Ep. #451: Pat Flynn on Politics, Memes, Religion, Logic, and More

Mike: Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my best selling health and fitness books, including bigger leaner, stronger for men, thinner leaner, stronger for women, my flexible dieting cookbook, the shredded chef, and my 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for personal transformation.

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Hello. Hello. And welcome to the most for life podcast. I am Mike Matthews, and this one was actually supposed to be about kettlebells. That was what we planned to talk about, but instead we. digressed early on and it turned into a meandering, but hopefully interesting and entertaining discussion about politics, psychology, religion, and other weighty topics, which let’s be honest is more interesting than kettlebells.

At least I thought so, or Pat and I both thought so. And Pat is actually an interesting dude to talk to about this stuff because while he is certainly Fitness expert and particularly a kettlebell expert. He also has a master’s degree in systematic philosophy, and he has written several bestselling books, including his most recent called how to be better at almost everything.

And in this interview, Pat and I go all over the place. And pontificate on questions like how much do memes influence our culture and our politics? What are some of the common rational and irrational arguments for the existence of God? How to think better about quote unquote conspiracy theories? How to think about Making decisions when there are no clear good decisions to make.

What are the chances that our lives are just pre determined by fate? The old pre destination idea and other such things. Now, I know this kind of stuff is not exactly the norm here on my podcast, but It was a fun excursion, nonetheless, into some of the bigger questions about how the world around us works.

And if you ever wonder about such things yourself, then I think you’re going to enjoy the interview hopefully as much as I did. And if not, if it’s not your kind of thing, don’t Most of my programming will of course be health and fitness related, and I am going to have Pat back on for that kettlebell podcast because he can also teach you how to put together some pretty killer kettlebell workouts.

Alrighty, let’s get to the interview. Mr. Flynn like I can’t even speak today. Mr. Flynn. Hello. Don’t you love it? Usually I was thinking it. So I was like about to say your name and then I was going to say mein freund and then I was gonna make a joke, about speaking German. And these days that means I’m a Nazi.

And then I got ahead of myself. You know what I mean? 

Pat: Oh, all so we’re already there with the conversation. Usually I’m Usually, I’m the one who’s baffling introductions, so it’s good to have someone else kicking this off. Mike Matthews, it’s good to be here. Yes, 

Mike: sir. We are here to talk about not me being a Nazi or supposed Nazi because I know how to speak German.

As interesting as A cultural and political discussion might be I’m not ready for that yet. I’m not ready to jump into the deep end. You know what I mean? I saw my floaties on. Yeah, we have to warm up. I make that same joke with Sal from mind pump and mark rip a toe. It’s not even that actually our views would be.

I think we would do all if all of us got together to be very fun podcast. I think we would actually do a very good job explaining our positions and in some ways we are, we might agree with what people generally agree with and in some ways we wouldn’t, but I do think we would do a good job at least explaining why we feel the way we feel about it.

Could you organize 

Pat: that? 

Mike: Because I think that would be a lot of fun. I’ll make a note. I spoke to each of them individually. And again, I think if we came into it with just an outline of the things we want to discuss and, and be able to actually explain our. Rationale for feeling the way we feel about certain things.

I think it could be for a fun discussion. 

Pat: I think it would be fruitful. I think it would also be probably enlightening for people who are somewhat on the outside to realize that there’s actually people in the fitness industry who aren’t extremely far left. 

Mike: Yeah. And also that have well reasoned Positions and like one of the things I just get amused by every time.

So on Instagram, sometimes I’ll make that not political posts, but there’s just some stuff that is so clown world ish. It’s so ridiculous that I just post the stories and laugh about it. Like there was one recently where it was It what’s her name? Ilhan Omar. Yeah, where she was saying that people should be fearful of white men in America, basically.

And like stuff like that, right? It’s just laughable. Wait, explain that. Because if when I go and consult, for example, the FBI crime statistics, they don’t exactly agree. I don’t know. I’m not very afraid of of random white people. First off, I love that. I love that you said you weren’t ready for it.

And now here we are true. True. And then but then, so here’s the reply though. So people this is if I, and these are again, lighthearted jokes and I don’t go after people personally. I actually don’t really care what people in a sense of I’m not gonna. Hold it against someone if they are left politically or right politically or even far left.

I think there are definitely ideas themselves regardless where they fall in the political spectrum that I do not agree with and some of them are far left and some of them are would be considered far right as well, of course, but a common reply I’ll get one or two whenever I make a post like that is someone like you just stick to fitness man.

We don’t need to hear, we don’t need to hear about your thoughts on politics or I would go to you for, muscle building advice, not political advice, right? 

Pat: Yeah. And, it’s just classic ad hominem and people throw that out to celebrities too, and. The truth is okay, most celebrities, most of the things they say seem pretty uninformed, but a good argument is a good argument.

It doesn’t matter who it’s coming from. You have to be willing to address the arguments, not just attack the person they’re coming from. And it’s just lazy. It’s a way of hand waving or dismissing something that’s clearly agitated you. Yeah. But it’s not advancing the conversation in any meaningful direction.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s my response. I’m just like, eh, standard ad hominem, usually coming from leftists, like tiresome, weird way to think. And then actually more often than not like the last person who did it was like how acquainted are you with Marx’s theories?

What have you read? I read manifesto. Oh, did you read capital? No. And then he actually engaged in a little bit of a discussion. So props to him. But anyway. 

Pat: And that’s good. It’s funny because for me, it could be, it should be the opposite, right? When I start talking philosophy or economics, that’s where my formal education is.

So people should be saying, stick to philosophy and economics and shut up about fitness. But most people know me as a fitness guy. So it’s the same. Dismissals that you receive. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. But as you are formally educated in those fields that’s a quick stafoo. That’s a quick retort.

Who are you? Why should I care what you have to say about philosophy? You’re like I spent a lot of time studying and thinking about this stuff. 

Pat: And but even that, you switch from kind of an ad hominem to appeal to authority. Okay. There might be some credibility there, but has it been demonstrated because there’s no shortage of people with degrees and in any kind of fields, PhDs after the name that just honestly don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.

So we need to see what the arguments are. We need to look at the arguments and just get away from the people. And the way our culture is right now, is it just. People seem unable, completely unable to do that. Just all rational discourse has just been blown completely out of the window.

And it’s really a shame, things have just, I’m like, look, I love memes. Memes are often hilarious, but meme culture definitely doesn’t help with the conversation. You know what I’m saying? 

Mike: Yeah, I think, yeah, no, I would. I would agree. I would agree if that’s like the extent of someone’s understanding is what they have gleaned from means.

But what I like about memes is it allows you to very easily and effectively communicate just a single idea in a way that anyone can understand. And especially if you’re pointing out Hypocrisies. Those are generally the ones that I find the funniest if we’re talking about, politics and culture are the ones that just point out the obvious absurdities in a way that makes you laugh.

Like those are powerful. 

Pat: Yeah. So as conversation starters, I think memes can be really funny. Interesting and provocative, but there’s the other side of it, too, is how many conversations do they really start versus how many flame wars? You know what I mean? They 

Mike: have a persuasive power, though. I feel like what was this?

There was a study on this. Actually, it was a study on the effectiveness of meaning. If you can even use that as a verb. And I remember the headline being that basically I don’t know. Conservative memes this was, they were looking specifically at the 2016 election. Conservative memes did pro Trump memes did way, way better than pro Hillary memes.

And so that doesn’t surprise me. Yeah. And then so from that, a meme was born that the left can’t meme and I understand that actually me having. Definitely I would say I would use the word conservative bias, but I’m going to say that I think modern what now passes for quote unquote conservatism is these days is conservatism does not strive to conserve.

