Joe Schmid

speaker

235 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Joe Schmid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Pints With Aquinas · Answering 7 Arguments For Atheism | Joe Schmid | Last Call Ep. 30 · 3 Sep 2026 podcast

The second thing to say is that, again, maybe there are just like lots of goods that having just this vast and maybe mostly lifeless universe enables.

So for instance, I don't know about you, but if you look at pictures in the Hubble telescope, it's just staggering.

It's beautiful.

And these are just lifeless gas clouds and whatnot.

It's just awe-inspiring.

It creates what Rudolph Otto calls numinous experiences where you just have this kind of awe and fear and kind of mystery and kind of trembling, but also a kind of like,

reverence and creaturely dependence kind of feeling that all this stuff enables.

That's enabled by this vast and diverse cosmos with all these beautiful cosmic structures.

I don't know.

That's another thing.

It can increase our humility when we just look at how tiny we are in comparison to this gigantic universe which displays the magnificence and glory of God and just our finitude in relation to it.

I've watched those videos where it's like Carl Sagan and he's like the pale blue dots and it sort of zooms out from like just our local vantage point and then it zooms out and out and out and you just get this overwhelming sense of like awe, at least for me, this awe and this mystery and this like almost creature feeling like dependence, like we are radically dependent on things around us and this dependence chain ultimately traces back to God and maybe part of the reason why God created things like this is just to give us that kind of sense of humility

and to allow for those sorts of experiences, to allow our kind of natural cognizance of God to kind of kick in, you know?

And there are lots of other reasons, you know?

Maybe like a vast and mostly lifeless universe is actually like sort of needed, given the law structures that we have.

And maybe it's not very surprising that the law structures that we have would obtain, given theism.

And then given those law structures, maybe a vast and mostly lifeless universe is needed for the universe itself to cooperate in bringing about creatures, biological organisms and us, right?

Because like,

The standard scientific story, which we have a lot of evidence for, is that, you know, there were, like, supernovae, and then they basically kind of imploded and then exploded and spewed their guts everywhere, where what the stars do is they forge the heavy elements that are needed for you to get, like, planets and for you to eventually get life on those planets, right?

So, like, basically the universe itself is, like, forging

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