This episode of Lutheran Answers features Patrick Flynn, a Catholic philosopher and author, discussing philosophy, theology, and arguments for and against the existence of God. The conversation begins with an exploration of distinctions in theology, such as the Lutheran view of imputed righteousness versus Reformed perspectives, and transitions into the philosophical utility of distinctions, particularly in arguments for God’s existence.
Flynn presents Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysical arguments, emphasizing the real distinction between essence and existence, which supports a classical theist understanding of God. He explains Aquinas’ cosmological argument and the philosophical necessity of a singular, ontologically independent being. They also discuss the problem of evil, both as a challenge to and support for theism, and critique weak arguments for and against God’s existence, particularly those rooted in scientific materialism or misrepresentations of philosophical theology.
The episode emphasizes the limits of human comprehension regarding God’s nature, advocating for humility and a recognition of divine transcendence. Flynn introduces his book, which systematically compares naturalistic and theistic explanations for reality’s metaphysical features, arguing that theism offers simpler, more robust explanations.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Remy: This episode of Lutheran Answers is brought to you by our sponsor, Dial A Podcast. Dial A Podcast, proud sponsor of Lutheran Answers, provides a simple yet powerful solution to bring your church’s sermons and Bible studies closer to those who might be a step away from the digital world. Getting started with a local telephone number is easy, allowing anyone to listen to your content with just a phone call at their convenience. It’s an excellent way for congregations of all size to extend their reach. Get started with a 30 day risk free trial at dial a podcast.com and ensure no one misses out out on your church’s messages.
I had actually just read a thing today by a Scandinavian Lutheran pastor where he was talking about how a lot of the critiques leveled against Protestantism, generally by Rome and generally by the Orthodox, a lot of their critiques of our soteriology, tend to disappear when you take the tact that God did not impute righteousness to us, that God doesn’t impute righteousness to us, because this is a big point of contention between a lot of Protestants and a lot of the other apostolic traditions is the idea of imputed righteousness. And he points out that nowhere, at least on the now on the Presbyterian end and on the Reformed end, the Westminster Confessions do specifically state that God imputes righteousness to people.
But he points out that the Lutheran Confessions do not say this. The Lutheran Confessions say that God imputes faith to people, that God gives us the gift of faith, and then he nurtures that faith and then he counts that faith as righteousness. And like, what an important distinction that is because then we get away from the like, legal fiction theory or whatever where God just pretends you’re righteous.
[00:01:59] Patrick: Yes. And I think that’s a distinction that makes a difference. What facilitated this for the listeners who are just hopping in, as we were. It’s funny we’re going to be talking about philosophy, but we started off kind of trashing philosophy, right? Sometimes a lot of philosophers are, are clever without necessarily being wise and they play the distinction game, right, where they just make a bunch of distinctions. But one can, can ask, is this a distinction actually makes a difference? And sometimes it does. Sometimes the sort of the finest little distinction can make all the difference in solving like a huge problem.
So in one sense, philosophy can be like the most useful thing ever because it can help you to hunt around for that. And by distinction we just mean that there’s, there’s a breaking of identity. That’s all distinction means, like that this thing is in some sense not that thing. And there’s many distinctions, right? There’s conceptual distinctions and virtual distinctions and real distinctions. There’s real distinctions with separate separability and real distinctions without separability. So there’s lots of distinctions within the family of distinctions. Right? So it can get a little. It can get a little tedious. But eventually, if you do philosophy long enough, you. On the sort of. The good side of it, you realize, oh, wow, okay, now I see why this was. Was necessary because this really helps me to solve, like, this really big issue, this little teeny distinction as you solve this really big issue. Right. So.
So I would. I would encourage people not to be, like, too put off by all the distinction making that philosophers do, because I think there’s been huge payoff and real advances and understanding and knowledge have come from that. At the same time, when it comes to just arguing with people on Twitter, it can be. Yeah, it can just be a bunch of.
[00:03:33] Remy: Well, so I think the prime example of the thing that gets on my nerves is when.
When I talk to a Calvinist and you say, well, John 3:16 says, God so loves the whole world, because they argue that God only loves the elect, and he doesn’t love anyone else, he hates everyone else.
And so you say, well, John 3:16 says, God loves the whole world, that whosoever should believe in him, Whosoever should believe in him. And they say, oh, well, in the Greek, it’s better rendered that all those that believe in him. And I’m like, okay, well, that’s. I don’t know if you know this, but that’s the same thing.
That’s. That’s just.
[00:04:16] Patrick: That might be a distinction without a difference. Right.
[00:04:18] Remy: That’s just a harder way of saying the same thing. So, like, I don’t know.
Yeah. So I hate when people do stuff like that. But at the same time, I think a lot of times you’ll see someone lay some groundwork, theologically or philosophically, where they’ll draw a very careful line and it feels pointless until we start getting into second and third order consequences and we kind of get down the line from this thought, and then it’s like, oh, now I see. Now I see why that division was important. Now I see why we.
[00:04:53] Patrick: Yeah, yeah. And just to tease how this plays out in philosophical approaches to God, which I know is what we want to explore here, we can look at, you know, St. Thomas and his distinction between the essence of every finite, contingent individual and its existence. Right. Now, this is a controversial thesis, and it’s. But it’s a. It’s a thesis that has been adopted and accepted by some of the most brilliant philosophers and theologians, Catholic and Protestant, right?
And if this distinction is correct and it’s a real distinction, so Aquinas is saying this is not just a conceptual distinction, meaning it’s not just distinct in how we think about it, but the distinction is in extra reality, extra mental reality itself, right? It’s in the thing itself, right?
If that. If he’s correct about that, he doesn’t just assume it, he argues for it. Several lines of philosophical motivation.
If it’s true that it is not of the nature of any, you know, finite individual like myself or you or a rabbit or whatever to exist, that its nature doesn’t guarantee, somehow guarantee or demand its existence, well, then this pretty quickly sets you up for a cosmological argument, right? Of, of. Of legitimately asking why does this thing exist? Right? Now the question of why does. Why does this thing exist is legitimate because there’s nothing about its nature or essence. Explain that, right? So now you start to look for an extrinsic cause of that thing, right? And what Aquinas does, just to kind of condense one of his approaches to God, is he says, look, if you’re going to terminate the hunt for ultimate explanation here, you’re going to have to get back to something whose essence just is its existence, a being of pure existence or pure actuality, right? Otherwise you have a sort of causal series where there’s this property, the prop. The causal property of existence that is always sort of on land. It’s always being borrowed or derived, but there’s nothing from which it is ultimately on lend from. And he thinks is. That’s. That’s absurd. That’s not an acceptable philosophical position for various reasons. And then once he has a being that is pure existence within his sort of metaphysical scheme, he thinks you can derive all the traditional divine attributes. You can conceptually unpack divine simplicity and immutability and omniscience and omnipotence. So this is this. But it’s all like, in a sense, like this grand philosophical approach to God of Aquinas hinges on a pretty like, fine little distinction, right?
Very fine distinction, right? Now, I think it’s also a sort of distinction. It can be motivated through common sense and common experience. But it’s certainly it’s, you know, it’s not something that just occurs to everybody, right? So that’s just an example where there is a distinction that people might not think about that that might be quite deep in the weeds. But has I Think enormous implications right down the line, natural theology and philosophy of God, stuff like that.
[00:07:53] Remy: It’s interesting the, I like, I like sort of the ideas of contingency. I think it, I like the idea that like if a thing doesn’t have to necessarily exist and yet it does exist, then we do have to ask, well then why does the thing exist? Right? And there has to be, there has to be something, a central thing issuing existence, right? Like a bank has to issue money for there to be money. No one just holds money and it’s like, oh well, it’s a dollar because we have to have dollars. And so there are naturally dollars, right? Or whatever. It’s, there has to be, there’s an issuing authority, right? There is something that gives the thing. But when we’re talking about this idea of the, that from once we get to this, once we get back to this, there must be this sort of issuing authority, there must be this being of existence, this being that is existence, and then from this we can derive all of the other attributes of God, et cetera.
How does that differentiate? How would that differentiate? Or does it differentiate our God from, from say the idea of the Brahman, which is, as far as I understand, literally exactly, that just the Brahman is existence and it exists and all things issue from it and all things are absorbed back into it.
[00:09:22] Patrick: Yeah, great question. So I want to make sure we circle back to the contingency argument because Aquinas’s argument is a sort of contingency argument. But the cool thing about his approach is I think he actually has a more robust framework where he can explain why something is contingent and also why even if something is necessary, it might still need a deeper explanation. I want to circle back to that. But to answer your question, the answer is maybe nothing, right?
So I mean there are Hindus that are classical theists, right. And they’re, they’re pretty close to what, you know, many Christians, not all, because not all Christians are classical theists these days. I think that’s a shame. Yeah, I think that, I think classical theism is where good philosophy winds up. And part of what I think demonstrates that is the fact that there have been many philosophers, many different traditions that get to the same result. Right, right.
You know, pagan thinkers, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu. So now once you get into the weeds, there can be certain differences, but they’re pretty fine grained. I have a very good friend, one of my best friend is a Hindu, he is a classical theist.
And so he thinks that, you know, God is one and absolutely simple. And, you know, the creator of every. Everything else. That’s not all Hindus, by the way. Right. But that’s, that’s what, that’s what he is.
But some Hindus might be more deterministic. They might accept things like modal collapse, such that, you know, God had to create. So the universe is itself a sort of necessary being, but it’s still a necessary being that ultimately is dependent on God for its existence or occurrence. Whereas. So you will find differences, if not necessarily in the immediate conception or nature of God. God’s relation to the world might be a bit different among these, these traditions. And again, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a pretty deep and important discussion.
[00:11:27] Remy: But.
[00:11:28] Patrick: Right. No, insofar as, you know, that’s, that’s kind of why natural theology is cool. That’s why I’ve always liked it. Because the idea of natural theology is we’re theology being the science of God. Right? Is we’re just trying to do it with our own natural powers. Right. We’re not assuming revelation and we’re just kind of working from the data of common experience that philosophers do, using the power of reason to try to search out the necessary conditions for, for things. Right.
And. Right. It doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean people always get it right. But it has been very cool for me to see how many other thinkers and how many different traditions and how many different time periods have really converged upon not just the existence of God, but a particularly robust conception of God.
[00:12:14] Remy: Right.
[00:12:14] Patrick: Where God is radically transcendent, one uniquely unique, simple, omnipotent, omniscient. It’s not exclusive to the Christian tradition. Even if it is, you know, most, I don’t know, well known or associated there. It’s by no means exclusive to that. You do find that in other traditions. Right. But then you also find other traditions that are more pantheistic or panentheistic, where they think that the sort of entire universe is the ultimate being. Those. That those are not classical theistic. But you find those as well, obviously. Right.
[00:12:45] Remy: I, I’m not too surprised that the, the, some of the core Christian doctrines of God and ideas about God would be universally found among other traditions. I mean, it’s, it’s like I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised when we run across some civilization’s, you know, trigonometry tablet and they’re describing trigonometry in the same way that then The Greeks would, 2,000 years later, completely disconnected. Like, I’m not I’m not shocked by that because, like, math, Math would seem to me to be like a universal constant. It’s a truth to be discovered. It’s not a thing to be invented. We’re not making it up. Like, if you have two items and then you get two more items, you now have four items. There’s not, you know, there’s no, there’s nothing to be invented or argued or debated. You. It. It just. It is what it is. Right. And I imagine God is the same way. So if you’re doing any serious thinking about God, it’s. To me, it’s really not shocking that you’re going to stumble onto the exact same conclus as someone else, because you’re not, you’re not inventing something, right? You’re. You’re finding something.