I think that are the problems that we have are much deeper than that. And, I often say, fuck the Democrats and fuck the Republicans too, and I have different reasons for. Saying, I dislike the Democrats generally, I dislike the party and the platform for different reasons than I dislike the GOP but in my eyes it’s about fuck them equally, actually, currently, maybe I disagree with a bit more that the Democrats are doing for obvious reasons, but I would not consider myself a Republican.

With that being said, I have my ideas, some of my ideas or if I had a way, all of my. Values, as far as politics and culture goes, I would skew a bit more right. And I have an obvious bias there, but I will say that I think it’s pretty clear to anyone. If you just take a sampling of.

Anti left versus anti right memes, the anti left memes are generally just better. They’re generally just, they’re funnier, they’re wittier they’re in oftentimes more biting, like really getting to the crux of a matter in a way that. Is the heart of the hypocrisy. Totally. Totally. Yeah.

Pat: And I agree with that. And wow, a lot to unpack there. I’m with you in our last conversation, we dove into this a little bit, it’s all about those fundamental principles you’re working from. And I would have used that would agitate certain people who consider themselves staunchly conservative in the American context.

And I have a Probably a lot more views that would certainly agitate people who consider themselves classically liberal or leftist as well as for memes. Think of kind of what the possible choices of audiences are, right? You’re going to have people who are, they’re receptive and they could be more or less receptive, but they’re open to being persuaded.

You’re going to have people that are indifferent and then you’re going to have people that are either actively or passively hostile. And I think that’s where I think the point you’re making is totally valid where the memes, especially if they’re funnier, right? As, as memes from conservative audiences tend to be, they will probably have more of an influence on the, on any audience segment that isn’t actively or passively hostile.

Mike: Yep. For sure. I can totally see that. Yep. I totally agree. And it just, even from a marketing standpoint, humor is powerful. If you can make someone laugh whatever your messages is going to just be more palatable. They’re going to be more philosophers 

Pat: hate comedians because the hardest person to debate is somebody that’s funny.

And it’s not because they necessarily have good audiences. It’s just because. The power of laughter is so inherently persuasive. It just makes people like you. So the thing that, and I, I think I’ve got a good sense of humor, so hopefully I’ve got a nice balance here, but honestly, the toughest people to argue with are just snappy, witty people.

And it has nothing to do with the quality of their arguments. Sometimes their arguments are pretty bad, but they’ve got a good witticism, so what you say is absolutely true. And that all goes back to Aristotle’s, rhetoric of understanding how to, Get people to like you, appealing to the emotions, and then, pushing the rest through with logic.

There’s a sort of hierarchy of persuasion that goes on. So it’s not just the matter of what you say, but the manner how you present it from a pure persuasion standpoint is hugely important. So that study totally completely makes sense to me that the rights memes would have more of an influence in the lab.

Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. And that was the conclusion was it in the 2016 election. They did by, I forget it was a huge factor too. And probably did play something of a role in Trump’s win. 

Pat: Oh, I think so. I think, I certainly, and I don’t think you would do this either, but people always try to reduce it to one or two things, but there’s such a confluence of conditions and causes that went into that mess of an election.

But it’s man, it’s so interesting to even try and analyze it, but everything back from I’m into video games. So gamer gate, I don’t know if you remember that was, it’s really interesting and to see how that kind of unfolded out into the larger culture and Kind of exposure of the menace of political correctness and people coming to terms with that and just watching this development from a subsegment of culture out into the 

Mike: larger folds was really interesting Jordan, the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson very much along those lines.

Yep. Not that I don’t even, I stopped paying attention actually to him months ago because there were just a number of things that I didn’t like where he was going with his, just his general messaging, his personal brand. But in the beginning I agreed with a lot of what he had to say and of course it all started with political correctness.

Pat: Yeah, I wrote an article for him recently for a website and I certainly have a number of critiques on his kind of. worldview, but as a cultural figure, he cannot be ignored. He’s hugely significant and significant in the sense that he takes people who might otherwise be leaning left and turns them completely around, right?

The people who are about to enter in that into that sort of locked in passively or actively hostile phase, And he speaks really well to, to young jaded man. Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. And personally, I still admire what he’s done and I still actually appreciate, I think he’s very much in that positive at least as of a couple of months ago when I was, that’s when I stopped paying too much attention.

I previously, I was, I listened to a lot of his lectures, his biblical series some of his interviews and ironically, I actually didn’t read his book cause I was around the I was starting to lose interest 

Pat: and I, and just before anybody, because I know there might be a number of Peterson fans. I say the fallacies of Peterson.

I like Peterson. I think he’s a good guy with good intentions from what I can tell, but I think he’s just got a kind of jumbled up philosophical worldview. So I don’t mean that as an attack on him. He’s a pretty hardcore young Ian, right? And I think that there’s problems with that, even when he takes it into his biblical series, interestingly enough, or it can’t be reduced to that.

So that might be, if people were interested an interesting. Starting point if we have that conversation 

Mike: in my criticisms would be less astute because I’m not as educated as you are in terms of psychology and philosophy, but there are certain specific things that are, I think, Very important that he dismisses just for example he was so he has, of course, spoken a lot about the dangers of identity politics and, but has extended that a bit further to where and yes, he, he has, I think, saved a lot of people from going hard left, communism left and brought them back to somewhere, At least reasonably in the center but he also has openly said that he is very afraid of a far right movement rising in response to the far left movement that we, that, that is, is blossoming all around us, right?

Which I understand, but so in more along those lines, for example, he was saying that you basically that we as, you know, as white people, we shouldn’t Be proud of any of our ancestors achievements and we shouldn’t feel a kinship with our ancestors or with our race because we didn’t achieve that has no bearing on our lives and it’s no reflection upon us.

And that’s a specific thing that I completely disagree with. And I think that’s an important. Having a shared heritage and having a an awareness of the achievements of your ancestors, I think, can be very healthy and that it gives you something to aspire to. It makes you immediately feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself.

And of course, yeah, if you personally in some way have Convinced yourself that you can personally take credit for something a distant ancestor did. That’s silly, but that’s not what people that’s not how that’s almost a straw man type of situation. That’s not what people do. Of course, that’s not the actual practical effect of that.

The practical effect is you can be proud in the achievements of your endeavor. Of your race and want to maybe add something to that to the benefit of all right. Not to just the benefit of your race. And that’s just an example of something that I disagree with. And if that was the only thing, of course, I wouldn’t be at a point where I like, I don’t pay that much attention to Jordan Peterson anymore, but there are just a number of things like that.

It just, it has that emotional effect on me or I’m like, I’m just less excited about him and what he has to say. 

Pat: Yeah, I get it. And I actually wouldn’t have much to say on that. Cause I’m coming from a different angle, my master’s program is in systematic philosophy. So it’s all about worldview.

So I’m always interested in people’s worldview, how they arrive at it. Is it consistent? Is it coherent? And that’s where I think he has the biggest difficulties. What he has to say on culture and economics and politics. I’m actually less interested in. Then I am in his more kind of academic work and his in his published work his statements on Say identity politics is interesting too, because even when you analyze it, like everything is actually identity politics, like people are being appealed to on identity on some level, even if that level is ideas, so you can’t even really escape identity politics, but you get what he’s saying in that it’s been perverted by the left.

Mike: And really brought to the forefront in a grotesque way. 

Pat: Yeah, exactly. Okay. Like, all right. On a superficial level and certainly on a general level, like when he says things like, Hey, take personal responsibility, clean your room, all that is great stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I know, I spoke to 

Mike: him.

So back when he launched his Patreon, I signed up for the, I think it was a couple hundred dollars a month. And one of the perks was you get a 45 minute Skype call with him. And so on that call, we ended up actually just talking, he was just asking like basically who I am and what am I What do I do?

And I got talked about a bit about books. And I had mentioned to him that I actually emailed him before he released his book because I was telling him, dude, you need to name your book, clean your room. Like you need to take your current title and make it a subtitle. The clean, no, seriously, clean your room is a meme.

