Pints With Aquinas - Can You Actually Know Anything? Epistemology for Normal People (Dr. Trent Dougherty) | Ep. 571

Starting point is 00:00:00 Epistemology is first philosophy from a phenomenological standpoint. The idea of whether or not we can have successful cognitive contact with reality, what does knowledge even mean? Can Christians know that they know, that they know? Was there a moment that you chose to believe in God and dedicate your life to Christ? And did knowledge and evidence play a part in that? There's nothing good about me that isn't something God, as it were, twisted out of a vice. of a vice. What is knowledge then and should we even care? You shouldn't care what knowledge is.

Starting point is 00:00:35 What you should care about is justified belief. And if we do not live in a demon world and we do not live in a matrix world, then following the evidence will get us to the truth. And if it does, and it does so in a non-accidental way, then we have cognitive contact with reality. Do you know that? I do believe I know that. Gide everybody. There are certain interviews that I do that will stay with me forever, and this is one of them. And so I'm asking you to trust the process of this interview. I had a plan to talk about epistemology, that is to say, can we have successful cognitive contact with reality? And what is knowledge anyway? And we most certainly discuss that. I would say probably two hours of this very long interview. We get into that. But just like my

Starting point is 00:01:28 interview with John Christ, if you watched it, we began talking about stuff. And then John really opened up beautifully about the struggles he's had in his life. And so I'd say, Throughout this interview, it just changed. The interview changed. And I decided to follow that tributary. And Dr. Doherty opened up about a really dark time in his life where he committed adultery, had a child out of wedlock, how he went to psychosis, how he went to 12-step, how he had temptations to unalive himself. And I thought it was really honest and really beautiful, but not for the faint of heart. So if you have children, watch this first before showing it to them. you do, in fact, decide to show it to them. Thank you. This is the nice thing about long-form discussions is usually takes 20 minutes to get into one. Yeah, yeah. A lot of the best ones, the guests will at some point say, so when do we start?

Starting point is 00:02:21 Yeah, exactly. That happens all the time on a lot of the podcasts. So we're started. Yeah, that's right. Trendoity, how are you doing? That's the exact opposite of what I was talking about. That's right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:31 So we are going to talk about, I'm so excited. I really am. I would say my favorite branch of philosophy, not because I know much, but just the thing that really tickles me is epistemology. The idea of whether or not we can have successful cognitive contact with reality, what does knowledge even mean? Can Christians know that they know, that they know that Christianity is true and all that. And dude, you're the man on this topic, I tell you.

Starting point is 00:02:56 Well, I certainly have been bequeathed a good training. So I am a grandson of Gettier, a grandson of Chisholm. My training was just amazing. And that I have to give a lot of credit to the amazing training that I received at Rochester, which is, of course, the er source of evidentialism. And I noticed that she really quoted the phrase from Linda Zagzebz. Cognitive contact with reality. And Linda is a wonderful woman, a mentor of mine, a great Catholic.

Starting point is 00:03:24 It's been my honor to go to Mass with her, kneel next to her in Mass. She's a very, very wonderful person, human being outside of philosophy. She's been a great. all of her students will just all avow that she's such a great mentor when she was at the University of Oklahoma where she's now emeritus. She's a wonderful person. And even though epistemologically we're on in certain respects, in certain respects, opposite ends of the spectrum. She's a virtue theorist, an externalist in a sense. But I love her phraseology of cognitive contact with the world because the reality is even though an arch-internalist, arch-evidentialist like myself, is going to be categorized,

Starting point is 00:04:03 oftentimes very opposite of that. The reality is the, it's more like, I'm just more interested in the internal picture, the internal side of things. And there's no such thing as an internalist theory of knowledge. People get this wrong all the time. Can I just pause you? I'm afraid you think I know more than I know.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Because I use the word epistemology and I had that great quote about contact with reality. And I probably know some things, but I don't know a lot. And a lot of people who watch don't know a lot. So you cannot speak down to me. Okay, so like even a lot of these words. Is that a command or is that a?

Starting point is 00:04:38 I don't know. Don't you dare speak down? You're like, enough of that. Yeah. I'm tired of this already. So maybe just to frame the discussion, I'll just tell you this. When I was 16 years old, I went through a bout of solipsism without knowing what it was. And would open up my door of my bedroom quickly to see if I would catch the void.

Starting point is 00:04:58 Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I was so afraid that my friends didn't exist when they went home. for the night. And this, I don't know, maybe I just like the idea of being interesting or maybe I actually was. Well, but this is what, so I want to talk about what can we actually know. And so wherever you want to start is good with me, but we probably should start at the beginning.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Well, so that sort of experience, I think, what it says about you is that you're a person who's interested in, in the other. And it is the fact that we are, to a certain respect, trapped inside our own minds is, is horrifying to those who love connecting with other people. I'm a person who loves connecting with other people. And it is so much harder than you think it should be. It should be able to say what you think, and that should be transferred to the mind of the person.

Starting point is 00:05:46 But it's super, super hard. When I was editing my first book, Evidentialism and It's Discontents, I gathered some of the greatest epistemologists in the world. We had a very clear agenda. They're going to write these criticisms of evidentialism. and then Rich and Earl were going to write replies and, you know, typical dialectical sort of situation.

Starting point is 00:06:08 And all these guys liked each other, by the way. You know, everybody had a lot of respect. Everybody in the book had a lot of respect for everybody else in the book. So they're the super intelligent people, super respectful people, and still, as an editor, I had to keep going, that's not what he means. It's not what he's saying.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Go back and look again. Look at this passage, you know, pay attention to this sentence and these words in this sentence. You're missing what he's getting at. And I never, tried to catch the void, you know, asleep. But there, a similar situation for me was I came across early in my reading SART's statement that hell is other people. Because there are times when,

Starting point is 00:06:44 and this happened recently in, you know, downtown Nashville is, is full of, you know, just so many people. It's packed all the time. And I was up in jelly rolls rooftop bar, celebrating Valentine's day with my wife, looking at the people and just thinking, I don't know what they're thinking. It kills me that I don't know what they're thinking. It kills me that I can't ask, that I can't instantly and omnisciently know for all of them. What are you thinking about? What are you wondering about? How can I help you?

Starting point is 00:07:15 How can I, you know, correct you? How can I learn from you? The barriers of personal identity that prevent us from direct mind-to-mind contact is an existential issue for me. Is an existential issue for me. And so it is important to me to think. about how do we how do I learn from other people how do I let their knowledge or justified belief or how does how can they be guides to me to reality and how can I be guides to them to reality because that really is my my animus epistemologically

Starting point is 00:07:48 and it always has been all right it's always been social it's always been relational it's never been me and only me and and so as as my as I've built my epistemological perspective it's always built around other people and teaching them, learning from them, and adding in collectively. And probably I will spend my dying years or my latter scholarly years thinking about one thing and one thing, first and foremost, which is the concept of the communion of the saints. That is honestly the thing that I think about most now more than anything else is the doctrine of the communion of the saints. All that rises must converge. How do we work out all of the things? How do we work out all

Starting point is 00:08:32 of these differences that we have, these angers, these bitternesses, kind of great divorce kind of stuff, right? That is at my heart of hearts. If you just open up the door to my soul and look in, it is that process of the spiritual beings coming down and really trying to connect with those individuals and help them see, help them come to behold the realities of their lives, emotional, spiritual, moral, et cetera, and how that can get them oriented towards the ultimate reality. Because this is not scholarly puzzles to me. It's not fun in games. Yeah, right.

Starting point is 00:09:05 To me, it's always been very serious. All right, let's start with Descartes, just because I think we live in a Cartesian-influenced day and age where we're really skeptical of knowing anything. And whenever somebody says they know something and they're serious about what they know, we pick holes in it. So maybe just, is that okay if we start there? Sure. And show whether he's right or not. Yeah. So Descartes is a mixed bag.

Starting point is 00:09:32 He's, you know, every Tomas' favorite whipping boy, the Shiite Thomas hate Descartes, hate Descartes. I love to hate Descartes. Descartes is awesome. And one of my early mentors, Peter Markey, wrote a book called Descartes Gambit. Absolutely wonderful book. And the first thing I read by Descartes was Rules for the Direction of the Mind. And to me, I loved what Descartes was doing because he was being methodically saying, okay. In our ordinary lives, we have these practices that we just sort of inherit, sort of pick up, unthinking.

Starting point is 00:10:02 They're okay for getting us around in the medium-sized world of dry goods and keeping our gene pool alive. But we want more than that. We want a sort of cognitive contact with reality and the higher the reality, the better the contact. And it seems to be coming out of this sort of cultural milieu, right? It's after the Cartesian, not Cartesian, the Revolution. Copernican. Thank you, Copernican Revolution. It's after the Protestant Revolution.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Very positive. The old, is it fair to say, the old authorities are now in question? Yeah. And people are trying to understand. For sure. And Descartes was no doubt about it. He was post scholastic, like hardcore post-scholastic. He was a dedicated Catholic believer in all of the silly things that argue that he wasn't, they just have holes in him.

Starting point is 00:10:44 But even though he was a dedicated Catholic believer and drew a lot, drew so much from Augustine that there are times he's clearly cribbing Augustine and doesn't give Augustine credit. It's in if you just compare the Latin side by side because because Descartes wrote in French, but he also wrote in Latin and if you compare some of Descartes's Latin treatises next to Augustine's Latin, he's clearly cribbing Augustine. Absolutely no doubt about it. But he's still a post post scholastic Protestant type thinker in that he's starting over. Yeah. He's not looking to see what they said. Yes. He's not like, you know, Aquinas is always like an authority every single one. of every single article in the sumist starts with an authority, right? He's not doing that game at all. So I understand why Thomas sometimes hate that and that post-Cartisians have been, you know, kind of solipsistic. But the reality is Descartes's not on the project of trying to explain ordinary understanding, ordinary knowledge. He wants, he wanted just something, he wanted a more rarefied knowledge. So there is no, like if you look at, say, the ordinary language philosophers or even somebody like Chisholm, they're not really, those guys are interested in what.

Starting point is 00:11:53 is the or something more like what is that property that we express when we say things like yeah I know that yeah they car's not about that at all he's wanting to ground something super hardcore so I do think he's badly misunderstood by thomas especially paleotomas and I think that what we should learn from Descartes is that we do mean he's right we do start from within I'm sorry but like that's the only place we have to start is with our experiences And yes, the world is ontologically prior to our knowledge of it. But epistemology is first philosophy from a phenomenological standpoint. This is why I love the fact that Carol Whitila became our greatest pope of my lifetime and the pope that I entered the church under.

Starting point is 00:12:38 Because his love of phenomenology led me to read Husserl pretty early on. And even though I made my name as an analytic philosopher and I stand by that sort of analytic rigor and that detailed investigation, I'm actually pretty well. read in Gabriel Marcel, French Thomism, early 20th century French toomism, scholastic manuals. If you can think, if you can name a scholastic manual, I've read it hard and I've, and I've, and I've just lived by that stuff. But the reality is we are, we always start from the inside of our own experience. Yes. And, um, and, and so we have to is there a, is there a reliable bridge? Yeah. The question, right? Yeah. I mean, because we've, we've all, and this is his point, this is Descartes point is that we've all,

Starting point is 00:13:23 been wrong about things. We've all had dreams and while dreaming thought it was reality. We've all been certain about things or said we've been certain about things and then later came to decide we were wrong. So what the hell do we know anyway? Yeah. And again, Augustine is, he brings this up. He says, and this is where if you actually look at, um, uh, Roderick Chisholm's first edition of his book theory of knowledge, um, which is his magistrate, you know, most people know the second third edition. In the first edition, he spends a lot of time talking about the Stoics. And there are, and he even quotes Augustine. And one of the places, one of the passages of Augustine that Chisholm quotes is Augustine talking about the Stoics and saying that, look, you, I might be wrong that I'm eating sugar, but I can't be wrong that I'm tasting sweetly.

Starting point is 00:14:11 Right. Right. And so some of these, so you can, it's one thing to say Descartes, you know, God is off on a wrong direction. It's another thing to say, where did Descartes go wrong? So I understand that is the idea that I can't deny the indubitable experience of sweetness. I'm being appeared too sweetly, as it were. That's right. Maybe I'm eating chalk.

Starting point is 00:14:32 Yeah. But if I'm experiencing sweetness, that's, that's indubitable. That's indubitable. You can't get rid of that. Right. And so then the hardest part is to go from a set of indubitable or nearly indubitable experiences. Even there, like in hardcore philosophy of language and conceptualism and reference, you know, in your there is a thought uh this is thus or that is thus there's like what what what what actual

Starting point is 00:14:59 properties are you ostending in your mind when you have the thought that's sweet what is outstanding mean uh just a point okay latin just literally pointing and so when we point to things in our minds we i take i take this um very nice uh cappuccino by the way yeah good good good yes take tom you know and so You know, that's actually really good. Can I put on a hold here and say, I'm so super stoked to be here, man. Oh, thank you. I mean, I am fraticalized. I am a legit member of the fratical religious right.

Starting point is 00:15:30 And I am here to make Aquinas great again. Well, I'm so, I'm so honored to have you. I first came across you in your little debate on Cameron Batuzzi's channel with that atheist. Oh, gosh. What was his name? Tom Jump. Is that, yeah. I got to me, I like him.

Starting point is 00:15:45 But I've watched that conversation. about five times. And I was like, oh my gosh, you did so excellent in that. Well, then it was Aaron Raw and then it was Tyler Fiction and then it was these ortho bros and we'll get to that later on. You know, it is it's a, it's a, I found out YouTube is quite a different world and land than I thought. But, but what you're doing here is is, is, it's, it's God's work, man. I mean, this is like, it's so wonderful to see what God has blessed you with hearing that your faithfulness has paid off in, in this sort of framework. So I'm super excited about that.

Starting point is 00:16:19 And I don't want to not acknowledge that. Okay. Well, that's very kind of you. I once heard of priests say, Lord, use even my bull crap as manure for their growth. There you go. That's my continual point. There you go.

Starting point is 00:16:30 Lord, use whatever you want for your glory, even the failures and the ego and all the stupid things. Amen to that. All right. Where were we? Because I want to know if I can know anything. Well, and again, so no, right? Okay, no.

Starting point is 00:16:42 Oh, that's a big discussion. Yeah. What is knowledge? Right. So, and why do we pick that word? So you go back and you think, okay, well, why did anybody pick that word? And so we got, modern epistemology got obsessed with that word, somewhat so obsessed with that word that latter day epistemology, things like contextualism, it's really more about the word than it is the thing, right? And so my dissertation was at the fringes of formal semantics and epistemology. So my, I'm a Yumi, which means that my entire dissertation committee were graduates from University of Massachusetts. U-Mass Amherst, which is where Gettier was. And so... Did you ever meet Gettia? I didn't.

Starting point is 00:17:21 No, no, no. We went down to UMass to pay homage, but he never came into the office anymore. He was a reckless by that point. But fortunately, I grew up around the people that had studied with him, and they inculcated that sort of, you know, desire for logical acumen. Can you show us what people said knowledge was before Gettia and how Gettia disrupted that? Or is that not how you think of it? The ironic thing is.

Starting point is 00:17:43 The ironic thing is that the special kind of Gettier case already existed in Bertrand Russell. It was already there in Russell. Okay. And the reality is I don't know how widely this lore is known, but like, so Gettier published that in like 1963, right? So this is at the beginning of publisher parish. And it used to be that professors, you know, you'd write two books in your lifetime and that was it.

Starting point is 00:18:07 And anybody who published more than that was Gosh, right? That was like low, low-minded to always be throwing your thoughts out there, right? Yeah. But it's the 60s. We're moving into a new era. And the deans were like, bro, you got to publish something. You just have to. He's like, why should I publish anything?

Starting point is 00:18:22 Everybody knows, you know, like, he's, he knew Gettier. He was great. You know, he had a great reputation. But he had to, he's like, a fine, I'll write something. And he writes this tiny little paper. He gets like 10,000 citations. And then it's like, there.

Starting point is 00:18:33 Is that good enough for you? You know? So he didn't care about this at all. Gettier didn't do epistemology. Getter did metaphysics and philosophy of language. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:18:40 So for those who are like, don't even know who Gettier is, don't even know what the philosophical definition of knowledge is. Catch us up. So, so there are all these people who look back to a certain paper in 1963 called just what is knowledge. And the idea was that it appeared to be, there was this concept that Plato talks about in the meno, in several other places. And of course, in Greek it's epistame, right? And it's translated knowledge in most cases. And Socrates is always talking about how, you know, there's a difference between beliefs that are, that get up and walk around and beliefs that stay put. And so he's talking about what is this fixating property that makes certain beliefs stay put? And he's talking really about cognitive contact with reality. And so, so Gator says, okay, well, that's kind of interesting, you know, like it seems like knowledge is justified true belief. and that gets cases right for the most case,

Starting point is 00:19:46 but then for the most part, but then he's like, but here's these other cases where you have justified true belief, but it doesn't seem like it's knowledge. And so those are now called getier cases. Can I slow things down a bit? You're at a much higher level than I am.

Starting point is 00:20:00 I vibrated a very high frequency. For those at home. So why can't knowledge just be belief? It's like, well, you believe something and it be false. Yeah. Okay. So then why can't it be true belief?

Starting point is 00:20:11 Well, because that could be a guess. Yeah. It's raining in Tokyo. Right. So you look at these, this is kind of like Mills method. You isolate an individual property and you vary it and you see. Okay. So, um, so, so I would say, um, you know, I look, I look over the bookshelf and I look

Starting point is 00:20:31 away and I think, um, I think most of the books on that shelf are blue. Hmm. Okay. Is that right? Yeah. Is it? It's got a plurality. It's close to being a 50%.

Starting point is 00:20:41 percent blue, I'd say. Right. Yeah. You know, but if I, you know, even if I formed that belief, it would be a very weak belief. Yeah. Right. And so if you said, um, uh, is that something you know, do you know that? I would be like, no way. No way do I know that. I believe it. Yeah. You know, but because it kind of, I got that, I got a decent look and. So real quick, what's belief mean then? So just, just, just, you're allowed to be a little glib here. Like, right. I will give me a basic working definition of belief. Right. So I actually like a phrase from a Quine is called to think with ascent. Okay.

Starting point is 00:21:14 And so you can, so let's, let's, let's start, let's let's let's start, let's let's let's start with the conceptual unit of a proposition. And a proposition is just, let's call it maybe an item of information, like that we are on set. Okay. Now, that proposition can be the content of lots of different types of mental states. Okay. So I can host that proposition in. the optative mood. I hope we're on set. Because if not, you've got a really weird looking

Starting point is 00:21:46 house. This is creepy, man. You've got cameras and microphones everywhere, right? I hope we're on set, right? So that's hosting the proposition that we're on set in the optative mood, okay? I can also host propositions in a, in a, you know, cupidic mood. You know, like I desire that this be cappuccino. Okay. This is a proposition. This is cappuccino. And I, have the propositional attitude towards that proposition that I desire. I desire that it be cappuccino. I also happen to hope that it's cappuccino. And so, so there's a proposition, and then it's a propositional attitude. Propositional attitudes are mental states that intentional beings, beings with thoughts have towards propositions. Okay. I can also fear that I'm on set,

Starting point is 00:22:36 right? I can host a proposition that I'm on set in a sort of timidic way. Right. Then there's this sort of assertive mode in which I can host a proposition where I believe that were onset. There I'm hosting the proposition that were onset in a way that is affirmative of that proposition. It's something that I am, uh, acceptance is fine. I'm accepting it into my map of the world. So what makes a belief a belief, I think is it's semantic content that it represents the world as being a certain way. When I hope that this is cappuccino, I'm not representing the world as a certain way. I'm yearning for it to be a certain way. When I desire that this be Cabuccino, I'm not representing the reality being that way. I'm stating what I would like reality to be like for my desires to be satisfied. But there's this other way of hosting a proposition of accepting it into this special belief box, which is my map of the world. This is the way I'm representing the world to be.

