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Sept. 2, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

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Edward Feser | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 17

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	When you unpack this idea of the human intellect, you'll find that what's highest in us, namely our capacity for thought, survives the death of the body.
	So we are here on today's Sunday special with Edward Fazer.
	He's the author of a book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
	So we're going to make him prove God to us in just a second.
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	Alright, so we are here, as I say, with Edward Fazer, and this is his book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
	It's not his only book, he's written a bevy of them.
	Professor Fraser, thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate it.
	Great to be here.
	So, let's talk a little bit about what brought you to this point in your life.
	Because your story is not quite, you grew up a religious person and then just started writing about religion.
	That's kind of my story.
	But you came at this from a very different perspective, writing about Aristotle and Aquinas.
	How did you get from where you were, which was an atheist, to the point where you were writing about religion for a living, basically?
	Well, you know, I was brought up Catholic and I fell away from the church when I was a teenager.
	And by the time I got early in my college years, I became an atheist.
	I was an atheist for about 10 years, roughly the decade of the 1990s.
	And during the last part of my decade as an atheist, I was a graduate student.
	I was given courses to teach while a grad student, introduction to philosophy courses.
	I got a chance to teach a philosophy religion course.
	And so you want to teach students material that they're going to be interested in, especially since a lot of these kids will never take another philosophy course.
	So you don't want to focus on topics that are too technical and abstract.
	You want to focus on topics that anybody would be interested in, whether or not they're interested in philosophy.
	So I thought, well, Looking at the arguments for God's existence would be a good topic to go with, so I did that.
	But it got boring teaching them the way that they're so often taught, which is basically you line the arguments up, and you trot out some of the stock objections, and then conclude that the arguments are really kind of silly and lame, and why would anybody have believed this?
	Let's move on to something else.
	It was boring.
	So I thought, well, I wanted to make it interesting to the students, make it understandable to them why anybody would ever have believed these arguments in the first place, and turn it into a real philosophical debate.
	So that got me, that was one of several things that got me to revisit the arguments, and to go back into the literature, and to read what Aquinas had actually said, and what Leibniz had actually said, and what Aristotle had actually said, and what their contemporary defenders were saying, so that I could understand the arguments better as a way of presenting them in the classroom, so that you had a real horse race there, even though I always ended up at the end of the section.
	Concluding the arguments didn't work.
	At least I could make it a real debate.
	As time went on and I got deeper into the arguments, I started to see gradually that, well, first of all, a lot of the objections that were trotted out, I realized, were aimed at caricatures.
	They were aimed at straw men.
	They weren't really attacking what Aquinas or Leibniz or whoever had actually said.
	So I thought, well, that's interesting, right?
	And gradually I went from that to thinking, well actually, so these arguments aren't as bad as they are usually presented as being, and as I always take them to be.
	And I went from that to thinking, as time went on, this occurred over the course of a few years, during the late 90s, to thinking, well actually these arguments are kind of interesting.
	They're philosophically interesting.
	They raise some interesting puzzles and offer some answers.
	Gradually that morphed in turn into the idea that, you know, these arguments are actually kind of challenging.
	They're very serious arguments.
	And eventually I concluded, you know what, these arguments were right all along and I'd been wrong.
	And that took several years for that to happen.
	But it was basically in the course of teaching other people the arguments and trying to get them to understand them.
	And when I went through my education as a philosopher in graduate school, we were always taught something that Philosophy department's hammer on, I think it's a very good lesson.
	Always try to see what could be said for an idea even though you might disagree with it.
	Try to get yourself into the mind of someone who thinks different than you do.
	And doing that actually led me to change my mind on this particular topic.
	So, what led you to atheism in the first place?
	What was it that made you drop away from the church?
	Basically, it's a common story where you start to study philosophy, and especially if you're coming at it from a religious point of view, or at least a point of view that takes the existence of God and other religious ideas for granted.
	And then you encounter skeptical writers like Nietzsche or David Hume or Bertrand Russell or someone like that.
	You're very impressed by that because you hadn't heard it before.
	You didn't realize there were people who were presenting these objections.
	So, you're very impressed by it.
	You're usually a teenager anyway, so you're open to hearing the language of rebellion.
	You're open to hearing the idea that what your parents taught you and what society takes for granted is all wrong.
	So I would say that was part of the attraction.
	That I was hearing that stuff for the first time, it was exciting, it was different, I was drawn to it for that reason.
	It also happened to be a very prominent attitude, a very prevalent attitude in academic philosophy today.
	That the traditional arguments are no good.
	So you kind of go along with that as well.
	Academic philosophers are not always as independent as they like to think they are as far as critical thinking is concerned.
	They often are quite willing to go along with whatever the consensus of the profession might happen to be.
	So your book is Five Proofs of the Existence of God and I want to go through some of them with you because I think that, you know, Like, as you say, most people, when they think about God, they think about, you know, whatever their parents told them about when they were kids, and they haven't really taken a serious look at, okay, why would people think God exists other than my parents think God exists and I like beautiful sunsets.
	So what is the actual philosophical grounding for the idea that there might, in fact, be a God?
	So, which of these proofs is your favorite?
	And if you could explicate it for us, that'd be great.
	Yeah, probably my favorite is the first one in the book, which I label the Aristotelian proof.
	And as you can guess from that label, it goes back to Aristotle.
	And it is important to emphasize, as I do in the book, none of these arguments I put forward in the book are new.
	They're not original with me.
	The formulations I give, the way I present them, might be novel.
	But the basic idea, the basic nerve of each proof goes back, in most cases, centuries, even millennia.
	The case of Aristotle's argument, at least 2,300 years, if not more, because you even see an earlier version of that in Plato.
	So, if you want me to present, you know, a simplified version of the argument.
	So, basically, the Aristotelian argument starts from the fact that change occurs, right?
	So, you know, the water in the cup here started out being really cold when it came from the fridge, and now it's kind of lukewarm, right?
	That would be an example of change.
	Or I move my hand through space, and so forth.
	That's an example of change.
	Aristotle argues that, on analysis, change always involves the actualization of a potential.
	Something going from potential to actual.
	My hand's potentially over there, now it's actually over there.
	Water's potentially lukewarm, then it becomes actually lukewarm.
	And he develops this idea in response to a couple ancient Greek philosophers named Parmenides and Zeno who denied that change was possible.
