Heaven, Hell, & the Human Condition | Jack Symes | Ep 478

We call out for meaning from a universe that's indifferent to us. This version of the Absurd threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and dragons; here be cold and dark and emptiness. And that's uncomfortable. If we're going to tell ourselves the truth, that search for meaning in a world that doesn't obviously present us meaning is the world that we need to embrace if we're going to live honestly and authentically.

Well, I can tell you what made itself manifest as evidence for me. Hello everybody, I'm talking today to Dr. Jack Sims. He's a public philosopher and researcher at Durham University. He's also known as a podcaster of the Pan Cast Philosophy Podcast, which is one of the UK's most popular higher education programs. He's also the editor of the Talking About Philosophy book series.

So he's written and edited a couple of books on the philosophy of consciousness and then, uh, books that describe the concept of God and also the morality of the god that's being portrayed. That doesn't mean that Dr. Sims is a religious believer, by the way. The discussion that we had that you'll watch would you say what did we delve into? Conceptualizations of consciousness. Also, we discussed what do we have in the popular culture now with regards to the arguments between the atheists and the believers, let's say.

Well, we have an argument about perhaps whether or not God exists. There's an argument underneath that, which is, well, what exactly do you mean? Who is this God that you're discussing? How is he characterized? And is that characterization reasonable on the theist or the atheist side? That's what we delved into. You know, before you can have an argument about belief, you have to specify what it is that you're actually talking about.

Now, one of the things we alluded to, let's say in the conversation, was the fact that the god that's criticized by the atheist types—the materialist reductionist atheist types—is somewhat of a straw man and a parody God. And that's not helpful because if we want to get to the bottom of things, we have to make sure that we're actually arguing about the right thing, let's say, rather than to reduce it to a kind of foolishness that can be easily dispensed with.

Well, that would be fine if you could make that reduction properly, but it's not fine at all if you have to reduce it without knowing what you're talking about. And that actually happens to be the case for much of the argumentation that's put forth by the atheists. The God they're dispensing with is not the god that's portrayed in the relevant work. So anyways, we walked through that kind of differentiation and so what's happening in the world right now in the West in particular? There's a crisis of belief. What we believe fundamentally is up for grabs.

There's an ongoing intellectual conversation about how to respecify that, and this conversation was part of that. So to the degree that you're interested in participating in and understanding it, then, well, this is the conversation for you. Well, so you have three books—one on consciousness, two on God—one associated more with existence itself and the other, I think it's the newest one, defeating the evil God challenge.

Maybe we'll start with consciousness. So tell me a bit, and everybody who's watching and listening, how you approach the problem and how you conceptualize it. Let's talk about that. I've done a fair bit of reading on the topic of consciousness, so I'm very curious to hear your take on it.

Well, what I thought was interesting, Jordan, is this interview you did with Elon Musk recently. He actually expressed a view that's pretty close to mine. He explained how, in the beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, there was just hydrogen and all of these physical processes evolved over time, and somewhere in that picture consciousness must come into it.

And he raised this question: he said, "Well, is it everywhere or is it nowhere?" Consciousness is that feeling you get when you see your parents at the school gate, or that drop in your stomach when you realize you've said something you shouldn't, perhaps. And though that process of thinking 1 + 1 equals 2, those are all conscious experiences, and they make the fabric of our worlds.

And just to understand the value of that, try and imagine your life without consciousness. It would be a meaningless wasteland, as the philosopher Gregory Miller puts it. So there's nothing more valuable to us, and as George Orwell said, it's difficult to see what's on the end of your nose. It's a constant struggle.

So that thing that the person watching this or you hearing my voice now—these are all conscious experiences and they don't seem to be captured in the language of mathematics and geometry, i.e., the language of physics. Galileo put consciousness outside of the picture when it comes to physical science in order for science to make all the incredible advances that it has.

And so our question is, where does consciousness fit into this scientific picture of the world that, on the whole, people seem to be accepting in Western societies? My view is that you should put consciousness at the bottom—that consciousness has to be there from the beginning. You need some rudimentary consciousness for evolution by natural selection to play with in the same way you need some physical properties to make eyes and ears. You need conscious properties or particles to make the kinds of interesting consciousness that you and I enjoy.

