The Natural Theologian

Joel Carini
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PhD Student in philosophy at Saint Louis University. I am a father and a philosopher. I write about life and philosophy. joelcarini.substack.com

  1. 11/04/2025

    Does the "No Meaning Without God" argument rest on a mistake?

    § In a recent lecture, popular science and philosophy communicator Curt Jaimungal presented an argument against the simulation hypothesis. The Simulation Hypothesis: The idea that we are in a realistic computer-simulation like The Matrix. Advocates argue that surprising features of reality, like false collective memories (“The Mandela Effect”), are what you would expect if the simulation hypothesis were true. Therefore, it probably is true. But Jaimungal demonstrates that this argument rests on a logical fallacy. (Relevant clip: 16:42) Consider its structure: * If the simulation hypothesis were true, you would expect false collective memories. * There are false collective memories. * Therefore, the simulation hypothesis is probably true. In other words, * On hypothesis H, you would expect evidence E. * There is evidence E. * Therefore, E indicates the probability of H. But this reasoning is precisely backwards. In order to demonstrate the probability of H given E, we cannot use the probability of E given H. We want the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence, not the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis. Logicians call this a “transposed conditional” or “the prosecutor’s fallacy.” And several common Christian apologetic arguments commit the same logical fallacy. § Seven years ago, William Lane Craig met atheist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in debate. But this was not any ordinary atheist-theist debate, because also on stage was psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. In his remarks, Craig argued that, given the hypothesis of atheism, we would not expect life to be meaningful or morality to be objectivity, and that given the hypothesis of theism, we would. Yet both his interlocutors argued for moral realism (the objectivity of moral truth), independently of the God hypothesis. As a result, Craig was left trying to argue his opponents out of their moral realism, because it is not what you would expect on an atheistic worldview. I recently listened to and reacted to the whole of debate and discussion. I’ll be posting my (very long) reaction to YouTube soon. Here’s the first clip from the video: Why did Craig end up in this unenviable position? Because his argument, the “No meaning without God” argument, is—like the above simulation argument—backwards. Consider its structure: * On the God hypothesis, you would expect to find meaning (or morality or mind). * Life is meaningful. We all want life to be meaningful. * Therefore, if we want life to be meaningful, we need to adopt the God hypothesis. It’s paired with the opposite argument about atheism (or naturalism): * On naturalism, you would not expect to find meaning (or morality or mind). * We do find meaning. It would be nice if life were meaningful. * But, if you believe in naturalism, you should conclude—in order to be consistent—that life is not meaningful. Like the argument for the simulation hypothesis, the reasoning proceeds by considering the probability of the evidence given the two hypotheses on offer. If God exists, it is probable intuitively that he would create meaningful rather than meaningless forms of existence. But that’s not what needs demonstrating. What needs demonstrating is that it is probable that God exists, given the evidence of meaning and morality. We need to prove the probability of God given meaning/morality, not the probability of meaning/morality given God. Therefore, we need first to demonstrate the existence of meaning, morality, or mind independently of either hypothesis. And of course, that’s where we encounter another wrinkle. § Rather than admitting the independently-evident existence of meaning or morality, Christians often object to it. As you may have noticed, I had to strike through the middle premise of each argument. Unlike in the simulation case, the evidence is not even granted. Instead, when Christians encounter a non-believer who believes in morality or meaning, we pressure them to call this into question, given its improbability on an atheistic view. But if there is no meaning or morality, then there is no reason to postulate God as the explanation of meaning and morality. How do you explain morality on an atheistic worldview? Well, if there’s no morality or meaning, then there’s no explaining to do. Unless we grant that morality and meaning are demonstrable independently of one’s worldview, the argument cannot get started. § The proper order of natural theology is not to begin from a hypothesis and postulate what we would expect to find if it were true. Rather, the first step of a natural-theological argument is to demonstrate the phenomenon that will serve as evidence, whether meaning, morality, or mind. That means that, in this debate, Goldstein and Peterson are engaging in the appropriate first step of natural theology, demonstrating the relevant phenomenon independently of metaphysical hypotheses. The second step is to demonstrate that the explanation of that phenomenon requires the existence of something else as its minimal, sufficient explanation. But notice what Popular Christian Apologetics does instead. It fallaciously reverses step two, by considering the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis, instead of the hypothesis on the evidence. And it undermines nonbelievers’ confidence in the phenomenon of step one. In effect, this is worse than the problem with the simulation argument. There, the evidence is granted. Here, the evidence is not even granted. It’s as if the simulation people tried to argue everyone else into thinking that hallucinations and false collective memories don’t exist. But those phenomena were supposed to be your evidence for the simulation hypothesis! Popular Christian Apologetics argues in just about the opposite direction it should argue. § What are the steps to demonstrate that meaning or morality—let’s pivot to morality—indicates the existence of God? 1. First, you must demonstrate the truth of moral realism, that moral statements express truths about reality. This is no easy feat. But let’s imagine you were able to do so. (I think that page one of Mere Christianity, Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” and Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology all do this work, in a certain way. By demonstrating that we all engage in moral thinking and can’t help but doing so, I think we are forced to recognize that we all are moral realists, whether we like it or not. See my video on natural law.) 2. Second, you must argue that moral realism cannot be explained naturalistically. My late professor Helen De Cruz carefully considers these arguments in her chapter on the moral argument for God’s existence. When it comes to moral psychology, there are many available evolutionary explanations of moral psychology, even if I would raise questions about them. But for moral realism, evolutionary explanations tend to be “debunking.” We believe these things, not because they are true, but because they contribute to group survival. As a result, many thinkers—both religious and secular—think it is difficult to see how naturalism can account for the truth of moral statements. From scientific ‘is’ statements, you don’t arrive at any moral ‘ought’ statements. Hence, a moral argument against naturalism has good odds of success. But what follows? Many folks who adopt moral realism “from below” adopt either a kind of Platonism or a kind of social constructivism (a non-reductionist one). For example, in analytic philosophy, Iris Murdoch proposed a kind of Platonism to explain the reality of the good and the truth of moral statements in contradiction to the ethical emotivism of the logical positivists. On the other hand, John Rawls resurrected moral philosophy by introducing a kind of constructivism, which many take to have realist implications. As a result, most secular analytic philosophers today are moral realists. (Even Peter Singer recently came out as a moral realist.) 3. Step three is to argue for the minimal, sufficient non-naturalistic explanation of moral realism. This could be the Platonism or constructivism mentioned above, or true Kantianism, where moral statements express not truths of theoretical reason but of the form of practical reasoning. Most Christians are not so chastened in their reasoning. Rather, we propose God as explanation and jump to the conclusion that we’ve hit the jackpot. But given the Euthyphro dilemma, it is not at all clear that this is so. Trying to explain morality (or logic) by God rather than Platonism is suggestive of voluntarism. In fact, I think that moral realism indicates either something like Platonism or something like Kantianism. Natural reality is an inadequate explanation of morality, so either a non-natural moral reality (vaguely akin to Platonic forms) is suggested, or something endemic to practical reasoning, a kind of logic of action introduces moral categoricity. 4. Step four is the one you’ve been waiting for. We ask what metaphysically explains the existence of this non-natural moral reality or what follows from Kantian practical reasoning. Only at this stage will we be led to appeal to God. If we think moral realism requires a kind of Platonic moral reality in addition to nature, then we ask a causal question about what could explain and give rise to it. A naturalistic causal explanation is not even an option, since this reality is non-natural. A supernatural source of moral reality must, arguably, be postulated. If moral realism leads to Kantianism, then, at least according to Kant, God arises not as a causal explanation of the world, of human beings, or of moral reality. No God himself is another postulate of practical reason, the being that must exist in order to bring about cosmic justice in accord with the categorical imperative. But either way, there are more steps until we arrive at anything like God, and those steps are not obvious. Th

