Pints With Aquinas - Blsd. John Duns Scotus w/ Dr. Tom Ward

Episode Date: June 10, 2023

Dr. Ward's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Ordered-Love-Introduction-John-Scotus-ebook/dp/B0BNLZ47BX?ref_=ast_author_dp

We already click the button. OK, that's right. And the father, son, the Holy Spirit. Amen. Father, we thank you for this time. And I ask that you bless it. Thank you for Tom and his good work. We pray that what we have to say would be a benefit to people

to draw them closer to the truth. Blessed mother pray for us. I mean. So lovely to finally meet you. Likewise. You know, I think I first heard about you from Alex. Yeah. And then Cameron Batuzzi.

Yeah. How is he doing? Ah, well, good. Yeah, I don't want to kind of divulge anything that he wouldn't want to divulge publicly. I think it was a difficult, difficult decision to kind of become Catholic. And I don't think he anticipated the kind of rush of emails and Facebook messages that his family would get as well, which made things awkward.

The family? Yeah, like his wife hasn't converted. And so she got a lot of like, you know, like welcome home or like, you should become Catholic. Oh, yeah. And then maybe even things like anyway. Yeah. So we talked briefly about the difficulty a few months back. Are you a convert? Yeah. How did that happen? What were you growing up? Nothing then non-denominational,

sort of powerful religious conversion I was evangelized by a kid in sixth grade. Mm-hmm. And then in college. I did the Anglican thing Yeah, and then we read our way into the Catholic Church amazing and then freaked out and left. Oh Amazing. I can't wait to get to that and then then came back. So were your family non-religious? Yeah. Yeah. Both of my parents had had Jesus freak, like Jesus hippie experiences in the 70s. Yeah. And then kind of washed out by the time they were married, weren't practicing.

I did go to a Methodist school until about fourth grade where we read the Bible. And so I knew like there were some things in my head. And then in sixth grade I was getting in trouble. And Tony Ramos was just a sixth grader in love with Jesus and he started telling me about his church. Wow. And then in seventh grade, I was alone in my room and I was listening to some rap music, like this explicit lyric stuff that I had removed the sticker

and put it over the explicit lyrics tab so that my mom would buy it. Yeah, nice. And I was listening to that in my room and just got this overwhelming sense of despair, gloom, and felt God reach into me and say, you should go to church. So I was crying. I walked into my parents' bedroom. Mom and dad, can we go to church? And they were looking at me like, what the, where is this coming from? And my mom started crying and we started going to church. The family looking at me like, what the, where's this coming from? And then my mom started crying and we started going to

church. The family did too. Yeah. Yeah. The whole family. Because once you get burnt out on Christianity, like it sounded like your parents may have, and maybe you did at some point, it's going to be difficult to come back, doesn't it? Cause you feel like I've already, I've already done this. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I remember my mom telling me stories about charismatic experiences where she felt stuff but was really scared. She talked about running out of a church one time because there was all these people were speaking in tongues and she was just getting really freaked out.

Yeah. So I think that I don't know too much about what that experience was like, but they had backed away from something that they just didn't feel comfortable with. Were you the only child? Or? I have a younger brother. Were they not threatened by your desire to go back to church? No, no, not at all. I mean, at the very least, right, they're good people and so it's like a good wholesome thing to do minimally, but then it kind of started this spiritual odyssey of the whole family and my brothers devout Christian, my parents still go to church and it's awesome. When I was a kid my grandma was

very Catholic. She'd always have her long neck beers beside her prayer books and murder mystery novels and rosary beads and I remember there was a I took to kind of Catholic religious imagery at one point and even kind of put some posters of Mary, not posters but like an image of Mary and Christ on my wall. But I don't know if that was our Lord just sort of trying to draw me, but it, it was short-lived. Yeah. This is, you were just a kid. I probably was like, yeah, like nine. Okay. But. So this wasn't like a, like a Catholic aesthetic. I know. No,

it wasn't like how I had been based on my, no, it wasn't like that. It was, I don't know. I think there was a real longing for something, but we didn't have a lot of. Inspiring Catholic liturgies or even Catholics that seemed to teach anything different to what the world was teaching, you know? Right. Right. So it was almost like there was nothing to reject.

Yeah. I mean, there was, I could reject an appointment that I had to go Every Sunday to mass like that was an appointment that apparently I had to do But often the homilies were just like oh, yeah, I Don't mean to be overly critical, but be nice. And yeah, I remember once I played Metallica music I was in charge of music at my high school and I chose mama Said from Metallica's Load album and no one said that's probably a bad idea. I remember being at a church camp where they, one of the worship songs was U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie

that's more moving than a lot of I like working song. Yeah That's better than mama said though. Yeah So the church you went to the sixth grade friend. Did he go to the same church or was no we end up going a different? one, I think I think My guess is that my parents had been Talking about stuff already, but we went to a Calvary Chapel. Hmm. You familiar with this? Yeah, it's a small denomination pastor Chuck Smith was the sort of guru of the denomination. And Costa Mesa, California is where he had his big church. And both my parents had had some experience there. And so there was a Calvary

Chapel in the town I grew up in, Marietta, in Southern California. We just started going there and took off. I got really involved in evangelism and Bible reading and discipleship groups and had some wonderful youth pastors. Throughout high school, huh? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got really serious about it and, you know, I was and awkward. And so I lost all my secular friends and I didn't mean to, but they, they just, they just dropped me. Did this happen to you? Yeah. I had never been more excited. I was more excited about Jesus than I was about pornography. I was pumped. Yeah. This is high school. Yeah. 17 years old. I came back from world youth day in Rome. Oh cool. And I just felt like it was true.

And it seemed to me that all I would have to do to my friends is say, I know, I didn't think it was true either, but it is. And they would believe it. That's how real the whole experience was. So I would bring my Bible to the same parties. I'd get drunk at and I'd like literally open the Bible and read to people. And I know how obnoxious that is. Yeah. But it's beautiful too, because it just, I wasn't trying to be holier than that

or anything like that. It was just like, let me show you what I love. Yeah. But it turned all the people off. Whereas now you couldn't evangelize in quite the same way, because now you'd be self-conscious about it after all this time. But that's true.

But there's a sort of immediacy of that. Yeah, there's a beauty to that, isn't it? Yeah. You probably love the Brothers Karamazov, do you? No, I've never read it. Oh, okay. Well, there's this beautiful line. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to throw it at you. No, not at all. There's about a billion books I should read, but haven't. I'm pretty much just committed to Lord of the Rings and Brothers now. I'm going to read those two until I die. But there's this line there where the narrator talks about aliosha's youthful enthusiasm and

He said something to the effect of like it's it's it's a it's it wouldn't be good If you didn't have it like there's that naivete of youth and more to be there so it can be then directed Yes, so there was that passion in me like I'd pulled the scapular I was wearing Down the back so it would pop out my front, you know, so it was this big brown thing. You sometimes see these. Oh, you had a big one, not just the little itty bitty. It was just the biggest one I could find. Yeah.

And then sometimes you go to Franciscan, you see these fellas with like wall, almost wall crucifixes. Not quite, but. And it's easy to be like, come on, dude. But that would have been me. I was just. So you lost a lot of friends. I did. Yeah. Yeah. They threatened by it? Were you preachy? What? I was probably too moralistic. You know, it wasn't like I had this calculated

plan, but I was falling in love with Jesus and wanted to be morally straight, and I was just kind of upfront about that, And I was probably insufferable, but I didn't mean to be. And I remember in ninth grade, we all got to high school. By this time, I was like a year and a half into trying to be a good Christian. And my old, one of my old buddies, he got a group of upperclassmen on freshman Friday when you're supposed to trashcan

freshmen you don't like. They tried to get me in the trashcan. I'm a big guy now, but I wasn't at that point. So it's like my one experience of getting genuinely bullied. I kicked the trashcan away. They didn't get me in. But I couldn't, you know, I couldn't, I was like helpless to like beat them up or something. You know, it was like four seniors. But that's when I knew that, yeah, these guys definitely aren't my friends anymore. Oh, they aren't your friends. If they're if they're arranging to have me trash can. But so it doesn't sound like you went from a time of like drinking and partying. No, I was too young. No, this was just this was just,

you know, I was 12, 13 years old and you know, it was beginning to, you know, it's in sixth grade where before everyone gets really bad and they start getting like really dirty mouths and you know, joking about bad stuff. And then by the time they get to high school, they're doing it. You know what I mean? Does that fill your experience? Yeah.

Yeah. Filthy. Was it Jose Maria Escobar says filthy talk makes us comfortable with filthy action. And you begin there and then you act it out. That's right. Yeah. So it was sort of in that scene of just, uh, you know, sort of cool kid crew that was just trying to be cool. And that meant trying to talk like nasty people. So really that was the worst of it. But what was happening in my soul is that I was getting the sense of despair, that

there was something really unsatisfying about the whole way of life that I was sort of setting out on without really even intending to set out on a way of life and just you know was really on some sort of ledge. I mean I wasn't I wasn't suicidal or anything like that but that night in my bedroom was just this you know I'm bad the world is bad everything is meaningless and then I felt this sense of well no it's not but you should do something about you should do something different with your life. Yeah, you were meant to be a philosopher. If you're in grade seven, I had feelings like

that as well. I remember saying to my mom, like, if I go into a rocket ship with unlimited fuel and all the way up, will I ever reach an end? She's like, I don't know. Well, I'd like to. I'll try it. Yeah, just boggled me. Yeah. So when did you move from, maybe it was more of an evangelical type church to an Anglican? Yeah, that happened in college. I mean, basically the, the, the two super important things that happened to me in junior high,

where was that sort of conversion experience that I was just talking about and reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time It just captured my imagination just sort of profoundly good and fun and adventurous and all that and I and I loved the adventure side of it, but just had the sense of Just the wonder of goodness or the goodness of goodness or something like that I don't I wouldn't have articulated it then, but I was just obsessed. Not in a geeky way, you know, this is before the films. And so there wasn't like a bunch of paraphernalia I could go by and poster my walls with stuff. It was just, you know, the experience of being in your head in this beautiful but perilous

realm that just drew me out. So high school, I was sort of holding on to my new Christian faith and my Tolkien obsession. And then I was like a decent student, but I didn't care very much about my studies. Like I had this lively intellectual, or inner life is probably a better way to put it. But it had nothing to do with scholastic stuff at that point. But it was discovering C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis' nonfiction, later in high school, like my senior year of high school, that really just, you know, if Tolkien converted my imagination, Lewis converted my intellect. And then I found myself, you know, reading through, you know, mere Christianity, great divorce, you know, all the,

once you get beyond Chronicles of Narnia and sort of get into the deep waters of Lewis, I found myself just wanting to know what he knew. Like, whatever made it possible for Lewis to be able to write like that, I wanted to go study what made that possible. And so that influenced my college decision, got me excited about studying.

And then by the time I got to Biola University in Los Angeles, I was doing this great books, honors program where I found tons of like-minded people who had all, almost everyone had read Lord of the Rings and all the C.S. Lewis that I'd read. And it was just, you know, a kind of like real, real friendship centered on good things. But it was at that point where I was starting to feel like there was something not rich enough about my non-denominational church experience. So I started talking to an older friend who was going to an Anglican church.

This was before the split between Episcopalians and Anglicans was really as pronounced as it is now. There were some Anglican Episcopalian communities who were already distancing themselves from the Episcopal church, but you could still find more or less sane Episcopal churches, even in Los Angeles. So we started going to the Episcopal Church of the Blessed Sacrament. For those at home, how important is Biola in the kind of evangelical Protestant realm in America? Because I know a lot of people hadn't heard of it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's.

You know, I don't know how prominent it is. I mean, when I think of it, I think of apologetics. I think I think Willie Craig, I think those fellows. Yeah. Yeah. So the there's a seminary attached to the university, Talbot Theological Seminary. And in the 90s, due to people like JPMorland and Scott Ray, more or less terrific. Yeah. They started this MA in philosophy of religion. And then there was an MA in apologetics that was added later. Yeah. And it became a sort of evangelical center for that, that mainstream philosophy of religion stuff that

a lot of which is really, really good. And then was there just sort of movements within this sort of evangelical school towards tradition and with some branching towards Catholicism and Anglicanism and Orthodoxy? What was that like? Yeah, yeah. So what happened, and I think from Biola's perspective, this is a, it was a double edged sword. And I think, well, so what happened was they started this great books honors program

And so this this guy named John Mark Reynolds, who's a really inspirational figure for me He's now in Houston and he has a school called the st. Constantine school. I don't know if you heard of it Yeah in Houston. I got a friend who works for them in Houston. Yeah, yeah I've been there but he was at that time. He he was a young professor and he had just founded this great books program and he himself was orthodox. Knew he was at an evangelical school and was not out to convert all the evangelicals, but also would talk about it when asked. And so he sort of inspired a contingent of students to move east.

But then the, and that was problematic from the administration's point of view. Don't want to say too much there because these are people I deeply admire. But so there's that Orthodox move. There was really a pretty anti-Catholic bias. I mean, I heard about one person who's sort of already Catholic who had come to Biola. I think maybe I'd heard of one conversion. But what was really popular was to explore more traditional forms of Protestantism, and that's where the Anglican thing came in. So there was a big group of us who were trying to learn all about the great tradition and wanting to see Anglicanism as a place where you could get the best of all of the patristics and the medieval authors that we really liked without having to go all the way.

