Ep. 383 dissects Trump’s UN speech—mocking globalism, branding Obama’s diplomacy as weak—and his political dominance, from healthcare pressure to DREAMer divisions, while allies like Netanyahu rally behind him. Professor Edward Fazer traces modern atheism’s rejection of teleology back to Descartes and Newton, arguing it eroded objective morality, then details his own conversion after re-examining Aquinas’ arguments, now expanded in Five Proofs of the Existence of God. The debate extends to transgenderism, where Fazer counters critiques of natural law by distinguishing repurposing from violation, while an artist’s "vanilla morality" challenge sparks a clash over human faculties versus design. The episode pivots to sex robots, warning of cybersecurity risks and dehumanization after a CNET clip exposes their glaring limitations. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, suddenly Donald Trump is grinding it into the dust.
He's got Congress scrambling to do his bidding.
And did you hear that speech in the UN this morning?
It was amazing.
He smacked Iran around, he smacked North Korea around, Islam, socialism, everything.
Made you forget, what's his name, that other guy who came last time.
It made him, you totally forget the last president in a big hurry.
We'll play the greatest hits from the U.N. speech.
We'll also talk about, we'll talk with Professor Edward Fazer.
He's here to discuss God and philosophy.
Terrific interview we taped earlier.
And plus, we'll talk about killer sex spots, something you really have to worry about.
But first, everyone is talking about President Trump's address to the United Nations today, but the Daily Wire has acquired the first draft of that speech.
Let me read it to you as written.
Quote, Hello world.
We all know why you're gathered here in Manhattan.
It's so you'll be able to double park in front of some of the best brothels in America without being towed away because you've got those terrific diplomatic plates.
It's a pretty good deal, but it means you have to sit here and listen to me for the next 30 minutes.
Otherwise, I'll shut this useless place down and you'll all end up trolling for make-believe virgins in Bangkok, where you obviously belong.
Believe me, I don't want to be here any more than you do.
Once I told Nikki Haley how hot she looks, I was basically done talking to the only worthwhile human being to step into this joint since Dog Hammerschold pancaked the DC6.
But since I am here, I'd like to say a few words while you corrupt morons daydream about whatever happy ending you have planned for later this evening.
First of all, I want to address what's his name, the fat Asian guy with the funny hair.
Stop shooting missiles all over the place or I'm going to blow you into the middle of next week, okay?
You've got a good situation for yourself walking around in a Halloween army suit while everyone pretends to like you, which is a laugh since they're all starving.
But anyway, it's a good deal and you don't want to blow it.
And by blow it, I mean we fire a warhead the size of Brooklyn into your yellow backside.
I know your hair is indestructible, but the rest of you can be turned into radioactive dust, so just knock it off.
Also, all of you people from Muslim countries, you know who you are.
Stop killing people over your religion.
I know you think it's great, but really get outside your palaces and look around once in a while.
You're living in like the 13th century, so maybe the Quran isn't all it's cracked up to be, just saying.
Also, try letting your women wear skirts once in a while.
Trust me, you'll all be a lot happier.
And finally, everybody gets upset when I talk about America first.
You think America should pay for your defense so you can spend your money on social programs and feel morally superior to us.
You think America should have open borders so people can escape from your crappy countries and come here and act like entitled ingrates.
You think America should be a shining city on a hill so you can crap all over us and then accuse us of violating our ideals when we slap you back.
Let me say this in answer.
Wrong president, losers, the pansy is gone.
So get your minds right.
That's it.
Call my limousine.
Unquote.
Needless to say, by abandoning this first draft, Trump has missed an opportunity to deliver the greatest speech in history.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
You know, I wrote that opening before Trump gave the speech, but his speech was almost exactly that opening.
I mean, I couldn't satirize it enough.
He actually did it.
It was absolutely terrific.
We'll talk all about it.
It was so good, you might want to send the president some flowers.
You know, you want to be, you want to do stuff that's spontaneous and unexpected.
I personally, I like to come up in the back of my wife sometimes and just go, see how that works.
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Resistance Failing?00:05:39
Trump transformed the skyline of New York.
Then he went off and did all that licensing thing where he slapped his name on a bunch of casinos and things like that.
And that was not, you know, that was not as exciting.
And then he had a successful TV show for 120 years or however long that show was on.
Not an easy thing to do.
Also, you know, very popular, big success.
And then I keep hearing this thing, like he didn't win the election.
Hillary lost the election.
