 Hello my friends and welcome to the 91st episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Got an awesome episode for you this week talking with Mr. Thomas E. Woods Jr. Yes, that's Tom Woods of The Tom Woods Show. I've been intending to have him on pretty much since the beginning of this podcast. We finally made it happen and we had an awesome conversation. One of the benefits of having your own podcast is that you could have talked to people about whatever the heck you want to talk to them about. There were two big areas that I really wanted to talk to Tom about. One was his own personal career starting as an academic in the academic system. He's got prestigious degrees from Harvard and Columbia. And then he started down his own career path of intellectual entrepreneurship. He's created almost 1200 podcast episodes, which is an unfathomably large amount of podcast episodes. He's written a ton of books and he's made a very successful career being an independent intellectual. So I wanted to talk to him about kind of his personal story, how he got involved in it, because it's obviously relevant to myself. And then the other thing I really wanted to talk to him about is Catholicism. Tom's a prominent Catholic. He's written several books on Catholicism and the history of the Catholic Church. And I want to know about it. There's lots of Catholics out there who I respect, who I don't know very much about Catholicism. And I would love to be able to pick their brain, Tom, as one of them. So we had an awesome conversation about how he got involved in Catholicism, why he ended up there, what his thoughts are about what's happening in Catholicism and kind of the big picture history of the Catholic Church and its relationship with Western civilization. And I got to ask him about one of my biggest sticking points, not just with Catholicism, but with any organized religion. And I guess that's the organized part of it. Or the idea of any religious or intellectual establishment or organization or hierarchy, for me is hard to square with the pursuit of truth. I just see over and over that hierarchy and the pursuit of truth don't go together. So I got to ask him about the Pope and how he conceives of papal authority and whether or not the truth stands apart from what the Pope declares. So if that's something that you're interested in, you are going to love this episode. Before we start, I do want to give a special shout out to all of the patrons over at patreon.com. Slash Steve Patterson. Thank you very much for donating and showing your support for the creation of content like this. And if you like this content and you want to show your support, you can head over to patreon.com. Slash Steve Patterson as well and chip in just a dollar or two whenever a new piece of content like this is released either a podcast or an article or a video up on YouTube. Thanks everybody for your support. And I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Tom Woods. Mr. Tom Woods, thank you so much for coming on Patterson in Pursuit today. Very glad to be here, Steve. So before we start, I want to tell you a story because I think you'll appreciate this as a true story. When I was about eight, we had a book in my house that was called The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. And I didn't know it at the time, but apparently turns out you're the author of this book. But I grow up being homeschooled. My brother and I both loved this book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. And so about a decade passes, we both get interested in libertarianism and Austrian economics. Some of your work comes up and I didn't make the connection. I thought that you were doing one of my favorite lectures was the unspoken history of the depression that wasn't in the 1920s. And so I think, oh, wow, this is really high quality content. Fast forward a few more, a few years later, and we ended up meeting in Mises University way back in day. We played some chess a couple of times. And then it was like, hang on a second, I see The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History in this bookstore. It's got Tom Woods. Is Tom Woods the guy that was the author of this book from my childhood? And I realized it and my mind kind of exploded. So it is a special delight to you. Well, I appreciate that. And of course, at that moment, you also realized not only is it that guy, but I can blow that guy off the chessboard nine times out of ten. Well, yeah. And we had good games. We had good games. Yeah, we did. Yeah. Fast forward a few more years later, and I get to now talk to you on my podcast. So thank you. I'm glad you're doing a podcast. I'm glad you, you know, it's something you love. You took the bull by the horns, you said, this is something I'm going to do. There are so many people, you know who you are out there, who are sitting on the sidelines, fidgeting and wondering if they should do it. And you just said, Doc Gonnett, I was made for this. So I'm glad. Good for you. Well, thank you. I want to start this interview off is talking about your career and podcasting. So I got a lot of things I really want to talk to you about, but this is kind of one of something I'm personally interested in. It's very relevant to the stuff I'm doing, but I consider you an intellectual entrepreneur. I like that terminology, people that are making a career in the world of ideas outside of academia, outside of the formal academic system. So how did this start? I know that you have a prestigious degrees. You went to Harvard, you went to Columbia. Why, when did this first seeds get planted in your head that, hey, maybe I can, maybe I got to make a career outside of the formal structures of the academy? Well, first of all, if you hear a little extraneous noise, they're building a house across the street. Now, when they were building my house, that was noise that everyone needed to tolerate. But now when somebody else builds a house, I wish they'd knock off that racket. Anyway, I did not think of it for a long, long time. I thought of myself as the anti-entrepreneur. I had no instincts for this at all. I liked the comfort and security of getting that paycheck. And I hadn't really had particularly unpleasant bosses. My department chairman had been a fine person. Then I was at the Mises Institute for four years and, gee, what a slave driver Lou Rockwell is, you know, basically telling me, Tom, you work on what you think is an important priority and we'll back you. OK, or occasionally I would get asked, we're releasing a new addition of Mises liberalism. Would you write the forward? Well, I guess I can carve some time out of my day for a project like that. So it actually is rather surprising even to me that eight years after that I'm doing what I'm doing. But it really is a case of necessity being the mother of invention because we wound up leaving Auburn, Alabama in 2010. And it was partly because it's just it's a great college town. But we had really young children and there wasn't much for them to do. You had to drive an hour each way to find anything for them. It's gotten a little bit better because a lot of Auburn grads are now settling in Auburn and now they want things for their kids. But anyway, it just it wasn't quite a fit family wise, even though professionally it was everything you could ask for. So I realized that, well, OK, now I'm not collecting a salary. And I'm going to have to support myself in different ways. And OK, the first thing I started doing was teaching courses for the Mises Institute through their Mises Academy. And that was fine. But mainly it was write books and travel around. And that's not a fun career because I mean, it is fun, but it's not stable because your income is extremely erratic. Obviously, with an author, you get a decent advance and that will hold you over. But you don't know if the next one you're not going to know if you have a next one in you. Now, don't get me wrong, even that I consider to be a pretty good existence given that 99 percent of authors don't get advances that are good enough to live on. So that was good, too. But I wanted something that was stable, but I didn't know how to create it. And one day, somebody I don't want to mention his name, but who's an extremely seasoned marketer, wanted to know how I was