Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Tanya Luhrmann: The Experience Is Real. But Is God?

Starting point is 00:00:00 The more lovable God gets, there is a sense in which the more unbelievable God gets. But is God real? Is real and feels real are two different phenomena. This is Tanya Lerman, professor of anthropology at Stanford. Much of her work is about how people come to experience God as real. People of faiths are constantly berating themselves for not believing more deeply. I think they're an awful lot of atheists. and churches and temples.

Starting point is 00:00:31 On this channel, I, Kirchei Mungle, interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. It's kind of the in-between area, real but not real. That's where God lives. It turns out, people don't often practice religion because God already feels completely real to them. Religious practice is partly what makes God come to feel real.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Importantly, the professor's not arguing that God is therefore imaginary or non-existent. Her question is purely anthropological. Regardless of whether God objectively exists, how does an invisible God become experientially real to us? Professor, when someone says that a Sam Harris or a Dawkins type hasn't found God because they're not open to God, there needs to be some element of sincerity there,

Starting point is 00:01:22 what do you make of claims like that? What's the evidence for that and what's the counter evidence? So what I know is that there are, there's the way somebody believes propositionally, their intellectual commitment to this, the idea that there is a spirit or a God or a higher being, and then their experiences. And those are related, but they're not the same thing. Sometimes when people have a vivid experience, of what they come to call God, that changes the way they think about belief. It can be terribly,

Starting point is 00:02:03 terribly powerful. So Augustine hears God speak, and Augustine's been wanting to be a Christian, trying to be a Christian, struggling with himself. But the fact that he heard God speak enabled him to kind of somehow break through his hesitations and commit. So that really happens for people. And when people are people of faith, those experiences are terribly, terribly important. And when people learn to pay attention to their experience or when they pray or when they do the things at a church or a temple or a shul invites them to do, they're more likely to have those experiences. If they're subtle experiences sometimes. So if somebody is very clear that they don't believe, don't want to believe,

Starting point is 00:03:00 have no commitments to, it's sometimes harder for them to have those experiences. But it's also true that you can have a vivid experience. You can hear a voice in the absence of a speaker. You can feel a sense of presence. You could feel an amazing sense of joy, break over the sky. and the person can say, oh, that's really interesting.

Starting point is 00:03:29 That's something that happened in my body. It doesn't change my belief commitment. So it's a complicated relationship, the experience of God and the commitment, the propositional commitment to God. So the short answer is that I don't know what would happen if Sam Harris heard a voice called out to him and told him that

Starting point is 00:03:55 God was speaking. What is it about Augustine and people like him who say that they want to believe? So in this case, he wants to become a Christian. But even in that phrase implies he's not a Christian, which implies he doesn't believe. So what precisely is going on?

Starting point is 00:04:12 There is something that you don't think is the case, but then you want it to be the case. But why does he want it to be the case? Why does he want to believe? So many, many people these days are what you would call seekers or people. Sometimes they call themselves spiritual but not religious. So that's a category that's used in the states. And now there's a floating number of 22, 28% of Americans who would identify themselves in that category. Those tend to be people who want more, but they don't really believe stuff. Or they don't believe. They don't, the traditional faiths are not for them. They don't believe whatever the traditional faiths tell them they want, they should be believing. So they don't believe in an omnipotent God or they don't believe in, you know, a God who became human.

Starting point is 00:05:08 Or they, you know, they don't want that stuff. But they want more. So why do they want more? Well, they often they want a sense of meaning. They want the world to be more interesting than just being material. They have a vivid sense that, you know, really there must be more to the world. So William James used this lovely phrase. He said, look, you know, all these different religions, they have theologies, they have words,

Starting point is 00:05:41 they describe stuff. Let's call those overbeliefs. Those are ideas people have about something. that's bigger than the world. I'm just going to call it, he said, the more. I know that there's more than the material world. And I don't know how to make sense of that, but many of us feel that. And he says, I'm committed to that. And I think many people who are spiritual but not religious, they have a sense that there's something more, that there is, that somehow there's more coincidence that's not coincidental or there's more purpose that's beyond random molecular movement,

Starting point is 00:06:26 there's something that is more than merely material, but they don't quite know how to put it together. And so they find themselves reading novels, buying, you know, buying music, doing yoga, buying crystals. They're trying to find something that will help them put a frame that will help them feel both more grounded in a material world and also more purpose-driven themselves. And I think that's a really basic part of what it is to be human, to feel, and people want to feel like they have a purpose. and for many people that sense of purpose is intertwined

Starting point is 00:07:20 with a sense that there's more to the material world than just, you know, bouncing molecules. Yeah, I think maybe this resonates with you. Most people who watch this show, they want there to be something real behind the phenomenon of God if they're going to believe in God, that it can't just be someone else saying

Starting point is 00:07:40 there are pragmatic benefits when you join a religious institution state. It's not enough to know, say, this pill is good for you. You need to know there's some reality behind the pill that the pill points to. Most intellectuals, I find, would rather take the chances at a more detrimental life than a peer imbecilic to their colleagues. Well, I think that in many social worlds for intellectuals, belief in God is kind of frowned upon. It's kind of stigmatized. and there's some good reasons for that

Starting point is 00:08:17 in that some of these claims about God are kind of hard to wrap your mind around I mean the idea that say for a Christian that a human was really the son of God and born of a virgin and ascended it to heaven there's that piece of it what Bill of Mayor once called the Talking Snake like who believes that snakes talk Yes, it's quite odd. Yeah, there's a snake that's talking. That's weird.