So are you coming at this primarily from a philosophical perspective? And to what degree is your viewpoint informed, for example, by biology and neuroscience? I'd say my view is 100% philosophical, but it goes on the basis of the things that are missing in neuroscience and biology. Neuroscience and biology are the wrong sort of methods of understanding consciousness. You can't scan someone's brain and see where, you know, the color red is. It's not going to come up.

It's a different kind of thing; it's a private experience that isn't available to third-person observation. So anyone who thinks that neuroscience or biology is going to tell us where consciousness comes from just doesn't understand what science is. Science can't tell us about the inner nature of what particles are; it tells us what particles do. This is known as the easy problem of consciousness.

The easy problems are the problems of trying to map out what David Chalmers calls the neural correlates of consciousness. So I give you a sharp punch to the chest, right, and your brain lights up in a certain way, and so I can go, like, "That part of your brain gives rise to these experiences." But it still doesn't tell me where consciousness itself comes from. So that's what's always going to be missing from biology and neuroscience.

And the hard problem of consciousness, as Chalmers formulates it, he gives it in two words: "Explain consciousness." So, okay, so let me ask you a couple of questions about that because I've thought for a long time that the formulators of the hard problem of consciousness are actually wildly optimistic in a sense because I don't really think they are tackling the hard problem of consciousness.

I think the hard problem of consciousness is distinguishing consciousness from being itself. I have a hard time distinguishing consciousness from being, and it's also quite difficult in some ways to distinguish consciousness from intelligence.

So let me delve into that on the consciousness side a little bit to begin with. I've spent a lot of time studying comparative mythology and also binding that analysis with my knowledge of neuroscience, and so I don't want to generate interpretations of cosmogonic narratives that run in contradiction to what I know on the neurobiological side.

I like that way of triangulating, so to speak, because it seems to me the probability that ancient mythology and modern neuroscience will come to the same conclusions by chance is very low because they're so disparate in terms of their mechanisms of generating knowledge.

In the typical cosmogonic myth, which seems to involve consciousness, you have three fundamental attributes of being and becoming. You have something that's equivalent; it's usually represented by a paternal figure, a figure of order, a father, a figure of light. Those are all symbolic associations, and it represents something like an extent structure of interpretation.

Then there's something to be interpreted, which is like a field of possibility that's usually represented as chaos, or it's often represented as feminine; it's represented as the night. It has a terrible aspect and a positive aspect because out of potential comes everything good and everything terrible.

And then you have an active mediary agent—that's an intermediary—and in the Christian conception, that's the logos, for example. The logos is the active principle that mediates between the forces of Order and Chaos. This conceptualization makes a lot of sense to me phenomenologically, and I think it actually maps on quite well to the neural science.

But the reason I'm giving you this lengthy exposition as part of this question is because it's relevant to this issue of separating consciousness from being. So I don't see how you can separate consciousness from being, even in principle, because I don't understand what it would mean—and you alluded to this—what it would mean for there to be a reality without awareness.

Now, that doesn't mean I understand anything about what awareness is, but I don't think it's distinguishable from the problem of being itself.

Well, I think you're in very good company. Bertrand Russell thought this; Darwin thought this; Philip Goff, Gena Stron, Mirel Bahari. There are a lot of people who share this view that you can't separate consciousness from being and that being as a whole—whether that's cosmos, existence, God, the divine as a whole—has to have the property of consciousness.

And I suppose that is slightly separate from intelligence in the sense that I can imagine some large language model being intelligent or, let's say, on the physicalist worldview, you could imagine some insect being intelligent in the way that it responds to its environment without being conscious. That's conceivably—I don't think that's the case in the world as it is, but you can conceive of such a thing.

So you can pull them apart conceptually, but what I think is interesting is this seems to tie into, well, what I understand to be your view, and I think perhaps it'll be good to just get that on the table so you can see the comparisons there.

