Episode 29 - Philosophy and Radical Theology

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so you were saying peter about nihilism oh well mike brought up the subject of nihilism he was saying that uh it's hard to what was it as an empiricist it's hard to get beyond nihilism yeah just any idea and philosophy i can't accept anything but nihilism yeah and you know the interesting thing for me is that actually philosophy in many ways it starts there it's not where philosophy ends up it's where philosophy begins when you're 15 years old and you're listening to your manic street preachers in your bedroom and you think life is meaningless that's the beginning of philosophy and the question for people like nietzsche is what to do can you embrace life after nihilism i mean albert camus starts off the myth of sisyphus by saying the only philosophical question worth asking is should we commit suicide basically should you put a gun to your head and blew your brains out that's the philosophical question and um and that's what inspires a lot of continental philosophy welcome to the liturgist podcast everyone we're happy christmas let's see if philosophy is a board game where you start at nihilism i've never figured out how to roll the dice and get past it i i just have to punt to empiricism which i understand is based on philosophy but i'm making like a weak assumption that the universe exists and once i make that assumption it just seems best to go with the data so what what i mean is when people try to convince me of ideas using philosophy i'm not sure what those philosophical ideas are actually based on yeah i mean this actually brings us to i mean this is probably too much for a podcast to be honest we're going to send everyone to sleep this is kind of like the sleeping tablet put this on at 10 o'clock at night you'll sleep like a baby right because i'm about to explain the difference between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy strap in your seat belts everybody we're in for a wild night okay philosophy is broadly uh split into two warring tribes you would have thought so and on the analytics side people very much enjoy empiricism it's very closely related to science a lot of analytic philosophers study physics they they're interested in in quantum mechanics and mathematics and then there's continental philosophy and continental philosophy is much more interested in one's experience of life what's called phenomenology or existentialism and so just to kind of parse it out a bit an analytic philosopher might ask the question does a god exist or is the concept of god coherent but a continental philosophy would say would ask what does it mean to say i believe that god exists what is the life world of a person who believes um and so they're quite they're slightly different questions and the second question is less empirical because you're not like looking at data or trying to interpret the world what you're doing is trying to put words to people's experiences that's a different type of question and a different type of research than probably mike you are interested in or enjoy and that's totally cool i like tennis and you like football and i'm right and you're wrong but we can all we can all live i think if i had to pick a side of that debate i'd be hard pressed to do so it seems like they're interesting reference frames for exploring different questions yeah and you see this even if you take psychology and psychoanalysis that that's kind of like a place where they almost blur psychology is a little bit more influenced by the sciences so they like do big research into you know how people act in relation to authority or whatever and psychoanalysis is about the individual it's so it's not science because you can't reproduce it every person is taken as a universe so by definition you can't you know create things that can be replicated and so the concepts can you know can't really be verified or falsified so talking about projection or transference um you know is is more difficult from a scientific perspective but psychoanalysis does influence some psychology and some psychological ideas can influence psychoanalysis so and there are some philosophers who try to be in the middle between the two warring factions and uh there's a guy bruce benson who's a a friend of mine he works in that area trying to see if there's a way of bringing the two sides together i've brought everybody to silence this is this is usually what happens when i go to cocktail parties what do you do i do philosophy can i explain the difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy like yeah i think that's actually just a huge home run for our listeners yeah no it's amazing analytic philosophy does it have any ground in reality outside of like how do you talk to someone about this conversation we keep having mike saying what which college is it that keeps trying to throw out the philosophy department mike pretty much about every single one of them it is disastrous right there [Laughter] it's a damn scientist man well the scientists are in trouble as well because it's tech technologists who everybody wants scientists are out there doing research that that's like into things that will not make products for a hundred years if ever yeah it's the people who can create the technologies that's what everybody wants i mean this is a crazy idea but money runs the universities who would have thought that i mean that's very cynical you know again merry christmas but here but mike was i think was asking me something about uh analytic philosophy like we're sitting in a room at the moment and there's a book that i can see well it's actually behind me but the viewers don't know that i can see right now it's written by an analytic philosopher and it is called hold on i think it's by a guy called alvin planting i think it's called the coherence of theism and basically it's a massive book that just is attempting to argue whether christianity is coherent not whether it's correct or incorrect or anything like that just whether it's correct not plausible even not even just just a coherent concept an analytic philosopher would never do that because you know you know michael you're asking about kind of i think philosophy in terms of does it get practical is it grinded um you know for a continental philosopher there's virtually no christian in the world who's going to read alvin plantinga and and kind of like base their faith on whether they think it's coherent because some philosopher said it you know um so a continental