Starting point is 00:08:46 But the other thing is that in the modern world, life is not so precarious. I mean, I know it's precarious in many ways, but many people have, they're not starving. They're housed, many are not. But I mean, the audience that I'm talking about, they tend to be middle class, They tend to be housed.

Starting point is 00:09:12 They tend to be relatively good hospital care compared to earlier centuries. God is often presented not as a threat. Believe this or you're going to suffer. But instead, God is presented as a benefit. God really, really loves you. And if you believe in God, everything's going to go right. and many people find it hard to wrap their mind around that kind of impossible promise. Anyway, so that's, it's not surprising to me that many modern people struggle with the idea of a god.

Starting point is 00:09:57 I mean, Christianity in the largest religion in North America has really shifted since the 50s to to what you might call a buyer's market. So it's perfectly acceptable since like 195, 1960, to be a good, upstanding citizen and not to be a Christian, not to be a believer at all. And so the churches that have grown up in that social condition

Starting point is 00:10:28 often present God as very, as a great big teddy bear, loving, powerful, present, you know, you will be happy if you accept God. And so the more lovable God gets, there is a sense in which the more unbelievable God gets. Does that make sense? So the more the believer or the would-be or the quasi- or their pre-believer is told, come to God, God will love you, and God will do anything for you. the easier it is to feel skeptical about that kind of claim.

Starting point is 00:11:11 I should say, for the new believer who becomes a believer, it's kind of a wonderful experience for that person. But for the person, for the spiritual but not religious world, that can feel like it's not plausible. And so there are, you know, and that may be one of the reasons why the category of spiritual, but not religious, has been growing for the last three decades. And that's a pretty big percentage.

Starting point is 00:11:44 I don't know what the numbers are in Canada. I think Canada may be more irreligious even than the United States. But in the United States, certainly, I don't know what the numbers currently are, but it's been the last time I checked, it was 28% of Americans, which is a very large percentage of the country. And I think it represents the fact that people sort of find some of the claims of religion hard to believe. But then they can, as a result of that, they can feel more adrift, they can feel less purpose-driven, they can feel more lonely. one of the things that I've seen as an anthropologist

Starting point is 00:12:31 is that when people enter the social world of the church and they start doing what the church invites them to do God actually comes to feel like a social relationship, like a person among people. And we know that people become less lonely, they become feel more loved.

Starting point is 00:12:52 I mean, there are a lot of positive consequences from that. Interestingly, the spiritual but not religious people, even though you mentioned that the more teddy bear like God becomes less believable, they tend to, in my experience, tend to believe something like the ground of being, this world is synonymous with love. What does that mean? I mean, it's not precisely the claim that behind quarks is love. I mean, sometimes it may be. But why do you think that's more palatable? Well, part because it doesn't come. with a clear theology. So it doesn't, because it doesn't make sense, it's less open to doubt.

Starting point is 00:13:37 So many religions will present a theology, an organized body of knowledge about how the world works and where it came from and why it was created and with what intent it was created and who's doing the creating and what that being is like and the rules you need to follow and the spiritual but not religious world doesn't have that and so it's both less satisfying and less unbelievable as it were it's a mystery and it's you know mysteries are mysterious you mentioned yoga yoga and crystals crystals i i understand are associated but yoga yeah is from my experience, extremely irreligious. It's about, I mean, I know that the practice that it's pulled from the East is more religious,

Starting point is 00:14:31 but it's more about stretching here. I mean, we do it at the Good Life here in Toronto, which is a gym. They don't talk about large questions. You know, it really depends. It really depends on your yoga teacher. There are a lot of different ways of doing this. And I should say the spiritual but not religious world is a really heterogeneous world. I mean, there are people who might fall into that category and really don't have any deep yearnings or needs or they don't want more.

Starting point is 00:14:58 But there are a bunch of people who want to have a change in their more emotional experience when they go to yoga, want to feel. You know, some yoga teachers will talk about the energy that moves through you and organizing the energy and directing the energy and being healed by the universe and drawing in the higher power. and, you know, and there's some of that gets, is a discourse that people will use. Yes, I have experienced that as well, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I just mentioned a broad term called the East. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:33 I know that one shouldn't say that, and this one's going to be so watered down and say it's Abraham versus the Darmic. I mean, okay, whatever. But the New Age has some influence on our culture, our being our Western cultures, emphasis on spiritual over institutions, spiritual but not religious. Can you spell that out?

