#163 Religion is an Obligation - Ross Douthat

22:39Alex O'Connor:Ground News is a news aggregation service which brings together thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place so you can compare reporting across the political spectrum. Try it out at ground.news forward slash Alex OC. Did you see that a Harvard professor who's known for UFO and extraterrestrial research was recently picked to lead a new White House UFO Council? If you only typically read from news sources which lean to the right, you might not. Using Ground News, I can see that of all the sources reporting on this story, only 5 % of them lean to the right. And Ground News even has a dedicated blind spot tap, which specifically seeks out stories that you would otherwise miss based on the news that you normally read.

23:19Alex O'Connor:So cut through media bias and get a better idea of what's really going on in the world by going to ground.news forward slash AlexOC or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. Use my link to get 40 % off their unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. I kind of want to ask you about that religious plurality in a moment. But first, you also mentioned this sort of connection between the mind and the universe, the intelligibility of the universe, the apparent fine-tuning of the universe. To be clear, we're not talking about things like the distance of the Earth from the sun, because there are billions of planets, and some of them are going to be life-remitting.

24:00Alex O'Connor:But we're talking about like the nature of the universe itself, the physical constants, which allow for not just life as we know it, but for atoms to form, for stars to exist. And it seems like you're quite impressed by the apparent fine tuning of this physical makeup of the universe that points to creation.

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25:40Ross Douthat:take that landscape and introduce into it the current scientific understanding of the likelihood of a universe like ours existing which is you know on the order not of like oh well for every thousand universes you get one that might have life it's more like on the order of for every quadrillion quadrillion potential universes you get you get one like this i guess my view is if you introduce that point to any prior era of arguments between the religious and the non-religious, it would be immediately recognized as, you know, better for the theists than the non-theists.

26:20Alex O'Connor:Yeah, I mean...

26:20Ross Douthat:In a pretty significant way, and not what would be expected on atheistic premises. Doesn't mean that it's a slam-dunk argument, and doesn't mean that, you know, some new round of scientific speculation won't tweak it. But I would say more, just to make a broader point, I don't think there is one single slam dunk argument for religion. I do think that the intellectual case for being religious lies in convergence of these different lines, right? where you say, okay, the line of evidence from fine-tuning seems to be more what you'd think you'd get in a designed cosmos. Likewise, the lines of evidence from consciousness.

27:11Ross Douthat:Likewise, the lines of evidence from religious and mystical experience. And when you've got enough converging lines, you say, well, the non-theist needs basically an explanation over here to take care of this one, an explanation over here to take care of this one. And at some point you just say, okay, but this, broadly speaking, this looks like a universe that a mind created and is interested in, you know, things we're doing and communicating with us. That's sort of, that's...

27:37Alex O'Connor:It's like a cumulative case, and that's fair enough, and I think that's the most sensible case to make. I think it's interesting to think what people in history would make of this so-called fine-tuning. I think it would depend on how it's presented and what questions they ask. Because you could say something like, there are a number of constants which seem extremely finely tuned. And I think people often misunderstand how this argument works. For example, you cite the cosmological constant in your book, which is this sort of constant in the theory of general relativity, which describes the expansion rate of the universe.

28:17Alex O'Connor:We discovered in the 90s that not only is the universe expanding, but it seems to be speeding up, which is a complete mystery. And so people might have heard of this stuff called dark energy. And that is just a product of scientists doing what they do best, which is taking something which we haven't explained, giving it a label, and then sometimes acting as though that label has explained it. I like to give the example of the placebo effect to explain the way that sometimes when people think that we've described something, we've thereby explained it. in that you could take a sugar pill and it works.

28:50Alex O'Connor:And everyone goes, that's really weird. But it happens consistently enough that they name it, they say, this is the placebo effect, and we hope one day we'll understand it. And then years later, we still don't really understand exactly why that's doing that to the brain. Sometimes people can take a placebo, know it's a placebo, and it still works. We still don't really understand exactly how that works or why it's happening. But now if you take a sugar pill and it works and you're amazed by it, somebody will just say, oh, that's just the placebo effect. Thinking they've explained it when really they've

29:16Ross Douthat:just described the very thing that we're trying to and in fact have opened another incredibly complicated debate about consciousness and its interaction with the physical world i mean dark

29:25Alex O'Connor:energy is is like this it's it's dark because we can't see it and we don't know what it's made out of and we don't know why it's there but we need it because it makes the universe expand and so this measure of dark energy is called the cosmological constant and i think the problem comes from quantum mechanics tells us that the figure for this value this constant this this fat this sort of strength of the cosmological constant should be massive. I mean, it should be absolutely huge. What we observe in the universe is actually relatively weak, very near to zero. And so there's this idea that like, of all the possible ranges that this cosmological constant could have, there's only a tiny slither in which like the universe could exist without flying apart or collapsing in on itself.

30:06Alex O'Connor:And people hear that and they think that means that if you were to, if you were to change it ever so slightly, the universe would cease to exist. But that's not true. I mean, on some calculations, you could make the cosmological constant hundreds of times stronger than it is, and everything would be fine. You could make it zero, and everything would be fine. And the scientists thought it was zero for the majority of the 20th century. And yet it's because we sort of calculated this huge range of possible positions it could have, that this rather relatively larger than people might think range of life-permitting values is so small by comparison that it feels finely tuned it's like if i asked you to to to pick a number between one and a hundred trillion and you win if you pick somewhere between five and six million like you pick a number at random and if you pick somewhere between five and six million you win and if you pick out a winner it's really unlikely that you pick a winner because there's a hundred trillion like options but you still could have like varied that by like a million either way and still have won and so much rides on our analysis of the potential possible ranges this isn't some like observed value that we that we sort of see in the universe it's the result of a calculation from quantum mechanics which we know is wrong because the figure it gives us is way too strong and so i feel as though so much rides on knowing exactly what the possible sort of uh different options were and also knowing what the probability distribution is the analogy that i've sometimes given is this like if i if i were to roll a die and it came up four what were the odds of that you might be tempted to say about one in six but i didn't tell you how many sides the die had okay so maybe it's a big dungeon we're playing dungeons and dragons right it's got 12 right okay so what are the odds of getting four well one in 12 not quite because i didn't tell you what numbers were on each side of the die okay it's a normal 12 sided die and still might not be one in 12 because you don't know if the die is weighted and you need to know all of those facts in order to to understand the probability so So if I sort of rolled a die and it came up with a particular number that I liked, let's say that I roll a bunch of dice and it hits this number, which is like a winner in a game.

32:22Alex O'Connor:And I think that seems exceptionally lucky, but it's the only time I've ever played the game. It's the only time I've ever rolled the dice. I don't know how many dice were rolled. I don't know how many sides those dice had. I don't know anything about that, but it seems like they could, you know, the dice could have, there could have been loads of dice. They could have been all kinds of numbers and so the probability that i would hit this number seems really really low only by comparison to this sort of massive scope of possibilities which aren't as far as i can see like that well grounded we don't we don't know for a fact that that is in fact how large the the sort of value set is and even if we did we don't know what the probability assigned to each of those is in the in the way that if you roll it if you roll a die that's a fair die six sided a fair die um you can use the principle of indifference and say that given that we don't know anything else we say it's one in six chance of any number coming up if i roll two die two dice then what are the odds of now hitting a one they've actually reduced to zero i now can't hit a one and the chances of getting like a a 12 are also extremely low um but the chances of getting like an 8 are higher because there are just more ways to make an 8.

33:30Alex O'Connor:And so I might be tempted if I hit an 8 to say that I had just as much chance of hitting that number as any of the other possible options. But it turns out that when we understand how the probability distribution works, it's actually more likely to get a particular set of values. Now, that doesn't undo the fine-tuning argument, but I think it at least sort of puts a dent in the confidence with which many people often present it. I think you could change the strength of the strong nuclear force by like 50%. 50 % and everything would be fine. It's just that when you consider how big it could possibly be in principle, it's like a tiny, tiny amount of variance.

