Speaker 1Theistic. What does that mean?
Speaker 2A personal God. A God. There is a personal God who is involved with the world. He made the world and he still maintains activity, as opposed to deistic, which just wound up the clock and let it go. So my view is God is still involved, in fact, so involved that he actually came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to create a rescue plan. Now, what's interesting to me about this broader question, we can get into more details too, is that it's not – if there is a God who made the world for a purpose with meaning, people can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don't know God. They're not – they won't be experiencing what they were made for, which is to be in friendship with him with the plan that he's made for their flourishing. But they still can flourish in some measure insofar as they touch on these objective features. But insofar as we are able – Even without belief in God, to kind of get in that groove of the things that God made us for, the purposes that he intends, in light of being made like him in some way in his image, there's going to be a measure of satisfaction. But what they'll be missing is the ultimate, and that is that friendship with God and being restored in that. Alex. Yes, sir.
Speaker 3Same question for you about your – what you bring to this conversation in terms of your perspective, your experience, and maybe some of your sort of personal journey.
Speaker 4Well, for my own part, I was quite swept up in the new atheism movement, which was a mid-2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world, saying that religion is evil and terrible. And I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular humanist utopia, that if you'll only throw off these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself. People tried that, and it didn't seem to work. And I think that's because the new atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn't seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place. And I think that is why it exists. I think humans are in a strange predicament due to the mystery of consciousness. We find ourselves possibly uniquely amongst other animals in a position of being mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world, but also knowing those things. It's one thing to experience the world. It's another thing to be aware that you're experiencing it. Josh Rasmussen once said, there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree. We have this sort of second-order abstraction that we can do. So we know that death is coming, for example, and death makes a mockery of everything that we do. It seems to just obliterate any sense of purpose or meaning because anything that we're building will ultimately, as far as we're concerned, be gone. And that may well be unique to human beings. And so I'm not the first to suggest that the principal motivating factor behind meaning-infused activities that humans do is… There's an engagement in death denial or some kind of immortality project. People literally, for fear of, as a result of the knowledge that this will all come to an end, engage in what we might call immortality projects. They engage in things which will outlast themselves, which give them a sense of escaping this death. The most obvious example is in religious traditions, which literally promise immortality for your own soul. But if you look just practically at where people subjectively report. They find it in their children. They might find it in their job, but they're unlikely to find it in their job if they're doing something they don't really care about. They'll find it in their job. Maybe they're like a barrister and they find a lot of meaning in bringing justice into the world because they're participating in a system which they believe will outlast them and is bigger than them. So when people talk about meaning, we talk about transcendence, something being above and beyond their own sort of material situation. And I think religion is the… The archetypal example of this, and I think it's why it evolves in the first place. There is this idea that we are living in a meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past hundred years or so, or maybe in the last few hundred years or so, as a response to the Enlightenment and the decline of religion. I think that's far too easy. I think that's way too easy. I think that if there is such a thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first place. I think literally speaking, what people are doing in religious traditions is… Realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something less finite.
Speaker 2Can I add a thought to this?
Speaker 4Of course. We have this hunger.
Speaker 2I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness's hunger for meaning and significance because that's all propositional. It's not molecules in motion.
Speaker 3What's naturalistic mean?
Speaker 2Naturalistic just means nature and that's all there is basically. So you have molecules in motion largely governed by natural law. There is no outside transcendent anything. There's no immaterial anything, certainly not an immaterial God that has started the process and sustains the process and gives life meaning. There either is meaning objectively or not, okay? If not, then it's up to us.
Speaker 4For example, a moment ago you said that if there is a creator God who brings us into existence, then you are designed and you are given purpose by God. And I think we need to investigate this a bit further because, for example, a quite sort of boring and overdone debate at the moment is the extent to which we are engaged in the production of potentially artificially conscious agents with artificial intelligence technologies. And there's all this discussion about whether or not these things can be conscious, like, you know, whatever. Let's just suppose for a moment that they were. Let's suppose that I created an artificially intelligent… And I gave it a purpose, and that purpose was to produce paperclips. And because of the development of artificial intelligence technology, it became conscious in a recognizable sense. It had an interior sense of self. It sort of had, say, feelings or emotions about the world. But it is just an AI robot whose entire purpose in life is to make paperclips. Now, I could say that because that AI was designed by a creator with a purpose that was… Explicitly given to it, that that life is meaningful. But I think it would seem to most people that a life whose meaning consists in creating paperclips is not sufficient. It's not enough to address what people really want. It's not just some kind of purpose. It's not just even some kind of purpose which is given to you by an authoritative, creative source. It's something which is further than that. Yeah, but if I can just relate this to the God question. Okay. The problem that arises is that you have to… To answer the question of why God infuses life with the meaning that he gives it. It's either something which he has sort of arbitrarily plucked up and chosen to create, in which case we have this problem of arbitrariness, or no. Or, in fact, there is some reason why God had to give us a particular kind of meaning that's endemic to the human condition, that he had no choice but for that meaning, that more important kind of meaning, to be given to human life. But if he was beholden to that, if he had to give us a particular kind of meaning, it seems like there's a standard of meaning which exists. Right, right. Outside of God. So, I'm not sure, in other words, the mechanism by which being created by someone who says, this is your purpose, would be fulfilling in the way that people want it to be.
