Pints With Aquinas - Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Return of God (Dr. J. Budziszewski ) | Ep. 577

Starting point is 00:00:01 How did you go from being a nihilist professor to embracing or re-embracing the Catholic faith? I actually prayed to God. I said, I don't think you're there. And I think I'm talking to the wall. But if you are there, you can have me. But you're going to have to show me because I can't tell anymore. And that was true because I'd torn up my own mind. I want to get your opinions on AI, transhumanism, where this is all leading.

Starting point is 00:00:23 They thought that it was inevitable. What general would not welcome the prospect of soldiers who never had to sleep and who couldn't disobey their orders? Could you tell me a bit about Nietzsche? I think a lot of people hear about him. They're afraid to read him. I run into people who really want to believe in God. But they just don't know how to. And I'm not going to trade in my intellectual credibility to believe some bloody fairy tale.

Starting point is 00:00:44 But I want to. If it were real, I would do it. What do we mean by nihilism? It's a way of experiencing the sin of despair, whereupon it takes on the garments of philosophy. The root of the word NIH-I-L is nothing means nothing. Deep down, you know, just as well as I do. that the longing for meaning and coherency is deep set in every created mind.

Starting point is 00:01:05 I love it. So why don't you tell me what is it that you want so badly that you're willing to do without meaning and coherency to have it? I actually want to know about this. So you have been on interviews. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:26 And the people have said, what? They said, don't make noises like tapping on keyboards. I said, we're kind of tapping on keyboards. Well, apparently some people, they might be looking up their notes. They might be trying to take notes on the conversation,

Starting point is 00:01:43 but they said that they might even be doing email and other things, being distracted while the interview was going on. And they want you to pay attention to them. I can't imagine that anybody would do that. You're talking about a podcast interview? This was before a podcast. It was video, you know, and it was and also telephone. Actually, I think...

Starting point is 00:02:03 Who would be so confident in themselves that they're like, I'm going to go on CNN, but I'm not going to listen to the host. I'm going to be doing... I don't know, but it says a lot about that someone, doesn't it? I can't imagine that. I can't imagine that. Yeah. A confidence in yourself doesn't seem to be the right expression for that.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Maybe stupidity. Stupidity. Rudeness. No, that's why it's been interesting to see media change, hasn't it, over the last 20, 30 years? Oh, yeah. When I began teaching and doing all this jazz, there wasn't any of this video stuff. you know it was a great sentence all this friggin video stuff all this video stuff well that's a look I'm a geeseer what do you what do you expect that's that's that's that's right that's how I'm gonna talk

Starting point is 00:02:49 because it still seems like that to me although I like it I don't like all of it some of it just seems crazy to me and seems to be an excuse for people watch videos so they don't have to read and I think you should be able to do both things you should be able to watch videos and you should be able to read now I'm and I and I and I and I and I I must have some sort of a video attention deficit. I don't take in information very well that way. If somebody says you gotta watch this video, I'll usually say, well, is there a transcript? Ah.

Starting point is 00:03:19 See, that's how old school I am. Yeah. My wife can consume audio books incredibly well, even at double speed, you know. My goodness. And she can listen to the entire book in like, like, we've gone on road trips and she'll listen to like a five-hour audio book. But like 20 minutes in my mind is wondering. I need the page to help me stay, you know.

Starting point is 00:03:40 Yeah, yeah. Well, and you can look back and forth. Yeah. And you can, do you say something like this on page 45? Wait a minute, this is different. I've only listened to one audio book in my life. I enjoyed it very much, but it was C.S. Lewis reading his own book, The Four Loves. Oh, yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 00:03:55 It was terrific. It was before they did audiobook. Somebody just taped him. And it was magnificent. That's right. You can get that on Audible right now. Can you? Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

Starting point is 00:04:05 Well, accidentally. Okay. Free Blood. I recommend it. Yeah. It was wonderful. So for those who don't know you, this is really cool. You teach at the University of Austin.

Starting point is 00:04:14 No. University of Texas at Austin. What's your name? Sorry. You teach at the University of Texas at Austin. University of Austin is a real place, but the University of Texas at Austin is where I teach. All right. But you're a philosopher and you're a philosopher who converted from atheism to Catholicism.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Did I get that right? Yeah, except I got to add something. Some of my colleagues in the philosophy, Department might not like it that you put it that way because my PhD was in political science. I was hired by the government department first. I became jointly appointed in philosophy because philosophy is really what I do. But you know, some people, they think you shouldn't be called a philosopher unless your PhD was in philosophy. So, so I always, I always say, don't say Department of Philosophy is a government and philosophy. It makes my colleagues feel better.

Starting point is 00:05:00 Do your colleagues watch this show? We'll find out. There is, I have two colleagues who, who probably have watch this show, yes. Who annoys you the most out of all your colleagues? Oh, I'm not going to tell you that. I'd try. I was tempted. On the back of your new book, it calls you a best-selling moral philosopher. So just so everyone knows, your new book is pandemic of lunacy, how to think clearly when everyone around you seems crazy. I love that front cover because it looks like, I don't know, it looks like a fiction book from the 80s in a good way. Yeah, it does. I, well, I think it's a, it is a pandemic, really. It is a, it is a pandemic, really. All these crazy ideas. I go and I speak somewhere. And the first two questions a lot of audiences will ask is, what's happening to us and why are we all going crazy? And they don't have to go into details. Everybody understands.

Starting point is 00:05:51 They don't have to talk about tampon dispensers in boys' bathrooms. It's obvious. There are so many different lunacies. I talk about 30 of them in there. Do you have tampon dispensers at your university? We do not have tampons. But there are a lot of people who would like to have tampon dispensers at my university. How have you survived? Do you have tenure?

Starting point is 00:06:09 I do have tenure, yes. And I wonder sometimes whether I would have gotten tenure if I had been converted, if I'm a revert, I abandoned Christian faith and came back to it, if it had been more widely known that I had because I was a nihilist when I was hired. Okay. You know, there's no difference, there's no objective discernible difference between good and evil and we're not responsible for actions anyway, said I. Give him a job teaching the young, you know? And then God pulls me back into sanity and into the faith. And, you know, then it became a more questionable thing for me. You're pretty happy.

Starting point is 00:06:47 You seem you're very kind and jolly and happy. I am happy. You know how I know this? Because last time you were on my show, it was in Steubenville. Yeah. And the friggin elevators weren't working because of Stubinville. And I made you. How old are you?

Starting point is 00:07:01 Seventy-3. Yeah, old enough. Old enough. Did not have to walk up seven flights of stairs in a horse. building in student. Oh, actually, I kind of enjoyed it. I mean, I can't say that I enjoyed the walking per se, you know, but it, but it was, but I think about those things and I think, boy, I'm going to have a story to tell here.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Yeah. No, no, I am one of my, one I was, you're the, you're the second person who's told me that, a student of mine who was doing very poorly in the course, so she might have been trying to butter me up, said, she dropped it later, said, said, you're the happiest professor I've ever had. My question was, will you like that as an Aylist? Oh, no. No.

Starting point is 00:07:39 As a matter of fact, I'm not really like that dispositionally. Dispositionally, I'm sort of melancholic. Yeah. You know, I tend to brood on things. But faith changed everything. It doesn't have to depend on my personality or whether I'm melancholic or what's happening in the world or the fact that some things are going down the tubes. It's different. Okay.

Starting point is 00:08:08 I know we touched upon this last time we spoke, but I'd love to just circle around it again. We don't have to do it long if you don't want to. We can do anything you want. Okay, great. How did you go from being a nihilist professor to embracing or re-embracing the Catholic faith? And what was that like for your students, colleagues, and friends? And maybe wife? You know, I think sometimes some of my students might have had some anticipation of something going on before I did.

Starting point is 00:08:32 when I would, even as a nihilist, I would teach Thomas Aquinas, for example. I mean, he was one of the greats. I was teaching about foundations of legal and political philosophy and all that kind of thing and ethics. So I would teach Aristotle and Unit 2 would be Thomas Aquinas and I'd go on to do some other stuff. And after I'd been talking about Thomas Aquinas, I have to tell you, Thomas Aquinas moved me. I wanted sometimes and I thought I was, I thought I was hiding it completely. I wanted to weep because, of the appearance of the truth. And I kept telling myself, oh, but it isn't really true. It isn't really true. It's just an appearance. Hold on to that ironic view of reality, Budushchevsky. And a student came up to me after class once. Texas students tend to be very polite. So he's very hesitant. He says, professor. And I say yes. And he says, can I ask you a question? I said, yeah, well, you can ask anything you want. I might not answer it, but ask. And he said, well, I've been listening to you since the semester began. And I figure, You're either an atheist or a Roman Catholic, and I can't figure out which one.

Starting point is 00:09:38 Why did he think it had to be one or the other? I don't know. Maybe because I was teaching Nietzsche, but on the other hand, maybe my reactions didn't seem like those of a, that he might have expected from a Nietzschean. I mean, it was eating me up, you know. And is it because you were teaching Aquinas that he thought you may have been Catholic? Like, why not a Protestant or something? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I wish I could ask him.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Is there a world weariness to both nihilists and Catholics? Just the past ones don't have Catholics. Yeah. Oh, yes. And now let's talk about the Savior of the world. I can't. No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't know why. I'd had another conversation with a, with a professor of mine when I was in graduate school and I was already ensnared in Nietzsche. then I was actually more Nietzsche into Nietzsche, which I can explain if you want. But he wasn't one of my own professors, but faculty and students used to meet together to socialize at certain times. And he says, so what are you studying? And I said, oh, Nietzsche. And he was not a believer himself.

Starting point is 00:10:50 And he said, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, you better be careful of him or the next thing you know you're going to be a Christian. Wow. This is a student said that. No, a professor. Not one of my professors, but a professor. Yeah, he said that. He was alarmed that I was studying Nietzsche. Oh, so he wasn't saying that ironically. He didn't want you to become a Christian. He did not want me to. He did not want me to. He didn't follow up. I didn't follow up. I just thought, what does that mean? Okay, so was this before or after the student said you're either

Starting point is 00:11:18 an age? Oh, that was long before. That was when I was in graduate school. So the student said that after I was already teaching at the University of Texas. And what did that do to you? That obviously is memorable. Well, it, it, it turned around in my memory. But you don't know what those things are doing down there. You don't know when they're turning around, what kind of churn they're stirring up. You don't know what the Holy Spirit might be using them to churn up. And so I'm sure that in God's providence, there was some reason for him making this comment to me at that time. But no, that wasn't what brought me back.

Starting point is 00:11:50 What brought me back was that, look, on the one hand, this ate me up. I was miserable believing as I believed, or at least telling myself that I believed those. things. Long, long afterward, I came to realize that I had always known that there was a God and only told myself. I didn't know that. That I'd always known that there was a real difference between good and evil and only told myself that I didn't. But I believed that. I believed to that. Okay? My wife used to laugh at me. I would talk about this, this nonsensical, nihilistic stuff, and she would just laugh. And she would say, you don't believe that. And it would say, yes, I do. Yes, I do. But it was, it was, it was very, we laugh about it together now, but she's very modest and she doesn't remember that.

Starting point is 00:12:34 That was actually instrumental for me too, to have somebody who could laugh at me, who didn't engage in serious conversation. Yes, do you really, do you really think that there might be no real difference between good and evil? She would just laugh. Right. And that was, that was willing to get into the game. She was not willing. And that, that, you know, this kind of thing teaches me all. Some people, you can't get into it.

Starting point is 00:12:54 Some people you can. Somebody asks you an honest question or makes an honest, an honest objection, and you have to make an honest response. Somebody says some complete nonsense, right? Or puts up a smoke screen, and what you have to do is blow away the smoke. And apologetics, most people in apologetics, I don't think, get that. Although it was from, I learned that originally from a guy who did apologetics, so I can't take credit for it. But anyway, I love my wife. I love my children.

Starting point is 00:13:22 I had my children already then. We were married young at what passes for young now at 19. So we were married all through grad school and working in all this sort of thing. And you know, when you don't have faith, it's much harder to maintain a marriage. When you don't have grace, this is the, especially under the circumstances of today's world. And we'd had a quarrel. And because I loved my wife, it was just devastating to have a big quarrel. And she's gone to bed and I'm sitting out in a chair and in the living room.

Starting point is 00:13:53 and I'm weeping and I sort of bring myself into control. And I actually prayed to God. I said, I don't think you're there. And I think I'm talking to the wall. But if you are there, you can have me. But you're going to have to show me because I can't tell anymore. And that was true because I'd torn up my own mind. To tell yourself things like there's no difference between good and evil,

Starting point is 00:14:21 you have to ignore so many things. You have to deny, you have to forget so many memories. You have to ignore so many things about everyday experience of goodness and of the wonderful and of the horrible. And you have to, in order to tell one lie to yourself, you have to tell so many lies to yourself that it messes up your mind. So I was really, you know, pretty crazy. And so it was really true when I said, so I can't tell anymore. And so, okay, my tears dry up, and I'm breathing normally. And as I said when I told this story before, the walls didn't open up and there were no choirs of angels and nothing like that happening.

Starting point is 00:15:03 I didn't hear the air on the string of G by Johann Sebastian Bach. And I thought, I was right. I was talking to the wall. But actually, I wasn't. And he heard me. and I hadn't meant it. You could have me. And he showed me. It took about six weeks. But it wasn't like all of a sudden, God, is real. Nothing like that. And I didn't reason my way into faith. So I am really excited to tell you that I have partnered with Theotokos Rosaries. These are, without a doubt, the most beautiful rosaries I have ever seen in my life. Thetocos Rosary sent me one maybe about a year ago or so. And I remember being absolutely. blown away. You probably heard me talking about it. I've sent one to my mom and dad and uncle.

Starting point is 00:15:52 I give them to some of the guests that we have and everyone who receives one is blown away. These are just a total different caliber. And when you think about the kind of money we're willing to spend on a phone, it's like, you know, sure, you can pray a rosary on your fingers or on a string rosary and it would work just the same, obviously. But if you're looking for a beautiful rosary that's more of an also like an heirloom, something that you're you could have for life. Check this out. Go to dailywire.com slash shop and pick up one of these. This is more of the masculine one. This one, they based on St. Peter's Basilica. So it has real stone beads and Italian olive wood. This one is inspired by Notre Dame in Lyon, France. So you might want to, again, pick this up. It'd be a beautiful ordination gift, a gift for those

Starting point is 00:16:44 who are getting married, maybe Father's Day, Mother's Day. day, like honestly, a beautiful gift. I remember what moved me so much is when I sent this to my, I won't say who, because I don't want to call them out, but a family member who doesn't actually pray the rosary, they started praying the rosary. And I think it's honestly because it's so beautiful and so sacred looking. So again, go to dailywire.com slash shop to pick one up today. And thank you to Theotokos Rosaries for partnering with us. What happened in those six weeks? I began to, there's a difference between. between recognizing your own condition and just being miserable.

Starting point is 00:17:22 There's a difference between recognizing your own condition. And being miserable. You know, I was miserable. Yeah. And I knew I was miserable, but I told myself, like Nietzsche, well, I'm one of the few who can realize the emptiness at the heart of the universe and still live. Walking on the rocky heights and breathing the thin air. And so it's sort of a macho nihilism.

Starting point is 00:17:46 And so being miserable only reinforced me, you see. So that didn't do it. But what happened was, although it had something to do with that prayer, but I came to have a perception, not a feeling, a perception like I perceive this microphone in front of me, I perceive this stout in front of me, and a perception that my condition was objectively evil. Okay.

Starting point is 00:18:15 Now, you've got to realize I'd been telling myself that there was no objective evil, no objective evil, no objective good for some time. And that was one of the reasons that it tore me up, for example. I loved my wife and I loved my children, but love is a commitment to the will to the true good of another person. I didn't believe that there was a good and evil. I didn't believe in other persons. I didn't believe that I was a person. I didn't believe in my, that I had control over my commitments because I was just a process. You see what I mean?

Starting point is 00:18:43 Maybe not even that. and all of this was an illusion. So how did I make sense of that love? And I came to realize my condition is objectively evil, and I didn't argue myself out of it this time. I just seemed obvious, obvious, like walking out of the door one day and saying, the sky's blue.