Absolute nonsense.
Listen, he knocked off people who Charles Krauthammer called the best array of Republican candidates ever.
He knocked them down like nine pins.
Also, yes, it's true.
Was Hillary Clinton one of the worst candidates ever?
Yes, she was.
But, you know, he knew she was going to be the presidential candidate.
He knew who he was coming up against.
And he chose his time.
He took his shot and he won the presidency.
You don't do that stuff if you don't know, you know, if you don't at least have an instinct, a kind of native intelligence for success, which he obviously does.
This thing he did with dealing with Chuck and Nancy, you know, I predicted he was going to do it, but I did not predict how completely it was going to set wheels in motion everywhere.
Like, I don't think Trump could have predicted it exactly, but suddenly they're re-looking at the Obamacare repeal and replace.
That's moving forward.
The Lindsey Graham deal is moving forward into committee.
You know, the Democrats, he's got the Democrats in this terrible position because they're dealing with him over the DREAMers.
But now the DREAMers are angry because they feel like they deserve, you know, they're just completely entitled people.
Nancy Pelosi goes to a meeting in San Francisco and the Dreamers show up.
She's trying to explain to them that she's getting them this deal where they'll get to stay in the country by law.
And they stand up and they shout her down.
They chase her off the stage.
And you can hear him, in case you can't make it out, what they're shouting is, we owe you nothing.
This is our democracy.
These people who came here illegally, right?
It's like, welcome to America, Nancy Pelosi.
They're shouting down a U.S. Congresswoman.
Take a listen to this.
Let me say this.
Because you've had your say, and it's beautiful to our ears to hear your protection, yourself dignity.
But I'm not.
Why not?
Hey!
What if you don't?
Hey!
Stop it!
Just stop it now.
Let's stop it now.
Stop it.
Look.
I want to tell you something.
You can.
Yes or no.
To what?
Yes or no.
To what?
Yes or no.
Of course.
We have.
So do I assume.
Do I assume.
Burton.
My chat.
This is our.
This is our.
It would be so much fun to deport those people.
I mean, it would just be, I would laugh.
You know, I usually think, oh, if they carry these poor people out, that's too harsh.
I would have just come in like in that moment and just said, all right, we're deporting everybody.
But think about it from a political point of view.
Trump has now put Nancy Pelosi in the position where, from the minority, she's got to deal with him if she wants to get anything.
And if she gets anything, and if she deals with him, the base goes nuts.
So he's got them kind of in this, you know, whipsaw.
He's got them stuck in this terrible place.
And the Republicans are now thinking, gee, we can't go home without having done anything.
So they're talking about tax reform.
They're talking about real stuff.
They're talking about repealing Obamacare.
Now, he goes to the UN.
And of course, all through the campaign, he's saying the UN stinks.
And the UN does stink.
The UN is a corrupt organization that has been taken over by its worst actors.
But suddenly, like all of a sudden, people are showing up.
And the reason I say, one of the reasons I say the resistance is failing is because you couldn't help but see Trump goes in and Netanyahu is like, Netanyahu looks like a little Rosh Hashanah elf.
It's like the Jewish New Year's coming up.
I think it's tomorrow.
And Netanyahu looks like, I mean, the happiest man alive.
He's like, suddenly he's got the support.
After eight years of Obama stabbing him in the back, he's finally got the support.
Emmanuel Macron, everybody made a big deal about the fact that Trump said some stupid thing about he saw their Bastille Day parade, which was one of these military parades.
And he thought, we ought to have a big military parade.
Not a good idea.
We don't want a big military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.
But what they failed to put out there was Macron thanking him, saying, we were so proud to have you come and all this stuff.
Suddenly, this guy's a world leader dealing with world leaders.
And all the attempts of the press to delegitimize him and denormalize him and not let him become a normal U.S. president are failing.
They are failing.
The press looks terrible.
CNN puts out this thing now, an exclusive story they've got that Paul Manafort was tapped, his phones were tapped during the election.
So all that stuff about Trump was lying when he said his phones were tapped.
I mean, this to me was always a silly story because the New York Times and other news organizations were leaking tapped information.
So Trump was, of course, right.
They were listening in and the Obama administration had become virtually lawless at that point.
Yesterday, before we get to the speech, which is an amazing, amazing speech, but before we get to the speech, I just have to show you Nikki Haley yesterday when he sat down at the General Assembly and everybody shows up because they want to see Donald Trump because he's a celeb.
