Atheist vs Christian vs Spiritual Thinker: The Paperclip Problem That Exposes Religion!

0:00:05 Nine in ten young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose and a lot of people
0:00:09 are turning back to religion. There is something going on. This is about the most important thing
0:00:14 that anyone could ever find out about their life and God has made us for a purpose and the purpose
0:00:19 flows from that meaning. I kind of reject that because this is a perfect example of a solution
0:00:23 being provided without explaining exactly why it provides a solution and that’s what people are
0:00:28 doing in religious traditions. I hard disagree. For me finding meaning and purpose is like a very
0:00:32 practical thing. And that’s what I want to talk about today. We are joined by an atheist, Christian
0:00:38 and spiritual thinker to find an answer to the purpose crisis millions are facing today. One of
0:00:42 the reasons that I’m a Christian is because it’s the best explanation for the way things are. But if
0:00:47 Christianity were true we would not expect the kind of suffering that is present in the world. So I’m
0:00:53 very curious what if I died from cancer at one years old? So someone violated God’s commands and that had
0:00:57 an impact on the world. So children get cancer because a few million years ago someone ate a fruit.
0:01:02 If you want religion to provide existential comfort for people who are suffering you have to do more in
0:01:07 the face of children dying of cancer than some reference to mythical human beings. But if your
0:01:12 worldview does not have a way of making sense or moral intuitions about suffering it’s not an adequate
0:01:18 worldview. What I would say that science and spirituality can really add is it’s effective in terms of reducing
0:01:23 suicidality, improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the morning and we’ll get into that.
0:01:27 And Alex, if someone’s listening now and they feel lost in their life, is there any advice that you
0:01:31 could give them? So as an atheist I’m offering a psychological explanation. So I would recommend
0:01:37 that they… You’re spot on Alex. So the first thing to understand is it is an internal feeling. We found in
0:01:41 our study that if you… your sense of purpose increases by 68%.
0:01:49 Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you
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0:02:35 Oleg. Greg. Alex. The reason I wanted to speak to all three of you today is to discuss meaning and
0:02:40 purpose. And there’s some stats that I wanted to share that kind of frame the discussion. Three
0:02:46 in five young Americans believe that their life lacks purpose. Nine in 10 young people in the UK
0:02:51 believe that their life is lacking purpose. And when I look across other stats as it relates to
0:02:59 things like mental health, 59% of Brits said they lived a meaningful life compared to just 25%
0:03:05 who said they did not. In an October 21 survey, 34% of men in the UK said life had no meaning compared
0:03:11 to 18% of women. And 50% of the same group who said that their lives lack purpose and meaning
0:03:17 said that their poor mental health was linked to not knowing what to do with their life. And to give
0:03:21 some further stats, which I found really interesting around the rise of religiosity in the
0:03:29 UK, a belief in God amongst 18 to 24 year olds has risen from 18% in 2021 to 37% in 2025, according to
0:03:37 YouGov. And in the UK, monthly church attendance has risen from 4% up to 15% in 2025. There is
0:03:42 something going on. And that’s what I want to talk about today. But before we do that, I’d love to
0:03:47 understand the perspective that all of you bring to this conversation. So if I start with yourself,
0:03:51 Alok? You know, it’s interesting. You mentioned a lot about mental health. I’m a psychiatrist.
0:03:56 So for me, finding meaning and purpose is like a very practical thing. So literally a patient will
0:04:03 come into my office, they’ll say, I have no reason to live. There’s nothing worth it in life. I am
0:04:10 suicidal. I want to kill myself. So I have a job as a clinician to like fix that problem in a very like
0:04:17 practical way. So I’ve got, you know, a couple of weeks, hopefully 15, 20 weeks to teach them how to
0:04:23 find purpose. And so usually the way that I approach that is there’s a lot of sort of evidence-based
0:04:29 scientific approaches to finding purpose. I think those tend to work really well. But I’m sure as my
0:04:35 philosopher colleagues will point out and tear me apart, you know, science has a lot of shortcomings.
0:04:40 And so then what I tend to find works incredibly well is adding a certain degree of spiritual practice to
0:04:48 that. And usually when we put those two things together, things work. And the real proof point
0:04:52 for me was when I started streaming, 10,000 people reached out to me in one month asking, hey, like,
0:04:57 do you have room in your private practice? And so I started to think about, okay, if this is a
0:05:02 methodology, then can it be taught? So I started this coaching program. And what we found in our
0:05:09 pilot study of 1,453 people is that if you stick with the program for about 20 weeks, your sense of
0:05:15 purpose increases by 68%. I’d love to hear from my colleagues, but I think, you know, if someone asks
0:05:21 me, what is the meaning of life? I don’t know. But if someone says, I have no meaning, can you help me
0:05:27 with that? The answer is absolutely yes. And I want to attempt to just define two terms that you said
0:05:31 that one is purpose. And it doesn’t have to be a perfect definition, but roughly what you mean by
0:05:35 that. And then you said you introduced spiritual practice. What did you mean by that? So what I think
0:05:42 about is purpose is using something called factor analysis. So if you ask someone, do you have direction
0:05:48 in life? Do you have purpose in life? Is there meaning in life? All three of those things cluster
0:05:54 together to some thing. Even being in control correlates with that. So if you were in control of
0:05:59 your life, your sense of purpose will increase. So there are a lot of these like words that we use,
0:06:07 but all of these words tie back to some internal sense of what is happening in your life. So that’s how I
0:06:14 would describe purpose. In terms of spiritual practices, what my experience is, is that if you
0:06:20 look at human beings who say they have purpose and human beings who don’t have purpose, their lived
0:06:27 experiences in life are different. So when I work with survivors of trauma, they have certain
0:06:32 experiences. Like literally, we can scientifically sort of measure this. You have a particular experience
0:06:38 which destroys your sense of meaning in the world. I had a patient once who was attacked in a bathroom
0:06:44 for about five minutes. And in five minutes, this person had a sense of what they were doing in life,
0:06:50 was dating, was doing well in college, had loving parents. And in five minutes, their compass for
0:06:56 navigating the world was shattered. So if we sort of think about experience can lead to a loss of
0:07:03 purpose, experience can also lead to a gain in purpose. Now, the spiritual tradition that I come
0:07:12 from is all about particular practices that evoke certain subjective experiences. And as people have
0:07:18 those experiences, their sense of purpose increases. And this is where I think there’s a major shortcoming
0:07:27 learning of science. So science can tell you what you should do, but it doesn’t create experiences in and of itself, right?
0:07:32 So we can scientifically understand that the highest risk factor for pornography addiction is having no meaning
0:07:38 in life. But even if we know that, that doesn’t help us, like, fix the problem. And there’s always a question of how.
0:07:43 Like, so we can discover something with science, but then there’s a question of how do we actually, like, move from point A to point B?
0:07:46 And that’s where I find spiritual practice is incredibly helpful.
0:07:49 Would you classify yourself as religious?
0:07:52 Yes, I think so.
0:07:53 Greg?
0:07:53 Yeah.
0:08:02 What is the perspective you bring to this conversation? And what’s the lived experience, the academia that lends itself to that perspective?
0:08:09 Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of that fitting in. And I relate to a lot what you’re saying, Alok, about people’s challenges.
0:08:19 Now, what’s interesting to me about this whole discussion, since I’m a Christian, and I understand the world from a theistic perspective, because I think it’s the best explanation for the way things are.
0:08:24 Just to give a definition to that, theistic, what does that mean?
0:08:25 A personal God.
0:08:26 A God.
0:08:36 There is a personal God who is involved with the world. He made the world and he still maintains activity, as opposed to deistic, which just wound up the clock and let it go.
0:08:45 So, my view is God is still involved. In fact, so involved that he actually came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to create a rescue plan.
0:08:59 Now, what’s interesting to me about this broader question, we can get into more details too, is that it’s not – if there is a God who made the world for a purpose with meaning, people can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don’t know God.
0:09:07 They’re not – they won’t be experiencing what they were made for, which is to be in friendship with him, with the plan that he’s made for their flourishing.
0:09:13 But they still can flourish in some measure insofar as they touch on these objective features.
0:09:29 But insofar as we are able, even without belief in God, to kind of get in that groove of the things that God made us for, the purposes that he intends, in light of being made like him in some way in his image, there’s going to be a measure of satisfaction.
0:09:36 But what they’ll be missing is the ultimate, and that is that friendship with God and being restored in that.
0:09:36 Alex.
0:09:37 Yes, sir.
0:09:45 Same question for you about what you bring to this conversation in terms of your perspective, your experience, and maybe some of your sort of personal journey.
0:10:00 Well, for my own part, I was quite swept up in the New Atheism movement, which was a mid-2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world, saying that religion is evil and terrible.
0:10:15 And I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular, humanist utopia, that if you’ll only throw off these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself.
0:10:18 People tried that, and it didn’t seem to work.
0:10:22 And I think that’s because the New Atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow.
0:10:30 It didn’t seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place.
0:10:33 And I think that is why it exists.
0:10:37 I think humans are in a strange predicament due to the mystery of consciousness.
0:10:49 We find ourselves possibly uniquely amongst other animals in a position of being mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world, but also knowing those things.
0:10:51 It’s one thing to experience the world.
0:10:54 It’s one thing to be – it’s another thing to be aware that you’re experiencing it.
0:11:00 Josh Rasmussen once said, there’s a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you’ve noticed a tree.
0:11:03 We have this sort of second-order abstraction that we can do.
0:11:09 So we know that death is coming, for example, and death makes a mockery of everything that we do.
0:11:16 It seems to just obliterate any sense of purpose or meaning because anything that we’re building will ultimately, as far as we’re concerned, be gone.
0:11:18 And that may well be unique to human beings.
0:11:35 And so I’m not the first to suggest that the principal motivating factor behind meaning-infused activities that humans do is an engagement in death denial or some kind of immortality project.
0:11:45 People literally, for fear of – as a result of the knowledge that this will all come to an end, engage in what we might call immortality projects.
0:11:51 They engage in things which will outlast themselves, which give them a sense of escaping this death.
0:11:56 The most obvious example is in religious traditions, which literally promise immortality for your own soul.
0:12:03 But if you look just practically at where people subjectively report finding meaning, they find it in their children.
0:12:08 They might find it in their job, but they’re unlikely to find it in their job if they’re doing something they don’t really care about.
0:12:09 They’ll find it in their job.
0:12:18 Maybe they’re like a barrister and they find a lot of meaning in bringing justice into the world because they’re participating in a system which they believe will outlast them and is bigger than them.
0:12:27 So when people talk about meaning, we talk about transcendence, something being above and beyond their own sort of material situation.
0:12:32 And I think religion is the archetypal example of this.
0:12:34 And I think it’s why it evolves in the first place.
0:12:45 There is this idea that we are living in a meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past hundred years or so or maybe in the last few hundred years or so as a response to the enlightenment and the decline of religion.
0:12:47 I think that’s far too easy.
0:12:48 I think that’s way too easy.
0:12:56 I think that if there is such thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first place.
0:13:07 I think literally speaking what people are doing in religious traditions is realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something less finite.
0:13:07 Of course.
0:13:09 We have this hunger.
0:13:21 I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness’s hunger for meaning and significance because that’s all propositional.
0:13:24 It’s not molecules in motion.
0:13:25 What’s naturalistic mean?
0:13:30 Naturalistic just means nature and that’s all there is basically.
0:13:35 So you have molecules in motion largely governed by natural law.
0:13:38 There is no outside transcendent anything.
0:13:40 There’s no immaterial anything.
0:13:47 Certainly not an immaterial God that has started the process and sustains the process and gives life meaning.
0:13:52 There either is meaning objectively or not.
0:13:52 Okay.
0:13:54 If not, then it’s up to us.
0:14:04 For example, a moment ago you said that if there is a creator God who brings us into existence, then you are designed and you are given purpose by God.
0:14:21 And I think we need to investigate this a bit further because, for example, a quite sort of boring and overdone debate at the moment is the extent to which we are engaged in the production of potentially artificially conscious agents with artificial intelligence technologies.
0:14:26 And there’s all this discussion about whether or not these things can be conscious, like, you know, whatever.
0:14:28 Let’s just suppose for a moment that they were.
0:14:34 Let’s suppose that I created an artificially intelligent machine and I gave it a purpose and that purpose was to produce paper clips.
0:14:43 And because of the development of artificial intelligence technology, it became conscious in a recognizable sense.
0:14:44 It had an interior sense of self.
0:14:48 It sort of had, say, feelings or emotions about the world.
0:14:53 But it is just an AI robot whose entire purpose in life is to make paper clips.
0:15:02 Now, I could say that because that AI was designed by a creator with a purpose that was explicitly given to it, that that life is meaningful.
0:15:11 But I think it would seem to most people that a life whose meaning consists in creating paper clips is not sufficient.
0:15:15 It’s not enough to address what people really want.
0:15:17 It’s not just some kind of purpose.
0:15:22 It’s not just even some kind of purpose which is given to you by an authoritative creative source.
0:15:24 It’s something which is further than that.
0:15:25 Yeah.
0:15:34 But if I can just relate this to the God question, the problem that arises is that you have to answer the question of why God infuses life with the meaning that he gives it.
0:15:42 It’s either something which he has sort of arbitrarily plucked up and chosen to create, in which case we have this problem of arbitrariness, or no.
0:15:50 Or, in fact, there is some reason why God had to give us a particular kind of meaning that’s endemic to the human condition, that he had no choice.
0:15:54 But for that meaning, that more important kind of meaning, to be given to human life.
0:15:54 Yeah.
0:16:00 But if he was beholden to that, if he had to give us a particular kind of meaning, it seems like there’s a standard of meaning which exists outside of God.
0:16:01 Right, right.
0:16:01 Outside of God.
0:16:11 So I’m not sure, in other words, the mechanism by which being created by someone who says this is your purpose would be fulfilling in the way that people want it to be.
0:16:23 The reason the paperclip illustration doesn’t match is because it seems to me that you’re subtly taking the thing that’s conscious that makes paperclips and comparing it to a human being.
0:16:31 And for human beings who seem to have a different purpose, I would argue, be consigned to make paperclips, well, that’s dehumanizing to them.
0:16:41 But if you have, just to follow your illustration, if you have a creator that makes something for a reason that the creator has in mind, then it’s fulfilling its purpose perfectly.
0:16:46 For a human being, that’s not going to be satisfying making paperclips.
0:16:50 And a lot of people who are making paperclips are not satisfied with it, okay?
0:16:54 I don’t think it’s arbitrary if God is making something for a purpose.
0:17:10 If God decides that he wants to make creatures to be in friendship with him because this reflects his loving character and that purpose is to be in friendship with him, I don’t see how that is somehow negligible or arbitrary at all.
0:17:19 I guess you could have said that God could have done otherwise, but his love and desire for communion is seeing to be an adequate explanation for that.
0:17:21 This is fascinating.
0:17:25 So my first question is, what’s the point of this conversation?
0:17:36 Yeah, so I think that the ultimate answer that we’re looking for is it appears that the numbers around purpose and meaning are fluctuating at this moment in time.
0:17:41 A lot of people are turning back to religion, as Alex says, we were just chatting about a second ago.
0:17:49 And I guess there’s two questions, which is one, understanding why that’s happening, why there’s this fluctuation, why we’re seeing a mental health crisis around purpose and meaning.
0:17:56 And the second is to try and figure out if there’s a truth one can arrive at, if there’s an objective truth that exists.
0:18:03 So for y’all, I’m curious, when y’all show up here, like what is the purpose for y’all showing up?
0:18:08 Literally trying to discover, like it’s the stated purpose, right?
0:18:12 It’s literally just artificially given purpose by being designed in a particular way.
0:18:18 We’re going to get together and we’re going to have a conversation and see if we can figure out this meaning stuff, right?
0:18:18 Awesome.
0:18:21 And by the way, like we’re not going to solve that problem.
0:18:26 I think it’s worth pointing out that like these conversations have to be exploratory and subjective.
0:18:36 If anybody thinks that the four of us sat at this table are going to solve the meaning crisis and give people a five-step guide finding meaning in their life and that will be the sort of case closed, then they’re delusional.
0:18:40 I don’t know if I agree that we can’t find an answer, but we’ll talk about it.
0:18:42 Well, this is what I wanted to speak to.
0:18:47 Obviously, we’re talking about this broader issue of meaning and purpose, all right?
0:18:52 And as I mentioned earlier, there either is an objective one or it’s only subjective, okay?
0:18:58 If it is an objective one, this is about the most important thing that anyone could ever find out about their life if they were created for a reason.
0:19:05 In my view, the reason I’m here is because I’m convinced that that’s the case and I’m willing to give reasons why, okay?
0:19:22 But I don’t think – I’m sympathetic to the concern that you can’t sit around a table and in two or three hours solve the problem for any individual because people going through the process of trying to figure these things out, it takes a long time as they put the pieces together.
0:19:30 But I think there’s a lot of people in the world that think how they have put it together and they’ve come to conclusions about ultimate meaning and purpose and they don’t come to my own conclusions.
0:19:31 But many have.
0:19:38 So what I would hate to do is leave people with the feeling like we can all search and the glory is in the search.
0:19:41 But if you think you found the answer, then you haven’t.
0:19:44 Of course, this to me is a nihilistic enterprise then.
0:19:46 I think it’s possible to come to conclusions.
0:19:54 I think so too to be clear but I think what I’m trying to say is this will be something that one will experience for themselves and will discover for themselves in their own life.
