The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 215. The Problem with Atheism

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

In this week’s compilation, we explore the idea of what happens when the religious instinct gets brushed aside – and the things that fill that void instead. Things that, depending on who you ask, may be actively contributing to the breakdown of a society founded on the Abrahamic tradition.Nietzsche has his famous God quote, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods, simply to appear worthy of it?”The voices in this compilation may be very familiar since some of them are also featured in the Conceptualization of God series. You’re about to hear from the whole spectrum: through Jonathan Pageau and Matthew Petrusek to Stephen Fry and Lawrence Krauss, just to name a few.

Welcome to the Jordan V. Peterson podcast. In this week's compilation episode, we explore what happens when the religious instinct gets brushed aside and what fills that void instead. And whether that's contributing to the breakdown of a society founded on the Abrahamic tradition, Nietzsche has his famous God quote, God remains dead and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest has blood to death under our knives? Who will wipe this blood off? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we invent?

Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? The voices in this compilation may be very familiar since some of them also featured in the conceptualization of God's series. You're about to hear from the whole spectrum through Jonathan Pazzo and Matthew Petrusic to Stephen Fry and Lawrence Krauss and more.

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at the door and you're looking at the church and you're saying, hey, this isn't not so bad. Look at this. What is going on here? What is this about? And then because of that how do you think you've got something better? You know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day when we were walking. Because as I said, I walk about 10 miles a day right now, trying to keep myself under control. And, you know, he was raised a communist in Poland and then an atheist.

And he was complaining, I think, I think this is what he told me, that he was complaining to his parents at one point about a religious wedding that they were going to, despite not believing. And he said, as he got older, he realized he had nothing to replace that with. It's like, okay, throw it out. Fine.

Okay, now where are you? Well, you're just as bad off as you were before, but you also don't have that beautiful thing. It's like, what would happen if we dispensed with Christmas? Well, if it's not jobbing, it's a good thing. That's a good thing. That's a good way to keep it sharp. And the new atheists, let's get rid of Christmas.

Or we could say we could make it entirely secular, but then it would just disappear. But you know, that's not what's going to happen because religion is inevitable and we're seeing it coming back in very strained ways. It's going to be a weird, woke, identitarian religion, which is going to come back. That's why you're going to be a prime minister. You know, part of it's going to be a prime minister. It doesn't matter. Can you believe that?

Yeah, so it's a scary thing. You could say that that's one of the failures of the new atheists is that they led to the what they partly led to the new woke phenomenon because they they didn't realize that you can't get rid of religion. You can't get rid of rituals. You can't get rid of the problems and opportunities of identity. All of these things are going to come back. If you try to just, if you try to brush them aside, then they're going to come back in varied, weird ways. And without you realizing what's going on, you'll have people kneeling to a shrine of a man who was killed by police and putting a halo on his head and, you know, and self-mortifying

themselves and doing all kinds of insane things or that look to you insane, but that you need to understand it's just this religious impulse gone off the rails. So. Yes, and then the question is, what's the right place for it? That's right. You know, I've thought in my, I suppose it's a form of comedy that Catholicism is as sane as people get. You know, it's Baroque, right? It's Gothic, not Baroque, it's Gothic, it's dark, it has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror film. And I'm not being, I'm not saying something

denigrating by that. I mean, it's part of its strange mystery. And I'm not being, I'm not saying something denigrating by that. I mean, it's part of its strange mystery. And all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more insane without it than they are with it. And it's a container for that religious impulse. And that impulse is to the, to the good. Yeah. And, and, and, and the image of the crucified Christ and also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right? If you think of the symbolism of communion, you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most transgressive, all of it comes together.

That's worth unpacking that. It's ritual cannibalism in the service of God. Yeah. Yeah, and it, but it's also, it's also seen as a, as a normal, like, meal of communion. And it's then also seen as a, as a sexual union because there's a relationship, there's a notion in which then in the altar and in that moment of communion, there's this joining of heaven and earth, you know, that raises up the chalice and there's this joining, which is this image of this, the sexual communion between God

and the soul, between God and His church. And so all of it just jammed into this, into, into this ritual as a kind of center of reality, would call it. And so like you said, if you get rid of that, then you're going to have all kinds of strange, fictitious versions of it that are going to pop up and are going to try to replace it. And it's leading to the fragmentation of our world and to the breakdown of the West for sure. We make religious the next thing on the hierarchy if we don't give to what is religious, it's

proper place. And I think the new atheists are beginning to realize this. It's like, oh, look at that. We didn't eradicate the religious spirit. We can't. It just moves somewhere and it becomes pathologized by its association with that. This is Tillic's critique of ideology. I'm sorry, well, I love ideology because I think ideology is a form of idolatry, but this is tillic critique of idolatry, which is, we cannot, and I think you said things along this discussion that point to this, we cannot abandon our ultimate concern, right? That's his way of life. Yes, that's right. We can't. So this isn't a negative discount. This isn't a negative definition of God either because

to get back to your negative theology point, I've been concentrating in my thought recently on the positive attributes of God. And so like to drive towards unity in the motivational hierarchy, that is so neoprotonic Jordan. I mean, my gosh, that is so neoprotonic. Well, you know, we were all unconscious avatars of great philosophies. Then some less unconscious than others, but it's still there. And so, but you can't do away with that drive to unity. And in some sense, you also can't critique it because when we say the good, we assume that there's a unity between goods.

I think, yeah, this is for kindness is trans-moral notion of the good. And you and Jonathan talked about the trans-moral notion that there's a unity between goods. I think, yeah, this is platyneus' trans moral notion of the good. And you and Jonathan talked about the trans moral notion that there's, like, he says, look, any sort of moral or aesthetic goodness is ultimately based on the goodness of being. And he says, when are we attributing being? He says, we attribute being the more we find that there's a oneness of something.

