Episode #076 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday. And most of all, I hope you love the show today.

So, for the next 30 minutes or so of your life, try to forget everything that you know about God. Well, everything that you believe you know about God. See, because when I say the word “God,” it’s a very loaded term, isn’t it? Just consider the fact that every single person listening to this right now—when I said the word “God” right there—everyone had a slightly different thing that they pictured in their head. We all have our own personal vision of what God is, and it’s different from everyone else. We’ve talked about this on the show before. It seems to be an inescapable aspect of human language that these things called nouns and verbs and adjectives, these things that we use to describe things, are just not descriptive enough to plant the exact same image in your head that’s in my head. Two different people that come from different childhoods and different experiences and think about things in different ways—how do you use nouns, adjectives, and verbs to get the same picture in both of those heads? It’s crazy. It’s a crazy problem.

Now, as we’ve talked about in the past, philosophers have tried to fix this problem. But the reality is, at least so far, when you’re listening to this episode, when I say something like “microphone,” each and every one of you pictures a slightly different microphone in your head. You might picture a black, oblong one. You might picture a pink, sparkly one. The point is, the microphone that you picture isn’t preprogrammed into your head by something. All of it’s just the byproduct of some process going on in your head. It’s the sum total of all the experiences you’ve had with microphones filtered through your mental faculties to determine what a microphone is. Well, the word “God” is just another example of one of these words like “microphone.” Based on all the experiences, the conditioning that you’ve received from the people around you up until the moment you decided to listen to this episode, you have an acquired definition of what God is, an expectation of what I mean when I say the word “God.”

But for the episode today, let’s just try to forget all that. Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s go deep down into the dark recesses of our brain. Let’s find that folder deep inside of our hard drive where we have that definition of what God is. Go on, pretend you’re Ms. Frizzle on The Magic School Bus, and let’s delete that definition just for today—zero expectations. What I’m asking you to do is basically pretend like you’re a child again. Pretend as though you had never even heard the term “God” before, that there’s nothing you think you know about God at all. See, because when you’re a child, it’s a very unique place to be. I mean, before you go up to your mom and dad and ask them, “Mom and Dad, what is God?” before they begin that process of conditioning you about what it is, there’s really no inclination that you have in any direction about what God must be. God could be any number of things. God could be a piece of paper. God could be the fuzzy, red stuffed animal that you want down at the arcade. And, yes, it could be the all-powerful creator of that stuffed animal that knows you by your first name and willed that you would get that stuffed animal when you played the game with that claw that never works.

Point is, to put yourself in the shows of a child that doesn’t have this conditioning in them yet is an extremely useful thing to do for a number of reasons. And these reasons extend far beyond philosophy. It can help you change your life. It can give you a whole new perspective. It’s really good at helping you with basically anything that’s difficult to understand, if you remove yourself from what you already think you know.

But most importantly, it’s instrumental—this thought experiment is instrumental for the episode today because, as I’ve been rereading Hegel over the last month and a half, I came across a section of Hegel where he talks about a possible option of what God is. And it was fascinating to me. I’d kind of forgotten about it. It reinvigorated me with Hegel. I felt as though I had been put in the microwave for about 30 seconds. I was refreshed, people. Continued my research on it, found a few great articles. I just thought, you know, this has to be talked about. Hegel does such an awesome job in this section at doing basically everything that we do on this show, not the least of which is that he spends a very large portion of time before he even mentions anything about God, and he tries to get us to question all of the glaring assumptions that we have about what God must be.

So, let’s start there. That’s the reason why I’m asking you pretend as though you’re a child again. Ever since the rise of this New Atheist movement in the early 2000s, it’s very easy—especially for young people, I’ve found, or just people that are new to this process of questioning the nature of existence—it’s really easy to think of our beliefs or our lack of beliefs about God as just one point on a giant line graph between two extremes that are actually a false dichotomy: you can either be a fundamentalist follower of religion—God created the world in seven days; a man loaded up two of each animal onto a boat—or on the other hand you can be a science-loving, occasional skeptic that proportions your beliefs to the evidence. Look, it’s unfortunate. I don’t want to live in this world between these two extremes, but it is conventional wisdom that this is the God landscape that we were born into.

It’s very easy to fall into that trap, but as people that like to think about this stuff more than the average person—people that listen to this fine program—we of course know that this is a cartoonish representation of either side. It’s nowhere near this simple. We don’t live in some brand-new world where these are the only two ideas that are intellectually respected anymore. Just the name “New Atheist,” that kind of implies that there was an old atheism before it, right? When Richard Dawkins writes The God Delusion or when Sam Harris writes The End of Faith, neither of these guys would say that these are new ideas that they’re presenting. Atheism has been around for thousands of years: Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius. We’ve talked about them before.

