Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Hardest Question No Religion Can Answer... | David Bentley Hart

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Starting point is 00:00:38 Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. I heard you mention that the problem of evil is the most compelling and coherent argument against theism, especially in its challenge to the idea of a benevolent and omnipotent God. So what is the problem of evil? Why is this such a powerful critique? And then what is your response to said powerful critique? I see. We are starting at the deep end, or at least the… Oh, the problem of evil is simply the obvious one, the suffering of the innocent, the pestilence, famine, war, children dying of cancer, the suffering of all creatures. I have never been able to accept any of the sort of standard arguments from modal logic

Starting point is 00:01:53 or English analytic philosophy regarding materialism. I've never been able to accept the notion that the materialist picture of reality conforms either to logic or experience, but the argument against belief in at least a benevolent good or God or belief in any sort of rational order to the cosmos at all, from the sheer suffering of the innocent, from the sheer darkness of this world I've never taken issue with, I find it the most powerful and to be honest unanswerable riposte to theism, at least as conventionally conceived. The normal gesture of the religious imagination, of course, is simply to say there's more to it than we understand. There's a good ending beyond it all. But as Ivan Karamazov argued, given the sheer enormity of the evils we're talking about and their reality within the present, deferring the justification to this to some presumed eschatological future doesn't make the cost any more morally bearable. I have no answer to it, to be perfectly

Starting point is 00:03:35 honest. I've never pretended to. I'm caught on the horns of a dilemma, metaphysically, intellectually, I'm a theist, just because I think that the evidence of reason points in that direction, but the problem of evil, I regard, is irresoluble in the terms available to us. What's the difference between the problem of evil and the problem of suffering? Oh, none. It's two names for the same thing. The notion of evil, I mean, the problem of evil, I suppose, also encompasses the reality of human malevolence, you know, as moral evil as well as natural. But at the end of the day, the truth is that as long as a single child has died of diphtheria in the history of the human race, the preponderance of the argument, the

Starting point is 00:04:38 preponderance of the power of the argument is not one that favors the theistic or at least theistic platitudes. Matthew 16.30 For me, problems that I can't solve, they stick in my craw and I think about them as I go about walks, if I'm at the gym, if I'm laying up at night trying to sleep. This is an insolvable or insoluble problem. Is this one that keeps you up or is there something else? Well, I don't know if it keeps me up because I'm a fairly lethargic creature. I can find It leaves me in an uncomfortable position. I simply cannot make myself become the metaphysical optimist I might wish to be when confronted

Starting point is 00:05:39 with the reality of the suffering of the innocent, it simply exceeds anything my imagination or my reason is able to overcome. At the same time, in other moments, I'm aware of the beauty and goodness of things. It could be something like a child at play, or the sight of a dog. I'm terrifically fond of dogs and cats. But at the end of the day, no, I don't think I'll ever comfortably settle into any state of firm and fervent and contented faith. So, I guess what I'm looking for is there a variety of things that occupy one's mind, whether they're positive or benign or problems, and then the problems come of a sort of philosophical or theological sorts. So I'm looking for, are there any quandaries or paradoxes that you think about almost on

Starting point is 00:06:53 a daily basis, theologically or philosophically? Well, definitely this one. I mean, you know, this, I think, I mean, not to wax too confessional here, but right now, you know, I've been suffering from ill health for much of this past year, sort of unexpected descent of a chronic pain condition. So I'm in pain every day. And without much assurance of what direction I'm going in. And one becomes conscious in those situations, not that this is especially unfair because others, so many others suffer so much. But it does make one less inclined to be glib about these things. I think it's very easy for us to place the suffering of others in the back of our mind as merely an intellectual quandary,

Starting point is 00:08:03 so long as it doesn't touch us directly, and so long as those most immediate to us whom we love are not suffering. Things change fairly rapidly when one has to deal with suffering at closer quarters, not necessarily because of self-pity, there's always that danger, but because it gives you a keener sense of how you've failed to take sufficiently seriously the sufferings of others. And I don't think I will ever, I mean, I could keep saying the same thing over and over again, and I'm sorry to be repetitious, but the truth is, I believe certain things, I believe certain things intellectually, I believe certain things religiously, but I

Starting point is 00:08:51 also think that if there's a way of understanding the price that is paid for existence in this world for the good that we hope lies at the essence of all things or at the end of all things. We simply do not possess the resources to calculate it. I think actually one of the great virtues of the Psalms, to be honest, is how often they're rather bilious in their attitude, you know, how much of them consist in complaints to God. Right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:40 Yeah, you can read them and they sound like they were written by modern day, well, they sound like yourself. It's remarkable because much of the Bible you read and there's plenty of it that's antiquated. Yep. But that's not, it's not a book of consolations and that makes it timeless. Oh, there's one part, and you know this far better than myself, there's this one part that says, God, I'm suffering, I'm praying, and all I get is silence.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Where are you? Should I just not believe in you? Or something akin to that or analogous to that. It's something of a refrain in the Psalms. David Gordon called you one of the most well-read people in the world. One-half? Yeah, I'm sorry. groups. David Gordon called you one of the most well-read people in the world. One of? Yeah, I'm sorry. That's kind of him. I'm grateful to have you here, not only for that, but in spite of your health troubles and your suffering that you've chosen to spend some time with me.

Starting point is 00:10:39 So thank you for that. I don't know many people who have translated the entirety of the New Testament, so that's pretty cool. Let's talk about that. You once said that we're fools if we think we understand it, referring to the Bible, and that it's not a unified text. It doesn't reflect a unified theology. What reflects are many different reactions to an event of extraordinary mystery and power

Starting point is 00:11:04 to those who are writing about it. Now my question is, what event are you referring to and how should it be read if it's not unified? Well, the event I'm referring to is described early on in 1 Corinthians 15, it was simply the experience of the risen Christ. I find it very hard to get past those verses for any number of reasons. Those are the earliest accounts we have of not the resurrection, but experiences of these encounters. They antedate the empty tomb narratives of the Gospels. And they have a plain documentary quality to them that's extraordinarily convincing. It's also the case that it's always been something of an enigma why it is that Christianity survived the death of Christ, I mean the death of Jesus of Nazareth, but for some supposition that these reports are based in reality.

Starting point is 00:12:17 When Paul says, you know, he's heard that one time 500 persons at a time had this experience. And then speaking out of it as his own personal experience coming very late in the day, he too had had this encounter. Now, he doesn't talk about an empty tomb. And the empty tomb narratives in the gospels themselves obviously are contradictory. I mean, there's obviously a unified tradition there of the women finding the tomb empty first. But if one were simply going on those stories, they would seem fairly incredible.

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Starting point is 00:14:24 d.com slash DI offer to learn more. Pete But that, but what Paul's talking about is something else and it is a very curious thing. I mean, many historians have acknowledged this, even those who have no stake in theological claims, that all the other patterns of these messianic movements were great enthusiasm followed by disappointment, followed by dissolution, disintegration. Here alone you had the movement after the death of its putative founder, taking deeper root and beginning to spread. And even, and I don't think this is purely hagiography because the evidence suggests otherwise, even many of them being willing to die rather than to deny that experience. You know, there was a famous Protestant, or I should say, Evangelischer, theologian Wolfhard Pannenberg who converted to Christianity out of this experience, this event was a concrete historical datum that he couldn't get past. Now, that's not an absolute proof of anything,

Starting point is 00:16:00 but it's a compelling one. And as far as I'm concerned, the variety of responses, I mean, to be perfectly honest, you know, any attempt to claim that there is a single unified theology in the New Testament simply requires such a forced reading. Now, that forced reading is often facilitated by traditions of translation, which somewhat suppress, somewhat hide what the actual language on the page is actually saying. Things that are much less definite in the Greek have been, shall we say, cajoled into conformity with the general picture in the translation. But even then, it's clear that what we're getting is not a system of belief, not in a final, refined form. But what we are getting from Paul and others is a genuine conviction that something

Starting point is 00:16:56 has happened that has altered the frame of reality and has altered their relation to it. And they're responding to it in a variety of ways using the theological paradigms available to them or the philosophical paradigms available to them. And Paul talks about resurrection, he seems clearly to be influenced by, say, Stoic metaphysics to some degree, for instance. But it's not a system. So you mentioned this word, and I've heard you mention this several times in other interviews, stoic metaphysics. So what is the relevance of stoic metaphysics?