And we were happy there. I mean, it was deeply formative on my spirituality, aesthetic sensibility, sort of my, my circle of friends. Yeah. Yeah. We were really into the books, studying together, reading together, uh, geeking out, but then would go to church at blessed sacrament and father, father David Bowman was the priest then. This is the Anglican church. Yeah. Yeah. The Anglican church. Yeah, yeah, the Anglican Church. Yeah, so it was a really rich time. The broader movements in the Anglican world

just made it harder and harder to stick with that. What do you think are some ways that Catholics mischaracterize, misrepresent traditional Anglicans? You know, I think the sort of nastiest thing is that they're just posers, that it's not real. They're lopping. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know, they don't see it that way, of course. But you know, it really is hard. If you've been raised a Protestant, especially as many of these Anglicans are. They're former evangelicals. It's actually not that common anymore for cradle Episcopalians to be serious about theology because the Episcopal Church has gone so wacky. So the people who are filling the pews of these great churches, you know, like the the ACNA, the Anglican Church of North America,

there's a wonderful church, ACNA Church in Waco, and it's almost all disillusioned Baptists or non-denominational evangelicals who are looking for tradition, who are looking for the beauty of liturgy and just can't go all the way. But I, like so many millions of American evangelicals, was raised thinking that the Catholic Church was evil, not just mistaken, but evil because of the whore of Babylon and the Pope and surely the Antichrist will have something to do with the Church of Rome and all of this. And intellectually, it's bonkers.

But if you've been raised to think that way, it's really hard to shake yourself out of that. And so if you can have something that really seems like it captures a lot of the beauty and reverence of the great Christian tradition without having to make your peace with Rome. You know, that is really attractive and it was for me for a long time. And then there's also the cost of separating yourself even further from your family, your local community.

You know, my parents thought it was a little weird when I was doing the Anglican thing, but they were sad when I became Catholic. And that's an ongoing source of disagreement. There's no hostility there at this point, but it's a separation. We just had, my seven-year-old daughter was just, just had her first communion,

but because of some complications, she had to be received into the church at seven years old because she was baptized Anglican. I don't know the full, like, canon legal explanation of why that had to be. So she's now at seven years old, she's received confirmation as well as first communion. So we were there, my parents came, this is just two days ago, and we were really happy to have them there. But you know everyone gets up for communion and they're in their pews and that's what really rankles my my dad the most. You know this sort of separation. So if you're trying to discern, you know, some attraction to Catholicism,

but don't really get the whole system yet, well, why do I need to go so far as to break fellowship in this really profound way from the Christian community that made me interested in Jesus in the first place? So it is a big cost. And so, what I would hope, we want Catholics who are knowledgeable about their faith, of course, and confident and all of that, but to, you know, maybe have some some sympathy, some compassion on just how

hard it is. Now there are some crusty, you get crusty Catholics, you get really crusty, spiky, as we sometimes call them, Anglo-Catholics, who are not just, who don't think of themselves as doing good enough and that they don't need to go to Rome but think that they really got it. And this narrow, teeny tiny interpretation of Anglicanism really is like, and they're hardly in communion with anyone

because they're not in communion with Rome or Orthodoxy, and they've broken communion with the vast majority of Anglicans worldwide because of what the Anglican church is doing. This is something that we're seeing across the spectrum, it seems to me. I just spoke to a fellow who has a friend who's an Orthodox priest who isn't in communion with anybody because everybody is impure, and he has his little church in the garage where one or two people come. And you think of like that Pope Michael fellow in Kansas. Or you think of just the temptation Catholics feel today, to kind of splinter away into a more pure group. Like I fully understand that feeling. And I think

I understand, I'm talking psychologically now, I'm not talking like arguments, just because like I'm afraid of the chaos and I want things to be really neat and really black and white so that so I can feel safe. Yeah. And I think, would you agree that that's kind of where a lot of this comes from? Or is there something else that needs to be? I certainly feel the same way as you. I don't know how much it generalizes, but yeah, that need to, you know, when you really care about truth

and believe in truth, you don't wanna like, a sort of live and let live pluralism about the most important things, God and the soul and heaven and hell. live and let live pluralism about the most important things, God and the soul and heaven and hell. Like, it's hard to just be okay with, well, everyone's got their own different way, and you wanna have it nailed down for yourself

and then for others, and it's hard to resist that. And so, when in a world where we certainly don't have that, we're in a radically pluralistic society, we got to in some sense, find our own way to have some sort of community, even if it's really niche, where you feel like you really do fit in and you have some, like you got things nailed down, you're surrounded by people who sort of agree with you.

And it is so comforting. It really is. Yes, yes, that's what it is. I'm trying, I'm working on this kind of thought that it's almost like in response to the loudness of the chaos in the church, outside the church, things Pope Francis may or may not have said, transgenderism, dealing with that tension is so difficult that it's almost like we want to shout back as it were. We want our reaction to be as loud as the chaos we feel.

And so I think for some people, like anything less than he is the anti-Pope and this is the prophet we have to follow, like, see what I mean? Like that reaction is as loud as the loudness of the chaos. I get that because it's tough to live in the tension of having to go to a church where maybe the liturgy is sloppy, when you would much rather it be better and to see your own sloppiness and to wish you were better. And that isn't to say that there isn't like actual arguments for calling people out or pursuing what's true.

But I am fascinated with the psychological aspect of this puritanism within Catholicism and all these different Anglicanism like you said. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, I wish that, um, I wish the Pope were a little more consistent in bringing, bringing people together. You know, in bringing people together. There's a sort of prudential argument about just how wise was the recent restrictions on the Latin Mass, for example. Does it actually exacerbate whatever problem the pope thought that he was addressing? I worry that it actually exacerbates that problem

way more than if he had just taken a more laissez-faire attitude. You know, I don't follow this too closely and I'm not, you know, 100% Latin master, though we have Latin mass at the student center in Waco. And we go, and because we're a student center, not a parish, we're not affected by the restrictions. And the bishop is good.

But in Catholicism, it seems like the, yeah, I mean, these people who do have this kind of Puritan streak, for better or worse, but you know, want doctrine to be pure, want practice to be pure, and are not comfortable with the accommodations with the modern world that so many Catholics have made, even clerics, they do seem to be the ones who are most ostracized, and that's maybe not the most prudent way to deal with someone who already has that sort of disposition, right? Yeah. It reminds me of an old onion video.

Did you watch the onion back in the day when it was funny? It said, should the government be spying on schizophrenics more? Yeah. Yeah, the Babylon Bee overtook the really several years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the, the old onion is as good as it gets. It is just hilarious. Yeah. So at what point did you start looking to Rome? Where were you in your kind of schooling or career life marriage? So I, we got, my wife and I got married young. I was, I was 20.

Nice. She was 21. So then our, our spiritual lives were literally wedded together. And so it was a journey that the two of us took, but she was Anglican with you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she was raised in the same sort of non-denom world. And then when we started getting really serious about our relationship, she was still living

in our hometown, Marietta, which is about an hour away from Biola. So she started coming up on Sunday mornings and experiencing this Anglican thing that I was doing in college. And we decided to get married in that church. And so after we were married, we were just doing the Anglican thing.

And I had started thinking that I was called to be an Anglican priest. And I thought, well, that's just great, sort of venerable tradition and Anglicanism of the scholar-priest. And I wanted to be a philosopher, I knew that, or maybe a theologian, maybe be a professor, but a priest too, and maybe work at a seminary, something like that. So I was beginning to sort of dream up this life, and Katie was on board. Went through a discernment group at our church. I don't know if there's anything like this in the Catholic Church, but if a person was interested in ordained ministry, he was supposed to talk to his priest, and then there'd be a group of lay people within the church

who would kind of interview him over a few months and then deliver a report to the bishop. And so they said, yeah, we think, you know, we affirm, you've been called, you need to be a priest. So I went off to grad school with that in mind, and I was already in correspondence with the Episcopal Bishop of LA. And then, so I go to grad school

and I do this two year program at Oxford. And it was a very narrow course of study on scholastic theology, you know, 13th, 14th century stuff. And like 90% of it was Aquinas. So I was spending my days for two years just reading through the Summa and then, you know, other stuff too, but yeah, yeah, it was nice. And like the Bodleian Library in Oxford, it was great.

But the more Aquinas I read, I thought, I just like, I need to be the same religion as this guy. And there were enough differences. And I thought, yeah, I mean, Aquinas would, he'd have his criticisms maybe about Catholic practice or whatever nowadays, but who would he recognize as the church that he belongs to, not the Catholic church? He would, if he tried to explain Anglicanism and Henry VIII and divorce and Right. It's like he'd just give you an incredulous stare. So I started, I had this conflicting

Impulses, you know on the one hand I thought I gotta do an Anglican priest thing and then on the other hand I thought well, I'm basically convinced that the Catholic Church is is right I don't know what to do about that. It took four years of just kind of wrestling with that and I sought the advice of lots of people and of course got conflicting advice and eventually I sort of went like this you know discernment is hard because there's something subjective about it even if you're trying to be sensitive to objective information, but there is ultimately something subjective about what you feel like you're called to and hopefully that gets confirmed for you if it was the right choice or not. But I thought well look on the one hand the decision about whether

Catholicism or Anglicanism is a better way to be a Christian. That's all sort of laid out there, you know, in the documents as it were. Whereas the decision whether or not to become an Anglican priest is just like, I just kind of feel it in here, and it's less reliable. And so that coming, eventually coming to sort of line things up that way helped me decide in favor of Rome But since I was already married, of course that Decision to become Catholic meant giving up this thing that how was Katie journey? Is that your wife's name? Yeah, yeah, we were she journeying with you as you felt this pull to Rome

so I was I was always reading more than she was but but she was reading along with me and talking and yeah and I had this moment of like falling in love when I finally sort of thought, okay, I think this is it. Then it was like falling in love all over again. And I just was like, just gotta do it now. It was like this release of all this tension over all these years and I'm just gonna do it now, you know, and, uh, it was like this release of all this tension over all these years and I'm just going to do it now. And so I started going to mass and uh, and Katie wasn't quite there yet, but, but we went through where were you Oxford

Baylor? We'd come. So we were in Oxford for two years. We'd come back. We were living in Long Beach, California by the beach. It was really nice. Was it a good church? I guess is what I'm getting at. Yeah. So we had lots of, lots of options. And across the, across the Harbor, there was a saints Peter and Paul church, which had recently undergone this transformation under a local priest there named father Peter Irving, who's now at Holy Innocence in Long Beach. And he had turned this parish that was physically dilapidated, ugly,

had a security gate around it because it was kind of a rough area. Took the gate down, fundraised to aesthetically refurbish the church, was offering Latin Mass, and then a very reverently said nozordo. And so I was going there because I thought, well, Latin Mass, that just sounds cool.

I didn't know anything about this stuff and the controversy of the Latin Mass within the broader Catholic world. And it was just an innocent thing. So we were going there, but then thought that maybe we should go to a place a little closer to home and so started exploring the local parishes and and it was a it was a gut punch in some ways. On the one hand it was cool to see a much wider slice of the Long Beach population at Mass than we'd get when we traveled to our hip, rich, Anglican

church. You know, you just get everybody. And that was neat. I mean, this isn't like a diversity, hip-hip-hooray kind of thing. It was just cool to see people. Here comes everybody. Here comes everybody, exactly. So that was refreshing. But then all the priests within, say, I don't know, five miles of where we lived, it was just this banal, you know, be nice. Even the Irish priests. There was one church staffed by these two Irish priests, and they were just so, I don't know, they weren't bored, but they just, they had nothing interesting to say and everything was so lazy and slapdash.

So that was hard. It actually, it wore on us so much that I stopped being able to sit through mass. I just, it's like I'd get so irritated and I'd walk out and Katie started getting mad. We had a kid at that point. I said, look, you can't, we can't walk out of Mass. It's like, well, I can't sit through it. So well then, you know, we should just stop. Okay. Had you been confirmed in the Catholic Church?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had sort of fast forward a little bit. That's okay. So you are Catholic. Okay. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we had a sort of fast forward a little bit. Yeah, so that's okay, so you are Catholic, okay. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this was 2008. We became Catholic. We were received into the church at Holy Innocence, actually.

By that time, Father Irving was no longer at Saints Peter and Paul in Wilmington. He had moved to Holy Innocence in Long Beach. So we were received there. That was nice. And then we moved from Long Beach to Fullerton, had a kid. I was in the middle of a PhD at that point. Kind of stressed out about that. And we were doing our Catholic thing, faithful, but we were deeply disappointed in the parish scene, and then we didn't know anyone. We had no Catholic friends.

And that made it really hard because we had all of our Anglican friends who were still all together doing their church thing, and they were still our friends. They were the people we'd hung out hung out with but then we couldn't you know when it came time to go to church we were just off yeah so and was it like you couldn't find any Catholic intellectual companions as well who were at the level of well it's just it was you know so we're we're a young family we got this baby that we're worrying about, we don't know anyone at the churches we're going to, didn't really have the headspace to get too involved. So

I'm not actually blaming the churches here. We should have done more to get involved and build relationships, and then that would patch over a lot of the disillusionment with the liturgy not being good. So I don't mean to sound like I'm blaming the churches for our disillusionment as young converts, but it's just where we were at. But I got a job shortly after finishing the PhD at Loyola Marymount University, which is a Jesuit school in LA. And so we moved close to campus there, and we were going to the campus chapel, staffed by Jesuits. And I thought it was bad in Long Beach. I thought it was bad in Fullerton, but at LMU, I mean... Give us some examples. A sermon on the loyal opposition to the papacy of Benedict XVI.

It's just outright rejection of what they thought Pope Benedict was about. And then, you know, the Jesuits have this weird thing where they don't, they won't use male pronouns for God. Or during the creed, they won't say, for us men and for our salvation, you know, for us and for our salvation, for our good and the good of all God's holy church and the good of all his holy church. Just these like needling little tweaks here and there. So I was already disappointed as a Catholic convert and my time with the Jesuits, you know, I had spiritual direction with one

of them and was kind of trying to talk through some of this disillusionment. I'm a young convert, full in a Catholic three years now, but I don't really think that it was the wrong choice, but it's just not what I thought it would be. And he said, well, you probably converted for the wrong reasons, and you probably should've just stayed where you're at. And then he broke up with me.

So I was like, I don't think I can help you. So it was a really crushing experience with this Jesuit retired bishop who, you know, was on, he described himself as being on leave, on leave for health reasons or health retirement, something. They shipped him out to the coast of California and he had a house over the bluff and later he was one of these priests who had been forced out, or bishops who had been forced out for misconduct. But I didn't know that, none of the kids knew it. He was a leader of a student group on campus.

