Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Hall argue that science maps reality while religion provides the necessary vertical hierarchy of values to prevent collective ruin. They contend that ideologies lacking a transcendent anchor degrade into "garbage cults," whereas true religious frameworks bind individuals into lineages capable of self-sacrifice for long-term survival. By treating sin as a misalignment with reality's checksum, they propose that recognizing error allows humanity to override gene-driven instincts through cultural protocols of love. Ultimately, this dialogue suggests that navigating complex systems requires humility and voluntary correction rather than perfect blueprints, ensuring the future of all life against the inevitable confrontation with truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Mapping Worldviews and Faith00:07:15
Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Inside Rail.
I am sitting today with Jordan Hall and Jonathan Pajot.
Jonathan Pajot is a returning guest to Dark Horse.
Many of you will remember an episode in which we had a far ranging conversation that the audience felt you and I were talking past each other, and there was further thought that Jordan might be exactly the right person to translate between us as someone who understands both our languages well.
I don't think that's going to be necessary.
Because we've been together for several days hashing out these issues.
We've learned each other's language enough that I think we can have a productive conversation.
For those of you who don't know, Jonathan, I think he would not necessarily cotton to the term, but I would say he is a religious scholar.
Is that an acceptable term?
It's acceptable, I guess.
All right.
In my book, he's a religious scholar.
He specializes in Christendom but is broadly educated.
Jordan is a little hard to pin down.
Broadest thinkers I know.
He and I have been good friends.
We've known each other since about 2008 or 2009.
And he is capable of bringing clarity on a wide range of issues.
So, without further ado, Jordan and Jonathan, let me just say welcome to Dark Horse.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Thank you.
It's great.
Well, this is exciting.
I will say I have some trepidation.
I know from Our conversations over the last several days.
That this discussion is going to, I believe, frustrate just about everybody who watches it on one level or another, because what we are trying to do is prototype an interaction between schools of thought that are in some ways more compatible than they initially seem, but that run afoul of each other in important places.
And so if you're in the audience, I would just say, bear with us.
The conversation that we're having is one that.
I think we each believe needs to be had more broadly, and this is an attempt to figure out what that might sound like and how we might do it productively.
The topic really is about this moment in history when we find that there are different ways of viewing the world and our obligation to it that are in conflict, and those conflicts are looking increasingly dangerous.
Forcing us to try to reconcile those perspectives rather than just agree to disagree at some sort of global scale.
So, I obviously am an evolutionary biologist.
I would say, as I've said many times before, I am perfectly open to the possibility that there is something that I would call supernatural, but I have yet to see evidence that would compel me in that direction, and rigor requires me to await such evidence.
And you are orthodox.
And therefore, coming at deep epistemological questions with great rigor, but also from a place of faith.
And Jordan, I would say, tell me if I have it wrong, but you come from a school of thought that is much closer to one that would be native to me, sort of a scientific materialist worldview, but of late have become persuaded that that is not, in fact, the highest logical position to come from.
You've become convinced that there is something outside of what.
We materialists recognize as the sum total of forces that allow the universe to function.
Is that fair?
Yeah, that's very fair.
All right.
So, I'm not sure exactly where to begin, but let me ask you, Jonathan.
Can you tell me how it is that somebody who is obviously deeply intellectual and compelled to be rigorous about your understanding of the universe, how does that coexist with faith for you?
I mean, I think that one of the things that I realized when I was younger at some point is that science was a very powerful tool and it had, you know, it.
That's why it's all so convincing, is because it can predict phenomena, it can quantify, it can do it very rigorously, and it can also predict very faithfully certain things.
And so it's very convincing, but there's something, what I call verticality, that is, it doesn't provide meaning in its own method.
That is, there is something around it.
You could call it a story, you could call it a hierarchy of.
Virtues or a hierarchy of priorities that precedes the scientific method.
And so when the scientist is doing the thing, he's not concerned with that, but then it ultimately is integrated into that hierarchy, the way it's applied or the way that it's seen.
And so to me, what happens is that if you remain in this horizontal world, there's something that's missing.
You don't know how to orient yourself, there's no hierarchy of values.
And to me, that is the most important.
That's the priority everything has to start with that hierarchy.
And so to me, it became inevitable to realize that there is a, that first of all, that exists, and where can we find it, and how does it work in terms of human societies?
How do human societies bind together into a vertical, right?
So what binds us together?
What binds us together as people?
And ultimately, I came to the conclusion that it is something like worship, that it's something that attention towards something that transcends you, that this happens at every level.
So, you know, as a nation, you have to be able to attend to the thing that binds you, which is Your nation.
As a family, you have to be able to do that.
In a marriage, you have to do that.
But that ultimately, I see that that's how stuff works.
And so God becomes the radical of that, becomes the one that holds everything together.
So let me just say one of the things that we've been doing that I suspect is going to frustrate people is when I hear you or really anyone of faith speaking, I am tracking whether or not.
My materialist worldview can be mapped onto what you're saying.
And there's a very large space in which it's not even difficult to do.
And then there's a point at which it becomes impossible, or at least for me, it is so far impossible.
And that ends up being the sticking point.
From the point of view of your claim that there is something missing, I would agree.
Science is not a sufficient worldview.
Because it does lack inherent values.
Now, there are obviously people who would disagree with that.
The Freshness of Olive Oil00:03:11
Sam Harris, for example, would claim that you can work bottom up from the facts of the universe to a description of how it is that we are to live.
I think it's absurd.
I think, frankly, one of the things that Sam says is that we can all agree that suffering is bad and therefore we should work to minimize it and that that's deducible from the facts.
I don't think it is because, for one thing, and you might map this onto the AI discussion, if you decide that it's all of our obligation to minimize suffering, there is an obvious way to do it.
And it is absolutely the opposite of what we should do.
You could end things that suffer and stop suffering.
So, if you become possessed of the idea that everything is reducible to the science, you end up in absurd paradoxes and there's no reason for it.
Yeah.
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Knight, Theology, and Virtue00:15:15
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Yeah, and there are people that actually have that position that in fact humanity, that living things should cease to ultimately cease to exist or that we should minimize their existence so that we actually remove suffering from the universe.
And so that's it.
People actually believe that.
There are some people that believe that.
There are some people who believe that, and we need to make sure that they never get power because they're liable to do something terrifying.
All right, Jordan, do you want to explain how it is that somebody who is as deeply insightful and capable in the realm of science and logic finds yourself in a place where faith is now playing a dominant role in your life?
Briefly, I assume.
This is not an easy question.
Yeah, all right, let's try it briefly first.
Maybe a way of thinking about it is one of the phrases that came up in our conversation was that it's an error to imagine that science and I'll just say religion are competing for the same domain.
It is proper, and the old fashioned phrase was that theology is the queen of the sciences.
And the key thing here is to recognize that in relationship to, say, a knight, A queen is not like a bigger, stronger knight.
The queen is one who stands next to, in fact, in some sense, particularly above the knight, but provides the knight with the context that orients the knight towards why the knight is doing what the knight is doing and how to do it properly.
Once you recognize that, then you recognize that both of these domains are not just compatible, but if they are separated, catastrophic.
And that when they cross the streams, when theology tries to do science, this creates all kinds of weird errors that are sometimes.
Profoundly bad for theology because they're so absurd and so easy to undermine that then you lose track of this altogether.
The same thing happens, of course, when science tries to do theology.
So the challenge is to figure out how to actually allow each to hold his proper role and then bring them into their proper relationship so that we can, in fact, actually live.
I think we should just kind of hit that point.
In some profound sense, the beginning and the end of science is about understanding how to say true things about reality.
That's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to perceive reality clearly, trying to perceive reality with each other clearly.
That's an important piece.
And then be able to actually articulate that honestly but truthfully, saying true things about reality.
Whereas, in a profound sense, religion is about how to live in reality well, like to live wholesome, vital, thriving, fruitful lives.
Now, you can see how obviously these fit together.
If you cannot understand reality well, or you lie about it constantly, Note to our culture, then your life is going to begin to degrade.
Equally, your ability to do these kinds of things begins to degrade when, for example, the underlying ethos of honesty is not valued.
The value of truth cannot come from science itself, it has to come from something that precedes it and then is injected into the attitude that you bring to what it is you're doing.
And we've seen, it seems to me, we've actually seen that even the scientific method break down in the scientific world because people have lost.
The honesty, right?
A lot of the insane things that have come around, gender and all of this nonsense, has been due to the fact that the people that are engaged in science don't have the value necessary to do science properly and therefore have actually distorted science.
Right.
And we can say, like, there's an ordinary stack that is well known to old fashioned, honest people, which is a character, a thing called character.
And then you've got things like values.
Character would be to have lived in such a way that the values that are Yours, at the very least, and ideally values that are good, have become the wave that you show up in life regularly under whatever context you find yourself in, particularly when you're under duress.
