Jack Symes

You just have to look at the 20th century to see how when people think they know what ought to be done, despite all the pain and suffering they cause, how that can lead to all kinds of atrocities. So this idea that we should just carry on sticking with our thinking beforehand and This ultimately comes from having the wrong view about things.

It ultimately comes from taking an unreasonable leap of faith. He offers arguments. Let's take Peterson, for example, again. People are holding him up as the champion of Christianity at the moment. People are writing books saying, this person's going to save our faith, which is going extinct.

In the U.S., for example, the Southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s. But your population's growing. It's disappearing. In 2001 in the UK, we had 70% of people identifying as Christian. Now it's less than half. And you're about that now in the US. You're just 23 years behind and it's the same trend.

Religion is disappearing and it needs to evolve philosophically. You need a proper philosophical defense of it. People like Bill Craig do a good job. I don't see why we can't just keep holding him up for the Christians. But this same old... Just bet your soul on it. Just go for it. Take the leap of faith is the thing and the reason why Christianity is going out of favor.

I saw one televangelist saying he has a private jet because it means he's closer to God and God can hear his prayers quicker.

Okay, we can kill it. We get it. It's like he's been possessed by a demon, isn't it? His eyes when he jumps up for defense.

Because we have factory farming religion too. They skipped all the verses about selling all your stuff, giving it to the poor, not fitting through the eye of a needle.

God, you can tell that he's just fumbling, isn't he? Just trying to find anything to say.

You look wild, wild behind the eye. Maybe it's wild with the Lord. I think here's something I think the atheist does need to concede, though, right? I was just thinking about it as well. Look at those fucking eyes.

I think the theist, if they think they've got a good reason to believe in God, right, and we talk about all this evil, which we've just explored, maybe we can jump and bring the multiverse in on this as well, is that... If you're up at the University of Oklahoma, which is not too far from here, is it? It's like five, six hours?

Eugene Nagasawa working there has got this brilliant argument where he says, given the evil in the world, it's unreasonable for atheists or agnostics to be what he calls existential optimists. Like you can't be happy and pleased to be alive. and think the world is a good place, and believe in all of the evil that you typically run against the God of traditional Christianity.

So when I run the argument as an agnostic against the Christian about all this evil, that means I have to concede my optimism about the world. I can say that the world is neutral at best, or mixed, or maybe I have to be pessimistic. I think this is the difficulty of it all.

Again, to give another quote from Camus that I love, he says, I've always felt as if I was living on the high seas, threatened at the height of royal happiness. So you're in this moment where you think, actually, my life's pretty good. And then you remember all of the crap in the wider world and in history and the purposelessness of it all.

And you're sort of left like, that's the state for the atheist. And that's... I mentioned that notion of the absurd from Nagel's idea, like, I wish I was bigger and I last longer. And maybe that resonates with a few people. Maybe that's just Thomas Nagel. The real problem of the absurd and the meaninglessness of life for us as agnostics and atheists is,

is we desire or want meaning from the world, but the world sits there cold, dark, and empty. It doesn't respond to us. It's worse than having a parent that doesn't care about you or a partner that doesn't want anything to do with you because at least they're there, right? The world is completely unresponsive in terms of that love and affection.

The universe, we ask for meaning, we ask for purpose, and it doesn't respond. I love this quote from Michael Housecutter from Liverpool, who used to be my head of department. He says, this notion of the absurd rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity. Here be lions and dragons. Here be cold and dark and emptiness.

And you sort of feel that and you go like, all right, that is the hole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world.

But that I think is, Camus says that this is why people commit what he calls philosophical suicide. They kid themselves and think that God exists despite the evidence against the hypothesis. They don't want to feel that feeling. Like it's a really uncomfortable feeling. You know, there's three great books by Camus which I highly recommend. One, The Outsider or The Stranger.

A lot of high school students read this book. And the main character starts off, his mom just dies, and he doesn't care. And then he goes to the beach and just shoots some random guy, and he doesn't care. And then he's put on death row and he dies, and he still doesn't care. And you're reading it as the reader, like, what's wrong with this guy? But he's mirroring the world's indifference.

That's what it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world. In one of his next books, The Fall, the characters trying to find meaning or better put, trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins. Again, I think this is a huge problem for agnostics and atheists. When we do something that's bad, we don't have this omnipotent, all-forgiving father figure