    17 min

  2. 10/28/2025

    Before You Discover the Meaning OF Life, Try Finding Meaning IN Life

    § Recently, one of the world’s most downloaded podcasts hosted a debate between a Christian, an atheist, and a psychologist. Their topic? The meaning of life. Christian apologist Greg Koukl argued that, without belief in God, a materialist worldview holds no hope to provide meaning. The atheist—young and dapper Alex O’Connor—countered that, even if there is a God, who’s to say he hasn’t given our lives a meaning that we find meaningless? Say, designing us so that our purpose in life was to produce paperclips? However, at other points the Christian and the atheist seemed to be in complete agreement: Koukl: “There either is meaning objectively, or not.” O’Connor: “I think so too, to be clear.” Meanwhile, a third participant, “Dr. K,” trained psychologist with a background in Eastern spirituality, had this to say: Countering both sides of the metaphysical debate, Dr. K continued, “For me, finding meaning and purpose…is a very practical thing.” Rather than answering the perennial questions of metaphysics and religion, Dr. K is concerned to intervene in a recent, acute crisis of loss of subjective meaning—the very crisis with which Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary, framed the discussion. As Dr. K puts it, “If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know. But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’” And in saying this, Dr. K exposed the deep failure of several decades of both Christian and atheist apologetics, a failure that comes down, in this case, to a single preposition. The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 1. The Setup § The Diary of a CEO is one of today’s top podcasts. Host Steven Bartlett is a young, successful entrepreneur who interviews the best minds in a wide variety of areas, from psychology, to politics, to—more rarely—religion. That is why it was exciting to see him host this discussion on meaning and religion with a Christian apologist among the participants. Even secular audiences have become interested in religious questions as a result of what many term “the meaning crisis,” a combination of psychological down-turns that have prompted a resurgence of religious belief and participation. And that is the setup with which Bartlett frames the podcast discussion: The reason I wanted to speak to all three of you today is to discuss meaning and purpose. And there’s some stats that I wanted to share that kind of frame the discussion: Three in five young Americans believe that their life lacks purpose. Nine in ten young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose. And to give some further stats, which I found really interesting around the rise of religiosity in the UK, a belief in God amongst 18-24 year-olds has risen from 18% in 2021, to 37% in 2025. According to YouGov and in the UK, monthly church attendance has risen from 4% up to 15% in 2025. There is something going on, and that’s what I want to talk about today. Bartlett identifies two trends. First, there is an increase in the number of people in Western countries who report lacking purpose in their lives. Second, in only the last couple years, there has been an increase both in religious belief and attendance. What is interesting about this is that, for a long time, there have been intellectuals—from Friedrich Nietzsche to Francis Schaeffer—arguing that the decline of religious belief is the cause of contemporary purposelessness. This argument has ramped up in intellectual spaces in the last nine years, chiefly through the influence of Jordan Peterson. However, until the last two years, there was little evidence that this had had an impact on the religious beliefs and practices of the population at large. This recent turn of events lends empirical, sociological credence to what was previously only a philosophical postulate. But the connection between religious belief and felt purpose remains opaque. Does one need to resolve questions of religion in order to gain a sense of purpose in life? Or is religious conviction merely a psychological remedy that happens, sometimes, to be effective? 2. Team Metaphysics, Unite! § Over the course of the discussion, it is revealed that the Christian apologist and the atheist are strongly aligned in their answer to that question. For both Greg Koukl and Alex O’Connor, the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology. So Greg Koukl: “I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness’s hunger for meaning and significance.” In other words, you need to decide between metaphysical naturalism and theism before you can satisfy the hunger for meaning and significance. And Alex O’Connor: “You asked, ‘Do I know my own purpose?’ That assumes that there is a purpose to know.” On the other hand, they both throw bones to psychology, acknowledging its significance in measure. Koukl rightly points out that, because God made the world with objective purpose: “People can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don’t know God.” Effectively, Koukl acknowledges the doctrine of the natural law in a way I applaud. For O’Connor, the New Atheists neglected the psychological dimension, and he acknowledges that religion serves an important role in strengthening us against the existential threat of death: “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.” However, in spite of these concessions, when pushed, both Koukl and O’Connor express their view of meaning as 1) turning on questions of metaphysics, and 2) being all or nothing. At one point, Greg Koukl bluntly says, “There either is meaning or there isn’t,” to which O’Connor responds, “I completely agree.” In short, the atheist and the Christian have teamed up on team metaphysics. Their program is this: “Want meaning in life? First determine the meaning of life.” But the psychologist is having none of it. 3. Psychologist: “I hard disagree.” § Several years ago, Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, who has long been YouTube-famous for rattling sabres with atheists in heated philosophical debates, was caught off-guard by the introduction of a third participant: Psychologist Jordan Peterson. In debate with Peterson and atheist Rebecca Goldstein, Craig’s directly metaphysical approach to defending Christianity seemed preachy, dated, and out-of-touch. Something similar occurs in this discussion. While Koukl and O’Connor are clearly poised to engage in some classic atheist-theist exchanges, Dr. K presses a different question: “If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know. But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’” At one point, Dr. K brings the discussion back to the statistics with which Bartlett framed the podcast: Steven 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. Dr. K also challenges Alex on an important point. Alex argues that the discussion they are having is a perennial one. People for all history have had existential questions, questions of meaning and metaphysics, and so these are the perennial questions which will not be answered in one conversation. But Dr. K points out that their discussion is not framed by a perennial problem, but an acute one. That acute problem is not the perennial problem of metaphysics: What is the meaning of life? Instead, it is the personal problem: How can I find meaning in life? The difference is but a preposition. Because he thinks the problem of meaning is perennial, Alex emphasizes more than once that it will be impossible, in the course of one conversation, to settle the matter. But Dr. K disagrees. He does think their conversation can provide an answer. 4. Incremental Improvement § Moments later, Dr. K reveals why he thinks the meaning crisis is manageable. While, for the atheist and the theist, the problem of meaning is all-or-nothing, for Dr. K, meaning is measurable along a sliding scale. He describes how psychologists measure a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They give people a series of surveys that get responses to questions related to meaning, control, and purpose (all of which clump together psychometrically, suggesting that they measure the same psychological variable). He surveys the debate participants on the spot, asking how they would rate their subjective sense of purpose on a scale of 1 to 10: Koukl offers 10, Bartlett 5, and Dr. K presses Alex to admit that he would score greater than five on such a scale. But what is Dr. K’s goal in the conversation? Not to get people from zero to ten in a single conversation, but to help people move “some vague percentage points, I’m shooting for about 20%.” Yes. This is it. Dr. K wants people to move some small percentage along a vague scale that he doesn’t understand, but that we kind of all know is there: More meaning and purpose, less meaning and purpose. That’s what he’s going for. It’s incremental improvement. Meaning in life is not a grand, metaphysical sense of the purpose of all existence. Meaning can be as simple as moving from doing less well to doing a little bit better. 5. A New Apologetic § In much of popular Christian apologetics, a certain kind of argument predominates. While I have previously made much of the presuppositionalist-classical distinction, this argument predominates on both sides, whatever the apologist’s professed methodolog