So I came home and basically said, look, Katie, I'm done. This was in 2013. And I just, I just stopped practicing my Catholic faith and mostly for the sake of community, uh, we started going back to the Anglican church. And that's why, that's why. Was there a new kind of excitement and energy and re-embracing this old community? And yeah, I mean, religiously not much. I mean, I felt, I had a conflicted conscience about it. But it was refreshing to just be back with all those people who were trying to be faithful Christians who were raising families who had the same values we did. It just felt

so right in one way from a a like a social fellowship perspective, even though I was kind of, my conscience was tormenting me about you know what I'd done. And we did that for a few years and that's why two of our kids were baptized Anglican. So poor Lillian who was just had her first communion also had to get confirmed because she's when we were wandering in the wilderness of Anglicanism. Yeah. She was born and baptized. And then when we moved to Waco six years ago,

we actually started going to the Achaan church there, Christ Church Waco. And then this really weird thing happened. The McCarrick Report came out and the Pennsylvania abuse news, and it was all shocking. And I had a close friend who was, you know, credibly accused of misconduct, who himself was a faithful Catholic, and he lost his job, and all this stuff, you know, Catholics misbehaving, was just crushing me.

And I thought, well, this is weird, you know, cause I've actually haven't been to mass in like four years at this point. And why is this bothering me so much? And it dawned on me that, well, I'm a Catholic, and like, these are my people. And even as, you know, in some ways, understandably, so these like new horrific revelations were driving people away or making it harder for Catholics to practice their faith. It actually

invigorated me to like man up and just like enter the fray because I thought, well, all these people are like insofar as they're doing these bad things they're being bad Catholics. I'm being a bad Catholic by like not having been to mass in four years so. And you're you know you're a professor at this point. Yeah. You're a professor at Baylor. You're a professor of theology. Yeah yeah, so this is 2018 fantastic Yeah, so then I email the the priest and I said like I've been away for a while I need to come back, you know, could we meet and talk and said well, why don't you come to confession? Okay That was that so I came home one day and okay, we're back

Did you run this by Katie before? No, no, no, no. Good. Yeah. How did she handle that? It was fine. Yeah, she was fine. Rolls with the punches. Was the lack of community and Catholicism as big a deal for her as it was for you? It was hard on both of us, yeah.

So then wasn't she then afraid to perhaps be brought into a community where she didn't feel at home again? I know I'm not interviewing Katie. No, possibly. We had met at least one Catholic family that we were becoming good friends with at that point. And so maybe there was a sense, well, we got something ready-made here to jump into.

And it doesn't sound like there was a lot of doctrinal disagreements at this point. No, not at all. It was just the reality on the ground of... So one thing that really weighed on me was becoming a dad for the first time. And I suddenly, well, I got a lot of anxiety about passing on the faith.

Like how in the world am I going to do this? Like to try to get into their hearts and heads, this thing that has meant so much to me that I think is the most important thing in my life. How do I do this to them for them? You know, I can't compel them, but what are the most auspicious circumstances possible? You know, uh, and I got really nervous about that. And I thought, it just seems way more likely that if we stay in this Anglican community that we had been involved with for so long,

with like-minded families, with kids who were our kids' friends, much more likely that our kids would come out being Christians than if we just heard a bunch of either banal or heretical sermons. I remember one sermon just outright denying the reality of hell. You know, it's like, don't worry guys. You know, this is not, then what do you have to worry about? Anyway, so I think in some ways,

I still sort of believe that a really good Anglican community and a really bad Catholic one, if what you want at the end of a child's upbringing is like a firm commitment to Jesus, like maybe, maybe the better bet is to raise them Anglican and then hope they find their way afterward or something like that, because at least they have a foundation. And that might sound too Protestant or too subjective because, you know, the sacramental efficacy and all of that. But you're right.

And yet we all get it. Like it does. Right. Like my defenses go up as you say that. But I also agree with you. Like I, and I don't know how not to. Like if I find myself in a town and I've got two options, I've got a Jesuit church that's hanging BLM and pride flags, we're thinking of the worst possible. And then I've got some like Antiochian

church or a Serbian Orthodox church, just teaching the apostolic faith. And those are my options. I understand that technically I have to, and maybe that is the answer. You have to. I don't know what I'd do. I wouldn't go there. I'd probably go there. These are weird things to have to wrestle with, aren't they? Because Aquinas in the 13th century is dealing with Islam, Catholicism, and maybe atheism. That's an easy choice for him and for Catholics today when you're raised in a culture, which we're not like we don't have a culture. We were just given MTV and the Super Bowl once a year and something. Holy crap. This is hard.

This is the wreckage of Western civilization that we're making our way through. Yes. I was just in Ukraine. I said it the other day. So forgive me for those who are hearing it again. But you know, in Ukraine, I used to think it was just like this thing that Eastern Catholics, I'm a Ukrainian Catholic.

So when people would say like, glory to Jesus Christ, glory forever, you know, it's like this little thing that we we kind of force our poor Western brothers to endure. No, it's indeed he is. You know, and I just thought it was this religious thing. I got a Ukraine. Every single human being says that on the street, at the pub, at the coffee shop. They all say, glory Jesus Christ, glory forever. But now it's he's risen. Indeed, he's risen all in Ukraine.

There is this it's almost like the liturgy. It elevates culture. And maybe I don't know what it does, but all I know is I live in a day and age where I don't feel like we have a culture. And it's an awkward thing to adopt one in a religious manner. I want a culture because I feel like an orphan. And then you kind of fetishize this culture that wasn't yours, was never given to you like I've done. And like we all kind of. You shouldn't have to choose your culture. You shouldn't have to choose your faith in one sense. You should be bestowed upon us.

Yes. But now we're in this very awkward situation trying to find family traditions, but we don't have a family. Isn't that it? There's a word for this in Welsh. And I love it's my favorite word because my last name is Welsh. It's h-i-r-a-e-t-h. And it means to have a deep longing and miss something you have never known.

Okay. And I think that's what you're kind of driving. I'm woshe too by the way. Yeah. Up top. Am I right? I feel like I'm saying something true. I think you are.

I haven't got any definition to what I'm saying yet. Yeah. We're all just awkward. It's awkward as hell. Yes. Like we're just looking for right answers and right devotions and right books and And then we're latching on to people who can lead us through this forest of blah Because we feel like the Pope can't or our bishop can't and so we come up with these internet

personalities to lead us through the wilderness and then we get disillusioned with them we we try to find someone else so we just Rot Hell, it's a hard time. Yeah it is but But you know, that experience in 2018 of realizing that my rebellion or my anger at the church not being as good as I had hoped it would be, that all of that meant that I was just being a bad Catholic. It didn't just wash away whatever valid criticisms

I may have had here and there, but it did put this onus on me to do my part. And that was really liberating, it was really energizing. You weren't tempted to say, all right, I just made a mistake with that Catholic thing. It's a mistake, they don't have to be my people. Yeah.

There wasn't a temptation to do that. No, because, you know, it was was because I live so much in my head. So there's always the intellectual side of things. And so if it were merely experiential, if it were merely a community thing, um, I'd be, I'd be a really happy Anglican. And I know exactly what church I'd go to in Waco. Yeah. I'd go to Christ church. Waco. I think it's great. But I am convinced of the truths of the Catholic faith. And so I would never be at peace.

Yeah. Damn. Yeah. Is there an ordinary in Waco? There's not. But we have friends in Houston. And every now and then we go to Our Lady of Walsingham. I've been there several times.

Oh my gosh. It's just, it's my home. I've been there several times. Oh my gosh. It's just. It's my home. But again, it's this is strange. Like I had a friend who now attends a Ruthenian Byzantine Church and he said to me, he wonders if the Reformation had never have happened, if our version of Catholicism would look a lot more Anglican today. Like the fact that there was that severing, we are the beneficiaries and recipients of French, Italian, Polish, German Catholicism.

Whereas the English stuff was kind of relegated to the Anglicans. Yes. Yeah. If anything's our kind of inheritance, if we're from those islands, like that would be it. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. But I love the ordinary. It is. Yeah. Yeah. And Cranmer's prayer book language. I mean, it's just it just feels.

The best way to pray in a prayer book, English for me. What's your favorite translation of the Bible? The R.S.V. So I've read the King James Bible more than any other, partly for literary reasons. But I found the RSV is a sort of happy medium. I have the ESV with the Apocrypha. Okay. Or the Jurikun, depending on who's side you're on. But yeah, which is essentially the RSV just slightly edited.

No, I'm with you. I love the KJV, but there are times where I read it and I find myself being like, yeah Yeah, okay. But what does it actually say? One of the RSV is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's funny with the going way back to the The Calvary Chapel thing that we did so this pastor Chuck Smith despite the fact that You know liturgically Theologically, this was all very shallow thing that we did. So this pastor Chuck Smith, despite the fact that, uh, you know, liturgically, theologically, this was all very shallow. He has preferred version of the Bible was the King James Bible. So sort of normal for all of these, yeah, like so Cal kids,

who were like skaters and to be, uh, reading the King James Bible and youth group. It's kind of funny. What's interesting is like when you talk to God, you can either have your language be heightened or lowered, but you can't talk to him the way I'm talking to you. It's funny. My wife talks to cats the way I'm talking to you. She's like, are you coming in or out? OK, just stay out. But you'll get food tomorrow. Who are you talking to?

She's talking to cats. It's weird. Very weird. But when we talk to God, it's like you want to. So why we love a reverent liturgy. This is why the Protestants want a reverent Bible. We need to be different, sacred. There's going to be something sacred,

doesn't there? Yes. But we all have to shuffle about the place like it's a 7-11. Is there somewhere to kiss the earth? Yes. And the reverence is still I mean where do we have reverence these days in the broader culture I mean I suppose when it comes to patriotism we still there's still a big segment of the

population would be happy to and And then events around birth, marriage, death. There's some reverence there. There's some like formalities that seem appropriate maybe. Yeah. With death, I mean, isn't it, you know, the, the people wanting celebrations of life rather than funerals, you know, it's a kind of, I mean, there's something good there. Youth and age instead of aging. Oh gosherals. You know, it's a kind of, I mean, there's something good there, of course. Euthanasia instead of aging. Oh gosh, yeah. Yeah. We're gonna try to get rid of that cross one way or another, aren't we?

But it won't work. The cross of? The cross we're all called to bury, to carry, you know, in life, we want to get rid of it. Boob jobs, hair implants, faster car, different wife. I was reading about a guy who got leg extension surgery I didn't know this was a thing. How the hell does that happen? Yeah, they can why don't you just get higher platform shoes? I think what they do is they break your legs and break your shins

Stretch it out put some plates Is that why you're so tall? Yeah Yeah, I was just in Turkey and I guess Turkey's a place people go to get hair transplants because on the aeroplane I saw like three or four guys and they've got, it looks like what they have third degree burns on their head. We just so want to be desirable and young and yet here comes the cross. Anyway, now I'm on the couch so we should probably go back to whatever we were talking about before. So when you became Catholic then, after the kind of McCarrick scandal and realizing you'd

been a bad Catholic and you went to confession, are you going to all in now or are you still teetering a bit? No, I'm all in. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I feel less triumphant about being Catholic way less than I did eight years ago. And I don't know how to process that.

I can't tell if it's a matter of humility and correct expectations when engaging with committed Protestants. It could be that like I now know that just clobbering, clubbing somebody, clubbering, clubbing, clubbing somebody with scriptures isn't going to do it. So I know I've learned that. And so now maybe a little bit more sort of modest in my, you know, I don't know if it's that or if it's like, yeah, I also feel kind of exhausted with the scandal, with the, with the, with Pope Francis, with the liturgy wars.

That's a confession of mine. Like if you were here to me as a, like a committed Anglican, I would, I would present my case, but I wouldn't kill myself doing it. Whereas I feel like eight years ago I would have. You know, I've realized that there's so little that I can do with the broader issues of liturgy or priests who are active on social media saying things contrary to Catholic faith. I can't do anything about that really, you know, maybe write something here and there. But what I can do is try to, like, save my soul and try to be a good dad and husband. And I found that, like, doing a deep dive and just embracing Catholic spirituality and just the rule of life that we're called

to. Nothing too rigorous, but just embracing the sort of like local, what do I do today to be a better Catholic or to be a good dad or whatever. That that has like, I've just sort of lifted the burden of the horrible state of the world and the church off my shoulders a bit. And then we have six kids, there's just a lot of work to be done. And yeah, I do worry about the state of the world at large. I do worry about the state of the church. I think that clearly what I'm called to do is, Yeah. Amen. You're exactly, you're exactly right. I think the peripheral stuff has the facade of the sophisticated man caring about the state of the world. It is in actuality distraction from pain and distraction from duty. Yes. It's like, uh, it's like it's candy.

Yeah. And if it doesn't look like it, it looks. And if that concern is taking the form of just reading a bunch of blog posts or listening to a bunch of podcasts, and that's your main form of engaging the issues of the day, then in terms of what you're physically doing with your body and your eyes, and you're sort of like a guy who's just a political junkie or a guy who has a weird hobby of you know collecting stamps and like searching You know watching YouTube videos of stamp collectors. You know, so there's there's something don't be like that guy. Don't be that guy

Yeah, it's one guy like spam. She's like hey, I have the urge all of a sudden to go watch stamp collecting on YouTube I bet you know, I I don't know this from personal experience. I bet there's at least one out there Yeah, and they will tell us in the comments. No, but you're right. I mean, it's, I don't know this from personal experience. I bet there's at least one out there. And they will tell us in the comments. No, but you're right. I mean, it's not national politics, but it's ecclesial politics. And just a steady diet of that. It's distracting.

It makes you feel superior like political commentary does. Like you listen to your political commentator so you know what to believe and you know what's safe to say. And it's the same thing with ecclesial politics. Like, tell me what to think and help know what's safe to say. And it's the same thing with ecclesial politics, like tell me what to think and help me feel outraged and sneer at those who are less pure than me. Moderate consumption. I get the temptation. Like that's, that's why I'm so angry against it.

