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———– VIDEO NOTES ———–
Welcome to Within Reason, a new weekly podcast dedicated to broadly philosophical discussion with expert guests.
Bishop Robert Barron is the bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. His website, http://www.WordOnFire.org, reaches millions of people each year, and he is one of the world’s most followed Catholics on social media. His YouTube videos have been viewed over 125 million times, and he has over 3 million followers on Facebook.
Bishop Barron joins host Alex O’Connor to discuss the “crisis of meaning” we might be living through, the reducibility of purpose to evolutionary drives, the conditions for salvation on Christianity, and whether God can be accurately described as analogous to a tyrannical dictator.
—————– LINKS ——————
Alex’s previous debate with Bishop Barron: https://youtu.be/aC9tKeJCJtM
Bishop Barron’s Website: https://www.wordonfire.org/
———- TIMESTAMPS ————
0:00 Introduction
4:51 The Crisis of Meaning
17:39 Are we Just Driven by Evolutionary Drives?
30:55 Death
41:17 What if Someone Struggles to Believe in God?
44:18 Jesus Christ and the Conditions for Salvation
1:02:43 Is God a Tyrannical Dictator?
1:09:41 Outro
——-SPECIAL THANKS ———
As always, I would like to direct extra gratitude to my top-tier patrons:
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Evan Allen
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Dmitry C.
Seth Balodi
James Davis
g8speedy
James Davis
Thanks to Arian Foster for producing the Within Reason intro music, and to Matthew Sienzant (https://mdsienzant.com/) for the animations.
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Let me know what you think of the new podcast! Looking forward to posting these weekly. Don't forget to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Spotify/Apple Podcasts, if you feel inclined, which really helps me out. Thank you!
"God needs nothing from me." You could not be more wrong. To simply exist, God does not require us, but for God to be witnessed, to have existence witnessed absolutely requires some element that considers itself outside of God. That is the whole point. If that is not understood, you are acting in a completely sinful manner. That is what the bishop is doing; he is sinning and painting it as saintliness. I cannot say for certain that the bishop is a conman, but he is demonstrating all of the attributes of one.
Alex, evolution is a red herring; have a look at the non-creationist arguments in favour of intelligent design – in particular Stephen Meyer and Gunther Bechly.
Trying To Live By Bread Alone Is Indeed A Hopeless, Empty, Foolish Endeavor.
Alex posted in his last video that he had forgone traditional theological texts in his major because he found them “dry” and “boring” and opted instead for Dostoevsky, but I think that’s actually hobbling his understanding of things like “divine law,” and purgatory. Thankfully Barron can clarify them but, for example, theologians for thousands of years have made statements like “the words and decrees of God are the laws of nature.”
These are extremely basic theological concepts, and Alex is obviously quite intelligent, but he’s hobbling himself getting a “theology degree” by reading novels and not theological works.
Who would not like to live in such a Christian world as the bishop describes? The same way I would like to live in the Tolkien's world, full of wonder and eternal struggle between good and evil. But is it our world? Sadly, that's when I'm brought back to Earth, both figuratively and literarly. Thank you for the poetry, it lifted my day
I though the doctrine of purgatory had been rejected by a recent pope.
Bishop is wrong what you worship is an invisible invented ghost that doesn't exist only undermined of con artists and they all want to get rich praying on fools
Bishop Barron does a great job, expressing the logical explanation of theism. Love you Alex but I feel you overthink to a point that has no end game in mind. Other than to convince yourself and others what we all know is true.
Why does the source of poetry need to be transcendent or eternal? God’s not going to read your poetry. It’s a human endeavor, human enjoyment. That’s enough.
On the subject of the "objective meaning of life", I'm an absurdist, I don't believe that life has a meaning and I don't care about giving it one.
And once you get to this mental state, you no longer suffer because of it.
24:10 Should really bring generative AI into discussion. The algorithm itself can be described in less than a thousand lines of code, but it can produce very good results.
The religious point of view just sounds to me like people can't accept that they are a bunch of cells not that much different from a monkey, so they have to invent some other reason for their behaviour/existence to make themselves feel special.
In a few years once AI develops even more, more and more people will realise that we are way less special and complex than is commonly believed.
On the evolution and survival point, I really think it was a bit reductionist, the person who sacrificed himself with the nazis is a part of a societal structure that developed among a social species.
Our capacity to develop complex social structures is our survival advantage, and sometimes certain characteristics come with quirks.
And the arguments against are basically appealing to emotions.
32:20 Maybe he was just bored? Why was he bored? Because at that point he managed to satisfy all conditions required to live a bit and procreate. Also, this smells of survivorship bias. Many people wrote plays throughout history to earn money, Shakespeare was good enough to be remembered until our time, so by that very fact what he wrote must have been good.
We weep, we don't gnash our teeth 8n los8ng someone because Jesus wept at death. God hates death so do we .
Yes more podcasts incoming! Something great to listen to on the commute, can't wait for more from this madlad
Thank you Bishop Baron
I don't deserve a person's forgiveness but God in His Mercy through His death on the cross forgives me. We are called as followers to be merciful. To forgive.