We've seen circumstances in the past where people who otherwise were showing up with, say, earnest integrity for sometimes quite bewildering reasons began to be full of shit.
And that's a lack of character.
And so if you've got character, you have something that people can count on and they can relate to.
And then above that is something like good faith.
And notice the word faith is in there, right?
In actual capacity to choose to be in relationship with reality and with other people on the basis of what is good and true without a particular need or desire on your part to be, say, right or to have your version of things be dominant, but rather ultimately with a willingness to sacrifice yourself in service of something that is higher than your particular ego or model or mind.
And the basic point is something like for sure, if we cannot show up with good character and good faith, Then the entire institutional fabric of science is utterly corrupted and can do nothing but become a form of ideology, which then becomes a form of a bludgeon.
And the flip side is also true.
I mean, if you can actually cultivate people who have good character and who can hold to the responsibility of truth with integrity, then magic happens.
Then we actually find things rich, powerful, deep, insightful things, and we all learn from that.
And you hinted at this, but I think it's critical to say that.
While what I'm saying is sort of obviously true, it is simultaneously, obviously, decreasingly present in the world in which we live, and obviously increasingly necessary, lest the world in fact actually fly apart.
I just want to say one last thing regarding to that.
Sure.
Is that we saw an example of this.
It was a very particular example in COVID, if you remember, the follow the science idea.
And there was some, there's very pernicious.
Brett actually does not remember that.
No, you don't remember that.
Of course, you know, I'm informing you.
I was traumatized by it, but I remember it rather vividly.
The way that was happening is that what actually needed to happen was a discussion about priorities and values, which is that we have things that we find important and we have to balance the different things we do based on the different priorities we have.
That discussion was never taken.
They took this medical layer of reality and they limited everything to that layer and they tried to say, well, this is what the science says.
If you don't want to get sick, these are all the things you need to do.
We're going to limit it to that world and we're going to follow the science.
And it was ridiculous because.
And it was the most superficial type of follow the science that you could find.
Because if we actually had a true discussion between the hierarchy of values and then what science can help us do in that hierarchy of values, then we could have formulated a much better response that would have respected our need to be together, for families to be together, for children to have friends, all of these things that we totally ignored and just focused on this chemical, medical layer.
Well, we could have actually gotten to something like truth.
About the chemical middle.
Right, yeah, exactly.
Well, that's what I wanted to say.
It was ridiculous twice over.
Yes.
Because on the one hand, it was the discussion of the so called science without the discussion of the values.
But the science wasn't science at all.
It was the product of a cult, a cult that we had no ability to check in on and figure out how they'd come to anything.
So, you know, for example, the fact that we were locked down, that the beaches were closed, that the Trails were closed, that the sand was poured into the skate parks was ludicrous in light of the fact that the science actually did say that the virus didn't transmit outdoors.
So, you know, and that is one of a dozen examples I could give you where what we did wasn't reasonable with respect to the values or with respect to the actual attempt to deal with the virus as a physical phenomenon.
This has been true in terms of scientism, like this weird aspect of scientific thinking that tries to take over everything is that.
Often, what happens is that people say, Look just at the signs, but there's actually a secret value that is behind it, right?
Right.
And so when you say something like, oh, look at the science, we can create pills that will prevent women from getting pregnant.
And look at the science.
Here's what the science does.
We're going to do this.
We're going to get into the world.
But there's actually a value that is making you do that behind it.
And you can just pretend that it's not there and just say, well, this is a medical thing.
It's a purely medical scientific thing.
And you can, in some ways, obfuscate what the values that are motivating the action really are.
Same with AI.
We see the same problem with AI, which is like, we're not asking what is the reason why we're doing this.
We're just like, no, we can do this.
Here's the science, here's the math, we can do it.
And we just push, but there's something else behind it.
Well, there's a lost leader.
Obviously, anybody who has compared an AI search to a Google search understands that there's tremendous power to do wonderful things with this.
You can answer questions that you can't answer with Google, or at least not without spending a week sorting through a bunch of haphazard results.
On the other hand, AI is a profound intervention in a complex system which is guaranteed to produce.
Unintended consequences about which we have not had a proper discussion.
We've had ghost stories about what might happen, but nobody is managing the fact that we are guaranteeing chaos of a kind we are not prepared to address, and we don't even have a shared framework about those values that should govern our reaction to the consequences of this.
We're just sort of running an uncontrolled experiment, and that's not a rational thing to do.
It's just sort of the march of technology and our What is our de facto shared religion, which is that anything that makes us more powerful is inherently good?
That's right.
It's demonstrably false.
Right.
You said de facto, and this is important.
You're going to have a religion.
If the word shared is anywhere in there, there's a religion involved.
And it's going to be de facto if it is not de jure.
But if you've not actually endeavored to enter into it with rigor and depth and earnestness and investigation, practice and tradition, Then it's going to be something that is imported, rough, and usually quite toxic because we'll have to be dealing with how does it win in the local regime of whatever kind of mimetic warfare domain it finds itself in.
And that's a terrible way to select your religion.
Well, I want to.
This is one of these places that, in order to have a proper discussion between people who have educated themselves separately in order to do high quality work, anybody who does that ends up having to.
Redefine terms and make up other terms in order to do the work well, because the natural consequence of millions of people speaking a language is that the terms become very dull and broad and that you can't do rigorous work with them.
So I always point out to people who are trying to do rigorous work, you've redefined things and you forgot that you did it.
And then when you talk to people, you do tend to talk past them.
So anyway, I would say it's not inevitable that you will have a religion.
It is inevitable that something will play that role in your life.
But In my terminology, you cannot start a religion.
You start a cult, and if it is high quality, selection shapes it into a religion over time.
But there's lots of garbage cult, and what is going on in the space of science right now is a garbage cult, right?
It is not viable in any regard.
And what happened is people embraced it because it's clearly very powerful, but power is not the only ingredient that you need in order to have a proper tradition that fits in that space of religion.
In fact, the only things that we can be sure have that capability are ancient religions.
And how do we know they have that capability?
Because they have stood the test of time.
So, the bitter pill that comes with that is having stood the test of time against past challenges is not a guarantee that they have the goods to address current challenges that nobody has seen before.
And I'm afraid, as much as I feel like it's my job as an evolutionist to point out, actually, the religious folks are trying to tell you something of profound importance, I also feel like I have to say to the religious folks there's timeless wisdom in what you're saying.
And then there is a zone in which there isn't any timeless wisdom, and it is necessary that we find it because the problems that we are facing are now simply novel, and the degree to which the solutions that we have are there, they're just incomplete.
But I think that the basics of what Christianity offers, which is on the one hand an orientation, if you think about it that way, which is on the one hand saying, No, not me, but that which transcends me, you know, that God is.
The judge of me and not me, the judge of everything else.
That's already an orientation.
Then that lays itself out in terms of the virtues.
What is it that happens in me?
How do I know that I am aligned with God?
I have the fruits of the Spirit.
I'm having more love.
I'm more patient.
I have all of these characteristics.
Now, when you say that religion doesn't offer the solution, I think that the orientation is the first solution.
That is, if we have the proper orientation, we believe.
That truth is a good in itself, right?
That beauty is something that's real that we can participate in, that love is the virtue that binds us together.
All of these things will prepare us and will give us the right orientation to be able to manage whatever problem comes at us.
But we kind of need that orientation first without it.
So obviously, you know, there's no text in religion that deals with very, very specific technical problems that we could face in terms of how to scale a society in different ways.
There are orientations.
In religion that will provide that.
But I don't know if that kind of answers that question in terms of what is it that religion gives us?
The language here is a little bit technical, but the key is to say that you can operate, you have the notion of ethics, epistemology, and ontology.
And when you actually enter into a proper religion, there's a location where those three are not yet separated.
Dropped Balls and Roman Peers00:08:19
That is the root from which the three are able to separate but still maintain connection.
They have to be consistent, they have to be able to function together, and support each other.
They actually are literally in a relationship, and that relationship, by the way, is called love.
And so, Jonathan's point is there.
It's not really about something like content, it's about who is able to participate so fully with reality and with each other that we can respond to what is happening.
That's the key, right?
It's a question of who do we become so that we can respond to what's befalling us.
And I can just point out what caused.
You and Heather to begin to really show up quite brightly during COVID was who you were and how you showed up.
Then finally, what you said.
You didn't begin with, you actually began with the wrong answers.
Right.
You were, in fact, wrong.
But you were the right kind of people in the right kind of relationship with each other and with reality that over time you began to work your way towards what was right.
That's just how it is.
That's just how reality works.
And so if you can find a way to achieve, let me think.
Something we had talked about, maybe a bit abrupt, but something we talked about, I think, breakfast yesterday was the problem.
I called it ideology, you called it corrupt ideology, right?
Ideology, right?
The notion that people often find themselves unduly attached to the frameworks that they use to think about reality.
Oftentimes, if they invented them themselves, they're really unduly attached to them.