    15 min

  3. 09/26/2025

    Natural Selection Only Explains a Fraction of Biological Adaptation

    In A Natural History of Natural Theology, my late professor Helen De Cruz (1978-2025) and husband Johan De Smedt write that “most modern versions of the design argument do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75). Advocates of the design argument have not proven that the argument remains valid after Darwin; they—we—have simply ignored natural selection. Dr. De Cruz, who served on the committee for my dissertation prospectus, died this June at the age of 46 of an aggressive illness. She left behind two children and a husband. Her work in philosophy was truly remarkable, not to mention her prior Ph.D. in art history, her fiction-writing, and lute-playing(!). While this article engages in criticism, it arises from deep respect for her amazing, cross-disciplinary scholarship. However, while De Cruz and De Smedt argue that contemporary natural theologians ignore natural selection, their own description of natural selection is simplistic. They illustrate the process with an example of Richard Dawkins’. And they begin with an important admission: The likelihood that a computer program that generates random combinations of letters will produce by pure chance a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, such as METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL, is vanishingly small. (I did the math; that’s less than 1 in 1032!) But here’s how natural selection can overcome this probability threshold: However, allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs. Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt? That’s not natural selection. That’s cheating. What I greatly respect about Dr. De Cruz’s work is its careful integration of science with philosophy and theology. For example: But on this point, I find myself disappointed. I had hoped for a robust analysis of wherein modern evolutionary science conflicts with the design argument. Instead, I find an inaccurate overestimate of the power of natural selection, with the assumption that natural selection is the sole causal source of biological evolution. De Cruz and De Smedt are also dismissive toward Bill Dembski and the theory of Intelligent Design. (At least they are willing to cite Dembski!) As a result, I find myself craving more accurate analysis of the power and limits of modern evolutionary theory and the remaining viability of teleological thinking in science and philosophy. In this article, I’ll argue that De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of natural selection assumes the presence of design and, citing Bill Dembski’s recent article on “the conservation of information,” argue that natural selection explains only a fraction of biological diversity. While structural biologists, admitting the problem, propose additional mechanisms of evolution, I conclude that no naturalistic explanation of the origin of biological diversity yet exists. The design argument, therefore, remains as viable as ever. To support research exploring academic heterodoxy on evolution, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to The Natural Theologian. You’ll also get exclusive access to paid posts. 1. Natural Selection…Plus Additional Programming In his analysis of the origin of biological forms, Aristotle discussed three kinds of cause: Chance, Necessity, and Purpose. (This is distinct from his “four causes” idea.) In his contemporary defense of the design inference, Dembski discusses the same three, calling them “chance, regularity, and design.” But De Cruz and De Smedt argue that this is to ignore a fourth causal option that modern science has turned up: Natural selection. Admittedly, natural selection is not independent of the other three causes. It is a combination of chance and regularity, and purportedly, it mimics or creates the appearance of design. On this analysis, Aristotle’s trichotomy has been superseded by Darwin’s tetrachotomy. Hence, contemporary teleologists, including intelligent design theorists, are working with an outdated palette of options. For pre-Darwinians like Aristotle and Cicero, and even William Paley, “natural selection was not in the pool of possible explanations,” De Cruz and De Smedt admit. But for modern advocates “of the design argument,” De Cruz and De Smedt allege that they “do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75). Modern advocates of design are simply ignoring the advance made by Darwin’s discovery of natural selection. But as revealed in the above example, De Cruz and De Smedt confuse natural selection’s combination of chance and regularity with the workings of a pre-programmed filter. While the chance of producing METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL by chance is prohibitively low, they argue that, by the “principle of cumulative selective retention,” a computer could reduce the odds from Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs. But a computer program that “retained the correct letters at each attempt” would not be a combination only of chance and regularity, but of chance, regularity, and design. Chance is involved in the mechanism of random-letter-generation. Regularity governs the mechanical working of the computer’s selection mechanism. But allowing, i.e., programming, a “computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt” would require design. While De Cruz and De Smedt are confident that “Darwin…came up with natural selection as a naturalistic explanation of design,” their own description of its workings—even as highly-educated, scientifically-informed philosophers over a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species—tacitly invokes design. 2. Information In, Information Out This week, mathematician and philosopher Bill Dembski shared on his Substack an academic article he published earlier this month: “The Law of Conservation of Information: Search Processes Only Redistribute Existing Information.” In that article, Dembski argues the following: Conservation of information sparked scientific interest once a recurring pattern was noticed in the evolutionary computing literature. In grappling with the creation of information through evolutionary algorithms, this literature consistently revealed that the information outputted by such algorithms always needed first to be programmed into them. Thus, the primary goal of this literature—to uncover how information could be created from scratch or de novo—was shown to be misconceived: the information was not created but instead shuffled around or smuggled in, implying that it already existed in some form or other. Information output in these situations therefore always presupposed a counterbalancing input of prior information. In other words, mechanistic processes are incapable of producing new information. The most a mechanistic process can do is shuffle it around or destroy it. Accordingly, while natural selection was an important scientific discovery, it does not have the power to produce new biological information (or lines of Shakespeare). It can only reshuffle or destroy existing information. Consider an example of biological evolution for which the mechanism of natural selection is adequate: The evolution of the polar bear. Scientists believe that the polar bear shares a common ancestor with the brown bear and the North American black bear. The evidence of this is their shared genetic material, less two notable mutations. One mutation is to a gene involved in fat metabolism, which allows the polar bear to have a diet that ‘contains a very large proportion of fat (much higher than in the diet of brown bears)’ (Behe, Darwin Devolves, 16). The second gene “is associated with pigmentation, and changes in it are probably responsible for the blanching of the [polar bear] ancestors’ brown fur” (17). (I wrote about this here.) Yet both mutations, when they occur in other mammals, are damaging. “When the same gene is mutated in humans or mice, studies show it frequently leads to high levels of cholesterol and heart disease” (Behe, 17). Likewise, the loss of pigmentation in the fur was a loss of functional genetic material, not the creation of a new gene for white fur. As I once summarized it, “Scientists have reason to believe that both variations that occurred in polar bears [involved] a loss of genetic information that, as we saw, is shared by mammals, up to and including humans.” In other words, in a scientifically demonstrable instance where biological evolution was caused by natural selection, no new information was created. Biological information was lost. And this loss of biological information was, by accident, beneficial. It was selectively retained without any pre-programming—without any design. Importantly, however, while natural selection can explain how the polar bear evolved from the biological kind of bear that was the common ancestral population of the brown bear and the North American black bear, it cannot explain the origin of the biological information that gave rise to that ancestral kind of bear in the first place. Natural selection explains the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest. Natural selection explains the speciation of an off-shoot, whose differentiating mutations are damaging to existing functional genes. But what natural selection cannot explain is the origin of biological kinds. 3. Evolutionists, Don’t Give Up! In What Darwin Got Wrong, philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report that, among structural biologists, no one believes that natural selection is sufficient to explain biological diversity: “None of them is ‘that kind’ of Darwinist any more” (xiv). Howeve