	So he presents this argument of what change is as a way to answer them.
	But it also forms the starting point of his argument for God, for what he calls an unmoved mover, the prime unmoved mover of the world.
	Because the idea is that, well, if change involves going from potential to actual, we have to ask, how does that ever happen?
	And his answer is that something can go from potential to actual only if there's already something there that's actual that makes that happen.
	So to make that a little more concrete, my hand's actually right here.
	It's potentially to the left, right?
	And for it actually to become to the left, right, there has to be something already actual that makes that happen.
	The firing of the nerves in my nervous system that causes the muscles to flex.
	So, Aristotle proceeds to the conclusion that, well, whenever something goes from potential to actual, there's always something already actual that makes that happen.
	And if that already actual thing goes from potential to actual, there's something already actual making that happen.
	So we've got one thing being changed by another being changed by another, or one thing being actualized by another being actualized by another, and so forth.
	And, crucial step in this argument, the most fundamental way in which this is true for Aristotle has to do with series of changers or causes that extend not backward in time into the past, but downward here and now you might say.
	So my hand moves here and now because the motor neurons are firing here and now.
	And those motor neurons are firing here and now because there are other neurons firing here and now.
	And that's only possible because my nervous system is held in place, you might say, by its molecular structure and so forth.
	So we have one level of reality here and now, actualized by another, actualized by another.
	And Aristotle concludes that we would have a vicious regress if there weren't something at the bottom level, you might say, that actualizes everything else without having to be actualized.
	Because it's already, as he puts it, purely actual.
	It's moving other things or changing other things without itself being moved or changed.
	It's a, what I call in the book, a purely actual actualizer or an unchanging changer or an unmoving mover.
	And if there weren't such a thing operating here and now, not just something that knocks down the first domino back at the Big Bang, but here and now, then there wouldn't be change going on here and now.
	That's the basic idea of the argument.
	Okay, and what makes that thing God, per se?
	Why couldn't it just be a thing?
	What makes it all the things that we think of God as?
	Well, the next stage of the argument, you see in Aristotle and in later Aristotelians like Thomas Aquinas, is to start unpacking what something would have to be like in order to fit this description of being an unmoved mover, a purely actual actualizer, to use my more technical language.
	And one of the things they say is, well look, I mean, if change involves going from potential to actual, and this cause of things It's purely actual.
	It's got no potential.
	It's already, as it were, fully actual.
	Then it can't be capable of change.
	It's not susceptible of change.
	It's an unchanging changer.
	But if it's unchanging, then it must be outside of time and space, because things that are in time and space are susceptible of change, they're capable of changing.
	So if it's not capable of changing, it must be outside of time and space.
	Material things, physical things, are also always changeable in theory.
	They're always made up of parts, for example, that can be rearranged.
	So if it's not changeable, it must not be a material thing either.
	Furthermore, anytime we see any sort of power, you might say, manifest in the world, like the way I have the power to pick this cup up, or the way that an earthquake has the power to knock a boulder down a hill or what have you, that always involves the actualization of a potential.
	So if we work back to something that actualizes every potential without being actualized, that means it's the source of the exercise of every power that exists in the world.
	It's the source of all power activity, in which case it must be all powerful.
	So we get attributes, divine attributes or characteristics like being outside time and space, being immaterial, being all powerful and so forth.
	And you go down the list.
	Some of them, the reasoning is a little more complicated.
	But you can argue that in God, there must be something like intellect or thought, something like will or choice.
	So you get the whole battery of divine attributes that characterize God as traditionally conceived in both philosophy and in the monotheistic religions.
	So there are two objections that I've seen leveraged particularly at this argument.
	One objection is, why couldn't there just be a vicious regress?
	What's the problem with vicious regress?
	Okay, so it just keeps going back and back and back and back and there's no actual unmoved mover.
	It's just a series of things that are contingent on one another.
	Why couldn't that actually be a possibility?
	Yeah.
	Well, if you posit that, if you suppose that there's no beginning to the series, that there's no bottom level, better way to put it in my view, then you don't really have an explanation of what you started out with.
	You just keep deferring the explanation.
	It's like an endless series of IOUs that's never backed by actual money.
	The idea being that if there weren't something that could actualize everything else or move everything else without itself being moved, then you wouldn't have the motion or change that you started out trying to explain, the movement of the hand, Or the water-grown lukewarm, or whatever it might be.
	And this is this idea that, why don't we just postulate that there's no explanation at all?
	It's something we would never consider in any other context.
	In chemistry class, you know, if there's some explosion because you mix two chemicals together that professor told you just not to goof around, he wouldn't take seriously for a moment if he said, who did that?
	If he said, well, there's no explanation, it just happened, right?
	Nobody would take that seriously in the context of science, in the context of everyday life.
	The only place where people start trying to Take seriously or pretend to take seriously the idea that there aren't really any explanations is when they're confronted with an argument for God's existence.
	Suddenly they say, just throw up our hands and say there is no explanation.
	But there's cognitive dissonance there because they wouldn't say that in any other context.
	They couldn't coherently say that in any other context.
	If you push forward consistently that basic idea that things must have explanations, you're going to be led unavoidably to the existence of an unmoved mover or uncaused cause.
	And that argument that you're making about the sufficiency of reason actually is a separate argument that you have in the book.
	You can make it a separate argument as I do in the book.
	Right, the kind of principle of sufficient reason, as you mentioned, this Leibniz argument, I guess?
	Yes.
	That essentially, if there's a reason for everything, then there has to be kind of a core reason.
	Yeah.
	That's a pretty weak way of putting it, but that's sort of the essence of the argument.
	Yeah, so Leibniz's argument, and I label it in the book the rationalist argument because Leibniz is one of the best known philosophers classified as a rationalist in the history of philosophy.
	He's not the only one who presents this sort of argument.
	It argues for God's existence in a way that avoids the kind of reasoning about the nature of cause and effect.
	or reasoning about the nature of a physical object, or any of these other starting points that some of the other arguments begin with.
	It just starts with the idea of explanation.
	It starts with what is called the principle of sufficient reason.
	The idea that for anything that exists, any fact about it, Any event that occurs, there must be some reason sufficient or adequate to explain why it exists, why it occurred just the way it did rather than some other way and so forth.
