https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3omKTJ5n35w
Go ahead and challenge me with an atheist trope and see what happens. All right. Man finds himself in a chaotic world in which he doesn’t understand and which he’d like to order in order to remain safe and in order to flourish. And so in much the same way that that machine of an optometrist’s office makes things clearer or blurrier, he finds a narrative which for the most part, or at least as far as he can see, it sort of fits things nicely together in a way that feels ordered so that he can gain mastery over the chaos to some extent, as far as he can see, and that also makes sense of it as far as he can see. And that this is a perfectly understandable thing for a creature that has evolved to grow into and a way to use religion to make sense of that. I mean, that just seems like a naturalistic explanation of religion, that these are overarching narratives that no one’s saying are meaningless. Like they’re meaningful in the sense that they help us to prosper. Feel free to steel man that if you’d like to. No, but the answer is yes. Why not? Of course. Okay. So what I’m saying then is that can exist and God cannot. Well that’s the thing is that if it works, then it has a certain amount of truth to it. Yeah, sure. It has a sort of functional truth. It’s revealing a pattern, which is true, just in terms of pattern. It’s revealing a pattern which is true. Let’s use a better word. It’s revealing a pattern which is good. Let’s use that. I don’t know if I want to agree with true or good. I would just say it’s revealing a pattern that works. But if it works to a certain extent, it has to be revealing some kind of a good. Like if I have an apple and I have a pattern where I try to put the apple in my nose and it doesn’t work, but if I put an apple in my mouth and it works and it’s like I’m revealing the good of the apple when I’m engaging in the proper pattern around the apple. And so you could say that this is something which scales up all the way into. So you could see it bottom. So the scientist wants to see it bottom up, right? And you’re like, yeah, that’s fine. All bottom up, bottom up. That’s fine. I’ll go with you. I’ll follow your game. Go all the way bottom up until we realize that without these overarching narratives and without these patterns of behavior, society crumbles or gets taken over by other groups. And you’re like, OK, well, that’s pretty real. Like that’s a real thing. Then once you reach there, you can say the reason why it works is because it’s also top down. It’s also revealing the pattern of reality back down into the world. And so that’s what I mean. So we as Christians, we say it’s a revelation of God. And the scientists will say, no, that’s silly. That’s stupid. It’s like, OK, fine. I’ll follow you bottom up until you realize that without them, society does go into chaos. Society does start to stop reproducing. You actually do create infertility. Now that you’ve broken those patterns, you’ve created an infertile world that is obsessed with idiosyncrasy, that is full of people falling into addictions, that is full of social fragmentation, that is full of social conflict at the lowest scale possible. And so it’s like, OK, maybe there was something about these things that were that was real, that was actually that were revelatory, that were prophetic. Yeah, that were revelatory of the good in a real way. And so it takes a lot of the materials that I encounter, they struggle to get to the point where you were like, if it’s bottom up all the way, then it’s also top down. It also works top down. And that’s the way of describing it is coherent. It’s not superstitious, for sure. It’s a revel, and especially the way we experience it, like when you experience a good, like especially when you intuit a good, your experience of that is not something, it’s something that you feel like a revelation, like you feel like it’s coming from outside of you, even in a small way, you know, like when you’re writing a story and then all of a sudden it clicks, like you if you’re attentive to yourself, you’ll notice that you don’t think that comes just from you, that you’re somehow tapping into something which is coming back down on you, you could say, right, that is kind of, that is a little revelation, not obviously not like a like a prophet or anything, but like a little thing. And so that experience you can’t, so if a materials will say, well, that’s just an illusion, it’s like an illusion of what, what is it again, what is the just again? Like if every single culture in the world has these intuitions about, and it manifests itself that way, then what does it mean to say it’s an illusion? Like what is it even, what are you referring to? If that makes sense, I’m sorry if I… No, these are great conversations, and these are conversations that should be had over a pint of beer and a cigar so that we could each sort of think and think them through, you know. Scientists try to understand them bottom up. I’m not, I guess I’m not sure what you mean because when I think of materialists, they tend to try to break things down to the lowest common denominator. I remember somebody saying to me, and forgive me if this is a crass example, I don’t think it is, but she said, why are men so attracted to breasts? They’re just bags of fat. But that kind of thing, right, where you reduce everything to the material. Monography does that, right? It reduces whatever this person is and is capable of to a sort of two-dimensional thing for my consumption. And science in a way does that in order to look at the parts and understand them. So I say bottom up. Is that kind of what you mean? So you get down to the lowest thing, like quarks or whatever. So you could say something like, a good way to understand it would be that, okay, so let’s say that, say, why are men attracted to, attracted to breasts? It’s just bags of fat. And you could say, okay. Could you explain it, even in terms of just basic evolutionary biology, could you explain more why men are attracted to, let’s say, breasts than attracted to? Elbows. Yeah, to antlers, exactly. Or to something completely random, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can say, well, first of all, it’s part of a woman. Second of all, breasts become bigger when a woman is pregnant, by the way, that this is something that is just biologically explainable, that there is a relationship between fertility and breasts that is actually discernible visually when a woman becomes pregnant and when a woman has a child and is feeding a baby. So the idea that a man would see in a breast something which would make, which would properly make that woman into the house for his child is not something which is completely bottom-up explainable in terms of biology and in terms of how animals reproduce. Now, you can’t, like, I think as a Christian, it’s not reduced to that. It’s actually manifesting another type of reality, but you can explain it that way if you want, and then you could keep scaling up, let’s say, in terms of social behaviors and why it is that people act the way they do. You can kind of explain it, but usually it actually ends up surprisingly revealing some patterns which end up being, let’s say, true, even in the way that we as Christians understand it. Yeah. But how is a naturalist not just, not explaining things bottom-up? Why can’t it just be, well, they’re explaining it by looking at the bottom, and that’s it. There is no up. Because they’re bullshitting themselves that they think they’re looking at the bottom, because the bottom is a quantum field. Let’s start there. Yeah, yeah, okay. Or are you going, the only reason why they start at bags of fat is like, what, do you think the bag is the bottom of the reality? You think fat is the bottom of reality? It goes, it keeps breaking down, my friend, keep breaking down. So you bring it up to identities that you can, that are actually qualitative. You say a bag, so you say it’s a container, right? And then you are relating it to something which exists. So you stop there and you think that you’re not, you’re not scaling up the levels of reality? You are. Fair enough. You’re just not doing it, you’re not, you don’t keep going. It’s like, let’s just keep going now, because it’s not true that you’re at the bottom of reality. That’s a, that’s a, now you’re deluding yourself if you think you’re at the bottom of reality. But the identity of a bag is something which we know what it is, it has a teleological purpose, it has a good, and we know what that good is. So there’s something about the process which doesn’t work. Got you. That makes sense. So you haven’t started, when you say bag of fat, you’ve started well up the chain. You’re well up the ladder. Way up the chain. Like really into human, even into like human teleology and human purpose driven action.