But if you have a proper posture of relationship to reality, one that prioritizes a willingness to sacrifice everything towards something that is higher, then you cannot be captured by the ideology.
And therefore, when reality is coming at you as something where that ideology is not going to be fit to function, you can in fact respond to reality.
That's the kind of thing that we're talking about.
So let me put some flesh on these points.
I would say there are various versions of this conversation, and they have arbitrary levels of difficulty.
The easy one is whatever the nature of an ancient religious tradition is, right?
We can be agnostic about whether or not it is divine and somehow outside of the universe that we have easy access to, Whether it is fully the consequence of emergent properties in a material world.
Whichever that is, one of the functions that religion serves best, and in fact, maybe uniquely or almost uniquely, is solving deep game theory problems.
So, primary among them is the collection of what are called collective action problems, where each individual, following their own incentives, causes the sum total of.
The behaviors to reach a suboptimal outcome.
So, the tragedy of the commons is such a puzzle, prisoner's dilemma is such a puzzle.
But there are many such things where we can say together we would like to leave the world in as good a condition as we found it or better.
But the problem is each individual is in a position to enhance their own well being at an expense to the world.
And if they are morally required to restrain themselves from that, they do not preserve the world.
What they do is they enable their competitors to succeed.
And so we are constantly running up against the destruction of the world because of the game theory, not because we don't understand that we shouldn't destroy it or that we can't say it would be great if nobody acted to destroy it, but because it is pointless to hurt yourself in an effort to do something that you yourself have no impact on whether it gets done.
So I hope that wasn't too complex.
But the point is.
If you have a religion, whether there is an actual God who is looking over us, or that is simply an agreement of how we are to behave, as if there is a God, you can say, well, it is not my right to do this thing that destroys the world, and to me, in my own framework, there is a profound consequence if I violate my obligation, therefore I will not violate my obligation.
And as long as everyone is in on that same agreement, it actually works.
So you can solve the game theory problem, the world doesn't get destroyed.
Problem is, everybody has to be in on that agreement.
And if you have a world in which you have a bunch of people of faith who are resisting the pull of the game theory, and you have a bunch of secular folks who don't think it means anything, then the secular people have a very temporary advantage, and everybody pays the cost.
So, one of the reasons that I think we have to have this conversation is that that is now happening at every scale.
Not only do we have a world in which secularism is causing all of the game theory to.
Force the entire world to face the penalties of the liquidation of the well being that is at our disposal.
But we also have a conflict even between religious traditions.
And so there must be, I think, an overarching structure that includes the values that we should all agree on that everyone, whatever continent you live on, should agree the world is not ours to destroy.
We are stewards of it.
But we don't have that superstructure.
And as a result, the game theory is haunting us in a way because of our technology that it wouldn't have 300 years ago or 1,000 years ago.
That's a long winded way of saying this conversation is a prototype for how do we take, you know, a secular materialist, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, how do we have a conversation in which we say, well, what do all of these traditions agree on?
What do they not yet agree on?
What does this tradition have to learn from that tradition?
How does that conversation happen?
Mm hmm.
Well, I think that.
You know, in some ways, I want to bring it back to.
I'm a Christian, and I do believe that Christianity offers, because of the notion of love, I think is the deepest metaphysical principle.
This notion also that reality is grounded in self sacrifice, I think is ultimately the solution to this problem.
But I do think that this is something that, honestly, the only way that we can get to it is for Christians to live it out.
There's very difficult, it's difficult to.
I think that one of the reasons why we're here is because Christians have dropped the ball to some extent.
I've dropped the ball, that we've dropped the ball, that we have not been proper images of what Christ has taught in the world.
And therefore, we have a faded, kind of thin version of that in reality.
And so, obviously, we should have the conversation, but that conversation should be done by people who are shining examples.
And that's why we kind of need saints, we need people that exemplify it.
And the truth is that if you look at how Let's say in the early centuries, how people were converted to Christianity, which mostly because of that.
They saw the Christians adopting the abandoned children.
They saw the Christians caring for the people that were suffering.
And they were like, well, what is this thing?
There's something in me that's telling me that that's not my virtue structure, but there's something telling me that there's something more going on here.
I don't know what it is.
And that's what kind of led them to seeing that.
I don't know, Jordan.
It's kind of a frustrating answer because it's.
It's kind of saying we have to live up to what we believe.
Well, let's see.
Let's throw.
I'm going to work backwards to give myself time to get to the big ones.
This is the end.
So, one example that comes to the foreground as you were speaking is I think around 200, maybe late 100s, there was a purge happening among Christians in southern France.
Evolutionary Objectives and Lineage00:15:42
And the Roman governor was being particularly vicious.
And one of his peers was sort of defending the Christians.
And the Roman governor just sort of turned him and said, You know, Gaius, I would mistake you to be a Christian.
And he goes, But I am a Christian.
At which point he was torn, you know, he was immediately tortured and killed.
But the point was, the people who were watching that said, Wow, this guy was willing to live to the Roman virtue of telling the truth more powerful than the Romans would.
Like a Roman at that point would have been like, Yeah, no, I mean, no, I'm just being very, you know, judicious.
But the point was, he was so committed to the values that he was willing to step directly in.
And he wasn't mistaken.
He knew he was going to get killed when he said it be.
He chose to stick to the thing that was right.
Rather than preserve his life.
Life.
Well, let me just point out why that mirrors exactly what I'm saying about game theory.
If you, again, I have to be agnostic on this point in order for the whole audience to get it.
It doesn't matter whether the story is literally accurate or whether the story is simply a metaphor that we take to be accurate.
But if you have a belief that there is an infinite reward.
That comes from behaving according to your values, even when the cost of doing so is not only absolute, the cost of your life, but the cost of dying horribly this instant.
If you believe that there's something big enough to warrant that, then the point is you don't defect from those values, even when the game theory is blinking red at you hey, do the other thing.
So, a world of people who share the same agreement with respect to how we fix the collective action problems.
Is a much better world than one in which we all get to figure out our own relationship to that game theory and, in fact, give advantage to those who are least prone to self sacrifice.
But the question is where this better that you mentioned, you know, if it's simply a metaphor that it doesn't have a truth in its own right, where does the better come from?
Where does the perception that this is better come from?
Because maybe the best thing to do is to run through the game theory thing.
And just kill your enemies, and your descendants will be the ones that survive, even if it's just you in the end.
I want to give you what I think is the right analytical answer to that.
And I know it is unsatisfying, and I think I know why it is.
And I know it doesn't land, but maybe it will get there.
Human beings are a creature.
I believe it is secure that that creature is the product of an evolutionary process.
We can debate the fine details of that, but I think I can defend that.
Successfully.
But the consequence of it is that we are structured to be effective.
We are not structured to be accurate.
Now, sometimes being accurate is the way to be effective, and that's why we have the capability of being accurate.
But the higher purpose, as built by evolution, is to do the thing that achieves the evolutionary objective.
And the consequence of this is that we individuals are.
Persuaded of our own significance in a way that's ridiculous, even evolutionarily, right?
You could not possibly affect the fraction of the next generation that contains your genes, no matter how carefully you followed that as your North Star every hour of every day of your life.
It just is a big population.
You're not going to have an impact on it.
But the reason that you behave in such a way so as to Try to increase the number of your genes in the next generation is because that is the limit of your ability to affect the world in general.
Historically, it has been, right?
So it might be a person who has 10 times the average number of children in their lifetime, but where each of the lineages that they have sparked goes extinct 500 years later, their fitness is zero.
During their life, it seems like their fitness is very high.
So you can behave in a way.
That seems evolutionarily wise, but if it is self terminating, it is the opposite.
So, my point is, our sense of our self and our importance and all of this is built in for practical reasons because our likelihood of affecting things distantly in the future or far away in space is pretty low, and our ability to affect things here and now is pretty high.
So, we are over focused on here and now.
And so, anyway, my point is, a religious framework can actually correct the.
It's like glasses on a person with.
Eyes that are misformed, right?
It corrects the vision so that you don't lose track of your role in the deeper evolutionary objective, which is hey, let's do everything we can not to go extinct.
So let me, I'll use my definition of ideology and distinguish it from my definition of religion.
So we just have to do the disambiguation quickly.
So the idea is that an ideology, in the way that I'll describe it, has to do with representations of reality.
That are taken to be reality adequately to guide human behavior.
In religion, we may make use of frameworks, but the key, and again, this is my way of understanding it, is that reality is reality.
And so science, when it does its job right, as you said this, there's map and territory.
There really is a territory, very important, and the maps can help us, and we're going to try to get better and better maps, but we know that the territory is the actual sovereign in this thing.
Because you just described something in the framework of evolution.
When I was listening to it, what you were saying was something like there's an underlying reality to how the evolutionary dynamic operates.
And if you can perceive that reality more fully, you will recognize that short term optimization that seems really satisfying in the short term is actually mid and long term idiotic.
And therefore, we'll select a different short term choice because it actually is a better choice in reality.
