Atheist philosopher invited me to question his beliefs...

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00:00

You mentioned William Lane Craig. There are developed areas in the realm of reason that people have given to argue for the existence of God.

00:07

So how do you take any of those arguments? I think we're running into an issue that I see from my vantage point.

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If the laws of logic and logic and reason itself is a feature of the mind, can the laws of logic change at all?

00:23

That's a great question. Yeah, that's a terrific question. Hey! Hey everybody, thanks for coming.

00:37

Welcome, Nate Sala. Is that how you pronounce it? Sala? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Conversations with Peter Boghossian.

00:43

Thanks for coming on and talking to me today. For those of us who don't know about your work, tell us about yourself and what you do.

00:50

Yeah, thank you for having me. My name is Nate. I'm a Christian. I'm a former pastor, former high school teacher.

00:56

A lot of formers, apparently. I have a YouTube channel where I help Christians live their lives the way that Jesus intended.

01:02

And my concern is that, man, over time, a lot of us in the church have lost what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

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And we've lost it for the same reason that others in society are struggling as well. We're all making the same mistakes. We've grown accustomed to living shallow lifestyles.

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So like in practice, I think a lot of us disagree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. And that has led to us forgetting how to be in relationship with each other.

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I think that maybe explains why you got heckled recently. And that's why

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I reacted to it. And I think that also explains a lot of the disputation that we see in our culture right now.

01:38

So that's what I'm up to. Cool. And on your website, it says that you are into apologetics and debate.

01:45

Is that right? Or did I? I was a debate teacher when I was a high school educator. Okay, cool, cool.

01:53

So in that clip, someone heckled me from the audience and didn't let me finish a response.

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And a lot of people have asked me to finish that response. And I think that's not only reasonable, but important.

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And the question was, what would it take me to believe in God? And I started, instead of just telling people,

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I started with the opposite, what it wouldn't take. And then I was going through those reasons and someone heckled me.

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But before I do that, two questions. So what do you wanna get out of today or do today beside, and we'll play that clip, beside me explaining that?

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And I'll put it on myself first. So one of the things that I wanna get is like a reason check to see if the reasons that I give for not believing and believing are sufficient to warrant my confidence in the claim.

02:52

So that's one of the things that I'd like to get. And what would you like to get out of today? And would you be willing to subject your own beliefs to that same scrutiny?

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Perhaps, I think I'm here, well, you graciously invited me to come with and be with you here.

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And so I don't know if I have a lot of, like an agenda.

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I think I'll just kind of go with the flow and let you lead and we'll see what happens. Maybe we'll have an interesting conversation.

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I think overall, I would really love, I imagine you and I disagree. I think one of the things that I would like is for everybody to recognize that we can disagree with each other and still genuinely enjoy each other's company.

03:38

Correct, 100%. So why don't we start with this? So I'll, Travis will play the clip.

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Al, I'll go over the reasons that would be insufficient to warrant my belief.

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You tell me, you kind of interrogate those reasons. And don't be afraid to, big boy, don't be afraid to just go at those reasons.

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And then we'll just take it from there. How's that? Sure. Yeah, sounds good.

04:06

Okay, here's the clip. Hopefully.

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Hopefully, here's the clip. No empirical phenomenon would change my mind. So Lawrence Krauss, the physicist who's a buddy of mine, has these things.

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You walk outside and you look in the sky and it says, I am God, believe in me. Would that be enough?

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And literally everybody sees it and you haven't been dropping acid. For me, the answer to that would be no.

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And it would be no because you'd have to have, you'd have to be able to rule out other alternative possibilities.

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Time travelers, trickster alien cultures, et cetera. And because we can't do that, we can't, so it couldn't be phenomenon.

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It couldn't be anything internal, right? It couldn't be a feeling state. Why couldn't it be a feeling state?

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Because people who have different God beliefs have different feeling states or claim to feel the presence of something, their

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God that has very different moral pronouncements and pronouncements. Yes, sir. What'd he say?

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A fool says in his heart, there is no God. Well, I think it didn't happen.

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I think it's nonsense. Well, that's interesting because look what you just did.

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Okay, Travis, pause it. Okay, that's the, that's the basic idea.

05:38

Okay, so let me run down the list of what it would not take me to believe. So let's go with that first one.

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So it couldn't be an empirical phenomenon. So like it couldn't be, oh, and then just, you know, as I mentioned before,

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I have a heart out. I got a friend of mine dealing with some stuff. I have to help him. Of course. And at three, which is 55 minutes now.

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So it couldn't be an empirical phenomenon. And so, you know, you walk outside, you look at the stars, they're organized.

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I am God, believe in me. You haven't been on drugs. Everybody else sees it. That wouldn't be enough because you'd have to rule out other things.

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Now you want to take that one or do you want to go to the next one? Maybe I'll hear you out.

06:21

And then if we could circle back around on some of the pieces. Okay, well, so I'm going to argue against my own point.

06:31

So I asked, because I want to figure out what's true, right? So I asked

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Krauss about that. And he said to me, he's been a friend of mine for years. He said to me,

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I don't know, that might be enough for me. And I said, why? And he said, because I know things that you don't know.

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And I said, well, what do you know? And he said that it would take more. And again,

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I'm not a physicist. So I'm just, just accept whatever he says is the case because I couldn't possibly tell you the way.

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It would take more energy in the universe to align the stars like that than it is in the universe.

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And then I said to him, well, if there's an artificially intelligent entity, how do you know it doesn't draw from other universes?

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In other words, you can always kind of manufacture conditions. And if you start looking at quantum computing and stuff, then it gets like super weird.

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But anyway, but that's one thing. It wouldn't be an empirical phenomenon, but we can have a conversation about if physicists tell us that that's not possible, that it has to be some kind of supernatural thing.

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Would that be sufficient? But anyway, bracketing that caveat. Okay, so then the second thing is it couldn't be a feeling state.

