Within Reason - #130 Philip Goff - Why I'm a Heretical Christian

Episode Date: November 16, 2025

Philip Goff is a British author, panpsychist philosopher, and professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and consciousness. Specifically, how consciousness can be part of the scientific worldview.Buy Philip's books here.- Timestamps0:00 - Why Philip Became Religious7:13 - Panpsychism and the Fine-Tuning Argument18:46 - Why God’s Power is Limited30:10 - The Problem of Suffering42:53 - Non-Western Religious Positions48:34 - What is the Role of Jesus in This?57:35 - “Why Aren’t You Just a Hindu?”01:02:23 - What is the Point in the Crucifixion?01:09:41 - The Beautiful Uncertainty of Religion

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Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. Philip Goff, welcome back to the show. Thanks a lot, Alex. It's been a while. It was one of your first ones, wasn't it, when we last chattered. And, God, you done good, the boy done good. That's right.

You saw me sort of lug in a literal suitcase. filled with cables and tripods and microphones and just set up in your office for a while. I had this horrible blue light in the background as well that I thought looked good at the time, just like this LED panel. I think we've stepped things up a little bit, but... Rings a bell. That's nothing to do with me. That's the wonderful team.

We can just walk in into this beautiful, beautiful location now and everything's ready to go. Some other things have changed since then. You believe in God now? Sort of. Yeah, I mean, I have become religious. I never thought I'd be religious. It's kind of bizarre. And although I haven't said that, I'm a pretty non-standard Christian, you know, I don't believe in the virgin birth, don't believe in an all-powerful God,

think the Bible's wrong about loads of stuff, and I'm very uncertain as to whoever it's all true. So, a bit of a non-standard Christian, but yes, even then, it's all, I'm still processing what's going on, actually. Yeah, well, you're sort of a self-described heretical Christian, right? But I suppose the first step into Theism of any kind is the Theism part, right? There's usually, I think, the story is that somebody becomes kind of convinced that God exists in some form. And then, you know, as C.S. Lewis described mere Christianity, you're sort of in the corridor. And it's great to be in the corridor, but then you have to choose a room.

And for him, that was like what form of Christian you are, but for many people, it's what kind of God are we talking about here. So before talking about meaning and purpose in your book, Why, which is the most recent that's been published, you were most known for being a pan-psychist philosopher. I've spoken loads about pan-psychism. I'm really excited by it. So I think it surprised a lot of people that you would sort of then come out and say, you know, God and religion, this is sort of something I'm really into now. So let's take that first step first. Like where does the, or is that how it happened for you? a sort of general theism of a kind and then Christianity?

It's a bit of both really and yeah, I mean, there is a bit of a split in the panpsychist community about this actually. Some senior members of the profession who will remain nameless got a bit annoyed at me becoming religious, but we're trying to make this serious science. I think it's maybe a split, maybe a little bit like in the early psychoanalytic community, the split between followers of young and followers of Freud, to the followers of younger into spiritual archetypes and the collective unconscious and all that stuff and then followers of Freud are like,

I get rid of all that superstitious nonsense, we're trying to get serious science. So, I mean, I think, God, where to begin? So, I mean, I was raised Catholic. Church every week, confession. But, you know, by the time I was 14, decided God obviously doesn't exist. There's a load of bollocks.

refused to get confirmed, upset my grandmother. Wow. She forgave me eventually. As Christians are prone to do. She was quite serious about it. And then I was sort of happy atheist for 30 years. I didn't feel there was a God-shaped hole in my life. I think I've just very slowly, over the last decade maybe,

come to think that both sides of this, never-ending debate between God and atheism, both sides have something they can't explain. So I think theists can't explain suffering. Why would a loving God who can do anything choose to bring us into existence with this horrific process of evolution by natural selection that makes no sense to me? But I think there's also things atheists can't explain, like the fine-tuning of physics for life, something we've had an argument about, Alex, maybe we can argue about that again today. So I think, you know, I think both sides have things they can't explain and the theists tie themselves up in knots trying to explain

suffering, the atheist tie themselves up in knots trying to explain fine tuning. And what we've neglected, in that kind of rigid dichotomy, what we've neglected is the middleway options. So I guess this eventually led to, as you say, my book modestly titled, Why the Purpose of the Universe, which I guess, was partly exploring panpsychism as a sort of middle way between God and atheism and as a way of kind of integrating our scientific and our spiritual yearnings and yeah so that's that's the start of it really I think so it wasn't like some kind of here's an interesting argument for the existence of God and suddenly it's like now I believe that there's this kind of this figure or

this creative power that brought the universe into existence. It was more the result of just an exploration of your panpsychist philosophy in the face of one big particular mystery that the atheist faces, which is something like the fine tuning of the universe. I think there are head and heart things going on here. And in terms of the head stuff, the intellectual stuff, yeah, I think that was what's driving me, primarily the fine tuning, some other more fiddly stuff to do with consciousness and you know it i mean it took me a while to admit there was something going on here i think i think in western intellectual circles were raised to sort of be very wary of religious bias you know oh maybe you just believe in god

because you were brought up that way but i think there's also secular bias i you know i feel silly talking in front of my peers about fine-tuning and the purpose of the universe and that's a very powerful group think that was very hard to overcome. But, you know, I just, I had to some point face up to the fact that I just think in our standard ways of thinking about evidence, this recent scientific discovery is not evidence for the traditional God necessarily, but let's put it this way for something godish. And then, but, but at the same time, I've for all my life, as far as I can remember, like yourself, Alex, been totally persuaded by the problem of evil. So I was sort of wrestling back and forth with this conundrum being

how I thought of it was being pulled in two different directions. And then I think at some point I just kind of a eureka moment that these are not necessarily pulling in different directions. There are, for example, forms of panpsychism. I explore other options in the wide book. that can accommodate both the fine-tuning and explain the suffering. You can have your cake and eat it. So we, you know, we don't have to choose. Okay, so we did a whole episode on panpsychism. It was the first time I was introduced to the idea,

and I'm indebted to you because it's now become one of my favorite ideas in philosophy. I think it's so plausible. It's not even funny. I didn't see that come in, I must say, but, yes. Well, I feel similarly, I suppose, to you, in the, that if myself from, say, 10 years ago, wouldn't have been saying too much because I was, you know, a teenager,

but could have heard me now talking about consciousness as fundamental, at least without getting into too much detail, I would have thought that I'd lost my mind, if you will. Right. And in a way, I feel like I kind of have, you know, and I've submitted it to the foundational consciousness of everything that the universe is made out of. But I kind of know what you mean. You sort of, after some time,

you sort of have to think, something's definitely going on here. And what I'm interested in is the details here, right? Because you say that you're confronted with fine-tuning, which, oh, and I should say, the reason I brought that up is because if you don't know what panpsychism is, it's the view that the universe is made up fundamentally of conscious material or that matter itself is consciousness or has conscious properties. And if you're interested, we had that whole episode which people can go and listen to

or just, you know, Wikipedia, I don't want to waste too much time. going over that again, just so people know what that is. And it seems like you can sort of shelf that, and then you've got this problem of fine-tuning, which is the issue of the constants of the universe. Things like the strength of gravity, the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces that hold the universe together. In principle, there seems to be no reason why these constants couldn't have been different. You know, like these forces could have been stronger or weaker.