0:20:02 It’s not going to be something that – you know, there’s that old – was it Linshi, the sort of the Buddhist koan that says if you meet the Buddha, kill him.
0:20:13 The idea being that if you think that the kind of enlightenment which is necessary to spiritual fulfillment can be found through some kind of guru, you’re missing the mark.
0:20:15 It’s something that you need to do for yourself.
0:20:20 But isn’t that statement itself meant to be a truth about spirituality that you can actually count on?
0:20:21 Can I jump in?
0:20:23 I just want to make sure I understand y’all’s point.
0:20:27 So you’re saying that the search for purpose, first of all, is never going to go away.
0:20:30 Like it’s a human condition, right?
0:20:30 Yes.
0:20:34 Like so as humanity, humanity will never find its purpose.
0:20:35 I can tell you why if you like.
0:20:36 No, no.
0:20:37 I don’t even know why yet.
0:20:39 I think individuals can.
0:20:40 But humanity can’t.
0:20:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:20:42 I’m just making sure I understand, right?
0:20:47 So an individual can find their purpose, but as humanity, it’s never going to be solved.
0:20:55 And then you said something about purpose being tied to opposing to death in some way.
0:21:01 So transcending death that human beings basically look for purpose because death is inevitable.
0:21:04 And if we can find purpose, then we can give our life meaning.
0:21:09 But if death, if we die and I don’t leave something behind, can you talk a little bit about that?
0:21:26 This is essentially a version of Ernest Becker’s denial of death hypothesis, which famously suggests that the motivation for a great deal of human behavior is at least human behavior outside of immediate sensory concerns like eating and stuff like that.
0:21:33 Anything that humans engage in on a societal level, on an abstract level, is ultimately motivated by an apprehension of death.
0:21:37 I think that’s probably too simple, but it’s definitely a contributing factor.
0:21:40 I think that, for example, put it this way, right?
0:21:43 Here’s an example that comes from, I think his name’s Scheffler.
0:21:45 And he has this interesting thought experiment.
0:21:48 Suppose, I don’t know, maybe you’re engaged in writing a book.
0:21:54 Suppose you discovered, and this probably won’t be the case for you because you believe in an afterlife, but suppose that you’re an atheist for a moment.
0:22:01 Suppose it were the case that you discovered that after you die, a meteor is going to come and wipe out all life on Earth.
0:22:04 Everybody’s going to die almost instantly after you do, but you’ll be dead.
0:22:06 So you will live your entire life as it was anyway.
0:22:08 And suppose the rest of the world doesn’t even know this is going to happen.
0:22:10 But you’re told this is going to be the case.
0:22:13 Would that motivate you to write your book more or less?
0:22:16 Most people say that it would seem a bit pointless now.
0:22:19 What’s the point now in writing this book?
0:22:23 What’s the point in having children if they’re going to die 30 days after I’m gone?
0:22:25 What’s the point in doing any of these things?
0:22:26 What will they still do?
0:22:27 They’ll still do the sensory stuff.
0:22:27 They’ll still eat.
0:22:28 They’ll still have sex.
0:22:30 They’ll still sleep, this kind of stuff.
0:22:36 But the typically meaning-laden activities of life, they would certainly be demotivated to do.
0:22:46 And it’s an interesting thought experiment to give us some insight as to the fact that what maybe this means, that at least in part, the motivation for these actions in the first place is that they will extend beyond our death.
0:22:52 I agree with so much of what you’ll say, and I also, like, hard disagree with some of the fundamentals.
0:22:58 So let’s say you have this example of, like, I’m going to write a book, and then the world is going to end 30 days later.
0:22:59 Yes.
0:23:03 And so you say – because a lot of what you’re talking about is, like, what people say, right?
0:23:03 Yep.
0:23:11 So you’ll say, like, okay, so, like, people would say that this is a waste of time, and I’m not going to do it if the world ends in 30 days.
0:23:18 And you’re also saying people is an everlasting thing or struggling with purpose, right?
0:23:19 You’re saying both of these things.
0:23:20 So here’s my question to you.
0:23:23 If you tell someone, you know, you’re writing this book.
0:23:27 Let’s say you write it, and then you die because we’ll simplify the example.
0:23:29 And then 30 days later, the world ends.
0:23:35 Let’s take two people, one who says, I’m a write-it anyway, and one who says, there’s no point.
0:23:40 Which one of those two people do you think has a greater sense of purpose?
0:23:41 Probably the former.
0:23:42 Absolutely.
0:23:44 So this is the key thing.
0:23:51 Purpose is absolutely – because I love that you’re asking about mechanisms, and I think maybe that’s what I can provide.
0:23:53 I think that’s actually the answer, right?
0:23:59 So it’s not that people believe – and I think you’re right that the reason that this is a perennial problem
0:24:04 is because most people do not live a life where they understand how purpose works.
0:24:09 And what I think is really fascinating about sort of like this scientific clinical approach,
0:24:14 like if you ask me, can I help people find meaning and purpose?
0:24:15 I don’t know.
0:24:18 But if you ask me, can I help a person?
0:24:19 The answer is absolutely.
0:24:25 And we have like particular scientific things, and this is where it’s really counterintuitive.
0:24:30 So a big part of like finding purpose is doing particular things.
0:24:35 And if you do those things, the likelihood that you will increase your sense of purpose in life,
0:24:38 which is another thing that’s very counterintuitive to people, purpose is not binary.
0:24:40 It’s quantifiable.
0:24:41 It’s like a scale.
0:24:43 So if I were to ask the three of y’all, right?
0:24:46 Maybe let’s like let’s do this not thought experiment but this practical experiment.
0:24:49 Do you know your purpose in life?
0:24:52 Like how confident are you that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing in life?
0:24:57 How confident am I about the God part or that I’m doing the things that are appropriate?
0:25:01 How confident are you that you’re doing what God wants you to do?
0:25:05 Well, in that general sense, extremely confident or else I wouldn’t be doing it.
0:25:06 Perfect, right?
0:25:06 Yeah.
0:25:08 So, Stephen, what about you, bro?
0:25:10 About five out of ten.
0:25:11 I knew it.
0:25:12 Okay, right?
0:25:13 So, Alex?
0:25:16 I don’t want to be difficult, but I kind of reject the grammar of the question.
0:25:17 Awesome.
0:25:18 Reject away, bro.
0:25:21 I think it’s what a logician would call an exponable statement, something which needs
0:25:22 to be broken down.
0:25:24 You asked, do I know my own purpose?
0:25:27 That assumes that there is a purpose to know.
0:25:32 It’s a bit like the comparison I would give is if I asked you the question, the classic example
0:25:36 in logic is, is the king of France bold?
0:25:36 Yes or no?
0:25:39 I can rephrase my question if you have problems with my question.
0:25:46 So, do you have a lived experience of something called purpose?
0:25:50 Oh, well, look, I think purpose is having some kind of reason to act or be.
0:25:50 Yeah.
0:25:54 And I certainly subjectively am motivated to do things.
0:25:55 I think everybody is.
0:25:57 Otherwise, you literally wouldn’t be able to do anything.
0:26:02 But it’s a bit foggy to me what psychologically speaking, on a personal level, that fundamental
0:26:03 motivation actually is.
0:26:06 Wouldn’t purpose be more the goal rather than the reason to act?
0:26:09 What you’re trying to accomplish?
0:26:13 It’s a semantic thing, but that’s why it depends what you mean by the word purpose.
0:26:14 I’m with you.
0:26:14 I’m with you.
0:26:18 And I don’t know what I mean with the word purpose, which is part of this challenge.
0:26:21 But, okay, so, like, I’m just wondering.
0:26:24 So, like, when you – so, a lot of people are motivated to act.
0:26:26 Everyone is motivated to act every day, right?
0:26:26 I get out of bed.
0:26:28 I need to take a dump.
0:26:44 But my guess is that if we were to administer a scientifically validated instrument that measures your subjective sense of purpose, direction in life, that that would be north of five out of ten.
0:26:45 Okay.
0:26:49 Do you think that’s fair or is that something that you don’t –
0:26:50 Maybe, yeah.
0:26:50 I don’t know what –
0:26:56 So, like, do you – when you wake up, do you feel like you know what you want to do and what’s going on and you’re, like, doing good work?
0:26:58 Like, I’m asking about the subjective thing.
0:26:59 Not on a grand sense.
0:26:59 I’m quite agnostic.
0:27:01 I mean, I’m sort of –
0:27:01 I’m not talking about it.
0:27:01 Okay.
0:27:02 Maybe a grand sense.
0:27:04 I really don’t know what you mean.
0:27:05 Perfect.
0:27:05 Okay.
0:27:09 So, not on a grand sense but on some other sense.
0:27:09 Yes.
0:27:10 Okay.
0:27:10 Great.
0:27:17 So, I think that this is, like – this is – I think this is beautiful because I think what we have here is, like, not on a grand sense.
0:27:19 So, I think on a grand sense, you’re there.
0:27:19 Right.
0:27:20 Right?
0:27:23 But you’re absolutely motivated by particular things.
0:27:25 So, I think this is the first thing about purpose.
0:27:27 Can I – a clarification real quickly.
0:27:28 Yeah.
0:27:32 On a grand sense, yes, but there are distinctions that you were referring to a few moments ago.
0:27:34 So, there are a lot of things that are dissatisfying my life.
0:27:38 But in terms of being on the right course, that’s part of what life is.
0:27:42 Being on the right course, lots of crazy stuff that’s happening in between.
0:27:43 Cool.
0:27:52 So, like, the first thing that I’ve kind of noticed in my work is that I don’t know whether a grander purpose exists or not.
0:27:54 I think that’s a lovely discussion that I want to continue to have with you.
0:27:57 But I’m sort of – here’s where I’m sort of coming from in this discussion.
0:28:01 Stephen started this out with some really scary statistics that we’re seeing, right?
0:28:02 There’s a mental health crisis.
0:28:09 I think a lot of what we’re seeing is – while it may be perennial, I think it’s like seems more acute right now.
0:28:13 Maybe that’s because of the atheist materialism, whatever.
0:28:14 I’m not quite sure.
0:28:15 But this is a problem.
0:28:35 And I think a big part of what I’m going to try to contribute here today is my understanding of, like, how to do that.
0:28:39 That this is a quantifiable thing that we can sort of see at this table.
0:28:42 People are sort of, like, at different places.
0:28:49 And so the first thing that I kind of want to point out is I don’t know whether there’s purpose or not.
0:29:00 But as a human condition, there is something that each of us feel or experience that gives us an answer, right?
0:29:01 So you’re, like, at 10.
0:29:04 But what that means is that something is going on in your mind.
0:29:06 Something is going on in your heart.
0:29:10 Something is going on in your body where you wake up and you feel like you have purpose.
0:29:13 Stephen wakes up and he’s, like, at a 5 out of 10.
0:29:14 So he’s getting some signals in that area.
0:29:16 Some signals are not in that area.
0:29:18 You have some signals in that direction too.
0:29:20 You know why you’re showing up at this podcast.
0:29:22 You’ve got a book that you’re working on.
0:29:22 Awesome.
0:29:23 Can’t wait to read it.
0:29:27 But on a grander sense, you’re, like, I don’t know about this, like, objective stuff or whatever.
0:29:30 So this is sort of, like, this quantifiable thing.
0:29:30 And you?
0:29:33 I’m going to let you all guess.
0:29:36 Where would you put me out of 10?
0:29:37 I don’t like to psychologize people.
0:29:40 It’s okay if you don’t like to.
0:29:41 Will you?
0:29:42 I mean, I just met you.
0:29:43 I don’t know.
0:29:47 I have no idea what sense of meaning you have in your life.
0:29:49 Okay.
0:29:53 I mean, for me, I’m just motivated to try and find out.
0:29:55 So I think the audience can guess too.
0:29:56 Yeah.
0:29:57 I would say you’re pretty high.
0:29:58 That’s why you’re here.
0:30:00 That’s why you’re articulating your ideas.
0:30:03 Probably closer to 10 than 5.
0:30:04 Yeah.
0:30:04 Yeah.
0:30:04 Right?
0:30:09 So it’s like, it’s okay if you don’t want to do that because I’m guessing that there are
0:30:11 certain things in your intellect that tell you.
0:30:13 So do you have a subjective instinct?
0:30:15 No, I just don’t know you that well.
0:30:16 I mean, I don’t know.
0:30:17 Okay.
0:30:18 And also, it depends what you mean, right?
0:30:22 Because you’ll say that you have a, if you say that you’re a 10, like, you have this,
0:30:25 there’s this, you used the phrase earlier, sense, a sense of meaning in life.
0:30:30 And because you’re talking about this from an empirical standpoint of whether people report
0:30:35 having a sense of meaning, whereas I think that Greg is probably talking about, literally
0:30:39 speaking, whether there is actually, in fact, a real meaning, whether or not people sense
0:30:40 it or not.
0:30:43 You could say that you have a 10 out of 10 and Greg could say, well, that’s, it’s great
0:30:47 that you feel that way, but it’s misguided because the purpose that you have identified
0:30:49 in your life is the wrong one.
0:30:54 And so to me, the important question is not so much whether you subjectively report feeling
0:30:57 like you have purpose in life, but whether that purpose is grounded in something real and
0:30:58 true.
0:30:59 Yeah.
0:31:05 So I think that your answer right now is the reason why you think some of these questions
0:31:06 are unanswerable.
0:31:10 So I think if you adopt that frame, you’ll never know.
0:31:12 But I don’t think they’re unanswerable.
0:31:12 Okay.
0:31:13 Let me, let me just finish.
0:31:14 Okay.
0:31:21 So my first experience of this, right, is that first of all, there is a subjective barometer,
0:31:23 like how do we know whether we have purpose?
0:31:28 Maybe we listen to other people, but there is some sort of internal sense of this.
0:31:31 And this is where the science becomes really important because if you look at people who have
0:31:35 like a history of trauma or something, what you tend to find is that there are certain like
0:31:41 neurobiological things that can happen to you that will literally affect the parts of your
0:31:43 brain that are able to detect purpose.
0:31:46 So this is sort of like a subjective experience.
0:31:50 And I think the way that, and I love your emphasis on mechanism.
0:31:54 And I think this is what, in my opinion, science and spirituality can really add is they add the
0:31:55 how, right?
0:32:00 They add like, why is it that one person has purpose and another person doesn’t have purpose?
0:32:04 So first thing is that in my experience and the way that I operate, I’m not saying it’s
0:32:05 correct.
0:32:11 It’s just, it’s effective in terms of helping people move the needle on reducing suicide.
0:32:15 Improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the morning.
0:32:16 Like it tends to work.
0:32:18 And it’s not just me.
0:32:22 It’s that there’s a bunch of, you know, methodologies that we have in psychotherapy and stuff like
0:32:24 that, that accomplish these kinds of things.
0:32:26 That there’s some internal sense of purpose.
0:32:32 Now, what I think surprises a lot of people is that there are two ways that you increase
0:32:33 that sense of purpose.
0:32:38 The first is a bucket of things that are kind of counterintuitive.
0:32:44 And this is where we also have to understand that purpose correlates with certain other things
0:32:44 in life.
0:32:51 So if I feel like I am in control of my life, then my sense of purpose will increase.
0:32:53 Those two things are correlated.
0:32:57 It’s not clear whether it’s one thing that manifests in two ways or it’s probably two
0:32:59 discrete things because there’s some subtlety there.
0:33:05 But just as a very simple example, if you take someone who feels out of control in life
0:33:09 and you help them get control of their life, and there’s a really great example of this,
0:33:12 which is something called passive challenges versus active challenges.
0:33:17 So there’s a fascinating research on anxiety that shows that if you’re someone in life whose
0:33:21 life is happening to you, like you wake up one day and then like your boss wants you to
0:33:25 come in for work and you have to pay rent at the end of the month and like you’re logging
0:33:31 onto Tinder and people aren’t responding to you, life is controlling the direction that
0:33:32 you move.
0:33:36 And people feel overwhelmed by this and they want freedom.
0:33:36 They want control.
0:33:40 What they end up doing is they wish that they didn’t have these things.
0:33:42 So they run away from these problems.
0:33:49 So passive challenges are challenges that life imposes upon you that you didn’t sign up for.
0:33:55 Then there’s something really fascinating, which is your sense of control in life does not correlate
0:33:57 just with the passive challenges.
0:34:02 It correlates with the ratio of passive challenges to active challenges.
0:34:06 Active challenges are things that you choose to do that are difficult.
0:34:08 So this is really fascinating.
0:34:13 But if you’re getting bodied by life in three different directions, the solution to that is
0:34:14 not run away from those problems.
0:34:19 It’s actually to wake up and start to push yourself in a particular direction.
0:34:21 I want to do this instead.
0:34:25 If you want to learn how to like read, you know, learn philosophy, you know, start studying
0:34:30 philosophical texts, you know, like as you start to take on more, which is very counterintuitive
0:34:33 because when most people feel overwhelmed, they don’t feel like they can do more.
0:34:37 The exact solution is to take on more active challenges.
0:34:40 Then you have some sense of control in life.
0:34:45 And once your ratio of active challenges to passive challenges is more evened out, this
0:34:46 does something really cool.
0:34:48 It gives you a sense that I’m no longer out of control.
0:34:53 Once you feel like you’re no longer out of control, this is the really cool thing.
0:34:59 Then your capacity to deal with the stuff that life throws at you actually improves.
0:35:05 So there’s this, this is just one example of like one scientific neurobiological principle
0:35:11 that has some psychology associated with where you can do particular things to give yourself
0:35:13 a sense of direction in life.