Starting point is 00:19:01 I thought it was pink. So even as an atheist, I'd read all kinds of stuff like Augustine of Hippo, and I knew about the so-called privation theory of evil. means evil doesn't exist on its own. There can't even be an evil thing except as a disorder or something missing in something that would otherwise be good. So the only way that you can get an evil is by taking a good and ruining it. The only way that you can get a horrible is to take a wonderful and ruin it. And so if my condition was objectively horrible, there had to be

Starting point is 00:19:41 an objective, wonderful, of which this was the perversion. Now, okay, that. that meant that there was a good and an evil. And if that was true, that contradicted everything I've been telling myself so flatly, so grandly, that I'd been so wrong for so long about so many things that it seemed like almost anything could be true. So I went back and started reading all kinds of Christian stuff. I read my Thomas Aquinas differently.

Starting point is 00:20:05 I read Augustine. I read, I devoured everything by C.S. Lewis. I read, I reread it before, but I reread Dante, whom I adore, adore and had always recognized myself in his inferno. Yeah. But, and now you have to realize when I had abandoned faith, there had never been a day when I thought, no, Jesus is not the Son of God. There came a time when I realized I hadn't been believing that for some time.

Starting point is 00:20:42 Right. There wasn't a moment when I thought, no, there is no God. I came to realize that I had not been believing in him for some time. And that's how I came back. There was no moment on the 28th of June, 6 o'clock in the evening, yes, there is a God, yes, Jesus. I just realized that I've been believing again. The fog had cleared, as a way of putting it.

Starting point is 00:21:04 That's a good way of putting it. I've used a different metaphor, but fog is pretty darn good because, as I said, I'd pretty much taken my mind apart. but it was like having lived in a dark cellar for years, and somebody was throwing back the shutters and all these bolts of light were coming in. And I use that as a metaphor, but it seemed to me at the time stronger than a metaphor. I could almost feel the bolts of light were almost palpable.

Starting point is 00:21:37 Coming in here, clearing things up, restoring memories, things that I had refused to allow myself to remember, experiences that I'd refused to allow myself to experience lines of reasoning that I had forgotten how to follow through. And it took about, you know, two years, basically for God, after I, forgot to put my mind back together. But I had to, you know, I had to commit. I thought, well, he is real then. And I said, well, I told him that he could have me. So, okay. What now? And he followed through. I want to circle back to you saying that you didn't think you were a person, your wife was a person.

Starting point is 00:22:19 Yeah. What do you mean? I thought we were just processes. What does that mean? We're just things happening. Things happening. Things happening. You know, if we, um, sometimes people say, oh, you mean a mechanism.

Starting point is 00:22:30 Well, I didn't even believe strongly enough at that point in cause and effect to be able to talk about mechanisms. Right. You know, but there's, there's stuff here. Something working itself out. Something is. Something is, something is working, even working itself out almost suggests that there's a beginning of process, teleology, and an end to the process and a purpose,

Starting point is 00:22:47 and I couldn't have put it that way. In fact, even my perception, when I would try to say, I'm not really a person, I'm this or I'm that, there isn't any truth. I realized that if all of that was true, then what I was saying couldn't be true.

Starting point is 00:23:03 Because truth didn't have any meaning anymore either. If I was just a process that worked along and produced these thoughts, this is true, this is false. then the mind was not the sort of thing that says this is true because it's true. The mind is not the sort of thing that is able to recognize the shape of reality and say, oh, this is true. It was just something happening.

Starting point is 00:23:28 There's this thought. It's true. And so why should I even believe the thought that nothing is true? Yeah. So it was just crazy. Would you have said that the self doesn't exist to sort of humian, Yeah, I thought the self was an illusion. Now, the obvious objection to that is, well, who's having the illusion?

Starting point is 00:23:50 And what would you have said to that? And I knew that. And I knew that. I saw the holes in my, in my land of thinking. I saw this. But what would you have said as a response? Well, I must adopt an ironic view of life. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:04 I feel like, you know, just a lot. You would have had a better answer. If I had have said, well, if I had have presented Hume's bundle theory to you or something like that, would you have, but then what would you have said? But that would have been your view, and if I had to say, well, what's holding the bundle together? So that it's not somebody else. But I didn't think anything actually necessarily was holding the bundle together. And I wasn't even certain that it was a bundle.

Starting point is 00:24:23 It just seemed to something called me that there was a bundle. Did you ever want to do something really evil? And did you? And you don't have to tell me what that thing is. Oddly, most of the sins that I committed at that time were in my mind. I mean, everything that I'm telling you about is, really sin. It's intellectual sin, which is real sin. But any other sin was in my mind. I mean, I didn't, I didn't cheat on my wife. I didn't do all these other kinds of things. I didn't

Starting point is 00:24:51 Why not? I had no reason to, but I thought, I thought, you may have had one eventually. I had, I was coasting partly on momentum. I'd had a pretty moral upbringing. Yeah. At one time before abandoning faith, I'd been pretty pious, although not good, not holy. And I had bought into this Nietzschean idea insofar as I could speak of ideas at all, that rather than virtue being a quality of a character that is constituent of a flourishing life or something like that, I thought, well, there are different kinds of souls. and for one cruelty might be a virtue and for one kindness might be a virtue and you know I belong to this I happen to find myself belonging

Starting point is 00:25:43 to this coalition of types of souls but I could just as well have belonged to another one Is that because you perceived yourself to be magnanimous the kind of Nietzschean idea of resentiment Is this you thought you were the strong man? No you know even in my Nietzschean phase I thought that his idea of resentment and his and all of those ideas

Starting point is 00:26:01 were silly. I think it's an excellent, incredibly perceptive idea. Do you? I just disagree with his attributing it to Christian values. Oh, oh, I, if what you mean is that there can be certain outlooks that, that, that grow from resentment, yes, I think that that's true. You despise what you believe yourself incapable of attaining.

Starting point is 00:26:23 Oh, yes, I think that's, I think that's true. Okay, all right. And I actually think what happens is. But then again, he wasn't the first doing who came up with that idea. Who came up with that idea? No, I mean, I think that's been realized by many people all along. But he just took it in a particular direction that an apologetic against Christianity. Right, yes, that's right.

Starting point is 00:26:42 So you make meekness a virtue because you're not powerful. Because you're not powerful because you're only a slave. But my point is, were you of the opinion that you had the kind of magnanimous soul? No. Like Dostoevsky? No. No. No.

Starting point is 00:26:54 Not Dostoevsky. Like Roskalikov. Yeah, I knew what you meant. Yeah. No, I was not, I was not, I was not, uh, I was not, uh, Raskolnikov. although I could understand how Raskolnikov could think that way. So when you would hear about tragedies taking place in your town or on the news, did you have to rebuke yourself for any empathy you accidentally felt?

Starting point is 00:27:13 Or no, because even empathy over something meaningless couldn't be evil. Sometimes I thought to myself that there was, on one occasion I was arguing with somebody, if there was some catastrophe and 10 million people died as a result of some act, How could I even say that this was good and evil? If I was going to say that there was no good and evil, that this was all, these were all humanly invented constructs, humanly invented distinctions with no rational basis, then, okay, somebody says, well, what about this?

Starting point is 00:27:42 I'd have to be consistent. All right, so what would you have said if somebody had said to you, like Sam Harris has tried to do? I'd love you to talk to me about this, but the idea that what we mean by good and evil, morally speaking, is whatever is conduce, conducive to human flourishing. That's what we mean by it. And, you know, the worst possible misery for everyone will call that evil and then whatever goes above that we can say is better.

Starting point is 00:28:08 So that's it. That's all it is. Well, that's, that's a better point of view than, than I held then. But, but, but it, but what Sam Harris means when he says, flourishing, I doubt that he means what I, what I, what I mean by flourishing in the first place. And in the second place, he thinks that, uh, what causes us to flourish, is merely an accidental byproduct of a historical, history, I mean here, natural history, of an eons long process, which did not have us in mind. We just happened to end up with inclinations

Starting point is 00:28:43 to take care of our children or to be kind or to prefer kindness to cruelty or something like this most of the time. We just happened to. But if we had evolved a little bit differently, then we might have been like guppies didn't eat in our children. No, no. His point would be that's not possible, because if we had have ended up like guppy's eating our children, we would never have made it this far. But he's wrong. I mean, if you don't have any, if you don't have any, if you don't have any, if you don't have any, if you don't have any idea of providence, it's very difficult to see from an evolutionary point of view. Look, from a purely Darwinian point of view, it was vanishingly, the probability of us, of intelligence developing was vanishingly small at all.

Starting point is 00:29:22 And we certainly can't say that it was more likely to happen to primate. who follow the reproductive strategy of having a few young and levishing a lot of care on them, then on organisms like worms or guppies that have lots and lots of young and lavish, no harm, no care on them. It could have just as likely happened to there. Yeah, they're flourishing. They're flourishing in their way.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Sure. Yeah, and so there would have been no significance in it. And if you had changed it, you could have no argument against that either. If you say, well, you know, I find, that despite all of this, I have these nagging feelings of conscience from time to time. And they too are meaningless because they're meaningless results about this meaningless purpose that did not have me in mind. So I'm going to implant a chip in my mind that blanks out the impulses of conscience

Starting point is 00:30:16 and I'll flourish much better than. What argument do you have left against that? It seems to me you don't really have any. You might say, you might say like, you know, like British noble. who said, well, cheating at cards is not the sort of thing I would do. It is just not done. You know, you would say, well, that's not the sort of thing that I would do, but you wouldn't really have any argument against doing it. Yeah, trying to think that through. I think the other thing is it's a speciesist sort of argument. Why think, why think that reality or this is about

Starting point is 00:30:49 human flourishing? And instead of maybe the point is cockroach flourishing. Sure. And it's speciesist in another way, too. Here, you've got this. If, if, if, it's, it's a speciesist, it's If it's, I have friends, including Christian friends, who don't buy this line of argument, but I think it's very good. C.S. Lewis had made this argument. Alvin Plantica has made this argument. Right. If that's how the mind had developed, then.

Starting point is 00:31:09 On what basis? Then why should we, our mind has developed in such a way as to promote our genes being passed on into the next generation. It doesn't follow from that, that our mind will make us believe things that are true. Right. And so why should one have confidence, even in his theory, in Sam Harris's theory, and Darwin's theory, and anybody's theory, it seems that that's entirely baseless. You just pull the rug out from under yourself, which is, that was sort of where I was in those,

Starting point is 00:31:41 in those ways. I had pulled that rug out underneath, and there was nothing there. You know, Mother's Day is coming up, and it's such a beautiful time of year to share life-changing news. Maybe you've seen it happen. A family gather around the table when someone stands up and says, next year, there will be a brand new mum in our family. There's really nothing like it. But for some women, Mother's Day feels very different. Instead of celebrating, they're carrying a secret,

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Starting point is 00:34:31 Okay. The root of the word is NIH-I-L is nothing means nothing. The nihilism is nothing. It means there are different forms of nihilism. I mean, there can be a radical denial of moral meaning or a radical denial that we exist or. or a radical denial of any kind of meaning at all, you know, but basically it's nothingness, and it's a sort of an adoration of nothingness. And there are different forms of nihilism, even.

Starting point is 00:35:05 You know, when Nietzsche found his own nihilism very, very difficult, claimed to have overcome his nihilism, although he didn't. And in the 20th century, you've got the existentialists in the mid-century, and they all anguished over this, and they were in despair. was sort of like that. So, okay, you've got the despairing nihilist, but you've also got pop culture nihilists who say, okay, everything's meaningless, that's cool.

Starting point is 00:35:27 I'm so cool that I like things meaningless. You've got the Jerry Seinfeld show kind of nihilist, who says, who says, nothing has any meaning. Where are we going to have lunch? Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:38 And it's very funny, but if you're not in it, but it's hopeless. I don't think you can argue yourself into it strictly speaking, because it involves incoherencies. You know, for instance, we said that if you really can't, if even statements about truth are meaningless, then you can't even say that nihilism is true. Well, philosophy involves making arguments.

Starting point is 00:36:08 If arguments themselves become incoherent, how can you argue yourself into it? I don't think of nihilism really as a philosophy. I don't even like to call Nietzsche a philosophy. He was a thinker, but even, see, he said, he said rationality is just a mode of thought we can't escape, which is a very nihilous thing to say. Now, so I don't think you can argue it into it. I think it's a better way to describe it is as a version of a way of experiencing the sin of despair whereupon it takes on the garments of philosophy. Oh, say that again.

Starting point is 00:36:45 it's a way of experiencing the sin of despair whereon it takes on the garments of philosophy it cliques itself in philosophical clothing why does it do that why is it for admiration is it or for self justification you know you can't it's just like I had commented that I knew deep down that there was a good and evil and I just told myself I didn't

Starting point is 00:37:07 deep down you have to know that even if you can't find the meaning of things that there's got to me a meaning of things Why are we even upset if we can't find meaning? Why do we throw bricks at the universe and say, well, you don't have any? It's because we're mad that our expectation of meaning has been disappointed. Why do we have that expectation? Because in general, things do make sense.

Starting point is 00:37:32 People say, well, I can admit my own meaning. Well, come on now. I might say, because I was eating a sardine sandwich once while watching children at play, I might say the meaning of, and I associate them, I might say the meaning of children at play is the flavor of sardines. But this, no, I'm sorry, that's not what it's mean. That may be my meaning, quote unquote, but it is not the meaning, right? The meanings of things are, the meanings of an awful lot of things are already there, right?

Starting point is 00:38:03 I, I, I, I, um, there are meanings and purposes in dwelling us built into the the fabric of our minds. This was one of the, we've known this about purposes for a long time. Natural teleology is a big theme in natural law theory, for example, that what is the, what is anger for it has a purpose? It's to arouse us to the defense of endangered goods, the ordinate defensive endangered goods. What is, what is the eye for? It's to see, what are the sexual powers for, for turning the wheel of the generations and for the union of the procreative partners. Now, those purposes are embedded. John Paul, too, was very good in recognizing that this is, that's, meaning is objective,

Starting point is 00:38:52 but he was very good at recognizing that this has a subjective side too. By subjective, I don't mean relativistic. I mean something the subject experiences. It has a meaning when my wife and I, or any two people who engage in the Merrill Act, they are giving themselves to each other. It means that. It can't not mean that, even if we try to make it mean something different

Starting point is 00:39:19 or try not to think about it or overwrite it with some other meaning. So there are both inbuilt meanings and inbuilt purposes. This produces such strong expectations of meaning that that's why we become so frustrated and so angry when we can't find it. Or when we think we know what the meaning is,

Starting point is 00:39:40 we don't like it because we want to do something different. This reminds me of that famous quote from that otherwise terrible movie where Cameron Diaz said to Tom Cruise, who had fornicated with her, you know what I'm saying? No, no. She said, your body made a promise to me even if you didn't. Oh, that's very good. I never would have expected to find that in a Tom Cruise movie. Yeah, but that's what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:40:03 It can't mean something different, right? Right. It can't. It can't. It can't. You can, no, of course, you can use a kiss to betray. Yeah. But the only reason that using a kiss is so effective at betrayal is that it means something else.

Starting point is 00:40:21 And the reason we find it so disgusting is precisely because it does mean that, that it does mean that. You know, I can't, I can't slap somebody in the face and say, this means I love you. Yeah. Be well and prosper. Be well. Yeah. Could you tell me a bit about Nietzsche? I think a lot of people hear about him.

Starting point is 00:40:41 They're afraid to read him. Yeah, well, I think that if you don't have to, if you don't need to read Nietzsche, that the, the, the aversion to reading him is not a bad thing. Do you mind if I smoke? No, it's okay. Tell me, but I mean, maybe make a steelman case for Nietzsche, because I find too often Christians are too quick to dismiss. All right.

Starting point is 00:41:00 All right. It is, it is, this is not something I, I would expose younger people to. Somebody wrote me and said, I'm a, I'm a high school teacher and I teach, I, I teach, I, I teach a little bit of philosophy to my students at this Catholic school. Should I expose them to Nietzsche? Should I expose them to nihilism? One of my fellow teachers says, I have to because they're going to meet it in the broader culture. And they need to have some exposure or they're just going to fall down like ten pins.

Starting point is 00:41:24 Well, there was something to that. It's like saying you're going to expose seminarians to pornography because they don't have to deal with them in the confessional. That's the thing that happened. Oh, I'm not. I met a guy who. I'm sorry to know it. That's very similar to something that I'd said to her. I said it would be like teaching your children

Starting point is 00:41:38 sexual ethics by having them watch pornography and then saying, now this illustrates what's wrong with that. Okay. But, and... Well, what was it? Nietzsche has to be studied in, and this would be my strong man case for studying, I guess, not for, not for Nietzsche himself.

Starting point is 00:41:55 Nietzsche has to be studied because as nearly as as anyone has come to making an argument for that, for which you cannot make an argument because it's incoherent. As nearly as you can come to all these incommator arguments and embracing the incoherency, Nietzsche has done it. Could you sum up that argument?