Helix Sleep Quiz00:02:29
Look at Nikki Haley.
Look how happy she looks.
Thank you and welcome to an event that shows it truly is a new day at the United Nations.
I thank you very much for being here.
You should know that we had to get a bigger room to accommodate everyone here today and that's a good problem.
And that is one of the greatest signs of hope for the United Nations that we've seen since I've been here.
She's beaming.
I mean, she's beaming and everybody is paying attention.
All right, we're going to get to the speech.
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All right, you got to listen to some of this speech.
Trump gets up and he just lays into them.
United States' Patience Tested00:14:54
Like he was really charming yesterday, but today he gets up and he starts out talking about, he tells them that we are paying for the UN and the UN has become a bureaucratic, corrupt institution.
This is cut number 10.
Too often, the focus of this organization has not been on results, but on bureaucracy and process.
In some cases, states that seek to subvert this institution's noble aims have hijacked the very systems that are supposed to advance them.
For example, it is a massive source of embarrassment to the United Nations that some governments with egregious human rights records sit on the UN Human Rights Council.
The United States is one out of 193 countries in the United Nations, and yet we pay 22% of the entire budget and more.
In fact, we pay far more than anybody realizes.
The United States bears an unfair cost burden.
But to be fair, if it could actually accomplish all of its stated goals, especially the goal of peace, this investment would easily be well worth it.
I just want to compare that to Barack Obama's final speech at the UN, just so you remember what we were dealing with before.
Okay, here was Trump telling the truth to the UN, telling right to their faces.
Here was Obama on his final address.
And we can only realize the promise of this institution's founding to replace the ravages of war with cooperation if powerful nations like my own accept constraints.
Sometimes I'm criticized in my own country for professing a belief in international norms and multilateral institutions.
But I am convinced that in the long run, giving up some freedom of action, not giving up our ability to protect ourselves or pursue our core interests, but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term enhances our security.
That was what Donald Trump called the siren song of globalism, I believe.
Okay, now compare Donald Trump.
He goes down the list of bad actors.
He's talking about Venezuela.
Listen to him hit socialism and listen to him wait for applause until finally, like three guys in the back applaud.
Number one.
The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.
From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.
Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.
America stands with every person living under a brutal regime.
So you've got the entire UN going, wait, we don't like socialism?
I didn't know in the late.
Who knew?
Who knew?
Because right down the line, my favorite has to be his hit on North Korea.
Listen to this.
The United States has great strength and patience.
But if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.
Rocketman is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.
The United States is ready, willing, and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary.
That's what the United Nations is all about.
That's what the United Nations is for.
Let's see how they do.
I mean, I was joking in the opening.
That's better.
That's actually better than my joke.
I mean, Rocket Man is on a suicide mission right down the line.
I got to play the rest of this.
Islam, Saudi Arabia is sitting there with this look on their face.
He goes after Islam.
It's Cut 13.
We agreed that all responsible nations must work together to confront terrorists and the Islamic extremism that inspires them.
We will stop radical Islamic terrorism because we cannot allow it to tear up our nation and indeed to tear up the entire world.
We must deny the terrorists safe haven, transit, funding, and any form of support for their vile and sinister ideology.
I mean, is it me or is it just like refreshing to just hear somebody say what is right in front of everybody's eyes?
You know, I mean, it's like, you know, and finally, I got to play this because I want to get to the Edward Fazer interview, a terrific interview with a philosophy guy talking about God and philosophy, a philosophy professor talking about God and philosophy.
But I have to end with this Iran thing because the head of Iran, the Iranian guys are sitting there just staring.
And Obama must be curled up somewhere.
He just humiliated him as he goes after the Iran deal that was one of Obama's key efforts.
We cannot let a murderous regime continue these destabilizing activities while building dangerous missiles.
And we cannot abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear program.
The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.
Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don't think you've heard the last of it.
Believe me.
I love this guy.
I mean, I'm sorry when he's like this.
It's impossible not to love him.
You know, he's slapping around these people who need being slapped.
Look, I think he's got Congress in motion.
He's got the Democrats running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
He has just told the UN everything it needed to know.
I think we have to have a Trump happiness montage.
I'm sorry, but it's just that time.
Play it.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You'll say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
We're going to win more.
I love it.
I love it.
All right, listen.
We're going to play this interview I taped earlier with Professor Edward Fazer.
Really fascinating.
So don't go away.