I find it a little bit difficult to follow some of the language you're using there, so excuse me if I oversimplify this for the sake of trying to keep it clear in my mind. It seems to me that your view consists of essentially three broad propositions. Those propositions are something like: one, when we perceive the world and act in the world we're making value judgments—like the reason I see you now is because I, you know, I value this conversation, rather than seeing some other thing out of the infinite ways I could see the room before me.

The second is that you think these values exist on a great chain of being, on Jacob's Ladder. They emanate the form of the good, or they lead to an Anselmian conception of the divine or something like this. And third, I believe you think something like this, and I'm eager to hear any clarifications: is that you see story or fiction and scripture as tapping into the divine, tapping into truth or goodness, whatever that thing is that exists on top of Jacob's Ladder.

To link to our discussion on consciousness and being, there that the greatest being, or the fullness of being, the thing that sits on top of the ladder, must be conscious and must be the totality of being. And again, that seems to run through the entire history of Christian philosophy and maybe philosophy more generally.

So I wonder, did you think that captures it? Am I getting the bits and pieces in the right order there?

I'm taking four of my esteemed colleagues and you across the world. Oh wow, this is amazing to rediscover the ways our ancient ancestors developed the ideas that shaped modern society. It was a monument to civic greatness to visit the places where history was made. That is ash from the actual fires from the Babylon burn, Jerusalem, from 2500 years ago, to walk the same roads.

We are following the path of the crucifixion and experience the same wonder. We are on the sight of a miracle! What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe? Science, art, politics—all that makes life wonderful and something new about the world is revealed.

Well, I think you've got the bits and pieces in the right order with regard to conceptualizations of the divine. I mean, let's take that apart a little bit because that's very much worth delving into.

So in principle, the postmodern ethos is defined by so-called skepticism towards meta-narratives, right? So their proposition—this was Lyotard, but it was shared—well, it's one of the defining characteristics of the postmodern school, I would say—is that there's no overarching meta-narrative; skepticism toward meta-narratives.

And that actually, I find that, what would you say, it's a puerile idea. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell—you can tell me what you think about this technically—is that every perception and every action requires a unifying ideal.

So for example, if I want to lift a glass of water to my mouth, I'm sequencing; I'm unifying a tremendous number of unbelievably complex operations in order to do that. Now, it seems simple in some ways to my consciousness because I'm operating slightly above what I have automatized neurologically, and so I don't really have any conscious idea of the complexity of the molecules and the atoms and the cells and the muscles even that I'm using to move.

But I'm unifying all those with regards to a value-oriented purpose. And that would be to quench my thirst. And then that would be nested in a higher order of structure of values because I'm quenching my thirst—I presume because I believe it's better not to be thirsty, not to be in pain. I believe it's better to be alive than to be dead, etc.

So even that micro, that unifying, that micro unity of a given action unifies all sorts of things that are subordinate to it, but it also partakes in a higher unity. And what the postmodernists seem to be claiming is that you can just draw some arbitrary upper limit to that unity.

And so then let's go there for a second. Okay, so there's no overarching meta-narrative. This would be, I suppose in some way, skepticism about God—there's no upper unity. Okay, so what's that? The highest level, then? Disunity, like nothing? Well, nothing is a stupid answer, because if it's nothing, you can't unify. And if it's disunity, then really what you've done is you've developed a metaphysics of discord and disunity, and you also have done it arbitrarily.

It's like, okay, so you admit to the existence of the uniting narrative that allows you to drink from a glass, but you what you don't admit to the uniting narrative that enables you to live in harmony with your wife. Like, where do you draw the line exactly? And exactly is the issue. Like, you don't just get to say, "Well, there are micro-narratives and meta-narratives, and we don't believe in meta-narratives."

It's like, first of all, there's not a qualitative distinction there. So like, what exactly are you talking about? And second, if there's no uniting meta-narrative, then what the hell do you think's at the top? Because it's either unity or discord or nothing, I suppose. And then you're in this nihilistic catastrophe that seems to do nothing but demoralize and wreak havoc.