Starting point is 00:42:13 I know it wasn't an actual argument, but like, give me, give me the force of what it is he says and why it is. Well, yeah, okay. You know, he mostly, the interesting thing about Nietzsche is that he says a lot of things by indirection. He doesn't say, here's my proof that there is no meaning. What he says is, and this was very much my mood as an nihilist, you know, we've seen through this now.

Starting point is 00:42:33 He doesn't say, here is an argument against existence and God. against the existence of God. What he does is he has his character, say to another character in this book Zarathustra, have you not heard that God is dead? Notice that that's an interesting way of putting it.

Starting point is 00:42:49 He doesn't say there is no God. He says God is dead. Now, of course, that kind of a statement slaps a Christian in the face because you think God is eternal, inextinguishable, he cannot die. But the point of this was that if, according to Nietzsche,

Starting point is 00:43:04 I mean, he denies among other things, He refuses to acknowledge even a real distinction between the observer and the observed. When he says you have to make up your own values, you have to have your own tablet of values. What most simple-minded relativists think is I can have my own values and leave reality as it is. But no, for your values to be made up to suit, you'd have to be able to make up reality too. And Nietzsche really thinks that that's sort of what we do every day. God was just one of those things that was real quote unquote, only insofar as anything else is real, quote, unquote,

Starting point is 00:43:42 and that's that we've constructed it. It's part of this manifold of interpretations, of interpretations of interpretations. He's part of it. And so when we stop constructing him, he isn't there anymore, so he's died. Now that's many people who, that's a different kind of steelman argument than you're going to hear from some people who give a steel man argument because they think that there are arguments in nature. I don't really see them. I don't really see them. He just, his character just asserts, does he not know that God is dead? It's kind of like when I thought, oh, I haven't been believing in him for some time, right? He just asserts it. It's like we've seen through that now. And a lot of this, a lot of the appeal of Nietzsche, it's especially powerfully intoxicating to many young people because of the rhetoric, the language that he uses, the images of camels being loaded down and dragons and snakes eating themselves and people choking on them and so forth.

Starting point is 00:44:53 It just sort of blows you away and staggers you and a certain kind of mind that is vulnerable to that says, gee, cool. Or, yes, I'd suspected that it was like that all along. So it's hard, you see, I'm struggling here because I can't extract a rational argument for nihilism. But I think that he wanted, he was certainly, let's say, put it this way, producing an apologetic for it. Was he a believer in God at one point in his life? Yeah, he was. His father, that's my understanding, biographically, his father was a Lutheran pastor, wasn't he? I think he lives.

Starting point is 00:45:30 I've heard something like that. Yes, he was. And some people have even spoken of Nietzsche's Christian unconscious mind. Paul C. Vitz, a psychologist, has written a book on Freud's Christian unconscious. In that sense, then, Nietzsche, at least what you've just described, reminds me of, say, Christopher Hitchens, who could write a book called Religion Poisons Everything and takes for granted that God doesn't exist, but doesn't make any good argument, any argument at all that he doesn't. Yes, that's right. That's right.

Starting point is 00:45:57 And so I find people were very bold over by the rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens and didn't want to look like dimwits, didn't want to be part of the naive, unwashed masses, and saw atheism on the ascent and joined that crowd. Is that kind of what happened? I think that's something like what happened. Now, people wouldn't have, it wouldn't have worked so well if many people weren't already disposed in that direction. Like today, like today, faith in God was eroding in his time. A lot of it was on the surface or it was a pretense. Many people thought that that was nonsense for various reasons. Some of the reasons would be different than today.

Starting point is 00:46:37 There is a good deal of out-and-out materialism today, but in the sciences, it was even less questioned, perhaps, in some realms of the sciences than today. And so people thought, well, of course, there can't be a God. You know, that's just silly. It's just silly. It's just silly. Although, you know, materialism itself is awfully silly.

Starting point is 00:47:00 Why is it silly? Well, even if everything is matter... Which is what? What does matter mean? Well, matter is sometimes taken to mean that which has mass and takes of space. Okay. I was criticizing materialism once, and I said, well, how do these people even use the term matter? There's something fishy going on here. That was a...

Starting point is 00:47:19 The materialist who wrote the article on materialism, and I think it was in encyclopedia, Britannica, defined it that way. I thought, okay, well, let's go with that. Okay. Okay. Well, if everything is matter then, and matter is that which has mass and takes of space, how about the meaning of the sentence, everything is matter? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:36 It doesn't have mass, and it doesn't take up space. Now, some materialists would say, oh, yes, it does. Because you see, what that is, is that sentence, its meaning is an activity of your brain. And your brain has mass and takes of space, and this is a process of the brain. well that's fudging you know

Starting point is 00:48:02 it's or somebody might say the sentence of course it has mass and takes of space because look I'm writing it down with ink on this piece of paper it may not weigh a lot but that ink weighs something it has mass the paper takes up space but of course if that's all it is

Starting point is 00:48:19 if it's just matter then if I represented it not by ink on paper but by pixels on a glowing phosphor on a computer screen, then the meaning would have changed because the matter has changed. And we say, no, no, it has the same meaning. Well, how can it have the same meaning if the matter is changed, if meaning is matter? These kinds of paradoxes, you don't even have to get to the point of talking about consciousness

Starting point is 00:48:46 or what that is or anything like this. You just have things all around you. or take the color red. The interesting thing about red is that there's a reality outside me, there's light of a certain frequency, and there's a reality inside me. I perceive that color red. Now, on a purely materialistic theory,

Starting point is 00:49:09 there's no difficulty inventing a machine with a photoelectric cell that's sensitive only to that frequency of light, and it has some sound reproduction machinery, And whenever I beam red light on the photo cell, the machine announces red, red, red, but does the machine understand red? Does it experience red? Does it have the sensation of red? That's absurd.

Starting point is 00:49:33 We don't, you know, sensations can't really be given materialistic explanations. All these kinds of things are so difficult that there are even some materialists now who call themselves eliminative materialists, which means that all the things that all these things that materialism can't explain, they eliminate them from consideration. They say those don't exist or their illusions. Is this sort of like the old positivism? Well, it's a little different. Positiveism, logical positivism, logical imperative. Let's take an example of it. Let's take moral statements. The usual line among these guys was what, I'm sorry for somebody. It was called emotivism.

Starting point is 00:50:21 That if, that, that, that, that, um, if I say murder is wrong, mm-hmm.

Starting point is 00:50:27 That actually does not mean anything. Um, it would, if it could be true or if it could be false, if it had a truth value, then it would mean something. Well, how do you know it doesn't have a truth value?

Starting point is 00:50:42 Because only things that, uh, that are reports of sense experience, the table is hurting my knuckles. the uh our sound reproduction quality our voices are very loud only only sensory experience and um and the result of definitions like what what they claimed was going on in mathematics everything is just is just circular it's just tautological right only those things are meaningful if you can if you can confirm it by reference to either to either definitions or um or uh sensory experience

Starting point is 00:51:18 then it is meaningful and has a truth value. If it's not, you can't. So people would say, so you're saying that there's no God? And they would say, no, we're not saying there's no God. We're saying the statement there is a God has no meaning. The statement there is not a God has no meaning. The statement murder is wrong has no meaning. The statement murder is right has no meaning.

Starting point is 00:51:35 Well, then what are you doing when you say that murder is wrong? What you're saying is, I don't like murder. And I don't want you to like it either. Yeah. But if you say, the problem there is that if they say, Why don't you want me to like, why do you want me to dislike murder too? The answer has to be because it's wrong.

Starting point is 00:51:57 It's not, it's not just that I don't want you to because I don't want you to. And so, you know, the whole enterprise falls apart. Verificationism, as this is called, it doesn't have a truth value unless you can verify it either by reference to, to definitions or sense experience, falls apart because that criterion itself can't be verified by sense experience or by, yeah. Yes.

Starting point is 00:52:17 Yes. Incoherency is the big thing. I think we should teach students more about this. They know about inconsistency. They know you can't say, this is a mug. This is not a mug. Okay. But what if I say, Matt, I want you to...

Starting point is 00:52:36 I don't speak a word of English. Yes. Or what if I say, Matt, I want you to understand. Nobody, nobody who says that this is not a mug can be understood. You know, that's incoherency. And inconsistency is just one of the simpler kinds. But we meet this all the time. I got a story.

Starting point is 00:52:57 I remember giving a retreat in Ireland. And after the retreat, a fella came up to me and my friend Charity and said, it was a great retreat, but I don't believe in God. And my friend said, oh, why don't you believe in God? And he said, I don't believe in absolute truth. And my friend Charity, without missing a beat, of course, you know what she's going to say, said, are you absolutely sure that there is no truth? I'm not joking. I watched him stagger backwards like he was about to fall on the ground. Really?

Starting point is 00:53:23 Yeah. A physical reaction. Yeah, he had a physical reaction to the self-referential. Oh, that's great. Oh, that's great. I've seen stunned reactions before, but never a physical one like that. Yeah, he didn't fall over, but he did step back as if he was, like he had someone just smacked him in the face. Oh, that's great.

Starting point is 00:53:38 Yeah. I remember an occasion I was speaking with somebody, and I don't even remember what we were talking about. It might have been God. It might have been right or wrong. It might have been right or wrong. And it might have something else. And he said something. And I don't remember the incoherency either.

Starting point is 00:53:49 But I said, do you realize that you've just, you've just said something incoherent? And I had to explain why I met by incoherent. And he said, oh, yeah, I have. That was incoherent. He said, but that's okay because the universe is incoherent and I don't need coherency or meaning in my life. And I, and I, once upon a time, I would have thought, oh, this poor guy, I have to explain to him that he does need meeting incoherency and that such a thing as possible and all this. But of course he knew this really deep down. He was evading it.

Starting point is 00:54:22 Yeah. So I said, I don't believe you. Good. I said deep. That's very good. I said deep down, you know just as well as I do, that the longing for meaning and coherency is deep set in every created mind. I love it. So why don't you tell me, what is it that you want so badly that you're willing to do without meaning and coherency to have it?

Starting point is 00:54:43 Oh, far out, man. He was stumbling, not physically. That's good. Like your friend's response. not physically, but he was sort of staggering verbally, verbally, for 90 seconds. Can you ask me that question again? What is it that you want so badly?

Starting point is 00:54:58 That you're willing to do without meaning and coherency in order to have it. Come on. You know, I spoke about blowing away the smoke before. Come on. That's an example of what I mean by blowing away the smoke. What do you think someone might say to that? Like, freedom or just monkey sex?

Starting point is 00:55:14 He didn't have an answer. He didn't have an answer after after sort of beating around the bush and evading and talking like Kamala Harris for a little while, he then just sort of changed the subject and we talked about something else. I let him off the hook. I mean, I didn't keep forcing him. Then they push back too hard. I want him to remember. That's the stone in the shoe. Yes. You have to look with that now. Yes. That was exactly. That's exactly right. It was the stone in the shoe and I want him to remember that it hurt his foot. I want him to remember it so that the next time somebody talks to him, you see, already primed. Maybe the next time somebody will talk

Starting point is 00:55:48 talk to him and he's got the stone in his shoe for five minutes, maybe for eight minutes, maybe one of these days, or maybe to shift the metaphor, the window was open for 90 seconds. And then he slammed it shut with cleverness again. Now, maybe next time, eventually, after enough experiences this with various people, he'll want to keep the window open himself and say, what's out there? One can hope. One can hope. So is this the main thing that people take away when they really,

Starting point is 00:56:18 read Nietzsche, that morality is relative and that God doesn't exist? Younger students take that away from it. Older students take away much more radical versions of incoherency, although they tame them down. You know, for example, postmodernism, which is supposed to be an outgrowth of Nietzscheanism, postmodernism is really, although it's crazy, it is a lot tamer than Nietzsche. The Nietzsche, I think, to his credit, I think he understood that he was wrestling with incoherencies. So how does he make an argument when he believes everything's meaningless? He doesn't. That's your point. He doesn't. That's my point. The postmodernist, though, will say

Starting point is 00:56:57 things like, oh, you say, well, what is postmodernism? And he says, suspicion of metanarratives. What do you mean by suspicion of menoratives? What it means is everybody's got a big story, and none of them has got it right. All of the big stories are wrong. Well, what about the postmodernist big story? His big story is that nobody. he gets the big, big story right, except him. Yeah, right. You know, and that's the meta narrative. Yeah, there is no meta narrative.

Starting point is 00:57:26 Yeah, that is his, the metanarrative is that there's middenarrative and he's got it right. Yeah. So, uh, there's something wrong here. If it's possible for that to be true, why couldn't something else be true? You know, all you have to do is admit one truth. Like in my case, I didn't even have to admit one good. I just had to admit one evil. And that committed me to everything.

Starting point is 00:57:46 Like what which was your nature? Yeah, yeah, my own condition was objectively evil. You just have to, it was the only thing that I could, that I could clearly recognize as evil. Okay, fine. Start there. You know, you can, and you, and you build. The universe is so tightly constructed. It is so tightly woven together that if you, that if you, you can't pry one thread loose without other things unraveling too.

Starting point is 00:58:09 But when you, but on the other hand, it's so tightly connected that when you get one premise right and you think about it, Clearly. Hmm. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. You just don't know where else you're going to arrive. Wow. So why do you think your colleague told you not to read Nietzsche or else you'd become a Christian? I think it was because.

Starting point is 00:58:31 If you had to guess. I can only guess. It was because he had had experience, perhaps of other students or of other people, who had taken Nietzsche seriously and did start, did have these existential crises and end up being Christians. And he didn't want that to happen. Hmm. Yeah, yeah. I had a, I had another, uh, professor at that time who called me Dostoevsky because he thought that I, he, I don't know, I don't think he thought that I was like Raskolnikov, but he thought that I was in, he thought that I was in some kind of existential dread. Well, speaking of Dostoevsky, what are your, what's your opinion on the man from, uh, notes from underground? Because he seems, have you read that? He's even more far. I, I, I, it has been about 40 years since I've read it.

Starting point is 00:59:13 That's funny that you say that because he says it's a shameful thing for a man to live beyond the age of, 40, which is interesting. So I'm shameful. It's been 40 years. But that's a man who is the classic, the kind of depiction of resent him or of just hating what he cannot be, what he believes himself unable to attain. Yeah, you have to destroy every canvas. You have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to, you have to ruin every meaning. Brothers, how is your Easter going? I know that's not a question we often hear. We spend 40 days learning how to fast, but 50 days, of real celebration. That's something most of us aren't really sure how to do. And that's exactly why I want to tell you about the weight of glory challenge from Exodus 90. It runs through the Easter season

Starting point is 00:59:58 and helps us live in that joy, not just talk about it. Because Exodus isn't just a 90-day challenge. It's a way of life shared by tens of thousands of men across the world who are learning to walk in freedom and deeper communion with God. Through the leadership of Dr. Jared Stout and Father Jonathan Meyer, the weight of glory challenge gives us a space. to celebrate, to build a sustainable rhythm of prayer and life, and to see how our daily struggles can be transformed by grace. It's about meeting the father's love in a way that leaves you changed, because that's the kind of joy Easter was meant to bring. Join the Exodus 90 Brotherhood today to live out the joy of Easter through the weight of glory challenge. Download the Exodus 90 app to

Starting point is 01:00:39 start your 14-day free trial or visit Exodus 90.com slash Matt to learn more. That's Exodus 90.com slash Matt. The Weight of Glory Challenge runs throughout the Easter season. Download the app today and become the man God created you to be. May is the month we honor our lady. And what better way to draw close to her son than through prayer. If you're like most people, sometimes you need a little help making it happen. That's where our sponsor, Hallow, has seriously changed the game. Whether you've got five minutes on the commute or a quiet hour in the evening, Hallow helps you slow down and really pray with guided rosaries, reflections and meditation. from folks who actually make prayer feel accessible, not complicated.

Starting point is 01:01:21 I use Hello. I sometimes play their beautiful Bible sleep stories for some of my children at night. It's an excellent app. This month on Hello, you can join thousands around the world, praying the Marian consecration with daily reflections and beautiful audio guided by voices you'll know and love. So if you've been meaning to reconnect with God, don't wait. Download Hallow today. it's free to start and honestly I've met so many people who say it's the one thing that keeps them

Starting point is 01:01:50 on track with their prayer visit hallo.com slash matt frad to get three months free let's make this may a month of grace peace and genuine prayer again that's hallow dot com slash matt frad for three months free i love how you said that earlier about the fact that we're standing throwing bricks at the universe and complaining and hating it for not having meaning is really interesting, isn't it? Have you ever, do you know that I mentioned him earlier in another context? Do you know the psychologist Paul Vitz? I've heard of him, but I don't know much. He's very smart guy.

