https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=s47l1AehVvo
The atheist types the rationalist types there something they miss and what they miss is that. Fiction isn’t false it’s not a lie right it’s not literal. What is not a lie and great fiction is true but it never happened so how can it be true. Answer to that is something like. Well there are patterns in things deep patterns. Deep recurring patterns you know human nature the fact that we’re human. That that the humanity itself is a recurring pattern it has characteristic shape and. Great fiction. Describes the shape of that pattern and the greatest of fiction the greater fiction becomes the more it is religious in nature and. That’s not even a. Claim about the nature of truth it’s more a claim about the nature of experience you know when we say something is profound. What we mean is that it’s moving and. That it has a broad influence it’s capable of having a broad influence on the way we think and see it act. So if you read a profound book like one of Dostoevsky’s books. You could say of that book and people often do that it changed my life when I read that book. And a story that can change your life has a power that is best described as religious. And so religious is a kind of experience in some sense rather in addition to a claim about what constitutes truth. Then those stories in Genesis. Cain and Abel I think and the story of Adam and Eve because those stories are so deep that it’s almost unfathomable. They get at the at the most profound of patterns and so to say that they’re literally true. Is actually to massively underestimate how true they are. Because you could tell me what you did this morning. Now it’d be literally true, but like who cares? Whereas if you read the story of Adam and Eve it’s so true that it applies to everyone always. And mere literal truth can’t do that. And we don’t have a good language as scientists. Let’s say as psychologists or even as citizens. We don’t have a good language for that kind of truth. And so. Well, I guess I’d like your thoughts about that idea. Yeah, so the the literal sense of Scripture is sometimes misunderstood by people. And I think that the right way to think of it the literal sense of Scripture is what the original human author. Intended to convey to the original human audience. And so if we’re looking at Genesis, I think that we need to put Genesis back in its context. If you read Genesis as if it is a contemporary textbook on science, I think what you’re doing is. Wrenching it out of its original context and therefore you’re bound to misread it. And that’s true of not just Genesis. It’s really true of any work that to understand that we need to understand its genre and we need to understand its context. So what is the original context of the Genesis story? Well, the original context, it was written in terms of rival stories of creation. Other stories that were circulating in the ancient world. And it was meant to be an answer to those. And it uses poetry. It uses imagery. And that was what all those stories did. And the poetry and the imagery, I would not set that against truth. As if on the one hand you have truth and the other hand you have poetry, imagery and story. I think that one kind of truth is scientific truth. The empirically verifiable. But I think it’s too narrow to say, well, the only kind of truth is the empirically verifiable. I think truth actually is broader. And in fact that claim that the only that the truth is empirically verifiable, that’s the only kind of truth. That is itself a self-defeating statement. Right? There’s no empirical evidence that the only way to get the truth is through the empirical method. So if we put Genesis back in its context, what do we see? Well, we see it is a story telling us about, in contrast to the other stories, the other stories in the ancient world were stories in which there were multiple gods. They engaged in a warfare and violence. So you think of the Greek myths are like this where, right, Zeus overthrows his father and there’s all this violence. And Genesis is meant to answer these other ancient myths. And it’s saying things like there’s only one god. There’s not multiple. Secondly, that creation is not a matter of violence, but that the creation is reasonable speech. And this was something that you talked about in your lecture, which really struck me because I obviously had read that story before, but I never really thought of it that, well, creation arrives, right? God says, let there be light and there was light. And what is reasonable speech? Reasonable speech is orderly, right? The difference between, you know, random sounds make and reasonable speech is that there’s a kind of order to it. So if creation arises from reasonable speech and the creation itself is ordered, it’s intelligible and makes sense. And that gives rise to centuries and centuries later, that belief that creation is orderly and makes sense gives rise centuries later to science. But to read Genesis as if it’s failed science makes about as much sense as to read Genesis as if it’s for or against iPhones. I mean, imagine somebody reading Genesis and they’re like, well, is this should I buy an iPhone or not? I’m not going to read Genesis to determine this. Well, clearly the original author of Genesis wasn’t addressing that. And the original author of Genesis wasn’t addressing for or against evolution. So I think that these readers who want to make it for or against evolution are just utterly misreading and taking the story out of its original context and therefore necessarily providing a really bad reading of Genesis. There’s