0:35:17 Now, some of the stuff around worship and spiritual practice, that can do it too.
0:35:24 But I think that usually what I tend to see is that, you know, if someone is lost in life,
0:35:27 you can sort of answer it by these big questions.
0:35:31 You can sort of think about this sort of transcendental purpose, which I’m happy to talk about.
0:35:34 But I think there’s a lot of like little stuff that you can do.
0:35:40 And as you implement these things, the sense of purpose in your life, your internal lived
0:35:43 experience of feeling out of control will change.
0:35:45 Let me offer a few thoughts if I could.
0:35:50 One, I want to speak to something that you’ve said, Alex, that I just want to offer a caution
0:35:51 about.
0:35:56 When we talk about motivation, the motivation for something, we sometimes confuse that with
0:35:57 justification.
0:36:01 So someone might say to me as an atheist, for example, well, you’re a Christian because
0:36:02 you were born in America.
0:36:06 If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn’t be a Christian.
0:36:06 You’d be a Muslim.
0:36:11 Of course, that’s irrelevant to the question of whether Islam or Christianity or some other
0:36:11 religion is true.
0:36:12 It doesn’t speak to that.
0:36:14 It speaks to psychology.
0:36:14 Okay.
0:36:19 And the fact is that if the atheist was born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn’t be an atheist
0:36:20 either, likely.
0:36:25 The key question is what motivates people, for example, to think about purpose, death
0:36:26 maybe, a fear of death.
0:36:28 That might be a motivation.
0:36:32 The question is whether the place they land in answering the question has any objective
0:36:33 truth to it or not.
0:36:36 It could be that there is a God and that there is an afterlife.
0:36:40 And facing death does give comfort to that.
0:36:46 I should say, when facing death, you have comfort because there is a God and there’s something
0:36:46 that you’re going to.
0:36:48 It’s closer communion with him.
0:36:49 Okay.
0:36:53 Just because you’re motivated by death doesn’t mean that your belief about the afterlife
0:36:54 is somehow an error.
0:36:56 I just wanted to add something in here.
0:37:02 So I think part of the reason I’ve also convened you guys to have this conversation today is
0:37:09 because I’ve got several people in my life that are, I can literally lay out the personas,
0:37:14 but I’ve got one particular friend who’s 35, between 35 and 40 years old, living in Dubai,
0:37:17 living in a glass box, freelancer.
0:37:19 So he wakes up in the morning, his bed is there.
0:37:21 He then works there, then goes back to bed.
0:37:22 He’s single, no kids.
0:37:26 In his life at the moment, he said to me that he can’t get out of bed anymore.
0:37:27 He feels stuck.
0:37:32 And then about six months after, out of the blue, it turns out without telling any of us,
0:37:34 and we’re his best friends, he’s flown to America.
0:37:34 He’s been baptized.
0:37:35 He’s a Christian.
0:37:37 Suddenly his life has purpose and meaning again.
0:37:39 He’s a completely different person.
0:37:43 And this individual never, ever, he would be the last person that you’d think would be religious.
0:37:47 Got another friend, female, just over 30 years old, doesn’t have kids,
0:37:48 freelance, works at home.
0:37:51 When I asked her what her meaning and purpose in life,
0:37:55 she said to me she wants to get to having 200 plants, plants she can water.
0:37:56 She names all of them.
0:38:00 She then told me a week after she’s in therapy because she feels lost and stuck in life.
0:38:04 And so much of the central point why I’ve been motivated to have this conversation is
0:38:10 it appears to me, and I haven’t nailed this hypothesis yet, that freedom, independence,
0:38:17 be your own boss, the decline in people having children, the glamorization of, as you said at
0:38:22 the very beginning, like, you know, do it yourself, do it your way, is failing people in some way.
0:38:27 And then actually the push for independence was in some way some kind of light.
0:38:33 I actually also went through the same new atheist baptism that you went through.
0:38:34 And I read all those books at 18 years old.
0:38:37 And two years, I was debating dog walkers on the street about God.
0:38:39 I was such a staunch atheist.
0:38:44 But I now find myself in a position where I’m almost back to being curious again,
0:38:47 because it feels like independence wasn’t the answer.
0:38:49 So I just wanted to reframe.
0:38:49 You should be curious.
0:38:52 I think, yeah, I mean, I think people need to ask.
0:38:57 I think the purpose is intimately tied up with the idea of task to fulfill.
0:39:01 It’s why people tend to find meaning in projects which are not completed yet.
0:39:04 In fact, Pascal writes quite compellingly about this when he writes about boredom.
0:39:10 And he imagines a gambler, someone who enjoys gambling, and says,
0:39:12 well, why is this person gambling?
0:39:15 Because they’re doing this thing with the chance of winning some money.
0:39:17 OK, so why don’t you just give them the money?
0:39:22 Just take the gambler and give him all the money that he could possibly receive without playing the game.
0:39:27 And he won’t be very fulfilled, even though he’s getting ostensibly what he was trying to get.
0:39:30 No, no, that wouldn’t be fulfilling because he enjoys the gambling.
0:39:31 OK, says Pascal.
0:39:37 Then let him play the game, but make it such that he’ll never actually win the money.
0:39:39 But he gets to keep playing the game.
0:39:42 And he’s not going to be very fulfilled by that either.
0:39:43 That’s also going to be completely pointless.
0:39:50 And so Pascal noticed that what you kind of need to avoid boredom, and I suppose to imbue your life with purpose,
0:40:00 at least in this analogy, is some kind of task to fulfill that you haven’t fulfilled yet, that you don’t know if you’re going to fulfill,
0:40:05 that you believe will bring you fulfillment when you get it, but you haven’t got it yet.
0:40:09 That’s why I think religion does it really well, because it’s the definition of something which you don’t have now,
0:40:15 which you can strive for, which when you get, you believe will be fulfilling.
0:40:22 Yeah, so I love these examples because actually we know exactly what’s going on in that thought experiment, right?
0:40:30 So now there have been – there are so many advances in neuroscience that we understand why people gamble, right?
0:40:37 So we understand that giving someone money will satisfy a gambler in one of two cases.
0:40:37 And I’ve seen this.
0:40:39 I’ve worked with people who are professional poker players.
0:40:45 Some people – what we describe motivation is actually like a dozen different things going on in your brain.
0:40:51 So if you were a professional poker player in poker – and I’ve literally worked with professional poker players who had no meaning in life.
0:40:52 It’s so funny.
0:40:53 I’m thinking about a particular person.
0:40:57 And then, you know, achieved a certain financial goal, that’s why they play poker.
0:41:09 So if your motivation is that I’m playing poker because I have a skill that I’m using to get money, if that is your internal motivation, that is going to come from certain circuits in your brain.
0:41:11 It’s going to come from places like your frontal lobe.
0:41:18 Now, as Pascal pointed out, if you give the average person who gambles money, what are they going to do with it?
0:41:20 They’re going to gamble more, right?
0:41:27 So that means that their motivation is coming from something more closer to the nucleus accumbens, a random reinforcement schedule.
0:41:29 Maybe they’re trying to suppress amygdala emotions.
0:41:35 So we actually can like look at that example and we can understand why each of those things happens.
0:41:44 And then the most beautiful thing is that there is absolutely a scenario where someone can gamble and never win.
0:41:47 And they can absolutely have purpose.
0:41:54 So this is where – I know that sounds insane, but if you look at some of these things from the Zen tradition, right?
0:41:58 So these are practices that have no purpose, to act with no meaning whatsoever.
0:42:15 And the beautiful thing about that is as you explore that sort of angle and there’s sort of a neuroscience perspective to this as well, is that if you really think about it, you’re saying, okay, so people invest in this purpose or in this purpose-seeking thing like religion with the idea that I’ll find payoff at the end.
0:42:17 Is that what you were saying earlier?
0:42:18 I’m saying something a bit different.
0:42:26 What I was going to go on to say is to point out – and bear in mind, this comes from a part of Pascal’s Pensee, which is titled Man Without God.
0:42:28 You know, he goes on to discuss man with God.
0:42:35 But I look at the development of the human species and our particular proclivities.
0:42:37 Lewis makes this argument from desire that you mentioned.
0:42:39 Why do we have a desire for food?
0:42:42 Well, because there is actually food to have.
0:42:47 The evolutionary biologist says the reason that we develop hunger is because of those who didn’t died.
0:42:51 And if you don’t have some sense of hunger, you’re not going to seek out food and you will die.
0:42:56 And so it just so happens that those who develop this feeling of hunger will be more likely to survive.
0:42:58 And therefore, hunger is a part of our human condition.
0:43:01 Well, such is meaning.
0:43:06 If you have two isolated communities, one of whom says, I just don’t care.
0:43:07 Whatever, man.
0:43:08 No interest in having children.
0:43:13 No interest in building societies, legal systems, constitutions, whatever the case.
0:43:14 Moral systems.
0:43:14 None of them.
0:43:15 They just don’t care.
0:43:18 They’re not even going to have children.
0:43:19 That society will die out.
0:43:26 Another society, which just so happens to perhaps delusion, like in an exercise of delusion, just develop this inexplicable feeling.
0:43:34 And of course, this evolves over time and starts with essentially the kind of random mutation of ideas that works on the genetic level in evolution.
0:43:37 They call it memetics when it’s ideas rather than genes.
0:43:48 The society which just ends up developing this idea that actually, I can’t quite explain why, but I just have this drive towards building a society and engaging in legal justice and moral systems.
0:43:50 They’re just more likely to survive.
0:43:58 So we end up with this sense, this drive within us that we can’t explain and yet we have.
0:44:01 So imagine for the majority of our evolutionary history what it was like.
0:44:06 Every single day you woke up and you did not know if you were going to have a roof over your head.
0:44:07 You didn’t know if you were going to have food to eat.
0:44:09 You had to go out and you had to hunt it.
0:44:10 You had to go and find it.
0:44:12 Every single day, the game reset.
0:44:23 And so I would imagine that those lives were probably quite meaningful, at least in the sense that I don’t think there will have been many existential crises on a day-to-day because the purpose was quite clear.
0:44:29 And like Pascal’s Gambler, they had a task that they think will fulfill them when they get it and they don’t know whether it’s going to be fulfilled.
0:44:31 So what’s happened today?
0:44:35 Well, now we’ve been given the money without the game.
0:44:36 We’ve got houses.
0:44:37 We’ve got food.
0:44:42 We can go next door and get some water, get some food from all over the planet.
0:44:44 You know, like that’s it.
0:44:45 You’ve got the money without the game.
0:44:50 So what do people do in the modern situation when they find that their life is a bit meaningless?
0:44:53 They start intentionally doing things which are difficult.
0:44:55 They start doing ice baths.
0:44:56 They start exercising.
0:45:04 They start going into a room just to physically exert themselves in order to sort of build muscle and whatnot, like on purpose, for its own sake.
0:45:07 Because today we’ve got the money without the game.
0:45:11 So people are going out and seeking the game without the money.
0:45:12 They’re going and doing the ice baths in the gym.
0:45:14 But it’s a truly meaningful life.
0:45:19 It’s one in which you are playing the game in the service of getting the goal.
0:45:24 That is why I think that, you know, literally just seeking out those things.
0:45:26 I think that there’s a reason why they have a psychological impact.
0:45:32 It’s not as simple as just like, oh, well, if you go to the gym, you know, it releases endorphins and makes you feel good.
0:45:33 It’s like, let’s think a bit deeper than that.
0:45:34 What’s actually going on?
0:45:37 People are seeking out the game without the money.
0:45:43 Crucially, I’ve talked about this as a death-denying pursuit, right?
0:45:51 The idea that the things that you engage in here, at least in terms of grand projects like religion and society, are, even if just subconsciously, an exercise in the denial of death.
0:45:52 What would that mean?
0:46:07 It means that if you encounter other communities, if you encounter other traditions who just by their mere existence threatens the truth of your claims, those traditions subconsciously represent death.
0:46:08 They represent nihilism.
0:46:23 So what happens in a society that develops the kind of telecommunication technology whereby every single day you open your phone and you are addicted to a process of scrolling through every seven seconds a new person with new ideas, with different beliefs from all over the world?
0:46:28 Do you think that might have something to do with the meaning crisis that we find ourselves in?
0:46:33 We’re told that what’s happened is that people stopped believing in God and now they’re all depressed and upset and nihilistic.
0:46:34 That’s far too simple.
0:47:02 You don’t think it might have something to do with the fundamentally revolutionary change to our society that has been brought about specifically by telecommunication, by the ability to oftentimes unintentionally and non-consensually be confronted with traditions and people from halfway across the world that just remind you every single day, zing, zing, zing, every single day, that your truth is not the only truth.
0:47:12 That the transcendence that you’ve said that the transcendence that you’ve placed your trust in is completely subjective and personal and that someone over there believes something totally different and seems to be living just the same kind of happy life.
0:47:16 That, I think, is why people are struggling so much.
0:47:19 It’s not just because they’re atheists now.
0:47:20 I have a lot to say about this.
0:47:21 I’ll try to keep it compact.
0:47:26 By the way, just – we are aware of all kinds of different options for us spiritually.
0:47:27 Yes.
0:47:32 That doesn’t necessarily suggest that none of the options are actually accurate.
0:47:32 I agree.
0:47:33 Whether they are – okay.
0:47:34 I’m making a psychological case.
0:47:42 So there seems to be an implication there and this is what creates kind of the angst because all we have is our own personal subjective point of view.
0:47:44 I think that’s why people experience that.
0:47:50 Now, of course, as a matter of truth, you could say, for example, yourself, you could say, yes, I’m constantly confronted by different religious traditions.
0:47:52 But I believe that Christianity is true.
0:47:53 I think it has the best evidence and whatnot.
0:47:56 This is even true even in the scientific realm.
0:48:03 You have all kinds of different ideas but no one wants to say just because there are so many different ideas to explain things that nobody can be correct.
0:48:07 Which is why what I’m saying is insensitive to the truth or falsity of any of the traditions.
0:48:09 What I’m saying is –
0:48:09 Okay.
0:48:10 That’s good because I want to go to that next.
0:48:17 As an explanation as for the psychological phenomenon, the literal feeling that people have.
0:48:21 Because likewise, you would say that there is a meaning crisis maybe.
0:48:26 You would say that lots of – the statistics we just heard, you would say lots of people, you know, don’t feel meaning in their life.
0:48:28 And you’d want to offer an explanation for why that’s the case.
0:48:30 You think their lives are meaningful, right?
0:48:33 You think that all of those people who say my life has no meaning, they’re wrong.
0:48:35 Their lives actually do have meaning.
0:48:35 Is that what you think?
0:48:38 Well, this was the subject of response.
0:48:40 They feel like they don’t have meaning.
0:48:42 But they were made for a purpose.
0:48:47 If they’re not in touch with that meaning and purpose, then they’re going to feel bereft and adrift.
0:48:49 They believe there really is a purpose for their life.
0:48:51 But subjectively, they haven’t either found it or they don’t feel it.
0:49:00 What I’m doing is I’m offering a psychological explanation for why they don’t feel it, which is completely insensitive to whether or not there’s a truth of the matter.
0:49:04 I’m so glad you put it that way because this is exactly my point.
0:49:05 I don’t want anybody to miss it.
0:49:09 We’re really offering two different pictures of reality here, okay?
0:49:11 People have to ask themselves two questions, I think.
0:49:17 One is they reflect on their own personal awareness of the need for meaning and significance.
0:49:25 Does it seem to them that this is just a psychological thing that people can satisfy in all kinds of different ways depending on the individual?
0:49:34 Or does it seem to them I’m asking these questions because I suspect there is a truth about life that might be discovered, okay?
0:49:35 That’s the first question.
0:49:43 And I think most people’s awareness of this is that there’s something transcendent, something bigger than them, okay?
0:49:47 And any kind of naturalistic explanation is not going to ultimately satisfy that.
0:49:58 The other thing is, is there any reason to believe that there is a transcendent reality, that God exists, that souls exist, that there is an objective morality that guides our life.
0:50:04 And if we’re living virtuously, that’s going to be satisfying even if we don’t believe in God or not.
0:50:06 Those are the two things at stake here, you know?
0:50:13 And now this description, the story of reality I just described that I hold to, it seems to me completely coherent.
0:50:26 Maybe not true, but it certainly is coherent that if there is a God who made us for himself and places eternity in our hearts that we’re going to yearn for that and made the way for us to live and they’re going to find good ways to live as opposed to unsatisfying ways to live.
0:50:27 That makes sense.
0:50:37 It doesn’t make any sense to me at all to say that my molecules are moving in a certain way to create in my conscious mind what Darwinism cannot offer an explanation for.
0:50:38 It hasn’t.
0:50:43 That’s why Daniel Dennett said consciousness is an illusion, you know, because he couldn’t do anything with it.
0:50:52 Thomas Nagel wrote his book, Mind the Cosmos, you’re familiar with this, I’m sure, you know, why the neo-Darwinian materialistic view of the world is almost certainly false.
0:50:57 And he’s an atheist, for goodness sake, because he can’t explain consciousness, not in a Darwinian way.
0:51:13 So how is it that this mystery of consciousness, which contains propositional thoughts, ideas, and purposes, if consciousness can’t be explained in a Darwinian way, how can some characterization of molecules in motion accomplish that same end?
0:51:14 That’s my concern.
0:51:17 That’s why I’m not convinced at all about the naturalistic one.
0:51:19 And this one seems so much more plausible.
0:51:25 What you’re raising is the problem of consciousness, which is, I think, a new question, but an important one.