Starting point is 01:02:26 He did a study of biographical study, comparative biography of, oh, I don't know, something like 200 famous skeptics, atheists. Yes, I know where you're going with this. Yes. Yes, and he had not picked them out by any criterion except that they'd been influential and discovered that in every single case, there was a defective relationship with the father. So maybe the dad ran off. Yep.

Starting point is 01:02:54 With the secretary or something. Maybe he had a distant relationship with his father. The father was emotionally unavailable. He beat him. He's something. But in every case, there was a difficult relationship with the father. And I see that among my students. And what we're not doing is committing the genetic fallacy.

Starting point is 01:03:10 We're not saying God exists because they've arrived at this opinion because bad fathers. Right. We're not saying that these atheists are wrong because having bad fathers predispose them to this. But it is an interesting sociological. But it is interesting that having bad fathers does predispose people to this. They miss the experience of fatherhood. They want it. They need it. And not having had it, find it difficult to believe in God,

Starting point is 01:03:40 father or resent him so much that they have to disbelieve in him in order to get back at him. Wasn't that Lewis? Who said, I hated God for not existing or something like that? Did he say that? May, it probably wasn't Lewis. I don't know. He might have. It was when he, the only description of his atheist days that I remember is where he said

Starting point is 01:04:01 that the thought of God was odious to him. It felt like it squeezed all the air out. It was suffocating. Okay. Even in his novel, perilandra. Yep. The protagonist is a devout, seriously devout Christian. But at one point when the presence of God becomes overwhelmingly powerful, obvious to him early on in the novel, he feels almost like there is no air.

Starting point is 01:04:28 And he, the only solution, the only way he's able to breathe again is to simply submit to this. So I sometimes run into people who are, I love how you've got a beautiful way. of speaking. I've read a couple of your books and you write really, what's the word? It's like vigorously. The way you said it earlier is I ripped up my own mind or something like that. Oh, they did. I tore it up. Tor it. Yeah. So, um, all right. So I run into people who really want to believe in God, but they just don't know how to. And they're not, they really, they say to me, it's, it's, I want to. I just can't make myself do it. One, because it seems like bullshit. It seems like a story, parents tell kids to make them behave or old people like you tell yourself because

Starting point is 01:05:16 you're afraid of death. It's a lens to make sense of a chaotic freaking world. And I'm not going to trade in my intellectual credibility to believe some bloody fairy tale. But I want to. If it were real, I would do it. But I have no idea how to cross that chasm is what they'll say to me. Yeah. Well, you notice that they're assuming things about God that they can't know here. They're assuming that the only reason anybody does believe in God is to comfort themselves, to make sense of what actually doesn't make sense. Then Lewis, we mentioned Lewis,

Starting point is 01:05:46 he spears that. That's the crutch idea, right? People believe in God because he's a crutch. But Lewis says, well, you know, disbelieve in God can be a crutch too. And we all know lots of cases like that. The philosopher Thomas Nagel once said in a book, he said, he admitted that the implication

Starting point is 01:06:03 to his argument, you know, strongly suggest that there could be a God. He said, this made him uncomfortable. He said, I don't believe in God. He said, some of the most intelligent people that I know do believe in God that makes me deeply uncomfortable. He says, it's not just that I don't believe in God. And of course, I hope I'm not mistaken. Everybody hopes he's not mistaken.

Starting point is 01:06:21 But he says, I don't want the universe to be like that. I don't want there to be God. That's right. Now, back to the business about making things easier for yourself. if you, to say people only believe in God to make life tolerable for themselves, you really need to examine that and see, and not just leave to the conclusion, it's a genetic fallacy for one thing, because that's their motive for believing in God, God couldn't exist.

Starting point is 01:06:54 And in the second place, it isn't true anyway. People, sometimes people disbelieve in God in order to make the universe more tolerable to themselves. Don't presuppose something about God or about belief in God. just look at the reasons for thinking that there is a God the you know

Starting point is 01:07:09 it's it's if one I'm surprised that more people don't come to God for this reason look the the ancient people

Starting point is 01:07:21 will say something I guess it's believe in God like believing in Zeus or you know Athena or or somebody or Jeff

Starting point is 01:07:30 I think that's the Mormon God Jeff or Jeff Jeff okay Steve or or or or or or or like a Marvel

Starting point is 01:07:39 superhero comic whatever comic superhero I'll get it right but God isn't like those gods those gods are powerful beings in this universe the Marvel superhero character is like you and me but he's stronger the Hindu god is like you and me

Starting point is 01:07:55 but he's much much stronger you know the Hercules can lift all these things Jeff Jeff I guess can do that too yeah Jeff can populate planets Populate planets. Okay. But God is the first cause. God is that without which none of this would exist. He's not a being in the universe. Although he acts within the universe, he's not in it in that sense. He's he's that without which it wouldn't exist. He's that without which it wouldn't have a reason to exist. It wouldn't have a cause of existence. Nothing would have meaning. Now, the Greek gods, if you asked the, obviously weren't first causes. If you, if you tried to make this idea clear to an ancient Greek, you would have said, well, no, Zeus didn't create the

Starting point is 01:08:43 universe. Well, where did the universe come from? Where did Zeus even come from? Well, you know, he came from the Titans. Where did the Titans come from? Well, they rose up out of the mist of chaos. What is chaos? It's meaninglessness. It's disorder. What you're saying is that actually everything came out of absolutely nothing. This is a nihilism. classic scholar Edith Hamilton in an introduction to a book written for ordinary readers. It wasn't one of her more scholarly books about Greek mythology, talked about the luminous reason of the Greeks. And I thought, what a strange thing for somebody who knew all about

Starting point is 01:09:22 Greek mythology to say, because at the bottom of this was the dirty secret that none of it made sense. All of this beautiful stuff, God, the Apollo, God of Light and Reason and all that, comes from chaos. So that means all of the stuff that you're spinning, I'm spinning my, my syllogisms and my theories and my arguments, there is a God, there isn't a God. I can build these buildings and I do my, and I do the differential equations to figure out if it's going to stand up. All of that is based on nothing. Now, you can do either of two things. You can either say none of this makes sense because there's no God, you know, because it's all based on nothing. Or you can say it does make sense. Therefore,

Starting point is 01:10:02 there has to be an ultimate principle of sense. There has to be something that causes sense to make sense, that makes it possible for sense to make sense, and there's God. Now, people don't usually think it through that far, right? The one other thing that I would suggest to this person is, well, you're a living as though you already know that there's no God, but you don't. If you're saying, I wish I could believe in God,

Starting point is 01:10:32 at least, you know, mean that. mean that you're open to the possibility. Why don't you try living as though there is a God? Or living as though there is the Christian God. Why don't you try praying? You know, you can pray. It's okay if you think you're praying to the wall. As long as you take seriously,

Starting point is 01:10:50 if I'm wrong and you're not the wall, here is what I'm saying. Why don't you try worshipping? Why don't you try to live as you would if you did believe in him? See what happens. Benedict the 16th made that advice. People said, oh, that's just Pascal's wager again.

Starting point is 01:11:07 No, it isn't Pascal's wager. This isn't a flip of the coin. I'll believe in him because the consequences work out better, you know. Which isn't a bad idea. Which isn't a bad idea, but it's a different argument. It's a different argument. This is saying, try it. But Pascal says the same thing after his wager.

Starting point is 01:11:21 He says, take holy water, genuflect. Yes, you're right. He does say that. I had overlooked that. You're correct. I stand corrected. But, but, but, but the objection is I don't want to be insincere. I don't want to be insincerical.

Starting point is 01:11:35 Don't be. Don't be. You know, you can be, you can say, if you say to God, I'm praying to you on the chance that you're there, but I don't think you are. That's not hypocritical. You're admitting that you, that you don't think he's there, but you're also saying, I am open to the possibility. I might be wrong.

Starting point is 01:11:56 I'm, and I want this to be a real communication if you are there. Answer me. See if he does. All right. I wonder if you got a thought about this. It seems like in this day and age, we are much more open to the possibility that we are characters in a video game that somebody's playing for the future than we are in the existence of God. And we could come up with other ideas as well. Maybe solipsism makes more sense than believing in the classical theist Christian God.

Starting point is 01:12:23 I want maybe talk about what you're seeing in this area. And why is it, do you think that we're taking these things seriously while dismissing the God hypothesis? Is it just because it's new and tech? It isn't new. This is Gnosticism. You know, the Gnostics believed that at least one kind of Gnostic, there were all kinds of Gnostics, you know, believed that whatever we call God isn't really the real God.

Starting point is 01:12:53 You know, he's just sort of an emanation from this other thing, which is an emanation from this other thing, which is an emanation from this other thing. And way back there, maybe there's something. Okay. And so far as I know, all of those guys did think at least that it wasn't an endless regos, and back there there was something. But they thought that, you know, we didn't have any commerce with God himself. It was just with his emanations.

Starting point is 01:13:19 And this is a version of that, too. I'm living in a simulation. Well, that's a simulation that's on a computer. Where did that computer come from? Well, that computer might have actually been just something in somebody else's simulation. So there are simulations upon simulations upon simulations. Is there ever one at the beginning of it. And some of these guys who actually do this, try to work out the mathematics and figure out whether you could whether you could prove

Starting point is 01:13:43 that there was a simulation at the beginning of the simulations or whether we could ever know that or whether there had to be one. But, I would want to say, though, that even, there can't be an infinite regress. To say that there are infinite regresses of explanations for things amounts to saying

Starting point is 01:14:00 there's no explanation of things. And there has to be an explanation. Now, so that even if that were true that we're simulations. And those simulations were in a simulation and those simulations were in a simulation. If there's a first simulation,

Starting point is 01:14:21 then that's God. And if we're here in this one, well, you still have to decide, am I just, I mean, I'm in one sense, I'm God's artifact, right? Yeah, I don't know that it's that much worse to say that he programmed me than that he created me.

Starting point is 01:14:40 In some, in one sense, if the, the, the, the, the, the, the, The real question is not that. The real question is, am I really a person? Am I really a substance? Am I really an individual substance of a rational nature? Am I responsible for my actions? Do my decisions have meaning?

Starting point is 01:15:01 And whether it came back to many, many, many, many, many. This is similar to the argument that people make about multiverses and things like that. They say, oh, your argument to a first cause presupposes that there's only one. one universe and there are many universes. No, I mean, that's silly. If there are many universes, then universe is not even the right word for the one that we're in. It's only a sub-universe. The real universe is the multiverse. Okay, where did the multiverse come from? For which we have no evidence. For which we have no evidence, by the way. There are a few physicists who claim that perhaps we could have evidence of that, but it's very speculative. We, the, the most of them

Starting point is 01:15:42 view this as the other universes as things of which even in principle we could not have observational evidence. That's right. And so... You would need some kind of universe generator, apparently. You would need some kind of a universe generator. You'd have to have instead of speaking of the laws of, you know, maybe in some other universe,

Starting point is 01:15:58 Planck's constant is different. The gravitational constant is different. Light travels at a different velocity or there's something instead of light. Okay, maybe so. But even if the laws of nature of this nature are different, there have to be laws of meta-nature, the laws of the...

Starting point is 01:16:14 So you still have the problem of what causes it. It does not in any way dispense of the... Even the argument to a first cause was willing to say, look, you've got this, you've got the universe, and that might have been caused by something. Well, somebody says, but what caused the cause?

Starting point is 01:16:30 Well, you have to ask, was that a necessary cause or a contingent cause? In other words, was the cause of this universe something that had to exist? Or was it something that didn't have to exist? If it's something that didn't have to exist, then it's reasonable to say it had to have a cause too. And we go say, what was its cause? Same question. Is that a contingent cause or is it necessary cause? And the

Starting point is 01:16:51 argument is there has to, there can't be an infinite regress, doesn't make any sense. So there has to be a first cause that is not contingent, that had to be, that can't not be. And that is God. So even in the classical, this classical argument for the existence of God, you don't have to say, here's God and here's the universe, bang. There can be all these inter, intervening causes, and there would still be a first cause. So this is, I think that people find this attractive because it's another evasion maneuver to sort of not talk, not talk seriously about God. It's, you play with video games all the time and you think all this stuff is cool and

Starting point is 01:17:32 we're going to be putting chips into our brains and making ourselves smarter and we're going to do this and we're going to do that and we're going to live forever. And how cool if all, if everything that we see is just a big video. video game. So to that point, I want to tell people to go check out your book. Don't worry, we're not wrapping up. I just want to shout this out again. Pandemic of lunacy, how to think clearly when everyone around you seems crazy. We're putting a link to it below, but one of the things you talk about is transhumanism. So to this point of the chip in the brain thing, I want to get your opinions on AI, transhumanism, where this is all leading. Yeah. And how, okay, I know I just

Starting point is 01:18:09 asked you a question. Now I'm going to ask you a different one, but I want to fit this in there somehow, Because how readily do you think people would submit to this type of surgery where we could put the iPhone in our brain and blink in a certain way and then see things? There are people who claim that they can't wait. Yeah. I think some people would. Of course we would. Sort of, you know, it was Elon Musk. I think he was asked on Rogan's podcast about when do we become cyborgs.

Starting point is 01:18:34 And he's like, we basically are. I mean, we're all walking around with this thing. Sure, it's not sewn into our flesh, but it may as well be. Yeah, some people, some proponents of this, there was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by a couple. It's amazing. One tends to think of the Wall Street Journal as a more conservative publication, although its news division is actually pretty liberal. One tends to think at least of its editorial page is pretty conservative, but they're very, very pro-transhumanism. They publish a lot of pro-transhumanist stuff.

Starting point is 01:19:01 And one such article about, oh, I don't know, 10 years ago, something like that, I don't have much of a sense of duration. These people were gung-ho for the transhumanist revolution. They said, and they thought that it was inevitable. They said, what general would not welcome the prospect of soldiers who never had to sleep and who couldn't disobey their orders? What parents could resist if the other parents were all putting implants for increased concentration on tests and their kids didn't have them? That's right. So they say, it's going to happen. Yes.

Starting point is 01:19:34 Makes sense to me. I feel like you're about to show me why it doesn't make sense, but right now, I mean, I was the one banging the friggin' the frigging the frigging damn years ago, 15 years ago, telling parents obviously don't get your kids' iPhones. No, I want to listen to me. No, nobody does. Nobody does. So the same thing would happen.

Starting point is 01:19:50 Yeah, I, it will. Now, I don't think that we can, the transhumanists think that we can transcend our nature. What they really believe is that we can, we can invent a new nature for ourselves, so we can change our nature. I think this misunderstands that. difference between a nature and an artifact.

Starting point is 01:20:07 Okay. You know, we're treating ourselves like digging machines or like televisions or like dishwashers. Yeah. And sure,

Starting point is 01:20:15 I can change them and their purposes depend on me. They're my artifact. Yeah. The meanings and purposes in me are already there. Are there already there?

Starting point is 01:20:25 I don't think that we can create a new nature. I don't think that is within our power to do this. I think we could ruin the ones we have. And so it's not going to happen. Well,

Starting point is 01:20:34 in one sense, yes, sense, no. Are we going to have a new nature? No. Could we destroy the one we have? Yes. And that really gets scary. You know, already we have intimations of a caste system, even in things that have nothing to do with transhumanism. For instance, the arguments for abortion. If you say, the reason that you can kill an unborn child is because he can't communicate, this is one of the arguments that's out there. He's not a human person. Why isn't he a human person? Well, the criteria of personhood is that you have to be able to perform certain functions. Well, what functions are

Starting point is 01:21:05 those. You've got to be able to communicate in a sophisticated way, and you've got to be conscious, and you've got to be able to make sophisticated plans and carry them out. Well, toddlers can't do that either. Some adults are not very good at making plans. Some adults are not very good at communicating clearly in a sophisticated way, and that's also a matter of degree. So now it makes personhood depend on degree. Somebody can communicate better than another person. So is he more a person than this one? You've already got an implicit caste system. Now, back to transhumanism. One theorist had, I think the term has become general, had said that as this is proceeding along,

Starting point is 01:21:42 the people who can afford, this isn't going to happen, but he didn't see it as happening through top-down government intervention, but by consumer choice, the people who can afford to get their kids all hooked up with monkey genes for stronger muscles and all this kind of stuff, they will be the gene rich.