Starting point is 00:17:36 What is it? What does it mean? Well, you see, in a sense, it's kind of anachronistic when we're talking about late antiquity to assume that everyone occupied just a single school. As it happens, all of the different philosophical and metaphysical schools seem somewhat intermingled with one another. Late Platonism had Aristotelian elements, it consorted with Stoic elements. So it does Stoicism, specifically a school of thought, you know, greatest proponents, someone like Proppounder would be Epictetus, for instance, that had, you know, in one sense, it did not make any complete and absolute division

Starting point is 00:18:21 between the physical and material understood spirit as a kind of higher element, mind as a kind of divine fire, God as a kind of divine fire pervading all things, understood the cosmic cycle of existence as one tending towards dissolution and a final great ecpyrosis, so that there's a structure to history. Now, it's a cyclical structure in Stoicism. It recurs over and over again. But within history itself, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And there have been very good scholarly works on how Paul's descriptions, say, of the resurrection body also in 1 Corinthians 15 indicate a leaning towards a stoic metaphysics of matter and

Starting point is 00:19:18 of the body and of spirit. I mean, we, you know, later tradition talks about things like the resurrection of the flesh, but that's something Paul didn't believe in. He meant what he said when he said, flesh and blood can't inherit the kingdom of heaven. For him, flesh and blood are inherently mortal composite realities of the psychical body, which is often mistranslated as natural body, meaning a body animated, a body that has a psyche or soul or life principle super added to it. And he foresees this being transformed into a body composed entirely of spirit so that,

Starting point is 00:19:55 you know, it's continuous in one sense, but in another sense, not. Just a moment. So a body composed entirely of spirit. So the way that we think of it, even though we're not supposed to be dualists, but the way that we think of it in modern times is that there's spirit and then there's matter and that a body of spirit is just spirit. Yeah. Well, again, that's modern sort of Cartesian notion, the notion that the soul is a kind of ghost in a machine or something. And

Starting point is 00:20:26 some people think it has a kind of antecedent and platonic thought. I think that's mistaken. But in Paul's language, and this is pretty much true of most of the metaphysics of late antiquity, spirit is not disembodied. That's the wrong way of thinking. It's more like a higher, a more super eminent, a more powerful element. It's what angels are composed of, for instance, or for non-Christians or non-Jews, what gods or demons, the intermediate divinities are composed of. It is a kind of matter in itself. It's just not the lower matter of mortal existence below the sphere of the moon, which is susceptible to genesis and decay. So they don't talk about you having spirit?

Starting point is 00:21:25 Because when someone says you have this, it's as if it's like a purse or a backpack. It's something you have and you can also not have it. Oh, so talk about the, you know, they use that language well. There's not a single consistent grammar here. You can speak of in this life, having spirit, having more spirit or not. There are many for whom the sort of things we call the early Gnostic schools may or may not have had this notion of the psychical body or a psychical man as being entirely devoid of the element of spirit. You certainly get language

Starting point is 00:22:05 of that sort in the epistle to Jude, which suggests that there are those who are purely psychical. Again, it's often translated as sensual man or animal man or whatever, but it was a psychical not having spirit. But that's often, again, translated as not having the Holy Spirit, but that's not what the Greek says. So again, there's not a single systematic vocabulary or grammar at work. But when we try to think of this in terms of either even the later medieval notion of disembodied intelligences, I mean, Thomas Aquinas thought of angels as being disembodied intelligences with no kind of material substrate at all, either ethereal or earthly. And so each angel is its own species because he's very much an Aristotelian and what individuates form or speech is matter. Well, that's not

Starting point is 00:23:08 the way late antiquity thought. They just really didn't have that notion. And of course, in the modern age, we have this radically Cartesian notion that Descartes gave us this picture, he more than anyone else, of body and soul as two qualitatively different things. Only body, the material body, is an extended substance, a race extensa, and mind is simply race, kajatans, mind or soul. And never, though the two meet, never, never should they be confused with one another. They're entirely different. That's not the way Paul is talking in 1 Corinthians 15.

Starting point is 00:23:51 How much can we read into 1 Corinthians 15 if it was just two or three lines? How can we tell the entire, not entirety, but a large portion of Paul's metaphysics just from three lines if it wasn't mentioned in other places. Well, it is mentioned in other places more elusively, such as when he talks about the Outer Man and the Inner Man. If you look at that, it's clear that he's, or he talks about body and flesh, flesh and spirit rather, being in tension or being at odds with one another. He's speaking much more literally about, we tend to take the word flesh there and make it into a moral category or something. But

Starting point is 00:24:31 also in 1 Corinthians 15, these are not vague, it's not just two or three lines, it's maybe seven or ten lines. He is giving an account of the resurrection body in which he is very specifically denying that it's flesh and blood, a psychical body, one that's animated by soul, and insisting that it's a body of spirit, a summa pneumaticon. There's no – and explicitly denying that flesh and blood can inherit the kingdom of heaven. These aren't vague phrases. So, again, Paul is a stoic. That would be a mistake. But it was a very influential school of thought, I mean, you know, in its time. And it was also the one morally most consonant with Christian thought. I mean, Paul is, and in its time, and it was also the one morally most consonant with Christian thought. I mean, Paul is a cosmopolitan in the sense that he believes that in Christ

Starting point is 00:25:31 the divisions of peoples have disappeared. And he's quite happily a citizen of the empire using its apparatus in order to spread the gospel. And he has, you know and he has no desire to maintain divisions of identity, he thinks, in the event of Christ, whatever this event is he's reporting, its ultimate significance in terms of human community is that there is this body in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, man and woman or husband and wife even, depending on how you translate that. And stoicism was very much, the ethos of stoicism was that of cosmopolitanism. It was of trying to, without absolutely abolishing, radical thought was very difficult in the first century, for instance, but break down the distinction between slave and master and barbarian and civilized, and to proclaim a sort of universal family of humankind, a cosmopolis, a city of the

Starting point is 00:26:48 cosmos as opposed to just say Rome and its abanations of power. So in many ways, when Paul speaks morally, not merely metaphysically, but morally, you can see that if there's a pagan school of thought most consonant with the gospel he's proclaiming, it's definitely Stoicism. Help me and the audience who are modern people, not necessarily do-less, but help us understand how the flesh and blood can't inherit the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, but the spirit can, yet at the same time the spirit is not wholly different than flesh. Well, is it wholly different from flesh? It's the flesh, in Paul's language, sarx, is a sort of animal constitution, which of its nature, certain things you have to understand,

Starting point is 00:27:47 it's intrinsically mortal. And for Paul, remember, salvation is from death. I mean, in the Age to Come, he doesn't, he nowhere talks about heaven and hell. He talks about a renewed new creation, age to come of life as opposed to being lost to death. The final judgment or the final crisis, the eschaton, is the creation of a new age beyond the reach of death, which means it's not a creation still in which we would be bound to flesh and blood, but have a different, a body of a totally different kind, the sort of body that angels have. I mean, you know, even in the Gospels, we have Christ speaking of the age to come, we will live as the angels in heaven. Well, we tend to think of that again, very vaguely, but it could, I mean, if he's speaking to Pharisees and what we know of pharisaic religion suggests this is the case, what he is literally saying

Starting point is 00:28:59 is that in the life of the age to come, we will be physically like the angels. And that means – and again, if you're working within the realm of late antique cosmology, that means also a certain liberty from purely terrestrial limitations, because angels can live above the sphere of the moon in the ethereal heavens, you know. We can't, but, and this is the thing that's hardest, perhaps, for late modern people to grasp, is that the distinction between the metaphysical and the physical is not as pronounced in late antiquity

Starting point is 00:29:42 as it is in late modernity. That there's a sense in which, yes, know that God's transcendent, at the same time, there's a sense in which God's true heaven is the Empyrean above the fixed stars. And in a sense, and when Paul talks about thrones and dominions and powers in high places, he literally means these sort of mutinous angelic sort of beings who spiritually but also in a sense physically separate us from God on high and that Christ has made a way through the heavens and has conquered these powers. So there's still a kind of place with the cosmological and the spiritual or metaphysical are as yet not clearly distinguished from one another.