I see this in emails all the time. Maybe that’s where this is coming from. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are not philosophers. Where their genius lies is being able to package together these ideas that already existed and write them down in a way that resonates with the culture in the early 2000s, a very unique time in history where it’s actually possible to package together these ideas without being drawn and quartered. These are not new ideas. It’s not like these are new ideas that rattled the foundations of thinking and now we only have one of two options. But we can at least be sympathetic of the fact of how somebody new to these discussions might look around them and they might feel like they live in that world. These two groups are very vocal. They’re certainly the ones we see the most. And there certainly is a divide between the two of them, a divide that we’ve been led to believe by either side is irreconcilable.

The book of Genesis and the current scientific narrative—just to give one example—these two things seem to be irreconcilable. Theologians ever since Darwin have been trying desperately to make this happen. It’s proven to be a pretty difficult thing to do. Now, it should be said, some people claim that they’ve done it. But there’s always problems, always questions left to be answered. And by virtue of the fact that there is no knockdown argument for this yet, it becomes really convenient, really easy to believe that you either have to believe in one or the other, right? Fundamentalist religion or the scientific narrative.

But Hegel would say, stop. Throw all that out the window. Forget this debate that’s going on during your time period. Forget what the people at work are saying. Forget what you think you know about God because most likely, ultimately, it’s probably founded in a giant assumption that you’re making about what God must look like. Hegel spends page after agonizing page pointing out all the problems with the way that people typically think about God. He says, most people, you ask them if they believe in God, and they say yes. You say, okay, what does that God look like? What do you believe in?

Hegel says, most people by and large—and I think this is pretty accurate—most people say they believe in something that is an omniscient, omnipotent being that is good and just and all that other stuff. But Hegel thinks this is ridiculous. He thinks it’s a giant oversimplification. He thinks it’s unsurprisingly transparent that this is the sort of conception of God that’s usually arrived at by people that don’t think about God that much. By the way, that criticism goes both ways. Either they don’t like to think about the possibility of a God existing—they’re quick to dismiss the idea of a God out of insecurity or whatever it is—or on the other side, they went to church when they were seven and were told what to believe.

Hegel says this relic of human thinking is probably there for a few different reasons. He starts out by saying that if this is the sort of definition of God that you subscribe to, forget about omniscience or omnipotence; forget about all these personality traits that you’re trying to tack onto that God. One big mistake that you’re making if that’s the way that you think about God is that you’re assuming that God is a being at all. Remember—omniscient, omnipotent being? That’s how we typically think of him, right? That’s how a lot of people think of God. But God is not a being to Hegel. God can’t be a being. To be a being in a world where we describe ourselves as beings—we call ourselves human beings. A lot of people think of themselves as spiritual beings having some sort of contact with this God we’re talking about. God can’t be a being in that universe, because if it was, it would be limited in some way.

One thing’s for certain, if this archetype we refer to as “God” exists, Hegel thinks, it must be something infinite. It must be by its very nature something that is unlimited. To be a being in a universe filled with beings is to be limited at least in some small way. After all, I’m not God. You’re not God. When your dog has an accident on the floor, your dog didn’t just excrete a piece of God onto the floor. To be a being is to be finite. God is not finite. So, in this way, Hegel says that God can’t be a being. If it exists, whatever it is, it must be something greater than a being.

Now, this probably reminds you of my monodies in many of the subject matters of the episodes that we did closer to the middle ages. This eternal question, can faith and reason coexist? Can reason justify the existence of a God? And if it can, what does reason dictate? What can we infer about that God if it in fact exists? Hegel talks about how we’re so quick to make all these sweeping inferences about what this God must be like. So, what we often do, the mistake that we make, is we just think of God as this bigger, stronger, backlit version of a human being that can do all sorts of cool magic tricks, when in reality, Hegel thinks, God isn’t anything like that. God isn’t a wish granter. God didn’t write his magnum opus on a bunch of clay tablets. God doesn’t have a personalized plan for you. God, to Hegel, is just the process of self-determination that’s imbued into the cosmos. That’s what God is.

Now, what does Hegel mean by this? Well, he thinks—at least he seems to think—that understanding what he’s referring to as “God” here is easiest by looking at what we are in relation to God. He breaks it down like this. Hegel doesn’t think that most of us are real. Not in a physical sense, of course we’re real physically. Of course you could have a scientist come down to your house, and they could put their goggles on and run an experiment on you. And it’d be pretty clear that you do actually exist in an empirical sense. But just like last episode when we talked about freedom and how it’s practically synonymous to total self-knowledge to Hegel, and how you’re not completely free unless you understand why you do what you do, in a sense, when we realize one of these ways that we’re being controlled by the stuff around us and not by ourselves, Hegel says that in a small way we are more real then than we were before. Now we’re more self-determining as opposed to being just a mere subject in this dictatorship of outside influencers—from advertising, cultural shifts, friends, anything.