    15 min

  4. 07/21/2025

    Further Reflections on Machen: Objectivity, Convictions, and Institutions

    In response to my recent post on J. Gresham Machen, readers offered thoughtful pushback on several fronts. Some questioned whether Machen’s later turn away from “objective” methods wasn’t the right move after all. Others raised concerns about the dangers of free inquiry, especially when it risks undermining Christian convictions. Still others debated the wisdom of staying and reforming corrupt institutions rather than leaving them to act authentically. Here are a few reflections in response to those critiques. 1. Should Christians Strive for Objectivity? A common objection was: “The theological modernists claimed objectivity, but they were, in fact, biased. Doesn’t that vindicate Machen’s later turn toward Christian perspectivalism?” This strikes me as a category confusion. The problem with theological modernists wasn’t that they tried to be objective. The problem was that they weren’t. They imported philosophical and theological assumptions while presenting their conclusions as neutral scholarship. Their failure wasn’t in aspiring to objectivity, but in failing to live up to it. The right response isn’t to embrace perspectivalism as if all truth is merely a projection of our ideological priors. It’s to strive for greater objectivity, not less. I’ve described this elsewhere as civilized empiricism—a pursuit of truth grounded in a recognition of one’s biases, tested through dialogue with dissenting voices and institutions designed to expose blind spots. This is distinct from a kind of naïve or “brute empiricism,” where a lone thinker imagines they can arrive at truth without community, history, or correction. If our institutions are prone to dogma, the answer isn’t to surrender to subjectivity. It’s to lean more fully into practices that counterbalance our partiality. That means that students of faith should study with secular professors and peers, and secular scholars should welcome religious students into their classrooms. We need shared spaces of inquiry across disagreement, not echo chambers of our own convictions. 2. Should We Pursue Truth Before Christ? Another objection was more spiritual in nature: Is there not danger in pursuing truth wherever it leads, especially if that pursuit might lead us away from Christ? I take this concern seriously. The fear isn’t just about what we might find out if we looked deeper. It’s about our own susceptibility to pride, to the allure of intellectual respectability, or to temptation masquerading as insight. There is wisdom in spiritual caution. Not everyone is ready for every branch of philosophy or science. But while maturity matters, I don’t believe the answer is to foreclose hard questions for fear of where they might lead. Christians often speak of the need for moral commitment to Christ prior to intellectual inquiry. But the New Testament seems to assume the reverse: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Our faith depends on something being true, and that truth is, in principle, open to examination. Faith seeks understanding, yes, but it also rests on good reasons. We are not asked to believe blindly, but to weigh, inquire, and discern. To do that well requires what I might call a “philosophic temper”—a posture of non-anxious, open-minded interest in truth. Some secular scholars model this better than many Christians. (This is very different from the kind of student who learns a bit of textual criticism and suddenly becomes pro-abortion. That’s not inquiry; that’s reaction.) One helpful way to cultivate a philosophic temper: Ask yourself what kind of worldview you’d hold if you lost your faith. Don’t just assume you’d become a Nietzschean or a nihilist. Perhaps you would continue to “act as though God exists,” like Jordan Peterson, or maintain the best insights of “religion for atheists,” like Alain de Botton. Thinking through those scenarios helps clarify what’s at stake, and what’s not, in our beliefs. 3. Should We Stay or Leave Broken Institutions? Finally, some readers defended Machen’s own institutional departures, asking: Wasn’t Machen right to leave the mainline Presbyterian church and Princeton Seminary? Aren’t some institutions working at cross-purposes with their founding principles? In my earlier post, I only revealed my views on Machen’s decision to paid subscribers, but I will say this here: Burnett’s biography has me reconsider my Protestant impulse to take doctrinal purity as the deciding factor in favor of leaving corrupt institutions. The question applies far beyond Machen’s choice to leave his denomination and academic home. Many of us wrestle with similar choices in our relationship to academia, to the church, or to legacy institutions in general. Should we remain, or break away and start afresh? Often our conclusions reflect our own sociological positioning. Those outside academia often see only its ideological flaws and institutional failures. Those within it, especially those embedded in its better corners, see the benefits it still offers: peer review and intellectual collaboration and camaraderie. I’m part of academia, though not at its center. I see both its value and its limitations. (See my “Don’t Let Academia Stop You Being an Intellectual.”) I envy the acknowledgements pages in academic books, in which top scholars credit tens, if not hundreds of other academics for conversations, criticisms, and challenges that shaped the final work. That kind of collaborative refinement can’t easily be replicated on Substack. Substack has its strengths, but it doesn’t yet foster the same kind of rigorous back-and-forth. The same dynamic plays out in the church. Many evangelicals ask, “Why stay in a theologically liberal denomination?” But consider what was lost when evangelicals abandoned the mainline: beautiful buildings, central properties in every city, and a visible presence in the cultural square. By leaving, we may have preserved our theology, but at the cost of place, heritage, and public witness. There’s a kind of escapism in that. Doctrinal purity matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Institutions do more than just preserve doctrine: they order life, preserve memory, and embody truth in social form. When they lose their way, leaving is tempting, but rebuilding outside the institution is costly. You lose the infrastructure, financial, intellectual, and even architectural, that once supported your mission. Those supports aren’t ultimate, but they’re not irrelevant either. There’s a kind of radical Protestant, or Donatist, impulse in assuming we can do without them. “Donatism was a schism from the Catholic Church from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.” from “Donatism,” Wikipedia What Comes Next? As I continue reflecting on Machen’s biography, I find myself drawn to an earlier generation of Christian leaders—those turn-of-the-century college presidents who pursued academic excellence while holding firm to the faith. There was a window of time when Christian intellectuals helped shape the modern university—before ideological conformity closed that door. In one sense, you could see what I’m doing as reconsidering the idea that the seminary theologian is the ideal of the Christian intellectual. Perhaps the ideal of the Christian intellectual is somewhere closer to the interface of the modern research university, the Christian faced with the objective pursuit of truth in a whole variety of areas, with empirical research, with philosophy, and so on. It’s for such an individual that the conflicts between faith and reason are raised in an institutional calling. I’ll be drawing attention to some of these figures in the near future. This post was written with the editing help of ChatGPT. The Natural Theologian is a reader-supported publication. To receive free posts like this one, become a free subscriber. To get access to premium paid essays and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Natural Theologian. Get full access to The Natural Theologian at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