philosopher is much more interested in going you know what's going on when someone makes that claim um and on how much is that claim connected to their their own subjective experience of the world so so in some respects i think continental philosophy is much closer to lived experience than analytic philosophy but and i did both i started as an analytic philosopher and then i moved over because i moved because i wanted to really understand the lived experience of real people rather than just you know argue over like very minute points so like someone like daniel dennett then would be an analytic philosopher yeah and then plantaga would be more of a continental philosopher oh no sorry no planting is totally analytic as well planting is an analytic philosophy philosopher's religion there's not many of them around um and i i don't think they're doing incredibly interesting things sometimes there's you know that's that's probably not completely true but both dana and plantinger are analytics but like daniel dennett from the little i've read he's done some really interesting work into ideas of consciousness that actually continental philosophers uh would definitely be interested in can you give an example of consciousness from the analytic side versus the continental side well i mean continental philosophers will ask you know that you know so for example the whole thing about say the unconscious take that example the unconscious some people are going well well what is it is it something that you can empirically find can you open up the brain and and see it um and the whole thing for a continental philosopher is the unconscious actually doesn't really exist it insists it's it's part of a subjective experience that that's part of language and part of being conscious but it's not something that you will be able to find in neuroscience probably you know it's not some region of the brain that will light up so analytic philosophy will tend towards more of an interest in neuroscience and the plasticity of the brain et cetera et cetera but continental philosophy will take more of an interest in you know as i say the experience of when i'm talking to when i put my hand up in class maybe when i'm a kid and i say mummy instead of the teacher you know someone will say oh that's a freudian slip so that you know again that's kind of like it's more of the subjective experience what's going on not whether you can find it in a brilliant scam but something about you know what it means to be a creature that speaks so let's say two philosophers come up with differing claims how do you like arbitrate which claim is more correct in philosophy oh i mean you know that's a that's a great question um so it depends again the air one of the areas that i'm interested in is is psychoanalysis and and the theory of psychoanalysis really it's become the sexy subject in philosophy it doesn't sound very sexy but it's kind of like there's a there's a philosopher called the khan or a psychoanalyst called the calm and he's become incredibly popular but you know the question is you know if someone comes up with a theory of the psyche you know how do you which is better if someone says um i'm kind of a bit crazy because i saw a black cat when i was young um to i'm a bit crazy because you know i had an absent father and whatever you know how do you judge between these and you know in some respects it's similar to other issues in science you know there's there's what's called occam's razor which is an explanation that requires as little as as necessary um that unexplains as much as it can so uh to say that you know you have a couple of different explanations but one of them's just much more neat smaller and seems to make sense of more data but in psychoanalysis you've got this thing where the method is pretty much solid you sit in the couch you talk about your problems eventually you project your past relationships onto the therapist that's called the symbolic you know first the therapist is just like you you're just going out there just like me they you know they're just interested in money they don't care about me that's called the imaginary and you can't really do therapy at that level but then the therapist becomes a symbolic figure so you say something like oh you're going to really hit hate me when i say this now the therapist if they've done their job right will have not given you any indication whether they would hate you or like you for something so suddenly they might go why do you say that and you go well actually my father used to say that's what my father would think and that's where you're projecting on to the therapist your father the third stage is the real where the therapist can start to you know help you work through that but anyway the point is that the method stays pretty much solid but the theories as to what's happening are changing and developing and it's similar to science it's like there's no verification there's just falsification there's there's you know some theories will be overturned by others that just make more sense of the data but yeah it's a it's a it's a very um difficult and winding route does that i mean does that even answer your question or does it so there's it's a similar like peer review against observation and data process that you see in the sciences yeah and and you know in in something like continental philosophy where you can't kind of actually do much empirical research a lot of it is what we call a priori so a posteriori is as you know i'm sure after experience you know it's experience you look at the world you make judgments according to what you see a priori is you're trying to make claims through pure reason through pure mathematics through pure logic now the interesting thing is even in the sciences even in the heart sciences these are blurring so in in the realm of you know as you know quantum mechanics and uh there's there's theories that are being put out that we we won't be able to empirically test maybe for 10 15 20 years some things we may never be able to test and yet still the theories have some explanatory value in fact as far as i know you would know more about this than me but we can make technologies in areas where we haven't really understood what's going on we've just got these theoretical frameworks so strangely just in philosophy does use empiricism to to some extent in the same way the hard sciences seem to also they they use pure mathematics and some of them say that strangely pure mathematical formulas seem to reflect something of the very nature of the universe