[00:14:20] Patrick: Yeah, I agree. And, you know, even though we come up with certain conventions, like what the symbols are that we use and stuff like that, I’m certainly a realist when it comes to math, but related to theology. Yeah. I don’t want to say. I, I don’t want to claim that, you know, every philosopher came to the exact same nature of God. That’s not true. But there’s a lot of people that are in the kind of same general ballpark or neighborhood. Right.
[00:14:42] Remy: And that’s.
[00:14:42] Patrick: And it doesn’ not shocking. Yeah, that’s not shocking. Right. And the divergences are understandable because, look, thinking about God is hard, man. Yeah, we’re thinking about, like, fundamental reality, right? Like, there’s, there’s no reason to think that this should be easy, but it is cool to see that when you have the most brilliant minds working hard on it, there is this general convergence. Like, you know, you have Plotinus, right? And like, yeah, there’s some differences, but if you read, like, Lloyd Gerson’s interpretation of how plus thinks about God, like, it sounds really, really similar to how Aquinus thinks about God. Right? And of course, you know, there’s. There’s borrowed thoughts here and there, but you have other cultures and other times where. And even in contemporary philosophy of religion, man, you, you have philosophers, I think, that, like, are kind of coming upon the same or similar results. And I’ve talked to these philosophers and I’ve said, hey, like, are you from. Do you know, like this. This other guy has said this, like, a really long time ago. And they’re like, no, actually, I wasn’t aware of that.
And I. And I think they’re being honest about that. Right? I think that they’re just like, really intelligent guys that are thinking hard about fundamental reality and converging upon that result, you know, sort of once again. And to me, that’s. That’s. That’s cool, man. I think that’s like, kind of confirmatory.
[00:16:02] Remy: Yeah, it’s pretty compelling. It’s pretty compelling.
It’s also not shocking that there are differences and variations in sort of where everyone ends up.
Because we’re also attempting to conceptualize something that is, I think, my.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but just my own personal theology. But we’re attempting to conceptualize something that is, I think, beyond human conception. Right? Like the fullness of God. There are certainly parts of God that are accessible to us that must be accessible to us for our salvation. Right. And then you certainly, you have the incarnation and. And all of that, but the actual, actual, like deity.
Right. I think is beyond what we can. What we can even in our. In our own minds. Think of. Like I was talking to a Unitarian about this, and I asked him to picture God in his head. Picture God for you Calvinist listeners don’t do that. That’s a violation of your second commandment there. But picture God in your head. And when you picture God in your head as however you want to picture him, a ball of light or a guy or whatever you want, whenever you picture God, he is in a void of some kind, right? White or black or whatever, he’s just in a void.
But before all creation, God wasn’t in a void.
There’s no void for God to be in. God is the only thing. Before all creation, there’s only God. There’s no void that God can be in. There’s no locality for God to be in.
He just simply is. And he’s the only thing there is. And you cannot, no matter how hard you try, you can’t picture that in your head.
[00:18:18] Patrick: Right.
[00:18:18] Remy: Like it’s something we can talk about.
[00:18:21] Patrick: Yes.
[00:18:22] Remy: It’s something we can understand sort of linguistically, you know, conceptually. Maybe we can, but you can’t actually.
[00:18:30] Patrick: Yeah.
You can’t picture it. Right. And this is. Here’s a distinction, right? There’s a distinction between conceptual ideas and perceptual ideas. You can’t image God because God isn’t a material being to be imaged. Right.
Whereas conceptual ideas, same thing. Like you can’t even image triangularity. You can image a particular triangle. Right? Triangularity, right. Is something that we have an understanding of. We know what it is, but anytime we have form a picture of it, we use imagine, you know, our Imagination, it always becomes particularized as this particular triangle or that particular triangle, right? And that’s an important distinction because I, in philosophy of mind, because I think that it’s our conceptual ideas that points to the immateriality of the intellect and ultimately the immortality. Whereas the perceptual ideas are the things that we kind of share with the lower animals and stuff like that. But related to your point, it’s absolutely true that we cannot fully grasp in our understanding the complete essence of God. That’s totally correct, right? That is beyond us. And for many of the, I think of the best sort of natural theologians, they think we kind of get to God in like one of two ways. One is the way of negation, right? That we can figure out what God is by saying what God is not, is not, right? God is not finite, God is not composite, God is not contingent. Now these are all true of God, right? These aren’t, these aren’t untrue things, but they don’t give us like a totally super rich conception of what we’re talking about. The other way that we can make true statements about God is the way of analogy, right? When we say that God is powerful, he’s got power in a way that is something like the way that we understand power, but in a, in a, in the mode of divinity, right? A completely different mode, same thing. When it comes to God’s knowledge, God has something like knowledge. And this is the idea of analogical language or analogical predication using stretch concepts, stuff like that. And to motivate this a little bit, we can think about the ideas of, of. Of a limit, case versus limit simplicity. This is a little technical, but I’ll, I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can because I think it’s really helpful. So just imagine, imagine a bunch of polygons. It’s an ordered series of polygons with, you know, each one has. You have increasing number of sides and angles, right?
[00:20:58] Remy: Okay.
[00:20:59] Patrick: And what is that converging towards? Clearly it’s converging towards a circle, right? But a circle itself is not a member of that series. Right?
But it’s also clear that that series is converging towards a circle. So you would say the circle is the limit case instance of that series. It’s something towards which the series converges or points to, but is not a member of that series itself. Yet there has to be some similarity in the difference, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to think that it’s. The series is actually converging towards the circular circle. So I think when natural theology is done, right, God ends up being the limit case instance of certain ordered series, right? The limit case instance of existence, of power, of knowledge, of any sort of perfection that isn’t inherently, that doesn’t inherently come with a limit or bound. Right. But when you understand him as a limit case, then you understand that what you’re saying of God is not to be predicated in the same way that we would typically use it of us univocally, right? It’s, it’s analogically using stretch concepts and stuff like that. So, so that allows us to say very true things of God. But the point is that at the end of the day there’s a tremendous mystery right there. Like these things are, these things are true. We can know it through the power of natural reason, but we still really do not understand it, right? We really do not understand it.
[00:22:18] Remy: We can see, we can see what our own, I want to say like our own knowledge or power, etc. Points to. We can see, we can see where this is going. But at the end God is still wholly other from us.
[00:22:40] Patrick: Yes, right. And an idea that might be a little bit helpful there is, you know, when we think about power is just the ability to sort of make or produce, but whenever we exercise our power, we always sort of work on pre existing material. I mean, it sounds weird, but even when I, when I raise my arm, I’m working on my arm. Right?
[00:22:57] Remy: Right.
[00:22:58] Patrick: Whereas whatever God’s power is, he doesn’t work on anything, he just brings it about. Right?
[00:23:04] Remy: Yeah. Wow.
[00:23:05] Patrick: That’s that. That is like the limit case instance of power, right?
[00:23:08] Remy: That’s ultimate power.
[00:23:09] Patrick: So like you’re more powerful to the extent that you have to work on less and less stuff. But everything that isn’t God always has to work on something, right? But God works on nothing. He makes it to be the case that there is any stuff, right. To begin with. So that’s kind of an idea of what we mean by this sort of limit case instance, right? Of that’s what, that’s what the ordered series of producers is or power bearing agents or whatever is pointing towards with respect to fundamental reality. Right.
[00:23:35] Remy: That’s amazing.
That’s amazing. That’s really good.
[00:23:40] Patrick: Pretty cool stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, I think it’s good, I think it’s good to keep that mystery there, you know, with respect to the transcendent, because it keeps you humble and a respect and like man, there’s just a lot of things about this world that are just really really hard and difficult to figure out.
But I think having that sort of transcendent anchor point that we can. I think we can prove, you know, philosophically that it’s there even if we can’t, you know, conceptually unpack all of its infinite riches.
It just, I don’t know, man. It provides, I think that that right degree of hope and confidence and reverence and awe. One of the mistakes that I think is. Is made a lot of times in philosophy and theology is just this, this anthropomorphizing God. Right. Of just, of just having this two. This picture of God that is far too similar. Right. God is just sort of like a very souped up being. Right. But not the truly radically other transcendent foundation of all reality. I think that’s where a lot of philosophical theology and just, just straight up Christian theology starts to go awry. Right. When it’s, when you, when you. I don’t know what. I don’t know. There’s different reasons that people wind up there, but I think that that is a major mistake. Right?
[00:25:03] Remy: Yeah.
[00:25:03] Patrick: And it has a lot of negative.
[00:25:04] Remy: Implications because God’s not. He’s not just a big man, you.
[00:25:08] Patrick: Know, I would hope. Yeah, certainly not.
[00:25:11] Remy: But that’s. You’re right, though. That’s like a lot of the place, a lot of the place where we go is that God, that God is just.
He’s just a bigger me. He’s just a bigger, more powerful me.
[00:25:22] Patrick: Right. Or maybe, you know, he’s just like, you know, a very powerful spirit or something like that.
[00:25:29] Remy: Yeah, right.
[00:25:29] Patrick: Well, I mean, this body, I mean.
[00:25:32] Remy: And this is even like, this is the root of so many different heresies. The one that really springs to mind for me is like Mormonism where God is just. God is just some kind of ascended. Ascended being. I too can ascend to, you know.
[00:25:48] Patrick: Yes.
[00:25:49] Remy: And it’s like, yeah, yeah, God. God isn’t just big you. He’s. He’s wholly other. He’s completely different.
[00:25:57] Patrick: Yep. And this is why maybe this will help connect what we were talking about before with Aquinas’s argument. I’ll try to, to connect some dots here. Right. Is that okay? So there’s. You have the contingency argument. People might be interested in this.
For God, pretty classic argument, has, has ancient roots. Leibniz is kind of the guy who really starts to give this a lot of steam. And the contingency argument goes something like this.
There are contingent things, and by contingent things, we mean they’re modally contingent. They exist in some but not all possible worlds, again, they exist, but it doesn’t seem like they have to exist, right? So we want some sort of explanation for why they exist.
And then what the advocate of the contingency argument has to do is they have to motivate some sort of causal or really explanatory principle. This is sometimes called the principle of sufficient reason. And that says that, hey, there’s an adequate, you know, reason or explanation for why anything exists and has the attributes it does, either from an extrinsic cause or the principles of its own nature. And so you motivate that principle. I think it’s a true principle, by the way. I spend a lot of time motivating it in my book. And if that principle is right, then you can kind of just wrap it around all the contingent things and then you can say in order to get a non circular explanation of why there’s anything of the type contingent, we need something that is necessary to explain all the contingent things. Something that has to exist no matter what, right? It could not, not exist. Right, okay, so that’s kind of cool, but like what is this necessary thing, right? And this is where a lot of contingency arguments kind of get a little bit stuck. There’s, there’s some good stuff in the literature of showing how you can kind of move from necessity to divinity. But there’s also a number of atheists, professional atheist philosophers and literature to say, you know what, I actually agree with that contingency argument that you just, that you just did, which I think is great philosophical progress, by the way.
But I’m just going to say that necessary being is like the universe or some part of the universe, or some initial physics singularity, like that. The singular, whatever, right?