And when we understand, we are bringing things. So the knowledge is a process of oneness. And what we're doing is we're conforming to the reality, which being is a process of oning. And when those are at one, that is when the heart starts to rest from its suffering. And I think there's something fundamentally right about that. I can ask you something because I think I'm getting you. What I heard you saying is like let's take the metaphor of the idol and the icon fused. And if there

isn't something beyond them, you can't actually pull them apart. That's what I'm hearing you say. Yes, they collapse into one another. Yes. Look what happened with the deification of Stalin and Marx and Lenin and Mao. That's not accidental. It's inevitable. And we have the, we have the deification of celebrities and we have the deifications of products and we have the deification of ideologies. Part of what Nietzsche predicted was that the death of God, what the death of God meant, what he described and predicted was that the death of God meant the collapse of the highest

unifying value. Okay, so it's become pretty evident to me that we literally perceive the world through a hierarchy of value and we certainly organize our social communities inside a hierarchy of value and there has to be something communities inside a hierarchy of value. And there has to be something at the top to unite us. Now, it isn't obvious what should be at the top. In fact, it's so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images. We're not philosophically astute enough to actually conceptualize it.

And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top. Now, let's say it dies because it's God, and it got too abstract. Marcella, at a historian of religions, said that that happened many times in our history, that the top value got so abstract, it got disembodied, and people didn't know what it was

anymore, how to act it out, or what it meant, and so it floated away, and then collapse into competing claims about what should be the highest value. Well, let's say diversity, equity, compassion, well, why shouldn't compassion be the highest value? Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing to argue about. I think there's some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value.

Perhaps there's truth and beauty, many other issues. Okay, so the highest value collapse, we're not united anymore, well then we're motivated to argue about what the highest value should be, and since it's about the highest value now, now I have an idea at saving the environment, that's the highest value.

Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal. And so you threaten me psychologically, because that's where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance. And so I'm not going to listen to your practical solutions either. And then I haven't examined what other motivations I might have. Like, well, this anti-capitalism issue, that's a terrible contamination for the environmentalist movement. But Che Elliott had about the continual disappearance of God because he looked at Nietzsche's pronouncement and said, well, God has vanished into the stratosphere of abstraction many times throughout

history. This isn't a one-time only. The danger of an abstract God that can't be represented is that he becomes so detached from human affairs that it's as if he's not there. And so the Catholic Church maybe produces saints as intermediaries and priests to sort of link the absolute to the proximal. But I wonder too is what happened with Brexit in the UK? I mean, I thought of that in some sense as a tower of Babel phenomenon is that people felt that their representation in Europe was so abstract that they were no longer connected to their land, to their town, to their community.

And so the distance between them and the central authority became too great. And there was a longing for return to something like the concrete, which I had some sympathy for. But it begs a question too, is like, maybe there's a rank order of identity. And so you are a patriot to your land, but that's nested under under an affiliation to something that's absolute that isn't associated with nationalism. And I talked with Stephen Fry a little bit, for example, about the utility of having a monarch. It's sort of analogous to that, is that the monarch is an abstract figure, but exists. And you can have affiliation to her, like the Prime Minister does, and still be in charge

of the state. And it's like there's a hierarchy of identities, and the hierarchy has to be structured properly, or the parts start to contain the whole in a way that's pathological. Yes, I mean, I was just thinking as you were speaking that certainly the way a lot of the arguments for thinking of one's love of country as a form of of piety in the traditional moral theology, start from the most intimate and the most immediate. So it's love of parent, your biological parents, you didn't choose your parents, it's as it were, you're thrown into this relationship with them,

but it's the most intimate relationship there is. And similarly, the thought is that you owe your loyalty, your loves, your affections to your community, and so on and so on in, in, in, uh, ever-expanding concentric circles. But I think both the quietness and somebody very different, somebody like David Hume later on in the, in the 18th century, stressed that there's, as it were, I kind of, there are diminishing returns as the concentric circles move outward and there's certainly a limit and it's not is it where it may be not not an ideal limit, but it's simply a function of our finitude

and our fragility and and and in the Christian traditional fallenness that we can't as it were love every single human bit we can't love humanity in the abstract and and nor can we love every single human being with the same sort of intensity. So that might be a more positive way of thinking about why we ought to owe what Augustine calls our common objects of love, or we treat our common objects of love as broadly proximate, but organized by the horizon of a transcendent orientation towards the source of love, which of course in the Christian tradition is God himself. I can't agree with you that we inhabit a range of identities, some more local, some more regional, national, global, and then religious. And each, each identification, each thing we identify with gives a certain meaning to our lives and certain significance.

Just wondering in terms of your encounter with younger people, at what point that does religious identification begin to gain traction? Well, I think there's a variety of answers to that. One is that one pathway is the diagnosis that the desire for deep meaning and also deep responsibility is there and valid and in everyone and to be encouraged and recognized. So there's that. And then then there's a serious discussion about I would say about love and truth and the pragmatic utility of both and both as expressions of faith.

