The Eric Metaxas Show - We Need Free Speech the Way the Body Needs Oxygen to Survive | Professor Robert P. George

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Is there an innate human knowledge of Truth? Socrates in the City host Eric Metaxas sits down with Robert P. George, Princeton University Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program, to discuss his new book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. Their conversation delves into the nature of humanity, examining how our understanding of it influences our perception of truth, and the interplay between biblical perspectives, classical traditions, and modern philosophies. From moral contrasts to reflections on great philosophers, they examine belief, feeling, and the shared foundations of truth.

Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling threat of The Blob. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because The Blob was supposed to eat him. But he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest.

Eric the Texas! Welcome back to the guy. to Socrates in the City Fridays. Today's guest is Robert George. Welcome to Socrates in the city. Today, it is my great joy to interview someone I've known for a long time. I call him Robbie George, but his real name is Dr. Robert P. George, or technically, since he has three doctorates, Dr. Dr. Robert P. George.

He's the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He served as chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics. He's also been the U.S. member of UNESCO's World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology,

but haven't we all? Robbie George, welcome. It's a pleasure to be a member. on with you, Eric. Great to see you again. It's so much fun to talk to you, or at least even to think about talking to you, but now I actually get to talk to you. You do have three doctorates. I just want to start there. In what? Well, they're all from Oxford, a doctor of philosophy. Now, listen, there's no need to show off. We're already impressed, Robbie. So you have three doctorates from Oxford. Okay, all right. I don't.

It's all right. You're forgiven. And what are they? So my doctorate of philosophy is in the philosophy of law. And then I have a degree called the doctor of civil law, which is what Oxford calls a higher doctorate. It's the doctorate above the PhD, or what Oxford calls the DFIL. And then I have a doctor of letters in political philosophy, and it's another one of the so-called higher doctorates.

Before the PhD degree was introduced, which was the late 19th century, The doctorates that you had at the great universities, Oxford, Cambridge, those types of places, were the doctor of divinity, of course, the doctor of civil law, the doctor of science, the doctor of letters, and the doctorate of music. Very few people had those doctorates, and you couldn't actually sign up for a course to get the doctorate. you were awarded the doctorate on the basis of a lifetime in many cases or nearly elected. Sort of like the honorary doctorate. They're not honorary, though. But they're not honorary. They're not honorary. This would be the time for me to say that I have five honorary doctorates.

Thank you very much. 23. I was going to say, I knew it. You and George Weigel are a little, I'll never catch you. And Cornell West. Cornell's got more than I have. Is that right? Yeah.

Well, that shows you the value of an honorary doctor. Well, listen, I want to talk to you today about many things, but fortunately, you've written a book called Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, or really you've edited the book because it's essays that you've co-written. But in the book are all of the topics I think I would have wanted to touch on with you in any events. Let me ask you the simple opening question. what led you to put this book together? It was a concern about the collapse of people's appreciation of the importance of truth or even the meaning of truth. We've now had more than one generation of students

who've come through our great universities believing that there's no such thing as objective truth, no such thing as the truth. There's only your truth and my truth. truth to the extent that it can be spoken of at all is considered subjective. It varies from person to person. And of course, in many cases, they get all the way through university not being disabused of this clearly, in my view, fallacious idea. So as part of my vocation as a teacher, which is to form the young men and women entrusted to my charge to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers, I want to confront them with the, arguments in favor of objective truth. They know the arguments against it. They're very poor arguments,

although they seem to so often have accepted them. But I want them to see the arguments on the other side, and then they can make up their minds. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, when students are required to think about it, to actually reflect on it, they reach the conclusion that there is a truth. It's very often hard to grasp. It's never grasped perfectly or completely or fully. We can always deepen our understanding of truth. Because we're fallible, often we need to be corrected, and that means we need to be open to challenge. But it's important to understand that there is a truth to be sought, and it's really important to seek it and to give it priority.

Not to live by, one of the people I talk about in the book, Eric, as you know, is Solzhenitson. And Solzhenitsyn's basic story, his basic plea to us, was not to live by lies. In other words, aspire to the truth and try to live by the truth. And I'm for that. Well, you're all for that, and me too. Well, what's interesting, I mean,

it's part of the conundrum in talking about truth, is that anybody with a high view of truth, objective truth, has to admit that the project toward truth is asymptotic. You cannot ever fully, get there because, you know, this brings you into the realm of theology. You know, what is truth? God is truth.

