The Sean McDowell Show - The (Updated) Story of Jon Steingard

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

What would cause a devout Christian rockstar to deconvert from his faith in Christianity? In this video, I catch up with Jon Steingard, who was the lead vocalist and lead guitarist for the Christian pop-punk band Hawk Nelson. In May of 2020, he announced that he no longer believes in God, but remains open to believing again in the future. I've had a few conversations with him, but today I'll be catching up with him on different topics related to his deconversion. READ: Set Adrift: Deconstructing What You Believe Without Sinking Your Faith, by Sean McDowell (https://amzn.to/3EpGpTu) WATCH: Why Keep the Faith? Why Leave it? Jon Steingard and Sean McDowell Continue the Conversation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdNQN18jRTU&t=2s) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 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

All right, friends, you are in for a special conversation because I'm here with my friend John Steingard. You might recognize this name because he was the lead singer of a band called Hawk Nelson. And about three years ago on Instagram did about a 2000 word plus just writing or not really manifesto, but description. That's definitely the wrong word. Description of deconstructing and deconverting your faith. Yeah. Now, you and I have had a bunch of conversations. We've gone running down in Sangamani talking about this.

And I really, through this, have just treasured our relationship. You've made me think about things. Me too, yeah. And I've really enjoyed seeing this journey you're on. But we haven't really talked in depth for about a year. Yeah, that's right. Now, you told me that some of your thinking shifted and it's changed. Yeah, it's kind of always changing.

And you were about to tell me before and I said, I don't want to hear, surprise me. Sure. So the goal of this is usually I script these conversations out to like maximize time and just like respect my viewer. But I also want to just model at times, just having a conversation and being curious. So I really have two goals. Number one, I just want to catch up,

hear what's going on in your life, but I'm just curious what you're thinking about issues related to God. How does that sound to you for this conversation? That sounds great. I love that. Awesome. Can I just say before we get started,

I can't remember if I've mentioned this on your, the last time we talked on your podcast or your YouTube channel, but the very first time we had a conversation after we got off, it was on Justin Briley's show. That's right. And after we got off that conversation, we weren't recording anymore or anything. You kind of leaned, I mean, we were virtual, but you kind of leaned, I mean, we were virtual, but you kind of leaned in and you were like, hey, I know this is really difficult. Like, how are you doing?

How's your family? Like, how has that, like, I was, that left a really strong impression on me. So I just, like, right from the get-go, I just kind of wanted to say, like, thank you for that because that left an impression whenever I hear someone say like, oh, all apologists care about it's making a point or something like that. I'm just like, well, I've had personal experience that says otherwise. Well, I appreciate you saying that. And I went through a very different phase of questioning in my own life where I doubted things.

Didn't have a public platform. I was a lot younger. But I can remember ways that people responded positively and ways people responded that were not so helpful. Sure. Oh, and I've gotten plenty of that. Tell me about that. I'm actually curious, what's helpful and what has not been helpful through this for you? I think they're on many different issues. When we're talking about any faith issues or deconstruction or philosophy of religion or any of these things, sometimes there's a tendency to want to stake out a position and defend it really aggressively.

And lots of people on lots of different sides of basically every issue tend to do that. And then, you know, you throw in online where people can say things and not have to look other people in the eye. And things can get a little bit, you know, a little bit rude or nasty. So I try not to engage with people that go there really quickly too much because life's too short. There are thoughtful people that disagree with me that I can engage with without siloing myself off entirely. I think that's totally fair. Now, I saw a tweet, and I know I'm going to butcher the words. But within the past few weeks, you had something to the effect of being in just a good spot in your life that you hadn't been for a while.

Now, I don't know if you meant relationally, spiritually. Probably all of that. Tell me about that. Yeah. I mean, so anyone who's gone through a process, you know, whether we want to call it deconstruction, I know the word is debated, but it's a really earth shaking sort of process and it causes you to sort of rethink a lot of things about your life. And it actually took me maybe a couple of years to feel like I had, I was sort of on steady ground again. And, you know, like relationally with the people that are in my life that matter to me. And then also just like, how do I go about living,

living my life and what choices do I make? I've got kids. What am I teaching my kids? What things do I want to make sure that they know? You know, I want to think about do we, how do we restrict information from my kids? And maybe I want to do that as little as possible, but also be age appropriate. How do you do that? Great questions. So there's all of that stuff. And then I think in the last year, I've gotten to a place where

one of my main focuses was just like, I want to, as best I can with what I know, live a healthy life. I don't want to be tortured by this existential dread that sometimes – Nobody does. You know? And there is a limit to how much time and energy you can spend thinking about these really deep issues. Like why is there something instead of nothing? And so I had to focus a little bit on, hey, like I need to focus on my family. I need to focus on what's best for them, the people that are in my life.

It got really important to me. I just turned 40. So I was like, it was really, I felt, I felt the pressure to make sure that like, Hey, I want to be really healthy. I want to be eating healthy. I want to be exercising, um, that kind of stuff. And so some, a lot of my attention over the last year has been focused on like just really practical stuff like that. Okay.

So it's less that you feel like you've landed and answered some of these questions to your own satisfaction, more you're content living with the questions. I think that's fair. I think that's part of it. But then in the last few months, I've gotten, I've been able to slow down on work a little bit the last month or two. And I've gotten, I've had a little bit more flexible time.