	Now, Leibniz would argue that this is a bedrock principle of human rationality.
	It's presupposed in all scientific inquiry.
	It's presupposed in all philosophical investigations including atheistic ones.
	And as I argue in the book, if you try to deny it, you're ultimately led into incoherence.
	So there's really no coherent way to deny it, whether you're an atheist or a theist.
	But if you take that starting point seriously, the idea that things have explanations, they're intelligible, they can be made sense of, then you're unavoidably going to be led, Leibniz argues, to the existence of God understood as a necessary being.
	And so he moves to this distinction between what he calls a necessary versus a contingent thing.
	A contingent thing is something that it exists, but it didn't have to.
	It could have been different.
	So, we exist, but had my parents never met, I wouldn't be here.
	Had your parents never met, you wouldn't be here, and so forth.
	This situation, this interview exists, but had you never invited me, it wouldn't have occurred and so forth.
	So all these things are contingent upon other things.
	And as long as we're locked in the realm of contingent things, things that could have been otherwise, Leibniz argues, we don't have an ultimate explanation.
	The ultimate explanation of why anything exists at all, why, for example, this universe exists at all rather than some alternative possible universe or any universe at all, is if there's something that caused it that itself could not have been otherwise.
	Something that exists in a necessary rather than a contingent way.
	There's something in its nature where not only does it exist, but it could not have not existed.
	If you don't have that, you don't have an ultimate explanation for anything.
	That's the rationalist proof or the argument from the principle of sufficient reason.
	So in a second, I'm going to ask you sort of the flip side of the argument I asked about in Infinite Regress.
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	Okay, so back to the question.
	So, the sort of flip side of the infinite regress question is, I guess, the Bertrand Russell question, which is, why don't we just hit a certain bare root fact?
	Okay, fine.
	There may not be an explanation for something, but this is just the way that it is.
	Why do we always need an explanation for everything?
	Why can't it be that there's rationality to a certain point, and then beyond that, that's it.
	There's no place to go.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, you mentioned Russell as someone who suggests this response.
	Another one is a guy named J.L.
	Mackey, who's another prominent academic atheist.
	And their idea is that, well, the atheist can simply take the view that we have explanations for things down to the level of the fundamental laws of physics, whatever they turn out to be, the fundamental laws of nature.
	But then we reach that level, we're at the level of what you refer to as brute facts, where a brute fact is one that Not only is it the bottom level of explanation, but it itself has no explanation at all.
	Not just, it's important to note what they mean by this.
	They don't just mean something that has an explanation but we don't know it.
	We're not smart enough to figure it out.
	No, no, no.
	What they have in mind is the idea of something that has no explanation.
	It has no intelligibility.
	You cannot make sense of it.
	Even the most brilliant mind, in principle, even God's mind, if God existed and they think God doesn't exist, couldn't make sense of it because there's no sense to be made.
	That's the idea of a brute fact.
	Not just something that We don't know the explanation of, but it has no explanation for intelligibility, no rhyme or reason whatsoever.
	Now, I argue that that idea is ultimately incoherent, that you can't really make sense of the idea that we can explain what's going on in the world of our experience by reference to certain laws of nature, laws of chemistry and physics, and then you can explain those laws in terms of deeper laws of physics, and those in terms of yet deeper laws, but when you get to the deepest level of laws, you have an unintelligible brute fact, something that there is no rhyme or reason to.
	That, I would argue, is like being a little pregnant.
	It's, you know, you either have explanations all the way down or you don't.
	There's no middle ground.
	And I compare it to, you know, putting your books on a shelf because you don't want them to fall.
	Put them neatly on a shelf.
	Then you take the shelf.
	What's going to support this?
	And you put them on two brackets, right?
	Okay.
	Then you say, what's going to support the brackets?
	And you put the brackets on these two rods, right?
	And then you take, finally, those two rods, and instead of fastening them to the wall, you just let go of them, right?
	They're going to take everything down with it, right?
	The fact that the books are supported by the shelf and the shelf by the brackets and the brackets by the rods, none of that support is going to exist at all, unless there's something you can fasten them to, which holds all of that stuff up without itself being held up.
	If there's nothing like that, then the books will fall to the ground.
	The support that the books get, you might say, is borrowed from the support of the shelf, which borrows it in turn from the brackets and so forth.
	Now, in the same way, I would say that we explain what happens in the world of our experience by reference to certain laws of chemistry and physics, and those laws in terms of deeper laws At each level, you're in a situation that's like the books on the shelf.
	The support the lower levels give the higher levels is itself borrowed support.
	And unless there's something to borrow it from, some bottom level of reality that can make everything else intelligible, but it doesn't need anything else to cause it, it's got its intelligibility or explanation built into it, then you've got nothing For everything else in the chain to borrow support from.
	The whole system is going to collapse.
	Well, it seems like they're taking all the attributes of there is a logic to the universe that we can understand at least to a certain point but not beyond that and they're just not calling it God.
	Well, that's right.
	So that's a very good point because someone could hear the point I've just made and in response would say, okay, fair enough.
	We can't say coherently That the bottom level of laws has no explanation but is just a brute fact.
	So why don't we say that that is the necessary being?
	Maybe the fundamental laws of nature themselves exist in an absolutely necessary way they couldn't be otherwise.
	So now we've got a complete explanation of everything that exists but it's an atheistic explanation because it's not God.
	Okay.
	That's kind of the response that you're throwing out there.
	What I would say to that is, well, Once you acknowledge that there's something that exists in an absolutely necessary way, it's not contingent on anything else, it's self-explanatory, then you need to ask, well, what follows from that?
	One of the things you're going to have to say about it, for example, is that if it exists in an absolutely necessary way, then it must be what I referred to earlier as a purely actual entity, something with no potentiality.
	Wait a sec, we already noted earlier what follows from that.
	It's going to be something that's outside of time and space, something that's not material, something that's all-powerful.
	So on analysis, this so-called atheist ultimate explanation is itself going to turn out to have the divine attributes.
	It's going to turn out to be God.
	You really can't escape it.
	And it only seems like you're getting to something other than God because you haven't really thought through the implications of what it is for something to exist in an absolutely necessary way.
	And this is why when I was reading your books and I stumbled on the line that Aquinas says, and it's this thing that we call God, it occurred to me for the first time that as a religious person, you're taught that God is sort of the starting point of the argument, not the end point of the argument.