You know, because you can't say, well, there's evidence that love in the broadest sense is the most effective manner in which to orient yourself in the world. You could make a countercase that it's power, for example. And you can't prove that speaking the truth is for the best. And partly, that's because people get into trouble for speaking the truth all the time. But you can say, you can stake your life on those two things and see what happens. And that there's an

adventure in that and that appeal to adventure that that's really attractive to you, especially to young men, but to young people in general. And then there's one other element, which is part of it has to be the removal of rational objections. It's like when I did my Biblical lecture series, I said I was going to stay psychological about it except when I had to become metaphysical because of the limitations of my knowledge. And so I was trying to make sense of it. It's like how can you have a relationship with this book that makes sense so that you're not crucifying your reason, but using it alongside of you. And so that it's not mere, let's say superstitious foolishness with regards to your axiomatic

presuppositions of the form that the rational atheists criticized. So, well, let's say so effectively. So I said, well, I brought reverence to the genesis. I said, this book's been around a long time and there's possible there's the possibility that there's something in it that I that I don't understand that's appealed to people across history and let's approach it from that perspective and see what we can make of it and that that seems to have proved extremely popular like sort of unbelievably popular. unbelievably popular. So when you mentioned this desire for a deep desire in a sense for a sense that for a sense of being responsible. Yeah, for certain. And the truth. But both of those connect to me as it were something that is given an objective to which we are accountable.

And it reminds me of what your compatriot Charles Taylor once wrote in his best shortest book and grabbed to say, the ethics of authenticity, he said, reflecting on authenticity as being the kind of universal popular value we all recognize, he said. Authenticity only makes sense when there's a wider given horizon that gives it significance. So choice only has significance within a context that gives it significance. Otherwise, choice is a crease. It's whimsy. It doesn't matter at all. So I suppose seeing this through through Christianizers I do, what we have here is a recognition of the need for, if you like, a given moral order within which we are, you know, we have freedom and the freedom is what makes us responsible and makes our decisions and choices really heavy with significance.

But there is something that is given and we didn't create it. And a large part, not the only part, a large part of the affirmation of the being one God is that there is not just a physical coherence to created reality, but also a moral coherence. And I wanted to make another comment too about truth, Dr. Kaser, you mentioned that I engage in a moral reading of scripture, rather than a literalist reading. And maybe we should have a talk about that because it isn't easy to read a book like the Bible literally because it's full of literal contradictions. And it, whatever it is, especially the really archaic stories in Genesis, whatever it is, it's not history the way we think of history.

And so that's hard for people to see how that might still be true. If it's not literal, how can it be true? And this is a discussion that I tried to have with Sam Harris a lot, because the atheist types, the rationalist types, there's something they miss, and what they miss is that fiction isn't false. It's not a lie, right? It's not literal, but it's not a lie, a lie, right? It's not literal, but it's not a lie, and great fiction is true, but it never happened. So how can it be true? And the answer to that is something like, well, there are patterns in things, deep patterns, deep recurring patterns, you know, human nature, the fact that we're human, that the humanity itself is a recurring pattern. It has characteristic shape.

And great fiction describes the shape of that pattern. And the greatest of fiction, the greater fiction becomes the more it is religious in nature. And that's not even a claim about the nature of truth. It's more a claim about the nature of experience. You know, when we say something is profound, what we mean is that it's moving and that it has a broad influence. It's capable of having a broad influence on the way we think and see it act. So if you read a profound book like one of Dostoevsky's books, you could say of that book and people often do that it changed my life when I read that book. And a story that can change your life has a power that is best described as religious. And so religious is a kind of experience in some sense, rather, in addition to a claim

about what constitutes truth. And then those stories in Genesis can enable, I think, and the story of Adam and Eve, because those stories are so deep that it's almost unfathomable, they get at the most profound of patterns. and so to say that they're literally true is actually to massively underestimate how true they are. Because you could tell me what you did this morning. Now it would be literally true, but like who cares? Whereas if you read the story of Adam and Eve, it's so true that it applies to everyone always, and mere literal truth can't do that. And we don't have a good language as scientists, let's say as psychologists, or even as citizens,

we don't have a good language for that kind of truth. And so, well, I guess I'd like your thoughts about that idea. Yeah, so the literal sense of scripture is sometimes misunderstood by people. And I think the right way to think of it the literal sense of scripture is what the original human author intended to convey to the original human audience. And so if we're looking at genesis,

I think that we need to put genesis back in its context. If you read genesis as if it is a contemporary textbook on science, I think what we need to put Genesis back in its context. If you read Genesis as if it is a contemporary textbook on science, I think what you're doing is wrenching it out of its original context, and therefore you're bound to misread it. And that's true of not just Genesis, it's really true of any work that to understand it, we need to understand its genre, and we need to understand its context. So what is the original context of the Genesis story?

Well, the original context, it was written in terms of rival stories of creation, other stories that were circulating in the ancient world and it was meant to be an answer to those. And it uses poetry, it uses imagery and that was what all those stories did. And the poetry in the imagery, I would not set that against truth.

As if on the one hand you have truth and the other, I would not set that against truth, as if on the one hand you have truth, and the other hand you have poetry, imagery, and story. I think that one kind of truth is scientific truth, the empirically verifiable. But I think it's too narrow to say, well, the only kind of truth is the empirically verifiable. I think truth actually is broader. And in fact, that claim that the only that the truth is empirically verifiable, that's the only kind of truth. That is itself a self-defeating statement, right? There's no empirical evidence that the only way to get the truth is through the empirical method.