Starting point is 00:30:38 Obviously we live with very different cosmology. And again, does that mean that this was all pathetic illusion? They were bound to an antique picture of reality that has been superseded now, but it means that they're thinking in the terms of their time to express this otherwise inexpressible experience of salvation in the risen Christ. You personally, David, when you're thinking about the Bible or you're looking at the world, do you have to switch your cosmology? Do you have to switch your philosophy such that you diminish the distinction between metaphysics and physics or physical, sorry, and adopt a stoic or a more stoic metaphysic? Or do you now, because you've studied this and you've thought about it for so long, it's natural to you and instead what you have to do is you have to switch to speaking to someone

Starting point is 00:31:48 like me who would require an analogy to say, okay, is this like flesh? And then you heat it up and that becomes more spiritual because it's on the same continuum, but it's temperature. I don't even know if it's a continuum. I mean, I think flesh and blood are genuinely abolished for Paul. How that then is a transformation rather than an exchange of one body for another, I don't think Paul ever works out exactly. I mean, he sees it as sort of like a seed, as he says, you know, it's sown of a psychical

Starting point is 00:32:24 body, it's sown a psychical body, it's raised a spiritual body. So, in some sense, it's a continuity and a transformation. But in that continuity, something is definitely shed. What he does not believe in is a resurrection of the flesh. Now, we have one verse and one verse only in the Gospel of Luke in which the risen Christ says I'm flesh and bone I'm not I'm not a spirit using spirit there as it was also used in late antiquity just to mean a ghost phantom So again, the New Testament doesn't present a single picture most for the most part It seems to me at least the epistolary materials are closer to Paul

Starting point is 00:33:02 and anything else but I'm not claiming, again, what I would say is that the experience is very hard to deny that something happened. How the persons of that time understood the experience was of its time and was various. But it's quite possible for something to be very real and very concrete and still elude single uniform expression. But today, if we had this experience, we might very well be thinking in more Cartesian terms, you know? Or we might not, I mean, you know, we might be thinking in terms suggested to us by modern physics with some sort of transformation into another kind of corporeal frame made of light

Starting point is 00:34:04 or something, I don't know. The imagination can only accomplish so much and conceptual models have only so much applicability. But, you know, what's important to me is that we not misinterpret the original text for two reasons. One, just for the sake of intellectual honesty. If we're not going to acknowledge that Paul means what he says, and say, oh, well, no, he believed in the body of flesh and blood being raised up, but made immortal and all that, then we're just refusing to acknowledge that his language doesn't conform to a lot of the later theological language of Christianity. But the other thing is, to me, there's a kind of healthier intellectual hygiene in seeing

Starting point is 00:34:58 and recognizing the plurality of perspectives in the New Testament because it teaches us not to be either fundamentalist about not to think that dogmatically we understand and know. It reminds us that the event compels us perhaps, but that it's not something that anyone has ever been able to understand with an absolutely exhaustive and convincing language or model to work from. So, David, as a Christian, when you're trying to make sense of the Bible, do you give different books, different weights of credence? So for instance, you would say an example that Mark was written first, therefore what comes in John is likely embellished with a poetic undertone and so I'm going to, if I'm

Starting point is 00:35:56 supposed to take a literalist frame or a more historical frame or whatever frame you may want to take, you're going to evaluate Mark differently than you do John. And there are disputed epistles, so I'm not going to put as much weight to them as I would say 1 Corinthians. Well, with the pastoral epistles, Timothy and Titus, there are things that are disappointing when you compare them to Paul's authentic epistles, and then there are things that are quite encouraging about it, so, you know, it's a matter of sort. Well, I don't, I mean, it was to say that Mark came first is not to say that it's, I mean, assuming, I mean, we're pretty clear, it's probably the earliest of the Gospels, but that doesn't

Starting point is 00:36:40 mean it's any more accurate or trustworthy than the others. It establishes a narrative framing of Christ that's then taken up in Matthew and Luke. So, Mark is part of what gives us the other two synoptics, and that's a framing of Christ in certain, framing of Christ's ministry in certain terms and in a certain way of indicating who he is. Even then, Mark lacks the logium material, the sayings of Christ that actually give us any firm sense of, say, his moral teachings for that. You need to go to Matthew and Luke to get a better sense of what the tradition there says. John is clearly from a completely different ambit. It is a theological commentary on Christ, but doesn't even make the pretense of being an historical narrative in the same way, except when it does, you know, when suddenly you get very particular information given about

Starting point is 00:37:46 Caiaphas, say, or something, whether it's true or not. I don't know. I mean, again, as I say, when it comes to the credibility of the claims Christians make, That one chapter in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, has a force that's unique to my mind in the New Testament in terms of credibility. Other than that, since I'm not looking, I mean, I don't regard Scripture as an index of dogmas. I don't really think in terms of how to weight it. I believe that—and when I say the event of Christ, I don't just mean the resurrection, I mean his presence and time and his teaching and all that—is indicated, is elucidated to a great extent. And then there are great layers of interpretation of it, as in, say, John's Gospel, that are precious perspective on it, but that by themselves, if they're not part of this sort of polyphonic testimony, would not be as compelling or as convincing because to be honest, Jesus as he appears in the Gospel

Starting point is 00:39:26 of John is not an attractive figure in the way he is in Luke, say. He's not as attractive? Well, I mean, there's very little of the, you see very little, with the exception of the story of the woman taken in adultery, which of course isn't actually originally part of John. It probably was a free-floating tradition that would fit better in Luke. But you see very little. At times, you do. You see the humanity of Christ weeping at the grave of Lazarus and all that.

Starting point is 00:40:00 But most of it is taken up with discourses and very mystical discourses and a very pronounced language of judgment, of discrimination, you know, you're children of the devil, or it's light and darkness. Christ in the Gospel of John, we see him not in his aspect as the moral teacher of Matthew and Luke, but in the aspect of a moment of decision for those who encounter him. Is this the face of God or not? And there, you know, it's sort of a, the gospel is making a theological comment about God entering time in a way that separates light from darkness. But we hear very little about feeding the poor, about caring for the sick, about visiting the prisoners. We think of the Jesus of John in those terms because we're thinking of Jesus as he's presented in the two long synoptic

Starting point is 00:41:10 gospels. And that's necessary. You need this counterpoint. You need to see the historically concrete figure who emerges from the sayings attributed to him And from the story of this man who comes out of Galilee into Judea speaking on the behalf of the poor and the excluded, in order for that light of judgment that you see in John to be something more than just a terrifying and to be honest, somewhat incredible myth. Now let's get to something controversial. Unlike this, yeah. So speaking of John, John, the first part of John, the Greek is often rendered in the beginning was the logos or the word, and the logos was with God and the logos was God.

Starting point is 00:42:07 Now I just brought up this cup here. There's an event that I went to called O'Shaughnessy Ventures. They fortunately gave me a grant to work on something and over there someone else was given a grant. His name is Jonathan B. I'll put a link to his channel on screen and in the description as well. He was telling me, Kurt, in that verse, in the Greek, there's something called pros. Prostateon, yeah. Yes, right, right. And it implies a moving toward or a facing. And that connotes something that's distinct. So, most Christians think of Jesus as God, not just an aspect of God, but as God.

Starting point is 00:42:50 And sometimes they'll even pray to Jesus. But this to me suggests that Jesus is not God. Now in your translation, again, I'll put the link on screen to your work, you do a similar translation except God is in capitals and then at one point God is in lower case. So walk us through John 1.1. Well, I'm trying to remember the order there, but it's actually, theos logos, come to think of it, it's a god, the word was, or something. But it's not the word there. And I say a god because the actual distinction in the verse that, or at least that the verse seems to honor. Although again,

Starting point is 00:43:46 structures of predication have ambiguities in Greek. But, auteus, or hotheos as you'd say in Erasmian Greek, the God is generally the privileged term for God most high in the ancient world. And this is a convention in pagan and Jewish and Christian thought. And for Christians, I mean, I honestly believe in the New Testament, auteus always means God in the sense of father, right? But when it says the logos was God or God But when it says the Logos was God or God was Logos, the article is missing. There's no article. And the word God had a much greater elasticity in the antique world. It could be used, you'll find even, say, church fathers using the term when they're speaking of saints, John of Damascus will speak of saints as they, you know, God.

Starting point is 00:44:55 And of course, angels, became angels, were originally gods within a pantheon, within an Israelitic pantheon. And so here what you're having is an assertion not of necessarily co-equal identity, but of continuity. It's still saying the logos is God, but it's not equating it there, equating the logos there with God most high. Still here the issues begin to arise. And this is quite common right up through the fourth century in Christian thought that's still a very strong, what's considered an orthodox strain of thought, small o, especially in the East up until the Council of Nicaea

Starting point is 00:45:45 and after for a long time afterwards as a kind of what would be called a subordination essentially, that God misties God in the properties of the fathers. And then the logos is defteros thales. And you find this saying a Jewish thinker like Philo, but also Christian thing. If you can read, say, Eusebius before Nicaea gives you a pretty clear notion of what many believe to be Orthodox Christianity, which there's not a co-equality. There's a continuity, but it's vague. It can even, in the case of, say, Arianism, be, you know, the sun can be seen as created, and there's a kind of ambiguity between the notion of creation and generation. Genema and genema spelled slightly differently.