I don't want people to apologize,e to me. It's not necessary. Go to the Lord because friend of Christ.
On the subject of comparing god with a dictator and the idea that if he knows me perfectly he would know what should I do, taking the comparison with the golf instructor and changing it to Tae-Kwon-Do, that I practiced, my teacher wouldn't simply say what should be the action I should do, he did explain to the best of his knowledge why to take that action.
The reasons why we repeat the same movements lots of times, first slow and increasingly faster is so it becomes part of our "muscle memory" and so when we are in a fight we do it reflexively, because we don't have the time to think.
So in that comparison, shouldn't god explain the reason why that instruction would be better for me?
Answering your question at the end, I enjoyed the conversation, but at the same time I think there was a biy of a lack of pushback at some points.
Not in the sense of being belligerent, but on not presenting counter-arguments.
Yes awesome
Bro literally said “I don’t think you believe that because I can’t understand it”
Open your mind dude. Repeatedly demonstrating that your thoughts are small and you’d like to keep them that way thank you very much
I did, indeed, like this video. This was not a debate in any traditional sense, it was Alex O'Connor's concerted effort to fully comprehend an opposing view. He asked all the right questions, and Bishop Barron gave some great answers. A thousand thousand thanks for sharing this wonderful conversation with the rest of us.
As much as I respect and appreciate this conversation, I would have loved a more detailed debate or discussion a lot more. There were far too many assumptions and unsubstantiated claims made by Barron to let slide here
Humans are the most ridiculous living creatures on earth. And why does he have to quote other people? Can't he just say what HE thinks? He also talks about objective values. Objective to who? Anything invented by humans is necessarily human-centric and if anyone says values are NOT human-made is deluded. We humans have created everything in our own heads. You get out of bed in the morning because we are wired to get out of bed and we are genetically wired to lean towards purpose, to happiness, to patterns, to anthropomorphism. We are geared to simply ACT. We act because we are told to by our genes. Being wired to be depressed would be pretty stupid. And what I say and what they say in this video is just OPINION. My opinion versus their opinion.
Alex quickly arrived at the point of real disagreement, and Bishop Barron's opposing answer was [We do good things because they are good.]
The evolutionary survival-based model provides a more fundamental reason; [We aim higher than ourselves out of a desire to survive as long as possible.] This answer reeks of much more honesty to me. Loved it.
The Bishop is a Catholic so of course he's going to argue for his position and will grab every piece of evidence that supports his position and ignores any evidence that undermines his position. Typical human behaviour. Reductionist? That is the only thing you should do. Reduce things to their essence. And in essence we are no different to an earthworm or any other living creature. Do not mistake complexity for better or higher. Also, do not forget the human' mind's ability to fool itself. The human mind is geared to create a world and to fool itself. So, you can't believe what you mind tells you. I'm daily aware of this simple fact. I'm sorry, as far as I can tell, the news is terrible, but if you accept it, then you do earn a type of freedom. A terrible freedom, but freedom nonetheless. But these ideas of freedom and so on are just ideas created by humans. What is the 'human condition'? The awareness of our awful position. Bishop, please explain Ecclesiastes to me. Whoever wrote that beautiful chapter of the Bible had come to terrifying but fundamentally correct conclusion.
Read Ernst Becker's The denial of death and then come back and have this conversation again.
We are more than a body? Prove it. Ashes to ashes dust to dust. We began as dust and back to dust we must return.
Bishop Baron is one of the rare ones that does such a surgical extraction on the ideas/philosophies that intrigue me, but ultimately feel wrong in a way that's oft difficult to describe without thinking on it intently for a bit. Doing that on the fly mid-convo is really a kind of masterclass on that level of abstract thinking. Kudos.
I have nothing but deep compassion for the bishop. He is suffering the human condition very deeply. Does he have doubts at all? Crises of faith? I don't because I have given up (as much as possible) any pretence that any of this has any intrinsic value or meaning. If you can ask 'what is the point of a rat?' you can ask 'what is the point of a human?' Some people being very clever doesn't mean we're divine. My father was a Church of England minister and I grew up in the church so I grew up with and lived completely within Christianity and its beliefs, so I've heard all this stuff. We are all searching for certainty. But that is a completely foolish search. Go read Gilgamesh, the earliest known human story, and tell me what it's trying to say. Hint: Gilgamesh doesn't want to die and searches for a means of escaping it, and is told that there is no escape and to go back and play his role as the king of his kingdom and do his best and behave and act with as little harm as possible. That's about it, really.
Looking at this again …. Please keep these wonderful discussions up . Thanks to you both . I’m on my BB ‘ s side by the way . Lol . Love that man , Alex keep talking , keep thinking , keep digging, it’s real good .
They say summum bonum’s are like assholes. Everyone’s got one.
God bless you Alex! You’re heart seeks
Bishop Barron Preach!
I think Sartre would have more trouble with the 'blades of grass' criticism than the Nazi criticism. Sartre reserved exactly one avenue of critique, and it works well against the Nazis:
"…I can pronounce a moral judgment. For I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values. … We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim."
The next few lines are a bit obscure, but the Nazi project is clearly not in line with the liberty of all.