monetizing my so-called brand. And I thought, I don't think this is like Chinese, you're talking to me. I don't know what you're talking about, my brand. He said, well, look, you've built up a following. Why don't you provide your following with something that they want and that they'll gladly pay for? Isn't that what, you know, capitalists do? Isn't it the people you theorize about 24 hours a day and you come up with moral justifications for that the precise thing you're not doing? How about that? I thought, well, I mean, what could I have than anybody would? And then he said, well, they like your books, apparently, because you sold a whole boatload of them. Why don't you package that into something? How about you teach courses? People like listening to you. So that's where I came up with the idea for libertyclassroom.com. And I'm not an expert on everything. So I brought in people who have expertise in areas that I don't. And I created a subscription site where people get like the education that we feel like we should have gotten, but never did. And it's taken off like crazy. I just had, I guess it's now this year, over six years running, not slowing down at all. To the contrary, it's doing super well. So at that point, I realized, now, hold on a minute. Now I have something that means I don't have to fly all over the country and leave my family doing speaking gigs or whatever. I can have a more comfortable sedentary kind of existence. And also it has continuity built into it. That's another thing you're looking for is continuity. And that's true also of donations, like with something like Patreon. It's great if somebody wants to send you 50 bucks as a one-shot deal, but it's better if they want to send it to you every month. And so the continuity aspect is something that an online entrepreneur needs to look for. And so I was glad that that was part of this. So from there, I started to think, well, what are other things that I can do? So I worked on the Ron Paul Homeschool curriculum and I have that up at ronpaulhomeschool.com. That's, Liberty Classroom was kind of, I always envisioned that as being for adult enrichment, for adults who feel like, I didn't get the knowledge I should have gotten. Liberty Classroom, the Ron Paul curriculum is more, it's a traditional K through 12 curriculum, but with some tweaks to it. I mean, you're gonna learn business in this thing. You're gonna learn ad copywriting. I mean, you're gonna learn skills that nobody is teaching you in a brick and mortar school, period. You are not learning this stuff. So it'll help people, not just in giving them good American history, but in giving them real genuine life skills. And so I promote that, but I also promote it as an affiliate, because my audience, look, my audience likes Ron Paul and my audience likes homeschooling. And I am promoting a thing called the Ron Paul Homeschool curriculum. So I realized that if I have things that I'm proud of that are a natural fit for my audience, I can promote them in good conscience. Then I come up with bonus packages if you order them through me. So now these people get free bonuses. I get a commission. The curriculum gets a new customer. There's nobody unhappy about this. So I've gotten good at stuff like this, I have to say, to the point where if I never gave another speech or wrote another book, it wouldn't matter to my bottom line. So now it actually frees me to now go give speeches at places that can't afford to pay me. Because in the past, I mean, it would have been nice. I would donate here and there. I would do pro bono stuff for people I liked, but I couldn't do that all the time because it wouldn't be fair to my kids. But now, because I'm not flying around like a nut, because I am comfortable and I can choose to do something that I just deeply believe in. Like I'll look at something and say, I need to be there. And I can just hop on a plane and go and not even worry about it. So when you're working, I know you spend a huge amount of time on creating your podcast and you've created all these lessons. How much time do you have to do research nowadays? Is it mainly you accumulated a massive amount of knowledge and then you're disseminating that knowledge? Are you still out there in the trenches researching stuff for future projects? I would say the research has trickled at this point. While I was working on the Ron Paul curriculum, I did nothing but read, nothing. Every day I would go out to lunch by myself at a diner and I would open up a huge history book and I would just start marking it up notes. I would look for anecdotes that would spice up the lessons, whatever, but I worked like crazy. And then at night I would be reading every time I had a spare moment I would be reading. So I feel like I've kind of put in as much as I can put in for a while. And so now basically most of my learning actually comes through the Tom Wood Show because preparing for these episodes, I read a lot of books. I can't read every book cover to cover because it's just not enough time, especially with five children, but I still do a lot of prep and I do read a lot of them cover to cover. And so I'm still actively, sometimes people will say, well, what are you reading these days? And I feel like I have to say, I'm not really reading anything. And then I stop and say, well, yes I am. I'm reading all these books for my show. So I learn a lot about a lot of different topics all the time and I bring experts on who can teach me things. And I ask them things that I wanna know or I play devil's advocate in ways that I think will elicit a lot of good information. And that has actually worked out really well for me, I think, and the listening audience. Yeah, this is something, this is a new career avenue that I think once people realize it's possible is gonna totally be a game changer for independent intellectuals who maybe don't have the psychological traits to really make it in the academy. I'm thinking of course of myself. I have very little patience for nonsense and so I would have very little patience for the academic bureaucracy. However, I'm interested in interpretations of quantum mechanics and alternative theoretical foundations for mathematics and like super nerdy high level stuff that nobody thinks is monetizable but what I found is actually people are interested. There is an audience for intellectual content that doesn't have the stamp of approval from the academy to my surprise when I started this. Last month I was in New York City or I guess a month and a half ago for a debate between Bob Murphy and George Selgen over fractional reserve banking and whether it creates instability in market economies and the room was packed. And I thought this is one of the happiest moments of my life that the room is packed for this nerdy topic. So it goes to show there are people out there who will come out of the woodwork for you in niches you could hardly imagine at this moment. It's true and the thing that I'm enjoying and just starting to transition out of now is the amount of time that I have to research is grotesque. I mean really, if I were to think of life as like a professional philosopher, you have to teach classes, you have to teach courses to students that don't care, you have to grade their work, you gotta deal with the bureaucracy, you gotta publish things you don't wanna publish, research things you don't wanna research just so that you can publish or perish. Thinking oh that's torture. Versus the life of the independent intellectual is like I get up when I went, I think about some things, I hop in the tub, I think about some things. You know, I go on, I read things about the topics that I'm thinking about, I write some things, I do this podcast and then I think some more. It's like it's almost close to the ideal setup for being an independent intellectual if you're interested in the world of ideas. And I almost feel bad about it because it's like these poor schmucks trapped in the academy, they have no idea what is possible for them if they just were entrepreneurs. Well, sometimes when I'm swimming in the pool at 2 p.m. with my kids, I have these guilt feelings. But on the other hand, I remind myself of the years and years in which the people who have the traditional nine to five job were going home and relaxing and having dinner