    10 min

  5. 06/23/2025

    Why I STOPPED Being a Presuppositionalist

    My theological education took place at Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism. Presuppositionalism: Christian thinking must begin from all and only Christian presuppositions. And this thesis had a noticeable effect on our studies. 95% of the time we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said. 5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them. But after Westminster, I did a program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. In this beautiful, gothic reading room, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation: “Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.” And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositional seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago. Now, my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions. Now, my Christian perspective suggests that even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine. Readers, last week, I argued that the theology nerd mindset is that of a closed system, a self-reinforcing circle of Bible and theology, with no outside inputs. While much evangelical theology makes this error implicitly, presuppositionalism endorses and radicalizes this error explicitly. The presuppositionalist avows that theology should utilize circular arguments, beginning all and only from Christian presuppositions. And even if you haven’t encountered presuppositionalism, I think you’ll recognize the tendency to ideological thinking that refuses to be challenged and protects its ideas from outside interference. Not so the Christian humanist. Outside interference, from reality, is what the humanist desires. That’s why the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist is also the story of how I became a Christian humanist. In the rest of this post (originally a YouTube video I made in February), I tell the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist. Thank you for reading. If you want to learn more about transcending the theology nerd mindset, sign up for my upcoming (July-August) course, From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist. I. What Is a Presuppositionalist? The story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist begins back when I was one. A presuppositionalist is someone who believes that, to have a consistently Christian worldview, you need to start from all and only Christian presuppositions. The underlying theory is that people of different worldviews all start from their own presuppositions. If you’re a materialist atheist, you start from those presuppositions. If you’re a Christian, you start from a Christian set of presuppositions, and never the twain shall meet. Nobody really bases their beliefs on just an objective look at the evidence. We all bring a set of lenses, interpretive schemes to the world, and a Christian ought to make the Bible their interpretive scheme. Now for me, this was compelling as I was first taking my faith seriously. I’d had a lot of time where I just was a Christian on Sunday, and I didn’t know how to apply my faith to the other days of the week. That’s a lot of people. But as I was trying to take that faith more seriously, reading the Bible more, studying theology—the idea of having Christian presuppositions for all that you do sounds really compelling. I was also getting into the Reformed theology space where there’s an argument put forward that presuppositionalism is the consistent Calvinist or Reformed approach to apologetics, instead of classical or evidential apologetics, where you start from common ground and evidence to argue to a Christian worldview. Now I remember going off to college, at a Christian college. I thought, “Hey, I can get a Christian perspective on things!” And my now wife showed me her homework from a philosophy class, and it was about Thomas Aquinas, who is the opposite of a presuppositionalist. He’s a natural theologian. And he was arguing that there’s a distinction between the preambles of faith, the things you can know apart from faith or revelation, and the articles of faith, the things that are taught by faith. Aquinas would say that the Trinity, the Incarnation, and redemption you can only get from the Bible. But that God exists, that there is a moral law, and that we’ve sinned, these things can be known apart from Scripture. They might be even what gets you interested in Scripture. If you start to think, “I think there’s a God out there. Maybe I should read this Bible people keep talking about.” That’s the preambles versus the articles. But I denied that. I remember at the time thinking: “No, everything’s got to start from the Bible. That’s how you’re going to have a consistently Christian perspective on things in the world.” II. The Turning Point: Moral Attitudes in P. F. Strawson But there was a time in a final philosophy class I took at that college, we were reading about free will and moral responsibility. And there’s an important essay by Peter Strawson, British philosopher from the mid-20th century—“Freedom and Resentment.” In it, Strawson was arguing against the hard determinists. These are philosophers who think that free will and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is true and that therefore free will is false. And the hard determinists thought that therefore, we should rid ourselves of all emotions that assume that other people are moral response morally responsible. Think, e.g., resentment, from the title, that assumes that the other person has free will and purposefully did something to you. Or gratitude on the positive side: to be grateful towards somebody assumes that they were free, deserving of praise for what they did, and not just, “Well, they were pre-programmed to do it.” And Strawson’s argument took an interesting form, because Strawson was not a Christian. He was not somebody who argued that we have a soul or a metaphysical basis for free will, that we're not physically determined by our psychology or something. No, he just said, “There’s no way that we’re going to rid ourselves of these emotions of resentment and gratitude, blame and praise. These are part of being human, that we are equipped with the ability to make these evaluations.” And so from there, he said, no metaphysical thesis that pointy-headed philosophers or physicists come up with in the lab is going to affect this practice and its validity. If you bump into me, what decides whether I should be mad or forgiving is whether you intended to do so, not whether physicists have figured out whether quantum mechanics is true. So that idea, I didn’t realize it, but that was already incompatible with presuppositionalism. Hey, if you enjoy content like this, hit like and subscribe to The Natural Theologian. If you want to support my work further, consider becoming a paid subscriber. How? you say. How was Strawson’s idea incompatible with presuppositionalism? Well, let’s take an example of a presuppositionalist argument. A prominent one was the way Doug Wilson debated Christopher Hitchens in their recorded debates. Wilson is officially a presuppositionalist. (He’s got some other C. S. Lewis, natural law influences that we’ll leave aside for the moment.) But Wilson kept pressing Hitchens on Hitchens’ morally fervent critiques of the God of the Old Testament and the New. He would say, “Where do you get this morality by which you can judge—by what standard can you judge that God is evil, for having the Israelites go and kill the Canaanites? By what standard can you judge that penal substitutionary atonement is morally repugnant? You must be assuming a moral standard that has no place in an atheistic, materialist universe.” Now there are two ways you can go with an argument like that. The presuppositionalist essentially says: “You, atheist, have no basis for morality. Stop it. You need to be consistent. Go become a nihilist and go kill other people or yourself.” That’s the extreme version, but that’s essentially, “Go take your presuppositions to their logical conclusion.” But that’s not the direction that Strawson goes. Strawson is not a Christian, but he’s saying there’s something else beyond metaphysical inklings (i.e., do you believe in God or materialism). There’s our ingrained human ability to evaluate things on a moral level and to feel the emotions that are part and parcel of that. And that’s not going away. To read and understand Peter Strawson’s article, sign up for From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist. I’m adding it to the syllabus for “philosophy week.” Grab a copy of the syllabus by clicking this link. III. C. S. Lewis and my Agnostic Professor And that’s actually where C. S. Lewis starts his argument for Christianity, in the very opening pages of Mere Christianity. C. S. Lewis says people are doing this all the time. They’re saying, “That’s mine!” “Don’t take that.” “You pushed me.” “I didn’t mean to!” They’re arguing in these moral terms based on these practices of praise and blame that we all already participate in. And C. S. Lewis says, “We all already know about that, but that thing is a clue to the meaning of the universe.” So both the presuppositionalist and the natural theologian hold that you can’t make sense of morality without God, but they do different things with this claim. The presuppositionalist says, “You need to be consistent and give up on morality.” The natural theologian says, “You need to be consistent with what you already know—that morality exists—and adopt a worldview that explains why the world is more than just material.” The presuppositionalist says, “There’s no common ground between believer and unbeliever; there’s nothing we have in common. All that morality y