and if gravity had been stronger by even a minute proportion, an unfathomably minute proportion, the whole universe would collapse in on itself. And if it were any weaker, then the universe would fly apart at the Big Bang and atoms wouldn't be able to form. And so everything is very, very finely balanced. And so confronted with this, many people say that the only options are that it's chance, which seems completely ludicrous, it's just so unlikely, or that there's a multiverse, which is one version of charts

like yeah it's really really unlikely but there are so many different iterations that one of them is going to be this universe and the third is to say it was designed that way yeah that's the classical response to the fine tuning it sounds like I mean the way you just presented it then wasn't like that it wasn't like you were confronted with these and you went with design and now you're a theist

seems like something else is going on so in the face of fine tuning you're a panpsychist you think the universe is made out of consciousness you're not a theist yet, like, what do you, what is the response to fine-tuning that makes you now say that you're maybe a bit religious? Yeah, I think panpsychism offers us a really nice solution to the fine-tuning problem. So, I guess the people on the theistic side of things usually postulate a supernatural designer who's fixed the numbers to make sure we can get life. But if you, if you're a pan-psychist

and you think the universe is conscious, which is one prominent form of panpsychism that I've defended among other forms, often known as cosmocycism, that the universe itself is the fundamental conscious thing. So if you're starting there, then that opens up the possibility that maybe the universe has goals of its own. And maybe we don't need a supernatural designer outside of the universe. Maybe the universe fine-tuned itself. So I think this offers a quite nice, elegant solution. We don't need loads of other universes. We don't need something supernatural and very different. We just need the universe itself, designing itself. Now, you had a debate with William Lane Craig not that long ago. It's quite extraordinary.

I think you really sort of go to blows a bit in that. It's really interesting to watch. And one of the things that he pointed out that didn't get a lot of airtime was that he thought there was a circularity here because the fine tuning is needed to explain the existence of the universe. I mean, the idea is that without these constants being tuned as they are, the universe just kind of couldn't form. You wouldn't have atoms, you wouldn't have matter, you wouldn't have anything going on, at least in a way that makes sense to us in this universe. And so to say that the universe itself is some kind of conscious agent, William Lane Craig wants to say, well, in order to get that conscious agent, there had to have been finally tuned constants to bring about

this conscious agent. So it can't have been that conscious agent that did the tuning. What do you say to that? Yeah, well, here I kind of cheekily borrow from multiverse theorists. So they tend to postulate slightly speculatively, but rooted in kind of string theory and, I mean, the fact that our current models kind of collapse in the so-called plank epochs. the first split second of the universe, they speculate that in the very early universe there was some sort of flexibility, the constants weren't set in stone, and there's some kind of random processes fixing what the constants end up at. And then they think there's so many universes connected to eternal inflation. They think there's so many universes with each getting their

constants fixed kind of randomly at the start that, you know, one of them's going to fluke the right numbers for life. If enough people are playing the lottery, someone's going to win. So basically, I can take that picture that there's a very early period in our universe where there's some flexibility, where the constants are not determined, but rather than being determined by random processes, they are determined by the universe itself. And that way we don't, We don't need other universes. And if you're already in the ballpark of being, you know, a panpsychist and if it's not like an extra speculation, then it seems like a saving to not have to postulate loads of other universes. I suppose it will feel like a lot to swallow if you're just sort of your average Joe, a physicalist, materialist guy.

If you're not already a bit on board with panpsychism as you were. Yeah. And you can sort of imagine saying, hey, guys, like, I've got this argument that God exists. Okay, first you have to accept that the universe is conscious and made out of conscious. It's like, well, okay, stop there. So in telling your story, it makes perfect sense to say, well, look, if the universe is conscious, we have this lovely solution. I just want our listeners to be aware that we're not trying to say here, like, this conversation we're having now should convince you of God's existence. But rather, this is how you and your philosophy will slot into something like theism.

But okay, so universe being conscious. And as I say, you know, reasons why you think that are all over the internet and people can find them in your writings. You've got this sort of universe that's conscious and this early period of the universe. The questions that jump out to me are firstly, there still will remain this question of like where that came from. Like what got that off the ground? I mean, even if everything's made out of consciousness, you might still have this sort of causal argument that says that there are these causal relations between material object and even if it's made out of consciousness. It still abides by causal laws and you want to explain sort of how that got going. And secondly, like how you characterize this very early state of the universe, this sort of, you know, very chaotic state, have you got a bunch of individual sort of fundamental units that all have a particular kind of rudimentary will, that all like will towards the production of the universe?

Or are they kind of randomly bumping into each other until they form a kind of conscious hole? Or is it already a conscious hole? you know, where does it come from and what is the nature of the thing that first exists? Excellent. Two very good questions. So on the first point, yeah, I mean, look, there's two very different arguments for God or that are traditionally put in support of God. You know, one is this fine-tuning stuff. How did you get the right numbers for life? Another is what we call the cosmological argument. Where does the universe come from in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing.

So suppose, I mean, if you were just convinced by the fine-tuning stuff and you just didn't buy the cosmological argument, you're happy to go with Bertrand Russell and say it just is, brute fact, that's all there is. Well, then you can just say, well, the universe just exists. It's brute fact, it came into existence, and then it fine-tuned itself. So you've got an answer to the fine-tuning, but not, you don't care about the cosmological argument. However, if suppose you're convinced by both, and I got into this a little bit with Craig.

Yeah, my debate with Craig was interesting. Usually with debates I like to kind of make it more of a discussion, you know, I see what you're saying. I see, you know, I can see part. There's some truth. But then I was talking to someone about this and saying, Craig's not going to do that. Craig's going to prepare to destroy you. So I responded in kind. But I think it was a friendly, spirited debate.

I think so. Yeah. I mean, it was a nasty, which is, that's fine. I just say spirited, you know, you were sort of getting into it and there were points where you're sort of saying, look, you just said something that's just wrong. It's just false, you know, and Craig's like, you're just digging yourself into a hole. But I do think it had a sort of friendly vibe. He was telling me, I'd got Dale Allison, the biblical scholar. Yeah.

I happen to have a quote from his book available to me. Yeah. I remember because, yeah, you were like, well, I've got a quote from there. Dale Allison. And he was like, well, I just emailed Dale Allison. And then you would say, well, I just went for coffee with it. Well, Dale Allison's my dad. It seemed like it could just sort of keep going on forever. Yeah. Well, Dale Allison, he's been very formative in my turn to heretical Christianity, actually. And his, his views on the resurrection have led me to a sort of non-standard view of the resurrection. Anyway, well, we'll talk about that. Let's not drift off topic. Yeah, but so suppose you are convinced that there has to be, let's say you think there has to be a necessary. being um because otherwise there's no explanation of where it all came from that's to be something that had to exist that created everything else well in that case and this is what I explore actually in my academic version of this I've got an academic paper did the universe design itself and you could just say well the universe is a necessary being and um it didn't

or so then you might think well doesn't that doesn't that mean it's eternal Well, you could say its temporal form is just one stage of the universe's existence. So the universe, if it's a necessary being, maybe before the Big Bang or before the start of time, it existed in a timeless form, and it then became a time-bound physical entity. And then if you're Christian's going to say, well, that doesn't make sense. How can something necessary become physical? I'm going to say, have you heard of Jesus? Yeah.