Starting point is 00:15:52 Have you studied that much? And is it causative or is it just correlationally? I think that the New Age emerged as general as there was a, in response to the great social upheaval that was the 1960s. and so there was a shift away from traditional faiths and a tolerance of other ways of thinking about the faith. I mean, you know, the Beatles found Maharashti Mahesh Yogi, and suddenly Hinduism became cool.

Starting point is 00:16:28 And there was a mish-mash of ideas that emerged that came to be called the New Age, which tended to be, tended to include the ideas that the material world, is not all that there is, that there is something like power or energy or spirit that is almost layered into the world, that there is, you know, if you wanted to be, you could call this neoplatonic, but that might be a little bit of a stretch. But there's this idea that there's a

Starting point is 00:17:07 material world and then there are often different layers of degrees of substantialness until you get up to a domain which has no materiality and is entirely spirit and often different ideas about crystals for example is that like the crystal will pull in higher energy sometimes people talk about vibrations. That's a word that floats around these different manifestations of alternative spiritualities. The crystal will pull in certain kinds of vibrations from different kind of layer cake, different points in the layer cake. They'll concentrate those vibrations and they'll send them out as healing energy to the people who use them. So that's a new agey kind of idea. And the new age sort of allowed there to be different kinds of teachers and different kinds, sometimes they were

Starting point is 00:18:05 called masters. And sometimes these were Eastern inflected practices. So you'd have a nice Jewish girl from San Diego who became called the goddess Patini or something, and she would, you know, she would run this group. And I'm thinking of a group called The Miracle of Love where a woman a non-Hindu woman became the leader of a group and the group had many teachings and many practices and there was a kind of a mixture between the language of psychotherapy. You come to the group, you do these practices, you will feel better, and the language of spirituality in which there are also these energies that are coming in and flowing in from the heavens and moving through kind of concentrated in the leader of the group, but then slowing out to her followers.

Starting point is 00:19:03 And then people would kind of live together in houses and they would try to, you know, learn from each other. And there was a lot of talk about developing your purpose and developing your, your stance. But there are a lot of different things that come under the new age. The call service system is messed up on two ends. One is the person answering who's stuck with the same relic of older technology that you're also stuck with, and then the next is the company that's behind them. That's where 11 agents come in. 11 agents is a voice and chat agent that listens, understands, and resolves. It looks up your account, processes requests, and then hands it off to an actual person when one is needed. It's made by 11 Labs, whose voice models run in over 70 languages,

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Starting point is 00:20:39 And there are studies, which I'm just going to make up, but are somehow paraphrasing a slew of studies, I'm shirt. Something like, okay, get someone to meditate in this room with a crystal that they, you tell them there's a crystal from Tibet, and then they feel the energy, and then you do the same for another set of people, but then you tell that other set, you realize, oh, half of them were given, this is plastic, it's from Proctor and Gamble, it's the people who make Colgate, and they still felt the energy. Yeah, I don't have a question there, but just tell me your thoughts. Tell me your thoughts when you hear that. As an anthropologist, I don't take a stance. I don't have a point of view about whether the energy is real or whether God is real.

Starting point is 00:21:21 I don't think of that as my job. I look at what people do and how that is shaped by society and how what they do changes them. So placebo effect is a real effect. And if you can harness the placebo effect for yourself, you're much better off than if you don't. I mean, you know, you, you know, you sprain your ankle, if you really believe that this crystal is going to improve the behavior of your ankle, probably will. I mean, the placebo effect is a real scientific effect. So people who believe that this sugar pill is efficacious will feel less pain, recover more quickly, respond better to the medical therapy, that's a real thing.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Hypnosis is a real thing. So what's exactly what's going on in hypnosis? There are hundreds of scientists who debate this. But if you can, there is a capacity that humans have for concentration, focus, attention. and as people focus their attention, they're on a particular thing, their awareness of the broader ambient world diminishes, their experience of time changes,

Starting point is 00:22:52 they feel that what they experience in that state starts to feel more real, and it changes them. Prayer practice. prayer, so scientifically, we know that people who go to church are, they live, I mean, according to one study, two, three years longer than people who don't. Right. So contrary to what people may think, where they hear, okay, but if you're just going to pray, and if you're going to believe some crystal heals, if you're going to believe this and that, then that's going to prevent you

Starting point is 00:23:28 from efficacious treatments. No, no, they go together. I mean, they will improve, your medical treatment. But there are other things. You know the teddy bear that you loved when you were a kid? Did you have a teddy bear? Yes, and my sister, she did something to it, and one of the eyes came out. And then I got so upset.