    19 min

  6. 04/18/2025

    Why I'm Getting a PhD in Philosophy, Not Theology

    Hello, readers! The last several weeks, I’ve been deep in work on my Ph.D. dissertation. I’m excited to share some of the fruits of that research here. I’ll begin with my reflections on why I’m getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in the first place. Thanks for reading. Hey, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian. And in this post, I’m going to talk about why I’m getting a PhD in philosophy and not theology. 1. Biblical Exegesis Is Not Enough My first intellectual love has been theology, the study of Christian doctrine and what the faith teaches. That led me to take an interest in studying at seminary where we would study the sources of Christian theology in the Bible and the history of Christian interpretation of the Bible and the systematization of that into systematic theology. A whole coalition of disciplines that explore the contours of what Christianity teaches. And by attending seminary, you become competent. You can learn the original languages of the Bible. You can learn how to use the Bible in theological debate, what are the main arguments for and against different positions, and how to ground one's own position in those texts. (For background, see my post, “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Seminary.”) But what I realized over the course of my seminary studies was that the resources of biblical exegesis alone are not enough to do Christian theology. I noticed this in each of the main evangelical debates. Take the debate over complementarianism and egalitarianism, the relationship between men and women in the home and the church. Now both of these arguments were presented as if they were purely exegetical arguments. They rested on the meanings of certain Greek words like kephalé, for head, the husband is the head of the wife (Eph 5:23). What does this mean, authority, source, or what? The “helpmeet,” the “companion” in the book of Genesis (Gen 2:18). These Hebrew and Greek words were supposed to be the linchpin of theological arguments. Yet it wasn’t plausible to me that biblical exegesis alone was even the reason people held the positions they held. Did the evangelical feminist really hold their view just because of a dictionary definition of kephalé? Or was something more going on? (And the same applied to the complementarians, by the way.) No, I started to think people get their ideas from outside the Bible. They’re shaped by the Bible, but their reading of the Bible is also shaped by what they already think. And so we’re kind of thrown back on ourselves to actually examine the fundamental assumptions that we hold and the reasons for and against those, in conversation with the Bible, but not with the Bible alone. Specifically, I started to see the way that different theological debates reduced down to philosophical debates. The feminist one remains a simple example. If someone thinks that the reason churches, certain churches, ordain only men and not women is because of the patriarchy, we’re not dealing with a specifically Christian argument. That’s not a knock against it, but it is to say that this is an argument that shows up elsewhere. To actually understand the merits of a key feminist argument like that, you have to go into feminist philosophy, look at the history of that argument. What is the sociological evidence for it? What is the philosophical grounding of it? And what are the contrary claims of the other side? Well, this would enmesh you in philosophy, that universal human discipline, rather than the parochial Christian theology of adherence of the Christian faith. And so, I began to think in that, as in so many other debates, what we really need to do is get down to the philosophical arguments that are at the heart of things. And this just dovetailed with the fact that, as many people criticize evangelicals for, debating from Bible verses actually doesn’t solve our problems. There are contested interpretations. There are different interpretations on completely opposite sides. There are views on completely opposite sides that both claim a basis in the Bible. Now, this isn’t to say that there’s no way to read the Bible aright, but it is to say that the idea that you can do it all from the Bible is a bit shallow and narrow. If you enjoy content like this, hit “like” and subscribe to The Natural Theologian. That will help me make more content like this and get it out to more people. Thanks for your support. 2. Attending to Reality Now another reason to go outside the Bible in order to understand Christian teaching is because the message of the Bible is actually about those things themselves. It’s a message to human beings about human beings. It addresses the various aspects of their lives. It addresses the world, the natural world, the human world. And if you don’t understand those things on their own terms, as it were, you're liable to ignore them or misunderstand them or not even to comprehend how the Christian faith speaks to them. If you try to speak about those things just from the Bible and theology, you’re likely to be missing a lot of the relevant information. An obvious one is politics. Whoever claims that their view of politics comes directly from the Bible immediately invites suspicion. Because there are people who can argue the exact contrary position and claim that it’s from the Bible. And more importantly, because politics is a complex and messy subject in the real world. We have to use our eyes and our senses to gather empirical information about how the world works. And this is done in political science, political philosophy, sociology, history, and many other disciplines. The idea that we can do this from the Bible alone, get that sort of magic shortcut to the right answers, is deeply misguided. There are other areas as well. Broadly, we could think about anthropology, the study of human beings. Can human beings be understood through science? Can