and spending time with family. And I mean, I always spent time with family. That was never an issue, but still I was always in work mode and just frantically nonstop getting that project done. So I don't feel too bad about relaxing but the nice thing is the schedule. I mean, I could do something at eight in the morning, I could do it at eight at night, I could do it at 3 a.m. I could do it pretty much anywhere, except the moon, I suppose, but I could do it anywhere where there's an internet connection. If I go on vacation and I just haven't been able to catch up before the vacation, when everybody goes to bed, I can stay up for an extra half an hour, an hour getting a few things done. I mean, if there's any plausible, remotely plausible way that you can make this kind of lifestyle happen for yourself, then you owe it to yourself to look into it, to think about what could be my area, what do I bring to the table that's unique? The key thing you have to learn about is how to build an audience, that's the thing, because you can be as interesting a person as anyone's ever met, but the problem is, are they gonna meet you? And now that's a separate conversation. I gotta get good at that, but even just a Google search, how to build an audience, I bet you'll have plenty to learn from and master, all the information you ever need on that. So the last question I wanna ask you on this topic is kind of about the quality of the research and the ideas that you have access to when you're not operating in the academy, because a lot of people think, well, okay, yeah, you can make a go at it, but you have to really water down your content and you can't really engage with the highest level of theorizing. What I found after getting out of college is the ideas that I have access to in my own research are 10,000 times more advanced and subtle than the crap I was reading in college. So it's literally the case, I'm not tooting my own horn here, this is a factual statement. It's literally the case that after about two weeks of independent research, you can have more specialized knowledge than a PhD in some field if that is what your interest is in. And they may have a lot of factual, and they might be able to repeat textbooks, but all of their knowledge comes from textbooks, which is incredibly thin. There are 10 different alternative frameworks of the foundations for mathematics I can think of off the top of my head that a PhD in mathematics is literally not going to even encounter one of them. So that's the way I see it is like, oh man, actually you get better quality content by yourself outside the world of the academy. What has your experience been? Do you feel like you really have to cheapen and water down the things that you're producing in order to have a career at this? Oh no, no, no, not at all. And it really astonishes me the topics I get away with, it really does. I could do an episode on Fraction Reserve Banking and everyone would want to listen to that one. You know, sometimes it's the fun ones I have to beg them to listen to. So it's the opposite of what you would think. So also I think your experience is very much like mine. You've been able to find those academics whom you do want to talk to, whom you do find interesting and they're just delighted that somebody finds them interesting. Or found their work. Yeah, right, who are you, right? And I'm able to do that with the show. I find people who are doing good academic work who may be obscure, but who are dying to share what they know with a literate audience. And that's been great. But also I've been able to talk to just creative people outside of academia whom I wouldn't have encountered very likely if I'd been within, you know, in the ivory tower. People, like for example, the creator of Mines.com which is a really interesting new social media platform that's got a million members and they're trying to be a anti-censorship and an anti-crazy algorithm, kind of like Facebook, a platform. And that's hard to do because a lot of people have tried and failed because you need widespread adoption. No one's gonna join if nobody's there, but if nobody's there, nobody's gonna join. How do you break through that? So that's fascinating to me. Or Gret Glyer is this young guy graduate of Grove City College lived in Malawi for three years and two out of those three years, Malawi was the single poorest country in the world. But this guy, I mean, puts his money where his mouth is. I mean, he lived in Malawi and if he had his way, he would be back living in Malawi but instead he's running an app, the Donor C app and he's running this from the United States. It's an app that helps people engage in micro philanthropy not like building hospitals for 10 villages but helping that one kid get a hearing aid or helping that one kid get eye surgery. And the beauty of it is you then get a video as the donor or a donor, a video showing that child seeing or hearing for the first time or that widow walking into her new house. Because my folks actually, this actually was a project in Malawi. A lot of my listeners banded together. We had heard the story of a widow. She was raising several of her grandchildren and one of them had some health problem and she had literally no home. And so within a few days, our people had donated enough money to build her a house. So we got a tour of the house. They walked us through, we saw the whole house. We got the thank you, naming every donor by name. That's amazing. And this is a guy who he's not part of any giant bureaucratic behemoth where 20 cents on the dollar gets to the needy. He's just a guy who lived in Malawi and who built this thing. And that's the kind of person I get to talk to every day. Right, and that's all made possible by the internet. That's fantastic. And one of the, so this is a great segue because one of the pure ideas that I've had access to because of the internet comes from doing a little research in preparation for this conversation. I know that you have written a few books about Catholicism or the history of Catholicism, but I stumbled across some videos that you produced called How the Church Built Western Civilization. I think it's a 12-part series that was done and it kind of goes through in debunks, various myths that you pick up about how, for example, the Middle Ages was just this complete dark age where there was no intellectual work that was done. And then finally, because of the Enlightenment, we broke the shackles of the Catholic Church, the grips it had over our minds, and then we started intellectual progress again. That's something that you kind of pick up as you just have a general history, people's general historical understanding of the world is that story and of course it's total bunk, it's nonsense. And so it's fascinating, it's fascinating to go through this. But I wanna ask you about some of those historical ideas and then some about your own personal beliefs here. So to start, can you give the summarization of your analysis of the story that the Catholic Church, as everybody knows, is a, has been historically an anti-intellectual and anti-scientific organization that has kind of oppressed those individuals who are trying to do honest scientific work. And it was only until we had the Enlightenment that we broke free of that and out of it came modern science that if we didn't break the shackles of the Catholic Church, we essentially wouldn't have had all the benefits that we think of being like high-tech, Western civilization. Right. Well, this is the biggest myth to debunk because everybody thinks he knows this, we've all heard this. And that's why in my book of the same, I have a book called How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. And the longest chapter in there is the science chapter because I know I have the toughest road to hoe there. The series you're talking about actually was on television. It was broadcast by EWTN, the Global Catholic Network. And they invited me to do this television series on this topic and they built me this beautiful set. And I was just on top of the world, fancy cameras moving in and out the whole time. Yeah. And the set was like a medieval laboratory and I, wow, you did this just for me. That's amazing. Anyway, on the scientific thing, I've given so many talks on this, but the long