And this is where I think just, just doing a little more metaphysics up front is really helpful. So we go back to Aquinas, right? And he’s, he’s got his theory of individuals. He’s a hylomorphic guy, right? So he thinks that all me and you are hylomorphic compounds, compounds of form and matter. These are the two principles that make us be what we are on one level, the deepest level, what we are.
The existing pat is comprised of an essence element, the essence of humanity particularized in me, and the existence element or the actuality element, right? And what’s cool about Aquinas’s theory is this, is that if he’s right, you actually get an explanation for why things are contingent, right? It’s not just a mystery why things are contingent. Things are contingent because they’re composite, because their essence does not include or guarantee or entail their existence, right? So that’s nice. We actually get a nice deeper explanation. But then moving further, you get a sort of principled stopping point of not just a necessary being, but a being that is truly ontologically independent because we don’t just want, like, necessary beings or necessary truths. Aquinas maintained that something could be necessary, but it could still depend on something more fundamental, right? Just imagine that God just created for all eternity something that just had to be there, a pop tart, right? So. And it’s invincible or whatever, right? So it’s necessary. You can’t get rid of this thing, right? It’s just created and secured by God from all eternity. So it exists in all possible worlds, right?
[00:29:27] Remy: If I.
[00:29:28] Patrick: If I could.
[00:29:29] Remy: If I could, just for my own layman’s sake, the idea of something being necessary but still contingent would be like gold standard dollars. Like the dollar is necessary for commerce and trade, but is still dependent on the gold that backs it to be valuable.
[00:29:53] Patrick: Sense of necessary, right? The necessity we’re using here again is a sort of modal necessity that if something is necessary in the sense, it has to exist in all possible worlds. Possible worlds. Semantics is just a way of trying to tease out modality, right? Which is just notions of contingency and necessity and impossibility and stuff like that, right?
So we say that God is a necessary being because we say in all possible worlds, all the ways that reality could have been, God would have to be there, right? That’s what we mean where I’m not a necessary being, I’m a contingent being. Because we can easily conceive of a way that the world could have been where I’m not there, right? My parents never met or something like that. So there’s nothing that, like, demands that I have to be in the world, right? So I mean, there’s lots of necessary truths to find deeper explanation, right? There’s. There’s mathematical truths that we explain with, you know, deeper axioms and stuff like that. So the idea is that just because something is necessary in a sense, right, doesn’t mean that it’s automatically exempt from finding a deeper explanation. So what I’m saying is, like, what the theist wants is not just necessity, that’s a part of it, right? The theist wants is true ontological independence, something that can stand entirely on its own and does not in any way depend on anything else apart from itself, right? That’s what we mean by God. And Aquinas gives us that because of his distinction between the essence and existence of real distinction between the essence and existence of any contingent individual. And he says, well, whatever the ultimate reality is the ultimate. I liked how you put it before the issuer of existence. Right. This thing would have to be something whose essence just is its existence. Right. And this would be a simple being. Right. It’s not a. It’s not a being that is compounded of a finite essence element and an existence element or a potency and act. Right. And this is a nice theory because it allows us to say that existence exists, which seems a little weird, but that it is also God. Right?
[00:31:50] Remy: Right.
[00:31:51] Patrick: And if anything seems to be like the sort of thing that could just exist of its own accord, it would be that. Right. That seems like a principal difference maker. And that’s what we want ultimately. What sort of thing would be the right sort of thing to anchor all the other things that just don’t seem to be the right sort of thing to give us an ultimate explanation of why anything is here and not nothing instead, if that makes sense. And Aquinas’s theory, I think, really gives us that. But in. In giving us that being whose essence is his existence, he’s going to rule out the possibility of any naturalist explanation. Right. And this gets back to how Aquinas unpacks the divine attributes. Right. He thinks that, for example, I’ll give you one way he does this, right? He thinks that if. If a being’s E is his existence, then it’s a being that is simple and self subsistent. Right. Its essence is just pure existence, and it exists of its own accord because its nature just is to exist, to be. Right. And then he’ll say, well, there can only actually be if there. If there is one of these beings, he’s hyper. He. He presents it as a hypothetical at first. There can only be one. Why? Because if you tried to have multiple entities like this, it would actually contradict the nature of being simple and self subsistent. And this is a simple thought experiment. Imagine there’s two of these beings whose essence just is existence. Well, if there’s two of them, there’s some difference, some difference trivially between the two of them.
[00:33:11] Remy: Sure.
[00:33:11] Patrick: That means. That means there’s some feature that one of them has that the other lacks. But to have a feature is to have a feature. You know, it’s a feature of something. So now you have a feature that is ontologically grounded in a deeper reality. And now you Have a composite, a complex being again. So you’re not even talking about a simple being. Right. Little complex, but I think Aquinas is really on the mark there. They says it’s actually the nature of subsisted existence that prohibits multiplication. Right. So if there is a being like this, it’s one and only one. So he actually is able to secure a radically unique monotheism. It isn’t just that there happens to be one God. He argues, given the nature there must be of this being, as there has to be and can only be one God. And I think that’s a great result.
[00:33:55] Remy: It’s the idea is the idea that. So you say if there’s two beings, there must be a difference. Right. One of them must have some kind of attribute or facet or delineating factor.
[00:34:07] Patrick: Rightly feature.
[00:34:09] Remy: Yeah.
[00:34:09] Patrick: Right. Yeah. And then that feature is ontologically grounded. Right. We have a metaphysical complex.
[00:34:14] Remy: The idea. The idea is that if God is compounded of different features, then he is necessarily contingent, like I necessarily. I mean, he must be, because in order to be compounded of features, something must put the features together.
[00:34:32] Patrick: Yeah. That is a different argument of Aquinas. Certainly he thinks that. He thinks that all composites do point to an extrinsic unifier, and we can unpack that as well. But for right now, he’s just running a kind of hypothetical of, okay, if there has to be an ultimate reality whose essence just is his existence. Right.
[00:34:49] Remy: Then we can’t have two or one realities. Yeah.
[00:34:52] Patrick: Could there be more than one of them? And then he. And he gives you that. That argument in his own words. I’ve sort of rephrased it, but that’s the. That’s the essence of it, if you will. But then he actually runs that back through into a cosmological argument because he says, well, look, there’s actually a lot of things in this world that we actually have multiple instances of. We have multiple instances of humanity and rabbit essence and this or that. So whatever those things are, they’re not the fundamental reality. Those are contingent things. Right, Right. And then he sort of runs. So that’s actually one way that he establishes the real distinction. Because he argues, like, if there’s something whose essence just is his existence. Right. There could be one and only one. So then for anything where there are multiples, it must be the case that there is a real distinction between its essence and existence. That’s one of the philosophical lines of motivation he uses to. It’s called the multiplicity argument. I think it’s actually pretty convincing. And then once he has that, it’s kind of cool because what he does then is, okay, well, these things are contingent. Their essence does not, you know, demand or include or guarantee or entail their existence. So now we need something that can explain them. Well, the only thing that can also explain why there’s anything like that would be that there has to be a being whose essence just is his existence. So that it turns out that hypothetical reality is not. Is actually hypothetical, that’s actually actual. Right. So he starts out with the hypothetical to motivate the real distinction, then uses the real distinction to demonstrate that the hypothetical being is. Is actually a necessary condition for all that other stuff. Does that make sense? It’s a little. Little complicated, but it makes sense. Clever.
[00:36:27] Remy: It makes sense. It makes sense. We start out. We start out with the hypothetical, and the hypothetical leads us to actual.
Yes, actual thinking. And then the actual thinking proves that the hypothetical isn’t actually hypothetical at all.
[00:36:45] Patrick: Yeah, that’s right. The hypothetical gives us a conceptual impossibility which Aquinas thinks is a real impossibility.
[00:36:51] Remy: Right.
[00:36:51] Patrick: Which then he uses to argue for the real distinction, which he then uses to feed into a cosmological argument to demonstrate the actual reality of the original hypothetical. If you can see that kind of chain of reasoning there, that’s his De. If anyone wants to know what I’m talking about, that’s Aquinas’s De and day Dante at Asentia on being in essence.
But the. But the upshots of that approach of doing the kind of. The more heavy metaphysics up front is again, you not only secure robust monotheism, but then, like you. You really kind of rule out any naturalist alternative because if you just follow Aquinas and now granted, like this requires that you actually take on Aquinas’s metaphysical system, right? Which is broadly Aristotelian and Neoplatonic. I think it’s a great system. But if you have that system in place, then I think you can pull out all the other divine attributes and show that the only candidate, if you will, for this fundamental reality is God. It can’t be any natural, finite, bounded entity or anything like that. It can’t be the universe, can’t be some initial physical state or anything like that.
[00:37:52] Remy: Do you think that that’s the best argument for God? What is the best argument for God? You wrote a book on it.
[00:38:00] Patrick: Yeah, I did. Yeah. So that’s super misleading because that’s not the argument that I present as the best argument for God. I think it’s a darn good argument.
[00:38:08] Remy: Yeah.
[00:38:09] Patrick: And I think it’s actually demonstrative if you’re working within Aquinas’s metaphysical system. I think it’s a true demonstration. I think it’s a true demonstration.
[00:38:19] Remy: And I.
[00:38:20] Patrick: Can I. Yeah.
[00:38:21] Remy: Can I pause it, actually, before we get to what you think the best argument for God is? What do you think is.
Can we do the positive and negative for and against, like the, the worst argument against. The best argument against. Worst argument for.
[00:38:38] Patrick: Yeah.
[00:38:39] Remy: Best argument for.
[00:38:40] Patrick: For sure. For sure. Yeah. Okay.
[00:38:43] Remy: So that feels like a lot.
[00:38:44] Patrick: I’m gonna say, like any, any. All right. Aside from the one I’m going to talk about, I would put Aquinas is right up at the top of really, really good and convincing again. There’s always more work that has to be done. There’s objections, blah, blah, blah. That’s nothing new. And that’s like general contingency arguments, I think are really powerful. Right. The Leibnizian, I think that they just, you know, have certain hurdles that can be overcome easier if you take this sort of metaphysics approach, Aquinas’s approach. But I would. I would defend the contingency argument for sure.
What is the worst argument for God? Oh, my gosh, this is tough because I try to avoid these, you know, what is the worst argument for God? How maybe can I give you, like, the worst of the best?
Because I try to focus mostly on, like, arguments I think are pretty promising, but maybe, maybe it’s the one that I’m, I think is, like, pretty good, but I’m not, like, the most confident in. Okay.
I would, I would probably say various moral arguments for God. Right. I think are in various ways strongly contestable or at least you have to do a lot more work to get them through than I think a lot of even professional philosophers have currently done. I develop a kind of moral argument in my book, but it’s in relation to my concerns and skepticism about a lot of the. The kind of more prominent moral arguments say. So that’s. That would be my kind of. Okay, there’s. There’s promise here, but I’m just not as confident as many other. The philosophers who push to moral arguments for God.
Best argument against God is the. Is that. That actually ties into my book.
But I’ll set that one aside. I’ll hold on to that. It’s the problem of evil. Right. Just a broad pro. Problems of evil, different ways, obviously. It’s that I can’t imagine.
I mean, there’s there’s, look, there’s. And I’m not saying that that’s the only objection against God. There’s lots. You have coherence objections, you know, various paradoxes, omnipotence paradoxes and stuff like that. I, I think those are more easily dealt with, though. So I think the problem of you was the best one against God, the worst one against God.