Now you own that phrase. And I gave him the example. I was like, look at the book, make your bed by The Navy guy that I, for McRaven, right? Super best selling book. And it’s a good title. It’s simple. It evokes some curiosity. Like what, why, why it’s such a simple thing. Why is he telling me to make my bed?

What does he mean? You know what I mean? And so clean your room, Jordan Peterson’s version of that. And and it’s funny. So when I was telling him that he was like, he agreed, he was like, Oh, Yeah. Yeah. That would have been, that would have been actually a really good title. And so afterward he tweeted out McRaven’s book and then question, and then it was like, or clean your room, right?

First cap, like as a title question mark. And a number of people replied, you’re you need to write, that needs to be your next book. It needs to be called clean your room. Yes. Oh, 

Pat: I completely agree. And Peterson, I guess he can’t be faulted for not being a marketer. I know. 

Mike: Yeah, totally.

I tried to get ahold of him beforehand, but at that point he already, it was just so swamped that it just obviously never, he never saw it. I tried to get like message him, put something through on Patreon. He just never saw it. 

Pat: Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. I know a number of people that interviewed him and talked to him like right before.

He just exploded into celebrity. And I was actually, he was on my list of people before that happened that I was going to invite on my podcast, but he just like, for whatever reason, I just never did it. And now of course I’m like kicking myself, right? Because, and I have gotten people like that. One of my earliest interviews was with Tim Ferriss.

Now I can’t reach that guy at all. So it was that was which book was it? I was part of his launch team for the four hour one. And yeah, we did an interview. We were, and he was definitely really well known then, but he was still somewhat reachable. Yeah, not anymore.

So I, I totally blew it with a Peterson. Cause I would have actually loved to have sit down and had a conversation like this with him about the questions that I wish everybody asked, everybody else would ask him, but aren’t. But that’s probably not going to happen at this point. Unless I somehow blow into celebrity, which with this podcast, Mike, you might just help me do this.

Could be it lightning. This is the lightning in the bottle right here. This is it. You only need that like one thing, right? Like all of these people had that one thing. Like Peterson’s one thing was the whole showdown with political correctness at his university. Who else? Ben Shapiro was the Piers Morgan thing, right?

They had. Nobody really knew these guys before. And then they had that one thing that just blew up. Now, of course they were preparing, and being educated and putting out, they’re really smart people who can, who should be recognized, they were ready 

Mike: for, it’s almost like the through, through just many years of hard work and which also doubled, of course, as preparation, they finally quote unquote got lucky, that was let’s look at it though.

That was after a lot of instances of getting. Unlucky in a sense. Look at yourself, right? Like how many opportunities are we missing every day? How many instances was someone where someone who was maybe going to reach out to us with something and they didn’t, or if we would have just been in a certain place at a certain time, so you can look at it then so they just kept on working though, just kept on going and I think it’s it’s just one of those cheesy quotes, right? You make your own luck by just continuing to work but there’s a truth in that 

Pat: there, there is. And that’s why those cliches resonate because it’s speaking to something that is true or at least very close to true.

And you can’t just plop luck on somebody who’s unprepared. That’s your class. Then you’ll have your 15 minutes of fame and then you’ll completely fade away. But for these people, it was okay. Constant grind hustle. I’m working really hard. And then, you keep taking swings at the bat.

Eventually you might actually hit something. Like my I’m not, what I’m not saying. What I’m not saying is that they just got lucky. Cause I don’t buy that at all. There was certainly luck meeting preparation, et cetera, whatever that, that kind of launched 

Mike: them to where they are now. Funny enough, a friend of mine after nine 11, it was I don’t know.

Sometime after a couple months after he, there was remember that documentary loose change. No, it was a documentary that was basically trying to make the case that it was an inside job, right? It was one of the first ones and it got heavily criticized, of course, and validly in some of the points, stood some scrutiny and some of the points they’re making did not right.

And but anyways, at the time, a buddy of mine who was a smart dude just. Yeah, high IQ, read a lot, researched a lot. Somebody whose opinion, like if he were to tell me something, I wouldn’t just dismiss it. I know that he’s looked into it. And he had brought up, he’s Hey, so I watched this documentary loose change.

Then I went and there might have been a. I don’t know if there’s a book out yet, but he had looked into as many things at that time as there was available in terms of some of the anomalies just in the official story. Some of the things you’re just like, what, how does that work exactly? And he was like, yeah, I don’t know if it was an inside job per se, but it’s interesting.

Some of these things really don’t. Sense like they’re and the counter argument to them, they don’t make sense, so they’re unresolved, right? And so at that time is that’s when I was like, oh, that sounds interesting and started looking into that stuff myself. And that’s when I came across Alex Jones and initially I was just like, this guy’s hilarious.

He’s a great, he’s just a, he’s a great performer. 

Pat: He’s a character. I’ve seen, of course, like the memes of him and him shouting and gyrating and all his antics and all that. So I’m familiar with that. Exactly. 

Mike: So then that was my first impression. And fast forward to today, I would say that in, in many ways, I think he’s been vindicated.

And at least in he’s had his guns probably pointed in the right direction for a long time. He’s just not very accurate. It’s old artillery that just blows all over the place. And sometimes he hits a target and sometimes he doesn’t. 

Pat: Sure. 

Mike: People 

Pat: say the same thing about Trump, right?

It’s clearly he’s not telling the truth on a lot of the details. But Scott Adams says he’s not trying to do that. He’s trying to be persuasive. So he says things that are directionally true. . I like that. That’s a in the vague direction of things that people might be able to find truth in that way.

Right. , that’s a, that’s an interesting way to put it. I saw, and it’s a persuasive technique so if you try to understand Trump as a philosopher, you’re always going, and this is what I tell my philosopher friends who are, and they’re like, I’m like, you’re just looking at him the wrong way. Like you have to see him as a market, which is my other hat, as a marketer and somebody who is in the game of persuasion. And once you see him that way, he actually starts to begin to make a lot more sense. But if you’re looking at him as through sort of an analytic lens, you’re just always going to be finding, things that he’s stumbling over these inconsistent with and whatever.

And rightfully there’s many things that he says and does or implements that I would have issues with. But I think if you’re trying to understand where he’s coming from, then you have to understand that his background is in marketing and persuasion, 

Mike: Even why, where he repeats himself over and over, I, that may just be a verbal tick, but it’s also a.

Persuasion technique. Repetition has power. That’s repetition is one of the fundamental principles of advertising. Why do you think Geico makes silly commercials with a gecko? They just, actually the purpose of those commercials is not to try to get us to run over to Geico. com and sign up.

Sure. They would love that. They usually, if I’m remembering correctly, have a simple call to action. If you’re, In the mood to do it right now, but they know that most people are not. Most people are not going to see the Geico Gecko and then be like, Oh, let me just go change my insurance right now.

What they want, though, is this is again, you read any classic book on advertising and you’ll come across this and in all of them really is this point of repetition and the power of repetition. Because if you, me, all of us, this works on all of us, The more we’ve heard something, the easier it is to recall it to mind heard or seen.

And so what these companies want is they want when we say Geico. We’ve seen Geico over and over. We know the Geico and we’re sitting at our desk one day. We’re going to pay our insurance bill. And it just went up. We’re like, what the fuck is this? And then now we’re like, I’m going to go get, I’m going to, I’m with all state and I’m going to go see what else is out there at that moment.

They want us to think Geico. They want us to think, I’m going to go to Geico and check it out. And that’s the key. And Trump know, 

Pat: of course he knows this. And if, and like none of this is either an endorsement or issuing a disapproval, it’s just trying to understand him if you, and whether you like him or you don’t like him, whether you want to be elected or.

Not elected. You should at least try to understand him. And people just don’t seem to be able to see him through this perspective. And it makes perfect sense. And it’s not just repetition. It’s not just directional truths, but it’s also exaggeration and hyperbole. And what sticks in your head more than things that have been grossly exaggerated, Trump.