0:51:34 I wanted to point out earlier that when I gave an explanation as to why people feel a lack of meaning, and you said that has no bearing on truth, I think that’s –
0:51:35 You admitted that too at the end there.
0:51:37 I don’t admit it.
0:51:38 I assert it.
0:51:39 Of course that’s the case.
0:51:41 You affirmed you weren’t making the case.
0:51:54 In the same way that if somebody says that, like, if you’re a Christian and you say the reason everyone’s so depressed is because society has become atheistic, somebody could say, well, yeah, I mean, that might be the case, but that doesn’t mean atheism is false.
0:51:56 It might be that it is true and just depressing, right?
0:51:57 Of course.
0:51:59 Like, the question – if we’re discussing –
0:52:00 There are alternate explanations.
0:52:07 If you want to know why somebody feels a particular way psychologically, you can offer an explanation which has absolutely nothing to do with the truth or falsity of a worldview.
0:52:13 You can then separately discuss the truth or falsity of a worldview, which you’ve then gone on to do with specific reference to the problem of consciousness.
0:52:19 It thinks it has absolutely nothing or it can be experienced apart from the issue of worldview.
0:52:30 I’m saying that if you’re literally just trying – I mean, if the question I’m asked is why do people perceive a lack of meaning in their life, that’s just a question about their psychological constitution.
0:52:33 That’s just – that’s literally a question about why they feel a particular way.
0:52:44 So if a person was a total nihilist, didn’t believe in anything, was important, and then they were depressed and even suicidal, would you say there wasn’t a link between that worldview and their feelings?
0:52:45 Yes, there is.
0:52:49 But what I’m saying is that the link between that worldview and their feeling has nothing to do with the truth of the worldview.
0:52:50 You see what I’m saying?
0:52:52 It doesn’t – nihilism can be true.
0:52:53 Nihilism can be false.
0:52:53 Right.
0:52:56 Nihilism can be an unintelligible concept.
0:53:00 It can still be the case that that person’s conviction is making them depressed.
0:53:00 I agree.
0:53:05 In the same way that somebody could be a Christian and that makes them really happy, that doesn’t mean Christianity is true.
0:53:07 Someone can become a Christian and become really depressed.
0:53:09 That doesn’t mean that Christianity is false.
0:53:11 What I’m trying to point out, it is just trivially true.
0:53:16 So I still want to try to understand a little bit about what you’re saying.
0:53:16 Okay.
0:53:18 Because I don’t fully follow.
0:53:18 Fine.
0:53:25 And I think that the reason I’m – I feel way more confident in what you’re saying is because –
0:53:26 Christ is pulling at you.
0:53:27 A hundred percent.
0:53:27 Yeah.
0:53:31 So I think Christ – we both talk to Christ.
0:53:32 So like we’re good on that.
0:53:33 Like I know where he’s coming from.
0:53:36 So a couple of things that I’m –
0:53:37 I talk to Christ too, you know.
0:53:37 Awesome.
0:53:38 Does he talk back?
0:53:39 He does not fall back.
0:53:39 Yeah.
0:53:40 That’s tricky.
0:53:41 We can talk about how to get you there.
0:53:44 One person said just read the Gospels aloud.
0:53:46 So a couple of things –
0:53:47 I’ve done that a few times.
0:53:49 So a couple of things that I’m curious about.
0:53:49 Yes.
0:53:55 One is – so I’m noticing that you’re – I’m trying to understand where – so I love
0:53:59 the way you’re sallying forth to grapple with this problem of purpose.
0:54:04 You do a beautiful job of sort of talking about like, okay, what’s the truth?
0:54:08 And then there’s this psychological perspective.
0:54:11 And I want to just try to understand this.
0:54:16 So are you of the mind that from a psychological perspective you can wake up one day and feel
0:54:22 like you have purpose but that doesn’t necessarily talk about purpose transcendentally?
0:54:22 Capital P.
0:54:25 I’m saying that doesn’t talk about the truth of your belief.
0:54:26 Okay.
0:54:33 So for example, you could believe that your children are about to die and that suddenly
0:54:35 your life feels really meaningless and really purposeless.
0:54:37 It could be completely false.
0:54:38 You could have been like misled.
0:54:39 Someone could lie to you.
0:54:43 But like what I’m saying is the psychological explanation for why you feel a particular way
0:54:46 has nothing to do with the truth of the thing that you believe that’s making you
0:54:47 feel that way.
0:54:47 Gotcha.
0:54:48 Okay.
0:54:55 So what I’m curious about is when you are exploring purpose, are you exploring it from
0:54:58 are you trying to find the answer at the top?
0:54:59 Like what is the truth of purpose?
0:55:05 Or are you focused on the subjective experience of purpose?
0:55:07 Depends on the context.
0:55:12 If you’re asking, I mean, we were talking literally about a psychological explanation for why people
0:55:13 feel a particular way.
0:55:15 You know, is it due to a decline in religion, that kind of stuff.
0:55:16 In that case, it’s subjective.
0:55:17 It’s individuals.
0:55:17 Yeah.
0:55:18 Yeah.
0:55:23 So do you think that the top one can be answered?
0:55:26 The top one is in like their being?
0:55:28 Their being purpose, right?
0:55:30 So that’s not subjective at all.
0:55:32 So what does that mean, their being purpose?
0:55:37 Because for me, that looks like some kind of reason to act or to be that is not contingent
0:55:39 on some other fact.
0:55:42 Just to be clear, to make clear for the listener, I think you hear what I’m saying.
0:55:47 But like suppose you woke up and you were a Christian and that brought you meaning.
0:55:52 What I’m saying is that subjective sense of meaning that you get from Christianity has no bearing
0:55:54 on the truth or falsity of Christianity.
0:55:55 Gotcha.
0:55:55 Right?
0:55:56 Right.
0:56:01 So what I’m curious about is, so what I’m curious about is, in your opinion, and if you don’t have one, that’s totally fine.
0:56:09 You know, do you think that, so sure, there’s a subjective experience which doesn’t speak to truth, right?
0:56:11 It’s just a subjective experience.
0:56:15 Do you think that there is some way to grapple with that truth?
0:56:17 What, the truth of Christianity or something?
0:56:18 Absolutely.
0:56:20 The truth of purpose.
0:56:22 We’re shifting here, right?
0:56:22 Okay.
0:56:23 Because what I’m saying is…
0:56:24 Let me shift.
0:56:25 I want to do that.
0:56:26 So then I’m going to go back.
0:56:28 That’s why I, maybe I’m not understanding your question.
0:56:40 All I’m saying is that if you feel a subjective sense of purpose from Proposition P, like, the fact that you feel purpose from that does not have any bearing on the truth in P.
0:56:44 And then you just ask, but is there a way to discuss whether P is true?
0:56:45 Well, yeah.
0:56:50 Like, so if Proposition P is Christianity, then yeah, we can talk about the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus or something.
0:56:50 Gotcha.
0:56:51 Gotcha.
0:56:56 I’m not trying to reach into some mystical capital P purpose realm.
0:56:57 Gotcha.
0:56:57 So, right.
0:56:59 So, and I think that’s so helpful.
0:57:00 Thank you so much.
0:57:01 Okay.
0:57:11 So, that’s really helpful for me because then you, I want to go back to something you said earlier about, you know, cell phones and we’re scrolling on cell phones and things like that.
0:57:13 And we have this, like, this worldview.
0:57:22 And then if we encounter a worldview that is different from ours, that could put us into some form of crisis or difficulty and we’re getting bombarded by all of these things.
0:57:29 And so, what that means is that the individual, when they wake up in the morning and they scroll through their phone, right?
0:57:32 We’re not talking about whether the Proposition P is true or not.
0:57:37 Their subjective experience is like I have no meaning and I have no purpose in life, right?
0:57:44 And so, you posited one mechanism, which I think is a completely valid mechanism, is a philosophical mechanism.
0:57:48 But we have a lot of neuroscience mechanisms that support what you’re saying.
0:58:03 So, and this is where I think that we kind of – I’m going to sort of restate that what my experience of this stuff has been because I’m not a philosopher is I don’t really know too well how to contend with whether Proposition P is true or not.
0:58:04 That’s why I was asking.
0:58:06 And it’s not that you weren’t being clear.
0:58:09 It’s that I’m just ignorant of how philosophy works.
0:58:13 And so, that’s why I was kind of asking like, you know, can you do that?
0:58:21 So, that’s where – also where like I’m kind of coming from is that we have this crisis that has high suicidality, high addiction rates.
0:58:27 People left the church in big ways and then we’re sort of left with like, okay, how do we navigate this?
0:58:37 And that’s where I think if we look at a lot of this, the influences on society, we see that there’s profound neurological influences.
0:58:50 And what I sort of found is when I was working especially with like patients with trauma, that there is a set of things that is happening in the world around them that induce certain changes to their – how they experience the world.
0:58:57 So, a really good example of this is if you want to find your purpose in life, you should reduce your level of alexithymia.
0:59:02 So, alexithymia is the inability to tell what you are emotionally feeling.
0:59:11 And if we look at the influence of things like cell phones, what they’re doing is they’re suppressing the parts of our brain that have – that experience negative emotions.
0:59:13 Sometimes they provoke negative emotions.
0:59:14 Sometimes they suppress negative emotions.
0:59:20 And so, if you start to be able to feel more, right?
0:59:27 So, this is literally shutting down the parts of our brain that give us an internal sense of what we feel.
0:59:38 And so, as you shut down your ability to detect what you are feeling on the inside, that correlates with your not having a detection of purpose on the inside.
0:59:42 So, I think that this is – you asked the question, why is this happening?
0:59:53 I think we’re disabling – and I was working with people with trauma and sort of figured out a sequence of things that is based on the literature that involves things like reducing your alexithymia.
0:59:56 Another big part is managing your ego.
1:00:04 So, I think this relationship with God thing is a really, really, really great example of like if you ask what is the mechanism of a relationship with God.
1:00:07 So, we as human beings tend to be like I’m here.
1:00:13 But then as you relate to other people around you, your sense of identity changes.
1:00:19 And when you relate to something that is transcendent – I know that that’s a scary word and I don’t know exactly what that word means.
1:00:28 But as you relate to something that is really big up here, that has noticeable effects on your default mode network, your sense of self.
1:00:38 And as your default mode network no longer becomes hyperactive, the more hyperactive your default mode network is, the more likely I think you are to be like nihilistic, to have a pessimistic worldview.
1:00:44 As we start to make those changes, then people start to feel a sense of purpose.
1:00:46 They start to feel a sense of connection.
1:00:58 And then the last kind of really interesting data which we can go into is psychedelics, which is really, really fascinating because this allows us to test subjective experience and the effect of subjective experience on a person.
1:00:59 Is this an opportunity?
1:01:00 Please.
1:01:14 I’m just concerned that you might have overstated something, maybe reflecting back something you thought I was saying and I was making the case about the genetic fallacy and just because a person has a motivation to believe something doesn’t necessarily mean that that thing is true or have a subjective experience.
1:01:16 I think it goes a little further than that though.
1:01:22 If you went to the doctor and you weren’t feeling well and the doctor gave you a pill and then you went home and you took the pill, then you felt better.
1:01:30 I think it would be appropriate for you to say, well, that pill, taking that pill, going to that doctor had something to do with my experience that I’m having right now.
1:01:30 Oh, yeah.
1:01:44 I think – this is why I think it might have unintentionally been an overstatement on your part because I think just like your friend, Stephen, who in Dubai all of a sudden became a Christian, everything changed, OK?
1:01:55 Well, I guess you could say the change of life isn’t maybe knock down, drag down proof that what he believes now is actually true, big P, big T.
1:01:57 That like Jesus rose from the dead.
1:01:58 But it seems to be – pardon me?
1:01:59 That like Jesus rose from the dead.
1:02:02 It’s got no bear on whether that’s true or not.
1:02:04 Well, I’m speaking of a different thing right now.
1:02:08 I’m thinking about the experience now with God that he’s having.
1:02:12 If he’s having this changed life, this is evidential.
1:02:20 This lends credibility to the belief system that he’s now adopted because it created this particular significant change in his life.
1:02:27 It may not be proof and that word is really an oozy-goosy word just how to pin down.
1:02:29 But nevertheless, it still seems to be evidential.
1:02:37 It speaks to the legitimacy and accuracy and truthfulness of the belief system that produced this changed life.
1:02:38 That’s what I’m saying.
1:02:42 It’s only evidence that belief in that thing makes someone feel more fulfilled.
1:02:44 That’s the only thing it’s evidence of.
1:02:44 OK.
1:02:45 So this is where we differ.
1:02:47 Just like –
1:02:48 I’m with him on this one.
1:02:48 OK.
1:02:56 Just because a certain – you’re saying just because they believe it, this makes them better.
1:02:58 It doesn’t mean that the belief is actually sound.
1:03:00 Greg, I’ve got a good way of coming at this then.
1:03:01 This is where we differ.
1:03:02 That’s right.
1:03:14 If I had five friends and they all picked five different religions and they all felt the same thing that my friend did in Dubai where they all felt better for it, is that evidential that all five religions are true?
1:03:17 Well, see, I don’t actually think it works that way.
1:03:20 You can speculate and say and offer that illustration.
1:03:22 But I don’t think it actually works that way.
1:03:29 I think that universally the experience of Christians is very, very quantifiable.
1:03:38 In terms of transformed lives, and this is one of the reasons that these transformed lives lend credibility to the belief system itself.
1:03:50 So in that scenario where one of my friends turns to Islam, one of my friends turns to Christianity, et cetera, et cetera, the only experience that’s evidential of truth is the Christians.
1:03:53 Well, I think you have to look at every individual thing, all right?
1:03:59 And here’s my suspicion, and I haven’t quantified this across the board, all right?
1:04:05 Different people have different experiences by engaging different religious belief traditions, whatever.
1:04:17 But insofar as anybody’s life is significantly altered by that thing, this to me is evidence that something is going on here than merely the belief.
1:04:28 If it’s just the belief, you’re back to Marx again and the opiate of the people, you know, that would be Carl, not Groucho, although it’s not clear that anybody knows who those two people are anymore.
1:04:38 It sounds as though, you know, if I lied to somebody on a cruel prank and I told them that – say they’re really struggling with money.
1:04:40 They’re really, really suffering for it.
1:04:46 And they feel – and they have these psychological effects of feeling that life is meaningless, they want to kill themselves, whatever it is, because they just cannot keep living.
1:04:55 And I tell them, good news, you’ve won the lottery, you’ve won a million pounds, and suddenly the weight is lifted, the joy is brought.
1:04:58 Of course, money isn’t sufficient for bringing about meaning in life, but this person is.
1:05:00 But I’ve lied to them.
1:05:12 Like the fact that they feel this immense sense of meaning from a belief that they’ve adopted bears absolutely no evidence on whether it’s true that they’ve won a million pounds.
1:05:18 I’m just saying that to divorce all results from belief systems is a mistake.
1:05:18 I don’t want to do that.
1:05:20 Because I think there can be a connection there.
1:05:30 Just because you can mislead somebody by telling them a lie and they can experience something emotionally doesn’t mean that the other person who is experiencing something transcendent in their emotions.
1:05:36 And by the way, for Christians, it’s not just a high because Christianity is not a continuous high.
1:05:49 Even people who are suffering terribly as Christians in persecution, read Fox’s Book of Martyrs, still have this strong sense of value, purpose, and security, even so.
1:05:52 I’m just saying there’s an evidential relationship between those.
1:05:57 It’s not enough to just simply dismiss it because you can tell a lie and someone could have the same kind of feeling.
1:06:04 I’m even happy to say that, like, I don’t know if this is true, but suppose it were just the case that only Christianity brought about this positive effect.
1:06:08 Suppose we just discovered that everybody who claimed to feel meaning, it just didn’t compare.
1:06:09 That’s not what I’m saying.
1:06:11 But suppose that were the case.
1:06:25 Even if there was something really special about Christianity that gave some evidential credence to something specific about Christianity that’s true about Christianity, that it particularly infuses life with meaning, I still think it just has nothing to do with the truth of Christianity as a worldview.
1:06:30 I mean, Christianity hinges on the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus, right?
1:06:44 And so the best way of explaining this is to say that if your friend from Dubai starts going to church and they start feeling really like meaning, like start experiencing a lot of meaning in their life, that has absolutely no evidential bearing on whether Jesus rose from the dead.
1:06:55 And if Christianity as a proposition essentially is the resurrection of Jesus and this feeling that your friend had has no evidential bearing on the resurrection of Jesus, then the feeling that your friend had had no evidential bearing on Christianity.
1:07:00 Well, it turns out that Christianity has multiple factors of support and evidence.
1:07:10 Crucial, obviously, the crux, one might say, is the resurrection of Christ, death and resurrection because of the theological significance of that is in the whole system, all right?
1:07:12 But there are lots of other things, too, that I’m bearing.
1:07:19 And actually, I think there are people who have become Christians without having a robust understanding even of the resurrection or that.
1:07:31 So even though theologically that is the crux, I agree, it doesn’t mean that for subjectively every person who enters in a relationship with Christ has all of that in place immediately.
1:07:44 I’m really interested to understand, for my friend in Dubai, if he came to you and he was your friend in Dubai and he said, my life is lacking meaning, I can’t get out of bed anymore, what would you prescribe him?
1:07:48 What would you recommend, what would you suggest, as he’s your friend?
1:07:52 It’s hard to know without knowing that friend.
1:08:00 But if it seemed to me like going to church or reading the Gospels might provide that for him, then I’d probably recommend that he did that.