And why I'm so on guard against it. Like there is zero temptation in me to become like say a father, James Martin or somebody who would kind of cozy up with the LGBTQ movement, right? Whatever it's called these days, zero at all. There's no temptation to me. But like, I feel the temptation to become a sneering, rigid. I'm not accusing traditionalist of being rigid, but I get that temptation, which is why I find myself pushing against that more or less.

I fall into it. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. So, yeah. I'm with you. And even, you know, the community that we have now in Waco, you know, a lot of good Catholic families. It's not quite the neighborhood experience that I that you have here. Oh, my gosh, I was walking with Alex last night after dinner.

Hi, hi, hi, hi. Kids, kids. Oh, there's, there's Pat Lee. Let's talk about Aquinas on the street corner. Oh, there's John Crosby. Let's talk about, I don't know if you caught my little meth bust reference there, but it's like Catholic, Catholic, kids, Catholic, meth bust, Rock Wheeler, weird.

But yeah, later on he did show me the houses burned down by arson or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it was pretty idyllic. So we don't have that neighborhood experience. Okay. Waco's a little more spread out, but through our church, we do have a good Catholic community.

We had three weeks of meal train when our kid was born, our youngest was born a month ago. I mean, just amazing, people stepping up. Not all of these people are Latin masters, some are, but my own experience with these so-called more rigid people is that, well, they're not, and I'm sure they're out there. The most spiky religious types I've met are actually Anglicans.

And I say that, loving Anglicanism in general and knowing that the vast majority of people aren't like that, but what I've found is that these people who are really serious about their Catholic faith really are serious about it like Living living lives of piety not being stuck up, you know 100% in fact, well, maybe I just got lucky what I've sometimes experienced is the opposite

I'll meet someone and I'll say I'm like we go to the Latin Mass and like, oh, you know, they're all up there talking to themselves I'm like, oh, they're all up there talking to themselves. I'm like, oh, it seems a little judgmental. How would you feel if someone said that about your little Novus Ordo church? Then that would justify all of the presuppositions you have about those people. It's funny where, where, where the libertinism and Puritanism lines are, are drawn, you know, like, so, so some of these Catholics are the, you know, some of the drinkiest, smokiest people I've ever been around. And you think, well, that's kind of libertine. But there is a sort of liberal or progressive Puritanism about that sort of thing. You know, just cutting

loose at night on your back patio, like drinking bourbon and smoking. That's the sort of edgy conservative thing to do. And you know, it's unhealthy because of the cigarette smoke. And so there's a kind of puritanism, sort of left puritanism about some things. I don't know, we pick and choose. Yeah. When did you, I don't know how much of your career has been spent examining proofs for God's existence or something.

So tell me, is this something you're invested in heavily or have been only recently? Yeah, yeah. You know, Duns Scotus has a book called De Primo Principio and it's, it's his extended argument for God's existence. And I just translated that and wrote a commentary on it. It's coming out later this year. From the Latin? Yeah.

Wow, that's really neat. Yeah. What's it called? The Tractatus De Primo Principio. Good luck. And the English translation will be the treatise on the first principle. Yeah, and if you could put a link to

Tom's book ordered by love an introduction to John John Don Scodas Give it give people a little introduction to Scodas because some people are scared of Scodas Yeah, they shouldn't be they they lump him with Ockham Ockham? Ockham, yeah. No, he's a Franciscan like Ockham, he's a Franciscan. So Aquinas is the Dominican, Scotus is a Franciscan. He was born in 1265, so you know the Franciscan order had only been around for a couple of generations. And we don't know very much at all, unfortunately, about the about ScotUS's early life, you know what led him to get interested in the Franciscans There was a

Franciscan house we know not far from the village he grew up in Some people think maybe he had an uncle who joined the Franciscans and so that might provide some connection, but we just don't know We don't hear about him until he shows up at Oxford as a student who's staying at the Franciscan house in Oxford. He was ordained priest in 1290, and on the assumption that he was ordained as early as he could have been, about 24 or 25, I think, at the time, then we can work backward and think and surmise, as most scholars do, that he was actually pretty young when he went to Oxford, probably 14 or 15 years old. So I, you know, imagine this

young teenage boy who's some sort of prodigy, everyone in Scotland recognized, was way too smart for them, and so sent him down to Oxford to get the proper liberal arts education and theology education. And then he just really impressed everyone, not just his dialectical brilliance, but their reports of his good character and you know and all that. So he was sent from Oxford to the University of Paris and Oxford and Paris were the, at least for theology, were the two main universities, the highest powered universities in Europe at the end of the 13th, beginning of the 14th century. So he was there and he had sort

of taught teaching jobs at each of those universities. But he was a Franciscan first and foremost and was assigned to Cologne, Germany, when he was about 41, 42 years old, which is kind of an intellectual backwater. No one knows why they assigned him there, but he went off and died the next year. So he only lived to about 42 years old. And we don't have any cool stories of his life, you know, like adventures or, you know, like prostitutes being led into the room. Exactly. Yeah. Chasing off prostitutes with a poker like we do with Aquinas, these sort of little vignettes that give us some insight into his character. There's this one story about Scotus being asked to sign some sort of oath of loyalty to the king. He was disputing with the pope about taxation of church properties,

and Scotus sided with the pope, and so had to leave Paris for a while, for about two years, and probably went back to England during that time. So there's, you know, taking a stand when most of the scholars at the University of Paris, many of whom were also clerics, sided with the king in order, probably just in order to keep their jobs. But Scotus did stand up for something and, you know, his life was interrupted life was interrupted but he didn't you know suffer torments or anything like that. He probably just went back to Oxford, maybe to Cambridge and just taught there for a couple years until it was safe for him to come back. There's what is

probably an apocryphal story about when the news came that Scotus was supposed to up and move to Cologne. He was engaged in conversation with some of his students and he gets the news and immediately sets off on foot for Cologne, you know, the Franciscans couldn't, they had to travel on foot. So he didn't pack his bags or anything, he just took off. So hopefully that's a true story, that's pretty cool.

Yeah. But what we really know about him is just his, his intellectual output. And then, you know, we can, uh, maybe make inferences about his personal life. Um, you know, and at least in the sense of his, his inner religious life on the basis of his theological writing, but the genre in which he wrote was, uh, was very academic, very scholarly, very scholarly.

You know, Aquinas, part of the brilliance of Aquinas is that he could write the most technical academic writing of the day that scholars of his stature were expected to produce, you know, like a commentary on Peter Lombard's sentences or a technical book of metaphysics like on being in essence. But he could also write at this like lower key. And so the summa, which for most of us is like hard enough, it really is a step down, not a dumbing down, but it's like, it's simpler, it's clearer than even the summa contra gentiles,

let alone the sentences commentary. So Aquinas had that organization, that sort of teaching impulse that Scotus either didn't have time to cultivate or just chose not to. So almost everything he wrote is just in that highly technical academic mode. And that's a big reason why he's so intimidating to people, I think. And that's also a big reason why he's controversial is because he's just harder.

He's much harder to understand, uh, than someone like Aquinas or, or even Bonaventure, you know, Bonaventure had the academic side, but he also had these wonderful works of spiritual theology. And so you can engage his thought at this other level and see of how it's connected up in an organic way with his academic output. But Scotus just didn't, he didn't have those, you know, the, the treatise on the first principles, what I just mentioned is the closest he ever came. I mean, he, he opens it with this beautiful prayer,

asking God for help, uh, to, to help him discern what can be known about God just by natural reason. And when he gets through the, the long proof for God's existence and all these proofs for various divine attributes, he closes with this extraordinarily rich prayer. Um, maybe we should read it later. It's just, I don't have it memorized, but it's wonderful. Talking about, just basically praising God for all of the attributes that he's just shown that God has. But it's, there's a little bit of literary effort there, and it's like the only time in Scotus where we see him trying to write just a little bit stylishly. Yeah. We know that Saint Anselm was a huge influence on Scotus. We know he read Augustine with care and was broadly Augustinian

the way that all the major theologians of that period were. Both Augustine and Anselm in his own way had their own literary brilliance in addition to the philosophical, theological brilliance. And it's only in this little tiny work of Scotus' De Primo Principio, where we get just a little bit of gesture for the literary side of things. But yeah, for the most part, he was just working through the texts, you know, the collating objections to his view from all of these contemporaries and working through them in this really technical way.

It really is a kind of, you know, nowadays we think, like if you're doing physics at the highest level, no one thinks like, well, you should be able to write your technical papers in a way that a lay person can understand. Well, no, I mean, it's nice if you're a physics teacher to be able to make that sort of translation. That's usually not your job. That's something else. Yeah.

I sometimes think of theologians and philosophers in the late 13th, early 14th century as like the physicists of their day. Like this was human intellectual effort done at its highest level. And, uh, human intellectual effort done at its highest level. And they did have a jargony way of talking to each other that is hard to access. But sometimes scholasticism in general is blamed as being, cutting theology off from spiritual heart. And I'm not too sympathetic.

I mean, I like good spiritual theology that is sort of meant to stoke the affections as well to stimulate the mind. But theology is just, it's hard. Like if you're talking about the Trinity or the incarnation, there's just some hard intellectual questions that come up there. And it's okay for people who have the training to be able to discuss those at a really high level. And then, you know, every now and then you get your acquaintances who can operate at the highest of the high levels and then distill things and then distill things. So then how are you confident that you've understood Skotus if he is so difficult to kind of read being so removed from him? Is it just a matter of understanding kind of the scholastics in general

that help give you access into his work? Or is it not that impenetrable such that someone studied philosophy can't understand it? Right. Yeah, that's a fair question. I mean, there's a kind of tradition of reading history of philosophy. We have our Aristotle and our Plato. Even when we're reading in translation, philosophers or just casual readers of philosophy take themselves to be able to look at Plato and Aristotle. Yeah, there's some really hard and penetrable bits, but, you know, get a sense for like what the philosophical

questions are, how to ask them, how to go about pursuing them. And you can kind of see the history of philosophy, at least in the West, as unfolding in conversation with Aristotle. Plato at different points, but Aristotle is this more or less constant source of influence through late antiquity. And there's a similar kind of trajectory from the church fathers into the middle ages.

So if you take yourself to be able to kind of grasp the basics of theology as discussed by patristic authors, the basics of philosophy as discussed by classical authors, and then see, recognize the way in which Latin scholastics are doing this. They're in conversation with the same. So if you're only familiar with modern philosophy but have no understanding or reading of ancient and medieval, then SCOTUS might be impenetrable.

But if you've read from Aristotle up, then it's... I mean, the fact that translators and scholars are writing on authors like Scotus within this broad tradition of the history of philosophy, you know, you can pick up a book like Order by Love or read some scholarly essays, interpretive essays, and you know, you have people qualified to sort of make the relevant connections and so I mean it's not you know when you when you open up the summa say and you know you're like reading reading a couple of articles on virtue of prudence or whatever like there might be some a reader who hasn't already done a lot of investigation in Aquinas might have trouble with some of the technical vocabulary, but I think there's something, you know, maybe it's, there's something that, you know, someone like Flannery O'Connor, I know she was brilliant in her

own way, but she wasn't a trained philosopher or theologian, and she talks about, you know, reading a, what, a question of the summa every night before bed, like, you can't, you really can access it. But once you get comfortable with that thought world, even though the summa is not written at that very high academic level, once you get comfortable with the basic concepts, the basic vocabulary, you really can kind of find your way

in to the more technical stuff from there. That said, I mean, reading Skoda, sometimes I get to some complicated argument he's trying to lay out and it takes me a long time to figure it out to feel like I've really wrapped my mind around how the argument is supposed to work, you know? And I often have the following experience, which is humbling because I wish I were smarter than I am, but sometimes I'll, like if I'm in the frame of mind of working through an argument, I'll finally get there. Well, I feel like, yeah, I think I know how this works. And can, you know, write it out in some clear way that hopefully will be helpful to someone.

But it's too complicated for me to actually hold in my mind. And so in order to access it, I have to go back to the book. So in that sense, those sorts of arguments, whether they're about God or just about anything else, those kinds of arguments are not that useful to people because you can't always have a book of Scotus on your person to whip out. I think there is something really nice about philosophy

that you can hold in your head. So that as you're going about your life, you can think about it. And whether it's an apologetic sort of context or whether it's just a more personal context. Or I like to have been more mindful about trying to incorporate virtue vocabulary into my ordinary speech for the sake of teaching, like my kids first and foremost,

but students as well. So to be able to have these kinds of philosophical terms and concepts in mind is nice. these kinds of philosophical terms and concepts in mind is nice. I mean, I often, when I teach medieval philosophy all the time, unsurprisingly, and I'm always telling students that it's one thing to be able to read the text and pass the test, and another thing to recognize the way in which, like, this might have something to do with your life and But that might have something to do with your life stage of philosophy really can only happen if you can like hold it in mind

and and sometimes Not just not just go to some of the scholastic literature is just too complicated at least for me to do that You know smarter people might be able to retain more at once. Renee Descartes had this experience. He was smart, I mean, he's not my favorite philosopher, but he talks about, in the meditations, he talks about getting through his long argument for God and then forgetting it.

And because God, for Descartes was supposed to make it possible for him to know other things, he was worried that if he forgot his argument for God's existence, he shouldn't have any confidence that he really knows what he seems to know. He thought, well, it's okay because I know, I can't remember the argument, but I know that it's there waiting for me to return to anyway.

Yeah. OK, let's talk about an argument from SCOTUS for God's existence, then. Suppose I'm just a fella on the plane and I've met you and you've said you've written a book that has to do with SCOTUS's argument for God's existence. How might you break it down? Yeah. It's like I would ask him. And by the way, I'm probably as familiar as the guy on the plane. I'm just using him as a decoy. That's really me. I might I might ask him why he wants to know.

But yeah. Well, how about how? No, I know you are, but it's a good it's a good question, right? I mean, I think it's a good question. Are you like our motivations often really color the way we assess arguments? Is that what you mean? Or no, that's part of what I mean. Yeah.

Yeah. I what if, what if I say I was raised Christian and I really hope it's true. I see the insanity of what's taking place in our country today. I've left church. I do want to come back just because I don't know. It just, it seems like a good thing to do, but I can't make myself believe something that's not true. And I'd love a logical reason for thinking God exists.