Starting point is 00:46:32 That said, and the reason for this notion of a secondary God is that God properly is so transcendent that he can't enter into direct contact with finite reality. Therefore, he generates his word, or his secondary God, the angel of mighty counsel, the chief of the angels, to govern creation and to deal with the lower world. And then the spirit would be maybe God too, but you know, and, but there's a reticence about this right up till very late, several centuries along, ever to use the term Otheos for anyone other than the Father, okay? And yet, in the Gospel of John, though you have that in the prologue, in chapter In chapter 20, the apostle Thomas, when he speaks to the risen Christ, doesn't – people think he actually touches Christ, rather Christ invites him to touch, but he doesn't.

Starting point is 00:47:35 Instead he falls to his knees and says, O, Chiriasmo che o Theosmo, o, my Lord and my God. And there he seems to be addressing Jesus as Otheos, as God most high. Now this is extraordinary. The Gospel of John also is full of statements like, he has seen me, has seen the Father, of I and the Father are one.

Starting point is 00:47:57 So while the prologue of John seems to maintain this distinction, this distinction in other ways is breaking down and then climatically in chapter 20, which is probably the original ending of the gospel before that beautiful dream like chapter 21 was added, goes so far as to address Jesus as Othais mo, God most high. And this is the debate going into the fourth century. Is this an honorific? Is he saying this to proclaim that just how high Jesus has been raised in the esteem of

Starting point is 00:48:36 the heavenly powers due to what he has accomplished, or is it a statement of who he is eternally? And I could go on a great length of what happened at Nicaea and after. I mean, of course, there is the issue of imperial pressure, the newly Christianized Emperor Constantine wanting some sort of uniformity of confession. But it's also the case that there's a very real line of reasoning going on there, that what has happened in Christ and what happens in the Spirit is real union with God, God the Father. And such union is impossible, is something that can't be accomplished by a lesser agency or by a Spirit.

Starting point is 00:49:20 So if we believe this, if we believe that Otheos really is present in Jesus, and now Jesus is really present in the Holy Spirit in sanctification and sacrament, then there has to be inequality. In some sense, you're always dealing with God himself. And that's how the later confession finally coalesced, finally reached its convictions about what the proper language of the Trinity is. Still, it would be wrong to falsify the New Testament and pretend that there's a fully developed Trinitarian theology there. There simply isn't. And in the prologue, you're still very much in the world of late antiquity in which there's God Most High and then a secondary, Adephthira Seos, who is in some sense the

Starting point is 00:50:13 reflection of God Most High, but who has turned toward the Father as the priest leading the liturgy of creation. Did I hear you earlier say that you could read it as saying Jesus, which is the Logos, even though it says the Logos, but so the Logos was a God instead of the Logos was the God because there's a missing article you said? Yeah. Interesting. But I think, but I mean, the thing is, again, we can't think about that polytheistically

Starting point is 00:50:46 though. It would be a divine being, a divine, but it's saying more at the same time. Or you also mentioned angels could be thought of as gods from before, but not in a polytheist. Well, I mean, the earliest dominant Christology is what scholars call angelomorphic. I mean, it was thought to be, and this remains part of the discourse very late in the Christian tradition that Jesus is also the captain of the angels, so to speak, the leader of the heavenly hosts. And there was this notion of the defteros theos as the koryphaios, the one who leads the heavenly choirs and their liturgy of praise. And so he's turned, he's the one alone who's, because a priest, well except in the Nova Sorda, but generally

Starting point is 00:51:33 speaking a priest has his back to the people because he's leading the liturgy, all, everyone turned towards the mystery of God, right? And this is certainly how a lot of the early, how the Christians well into the fourth century and after were thinking that, you know, he uniquely is the highest of heavenly beings, the angel of mighty counsel, the highest of the angels, and also the unique son of the father is leading the heavenly liturgy. This language falls away later as it becomes very much superseded by the formal language of Trinitarian dogma. This is controversial, not because the scholarship is controversial.

Starting point is 00:52:28 I want to point out, even people of impeccable orthodoxy, scholars have known this. I mean, they've known that Arius was not some strange, curious anomaly, that he was simply an extreme expression of what was regarded by many as the orthodoxy of centuries. And there's a reason why after the Aryan controversy, the controversy continued with the Enomians and others. Bishops and priests still committed to this older view that they thought was the correct view. It was the Nicene party that was proposing a

Starting point is 00:53:02 new grammar, even a new word, homoousios consubstantial. It's not in scripture and it wasn't in previous Christian usage. But to this day, you say that the people, even theologians or people who do Christian philosophy, but who don't study Christian history very closely and don't know late antiquity very well, think that you're saying something

Starting point is 00:53:26 that's just an opinion. It's not. I mean, it is the hard and fast data of the time. And again, as I say, you can read, you can see the change occurring in Eusebius. You just read him before the Nicene Council on who Jesus is and then read him after, and there's been a change, you know? Yeah, I also don't see it as so straightforward that Jesus Himself identifies as God. Now, in these examples, there's John, which is the first part is just some narrator saying that Jesus is God and then there's Thomas who says, my God, as well as my Lord. But also when

Starting point is 00:54:05 you see anything majestic, you go, my God. To me, it's just not so obvious. And also- Oh, yeah. Well, it could be a fervent expression of praise of God. I mean, that was one of the arguments of the past, you know, among those who said, well, you know, that he's not addressing Jesus. And how can you tell? Because it's not in the vocative. He doesn't say, kirei emu kei thei emu. So it could be either. I love that I'm speaking with you, that you know the Greek inside and out.

Starting point is 00:54:39 Well, you kind of need to, if you do some of what I do. You need to know some Greek. It helps. Yeah, and also Jesus said, when you pray, you go to your room, you shut the door, so you do so in private, you pray to the Father, and our Father who art in heaven. Right. And another point He said- You're still in Matthew now. Yeah, and another point someone said, who is good? No, someone called Jesus good. He's like,

Starting point is 00:55:03 no one is good but the Father. And if you ask for anything in my Father and in my name, which it seems to me like he's pointing out a distinction between himself and the Father. Yeah, there's one who is good. There are two different versions of that verse. There's the majority text and the critical text. But anyway, yes, the point is, it seems to be saying, yeah, in John, however, again, you do have statements

Starting point is 00:55:30 that, again, I don't attribute to the historical Jesus one way or the other, I'm just saying in John, you have theological statements already emerging which I and the Father are one. Now again, what is that oneness? What is that unity that he, when he's praying in Gethsemane that he had with the Father before the ages?

Starting point is 00:55:48 Well, you're not going to get a single answer. And the early church didn't have a single answer. And you've got to remember that when the Council of Nicaea was convened, as yet there was no notion of church councils as having some preeminent and indisputable doctrinal power, authority. That too is an emergent phenomenon in Christian history. It's not something that's, okay, well, we better call our first infallible council. That's not what was going on. But definitely, Constantine wanted a clear, single voice emerging from what was becoming an institutional support of the empire.

Starting point is 00:56:36 Now, speaking of oneness, I prepped for conversations weeks in advance quite extensively. So unfortunately, I can't give you the source of this quote that you said. And in fact, I'm paraphrasing it, so it's not even a quote. But you said that life, consciousness, and language are the same. Now, I can imagine how consciousness and life have a tie. However, what would be your definition of language such that it's the same as consciousness? Oh, now we're shifting into my recent book. You see, now I take off the theological, biblical hat, put on the philosopher's hat, I guess,

Starting point is 00:57:16 the mantle. Well, this is about physics, philosophy, and consciousness. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I take several hundred pages of that book to explain what I mean, so forgive me if what I say here is less than satisfying. life and consciousness both examined phenomenologically, but also logically exhibit a kind of intentional structure, intentional in the philosophical sense, I don't mean in the psychological sense, but and that language too is nothing but intentionality

Starting point is 00:58:02 and that the existence of language and of language using beings is every bit as mysterious and exhibits the same causal structure. But also that you can in a sense, analogously speak of language in terms of, or you can speak of mind and life both in terms of language, even in the obvious sense that life has an element of transcription and hermeneutics involved between one phenotype and another. And I think we've known for more than 70, 80, maybe, you know, going on quite, getting near the century mark, but at least since the time of Barbara McClintock's experiments with maze, we have much firmer sense of the sort of intentional systems within intentional systems, right up to say, like, the sort of experiments,

Starting point is 00:59:13 how convincing they are, you can debate. But let's say Michael Levin's at Tufts and Zena Bots and the power of life. For curious listeners, I've spoken to Michael Levin four times on this channel. Each one is linked on screen and in the description. The topics include consciousness, bioelectricity, intelligence, emergence, and even the nature of reality itself. Much like this conversation. So if you enjoyed this conversation with David Bentley Hart, then I recommend you check out

Starting point is 00:59:41 this interview on screen here with Michael Levin. I'll also be speaking with Michael again in person at some point soon, so please leave your questions for both David for the part two and Michael for whenever I speak with him again in the comments below. You can debate, but let's say Michael Levin's at Tufts and Zenobots and the power of life to engineer organic systems towards solutions that are not simply provided by a prior template, but that require kind of hermeneutical plasticity in the cell and gene editing. But there's also a sense, you know, when you think about what is language,

Starting point is 01:00:30 I mean, as intentionality, as a... Every time you make a statement, if it's a coherent statement, there's an antecedent finality. If you're gonna talk like an Aristotelian, there's a final cause, right? And there's a sort of formal cause. And it's that semantic intelligibility that determines the material substrates of sounds

Starting point is 01:00:53 or words on the page, just as there's a semantic level of intelligibility, arguably, that determines the way the material ingredients of organic life or the working of conscious processes in the brain operates. And that always, you know, the curious thing, I think, when you think about it, when you actually allow for the reality of intentionality, and there's a reason why the most radically eliminativist models of mind and of life want to do away with intrinsic intentionality, as impossible as that is to do. I mean, it's something like Alex Rosenberg denying that, you know, anything has ever been about anything else, which he writes a book about.