Okay. And our kids are now at an age where they're both in school. And so we've just like got our life back a little bit, my wife and I. And so we've got a little bit more free time. And so I've been like, I've been in a new phase where I'm really interested in sort of philosophy of religion again. Oh, okay. Interesting. And the biggest things is just like I'm super interested in the concept of theism on its own, right? So like I think when I – for a lot of people who grew up and grew up in Christianity

you know Christianity isn't a single belief it's like a collection of beliefs right like there's and there's quite a few and you might not be aware of all the beliefs that you're holding individually it's sort of this conglomerate of like things that you believe and I think when I went through this process of deconstruction part of the reason why I think the word deconstruction is actually like at least somewhat accurate is because it does feel like there's an aspect of like taking those apart and looking at them individually. And like there might be some of those beliefs that I grew up holding. There's plenty of other Christians that don't hold that view. So like, you know, like there's different views on hell or atonement theory or, you know, exactly what do we mean when we say the Bible is inspired? You know, the authority of scripture, like there's

different ways of looking at all of these things, even within Christianity. So I sort of found it helpful to go back to the basics and go like, okay, setting aside Christian ideas or claims or anything like that, just looking at theism from the beginning, like just basic theism, what are the arguments for and against God? And that space alone is like really interesting. Oh, good. I'm glad you're there. So I want to come back to this if we can. It's interesting that one of the things that spur this conversation is my most recent book

is on helping Christians deconstruct without losing their faith. That's like the subtitle. Now we define deconstruct. How do you define it? So we kind of define it as shedding away secondary beliefs, which is the D, the breaking down. But construct is building something up. Now, our book is not written for somebody who says, I don't even know if I want to follow Jesus.

I don't know if God exists. It's written for somebody more like me who went through a period of crisis in faith and said, how do I navigate, like you said, secondary issues from primary issues? What does it mean to follow Jesus? It's kind of the book that I wish somebody had given to me when I went through a doubting period. We tend to write and think along those kinds of lines. So I think it's really interesting that you define

deconstruct and approach it the way that you did and that you made these distinctions between kind of essential and non-essential beliefs. I think so. Although I think at the time, like I, it took a while to identify what the components of my faith were. Right. It's like when I started, I mean, when I first wrote that message, one of the metaphors I used was one of a sweater and like pulling on the threads of a sweater, which is funny because there's these, do you know who Rhett and Link are? Of course, yeah. So I didn't, I didn't know. And they, like a couple months before me, came out with like a similar thing. And they used the same metaphor.

And so a couple of people had said to me like, oh, you used the same metaphor as Rhett and Link. And I was like, who? I don't even know who these guys are. I had no idea. So, but I think that's an apt metaphor because it wasn't like I looked at the whole entirety of my belief system and was like, well, that's all wrong. It started with like, wait, something's bothering me with this issue or like with that thing. And then I'd sort of

like investigate it and it would lead to other questions. And then I would investigate those and those would lead to other ones. And it just kept going. And I was like, you know, and as I think we've talked about before, like it wasn't something I like went looking for. And I was really troubled by it, honestly. Like I was like, well, this is disturbing. And so I think I'm looking at it in retrospect now. And in retrospect, I realized that a lot of what was going on is pulling apart all these individual ideas that were just sort of this big glob for me. And I'll be the first to say,

because like sometimes people come at me with this, well just it sounds like you didn't know a lot about theology you know when you were a Christian and I would say yeah I agree I don't think I think there's a lot I didn't a lot I didn't know and even when I went through that process of deconstruction

and I you know you know I was on your podcast or your your YouTube channel and Justin Briley's. And like I did briefly, I did a podcast of my own while I was exploring all this stuff. And I think during that whole process, I still hadn't totally recognized how much, like how much further I still had to go. Uh, and, and how so many of the questions that I was asking, like they've been asked for a long time. And there's a really robust body of work surrounding a lot of these questions,

like the problem of evil or why is there something instead of nothing? Like these questions have been addressed for a long time. I don't think they're solved, but sometimes someone will come at me and be like, oh, that's been answered ages ago. And, you know, I just think that's a little. Depends what you mean by solved or answered or addressed. Right, right. I mean, addressed, I would say yes, for sure. And so now I feel like I'm going like, okay, it is, I mean, I don't know tons of people that hold this.

I'm starting to meet more of them, but people that would call themselves theists but are not Christians. And getting to know people in that position is just interesting to me because growing up in Christianity, you know, it's like, I didn't really hear the word theism, you know, it's just, it was, it was sort of a, it was an important component of Christianity. Gotcha. So one of the things I love doing is just comparing and contrasting experiences with anybody in life. But both of us grew up, your dad was, or still is a pastor, if I remember correctly. My dad's not a pastor, evangelist, but traveled in some certain circles. He traveled with Petra and the Newsboys and we've been to similar concerts. But when I hear you saying just

openly, I didn't know a lot of theology. I didn't. Part of me, I think, okay, something's going wrong within the church that we have somebody who grows up in the church, no matter what their profession is, doesn't know a lot of theology, and then is invited to write a whole bunch of songs that people sing and learn and work into their mind, throw them on stage. Oh, I know. Without knowing a lot of theology. I'm not criticizing you. You're following the path that was laid out. I was like, I'm in a band.

This is fun. Yeah, that's awesome. But so as I hear your story, I'm like, we're messing up and falling short. I'm curious if you agree with that. Yes, somewhat. I think it's like a, it's, so like when you say given a platform or something like that, I don't remember exactly how you just worded it. So I don't want to put words in there, but it's not like there's a platform giver who

just like decides who gets to be in a Christian band. Right. It's like, it's this sort of living, breathing thing, like any, like any sort of artistic arena is where like people write music, sometimes other people really like that music and they sort of start listening to it. So I don't think anyone ever like looked at me and decided, you know what, he should be a leader in the church. Like I don't think that ever happened like that. So I agree with you and I think that's part of the problem. Like, I don't think that ever happened like that. I agree with you. And I think that's part of the problem. Oh, okay.

Is that there are certain values that you say, if somebody can sing, if somebody can entertain, we just give a platform because this is important to us. Yeah. That's more so what I mean. I think of the larger values we have as a church, theology and who has a platform is not really up there. So that's one piece. So you can weigh in more if you agree or disagree with that. But I'm curious if there's other things looking back at the church now that you're a little bit removed and you're like, I didn't see that, but that bothers me, whatever it is.

Oh, there's definitely things that bother me. Okay. But, I mean, I was raised in a very charismatic setting where, in retrospect, I think that someone's relationship with God and the quality of their faith was largely, if you were to look at someone and go, oh, they're just like, they're really following after Jesus. It's largely a result of your perception of their emotional connection. Wow. That's interesting. Well, I mean, like you've probably been in sort of settings like that, right? Where if you see someone who seems like very emotionally connected to their faith

and very passionate, it's very easy to think, oh man, they're just like, I mean, I remember hearing this term on fire for Jesus, right? They're on fire for Jesus. And so I think- Acquire the fire, baby.