We're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube so you can enjoy the interview, but you want to subscribe and then you can watch the entire thing.
It allows you 10 bucks a month.
You can watch the entire show on the Daily Wire site.
And you can later on, you can tune into the conversation, which is going to be at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
This month, it is Ben Shapiro.
He will be live.
Anybody can watch it, but if you subscribe, you can ask questions while he's there.
You subscribe for a year.
It's only a lousy hundred bucks.
And you get the leftist tears tumbler, which fills up every time Ben speaks.
This is amazing.
It's just an amazing thing.
It fills up with leftist tears every time Shapiro talks.
All right, let's hear this interview with Professor Edward Faser.
Recently, I made a tremendous discovery in the works of Dr. Edward Fazer.
I was just looking to refresh my memory about Thomas Aquinas, and I got a beginner's guide.
That's what it was called, the beginner's guide to Thomas Aquinas.
I was a couple of pages in when I suddenly thought, wow, this guy is really good.
He is not just a guy giving me a beginner's guide.
This is really intense, intelligent philosophy.
And I picked up his book, The Last Superstition, which is a refutation of the new atheism.
The guys like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and all this.
Wonderful, wonderful book that speaks so much into the trouble in our times and what has gone wrong with the thinking in our times.
Dr. Edward Faser has a new book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
I have forced his work on Shapiro, who actually likes it as well.
And I'm really thrilled to have you in the studio.
It's great to meet you.
It's great to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Really was one of those things where I was halfway through the last superstition, and I thought, oh, you know, this is what I've been trying to see, what I've been trying to say, but I didn't have the kind of background in philosophy that you have.
I didn't have that vast knowledge, and I didn't put it together.
You did that thing that writers do, where you expressed the thing that was in my head, but I couldn't say it.
It's really wonderful.
So let's see if I can get you to communicate some of this to my audience, their lowlives and, you know, troglodyz, slavering droppers.
Well, I've been called that, so I think I can relate.
You should be right at all on my program.
One of the things I talk about a lot is the fact that we now not only live in a society that doesn't value truth, we live in a society that basically tells you you're virtuous if you lie.
If you say that a man in a dress is a woman, then you are a good person.
If you say, you know what, he's just a guy in a dress, then you're a bad guy.
In your book, In The Last Superstition, you trace the failure of philosophy.
You trace a philosophy gone wrong.
And it basically has to do with what you call and what is called teleology.
Can you explain what that is?
Yeah, let me give it a shot.
So, one of the big themes of the book, as you know, is the idea that in modern times, and by modern times, I mean the last 300, 350 years or so, a picture of nature, of the natural world of our universe, has come to dominate Western thought, which the architects of that view called the mechanical world picture, the mechanical philosophy.
It's the idea that the world is a vast machine, a vast mechanism, right?
So that just like you can explain the operation of a watch, the movement of the hands and so forth, and the gears in terms of the turning of smaller gears and ultimately a mainspring and so forth, and you ultimately don't have to make reference to purpose or meaning or value or anything like that.
The idea is that the physical world is a mechanism of that sort ultimately.
So that any mark of purpose, any mark of intelligence, anything that smacks of design or order or what have you is ultimately a kind of illusion.
And what lays beneath the illusion is simply a clockwork world of meaningless particles in motion and so forth.
So the idea of objective value, the idea of objective purpose, that things in the natural order, that biological functions, you know, that human organs and so forth, have any sort of objective purpose that they aim to, that could entail a difference, an objective difference between good and bad, better and worse, right and wrong, that disappeared with this idea that the world is really just a meaningless machine, meaningless particles in motion.
And so with the dominance of that model, the idea that value and purpose are simply a projection of the mind, they're not really out there.
We don't discover them, we invent them, we make them up, has been a byproduct of that.
So how did that happen?
I mean, it seems obvious to me that water is for drinking, that hands are for holding, the heart pumps blood.
How could they have come to that conclusion?
What happened?
Well, what happened in a nutshell is essentially that the originators, or at least many of the originators of this picture, people like Descartes and Newton and so forth, they themselves wouldn't deny that things have purposes, that there is real meaning and purpose, or as you put it, teleology and nature, goal-directedness.
But what they wanted to say is that for scientific purposes, as they decided they were going to redefine science, we're going to ignore that.
We're going to focus only on those aspects of the natural world which we can study and which we can define apart from reference to purposes and goals and ends and so forth and meaning.
And so in particular, they were going to focus on what you could put in the language of mathematics.
