Sunday Uncensored: Andrew Klavan Member Podcast: Could God Exist Inside The Universe He Created?
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We had a super chat where someone said that if God created the universe, he wouldn't, I believe he said he wouldn't exist within it or wouldn't have to.
And he said, computer programmers aren't constrained by their own computer code.
They exist outside of it.
I think that's a simple way for people to understand.
I think the question of God is substantially more profound than that, but I think it's a simple way for people who don't understand these questions to understand them and to carry this conversation forward.
This person said, computer programmers aren't constrained by their own code.
I believe that God could exist within the universe he created through an avatar of sorts.
We can see a facsimile, a two-dimensional representation.
When you're editing a video, you can see the file in your program from start to finish all at once, and you'll see little snippets, like little frames will be on the bar.
You ever edit a video?
There's the video bar, and you can see little clips of it, and you can see the audio waveform.
So it's sort of Granted, we don't have the mental capacity right now to experience it all literally at the same time.
Well, also, yeah, there are just some questions we'll never be able to answer, so it's a mystery.
I've been thinking about time.
You know, Christ being all-God and all-man, or God being all-just and all-merciful, these are things that aren't perfectly possible for a human brain to reconcile.
And I said, you know, I grew up Catholic, became atheist, you know, got, you know, just hanging out punk rock, there's no God, all this stuff.
Then I had a few interesting philosophical conversations and then sort of, I would say, profound realizations.
And then I was like, okay, I definitely think there's a God.
I had like, I guess I'll describe it as I saw something when I was pondering and meditating.
And I don't consider myself theistic in the sense of scripture or anything like that, but I certainly believe there's something greater than us, there's a God.
So as I explained to this guy, and I mentioned on the show, If humans, if the universe is expansive and as massive as these people think it is, then I ask, like, would you assume that humans are the end, the most powerful form of intelligence that exists in the universe?
Certainly something else exists more powerful and greater than us, right?
Okay, there we go.
That's the first step.
We know that four dimensions exist.
Mathematically, we've done it.
We're like, boom, there's more than three dimensions.
We can't perceive them.
We know there's something beyond us because it's like a Sudoku puzzle.
If we look at the universe and, based on science, believe that there will likely be a greater intelligence than ours, doesn't it stand to reason that it could scale up beyond human comprehension?
Yeah, I mean, the idea that you're always comparing, you know, the reason I made the point about the The step of faith to say that it is better to give a beggar bread than to kick a child is because once you have something that is better than something else, it means it's closer to something that is good.
And once you have an ultimate good, the question is done.
I don't believe that there's a proof of God because that would deprive you of your freedom.
But once you acknowledge that there are some things that are morally better than others, you're stuck with God.
I think there's actually, I would describe it like a Sudoku puzzle, in that we're trying to figure things out, we're trying to learn and understand the universe, and based on what we think we know now, I believe there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest it is very likely there is a God.
Even the fact of mathematics, you know, I talk about this in the book a little bit, You know, some scientists will say, the one I heard was, I'm a meat puppet with a chemistry set inside, you know?
And I always think, well, you know, show me a two.
You know, if everything is material, you know, what's a two?
Ah, well, I certainly believe that you are part of eternity, and what I believe is that we are cultivating that part of ourselves that actually is eternal.
And one of the interesting things about Christianity is that it insists that you get a new body.
And to me that's really meaningful because I don't know what I would be without a body.
You know, I don't think I'm a ghost in a machine.
I think my body is carrying the essence of who I am through memory and through by organizing
my experiences and all this and I think that will happen again.
I do believe there'll be a new heaven and a new earth.
We don't completely share a view here, but what I really appreciate you bringing up is the physical resurrection, because so many people conceive of the Christian afterlife as your soul just floating off of your body and never returning, but that isn't what we believe.
It's actually really important, because there is this C.S.
Lewis quote, which is very clever, but it's actually heretical.
Someone said, do you really believe you have a soul?
He said, no, you are a soul, you have a body.
Yeah, he didn't actually say that?
Oh, thank goodness.
All right, thank goodness.
Because it's not true, but you hear people say this all the time, and that's not a Christian view.
It's actually quite gnostic.
We as Christians believe that we are a body-soul composite, so the resurrection is a very important component of that.
Though, you know, I do believe at death, obviously, your soul is separated from your body.
I believe you are judged by God, and if you're in His grace and friendship, you go to Heaven, but if you're not quite perfect enough to be with him, because as scripture says, you can be united to nothing and perfect, you go through a process of purification that we as Catholics refer to as purgatory.