i mean that's a controversial claim but yeah absolutely yeah yeah you know and that's not one that i i have much insight uh in maybe you have something to say on that [Laughter] so like maybe the biggest unsolved quandary at the foundation of science is math and invented construct or is it something we discover that's intrinsic to reality yeah i don't think anybody has anything intelligent to say on that subject nothing i've read in the realm of philosophy there's a french philosopher who's probably the biggest french philosopher alive called alam badu and he's doing amazing work with set theory and mathematics uh in relation to politics so it's a strange interesting thing where he's doing pure mathematical theory but then applying it to political revolutions political transformation um but again you know it's it's weird because it's just pure mathematics in some ways but it's making real claims to the way the world is and it's it's helping uh him make sense of how political transformations actually come about so and he's an interesting philosopher so you have like a couple of minutes in front of a college board to defend philosophy why should it still exist what is it going to do for humanity oh yeah i mean heidegger i think sebby said like if you're looking at what philosophy can do to for the world or to make money or anything like that you know not very much um and so it doesn't have much practical value it's not going to make you rich sadly if you're thinking of doing philosophy there is one story of a philosopher who they someone said this to him says you philosophers like don't know how to make money and so this is like an ancient greek philosopher and so he spent a year studying the cycles of the weather and he started to make predictions about kind of what when whether when when the sun would come out when rains would come and then he bought a field he planted these crops he made a load of money and then he just gave it all away but he just wanted to prove that actually philosophy can't make money if you wanted to um but i've never seen that happen since i think he was the first and last philosopher to ever make money but it's what philosophy does to you i mean that's the the amazing thing is um you know it it it does rock your world i mean the biggest thing for me actually i'm a big fan of what's called deconstruction and a deconstructionist philosophy and i mean it's always been around i mean basically it means we all try to close down the world with political and religious ideas we try to name the universe we try to think we have some massive insight into the metaphysical reality of everything and philosophy and people think that's what philosophy is about but interestingly what i learned about philosophy is this little phrase that is you're more enslaved by theory the less you know about it so in other words the less you know of philosophy the more enslaved you are to philosophy and actually the more you learn the more you realize what you don't know the more your world explodes and breaks open the more questions you ask and ultimately i think this is productive for individuals and also it i think it has political consequences as well because it breaks open enclosed fundamentalisms that derrida the french philosopher he said basically justice is a beautiful word and it it holds a promise but if you ever meet someone who says i know exactly what justice looks like and i can make it happen right now be wary because he says justice is a wonderful promise for something that you that's to come that you have to work for that you have to wrestle with but always question your notion of justice always be open to seeing that it might be unjust and i think philosophy at its core is kind of about that when you have a word like god immediately you nominate god so you name god and you say oh i know god is x y and z but then you also have to denominate god which means to say oh but when i say god is father it's not like my father or if god is a being well god isn't a being like i'm a being right so there's always the denomination and the denomination that's why i like the fact that churches are called denominations the church should be the place that d names god that's always breaking that apart always saying we don't know it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's better help h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists i don't know if it's the if it's the beer the spiced holiday beer or your charming personality but i feel a lot better about philosophy right now that i did before the podcast and i certainly feel like philosophy is more grounded in reality if reality in reality than theology i don't i think that is the drink talking i know i was working you're called science mike so i was trying i'm trying to work to make to change you to philosophy mike i've got a little bit of work to do but i'm i'm trying you got a lot of work to do i'm still a philosophical nihilist but uh yes at least i'm hearing there's some grounding in reality yeah you know pascal says there's like you know there's the universe out there that is just infinite and incredible and amazing and then there is the universe within um and it is amazing and incredible and fast well actually pascal said he said it slightly differently because he was talking about the physical world he says the the minute spec is an infinite realm of possibilities and amazing stuff that we don't know and then the macro world but but in a sense philosophy and science science does amazing incredible work in the physical world like what you're doing is you're talking about the the laws of physics and what you can and can't do in space time and all that fascinating stuff but and and what i kind of am drawn to is the inner world of human beings subjectivity what's going on and people uh that's that's that's vast because every human being is like the tardis you know in doctor who it's like a tiny box but it opens up and it goes on forever inside this tiny box there's an infinite universe and so in inside the fragile fleshly frame of each individual there is this vast internal universe and and that's what i think a lot of at least continental philosophers are interested in doing i love it one of those worlds is running on planets and asteroids stars comets interstellar dust and emerges from those properties the other of course is emerging from 86 billion neurons and countless dendrites and glial cells and yeah but so i guess what i'm saying is is it fair philosophically to say the individual subjective world is a smaller