Recapping Lex Fridman and Shia LaBeouf
God is the act of being. To be god is to be to be. God is not an entity in the world. God is the reason why there’s a contingent realm at all. This is the way to put it. In more theological language, God’s the creator of all things. So if God is outside of our world, is it possible for us to visualize, to comprehend, to know God? Not utterly, of course. But I think we can, through metaphysical analysis, through philosophical reasoning, can come to some knowledge of a reality which is transcendent to our experience. So we gesture toward it (The Power Of Now - enlightenment).
What is to be to be? Well, to be me is to be a human being, right? To be this is to be a table. To be this is to be a microphone. So it’s, I’ll use Aquinas’ language. It’s the act of being poured, if you want, into the receptacle of some essential principle. So it’s got an ontological structure. So Moses is wondering, okay, there’s a lot of gods and there’s a lot of things, a lot of entities. Which one are you? You gotta be one of them, so tell me your name. In philosophical language, give me the essence that receives your act of existing, right? And God’s answer blows the mind of Moses and the whole tradition. I am who I am. To be God is to be. I’m not up or down. I’m not here or there. God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, as the mystics put it. Now, can I get a clear and distinct idea of that? No, and in a way, that’s the whole point.
I’m with Paul Tillich, though, the Protestant theologian, said the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary is faith. Because he said the way we take it usually is something subrational. You know, I have proof of this. I really know this, and I only kind of believe that. Like that’s just a personal opinion or impression. But that’s to identify faith with the kind of infra-rational, and that’s not it. I mean, I don’t want something infra-rational. I don’t want superstition or childish credulity. So authentic faith is the darkness beyond reason and the far side of reason. It’s super-irrational, not infra-rational. And that’s a very important move. At the limit of what I can know, at the limit of my striving and my vision, there’s this horizon that opens up. And I think that’s true even in ordinary ways of knowing. There’s kind of a horizon that lures us beyond what I’ve got. Faith has to do more with that kind of darkness rather than a darkness prior to reason.
Take off your shoes, you’re on holy ground because you’re not in charge here. You’re not in command because if you got shoes on, you can walk wherever you want. You can walk with confidence, but you take your shoes off, you’re much more vulnerable. And that’s appropriate when you’re talking about God.
Beings are competitive with each other. And so these can’t be in the same place at the same time, these two beings, they’re mutually exclusive if you want. But as God comes close to a creature, he doesn’t destroy it or consume it, but the creature becomes more beautiful and more radiant, right? And see, compare it to the classical gods and goddesses. When they come bursting into life and experience, things are incinerated and people give way and they’re overwhelmed. Then there’s this biblical idea of God comes close and sets things on fire but doesn’t burn them up. And that’s because he’s not a competitive being in the world. If he were a big being, then he’d be in this, he’d be competing for space, so to speak, on the same ontological grid. But he’s not like that. So God can come close and we come more fully alive. Now we’re starting to gesture toward the incarnation, I mean the central Christian doctrine, that God can actually become a human without overwhelming the human he becomes, right? I think a really good analogy would be author to book. So like Tolkien or someone that writes one of these big, sprawling novels. And Tolkien’s good too because he creates a whole world. He creates a new nature, a new language, new history, all that. Think of the thousands of characters and the plots and subplots and all of it. Tolkien is utterly responsible for every bit of that story. Right, every character, every plot, every subplot, every description, he’s completely responsible. He’s involved in every nook and cranny of it. But he’s not in the story. He’s not in the book. He’s closer to me than I am to myself. And he’s higher than anything I could possibly imagine at the same time. But once you get the insight that God is the sheer act of to be, well, of course that’s true.
What makes Christianity distinctive, of course, is the claim of the incarnation. Christianity comes out of Judaism.
When Jesus says to his disciples, the night before he dies, I no longer call you servants but friends, it’s an extraordinary moment. Because every God who’s ever been served, well, that’s the best we can hope for, is that we’ll be the servant of God.