and the short of it is when you look at what let's say the mainstream of the history of science is saying, they are actually not saying what the average person thinks they must be saying, which is that, and this is always argued at a very low level, religion and science are at war with each other. Right, right. I mean, it's a little bit more to the question than that. That was the consensus that developed, well, certainly in the Enlightenment, but then we also have two volume work by Andrew Dixon White, who was the president of Cornell University, came out in the late 19th century on the so-called warfare between theology and science in Western civilization. And that set the tone for the way people thought about these issues up until the mid 20th century. And then in the mid 20th century, we got a whole variety of historians of science who were Catholic, non-Catholic, anti-Catholic, whatever, but the consensus was this is not the right way to think about it. I mean, first of all, there's something a little bit implausible about the idea that Western civilization where science really has its birth. Yeah, you find some science, you find some investigations in other places, but in terms of science as an ongoing enterprise that is cumulative and continues to move upward and isn't suddenly interrupted, Western civilization is where it's at. Now, is it really plausible to say that happened completely in spite of the most influential institution at the heart of that civilization? I mean, it's not impossible, but on the surface of it, there's something implausible about it. So there have been a couple of ways that scholars have looked at this to try to figure out what was really happening here. One is to look at empirical examples of people who were obviously churchmen and yet were pioneers in the sciences. So whether it's geology or Egyptology or atomic science or whatever, you can find that the father of each of these sciences is some priest somewhere. And I give example, Father Giambattista Riccioli measuring the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body. And you just go on and on and on. You can name all these Jesuits who were great scientists. In fact, there was a historian of mathematics in the 19th century who compiled a list of the greatest mathematicians from 900 BC to 1800 AD. So 27 centuries. And he found that 5% of the greatest mathematicians ever were Jesuits. Now, consider the Jesuits were only around since 1540 and then they were suppressed for a while. So it's a very small window that somehow one out of 20 of them is one of the greatest. And there are 35 lunar craters named after Jesuit scientists and mathematician. I mean, the study of earthquakes has been called the Jesuit science. And in fact, to this day, the American Geophysical Union awards a medal to an exceptional young geophysicist. And that's named after Father J.B. McElwain who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first textbook on seismology in America in 1936. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So you have those empirical examples. But beyond that, there's the more general question of what is it? Is there something in the Catholic worldview that is not actually at war with the scientific method but that is consonant with it? And of course, one thing that you hear and I'm sure you've encountered this line of argument is first of all, the fact that the universe is intelligible to our minds. And secondly, that we expect to find patterns in it. And now I can't offhand because I haven't been in chemistry for so long, I can't remember the atomic number for the element Scandium dug on it. I can't remember the atomic number. Even if when I was in chemistry, I don't think I would have known, I'll be honest with you, I wouldn't have known that. But there's such an interesting strife, was it? I don't know if it was, well, I can't remember the exact person. Yes, it's got to, it's Mendeleev, right? Who compiles the periodic table of the elements. And the idea that I'm trying to get across in the chapter that ties into this Mendeleev story. Now, of course, the idea is that the Christian worldview leads you to expect to find patterns. Because I mean, there is one of the so-called Deutero canonical books, the book of wisdom where we read that God has ordered all things according to measure, number and weight. And there were a lot of the early fathers very fond of, St. Augustine was fond of citing this. And what they took that to mean was that God was like a great geometer. So for all you folks who hated math, well, nuts to you, God loves it. And the idea is that therefore what we expect to find are mathematical relationships. Now, what exactly is science, to some degree, if not the reduction of qualitative phenomena to a quantitative understanding, right? To trying to understand things in terms of formulas that are constant over time. So we find that and we see this replicated and repeated by so many people who think about that question. And so for instance, people would say, yes, of course we know God can perform a miracle. But as St. Anselm said, God has an ordered power and an absolute power. Yeah, he has the absolute raw power to turn me into Elvis right now. But that would be beneath his dignity because normally he operates according to his ordered power where he builds this structure into the universe. Okay, so anyway, if you have this case of Mendeleev and he's setting out the periodic table and it's so elegant, the periodic table, right? Because you look at the columns and these elements have things in common. It works out great. But whatever that darn atomic number of scandium was. I think it's 21. Okay, it could be 21. All right, well, there's no element. He had, scandium hadn't been discovered. So he leaves a gap there. I mean, can you believe the gall of this God? He just says, well, look, there's gotta be an element. I just don't know what it is yet. So we're gonna skip that and go on. Now, what right do you have to do that? But it's when you're in this milieu that takes this for granted that of course the universe is not totally irrational. And by the way, there are civilizations like the ancient Babylonians, for example, that thought of the universe as being complete chaos. How's the scientific method gonna take root there when the whole point of the scientific method is that you can engage in experimentation, you do the same experiment under the same conditions, you're supposed to get the same results. That's how you verify or disconfirm hypotheses. You can't do that against a backdrop of chaos. Well, anyway, so Mendeleev dies and then later on they discover scandium and it goes right in that spot. So in other words, that's, he didn't have to give a philosophical rationale for what he was doing because everybody imbibed this from the cultural milieu in which they lived. I think that's a great example and I think that's just another case of philosophy. It's funny because that method of seeing a pattern and then seeing an absence and thinking that absence should be filled according to the pattern is itself, it's kind of preposterous. Right. Yeah, if you take certain assumptions about how you come up with theory for granted, but on the other hand, it's eminently reasonable. It's kind of like, it's funny, we don't have to get into this, but it's funny because this discussion actually kind of took place around the beginning of the 1900s. So I don't know how familiar you are with the history of physics, but there were discussions about whether or not reality is fundamentally probabilistic or deterministic. And this is where you probably bumped into some people who make very lofty claims about quantum physics. They'd make a really bad argument and then they'd go, oh, because quantum physics. A lot of that comes from this debate that was happening from like 1920 to 1950. The wrong people ended up winning, so the probabilistic people ended up winning, but you had sort of this idea paralleled. You had thinkers like Einstein, who to his death refused to accept the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics because he said this is totally nonsense. God doesn't play dice was his phrase. Right. An interesting example. And I'm pretty sure there's a quotation from Einstein where likewise where he says something