infinite set than the larger macro reality yeah i mean you could say it's a type of trans-finite reality but i mean what's interesting to me is if you believe in non-reductive uh kind of emergence the idea that that the universe can give birth to something that can't be reduced to the previous level you know then you know you can say consciousness of course is grounded in physicality you've basically got five miracles i think you basically got being from nothingness life from being consciousness from life and then and then there's potential fifth that hasn't happened or whatever but but each of these is a type of weird scientific miracle you know being from nothingness pretty damn cool right um life from being wow and unconsciousness from life and and if if each of these is kind of non-reductively emergent so as each one comes comes into being they can't be fully articulated or understood in relation to the last one then that means that they deserve their own regime of explorers their own aspies their own discipline and so yes in some respects you could say consciousness as something that's come from life which is something that's come from being which has potentially come from nothingness is therefore a smaller set it's a small set within a bigger set but in a sense it's non-reductive so i would say that you can't explain say consciousness using physics it requires its own discipline so this is what i mean when i say i'm a philosophical nihilist and i just sort of skip a couple of spaces and set my little play piece on empiricism yeah cause i'm not sure i buy into um non-reductive uh approaches to understanding reality yeah i think i think maybe i mean we don't know but i think it's plausible that consciousness can be described in reductive terms still miraculous and beautiful but you know i've talked about on previous episodes of the program a a physicist model of consciousness that effectively says the most basic form of consciousness is the most basic model of reality which would be a thermostat that knows the temperature and response to the temperature and then a more elaborate consciousness would be a plant that knows more about reality has more feedback loops and then a more elaborate version than that would be an insect that can move and has to be aware of its space and hunt food and find mates and not eat its mate and then beyond that you would have even more loops to deal with social animals that not only have a map of reality but also have to you know emulate other animals maps of reality they have to imagine what another being another consciousness is modeling the world as and then finally you have humans who have this kind of space-time model of consciousness we have a specialized function of their brain the orbiter frontal cortex that causes them to constantly contemplate the future which is somewhat unique in the animal kingdom but all those things emerge from a series of feedback loops designed to keep organisms functioning in the environment yes now i would partially agree with that uh with the small caveat of throwing in the idea of short circuits in these feedback loops so for me so for example you know i i totally agree as in you know you you you have multiple layers of increasing complexity you see coming through evolution but the idea is that there's a certain point when communication becomes language and i don't we don't know when this actually happens but communication is when a bird or a monkey or whatever makes a sound and that sign means something it means there's a predator or it means that you want to meet right so there's a direct correlation between the signed and what it means so you see a footprint in the sound the cam was saying and you go okay so there was somebody there because the footprint rep symbolizes what it means and then there's certain animals who can make footprints that are false tracks right and can you so like a couple of animals i think that they can make false tracks so as a hunter will go in the wrong direction but human beings are the strange species where we can make true tracks knowing that the other person will think they're false tracks and therefore so we can make the truth a lie in other words as soon as lying the difference between language and communication is communication is one to one this thing means this thing language brings you into a space where you can tell the truth by line and line by telling the truth and and miscommunication is therefore an inherent part of communication and so there's this nothingness in the midst of the being of language there's this undecidability there's this almost superposition kind of going on until someone decides an interpretation if for example you've seen the princess bride where the poison has moved back and forth between two people and it's always about do you want me to drink this glass of wine because you knew i was going to pick the other glass of wine with a poison in it and it's a super super position until someone makes an interpretation and all i'm saying by that is that there's a certain level of complexity that arises that is a subjective experience that while it can be explained by increasing complexity brings us into the world of the unconscious and the unconscious is not something that can be find in neuroscience it's not something that exists it's something that insists it's a virtual reality just like sectarianism doesn't exist if there are new people in the world there'd be new sectarianism or new racism but that doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist it's a property and strangely here's the weird thing you can have a society where nobody is racist in their thinking but still racist structurally where everybody decides i'm not going to send my school my kids to that school i'm not going to buy a house in that area and strangely if you ask anybody at the level of consciousness they're not racist and that strangely racism continues to operate at a structural level so my argument is simply that that when it comes to those types of phenomenon neuroscience and physics just aren't equipped to explore them well is it that is it that neuroscience and physics are ill-equipped to explore them or that the model our brains can hold of physics and neuroscience are insufficient to explain them i sometimes wonder if human beings have a tendency to ascribe to mis to mystery or to emergence that which is beyond our limited ability to model in our own consciousness i know but the difference is this so if you take sart's view of consciousness for example where you