Starting point is 00:23:53 I got so upset that I kept throwing it against the wall when I was four or five years old. And then I took a red marker, and I drew red in its eye that was missing to make her feel mad. But yeah, I had a teddy bear when I was a kid. And so that teddy bear really, really mattered to you. And you knew that that teddy bear wasn't alive,

Starting point is 00:24:16 but you also kind of felt that it was alive. It was, it's this state, this in-between state, this liminal state. And that state can be incredibly powerful and positive for people. That's where God lives. I mean, a lot of people who are people of faith, they have all sorts of complicated ideas about whether God is real. But they know that God is different from, you know, a table.

Starting point is 00:24:43 But there's a way in which, you know, they can relate to God as if God has the emotional vividness of a teddy bear. And that can be incredibly comforting for people. It can be comforting, it became soothing. You can tell your teddy bear things. You can't say to anyone else. you could be comforted by your teddy bear because you could actually hold that bear. You know, you knew that it was just a like stuffed collection of stuff bag of cloth.

Starting point is 00:25:14 But if your parents left it behind at the picnic table, they'd have to drive back and get that bear. Yes. Because it mattered so much. So there's so human capacity. Sometimes I call this the liminal area of human experiencing. It's kind of the in-between area. real but not real. And people can use that domain to improve their health,

Starting point is 00:25:43 to it's a source of creativity, it's a source of companionship, it's a source of belief and hope. And when your teddy bear made you feel that good things were possible, it was going to be okay. you had your teddy bear, even though you kind of knew that there might be problems,

Starting point is 00:26:07 that maybe your mom was not going to come back, but you had your teddy bear. And there's something really powerful about that in-between capacity. It's why play can be so powerful for people as well. So they know that they're playing, but they are also sort of somehow changing who they are while they're playing.

Starting point is 00:26:37 They're remaking the world. What is it about us modern people that for many of many modern people, I don't want to speak for everyone, but for many modern people, it's not enough for it to be fructuous and powerful. There has to be something else, something like scientific truth, somehow took precedent over fructuous and powerful. Even this account that you're giving right now, It's a convincing account, and much like you mentioned, Augustine, with, please, I would like to become Christian.

Starting point is 00:27:06 I imagine it's not exactly the same. The reasons you're giving me may be different than the reasons Augustine had for wanting to believe in Christianity. It's more an account for modern people. What is it about us that changed? Well, we became a much more secular society. So that's been a change that's in North America, that's been in Europe. that's been growing since the 19th century. Lots of different reasons for that. Often people will say, well, you know, science became more powerful. Technology was a kind of proof of concept of the power of science.

Starting point is 00:27:45 The other thing that was going on that people sometimes don't pay attention to is that these Christian worlds became very aware of other ways of doing religion. So Protestants became aware of Catholics, for example. And then they became aware of Jews. And then it became a... There's a colonialism

Starting point is 00:28:05 introduced people to introduce Westerners to the religious sophistication of other countries. So at the end of the 19th century, there were these books called The Sacred Books of the East, in which you could see that that phase like Hinduism and Buddhism and Jainism were full of situations.

Starting point is 00:28:29 sophisticated theologies, it's very hard to have the point of view that those people have religions that are the product of culture, but your religion is true. So if a young person of faith goes to college, often the class that is most disturbing to that person's faith is not their biology class. It's not ideas about evolution. It's religious studies where they see that other people have ways of of thinking about God that are quite sophisticated, but are very different from their own. And so then it becomes hard to kind of hold on to your own views as being correct, but those Hindu ideas or those Buddhist ideas as being somehow just fiction. And so a lot of things happened at the end of the 19th century that changed the ways that Westerners thought about faith.

Starting point is 00:29:27 and secularism has been, you know, it's been rising and falling, and it's a complicated story, but we live right now, I mean, one of your great Toronto professors, Charles Taylor, has written these monumental books talking about the modern world as a secular age. And secularism carries with a doubt that you don't, You don't accept what other people tell you. You face because becomes something that people are skeptical about. And so that's been a kind of condition of the modern world. And instead, you know, there are some wonderful things about that,

Starting point is 00:30:18 and there are some costly things as well. Can you rationally have both of these coexisting in your mind that one, my religious institution, let's forget about the spiritual, but not religious. Let's say, one wants to belong to a religious institution, say Eastern Orthodox, Christianity, or what have you, that that one is correct, but at the same time the others are somehow correct, even though mine is also saying that they're not correct. So I need to hold that they're not foolish for their beliefs, but I am ultimately correct. Have you encountered that? So that's one of the big struggles of modern faith commitments.