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It couldn't be a feeling of the transcendent.

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It couldn't be anything internal to myself. And the reason for that is we know that different people have different feeling states that they've claimed with certainty.

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In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, we have the unequivocal testimony of yogins who claim to have died and re -entered the human womb consciously.

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And we have other pretty extraordinary claims from other religious traditions, and those internal feeling states, they can't contribute to things.

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Just as a parenthetical, this guy,

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I was telling you, I was right, I wrote the, he wants me to blurb his book in the psychedelic community.

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He was telling me, I'm pretty sure he's a Christian. He said he's a devout believer. And he was telling me over dinner that anybody who does

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DMT, he finds it hard to believe that they could come back from that experience and not be a believer and not have a kind of a sense of the transcendent or of something bigger than themselves.

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Not LSD or psilocybin, but he specifically said DMT. And there's this one type of DMT that you get from a toad, which is what he was telling me about.

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Okay, so feeling states are out. No, they basically milk the toad to get this,

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I don't know, whatever. I haven't done it, so I can't say. Okay. So that's where these conversations always get kind of weird because you want to really try to include all various possibilities to change your mind.

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So it wouldn't be that. It wouldn't be that I could take some psychedelic or hallucinogen because it wouldn't be,

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I wouldn't be sure in the case of that hallucinogen that that was actually mapping on to an external reality that was true.

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It could just be my feeling states or things in my culture. I remember reading once a while ago, and if I'm talking too much,

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I don't mean to, you can interrupt me at any time. There's this thing called a god helmet.

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Then this guy, Persinger, it stimulates different parts of the brain. It basically looks like a, it's just like a hockey helmet or, no, no, no, one of those things, a downhill skiing helmet.

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And a friend of mine went in it and he's an atheist and his girlfriend is

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Christian. And when she's like serious, like hardcore

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Christian, he's just, you know, doesn't care about anything either way. And he was telling me that when he went in, he saw nothing.

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My friend, Michael Shermer went in, he saw nothing. Dawkins has been in it. And when she went in, she had feelings of Jesus.

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And this guy said that he's a Muslim. When he went in, well, this is the report from the researcher, he had those kind of experiences from his religious tradition.

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I say that as opposed to faith tradition. So if everybody went in the god helmet and it was kind of univocal, like everybody spoke in one voice about Zeus or something,

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I'd be like, holy moly, maybe there's something there in the brain about Zeus or something. Okay, so it can't be, shit, it can't be any feeling state.

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And it can't be any like, you know, drug induced. I have this vision from some kind of a drug.

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Okay, so empirical phenomenon is down, feeling states are down. What about testimony?

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Well, it can't be testimony because we have different testimonies from people who testify about different things.

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So we know it can't be that. There's a book,

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Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, about these missionaries who go, this missionary who goes into some village and nobody can penetrate this language.

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And basically he penetrates this language. And long story short, you know, they asked him like, have you ever seen

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Jesus? Have you ever? And he's like, no, I haven't. In their society, linguistically, the way that they engage is testimony is only good if you know the person giving the testimony.

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So I'm just saying like, that's one way to think about it. But so nobody's testimony could be, because, you know, we have testimonies online from people of all different faith traditions, religious traditions, and they have different, both moral pronouncements and, you know, like don't eat pork, face this way, testimony of a woman is less than a man, accord, inheritance, like whatever it is.

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Okay, so it can't be testimony. So that's empirical phenomena down, internal states down, testimony down.

12:50

So what does that leave? Well, that leaves the thing that would convince me, and I think it was either my first or my second public fireside chat with Richard, Richard Dawkins.

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I asked him that question. And so it leaves a few other obscure things like the fine tuning argument.

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Again, I don't think about this stuff at all anymore, because metaphysics just, I find it increasingly irrelevant in my life and to the preservation of Western civilization.

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But we have more immediate and pernicious concerns at the moment.

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So like, you know, I don't think it's the fine tuning argument. So what would it be? Well, it would be the thing that really smart apologists know, like the best apologist, you know, we can disagree on who's the best apologist, but like William Lane Craig, for example, in his conversation with Alex Rosenberg, he does a wonderful job of just laying out in syllogistic format those seven arguments.

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So I think it would have to be something with reason. So it would have to be, ideally, that reason would have to be tethered to some empirical phenomenon to justify it.

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So it'd have to be like, he uses the Kalam cosmological argument. That's his kind of darling.

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People have spent a ton of time. I've never understood why that holds so much sway, but it would have to be something like that.

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Like some reason that I would have to have to make me say, okay, and then I'm gonna import one more concept.

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It's Walter Kaufman's idea, not what a reasonable person believe this, but what every reasonable person believe this.

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Like, is there a kind of unanimity to the argument that rational people independently would consent?

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Oh yeah, like that's a thing. So that's the way that I'm thinking about it. And if my reasoning is error,

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I've made a mistake, let me know. But that's just the way of my thinking, like what it would take me to believe. Well, that's good.

14:56

I mean, if we could press into the details a little bit. Yeah, of course. Would that be okay? Yeah, 100%, that's why you're here.

15:03

Give it to me. So you said something, and I think I understand what you mean, but when you say reason tethered to, could you say empirical?

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Yes, something like that. Could you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, sure, sure.

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So in that conversation I had with Richard, he said that if the decimal places at some point in pi contained a hidden message, like 3 .141592654,

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whatever it is, if there was a kind of code within that, that that would be a kind of something you could figure out independently to then use that as a premise for your argument.

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So it would be something demonstrable, empirical in the world that you could then use as a premise, but something that's not, something that can be independently, he was

16:19

McIntyre who says that every single person could look at it and say, aha, this really is in pi when we divide it up to whatever decimal place.

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Yep, it's there, something like that. Okay. Because when you said that, my first thought was,

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I can't think of an example where reason is not tethered to some kind of experience that we have or some kind of reason is embodied.