Speaker 2The reason the paperclip illustration doesn't match is because it seems to me that you're subtly taking the thing that's conscious that makes paperclips and comparing it to a human being. And for human beings who seem to have a different purpose, I would argue, be consigned to make paperclips, well, that's… Be humanizing to them. But if you have, just to follow your illustration, if you have a creator that makes something for a reason that the creator has in mind, then it's fulfilling its purpose perfectly, you know. For a human being, that's not going to be satisfying, making paperclips. And a lot of people who are making paperclips are not satisfied with it, okay. I don't think it's arbitrary if God is making something for a purpose. If God decides that he wants to make creatures to be in friendship with him, because this reflects his loving character, and that purpose is to be in friendship with him, I don't see how that is somehow negligible or arbitrary at all. I guess you could have said that God could have done otherwise, but his love and desire for communion is seen to be an adequate explanation for that.
Speaker 1This is fascinating. So my first question is, what's the point of this conversation?
Speaker 3Yeah, so I think that the ultimate… The ultimate answer that we're looking for is, it appears that the numbers around purpose and meaning are fluctuating at this moment in time. A lot of people are turning back to religion, as Alex was just chatting about a second ago. And I guess there's two questions, which is one, understanding why that's happening, why there's this fluctuation, why we're seeing a mental health crisis around purpose and meaning. And the second is to try and figure out if there's a truth one can arrive at, if there's an objective truth that exists.
Speaker 1So for y'all, I'm curious, when y'all share, when y'all show up here, like, what is the purpose for y'all showing up?
Speaker 4Literally trying to discover, like, it's the stated purpose, right? It's literally just artificially given purpose by being designed in a particular way. We're going to get together and we're going to have a conversation and see if we can figure out this meaning stuff, right? Awesome. By the way, like we're not going to solve that problem. I think it's worth pointing out that like these conversations have to be exploratory and subjective. If anybody thinks that the four of us sat at this table are going to solve the meaning crisis and give people a five-step guide to finding meaning in their life and that will be the sort of case closed, then they're delusional. I don't know if I agree that we can't find an answer, but we'll talk about it.
Speaker 2Well, this is what I wanted to speak to. Obviously, we're talking about this broader issue of meaning and purpose, all right? And as I mentioned earlier, there either is an objective one or it's only subjective, okay? If it is an objective one, this is about the most important thing that anyone could ever find out about their life if they were created for a reason. In my view, the reason I'm here is because I'm convinced that that's the case and I'm willing to give reasons why, okay? But I don't think – I'm sympathetic to the concern that you can't sit around a table and in two or three hours solve the problem for any individual because people – going through the process of trying to figure it out. It takes a long time as they put the pieces together. But I think there's a lot of people in the world that think they have put it together and they've come to conclusions about ultimate meaning and purpose and they don't come to my own conclusions, but many have. So what I would hate to do is leave people with the feeling like we can all search and the glory is in the search, but if you think you found the answer, then you haven't. Of course, this to me is a nihilistic enterprise then. I think it's possible to come to conclusions.
Speaker 3I think so too.
Speaker 4To be clear, but I think what I'm trying to say is this will be something that one will experience for themselves and will discover for themselves in their own life. It's not going to be something that – you know, there's that old – was it Lin Xi, the sort of the Buddhist koan that says, if you meet the Buddha, kill him. The idea being that if you think that the kind of enlightenment which is necessary to spiritual fulfillment can be found through some kind of guru, you're missing the mark. It's something that you need to do for yourself. But isn't that statement itself meant to be a truth?