And the fact that there's a reality is the key driver.
What I would say is that religion properly is like glasses that allow you to see reality more clearly and therefore to make better choices.
And that's what it's supposed to do.
And this is going back to that notion of disposition and character, that we can say that being able to have certain qualities of relationship, certain qualities of relationship with reality, certain qualities of relationship with other people, is a lens that allows you to see reality more clearly.
Now, there's the next piece, which is also.
Discipline.
Religion also includes saying, hey, you need to not just be able to believe something in a certain cognitive way, but to recognize that the word belief, the Greek word that would be in our shared tradition as pistis, is actually most fully understood in the way that you are living it in life.
To believe something is literally to embody it in reality.
And so if you believe in, let's pick a really nice virtue, when we experience it, say you believe in hospitality, but you treat your guests rudely.
I know what your real belief is.
Yeah, pretty obvious.
So the idea is that religion properly is a thing that allows us to simultaneously participate by virtue of discipline in a living belief that gives us more clarity in the nature of reality and more capacity to relate to other people so that collectively we can simultaneously achieve more clarity in the nature of reality and achieve more discipline in our ability to live that in reality.
Can you remind me who the character is that you just described?
Surrendered his life by confessing that he was a Christian?
I cannot.
It's in Eusebius.
I don't remember his name either.
Over the last several days, we've had several of these stories that have come up in our conversation.
And I want to point out that this is a case where you've got some version of a corrective lens that takes an individual person and causes them to behave in a way that actually does have the long term net best effect on their fitness.
And I just want to map this onto that story because whoever this character was, or any of the other characters that tell this story, you had a particular favorite that you were mentioning, a gentleman.
Polycarp.
Polycarp.
Polycarp, my boy.
Right.
So, this is another person who refused to tell a small lie about his own belief at the expense of his torture and death that he knew would come from just simply not being willing to say something false.
On the other hand, we're talking about people whose names we are still referencing thousands of years later.
So, in fact, the terrible price that these people have paid actually does have an impact on the well being of the lineage to which they belonged.
They had the capacity to have an impact thousands of years down the line.
And so, that corrective lens is actually demonstrably potent.
And the fact that the religion to which they belong is actually the most populous religion on earth tells us something.
There's something about this tradition that actually.
Does aim at the long term in a way that I would argue is highly consistent with the best evolutionary objective.
One of the things that just popped in my mind as you were talking about that is that the way in which you are able, because you talked about how you need to be able to sacrifice your proximal desires, you could say, to some extent in order to be able to push yourself forward in more time.
And in space or in relationships between people, This is what groups to some extent are for, that is, groups in general.
And so, if you have allegiance to a group, you are already having to sacrifice some of your proximal goals in order to be able to serve that reality.
And so, this is already a little aspect of transcendence.
So, you have something that is beyond us, that binds us together.
And this is related to what religion is it binds us together.
And we all recognize we have something in common, some value in some ancestor, even if it's just an ancestor.
There's something beyond my individual that binds us together.
And I have to sacrifice some of my proximal goals in order to benefit from the group and participate in it.
Now, this insight that people have and this reality, which is actually how reality functions, has layers.
There are layers to that.
And it's related to, for example, we talk about a virtue.
That is, at some point, the reality of a virtue starts to bind us together.
And we say, well, if I act with truth, Then I give myself, I sacrifice my proximal goals towards something that is transcending me, something that is above me and is managing me.
I'm accepting that it manages me.
I'm accepting that it actually, its will, what it wants.
If we could talk about, especially a virtue, wanting something, the virtue wants you to live in a certain direction.
If I submit myself to that, then I am participating in this broader story, in this bigger story.
And so to me, this is why.
This is why the metaphorical language bothers me.
And you know, it bothers me over and over.
It's like, I don't understand why we have to say it's metaphorical in the sense that this idea that this base relation, this base world, and this material world is the real world, and there are layers of metaphor on top of it.
Let's say a virtue is a pattern of behavior that you follow.
You submit yourself to that pattern of behavior, and then it plays out in the world.
And so to me, it's not a metaphor.
It's like, it's an absolutely real thing.
Well, hold on.
I want to defend it.
Yeah, go for it.
I want to defend it, though I know.
It is annoying.
I don't want to do the annoying thing.
It's much more pleasant not to.
But I think we have to because if we sideline that now, we'll trip over it shortly.
So let me just say when you say group, you are immediately throwing an error in my world because group is a term that there has been a long running battle in evolutionary biology.
What word should we use?
Well, a team.
No, no.
The example that I would give is, say, like, A football team.
Yeah, a football team is a good example.
Right.
But a football team is properly structured to function as something akin to an organism, right?
Because everybody benefits if we get to the championship.
And so the point is the basis for competition within the team is not zero.
You do have people who are trying to get hired by the pros, and so they play in order to be impressive rather than in order to win.
But in general, you do well in sports if you play so your team wins, right?
That's the issue.
So you distinguish between group and team?
No, we're going to point out that there is an unresolved battle, and that the right way to think of a group, right, any collection of people, people in this room, are a group by definition.
The important idea is a lineage.
A lineage is actually something on which selection can act.
And when we try to make a group function like a lineage, it doesn't work unless we have a very narrow structure in the game theory, like a sports team, right?
Strange as this may sound, the very same thing that causes the cells in your body, 30 trillion cells, to act in perfect coordination so that you can be a living, breathing organism that does coordinated things, that same property at a lower strength is what allows a population of people to function in a coordinated way towards, at the very least, survival.
And so that is the substance.
That is actually functioning towards our long term well being.
And my point would be we now live in a world in which the logic of lineage is both very dangerous.
It can result in one population deciding that it needs to eliminate another population.
That's a very common pattern of history and it's based in evolution, unfortunately.
And if we are to try to frustrate the game theory that leads one population to try to exterminate another population, we have to understand what drives them to do it and what conditions would cause that not to be a wise.
Jesus as a Power Metaphor00:02:50
Course of action.
So the reason, and mind you, I don't say that that higher power is a metaphor.
I would say it is at least a metaphor.
From my materialist perspective, I can say that it is at least a metaphor.
There's the metaphor there.
If there's something else, wonderful.
I'm eager to find out about it.
But we can at least go this far together.
We could say that that metaphor has a very powerful implication for how we behave.
And the more literally you take it, the more effective it is, which is one of the stumbling blocks here, because we can't just all agree to behave according to what Jesus says the right way to behave is, because those that don't really believe it have a loophole.
So, on the one hand, it works well when everybody actually believes it for whatever reason, maybe because it's true, or maybe because.
Belief is what makes it work.
But what we can't do is have our own independent relationship with those ideas, or the bad game theory is going to break out every time.
Well, at least in the case of Jesus, what seems to happen is that we have this in the early church, we say the seed, the blood of the martyrs are the seeds of the church.
That is, that people like Polycarp or these characters, one of the things that seems to have happened is that by being willing to sacrifice themselves, For that which they knew was true.
And we're also willing to live a humble life where they would care for others and they would act in the way that Jesus, that their willingness to, in some ways, sacrifice themselves is what drew people to that teaching.
That it acted in a real way to draw people towards the vision that Christ was giving.
I want to recapitulate some stuff because the corrective you gave on group.
I don't want to distract from what I'm trying to make it.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I think we can actually add some richer language.
Because of this, we can add some richer language.
So the idea was something like, and I think we can actually do it quite nicely.
So let's say we have a football team.
And we have actually, in America in particular, I guess also in Canada with hockey teams, we have a very clean language of what it looks like to behave properly and not properly.
Like the mythos on that is actually quite strong.
We know that somebody who is a selfish player, somebody who is a ball hog, somebody who is trying to get attention, trying to play for themselves instead of for the team, Is doing something that is actually morally wrong.
It's a betrayal.
It's a betrayal.
And that a team that hangs together as a team properly, even if they have less talent, will be more successful as a team.
And the players will participate in the glory of the team.
Mimetics, Identity, and Hierarchy00:04:24
And by the way, this happens largely because of selection.
Selection acts on teams.
Now, what this tells us, though, is there's some right way to do this.
Like reality actually constrains this kind of behavior in a very profound way.
And we're aware of it at that level.
And then what we can say is there's something like a hierarchy.
And so we can do this at higher and higher levels because there's a higher level of something like team, which let's say the Spartans vis a vis the Persians, where if they behave in exactly the same way, they produce a whole that has more capacity to engage in a selection function with another aggregate in this case, by the way, or a group, if we'd like to put it that way, or a weaker identity.
So a stronger identity and a weaker identity.
And what I'm hearing is there's basically two elements to the story.
Well, there's probably ultimately three.
One element is the notion of The quality of the identity in which you're participating.
So, a group is a weak identity.
A lineage is a strong identity.
A lineage has things intrinsic to the nature of the members whereby they are more available to a variety of different elements that hold them together in more intense and diverse contexts.
And then can continue to tell.
