Is There a Soul?

In this episode, Kyle and Randy discuss the philosophy of the soul and its implications for religious belief, the lived experience of faith, and even ethics. Kyle is a materialist, which means he thinks humans are physical objects, and Randy leans towards dualism, which involves belief in a soul or non-physical part of a human being. Are there any good arguments either way? What do most philosophers think? What are the implications for religion? Does any of it matter? What does it have to do with Donald Trump? This one is definitely on the headier, more philosophical side, so strap in and try to check your assumptions at the door.

The bourbon we tasted in this episode is the exquisite cinnamon bomb RD1 Brazilian amburana-finished straight bourbon.

To skip to the interview, go to 8:40. You can find the transcript for this episode here.

Content note: this episode contains some profanity.

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Chapters

• 2:52 Beverage Tasting
• 8:40 Main Segment

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript was auto-generated by an artificial intelligence and has not been reviewed by a human. Please forgive and disregard any inaccuracies, misattributions, or misspellings.

Randy  00:06

I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle is a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Kyle  00:15

We also invite experts to join us, making public space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy  00:24

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar. Friends, today we are going to be talking about some philosophical things. We're going to be talking about some some words that we've used in particular that Kyle has used quite a bit, we're gonna be talking about materialism, we're gonna be talking about some existential things like, what is a soul? And do souls really exist? And is there any more to humanity or existence than the flesh and blood? And the I don't know, what we see. Is there anything more to us than that? Would you? I have no idea what I'm talking about?

Kyle  01:14

That's pretty good. I like it. No idea how that intro was gonna go. Yeah, I think he nailed it. No, yeah. So this is something that's come up a few times. And we've one of those topics, we said, we'll get to that eventually, every now and then somebody will ask us about it. Because I've hinted that I am what's called a philosophical materialist. And that bothers people and they want to know why. So we're gonna talk about that now. And it's gonna be super nerdy. So strap in. There we go. This is you could consider this one of those, like, Intro to philosophy kind of topics. This is something I always covered in my intro classes, and students sometimes really dug it, and sometimes their eyes glazed over. So let's see which way it goes.

Randy  01:52

And let's promise to make it better than your philosophy. I'll try one. I'll try. All right,

Kyle  01:56

yeah. And but it has obvious implications for religious belief and for Christianity. In particular, my son has a lot of people do the thing. My view commits me to the falsehood of Christianity. I don't think that's true. But a lot of people would take that tack and say that, again, the being a materialist means Christianity is false, that they're just incompatible. It doesn't

Randy  02:13

make tons of sense to me to be a Christian and a materialist. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why I'm excited to to hear you talking. Get into it. I think you can be a Christian and being materialist is just a very, very atypical kind of

Kyle  02:28

I am therefore you can

Randy  02:31

well, whether it's Christian, that's

Kyle  02:34

a different question. So that's what we're gonna be talking about. And hopefully, it'll be interesting to folks and it may be a little bit challenging to we'll see. So we've been tasting some whiskies with our friend Tim from the power of bourbon YouTube channel, because one of the things we do around here is feature alcoholic beverages on the show, because we're a pastor and philosopher walk into a bar. And he sent us a whole case of stuff, and we've been blind tasting all of it. But we don't know what this is.

Randy  03:09

I didn't say you think specifically I will love this, right? Yes, I

Tim  03:14

think this will be right in your wheelhouse. Yeah,

Kyle  03:16

yeah. So we just smelled it. And I've never smelled anything like in the world of whiskey. It's difficult to describe

Randy  03:25

I have like a disembodied experience when hausky

Kyle  03:27

how pure the sentiment is, I have knows I've never smelled a whiskey like this and it doesn't diminish and that's what's weird to me because every whiskey I've ever smelled whatever you get on the first sniff is different from what you get on the second and it diminishes quickly. Oh my because you get used to you get those blind to it. This does not like

Randy  03:46

cinnamon toast crunch

Elliot  03:47

in my way. Yeah, it's not like smell the spice jar. This is like fresh cinnamon rolls cinnamon.

Randy  03:54

Well, because it's made of grain. I mean, this is the most astounding and delicious smelling bourbon I've ever smelled. I don't even need it tasted.

Tim  04:05

Yeah, so I agree Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but also do you remember like the old Quaker oatmeal pouches? Yes, the apple cinnamon one like yeah, that's

Randy  04:14

what I do. Oh my god.

Tim  04:16

And we all know the apple cinnamon one was the OG I'm

Kyle  04:19

like my 15th sniff and it's

Randy  04:22

you just are missing out on life. Smelling Yeah, whatever it is. Go by it and smell just live your life smelling this. Yeah,

Kyle  04:32

someday they're gonna import some AI is gonna figure out how to incorporate smell into podcasts and you're gonna enjoy this be

Elliot  04:39

like a Patreon tear in itself is just you just get to smell this one.

Kyle  04:46

Alright, I gotta taste it. Wow.

Elliot  04:48

Cinnamon Toast Crunch is right.

Randy  04:50

Oh my gosh. It is it brings the cinnamon on the flavor profile. But it balances on your pal left because it's so effervescent. It's got that bright lemony thing going on, but it's got a deep wood on there. I'm in love with this bourbon.

Kyle  05:08

Yeah, this is incredible. This is no joke. So a lot of times the the nose promises you something that's just not in the body. And that is not the case here. It's it is not oversold. It's exactly what it says it's gonna be I've

Randy  05:21

had pappy 23 We've just sampled a bunch of really good whiskey. This is right there, dude. I mean, this is yeah, this to me. This rocks me. Yeah,

Tim  05:32

when this is in your wheelhouse of things that you enjoy, which is the cinnamon and the apple and the spice. Like, it's hard to beat this. It's so unique and so special. And personally, because I know what it is it makes one heck of an old fashion.

Kyle  05:50

Well, so that sounds good. If you're willing to put it in an old fashion tells me it might be somewhat accessible. Although I am one of those people who puts rubber but an old fashioned so

Tim  05:58

yeah, my wife puts super rare bourbon and old fashioned so that doesn't help. Yes,

Randy  06:03

it's Shane. You guys. It's

Kyle  06:04

so balanced though. There's, there's it's well rounded. There's nothing even slightly off about it.

Randy  06:10

It's the most the most unique bourbon have ever tasted. Can't wait to hear this. Yeah. Tim.