Speaker 2It's a truth about spirituality
Speaker 1that you can actually count on. Can I jump in? I just want to make sure I understand y'all's point. So you're saying that the search for purpose, first of all, is never going to go away, like is a human condition, right? Yes. Like so as humanity – humanity will never find its purpose. I can tell you why if you like. No, no. I don't even know why yet. I think individuals can, but humanity can't. Yeah, I'm just making sure I understand, right? So an individual can find their purpose, but as humanity, it's never going to be solved. And then you said something about purpose being tied to – opposing to death in some way. So transcending death, that human beings basically look for purpose because death is inevitable, and if we can find purpose, then we can give our life meaning. But if death – if we die and I don't leave something behind, can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 4This is essentially a version of Ernest Becker's denial of death hypothesis, which famously suggests that the motivation for a great – Okay. A great deal of human behavior is – at least human behavior outside of immediate sensory concerns like eating and stuff like that. Anything that humans engage in on a societal level, on an abstract level, is ultimately motivated by an apprehension of death. I think that's probably too simple, but it's definitely a contributing factor. I think that, for example, put it this way, right? Here's an example that comes from – I think his name's Scheffler, and he has this interesting thought experiment. Suppose – I don't know. Maybe you're engaged in writing. Maybe you're writing a book. Suppose you discovered – and this probably won't be the case for you because you believe in an afterlife – but suppose that you're an atheist for a moment. Suppose it were the case that you discovered that after you die, a meteor is going to come and wipe out all life on Earth. Everybody's going to die almost instantly after you do, but you'll be dead. So you will live your entire life as it was anyway, and suppose the rest of the world doesn't even know this is going to happen, but you're told this is going to be the case. Would that motivate you to write your book more or less? Most people say that it would seem a bit pointless now. What's the point now in writing this book? What's the point in having children if they're going to die 30 days after I'm gone? What's the point in doing any of these things? What will they still do? They'll still do the sensory stuff. They'll still eat. They'll still have sex. They'll still sleep, this kind of stuff. But the typically meaning-laden activities of life, they would certainly be demotivated to do. And it's an interesting thought experiment to give us some insight as to the fact that what maybe this means, that at least in part, the motivation for these actions in the first place is that
Speaker 1they will extend beyond our death. I agree. With so much of what you all say, and I also, like, hard disagree with some of the fundamentals. So let's say you have this example of, like, I'm going to write a book, and then the world is going to end 30 days later. And so you say – because a lot of what you're talking about is, like, what people say, right? Yep. So you'll say, like, okay, so, like, people would say that this is a waste of time, and I'm not going to do it if the world ends in 30 days. And you're also saying people is an everlasting thing or struggling with purpose. Right? You're saying both of these things. So here's my question to you. If you tell someone, you know, you're writing this book. Let's say you write it, and then you die because we'll simplify the example. And then 30 days later, the world ends. Let's take two people, one who says, I'm going to write it anyway, and one who says, there's no point. Which one of those two people do you think has a greater sense of purpose? Probably the former. Absolutely. So this is the key thing. Purpose is absolutely – because I love this. I love that you're asking about mechanisms, and I think maybe that's what I can provide. I think that's actually the answer, right? So it's not that people believe – and I think you're right that the reason that this is a perennial problem is because most people do not live a life where they understand how purpose works. And what I think is really fascinating about sort of, like, this scientific clinical approach, like, if you ask me, can I help people find meaning and purpose? I don't know. But if you ask me, can I – Can I help a person? The answer is absolutely. And we have, like, particular scientific things, and this is where it's really counterintuitive. So a big part of, like, finding purpose is doing particular things, and if you do those things, the likelihood that you will increase your sense of purpose in life, which is another thing that's very counterintuitive to people. Purpose is not binary. It's quantifiable. It's like a scale. So if I were to ask the three of y'all, right, maybe let's do this – not a thought experiment, but this practical experiment. Do you know your purpose in life? Like, how confident are you that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing in life?
Speaker 2How confident am I about the God part or that I'm doing the things that are appropriate? How confident are you that you're doing what God wants you to do? Well, in that general sense, extremely confident or else I wouldn't be doing it.
Speaker 1Perfect, right? Yeah. So, Stephen, what about you, bro?
Speaker 3About five out of ten. I knew it.
Speaker 4Okay, right? So, Alex? I don't want to be difficult, but I kind of reject the grammar of the question.
Speaker 1Awesome. Reject away, bro.
Speaker 4I think it's what a logician would call an exponable statement, something which needs to be broken down. You asked, do I know my own purpose? That assumes that there is a purpose to know. It's a bit like – the comparison I would give is if I asked you the question – the classic example in logic is, is the king of France bold, yes or no?
Speaker 1I can rephrase my question if you have problems with my question. So, do you have a lived experience of something called purpose?
Speaker 4Oh, well, look. I think purpose is having some kind of reason to act or be. Yeah. And I certainly subjectively am motivated to do things. I think everybody is. Otherwise, you literally wouldn't be able to do anything. But it's a bit foggy to me what psychologically speaking on a personal level that fundamental motivation actually is.