Starting point is 00:31:02 There's certainly many people in many kinds of faiths who have a very clear sense that their faith is correct and that other faiths are wrong. So we would, you know, we might call them right wing or conservative Christians, Muslims, Jews. That's certainly there are many, many people like that. are also many people who have a more ecumenical perspective who want to embrace people of other phase and they do that in many in different ways. They say, well, okay. So, you know, we all come to God through our local communities. God is a mystery. Many of this more ecumenical folk will say that God is one, but faith traditions all approach the one from different perspectives. And so that kind of person would be, you know, would be very comfortable with the idea that,

Starting point is 00:32:10 you know, there's just a lot of stuff between me, myself, and this mysterious one. And so I come to the one through the culture of my understanding. So that's one way that people do that. I want to read to you a quote from Richard Feynman, which I don't think many people are aware of, and I think they should be. I want to know what you think. This is called the heritages of Western civilization.

Starting point is 00:32:43 Western civilization seems to me to stand on two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure, the adventure into the unknown, an unknown, which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored, and the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics, the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent, but logic is not all. One needs heart to follow an idea. If people are going to go back to religion, where are they going to go back to, or what are they going to go back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who

Starting point is 00:33:24 doubts God more, one who disbelieves in God? Is the modern church a place to give comfort and encouragement to the value of such doubts? How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of Western civilization so that they may stand in full vigor, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time. So that's basically the anxiety of somebody who's spiritual, spiritual but not religious. They want something. It's kind of hard to commit to anything in particular.

Starting point is 00:33:56 And so that is a great dilemma of our time. And is why so many people struggle. So some people, in response to that, kind of join the most conservative church they can find. And then they say, okay, well, I'm going to commit myself to this Orthodox Judaism. I'm just going to commit myself, and I'm going to find meaning in the social world of the shul. And that can be very satisfying. Or I'm going to become a, I don't believe a darn thing about Mormonism, but I really like the community.

Starting point is 00:34:37 I'm going to commit myself. I'm going to follow these rules. and I'm going to find comfort in these rules. You know, it's, you know, I think that within any church community, using the word church loosely, you find a really broad array of ideas about the ultimate nature of God. I think there are an awful lot of atheists and churches and temples and shules. I think there are an awful lot of people who treat God as a metaphor. There are also a lot of people who treat God as, you know,

Starting point is 00:35:20 as an invisible person who can show up and talk to you. I think that's all true. So what is it then that defines God? What is this core that overlaps between all of these disparate accounts that seemingly contradict, but yet we use the same word. there must be some shared quality. So I'm not a theologian. People often use the word God to describe something that is mind-like,

Starting point is 00:35:58 that is something that has the capacity to think, often as a source of good, as the emblematic source of all good, and as the source of great power. So, I don't know if you remember this book in the Hebrew Bible called Job. And so, and the story that the book tells, Job is the perfect man and a very, very devout and pious man. And he is prospered under God's care. And he has many flocks. He has a lot of land.

Starting point is 00:36:37 He's got a lot of children. He has got a loving wife And he's got many servants or slaves Don't remember how the Bible words that But in any effect he has many He has many servants And

Starting point is 00:36:53 God is Satan Trump comes along to God And Satan says You know Joe only loves you because he gives him This stuff If you took away his stuff he would curse you And so God says, well, agrees to a bet. Let's see. And Satan removes piece by piece all these features of Job's

Starting point is 00:37:22 life. And so I'll tell Job is like alone and scratching at his boils with potchirts. I think he's still got his wife. And then Job sort of does curse God. And he demands that God come and explain. what happened. And the point to the story that I think is so interesting is that God shows up to Job, and he behaves kind of like a schoolyard bully. And he says, where were you when I made the earth? You know, I can, I created the Leviathan. I created the stars. And he just sort of goes on. And he doesn't explain anything to Job. But when God goes, away, Job says, I have seen your power and I am content. And what the text seems to be saying is that God is mysterious. God is powerful. And if we understood how powerful God was, we would be content.

Starting point is 00:38:33 So, I mean, that's one reason why I think that people use the word God for, you know, power, goodness, something like a mind or an intention. People have a lot of points of view about that question. Plenty of people use nicotine pouches as a pre-workout. Ultra, on the other hand, makes the opposite case. They're saying, look at the mechanism itself. Nicotine is a vassal constrictor. It narrows your blood vessels. It restricts oxygen delivery to muscles. It raises cortisol. It pushes your heart rate and blood pressure up. That works against the pump that you're training for.