The point that Hegel’s making is, something that makes itself what it is is more fully real than something made by something else and constantly dependent on something else. Once we get past these barriers of trying to simplify the world down into terms we can understand, when we transcend that cultural slavery that we’re born into—that conditioning, those shackles that we’re born into, shackles that by default would drastically affect what we do without us even realizing it—when we engage in this sort of openminded discussion with ourselves about why we think and believe the way that we do, we are to Hegel more real in those moments than in others because we are more self-determined. We are making ourselves what we are instead of being at the mercy of something else. So, Hegel’s saying, how about this idea? How about, God is not some Gandalf-looking guy up in the sky that’s mad at everyone. God isn’t some finite being with a plan for everyone. No, what if God was just the process of self-determination? And if you think about it, in keeping with what we talked about on the last Hegel episode, wouldn’t that also make God the truest reality?

Now, what makes this such a profound thing is that this is the connection. In this world where some people believe in God for the sake of spiritual growth, in a world where people feel gratified because they believe in something greater than themselves, and then they’re told that there’s no way to have that spiritual tool available to you unless you’re willing to be in direct opposition to the current scientific narrative—in that world, here’s Hegel talking about a God, or at least a possible God, where it seems like that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case. Both can be true. After all, if God is just whatever is most fully real, well, that sounds a lot like the chief objective of science—to use induction and falsifiable experiments to arrive at an increasingly more accurate version of what reality is, not our superstitious assumptions about the natural world. Seems to correspond with that. And for the person that doesn’t really care about that and just sees God as a catalyst for personal development, what an incredible virtue to strive for: pure self-determination without being unknowingly controlled by outside forces. Hegel’s point is, this potential God accomplishes both ends. It’s not a dichotomy like we’re often led to believe.

Now, I have a secret. I have a secret. I can see the future, everyone. I can see the emails coming in now. And I know that one recurring one that I’m going to get is this one, so I might as well address it now. It’s funny, I don’t think I’m going to get much email disagreement from people who are fundamentalists here. Hegel’s saying God exists. That corresponds with something that they already believe. Most of the people that fall into that category will probably just try to find a way to find similarities between what they believe and what Hegel believes. Those people are going to be fine. The people that are going to be up in arms about this episode are people that probably don’t believe in God. They probably pride themselves on being a skeptic. And they’re probably sitting around saying, “Well, Hegel certainly hasn’t proven the existence of God here. And really all he did was just switch the definition of ‘God’ to something else less controversial. What’s the big deal? Couldn’t you do that with anything? Could I just go out to my car and personally define God as my car, point to my car and say, ‘Oh, look! God exists!’ What’s the big deal?”

Well, Hegel would probably listen to that person and no doubt say, look at you. Look at you. There is nothing else you could have said right there that more obviously shows the biases that you’re bringing into this discussion about God—biases conditioned into you by the current discussion going on during your lifetime. The notion that God is this omniscient, omnipotent being that knows you by your first name—that was never on the table. That wasn’t even what we were discussing. I think honestly Hegel would be confused at first if somebody said that to him, but then I think he’d feel like what was really happening here, the subtext—something else he talks about extensively—is that this person that’s taking issue with this is blindly vitriolic to the word “God” being used at all no matter what it looks like because of the history that’s connected to the word. And on one level it’s understandable. I mean, I think we can all understand where this person’s coming from.

But I think Hegel would say, if every time you hear the word “God” you instantly raise your eyebrows or scoff at it or find some way to dismiss the conversation on the grounds that it’s outlandish because it has to do with a God existing and that’s unverifiable—if that’s what you do, then you are not someone interested in finding the truth. You’re someone interested in reinforcing what you already feel is true. Think about it. Why is the word “God” a bad thing to say, to mention in passing? Why is this archetype of some sort of creative mechanism or thing that sustains the laws of the universe or whatever it is—why is that an idea that we should be instantly dismissive of, if in fact we want to know the truth? Shouldn’t we leave room for the possibility? Imagine a world where we know a lot more about the universe than we do now but there’s still some big mysteries out there. What if allowing for the possibility of a God existing is the missing puzzle piece? What if allowing for the possibility of that philosophical archetype of a God existing was the only missing link between total understanding of the universe and living in ignorance? Shouldn’t we at least entertain the idea of there being a timeless, infinite, incorporeal thing that’s responsible for certain constants in the universe?