Truth is infinite. Truth. It's so many things you can understand somebody who's not an advocate of objective truth. Why they would just say it's, it is so vast that it becomes, at least it seems, it can seem subjective. It can seem impossible. to nail it. We can talk about 2 plus 2 equals 4.

But when we're talking about truth, it is such a vast, ultimately incomprehensible concept. So we're sort of charged with comprehending it, but at the same time with comprehending the idea that we can never fully comprehend it. That to me is kind of the paradox, not really conundrum when we're talking about truth. Yeah, what you say is absolutely true,

and I would just add to it, that we need to recognize our own, fallibility. Okay, now right there, a lot of people would say, well, what do you mean fallibility? Why should I acknowledge my own fallibility? Because you'll never get at the truth unless you acknowledge your own fallibility. You will persist in whatever errors you have in your head until you rethink the situation. And ordinarily, that's going to require someone to challenge you on the subject.

But as soon as you bring that up, you know, in other words, I can see somebody say, well, you are bringing presuppositions already. The idea that we're fallible presupposes some perfect state from which we've fallen. That's theological, and I don't buy it. I mean, it seems to me a lot of people who reject objective truth would say that. I sometimes ask my students in a classroom, Eric, is there anybody out there who right now has only true ideas in your head and no false ideas. And no hands go up. And I say, well, wait a minute.

No hands are going up. There's nobody out there who is infallible, and they giggle. Because, of course, they know that they are fallible. But then I have to ask the next question. Is there anybody out there who has only true ideas, no false ideas, about the most important things, about the things that really matter to us or to you? And now they have to think, because when they give the answer that eventually they all give,

which is, yes, I'm fallible, I can be wrong, I probably am wrong, not only on the minor, trivial, superficial things of life, but also on some of the big, important things in life, the things that really matter to me, the beliefs around which I actually integrate myself, my identity-forming beliefs. Once they acknowledge that, they know that they're going to be. going to have to face up to real challenges to their most fundamental beliefs. And that's hard for us human beings to do. It's hard for them. It's hard for me. I'm sure it's hard for you. We want to imagine that the stuff we really care about, we are absolutely 100% right about

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Don't forget to use promo code Eric to grab your standard, My Pillow, for only 1798, only while supplies last. Socrates in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George. We have to ask. The fundamental question, what do we mean by truth or what is truth? What do we mean? When we say truth or objective truth, there are some people like, I think, you knew him personally, Richard Dawkins, who would say... An old friend of mine. You were at Oxford together? We were not only at Oxford together.

We were in the same college and the same senior common room. We had many coffees together, sat together at lunch when I was just a graduate student and a young lecturer at the university there. Which of your three doctorates were you getting at that time? My defil. My doctorate and philosophy. I want to make sure we get that. So somebody like Dawkins, and I wrote about this in one of my books, he puts forward what to me is a patently preposterous idea that the only things we can know we can know through scientific knowledge, which I think most people don't operate that way. But isn't that part of the problem?

We have to talk about what we mean, and even somebody like Richard Dawkins doesn't seem to grasp that truth can be something that has to do with, is murder wrong? He doesn't, he's not interested in going there. He says that has nothing to do with anything. I'm only interested, quote, unquote, in science. That's the only way that I can get at.

Would he even call it truth? I guess maybe that's another question. Well, here's something we can know with something approaching certainty, and that is it can't be true that the only things that we can affirm are true are things whose truth we established by scientific inquiry and scientific methods. And the reason we can be virtually certain that that's false, that that claim about truth is false, is that it can't pass its own test.

It's a self-defeating proposition. Because the proposition that, the only genuine knowledge is knowledge earned by scientific inquiry is not itself establishable by scientific inquiry or experimental methods. So we can throw that out. We can leave that out of, you know, we can put that off the table and then get down to the real business of, well, okay, but how can we know other things?