Yeah, yeah. So my, I typically have these sorts of conversations with students, like in office hours, students who are struggling with their faith. And not often on the plane, to be honest on planes, I try to with my body language, I try to make it seem like I don't want to talk to anyone and I usually succeed. Yeah. It's just too close. Way too close. Please don't turn your face towards me. Like if we're getting the conversation here, I'm gonna have to look at you and then I don't

know what state my breath is in and we're going to be 12 inches away from each other. This is this is why I think people are much nicer when the plane lands. I don't know if you've noticed this, but when the plane lands is when people start talking to babies and their parents. They don't want to commit to them at the beginning because they don't know what that's going to entail. Yeah, six hours of talking. Yeah. So so when students come in, rather than saying, well, so my favorite argument is blah, blah, blah.

I'll usually start with, like, well, what's your hangup? Is there some sort of specific challenge to belief that you struggle with? Is it the problem of evil? Is it the explanatory power of natural science and the way that it doesn't make reference to God? What is it that's actually driving your doubts? I think evangelistically, I think that's important.

That's a really good question. An abstract argument like one of Aquinas' five ways, it might not land. and there's the you know, however good the argument is in an actual moment of you know genuine philosophical Discussion or evangelism the point is not to clearly deliver the argument. Yeah, you know, it's it's to make it land Well, let me kind of share with you But I want to do that but I want to kind of show you some of my kind of the doubts Maybe I've had in the past and maybe you've experienced this where it's like, no matter how much I learn about arguments for God's existence, there will always be somebody smarter than me that can tear my argument to shreds. You know, maybe there's somebody smarter than him who can then show why he didn't actually tear it to shreds.

But I will never be in the position to argue somebody. I will never be in the position to argue somebody. And therefore I'm afraid I'm deluding myself and I can't get out of this cycle. Yeah. And maybe everyone except for like Alex Proust. Yeah, he's the only one who's allowed to be confident in God's here. Yeah, and he's pro God.

So there you go. Yeah, but then it's like, well then who else do we have on the other side? Yeah, yeah. No, I know, I know. I think that philosophical arguments have a limited value in religious life and in coming to belief. Sometimes you hear stories about intellectual conversions in coming to belief. You know, sometimes

you hear stories about intellectual conversions where they become convinced that it's true and then, you know, follow along behind that recognition of truth. But that sort of case is different from someone who thinks that they've arrived at some sort of demonstration thinks that they've arrived at some sort of demonstration of God's existence or demonstration of the truth of the Catholic faith that is beyond any

reasonable dispute. And I actually don't look for certainty in that sense. I don't think that the best arguments for God's existence deliver that to us. I think they maybe do more than, to some philosophy of religion types, who are theists, we'll talk like this, like, well, the arguments don't prove God's existence, but they make it reasonable to believe in God's existence. And I want something a little

stronger than that. I don't want some sort of minimal threshold of rationality, like, yeah, I'm a theist, but I'm minimally rational. I want it to be... I think that where theists really do have the upper hand is total explanatory power power, you know, or best explanation of things. That if you are committed to atheism, you just have so much explanatory work to do, you know, not just the origins of the universe and laws of nature, but human consciousness itself, you know, why is it that there are things like minds, like a subjective perspective that we can take on the world? Like, how can a being makes stuff, it's explanatory far simpler than an atheistic

or a naturalistic alternative. And so when I look for like best explanation kind of arguments, that's not certainty, that's not demonstration, you know, where if P then Q, P therefore Q, you know, where you can't accept the premises and deny the conclusion. It's not like that, but it's still pretty good, and it's more than that sort of minimal threshold of rationality.

And arguments like Aquinas's Five Ways, arguments like Anselm's ontological argument, Scotus's sort of hybrid of the two approaches to God's existence that he offers in De Primo. I mean, they are, I think, good arguments that can be picked apart individually, not picked apart in the sense of refuted, but where someone might identify a premise that he either is not convinced by or has some reason to think might be false.

So in Aquinas' first and second ways, each one in their own, so the first way, as you know, is argument from motion, second way is the argument from efficient causation, and each one has a premise against asserting the impossibility of an infinite regress of either movers, moved movers, or caused causes in the sense of the second way.

Now, to me, the impossibility of an infinite regress is just so intuitive. It just seems obvious. And yet I've met people who I take to be people of goodwill who aren't just faking it or lying, who just don't see it. And again, for those at home, are you talking about a linear regress or a hierarchical regress?

Hierarchical, so the sense in which Aquinas means in the first and second, yeah. So the, you know, Aquinas thought that it's conceivable, say that the universe is eternally old and things have just been causing other things, you know, stretching infinitely far back. And that's a controversial position, but Aquinas thought that was okay. What he was concerned, more concerned about and what he thought really did lead you to a first cause was the sort of, the sort of causal dependence that things are in at every moment of their

being. So we can identify ways in which right now we're causally dependent on other things for our own ongoing existence and for being able to do what we're doing. And it's those kinds of causal series that Aquinas thought had to tap out in a first. Right, so, I mean, some people just say, yeah, why not? Why can't those sorts of causal dependencies just run onto infinity? And I don't really know what to say to such a person,

because I think really? Like really, you don't see the impossibility there? One thing I struggle with as I began to think about this is OK so we have these things which are dependent on other things and presumably those things are dependent on other things. Alright so you think of these like threads that are kind of going up right why do they have to converge in one thing why can't they converge in multiple uncaused causes? Like why do they all have to kind of meet at an apex of the thing? Yeah. Multiple uncaused causes. You see the argument. You see the point though, right? I mean, Aquinas,

I think Aquinas would respond to this when he talks about the impossibility of polytheism. They're talking about being as such, the act of being kind of two acts of being, because they would differ in some way. But when I first hear the argument of we're all dependent and those things depend, those independent, if anything, I kind of get this visual in my mind that there's like these things at the top. Yeah. And they all kind of explain the things below them, but they don't necessarily have to so you'd have a kind of Like a shower a shower curtain of rings up the top. Yeah, they're all holding everything. One is an uncaused. Yeah cause Yeah, yeah, and just as Monotheists don't don't reach for an explanation of why God is an uncaused cause.

So the sort of metaphysical polytheist might say, don't look for an explanation of why each of those uncaused causes is uncaused. They just are, and therefore there's not a God, it's just these things that exist. And maybe it's the bedrock of reality upon what like quarks or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there, there would be, um, one sort of argument for just one of those is, um, an argument from explanatory simplicity, sometimes called Occam's razor, but it's a, it's a method, methodological principle that's actually due to Aristotle. It's sometimes called the principle of parsimony. Don't multiply entities without necessity.

And so nine uncaused causes does no more explanatory work than one uncaused cause, but the single uncaused cause is explanatorily simpler. So that would be again, not a demonstration that there aren't actually nine or 10 of them or two. But a better overall explanation that there's just one that is the origin of everything else, rather than that's just a, like a brute fact of reality that there are nine, you know, it's like, why nine? Yes. Yes. Why eight, seven?

That might be one sort of response. But then there'd also be, I mean, this is, okay, if you start asking about the attributes of each of these uncaused causes, like what more can we say about them, if any? Like, is one better than the other in some respect, you know? And suppose one of them has like all

of the divine perfections, plus being an uncaused cause. Whereas the others are like, they're just okay. So that they're an uncaused, genuine uncaused cause, but they're just okay. It was like, well, then we'd recognize something as an uncaused cause, but not as God. Because surely the thing to do would be to say, well, the one that has all of these perfections, that's the one that we're actually going to worship as God. So where speculative arguments for God's existence meet, you know, the religious

road to mixed metaphors. Where the rubber meets the road. That's what we would care about. What more can we know about these? Can we make some sort of discernment between them? See which one is, say, more worthy of worship, or and so on. Now, suppose Per Impossibile turns out each one is equally perfect. And so each one is just as God-like as the other.

And then you run into paradoxes. Like, well, if one is, if they're both omnipotent, but neither can create the other, maybe there's some sort of incompatibility in two beings being omnipotent. Or if, as, uh, as, as SCOTUS thinks to be the sort of thing that can, um, be uncaused, but cause everything else

makes you like infinite in power. So how could you have multiple things that are infinitely powerful? So there, you know, depending on exactly how you end up describing these, this sort of, you know, putative multiplicity of uncaused causes, you might, further work might show that, yeah, even if it's possible that there is an uncaused cause

that isn't God, that might not be that big a deal. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Do us a favor then, even though you may not want me to box you in like this, give us Skodas's argument. Yeah. Sum it up as quickly as you can, maybe maybe quickly as you can. And then we can, you know what I mean? I want people to get a view of it. No, this is really,

but I think I think the best way to do it is actually to kind of introduce it in a sort of direct comparison with Aquinas' second way. Okay. Okay. So the second way, Aquinas begins with the premise, like something has come into existence, right? It's like, no one's gonna deny that. Well, actually it is possible to deny that, but it's supposed to be obvious.

Like it's evident to the senses, he says. Okay. And then it proceeds from there, that if it's come into existence, it's come into existence by a cause. We can't have an infinite regress of causes, the right sorts of causes. Therefore there's an uncaused cause, and this everyone recognizes to be God. All right. So, SCOTUS has a kind of argument from efficiency, efficient causation,

but he tweaks it just a little bit in a way that he thinks strengthens it. So instead of starting from the premise that something has come into existence, Scotus starts with the premise something can come into existence. And if something can come into existence. And if something can come into existence, then something can be productive, something can cause it to exist. And then the argument runs almost the same way. There can't be an infinite regress of things that are able to be the causes of the things that can come into existence.

So there must be something that is able to cause the existence of other things, but itself is not able to be caused by anything else. And this is because of infinite... Infinite, no, infinite, yeah. So now, take that, he calls it a nature. We haven't yet shown the actual existence of anything. So we get this nature that is Essentially the sort of thing that cannot be caused to exist but can cause everything else Now if you start with that first premise something really can come into existence

Well, then a condition on anything coming into existence is that there's something already real that is the ground for anything else is coming into existence. So once, so the first stage, so to speak is reaching this nature that is uncausable by nature and then showing that if it really is able to cause other things, it must in fact exist. So it's sometimes described as a hybrid of a kind of ontological argument and a cosmological argument because like Anselm's ontological argument, it argues from the possibility or coherence of a nature to that nature's actual existence. So in Anselm's argument, just by way of refresher, God is that then which nothing greater can be conceived,

it's greater to exist in reality than in the mind alone. It does exist at least in the mind. If it only existed in the mind, it would, we could imagine a greater being, and so this being must exist. Now, the point is not to defend that argument, but you start with a description of a concept, that being then which nothing greater can be conceived,

and you show that reflection on that concept is supposed to yield that something in fact matching that concept really exists. And that's what Scotus's argument does, that the concept of something that cannot come into existence but can cause the existence of anything else. That's a coherent concept, but it can only... but if it failed to exist, well then it couldn't cause anything to exist. But it can. That's what the description yields. And so we infer that it must in fact exist.

Could you give it a nice polished William Lane Craig syllogism for us, or is that asking too much? You know, I don't think like William and Craig, uh, to my, to my shame. I mean, that's a great skill to have. Let's see. Or even another syllogism. Just try to give us a couple of steps. Yeah.

Yeah. So something can be produced. Therefore something can produce. Yeah. There cannot be an infinite regress of things that are able to be produced and that can produce other things. So there is something that is unable to be produced, but can produce other things. It's so beautiful because in a way it's so close just to the five-year-old's

question who created God. He's asking the exact same thing He's understanding it at an intuitive level what SCOTUS is showing Yes, there has to be an explanation outside of which there is no other like a basement. There has to be some bedrock Yes, that explains everything upon it. Yes. Yes It may have been similar to my question about going all the way up in that rocket ship. Like where is the end or where is the beginning? Yeah. Yeah.

He situates that little argument that I just gave in a broader context of what's sometimes called an argument for God's triple primacy. So God is the first or the primary thing in the order of efficient causation, which is what we just talked about. But He's also the first or the prime in the order of final causation. So God is the ultimate purpose for which anything else comes into existence. And God is also the first or the prime in the order of eminence. He's the most perfect being. And reflection on this triple primacy, first in efficiency, first in eminence, first in

finality, yields a bunch of subsidiary arguments that Scotus runs. He actually is very sympathetic to Anselm's argument. If there is, he thinks that there, there's got to be some like nature that is perfect excellence or perfect eminence. And he thinks this because we can make these objectively true discriminations about the values of things. You know, so like a human being is just better than a charcoal briquette. Yeah, it's more valuable. It's more excellent.

Yeah, even a really bad human being is still better as a thing than a charcoal briquette briquette is. Here we're talking about degrees of being right? I think that that is important to point out because otherwise you might say the you might misinterpret say Aquinas or skittish is argument in saying the only way we can judge better or worse is if there is a perfect that sounds like saying the only way I can say that you're taller than me is that there is somewhere an infinitely tall man. is somewhere an infinitely tall man or to or to use Dawkins argument that there must be like a this is his parroting of Aquinas's arguments which I put money on him having never read that there must be like an infinite smelly thing in order to say that there are degradations in smelliness. Yeah.

But it's important isn't that we make that distinction about being. That's right. That's right. I mean, they. And if that distinction about being. That's right. That's right. I mean, the. And if I'm right in that, flesh that out for me. Okay. Yeah. So with the height example, you know, we do need a number line that stretches to infinity.

So we don't need like a maximally tall person. But the problem there is that the concept of tallness excludes maximum. Like it's just, to be tall is to be some height. And so there can always be a taller. Whereas something like being, there's nothing about the concept of being that excludes a maximum. that excludes a maximum.

So, I can give you an argument from Anselm to maybe make this a little clearer. Anselm's argument was criticized by the monk, Gaonelot, who said, well, you say that if you think of the greatest conceivable being, you can show that it really exists. Well, here, I'm thinking about the greatest conceivable island. And since it's better to exist in reality

than in the mind alone, ha ha, I've shown the existence of such a thing. But of course that's stupid, so your argument must be stupid, Anselm. That's how Galileo's argument's supposed to work. And the reply that Anselm offers, this is glossing a little bit, is basically that the very concept of an island

implies finitude. And so it can always be imagined to be a little, for any island that you're picturing, you can always imagine it to be a little bit better. Just like tallness. Yes, just like tallness. Finitude, that's why we don't say whatever, infinite in height.