Oh, man. There’s. I mean, there’s different types of objections, right? So there’s lots of really bad objections against arguments for God, which is not itself necessarily a direct argument against God, like the what caused God objection or something like that. And it’s like. Well, if you’ve been paying attention to the conversation we’ve been having, that’s the point. You’ll be able to see why that doesn’t make sense.
[00:41:28] Remy: Right.
[00:41:28] Patrick: Like, the arguments are showing there must be something that has to be uncaused to make sense of all the causable things. What sort of thing could be uncaused? And then to ask like, what. What caused the thing that must be uncaused is just conceptual.
[00:41:40] Remy: It’s just stupid, right?
[00:41:41] Patrick: It’s just stupid. It’s the, it’s the. Tried to be polite about it, but it’s the.
[00:41:45] Remy: It’s.
[00:41:45] Patrick: It really is a bad objection right now.
[00:41:47] Remy: It’s. Could God. Could God rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it?
[00:41:50] Patrick: Right.
[00:41:50] Remy: It’s. Well, I don’t know. Could he make a square triangle? You know, no, we’re.
[00:41:54] Patrick: And that’s. That. That’s one of those paradigms that’s like an omnipotence paradox. Right. And I think you can work through. And there’s trickier ones than that. But, like, those, Those would be coherence of theism objections. Right? And then, yeah, the, the standard response there is that, well, no, a stone by nature is always inherently liftable. So, like, what’s going on here is just sort of a trick of language. You don’t see that what you’re talking about is actually an impossible trick of a good.
[00:42:15] Remy: Also, could, like, could the. Could the answer. Could the answer to that also just be, like, maximally. Yes, in all cases? Like, could God make a stone so heavy he couldn’t lift it? Sure. Could he then lift that stone? Sure.
And, you know, is that a. Is that a.
That’s a. You know, that’s a contradiction. Okay. But, you know, you’re not God and he makes the rules and you don’t. So just, like, deal with it, you know.
[00:42:41] Patrick: Yeah, I don’t take that approach. I mean, Some people do. I think that the standard one that we went over is. And I actually developed the standard response in my book, and I go through different coherence objections and stuff like that.
I think contradictions are just negations of being. I think it’s just the very nature of being that just sort of grounds the rules, if you will. And God is pure being itself. It’s just sort of the nature of existence. Right. That. That it’s. It’s ontology that ultimately grounds the contradictions are ontological impossibilities. Right. Not just logical. Right. So they just. They can’t. They can’t attain. So, yeah, I’m. I’m hesitant to go the route of accepting that there can be contradictions. There are some people that do that, but I think that creates a much bigger mess that I don’t particularly want to try to pick up. And I just don’t think you have to go that direction, if that makes sense. Right.
[00:43:36] Remy: Yeah, no, it does.
Can I tell you what I.
[00:43:39] Patrick: So the best argument for God? Oh, yeah, yeah. You go ahead. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, you tell me. Yeah.
[00:43:44] Remy: Okay. This is what I think. Worst argument for God. Okay. Just in general, overall, not talking, just philosophy. Yeah.
[00:43:54] Patrick: Like, you might have seen this on Twitter yesterday.
[00:43:56] Remy: Right. When someone is just like, you know, I just. I just feel it. I just know. You know, I just know. I think that’s. That’s probably the worst argument for. Worst argument against is, I think, always the scientific arguments.
[00:44:15] Patrick: Mm.
[00:44:19] Remy: Because, I don’t know. I. I’ve. I’ve sort of had. I’ve sort of had this idea for a few years now that the philosophers are better both for and against God than the scientists, because the scientists are so bound by just what is right here in front of me, and they cannot get past these preconceptions. And I mean, if you can explain humanity and the entire universe through evolution and just slapping enough time on something, and maybe it’ll work. Okay, that’s fine. But, like, you still, like, we’re talking about contingency a lot. You still haven’t dealt with that. You still haven’t dealt with the fact that. That this. This whole universe came about in the way it did, in the method that it did, that resulted in you and me for no particular reason at all.
[00:45:13] Patrick: And I think there’s an annoying philosophical distinction again between etiology and ontology. Right. So science deals with the etiology, how one physical event leads to a producer, another physical event. Ontology is asking, why are there any physical events at all?
[00:45:25] Remy: Right. Why are there any physical events?
[00:45:27] Patrick: It’s just a conceptual restriction to how much science can, can answer. Right. Once you understand that it’s gonna, it’s gonna put constraints on how much the scientists can, can bring to these. It’s not say they can’t bring anything, but it’s. You’re, you’re right. That many of them think that they have a lot more to contribute than they actually do.
[00:45:44] Remy: Right, yeah, that’s what I’m going for. Yeah, that, that there’s, that there are natural constraints to physical sciences.
Probably most telling is in the name. Right. That they’re physical. That like there are there, they’re dealing with stuff.
And a lot of. Maybe, maybe it’s just because the presupposition here is that stuff is all there is, you know. Right.
[00:46:12] Patrick: And that’s certainly not something that science gives us. That’s something that somebody would be feeding in.
[00:46:16] Remy: Yeah. You have to assume, you have to assume this sort of raw materialistic idea that there’s only stuff. And I don’t even know how you can do that when you come up with that idea that there’s only stuff. And the idea that there’s only stuff is actually get this, not stuff.
You know what I mean? Like the idea that there’s only the physical is itself not physical.
But I don’t know, I don’t know how they get around that actually, now that I think about that, and that may sound really stupid, but it seems like a pretty big barrier to me.
[00:46:53] Patrick: Yeah, yeah, no, I think it is. And the smarter atheists realize that. That’s why they will motivate naturalism. And naturalism is just a philosophically developed form of atheism as a philosophical project. And they will, you know, say, hey, we should kind of fill out our ontology or whatever with, you know, in accord with what, you know, the best of science has to offer. But they don’t say that it’s science itself that is giving us the non existence of God or something like that. Right. They’re, they’re motivating it philosophically. And different philosophers have different motivations for that. Right. They might think, for example, now this will, I’m sorry, you finish yours and then I’ll get it because this will lead into my book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They might think, for example, here’s the best, here’s the best argument against God. Right. Something like this. Right. If two theories explain just as much, believe the simpler theory, theism and atheism explain just as much. But atheism is simpler. So believe Atheism, right? So that would be an argument. You have to support it, of course. And I think that that’s a very interesting argument. I think it is one that is actually worthy of serious attention when it is presented by serious atheists. And it sets up for my book, which I think is the best argument for God, because I essentially, I attempt to like, do judo on that argument. I try to reverse it, right? And I say, okay, here’s the real deal, friends. Atheism or naturalism?
[00:48:20] Remy: Can you, can you lay out and support that argument?
[00:48:23] Patrick: The atheistic one? Yeah, well, we’ll, we’ll get there. Here’s. So here’s, here’s my, my thesis, right? I say, well, naturalism can only explain some of what theism can, but only when strapped with vastly greater complexity. And I say that that’s the best argument for God, which is a reverse of the naturalist one. Now to, to support these arguments, to evaluate them, we have to ask, well, what needs to be explained? Right? And this itself opens up a debate. It opens up a debate on like, well, what, what is the data that we need to explain? And there’s a good amount that’s agreed upon, but not all of it. But we’ll call this metaphysical data. And metaphysical data is a sort of stuff that we have good reason to believe is a, is real, is that is an actual feature of reality kind of at the common sense level at the beginning of our investigation. So what would some examples of this, of this be? Well, contingency, right? Most of us just have this deep intuition that there are some things that are contingent that are here but didn’t need to be here, right? Moral features of reality, consciousness, rationality, order, stability. So call these broad features of reality. What a philosopher needs to do is they need to have a theory, a metaphysical theory that can explain these types of things. These are the types of things that really get fed into science as assumptions. They’re not things that science itself confirms or tells us much about, right? They’re kind of just, they’re just, they’re just too deep down. And what I argue in my book, what I do in my book is I literally just go through all that data and say, okay, well, what’s the naturalistic explanation? And then in some cases, I’ll admit, okay, there’s, there’s, there is some explanation here, but the theistic one is a lot better and it’s a lot simpler. Here’s why. In other cases, I’ll be a bit punchy and I’ll say, actually, naturalism has no explanation at all. It really doesn’t. Right. For contingency. I think when it comes to the question of contingency or why does any, you know, metaphysically finite composite being exist, I don’t think naturalism can give a good principled explanation there. And I’ll say that only theism can. So that’s literally the project of my book is just like section by section, chapter by chapter, like looking at some piece of metaphysical data and saying, okay, what is, what does theism offer? How does theism explain this classical theism? And then is the naturalistic one as good? Is it better? Is there a naturalistic one at all?
So, yeah, I can substantiate that argument, but that’s, it’s all my book, right? Not like shamelessly promote it, but I spend an entire book, go read the book to detail. It’s a lot. Because it’s a lot, right? There’s a lot that goes into each one of those, you know, considerations, right? Whether we’re thinking about contingency or rationality or order or stability or the problem, Evil and suffering too, is the final chapter in my book. And I do argue that theism actually can give a better explanation of that even. And then the naturalism, which is probably the most provocative chapter of my book. But I thought it was important and I still think it’s correct.
[00:51:20] Remy: Has anyone ever presented you with an argument against God? I think I maybe even asked you this last time. That gives you any serious pause?
[00:51:29] Patrick: Yeah, man, that’s an, that’s a good question.
I mean, here’s the deal. The deal is, you know, for, for your listeners aren’t familiar. I spent most of my, still, most of my philosophical life as a naturalist, right?
So in a sense, I was already kind of familiar. It’s not like I haven’t discovered any new atheistic voices or anything like that, but I, I like, I wasn’t ignorant of what really smart naturalists were proposing, right. As arguments for their position against God and stuff like that.
So what happened is over time, I just, as I went deeper into that paradigm, I just realized, man, I just don’t think naturalism explains much of anything particularly well. Right. Whether we’re talking about, you know, the qualitative dimension, the conscious dimension, the moral dimension. I know I said that was the weakest, but I still don’t think naturalism has a particularly great account of, of moral realism, at least, if it’s not. At least not a super contrived one. Certainly the question of why anything exists and not nothing, instead and even suffering evil, the more I thought about it. So. So, you know, the first thing that happened to me in my shift was naturalism just sort of started to crumble. And then, you know, as I started considering the other side, there were a number of arguments initially fascinated me, but then I did drop them because I thought that there were good, you know, atheistic objections to them, particular formulations and stuff like that.
I think, you know, we all have our biases and prejudices, but I think I’m, like, pretty committed to just wanting to know what’s true. Right. Not hold on to arguments just. Just for the sake of it. Like, if I think that there’s some good objections and there’s lots of arguments out there, like, there’s, you know, there’s arguments about the Kalam cosmological argument. Now, whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause, et cetera, et cetera. Pretty popular argument. And there’s a lot out there about whether the universe began to exist and whether there can be infinite causal chains that are accidentally ordered. And there’s lots of paradoxes that are put out there to. To show that it produces absurd or contradictory results. There’s also a lot of responses to it that when I look at that argument or I see objections there, I just have not made up my mind on it. You know what I mean?
[00:53:57] Remy: Yeah.
