Jack Symes

aren't the like for me the the sense of community and the cultural aspects they don't appeal to me i couldn't think of anything more really boring than spending my sunday singing hymns and doing that no that's that's not for me there's so many other things that that you can do to find community to find fulfillment well but you could recognize how some people would find yeah sure that's fine with the enjoyment from it but i think in terms of like philosophical arguments for thinking it's true like the one you mentioned a moment ago like where this all came from

Science can't get to that question. The Kalam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular. It just goes, everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, it needs a cause. And then you do this deduction to figure out what kind of cause that could be.

And it would have to be something outside of time and space with the power and knowledge to bring this into being. And that might not be... That might get you all the way to God. That's a really strong reason for believing in God. And the answers the atheists give in place of it are nowhere near as strong. And likewise, like the argument from fine tuning, which is gaining traction again.

The physicist Sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature, like 26 of them, have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and intelligent life to form.

He calculates that the initial low entropy point of the universe had to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, which means if you sat there writing out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe first started expanding, and you wrote down one digit every second, you'd still be writing out that number now.

That number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are incredible. And when we're thinking of probability theory, if we're looking at the best explanation for that, then I think, you know, those that posit the existence of God have the better hand.

Like, I'm not religious, but I think we have to put our hands up and go, no, to those two problems, they've got really strong arguments for believing in God. But, you know, people like Dawkins, people like Hitchens and the like, even Dennett, I think Harris is a little bit more... I guess, sympathetic to those arguments than the other three. But they're not serious about following the arguments.

They're not serious about going wherever they take them. Like you say, there is a dogmatism there. They're not open-minded enough on these points.

Yeah.

controversial ideas they're throwing around about like 22 billion years old or 23 billion years old oh well no it's interesting what you say first of all like about us being like so involved with our egos in terms of these arguments it's always baffled me that people can care about their like their views or their philosophies to such an extent that they're they're willing to die on these hills yeah and refusing to they count in their their wins and not their losses i just had a

two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Jordan Peterson on his podcast about his motivations for being religious. And so I basically sketched out my broad argument, which is atheism's shortcomings are it can't answer the two problems we've just spoke about, why there's something rather than nothing fine-tuning.

But then the problem with theism is that no perfectly good God would allow for evolution by natural selection. Like, what a wicked thing to do to create the rules of the game to be that... To have intelligent life, it necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures over billions of years. If God exists, then God's a psychopath, right? God didn't have to do that.

It's logically and metaphysically possible for God to create it as the Christians thought God did in the Garden of Eden 5,000 years ago. That is way more compatible with the perfectly good God hypothesis, right?

Yeah. But then when I asked Jordan about this, again, I don't think he's serious again about following the evidence and argument. He just digs down. He builds a trench. He says, like I said, what do you think of what's called the systemic problem of evil? Why would God create the system? And he goes, we just need to keep working on it. It's like, no, you need to suspend belief in something.

What did he mean by that? You don't have the evidence. You need to keep working on it? Like we just need to crack on with the problem.

Yeah, but we've been trying to solve it. In between 1960 and 1998, 3,600 articles and books were published on the problem of evil. People are working on it, and it's not going anywhere. The systemic problem of evil undercuts the God hypothesis. But then it's this weird place, right? Because you've got these strong arguments. that an atheistic view can't solve.

But then you've got this big problem for belief in God. And like you say, this is moving philosophers of religion to this really interesting space where they ask, well, maybe we need a different concept of God, like the universe. So this is pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical. And panentheism is the view where

the universe is in God, but there's this extra layer of God, which is like heaven, or the thing that brought it into being.

Pantheism. I'll go with that now. The interesting thing about pantheism is, is it worthy of the name God, like the universe? Because if it's just nature-loving atheism, then that doesn't get you far. But I think if you believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious...

like there is some will or agency underlying the things that we interact with, then I think that gets you pretty close to a concept of God.