the rosary prays the rosary, has a major impression on the children, and sends a statement, all that stuff is false. Yeah, no, that's spot on, because I wasn't raised that way. We didn't talk about faith outside of church, and when we went to church, the priest would say

things like, well, we'll try and get out early tonight, because the big game's on. I thought, what the bloody hell is the point? Why are we wasting our time if we're just getting out early? Why don't we just cancel the whole thing? I didn't see any reason to keep it going. Yeah, a faith practiced and lived will do a great deal in pushing back this naturalism all over the place. Have you been counting? Keep going, sorry. Yeah, I will.

It just does. Well, that's what the World Youth Days did under John Paul II, was you had a lot of students, a lot of young people who'd been raised and, you know. That was me, just so you know. 2000 is when I came to Christ. I was agnostic. I went to Rome 2000, didn't go to church. I was the agnostic on campus because atheist wasn't a cool word yet. And then I came home a ragingly happy Christian that terrified everybody. Right, right. What happened was you came together and you had an experience of the transcendent. You had an experience that there's of something from beyond this world. And you encountered that reality at the World Youth Day. and you encountered that reality at the World Youth Day, and without necessarily going argument by argument or principle by principle through the five points of big Platonism and all that and trying to refute nominalism,

without going through all that individually, it was all pushed back somehow just by that experience of world youth day then after you had the the experience the world youth day experience then you became interested in the philosophy yeah absolutely and then you started to make inquiries and there's now i would say more resources available on a large scale in the church than there was in 1993 or in 2000, and there's a lot more available in terms of inquiry into these philosophical sorts of things. There's your show, for example, there's the Thomistic Institute. Yeah, I was going to ask you, please tell us about the different resources that you and the Thomistic Institute are putting out. We're always

plugging them, but I want people to know about them. Sure, you and the Thomistic Institute are putting out. We're always plugging them, but I want people to know about them. Sure. Well, the Thomistic Institute has a huge number of talks that are now available on its SoundCloud site by Catholic professors who have traveled around to campuses, college campuses throughout the country, giving talks on every imaginable topic. The existence of God, immortality of the soul, relativism, art, beauty, ethics, end of life issues. I mean, you you name it. There's there's talks on it on the Thomistic Institute. And these are these are sophisticated talks by professors. Yeah.

Really, they're good in their field and they've done their homework and they can speak to the actual things that actual professors say. So there's a vast resource there. And you also have the Aquinas 101 series on YouTube, which is going through the Summa Theologiae section by section. It's amazing. And it's given a kind of introductory presentation, leading a person into the basics of that section with the understanding that this will peak a person's interest and lead them into studying more. Now, ever since the whole COVID thing began, we started the quarantine lectures. And that's a series of lectures that have been coming out of the Dominican House of Studies, again, on every kind of topic. There's spiritual topics,

scriptural topics, theological topics, some philosophical topics. So there's another set of resources. Now, that's all by Dominican friars, because, or almost all of them are by Dominican friars, because we were in the House of Studies together kind of not able to go out, so we just continued to produce these quarantine lectures. So those are available. And those things offer people resources by way of introduction to a very different understanding

of reality than what you get out of the contemporary matrix of materialism, nominalism, uh, mechanicism, relativism, and skepticism. See a lot of students, one of the, one of the most common things people say in response to Thomistic Institute talks is I didn't even know this was like a thing. I didn't even know this was out there. People really think the only option they have is to go in for this web of kind of atheistic, scientific, naturalistic sort of worldview.

And it's not. There's a deep ancient alternative and there's new life that's really flowing through this movement. And a lot of people are starting to study Thomas Aquinas more and more. I even know that a lot of Protestants are starting to study more and more and they're finding in Thomas Aquinas more and more. I even know that a lot of Protestants are starting to study more and more,

and they're finding in Thomas Aquinas an ally in their own attempts to evangelize. And there's a way in which Catholics and evangelicals can be partners if we take St. Thomas seriously and learn his theology and see how it helps deal with the world around us. Yeah, this is great. Well, just to remind everybody, I'm going to put that link in the description below to the talk you gave, Father. I would imagine that those books by Lloyd, how do I say his last name, Gerson? Lloyd Gerson, yeaherson those are probably pretty

academic yeah they are that's going to be heavy reading is there anything, is there a layman's version out on this sort of things or are you about to write it well, clients with Aquinas well I guess so

alright, well thank you kindly, this has been super helpful and thanks for taking the time sure, happy to Well, thank you kindly. This has been super helpful and thanks for taking the time. Sure. Happy to do it. Thank you, Matt. My goodness, that was such a great episode. After it was complete,

him and I spoke for like another 20, 30 minutes. And as we were talking, I'm like, man, why didn't I include this? It was so powerful. Such a terrific fellow, really intelligent guy and just sheds light on this topic. Hey, you probably saw me drinking out of my pints with Aquinas Beerstein. Yeah, I'll show you. Actually, there was one point where I reached over this side and then put it back and then reached over this side and put it

back. And that's because I have two on my my desk if you would like to get a pints with aquinas beer stein as well as a bunch of other free things in return you can become a patron at patreon.com slash matt frad once you go there you'll see all the different stuff that we give you in return um yeah tons of stuff we're about to release a seven-part video series masterclass on Augustine's Confessions. You'll only get access to that if you're a patron. I'll send you signed books, beer steins. You'll get access to private interviews that we've done, all sorts of things. slash Matt Fradd because actually in the discussion with Father Brent, Father James Brent, I was saying to him that I would actually like to come up to Washington, D.C. and just set up a few cameras and chat with him for like three, five hours. And he would love that. So awesome.

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