 Omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. These are the traditional labels that are applied to a theistic conception of God. Is there a way to think of a God that isn't the Omni-God? That's the question I'm talking about on the 39th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Hey guys, got a really great episode for you today? I recently spoke with a professor of philosophy about some basic religious concepts about what we mean by the term God, some non-standard definitions of God, we had a great conversation about faith, the reasons for faith, what faith means, and the limitations, if any, of the rational methodology. My guest is Dr. John Bishop, who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland for more than 20 years. He is the author of Natural Agency and Believing by Faith, in addition to a bunch of professional articles on the topic of the philosophy of religion. This interview I think is the longest interview so far, and it was very kind of Dr. Bishop to speak with me for so long because we went over the allotted time, but I was having such a good conversation that I figured I'd milk it just a little bit longer because I know you guys are really going to appreciate as I did what he had to say. Also I'm very pleased to announce that this project of creating philosophy and big ideas outside of academia is growing, and I'm looking for some help. So I just posted an article on my website, steve-patterson.com, go check it out, where I'm outlining exactly what I need help with. I'm looking for an intern that can do audio editing, some proofreading, some research, some strategic research, social media stuff. Right now the position would be for less than 10 hours a week, and it's an unpaid position, but as things grow it's very possible that this could develop into something paid. So if you've been listening to the show, you really appreciate it, you're excited about the project, check out the website, there's more details there. Maybe we can work together. All right, I hope you enjoy my interview with Professor John Bishop of the University of Auckland. So first of all, thank you very much for sitting down and speaking with me today. A pleasure. I have several questions for you related to basic concepts in theology, in Christianity. Part of my conversations with people is not just talking about strict topics in philosophy. I'm really interested in theological claims because I think there's some truth to be found, but in my experience it's mired in a lot of poor arguments or things that don't make sense, at least to me. So I'm going around talking not just with theologians but with pastors trying to sort out the good from the bad. And like I said before we started recording, a few of your colleagues recommended you in particular for doing that. Yes, well I certainly am sympathetic to the idea that although there's this very familiar language where we talk about God and God's actions and God's will for us and so on, there's a lot of obscurity about what we really mean by it. And that's an excellent place to start. And I think many people have the sense that this language does something important and it connects them. It's capable of connecting them with what reality is really like. But when you actually ask them to explain how that is so, they find it difficult to give an answer and they probably just say well we use this language and we realize that it doesn't operate in exactly the same way as ordinary factual language does. I mean when we're talking about God, we're not really thinking that God is a person exactly like us. They realize that. But trying to understand from a philosophical point of view what exactly we might mean by talking about God is really very challenging. And this is something that I'm very interested in and I can see you are too. Okay, so that's the perfect place to start. The word God means a million different things to a million different people. And I know growing up my background is in Christian evangelicalism is where I was raised. I kind of fell away from that and I'm just now coming back around to some religious beliefs. But what do you mean as somebody who's a philosopher who appreciates clear definitions and clear thinking, clear concepts. What does that word mean to you? Right, okay well I will answer that question but I want to make a tangential remark first because one of the things, I mean if we are going to be trying to clarify what God means I think we have to connect with the tradition. The tradition in which you were brought up and so was I. Although my tradition wasn't so evangelical it was more sort of liberal, theological, theologically and somewhat Anglican and Anglo-Catholic. So perhaps we have slightly different background. But I think whatever God means if we're going to have a proper understanding of it it's got to connect back to the tradition and make sense somehow within that tradition. Now one of the things that that tradition says classically is that God is incomprehensible. So the idea of if you're asking me what is the definition, can you, people have different definitions and what is your neat definition. The first thing I have to say is I don't think it's possible to offer something that is a neat definition of God, of what God is. And when the medieval said that God is incomprehensible I don't think they meant as we might hear it now that what God is or who God is is unintelligible. Because I mean if it were just unintelligible then we would just shut up. We wouldn't be able to do any philosophizing about it. But what I think they meant was that we can't get the kind of understanding that gives us a complete intellectual control of what it is we're talking about. So who or what God is is always going to outrun that kind of total comprehension. But I think it is very important to pursue the goal of trying to make what God is as intelligible as we can. So that's sort of preliminary remark. I mean in order to explain what I now think God is I probably have to make some remarks about the sort of history of my thinking about this. Yes please do. I mean as I'm sure you're aware within analytical anglophone philosophy there's a very widespread view that it is possible to make pretty intelligible what we're talking about when we're talking about God. If you look at the writings of philosophers like Alvin Plantinger or Richard Swinburne they will say things like to believe that God exists is to believe that there is a person who created the universe, ex nihilo, whatever that may mean. And who is supremely powerful, indeed omnipotent, knows everything omniscient, is morally perfect and