	You're taught that everything, you're taught that God exists and then everything else comes from that.
	And the way that you're arguing is basically, there is this thing that needs to exist and does exist, and we're calling that thing God.
	So it's really not you're arguing from God's existence to everything else, you're sort of arguing from everything else back to God's existence.
	Which is a more logical way of going about it.
	So, with all of this said, if these arguments are plausible, why do you think it is that they're increasingly unpopular?
	Levels of religious activity are going down in the West.
	Levels of religious belief are going down in the West.
	Is it just that people have never dealt with these arguments, or they decide that they're not interested in hearing the arguments because it's more fun to be atheist than not to be atheist?
	Why is atheism gaining?
	It's a little bit of both.
	I would say, speaking from the perspective of an academic philosopher, a major part of the problem is the hyper-specialization of modern academic life.
	We just know so much about so many different things.
	You could spend your whole life, for example, just doing molecular biology and never read anything in any other discipline.
	And you still will not have plumbed the depths of that one field.
	It's not a little field, but that one field, molecular biology, right?
	That's true even in philosophy itself and in different academic disciplines.
	They've all got their sub-disciplines, and you could spend your whole life just studying the sub-disciplines.
	Now, what follows from that is that you have fewer and fewer generalists in modern academic life.
	In other words, people who try to look at the big picture.
	If you're talking about an Aristotle, or to go back far fewer centuries, a Descartes, or even to go back 100 years, 150 years, the average philosopher or scientist in those days, for most of the history of Western thought up until about a century or so ago, Could literally be a know-it-all.
	You could still master all the different bodies of knowledge and you can know a lot about philosophy and a lot about physics and a lot about biology and all the rest.
	Much harder to do that now.
	So part of the problem is that you get people outside of philosophy but also even people within philosophy who simply don't know a whole lot about the kind of arguments that I talk about in the book.
	They may know nothing more than whatever cliches were trotted out in their Introduction to Philosophy class when they were a freshman or a sophomore, and they heard some of the canned objections that were aimed at caricatures of Aquinas or Aristotle and Leibniz, and then they never looked back.
	And then they repeat it to their own students when they teach an Introduction to Philosophy class, say.
	So, part of the problem is just that.
	It's lack of knowledge on the part of your average intellectual or your average academic because modern intellectual life has become so specialized and fragmented.
	It's hard to know enough about the issue.
	Unfortunately, ego prevents people from Uh, refraining from talking about things they don't know about.
	So you'll have someone like a Richard Dawkins, for example, who's undeniably a brilliant man, a very good writer and so forth.
	He knows a lot about biology.
	Unfortunately, he knows very little about philosophy and even less about theology.
	But for some reason that doesn't keep him from pontificating on those subjects, right?
	So he trots out the stock objections that he might have heard when he was an undergraduate.
	And he doesn't bother to sort of do the research and so forth.
	And so what happens is when someone with that degree of prominence repeats these same tiresome and tired objections, then that gives them new life.
	Because people think, well, Richard Dawkins, he's a smart guy.
	He's an Oxford professor.
	He must know what he's talking about.
	No, not necessarily.
	But that gives a whole other generation of young people, students and so forth, the same erroneous ideas about the arguments.
	And so they get perpetuated that way.
	That's another part of the reason.
	And one of the things about reading your books and talking about actual philosophic arguments for the existence of God is that after you read your books and then you go and you read somebody like Dawkins and he's talking about flying spaghetti monsters, you realize he's either deliberately missing the point or he's completely missing the point non-deliberately to be charitable to him.
	That his argument doesn't actually correlate to anything that any religious person has ever seriously thought about these issues in any real way.
	The thing about the religious argument that has always appealed to me is that it seems to me a better explanation for the life that we live than the scientific materialist argument.
	And it seems to me that the argument that there is no God, it's very difficult to square with Any sort of human meaning, any sort of free will, any sort of reason, all the various principles that so many people in the secularist world seem to base entire moral systems upon, are based on bricks that they've stolen from a house that they forcibly destroyed with a wrecking ball.
	And this is sort of the case that I was making to Sam Harris when he was sitting here, is that he comes up with this entire moral system, but all of his values are based and predicated on the notion that human beings are inherently valuable, for example.
	Where is he getting the notion that human beings are inherently valuable?
	Why are human beings inherently valuable?
	If you say reason, well, why is reason inherently more valuable than non-reason, considering it's just, I guess, an evolutionarily beneficial biological function?
	It's sort of a neuronal order that works the best.
	None of that makes a lot of sense to me.
	What's your chief attack?
	On sort of the atheistic philosophy.
	Is it a utilitarian one that it just doesn't work?
	Or is it that you think that there's a fundamental illogic to atheism itself?
	Is there a... Steal man atheism for me.
	If you're going to make the best argument you can for the atheist perspective, what does that look like?
	Yeah.
	Well, I can answer those two questions in tandem.
	You know, the question, you know, how would I steal man atheism, right?
	But also question what's wrong with it, because they're actually related in a way I want to explain.
	What I would do if I were to try to make the best case for atheism that I could would be to push as far as I could, this brute fact idea that I rejected earlier, right?
	Because I think that's ultimately what you're committed to.
	If you really are a rationalist deep down, in other words, if you think that the world is ultimately intelligible, that the human mind can make sense of it, the human mind can penetrate its nature, right?
	You have a very ambitious and optimistic view of human reason.
	And you push that through consistently, you're going to be a theist.
	I mean, it's no accident that the arch-rationalists in the history of philosophy, the people who really pushed through this idea that the world is ultimately intelligible, we can make sense of it, they were all theists.
	They all believed in God.
	Leibniz, Descartes, people like that.
	Even Spinoza, though his conception of God is an eccentric one, he's not an atheist.
	He's a pantheist, but that's very different from atheism.
	So I would say that If you're going to avoid theism, you really have to take a view that the power of human reason is extremely limited.
	You have to take a very pessimistic view of human reason.
	And you see that kind of view in Nietzsche.
	You see that kind of view in David Hume.
	You see that even in some of his moods, in Bertrand Russell, though in others of his moods he's more optimistic.
	But I think that's the more consistent view that you're going to have to take.