Well, before we get to how can we know other things, I just have to ask you, you know, whether you knew Dawkins personally or didn't, obviously you did. But it isn't part of the larger conversation how someone like Dawkins cannot understand this, which is so simple, at least to us, it seems self-evident. But there are people like Dawkins who seem to live to disagree with what you in 40 seconds, showed to be fruitless? Well, there was a whole school of thought that was very prominent in philosophy

in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century. You'll probably recall it. I mean, you won't recall it from being there at the time, but you recall it from your philosophy courses at Yale. It was called logical positivism. And basically logical positivism, sometimes known as scientism, embrace that idea,

that the only knowledge we can genuinely claim to have is knowledge that we've established by scientific methods. And that school of thought somehow persisted for several decades before it did collapse under its own self-referential implausibility. In this very room, I had a conversation just like this with Hadley Arcus about natural law. I think the title of his book is mere natural law. Mere natural law. And it touches on similar ideas. How can we know what we know?

and there are things that were somehow obliged to presuppose. I guess I call it common sense. Do you get into that in the book? In other words, I do. I do. There are intelligibilities that we grasp in just our ordinary lives that are not established by scientific inquiry or really any kind of formal inquiry,

one of those is the principle of non-contradiction, that something cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time. We all grasp the intelligibility of that. It is true. It's a truth. Something cannot both be and not be at the same respect at the same time. And then that becomes itself a principle in line with which we conduct our inquiry in other affairs. But it's not the only,

such truth that we grasp. Sometimes these are called self-evident truths. That's a little bit misleading because in contemporary parlance we misuse the concept or term self-evident to mean, well, everybody agrees. That's actually not what it means. It means something that can be known to be true

but can't be deduced through a middle term. Principle of non-contradiction is one of those. You can't give a formal demonstration of the principle of non-contradiction. Indeed, if you tried to do that, you'd have to employ the principle of non-contradiction in making the argument or providing the demonstration. But the same is true of other things.

Take, for example, just the ordinary matter of friendship. Most people quite easily grasp the intelligible point of having or being a friend. That is, entering into a relationship, which you're not entering into in order to use the other person, or that person's not entering into it to use you. In fact, if you have two people, even if there's no injustice, an ordinary business partnership, for example,

two people who have entered into a relationship because they both will be advanced in their pursuit of profit by it. Whatever that is, that's not a friendship, or it's not the paradigmatic case of a friendship. A friendship is where the two friends, each will the good of the other for the sake of the other. And we easily grasp the intelligible point of

doing that without any sort of formal demonstration. We can tell the difference between something that is intrinsically valuable, good in itself, like friendship. We can distinguish that from something that's merely instrumentally valuable, like money or an insurance policy. I mean, nobody wants an insurance policy for non-instrumental reasons. You only want an insurance policy, not for its own sake, but in case something bad happens so that your loved ones can be taken care of. And I'll give you a good example of a story that illustrates the difference quite poignantly between instrumental goods or merely instrumental goods and intrinsic goods. And this story involves money as an instrumental good and friendship as an intrinsic good. And it's a story that's familiar to you and familiar to all of our viewers and listeners.

It's Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. What's the interesting thing about Old Ebenezer Scrooge? Here's the interesting thing. When the story begins, he has things exactly backward, doesn't he? He's treating something that is only and obviously instrumentally good money as if it's intrinsically good. And he's treating something that is obviously intelligibly intrinsically good, friendship, as if it's only instrumentally good. He has one and only one friend, old Jacob Marley, whose ghost visits him, to convert him to the right view,

Marley's relationship with Scrooge was a purely business relationship, a purely instrumental relationship. But when Marley comes back and then the next three ghosts come, they show him where he's gone wrong. They show him the wounds that have darkened his capacity

to understand that, no, money is merely instrumentally valuable. Friendship is what's intrinsically valuable. And once the blockages to that understanding, are cleared away, not by a scientific demonstration, not by an experiment, but once those are cleared away, Scrooge becomes the best of men. He can keep Christmas if anybody knew how to keep Christmas. He adopts Tiny Tim. He sends a turkey over to the Cratchett, or I guess a goose, it's England, a goose for Christmas over to the Cratchett family. So that's how it works in our

ordinary lives. And I'm not breaking any news here. The story that I'm telling you about the intrinsic value of friendship, for example, and the way we distinguish something intrinsically valuable from something instrumentally valuable is as old as Aristotle. We get it in Aristotle's ethics. Robbie, I hate to contradict my guest, but I'm sure that it was, in fact, a turkey, not a goose. That works for me. Is it? So I got something right here. I just want to say that. You did. I have to say that story, it's such a beautiful story. It's one of the reasons most of us love Dickens, our introduction to Dickens, is a Christmas Carol.

But what we're talking about, we're talking about truth, and it seems maybe almost ridiculous to say it, but when we're talking about truth, we're talking about what it means to be human. It's inescapable. It's not something that exists apart from humanity. It can't, which is why the materialist assertion that we can know, scientific truth. It's like it's just numbers or I don't know what it is that people mean by that. But we all seem to know that no truth has to do with what it is to be human because you wouldn't think of an animal, you know, even a sentient animal. Can an animal be sentient?