1:08:10 But I think that literally the subjective feeling of meaning is usually tied up in the identification of something that transcends your individual self.
1:08:19 And I think whatever is the most plausible course of action for that person to engage in something like that would be what I would recommend for them.
1:08:26 If they’re maybe that maybe they’re not particularly interested in religion, I’d recommend that they read some philosophy of mind and try to understand the nature of consciousness.
1:08:33 I might recommend, depending on who they are, that they take a psychedelic drug and try to experience something which cannot be put into words.
1:08:45 Because a lot of the time when you experience something like an ego death and you might realize that the individuated self is an illusion and that these cliches that keep cropping up when someone does psychedelics.
1:08:49 And I actually think that the problem of consciousness is absolutely crucial to this.
1:09:03 I mean, I think the most plausible account of consciousness implies that consciousness is something which is sort of received by the biological organism rather than produced by it.
1:09:06 Because I agree with you that you can’t just put a bunch of molecules together and get consciousness.
1:09:08 That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
1:09:18 But it’s interesting that some of our best scientific evidence is suggesting the fact not that the brain produces consciousness but that the brain inhibits and focuses and organizes consciousness.
1:09:19 It does not produce it.
1:09:20 Yeah.
1:09:22 So I love your answer.
1:09:25 So you were saying, you know, depending on the person, you can do different things.
1:09:26 You can read philosophy of mind.
1:09:27 I’d recommend them to do that, in other words.
1:09:28 Psychedelics.
1:09:29 Look at that, depending on who they are.
1:09:31 You know, read the gospels.
1:09:42 So I think what’s interesting is that when you, you know, when Stephen gives the concrete example of like if my friend comes to you who’s had this religious awakening or prior to religious awakening, what would you recommend to them?
1:09:50 And I think what’s really interesting is basically all of the answers that you said I think can map onto mechanism.
1:09:52 And I’d just love to talk about that for a second.
1:09:55 So the first thing is, you know, you asked me at the beginning, am I religious?
1:10:03 I think here’s my understanding of – and we were talking a little bit about, you know, people can have this subjective feeling of religion.
1:10:05 What is the relationship to that thing being true?
1:10:07 So here’s what I’ve sort of observed.
1:10:10 I don’t know if you all have ever been to like a really great cathedral.
1:10:11 Oh, yeah.
1:10:18 But like, you know, if you go to a great cathedral, you don’t have to be Christian to be awe-inspired by what you see.
1:10:19 Sure.
1:10:34 So when I look at the project of religion, which is a little bit different from spirituality, one of the things that I’ve observed is that religion is a series of structures to evoke a personal experience.
1:10:39 So the whole point of reading the Gospels is fingers crossed, and we’ll get to how to optimize that.
1:10:48 Fingers crossed if you read the Gospels enough or you go to church enough or you pray enough, if you keep on talking to Christ, one day he’ll start talking back.
1:10:53 But I think the really interesting thing is if you struggle with purpose, you can read the Gospels.
1:11:06 If you go into religion – and I think what’s changed now is that we have so much science to understand the mechanism through which religious practices evoke subjective experience.
1:11:17 So I can go to church until – for my whole life, but until I have that relationship with God, that is a subjective experience that is evoked by the sort of structure of the religious practice.
1:11:20 So that is absolutely one thing you can do.
1:11:31 I think the cool thing is that the problem with reading the Gospels, as I can clearly see that you’ve done, and, you know, I see the striving for religion in you.
1:11:33 Like you’re like you want to have that, right?
1:11:36 Like you want to know like what are these people actually kind of talking about?
1:11:45 I could be wrong there, but I see this beautiful striving that you’re like – you’re trying really hard to figure this stuff out, which is just awesome to see.
1:12:01 I think though that if we kind of look at it, and you mentioned kind of psychedelics as well, and I think psychedelics is really interesting because we know that – so if you take someone who has treatment refractory depression or someone who has PTSD and you give them a psychedelic, the psychedelic is not healing.
1:12:06 What is healing is specifically whether they have an ego death experience.
1:12:10 So if I see colors and things like that, that doesn’t solve things.
1:12:14 But the ego death experience is what correlates with clinical improvement.
1:12:22 So psychedelics are a good way to evoke a subjective experience, right?
1:12:24 So we know that there are a couple of pieces.
1:12:32 And when I worked with people – so one of the things that we know is that when you experience trauma, it shatters your meaning of life.
1:12:33 Yes.
1:12:41 And so working a lot with people with trauma – and this is something that I kind of laid out in terms of like making a guide about it.
1:12:47 But what I realized is that there’s a set of things that you can do relatively sequentially to get your meaning back.
1:12:57 And so I think the cool thing about like, you know, reading the gospels or psychedelics or things like that is those each have some fingers crossed change in you.
1:13:13 But the cool thing is like if you start with something called alexithymia, so as long as you are like using a bunch of substances, as long as you are not able to detect what is going on inside you, that is a fundamental prerequisite of the subjective experience of meaning.
1:13:18 The second step to that is to go through some stuff around ego.
1:13:27 So this is like the other like big thing that we try to focus on is like when your default mode network is hyperactive, this is the part of your brain that gives you a sense of who you are.
1:13:30 Hyperactive default mode networks lead to depression.
1:13:37 Hyperactive default mode networks also lead to some degree of like existential depression.
1:13:41 And this is where so many of my patients get tripped up when they start reading philosophy.
1:13:45 This isn’t against philosophy, but remember, this is happening in a subjective mind.
1:13:56 If you’re not careful, what we know is that philosophy can turn into intellectualizing, that there is a psychological defense where you start looking at theoretical stuff.
1:14:01 And it sort of shapes the way that your mind functions and it starts to become maladaptive.
1:14:03 What does that mean in simple terms?
1:14:10 So people, if you have a problem in life, you can think about it a lot.
1:14:11 You can read about it a lot.
1:14:19 There are a lot of people that I’ve worked with that just go on watching podcasts, like chain watching podcasts and reading books and things like that.
1:14:19 Right.
1:14:21 But their life never changes.
1:14:21 Yes.
1:14:33 So this is where – so there’s a certain amount of like, you know, learning how to ground yourself in your experience, which involves reducing alexithymia, which involves dissolving your ego.
1:14:38 And this is another really, really important thing that I think we find in people who have purpose.
1:14:53 Because if we go back to the earlier example of the person who 30 days after they die, the world ends, that person, if they decide to still write the book, I think that there is a certain egoless involved in that.
1:14:53 Right?
1:14:54 I’m doing it for the sake of the work.
1:14:56 It’s not for the benefit of humanity.
1:14:57 It’s not for some transcendent purpose.
1:14:59 It’s not for something that goes beyond my death.
1:15:01 Actually, it’s the opposite.
1:15:06 I am doing this thing here and now just for its own sake.
1:15:13 And so preparing for this podcast, I actually texted and called a couple of my former patients.
1:15:15 These are people that I haven’t seen in three to five years.
1:15:16 And I just asked them.
1:15:19 I was like, hey, bro, do you have purpose?
1:15:20 Tell me what it is.
1:15:25 And I was stunned by how their answers are not about what happens after they die.
1:15:29 They’re very like, I’m just here for the flow of it.
1:15:29 Right?
1:15:32 My purpose in life is to experience what life has to offer.
1:15:33 That’s it.
1:15:35 It’s not about something beyond you.
1:15:42 And I think this is where you’re spot on, Alex, that a lot of people deal with the fear
1:15:45 of death by wanting to live past it.
1:15:49 But that is actually, that’s the default mechanism that we use.
1:15:51 But that is actually ego driven, right?
1:15:54 I want to exist beyond when I die.
1:15:57 And so that gives people some sense of purpose.
1:16:08 But I think the deepest sense of purpose actually comes without that, comes from being able to make paper clips every day and being content with that exercise.
1:16:12 So you’re describing Sisyphus being happy is what you’re doing.
1:16:13 Yes.
1:16:14 So Sisyphus can be happy.
1:16:14 Yeah.
1:16:16 I mean, that, that, and that’s.
1:16:19 It explains Sisyphus for those that don’t know about the guy pushing the rock up the hill.
1:16:24 Camus, who is an existentialist, even though he doesn’t call himself an existentialist.
1:16:31 He founds this school known as absurdism, which is a word I used earlier too.
1:16:42 And he, he tries to describe the absurdist condition of one in which you have all of these desires about the world, but the world literally just can’t fulfill them.
1:16:43 You’re looking for meaning.
1:16:44 It’s not there.
1:16:48 It literally, your desire and the real world are in conflict.
1:16:51 And he calls this, the realization of this, absurdity.
1:17:03 And he writes this, this short treatise called the myth of Sisyphus, which is based on an actual ancient myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned by the gods as punishment to roll a boulder up a hill.
1:17:07 And when it gets to the top, it rolls back down again.
1:17:11 And he goes back down and he pushes the boulder up to the top of the hill.
1:17:13 And he does that over and over again for eternity.
1:17:18 The real torture of this is not so much the suffering of the pushing of the boulder.
1:17:18 There’s that.
1:17:21 But the suffering in the knowledge that it’s meaningless.
1:17:24 And that, that describes the absurdist condition.
1:17:35 And Albert Camus tries to respond to this by imagining Sisyphus being happy and essentially as an act of rebellion against this condition, just getting on with it anyway and being okay with it.
1:17:37 I’ve never been fulfilled by this.
1:17:42 I’ve, I’ve, I’ve sort of always thought that this may literally, and I understand that there are people who could do that.
1:17:43 There are people who could write the book.
1:17:50 And I, I thought of Sisyphus when you said the person who writes the book anyway, because it almost feels like an act of rebellion.
1:17:52 Because it’s not, you didn’t just say they still write the book.
1:17:54 You said they write the book anyway.
1:17:57 They do it despite, they do it almost in protest of this condition.
1:18:03 Some people can do that, but I think that, that, that is probably a sort of psychological cope.
1:18:05 No, no, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s not a cope.
1:18:06 It’s a mechanism.
1:18:08 Well, I’m saying I think it’s a cope.
1:18:12 I think that, I think that it’s, that it’s not grounded in, in anything rational.
1:18:15 I don’t know if it’s grounded in anything rational.
1:18:17 It’s absolutely grounded in something empirical.
1:18:18 Sure.
1:18:23 But like, again, you can empirically, like, explain exactly why somebody’s brain is doing what it’s doing.
1:18:29 But that doesn’t mean that, that there’s any rationality or truth in the thing that their brain believes.
1:18:30 Sure.
1:18:31 Right.
1:18:48 So, but I think this goes back to the issue of whether there’s capital P, but I think that you can, you can observe the world and you can make observations and you can, I don’t know what your relation to scientific observations and truth is, whether those things are connected or not.
1:18:56 But I think that we know actually there, there, there are multiple psychological mechanisms, some of which are copes and some of which are not copes.
1:19:01 I suppose I mean like a philosophical, I mean like it’s, it’s not, I think it’s untrue.
1:19:08 I think that the person who is content in such a condition is almost by definition delusory.
1:19:09 What does delusory mean?
1:19:12 Like under the influence of a delusion.
1:19:19 I think that it is not a happiness inducing condition to be Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the mountain.
1:19:19 Yeah.
1:19:22 So, so this is where I, I think the data is actually against that.
1:19:31 So, what the data shows is that it is your attitude towards the circumstances of your life that determines your happiness or your lack of happiness.
1:19:33 Well, someone can be in a happy delusion.
1:19:36 In fact, that’s why most people suffer from delusions because it makes them happy.
1:19:38 That’s not why most people suffer from delusions.
1:19:43 So, but do you, but you understand, you understand what I’m saying that like, like.
1:19:45 Yeah, I understand what you’re saying.
1:19:46 I just, I just think that it’s.
1:19:50 You can’t empirically show that something is not a delusion because it makes people happy.
1:19:51 Yeah.
1:19:59 So, so you can absolutely differentiate between a psychological cope and an attitude towards life that is not a cope.
1:20:02 And the reason you can differentiate that is because of what is underneath.
1:20:08 And people can be delusional, but they’re not necessarily delusional to make themselves happy.
1:20:10 In fact, quite the opposite.
1:20:16 So, we have diagnoses like schizophrenia of which one of them is having delusions.
1:20:25 And those delusions, generally speaking, the more schizophrenic and the stronger your delusions are, the more that inversely correlates with your happiness.
1:20:28 To be clear, I’m talking about like a philosophical delusion.
1:20:33 The question I want to get an answer to is this idea of the person who writes the book or pushes the boulder up the hill.
1:20:37 And can that person be, have a purposeful life?
1:20:37 Absolutely.
1:20:41 So, so this is where, this is what’s so confusing for people is that people think.
1:20:48 So, what Alex is saying, I think, is a really, really common representation of what people think about purpose.
1:20:51 My purpose is to make something that is greater than me.
1:20:55 My purpose is to have some meaning or impact in the world around me.
1:21:05 What we know is there’s a great example of this called self-determination theory, which is that if you ask people, if you look at people who have purpose, what you find is it’s not about anything transcendent.
1:21:07 Have purpose or have a sense of purpose?
1:21:08 Have a sense of purpose.
1:21:09 Okay?
1:21:10 We’re asking them subjectively.
1:21:10 Yeah.
1:21:11 Right?
1:21:13 So, if we’re like, you know, and that’s what I think.
1:21:19 And these people are less likely to be addicted to things, are more resilient, tend to be subjectively happier as well.
1:21:20 So, we’re talking about subjective, right?
1:21:23 What you find is that they have three things.
1:21:26 The first is that they have some degree of self-direction.
1:21:29 So, this is like, I choose to do something.
1:21:31 They’re not just taking it from life.
1:21:33 They are making choices.
1:21:37 And this is where people also get confused because they think, like, which choice is right?
1:21:39 That kind of thinking is actually irrelevant.
1:21:41 There isn’t a right choice or a wrong choice.
1:21:45 What correlates with your sense of direction is whether you make it or not.
1:21:48 So, you actually need to get away from the concept of right and wrong.
1:21:51 The second thing is that they need a stretching of their competence.
1:22:02 So, if you just take a bunch of people who are not being pushed and finding themselves grow, then their sense of direction or purpose will decrease.
1:22:05 And the third thing is a sense of relatedness.
1:22:13 So, there is something where I have to know who I am and have other people see that part of me.
1:22:29 And if you cultivate these three variables, then your purpose will empirically – and by empirical, what I mean is that we can measurably – we can literally measure people’s subjective experience in an objective way.
1:22:34 And so, like, these kinds of things, I think, can end up improving your purpose.
1:22:36 What are you measuring when you’re looking for –
1:22:39 Alex, I just would love to get your answer to this idea.
1:22:54 Can you – do you think the person who is pushing the boulder up the hill or is writing the book, even though the world’s about to end, can still genuinely live a subjectively – and by subjective, I mean in their opinion – purposeful life?
1:22:55 Yes.
1:22:56 Yeah, absolutely.
1:23:02 I think Sisyphus can be happy, but I think that’s not the attitude that I would have.
1:23:14 And I don’t, for myself, find it satisfying any analogy which is sufficiently similar to the Sisyphus condition that is – and the attempted solution is, well, just imagine Sisyphus happy.
1:23:17 That’s how he literally ends the myth of Sisyphus.
1:23:18 One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
1:23:21 And I can imagine him and say, you know, good for him.
1:23:27 Do you think you would be happier if you believed in Greg’s views of the world?
1:23:33 Almost certainly, but not because of Greg’s views, but because of the confidence and satisfaction that they bring.
1:23:41 I think I’d feel just as much meaning in my life if I was a convicted Muslim or were I a Jain or something like that.
1:23:43 I think I would find that fulfillment.
1:23:51 So the content of the theology has no bearing in your mind on the way a person experiences their life.
1:23:52 Of course it does.
1:23:53 Can you explain that specifically?
1:23:54 Content of the theology.
1:24:02 Well, the content – well, you talk about different religions and there’s – these different religions are – they cannot all be true as Alex has pointed out.
1:24:04 They have different content.
1:24:06 They say different things about human beings.
1:24:14 For example, the view that human beings are just an illusion.
1:24:16 The reality is illusion, maya, that kind of thing.
1:24:23 Well, that seems to me to convey a certain understanding to human beings about themselves and about the world.
1:24:30 If you have a view that human beings are significant individuals, this is going to convey a whole different experience that they have.
1:24:37 So in other words, the theology that they believe is true is going to affect their feelings and their experience.
1:24:44 This is what I was getting back at a little bit ago when I talked about the person whose life has been changed by becoming a Christian.
1:24:48 And these aren’t just what you explained to your friend.
1:24:50 These are not things that just happen here and there.
1:24:56 But there seems to be a very, very broad experience of this and a change that doesn’t depend on circumstances.
1:25:03 It’s because they adopt an understanding of the world that I think is an accurate understanding.
1:25:10 And this is why their emotions and their experience follows along because they’re choosing an accurate understanding of the world.
1:25:17 When you look at Jesus and the Gospels, I think it’s so interesting to me that people read the Gospels to be uplifted by the reading of it.
1:25:22 It seems that misses the point that Jesus is talking about the way the world is.
1:25:24 He’s teaching about the nature of reality.
1:25:26 He was a Torah-observant Jew.
1:25:27 He wasn’t a Hindu.
1:25:28 He wasn’t a Buddhist.
1:25:28 He was a Jew.
1:25:31 And he spoke in the context of that.
1:25:32 Okay.
1:25:43 So just to simply read the Gospels as if we’re going to read some nice things that people said to make me feel better is missing Jesus’ point when he’s trying to describe the nature of reality.