[00:53:58] Patrick: So in that sense, like. Like, I have paused around different arguments if, you know, as I’ve really tried to think very hard about God. Like some I. I, like, I’ve thought about really hard. Right. For a long time, and they’ve only gotten stronger. And certainly not in recent memory have I encountered any, like, objections. It makes me, like, totally, you know, think I need to reconsider this. You know, like, Linus’s arguments and stuff like that. Right. The problem of evil I was obviously very familiar with in many different forms even before I became a theist. Right. So it’s not like this was like, news to me. Right. It’s like the difficulty answer your question is like, there was little that was sort of news to me on the philosophical front. Right. Like, I was already really familiar with the really smart guys presenting the best objection. So. Right.
[00:54:47] Remy: I guess a better. A better question then would be, so were you an atheist prior to being Roman Catholic? Are you raised Catholic?
[00:54:56] Patrick: Yes. Yes. Yeah, I was an atheist, so I was baptized, but I. I had no religious upbringing.
[00:55:02] Remy: Okay.
[00:55:02] Patrick: I lost whatever kind of little cartoon faith I had really, like, late middle school, definitely by, you know, High school and then I was, you know, pretty, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t your annoying, I was not your annoying atheist. I was really just a guy who thought that naturalism was the best picture in town. And I just wanted to try to make sense of the world. Right.
[00:55:25] Remy: So then I guess, I guess that’s where I was.
[00:55:27] Patrick: Yeah.
[00:55:27] Remy: The better question then is what was, what was the biggest hurdle to overcome is probably a better question than are there any arguments that give you pause? What was the hardest one for you?
[00:55:37] Patrick: Yeah. To get around evil. Of course it is. Of course it’s the problem of evil. Right.
[00:55:41] Remy: Simply, simply put, what is the problem of evil? If God real, why bad thing happened.
[00:55:46] Patrick: Yeah. If God is so great, why does all this stuff suck? Right. That’s the not precise, you know, formulation. If you want to get technical, we can. There’s, it’s, it’s a family of arguments, right. You have logical problems of evil which are meant to try to expose. There’s actually something completely incompatible about God and negative states of affairs. Those are pretty punchy arguments. I think that they can all be defeated and I think a lot of philosophers realize that those arguments can be defeated. So the debate is kind of moved more towards evidential or abductive arguments from evil. And the idea there is, okay, maybe evil isn’t like strictly incompatible with God, but just look how much stuff sucks. Doesn’t this make better sense if God doesn’t exist? And if God does exist. So it’s supposed to be an evidential game, right? Like this seems to just be a better fit on atheism or it seems to be obviously much better evidence for atheism. Again, maybe it doesn’t strictly disprove God, but let’s just, let’s just be serious about it, that, that, that sort of approach.
So yeah, I think that’s the, I think unsurprisingly, that’s the, that’s the best one, right. That I think points in favor initially, it only initially towards ac. Atheism. But I think once you think about it very deeply and seriously and respectfully for a long time, I think it starts to actually point the, in the other direction.
[00:57:07] Remy: I think it was the last time you were on this show with me that you said regarding the problem of evil, that things do suck, but like just enough to make saints.
You know, it’s not so bad that we all just kill ourselves right away. And it’s also not so good that there’s no adversity, but there’s just enough adversity to really drive home the righteousness. Right. There’s just enough bad to make the good that much better, I think is.
[00:57:48] Patrick: Yeah, yeah. It’s just. It seems that the way that all the evil and suffering could have been distributed in the world, it could have been far worse in certain respects, certainly far better as well. And this is a point Trent Doherty makes in his very good book, the Problem of Evil and Animal Suffering. He argues that it seems like that it’s been fine tuned for something. Right. Call it saint building or soul saving or something like that. Right. Peter van Engwegen developed something like this as well, a bit different. Right. But the general, the general, certainly the traditional Christian idea is that God permits this providence of suffering.
Why? Well, we don’t have to think it’s just for one reason. That’s. I think that’s a mistake in the. Probably don’t think that there’s just one reason for all of it. But certainly one reason I think is important is that suffering might be the best or only available means to bring us to that point of repentance and justification and make us holy and make us saints and all this and all that stuff. Right. So there’s all these sorts of theodicies. I think that’s right. I think you have to tell us a story about seemingly gratuitous evils which you can. Which I do in the book Evils, where it’s hard to see that it could serve some, some greater justifying purpose. So you need something in your theory to explain that. I go into that in, in my book. Right. I think there’s again, a number of different considerations that can help anticipate that from a theistic framework. And again, it’s not just one thing, but. But many. Right. But then I think the really important thing to ask here is not just can theism explain this sort of distribution pattern of suffering and the types of suffering. Right. I think it can.
But can naturalism really explain it? And this is in my book, I, I developed this, an argument that it really cannot, not without great.
Without being greatly contrived and complicated. And I have a. A paper in a academic volume appearing probably sometime next year that will, that develops this argument further. And it’s a little bit technical, but it’s, it’s. It. Let me give just the sketch of it so people, maybe this will just get people interested. Right. So if you are a naturalist generally, you’re committed to several important, you know, theses. Right. One is the idea of source physicalism. And source physicalism is the idea that the physical realm, whatever that is, precedes and causes and determines the mental realm, the qualitative realm of the. The realm of what it is likeness, including the. What it is like to feel pain and this or that. Right.
Again, this is going to be a very condensed, simplified version. But the argument is essentially this, okay? If that’s true, if. If everything about us is sort of kind of coming from the bottom up, right? And that the mental realm doesn’t play any sort of causal role or influence. This is why many naturalists are committed to a view and philosophy of mine called epiphenomenalism. That whatever else the mind is the qualitative dimension, something sort of just floats atop its physical base. It doesn’t exert any downward causal influence, okay. On what the physical stuff is doing. The physical completely determines the mental. Right? All right. If that’s right, then naturalism has a couple of problems. One, it doesn’t really have a good explanation of why the mental realm emerges at all or evolves at all. Because it’s not playing any functional role, right? It’s not playing any functional. But not only that, if it can’t explain that, it certainly can’t explain or doesn’t explain hardly adequately why we have the types of feelings that we do if they’re causally irrelevant, why do I suffer? Or why does it hurt when I get pricked with a pin, right. If. If the physical stuff can just do all of it, right? And I don’t need to feel anything to get my joints in the right place. And why do I. And why do I have that feeling? Because what the feeling is is causally irrelevant. I could feel like I do when I hear the Bonnie theme song when I got hit by a pin, but as long as my joints are in the right place, it doesn’t matter what the feeling is. Right?
[01:01:48] Remy: Right.
[01:01:48] Patrick: So when you get into the. The inner lot, this is what I argue about. When you get into the inner logic of naturalism, we actually get into the weeds. When you look under the hood and you get off of the. Just the kind of. The kindergarten perspective, right. You suddenly realize, oh, no, naturalism really doesn’t have a good explanation for why there’s any qualitative feelings of suffering, just feelings of suffering at all, or why they’re distributed the way they are or why they tend to harmonize with behaviors that would be justifying of that. Right. And it all has to do, again with the sort of inner logic and deeper principles of natural. And once you see that, you realize like, wow, it just seems to be an incredible coincidence that you have these sort of, these links. This, they call it. They call it psychophysical harmony. Right. Like, naturally doesn’t really seem to have an explanation of this. But if you talk about the problem of suffering, it’s. It’s that feeling, the feeling of suffering that needs to be explained. And you can’t just point to evolution here because again, this problem is deeper than evolution. Right. It’s way like evolution can’t touch this. Right.
[01:02:51] Remy: That’s what, that’s what I was gonna. That was my initial thought was like, if, you know, the stove is hot and I touch the stove and it hurts, so I move my hand, I’m experiencing suffering. The physical is exerting on the mental. But what’s the point of me feeling bad feelings?
And it’s, well, so I move my hand off the stove. But if good feelings can produce the same. If they can produce the same feeling.
[01:03:15] Patrick: Had nothing to do with you moving your hand. That’s the point, right?
[01:03:18] Remy: Yeah, exactly. Well, and I oftentimes have moved my hand before I have the feeling.
[01:03:23] Patrick: Yeah.
[01:03:24] Remy: You know, I mean, just on a purely physical level.
[01:03:27] Patrick: But if the result can be achieved.
[01:03:30] Remy: Yeah, if the result can be achieved with a different feeling, though, there’s no reason why the feeling evolution. What I’m saying is that evolution doesn’t explain it being bad feelings because we could have evolved it to be good feelings too and had the same outcome.
[01:03:48] Patrick: Selective pressures can’t solve this problem. As I argue in my book and in the paper and for people who are hip to these issues in philosophy of mind. Yes, that argument is assuming epiphenomealism, which many naturals assume. But I show how you can run the argument with different positions in like reductive functionalism, whatever. I think the same problem results. So the point is, is like, look, all right, if that’s right and naturalism really doesn’t have an explanation at all, then even if, like, you don’t think the theist has a super great explanation, I actually think you can give a very good theistic explanation. Takes a bit of time, but I think you can give one.
Some explanation is better than none. Right?
[01:04:23] Remy: So, yeah, right.
[01:04:25] Patrick: Evidentially, it’s still going to weigh in favor of theism if you, if you take all the steam out of the, the naturalist sale, if that makes sense. Right.
So, yeah, that’s, that’s how I do that. And I know I haven’t given the theistic theodicy, but again, like, I, I always try to be careful when responding to probably because there’s so much there. And I hate to be the guy that says like, go read my book. But you know, it’s, there’s a lot there and it’s a tough problem. I think the, not just classical theism, but Christianity has the resources to deal with it. I really do can give a good explanation, a very hopeful one at the end of the day, but it deserves a sort of careful reading and attention and stuff like that. Because every time I’ll do something I probably will forget something and be like, oh yeah, so maybe really important thing, right?
[01:05:08] Remy: Maybe maybe not to get too, too far into the weeds or detract too far from the book necessarily, but what moved you, I guess personally to Christianity specifically or maybe even Roman Catholicism as an expression of Christianity? Yeah, an accurate expression of Christianity.
[01:05:33] Patrick: Yeah. Good questions. Well, I mean, you hang around with these Thomistic philosophers for a while, you start getting very interested in Christianity because that’s sort of what they’re doing. And some broadly philosophical considerations, actually, I think kind of coming from that Thomistic standpoint, which is very Neoplatonic, it’s a very, it’s a very beautiful view of the world. And I don’t think beauty is like the ultimate thing, but I think it, it can be indicative or suggestive and it could certainly be a tiebreaker in certain respects. Right? So if you’re a classical theist, you think, okay, God is not just pure being, but he’s pure goodness. Because Aquinas holds the convertibility principle that goodness just is being under the aspect of perfection or desirability. So any being that is pure being is going to be pure goodness. He can start to ask some, I think, cool questions like why would God create, right. If he’s just this being of just absolute perfection, goodness, he doesn’t need to create. Right. And Aquinas would say something like this, you know, you know, a being can enjoy its goodness in one or two of, one of two ways. It can just rest in it or it can share it. Right. And God creates to share that creation is an act of pure loving gratuity. Right?
