The Sean McDowell Show - Is Morality Better Explained By God Or Science? (Sean McDowell vs. Michael Shermer)

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Can Morality be explained without God? Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon Podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Today, he's here to argue that science can explain morality better than God. *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Is God or science the best explanation of good and evil? Can we be good without God? These are the questions I'm going to discuss today with our guest, New York Times best-selling author, Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, Dr. Michael Shermer, one of the most recognizable and influential skeptics today. We had a couple of coffeehouse debates or discussions maybe 15 or 20 years ago, Michael, and I remember that well. I appreciate your thoughtfulness, the way you carry yourself,

so I've wanted to have you back for years. My only regret is how long it took, but better late than never. So thanks for coming back on. Oh, you're welcome. By the way, I was just going through my library here from 1972. I have this book on my shelves. Wow. Yeah, that's the 1972 edition. Is that your father? That is my dad. Yeah. There he is. He is younger than I am now. He's younger than you are now. Yeah, look at that hair. That's a 1970s in that suit.

Oh, man. You got to love it. Don't get me started. And here's the dedication to the book. To Dottie, my sweetheart, my best friend, and my wife. Without her patience, love, and constructive criticism, the project could never have been completed. Is that your mom?

That's my mom that's right oh boy wow how about that and your dad was a graduate of wheaton college and a magna cum laude graduate of the talbot theological seminary so you've kind of taken into your father's footsteps i certainly i certainly have in some regards i remember when we were together 20 years ago you brought me a signed book of your latest book of time i appreciate I appreciate, and asked me how my dad was doing. I thought that was really just thoughtful. That's right. Okay. I forgot about that. Yeah. Is he still with us? He is 85 years old. So he stepped back just for reasons that hit an 85-year-old, but all things considered, he's as healthy as I think someone could be at 85.

That's great. Nice. Well, I love that you still have that for so many reasons, and that's a whole other conversation that we could have. But you sent me a chapter from your book, which I think is a forthcoming book on truth. Is that correct? Yeah. So the next book is Truth, What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Matters. It's the Johns Hopkins University Press. It'll be fall of about a year from now, fall of 2025. Wanted to avoid any election political season of books because there's a lot on that. universal objective reality, not only in the physical and biological worlds, but also the human, social, moral worlds. There are facts about the world we can discover. I'm not a cultural

relativist, even though I'm an atheist. You know, politically, I'm a libertarian, really socially liberal, fiscally conservative. And so the point I put forth in the book is that there is a, you know, a truth to be found, that it is objective reality we can discover, if not with a capital T truth, but with, you know, high or low degrees of probability of the claim being true or not true or undetermined. And so the chapter I sent you on morals, you know, I deal with consciousness and free will and all the big issues, but the moral one seems to be a conundrum for a lot of atheists because they tend to be politically liberal and therefore they lean toward blank slate-ism and cultural relativism and that, you know, they can't truly say there is objective moral values and that you can't derive values from facts. But I disagree with all that. You know,

this is the is-ought fallacy, the naturalistic fallacy, which I claim is a fallacy. So I call it the naturalistic fallacy fallacy. And, you know, they always turn to Hume was the first person to kind of articulate this. But I think when Hume wrote that, you can, they always turn to Hume was the first person to kind of articulate this. And but I think what when Hume wrote that you can't derive an ought from an is, for example, the fact that there's been slavery in history doesn't mean that's what we ought to do. You know, that's true. And the fact that there's always been more doesn't mean war is good. You know, that that kind of thing. Yeah. OK. But, you know, technically he meant it in a in a thin sense as philosophers call it thin a thin argument uh there are plenty of exceptions and and i like to just take them one by one you know can't we you know objectively say that it's better to live in south korea than north korea and you just have to ask people where they'd rather

live and they'll tell you yeah i'd rather live in live in South Korea than North Korea. So can we say that democracies are truly better than autocracies? I mean, objectively, measurably, absolutely, whatever word, descriptions you want to use or criteria, yeah, we can. And I don't see any problem with saying that. And so I just see how far I can go in this chapter and in the book in general with that idea that is there's an objective reality, universal, whatever you want to call it, universal realism, we call it, and that we can discover something about it, if not perfectly, because we're all fallible beings. By the way, I start off with the premise that if there is a God,

it's an omniscient, omnipotent being. But one thing I know for sure is I'm not God and neither are you. So none of us knows anything for sure. Fallibilism is one of the. You know, we have to start there and say, but that doesn't mean everything is relative. That doesn't mean your opinion is as good as mine or or this indigenous people's origin story is as good as the scientific origin story or, you know, whatever. Or that your race or gender identity determines the truth about reality. No, no, there's actual objective truth out there, separate from you and I and our culture and our upbringing and our, whether we're Western, Westerners or not, whatever.

Sure. That's, that's really helpful. I appreciate you sending me the chapter. When the book is out in a year, let's have a conversation about that. But I think it's helpful to focus down on the question of moral truth that you highlighted. And one of the questions I was going to ask you is what you thought we had in common. And from what I can tell, I think we have in common, although we differ over how to get there and probably will challenge each other's position. We both are not relativists. We both claim to be moral realists. In your chapter on the science of good and evil, I think we also agree. You're like, we kind of have our better angels and our worst angels. We're capable of the Holocaust,

but we're capable of altruism. We both reject the blank slate approach. And I think you and I probably on most ways of knowing right and wrong, from the Bible of course whether it's through experience Reflection asking people I think for the most part if we live our lives Michael you and I would agree about how we know right and wrong Before we go further did I miss anything in terms of not issues like we probably disagree on abortion maybe immigration I have no idea, but our ethical systems did I miss anything you think we maybe have in common? That seems pretty thorough. I would say just in terms of recent events in the last few years with the rise of Islamic terrorism and so on, Richard Dawkins and I have been talking about this, of being kind of cultural Christians, even though he and I are atheists, that the Western world that has adopted Judeo-Christian

values, you know, that also includes democracy and free market capitalism and the Bill of Rights and so forth, the concept of rights, know we're we're all children of the enlightenment that is a better world view than other world views such as um you know middle eastern islamic countries and theocracies that don't um acknowledge the rights say of women or or lgbtq people and so forth and um and so when this conversation came up because ian hersey alley who was a famous atheist yeah um has become a christian you probably are aware of this uh you know she had a conversion in part it was because of personal experiences she had dealing with personal problems and that christianity helped her out but then she's gone further to say it's also a better worldview for our society. And so Richard and I have kind of said, yeah, okay. If you mean by comparison, living in a theocracy like an Islamic country, yeah, sure.

Okay, that's fine. So we may have some common ground in the sense that Christianity did go through the Enlightenment and it came out the other end much more rational, liberal, tolerant, and so on. I mean, the Christianity of the Middle Ages in the early modern period before the Enlightenment, you know, was not what we would call a liberal tolerant religion. I mean, the anti-Semitism and the pogroms against the Jews and so on was, you know, the witch crazes and all that was not good. But, you know, but it changed. So one of my thesis is that religion changes with the changing times and that we've all

had our moral sphere expanded to include more people as honorary members of our in-group. And therefore, we're more tolerant of them. And everybody in the West has done it. Now, what's the cause of that? Christians will say, well, that's because of Christianity. I argue in the moral arc, no, it's actually the result of rational arguments. But that aside, it is a better worldview. So the idea of forcing women to wear the burka or forcing them

to undergo female genital mutilation i'm willing to go out in the limb and go that that is wrong i mean it is morally ethically wrong objectively wrong it's absolutely wrong and i could give you arguments for why but back to where we started most of my fellow atheists would say well no we can't say it's wrong and i'm i just find this flabbergasting i mean they may say well i personally don't think it's good well yeah i would hope so but you know can't you go better can't you do better than that i mean how about ask the women you know how about how about that is just kind of a basic moral starting point ask the person who's going to be affected how they would feel if this was done to them. You can't just ask yourself, how would I feel, you know, the golden rule,

that you have to go further than that. You know, take the point of view of the person who's being affected and then go from there. So that's helpful. There's a million things there and separate issue. I would agree with you on the cultural value of certain Christian ideas. I would challenge the narrative, I think, that maybe you told about working through the Enlightenment, but that is a conversation for another time. I think we do share that common ground and certain cultural values. So let's keep going. One more question about your worldview.

It wasn't clear as I was reading your stuff. I want to know, would you consider yourself a materialist? Because you said earlier about truth, you said like biological and physical things exist. Can the world be reduced down to particles in motion and matter? Or are there immaterial things that really exist? Because I know even atheists differ on this. Are you a materialist or not? Yeah, mostly I'm a materialist reductionist. But, you know, there are platonic ideas like the laws of nature and the ideas of God or righteousness or rights, justice, goodness, truth.