Starting point is 01:01:49 And it's because the moment that you allow intentionality and intrinsic existence, even in language, which is baffling enough, I mean, there's an argument in the book against the notion that language can be a purely emergent phenomenon from purely pre-linguistic origins. Too complicated to recapitulate here, but nonetheless, immediately you realize that in addition to the physical space of consequence in which things unfold, there's a noetic space in which the final, the end and the beginning are both co-present in a sense that exists in a sort of hermeneutical or noetic space. I think this is why like neoplatonism is sort of an almost natural reflex of the mind the

Starting point is 01:02:41 moment it grants intentionality, why you find a very similar metaphysics in India in putting aside issues of cross-pollination and all that. And then of course the unity of that noetic space, you're going to think, well, even that unity itself has to subsist in some sort of higher unity, some true simplicity, some pure source that holds things together as one and yet many. And so you posit sort of the one, the tohen of Plotinus. But definitely I think that when you, the more deeply you think about it, that mind, life and language do all pose the same problems to the materialist reductive process,

Starting point is 01:03:30 or project rather, sorry. And the purpose of that recent book, All Things Are Full of Gods, which is a long book, is to give the reductive project its due. I mean, there's a voice in there. It's written as a dialogue and Hephaestus is allowed to argue for it at great length. But I mean, the purpose of the book is to show

Starting point is 01:03:56 that again and again, the project does not explain this irreducibility or does not reduce this reducibility adequately. And it turns out to be the same problem, the same irreducibility in mind, in life, in language. All things are in a sense, intelligible discourse insofar as they have structure that has any, I know we're not, teleology is the thing we're supposed to avoid and yet it's the thing that's almost impossible to avoid at least even a scientific method, even when we're denying it any ontological purchase we're using it methodologically and that raises questions of its own.

Starting point is 01:04:48 To understand evolution, you're always asking, what was this good for? And then you can say, but of course, all we're really talking about are serial attrition and an evolutionary process. But that's a supposition, you know, if a method illuminates, why does it illuminate? Well two thoughts occur to me. One is Brentano's thesis, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. I wanted to know if your association with consciousness and language relies on that. But then you also said something else that's interesting I want to explore.

Starting point is 01:05:27 So I'll just say it and we can explore it later. You mentioned that neo-Platonism is a natural consequence of allowing for intentionality, something like that. I don't know how that is the case, so I would like to hear more about that. So. Yeah, well, as for Brentano, I take it you mean the thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. Yes.

Starting point is 01:05:47 Yeah, I believe that when again, phenomenologically, you can't separate intentionality from consciousness, from rationality, the notion that you can have consciousness without intentionality, I think, can be dealt with pretty brutally but fairly. The tendency in Anglo-American philosophy of mind has been sort of divided and conquered for years. If you can just isolate one thing like consciousness and say that's the hard problem and if you could solve that, everything will fall into place, I think, is an illusion, that they're all the hard problems. And also that when mind acts, it always acts in concert. The things that we want to pretend are separate faculties are in fact just phenomenological

Starting point is 01:06:40 dimensions of a single unified act that can't be dissolved. And that's part of the reason why we don't have a satisfactory model of mind is because we're trying to compose it from parts that we've abstracted from the whole, but in fact, the whole has to exist in its totality for the parts to exist. So, yes, I, the, you know, Brentano's understanding of intentionality, I differ from him in certain aspects of it, but yes, and also his reflexive nature, the fact that to be conscious is to be conscious of being conscious. So that's not just intentionality is directed towards an ever more transcendental end point that's always eliciting conscious and volitional and rational and intentional acts,

Starting point is 01:07:33 but also that intentionality requires this ground of consciousness that's always founded upon itself that I don't think can emerge from a composite material basis. Again, an argument too long to rehearse here. As for the remark about Neoplatonism, well, I mean, I think it's just that I think if, you know, Neoplatonism, you have the one which generates noose or mind in its pure aspect, which is just self-reflection, whereas the one has a kind of super-intellections. It's not reflective.

Starting point is 01:08:08 And from this, the lower aspect of psiqui, or life, or soul. And I think that when you think in these terms, when you realize that if you go back the other way, say, and you look at life, and you look at soul or mind, or you look at logos, see the language, and you find yourself unable to get away

Starting point is 01:08:33 from the intentional structure, then you allow for the future to be a real cause in the present, right? For that to be the case, for there to be this integrated intentional reality, there has to be and again, I'm not proposing a particular ontology of it. I'm simply saying structurally, you have to think that there's a noetic space, noetic realm in which noetic realm in which beginning and end are present to one another. If I'm going to say, why doesn't it have to be a sentence?

Starting point is 01:09:12 Two plus two equals four. I'm granting my ability to make that statement, to communicate it to you, to think, Grant, that the four and the two plus two in that noetic space are already indissolubly connected to one another causally, consequentially. And then of course you ask yourself the question of what allows for unity at all in the many, you know, because how is that noetic space one? And you begin thinking in terms of a profound simplicity of unity, a sort of ontological

Starting point is 01:09:56 unity, a trans-finite unity even that traverses everything, that allows everything to be both this, not that, and yet altogether everything. So all I meant was that Neoplatonism has a kind of natural plausibility to a mind that's thinking in these terms about the structure of life and mind and why it's really not until the modern period that sort of a purely mechanical notion of nature really gains wide purchase. I mean, you have early schools of Greek thought like democrat, you know, democratists and, you know, the notion of certain aspects of fabricarianism, but these are, these are boutique schools and even they have a kind of unfinished quality to them

Starting point is 01:10:49 that admits of ambiguities. It's only really in the mere modern period that we were able to create for ourselves the notion of mechanism and to do away with a different notion of the causal structure of reality in part because intuitively a mechanism doesn't make much sense to us until we make it make sense to us. And even then it's never to my mind managed to produce a purely coherent ontology. Now there's a strain of Buddhism, one of the oldest schools of Buddhism called Theravada, and there's a particular state called Neroda Samapati, and it indicates that you can have

Starting point is 01:11:33 awareness without self-awareness. It's like a bare consciousness event. So does that not contravene that every conscious experience needs to be one of self-consciousness? That indeed you can have consciousness without the I know that I know? Theravada is just one school of Abhidhana or Dharma Buddhism that persisted in Sri Lanka. And later Buddhist, you know, sort of condescendingly called Hinayana, lesser vehicle Buddhism. But yeah, no, I just, I mean, I simply believe that it's, how can I put it, there's a truth about making, you know, having a propositional claim about the self.