Knows this, he knows it. Now, whether that’s morally justified, whether that’s ethical to do, those are completely separate questions. Interesting questions, good questions, important questions, but just on the level of trying to understand Trump, you, you have to see him as what he is. He’s a marketer.

Mike: And there’s another advertising principle. Vivid images generally sell better than blase images. And that’s even a hence 

Pat: the wall 

Mike: rather than exactly here. And that’s a perfect example of it. And that’s also a memory technique. That’s a, you’ll read any book on read Kevin Horsley’s book. That’s one of the, what is it unlimited memory or something?

I always see it on Amazon’s that book sells so well. I’m actually impressed. But it’s a basic memory technique is if you. It pagan link, baby. You want to use it. You want to use images and make them vivid, exaggerate them. So if you want to remember a list of 10 things, this is actually fun to do.

You should people, if you’ve maybe tried it, Pat, but anybody who’s listening, it’s called the pagan link mnemonic system. I haven’t heard it under that. Name, but anyways, you have a list of, let’s say, 10 things, and if you turn them into a sequence of almost like a movie in your mind of vivid images, exaggerate things about them, it could be like lurid colors or crazy proportions, but if you can turn the list of, you can do it with more than 10, actually both states, 10, if you turn that into just a little movie, So let’s say, I have my wallet on my desk and I have a book on my desk.

So if those are the two items, wallet and book, I would first see my wallet and I might make it bright. I’m doing it in my mind right now. Bright green, right? And it’s glowing. And now a book falls on it, a big book and smashes it. It violently and it, the cracks in the concrete ripple out. Okay. And then I work in the next thing, which might be my phone.

And so then my phone might then break up through the ground to these things, right? So you build this vivid, exaggerated movie in your mind, go through it. We get good at it. You can just do it in one pass, actually. Yeah, 

Pat: it’s great for grocery. That’s actually a little different than the 

Mike: pagan link system, but it’s one.

Yep. But now what you can do is what is you, if you now just run through that movie in your head and you’re like, Oh, wallet, book, phone, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then we’re, it gets impressive to people. As you can go the other way around now, just play the movie in reverse. Ah, now you can go from 10 up to one, or you can tell people, all right, just tell me, where do you want me to start?

And they’d be like, Oh, start it at the model plane, right? Start at number seven and go to down to number 10. You can just fast forward to that in your mind and go down to number 10. Or they could say the other way. They could be like, Oh, start at number seven and go back up to number one backward. And you’re just using images.

So Anyway, my point is vividity and exaggeration, like those are just the standard you do that because those are the images that really tend to stick in your memory. And of course then, so when you’re speaking, yes, if the more vivid of a picture you can create in people’s minds, the better you’re going to sell.

And that’s a copywriting principle as well. 

Pat: Yeah. So just to give people, I’m not a memory expert by any means, but these little things, even if you don’t master it, these little things can be really helpful. The pagan link is where you just put a. And it’s a qualitative dimension to the quantitative.

So you have a list of one to 10, right? And then you create a peg for each number. That’s an image. So for one, maybe you have this image. It’s carrot. Carrot always means one. Then what you do is you then link. To the pegs, the various things you need to remember for one. 10 grocery list, one is a carrot.

Then whatever your first item on the grocery list is you make a movie between that thing and the carrot. So it actually builds on what you just outlined. 

Mike: I like that. That’s a, that’s useful. Versatile. Look at that. We got to our first practical tip of the conversation. We’re already 34 minutes in.

So this is actually what the conversation is going to be. We were going to talk about kettlebells, we were we’re as a more exciting, it is. Bill O’Reilly. Fuck it. We’re doing it live. We’re doing it live. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it?

Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well. Please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you.

You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. 

Pat: Just you brought up 9 11. That’s funny. Cause that was a big turning point for me too. And like everybody, there’s certain memories in your life and everybody knows where they were when 9 11 happened.

I was in the classroom, they put it on television. Of course the parents all freaked out that they let the kids see the, see it all go down. That, that sparked my interest in politics too. And then it was actually politics and trying to answer like difficult political questions that I couldn’t answer in the political domain alone that eventually drove me to philosophy.

But we have a similar starting point, I think, with that very obviously traumatic event of nine 11 and that it’s just one of those things, and I was pretty young at the time that, you for me anyways, I was in a, not a completely sheltered world, but you just didn’t imagine, too much outside of what was going on in, middle school and then something like that happens, it just wakes you up and you just start asking all these questions and searching around and trying to figure things out.

So that was definitely a kicking off point for me and my. Sort of intellectual searching 

Mike: as well. What gets me about nine 11 is when you have people who can’t even entertain the idea that maybe the government was involved in some way, or maybe had advanced set information that they ignored or in, even in the extreme would allow something like that to happen.

That’s a dangerous That’s a dangerous way to think because a cursor review of history, and I’ve spoken to this a number of times is it becomes immediately clear that we have basically a never ending series of major conspiracies that have from a very powerful people who just want to stay powerful, destroy their enemies become more powerful.

And working secretly behind the scenes to do those things. And the downstream effects are a lot of the major events of history. So to think that’s just human nature. There’s not even something to get upset about, but now to think that Oh, that doesn’t happen anymore. No.

They would never, our government would just, you would just never do that as people now couldn’t happen in America. Yeah. We’re just, yeah, we’re better. It’s Americans. We’ve evolved beyond that. The, we have. Really pushed human nature, beyond that, then it just, there aren’t people who would do that anymore.

Oh, but there are Jeffrey Epstein’s out there who would rape kids and who do who know what’s up but not, let a couple thousand people die to, to start a trillion plus dollar war that is going to enrich a lot of people. And also keep a lot of people in their current positions of power.

Pat: As somebody who doesn’t really, who has not sufficiently investigated that and remains, I don’t want to say agnostic on it, but I just, I couldn’t add anything intelligent to that either but what I do know about principles of reasoning and thinking, right? And so in science, as well as philosophy, we have this device called inference to the best explanation, right?

And the idea is, especially as you mentioned, as you go through history and that there are very clear periods where. Government institutions will deliberately stage things to gain support for themselves and especially evil and wicked ways. Now that you know that is a data point and that, that can and has and does happen, you then just have to sit around and try and gather the data and evidence to say, does, what is the inference here from what happened at nine?

I’m not saying that I’ve made one, but I’m just saying it shouldn’t be off the table. Like you’re like, you’re saying now I would say if you were to press me, I’d say, I think the best inference is that. It is very complicated one that what seems to happen probably did happen, but it’s probably more complicated nuance that there probably was some missed information or more things could have been done, but there’s other deeper layers of asking questions.

Why did it even happen to begin with? Like, why would somebody want to fly a plane into one of our buildings? And that was the questions I answered. Like, why would somebody ever want to do this to us? Aren’t we America? Aren’t we the greatest freest country? Who could hate us? So much to want to do something well, these days, a lot of them are just 

Mike: walking around Portland and Los Angeles and in terms of hating us, whether they’d be willing to give their lives to harm us, I don’t know, but you have that more so now than any time in my lifetime.

Pat: And there’s also, Occam’s rule that the simplest explanation, all else equals is generally the best explanation, but that doesn’t mean that a more complex explanation can’t be true. It just says all else equal, we should prefer the simplest explanation. So we can actually use principles of reasoning, principles of philosophy, principles of science to look at this and that’s actually how.

Historical sciences generally work. They go and they gather a pool of data and then they try to make an inference to what they think the best explanation is in terms of explanatory scope, power, degree of ad hocness, and et cetera, again, to the specifics of that, I can’t really speak, but just maybe it can just like when you’re thinking about anything historically, you should be taking these principles of reasoning and tools into the investigation and say, okay, what best explains this? And if you don’t know, maybe you’re missing some data. Maybe you need to do more investigations but you certainly, it’s not a healthy mindset to just assume what you’ve told is automatically correct. 