Whereas being does not. It doesn't imply that finitude. Of course, most of the beings that we're acquainted with are in fact finite. But it's not due to the fact that you are a being that you are finite. It's due to the fact that you are a human or a body. So the very idea of being sort of leaves it open whether a being is finite or infinite.

And if a being can be infinite, then Anselm's argument sort of at least is still on the table. But that I think is this idea of a maximum perfection or a most eminent nature. Part of it is just as you say, you gotta have, so part of the motivation for it is that we make these objectively true discriminations among things and in order to do that, we're supposing some kind of standard of excellence.

How does that not fall prey to the tallness objection? Well, there's nothing about being, or for that matter, goodness that implies any limitation or intrinsic limitation. So we just have like we have a concept like goodness as such you know just goodness and that doesn't imply any limitations it's just it's just goodness then anything else that we recognize that is good participates in it participates in it but it's good in a limited way you know so the goodness that a charcoal briquette is is not goodness as such the goodness ofette is, is not goodness as such. The goodness of a human being is not goodness as such.

But we're able, we have some sort of access to this concept of goodness as such, and it's sort of in virtue of being cognitively acquainted with goodness that we're able to recognize things as having more or less goodness than each other. So yeah, Scotus is happy with this idea that there is something that just is the good, it's just goodness as such. And that enables a certain mode of reasoning that's sometimes called perfect being theology.

You know, like, well, so what would be the, like, defining excellences of the thing that is good without limit? And so from there, he develops an argument for God's existence, that, you know, Aquinas thinks God is the good, but as Christians, we want to say more about God than simply that He is the good. And so if we can get from, like, a concept of the good as such to something that is say personal, uh, well, then it starts to look more like a God with whom we can have a relationship and worship and obey and that sort of thing. Yeah.

You think we're on the cusp of a Franciscan intellectual tradition or a revival in the church or you'd like to see that happen but we're nowhere near? I'd like to see it happen. I mean it would be nice for St. Francis and his followers, his early followers, to be understood as more than sort of like nature hippies, you know? There's that side, this popular conception of Franciscans. Yeah. Or it's like people have this view that the Franciscan view is the what the furthest permissible left view from orthodoxy. So I heard someone in a debate say that they were okay with lying because then we're a Franciscan. I'm like, oh wow Bonaventure would condemn lying What are you talking about? Yeah

Yeah, but it does seem that way like they're kind of given though like, you know So if there is this question still in the church today about Whether I can speak of falsehood Intentionally if that's still a question Then if I say yes still a question. Then if I say yes, then that's the that's more than maybe the Franciscan kind of liberal. That's what I that's not. Maybe you don't get that because you're in academia, but that's kind of what I pick up on when I talk to folks. No, the sort of liberal conservative line does seem to characterize the

Franciscan Dominican. I mean, I think that's kind of a recent thing. Yeah. But I'm, you know, it's funny. It's a recent thing and maybe it's an unfair thing given the intellectual tradition. But there's something really cool about having wandering hippies in the church who are faithful. Oh, yeah.

There's something cool. Like if that wasn't it, if the Franciscans changed or became intellectual. No, no, no, no. We would need them somewhere. Yeah, I'm totally with you. So the, you know, so the thought is that like, it would be nice if the broader church recognized that the Franciscans really have an intellectual tradition, that it's like, that it's rigorous, that it's not, it's not touchy feely. It's not just about, um, you know, mission and being there for the poor. And, uh,

all of that is really important, maybe more important than SCOTUS's arguments for God's existence, but that there really is this like intellectual heft, um, to that spirit. And Thomas don't have to be threatened by it. No, no, no, no. I mean, there are differences. Sometimes there are differences that would amount to. No, no, no, no. There are differences. Sometimes there are differences that would amount to disagreements.

But just think of these guys as really smart dialogue partners, even if in the end you prefer Aquinas on this or that topic. Yeah, there's no ideological opponent to a Thomist more sort of severe and threatening than another Thomist. I mean, it's not like the Franciscans

you have to worry about, but. Yeah, John Hare was a scholar of ethics and wrote some stuff on SCOTUS. And in one of his books, he says that he's resolved never to say anything about Aquinas because whatever interpretation he gives, he'll have some Tomas who agree and some who think that he's just off his rocker.

But no, I mean, I actually don't think Aquinas is as hard as that makes it sound, but you're talking about the fact that there are all these schools of Thomism and they don't agree with each other. But no, I mean, here's a kind of Franciscan theme that is not perfectly at home with Thomism, but that any Catholics should be able to is not perfectly at home with Thomism, but that any Catholic should be able to understand and appreciate and sort of think through. And there was this debate in the late 13th century about whether the beatific vision was primarily an act

of the intellect or an act of the will. So is it primarily consistent in thinking about God or in loving God? And intellect and will are two really closely related faculties, you can't, how do you love something if you don't know anything about it? So it seems like knowledge is a condition for loving. Also knowledge or understanding was seen as like

the most distinctively human faculty and so having that just like maxed out in the atypic vision is like the perfection of our humanity and so that's what our flourishing. So there are these these interesting questions that arise when you put put to yourself the like highly speculative question whether beatific vision consists in intellect or will. And in at the end the differences between Thomas and Scotus say on this question might not matter that much, but it's a sort of way of focusing attention.

And Scotus gives the answer that the beatific vision is primarily an act of love. It's accompanied of course by a cognitive understanding of God that God himself gives to us. And so it's, you might say, qualitatively indistinguishable from a Thomistic experience of beatific vision, you know, but it's the emphasis, right? And then that kind of focusing or prioritizing of will or love over intellect, not at the expense of intellect, but just slightly more important.

That has ramifications for how SCOTUS understands the nature of theology itself. Like, is theology primarily a speculative or practical discipline? Is it concerned with, Is it concerned with, is it more like a science or more like a guide to life? And Scotus cited on this. Aquinas would say speculative. Yes, yeah, yeah. And Scotus says practical. For all of the dialectical tediousness of a lot of what he has to say, he thought this was all ordered at the knowledge and the love of God and obeying God's commands

and all of that, sort of living a good life. So there's something very practical about Scotus's high-level intellectual activity. Is he successful in the sense that, like, he claims there's supposed to be this connection between high-level theology and Christian practice? Is there really, or did he just get carried away on the intellectual side of things? And I think for those who want to read about SCOTUS in books like mine or in Sister Mary Beth's Ingham, or try to tackle SCOTUS firsthand. Yeah, I really do think it's there.

I mean, the way in which SCOTUS's emphasis on, like, the way in which love draws us outside of ourselves and has us attend to the good of the beloved, God's good primarily, but even the good of the beloved. You know, God's good primarily, but even the good of our human beloveds, that properly loving someone is not merely a matter of like achieving eudaimonia for myself, but really is a kind of getting over myself

or getting outside of myself and really attending to the good of the other. That's a schodistic theme that, you know, he argues about that in a really technical way. But that's just had this huge payoff in how I think about moral life. You know, I'm really drawn to the broad Aristotelian tradition of what's broadly called the virtue ethics, right?

That we are by nature seeking the good, and that good is happiness, and happiness consists in the full realization of our distinctively human powers and so we need to develop virtues in order to be able to reliably act and toward the good so as to realize our own end which is happiness. Like I just love that and that that theme runs through Christian theology, Christian spirituality in a deep deep deep way and And Scotus inherits a lot of that sort of conceptual machinery of Aristotle about ethics and the good life. But he adds this like twist to it.

And yet, one of our distinctively human capacities is this ability to will another's good, and not just our own good. And so by cultivating what he calls the affectio eustitiae, this affection for justice, not justice in like a social justice sense, but justice in the sense of just like the right ordering of things. So I'm willing, you know, if I can recognize, say, that we are sort of equally, equal rungs on the great chain of being or something like that, then I can recognize that your good is no more or less important than my good. And so I might have this like

special relationship to myself that demands that I like attend more to my needs than to your needs. But at the same time, as a matter of justice, I'm not owed anything more or less than you are. And so my willing goodness ought to include something beyond my own goodness, not to include yours. If and when I'm in the circumstances where, when I go home to Waco,

I don't think that I should just be like sitting around in my office, like willing you good, like, you know, but insofar as I'm able to like here and now and my concrete actions of life, like do good for other people, like that's, that is a real, and what's, so it's not, but what's cool about this for SCOTUS is the way that he situates it,

not as this like Kantian kind of recognition of duty, and we just got to suppress our own desires and just do things simply because they're our duty, but he thinks that there really is this inclination in the human heart to will others' goods for their own sakes and not for our own. And so what he calls us to, so to speak, is to recognize in that broad Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition, this extra capacity that also ought to be cultivated.

Is it a matter of emphasis then? Because you're not saying this virtue ethics is solipsistic and close from other people because of course virtues entail giving another their due and that sort of thing. Yeah. But is it more is it more a matter of emphasis or? Yeah, but I think the difference the new thing is like without this inclination toward the good of others, like maybe the Aristotelian virtue ethics does become a little too egoistic.

Like if you thought that all of your powers, capacities were, so to speak, like ordered to your own flourishing, and maybe the flourishing individual would do a lot of good for other people yeah but it would be still about you still in one sense ordered to one's own achievement of self-realization or whatever yeah whereas the scotistic call it call it a scotistic emphasis but he he says no no no it's it's not just that morally speaking we ought to will others' goods. It's that there is within our willing

something that does stretch out beyond ourselves. And so it's a kind of like, you know, maybe a little too jargony, but a sort of phenomenology of the moral life. We can see in ourselves, even despite our many failings, whatever, we can see in ourselves, even despite our many failings, we can see in ourselves that we really do have this impulse to will others' goods.

Selfish as we are, and sometimes our inclination to our own advantage is in conflict with our inclination toward the good of others. Moral life has sort of played out in that struggle so many times. The schistic point is that inclination to others is really there. Moral life has sort of played out in that struggle so many times. The schistic point is that inclination to others is really there. And so it really is possible to love God for God's own sake and not for the sake of the

good things He gives us. It really is possible to love your neighbor as yourself, not as a way of loving yourself. I've been thinking a lot lately about utilitarianism versus personalism in Carol Voitiwa. And it sounds like, and I know you're not trying to drive this harsh distinction between what Skodus would say and what Aristotle or Thomas would say.

I know, I understand that I think, but maybe what we're saying is, I forget what work it is of Aquinas is where he says a small error in the beginning leads to like drastic outcomes. Yeah, we think and yeah, just this idea that like I, I, uh, if I'm here seeking my own happiness, then, then I maybe could be tempted to view you as a sort of object to be used for my own fulfillment as opposed to honoring you as the person that you are. Yes. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Is, is it something? Yeah, no, I think, I think there is, I don't know this, um, probably as well as you do, but the society of the gift of self, like really to be able to give yourself to another, I think has, is like, that doesn't sit so well, I think, with a, a purely like Aristotelian pagan idea, uh, that there would be this like in loving

a kind of reaching out like the self reaching outside of itself to be concerned about another's good. Like I'm thinking of like Buddhist enlightenment and that sort of thing. Something similar there too, where I have to go and acknowledge that there's suffering in the world. And in order for me to seek enlightenment, I have to kill my desires so as not to be disappointed or something like in that, it seems like

there's this emphasis on the self in inordinate. Yeah, am I wrong? I don't want to. Yeah, I don't. Philosophy, but I'm. Yeah. And I don't want to. I mean, of Buddhist philosophy, but I'm, yeah. And I don't want to, um, I mean, there, in the end, I think there is, there isn't this, there isn't a theme of the self as something. Well, that's true. To be got over, you know, to be got rid of, or, you know, whereas there is in Buddhism and, and yeah, or that it doesn't exist at all. Or that it doesn't exist. Yeah. It's an illusion or whatever. No. So SCOTUS really does think that like God, uh,

loves you very much and greatly desires your flourishing, uh, wants you to be happy in heaven and it would be wrong of you not to want what God wants for you. Right loving ourselves, doing good for ourselves is an important part of the moral life, but it's not the only thing. And so it's this, put it this way, you could think of this self-transcendence as like really just a getting over yourself. Or you could think of it as a completion of what a self is supposed to be. Yeah. And it's, it's more that that's, that's the SCOTUS idea.

All right. We want to take a quick break and the quick break might be a little longer than usual, but then we'll get back to it. And we're going to take questions from our local supporters. You want to do the read now? Sure. Hi everybody. I want to tell you about a lovely little app called. Hello Hello is the number one downloaded Catholic app on the Interwebs. Have you ever used it? I do. Yeah. Yeah, I use it regularly. Yeah well, I Look into that camera and say hollow comm slash Matt this one over here. Hello.com slash Matt very go there

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We're gonna eat that with you. Hello.com slash Matt. I'll do another one afterwards. Hey, Matt. Yeah. I hear that the June's coming up. What's going on there? Okay, so you might not know this, but June is the month in which Catholics

dedicate to venerating the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And that's it. That's all you're allowed to do in June. You're not allowed to celebrate anything else. You might be looking around and thinking, gee, everybody's celebrating God's covenant with Noah. That's not what they're doing. And so we want to take back this month for the Sacred Heart, which is why we've put together this really beautiful t-shirt. It says Reclaim the Month. It's a way to show that we stand in opposition against the sexual debauchery that's being pushed on us and promoted in our society, and instead we want to turn to Jesus Christ. And it's a great conversation starter, so please click the link in the description below and pick up a t-shirt today

Hey, so I also want to say thank you to hello. Hello is an excellent app that will help you pray and meditate it's got excellent sleep stories and Audio books if you go to hello.com Matt right now again We'll put the link in the description below just by signing up over there You can try the entire app for free for three months free So after those three months if you don't like it you can cancel it you won't be charged ascent But I use it and many people I know use it as well, and I think you'll really like it hello.com

slash Matt Okay good, I'm glad Dot com slash Matt. OK, good. I'm glad. Anyway, welcome back to Pints of the Coinas. Our friend Dr. Alex Plato brought us over some bread during the break with cheese that's illegal because it's filled with heroin.