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Starting point is 00:40:30 than a magazine. Actually, I subscribe to the Economist's annual subscription. Their science and AI coverage is among the best that I've found anywhere. And I say that as someone who reads plenty of it, they even covered how dark energy may be weakening with time. If that holds up, it completely changes our understanding of the universe's fate. Those are exactly the kinds of questions that we explore every week on this channel. Now, the Economist is, of course, known for global affairs, both political and economic reporting. Interestingly and flatteringly, Toe is one of the only podcast that the Economist partners with. So as a Toll listener, you get their exclusive sale, 35% off the annual subscription. This is not a deal they have just anywhere. Head to Economist.com

Starting point is 00:41:11 slash T-O-E to subscribe. That's Economist.com slash tow for 35% off. Many of the modern new atheist types like to characterize people who are religious as without doubts or without a productive amount of doubts. But if you read even the Psalms and even Job's, Job, it's clear that Christians throughout the centuries and even Jewish leaders debate themselves about the character of God, the existence of God, and this is all within the religion. Yes, and in fact, people who are people of faiths are constantly berating themselves for not believing more deeply. Right, right. Constantly. So even people who would come out as complete, you know, 100% believers on some kind of social science survey, you know, they will berate themselves for not believing, not thinking about God when they're washing the dishes or, you know, they go to church, they resolve to be more like Jesus.

Starting point is 00:42:14 They come out and they yell at their kids in the car. And then they feel like, what happened to me? Why don't I have enough faith? I mean, I've heard people who stood up at, you know, people who stand up at the front of the church and say, you know, I've just lost my job. I wish I had enough faith to really believe that God will get me a better job. Bad things happened. Good, good people. It's one of the most moving things. One of my anthropological forays was with evangelical Christians, so people who were,

Starting point is 00:42:50 really committed to the idea that they wanted a back and forth relationship with God. And I remember being in a church that was full of young people. I was on the edge of a university. And one of the kind of pillars of the church, a young couple, was about to have a child, and their child died at eight months in the womb. And so the other members of the church were sometimes very foolish and talking to them, and they would say things like,

Starting point is 00:43:21 oh, I'm sure that God has a better child in mind for you. Just like a really not helpful thing to say to somebody. And I remember the couple themselves, they were numb because they were committed to their sense of God, to the realness of God, for want of a better term. But they also didn't know how to make sense of what had happened. I remember the husband saying to me, there's a point in the Gospels in which many townspeople are being kind of mean to Jesus and they leave him. And Jesus turns to the disciples and said, do you want to go to?

Starting point is 00:44:07 And I think this is Peter, he turns to him and said, Lord, where would we go? And so this young man said that to me, where would I go? and it's, you know, and so there's, that's also part of faith that, you know, you commit this way of being in the world, the sense that if we all committed, the world would be a safer, more just place, but bad things happen. And it's, and the human has to figure out how to manage. And the church can, and church, any faith tradition can also help with that, but it's, but it is part of the struggle of being a person of faith. To get a bit philosophical, there's someone named Tarski who when looking at the liar's paradox like this sentence is false,

Starting point is 00:44:58 how do you make sense of the truth of this? Because if you think it's true, it implies it's false, and false implies it's true. And then Tarski said, well, perhaps there are different levels of truth where one level is the sentence referring to itself, and another level is this, sorry, you can never have the sentence referring to itself. That's actually the way you get out of the problem, that there's a higher level that refers to the one below,

Starting point is 00:45:17 and then another one that refers to that one below. And then there's this infinite hierarchy truth. But let's forget about the infinity. What I want to know is, are there different kinds of belief such that that person that I asked earlier about how can you rationally coexist these two contradictions? Actually can because it's not the same sort of belief.

Starting point is 00:45:37 So belief right now that I have your book open is, let's call it an order one belief. I don't know what to call it, but it's not the same sort of belief that I often have as well when I'm thinking about faith and I don't have faith and I want to have faith and it's almost like it's a different sort of belief. Yeah, I think that's true.

Starting point is 00:45:54 Even call it the same word, belief implies it's the same thing but it's more like belief sub one versus belief sub two. I think that's a really wise observation. I think that humans often have different degrees of commitment to what they think is true. I mean, I think that teddy bear example is actually really important. because you know that the teddy bear isn't real, but it also kind of is real. And I think that people have, I sometimes think about these as different frames of commitment.

Starting point is 00:46:27 So there's something that I would call the faith frame. There's a way in which, you know, the way that you hold tables and chairs and rocks and birds and trees to exist. it's probably different from the way that you hold gods and ghosts and spirits to be real. And there are probably different kinds of commitments. Like it's not just God and trees. There's, you know, there's the real world of materiality

Starting point is 00:47:03 and then the world of spirit. It's probably even more complex than that. I mean, certainly emotionally, many of us have beliefs about our parents, which coexist with beliefs that are less pleasing to us about our parents. So we have come to some resolution of who our parents are or have been that helps us to make sense of having lived a decent and pretty. purposeful life. And we know that maybe our parents were, in some ways, had a different side to them. And that coexists in our own awareness. Or, so we manage our commitments to what we know and how we know and how we allow ourselves to know it in pretty complicated ways.