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Would you agree with that statement or not? Yeah, I think so, pretty much. I mean, I'm thinking about this as it spills into the moral domain.

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Everybody wants to be treated fairly, thinking of John Rawls. Everybody wants to be treated fairly.

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We all have the experience of being treated unfairly. And so some kind of experience, some kind of experience would be there.

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I'm kind of thinking about moral propositions about how to treat other people, how to treat them justly, fairly, lovingly, with care, something like that.

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So I have so many questions that are gonna divert, I think, from what we're doing. And I get the sense

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I should not divert just yet. Because I just want to know, as an aside, what was the lead up to the discussion?

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What was the demographic of the audience like? Like I had so many questions from that video. Before we do that, if that's okay.

17:57

No, anything you want. Yeah, go ahead. This is your. Well, I appreciate it. You say that reason, so I think

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I'm tracking you because I think that is probably the way that I would do it. By the way, I was an atheist until I was 30, and I'm 45 now.

18:13

So, you know, it makes sense to me what you're saying. And if I were in your position, that's what

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I would say. But so then you, and you mentioned Wayne Lane Craig. There are developed areas in the realm of reason that people have given to argue for the existence of God.

18:33

And then I suppose, specifically, the existence of the God of the Bible. So how do you take any of those arguments?

18:41

Yeah. I mean, we're speaking in the abstract, but what specifically is your reaction? Yeah, that's a good question. So you got two things going on there.

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The more claims one makes, and one would have to change one's Bayesian priors, et cetera, for the theological stuff.

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But in terms of deism, that's a far easier sell, obviously, because you're not, it's just a far easier, and I could go into that, the universe came from nothing, the universe was always here, the universe was created by God.

19:09

Okay, so those things are, and as the likelihood of one decreases, the likelihood of the other two would have to go up.

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And we can just, I know that people are gonna be watching this, and it's like, well, you know, what if we were a brain of that, or an image, okay, so whatever.

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Like, we'll just bracket those for the moment. So the claims of deism, those are easier claims to make, but anytime you talk about a specific phenomenon, and every time, you know, it's like you add a conclusion, the thing becomes less and less likely, unless it's actually true, and then the whole thing comports together.

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So I hope that answers your question, but deism is a much easier pill to swallow for me, even though I'm not a deist.

19:56

Okay, because I was gonna ask you, you're not a deist, though. No, no, I don't, I don't, I think we can, and it's not an

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Occam's razor thing, I think we can just do away with the whole thing, but you know, I think it was Victor Stein who said, the amazing thing about the universe is not how it is, but that it is.

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You know, that there is, I think maybe the best argument I've heard is that there is something rather than nothing, and I don't even think that's an argument, that's just kind of an interesting thought.

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Like, why is there something rather than nothing? Well, I mean, I don't know, just because you put a question word in front of a bunch of other words doesn't make a legitimate question.

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I mean, maybe it was always here, you know? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know how anybody could know that, which is the reason for my answer.

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Like, how could you not, how could you know that? I don't know. Hmm. But for the,

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I think you mentioned the Kalam, right? Yeah, that's the big one. What specifically breaks down for you in the argument?

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Yeah, so I'll answer the question directly, but I will say, you know, I used to teach at a university, I will not name, and I taught an atheism class there, and I used to spend time on arguments, and I used to do less of the, you know,

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I did the Anselm and ontological arguments and Aquinas, and then when

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I would put in the new stuff, people, my colleagues were not very happy about it, the ones who would speak to me, and I can't tell you how

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I'd know this, but I would always tell them, like, if you look at the best apologists, they think that these arguments are convincing.

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So if they think these arguments are convincing, I mean, how many people are really, you know, convinced anymore by Aquinas' five proofs?

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I mean, I don't know, maybe somebody, but anyway, I used to get griefed by that. Okay, what breaks down, let's see, let's see what breaks down from that for me.

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The idea that, well, okay, you give me the syllogistic form of it.

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Yeah, I was gonna say, if I can help you along, because it's kind of short, it's like everything that begins to exist has a cause.

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The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. Yeah, and Craig uses the

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Lincoln and the Big Bang, et cetera, for that. I guess what doesn't convince me about that is it's not clear to me that the universe began to exist.

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It's possible, I'm not a physicist, but it's possible, maybe even likely that this instantiation in which we currently find ourselves began to exist, but we could be one of an infinite number in four -dimensional or even nth -dimensional space, as my friend

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Eric Weinstein says, or we could be, it just could have popped into existence from nothing.

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I can tell you Craig's response to that argument, but basically, you'd have to rule out other possibilities that it always existed or kind of multiverse, and I know

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Craig has a pathological hatred of the multiverse argument. Oh, do we have a,

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I'm not sure what we're looking at. Well, that's just people, he's just popping up, William Lane Craig. Yeah, so my friend, my late friend,

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Victor Schneider, who was kind of a mentor to me, wrote God and the Multiverse, which is a very profound book, and he told me he thinks that there's an infinite number of the universe, not only is it turtles all the way down, and that's a kind of infinite regress argument.

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I've never understood, I actually had a philosophy professor of mine who yelled at me about this and basically told me

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I was stupid. I've never understood why there can't be an infinite regress, like why does something have to have a beginning?

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It only has a beginning when you live in what Dawkins calls the Middle Kingdom, when we are subject to evolutionary forces and our ancestors evolved to throw spears and whack gazelles, and if you couldn't do that, then you didn't get to procreate, and so it didn't confer an evolutionary advantage to understand what happens inside black holes or in the realm of the very, very small, so I'm never really sure

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I understood the argument, and it certainly breaks down with like Ramanujan's math inside of black holes or quantum theory.

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I've never understood why something had to have a beginning. Yeah, I mean, you're running up against things that I don't understand either, so fair enough.

