https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TmCMmS60OuY
Well, let me ask you one short-lived biological meatbag to another. Who is God then? Let’s try to sneak up to this question if it’s at all possible. Is it possible to even talk about this? Well, it better be because otherwise there’s no communicating about it, right? It has to be something that can be brought down to earth. Well, we might be too dumb to bring it down. It’s not just ignorant, it’s also sinful, right? So because there’s not knowing and then there’s not wanting to know or refusing to know. And so you might say, well, could you extract God from a description of the objective world? Right? Is God just the ultimate unity of the natural reality? And I would say, well, in a sense, there’s some truth in that, but not exactly, because God in the highest sense is the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive. How’s that for a biological definition? Spirit is a pattern, the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive. So it’s a kind of, in one sense, when we say the human spirit, it’s that. It’s an animating principle. Yeah, it’s a meta, it’s a pattern. And you might say, well, what’s the pattern? OK, well, I can tell you that to some degree. Imagine that like you’re gripped by beauty, you’re gripped by admiration. So and you can just notice this. This isn’t propositional. You have to notice it. It’s like, oh, turns out I admire that person. Hmm. So what does that mean? Well, it means I would like to be like him or her. That’s what admiration means. It means there’s something about the way they are that compels imitation, another instinct, or inspires respect or awe even. OK, what is that that grips you? Well, I don’t know. Well, let’s say, OK, fine, but it grips you and you want to be like that. Kids hero worship, for example, and so do adults for that matter, unless they become entirely cynical. I worship quite a few heroes. Well, there you go. Yes, well, there you go. And there’s no that worship, that celebration and proclivity to imitate is worship. That’s what worship means most fundamentally. Now, imagine you took the set of all admirable people and you extracted out AI learning. You extracted out the central features of what constitutes admirable. And then you did that repeatedly until you purified it to what was most admirable. That’s as good as you’re going to get in in terms of a representation of God. And you might say, well, I don’t believe in that. It’s like, well, what do you mean? Yeah. It’s not a set of propositional facts. It’s not a scientific theory about the structure of the objective world. And then I could say something about that, too, because I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially since talking to Richard Dawkins. It’s like, OK, the postmodernist types going back way before Derrida and Foucault, maybe back to Nietzsche, who I admire greatly, by the way, says God is dead. It’s like, OK, but Nietzsche said God is dead and we have killed him and we’ll not find enough water to wash away all the blood. So that was Nietzsche. He’s no fool. He’s got a way with words. He certainly does. And so then you think, OK, well, we killed the transcendent. Well, what does that mean for science? Well, it frees it up because all that nonsense about a deity is just the idiot superstition that stops the scientific process from moving forward. That’s basically the new atheist claim, something like that. It’s like, wait a second. Do you believe in the transcendent if you’re a scientist? And the answer is, well, not only do you believe in it, you believe in it more than anything else, because if you’re a scientist, you believe in what objects to your theory more than you believe in your theory. Now, we’ve got to think that through very carefully. So your theory describes the world. And as far as you’re concerned, your description of the world is the world. But because you’re a scientist, you think, well, even though that’s my description of the world and that’s what I believe, there’s something beyond what I believe. And that’s the object. And so I’m going to throw my theory against the object and see where it’ll break. And then I’m going to use the evidence of the break as a source of new information to revitalize my theory. So as a scientist, you have to posit the existence of the ontological transcendent before you can move forward at all. But more, you have to posit that contact with the ontological transcendent, annoying though it is because it upsets your apple cart, is exactly what will, in fact, set you free. So then you accept the proposition that there is a transcendent reality and that contact with that transcendent reality is redemptive in the most fundamental sense. Because if it wasn’t, well, why would you bother making contact with it? You’re going to make everything worse or better. Why does the contact with the transcendent set you free as a scientist? Because you assume that, you assume, I mean, freedom in the most fundamental sense. It’s like, well, freedom from want, freedom from disease, freedom from ignorance, right? That it informs you. So it’s the eye of science. It is definitely that. Yeah, it’s the direction, let’s say the directionality of science. That’s a narrative direction, not a scientific direction. And then the question is, what is the narrative? Well, it posits a transcendent reality. It posits that the transcendent reality is corrective. It posits that our knowledge structure should be regarded with humility. It posits that you should bow down in the face of the transcendent evidence. And you have to take a vow. You know this as a scientist, you have to take a vow to follow that path. If you’re going to be a real scientist, it’s like the truth, no matter what. And that means you posit the truth as a redemptive force. Well, what does redemptive mean? Well, why bother with science? Well, so people don’t starve, so people can move about more effectively. So life can be more abundant, right? So it’s all ensconced within an underlying ethic. So the reason I was saying that while we were talking about belief in God, it’s like this is a very complicated topic, right? Do you believe in a transcendent reality? See, OK, now let’s say you buy the argument I just made on the natural front. You say, yeah, yeah, that’s just nature. That’s not God. And then I’d say, well, what makes you think you know what nature is? Like, see, the problem with that argument is that it already presumes a materialist, a reductionist, materialist, objective view of what constitutes nature. But if you’re a scientist, you’re going to think, well, in the final analysis, I don’t know what nature is. I certainly don’t know its origin or destination point. I don’t know its teleology. I’m really ignorant about nature. And so when I say it’s nothing but nature, I shouldn’t mean it’s nothing but what I understand nature to be. So I could say, will we have a fully reductionist account of cognitive processes? And the answer to that is yes. But by the time we do that, our understanding of matter will have transformed so much that what we think of as reductionists now won’t look anything like what we think of reductionism now. Matter isn’t dead dust. I don’t know what it is. I have no idea what it is. Matter is what matters. There’s a definition. That’s a very weird definition. But the notion that we have, you know, that if you’re a reductionist, a materialist reductionist, that you can reduce the complexity of what is to your assumptions about the nature of matter. That’s not a scientific proposition.