Well, I have to, I mean, again, I don't want to play this annoying role, but I think it's got to be done.
The other thing about a lineage is that the cost of sacrificing.
Sacrificing to the lineage is reduced by the degree to which you are related to its members.
So, the fact of giving up your life for the benefit of lineage, if it causes your lineage to continue, is actually a justifiable calculation in narrow evolutionary terms.
I'm trying to abstract above that.
So, I'm saying that what you're describing is a very strong binding agent that allows the thing called lineage to be.
That characteristic in biology.
But if I were doing it in mimetics, it's a different kind of thing.
And yet, there are things called lineages in mimetics.
And there are lineages that have something where the identity of the individual is so closely tied to what's going on in the larger group that there's something about the sacrifice of the individual that works just because their participation in the large group works.
And I would just point out this has a profound relevance to the way history unfolds because many of the Religious traditions that bind people together actually unite distinct genetic lineages.
So, for example, it's very different.
The lineage in question is very different if we're talking about Persians than if we're talking about Indonesians, right?
They believe in overlapping traditions which unite them in some ways, but genetically speaking, we have distinct lineages functioning.
And that's often the way it does work.
These two things have a subtle interplay.
But continue.
Okay, so given we have that set of ingredients, which is kind of the characteristics and the nature of the participants in the group that they're participating in, of which lineage is a very particular case of vectoring towards stronger and stronger.
And then we have over here, which is something like the set of processes and procedures by which they relate to each other.
So we say, hey, if you are a member of my biological tribe, but you're operating entirely as 100% de facto, one, you're being stupid for yourself, but two, that's actually bad.
That's a bad behavior.
That's an error in how we do this.
So, if we run the protocol, these two things coming together is what produce something that actually is successful in the world and continues to move forward in time in increasing richness and thrivability.
And if I just take, and Jonathan, by the way, makes this point beautifully multiple different times, which is the embedded fractal nature of how reality operates.
So, you can see it at a low level, but the thing you're seeing at a low level repeats in nested levels.
So, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, okay, I'm taking that fractal embedding as a principle and say, great.
What would happen if I just sort of thought about what is the highest version of that?
What is the lineage of lineages, which is participating in the religion of religions?
If I can identify that there's a particular right way to behave in a football team, and there's a particular white right way to bring groups of people together such that that group has a strength of binding that allows it to have a wide variety of good reasons to be able to move forward, and I just say, okay, what would happen if I tried to imagine what is the highest possible version of that?
Structures of the Infinite00:16:06
That's actually what we've been talking about.
And that is exactly what we have.
Arrived at a resonance there.
First, I just want to point out lineage is simply fractal by its very nature.
If you were to look at the tree of life, right, initially you're talking about large clades, vertebrates over here, mollusks over there.
And if you keep zooming in and looking at finer, finer grain branching, you eventually get down to the individuals and all of these things.
So it is literally fractal, which is why so many of these belief structures that have this fractal nature.
Seem to actually kind of map.
We're really telling a story that, at least until pretty deep into the structure, is consonant.
And that's important, right?
Most scientific materialists won't acknowledge that, and it's about time that they did because there's a meaning to it that not only is it important in the context of how we are to live, but it's also important if you want to do the science correctly, you have to understand what religion is and why it functions the way it does, irrespective of what the ultimate causation might be.
But the other thing is if we compare between traditions, we have some conflicts.
That have to be resolved.
And I would point out, I've just started researching the question, you know, partially in light of the behavior of Israel in the Middle East recently, does the Torah contain the concept of ceasefire?
I don't think it does.
So when Israel is attacking peace negotiators, that may be consonant with the particular book.
Can we have a world in which Powerful parties don't have a concept of ceasefire, I don't think that world is conceivable.
It's not stable.
It won't last.
And so, you know, it is certainly true that the New Testament has this concept, Islam has it.
So maybe the point is well, that's actually a deficiency in the Torah, that it's missing.
And if we are to continue to live well on this planet, that's something that needs to be imported.
And, you know, we could go about mapping those things.
Which things are missing from what places?
I'm led to understand.
That in Islamic tradition and the Quran, the failure to act with maximum strength against an antagonistic nation comes inherently from weakness.
Well, that's in violation with the New Testament.
Can we have a world in which you are obligated to act when you have the ability to get the better of a competing nation that you're forced to attack them?
We can't have a world like that.
So the question is what conversation do we have to have?
Where we stop, the religious people stop pretending that the evolutionists are on about some nonsense, in which the evolutionists stop pretending that the religious people have a mind virus, in which the various religious traditions stop pretending that it's all one story told in different languages.
Whatever these things are, that doesn't sound like a fun conversation to me, but it sounds like an essential conversation that the world doesn't survive if we don't figure out how to have it.
And one of the things that's interesting in what you're saying is that.
Maybe, I don't know if you agree with this, but there's something very specific about the monotheistic religions that tend to have in them the desire to move towards transcending lineage as the only mechanism by which you exist.
And so, this idea is that we have a common source, but what's up with what we're saying?
The Christians, even in Judaism, even though the Jews believe they have a special role in this, there's a sense in which we all have a common origin.
And that we recognize that as being more important doesn't mean that the differences don't exist and that we don't have all our particular fractal participations, but that there is a way in which we are a like we all are an atom, right?
We all have something that binds us together.
And that is you're going to have to forgive me for this, but that is not a metaphor.
What you are describing because of the fractal nature of lineage is actually just simply literally true.
The part that's subtle is this.
We are, for both better and worse, driven by our genes to attempt to preserve their existence in the world, to get our genes into the future.
Future.
And that is the cause of all of our best characteristics and all of our worst characteristics, right?
That desire to get the genes into the future can literally cause you to make the ultimate self sacrifice for the benefit of others, and it can cause you to commit genocide, right?
It is an amoral objective.
So I'm not defending it in that regard.
But the genes, in wanting that, have done something very special in human beings.
They have engendered A second heritable layer, right?
And this didn't start with humans.
There are lots of other, well, basically it's birds and mammals, but amongst birds and mammals, there is culture that is passed outside the genome.
In human beings, that culture is to the tenth power because we have language.
So we can pass on detailed values and models and other things outside of our genomes.
Why did the genes do that?
They did it because using that second layer, using cognition, using Consciousness and passing things on through culture, we can actually do the genes' bidding better than they can do.
We can understand that if it would be advantageous for the next hundred years to behave in X way, but it will be fatal 200 years later, that's not the way to behave.
We can reason our way through the puzzle.
So if you take all that and you map the question that you just pointed to, we act on behalf of lineage.
That can have Jews fighting Muslims, it can have Christians fighting Jews.
It can do any of those things.
It can also get you to look at the pale blue dot, Carl Sagan's formulation, and recognize that actually sometimes the lineage that must be prioritized is the full lineage.
It's all of us.
We are actually one lineage.
And if the genes were capable of understanding that in order for that lineage to survive, we have to stop doing certain things at lower levels of lineage, if they knew that, that's what they would want because their only real objective is to get into the future.
But it's funny because I see all higher order beings, I don't know what word you want me to use, but all higher order beings, that is, beings that are above the individual person, that the role of that is to manage this problem.
And you could see it from, let's say, from a Christian point of view, you don't have to use the word genes.
You could say that we have desires that appear in us, and we have these desires that are serving our proximate goals.
You're hungry, you want to survive, you have all these things that you could do in order to make sure that you.
That you're surviving.
But we have these higher order beings, and what they do is they establish a hierarchy in how it is that you can participate in that, right?
That what desires you have to prioritize and when do you have to engage in certain desires, and they kind of manage this.
And this happens at higher and higher levels.
And religion is, to me, it's the highest level of this because it's oriented towards the infinite, you could say, right?
It says, we're doing this in view of the infinite, we're doing this in view of the thing that has no limit.
We're not, we're trying to.
Everything that is limited, it's not that it's not good, but we're all trying to orient it in a manner that will serve that which is infinite.
And so, this is why it's I mean, again, we're gonna we're always running into the same problem, which is like, I think that that has priority, like, I think that that has more real existence.
I don't, I don't think you're gonna get a disagreement at the table.
In fact, I think this is exactly what Jordan was pointing at.
You, when you made the allusion to what you call the religion of religions, the point is it is the thing that you are talking about extrapolated.
To a higher level.
And I would argue it will be uncomfortable for at least most of the other religions of the world.
But this is one of the things that Christianity has to teach most of the rest of us, which is you don't get to protecting the entire lineage of humanity from our own game theory that will destroy us if you don't come to the realization that all people are deserving of dignity, irrespective of what particular branch of humanity they're on.
And by the way, you can't actualize that if you don't take on, for example, self sacrifice as a fundamental value.
Yes.
So there's a whole bunch of things that, let's say, not at all haphazardly happen to hang together that are part of this particular tradition.
Yeah, I think that just to kind of re-emphasize that this notion of grounding in the infinite is an extremely useful thing to do.