You know, these are ideas also that are not material so um you know i guess we could get into what is consciousness because it's not a material thing although i i think of it as an emergent property of material stuff neurons firing in certain patterns and so on from that you get consciousness and though and that from that drives ideas so those ideas you know this is a debatable point you know platonic ideas logic is it out there in the universe somewhere and we're discovering it or are we just completely making this up well i think it's both you know i think um if there were extraterrestrial intelligences they would discover the same

rules of logic the same laws of physics and biology and and really society if they're you know subject to evolution they're going to have the same kind of motives and biology and really society. If they're subject to evolution, they're going to have the same kind of motives and emotions we have or at least something similar. And those they would call something, whatever the words they would use would be different, but they would be similar to our concept. So I do think ideas exist out there separately from material stuff. Okay, so ideas exist like real, like they have properties and they exist. It's

one thing to say you write a book with ideas in it, but things like justice and virtues, moral obligations, do those things exist if no human beings existed or are they dependent on our brains and don't really have independent platonic existence in some sense? Yeah. You know, I mean, just the lone survivor on a desert island, there's really no morality there. You know, morality involves interactions with other people. So I would say it requires sentient beings of some kind. If there were no, yeah, yeah, I guess I would say that. Yeah. It requires sentient beings of some kind. If there were no, yeah, yeah, I guess I would say that,

yeah. It requires sentience. Fair enough. Just trying to get clarification. So one of the things you talked about in the article, I think it's helpful. I think we can jump in and kind of go back and forth on this and flesh this out a little bit is the is-ought, you call it fallacy, fallacy. And I wonder if you could explain as briefly as you can what you think the fallacy is, and then we'll come back to unpacking and discussing it. What is the fallacy? Well, the fallacy here, I'll read to you what the philosopher Robert Penick wrote me, because when I went about this, debunking this myth of is ought fallacy fallacy, I'm not a philosopher, so I thought I better have somebody

who does this for a living read my stuff. So here's what he wrote to me. The way the argument works is to say, if you wanna get a moral conclusion, you need at least one moral premise. It's not that there aren't factual premises, and this I took to be your main point, that science gives us some moral premises that make a difference, and that's

exactly right. But the naturalistic fallacy doesn't say you can't have factual premises. It says you can't have only factual premises. You have to have something that has an ought, and such that together with the is, you can get an ought in the conclusion and i would say that uh that the way to make your argument is actually bringing in oughts into your premises and so you're not actually denying the naturalistic fallacy okay really you're accepting it but building in some ought premises from the beginning and that's the right way to do it so i guess um my built-in odds from the beginning is that sentient beings... Can I jump in just for a second?

Just for clarity, people watching. Here's essentially, I pulled up a text on meta-ethics. And they said, here's an example of the is-ought fallacy. It is true that smoking is harmful to your health. Therefore, you ought not smoke. It doesn't follow from the premise that smoking is harmful, that somebody ought not smoke. Getting an ought from a description. Now, hang on.

What we need is some additional premise that we are committed to the health and flourishing and moral good of a human being, then we can move to the ought. But the mere observation that smoking itself causes harm, the is, doesn't give us any ought. And so oftentimes the argument is made that science describes the way the world is, chemistry, physics, biology, but that doesn't carry with any sense of oughtness of what we ought to do and how we ought to behave. As you know, you can't get a prescriptive claim from a descriptive claim. That's the is-ought fallacy. So this is where you differ with it. So maybe explain to me why you... Let me read what you wrote. This might help us have some context. It's from the article you sent me. You said, if the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings

is the foundation of values and morals, then we can say objectively and absolutely that ending poverty is real moral progress. Now, a couple lines later, why is it better? Because it is in our nature to prefer flourishing to suffering. So it seems to me as I'm reading this, I would argue, and obviously a pushback that you are committing the is-ought fallacy by assuming a certain ought that's not a part of your system itself. How do you justify that ought scientifically or philosophically from within naturalism? Yeah, nice. So what you're saying with the smoking example is correct i am starting from the beginning point saying people ought to the odd i'm building in there is human health and

flourishing and that cigarette smoking will decrease that uh so yeah that's my built-in odd you know so you and panic have both correctly identified that i'm not deriving moral odds just from is's i'm starting with you know a starting point the survival and flourishing of sentient beings okay but even that you see i'm saying that's not just some random thing i plucked out of the air you know that's a derivative of the laws of nature, evolution, physics, entropy. You know, the second law of thermodynamics is, as you read in that chapter, you know, leads to entropy. Everything is running down. So the first purpose of life is to push back against entropy, to carve out a little niche of order, to find food to eat,

to find shelter, to find a mate, and so on. And that's what evolution, really natural selection, designed us to do. Here, I'm crediting Tubi and Cosmetes with this idea. Let me see if I can find their quote here that it's the, you know, the second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life, that you have to push back against entropy. Now, why are organisms doing that? Because those that didn't do that just died. So they didn't leave behind offspring and descendants who then have the motive or the drive to have some kind of purpose in life. So I actually think you can even derive some kind of purpose, that we have a built-in purpose, part of our

nature. What is that purpose? To push back against entropy, to find food, to find warmth and shelter, to find mates, and basically survive, flourish, reproduce, flourish, and so on. So that's my moral starting point. But it's not just a random thing. It's something I'm deriving from science and reason. I guess I would say, I don't know that we need science to tell us that we care about human flourishing. I think it's somewhat obvious and you'd probably agree with me on that. Yeah, just look around history. It's kind of obvious.

But it's not clear to me why that's obligatory within a naturalistic system. So the way you described it is, sure, look around us. We have feelings that we want to survive. We have feelings that we want to flourish. But why are those feelings obligatory in terms of how I should care about anybody else's flourishing and act A versus B?

That's a thing that I think is getting muzzled into the system that is not justified by the system itself. So I agree with you. If the survival and flourishing of individual sentience beings is the foundation of values and morals, then ending poverty is real moral progress. But it's not clear within naturalism why that's grounded and how that purpose, which is not a material thing, right? Purpose is not physical. Obligations are not physical. They're not a part of the natural universe. Why that exists and why I have any obligation to follow that, that's what's not clear to me within a naturalistic system in a way I think theism grounds that naturally. Well, first of all, I don't see how theism does that, but we could get back to that in a minute. What I'm saying is that evolution designed us as survival machines to push back against entropy and all the ways that we can die and suffer and so forth.

And so the first purpose of life is to carve out a little niche of order against the entropy of the universe, the second law. So it's really the second law of thermodynamics is the fundamental law of physics leads to kind of a logic within our evolved psychology to have something to do we have what is the purpose you know this this is what emotions are emotions are proxies or drivers of human behavior so and natural selection is done the calculating force you don't have to calculate calories uh you just desire food like, oh, I really like sweet, fat tasting foods. Cheesecake is kind of a hack of the system. It has both the sweet,

sugary taste of fruit, that's right, and the kind of greasy, fatty stuff of animals, meat and fat that we like that is really good for us in terms of, you know, caloric intake that you need, not in today's world where you got too much of it, but in the ancestral environment. So, so, so that's, you know, that's kind of the logic behind it. If we wanted to apply it to human relationships, you know, I guess starting with sort of a Richard Dawkins selfish gene model, sometimes the most selfish thing I can do for myself to get my own genes into the next generation is to be nice to you, to be helpful to you, be cooperative with you. Not just my kin and kind, you can do the kin selection calculation

with Hamilton's rule and see the math of why it would behoove me to help, say, two of my brothers and four of my half brothers or whatever calculation is based on genetics. But why would I help you, Josh? Sorry, Sean. It's my middle name no worries uh because i had the book here um that i don't even know you we're not related i mean i kind of barely know you so the logic is is that in fact um because of the uncertainty of the future in the world we live in in our ancestral environment it pays to be nice and cooperative and helpful to our fellow group mates, such that when times are hard for me, I can count on you. And when times are hard for you, you can count on me. So this is what's called reciprocal altruism.

But it's not enough to do it in a cold, psychopathic, calculating way, like in a utilitarian calculus, where I'm just using you. I'm just this sort of trying to convince you through my good acts to be nice to me later. Because if you, if you fake it, you can kind of tell if somebody is a genuine friend, if it's somebody you really do trust, you can tell people are pretty good at this. And the reason for that so this is robert trivers theory of of deception and self-deception that it's not enough to fake being a good person you actually have to be a good person i mean feel it live it experience it like i really feel good when i do something nice for somebody who's a total stranger why would i do that i, I could get away with not tipping or whatever, but it's kind of a self-reflection. I feel better about myself, but not just that. It's not pure egoism. It's that it pays to actually be a genuine, caring, loving friend, partner, lover, spouse, whatever. And that's where I think the deepest emotions of all that

things we care about, love, commitment, honesty, and so forth. Okay. That's helpful. First off, Christian's been calling me Josh for 48 years. So now atheists are calling me. I'm in trouble, man. Sorry. I'm totally kidding. It's fine. No problem at all. Proud of my dad. So there was a lot there. Let me pick apart a few things. You said evolution designed us. I would say, and I feel a sense of purpose, caring for others, fighting for freedom. We feel that, but it's a trick of our genes, so to speak, to get us to behave in a certain way. But we don't actually have an objective purpose that we are supposed to do. You say, if we don't do it, then somebody dies out. Yeah, that's a fact. We're still at the is, but that feeling that has bubbled up through evolution that operates in a way towards getting

us to survive doesn't carry any obligation or authority within itself. If I don't want to listen to my genes, if I don't want to follow some of the principles that were given, that would be one of my challenges. And I would also say, this is something C.S. Lewis brought up in The Abolition of Man, because in your quote, he said, why is it better, again, fighting towards poverty and real progress? Why is that better? He said, because it's in our nature to prefer flourishing to suffering. But as you point out in your book, that's not the only thing that's within our nature.