say consciousness is literally a gap and nothingness so for example sart makes a distinction between being in itself and for itself right and you you probably know these distinctions but basically anything that's in itself is something that just is a rock a planet a glass of wine just whatever it just is it's it in itself a for itself isn't any object that knows itself as an object that knows itself as something is dis that experiences a distance from the wine glass and a distance from itself and for sort he says this means to have distance to be able to reflect on yourself as an object means you have to have space of some kind you know some distance if you don't have distance from something you can't reflect on it and so he calls this nothingness so he writes a book called being and nothingness to say that being to be is to have nothingness within it which means that to be a human is to experience a gap in one's being to experience oneself as an object of reflection and therefore and this is where it gets into my work as a philosopher of religion you have a sense that you're lacking something there's a lack there's a there's a nothingness in the heart of being now if that is correct no science will ever be able to find it because it's not something defined it's literally nothing it's a gap so so neuroscience so no scientists will be able to find and nothingness but this for for me just connects with what we see in physics at the moment where you know there there is a sense in which you could say there is with with the uncertainty principle and and what we see with the double slit experiments that there is a nothingness and undecidability built into heart baked into being itself and and i say this is not because of a lack of knowledge this is actually due to us having an understanding that nothingness is part of being yeah this is like this is like superman versus batman except i'm having a really good time so so first of all a couple of things one um you could make the same sort of statement in regards to consciousness and structural racism not existing if beings don't exist you could also say that relational databases and ip addresses don't exist without computers yeah but that doesn't mean that relational databases and ip addresses aren't rooted in the behavior in physics of silicon photons magnetic bladders and copper cabling absolutely you can as you add more nodes to a network the complexity of the behavior that emerges from those nodes can exceed the ability of its own creator to understand it so today for example in high speed trading even though we wrote the software our computers surprise us with their behavior because there's too many factors in play for human consciousness to model and so even though we build the system even though we understand very well all the individual components the emergent behavior that comes out puzzles us but i don't think that's because this new property of say the internet of high-speed trading of large-scale systems interacting with each other with uh you know genetic algorithms what it simply means is when you add all those components together they create a system of such complexity that a human brain can't model enough of the components to make accurate predictions with the orbital frontal cortex anymore in the same way that uh absolutely i'd agree that well there's i hate to go down this rabbit hole there's a big divide in philosophy and science over the definition of nothing in the first place yes yes uh the scientists always go well show me nothing and the philosopher goes well i can't show you nothing that's kind of the point and so as a pragmatist scientist go well if you can't show it to me it's irrelevant yeah but if if you look at for example the uncertainty principle that's a function of how waves behave where if you're if you're looking at something in a wave you can think of ocean waves right now if you're looking at the peak and trough of a wave in order to measure the distance of the wave you're not actually measuring any particle that's a part of that wave any individual molecule of water for example but if you look closer at a molecule of water it becomes difficult increasingly difficult to tell what is the beginning and end of a given wave and that's the uncertainty principle it's an innate function of wave particle duality and that's why for example in the dual slit experiment you see that odd behavior because it requires a particle interaction to collapse a wave function into a deterministic particle it sounds really interesting but it's it's really just a nature of how waves work and in theory you could devise a wave slit experiment they used ocean waves instead of quantum waves and i i don't know how that speaks to some intrinsic property wherein smaller components fail to encapsulate or produce these emergent behaviors again not denying that subjectivity is beautiful i just think that subjectivity even our understanding that something is quote lacking unquote is rooted in our neurological makeup as it has been optimized by evolution over the eons you know there's strangely there's there's a lot that we agree on um but so where i'm coming from as a speculative philosopher is the idea that the subjectivity is not a reflection on the universe subjectivity is uh the universe itself reflecting on itself so my eyes are not looking at the universe my eyes are the universe looking at itself subjectivity is not somehow outside of the world of being a physics of nothingness and being subjectivity somehow expresses that so to delve into the depths of your subjectivity is to delve into the very nature of everything and so i'm agreeing with you in a sense of yeah subjectivity is not anything different from what you know from the universe it's it's it's it's a it's part of the universe what i'm arguing however is that subjectivity helps tell us something about the universe which is it's in antagonism with itself that being and nothingness are intertwined and and philosophers have been saying this for hundreds of years i'm actually saying to you that the scientists are just gradually catching up to it was there long before the mechanics and saying that that you know in this idea of nothingness but but i i know scientists get very frustrated with philosophers and okay what do you mean by nothingness you know what's this but and i can understand that but you know i so i i but my example of the being in itself and for itself is one example of what i'm what philosophers mean which is simply when you're born there is no you you know there's