And interestingly, William Lane Craig has this view of God, not just in the form of Jesus, but Craig himself thinks that God was timeless, and then upon creating the universe, entered into time. Yeah. Which a lot of people look on with suspicion, but it's not, like, this isn't a view that's unique to what you're saying here. But it does sound like, fair enough, but haven't we just got a terminological dispute here? Because what you're postulating is a necessarily existing conscious agent, which gives rise. to all physical matter and human beings and, you know, human consciousness and all of that kind of stuff, isn't that just the same thing as what the traditional Christian says? And if it's not, what is your view here?

Is it a kind of like pantheism? Pantheism is usually described as the view that God just is nature or the universe, and it kind of sounds like maybe that's what you're describing, but I don't know how comfortable you are with that label. Yeah, I mean, you can think of this as a form of pantheism. So, I mean, I think that there are two attractions to it. One is parsimony. It's a more parsimonious conception of the divine because it's not something outside of the universe.

You might think it's extravagant already to think the universe is conscious, but if you get into the panpsychism literature, I think it's actually, you know, pretty motivated, but that's another discussion. Passimonious meaning sort of simple or elegant or like. lacking too many seemingly unnecessary complications. Exactly, exactly. Respecting Occam's razor. So that's one attraction, but I think the more important thing that's motivating me is the problem of evil and suffering.

So as I'm thinking of this conscious universe, it's not an all-powerful being. I mean, so it's interesting, how do the laws of physics fit? in here, right? If you're thinking, okay, there's this being, conscious being with goals that is the universe, or what about the laws of physics

that scientists seem to be telling us about? As I've developed this book, how we think of the laws of physics, what they're doing is recording the limitations, the constraints of the universe. I'm going to say constraint. It's not that, I'm not thinking that there's something

outside of the universe that's constraining it. It's just a fundamental fact that the conscious universe can do some things, can't do others, and physics is, my philosophical interpretation of the laws of physics is it's capturing the limitations of the universe. Wow. And actually, you know, what I like about this theory is I think you can, you can give

those limitations very simply, right? You just take physics, take out the values of the constants, that will give you a certain mathematical structure. And then the thought is, the universe is able and is only able to create a universe with that structure, but can fiddle, fiddle with the constants. So that's, that's simpler than physics, right? So that's, that's pretty damn simple. And I mean, you can capture it more precisely with a little logical tool called a Ramsey sentence named after Frank Ramsey, who was, I don't you know, Frank Ramsey, Alex, who was, died at the age of 26, after May. And making fundamental contributions to philosophy, economics, mathematics, and then died at the age of 26. Very impressive.

Anyway, but we maybe won't go into those sort of fiddly details. But yeah, so it's a very nice, simple, precise hypothesis, deals with the fine-tuning, deals with the suffering. What's not to like? Would you call it pantheism? I'm happy with that. In a way, like, who cares? You probably spend a lot of time at the moment I hate terminological dispute You know they sort of I didn't use that word I suppose when I was first talking about this

I wasn't using that language For kind of PR reasons maybe To try Persuade my secular colleagues That there's something worth thinking about here But I'm kind of A bit of a religious person these days So I'm happy with that

Why not own it? I think this is really interesting Right the view that I would describe as a kind of pantheism, the universe kind of is what you might call God, but the universe is this sort of conscious, possibly necessary. I want to say possibly necessary, but that means it's necessary. So, you know, a necessary existing being who's conscious, who gives light, like, rise to everything, but is the same thing as the universe.

And like you say, the laws of physics are a record of the limitations that just exist. You know, when you figure out that nothing can travel fast than the speed of light, that's not because of some decision that was made, that's, that's just a limitation of the universe that we are just sort of noticing, observing, right? Yeah. The question that's going to arise is, why, why that limitation? I mean, the speed of light is, is what, 300 million something, you know, meters per second. Why not 400?

Why not 200? You know, why, why there, why precisely? It doesn't seem logically necessary. And you seem to sort of get this, maybe not a fine-tuning. argument back, but something a bit like it of like, why is the universe limited in this way, but not limited in another way? Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say you can never get rid of all the why questions. So even the traditional theists are left with, why is there an all-knowing or powerful,

perfectly good being? Why does God exist? I guess if you buy the ontological argument, you don't, but I don't think that argument works. So I think that even the traditional theorist has to just say, well, that's a why question I can't answer. That's just at least relative to human understanding is just a brute fact. Now, I accept. I've got a few more why questions. Their view is a little bit simpler than mine. I concede to them that it's simpler to say God is all powerful than that God has these limitations,

even if you can quite precisely and simply specify the limitations, it adds a bit of complexity. But my view accounts for the data better. And I think that's what we try and do in science and philosophy. Yeah, you go for the simplest view you can, but ultimately you want to fit the data. Actually, Richard Swinburne has this analogy in his book, The Existence of God, which I think works in my favour. He tells us that we used to think the speed of light. was infinite. Because that's a very simple value just being infinite. Zero or infinity are very simple. But of course, when we get evidence to the contrary that it's some finite speed, we don't sort of

try and tie ourselves in knots to think it's still infinite. No, we go, you know, we want our theory to be simple, but we want it to fit the data. So likewise, yeah, an all-powerful goddess is the simple hypothesis, but it doesn't fit the bloody data of suffering. And so we should, you shouldn't tie ourselves up in knots, try to keep a simple theory. We should add a little bit of complexity to the theory to benefit the data. I think that's what I mean, just finally, I think insofar as I'm a religious believer, you know, I mean, I guess maybe if you, if you understood, if you really understood the essence of God, you'd just see God has to exist. I think that would be really satisfying. Oh my God, this has to exist. And on my view,

you'd see, oh, God has to have these limitations. That's something, but that's something totally beyond human understanding. And so these things are just brute fact for us humans, but that's the same for the traditional theist. I think that's what the ontological argument is supposed to provide, at least those, I mean, Bertrand Russell himself at one point says that he was sort of walking home and I think he sort of throws his can of tobacco in the air. And by the time he catches it, he says, by Jove, the ontological argument is sound.

And even though I think he later sort of retracted the thought, he had this moment. moment of like apprehension of just like oh yeah god exists he has to it's just like it sort of presents itself to the intellect um interestingly as far as i'm aware because of relativity and how time dilation works if you were a photon of light which is a weird thing to say to anyone other than a panpsychist perhaps but photons having no mass traveling at the speed of like you know the faster you travel like the slower time is for you um relative to everybody else if you If you're a photon of mass, for us, it might take eight minutes for a photon to get from the sun to Earth. But as far as the photon's concerned, it's the same instant.

