https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=r134VxyEdXY
So, and this gets to, I think, the broader question that I know you and Sam went on for three hours about the nature of truth, because particularly truth in the moral sphere. I think that, would it be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the scientific sphere, that if something, that there is such a thing as objective truth, or are you more? I would say we agree on a lot of that. The question is, to some degree, why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true? And then I would say, we probably don’t agree about that, because I would ground that in pragmatism, and Sam would ground that in the idea of an independently existing objective world. Right, which is a leap of faith more like my own, actually, than the pragmatist view, right? That if you believe that there’s a God who’s out there in the universe who created the structures in a particular certain way, then what he created is the truth, and it is apart from you. That if human beings didn’t exist and they weren’t able to utilize the truth, that truth would still exist out there, whereas the pragmatist might say, truth is in the use that it has for human beings. Well, that’s the thing, is that, you know, I don’t know if we would consider scientific truth true unless we are also simultaneously accepting the idea that scientific truth is good for people. So there’s one other thing I wanted to bring up that’s relevant, because you brought up the idea of God. So here’s a way of thinking about it. And I don’t know what to make of this, because this is stretching me, this is stretching my thoughts out beyond where I’ve been able to develop them. So this is the intuition that I have based on a variety of things, experiences I’ve had. So imagine that there’s a very wide range of human behaviors, okay? And some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable. So let’s call them good and evil at the extremes, okay? Then we might say, well, there’s a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are good, and a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are evil. And that’s a transpersonal pattern, because it’s not just about you or me, it’s about everyone. Okay, and so then that gets personified. That’s Christ and Satan, let’s say, or Cain and Abel, right? That gets personified. And that’s a bad guy and a good guy in a movie. Like it’s personified all the time. It’s Thor and Loki, you know, in the Marvel movies, you know? So now you have the, let’s say, you take the idea of Christ and you think, okay, so that’s the abstraction of everything that’s admirably good about the set of all human behaviors. Okay, and then you think, well, what sort of reality does that have? And this pulls back into the reality of the idea of the logos, and the idea that it was the logos that God used at the beginning of time to extract order out of chaos. So you think, well, it’s transpersonal, the goodness, because it’s not just characterized stick of any one person. It’s more like something that inhabits a person, rather than that a person is. You can really see this, for example, on the other end too, with the satanic end, because if you read the writings of people who do absolutely horrific things, like the shooters, you can see that possession extraordinarily clearly. If your eyes are open, it’s like, and it’s shocking, so people don’t usually look at it. And they even say that themselves, like the Columbine kids, their writings are hair-raising, you know, and they were clearly possessed by an evil that you only encounter if you sit in a dark place and brood on your hatred for months and years, right? You go places that, you go places where all the dark people go, right? And then that takes you over, okay? So the good can take you over as well. Okay, so there’s this spirit of good, let’s say, and what the spirit of good does is act in the world on the potential of the world to generate the actuality of the world. And the Judeo-Christian proposition is, is that if you confront the potential of the world with good in mind using truth, truthful communication, then the order that you extract is good. And then that’s echoed in Genesis when God is using the word and he creates cosmos out of potential. And every time he does that, he says, and it was good, which is, I think it’s so interesting because there’s a proposition there. And the proposition there is that if you encounter potential with truth, the cosmos you create is actually good. Well, that’s just an absolutely overwhelming idea. It’s like, if it’s true, if it’s true, it’s the greatest idea there ever was. Yeah, your thoughts on this actually from Maps of Meeting helped generate what we in Judaism called Zvartorah in Hebrew, meaning a thought about the Bible. But this merged with a little bit of Aristotelian thought led me to the idea that when it comes to the mystical notion of the tree of good and evil in Eden, what is that supposed to be? What did people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil? And my feeling is that what they did wrong is that God created a universe in which the value was embedded in the object. In the same way that you, in your book, talk about if you’re teaching a child about an object, the rules of the object are embedded in the teaching about the object. So you use the example of a vase, we were discussing this earlier, but you use the example of a vase where you teach a child, don’t touch the vase because the vase will break. So that the rule is