Starting point is 00:23:40 And certain parts of that map, I'm highly confident in because I've worked that ground a lot. And other parts are kind of sketchy, just like, you know, maps are when you're making maps. And so I think the fundamental notion of a belief really is, is this certain sort of repositional, propositional attitude where I am actually taking that proposition as representing the way the world really is mind independent from me. And so I think that's the main notion of a belief, roughly speaking. You cannot say you know something and not be. believe it. So if you ever know something, you also believe it, but can you believe something and not know it? And what's the distinction? Yeah, because like I said, I used to do this all the time in class in intro to epistemology and even my intro to philosophy class. I'd say write down

Starting point is 00:24:23 12 things you believe. Okay. And they would inevitably start with my name is this or I'm in class, but then they'd have to get a little more ponderous, get, you know, um, uh, do it with me. The year, okay. I was born in Sydney. Okay. All right. Yeah, I believe. that. Okay. I believe my wife is not a Russian spy. Okay. Keep going. I believe that the earth is spherical. I believe that we're currently sitting in Nashville. Okay. So let's compare the earth is spherical to, um, your wife is not a Russian spy to, um, what was the very first one? I was born in Sydney. Born in Sydney. Yeah. I mean, like, what's your? And I have, I would say I have different, um, levels of confidence in. Yeah, right. Because if I tell you to, so this is what I would do in class.

Starting point is 00:25:08 I'd say, okay, they would, tell me when you're done. Okay, everybody's done listing their 12 beliefs. I say, okay, now rank them. And I wouldn't even explain. That's good. Wouldn't come in, what? No, no, just rank them. Just rank them.

Starting point is 00:25:19 And so they'd rank them. And everybody would, without even being told what to do, they would, they knew exactly what I was talking about. They would rank them from strongest belief to weakest belief, from firmest ascent to weakest assent, okay? And, and Aquinas even talks about this. There's actually a surprising amount that Aquinas talks about in terms of degrees of assent. And then Jacques Maritaine goes on and writes a book called The Degrees of Ascent,

Starting point is 00:25:44 sort of drawing out some of what Iniquinus is sketchy and implicit and makes it more explicit. What's clear is anybody can perform this exercise. Nobody in the natural... Now, you do a bunch of philosophers already on their guard because they've got their, you know, publication agendas. But you do this amongst O'Hoy-Polloy-Polloy. They don't have a problem with. They know exactly what you're talking about. Everybody can rank their beliefs from strongest to weakest. And I say, no, what separates all these things? What did you use? Because notice, and I would get two or three lists, bring them up, write them on the board, compare them. Remarkable similarities. Everybody starts with what is closest to them experientially, let's say, and then moves out to

Starting point is 00:26:18 what is farthest from them experientially. I'm like, well, you guys all seem to be on the same project here. What is it you're keying onto? What is it you're using as a metric to do this ranking? And of course, they're like, oh, God, this guy is killing me, right? So get a lot of that. But I just, you know, I said, just because my ideas on the world, what do we rank? And of course, they end up describing the concept really of evidence and of weight of experience and we get a testimony. Because like there's no question about like the born in Sydney thing, right? I mean you're. I don't remember that at all.

Starting point is 00:26:49 You don't remember that very well at all. Do you have how firm of a, when you think, do you know where your birth certificate is? Yes. When was the last time you looked at it? Ah, maybe a year ago. Maybe a year ago. Yeah, I don't even know that. Well, I say it is.

Starting point is 00:27:04 I mean, even then like, maybe. you could be projecting. You could have been told that or maybe that was the name of the hospital. Technically it was outside of the city limits. I think I've got multiple strands of reasons to think I lived in Sid, was born in Sydney. And there you are multiple strands of reasons, right? And what, and this is so awesome. This is so awesome.

Starting point is 00:27:22 So one of the things that that I've tried to do is try to reduce the notion of evidence to the notion of a reason and derive sort of probabilistic structure out of that. So the fundamental axiom of probability theory is addativity. There's all sorts of functions that are additive. It only be, an additive function becomes a probability function when you bound it by one and zero, which you don't even technically have to do. We're in that later. But, and then, and then you get degrees, right? Okay. And that they add in a certain sort of way.

Starting point is 00:27:52 So if you say I have, okay, I've got a pretty good memory of my, of my birth certificate. Okay, there's our reason. And then I've- My parents told me. My parents told me there's another reason. And then let's say those reasons are approximately equivalent. Well, they add perfectly. Now you've got twice the, you have two units of reasons.

Starting point is 00:28:15 Yep. I was told for that proposition. For that proposition. For that church. There you go. See that church and noticed it was close to ride hospital in Sydney where I was born. There you go. So, okay.

Starting point is 00:28:25 So maybe that's roughly a half a unit of reason compared to these other two. You actually, you can derive a probabilistic structure out of that. And thanks to the amazing work. of James Franklin, an Australian philosopher and historian of probability theory, he really dug down into pre-Pascallian exemplars of probabilistic reasoning. I love that sentence, but I don't know what it means. This is so great. So Aquinas is writing to a novice who is really kind of freaking out because he's lost a couple of

Starting point is 00:29:04 patrons. Do you have a Patreon? Used to. Okay. So you know. Daily Wire Plus. There you. But, you know, I know people that rely heavily on their income for Patreon.

Starting point is 00:29:18 And when people, you know, they get nervous about it. Well, that's been going on for, you know, well over a thousand years. And so this novice has written St. Thomas saying, oh, man, Thomas, I'm lost like three patrons this month. I'm a little worried. And Thomas says, don't worry about it, man. He's like, some fall, some ad. It all evens out in the end.

Starting point is 00:29:39 He's like, he's literally like basically saying it's the law of averages, you know. It's like the probably you're just going to go up, you're going to go down, but there's going to be a central point that remains approximately the same. And then you go back and you look at the legal theory of testimony, okay, in the early Middle Ages that they partly took over from, from, from the Roman system. So in court, the testimony of a bishop is worth four parish priests.

Starting point is 00:30:14 And the testimony of a parish priest is worth four peasants or two lords. Okay? Now, this is like, the math is trivially easy to start building a probability theory out of that because it's just ratios, right? And so we understand the notion of a weight of reason. We understand the notion of,

Starting point is 00:30:33 weighing reasons. And out of that, you can get this idea of, well, how many, how, what is the weight of reasons that I have? And in particular, for proposition or it's negation, which one has the better weight of reason behind it and to what degree? Because if you've got a ratio of, if you got, well, I've got four, if it's a four to two ratio, okay, well, then I should be 67, that's 67% probable, right? That's a sort of artificial precision, but my point is simple common sense notions of the weight of a reason tracks standard Kamal-Garoff probability theory. And so when formal epistemologists like me are doing this fancy-spancy probabilistic epistemology, all we're doing is regimenting something that is actually not only common sense that every one of my freshman students could figure out without being tutored, it also goes back and sort of helps explains and is a rational reconstruction. of what's going on in early, you know, legal theory of testimony and evidence right there. So that's a lot. But my main point there is that this stuff is common sense.

Starting point is 00:31:38 Yeah. And that when what happened in the post-Gadrier world was people sort of left behind the world of common sense. Nobody's looking back to see how many bishops testimony weighed against a peasant, you know, because you could do the math. Like one bishops worth like 12 peasants. Yeah. They're asking a very different kind of question. and it's influenced by this British School of Thought called Ordinary Language Philosophy

Starting point is 00:32:04 where they think you just sit back and think about the words. I did an interview with Richard Swinburne where he talked about, where I talked a lot about his education, his early education. And he talks about how in those days, you didn't question ordinary language philosophy. I mean, that was just, that was what it was. And so they didn't care about historical precedent.

Starting point is 00:32:22 They didn't care about any of the stuff. They're just like, okay, well, let's look at this word and let's look at these examples. and then let's come up with counter examples, and let's try to, you know, and then, and then, and then you end up with something completely opposite of ordinary language philosophy, where, so it sort of starts in that mode, where you're like, what is knowledge? Let me think about how the word is used, but then you end up with all these epicycles, you couldn't be farther from ordinary language or common sense. So I love coffee. I love it too much, and we have tried a lot of different

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Starting point is 00:34:42 And it's great that they exist and they're doing amazing things, helping people grow closer to the Lord throughout the Lenton season. But what are we supposed to do for the 50 days of the Easter season? Anything? Well, like the women disciples of Matthew 28, we're called to announce the joyful news of the Lord's resurrection and to accompany others on their journey with the risen Lord. Easter, I mean, a lot of it, obviously, Lent is very important, but sometimes we focus so much on it that when Easter comes, we kind of forget just how important this season is. So this Easter season, how do you walk alongside others? Confident that together you are drawing closer to our risen Lord. St. Paul's Center, invite. you to join Father Bonifus Hicks, the Mercedarean Sisters and their world-renowned theologians for a unique Easter challenge. Over these 50 days, you'll learn the art of spiritual accompaniment from Father Bonavus Hicks, renowned author and spiritual director. You'll discover the biblical foundations of spiritual accompaniment with the St. Paul's Centa's Theological and

Starting point is 00:35:41 biblical experts, and you'll witness the transformative power of spiritual companionship through the testimony of the Mercadarian Sisters. This challenge combines practical insight theological expertise and first-hand experience. The fact is our faith is never truly understood until it is shared. Share your faith with others this Easter season by joining the Easter accompaniment challenge. Join the challenge by visiting St. Paulscentre.com and becoming a member today. Feel free to take a cigar if you want one. I don't know if you do. I will not say One thing I'd like to get to is this. We seem to treat religious beliefs differently to other beliefs.

Starting point is 00:36:22 And we tend to expect our religious beliefs to be impenetrable and indubitable in a way that we don't expect for other beliefs. And I think that's partly what makes us nervous when we ask, well, do I know? I remember once hearing a preacher say, yeah, but do you know that you know? And I thought, well, bloody hell, I don't know. I mean, if you ask me, if you, you know, you could press me right now on whether I know my wife's a Russian spy. 12 questions in, I'm like, look, I don't know, but I know. And so what do I mean by the word? I mean, I've got reasons to think it's true and I accept it as true.

Starting point is 00:36:57 And I don't need some inhuman standard of knowledge before I accept it as such. Hang on, let me just ask you this, though. Do you understand what I mean about the anxiety, the Christian feeling? Absolutely. And how unfair it is when the atheist presses him, which is why I think modern atheists try to escape the burden of proof, though they certainly have one, when they press you. But in other words, they could have pressed me on whether I'm currently in Nashville. And at some point, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:37:27 Fine. I don't know. I'm not 100% sure I'm in Nashville. As you ratchet up the standards, your confidence that you know goes down. So much so and so reliably that this group of epistemologists or philosophers of language called contextualists literally think that the word quote knowledge expresses a different property depending upon what standards are in play in that conversation that's how that's how loop the loop they go based on that correlation did that ever bother you because by the way I think anyone who

Starting point is 00:37:57 holds any belief including the atheist the same thing could be done to them I mean they could get pressed in not knowing but I guess I'm asking more of a psychological or sort of a pastoral or personal question. Like, have you gone through a stage maybe before you studied epistemology where you were like, I guess I don't know how sure I am? No, I didn't. And part of the reason is I have just been an inveterate probabilist by nature my whole life. I love it. Explain what a probabilist is for those a time. It never, this binary notion of no or don't know never appealed to me was never part of my experience, was never anything that I was tempted. I was never tempted to think in that sort of binary way. It's kind of like, so I grew up in a really weird milieu, okay? So I was born in 1971,

Starting point is 00:38:48 just a little bit before the end of the Vietnam War, okay? And so in my world, there was still, my young world, there were still a lot of hippies around. But my dad was, you know, from the country, from redneck land. My dad's very intelligent businessman, successful, but he came out of what is undeniably a red, duck dynasty, like I am not kidding you. That is my family. My grandfather was the first living inductee

Starting point is 00:39:15 into the Waterfowler Hall of Fame. And I am a junior champion duck caller. Come on. I'm not kidding. Dude, if you got a duck collar around here, I will mallard highball you into oblivion. I promise.

Starting point is 00:39:26 I accept it as true. And so, um, so my mom's, but this idea of probable, probillot being a probable, probillus. Have you already started the scotch?

Starting point is 00:39:37 Not yet. Wait. This idea of being a... What's going to happen after the scotch, Matt? The probabilist, this is really good. This idea of not viewing things in a binary way. Explain that to people. Well, like, say, do you know?

Starting point is 00:39:49 Like, I don't know, but I have excellent reasons to believe it. Where would it possibly make a difference if I have this thing that you know? And notice how when you stress it. Yeah. So you say, think of how differently we use, we in tone, no, right? You say... Do you know you're in Nashville? Hey, yeah, did you know that...

Starting point is 00:40:07 So he comes, they know, I love jelly roll. Okay. Like, Jason, we are. We are. I don't know anything about him, but good on you. Yeah. I don't know if you can pull this off, but like, he's the sort of person that a lot of Christians need to be talking to right now. All right.

Starting point is 00:40:22 He's recently really either become a Christian or become very serious in a different way. He's got a lot of pressure on him because he's a very, very big star. And there's sort of a battle for him who's going to claim him and what kind of Christian he is. He's in a very, very, very. hard position right now. God bless him. But he's really got his life together and um he's a musician. He's a musician. Rapper or something? I don't know. He used to rap. Now he's country music. He's one of the biggest country music people in the world now. He was just, probably know who it is. You probably know. We're in Nashville. I don't know if you look outside. If you just like, fly, yeah, that's right. You just fly into the

Starting point is 00:40:55 daily wire bunker and fly out. Try hitting downtown, man. There's actually underground tunnels that, no, but this is a good question because you say, do you know you're in Nashville? Right. That's my point. Yeah. You intone it and then everyone. And you change the nature. of the conversation. Talk about why that's an unfair way of phrasing it, or the intonation is unfair. Because you don't, you don't. So David Lewis, who's widely considered one of the very best philosophers of the 20th century, had this great paper called scorekeeping in a language game. Okay, scorekeeping in a language game. Vicenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, very important early 20th century founder of analytic, or important influence on early 20th century analytic philosophy,

Starting point is 00:41:33 had this big idea that language operated like a game. Okay? Lots to go into there. But let's just get the intuitive notion there. When you issue that term with a different intonation, without saying it explicitly, it seems like you've changed the rules. Yes. Right?

Starting point is 00:41:55 And then I think, well, I feel like something's just changed. Yeah. If you say, hey, did you know jelly roll has a place downtown in Nashville? I go, yeah, I know. Okay. I know. Super casual. And what would it take for me to answer in the affirmative to? Yeah, I know. I saw a TikTok real, right? Super easy to like to say, that'll do. Yeah, exactly. That'll do. I know. But then when somebody says, do you know you're in Nashville, we're not playing the same game anymore. Right? The game has changed. Now, there's ways in which that's good and there's ways in which that bad. So the Socratic project, you know, Socrates was an agitator. And Socrates was interested in digging deeper. And so he would say, and this is actually going to trace us right back to the internally, internal theory of evidence, by the way. It's a perfect rabbit hole that just circles back on itself.

Starting point is 00:42:43 When you say, well, how do you know that? Well, how do you know that? Well, how do you know that? Well, how do you know that? As you keep answering that quote, you can say, screw your philosopher, drink this Himlock, go away, die, I hate you, which is kind of how they did. It's what they did. And it feels like that, man, being a philosopher in ordinary society.

Starting point is 00:42:59 Because, I mean, I can't tell you how often, you know, people often say to me, why are you grilling me? Yeah. And I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm so interested in your thoughts. You know, I'm so interested in your thoughts. Why are you grilling me?

Starting point is 00:43:12 Why do you got to, everything I say, you got to, I'm like, point out what's everything is wrong. No, no, no, I'm just trying to learn. I'm trying to figure this out, right? So the Socratic spirit, you know, is strong in this one. All the, from the moment I read the primary Socratic dialogues played Apology, Cretto and Fido, I was hooked. I mean, absolutely hooked.

Starting point is 00:43:29 Because I love that digging, digging, digging, digging, digging, digging, that makes you deeply unpopular. Yeah. And if you poke in power structures, then you become really deeply unpopular, right? And endangered in certain ways. You poke at power structures and you question them. They are threatened and they feel that sense of danger. And then they want to contain you or eliminate you or remove you, cancel you,

Starting point is 00:43:52 whatever you want to call it. They want you out of the picture not asking questions, right? So So Socrates says, is the most Monday. So my wife and I are really big burders. and also really big into flowers. And my wife can identify trees, birds, flowers really well, way better than I can. Lovely.

Starting point is 00:44:09 And the older you get math, the more you suddenly find yourself pointing out an indigo bunting to your partner. So maybe one of my favorite birds is a goldfinch. It's the bird that I miss the most in Texas is the goldfish. Now, we've substituted that we have painted buntings, which are absolutely amazing. And I got to see those when I moved to Texas.

Starting point is 00:44:31 Texas has got great bird. but I really miss the goldfinches that I had in New York when I was doing my PhD. And sometimes, but they do migrate through occasionally. And I say, oh, that's a goldfinch. Yeah, I think that's a goldfinch. And then you say, well, how do you know that? Somebody might even say, are you sure? Like, yeah, I'm totally sure.

Starting point is 00:44:50 Well, what makes you sure? Well, I start describing what goldfinch looks like. Key characteristics, that. Well, how do you know that? And I say, well, because it's the pattern. that I, I, I, I, I, goes back to mental states because I'm hosting a conscious mental state that represents that thing as having this pattern of yellow on its body, you know, well, how do you know that? How do I know I'm hosting that mental state? You know, I'm directly acquainted

Starting point is 00:45:19 with it. There is, you know, it's almost like, the game is changing. The game is changing. Which means that, but, but because the game changes, I'm not undermining that knowledge. what I'm doing is I'm not taking my ball and going home, in other words. I'm not undermining that knowledge in a skeptical sort of way. Rather, I'm asking a different sort of question. What are the foundations, the absolute utter foundations of my belief to that? And no matter what belief you start with, it comes back to the same thing, comes back to experiences. Okay.

Starting point is 00:45:52 It comes back to experiences, whether they're simple, vivid sense impressions, where you're hosting what are called phenomenal qualia of redness, roundness, you know certain dimensionality type properties or even think about think about things like um no um no part can be greater than the whole of which it is a part well that's like how do you know that yeah well i can't prove it yeah it's just it's conceptual truth you see it or you don't right you see it or you don't okay well what's that there's just something it's like to see it when i think about the transit of property, if A is equal to B and B is equal to C, then A is equal to C. When I think about the transit of property, I can't not see it as true. I can't not see it as true. I'm stuck with it. And so that becomes a part of my foundation because I'm stuck with it, right? And so justification is

Starting point is 00:46:46 partly about what more can you do. Right. Right. Yes. And then you get into holistic justification, things like that. There's a lot of the story left to tell. But the reality is if we aren't going to crucify Socrates, then we have to be the Socrates and say, well, how do I, what's that based on? What's that based on? What's that based on? What's that based on? You got no air skill, but experience. Your innermost experiences. That's the only thing you have to work with as fundamental atomic building blocks of our intellectual lives. Some people are threatened by that. That's the bedrock. Yeah. It had, there has to be bedrock. Because if you, if you had, I know you know this, but for those at home, if you had to have a reason for believing everything you

Starting point is 00:47:28 believed, you would never believe anything because you would have an infinite regress of reasons so you'd have no stop. Yeah, and there are people like that are, you know, that infinitism is a thing, very creative, but like, you know, it's a philosopher's toy, really. And, and then like said, there's holistic theories of justification. Open to all of those things, but they're all overlays on top of our fundamental bedrock experience. Yeah. And I love how many pre- precursors there are to these great insights prior to the rise of analytic philosophy. So do you remember the real name for Lewis Carroll? Remember Lewis Carroll's real name? The Reverend Charles Dodgson. Okay. In Cambridge, I went to his little candy shop that was based in Allison

Starting point is 00:48:17 Wernel was based on. And so Charles Dodgson was actually a, basically a math teacher and a logician. And he wrote volumes and volumes on foundations of logic. And he published an article in the journal Mind, I believe it was, which is to this day, or at least until very recently, a major, major journal of philosophy, analytic philosophy in the 60s, 70s, probably into the 90s. And it was called on what the tortoise said to Achilles or vice versa. Okay. And he sort of does a Zeno's paradox of logical reasoning. So, do you remember what the rule of modus ponens is? Yes.

Starting point is 00:48:57 If p then Q, P therefore Q, in most axiomatic logical systems, that's the fundamental axiom in a lot of systems. Yep. And so, well, how, how, how, what grounds that? Like, I think, okay, well, if I know one thing, if I'm reasoning, if P then Q, yeah, P, therefore Q. Right. That's pretty rock bottom. But why accept that?