Because for the photon, time moves slower and slower and slower the faster you get. And if you get to the fastest possible speed, that time just sort of shrinks to zero. So for the photon, it leaves the sun and hits the earth in the same instant, which is perhaps relevant here to those who are a bit mystified by the precision. of this number, why this particular number, that might just be because of where we are in relation to light in terms of the amount of mass that we have. But it still seems a little bit mysterious. And you say, yeah, I've still got why questions, but so do the theists. But there seem to be like satisfying answers here. Like even in traditional theism, God has some limitations. You could characterize it that way. For example, famously, he can't make a rock so heavy

he can't lift it. Why not? Because he can't form logical contradiction. and somebody might come along and say, well, why can't God do a contradiction? And it seems like you can think to yourself, well, can he make P true and false at the same time? It just doesn't seem like conceivable and it seems just quite satisfying to say that's just not a thing. That's just not possible. In a way that when you say, well, God just, you know, couldn't make something travel faster than the speed of light or God couldn't make gravity stronger. I don't have the same intuitive sense of like, yeah, fair enough, that just doesn't seem possible because it seemed perfectly possible to me. So for that reason, in terms of the limits that God has, I'm much more intuitively able to accept the traditional theistic view than this view that God is the universe and has a really large amount of power, but for some reason is limited in very specific kinds of ways in terms of how electricity sort of manifests and interacts with other, you know, electrical sources

and, you know, the strength of magnets and gravity and it just seems so specific and ordered and systematized that it seems weird to think of it in the same way that the traditional fears thinks of like, oh, well, God just, God just can't do a contradiction, you know what I mean? Yeah, but don't we have the same thing with God's existence? Like, why does God, why does God have to exist. It seems conceivable that God doesn't exist. So that that also seems like a brute fact. God just has to exist. Yeah. And so I think what I'm positing is in the same ballpark. Why does God have these limitations? We just have to accept that as a brute fact. So it's a slight cost of the theory. As I say, I don't, I think the theorist is doing something similar, but I'm doing it a little bit more.

Right. But look, okay, you have to, it's a trade-off. But look, compared to explaining suffering, I think I've just got a much better explanation of suffering. I mean, look, I root my version of the problem of evil, what I call the cosmic sin intuition. I just think it would, it would be immoral for an all-powerful being to create a universe like this. And theists say, you know, I had a debate with Richard Swinburne. You know, they say there's certain goods that you couldn't get without what use as free will and you need natural evil for certain goods, certain serious moral choice and stuff. I'm happy to say, okay, yeah, maybe that's all true. Maybe there are goods that we need suffering for. Still, I think it's immoral for a creator to kill and maim in order to bring about those goods. I think it's like the classic utilitarian, the challenge to utilitarianism, where, you know, suppose there's a doctor who has five ill patients, you know, one's missing a heart, one's

missing kidneys and so on, the doctor could kidnap one healthy patient, harvest their organs and save five lives. Okay, it's a better world. We've saved five lives at the cost of one. But most of us say, no, no, no, that's immoral. That's taking that person's right to life. Likewise, I think if a god creates hurricanes and cancer that kill people in order to get these goods, that's wrong. So that, that to me, avoiding that is much more significant than adding a little bit of complexity to our fundamental theory. Yeah, it also just feels a bit too easy, I think. Like, in the abstract, for me, the problem of suffering isn't so much the existence of any form of suffering, but like the extent and depth and arbitrariness of it all in that like it's very easy to say well without fear you couldn't have bravery you know without suffering you couldn't have good things but like for a start I agree with you it's a little bit like being grateful for the existence of cancer because now we have the good of chemotherapy which you wouldn't be able to have if you didn't have cancer it's like I think I'd rather have neither you know we couldn't have Martin Luther King if we didn't have racism it's like I know it sounds

really kind of weird on the surface level to say, I'd rather Martin Luther King didn't exist. But I'd rather have neither than both with them. You know what I mean? And there's also like, I mean, I just had a back and forth with, on this Diary of the CEO podcast with, I've forgotten his name, the stand to reason, a Christian guy who was across from me. It was the first time I've met him.

And at one point, Stephen Bartlett, the host, we're talking about meaning. And there's Dr. Kay as well, who's next to me. And he sort of says, but what if, you know, young Stephen had gotten cancer? Like, what's the, what's the meaning and purpose of that? And I watched him, I think his name's Greg. I watched him say, well, we live in a fallen world and Adam and Eve sinned. And I kind of had to stop and, like, wait for my turn to speak again.

And can we just go back a second? Like, I really want to drill this down. Do you mean, and it transpires that he believes in a literal sort of first human of some kind, not quite sure when, but that they literally committed some kind of transgression that, And I'm like, so you think that children get cancer because maybe two million years ago or so somebody literally like ate a fruit. It just, once you actually start cashing out how this works in practice, it just seems so deeply unsatisfying. So I agree with you that this is a huge motivation.

And I suppose you've got this idea that, well, there's a God, but this God is limited in power. and you said it would be immoral if there were a sort of all-powerful being to bring about suffering. But the question that jumps out to me is, like, why limit the power? Why not just limit the goodness? You know, why not say, well, God is all-powerful,

but not all good? Because that seems to be a more popular response from people who aren't convinced of a traditional God because of suffering. They say, okay, God exists, but, you know, he's either amoral or immoral, but you don't do that. You seem committed to the view that God is good.

Well, I think we should consider all these possibilities And in the Y book, I, you know, I consider various options. I'm not a dogmatic person, as you might have noticed. But I think, well, if you, suppose you have a bad god who's all powerful. I think the problem with that, as Stephen Law has and others have explored, is it creates the kind of mirror image of the problem of evil, the problem of the good. If there's a really bad god, why create those lovely things, you know, flowers and why can't I think of love things?

The smile of a baby. Yeah. And the laughter of a podcast host. I could easily give examples of pain and suffering? What does that say? This is turning into a therapy session. Yeah, so that's one problem. Yeah, you get the mirror image, so that's no good.

But then it's like you could say, okay, there's, the problem of evil makes us think there can't be a perfectly good, all-powerful god. The problem of good makes us think there can't be a perfectly evil, you know, all-powerful god. So what about an all-powerful god who's just amoral? I mean, you know, the universe is conscious, but it sort of doesn't have moral preferences. It's just, you know, a bunch of atoms want to do this and a bunch of molecules want to do that, and it all just kind of happens. So it's conscious and it's all the result of agency, maybe molecules hold together because subatomic particles sort of want to be, you know, connected in a particular way. But there's no good or bad. So you don't have a problem of explaining if a bad God

why this, if a good God, because it's neither of those things. It's just amor. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of the philosopher Tim Muldgan has a book, A Purpose in the Universe, where he argues for what he calls ananthropic purposivism, which is that there is a God, there is a purpose to the universe, but it's nothing to do with us. Right, right. Sort of accidental buy products. Yeah. This is what I love, you know, I love, just get stuck in the dichotomy.

I love exploring these possibilities. Yeah. But yeah, okay, so why don't I go for that or the view you described? Yeah. I think, look, why do we think the fine-tuning needs explaining? Why do we think there's something striking here? I think it's because of all the values the constants could have had they fall in the narrow range that are compatible with things of great value.

Life, intelligent life, people falling in love and writing poetry. There you go. I came up with some of the other universes you get from different values is just hydrogen or it all kind of just hydrogen or it all collapses in a split second or it shoots apart so quickly that no two particles ever met. There's little or no value in these universes. I think what strikes us is that the constants are compatible with value. Okay, so I think that needs explaining.

So there's some, you know, there's something, some moat push towards value. But then there's the suffering. Yeah, because there's also, you kind of need the fine tuning to get suffering. You know what I mean? Like, you don't get, like, conscious organisms who suffer from evolution by natural selection without the fine-tuning too. So it kind of feels to me that those almost cancel each other out in a way that you're left with this amoral, you know, universe. I don't think, I don't see how they'd cancel out. I just think you need to explain both.