24:22

Yeah, they're tricky, they're tricky, because neither one of us are like mathematicians or physicists, so. Right. Yeah, I'm trying to imagine what

24:31

Dr. Craig would say. I've heard that Vilenkin, the theory there also applies to multiverses, so to propose a multiverse is not necessarily to get out of the problem of a beginning.

24:49

Vilenkin probably says something along the lines of you can't, something like past eternal inflation without a beginning is impossible, so what would you say to that?

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I would say two things. I would say two things that, and again, you know,

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I'm, I just have to be, I'm no physicist whatsoever, I'm completely talking out my nose, so I would say that one would need to know in that situation, and since we have just this universe,

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I would need to know why many of the models that, for example, Stenger puts out of universes existing in four -dimensional space, how that inflationary principle would act to rule out those possibilities.

25:45

I actually asked Krauss that possibility, I actually, and I asked Brian Keating, the physicist about that, and those guys told me that it all depends on the starting assumptions, you know, roughly, roughly, that's what they told me.

26:02

Right, well, so, I mean, that's interesting because that's kind of, that was my first thought when you said that reason would essentially be the thing for you, because I guess my concern is our starting assumptions with regard to reason, and so, for the fact that we're even using reason in the first place, not to be too pedantic about this, but what is, and I apologize, it's probably an elementary question for your audience, but I'm talking to you for the first time.

26:38

What is your explanation for logic? What do you mean, the fact that it exists?

26:46

Yes, well, let me back up, I don't think we said this, you're not a deist, are you an atheist?

26:54

Yeah, I think that's, again, I don't think you're being pedantic at all, I think we need to define those, a lot of these mistakes in conversations comes because people, they mean different things by the terms,

27:05

I consider myself, yeah, if you had asked me a few years ago, I probably would have said

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I was an infidel, but I consider myself, I'd mellow it out,

27:15

I guess, I consider myself somebody who does not think that there's sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a god of gods, but if I were given that evidence,

27:27

I would believe, evidence or reason. Okay. So I'm certainly open to the possibility.

27:37

Sure, and so I would try to categorize this philosophically, are you then a, would you then be a materialist, or how would that work out?

27:48

Yeah, pretty much, I try to eschew those classifications, but I think I'm pretty much a materialist,

27:54

I mean, the problem with positing a supernatural realm would be like, how would you know it was, how would one even know there was a supernatural realm?

28:05

That's my problem, because any evidence of that would fall into the naturalistic phenomena.

28:11

And I suppose that was the original question restated. Yeah. That caused you to get up there and give your reasoning, you know, well, so, okay, but for all intents and purposes, you would say you're a materialist, so then

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I guess that just informs the question, like, where does, how would you account for logic then, or what would be your definition?

28:33

Okay, yeah, that's good, let's just get to Justin Chile's question for 10 bucks here. So then why can't

28:38

God be the infinite regress? I don't know, is that a question for you or me? I don't,

28:46

I would not say that God is an infinite regress, I don't. You think Aristotelian, kind of the first cause, the prime mover, is that your take?

28:57

Sure. Okay, yeah, okay, okay, so yeah, so there is no infinite regress, God is kind of the first, okay.

29:05

All right, so what did you, oh, how do I account for logic? So I have a kind of a, I actually wrote a little piece about this,

29:10

I'll send it to you if you want. Okay. I think Max Tegmark and others are wrong.

29:17

Now we get like 5 ,000 Max Tegmark fans yelling at me. I don't, I don't think he's the, he's the mathematician.

29:25

I don't think that you need to posit any kind of platonic realm for math. I think math is just, and James Lindsay and I completely agree on this, his actually is his view in infinity,

29:39

I can't remember the name of the book, I think, I can't remember if I wrote the forwards or not, but in the conversations with him that have helped me clarify this, that it's just counting, you know, it's like, you know, it's an empirical experiment that can be done over and over again.

29:56

You know, like one cup of coffee with oat milk, another copy of coffee with oat milk, that's two coffees with oat milk.

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And so every time you add one to that, it's a kind of experiment at which you know the outcome.

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So from there, you can derive certain principles, certain axiomatic principles about mathematics, about, you know, like subtraction or division or what have you.

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But I believe those phenomenon are all empirical. And I think the idea of positing another realm, like a platonic realm of the form of a number seven or something,

30:31

I just don't think that we need to do that at all. In fact, I think even thinking that you need to do that is a mistake in reasoning.

30:40

It sounds, correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like then, because if there is no platonic realm, and there is no, so then would logic just be a feature of our own minds?

30:54

It's a feature, and I'm not full of my own, because everyone says I'm fully defensive. I have a shoulder injury.

30:59

I'm trying to keep exacerbating it from jujitsu. So I keep folding my arms here because it's just comfortable for my shoulder, my left shoulder.

31:10

Anyway, it's a feature of our own minds as we engage the world, as we interact with objects and things in the world.

31:19

Okay, because an uncharitable, I suppose, way of characterizing that would be that logic would then just be a human convention.

31:29

But that's not, you would not. Yeah, I wouldn't say a convention because you could get someone who's like three foot tall from Japan who doesn't speak a lick of English who lived 500 years ago, and you could make, you could get them to add objects up, and what's it, ich, ni, san, chi, go, broke,

31:47

I don't even know what it is. Like whatever the number five is in Japanese, that there'd be, everybody would see that that's what they meant by five.

31:54

And you say, well, we'll take away one object. And by the way, all these postmodernists who argue with that notion, they're never arguing with that when they're getting the wrong change that's not in their favor from the fact.

32:04

Right. Well, and I, so again, not wanting to divert, I'm not sure how much time we have left.

32:11

In grad school for education, I was confronted with woke ideology, and there was no term for that back then, but it was quite jarring, to say the least.

32:22

Well, yeah, because it's total nonsense. I mean, it's dangerous nonsense. They are, it's predicated on assumptions that are never questioned.