So, okay, so you mentioned Jacob's Ladder—it's like, well, it seems to me that the monotheistic insistence is that all goods unify towards something that brings everything together, which would include—it would include, but even transcend consciousness—right? Because God would be beyond consciousness, beyond unconsciousness. But certainly one definition of God is what stands at the highest level of unity.

Now, well, so let's bandy that about a bit. Well, I wonder, just to ask you then, at the top of Jacob's Ladder then, do you take God to be there? Do you take God to be the thing on which all values hang on, slash the thing that grounds all of the values? To be clear, are you happy to say that I believe in the existence of God as the greatest conceivable being, let's say?

Well, I think it's in some ways it's a matter of definition, I guess. I would, it's a matter of definition.

So because before we can talk about whether or not God exists, we should have some sense of exactly what it is that we're talking about in the moment—we're talking about the highest conceivable potential unity. But then I would also say so it stands at the top, but it also stands in the top in a peculiar way, and this is definitely insisted upon in the Judeo-Christian canon because God is inconceivable and ineffable.

And so even if you do put him at the top, as you approach him, he recedes. And that capacity to recede is infinite. It's also not within the scope of conceptualization, right? I mean, the classic atheists, they do a sleight of hand and what their God is always the wise old man in the sky who's the superstitious obstacle to the progress of science, but that's not at all how God is conceptualized in the biblical corpus.

I mean, God is put at the top of Jacob's Ladder, but he's also ineffable and receding. Well, let's pick up on a few of those ideas then. The first thing I think that's worth pointing out is obviously, as you've said, there are conceptions of God in which God is ineffable, and there's a big debate, as you know, there in philosophy of religion to the extent to which God is ineffable.

Some people take God to be completely ineffable; you can't say anything positive about God. You can only say what God's not. In this view, God's not a pineapple. God's not an Adam Sandler movie, and thank God for that. Think God's not this delicious beer to my side or anything like that.

So I can say negative things about God, but I can't say anything positive because God's beyond my own descriptions. But I think the majority of philosophers of religion agree that you can say some things about God. Descartes gives the example of trying to get your arms around a great mountain, and the great mountain is God. But you can't understand God in his entirety. You can pick up a few rocks, you can describe a few rocks, and say, "Hey, this is the property of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, consciousness, and being immutable, being unchanging," and the like.

And so I think there are some things we can reasonably say that God must have as part of God's essence. On this question of—oh, let's go there—there are some things that we can just pause for a moment. Some things we can say about God's essence such as this: right, okay, the just—and just finally on this, because I know that you know your scripture very well.

I don't know my scripture certainly as well as you do. I'm more from the camp of perfect being theology. As you know, there are three major strands of theology and philosophy which all try to arrive at a different or the same definition of God, really. Revelation theology looks at religious experience and scripture and tries to infer properties from God from revelation. Creation theology looks at God's hand in the world and says, "Well, God must be powerful enough to create the world, good enough to give us the world, and knowledgeable enough to give us such a finely tuned universe."

And then when we look at other versions like perfect being theology—and this is the version I think is the most reflective of God—is that God by definition must be the greatest conceivable being. If there is a greater being than God, then the thing that you're talking about that isn't the greatest thing isn't God. God must have all great making properties—that is power, goodness, knowledge, and anything else we take to be intrinsically great—at the top of Jacob's Ladder.

If God has those things, then it is worthy of the name God. Think your online activity is private? Think again! Even in incognito mode, your internet service provider, mobile network, and Wi-Fi network admins can see every website you visit. That's right, your school, boss, or even your parents could be tracking your digital footprint right now. But there's a solution: ExpressVPN.

It reroutes all your internet traffic through secure encrypted servers, making your browsing history invisible. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like Cena and The Verge, ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly. Just open the app and click one button to protect yourself. Plus, it works on all your devices: phones, laptops, tablets—you name it! So you can stay private wherever you go.