who has purposes which relate to true human destiny. Something of that kind. And people now very often refer to that as the personal Omni-God conception of God. And for a long time I suppose I held that kind of conception as, at least I believed that that was philosophy, that was the best that philosophy could do in making intelligible this theological tradition. But I was dissatisfied with that conception of God. And so I thought of myself as exploring alternatives to that as I would have described it, classical conception of God. And what was your difficulty? What did you not like about that? What did I not like about it? Well that's quite a long topic but to cut to the chase the thing that's most worrying about it arises from the problem of evil. Because if you believe there is such a God you have to believe that when something like the Holocaust, you know, some mass tragedy, some perversion of goodness occurs, like a genocide, there is a powerful agent who could stop it who presumably for very good reason is not doing so. And that's a very hard thing to do. I mean, you might have a kind of Ivan Karamazov response to this who says, well look, you know, if there is an agent who could stop, I mean he was actually talking about the torture of a child, or at least the character in Dostoevsky's novel is made to talk about the torture of a child. And he says, well look, I will not call God good if he stands by and does nothing while this child is essentially tortured to death. And I have a lot of sympathy for that response but people might say, well, you don't know the whole picture, you know, if you understood the greatness of the goods that are somehow linked in ways that you can't possibly fathom to allowing these horrors to happen, then you would realize that God has an adequate excuse. And intellectually, even if emotionally one finds that rather worrying, intellectually you can see that it might be possible to construct a view of that kind and there's a vast amount of writing about theodicy in which people are trying to do precisely that. But in my own recent work I've come to the conclusion that however sophisticated a theodicy that you provide, you are going to have to understand God as one who, first of all, sustains people through the experience of terrible suffering, either as victims or as perpetrators, right, including, so we have to include the perpetrators here, and then ultimately restores things to justice and peace and harmony, right. So, I mean, a lot of theodices will say God has to care very much about this kind of suffering, but he's got enormous resources to do this. A writer like Marilyn Adams is a very good example of this. And out of his infinite resources he will bring everyone, both perpetrators and victims of horrific evils, into the joy of eternal relationship with him. Now, those rather sophisticated kind of theodices seem to me to have one basic flaw, that they're going to portray God as a powerful person who has a relationship with creatures in which he first sustains them through suffering and then wonderfully compensates for it and defeats it and makes good on it. And what I want to say about that is, what is that a perfectly loving kind of personal relationship? I mean, imagine what we would think on a human scale if somebody did that. If I put you through some, you know, fairly terrible suffering, only because this was the best way to get you into the experience of some great good. It seems to me that the kind of relationship that I would have with you would not be the most perfect possible kind of interpersonal relationship. It would be sort of inherently manipulative. And so I think that even the most sophisticated theodices are not going to be able to get over that kind of problem. And so for me, now I acknowledge that people may have answers to that, or they may not have the same kind of intuition. They might say, because it's God who is doing all this, what we would find unacceptable in human terms may be perfectly acceptable. So I don't think this is a knockdown argument, but it so to speak clarifies for me my reason, and a reason which other people might share, why they cannot endorse this particular conception of God. So that the idea of God as a person like us, although with unlimited power, unlimited knowledge and unlimited goodness, who so to speak superintending the whole of reality all the time, seems to me to be a conception that is not adequate. So that's my reason for being unhappy with what I would be inclined to judge is probably the dominant conception of God, but by no means the only conception of God that you find amongst philosophers of the analytic persuasion. Okay, so the next natural question to ask is if not the personal omnigod, what are the other options? Maybe not all of them, but one of the ones that are attracting me. Well, one thing that happened to me very much as the result of my interaction with a student here who is now a PhD student, and he's in the process of completing his doctorate on the problem of evil, Thomas Harvey, was that I came to realize that although I had been brought up to think that this personal omnigod account was the best philosophical account of classical theism, as a matter of fact, if you go back and look at the medieval themselves, there are reasons to think that they didn't endorse a metaphysics of God as a supreme person superintending everything, that they recognized that that way of talking was a way of talking by analogy, and when you ask them what they really think about the nature of God, they tend to retreat to what is known as the apophatic. In other words, they describe God in ways that convey to us important understandings of what he is not, but do not purport to tell us directly what he positively is. So if you look at classical philosophical theology, God will be said to be a temporal, immutable, impassable, not limited by time, not subject to change, impassable meaning not the kind of thing that undergoes processes or anything else. And unnecessary, which means not amongst the things that are contingent. And then there is this very puzzling one which looks positive that says that God is simple. What immediately comes to your mind if you hear somebody say God is simple as a matter of interest? Like a simpleton, that's what I think. If you call a person simple, you're simple-minded. Yes, and you think well it can't be that. And you might think surely from the point of view of the divine intellect it must have an amazing complexity and sophistication that we can't even fathom. So what on earth could simple mean? And you think how could God be this ultimately absolutely