Starting point is 00:49:20 Yeah. Why accept that? Yeah. How do you know that's truth? preserving. Because I can't see how it could be other words. You can't see it. Some people are like, well, oh, here's how we know. There's a thing called a corresponding conditional where we form a conjunction of the premises. And then the conclusion is the consequent of the conditional, which is the antecedent is the conjunction of premises. And we do the thing called a truth

Starting point is 00:49:40 table where we assign every possible out, every possible valuation of truth and falsehood to the premises. And then it's like putting nature on the rack, but putting truth on the rack. In a way, I like that. That's pretty good. Right. But in a truth table for, for an axiom, in every outcome it comes out true. You cannot assign true and false values to the atomic elements in such a way that the overall proposition doesn't come out as true. And she goes, there you go. There's your grounding.

Starting point is 00:50:08 And then Carol's like, okay, so what you're saying is, if the corresponding conditional is true in all cases, then modus ponens is valid. Its corresponding conditional is true in all cases. Therefore, oh, I just use modus ponens, right? You cannot escape this, man. You cannot escape it. The rock bottom epistemologically is that which is obvious to us, that which we cannot see as other than true. And so this is what, in fact, the term evidence, you know, is really the early employments of that term evidence were different.

Starting point is 00:50:45 It was like evidentness. Okay. Evidence was a property of like a proposition. It had evidentness to you. Uh-huh. You couldn't see it as not evident. It shone its light of truth to you, right? Kind of reveals itself.

Starting point is 00:50:58 It revealed itself to you, absolutely. And so, and this is where you get back to types of, you know, epistemological writings before and outside of the analytic tradition, like Michael Polanya's personal knowledge. I don't know if you know who Michael Polani is, but you're going to love him. He was a, I believe, Hungarian-born physical chemist who escaped the Eastern Bloc under Nazism, moved to Great Britain and was also a full. philosopher. He was such a good physical chemist. His son ended up winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And I believe, I think he's still alive in his late 90s. But this guy, Michael Polangi will blow your mind. Amazing, amazing, amazing fun figure. And then Jacques Maritaine, a wonderful figure, early French tomist and his wife, Raisha. If you wanted something really interesting, if you want to study cool foundations of early 20th century tomism, look at the conversion of Jacques Maritaine and his wife Raisha, who were both geniuses and both wrote poetry. She was primarily poetry.

Starting point is 00:51:52 in art, he had this idea of co-natural knowledge. And these are intuitive modes of knowledge. And sometimes analytic philosophers hate this sort of talk, but the reality is, this is personalism. This is why, you know, even though I'm an analytic philosopher, sort of my core view is personalism. Like, why am I an internalist? Yep.

Starting point is 00:52:13 It's really part of a bigger hole called personalism, where we start with persons. Our conceptual unit is the person. And of course, God is a person. And so it's no surprise to me that Descartes bridge, as you put it earlier, from our internal experiences to the external world is, in fact, God himself. Yeah. And God's character. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:36 Note that. And that we, and that his reasoning to God comes a priori. It doesn't come from experience itself, but it does come from that which is evident to him. And so for, and then Linda Zegzevsky, cognitive contact. with the world. Got this amazing concept called Omni Subjectivity. I published an article on this, I think it was in a volume on pain edited by Eleanor Stump. I can't remember. But Linda Zexebsky's work on Omni Subjectivity is amazing. It's about God having God's ability to have our experiences, even from the first person perspective. What? Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:53:16 man. It's a mind-blowing concept. Do you accept that? Concept. I don't want to go down in a rival I criticize it. I criticize it in this article. No, I can't imagine God knowing what it's like to sin. I can think God would know what it's like for me. That's right. And that's the first objection everybody comes across. I do, in fact, try to detail that objection.

Starting point is 00:53:35 I wish I could remember where I published this, but most scholars when they... If you remember, text me. I'll put it in the... I will, yeah. Because mostly just to point back to her work. I mean, all I do is I'm trying to like... With a case with Linda, I am a, you know, dwarf standing on... on her,

Starting point is 00:53:50 you know, she's the giant on the dwarf and I do work really hard in that article to tease out some finer points, but she's great

Starting point is 00:53:59 at bringing forth these big concepts and you're just like, whoa, yeah, I need to think about that. I don't want to interrupt you. Were you wrapping that up or did you have somewhere

Starting point is 00:54:08 you wanted to go with that? Because I, I'm just, this is not. Go for it. Go for it. Otherwise, I'll just, I'll go all there.

Starting point is 00:54:14 Yeah, so I think of, um, to use three, to use Plato's cave, right? So you think, okay, here we are within ignorance and we know that we get things wrong and we wish that we could have access to things in the way that they actually are and know them as such. And I think of Descartes trying to sort of get out of this cave by building a ladder, right? And so you start with

Starting point is 00:54:34 the cogito. That's the first plank, perhaps, you know. And then maybe you have his second, which might be his argument for God's existence, which I'm not sure is very good. And so suppose you believe it holds true. And so the rung holds. Maybe you can make your way out of the cave. I think Descartes thought you could. But what's bananas, right, is within how many years do you have Hume and Nietzsche and others denying even that first rung of the ladder? And so we've just, we're plunged back into darkness. And that's why for me, it seems, and I don't know what your view on this is, but like phenomenal conservatism just seems like the most obvious, I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding a Cartesian epistemology, but if you, and maybe I'm misunderstanding

Starting point is 00:55:15 Descartes, but I think if you take that, the strictness of Cartesian, epistemology is the way to kind of access the world and know the world. You can, I don't think you can do it. But I think phenomenal conservatism is the more modest approach. And it's the way we approach absolutely everything else in life. It's just how we do it. Right. And so when you start approaching Christianity with phenomenal conservatism, instead of Cartesian

Starting point is 00:55:35 epistemology, I think you just take a sigh of relief. Yeah. And I don't, I don't deny that at all. I do want to protect the historical Descartes because, as I said before, I don't think he's, I don't think that was his project. I think his was more, I think he was just doing something different. He wasn't saying everybody needs to do this all the time. He was just on an exploration of,

Starting point is 00:55:54 what if I do want to ground everything? What is the absolute rock bottom that everything can be built on? But I don't think he expects, you know, my grandma to go through the cogito and necessary existence and all of that. And then from that to God wouldn't let me be systematically deceived to. I'm not systematically deceived to, you know. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:15 Rather, it's more something, it's actually more like what John Locke, John Loxson more like an inference to the best explanation from our experiences. And that the principles of inference are them, like you said, those are things we can know opera or those are things that we can't see as not true. Those are things that are natural to us, preferring explanations that have certain properties

Starting point is 00:56:37 or certain patterns. And as a result, we see the world as other than us. It's not like, there isn't otherness built into our experience, in other words. This is like, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is Pellonia and Maritaine and there's an otherness. I don't perceive you as just an image in my, on my screen. I truly perceive you as other, as an, as an existent individual. I see you as that. And you don't, you want to talk about something hard to defend with discursive reason

Starting point is 00:57:10 that you're another mind. A hundred percent. Very, very, very, very hard. Yeah, I can't prove that you are a person. And that's why. Plannig's first book was God and Other Minds. Yeah. It was because his, and, you know, Al's been a great mentor and friend to me, my whole life. We were also opposites in a lot of ways, but not really. Once you get behind the sort of shallow understanding of their views, a lot of these people are on a lot closer common track than you think.

Starting point is 00:57:37 But what Al was, his fundamental point in God and Other Minds was, look, we believe quite rationally that you're another mind and you believe quite rationally that I'm another mind. And we don't do that through discursive reasoning. I have no immediate access to right, not at all. And if you try to lay out the premises, it could be a good philosophical argument, right? You could say, okay, I can, it's a valid argument. That's never why anybody has never, ever, ever. And of course, if you crack my head open and see my brain, you still haven't proven my subjectivity. Not a thing, right. And so there is something about this seeing as that is that never got the attention with an analytic philosophy. That,

Starting point is 00:58:18 it really should. Seeing as. It's built into my experience of you that you are another mind. It's not like some extra thing. It's not like there's the visual coordinates plus this added belief. It is instinctive and automatic. And in the way that our, you know, reasoning is this way. But wouldn't that be the case if I were a cyborg? Wouldn't you see me as a person? Sure. If I was a very sophisticated one? Sure. Yeah. But then the question is, what's the argument? Right. And so to, to, to, from the tradition that I come from through through the chisel line, um, we treat, um, and I'm, I was born and raised in Missouri, the show me state. And back when every graduate program was starting their first blog, um, ours at Missouri was called, um, show me the evidence or something like that or show me the argument. Show me the argument. And like, okay, if you have, if you think that the, that the brain and the bat thing or the, or the, the, um, curve-fitting problem? If you think that leads to skepticism, sure, give me the argument. I'll evaluate

Starting point is 00:59:22 that argument. It always has a bad premise. There's always a bad premise in the skeptical argument. It's not like skepticism. Some people act like it's this like you wave the magic one. Ah, but wouldn't you also think that? And like, yeah, so what's the argument? Give me, that's one premise. What are the, what are the, you know, this is a, this is an enthamine. What do they make the other premises explicit? Just because something is possible doesn't make it probable. No, right. Yeah. Can I give you an analogy? Just really quick. This is so fundamental.

Starting point is 00:59:50 So when you're taking an enthamee, an argument from one premise to one conclusion with the rest of it submitted, suppressed. Okay. The heuristic is, well, first put it in a conditional and see what it sounds like. Yeah. Okay. What would be the most, what would be the simplest connecting premise necessary to get from that premise to the conclusion? It would be this. Knowledge entails that it could not be otherwise.

Starting point is 01:00:14 Why think that? Yeah. When you go, well, couldn't you have been deceived? Yeah. Why would that go to and therefore you don't know without the connecting premise, knowledge is incorrigible or knowledge, you know, why think that? Why think that? Forget that. If you can't convince me of that, then is that just because philosophers have been playing with knowledge as a word instead of a reality for too long?

Starting point is 01:00:35 Yeah. I think there's, I think it's been, it got to be its own little game. This episode is sponsored by Catholic Match. You know, our culture tells us that dating apps. the way to go. But they're mostly about superficial connections and endless swiping, where half the people don't even know what they truly believe or what they're actually looking for. But if you're a Catholic, you understand that marriage is a calling to something deeper. It's a sacred vocation, not just another relationship. And that's why there's Catholic Match, which is the world's largest

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Starting point is 01:03:14 at checkout. Here's the analogy. Suppose a fella takes a lady out on a date and he's been hurt before and he will bloody not be. That's a little heteronormative of you, man. And he will not be hurt again, right? Yeah. So he sits in front of her and they start a discussion and everything she says he doubts. Yeah. He'll never marry that woman. He'll never have communion with that woman. Now she might be lying to him, but even if he doesn't have any good reason, he chooses to be suspicious toward her. And to me, I feel like that's what, okay, I know we want to protect historical Descartes, but let's say an admirer of Descartes who gets Descartes wrong. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:49 Use the world. The world presents itself to me. And I will not be hurt. I've believed things before and I've been wrong and I will not be let down again. Therefore, if I'm skeptical about everything, I won't be let down. But then I can't have confusing with reality. Does that analogy work? It does work. Okay. I can't remember if I said this or I'm quoting somebody. Surely I'm quoting somebody. But I've said for a long time that skepticism is a failure of nerve. Okay. Skepticism is a failure of nerve. It's like, agnosticism too maybe yeah well that's that's a different thing i got i got worse things to say about that okay so the failure of the testicles okay yeah all right a failure do you want to drink by the way

Starting point is 01:04:24 i would not i mean i've got i've had a cigar now without a glass of scotch for a while so both have a d pill it's time i'm not sure how this mine is severe i have pretty wild do you want um a lagovullen a uh that's scotch you had me at lago yeah right yeah so so when i say that skeptic is a failure of nerve, it's, it means that you, you, you get scared before you push through, right? It comes, it comes out of fear. And so you sort of give up too, too easily and you don't go on, you know, you just, you just throw, you, you give out the baby with the bathwater. Yeah. You sort of throw up your hands and that sort of thing. Whereas the, the, the, the bold way of going is,

Starting point is 01:05:07 okay, well, let's just look at what we have and let's think about how what we've, how our, common sense judgments could be related to that sort of starting point. And it's more like a reflective equilibrium. And it may require the revision of some of our common sense notions. That's fine. So what? Yeah. That's fine.

Starting point is 01:05:26 There's no guarantee that our common sense notions are going to be either our folk epistemology or our folk psychology or our folk physics are going to be preserved in toto at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah. Cheers, mate. I've heard you say, quoting Hume, and I think this is good, and maybe I misunderstood you, but the wise

Starting point is 01:05:46 man proportions his beliefs to the strength of the evidence, and that's all we have. That's right, yeah. That'll do. Yeah. Why do you want more? Why would you ever want more? It's almost, it's like the opposite. It's actually unreasonable to think you ever should have more.

Starting point is 01:06:01 Yeah, well, Locke says, because it's called Hume's dictum, but Locke actually said it first, because remember the, the rationalists are Descartes Spinoza-Libniz, and then the empiricists are Locke, Barclay, Hume. Okay? And they sort of overlap just a little bit. And so, so Hume's dictum is the most, you know, pithy, that the wise man proportions

Starting point is 01:06:27 is believed to the strength of the evidence. But Locke said earlier than that, that to believe something in excess of the evidence that you have is the same as believing it for no evidence at all. And that's actually really good, because think of the gap. So I've got this much evidence, and I believe it to this much. Yep. Well, this much of my credence is literally based on nothing. So to believe that you should believe something out, you know, beyond the proportion of the evidence is literally to say you should have some credence on the basis of nothing.

Starting point is 01:06:58 And my animus from beginning to end, because I wasn't raised in the church. I was a very late convert. I was a miscreant, malefactor teenage... Were you an atheist at all? I was a who gives a F. Yeah. That sort of question was for dorks, man, right? Shove those guys in the locker.

Starting point is 01:07:21 That was not something I was interested in in that sense at the time. Were your parents Christian? No, they were, they were my parents. So if someone asked you when you were 17, do you believe that God exists? You would have said, I don't know, maybe, who cares? Yeah, I would have been like weird. I'm like, I probably would have just been like dork. Okay.

Starting point is 01:07:41 Yeah. Which is wild, because you're an intelligent guy who's clearly very thoughtful. So. And I always was. It's just that I didn't realize that those concepts would feature in an intellectual picture of the world. And I was also very, you know, I mean, my dad was a coach. I was an athlete. I was raised in a world where the rules were pretty, the roles were pretty, you know, defined.

Starting point is 01:08:09 and limited. I did not share any of my intellectual machinations with anyone ever. Okay. And when I first ran into, I mean, so they had to have me tested in grade school. And so I ended up going to the trailer to get my, you know, Miller analogy test. And so I had to go to like, you know, talented and gifted trailer for a while, which, but I felt like I was being experimented on at that time. Wow. I never had an intellectual mentor until I got to high school. Because I went to a teeny tiny little country school, teeny tiny.

Starting point is 01:08:45 There were, so first and second was in, my junior high was one room. My junior high was one, seventh and eighth, we're in one room together. 14, 14 people told. Yeah. Yeah, I was way, way, way out in the country, in the middle of nowhere. So did your teachers see you as a threat? Oh, they, they hated, they hated me. You've got the intelligence and the lack of attention.

Starting point is 01:09:03 I got suspended from school for accidentally inventing non-Euclidean geom What does that mean? Well, probably it was for telling my teacher did. Oh, okay. Yeah. But it started with me with this, you've probably seen this puzzle. It's like a matrix, a three by three matrix of dots. And the instructions are connect all of these using only straight lines and never using, never lifting your pencil.

Starting point is 01:09:28 Okay. And, you know, you do it all these different ways. And the idea is, well, you can, and it's always five. You can only do it as four if you go outside of the line. Because most people see the matrix and they're thinking of a box. So but if you go out past and then come back through, then you can catch the one on the diagonal and you can do it in four. And I'm like, I can do it in three.

Starting point is 01:09:54 And she's like, what do you? I'm like, I can do it in three. So you just superimpose this three by three dot matrix onto the globe. And then you start at the North Pole, pass through the first two on the way to the south, middle two on the way back to the north, and the, the second Tursit on the way back down to the south. And you've got three straight lines.

Starting point is 01:10:16 And I've never picked up my pencil. And she was like, that's stupid. That's not, and I'm like, are those lines are straight. I followed the rules. I followed the rules. I did it in three. And what's ironic is the whole point of it was to literally break the box, to think outside the box.

Starting point is 01:10:29 That was explicitly the purpose of it. And then you put, it was for it. Yeah. And now I got insolent and rude about it, which is why I got suspended. But that's the sort of thing, where I was punished. Anything I did that was intellectual and creative was punished as a child.

Starting point is 01:10:42 Was there a moment that you chose to believe in God and dedicate your life to Christ? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And did knowledge and evidence play a part in that? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. On the backside in a bad way. Every, there's nothing good about me that isn't something God, as it were, twisted out of a vice.

Starting point is 01:11:07 Okay. So everything good about me is a vice that God has sort of turned around into something good. So like I said, as a high school, as a grade school, early high school, I was not, you know, I was bad. I was kind of out of control. And I ended up, it's a long story, but I ended up going to church with these people who had moved from out of town. And I was feeling disconnected, you know, from everywhere. everything. Very isolated and alienated from my parents, alienated from my teachers. Um, with so few students, I was even alienated from most of the students. I just felt alone,

Starting point is 01:11:48 alienated outside of everything. And so this family kind of adopted me. They would always ask me to go to church with them. I'd say no, like, no. And they'd be like, I'd be at their house. And they're going. We'll be back and we'll have spaghetti for dinner. I'm like, they're leaving me alone in their house. I could rob their house. You could do whatever I want, right? Just like, what is up with these people. You know, they're not, I'm not giving them what they want. I'm not going to their little church thing, you know. They just were like, okay, no problem. We'll see you when we get back. And so, finally I go, and I'm like, I felt bad, right? So I'm going to throw these guys a scrap and go to their little church with them, you know? And I get there. And for the first time in my entire

Starting point is 01:12:29 life, I heard the gospel preach. Can I just say God bless Protestants? I know, man. Especially Protestants from Texas. Yes. I love my Catholic faith, but I was gifted so many things from my Protestant evangelical background that I wish I could, you know, pump into the church. So what happened when you went to this church? It was the Holy Ghost, man. Yeah. It was it was hellfire and brimstone gospel.

Starting point is 01:12:56 I'd never heard the gospel in my life, much less preached with passion, right? So it was a religious experience. I met God. I met God. I felt the conviction. I mean, it was like God was looking into me. And what I knew, and I had zero theology background for this whatsoever, but I knew I knew I was a sinner. I saw my sin.

Starting point is 01:13:20 And I knew that somehow that sin was separating me from goodness and that somehow I needed that sin to be taking care of either encapsulate. I think I was thinking of it as encapsulated, contained, sectioned off in order for me to go into the life. light. Okay. And I understood that somehow Jesus did that, didn't really understand any of this sacrificial, you know, vicarious atonement, none of that had no idea. All I knew is that something about what Jesus did contained and mastered my sin in a way that allowed me to move forward into the light. That's, that's all I knew. And that's about how I put it at the time. No other theological language were. So when you walked out of that little chapel, what were you thinking or what were you saying to this family that brought you?

Starting point is 01:14:11 Was it that immediate? Well, they were, yeah, it was immediate. Yeah. It was immediate. It was a religious experience for sure. But they must have been happy. They were jubilant. The whole church threw a party.

Starting point is 01:14:19 What about your mother and father? Um, I think mostly, mostly disappointed at first because they came from backwoods, Baptist, you know, almost snake charmer kind of backgrounds. My mom had a really, really, really, really. So did it just seem superstitious and? Yeah. And, you know, church, where I could. Where I grew up, church was for old ladies.

Starting point is 01:14:41 You know, they're about to die and they just want to... Wouldn't they be glad that you're at least probably going to get your life together? If you didn't have it together already? Nope. Opposite, honestly. Yeah. Because... That reminds you of my mate Todd up in Canada.

Starting point is 01:14:54 I won't say his last name for his own sake. But he was in, you know, his mother was a fallen away Mormon, I believe. And so they didn't go to church or anything like that. And in his high school years, he started to get interested in Catholicism. He would sneak out to church by... By saying he was going to parties. Yep, same. Dude.