So if we put Genesis back in its context, what do we see? Well, we see it as a story telling us about, in contrast to the other stories, the other stories in the ancient world were stories in which there were multiple gods. They engaged in a warfare and violence. So you think of the Greek myths or like this where right Zeus overthrows his father and there's all this violence. And Genesis is meant to answer these other ancient myths and it's saying things like there's only one god. There's not multiple. Secondly, that creation is not a matter of violence, but that the creation is reasonable speech. And this

was something that you talked about in your lecture, which really struck me because I obviously had read that story before, but I never really thought of it that, well, creation arrived. Right. God says, there'll be light and there was light. And what is reasonable speech? The reasonable speech is orderly. The difference between random sounds make and reasonable speech is that there's a kind of order to it. So if creation arises from reasonable speech

and the creation itself is ordered, it's intelligible and makes sense. And that gives rise centuries and centuries later, that belief that creation is orderly and makes sense, gives rise centuries later to science. But to read Genesis as if it's failed science makes it by as much sense as to read Genesis as if it's four or against iPhones. I mean, imagine somebody reading Genesis and they're like, well, is this should I buy an iPhone or not? I'm not going to read Genesis to determine this. Well, clearly the original author of Genesis wasn't addressing that in the original author of Genesis This wasn't addressing four or against evolution. So I think that that these readers who want to make it four or against evolution are just utterly misreading and taking the story out of its original context,

and therefore necessarily providing a really bad reading of Genesis. There's also a really important theological point to make here as well, and that's, we could put it philosophically, what's the condition for the possibility of something being literal in the first place? What's the condition for the possibility both of it being recognized, spoken, and then apprehended? There's a certain court of orderliness that's necessarily pre-supposed in the act of knowing and in the act of communicating that knowledge that itself, as Chris said, can't

be empirically verified. So when we as Catholics say that, that recognize from the New Testament that Jesus is the truth, that would include in a literal historical sense, but also the condition for the possibility of anything being intelligible and literally understood and communicated at all. So I think one of the frustrations I found

in finding contemporary debates on these questions that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing

that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing that we're doing, we're doing to be on their territory. And I just don't think that's philosophically the case. It presupposes a lot of things that they can't give an account for. Yeah, I mean, so one more little, yep, please go ahead. No, I just was just gonna add one thing. So imagine somebody was reading Shakespeare's son at 18,

right? Shall I compare the two of Somers Day that aren't more lovely and more temperate? Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May and Somers lease half all too short of date. So imagine somebody reads that and they're like, okay, Shakespeare's a meteorologist. He's a weatherman.

And I'm going to look up in the almond act to see if May had rough winds. And that turns out there's no rough winds in May. Oh, Shakespeare about it at telling us about the weather. Well, I think that's a, obviously, radically radical misunderstanding of Shakespeare. He's not trying to tell us the weather and then failing to tell us the weather. Well, I think that's obviously radically radical misunderstanding of Shakespeare. He's not trying to tell us the weather and then failing to tell us the weather. And so I think Genesis is not trying and failing to give us scientific truths. It's just doing something totally different. And that's part of the reason I appreciate your lectures is that you highlighted

the reality that the author of Genesis is trying not to is trying to communicate very important truths, but not truths that are in the scientific discourse. They're true, but not scientific truths. The problem with the empirical approach, the problem with totalizing it is that the empirical approach tends to be mostly descriptions of things and the way they interact and the way they can be manipulated. And that's fine, but doesn't tell you, doesn't provide any real insight into how to live, how to act, how to take your next step, how to produce a hierarchy of values, and how to determine what's most important,

and what's least important. And all of that is also so difficult that we actually don't know how to do it completely explicitly, which is why we need poetry and drama and literature. We need that whole domain, so we could call that the literary domain. And then I think you could consider it,

this might be an empirical proposition, is that the religious domain is at the base of the literary domain, and as literature gets deeper, it becomes more and more like religious writing. And so by definition, in some sense, and I've swiped this in part, I would say, from Jung, is almost by definition, that the sense of profound engagement, that the most profound literature produces is what constitutes the religious. And that's a domain of experience. When you're captivated in a movie theater,

when you're captivated by a story, when you're taken outside yourself, none of that has anything to do with logical argumentation. It's a whole different issue, and to me it's tied very, very deeply to our ability to imitate and mimic. And so we're really good at that, way better than any other animal. We like languages mimicry. We use the same words. And so we're mimicking each other. And but I can't mimic every person separately. I have to extract out from each person some essence of being that's admirable. And I do that person after person.

And I try to imitate that. And then that core thing that's admirable that I imitate, that's as far as I'm concerned, that's psychologically equivalent to Christ. Whatever else Christ is, Christ is, that's why he's sometimes described as the King of kings. It's like if the king is the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy, and then you look at all hierarchies, and you take the thing that's at the top of all hierarchies of value, then that figure, when you see reflections of that figure anywhere, it produces awe and respect. And that's because that pattern constitutes the appropriate

way to act, just as when you see the opposite of that pattern, which might be in its most fundamental essence, satanic or demonic, it's something that's ultimately evil that produces revulsion and terror. And that's all instinctual. It's not in the domain of rationality precisely. It's way, way deeper than that. And then there's another problem that the atheists have never come to terms with. I believe, and you guys tell me what you think of this, is that if what is rendered unto God, is rendered unto Caesar, then Caesar becomes inflated to God. And when that happens, all hell breaks loose.