1:25:44 I don’t think that’s how the Gospels should be read.
1:25:45 But I do think –
1:25:45 One second.
1:25:47 I have a question for you on that.
1:25:48 It’s a personal question more than anything.
1:25:56 So I find myself in the same position as Alex where I think I’d be happier, all things considered, if I had an anchoring in a religion.
1:26:05 I think that’s like subjectively true that I’d be happier probably just because it would close a gap of some sort.
1:26:07 It would anchor me in some way.
1:26:08 Answer a question.
1:26:09 It would answer a question.
1:26:13 And then it would give me more of a structure to my decision-making.
1:26:14 Sure.
1:26:20 You know, it would mean that when I have moments of suffering, I’d have a solution to that moment of suffering.
1:26:29 So if my parents end up dying someday, which I’m sure they will, I will believe that they are still alive and they are somewhere and they’re fine, which will ease my suffering.
1:26:31 So I agree with Alex in that regard.
1:26:37 The problem I have is in order to adopt that view, I need some kind of – I need to believe it.
1:26:37 It’s true.
1:26:41 Like people aren’t very good at lying to themselves.
1:26:46 And also when you talk about my friend in Dubai has had this experience.
1:26:47 He now feels better.
1:26:55 He could have well felt better, I believe, if he had, you know, believed that Islam was true and become a Muslim.
1:27:00 So it’s the feeling itself people can get in a lot of ways.
1:27:04 I know people that actually would tell you that they feel better now that they’re out of the cult and they’re agnostic.
1:27:07 And the cult made them feel terrible.
1:27:08 Now they’re agnostic.
1:27:09 They feel better.
1:27:11 Does that mean agnosticism is truth?
1:27:15 So the presumption that you made is a presumption.
1:27:16 We have to keep that in mind.
1:27:31 I mean the people that I have talked to who were former Muslims and are now Christians, very devout Muslims, they did not have the experience of satisfaction, fullness and connection with God with – in Islam that they do in Christianity, OK?
1:27:33 So we want to be careful that we don’t just stipulate.
1:27:34 Yeah, there are people who do the opposite.
1:27:40 Yeah, there’s people that would have gone the other way and they’ll be in the comment section right now saying, well, I went from Christianity to Islam.
1:27:40 OK.
1:27:41 Well, sure.
1:27:44 I’m just telling you what I know of those people, OK?
1:27:49 And I think it’s a mistake to say, well, everybody has their own religion.
1:27:52 They have their own experience with their religion because I don’t think that’s the case.
1:27:55 I’m not saying there aren’t satisfied Muslims.
1:27:57 That’s not what I’m saying or Buddhists or Hindus or whatever.
1:28:04 But what I’m saying is the – there is an evidential element to the changed life, OK?
1:28:05 And it may not be decisive.
1:28:08 There may be other things that are involved, OK?
1:28:12 I do think that for many Christians – I think you’ve made this point in the past too.
1:28:14 It’s the experience with God that makes the difference.
1:28:26 But it’s not that the other evidences for the existence of God, maybe philosophical type of evidence, haven’t made a difference because I’ve talked to lots of people where they have made the difference, moving them in that direction.
1:28:29 The point there that it’s evidential, that’s a presumption.
1:28:42 What I mean by evidential is that there is information that can be brought to bear that seems to be evidence indicating that the belief system is true.
1:28:43 Is that a presumption?
1:28:46 I don’t know why you would call that a presumption.
1:28:54 Is that the evidence that – evidence that Christianity is true from the increased sense of purpose that people get from becoming a Christian?
1:28:57 I think that’s one of the evidence.
1:28:58 It’s a subjective evidence, yeah.
1:29:00 So it’s evidence of the truth of Christianity.
1:29:02 Well, I wouldn’t build the whole thing.
1:29:03 But it’s evidence.
1:29:07 It’s contributing evidence to the actual truth of Christianity as a worldview.
1:29:12 If the story of reality is simply that God made us to be with him,
1:29:20 and then we find the way that God intends for us to connect with him principally through forgiveness and be restored to our relationship with the Father,
1:29:25 and then that gives us, when we do that, a deep sense of satisfaction.
1:29:26 I do think that’s evidential.
1:29:31 You know, in Alex Field, he could explain that through neuroscience, right?
1:29:33 Serotonin, dopamine, endorphins.
1:29:33 Yeah.
1:29:35 So can I go back to something real quick?
1:29:35 Go ahead.
1:29:38 So, you know, I was thinking about the Sisyphus example.
1:29:38 Yes.
1:29:45 And I was just thinking to myself, you know, so many people go to the gym to do futile physical activity.
1:29:51 But not on its own for eternity with no sense in which it’s improving their life, right?
1:29:56 Imagine going to the gym, and not only is it not making you healthier, it’s actually just making you fatter.
1:30:01 And you have to do it forever, for the rest of eternity, for no reason, with no end.
1:30:05 And then somebody says, well, all you’ve got to do is imagine that person being happy.
1:30:15 Yeah, so that’s kind of interesting, because then that presumes that the attitude through which you approach the action is what determines it.
1:30:17 Determines what?
1:30:18 Determines whether you’re happy or not, right?
1:30:22 So every time you eat, you buy yourself a trip to the toilet.
1:30:24 This is something you can never escape.
1:30:25 Sure.
1:30:26 It is true for all time.
1:30:28 And yet, how do you feel about going to the toilet?
1:30:33 Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re getting at.
1:30:35 So I think it’s interesting, right?
1:30:39 Because the problem of Sisyphus is in the way that he views it.
1:30:43 And this is exactly why I think the paperclip example is, like, actually such a good one.
1:30:49 Because I think what we find when we look at some of these things like radical acceptance, dialectical behavioral therapy,
1:30:56 sort of the ways in which people become happy despite the fact that there are painful things in life,
1:30:58 it is an attitudinal shift.
1:30:58 Totally.
1:31:09 I think one of the reasons why it might seem like we keep talking across purposes is because I think you are offering an explanation for why people feel a particular way.
1:31:18 And I’m trying to see whether those feelings are, shall we say, philosophically validated, whether those feelings are sensitive to truth.
1:31:21 If the way you feel about the world is accurate.
1:31:26 So I can perfectly understand that it’s possible for Sisyphus to be happy.
1:31:38 What I’m saying is that I think that the philosophical underpinning that would be required for him to be content in that condition is unsatisfying, at least to me.
1:31:41 So what is a philosophical truth?
1:31:49 It doesn’t have to – I mean, maybe I shouldn’t say philosophical truth, but I mean to say – I mean to separate it from what you might describe as like a neurological truth,
1:31:56 which is to say it could be true that your brain believes this or believes that based on this or that condition.
1:31:57 I’m saying that totally.
1:32:00 But what I’m interested in is the thing that it believes.
1:32:01 Is it true or false?
1:32:07 It could be in the same way that believing in Christianity can make you happy.
1:32:08 It can make you sad.
1:32:09 And you can scan someone’s brain.
1:32:16 You can put them in an MRI scanner and scan their brain when they – at the moment they convert to Christianity and see that it starts going haywire.
1:32:19 But the MRI is not going to show any beliefs.
1:32:21 It shows neurological activity.
1:32:21 Exactly.
1:32:23 Beliefs aren’t in the brain.
1:32:24 Yeah, we’re going to get to that.
1:32:26 I kind of agree with that.
1:32:33 So, Alex, I think this is – I thank you so much for pointing out how we’re kind of talking across each other because I think this is the really weird thing.
1:32:39 And I’m going to say something and then as we talk about consciousness and what we just talked about, I’m going to torpedo it.
1:32:52 But I think what we sort of find is that from a practical sense – and this could be where like philosophy – I don’t know what the – how the word practical ties together with philosophy.
1:32:55 Because I tend to think of philosophy as sort of practical.
1:32:56 We can go into that in a second.
1:33:01 But I think from the perspective of finding purpose.
1:33:06 Now, I’m not talking about purpose as a capital P truth, right?
1:33:07 A capital T truth.
1:33:27 Finding purpose, what – it may not be philosophically satisfying to you but what we sort of know from empirical evidence of people who are purposeless and people who are purposeful is that the subjective feeling of purpose is – comes out of a number of different things.
1:33:33 Like I mentioned like kind of autonomy, being able to detect your emotions, also a sense of like narrative identity.
1:33:43 So having a purpose in life requires a you and one of the reasons that no one feels like they are going somewhere in life is because they don’t really have a clear sense of who they are.
1:33:57 And so I think that it’s a great kind of catch that we’re sort of talking across purposes because I don’t know – the thing that you find philosophically – not philosophically true, maybe neurologically true but isn’t philosophically true.
1:34:00 I don’t know how to approach that.
1:34:08 I mean I think I sort of do because if we talk about consciousness and subjective experience and how your friend was transformed – and by the way, he may not be transformed.
1:34:16 So speaking of coping, there’s a chance that when someone, you know, drastically joins a religion and like this is great, that is like the mother of all copes, right?
1:34:20 So sometimes they find – they adopt – it’s not identity formation.
1:34:26 It’s actually identification where like I’m going to join this team and now I’m on this team and now that I have this team, now I know who I am.
1:34:27 Now I have a purpose.
1:34:28 Like everything kind of gets laid out.
1:34:42 But oftentimes this is also why religion is not like 100 percent at giving people happiness and things like that because there is an internal subjective experience of a relationship with God or something like that, which I think we can segue to consciousness.
1:34:46 That’s ultimately what determines whether you feel really good about it.
1:35:02 And then the other really interesting thing is through some of those subjective experiences, I think we – the people who have these subjective experiences believe that it gives them access to truth with a higher T, like the Gnostics and folks like that.
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1:36:12 Let me just bring it back down to some of the popular questions we had from our audience.
1:36:19 One of the most popular questions we had is, do we each have a specific purpose, or is it self-chosen, Greg?
1:36:26 Well, my view, if God has made us for a reason and he wants us to be in relationship with us,
1:36:29 each individual person has different capabilities.
1:36:36 And fulfilling those capabilities that God has given him, general ones and specific ones,
1:36:42 like I have my own particular peculiar capabilities, doing that is going to make me satisfied.
1:36:44 So did God give me a purpose?
1:36:44 Yes.
1:36:46 And is it different from Alex’s purpose?
1:36:51 I would say in the kind of the minutiae, yes.
1:36:52 You’re a different individual than he is.
1:36:55 And can I ask you a question that then springs to mind?
1:36:57 Again, I’m very curious.
1:37:00 If Stephen Bartlett had gotten cancer at one years old and I died.
1:37:00 Oh, I see.
1:37:01 Yeah.
1:37:06 Well, then you wouldn’t be fulfilling the particulars that God had intended for you.
1:37:09 But that kind of thing happens because we live in a broken world.
1:37:11 It isn’t the perfect world.
1:37:16 It is not the good – it’s not the totally good world that God made.
1:37:18 Something happened that broke the world.
1:37:18 What happened?
1:37:19 Human rebellion.
1:37:20 Human rebellion.
1:37:22 At what point in history?
1:37:25 Well, early on with our first parents, okay?
1:37:26 So the first humans.
1:37:27 The first humans.
1:37:34 That’s why all humans since then have the same proclivity towards evil, which I think is pretty much quantifiable.
1:37:35 Does that include other species of human?
1:37:36 Homo neanderthals?
1:37:40 Well, I know that’s a question that a lot of people are discussing right now, okay?
1:37:42 And where exactly do you draw the line?
1:37:45 And I’m not – that is the area that I go deep in.
1:37:57 But I do think that there was an original progenitor to the human race as we understand it right now that has the image of God in man and violated God’s commands, rebelled against God.
1:38:00 And that had an impact on the world, okay?
1:38:00 And that is why –
1:38:02 And so therefore you’re going to have –
1:38:02 That is why children have cancer.
1:38:10 Some people aren’t going to be, you know, fulfilling all of their – the ultimate purposes that God has for them in this lifetime.
1:38:18 Just to be clear, children get cancer because, say, two million years ago roughly, the start of the human species –
1:38:20 I’m not going to set a date on it.
1:38:24 Somebody rebelled against God’s commands.
1:38:26 And that is the explanation for –
1:38:27 This is a fair question.
1:38:29 And, you know, some of these details I haven’t worked out.
1:38:32 What about earthquakes and tsunamis and all those kinds of things, okay?
1:38:37 Clearly there is an impact of human rebellion upon the earth, okay?
1:38:40 What the extent of that impact is, I’m not entirely sure.
1:38:49 But this is why I use the word broken because it’s a rather broad term rather than trying to identify every instance of things that seem anomalous to a good world.
1:38:52 Not the way it should be, so to speak, okay?
1:39:01 I think that’s an explanation for these things even though we can’t necessarily itemize each individual particular instance and how it falls short.
1:39:07 Alex, I want to put the same question to you, which is do you think that you were born with a purpose that was endowed for your life?
1:39:09 No, not in the literal sense.
1:39:16 I think that there are – that I was born with literal, like, proclivities built into my consciousness and my DNAs.
1:39:19 Almost want to do tendencies.
1:39:21 Yeah, tendency is a great word, yeah.
1:39:24 For example, my tendency to eat food.
1:39:26 I don’t think I learned that.
1:39:27 I think I was born with it.
1:39:35 But it’s – like, I would use the language of when you say – if you said, do you think that you were, you know, you were given hunger from birth?
1:39:38 I’d be like, no, in a poetic sense maybe.
1:39:42 But what I mean to say is I was born with this thing called hunger, which I didn’t learn, which was just a part of my makeup.
1:39:48 I think the same thing is true for many motivations of life, such as the sort of meaning that you might report feeling.
1:39:50 I think it’s there from childbirth.
1:39:51 Same question for you, Alec.
1:39:55 Do you think that we each have a specific purpose or is it self-chosen?
1:39:56 I think it’s both.
1:40:01 So I’m going to introduce two concepts that we haven’t talked about yet, dharma and karma.
1:40:07 And I think these are concepts that are sometimes hard to understand.
1:40:08 I’m going to do my best to kind of speed run them.
1:40:12 So dharma is the Sanskrit word that kind of gets translated as duty.
1:40:22 The way that I would describe dharma, the reason I think it’s so important is right now if we look at the world, people are like not having a good time.
1:40:29 And oftentimes what they do is they’re stuck between this choice of doing what they want and doing what they should.
1:40:33 So doing what they want is maybe dopaminergic, is maybe fun in some way.
1:40:36 Doing what they should is like painful in some way.
1:40:41 So for me, what I think dharma is – dharma is like sort of duty.
1:40:48 But I think the key thing that helps people once they find their dharma is it’s what allows you to choose the negative thing.
1:40:51 It’s what allows you to choose the hard thing.
1:40:57 So if someone points a gun at me and I look at that gun, that gun means pain, suffering, death.
1:41:02 You know, my life will end and then I will have nothing to leave behind me so my purpose will end.
1:41:06 So I try to move away from that thing.
1:41:13 But if someone points the gun at my child because I have this overwhelming sense of love and joy or whatever, I step into the path of that thing.
1:41:20 So I think once we understand what our duty is, that gives us a sense of tethering.
1:41:21 It gives us a sense of direction.
1:41:27 I think what confuses a lot of people is that they think duty is like some transcendental – it’s like a big thing.
1:41:29 Like duty with a capital D.
1:41:33 Like I was born on this earth to do these like particular big tasks.
1:41:35 Like I need to say cure cancer or something like that.
1:41:37 Oftentimes, dharma is really small.
1:41:38 So the way –
1:41:42 Duty is not transcendent and it’s not tied to some moral transcendent thing?
1:41:45 I think – I don’t know about moral.
1:41:47 So this is where I think like I –
1:41:47 You said should.
1:41:48 Yeah, sure.
1:41:50 So that’s usually a moral term, right?
1:41:52 In the West, right?
1:41:54 So I think there’s a whole different set of axioms.
1:42:00 I’m using dharma and that’s what – people will like put morality onto dharma where I don’t think that that’s actually fair.
1:42:07 So going back to I have a duty just to give another example and y’all can decide whether this is moral or not.
1:42:13 But when I’m sort of working in the emergency room and a patient walks in, I have a duty to that patient.
1:42:18 So a lot of people don’t understand about dharma is that it is very environmentally determined.
1:42:24 So your dharma will depend somewhat on the family that you have, the responsibilities that you have.
1:42:27 If you have children, you have a dharma to those people.
1:42:30 So I think that’s one part of what we would call purpose.
1:42:35 I think the other part of purpose and I think this gets really closer to the more Western conception is karma.
1:42:45 So going back to your question about if a child with cancer dies at the age of one, is their purpose fulfilled?
1:42:49 Arguably, yes, because that could have been their purpose in this life, right?
1:42:56 So their purpose could have been – so there’s a really interesting story about – many years ago, there was a – there were a group of angels.
1:43:01 I’m just going to use the Western terminology, devas, who disturbed Shiva in his meditation.
1:43:10 And so he cursed them and he said, I’m going to – the curse that you guys are going to do is y’all are going to be born on the earth for one lifetime of a human.
1:43:13 And then the devas were like, oh my god, like this is terrible.
1:43:20 Like we’re going to be cursed to be born on the earth and the earth is full of suffering and Sisyphus and there’s no meaning with a capital M.
1:43:25 So then they go to Shiva’s daughter and they ask her, hey, can you help us out?
1:43:27 Like can you please go talk to your dad?
1:43:30 Can you please get him to change his sentence?
1:43:32 And she says that Shiva is never going to change his sentence.