Mike: And to be afraid of, and at least not be aware that, is it just that you’re afraid that maybe your government could be capable of such a thing?

And that’s an understandable, there’s nothing, there’s no shame in that. That’s understandable. 

Pat: Yeah, I would admit that terrifies me, like that does scare me. But look, just because something is scary doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. And vice versa, right? Just because something is pleasant or makes you happy doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.

We just have to look at what is it supported by the evidence or isn’t it? So it’s an interesting thing. I think it actually invites a, Aside from the details, I’ll let, other people make those specific arguments, but it should tell us something about how we should go about asking questions and finding answers.

And that is always a value. And it’s also, 

Mike: it’s not hard to, especially with something like that, that was some time ago now and quite a few books have been written. There’s a lot of work that’s been done on both sides of the argument. It’s not hard at this point to pick up a couple of those books and come to your own conclusion.

And just go, okay, I want to understand the best arguments for 9 11 was an inside job. Okay. Now I want to understand the best arguments against 9 11 was an inside job. Okay. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna now go through these and come to my own conclusion and which argument carries more weight for me, where do I feel the weight of the evidence is?

And historical data points would be, of course, a point that’d be those would be in the argument for if you want anyone listening, go look up operation Northwoods. You might’ve heard of that. It’s on archive. gov and you can see the minutes of the joint chiefs of staff, spit balling fake data.

Terrorism events like ideas for as a pretext to invade Cuba and one of them did involve shooting down a plane and it was going to be full of so you have a plane full of whatever was going to happen. This was shot down by JFK, by the way, it was presented to him and he shot it down. It was going to be, if I remember correctly, this was many years ago, so I make it.

Details wrong, but this is the gist is there was a plane. It was going to be full of CIA that, of course, nobody would know, but these are all they’re all going to be CIA. All the supposed passengers from her correctly. The plane was going to take off. It was then going to land. Everyone was going to get off the plane.

It was then going to take off. It would be flown by remote over the ocean, I believe, and then be shot down with a missile. And then they were going to blame that on Cuba. That was one of the just proposed scenarios. Hey, we could do this. And then we could use that to rile up all the American people.

And then we could invade Cuba. There was another one. I remember to blow up astronauts. That was another one. There was going to be a seriously it’s in there. And there were like five or six of these scenarios. They were serious about this. Again, this was presented to JFK and he’s the one who said, no we’re not doing that.

But what if he would have been Lyndon Johnson, who got us into Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin, go look into Gulf of Tonkin as well. And you realize that of those two attacks, we now know one didn’t even happen. And there were some strange, there were some oddities with the attack that did happen. And so if it were Lyndon Johnson, if that operation Northwoods would have been presented to Johnson, Who knows?

He was a, I think, a truly evil person. He was a bad person. He may have been like, absolutely, this is the greatest good. We need to invade Cuba. 

Pat: That’s what I was going to bring up, right? Is that, just take that as an exercise in an ethical theory. Some of these people.

May, they might not have just, enjoyed the thought of destroying innocent people, but they may have been reasoning from what I believe is a severely defunct ethical premise of utilitarianism. If we do this, then we might be able to stop nuclear war, right? If we, break a few eggs, we might be able to make this delicious omelet.

And so that too invites ma so you can see where like these things invite. So ma, so many and so much more deeper. More probing philosophical questions that’s where I spend most of my time. So when I was like after nine 11 thing, and I started asking these questions, I quickly realized that all the superficial kind of details that the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, there’s so much under the water that most people don’t think about.

They don’t analyze, they don’t examine those, that sort of base of assumptions. So the example you’re giving us a really interesting one in terms of a certain ethical mode of thinking that some of these people might’ve been using to think that this behavior was actually morally justified when clearly most everybody would say 

Mike: that.

Yeah. And you can understand it though. In that, okay, let’s take a simple example, right? Also, I want to throw out Pearl Harbor as another example. There’s a book called Day of Deceit. I recommend it to anybody listening who wants to get a whole new view of Pearl Harbor. And this book was meticulously researched primary documents, not like someone read 20 other books on Pearl Harbor and wrote the 21st.

Established journalist and makes. I think a very compelling case that we absolutely knew that they were coming and we allowed it to happen so we could get into the war and anyway, they have to see is the book on that I recommend, but to get back to your point. Okay. So if you look at it, let’s boil it down to is a cure that kills one and saves a thousand and acceptable cure.

Pat: Yeah, this is one of the classic philosophical thought experiments, right? The even more general one is the old trolley problem, right? You have a trolley kind of careening down the street, you can pull a lever, you can either save your own child, or you can, cast three to the fires of death, right?

The trolley of death, or whatever. And it’s really a question, it’s a searching question and an important one. But what if you actually had to make a decision like that? Yeah, so what, the question is, what if I had to make a decision, and that’s actually a, it’s an important, but it’s a difficult question, because you’re asking what I would do, and there’s what I would do versus what I should do, or what everybody else should do.

What Pat Flynn would probably do, out of pure emotion, and love for my kid, is I would probably save my kid, right? But that doesn’t mean that’s the right, Or ethical decision. And it’s also important to realize that there can be, and I think that is, this is how you generally look at these things.

There can be situations in life where there is no good decision, where there’s decisions are just bad, no matter which one you pick. And that there can be certain situations or contexts that given two bad situations, there can still be a right decision to make. Sophie’s choice is another classic one, right?

Nazi guard comes in saying, Hey, you can either sacrifice one of your kids. Or all of your, and if you sacrifice one of your kids, we’ll spare the rest or we’ll kill you all, right? That’s another kind of classical ethical quandary or dilemma. So it invites a lot of different questions but just asking what Pat Flynn would do does not necessarily settle it, see what I’m saying?

Absolutely. 

Mike: Yeah. It makes me think of, I believe it was. Oliver Wendell Holmes the justice, I think it was a chief justice. Wasn’t he? Oliver Holmes. I’m Googling right now. Yeah, he was an associate justice in the Supreme Court, but I remember one of his positions on right and wrong is that there is no real right or wrong.

Right is what the strong say is right, basically. And so you combine it. That with the greater good kind of, where it can be perverted to say Hey, we’re in a position to affect our will and that automatically makes us right. And if you want to put some Calvinistic spin on it, it’s that, Hey we’re the chosen, nothing we can do is really going to nothing, nothing’s really going to change that and all the rest are the 

Pat: doctrine of full on double predestination for any curious logical listeners.

Yeah. Huh. So the 

Mike: idea is Hey, we’re the, what is it? The elect? I forget. The elect and the reprobate. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. And us being in the position of power, what we say is right is what’s right. There is no objective, real right. And. We’ll do this and we’re doing it for the right reasons.

And if, yeah, we may have to crack, we may have to crack some eggs, but we’re going to make a beautiful omelet. 

Pat: Let’s pause there because there’s so much to unpack. And I think this is a really important point. And the last part you said gives it away, right? We’re doing it for the right reasons.

So you just said there is no. Right or wrong, but yet we’re doing it for the right reason. So you’ve just smuggled the premise right back in, that you were trying to ignore. And that’s where, it’s the trolley car incident, the save one to, or kill one to save a thousand, they actually tell us something really important.

And what they tell us is that. All of this is bad, right? And that’s the most important insight is that all of this is wrong and it’s bad no matter what. So it’s speaking to a certain dimension of reality that is so fundamental to our experience, the ethical dimension, the dimension of moral obligations and duties.

And the fundamental question that every philosopher has to wrestle with, every human person, I would argue, has to wrestle with, is their binding force, is their objective reality to what we experience in this sort of moral dimension. That’s the question, right? So is morality something, here’s the key, That we invent, or is morality something that we discover?

That is the fundamental difference. And if it’s something that we invent, I think you run into a lot of problems. 