Tim  06:16

Yeah, this is already one finished and Brazilian ombre Rana wood. So on Maronna has become a really big thing that people are using. It's from Brazil. And it gives that Cinnamon Toast Crunch flavor to things but a lot of people overdo it. So this is a $50 bottle that is readily available in the states that people don't know about. And it's starting to get bought up all over the world, because are all over the United States because people realize how good it is. But yeah, it's like a two and a half year old bourbon. No. And it's just added to on Brahma. So

Kyle  06:56

oh, well, okay, I need to find everything on Verona finished. And,

Randy  06:59

Tim, you are our bourbon Messiah.

Kyle  07:02

This seriously. I've heard of it. I've never had anything finished in it. I saw something in a store the other day and was tempted to buy it but didn't know anything about it. This is great. Oh captain, my captain.

Elliot  07:12

But when, when we see something finished, and I'm brown, you're saying a lot of times it's overdone. Like that's not necessarily an indicator that this is going to be a great bottle. It's just that this was

Tim  07:22

Yeah, so I think rd one did it for like maybe 30 days or something like that, and it gets all this flavor. Whereas a lot of places are doing it three to six months. So it becomes really Cinnamon Toast Crunch, almost overpowering. Whereas this one just gives you a little hint of it all the way through and you still get some of the bourbon

Kyle  07:43

characteristics. That's great. That's just fantastic. What a different kind of tree can do to just

Elliot  07:50

get him into think of that just to smell and feel like understand what it is.

Randy  07:56

Well, so one more time, Tim so everyone can make this note, write it down. So you can go spend $50 and enhance your life.

Elliot  08:04

And know that until this episode came out we have we have already been clearing all the shelves.

Randy  08:10

What is it again, what times it is

Tim  08:12

already one on Maronna finish and it comes in a green label so you really know what you're looking for

Randy  08:18

praise the Lord years.

Kyle  08:40

So let me start as I like to do when we talk about more philosophical things with a disclaimer. The disclaimer in this case is that this is hugely complicated. And it's one of the biggest topics in the history of philosophy and not even just Western philosophy anywhere. philosophy of mind as this is often called this kind of class under that umbrella is enormous ly complicated always has been. And it's probably like the biggest subfield or certainly one of the biggest subfields of philosophy today, there are actually places you can go to get like joint PhDs in philosophy of mind and neuroscience, for example, or computer science, or there's all sorts of crossovers. There's all sorts of interesting things. And this concept, this ancient idea of a soul is bound up with a whole lot of those conversations. And we're not even going to scratch the surface. I'm gonna say things that if other philosophy people are listening are just gonna piss you off. I know that I'm going to leave out the thing that you think is the most important to the whole damn conversation. I'm gonna, you know, shorten things that you don't think should be shortened. So this is for people who are religious who are wondering, what are the alternatives to what I've always understood is the Christian view about the soul and the afterlife, which is bound up with this. We've talked about the afterlife before go listen to that episode. If you But this is related. And it's gonna be very cursory and very introductory. And if I ever get too much in the weeds just pull me up. Yeah, so the soul, what is it? So there's this ancient idea. I mean, I'm just gonna stick with Western philosophy, because that's what I know, goes all the way back to Plato, that the human person is somehow different from the human body. Okay? That whatever is true about you physically does not exhaust what is true about you, as a being. And Plato thought the the most crucial part of you was non physical, or immaterial, as it's sometimes called, they had different ideas of what physical meant back then than we do today. But we can get on board with what they were getting that and he thought that as a result of that, or at least his character, Socrates thought that as a result of that, when you die, you don't stop existing, you continue on, because the thing that you always fundamentally were was something other than your body. So when your body disintegrates any you so it gives you some hope for an afterlife, and some really interesting philosophical arguments for that. Maybe we can talk about a couple of them later. So that was called a soul. That's what Plato called it and not the whole tradition since then called it. Somewhere around the modern period, they stopped talking so much about a soul and started talking about a mind, but they meant more or less the same thing, except it became very intellectualized. So for Plato, it was the thing that did the thinking, but it was also the thing that had all the feelings and all the, you know, personal qualities that made a person a real, you know, full human. Yeah,

Randy  11:35

I mean, we talked about the mind we talk about the heart exactly in ways like that. We talk about the gut, even in ways like that.

Kyle  11:41

Yeah. So yeah, other traditions had those ideas, too, like the Jewish tradition would talk not so much about the the mind that has like the entrails or something like the, but I think they're getting at something similar. I'm not a Jewish scholar. So I don't know for sure, but I think they were, but then it became super intellectualized around the modern period. And people just mostly talked about the mind and the thing that did all the thinking. And they had some really clever arguments for why that thing could not be the same as the body will talk about one or two of those probably. And then, I don't know if that was, I don't know when that started to be seriously questioned. But like, being what's called a duelist, I'm going to define that in a minute, thinking that there are two parts to the human part of the physical part in the non physical part. That was like the majority view for a long time. But now, it definitely isn't. And it hasn't been for a long time. I don't know when it switched, it probably oscillates. But today, most philosophers, and certainly most who specializes in things like this are what are called materialists or physicalists. They think that the human person is just a physical object, and there isn't anything non physical about it. Obviously, they're not saying that there's no such thing as emotions, or feelings or beliefs, although some of them actually do think there's no such thing as beliefs, but most of them don't think that they just think those things are physical. What did that what does that mean? At bottom, there's some kind of activity in your brain, or maybe your brain plus certain other parts of your body plus certain parts of the environment. Okay. So when we talk to Andy Clark, you know, back then about what the brain is doing and like, anticipating and to some degree creating our experiences, he thinks that's entirely physical process, you don't have to reach outside of physics to explain it. Everything is causally closed, in the sense that there isn't any magical stuff going on that's that's non physical, or that can't be accounted for with the basic constituents that we think comprise the universe. Yeah, anything else?

Randy  13:43

The thing that makes me listen to this a little bit, right, as a, as a pastor, as a Christian, somebody who has talked about soul and spirit and your spirit inside you all that stuff. I mean, the more we understand about the brain, and more more we understand about the mind, the more we are understanding the complexity and the depth, and that that really is the place the seat of our personhood, in many ways, right? Yeah.

Kyle  14:07

And so does it bother you at all, as a religious person, as a pastor as a Christian, to think that that thing would be entirely physical? Because when we've when it's when we've broached it before? On the show, I felt a little bit of resistance to the idea of materialism, which I still need to define. I know that, but is there anything in your religious convictions or your experience of Christianity that makes that seem dangerous or problematic or like it just can't be true?