1:43:33 That’s impossible to do.
1:43:38 He’s also kind of this embodiment of karma and things like that but – so he says, but I can help y’all out.
1:43:49 What I can do is I’m going to be born with y’all and then there’s this other story in the Mahabharata where basically she has seven children and then she drowns them the day after they’re born.
1:43:53 And so she says the technical situation is you’re going to be born for one lifetime.
1:43:56 I can make a lifetime happen in a moment.
1:43:59 Now, I don’t know if that’s true.
1:44:00 I don’t know if that’s moral.
1:44:01 I don’t know if it’s mythology.
1:44:03 But a potential explanation for why children get cancer.
1:44:06 It’s a potential explanation for why children get cancer.
1:44:11 Now, I think the karma thing is when you said is your purpose in life predetermined.
1:44:24 So I think that you inherit a certain amount of circumstances and that part of your purpose will be in relation to the circumstances that you inherit.
1:44:29 But the other thing about karma, which I think a lot of people misunderstand, is they think that it means destiny.
1:44:34 I think all it means is Newton’s third law, which is every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
1:44:43 That while you may inherit a set of circumstances, the way that you act is sowing seeds for your future life.
1:44:49 So this is where, like, you know, I know I’m introducing a bunch of concepts and it’s interesting.
1:44:54 You know, we started a membership program here at Healthy Gamer.
1:45:03 And part of the reason we did that is because a lot of these concepts, if you turn them into, like, 50-minute YouTube videos, people just end up with more questions than answers.
1:45:08 So we go into a lot of depth and I think it requires some depth because I’m sure everybody who’s listening has a ton of questions.
1:45:20 But in order to succinctly answer your question, I would say that, yeah, you were born for, I don’t know about a specific reason, but there’s a set of different things which only you can do.
1:45:26 Like, you are a unique set of genetics, you are a unique set of experiences, you are a unique set of psychology.
1:45:33 And this process in psychiatry is something that we call meaning-making, helps a lot when people have trauma, right?
1:45:38 So to help someone understand why did this terrible thing happen to you.
1:45:42 And once you make meaning from it, that helps you adaptively.
1:45:46 But I think that it’s also not, like, predestined necessarily.
1:45:51 You can procrastinate on fulfilling your karmas and then they’ll just keep coming back.
1:45:53 So, Dr. K., I still have a question about this.
1:45:58 You talk about duty and I’d asked about morality there and you kind of begged off on that.
1:46:01 Well, not really, but then you used the word obligation in the emergency room.
1:46:11 And it sounds to me, when you talk about those things, you are actually invoking moral categories, things you ought to do, you have an obligation to do, you have a duty to do.
1:46:19 Maybe the right thing, you didn’t use this phrase, but it sounds like you’re saying this is the right thing to do, the virtuous thing to do, as opposed to the wrong thing to do.
1:46:25 So, how am I to understand those phrases if they are not really invoking genuine moral categories?
1:46:34 So, when you say moral categories, are you referring to a transcendental right and wrong?
1:46:39 I’m talking about ethical principles, ethical rights and wrong, if you want.
1:46:43 They are transcendent because they’re not simply in the molecules, as it were.
1:46:44 They’re above us, transcendent.
1:46:45 Okay, so I –
1:46:46 So, yes, in that sense.
1:46:47 Okay.
1:46:51 Yeah, and has – and there are consequences to our behaviors one way or another.
1:46:55 And the consequences, it’s not just, you know, utilitarian.
1:46:58 It’s not just, well, I – if I put toast in too long, it will burn the toast.
1:47:02 But you’re – you ought to do the things that you just described.
1:47:04 You ought to help that person.
1:47:11 I think it’s a fairly common-sensible word, a moral category, virtue, vice kind of thing.
1:47:15 I think whether it’s common-sensical depends on what’s common, right?
1:47:19 So, I think that this is where these concepts I don’t think are one-to-one.
1:47:28 So, I think doing your dharma is basically the way I would describe your dharma is when I throw a ball in the air, it comes down.
1:47:29 Okay.
1:47:29 Right?
1:47:36 So, dharma is kind of doing what is the second part of what you’ve kind of signed up for.
1:47:44 So, when you say you ought to help the person in the emergency room, all you mean is you’re not morally compelled to do that in terms of a virtue.
1:47:50 But there is a consequence for you to do that as opposed to doing the opposite.
1:47:54 Yes, and I think there is a layer of morality, but that is not within dharma.
1:48:01 So, for example, there are yamas and niyamas, which are things like truthfulness, ahimsa, which means nonviolence.
1:48:05 So, there’s a set of different things that we would, generally speaking, call morality.
1:48:08 And doing those things is usually in accordance with dharma.
1:48:16 But, you know, the Mahabharata is a great case of someone saying, I don’t want to kill my cousins and I don’t want to kill my teacher.
1:48:21 And Krishna saying, you absolutely should because it is in accordance with dharma.
1:48:27 So, I think dharma oftentimes gets like translated over to morality, but I think you lose something in translation.
1:48:32 Greg, can I ask you, do you think you can have a fulfilling life without having a transcendent purpose?
1:48:34 In some measure.
1:48:35 In some measure.
1:48:44 What I described earlier is if God made us for a purpose and made the world for human flourishing, and I think we get a basic description of that in the beginning of our story, for example.
1:48:58 Then people who don’t even believe in God or even about even anything religious at all, if they fall within the pattern of the things that God has created for flourishing, they’re going to flourish in some significant measure.
1:49:03 You mentioned a few moments ago about having children, and this is somewhat of a universal experience.
1:49:07 Now, you made a kind of a naturalistic characterization of why we feel that way.
1:49:12 My sense is that God made us for that purpose, be fruitful, multiply, subdue.
1:49:14 And subdue doesn’t mean rape the earth.
1:49:17 It means to work productively what God has given us to serve.
1:49:33 Now, somebody can get married and stay married and have children and fulfill that purpose there and be very satisfied in doing it as opposed to all kinds of other variations that it’s just going to mess up their life.
1:49:36 And they’re going to experience satisfaction and fulfillment in it.
1:49:44 But that’s because they’re, in a certain sense, they’re doing the things that God has made human beings to do so that they would flourish.
1:49:47 It’s just like you can think of it in very mechanistic terms.
1:49:54 You have a vehicle that’s meant to operate a certain way, and if you do the things properly for that vehicle, it’s going to run well and do.
1:50:03 So I can have a grand feeling of purpose if I do many of the things that are considered virtuous within Scripture without needing to believe.
1:50:06 Yeah, you could still be virtuous.
1:50:08 Certainly, you can do those things.
1:50:21 My argument, and this is what I was getting at a little earlier, Dr. K, is that if there is no God establishing a right and wrong, then there is no right and wrong because there is no law that we’re conforming ourselves to.
1:50:23 We’re just doing stuff, all right?
1:50:26 If you believe the sort of evolutionary perspective in this.
1:50:29 Taken as a whole, I don’t.
1:50:31 Not the way that Alex has taken.
1:50:34 It’s a grand explanation of pretty much everything.
1:50:35 It’s not an explanation of everything.
1:50:37 It’s an explanation of the variance of life on Earth.
1:50:40 Because evolution does – I was thinking about my dog.
1:50:40 I was thinking about Pablo.
1:50:42 And I was thinking, why does he have sex with other dogs?
1:50:45 Why does he protect his puppies?
1:50:45 Yeah.
1:50:52 Why does he do these things that – somewhat in Dr. K’s example there, he takes care of things.
1:50:53 He takes care of me.
1:50:58 When I’m not in the house, if someone comes in and my girlfriend’s there, he takes care of my girlfriend.
1:51:00 He barks only when she’s at home alone.
1:51:02 So he seems to be expressing some form of morality.
1:51:06 He seems to understand his own sort of idea of right and wrong.
1:51:07 But I –
1:51:10 Well, I wouldn’t characterize it that way.
1:51:12 As if he’s thinking, I ought to do this.
1:51:14 And if I don’t do that, then I’m doing something wrong.
1:51:21 I think animals have instincts that they’re imbued with that can be influenced by natural factors to some degree, I guess.
1:51:24 But they are made for purposes.
1:51:33 And this is the reason that many of the creatures act the way they do is because of these very sophisticated instincts that allow them to get along in life and do well.
1:51:34 And survive and reproduce.
1:51:38 But I don’t have any reason to think that they’re – yeah, survive and reproduce, of course.
1:51:42 But I don’t have any reason to think that they’re thinking I’m doing the moral thing.
1:51:49 And if they didn’t do the thing that we would be – it would be appropriate to accuse them of doing something immoral.
1:51:58 Has history almost shown that even in times where we look back and go that was not the moral thing, like Nazis in World War II.
1:51:59 Yeah.
1:52:03 They acted in a way that was – helped them survive in the context they were in.
1:52:08 So the Nazi that would go to the concentration camp and come home and be really nice to his family, he thought he was doing the right thing.
1:52:13 This is why – one of the reasons I think this is – the evolutionary explanation is inadequate.
1:52:22 Because it seems that there are lots of things that people do that seem to be good for them or for their tribe that characteristically we’ll look at and we’ll assess it.
1:52:27 And the assessment is that that is wrong, it’s evil, it’s wicked.
1:52:30 And I think that our assessments are reliable in that regard, OK?
1:52:35 That we have moral intuitions that allow us to see things that are real about that.
1:52:37 And these things are relatively universal.
1:52:39 I mean it doesn’t matter where you live or when you live.
1:52:42 People are asking the question about the problem of evil in the world, OK?
1:52:43 And I think it’s because –
1:52:51 But the definition of what evil was seems to change over time because me – I mean I wouldn’t be sat at this table many – a couple hundred years ago because I’m black.
1:52:55 And everybody at the time thought that that was the right thing.
1:52:57 They didn’t think that was an evil thing at the time.
1:52:59 Well, everybody at the time didn’t think that.
1:53:05 But there are going to be social mores and that are going to change over time and people do respond in different ways.
1:53:13 But just because you have variations in the way people believe about morality doesn’t mean that there isn’t a morality that’s a sound morality.
1:53:24 And Lewis is – C.S. Lewis has done a study of this, looked at the kinds of things that seem to transcend culture in terms of assessments, moral assessments that seem to be true about every culture.
1:53:35 A lot of times the differences are not differences in moral facts but they’re – like the morality has actually changed but a difference in perception, OK?
1:53:44 So what counts as heroism in some cases would not count as heroism in other cases even though heroism is considered a normal kind of thing.
1:53:57 I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to rewind to the fact that we just brushed over two of what I think are the best available, at least the first that came to mind, explanations as to why children get cancer.
1:54:09 And I just wondered as a question whether you consider – whether your explanation sounds to you as your explanation sounds to you, as I think both of them sound to me.
1:54:18 And I don’t know how they sound to you, and I don’t know how they sound to you, but the idea that the thing that we are most fundamentally confronted with, I think, on an existential level is suffering.
1:54:27 And there’s our own suffering and then there’s the suffering of others and the seemingly meaningless suffering of a child who’s undergoing cancer and does not survive it.
1:54:42 And I’m told that in the face of such existential tragedy, I turn to religion to give us a sort of sense of fulfillment and a sense of explanation.
1:54:53 But when asked about the mechanism of how, I’m told it’s because at some undisclosed number of years ago, somebody committed sin against God and that’s why your child has now died of cancer.
1:54:55 There are millions of people who listen to this show.
1:54:58 There will be people listening to this whose children have died of cancer.
1:55:01 I wonder if that brings them any kind of consolation.
1:55:06 Similarly, the idea that, you know, maybe it’s some disgruntled angels who didn’t want to come down to earth for too long.
1:55:09 And so if anything, you’re actually doing them a favor by killing them of cancer.
1:55:11 I don’t know if that’s bringing the kind of –
1:55:11 Well, I don’t know.
1:55:13 What’s your answer to that?
1:55:17 I don’t think I have one, but I don’t like people professing that they do have an answer.
1:55:24 But when it comes down to it, actually saying something which I think will provide the opposite effect, which – and I don’t mean this personally.
1:55:26 I mean, as a point of religious explanation.
1:55:27 I don’t know.
1:55:28 I’m just going to bring comfort to it.
1:55:30 Everyone’s going to get a chance to respond to this.
1:55:30 Sorry.
1:55:36 The idea that this even approximates an explanation as to why this happens.
1:55:51 I would ask you to consider what you find more likely if we assume that we are essentially existing here as accidental organisms just competing in a struggle for survival with no endowed meaning or supervision.
1:55:52 What might we expect to find?
1:55:58 And I would ask what you would expect to find if we were created with purpose by a loving God who wants us all to come into communion with him.
1:56:03 But for some reason thinks it’s necessary that we exist in this veil of tears in this material world first.
1:56:05 What would you expect to find?
1:56:08 I don’t think – and then look at what you do find.
1:56:10 Look at what you do find in the natural world.
1:56:18 Even if you just take into consideration non-human animal suffering, just an unfathomable amount of negative experience.
1:56:20 There’s seemingly no reason.
1:56:23 Not to mention the fact that children are getting cancer, as you say.
1:56:27 And as you’ve already alluded to, there are evils that humans commit like the Holocaust.
1:56:30 But there are evils which they don’t like earthquakes and tsunamis and the like.
1:56:35 Well, I don’t think we would expect to see any of this if we assume that hypothesis.
1:56:44 But if we assume that we are just accidentally existing organisms in a struggle for survival, not only do we explain this, but we also come to expect it.
1:56:45 So I think it provides a much better explanation.
1:56:49 That is not to say justification.
1:56:57 The idea – we were talking about evolution and you said that the problem that you have with the Darwinian worldview is that it seems to say that – it seems to favor survival of the fittest.
1:57:01 And yet there are things which evolution seems to point to that we would morally condemn.
1:57:06 Well, of course, because evolution by natural selection is an explanation for how things got the way they were.
1:57:08 It’s in no way a justification for behaviors.
1:57:10 It doesn’t even function that way.
1:57:20 No scientific theory of why things happen are any kind of justification, any more than Newton’s laws of gravity are a justification, a moral justification for the motion of the planets.
1:57:21 That’s – of course it’s not the case.
1:57:22 It’s just an explanation.
1:57:27 But I just really want to drive home this point that it has to do more.
1:57:43 If you want religious traditions to do what you claim that they do, which is provide existential comfort for people who are suffering, you have to do more in the face of children dying of cancer than some reference to mythical human beings who existed or in a way that is completely unintelligible.
1:57:45 There’s a lot there, okay?
1:57:52 I don’t expect this could be comfort to anybody to say who’s suffering from whatever to say that there was a fall, okay?
1:57:57 The fall is just the explanation for what went wrong and why there is wrong in the world.
1:58:01 Like I said earlier, it doesn’t matter where you live or when you live.
1:58:02 Everybody knows something’s wrong.
1:58:07 And the way they express that concern about something wrong is in moral terms.
1:58:09 The world is not the way it ought to be.
1:58:10 It should be different.
1:58:13 And then when you give examples of it, sometimes there’s natural evil.
1:58:18 But generally, it’s examples of moral evil, what we would call moral evil, okay?
1:58:21 Things that people shouldn’t do, okay?
1:58:23 That’s why I particularly avoided those.
1:58:25 No, right.
1:58:28 You didn’t include any examples.
1:58:43 But the implication is, and this is where Richard Dawkins’ famous statement that this is exactly the kind of world we’d expect if there was at the basis, no design, no justice, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless, and difference.
1:58:47 Well, I actually think this isn’t the world that we find, the one he just described.
1:58:49 Yes, it’s a world filled with suffering.
1:58:52 And there’s a way of explaining that, which you just did.
1:58:56 There’s also another way of explaining it that has a solution, okay?
1:58:58 What is that explanation?
1:59:02 Pardon me, that God is in the process of solving the problem of evil over time.
1:59:05 I mean the explanation for why the evil is there in the first place.
1:59:05 You said the fall.
1:59:07 I don’t mean to interrupt, but you said it.
1:59:09 You’ve referenced the fall twice now.
1:59:12 And the last time I tried this, it seemed like you sort of said that you don’t really know.
1:59:14 But if the fall is…
1:59:17 I wasn’t giving particular details about the ancestry of human evolution or anything like that.
1:59:19 What is the fall, historically?
1:59:20 What is the fall?
1:59:29 The fall is when our first parents, characteristically known as Adam and Eve in the story, the account of reality, rebelled against God.
1:59:33 And when they rebelled against God, they disobeyed him is what’s important.
1:59:35 He had given them a restriction.
1:59:36 They disobeyed that.
1:59:41 And when they disobeyed that, they broke their relationship with God through rebellion.
1:59:43 They broke their relationship with each other.
1:59:45 They broke their relationship with the environment.
1:59:48 All of that had these kind of cosmic effects.
1:59:50 There’s a solution though.
1:59:52 That’s just the first three chapters.
1:59:52 Do you know what the command was?
1:59:54 Let me just finish the thought.
1:59:54 Okay.
1:59:58 The principal issue is rebellion or disobedience.
1:59:59 Okay.
2:00:03 There are different ways it’s characterized, but that’s the point in my view, the disobedience.
2:00:04 Okay.
2:00:04 Of what though?
2:00:05 Pardon me?
2:00:06 Disobedience of what?
2:00:07 Like what was it that was disobeyed?
2:00:09 God told them not to do one thing.
2:00:10 What was the thing?
2:00:13 Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and they disobeyed.
2:00:14 Disobeyed.
2:00:15 Do you interpret that literally?
2:00:15 Pardon me?
2:00:17 Like an actual tree and an actual fruit?