34:04Alex O'Connor:But I just feel like we don't know enough about the variables, you know?

34:09Ross Douthat:I mean, I think I'm certainly as a non-scientist, right? As a non-scientist, very open to the possibility that some of or many of the particulars of this argument would change depending on sort of advances in overall understanding and certain numbers that are cited confidently as evidence of fine-tuning right now might turn out to have secondary explanations or there might be some kind of broader breakthrough. To me, what is notable is you approach these things as a layman and you try and look at what are the scientists actually impressed by. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. And generally, my sense is that, in fact, scientists and philosophers of science have ended up quite impressed by this argument.

35:00Ross Douthat:Now, maybe to a fault, right? But that this is why you have this sort of, it's not the only reason, but it's why you have among people analyzing and making arguments around this issue who are not religious believers, which is, of course, a great many people, sort of the turn to conceptualize. of the multiverse, assumptions about sort of a near infinity or infinity of worlds and so on. And in that sense, you know, the fact of that turn, which is, again, quite different, I think, from a lot of perspectives that were pretty confidently held, let's say, in the late 1800s or early 20th century, the fact of that turn suggests that there is, in fact, something quite striking here it also though carries us back in a way to very old debates about um the you know the argument from design and so on right so you know if you go back to the classical era to the greeks and the romans right there weren't concepts of a multiverse exactly or maybe there were here and there but they but you would you would nonetheless have these arguments about the order and design of the cosmos that pitted people saying, you know, look at this reason and that reason to think that everything around us couldn't have emerged by chance versus people saying, ah, given infinity, right?

36:32Ross Douthat:Given sort of given an infinite context, right? Eventually, eventually these things are going to arise. So in an interesting way, fine-tuning has sort of brought that back, right? Where people who don't want it to be evidence for any kind of theism or design end up positing outside our own universe, a kind of infinity of universes, to explain this one. and to me that's sort of a I don't know it's sort of comforting in a way right that these arguments that those kind of arguments tend to circle back to the same place I do think that there was a period in atheism where there was a deep confidence in a kind of mechanistic necessity that was going to do away with the need to say actually there's you know a sort of infinite timeline on which to generate this this one universe and i think the fine-tuning argument has sort of taken us back to that older landscape permanently i'm i'm not sure yeah but yeah um but there but there are ways in which i don't know it it does seem a little bit hard to escape the choice between saying um we, you know, we need some kind of near infinity to generate this kind of remarkable jewel-like order.

38:04Ross Douthat:The choice between that and saying that this jewel-like order is actually ordered, that just seems like a choice that human cultures and arguers tend to come back to. And then you get into, you know, the sort of, the kind of Boltzmann brain argument, right? Which I co-taught a class on some of these issues at Yale where I was obviously the amateur and my co-teacher was a sort of friendly atheist, atheist interested in religious arguments philosopher. And, you know, we ended up sort of circling around to the Boltzmann grain question, which is for those, I'm sure they've probably come up on your show before, but it's the idea that, you know, once you start positing infinite universes or infinite time or anything to get you to this particularly ordered cosmos, then someone comes along and says, well, fine, but if you're talking about an infinite timeline or an infinite number of universes, it actually starts becoming more likely that you'll get sort of that your consciousness is in fact a has randomly popped into existence five minutes ago.

39:16Ross Douthat:And the whole universe that you think is out there is just contained in this brief transient consciousness. And most experience in an infinite world would be Boltzmann brains where everything is an illusion and not reality. Whether that's correct or not, I don't know. But it's a kind of, you know, it shows sort of there's sort of step after step in these kind of arguments that you sort of work your way out towards.

39:44Alex O'Connor:I feel like the strength of the fine tuning argument is just the thought that like it seems like things could have been different. Like, yeah. And almost trivially, if gravity were turned up sufficiently, everything would just collapse. The universe would collapse. I mean, we think that, although we don't have no idea how dark energy would like react to that. We just don't know, but it certainly feels as though there are ways that the universe could be that would just not allow for any kind of structure to exist. And it seems like there are many more ways for that to occur.

40:11Ross Douthat:I think we know. I'm pretty confident in that clip, right? As a layman. I think that's true.

40:19Alex O'Connor:I think that it's unclear because we don't really know exactly to what degree we could in principle tweak these constants. But I think a stronger maybe argument against that is to say, okay, fair enough to grant it and say, sure, the universe could have been many different ways. These constants could have been different. I think a criticism that's made by Timothy and Lydia McGrew, if I'm not mistaken, who are Christians. Yeah, they don't love it. And they say that, like, look, I mean, the only non-arbitrary way, really, and I don't know if this is actually what they say, but I just want to give credit in case it is what they said.

40:50The only sort of non-arbitrary way to come up with some kind of probability distribution.

40:55Alex O'Connor:because you could change the cosmological constant by hundreds of times and everything's fine. So in comparison to what is that a small window? Well, we could say in comparison to the number that's spit out by quantum field theory. Okay, but maybe our equations are wrong or maybe that's not really the upper bound or blah, blah, blah. Okay, the only non-arbitrary and certain way that we can say we know what the sort of possible limits are to think what's logically possible. What just is logically non-contradictory to imagine the constant being. And it seems like it becomes like infinite in scope.

41:27Alex O'Connor:It could be literally anything. It could have any strength. It could have 10, 100, a billion, a trillion. It could be anything. There's no upper bound. At which point you make the sort of total bound infinity and make it impossible to meaningfully talk about probabilities anymore. I guess one in infinity does sound more impressive. It does. It also makes it impossible to put the precise numbers that are often so impressive. You hear sort of one in 10 to the 120th power and stuff. And I think a lot of that is perhaps, I want to say more dubious, but we don't know for sure. But at the very least, I think the only non-arbitrary way to do it would be to make it infinite.

42:00And that makes it maybe a bit more meaningless, you know?

42:04Ross Douthat:Yeah, I think there's a way in which those kind of attempts to do sharp numbers are just sort of pulling us back towards a original version of the religious argument, which is to say, like, you're not going to know the exact probabilities, but, you know, why is there something rather than nothing? It's already a challenging question. And why is the something so ordered and law-bound and predictable and mathematically beautiful? Why does mathematics work? You know, all of these kind of arguments that predate fine-tuning. Yeah. And I think they're themselves quite good arguments, right? I don't think that they're actually undone by Darwinism, as much power as Darwinism has to explain certain features of reality.

43:00Ross Douthat:I guess, again, one thing that I find attractive about fine-tuning is just the extent to which it is a case study in how you don't just advance through scientific progress and get further and further away from religious arguments, right? And again, I think that's an important part of what I'm trying to convince people of, right? That there are things that happen in the sciences, in culture, in human experience, under modern conditions, that are things that religious people would have expected to find out. And that's different from the claim that there existed a misty supernaturalist past where once someone could believe that the universe had been constructed and designed, but now every step that modern science takes proves that it's less and less likely.

43:56Ross Douthat:um it's more like it's more like no whatever whatever the the true absolute value how many you know one to the whatever power wherever that ends up it's just a way of sort of renewing the mystery that the structure exists at all maybe do you think that people like maybe they

44:19Alex O'Connor:should or they shouldn't but do you think people are moved by arguments of this kind like on mass Like it seems to me that the principal motivation is experiential.

44:28Ross Douthat:It completely varies by the person. I guess I would say that the kind of person moved by that kind of argument probably has a particularly kind of mathematical, technical, and philosophical brain, right? And certainly it is by no means the primary reason that people become religious. Although, again, I do think that sort of a basic sense of wonder at existence itself as a beautiful and law-bound structure maybe is a more commonplace sort of thing that pushes people toward religion. But, you know, the reality is that if you're, I'm sure you've experienced this in your own interviewing, right? But I think that there are, let's say I think that there are five good arguments for being religious and that their convergence together gets you to strong reasons to be religious, right?