simple thing? So it looks kind of nonsensical. But what they mean is that there is no composition in God. God isn't made up of any parts. Now that is still rather puzzling. But what really clarifies it for me is when you realize that they mean that in particular God doesn't have the composition of essence and existence that everything else they thought has. So again this is terminology that isn't terribly familiar to us now. But just to illustrate it, you and I have composition of essence and existence because we both have the essence of humanity, we're both human beings. But you instantiate it. It exists in you in the particular Steve kind of way and it exists in me in the particular John kind of way and so on. And so we are the kinds of things that are, as we might say now more familiarly, we're instances of a general kind. And what they're saying is God isn't an instance of a general kind. God isn't just a kind of thing amongst other things. And so the idea of divine simplicity is a way of signaling the absolute transcendence of God that God can't be identified as any kind of thing. And for that reason, although of course the medieval do use personal language about God as much as any theologians do and no doubt will continue to do, in their philosophizing they were I think much more cautious than contemporary philosophers have been in saying we mustn't take this language as delivering to us an intelligible metaphysics. However sort of psychologically compelling it might be, and it might actually be that in a certain sense God wants us to think of him in personal terms but as a matter of fact, or at least to relate to him in personal terms because that's the only thing we can do, we are personal beings, right? As a matter of fact when we, for our understanding, when we're doing fides, quirens, intellectrum, faith seeking understanding we mustn't get too hung up on the idea that God actually is a person and otherwise we will get into these sorts of problems that we're having to say when something terrible happens. There's a person more powerful than us who's letting it happen. What could his reason be? Could he be punishing me and all this kind of thing? That I think for them those kinds of problems were sort of blocked off, right? So one of the things, and as I say, I was persuaded about this by Thomas. So this is a very good example of something that we always say we are open to namely learning from our students but this made quite a difference to my thinking because I thought to myself well wait a minute, it's not at all obvious that my desire to find alternatives to the personal omnigod conception is amounts to trying to step outside classical theism. It might turn out to be rediscovering it. So now of course in order to do that properly one would have to go off and become a great expert in sort of medieval philosophy and I haven't been able to do this. But I have continued to think about what the alternatives might be from my own point of view but now I'm thinking maybe what I'm now thinking if you go back and compare it with what medieval philosophers thought maybe there would be some connection there and I'm not necessarily coming up with something absolutely new and indeed whoever does in philosophy. So when you made that distinction between existence and essence God doesn't have existence. Can we say God doesn't have any essence? Is there no essence either to God? Does neither category apply to your conception? Well, he doesn't have the composition of essence and existence which I take it to mean he isn't an instance of any kind even the unique instance of some kind. But on the other hand, presumably, God does have essence. Of course what Aquinas says at one point is that God is Ipsum essa subsistence. It means being itself subsisting. What does that mean? And of course another thing that Aquinas says is God is pure act. There is no potentiality in God. So when it comes to God, it's not as if God has the composition of essence and existence. It's almost as if he's saying God's essence is his existence. There isn't any distinction. In us there's supposed to be the distinction of essence and existence but in God there isn't that distinction. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't have essence. It's just that he doesn't have an essence that is separate from his existence. I mean, that was what the medieval philosophers would have said or somebody like Aquinas would have said. But I think I myself, I can see you've got a lot of questions about this and I think in a sense I myself haven't really gone the route of trying to understand more in a scholarly way what the framework of concepts that we find in medieval philosophy provides for us by way of an understanding of God. I'm just sort of signalling that I think it's wrong to assume that what they were really getting at was the personal omnigod theory. I think actually they were setting themselves again, well they say things that ruled that out. But what I'm trying to do from my own contemporary context is to try and make intelligible what it might mean to say that God exists. If it doesn't mean that there is a personal omnigod. Okay, so there are lots of questions that I have about that, both epistemological and metaphysical. So let's stick with the metaphysical first. I'm trying to understand the term exists in this way of thinking about it because I have a general notion of existence, of being. I can think about there's a phone sitting here on the table and it's not the case that there is a rotary phone. The rotary phone doesn't spatially exist, maybe the concept of it exists, but it lacks that property of existence. And that concept of existence applies to everything. I could say something like everything exists if it's a thing and it exists. And I find that satisfactory and kind of complete. But there's this concept of God that when I've spoken with people doesn't seem to fit into that category. No, quite. So how can I understand that? Well, what I think is worth exploring is that to say that God exists is not really to identify some item and attribute existence to it as we might with a book or a phone or a human being or a tree or something. I think it's to say something about the whole of reality. As a unified thing? Yes. If you can call it, I mean it's a pretty extraordinary thing. But I think it is to say something about the whole of reality and what it says certainly implies that reality is unified. And what I have been exploring is that the basis of that unification has to do with the idea of purpose. That the whole of reality is unified because it exists to achieve a certain