I use ExpressVPN because it hides my IP address, making it nearly impossible for third parties to track my online activity. I finally feel in control of my online privacy and as someone who values their freedom online, this makes ExpressVPN a must-have. Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com/Jordan. That's expressvpn.com/Jordan and you can get an extra 3 months free! Expressvpn.com/Jordan.

Okay, so with regards to the argument about ineffability, Mer Eliad points out one of the consequences of a God that's too ineffable, so a God that you can't characterize. He’s mapped out the 'death of God' phenomenon across many cultures and over many times. What you often see happening when a culture emerges and begins to flourish is that there's a revelation at its beginning.

Interestingly, that has a certain amount of psychological and sociological energy and it unites people, it offers them a framework of meaning that quells their anxiety, and also a goal or a destination that imbues them with positive emotion and that pulls a culture together.

And then it happens upon occasion that the pinnacle value that's posited by that culture comes under rational assault or perhaps falls prey to conflict with other religions, and people start to doubt, and the system decays—the death of God, let’s say. Well, Eliad pointed out that a God that is so ineffable that nothing can be said about him tends to float off into what would you say, into the cosmic ether and lose and lose his connection with humanity.

And so I think it's better to think about it as in a hierarchical manner. And so here's one way that I've come to understand it. It's both neuropsychological and mythological at the same time. So you know, in the story of Exodus, Moses is compelled forward to take a position of leadership as a consequence of his encounter with the burning bush.

Right? The bush, the bush is a tree; it's the tree of life, and it's on fire because it's alive. A burning bush is a representation of that which calls you forward. That's a good way of thinking about it. Now that takes concrete form in your life, right? So you might be attracted to a particular lover. You might be attracted to a particular profession or a particular book on a shelf when you walk into a library.

It's like a light turns on and you're called forward to it like a moth. And then, as you know, as you mature and you transform and the way that you look at the world changes, the thing that compels your interest transforms. But then you could imagine something at the bottom of that that's constant across all those transformations that's like the spirit of calling per se, and it spirals you upwards in a developmental path, and it recedes as you move towards it.

Now that's one characterization of God, particularly in the Old Testament, is God is calling, right? And that's reasonably well mappable, I would say, onto the neurological systems that mediate positive emotion because the positive emotion systems do call you forward. They fill you with hope, they fill you with enthusiasm—which is a word derived from the phrase for being possessed by God.

But you know, you can kind of understand that behind all the things that call approximately is the spirit that calls transcendentally, and you could think of the essence of that Spirit as a closer approximation of the Divine. That's not a full characterization of the Divine because you in the Old Testament, for example, you also have God as the voice of conscience, which is quite different—more of a restrictive voice or impulse, so to speak.

This is good, though, because I think that these things that are in scripture, whether scriptures revealing truths or it's revealing moral truths and the like, whether it's revealing symbols, I take your view to be they're reflecting the Divine. There Schopenhauer's view of aesthetics was that when we're having an aesthetic experience, it taps into the rhythm of what he called the will.

So you're tapping into the form of aesthetic beauty, which I think your view is sort of similar to there in terms of scripture. There are certainly parallels, at least. But what I think is interesting from a philosophical point of view is— and I think for people more generally—is whether these events are concrete in the sense that they're historical events.

And second, whether or not you do take this God to be a perfect being, like the God of Anselm, the God of Aquinas, the God of Augustine, like the classical conception of God. Because I think there are a lot of Christians out there at the moment that are holding you up and saying, "Look, Christianity is back! Here's Jordan Peterson saying he's a Christian, and here's him talking about scripture; new atheism's dead and here we are with the resurrection of Christianity."

But I don't think you're the type of Christian which they have traditionally had in mind for sure. My colleague at Durham University, Philip Goff, is either coming out or maybe I'm going to be coming out for him here as a heretical Christian. He thinks you don't have to believe in a perfect God, and you don't have to believe that the Christ event was a real event in order to be a Christian. There is a middle way between God and atheism, and that's my view as an agnostic as well.

There is a middle way; it's just different to perhaps yours and Philip's. And I wonder, like, would you be happy to be characterized in that middle ground in finding new radical solutions to what's been a very partisan debate between theists and atheists?