Starting point is 01:15:12 Same. Really? My dad, the only way he would take me to these people's house was they were twins. I swore. I was going to get drunk. Yeah, kind of like that. No, the girls were twins. Okay.

Starting point is 01:15:24 It was a, it was a, the family had an older boy and then two girls that were twins that were in my class. Yeah. And I'm like, hey, man, I'm going to go see the twins. Okay. And he'd be like, right on. He thought you were seeing a girl or girls. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:36 Interesting. Yeah. And because they screwed up sports. Well, what happened? Sundays are for sports. Were you ever then pressed? When were you first pressed or challenged by those who didn't accept Christ? And how did you experience that?

Starting point is 01:15:49 Within a couple of days. Because by this point, I had, well, in a way within two days. Because I immediately, you know, you wake up the next morning. It's almost like waking up from a hangover and wondering, what the hell did I do last night? You know, it was kind of like that. The next morning I was like, oh, my God. What did I do? What did I do?

Starting point is 01:16:10 Was that real? Did that happen? Did I dream that? Now what? Yep. What kind of damage control do I got to do now, right? But I ended up having to actually change schools because I was so deeply enmeshed into- Really?

Starting point is 01:16:23 Because in the small country school that I went to as a freshman, you didn't get to really have different identities. You know, I was, I played football, basketball, ran track, wrestled. That was the crowd you're in and there was no intermixing, right? And you couldn't have just joined a Jesusy crowd? No way. There really wasn't one that I was aware of at all. Okay. Small country school is just drinking was all you had.

Starting point is 01:16:47 Pretty much everybody. And you know how it is? And country, country Protestant. The kids were like Christians on Sunday. But there was not really a, you know, nobody was having Bible studies at school. All right.

Starting point is 01:17:00 So me and the twins transferred to the big giant intercity school. Whole different milieu in so many ways. And very good for me there because there was a lot more types of, there was a lot more modes of being open and available. And, and me and one of the twins, you know, started saltines, salty teens. I don't know what that is.

Starting point is 01:17:27 It's a group of teenagers having Bible studies on campus. And, you know, they didn't want us to have Bible study on campus. So we were rebels and all that. We were in the newspaper for fighting. for our rights, you know, and that kind of thing. And I will say that that school had amazing teachers, one of whom was an atheist and hardcore atheist, introduced me the works of Bertrand Russell.

Starting point is 01:17:47 And so I became a Christian in June, between my freshman and sophomore year, and by, you know, September, I was reading Bertrand Russell's why I'm not a Christian. You know, which is great, which is awesome. So, and I, you know, I mean, Russell's a little snide, but his and his reasons

Starting point is 01:18:08 are actually frankly pretty bad I don't know if you've ever watched the debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Cappleston

Starting point is 01:18:12 yeah I mean Russell and very a lot different to modern YouTube debates let's say yeah there are

Starting point is 01:18:19 no no jazzy stuff there that was just very is about as boring as can be yeah Mortimer Adler

Starting point is 01:18:26 also debated Bertrand Russell on one occasion I forget what the topic was but Adler was so frustrated with

Starting point is 01:18:33 Russell's flippancy that he almost like walked out. So. All right. So this guy gives you, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:18:40 Yeah. Right. And I'm like, okay, well, these are reasonable questions. So how old are you? 16, 17, 17 younger? Very early 16. No, no, very late 15. All right.

Starting point is 01:18:50 Very late. So the teacher gives you this, you read it. Do you go back to talk to him? Oh, yeah. Like every day. Every single day for. And is he looking at you like a project? Yes.

Starting point is 01:19:01 He wants to deconverter me. Yeah. Very important to him to deconver me. He was very obvious. Obviously, I was the smartest kid in the class. I mean, let's just call it what it is. Yep. By a mile, right?

Starting point is 01:19:10 I was a phenom in high school. And he recognized this. And he was like, this would be a very important victory for me. It's very important to him. Yeah. That the smart kid who becomes the born again, we can't. That ain't, that ain't right. We got to fix this.

Starting point is 01:19:26 And so he would give me not just burden. I mean, he gave me every skeptical thing you can possibly imagine. He gave me a bunch of books by AJ Air. I was reading language truth and logic when I was 15. Oh, wow, man. This guy was a straight-up, self-appointed logical positivist, man. I was reading all that stuff when I was 15. It was wonderful.

Starting point is 01:19:45 It was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. Unapologetic logic positive as well. That's benign. Nothing better could have happened to somebody like me. Yeah, and why? At that time. Because I needed to be challenged because I was too big for my britches, and I needed to be up against the bigger opponent

Starting point is 01:20:05 than just other high school students, right? I needed to aim higher. And were you, what's the word? Were you being convinced of atheism? At least was your Christian faith rocked at all? No, no, no, no. Because it was pretty evident to me that, though these were good questions, I could, I think, see pretty quickly their intuitive answers.

Starting point is 01:20:27 I may not be to formulate them perfectly, but I was like, okay, I'm pretty sure I can work this out. You know? In your own words, since may have been a while since you've read it, Give me a type of argument you may have read and why at 15 or 16 you could see that it was wrong. Well, you know, logical positivists and their ilk didn't tend to present, say, the problem of evil or the problem of naturalism, those sorts of classes. It was more like, this makes no sense. Yeah. It's like there's natural language can't hold supernatural meaning.

Starting point is 01:20:59 These are incoherent concepts. Nothing could be both. there couldn't be an infinite person. Nothing could, you know, paradoxes of foreknowledge and freedom and things like that. I'm like, okay, these are really interesting, but these are puzzles, not problems, which is how I see skepticism. And I've got a couple of published things where I talk about skepticism as a puzzle, not a problem. And this goes back to Newman's statement that, you know, a thousand questions don't equal one objection. It's fine to be like, huh, that's interesting.

Starting point is 01:21:28 I'm not sure what to say about that right now. But that's not a basis to a jettison of belief. But was he trying to formulate arguments against your Christian faith? Not as much as he was trying to show that it was just stupid. Stupid. Yeah. And or didn't rise to the dignity of error, right? Because that's what, that's the logical positiveness program.

Starting point is 01:21:47 It's not that it's false. God is nonsensical. Yeah, right. And yet you're using it in a sentence and you presume you're meaning something. There's certainly some problems. There are some self-referential problems with that. I think the thing, one of the things I'm most proud of having published is the article and philosophy of religion, the entry in the Cambridge history of the philosophy of the 20th century.

Starting point is 01:22:07 Cambridge history of the philosophy of 20th century, I wrote the entry on religion. And in there, I sort of do the narrative from logical positivism to logical positivism to basically analytic philosophy, religion. And it's the biggest turnaround you ever saw. It's the biggest turnaround you ever saw. That story is amazing. Yeah. That is something that the world needs to hear more about. Can you say it, but briefly? Yeah, basically it's like the logical tools that early 20th century analytic philosophers used to try to show that religion was meaningless or false at best are precisely the same tools that grounded the strongest arguments for Christian theism some 60 years later. I mean, it's unbelievable. Can you show us that briefly?

Starting point is 01:22:53 Yeah. So this is kind of a funny, funny story. So, modal logic, which is the logic of necessity and possibility, experienced really immense growth in the early 20th century. So around the same time that Einstein was publishing his general and special theories of relativity 1905, 1915, at the same time, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were writing Principia, Mathematica, which is quite a. title since that's pretty sure that's what Newton called his first, where he presented the law of universal gravitation. I think he called that Principia as well. But it really was. It was the first major treatise in symbolic logic. I mean, stuff had been done by Bull, Javons, Fickenstein, Frege, and others. But the magnum opus, the bringing together of

Starting point is 01:23:52 symbolic logic, mathematical logic, was in the Principia, Mathematica by Alphal North Whitehead and Burton Russell. I forget exactly, but 1905, somewhere between 1905 and 1950, I'm pretty sure. You can check that. Right now out there, there's somebody watching this going, God, it was 1907, you idiot, you stupid idiot. Early 20th century, I'm pretty sure. I did no preparation.

Starting point is 01:24:16 I'm pretty sure it was between 1905 and 1915. And that led to a real explosion in formal philosophy, formal logic, okay? And so people used, it was basically predicate logic. the people expanded that. Lewis and Langford expanded that to C.I. Lewis, who was actually Chisholm's primary mentor, interestingly enough, developed this modal logic. And one time, C.S. Lewis received a copy of a review of the symbolic logic book published by C.I. Lewis, who was also a British philosopher at the time, British Analytic philosophy at the time. and I think it's in Lewis's letters.

Starting point is 01:25:01 It's in Lewis's letters. I think he was writing to Arthur Greaves, or he was somebody, and he says, it ends with Pasha to think of the mathematical. He just thought it was hilarious that anybody would accuse him of writing about mathematical logic. Nothing could be more averse to C.S. Lewis

Starting point is 01:25:17 than that stuff, right? He thought that stuff was crazy, silly, nonsense. He did interact with it, though. So if you look at the changes between the first edition of the chapter and miracles that was originally entitled the self-contradiction of the naturalist, his famous debate with Anscom,

Starting point is 01:25:31 and then he rewrites it and changes it to the cardinal difficulty with naturalism. And people think that, oh, well, Anscombe beat him. If you look at the transcript in the old Socratic Digest, Lewis was, it was actually very big of him to rewrite that chapter, because he wasn't trying to use the language

Starting point is 01:25:50 of, you know, mathematical logic. But he took Anskam's comments very seriously, and he tried to write the chapter in a way, which wouldn't lead his contemporary analytic philosophers at Cambridge to misunderstand what he was saying. And I believe he did learn some things in there, and it's a better chapter as a result of that. But Lewis hated that stuff, called himself a dinosaur,

Starting point is 01:26:10 but lived at that same time and ended up getting like this bulletin, congratulations on the publication of your book on symbolic logic. And he's like, what a joke. And so, but it was that very same system of modal logic that Alvin Planiga used. to take essentially Leibniz's argument and make it the strongest it's ever been. I see.

Starting point is 01:26:34 The strongest it's ever been. And the same thing with Richard Swinburne. I see. So I think it was, I think, Keynes wrote his treatise on probability, I think, published it in 1921, which is about the same time that Carnap's, Rudolph Carnap's work on symbolic logic

Starting point is 01:26:56 was published in English for about the first time. So this is early, early 1920s, right? And this was hardcore, leading edge, analytic, philosophy, mathematical logic type stuff, right? And this was like, you know, this shows that this Christian tradition is nonsense. This is what real philosophy looks like. Well, by the 90s, Swinburne's making the greatest teleological argument ever devised. Based on what was meant to take God down.

Starting point is 01:27:25 Yeah, man. Is it, what is it, judo where you... Yeah, it's judo, yeah, that's right. It's exactly what it was. It was intellectual judo, and it's an amazing story. Abortion happens fast, and right now in towns and cities across the country, women are being pushed to make these terrible decisions in moments of fear and confusion. You know, they're told, you have to decide right now as if love, hope, or motherhood can be rushed or discarded.

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Starting point is 01:29:30 Well, it, he set me down a lot. What he did was it grained in me or got started in me the very good intellectual habit of reading everything contrary to my views and steel manning the arguments. And were you aware of Christian apologists like Lewis or Planned? think that at the time? Not at the time, no, uh-uh. Nope, what I did, I went back and I read Descartes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:54 That's what I mostly read, because I went back in Red Day Cart and Gabriel Marcel and, um, uh, did you ever come across the five ways back then or? Yeah, yeah, but that wasn't, that actually didn't, well, what I ended up getting was an early copy of, just at a bookstore, um, John Hicks, readings and philosophy of religion. And it was, and it was, uh, tenant, is it? our tenant. It was, it was an early, very early, abductive argument, okay, uh, from design. Yep. And I was like, ooh, look at that. And I read Coppelson. So, so I read, the five ways as,

Starting point is 01:30:30 as written, didn't necessarily speak to me, but Copleston's, you know, exposition of them, like, oh, contingency, can't have universal contingency, can't have an infinite regress. You know, that stuff did speak to me, uh, big time in Bruce Reichenbach at the time as well. Um, and so, so I, it wasn't until so it was later in that same year, sophomore year that this guy's, this teacher's rival, they were friends, but they were rivals, challenged me to take their class because I was,

Starting point is 01:31:02 I was a brat, okay, I was a brat. I would use my verbal abilities and logical acumen to kind of twist people up, right? But it wasn't, you know, it was more just, it was more like, it was bullying is what it was. And this, this, we're at, we're at, we're at, study hall and this this this this teacher comes up to me mr reynolds god rest is all man i'm so sad

Starting point is 01:31:24 he's dead so so some of some people that you're like yeah man i wish i could just call him every day um he comes up to me he's not i've never even had him didn't know what he was i'd seen him and he's he's he's shaking he's shaking and he says you're a bully oh and i'm like what are you talking about It's like, you're a bully, you're an intellectual bully. He said, I dare you to take my class. Like he, but he was like... Why was he so upset? Well, partly he was afraid.

Starting point is 01:31:58 Because I'm telling you, man, if I turn it on, look out. Like, look out. I mean, you've... Well, some of that is well known now. Some of that is documented on the internet. Yeah, but you mean intellectually, not physically, presumably. Yes, but it's worse. Right, but I can tie some...

Starting point is 01:32:14 Like, if I get mean and nasty, I get super mean and super nasty. It's like I said, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a twisted. It's, but when untwisted, it allows me to do that like hardcore analytic work where I will be dedicated. I will read every, I will take every sentence you write and I will diagram that sentence and my replies will be as tight as iron, right? There'll be ironclad. But it starts with the vice of just being kind of a jerk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and he was partly just agitated at my bad behavior, but partly I think,

Starting point is 01:32:47 a little worried. Now, is it because you're being a bully about God? Yeah, see, you know, some atheists. Is he an atheist too this? No, no, he was a Christian. But he saw me, like, like, basically abusing atheists who would, who would be like, well, man, and they were saying stupid things, but I would. In fairness to me. In fairness to me, they were being idiots. But that didn't justify my being, you know, really. I mean, I would, I would make them, you know, not cry, but I mean, I would, they were embarrassed. Well, if you're publicly dressing down someone who's meant to be your intellectual superior, that's got to be embarrassing for someone, yeah. Yeah, so, so, and he was dead right.

Starting point is 01:33:27 I mean, I was wrong. He was right. But it really shook me up because I'm like, I don't even know who this guy is. He's super agitated about what I mean. So I did take his class. And he and this atheist taught this class called tag humanities, talented and gifted, which I always said, before I took the class, I said, stood for torps and geese. But it was formally called Talented and Gifted and it was a team-taught class between a Christian and atheist

Starting point is 01:33:53 Who where you got to design your own curriculum. Okay, they didn't assign anything. Wow The first like three weeks of the class were what do your interest here's reading lists the beginning of unschooling Yes, really it was it was it was great. Yeah, and so I put together a curriculum with their help in Christian existentialism Wow. Christian existentialism. That's where I first started reading Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricor, and other early, you know, French Christian philosophers. I think they're influenced by Thompson. Might be controversial.

Starting point is 01:34:27 I don't know. But it was existentialism from Augustine to, I forget where I ended it, but certainly, you know, early 20th century. And in that class, you could have. proper intellectual debates, vigorous, pointed debates. But they made, I mean, if they got rude or mean, they would shut it down immediately. And they'd be like, it's propositions, not people. That's good.

Starting point is 01:34:55 Like, don't you dare? And they were like serious about it, man. Like, like, if it wasn't for them and any number of mentors who called me out and said, that's bad, that's bad. In fact, I've suffered the most in life when my mentors failed me. when the people whose roles it would have been to call me out and help shut me down and slow me down didn't do so either out of fear because they wouldn't

Starting point is 01:35:23 and I don't and I'm not showing them any mercy because Mr. Reynolds he had the courage to do something he didn't want to do and get in front of me and face me which I promise you nobody wants to do if I am if I'm on a role and I'm not happy nobody wants to stand in front of me not a good place to be. He had the courage to do that. And because of that,

Starting point is 01:35:59 I became a better person. And the best man at my wedding, Jake Klein, when I first got to Mizzou, because, dude, I've been going through these cycles my whole life, man. I get better. Then I got to the big university, bigger stage,

Starting point is 01:36:12 more people, harder professors, and I just got a rush. I got out of control again. And he was also this more gentle spirit. And he's another person who literally had to get his courage up was also shaking when he told me, man, you need to cool it. You're on a bad rule here. And he, and he...

Starting point is 01:36:36 Violent? Not, no, just a juggernaut, just unstoppable. You know what I mean? And I would leave a wake of destruction. I mean, I hurt people. I hurt people. There's lots of ways to hurt people. Yep.

Starting point is 01:36:50 You know? And that wasn't good for Christ. Yeah. You know, like, there's that line from C.S. Louis's poem, The Apologist Evening Prayer. I love it. From all my lame defeats. And oh, what's more from the victories that I've seemed to store. Clevenous shot forth on thy by half at which while angels weep, the audience laugh.

Starting point is 01:37:12 My man. Yeah, yeah. Come on. My man. Goose bumps, right? That's me. And the next one, from all my proofs of thy divinity, thou who wouldst give no sign deliver me. That's right. I know, man. It just absolute goosebumps. Absolutely goosebumps. And that is me to a T. That is me to a T. And later in life, when it was clear that I was out of control, people either didn't summon the courage to do that or I was very useful to them. And this has been definitely verified. I was very useful to people.

Starting point is 01:37:52 in ways that were tied in with my dysfunction and therefore let her roll. Keep the chips on the table, just let it roll. And I said, I guess my wife's got my phone. I came across a text from, I'm gonna say Dan Bonavac, wonderful man, brilliant philosopher at the University of Texas, brilliant, blinding, brilliant man and a good man and I had forgotten all about this I found this I'm not kidding man

Starting point is 01:38:31 yesterday morning on my phone was looking for something totally different and it just came up because of some words that were inside of the text and it was him texting me saying I don't understand how you're doing what you're doing what you're doing what you're doing so much I don't understand how anybody could do what you're doing without burning out flaming out and was this before did you flame out I did flame out and is this so So is this before? This is before. This is like quite like recently before.

Starting point is 01:39:00 Yeah. Yeah, man. And God bless him for doing that. And I wish I would have, you know, he was. Did you write back to him? Huh? Did you write back to him? I don't have that?

Starting point is 01:39:10 Number? The copy of that. No, I've got it. But you have the text, don't you? You said. No, this was a screenshot of that text. Oh, I'm sorry. So I don't have the phone from, you know, I can't go back and see what the heck I said.

Starting point is 01:39:18 But it makes me want to reach out to him today and say, thank you. And I wish there were other people like you in my life closer who could have done that, you know, people whose role it would have been to do that for sure. So I don't, I can't do it alone. Can't do it alone. I don't have, I'm missing something. I'm missing something that that makes me have to work with other people who can help provide boundaries for me in lots of different ways.

Starting point is 01:39:55 I mean, we don't have to go there if you don't want to, but I feel like Like, I said to you before this show started, it takes 20 minutes to get into a conversation. I feel like we hit it like 30 minutes ago. We started. You know, we had an hour of, I think it was like, I was trying to drink through a, what do they say, a fire hydrant. I just unlock a fire hydrant about epistemology. I'm like, I'm not, but I feel like we found a tributary we can go down. Do you want to go down it?

Starting point is 01:40:17 Or do you not? I am. I don't want to push you to talk about anything you don't want to talk about. Open book. The wonderful thing, the wonderful thing about where I've been is that. I know myself better than I've ever known myself before. I've slayed the biggest of the demons. You're never free of them, right?

Starting point is 01:40:38 But I've, I've, it's just, it's wonderful to be where I am now, to know myself better than I've ever known myself, and to be more at ease in my skin than I've ever been, and to not be in a system that depends on the approval of other people. I am an affirmation junkie. That was my drug above all drugs. And the degree of freedom, I'm not saying I'm free of it by any means, but the degree of freedom that I've achieved from that loop of affirmation addiction has yielded a kind of freedom that I've never experienced in my life and therefore open book. Well, I'll ask you then, how did you, I think you used the word burnout or flame.

Starting point is 01:41:27 out or did you do that and what what what would what happen well and yeah no i was um i was producing at an and and it just impossible impossible publishing publishing conferences all of that at an impossible inhuman rate the other people's other people's words they put me at the department at baylor put me up for early tenure at at three years which is wow like unheard of, but I had all the publications for it, right? And I had like more publications the year that I went up for tenure than most people had accumulated by that time, right? So I get the year that I'm up for tenure because the administration was like, no, at six years no matter what. And one of my colleagues pointed his finger at the dean or provost and said, if we lose him, it's on you.