Right. And oh man, don't get me started on acquire the fire. I have stories. My dad spoke at acquire the Fire for a few years. Yeah. But keep going. Well, that's a tangent. But I think every stream, every faith tradition probably has blind spots. That's fair. To some degree. And so I think the blind spot that this sort of very charismatic evangelical stream that I grew up in had was that it really emphasized this emotional connection in your faith, this very emotional experiential aspect and probably didn't emphasize enough thinking about theology or Bible teaching.

I mean, it's not like that stuff wasn't happening, but it wasn't the thing that was considered the most important because you hear things like, it's not a religion, it's a relationship. I hear that one plenty of times. And so I'm not passing judgment on that phrase or that approach or whatever. I just think it's probably the blind spot of the stream that I grew up

in that it produces people like me. I was not implying. That was not my point. It doesn't only produce people like me. I grew up on a crusade. My parents were on crusade staff. So in many ways, there's an emphasis on are you outreaching and winning people for Jesus?

Sure. That's the mark of a Christian. There's probably some rationalistic, if you have the right theology in place, marks a Christian. There might be some a little bit more of the social gospel. If you are serving the poor a certain fashion, then that is the mark of a Christian. And I think you're right that all these can have strengths and all these can have weaknesses, I think is a fair way to look at it. Now on your journey, I think you use the word atheist in your original post. Did you?

I didn't. Oh, you didn't. Okay. I know I didn't. But I did say, I think the wording was, I am finding that I don't believe in God or something like that. Okay. I have always felt weird about the word atheist. Okay. And I've had, you know, there's all these conversations about like, how do you define

atheist? Is it just a lack of belief or is it an active disbelief in God? You know, like I don't find that conversation interesting. I agree. So I tend to, I mean, I prefer the term agnostic because at least it signals an openness that like, hey, I'm sort of withholding judgment here and I'm interested. I'm curious. I mean, I'd rather approach all of this stuff with that posture. Okay. But I'm fine not using any term either as well.

I mean, I've heard crypto theist, which I think is funny because... I've never heard that. And I know all these conversations. It's basically someone who's not actively a theist, but who is curious about approaching things from that perspective. It's not a very useful term if no one knows it. That is more of indicative of our culture, needing a term with every possible belief

that somebody has. I think it's funny. I don't use that term either because if no one knows what it is, it's not helpful. I agree. So would you, if you had to use a term, is agnostic more where you're at? I would probably, that's probably the closest, yeah. Okay. It seems like I remember this.

Correct me if I'm wrong. When we were having one of the first jogs shortly after your announcement, you had said you kind of went through an atheist type, like not believing in God, but very quickly looked at certain things in the world and just thought, the idea that this is all material is just not attractive to me at all. Do I remember that correctly? Yeah, no, that's right. Is that the case? I think I, I don't think I ever wanted to say this like publicly, but I think to you

privately, I said something to the effect of atheism seems boring. Yes, you did. I remember. I never quoted you. I was hoping you said that actually. But I so wanted to tweet that. I know, you did. I remember. I never quoted you. I was hoping you said that actually. I so wanted to tweet that at the time. I know. And I was like, well, don't quote me on that. Because it's like, I think what I mean when I say that, into philosophy of mind for a while. Okay.

And I don't think I can be a physicalist. Okay. So I tend to hold, I mean, of course, it's one of the wackier ones, but I tend towards panpsychism. Okay. Or I could be convinced of idealism. Okay. Oh, interesting. Basically, my intuition tells me that we are not two things like body and soul or body and mind.

My intuition tells me that whatever we are, we're one thing. And so that, that if I take dualism off the table, I could either, I could either go physicalism and say, well, yeah, we're one thing. We're just matter. We're just stuff. Or I could go the other way and I could say, well, in some way, mind is fundamental or primary. The way that panpsychism does that is just says everything is conscious. Right. So what seems to be matter has this conscience potentiality in it, in a sense. I'm pretty, I'm fairly, at the moment,

I'm fairly convinced that the subjective experience that each of us has is not explainable within physicalism. I'm pretty convinced of that. Okay. Like, so like the classic example is philosophical zombies, right? So like you could imagine a creature like you or I, you know this already, but I'll reiterate for your audience. The classic example, I think it was Chalmers that

suggested this, David Chalmers. And so he says, you could imagine a physical creature, the same as you and I, where all the mechanisms are working exactly as they do, but there's no inner experience because the inner experience doesn't seem to be necessary, you know. And so if that's the case, why do we have an inner experience? And if physicalism can't explain the inner experience, then we have some work to do. And so he's a property dualist, which is borderline. I mean, you could, it flirts with panpsychism. But panpsychism is weird because it's like everything that exists is every,

it posits that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the physical world in the sense that like, even an electron has some fundamental bit of consciousness about it. And that wouldn't be the same sort of awareness that you and I have, but. Okay, so just for clarification,

you said you, like when you reflect upon yourself, you believe it makes more sense, not there's two parts of us. It makes more sense to me that we are one thing. One thing. Not two. Okay, so now you know this. Technically, a Christian worldview is that we are

embodied souls. So we're one thing, but we have a material and an immaterial part of what we are. So I'm agreeing with you. I'm just clarifying. Yeah, substance dualism is probably the most common view within Christianity. Yeah, and there's nuances

from Plato's approach to Aristotle's approach, but bottom line would be an embodied soul. Now, to me, like that just perfectly fits the way I see the world. So, for example, when I think about something like pain, right, there is clearly physical cells that we have and C-fiber firings that are taking place. We have physical bodies. But pain cannot be reduced down. You can't describe it by a certain weight or color or extension in space.