Within our nature sometimes is to harm people, to steal, to hurt people, to lie. You and I agree 100% that we have our better angel and our worser angel. Actually, that's not a word, but you get the point. Inner demons. Exactly. What better said. Good point. And so if both of these bubble up from within our nature and make us feel a certain way, there's got to be something outside of our nature that we say, oh, that one is objectively good and that instinct is objectively bad. That can't come from within nature. And if there's no morality outside of our feelings, outside of evolution, then there's no basis by which we can say one is objectively purposeful, objectively right, since they're both instincts. Now, I'd love to come

back to the idea of reciprocal cooperative. Let's hold that one off and come back to it. But I think that would be my challenge as it comes to grounding it in our nature, the process of evolution. And we're not debating whether evolution is true or not. That's not the point. We're just saying that's within your system, naturalistic evolution. You've appealed to it as a means of explaining evolution. So in principle, evolution can give us feelings. It can give us instincts. It can make us think that we have purposes.

But those aren't grounded in anything besides the unguided material process of evolution. So I'm not bound to follow those given that I have other instincts as well. Go ahead. let's say the hunter gatherers of a few dozen to a few hundred people, um, you will find a handful of free riders, bullies, cheaters, and so on. That does happen. And in fact, in our society today,

roughly maybe 1% of women and 3% of men are, are, are psychopathic. That is, they really don't care about you. They're they'll, they'll hack the system. They'll free ride cheat. They'll free ride, cheat.

They'll do whatever they have to do. Now, my argument is that evolution kind of created societies in which we eliminated. There was kind of a self-domestication. We eliminated most of the violent people. Not all of them. You don't have to get rid of all of them to have a relatively flourishing society. But you do need some kind of underlying logic to smooth out the uncertainties of the future in a natural environment, such that, again, food sharing is very common on hunter-gatherers.

Sometimes they want to do it. Sometimes they don't want to do it. So they have various rituals to make sure that people really do share their food and tools and that, you know, they follow a cooperative model more or less. And that works pretty well. And so back to the is-ought, you know, one of the examples you run across in a Wikipedia kind of analysis of the is-ought fallacy is, you know, I made a promise to you. That's the is. So I ought to keep it. To me, that's perfectly logical. Yeah. Why should I keep it? Well, there's kind of a game theory logic behind it. That is, if I don't, the next time I promise you something, you're not going to believe me. And we know from research that you can be lied to or cheated on by a friend or partner or business colleague or whatever a couple of times, but that's it. Just two or three violations of a contract or an agreement,

your spouse, your business partner, whatever cheats on you or embezzles or whatever, maybe once, maybe twice, but that's it. You're out. You will never be trusted again. And so that makes sense because, you know, most people, most of the time are better angels, really do work pretty well. And most people, most of the time are nice and the better angels come out. But we do have these inner demons. Now let's tease apart those for a second. A lot of violence that is in the world is moralistic in nature. Something on the order of 90% of homicides are moralistic.

They're not instrumental. The guy killed him because he wanted the Rolex watch or whatever. Most of it is revenge, anger. You know, the guy took my parking spot. You know, he cheated in the pool. My spouse, you know, she was flirting with somebody and I had to respond and so on. Most of it's moralistic in nature. But there's kind of a logic behind it. Because there are free riders and cheaters,

you need to have a reputation that you will not stand for being taken advantage of. You will not be bullied. And so one of my favorite books on this is Christopher Boehm's book, The Origins of Moral Origins, it's called. And so he studied these hunter gatherer groups and they all have somebody who's kind of a bully, just a guy who doesn't play nice by the rules. And they, they start dealing with them by gossip and shunning and talking to and so on.

But if worse comes to worse and the group is really not flourishing because of this guy, they'll take him out on a hunt and come back without him. That is, they practice capital punishment. And you need that. Deterrence is absolutely necessary, not just in international politics, although it is. You know, I don't like nuclear weapons, but we got to have them because the other guy and, and as well, individually, you have to stand up for yourself. You have to say, you know, I'm going to be nice and cooperative and so on. But if you stab me in the back, that's it. I'm going to come, I'm coming for you. I'm not going

to put up with that. And that actually leads to a more stable society. So again, you and I probably agree on these things, you know, rule of law, police, you got to have walls and fences. So I agree with that. That's helpful. But here's where, where I disagree. You said, I'm going to make sure I got this right. You said societies flourish better when we are moral. I totally agree with you on that. Societies break down and there's chaos. We can't do a business deal if we don't trust each other. We're not going to put our money in the bank if we don't trust each other. Societies flourish best when we are moral.

Agreed. You gave the example of kind of cooperation with people. This was last time. And that you can't just pretend to be a good person. You've got to really be a good person, example you gave. And then you said it pays to do that. And that's where I think we differ. Because while we agree that being moral and following the kind of moral principles that you lay out helps society flourish better. The way you've laid this out, as I understand it, is morality now is instrumental. It's towards accomplishing some end, which is maybe flourishing or getting the kinds of things or pleasures in life that I want.

So society has eliminated most people that are evil so we can flourish together. Okay, that's happened. This is a description of what's taken place in a society and an observation. We're at the is part that societies flourish better when we play what's called the moral game. So you gave example of truth telling, right? Like if I want to be in relationship with you and you write about this in your book, like you can't have any kind of decent relationship if you don't tell the truth. And people can tell if you're faking it and they can tell if you're not sincere.

It's like we have a BS meter just built into us. But it seems to me when it comes to telling truth, that's secondary. The moral project is that truth telling has an intrinsic goodness within itself, even if a relationship is harmed by it in some fashion. We should tell the truth, period. Now, I'm not saying there's not some exceptions hiding a Jew from the Nazis. That's not my point. We can come up with some exceptions. But for the vast majority of cases, telling the truth has intrinsic good, not just instrumental good. So here's the way I look at it, and you can tell me if you think I'm wrong. If I said to you,

okay, we want to flourish as a basketball team, so we need height. You need to share the ball. You need to close the gaps on defense, whatever it is. And you look and you go, I don't want to play basketball. I'd rather play football.

You're not bound to play basketball if you don't choose to play that game.'d rather play football. You're not bound to play basketball if you don't choose to play that game. There's no higher rule that says if you want this team to flourish, don't play. I don't see that as being any different from human beings in a naturalistic universe. You've laid out that we do flourish better if you scratch my back and I scratch yours. I go, I agree with that. We flourish better. But that's still on the is level. There is no moral ought that says I am bound and I have duty and obligation to do this from within a naturalistic system. That's what I don't think naturalism can explain. Now, at this point, we might be going round and round. I want to let you give your response to this and then move on to other things. But I think to me, that's what I don't think naturalism can explain. Now, at this point, we might be going round and

round. I want to let you give your response to this and then move on to other things. But I think to me, that's the big difference of how we're approaching this. But go ahead. I guess it depends what we mean by naturalistic. I mean, I'm including just human society and relationships as part of the natural world. It's something you can observe. Again, you can observe people move with their feet where they'd rather live uh there's a reason why everybody wants to come to america and americans are not you know flooding mexico or whatever um you know so why why is that this isn't just random there's a reason for it because they can flourish here well why do they want to flourish well duh just ask them you know because I'd rather make more than $2 and 50 cents a day than less defining the point of poverty or whatever your metric is.

So what, I guess what I'm saying is if you drill down as far as we could go, which is, you know, I'd rather be alive than dead. I'd rather be healthy than sick. You know, I'd, I'd rather, um, be told the truth most of the time than lied to most of the time. I'd rather live in a society where I have rights than I don't have rights. And I'm not really pushing it back against theists so much like you, but against really more atheist liberals who can't seem to grasp the deeper reason why these values hold as they do, and there's been moral progress toward those values. It isn't random. It isn't relative. It isn't just we happen to be living in this time,

and who knows, maybe centuries from now, people will love living in societies with slavery and where women don't have the vote and where torture is commonly used and where Jews are gassed in gas chambers. But I don't think so. I doubt it because we discovered truths that are really there, real objective moral values. As Lincoln said, as I would not be a slave, I would not be a slave owner. There's just kind of a logic behind that. Now, last point. So much of that is consequentialism or utilitarianism, but not all of it.

The flawed utilitarianism, as you identified, you know, you should always tell the truth. Yeah, except for when a Nazi comes to your door and says, are you hiding, Anne Frank? And you are. You should lie. It's a moral value to lie. You really should. And there's enough examples of that that we need the other big model, you know, deontological, you know, kind of rule based or rights, you know, certain things, you know. And then there's kind of rule utilitarianism that adopts some of that.

And sure, you can go down that rabbit hole. But basically, those are the two big systems we have, plus Aristotle's virtue ethics in which they're, you know, living a virtuous life makes you a virtuous person. And that makes you live a more virtuous life. And as I understand what Aristotle's arguing, it's what I'm arguing from an evolutionary perspective. You can't just fake it. You can't just pretend to be a virtuous person, but inside you're just a psychopath. I mean, there are people like that, but not many. Most of us are. You really gotta believe it and feel it and live it.

And that makes you a better person. And to me, that's as good as we could go. That's as deep as I can go. I don't see that. But even, Sean, if there turned out to be a God, we can set that debate aside. Even if there is a god these these things i've just described they're they're true christians should discover them also these are the reasons

and i would think that if god gave us a reason for why he said this is valuable and this is wrong or this is right those would be his reasons too if that's the case okay so this is right. Those would be his reasons too, if that's the case. Okay. So this is a healthy transition or helpful transition in the sense that you said these objective values are not random, relative, or arbitrary. I agree with that. The question is, are they binding? And do we actually have moral obligations to obey them? So it seems to me that you're pointing towards people having feelings of coming to America, desires come to America, understandable, desires for health, desires for other things in life. I agree with you. Those desires exist.