	What you're not going to have is this kind of rosy, if we just got rid of religion everything would be wonderful, kind of idea that you get in someone like Richard Dawkins.
	So I would say that if you're going to steel man atheism, you're going to have to swallow the consequence of accepting that the world is ultimately not intelligible, you're probably going to have to be less of a science booster than you are, because science really rests on the idea that we can make sense of the world.
	So if the world ultimately is not intelligible, if it ultimately is a brute fact, you're going to have to have a much more modest idea of what science can accomplish.
	Once again, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche had exactly that kind of modesty about the possibility of scientific knowledge.
	So that's what I would say is, you know, if I wanted to be, if I wanted to sort of give the atheist advice as to where to go to make his position as defensible as possible, and as little open to the sort of objections I would raise, that's the direction I would go.
	But that brings me to what the main problem, I think, with atheism, is with atheism, which is that ultimately you can't make that position work.
	It's ultimately a self-defeating position.
	If you ultimately take the view That nature is not intelligible, that we can't make sense of the view.
	It makes sense of the world.
	You're ultimately undermining the power of human reason to such an extent that it takes down any argument you can give for any conclusion, including any argument you can give for atheism.
	So I ultimately don't think atheism is a coherent or consistent position.
	And that's what I think is the main problem with it.
	It has all kinds of practical downsides as well, but those are less fundamental than the fact that it's just false and it's not rationally defensible.
	Well, this is also the argument that Harris has made in reverse.
	He'll make the argument, essentially, that while atheism may not be tenable in terms of supporting things like free will, you have to act that way anyway.
	There's a certain level of whistling past the graveyard that I feel like you get from some atheists where, yes, we can change the world if we just get rid of religion, and yes, we can have rational discussions.
	And I just keep thinking, where are you getting the tools to do all of these things?
	I mean, you are basically a ball of meat wandering aimlessly through the universe, randomly firing neurons, and yet I'm supposed to believe that we can construct entire moral systems, change our lives for the better, and make civilization a rosy, wonderful place.
	I was reading E.O.
	Wilson in his sociobiological theories, and he Gets almost to the verge of what you're talking about, where he basically says that everything is an outgrowth of evolution and biology.
	And then at the very last instant, he sort of veers away from it, because he realizes that the conclusion is just too depressing and self-defeating, which is that every change that has ever occurred was bound to happen.
	It was not, it was not willed.
	There's no possibility for actual change.
	You almost end up in this sort of human-xenos paradox, where change is occurring all around you, but it can't actually be occurring all around you.
	Well, I think that guys like Harris are probably misled by the fact Status as nice guys, right?
	As evidence that it's possible to have a moral world, say, even if morality is an illusion.
	So someone like Harris might think, well, I'm a nice guy.
	I'm not, you know, I wouldn't murder and steal and kill and so forth.
	And some of my atheist friends are like that, right?
	And that would be true even if it turned out that morality is an illusion.
	Even if it turned out that free will is an illusion.
	Therefore, you could have a society in which belief that morality and free will were illusions was widespread.
	That doesn't follow.
	It's very naive to think that what might be true of the individual person here or there could be true at the level of mass society.
	Where everybody just took it for granted that free will was an illusion, morality was an illusion, but a useful illusion, right?
	It would be irresistible to cut corners where you could get away with it.
	Because it's just an illusion after all anyway, right?
	So I think there's a kind of sociological naivete behind this idea that, you know, Morality could still work even if we all just agreed it was false and agreed not to talk about it very much.
	Okay, so we'll get to more on that in just one second.
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	Okay, so let's talk about the construction of morality.
	So now we've talked about the construction of arguments that support the existence of God.
	But where atheists usually go is once you've started arguing that the spaghetti monster argument isn't particularly productive for them or fulfilling for them, and that you actually have some pretty good arguments for God's existence, they immediately leap to, okay, there's a bunch of stuff in the Bible I don't like.
	There's a bunch of verses in the Bible I don't like.
	Is it possible or necessary or useful to construct a morality simply on the basis of God exists?
	Does that really help you construct some sort of objective morality that can be useful?
	I'll acquiesce in the belief that it's more useful than atheism.
	Scientific materialism can't really generate, and facts don't have anything to say about actual values.
	But there's a serious fact-value distinction.
	But let's say that we now all acknowledge that God exists.
	Can you actually generate a moral system that works off of that, or do you still need some sort of religious tradition?
	Well, I think it's neither.
	What I mean by that is this, that atheists often suppose that the traditional defenders of God's existence, a Thomas Aquinas or an Aristotle or a Leibniz or what have you, are committed to the idea that religion and morality are related in the following way.
	That morality is essentially a matter of God arbitrarily giving certain commands, right?
	Don't murder, don't steal.
	And that if you ask, well, why?
	Because I said so, right?
	That God just arbitrarily stipulates that certain things are wrong.
	And that if you believe that there's a link between religion and morality, that must be what you mean.
	That's not what thinkers like that meant by that.
	If you look at something like Thomas Aquinas, and here his ideas are, as they so often are, grounded in Aristotle.
	Morality is fundamentally grounded in human nature.
	This is the idea of morality as natural law.
	Now, there is a link to religion, but it's not as direct as atheists often suppose.
	It's more indirect.
	The idea is that what's good or bad for something is determined by its nature.
	That things by their nature have certain tasks they have to perform.
	They have certain ends or goals they have to fulfill in order to flourish the kinds of things that they are.
	So forget about human beings for the moment, right?
	Just think of something like, to use some stock examples, like to use a tree or an animal like a squirrel or a bird or something, right?
	A tree, given its nature as a tree, if it's going to flourish, has to realize certain ends or goals.
	It's going to flourish.
	It's going to flourish.
	It's got to sink roots into the ground to give it stability and to take in water.
	It's got to grow bark to protect it from the elements and insects.
	If it doesn't realize those goals, you might say, it's not going to be a very good tree.
	It's not going to flourish as a good specimen of a tree.
	Same thing with the squirrel.
	It's going to flourish as that kind of animal, as a squirrel.
	It's got to gather its nuts and acorns for the winter.
	It's got to scamper about and evade predators and so forth.
	If it fails to do those things, it's not going to flourish as a squirrel.
	Now, human beings are like that too.
	We have certain ends we have to pursue, certain goals we have to realize or reach, if we're going to flourish as the kinds of things that we are.