So that’s cool that, that I think that kind of gives an anticipation of why God would create, but also why God wasn’t necessitated to create. I think we can avoid modal collapse. I think the Trinity helps with that as well. That God is internally self diffusive, right? With the Trinity, the life of the Trinity. So he doesn’t necessarily need to be, doesn’t necessarily need to be externally self diffusive. But he decides to, he decides to create. He wills that this world exists and if. Okay, that’s right. But this world is a world of natures, and he lets those natures operate according to the kinds of things that they are. Right. God isn’t just some, you know, guy that sort of winds up a big mechanism and then tinkers with it as he goes. He just supplies being right to the natures of things. You know, puts actuality into the essences, if you will. Right. So he’s not going to be constantly tinkering or miraculously intervening because that would kind of make nonsense of creation. And God being perfect isn’t in the business of nonsense. And some of those beings, some of those beings are us, or they are like us. They’re beings that are metaphysically fallible, that have the power of deliberation and the power to end deliberation, which is the power of the will. And they can fail in their judgments. They can fail in their intellectual judgments. They can fail in their moral judgments. They can sin. Right. So Aquinas’s theory of sin is. It’s actually bound up with our metaphysical finitude that only God by nature is impeccable. Right. Everything else, no matter how awesome God makes it, is the sort of thing that can fail. This is just a sort of metaphysical constraint, Right? They’re, they’re, they’re beings of potency and act. They’re finite. We can only consider so many things at a time. We can choose to consider certain things when we’re making or when we’re about to make an important decision, and we can choose to ignore certain things. So Aquinas’s theory of sin is, yes, it’s due from ignorance, but it’s a culpable ignorance because we chose not to consider what we could really have considered, the power to consider it. Right. So yes, ignorance plays a role in Aquinas’s theory of sin, but it’s a culpable ignorance because we had the power to consider it. Right? All right, so things can sin, and when they sin, bad things happen and the world can become seriously disordered. Right. But God is the sort of being we think, I think philosophically that wouldn’t just kind of let that happen and step aside. Right, Right. In fact, I think the kind of original philosophical motivation for God is not just to share the good of existence. You know, if God’s going to be, you know, generous, he won’t just bring things into existence. He’ll probably be super generous, which means he’ll bring things not only into existence, but to share in the highest good, which is union with himself. Right, sure. So, right. And this is, this is very Christian, but I think it could be philosophically motivated as well, just from these principles of pure existence. And the good is self diffusive and stuff like that.
But there’s like a problem, right? Like, how is God going to like unify with a rock? A rock isn’t the kind of thing that can have that sort of personal friendship with anything because it’s not a conscious being. So it seems like God, if he’s going to kind of pull all creation into union with himself. I think this is a really cool insight in the philosophical tradition.
He’s got to kind of create something that is a microcosm within the macrocosm. Right. Something that sort of concentrates in itself the entire spread of creation. And this is what the human person is. Right. We’ve got the lower material aspects in us. We also have the higher angelic, spiritual aspects of it. Right. We’re composites of form and matter, of immaterial intellect and all these good physical parts. Right. So the idea then is that if God sort of pulls us into union with himself, he’s sort of automatically bringing all of creation along for the ride.
[01:10:27] Remy: Fascinating.
[01:10:28] Patrick: Isn’t that awesome, man? Isn’t that sweet? I just. Man, I fell in love with that line. I’m like, that is, that is. That has to be true right now. It gets better, I think, because not only. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it’s.
[01:10:42] Remy: I just real quick. It’s neat because it, it makes sense to then turn around and say that through his precious suffering and death that Christ redeems all creation. Because by redeeming us, it’s sort of, it’s spreading. It also explains why Hebrews would say, you know, when Adam fell, all creation fell because we are.
[01:11:06] Patrick: Yes, yeah, right. We’re the microcosm in the macrocosm. Right, yeah. So, yeah. And you already anticipated was going to go is that once you have that in place and then the fact that things got screwy, man, it just sets up for the incarnation and atonement like that. Yeah, right. Well, like that just seems like that God became man so that man might share in part, you know, become God. Right, that’s. And that’s true. And bring us back to Himself.
[01:11:31] Remy: That’s truly God. Then also, I mean, like you want to talk about God unifying with his creation and sharing with it his, his glory and majesty and being and all that he is, you really can’t get any, you can’t get any closer to that idea than the Incarnation, than God taking flesh into himself. Right. Like, it’s so funny. We argue all the time on Twitter because it’s a useless hellscape. And one of the things we argue about, one of the things we argue about are these simple phrases like, God has a mom.
God has a mom. And people, they freak out because they’re like, oh, if we’re talking about the Father or if we’re talking about true divinity or whatever, no, that’s ridiculous. And it’s impossible. And it’s like, well, guys, Jesus is God. Check. Step one, Jesus has a mom. Step two, you know, vis a vis.
God has a mom. You know, God.
[01:12:37] Patrick: Yeah, I’m with you. Yeah.
[01:12:38] Remy: You know, God was hungry. At some point in time, there’s really, there’s no, there’s no better, truly. Unification, redemption, pulling into himself of this reality and sharing himself with this reality, then the incarnation is there. That’s.
[01:12:58] Patrick: Yeah, yeah. So I think just from good philosophy, you can really, really anticipate something like that. And then once you just kind of have that on the scene historically, like, how can you resist it? Right. Yeah, I couldn’t. I couldn’t, not intellectually. Now, of course, there’s the whole moral conversion aspect. Right.
You know, was, was very significant as well, but that’s that. All right. And then why, why am I Catholic? Well, yeah, I searched around for a while, and I thought, I thought a lot about this, and, and I was veering Protestant for a while. In fact, a Lutheran. We went to a Lutheran church for a while, and then Evangelical.
I, I, But I hesitate to ever say that. Yeah. I hesitate to ever call myself Protestant because I just really wasn’t. I was just kind of searching and thinking. Right. And I guess I would just say a lot of things again, I think there’s good philosophical motion notions, and not that Protestantism can’t pick up any of these, and certainly Lutherans be able to pick up more than other Protestants. But we’re not just rational animals or rational social animals that depend on hierarchy, tradition, authority to get around in the world. We’re physical beings. So sacraments make a lot of sense to me.
[01:14:12] Remy: Yeah.
[01:14:14] Patrick: Institution makes a lot of sense to me. Authority makes a lot of sense to me. The right. Authority for judicial purposes, not, not always epistemic purposes, but for judicial purposes, unity purposes, functional purposes. Right. And then there’s the historical data. So I would just say there’s a cumulative case without getting into any of the weeds, where I just thought that the Catholic paradigm was able to explain the best of all that stuff, the philosophical and historical data for me.
[01:14:42] Remy: Sure.
[01:14:42] Patrick: And that’s why I became Catholic. That makes sense. Yep.
[01:14:45] Remy: Yeah. No, that. That makes a lot of sense.
[01:14:46] Patrick: Yeah. And. And look, man, I. I have tons of brilliant Protestant friends. Has had a great conversation with Gav in Ortland. I love those. These conversations. And just as I try to be as, you know, respectful to atheists and realize there’s a lot of brilliant atheists out there, there’s a lot of brilliant Protestants.
Love you guys. Right. I’m just glad that we’re able to have these types of conversations together.
[01:15:06] Remy: Yeah. Big, big on the ecumenism over here. I always.
I always.
That I find there’s. There’s a lot more unity than there is discord, I think.
[01:15:24] Patrick: Yeah. You brought up the points about, like, justification and stuff before, and that’s what I’ve found, man, when I was really just trying to figure it out for myself, you know, like, once you get out off of the online debates, you realize there just is a lot more harmony on things.
[01:15:36] Remy: Yeah.
[01:15:37] Patrick: Like, sometimes, like, the way we talk about things is very different. Right. But once you clear up that.
Not so far apart as I think a lot of people realize. Right.
[01:15:47] Remy: I sat down. I sat down with a Catholic priest one time on this show, which, you know, good on him. Very brave of him to do, I found. I’ve always wanted to, like, I really enjoy talking with. With different priests of different Christian traditions. And I find that the Catholics are the hardest ones to get on. And then I think part of that, a lot of that, I think, is humility. A lot of them, I don’t think they realize maybe how highly educated they are. You guys educate the crap out of your priests. They’re. I’ve not run across one. I’ve not run across one that I’m like, wow, this guy’s an idiot. You know, like, they’re always very smart, very intelligent, very well spoken, but I don’t know that they necessarily. I think most priests probably just. I have my parish and I have my people, and that’s, you know, good enough for me. Yeah.
[01:16:47] Patrick: And, you know, there’s different levels of training, philosophical and historical and theological. Different priests get. And of course, like, priests, again, just have different interests. Right. For me, my interests are metaphysics. I don’t really do Catholic Protestant. Like, that’s just not my area. Well, I had to work. I had to work it for myself. But, like, that’s not just that’s just not what I do. Right. Interests are just philosophical largely. Right.
[01:17:10] Remy: A lot of them also, I think, worried that it’ll end up being a gotcha like that, that it’ll end up being some kind of gotcha conversation where I’m going to grill them on. On theology, you know, and so then they’re hesitant to come on. But it’s like, I don’t. I actually don’t want to do that at all. I just kind of want to chat and see. I want you to explain what you. I’ll explain what I believe and we’ll see where we meet in the middle. And I did have a priest that came on and was willing to do that with me. And we got to talking about the sacrament of the altar and the Eucharist and we started talking kind of like really delving into sort of finally parsing the theological language. And I said, well, you know, ultimately in Lutheran theology we’re going to believe in a motive presence. We say he’s physically present is what we would say. He’s physically present in the sacrament. But we don’t mean like fleshly physically present.
We’re going to say ultimately we would refer to his mode of presence in the sacrament as sacramental. It’s his sacramental mode of presence.
[01:18:12] Patrick: Yeah. The distinction is really fine. It’s been a while since I looked into this, but the way I remember it being is that it’s not just a real presence that the Catholics maintain, but a real absence too.
[01:18:22] Remy: Right.
[01:18:24] Patrick: We’re talking about transubstantiation versus consubstantiation, stuff like that. So you want to talk like deep in the weeds of distinctions, but that is actually to your point that the things are actually a lot closer than I think we realize.
[01:18:34] Remy: Well, because.
[01:18:35] Patrick: And the differences are really fine grained. Right? Yeah.
[01:18:38] Remy: Even though y’all would say that the essence of the bread and wine is truly absent, and it is truly the essence is now truly the flesh and blood of Jesus. I don’t think there’s a Catholic out there that would maintain that when you eat the bread, you’re ripping Jesus, Jesus limb from limb. That. You know what I mean? Like, it’s not physical. It’s not physical in that way that you’re tearing Jesus apart with your teeth, you know, like no one, no one is saying that. And so it’s funny to talk to somebody on the Catholic side and explain, like, we understand you don’t believe that. We don’t believe that. And it’s like we actually are the real Distinction. Yeah. Is the. Is going to be. The true absence of bread and wine is probably going to be one of the bigger distinctions between the Lutheran and Catholic Eucharist.
I think also we just sort of buck at the idea of explaining it at all.
You know, Jesus said, this is my body.
[01:19:38] Patrick: Good. At some point, there’s. There’s just going to be some impenetrable mystery. Right. Which I think is a thing. Right.
[01:19:43] Remy: Well, because once again, circling. Circling all the way back, we’re talking about what is, to us an impenetrable being, you know?
[01:19:51] Patrick: Yeah. Right. I would, you know, there’d be.
I would love to, because the guy that I think you would have more material to converse over because theology is not my area of specialization, but I think he’s. He’s like you two. He really enjoys ecumenical dialogue. Very friendly, not into gotcha stuff. As Eric Ybarra.
[01:20:10] Remy: Okay.
[01:20:11] Patrick: I would love to see a conversation between you two, and I’d be happy to make that connection to good friend of mine.