I mean, maybe, you know, you could have a sort of hypothesis where you've got a god that's a bit good and a bit bad. I don't know, you know, I'm watching the Vikings on Netflix. This is kind of the Viking gods are a bit, you know, maybe they get a bit moody, but they're good in some ways. But you'd have to somehow describe the hypothesis of this God's moral, mixed moral character, such that you get the mix of good and bad we actually find, such that you get, okay, the constants are just right for life, but then you get cancer and stuff. And I just don't see how you get, it's going to be like some very complicated. psychology, whereas what's great about my hypothesis, if I may say, is very simple. God's just perfectly good, but has got these very precise limitations that you can specify in a way that's simpler in physics. So that's why at the moment I'm thinking that's the best option, but,

you know, I'm open mind. Yeah, I mean, it does seem a little bit weird that there would be any kind of, of, like, human value on the level of, you know, pain and pleasure and stuff like that. If the were completely amoral because you might imagine that it's conscious so it's it's got some kind of desire to limit in various ways to have tables and chairs and clouds and planets and stuff but to have to bring about like pleasure and pain seems like there's this element of desire because pleasure and pain are necessarily tied to desire right like to be in pain is to not want an experience while you're having it and to be in pleasure to experience pleasure is to want an experience while you're experiencing it. I think those are good definitions of pleasure and pain. And so you do

seem to bring in this element of desire. And if there is some kind of desire, traditionally good and bad are thought to just be sort of expressions of the desire of God. You know, something is good because that flows from God's nature. And if these concepts of desire and pleasure and pain just flow from the nature of the universe, maybe we can just say that that's what morality is. It's the good and bad that we feel. We feel it because we are expressions of the universe. And so, like, our sort of concepts of good and bad are expressions of the universe's conception of good and bad. Maybe. I get, it gets a little bit murky. But if I were to say to you, for example, you know, Philip, I'm totally convinced. Fine tuning, there's got to be

an explanation. And I think that there's a God. And you said to me, but then you've got to explain suffering. And I just said to you, okay, God is amoral. Would you say, well, I did disagree with you. I think you're wrong. Or would you say, yeah, maybe, fair enough, but I've just got this other view. Like, how committed are you to the view that in order to solve this problem, we limit God's power instead of limiting his goodness? Boarding for flight 246 to Toronto is delayed 50 minutes. Oh, what? Sounds like Ojo time. Play Ojo. Great idea. Feel the fun with all the latest slots in live casino games and with no wagering requirements. What you win is yours to keep groovy. Hey, I won.

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I want success. Get it for me. Andy Garcia, Ali Larder, and Sam Elliott. You don't even know the game we're playing, do you? Landman, new season, now streaming. Only on Paramount Plus. Maybe you have a more hedonistic meterethics than me. I suppose, look, I mean, I think you could have, as a panpsychist, I think you could have pleasure and pain maybe in a universe where there's just hydrogen.

Maybe there's extantism. see in, I think Galen Strausson, my PhD supervisor who's, I studied with him because he was basically the only pansearchist in the world, yeah. When I studied with him, I talk about this, did him get my book, Galileo's error.

He thinks, you know, there's bliss before evolution. Its evolution brings in suffering because that kind of motivates you to survive. So the rest of the universe is blissful. Okay, so, but what you get with the right constants is

complex organisms that can ultimately become rational and reflect on their own existence and make moral choices and have understanding. So I suppose I think there's a very great value in, you know, poetry and philosophy and understanding reality or trying to understand reality. There's a great value there that you wouldn't just get in a universe of blissful hydrogen So I want an explanation of how come at the start of the universe you get the right numbers for those kind of great values. And then don't make them inevitable, but that are compatible with them in a small range that are compatible with them. So I don't see how you're a moral God would explain that.

I think we've got to say, well, in some way, the creator, which could be just the universe, aimed at something of value. Now, they might have aimed at something of value to destroy it, but then, okay, well, tell me more about the store, there's this psychology, and it gets complicated, so that's how I'm thinking of it. Just thinking there the way you said, like, this creator, but maybe the creator just is the universe, our language is a bit tricky here, because when you say, well, the creator is just the universe, I'm kind of picturing the universe as this big orb that is then creating

stuff like within itself and it kind of gets a bit difficult to conceptualize do you how interested are you in like non-Western philosophical traditions the reason I ask is because like if you were to ask someone from the Vedic tradition if you were to ask a Hindu they would probably say that you know the closest approximation to God is Brahman which is sort of the the unknowable knower the the unmoved mover the it always has to be described in these quite mystical terms and they say it's not quite like this being who creates the world. It's rather kind of just everything that is, just is Brahman. And it seems to be like maybe because it's always a little bit vague, because it has to be. It seems a little bit easier to get across this idea that you're not

talking about some creative dude who comes along and goes zap, there's a universe. But you're also not talking about this super naturalistic view where a universe just starts going zap, zap, zap, and bringing things into existence. There's just this sort of one creative force that we're all a part of. I wonder are you, like, attracted to that. Because it seems to me from what you're saying, if we hadn't used the word Christianity yet or whatever, and you said, you know, these are some of the thoughts I'm having. I would say, you know, Philip, you're starting to sound a bit like a Hindu sooner than I would

say, you know, heretical Christianity. Yeah, so as I said earlier, I was an atheist for 30 years. But in that time, I was sort of spiritual but not religious kind of person. And I've always been taking mystical experiences very seriously. And I think being a panpsychist, you're better able to do that. Maybe we could talk about that. And I guess I always thought, like many spiritual but not religious people, you know, Buddhism is deep.

Advaita Vedanta is a spiritual depth. But, you know, Christianity is all about, you know, doing what the old guy in the sky wants. so you get to heaven. And part of what has brought me back to Christianity, though, is discovering the mystical traditions of Christianity that have always been there since the start. And particularly the Eastern Church

and how they think about the core of Christianity. So I think, you know, when I was growing up, this is what I thought was the core of Christianity. We're all sinners. We deserve to burn in hell forever. fortunately Jesus is up for taking the rap for us so we're going to if we accept that kind gift we'll go to heaven right and you know this sort of makes no intellectual sense to me in such a ways like why does it fulfill justice to punish an innocent person and and also it doesn't

make sense to me on a spiritual level you know my census divinit artist just kind of says nah um but then you know what i've discovered embarrassingly first early recently is, you know, that version of Christianity, which we call penal substitution, was invented basically by the Protestant reformers 500 years ago. It has not been a form of Christianity back to the start. This is one of the things I say on X that seems the most annoyed people. I've seen. I've seen a bit of... Because I think, yeah, I think a lot of Americans think that is Christianity and you're a heretic if you don't. No, this was, you know, invented by Calvin and Luther, basically. So what's the idea before?

that in terms of Jesus' sacrifice, if not a penal substitution? There was big decisions and councils about the Trinity and the divinity of Christ and so on, but there was never any official decision on how to understand

how Jesus brought salvation, the mechanism there. And in fact, well, and what I've become fascinated with is how the Eastern Church thinks about this. Right. So has absolutely nothing to do with sin and punishment, it's all to do with God and humanity and the entire universe

becoming one. So God's not interested in finding someone to punish for our sins. God's fundamental desire is to become one with the entire universe. And so this is what they think the Jesus stuff was all about. It was all about, it was a crucial part of this ongoing process of God and the universe becoming one. God became more like us so that we can become more like God. So when I learned about this fairly recently, it's a form of Christianity that deeply resonates me on a spiritual level. I think it fits with panpsychism. I think it makes sense of mystical experiences that I take very seriously. And while at the same time this was happening. As I said, I think there's head and heart things going on here. So at the same time,