Starting point is 01:21:58 It'll start out as physical wealth, monetary wealth, but it'll be converted into genetic wealth. And then at the other end of the scale, there will be the gene poor. So you're going to have a new caste system much more powerful than anything that we've ever historically seen. The time traveler, that short story by, what's his face? By, by H.G. Wells. That's it.

Starting point is 01:22:18 Yeah. Yeah. With the underground. The, I can't even remember what they were called anymore. I forget what they called too, but you've got that underground cast of people who have become, what, strong? And then those who have been pampered have become, like, weak and fragile. Right, right. Although in this case, it would be more like C.S. Lewis's imagination of this in The Abolition of Man, which was a great and prescient book.

Starting point is 01:22:41 There were only two people in his era that were really writing about transhumanist. Huxley, who was a transhumanist and invented the term transhumanist and said, this is going to be great. And Lewis, who, I don't think he used the term transhumanism, but he says, no, this, if it could happen, would be awful. But he described the innovators. You say, people think that this is going to make us more free somehow. Well, if I'm the, somebody has to be plugging in the chips. Somebody has to be designing the chips. Who are they?

Starting point is 01:23:15 The people who are receiving them aren't free. You know, they're getting them. They're being operated upon. They are the patients, not the agents. Okay. And suppose we monkey with our genes. The next generation is less free than this one because their range of choice has been constricted by this operation on their genes. And the controllers in that

Starting point is 01:23:35 generation then continued a monkey with the genes and the generation after that is even less free until far enough in the future, nobody can, nobody has any freedom left at all. This isn't an increase in freedom. It also means an increasing irrationality because Lewis pointed out, on what possible basis can you say this is better than this? We're going to improve our nature. This is better than this. Well, in some cases, that's a no-brainer. If we could do away with cancer. Sure.

Starting point is 01:24:07 But cancer, there's a natural basis. There's a basis in our nature. There's a natural law basis for saying that cancer is bad because it's an interruption of or a perversion of or an undermining of natural function. A cavity in the tooth is bad.

Starting point is 01:24:23 It's okay to fill it. It's not transhumanist to fill a cavity because the function of the tooth is to chew. The cavity keeps it from chewing properly. or causes pain. So you fill the cavity, it restores the function, fine. Contrast that. Correcting infertility is like that. Yes. By contrast with something that is really more transhumanist, and that's conceiving the children in a test tube and then re-injecting them. So one is an aid to human nature, and one subverts some aspect of it. One subverts it in some way.

Starting point is 01:24:54 It changes the meaning of the program. So this is a difference between like taking a Tylenol or taking the oral contraceptive pill and then sterilizing the act. Right, right. the church condemns the ladder is precisely because it subverts you. Right. And that's also why the church doesn't condemn an NFP, because in NFP, natural family plan, you're cooperating with the structure and the cycles and the patterns of the natural reproductive powers. Well, anyway, so, so he says, on what possible basis can you decide that human beings like this would be better than human beings like this? Human beings, for instance, who abate all their orders. well it would only be because you have some desire

Starting point is 01:25:31 for what for power or you know you're an industrialist you have a power you have a desire for are you saying what would my reason be for receiving the chip what would no what would the motive of the controllers the motive are the ones who designed the chips and the motive are the ones who introduce these forms of conditioning capital all right let's say it's that now but capital although the desire for wealth upon wealth upon wealth is a perversion. It is nevertheless a perversion of something that is in itself good and natural.

Starting point is 01:26:03 We do need, we are bodies, we are embodied souls. We do need some material things. It is not wrong to want to have a roof over our heads that doesn't leak, to have clothes that keep our children warm and to have enough food to eat and enough wealth, let us call it that, to be able to practice the normal everyday activities of our culture with our friends and our neighbors. Now, the problem is that then we pervert that into wanting more and more and more. So your motive for having, let's say, factory workers who were programmed so that they would never go on strike is so that I'll make more money, which is a perversion of something natural. But now you're devising the next generation. Maybe you think it would also be good, maybe you're socialist programmers.

Starting point is 01:26:49 And you think we're going to breed the profit motive out of them. okay there has to be well there's a sort of a that's a perversion too compassion is something that is natural to us but there's right compassion and wrong compassion you know you can pervert this into the idea it's evil for anybody to have more than anybody else and you know you shouldn't have to work for what you get and all that kind of thing but you always have to there always has to be some some your nature provides you with a set of possible motives either intact or perverted it provides you with a with a set of possible motives, the controllers, the inventors,

Starting point is 01:27:26 the innovators are working within that set, the next generation of innovators is going to be working from a different set because you've changed it. The one after that is going to be working from a different set. Keep extrapolating that out. What possible motive is even left

Starting point is 01:27:41 all the way down the line? Lewis says there is no possible motive left except acting on the felt impulse of the moment. Yeah. So the whole thing just collapses in incoherency. Well, what if we only use transhumanism to aid human nature. Well, what do you mean by aid?

Starting point is 01:27:55 Do you mean, for example, oh, we are afraid of death and we would like to live, and so let's live forever. Sure. That sounds great. Let's think of all the human things that would be hurt by that.

Starting point is 01:28:07 Now, I do believe that if it hadn't been for human sin, that there's, I don't know what God's plans for us would have been exactly, but there's no particular reason. But we wouldn't have died as we do now. But I know, but I'm not talking about that. Well, there's still this, my point, I just want to add the second coming is still going to happen.

Starting point is 01:28:23 So choosing to live forever is not to choose to not go to heaven. Right. So let's just do that. But living forever in this life is. And even apart from the theological consideration, even apart from faith in the second coming, look, if you live forever, you're going to stop having children. Yeah. I try to imagine a world without the laughter of children in it.

Starting point is 01:28:43 No, yeah. You would have to enforce sterilization. You would have to enforce sterilizations. You would have to be brutal. and you would have a world with no children, and I think that would be a brutal world. I agree. People think, oh, how wonderful we'd live forever.

Starting point is 01:29:00 It already is a brutal world. It already is a brutal world. You go to the place where adults go to indulge their lowest passions. Oh, yes. Children are hated. Yes. And absolutely unwhelcomed. I read somebody once, or was this a student,

Starting point is 01:29:17 somebody was saying, if we lived forever, we'd have a time. time to work on our virtues all that much longer and we become better and better and better. No, I think it's more like Peter Crave to says we'd be more like a carton of milk left out in the sun. Yes, that's right. If somebody hasn't become virtuous by the, by the six hundred and seven. Yeah, he's not going to be. He's going to become worse and worse and worse. He's going to be a more and more depraved and lonely and miserable. This episode is sponsored by the St. Paul Center.

Starting point is 01:29:49 We Catholics have a million Lent programs and thank goodness for them. It's great that they help us grow closer to the Lord throughout the Lenton season. But what do we do throughout the 50 days of the Easter season? Well, like the women disciples of Matthew 288, we're called to announce the joyful news of the Lord's resurrection and to accompany others on their journey with the risen Lord. It is interesting, isn't it, that we feel much more comfortable during the season of Lent than the season of Easter. We often forget that it's a season at all.

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Starting point is 01:30:53 Sisters. This challenge combines practical insight, theological expertise and firsthand experience. Our faith is never truly understood until it's shared. Share your faith with others this Easter season by joining the Easter accompaniment challenge. Join the challenge by visiting St. Paul's Center.com slash pints and becoming a member today. All right, so they tell me that dating today is weird. You can feel like the only practicing Catholic in your city and you start wondering, is everyone either hostile to the faith or just spiritual but not religious? Meanwhile, you'd actually like to pray a rosy with someone, not just hope for the best together,

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Starting point is 01:32:07 situation ship. Have real conversations about God and what a holy family might look like. Catholic Match puts you in a place where people are on the same page about Christ and his church so you can find your forever. So if you're serious about finding a spouse who loves Jesus and his church, stop wasting your time scrolling past people who don't. Download the Catholic Match app on the Apple App Store or Google Play. It's free to sign up and only takes five minutes or go to Catholicmatch.com to get started. Again, visit Catholicmatch.com and sign up today. Okay, so when we talk about things like perfecting our eyesight and our hearing and just making sure those things are functioning like when we're at our prime, could that be called

Starting point is 01:32:49 transhumanism? Would that be okay? Well, no, you do have some difficulties here because it's one thing to fill a tooth. It's another thing to monkey with the genes. And I don't really have, I may be wrong on this, Matt. I don't think that I have, if I'm right, the vulnerability to cancer, the vulnerability to tooth decay is not a result of our design, but it's a glitch, you know, it's a, it's a recessive gene or something like that. And so conceivably, you could fix all those things. However, then a different kind of consideration comes in. the genome is incredibly complicated.

Starting point is 01:33:39 And it's not just that this picture that we have, you've got a gene for a good teeth. It's much more complicated than that. There are probably all kinds of genes that affect the integrity of your teeth. And some of those genes may do other things that have nothing to do with the teeth. Some genes are really multifunctional.

Starting point is 01:33:58 We're only beginning to catch on to this. Or take sickle cell anemia. It's a disease. But some people think that the disease, the genes spread through the population because they confirmed, conferred some degree of immunity to a certain kind of parasitic fly. Now, when we're monkeying with the genes, do we know what we're really doing? We have the intention of curing this defect over here and it does all of this. We even have that problem in ordinary medicine. You have to, before something is prescribed, your doctor has to say, now what other medications are using?

Starting point is 01:34:36 This interacts with this, but it only interacts with this if you're also using this. Or it'll interact with this if you're overweight, but not if you're underweight. And it has this long list of possible side conditions. Do you have any of these predisposing things going on in your body? This is already complicated. And so even apart from the ordinary ethical things, there's just the epistemological thing. Do we know enough to monkey with this? We might find that we're destroying ourselves.

Starting point is 01:35:02 And the conditions under which we could know enough to do this, that would be a long, long, long time in the scientific future. And at the rate things are going now, people are even forgetting how to read. I doubt that they're going to be good scientists. Yeah. Yeah. But if we got there, you'd be okay with it. That's the point we're making it.

Starting point is 01:35:23 Yeah, I think so, probably. I think so. Let's talk about sex stuff. Why? I'm saying that abrasively. I know. On purpose. Sexual perversion is weird.

Starting point is 01:35:37 It's weird because it feels like perversion breeds perversion breeds perversion. Yes. Okay. Let's talk about sexual desire and why it goes really bad when it goes off track and really quickly. I mean, all of us have had to endure snippets about Epstein's Island and was taking place in London with these rape gangs and Yeah, well, let's think about this. This is a a lot of people assume

Starting point is 01:36:05 one of the reasons that people assume that you need sexual variety. You know, there are even some counselors who advise you if you're having difficulty in your marriage. The two of you need to have sex with some people besides each other. God, be merciful to our sinners.

Starting point is 01:36:19 That's right. Now, the assumption is there that impersonal sex, sex with somebody to whom I mean, how can you stand negative? in front of somebody who has not given his or her life to you. It's pretty hard to see, I think. The assumption is that impersonal sex is more fun.

Starting point is 01:36:44 Well, that tends to reduce it to just. It depends what you mean by fun. I know. If you mean more exciting, I think the answer is obviously yes. Probably, if you've been married for 50 years and you get a hooker, the idea that sex is going to be more exciting seems obviously true. Well, there's another side to that. Let's talk about the yes side.

Starting point is 01:37:01 It may be more physically exciting, but on the other hand, sheer pleasure becomes old. You know, there's a reason why we have joking expressions like, are we having fun yet? Pleasure itself, you know, pleasure itself gets old. What philosophers call the hedonistic paradox is the fact that if you... Oh, yeah, that's brilliant. If you pursue nothing but pleasure as your end in life, you're going to end up not having any pleasure. This happens in the desire for sexual thrill, sexual excitement too. I used to write a monthly column of dialogues.

Starting point is 01:37:34 This was back when I was a Protestant, before I was Catholic, after I was no longer a nihilist, somewhere around there, for a magazine that was for evangelical, it was produced by evangelical Protestants, and it was for Christian Catholic, Christian college students, and it was dialogues between an imaginary professor Theoblus

Starting point is 01:37:55 and his students. Well, that's, I got so many letters from people, readers that I just was having difficulty. It was taking up my whole week answering all these letters. So it spun off a second column, a correspondence column, called Ask Theophilus. So the nature of the letters was interesting. An astonishing number of them were about sex. They were about all kinds of things. They were about, you know, prudential things, pragmatic questions about life and making choices about relations with parents and relations with other people and evangelism, this and that and the other. But a lot of them were about sex.

Starting point is 01:38:30 And an unusual number of people, especially young men, not so many young women, would write to me and say, I'm in trouble. I started using pornography, and it was a lot of fun and it was pleasurable and it was exciting. And then it stopped exciting me. So I turned to another kind, a more exotic, a more kinky kind of pornography. And that restored the excitement. And then that paled and didn't do it anymore. And then I started turning to unnatural stuff. Yep.

Starting point is 01:39:10 And now I'm deeply in all this horrible, creepy stuff, and I don't know how to get out of this, and I'm trapped. What can I do? This is very common. So, yeah, you can say. And it's really good neurological reasons for this. You've reset the pleasure thermostat in your brain and now need more perverted things just to get the dopamine levels up.

Starting point is 01:39:31 enough to feel yes i think that's right but now let's go back in the other way the the the parallel assumption is oh come on sex is fun when you when you're just married and and and and it's all new to you which is true and but after 50 years of marriage okay i've been married more than 50 years now yeah yeah as a matter of fact i've been married more than i think i've been married more than have i been married no and not more than six you glory to jesus christ i'll be married 20 years this year i'm going to ask you for advice at a minute but continue okay but look i'm I made a whole bunch of mistakes, but the thing is, almost anybody who's been married long enough will tell you, you know,

Starting point is 01:40:09 there were times when there had been seasons in our marriage where things got kind of dull. And where one lady told me I fell out of love with my husband, but I fell back in love with him again later. Very common. Because love is not a feeling. Love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person. That is love and that is true of non-erotic love.

Starting point is 01:40:35 But that's true of erotic love too in a Christian sense. It should have that element of charity in it. Now, feelings, romantic feelings often accompany that they don't always. And if they don't at first, I mean, even in an arranged marriage, for instance, they often come if they've made a real commitment and love each other. You know, the erotic feelings, the excitement come. And if they faded away, they often come back. And as a matter of fact, when you know each other, okay, you know what? You've had intercourse with dozens of women.

Starting point is 01:41:14 It's like waiting in the kitty pool. You never know anybody in their depths. And now you're swimming in the ocean. And it may take a long time to swim, to learn to swim in that ocean, and to learn how to deal with the waves and sometimes you feel like you feel like you're choking because you swallow some salt water. And then you figure that out and you learn how to work with the surf and all of this sort of thing. And it is so much more interesting and so much more intriguing to learn another person. I can't say all the way down.

Starting point is 01:41:44 There's a mystery in the human person that only God knows. But way deeper than you know anybody. And where that person knows you perhaps better than you know yourself. That is exciting. and you discover new excitements in this. I like how Peter Crave put it. He said the essence of sexual pleasure, at least on one level, is to be allowed into the other person's inner sanctum.

Starting point is 01:42:09 Yes. And you probably don't get that with nightly fornication. Yes, it has also been said that the very physiognomy of the body reflect something of this in the case of a woman. This is the people think that it's so crass to speak of entering and this and that. And it's so sentimental to speak of a sanctum. But there is a sanctum here with a throne in it

Starting point is 01:42:34 where only one can sit. And it's even shielded by a veil. This is, I, this is, um, beautiful. Yeah. It, I'm trying to think of who said that. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:42:46 I wrote a book about this and I quoted her, but I can't remember now. I'm sorry. But, uh, I think it is beautiful. And, if it's a Christian marriage,

Starting point is 01:43:03 you know, all of this stuff is pretty much available from the beginning, whether or not you access it. And if you become Christian or return to Christ after marriage as my wife and I did, that you discover these depths in it. And it's, it just is flabbergasting. And so I think, what could a bunch of casual sex with a prostitute mean for that? I mean, I won't say that there's never been temptation or mistakes of various kinds, but my gosh, I've been saved from an awful lot of a awful lot of catastrophe. I remember listening to two secular people who don't appear to have much belief in God or grace or anything like that. I actually may have been a comedian.

Starting point is 01:43:51 You said, like, marriage sex is like a great piece of salmon, you know? You eat the salmon. You're like, I'm really glad that was great. I'm really glad I did that. What are you saying? Like promiscuous sex, I think you said, is like one of those all you can eat buffets. And after you've done it, you're like, I hate myself. Everything's awful.