along the lines that to some degree we have no right to assume that the universe is orderly, and yet there it is. Right, right. Well, so this is a great segue. So the questions about patterns and relations and formula and mathematical structure, they definitely, they're about metaphysics and they definitely hint at the idea of like a traditional theological conception of God. For you personally is when you have your beliefs about God and Catholicism and religious ideas, what is your understanding or your conception of what God is? Is it the case that you take the traditional approach and view it God is the great Geometer? Do you take, there's of course a million approaches in which it mean by God. Is it a more transcendental God is God something that's everywhere? Do you view God as being not just a Geometer but something that has a relationship with humans? Can God be something that's experienced? What do you mean? What does that term mean for you? Yeah. Well, okay, I do believe that a human being can experience God and can have mystical experiences but I don't rest my own belief on those because I don't want to, because who knows, maybe these people are crazy. You know, I don't want to rule that out. So, and in fact, it's interesting that in the, even the Protestants in colonial Massachusetts, one of the things they didn't like about Ann Hutchinson was that she claimed that God had basically spoken to her and told her certain things. And you would think based on the caricature we have of everything Christian that they would have all thought, oh, this is an amazing woman. She spoke to, they thought she's a loon, right? This isn't how it works. So anyway, I'm not in any way disparaging that. I do think that happens and I do think it's not something that's, let's say, confined to the saints. I think anybody can have that type of experience but although that, and in fact, I think there's a book by, it might be Robert Hugh Benson and it's called, it's either called the friendship of God or the friendship of Christ. And the idea there is that you, although God is transcendent and although he is unlike you in ways that are very important, the same time you are like him in ways that are very important in that you have an intellect and a will. And there is a way for you to have, and also that you should think in terms of friendship is really quite astonishing because nobody would have been friends with Zeus. Right, right, there's a kind of peership there. Right, exactly, exactly. I mean, even some of the own gods, I'm not sure how they felt about being friends with Zeus. So there's definitely, I don't want to disparage that aspect in my answer but I do want to say that what impresses me is that when I read, for example, Edward Phaser, who would be a great guy for your podcast, by the way, because he's gonna disagree with you on some of these religious questions, but in a way that you will find so enriching because you'll say, here's a smart guy who disagrees with me, who's not calling me a name and who is making me think in really challenging ways. That's why Steve Patterson exists. Well, Edward Phaser, FESER, just came out with a book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God. And he goes through proofs from Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, let's see, Aquinas and Leibniz. I may have said one twice, I can't remember, but anyway, it's a great book. But what tends to happen is that the old-timey proofs for God's existence either get mangled in translation or people never really studied them or they think they know what they were but they weren't really. And he gives them a really, really good exposition. And what impresses me about it is when you get done with the one of Thomas' proofs that he goes into, once you come to the conclusion that God exists based on this argument, and I did this in episode 272 of the Tom Wood Show, by the way, tomwoods.com.slash 272, I went through the argument, you can then from there derive some of the attributes of God. If you have, just stipulate for the sake of argument that you have followed the logical steps we've taken up to now in this metaphysical demonstration, then from that point, we can then say, well, therefore, there are certain characteristics of God that jump out at us. So for example, you can demonstrate that God must be one, that he would have to be all knowing that he would have to be immaterial, that he would have to be pure act. He would have no potentiality in him to become something else. Whereas water has a potential to become hot, the potential to be cold, he is all act, he's pure act. So there are certain things that basically, that he's good, he's one, he's omnipresent, he's all knowing, all powerful. These sorts of things that you just, that we associate with Western Theism, they flow so naturally from this demonstration, it's almost eerie. And then Thomas will say, now look, I can't now prove to you that the Trinity is who God is. That, there are some things that we know, in other words, there are three categories of knowledge that we can have about God. One of these categories comes from reason alone. Another category would come from reason, but also from faith. But so Thomas would ask, why would God give us the reasoning ability or to think through something we would know by faith? Or why does he tell us through faith or through revelation, something that we could know through reason? And he says, well the answer is some people are dumb and lazy. So he helps them out, even with things that he's already given them hints about. And then there are some things we could know only through divine revelation. There are some things about God that you can search through rocks and the sky, all you want, you're not gonna find the answers. And so he would say that there are some things about him I can't prove to you in this way. But I can give you a very strong and highly suggestive head start. I like that, I like that a lot. And in fact, that's not too far away from my own position. I do think that you can have a purely logical argument for the existence of a first cause or the unmoved mover, the prime mover. I've made this argument, I've been on podcast making that argument saying, I don't think, the way that I like to put it is, it's not the case that there is an infinite series of previous events. You have to have the first cause, you must have the prime mover. I believe that's true. And what's interesting is, so in my own background, I grew up in a Protestant evangelical household, fell away from a lot of those beliefs because I don't think they're correct. Discovered reason and rationality and the universal application of reason. And then through the argument against the infinite regress, discovered what you could call God or the deistic conception of God, but it didn't end there. So sometimes when I'm talking to people, I like to just talk about the rational logical deductive argument that you say, look, it must be the case that there is a first cause and a prime mover, but it doesn't end there. Because on top of that, a few years after being confident in the deistic conception of God, I had an experience. I had a love experience. I had the experience of falling in love with the woman who's now my wife, Julia. And I thought that the nature and the properties of that experience were so powerful, were so unlike anything else I could have conceived of. You might call it divine revelation. I said, okay, it's not the case that there's only the deistic conception of God. It's the case that there is God and it has some connection with human beings. And my mind kind of blew and I was like, okay, I guess that means I'm religious now or like I'm trying to still piece together my worldview and maintain rationality. It's hard to have a high value for a logic and rationality and actually conclude to yourself. I think God just like spoke to me. I think I just experienced the thing that people call God in the form of love. And you know what, let's be honest. A lot of our opinions on things that don't have anything to do with God begin first, if we're being honest with ourselves from an emotional reaction to an event. And so I often give the example of people who were raised, let's say in a working class household where the father works for a terrible boss. Now