The best explanation is hurtfulness. So there's this subjective, almost immaterial, not physical part of our experience. So I'm not so much making an argument, just saying for me- No, I see that's your intuition. Maybe I've talked myself into this,

but it seems like we talk this way all the time. We talk about our bodies as if it's ourselves. When someone gets hit, if I hit you, you'd be like, you hit John. But there's also a sense where your body changes and you, your thinking and center of consciousness stays the same over time. So my only point is that really seems to match up with the way I would argue most people see the world, myself included. What am I missing in terms of

how you would say you see the world? So I think that my objections to that view would be substance dualism. My objections to that are along the lines of, well, there's a couple of them I can think of off the top of my head. One of them is that it's not clear how your, if your mind is immaterial or if your soul, whatever word you want to use, it's not clear how that interacts with your physical body. Okay. And in neuroscience, there's like no real place where like they can see that happening, right? So it's not exactly clear how that interaction would occur.

And then there's also plenty of examples of someone who has a brain injury. And their brain injury dramatically changes their personality, dramatically changes who they seem to be in some sense, right? And so the classic example is this guy named Phineas Gage. You've probably heard this story. Great example. Yeah. So this railroad worker? I forget the exact. Yeah, so he, this railroad worker. I forget the exact profession.

I think it was a railroad worker and he got an iron bar that just went through his skull and he lived, but it damaged like a significant portion of his brain. And after that, he was like a different person where like he didn't used to be. He became very angry.

I think he became an alcoholic. He was like not able to control his urges. And so it's clear it's the lesson from that for me is that it does seem like physical things have the ability to sort of change who we are in a sense, like physical changes, like damage to our physical bodies. So, I mean, a lot of people use that example to argue for physicalism. Right. I have other problems, as we've said, with physicalism because I don't think it can explain internal qualia. But now we're doing a podcast about the philosophy of mind.

So I don't know how long we want to stay there. So I'm torn live making a decision because I don't want to have a debate about these things. Oh, no, no, no. I think this stuff is fascinating. I also know you're the kind of person that you can push and pull and think and are not out to like win points on this. So let me throw a thought on each one of those. Sure.

And then you say what you think and we'll move on because I want to get back to your story. So the first one, you're right. We don't have a mechanism for how mind and matter would interact. Yeah. Now, if there really is mind that's not matter, you mentioned like neuroscience, how exactly would neuroscience detect this anyways? That would be a question that I would ask. I'm not sure that's the right tool to identify it.

I actually – I don't know either. I'm not a neuroscientist. Yeah, I don't think in principle because they're studying matter that such a thing could be detected. But with that said, I think my thought is I would say, you're right, we don't know how that happens. But there's a whole lot of things we don't know how it happens. Like electrons are particles, and they're waves at the same time. We have no idea. Yeah, but we see the effects of both, even though we don't know how it makes the most sense of the two phenomena. So if I just reflect upon my experience, I know I have a body and I am going to pick up that cup in a minute. Not a minute. You know

what I mean? In a moment. Well, how did that happen? I made a decision with my mind. I don't know how my mind translated my body, but it seems the obvious best explanation is that a mind made that choice and actually did it even if i don't know how i would agree that a mind a mind did uh although i'm with an asterisk here i'm sort of agnostic on like determinism versus libertarian free will okay i i go back and forth on that one so i I don't, I don't, I have problems with both of those views. So in a sense I find compatibilism appealing, but I don't, I don't understand how compatibilism works. And so when it comes to free will, I'm sort of, I don't know, I'm not sure about that one, but I agree with you that you have a mind or you are a mind. But whether that is something that's separate from your physical body or not, that's where I'm not sure.

That's where you're hung up on it. Yeah. That's the right. But I've heard like Josh Rasmussen. Yeah. I've heard him say. Yeah, he's fantastic. Brilliant.

He's a theistic. Brilliant. Philosopher. Brilliant philosopher. Yeah. I've heard him say, yeah, he's fantastic. He's a, is a theistic philosopher, brilliant philosopher. And he, you know, he, he said something it's fun. Twitter's fun because I get to interact with like real philosophers and they actually like answer my questions. I don't know why. That's impressive. But it's But it's so fun. And he made this comment to me on Twitter once where he said, it seems like your worldview, he's big on worldview, right? He's like, it seems like everyone's worldview tends to track towards prioritizing matter and thinking that's fundamental or to prioritizing mind and thinking that's fundamental, or to prioritizing mind and thinking that's fundamental.

And what he means by that, I think, is for, I mean, just to address the dualism part of that, like, I think that for most Christians, in some sense, if you believe that you have a body and you have a mind or a spirit or a soul, you would, in some sense, think that that mind or spirit or soul is more fundamental than your body in some sense, right? I'm with you. So you would be more on the side of like probably mind is more fundamental in some sense. We could put a lot of asterisks on that.

But I have found a lot of the arguments of the sort of primacy of mind to be kind of compelling. And I think Josh Rasmussen is someone whose work I've appreciated. Bernardo Kastrup is an idealist who I think is really interesting. Philip Goff is a panpsychist who I think is really doing interesting work. And so I'm really fascinated by that side of the spectrum. You're dropping names on this, man. David Chalmers. I didn't mean like name dropping.

I'm impressed that you're reading Chalmers and Rasmussen and some of the thinkers here. That's awesome. That's commendable. And for anyone who's out there, oh, they have one pointed at me. I've been like, but for anyone who's like interested in these kinds of topics, like these are great people to check out and learn from. I agree. I think so on the second point, the objection you had was Phineas Gage was the name, the nail goes through, changed the personality.

I think this could be interpreted through different lenses. So a substance dualist perspective would say, well, there's a neuroscientist by the name of John Eccles. And he says, compare the body and the soul, like a piano player and a piano. Now falls short because piano player and piano are both physical. But the idea being the piano is like the body and the soul is like the piano player. So the soul has the capacity,

the piano player, to play through the piano. But if the piano is damaged, there cannot be the expression of the music in the way it should be played right right so in a sense from a substance dualist perspective your soul has a capacity to see but if your eyes get damaged you cannot see there's parts of the brain that are connected with different parts of our personality and our decision making they get damaged and the rest of the brain can't compensate we would expect to see personality and decision making changes. Now, that's not an argument for substance dualism, but I think it can withstand, it can make sense of logically that objection, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And I think also it's open to the substance dualist to say that correlation is not causation. Like I think that response is open to the substance dualist to say that correlation is not causation. Like I think that response is open to the substance dualist too. So yeah, it's not like, that's the thing. If there were knockdown arguments for any of these things, then we'd, well, I was about to say we'd see more agreement. Maybe we wouldn't, but I think it's, you know, we all have our own intuitions about some of these things. Fair enough.