32:32

Yeah, and can't be questioned because then you're a bad person for questioning them. That's true. Which I found funny, and maybe you wouldn't think it's funny, but I went,

32:42

I originally went to, I guess we are changing the subject, sorry. No, this is your, this is, you can spend your half hour everywhere you want.

32:50

I'm all yours. Okay. I originally went from my theology degree to then going to grad school and getting my education degree, and as I look back now,

33:00

I realize that it was my training in theology that actually safeguarded against some of the, like I say, the assumptions that were sort of embedded within the lessons and the content in the education program that I was going to.

33:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a little bit of philosophy in my theology, but also like biblical exegesis, which is basically

33:21

Mortimer Adler's way of reading a book, you know, which is anti -postmodern, but I, yeah, it's incredibly frustrating to see the unquestioned assumptions just sit.

33:37

Yeah, sit and fester, and now we see the Oboros, you know, the snake that eats stonetail, they're starting to have, you know, camps up on universities, and it's shocking to me.

33:53

So, yeah, I think it's really important like having you come on and interrogating my reasoning, and I really,

33:58

I honestly have no ax to grind. Like, I don't want to be wrong about any of this stuff. So, I'm also 57, so most of my life is behind me rather than in front of me, so I don't want to,

34:08

I would like to go to the grave with as few false beliefs as possible. So, yeah, and so if I've made any mistake in my reasoning, let me know.

34:19

So we're not going to upload ourselves like Kurtzweil and live forever in transhumanist utopia or something?

34:27

Yeah, I don't know, I don't think so. I have a buddy of mine who pays this company, I think it's like,

34:33

I can't remember how much, is they're going to chop off his head? Timothy Leary wanted to do that, and they're going to store it.

34:38

But, you know, when you listen to the arguments of Bostrom, et cetera, the singularity is much closer than we think, and I don't just mean with these large language models,

34:47

AI, but yeah, I don't know, everybody thinks that, and then I think it's a version of the

34:52

Methuselah effect, everybody will live for one year longer than a year, so we're always slowly extending our lifetime, but as Shermer says, you know, isn't it funny how this is always in our lifetime, like we are the chosen, we are going to see something.

35:08

So I don't know, I doubt it, but I would definitely be very cool with choosing the date and time of my own death, because I don't think 80 or whatever is long enough.

35:18

Yeah, well, so we're getting into morbid territory. So a moment ago,

35:24

I swerved away from the ditch there, because I think just full transparency,

35:32

I think we're running into an issue that I see from my vantage point, and maybe there is no issue, so I'll go ahead and acknowledge that too.

35:41

If the laws of logic, and correct me if I'm wrong, and logic and reason itself is a feature of the mind, can the laws of logic change at all?

35:56

Like, I suppose if we evolve differently? That's a great question. Yeah, that's a terrific question.

36:06

So the logic itself, it's not, so you have a bunch of things going on.

36:13

So I'll give you my answer, you don't have to, obviously, you don't have to agree with this, you can push back, what have you. So it's kind of the euthyphro dilemma, right?

36:26

Is it that it's always there, and we just happen to stumble across it?

36:35

Do we discover it? Do we invent it? Do we create it? So modus ponens, for example, you know, if P then therefore

36:43

Q, P therefore Q, that's an independent feature of reason, and any being with any epistemology on any, subject to any evolutionary mechanism, should accede to that, you know?

37:03

I don't think that that's, that we have written that rule. Like, you know, putting two objects together, we have linguistic placeholders for those objects, and you could easily imagine a pre -linguistic culture that, you know,

37:16

Victor Stein, I think it was in the blue book, talks about a slab as the first word, you know? I have a slab. But if you put one object, and then you put another object, that's not a feature of the mind.

37:26

Now, the grouping or the classification, the categorization of those features as being quote -unquote together is the classification, and then we develop a language, and then we develop, you know, symbols, you know, you don't have to have symbols if it's not written, but, you know, plus, minus, et cetera.

37:44

But those are features of the mind, but those features of the mind participate in a reality that is independent of the mind itself.

37:55

Now, you could be a phenomenologist or someone who says, well, it's just all phenomenon, but okay, whatever.

38:01

But that's how I view the problem. Okay, I hear you, you know?

38:08

It's, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to discuss, and I think, you know, a lot of people probably don't have the stamina to continue to press, which is why a lot of people -

38:20

Press me on anything you want. I mean, not you and I. I just mean, you know, in normal conversation.

38:28

But I think where, with my experience, and I suppose the ways that I've thought about this,

38:42

I would want to go further. Okay. And so, you know, to suggest that logic, especially the laws of logic, because I recognize that you're using something probably in a way to express the universality of logic, and so you reference counting.

38:59

Yeah. The laws of logic, though, are a little bit more complex, and so, you know, when

39:05

I hear you say certain words like independent, and it's almost like there's a standard that we sort of align ourselves to that then causes a problem, because if I'm really trying to think about it, it sounds like what we're doing is we're aligning ourselves to our own individual subjective minds.

39:30

Yeah, I can see that. So maybe, so I'll put that on, that burden. I mean, I should have been more clear. The laws of logic are features of language.

39:38

They're the linguistic features that we use, so they're embedded in those linguistic structures. And so our minds latch on, you know, like, you know,

39:47

I know a rose is a rose via tautology, or so, you know, a bachelor's an unmarried man, but if we drop, you know, neutron bombs over the whole world and killed all bachelors, that wouldn't change the definition of bachelor's an unmarried man.

40:04

So there's a difference between features embedded in language and linguistics and the world.

40:13

Right, yeah, and I apologize. You're probably, there's an element here that's probably implicitly suggested that I'm just not picking up on, but language -

40:24

I could have made the mistake too, so let me know. Language too, though, is,

40:31

I'm trying to choose my words, beholden to human beings. Would you agree with that?