that's not surprising that they're gonna grow up thinking capitalism is oppressive and wage labor is slavery and all that. And so I'm not gonna just say, well, you're just too stupid to take economics 101. I see where they're coming from. I grew up in a working class household as a matter of fact. And so I kind of understand some of that. So sometimes that colors the way we see the world but then something will happen. Some major thing will happen to us that like for example, the birth of a child is another such example. Where there are people who were living crazy lifestyles then that child gets born and it transforms them in ways I can't account for on a purely naturalistic basis. And so that suddenly makes them think in different ways. Maybe they become a little bit more conservative or maybe they change their behavior in some way or another because that thing jolted them. And so your experience there jolted you into thinking maybe the world is bigger than I've imagined it could be. It has room for more possibilities than I thought it could. And so that, but that really, that does, everybody listening has to admit that on some level that really has probably happened to all of us. And then after that, when we have time to reflect we can come to a rational understanding of what we've experienced. We can incorporate it into who we are. But, so it's not like it's just an irrational experience and we leave it at that. We can form a worldview around it, but as human beings we have both. We have rationality and we also have this mysterious world of the unexplained and of the emotional and you gotta have both. Yeah, and for me like faith I wouldn't say is a part of it. I reject the methodology of faith as understood as belief without reason or in the absence of reason. For me it's literally, it was the most rational conclusion to come to, given, and it wasn't just the emotional state of love, it was the thousand things that had to be just right. It was as if I was reading a story and I was part of the story and it was like all of these coincidences had to happen exactly the way they did to result in this conclusion. But anyway, you mentioned that you have the experience and then there's an integrative state. I'm still integrating. I'm still trying to piece. I'm trying to say, okay, what is the most rational worldview and way to understand this? And I've ended up at something like a, you could call it like a Jesusism or the way that I would like to put it is, what Jesus was talking about was correct and when he's talking about love, that's the thing that he's getting at and you see, I don't think it's just exclusive to Jesus. I think you see in all of the major religions, maybe with some exceptions, you see the divinity of love or the supernatural quality and importance of love that really that is the thing in life that's most important. And so I think that is very much, it's not universalist, but it's a very liberal theology. For you, how do you go from your beliefs? Let's say you're persuaded by the pure logical arguments that get you to deism. How do you then make the next step to something like Catholicism? Well, I had become a Protestant in college. I wasn't really much of anything up to that point. And that was because a guy took me out for lunch. He's now, I think he's now with the council on foreign relations. So we've taken different paths, let's say, in our lives. He sat me down, he just asked me point blank. He said, look, Woods, do you believe in truth or don't you? So what kind of crazy question is that? I mean, I was 18, I couldn't even conceive of what he was asking me. So he invited me to come to his church and I thought, all right, I'll humor this guy. And then it went, so I did that. And then he also gave me a book and it was a, it was the text of a debate between Anthony Flew, who I think died not too long ago, a number of years ago, who was at that time probably the world's, at least one of the most celebrated atheist philosophers and a guy named Gary Habermas. And they had a debate that was published under the title Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? And they just debated it based on the sources. And they had a five-person panel and three out of the five agreed that Habermas had won the debate. And I remember thinking, well, how's that possible? But why wasn't this a home run for Flew? How could this be? And then a Flew later, of course, became something like a deist to the end of his life, which was interesting. But, and he was more or less a libertarian too, Flew. He had a lot of things to be said for him and very, very smart. But all the same, that sort of thing, at least, that cracked through my natural cultural resistance to any of these ideas that, well, if you're religious so-called, you're stupid and irrational. I thought, well, wait a minute, how did Habermas beat Flew in that debate? So I started, so that, so I'm not saying that I reasoned myself into it purely, but that I couldn't have gone any further. I couldn't have changed my mind on this if that kind of resistance hadn't been broken down. Now, at that time, were you an atheist or did just non, didn't have a person? I was agnostic. Agnostic. And I thought, and I always felt sorry when Christians would be put upon, made fun of, or criticized, whatever. I was never ever part of that. So, but I just didn't, I figured, well, maybe someday I'll have an insight about this. But for now, my life doesn't seem any the worse without it. So off I go on my way. But I became, the more I studied it, the more I read, I did become convinced that there was something to Christianity. But then once you're there, then you gotta ask the question, well, there's a whole bunch of kinds of it. Right. And so how do I sort of pick one? And I didn't stop around and say, well, this one says the things I want to hear. Maybe God wants to tell you things you don't want to hear. That's because he's God and you're some schmuck. So that's not the right way to think about it. So I did become a Lutheran at one point because I thought Lutheranism seemed to have some intellectual heft to it. It had a real liturgy. It wasn't just, and I'm not saying this to make fun of people, but it wasn't people throwing themselves on the floor and writhing around. That's not for me. That not, I have no interest in that whatsoever. So I thought, this is a way I can be intellectually fulfilled and not have to be a Catholic. That was not happening. No way was that happening. So, but that did eventually happen. It was just because through conversations with friends who would say, well, what about this argument? What about that? What about this? Or they would take me to things. They would take me to so-called Eucharistic adoration. I thought, what in the heck is this? And then I walked away thinking, well, I don't want to base my decision on experience because that's such a weak read. Because a lot of people, I feel like this is true of a lot of Protestants, that they have to feel, like really feel God's presence. And if they, but the thing is, if you don't, then what? Exactly. If your faith is wrapped into that, because sometimes you don't, and there are people, great Catholic saints who went through tremendous dry periods, but their faith wasn't based entirely on experience and so they were able to struggle through it. So anyway, it was a number of arguments that were made to me and then I started looking into the history and I thought, well, there does seem to be pretty strong case for the primacy of Rome pretty early on. And there are some documents discovered, well, like in the past, just over a hundred years where that seemed to point this way. And there was, for instance, the fact that there was a controversy going on in the church in Corinth and they wrote a letter to Rome to try to resolve whatever the dispute was. We don't actually know what the dispute was based on the documents, but they get this very authoritative letter returned to them in the late first century, late first century, from Clement of Rome who appears to have been the Bishop of Rome at that time and he's very authoritative about how they've got to put their bickering aside. Now at the same time, the apostle John is still alive in Ephesus. So you could have actually gone to, you could have gone to Ephesus where