Starting point is 01:42:25 Because at the time, I had lots of offers. Everybody wanted to scoop me up, steal me. And so when the year that I was slated to get tenure, I got the award for pre-tenure researcher of the year. Up on stage with Kinstar, God rest of soul, you know, $5,000 check, literally in the freaking homecoming parade. I mean, it's like this ridiculous, like, holding up of me in a way that was, A, not healthy, right?

Starting point is 01:42:59 And B, based on, it was intrinsically unhealthy to keep that sort of laud on a human. We love to, in Christianity, we love to lift up our heroes, and we absolutely love to tear them down. I see that on YouTube all the time. It's all the time. And people like, you know, Philippiancy recently, gosh, dang, man. But I don't think what a terrible person, I think, oh, man. I'm sorry. I think I know, yeah, I think I know what he's going through.

Starting point is 01:43:31 Is also built on unhealthy behavior of working myself to death. And in a network of unhealthy people, you know, I mean, it was just, it was so horribly unhealthy in so many ways. And I asked a mentor later, why didn't you say? say something. Like, all the signs were there that I was like, I was experiencing burnout to a degree that was, you know, I was on fire, not in a good way, you know. And the answer was, you were producing so well. You seem to have it under control because you were able to produce.

Starting point is 01:44:13 Talk about reductionistic, right? So it was literally publisher parish. What about people in your life, like your good wife or family? Because they know you in a way that colleagues don't. Yeah. Yeah, but in some ways it's harder for those people, you know. And man, when you're building a career as an academic, you know, I'm not home that often. For years and years and years, I was gone three weekends a month, 10 months a year.

Starting point is 01:44:39 You know, and everything was, you know, everything was like, okay, wait till I get my fellowship. Okay, got my fellowship. Okay, wait till I graduate. Okay, wait till I get tenure. Wait till I get a named chair, right? Nothing, there's nothing like academia for workaholism. Never arriving, right? I see.

Starting point is 01:45:01 I see. You never arrive. The goal, the summit is always receding. Yeah. So. Because even once you've got tenure, you need to stay relevant. That's right. You need to keep being.

Starting point is 01:45:13 And I mean to tell you, you can, there's nobody so big they can't lose relevance. It's unbelievable how after, say, 2017, 2019, the whole set of values inverted. And everybody, you know, not everybody, but a massive number of people who were super important luminaries, old school, just dropped. You know, the rule, you know, it was like disorienting kind of thing, right? So, so, um, I was doing, I was working myself to a, to a absolute point of distraction. it turns out that there is, you know, post-tenured depression. It's kind of like postpartum depression.

Starting point is 01:45:56 Interesting. And until I started asking some of my other at the time, young, no longer, you know, the people that were like the young guns, like me at the time, that we were always the, there's always the, you know, the first untenured person to do this, the first untendered person to do that, you know, me and a few other people were like firsters, right? And I asked them like, after tenure, did you just feel like, what is the point of life? Because here's the thing about tenure, especially, you know. That's the carrot, right?

Starting point is 01:46:22 It's the carrot that you chase from the time you're an undergraduate, really, because I was one of those undergrades was already publishing stuff and like working to reading citations and all that stuff, right? So you work for, let's say, and all the time you're in grad school, if you're really want to be successful in academia, you have to be focusing on tenure in grad school. Okay. So you're publishing in grad school, like almost immediately. And like research, I had to think about my research program.

Starting point is 01:46:54 So my publications in grad school were setting me up for tenure already. And so, but you have to go around to every conference in the world to try to get your stuff in front of people, right? So it's a lot, it's a very, you have to be intentional about it. Like it doesn't just happen, hardly ever. You have to work for it. So from the time you enter grad school, In my case, undergrad, you're working towards this particular goal. Then you get your two-two tenure track position that is like, you know, super rare.

Starting point is 01:47:23 And then for six years, you're working towards this common goal. And then, and even, it's really fascinating. So even though you like know you're getting tenure, like it's just like you look at your stuff. Until you get the letter from the dean, there's always this like, who knows what these freaking people are going to do, whatever, you know. But then one day you go into the office and you, you're getting the stuff. out of your little pigeonhole. And there's a letter. Congratulations, you got tenure, right?

Starting point is 01:47:52 And you look around, and it's 8.30, and the secretaries in the office. Like, where are the trumpets? Where's the fash? Where's the confetti? What just happened? How are these other people around me not experiencing what I'm experiencing?

Starting point is 01:48:02 It's the biggest letdown. It's unreal. Is that right? It's unreal. And there's zero acknowledgement of it. Is that right? Yeah, it's like, oh, okay, well, this Friday, let's go to the dancing bear.

Starting point is 01:48:11 And like, but then other people are busy and like, who's going to organize, whose job is it to organize that? Do I organize it myself? It's just like, it's there. I get you. And epistemologically, it's crazy too because, like, you think about what

Starting point is 01:48:25 at the Olympics are going on right now, right? Those guys never know. I mean, there have been some big upsets at the Olympics and there have been some favorites who've gone down. Nobody goes into the Olympics like firmly knowing they're going to get gold, right? For tenure, it's not like that. It's like there is a system.

Starting point is 01:48:43 And I had, if you said, what is the probability that you're going to get tenure this? I'd be like 99 minus epsilon, some of your relevant least small number, right? So you spend a decade, there's a certain proposition getting tenure, a certain event, and you spend a decade working 90 hours a week to drive the probability of that proposition as close to one as humanly possible. And then somebody tells you it's true.

Starting point is 01:49:09 It's inherently set up to be disappointing. It's inherently set up to be disappointing. And, and, um, and my signs of depression were very obvious, quite frankly. Okay. And I went to, I don't know, my wallet with me. But how quickly did it take for you to feel like you were depressed? I mean, was it a week, a month, a year after 10, you? Maybe 10 days.

Starting point is 01:49:32 Yeah. Maybe 10 days. And you just couldn't figure out like you're trying to process. I was in a. Why aren't I happier? Oh, was it that? Yeah. Like what was, yeah. Like what is?

Starting point is 01:49:42 Yeah. And then, and now what? Do I just start over again? looking for a named chair because I was getting a lot of offers. Lucrative, big money, titles. But I was also happy where I was. I loved where I was in a way at the time. Yeah. My family was there.

Starting point is 01:49:58 Because when I was at Baylor, I wasn't just involved in Baylor. It's very much involved in Waco as such. I was on all, you know, Farmers Market Committee, uh, founder, you know, helped found the farmer's market was, um, you know,

Starting point is 01:50:13 president of Waco Bicycle Club. I was on, city committees for downtown community development. We're busy. It was insanity. It was insanity. So I had this community there in Waco that was really separate from the Baylor bubble. And I had people that was close to very close to at Baylor like Alex Bruce, you're wonderful, beautiful people like that.

Starting point is 01:50:38 So I'm getting these offers that are really good money, really good prestige. and thinking, do I just start over? Do I take my kids out of this community that we're in? Because we were very, this. And again, what was the desire to do that? Was it just to chase the next thing? Or did you not have enough self-reflection and quiet to figure out why it is you were sad and why it is you may have wanted to start again?

Starting point is 01:51:04 Does that make sense? It's dumped me an addiction. Yeah. Just dump me an addiction. I needed, and I needed more, accomplishments for people to praise me for. Yeah. Bless you.

Starting point is 01:51:18 You know, Richard Roar, Father Richard Roar, may be a heretic, but I love him. And he says some very beautiful things. And one of the things he said is something like the lovely thing about growing in self-knowledge is no matter what anybody else thinks about you, it's way worse than what you already know. 100%. 100%. And his books have actually been very helpful for me. I'm glad that you're right. There's one like breathing underwater or something like that.

Starting point is 01:51:40 And then there's also one about the two, the two half. of life. I get it confused with one of Brooks's books. Those books were very helpful for me. Good. Those books were actually super helpful for me. And, you know, I mentioned to you, you met my wife. Lovely woman. We came into Nashville early because it was Valentine's Day, and that was the 34th anniversary of our first date. Praise the Lord. Yeah. That was a brilliant move on my part. First date on Valentine's Day, very right out of the Trent Doordy Handbook. All right. So what happens next? How do you? you burn, is this the burnout or is the burnout leading to something or?

Starting point is 01:52:16 Well, um, yeah, I mean, the, uh, burnout led to me having a child out of wedlock. That's what, that's where it went. That's where it manifested. Yeah. And thank God for that. Thank God for that. First of all, because we've got, my wife and I have this wonderful, beautiful, just, oh, my God, Marilyn,

Starting point is 01:52:45 Eleanor Maryland, named after Eleanor Stump and Marilyn McGord Adams, two of my favorite women and both mentors of mine, both people who were incredibly helpful

Starting point is 01:52:56 to me throughout my career, both of whom, you know, wrote for me, stood up for me, all that. And so she's, she's named after them. And, and I can't imagine

Starting point is 01:53:08 life without her. And she's been... Is the mother not in the picture? The mother is in the picture. Yeah. She's in the picture. But you have custody?

Starting point is 01:53:18 Sarah and I have pretty much 50-50 custody. We have the, it's called the expanded standard possession. So we get as much, it's basically 50, technically it's like 48.77. If I ask a question that's too sensitive, tell me to, hit off. There is no question too sensitive. Because I don't want to do that. I want to know what it was like maybe when you woke up and realized what the hell did I just do. Oh, it was disorienting.

Starting point is 01:53:40 Because I've often said that sin is the least interesting. thing about us. You know, I remember when Jordan Peterson said something like this, he said, people will ask, how could people get addicted to drugs? He's like, wrong question. How could they not? The question is, why aren't we all doing this all the time? 100%. Right? So I'm not, it's like not at all surprising that someone does this. What's interesting to me is when someone comes to their senses and decides what to do with you. Yeah, let's make me real clear, I didn't come to my senses. Okay. It was forced upon me by something, by the, couldn't be hidden. right couldn't be hidden um so i didn't come to my senses i was hit upside the head by

Starting point is 01:54:20 the consequences of my sin what was that what was that experience like do you remember where you were oh yes i do and it was um you know you're taken out of the world you're just you're literally dizzy lying on the ground this can't be real this can't be happening um literally just can't be happening right And then you wake up the next morning and you think, did that, you know, it's just like disorienting. And then I did experience a period of psychosis. Thankfully, Sarah gathered good people around me. Bless her. Father Timothy from the parish at West there, Alex Pruse, other people in our family, you know, in our sphere and community.

Starting point is 01:55:09 I bet that's when you know who's got your back. That's the beautiful thing about where I am now. I had a decent amount of like power and influence in the discipline to the tune of millions of dollars. I could like really influence people's careers. You know, when you have like multiple postdocs to just hand out, that's a lot. You know, people, there were some sycophants in my life pretending to be friends. And the freedom of knowing who your real friends are is like so liberating. It's amazing.

Starting point is 01:55:39 everything about my life is better than it was before, you know. And that's why Paul has to say, should we then sin that grace might abound? And he says, ooh, may. No way. But the reality is that life's better now. That's permissive will. Okay, so it's 2026. When did this happen?

Starting point is 01:55:57 That was 2019, I think. Okay. 2017 through 2019. It might look like I'm playing dumb, but I actually don't know a lot of this. I know. I don't necessarily know because it's such a small part of my life now. It's not like, it's not something that I. That's beautiful.

Starting point is 01:56:08 It's not something that I really think about it. Upside the head, you had a beautiful wife and other people who came around you to love on you. So how did you come out of the fog and haze of what the hell did I just do? I took a year off to do nothing but read spiritual classics. Wow. Literally. So, and what I found was, this is part that's kind of funny too. So some key books were, so, so, I can't remember it was Father Timothy or Alex, but one of the two of them were, I think Father Timothy told me to read St. Francis DeSales, the introduction to the devout life.

Starting point is 01:56:38 Absolutely. And I think Father Timothy told me to read it. I think Alex gave me his copy. What a book. Everybody should read it. Wonderful. Everybody should read it. Sometimes you'll read a book and you're like, if I just had the Bible,

Starting point is 01:56:48 that would be enough. That'd be enough. Why am I just start back over and do again? Yeah. Thomas Acempis practicing the presence of Christ. Spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Joseph Piper's. Yep.

Starting point is 01:57:02 Which one? Basis of leisure? No, no, no. No, no. His book on virtue, actually. Okay. Yeah. I think it might just go.

Starting point is 01:57:08 I can't remember. It was just book on virtue. Yeah. So I took a year, well, that's all I did. Sorry, I meant to say leisure basis of culture. Right. That's all I did for a year was be outside, be surrounded by my family and close his friends, and read spiritual classics. Again, tell me to piss off if I get too personal, but how did your lovely wife forgive you?

Starting point is 01:57:29 I mean, that's probably a question for her, but how did you handle that? Well, those are two different questions. Yeah. I didn't handle it. She just took care of everything. That's, that's, she handled it. She handled it. She invited the mother to live with us.

Starting point is 01:57:48 The mother lived with us. We, we had a, we, she had her own room and a little crib and everything. That was her idea, not mine. God, you'll be serving her drink. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, bless, no doubt about it.

Starting point is 01:58:00 But, but she's the one who knows me inside and out. She's the one who knew that, that that came from, brokenness. She's the one who knew that I would had been flaming out. Because before it, where I was going with that story before was way before this, or not way before, two years before this, after the, after tenure, after the post-postpartum, I went into student health services with suicidal ideation and said, I got to talk to somebody. And I still carry around the, the, business card of the director of that. Now, at the time, I actually looked really young.

Starting point is 01:58:40 I grew my beard when I went to tour Iran. I gave some philosophy lectures throughout Iran, which was super cool, super cool. Got a lot of friends of Iran that I really miss right now because I'm not able to communicate with them. I formed lifelong friendships in Iran with certain Iranian people that I'm really worried about right now. And I haven't been able to contact them for quite some time. But before I grew that, because they were like, if you don't have a beard in Iran, nobody's going to take you seriously. And then kind of like the way it looks, so I kept it. But before that, I looked really young for my age.

Starting point is 01:59:13 Yeah, you are young looking for your age. You got a good head of hair. You look like you're in your 40s, yeah. Yeah, so I'll be 54 this year. But I've always, I've typically looked about 10, 10 years younger on average. And of course, the older you get, the more you converge upon your true age. That's right. But certainly in my 40s, I was usually in my early 40s, early to mid 40s, people usually thought I was late 20s, 40s 30s.

Starting point is 01:59:35 So I looked a lot younger than I was. It looked like a kid. Which probably added, right, to the, you know, the boy wonder myth. Oh, yeah. That was, you know. Yeah, because I got treated like I hadn't been reading analytic philosophy for 20 years. Most people come out of grad school because I taught, I taught Greek and Latin in high schools for a while before I went back to grad school, before I went to grad school. So I'm coming in with, like, insane amounts of reading, you know, in the classics and analytic philosophy, 20, 25 years.

Starting point is 02:00:06 when I graduate with my PhD at 36, but I look like I'm 22. Yep. And so, good God, where did this guy get all this understanding? You know, it was like, it worked very much my favorite. Definitely created a false boy wonder effect, for sure, hail effect around me, no doubt about it. But it's, but, you know, I'm telling this with a smile on my face,

Starting point is 02:00:24 but at the time it was horrible. So they do the intake, and I'm filling out my forms, and I take them up there, and they're like, oh, oh, here, I give them my ID. and it's oh your faculty yeah I didn't know it was student health service I just thought it was health service I don't think if it did I didn't notice it and like oh we only serve students and I'm like so what am I supposed to do just told you I'm experiencing suicidal ideation yeah so I get this mimeographs are the little purple ink no so back in yon olden days before there were copy machines you like it was like a roll this was a

Starting point is 02:01:05 ancient pieces of paper. She pulls out of a file. Here are several counselors in the community that might accept Baylor Blue Cross Blue Shield. And I'm like, that's the answer to suicide ideation is here's a list of, you know, a 10-year-old list of service providers who probably take Blue Cross Blue Shield. I mean, if it hadn't been so ironically funny, who knows what I would have done? Can you tell me what suicidal ideation is like? I know that sounds like a silly question.

Starting point is 02:01:41 And then I'd love to ask you your advice to those who are watching who know what it is. Well, part of it is, so this is going to sound weird and it might be different for different people. And also Maria who's watching this, we are definitely going to blank out every use of the word suicide here. Oh, yeah, that's right. But I do think this is so bad. Unaliving is what we say on social media. This is going to be so beneficial to those who are. It was, it's like acceptance, really.

Starting point is 02:02:06 You're just like, okay, well, all logic trees, the most logical choice is kill myself. I can't, everything that I've worked for is going to be gone. Everybody who loved me or pretended to love me. Because I was, you know, I mean, obviously there are people that didn't like me. It's funny because it's just so ironic. So ironic. There's a super popular secular leftist philosopher who, like, it's not even disputed that he did things like a hundred times worse than what I did,

Starting point is 02:02:38 but he's like still the man because he's basically a popular leftist, right? But his case, you know, his court files are unsealed. And there's mentions of me in there of talking about, you know, not liking me because I was a Republican, supposedly, which I actually am not. I'm conservative. Okay. It tends to align with the propaganda. Including things like, I think they wish I was dead or something.

Starting point is 02:03:02 Like it's a pretty hardcore stuff. It's on the internet. Like, it's, it's part of court cases. Like, my name is mentioned in this testimony on these sexual, you know, harassment cases from this guy. And I like him, quite frankly, we always got along. And it was like, oh, you know, like, I had no idea that while we were talking and having fun and seemingly connecting, he's telling this other girl who was like, fangirling over me, they're having, he's, her conversation with him is, oh, yeah, I wish these conservatives would just die. This is the craziest thing, man. It's such a sick environment.

Starting point is 02:03:33 It's such a sick environment. But for me, it was just very logical. It was like, okay, well, this could happen. Here's the possible paths out of here. All of them lead to ruin. The most logical thing is just to die. This is to pull out. And so does ideation mean?

Starting point is 02:03:49 Forming plans. Forming plans. You're like running through. Again, it was very logical. It wasn't, I wasn't crying. I wasn't sad. I wasn't even emotional. Or logical.

Starting point is 02:03:59 Very logical. It was like, car crash. Car crash couldn't look like an accident. Life insurance still kicks in.

Starting point is 02:04:09 Kind of makes people wonder, you know, it's not obvious. You know, I was a rock climber and a mountain biker.

Starting point is 02:04:19 Like, okay, well, if I fell off the cliff, you know, it's a very, very cold, very cold,

Starting point is 02:04:24 rational, deliberative process where you're just like, okay, what is the most, what is the most logical, this is the most,

Starting point is 02:04:31 I've already arrived at the conclusion. This is the most logical outcome. So what is the, so now it's, the, the, the question of ends is already settled. So now what are the means? I see. Right. So, and for, you know, fortunately, I guess, because it's still fortunate because it slowed me down.

Starting point is 02:04:47 It was just like, I better go get in front of somebody. I better go quickly tell somebody that I'm having these thoughts. Is that your advice to those watching? Yes. Yes. Just tell anybody. Really? Tell anybody.

Starting point is 02:04:58 Okay. Tell a stranger. Literally tell a stranger If somebody walked up to me and told me that I would be helping them in a heart I would be like Yeah but you're unusual I mean

Starting point is 02:05:07 That's true You went in a good way But I mean because you've been through this is what I mean Yeah but honestly God I think most people would do that I swear to God I believe this I think most people

Starting point is 02:05:16 If a stranger walked up And said man I'm thinking about killing myself I think they would say Let's They'd be like let's go They may not know what to do But they'd be like Let's don't do that

Starting point is 02:05:26 I know there's people They would say to them I know there's people that love you. I know there's people that would be hurt. They've seen, um, you know, the, the Jimmy Stewart movie. It's a wonderful life or they, or they intuitively get that. They would just immediately start telling you, there's people, don't do it. There's people who care about you. And yes, this, this, this, Sheila at the booth didn't do that. No, you gave you a card. Give me a card. Blesser. All right. Yeah. So did you go get help? Nope. No. So how did you

Starting point is 02:05:51 get over that? Scotch and sin. Okay. More scotch, more scotch, sin. Yeah. Okay. So this is why I was dry as a bone for three years. Were you? Yeah, not a drink for three years. This is after presumably you got something better. That's right. So you're in a place now that you have a scotch. But I was, but I was, yeah, I was, I was, I was, uh, I don't know how long I was but surely the scotch and the sin didn't get you over it. That would have just dug you deeper into it, I would think. Yes. No, no, that was, that was the way of dealing with it at that moment. the only thing I mean honestly

Starting point is 02:06:26 it was more I didn't do anything it was more the it was the falling away of the false gods okay so every sycophant turned on me

Starting point is 02:06:41 left me right the big shiny career they bought out my contract you know and a little more yeah said so you're unemployed yeah

Starting point is 02:06:53 you probably have no other college that's interested in you. Not then. Yeah. Not then. No. Since then, yeah, but not then. God, love you. But I, you know, I mean, I had, the settlement was good. I had a lot of money and I made a lot of money at Baylor. That's the thing that people don't tell you too. It's like, good Lord, if you play the game right, you can make a lot of money. Yep. You know, so I, I mean, it wasn't, I mean, any worries about that at all. There was zero worries about that. It was more, it was just all the false gods fell away. And your false god was, you know, adjula. Any form of adulation.