purpose, end, or to use the Greek word telos. And after all, certainly in the tradition, the idea, of course, is a very strong idea in theism that God is the ultimate source of all that is. But there is also the idea that God is the ultimate end, purpose or point or goal of all that exists. And I think that perhaps it's worth trying to recover the idea of God as end or purpose in order to understand what we might mean by saying that God exists. So when I think of the concept of purpose, it's for me inescapably tied to mind that if you had no mind you would have no purpose in the sense that that's a mind-dependent phenomenon as purpose. So if God is purpose, what does that mean? If I were to say, from the internal standpoint, if I have a purpose, it's something like I have intentionality to reach an end state. Yes, yes. You're saying God is the end state. Well, no, not precisely. In fact, I would be inclined to be extremely cautious about identifying God with anything in particular. I think looking for something to identify God with is not going to work. Can I jump in just right there? Yes. Because it's hard for me to... When you say the term God, we can't identify anything in particular. Even right there, it's hard for me to wrap my head around how you could be talking about something when we're saying it's not a something. It smells like a logical contradiction, just kind of on its face. Yes, I see. I quite understand that. So how can I get past that? Okay, right. Well, I think only indirectly. If you butt your head against that too directly, you won't get past it. So what? The way I have done it, or at least tried exploring doing it, not necessarily saying I can succeed in doing this. Instead of trying to say, well, God exists is really affirming the existence of some item and with what item, however wonderful it may be, could we identify that thing that we call God? Instead of doing that, let's ask ourselves the question, what it might mean to say that all of reality is divinely created or is a divine creation. Okay. And so what I want to suggest is that to say that reality is a divine creation is to say that reality quite inherently exists for the realization of a purpose, a purpose that is supremely good. And as a matter of fact, I also want to add, and the ultimate explanation of why reality exists at all is the fact that it does actually achieve the purpose that is inherent to it. Okay. So we'd set aside for a moment the question, but what precisely is God? But we're looking at something that is surely absolutely central to theism which is what does it mean to say that reality is God's creation? Right. And I'm saying what that means is to make a claim about all of reality as united because inherently it has a certain purpose, that purpose is the supreme good and reality exists at all only because that purpose is actually achieved. Right. Now, of course, you can go into a discussion of what the supreme good is, of course. And since we both have a Christian background, one could, for the sake of discussion, use the Christian claim that the ultimate good is existing in love. With God and with all else that is. So you could say that to say that reality is God's creation from a Christian point of view is to say that all that exists exists for the sake of making love a concrete reality. And the only reason why there is anything at all is because that, within reality, that happens. That does actually happen. I like that. So could I rephrase it this way? Yes, yes. In a sense, what you're saying is all of reality itself is something like a love-generating machine. Yes. Something like that. Now, this might sort of give us a transition into the epistemological because it is far from obvious that that's so. Right. Even if you and I have experienced states of existence in which love is realized, nevertheless there's a whole lot out there that fails to achieve that ideal or seems to be directed towards undermining it. It seems to be actually perverse. So it's not. One isn't claiming that one can look at reality and decide that it's rationally compelling that reality must be this love-generating machine. Well, let me just float this idea that popped in my head. Yes. So part of my own background of research is understanding market dynamics and economics. So in a marketplace, if you have a good that is successful and creates value for people, it naturally generates wealth for whoever created that thing. If you have a product that hurts people, then it's not going to sell very well and it's going to naturally go bankrupt if you will. Yes. So perhaps in this conception, the reason that we have this mixture of love and not love is because in this generation device, you have the natural growth of the love things, the loving generators, and the natural death of the non-love things. Might that be an explanation? It might be. Yes. Yes. So, I mean, this way of putting it is still going to leave to a kind of problem of evil, but there may be answers, and those answers might be more satisfactory, precisely because although we're talking about reality having an inherent purpose, we are not talking about some being whose purpose it is who's constructing reality for the purpose of realizing that purpose and who is therefore responsible, et cetera. We haven't, even though it's rather compelling to use that imagery, right, when we actually ask ourselves what our strict understanding, what the metaphysics is actually telling us, we haven't got that kind of a being there at all. We've just got the whole of reality with an inherent telos. Now, of course, some people might argue that it doesn't make conceptual sense to talk about things having inherent purposes, right, that the only way anything can have a purpose is if it's imposed on it by a mind. Now, I don't know whether you were suggesting that earlier or whether when you were saying there's a connection between purpose and mind, there is such a connection, but it needn't necessarily be of that kind. So this kind of view of reality is, so to speak, a tributing mind, you know, with a capital M to reality itself in a way that interestingly enough, Hume acknowledged might be a possibility in his dialogues concerning natural religion, but he has philo in the last, in section 12 of those dialogues, admit that, even though he has strongly criticized the tele-logical argument as an argument for the existence of an anthropomorphic-style God. So, you know, one of the things that's very interesting is when you look at people who are sort of put forward as prime atheists and you look at them again and say might it be that what they were atheistic about is