That's the genesis of totalitarianism. That's subservience to an idol. And so, and this is a case, I think, the church needs to make, particularly the Catholic church, in the most strenuous of ways, is that if we don't segregate off the religious instinct and give it its proper attention and do, which I suppose you do in part with ritual and church attendance and so forth, then every single thing we do starts to become inappropriately contaminated with

religious longing. And that's why you see the rise of extremely powerful political ideologies and the division of people, you know, for trivial reasons into moral camps. It's that religious instinct isn't, hasn't got a grounding in it. It's searching for something to attach itself to and it, it picks up second rate substitutes. You know, they, people like Dawkins, they seem to think that if we all just debandoned our religious superstitions, we'd all become, you know, rationalists like, well, like Isaac Duton, who was an alchemist and not a rationalist, by the way,

that great genius. And so, one of the things I think that the Catholic church in particular isn't doing a very good job of is warning people how dangerous it is to lose the proper theater of expression for our religious instincts. They don't go away. They just get perverted and they show up all sorts of places they shouldn't. That's terrible, it's not good. Yeah, that theme is one that Augustine talks about in the city of God. He talks about two loves. He talks about the love of God and it creates a certain city, a certain organization. If you don't love God, if God is not your ultimate love,

well, you're gonna love something. So it could be power, it could be pleasure, it could be money, it could be status. But Augustine thought that if you love, say, power the most, well, what that's gonna do is it's gonna shape you and ultimately distort not only you, but also your relationships in your society. So the question view is that ultimately God is perfect truth, love, and beauty. And so not

only is it the case that worshiping anything other than that is going to fail to give God what's due to God. And that's what religion in the sense is about. It's a binding of oneself to God, giving to God what's do. But also it ends up making the person ultimately unhappy. So you can't think about this, even from a psychological perspective that people like Martin Selegman would say things like love is at the core of human flourishing. And, and if we don't have that, if I love money or power more than I love God and more than I love my friends and more than I love my family, well, that's going to deprive me of the source of my flourishing. I'm going to end up harming myself and characteristically also harming others when I love power or money or whatever, too much. And so, yeah, for a guest, at least, this is a perennial temptation to replace God

with something else. That's perhaps the warning at the end of Genesis with the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel. Because the Tower of Babel is people get together and they try to build an edifice that's absolute in some sense, right? It's a building that's under the controls, an edifice that's of human manufacture and it becomes larger and larger and larger and then it devolves into a kind of chaos. And so with the flood story, with knowing the flood, that's one form of danger that emerges

as a consequence of deviation from the proper path, let's say orientation towards whatever the highest good is. And the Tower of Babel is a secondary one that has more to do with the danger of ego-tistical human construction. And it is something like the worship of these idols. So imagine we can think about this technically and psychologically, in some sense, is that in order to act,

you have to presume that that to which you're moving is more important than where you are. Right? So you make a value judgment. Moving in this direction is appropriate. And then you have to move in a lot of directions over the course of your life. And maybe you search for friendship and you search for love and you search for money and you search for power and so forth.

And if there's nothing integrating all that, then you're pulled in all sorts of directions, right? It's like devil's pulling you apart because you don't know what's more important than what. and that's very, very confusing and off-putting. And if the wrong thing takes control, then you get demented and bent. And so what you see in Christianity is this struggle over thousands of years to specify the thing that should be at the top of the hierarchy. And one of the things that really opened my eyes to the depth of these works was this strange proclamation that the word that existed at the beginning of the time,

that brought creation into being was the same as Christ, which is an unbelievably bizarre proposition. I mean, I'm not speaking about precisely religiously, I'm thinking about it more conceptually. It's like the people who had that revelation or intuition are making the presupposition that there's something about the emergence of reality into conscious being, like because reality without consciousness doesn't really seem to exist, right? So when we talk about reality,

we always presuppose a conscious viewer. And that the conscious viewer that makes order out of chaos is most appropriately the perfect being that's manifested in the figure of Christ. And so that we participate in that process in some sense to the degree that we're attempting to embody that mode of being. So, I know that's going out there in some sense, but it struck me as such a brilliant idea that it was hard to account for. I don't know if I've made myself clearer with that. Well, I think it cuts in many different ways at the same time, but it also cuts directly to

the previous question that you asked about the right domain of religious expression. the right domain of religious expression. And in a sense, it solves that problem. Why? Well, if Jesus Christ is the logos, on the one hand, that means that there is a logos. There is a truth. There is a way of existence that is real, which gives us a standard to be able to identify false ways

of being both individually but also important politically. So it establishes a ground work for there to be an intrinsic limiting principle politically speaking and morally speaking to life, and that is there is a truth of the matter. And if you're not alive according to the truth, you're deviating from it. So that establishes a kind of ground and ceiling for the proper expression of what it means to live morally individually and also political power as well. You only have right political power insofar as it conforms to the truth.

But the logos is also Christ. That means Christ is also the person, the historical person that, as Catholics we believe is literally real and literally raised from the dead. And that shows that the political life is not the sumptotality of life. The moral life isn't even the sumptotality of life. The sumptotality of life is love in relationship with God who has made himself incarnate.

So on the one hand, you have the foundation of truth to structure and limit human life and then its ultimate transcendent tale or purpose. Taking apart Genesis like that was really revelatory to me because but I am I differed from the atheist because I text I approached the text with reverence and ignorance and humility believing that I was nothing in comparison to what it contained. You thought that there were truths available through transformation, not just through information. Well, what are we stupid? Are we stupid? Is what we were guided by this book for so many thousands of years and preserved it?

Is because we're stupid. Yeah. I don't think so. Yeah, I mean, that means there's something I don't know about it. It's poor. We're all stupid. Either we're stupid, which is highly probable. Or we're all stupid, which is not so highly probable. I think, well, I mean, as I've said, I think one of my deepest criticisms of the new atheists is precisely the fact. I think I have a lot of criticisms of theism too because of the way it has bound itself. I mean, current theism, it has bound itself to I mean, current these and it has bound itself to a cartesian conception of modernity and reality. And that's why- Going to that, go into that. Well, I want to talk to you about dogman spirit a bit.

Okay, well, let's leave that. Go into what you just said. Okay, so I'm going to put it, I'm going to say thing I'm going to put a pin in it because we're still trying to do the four P's of knowing. But the new atheists lose the three other P's and they lose, they look for scientific knowledge in the Bible, not paying attention to how it cultivates wisdom. And the fact, right, and not knowing that there's any difference between scientific knowledge and wisdom. This is what I talked about with Stephen Fry recently because Stephen, who's aligned with the atheists, knows that there's such a thing as wisdom, which is why he pursues and embodies myth.