just a body of experiences bam bam explosions but you're the first time you experience yourself as separate and for some psychoanalyst that's the primary caregiver or that's the breast you know the first time you experience yourself as separate from something is the very moment that there's a kind of gap introduced into your subjectivity there's a me and a not me there's an eye and a not i and that haunts us and i live in la where you see that haunted all the time where everybody feels a gap and they think if they have the fancy car or enough money or enough fame they'll be able to close that gap or their right spiritual experience or the right drugs or whatever so and that's what religion for me offers religion and it's a false offering religion says you can be whole and complete and get rid of the nothingness in your being and by the way by religion i mean secularism secularism is the most religious thing in the world today for me as a philosopher because everywhere you turn in la someone's saying you can be cool and complete just do this yoga do this take ayahuasca you know get famous and so this is not to what i'm trying to do when i'm saying this is not simply explain what a philosopher means by the gap or the nothing and not simply say that that reflects something of the nature of the universe i also want to say it also affects us day to day that the nothingness that philosophers talk about is actually really it really means something because it helps to explain why we frantically often pursue something that we think will take away that lack and the existential philosophers and theologians say no the real task in life is to make peace with the lack to to rob it off at sting and to stop seeking wholeness and completion and realize that to be human is to experience a certain level of alienation a certain level of nothingness i just agree with all that although i will say accepting the lack sometimes feels a bit like wholeness yes oh yes oh i totally agree the strange thing is when you're able to stop frantically pursuing wholeness and simply be the irony is you feel much more whole and complete and happy strangely in the very lack of pursuit of that so i'm i'm totally on board with that and that's the whole nature of my work is that we conspire we conspire with religion and politics and and and drugs and technology to try to find a thing that will make us happy and and so what we do by the way is not only can we not get it we fantasize that someone else has it and in psychoanalysis is called a non-castrated other so we found that in la you walk around and everybody looks like they're having a ball they're all having a great time and you feel crap because you're in on friday night and you've got no one to see you know but the funny thing is we're all kind of engaged in this type of fantasy and and we we're all laboring under the unhappy tyranny of happiness and strangely to break free of that tyranny and simply accept that kind of that existential lack is the path to a real full and fun and joyous life the first thing we ever did uh as the liturgist michael wrote a song called vapor and then that became the centerpiece of our first like project which was also called vapor and then we turned around and did a few live events called oddly enough vapor and it's it's it's built around the teachings of coalette and in ecclesiastes basically saying that everything is meaningless the best thing humanity's capable of is is worthless it's nothing um and it's sort of this like dark existential nihilism that ends up becoming freeing because that means all the things you worry about are also meaningless and that there's there's this tremendous freedom in realizing that you are an insignificant little bit of organic matter on a thin film of bio material on a very small rock in an un spectacular solar system in a totally ordinary galaxy itself minuscule in the larger universe and i think it's interesting that's the first thing we ever did because i sometimes joke that we could call this the nihilist podcast and it would be just as descriptive yes that that's where you started that's not where you ended that's where you began that's exactly what i was meaning at the beginning when i said nihilism is not where you end it's where you begin it's almost like it would be really good if somebody had once said those who seek their life will lose them and those who lose their life will find it you know because that that idea of like you know going into the darkness and into the nothingness and into the nihilism all of us go oh you know that that couldn't be a good idea that's the last thing don't lose your life go find it go pursue wholeness and completeness but what if that's the very place you have to go in order to find your life and actually what you did by starting the liturgist and not place is is actually you know is exactly what we're talking about here you go to that place of loss of nihilism of darkness but strangely in the very moment of the the darkest space you find life in wholeness this is why i say like i love the new age because new age people always say fulfill your dreams and i love this i love this because fulfill your dreams because then you'll experience the abject horror of them you'll realize how crap they are how impotent they are fulfill your dreams so that you can experience the absolute terror that results from us if you think that getting 10 million dollars is gonna make you happy great get it so that you realize it's ridiculous it's utterly stupid and then you can get to the point of delving into the darkness and then in that darkness you'll find light you're describing my entire theological project but i've spent 15 years trying to convince people that christianity is most subversive is exactly this [Laughter] i'll drink to that i love it okay so what about theology for the philosopher and the scientists we've heard from mike plenty of times about theology well maybe not plenty of times but ethan peter just so you know my stance on theology yep i say that you can always substitute the word fan fiction for theology and not change the meaning of the sentence you're the type of guy who puts the bible in the fiction section in bookshops inspirational fiction inspirational fiction yeah well i i am profoundly influenced by a tradition that you know there's multiple names for it but there's a there's a theologian paul tillich who i love who's an existentialist he wrote a book called the courage to be and and in the book he's basically saying that that there is this experience of