And more than anything, I just, I think the conversations about it are really interesting. And thinking about consciousness really opened my mind up to be able to consider theism again. Because I read this book called Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith. And he studied, he's a philosopher of mind, but he studied octopuses, like for a really long time, cephalopods. Interesting. And octopuses are really intelligent, but their intelligence evolved on a totally separate track to ours.

So like if you look at intelligent animals like intelligent apes and stuff like that, or even- Like dolphins maybe. Yeah, even dolphins. Yeah, like it's like we're all mammals, right? Yep. And so there's a common evolutionary history.

I'm assuming evolution here. It's fine. Don't worry about it. But cephalopods, they broke off from our evolutionary history way, way earlier before any animals were nearly as intelligent as we are. And so their consciousness, I'm assuming they have one, which I think is a good assumption. Their intelligence evolved really differently than ours. Their nervous system is distributed throughout their bodies. They have basically these little mini brains for each arm.

And then a central brain that coordinates everything. But that central brain isn't nearly as significant as ours. Like their nervous systems are way more distributed. So what would it be like to be a creature where different parts of your body are in some sense thinking for themselves and acting on their own, but also coordinated. Yeah, yeah. And so that got me thinking about like what it means to be aware. My awareness is one example of what it means to be aware. But awareness could seem really different for other types of conscious creatures.

So like octopuses, just what it is to be an octopus must be so different than what it is to be a human being, right? So that got me thinking about there are different, there are probably many different ways to be a conscious entity. And that made me think, well, maybe if God were real, maybe the sense in which God is a conscious entity is completely different than the sense that I am, you know, which I think, you know, you would at least agree with that somewhat, I think. Yeah, I think. For sure. And so I think that opened me up to think like, okay, like maybe I've been thinking in this box

where I'm imagining that God, whatever God is, has to be a person in the sense that I'm used to. And maybe I need to explore outside of that box a little bit. And so that's- I love that. I've been asked like, how can God answer prayers for multiple people at the same time and be aware of so many different things? Sure.

And I hadn't thought of the octopus example. I might use that in the future. Sure, yeah. Note to self, I will try to remember to give you credit, but I'll probably forget. No, I don't care. I don't. It's not me, it's Peter Godfrey Smith.

Oh, that's a very interesting, helpful way to think outside of the box. I love that. You know, one interesting thing about octopus is this, a side note, is the structure of their eye is very remarkably similar to a human eye. And yet a very different, like you said, evolutionary pathway. Yes. So either people argue there's certain things in nature that push towards a common structure to emerge, or there's design that could account for it. Of course, I favor

design, but that's just an interesting point about the octopus and a human, not even a coordinate like we are, similar eye structure, fascinating. Now, that aside, how urgent are these questions for you? Like, what motivates you? Is it just that this is a good question? You're just interested or there's a sense of like, I've got to figure this out. So I think there was a sense of urgency like earlier in my process where it really stressed me out, Sean. Like, I was not, well, I was mostly not having a good time.

Now I feel like a huge sense of peace about it. I feel like now it's more of an adventure of exploring these things the way that I like to explore the physical world, right? Like I love to travel. So I think about philosophy in the same way. Like I'm reading Swinburne right now, Richard Swinburne, which is like, I feel like so overdue because I asked on Twitter a few weeks ago, like, okay, whether you think these arguments succeed or fail, what do you think are the best arguments for theism? And a lot of people said Richard Swinburne. And I was like, yeah, I know a little bit about him, but I need to actually go and read him. So I'm doing that now. And right out of the gate, he shares a few of my intuitions that... and not all of them, of course, I'm finding ones we're diverging

on pretty quickly too. But like there's certain intuitions that he shares. Like I don't know how to make sense of a person who is timeless because it seems to me that any sort of choices or actions or experiences require time. Are time bound. And, or some kind of time, you know, like I think William Lane Craig posits a meta, like a meta time of some kind or metaphysical time, I think he calls it. And so, so that to me is some kind of time. It doesn't have to be time

as we experience it. But it seems to me like I don't know how to make sense of the sort of classical theistic view that God is timeless and immutable. To me, I don't know how that kind of a being could be a person in any way that we'd recognize. But I still think it's a live option. Like maybe, you know, I'm bouncing all over the place here. I apologize. But like one of the more compelling theistic arguments that as far as I can see is like arguments from contingency. And so I like the Leibnizian. I always feel like I'm going to say his name wrong. I like his formulation of it where he talks about explanation, contingent things have an explanation for their existence. That chain of explanation either has to end somewhere or goes on forever, which has problems,

or runs in a circle, which has even more problems. And so it's like the most attractive view is that that chain of explanation has to end somewhere and that ending is some sort of necessary. Necessary being, that's right. He says necessary being. I know technically being doesn't mean a person in this case, but like in colloquial terms, being usually does. I think in, oh, I'd have to go back and confirm this but i think

leibniz would say it has to be a person and a being not just being itself i think in stage two he goes there right let's stay like there's two stages to his argument argument from contingency okay i think the first one just establishes he does argue for a necessary being but i think and i kind of i get this wording from rasmussen because he says foundation a lot and i like that word because yeah because it's like you can the the the atheist or the agnostic agnostic could agree on a necessary foundation, right? Like without, you could say there's some sort of, that chain of explanation ends. Okay. And then there's some sort of necessary foundation to reality.

And then you could go on to talk about like, well, is that foundation something that could be called a being in any, like a person or, you know, anything like that. But I do think that stage one of Leibniz's, Leibniz? Yeah. Leibniz? Leibniz. Leibniz.