Speaker 2Wouldn't purpose be more the goal rather than the reason to act, what you're
Speaker 4trying to accomplish? It's a semantic thing, but that's why it depends what you mean by the word purpose.
Speaker 1I'm with you. I'm with you. So, and I don't know what I mean with the word purpose. Which is part of this challenge. But, okay. So, like, I'm just wondering. So, like, when you – so, a lot of people are motivated to act. Everyone is motivated to act every day, right? I get out of bed. I need to take a dump. But my guess is that if we were to administer a scientifically validated instrument that measures your subjective sense of purpose, direction in life, that that would be north of 5 out of 10. Okay. Do you think that's fair? Or is that something that you don't –
Speaker 4Maybe, yeah. I don't know what –
Speaker 1So, like, do you – when you wake up, do you feel like you know what you want to do and what's going on and you're, like, doing good work? Like, I'm asking about the subjective thing.
Speaker 4Not on a grand sense. I'm quite agnostic. I mean, I'm sort of –
Speaker 1I'm not talking about – okay. Maybe a grand sense. It depends. I really don't know what you mean. Perfect. Okay. So, not on a grand sense, but on some other sense. Yes. Sure. Okay, great. So, I think that this is, like – this is – I think this is beautiful because I think what we have here is, like, not on a grand sense. So, I think on a grand sense, you're there. Right? But you're absolutely motivated by particular things. So, I think this is the first thing about purpose. Can I – a clarification real quickly?
Speaker 2Yeah. On a grand sense, yes, but there are distinctions that you were referring to a few moments ago. There are a lot of things that are dissatisfying in my life. But in terms of being on the right course, that's part of what life is. Being on the right course, lots of crazy stuff that's happening in between.
Speaker 1Cool. So, like, the first thing that I've kind of noticed in my work – is that I don't know whether a grander purpose exists or not. I think that's a lovely discussion that I want to continue to have with you. But I'm sort of – here's where I'm sort of coming from in this discussion. Stephen started this out with some really scary statistics that we're seeing, right? There's a mental health crisis. I think a lot of what we're seeing is, while it may be perennial, I think it's, like, seems more acute right now. Yes. Maybe that's because of the atheist materialism, whatever. I'm not quite sure. But this is a problem. So, just sharing where I'm coming from. My hope is that someone who is watching this will have moved forward some vague percentage points. I'm shooting for about 20% in their personal quest for purpose. And I think a big part of what I'm going to try to contribute here today is my understanding of like how to do that, that this is a quantifiable thing that we can sort of see at this table. People are sort of like at different places. And so the first thing that I kind of want to point out is I don't know whether there's purpose or not, but as a human condition, there is something that each of us feel or experience that gives us an answer, right? So you're like at 10, but what that means is that something is going on in your mind, something is going on in your heart, something is going on in your body where you wake up and you feel like you have purpose. Stephen wakes up and he's like at a 5 out of 10. So he's getting some signals in that area, some signals not in that area. You have some signals in that direction too. You know why you're showing up at this podcast. You've got a book that you're working on. Awesome. Can't wait to read it. But on a grander sense, you're like, I don't know about this like objective stuff or whatever. So this is sort of like this quantifiable thing. And you? I'm going to let you all guess. Where would you put me at?
Speaker 4I don't like to psychologize people.
Speaker 1It's okay if you don't like to.
Speaker 4Will you? I just met you. I don't know. I have no idea what sense of meaning you have in your life. Okay. I mean, for me, I'm just motivated to try and find out the truth.
Speaker 1So I think the audience can guess too.
Speaker 2Yeah. I would say you're pretty high. That's why you're here. That's why you're articulating your ideas. Probably closer to 10 than 5.
Speaker 3Yeah. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1So it's like it's okay if you don't want to do that because I'm guessing that there are certain things in your intellect that tell you. So do you have a subjective instinct?
Speaker 4No, I just don't know you that well. I mean, I don't know. Okay. And also, it depends what you mean, right? Because you'll say that you have a – if you say that you're a 10, like you have this – you used the phrase earlier, sense, a sense of meaning in life. And because you're talking about this from an empirical standpoint of whether people report having a sense of meaning, whereas I think that Greg is probably talking about, literally speaking, whether there is actually, in fact, a real meaning, whether or not people sense it or not. You could say that you have a 10 out of 10, and Greg could say, well, it's great that you feel that way, but it's misguided because the purpose that you have identified in your life is the wrong one. And so to me, the important question is not so much whether you subjectively report feeling like you have purpose in life, but whether that purpose is grounded in something real and true.