embedded in the object. In the same way, in Aristotelian thought, the rules for behavior are embedded in the nature of the universe. Meaning, what makes a man good is what makes a man unique, which is reason. The idea is that reason is what makes a man unique. So acting in accordance with right reason is what makes an action good. So if you believe that God created the universe along these lines and that what natural law is, is just the human attempt to understand the lines along which God created the universe, then where human beings went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe. When we decided to take values and say, this is a completely separate thing. So this vase has no rules attached to it anymore, it’s just a vase. And we can construct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase. And so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil changes the nature of good and evil from the universe comes along with a set of rules to human beings think that they can use their own intuition to supplant God’s rules and to supplant universal rules with their own particular vision of what the universe ought to be. And at that point, they have to be expelled. Yeah, well, okay, okay. So that’s also associated to some degree, I would say with Milton’s warning in Paradise Lost, because Milton basically portrays Lucifer, who’s the bringer of light, weirdly enough, as the spirit of unbridled rationality, which accounts for, say, the Catholic Church antagonism, the Catholic Church’s antagonism towards rationality. The idea was, same idea in the Tower of Babel, that human beings have a proclivity to erect their own dogmatic ethical systems, and then to expand them into a grandiosity that challenges the transcendent, and that that’s a totalitarian catastrophe. And for Milton, Satan was the spirit that eternally does that, right? Who says, everything I know is enough, and that supplants what I don’t know, that supplants the transcendent, and that that’s a catastrophe. How that’s tangled up with the knowledge of good and evil, well, you’re making some headway towards sorting that out. I mean, there is a cataclysm that’s explained in the story of Adam and Eve, right? The cataclysm is the coming to wakefulness, and it’s associated partly with recognition of nakedness, which is recognition of vulnerability and mortality, and the discovery of death, and then also the discovery of good and evil that goes along with that. So you said, well, that’s partly the cognitive division of ethics from the facts of the object. So I have to think that through. I would also recommend to people, I think I mentioned this before, as Ian McGilchrist spoke in the Master and His Emissary, because he looks at this neuropsychologically, right? And looks at the left hemisphere as the hemisphere that’s dealing with the explicitly axiomatic systems, and the right hemisphere that’s dealing with what those systems are embodied in. Okay, so part of what happens with the emergence of good and evil, as far as I could tell, it took me a long time to think about this, and this is different than the hypothesis that you laid forward, which is why I can’t reconcile it exactly as… You recognize you’re naked. You know you can be hurt. You know you’re vulnerable and insufficient. You hide from God, because that’s what happens next. And the reason you hide from God, say God is your destiny, or God is the… You’re walking with God as a manifestation of your ultimate proper destiny. You doubt whether you’re capable of that, because now you realize your embodied finitude, your nakedness and insufficiency. So you hide and you’re ashamed. So there’s that. You also realize that you can be hurt and suffer, and that kind of goes along with God’s command that you’re going to work in the sweat of your brow, and that you’re going to die, and that women are going to be subjugated to men, which is put on as a curse, not as a moral imperative, right? But then what emerges out of that is that as soon as you know that you can be hurt, this is what differentiates us from animals, and you really think that through. Here’s all the myriad ways I can be hurt. Then you’re angry about that, because you can be hurt, but even worse, you can figure out how to hurt other people. And so that’s part of that knowledge of good and evil. You associated with this dissociation of the object from its ethical container. Right, of the universe as created by God from our interpretation of the universe, that there is a gap between the two, and that once human beings begin to supplant their own rationality for atelos, right, in the ateliology, what we end up doing is creating all sorts of awful systems that end up destroying us in the end. There’s something about that that’s right. I mean, part of what happens in the New Testament, as far as I can tell, is that what Christ says, so He’s trying to transcend the rule structure, right? Not because there’s anything wrong with the rules. There are necessary preconditions for discipline, which is actually why I wrote 12 rules, right? It’s like you need rules, but rules conflict, and they don’t always apply, and so there has to be an ethic underlying the rules, and you should have more respect for the ethic than for the rules. Okay, Christ’s idea, and this is part of the idea of the reestablishment of paradise, is that you should orient yourself towards the good, and that’s something like an alliance with God, and then that you should tell the truth, and that that’s the ethic that generated the rules to begin with.