just this particular conception of God and they were leaving open other understandings, you know, to say that that could be true of Hume is really quite interesting. That is interesting and that seems very plausible to me just to my own conversations with atheists. I was just having a conversation the other day as a side note with a gentleman who was an atheist and I found myself agreeing with all of his arguments. I don't consider myself an atheist. I thought, by that criteria, what you're arguing against, so you're right, maybe this opens the possibility for being an atheist Christian. Yes, exactly. This is terminology. Okay, so let me ask a couple more questions on this. This is a very interesting conception of God. What that way of thinking about God doesn't get you, which I find helpful in the more traditional way of thinking about God, is the cause of existence itself. So, like, we have this love-generating machine, I like thinking of it that way and, in fact, I can even take out the purpose. I can say it's not that there's purpose as we think about it. It's that kind of by natural processes what generates love promotes love itself. It's kind of like a self-perpetuating cycle and what generates not love generates death kind of extinguishes itself without necessarily any purpose. But I still don't have an explanation for why that system exists in the first place. Right. And surely it is characteristic of theism that it does say there is an ultimate explanation for why anything exists at all, why there is something rather than nothing. But I want to claim that this view, which the colleague and I, who are currently writing a book on this, call Utiliology, that this view does allow you to give an ultimate explanation of all that is. So long as you're prepared to be pluralist about efficient causation. Okay. Now, we normally now think of efficient causation as really a matter of the cause, as producer bringing about its effect. Right. But strictly speaking, an efficient cause is just whatever explains the actuality of the effect. Okay. Right. And clearly if reality as a whole is going to have an ultimate efficient cause, right, it can't be in terms of its producer. Because its producer would then be part of reality as a whole and then you wouldn't have an answer. So what we claim is that the ultimate explanation of the existence of reality is the concrete realization of its telos, the supreme good. So what explains why anything exists at all is the fact that what exists contains realizations of the supreme good. And would you, so realizations of the supreme good meaning love? Yes. Now, of course, this looks like it's absurd, bootstrapping, and of course it would be if you're thinking of efficient causality in terms of a producer. But we're saying you don't have to do that. And I think there's quite a long tradition that recognizes that you don't. I mean, one of the things that's worth exploring, and our view has some similarities to it, is what's called the axiarchic view of ultimate explanation for existence, which you find in Plato, and which John Leslie has elaborated recently and is also defended by a philosopher at Oxford called Hugh Rice, that reality exists because it is good that it should do so. Now, it's not clear that if you're looking for ultimate explanations, that that isn't a possible candidate. I mean, ultimate explanations are going to be very special, by the way, because they're supposed to be explaining everything. And I mean, most of the time, what we're familiar with is explanations of some things in terms of other things and so on. But in this theological context, we're doing something very bold and thinking about ultimate explanations of the whole, and they are going to be of unique types. So it sounds like the reason that, at least of course, all I've heard is a sentence, so I can't act like I have a full understanding of the depth of that argument. But the way that I view existence is something like a system. It is an existing system of things that all interact. But it would be difficult for me to think there is a principle, there's like a system principle that exists by itself. So something like what is inherently good is the explanation for the system. It sounds like, well, you still have this principle of what is good being the generator of existing things. Where does that principle come from? Well, yes. It looks as if the good in itself is somehow too abstract to be an ultimate efficient cause of anything. So that's why, on the account that I'm giving, the ultimate efficient cause is a fact that has to do with things that are completely concrete, namely the actual realization of the supreme good within reality. But it certainly is something about the concrete nature of the system explains why it exists at all. As an explanation or as a causal explanation? So is it the cause of it or is it just the explanation of it? Well, it depends. It's not the productive cause. It's the explanation of its actuality, which is what an efficient cause has to be. Okay, so is there no, would we say there is no productive cause? No productive cause, no. I mean, of course productive causes are absolutely essential to get concrete realizations of the supreme good within the system, but there's no overall productive cause of that system. That's the view. Now we think that as a matter of fact, this idea is quite familiar within Christian thinking as a matter of fact because remember that in the first chapter of John it is said of the word with God from the beginning that without him was not anything made that was made. Right? But that word is given birth, so to speak, within the system. And so for example, you get doctrines like Mary being the Theotokos, you know, the bearer of God, or so that she actually gives birth to her most wonderful creator. Right? So this looks very bootstrapping in terms of productive causation. But what we're rarely saying is the one who is the ultimate explanation for her very existence is one who depends on her to be given life. Right? And Jesus is said to be root and flower of Jesse's stem. Right? So he's descended from Jesse. Right? But he is the root of that whole. You know? So this kind of idea is not sort of theologically outrageous, although it's sort of philosophically rather challenging, but I think also quite exciting. It sort of sends shivers down the back of one's spine. Well, this is a perfect segue. This is a perfect segue from philosophy, theology, and epistemology. So my disposition is to think that I'm pretty much all in the philosophy basket where I have experienced love and part of my love experience what totally