40:37

So if there are no human beings, there is no language. That's certainly true, yeah. In the same way that if there are no human beings, there is no logic.

40:44

Or am I, is that not, does that not follow? Yeah, I think it's true. I just looked at Tim, my buddy Tim Urban's tweet today, and he showed four pictures, and he said, you know, these are all beautiful, but if there were no humans, they wouldn't be beautiful.

40:56

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. There'd be no, they'd just be there.

41:04

Yeah. Well, so yeah, so again, from my perspective, there's a bit of an issue here, because then, for example, if I were to suggest something easy,

41:20

I'm trying to think, like, so like, is this statement true?

41:27

Oh, yeah, that's Tim's, that's the picture, yeah. Oh, is this? Yeah, it is strange that beauty is entirely subjective.

41:33

These are beautiful to us because of how we're programmed. If I put that woman in there with tweet of that, I'd have like a million people calling me a

41:39

Nazi. Objectively, objectively, they're no more beautiful than any other arrangement of atoms and photons.

41:47

The day humans go extinct, everything we find beautiful will cease to be beautiful. Well, yeah, totally. I think that speaks to your point, right?

41:55

Well, and you get into some weird, I guess, things that come from that as well, you know, to test that particular theory, because, you know, would we hold up a sack of dog crap and suggest that that is on par with whatever it is that those other pictures were?

42:13

Because if beauty were merely subjective, then we're not really aligning ourselves, again, correct me if I'm wrong, we're not really aligning ourselves to some kind of objective standard of beauty that dictates to it and we discover it.

42:25

In actuality, we're just sort of talking about ourselves, which clearly there's a contingent of America that believes a lot of crazy stuff about dog crap and art.

42:34

So I guess the, yeah, or Serrano's Piss Christ, or what have you, or Jackson Pollock, you know, things that I don't, that just don't resonate with me.

42:43

So I guess the question there is, can a person be wrong about it? Like, Travis, pull up those photos again, please, of the

42:52

Tim Urban quote. Like, if a person looks at a beautiful sunset, or I'm gonna avoid saying a beautiful woman because I know it's gonna get me in trouble.

43:02

If a person looks, like the sunset, the second photo, or the mountains, or the flower, or okay, even the woman, if a person looks at that and says, no, that is not beautiful, are they wrong about that?

43:13

And so I think that way of thinking about it, is there something to be wrong about? Yeah. Yeah, and my friend

43:20

Jeff Miller commented on that. They use made choice, yeah.

43:26

So, you know, Peterson got in trouble because he tweeted that picture of an overweight woman and said, there's nothing beautiful about this, and everybody lost their minds.

43:37

So, you know, there are people, when I researched the, for fats, I'm actually a fat studies scholar,

43:43

I'll have you know. Oh my. Yeah. I am a fat studies scholar, but I learned that from the literature, there's actually, there are these people called chubby chasers, and they're just dudes who like morbidly obese women, fat women, and then

43:59

I fell down this rabbit hole. I think there's a good tangent to go on just for a minute. There's a show that I love.

44:05

No, it's not. I think there's, oh, it's a good, oh, it's probably, it's not. Well, yeah, see, then there's something to be wrong about. Yeah, yeah.

44:12

So, my 600 pound life, where they show these people who are 600 pounds plus, and they go on these weight loss journeys, and then

44:18

I watched this documentary, you know, where they, you know, gavage when they, you know, force feed the, you know, goose and the geese, and then they eat their liver, and so it's just super creepy.

44:29

But this guy was like doing gavage to this woman, and he was like sticking this tube down her throat, and he just forced feed her, and she was willingly engaging in this.

44:39

Now, bracketing aside the morality or the legality or any of these issues, everybody, people probably have deep -seated mental health issues, but bracketing that for a side, is there something to be wrong about?

44:50

Like, that guy, that to him is beauty, whereas, I'm assuming you're straight,

44:57

I don't know, that woman in the picture was beautiful, that sunset was beautiful, so is there something to be wrong about it?

45:04

And if there is, you know, is that indicative of platonic realm of beauty?

45:09

Is it indicative of like, you know, culture, is it indicative of something intrinsic to us genetically or normally?

45:16

I mean, but if you don't, if you, in order to have that conversation, you have to admit that there's something to be wrong about.

45:23

It's like morality. If you're not willing to admit that there's something to be wrong about, then what are you actually, that's a different conversation.

45:31

Yeah. Yeah, in a sense, I get the impression that what we're doing, this whole exercise,

45:37

I apologize for taking up, you know, the majority of the time here, asking you questions, but I get this -

45:44

That's why you're here. Interrogate me, I'm ready. I get the sense that from our two particular vantage points, we are running up against transcendence, whether transcendence is a real phenomenon, or it's just something, a word that I'm wrong about, and it's not real, and it's just a word.

46:01

I feel like that's what we're trying to get at, is what is the explanation for these kinds of things? This was my conversation with you about logic a moment ago.

46:09

Yeah. How, you know, how can, for example, oh, right, so before the photos came up, the question that I was gonna ask you was, if, again, logic is a feature of the mind, and if logic, if people disappear, then logic disappears, then before there were any people on the earth, was the statement, there are no people on the earth objectively true?

46:33

Yeah, yeah, I'll answer that, yes.

46:38

My answer would be yes. Oh, okay. Yeah, my answer would be yes, too. But can you define transcendence?

46:44

How do you define that? What do you mean by that? Yeah, something that stands above, well, yeah, it's hard, right?

46:49

Yeah, yeah. Something that is not just a feature of our mind, but something that, whether platonic or otherwise, is outside of us that we then align ourselves to, in some kind of obligatory sense,

47:05

I suppose. Yeah, I think we have to narrow that down because, you know, physics would fall into that category.

47:16

The laws of physics. Yeah, so I mean, you mean something like, I'm trying to avoid the word, but I just can't seem to, like supernatural.