Starting point is 01:44:09 Oh, gosh. That's, there's more truth than I would have expected to get from some stand-up comics. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, you've been married 50 years. Give me some advice. What have you learned? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:44:23 Let me preface that by saying this. everything you're about to say or that I would say to someone who's early on in marriage to me, I would have told you I knew when I was married. Isn't that funny? Oh, yeah. But I had no idea and I still have no idea and I keep learning things I thought I knew. You know, there's Thomas Aquinas even has a term for that. There's con-natural knowledge.

Starting point is 01:44:48 The con-natural knowledge of another person, for example, it isn't that you learn by observing on the outside or it isn't propositional knowledge. You learn that person by becoming like that person. And he says it's like this in our relationship with our God too. Because in this life, we aren't beholding the face of God. We aren't beholding with the eye of the mind, God in his own being yet. But in a sense, we know him because he is making us more like him.

Starting point is 01:45:19 Well, anyway. So advice. Continental knowledge can also mean you learn things by a young guy that I know was in a seminar on Thomas Aquinas and we were talking about con natural knowledge and he says, I know what you mean. He says, he says, I've just had kids and there are all kinds of things that I understand now that I didn't understand before about fatherhood and about children. That he may have said he. But I would have thought that I knew them before, but I didn't. Or I would have thought, gee, that could be true. That could be true

Starting point is 01:45:50 and that's very abstract. But now it is obvious. It is obvious. And I mean, that's all amazing stuff. So I'm telling you to tell me things I'll think I understand but don't. Yeah, okay. Do that. Well, one is, you remember I was just making the point that love isn't a feeling. It is usually accompanied by certain kinds of feelings, but the feelings come and go.

Starting point is 01:46:13 When people marry each other, they exchange vows. And one of the vows is they vow to love each other. And people think, oh, you can't realistically vow to love each other because you're feelings change. Yeah, but love isn't a feeling. You can realistically, love promises and commitments of the will, well, they are about the will. Commitments are about the will. This, we can bind ourselves. You can commit yourself to go on willing the true good of the other person no matter how you feel. I don't feel any particular affection for you, dear, but right now you're saying to yourself, not a good idea to say, to put it like that to her. But I'm going to

Starting point is 01:46:53 continue acting for your true good. I still desire your true good. I am I am still going to be glad that you are in the world and not not in the world. I am going to rejoice in this fact. I am going to say it is good that you are and I am going to end and I'm going to will more good to you. You do that and the feelings are going to refresh themselves and they're going to come back. And the surprising thing is in a lot of ways I find, look, I am one of those who who, who, I mean, I mean, you know, I was married to my wife. I loved her. But a lot of the feelings became pretty darn difficult at one phase.

Starting point is 01:47:31 And it was after returning to Christian faith, and especially, actually, after reception into the Catholic Church, which I had not expected, access to the sacraments and so forth, and she reports the same thing, that I love deepened incredibly. And it's so much more fun than anything that we knew when we were kids. You know, I hate to sound corny. People talk about adventures, and there's a lot of hallmark card ways of speaking about that,

Starting point is 01:48:01 but it is like that. So I would say, don't worry too over much about the feelings. If the feelings go away, go on loving, go on engaging in the practices of love, and people say, but it's hypocritical.

Starting point is 01:48:15 You mentioned hypocrisy before? We've talked about Lewis a number of times. C.S. Lewis made the remark that even good manners, are there like a mask? Yes, but it's a mask that your face shapes itself to fit. And the routines of love,

Starting point is 01:48:32 consideration, pulling out the chair, pouring the cup of coffee for the beloved. You know, doing these kinds of things train the soul. Beautiful. And they are modes of cooperation with the grace of God by which real charity can enter the soul

Starting point is 01:48:49 so that you can love her with the same. kind of love, although only a finite measure of it, with which God himself loves her. I heard only a little while after becoming Catholic. I heard somebody say something like that in a homily. I don't remember whether he said it well or not, and I thought, oh, that seems a little bit exaggerated. But, you know, it's all over the New Testament, these remarkable things that Paul says about marriage. He says, submit yourselves one to another. He then talks about the mode of submission of the wife and the mode of submission of the man,

Starting point is 01:49:29 which is a lot harder. He says you have to lay yourself down for her as Christ laid himself down for the church. Have you read Chris Systems commentary on Ephesians 5? No, I should. Write that down for me before I leave. And then he goes on to say, this is a mystery. And I'm telling you that this is about the relationship between Christ and his church. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:49 You know, this is about exulting marriage, huh? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, people say, oh, they all dismarriage. Oh, they're so against the body. baloney. One thing Chris Stom says that you've said is that he says, never call your wife by her name alone, but always with a term of affection, like my love, my dear one, my... Isn't that lovely? Yes, it is lovely. Yeah. It is lovely. And spontaneously, lovers do that, husbands and wives do that. Even if it becomes just a sort of matter of... Yes, dear. Yes, dear, yes. Still, why do they say dear? It's not very, it's not very common among young people today. I think. it seems kind of old foggyish but it's um bring it back it's bring it's well good it's it's it's said let's bring it oh let's bring it back yeah the well there are a lot but you know there

Starting point is 01:50:34 are a lot of things that are coming back yeah people are some people are trying to try to reinventating which means rediscovering it you know the possibility of of courtship and that can go in some really weird directions too but but um but uh even the recognition that men and women are different Wait, what? Even the recognition that men and women are different. This is something

Starting point is 01:50:56 that has been almost forgotten is denied in some quarters but in some quarters is coming back. It's coming back and it's good. We don't have to say,

Starting point is 01:51:05 you know, you know, you're different than me, dear. That's not putting her down or putting him down. It can be a sort of a fun put down. I once was trying to talk

Starting point is 01:51:17 about sexual complementarity to an audience. And, you know, this is the idea that there's something men and women need each other. They balance each other. There's something that is not as fully present in the man. It is more fully present in the woman. There's something that is not as fully present in the woman that is more fully present in the man. And without each other, we'd be unbalanced. Even people who don't marry need the presence of women in their lives, women who are friends, women who exist. And I said, by way of illustration, I said, most of the audience in this particular audience were women. And I said, women, haven't you noticed? that there are some things that seem to be sort of missing in your husbands.

Starting point is 01:51:55 Or I phrased it some clumsy way like this. And they all started laughing. It wasn't because they weren't laughing because they were mocking their husbands or because they didn't love them. They said, yes, of course. There are things that the guys just don't get. Well, and vice versa. And vice versa.

Starting point is 01:52:11 You go into a nail cell and listen to the way those women clatter on. My God, we need men in here seriously. Yes, yes, yes. And we can laugh at each other. And that's okay. It's okay to find it funny. There is so much more color in the world. There is so much more music in the world

Starting point is 01:52:28 and so much more laughter in the world because there are two kinds of us in it. I love what you said earlier about. I'm glad you exist, yeah? Yeah, well, that's from, that's not me that I borrowed that way of putting it from Joseph Piper, the great gentleman Thomas. This happened to me the other day,

Starting point is 01:52:43 my wife and I got up at four in the morning to take her to the airport because I'm such a good husband and she kind of told me she wanted me to. So I took me and I was absolutely bloody exhausted because we had to both get up about 3.30 in the morning, drove her. And I had to fly here to Nashville. And anyway, she sends me this message. And she begins by saying, yeah, it was a good flight.

Starting point is 01:53:06 There was a lot of crying babies on the plane. I thought her point was going to be, I'm exhausted and it was a long trip. And it was kind of hard to hear a lot of crying babies, which would have been perfectly fine. Instead, she said, it was hard because they were so far. I wanted to hold them, but they weren't near me. Oh, I went, oh, you are a really good person. Isn't that beautiful? In our church, which is really amazingly.

Starting point is 01:53:39 And I want to add, just real quick, I want to add, she didn't, she wasn't trying to flip the table to kind of impress me. It never occurred to her. I understand. That it was an irritating flight. Isn't that bananas? Yeah. Who are you? Is what I wanted to say to it.

Starting point is 01:53:53 A guy might, now, there's a difference. A guy might have not been irritated by that and even delighted in it thinking, well, yeah, okay, the kid's squawking, but isn't it nice that we, that there are these kids? And he would have noticed himself doing it and maybe complimented himself for having his attitude toward children. You know, a woman does this much more, much more spontaneously. Yeah. I would have, too. And patted myself on the back a little bit for that attitude toward the babies. I'm going to tell my wife about what I just did.

Starting point is 01:54:18 unselfconsciously too. I'll tell her unselfconsciously. But my parish has really come to life in recent years. And one of the interesting things, there are so many converts and so many intendances agree so much. And it's all generations, including lots and lots of young unmarried people, couples thinking about getting married,

Starting point is 01:54:42 young married, young families with children. And lots and lots and lots of, of old people too, but you hear them squawking, and it's just kind of fun. I mean, it can be difficult if you can't hear the homily. Most of the time, you can hear the homily just kind of fine. Unless the time the homily is not that great. Well, oftentimes, that's true. Although we have a couple of really good homilists, one in particular at our parish. We're really fortunate. But, but, but, you know, as long as you can hear it that kid, man, I would, I try to imagine a world in which I never heard a kid squawking that way.

Starting point is 01:55:23 You know what? It is such an unhappy thought. That's such a beautiful thing that you're saying. And I'm going to just be a Debbie Downer and have my melancholic, just teabone into your car here. Of thought by saying a lot of people think the opposite and are vocal about it. I know that. Like women, hardened women who seem like there's nothing in their eyes. There's nothing behind their eyes.

Starting point is 01:55:43 There's a lot of them. I see him. I meet them. Well, sure. But they've made themselves hard like that because they've made certain choices. Yeah. and have to convince themselves that those choices were okay and have to convince themselves that they haven't suffered.

Starting point is 01:55:56 I also want to say that as a dad of I have four kids, my youngest is now 11. I always like to tell parents of screaming children, just so you know, he doesn't sound as loud to me as he probably does to you. Because when my kids were babies and was screaming, I was like mortified and I, you know, but when I hear other people's,

Starting point is 01:56:12 I don't care, you know. I think it's kind of cute. I mean, there's a point at which I'm like, you really should go. For a while. This church, don't get me wrong. For a while, our priests would say to people with babies, you're all sitting in the back of there.

Starting point is 01:56:26 You don't need to do that. Bring them right up to the front row. I thought that was terrific. He regrets that. No, he doesn't regret it. He doesn't regret it. But unfortunately, hardly any of the mothers and fathers will do that. Because they're embarrassed.

Starting point is 01:56:40 They love being at the mass. They love bringing their children with them. The children want to see. They'd love it up in the front. but they are afraid that everybody will be disturbed by the crying, so they won't do it. It's scary. They give you this thing.

Starting point is 01:56:55 You got to take it home. You're like, really? You're trusting me with this thing? It's terrifying. Of course it is. Because it's one of these things you learn by doing. Yeah. Although we're designed in such a way to make that possible, right?

Starting point is 01:57:09 We are designed. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we're designed with a view to marriage and family life. We have in us inclinations to affect. with our, with our spouses, with our procreative partners. We have in us inclinations to love these children. They seem adorable to us. And, you know, there's something to be said even for a snoddy nose.

Starting point is 01:57:31 You know, when the kid holds his head up and you wipe that little nose. Okay, that's all right. So when you became a theist or were open to theism, it sounded like you were a Protestant. So why did you become Catholic? Oh, when, okay. You were raised a Protestant. The sequence was I was raised a Protestant. I was raised in a very devout Baptist household.

Starting point is 01:57:55 And I'm always grateful. They taught me the gospel and taught me to reverence the scripture and all kinds of other stuff. My grandfather, I think, was the first Baptist pastor of a Polish-speaking church in the United States. So that was, we talked for hours about these things. But I abandoned it all. Then I'm in the wastelands for a long time. then I came back to a Protestant faith, but it wasn't Baptist. There was a reason for that.

Starting point is 01:58:21 And then realized this can't be right and became Catholic. Now, there was a question there, and I lost. Well, just why did you become Catholic? Why not to stay Protestant? Well, this has to do partly with the reasons why when I returned to faith, I didn't just return to being a Baptist. I was brought up. Relations between Protestants and Catholics have changed very much over the years

Starting point is 01:58:44 and lots and lots and lots of Baptist friends who know perfectly well that this isn't true but I was brought out to believe that you know Catholics weren't Christians at all and that they're idol worshippers and that they think the Pope is some kind of a God and every word that drops from his lips is gospel truth

Starting point is 01:59:01 okay we know that isn't true but ironically it was during my wasteland here years when I was when I was a nihilist that I read a lot of Catholic stuff that I had never read before That's when I first discovered Thomas Aquinas. That's when I read Augustine. That's when I read Dante.

Starting point is 01:59:20 And I thought, well, gee, this Sherlock's Christian to me. And I did not abandon. I still had a profound critique, I thought, of the Catholic Church. I agreed, I thought, with what Luther had said, as I understood it, when he said, on the doctrine of justification the church stands or false. Justification meaning that the doctrine of how we become right and just in the eyes of God and reconciled to it. And he said that's not by works, but that's by faith. And the Catholic Church has that all wrong. Well, I came to realize that that isn't, that the way he, what he said

Starting point is 02:00:06 the Catholic Church believed wasn't what the Catholic Church believed anyway. But nevertheless, I thought that it was at this time. So I didn't want to become Catholic. Catholic. But with all this good stuff, quote unquote, I wanted to have a foot in Catholic tradition. Hmm. So I thought, well, I'll become an Episcopalian, which is the local offshoot of the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, and they'd always prided themselves on being a middle way between the Reformation and the Catholic Church.

Starting point is 02:00:39 I came to realize that they weren't a middle way, but also I came, but but, but, but I came, but But that wasn't really it. What was that the problems in the Episcopal Church were so overwhelming. And the communion was melting down. Many sections of it were schisming off and forming what are called continuing Anglican Communions, the North American Anglican Church and all kinds of others. And they, I mean, they were, the presiding bishop was a homosexual

Starting point is 02:01:12 who would run off with his lover and a baby. into his wife and children, for example. Oh, my gosh. And my wife and I thought of ourselves as part of the faithful remnant. You know, the word that is used sometimes for the faithful Hebrews in the Old Testament,

Starting point is 02:01:25 who weren't going herring off against, you know, to worship the fertility gods and goddesses and all that sort of thing. And people would say, what is your denomination? And I would sort of get sheepish and say, well, I belong to the Christian wing

Starting point is 02:01:38 of the Episcopal Church. But it got so bad that it forced me to rethink my ecclesiology, my understanding of the church, the ecclesia, the Christ had said, the gates of hell will not prevail against your church, my church. Well, they sure were prevailing here, or at least so it looked. So this can't be where the church is.

Starting point is 02:02:08 Even if some of us are in communion with the true church somehow, this body is not the church, or a part of it, or as a communion in communion with the true church, where is the true church? You know, you read the New Testament and even if you haven't been very well exposed to Catholic doctrine about the church, if your eyes are open to seeing it,

Starting point is 02:02:36 which earlier in my life they hadn't been, you're going to see that all of the the marks of the church that are presented there the Catholic Church has and the others don't. One, holy Catholic and apostolic. And also, this is a big one. Many of my, I have a lot of friends who are very devout and Protestants

Starting point is 02:03:06 who are very insistent on remaining Protestants. There are some who are attracted to the Catholic. Church and in a process of discernment. There are some who, like me, have become Catholic, but among the ones who have become Catholic or who are in discernment, thinking about it, almost always the last issue is authority.

Starting point is 02:03:23 The last issue is authority. Gee, maybe I misunderstood the doctrine of justification of the Catholic churches. Gee, I thought that they dissed scripture. No, they don't. I thought they worship Mary. They worship Mary. No, they don't worship Mary. They don't worship her instead of Jesus.

Starting point is 02:03:38 She points to him. but the last issue is authority. How can it claim to church to teach with authority? And that wasn't for me. That was the first issue because there was no authority left, none in the Episcopal Church. The defining point of that was when at a canonical trial about something or other having to do with sexuality, the court said it wasn't going to accept scripture as dispositive

Starting point is 02:04:07 here. I thought, okay, that seals the deal. You could talk about this or that or the other is an aberration. But when they say, we don't accept the authority of Scripture, well, what were they accepting? The authority of their own minds? So, you know, you can say, I don't accept a pope, but every man was his own pope. Not only that, but every man is his own infallible pope. I mean, infallible much more radically than the pope claims to be infallible, right?