Mike: One is that is it a construct or is it more of an essentialism type of thing? First 

Pat: off, if it’s an invention, right? You’ve really just collapsed into nihilism.

Immediately, right? Relativism is just a phony hold up for nihilism because you’re just you’ve really reduced everything to preferences and there really is no right or wrong. So you’ve lost any basis to speak of things like moral progress. The only thing you can have is moral change, right? So anybody who’s a relativist or holds to a sort of useful fiction theory of morality, they have no legs to stand on to condemn things like slavery.

Or persecution or pedophilia or any of that. And nobody can live consistently with that worldview. Now, just because you can’t live consistently with something, just because there’s an immediate performance contradiction doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, right? It could be, it could lead to a worldview that seems absolutely absurd, but you know what, maybe it still is the case that it’s an invention, but what I would argue is that our moral sense.

Isn’t provided with a sufficient defeater. Meaning I trust the reliability, the general reliability of my faculty. So I trust that there is a world outside of my head that I’m talking to a Mike Matthews right now, that there is a table here. I can see it. I can feel it. There’s a microphone. I could taste it.

It probably wouldn’t taste very good. And then I have this moral sense and it’s a different kind of sense. It’s not something I see. It’s not something I can find under a telescope or a microscope. But it’s just as much a part of my sense experience, right? It’s just a part as much of my reality and sometimes even more real.

Like I would sooner doubt that I’m talking to Mike Matthews than I would doubt that there’s something inherently wrong with raping, beating, and killing an innocent child, right? Like that inherent sense of that being wrong is so overpowering to me. Yeah. It’s just there’s something 

Mike: so visceral about it.

Pat: I would sooner question my other senses before that. So do I have a reason to doubt this sense? And the answer is without any prior metaphysical commitments. No, right? No, I don’t. It seems if my faculties are a bundle deal, if they’re generally reliable, unless I have some really good reason to doubt.

To believe that I’m either in the matrix hallucinating everything, then I have just as much just 

Mike: or you’re a bonafide psychopath and you know it, you’re like, yeah, I don’t know. I’m broken in that regard. That’s the funny 

Pat: thing. When somebody is a psychopath, right? We say that there’s something wrong.

We say in the same sense that if somebody’s blind, there’s something wrong with them, right? If somebody is lacking that qualitative moral sense of empathy or whatever, we say they are missing something in the same sense that. They should have it. They should have it. If somebody’s born blind or can’t hear or something like that.

So even that is telling, right? They’re not sensing something that they should be sensing. There’s something wrong there. It, it invites a metaphysical investigation. And what I mean by that is what is your ultimate worldview? Because if you’re something like a physicalist, right? And this is where it all comes from.

This is where the idea of sort of moral fiction comes from. If you’re committed to the idea that reality at bottom is just a bunch of dumb physical bits, particular bits of matter in motion, then it’s hard to see how what because morality isn’t something that we can find under a microscope or through a telescope.

It’s nothing that we can turn out through the empirical sciences. So if you’ve reduced your worldview to physicalism. And believe that the only things that are, that exist, are things that can be turned out by the scientific method. You’re, you’ve just automatically ruled morality out of the picture. But it’s not something that, aside from a prior metaphysical commitment, we have any reason to doubt.

I would argue that it’s a properly basic belief, and that any prior metaphysical commitment that would rule it out has itself so many, Inherent inconsistencies and incoherencies. We shouldn’t subscribe to them anyways. So we have just as much reason to trust our moral sense that we really are coming to discover something about the world rather than invented.

Now, some people might bring up evolution, but evolution doesn’t solve the question, right? Cause we could have evolved to discover something or invent something. And we generally believe that we. evolved to discover the external world, to see real things, to touch, so it just runs the question around in a circle again.

So you actually have to go beyond the evolutionary questions if you really want to try and answer this stuff. You got us there, Mike. It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? 

Mike: And that’s not to say that secular People who, they may even be as far as atheists couldn’t have still that inherent sense of right and wrong and live generally, moral lives and be a net positive in society and understand that you’re not supposed to, you’re supposed to try to do the best you can within your sphere of influence and let’s say create more positive effects or more construction than negative effects and destruction.

Pat: Yeah that, yeah, and that’s a really important point. I’m not saying if you are an atheist or a secularist that you can’t behave decently. I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is in that worldview, you lack the metaphysical or ontological justification for the categories of good, bad or wrong to begin with.

And there’s a fundamental difference between what I’ve just said, right? One is a matter of just personal behavior. Of course, you can act in accordance to what I would say is the sort of moral realm, the moral law, which is objective. Whether or not you have any, no matter what your prior worldview happens to be.

And I think most of us know people who are secular or atheistic. And I didn’t even go into atheism or theism yet, but the question does eventually get there, right? Who are really good people, really good, genuine people. There’s no doubt about it. But the question is, What worldview can accommodate or explain this moral dimension to reality and what worldview essentially has to eliminate it?

That’s the more important and the more interesting question. 

Mike: Yeah, and did I understand you correctly that basically you’re saying Let’s say you have someone who they don’t believe that there’s anything spiritual regardless of ideology just period that We’re a bunch of Adams and eventually we’re just, it’s just gonna, we’re gonna turn into dust and that’s it that they don’t really have any moral legs to stand on in terms of criticizing right and wrong.

I just don’t know if I understood you correctly. 

Pat: What I’m saying is on the, on a sort of physicalist worldview like that, there’s no way to account for how morality can be anything other than an invention or a social construct. Yeah. That’s it. And that is all I’m saying. So I’m not saying if you’re a physicalist or if you’re a metaphysical naturalist or anything like that, that you can’t be a good person.

And sometimes people take that to mean, and that is not what I’m saying. You weren’t saying that I just, I know you do, but people often misunderstand a misunderstanding organ. So I’m actually happy that You’re making these distinctions because they are important. 

Mike: And so it’d be more the point of unless, cause the only thing that you could say really is there’s something, it’s just biological, it evolved, but to your point, it’s like that just doesn’t, the, that, that worldview isn’t robust enough when you really start going, okay.

Let’s look a little bit deeper, look a little bit deeper where then and that’s where a lot of the social constructivism, if that’s even, if that’s even a proper word I think that there’s a lot of overlap there with just the very humanistic view of everything that, things are just what we say they are.

And there’s, there are, there is no real such thing as biological essentialism or even spiritual essentialism. 

Pat: Yeah. Would rape be wrong if we evolved to. That’s a, that’s an important question. And this was actually Darwin’s fear himself. He looked at other animals that behaved, if they were held to human standards, quite barbarically, right?

And he thought if humans were raised under the same condition as certain insects, like they might, Destroy a certain number of the young and bite their heads off and stuff. And would that still be wrong? And that’s, that’s, that is the critical question. And biology alone can’t answer it.

That’s the, that’s what I’m saying. It’s a deeper, more metaphysical question. Yeah. In that way, like, why are we more special than the praying mantis exactly then? That’s it, right? It’s a question of value. It’s a question of purpose. It’s a question of what is this world? Is it reducible to mere fermions and bosons?

There’s actually a really good atheistic philosopher. So for many years, I was an atheist, right? And then through philosophy, I actually came to theism and then of all places, I wound up in the Catholic Church. So that’s the short, condensed story, right? But, all the old atheists pretty much affirmed this, right?

Like Nietzsche, Sartre, Russell, Camus, these guys. But there’s Alex Rosenberg’s kind of a more contemporary and he has a book called the atheist guide to reality. He just starts from that premise that look, only physical things exist. We’re all just different, collections of fundamental particles.

And if this is the case, then we have a construction problem and he gets it because from the sort of like dumb, physical, particular bits that are unconscious, they’re not unified. They can’t be about anything. They’re unintentional. They’re undirected. You can’t get consciousness from that. You can’t get morality from that.