47:24

I would agree that the laws of physics is not something, it's not a feature of our language.

47:30

When we talk about the laws of physics, we're describing the feature of the universe around us. I don't know why

47:35

I pointed that way. I don't know. It's okay, it's okay. It's okay, I was thinking about light cones when you said that.

47:42

So yeah, so I'm trying to think, so for you, when you talk about transcendence, you're talking about, and again,

47:50

I understand the words are totally tricky here and people get caught up in these, but we have to kind of try to be precise.

47:56

Are you talking about like spiritual things? I'm talking about, well, yeah, so when you say spiritual now, what does that mean?

48:06

We're maybe importing only Christian connotation to it. Again, trying to be precise, it's,

48:15

I'm describing a separate category besides what is just inside our own minds.

48:26

So what I'm trying to, so I almost think of it as synonymous, although I know it's not, with objectivity and the subjective -objective sort of contrast.

48:38

Yeah, I mean, I think even the postmodernists believe that there's an objective world.

48:43

Maybe the truly, truly crazy ones don't, but it's just that they think that those relationships are mediated through power.

48:51

So yeah, I think that there's an objective world out there. I'm still not, and I don't mean to be dense,

48:58

I'm still not sure of the transcendence thing. Well, so logic, we'll go back to logic because I think we were spending some time on that.

49:07

Yeah. Logic, a truth statement, let me back up.

49:14

I don't want to assume anything. If we were to make a truth statement, even the communication that I'm communicating to you right now is predicated on the laws of logic, excluded middle, identity, the other one

49:25

I'm forgetting. Definitions, I know what you know by words. If you were speaking to a Healy, that would be different. Right, but maybe another episode, you invite me on,

49:35

I'll teach you some Samoan. But then the truth statements, so if I were to say something that was true and then

49:43

I died, that truth statement, from my vantage point, would continue to be true. In that sense, it doesn't disappear because I've communicated, the subjective mind that I have is also gone.

50:01

Yeah. The thing that I said is actually objectively true. And especially if I were to say, woke culture is a blight on human society.

50:12

Right. Well, now that affects other people too. Right. And maybe people are incited by my statement to do something about it, to correct woke culture, but I'm dead,

50:21

I'm long gone. So like now my statement, my truth statement has lived on. That's not quite, you see what

50:28

I'm getting at. And then now it transcends me. Yeah, that's right. So Hegel writes about that when he writes, it's raining now.

50:36

And what happens when he puts the note in the drawer the next day and it's not raining, what happened to the truth? I think he wrote,

50:41

I can't remember the word for stale in German, but did that truth become stale? And so you have kind of truths that are true at time

50:50

T, and I would assume the transcendent truths, I'm trying to do this without incorporating physics into this category, but that are kind of immutably, unchangeably, eternally, and timelessly true.

51:08

And I would actually add necessary. Is that okay?

51:14

Is that right? Is that? I would agree. Yeah, okay, yeah. So I don't, so if you're asking if I believe in any of those,

51:23

I believe in those as long as they have a naturalistic footprint.

51:34

Okay, how would they have a naturalistic footprint? You know, like,

51:42

I only know, please don't think my knowledge of physics is any more than the two examples

51:49

I know, the two numbers I know. But like things fall in a vacuum,

51:55

I think it's like 9 .8 meters per second squared or the speed of light, 186 ,000 miles per second. Like those two things.

52:00

Those are the only two numbers in physics I know. Like two numbers in chemistry, like salt and oxygen.

52:06

But so that would be like, it doesn't have to be measurable, but at least measurable in potential at some kind of theoretical technological limit.

52:19

So something like, you know, in physics, like you can, it can be demonstrable in some way that we can look at as opposed to like, oh, you know,

52:30

I'll just give myself an aside. So I remember, I'm a science fiction fanatic and I remember watching the science fiction show once.

52:38

God, it was just great about these entities that just kind of came down and they were just malevolent entities.

52:47

And basically they figured out a way to destroy these things. It's a long story short, but they were coming down from the fourth dimension and they were only destroying like one piece in the third dimension.

52:59

So, and the whole point of that tangent was that it could be that we see the footprint of something.

53:07

It's like a flatland, the old book. And you know, if this is a piece of paper and you have a pen that shoots through the paper, the people in the flatland, the two dimensional objects just see every plane, but they don't see the whole object.

53:22

So that could appear as if it had a supernatural explanation but actually had a naturalistic explanation.

53:27

There's like a pen or whatever, a pin piercing the two dimensional space.

53:33

So I would naturally, I would just assume that there are naturalistic explanations as opposed to going to supernatural explanations for apparently naturalistic phenomenon or at least the phenomenon that made a footprint in the naturalistic world.

53:45

Yeah. So connecting that to, I guess the last theoretical I sort of offered you, how would that work out?

53:56

So what I asked you again was before, if there are no people on the planet, and I totally forgot what

54:04

I was saying, then the truth is that there are no - Oh, is the statement still true? Is the statement still true? You would say it is still true as long as, wait, no, yeah,

54:13

I don't know. How would you work that out? Let's see, if there are no people on the planet and I just have to create the conditions for how the, so maybe there was one guy on the planet after a nuclear holocaust and he wrote this, oh, but he couldn't write that because he's alive.

54:32

Yeah, okay, so maybe, okay, so, ah, how about this?

54:39

There's one guy left after a nuclear holocaust. He writes, in four hours, there'll be no one left on the planet and then he kills himself and there's no one left on the planet.

54:48

Would that statement be true? As long as he's, well, in four hours, there would be,

54:55

I suppose, well, from my vantage point, it would be true. It would be true, yeah. I don't think logic is just stuck inside human minds.

55:02

Well, there'd be nobody to apprehend it, but it would be true because it accords with reality.

55:09

That's basically what I mean by true. It just accords with lawful, it lawfully accords with reality. Well, I mean, that's great.