Oh, I mean, I guess what I'm not sure what I mean by sentient sometimes. But, you know, it's something that's inherently human. And then I would even go farther and say that it says it says about what it means to be human, that we're thinking about truth, that we talk about truth. I think it shows that we're made in God's image, that we care about truth, or at least some of us would talk about truth. That's right. What is a human being? A human being is a rational creature. A rational animal. We are animals. Excuse me, I'm not a biologist. I can't answer that question. You are Socrates in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George. Yeah, we're rational animals.

That's our nature. We are creatures with a rational nature. We are not God. We're not gods. And yet, we possess an immaterial power or set of powers that is quite literally God-like. And those are the powers of reason and freedom. The power to envisage states of affairs that do not yet exist,

to grasp the intelligible point, the value of bringing them into existence, and then to be able to act freely on the reasons we've grasped to bring that state of affairs into existence. Not acting on mere impulse or instinct like a brute animal, but acting rationally. This, I think, is the essence of the biblical teaching affirmed by Jews and Christians that human beings, man, although fashion from the mere dust of the earth, material stuff that will die and dissolve,

is nevertheless made in the very image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is. That's what it means to be a human being. And as rational creatures, Eric, we are truth seekers. Our fulfillment depends on, in part. There are other things as well. But a key element of our fulfillment is the pursuit of truth. the affirmation of truth, the revision of our thinking when we discover that we're in error, and then, of course, the effort to live a life authentically in line with what we best judge,

fallible though we may be, to be the truth. The truth is all about being in touch with reality, whether it is natural reality, what we do in the natural sciences, social reality, we studied that in the social sciences, spiritual reality, what we study in theology and religion. It means being in touch with the way things really are, not living with illusions, not living with wishful thinking, but being in touch with the way things actually are. It's interesting that you bring that up

because in the last few years, I've been talking a lot about where we are in the culture and how it seems to me that things have gotten, so crazy that if you're on-team reality, as I put it, we're on the same team. We don't have to agree on everything, but if you agree that there's something called reality and you want to live or try to live in accordance with it, we're on the same team. We can have a conversation. There are many people that are hostile to reality and so they want to live in a fantasy or they want to say that there is no reality and I will subject to you.

create my own reality. It's like my own truth, whatever, and it doesn't matter whether it's consonant with anything external to me, which takes us back, I guess, to Rousseau or the idea that what I feel trumps anything external and that there is no reality beyond my feelings. Where did that idea come in? Because in the book, you talk about faith and reason, and I want to talk about faith and reason. But where did that come into history, this idea that, you know, my sense of things is potentially more important than anything else? Well, I'll say a word about that, but can I pause just to commend my old friend Richard Dawkins? Because Dawkins recently, in social media, has taken a lot of heat for insisting that we cannot define ourselves or others

as being male or female, depending on their or anybody else's feelings, that our sex or so-called gender is a matter of objective reality, a matter of truth. Not my truth or your truth. It doesn't vary with how you feel or how you self-identify or anything like that. And Dawkins has taken a lot of heat for doing that, but he stood up for it because he believes that it's true. This is an example for me of working with any of, anybody who's willing to speak the truth, especially those who will speak it courageously

and at a cost. We don't have to agree on everything. Dawkins and I have lots of disagreements about religion and ethics and other things, but I really do commend him for speaking out courageously when it's difficult on the question of gender ideology. And I welcome him to the movement to try to return to a kind of sensible understanding of sex and relationship between the sexes. And he's actually a biologist.

He is actually a biologist. So maybe he can answer that question that you were asking you earlier. What is a human being? What is a human being? We need to get him on the phone later. But you ask me about where these ideas come in. As I said, when we talked on your radio show, especially when it comes to bad things and bad ideas,

once you start tracing them back, the next thing you know you're in the Garden of Eden and there's the serpent and Eve, So I don't want to go all the way back there. But you mentioned Rousseau. Obviously, Rousseau is a founding father of the Romantic movement. And that's a very important moment in our history. We're talking about the 18th century.

We're talking about Europe, obviously, in which the idea begins to gain credibility that we get at the truth of things when we throw off the so-called shackles of historic civilization, Christian civilization, civilization, biblical, Judeo-Christian civilization. And we live as if we were noble savages because human beings are naturally good and therefore we can trust our instincts, our feelings, our emotions. It's a very, very bad idea. It leads to catastrophic results.