Starting point is 02:07:25 Students, colleagues, societies, institutes. Yeah. And that got smashed for you. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't do anything. It just went away. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:07:38 And when it went away, everything got easier. Now, I did, like I said, I went through a period of psychosis of unknown length. Yeah. But that was the main thing. I did, you know, done a lot of counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatrists, C-SATs. That's, you know, lots of different, about five different categories of, you know, that takes courage. Professional help.

Starting point is 02:07:59 That's so much easy. 12 step. Yeah. 12 step is. Tell me about that. Amazing. 12 step is amazing. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:05 I want to one of my. Can I insert something real quickly here? I used to run a website called the Porn Effect.com where we talked about the problem of pornography. And, you know, in one of these articles, I was talking about the benefits of 12 steps. Fully understanding and even acknowledging that not all 12 steps are created equal. This fellow wrote to me really upset. and he said, all you need is to fall in your knees for confession.

Starting point is 02:08:28 And he really let me have it. So much so, though, I'm like, oh, God, what do I know? Maybe, you know, five months later, he was arrested, prostitutes, coke, you know, L.A., hotel. And, you know, I don't say that with glee at all, but just, well, maybe 12 steps could help this poor fella. And maybe they had it. Yeah, and hopefully he found it since, yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:45 No, 12 steps, it's just freaking amazing. And the date is there on 12 step. One of my current book projects is called the human condition, because unfortunately we so many of us have to hit rock bottom before we can you know get things sorted out I would love it if we could take the principles of 12 step because because the problem is I had various specific addictions but it is the human condition to feel unworthy to feel less than to experience fear and anxiety over acceptance to feel alienation that's just the human condition. And for some of us who are more extreme personalities, it manifests more extremely. But for

Starting point is 02:09:27 other people, it's more of a slow burn, but it ends up in the same place. And I could not believe more in the principles of 12 step. Would not have gotten through it without 12 step. And was it a long slog? I mean, were there times you like, you know, F this, I'm done. Because that's what I mean. It takes courage. No, no, no. No, because when you're in the rooms, you tell, when you tell people about what you've done, their reaction is, oh, man, I'm so sorry. They're not judging you. That's like, you'd think it's Christianity. You're no longer hiding.

Starting point is 02:10:01 Yeah, that's right. You're removing the fig leaf. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. This is who I am. That's right. And the people, they'll love you anyway. Intimacy is the result of vulnerability plus acceptance.

Starting point is 02:10:14 That's the formula. Vulnerability plus acceptance equals intimacy. And so I had a certain kind of intimacy. with the guys in the rooms because there was acceptance in the face of my vulnerability. This should be something that every Christian community

Starting point is 02:10:28 is able to exercise. Unfortunately, none of the Christian communities that I was in was able to exercise that, were able to exercise that, even to the smallest degree. They were all completely secular responses. Every religious institution, organization, or group that I was a part of,

Starting point is 02:10:42 their response was completely 100% and thoroughly secular inside and out without remainder. That was, I think, part of the organization. version of the psychosis was, I could not believe that that was the case. Well, thank God for the individuals that you've pointed to like Pruss and others who would, you know, it's like the man wounded on the street and the Good Samaritan comes along. 100%.

Starting point is 02:11:02 100%. You had some of them. 100%. And I wish I, God's on the street. I wish I knew how I got hooked up with 12 Step. You'd think that's... What was it like going there for the first time? Oh, man.

Starting point is 02:11:14 Yeah, you got. So... Was it in a stinky basement? No, it was in a... No, no. It was in a... It was in a Sunday school room of a local church. Close enough.

Starting point is 02:11:24 Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's the idea, because you see that in the movies, right? Yeah, yeah. And I'm inveterately early. Like you noticed today, I got here, like, quite early, 20 minutes early than the earliest thing that was moved back earlier than it was before. So I'm inveterately early. So I'm the first freaking guy there.

Starting point is 02:11:42 And I'm sitting here. First of all, I don't know. I can, it's the such and such room. And I'm like, I don't know where this room is. Got to find a janitor to find. about where that room is. Then I'm sitting there. And most people in life are late. So then the leader comes in like one minute before it starts. So it's me and this other guy. And we're sitting there waiting. And I have no idea what's, you know, it was super awkward. But once it got started,

Starting point is 02:12:08 you know, other people share and you're like, oh, okay, my experience is not fully unique. you know and so the ability to be vulnerable about who you really are and have people not hate you for that come on is like that's our deepest desire it's so crazy it is our deep every single human wants to be seen yep not rejected yep and there's we're so afraid will be rejected so we cover ourselves up yep this is why whenever i meet people who've been through essay or uh uh uh uh um, AA meetings, these sorts of things.

Starting point is 02:12:40 I just, I'm like, oh, there's a depth, there's a thickness to this person that I don't always encounter. Well,

Starting point is 02:12:47 it's because they're multi-dimensional because there's other people contributing. Like I said, I've done, I'm, I'm incapable of operating on my own. I'm,

Starting point is 02:12:54 I'm a person with great capabilities along multiple dimensions, incapable of functioning on my own. And, and in, in academics, it is a lone wolf thing. You think about collegiality.

Starting point is 02:13:06 I mean, what a joke. What a joke. Everybody's so focused on their own careers. Everybody's so focused on their own set of personal advancements that almost everybody's isolated. It's a freaking joke. This reminds me of a line from Descartes. He says something like, and I know he's not the only one to have said it, but no idea has been so strange that some philosopher somewhere hasn't thought it up. And again, the reason is is novelty. If I can defend some novel theory, then I can make my way to the top. Maybe that's a cynical way of looking at it. There's a lot of that going along because, like, there's certain philosophical problems I think have been solved. Yeah. But there's. But we refuse to let them.

Starting point is 02:13:45 Yeah, you know, that would kill a career if it's solved. Yeah. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of people out there writing about solved problems just because what the hell else are they going to do? What have you learned about the Lord Jesus through this whole experience? That it really is the the arms on the cross are open arms of welcome that he's just, like, you just can't shock Jesus. That beautiful. It is incredibly beautiful.

Starting point is 02:14:12 Oh, how old for a moment. Dude, your book. Your book. Jesus is our refuge? Yeah, man. Dude. I read that on a retreat this last year, I think I told you. He is our refuge, man.

Starting point is 02:14:23 Refuge. Run to him. I had... Lovely. I was like defending Christian... I was defending the Christian position. I think quite well. Not a week goes by that somebody doesn't write to me and say,

Starting point is 02:14:35 oh my God, your book. My brother-in-law was... or my brother or my mom or my sister or my dad or my uncle or my cousin. They were losing their faith. I gave him this or that that she wrote. And it really helped turn them around. Thank you so much. Okay, great.

Starting point is 02:14:47 Awesome. I'm super stoked about that. But I wasn't experiencing the benefits of that personally myself. Yeah. Because I was focused on what is going to get me tenure, what is going to get me grant money, what is going to get me? And a lot of it was benevolent, quite frankly, in a in a sort of self-centered way.

Starting point is 02:15:08 I truly, truly, truly love helping people and advancing their goodness. Like there's a lot of benevolence in me for that, but you've got to have power to help people. Yeah. And so what I told myself was, I'll do this so that I can get the power to help these people truly, truly benevolent motives.

Starting point is 02:15:29 Yeah. But what you got to do to get that power hurts you and lessens you. And so it doesn't, you know, in the end, was it worth it? I don't know. But it's not the right way to do it. You know, whatever good was achieved through me, you know, pursuing those power plays and playing the game. I did a lot of it.

Starting point is 02:15:52 I know for a fact I did a ton of good. Was it worth it? I don't know. But it wasn't the right way to do it. Even if it did do more good than harm. And it sounds like now that you've come through all of this, you're saying, You know, it's like that oh, happy fault that merit. Oh, Felix Culpa, 100%.

Starting point is 02:16:09 That's how you feel. There's, I, my life has, my life could not, you could, there's no amount of money to get me to go back to that way before. Partly I said, because I've got this, I mean, Eleanor is such a blessedly wonderful, amazing, uplifting, beautiful, brilliant, angelic, inspiring child. cannot imagine life without her. But part of it's also just like, I'm not living for the, I'm not living for the little pills, the little pez dispenser of attaboys.

Starting point is 02:16:44 Come on. Like I used to, you know. Now, I'm not, I got a long way to go. Yeah, got a whole long ways to go. It's helpful. But at least, at least I'm not fundamentally living for affirmation in the way that I did for. Yeah, because it was that like, right?

Starting point is 02:16:59 30 years. It's, you know, I'm sure there are some people who are less interested in affirmation than others. And then some are addicts to it. You want to use that word or not. And it sounds like that's something you might say of yourself. So to go from being addicted to affirmations to being the focus of everyone's scorn. Oh yeah. Psychosis. What is, yeah, what does that feel like? What's psychosis? Dissociation. I literally, I went through a period of time where I literally had no idea it was real and it was not. I would go into these, um, these, uh, kind of like hallucinations, but they would,

Starting point is 02:17:33 seemed to last days, if not weeks, very, very clear timelines. I mean, I could, I could, when I came out of them, I could narrate. What is it? What, can you tell me? But they were like 10 minutes. Like, what happened? What, what do you? Um, most of the time it would involve like things working out. Are you in bed? I would be laying on the couch. Is it like a daydream on steroids? Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. I'd be on the couch because I spent like, I literally don't know. I have no idea how long it was. I was dissociated for an undetermined period of time. I think I asked my wife one time how long it was and she told me about this is it's been years since I thought about any of this stuff.

Starting point is 02:18:08 Yeah, yeah. Um, and are you just not responsive or what's when you're what you said your wife was sort of Yeah, I mean, I would just, yeah, kind of a thousand miles sitting on the couch, a thousand miles there. And, and I would kind of, so, so I would come out of the psychotic episode that was kind of like you said, a daydream on steroids. And there were, they were usually things working out. Usually it would be me talking to an injured party and having some sort of reconciliation.

Starting point is 02:18:33 And coming out of that, it's tough. Because all of it was very realistic. It's exactly what I would have said. It's exactly what I would have expected them to say in their best selves. And then you come out of it and you're like, oh, shoot. That didn't happen. They didn't happen. I couldn't have.

Starting point is 02:18:49 I'm on the couch. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Super bummer. Wow. Major bummer to continue. It's like torture almost to continually go through this imaginative reconciliation with all these people,

Starting point is 02:19:01 injured parties in both directions, people who wrong me, people I wrong. people we wronged each other, quite frankly. And then to wake up and be like, how long have I been here? You know, 10 minutes? I could tell you like day by day what happened in the last, you know, week of this hallucination. Like, I could take exactly what happened. On the first day, we did this, second day we did this, third day we did this. Nope.

Starting point is 02:19:24 And it would take me, it would take me longer to write out the script of what happened. How wild and ironic that an epistemologist would have to go something like this. Yeah, continually. unsure what reality is. What's the, what's the, what's the, what's your opinion on drugs for psychosis and these sorts of things? Man. How do those two things intersect?

Starting point is 02:19:44 I've, I've, I've, like psych. But what I mean is like drugs and therapy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so big topic. Um, so I was on depa coat, uh, for a long time for, uh, bipolar one. Um, that was another good thing that came out of this was I'm like, tell me what's, Tell me what's wrong with me. Please tell me something wrong.

Starting point is 02:20:08 Please tell me what's wrong. So psychiatric definition of bipolar one. And I was on depicote impulse suppression for a while to just like ground me. Right. And so there's, but I'm off of it. Is that helpful at the time? Yeah, because I needed, I needed stabilization. But you felt it.

Starting point is 02:20:25 There was a noticeable difference? Not from the inside. It just turns out I didn't do certain things. From the inside, you can't tell the difference. You just, it just turns out you don't do things. I was told, you know, afterwards. I was, when I was trying to make amends to people, I was, people would tell me certain things that I did. Zero recollection of having done those things.

Starting point is 02:20:43 Don't doubt it one little bit. Negative things yourself. Yeah, like one girl, a neighbor of mine who were very good friends and she was very cold to me for a long time. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm going to this process. I'm in 12 stuff. I'm going on making amends. I have no idea what I did to come between us. This is before the burnout happened.

Starting point is 02:21:04 No, no, this is after. It's after. the drugs, forgive me, I'm losing the... This was, yeah, I was on, I was on... Okay. Devocode at the time, yeah. All right. Going through 12-step trying to make amends and trying to...

Starting point is 02:21:12 Oh, of course, of course. Sorry. The hell I did. And she says, oh, you mean like licking my face in the middle of the grocery store? Oh, my gosh. And I'm like, I did that? She's like, yeah. There were, it was coconut water samples being given out at H.E.B.

Starting point is 02:21:28 And she took one and had like a going down her face, and I just licked it off her face. And why did you do that? I don't know. Was it the drug you were on? No, no, no. This was before. Before you were on the drugs. Yes, this was me on drugs on making amends to people during 12 step.

Starting point is 02:21:45 And she's telling me what I had done in the past to why she was acting coldly toward me now. Zero recollection. Have no recollection of it to this day. I do remember the day. Like I remember being in the store with her. What I'm trying to ask, and I apologize, what I'm trying to ask is when you like this woman's face, which is not a sentence I thought I would have. have to audit today. Thank you. You didn't get up this morning thinking you're going to say that. What I'm asking is, was that during your 12-step on the drug thing? Or was this way before?

Starting point is 02:22:14 Before the crash out? Right. That's right. That's right. And so, and you don't know why you did that? No, it was just a bipolar. It was a manic episode. It was a manic episode. Oh, right. On a manic episode, you do the phrase they use all the time as risky behavior, um, feelings of grandiosity. I mean, look, this is one of this is, it was obvious that I was bipolar. I could do. with some feelings of grandiosity. It was obvious. When I'm on a manic swing, I can do anything, man. And guess what?

Starting point is 02:22:43 I did. I did. And, you know, Dan's saying, how are you doing this? The answer was, I'm manic. Did you know you were bipolar prior to all this? I didn't really understand what bipolar was. I grew up with that sort of... I still don't really know what it was.

Starting point is 02:22:57 I grew up with the like, sort of, I don't know where you get these ideas. Depression is sadness. Yeah. And bipolar means... setting your house on fire or whatever. Right. I didn't understand clinical diagnoses. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:10 So I had no idea that, that what I was experiencing was mania. Yeah. When I felt like I could do anything. Yeah. Exhibiting all sorts of risky behavior, not just relationally with other people, like, and that kind of stuff, just anything. I mean, I've always been in, you know, rock climbing, mountain biking, whitewater kayaking, just anything to-

Starting point is 02:23:34 Dopamine. Get the rush, right? Anything. Whole life based on that. God bless. No wonder she was cold to you. Yeah. No, it makes sense.

Starting point is 02:23:42 So she said that to you. How did you react? I apologize. I said, I'm honest to God, don't remember that. Honestly, I don't doubt you one bit, but I don't have the slightest recollection of it. Did your wife see you acting in a way that she thought something's wrong with him? At times, I'm sure. But, but again, what she saw primarily was because I've always been super extroverted.

Starting point is 02:24:01 Yeah. The jokester around, you know. You look at her face. That's what he does. And look, you know, prior to 2017, my crazy behavior

Starting point is 02:24:13 was widely, widely, uh, rewarded. It's like, oh, he's so crazy. He's so crazy.

Starting point is 02:24:20 Like Chris Farley, right? What happened in 2017? Well, the world changed. Everybody's perspective towards appropriateness completely,

Starting point is 02:24:26 completely changed. Okay, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, good,

Starting point is 02:24:29 yeah, yeah. Yeah, which had some positives and some negative. It had some positives and some, like everything. I was some positives and some negatives. And I was at the peak of a grown man can't lick a woman's face in the grocery store.

Starting point is 02:24:41 What the hell? Please don't say that. Sorry. Please don't say that. Oh, my God. But in general, in general, a lot of my wild and crazy behavior was rewarded. Life of the party. I see.

Starting point is 02:24:51 Right? Yeah. Wild and crazy guy. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, this was like, oh, he's such a fun guy. So you never know what he's going to do. You know, so you get, so you get rewarded for that. Sure. And, you know, this is, this is, look, everybody goes towards the praise and away from the flame.

Starting point is 02:25:08 Yeah, yeah. You know, everybody does that. I just happen to have a little bit more extreme personality due to that, that. So the drugs help stabilize you. Right. And then the therapies. Therapy and 12 step. Okay.

Starting point is 02:25:20 Yeah. We're right. And within all that, um, for sure, 12 step is the biggest thing. I mean, therapy helped CESAT help, psychiatric stuff. It helps for sure. But nothing like 12 step because you have a community. community of people who are just going to, you're just, they're not going to kick you out. I mean, I suppose eventually, if you just repeatedly refuse to reform in any way.

Starting point is 02:25:41 Yeah. Fine. But there, it is, you know, um, 12 step is a little better every day. 12 step is 1% better. 12 step is 24 hours at a time, one day at a time. Um, uh, 12 step is how many days can you go? You know, um, let's, let's try to, okay, you made it 30 days. Let's, let's do 31.

Starting point is 02:26:02 Let's do 60. 12 step is always solution-oriented. Now, that is a number one thing. One of the first things you'll hear in a 12-step meeting is we are solution-oriented. It's not about blame, shame, or any of that sort of stuff. Because blame and shame drive things underground where they fester and get worse. It's only the light of day that kills that sort of. Antiseptic lot of truth.

Starting point is 02:26:25 That's exactly right. And so having a group of people that I could be completely honest with about my problems, bad behavior, pathologies, because it's a combination of all of it, right? And having those people be like, on the one hand, they're going to hold you accountable because they're going to be like, you know, the first reaction is always, sorry to hear that, man. Get back up on your feet. You can do this.

Starting point is 02:26:50 You made it 90 days. You can make it 100 days. You can do this. But then that's the group. And then your sponsor is the one that's going to come on and say, okay, what bad choice? do you make to leave to this backsliding? You know, let's take a look at this. You know, so it's this perfect combination of like accountability and acceptance.

Starting point is 02:27:09 And this is what you would have hoped the church could do and the church could provide. And I think ultimately when you really dig deep into... I mean, in fairness, the 12 steps were... Absolutely, that's what I'm going to say, yes. By Catholics. It is... Whatever. And I understand people are skeptical because you go to some places and you might get some woo-woo there, but the basic 12 steps comes from the Catholic... 100%.

Starting point is 02:27:28 100%. And I was able to see that pretty clearly. So I was like, absolutely. It's just sad that it can't officially be that. It's sad that it has to be filtered through this other thing. It should be on the forefront of Christian, you know, health care. It's funny, isn't it? Because, you know, at Holy Mass, we say, you know, I confess to Almighty God and you, my brothers and sisters.

Starting point is 02:27:48 I mean, that's kind of what it is. But then if you would have like, oh, you're a sinner? Yeah, man, I'm a sin. It's a lot easier to say, I'm a sinner than to say, I'm a chronic masturbator. Yeah. No one likes to say, I love to masturbate. Yeah. big fan. But people say

Starting point is 02:28:00 with the sort of relative, I'm a sinner. Yeah. Are you how? In general. Not really. Yeah. Because no, I'm not struggling with anything. I'm fine, basically. Right. It's fine in general, but not in specific. That don't get me wrong. I understand. That is my favorite line in mass though. By far. 100%. And I'm one of those guys that we say me a culpe of me. I, you can hear me

Starting point is 02:28:17 thump on my, because I'm, for me, that's like, that is by far the most moving part of the mass for me. Easily, easily. But, yeah, so, you know, I was, you know, I'm off social media now for very good reasons. But at the time, I was like very forthcoming about my pornography addiction, you know. And the thing is when you, when you no longer fear that sort of judgment, because it kind of can't get any worse than so many people that say that your friends turn their back on you. Um, you use the freedom to say stuff like that and dude, the DMs. People, dude, the stuff.