Brilliant mind. Just, just. It’d be. I think that would be a very. If you’re looking for, like, that type of conversation with a Catholic who’s into a lot of these. These types of, you know, areas of discussion, he’d be a good guy to connect with, for sure.
[01:20:32] Remy: Yeah. No, I would love that. I’m always down. I’m always down.
That’s awesome.
So if I wanted to get into.
Not necessarily.
I feel like with stuff like this, people always kind of tend to drift towards apologetics and maybe, like, philosophically thinking about Christianity and theism in general sort of lends itself to that, but not necessarily from an apologetic lens. But if I just wanted to get into philosophy to deepen my own knowledge of, say, classical theism and how it ties to Christianity, where do you recommend I start?
[01:21:14] Patrick: Yeah, well, that’s a. That’s a great question. I always recommend this, like, if for anybody. Right. I think just at least some degree of philosophical education is just so useful.
Don’t be intimidated, you know, by it. I mean, what is philosophy ultimately? I actually like Planica, one of my favorite pots and philosophers. Right. He says philosophy is just thinking hard about things. That’s all it is. Right.
[01:21:35] Remy: Okay.
[01:21:36] Patrick: Doesn’t that sound good? Right. Doesn’t that sound good? We should want to think hard about things.
[01:21:39] Remy: Things.
[01:21:40] Patrick: Right. And he says it’s best done slow, and that’s that. Man, that’s. That’s definitely true. So there’s lots. I mean, first off, I do recommend, you know, one of the benefits of My master’s program especially, which is odd because like you didn’t even get this in the philosophy courses I took as an undergrad. My undergrad was not philosophy, but I took a lot of undergrad courses in. It was time spent with just, just, just the classics, the original texts. So I would say just to give people a few to get started with that aren’t like too crazy. Don’t do Aristotle’s physics. You’ll need a huge bottle of Motrin for that. But his ethics, you know, start with his, his Nicomachean ethics. That’s fairly accessible. It’s such a classic. Do Plato’s Dialogues for sure, maybe the Republic.
Another one that I think is a really good, important classic is Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy. He does more philosophy of God there. He’s. It’s really just a long extended response to the problem of evil.
Really, really good and important. Aquinas. Well, man, there’s a summa that’s quite a monster. But yeah, you could just kind of like pick through that a little bit here or there if you’re into like the philosophical parts of it. Right.
But definitely, you know, Aristotle, Plato, Boethius would be like three. If you’re just gonna, you know, do, do a few of the classics and the contemporary scene, there’s a lot of good, there’s a lot of good books. Right. One guy I really like because he’s both a great philosopher and a great writer is Mortimer Adler.
And if you get his book how to Read a Book, it’s actually a disguised book in like classical Aristotelian logic. But it’ll just, it’ll teach you how to engage with philosophical texts and how to like do those sort of mental chin ups. How to go from a state of understanding less to understanding more. When you don’t have a mentor, it’s just you and the book. So definitely get that and read that. And then at the end of that book he’s got the great works of philosophy and you could just spend your lifetime going through the great works of philosophy using the principles he taught in the book. So that, that, that book is really good. He’s also got a book called Aristotle for Everybody. And I’m broadly an Aristotelian. I think Aristotle has got a lot of things right. So if you’re just looking like good introduction to Aristotle, maybe even while you’re reading Aristotle, I think it is helpful to have some, some help there even just to help you get clear in terminology and stuff like that. Aristotle for everybody is really Good.
And then there’s. Man, there’s just so many. There’s so many introductory books. I actually just picked up a new one recently, if people like the kind of metaphysics we’re doing here, a book called Introduction to. I think it’s just called Introduction to Mystic Metaphysics by Michael Gorman. I just. I’ve only read two chapters, but I’m really impressed because it’s. It’s a book that is definitely accessible, but he’s going into. Into depth as well. So I think I’m. Even though I haven’t read it, I think I’m. I’m already ready to endorse that book and then just be completely shameless. I’ll say my own too.
[01:24:38] Remy: Yes.
[01:24:38] Patrick: Because even though I’m kind of like going into the deep philosophical weeds, I was inspired by Adler to, like, try and, like, provide a philosophical education as I was getting into the debate. Right. So my book has lots of sidebars where if there’s, like, you know, some fancy philosophical term, I take the time to explain what that means, maybe give a little bit of the history. So I think people will actually genuinely learn a lot about what the discipline of philosophy is and methodology just by working through my book on the existence of God as well. So those would be a few off the top of my head to start with.
[01:25:11] Remy: It occurs to me. It occurs to me if you want to get into philosophical thinking just thinking about it, you need to a. Know how to think, right?
[01:25:25] Patrick: You.
[01:25:25] Remy: You need to learn how to, like, actually think and not just, I think a lot of people react and they think. That’s thinking.
Yes.
So you need to know how to think. And I think the other thing that helps is probably you need to know how to speak. Like, you need. You need a vocabulary. You’re gonna need. You’re gonna need to know words. Because if you don’t know words, you can’t formulate the ideas. You have to have. You have to have the words to have the ideas.
[01:25:59] Patrick: That’s why you get so many technical words, right? And then you’ll wonder, well, why do we need these so many technical words? And you try to do without them, and then you realize, oh, I guess we did need those. Right? Yeah.
[01:26:08] Remy: Yeah. It’s. It’s funny in. In theology and in the study of theology, you wonder that a lot. You know, you wonder that a lot. Where it’s like. Where it’s like, why does everyone constantly refer to this thing in Latin? And so then, like, you don’t refer to it in Latin, and then you realize that in English, it sounds just like this other thing that’s completely not at all the same thing, you know, and you, like, you start to realize the confusion that happens with sort of the imprecision of language. You know, there’s my favorite example in English, the imprecision that modern English can lend itself to is like the word heaven. You know, we’re all going to go to heaven when we die. But in, in precise theological language, what you’re thinking of when you think we die and go to heaven is actually the intermediary state. It’s a temporary intermediary state before the resurrection. And the thing that you, you should actually be hoping for, the thing that’s actually closer to what you’re conceiving of as heaven is going to be the resurrection and the new earth, which is entirely different from where your spirit’s going to be on the cloud with the harp or whatever you want to think of after you die.
But I feel like in order to think about things, you need the vocabulary to talk about them.
And, and a precise, you know, a precise vocabulary. You.
[01:27:39] Patrick: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why I would say, like, if, if you are going to read Aquinas, you know, get, yeah, just get like something like Aquinas A Beginner’s Guide. There’s another one, Aquinas A Beginner’s Guide by Ed Faser, because he’s going to help you get the vocabulary vocabulary down.
And it’s important because not only is it a technical vocabulary, but he will just use terms in ways that are just very different than how we currently understand them. Right. So you want to make sure that you’re just not, you know, importing your modern assumption or understanding into his text when he means something actually completely different. So I do recommend that you get a little bit of outside help or a guide if you’re going to go to, you know, to the, to some of these classics.
[01:28:21] Remy: What, what do you think are some of the biggest, biggest benefits for Christians to study philosophy? Like, what are some of the biggest reasons you think a Christian should man?
[01:28:33] Patrick: Well, for me, it’s just, it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s purifying. Right, Purifying your, your understanding, hopefully, of the world, hopefully also about God. You know, we talked about not falling into anthropomorphisms about God. And, you know, thinking philosophically about God, I think will give you a much, I don’t want to say richer understanding because it’s. What we’ve been talking about is like you come to understand that God is so radically other and transcendent, but a greater hopefully. All right. Or opportunity for reverence, stuff like that.
I think philosophy, I mean, look, we’re, we’re, we’re intellectual animals at the end of the day, we sort of thrive on this stuff. Doesn’t mean that everybody is meant to be, you know, that, that ivory tower academic. But I think everybody stands to benefit from sharpening their intellect.
[01:29:28] Remy: Sure.
[01:29:29] Patrick: To various degrees. Absolutely. It helps. I mean, it helps in evangelism, man. We know that, right? Apologetics is a legitimate field. You always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you and with gentleness and respect, right? So we know that Christianity is not just broadly assumed in our culture anymore, right? People are very skeptical, people are very critical.
So even when people just see that you have thought about it, right? Even before they have even seen what your arguments or reasons are, just the fact that they’ve seen that, oh, you’ve actually put some thought into this, they tend to. That, that gets them interested or impressed or curious in different ways. And then if you can back that up with some decent reasons, again, don’t have to go like super in the weeds on everything, but if you could just maybe, you know, kind of get your, you know, you know, you know, master, like just a few things here or there, right, that you have on the ready, that can just be enormously useful in everyday conversation, evangelism, apologetics. So I think it’s useful on that front.
Yeah. And I don’t know, man, I, I always just, I just love it because I just, I feel like I’m just borrowing intelligence from people that are a lot smarter than myself too.
[01:30:45] Remy: You know, I get.
[01:30:47] Patrick: And it makes me, it makes me. It helps you with humility, for sure, which, you know, I always need, but also gratitude, right? You know, there’s people there who’ve wrestled with these tough ideas and they can be of help to you. That’s always really cool, Right? And it’s reassuring in a sense, too, because you can’t answer everything, that’s for sure. But you can be pretty confident there’s somebody out there who’s, who’s wrestled with it and probably has some good answers if you need some help, right? So, yeah, I guess those are some reasons I’ve just never been able not to do it, you know, so just, just, just always been into it, you know what I mean?
[01:31:27] Remy: I like to say that the church has been around for 2,000 years. You know, Christianity has been here for 2,000 years now.
[01:31:38] Patrick: Yeah.
[01:31:39] Remy: People smarter than me or people smarter. Like, if I’m talking to an atheist, people smarter than you have asked better questions to people smarter than me. You know what I mean? Like, this isn’t. We’ve, it’s been around a while. None of us are treading new ground here. I don’t think anyone’s come up with any novel, brand new objection to anything.
You know, we’re so. Yeah, there is that. I get to borrow. I get to borrow from people smarter than me, you know, I get to lean on. There’s a whole, there’s a whole past, a whole group of people that have, that have done work and like, I just have to follow in the footsteps here, you know?
[01:32:24] Patrick: Yeah. Maybe you can push it forward a little bit. Inspired too, right? Like. Yeah, refine a little bit. Right, Absolutely.
[01:32:31] Remy: But it’s not like, it’s not like I’m, it’s not like I’m the first person that’s ever been faced with this, you know, like, there’s. I find that to be very encouraging, you know?
[01:32:41] Patrick: Yeah, totally.
[01:32:42] Remy: People can do this. They’ve done it.
[01:32:44] Patrick: Yeah. They’ve been through that. Right. Like. Yeah. Right. And. Yeah. Is there anything ever totally new? I don’t know. I’ve spent a lot of time, you know, in the, in the weeds of this stuff. And like, there’s, you know, there’s different formulations and refinements and stuff like that, but the kind of, the big stuff is largely the same, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Like, even atheism, modern materialism, like, you see, it’s precursors and ancient atomism and all that stuff. Right. Like, even, even the broad philosophical schools have always kind of been there, you know.
[01:33:20] Remy: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t know that.
I don’t know that there’s a, A real.
There might be novel ways of thinking about certain things, but I don’t think anyone’s coming up with any brand new.
Stepping up with some kind of brand new novel thought altogether that no one has ever thought that I can defeat theism and prove atheism with this brand new way of thinking about God that no one’s ever thought about God this way before. And I can prove, and I don’t think that’s happening. I think, you know, like you said, it’s. People take things like the problem of evil and maybe we can approach this, we can refine this down and approach it a different way to come up with an objection or a solution, but no one’s come there’s not a new problem of evil, you know.