Randy  14:33

I mean, it's certainly one of those concepts that doesn't sit comfortably right away. It takes a little bit of sitting with it settling in and acknowledging the the empirical nature of what we're talking about, right? And how a lot of things that we take as a given as spiritual people or as Christians, you know, you're reading the Psalms, why are you so downcast? Oh, my soul. We're just conditioned to think that there's this The other person, you know who's more or less inside of us, that will float away and go to heaven when we die. All right? So it does take some consideration, it takes some sitting with it. And it's easier when it's from a person I trust, right? If you weren't who you are to me, I'd probably be like a BS, you know, whatever. However, no, I don't think it's not that it doesn't fit. It's just that my main my main rub right now with it is that God is spirit, I think, in some way, shape or form. I think God is not a being like we talked about beings, God is more of the ground of all being if that, you know, yeah, that kind of concept will blow your mind. But I think it's a, it's a way more appropriate way to think about who the Divine is, or what the Divine is. So as we just unpack some of these concepts that we've taken as a given for a really long time, you begin to run into problems, and you begin to run into logic, and you begin to run into reason. But I think because the divine life that I believe exists, is not a physical being or entity. I don't think it makes me think that there's something more to us as well, that would make sense to me.

Kyle  16:10

Okay, yeah, that's fair. Let's return to that. Let's make sure that we do because one of my questions for you later on was going to be do you think anything significant theological hinges on this or becomes more unwieldy or harder to commit yourself to if materialism is true? Like what what's the real cost? If we were to switch to this? And I'm not, I'm not of the opinion that there is no real cost? I'm kind of ambivalent about some of it. And that might be a good one. So let's, let's return to that. Sure. For sure. Okay, so first, let me say this, you've asked me about metaphysics several times. Yeah. Like you wanted to do an episode about metaphysics. Sounds fun. Why? What sparked that for you, just out of curiosity,

Randy  16:50

I've listened to a couple of conversations in which the the concept of metaphysics sounds really fascinating to me, that's all I got for you.

Kyle  16:57

Fair enough. So if we go all the way back to the very beginning of Western philosophy, we've got several categories of philosophical thought, really, it's just the kinds of questions that the earliest thinkers were interested in. And then later, they get kind of classified into different types of philosophy. And people argue back and forth about what's the most important. The biggest ones were metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. And now there's a whole bunch of other social political philosophy, aesthetics, tons of stuff, philosophy of science now, you know, big fields that didn't exist at the very beginning, or they existed, but then they later got so big that they split off and became their own thing. So metaphysics, and again, at the beginning, it was just people thinking about was what was interesting to them, and didn't become classified as metaphysics as a separate discipline until after Aristotle. And the reason for that is Aristotle wrote about everything. He went out and like dissected human cadavers, and he categorized all the plants. And that's where we get our, you know, all our plant classifications, go back to Aristotle, plus all the philosophy that you can think about all the nascent science of the day. And so he had just voluminous writings. And so after his death, they were compiling it all. And he wrote a lot about what we now call physics, which to him was just moving stuff, stuff moves, okay, how does it move? How can we describe it, and that they just called the physical, which means movement, essentially. And then then he wrote about stuff that didn't move, or was the origin of movement. And it came after in the order of the compilation that came after the physics and they didn't know what to call it. So they called it the one after the physics and that's what the word metaphysics. I'm so disappointed by this. I know, right? But in that book, he makes an argument for what he called a prime mover, which later thinkers just called God, because it's kind of a cosmological argument, if if everything has motion, that motion had to begin in something, you can't have an infinite regress into the past, or we would never have gotten to the present moment. So there had to be an origin of all the motion, the prime mover. If you're religious, it's easy to look at that and say, That sounds like That sounds a lot like creation, doesn't it? So that became kind of a religious thing. And for that reason, metaphysics came to be known as including all the religious questions, really, the existence of God, the existence of immortality, the existence of freedom, all that stuff, that is all heavily bound up with religious questions and ethical questions do so metaphysics really is just trying to categorize what exists thinking about what there really is, and trying to sort it as much as we can into its most basic categories. And this is a version of a metaphysical question, the mind body problem, what is a human being? Fundamentally that's what we're asking. So if you go into a bookstore and you see a section on metaphysics, it's probably not going to be about that. But that's what philosophers me for some reason, it also is the word that people use for weird occult stuff. I don't know. Yeah, so that's what metaphysics is. Now, the mind body problem or the existence of the soul. This is a classic topic and metaphysics there's never been agreement about it. There's never been anything even approaching consensus until fairly recently that I know of. Now, I'm not a historian of philosophy. So people could correct me there might be wrong about that. But like today, somewhere above 50% of working philosophers are materialists or physicalists, which doesn't sound like consensus to me. For a philosopher. That is amazing.

Randy  20:31

Yeah, so for teenagers and philosophers Yeah, remarkable.

Kyle  20:34

Yes, yes, yes. I mean, more than it's totally accurate. Getting more than half of us to agree about anything at all is truly remarkable. Compare that with how many philosophers prefer socialism to some kind of capitalism. And it's about the same, the same number. So that should kind of put it in perspective a little bit. It's not like, obviously true to everybody who looks at it. That physicalism is true. But it is more of a consensus than there's ever been a hold

Randy  21:02

on this topic. A majority of philosophers support socialism.

Kyle  21:07

Yeah. On at least the surveys that I'm familiar with. Now, they don't make you explain what you mean. And there's always an other category that is, you know, a substantial percentage of people. But yeah,

Randy  21:17

so does that mean that philosophy is only for lefty liberals? Or

Kyle  21:21

that lefty liberalism is more likely to be true? A couple of ways. You could look at that. Yeah. So anyway, you know, a little over how many

Randy  21:30

people you just met somebody, I'm gonna, I'm gonna deepen and save. We say you made so many people met right there.

Kyle  21:35

Yeah, a little over half. Now. Does that matter? I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter. I think it's at least striking that the people who are the most informed and have thought about this for the longest. Think that probably there's no such thing as a sole.

Randy  21:49

But that's interesting. I'm looking at your Yeah, your outline and 51.9% are materialist. But 32.1% or not,

Kyle  21:57

or not. Yeah, that's a lot. And then about 15% 16% that other agnostics, something like that.

Randy  22:03

And I don't think that there's 32% of philosophers who are Christians, right? So what do you say

Kyle  22:07

there is a stronger correlation between the non physicalist and the religious ones, the people who specialize in philosophy, religion. So there is a religious component to it, that's undeniable, but it's not exclusively them. There are other folks too. It's much more likely that if your religious philosopher you will be some kind of a materialist and vice versa, but it's not guaranteed. And the same thing goes in the other direction, most non fit or most physicalist, or some kind of atheists, but it's not guaranteed. I'm more interested in what the arguments are? And are there any compelling reasons to think that there's something non physical about us and I used to think there were I was a convinced to duelist. There are several very famous philosophers in recent memory, some of them still alive, who are duelist, and to make really clever and interesting and intricate arguments for dualism, and I used to be convinced about them, but I'm not anymore. I think all the arguments for dualism failed the ones that I've seen anyway. And I also think this is one of those controversial things, it'll piss people off if they're philosophical at all. I think the burden of proof is on the side of the duelist. I would agree with that. Well, okay, then I'm not even gonna try to make that case.