But he's annoyed at the church because of its dogma, and he confuses the church with its dogma. Exactly. You know, I'm also going to say a few positive things about dogma. Dogma is the map. I think dogma is, you know, in single detection theory. I think dogma is the in it. The inescapable need to set the criterion. At some point you can't like in single detection theory, you have to set the criterion. And all you do to set the criterion, this sounds like Pascal,

is you assess the relevance of the risks because if you all gather more information, but then you have to set the criterion for that. Yes, yes, again. And again, and again, and at some point. Yes, that's right. That's right. But you can see. So the criterion, the criterion we're talking about is the worship of that ultimate spirit. Well, and that's the setting of the criteria.

And there's an element in which dogma serves that. So we can't just, because Fry says, well, I like the spirit, but not the dogma. It's like, no, because you know, because you have to make a decision. That's your point. Okay, that's right. And in every act, there's a decision. So in every act, there's a worship of the dogma,

because you set the criterion. Right, but you set the criterion, but that's not the same thing as making the connection. Don't forget that credo is later, and I say, should always be in service to religion. Religio, which means to bind, that's that connectedness we've been talking about throughout. And the point about setting the criterion, and this is like a, you know, this is like a William James thing to say, the point of setting the criterion is to get as reliable

a continuity of religio as you possibly can. And when CRETA goes from giving your heart to I assert, we stop making Crito, we stop conceiving of Crito in a way that sees it intrigally in service of Religio. This episode was brought to you by Shopify. Selling or providing an online

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stress by 14% in just two weeks, which is amazing. But even better news, there are at least four weeks in that free month that's waiting at headspace.com slash JBP. Again, headspace.com slash JBP. Again, headspace.com slash JBP. One of the things that I've been so delighted by is my observation that there's a tremendous hunger for serious conversation. Yeah, public hunger for it. And when I have engaged in my lectures,

I'm always extending myself to my limits of thought. Like that's what the lecture is. It's an attempt to go past what I think. And there's absolutely no doubt that everyone in the audience is on board with that. I mean, it was the case when I debated Sam Harris, for example, that discussion, which, you know, was as technically complex as Sam and I could make it. And, you know, and that might not be as philosophically complex as the absolute ideal. But it was, it wasn't dumbed down by any stretch of the imagination.

And there, there's just, there was, there's no reason that that is if you spoon feed that material, it, it catches no one. I can tell you this, those new atheists, so Sam and Hitchens and Dawkins, those guys, they were good evangelizers. I mean, for their position, I deal with them all the time. Yeah, and they didn't dumb it down either.

They didn't dumb it down. They had the two things I talked about. They were intelligent and they were passionately committed to it. But every day on the internet, when I go into these con boxes, I hear the phraseologies from Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris. A lot of young people read them.

They didn't hug them into atheism, they argue them into atheism. So I've been telling our people, we got to stop trying to hug people back into the faith. We have to argue them back into the faith. We have to make it compelling. And the problem with the atheists is that they don't have, the best they can offer is something like a materialistic utopia. And I've got nothing against that. I've been talking to people like Bjorn Lomburg and who lay out this vision of an increasingly wealthy world where absolute poverty is the thing of the past and where

people can take the levels of health that are more or less taken for granted in the West, for granted everywhere in the world through a process of incremental economic improvement and you know more power to that I think. But I also know that that isn't a sufficient story. And there's a kind of despair that goes along with material security, because the adventure is drained out of it. And Dostoevsky touches on this. And this is where I really learned this

when I first encountered this idea. You know, Dostoevsky and notes from underground, underground says, look, this is something you have to understand. If you gave people everything they need so that they had nothing to do but eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, if they were so happy that nothing but bubbles of bliss would appear on the surface of the water that they were in, they would smash it all to pieces just so that something adventurous and unique could happen. And so, like, there has to be a call to a higher order of spiritual being, let's say,

a psychological being, that accompanies that materialism, or it's, or we won't even accept it. It'll kill us. It'll kill us. It'll kill us. It'll kill us. It'll kill us. It'll kill us.

It'll kill us. It'll kill us. It'll kill us. It'll kill us. It'll kill us. Mother-us, it's got to be the call to sanctity. And the call to sanctity is a call to love. And they're Dostoevsky, you know? Love is harsh and dreadful. It's not a cute little emotion, or it's not a sentiment. Real love is harsh and dreadful because it means going into the place where people are suffering and becoming another Christ and bearing the burdens of the world. That's serious business. Love is, and something awful about it, you know, but when you summon someone, but there's also something awful about the judgment,

you know, because if you love someone, you also hold them to a standard. Yeah, you will they're good. Right. And that means holding to a standard. I see you as a border figure. You've got one foot in the rationalist human, rationalist humanist, atheist, empiricist world, firmly planted, but then there's the artist in you, which is a major part of your personality. And obviously a part that's incredibly productive and very well received, and it has an intellectual end as well. That domain, that second domain that you occupy isn't formalized, the investigation of that

isn't formalized as well by the atheist community. They lose what's there and they don't value it properly. And that's a problem. Like with Dawkins, for example, I get letters from lots of people, lots and lots of people, and lots of them are nihilistic. And because they're nihilistic, they're suicidal. I had a friend. I went for a walk with him the other week and he was a communist atheist when he was a kid. He grew up in Poland and he had criticized his family for celebrating Christmas because it was irrational. And then he realized at one point he said, I could kill Christmas and we just have another weekend. That wouldn't actually, right, right? Because