If you have made yourself his enemy and are an obstinate mortal sin, you go to hell for all of eternity.
So it's a show about insignificant people Who travel through time to fix history.
And the idea is they were taken from the timeline because they didn't have big enough impact to screw up history.
And it's on like seven seasons.
But the fascinating thing is that one of the underlying plot points of the show is that Jesus is the son of God.
It's a fact and everyone knows as they travel through time.
So the second season was trying to reconstruct the Spear of Destiny that was granted its powers by the blood of Christ because it gives you godly powers over the timeline to rewrite it.
So I just think, I bring that up because There's also another scene where they're talking to a bunch of Vikings and they tell them that Jesus is the one true God or something like that.
But I bring this up now again, Seamus, because I'm on season five, I think,
and they said the fates, the Greek gods, have taken over reality with the loom of fate.
Everything is authoritarian.
And they explain how much better life is because these people who are being controlled
won't become evil.
Do you see an evil person like a Joseph Stalin around you?
They actually said that.
I just find it fascinating.
This show has an underlying premise that Christianity is true and unfalsifiable.
And the fascinating thing was it was a researcher who was a skeptic, not overly religious, but interested in the phenomenon, interviewed hundreds of people and said that like the overwhelming majority were the exact same story.
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And also, to be fair, they could be underrepresented because if you did go to hell when you have this NDE, if it is a legitimate experience of the afterlife, you're not going to wake up and be like, Yeah, I went to hell, you guys, I'm gonna be honest.
If you have a near-death experience and did very, just even quickly, perceive yourself going to hell, if you came out of that and then said, I repent, out of true fear and faith, actually, out of true fear, and then started going to church and praising the Lord, Would you actually go to heaven at that point?
Well, because you have to make a decision in deciding whether you're going to believe that was just a neurochemical reaction occurring in your brain because you were deprived of oxygen or if you really stepped into the afterlife for a moment.
And I'll let you answer after, obviously, because I stole the mic from you, but I believe hell is ultimately an eternal state of separation from God, but I do believe it also involves physical torment, especially because I believe in a physical resurrection of the body.
And so I do believe people are in hell, they're burning, they're tortured by...
Oh, so you don't believe... Yes, this is a different... I don't agree, but it's interesting.
I don't know.
There is a view that... There is one view that the person is effectively sleeping until the final judgment.
We as Catholics believe that there's a particular judgment and a final judgment, so you are separated from your body, your soul is in one part of heaven or hell ultimately, but at the end we're resurrected and there's a public judgment.
So I've actually, I have heard that before, and you know, I remember talking to some people about it, and they said, you know, they believe the reason why we preserve bodies, ceremonial burial that we do, is to keep your body ready for resurrection.
I think the soul, I'm wondering now that if the soul is stored in the earth and then maybe the body is kept in intact because the patterns, like if you ever look at astrology, like wherever the sun and the stars are when your body's being created have this imprint on you.
So maybe there's something to it.
So it utilizes that imprint to release the energy through it and out into space.
And that's like going to heaven.
And maybe when you're, if you're more in touch with and you're, you're, you're more like calm and confident with what you are that you're, you just immediately go to heaven.
But have you considered that the soul could be something completely immaterial that we could never detect or capture with any instruments and that doesn't look like anything?
You believe in a soul which is sort of more material, takes up physical space, and it's because you can't quite wrap your head around the idea of a soul which is totally material.
My question is, do you think it could still be possible even though you can't wrap your head around it, even if it's difficult for you?
Like, the pharaohs were right, and your body rotting away actually affected you in the afterlife, and so you only had, like, max, you know, for them, I guess.
But for them, they have, like, a couple thousand years of having paper-thin skin that doesn't really look right, and it's super gross, but that's... No, no, no.
We were talking about super-acceleration of the soul through the Earth's core into the galaxy if the gold stored with the dead people was also super-accelerating the energy field.
That's very fascinating, because I wouldn't say that I believe that, but there's an idea, if I'm not mistaken, in Orthodox Christianity, which is essentially that heaven and hell are the same place, and it's the state of your soul that causes you to react to God, either with love or with intense pain.
Again, not necessarily my belief, not my theory, not what I feel, but it's interesting you should say that because there is some precedent in some schools of Christian thought for that.
But what I want to ask you about the soul here, your view of it, and maybe what I'm getting at, because by definition it's impossible to really explain the immaterial or the spiritual or what a soul is.
Yeah, well this one guy, this neighbor of mine at one point was beating his girlfriend, and I was like, who the fuck?
I called the cops on him one day, I didn't know who they were, and one day I saw them walk by, and I didn't know who it was, I just felt this dark force, this black hole force, and I knew it was the guy.