It leads to the French Revolution. Beginning with the French Revolution, with the terror, with the guillotine. So it's a very, very bad thing, but that's a key moment. But we can't, those of us especially like myself, who give a lot of credit to Anglo-American thinking, to English and American thinking, we can't just blame those Continentals. These ideas, in a more polite form, are entering into Anglo-American thought, English thought, in the first instance, British thought. Welcome back to Eric Socrates in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George. Also in the 18th century and even earlier, I'm thinking of David Hume, who famously declares that reason is and not only to be the slave of the passions

and may pretend to no office other than to serve and obey them. That's the idea that we can't actually adjudicate rationally. We can't reason about what to want. Our wants will be brute givens, given by our desires. All we can reason about is how to get to what we want, how more efficiently to get what we want. Now look at the implications of that. Hitler wants to murder a lot of Jews and Slavs and others. Mother Teresa wants to rescue people and care for them on the streets of Calcutta.

According to the Humeian view, not that Hume himself embraced any such thing, but the implications of his view are, is that Hitler can't reason or we can't reason about. the genuine truthfulness or desirability of what Hitler wants. He wants what he wants, and that's all that can be said. All reason can do is to help him more efficiently to achieve his ends. We can't judge Mother Teresa's wants to be superior or inferior. All reason can do is tell Mother Teresa how to be more efficient and caring for people on the streets of Calcutta.

And it doesn't, as I say, even in the English tradition, in the English anglophone tradition, begin with Hume. A couple of generations earlier, Thomas Hobbes had written that the thoughts are to the desires as scouts and spies to range abroad and find the way to the thing desired. But that's not really proscriptive,

is that he's just describing what he sees in the fallen world? But it's proscriptive in this sense. He's indicating what is possible and what is not possible. And his argument is, all that is possible is to reason about how to get what you want. It's not possible to reason about what to want. So it's a rejection of two streams, the two streams that really formed the West. One stream, of course, the biblical tradition, Jerusalem. The other stream, the classical tradition

from Greece and Rome, figures like Plato and Aristotle and Cicero, who are nowhere near the idea that all reason can do is tell us how to get what we want. Both of those traditions, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the classical tradition, are fundamentally interested in trying to adjudicate between our wants in a way that's rational. Getting it the truth is what Mother Teresa wants the right thing to want or is what Hitler wants the right thing to want. They both can't be okay. And by the way, just for the sake of the conversation, I'm going with Mother Teresa. Okay.

So it's interesting how cynical that view is, that, you know, when you talk about Hume and Hobbs, maybe you know enough about them to say whether they were so cynical. Hobbs, I think I can explain somewhat. He's writing in the context and wake of the great civil war, and the British Civil War, English, and, you know, it was catastrophic. and the carnage was profound and human beings looked to him the creatures who would do this to each other

looked to him basically like just brood animals driven by desire and I think the cynicism grew out of that experience it's parallel Eric to the cynicism I think of Oliver Wendell Holmes the great American jurist profoundly cynical person a great jurist, but a profoundly cynical person, his cynicism grew out of his experience

with the American Civil War, serving in the Union forces in that war, seeing the carnage. It was really horrific. And wars can take people in different directions. The experience of war can take people in different directions. It can inspire in our hearts a deep desire to do the right things so that something like this will never happen again. In others, it will lead to this kind of cynicism. And I fear in Hobbes, as in Holmes, it led to that cynicism. I some months ago interviewed a Plato scholar and was talking to him about how it's fascinating to me as a Christian to think that people like Plato or Socrates or

Cicero, that they would have somehow intuitively grasped that it's possible to reason your way in the direction of something called truth. In other words, that they had an innate sense that there was something like truth and that we could reason toward that. And I was asking him, and I'll ask you now, what do you suppose it is? Because we can talk about the cynicism of Oliver Wendell Holmes or of Hobbes. But what do you suppose it would be that would make somebody, let's say, Socrates,

have this innate sense that the unexamined life is not worth living, as we say, at almost every Socrates event, and that it's worth examining life. It's worth thinking deeply. It's worth trying to reason our way toward something, whether we know it or not, that we're made in God's image. But it's fascinating to me that these folks, centuries before Christ, had that sense. And they, of course, had no, you know, conversations

with the Hebrews, they weren't aware of the writings of Moses. Let me begin with two points in response, Eric. First is that this is not a new view. People have been asking the same question going all the way back to