I become convinced intellectually by the fine-tuning that there's a purpose to the universe. And then I learn about this, how the Eastern Orthodox Church think about the core of Christianity. And then I think, this seems to me like a plausible view of what the purpose of the universe might be. Yeah. And so the head and heart kind of came together at that point. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting account and I appreciate you're sort of telling me how it happened in fact. But I'm kind of interested in a few questions here, one of which is like this figure of Jesus, because the thing that really distinguishes Christianity is the Jesus character, right? Yeah. There's this particular human being who is also God, who, you know, does something through his crucifixion and resurrection that brings us into unity with God. traditionally in terms of forgiveness from sin, because we can't be unified to God if we're in a state of sin, and so he does that for us. But even if not, there's still a sense in which he dies for us. You know, like while we're still sinners, Christ died for us. And if the job of Jesus was just to become more like us, so we can become more like God, it seems like an unnecessary extravagance that he gets crucified by the Romans. He could have just come to earth, lived a life, ascended into heaven. Bob's your uncle, as they say. The other question that springs out to me about Christianity

on your view is that if the universe is just God, for want of a better word, then like, as far as we are all manifestations of consciousness that are within the universe, we're all expressions of God. We're all, we all have the divine within us. We've all sort of come from the same place. in what special sense can Jesus be God in a way that you and I are not on this view? Because for the traditional Christian, it's like, well, there's a kind of dualism, there's this world, and then there's heaven and there's God. And Jesus is God or Jesus is special because that external realm has sort of entered into our world. You know, the word becomes flesh and dwells among us. Whereas on your view, everything does that.

Everything springs out of this divinity of the universe. So what's so special about Jesus? Yeah, so I think you asked me earlier, is my view a form of pantheism or panentheism? So pantheism being the view that God just is the universe, they're just one and the same thing. Whereas panentheism being the universe is within God. So God is more expansive than the universe, but the universe is sort of embedded within God. Or like a part of God. Yeah.

And I think if I was just going off the fine-tuning and the panpsychism, I'd be a pantheist, insofar as I've embraced Christianity, and I think that's a matter of faith rather than certainty, I'd suppose I'd be more inclined to a panentheist view. So there's more to God than the universe. The universe is within God, as St. Paul said, in God we live and move and have our being. But there's more to God than the universe. So I suppose the core of, of the Eastern view, which they call deification, right? The idea is that they say we will become gods. So the way the Eastern Church thinks about it, right, the idea is for these two things to become tightly unified. This is what they see in Jesus' beautiful metaphor about the vine and the branches. He says, I'm the vine, you are the branches. Think of that intimate, organic connection between a vine and its branches. but the thought is there's a problem that we're really different to God

or we're really different to that bit of God that's outside of the universe philosopher Robin Collins has a nice analogy is that it would be like trying to graft a branch onto a horse trying to bring us together with God trying to unify God and Oz would be like trying to

graft a branch onto a horse they sort of just don't fit together so to solve that problem to close the gap, God had to share in our form of existence in life, in suffering, in death, fully share in human existence in order to allow us to ultimately fully share in God's form existence. And that's what they, so these interiors, they're happy to say, we will become gods. Yeah. We won't become identical with God, but we will fully share in God's form of existence. What it's like to be God will ultimately be what it's like to be us. It'll

almost sounds heretical itself, but that is just, I think to American Protestant Christians, that's heresy, but that is the standard view in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Okay, so panentheism as opposed to pantheism means there's something outside of the universe, which is God. And so does that mean that the thing that's special about Jesus is that whilst you and I are expressions of the universe, Jesus is somehow an expression of like the whole thing. Because Jesus is also just an expression of the universe. But is it like there's something about this outside the universe, God sort of thing that enters into Jesus? I'm still a little bit confused about what it is that's special about Jesus. And also, it starts to sound a bit similar

to just traditional Christianity. Like, yeah, the universe is kind of, if you want to call it a part of God, fine. But the main thing is that there's, that God is bigger than the universe. God is outside of the universe and that the universe kind of exists through him and Jesus enters into that, it starts to sound almost a bit orthodox. Yeah. So the Eastern Church distinguishes between two aspects of God, the essence of God and what they call God's energies. So the essence is the fundamental identity of God, which they take to be completely unknowable, completely transcendent, completely beyond human understanding, whereas God's energies are God's form of existence, God's manifestation, God as a living force that is imminent and

that we ultimately participate in. So I suppose that the specialness of Jesus of Jesus, Jesus, I suppose, would be Jesus understood as part of God's essence that we will never be. So this is, it's different to Advaita Vedanta because on Advaita Vedanta, we are Brahman because there's nothing more than Brahman. Yeah, tell us what that means. Advaita Vedanta is a form of Hindu mysticism. Literally means non-dual, the non-dual form of Vedanta. Where all there is is Brahman, ultimate reality, ultimate divine reality, if you like. And the word Atman, which is the word for the fundamental self or soul.

And the core of Advait of Advanta is Brahman. I, what I refer to with the I pronoun, my deepest self is Brahman. And it is nothing more than Brahman. So the Eastern Church doesn't go that far. In terms of God's essence, that will always be distinct from us. But in terms of God's form of existence, God's manifestation, what it's like to be God, we will fully share in that. I like to sort of speculate whether mystics in these two traditions were having the same experiences, but interpreting them in different ways, having this sense of oneness with the divine. So in the Eastern Church as well, there is a deep oneness with the divine.

It's not quite as radical as Advait of Adanta, but there's still that oneness, whether they're just interpreting the same experiences in different ways. But you said, oh, this is sounding orthodox. In terms of my core spiritual understanding of Christianity, it is just the non-heretical view of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I call myself a heretic. I suppose to flag up that, non-standard in certain respects. I've got a non-standard view of the resurrection. For example, I don't think

the resurrection experiences were a matter of seeing and touching a body. I think they were a matter of visionary experiences. I'm very influenced by Dale Allison, which is not to say false. It's not to say that they're not like real or true. No, I think there was a radical transformation in reality. God and the universe coming closer together, the possibility of the possibility of of deification, and I think what happened on Easter Sunday morning is people starting with Mary Magdalene and then Peter were getting thrown to the ground experiencing deification for the first time in human history. And that was the radical experience that kicked off Christianity. So I think there was something real going on here. It wasn't just our, you know, feeling good

about things, but I don't think it was seeing and touching a body. Can I ask why you don't go that far. You said just before that the Eastern Orthodox Church, which you're not a member of, by the way, you've spoken about the Eastern tradition, which you're attracted to, but people might get the impression, you know, you are Eastern Orthodox Christian now, but that's, that's not what you're saying. No, no, I'm, so whilst I accept the, the core understanding of Christianity from the Eastern Church, I think there's other things I disagree with. They think God's all powerful. They believe in bodily resurrection. And also, you know, they don't have women priests. They think gay sex is sinful. And I think these are

manifestly false and harmful, right? So actually, where I found my spiritual home is in the combination of the mysticism of the Eastern Church and the liberal flexibility of the Anglican Church. So we're practicing. I mean, if you just had the liberal flexibility of the Anglican Church, you say, it's a bit wet, it's a bit empty. It's mostly based around drinking tea. as the comedian Dylan Moran said. But it's the combination of the two, sort of the spiritual depths of the Eastern Church, which is the core of my spiritual life,

but also the flexibility of the Anglican Church, that you have women priests, that you have a more flexibility in how you're approaching. Now I'm an Archbishop of Canterbury, indeed. But so, okay, so you're not Eastern Orthodox, but you said a moment ago, like, that they don't go as far as to cool everything, you know, Brahmin is to say that,

I, in my deepest self, am the same thing as Brahman. Why don't you go that far? I mean, it seems like quite an attractive view. I just wonder if there's something in this Vedic, Brahmanic philosophy that makes you go, I'm not so on board with that. I'm more on team Jesus. Because like I said earlier, without hearing much more detail than what you've said today, I would say that you sound sort of quite compatible with a Vedic view of the world and it feels a bit trickier to explain the uniqueness of Jesus and certainly the crucifixion and resurrection stuff like sort of added material just seems like the you know we are all just manifestations of brahman and it's all sort of one big thing called the universe and that's what consciousness is and

consciousness the self is the same thing as the universe brahman atman is Brahman it just seems to sort of go together quite well, you know what I mean? And I wonder if there's something that puts you off that. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's taxes extra. I suppose I do struggle with where the bad stuff comes from for Advaita for danta, which is the problem in all the religions. If there's just Brahman, why is the suffering? Why is... Now, of course, Christianity has this problem as well.