anxiety we have experience of nothingness and he says it manifests itself in one of three ways in a sense of meaninglessness like oh my my goodness my job is meaningless i should get a better job that's the weak form and the strong form is i don't think there's any meaning guilt which is oh i should have been a nicer person than my mum that's the weak form the strong form is i don't think i'll ever match up to what i think human potential should be and finally death which is obviously the ultimate luck and the weak form is you go to the doctor because you think you have cancer and the doctor says it's okay you're going to live and you go brilliant and then the doctor says well you're still going to die you know but you're just not going to die of cancer right the strong form is you go oh right we all have a terminal disease right we're all going to die and and for paul tillich he says this nothingness the lack of meaning the lack of wholeness as a person the lack of life it it's not it infests us it it's in us and the courage to be involves the courage to embrace non-being and and religion at its best at its worst religion is something we can spar with to protect ourselves from this but we never can it never works no matter how much joel olsen you listen to ultimately it's not going to work um and so tilik is saying that we have to make peace with this lack and so that's the theological project i'm in and it's called radical theology but it's very different from confessional theology is very different from what you see in the churches but that's what i think theology at its best is attempting to do not give you a god who will make everything great and fantastic and good but rather a way of of bringing up the brokenness the doubts the unknowing living with complexity and ambiguity and being able to realize that you're going to die and can i say one thing about that by the way if you want to hear a good sermon about living forever about getting rid of your body about entering some higher celestial realm or we will know all things don't go to a baptist church go to a ted talk right because they're the ones you're promising you know maybe we'll be able to digitally download ourselves we'll be able to live forever and by the way i'm not against that i'm not against the idea that we'll be able to live forever that's just not a theological question that's a medical question that's a scientific question the medical question is life is is life possible to to extend forever but the theological question is not is there life after death the theological question is life possible before we die because death is not the end of life death is what infests life that's what the existentialists say death is nothingness impacts us all and the big question for everybody who's listening to this show is not is life possible after death but can we live before we die can we embrace existence on one another and love each other and find meaning not and put it this way it's like maybe there is no meaning of life but can we find meaning in life [Music] a lot of my work is centered around people who are going through kind of an involuntary deconstruction right where instead of like intentionally leaning into this they came across something that had a life experience whatever their boxes fell apart and inevitably people who came from some form of orthodox christianity end up emailing me and want to know what happens when we die and to your point there is not a question i could be less interested in yes what happens at physical death because whenever i do actually engage this story of christ or or or even the stories in the bible this this inspirational fiction we joked about uh is what happens if we live like who cares what happens when we die none of the text seems to be talking about that yes i mean it says things like let the dead bury the dead the one of the mentions of dead is is existential death i've come to bring life and life and all this fullness that's not spoken to people who are literally dead that's spoken to people who are alive but here in a form of death i mean imagine i had a spiritual gift that i could touch people in the forehead and they would live forever but if they couldn't enjoy the depth of their life i wouldn't be a god i'd be a devil longevity is horrible if you can't enjoy your life that's why nietzsche said that you know he mentions the wisdom of celensius where a devil says you want to know that the secret of of happiness never to be born and the second because obviously you've been born so you can't have that is to die quickly right and nietzsche's whole point was to say well can we get to a point where that wisdom makes no sense where we actually enjoy our lives so it's not about for me longevity as i say let's go to the doctors for that it's about depth and density and and most of the people who ask me about life after death when i talk to them in depth i generally find it's because they are not enjoying their present life and so they are fantasizing about what might happen in the next life but when you help people read and say to people eternal life is not simply the continuation of this life into the next because that would be terrible heaven would be millions of people screaming for annihilation but eternal life is a transformation in the very way that we taste life in the very way that we experience life then you know that makes sense and that's by the way what i how i interpret rebirth to you don't experience your birth your birth is what allows you to experience right so i don't experience my life it's my life that allows me to experience in the same way for me religious experience is not an experience of something you know i i've experienced 10 things and now i experience 11 things because i've had a religious experience religious experience is what transforms your experience of everything so it's not so much that you feel it it's that you feel nothing in the same way and and so this brings me to the heart of what yeah you're doing and and and michael's doing and what i'm trying to do is say to people there is a depth and density to life you know the sacred is not something that you love it's what you experience in the very act of love itself and just enjoying your life and being it's fascinating to me that if you look at the suicide statistics in america today the most achieved demographic middle-aged white men baby boomers who have you know the greatest positions of privilege the greatest economic accomplishment as a group also have by far the highest suicide rate yes it's it's