an apostle is alive who directly interacted with Christ himself and have him resolve the dispute. Why are you going to the Bishop of Rome? So things like that made me think, all right, well, maybe there's something to this. And then on top of that, I started reading, I read a book called Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Brian Davies. And one day, one of my closest friends in the world, he's now a Lutheran pastor. I won't say where, I don't want people to harass him. But he came in, he looked at that book and he said, why are you reading about a heretic? And I thought, wait a minute. So to be a Lutheran, I have to completely reject at least a thousand years of Western civilization. And I said, that's just alienating to me. I just, I just feel like that can't be right. And so it was just all those sorts of things coming together. And I felt more like I was at home. Like I'm part of this thing now. I'm not this guy who thinks, well, everything went wrong for a thousand years until we came along and fixed it. I mean, I'm not saying that that couldn't possibly happen, but I'm unconvinced. And then likewise, I know there are Protestants who can answer every single claim I make. But the idea of Sola Scriptura is a total non-starter. The idea that everything about the Christian faith is to be found in the Bible, that proposition itself is not to be found in the Bible. That, and there's many problems with what interpretation, not just what translation of the Bible, but each individual, the way that language works is that words mean different things to different people. How do you resolve that one? So are you actually telling me that the average person, the average working stiff has to stop what he's doing and learn ancient Greek and Hebrew in order to be able to read in the primary languages? And then somehow, even though you have disputes between people all the way from Mary Baker Eddy, who started Christian science, to Thomas Aquinas, to Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, all these different people, not to mention the Anabaptists, he's supposed to figure out, even though they're experts who spend all their time on this, he's supposed to figure out which one of those is the correct one, the whole thing is extremely implausible, not to mention that we do read about holding fast to what has been handed down by word and by letter, but also, there are no printing presses, most people are illiterate, the idea that the faith is gonna be handed on through a book when almost nobody has the possibility ever of reading a book for 1500 years. Yeah. Yeah, I know there are Protestants who can get around that, but I'm sorry, that's special pleading, if you ask me. No, I'm with you. And it's really interesting when you say that. So it sounds like your identification as a Catholic is there's a bit of like organization to it, or like you like the organization, I'm not gonna say you like the organization of the Catholic Church, but it's a group identity thing. Is it that you agree with the theology that's come out of the Catholic Church or that you see it as a kind of a cultural identity, that these are the, in general, the people that I think have caused a lot of benefit in the world? Well, I actually think it's both, and I think one flows into the other, because if I believe in the theology, then I ought to expect that it would have good practical consequences, but I wouldn't just go for it because it had good practical consequences, because then I would feel like I'm not really, yeah, I couldn't really be true to myself, I guess in that case, but I will say, though, that the cultural aspect is very strong, and it's broken down since the Second Vatican Council. But for instance, there's a communist writer, and now again, my middle-aged brain is coming to get me, and I can't remember who he was, but he had been a lifelong communist, and he converted to Catholicism and he wrote his story, but he said that one of the things that impressed him was it was Christmas Eve, and he had his radio, and he was able to tune in to midnight mass in Prague, in London, in Paris, in all these places, Munich, anywhere, and he could hear the same mass because it was in Latin. Now, obviously, the scriptural readings, when it comes before the sermon, you read those in English and stuff like that or in the vernacular, and the preaching is done in the vernacular, but he was amazed that there was this international community, totally voluntary, you can leave anytime. You don't like it, go, no one's gonna stop you, but it exists, it's this amazing thing that's been there for 2000 years, and no matter where you go, you leave behind for just an hour a week that you're Italian or French or German or British or whatever, you leave that behind, and you walk in and you have an instant kinship with people you can't even communicate with, but you all know the Latin, yeah, you don't have to learn the Latin, although it's a good idea, but you can follow along in a missile, I mean, a seven-year-old can do it, and you know what the responses are and you're part of something that is universal. Now, I think there is something, there's something that's absolutely not to be disparaged about being proud to be French, that's not fascist, that's just normal. You live in France and you have a great tradition, you say, it's so awesome that I live here and there's nothing wrong with that for heaven's sake, everybody, you lighten up already, but at the same time, it's also great to step out of that for a minute and say, yeah, I'm French or I'm American or whatever, but these people are people too, and I step into this building and we're all part of something that's much bigger than France and much bigger than any one of us, and that alone is something that has a tremendous power to it, and I really don't, frankly, want to get into the whole story of the church kind of leaving all this behind and now you have polka masses and interpretive dance and whatever else main thing going on at the altar, but they used to have something fantastic and could still have it again sometime. Okay, so the last question that I have for you on this is when I look, as I'm shopping around and listening to different religions, I see lots of good in all of them, almost all of them, I should say, and I'm kind of picking and choosing parts that I like. When I look at Catholicism, there's one part of it that I struggle with very deeply and it's kind of like the same hesitation I have to the solo scripturier idea where it's like, that just can't get on that, and it's the idea of papal authority. Maybe it's because I'm young and naive and I'm a rebel or something, but when I look at virtually any hierarchical organization, I don't go, oh wow, that's a group filled with people I wanna obey their edicts and like they're morally enlightened and they're saying things not based on their institutional incentives. So I look and I think it just looks like an organization to me that is very hierarchical and when you get, when you have hierarchy and the pursuit of truth mixed, it doesn't work for me, I kind of wanna be independent. I value the truth more than it lets me just believe what somebody says cause he has a position of authority. What's your perspective on that? Are you kind of liberal when it comes to papal authority? Do you think that it can be explained consistently like with an irrational worldview? Yeah, I mean, I like, I'm okay with hierarchy. I think hierarchy makes the world go round. I think hierarchy builds civilization. I'm okay with it, but I wanna address your concern. First of all, just as a matter of fact, in this day and age, the hierarchy is not very, let's say insistent on its own powers and is almost embarrassed by its powers. So even though Pope Francis, you know, has no hesitation decapitating people who disagree with him, even when he was elected, he normally the Pope stands when he's, after he's been elected, he stands on an elevated platform when he speaks to the assembled crowd in front of St. Peter's. Pope Francis said to the Cardinals, I think I'll just stay down here. And then he asked the people to pray for him. And then he doesn't wanna live in the papal apartments because they're luxurious. So he's gonna live in some other thing. So he very much wants to