Because if you do things that are trying to be big and bigger and bigger, you're going to run into a lot of different kinds of problems.
But if you're actually able to perceive the infinite in the category of the infinite itself and find things there, That can actually guide what's happening underneath it, then you're good to go.
This is very commonplace in math.
It's actually very commonplace in science.
It's like why physics uses math.
If you can actually find things in mathematics that are not part of the things that happened in time, circles don't change from year to year.
Great.
If I can design things around circles, I know I'm really solid.
I've got a lot of grounding that I can deal with there.
And so this is a very similar idea.
Because, hey, is there something we can do that allows us?
Sorry, I have to finish my sentence, but.
The better thought just came in.
That allows us, yeah.
Unfortunately, my handwriting is an automatically encrypted process for everybody, including myself.
If we can find and discern principles with principles, right?
When I say that, what I'm saying is that that which is the deepest possible way of thinking about or participating in a principle, which of course a principle then grounds things that are actuals underneath it, then we're actually operating at the right level to be able to start doing the heavy things that we have to do.
And as Jonathan mentioned, I in fact don't just think, I actually live under the deep conviction that love is the principle of principles.
And you can then, if you want to think about it very carefully, you can actually extrapolate from the nature of what love must be everything else in a proper order.
Now you have to not be at all ideological and you have to be very, very resistant to bullshit.
And lack of rigor.
Because what will end up happening is you will tend to put various forms of sentiment or various forms of game theoretic hijacking mind viruses that are plugged into that environment.
But you don't have to do that.
You can actually do this very cleanly.
And that is a very high hope because that can carry the weight of the thing that you've put out there.
And remember what you've been broadcasting, I haven't thought about it this way until recently.
When you say something like, Where the natural logic of game theory, multiplied by the mandate of lineage, multiplied by the arms race of technology, hey, genes, you're all going to die.
If your job, if your only mandate is to not die immediately, you're going to have to figure out how to participate in something that's strong enough to prevent that from happening.
So it's really neat.
It's actually a message from culture back down to genes, which can't listen, but I get it.
This is a metaphor, but it's a clean one.
We need to find that.
We need to find that thing which is clear enough, strong enough, robust enough, and by the way, real enough upon which we can truly rest and then hang everything else off of it.
That is exactly, exactly what I'm getting at.
The genes sent our cognitive structures out into the universe in order to navigate better for them.
And the message that comes back is uh oh, we have a five alarm fire, right?
We are headed for extinction.
It's going to go down some way and it doesn't matter.
It's going to take us all out with it.
And there is a way, conceivably, to avoid that, but it involves solving a game theory problem at a scale that's never been solved before.
We have many analogs of it being solved at a lower scale, but it is time.
We have to solve the top level game theory problem or that's it.
So once you know that, it isn't even a question of overriding your genes.
It is a question of effectively acting on the basis that if they understood the puzzle at that level, this is what they would want you to do too.
Not going extinct is what they want.
And it is time for us to override the little instincts that it's given us in order to solve the game theory problem.
Let me just remind me, I just want to do a little loop of one of the things that's a recurring conversation in my church is that Christendom, or at least the particular branch of Protestantism that I'm a member of, walks too closely to a Gnostic anti life ideology, which looks like this life actually really sucks a lot.
The only reason I'm participating in life. Is because one, I've got to get saved, and two, I guess I got to save other people.
Right?
That's that's a we even talked about this yesterday.
Jonathan's participated in that same thing, but that's actually not at all what this is supposed to be.
What this is supposed to be is the analog to the genes.
Hey guys, life is actually unspeakably beautiful.
And by the way, Sam's suffering that is meaningful is incredibly wonderful.
That's right.
It actually allows the wonderful part to be wonderful without it, it would be just numbing, numbing, and you know.
So, the message is something like this is something that is in fact win win.
It's a funny thing to say.
It is in fact win win.
The lowest is brought on a continuing journey towards a perceived and lived higher.
And the highest is increasingly literally embodied in life.
And there is no discontinuity between them.
That's the thing that we're actually talking about and yearning for.
And the beautiful thing is, it's the way reality works if you can perceive it very, very clearly.
If we can just learn how to participate with each other and with reality, that is very well said.
And I would point out that it, I think, eloquently addresses the thing about what I'm doing here that is so hard for most people to swallow, including me.
Even as I say it, it feels petty to be pointing to the materialist explanation that maps onto all of this more important stuff.
I don't like doing it.
As much as I enjoy thinking about biology, I don't enjoy mapping biology onto human affairs because human affairs are.
Important at a different level.
But it is the fact that you see that consonant story that actually it does map onto the game theory and that the game theory really is, for whatever reason, divine or otherwise, it does map onto the full landscape of these religious structures.
True Participation Within Religions00:07:34
And that if we can recognize that that is true, not just within any of these structures, but that it actually is true within each of the structures, but that there are missing elements, right?
The fact that there are missing elements means that there's actually room at the table for all of those traditions to get together and actually figure out what you call the religion of religions is.
What are the values on which all human beings should agree that actually are the basis for how we can get along together indefinitely, how we can manage the quality of the planet so we don't keep handing each generation a degraded version of the thing?
Yeah, but I think that one of the issues of what you're saying when you talk about the religion of religions is that the only way that we can participate in the world is in this embodied way that Jordan is mentioning.
And so when you talk about the religion of religions, It's as if you're pulling yourself outside of the world and you're kind of showing that there is this thing that for some reason you seem to be able to see that is beyond all of the instantiations that are in the world.
Whereas that's actually not how we function.
It's like I'm a Christian, I follow the Christian story, I live it, and I don't even know from which point of view I would stand.
To be able to say, well, this is good in this religion, this is good in this religion, this is good in this religion, let's like kind of bring them together in some way that we have to live it through our instantiated story.
I agree, and that's the puzzle.
And this is, I think, the reason that I stand in this spot in the conversation is that the only place, and I'm not claiming to have a privileged view of any of it, but the only place that you can see that there is an unsolved problem between these religions.
Is from the position of game theory.
And I'm not arguing that anyone, me especially, is in a position to say, hey, you all need to recognize X, Y, or Z.
I don't know what you need to recognize, but I do know that you can't do it from wholly within any of these traditions because the problem is actually one that these traditions have not solved.
It's the same game theory, it's collective action problems at a level that's never been solved globally.
And I will say, from what I can see, from my limited perspective, The unique element, maybe it's not fully unique, maybe it's in Hinduism, maybe the Buddhists have seen, I think that's likely, but the co equal status of all people, irrespective of tradition, right?
That thing is A, the core of the West.
And by the West, I don't mean a list of countries, but I mean the idea that the countries we call the West sometimes live up to and often fall down on.
That thing.
Is an agreement.
It's a prototype of an agreement for how to get along together in the world.
We don't stop competing with each other, but we do agree not to destroy each other, right?
And the world becomes wealthier in our doing that.
We create wealth when we collaborate with each other, and that is a very beneficial thing that we waste a lot of its potential when we go out on the battlefield and start blowing each other up.
This is an interesting way of twisting the question.
This is by zooming in.
So you zoomed out, and we've sorry, give you context.
We're talking about the notion of something like a very big conversation that includes all the major traditions, and we've identified sort of a couple of big distinctions.
You've got the secular world, which, if it is at all coherent, is mostly grounded about something around science.
Otherwise, it's just a runaway death cult.
You've got Christianity.
You've got a series of traditional religions that have been around long enough to kind of like say, okay, that's got something going on that holds together.
And that's kind of the big conversation.
And what we recognize is that if we zoom in and just say, okay, well, you are part of one of those lineages in a very profound way and are able to participate in the direction of lineage, meaning I'm not a scientism guy.
I'm actually a guy who tries to show up as what science is when it's at its most alive.
We, much more him than me, are participants in the lineage of Christianity.
Okay.
What I notice is if we zoom in one step closer, there's a conversation between Jonathan and I that actually is a prototype of the bigger conversation, which is Jonathan's orthodox.
I'm not orthodox.
From the point of view of orthodoxy, there's a wide variety of things about what I'm doing that are not just wrong, but really catastrophically wrong, like at the level of the infinite.
And yet we're very good friends.
I hope to become even better friends.
His wonderful wife invited my family to come visit their family in Montreal, which God willing we will do.
Notice that we are actually able to be friends.
And notice that, by the way, the protocol to which we both participate puts that as not only an available, but even a mandatory thing.
And he has a responsibility, because I have chosen to profess that I'm a Christian.
He has a responsibility, an invitation to convict me and rebuke me more towards the deeper truth and reality from a place of humility and from a deeper place of love.
And by the way, I do as well, but I'm, again, I've been only doing this for a couple of years, so I know the magnitude of what I do not know.
But notice that.
That point's very, very important.
There's something like back to this notion of who in process, that before we can begin to endeavor some notion of, let's say, reconciliation at the level of the big stories, we first have to become ones who can simply participate in loving relationships with people who are not exactly like us.