You can’t get meaning from that. You can’t get truth from that. So he denies that any of these things exist. He’s in philosophy, what’s called an eliminative materialist. So ironically, he denies that there’s even any meaning in any of the sentences that he wrote in his entire book, right? But what I would argue.

What I would argue is this is a man who’s being consistent. He’s actually driving through to the conclusions. What I would also argue is he’s wrong on his starting point. And at any point that you start at that point and get to such absurdities, such as, he denies consciousness, so he denies that even you exist, which you can’t really, that is a patently self defeating in the sense that if consciousness is just an illusion, which some of these eliminate.

Eliminated this hold it just begs the question of who’s having the illusion, right? You just it’s the whole I think therefore I am the one thing I can’t deny as myself because to even deny it I have to exist type of thing So it’s at that point that I would say no, like he’s being consistent He gets what the consequences would be.

He sees that there’s a severe construction problem here that there’s things in this world qualities about this world that a purely physicalist atheistic, naturalistic viewpoint cannot possibly in principle explain. So rather than trying to explain them, he denies that they even exist. And what I would suggest, and this is what happened to me when I reached these conclusions is.

Maybe there’s more to the world than just physical dumb bits, right? 

Mike: Let’s go back and check that starting point. And then follow that through at the same level of rigor and open mindedness and see where that takes you. Inference. 

Pat: So you can do it in a couple of ways, right? So now we’re arguing, is there some type of transcendent dimension, right?

The big question of does God exist? And when I discovered classical thinkers in this sort of theistic tradition, ranging even from the pagans back from Plato to Aristotle up through Aquinas and then the contemporaries. You can do it through just pure metaphysical or rational demonstration, which a lot of those guys did deductive forms of argument, or you can just do inference to the best explanation and say look, if the foundation to reality, whatever that is, isn’t at least mind like and somewhat personal then we wouldn’t have anything like us.

We wouldn’t have conscious beings capable of knowledge, reason. Logic, mathematics, right? Love feelings, all these things. It’s just, in terms of like best explanation, it’s just, it seems so much more obviously powerful in terms of its explanatory scope than the alternative. So there’s a number of ways you can get there and I think they’re all valuable and worth exploring, but it’s to the point that you said, it’s like just.

Grab, hey, grab two books, weigh 

Mike: the arguments 

Pat: and see what you think. Yeah. And if 

Mike: you want to throw in a, I think a healthy dose of American pragmatism, what tends to work out better for people as well? And I don’t I couldn’t cite research on this. It’s not something, this is something you probably could but not me.

Cause I haven’t really looked in the details that heavily because. I guess I just, it never really occurred to me, but I’m just saying it now that I think that living as if, and I guess it’s something that Jordan Peterson has even mentioned, but living. Yes, 

Pat: he’s a pragmatist.

So he’s a, he holds a pragmatist theory of truth, which I think is, doesn’t work. I’m a correspondence theory of truth guy. But he does make these types of arguments, right? 

Mike: And I’m not even speaking to that specifically because I don’t even know enough about that to have an intelligent conversation.

What you just said, I don’t even know exactly what that is. 

Pat: Oh, it’s actually pretty simple. And then I’ll let you finish your point here. If it’s useful, it’s true. It’s the pragmatist and that’s notice that’s overly simplifying it. Obviously it has more detail than that.

So I don’t want to come off as uncharitable, but then the correspondence theory is what’s true is what actually matches to reality, right? The say of what is that it is. Is to speak truth as Aristotle would put it right. And that’s the common sense view of truth. And I would say the common sense view is actually correct.

If 

Mike: it’s useful, it’s true. Then lying could be, oh, that’s useful in this situation. Or it might 

Pat: be useful for me to think that there’s monsters living under the manhole cover. So I don’t go out in the street and get run over by the bus. But does that mean that it’s true that monsters actually live under the man?

No, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that’s actually a danger to certain Sort of naturalistic theories of evolution is that evolution aims at supposedly aims at fitness advantage. It doesn’t aim necessarily at truth. And those things are not necessarily the same. We can easily conceive of scenarios where we might’ve developed useful, but false beliefs.

Which then cast doubt on pretty much all of our beliefs, which should also cast doubt on our belief in the theory of evolution. So there’s an epistemological circle of self defeat in that worldview also, if that’s what you reduce everything to. It’s 

Mike: interesting. Yeah, no, I could see that, but that actually wasn’t exactly what I was even gonna get to with the pragmatism point, but that’s interesting.

And it makes sense to me. All I was going to say is if you look at how effective take worldview, right? And I’m with totally with you. I totally agree that in, in many ways are our current circumstances that we find ourselves in our lives or a product first and foremost of our worldviews, because those fundamental assumptions about how the world works or how it should work, drive our decisions, which drive our behaviors, which driver outcomes, and here we are.

And if you look at it, okay, there are clusters of worldviews that have been given titles, right? And which of these worldviews tends to create better life outcomes to me. And I think I’m just a, I always have been by like, just have a bias toward just practicality of what works, not necessarily what everybody says is not necessarily dogma, but if dogma works, that’s fine too.

But looking at it in terms of. If I start adopting these worldviews and behaving in line with those, what kind of life outcomes do I get versus these other ones over here? And I think, it’s clear to me, at least just based on, I don’t know about as much about this stuff as you do, but based on my limited education, my limited understanding of things and how things work, I think the worldview that assumes that there is something transcendent to our existence, Works a lot better like we just get down to the day your day to day life is going to be better on the whole.

If you put it on a bell curve, some people sure are not gonna do. They’re gonna do really well with it and that’s great for them. Some people are not gonna do so well with it, but the majority of people are gonna do a bit better in life than if they just adopt the full on humanistic materialistic, which can easily turn into nihilistic cluster of world views.

Pat: I, yeah, I don’t think you can escape nihilism. I think it’s only if you maintain a very superficial level of secularism, humanism, atheism, right? But if you push through like people like these philosophers like Rosenberg do, I think you do get to nihilism. And I would, and then I would say, yeah, 

Mike: nobody can, I have a friend actually who that, that’s him.

So he studied history and philosophy in school. He went to GW and got a master’s in one of them. I think it was in history, but. Yeah. And he is a self avowed atheist, neat guy. I don’t hold any of his views against him, but yes, he has come to that point. Nietzsche is one of his favorite people whoever existed.

And he would say himself that he’s, Has a he’s fully in the nihilism band now, and he’s got his dues paid up to the nihilism club, right? And that’s and I think that’s to transcend that to where okay, he’s accepted basically these nihilistic assumptions, but he’s still going to try to live as a decent person.

And raise his kid well. And just cause you might as well, basically. Yeah. 

Pat: Because it’s Oh, you know what? This TV shows on, I don’t really like it, but I’m too lazy to turn it off. 

Mike: I’m here and these are some motions I can do. I might as well do them. 

Pat: Yep. But there would be nothing wrong in that worldview if he did decide to turn it off, to just snuff himself out of existence.

And, there were certainly nihilistic philosophers. Even going back, he wasn’t exactly a nihilist, but he was a pessimist. Schopenhauer thought suicide was just a perfectly fine idea for people. But to what you said before about what works, even that’s an interesting question because it assumes that there’s something you’re working towards that’s of value.

And so immediately we’re brought back to the more fundamental questions of like, why should we assume that? What are we working towards and why should we even assume that’s valuable to begin with, whether that’s human happiness or population growth or whatever the goal is, but I know what you need.

And let’s speak 

Mike: personally for being like, I’m just talking about happiness and life, happiness, life satisfaction basic things, organization, 

Pat: things like that. And there you’re definitely, I think onto something, cause think about it, if you’re, and I got there, I got to the deep pit of nihilism. And it’s, it, how you can get to nihilism and not be in deep depression, I don’t know. Now, I don’t think you should not accept something because it makes you depressed. I think you should accept something because it’s true. But at the same time, I don’t think you should not accept something because it would make you happy.