[01:34:16] Patrick: Yeah. And same thing with a lot of, even with a lot of the theistic stuff, you know, I’ve, I’ve got some takes that I think are novel, but I’m always, I’m always borrowing or synthesizing, you know, or just connecting, you know, dots that are already out there. And that’s good because like, you don’t, you don’t, you shouldn’t be like discouraged, like, oh, everything’s already been said so nothing more news that’s not true. Right. The things can be pushed forward and refined as well.
[01:34:39] Remy: Absolutely.
[01:34:40] Patrick: I guess what we’re trying to say is that, you know, have confidence. Right. That these, the tough questions of this general form have always been around and brilliant people have been wrestling with them and there’s, there are good answers out there, you know.
[01:34:51] Remy: Yeah. And I think it’s, I think it’s encouraging too that, you know, the questions are still, you know, that we’re all still playing the same game. I guess I find that to be encouraging as well. And part of this, I guess, is from the theology side of it, the goal with good theology is in fact to not innovate and to not refine and to not be novel.
The goal of good theology is to take what the apostles taught, what Jesus taught the apostles and they taught the apostolic fathers and so on down the line, to take that teaching from them and pass it down to the next guy. Just, you know what I mean? We’re not, I don’t want to change it, I don’t want to add to it, I don’t want to take away from it, theologically speaking. I just want to hand on the gift that’s been given down to me, you know, and again, it’s just, I, I, I find it encouraging that there’s, I am a hundred percent certain that there’s never going to be some kind of great historical or scientific breakthrough that’s going to completely upend Christianity or like, on your end, Christian philosophy. We’re not going to discover something that all of a sudden calls into question everything.
[01:36:12] Patrick: I think that’s, I think that’s right. I mean, I can’t close off the logical possibility of some things. Right. But yeah, I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the so called conflict thesis. Right.
And I’ve largely come to conclude that there just isn’t one. Right. It’s just sort of bogus. Right. Greatly exaggerated and I guess I would say in a modest respect, the best of what contemporary science has to offer is more confirmatory of the existence of God rather than disconfirmatory. Right. Whether we’re talking about physical fine tuning or what have you. Yeah.
[01:36:56] Remy: Here’s a question for you. This is something that I think, and I’m wondering philosophically how you would approach this idea and what you think about it. And I understand this is probably going to be kind of off the cuff, but you’re a smart guy. I think he can handle it. Let’s try.
I think that there are hard limits that God puts on humanity.
And I mean that generally when I say that scientifically, But I also would say philosophically as well.
I think there are hard limits that there are things that we just simply will never be able to do, like beat death, death, anti aging, cloning, I think, traveling faster than the speed of light, I think. And these are scientific examples because this is the way I’ve thought of it.
But I think there are hard limits that God puts. You know, the Bible says that he tells the sea, thus far and no farther. And I think he does the same. But there’s plenty of us that he wants for us to discover and explore and learn and see and grow into. But there are also, I think, hard limits where he says no farther than this.
[01:38:09] Patrick: Yeah, I mean, look, I think that’s true with. With respect of the problem of evil. I think that there is, like, some threshold of awfulness that God would not allow, you know, the world to descend into. Obviously, I don’t think we can say exactly where that is. But it’s also important to understand that wherever that threshold is, it’s compatible with us coming right up against it. So, like, epistemically, it might seem no different. Right. Like, you think, like.
[01:38:35] Remy: Right.
[01:38:36] Patrick: There’s no way God would allow the world to be this bad. Where the answer is, actually, you’re. You’re almost right. Right. But we’re right there. Right.
[01:38:44] Remy: Right.
[01:38:44] Patrick: Yeah.
[01:38:45] Remy: The. The truth is he wouldn’t allow it to be a tiny bit.
[01:38:48] Patrick: He wouldn’t. I’ll be like, plus one, worse than that or something like that. So I think that’s true. Right. I just don’t know where to draw those lines. You know what I mean? Sure. And I think it’s important to be humble about it now. I think that there are, you know, certain things you can be positive about. About what? I think you can have certain expectations of God. For example, Aquinas thinks that God isn’t just going to annihilate the world out of existence. You know, five seconds from now Right. He thinks that that would just be against God’s will for creation and God would be acting irrationally, which God you just not only wouldn’t do, but just can’t do. Right.
But like those are really broad, really broad expectations when it comes down to like making really hyper specific. Make predictions. Again, I think there are specific lines. I just don’t think I have, I know I don’t have access to them and I question whether anybody could. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I agree that they’re there. I think, I think, I think, I think death is probably certainly one of them. Like I think that the Christian can, can say, yeah, I think I can predict that there’s just, we’re just not going to be beaten death anytime soon. Right. I’m with you on that. Right, Right.
[01:39:54] Remy: Well, well. And even to say, even to say that there are hard limits, to say human knowledge that they’re. That there are hard limits, but to say that I don’t think anyone can probe necessarily what that limit is, even that itself. Right. Would be another example of a hard limit that, you know, God says, look, there are just, there are things that are for me to know and for you to just not know.
That’s.
[01:40:22] Patrick: Yeah.
[01:40:23] Remy: There, you know, whether it’s just out of, out of some kind of love for us, maybe protection or something like that, or whether it’s just a facet of his being versus a facet of ours.
[01:40:34] Patrick: Right. I think it’s one of those two things. Right. I think if it’s. It might just not be metaphysically the case that we could know certain things, at least in our mode of knowing, but it could also just be the case that it’s better for us in, you know, this providence of salvation, not to let. Here’s a good example. Right.
Many saints have thought that if God revealed to you all of your sins at once, if you knew how bad you really were, you would despair. Right. So he.
[01:41:02] Remy: Yeah, 100%.
[01:41:03] Patrick: So you don’t know all of it all at once. Right. But gives it to you in a way that like, you can deal with it without like completely despairing. So that would be God putting a restriction in place. Why? Because of his loving providence. Right. So I think that that would be a good example of that. Right?
[01:41:17] Remy: Yeah, it’s like when, when someone says, like, well, why doesn’t God, why doesn’t God remove all the evil from the world? And the theological answer to that is, well, he did that one time and it involves slowly drowning planet over the course of 45 days. You know what I mean? Like, God can certainly remove all the evil from existence if he wanted to, but it means your precious Gam Gam is going to die.
[01:41:41] Patrick: Yeah. You know what I mean? It also. So, like, you know, we certainly believe that God is at work at this right now. Right. Might not be on. On the timeline that everybody wants or in the way that everybody wants, but why should we expect that? We know the best way to deal with this. And I think we shouldn’t. Right. I think here’s an. You know, here’s an analogy. Right.
I don’t play chess. Not really. I kind of know the basic rules, but if I’m sitting down with a chess master and he’s making all these moves, I probably don’t see the reasons why he’s making the moves that he is. But I have good reason to think that even though I don’t see the reasons, he’s got them and they’re really good. Right.
[01:42:21] Remy: Yeah.
[01:42:22] Patrick: So a lot of things. I think that analogy is. Is pretty similar to how we should think about, you know, the order of Providence. I. I shouldn’t. It’s not that I just don’t see the reason for God doing all the things that he does, but given the sort of distance between me and God, which is infinitely greater between me and a chess master, I shouldn’t even expect to see the reasons. I should expect not to see what all those reasons are.
[01:42:46] Remy: Right.
[01:42:46] Patrick: Right. And again, this is. I think that maybe should just. It should be. It should give you hope, but also humility. When you see it like that, you know, it’s.
[01:42:56] Remy: It’s crazy because a lot of people today, going back to like, the chess master analogy, not only do they.
Do they not understand the reason the chess master is making the moves he’s making, but them having never played chess before in their lives, but put it like, that’s just.
[01:43:14] Patrick: Nobody would do it like that. Right? Yeah.
[01:43:17] Remy: Yeah.
[01:43:17] Patrick: Well.
[01:43:17] Remy: Or worse, like, accused the chess master of breaking the rules. You know what I mean? Like, you can’t move that piece like that, you know? And it’s like, dude, you don’t even know.
You don’t even know how to play the game, you know? Like.
Yeah. I don’t know. It’s the air. The. I think the only. The only thing in general that. That outpaces the stupid. The stupidity of humanity just sort of in general is our arrogance.
[01:43:48] Patrick: Sure.
[01:43:49] Remy: Like, man.
[01:43:51] Patrick: Yeah.
[01:43:52] Remy: Like, we are so quick to be like, To. To assume so much of ourselves. Right. It’s difficult.
[01:44:03] Patrick: Yes. That’s that is again, I think a great thing that philosophy can do is it can, I mean, if nothing else, when you’re doing philosophy, you’re, you know, up against a lot of other people who are really smart and thinking really hard about things. I think that can instill a lot of humility. Right. So I think that’s another potential virtue of philosophy. Potential. You know, sometimes there’s, there are people who get into this and it, it, I don’t know, they, and they just become more clever without being, becoming more wise, as we mentioned at the beginning.
[01:44:33] Remy: Yeah, good way to round that back. That’s so good.
Pat, thank you so much for hopping on for like two hours with me, man. It was a great time.
[01:44:43] Patrick: Yeah, this was, this was great, man. We got to explore a lot of territory. And like last time, I really enjoyed it, brother. Really did.
[01:44:49] Remy: What, what kind of things? What kind of things can I link for you? What do you want to tell people about real quick?
[01:44:53] Patrick: While we have most relevantly, my book that we discussed a fair bit here, the Best Argument for God, published by Sophia, I think that would probably be of most interest to people as we record this conversation. Sophia has it discounted from like 20 bucks to 5 bucks for the paperback, but I have no idea how long that’s going to go on for most people. Just get it off of Amazon so people can check that out. Otherwise I have my podcast Philosophy for the People, so if you just search my name and Philosophy for the people on YouTube, that’ll come up and I’ve got a substack as well, so we can put a link there in somewhere, I suppose.
[01:45:30] Remy: Excellent. Yeah, I’ll link to all that. Make sure that people don’t get hoodwinked by the other Pat Flynn, who also great dude and puts out good stuff.
[01:45:42] Patrick: I’ve been on his podcast. Right?
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. We finally decided to dissolve all the mystery of who the real Pat Flynn is so people can check that out if they want.
[01:45:55] Remy: In my mind, he will always be the false Pat Flynn.
[01:45:57] Patrick: Good, good. Yeah. Fake Pat Flynn. He’s a great, he’s a fun dude though. He’s, he’s, that’s, that’s the smart, passive income Pat Flynn, if people are curious. Not this Pat Flynn. Right. But, but still a good guy and worth checking out. Yeah. Uhhuh.
[01:46:10] Remy: Yeah, he, he, he’s. Honestly, he’s taught me a lot, just about finance and just how to think, like in a business way. Oh, and the stuff.
[01:46:22] Patrick: He’s great. Yeah, he’s really good for sure. So definitely recommend him. I just. It’s like if you. You start asking, like, hold on, why is this guy talking about how to make passive income online? You might have a different Pat Flynn than this conversation.
[01:46:38] Remy: Still worth checking out, though.
[01:46:39] Patrick: Yeah.
[01:46:40] Remy: Awesome, Pat. Thank you so much, bud.
[01:46:42] Patrick: Yeah, cheer.
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