we understand ourselves through the disciplines of psychology? What are the limits of that scientific understanding? Are there ways that human beings cannot be reduced to their scientific and natural substrate? We see debates about counseling and psychology and their legitimacy for Christians. Can we use this information that’s gathered, not from the Bible, but by secular study and by secular psychotherapy to understand the human mind, to help people? Can we differentiate spiritual problems from psychological problems and properly relate these? Again, you can’t do that if you just say everything's going to come from the Bible, as some do. You’re liable to to mistake psychological problems for spiritual ones. (See “Are Thoughts Sin?” by Anna Carini and myself.) If the Bible is to help human beings live human lives, we actually have to pay attention to human beings, how they work, how their minds work. We can’t just look at the Bible. Now that’s not to say that the Bible can’t correct secular understandings. It’s not to say that the Bible can’t, for instance, emphasize human responsibility in ways that a kind of determinist psychology ignores. We should emphasize human moral responsibility. In fact, when you don't people become helpless, and science can even confirm that. (See discussion of “learned helplessness.”) But you need a healthy discussion and dialogue between between faith and science to even get that right. There are other areas. In the church, when we try to reduce everything to theology, we often ignore power dynamics, ways that people are driven by narcissism or fame, psychological motivations. If we understand the church as another human institution, trying to exemplify something greater, but still subject to those infirmities and patterns, we're going to be on a lot better footing. We can pay attention to how social media is shaping the Christian life, shaping online Christian personalities. We get a better sense of what’s really going on. Example: Homosexual Orientation Maybe more controversially, same-sex attraction is an important topic for the contemporary church. It’s where the church is frequently accused of homophobia, of misunderstanding and lacking sympathy with one particular human experience. And the church can easily do this. We can say, we’ve got our answers straight from the Bible. There's no mention of a homosexual orientation. Our desires are themselves sin. We can make these blanket proclamations. This is an area of theology where I think the church needs to really grapple with reality that we can learn through philosophy and empirical science. We can learn from people’s experience and from scientific study that some people have a sexual orientation that is ordered contrary to how the Bible says we ought to direct our sexual activity. (See my “Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct.”) If that’s the case, that presents a real obstacle to just stating the Christian truth simply. If there’s a fact that some people are same-sex attracted or gay, then we cannot simply assume that every desire is sin. We cannot simply assume that the Christian message of sexual fidelity in male-female marriage is easy for everyone. We must understand that it is more costly for some than others because of the way some people’s nature has been made, even though that's affected by the fall. Empirical reality, things that are known from outside the Bible have to be allowed in if we are to be sympathetic to human nature, to the human beings that are around us as we know that Jesus Christ himself is. 3. Openness to Experience and Thought We’ve moved further afield than just philosophy. Why does this explain that I'm getting a philosophy Ph.D. instead of a theology Ph.D.? Well, it's because of this openness to other fields of learning. Now, philosophy itself acts as a kind of bridge between all these fields. It’s been remarked before that philosophy doesn't really have its own subject area. It studies all phenomena. There’s a

    18 min

  7. 02/27/2025

    In Defence of Christian Civilization

    Yes, that’s right — “defence,” with a ‘c.’ That’s because my guest on this episode is an Anglican priest and Substacker Father Thomas Plant (Fr Thomas Plant). Father Plant recently responded to Paul Kingsnorth’s lecture “Against Christian Civilization” with his well-titled reply, “Kingsnorth’s Radical Protestantism: In Defence of Christian Civilisation.” Fr. Plant writes: “Do we want civilization,” he asks, “or do we want Christ? What if we can have only the one or the other?” The question is rhetorical, the presumed answer clear. Christ and civilisation are antitheses. To follow one is to reject the other. They are rival masters, and woe on him who tries to serve the two. This dualistic principle governs Kingsnorth’s recent diatribe for First Things, Against Christian Civilisation. It is an ascetic principle of sorts, grounding Kingsnorth’s quietist distaste for politics and technology. But despite his newfound profession of Orthodoxy, it is a principle closer to the Puritans and Levellers than to the Hesychasts and Stilites he admires. Read the whole thing. Given my own take on Kingsnorth’s talk, I had to have Fr. Plant on the podcast. Here is our conversation. For the video version, watch our interview on YouTube. (And be sure to subscribe to The Natural Theologian YouTube channel.) Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:57 Kingsnorth's Mistake 07:03 The Puritan Error? 11:00 Contemporary Radical Protestantism 16:50 Kingsnorth's Critique of Jordan Peterson 26:42 Good without God? 33:01 Pastoral Implications 37:00 How to be a Christian in abundance? 44:35 Christian culture v. civilization? Fr. Plant’s Article: “Kingsnorth’s Radical Protestantism.” Paul Kingsnorth’s Address and Article: “Against Christian Civilization.” More from Father Plant Book: The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World Substack: Get full access to The Natural Theologian at joelcarini.substack.com/subscribe