dispense with a lot of those sorts of things. And by the way, people in Rome loved when the Pope lived in the papal apartments because his light would be on at night and he'd be working. And for some reason, they just gave them some comfort to know there's the Pope up there reading and doing his thing. And now it's dark. They don't have that because of Pope Francis. But anyway, the bishops mostly are asleep at the wheel. I mean, you can do anything you want in your parish and the bishop isn't gonna care. So yeah, in principle, and they wear their outfits and all that, it's a big hierarchical organization. In fact, everybody can do what they want unless you wanna be a traditional Catholic, then they'll come banging on your head. Even under John Paul II, who people think was a deeply conservative Pope, John Paul II, for all his virtues, would have horrified popes from the 1950s and before, would have appalled them for his leftism. So it just goes to show how not conservative our civilization is. They look at John Paul and they say, there's a rock of orthodoxy. On a lot of things, yes, on some things, no. But even John Paul liked something of the regalia of the off, at least a little bit of it. But now it's like, oh, that's just old hat. But all right, but let's suppose though, that we were living in 1950. Most people have a total misunderstanding of papal authority. And it's partly Catholic's own fault because they don't understand it. I have a friend, I mean, a good friend who, honest to goodness, it's like I'm, when I talk to him, it's like I'm inside a Kafka novel because one pope will say one thing and another pope will say another thing. I mean, not on a dogmatic question, just on a practical issue. And he's totally with that first pope on that issue. And then he's with the second pope on the same thing, even though nothing about the issue has changed in the interim. And it's kind of like, well, we don't have to deal with that earlier pope anymore. But then that's not a position you can expect any self-respecting intellectual to adopt. That's, you're just a liar. You really are not being honest with people. So it is okay. It is absolutely okay to say this pope was wrong because what I loved about Pope Benedict the 16th was when he liberalized the allowance for the old mass, the liturgy before they reformed it, he more or less came out and said, it was wrong to suppress this. Now we'd been saying for years it was wrong to suppress this and oh, how dare you say that? Now what do you say to us jerks? When the pope says it was so now retroactively, were we allowed to have said that years ago? I mean, the whole thing is stupid. Stop acting like this. Nothing requires you to act like this. But the thing is that I think John Paul II played into this in part because he was this international superstar, which popes had not previously been like, you don't see a world youth day with Pope John the 23rd or high as the 12th or whatever. And you don't see that. And you could say, well, he was spreading the gospel. Maybe he was. I mean, I'm not gonna take that away from him. But he became this larger than life figure which fed into this idea of a cult of personality around him. The Catholicism became John Paul II. And so you would hear people say inane things like, well, as John Paul II teaches, marriage is a sacrament. Well, not just John Paul II. How about the whole Catholic church for two days? Why would you word it that way? That's really weird. And so that led people to think that if the Pope's favorite color is blue, then yours also better be blue. And so I wrote a book called The Church and the Market, trying to disentangle principles from application. If the Pope says, we want families to flourish because they're the building block of society. Well, who can dispute that? But if he then says, now for that to happen, let me give the practical economic policies that we'll need. Well, obviously that's outside of his realm of expertise. He can have the general principles, but in the same way he can have general principles for architecture and say, the way a church building is built ought to be fit the majesty of God. Okay, but he can't say now, you better use enough concrete to make sure the foundation is, then obviously he's beyond the area, but there's not been a careful enough distinction between these two things. And it confuses Catholics and it makes them feel like they're not good Catholics. So they've got to be much clearer about this. But secondly, in terms of papal authority, the idea is that generally you show deference to the Pope, if he's gonna write something before criticizing it, you read it. But in general, in terms of cases where the Pope has spoken definitively and said, this is something that the tradition of the church requires us to hold. Well, generally that is not done that often. You can tell by the language he uses that he's committing the church to a particular position, that's actually not done all that often. And in fact, Pope Francis even called up a critic, a traditional Catholic critic in Italy and said, you know, I know that your criticisms are coming from a love for the church. And I know that in your heart, you wanna support me and you're trying to support me by telling me I'm wrong is actually a good thing. And I wouldn't want you to stop doing that. So when the Pope says, I want you to be critical when you think I'm doing something wrong, if your position is, well, everything the Pope says is right, now your head explodes. Now you can one of these things like, this statement is false. And you don't just know what the status statement is. Right, so it sounds like what you're saying is the truth stands apart from what the Pope declares, which I completely agree. And this really is the objection that I think a lot of people have. It's the same thing with the people who claim what is true is literally what's only in this book. It's like, well, that's not the case. And what is true is not literally what some human says. That doesn't work. And in fact, in the Catechism makes this clear, the Catechism that John Paul II approved and Benedict the 16th made this clear. He says, the Pope is not a dictator and he's not a dictator over tradition. He is a guardian of tradition. So there is an independent deposit of faith from which you can judge what is going on. Now, I would note that I believe that the particular episode we're living through now where I think Pope Francis has been just a walking scandal is actually helping people clarify what precisely the role of the Pope is. Because they're now realizing, okay, I couldn't possibly be right about this anymore. That's now coming, being made clear to me. Well, Tom, that's a great note to end on. I really appreciate you going into detail there. It's fascinating. I'm still open to Catholicism. Maybe someday we'll be doing mass together or however those things work, I don't know. Well, I really enjoy this. And the thing is because I've maximized Skype on my screen, my clock was not visible. And so I just now checked it and I thought, how did this happen? I thought we had another half hour. Well, I would love to continue, but I know you're a busy guy, so I'm gonna respect that. Unfortunately, I have to run today, but I'm glad to have had the time and I appreciate it. And for people who don't know, probably all of my audience does know, but for those who don't know, where to get more Tom Woods resources to hear your Tom Woods show, to get some access to some of your books, some content you're creating, where could they go? Well, TomWoods.com is my website. TomWoods.com slash episodes is one page that lists every single episode I've done, almost 1200 of them. And you can get a sense of the variety of topics I cover. If you like Steve Patterson, you obviously like a variety of topics, so I've got that. And then I have some eBooks, free eBooks on a lot of areas that are tricky for libertarians to argue, like what do you want everybody to be ignorant? There'll be no education or whatever, all these sorts of things, or you want there to be, we want everybody to die in a school shooting or whatever. I've got eBooks that just smash to smithereens, these sorts of objections. So that's over at tomsfreebooks.com. All right, thanks again, Tom, this has been great. Thank you, Steve.