45:27Ross Douthat:If you talk to five different people, each of those people will find one of the arguments I offer sort of ridiculous. Yeah, sure, sure. But find another one intuitive, right? So, for instance, when I co-taught this class, right, this was a bunch of Yale undergraduates and graduate students. And they had coming in a strong scientific materialist bias, many of them, not all. You had all kinds of kids, but it was a seminar. So let's say five or ten of them were the kind of people for whom the fine-tuning argument was very powerful.

45:59Alex O'Connor:Yeah, sure.

45:59Ross Douthat:And it sort of confronted them with a mystery. and then when we got around to the point in the course when we were reading about religious experiences and miracles they were like oh come on yeah right this is you know i i can believe in the fine-tuning god the watchmaker god but not the levitating saint yeah right even god as long as he's a scientist exactly yes but then let's i mean what would be an example i did you know andrew sullivan the anglo-irish-american catholic gay journalist right um i've known for a long time I did his podcast to talk about the book. And he was just like, Ross, you know, all this stuff about, you know, the laws of the cosmos and these constant, how would anyone ever know any of those things?

46:46Ross Douthat:Right? Like this all, this all, and you know, this all just seems like we're sort of building structures, you know, on shaky foundations. And in fact, against the scale of the cosmos, how can you possibly make any statements about who God might be? But then meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan believes in the mystical side of Christianity in this incredibly powerful and palpable way. Right. And that is where his religious belief rests. And I think like if you're doing psychological studies of people, probably that's probably the norm. And I'm a little bit weird in saying, well, I have, you know, I have these, I have all these different lines of argument and I locate the argument for, you know, for being religious where the lines intersect.

47:33Ross Douthat:And it's much more normal to not be convinced by a bunch of them, but have one or two that you're really personally committed to.

47:41Alex O'Connor:So, I mean, you're motivated by these arguments then. I don't mean to say that that's necessarily the reason you became religious or became Catholic or whatever, but now it's one of the sustaining sort of factors of your faith. It's not just something, in other words, that you felt like you kind of had to cover in a book about God, like we better do the arguments. These are things which do actually motivate your belief?

48:03Ross Douthat:I think so. Yes. Yes. I would say that. So I grew up in a household that was sort of on a mystical religious journey when I was a kid. And so by the standards of, you know, American journalists who argue about these topics, I probably had a more unusual than most exposure to the mystical and supernatural as a kid. like speaking in tongues, charismatic healing services, those kind of things. But I didn't have the experiences myself, right? I watched other people have them. People I was close to and trusted and, you know, whatever religious experience is, these were authentic experiences. They weren't somebody, you know, waving, you know, an intoxicant under your nose and pushing you down or something.

48:58Ross Douthat:Like, these were actual William James-style religious experiences. But probably that combination of having this kind of exposure, thinking that this is a real and important part of the world and human experience that is definitely underappreciated by people who hold, you know, Oxford or Ivy League professorships and so on, but not—but experiencing it indirectly. That probably led me to be maybe more interested than average in sort of theories of what's going on. Right. And but I'm I'm yeah, I'm very interested in theories of what's going on. I I think that I think there's obviously elements elements of reality that under almost any theory of religion are not accessible to us.

49:54Ross Douthat:And you're not you're not going to know the whole plan. But yeah, I've always been interested in trying to figure out, like, how do these different things fit together?

50:03Alex O'Connor:What do you think are the best reasons that you've heard for not believing any of this? For not believing in any kind of God, not believing in any religiosity, thinking that consciousness must just be some kind of evolutionary accident from an accidentally existing universe? Or do you think that is just a preposterous view now? I mean, it wasn't that long ago that new atheism was super popular, and now you kind of don't really...

50:28Ross Douthat:Yeah, I mean, as a baseline, one reason that I wrote the book is that over the course of my adult life, I guess I've found the basic atheist case, like the hardcore materialist case, right, less and less convincing. and over the same period that it's not a period in which I have become like in the practice of my own Catholic Christianity you know infinitely more zealous or anything like that in fact you know the experience of controversies inside Catholicism since I became a Catholic has probably made me less certain about certain particular points of dogma or morals as a Catholic but I do feel like there are elements of the materialist case that do seem a bit preposterous to me as a kind of baseline now with that said what you know it doesn't mean that there aren't sort of things like sort of intuitions right that that you have that might offer some pretty strong challenges to to religious belief um i mean certainly one of the most powerful ones is just like the difficulty in figuring out what God is up to in the ways that different human beings experience, you know, experience human life.

51:54Ross Douthat:Yeah, yeah. Right? Where, you know, if you're a Catholic, you think that there's a lot of miracles out there. We have a lot of excellent miracle stories in Catholicism. Some of them have, you know, reached the level of being endlessly debated by the rationalist community on the internet. But everyone doesn't get a miracle, right? Lots of people don't get miracles. One person can get this incredibly intense experience where you listen to them and you're like, well, of course you believe in God, right? Of course you have absolute confidence in Jesus or the Virgin Mary or anything else. but that is denied to the next five people in line for reasons that are certainly beyond my capacity or knowledge now not you know not completely i think there is a way in which yes if you set out and seek god are you more likely to have an experience of god yes i think that's that's true but it's not true in some absolute ironclad way right it's like statistically probabilistically you're more likely to get a mystical experience if you spend a lot of time in church but plenty of people spend a lot of time in church and don't get one yeah and plenty of people get them for you know and don't know what to do with them right like i mean one of my sort of pet fascinations is what you might call like non-conversion stories where people have some kind of wild mystical experience and are operating out either well there's there's different categories There's people who have them who have no religious background and are just like, I don't know what that even was.

53:29Ross Douthat:I don't know how to process it. There are people who have them and run away from them.

53:33Alex O'Connor:Right.

53:34Ross Douthat:So there's all kinds of ways, all kinds of people, all kinds of contexts where people have them and all kinds of contexts where people don't. And it's just, I think, understandable for the non-believer to say, well, this all seems ridiculously arbitrary. And the religious response has to be, well, you know, we sort of assume that there's an actual plan here and these things connect to things that God is doing and is interested in doing in different people's lives. but there's no definite answer to why one person gets the profound thing and another person doesn't and then what comes out of that is just the sense that as much as i may push you or anyone else to take religion seriously or become religious clearly the cosmos is set up to allow for unbelief right yeah like whatever god's up to it includes the possibility the allowance that you may never you know, that you may not be a religious believer.

54:38Ross Douthat:Yeah. Right. And that's sort of, that seems built in.

54:40Alex O'Connor:Obviously, all of the problems that people have with religion are known to religious traditions and their scriptures, at the very least sort of acknowledge them. You know, the problem of evil is acknowledged in the book of Job or in the suffering on the cross. The problem of divine hiddenness is acknowledged when Jesus's prayer goes unanswered in the Garden of Gethsemane. I mean, people don't reflect on that enough. Like he, Jesus himself prays to God and gets told no. Which I think is quite profound. Well, it is an answer. No is an answer. Quite, quite, quite. But it's not an answer to our quandary.

55:13Alex O'Connor:It's not like, oh, well, that's fine then. That explains divine hiddenness. But it at least tells us that it's not like they're unaware of it, right? And I will say, I think that to me, the kind of...

55:28Ross Douthat:That seeming arbitrariness seems like a more powerful argument for non-belief than the problem of evil. I understand at an emotional level why in certain circumstances the problem of evil seems incredibly intense and difficult to reckon with. but i guess i think it's sort of a subcategory like of the arbitrariness question right it's like because if you know if we said like you have to suffer x or y amount and in the end you will be transformed and sanctified and go to heaven then fine then i mean not fine not fine right but it makes more sense than this random distribution well and it's like we we don't just as, you know, just as we don't actually know the necessary distribution of potential cosmological constants, right?