    51 min

  8. 02/21/2025

    Jordan Peterson's Vision of Christian Civilization

    Recently, Jordan Peterson spoke at ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, his organization for international leadership. This article contains the transcript of his talk and my reaction to it, taken my from most recent YouTube video. Hey! I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian. In this post, I'm going to react to Jordan Peterson’s speech at ARC 2025, the text of which is transcribed below. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is Jordan Peterson’s sort of global policy and vision network, kind of an antidote to Davos and the elite culture. And he’s been casting his culturally Christian, conservative/classical liberal vision over last year’s and now this year’s conference. This video just came out, so I’m gonna react and see what we can say about the philosophical and theological significance of his talk. Jordan Peterson: What is the defining characteristic of this civilizational moment? I would say that what lies in front of us, perhaps for the first time, is the opportunity to make the foundational principles of our civilization, conscious, explicit and propositional, and in so doing, to pave the way for a genuine and mutually appreciative union of traditional conservatism and classic liberalism. To undertake such a venture, the first question that we must address is the nature of motivation, for life, for being and becoming. And I think we've proceeded far enough in our philosophical, theological, and psychological, biological investigations to provide an answer to that. The default drives that motivate us, or personalities that possess us might be regarded as those that foster a narrow and self absorbed hedonism. And I would say that that's the default state that characterizes human immaturity. That possession by implicit, fragmented whim must be transcended by a more sophisticated, uniting principle in order for the psyche to be integrated and to be sustainable across time in an iterated manner, and for community itself to exist. Hedonistic pleasure, seeking the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure is not a principle that can improve when it's implemented, or unite people in productive cooperation and competition, so that a society can be established. The dominance of the personality by local, narrow and self serving whim is not a playable or noble game, and it allies itself necessarily with the force that cynics, like the postmodernists, like the Neo-Marxists, believe is the only viable uniting force, that of power. If you're motivated by nothing but the pursuit of your own subjective desire in the moment, or your desire to avoid the necessary pain that mature conduct involves, you have to turn to power to impose your narrow will on others; because if you're dominated by the immature longing for your immediate self gratification, then it's all about you in the narrowest sense, and the only option you have in terms of your relationship with others is to turn to the force and compulsion that make them involuntary servants of your will. We've seen forever, the dynamic between immature hedonism that fragments and that degenerates as it's played out, and the demand for the power that subjugates others to the will of the moment. Hey, let’s stop there for a second. Refounding Our Civilization So the setup is giving an intellectual foundation to our civilization. And it’s really interesting because all the questions about, “Is this Christianity just cultural?” come to the fore as well as just like, “What is Jordan Peterson's project?” He isn't bringing us back to religion kind of for its own sake in a a pietist way, to just get us close to God. It's not even narrowly psychological, for us to sort ourselves out, though that's obviously part of Peterson's program. It's for our civilization. If you think about the foundational questions that have driven Peterson, it was the Cold War. It was ideological conflict and the ability of human beings to do collective evil. And part of that is to say that those two – psychology and politics – are connected. Like tyranny, a tyrannical state is one in which everyone is lying all the time, as Peterson says. And so very much the way that Socrates and Plato spoke in the Republic, the soul of the individual and the soul of a community are connected. And I think that's important for those on the kind of religious side who really want Peterson to profess to be a Christian and to get other people to profess Christianity from the heart, with true piety, kind of à la Billy Graham. That's not what Peterson is about, but I think it's also a corrective that, “Isn't that too narrow a goal?” You could think, as many do, that Peterson is instrumentalizing Christianity to political and social ends. But on the other hand, he's saying Christianity has at least to be something that can give foundation to society. Maybe it's more. Maybe it can bring you into the kingdom to come. But if it has nothing to say to the life here and now, in our political situation, what worth really is that? Now he's really spelling out the poverty of what you could call “metaphysical liberalism.” So John Rawls is supposed to be a theorist really of classical liberalism. Rawls's liberalism was the idea that we're going to choose a society where you don't know what religion you're going to be. You don't know what your social or economic position is going to be. We're behind this veil of ignorance and we want to choose something fair for everyone. And so it's not going to be based on any partisan doctrine. It's going to be metaphysically agnostic as to those things. And it's also going to be generally egalitarian social safety net, because if you don't know if you're going to become a poor person, you're going to want to be cared for. You're not going to want to just be blamed. We allow the kind of inequality that actually benefits everyone and especially the least well off. Now, Rawls, early in his life was a Christian. He left behind that faith to be kind of this ethical figure spelling out political liberalism. But he never intended for [his theory of liberalism] to be metaphysical agnosticism. In response to critiques of his view, he argued that he was just after political liberalism, which is just a principle of pluralism. “Here's how we're all going to operate together, even though we don't agree on every point.” He's like, “If you can get there by thinking about natural law, as a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. Great. That's not my foundation. If you can get there and you’re postmodernist, if you can just get there by mutual respect for other beings, great.” But as it's played out, the lack of a coherent vision of the good or metaphysics has allowed society to become more about everyone seeking pleasure, with side constraints on your action so that you just don't hurt other people or inhibit their pursuit of pleasure. It's basically become organized hedonism, hedonism with maybe a little bit of Kantianism to respect other people's right to pursue their own hedonism. And as Peterson is saying, that's just not adequate. We need a deeper foundation for society than that. Even the principles of classical liberalism that Rawls was for, those need a metaphysical foundation. We need to truly believe that people are ends in themselves, that humans have dignity. We need at least the mythical mythological version of the doctrine of the Image of God that Peterson is so famous for. So I want to see where he keeps going now. He's going to have an argument against hedonism but let's just think about that setup. That seems like a very legitimate thing to be after and very necessary, especially the idea that it's time to become self-conscious as a civilization about our foundational principles. For a long time, religious societies were very self-conscious about their foundational principles. They just thought of it as doctrine, though. They didn't think, “Well, we need this to be the foundation of civilization.” Maybe the kings and princes were thinking that way. But there's something interesting about a society that has left that behind now saying, “Well, hold on, what do we actually need, simply in a political or pragmatic sense?” There’s a possibility for a civilization to become self-conscious of its own intellectual foundations. I'm excited for that. Friends, my publication, The Natural Theologian, is supported by readers like you. If you want to receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you. Let’s hear what Peterson has to say about hedonism: Why is hedonism wrong? Why is power wrong? Technically, I think it's because both of those motivating forces, or sets of motivating forces, degenerate when they're iterated. You can't go through life like an immature two year old, because you can't sustain your own existence while pursuing immediate gratification in the present, and you can't sustain a society in a productive and abundant manner over the medium to long run if you use power to subordinate the will of others involuntarily to your desires. The reason that the hedonistic proclivity the fractionated, hedonistic proclivity and the drive to power are immoral is because they degenerate when they're implemented and iterated. The skeptics, that's particularly true of the post modernists – this is the definition of post modernism. Literally, the skeptics proclaim that there's no uniting metanarrative other than that of power, and that's wrong. There is a uniting metanarrative, and as I intimated at the beginning of this discussion, I believe we're now in a position where we can explicitly understand it; and that explicit understanding, in principle, could allow us to regain the necessary faith in the self-evident…axioms in which our liberal democracies are nested. The biblical library, that lays out the narrative principles upon which free, Western societies a

    34 min
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About

PhD Student in philosophy at Saint Louis University. I am a father and a philosopher. I write about life and philosophy. joelcarini.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Joel Carini
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
  • Episodes
    44
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Joel Carini
  • Show Website
    The Natural Theologian