Starting point is 02:28:49 Because, because most people who are DMing me are pretty much going to know that, I've done worse stuff than they have. So they're like, well, he's not going to judge me. I see. And so. Oh, that's good. I thought you were saying you get these abusive games. I do.

Starting point is 02:29:03 I do. I do. But what you're gay. And sometimes they're disappointing and sometimes they're like, whatever. You know, I thought what was so sad about the, uh, the debate you engaged in is that, that, that fella turned that on you, right? Like he, yeah, he brought up this stuff. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:29:14 You know. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know what I was getting into with that at all, like even a little bit. I'm so naive still. And so it's funny that somebody so worldly could be so naive. but like that world and the whole thing I was getting texts

Starting point is 02:29:29 from some other people in that environment saying you're doing great keep going lay it on don't give up you got him on the ropes keep punching

Starting point is 02:29:38 yeah I can show you those screenshots yeah and they're pretty brutal actually and it had been presented to me like oh here's this guy

Starting point is 02:29:47 he's a total bully here's some videos of him being a total jerk to really nice people and all that and they knew from other things things they'd seen that like you can't bully me. I can't happen. Can't happen. Right. You're not

Starting point is 02:30:00 going to outdo me, period. Not going to happen. Nobody around. Nobody anywhere is going to bully me, period. Do you regret offering to box him? Be honest. I think you should regret it personally. I think you shouldn't have said that. I think that came out of that place in you. That's probably right. That you want friends to correct. That's probably right. But I also understand why you did it. Well, I would say you shouldn't of, but... Yeah, so, so a big concept for me, and one of the things that my wife and I talk about a lot is the distinction between exculpation and intelligibility. Oh, what is...

Starting point is 02:30:33 I like that word. I don't know what exculpation. I don't know. Oh, you know? No, there's a lot of things I don't know. So, mea coppa, mea maxi mic, micawpa, right? So sin. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:30:42 So exculpation. Digging out. What does that mean? No, it means like, um, it's like, oh, I didn't do anything wrong. Ah. That's what exculpation means? Yeah, yeah. You're like, you're saying that I have culpid, as it were, I have sin?

Starting point is 02:30:56 No, I haven't. I am taking your culpa accusation and throwing it out the exit. I'm defending myself saying, I didn't do anything wrong. That's so, exculpation. I'm taking the mantle of sin, culpa, that you've put on me, and I'm taking it, wadding it up, throwing it away, saying, I didn't do anything wrong. Is it like the Wonder Woman cuffs? Like someone accuses you of something and you quipping. That's right.

Starting point is 02:31:21 Like I will not be. Like I will not be. Right. So you can say. So, so exculpation is saying, I didn't do anything wrong. Um, explicability is saying the thing that I did wrong is understandable. Yeah. It's like.

Starting point is 02:31:36 Yeah. You know, I don't wonder how people become addicted. Isn't I don't say, how can people be addicted? Yeah. It's not. That's wholly intelligible. So they can, yeah. So what we do, my wife and I to each other is without exculpating our own.

Starting point is 02:31:51 you know sin we say here's here's what can make this understandable to you yes and when we ask each each other to help me understand what made that attractive to you so it's it's it's it's like there's an explanation isn't justification that's 100% right that what it is yep yep that's right so so we want to understand one another yeah because we are like we ain't going nowhere right with 34 years together that's we're not going in right so so so but you can't do that either by denying that you're doing wrong or by failing to understand where that wrongdoing is coming from. Does ex-book, how do you say it? Exculpation.

Starting point is 02:32:28 Does exculpation always mean denying something that you actually did wrong or can you exculpate? No, sometimes you're right to. Sometimes you should, right? If you've been falsely accused, you should exculpate. And that's what makes so many things so hard because a lot of times it's a mix, right? It's like, okay, in, because I got the, you know how gossip and the 24-hour news cycle and Facebook.

Starting point is 02:32:50 But, Mops. Ever since I joined Daily Wire. Oh, my God. There's been people who've said things I think, okay, fair enough. I understand where you're coming from. But then there are things

Starting point is 02:32:58 that I like factually incorrect. Yeah, yeah. And I'm in an epistemic place to know it. I know that they can't possibly be. Right. And I wonder about the state of human being. Yeah. But they all come at once, right?

Starting point is 02:33:08 And so trying to untangle the, the accusations that are true from the ones that are false, but. And some are kind of true? Fair, exactly. from the ones that are made up with whole cloth. It's very messy.

Starting point is 02:33:23 One thing if you were the Blessed Virgin, you could go, actually, no. Right. With us, when people accuse us of something, there's always sometimes a little bit of truth in it. Not really, but kind of in some ways, but not others. And then there can be a sort of false humility where you accept the blame even when you shouldn't. Yeah. You accept most of the blame. Yeah, that's not helpful either.

Starting point is 02:33:42 That's totally unhelpful because your heart will never accept that. Your heart will never accept that. And that's why taking it back to apologetics, you know, my first mentor in apologetics was Norman Geisler. And I don't know if you know who Norman Geisler was. I read his book. I've heard some of his lectures. He seems lovely. He was a tommist. He's a tommist. He's a tommist. He was a deceased. He was a deceased. So he's very much a tomist now. He was my first real philosophical mentor. So I, he hand-selected me to be his, um, uh, research assistant at Liberty University at the Liberty Center for Research and Scholarship. It was in 1990. Yeah, yeah, this is 1990. You're Protestant?

Starting point is 02:34:18 Yeah. I was a, dude, dude, dude. So I graduated from high school in 1990. Right before I graduated my church, Southern Baptist Church, ordained me. Okay. Didn't know that. Yeah. Because I had the gift of the word. Yeah. I had the gift of the word. And so I went, you know, really to seminary right out of high school at Liberty University and studied with Norman Geistory. He had selected me to be his, what was he like? He was super cool, man. He was humble. It's not his reputation because he was was a dogged debater. And when he thought that somebody in the church, like Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Murray Harris,

Starting point is 02:34:54 were teaching heresy, who, you don't want to be in his way. Storm and Norman, right? So a lot of people actually didn't like him because of that. But in reality, super humble, super caring, super devoted. His wife, Barb played the piano. They'd have us over for dinner. Wonderful. He was great to his students, great to all the students,

Starting point is 02:35:11 helped so many of his colleagues, helped so many people come up. Super wonderful man, way more. than almost anybody really understood. Oh yeah, 100%. He was way better than hardly anybody recognized. Isn't this, it's an interesting trait of the brilliant man that he can, he can converse with the riff-raff in a way that doesn't make them feel like he's condescending. Yeah, and he was from Detroit. Lewis was like.

Starting point is 02:35:32 Absolutely. The best, the best there ever has been. So how did he respond when you were becoming Catholic? Did he care? He didn't actually like it because he didn't like it because he was a dedicated Protestant, no doubt about it. And I converted, I think right. before he had a book that came out on it where he was making, because, you know, a lot

Starting point is 02:35:51 of norm students did become Catholic. And that was like, he wasn't like super happy about that because it made people suspicious of his Protestant Thomism, right? So he had, it's kind of like, oh my God, so at Baylor when Tom Hibbs, the brilliant and talented Tom Hibbs

Starting point is 02:36:07 who was for a while president of Dallas, University of Dallas, he was the dean of the Baylor Honors College and it was just, it was like great book central. It was a golden moment, golden moment. A fertile ground for Catholics. Fertile. Yeah. And the thing is, right, that these young Protestant Baptist would come in and they'd say to the great books and become Catholic. There was no proselytization going on at all, like not even a little bit. Yeah. They just kept becoming Catholics and hordes. And so somebody was going to make a T-shirt something about, you know, Baylor, Baylor Honors College came in as a Baptist, left as a Catholic. And he was like, do not make that. Do not make that. Do not make that.

Starting point is 02:36:46 That T-shirt, because it's like, we're not trying to do this. This is just happening. Okay. When you encounter the truth of the Catholic faith in the great books, it just does it to you. Like, my conversion to Catholicism was largely just reading Ironias, reading the church fathers, over and over. And then going, oh, this is Catholicism. You know, it's like, it wasn't even like super, like fireworks going off. It was just like, oh, didn't see that coming.

Starting point is 02:37:14 This is Catholicism. well I guess I'm going to become Catholic you know it wasn't some big thing all of a sudden it was very like it was just like oh hmm didn't realize that yeah now I've learned that so I guess I'm going to become Catholic but he wasn't he was not thrilled about it all right let's this has been such a beautiful discussion and it went in a much more beautiful direction that I was hoping for but I it would it be okay if we just circled back to epistemology as we begin to slowly wind down what if you be the Christian and I'll be the atheist okay okay we live in a

Starting point is 02:37:45 chaotic world and we need a story to make sense of things. So that experience you had as a young man was simply that. Yeah. You were impressionable. You adopted a story that isn't actually true, but made sense for you, made sense of the world for you, good for you. Yeah. And now you're seeking to defend it so your life doesn't further unravel. Yeah. And something can be coherent and false. For sure. Star Wars trilogy, let's say the beginning one was was coherent. Yeah. So sure, I'm sure you can come up with a way to prove internally the consistency of Christianity, but there's actually no good reason to think that God exists. Yeah, no, that's, I'm sure from your perspective, that's what you, that's probably the explanation

Starting point is 02:38:25 that makes most sense to you of your experience of me and other Christians from the inside of your experience. So I have, and I can say the same thing about you, I can say atheism is really sort of the biggest Oedipal complex there's ever been. The what? Edipus. What's that? Oedipus who ended up inadvertently sleeping with his mother in Oedipus Rex from Sophocles.

Starting point is 02:38:46 Explain this to me? So the Oedipus complex is Freud's, Freud borrowed it from, I'm pretty sure it was Sophocles. I see. This is why people say Freudian slip when they said. That's right. Yeah. So he says, there's this weird, like, way in which people are in love with their mothers and therefore they see their fathers as enemies.

Starting point is 02:39:03 He's trying to partly explain teenage rebellion against the father. It's because you're in love with your mother and your father's the, the, the, the enemy and you have to you surp him. In other words, what you're doing is you're seeing my genetic fallacy and giving me another one. Yeah. What I'm saying is we've each got, we can each come up with a just so story for the other person. I can say you are in love with, in this case, Mother Nature. And you want to conquest Mother Nature through technology and self-advancement, things like that.

Starting point is 02:39:30 Father God kind of gets in the way of that project. So of course you want to cut, you want to slay your father because that's what it is. You want to kill your father. You want to kill off Father God so that you can live out your life of earthly conquest. free of, you know, mental anguish of thinking that there's going to be consequences, punishments, or that you're even doing anything. All right. So I'll respond and say, I don't think that's true at all.

Starting point is 02:39:52 I think that there are many things that I would like to believe. I would like to believe that I'll see my loved ones in a future fairyland. There's just no good reason to think. Yeah, yeah. Well, I would like to believe that I could do whatever the hell I wanted in life with no possibility of consequences afterwards. But as an atheist, that's not what I'm saying. I understand.

Starting point is 02:40:09 Well, sure, afterwards. Well, I'm just, but I'm saying, but I also, you, there's also things about atheism. I would love it if atheism would. I would be the most, you know. Heedynistic, I don't think you would be. There was a time when it would be. Yeah. There was a time when it would be.

Starting point is 02:40:26 But it's certainly an attractive thing to think, you know what, I can do anything I want. Right. So we could trade this. But I'm the atheist. I think that's not my experience. My experience is I want to live virtuously as an atheist. and when I do, I find that I'm rewarded. But the bottom line is there's no good reason to think that God exists.

Starting point is 02:40:45 I'd be happy if you had one. I just don't think there is one. Right. So I'm saying at the second order level, we can each come up with explanations of each other's lives, experiences, beliefs, predilections, and life paths. Okay? So we can go back and forth about that all day. Sure. Or we could look at token reasons and treat them just all on their own without all the psychology.

Starting point is 02:41:07 Fair enough. So I'll put my Freud. All right. And you put your Freud away, and we'll just look at reasons. Good. And what I'll do is, I'll say, here are a set of propositions that bear a certain logical relation to a special proposition that God exists, or that Jesus rose from the dead, or that Jesus is the son of God.

Starting point is 02:41:27 Yep. And then I will tell you, you can evaluate, you can tell me if you think the argument is valid or at least probability preserving. And then we can go through the premises one by one, and you can say, what do you think about them and then we can just only look at the reasons and all the psychology behind are you prepared to do that now i am certainly prepared to do that give me any argument so the simplest one i don't even know what god means first of all yeah well a lot of times so david louis again one of the most you know widely thought to be one of the one of the best philosophers the 20th century had this great

Starting point is 02:41:59 statement he's like if you want to know what the conclusion of an argument means just look at the premises Like, what follows from the premises? That's what the conclusion means. Okay. It means, because there's an ancient statement, there's an ancient phrase that there's nothing in the conclusion that was not first in the premises. Right. Very ancient statement.

Starting point is 02:42:19 So, so let's just see, let's just look at the premises and let the premises define the term. Okay, fair enough. Okay? So this is a very popular one right now, you know, sometimes called the Kalam cosmological argument, at least a version of it. And it says that everything that begins to exist

Starting point is 02:42:32 has a cause outside of itself. The entire space-time continuum, began to exist. Therefore, the entire space-time continuum has a cause outside of itself. So what does the conclusion tell us? The conclusion tells us there's a supernatural originator, supernatural in a very precise sense, outside of all space and time, originator in a very specific sense, caused it to come into being. And, you know, as Aquinas always said, and this, by this, all men recognize God. It's certainly a divinity. It's certainly a God-like thing. It's certainly supernatural. I don't even care about the word. You can call it, God. You can call it, not God. I don't care what you call it.

Starting point is 02:43:07 but it's a supernatural something outside of the space time continuum that is going to get us down the line towards deism in a way and away from atheism and naturalism. So it's moving my direction. I would say as an atheist that I think the world is more curious and wonderful than you apparently do, because I'm willing to even suspend belief in the first premise. I don't know if everything that begins to exist has a cause. Maybe the world's more mysterious than you think it is. And you are no more a scientist than I am. And so I don't think either of us has any good reason to think the universe did begin to exist.

Starting point is 02:43:40 Well, certainly. Maybe that will be overturned in 20 years. So I'm not willing to stake my life and change my sex life and my partying based on this recent scientific hypothesis. Yeah. Well, we can certainly see what happens in the future. But right now, the consensus is the space time continuum does not, has not existed forever. Is this the consensus? I don't know.

Starting point is 02:44:00 Is it? It's still the consensus overall. Yeah. I mean, because all of the, all of the. Again, I'm the atheist. I'm not breaking character yet. When you look at the models that deny that, they're very speculative, very speculative. And if you go to the individuals who are proposing these models of a universe that has always existed or infinite oscillations or whatever, they're pretty honest when you go to them in person and say, do you believe this?

Starting point is 02:44:28 Do you think this is more likely than not? None of them, not one of them will say yes. They always say the same. These are just models. These are just models. And these models are plausible and they cover some data. None of them. I'm not aware of a single one that will just outright say, yes, this is more likely to be true than to be false.

Starting point is 02:44:47 Its probability is greater than 50 percent or especially its probability is high enough to, to exceed the minimum level of rational acceptance. They don't believe it. A lot of times they'll say, well, we don't really believe hypotheses. We just propose them and explore them. That's what a lot. Because when I was at the University of Rochester at the time, they had the strongest, laser in the world. I think Rochester and Santa Barbara go back and forth. And the importance of that is you have to have a laser to do high energy physics to explore particle physics to explore the early

Starting point is 02:45:15 origins of the universe, right? So we had a physics and philosopher Brownback lunch, I think it was every Wednesday. So I've talked to and sat down with some of the best particle physicists in the world. Some of them also studied with Janes at St. Louis University who also did major groundbreaking work in probability theory and scientific inference. And so I I've met with some of the best of the best. Okay. And they're very characteristic. And then in other conference, a great guy on this is Luke Barnes.

Starting point is 02:45:42 Luke Barnes is probably the best guy I've talked to him. He's so great. Luke is great, as a human, as a scholar. Seems like a good bloke. He's a good bloke. He's a great bloke. All right. Because he's a good bloke doesn't mean he's right.

Starting point is 02:45:52 No, it doesn't. But he's... All right. You're saying the evidence right now, at least, points in the direction. Now, what do you mean by space-time continuum? Well, you can either give an, uh, uh, uh, exactly. definition of that, but the best thing to do is to think of that phrase in terms of how it functions in a canonical set of sentences in a certain canonical dialogue. So there are, there are some

Starting point is 02:46:19 fuzzy boundaries of reference for that term. But then there's this thing called supervaluationism, which says that in a, there's other models besides supervaluationism. But the idea is basically that a vague term that has some looseness in its reference, you can say, okay, well, let's let's let's let the set of all things that that term ranges over. And let's see if, okay, we have persistification one, precissification two, persistification three, all the way through in.

Starting point is 02:46:48 And let's see on how many of these persistifications, this proposition is true, okay? This is a, this is a, Bost von Frausin came up with this, who's also a Christian philosopher, Catholic, super interesting guy. Dude, super interesting guy. writes books on taro, does short,

Starting point is 02:47:05 writes stories about cats, is Alvin Planiga's top rock climbing partner. This dude, Boss Van Frazzit, is amazing. I want to know him. Great. Super, super smart. But the point is what? The point is that you don't have to be able

Starting point is 02:47:20 to define a term to assign truth value to sentences that contain it. If and when every admissible persistification of that term, you can make it precise this way, sentence still true.

Starting point is 02:47:32 Make it precise way number two, sentence still true. Precisely way three, still true. And you can even do it proportionally. You can say on 87% of admissible precisifications of this vague term, the sentence comes out as true. So it's got this high proportion

Starting point is 02:47:47 of verisimilitude, which is just almost another way of saying it's probability of truth, except verisimilitude is a degree of truthiness, as it were. Okay. So there's all sorts of formal models for cases of theoretical terms,

Starting point is 02:48:02 I still don't have what space-time continuum means. You don't have to know what it means. You just have to know. Well, you're telling me that the space-time continuum began to exist. And I don't know what that covers. Are you trying to say that nothing existed prior to what they call the Big Bang? Nothing physical. Nothing physical.

Starting point is 02:48:17 I don't even know what physical. Yeah. Well, but again, that's like, look, you're the naturalist. Define naturalism. Like, you know, famously, that's hard. Physicalism, there's a one of my former colleagues wrote an article called physicalism as an attitude. Because nobody can define what it means. Because there's this thing called Hempel's Dilemma.

Starting point is 02:48:34 Okay? Hempel's Dome. What is physics? What does physics say is true? Well, what physics says today is almost certainly false. Really? Yeah, because it's, well, at least inductively, it's called the pessimistic induction. Everything physics has ever said has turned out to be false.

Starting point is 02:48:50 So probably what it's saying now is false. So all that exists is what a complete and correct because physicalists, I mean, I studied with the best defender of physicalism ever, Andrew Melnick. He wrote the book called a physicalist manifesto. And a standard way of defining physicalism ontologically is saying that all that exists is what a complete and correct physics would say there exists. Okay, so you define the physical in terms of physics.

Starting point is 02:49:18 Okay. Physics isn't that which is about the physical. The physical is that about which physicists write. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But then you get what's called Himple's dilemma. Like, if you mean, what physics says

Starting point is 02:49:30 is all that's real, the only thing it's real is what physicists can tell you about. You either mean what physicists are saying now, in which case it's almost certainly false, or what physicists are going to say in the future, in which case we don't even know what it is. So really, it's the physicalist that has the problem here, not the the theist. You don't have the problem, but you're telling me that everything began to exist. And yet you shouldn't you have to know what physics? Look, if you don't know what it means, then I'm going to just say, I know what I'm a person.

Starting point is 02:49:56 I know what it is from the inside to be a person. And I'm saying personhood preceded everything. personhood preceded everything. And if you think there's something else besides personhood, for one thing I could say, what do you think exists beyond personhood? This glass? You know?