Starting point is 02:04:34 You know, you just, you think you can decide it all for yourself. that couldn't be right. So I started looking around, well, what could be the church? It's going to have to have authority. Who even claims to teach with authority? Some of the Protestant denominations have confessions of faith, and for that reason are sometimes called magisterial Protestant churches, but they aren't magisterial in that sense.

Starting point is 02:04:56 They only say this is our confession of faith. They don't say this is the confession of the faith. The only communion of believers that seemed to fit what the only possible description seemed to be of what the church would have to be was the Catholic Church. Now, what did that mean about all my objections? Well, did you not consider orthodoxy? Oh, I did. But it seemed to me that the authority problem was very telling against orthodoxy there because they lack. And even actually in Catholic Protestant dialogue, they've talked about this.

Starting point is 02:05:31 some of the Eastern primates who take the possibility of reconciliation seriously, talk about the chair of Peter and the charism of Peter and what form that would take and so forth. I'm glad. But it isn't present there. And so you've got these independent auto-cafalic communions. And one of the things that that means, since you can't settle any of the disputes among even theological disputes. There hasn't been an ecumenical council. Hasn't been an ecumenical council for who knows how long, and, which is funny because a lot of Protestants object that there are still acumenical councils.

Starting point is 02:06:07 But and it also means that it'll be much easier for the local political power to control you. Look at Archbishop Kareel in Russia right now, for example, you know, to just have them under his thumb. And that, now there have been periods in the history of the Catholic Church where that kind of thing has been a problem. where the local king or baron claimed to have the right to appoint the bishop or something like that. But we've always struggled against that, and the chair of Peter has always been an enormous resource there. So that was never plausible to me, although I was attracted to this Orthodox spirituality, you know, I could say spirituality. I hate to use that word because it's usually taken in a hallmark card sense. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 02:06:52 Oh, I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual. I was attracted to Orthodox spirituality. I admire Orthodoxy greatly, but I never could have become Orthodox. So it still looked like the only candidate was the Catholic Church. Despite the chaos, because I think that's what happens. Like sometimes people... Oh, yeah, but chaos under authority. Even if the authority is not always well used, even if sometimes it's lax or doesn't do things

Starting point is 02:07:17 that ought to do, you know, is different than chaos with no authority. There's at least an instrument that could put into... There's an instrument that could. And over the history of the church, over the history of the church, the Holy Spirit has always kept the church from falling into irrevocable error. I won't say the Holy Spirit has always kept the church from falling into some stupid error about this or that, but into something irreversible. It hasn't ever declared a heresy as something to be infallibly believed, right?

Starting point is 02:07:49 That hasn't happened. And I don't believe it will. And I believe Christ promised it wouldn't. I think that's part of what it means to say, The gates of hell will not prevail. So what did that do to all these objections that I had? Well, it didn't mean, oh, the church must be the true church. So, okay, changed my mind about justification, changed my mind about Mary church.

Starting point is 02:08:09 No, they were all that still there. But it meant that they were no longer objections. They were now obstacles. They were no longer things where the Catholic Church can't be true because of this. They were now, the Catholic, it's got to be true. But then what do I make of this? Am I wrong? I need to investigate this much further. That's a, you're in a different place there.

Starting point is 02:08:34 Yeah. And that took time. That took time. A big turning point for me was in 1998. This was some years before becoming Catholic still. But when the Catholic Church in dialogue with one of the world Lutheran federations released the joint declaration on the doctrine of justification, they revoked the mutual anathemas. That was stunning.

Starting point is 02:08:57 I thought to myself at the time the Reformation is over. It's only a matter of time now. Tell me in a paragraph or three how to think clearly when everyone around you seems crazy. Well, I think the first thing is to try. I think we need to reconnect with our common sense.

Starting point is 02:09:16 Most of the crazy things that we believe. For example, there are 95 genders. Oh, by the way, do you know what the latest gender to come down the pike is? No. Xenogender. Have you heard of that one? No. Can you make a guess?

Starting point is 02:09:30 No. Zenogender is defined as a gender which transcends all human understandings of gender. So, I mean, I always wonder, well, then how does anybody even know it's a gender? How could you even know you are? Shut up, bigot. Don't ask questions. Wow. Well, look, you live in Austin.

Starting point is 02:09:55 I got to be honest, from where I stand, this old, this gender insanity seems like it's dying out. But you're in Austin, so maybe. Oh, I don't think it is. I think that, I think that a battle is being won. But I think the war is still going on. The, the, uh, certainly people are beginning to think there's got to be something wrong here because I don't want my daughter to have to undress in front of these guys showing signs of arousal in the, in the lock girls walker room. I don't want this guy who claims that he's a girl and he's pumped and he's pumped up with all the hormones he grew up with knocking that in a boxing match with a woman and knocking her silly and injuring her. I don't want this is crazy.

Starting point is 02:10:41 Okay, it's good that people are seeing that this is crazy. Not so many years ago they would have been called bigoted even for saying that. Yeah. They were. We may, right now, if this was five years ago, this episode may have been banned on YouTube. Oh, of course. Of course, it would have been. And right now, there are an awful lot of people out there who would say that you and I are biggest for saying this.

Starting point is 02:11:01 And that, and that we are haters. They might put your show, they might put your show on the hate map, or is it already? I don't know. How do you find that out? The, the, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Oh, it has a thing? Yeah, yeah. Has a hate map.

Starting point is 02:11:17 The former, the previous administration used to use their hate map as a guide who they were going to persecute. Okay. I'm going to say, all right, is Matt Frad on the Southern Poverty Law Center hate map, or you could just say the hate map? Hate map. Or is Pints with Equites on a hate map? I don't think I'm popular enough to know this, but let's see. Oh, a lot of things that aren't, a lot of things that aren't popular. Here's the controversy.

Starting point is 02:11:43 While Frat often debates topics related to marriage and sexuality that are contested by secular and liberal organizations, he is not explicitly identified as a leader. All right. I got to step it up. All right. But a lot of organizations are. It's amazing that the Catholic Church isn't on there yet, but they know that this would lead to a different kind of pushback than they want. Anyway, all right, it's good that there's a little sanity about that.

Starting point is 02:12:08 But even many people who say, I don't want this, I don't want a biological male in my girl's locker room, still wouldn't say necessarily, yes, there are only two sexes and so on and so forth. they're not necessarily to embrace a completely sane view of sex. The sexual revolution has been around now for how long? I mean, in a cultural way, it has been around since the 20s, but in a doctrinal way, it's been going roaring ahead since the 60s. One could have predicted this.

Starting point is 02:12:46 As soon as you invent the birth control pill, which isn't the same as just let's not have sex, evening, dear, you know, it's not like dieting, okay? Yeah. It's more like eating food and vomiting. The, the, so that you will not take in too many calories. Yep. The, as soon as we did that, people thought, oh, our nature has changed.

Starting point is 02:13:11 Sex is no longer connected with procreation. Well, once you say that, everything becomes possible. So that, for instance, Peter Singer, the, who at Princeton University, who has been hailed by some as the most famous living ethicist. Is he an Aussie? A Nazi? An Aussie. Oh, an Aussie.

Starting point is 02:13:33 Yes, I think he is. I'm just want to say, sorry. I'm sorry. I'm hard of hearing. Well, no, Aussie and Nazi, to be fair. Okay, gotcha. Sounds similar. Americans always say Aussie.

Starting point is 02:13:44 Yeah, that's right. We do the S in a similar way, and I haven't learned to do it the proper way. So, Singer, what did he say? He said, he reviewed, he favorably reviewed a book on Beastie Allen. Yeah. And he made the point in his review. Look, why would anybody criticize this? Because as soon as you accept contraception, you know, you've already admitted that sex doesn't have any connection with procreation or no necessary connection with procreation.

Starting point is 02:14:10 So all of this stuff follows. If he said, as long as there's consent, I don't know how you get the consent of an animal. And it's mutually pleasurable. I don't know if you can tell how the animal is having pleasure with. But he says, as long as that's the case, why not? Not. More than that, you don't need the consent of an animal. If I can cut its balls off without its consent and that be moral, I can surely. But he probably doesn't think that you can do that because he thinks that a lot of animals have personhood and that newborn babies are less, are persons to a lesser degree than a lot of adult animals. So, I mean, I have to apologize to our listeners for being so explicit about this or sort of explicit. I use the noun for that practice. But this is what's out there. Now, I think he's right.

Starting point is 02:15:02 You are implicitly on board with all that stuff as soon as you buy the contraceptive outlook on what sex is. Another way to put it is this. In homosexuality, again, sex has been separated from turning the wheel of the generations. It has been separated from the love of the procreative partners,

Starting point is 02:15:19 because the partners are not procreative. It's been separated from all that stuff. many heterosexuals who would think to themselves, oh, I'm not like that, except basically a homosexual view of sex. They think it's all about pleasure, or it's all about, you know, I love each other in the sense of we like being together or something like that. And of course we can divorce. There are no children involved.

Starting point is 02:15:42 Da-da-da-da-da-da. Where one movement among young marriages is called the child-free movement. It means we aren't going to have children now or ever, because it will cut into our lifestyle. And we will be, they think, better persons and more virtuous because they will be able to give all our time to all kinds of good works.

Starting point is 02:16:02 Now, that's not, that is so, it's not just thinking, I may have sex before marriage. Much more is coming along with this. The society hasn't abandoned to that and all this transgender stuff is just one of the more odd, one of the more extreme, one of the more obviously loony outgross of that. One of the points I make in the book is one of the reasons lunacy can metastasize and spread like a cancer is that many of us who might call ourselves moderate, for instance.

Starting point is 02:16:41 what we mean is that we're only moderately lunatic or many of us who might call ourselves conservative mean, I want to conserve the lunacies that I've already swallowed I just don't want to take any new ones on board and we want to swallow we want to eat the poisoned apple but not have the poison. We want to have the premises but not the conclusion.

Starting point is 02:17:04 Yeah. Well, people, I made that point about abortion once. I said in an article, in an article I'd submitted to a magazine I said, you know, the premises that justify abortion also justify infanticide. And my editor said, yes, they do, but he said, but people are not that logical. And my view is, they are that logical, but they're logical slowly.

Starting point is 02:17:27 A conclusion that follows from the premises that they may not embrace in generation one, they may embrace in generation two. That's exactly right. So what's coming down the pike? I don't know. good that there is some pushback. It's good that there is a counter-apologetic. It's good, for instance, among Catholics, and this is true of many thinking evangelical Protestants and others, that

Starting point is 02:17:51 there is not just an assumption that this is a Christian culture any longer. Very few people still say that. Very few thinking people still say that. Very few thinking people still assume that you can trust the public schools to raise your children in a Christian view of the world. There's a realization that we're confronted with an entire world system, an entire philosophy, an entire, or a set of allied philosophies, an entire set of ways of thinking that are diametrically opposed to our faith, and they're not just different, they're virulent, and that we have to mount a real attack. Now, the biggest problem really is we may say, oh, Yeah, that is loony, but it's just silly.

Starting point is 02:18:40 And those people are grifters anyway. You know, well, a lot of the grifters are pretty serious about their own grift. And some of that silliness has lethal consequences, mutilating children, for instance, in the name of affirming them. And that's sex again, but there are lunacies about other things I talk about, belief in God, about the nature of reality, about politics, about virtue, and all kinds of things. but or maybe we do this we say well yeah that's horrible but it's no skin off my nose if they want to be crazy yeah i'm sorry it's coming for you and it's coming for your children or or i just don't want to get involved because i might lose my job now that's really true that's one of the reasons why these the pushback this is another area of pushback and some some of these aggressive mind control

Starting point is 02:19:31 programs and corporations and at universities has been so important how do you still have a job at a university in Austin. I'm shocked. Well, I guess, I guess the, I guess the, there's part of the, part of, there's several parts of the answer. First, it's not the case that I've never gotten in trouble at my university. I have on several occasions, not very seriously in the last 10 years, which surprises me because I'm even more unspoken now than I was then. But I think maybe it's that they think I'm close to retirement pretty, pretty soon they'll be rid of me anyway. Another reason is that the University of Texas, it's in a more, it's in a state that doesn't, most of the

Starting point is 02:20:14 citizens of whom do not accept all of these lunacies and, or at least want to think that they don't. And the legislature watches the state university more closely. You know, in principle, I believe in faculty governance. But even in the principle of subsidiarity, that you want, you want those social, forms of that can govern themselves, should govern themselves and do what they are cut out to do and not be controlled by somebody higher up the letter. John Paul too was talking about this in an economic context, and he said that.

Starting point is 02:20:48 And then he said, on the other hand, there are occasions when they aren't doing their job, and there has to be a corrective temporary intervention by higher authority to get into it. So there have been times when the legislature has stepped in and says, and say, you refuse to hire anybody of these of these points of view. That's got to end. So what they, what can they do? You can't, you know, you, you, we've, we've got new institutions on campus that have developed that where alternative points of view can be heard. Students can go and listen to different things. They can even take majors in different things. This is, now that's only been for in the last five years. What else? I think also there's the fact that since I am very, um, very outspokenly, natural lawsy and Christian, my colleagues mostly think, well, that's kind of crazy. And so don't pay much attention to what I'm doing. On the occasions when they have paid attention, like when I was up for tenure or when I was up for promotion or something like that, there have been problems. and

Starting point is 02:22:02 but you know most of the time they're just kind of ignoring it by the time I was up for 10 years it was a condoluted complicated process actually but I won't tell that story but but very few of my colleagues even knew

Starting point is 02:22:16 that I was no longer a nihilist anymore you're like the Peter Craft of the University of Texas I'm sure you have a lot of Catholics and Catholic curious people flocking to you some but also I have some very strong devout Catholic friends who are

Starting point is 02:22:31 excellent influences there and get more people flocking to them than me by far Rob Coons in the philosophy department Dan Bonnevac, Protestant, excellent guy Oh wow, I didn't realize Coons was there. A very excellent family sociologist

Starting point is 02:22:47 who has gotten into enormous trouble just for the excellence of his work because it breaks the things that the wood people want to believe Mark Regneris some really really excellent people and I'm privileged to have them as colleagues. So I'm not alone. And that's one of the other things. You know, you say, how have you survived? There's a matter of survival by being

Starting point is 02:23:08 chased out. There's a matter of survival by they delay you getting tenure, delay you getting promoted. There's a matter of survival, though, by just being suffocated. And if you have colleagues, even just a few, even just one, that makes an enormous difference. In the early days, after I'd come back to faith and I was trying to figure things out again and learn how to think, I didn't know of these colleagues yet, but it was enormously helpful to me that I found out about them electronically, you know, and you could have correspondences.

Starting point is 02:23:38 You could email people and know that there were people at other institutions who were sane. And, you know, even in my own department, most people are not out and out insane. What it is is that the high ground tends to be occupied by nutty people. and people will come to you and sometimes and say,

Starting point is 02:24:01 oh, I know that this is the case, but I would never speak out about that. Yeah. Maybe give us one last cure for nihilism. What's your last piece of advice for the, yeah, the person falling to nihilism? Because it does feel like it's on the rise again, does it not? I have mixed feelings about that.

Starting point is 02:24:24 Sometimes I think it's on the rise. Sometimes I think it's not. It's certainly on the rise in some sectors. The sectors where it's where it's going strong are getting further and further out there. It's attracting more people in vulnerable populations than it was before. But on the other hand, the sanely thinking population, I think, is increasing too. Now, that's kind of scary because it means you've got a much sharper polarization. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:24:54 And people on one side of it become very, very angry. What do you think Nietzsche would have said if he encountered a woman wearing a vagina hat telling him she was xeno. What did you call it? Zeno sexuality. Zeno gender. Zeno gender. What do you think Nietzsche? I think he would laugh.

Starting point is 02:25:13 Yeah. I think he would laugh. I don't think that he would have an intellectual argument against it. Do you think he would at that point want one? No. I think by that time, you know, even before he descended finally into insanity, he was, his very latest writings are really strange. They're not, they're kind of discontinuous and they're start and stop.

Starting point is 02:25:39 And I think he was, people say, well, you know, he had syphilis, he was having organic degeneration to the brain. I don't know if that's true or not, because a lot of people I know who have no organic problems of the brain talk and think just like that. And I had, I had some pretty serious problems thinking when I was, when I was like that. So I don't know if that's, it's the case. I suspect that syphilis is a convenient explanation in his case. Interesting.

Starting point is 02:26:01 So who knows? It would be interesting. It would be interesting to go back in a time machine. I've often had time machines. What if I could bring James Madison back to talk to my classes on the founding generation? What if I could bring Aristotle back and have him talk to my ethics class? What if I could have Nietzsche back and have him talk to a group of women wearing vagina hats? I don't know.