Well, I don't think that characterization is quite accurate, although I think not in its details, but I think perhaps there are elements of the gist that are accurate. I mean, I'm—I suppose would you say you could say philosophically that I’m an existential Christian? Maybe that's a reasonable way of putting it in that I think that what I believe that the Judeo-Christian ethos is not an ethos of what would you say a propositional belief.

The propositional belief is a surface, and it's necessary, but only in so far as it's in accordance with something deeper, just like your word should be in accordance with your actions, but your actions are the fundament. Now, the words shouldn't contradict that, and I'm not saying that words are trivial because they're not—but the commitment to faith that's demanded by Christianity is an existential commitment.

What that means is it's an all-in commitment, and that's a definition. I mean, Christianity is actually an outline of an all-in commitment. It's a representation of that. And so, with regards to God being perfect, well, in some sense for me that's a moot point in a way, partly because with this Jacob's Ladder conception, it's enough for me to know that no matter how high I continue to climb, there won't be an upper limit.

And, I mean, you know, hell is being characterized as a bottomless pit, and part of the reason for that existentially is because things—no matter how bad things get—and they can get very, very bad—you can make them worse. There's something you can do to make them worse.

But I also think that that's true on the positive side, which is that if you follow your calling, let's say, and abide by your conscience, there's no limit to the upward trek. And, and I guess I would say that we've conceptualized belief improperly in our culture, and because of that, we're caught on a dilemma between the Enlightenment rationalists and the Christians, because we have a propositional dispute.

But I would say let's talk about calling for a minute.

So, well, can I just come on? These are three fascinating points. I think we're into the detail and where things are perhaps different between your views and the, let's call them the analytic philosophers of religion—the people who are in the universities thinking about this question in detail.

I think there are three things there, right? The first is that you said, "You can climb Jacob's Ladder but you'll go on forever." There are two ways of interpreting, I think, that statement. The one is that you, Jordan Peterson, and me, Jack Sims, can climb the ladder towards intrinsic goods, but perhaps we'll never reach what we might consider perfection, i.e., reaching the fulfillment of goodness, knowledge, power.

We'll always be striving, but I don't think you can make a second claim, which would be that the ladder itself goes on forever. Because ultimately, I think you need something to ground or hang up those values onto. You need an intrinsic good at the end, a fulfillment of what is taken to be good.

So I think those two things—one, that's understandable, completely agree, need—one's understandable. But in terms of your, like the idea of God as perfection, again, this is just a side point of information. What's interesting is that Eugene Nagasawa and Katherine Rogers, two brilliant philosophers of religion, have claimed there has never been a philosopher of religion who has argued for anything less than a perfectly good God.

And that's phenomenal! That's changing, as I mentioned a second ago. Maybe Goth fits into this view with a God of limited powers. Or the God which, to go back to our earlier part of the discussion, a God whose consciousness underlies our world but is constrained by the laws of physics, let's say.

There is a greater being than that, and it's a being that's not confined to the laws of physics. So we're in a really interesting part of philosophy and religion at the moment in our culture where that's changing.

But the third point—and I think this distinction shows the difference perhaps between your thinking and my thinking on this—is that let's take that statement: "I believe in God." For me, that can be taken in two ways. The focus being on ‘bel'—either I believe in God like I believe in humanity. When I say that, I don't mean like there's a thing called humanity. I mean there's a thing which I'm putting my hope in; there's something that I trust, i.e., humanity.

But obviously there's a second way of taking that statement, which is, "I believe that this thing exists," like the concept of humanity or God. And so when you say you're an existentialist believer in God, I think you probably fall into that first category, that you take the leap of faith towards God. You trust God; you put your belief in God in that way, rather than making the propositional claim that there is some concrete entity that is satisfied and is true and described in the proposition, "There is a perfect being who’s conscious, powerful, good, and the like."

Do you think that's a fair characterization?

Well, I have a hard time understanding exactly how to get to the second without thoroughly dispensing with the first. So let me respond to that in a way that also addresses another issue that you brought up. If, so you said, with regards to Jacob's Ladder—I described this like infinite upward climb, let's say.