Pride is the, Augustine calls it, in curvatus in se. I’m caved in around myself, like a black hole, to get into the scientific. But the black hole to me is a great symbol. It’s so heavy that it draws everything, including light. Nothing can escape from it. See, that’s the sinner. We’re all sinners. But see, compared to the contrasting thing, is when you’re lost in a moment, you’re not concerned about the impression I’m making, you’re not concerned about drawing the world into yourself, you’re not concerned about this monkey on my back that’s always telling me, look good and sound right, but you’re lost in something. You’re just talking to a friend, and the two of you together are discovering something true or beautiful, or you’re lost in a movie, or you’re lost in a book. Those are the best moments in life. Those are the best, because they’re the least prideful moments. That’s when the light comes out. I become radiant, because I’m overcoming this tendency to fall in on myself. Dante is so good, because the way he pictures Satan in Divine Comedy, and he’s at the center of the earth, so like a black hole that way, he’s at the center of gravity, he’s at the heaviest place. And there’s not fire where he is, but ice, which is a much, much better image, that you’re frozen in place, and you’re stuck. And he’s got wings, right? And they used to be angel wings, because he’s an angel, but now they’re like bat wings for Dante. And they’re flapping, and all they’re doing is making the world around him colder, because he’s ice, he’s stuck in his own iciness. And then he’s beating his wings over the ice, making everyone else colder.
So in general, empathy, humility, compassion, love thy neighbor, is the way to fight the sin of pride. St. Bernard was asked, what are the three most important virtues? And he said, humilitas, humilitas, and humilitas. Because it’s the opposite of pride. When you are in the moment with no judgement or pride, that is humility, paradise.
What does it mean to live a good life? Yeah, you know, the metric is love, right? And love is not a feeling, it’s an act of the will. To will the good of the other. That’s Aquinas again. To will the good of the other as other. You see, that’s the anti-black hole principle. As other. See, because if I’m willing your good because it’s good for me, so, again, it’s good for you that I’m on this program, I guess. I’m willing your good, but that’s because it’s gonna redound to my benefit. That’s just an indirect egotism. That’s why I see love is really rare and strange, that I really want what’s good for you as other. So not connected to the black hole tendency of my own prideful ego. When I’ve broken that, I’ve forgotten self, and I’ve moved into the space of your own good. That’s what love is. Now, God wants us to be, by this, they will know that you’re my disciples, that you love one another, Jesus says. So that’s it. Now, I mean, life is ups and downs and back and forth, and we’re better or worse at that. So to be fully alive is to be in love with the world, or to love the world deeply, and what love means is the other. Is- Get out of yourself, right. It’s the humility, yeah, getting out of yourself. Let go. That somehow is not, that’s not even selfless, because the word selfless requires there to be a self. It’s almost like just letting go.
So I get when naturalists are speaking, or people that are pure materialists, they’ll just say, no, that’s perfectly adequate. A scientific account of reality is utterly adequate to our experience. So I would steel-man that and say, well, show me why we need something more. And to do that, you gotta get out of Plato’s cave, it seems to me. Because my objection to naturalism is it’s staying within the realm of the immediately empirically observable and making the mistake of saying that’s all there is to being. The minute I understand a pure number, or a pure equation, or a pure mathematical relationship, which would obtain in any possible world, which are not tied to space and time, that’s a first step out of the cave. And then that leads to the more metaphysical reflections. For example, on the nature of being. Do you think it’s possible for the cave to expand so large that it encompasses the whole world? Meaning, is it possible that we’re just clueless right now in terms of, scientifically speaking, with most of the world we haven’t figured out yet? But do you think it’s possible through science to know God, to look outside the world? So it’s fundamentally the limit of the empirical scientific method is that we can’t know some of these very big questions. And I’m a vehement opponent of that. There are dimensions of being that are not capturable through a scientific method of mere observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, et cetera. As great as that is, as wonderful as that is, but it’s still, I think, within Plato’s cave. And that’s not to say it’s not real. It’s just at a relatively low level of reality.
Bible, think of it as a library, not a book. So it’s a collection of books, right, from a wide variety of periods, different authors, different audiences, and different genre. So in the Bible, you find poetry, you find song, you find something like history, not in our sense, but something like history. You find gospel, which is its own genre. You find epistolary literature like Paul. You find apocalyptic. There’s all this in the Bible. So is the Bible literally the word of God? It’s like saying, is the library literally true? It depends on what section you’re in, right? So parts of like 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, a number of places in the Old Testament. Are there elements of the historical in there? Sure, but it’s theologically interpreted history. It’s not like our sense of history of, give me 10,000 footnotes, and I’m gonna look at all the source material I can possibly find. It’s more like ancient history, like Herodotus. People like that.