56:21Ross Douthat:We have no idea what even the most intense and harrowing pain looks like in the light of eternity, right? So people who just say, there's too much suffering, a good God couldn't have done it. I don't think they have the parameters right for understanding that, right? But people who say, you know, what's going on when the suffering seems absolutely pointless and the person who's suffering seems to get nothing out of it, right? I think that's the more powerful version, but it's connected more to sort of like, how does God seem to distribute grace than just the pain itself, right? So like, I went through a, you know, pretty difficult time with a chronic illness, Lyme disease that, you know, inflicted some pretty terrific pain on me for a sustained period of time.

57:16Ross Douthat:And I didn't find that that shook my faith in God in sort of a predictable psychological way. It made my faith in God much more important. Right. But, you know, but I also eventually got better. Right. And sort of enfolded, like, then it becomes sort of, yeah, then it becomes kind of part of your psychological development and growth. And I can say, like, I'm not sorry that I had Lyme disease, as I still have over some of it, like, kicking around, right? But then there are people who have Lyme disease and or any other chronic illness and don't seem to get anywhere and just endlessly go in circles.

58:00Ross Douthat:And some of them end up committing suicide or other terrible things happen, right? And so, again, that's the dilemma, right? Like, why don't those people, like, what are the lives for that don't seem to go anywhere? I think, honestly, that's one of the attractions of reincarnation as a theological concept. It's like, well, you extend, it's like, all right, we can't figure out what that suffering was for, but if we extend the timeline, maybe we would. So there it's a bit more of a problem for Christianity, except that Christianity also gets to say that God came down and suffered too. Yeah, that's right.

58:41Ross Douthat:But it is a poetically powerful resolution to the problem of evil, but not a syllogism that deals with it. Yeah, it doesn't seem to sort of philosophically address the problem. Well, it's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the philosophers, right?

59:02Alex O'Connor:I understand. And I think that's probably true for most people. But that's one of the reasons why I think that the majority of religious thinkers in history, and I mean anybody who's thought religiously, is probably more motivated by experience than by argument. Our argument seems to be more faith-seeking understanding than the justification for someone's belief. But yeah, I think when it comes to making the case for atheism, it's actually quite a difficult thing to do. I mean, atheism is often characterized as the rejection of a belief system. And so atheists probably spend most of their time poking holes in the fine-tuning argument and the cosmological argument and whatnot.

59:39Alex O'Connor:When you have to make the positive case for there being no God, you could talk about the problem of evil. and then somebody, a religious person might say, well, maybe God isn't all good, you know? And that kind of solves the problem, at least for them. Maybe they can't be a Christian anymore. That's a big problem for them. But like philosophically, it's not that difficult of a move to make. If you imagine yourself as a neutral observer, oh, okay, I guess God's not good. Or God is good, but not omnipotent, you know, not quite. It's one of the options. Maybe God is limited in power. Maybe God has some good reason that you can't possibly know, you know, okay, that's fair enough.

1:00:16Alex O'Connor:You know, it seems to me similar to being like how the materialist might have to say, okay, well, consciousness is a bit too weird to explain. Maybe there's consciousness everywhere in the universe, but you don't have to push it much further than that. You know, the religious person can say, okay, actually evil is a big problem. So maybe God isn't like sort of perfectly good or perfectly powerful in the way we thought he was, but you don't need to push it necessarily further than that. Divine hiddenness, which we've kind of touched on is really a version of the problem of evil because it becomes a bad thing that god hides himself arbitrarily but i do i do think it's the the arbitrariness i think you've put your finger on it that's what causes people the trouble it's not that there is suffering it's that this person is suffering in a particular way that another person is not sort of seems to make it even worse like there's only one thing worse than like freezing and starving outside on the street and that's doing so outside of a banquet where people are inside warm and having a good time.

1:01:11Alex O'Connor:It's that discrepancy. It's like wealth inequality or something, right? It's not necessarily the problem that people are too rich or people are too poor, but it's the disparity between those two conditions. And it feels like somebody's spiritual access to the existence of God and knowledge of his sort of interaction with the world seems somewhat arbitrarily distributed amongst people. There are people who try really hard and don't get anything. There are people who don't try at all and are sort of washed over by a religious experience And no, and you absolutely, I mean, there are propensities, right?

1:01:45Ross Douthat:Like there are mystical tendencies that seem to run in families. There are, you know, or there's mystical tendencies that are connected to culture and you're born into a particular culture, right? There are people, I mean, again, this is sort of probably a basis for my interest in arguments, right? I am a religious person. I don't have a sort of intensely pious personality. Maybe I have a sort of credulous personality, right? In the sense that like, I don't sort of, you know, somebody tells me they saw a ghost or experienced a miracle, right? I'm open, right? I'm open to the argument. But I'm not someone, like I struggle with prayer.

1:02:27Ross Douthat:I'm not sort of, you know, I appreciate Catholicism because it tells me I must go to mass on Sunday, right? And that gives me a chance to pray that I might forget to do otherwise. I think inside Christianity, though, if you read the New Testament, one thing that's notable is that Jesus does not spend a lot of time explaining to his disciples how to have mystical experiences. Mm hmm. Right. He spends a lot of time healing people and telling his disciples and others and the crowds. Right. How to treat other people and what to sort of what to do to other people, what not to do to other people. Right.

1:03:11Ross Douthat:Why you shouldn't be self-righteous or, you know, sort of insanely proud of yourself if you happen to have some kind of special religious access. And obviously the, you know, religious authorities that he was criticizing were not all sort of taking ayahuasca, right, and having some kind of special transcendent experience that way, right? He was criticizing them more for hypocrisy. But I feel like you could sort of apply the same logic to the points you're making and say that at least in that particular form of religion, there's nothing that Jesus says that implies that people who have mystical experiences are all better than people who don't.

1:03:58Ross Douthat:right or sort of necessarily closer to god or anything like that right the people who are closest to god are people who suffer and people who do good right and so if you're suffering and you can't know why right sometimes the christian answer is not you know go and you know have a silent retreat and try and have a you know a vision or something it's well you're you're suffering and your job is to treat people well while you're suffering and maybe that treatment Maybe treating people well, maybe, you know, maybe you're a leprous beggar on the street and treating people well just means constantly forgiving the people who are walking by.

1:04:34Ross Douthat:Right. Something like that. Right. But that I think that there is a there is a potential mistake in focusing when we're trying to resolve this question of why God shows up for some people and why he doesn't in saying the showing up is the point. Right. I think that's pretty clearly, if the showing up were the point, why would we live in a material world at all? Right? Like if all God was up to was saying, I want there to be conscious minds created by me that can commune with me directly, then just make the minds. But, you know, whatever this is, we established earlier we don't know what these things are, but whatever they are, they're material.

1:05:19Ross Douthat:We're inside bodies, whatever our consciousness is, it's physicalized. And again, in the Christian tradition, at least, there's just a lot of emphasis on what you do in your body is what matters. I don't want to like completely say that, you know, take, sorry, I don't want to overgeneralize. Obviously, Christianity places a lot of emphasis on contemplation, right? And there's the moment in the New Testament when, you know, Jesus is there with Mary and Martha, and Mary is doing things in her body, like cleaning the house and making dinner. And Martha is just sort of there with Jesus in kind of communion.

1:06:02Ross Douthat:And Jesus does praise Mary over Martha, right, in that situation. So you could say, you know, okay, right there is evidence that some kind of communion with God is higher. But for most people, right, Jesus isn't personally coming to my home, right? So if I don't have some kind of mystical access to him at any given moment, what am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to, you know, help people, right? and you know the parable of the sheep and the goats right the goats show up and the sheep show up and they're praised for you know helping the poor and visiting the sick and all the rest anyway you know the story right but this is this is one answer at least right to that problem that the solution to the problem of not knowing why God hasn't appeared to you and given you a great vision is that when God appeared on earth, he said that, you know, you were supposed to help people and be good in a pretty profound and extreme way.