Randy  23:15

I mean, how could it not be? Okay.

Kyle  23:17

I'm curious why that's your intuition. Because

Randy  23:19

you're arguing of the existence of something that other people say doesn't exist. It's like saying the burden of proof on proving the existence of God would lie on the atheists like that makes no sense. Oh, interesting.

Kyle  23:33

Yeah. I think that one's actually a little more complicated. I do think the burden of proof goes both ways on that question, but could be could be, yes. I see what you're saying. Because, you know, if you're an agnostic, that seems to me like the middle position, like everybody else has to make their case, but the agnostic doesn't really. And you can be agnostic about this, too. There just aren't very many. And they don't write that much. Everybody seems to have a strong opinion about

Randy  23:56

Yeah, I mean, if like, three out of five people saw like ghostly apparitions or whatever, and, you know, then we could have a conversation about like, okay, that makes sense. But that's not the case right now. Like we have a lot of beliefs that have been passed down, and we really don't think our way. Yeah, in complex ways.

Kyle  24:13

And also, if you saw it, I remember having this conversation with my wife, one time, when we were visiting an old mining town, we had lunch in a place that claim to be really haunted. Yes, they used to hang people at the courthouse and whatnot. But like, the thing about ghosts is if you see them, they're physical. Right? And if they're not, they're totally non threatening. I

Randy  24:34

don't want to talk about because that'll be given a totally different direction. But

Kyle  24:38

so if at this moment, you're wondering why the hell does this matter? Which my students often are, what what I tend to tell them what I told one of them once I remember, he came up after class actually wasn't even after classes during class. It was one of those kind of intrusive moments of stops class and was like, Is this matter at all to me, and I always made a point of welcoming that Question. And so my grandfather had died not long before that. And so I told him about that experience and standing over his bed and staring into his eyes as he passed and praying for things that I wasn't sure if I believed, because my family was there listening to it, all of whom were convinced 100% Convinced that at that very moment, something that was him was exiting what we could see Yes. And that that thing was immediately in a state of bliss. And they got enormous comfort from that idea. So did I, frankly, at the time, kind of talking myself into it in the context of a prayer, it seemed really real and really powerful and had a lot of religious significance, and did for a long time after two. So this is one of those places where really heady and difficult to understand and difficult to see the point of philosophical reasoning butts right up against the things that we care the most about in the whole world. And it can be extraordinarily uncomfortable to consider that we might be mistaken fundamentally about those things. Yes. Which I have come to believe that I was. And so my view that I'm about to describe to you commits me to the view that when he passed, he just stopped. That that was it. And I

Randy  26:13

don't know that you don't believe in the afterlife, like completely. So here's

Kyle  26:18

where I'm at. I don't have any good philosophical reason to think that there will ever be any other form of existence share for him. I have reason to hope for some religious circumstances that I have not foreseen or understood. People can go listen to that episode for more on that. But if I'm just talking about what is the evidence on the ground, and what am I compelled to believe? I don't see any good reason to think that we continue after we end. Now, great philosophers disagree with me. Yeah, always have further majorities on my side, right. There's just gonna be nothing. And significance. You know,

Randy  26:59

before we go on, I just want to remind listeners, what Kyle believes is not exactly what I believe. Yeah, let's continue. Yeah,

Kyle  27:05

okay. I just want to make real that you know, this matters. Okay, so what are the arguments for dualism? Now, let me define some terms. dualism is simply the view that there are two parts to aspects, two pieces to there's various ways you could carve it up. But when you talk about a human being you have something physical or material, and something non physical or immaterial. By physical we just mean it's made of atoms. Essentially, that's what we mean, or it obeys the laws of physics, more or less. Let's say we had a perfect physics, everything was explained. Once we applied that to the human being, there wouldn't be anything left over to explain that would be it, it would explain all our thoughts, all our emotions, all our desires, all our hopes, love everything, all of it. If you're a duelist, you deny that the best perfect science applied to the human being would miss something essential. Yes, it would miss the core of who we all are. And so there's something immaterial, but all of them agree all the duelists have always agreed that there's some kind of intimate connection between the immaterial part and the physical part. You have a body, and it's just the one and you can't switch it to a different one. Right? And when that one dies, sets, you're affected, right? It's not like you don't care at all, which is the feeling you can get from Plato sometimes, especially if you're a Christian, you're really affected because we care a whole lot about resurrection physicality is like baked right into our whole, our whole thing. Yeah. There's a lot of religions where that's not the case where to lose your body, you just kind of become one with the universe in some different way. And it's not a big deal you might even gained by dying. But that's not true for Christians, for Christians, you lose something really significant. So for almost all dualists, both parts are super important. But you, you can't deny that there are two parts, two separate kinds of stuff. That's what duelists think. Materialists deny that. There's also these weird people called idealists. And we're not gonna talk about them. Because there aren't very many physicalist say everything is physical idealist say it's actually the other way around everything is mind, or idea. And physical stuff is just an expression of that

Randy  29:17

sounds kind of like NUS ancient Gnostic ideas a little bit, but there's some really damn

Kyle  29:21

good flot my favorite philosopher of all time was a kind of idealist. So it was Plato weirdly. Yeah, so that's a whole nother topic we're not gonna talk about. So here are some arguments. Let me see what you think of these. Okay? And I'm just gonna give you the basic version of these. So first one comes from Descartes. Descartes, probably the father of modern rationalist philosophy, usually understood that way. And rationalist philosophy meaning non empirical, okay, so there's knowledge we can have just from our reason not using our senses at all. All the important stuff turns out, I think therefore I am. Yes, yes. Yes, exactly. Yes. That's the only thing we can be certain about. And he built a whole worldview on it. So he said, Look, all we need to do. And every dualist argument is follow this pattern. All we need to do to show that the physical part of us and the non physical part of us are not the same, are distinct, is to find one property that they don't have in common. Which makes sense, right? Your shirt has a property that you do not have. It's denim. Randy always wears denim shirts for the listener that he's wearing one right now. And so that's a property that you don't have in common, therefore, you cannot be the same thing as your shirt. Right? So all you got to do to show that two things are different is find a property that they don't share. And Descartes said, here's a property that I do not share with my body. Dreams. No, but close. Okay. It does have to do with what you can think, can be thought, by me not to exist. I can think of it's not existing. And he thought that was a property. Now, why can't you say that? Again? This gets weird. So I can think of my body not existing. It's not hard. Actually. I just close my eyes, I imagine me being present, but opening my eyes to find nothing. Okay, I'm suddenly a ghost. Or I suddenly have a totally different kind of body. So the one I had must not have really been made, like that old Kafka story where the guy wakes up as an ant or whatever.