changed my world to you in many ways. I thought, in a sense, this seems like an explanation for why anything exists. It's hard to explain, but in that state I was thinking, this is true. This is what you're talking about. Right? However, that doesn't come with any theology. I'm trying to piece together just rationally, philosophically, how can I understand this and make sense of it without including any tradition, any orthodoxy, any theology. If there's good stuff in the theology, I want to extract it and try to make sense of it. But with most people who are religious that I've spoken with, either pastors or theologians, the central is this concept of faith. And you brought it up. You used a phrase earlier, which was in Latin, but it's... I don't remember exactly... Fidei's Quirin's Intellectum. Yes. And what was the translation of that? Faith, seeking understanding, which kind of gives a priority to faith. Yes. But nevertheless emphasizes the importance of intellectual understanding. So can we talk about that? Sure. Because if I could reverse it, that would be my position is seeking understanding and if it leads to faith, okay, but only if you understand why. So let's talk about faith. First of all, we should start with definitions. What do you mean by faith? Because I know in my circles growing up, there was a base-level conception of faith, which is essentially blind faith or belief in the absence of any reasons whatsoever. And then I've also heard people say, no, no, faith is something like trust. It's a reasoned trust. What do you mean by faith? Right. Well, if we can articulate some sort of religious view of the world, which is what we've really been doing, right, we've been putting forward an interpretation of theism that might make sense of it without postulating this omnipotent, omnibenevolent personal agent who's superintending everything. So now we've switched to the epistemological and we're asking, well, what reason might we have for believing that such a view of the world is true? Now, when you ask me what I think faith is, I think the first thing I want to say is that what's really central is not so much the state of believing that something is true, the psychological state of having the attitude towards a proposition that it's true, right, although I don't want to leave that out of the picture, but I think the core of it is much more like trusting something and I would characterize it simply as practical commitment to a certain proposition that articulates a view of the world, where, of course, I mean, if this is going to be a religious view of the world, it surely must be something that makes a difference and indeed a profound difference to the way one lives one's life, right? So if we say that what's at the core of this is making and presumably continually renewing, perhaps in certain ways, revising a commitment to a certain world view that has implications for how you live your life, right? There's a question of is it justifiable to do that, right? And under what conditions is it justifiable? Well, it might be said since this world view is purporting to tell us what reality is like, you know, what is this reality of which we're a part and with which we're engaging when we act? We really need to have adequate evidence that this is true, right? And in general, you know, it's pretty important that when you, in practice, commit yourself to some things being the case, you've got good reason for thinking that that really is the case, certainly in any situation where it's going to matter to yourself and to other people how you act, right? So obviously, caring about evidence is very important. But I think in this religious context, there's a bit of a problem with that because what we're dealing with is a total view of the world that orients your whole life, right? And which seems to be sort of presupposed by any assessment of any evidence that you've got, right? What I think John Hick calls a total interpretation of reality or I like to call it a highest-order framing principle, a way of framing things. And if it's a highest-order framing principle, then it doesn't seem as if there's any sort of standing point outside it. You either sort of buy into it or you don't, right? And so, unfortunately, the evidentialist imperative don't commit yourself until you've got adequate evidence, seems just to be inapplicable. However worthy that imperative is, it seems to be inapplicable to this context. And this is an argument which is famously set out, you know, by William James in his lecture, 1896 lecture, The Will to Believe, which I've certainly been very influenced by and have thought a lot about. And I think what he's saying is, in a situation where the evidence can't decide that it be something bizarre about insisting that you mustn't decide, but eternally remain undecided, right? And he thinks that it can then be reasonable and justifiable, both epistemically and morally, to commit yourself if you have the resources to do so, which will be a sort of, whether you do have the resources to do so, will be a matter of kind of historical accident. You know, so that a Christian, under this circumstances, says, well, I haven't got rationally compelling evidence that would require anybody in my situation to commit to Christianity. There are other world views, there are other total interpretations that will actually make coherent sense of it all as well, right? But given that I've been brought up in this, and given that, you know, it engages with my passion or self, right, and has something inspiring about it, right, it can be legitimate for me to commit myself beyond what any evidence could guarantee and take it to be true in the way I live my life. And now that, now finally come back to faith, that is what I think the step of faith is. It does involve, in a certain sense, going beyond evidence, though in a situation where you're certainly not going contrary to any evidence, so you're not going to be able to use this, for example, to defend committing yourself to a form of faith that, say, insists on literal young world creationism, for example. So can I ask a few short questions just on that? Yes. Okay. So would this be a fair way to rephrase what you're saying, that in your conception, you're kind of talking about ultimate, from an ultimate worldview perspective, the biggest way that you interpret, even the way that you interpret evidence, you have beliefs about how you interpret evidence. So the beliefs about how you interpret evidence can't necessarily come from evidence per se. There's a prior step. Before you even evaluate the evidence, you have some kind of worldview