1:07:11Alex O'Connor:You know, I mean, I know that the purpose of the book is just belief in God and religion in general, but you do end with what you sort of refer to as a case study, which is your own belief in Christianity. And we've just talked about the Bible and Christianity. I mean, do you think that, I mean, surely you think that's equally important. Like getting that foot in the door is one thing, but getting it in the door in the wrong way could lead people kind of dangerously astray. In other words, I sort of wonder if like, if somebody becomes a, I think that one of the ways to explain why people suffer seemingly arbitrarily is that, yeah, the universe is made out of consciousness and mind, but that mind is not this sort of separable entity that invigilates everything, but rather is just like what the universe is made out of.

1:07:59Alex O'Connor:So there's this plurality of experience. Well, that kind of explains why there's no particular preference for who suffers and who doesn't, because it's all just one big mind. Or maybe fine tuning is best explained by the fact that the fundamental stuff of the universe just has a particular will. It just has a conscious experience. And that's just what it does. And that's why it seems to do a particular thing, right? And that sounds great. It's like, it feels like, yeah, we've got our foot in the door. But at the same time, if I show up to God in the afterlife, and I say, look, I'm an agnostic, I sort of had a look around and I couldn't really figure it out, maybe he'll take some pity on me.

1:08:32Alex O'Connor:But if I show up and say, no, no, I worked it all out. I think that you, I thought you didn't exist. I thought that there was some kind of weird pantheistic thing going on. And I thought that electrons were made of consciousness. It feels like I'm more inclined to actually have like a false doctrine, unless you have a worldview which specifically points towards the correct interpretation of God, you might sort of run yourself into trouble, perhaps, no?

1:08:55Ross Douthat:I think you would run yourself into trouble if you said that, you know, your concept of God, if your concept of God is completely detached from how you actually live, right? If you say that, you know, well, there's just hierarchies of consciousness, you know, it's mind everywhere, sort of sock puppeting everything, and therefore that means it doesn't really matter how I live my life, and it doesn't really matter whether I try to commune in any way with higher powers, anything like that. I think, yes, that would get you into trouble. Again, in actual religions, right, that end up with a somewhat pantheistic view of God, that's not what they usually do right they they usually say ah you know okay at some at some level maybe god in the universe are coterminous but in fact it matters tremendously how you live your life um your consciousness will continue into the next life and uh what you do on earth will shape what you experience in the next life and so on um and i think if you start out thinking like that that the fact that you conceive of God in the wrong way, yes, it may still create a bunch of problems for you, right, that, you know, mean bad things for whatever happens to you in the next life.

1:10:29Ross Douthat:But it's still closer, it's directionally closer to the truth than just saying, I'm sitting here as agnostic and, you know, I can't get anywhere, right? I can't get anywhere from here, right? And so, again, the book, it's not a book about Hinduism, right? And Hinduism does not really admit of generalizations. But I would say that you can certainly find within Hindu contexts people who like if you press them theologically might have a pantheistic view of god but who are for religious reasons living lives that seem quite similar to lives that a would-be holy person would live in christian under under christian conditions and again it's not that it doesn't matter like the the tension the tension right well the tension that you have to hold though i think you do have to hold this right is to say um there is a there's a there are things that are shared in common by the great world religions that taken together provide that in each case provide a decent starting place for a human being interested in being in right relation to god and to their neighbor and then it also matters but then there are also fundamental differences between them that are in fact meaningful and do in fact make, you know, some religions truer than others.

1:12:02Ross Douthat:And you want to be in the truest possible religion, right? But both of those things can be true at the same time. And it's just, I think it's, you know, the natural thing, clearly for human beings is once you've stipulated that God is present in some way in all the major world religions, it's very natural to get to a kind of ecumenical shrug or a perennialist shrug where you say, and therefore, right, it doesn't matter. But there's no logical reason why you can't say God is present in all the major world religions and it still matters tremendously which one you choose, right? It's like, I mean, it's not a great metaphor, right, or analogy, but the idea of, you know, maps, right?

1:12:46If religions are maps, you can have, you know,

1:12:49Ross Douthat:you can get somewhere with, I mean, the maps that were made in the 16th century of the Americas were much more correct than the maps that were made in the 1400s, and much worse than the maps that were made in the 1800s. Yeah. And you're better off, first of all, you're better off with a map. Yeah. You're better off with the maps from the 1600s. But if there's a map from the 1800s out there and you know it's a better map, right? And this is, I think, the crucial thing from at least my understanding of the Christian perspective, right? Yeah. the sin that is committed by someone who is not Christian is only, it's the sin of, it's only a sin if you are aware, right, that Christianity is the better map, or almost certainly the better map, and you don't want to choose it because it would be inconvenient or difficult or challenging or it's not part of your cultural context, then you're doing something terribly wrong.

1:13:48Ross Douthat:But if you just have your map and it's an insufficient map and you follow it as best you can, then I think you're likely to be in the position of, you know, the characters in Jesus's parable who said, oh, Lord, when did we, you know, when did we bathe you and help you? And he says, when you helped other people, you helped me, right? I think that, I think, yeah, I think you're, yeah, that's basically how I think about those kind of questions.

1:14:16Alex O'Connor:I suppose, but I think we have to sort of keep in mind that we're dealing with a map maker who knows how to bring you to where you are supposed to be and who, like, without whom you're guided into death and destruction. And this map maker makes a really accurate map, lets people sort of work it out for some time, and then they roughly sort of figure out the terrain, but it's importantly mistaken in various ways. And so he sort of makes this perfect map and gives it to like some people and not everyone when he could give it to everyone. And if that becomes a bit of a problem and people start thinking, I'm not really sure if I should trust this guy, because like, if this were really the way, why would he only give it to us?

1:15:10Alex O'Connor:And then people sort of had a bit of a debate amongst themselves. And the philosophers has said, well, I think ultimately that if you didn't have access to the proper map, you can still find your way. And it'd be like, well, then what's the point in the map that we got then? It's a bit like what you were saying about if God just wants to create minds to commune with him, why not just create the minds? If God has created us such that we don't need his particular message, then why give us the message? And if the message does do something important for us, then why has he only given it to some of us?

1:15:42Alex O'Connor:Because he gives people the imperative to spread that message, but he knows that not everyone's going to receive it. And you could say, yeah, well, he just knows who's not going to receive it and he takes pity on them. And it's like, I'd rather be one of them then. It feels like the best thing I can do for my children to guarantee their eternal welfare is to hide them from Christianity, lest they reject it. Because if they don't become a Christian because they've never heard of it, God will take pity on them and and say that as long as they sort of roughly were acting well, then that would be better.

1:16:10Alex O'Connor:But if they hear of Christianity and then decide not to take it up, then I've, you know,

1:16:15Ross Douthat:Well, if you teach them Christianity and they reject it because you've taught it to them badly, and you're a terrible person, right, and so on, right, then yes, God, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to reject Christianity. But, I mean, to the broader question, I think here, again, one, you have to take it as a given, I think, because it is the reality of the world, that there is some kind of good that God achieves by not just settling everything from the start, right? Like, again, God is hidden from many people, right? And that good has to be connected in some way, or doesn't have to, but it's probably connected in some way to human freedom, right?

1:17:05Ross Douthat:That there is some kind of value in creaturely freedom. This tends to be the Christian perspective, I think, for good reason, right? but that if you have that if you if you say okay there is some good in a god who is not immediately present to his entire creation one and some kind of good in human beings having a set of free choices to make in that context then you are in a situation where god can't just give everyone the map and they can't all know it's the map immediately because then there's no you know there's no actual freedom, right? There's no actual sort of dynamic journeying out and returning.