	For example, human beings are rational animals.
	Unlike other animals, we've got intellects.
	We've got rationality and free choice.
	So we need to learn things about the world.
	We need to study.
	We need to investigate the world.
	We need to do things like science and philosophy, or we're not going to flourish as the kinds of things that we are.
	Now, just as it's a matter of objective fact, That a tree that fails to sink roots is a bad tree in the sense of a bad specimen, a defective specimen of a tree.
	And the squirrel that fails to gather acorns and nuts and so forth is a defective or bad specimen of being a squirrel.
	So too, a human being that fails to realize the ends or goals that are built into our nature is a bad specimen of a human being.
	Now, you'll notice that I didn't make any reference to God there, right?
	I just made reference to human nature.
	What I did at least presuppose, however, is that there really is, in the nature of things, objectively, something that's there, we discover, we don't just make it up, there really are purposes or goals in nature.
	That's something that modern atheism rejects alongside its rejection of God.
	The idea that there really is any purpose built into the very nature of the physical world.
	What Aristotle called final causality.
	Final cause or end or goal or purpose.
	And they often reject this idea on the basis of modern science.
	They say, well, modern science has shown there are no purposes in nature.
	There are no final causes.
	What I would say is that modern science has shown no such thing.
	Modern science simply brackets that question off.
	It doesn't look for final causes.
	It looks for things you can put in the language of mathematics.
	And you can't put purpose in the language of mathematics.
	So for scientific purposes, physics just ignores that.
	That's very different from showing that it doesn't exist.
	But once you have that in place, I would argue that you could show that there must really be such things in nature as final cause.
	Then you've got the foundation for a system of ethics that doesn't have to make reference to scripture, and it doesn't have to make reference to some arbitrary divine command, but just to human nature.
	Now, scripture and divine commands are related to all that.
	They get worked into that as well in a whole system of religious ethics.
	But that would be the starting point or foundation.
	So what's the argument for final causes?
	What's the scientific argument for final causes?
	Because it seems pretty evident to...
	The Sam Harris's of the world that, as you say, there are no final causes.
	They're just brute facts.
	The world is made up of them.
	Then our minds kind of place those causes on the brute facts in order to make sense of the world.
	What's the best argument in favor of the idea that you can discover the normative from the descriptive, basically?
	What I would say is there are several arguments, some of them more technical than others, that you give for the existence of final cause or purpose in the natural world.
	But probably the one that's easiest to understand for the non-philosophers is the idea that if there is no final cause or purpose built into nature at all, if the whole idea of final cause or purpose is an illusion, then that means that human reason itself has no final cause or purpose.
	It doesn't aim or point at anything.
	But if that's the case, then the human mind, the human intellect doesn't aim or point at truth as its final cause or goal either.
	If that's the case, if the human intellect, if the human mind, if human reason isn't really for anything, it doesn't have the attainment of truth, As its final cause or goal.
	Because there are no final causes or goals.
	That means there really is no such thing objectively as a difference between good reasoning and bad reasoning.
	Between good arguments and logical fallacies.
	It's all ultimately just a matter of power.
	Of imposing your will on others.
	Now, I would say you can't really make coherent sense of that.
	Even to give an argument for that claim, you need to presuppose that the argument's a good one, not an argument that commits a fallacy.
	Even someone who wants to deny that there's a difference between good and bad arguments is going to have to give you an argument for that, and therefore presuppose that there is such a difference.
	But if there is... Did you make an evolutionary claim on that?
	Could you theoretically make an evolutionary claim to counter that?
	So you say, you're right, there's no such thing as good reason or bad reason, there's just reason that works.
	Right.
	And I've heard Harris actually make this argument.
	Yeah.
	He made it on stage with me.
	He basically said that, yes, I love reason, but it's because reason is useful, right?
	It's not because reason searches for truth, even though he does believe in objective truth, which I've never really understood.
	He says that reason basically allows you to convince the most numbers of people, because your brain basically is like a lock.
	When you come up with a reasonable combination, somebody's brain basically unlocks, and now they're on your side.
	Could you make the argument in favor of good reason, not on the basis of it's aiming at truth and then truth is the objective, but convincing people is the objective because then you are evolutionarily a winner, basically.
	Yeah.
	Well, there are two problems with that, depending on how someone like Harris would cash out that claim, right?
	If he wants to say that natural selection could explain why the human mind really aims at truth, I would say it doesn't and can't explain that because all natural selection favors is fitness, being well adapted to the environment, passing your genes on to the next generation.
	And there's no necessary link between that and truth.
	It could turn out, for all we know, that sometimes it's more adaptive to believe falsehoods.
	If that's the case, then natural selection wouldn't favor Intellects or minds that attain truth.
	We just favor intellects or minds that allow you to have greater survival.
	And they actually make that argument in the context of religion, right?
	They say religion is expandable and just because religion is really popular doesn't mean that it's true.
	It's just that it's a byproduct of minds that are evolutionarily fit.
	That's right.
	So if they're going to say that about religion, they're going to say, yeah, a tendency toward religion is hardwired into us because it has certain fitness.
	Characteristics, but it's not true.
	Well, there's no reason not to extend that to human reason in general, in which case you've got a self-undermining position.
	So if he's going to say that natural selection explains our capacity for truth, I would say that natural selection by its very nature could do no such thing.
	It's just not in that business of explaining that kind of thing.
	If instead he says, oh no, I'm not trying to explain how natural selection favors truth.
	I'm just trying to say that human reason must be a useful instrument because it has survived the process of natural selection.
	Okay, if he says that, then he's back with the skeptical position that I already criticized a few moments ago, which is that he's basically conceding that there is objectively no difference between good and bad reasoning.
	There's just reasoning that wins the mob over and reasoning that doesn't.
	But in that case, he couldn't present his own position as the more true or rational position.
	He's going to end up with a self-undermining, self-defeating position.
	Okay, so what happens to reason to connect it with any sort of moral principle?
	Let's say we assume that the Aristotelian version of the nature of man is right, that basically our nature is to be a rational animal, and that in order for us to pursue our telos, we have to be as rational as possible, or at least pursue rational ends.
	How does that connect to morality?
	Because one of the things that we saw between the 19th and 20th centuries is a lot of people who thought that they were being as purely rational as possible, who then proceeded to kill tens of millions of human beings.