Randy  31:25

This is Descartes. Like, you close your eyes and thinking, therefore we're he's a duelist. That's it.

Kyle  31:31

Oh, we're not there yet. Hang on. Okay, a little more complicated. So I can clearly hopefully grant this I can clearly conceive or think of my body not existing. Okay. Agreed. Sure. On the other hand, I cannot think of my not existing, try it. I do not exist. And like, can't you type doesn't work because there's something there doing the thinking. And it's unavoidable. And this is bound up with that whole, I think, therefore I am thing, it's the only thing I can't deny is my own existence. Because when I tried to do it, I immediately run into a contradiction, because I'm there thinking. So that seems to be a difference. Now, if there's any difference at all, then they can't be the same thing. And this is where my interest students get really angry and hung up on. Like, there's, there's got to be something wrong with this. It can't be that easy, right? People have the same reaction to this argument as they do to the ontological argument for God's existence. You can't just like make some tricks with words and then conclude something like God exists, or dualism is true. It's just too much, right? But that seems to be what's going on here. So that was, in essence, de cartes argument. No one is convinced by this, I'm gonna say sounds fairly weak. But spelling out the weakness is really hard, really hard. So

Randy  32:45

in another episode, we'll or not in another episode, I want to know why was Descartes so famous if

Kyle  32:50

Oh, he was brilliant. And his defenses of this specific argument? were brilliant. Okay, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not going to tell you why all philosophers today don't believe that this argument is successful, but they don't. And it's not hard to make a parody of it. Like I could give you a parody that has the same logical form that is obviously unsound. For example, I can say something like the co host of this podcast can be conceived by me not to exist, but I cannot be conceived by me not to exist. Therefore, I'm not the coach to this podcast. It's obviously wrong, right? But it's the exact same logical form. So every intro philosophy student can see there's something wrong with that. But I don't know what and spelling out the what is difficult, unfortunately. But suffice to say, this is not a good enough reason, probably, to conclude that I'm more than the physical stuff that it seems to me that I am. Okay. So that's one take. That's Descartes. Another I wonder if you like this one better. This one comes from Gottfried Leibniz, another modernist philosopher, rationalist guy. Brilliant, invent calculus had a whole thing with new hit him already. Yeah. Hints was interesting. His was not so much about conceivability of my not existing, or whatever. His was about what it would mean for a physical thing to do some thinking. Because clearly, if you're a materialist, you think physical stuff can think because I think I'm physical thing. And I'm thinking, yep. And he thought that was nonsensical, just incoherent. And he's like, imagine, try to imagine a thinking machine. That is back in like the 17th century. So thinking machines for them had like gears and pulleys and stuff. But you could do the same thing today with a computer chip. Something that simulates thought from the outside, you look at it, and it seems like it's doing some computing some something like thinking AI, whatever. But it's always some physical object that you could imagine yourself going inside of, and looking around, like the old Magic School Bus thing that I watched as a kid, and you're never going to see anything in there other than normal physical processes, just on a more micro scale. So he thought, you know, he'd like take one of these machines, blow it up to the size of a building. Go into it, walk around You see any thought in there. And his conclusion was, you're never gonna see any thought in there at all, you're just gonna see physical stuff doing what physical stuff does. And you can't produce a thought by the interaction of physical parts. That was his view. But it's all based on that intuition, that single intuition about looking inside it and not seeing what you think thought is. I

Randy  35:18

mean, it seems to me like, a lot of what you're talking about here, was brought to us by people who didn't understand the science of the brain shots

Kyle  35:26

a fact for sure. But I wonder if that's a little too easy. Because I think if he did understand the science of the brain, if he were alive today, he could say the same thing. He could say, you know, go inside. In fact, this is exactly what to do with my students, I put a picture of a synapse up on the screen, like imagine your little school bus right there. And you're looking around, and you see this little electrical firing down that axon? Is there anything thought like in that? Or even a whole bundle of those doing that? Is that like your feeling of pain, or your feeling of love, or whatever? It's just hard to get yourself to say yes, that's exactly what it is that it's just that it's nothing more than that. Obviously, the story is going to be more complex than we understand. But could any number of those interactions happening simultaneously just be what it is? When I look at my kid? Yeah. It's hard to to agree that that could possibly be what it is. So his whole argument is based on the force of that intuition. And there are still philosophers today who would think it's fundamentally right.

Randy  36:25

How much of this debate dualism non dualism is rooted in the concept of consciousness? A