I'm never going to say that with any confidence. It doesn't matter. I do think stage one is pretty compelling. I think it's more attractive to to to accept the view or at least tentatively accept the view that there has to be some sort of necessary foundation to reality interesting so then what is that foundation so when so at this stage you think that foundation could be physical or do you think that foundation even if it's not a mind, that's a personal mind, would be immaterial? Are both candidates in your mind or are you leaning towards mind?

So this is where the question gets really interesting because, so a philosopher like Graham Oppie, like a famous atheist philosopher, he would say that whatever explanation the theist, whatever range of explanations that are open to the theist to explain the existence of God, those same explanations are open to the naturalist to explain the existence of the universe or whatever exists, right? And on principle, I think that's right. Like, I think that's correct. But there is a question about like, what seems more likely to produce something? A mind or some sort of foundation that's fundamentally mindless? And, you know, I'm still exploring that one. But again, going back to consciousness, my curiosity sort of goes toward like, well, it seems like

mind would maybe make more sense there. So that's where like, I would sort of score a point for theism, right? And go like, well, you know, how do you make sense of a fundamentally mindless foundation generating anything, you know? But then of course, you know, in general, an atheistic response to that would be that it's possible that nothing is impossible. Like in the sense that like- It's not logically possible that it's nothing impossible. Well, they might say that, a better way to say it would probably be they might say that it's possible that nothing existing is not possible. Oh, gotcha.

Yeah, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to figure out the best way to say that. They might say that there might be some, it might be necessary. Whatever that foundation is, we're calling it necessary. And what we mean by that is that it could not have failed to exist. Or in possible worlds talk, you could say like, it exists in all possible worlds or something like that.

Okay. So you said that's one check for theism. You've gone back and you're looking at philosophy or religion. So I imagine you've looked at the moral arguments, maybe looking at information, fine-tuning. What are some of the other ones that give you pause or give you further checks in that category? And I don't want to come to those you would give X's to rather than a check. Sure. I think arguments for design, the problem with arguments for design is you very quickly

run into fields where it requires a lot of knowledge to make really coherent, to take really like coherent positions. So like our mutual friend, Dr. Jonathan McClatchy, right? He's a molecular biologist. And so he is a firm proponent of arguments from design. Whenever I'm having a conversation with him, I'm like, sometimes some of the stuff he says, I'm like, I don't think I agree with that, but I don't exactly know how to argue with you about this. Okay.

Because you're so much more knowledgeable than I am about these topics that I struggle to sort of know what to say. So with arguments for design, I think they hold a lot of intuitive weight, right? Agreed. But I also think that evolution by natural selection is pretty compelling. And I think that common descent is extremely compelling. And so I look at the fact that evolution, the process of evolution has managed to take us from single-celled organisms. Now, given we don't really understand how, what's the word, abiogenesis?

Yeah. We don't really understand. A biogenesis. Oh, yeah. There we go. Of course. A biogenesis. That makes way more sense. We don't really know how that occurred.

But from that point on, the idea of evolution by natural selection, getting us to where we are today seems to make sense to me. I think there's questions about some of the process that I think are legitimate, but I look at that. Okay. Keep going. Well, no, I'll just finish that. I look at that and I go, okay, I see a naturalistic process who, that can, that can definitely make things look designed in some sense. And so I wonder if, if there's other processes like that, because I do think that that process is fairly compelling and I think it's true. That's interesting.

So I look at that and I go, are there other areas where there appears to be design where if we just learn more, we'll find that actually there's a natural process going on. You know who made that argument was Dawkins in The God Delusion. I know. I know. About fine tuning. I'm trying not to reference him. My point was not it's wrong because he did, but he said, we know in biology this is so

definitive, so this can explain fine-tuning, this can explain. And he pointed that to other arguments. Well, he doesn't – I don't think he actually explains fine-tuning. He waves it away. Attempts to – I agree with you. Yeah, and I'm very resistant to any explanations that feel hand-wavy. On both sides, that's fair. I have qualms on both sides with that. Okay, so design arguments, most of them would concede some kind of biological evolution.

Most. So Swinburne, by the way, wrote a book called The Evolution of the Soul. And I think he believes in a kind of evolutionary account. I haven't read it since grad school, early 2000s. But he would be okay with some kind of evolutionary account. Yeah. That in some ways design would say, you know, something from nothing point to the big bang, obviously evolution's independent of that, point towards fine tuning, origin of life.

Yep. All questions. Our privileged planet. For life to evolve, you can't even have life unless you have a universe. I'm sorry. You can't even have an evolutionary process unless all these things are first in place. Biological evolution presupposes all of those things. In some ways, I would say even if evolution were true, and that's a separate conversation, that only gets somebody really this far unexplained. So you agree with that?

Yeah. Totally agree. Interesting. this far unexplained. So you agree with that? Yeah, totally agree. I think when we're talking about the apparent fine tuning of our universe, I think there are some interesting responses to fine tuning arguments. I have a friend who wrote like a philosophy thesis about, and I'm going to butcher it and I feel so bad. He made the argument that from the Christian point of view, if you as a Christian believe that, you already believe in non-physical life if you believe in angels and demons and stuff like that. So his argument is that like the universe doesn't need to be fine-tuned in any way for life to

exist it can exist it can exist in any number of different ways um so that's that's that's a quirky response i don't know why i brought that one up first because that's the weirdest one but uh i mean i'm i'm sure you're too too fine-tuning right right so and i think i i mean i think the response would be that you can't have life of any kind, even basic chemistry and physics, if there are not these laws that are set within the parameters that they are. Well, do you think angels are alive? I do think angels are alive. So that is life. Okay.

So I mean life in our physical universe. Angels are spirits, of course. So you're right, they're not bound by laws of physics. That's a fair point. But yes, there are some responses to, like there's the many worlds interpretation that all, you know, that- Of course.

Yeah, like multiverse type stuff, which I don't know. I don't know how compelling that is to me. You've looked at all these arguments, and I love that you're going deep and reading all these folks and reading Swinburne. Because I ask myself this question. Sometimes I ask myself, am I overanalyzing certain things and not just seeing certain intuitions and truths that are there. Because you seem to have certain intuitions that there's objective beauty in the world, arguably, or is that not an intuition that you have?