a interestingly by the way for contemporary psychoanalysts um they often say that the superego is the name that's given to this you know as you probably know this internal voice and that people think often the super ego is that thing which is saying to you you're bad you should be a nicer person you should be x y and z but actually the super ego is more often in the western world that inner voice it says you should be having more fun you should be out there having a laugh look at everybody else you get you you go you pursue you get more money you get more this you get more that and often that comes from the very fact that maybe someone's parents didn't like the fact that the child was sad sometimes and every time the the child cried they you know gave them food they rocked and within an inch of their life you know they kept trying to make them feel happy and and so that child learnt that that you know on uh depression and being a bit sad isn't isn't good so they pushed it down and so this voice remains with them go have fun go have a laugh everything's great and in the u.s it's called the american dream and people here i honestly i like i'm not from here when i've moved to la and i've been to las vegas and stuff like that it's like there's this super ego injunction to have fun to pursue to gain everything and the problem is if you don't gain it you're depressed but if you do get it all you suddenly realize that it doesn't work and and you become suicidal that somehow this frenetic pursuit is damaging to those who don't get it and it's also damaging to those who do we've strangely created a system in which even the winners lose that's amazing the losers win doubly because they don't get any of the material benefits and they also think that if they could get it they would be existentially happy but the winners lose as well because they get it and then they realize oh this didn't satisfy the gap and and so suicide rates even among lottery winners is is quite high so how does how does christianity fit in all this like why why christianity rather than just straight nihilism secularism like what does christianity bring yeah so for me christianity is a critique of secularism not because it doesn't go as far as secularism it's because it goes further so like my basic argument and in my last book i use the idea of a magic trick it's because a magic trick has three parts and very quickly if you've seen the film the prestige you'll know this there is what's called the pledge and the pledge is an object that's shown to you that that's like magical you know it's a bird oh wow look at that beautiful bird right and then there is the turn the birds put behind a curtain and uh hocus pocus the curtain is ripped apart and the bird's gone and then there's the prestige and the prestige is the third part where the bird returns and if you don't have the third part nobody claps everyone's waiting for the bird to return right so my argument is actually and funnily enough hocus pocus uh there was a there was an archbishop you kind of worked out where it probably came from a guy called tillotson that it sounds very like hawk as corpus which is what the priest says during mass when the body and you know bread and wine turn in the body and blood so he said oh you know what these these magicians are saying that christianity is just a magic trick and he thought this was terrible my my argument is actually that i think he was right and i think this is what makes christianity so interesting so my argument is christianity begins with judaism begins with this idea of there's this piece of fruit and if we could get it we'd be happy ah it's magical it's wonderful we want it and and that destroys us in our lives we all have a piece of fruit that we want it might be money it might be a relationship it might be religion something we think will make us whole and complete um we could call it the holy of holies and then i argue that in christianity there's a movement of hocus pocus where the temple curtain rips in half and we realize that the object that we want doesn't exist is not there this is in the temple in jerusalem the temple curtain rips in half we see inside the holy of holies and it's just a room so i argue the central movement of christianity is nihilism but then we have the third part of the magic trick and it's the return of the sacred but the key is this see whenever a bird disappears the bird that you get back's not the same that first bird is dead lots of magicians have lots of dead birds they broke that bird's neck and they put it up their sleeve and the dove that you see fly out of their hat is a different dove and my argument is that christianity it makes a sacred object that we think will make us whole and complete disappear but it invites us into a life where we get the sacred back but the sacred is no longer an object that we love an object that we think will make us whole and complete but the sacred is the experience of depth we feel in the act of love itself and just embracing life and and to really connect it to christianity i'll say that the eucharist is a magic trick you have the bread and the wine that's the sacred right in front of you you can touch it you can taste it there is god right there and then there's the turn you eat the bread and you drink the wine it disappears god is gone the sacred's gone and then you're waiting for the prestige right you're in church and you're waiting for the prestige you're waiting for the return of the sacred and the service ends and you get up and oh you realize that person lost their job and you go up to them and you say listen i know somebody's looking for someone to work for them and if i can help you know just let me know and listen here's here's some money to help you and oh that person just had a kid that's wonderful let me come round and help out with some cooking because life is difficult when you just had a kid and you realize that that is the prestige that is the return of the sacred the community of individuals looking out for one another loving one another caring for one another that is the new meaning of god god is now where two or three are gathered together in love that for me in a nutshell is the trajectory of christianity [Music] we've been talking to peter rollins about philosophy and various other things like radical theology his most recent book is the divine magician if you want to learn more about radical theology check out the orthodox heretic both of those are linked from peter rollins.net his website where you can learn more about his work