It's objective in that sense but what I have not heard and maybe we just need to let this go and move on is Why these are binding within themselves and why their? Obligations not just feelings that have bubbled up through evolution. Now. You said if God exists Correct me if I don't say this correctly He said if God exists we should still be able to follow these reasons together because they're out there for us. Now, I would say, of course, you don't believe that, obviously, and I know you know that you don't believe that, but I think

the question is not, do we have common ground? We started with with this that you and i agree we can know right and wrong in common ways so as a christian i look out and i go oh people have feelings of wanting to flourish wanting to come to america those feelings are real but i have those are not just feelings. I have moral obligations to love and care for my neighbor because of who God is and the commandments God has given us. So I think the difference is – I assume you see it differently – is in your system you have to start with an if, which is not a part of the system. It's not axiomatic within naturalism. In my system, if there is a God, and this God is good, and he's given us commandments to love one another, then it's built in we should care for the survival and flourishing of others. So I say, yes, we have common ground to share about flourishing and survival, though you and I would flesh out

what we mean by flourishing a little bit differently, which doesn't matter. But these feelings that we have are not just feelings. They're actually built into reality, which seems to me to give a theistic view the upper hand because it doesn't have to assume that. That's how I see it. Tell me what you think. Yeah, yeah. I think, I guess I would respond to that that again if if the way something is leads to survival and flourishing of sentient beings then we ought to do that that's not why it's obligation you made a promise you ought to keep your promise why well why you know the hell with it well then fine then Then you're a sinner. You would say that person's a sinner.

I mean, you'd recognize as a Christian that people are born sinful. What do we mean by that? Well, they're not doing what they ought to do. They're not following their obligations. They're not keeping their promises. They're breaking their trust, their line, whatever it is. And, you know, I think we're in agreement on that. It's just, what do you mean by these words?

Um, and of course, even Christians sin. Well, why? You were obligated. Well, yeah, I know, but I, I screwed up. Okay. So, you know, my person says, yeah, I know I should have, uh, been more cooperative, nice and tipped or whatever, but I didn't feel like it yeah well then you're a jerk you know whatever uh i don't see how you can get any more objective or whatever the word is um absolute or i sense you're looking for an outside source that says these are the things we ought to do because god said so but my point is and here's how I put it here, is, let's see, is what is morally right or wrong commanded by God because it's inherently right or wrong? Or is it morally right or wrong only because it's commanded by God? If murder is wrong because God said it is wrong, what if he

said it was right? Would that make murder acceptable? Of course not. If God commanded murder wrong for good reasons, what are the reasons? And why can't we base our prescription against murder on those reasons alone and skip the divine command stage altogether? Anyway. Okay, so I'm glad you brought this up. We can come back to the youthful dilemma. But what I would say is to the simple question, why keep promises? I think it's easy because we live in a moral universe and promise keeping is objectively good. God is truth and we shouldn't tell lies and we know this. So I think when we reason about truth telling, I think two things are operating. On one level, what you say, we're operating like, well, I want to be a good business person and I don't want to lose relationships like that.

Human horizontal level operates and we think that way and we need to think that way. But I don't think that's the whole game that's going on. I think there's a sense inside of us that says, wait a minute, I ought to tell the truth even if this costs me something. So I'm not just looking for a transcendent source. I'm looking for an adequate source that best explains how we live and how we think and how we approach moral values.

And I think an instrumental one, scratch my back, I scratch yours, gets us part of the way there, but misses what we mean. I'm sure you've told your kids growing up, why tell the truth? It's the right thing to do. And you want to be the kind of virtuous person. It's not just one, it's both.

And so I think that's really the question. Let me turn the microphone. You know, I just spent 40 minutes and I wrote that chapter, 9,000 word chapter explaining how I derive these. What is your explanation? Why should we be truthful or loving or follow our promises? Or what's the source of morality in your worldview? Fair question. So I would say God is the fount of morality. God is good. God is just. God is righteous. And he's given us commandments where we get our duties from. So morality is built into the fabric of the universe, so to speak. It's not something that I just have to assume to get my moral system going, if this, then that. No, built in is that God is morally good, just like the number two is necessarily even. God is just, God is holy, God is good.

Now, I'm not making this up. This is a part of what the Judeo-Christian theistic system entails, is that God is the source of morality, and that our duties, our obligations to tell the truth come from God's commands, which we may know through consciousness. We might know through experience without Scripture, but we also know them through Scripture. Now, why does this matter? Because I think this view completely avoids the Euthyphro dilemma that you brought up. And I want to know what you think about this, because I believe it was, I mean, it's about 400 years before Christ, obviously, Euthyphro and Socrates debating the source of morality tied to the gods being loving and pious and really simply stated is,

do the gods command something because it's good or is it good because the gods command it? Now, in one sense, we would say if God, if something's good because he commands it, then morality seems arbitrary. And you lay that out in your article, I think, really well. If the source is simply God's will, then morality is arbitrary. But if God commands something because it's good, then that follows there's some authoritative source and existence outside of God, which threatens God's sovereignty and status as God, so to speak. So is it A or is it B? Now, I think the Eutherford dilemma is a legitimate dilemma for certain Islamic views that have really God's commands alone as the source of morality.

And I know some Christians might take that perspective. I think it's definitely a challenge in the day of Socrates to the Greek pantheistic view or not pantheon of gods in which these gods were capricious, unpredictable. They were creatures in the universe. They were finite and they were did horrific things it would apply to the gods of his day but not the god that i'm claiming here because god is just in his very character so it's not arbitrary because his commandments flow out of his nature but there's also not a standard outside of god because god is good so i don't see why the euthyphro dilemma undermines the divine command theory that I hold okay so my question then is how do you know all this is this through scripture

from the holy book is it from prayer revelation or just do you listen to this still small voice within and that's god directing moral values to you or how you know just in your own words how do you know all this okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna take somewhat of a step back here because we're asking the question uh it does god or science best explain good and evil and moral values that's an ontological metaphysical question about where morality comes from. The follow-up question, of course, is epistemological. How do we know? How do we know what's right and wrong? And that's where I think you and I agree in a sense that our moral experience, the effect on other people, et cetera, is a way that we can know.

So to answer the Euthyphro dilemma, I'm not making this up. I'm just pulling from the Christian tradition of who God is and what moral commandments he's given us. And I think it splits the horns of the dilemma on Euthyphro. We could come back to how we know, but I think there's some preliminary questions we have to ask first to see if whether we need God or whether science itself can give us an objective moral standpoint. So before we go on, does my response adequately solve the euthyphro dilemma? It's not arbitrary. There's not a standard outside of God. I haven't answered how we know things, but that's irrelevant. I think that was a good response. Yes, I do.

But that's why I asked the next follow-up question, but how do you know that? Because, again, back to where we began, fallibilism, we're all fallible. You're not God and neither am I. I agree. So how do we know these things? I could be wrong. The entire theory I just presented, you could be wrong. Sure. And you could be wrong. And we could ask a Muslim what they think is the right moral values, and they'll make an argument similar to yours.

So an anthropologist from Mars that's studying earthly religions would say, well, the Muslims say this and the Christians say this about whatever the moral issue is, and they differ. So how can I tell which is the right one? And of course, to me, it's like, well, that's not the right question. They're not right in that sense, some cosmic sense. You know, these are each created their own moral systems from their historical trajectories as religions.

That's, you know, They got some stuff right, they got some stuff wrong, and so on. Yeah, anyway. Okay, so I think your skepticism is coming through here, which is very fitting for a lot of reasons. That's my job. Let me, I hear you. Let's go back to the article, and here's how I look at it. I could be wrong. Of course, I'll concede that you could be wrong. Maybe there's a third view and maybe the Hindus or Buddhists are right and we're both mistaken, Michael.

But I think what we owe to people watching this is to make our case, clarify the differences and let people decide if they think science is adequate to explain or if we need some kind of theistic grounding. So one of the points you make in the article is related to individuals and their rights. So I want to know, do individual human beings, and we could talk about other sentient beings,

but let's just focus on human beings, do they have value and worth and where does that come from? And here's a quote just to give us some context. This is on page four of the article you sent me. You said, it is individuals who are entitled to rights, not races, genders, ethnicities, religions, or nations, because it is individuals who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, and most notably suffer. Now, for the record, you and I agree that rights are things humans have, and it shouldn't vary based on race or gender or religion. That's common ground.

We're not asking if we share that. I'm asking what adequately accounts for and grounds human rights, especially since they're not physical things like atoms and molecules that seemingly science can study. And it seems to me when you say we have rights, because humans can perceive, emote, respond, we're back to getting an ought from an is, and I think the fallacy's at play. You disagree. Tell me why. Very nice. Yeah, you're very sharp on this. A couple of things. First, I'm not saying it's just science. I think of science as a branch of philosophy. I'm just talking about all of philosophy, all of human knowledge. I'm not saying you should go to the ichthyologist to figure out what's the right

moral position on abortion. I mean, just the entirety of human knowledge of which science is just a part, right? A lot of it is logic, reason, deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and so on, which when people think of science, they think of the guy in the lab coat, whatever. I'm just talking about everything. Okay. Then I guess I would, from there, say that, you know, we're trying to derive

what I think of as, again, like platonic ideas, they really exist. Rights really exist. Now, setting aside that, again, in part, I'm arguing against some utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham, who famously said, rights are nonsense and natural rights are nonsense on stilts. I disagree with that. I think natural rights really exist as part of our nature, but by my human nature that I inherited from my species, that bodily autonomy, choice, the right not to be tortured and killed, and the right to my own privacy and property, the right to the fruits of my labor. You know, these things that are largely articulated by the founding fathers and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, they're not dummies, and they were not just philosophers just making stuff up.