you're bringing to the table. Is that fair to say? Yes, that's right. Although, of course, that worldview will be sort of subject to quite an important objective test, as to whether it manages to hold it all together. I mean, it's claiming to be this highest order framing principle, this total interpretation. Well, does it actually do the job? Right. And if it sort of fragments things and says, oh, well, we have to discount all this scientific evidence about evolution or something of this kind, then I would say it's not going to be satisfactory. But doesn't that imply, then, that our epistemological criteria still lay outside all the other claims? So you have this kind of hierarchy. You can either view it the way that I recently wrote a book on logic and basic ideas in epistemology. And the analogy I gave was of a tree, where a tree, you don't have branches and leaves floating by themselves. All the leaves are connected to the branches, the branches are connected to the trunk, the trunk grows out of its roots. And the roots are, I would say, logic and epistemology, and then you get more derivative beliefs that kind of flow from that. Wouldn't that what you just said about if your faith goes against the scientific evidence, then you have to kind of revise that fundamental worldview? Wouldn't that imply that there are these roots or this fundamental position of maybe even rationalism that I'm going to try to follow wherever the evidence leads using my reason and application of logic? That really is fundamental, and all the religious stuff is derivative. It's like part of the leaves and the branches. Well, I think I agree that these rational requirements are fundamental, but I don't think it follows that the religious stuff is somehow derivative and dependent on that, because of course there might be reasons why the religious perspective, because that's the total interpretation, values the fundamental rationality that we find ourselves, so to speak, given in our very nature, right? So that we would see that. So from that point of view, it's by the grace of God that we're able to do this. So I don't think that is putting religion in the derivative position if you see what I mean. So this question will get right at it. Are you saying that the base-level orientation of pursuing the truth with our minds is fundamentally based on faith? Is that how you're using the term? Well, I mean, there are specific faith world views from which that is an absolutely fundamental element as to what we are and what we need to pursue in order to fulfill the purposes for which we exist, etc. So you can't have, would you say it's illusory to think that you have rationality prior to faith belief? Well, I mean, obviously people may not consciously be committing themselves to a faith belief and be patently concerned about matters of rationality. So if you mean you can't have rationality prior to faith belief, I mean, so that would suggest that that claim must be false in a certain sense. Now, I think that the point that I'm wanting to make here is that, of course, people can share a concern about rationality independently of what their faith beliefs are. And there may be faith beliefs out there which attempt to give human rationality some very subordinate place or which are suspicious of it and which actually advocate a form of faith that accepts things that would be judged universally as contrary to reason. There could be such things out there. But there are other faith beliefs, the ones that I'm attracted to which say precisely the opposite. So what I'm concerned to say is there's a possibility of an overall interpretation that you accept by faith that sees reason and what goes beyond it as absolutely in harmony and understands the roots of all our capacities, our capacities for reason and our capacities to accept faith as all depending on divine grace. So the question that I have is if you're looking at these different world views, these different faith world views as they're presented, some emphasize rationality, some are irrational or explicitly. How do you choose? That's right. So obviously the account of faith that I've given raises the question under what conditions is it justifiable to accept in practice a particular world view from beyond the evidence? And I've written a book about this which was published now 10 years ago now called Believing by Faith. And it really is a defense of the kind of feedasin that William James defended. And here we're using feedasin as a position that takes faith beyond the idea of commitment beyond the evidence seriously rather than just dismissing it as obviously irrational. It's not feedasin in the sense of a position that rejects rationality altogether. But a really important question is what are the constraints on this? What conditions is it justifiable? And what I argued in my book was that at this point we really have to bring in ethical considerations. We have to assess what's motivating our commitment given that it's not based on a rational assessment of evidence and can't be. Well, what James calls the passion motivation for it I think has to be of an ethically acceptable kind. But the content of the world view has to display a world about which we can make the judgement. The world's being like that would be a good way of being. Now, of course, this is now going to raise questions about the epistemology of where you get your fundamental values from and of course those fundamental values are going to have to be part of what's incorporated in this total interpretation. So there are worries that my account gets into about possibly a religious world view kind of endorsing itself by its own values, right? Even though from an sort of external point of view we would say it's not acceptable. So you can sort of imagine somebody whose religious world view involved gods of a Nazi kind because some people have interpreted Nazism as a kind of religion. So the gods who think that human destiny is fulfilled by ensuring racial purity and making the highest form of man the only one that's allowed to flourish or something of this kind. And obviously from the values that are inherent in that a world like that would be very good. And yet we want to say it's a monstosity. So I think here we have to appeal to just as we must appeal to the human endeavor of understanding the natural world through science which I think belongs to humans generally and isn't a purely cultural product but maybe some people would think that was very controversial. Similarly we have to think that there is a developing human consensus about ethical values against which we can judge particular