	So how do we get from now, so we've gotten from God to reason as an end, I guess, and so how do we get from there to anything that looks like a moral system?
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, what you see in the kind of systems of thought that you're describing there is a kind of incoherent or bastardized version of reason.
	I mean, on the one hand, they, in the name of rationality, They favor things like a centrally planned economy, and so I assume you're referring to communism and Maoism and Stalinism as manifestations of that and so forth.
	But my argument is that if you follow through consistently the idea that reason really has its end, truth, the attainment of truth, you're going to be committed to final cause, to purposes built into nature.
	Before you know it, you're going to have to accept a natural law conception of morality, which tells us that The things that are good or bad for us as human beings are there in the nature of things.
	They're there for us to discover and not to invent, right?
	And that means that there are absolute limits on the power of any state, any government, say, to manipulate human beings according to its whims and so forth.
	It's going to have to submit itself to the dictates of the natural law, and therefore it's not going to be a totalitarian state.
	So, you can't consistently, in the name of reason, End up with a kind of totalitarian or status system.
	I think there's a contradiction lurking in that very idea when you unpack it.
	And that may be a contradiction between Plato and Aristotle because in Plato's Republic he basically argues that theoretically you could have the rule of reason from the top that looks essentially like a tyranny and Aristotle is a lot more divided on the question of the power of government it seems.
	Yeah, that raises questions about how to interpret Plato.
	Is Plato serious about that?
	Correct.
	But even Plato, though, you know, one of the things that's interesting about Plato's Republic, which I think people often don't pay careful enough attention to, is that what seems like a totalitarian society, sort of rigidly regimented society, right?
	That applies primarily to the guardian class, not to the mass of human beings, right?
	It's only the small elite that has to live this very austere, military, sort of totalitarian lifestyle.
	And they have to do it in Plato precisely that it's not attractive, right?
	For Plato, you have to guarantee that being a ruler in his utopian society is as unattractive as possible to anybody but those with the purest motives.
	Modern totalitarian states were anything but like that, right?
	They weren't like that at all.
	Having said that, Aristotle is definitely more down-to-earth thinker than Plato.
	Even Plato later in his career moved away from this rather sort of strange utopian model that he presented in the Republic.
	But Aristotle is much more the philosopher of common sense.
	So the argument that I've made, and I'm making an upcoming book on some of these topics, is that With all the glorification of Aristotle, all the glorification of human reason, there still does need to be an admixture with essentially one revealed truth.
	Not necessarily everything that's in the Bible is necessary to supply the basis for natural rights as we understand them, but you do need basically one verse, and that is that man is made in the image of God.
	You do need the idea that every human being is imbued with a certain level of rights by nature of their very existence.
	Do you think that exists in the ancients in the same way?
	Because it seems, you know, obviously Plato and Aristotle were okay with slavery.
	There's a pretty solid regimentation of human beings into people who are fitted for one class versus people who are fitted for another class.
	Do you think that we need that sort of biblical admixture?
	Or do you think that it could have been, over time, evolved from the Greek position purely?
	I think we do need that biblical admixture.
	I don't think it could have evolved.
	You do see in Aristotle something like an echo of the idea that human beings are made in God's image in this sense.
	That he thinks that rationality, which every human being has some degree of, is the divine spark in us.
	It's what is most God-like.
	But beyond that...
	It doesn't have, in Aristotle, a lot of practical application to the life of the average person.
	This idea that absolutely every human being has a certain dignity and an eternal destiny, and so forth, and is specially loved by God, right?
	You certainly don't have that in Aristotle.
	In Aristotle, the unmoved mover, God, contemplates one thing, himself.
	Because nothing else is worth contemplating, right?
	But you don't see that idea in the philosophers influenced by the Bible, by Maimonides in Judaism, by Thomas Aquinas in Christianity.
	You have this idea of the dignity of the individual human being and the eternal destiny of the individual human being that really is something that biblical religion introduces.
	And I think it is absolutely necessary.
	That's its origin.
	I mean, even liberalism, which still uses the language of human dignity, it really is a kind of heresy, you might say, of biblical religion.
	What I mean by that is something that grew out of biblical religion and then chucked away its origins and supposes that you can maintain this idea of human dignity without the biblical source of it.
	And I would say, ultimately, that's incoherent.
	So, now we're in the realm of more traditional religion, as a lot of religious people feel.
	The talk about immortality and the value of each human being made in the image of God and all the rest of this.
	What do you think is the best proof for a soul?
	This is one I've personally had a tough time with, because the truth is that the Old Testament isn't big, it's big on the idea that there's a soul, because it says right in Genesis that God breathes breath into Adam and all of this.
	But there's nothing in the Old Testament that explicitly references the idea of an afterlife, for example.
	So what's the rational case?
	I know that you've discussed this before.
	What's the rational case for the idea of a soul?
	What exactly is a soul?
	Is there a rational case for an afterlife?
	Or is that just something that we've made up to comfort ourselves?
	I would say that The arguments for immortality that I think are the most impressive, and actually these are arguments that, for whatever reason, end up being a little bit philosophically more technical than the arguments for God's existence, or at least it's a little bit harder to state them in a non-technical way.
	But the arguments that I have in mind focus on what's unique about the human intellect, the human power of rationality, which other animals don't have.
	Other animals are clever in certain ways.
	They can hunt prey and they can solve certain problems.
	But what they don't have is the idea to grasp abstract ideas, abstract concepts, the sort of thing that we express in language, in distinctively human language.
	That's the difference in human beings.
	That entails, when you unpack it, and this is something that Plato argues, Aristotle argues this as well, Thomas Aquinas argues this as well, when you unpack this idea of the human intellect, you'll find that it's a power in us, it's a capacity that's not material.
	That is to say, it's not entirely grounded in bodily processes, not even neural processes, processes in the brain.
	Now, they don't deny, Aristotle and Aquinas certainly would not deny, that brain activity is part of what's going on when we think.
	But they would argue that can't be the whole story.
	That what matter by itself will not give you is the kind of meaning that you have in a human thought, or in a sentence that you write in a human language that expresses a human thought.
	That's a non-physical or immaterial aspect to human nature.
	Now, if that's the case, Then because it's the case, when human beings die, what happens is we lose our bodily capacities.