1:17:48Ross Douthat:But that then is sort of the second point, which is that there is some value in, or the presumption is that there is, that God is telling a story, right? And that there is some value in the story, and that people having different parts to play in the story is itself part of, it's part of the story, part of the drama, right? And obviously this gets into difficult questions about what does it mean to have free will, right, inside a story that someone else is telling. And for there to be free will, then the storyteller has to sort of work around the character's free will. Although if you spend any time writing fiction, just as a human author, you will sometimes find that your characters seem to have a certain kind, even a certain kind of unexpected free will themselves.

1:18:42Ross Douthat:I think there's ways in which sort of the novelist experience is maybe more useful for those kind of debates than the philosopher's experience. But yes, basically there is some sense in which, there has to be some sense in which there is value in a wide diversity of human experiences. there's value in God coming into the universe in a particular way that does transform the universe, but doesn't immediately get everybody on board with it. I mean, just something, you know, just something like the Christian story itself, right? Obviously, if all you're trying to do is maximize converts, then you don't want Jesus born in a manger in Bethlehem, right?

1:19:25Ross Douthat:You want him born magically on the altar of the Pontifex Maximus in Rome, right? Or something. But I think human beings have always responded like part of the power of Christianity. There's something very powerful and striking and poetic, right? About a God who enters his creation in the most, in the, you know, maximally humble scenario, right? And that connected to that, This is then connected to whatever the value is in suffering and difficulty and sorrow and trial, right? I think all of those questions are bound together. It's not as simple as saying, you know, well, if God wanted to, he could give everyone the map.

1:20:08Ross Douthat:Whatever is going on with divine hiddenness, human freedom, and sort of the mystery of suffering are themselves connected to why God would enter his own creation, as it were, by stealth. And, you know, I mean, if Christianity is true, right, it hasn't done that badly, right? I mean, you know, we've had a decent 2 ,000-year run, right? The world has been reshaped by Christianity. It's the largest religion in the world, right? So it's not, and it's not as if that were, if I were trying to persuade you that the truth about the world had been delivered by God to 30 people in the year 30 AD and then had died with them, right?

1:20:51Ross Douthat:Like, that wouldn't seem like a very good story, right? But the story of Christianity, I think, you know, a lot of people find it to be a pretty good and interesting and powerful story. And if there is a God, that story is, the power of the story is part of the point, I think. Which, again, is not going to be perfectly consoling to someone who feels in a particular moment excluded from the story. But the answer for that person, again, I think, is to, you know, not consider yourself abandoned by God, but consider yourself called to a life of virtue, you know, under conditions of uncertainty.

1:21:37Alex O'Connor:Yeah.

1:21:38Ross Douthat:Why— Sorry. Go ahead. When you think about these things, this is your primary objection. You're an agnostic who's become friendlier to religion, but not religious over the course of having lots of these conversations. But it is what is God up to? You know, what is God up to?

1:22:07Alex O'Connor:I don't think there are really many good reasons to be a positive A atheist. I think there are good holes to pick in the case for religion. And I think there are good holes to pick in particular religious manifestations. So I think the problem of evil is a huge problem against any kind of, so to speak, tri-omni god, you know, omnibenevolent and omnipotent and omniscient. I think it does pose a classical problem. The strongest version is the problem of animal suffering. the fact that it's not just humans, but non-human animals who don't seem to morally develop in the same way, who don't seem to have free will, who don't seem to, or if they do, it seems to not really matter that much, who probably aren't compensated in some kind of afterlife.

1:22:45Alex O'Connor:And if they are, it seems to be a kind of crude Bullingdon Club-esque, we'll trash the room and then throw you some money and you'd better be grateful because we're paying you what it's worth kind of thing. It doesn't seem quite right. That does pose a problem for me, for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God.

1:23:01Ross Douthat:But then, I mean, we have so, well, one, I don't, I mean, I know that there are sort of, you know, hardcore Thomist theologians who have very definite views on, you know, the impossibility of animals going to heaven and these kinds of things. Generally, it's not like Christianity comes to the problem of animal suffering with, you know, 17 books of dogma that say you are forbidden to believe that, you know, your pet is compensated. Right. That's totally fine. Right. But it just seems— Also, we have so little access, right, to animal consciousness, to know—I mean, I'll, you know, I read people who get very into the idea that, you know, there's absolutely nothing worse than the life of a wild animal.

1:23:45Ross Douthat:Yeah, right, right. Because it lives, right, it lives—and you can say, you know, you can say maybe that's true, right, that, like, you live under constant threat. You're just in fight or flight mode all the time. It's just like pain and sorrow and misery, and then it ends with death in a predator's hands, right? But that is a extrapolation or imposition of human concepts. And the idea that the possibility that, you know, animals, wild animals in nature are actually, whatever their happiness is, are in fact happy in the context of a world that can still end with their violent death. I don't think that can be excluded at all.

1:24:24Ross Douthat:Now, what we do to animals maybe is a separate question, right? Yeah, that's totally separate, right?

1:24:28Alex O'Connor:Because, of course, what we do to animals will be explained by human free will. And we inflict so much suffering on animals, it almost borders on divine proportions, I think. I think if animals could draw the devil, they would draw the devil in human form, at least any animal on a factory farm, indisputably. But I get what you mean. You can sort of recourse into a kind of we can't know, a kind of theodicy, a bit like Job's. It's like, well, who are you? Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Who are you to know? That's fair enough. You can say that, but it seems like in other contexts, religious people want me to rely upon my moral intuitions.

1:25:10Alex O'Connor:They want me to rely upon them to prove the existence of God. They say, well, look, you know that certain things are right and wrong. You know that there's a way that the world should be. And I can't prove that to you, but that intuition is so strong that you should trust it. And if that's the case, it must be grounded in God. And I say, well, one of my intuitions is that if a single, one wild animal experiences gratuitous suffering that isn't necessary, that isn't justified, if that happens on one occasion at any point in the billion-year history of life on this earth, that at the very least counts against the plausibility of an omnibenevolent creator.

1:25:46Alex O'Connor:And I think it is just, it's possible to say, well, maybe no animal has ever suffered in that way. I think that's implausible. And if it were the case, if you want to recoil into this kind of like, well, you don't know what it's like to be an animal, so you can't guarantee that they're suffering. Then it's like, okay, well, if I started beating up my dog on the street, would you stop me? And you might say, well, okay, but it's not like all other things being equal, maybe I'd stop you. But why? Because you know that you do believe that they experience pain. And you should balance that against the fact that it's my dog and you're imposing yourself on me, but you have this intuition that screams at you that they're feeling pain and that's bad and that's wrong.

1:26:22Alex O'Connor:And so, okay, maybe God has some good reason to inflict suffering on animals. And all you have to believe is that at one point, any point in the entire history of life on earth, that there's been some kind of suffering which could have been avoided and yet still served...

1:26:38Ross Douthat:But that's true of human suffering too. It's just that the animal case, one, you're assuming that animals don't have an eternal destiny and two, you're saying now we've extended from humanity just billions to trillions and so on, right?

1:26:52Alex O'Connor:The reason I'm talking about animals is only because it's easier to make the point. You're quite right. The same is true of humans. If there's one instance of gratuitous suffering, I think that counts strongly. And by gratuitous, I mean not just like a lot of suffering, but I mean the kind of suffering that cannot be justified. Because Christian might be listening and say, well, of course humans have suffered, but it's justified. I'm saying if there's one instance where it's not justified. But I think it's plausible for Christian to say, well, look, maybe that just hasn't happened. Because every single time a human suffers, there's something they can learn from it.

1:27:20Alex O'Connor:And when there isn't, maybe God only allows that to happen in circumstances where some other purpose is served. Fine.