also a really important theological point to make here as well. And that’s, I could put it philosophically, what’s the condition for the possibility of something being literal in the first place? What’s the condition for the possibility both of it being recognized, spoken and then apprehended? There’s a certain court of orderliness that’s necessarily presupposed in the act of knowing and in the act of communicating that knowledge that itself, as Chris said, can’t be empirically verified. So when we as Catholics say that recognize from the New Testament that Jesus is the truth, that would include in a literal historical sense, but also the condition for the possibility of anything being intelligible and literally understood and communicated at all. So I think one of the frustrations I found in finding contemporary debates on these questions is that secularism oftentimes isolates and identifies the literal, the empirical as if this is a free standing epistemic platform that belongs to them. And everybody has to compete in order to to be on their territory. And I just don’t think that’s philosophically the case. It presupposes a lot of things that that they can’t give an account for. Yeah, I mean, so so one more little. Yep, please go ahead. No, I just was just going to add one thing. So imagine somebody was reading Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, right? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May and summer’s lease hath all too short a date. So imagine somebody reads that and they’re like, OK, Shakespeare’s a meteorologist. He’s a weatherman. And I’m going to look up in the Almanac to see if May had rough winds. And it turns out there’s no rough winds in May. Oh, Shakespeare, you’re about it, you know, telling us about the weather. Well, I think that’s obviously a radical, radical misunderstanding of Shakespeare. He’s not trying to tell us the weather and then failing to tell us the weather. And so I think Genesis is not trying and failing to give us scientific truths. It’s just doing something totally different. And that’s part of the reason I appreciate your lectures is that you highlighted the reality that the author of Genesis is trying not to is trying to communicate very important truths, but not truths that are in the scientific discourse. They’re true, but not scientific truths. The Bible is the root of all wisdom, inspiration and spiritual nourishment. The Hallow App empowers you to explore the Bible’s profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life. A great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, available on the Hallow App for brief daily readings and reflections. Here you can dive into an extensive library of Bible reading plans accompanied by insightful reflections and audio guided meditations. Whether you’re a seasoned Bible reader or just starting your journey, Hallow provides a platform for you to engage with scripture like never before. 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The problem with the empirical approach, the problem with totalizing it is that the empirical approach tends to be mostly descriptions of things and the way they interact and the way they can be manipulated and and that’s fine but doesn’t tell you doesn’t provide any real insight into how to live, how to act, how to take your next step, how to how to produce a hierarchy of values and how to determine what’s most important and what’s least important and all of that is also so difficult that we actually don’t know how to do it completely explicitly which is why we need poetry and drama and literature. We need that whole domain so we could call that the literary domain and then I think you could consider it this might be an empirical proposition is that the religious domain is at the base of the literary domain and as literature gets deeper it becomes more and more like religious writing and so that by definition in some sense and I’ve swiped this in part I would say from Jung is almost by definition that the sense of profound engagement that the most profound literature produces is what constitutes the religious and that’s a domain of experience you know when you’re captivated in a movie theater, when you’re captivated by a story, when you’re taken outside yourself, none of that has anything to do with logical argumentation. It’s a whole different issue and to me it’s tied very very deeply to our ability to imitate and mimic and so we’re really good at that way better than any other animal. We like language is mimicry we use the same words and so we’re mimicking each other and but I can’t mimic every person separately I have to extract out from each person some essence of being that’s admirable and I do that person after person and I try to imitate that and then that core thing that’s admirable that I imitate that’s as far as I’m concerned that’s psychologically equivalent to Christ whatever else Christ is Christ is that’s why he’s sometimes described as the king of kings it’s like if the king is the thing that’s at the top of the hierarchy and then you look at all hierarchies and you take the thing that’s at the top of all hierarchies of value then that figure when you see reflections of that figure anywhere it produces awe and respect and that’s because that pattern constitutes the appropriate way to act just as when you see the opposite of that pattern which might be in its most fundamental essence satanic or demonic it’s something that’s ultimately evil that produces revulsion and terror and that’s that’s all instinctual it’s it’s not in the domain of rationality precisely it’s way way deeper than that