Starting point is 02:50:10 Well, I understand that you have a certain set of experiences. You have a visual impression as of a certain sort of partial cylinder. You have a certain tactile experiences, certain auditory experiences. But that doesn't mean there's a glass there. It might not be a glass, but is it a person? It's a non-person. So things other than persons exist?

Starting point is 02:50:31 Well, not only if that thing exists, which you haven't convinced me of. You've convinced me that you are having certain experiences. Now, if you want to go beyond your experiences and say, in addition to that, there's this thing called a glass. We can talk about that. Okay. But, I mean, that's way less clear to me than that I'm a person and that you're a person. All right. So personhood is fundamental and prior to everything else.

Starting point is 02:50:50 If you think there's something beyond persons that exist, I'm all ears. Well, okay. Well, why can't I just say it's, it, uh, it seems like. like it bloody exists and I know it's not a person. So maybe it's, I don't know what it is, but I know it's not a person and I know it's something. Okay, let's suppose that's true. I mean, I'm not opposed to that.

Starting point is 02:51:10 Suppose that's true. So what makes it the kind of thing that it is? What turns out that about the only way to define, you know, a material object is that it, it obeys the laws of physics. Okay. That I can tell you that it's a, what kind of thing, it's a material thing, because when I take its mass, I can calculate the right,

Starting point is 02:51:30 rate it, which it will drop. Technically, I can calculate its gravitational attraction to everything else. If I know it's, you know, crystalline composition, I can tell you what sort of force it will take to crush it. What makes it a material object is my ability to characterize it in terms of the laws of physics. Okay, fine. Then how about I say, then your argument proves too much? Not only have you not proven that God exists, you have not proven that things exist. You've just made me a skeptic about things other than my own person. Well, that might be progress in a way. because it gets us to the vision where we understand that people are prior to things and that the physical world that I know the existence of personhood way better than I know the

Starting point is 02:52:09 existence of non-personhood. Because this I have to kind of think about, you know, because the laws of physics are formulated by physicists, they're, you know, their generalizations of observations. So everything about, you know, physics is, if I define this object as physical in virtue of its relationship to the physical laws and the laws of physics are, um, mental generalizations over the observations, i.e. mental states of physicists that are, you know, have to be by definition of that, persons who have phenomenal consciousness, then I'm still winning the game. Because if you go back to like Lewis's miracles in the first few chapters, that's kind of what

Starting point is 02:52:46 he's really getting at there is that personhood, consciousness, agency, this is all prior to the natural. Because remember the chapter, I think it's chapter three, the cardinal difficulty with naturalism. And that's, that's, I'm not even a guy that wants to, I mean, I'm happy to, I'll stand by, whatever you want, any definition you can, you can, we can agree on on space time continuum, whatever way you want to persistify that, it's going to be something that on the consensus of physics is finite and limited. All right. So suppose I get bored or I realize I'm not smart enough to continue discussing the second premise, I'll just deny the first one. Let's go back to what I said earlier. I think the world is more interesting than you clearly do. Maybe it's

Starting point is 02:53:27 possible things can begin to exist without a cause. Interestingly, this is kind of what Bertrand Russell did with Frederick Copplston. He says, my physicist friends assure me that there are things that happen without a prior cause. Yeah. What's that fellow's name? The poor fellow who tried to debate Craig in Australia and got absentee. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:53:45 God bless. It's pretty bad. Yeah. What was it? I forget his name. He tried to make the case. Anyway, so suppose I'm not even interested in science showing that particles can come into existence out of nothing.

Starting point is 02:53:55 I just think, sure, a cat might be able to come into existence out of nothing. of nothing. And there's no prove me wrong. And if you can't prove me wrong, then maybe it's not about proving you wrong. That's my vocabulary. It is proof is really not in my vocabulary. It's more, it's probabilities in my vocabulary. So the, so there's lots of ways of signing probabilities, but in, in this realm, it's, it, the probabilities are usually assigned by proportions of cases, right? So, okay, um, when we think about what, what, what's our numerator? Okay. Well, this is, we're doing metaphysics. We're doing quantification. We're doing, is wide open. So our denominator here is basically events, right? So of the total set of

Starting point is 02:54:33 events that we're aware of, how many of those events have occurred without causes? I don't know. And what's the proportion of those that have occurred without causes to those we've observed to have causes? Well, it's... Sure, most things seem to have had a cause in my life. Okay, I'll grant you that. Like really hardcore, right? Like super hardcore. And so you can do this on the basis of what's called non-monotonic reasoning. Okay. And so, or what's called de-monitonex reasoning. default logic. And Bob Coons, another brilliant philosopher, blindingly brilliant philosopher from UT, Dan Bonnevac's colleague, also a convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism. We had some really fascinating conversations at the time he converted. Wonderful, wonderful human being

Starting point is 02:55:14 in addition to being a brilliant philosopher. And he published, gosh, I don't know when, but he published a version of the cosmological argument that takes that into account. He's like, okay, fine. We've got logics that are based on, they're not based on exceptionalist metaphysical principles. We say, okay, we have a default inference based on proportion of observation that if something has, if an event occurs, then probably it had a cause. And the probably is in proportion to our observed events that have occurred without causes, to observe defense with causes. So it's like super high principle.

Starting point is 02:55:46 The principle has super high probability. All right. And so he said, okay, so overwhelmingly likely if an event occurs, then it had a cause. This event occurred, therefore, overwhelmingly likely it had a cause. But not definitely. And so maybe I'll hold out hope that while other things in our everyday experience had causes, maybe the universe didn't. As our good theistic friend, and he is, he was a theist, David Hume said, the wise man proportions is a belief to the strength of the evidence. And in this case, your credence that an event occurred with a cause versus without a cause should be exactly proportioned to the subset of total

Starting point is 02:56:22 occurrent events that have had causes in observation to those who have not. That's a bigger probability. That is 99. Point, about as many nines as you can list of events that have observed to have occurred, have been assigned causes, and therefore you ought to maintain that probability. Because if I tell you, we've got this big jar of marbles, maybe that's what I'll get you for your set. It's a big jar of marbles. Because when we're doing probability theory, we usually take our examples from marbles. Okay. So if I've got this jar, jar marbles down here, and I'm reaching in, and I pull out a black marble, and then I reach in, and I pull out another black marble. And after a hundred marbles, two are white and 98 are black, and I'm, and I, you hear me?

Starting point is 02:57:07 Yep. And I'm like, okay, I've got it. Black, sure. It's probably. Yeah, probably. And if you want to get more specific, you can say probably about 98% or thereabouts, right? But certainly overwhelmingly likely that the probability you ought to assign that the next unknown marble that's going to be drawn from the jar is something like the proportion that's been observed. And that's just how rational people act. So you can hold out hope and you can be a mysterian about it. And that's fine. You can light candles and burn incense. But the rational man proportions is belief to the strength of the evidence. And in this case, we can do it on basically frequentist, you know, on a frequentist notion.

Starting point is 02:57:47 All right. And of course, they try to turn that around on the resurrection and try to use it against us on the resurrection case, but I don't think that works in their case. Suppose I just say, all right, so we've got two premises. The first may be overturned, so I'm willing to go along with that. That's fine. If I may, because remember, I published a lot in linguistic pragmatics, which is where you have implications that are non-simantic implications.

Starting point is 02:58:14 So if, you know, earlier, finding a bathroom in this place is... You got to walk a wise. Oh, my word. I mean, it's like, yeah, without a guide, you're just going to pee your pants. So, um, so... Which is kind of why Thomas says we need divine revelation. Okay. You will peat your pants if you just go on raw philosophy.

Starting point is 02:58:34 That's exactly right. So if I say, hey, where's the bathroom? Mm-hmm. And you say, go through there and take a right and then go left through the studio. and it's just to your right past there, okay? And then I go there, and there's a sign on the Lord that says, out of order. And I come back to you and I say,

Starting point is 02:58:53 that bathroom was out of order. You're like, I know. I'm like, what do you mean? You know, you didn't ask me where there was a functioning bathroom, right? You'd be a philosopher about it. That's, you know, that's invalid. Like, it is widely recognized that you violated.

Starting point is 02:59:05 Now, semantically, you didn't say anything false, right? When I said, oh, about the toilet. Right. But according to Grice's Maximum, Grice's maxims of conversational relevance, you did violate a norm. You violated a norm of language. You knew exactly what I meant.

Starting point is 02:59:24 And this is all demonstrable, okay? So when you say, okay, well, I'll say, I'm going to hold out that maybe that will be overturned. Well, maybe in this case, it's almost like a Moten Bailey fallacy. You're saying maybe meaning a maybe big enough that I can withhold a cent. When the reality is semantically,

Starting point is 02:59:42 no, no, no, no, no. This isn't that kind of maybe. This is a maybe in the sense of like, like, so you're saying there's a chance, right? This is Jim Carrey, maybe. This isn't like, well, maybe. No, no, no, no, no. All right.

Starting point is 02:59:55 That's violating the rules of language. This isn't maybe. This is like technically, possibly not 100% certain, but it's overwhelmingly likely. And in ordinary language, we don't take the negation of a proposition that is overwhelmingly likely and say of its negation, maybe. Okay.

Starting point is 03:00:18 That's not how language works. All right. And part of being like, it's funny. Okay. Then at this point then what I say, fine, fine, okay. But I'm still going to say maybe and then I'm also going to add to that, I'm not convinced. That's the psychological fact about you that I cannot help. You know, you might have also other psychological things about you.

Starting point is 03:00:37 You might have an edible complex, you know, you might experience generalize and anxiety. and you might be afraid of the dark. These are all things about you that I can sympathize with as a human being, but they are epistemically irrelevant to this case. Because I am telling you, man, when it's apologetics, it is we have premises and we have rules of inference and we have evidence, and that's it.

Starting point is 03:00:57 And that cuts both ways, because I've got zero truck with phoedism or any Christian epistemology that reduces the burden on the Christian. Because my fundamental animus from beginning to end is, religious belief, we do not lower the standards. No way. Now, that's on the one hand. Now, on the other hand, you know, you look at standard taught canons of scientific inference. You know, you can't get

Starting point is 03:01:25 to religious belief from those. And that's right. But that's because these ridiculous things that are taught in schools about the scientific method and this supposed fact opinion distinction are horrible epistemology. Is this like Joe Rogan, can you like put something up on a screen? folks at home, you know, Google fact opinion distinction and look at the slides that are being taught to. Maria, let's throw that up right now. We'll do it. It's horrible. It's the worst thing.

Starting point is 03:01:52 Look at the deaf. Look at any grade school or high school or even freshman college slide deck on the scientific method. You're right. That can't justify religious claims. But it also can't justify scientific claims. Because if you look at the great scientific claims throughout time, Copernican Revolution, Newtonian's theory of universal gravitation, Darwin's origin of species, all of these great major theories, they didn't follow the scientific method or anything like it. What they followed, they were neither deductive, like in Aristotle, nor were they any standard canon of inductive reasoning, like a numerative induction or anything like that. There was what's called abductive reasoning, a term by...

Starting point is 03:02:36 Explanation. Charles Standard Peace, inference is the best explanation. Inference to the best explanation, IBE. They exemplify a certain finite set of theoretical virtues. And that's how, that's the best rational reconstruction of all three of those scientific revolutions and every major scientific inference. The inference to dark matter. The inference to dark energy.

Starting point is 03:02:57 The inference to black holes. The inference to corks. The inference to the Higgs boson. All really cool science does. not go by the scientific method. It goes by inference of the best explanation. And inference to the best explanation, it turns out, can be explicated in a Bayesian framework, Jonas Stupac, at his brilliant philosopher, I think he's in Utah now, went to University of Pittsburgh, absolutely brilliant guy, wonderful guy. I think he just, yeah, he did convert to the Catholicians,

Starting point is 03:03:26 too. Hmm, notice a pattern here? And he's done some amazing work showing that inference of the best explanation. I started to do this in grad school, got sidetracked on this linguistic stuff that was super hot at the time. He stayed the course, worked on IBE and Bayesianism, did amazing work, including the experimental work. And so you've got Bayesianism, which is the best persistification of, the best rational reconstruction of the best science.

Starting point is 03:03:51 And if you take that, and then you apply that across the board to all disciplines, whether it be historiography, philosophy, religion, as in Swinburne, or even one of the first times I saw this, what got me going on this in grad school, the first time in my master's, rather than my Ph.D., was reading C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image. It's his lecture notes in medieval and Renaissance literature from Cambridge. And he was doing some literary criticism talking about authorship issues. And as he was reasoning through, you know, these arguments about, oh, what is the

Starting point is 03:04:28 authorship of this text? Same thing with biblical criticism. I was like, this is just IBE. This is just IBE. This is exact same thing Swinburnt's doing to prove or to argue for God's existence. This is exact same thing that Newton did to argue for his universal law of gravitation. It's the exact same thing that Copernicus did to reverse our, you know, go geocentric to heliocentric. It's one pattern of reasoning exhibited all throughout all disciplines. And so there's one method, one set of standards of evidence for everybody. I see. So you think as an atheist I'm demanding to hire burden? Or not maybe too higher burden, but a different level.

Starting point is 03:05:07 The wrong, the wrong method. Just the wrong method. I think you're using the wrong method. I think you're committed to the wrong method. And that the problem with that method is not only, it might be successful in it really rules out my stuff, but at the end of the day, it also rules out your stuff. It also rules out your stuff.

Starting point is 03:05:24 And as a matter of fact, a lot of the early logical positivist, the early Vienna school, some of the founders of the Vienna school, actually were almost solipsistic because they were like, hey man if i can't prove you exist that's right that's right that's right the early the history of early 20th century analytic philosophy is fascinating and the the epistemology that they developed in their early the scientific epistemology that came out of that the earliest parts of the venus vina school are very subjectivist very subjective we're we're not going to go past and when you think about it so take take um any kind of hardcore science you want even the stuff that does

Starting point is 03:06:03 maybe get captured by that ridiculous, you know, scientific method stuff in grade school. Chemistry, right? And so we want to know some discovery in chemistry is made and you say, okay, well, what's the evidence for that? Read the article, okay, what's the evidence for that, what's the evidence for that?

Starting point is 03:06:18 What's the evidence for that? It's all going to come down to, this is now a microscope. Right? Yep. It's all good. I now, I see a pattern of red specks oscillating within a blue field.

Starting point is 03:06:30 Okay, that's what it comes back to. It comes back to some guy or gal. Jim. Or gin, right? Hosting phenomenal qualia. They're having a certain experience. If you follow, I don't care

Starting point is 03:06:44 what physical chemistry, I don't care how mundane the scientific hypothesis, when you keep saying, well, what's that based on, what's that based on, what's that based on, if you become Socrates like that and do the annoying Socratic iteration,

Starting point is 03:06:54 well, why I think that, why I think that, why I think that, why I think that, why I think that. It's going to come back to some guy or girl looking in a microscope or a telescope, having certain phenomenal experiences. All comes back to that.

Starting point is 03:07:05 You like how I brought everything all back to the beginning? It was beautiful. I've so thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. Where can people learn more about you? Don't learn more about me. Okay. Well, forget you. What book might you want to shell at this point?

Starting point is 03:07:18 There you go. I like that a lot better. Fortunately, my book, The Problem of Animal Pain written in 2014 is still like, you know, it's very gratifying that 10 years later, 12 years later now, the book is still, you know, well-discussed. I read it again last year in 2025 and I was like, wow, you know, this is pretty good, you know. It's been so long since I wrote it that

Starting point is 03:07:41 a lot of it was, it's like learning stuff again. That's a book that does, and the only reason I I bring it out primarily is because it does have a primer on epistemology, including a certain explication of Bayesian epistemology that I call narrative epistemology, because I think what is happening fundamentally in epistemology, even like the hardcore, analytic, mathematical-based, basing epistemology, formal epistemology, is still, it's just a rarefied version of telling stories. And a good story takes a lot of diverse facts and ties them together in a single narrative. The compelling thing about the origin of species, because like you read Newton and you read Copernicus, it's pretty hard, it's pretty tough going. But reading origin of species is easy.

Starting point is 03:08:25 And reading origin of species reads like, almost like an adventure novel. It's a good story. And by the end of it, you're like, you know what? Yeah. Yeah, I think this is really plausible. And that's what happened to people at the time. The reason it was convincing at the time was ordinary people could read it and understand it. And it tells a good story.

Starting point is 03:08:44 It takes all these diverse sets of facts that are kind of individually surprising on their own, weaves them into a single coherent narrative that becomes convincing. and has a tightness and a sequentialness to it that I think makes it a good argument for its conclusion. And I think that's what's happening when C.S. Lewis argues that Shakespeare did write this or didn't write that. I think it's what happens when clinicians are trying to make a diagnosis. I think it's the same thing happening all throughout. And so this little, I haven't seen very many little short primers on this published anywhere. And so that's why I put that in there because you can't really find a little primer on narrative

Starting point is 03:09:28 epistemology. And so I would recommend it's in there. It's in there. The problem of animal pain. Yeah. God bless you. Anything else? Well, I don't like to shamelessly self-promote.

Starting point is 03:09:39 The problem is so much stuff is in journals behind paywalls. It's really a bummer. I'm hoping to put together a collection of my essays to make that stuff more available. I'd recommend people check out that conversation you had with again, Stump. What's his name? Jump. Jump. Jump.

Starting point is 03:09:52 Tom Jump. Because I have never seen Tom hesitate or squirm before. Physically sweat. Yeah. I'm told he was physically sweating. Yeah. And bless him. Bless him.

Starting point is 03:10:05 He's not a bad guy. No, he seems I like him. He just, there's a difference between internet atheism level and the, the level of a person that's had the training that I've had. And I'm not talking about having a PhD in philosophy because there are people that, don't that have had similarly good training. My mentors throughout my undergraduate and graduate career were phenomenal. High school, the training that I've had intellectually from high school through undergrad to master's to PhD, I had the privilege to study with amazing, amazing people who's who's who had the focus just there's nothing like it. When you come out of that, when you come out of

Starting point is 03:10:49 that, you know, Gettier, Chisholm, Feldman, Connie, Khyberg, Waringa, World, there's nothing like it. Just the training that I had was phenomenal. All right. Let's sum this up in like a minute or two and then we'll wrap up. What is knowledge then and should we even care? You shouldn't care what knowledge is. Which you should care about is justified belief. The truth, if the world cooperates, we can't determine whether we're subject to a malevolent

Starting point is 03:11:18 demon or not. All we can do is follow the evidence and hope for the best. And if we do not live in a demon world and we do not live in a matrix world, then following the evidence will get us to the truth. And if it does, and it does so in a non-accidental way, then we have cognitive contact with reality. Do you know that? I do believe I know that. I don't think I need to have that knowledge, but the reflective, because, you know, you can iterate, you know, at some point you can only have a certain order of mental states, right? So I not only do I know it, I believe that I know that I know that I know it, and I also believe that I know that I know that I know that I know that. But when you go to four, I can't I can't contemplate necessarily propositions that have that many nested, you know, um, modal operators. But then that's one reason, that's one way to tell like, well, look, I, like, you can't require infinite knowledge of knowledge of knowledge of knowledge. So, so. At some point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just at the end of the day and this is comes right of the Chisholmean school. One of the probably the biggest lesson to come.

Starting point is 03:12:19 out of the Chisholomian school is, look, what matters is what are the correct epistemic principles? What matters is what is the concept of justified belief? If the concept of justified belief is, when you experience, when you have a certain set of experiences, you form a certain level of credences, that's what literally defines justified belief. Yeah. The idea that you have to know that rule is why. Why think that? That's what William P. Olson called a levels confusion. If you want to read about that, read the seminal essay, levels confusions in epistemology. Phenomenal work. What matters is what is the concept of justification. And if it is proportioning your credence to the strength of the evidence, then if you have done that, then you

Starting point is 03:13:05 are justified. It doesn't matter what you think about it. That might be nice. It's interesting, but it's not required to have justified belief. The rational project of attempting to, of seeking cognitive contact with reality is the project of following your evidence. And there's no property that answers to the term knowledge that makes any difference there at all. None. Dr. Trent Doody. Thank you. Thanks, Matt.

Pints With Aquinas - Can You Actually Know Anything? Epistemology for Normal People (Dr. Trent Dougherty) | Ep. 571

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