right, there's a magic there that that rationalism can destroy. And for reasons. I have exactly that problem politically with the Royal Family, which on the face of it is, of course, more preposterous, even than Christmas and religion is the idea that we still have a royal family. But, the fact that you have a royal family, and the ceremony and ritual and symbolism is I look at America and I think think if only Donald Trump and now Biden, if every week they had to walk up the hill

and go into a mansion in Washington, and there was Uncle Sam in a top hat and striped trousers, a living embodiment of their nation, more important than they were. That's the key. He, Uncle Sam, is America. The president is a fly-by-night politician, voted for by less than half the population. And he has to bow in front of this personification of his country every week. And that personification, Uncle Sam can't tell him what to do. Uncle Sam can't say no past this act and don't pass that act and free these people

give them a pardon. All he can do is say, tell me young fella what you done this week. And he'll bow and say, well, Uncle Sam, say, oh, you think that's the right thing for my country? Well, that's what a constitutional monarchy is. And, of course, it's absurd. But the fact that Churchill and Bethatio show everyone had to bow every week in front of this something, there's something and also empirically look at the happiest countries in the world. That's all you need to do and they happen to be constitutional monarchies, Norway, Sweden, Benilux, Japan. They're always right up there on the list. Now, it may be that we can't find the cause of the link between their constitutional monarchy, but it might just be

something to do with that. And that's, it's a way of answering your question in the same way as religion. Yes, yes. It's that I can see the absurdities of the claims of many religions, and I can see the history of the wickedness and depression and suppression, particularly in my own instance, you know, being gay, growing up, gay and I, there's a long history of religion in particular, being intolerant. And to this day, even this Pope Francis, who I had some hopes for, it seems to be beginning to add to an ancient slander and nonsensical attitude towards

sexuality, which is extremely annoying and upsetting. But, you know, I kind of, that doesn't mean I throw the whole baby out with the bathwater, I can see in the same way that I don't believe in in Greek mythology. In actual fact, I don't believe that on Olympus Zeus lived there with his wife, Hira, but I do believe Hermes and Hira and Zeus live within us. There is a Hermes inside me. There is a there is a trickster, a liar, a Joker, a cute funny side, as well as a harmonic, a Pellonian and a bestial dynasty inside with his appetitive and addictive and and and frenziedied. And I see the value and the truth in those religious manifestations, those principles,

those elements of my character and the character of the human family. So you might say that in a place where there is no fourth branch of government, the president, the executive, tends to take on the symbolic weight of the king. Yeah. Okay, we agree on that.

That's possible. Absolutely. It's not a problem of American politics. Yeah. Okay, and now I would say that's also related to the problem of the separation of church and state. And one of the things the West seems to have got right is the idea that we should render unto Caesar,

what is Caesar's and render unto God, what is God's? Well, it's an analogous idea. That's okay. I'll just continue where I'm going. I need that. I need that to be described more, but okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, imagine there's a practical necessity

for this separation of the religious impulse from the political impulse. But imagine that there's a psychological necessity for that too. Okay. And then if there aren't domains specified out for the different domains of practical thought, political economic religious, then they contaminate each other. And what happens is you don't get rid of the rid of the religion,

you contaminate the politics with it. And so now I've been watching what's been happening to Richard Dawkins, for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And now Richard's idea, and I'm an admirer of Dawkins, but he can think, you know, I mean, he's brilliant. And I've read his books. I understand what he's doing and why.

And I get his argument. I think it's incomplete for reasons we could get into. And probably will. But I think there's something for reasons we could get into and probably will. But I think there's something missing there. And then just playing out is that when you when you remove the religious sphere and you confuse it with superstition or you fail to discriminate between the valid elements of it and the superstitious elements, you don't get rid of the religious impulse. It goes somewhere else. Oh, yeah.

And I think where, if you're saying it's going into secular religiosity now, I, well, what do you think? I agree. I mean, what does it look like to you? No, that's, I said that I've written a, I've written on it. And I, that was my argument is that, is that we're seeing many of the aspects of religion being manifest in, in secular arguments, as someone pointed out, the only difference being in, unlike at least the Christian religion, there's no possibility

of absolution, which is, yeah, yeah, but that's not funny. Yeah, I know it's not funny. That's seriously not funny. I know, I know, I agree with you. I know it's serious, not funny. Believe me, I know it very well. I know you do. I know, but that also points out what a remarkable achievement the idea of absolution is because it's like the presumption of innocence. Those two things are those are miraculous.

Yeah, well, I agree. I agree. I agree. And I, you know, I would argue that religion on the whole has not been a good thing for people. It's guys for argument. But. But in order to, but we shouldn't realize, we have to realize that in order, that it does serve an evolutionary purpose, if you want to call it purpose. It's there because it has, it has served, it has survived all of society's because it does,

it meets some human needs in one way or another. And therefore, we have to ask what needs does it satisfy and realize what they are and how can we provide them without the fairy tales? So I guess we definitely do have to ask that question. The problem with the new atheists is not so much their atheism, it's their apriori commitment to the doctrine of metaphysical naturalism,

which is roughly the idea that all truths are scientific truths or reducible to scientific truths. And it's a non-starter, the far more interesting golden thread that you talked about earlier that sometimes known as the perennial philosophy. Yes, exactly that. It is the thought that being, is the thought that being, capital B being, is the fundamental meta-visual question. And once you start approaching deep philosophical problems in that way, then you do start to see a remarkable convergence between Abrahamic monotheism, Vedanta and Upanishads,

the question of whether Brahman and Atman, Abrahamic monotheism, Vedanta and Upanishads, the question of whether Brahman and Atman are one, that is to say being and mind and the self-self are one, we see it, those sorts of questions are also not particular to religious systems. So think of somebody like Heidegger. You know, a Heidegger is supposed to have spawned the kind of the great atheistic tendencies in 20th century existentialist

and phenomenological philosophy. He says, the fundamental question is, why is there something rather than nothing? Why being? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so there's the metaphysical, so part of what this hinges on

is the metaphysical status of consciousness and you can make a case that that's equivalent to this question is, well, what, I mean, David Chalmers, who's maybe the most well-known cognitive scientist studying consciousness, he has one set of the hard question, the hard question about consciousness. But for me, the hard question is the question of being itself, because I can't distinguish between being and awareness.