Can you believe that's a joke? Yeah, there is no heroin in the cheese, but it's worse. It's non-pasteurized. Can I say that? You're screwed As if they're gonna come after you. I don't know All right How's it going? That was good bread. That was so good

All right. Well before I fall asleep,, we got some questions here from our beautiful supporters. And think of this as the lightning round. So the pressure is off of you to give a detailed, nuanced, big answer. Yeah, just whatever you want. Yeah. Anthony Skinner says, what is meant when the catechism says that God's existence can, quote, be known with certainty from the physical world? from the physical world. And see, so I said something against the catechism, or I think that's what the spirit of the question is.

Cause I was saying earlier that maybe we can't have certainty, but we want something more. Funny thing though, isn't it? It is a funny thing. What do you mean by certainty? Yeah, like two plus two plus four yeah i think you can yeah i think it's a a squishy concept um known with certainty from the physical world i mean i i think that the you know paul says that the existence of god has been made evident by what he has made

and fully support all of that um i think there is something about the order of the world, about purposes in the world that all point to God and make it more than merely reasonable that God exists. And as I was saying earlier, I do think that the explanatory power of theism is so enormous compared to what naturalists or atheists have to have to come up with, you know, there's just, they place on them so such a burden of making sense of the world, uh, on the denial of theism. So, you know, I don't know exactly the sense of certainty that the catechism is using.

Probably not this like highly philosophical idea where people can doubt their own existence. Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe a good Catholic can say that it's less certain that I have less certainty that God exists in that two plus two equals four, but it's not a, but there's a sort of practical. I wouldn't want to say that. I'd want to say the opposite is true, but only because of God's revelation, not because of the physical world. That's right. I mean, in terms of like my life, um, you know, I'm certainly invested in God's existence more than I'm in two plus two equals four. It's like, it matters more to me. And so there's like a practical certainty about the reality of God that, uh,

that I would place even over mathematics. But I take it that, uh, like, you can just sort of intuit the correctness of two plus two equals four, the impossibility that two plus two equals something else. You just, you just kind of see that. And I don't think that everyone just sees that God exists or, or maybe, maybe, you know, maybe they can be guided towards some sort of intuitive cognition of God's existence, but that if you're just sort of looking around you, you can infer that God exists, but you don't just see God's existence in the things that he's made or from the things that he's made the way that you see 2 plus 2 equals 4.

So maybe we have different concepts of certainty. Yep. 2 plus 2 equals 4 so maybe we have different concepts of certainty Yep, okay here we go. What are we good here? Devin Stewart says I have heard lots of philosophers talk about cosmological arguments as proofs as opposed to just evidentiary arguments like fine tuning, what are the strongest objections you have heard to these arguments that claim to be iron clad proofs? And how would you respond to those objections? It's a big question. Maybe. Proof I think is another term that's not always used with precision.

So the proof, the way that say Aquinas and Scotus would use it, it would be like logical demonstration from premises that are certainly known. So Aquinas thought it was evident to the senses that something has come into existence. Now you might think that in a naturalistic frame of mind, that you could deny that something has come into existence.

Like if you thought that the fundamental things are like matter and energy, and that what we recognize with our senses and our ordinary concepts as like discrete kinds of things that maybe that's not really getting at the fundamental nature of reality. And so even though things like elephants and humans come into existence, if they're not really real the way that the particles are real and those don't come into existence, well then you can see someone even trying to deny the first premise of Aquinas' second

way. Now, so then if if there is some reason for doubt there or at least if the premise is not certainly known to be true, then is it strictly speaking a proof? Well no, it wouldn't be on that sort of very high level of what a proof is. But if you thought that it was like beyond reasonable doubt that things really do come into existence, then the conclusion could in principle be just as strongly known as the premises from which it's derived. It would fall short of a proof in the strict sense, but it would be practically

speaking as good as a proof. Yeah. Okay. Matt one Oh three says, what are some misconceptions you had about Catholics when you were Protestant? And what are some misconceptions you see Catholics having of Protestants today? Yeah. So the first one, the biggest thing was the sort of attitude that Catholics didn't take their faith seriously.

I knew a lot of Catholics who really seemed to be nominal Catholics, and it may well have been true that lots of the Catholics I knew who didn't seem to care about their faith really didn't care about their faith. But I also had like a very nichey sort of understanding of what it meant to live one's faith or to express one's faith. And so I think probably as a younger man, I was too too quick to assume that some Catholic was merely nominal Catholic, you know, whereas it would have been a more generous thing to to assume until proven otherwise that people who said they were Catholics really cared about their faith. So that would be the main thing. Catholic

prejudice against Protestant. I mean, I've talked about this a little bit earlier. I think that this idea that Protestants are just LARPing is, you know, strictly speaking, I suppose in one sense, it's true that they are, but at the same time, I find it really hard to believe even qua Catholic. That God is not like- But LARP doesn't LARPing imply a knowledge that what you're doing isn't what you're actually pretending to

do. You're like live action role playing, right? Is when you're pretending to be something that you know that you're not. Protestants aren't doing that. No, they're definitely not doing that. But that it's um, I think that the Catholic criticism is that they just, because they don't have the sacraments, there's nothing that is like religiously efficacious that Protestants are doing. is that they just, because they don't have the sacraments, there's nothing that is like religiously efficacious that Protestants are doing. And I don't agree with that. I think that prayer, you know, corporate worship,

I mean, I think that these things are as far as they go, like real, sincere, uh, they're doing, doing things in the lives of those who are engaged in these activities. And I just think that it's, um, I don't have any good reason to think that God is not at work in Protestants. Do you think the argument from Catholics against Anglicanism is, you know, basically it just

had to do with this horny king who wanted a divorce. Do you think that's not fair and that we should? Because it wasn't as if there weren't abuses and corruptions within Catholicism that were being, people were seeking to remedy. Yeah, I think it does remain a scandal to the Anglicans that the mode of their founding really was political in that sense and a moral degeneracy. But it should be, that of course is not the reason why Anglicans are Anglicans, and so there is this own Anglican spirituality that has developed over the centuries. And so it's, uh, it's a little mean to kind of hold every Anglican to like,

Oh, Henry V is your leader of your church. Uh, that's not really how Anglicans understand their faith. I think it's still a valid criticism and should make Anglicans uneasy that whatever was wrong with the Catholic church, the, the, the immediate circumstances of the formation of the Church of England were just like indefensible. Right. They went first and foremost about those abuses. They were first and foremost about King Henry the eighth, winning a divorce. Yeah. Yeah. Um, M Kidwell, oh two says says what advice do you have for a Catholic science teacher in the increasingly secular age of science? Don't teach at a public school.

Good idea. Kyle Whittington says, what would be your advice to new converts that have anti-Catholic family? to new converts that have anti-Catholic family? You might think like you have all of the cool arguments and that it would be unreasonable for people not to agree with you. And since you have good access to family members, it seems like maybe they would be like the ripest for being the beneficiaries of your new found wisdom.

But family relationships, as intimate as they are, also quite complicated. And a lot of times, like the pure deliverances of reason cannot be received that way because family relationships have deep histories. Your parents, your brothers, your all of your faults. They know your... So it's hard to engage family members as though you were two philosophers meeting in the public square. And so approaching the relationships with patients, making more expressions of what your faith means to you or how important it is.

Um, like what good it's doing in your life might be more beneficial in the long road than giving the knockdown arguments. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. I wish I had taken that approach with my parents and friends when I got back. If I had just shown them charity that was unlike the way I was before, as opposed to feeling the need to. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. to feeling that into yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I keep clicking comments and they keep disappearing. Let's see. What does Dr. Ward do if when doubt arises in God, in Jesus, in our faith? Thank you so much. This is a good question, right? Because you know, we've been talking about a little bit last these days on the show and you know, if, if lust is not within your control, then you're not culpable for it. You know, this ordered desire for sexual

pleasure, same thing with doubt. And so how do we make that distinction between the grave sin of doubt as opposed to dealing with doubts that we have no control over. Yeah, no, I like this question a lot. Every now and then, you know, when you go into Damas before any Greek blessed sacrament or adoration, you know, I'll say something like my Lord and my God repeating the words of St. Thomas. And every now and then the thought pops into my head, he's not there. Like not just not there in the tabernacle,

he's just not there, not real. And it used to be really disconcerting. I thought, oh, like maybe I'm, maybe I am larping. Like maybe deep down I know that this is all a sham. But it doesn't bother me as much anymore because I think that there are a lot of pressures in the broader culture that would like make those thoughts, the kinds of things that can just sort of float

into one's mind. You know, I'm surrounded by people, not in my immediate department, but in the broader intellectual world I inhabit, surrounded by people, not in my immediate department, but in the broader intellectual world, I inhabit surrounded by people who seem to be really smart, but who deny God's existence. And there's a sort of presumption of atheism in popular culture. You know, it's a sort of like imminent nihilism,

like wants us to ignore transcendence. And so I think there, there's like a pretty decent psychological explanation. The same reason a teenage boy might say, maybe I'm a woman because he's been surrounded by the propaganda. Yeah, sort of social contagion theory of atheism or something like that.

And so I'm less surprised now when those sorts of thoughts pop into my head. So at one level, if it's just like a sort of fleeting thought, especially in a moment that a sort of fleeting thought, especially in a moment that's supposed to be pious, it's easy to kind of just like, you know, flick those away, like just little distractions. You know, every now and then there are more serious doubts.

You know, it's like, you know, am I just, am I wrong about all of this? And the best advice I have to others, and I think what's been most helpful for me in those moments or seasons, is to conduct the doubt prayerfully. Like, not the like, God, if you are real, sort of doubt, but to just sort of give that intellectual confusion

over to God. Now, that can seem paradoxical if God is the one who's in question in the intellectual confusion. But if you are a practicing Catholic, there's still practical activities you ought to be engaging in if you're like merely confused about the faith. If you've rejected it already, then it would be harder for you to have a prayer expressing your doubt to God.

But I think that to prayerfully give over your doubt to God has been just really helpful. You have a funny look on your face. Does that sound less helpful? I'm sorry. It was probably because I was burping from the bread. I just had far less of what you were saying. No, I appreciate very much what you're saying. I was recently in Guatemala with my kids and we were on this boat and my son pointed up at the clouds

and said, I think heaven's up there. And I had this whole feeling of it's all bullshit. I've lied to my children. I'm lying to myself. None of it's true. But, um, as CS Lewis said, if I were an atheist, when I was an atheist, I had thoughts that the whole Christian religion seemed rather plausible. And so it's a very dangerous thing to just start changing your life based on

moods. Yes. Yeah. And these moods really do cut both ways is the Lewis anecdote makes clear. I mean, also there's like, there's a difference between, you know, philosophers will sometimes talk about like credence and how high your credence is that such and such is the case. Um, and there's a sort of very intellectual way of trying to assess your degree of belief. And that's an important part of Christian life is having more and less faith, I guess. But then there's also these things that we do. Like, we pray, we go to mass, we give alms, we live morally upright lives, or we try to do all these things well.

And, and to be a committed Catholic is just as much about engaging all of these things sincerely as it is about having, you know, credence above point five or whatever. And I don't even really like that way of assessing belief, at least when it comes to religious commitment, because like ascent to propositions is one part, probably not the most important part, of what it means to live a Christian life. Yeah, yeah, that's good.

Atheism, theism. I remember back in the day, I went down the rabbit trail, that very delightful rabbit trail of Dr. William and Craig debates, you know, when you first stumbled upon them and there's just a cornucopia of them and you just go to town. And when you're in that headspace, you kind of, you're waiting for anybody around you to propose, like propose an argument for atheism. No one's thinking of that, but that's just how you now kind of view people in the world. And I thought to myself, you know, debates about God's existence can get in the way of my relationship with God in the way that debates around solipsism, let's say, if there were

such debates, could get in the way of me living my life or me entertaining thoughts about my wife being a Russian spy and how certain I am that that isn't the case. Exactly how certain. Yeah. Pretty really. Yes. But isn't that what you would think if she was really good? Like I pretty sure. And at that point, yeah. So it's kind of easy to do that with anything. Uh, you know, I think that, um, you think about how AI is developing and so all of a sudden the idea that we're all just part

Of some elaborate video game doesn't sound as stupid as maybe it did 20 50 hundred years ago Yeah, yeah, Alex and I were just talking about the matrix last night a little bit how how revolutionary that seemed at the time that idea That we're all just in pods living a virtual life Now that's you know one thing I think that I've done a lot of that like philosophy of religion apologetics stuff and I've done the YouTube rabbit hole and willing link Craig debates. I think one sort of mindset that it that someone can fall into is to to think of these good arguments as ammo and there's a way of like,

I think they can form character in a certain way, to be a little bit more combative or belligerent than evangelism requires or demands, good evangelism. than evangelism requires or demands good evangelism. And I think it could also induce a kind of anxiety, especially in younger believers who might be fully committed but are committed because of the arguments, because the arguments are really good, such that if someone were to come along

and show why the latest one from WLC isn't so good, they would stop believing, or at least would be less committed. And that's a dangerous place to be in. I mean, ultimately, the Christian formation ought to be happening in a life in such a way that it's sort of like running independent of however one is currently assessing the states of arguments

for God's existence. I think one thing that's been really helpful for me not to feel so dependent on the like apologetics arguments for God is my rootedness in history. Like there's something, can you realize the naturalness of belief in God across history, across cultures? Yeah, different views about what God is or how we should worship God, but the naturalness of, so to speak, the naturalness of a supernatural explanation of the world just seems so pervasive that I don't personally feel the need to defend that idea to myself. I mean, it just seems as natural as almost any other human, like just wholesome, ordinary human activity. And I think that if more theistic intellectuals or budding intellectuals just sort of rested in that naturalness of theistic belief. Then yeah, go by all means, like engage the arguments, but relieve yourself of the anxiety that maybe the, you know, your faith is

only as good as the latest argument you've read. Yeah, it is shocking to how dependent we are and influenced we are by pop culture. Yes. Like back in 2007, if you were a 17 year old looking at the arguments of God's existence, there's a really good chance you'd be an atheist because of all of the hype around Dawkins and Hitchens and Co. But then it's like, wait five minutes and you'll see it's all vacuous. But you couldn't have known that during the hype and the hoopla. Yeah.