I mean, they were, again, there was no science in those days. It was just natural philosophy. I mean, the great Isaac Newton, he wasn't a scientist. He was a natural philosopher. So I'm arguing that, and in part, I also emphasize the individual survival of flourishing because I'm pushing back a couple, I guess, two ideas there. Group selection, which I think does not explain much in evolutionary theory. So I reject group selection. That's a popular notion by their amount of melanin they happen to have or which gonads their bodies have. So I know you won't disagree with that, but that's where that definition comes from.

But again, I'm trying to derive kind of a naturalistic explanation. Why? How far down can I drill before I hit bedrock? I can't go any further than that. And for me, since I'm an atheist, I can't go outside of the system, the naturalistic system. That's what we have. But again, even if there is a God, this is kind of the point I make with whether or not there's an afterlife. It doesn't really matter because we're not living in the afterlife. We live here. And so whether there's some outside source to moral values,

what difference does it make? We live here in this world, in this natural world. You do, I do. That's as good as it gets. And that's as deep as I can go. That's fair enough i appreciate you responding in a way consistent with atheism and i think you're right to ask how deep does this go how far do we go now it's no surprise that i don't think atheism goes far enough to ground uh what we mean by individual rights and human value and human dignity.

Now, of course, I agree with you on my concern with identity politics, the right to speech, so many things you mentioned. I agree with you on those things. I think you and I probably agree on more things than we differ if we step back and consider everything. But the question here, when we say what difference does it make, is we're trying to get a worldview that describes the world as it actually is. We're trying to ask, do we just have these feelings that we have rights that have bubbled up through some evolutionary process? Or do we actually have such obligations? Now, I would venture to say that you live your life as if you really have obligations to people, to your neighbor, to the poor, to people of different religions. Everything I know about you is that you're trying to live a good moral life and treat people with dignity and respect. That tells me that there's something deeper going on, that we really believe that these things are real and that's a better way to live

than somebody who doesn't believe in those things. And so I'd argue when we say what difference does it make? It's not that I'm trying to reach in you know the afterlife heaven or hell that's that's not the point the question is do we have built within the system as it is a way to explain rights a way to explain value human intrinsic value not just instrumental value and of course within the judeo-christian system is there's a god who's made us in his image and so why should i care about the poor because the poor don't just have instrumental value they're made in god's image and i should treat them kindly why should i care about uh orphans well because they're made what does that mean in god's image what does that mean so let me finish this and i'll come back to it because there's big debate about what it means.

My only point is that you're talking about these things about rights and values, which are not physical. They're not material. It's not clear to me how these bubble up within evolution and have any ontological status. And I think, by the way, I'm going to come back to your question. I'm not avoiding it. But I think one of the differences is we're using the term objective here, but mean different things by it. So when I did a little reading on metaethical theory, just to make sure I understood, and objective means that something exists, morally speaking, whether anybody believes it or not.

And so gravity, for example, whether everybody came not to believe in gravity or people died, gravity is an objective feature of the world itself. It's what we call mind independent. And so what I'm hearing from you is that there are certain beliefs that we have about rights and values comes through evolution. And I'd say, sure, we have those beliefs, but those aren't grounded in anything apart of the fabric of the world itself. Those are just feelings that have bubbled up. So if people go away or arguably change those beliefs, then those moral values actually change. So we don't really have rights. We don't really have

objective values in the way gravity does that moral realists claim when they're talking about moral realism. These are just, again, feelings that exist in the world. And we're back to the point, practically speaking, why do we have an obligation to follow those feelings, especially if they're inconvenient? Yeah, nice. Yeah, you kind of echoed Philip K. Dick's famous line there, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Well said. And I would apply that to rights. You know, rights is not just something made up by Westerners. And, you know, we have no business telling people in other nations how they should or shouldn't live their lives. I think they really exist. And that there's a reason the directionality of history is toward more and more countries adopting rights. So I know it's like 100 plus countries now have constitutions similarly written to the

U.S. Constitution. I mean, they literally took it and just sort of copied and pasted and adjusted it for their own country. But there are those that still don't buy it. They would argue, like, again, to use this example ripped from the headlines, there is Islamic theocracies who say our country flourishes better without all this business of women having rights. We don't want our women running around in bikinis. Yeah, they're free, but look what it does. It degrades society. We want to, you know, our women covered up so the men can't have these ideas about what they'd like to do with those women, right? So our society is better. Well, I would say that that's a kind of a

consequentialist utilitarian argument to which I would say, it doesn't matter if you think it's better. Ask the people that are affected. You know, do you want to be forced to wear a burka? Do you want to be forced to have female genital mutilation? Do you want to, you know, be forced to not be allowed to drive and vote and so on? You know, they're going to tell us, you know, be forced to not be allowed to drive and vote and so on? You know, they're going to tell us, you know, what the what they really want and what they really want, you know, is, again, this kind of derived from our natural tendency to want bodily autonomy and choice and freedom and health and and so on. So I'm again back to where we started. You know, I'm driving an ought. to where we started, you know, I'm deriving an ought, therefore we ought to help these people. Now, you know, as a practical issue, America can't be the world's cop to every country. We can't do everything, right? Sure, we have to pick and

choose. We're going to help Ukraine, we're going to help Israel, this and that, you know, but what about that country? Yeah, we're doing the best we can, right? You know, and, you know, Bush's doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan was, you know, we're going to export democracy because democracy is better because he read Nathan Sharonesky's book about the defense of democracy. And I agree with that. But on the other hand, what a mess that turned out to be because, you know, you can't do everything right. So we do the best we can. We you know, we yes, we have a moral obligation to help people. They can't help themselves or being oppressed. You know, but if they're oppressed in China, well, there's only so much we can do. Right. So, you know, I don't know. But but the fact that those people are when we even use the word they're oppressed or their rights are being violated like it like the Uyghurs in China. Yeah, that's right uh they are

well what do I mean by that well those are rights that you know those aren't just made up western values they're derived through rationality logic you know they're really there that's that's how I'd respond okay so you said more countries have rights than did in the past and I know you've written a whole book on this the moral arc I'll trust your analysis on that. I have no problem for that. But it sounds like we're saying there is moral objective improvement that is taking place here. It's better that there's more people who have rights than those who don't. And that's across different groups. That seems to be built in an objective moral good that we ought to operate towards. I agree with that, but I still don't see the binding obligation for that that comes within a naturalistic universe. I'm still not seeing it.

And so one thing you said is you can ask people who've been affected and they will tell us what they want. Well, in a sense, that does make morality subjective then. That means I'm bound towards asking people and what they say will inform me and the moral good. Now, I agree with you that we should ask people and listen to them. That's a good moral principle, but that makes sense if I'm called to love people and people are made in God's image, have intrinsic value, and duties are objective parts of the world in which we live. That makes sense. I still don't see why I'm bound to care within naturalism how anybody else feels, if it doesn't benefit me, why anybody else has rights,

especially if I can gain more in the process. But then it would seem to imply on the flip side of this, that if we could talk people into believing certain things that are not really in their best interest, but they believe it, then we justify different treatments of people on the system that you're kind of setting up here. So you say this at the end of your article, and I'd love your thoughts on this. You said, first off, you say, if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. Totally agree. You and I have commonality in that. The question is not, is it wrong? The question is, why is it wrong? And how do we ground that, so to speak? But then you said, towards the very end, you said, sure. I suppose it's possible that one day scientists may discover that humans do not have an instinct to survive and flourish, that most people do not want freedom, autonomy, and prosperity, that they don't mind starving and being disease-ridden and in pain, that they prefer ignorance to education and illiteracy to literacy, very poetic, by the way, that women want to be lorded over by men,

that some people like being enslaved, and that large populations of people don't object to being liquidated in gas chambers, but I doubt it. What I would say is- You got to say, wait, wait, you got to say it, but I doubt it. Fair enough. You had it with italics, separate paragraph with emphasis. But let me draw my point and then I want you to come back in here. It seems to me on your system, if we did talk people into believing that, we're not actually violating the rights. We're not doing anything wrong because we've asked them and they just tell us, sure, enslave

us. We like it. On my system that I think most people would agree with, we'd say, wait a minute. If you talk people into that, it's not only unlikely, I doubt it, that in itself is immoral. You shouldn't lie to people. You shouldn't deceive people. And that's not in their objective good, even if they believe it. That's why I think the idea of grounding rights in asking people what they think and what they want isn't actually as objective if the people change their beliefs. Yeah, interesting. So here, I guess, the history of religion and rights and philosophy and so on makes a difference.

I'm arguing in the moral arc that these kind of enlightenment arguments from reason and rationality about rights and duties and so on, and the structure of society, democracy and whatnot, separation of powers, are grounded in an understanding of human nature and what societies are really like in history. Again, the founding fathers were very learned. They read everything because there wasn't that much to read. Steve Winick Sure. John Haskell And they were all classically trained.

Really, today we would think of them as natural philosophers or social psychologists or something like that. And so, but my argument there is that Christianity itself or the Judeo-Christian worldview was affected by that. It went through the Enlightenment and came out the other end, much more tolerant and liberal and so on. The people before that, Christians before that

would not be speaking the way you're speaking. You know, they thought nothing of slavery was perfectly understandable. Everybody did it. The only problem was as long as it didn't happen to you. I mean, and I can't say honestly that if you and I lived 500 years ago, we wouldn't be saying, yeah, of course slavery is natural. And that's the way it should be for those people and uh you know the way christians treated the jews and thought of jews all the way up until really pretty recently and i won't even get into october 7th and help yeah please don't for now but but um so what i'm saying is that the stuff you're saying now that you think you're deriving through your religion, I'm arguing you didn't.