I've thought a little bit about objective beauty, but not as much about, or not about as much of that as I have about morality. I've thought about morality a lot. Okay. So let me, let me come back to morality. But the point being, it seems like you have certain intuitions that lean more theistically than the opposite direction. Some, yeah. Some, so really like 60-40, or it's hard to just quantify. I don't know. my intuitions that maybe lean theist, I have a whole other set of objections once we come to Christianity, like a way larger set. And so I sort of have questions about, I tend to think that it is possible that there is something like God that exists, but that it's very – but that whatever that is is so different from what we're used to thinking about as far as like theism.

Because the theisms that we're used to encountering are various forms of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and then there's polytheism, which I actually think it's overlooked. Shout out to my polytheist friends. But so in these terms that we've inherited from the traditions that exist already in the world, whether we're raising them or convert into them. And so I wonder if there's options. Now, sometimes some of these lines are drawn for good reason, right? I think Swinburne actually makes a pretty good argument for a personal God. But I also, you know, Philip Goff, who I mentioned earlier, he defends panpsychism. He sort of holds this view of a limited God. He doesn't consider himself a Christian, I don't think, or even a theist exactly.

But I think he would agree that there's, you know, the thing he always says is that like, because he does think that fine tuning arguments hold weight. Okay. But he also thinks that the problem of evil is a really big problem. And so he says, what can account for both of these? And so his view is that a limited God or a sort of impersonal God could account for both of those things. And I think that's an interesting position to stake out. Let me shift gears. How many friends from when you were a public Christian are still your friends now? You don't have to throw anybody under the bus.

You don't have to name them in particular. But talk about now, because it's basically been three years, right? Yeah. I don't think I lost as many friends as I could have. I think I've been thinking about that a lot. Like most of my closest friends are all still my closest friends. And I would say the majority of them are Christian. But I realized that I think I had already surrounded myself with people who even if they were Christian they they were the kinds of people that would be open-minded and supportive of of someone going on the kind of journey that I that I went on. So, I mean, I have conversations. And again, I don't want to name

people because I don't want to out their positions, but I had multiple people... When I wrote that Instagram post, I had multiple well-known musicians that I'm friends with call me and say like, hey, are you okay? I'm actually not worried because I'm a universalist. In Christian music, there's a lot more people that hold to universalism than is known, I think, because I actually don't feel like they can say it because it'll be viewed as like a heterodox view. Now, by universalism, Christianity is true, but all will be saved through Jesus in some fashion. Not pluralism, but universalism.

Not like, not Christian, what, inclusivism? Is that the word? Yeah. Yeah. So universalism in the sense that they believed all will be saved, that in the end, God saves all. There's different ways to interpret that. Sure. There definitely is. But I had multiple people say like, hey, I'm not like worried about your soul or anything because I think God is in control. And I think I'm not like worried about you going to hell or anything.

But like, are you okay right now? Like I care about you here and now. That's pretty cool. They reached out to you and have shown care that way. And I realized that the people that I was already friends with, like, I think I was already unlikely to be close to people who were the more aggressive Bible thumper type. You know what I mean? I was probably just already not vibing with those folks. And so, so most of the people that, that I was close to, I mean, have, have, have, are still my friends and we're, we're still close. I mean, I think with some relationships, there's a, Over time, a feeling of distance has grown a little bit,

which is sad, but also natural. We might have less in common. I don't go to church. I don't... Every once in a while when I have gone to church over the last couple of years, it's been a really wild experience. Because I'm just like, oh, right. There's like so many things I forgot about. I'm like, oh yeah, this is a thing. But I also think, I don't, I think I have friends for whom their faith is an important part of their lives

in a way that I can make sense of. And I can go like, hey, that's a valuable thing in your life, partially because of community, partially because of ritual. I don't literally believe that some of that stuff is true, but I'm watching the effect that it has in your life. And I wouldn't want to push you to remove that from your life, especially knowing what the last three years has looked like for me. And so I'm a little softer on some of that stuff where I go like, I think my favorite way of wording it, this is a Michael Gungor quote. He said, yeah, I don't want to yuck someone else's yum. That's interesting. And so I'm a little bit taking that approach when it comes to religious views these days. Like, obviously, I think there's a time and a place to call out things that I think are harmful. And I think on both, not both, but like in many directions, people sometimes will do that. And I think sometimes that's called for, but when possible, I want to, I want to encourage people, the people that are in my life, I want

to encourage them and support them to, to live the way that they feel like they want to live. And for a lot of the friends that I have, that means some sort of Christian practice and community. Okay, so I promise the apologist in me will not even try to respond, but I'm curious what you would say are the top objections to Christianity. I know early on it was a problem of evil and the hiddenness of God. Yeah, I think those are still- Just list some of the top ones that would be hang-ups for you that if you some kind of theistic worldview doesn't incline you towards sure sure okay so i'll try to not be long here just give me the top few okay yeah you know so i still think problem of evil is a

problem i i think that the i do think it's possible that some amount of discomfort is necessary for a good life. Like I wonder, like the pleasure machine that, like the most people, if they could choose between having their brain hooked up to a pleasure machine that they just had pleasure all the time or living some sort of real life would choose the real life. It's called the matrix. Take the red pill, baby. So I do think there is some level of discomfort, like overcoming challenges,

like the whole working out in the gym metaphor. I actually think that holds some weight. I do also think there is some suffering in our reality that I just cannot look at it and not say that it's gratuitous. Gratuitous evil. Okay. And so to me, I just think there's absolutely gratuitous evil in the world. And that is surprising on the hypothesis of an omni-God, right? Got it. So I would use that phrasing.

It's surprising. It's not like you can't explain it. That's fair. But I, so I think problem of evil is one. I do think divine hiddenness is another. Okay. Which is kind of the flip side of evil. Yeah.