For an idea to come to fruition, you need the vibration and the body's reference, like the memory, so that you can be like, that feeling makes me think of that thing, and now I have a new, what I call, an idea.
Well, I look at the cosmic microwave background radiation that's like vibrating.
And then when you study like, um, Nassim Harriman's Schwarzschild proton, and you look at like, oh geez, the, the, the, I guess that comes from like the Planck constant and string theory.
I believe that... Well, I believe that God... So, God describes himself with masculine pronouns, but of course, he transcends... Yeah, yeah, it's not... No, I would not conceive of God the way that Ian is describing.
I think people make the mistake of characterizing God as just the biggest, most powerful thing in the universe.
And sort of the largest, toughest bully around, rather than the creator of the universe.
I believe people can go too far in either direction.
So you end up with people who are deists who say that, you know, God created the universe or some higher power created the universe and just stepped away and the universe sort of runs like a clock he wound up and let go of and he's not really paying attention to it.
Then on the other hand, you have pantheists who say the universe is God and everything you're looking at is God all the time.
My view is that God created the universe And he is constantly sustaining it in existence.
So the universe is something different, but everything in the universe is being held in existence by God.
So we learn about God through our observation of the universe, but the universe is not him.
I do believe, I think that, at least I tend towards belief that the universe is God, that God is, it's the essence of energy interfacing with matter, or vibration interfacing with matter.
If we were in a simulation, if someone programs a universe into their computer and they're sitting outside of it, they are the God of that universe, of that universe, not of ours.
So God could, in my opinion, is outside of the thing he created.
And I think, you know, referencing Jesus and visiting Earth as a man and all that stuff.
That's how you would do it?
You'd plug yourself in and send yourself into the universe you created and you are still you, the creator, and everything in the universe that you programmed?
Obviously, you know, analogies break down and it's very difficult to describe, but what we believe as Catholics is that God, we describe it as, the Incarnation is God entering history.
Well, what we believe is the reason he entered the universe in that way, the reason the incarnation occurred, is the same reason he created the universe, which was as an act of love.
So I'm into this black hole theory, where we're inside of a black hole, and that there's universes, black holes within a universe, which is also a black hole within another universe that's a black hole from an outside, and that God is the people out there talking to us.
And that it's so many of them, but then I asked Ben about this and he's like, no, no, it's much more complicated.
There's Ben.
Ben Townsend.
And he said it's infinite black holes.
So it's, it's the, the garden of... What if those black holes are just, you know, hard drives?
I'm trying to put things in a simplistic human perspective.
Like when people are like, we must be in a simulation where someone created it for some reason, an advanced race, and it's like, okay, we'll extrapolate from there.
You know what I mean?
So if you're, like I said, either recognize you can't attach human motivations to God, you can only perceive it through the lens of how a human may interpret what God Yeah.
Azor wants.
Or just go ahead and make up whatever human motivation you want.
In Bruce Almighty, I think it was, I think it was Bruce Almighty, he asks God if he talks to people and he says, well, people who claim to talk to me are mostly talking to themselves.
But I think it can definitely be the case that a person is having a conversation with themselves and then they attempt to personify it as God, or they believe that they're talking to God when they're talking to themselves.
I caution people to... Yeah, demonic influence because I've had different voice... I've had like different...
People respond or whatever it is a different force and it's not the same one It's like a different one almost every time but it's like a group of them and sometimes it'll be like 60% good 40% evil or it'll be like 11% evil, you know or 20 and it'll be this weird like and sometimes you'll feel that it's evil like you'll you'll feel the aggression in the response and Yeah, I mean, I would just caution you to stay away from that, then.
What if, like, tomorrow, like, we're getting ready for the show, and then when Ian walks in, his eyes are completely yellow, and his skin is gray, and he floats in, and we're like, Ian, did you give in?
Seeing how people are so disconnected from religion, if we truly can establish a connection to God, like if we can really do it, and then help people to learn how to do it... See, why don't we film that?
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That for the vlog?
Wow, I guess, you know, Ian... We are what remains.
I was thinking words instead of saying them for a while, 2006, 7, 8, like I was experimenting with just thought communication, low frequency communication, and it was, seemed like it was hijacking God.
Like, it was deciding what God was gonna, like, I was becoming... Ah, but so then it is yourself.
We, uh, tomorrow, we're gonna be heading to Nashville, right after the show.
So we'll be doing the show like normal, and then immediately once we're done, we're hopping in the vehicles, we're driving out, we're spending a week with the Daily Wire crew, it's gonna be a blast!