You and I and everybody else living today have inculcated into our thought processes these values that have changed over centuries in which it's been a hard one. I mean, the rights revolutions happened twice, basically in the 1770s and 80s, and then in the 1960s and 70s, the two major rights revolutions and the humanitarian revolution that derived after those that came about from those in which the moral sphere is expanded to include more people and we're more tolerant about blacks and women and Jews and so on. That has happened slow enough you can't barely see it. It's like a decadal measure of time or even centuries. And so the language you and I are using here, in which we find some common ground, we probably would not be speaking like that had we lived centuries ago. So your claim that you're getting this through some outside objective moral universe from God or whatever, I don't think so. I that you're getting this through some outside objective moral universe

from God or whatever, I don't think so. I think you're getting this from the same place I'm getting it from, you know, that everybody gets it, you know, through culture, upbringing, you know, society and so on. Anyway, that's my response. Okay, fair enough. So if it comes from culture, upbringing, and society, then when it's all said and done, we are relativists. We have not escaped a relativistic morality. And then all the critiques we could talk about of relativism would apply to your position. If there's no fixed standard of right and wrong that transcends culture, transcends time. Now, hold that thought for a second. I think you're resisting relativism and claiming objectivism, but I don't think you're escaping it. Now, you point out some

bad things that Christians have done against, say, Jews or others. Not just Christians, everybody. Okay, everybody. But as Christians, I think we're held to a higher standard. And so I plead guilty. Christians have done plenty of things that they should not have done. Well, the reason we can call Christians hypocrites is because there is a standard of goodness. There is a standard of human value. There's a way we really should treat people across culture and across time. And when Christians of all people violate that, that should sear us and that should give us pause. So I fully recognize that because there's such a thing as right and wrong, because there's human value, because things like kindness

and charity and treating other people with different faiths is a virtue and is a moral commandment that we should do even in the past. Part of my question would be, yeah, in the past, a lot of people believe things differently than you and I did. That's true. So let's go back to ancient Rome before Christians came on the scene. They would take infants at times and put them out to just die with the elements. If they didn't like the gender, if they thought they had some physical disability,

if they didn't want them, they'd go put them out on a hill to die. And a lot of people had no moral problem with that. Were they doing something morally wrong when they did that in ancient Rome? Yes or no? Was that morally wrong, even though they thought it was right?

Well, by my definition of survival and flourishing, yes, that was morally wrong. They did not know what we know. We've made discoveries, in other words. Okay. So the problem though, is that number one, we've still got a ground flourishing, which I don't think is within the system itself, but your objective transcendent standard is that feelings exist within people and that's what makes those feelings real. People had those moral sentiments at that time.

They thought they were real, rejected your feelings of flourishing. And so how can you stand over against them and tell them they're objectively wrong if they have their feelings and you have your feelings and there's not actually a standard and intrinsic human value feelings aside by which to make this judgment? Well, first of all, I don't do that because I can't say I wouldn't have done the same had I lived then. What I'm saying is that we now know they were wrong. How do we know that? Because we now have an understanding through research,

science, philosophy, logic, reason, and so on, of what human nature is really like and what people really want, and that the amount of suffering that happened in previous eras was unimaginably worse than today and so that's our that's an objective standard that's as deep as I can go Sean uh that you know the survival and flourishing you know it's like bentham said you know about animals it's not can they think or can they talk, it's can they suffer. It's the suffering of sentient beings that, you know, that our moral sensitivities today are tuned to trying to attenuate as best we can. Now, there are conflicting rights issues, like the abortion issue, you know, the rights of the fetus to live, the rights of the mother to choose, or, you know know a more current example i've been using is trans you know rights trans

rights you know our human rights yeah except you know if trans conflicts with the women's rights to privacy in bathrooms and pr and have their own sports you can't have everything as thomas soul famously said there's no solutions there's just compromises and so even rights has limitations you know uh it would be lovely to open the borders and let everybody in the world come live in america but you know we can't do that i have a right to to you know my own land and privacy whatever you know i mean there's just just rights conflicts like that uh you know and so i think privacy whatever you know i mean there's just just rights conflicts like that uh you know and so i think one of the reasons we still have these moral debates is because it's very complicated and it's not always clear what the right thing to do is and i don't

see the bible is very helpful on most of these issues it doesn't say anything about abortion for example how do you know what's the you know, you know, abortion did not used to be a Christian thing. It was not a conservative Christian thing. That's a very recent phenomenon. You know, Ronald Reagan, when he was president of, I mean, governor of my state of California in 1966, he passed the most liberal abortion law in the country. I know he did. Right. So it really wasn't until the 90s that abortion became an issue for conservative Christians. I know he did. So I do want to point out, I really appreciate the first part about your response when I asked about was, you know, somebody who leaves a child to die and not care for in ancient Rome, is that wrong?

And you said, I don't say that because there's a lot of suffering and hurt. I'm not in those person's shoes. I really appreciate that. that is also a Christian virtue that says we can stand here and make moral pronouncements, but we do need to be in people's shoes and have some humility that we might see things now they didn't at the time and have a sense of judging people by the standards of their day. So I think that's an important, just an important area of agreement I want to point out. Now, you still did say you believe it's wrong, though. So there is kind of a standard of rightness. Yeah, the way I said it, we now know they were wrong.

Okay, so we now know that they were wrong. So they were wrong. Now we have the knowledge, which is fine. So it was wrong then, even though if we have some compassion and understanding why people chose to do it. Now, you brought up the issue of abortion, and I don't want to debate abortion. We could do that another time. I'd be happy to. But what's interesting is it's never been a debate amongst Christians that all human beings have intrinsic worth and are made in the image of God. It's never been a debate that we're supposed to protect the most vulnerable amongst us. That's why James writes, this is good religion, to care for widows and to care for orphans. In that culture, they didn't have the instrumental

value of society, so they were deemed worthless and christians came along 2 000 years ago consistent with their jewish roots of the old testament that said wait a minute from the beginning everybody regardless of race regardless biological sex, wealthy, poor, whatever, married, not married, has value. Now, have Christians been inconsistent how they've applied this? Sure, of course. So moral practice has maybe changed, and we could talk about the 70s and 80s and 90s, moral majority, all that stuff, that's a separate conversation. But those grounded moral principles from the Old Testament and from the New Testament, those have not changed. And those are there long before the Enlightenment and could make the case that even ground things like tolerance. Why should I be

tolerant of you? Because you're a human being with value and you're the kind of things with beliefs that I should respect and encourage you to have those beliefs even if I see the world differently. Hence this conversation. Let's debate, let's discuss, let's have fun talking about these issues and show tolerance.

And so the historical issue aside, I think that this is not something new Christians have come up with. Although again, we maybe have been inconsistent how we've applied it. These are our deeper roots of human value, caring for the poor, caring for those who are marginalized by society. That's a deep Christian virtue that goes all the way back and makes sense of intrinsic human value. Now, there's one more thing I want to ask you about, but before we go there, anything you want to add to this point before we keep going? I'll give you the last word on the question of human value. I think I've done the best I can to ground it. Again, I can't.

Yeah, there's just nowhere to go outside of the system itself. Okay, that's fair. Partly what I'm hoping we can do is just clarify for people. Here's the differences. Here's what's at stake. And then people can decide. Now you, this conversation is going longer than I thought, but there's one more I want to push back on. Is that okay? You said you had enough time. Yeah, please. All right, let's do it. So you talk about this in, uh, in your book. I don't think it was in the article unless I, if I missed it, I apologize, but you had a whole section on free will that I thought was fascinating oh yeah and i want to read a section this is on page 108 i think you stated this as well as i think anybody could uh you wrote this you said if we live in a

determined universe how can we make free moral choices? If genetics, biology, culture, and history combine to create a suit of factors that determine our thoughts and behaviors, how can society hold us morally and legally responsible for our actions? It's beautiful. I think you hit right at the point that what makes moral principles arguably different than maybe scientific or other principles, is this oughtness that I say you should tell the truth. You ought to care for the poor. Well, as Kant said, ought implies can. I don't say to you, Michael, hey, man, I'm really disappointed. You should jump to the moon and be like, well, that's stupid because I can't. I only say you ought do something that it's within your power and capacity to do so.

And yet you lay out here, and as far as I understand, the majority of naturalistic philosophers would say there's profound tension between event-event causation in the natural world where there's physical causation and choice and freedom to do things. And so some naturalists will just deny free will, which I think has its problems. Others will say, no, we have free will within a naturalistic universe. Explain for me, you walk through in your book, I think in a really helpful way, different attempts, or if that's the right word, to have free will in a naturalistic universe. At the end, I didn't find any of them compelling.

Maybe you've updated your thinking. Tell us if you believe in free will and how you account for it with the naturalism. I do, yes. I'm a compatibilist, as it's called. What you just read from the moral arc, that was kind of my summary of the determinist position um it's not but it's not true that the majority of naturalists and philosophers are determinists in fact uh david chalmers has done a two surveys basically the same survey over the course of a decade uh in which he asked i don't know it was like 3 600 professional philosophers, graduate students

studying philosophy and so on, their position on 27 different arguments in philosophy, one of which was free will determinism, compatibilism, and about 60% were compatibilists. That is, they believe that you could derive something on the order of volition or choice. Free will is a problematic term because it implies what's called libertarian free will, which is the little homunculus is up there in your skull making decisions, which actually doesn't give you free will, it's just the homunculus is making the decision.