It's like if God is real and is personal and wants a relationship with me and I'm open to it, which I do feel like I am, I wonder why God remains so hidden. So the problem of non-resistant non-believers, I think as Schellenberger puts it. So I think that's a real problem. Again, it's not like I know that like you and other Christian theologians and philosophers have ways of addressing these things. Sure. But these are still ones that... Yeah, that's all I'm asking for is what you're...

So those are a few. And then I think a lot... I have a lot of questions about the Bible. Okay. I know we disagree on this point, but I think it's just so apparent that there's inconsistencies and problems. And it comes back to, for me, everything that we learn about God in the Bible, we learn because somebody wrote it down, right? Okay.

And how do I say this without just throwing anyone under the bus? I have learned from experience to be very cautious about people who speak for God. In our day and age, if someone says, God told me this. I agree with that. I've learned from experience that those people are often not trustworthy. Okay. And so I wonder why pushing that back a couple thousand years would make them more trustworthy. Okay. Right? And I know there are ways of addressing that objection too.

But so that's one for me where it's like, I don't know anything about God. Okay. I don't know anything about the Christian God except from what I've learned from other people. Because I've never experienced some sort of special revelation from God. I would think most Christians wouldn't claim to have, you know, to have like special revelation. God revealed his nature to me, you know, personally. So, you know, so that's an objection. I also think geography is an interesting objection. So now this only matters if you believe in some sort of eternal punishment.

So if you believe that believing in Jesus or not believing in Jesus has eternal consequences, then there's a problem with the fact that, I mean, I think there's a problem with the fact that if you are born into a certain country, you are less likely to be a Christian and believe in Jesus. And so it seems to me that there's something weird there where like, you can't control what country you're born into. So say if you're born into a Muslim country, you're statistically much more likely to be Muslim than Christian. And I get that you could make the argument that like, well, they may have the opportunity to encounter the story of Jesus at some point. But I just think the forces of culture are so strong

that like, it seems unfair to me that if there's a Muslim born in a Muslim country, or if there's someone born in a Muslim country and if they choose that path, because it's the path that everyone around them is choosing, that they would be condemned to some sort of eternal punishment. That seems... The problem of the un-evangelized. Sure, sure. Yeah. Like that seems like a problem. So evil, hiddenness, questions about the Bible, evangelize. Sounds like these are similar to the same objections in some ways you stated in your Instagram post. Yeah. But more sophisticated in some ways.

I think I've thought a lot more about them. I think one of the biggest areas where my views have changed is morality. Okay. is morality. I think that when I sort of departed Christianity, I sort of bought into the knee-jerk reaction that if God's not real, that morality is not objective. Because I think a lot of people... I mean, I sort of had... I don't think I consciously had this view, but I guess I subconsciously had the view that morality is rooted in God's commands or nature or something like that. Some version of divine command theory, but it's not like I knew what that was. And so without that, it's like, oh, well, morality is subjective. And I found that like that had some pretty troubling conclusions.

Okay. So you believe in objective moral values and duties without God. I do. But it took a while to get me there. Interesting. Very interesting. So I would consider myself a moral realist. I think moral truths are objective.

Okay. So last question. I know you've thought about this. What would it take for you to say, you know what? I am a Christian. And is your answer in any way biased from your charismatic background? What a good question. Expecting some charismatic thing.

Yeah. What do you think? Well, there'd be some pretty big hurdles. Okay. But I have thought about that. I have wondered, okay, so is there a part of me that's resistant to Christianity because for,

for, for not non rational, not rational reasons. Am I emotionally resistant? And I think I have to concede that like, I'm probably part of me is. I think it would be a bit dishonest to think that there's nothing. Like, oh, no, I'd be totally fine.

So I'm sure there's some truth to that. But I try to mitigate it as much as I can. That's all you can do. And go like, okay, like I have this intuition that Christianity is not true. I should probe that intuition and I should be willing to amend it. And honestly, part of the way that I do that, because I've thought about this, I've thought about if I were to be a Christian again, what's the version of Christianity or the stream of Christianity that I would find the most tolerable?

Like in the state that I'm at right now. And there are things about Catholicism that I think are really, really interesting. And I like they sort of deal with some of my beefs on scripture by like not holding to sola scriptura. Now, I think the succession of the pope and the leadership of the Catholic, I think that has its own problems. And I have gripes with that, too. But I don't know. my emotional resistance by cultivating views on different streams of Christianity that I might find more appealing. So like I have a friend who's one of the leaders in the Episcopalian church in San Diego.

And he's awesome. And they do all kinds of great work in their community. They're LGBTQ plus affirming, which I feel like is really important to me. And so there are streams of Christianity. Now, we don't need to get into the progressive Christian versus debate. I think there are versions of Christianity that exist that I could get on board with. It just wouldn't be where I came from, for sure. You know what's interesting is my co-author John Marriott has written five books on either

deconversion or deconstruction. So about six, seven years, interviews and studied this. And he said when people leave and they come back, it's almost always to within a different stream of Christianity. Makes total sense for so many reasons. John, literally, I could ask you questions until we fainted or

fell asleep or something like that. I can't tell you how much I appreciate how seriously you think about these questions, your willingness to let me just kind of push and pull. No, please. I love it. Your openness on this. Really enjoy it. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. We need to do this again sooner rather than later. That's for sure.

Sure. Thanks for having me. It's a blast to talk about this kind of stuff. And I don't always get the chance to do it in person. Well, you're a nerd like me. I enjoy it too. More so with people who disagree with me than people who agree with me often. Especially who are thoughtful. Well, usually if you're talking, you drill things down enough, you can find a disagreement with almost anybody. That's true. And you can certainly find agreement with almost everybody too. And something to learn.

Which you do as well. Hey, those of you watching, make sure you subscribe. This is brought to you by Biola Apologetics. We'd love to have you come study with me, not only defending the faith, but even just learning how to just engage people thoughtfully as hopefully we did today. How to have conversations with people

who see the world differently. So make sure you subscribe and think about joining me at Biola. We'd love to have you in class in our master's program. John, let's do it again, buddy. Yeah, thanks, man.