Kyle  36:34

lot. Yeah, I don't really want to talk about consciousness, because it's a whole ball of worms, can of worms, there we go, ball of wax, and one of those. It's enormous ly complicated, but it is kind of bound up with it. But whatever your take on consciousness, this is a problem. Either way, the basic consciousness problem is how could there be an experience to physical stuff? Why it's not anything you would expect to happen? Even if you're convinced materialist as I am? I have to acknowledge this is fucking weird, right? Why is it that this configuration I'm pointing at my head now, of physical stuff, has an experience and no other physical configuration that we're familiar with does, that seems really strange, and not at all, like what you would expect, and it seems extraordinarily rare in the universe for anything to have that. And again, you go in there and look around. And at the atomic level, it's it's totally normal, nondescript, nothing unusual happening. So to think that consciousness, and will and belief are emergent properties of that squishy gray stuff is strange, it's really strange. My response to this is, it's no stranger than thinking that it's immaterial. Like, it doesn't actually help you in either direction, to think that the thing is material or immaterial, for understanding what it means to think we just simply have no idea. It's a complete mystery consciousness thought, we're not getting closer to solving it. And that's my take anyway. And I don't think being a physicalist, or a non physicalist makes a bit of difference for anybody to be able to explain that adequately, because the duelists can't explain it either. In fact, they have all the exact same explanations that the physicalist have, because they have to admit that we still do it with a brain. And they just tack on. But it's also this immaterial part that is somehow mind itself. But we can't see it, and we can't interact with it. And we can't know anything about it other than the experience of doing it. I'm not, I'm not sure how that helps, personally, okay, so I'm in a group of folks who think that you have a kind of evidential parity between the duelist and the physicalist. And it's not enough to bear the burden of proof that the dualist has and making the case that we must be also non physical. Yeah. And you take that and combine it with this other huge problem. We're getting close now to why I'm materials. And this other huge problem is often called the interaction problem. And it's essentially pointing out that if you have a physical thing that is obeying all the laws of nature, and you have then some non physical thing that is somehow tied to it, you create a problem for yourself. And that problem is explaining how the two could interact. And I don't see a way around it. There have been lots of attempts to get around it, but I think they've all failed. It just remains utterly mysterious, mysterious, in a bad way. How it could be that when I raise my arm, the initial cause of that action is something non physical. Like we can follow the entire chain of causality. You could put me in an MRI, and watch the whole thing. And there's at no point, any need for anything non physical in there. We understand pretty well how the laws of physics work in this closed system that is our universe. And there doesn't seem to be any room for anything non physical, and if we posit it, we then burden ourselves with explaining how it is that something was No extension, no mass, no energy of any kind, has some kind of causal effect that is unaccounted for. And that we don't see a remainder of in some physical system that seems self explanatory. And I don't see any way to get around that personally. Now there are theists, theistic philosophers who will say, Look, God can do whatever God wants, right? And there's enough weird shit going on at the quantum level that, you know, some kind of little tweak of God's cosmic, I don't know, he does something with the vacuum fluctuations. And some way we can't measure. There's a thought. And you could go there, I guess. But what's the evidence for that? Right? Or if it's just some like, religious conviction, fine. I'm totally on board with religious convictions. But some philosophers have tried to pretend some religious philosophers, I think it's a kind of pretense that there is like convincing rational argumentation that supports or bears out those fundamental religious convictions. And I just don't see him. Sure. Now, maybe we should have somebody on to correct me or debate me about that, but I don't see him. So that's essentially, in a nutshell, why am I kind of materialist? Does that bother you? Now that I've explained it?

Randy  41:19

No, I think it probably would have bothered me, you know, seven years ago. But I think, because I would say my relationship with the EU, as a philosopher has helped me clarify, and contextualize some of the things that I believe in some of the beliefs that I hold, and helped me kind of put them in better compartments, if that makes sense. So while I would have taken it as a given 10 years ago, that we all have souls in that, you know, clear duelist, I would have, I would have been and I still probably move to that side a little bit more. Your experiences as a philosopher who really values evidence above almost anything else, it makes sense to me that you would be a materialist. Now it's kind of to me, it's a little bit sad, to think as a materialist, yeah. Yeah. It's just a little bit dark, depressing, sad. I like the thought that, you know, there's, there's things out there and that we get to interact with something just a tiny little bit, and that we're believing in something and Holding faith for something that's bigger than us and better than us. And that that's, that's where we're all headed. I love that. I love the idea of resurrection for crying out loud. However, it doesn't, it doesn't. It doesn't make me unsettled hearing you say this at all.

Kyle  42:36

Yeah. Yeah, I can get that. I totally get that. And I think there are there are real ways in which is super sad. It makes me sad to think that I don't know that there's an afterlife because of this. And I don't know. And a lot of people probably think that that's a silly thing to conclude on, based on the stuff that you just said, How could you get from a purely philosophical argument to such a momentous conclusion as that, but I'm, I'm really committed to following the argument where it leads following the evidence where it leads, and then facing what I take to be reality as a result of that, because it seems more honest to me. And that's, that's what I'm all about. But it is desperately sad. In some ways. That's, that's a fact. But there's just enough ambiguity in it. And I mean, we simply, we don't understand hardly any of our physical world, like, for all the amazing things that physics has been able to accomplish in the last few centuries, I mean, we have an amazingly detailed and intricate and almost entirely accurate model that physicists work with that very little is left out of MIT. It's remarkable. And yet, there's so much to the physical world to just what matter itself is that we have no idea about, there's this really hokey, weird view, in philosophy of mind that's actually gaining traction, called pan psychism, which is the idea that consciousness is just a fundamental feature of reality, that maybe even at the quantum level, some kind of, if you want to call it awareness, or some kind of sense of being or some kind of, there's something it's like to be that thing exists even at the most basic scale, and it just gets more complicated, the more complex the physical system gets. So that, you know, my phone is kind of conscious at a certain level, just not on the level that I would recognize that it's actually baked into the fundamental nature of the world. That to me is just as striking. I don't know if I buy it, but it's just as striking and just as mysterious and just as honestly kind of religiously motivating. As the more traditional dualist Christian view. I approach them in the same spirit. If something like that were true, I'd be really humbled by it. And I wouldn't know how to incorporate it into my experience of the world. When I studied like the Buddhist view of the self, for example. And they have this very kind of pantheistic view of, I'm very much a part of the universe and the universe is kind of Part of me and when I die my ad and we know this from physics now when I die, I don't stop existing, like all the stuff that was me continues on and other forms forever. I mean, it's kind of guaranteed immortality just in different forms, and that that's cyclical and will last until the universe dies. And there's just as much mystery and potential beauty and that I think, as there is in this other kind of traditional Christian view, at least for me now, but it wasn't that way. The first time I thought of it, it was really offensive to me at first. So I totally get if it is for some of our listeners, too. You asked earlier about God being non physical. And this is a good question like this is because every religious person, every Christian, I know who is also a physicalist also thinks God is not physical, right? So you have to draw a sharp distinction between creator and creature here. And so when God made the world, he made something, they made something fundamentally different from what God is. We also think that God if you're a Christian can be an ark incarnated physically. And that obviously creates no end of paradoxes.

Randy  46:08

Which is the one of the awesome things about it. Yeah. Yeah. So at that point, incarnation,

Kyle  46:14

right. Yes, totally. So at that point, I just throw up my hands and say, clearly, God was capable of making a thing that was able to embody God's image, in a way that was instantiated in something that God is not, God made something entirely other that was also like God's self. And if anything, that leads me to a more worshipful attitude, rather than a less merciful attitude, and I've always thought that that image had something to do with ethics with virtue with love, and not so much to do with the other parts of ourselves that we have sometimes taken to be essential, like, our intellect, or our language, or our whatever, fill in the blank or our physicality. I think all that's important, but it's not the image. Yeah.