And really this is kind of off topic. I mean, aside from how allowing for the possibility of a God might get us closer to the truth about reality, for the person potentially sending this email that might be having an argument about God on a biweekly basis, there’s a very real self-interested motivation that you have for not instantly dismissing the idea of a God every time it’s brought up. Because by dismissing it, you are essentially allowing the people that you’re arguing against to hijack the word “God” and conflate the possible notion of a God existing with their cause.

Here’s what I mean by that. It’s actually really similar to something we already talked about in the belief episode: the question of when it’s appropriate to make a faith-based assertion about something. When is that okay? See, it’s really tempting in today’s world to look at your Facebook wall, see someone post something about how this baby was saved from a harrowing fiery car wreck, and then see one of your friends say, “Oh, God is good. #hisgraceissufficient. Glory to God for saving this young child!” It’s very easy to sit there and say, “Oh, well, obviously they believe that God intervened and saved this child and killed everyone else. And they believe that based on faith. The problem with that to me is that that’s completely unverifiable, unlike me who believes in things based on evidence. I believe in cold, hard facts. If there’s not evidence to support it, I don’t believe it. That’s not like them.”

It's easy to mistakenly think that faith is belief without evidence when, in reality, faith is belief without sufficient evidence. By the way, picture a fundamentalist Baptist from Mississippi. Yes, they may have initially decided to believe in God when they were a kid. But every day they look around them, and they point to what they see as empirical evidence of God’s obvious existence. They see the beauty of nature, coincidences, feelings of bliss when they are praying to God. They point to these real, empirical phenomena as evidence garnered by their own personal scientific experiments that God exists. Evidence is all over the place. The really interesting question that remains is, what is sufficient evidence? What is sufficient evidence to claim to know something?

Because the same stereotypical person—you know, the one writing the email to me, the one hostile towards the idea of God the moment that they hear the word—that same person would, no doubt, acknowledge that what we think we know in the year 2015 based on scientific experiments is by no means infallible. It’s just the best thing that we have. No doubt, in 100 years most things that we think we know right now are going to be completely disproven. That’s kind of what’s great about science, right? It’s the furthest thing from dogmatic. It’s always improving upon itself. So, knowing that, even if science is the best thing that we have right now, is it sufficient evidence to claim that we know that something is true? Or is it just better than arbitrarily deciding to believe in something?

Make no mistake, as we talked about in the belief episode, it is a currently inescapable aspect of human existence that every belief that we hold—no matter what evidence we cite for why it has to be true—every belief is a leap of faith at some level, but not all leaps of faith are created equal. And that’s the key distinction. Because in the same way someone might instantly dismiss the idea of a God existing as soon as they hear the word, my point here is, people also do this with the word “faith.” To the person writing this hypothetical email, if you rail against the idea of faith-based beliefs altogether, you’re allowing your opposition to hijack the word “faith” and then align any merit connected with “faith” to their cause.

Let me give an example. Somebody might make the point that, guess what, we are human beings. We have certain limitations. We have very flawed senses. Our brains are designed to pick bananas, not understand the nature of existence. We have a very narrow lens to view the universe through. And there’s no guarantee, based on those limitations that we have, that every aspect of reality is going to be knowable to us. Maybe, to avoid going completely insane, maybe it’s beneficial to believe in some things based on faith because currently we just have no way for us to know some things beyond a shadow of a doubt. Look, I got news for you, that’s a totally reasonable point. This is a great argument for why it may be necessary to believe in things based on faith.

Now, think about that. If you’re someone that just hears the word “faith,” and you instantly cringe and say, “No, no, no, I don’t believe in things based on faith. I believe in cold, hard facts based on evidence,” you’re allowing the other side to align their beliefs—no matter what they are, by the way, no matter what faith-based assertion they’ve made—with the merits of faith itself, when in reality, ironically, every belief you hold is based on a leap of faith too. And I think what Hegel would say is that the truly productive conversation here begins when you admit that fact and say, “Okay, we both believe in what we do based on a leap of faith. Now, explain to me how yours is justified.”

What I’m saying is, in the same way it’s beneficial to not let any group hijack the word “faith” and align all things faith with their cause no matter what it is, the same thing is true about the word “God.” When you’re not instantly vitriolic towards the idea of a God existing, you’re not giving up. You’re not conceding. You’re not saying that talking snakes are real. What you’re saying is that you’re willing to be honest about what is possible. Now, at this point in the argument, similar to the faith conversation, now the onus is on them to justify why their individual conception of God is justified. And if I’m just giving advice to a fellow thinker, that is where you’re going to win the argument. That is the place where they’re not going to be able to hide behind general arguments about why the possibility of a God existing is reasonable, and they’ll be forced to verify the specifics about what they’re claiming.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.