Starting point is 00:48:13 And I think that people who don't believe in God are in a sense more committed to the secular commitment than they are, you know, describing a true state of their mind. I want to understand that So to me secular means You don't It means something absent from God So maybe I have the wrong idea of what secular means

Starting point is 00:48:43 So when I hear you say The person who doesn't believe in God Is more committed to secularism So-and-so It just sounds like a tautology Like the person who doesn't believe is committed to no I think that I'm guessing that Sam Harris

Starting point is 00:48:56 May be more committed To not being religious than many people Who sit in a church pew are committed to God being real. Interesting. So for Sam Harris, or for other new atheists,

Starting point is 00:49:15 the Richard Dawkins, there's a pretty firm commitment to there being nothing other than the world because snakes don't talk. Whereas many people who are religious, I think they are doing more like, you know, holding on to a teddy bear. They know that there are ways in which these beliefs don't make sense,

Starting point is 00:49:38 but they also know that they do make sense. They'll say things like, it's all a mystery. They'll talk about the difference between their own understanding and how the world is. They have lots of different complicated ways of committing. I imagine Sam Harris or Dawkins would say, look, Professor, what you call a commitment, I call a conclusion based on evidence or lack of evidence, and that I'd be perfectly happy to believe in God if said evidence were in front of me. Now, the counter may be you just haven't had an experience of God, and then the counter to that counter may just be, well, experiences are misleading. So what from your studies converts someone?

Starting point is 00:50:26 You've talked about what changes someone from theism to secularism or atheism, which is namely going to a religious studies class and then encountering other foods at the buffet table. But what is it that tends to convert an atheist to theism other than say psychedelics? Or you can explore that if you like. So I don't have a good answer to that question. I do know that when people do religious practices or spiritual practices, they can come to have more vivid experiences that feel as if they are experiences of something that you might call spirit. And for some people, those experiences can be very, very powerful. They're not always powerful, but they can be.

Starting point is 00:51:18 I mean, people who, so I study, people who engage in spiritual disciplines and practices that, and often these practices involve attending to inner sensory experiences. So you're thinking, you're seeing, hearing, spelling with your mind's eye. and you are also in those practices representing an invisible other. And what I know is that the practice of paying attention in that way helps people to experience their inner, represent their thoughts, their inner world as more vivid and as more sensitive. sensory and that helps them to experience this imagined other as more present.

Starting point is 00:52:23 And they're also more likely to have experiences like hearing that other person talk or hearing that invisible person, seeing that invisible person, feeling that other person to be present, feeling the other person is spoken to them in their mind in their mind, in their mind. They have these moments in which they have experiences that are, it's easy to call non-natural, and those experiences can matter to people. Sometimes they're extremely mundane. It's not uncommon that people have an experience of hearing their mom call their name when they're drifting off to sleep. So it turns out that between sleep and awareness, that's the time in someone's life when they're most likely to have vivid experiences. But sometimes those experiences are really quite powerful.

Starting point is 00:53:27 So some people say, you know, God spoke to me as I was drifting off to sleep. And I decided to become a Christian. I decided that it was right to go to church. And sometimes, And so those, anyway, that's what I study. Now many people, I'm sure you get this question all the time. And then you have to say, this is not my job. So they'll say, yes, your book is called How God Becomes Real. And that's about saying that the experience of God is a real experience and becomes real to people. But lurking behind that, what many people want to know, I'm sure, is, but is God?

Starting point is 00:54:03 Is God real? And you say, that's not my job to answer such a question. Not my job. Why don't you talk about that? But Israel and feels real are two different phenomena. Israel is that you have a propositional commitment. I believe that this tree is in front of me. I believe in God.

Starting point is 00:54:25 Feels real is something more experiential. They're related because the more something feels real, the more you're likely to think that it is real. and that can, and that can, it's one reason people in faith communities pray. I mean, they think of them, they might say they're praying because this is what God asked me to do, but it's also true that you're more likely to feel that God is real if you are praying, that you will have a, you will have a sense that, you know, you are doing something with intention and purpose. What are the different kinds of prayer?

Starting point is 00:55:09 You mentioned relational prayer. So I think that in some there are kinds of prayer where people are doing rote recitation where the demand is just that you produce some words. I actually think that beyond that, there are two dominant forms of spiritual practice that are often attached to this rest.

Starting point is 00:55:36 One of them in the Christian tradition, I'll use these Christian words, but I think they're found in many, many faiths. One is apathetic, which is an attempt to kind of empty the mind, disattend to the world as it is, and train your attention away. And the other is cataphaatic, where you are filling your mind with certain kinds of images and thoughts. So in all traditions have versions of these kinds of faiths. So spinning, it's been in the New York Times recently, quarreling dervishes, dimension of Turkish-Sufi-style faith, where people try to spin in a circle and rhythmically often to some chanting. That's a kind of apathetic practice. you are seeking to rid yourself of all these distracting thoughts that you have.