You can think, well, there's an objective world without subjectivity. It's like, well, try to think that through and see how far you get. It just, you just run into problem after problem with it. And, I mean, there's technical problems at the level of physics as well, but there's certainly metaphysical problems. And so, so then the question is, well, what is the, what is the cosmological significance of consciousness? And that's a central question, right? Maybe that's the central question. And when I look at the inside of a Christian cathedral, and I see the logos spread out against

the sky because that's what the dome is, as affiliated with the sun, there's this proposition that consciousness is what engenders reality itself, and that we partake in that. And let's say we abandon that notion, it's like, okay, well, then, do you have any dignity as an individual? And then we get into the post-modern question,

is, well, are you there as an individual, at all, are you just, this is part of the identity issue? Are you just one of your immutable, physiological characteristics, right? Your sex, your gender, your race, that's matter, man. And there's no individual soul there. Well, why can't I just reduce you to that? What are you gonna use as an argument?

Well, I'd just a very quick thought if I mad. I don't want to sort of keep batting in too much, but a very good line for Dawkins and others to remember, and you should remind him of it if he comes on your podcast, is that metaphysics always buries its undertakers. That is to say, every time there's an attempt to say we can all of that mumbo jumbo that was being talked about by those clever philosophers or those stupid religionists, that's all gone now. That's a warning sign. It's a sign that there's actually total, total confusion and all sorts of kind of fragmentation and the quest for meaning and the quest for the answer to the question of the meaning of the amendment of the perennial philosophy? It's an attempt, certainly, to reject it. And if you look in, say, Vedantic systems, you look in Indian philosophy,

there were materialists. There was a school of materialism, but it was a relatively small and short lived belief system. You see materialism in the Greek aromen world, you see it in democratic, democracy is atomism, you see it in epicurus, of course, but it is a minority report. It's a strange superstition there is, it's a quite a strange superstition in ancient thought. Well, I mean, just to cook it apart a bit, James, because you mentioned earlier that among, I think it was cognitive scientists that you were discussing that discussion of pan-psychism has become non-heretical because there's notion that there's a mystery in matter.

See, it isn't materialism. And exactly that's the fault. Perhaps it's deterministic clockwork materialism that's essentially Newtonian. And we know that's not right. I mean, it's proximally right, but beyond that, it's not right. Matter is very deep mystery. And I can't see how you can get rid of the problem of consciousness by positing a materialist substrate when there's no way that you can get rid of the metaphysics of matter. Very quickly, I mean, you mentioned David Charmers, as you say, and this brilliant young philosopher who in 1994 published his PhD thesis, The Contrast Mind, which brought back on to the table that what he called the hard problem of consciousness.

And he passed that in different ways. There's something absolutely irreducible about qualitative experience. But the problem that then opens up, that then I think leads him towards taking panpsychism very, very seriously. This is just really in the last 10 years, I think, is the idea, well, okay, we've got consciousness. It's a hard problem. We just can't get rid of it. And yet, we can't get rid of matter either. We can't get rid of the truths of the physical sciences. And we can't work out how enough these fit together. They couldn't be laws of nature. They couldn't be psychoanalytic or psychological laws. The laws of thought are fundamentally different from the laws of nature. So how do we fit these two together? And pan-psychism at that point, though it might seem crazy to

the person on this treat, suddenly starts to seem quite an attractive account of the nature of ultimate reality. And I suppose just as a quick footnote to that, once you're there, materialism, dockinzian materialism is is is decennzian and long gone. And the dialogue between the perennial philosophy and pan and anglophone philosophy of panpsychists is back on. So elaborate on that. That's what stopped me exactly because now I'm trying to figure out, well, there's this, we should define panpsychism again for the audience. But then, okay, so what sort of dialogue does that open up as far as you're concerned? Well, my view is that panpsychists, it's early days and at least in its modern contemporary

iteration, I think you can say that Aristotle, if you read the day Annemba Aristotle's Treaties on the Soul, there's soul all over the place that the plants have a nutritive soul, animals have a perceptual soul, and human animals have both of those and a rational soul. So as it were, all of organic life is minded. If you move to the basic framework of Abrahamic monotheism,

then look, it follows very naturally that if you've got an axiomatic commitment to mind at the bottom of the universe, as it were, the creator is a minded being, is ideal, is not material, and everything, all of reality distinct from God, is created, and including, as it were, space-time. Then the idea that the universe as we discover it, as we come upon it, is shot through with mind, is legible to the minded inquiry that happens when cognitive scientists are trying to unravel the mystery of the brain. It's something you've got an isomorphism there. I think the breakdown of Christianity is going to continue. I don't have short-term hope for, let's say, the situation, but I do believe that there are, that there are seeds which are kind of being planted

and there are people who are getting ready and will bear fruit, so it's been just, it's been amazing, I have to say. And thanks for that, by the way. I hope, I guess you're welcome to the degree that I had something to do with it. you