And by the way, love is not at all sentimental.
And convict.
And rebuke and bring closer out of that depth of love effectively, mutually, by the way.
And I've been calling this process anointing.
Anointing has, the way I use the term, is if you don't at all familiar with the idea, just think of somebody pouring a very valuable and fragrant oil on somebody else's head.
So it's a really nice viscerality.
But the idea is that it's a kind of a salve that comes from above.
And it has the characteristic that as it comes from above, the notion of salve is that it brings the parts that have.
Grown apart, back into a healed relationship with each other and back towards a proper relationship and orientation towards what is above.
That's what I mean.
So, what we're looking to do is we're looking to engage in this anointing process, looking to engage in a way that we can participate with each other and participate with reality in a fashion that heals us, heals our relationships, and heals our relationships.
Very much agree.
I would point out that this is actually built in.
The Heavenly Jerusalem Vision00:05:40
Lineage selection is my own model, but this is built into it.
The point is actually any group, any room full of people is actually defining a lineage, right?
It's a much bigger lineage than is contained in the room.
But there is a most recent common ancestor for any collection of individuals, right?
It may be very far back or it may not be very far back depending upon how closely related those individuals are.
But one of the predictions of the model.
Is that if you have two lineages that can't get along, like Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, that there are things that will bring them together?
And in fact, this was my prediction from decades ago, but we've recently seen an example.
And it was actually a unity that came about in light of an immigration crisis.
That is to say, a more distant lineage was seen as threatening.
And as much as most people would never have seen it coming, you had Protestants and Catholics in Ireland linking arms, like literally linking arms.
There's a picture of this happening.
So, in light of that, the point is any two lineages.
Can be brought together by a threat from a more distant lineage.
But, you know, and the sci fi trope is right if we can spot it correctly that, you know, the asteroid that is going to destroy the Earth and causes us to have to put our differences aside in order to fend it off.
We all think about that puzzle.
We all think, well, would we really?
And, you know, of course, we have a recent movie suggesting, no, we probably wouldn't.
But we are threatened by ourselves.
The enemy is the game theory.
And our recognition that the game theory forces us to put our differences aside sufficiently to build a structure that corrects our collective view of it, that's a pretty heavy lift.
But if we don't figure out how to lift it, there's nothing else to be said.
So I don't think it's unusual to imagine that people who profoundly disagree will find a reason to stop disagreeing.
The cause is big enough.
I mean, you know, sometimes I think about, you know, if I was on a ship and it sank and I found myself, you know, struggling for survival on a lifeboat with a Nazi, would we put our differences aside?
Yeah, I bet you we would, right?
If you have to in order to survive, suddenly you're going to figure out how to start collaborating and who needs to be doing what.
So that's in us already.
That's built in.
The genes built that in.
And figuring out how to properly trigger it so that we can.
Confront the game theory problem that's obviously at the fore.
Because one of the, I mean, it'd be interesting to hear what you think because one of the, seems like one of the strategies of the globalists was to do that.
Yeah.
Is to say to create the vision of an ecological disaster or COVID or whatever, and so that we will be able to become one nation, like one world, let's say.
I think you're giving them too much credit.
I don't think that's what they were trying to accomplish.
Okay.
Let's say, so the vision of the heavenly Jerusalem is one that I always go back to, right?
Which is that there is a manner, the image of the heavenly Jerusalem is different from that one, right?
It's not that there isn't commonality, but that commonality, it's like a breathing in and breathing out of similarity and difference.
It's fractal, right?
That's the way to understand it.
And so it's not necessarily this idea that in some ways we need like a religion of religions or that you would have to kind of find something that will make us all completely one in a Tower of Babel kind of way.
But that rather, there are, like you said, there are ways in which we can recognize our differences, but also we can still participate in the things that we can participate in.
And in the image of the heavenly Jerusalem, you basically have all the kings of the nations.
They come and they offer their crown to this image that is at the top, which is the king and the sacrifice one, right?
The king and the victim kind of together in one image.
But that it doesn't annul the differences of the nations, right?
The nations continue to be the nations, and there is.
There is a healthy amount of difference.
We have to be very careful of Moloch worship.
Remember, we used that metaphor earlier?
Sure.
So the distinction here is that there's roughly two ways of binding a group together, of taking differences, particulars, and creating something like an identity.
And Moloch worship is one way, which involves something like fear, for example.
And of course, the powers that be are extremely skillful at using fear to create a herd, which is kind of an assemblage, out of a group of particulars.
Sacrifice, sacrificing of something.
And by the way, increasingly of more and more valuable things, to force the group to be together.
And this is, by the way, the methodology by which all empires I'm sorry, Pavel Shalin will correct me on this, but a particular subset of empires hang together.
The methodology of fear, manipulation, by the way, greed, incentive, all these different things.
Leave me not into temptation.
I've actually just been calling it temptation as a methodology.
And when we rebuke the globalists properly, by the way, in addition to being both ugly and stupid, they are also.
Remarkably committed to using temptation to form a simulacrum of the heavenly Jerusalem.
Fractal Suffering Builds Faith00:02:48
So let us simply say that is the exact opposite of the right direction.
But what we notice is that, in fact, actually, in reality, there is this other way.
This other way is on the basis of just the truth.
It's on the basis of the fact that love is the most fundamental principle.
And it's on the basis that if we learn how to behave, become ones who can participate in this way, and we behave in this way properly, we begin to.
Inside, begin to discover that at these fractal levels it works.
And it's really weird how this works.
I've noticed in my own experience you get these local winds where you notice the fruits in a very beautiful way.
And then you go through local troughs of like, man, this is rough.
I imagine you guys have had this experience.
But in those troughs, you get the suffering.
You notice the suffering is not just suffering, it's meaningful suffering, which builds a deeper faith.
A deeper capacity to actually, in an embodied way, know and trust that what you're participating in is both real and good.
Now, of course, when you have a strong enough faith, you can do more.
You can extend yourself more deeply into helping other people and bringing them in because you know and trust that what you're doing is true and good.
And then the cycle continues.
You get these profound fruits, like something very bad will happen to you, and other people will come, in a great extent, to themselves to help you.
We did not mention to the audience, but this episode of The Dark Horse is being filmed in.
Asheville, North Carolina, where the Helene came and destroyed us pretty substantially a year and a half ago.
And we got to be in the benefit of watching all these people come in, completely disorganized, by the way.
They were not organized by an obvious secular institution, those didn't do a very good job, because they thought it was the right thing to do and just came in and helped us.
And that, of course, is profoundly encouraging.
Wow, I'm participating in something that has an ability and a willingness.
To help me.
And that help is well received, and the encouragement of that, which is to say these fractal loops begin to spiral out.
And now, as a consequence, I am prepared fully to participate in that to the degree to which the invitation shows up to me to help other people because my confidence, acting in this way, and when I say confidence, again, I don't mean like a confidence game, I mean like an embodied wisdom that just is at the level of almost habit, muscle memory, to use the metaphor that we were hammering on earlier.
And see how these cycles build?
So there's a practicum of how one participates properly in this.
It builds the strength to be able to extend it further and further out.
Wheat, Chaff, and Thriving Churches00:12:38
Right.
And I don't know if you said it, but it is inherently fractal.
Inherently fractal.
You walk into one community that is functioning in this way, you immediately detect that it has a capacity that some other community doesn't.
And so when anyone sees it, the point is well, how could I get that to work over here?
So it's contagious when it works for good reason, because to pick up that capacity is enhancing all of the objectives you might have.
So, yes, that.
And this is actually, you asked me, like, how is it that I came to choose to become a Christian?
A very big part of the initial move was I had spent the last 10 years investigating this problem of the meta crisis, and that in point of fact, living the way that we're living, we're all going to die in a variety of different, quite terrible ways, some of which involved not actually dying, but having the fullness of life completely sucked out of us.
And very deeply committed, engaging with all the smartest people in the world, some of whom are in this room, and coming to the conclusion of, man, we're in deep trouble.
And then showing up in this small town in Western North Carolina and noticing, All the signs of like the things that look good, all the healthy things, the signs of an actual healthy community that has the characteristics that you need to have to navigate the biggest possible humps.
Oh my gosh, they're here.
Okay, how do they do that?
What's the secret?
Well, the secret is we're actually all Christians and we live it.
We're not doctrinal Pharisees.
We're actually deeply endeavoring to participate in the responsibilities that have been given to us to be disciples and to be anointed.
So, at the risk of making what I think has been a very good conversation, Uncomfortable in a certain way.
I will say that one of the things that was very disappointing during COVID and frankly during the woke revolution was watching religious communities that in principle had the goods to resist the temptation of those, I don't even know what to call them, broken ideologies fail to do so.
Many, many, many churches failed on those lessons.
Yeah, but those churches are also.
That many of those churches are also doomed to die, and they're dying before our very eyes.