And then that means little mini me up there has to have a mini, mini me inside mini me making the decisions. So most don't agree with that kind of free will. So the compatibilist position, I'll just tell you what I think now. The argument that determinists make is could you have done otherwise? Here's a scenario. Here's what you did.

Could you have done something different? So if free will exists, you should say, yeah, I could have done something different. But in fact, if by the thought experiment, you mean, you know, we just rewound the tape and played it back. If it's a read only memory tape, then no, you couldn't have done any different because it's just a recording of what you actually did, which after the fact is now determined. But the universe we live in is not what's called a block universe where everything's already happened, past, present, and future, and we just happen to be living in this moment. Most cosmologists and physicists don't believe in the block universe. They believe that the universe is not predetermined based on the laws of physics, and that because of the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, the future is never exactly like the past. So here I quote Heraclitus, you can't step into the same river twice because the river's not different, the river's not the

same, and you're not the same. The river is changing and you're constantly changing. So my explanation for why I'm able to make choices is that while I am part of the determined universe, I am one of the determining factors in the determined universe. And since the universe is not predetermined as time moves forward and I'm in the flow of time myself moving, I am making choices and decisions that alter the future based on what happened in the past. I have a memory. I know what I did last time. I'm going to go right instead of left this time, and so on. After the fact, yes, it's determined, but it's not predetermined. So I should be held accountable for my choices, particularly if it harms other people. And society absolutely must hold people accountable for their actions. We need laws. We need punishment, both retribution and

restorative justice and so on. We need all that, but not just in a pragmatic utilitarian sense that we're going to pretend that there's such a thing as free will so we can have a justice system. No, I'm saying you really, again, with the exceptions, the guy with the brain tumor or the horrible background or whatever, crimes of passion. The law already makes adjustments for these kinds of things. And so I think that that's how I approach it. Okay, so let me push back on a couple of things. That was really helpful.

And I might have misspoken if I did. That's totally fine. But I'm pulling from the Wiley Blackwell, The Substance of Consciousness by Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland. It just came out. And they said, it's widely acknowledged that worldwide common sense spontaneously formed understanding of human free will is what philosophers call libertarian freedom. One acts freely only if one's action was not determined directly or indirectly

by forces outside one's control and must be free to act or refrain from acting. That that is the common sense view most people hold. Now, that's separate from what most philosophical naturalists might hold. That's a fair point I think you're drawing out. Here's what he says. He says, it's evident to most analytic philosophers, so not just naturalists, it says, but who are philosophical naturalists, that their ontological framework rules out or at least makes highly implausible the reality of libertarian free will and agency. And of course, they give their documentation we could talk about.

So I think my key point is that at least most naturalist philosophers, it seems like you agree and others, that there's minimally either ruling out libertarian free will or there's a deep tension between my ability to choose as an agent and deterministic rules and laws effects in the natural world. That's my only point. Now, as far as that goes, I don't see how the X one, I appreciate that you recognize free will. I think it's hard not to recognize this when the way we live our lives. For example, I tell my students, if you're walking, you're senior

walking out of the hall and a freshman bumps into you and says, sorry, I tripped, you respond differently than a freshman who comes up and punches you and says, get out of my way, right? One is an accident. The other one, the person. Exactly. Intent matters, which is a part of choice, right? Choice, we have ends, we have intent, and we get upset at that freshman because he or she should have known and behaved differently. Now, and that's just one example.

Sounds like you agree with me in principle on that. I've never met a determinist who actually acts like they are determined. 100%. I could not have said it better myself. I think that's right. The idea of moral praise and moral blame implies a level of free will. You should not have. So how do we account for it? Well, you made the argument that moving forward, there's an indeterminism built into the world. And so I guess if you take something like evolution and we rewind the clock, I think you would agree with me in line with Simon Conway Morris that evolution ends up differently

because of certain contingencies. Things would have not happened exactly the same. There's some contingency worked in. Fine. What I don't see is why contingency equals free will. Those are not the same thing. So let me just highlight where I think this is, if I may. I think you jumped from saying things are not determined.

There's indeterminism. Therefore, I make choices as a part of it. And that's where I say timeout. In a naturalistic universe, what enables that? How do you make choices? That's what I don't see an explanation for. Yeah. So again, just these terms, people get bogged down in these things, what we mean by them.

So there's not an element of indeterminism in the universe, set aside quantum uncertainties. But as Dennett pointed out, that wouldn't give you free will anyway. It's just randomness in the universe. The universe is determined, but it's not predetermined. So again, set aside the block universe theory, which is that everything's already happened. And if you were a deity outside the block universe, you could see already what happened. But in any case, we don't live in that universe. We live in one in which, again, the second law of thermodynamics and entropy means that the future is never the same as the past. So this idea, well, could you have done otherwise if you rewound the tape?

Well, again, I'll just repeat myself. If it's a read-only memory tape, then no. It's just a recording of what you actually did. You can't go back in time and do something different, but you can go forward in time. And because it's not predetermined, you as a causal agent in the determined universe are helping to determine what happens next. And that's where the choice comes in or the volition or whatever word you want to use. I'm going to go right instead of left. And it's my choice at that moment. And it's not predetermined. I have an element of choice determinism, whatever the words are, in the

system itself. Now, after the fact, yeah, here's why I did what I did because of all these elements. But the next time, I don't know what's going to happen because I don't know what I'm going to do. Yet, I may choose to do this instead of that. Anyway, that's how I derive it. Fair enough. So I might be pushing up against the bedrock again, but I just – Probably. Yeah, and fair enough.

And if you just say – How does a theist get – how do you get free will? Okay, so that's a great question. Let me push back, and then I'll give my thoughts on this one. As you said, you as a causal agent, I think the question is what that even means in a naturalistic universe. Because in a naturalistic universe, there's laws of physics and it's dominoes all the way down, so to speak. It's physical things in motion. So I might feel like I'm a causal agent in a naturalistic universe, but I don't actually have cause and effect because I'm physical just like everything else in the universe. And my behavior, my choices are shaped by my genes

and physical factors and laws of physics that came before me. I don't see how there's possibly me as a causal agent just pops into existence. Yeah, I'm also sentient. I have consciousness. I have memory of what happened before, and I'm going to do something different next time. Okay, but that raises a question when you say- That's me. Who's doing that? I'm an agent. I'm a causal agent. I'm a self.

I'm a person. I'm my own, not completely. I'm restricted. I can't go play in the NBA tomorrow because I choose to. I mean, there's certain restrictions. Me too. But within a channel, there's certain movements I can make that I'm part of that. Anyway, I'll just repeat okay so i agree 100 you're a causal agent i also agree you can't play in the nba tomorrow and i also

cannot play in the nba tomorrow anyway but how do you get so where does free will come from in the theist worldview okay so when you say you're a causal agent and you have consciousness, consciousness is not a physical thing. We cannot reduce it down to matter. To say it's an emergent property is basically to say I have no explanation for it. That's the biggest non-explanation for consciousness. Like in the same way that inflation is an emergent property of economic humans running around just doing their thing, buying and trading and selling and so on and printing money and inflation emerges from that. It's not a mystery. We know what causes it. And we can do something about it and so on.

It really exists. But it doesn't exist in the atoms. You're not going to find it in the physics equations. It doesn't exist there. Okay, but inflation has no causal power. That's a term that we use in economics to describe that prices have actually gone up. It's a useful term. Whether or not it really exists is a debate we could have, but just because things like inflation can emerge or things like wetness can emerge is miles and miles and qualitatively different from an agent emerging that doesn't just have bottom-up causation but has top-down causation that can now think and reason and weigh and evaluate and choose to do a as opposed to be emergent ism is basically just say well it popped into existence we have no explanation for it and if you said well i think you said hold on let me let

me know this is let me let me make this point and then jump back. Because I think your description was, you said you don't find it in the substance below in the matter and in the physics. It's not there. So if it pops up, then you're literally getting something from nothing. It's the same problem as getting a universe from nothing. You get this new qualitatively different substance that has causal powers. It doesn't exist in the physical system itself. To call that emergent is to basically say, we have no explanation for it.

We're just going to call something as it appears. That seems radically problematic to me. Anyway, as you know, this is the hard problem of consciousness. If you just look up on Wikipedia, there's a dozen different theories about it. There's no agreement amongst neuroscientists and philosophers about the explanation for consciousness, that is what it's like to be something, or how you get the sentience out of just molecules swapping across synaptic gaps and neural networks. Nobody has, there's no agreement about what the explanation is.

Now, it's not to say we won't get one, but it could be that it's one of these known unknowables that we're just confused about the concept itself. And we're going to need a paradigm shift in thinking about it. I mean, Christoph Koch just famously paid David Chalmers a case of wine. It was their bet 25 years ago that the hard problem of consciousness would be solved by April 2024. And it wasn't. So Christoph had to pay him a case of wine at a conference last April. Anyway, so to me, that tells me there might be something wrong with the whole concept of sentience and consciousness and how we're going about trying to explain it.