At least of human beings, you said, "Well, there has to be something at the top." So let me describe for a moment how I think that's dealt with at least in part in the combined Old Testament and New Testament canons. And I'll make reference, I think primarily, to the concept of the logos.

So there's an insistence in Christianity that—and Christ himself makes this claim—that he's the embodiment of the prophet and the laws, and this is very interesting claim technically because what you have in the Old Testament—and you already alluded to this—is a series of characterizations of God.

Like, that's all—it’s not all the Old Testament is, but the narrative part of it is a sequence of characterizations of God. It's sort of like there's a human being in this situation, and this is what God appears like to him or her. And then there's a human being in this situation, and this is how God appears to him or her.

And so, the God of the Tower of Babel is characterized in a different manner than the God in the story of the flood. There's an underlying insistence that these are all manifestations of the same transcendent reality, but the characterizations differ.

Now, there's a pattern across those characterizations. Now, Christ's claim is that he's the physical embodiment of that pattern, and it's an extremely interesting claim. I have a very difficult time dispensing with it, let’s say, on rational grounds.

And this is an answer to the definition of what's at the pinnacle, at least in so far as that might be comprehensible by human beings. Because Christ, like Job, is the mortal man who says yes to existence in the most radical possible manner. And so to understand that, you have to take apart in some sense what that radical acceptance would mean.

If it was truly radical, what it would mean is something like what was initially outlined in the story of Job. So Job is a good man by God’s own testimony, and God essentially turns him over to the powers of evil so that they can have their way with him.

And there's historical precedent for that idea because Cain invites in Lucifer to have his way with him. This is something that happens in the Old Testament canon. But in the case of Job, Job doesn't invite Satan, and God basically sicks Satan on him.

And then everything that can possibly happen that's terrible to a person happens to Job—not everything, not everything, but it's a close approximation. And Job's response, Job has two responses. Like, he's so tortured that his wife says to him, "There’s nothing left for you to do except shake your fist at the sky, curse God, and die."

And she has reason, viewing his misery, to make that claim. And part of the claim—and this would be relevant to the discussion we will have about notions of the evil God—is like Job is pushed past what you might regard as reasonable moral limits.

But he does two things that are extremely interesting. He refuses, under great duress, to lose faith in the essential nature of his being. So he says to his friends and to God, "Look, I'm not a perfect man. I have the imperfections of a good man, but that doesn't mean that I'm deserving of the existential catastrophe that has visited me. It isn't a mere cause and effect consequence; there's an arbitrariness about it."

But—and so I don't lose faith in myself as a being no matter what happens to me—but I also simultaneously don't lose faith in the Divine itself, even though all the evidence in front of me at the moment suggests that life is nasty, brutish, and short; and perhaps even unforgivable, and it's evil.

Now what happens in the Christian story in the passion is that that story of Job is magnified across virtually all conceivable dimensions so that Christ is the archetypal figure who faces the worst life has to offer, by definition, but also throws himself fully open to that.

And so you might say, well, what does that mean? It means that he takes the sins of the world unto himself. So, imagine that the proper pattern of being for human beings is radical open-armed acceptance of fate—not just acceptance, but welcoming. But then, imagine because the insistence there—it's a very interesting idea—is that the more radical you are in that willingness, the more what the Old Testament thinkers characterized as the spirit of God is likely to dwell within you and walk with you through your trials.

And I can tell you as a clinician, I can't see a flaw in that argument because one of the things we've learned in the clinical realm is that if you encourage people to face the terrible things that they're tempted to avoid, that their character develops radically, and they become much stronger. And that's been discovered across all the fields of clinical endeavor.

I think this might be the point where we find some interesting disagreement. I think we've been getting along like brothers so far, but those brothers might turn out to be Cain and Abel when I give some clarifications here.

It seems like your argument there is like there is one of putting faith in the Divine—in believing in the sense I gave a moment ago, to trust and place your hope into something—in God in this example—despite evidence to the contrary you might think.