And I think that the churches that are moving in the direction that Jordan is mentioning, they have, especially since COVID, they've actually started to thrive.
And your church, my church, so many churches are actually growing with young people, especially.
Well, I really don't like making the point, but that is exactly.
The story that I would tell about religion and its evolution is that there is a perfect analogy between the way these lineages function, right?
You have sectarian difference, right?
You have Christendom divided into all of these traditions.
Now, some of those traditions may be adaptations to particular conditions in particular places, and some of them may be competing methods.
And the point is, the ones that work flourish, they spread.
Other people take on the wisdom that they have because it works.
And then other versions, you know, wither on the vine because they don't have the insight to get through time.
You know, to take one fascinating example, the Shakers are no more.
The Shakers were a very noble, committed group of people.
Famously, their furniture is still sought after because it has, there's a wisdom there, but their tradition did not allow reproduction.
It was entirely based on recruiting, and it couldn't recruit at a level that met equilibrium, and the shakers are gone.
So, the point is, you have sectarian difference playing exactly the same role that genetic variation does, where the things that work well make it into the future.
The things that work poorly don't show up there.
And that is why we have the traditions that we have now.
These are the pieces of wisdom that won because they were wise.
And so, you just described it exactly.
You have churches that aren't passing the test, they will presumably not leave to settle.
That doesn't make me at all comfortable.
Does that make you uncomfortable?
No, not at all because it – I mean, because that truth is what – if something isn't true, then at some point it will – you know, if you – you can think that if I drink a bottle of vodka every day that it's going to be fine, but there are certain behaviors that will cause your own downfall and they will bring you – you know, they'll make you extinct.
Yeah, I would say that – again, to make this distinction between ideology and religion, sort of the most basic commitment to be in the category that I'm referring to as religion is that there's reality.
Reality is really real, and that ultimately the checksum of everything that you, every framework you build about reality is real, is reality itself.
And so, and I should add as a second, is that all ideologies simultaneously tend to try to become simulacra of reality.
This is the corruption vector, and to capture, and then ultimately they begin to separate and degrade.
So there will always be a process of a check.
We will fall away from reality at our cost, but.
Reality will come, slap us in the face, and if we're able to meet it directly, we will then grow more intimate with reality.
And those who don't will just go deeper and deeper into the.
Yeah, and that's really the way to understand sin, by the way.
Sin isn't an arbitrary imposition of moral principles on people, it's actually a reflection of reality.
If you do these things, you will thrive.
If you do these things, you will not.
If you lie, if you cheat, you might win in the short term, and you probably will.
But that over the long term, it will destroy you and the people around you.
Which is the exact description of how the game theory would play out.
But I would also point out humans are unique in that you are not condemned to live out the product of your, you know, in the gene space, you have a particular set of genes and you don't get another.
So you're condemned to their consequence.
In the space of belief and culture, you can recognize hey, when I do this thing, it ends up coming back to haunt me.
I should probably stop doing that thing.
And a person can do it, but a congregation could also do it.
Hey, that thing that we thought was the right way to go has now created a problem.
Maybe it wasn't the right way to go.
We can reverse course.
And so I would hope that there'd be a kind of recognition that a lot of things that seemed wise turned out not to be.
I mean, the wheat and the chaff got to be separated.
They do.
Well, but the problem with that analogy is that chaff does not become wheat, but you can go from making errors to not making them.
Right.
And in fact, your point about.
And it's the errors that get.
The errors are the chaff.
The errors are the chaff, right?
Not the peak.
It works both ways.
But I would point out that to go back to your point about Heather and me during COVID, we started out incorrect in our understanding of what was going on.
And, you know, I guess to your point that the errors are the chaff, it's the recognition that some of the things that you're thinking are true aren't.
And the correcting of that, it causes you to have a model.
So the deepest.
Well, it's actually quite nice because you said both.
The deepest protocol is.
Don't be the chaff.
Yeah.
It's a very important protocol.
If you become the chaff, then you will be selected out.
By the way, that's just how reality works.
In spite of the fact that you might have a really good weekend, you will ultimately be selected out.
But you don't have to be the chaff.
You can be the kind of person who participates in the sorting of the wheat and the chaff by allowing.
Funny, he actually talked about that notion of the extinguishing of the sin within you, of allowing the chaff in you to be sorted out, and you can become more and more in the direction of the wheat.
Recognizing that you will never be the wheat, but by participating in the process voluntarily, voluntary self sacrifice, you're now not committed to being the chaff in identity.
And that's why this fractal nature is so important to understand, at least.
From our point of view, is that the first thing you actually have to do is to become virtuous.
Like you have to become holy.
That is how the whole thing changes.
You know, and so we can think about the big picture, and we do have to think about the big picture, but that big picture, if we try to participate in it, but we come with a torturous heart, we come with it with our own sinfulness that hasn't been kept in check, then even participating in these big schemes will be the biggest temptation you have to indulge those kind of.
Uh, let's say sinful aspects of yourself, you know, and so we there's no other way but to start with yourself, right?
Yeah, well, then of course, fractally speaking, I'm sorry, the reason I was laughing, and I'm actually both of you had this experience, but the experience of oh, the one ring again, yeah, right?
The experience, oh, I've seen you before, and I remember what happens when I grab you, so now I could just actually kind of laugh at you because I've learned enough of what it feels like to see that temptation coming down the road to be able to know, yeah, that's tempting.
But I've learned enough not to grab that ring this time.
Well, as I've probably mentioned to you before, my favorite aphorism is good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment.
And, you know, I mean, really, at some level, in a complex system, you can't blueprint a solution.
It's not going to work because you can't anticipate the consequences.
But what you can do is you can navigate so that you correct your orientation based on how your current trajectory is working out.
And you can prototype.
You can make something and you can pay very close attention to how well it did relative to your objective, and then you can make a better prototype.
And so we are stuck in that process.
And all of us, whether we're religious in orientation, scientific, or both, have to understand that we don't have the finished version.
And I know that that comes as a bitter pill, maybe, or it can't be accepted if you come from a tradition that proceeds from the idea of divine perfection.
But with respect to the game theory of the world, We don't have, we have the prototype.
We know what we're supposed to do globally, but we've never done it.
And we need the structure that allows it to actually fire on all cylinders.
And we have, I mean, that's why I think, especially in Christianity, we have an eschatological vision, which is that we also do understand, and we should as Christians understand, that there's more to come.
Like there's a bigger version of what it is we're participating in that is ahead of us.
And it's kind of like the guiding light that's bringing.
We don't actually totally know what it's going to be, we don't know what it looks like.
But we also understand that although we believe we have the revelation of God in our life through the incarnation of Christ, that there is a second coming.
That is, there is a man in which Christ will reveal himself again to us in a way that will kind of over, and not necessarily overthrow, but will complete, you could say, whatever it is that we have now.
So there is a, in Christianity, there is this sense that, yes, we have, but we also have to be humble to know that there is more to come, that there's more coming.
That's an excellent point.
The story is.
Not complete even within Christianity.
And the category of humility is sort of very close to the base of the stack.
Like, hey, you're finite, full stop, in relationship to the infinite.
That means you're, in fact, perfectly inadequate.
You're definitely not going to have the fullness of the infinite in any amount of the finite.
Sorry to use theoretical language, but for me, it was very clean.
So you're just going to have to learn how to live with an embodied humility and recognize that you just have lucked out that the infinite is going to help out.
All right.
Well, this has been an excellent conversation.
I want to thank you both for participating.
Jonathan, where can people find you?
Yeah, so people can go to symbolicworld.com if they're interested in the kind of things that I talk about.
Coffee Shop Humility and Luck00:01:33
All right.
And Jordan?
If you happen to find yourself in Swananoa, North Carolina at a recess in a short sleeves coffee shop, I'll buy you a coffee.
Otherwise, don't find me.
Very nice.
And I want to thank.
Redeemer Anglican Church for loaning us the space to do this podcast.
It was very generous of them.
Father Gary Ball decided that this was a worthy endeavor, and I'm glad he did.
And I think one last thing, maybe I want to say, is that it's important for people to understand that, like, we're having this conversation, but we've been talking for three days, just nonstop going over.
And I also have to commend you, Brett, you know, because of coming to this with humility.
Our first conversations, our different interactions have been a little testy sometimes because that sense of we're talking past each other.
The first time we encountered each other, we kind of started this debate thing.
And they got taken away from us, if you remember, in Vancouver 10 years ago.
Right.
That's how I do remember.
Yeah, there you go.
And so I think that, you know, when Jordan said, hey, let's just all come together, spend three days, I thought this is a testimony to your kind of desire to continuously move forward in your own humility.
So thank you.
Well, I appreciate that.
And I will say one of the really glorious things about the conversations we've been having with the whole group who's been assembled is that it is just utterly clear that everybody is there with the best of intentions and with.
Incredibly high integrity and a willingness to listen that is uncommon.
So, thank you both, and to the whole group who was assembled.