So mathematics became the language in which the book of nature was said to be written, as Galileo famously put it.
So that if you couldn't put something in the language of mathematics, then at least for scientific purposes, we're not interested in it.
Let the philosophers deal with that.
But the earliest writers who took this view, again, people like Newton and Descartes, they didn't deny that there was something there that could only be captured in non-mathematical language.
They just decided for scientific purposes, we're going to ignore that because they wanted to reorient science to be a tool by which we could develop new technologies and master nature and so on and so forth.
And for that narrow purpose, appeals to purposes and meanings weren't necessary.
All you needed to do was to predict and control nature and focus on those aspects which could be mathematically quantified as the key to predicting and controlling nature.
So that makes perfect sense.
A guy who's standing at the plate trying to hit a baseball isn't thinking about how to make his wife happy.
It was just a way to do something.
Exactly.
But ultimately, it basically killed the whole idea of reason, meaning, and of God, too.
Yes, because what happened is the method turned out to be tremendously successful, needless to say.
When you're focused intently only on those purposes, only on those aspects of nature that you can precisely predict and control, that you can put in the language of mathematics, naturally you're going to find those.
Natural Law's Limitations00:15:25
You're much more likely to find them if you make sure that's all you're going to look for.
So modern science has been tremendously successful in finding those aspects of nature that could be precisely predicted and controlled.
We've developed tremendous technologies like the ones we're making use of right now on the basis of that.
And so science has given us tremendous practical advantages.
So far, so good, no problem.
But the problem comes in when people start drawing the inference, as over the centuries people increasingly have, that since science is so successful from a practical point of view and a technological point of view, then anything that's not science, that doesn't have that sort of practical technological application, must be intellectually second rate.
It must not be really capturing anything there is to reality.
But that's just a fallacy.
As I like to put it, it's like someone who uses a metal detector to find metal.
And let's say he develops a metal detector that's so powerful he can find any bit of metal in any beach anywhere.
It's like concluding from the fact that metal detectors are so, that his metal detector is so successful in finding metals that there's nothing else to be found, right?
That wood doesn't exist, stone doesn't exist.
And that somehow if you criticized him and said, well, that's a silly argument, he'd say, well, so you're denying that my metal detector finds metals, right?
And you want to find your keys too.
You make use of my metal detector when it suits your purposes, but suddenly, you know, in other cases, you want to start talking about wood and stone and these fairy tales, right?
Well, it's the same kind of argument that happens when people say that if it's not analyzable in scientific terms, in the language of mathematical physics, it must not be real.
That's like saying, again, that if it can't be discovered by a metal detector, it must not be real.
Because after all, metal detectors work so well.
They're tools.
Science is a tool.
So basically, this is almost an accidental wrong turn in the history of thought.
I mean, it is a useful device that became the entire highway of thought that people exactly.
So people understand why this is important.
The idea of teleology, the idea that things have a purpose, that we have a purpose, that we have a goal, it's very strongly Connected to natural law.
When our founders were writing about nature, nature's God, this is what they were talking about, teleology.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and this is an idea that goes back.
I mean, what it is, it's a kind of intellectualization or a philosophical articulation of something everybody knows in common sense life.
And that is that the difference between good and bad and right and wrong and so forth ultimately is a reflection of whether we're acting in a way that's in conformity to the purposes for which we exist by nature, the purpose of our natural faculties and so forth.
So everybody knows, for example, that eyeballs are made for seeing, and that if you behave in a way that frustrates that goal or purpose of the eyes, that that's bad for you because part of what's good for you is defined by what's good for your eyes, what's good for your teeth, what's good for your body.
When it comes to the body, when it comes to just straightforward medical questions, everybody acknowledges this, that we have to pay attention to, we have to show respect for the natural functions, the natural purposes that are inherent in human nature, the bodily side of human nature.
But when it comes to other moral issues, people start to forget this and they start to talk as if purposes and ends and goals somehow built into nature, that that's just kind of an illusion that it's not really there.
So this, I mean, this kind of thinking led you to become a Catholic, didn't it?
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that's a long story, but the short version of it, because I was an atheist for about 10 years during the 90s.
90s were a weird decade for a lot of us.
So during the 90s, but what happened is when I was in grad school, and not really as a result of anything that I was doing in the classroom or when I was working on my dissertation, but rather extracurricular activity, essentially preparing for lectures, because in my introduction to philosophy classes, and of course I was teaching on philosophy religion, I had to teach Aquinas.