Or despite punishment from a God who claims they are perfectly good, and that seems like an existential claim. And I believe it is an existential claim. But you put them the other way around a moment ago. You said, "I can't imagine the first idea of 'bel' I gave you without the second idea of belief."

I gave you a hard time about what you mean by 'existence.' And so you said, "Well, what do you think about X, Y, and Z?" You might think that would be relevant to my religion, and I said, "I can't understand where you're coming from."

So, I mean, I think that we need to keep these things separate. I mean, let's look at it from what the models of God are. Let's talk about the good God and the evil God here on the opposite end of the spectrum.

The problem seems to me that you make the leap of faith to believe in something that exists that you need to see miracles for.

So there are miracles that happen all around us. You can talk about love, responsibility, the acts of kindness that people have toward each other. And they extend far into beliefs in supernatural powers. But this encourages me to think there's a difference there because there are plenty of people who have points to make.

So I think that there is both a leap of faith and a reason for that leap of faith. And it's true for job's faith, which is irrational, but that doesn't mean it isn't valid.

Now, that leads me back to the point about wanting things to be true, and I think we've gotten along well so far, but underneath it all, to return to your earlier proposition, you say that you have faith and belief in God.

Your foundations seem to have many qualities, but they may you ask then if you can root your characterizations more roundly, rationally, and comprehensively, and would you want that when you realize how far gone the situation can be—in regards to being and your own requirements of what you might require out of the world?

I think that's where we might start to have some issues here.

Well, I have a hard time with not wanting to reach that level of existence, even in the shadow of doubt.

And I mean, I agree definitely about where that can lead to at least, but again to return to the idea of characterizations, there are many avenues to this question that I struggle to reconcile from all that you have said.

So, from this perspective, I wouldn't say you need to just be positive or mitigate things out of fear just for reassuring yourself but to act that way for the sake of kindness, progression, and genuine fulfillment.

So why wouldn't you want to draw from what the traditions have to offer? Particularly, central religion might say that we need to achieve these higher purposes, or how that situation might be evident in asserting that it's not just 'everything is suffering.'

But it seems to me that evil re-incorporates the aspect of God. If every reality is consumed in purpose, then why would you reject the role that faith in God plays?

Maybe even seek God as a vessel toward pursuing meaning or how the essence of certain ideas might ring true for the many traditions currently at odds with one another around these dynamics.

After all, I certainly affirm my own journey is meant to adopt some trappings of rationalism, but what makes one believe in an 'evil God,' as that question might lead us deeper away from our given matters of our unconscious preoccupations?

I guess I would say an engagement would be better suited toward pursuing those extraneous notions, instead of just vehemently rationalizing all of your perspectives together, lest you flounder into a black hole of conjectured views at large.

And I mean, let's keep that in mind and consider all the facets of life.

Let’s also explore if these pursuits need more grounding dimensions when considering complexities of faith—how they function, perhaps, along these lines for you personally and for those around you.

Because remember, most will settle on some faith, or even fictive hope, to leverage the ultimate aim of what's perceived beyond what might pull us away from these mental distinctions one way or the other.

We ought to keep this thesis intact, one aimed at provoking meeting faith head-on and how you'd explore impactful engagement to that—something ultimately meaningful, enduring, or progressive.

That's perfectly acceptable for us—if we're going to keep talking through these mediums and they will help us engage further into how the discernment of feelings for our reality musings serves to enrich our better points of reference.

So, I mean, can we take these ideas and examine other underpinning truths of positive nature or upstream narratives of how elevating our experiences serve to answer what we must answer next?

Because if I'm seeking out that unpredictable ideal, I'd want to regain some momentum of wanting not merely perusing objects at justification or what I might need rationally: I want to broker my terms too for this exploration.

So let’s go there and keep talking about this, in pursuit of how such narratives will shape what we should ultimately move forward with are great sustained moments of truth from either end of the arrangement!

Thank you for your discussion and for sharing it with everyone who's watching and listening. We'll continue in a couple of minutes. And as I said, everybody, join us!