Randy  47:06

Yes. So I think what this makes me think about and where I go to is thinking about the way human beings have thought about who we are and what makes us human, right. And my mind is drawn back to the ancient Egyptians is there and I'm not going to get all this right for historians, or smart people who know more than I do, go ahead and write in and correct me if you want. But I know what's this is incorrect. But it's close to where the ancient Egyptians would, I believe put like the, the entrails and the guts in like jars and basically try to preserve them because that they thought that was the seat of our humanity, or where we think from where we feel from where we how we experience the world. We now know that's, that's silliness right there, our stomach and our intestines and our all of our guts, just, you know, nourishes us and gets rid of waste and does all the things. It's a scientific process. But that was our best guess at like, Where does my personhood lie? Yeah, it's there, you know, so we got to protect him, we got involvement, we got to do all these things. I'm wondering if you know, our ideas of soul spirit, all of that is kind of along that lines, where I still know that there's something that's part of me, and that makes me who I am that cannot be like, will not be scientifically verified. I don't think right there that's mysterious. There's this part of who I am. That is fragile. It's it's like original to me. It's built on all my experiences since I was you know, since I have before I have memory, even that it's built upon, in now it creates who I am as a person. And it makes sense to me that right now, I think of that as a soul or spirit. But eventually it's going to get proven, the more we know about our brains, because we know so little about the human brain, that we'll be able to point to that and say, Oh, remember when we were silly, and we thought that that was your soul or something. Here it is in your brain, and we can actually point to improve it and we know it. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah, even if that's the case, right, let's, let's say that's the case that like this idea of a soul or spirit will 2000 years from now be disproven, and that it all resides in our minds. I still feel like this idea that there's something more to me than the physical. You know, what you see here? There's something more to me in that that's real, even if it exists somehow, physically in our minds, or some something that we're going to be able to explain, for instance, the thing that helps me have compassion on a person like Donald Trump is knowing that there's someone in there, that didn't happen by accident, right, like Donald Trump has, has this part of who he is. Yeah, that was formed right at the beginning and his experiences his family and his, you know, the way he was taught about the world and the whole all the things that led to him being like this Really, he's a problem for me, right? I don't want to see him primarily as a problem, I want to see him as like a person who deep down under all these layers of ego and nastiness, and immortality, all that stuff is still this fragile, vulnerable, innocent person, that if you take off those layers, you're gonna find something of beauty and value that I believe is the image of God.

Kyle  50:24

I'm glad you went here. Yeah, because this is where metaphysics and ethics bump right into each other, I don't think you can really separate them, even though lots of folks have tried, what you believe about the one is going to affect the other. And what you've just named is I think the the absolute core of Christian ethics, okay, is seeing the enemy as the same kind of thing that you are, and that God is, the divine image is the thing that is the basis for Christian ethics, it's seeing the divine nature in everyone in a way that can't be quenched, regardless of what they do, or what is done to them, or what happens in the world. It's just a basic fact about all human beings that they are of the Divine. And if you don't have that, then it's very easy to make any kind of excuse for treating them in an inhumane way. 100% very reasonable excuses in many cases, right? And so this is just like, a thing that is the essential tenant of our faith. We don't question this. It's one of those things that makes a philosopher a little bit uncomfortable, because we're starting with the thing that we're unwilling to question. But for ethical reasons. And so if I'm right, that materialism is true, that does get a little more complicated, because it's harder to locate what that thing would be, yes. If it's an immaterial soul, great, everybody has one, somehow they're born with it. And then no matter what decisions they take on in their life, no matter what happens to them, that thing remains. And then in the afterlife, if you're like, playdough, all the other stuff is shed, and that's what's left, and you see what damage you've done to it with your choices, right? I find a very attractive view of someone like Donald Trump to, to imagine, and there's a lot of schadenfreude in the idea of imagining him, you know, shedding everything and then being left with his damage soul and wondering, you know, how did you know? And yet I don't think there is any such thing. And so I'm confronted with the question of, well, for all the reasons that we just canvassed, I'm, I'm committed to the idea that Donald Trump just is the physical bits that may come up, and of course, all the choices that those bits of made, but there's not a thing that I think could be located in him or in his past, or in me or my past, that is really him. That's really me. I think I change constantly. I'm much more drawn to the kind of Buddhist view of the self in this way, like, everything's in flux all the time. And there's no part of you that was ever permanent. You can't look at anything anybody suggests, as a candidate, closer examination. Turns out that thing changes, too. And so if I'm simultaneously a Christian, and committed to that, I have to try to wrestle with the question of, how can I say consistently, that everyone is equally worthy of agape love, and equally valuable, when everybody I think is basically a bundle of physical processes? Right. And to me, it's an it's an ethical commitment. And there isn't a good knock, I changed my mind about this. But there isn't a good metaphysical basis for it, except to say that we're all part of the same universe, and that universe has a kind of intrinsic value to it. And I think that's true. But I'm committed to that view, every human being is valuable for ethical reasons, primarily, not metaphysical reasons, primarily. And if it turns out that the metaphysics doesn't sit easily with that ethics, then that's just the thing I have to swallow. That's a bullet I have to bite. And I feel very similarly about the Christian view of the afterlife. If it turns out that for considered reasons, I'm committed to a view of in this case, metaphysics, that doesn't sit well with my religious convictions, so much the worse for my religious convictions, unless they're somehow better grounded in this case, I don't think they are. So this is a good example of how all these different forms of philosophy play with each other and have to be, you know, you have to create your own hybrid, essentially, and there's taking a position on one inevitably commits you to something about the other and you gotta be careful with them. Um, so I'm glad you brought that up. Because as I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking through I'm realizing, yeah, why do I think that Donald Trump bears the image of God because I do. Right. And I'm challenged by the compassion that you displayed for him there which I don't naturally feel

Randy  54:46

and neither do I most of the time, by the way. Yeah. And yet, you know,

Kyle  54:48

I don't think there is anything about him. The the object that is you know, deserves compels me to be compassionate towards them. I simply am because I know Jesus would have been in I think that I should be like Jesus.