And it got boring, because at the time I was a skeptic, I was an atheist.
It got boring just talking about how dumb the arguments were.
I mean, I try to be polite and non-polemical in the classroom, but it got boring just lining Aquinas' arguments up and shooting them down and pointing out how silly they were.
And I thought, well, this doesn't really convey to students why anybody would take any of this stuff seriously.
And by all accounts, Aquinas was a smart guy.
So if I can see, or an eight-year-old could see flaws in the arguments, or at least what many people think are flaws in his arguments, that doesn't give students an understanding of why anybody would consider this guy a great thinker.
So I thought, what I'm going to do is I'm going to revisit Aquinas.
I'm going to try to sell him to the students, even though I didn't believe his views.
I wanted to kind of give him a run for his money in the classroom and try to make the students understand why anybody would take Aristotle or Aquinas or any of those thinkers seriously.
And so I got back into the study of Aristotle and Aquinas, got back into the literature, and I started to see that a lot of the stock objections to their view of the world, whether it's their arguments for God's existence or ethics or whatever, were directed at caricatures.
They were based on crude misunderstandings.
So I went from thinking, well, you know, actually, these arguments are a little better than I'd given them credit for.
You can kind of present an interesting lecture on them.
Over time, that became, well, actually, these arguments are pretty interesting.
You know, they're pretty challenging.
And then that eventually transformed into the conclusion that, well, you know, these arguments are actually, they're really powerful.
They're really strong arguments.
And eventually it just hit me, they were right all along.
Oh, wow.
And I was wrong.
Now, that's the Lord of the Sword, but that's kind of the short version of it, that I was converted in the course of trying to get other people to see why anybody would have taken this stuff seriously.
I ended up converting myself in advertising.
That's really fascinating.
And the church does represent, I mean, it represents a protector and a vessel of natural law theology.
And it goes back, it has included through Aquinas, it's included Aristotle.
Right.
It's brought him into the sort of thing.
When you pick up whatever nowadays passes for a newspaper and you're reading the news of the day or you're watching the news of the day, what are the things that leap out at you as part of this problem, part of this mistake where we turned away from teleology to this mechanistic viewpoint?
Are there things that you see where you go, ah, that's what I'm trying to talk about?
That is the thing?
Well, sure.
I mean, I think probably the most obvious example would be the controversy that's arisen in really an amazingly speedy fashion the last two or three years over transgenderism and this visceral hostility to the very idea that there's any such thing as an inherent natural difference between men and women, say, to the point where it's not even considered a legitimate subject of debate.
It's not that, well, look, we've got some very challenging ideas.
Hold on, folks, this is going to sound strange, but we think this is correct.
We understand you're going to be resistant, but here's how.
No, you must go along with this, or you're a bigot, you're stupid, you are uninformed, you're not scientific or what have you.
And debate is shut down.
It's silenced.
And that would probably be the most extreme example of the way in which the very idea that there's no such thing as nature, there's no such thing as human nature that we're answerable to or that defines what's good or bad for us, the way in which it's manifest.
What's interesting, though, is how inconsistent people are in this.
I mean, they never really take it to its logical conclusion because if you're really going to deny that there's any such thing as an objective difference between good and bad, or let's say there's an objective end or goal or purpose that our different natural powers and our different natural faculties are directed, you're going to find, I would argue, and I do argue this in the last superstition, that that really takes down everything.
That takes down all morality, including moral principles that everybody is still committed to.
And I think the reason people don't see that is they know that most people, for example, are against murder, right?
And so they think, well, we all know murder's wrong.
That's not a matter of controversy.
So there's a clear difference between that and some of the principles of traditional sexual morality say that they don't like.
But what they don't realize is all that means is that, yes, people agree that murder is wrong.
The question, though, is can they rationally justify that?
And if you undermine the whole idea of natural law, the whole idea that there's sort of a natural end or goal that we're built for, then I think you're going to find, to be consistent, you take down the rational justification for morality in general, whether that's through murder, stealing, or what have you.
And the illusion that you don't take those things down is there only because most people don't want to take it that far.
It's habitual, exactly.
No, I mean, that's one of the things that stopped me from being an atheist in my atheist period was reading the Marquis de Saat and thinking, you know what?
If there is no God, he's right.
And he's obviously not right.
And that was, and he basically was making that same argument.
Here is, let me put forward something that has always bothered me about the natural law arguments.