2:00:21 I do take that as a straightforward account, but that’s not the important part.
2:00:21 I don’t want to get caught up in it.
2:00:23 So children get cancer because somebody ate…
2:00:23 Pardon me?
2:00:26 So children get cancer because a few million years ago someone ate a fruit.
2:00:28 Let me just back up and give you the entire account.
2:00:29 Okay, please.
2:00:31 This would be, I think, more helpful.
2:00:33 I’m not trying to be difficult, by the way.
2:00:36 I just really, I don’t want to just brush over these points when we reference them.
2:00:38 I mean, people listening might be like, I’ve never heard of this fool.
2:00:39 I’ve never heard of Adam and Eve.
2:00:40 They’ll need to know what you’re talking about.
2:00:50 The point I’m making is that there was a disobedience by human beings that had an impact on their relationship with God, which they were created for, and had an impact on the rest of the world.
2:01:08 And since then, that problem of evil, broadly read, since then, the world’s been broken, and God has a plan for bringing that back together, not only for making the world whole again, but also for bringing human beings back in proper relationship with him when they’re in rebellion with him.
2:01:09 And this is where Jesus comes in.
2:01:17 Now, I’ve written a piece called The Story of Reality, a book that’s meant to characterize that in fairly clear terms, in more general terms.
2:01:22 It isn’t meant to answer all of these questions because some of them, frankly, are imponderables.
2:01:26 But the larger picture can be understood and is in the story.
2:01:31 It’s in the account of reality and the scriptures, the Hebrew scriptures and in the Christian scriptures.
2:01:32 They form a unit, okay?
2:01:35 And these are the things that Jesus spoke to.
2:01:40 And Jesus took these things seriously based on what he had to say about these particular things, okay?
2:01:47 So because we’re, broadly speaking now, because we live in a broken world, there is an answer that we have to that.
2:01:48 We have a possible answer.
2:01:55 You know, it was Bertrand Russell who famously said, how are you going to talk about God when you’re kneeling at the bed of a dying child?
2:01:57 Which I think is very emotionally compelling.
2:02:06 But I listened to philosopher William Lane Craig, who you also know, I think, who said, what is Bertrand Russell, the atheist, going to say when he’s kneeling at the bed of a dying child?
2:02:08 Tough luck?
2:02:08 Too bad?
2:02:09 That’s just the way it goes?
2:02:12 There is no answer that he has.
2:02:14 Dr. Kay, can you come in with your response as well?
2:02:14 Sure.
2:02:24 First of all, Alex, I want to thank you for bringing up and being a bit bulldog-ish.
2:02:25 I mean that in a good way.
2:02:26 You grabbed something.
2:02:27 You were like, this is not okay.
2:02:29 Well, we forget that people are listening to this.
2:02:30 Your children have died of cancer.
2:02:31 I totally get that.
2:02:32 I think we just need to keep it in mind, you know.
2:02:33 100%.
2:02:38 So I’m really glad you said that because I realized that I offered a terrible example.
2:02:45 And I say this as someone, I can remember the day I was a third-year medical student on my first pediatric rotation.
2:02:52 I was working in the ICU overnight and there was a nine-year-old child who had, I think, lymphoma.
2:02:59 And I watched and was with their parents as that child moved towards death.
2:03:08 I have worked in offices where people will come into my office and they’ll say, you know, they’ll ask me about karma.
2:03:12 And they’ll be like, I was nine years old when I was sexually assaulted.
2:03:17 Are you telling me that this is like part of purpose or whatever?
2:03:27 I also remember when I was in India, one of my best friends, the first time I went to India, I spent about seven years studying to become a monk.
2:03:34 I discovered a lot of really cool stuff like meditation, had some transcendental experiences, altered my worldview.
2:03:40 And one of my best friends who was also a very accomplished meditator, we kind of got to talking about religion.
2:03:44 And I was like, you know, what do you think about like Hinduism and some of these concepts?
2:03:51 And he said, I can’t accept any religion that says if you were raped, it’s your fault.
2:03:52 Yes.
2:03:54 So that stuck with me.
2:03:57 And so for a long time at the very beginning, Stephen asked me a question, am I Hindu?
2:03:58 I mean, am I religious?
2:04:00 And I guess I would say yes.
2:04:02 So that thought really stuck with me.
2:04:05 I think for a long time I was an atheist.
2:04:06 I think I’m still an atheist.
2:04:10 I think there are a couple of other things that are a little bit unusual.
2:04:15 So like people think – like in the West, we think that atheism, polytheism, and monotheism are contradictions.
2:04:19 We don’t really think that in Hinduism.
2:04:20 Like those things can coexist.
2:04:27 So – and what I’m really grateful for you for is because I think when – I’m so glad you said that.
2:04:36 Because I think when I offered the example that I offered, it’s so interesting because I was thinking about why I mentioned that we have a membership.
2:04:43 And the reason I mentioned it is because this is one of those things that I have lectured about for four to six hours.
2:04:50 And if you listen to that lecture, then you will understand the context that I’m coming from.
2:05:02 But without that context – and if you sort of assume – there are so many axioms about morality and deserving that that example without the appropriate context sounds awful.
2:05:04 It’s like your kid died at the age of one.
2:05:05 Oh, there’s some greater purpose.
2:05:06 You just don’t know what it is.
2:05:07 Fuck you, right?
2:05:10 That is not comforting at all.
2:05:11 So here’s where I am now.
2:05:16 I really think this is – I think karma is good in the sense that it helps people.
2:05:18 I also think it’s true.
2:05:20 But here’s kind of where I am now.
2:05:22 So that was sort of my journey.
2:05:23 I realized it was out of order.
2:05:25 Transcendental experience.
2:05:27 Karma seems awful.
2:05:29 There’s this concept of deserving.
2:05:41 Then many years later, through practice with people who have been sexually assaulted and watching children die in the pediatric ICU, grappling with these problems, not just like there are people out there.
2:05:44 It’s like you’re in the room with these people when their child is dying.
2:05:45 What do you say to them?
2:05:49 And even more so now as a psychiatrist with end-of-life care and things like that.
2:05:59 So I think the first thing to understand – the first question that I have for you is when I say the word karma, what does that mean to you?
2:06:00 I don’t know.
2:06:01 Okay.
2:06:03 I don’t know what you mean by that.
2:06:08 So I think the first thing to understand about karma is it’s just the principle of cause and effect.
2:06:08 Yeah.
2:06:12 So when a child dies of cancer, what would you say is the cause of their death?
2:06:19 Well, I don’t know about the science of cancer very much, but I would suppose it’s the cancer.
2:06:19 Perfect.
2:06:19 Right?
2:06:21 So that is in accordance with the law of karma.
2:06:23 Now, what is the reason they got cancer?
2:06:25 I don’t know.
2:06:25 Okay.
2:06:26 So there may be certain –
2:06:28 I mean, pick any reason you like.
2:06:32 There could be a genetic mutation, random chance, things like that.
2:06:37 So what I think that – all karma is is action and reaction.
2:06:37 That’s it.
2:06:46 So if you understand the doctrine of karma, what it helps you do is see the way that causes and effects link to each other.
2:06:53 It does not have anything to do with deserving more so than if I have a genetic mutation and I wind up with cancer.
2:06:56 That is an action that has an effect.
2:07:12 This is why I was reluctant to engage with moralities because I think there are certain assumptions that I think come from this kind of Abrahamic or Judeo-Christian worldview that get injected into these concepts like karma and dharma,
2:07:18 which is why I hate translating them because any time I translate something, it’s going to be filled in.
2:07:19 So you really have to understand karma.
2:07:32 But I would say all karma is devoid of – remove it, denude it of all morality, remove it of all deserve beyond simple Newtonian mechanics and that actions have consequences.
2:07:41 Now, the reason that this is helpful – okay, now I realize I’m making a functional claim here, not a claim about philosophical truth because I don’t know what else to call it.
2:07:45 I do think it’s philosophically true but that’s not what I’m talking about right here.
2:08:02 Is that when you’re sitting with a human being – because your primary concern is when a child with cancer dies or is dying, how do you deal – how do you – there are people who are suffering.
2:08:04 If we’re not careful, we’re going to hurt them, right?
2:08:06 That’s what you’re saying?
2:08:09 That’s one thing, one aspect of what I’m saying, yeah.
2:08:09 Right?
2:08:11 So I think what I sort of –
2:08:15 That there’s how it makes people feel but there’s also the literal explanation for why they suffer.
2:08:22 You know, it’s one thing to say that, you know, this religious narrative will bring you some comfort but it’s another thing as well.
2:08:24 I think that’s something you need to keep in mind.
2:08:25 But you’re saying more than that.
2:08:29 As a religious person, you’re not just saying that this narrative will bring you comfort.
2:08:30 You’re saying this is why it’s happening.
2:08:31 This is why your child has cancer.
2:08:36 So what I would say – so here’s my kind of response to that.
2:08:47 So the first is I think that when I sit with people who were sexually used at the age of nine, didn’t do anything to deserve it, you know, people will say like, oh, like you have to be careful what you wear and stuff like that.
2:08:51 I mean, you know, I have patients that were in onesies and overalls and all kinds of stuff.
2:08:52 At the age of nine?
2:08:53 Huh?
2:08:54 At the age of nine.
2:08:54 Yeah.
2:08:55 People will say all kinds of stuff.
2:09:01 So – and what I find with working with them – and there’s plenty of data to back this up.
2:09:10 Is that there’s a certain amount of meaning-making that is necessary to comfort those people, to heal from that thing.
2:09:20 And the meaning-making, if we’re talking about empirically, making meaning out of things that are bad is one of the ways that you alleviate suffering.
2:09:29 So one of the things that I find is helpful as an option for that meaning-making is understanding the doctrine of karma.
2:09:32 And when I share it with people, it doesn’t work for everybody.
2:09:36 So from a clinical standpoint, I’m not saying you should believe in the doctrine of karma.
2:09:40 I’m just – and I’m not saying you should believe in Christianity or anything like that.
2:09:45 The important thing is this is what the science shows is you should make a concerted effort to make meaning.
2:09:57 And because of my background, because of my expertise, helping people understand things from a karmic perspective, I would say is helpful about 80% to 90% of the time.
2:10:04 But there’s a very important caveat there from a data standpoint is that there is a huge selection bias to who comes into my office.
2:10:10 There’s a good chance that these people are already open to that concept and are interested in learning more.
2:10:15 So I make no claims about that concept being superior to anything else.
2:10:27 But I think what we know from psychiatry is that it’s not so clear which one is the best but that you just have some way of like making sense of what happens to you.
2:10:36 And that’s just one thing that I think is an option and I happen to believe in the principle of cause and effect which is all karma is.
2:10:38 There’s no morality tied to it.
2:10:41 It sounds like you’re saying that it’s just something that – it just happens.
2:10:42 What do you mean it just happens?
2:10:43 It just happens.
2:10:45 No, absolutely not.
2:10:47 I’m saying the exact opposite.
2:10:50 So it just happens does not imply a cause.
2:10:54 I mean it just happens as the result of some series of causes.
2:10:55 It’s like why do children get cancer?
2:10:58 It’s just the result of a series of causes.
2:10:58 Yes.
2:10:58 That’s it.
2:10:59 Yes.
2:11:00 There’s no redemption.
2:11:02 There’s no meaning.
2:11:03 There’s no intention.
2:11:04 It just happens.
2:11:07 And that’s fine because I believe that’s the case.
2:11:08 I think that’s true.
2:11:09 No, no.
2:11:23 I mean I think that we have overwhelming evidence, overwhelming, that if you have a BRCA negative mutation on both sides that you have a 98% to 99% chance of getting breast cancer.
2:11:31 That having this mutation here warrants a prophylactic double mastectomy which means removing both breasts before the cancer even shows up.
2:11:37 But I think the reason why – maybe I’m wrong about this but I think the reason you brought this up, Stephen, was not because you were interested.
2:11:41 When you said like – I don’t think you worded it like this but, you know, why does a child get cancer?
2:11:43 Why would young Stephen have gotten cancer?
2:11:44 I don’t think you mean in a scientific sense.
2:11:51 I don’t think you mean literally explain to me the process by which cancer develops in my brain and gives me leukemia.
2:11:55 I think you mean why does this happen if being supervised?
2:12:16 I mean you asked it to Greg in the context of religious supervision of the universe and I think the irony is that we’re in a context of a discussion where usually the boot is on the other foot and I’m sort of being told that as a non-religious person, as an atheist agnostic, I don’t have a satisfying explanation.
2:12:21 You know, what am I going to say at the footstool of somebody who’s dying of cancer?
2:12:26 But it sounds to me, at least today, like we don’t have a very plausible alternative in Christianity.
2:12:39 For example, I did have a few questions which maybe I’ll be permitted the time to ask and I don’t want to bang on about this but it’s important because this is – ultimately you’re here to represent your view and a worldview more broadly.
2:12:50 And this is to me the question, is the question of suffering and you’ve explained your views about the fool and I wanted to let you put them in full before I asked a few questions.
2:12:57 But the first question that jumps out at me is the question of pre-human suffering.
2:13:10 We’re not the first species to inhabit this planet and before we existed, billions of years – I don’t know if you believe that the earth is four and a half billion years old – but billions of years, hundreds of millions of years,
2:13:12 least of animal suffering.
2:13:13 Yeah.
2:13:14 Like – and that is experience.
2:13:31 They – like if – and you could say that it somehow is less like relevant or doesn’t matter as much but if you saw me right now step on a dog’s tail and watch it squeal, you’d tell me to stop because you know that absent just the effect that it has on our human situation, that’s bad for the dog.
2:13:34 That kind of stuff was going on for hundreds of million years before humans were around.
2:13:35 That means before the fool.
2:13:36 That’s true.
2:13:36 The second question.
2:13:37 The second question I have.
2:13:38 Let’s do one at a time.
2:13:41 Yeah, and I don’t entirely know how to answer that.
2:13:49 Part of the problem comes when you create a world in a certain way that has certain cause and effect kind of thing.
2:13:50 So pain is there for a reason.
2:13:54 Pain is there so that you can avoid something that’s harmful to the body.
2:13:58 When you start feeling pain, you withdraw from it, OK, in a very simplistic sense.
2:14:06 It also has a downside and the downside is that pain is painful and sometimes dying is very painful too.
2:14:08 So there’s a tradeoff there.
2:14:10 Now, I haven’t worked all those details out, OK?
2:14:17 But what I look at is a larger picture because I can’t refine all of those things from my own thinking.
2:14:23 The larger picture is we both – we all live in the same world that is filled with pain and suffering.
2:14:29 So then the question is who has the best explanation writ large about how that works?
2:14:38 No explanation or maybe some are going to go very granular and get the – here is why your baby is suffering in this moment for this thing.
2:14:40 We’re not going to be able to do that.
2:14:42 But we can understand why the world is broken.
2:14:49 Now, if you don’t hold that the world was made for something better, then the world we see right now is not broken.
2:14:50 It’s just the way it is.
2:14:55 There is no moral assessment whatsoever that we can make that would make any sense.
2:15:00 But we constantly make moral assessments, which is why you’re bringing this issue up about suffering.
2:15:03 I’ve been very careful to avoid moral language for precisely this reason.
2:15:10 Let me explain how – it seems to me that you are bringing – kind of smuggling in moral categories with the suffering issue.
2:15:21 Because if I said I don’t care about the suffering of millions of years of organisms that had experienced pain, that kind of cast me in a kind of a negative moral light.
2:15:22 You don’t have to say that.
2:15:28 It does seem to me that you’re smuggling in the notion that suffering is bad morally.
2:15:29 I know that people often do that.
2:15:35 I’m specifically avoiding that because I’ve had this conversation 100,000 times and that’s the accusation that gets brought up.
2:15:36 And some people do do that.
2:15:38 But I’m specifically – you can rewind the tape.
2:15:39 I make great pains.
2:15:41 I don’t say the problem of evil, for example.
2:15:42 I say the problem of suffering.
2:15:48 If you said that you didn’t care about suffering, I would say that you’re probably just being inconsistent with your Christian worldview, for example.
2:15:50 I wouldn’t say that you’re doing anything immoral in the context of this conversation.
2:15:51 So I’ll accept the qualification.
2:15:58 So what I’m saying is that if Christianity were true, we would not expect the kind of suffering that is present in the natural world.
2:16:04 I’m not saying that on my worldview that suffering is wrong and must be fixed and there’s some moral element.
2:16:05 I’m not saying that at all.
2:16:11 All I’m saying is that it is unexpected if Christianity were true that that suffering would be as it is.
2:16:13 In particular, the non-human animals.
2:16:14 No, I understand that.
2:16:14 Okay.
2:16:16 And the way I’m looking at it is –
2:16:18 Do you understand that I’m not smuggling in those moral –
2:16:19 Sorry.
2:16:21 Because you said that I’m smuggling in moral terminology.
2:16:21 No, okay.
2:16:21 I buy that.
2:16:22 It’s okay.
2:16:23 I understand your point.
2:16:24 Did you have a second question?
2:16:32 I did, which is that if the fool is the explanation for, shall we say, the moral evils that people commit, like the Holocaust,
2:16:39 the reason why people have a proclivity to commit the Holocaust, is because of the betrayal of God’s trust a few million years ago,
2:16:50 whenever it was you think it was, if Adam and Eve’s transgression is the explanation for why humans have a sinful nature and act upon sin,
2:16:55 then why did Eve act upon the sin before the fool had happened?
2:16:57 Eve must have had a proclivity to commit the Holocaust.