Starting point is 01:12:27 It's true to an extent, but otherwise, I would say that it's false as far as the actual consciousness goes. That there is always, to be conscious, to be conscious at all is simply to be conscious of being conscious. There's a kind of paradox in it. There's a kind of what would be an infinite regress if we were talking about a material

Starting point is 01:12:52 reality underlying it. And there's no way of consciousness actually to be conscious without that sort of reflexive dimension in it. I think Brenton is, so was Husserl, very good on this. And so depending on how you interpret the early Buddhist claim, depending on that, I would give it limited or no credence. So, if consciousness is always directed at something, so that's intentionality for people who are wondering what the heck is this word that keeps coming up over and over. It's aboutness, so you direct it, you're directing. So if consciousness is always intentional, directed at objects, but that object is always self-conscious,

Starting point is 01:13:52 do we get an infinite regress? If you're conscious of X, you're necessarily conscious of being conscious of X and you then have a consciousness or you're conscious that you're conscious of being conscious of at infinite. It would be an infinite regress if you're thinking of this in terms of composite of distinct forces. Sure. And that's the problem with trying to reduce it to material causes. It's a problem trying to reduce it to sort of a purely neurological or material base, because then you will be sort of in this infinite modular regress of, but if consciousness simply is this simple act of self-reflexive awareness, an infinite regress is a specter that can be chased away pretty quickly because what

Starting point is 01:14:47 you're doing is you're confusing categories. You're thinking in material composite terms about an activity and an agency that simply is what it is. It's like saying, well, what illuminates the light? I mean, it's not a real regress. It would be though, and therein lies the problem with the materialist reductionism or one of many problems with the materialist reduction of consciousness. What about pre-reflective experiences like being in the zone or flow states where you

Starting point is 01:15:21 have awareness and you don't have an explicit self-awareness? Well, I mean, I think that it depends as a psychological state, yeah. The psychological state of here I am, David Hart having this experience at this moment can recede. But being in the zone or just, you know, in that flow of action, there's still, in a sense, probably a purer reflexive consciousness. You're just purely aware of awareness. The finite and changeable preoccupations of the empirical self, the psychological self, fall largely dormant, but only to give way to a more immediate sort of reflexiveness. It's never, it's not like in those moments of flow you're in a coma, you know, quite

Starting point is 01:16:20 the opposite, there's an immediacy of experience that's over what, that, oh, you know, when the dancer becomes the dance, you could say that she or he is also becoming the consciousness, the dance becoming conscious of itself rather than the psychological self remaining preoccupied with itself for those moments. It's an escape from that sort of psychological limitation, but it's certainly not an escape from awareness of awareness of awareness. If all consciousness required self-consciousness, how could it be that consciousness came about in the first place?

Starting point is 01:17:07 Would the first moment also need to somehow include self-awareness? Yeah, now again, I'm not talking about psychological sense of identity. Self-awareness, just being like this moment of consciousness knowing itself as conscious may not take a very hard and fast propositional form. But yeah, I would say the consciousness does not emerge from the pre-conscious it so to speak descends It fashions life it fashions organism and as soon as there is life, there's already mind and consciousness of some kind How How that is within the structure of life, I'm not going to pretend to understand

Starting point is 01:17:47 exhaustively, but I think that consciousness is not an emergent phenomenon, but a super, uh, well, superintending, super forming. I don't even want to say supervening because that can be a mistaken for a specific sort of school of thought that I don't agree with either. Yeah, I don't believe that consciousness is ever a fragment of consciousness. It's never just sensitivity or something. That if it's mind, then it's this integrated act that cannot emerge strongly.

Starting point is 01:18:33 That is the important thing, strong emergence, meaning emerging as something from a material basis or from a lower basis that has no other source and yet is irreducible to that basis. I think that's a myth, that such a thing cannot be. If it emerges, as it emerges in nature in the weak sense, it does so because I think you have to think in terms of something like formal and final causes as well. Again, not as they were. I mean, let's be honest, in early modernity, all that Aristotelian language was already so badly misunderstood that what was being

Starting point is 01:19:08 rejected was just a rival mechanical model. They thought of final causes as sort of attraction from, as if these are extrinsic to one another and between them working out a phenomenon. Whereas, in fact, that's not what the Aristotelian tradition is, it's a completely different set of issues. It's really just talking about the predicable structure of something that is coherent, materially be identified substantially has some sort of intrinsic limit to or end of its potentialities. So that, you know, the seed that an acorn isn't going to grow into a penguin. So even though, but that's an excursus, so excuse me.

Starting point is 01:19:53 I would say that my contention would be that strong emergence is impossible for anything and strong emergence certainly will not explain if life is real, if mind is real, if language is real, if there is such a thing as intentionality. And I think we have good reason to think there is. Then the mechanical materialist reductionist project will always fail ultimately to give a cogent answer to the questions that torment us. So we've been speaking about emergence and consciousness. And for those who are interested in more, you have a book called The Experience of God and that will be on screen, link in the description as well as all of your books.

Starting point is 01:20:41 And the more recent treatment, which is a larger excursion into these topics is, all things are full of gods. Link on screen and in the description. How do you see the relationship between consciousness, being, and God? A all one, you know, that to be conscious, to exist, to be intentionally oriented towards transcendental ends, all of these are finite participation in the one consciousness bliss, or to use the Satya Dhananda, the Sanskrit terset, which were in Arabic, Rajut, Mishtan, you know, that you get in even Arabic, or analogously in Augustine's understanding of the Trinity, perhaps, you know, that ultimately these are all in God, one in the same. God is the being of all, the one source of all, my mentality, the one end of all, of all longing, desire, and intention, and we experience it in a plural way. But ultimately what we experience and seek is one and the same.

Starting point is 01:22:16 So I have some questions from the audience I would like to get to actually. So one here is, you've recently embraced a public and explicit form of universalism formulating a convincing metaphysical argument for a type of full cosmic theosis. In this view a finite will cannot infinitely resist an infinite will or the infinite will of God. Now simultaneously you've embraced a more explicit religious syncretism and according to all reports it seems like you've ceased participating in Christian tradition. If there are parts of this that you disagree with you can also talk about that.

Starting point is 01:22:58 But the question is, so in a world filled with these people who are saying I'm spiritual but I'm not religious, and there's a diminishing spiritual discipline and tradition, there's relativizing, there's laxity, what makes your recent positions different than New Age gurus? Do you still consider yourself a Christian? Do you advocate that others follow your own religious path? So feel free to disagree with some of the premises as well.

Starting point is 01:23:26 It's, it's, we have to wait, we have to wade through the confusions there. I don't know where this notion, what these reports are that I, uh, cease to be, uh, observantly Christian. I have been suffering health problems, I'll admit, so I don't get out of the house to church very often, or at all for the past few months. But that's That's not a matter of apostasy or tergification or anything. I didn't say that finite will cannot resist an infinite will eternally. That sounds like it's a contest between God willing salvation for all and humans trying to resist it. That's somewhat barbarizes the argument regarding the structure of freedom because I'm purely classical in my understanding of what free will for a rational being is. In fact, the arguments I make there

Starting point is 01:24:40 could have been made by Thomas Aquinas, for instance, but he was a double predestinarian. I know some people don't like that term for him, but it's true. And for him, the reason that he didn't have a free will defense of hell, he believed that certain persons were predestined to be saved and the rest had no hope of salvation, derelict by the withholding of efficacious grace. So if that's your picture of God, that's fine. But for Aquinas, there really would be an issue of finite will not being able to resist an infinite will as though it was when El Sinander said something. I said something very different. I said that a will that resists God is not a free will by definition if you actually look at what it would mean logically to say that something is a free choice. And again, I can only direct people to the book that all will be saved. I'm not interested in people who say they're spiritual or not religious, but I'm

Starting point is 01:25:47 not hostile to them because I'm not my place to judge the spiritual state of others. And I expect people to believe what they believe. I've said already in this interview what I believe, and it may seem minimalist to some. It's that the experience of the resurrected Christ described in 1 Corinthians 15 is very hard not to believe for me. I mean, I find that there's a plausibility there and a persuasiveness. And I find in the teachings of Christ, something that I think is an epochal shift in human culture that I see as nothing less than divine, that yeah, there were other schools of compassionate thought such as Stoicism, but something really unprecedented is going on in the teaching and in the person and the

Starting point is 01:26:46 story of Christ that to me, it would be implausible not to call revelation. From those two things, the belief that this resurrection experience was real and that this man who was experienced is already an anomaly. And one we've never fully adequately apprehended. I mean, how much of Christian history is just institutional corruption and the politics of power and cruelty. When we say we're Christians, we're probably making an unwarrantedly pretentious claim for ourselves. But yeah, so I'm not really interested in New Age spirituality. When I say syncretic in my thinking, I believe that all schools of human thought are open to us in the same way that say Greek thought was assumed into Christian thought. I would not be able to live religiously at all, not in terms of Christ. That's true. I mean, I don't know

Starting point is 01:28:06 if that's an emotional truth about me or an intellectual truth. I like to think it's the latter and the former, but the latter as giving substance to the former. But I couldn't become a Vaishnav. I have great respect for the piety of those who, and I believe that they're truly loving and worshiping and seeking God. But I can't imagine not seeing God as revealed in the face of Christ, in the form of Christ, and in this genuinely inexplicable historical enigma that the messianic movement of Jesus of Nazareth did not die out, and that this first generation of Christians, so numerously and so obstinately, and so in

Starting point is 01:29:10 some cases self-destructively, refuse to deny that experience. That said, I don't have much patience for bigotry. I know this thing that, you know, if this is simply a conflation of the notion of following Christ with absolutely limiting yourself intellectually, spiritually within the conceptual world of the institution. As you know it, I think you're making a grave mistake intellectually and morally because God speaks to all peoples. What is perennialism and would you consider yourself a perennialist? No, the name of those who called themselves that are people like Guénon and Chouin and