Starting point is 02:26:24 That would be interesting. How would he react? I don't know. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for coming in. Everyone should go pick up pandemic of lunacy. Where do they get it?

Starting point is 02:26:33 Why should they get it? Well, I wrote it for people who are seriously wondering, am I crazy or is the people around me? They all seem crazy to me, but does that mean there's something wrong with me? I wrote it for people who like me were in it but maybe beginning

Starting point is 02:26:50 to think about getting out of it. For people who maybe have one foot in the snare and are thinking about pulling that foot out. For people who, are feeling the gravitational attraction of some of these forms of lunacy. You know, we've talked about sex. Most of the book is not about sex. But who are feeling the gravitational pull of a lot of these forms of lunacy

Starting point is 02:27:08 and are concerned about that. I've wrote it for people who maybe are thinking sort of sanely themselves, but don't know how to actually give a defense of that, how to give a defense of common sense, or reconnect with their common sense, or elevate their common sense. And for people who want to know, how do I talk to my family,

Starting point is 02:27:29 how do I talk those members of the family who will listen to you? You know, how about my friends? How about my nieces and my nephews? How about my parents? Have you been accused of disparaging people who hold these views with the term lunacy?

Starting point is 02:27:44 People find it a very strong term. I haven't been accused of that so far. I'm glad you used it, but I just wondered. But I've been accused of disparaging people for much milder things than that, though. This semester, as a matter of, fact, I was explaining, it was a class on natural law. I was explaining the concept of complementarity of the sexes. And I said, you know, a kid needs a mom and a dad. There's something

Starting point is 02:28:06 that a mom provides the child that a dad really can't easily provide and something a dad provides that mom can't easily provide. And not only do the mom and dad need each other, but the child needs her both. Somebody made a complaint to the dean that by saying that I'd established a discriminatory atmosphere in the classroom. And what's that like when the dean reaches out to you? Is he like, oh, bloody Butchyshefsky again? Well, this is not going to air probably before the end of the semester. Am I right?

Starting point is 02:28:36 I don't know. Okay. That's probably a couple of weeks. We'll see. I haven't actually heard from the dean yet. I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know, I got a copy of the complaint. But usually I have heard, I have heard from the dean about things before.

Starting point is 02:28:49 One student who wasn't even in my class, wasn't even in my class, looked up my syllabus. That's how powerful you are. Oh, yeah. Oh, right. It's how powerful some students can be. He looked up my syllabus, saw on it that I referred to my personal website and said, at it, you can read a frequently asked questions about the course that tells you some of my norms.

Starting point is 02:29:13 And he says, this implies that they should read the other things at his website. And he says some really awful things at his website that students will now feel that they are compelled to agree to. And they're horrible and I object to this. And he complained to the dean who then passed on the complaint to my chairman. And so they wanted me to put a disclaimer in there that they didn't have to read my website. Oh, my goodness. Well, that's okay. I mean, I modified the syllabus, and I said, this frequently asked questions thing is at my website.

Starting point is 02:29:47 And there are a couple of other things that I assigned to students there, guidelines for students in my classes. You don't have to read the other stuff. But on the other hand, I'd be delighted if you did. And here's where to find them. Very good. I always think we don't play defense. No, we've got to be more forethroated in these things.

Starting point is 02:30:08 I was giving a talk once and someone raised their hand, this woman, and she said, aren't you slut shaming? Remember that term? I don't think people use that anymore. I do remember that term. But I said, well, I would think it's a pretty shameful thing to be a slut. But I think that is really the way you have to go, right? Like, as you say,

Starting point is 02:30:25 full-throated, not bloody defensive. And let's face it, the reason that people don't like what they call slut shaming is that they don't want to think of themselves as sluts. Which means that at some level, even they recognize there's a problem here. Gosh, if you go back,

Starting point is 02:30:41 Peter Crave just come up several times in this conversation. Yes, he has. I love him so much. He's great. He's great. I remember, golly, if you go back and listen to some of his talks, if you played them,

Starting point is 02:30:49 they would have conibion fits your students if they heard some of these talks. My goodness. What did he say? He talked about these women on university campuses who are, what did he say? Something like more shameful than the whores who at least are making money. Something like that. Yeah, there are amazing things, amazing things.

Starting point is 02:31:09 It's not just about sex. A student last year, I used to teach a course on religion and politics and American thought from the colonies to the culture wars. There was a unit on just war in the course. Yeah, good. And I was explaining the discrimination principle, which means that you can't look at collateral damage, so-called collateral damage, unintended harm to non-combatants. Right. There you have to weigh things. But there is an absolute prohibition on deliberately targeting non-combatants.

Starting point is 02:31:41 People say, terrorism is just a freedom fighter by another name. No, this is terrorism. That's not freedom fighting, okay? And as an example, I gave the Hamas attacks on October 7th. I thought, this should be pretty obvious. I said, look, you know, you're raping women, you're driving nails into them, your, your, bayoneting or stabbing anyway. I don't know if they used bayonets.

Starting point is 02:32:04 Babies. You're shooting people indiscriminately. These people were not soldiers, and you don't treat soldiers that way anyway. You might have to shoot the guy, but this is, this is torture. And I said, this is a violation of the discrimination principle. It was convenient to have that example handy. I used to have to give examples of... Atomic bomb, perhaps.

Starting point is 02:32:25 Yeah, and... Right. But this was more recent. Right. And a woman at the back of the room started yelling at me because she said that the Jews deserved it. They deserved it.

Starting point is 02:32:40 Even those who hadn't perpetrated such violence. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Who hadn't perpetrated any... What was her argument? I mean... She said because they... The Jews...

Starting point is 02:32:50 say? Just that, well, she met the Jews in Israel. I don't know if she met the Jews here were guilty or not, you know, but, but, but, but, but they were guilty. She said because they were colonialists. Uh-huh. Okay. And, and, um, and so they deserved it. So wouldn't that mean she deserves it? Living in a country that had been colonized? Well, yes, it should. You know, when, when, when Abraham Lincoln, uh, in the second inaugural address, when he was talking about winding up the war, he said, yes, of course we have to win the war. And of course we have to end. And of course, and slavery, and we have to, but what he said was, and then we shouldn't punish the South and take it out on them. He said, we have to bind up the nation's wounds because he said both sides

Starting point is 02:33:33 were complicit in the sin of slavery. Actually, we're all complicit, if you want to think of it that way, we're all complicit in some way, we're in the sin of Adam. And he said, we're part of a national community. We've had this, you know, this problem of slavery going on for a long time. So yes, it had to be ended. Yes, yes, this was legal in the South, but he said that didn't mean you can point fingers here. And so yes, I agree. I agree with you. It would have meant that she was complicit too. I think if she'd faced that, she would have acknowledged this. And I lectured about the Lincoln Second and inaugural address too in that class and made something like that point. Yeah. It's fun being a Catholic. You get upset everybody. I mean,

Starting point is 02:34:14 you get upset absolutely everybody. There's people in this building who would be, totally in favor of the United States having dropped the atomic bomb on innocent populations. Innocent populations that were not military targets, but chosen because they were civilian population centers, right? And what do you say then to the conservative Christian who says, well, you're just destroying, you're essentially doing, you're pulling down statues in another way, you're shaming America and you're anti-American for criticizing America in that war, so? Look, I'm an American. I understand myself to be patriotic. I love my country. Because I love my country, I also want it to become better. I want it to correct its wrongs. I'm glad that we ended slavery. I'm not going to say, oh, what a bad country, how horrible, because we had slavery. I'm going to say, boy, slavery was bad, and I'm glad we ended it. And I'm glad that there was the courage to do that. We ended segregation. We ended a lot of awful stuff. And there's awful stuff to end now. And I'm not, does that make me a hater of my country or a puller down of statues? I don't believe in that pulling down to the statues anyway.

Starting point is 02:35:30 I think, I think you need to, you know, talk about these things. It seems like the argument is, in order to be pro-American, you have to somehow think that everything America has done has been good and just and right. Yeah, and then there's that misquotation of Alexis de Tocqueville, America is great because it is good. Well, he didn't say that. It's more complicated than that. No nation is simply good in that way. That's like denying the fall. No nation ever will be simply good in that. God's own nation in the Old Testament did some pretty rotten stuff. And the prophets, you know, heap condemnation on them. And they had to keep being, get their, put their noses back, pulled to the grindstone and pulled back to the true faith. Why? They, you know, they had greater opportunities here than anybody in, in history. history, and they kept falling. Well, why should I believe that we can't do that? That we don't. I don't believe that about myself. I have sinful inclinations. I've committed many sins. I'm always

Starting point is 02:36:36 having to repent them. And I mean, this is why we have the sacrament of confession, for goodness sake, and reconciliation of the penitent, which is a great thing. Isn't that a funny thing? People think that Catholics feel terribly guilty all the time. well sometimes we talk about sin sometimes sometimes sometimes we should and what also you've got you've got release from uh from yeah well that's right from from guilt because of yeah yeah and then what is needed in those cases is not therapy but right action so that the guilt may not occur perhaps we need to put a chip in the brain and then what get rid of guilt get rid of guilt imagine well people people there are people who think that.

Starting point is 02:37:16 Drugs. Therapy, brain surgery. So I won't have a conscience anymore. I won't feel bad about that. Like George Delo. I'm going to ask you one last question. What's something you do for recreation that's totally unimpressive? Totally unimpressive.

Starting point is 02:37:33 Yeah. What do you do for fun? My wife and I love to, we love to travel to Kentucky every year. Yeah. Where we have a little house that used to belong to her grand. when they were alive. And it's ours. We've made it habitable again.

Starting point is 02:37:49 For a long time, it was uninhabable, and it was even a crack house for a while. And we live up in a holler in what some people would call hillbilly country. Okay. And I love it. Most of my, most Austin people think, what? And how often do you go there? Well, we've been, we've, while I've, I'm retiring. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:38:11 And I've, I've gone every summer. Okay. But now that I'm going to be retired, we'll be able to go there sometimes in the fall and see changing the color of the leaves and stuff. It's wonderful to get away from Austin, to get away from that kind of a culture, although we have many friends in Austin, of course, and even at the university, and to just be in a totally different culture. Why, what do you and your wife do when you're there? We go to Mass. We sometimes take drives to little towns with names like Mousie. I said, I was so happy.

Starting point is 02:38:44 We needed to get our land surveyed once. And the nearest guy who could do that kind of surveying was in a town called Mousie. And I was so happy that we could go all there. We take day trips to these little towns and I pick them out according to their names. And what are you and your wife do for fun? We think that's fun. You wanted something dull that we do for fun. We think that's fun.

Starting point is 02:39:08 But on a regular basis, like when you're at home in Austin. How do you hang out? How do you and your wife hang out? I asked Peter Crafe this and he said him and his wife, I don't know if she's still with us. So anyway, but when Peter was last on the show, he said they would watch English detective movies and shows. Well, I don't watch a lot of television. Sandra watches more than I do. But we do like to watch old movies sometimes together.

Starting point is 02:39:34 We don't like the more contemporary ones. But some of the old detective movies, yes. Like what? We watch some of the some of the, some of the, some of the. BBC doings of the Peter Wimsy Mysteries by Dorothy Sayers. Okay. And we've read those novels, so that's great. We've watched the, again, BBC, there are several different BBC versions of a lot of these things, but the Jane Austen novels.

Starting point is 02:39:58 Okay, yes. Okay. Some of those are really, really fine. The depictions of them by BBC are good, are they? Oh, well, yeah, there are better ones. Some of them they've done more than once. There's an older BBC version and a newer one. And sometimes one's better than the other.

Starting point is 02:40:13 But the good ones are really good. And PG Woodhouse is just one of the funniest people in history. Absolutely. He's been called the Shakespeare of comedy. Do you read those stories? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. When Sandra and I, when we first discovered them, it was hard because we both discovered

Starting point is 02:40:34 P.G. Woodhouse at the same time. And I'd want to read it, and she'd want to get the book away from me, and she'd be reading it. I want to get the book. So the only way that we could settle that was to read it out loud to each other. You have to read it out loud. Yeah. It is, they are such a scream.

Starting point is 02:40:48 Yeah. PG Woodhouse is wonderful. So funny. Yeah. Yeah, people should pick that up if they haven't heard of. Woodhouse, right. W-O-D-E-H-O-U-S-A. Looks like Woad House.

Starting point is 02:41:00 My kids love it too. Yes, my children do. They're grown now, but they loved it growing up. And, you know, but we're sort of home. bodies. I mean, we have friends over. We go out to dinner with our friends. We go to mass with them. And then we, we hang out with them after, after mass. And we, that's fun to us. But most, most of my students would think that our tastes are pretty dull. No, I'm pretty dull like that. Like my wife and I, like, we like to go on walks. Yes. Um, my wife has a lot of health issues,

Starting point is 02:41:29 so we often can't eat out. But sometimes what we'll do is we'll go park the car somewhere and watch a movie on the Tesla screen. Yeah. Just that's our date night. On the Tesla screen? Yeah, yeah. Because on the Tesla, the screen's big enough that you can open up a show and watch it. So we'll go drive to a park and the kids. Kids love it. Our kids love it when we go out because they barely watch television. So when mom and dad go on a date night, they get, they're like, please go. They get to stay at home and watch something.

Starting point is 02:41:56 When our girls were small, we used to, we had the rule, yes, they could watch television, no more than one hour a week and we had to approve it. Okay. Yeah, we've been there. Yeah, we've also gone through seasons where we're like, you know what, we don't care right now. What do you want to watch? We also have Fred Family Movie Night where I'm forced to watch it.

Starting point is 02:42:16 I often find movies very boring. I usually watch. I usually leave or desperately want to leave halfway through or three quarters through a movie. Or find excuses to leave. I hate it. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what most things cannot grip my attention

Starting point is 02:42:29 when it comes to television. Often I, these BBC productions of Jane Austen and some of those other things are exceptions. But usually I'll I will like to read the novel, but I don't like to see the movie. Well, and often it's because the movie has distorted it so terribly. I will, you can count on me that I will never see the scar, the movie version of the scarlet letter. Okay. Because I've read in the reviews of it that the adultery of the characters, which is, of course, the central theme, is presented as a good thing in the movie.

Starting point is 02:43:05 Good. And at the end, you know, the adulterers live happily ever after. You know, this is, that's not a dramatization of the novel. No. That's just a scandal. Yeah, we need Anna Karenna throwing herself in front of a train because of adultery. That's what we need. Anna Karenina is a terrific novel.

Starting point is 02:43:23 It is, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I discovered Dostoevsky very, very late. Tolstoy. Tostoy. Well, you see? You see, I did mean, I did mean Tolstay and the brothers Karamazov and all that stuff. And, you know, I get everybody.

Starting point is 02:43:39 but his name's wrong. Yeah, you were saying this. You sometimes called your daughters the name of your cats. Yeah, and I was talking to a colleague once, and he said, that's nothing. I called my kids by the names of the pets. I said, these were the dead cats. He said, you win. I would forget sometimes I'd be typing away, working at my computer,

Starting point is 02:43:59 and one of my little girls would come in and say, Dad, it was oblivious, I couldn't hear, Dad, and then I'd want her to come over to me, and I forgot how you address a child and how you address a cat. I'd go, is this the absent mind. Dad! Not the cat.

Starting point is 02:44:14 Is this the absent-minded professor thing? You know, I hate to admit that the characterization is actually accurate in my case. All right. Keep on. What are you going to say? It was it, I think. Well, this has been a pleasure. Isn't this fun?

Starting point is 02:44:30 I got a great job. I get to make people come and sit down and talk to me, and this has been a delight. Well, great. I mean, it's delightful to me, too. And it's also, I have to say, it's an honor. It's really nice. My students were so excited this week. They said, I won't have office hours on Wednesday.

Starting point is 02:44:45 They said, why not? I have to be in Nashville. Why are you going to be in Nashville? I'm going to be in Pines with Aquinas. They said, Paints with Aquinas! Isn't that nice? I'll say hello to them. I will.

Starting point is 02:44:55 Yeah, I'm glad you exist. I really am. Thank you. I'm glad you to exist. Thank you. All right. The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st for its fifth anniversary

Starting point is 02:45:12 with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health. Riders of all abilities are welcome, and both regular bikes and e-bikes can participate. Bring your friends, family, or corporate team, and make an impact. Register today at bikeforbrainhealth.ca.

Pints With Aquinas - Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Return of God (Dr. J. Budziszewski ) | Ep. 577

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