55:18

That sounds, so we're up on time, but that sounds like, now, a little bit of a different take on logic than where we originally started.

55:28

But I— Oh, how so, how so? Well, if it comports to reality, is not contingent on human minds at all.

55:36

Well, I suppose you would qualify that with, as long as there's somebody there to, I suppose, perceive reality.

55:44

I mean, again, it's so hypothetical. It's tricky because, you know, there'd be no one there to know that it was true because everybody would be dead.

55:53

That's right. Yeah. So it kind of assumes, yeah, so I guess that lends itself to a bunch of hyper -theoretical or abstract questions about the nature of logic and truth and the way our perception influences those things.

56:18

I guess our, yeah, no, go ahead. Sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say, I think, just so I can identify, and you already know this, so I suppose

56:25

I'm talking to your audience and my audience watching. But like, all I'm trying to do, I think, is investigate for coherence.

56:36

And I'll acknowledge, I'm doing it from my particular vantage point, and I'm, you know, maybe I'm making mistakes there too.

56:41

It's fine to do that. But that's ultimately what I was. Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, I mean, but that's the way that, the good thing is that, you know,

56:51

I don't think there's a problem with doing it from a vantage point. There may be a problem with only doing it from one vantage point, but so I think it's always a good thing, you know, that we test our own beliefs for coherence.

57:08

Yeah, I think the, I'm hesitant to go down this rabbit hole in three minutes, but there's so many rabbit holes that we could go down.

57:18

I mean, it's an interesting thing. I want to end something real quick, because I do have a hard -

57:24

A friend of mine has had quite a severe accident, and I need to attend to that. But so one thing that amazes me is that I think we're in what

57:36

I term culture war 2 .0 now. And I've noticed some of my biggest supporters have been

57:41

Christians. And I find that there are more, that the atheist community is a quote -unquote community.

57:49

I don't really like the use of that term, but boy, there are some non -well people living in that community for sure.

57:59

So I wanted to ask you a question. I mean, there are non -well people living in every community, but it seems particularly beholden to ideological weirdness.

58:10

And the fact that a religion grew up within an anti -religious community is utterly fascinating to me. But I wanted to ask you something quickly.

58:20

So that you can do what you do, and I'm trying to think of a way,

58:29

I don't mean to sound flippantly, but the whole Jesus thing, however you want to bundle that or term that.

58:36

Your success in that is almost completely contingent upon my success in what

58:43

I'm doing. Like if I fail, you're in trouble because the same people coming from me are going to come for you.

58:50

They're coming for your cognitive liberty. They're going to shout you down. They're going to prevent you from expressing yourself.

58:55

They're going to prevent you from believing what you want to believe, or at least making that public. And it always fascinates me that the people who don't see that, like that guy in the audience who started screaming at me, like he clearly does not see that.

59:12

Yeah. And maybe I'm kind of asking at some point if you can explain to your audience why it is essential that the people like me who don't believe

59:24

I am not your enemy, like I want cognitive liberty. I want people to believe what they want to believe.

59:30

I want people to have freedom of belief. I want people to have freedom of assembly, freedom of press, freedom of speech, the freedom to be who they want to be.

59:42

And we can talk about there's some basic restrictions like hurting other people, certain things when you reach lawful age like 18 that I personally don't think you should be able to do until you are 18.

59:54

And I think those are very reasonable, extraordinarily reasonable things. My guess is we can probably agree on most of those, not all of them.

01:00:04

But the idea that the people who are, for lack of a better word, maybe fundamentalists or maybe hardcore believers, they're just not getting the fact that what's at stake is very profound here in this culture war.

01:00:22

Yeah. And I want to give you a last word and a comment on that. I totally agree. Yeah, I mean, as concise as I can,

01:00:33

I think we have become, and I say we, the Christians in the church, we've become very comfortable with shallow living.

01:00:44

And we don't want to do the harder work. It's harder to actually pay close attention to, and now

01:00:54

I'll speak purely as a pastor, to what Jesus actually taught. Jesus gives us an ethic, a set of ideals to engage people, but do so very gently with all humility.

01:01:06

First Peter 3 .15, yeah. Yeah, okay, yeah. Even in the Sermon on the Mount, and you can even go to the

01:01:12

Beatitudes, to be radically generous, not only with our money, but also with the way that we look at people and our outlook.

01:01:20

And I, yeah, I'm doing what I can to try to help all of us from inside.

01:01:27

Because I think what that does is, if we just start there, if we just get used to even saying as Christians, four magic words, you know,

01:01:34

I could be wrong. Wow. What that does is it opens the door to learning new things, to talking to folks like you, and it paves the way for,

01:01:43

I think, a society that flourishes. Yeah, I agree, and I really want to thank you for coming on. You know,

01:01:48

I, it takes a lot to come on to the age in which we live, and I'm sure people are gonna grieve you about this.

01:01:57

I'm like, I would be astonished if they did not be talking about me, to talking to me.

01:02:04

And I think that there's a weird cultural thing now where like, you know, you can't talk to people you disagree with.

01:02:11

It's offense by proxy. I'm offended by that guy's evil while you're platforming him, or he's a Nazi or whatever kind of insanity that there is.

01:02:17

I really want to thank you for coming on and having a conversation with me. That means a lot. Where do you live, by the way?

01:02:23

Nashville. Oh, I got a good buddy of mine who lives in Nashville. I got a bunch of people I know in Nashville.

01:02:29

Travis, maybe you and Reid and I should go to Nashville. We can hang out. Come down here. I'll show you a good time. We'll have fun.

01:02:34

Yeah, awesome. All right, Nate, thank you so much for talking. Keep your window open, and I very much appreciate the conversation.

01:02:41

Thank you. Thank you, sir. I really do appreciate this. Yeah, my absolute pleasure. All right, thanks, everybody.