Starting point is 00:56:39 And sometimes when somebody does something like that, mindfulness meditation is another version of that or it's kind of Zen Buddhism where you're trying to be very, very still, and you're trying to quiet the mind. And sometimes those experiences are, those practices are quite powerful. People experience transformation, they have mystical experiences, they have presence experiences, they feel lifted up, they feel like their location and space has changed. Cataphatic practice is much easier. So cataphaatic practice would be guided meditation, ordinary Christian prayer. a friend of mine has written a book about women in Tehran talking, you know, talking back and forth to God. So these talkie practices where you are representing in your mind some person to whom you were talking

Starting point is 00:57:43 and you are representing some words, images, stories that in the context of this conversation, those also can be very powerful. So one of the famous powerful versions of this is Ignatian spiritual exercises where the person doing the exercise, the exorcant, would be the name loyally used. The exorcant will take a piece of the biblical story. So in one of the gospel stories, Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus are fleeing from Palestine. They're going into Egypt. And Ignatius had an Loyola.

Starting point is 00:58:36 Sorry, Ignatius rather than Loyola. Sure. Ignatius asks that you imagine yourself in that scene. So you imagine yourself as standing by the side of the side of the, donkey, looking at Mary, looking at Joseph, looking at the baby, then maybe you are Joseph, then maybe you are Mary, maybe you're the donkey, you're trying to imagine the road on the road to Egypt, and Ignatius says, you know, it doesn't really matter to me, whether it's a broad road or a narrow road, what matters to me is that you are vividly present in the scene.

Starting point is 00:59:14 and when people do those exercises, they are more likely to say, oh, I feel like God is a person, I feel like God is talking to me, I feel like I felt his presence, you know, I felt something. I think that those are the two dominant forms of spiritual practice in the world.

Starting point is 00:59:43 that sort of visualization is that what you would suggest I know that you're not prescriptive you like to be descriptive so rather than I'm not going to phrase this as how should someone I'll phrase this as how could someone so going from theism to non-theism that conversion process is relatively simple for most people who watch the show because they've gone to high school and perhaps university and they're confronted with other faiths and other beliefs either from the direct studies or people

Starting point is 01:00:13 Okay, but then that function, which takes you from theism to non-theism, is not easily invertible. So how do you go? How could someone who says, you know what, I'm a Sam Harris type, but I'm a slightly more open Sam Harris type who wants to experience, and then I'll judge for myself whether I should doubt that experience. But how could I, how could someone experience God as a modern person? So, yeah, I mean, we're actually, our team is actually trying to do this as we speak, trying to create these meditation practices that can help spiritual but not religious people to experience a sense of presence. There are many ways to do that.

Starting point is 01:01:03 I think that if somebody reaches out for what I would call a power, paracosin or some kind of richly imagined world in which they feel a sense of meaning. And then they allow themselves to immerse themselves in that world and try to have a sense of interaction with some satisfactory being in that world. You know, I mean, I think that, you know, sometimes I think that Tolkien nuts have a kind of religion. You know, so Gandalf becomes something like a god to them and can give that kind of soothing presence. They have to kind of get over their sense that this is ridiculous because it's just fiction. So one of the big differences between Middle Earth and, you know, the world of Harry.

Starting point is 01:02:04 Potter. And the world of faith is that people hold the claim that this is fictional a little differently. I mean, many people in churches, you know, they don't really think that snakes talk. But they kind of hold differently. It's more the world of myth rather than the world of story. Now, to wrap, what about the lack of community? So that's something that many people who are on the more religious end, traditionally religious end, will say to those who are the spiritual but not religious, that you lack this, and that that's a vital component. And even to the Buddhist, even those that you think are soul in a monastery alone, they're actually not alone. There's a heavy community practice. Well, where I was going is, does your practice come first, then the

Starting point is 01:02:49 community? Do you think the community comes first and then the practice? Or how does community relate to this? And it's all connected. I mean, if you're in a community, your experiences are stronger, you're more likely to commit to it. I mean, you're more likely to do your dual lingo if you have some sense that there are other people. You know, that's what dual lingo wants to do. They want you to know that there are all these other people doing it with you and, you know, where are you related to that person and that person? It's, community is really powerful. It's, but it's, you know, sort of depends on where the spiritual but not religious person is. again, that's why many people

Starting point is 01:03:30 who aren't believers will join churches. You mean where they are physically speaking or where they are on their journey or mentality? On their journey. I mean, there are lots of there are lots of communities to join. But often the spiritual but not religious person is not a joiner.

Starting point is 01:03:53 And so that becomes one of their challenges as well. Professor, thank you so much for spending so much time with me in the audience. I appreciate it. And then all good luck to you. Take care. Thank you. Hi there. Kurt here. If you'd like more content from theories of everything and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my substack at curtjymongle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time. You also get bonus. written content exclusively for our members. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org. You can also just search my name and the word substack on Google. Since I started that substack, it somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, substack for those

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Starting point is 01:07:06 Thank you for listening.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Tanya Luhrmann: The Experience Is Real. But Is God?

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