The fact that we can't seem to get a handle on it. And there's a couple others like that. Again, free will determinism, as we've seen. What do you mean by these words? And, you know, it could be like Wittgenstein said, you know, the language itself is restricting our concepts and how we think about them. It could be a restriction of our limitations of our brains, just the way they're structured and wired and their size. We can't get at that. Why is there something rather than nothing? Maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe something is the natural state of things and nothing would be the weird thing to explain.

And anyway, I have a whole chapter on that in the truth book, too. You know, so there's just certain, you know, you and I are bumping up against these bedrocks. And I but you accuse me of saying emerge and then a miracle happens. Well, it seems like every one of your answers is the same thing. God did it. Then a miracle happened happened god plopped morality into our brain he gave us he plopped this little homunculus free will into our brain and now we have it that's not an explanation or it's not a good explanation well i guess i like that you flip that around well done in terms of saying am i being inconsistent i think it's fair and here's where

i would say that i don't think i am i I'm not appealing to a miracle here. I haven't talked about the resurrection. I haven't talked about Jesus walking on water. I'm simply saying there are certain deep core beliefs we hold and we live as if they're true. And you agree with me. We live as if humans have intrinsic value. We live as if we ought to tell the truth. We live as if we're conscious beings and we have free will. Well, if God exists, we have a natural explanation for this phenomena. It's not a miracle. It's a natural fit. I don't have to pull outside of my system at all and say, well, grant me these different things to save my system. My system accounts for all these things that we've covered.

So you, in part, asked for my explanation. I realize this could open a huge can of worms, but I think if we are embodied souls that we have body and we have soul both are real the soul is an agent a center of consciousness that even though the river changes over time and it's not the same river that you step into if i step into it now and five minutes later, it's actually the same me because my soul and my identity stays the same over time. So we've been having this conversation an hour and a half plus. And although maybe some of my beliefs have changed, maybe some of my brain has changed, I've learned some new things, I've enjoyed it. I'm the same person and you are the same person. A soul makes sense of that. And so all I'm saying is that if we value rationality, if we value choice, it implies something non-physical to be able to assess A and B, consider the evidence, evaluate it, and make a choice, that doesn't fit within a physical system in which

there's just physical causes. There's no room for free will. I've got quotes I could pull from if I pull them up here. People like John Searle saying it's totally an illusion. The soul is like a ghost in the machine. So we'll just go back to the mind-body problem. How does the soul get the machine to run? How does it pull the tendons to contract the muscles and make the neurons fire or whatever it's supposed to be doing? And how does that give you free will in any case? Isn't it just the soul is making the decisions, not you? Unless by the soul you mean you. And then what do you mean by your body? Is

your body separate from the soul? It's a different thing? Anyway, how do you think about that? Yeah, there's a ton of questions here, and these are all totally fair questions to ask. I would say we, so my body is my physical self. That's a part of who I am. My soul is my immaterial self in which I have things like thoughts and beliefs and ideas that cannot be reduced to physical things. Even things like pain cannot be reduced to purely physical things. If I'm trying to explain a pain to somebody, I might say there's a C-fiber firing, but that's not the essence of the pain itself. It's a hurtfulness.

It's a feeling that cannot be quantified physically. And so I think our natural experience, hence my point earlier, is that most people think of themselves as having an immaterial center of consciousness that can't be weighed and doesn't have a certain color but i operate through in the world through my physical body and in some ways i could just say it's a basic action if i could give evidence for the soul and this would be a whole separate maybe we'll have a whole conversation on this if you'll ever come back but i could give a better good i think i could give good evidence for the soul but then i could point to thing like wilder penfield study going back to 1975 that he put in his book by princeton where he took patients with i think it was schizophrenia if i remember correctly and he would oh no not not schizophrenia epilepsy

thank you that's correct. With epilepsy. And he was, they were able to like do certain physical triggers with people. And the individual could say, you did that. Somehow like poked me and it caused events. But then they could say, oh, wait a minute. No, I did that in terms of behavior that the individual did. So it shows even inside of us, we're aware of passive thoughts and active thoughts. We're aware of physical things affecting us from the outside, but also operating from the inside. And so my only point is, yes, there's other questions we

could talk about in terms of evidence for the soul, et cetera. But there's a natural fit with rationality and free will and logic. If we are an agent that's a center of consciousness that stays the same over time, and you have to stay the same over time because you hear the first premise, the second premise, and then evaluate it. There has to be continuity over time that's not physical. Free will fits within that. That's my only larger point. I still don't quite see how that happens because the soul has to somehow interact and how are the choices made. But let me come back to that in a second. So if the soul is your memories, your ideas, your feelings, and so on, I'll ask you what I

asked Deepak Chopra. Where does Aunt Millie's mind and memories go when her brain deteriorates from alzheimer's so i didn't say that your your soul is your mind and your memories and what else did you say your feelings your thoughts your i i i don't want words you tell me what it is that's not what your soul is your soul is your center of consciousness it's your individual self you might say your ego now thoughts are obviously in in the mind and in some fashion you could argue are maybe etched in the brain a certain fashion like music is etched into a old-fashioned record player or something like that there's interaction between the body and between the mind. Well, if somebody gets Alzheimer's, for example, and I don't fully

understand Alzheimer's, so if I'm missing the medics of it, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but there's something going wrong with the brain, and so memories slip. Well, as we are embodied through the brain, if the brain is not functioning correctly, the soul can't experience the world through the brain. So it's not that the soul has changed, but it's that the brain has been damaged. So while we are embodied, we cannot experience the world through our bodies. It's like, I know this isn't perfect, but it was John Eccles. He was a famous neuroscientist who said, take a piano player and a piano. You have certain capacities in the soul with a piano player. I know the piano player is not immaterial, but it's just an illustration. And the piano is like the body. If the body is damaged, or the piano is damaged, then the piano player cannot play through the piano the music, even though it hasn't changed the nature of the soul.

That's the kind of interaction that I would refer to, and I think it fully fits our experience. So you're a dualist in that sense, that there is material stuff and then there's soul stuff. And then do you think after we die, the soul just kind of floats off the brain out into the ether or the quantum field or wherever it goes to heaven or something like that? And what is it? Is it just information? I don't know. Okay, so let me give one thought on this, and then I'll bring us back and kind of sum up the debate. This is a fair question.

In your book, you critique near-death experiences and don't think – not all of them, but some of them, that when our body stops functioning, there's a continued consciousness where people can know things at a distance that they couldn't have known in their physical state. Now, when they come back, they're able to report those things. Now, I totally realize I haven't made that case here. We haven't looked at the data. That's a completely fair pushback, but that is a line of reasoning. I would say, wait a minute, when the body stops functioning, that's what death is, separation of the body from the soul. The consciousness can continue to exist over time, and we have good evidence for it. Now, I agree fully you disagree with that. You can make your case. Maybe that's when we come back and talk about, I'd love to have a discussion or

debate or dialogue about near death experiences. Um, but let me, can I come back and wrap us up? Is that fair? Are you okay with that? Yeah, I gotta, I gotta leave in about five minutes. Okay, perfect. I totally pushed back my welcome, but you did say you would stay for a little while. So that's right. Yeah, no problem. No. So here's, here's how I see it. I'll welcome, but you did say you would stay for a little while. That's right. Yeah, no problem. So here's how I see it. I'll be as quickly as I can. We've talked about a few different things here.

And I think, so a few things, I wrote this down. Flourishing, human value, free will, and consciousness. All of those naturally fit within a theistic system. We're to flourish because there's a God who made us in a certain way and gave us commands to flourish. We have human value because we're made in God's image. We have free will because God is a free being, has made us body and soul. There's rationality. We have consciousness because God is conscious. It would make sense that we'd be conscious. So I don't have to pull outside of my system to try to account for these things. It naturally fits within it. And for other reasons,

I say, therefore, a theistic system offers the best account of morality. And I think your system has to say, well, it just emerged out of nowhere, or we don't understand, or we'll figure it out someday. Now, obviously, you don't think I represented that fairly, but tell me your case as you sum it up. The morality part, I gave you like an hour's worth of explanation that we do have a pretty good understanding of, but you'll be curious to know.

And then I got to run, Sean, that like Richard Dawkins and I, we're both materialist atheists in this regard. We're not dualists, but we belong to this kind of private um consciousness group these are like the leading consciousness researchers in the world they're all atheists but all of them think consciousness is um itself um the entire system it exists separate from material stuff. Deepak is, Chopra is one of

these, but most of them are not Buddhist in that sense. And that they think that you never really die, that your self is conscious, your consciousness continues on. Anyway, I just thought you'd find that interesting because there are people that largely agree with you, but not through a Christian worldview, but from a purely, what did they call it? Sort of almost a panpsychism or a consciousness first. The way they phrased it was consciousness is the ground of all being, almost like Tillich's definition of God. There's nothing underneath it. You keep drilling down in the brain looking for consciousness. It's not there. It is everywhere at once.

And something like God, something like that. Anyway, I just thought you might enjoy that. I love it. They think Dawkins and I are out of our minds to be purely materialistic reductionists in that regard. Last thing I'll say, if you're ever open to a Christian apologist coming, listening and being there and not even debating or taking notes, I would go to that in a heartbeat. And then you and I could just talk about it off air. I would love that. That sounds good, Sean. Thanks for having me on. This is a treat. See you. All right. That was great. Yeah. Let me know when you post it and I'll repost it on social

media. It's great. Really great conversation. You're very smart. I'm glad you enjoyed it. When your book on truth is out, please send me a copy and we'll do the same thing if you're open to it that sounds good yeah all right see you michael