And I believe that there is coming in the person of people like yourself an intellectual religious revival.
I do not believe the arguments for atheism can stand.
And I believe that people like you who are deeply read in philosophy and deeply read in the literature are going to start to say, you know what, just what you said.
This makes more sense.
Whenever I hear people talk about natural law, it always seems to me that they use it instantly to justify what the kids call norm core, you know, vanilla morality.
And it does seem to me that the world is full of a number of things.
And, you know, I'm an artist.
I've lived all my life among gay people and eccentrics and crazy people and have loved them all.
You know, they've been a wonderful part of my life.
It always seems to me that the idea of things having a purpose can be limiting beyond what is intended to, in ways we're not intended to be limited.
So just to give you an example, my computer has a purpose.
But if I walk outside and somebody tries to mug me and I hit them with the computer, the computer's purpose is taken over by my purpose of self-defense.
So if a person finds in his life that he is the sort of person who falls in love with people of the same sex, now we may say to him, look, a life lived in bathhouses, screwing people you've never met before, is a bad life and we can show you why.
But can he not be allowed to subsume the purpose of his generative organs into expressing love for the person he loves?
I mean, it just seems to me, it seems to me that what would be true of me and my wife now that we can no longer have children, but we can still express love in that way, would then be true for this gay couple as well.
Yeah.
Okay, so let me address that.
There are a number of sub-questions in your larger question.
So I want to say a little bit about all of them.
The first is that you're certainly correct that when people hear natural law, they automatically think sex.
So they think if you're defending natural law, you must be obsessed with sexual questions.
And that's not the case.
I mean, even if you just look at a, say you look at a textbook on ethics written in the natural law tradition from the 1950s or the 1940s, right?
There'll be material in there on sexual morality, but it might be one chapter out of 20, literally, right?
So it's never been the main focus.
I think the reason people think of it as the main focus is because it's the part of natural law, traditional natural law theory, they don't like.
So they jump on that and think that, well, you guys are obsessed with this, when the natural law theorists would say, well, no, that's just, the subject's just one issue we're interested in, but we're not, that we have something to say about, but it's not our main focus.
And it's, you know, it's one of 20 different issues, say.
Okay.
So part of what I'm going to say then is that the characterization is unfair.
You're right, it is the standard characterization.
But I think that it's the case where people are projecting their own interests onto the natural law theorists.
So they're focusing that part of traditional theory they don't like, and they magnify that into the whole.
Second point is that you raise the issue of the way in which natural purposes might limit what we might do.
And this, and you gave the computer example, you might use the computer to confront an attacker, use it as a weapon, right?
Now, there are a number of issues that are concerned with that particular question.
There's a difference between something like the way you might use an artifact, the way you might use one of your own organs, say.
But putting that aside for the moment, the natural law position on these sorts of issues, it's not that it's intrinsically wrong to use an artificial device, say.
For example, glasses are artificial in the sense that they're man-made, but they don't frustrate the natural end of the eyeballs.
In fact, they either restore the natural function or they enhance it, right?
So no problem there.
What's a problem is only when we do something that's positively contrary or it positively frustrates the natural end of some human faculty.
And merely enhancing our faculties or using them for some purpose other than what they were naturally made for.
There's no violation of natural law in that.
So we have to distinguish between acting in a way that's contrary to or positively frustrates a natural end on the one hand and merely using a faculty, a natural faculty or capacity for something other than its natural end.
So that's a second point.
The third point is you raised this issue and it's commonly raised between this issue about the analogy between an infertile couple or a couple who's, you know, they're far along enough in years where the wife's not going to get pregnant anymore or what have you.
And how is that different from a gay couple, say?
The difference that traditional natural law theorist argues is it's best understood by analogy with an eyeball, say, or that stopped functioning.
So even a blind person, if his eyes have stopped functioning, the eyes still have as their natural function or purpose, seeing.
It's not that someone whose eyeballs can no longer work, that they've got a different natural end or purpose than someone whose eyeballs still work.
They still have the same natural purpose, the same natural end, or they're aiming toward the same outcome, but they're just no longer capable of reaching it, say.
So the sexual faculties, according to natural law theory, are like that.
They have a certain natural end or outcome that they're aiming for, even if in some individuals, it's not possible for them to reach that anymore.
Nevertheless, that's still what they're aiming for.
And what they're aiming for in, say, the normal case, in the standard case, is what defines the good or bad use of a natural end or a natural function.