	We walk and we talk.
	Those things depend on bodily organs like arms and legs and mouths and so forth.
	We digest food.
	That depends on a bodily capacity.
	Bodily organs like having a stomach.
	We see and hear.
	That depends on bodily organs like eyes and ears.
	Those things are gone.
	But at least part of what we do, even when we're alive, namely thinking, namely abstract thought of the sort that even the least That's something that for Plato and for Aristotle and for Thomas Aquinas is not a physical or material power of human nature.
	It's something that we do even when we're alive that is immaterial.
	And so that aspect of us does not go out of existence at death.
	It carries on beyond death.
	And that's the foundation in these writers for an argument for the immortality of the human soul.
	That there's an aspect of human nature, what's highest in us, namely our capacity for thought, that survives the death of the body.
	So, even without a brain, even without any ability to function in the physical world, there is something else, but we can't quite define what exactly that is?
	I don't want to say we can't define, I think we can define.
	I think I would say, I mean the short answer would be that it's the human intellect, the human mind that survives the death of the body and that cannot be entirely explained in terms of or reduced to brain activity.
	Here you start to see a divergence between thinkers and the tradition I'm talking about.
	So for a writer like Plato, or Rene Descartes, father of modern philosophy, for them, not only is the human mind the highest part of our nature, but that's really definitive of us.
	What we are essentially is thinking things, and the body is just a vehicle we temporarily walk around in, or it's even a prison for Plato.
	So death is a kind of liberation.
	But for Aristotle and for Thomas Aquinas, that's not the case.
	For them, even though we're not entirely bodily, there's an aspect of us, namely our intellects, our minds, that's not reducible to bodily behavior.
	Nevertheless...
	Our bodily activity is still part of us.
	And so death is not a liberation.
	Death is really, what I like to call it, in Aquinas' thinking, death is like a full body amputation.
	That's something, that's bad.
	You want your body back.
	That's why you need, in the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, you need a resurrection from the dead.
	Now that's where, for Aquinas, philosophy has to give way to theology.
	He thinks philosophy can demonstrate that the human soul is immortal.
	But what it can't demonstrate is that We could ever get our bodies back.
	That would require special divine intervention, and that that's even a possibility requires divine revelation to know about.
	It requires biblical revelation to know about.
	That's where theology picks up the baton from philosophy.
	When it comes to the intellect, the mind that survives death, does that have any impact whether we're talking about somebody who is a baby, who has an undeveloped brain, or does it matter if your brain is developed?
	The way we normally think of intellect and mind is obviously imbued with these physical characteristics.
	But to take an abortion example, if somebody would argue, well, the intellect isn't developed, it's a fetus.
	It's basically got very little brain function.
	Is it a problem to kill that thing because is it really even living if it doesn't have this immoral soul that we've now posited?
	What gives a non-thinking person or human this capacity of immortality that makes them valuable in this perspective?
	Well, what followers of Aquinas argue is that in the case of a baby or a fetus or what have you, it's not that they don't have intellects or souls, they do have them.
	But what they don't have is intellects or souls that are developed.
	Because for Aquinas, though the intellect is not a physical thing, it's an incorporeal or non-material aspect of human nature.
	Nevertheless, the five senses and brain activity are its normal mode for acquiring information.
	It would be otherwise like a computer that's kicked off the internet because the modem's not working, right?
	So, the fetus or the small child, the baby that's just been born, is basically like a computer that's just been connected to the internet.
	It's downloading information, but not a whole lot has been downloaded onto it yet.
	But, nevertheless, just as a computer still exists, whether or not it's connected to the internet, whether or not it's got a modem, in the same way, the unborn child, the fetus, or the newborn infant still has a soul, still has an intellect, but it's one that has not yet developed.
	So, it's not that the fetus or the child is potentially a human being, or potentially something with a soul or an intellect.
	No.
	It's something that actually has an intellect, actually has a soul, but intellects and souls that have not yet attained their potentials.
	That's a different idea.
	Okay, so with all of this said, I mean, we've gotten pretty abstruse here.
	I've tried to bring it down to the point where I can understand it at least.
	And with all that said, one of the things that's pretty obvious is that we as a civilization have sort of lost our way in terms of these fundamental Western values.
	Because all of this is the basis for a Western civilization that actually believes in human rights and individual rights and women's rights and all the things that we actually care about in the West.
	Can this stuff be re-inculcated?
	Have we lost it?
	Have we lost it because we lost the philosophical roots or because we were seduced by the excesses of materialism around us?
	What do you think happened to Western civilization?
	Because all these ideas are not new to you, they're obviously not new to me.
	I got them from you, many of them, and then you got them from people who are a bunch older.
	So what exactly happened that it feels like very few people in the West are even familiar with these ideas?
	I wouldn't reduce it to one factor, but as I put it in my book, The Last Superstition, which came out about 10 years, it's the 10th anniversary now of that book.
	It's been out for about 10 years.
	At least on the philosophical side of things, the intellectual or academic side of things, I think the greatest mistake, I think the way I put it in the book was that the single greatest mistake ever made in the history of Western thought was abandoning Aristotle.
	And more generally classical philosophy.
	Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, the whole medieval and ancient tradition on which western civilization has been founded.
	That's its intellectual foundation.
	And that provides the foundation for these arguments for the immortality of the soul and the existence of God and the natural law conception of morality that we've been talking about were kind of a common coin for pagans and Jews and Christians for so long.
	That was abandoned about 400 years ago with the rise of modern philosophy.
	And we've been seeing for the last 350, 400 years is basically the gradual unspooling of the implications of that, the working out of the implications of that, as that idea that all that stuff is old hat, we need to chuck it out and get rid of it.
	Took root in the intelligentsia and started to permeate the thinking of academics and intellectuals and writers and so on and so forth.
	That, I think, is at least the intellectual or theoretical side of the modern problem.
	Now, there are all kinds of other factors as well.
	But I would say that that, at least at the level of philosophy, that is the main problem.
	Okay, so I have one more question for you, and it's the biggest one, which is, what is the purpose of life, and how do we attain it?
	So we'll do that in one second, but first, if you actually want to hear Professor Fazer's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
	Subscribe, head over to dailywire.com, and then click subscribe, which helps us bring you the show.
	Great to be here.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

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