Starting point is 01:30:12 others, I don't like them very much at all. In part because of their wretched politics, they're all very sort of arch-conservative believers in hierarchy in the most pompous and, I think, degenerate way. But also because they weren't really, I mean, they made it up as they went along. I mean, Shuan created this sort of esoteric inner core that he said is really there in all the religions. And so you should follow one of these paths, but of course you should be one of the esoteric ones, which means that you're following Shuon. And his own practices were, you know, he made up these sort of, these rather pathetic sort of sexual games he played with, it's very, it's a certain, that term perennialism associated

Starting point is 01:31:09 with them. But also, you know, I mean, I very much liked when I was young Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, which was just an anthology of mystical texts, many of which weren't available. I mean, you know, to be honest, it much wasn't available to him that later became available. But no, I don't, I'm a perennialist now. I just, I don't, I don't feel that I have to apologize when I see, say, a Vedantic text on the relationship of creation to God, say, let's say it's Vishishtadvaita or something, that I think makes a good point that clarifies points of Christian thought. I don't see any reason to remain aloof from it or deny myites or Muslims or Jews or Sikhs or others, obviously not with Jewish people, I mean, the others are somehow not genuinely seeking and being guided by God and enfolded within revelation and

Starting point is 01:32:49 within divine love. But perennialism, that was a fake system invented by very dubious men that I find a bit silly and a bit distasteful, to be honest. You find people like Steve Bannon are all on board with people like Evola and Gaynor. Interesting. Okay, I have a quote here from Ian McGilchrist, which you agreed with. So, we are experiencing something real. We're not just experiencing a representation, and that discrepancy is crucial. Many people think that they've overcome the Cartesian problem by intensifying

Starting point is 01:33:31 it, suggesting that we can only interpret reality through a bank of dials, a version of reality. However, it's not just an instrument panel that we're seeing, as if we're closed off in a windowless cell. We are actually making contact with what we mean by reality. Now just for people who are wondering where is that from you had a conversation with Ian McGilchrist I'll put that on screen as well because it's fantastic to listen to. So given this, what do you think about theories that purport to have consciousness first, but then they still say that what we see is an illusion. It's not actually reality because in some Kantian sense, we can never know ultimate reality. These

Starting point is 01:34:10 theories suggest that what we see is distorted. We interact with some watered down amorphous or anamorphic version of reality, as well as by Donald Hoffman or Thomas Campbell and that we're living in a simulated reality, although consciousness is first, it's not actually reality that we experience, it's not the same. I think, you know, as I am in a, in this case, now I put on my fiction in a novel I wrote called Kenegaiya. One of the characters is quoted as saying orthodoxy against small o, and this should be understood as sort of dogmatic scientific or philosophical orthodoxy. Is the elevation of a humble half truth to the, or I don't remember exactly the phrase,

Starting point is 01:35:08 the grand eminence of a total falsehood. There's a half-truth in that, and of course we don't have a full grasp of ultimate reality. We started this conversation talking about, for instance, the problem of evil. And there are all sorts of things about both the physical and the conceptual realm that lie beyond us. But then to say it's all illusion and representation, of course, the notion of representation and again taken to a sort of hyper Kantian extreme that begins to break down, I want to point out, after Kant, even in Kant's last Opus Postumum, it's already beginning in a sense to break down, but then begins to break down at Fichte, a German idealist, in returning to this notion that there is a commonality

Starting point is 01:35:59 between mind and being, rather than some sort of strange juxtaposition of two qualitatively immiscible realities. The way this would have been put in an antique metaphysics, whether Platonic or Aristotelian for instance, or whatever, is that both what informs an object of knowledge and the act of knowledge is one in the same form expressed in two distinct modes. So that there's a real openness of mind to world and world to mind because both are subsisting in the same formal principle, right? That's one way of putting it. But I mean, I think what Ian was saying is true. And there's a kind of sickness in imagining that our experience of reality is not an experience of, well,

Starting point is 01:36:54 I want to say the semantic consistency of reality. You know, its qualities, its dimensions, these aren't illusions superimposed on a bare mechanical order that is, or even a dinghanzig thing in itself, to which we have no access. And I think one of the great deconstructions of representationalism of that sort, you'll find in Hegel. But another, I think, in All Things Are Full of Gods, one of the few theological thinkers, philosophers I quote, or at least cite, is Bernard Lonergan, who understands that surfeit of the unknown over the known, not as something qualitatively impenetrable and repugnant to the act of knowledge, but simply an as yet undisclosed, undiscovered more, a greater depth into which we can yet venture. And the greatest depth of all, of course,

Starting point is 01:37:53 would be venturing into God, union with God. Representationalism is, in a sense, the epistemology of the modern age. It fits within the mechanical model. It fits within the model of the proper domain of the sciences after Galileo, who is a faithful Catholic, right? But I mean, for him, you know, it's the mathematical quantification of mass and velocity and things like that, which is in a sense the proper realm of the sciences. And then after that time, we came to the habit of thinking of the proper realm of the sciences as reality as such. So that there's an occult or numinal reality to which our only approach is one of gratifying and comprehensible illusions

Starting point is 01:38:54 imposed by the apparatus of perception. And first of all, I don't think that such a consonance could actually be achieved by material processes to begin with. But I also think it's just a phideism, it's just a dogma, and a confining and a dangerous one in some ways. David, as we end, firstly, thank you so much for spending so long with me and persisting through your pain. What are you striving for? Me?

Starting point is 01:39:38 Today? Really, to be honest? Sorry about that. To be honest, all I'm thinking about these days is my health, so forgive me. I'm not able to give you a more elevated answer than that. striving to continue to believe even when being forced to reflect on personal reasons for doubt. Why is continuing to believe so important to you? Well, again, there's the intellectual conviction that I've got it right, but it's more, I think we believe for the sake of others, isn't it? I mean, those we love.

Starting point is 01:40:48 If it were only ourselves at stake, it really wouldn't matter very much. But, you know, I have a son, I have a wife, I have people I love. And in addition to the intellectual convictions, there's the structure of hope that says that they are not just momentary accidents in a process of material causation whose underlying basso continuo is despair. Would you say then what's more important than faith is hope? Well, according to Paul, love is the most important of all, right? Faith, hope, and love, these three, but love is the one that abides. So, yeah, I'd say that love is what makes hope and faith worth persisting

Starting point is 01:41:56 in. Thank you. Thanks for everything. Don't go anywhere just yet. Now I have a recap of today's episode brought to you by The Economist. Just as The Economist brings clarity to complex concepts, we're doing the same with our new AI-powered episode recap. Here's a concise summary of the key insights from today's podcast.

Starting point is 01:42:27 Okay, so we're diving into this conversation between Kurt Jemmengall and David Bentley Hart. Oh yeah, Kurt from Theories of Everything. I've seen a few of those. He really gets into it with his guests. Especially- He really does, yeah. And I mean, in this one they talk about consciousness, physics, you know, even God.

Starting point is 01:42:44 Wow. That's a lot to unpack. It is. It is. But- It's really something how heart just goes right into the problem of evil, not like how you normally hear it discussed,

Starting point is 01:42:55 you know, theologically. I know what you mean. He kind of throws those typical arguments right out the window, like about how a good God could allow so much suffering, all that. Yeah, exactly. He even says the suffering of innocence is like unanswerable

Starting point is 01:43:07 if you believe in a benevolent God. Yeah, and he doesn't just talk about it abstractly. He brings in his own experience with chronic pain. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's really clear that suffering isn't just some theoretical concept for him. You know, he's lived it. It definitely adds like a whole other level of depth

Starting point is 01:43:24 to what he's saying. Yeah, for sure. It's not sugarcoated at all. No, he's lived it. It definitely adds like a whole other level of depth to what he's saying. Yeah, for sure. It's not sugar-coated at all. No, it's real. Yeah. Really makes you think there might not be easy answers when it comes to suffering. Nope.

Starting point is 01:43:33 And then, just when you think he's gonna stay in that heavy, heavy space, he switches gears completely and starts talking about Christ's resurrection. What? Really? Yeah. How does he even connect those two? Well, he argues that early Christianity,

Starting point is 01:43:48 how it survived and even grew, especially after, well, after Christ died, it points to something really big happening, like something truly remarkable. Right, right. He even brings up how other movements, with the messianic leader back then, they usually just disappeared

Starting point is 01:44:04 after some initial excitement. Interesting. Yeah, so it's like he's implying that those early Christians, when they said they encountered the risen Christ, it couldn't have just been wishful thinking or anything like that. It really focuses on 1 Corinthians 15,

Starting point is 01:44:19 specifically the accounts, the firsthand ones, of meeting Christ after the resurrection. Yeah, okay. He says they have this rawness to them, almost like a historical document, you know? Yeah. And then get this, he ties it all back to stoic metaphysics. Whoa. Stoic metaphysics. Now that's a curve ball. I know, right? I'm not super familiar with that, to be honest.