Speaker 1Yeah. So I think that your answer right now is the reason why you think some of these questions are unanswerable. So I think if you adopt that frame, you'll never know. I don't think they're unanswerable. Okay. Let me just finish. Okay. So my first experience of this, right, is that, first of all, there is a subjective barometer, like how do we know whether we have purpose? Maybe we listen to other people, but there is some sort of internal sense of this. And this is where the science becomes really important because if you look at people who have, like, a history of trauma or something, what you tend to find is that there are certain, like, neurobiological things that can happen to you that will literally affect the person. So this is sort of like a subjective experience, and I think the way that – and I love your emphasis on mechanism, and I think this is what, in my opinion, science and spirituality can really add is they add the how, right? They add, like, why is it that one person has purpose and another person doesn't have purpose? So first thing is that in my experience and the way that I operate, I'm not saying it's correct. It's just – it's effective in terms of helping people move the needle on – right? Reducing suicidality, improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the morning. Like, it tends to work, and it's not just me. It's that there's a bunch of methodologies that we have in psychotherapy and stuff like that that accomplish these kinds of things, that there's some internal sense of purpose. Now, what I think surprises a lot of people is that there are two ways that you increase that sense of purpose. The first is a bucket of things that are kind of counterintuitive, and this is where we also have to understand that purpose – purpose correlates with certain other things in life. So if I feel like I am in control of my life, then my sense of purpose will increase. Those two things are correlated. It's not clear whether it's one thing that manifests in two ways or it's probably two discrete things because there's some subtlety there. But just as a very simple example, if you take someone who feels out of control in life and you help them get control of their life – and there's a really great example of this, which is something called – So there's a fascinating research on anxiety that shows that if you're someone in life whose life is happening to you, like you wake up one day and then like your boss wants you to come in for work and you have to pay rent at the end of the month and like you're logging onto Tinder and people aren't responding to you, life is controlling the direction that you move. And people feel overwhelmed by this and they want freedom. They want control. What they end up doing is they wish that they didn't have these things. So they run away from these problems. So passive challenges are challenges that life imposes upon you that you didn't sign up for. Then there's something really fascinating, which is your sense of control in life does not correlate just with the passive challenges. It correlates with the ratio of passive challenges to active challenges. Active challenges are things that you choose to do that are difficult. So this is really fascinating, but if you're getting bodied by life – If you're getting bodied by life, you're going to end up in three different directions. The solution to that is not run away from those problems. It's actually to wake up and start to push yourself in a particular direction. I want to do this instead. If you want to learn how to like read – learn philosophy, start studying philosophical texts. As you start to take on more, which is very counterintuitive because when most people feel overwhelmed, they don't feel like they can do more. The exact solution is to take on more active challenges. Then you have some sense of control in life. Once your ratio of active challenges to passive challenges is more evened out, this does something really cool. It gives you a sense that I'm no longer out of control. Once you feel like you're no longer out of control, this is the really cool thing, then your capacity to deal with the stuff that life throws at you actually improves. So there's this – this is just one example of like one scientific neurobiological principle that has some psychology associated with where you can do particular things to give you – to give yourself a sense of direction in life. Now, some of the stuff around worship and spiritual practice, that can do it too. But I think that usually what I tend to see is that, you know, if someone is lost in life, you can sort of answer it by these big questions. You can sort of think about this sort of transcendental purpose, which I'm happy to talk about. But I think there's a lot of like little stuff that you can do. And as you implement these things, the sense of purpose in your life, your internal lived experience of feeling out of control will change.
Speaker 2Let me offer a few thoughts if I could. One, I want to speak to something that you said, Alex, that I just want to offer a caution about. When we talk about motivation, the motivation for something, we sometimes confuse that with justification. So someone might say to me, an atheist for example, well, you're a Christian because you were born in America. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Christian. You wouldn't be a Christian. You would be a Muslim. Of course, that's irrelevant to the question of whether Islam or Christianity or some other religion is true. It doesn't speak to that. It speaks to psychology, okay? And the fact is if the atheist was born in Saudi Arabia, he wouldn't be an atheist either, likely. The key question is what motivates people, for example, to think about purpose. Death may be a fear of death. That might be a motivation. The question is whether the place they land in answering the question has any objective truth to it or not. It could be that there is a God. That there is an afterlife. And facing death does give comfort to that. I should say when facing death, you have comfort because there is a God and there is something that you're going to. It's closer communion with him. Okay. Just because you're motivated by death doesn't mean that your belief about the afterlife is somehow an error.
Speaker 3What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. ♪ ♪
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