I've got a slightly heretical answer to that, that God is limited, but God is trying to create something new and something good, which is creation, which is partly separate for God and then ultimately a unity between God and creation. And that's what Jesus does. And that's what Jesus, that's the core movement in this. So, yeah, so my interpretation of Christianity, God's on the way to make in a perfect universe, but unfortunately can only do that in two stages. God can't just create it like that.

God can only do it in two stages. Firstly, creating a kind of okay universe with the right numbers to, create life for life to evolve and then when it's evolved enough starting to unify with it so it's going to be really good in the end thinking it doesn't quite have the same ring to it does it like in in genesis and he looked upon what he had made and he saw that it was okay yeah it's all right it'll do for now it's going to be really good in the end though but uh and god's like oh i'm sorry it's going to be messy like you know evolution and cancer and all that but is this or nothing whereas yeah where i mean i yeah i had a recent discussion with a with a

Advaita Vedanta Vedantam mystic and expert and where does the bad stuff come from? And then they could say to me, well, it's an illusion. There isn't really bad stuff. And then I'm like, okay, this is mysticism too far. There is bad stuff. And I want to know where it comes from. So in my slightly heretical version of Eastern Orthodox, we've got an answer. Yeah.

We're building something good, a unity between God and creation, and it's just messy along the way. But God's limited. and so that's in your way you can do it. So that's not unheard of in the Christian tradition too. You know, this idea of like bad is just a privation of good. It doesn't really exist. There's ideas. And what you said earlier resonates with me that a lot of the time, I don't want to do the sort of hippie-dippy, everyone saying the same thing, man.

There are clearly doctrinal distinctions between religious groups. But when it comes to the mystical tradition, when it comes to the experiential stuff, there does seem to be a lot of getting at the same thing in different words. I mean, I could read a passage from John. 17, I talk about this a lot, and it would sound like I'm reading a piece of Hindu scripture. It sound like I'm reading, you know, I don't know, I don't know what texts I'd be reading something from the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gita or something where Jesus is saying like, you know, praying for his disciples and saying, just as we are one father, may they be one with each other

and one with me and me and me and me so that we all may be created, brought into perfect unity. So we may all ultimately be one together. Now, Christians, of course, slot that into their theology, which they can do. But on the surface, at least, it's like, that sounds a little bit weird. When Jesus has said, I and the father are one, and in explaining what he means, he means I'm in the father and the father's in me, and then goes on to say, well, I want all of the disciples and then all Christian believers to be in me just as I'm in you. You get this, again, this deification, this idea that however Jesus, Jesus, was one with the father, he's kind of like the prototype for all of humankind. Now, for me, this is really interesting. I'm like, cool. So there's this guy called Jesus and he was some

kind of divine figure and awesome. And I'm totally on board. Like, that makes perfect sense. But then he gets crucified. And then you get these sort of post-resurrection appearances and stuff. And it just seems to me that if that's all Jesus was trying to do and there was no punishment for sin and it was just a case of coming down to provide the way for deification, where does like the crucifixion slod into this? Yeah, so there were two things there. Well, yeah, maybe this would be a good moment to slip in

that I've just finished a new book called heresy. It's probably about a year before it comes out. But part of that is diving into the mystical traditions we get in all the faiths. And I'm talking more about the Abrahamic faiths because I think people think, oh, they're not very spiritual. You know, his Buddhism, spiritual. But yeah, you've got Kabbalah in Judaism. You've got Sufism in Islam.

And you've got the mystical traditions in Christianity. I'm looking at Ibn Arabi, the Sufi mystic, who thought that, you know, God is completely beyond understanding. Even Allah is not God. That sounds heretical for a Muslim. But when you think of ultimate reality as Allah, you're qualifying it, you're relating to it, whereas ultimate reality is beyond qualification. What you were pointing to, though, I think was the last supper narrative in John's Gospel,

where it's very, you know, Jesus gives this kind of after-dinner speech, as it were, and the disciples are saying, oh my God, you're finally telling us how it is, you're finally giving it us straight. Now, what does he say? He doesn't say, right? You've all been bad people. Someone has to pay the price. Someone's going to be punished. I'm going to take the rat.

No, he talks about oneness repeatedly. It's like, as you say, I'm the father and one and you are in me and I am in you. It's like this intimate connection where both things are inside each other, paradoxically. And it's like this deep unity between Jesus and the being he called father being taken out to the rest of humanity and creation. So, yeah, so I see deification. I think that's what he's talking about. I think he's saying this is what it's all about. Okay, but you're pushing me.

I'm being a politician dodging the question here on the crucifixion. So what was, why was this horrific, painful death? I would say it's partly about deification, sharing fully in our miserable existence, the more gruesome aspects. I like to think also it's partly cosmic. solidarity or part of the revelation of God that we're supposed to get through Jesus. St. Paul says Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Why is Jesus in Luke's gospel born in poverty, you know, put where the animals eat, greeted by shepherds rather than kings? I think this is expressing that God identifies with the poor, the weak, the excluded. So what a wonderful sign of

that than seeing God as this naked, executed, humiliated peasants suffering that the cruelest form of punishment that was reserved for the lowest of the low. I think it's a sign that God is on the side of immigrants in cages, is on the side of the weak and the power. us and something which some Christians have forgotten. But yeah, so that's how I think of it anyway. So it's kind of like a display of solidarity. This is who I am and this is what I'm for. I mean, I guess that is probably the ultimate way of doing that.

And Christians speak in those terms, even if you took away their reflections on the nature of Jesus' sacrifice, they still say, but the reason why it was crucifixion. Because if Jesus just has to die for your sins, you know, he could have. have just sort of been euthanized in his sleep. They say, no, no, no, the reason that he did it with crucifixion is to demonstrate that this sort of, this concern with the poor and the downtrodden, identification with the weakest of society. And in the same way that you can separate out those questions, you can probably also

then separate out those concepts. And you can say, even if you don't need the punishment for sin stuff, for Jesus to be special, You still have this very good reason for him to ultimately demonstrate his identification. He's already shown us that he's identified with the highest of the high, because he's, like, you know, got God inside of him. So if he can show us that he's also identified with the lowest of the low. But that sort of raised a question for a lot of people as to, like, for example, why wasn't Jesus a woman? You know, like women are more downtrodden in society than men are. So if Jesus had been a woman and crucified as a woman.