And that includes, you know, the functions at just the raw biological level and also at the psychological level, our tendency, say, to want to bond with another human being in a romantic way and so forth.
The argument is that that itself exists for the sake of uniting a couple in a way that, in the ordinary course of things, results in children.
And so they need to be united for that lifetime bond for the sake of the stability of the family, good of the children, and so on and so forth.
So that even though some individuals may not, they may have psychological tendencies that go in some other direction, that would be analogous to, say, the way an individual person's eyeballs might not be functioning properly, say.
Okay.
Well, I wish I could talk to you about this for another 20 minutes, but I can't.
I want to hear about your new book, The Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
I know it's Aquinas who wrote the five proofs, but this goes beyond that.
Yes, now, so the book's called Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
It's not actually on Aquinas' five ways, though there's some overlap.
Restaurant-Level Meals Simplified00:03:45
I mean, a couple of the arguments I treat are arguments that Aquinas gives.
As a matter of fact, the original plan for the book was to call it four proofs, because I didn't want people to, I didn't want to make it five and think people, I don't want people to think now Phaser's giving his five ways, right?
It just sounded a little too pretentious.
But the problem was as I was writing it, I thought, no, there's this fifth argument that I think is really important and I want to bring into the book.
So, okay, I'm just going to go with five proofs.
So there's overlap with Aquinas, but it's not actually on Aquinas.
And the arguments are arguments that are there in the tradition.
They're not original with me.
None of them is original with me.
But the presentation is mine.
And the depth and detail in which I present and try to defend the arguments, I don't think you'll find elsewhere.
And so there are arguments that go back in some version or other to Aristotle, to Plotinus, who was a Neoplatonic philosopher, follower of Plato, to St. Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, and to Leibniz, early modern German philosopher Leibniz.
Wow, this sounds great.
Dr. Edward Faser, if you are interested in these questions at all, and I hope you are, you want to read The Last Superstition, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, terrific books, really deep, will change the way you read the newspaper.
If you read the newspaper, it will change the way you look at the news and look at the questions that are out there in front of us.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Thank you.
We'll come back.
We'll talk again.
Thank you.
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Sex Robots and Cybersecurity Risks00:03:09
It's not a bad thing.
All right, we finish up with sexual follies.
I love that.
I swear.
Bye.
By some estimates, the sex tech industry is already worth $30 billion and growing.
And the lead thing they are inventing, they are inventing these sex robots.
And they're getting better and better at making, looking more and more real.
There are actually, I have read this, there are actually brothels that now, instead of prostitutes, offer you a robot, which, yeah, I guess my feeling about that is you're going to degrade yourself.
What difference does it make?
You know, this way you don't have to degrade another living human being.
So here is Rai Christ.
He is a senior associate editor at what's it called? CNET, CNET, a tech site.
And he interviewed, he had a conversation with a sex robot.
And this is, just want to make sure we get the right one.
It's number nine.
My name is Rai.
Okay, I will call you Rai.
How are you doing today?
Very well, Ray.
I'm curious.
Do you like using sex toys?
Sure, why not?
Because I'm not in the mood.
So that's not that big an improvement, actually.
But now, you may think the worst thing that can happen is you degrade yourself having sex with a machine and you just become this lonely old person, you know, terrible person who's completely isolated in life.
Can't even have the most intimate relationship in your life with an actual living human being.
That's not the problem.
With sex robots, this is from the New York Post: with sex robots becoming increasingly popular and sophisticated, cybersecurity lecturer Dr. Nick Patterson revealed that the lifelike dolls could end up going Terminator on us.
In the case of sex robots, the danger isn't that the love dolls will end up developing minds of their own Westworld style.
Instead, the risk is that hackers could breach the realistic robots' inner defenses and catch their owners with their pants down.
Patterson told Star Online that hacking into many modern-day robots, including sex bots, would be a piece of cake compared to more sophisticated gadgets like cell phones and computers.
The tech expert from Australia's Deakin University said: hackers can hack into a robot or a robotic device and have full control of the connections, arms, legs, and other attached tools like knives or welding devices.
Once a robot is hacked, the hacker has full control and can issue instructions to the robot.
So it's not that just you're degrading yourself and dehumanizing yourself.
It'll kill you.
The robots will kill you.
All right, that's sexual follies that is our show today.
Stay tuned.
Michael Knowles is on next.
And then the conversation with Ben Shapiro answering your questions live, if you subscribe, will be there.