Starting point is 01:44:41 So basically the stoics believed that spirit was like a divine fire, like a higher element, and it's everywhere. Okay, I think I'm following. So is he using Stoic thought to explain the resurrection? Not exactly explain it, but he's using it to help us understand how those early Christians, especially Paul, thought about body composed

Starting point is 01:45:02 entirely of spirit. Okay, yeah, I can see that. So instead of thinking of spirit as this this disembodied ghost thing We should think of it more like like fire. Exactly. It's powerful transformative, but still part of the physical world. Wow That's a completely different way of thinking about the afterlife Isn't it makes you wonder how much our modern understanding of all this, you know spirit and all that has been shaped by Well by our own culture and philosophies. That's a good point.

Starting point is 01:45:28 We probably don't even realize how much we're projecting our own assumptions onto those ancient texts. Right, so we've got this honest talk about suffering, then a compelling argument about the resurrection, and now a connection to stoic metaphysics. It's a lot. Yeah, and this is just the beginning. Hart's ideas get even more radical and mind-blowing from here. It's amazing lot. Yeah, and this is just the beginning. Hart's ideas get even more radical

Starting point is 01:45:45 and mind-blowing from here. It's amazing how he can like connect all these seemingly random ideas. Makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about Christianity, you know? Yeah, and he's not afraid to challenge like those really traditional interpretations. I know, right? Like with John 1.1, the logos. Oh yeah, that part was wild. Yeah, he's saying the usual translation, we kind of shoehorned it into the whole Trinity doctrine, but the original Greek, it's way more open to interpretation than that. It is, and you know, he brings up this view, subordinationism, where the son's subordinate to the father.

Starting point is 01:46:20 Okay. And apparently that was a pretty common view in early Christianity. Wait, so are you telling me that Jesus being equal to God the Father, that wasn't always like the view everyone had? Nope, not at all. Hart's point is that the shift to the Trinity doctrine with that whole co-equality thing, it was a long process and super complex historically. It's like we've all been taught this, like, the super simple, cleaned up version of Christian

Starting point is 01:46:45 history. Exactly. And he's pulling back the curtain and showing us all the debates, all the different ways people understood things. It's a good reminder that, you know, these religious doctrines, they don't just appear out of thin air. Right. They come from these, like, messy historical and intellectual processes.

Starting point is 01:46:59 It makes you wonder how many other things we just accept as truth, you know? Yeah. Like, without realizing they have these really complex origins too. Oh, totally. And speaking of complex origins, that part where he talks about intentionality and how it connects to life, consciousness, and D language, that's where things get super fascinating.

Starting point is 01:47:17 Okay, lay it on me. Because intentionality is one of those things I've always kind of struggled with, to be honest. So think of it like the aboutness of your thoughts. Like when you think about a tree, right? Your thought has an object, it's about that tree. Okay, I get that. But how does that tie into life and language?

Starting point is 01:47:35 Well, Hart says intentionality isn't just limited to consciousness. Even living organisms, even simple ones, like single-celled organisms, they have a kind of intentionality in how they, you know, strive to survive and reproduce. So even at the like most basic level of life, there's this inherent direction, like a purposefulness. Exactly. And language, he says, it's inherently intentional, too. Oh, so.

Starting point is 01:48:01 Words have meaning because they point to something beyond themselves. Okay, I see what you're saying. So there's this like this thread of intentionality running through life, consciousness, and language. Yeah, precisely. And here's the kicker, the really radical part. He says this intentionality can't be explained by just material processes. So he's going up against like that whole materialistic worldview, the one that's dominant today. He is. He's basically saying that the directedness, the aboutness of these fundamental parts of reality, it points to something beyond the material world.

Starting point is 01:48:33 That reminds me of what he said earlier about how scientific methods, they rely on this idea of purpose, teleology, but at the same time, they claim to reject purpose as an inherent part of reality. It's like they're trying to have it both ways. It is it's like he's saying maybe Just maybe our current scientific way of looking at things It's not enough to really understand what reality is and get this he then goes on to say that Neoplatonism this ancient philosophy it actually starts to make sense when you grasp what intentionality really means. Aeoplatonism, I know the name, but I couldn't really tell you much about it. So basically they see reality as flowing

Starting point is 01:49:11 from this single divine source. Okay. It's often called the one. The one. Yeah, and it's the ultimate source of like everything, being, consciousness, goodness. But everything that exists is like a reflection of this divine source.

Starting point is 01:49:25 That's the gist of it. And Hart argues that when you really think about intentionality, this neoplatonic view, it starts to fit. Wow. It's like he's saying that if we take intentionality seriously, we might have to rethink not just materialism, but like our whole picture of the universe.

Starting point is 01:49:42 And are placed in it. Exactly. And that's what's so radical about Hart, you know? He's not just critiquing little ideas here and there, he's going after the very foundations of how we think. He is. But even with all that, you know, he's not saying he has all the answers, right?

Starting point is 01:49:56 He's really humble, intellectually. Definitely, he's not afraid to say, I don't know. Exactly. And he doesn't try to cram every mystery into some neat philosophical box. Yeah, he even talks about how his own religious views have changed over time, how he's embraced this more, what's the word, syncretic approach.

Starting point is 01:50:13 Oh right, that's where he talks about finding wisdom in all sorts of different traditions, not just Christian ones. Exactly, and he's against that whole like rigid dogma of perennialism. So he's open to truth, coming from different places, but he's still deeply rooted in his own Christian faith. Yeah, he says he can't imagine not seeing God

Starting point is 01:50:33 as revealed in Christ. There's a real reverence there, like that story is, well, it's unique and powerful for him. But he also seems to be pushing back against like the limits of organized religion, you know? Questioning doctrines and interpretations. Like he's saying real faith isn't about blindly following dogma.

Starting point is 01:50:53 It's about constantly searching for truth wherever it might lead. And he's not just talking about it, he's living it. He is, he's drawing inspiration from all these different philosophies and religions. It's really inspiring, honestly. It's like so open and curious and always learning and growing. Totally different from that, like that intellectual and spiritual rigidity you see so much these

Starting point is 01:51:12 days. You know, as we're going through all this, I keep thinking about what he said about love, you know, how we believe for the sake of others, the people we love. Oh yeah, that really stuck with me too. It's like he's saying faith isn't just this thing you do by yourself in your own head. It's deeply connected to our relationships, our connections with other people. Yeah, like love is, I don't know, like the fuel, you know, the thing that drives our belief. And maybe faith and love are like intertwined in a way we don't always see.

Starting point is 01:51:42 Makes you think maybe the deepest truths aren't found in doctrines and all that, but in like those messy, beautiful connections we have with each other. It's like he's saying faith isn't just about what we believe, but how we live. And how we treat each other. Right. So, you know, as we wrap up this dive into hearts conversation, I'm just left with this, this feeling of awe. Me too. Yeah. I just want to

Starting point is 01:52:05 keep exploring these ideas, you know. It really has been an incredible journey through some tough thought-provoking concepts. It has and even though we might not have all the answers, I think the biggest takeaway is that you know we got to stay curious. Eep an open mind. Yeah and be willing to challenge our own assumptions even the ones we really hold dear. Exactly. Well, we hope this has inspired you to do just that. Keep searching, keep asking questions, and keep exploring the mysteries of, well, of everything. Well, as we wrap up this deep dive into Hart and his conversation with Kurt Jemmell-Gall, I'm just, I know, I'm filled with a sense of awe, and I want to keep exploring these

Starting point is 01:52:42 ideas. It has been quite a journey, so many challenging, thought provoking ideas. It has. And you know, even though we might not have figured it all out, the main thing I think is to stay curious, open to new ideas. Keep asking those questions. Yeah. And be willing to question everything,

Starting point is 01:52:58 even the things we think we know for sure. We hope this deep dive has inspired you to do just that. Keep searching, keep wondering, keep exploring. Absolutely. Thanks for joining us on this incredible journey. We'll see you next time for another deep dive into the world of ideas. are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical

Starting point is 01:53:40 physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me.

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Starting point is 01:54:53 All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it personally I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comments that hey toe listeners also gained from replaying So how about instead you re listen onisten on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. And finally, if you'd like to support more conversations like this, more content like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash KurtJaimungal and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal, there's also crypto, there's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Hardest Question No Religion Can Answer... | David Bentley Hart

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