Whereas today it feels like there's more of a tendency to believe in God based on the popularity of more conservative thinkers who may not even themselves be Christians because of the admiration they have for religious texts. And yes, yes, yes. But even that is, I mean, that's maybe the environment we want to kind of cultivate because it's more conducive to faith. But even that's not a good enough reason to believe. You know, just cause Jordan Peterson says that maybe atheism is practically possible,

whether he says that or not. I'm confused. Yeah. I'm the big fan. I just love Pascal. I love Pascal's response to the question. Well, what do I do if I, if the evidence seems equal, just do what Christians do. Take holy water, receive the Eucharist. And when you read the brothers, you'll, you'll also receive that lovely line within the first several chapters of, uh, what's his name? Father's awesome. I come in out and speak into the, I think it's awesome.

Talking to the ladies and she says, you know, I sometimes think to myself, I'll give myself a humanity, like I would die for humanity. But then I can't live in the same room as another person. You know, they eat too loudly or they're too late or they smell and then I can't stand them. Their very existence oppresses me. I might be mixing up the stories, but the answer is essentially like go and love.

Like let that be what you do. And that gets back to our little discussion about like solipsism arguments and I guess for God's existence It's like part of the problem is of keeping God up on the scoreboard as it's very sort of self-referential Yeah, and so to do what we're talking about with our boy SCOTUS. Yeah. Yeah No, it's good. I think part of the wisdom of Pascal's advice is this, not just that if it's 50-50, you just take the gamble in favor of God because it's more likely to work out your favor. It's the more rational way to go.

But that the practices that are supposed to follow that, you know, they are themselves belief forming practices, not just like the kinds of activities that you need to engage now because you've taken the wager on God, and so this is what God requires of you. But that doing what the Christians do is the way to not make it above 50-50, but to shape your own mind to become theistic in its outlook. Yeah, and to put it very cynically, if God doesn't exist, then I don't see there being any problem with believing false things and living by false things, objectively speaking.

So I'm just going to go ahead and believe in this thing that may not be true. And when all is said and done, the only person who will know whether it's true or not is if God exists. Like if God doesn't exist and I die and it's lights out, then I won't be able to point at you and say, haha. The only one who'll be able to point and say haha. Sometimes I have trouble with Paul's lines about like if the resurrection isn't real, we're all messing, you know, eat, drink, and what we should do is adopt the outlook that we should just eat, drink, and be married for tomorrow we shall die.

So, you know, I'm obviously not more pious than St. Paul, but sometimes I think, well, I think he's wrong about that. I think that even if it's not real, this is still the life that I would want to be living. Now it would be impossible to live it, I think, if I knew that it was false I do too, but it's sort of hedonistic like if the alternative is like

hedonism, yeah, I Don't like I couldn't live that way. I certainly I would I would like have fun But I couldn't live a life that unless. Right. Because you, you start just feeling the oppressiveness of your own vices. Many atheists today who don't believe in God would agree with you. Yes. Yes. I think what I would do is I would, I would live as stoically as I could until the pain got too much. Then I would reach out for whatever immoral pacifier was at my disposal. Yes. Yeah. Good. Good. Maybe, maybe you couldn't resist, um, in like made or something, the assisted suicide at the end. Uh, like how, how do you suffer death in a holy way, in a patient way?

If you really are convinced there's nothing afterward. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe, maybe I'd be a pagan in that sense, but the, like, they'll just live it up kind of attitude. I'd like, that's definitely not the life I want, even if the God stuff isn't real. Yeah. I'm with you. I'm with you. And we do our atheist friends a disservice when we pretend that that is what they're doing or what they're saying. I think you can be moral without God. I mean ultimately I think that morality comes from God, but I think someone can lack a belief in God, but but have strong belief in Moral facts and attempt to live in accordance with them. Yeah, this might be the most important question. I'll ask you today

Matt 103 says how do you eat an ice cream cone with the majestic stash? Oh, yeah It's really good question. So you take the ice cream cone and the majestic stash? Oh, yeah. It's a really good question. So you take the ice cream cone and then you take a spoon. And then you spoon. What about even with the bread? That must have been difficult. Yeah. So I just had bread and butter and, you know, you just learn how to how to work the angles.

How does your wife like to kiss you with that thing is the real question. You know, every few months I kiss, no, every few months I ask her, it's like, are you sure? You know, because kissing happens in our family. You know, we have six kids, but she she's OK with it.

Yeah. You're a blessed man. Yeah. Can you have Dr. Ward engage on Bishop Barron's critique of Scodus's theory of the universe? Help me. Universe.

Thank you. University. Oh yeah. University of being. Have you engaged with his work at all? Not directly. I know the basic line. I can do a lightning version of this.

Do it. I do think that Scodus is like not actually as controversial as he's sometimes made out to be on this point. Sorry, for the rest of us, could you explain what universosity is? Univocity, yeah. So Aquinas famously defends the idea that when we speak about God, we use words and concepts analogically to say that God is wise. It doesn't mean exactly the same thing as we mean when we say that Socrates is wise. Okay. So that's an analogical theory of predication,

what we would call it. Scotus defends the Univocity theory of the concept of being. And what he means by that is that we do have a single concept, being, which we use when we affirm God's existence and which we use when we affirm the existence of creatures. And the concept applies equally to God as it does to creatures. Even though they possess it differently there be a they're very very different kinds of beings, but they are But the single simple concept of being attaches to God just as well as it attaches to creatures and because Being is used in the same sense or in one sense hence the term

Univocity yeah, okay, so you're already furrowing your brows thinking, Skotus must be wrong on this. Well, no, I'm just wondering, because I think like, wouldn't he affirm that, that God is being that we have being, we participate in it? Whereas... Yes. So, so having said that, that we'd have this simple concept of being that we use univocally of God and creatures, Skotus goes on to affirm radical differences between God and creatures, all the sort of differences

that Aquinas would want to affirm. That God is being itself, God is infinite being, any creature is merely finite being. So huge, huge, huge gap. Nevertheless, he thinks we do have this one concept, actually we have several, but the one that gets talked about the most is being, and that's used the same.

Okay, now, so this is commonly represented as a major point of disagreement between Scotus and Aquinas, and on the surface, it is. I think part of what's going on here is that Aquinas and ScotUS have a different, a different theory of what concepts are. I don't want to go too much in the weeds here, but if you look at a concept like being, it's what SCOTUS calls a simply simple concept.

Like there's no more content to it than just being. So it's pretty bare. Like the concept of, the best concept we have to refer to God, Scodus says is infinite being. He thinks that's the sort of richest single concept. But the concept infinite being is a complex concept, being and infinite.

And then the most suitable concept for thinking of creatures being is a complex concept, being and infinite. And then the most suitable concept for thinking of creatures would be finite being itself is a complex concept, finite and being. So, so to speak in the middle, if you draw a Venn diagram, the conceptual Venn diagram, we have being right there in the middle. So we have these two complex concepts

that really are different concepts. One concept of being for creatures, one concept of being for God. Finite being, infinite being. But they have this conceptual middle component, you know, and it's that that SCOTUS is really focusing on. So we have to think of him as like thinking about all the concepts we use to talk about God and creatures Breaking them down into their simplest conceptual parts and then asking like of the simplest conceptual parts Do any of them apply to God and just the same way that they apply to us And so all of the differences that arise when we think about God's simplicity or God's infinity

those differences we think about God's simplicity or God's infinity, those differences, we think those differences through additional concepts, like the concept of simplicity, the concept of infinity. We don't think those attributes of God with the concept of being itself. So in the end, and that's, it's a little bit technical and it gets more technical than that, but in the end, I think that there's something really innocuous about Scotus's theory of univocity.

But because of the surface level contradiction between Scotus and Aquinas on this point, and things that Aquinas has to say about univocity as Aquinas understands univocity, then Thomists are, you know, understandably disposed to say that Scotus really went wrong here. But what they're doing is looking at what Aquinas has to say about univocity and then looking at the fact that Scotus affirms univocity and saddling Scotus with everything with saddling Scotus with the view that Aquinas was rejecting When yeah what Scotus means by Univocity is not what Aquinas means by Univocity. Was it Maimonides who said we can only speak of God What he's not equivocally yeah, yeah, yeah, so Equivocation with

So, yeah, my right. So I just equivocation with analogy and you know, varsity. Yeah. So then in what sense is Aquinas right to say we can not speak about God? I can't say that word for some reason. You never typically. Yeah. What? Why? So how is he right in saying that? And presumably your man, Skodas, would understand would agree. Yeah. Yeah. The reason Aquinas gives for rejecting univocity is this.

Aquinas says a cause and an effect are univocal when the effect is of the same nature as the cause. But of course, where God is the cause of creatures, the cause is of radically different nature from its effects. So there is no univocal causation between God and creatures. And from that rejection of univocal causation, Aquinas develops a theory of concepts and of talking about God that sort of tracks that. So just as no creature stands in a univocal causal relationship to God, so the terms that we use, which after all we gather from our experience of creatures,

don't apply to God univocally. So it's this strong metaphysical understanding, if you like, of what univocity is. It's grounded for Aquinas in this causal relationship between God and creatures and the fact that creatures do not share the same nature as God. Now, Scotus, of course, would deny that God and creatures have the same nature, and so he would deny that there's univocal causation going on in the case of God and creatures. But the way that Scotus breaks all this down, that fact just doesn't have anything to do with what our words mean or how our concepts apply. All right, final question for the day. I want to get you to give us a one word reaction

to the following people. One word? Good luck. Hitchens, Chris Hitchens. Jackass. Richard Dawkins. I already used it. I already used my word.

Slightly less charming jackass. Graham Oppy. Smart. Daniel Dennett. Arrogant. Sam Hyde. Hyde? Yeah. I don't know him. Who's Sam Hyde?

Sam Harris. Sam Harris. You wrote Sam Hyde. I didn't know who that was. Sorry, I'll explain that later. That was a Bordian slipde Sam Harris Sam Harris you wrote Sam Hyde I didn't know who they were sorry I'll explain that later that was a party and slip Sam Harris. That's good you didn't pretend to know Sam I was I have no I can't do one word here Sam Harris has gotten into like meditation and mindfulness you know about this yeah he's been talking about that for a while. Even in his interview, debate with William and Craig, he talked about the advantages of meditation. Well, I have a friend who's sort of in the middle

of losing his faith, and he's all full of anxiety about stuff, and so not only has he become attracted to Sam Harris' arguments for atheism, but he uses his app to meditate. I say, you're abandoning your Christian spirituality to go meditate with a new atheist. So it's very strange. Have some respect.

Yeah, the thing, one thing to say about Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins is that they really, they haven't capitulated as sort of like liberal secularism has been outpaced by progressivism, wokeism, whatever we want to call it in recent years, they haven't just gone along with the flow on every single issue.

Yeah. And so they've taken some black for their own. Sam Harris. Well, I just said a lot about him. I want one more. Oh, well. Go. Oh, goofy. There was a great in that debate. He's got a great line in that debate.

Sam Harris, William Lann Craig, when he says, when you when you keep asking like who created the uncreated creators, I think it was in that regard. He said, at this point, you've hit metaphysical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question.

I love that line. That's so good. All right, Dr. Tom Ward, pitch your book for us. We'll put a link in the description below so people can check it out. Yeah, thanks. Pitch it right now. Yeah, good. So ordered by love. I mean, SCOTUS is he's all into love, love, love, love. But he's not merely he's not merely a hippie, for instance, like we were talking about earlier. We want the Franciscans to remain that sort

of like, go preach to the birds and all of that, that sort of hippie quality. But he has this deep sense of a rational order, structure to the world given to it by a personal God of a rational order structure to the world given to it by a personal God who creates primarily out of love. Love for himself most of all, love for Jesus, love for Mary, and then orders an entire world, so to speak, so that Jesus can be its awesome King and Center. So the title of the book is meant to capture these like two themes in SCOTUS. He's really, on the one hand, a rigorous philosopher. You might call that more of a rationalist theme, but he's motivated most profoundly in all of his thought by this

idea of God as love and yet as an orderly lover. So the book surveys aspects of Scotus' theology, his natural theology, his beautiful theology of the incarnation, the immaculate conception, but also some other distinctively Scotus' things, not all of which came up today, like his theory of thisness or uniqueness, that each of us has a hexiety a unique feature that is known directly only by God there's a chapter reflecting on that

theme in SCOTUS all the Univocity stuff that we briefly went through I cover that and try to try to build some reconciliation between Thomas and, and Franciscans on this point, because it does. So doing upset everybody. Yeah. Maybe upset everybody. But if you do it in a spirit of reconciliation, then people can't get quite as mad at you. You know, if you came out swinging, then they'll just swing right back.

But yeah, it's a, it's a sort of, would it be a good book for somebody who'd like to begin to understand where SCOTUS is coming from? Or interested in the Franciscan intellectual tradition? Yeah, it really is on both counts. It's not meant, it's not written as an academic book. It's not a commentary. I mentioned the translation project and the commentary, and that's the sort of scholarly side.

My thought with this book was, SCOTUS has meant so much to me over the years, but he's hard to access. How do I make SCOTUS sing? Or can I make SCOTUS sing so that people who don't wanna go get a PhD in philosophy can get the greatest hits, so to speak, and to get it in a way that is accessible.

Not easy, but not that hard. Yeah. Good. Yeah. So if SCOTUS tugs at any of your heartstrings, please get the book. Bishop Barron, or not Bishop Barron, but Brandon Vogt, just his assistant,

recently gave it a shout out on his. Oh, terrific. Bishop Barron did an episode on the Franciscan intellectual tradition quite recently. So some people are reading it. Good. Yeah. Good. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me.