That's a good point. But then, you know, I've heard people respond to that. by saying that, you know, the humiliation of women is so kind of normalized in various contexts that there's almost something more humiliating about being up on the cross as a man. And depending on who says that, that's either a very feminist or a very anti-feminist perspective. Because you've got the, you got the anti-feminist who says, well, it's more humiliating for a man because, you know, it's just worse for a man to do. And then you've got the feminist saying, like, because we're so used to seeing women, like, humiliated. And Tom Holland in his book,

Dominion has expressed how powerful that idea was, you know, that God is not the king in the castle, but as this executed, but it's like it was weird, and we sort of get, it sort of gets normalized. But I also kind of want to then ask, like, you know, you can, it gets to the point of parody, but if we think the universe is consciousness and, you know, there's nothing necessarily that's super special about human beings exactly. Like, why isn't Jesus a, you know, a rose? Or something like surely the way to really demonstrate his sort of identification with the lowest of the lowest to be like an animal who's sort of, you know, literally fit for slaughter. Maybe there's just a communication issue there, you know. It has to be.

You sort of got a draw a line somewhere, I suppose. Look, I mean, what I'm very happy to embrace is there's a lot of uncertainty. Yeah, sure. So, and you know, I mean, I can go further than that. You know, I'm very uncertain as to whether any of this is true. You know, I don't think faith is about certainty. I think it's about hope and trust and commitment. It's about living something out.

I think often people think, am I going to join a religion? They have to think, is it definitely true? Oh, no, there's some objection. But, you know, these things are always going to be incredibly uncertain. I think what you should think, if you're thinking of joining a religion, I think you should think, I'm going to get something out of it. And is it a credible possibility? So I think evidence and arguments are, is it a credible possibility?

It's always going to be very uncertain. So I suppose I've got to the point where I think this slightly heretical Eastern Orthodox-inspired Anglican version of Christianity is a credible possibility. But that leaves open that other religions like maybe a divide of a danta are also quite. credible possibilities, leaves open a kind of pluralism that doesn't just say, oh, they're all saying the same thing, but says, if it's all about certainty, then only one can be the one where we can be certain, it's true. But if it's, if we're open to like 30%, then there can be multiple, multiple religions where it's credible enough to be possible. So, so I feel confident enough to commit. And that's bought me great joy. It's brought me community. It's brought me

structure. It's bought me spiritual practice. It's brought many life benefits. So that's what I'm trying to do in this in this new book, Heresy, actually, is just aiming kind of at the spiritual, but not religious, this huge ever-growing group. I'm not saying, look, here's the one true faith. You've got to believe it. Or you're going to hell. Just saying, look, there's things you can get out of religion, tradition, structure, community. And there's ways of engaging it that might avoid some of the worries you have. You know, you can be very uncertain. You can be a bit heretical. You can take it all as a big metaphor, if you want. As a physics professor in my church, who is a very spiritual person there every week. He thinks, he says to me, what, it's all this mumbo-jumbo you believe? I'm too

orthodoxy. You know, he doesn't believe any of the specifics of Christianity. Now, of course, some churches will kick you out, but I don't know, a lot of Anglican churches or Quakers, you know, I'm going to interrogate you. And so, yeah. That's my message, really. Yeah. And you land on saying you are a Christian? Like, would you describe that? I mean, I understand you qualify it because we're having a conversation about your beliefs,

but in your day-to-day, you know, would you just say to people sort of who ask you on the street, like, I'm Christian? Is that like your view now? Yeah, I suppose the only reason I qualify it is because so many identify Christianity with a very particular form, maybe sort of US evangelicals. Christianity, you know, and I'm not saying evangelical Christians are horrible people, a lot of them are very good friends, but that's not the kind of Christianity I find plausible and spiritually resonates with me. So I suppose I might qualify it just because people may get an idea that's different from the truth. But yeah, I'm a Christian, sure. It's been a important part of my life and it's made me quite happy. I don't know if it's true, but yeah, quite happy. So. well, that's, maybe that's, maybe that's all that matters. I mean, at least it does for the individual, like, you know, who cares, doctrinally when it comes to experience of the divine. I mean, I talk all the time about how people who report having intense religious experiences, they just sort of give up on the intellectualizing and realize that that's kind of not what it's about. And so, you know, it's interesting to talk about, but I would be interested in seeing this fleshed out in an intellectual fashion, which it sounds like you've kind of done in this book, which, I'm excited to read, you know, you should send me a proof copy.

I'd love to have a flip through. Sure, I'd love to. That would be really, really cool to see. And I think people are interested in, you know, I don't want to say your journey, because we were talking before we started recording about how people often do that. They do that to you and they do it to me as well. Like, as soon as you say anything friendly to Christianity, it's like, awesome. Look, you know, this person's on board.

And then when you say, yeah, but I'm not sure God is all powerful. Yeah, but I'm not sure Jesus claimed to be God. Then it's like, he's on a journey, you know, he'll get there. eventually he'll get there eventually and like you said before we started recording like maybe you're already there maybe this is just the place to end up you know next time i talk to an evangelical christian i'm going to say oh you're on a journey towards the limited power god you'll get there eventually i mean insofar as i'm embracing the core of eastern orthodox christianity that's much older than the protestant idea of penal substitution that was like

500 years ago you often get the sense that there can't be innovation Yeah, right? But religions have always reimagined themselves. Aquinas was radically new philosophy at the time. The Protestant reformers had a radically new understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. So what's wrong with this maybe thinking? Maybe God's not all powerful in the way we've previously thought. And maybe this is just part of our moral understanding. I find like the problem of evil, I think you might agree with it. this Alex becomes more pressing as we've advanced morally and understood the importance of animal suffering, for example. So maybe this is part of progress and progressing in our understanding of God. Now, God's not going to be cruel enough to create a world like this if she could help it. There's another thing that winds up. Conserved questions. You're doing that on purpose. Yeah, with Craig, he said, when he was talking about my book and he said, and she, he uses the word she. I don't know. I mean, this, it's supposed to be these snowflakes,

these traditionalists, they just, you know, stop being so triggered, man. Yeah. I think, you know, God's obviously non-binary, so they is a good pronoun, the Trinity as well. Yeah, I think, I think it sounds controversial to say, but it's so, because God is like not any of these things. It's like, You know, God, no, God is not conceptualizable into, like, you know, categories and our categories of spatial extension and thought. And you're like, oh, so, so God's non-binary, then it's like, no, no, you're liberal. But, yeah, I know, I know what you mean. But, look, I think, look, I don't hate conservatives. But, you know, I think actually there, in most of society, there can be a natural balance between progressives and conservatives.

You know, progressives who are saying, like, we need to update in certain ways and conservatives saying, hold on, hold on, let's be careful. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. And there can be a nice balance. I think recently with religion, it's more dominated by conservatives, especially in the US. So I guess part of what I'm trying to do with this book is to try and help liberals make intellectual sense of religion, not so we can kick out the conservatives, but so we can maybe get back to that. natural balance that exists in a lot of society. Well, we will wait in anticipation until it arrives. The books that are already out, are in the description if people want to buy them and read them. And whenever this new one's out, we'll try to remember to put a link there too. So if you're watching a few years in the future, it should be down there too. And if it's not, leave us a comment, send us an email and we'll get that fixed immediately. Philip Goff, thanks for your time. Thank you very much, Alex. A pleasure as always.