commitments. But of course those, I mean that developing dialogue about ethical reality so to speak is something to which the various religious traditions will be contributing. So in other words the thing that I want to say is where we can't settle it by evidence we can at least consider whether the view of the world that it's putting forward can be judged to be true. And there is a possibility of endorsing that from a perspective that isn't just completely internal to that religious world view. And so I think criteria of that kind are going to be needed and I would think then that when we go back to say a kind of world view that really fragments things and says that okay there's ordinary rationality here but by faith you've got to contradict what is still. I mean I would think that that has a defect in that very compartmentalization. There's a kind of integrationist value which I think we ought to endorse. But of course at this point one can only make judgments about what you think the objective position is nobody's got any final authority to say what it actually is. Okay so let me try to... Sorry there was rather a lot there. That's okay. Okay so let me try to rephrase that and see if this is a fair restatement of your position. That in the analysis of a world view your biggest possible interpretation of explaining how things are the way that they are trying to make sense of the world. That includes perspectives on rationality and logical reasoning in science. And if there are multiple world views some more rational than others than the way that one judges what world view to take is based on ethical beliefs and those ethical beliefs are ultimately judged in a similar way that scientific consensus is judged. Yes. So it's humans trying to discover ethical beliefs and then from there we get the world view. That's right. Now what would you say because my thought is to say well you still... Well there's three layers of criticism that I would intuitively think. One is people can be wrong. So that doesn't mean you're going to have an accurate world view. No. That's right. The other would be that still seems like it puts the rational analysis even if it's like group rational analysis trying to discover ethical truths it still seems like that's outside the system that's still outside the world view to say I value the consensus of humans in what they think sound ethics are. That still seems like it's saying this is my rational judgment that this is the way we arrive at ethical truths. So doesn't that kind of put the cart before the hearse versus my position would be to say before we get any complex world view before we start talking about science or groups of people getting into ethics the ethics don't come first. The epistemology comes first. The rationality comes first. The rationality is the thing that is prior. It's not the ethics that's prior. Rationality is prior to the ethics. What do you think about that? Well that can't really be so because if you're valuing rationality that is itself a value stance isn't it? But the value stance is still not prior to the epistemological claims, right? So you still need some kind of analysis of where you get your values and I would say you can get those values from rational analysis. That's a possibility and of course famously that's the possibility that Kant pursues because basically what he's saying is that if only we exercise our practical reason consistently that will then produce substantial moral principles which is an extremely exciting idea but it doesn't actually seem to work. I think it turns out that he's always building into rationality certain presupposition that he doesn't kind of notice that the things that he just thinks are given by rationality are actually rationally contestable. So I would myself tend to be a little bit more humane about rationality. So I suppose I'm not confident that the values can just come out of rationality itself. What do you think the values come from? I think they come from a certain fundamental set of values a kind of given again this is a somewhat humane thought just because of the kind of beings that we are. So they come out of human nature or something like that. But then of course I think that although that gives us a good grounding they don't actually give us intuitions that rise up as far as what the supreme good is. And so I think we can only get values by revelation. And so that ultimately we do need to appeal to one of these religious world views that makes a rather specific claim about what the revelation actually is. I think that's unavoidable. One of the things that I'm interested in and I haven't explored this enough is I think that revelation is a much more central epistemological category than philosophers have been prepared to admit. I mean the general view that we have of revelation is that it's something really quite wacky out there where a group of people imagine that they're hearing the voice of God or something of this kind. And I would want to defend a sort of epistemology of revelation that makes it much more central. I love that. That's an excellent place to end. My own experience you could put in that context and say when one experiences love as deep as I have experienced it and other people have experienced it one will experience revelation in that sense. That's how I would put it. Yes I believe that's true. Well thank you so much for the conversation. This has been fantastic. Good. Thank you. Alright that was my interview with Professor John Bishop of the University of Auckland. Hope you guys enjoyed it. I loved that conversation. As I'm pursuing what it means for me to have a positive belief in some kind of God I'm really interested in the non-personal conceptions. There's a great deal in this interview that obviously I can't wait to break down because there's so much material. But also I found personally compelling. I thought it was very beautiful this idea of thinking of the universe as a love generation machine. I like that. I have to think about it. So what do you guys think? Do you have any non-standard conceptions of God that you find persuasive or do you think it's all just a crock-a-hoohy? Let me know what you think in the comments on the YouTube channel youtube.com slash Steve Patterson and if you haven't already subscribed up there make sure to subscribe because I'm releasing in addition to these podcasts and narrated articles I'm also releasing regular weekly YouTube videos which are short and punchy talking about issues that I'm not talking about on the show. So that's all for today. I'll talk to you again soon as we continue the pursuit of truth.