1:27:25Ross Douthat:I think that's certainly what you have to say if you believe in the omnibenevolent God. And I think that's fine. And I think there is, you do end up saying that, you know, we can account for, you know, the non-gratuity. You can account for the non-gratuity of the existence of suffering. And you can account for the non-gratuity of lots of forms of suffering. But yes, there's still a mysterious residua that rests on, you know, it's the Dostoevsky example. you know it's like the baby's tossed in spear points right or something like that and and yes they're they're again but this is sort of also what you would just to sort of talk my own book again right not this book but like the larger argument right that is what you what you would expect in a universe set up with god partially hidden not fully hidden but like not available at all times right or available at all times but not perceived to be available at all times where human beings are, you know, perceive themselves to be set free and to act freely, you would expect there to be some things that we can't account for.

1:28:32Ross Douthat:Sure, that's totally fine.

1:28:35Alex O'Connor:Yeah. But I think that the reason, I mean, to answer your question about, is it not just the same with humans? I'm like, it is. It's just a more, I think the case is made stronger for animals because it seems so much more implausible to suggest that every single instance of animal suffering that's ever occurred is in accordance with some divine plan. That actually you should almost be grateful for the fact that the animal is suffering because of the fact that it must be in accordance with something God wanted to happen. I mean, you also hinted at the idea that we kind of anthropomorphize, that we project human experiences onto animals.

1:29:08Alex O'Connor:We don't know what it's like for them to suffer. I think that cuts both ways though. I mean, it could be the case that animals just kind of don't really feel pain in the way that we do. That's what C.S. Lewis suggested. It's what William Lane Craig has suggested in the past. Those seem to have backtracked recently on that. But it goes the other way too. I think that dogs experience smell far more acutely than we could possibly imagine. I think that hawks have much better eyesight than we do. They experience eyesight more precisely and more acutely than we could imagine. And why is that? Well, because they rely on those senses more than we do.

1:29:38Alex O'Connor:And I feel like wild animals rely on their crude sensory pain receptors much more than we do too with our reason. We don't need them as much. I think there's a good evolutionary reason if we're going to accept that we should take seriously this this possible experiential gap between us and animals there's a better argument to make that those animals experience more pain more acutely more intensely than we do i think well have even more

1:30:00Ross Douthat:of a problem i mean i think that depends though on what we think it still depends on what we think animal consciousness is right like i i can certainly say that animal pain might be more intense in a particular way connected to their evolutionary survival strategies and so on right um but it still doesn't tell you what the conscious experience of that pain is right you still you still have to sort of settle on some you know some world where you say by analogy to human beings we should assume that animals have some kind of consciousness right a universe where animals were all pea zombies yeah right it would be which is an imaginable universe i i agree i don't think it's i don't think it's a certainly one and certainly once you get to the higher animals right yeah you i i don't i don't know i'm comfortable saying that shrimp are pea zombies right unless yes i guess i guess so that you know there's a there's a thing called the shrimp welfare no i know that's why i cited that that example yes i'm i'm i'm not persuaded by the shrimp welfare but if you told me that you know a blue whale was a pea zombie I would not be persuaded right and so there yes I think that like I guess I would say there are certain things we just don't know about animal suffering about animal consciousness that connect to the debate about animal suffering but based on what I do know or what we can sort of intuit.

1:31:39Yeah.

1:31:40Ross Douthat:Yeah, you would have to say that, like, the suffering of higher animals has to be non-gratuitous too at some level.

1:31:47Alex O'Connor:And that's fine, and you can just posit that, but I think I want to be clear that what you have to believe.

1:31:53Ross Douthat:But non-gratuitous, though, also can mean, like, in order to have a world that exists that is, you know, not simply a world that is an emanation of God, but where there is sort of, you know, creatures exist and have freedom and like the world, you know, the world is something worth having as a, you know, as a thing unto itself, right? You could just say that like, there are certain forms of suffering that are required to, of that world. You certainly can say that, but then I like to ask people, do you think that free will exists in heaven, in the afterlife?

1:32:39Alex O'Connor:Do you think that the afterlife is a life that's worth having? And if the answer is yes to both, then you either have to accept that it is possible for someone to commit a holocaust in heaven, which seems ludicrous. or you have to suggest that actually there can be a state of existence in which people are free and happy and living in a way that's worth living that does not necessitate the infliction of of suffering and the experience of right you know what i mean you have to well what you have to say

1:33:11Ross Douthat:what you would say right is that there is a world in which the um it is there's a world in which having creatures who can advance to holiness from a creaturely status that that world is good in and of itself to a degree that justifies the existence of suffering right which is but but it is the you have to say that like that progression is valuable right and again this goes back to the point i was making like there has to be some value in this experience it has to be the case that the perfected soul in heaven has something that an angel does not have. Right? That has to be the claim. Because yes, you can have a world of angels in which there's no risk of human suffering or animal suffering or any other kind of suffering.

1:34:08Ross Douthat:And if God is not omnibenevolent, then he can just decide to create this world and get some good things out of it and it doesn't have to be perfect. But if God is omnibenevolent, you have to say that there is a good in taking creatures and having them experience theosis and start here and end there. And by the way, we aren't even getting into the question of what it means to be resurrected. Right. I mean, look, you know, the Christian endgame, I don't think, has a set of clear philosophical arguments around it that I would be like, I don't think you, I can't sit here as a Christian and tell you.

1:34:53Ross Douthat:And that's why, you know, after we're perfected in heaven, there's a new heaven and a new earth and we have resurrected bodies. And here's why God would do that. I don't know why God would do that. Right. The reason Christians have come around to that view is based on the experience of Jesus' resurrection. It's based on claims about what happened with Jesus himself. You're not reasoning from first principles to get to the resurrection of the dead. Which maybe we should have talked about. I mean, I guess from what you've just said, I agree.

1:35:27Alex O'Connor:you have to believe that there's some good in humans being allowed to experience theosis and experience something which draws them nearer to God or something. But then it seems arbitrarily restricted by human free will from certain people. In the Catholic worldview that says life begins at conception, every single aborted human being presumably goes to heaven, or maybe goes to limbo for a bit. I'm not sure if they've made their mind up on that yet. But at some point they enter heaven and then you and I, God willing, enter heaven after a full life of existence. And you either have to say that there is just some benefit of having lived a long life of suffering and trials, in which case, even in heaven, our life is just better than those fetuses, which seems, again, kind of unfair and a bit arbitrary and seems wrong.

1:36:17Alex O'Connor:Or you say that actually we're all experiencing bliss and communion with God in heaven, in which case it seems equal. Right.

1:36:23Ross Douthat:I mean, this is where I might sound a bit like your prior guest, Father Pine. Right. I remember him talking to you about the idea that, you know, that there are hierarchies. Right. Yeah. Right. And that God. And again, this is something that that people might find offensive. Right. But like and recoil from. Yeah. But I think the points that you just made are themselves a good reason why the Christian has to say something like this, right? If the Christian says, you live once, you die once, and you either sort of make it to the divine presence or you don't, and the child, the fetus, the person who's barely had any experiences, that person is not going to be on the same level as the saint who has suffered through trial and tribulation and persecution, right?

1:37:18Ross Douthat:But they're not going to feel sad that they're not on that level because the hierarchies of heaven are not hierarchies of oppression and power, you know, sort of ruthlessly.

1:37:29Alex O'Connor:But it must be better to be higher up than lower down. And it seems like what this worldview does is it gives— Well, it's better to—right.

1:37:36Ross Douthat:But I mean, but that's true. You know, I mean, it's better to be—two people live an equally long life. It's better to be the saint than not, right?