early Christianity. Second, you're in very good company. Because some of the great early Christian thinkers ask themselves the question, how could Plato have known what he knew. And there were two bits of speculation, both of which were ultimately rejected,

but they were at least toyed with in the minds of early Christian thinkers. One was, could Plato have had somehow access to the Hebrew revelation? Did he get a scroll from somewhere? And then the second speculation, also in the end dismissed, not embraced, was that God had given him a private revelation of some of the essential content of the Hebrew scriptures. Now, both are rejected, but the fact that they were entertained at all means that your question occurred to them as well. Now, my answer, I think, is very much in line with your answer, and here we can go to another great Jewish thinker, St. Paul.

And St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that there is a law written on the hearts even of the Gentiles, who are the Gentiles. They are the people who don't have the law of Moses. There's a law written on the hearts of the Gentiles. It's not written on scrolls, like the Bible, written on the hearts of the Gentiles, that is sufficient for them to be held accountable. It enables them to no basic right from wrong. So a great figure like Socrates, like Plato, I would add Aristotle or Cicero, I think is someone who, is deeply exploring with a good heart, with a good intention, that law written on the heart. That law we call these days the natural law. Welcome back to Eric Socrates in the city conversation with Dr. Robert George. Martin Luther King invokes it in his famous letter from the Birmingham jail when he's criticized for breaking the law, which he did, breaking the human law, breaking the positive law of the state.

How can he justify that? especially when they said to him, his critics said to him, Dr. King, you yourself called for obedience to law when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ordering the desegregation of the schools in the southern states, and when there was resistance from the white majority, you called for obedience to law, but now you're breaking the law. And King says, well, that's because there are two types of law. There's the human law, but then there's the higher law. law. There are two types of law in another sense. There's unjust law and there's just law. An unjust law is a human law that is in violation of the natural law, the moral law, the law, the law written

on the hearts. That's what an unjust law is. A just law is a law that's in line with the natural law, in line with the moral law. A law that's in line with the moral law uplifts what he called in the letter, the human personality, in other contexts. He called the human spirit. by contrast an unjust law, a law that's out of whack with a natural law, degrades the human being, both the victim of the wrongdoing and the wrongdoer himself. Well, that's pretty good. And we can understand that law, at least to some extent, at least in principle, as Plato shows, as Aristotle shows, as Cicero shows,

even if we don't have the revealed truth of the scripture. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It is fascinating to me that the ancients all the way back in antiquity got this, and that many moderns who've had the benefit of living many centuries after the New Testament was written could get to a point. where they would argue with that. It does undermine the progressive view of history, doesn't it? Yes.

That we keep getting better and better and better and smarter and smarter. Things are a lot more complicated than the neoagalians would have us believe who think that history moves forward in a positive direction, and we're always making progress. No, we're not. We can make progress in some domains, like in the domain of science, and yet regress, lose knowledge when it comes to moral truth or spiritual truth. Where do you think we are now with regard to that?

You know, because it's interesting to look at, I mean, you know, it's one thing to say that, you know, if you want to trace things back, you have to go back to Eden. But intellectual history is different. I mean, there are moments. You know, there's the age of reason where people are somehow stressing reason and rationality. The age of faith before that, to some extent. Where do you see us now? And I assume that part of the reason you wrote this book is because of where you think we are now. Well, in the introduction to Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, my new book there in your lap,

in the introduction, I make the point that historians are fond of breaking the epochs up into the age of this and the age of that. And so they tell us that the medieval period was the age of faith. Now, what do they mean by that? Well, they mean that for the great medieval thinkers, whether they were Jews like Maimonides or Christians like Thomas Aquinas or Muslims like Averroes, whoever they were, for the great medieval thinkers, the principal touchstone of truth and of goodness and of justice and of brightness is conformity with the will of God, conformity to the truths of faith.

Now, that shouldn't mislead us into thinking that they had a low view of reason. They certainly did not. If you read Thomas Aquinas or Maimonides, you'll see. a figure who believes that reason has a lot to disclose to us. It has a luminosity and a power. And yet there's truth in the idea that for the medieval's, faith had priority. Faith and reason together, but faith had priority. Well, these same historians tell us, Eric, that the Enlightenment era in Europe was the age of reason. They sometimes call it the age of science. Well, what do they mean? They mean that for the great Enlightenment thinkers, the touchstone of truth,

and of goodness and of brightness, is conformity with reason.