Randy  55:04

Okay? I mean, I agree with you. But at the same time, couldn't you get into like more of a psychological mindset of like, there's something in any person no matter how evil diabolical you know, all of that they are, here's

Kyle  55:21

where it clicks for me, is just thinking of them as a kid. Yeah. They were once like my kid is now. Yes. And there was enormous potential there, and goodness, there and kindness there. And there's a set of circumstances in which any of us could have been Donald Trump. That at least enables me to have compassion for that kid, but I don't think that kid exists anymore. And I don't think that kid is ever going to exist again. Because that's not how the physical world works. Unless I'm very wrong about all this, and I totally could be. So I'm, I'm having an idea for an ideal,

Randy  56:00

right? Yeah. Yeah. I think I, maybe it is a belief in the, you know, there's something more whatever, but I do think I have, whether it's more hope for humanity, or just a little bit. You Yeah, that I'm not of a strict materialist in that, I do have hope for Donald Trump, or people like him, you know, put the warlord across, you know, across the world and inserted in the idea, I do think there is hope for every human and in that there's something in that person. who that is, again, if you peel away the layers of ego, and anger and bitterness and judgment, all the stuff, there's still something beautiful and good in there that can be accessed somehow. And most people die without that actually happening. I guess

Kyle  56:47

I see it as I'm just thinking out loud realizing these things, as I'm saying them right. So this might be another issue I have with universalism, which I know is your view. And we have whole episodes on that Christian universalism. Yeah. So this idea that everybody eventually will be made virtuous and right with God and make it to heaven or whatever, because of the left death and resurrection, which exactly everybody will be persuaded eventually. And for me when we're talking about Hitler types, as we call them in a previous episode, but I suppose we could include Trump types if we wanted to, like, really wicked people, yes, vicious. And there's the Chilean sense of vicious all their habits tend towards destruction. None of them almost seems tend toward good. I mean, they're so entrenched and so ingrained, that when I imagine someone like that becoming virtuous, what I'm imagining seems to be the death of the wall and the creation of something entirely different. Sure. And maybe it's the thing that's created is more similar to what the potential was when they were born. And of course, we can trace a trajectory, right? There's a trajectory of decisions that will lead to perfection eventually, if you're kind of Universalist, but again, with every decision towards the good towards repentance towards self giving and sacrifice, that type is slowly being destroyed. They're stopping being what they were, what we know them as now, they're not them anymore. If, if Donald Trump ever resisted saying a crude thing, he'd be a little bit less. And that's what we hope for. We want that. But I think what we're hoping for is, maybe its resurrection. I don't know, maybe that's a good word for it. It's some kind of new creation. But it's also a kind of death. Yeah,

Randy  58:26

I mean, or it's a birth, right, because Jesus talks about, you must be born again, or you must be born from above. And this conversation makes a little bit sense. It resonates a little bit with Jesus saying, like, Look, dude, like, we're not talking about going back into your mother's womb and being born again, we're talking about something of the spirit here. These are the kinds of conversations that still make me say, I think Jesus was onto something, I think there was something real that he was tapping into there. When he said, You need to be born from above you need it's like you need to be born again. And you Nicodemus can do it, right. Even though you're a religious scholar, and you you've said a lot of things that people are holding you to Yeah, you can still turn around and, and walk towards life, you can still actually, like, change the course of direction of your life. And I think Donald Trump can do that. I think any person can do that. I think it becomes harder and harder the further you go. But this idea of being born again, you can talk about it as death, or you can talk about it as is new life in both and probably, but that's what gets me thinking of not letting go of this idea that there's something more to us than than just the atoms, just the cells, that there's something to us that is the Imago Dei that is the image of the Divine that's been imprinted into us that is unique, something intrinsic and internal to us. I think that science against science may get to a point where we can point to it and say there it is right there. But still, even if we can point to it, I want to say that to me doesn't take away the possibility of divine life that doesn't take away the possibility of spirit that doesn't take away the possibility of afterlife. Right? Yeah, that's nonsense.

Kyle  1:00:10

I don't know, I don't think it's nonsense. I don't it's not my view. And I don't think that there is sufficient reason to embrace it as true. That's right. But I also, you know, I'm not so oblivious that, you know, the evidence that I've formed my decision on, it's pretty ambiguous in many ways, right? It's really just the strength of the arguments in either direction. And kind of, you know, my best judgment after practicing with a lot of arguments of which ones are effective and which ones aren't. And then, like, a huge faith in the conclusion of a sound argument, like, like, I'm really committed to the idea, which might seem quaint to a lot of people, including some philosophers, that if you have an argument that has true premises, and is valid, you should believe its conclusion. And that means that if there's something else you're less sure of than that, that contradicts it, you should be less sure about that thing, rather than the conclusion that you just argued yourself to. Yeah, like, I really am committed to that. So it puts me in a lot of uncomfortable situations, theologically, there's no doubt about it. But there is beauty to be had in this kind of view, too. There's a lot of mystery, and there's a lot of possibility in it. And I'm very much on board with all the stuff that you just said, I would just interpret it in a more physical way.

Randy  1:01:28

And that's fine. Here's here's where, for me, what this boils down to, and I think this is really extremely valuable, is that I hope that these kinds of conversations lead all of us to hold what we believe. And I mean, every single one of us, right, hold what we believe with more humility, to couch what we're talking about when we talk about things of God's spirits, not you know, materialism, whatever. We have a tendency to talk with so much hubris and pride and think that we, what I'm saying now is true. And everyone should think that way. I talk to so many Christians like this, who just don't question their beliefs, or don't hold the possibility that what I believe might not be real and might not be true, that's important to me, that we as spiritual people, we as religious people, in particular, we as Christians, could just hold space with the idea that everything that I believe about God and afterlife, and spirit and soul and all of existence, I could be wrong. Yeah, there's, that sounds scary. For most of us Christians, it sounds scary, isn't it, even as I say it, in some ways, you know, like, smaller ways than I used to, but still still scary. But I think it's really healthy perspective to hold, to listen, and to consider the evidence not to try to explain it away, to not try to rationalize it, or spiritualize it, but just to sit with it and say, I still believe like, I still believe that there's a spirit inside of me that like the Spirit of God connects to in some some way that's mysterious, but I feel it, I sense it, I have my whole life, you know, in there's these mystical experiences that I have that I can't explain, and I'll never be able to convince you that they're real. I've stood on the foot of it at the shores of an ocean and felt something so much bigger than me, you know, I'm just, there's all these things that can't be empirically true. But also, I can't I can't prove them and I can't stand on them with 100% certainty. And this is just gets back to, can we just be a little bit more humble? Can we just be a little bit less certain about what we think we know we're what we believe? Well,

Kyle  1:03:38

I hope this was valuable to somebody if you disagree with pisses you off, let us know why I'm very interested was one of the things and yeah, and the level of things I'm certain about this pretty low. So totally could be wrong, and I'd like to hear from you if you disagree.

Randy  1:04:06

Thanks for listening to A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar. We hope you're enjoying these conversations. Help us continue to create compelling content and reach a wider audience by supporting us at patreon.com/apastorandaphilosopher, where you can get bonus content, extra perks, and a general feeling of being a good person.

Kyle  1:04:22

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Randy  1:04:30

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Kyle  1:04:37

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Randy  1:04:46

See you next time.

Kyle  1:04:47

Cheers!