1:37:43Alex O'Connor:But you know, if I say, why would God allow me to go and harm a bunch of people in this world? You might say something like, well, because in the afterlife, they're going to be elevated and you're not. And that sort of makes up for it. But if I said to you, why is it that I'm allowed to go and kill a pregnant woman and send her unborn child into the afterlife, such that not only is there suffering in this world that they then get glorified in heaven, but that the mother gets to go to a higher plane of heaven and her aborted... like well okay here here here is loaded and that's up to me like i get to determine their like eternal like hierarchical state in heaven with god such that if i hadn't made that free decision her and her child would experience bliss together in the same hierarchy one day but because i've made that decision nothing to do with god because of course i have libertarian free will that child is now going to be on the lowest rung of heaven yeah it just seems so so implausible i

1:38:38Ross Douthat:I think, again, here it's important not, and this is, you know, this sounds like one of these things that religious people do, right? But you're not supposed to see it as this kind of, like, the metaphor of the latter implies that you're suffering from being lower down, right? And it's more like, again, to take the sort of prime example, it's like God loves the Virgin Mary in a special way. He loves maybe the pregnant mother who you've done something terrible to. And who achieves, you know, who has some kind of experience because he loves them in a special way that doesn't reduce the experience of being loved by God that that unborn child feels or that you would feel if you yourself repent, right?

1:39:25Ross Douthat:And again, I don't, you know, this is not like, this is not a provable thing, but it's, I don't think it's impossible to conceptualize, right? Like, you know, the basic claim, right, again, is that sort of God's love is like human love, but different from human love above human love and so on. And I don't think it's ridiculous to say that, like, in the afterlife, you could be content with God's love without feeling like, oh, my mother got put up here, right? I mean, you're still importing the kind of concepts of resentment, right, and sort of power. The idea that there is this power dynamic and that the person up here has this power over you and your mother was put up here and it's not fair that I'm down here, right?

1:40:15Ross Douthat:Like, that's what the devil wants you to think, right, in a way, right? Like, that's, you know, that God, and this is what he says to Adam and Eve at the start, right? It's like, and it's what, you know, the Christian conception is why Satan falls, right? Satan's like, well, it's not fair, right? God let those human beings have bodies, and he didn't give us bodies, right? But that's the mistake. That's the primary mistake. It's like, oh, I see this good thing that God seems to have reserved for someone else, and I want it for myself, and it's not fair. But in fact, God's love should be enough.

1:40:53Ross Douthat:Again, not to say that I achieve it. When I'm making these arguments, I'm not trying to say that I've achieved this feeling, But like that's that's the feeling that you're supposed to achieve. God's love for you as instantiated in your life is enough. And in a way, this is why spending all of your time trying to work out like, you know, well, even if I go to church and I'm a good person, God's going to fuck me over in the end in this particular way because I can construct this thought experiment like that's a mistake. you're making a mistake thinking that way and i can't prove it to you but i'm sure it's true

1:41:29Alex O'Connor:i don't mean to import views of like resentment or comparison but i think like i i have no problem saying that the the mother and the baby are just on sort of different layers of heaven and then but even even the layers i mean or different different they they they like god's love for

1:41:48Ross Douthat:them is shown in different ways and there is a and there yes there is a sort of a a special there is a thing that the pregnant mother gets in your thought experiment yeah that the unborn child doesn't get yeah that maybe is similar to the thing that human beings get yes so that angels don't don't get i definitely but it's still it's still good to be an angel and bad to be the devil

1:42:14Alex O'Connor:I want to be very careful not to say something like, when these people are in heaven, whatever it is that the mother gets that the child doesn't, will be experienced as better, will be preferred, there'll be any resentment or comparison. Totally not. I have no problem saying that they're both just living the best life, totally chill, having a great time. However, if the plan for that child had been by God, that they would become an adult. And that plan was corrupted by someone who freely chose to go and kill that child. When clearly the sort of ideal situation, the thing they were commanded to do was to not do that.

1:42:50Alex O'Connor:And the fact that we're not just minds floating around, but we have been embodied for some kind of purpose. There must be something better or more preferable to God about us going through that experience. And it seems troublesome that I'm given the power in this worldview to take that away from somebody eternally. To take away what God wanted for them. Unless the power that you're given is inherent in the larger vision of glorification, right?

1:43:20Ross Douthat:And this gets into questions, obviously, of like, can God do things that are self-contradictory and so on, right? But the Christian would say that, you know, there are things that are just somewhat contradictory. It's very hard to construct a world in which you have the freedom that you need to have the experiences that you need to achieve this particular kind of theosis and so on. And also in that world, you can never harm anyone else. You know, you can never affect anyone else's place in eternity through your actions, right? Um, but you do have to conceive, right, of God as a storyteller who does in the end, um, you know, he's, he's telling a story that works with your free will and brings about an outcome that is not the only possible outcome, right?

1:44:14Ross Douthat:Like to, you know, to take the, there's many different ways that you could write a Dickens novel or Lord of the Rings or anything else and get to a happy ending. And characters could have a lot of different fates and so on. Yeah. Right? But God is delivering a version of the story. And in this version of the story, this person ends up playing this role and that person ends up playing that role and so on in ways that are connected to the choices that you yourself make. Yeah. And yeah, some of it is, again, some of it is necessarily beyond our comprehension. But I do think that, like, if your starting point is, you know, the affirmative case for atheism is pretty weak, and there's lots of good arguments for God, and then you're sort of losing yourself in these questions of like, well, there's that person over there.

1:45:08Ross Douthat:I mean, look, I can say to you, like, I am, you know, I'll play the, you know, the heterodox Christian, right? And I'll tell you, if we died and met God and God said, you know, Ross, did you read any of the literature on reincarnation while you were on Earth? If you had, you would have noticed that, you know, often stories of reincarnation feature some kind of trauma, some kind of violent death and so on. And, you know, there are certain people who actually, you know, there are certain people who actually get reincarnated, right? Precisely because of Alex's objection, right? Like, you know, what's the point of the two-year-old's death?

1:45:44Ross Douthat:Well, you know, that person gets reincarnated, right? If God told me that, right, that this would be, you know, basically heresy. But if that turned out to be true, I wouldn't be like, oh, you know, how could that, right? Like there are different scenarios is all I'm saying that could end up explaining the thing that you are objecting to.

1:46:13Alex O'Connor:That's why I answered your question very carefully earlier when you were like, you seem to be asking, is this the biggest objection you have to? And I'm like, it depends on what you mean. If you mean, is this my biggest objection to the view that there is some kind of creative agency behind the universe? And the answer is just no, because you can account for it. But it is my biggest objection to particular presentations, because sometimes the way in which you can account for it is by moving away from a God who has individual instantiations of people who go to heaven in an afterlife because Jesus died on the cross for them, to something like, well, to keep God moral, we seem to imply that at least the plausibility of reincarnation may be the existence of oneself, which is sort of an illusion.

1:46:59Alex O'Connor:in so far as it's distinguished amongst different kinds of people and that actually heaven doesn't really work in the way that we thought. And I agree with you that, again, if God tells me actually the way it works is like this and like that, I would just be like, cool, awesome, that's really great. Glad we sorted that. But like you say, if we were talking to a heterodox Christian, they would say that that's heretical. And for me, I'm like, But in the

1:47:23Ross Douthat:everyday life of the Christian, which is the life that I'm aware of. This could apply to other religious traditions too, right? Like, you are going to church on Sunday, you are praying, you're trying to talk to God, whoever God may be, right? And you are trying to live up to the model of what God wants that is offered by the person of his son, who lived a pretty intense life on earth, made a lot of demands of people, suffered a great deal, right? There is a way in which, like, under lots of different theological schema, just that everyday life should be enough, right? Like, you don't, like, let's say you have, you know, you're a church, and you have a heretical thought.

1:48:17Ross Douthat:You're like, actually, the Christian worldview would make much more sense if we imported this concept from Buddhism, right? And like, okay, maybe you're a professional theologian or an academic and there's something interesting that you can do with that. Or maybe you're a really intense mystic and you're going to have this experience. But most likely, that's a distraction. right and the the kind of the everydayness of the practice of religion bears its own fruits that you know are just going to be there waiting for you right and don't depend on you settling the question of do we need 10 more reincarnation to make god's system work yeah as interesting as that question absolutely is because we've clearly we've clearly find ourselves interested in it

1:49:09Alex O'Connor:yeah well ross douthat the book is believe it'll be in the description of course thank you so much for your time thank you so much for having me alex