Just because something makes you happy doesn’t mean that it’s not true. So sometimes people will say that, be like, oh, you just like religion or you’re just religion because it makes you a happy person. I, it makes me happy to think that my wife loves me, but I also think I have really good reasons that she does, right?

So it’s not it’s not enough to try and, falsify my belief by talking about my motivations. Even if the only reason I was a religious person is because it made me happy, it wouldn’t follow that my religion isn’t true, right? You have to look at the arguments again, but to your other point.

Yeah, what works? Just think about it, right? And for even a justice system to work, there’s some fundamental philosophical assumptions. One, it’s that humans have free will, how you can have justice and consequences and punishment on a sort of a deterministic viewpoint just doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense at all, that, that moral responsibility, moral culpability is a thing.

And again, these moral responsibility, moral culpability make no sense on that physicalist worldview. It can’t accommodate them. So what I would say to your friend, is like, Hey, that’s awesome, man. Like I’ve been down that path. I get it. But there’s actually really good reasons to believe that God exists.

And you just lay out the table of options of what it best explains. It best explains why there is something rather than nothing. Why this contingent reality attains at all. It best explains the anthropic coincidences or the exquisite fine tuning of physics for the emergence of intelligent, interactive life.

It explains our perception of objective moral values and duties. It explains why consciousness is not reducible to mere physical processes alone. It explains for vertical data surrounding near death experiences, which is absolutely fascinating, right? There’s absolutely no physicalist explanation. And I’m not talking about the stuff you read in new age books.

I’m talking about the. The stuff you read in like the Lancet and peer reviewed medical journals of people. Completely braindead flat EEG fixed and dilated pupils reporting these out of body near death experiences of sensorial knowledge of things that are in the room going on in the room outside of the room in waiting rooms.

It’s incredible. You cannot explain that by epoxy or hallucination or any of that. I’m 

Mike: gonna raise you because I actually haven’t looked too much into that specifically, but I could see people. At least dismiss to get initially yeah, who knows what, because it’s an individual saying that this happened.

Pat: That’s what veridical means. It means it’s publicly attested. So that’s the key. It’s the veridical experiences, right? Not just the personal, what does that mean? Exactly. It means so somebody could come out and had this near death experience and then explain from a third person perspective, like what’s happening in the operating room as we’re dead that other people can attest to, or how do you.

Spell veal. V-E-R-I-D, Veri, ICAL. Veal, ah, vertical. I’ve even heard of this word. So that’s the key. ’cause a lot of people have a lot of weird experiences. Oh, exciting. With reality. That’s a cool word. Yep. . Yeah. Certainly people have hallucinations, no doubt. But hallucinations don’t produce veal experiences.

Yes. And that’s the key. Yep. So have 

Mike: you looked into I think it’s, I think it’s Jim Tucker heads up a team at UVA and all the research he was. He carried on the work of Ian, who I might mess up his name’s Erickson. I’d have to Google this. I, again, I came across this stuff many years ago.

A lot of research out of UVA, Jim Tucker for sure is the guy now into reincarnation and very similar. They have now, I want to say. Three to 4, 000 cases that have been meticulous. And this is, these also have been published in name, a prestigious journal and the the founder of all this work.

Again, it was in, I want to say Erickson, but it might be Stevenson. I don’t remember exactly published in the most prestigious medical journals. And they’re out of the three to 4, 000 cases they’ve documented. I believe about half of them have been solved. Meaning it’s exactly what you’re talking about.

It’s someone, there’s a famous one of a kid who. I won’t take too much time going through all of it, but basically there was a kid who was having a lot of he was Cleopatra. Is that? No, he was he was having recurring nightmares. And he about being stuck in a cockpit of a plane. It was on fire. And he just would always this is a young kid, 56 years old, drawing pictures of dog fights and planes on fire.

And this was an obsession of his right. And so his parents initially thought it’s just something he would grow out of. And he didn’t kept going. And so they started asking him about it. What exactly is this? And so as they’re probing him, he tells them that he, in his last lifetime, he fought in World War II.

And he told them eventually they got a name out of him. This is a young kid. He might be seven or eight now, but he’s still a young kid. And he said he got shot down in Japan over some Bay. His plane was it was on fire. He was stuck and he drowned and, they were like, Oh, okay, buddy. Sure. And then they actually looked into it and they’re like, what the dude existed.

They, the name, they found him, the squadron he was in. He, and yes this guy did get shot down over some Bay in Japan, exactly as the kid told them. And so then they were like, Oh, what the. And cause it, what do you do at that point? 

So even fast forward. So they found someone there was, I believe one remaining dude from his little squadron that was still alive.

And they just arranged a call. These are details that are just coming back to me. There were more details. These are the ones that stood out the vivid ones that stood out in my mind. And so they arranged a Skype call with this guy. Didn’t tell their son who this guy is. And Their son immediately recognized him, calls him by name.

No, Charlie starts crying. How are you doing? It’s been so long. Starts asking about his wife by name. How are your kids that are done? The guy Charlie doesn’t even know what to think. I believe that was his name, right? He’s just Whoa, what is going on? And how it ends, though, is and I remember hearing about this because there was a company that was they were gonna make a movie about it.

How it ends is. Mhm. The kid goes he gets flown by the production company out to japan to the bay where they’re the plane they find the plane it’s on the at the bottom of the bay and he holds a funeral for himself in his previous life and that gives him closure after that was the end of the nightmares the end of the obsession with.

The dog fights and that was the end of the whole thing. So that’s just one of over 15, 1600 cases that have been solved like that. Like the, all the details have been verified that are able to be verified. And what else? Like it got to a point where it’s just cool, this definitely happened in this nine year old kid.

It’s usually children. Most of the cases of this happens with children. This kid definitely knew about it. We have no idea how. 

Pat: Yeah, and it’s one, it’s just another weight in the scale. You know what I mean? It’s okay, if we’re committed to physicalism, here’s another thing that is going to be really difficult to explain, if not in principle impossible.

But we don’t need, we don’t even have to make that strong of a claim. We can just say it’s better explained by this type of worldview, right? And I think, I think it in a 

Mike: weird Oh from, okay. So we have these ancestral memories in our DNA and then in quantity, we have quantum entanglement between.

And so this kid wasn’t actually this guy. It’s just that their DNA 

Pat: sure. Yep. And that’s why we’re like, you got to compare it. That’s why I like near death experiences, right? Is there’s just no physical explanation at all for these things. And that’s why I, I think those are, is a lot stronger weight in the scale than say hallucinogenic.

Sometimes people want to bring up, but the brain’s still active. There, there’s, there could be many plausible physicalist explanations there, but not for these veridical near death experiences. And that’s just, in addition to all that other list of things that I put out before that I think, through logic alone, we can know God exists just when you understand conditioned reality.

And then you just realize there’s things in this world, that exists, but they don’t have to exist. Like reality didn’t need to include me, Mike, it didn’t need to include you. I’m really glad it did. I’m really glad that reality included you and we’re having, it’s awesome, but we’re conditioned.

Meaning like we exist because there’s certain conditions being fulfilled that allow us to exist and not just in a temporal sense, like my parents meeting or something like that, but in a hierarchical sense, like down through the chain of being, as it were, like, I depend on the conditions of my organs, molecular structure, chemical bonding, electromagnetic fields.

And then we can just ask a simple question like, could all of reality, the totality of reality, whatever that is, be a conditioned reality, collectively? And the answer is no, it can’t. Because then that would mean that all of reality is awaiting on the fulfillment of conditions outside of itself in order to exist.

Which would just mean that there would be nothing. There would be absolutely nothing. If this is what all of reality we’re like, and this was Leibniz famous question, right? Like, why is there something rather than nothing? And Thomas Aquinas speculated the same thing. Like, why does anything attain in reality at all?

And what they realized is all of reality is amazingly in some way, self sufficient. There can’t be anything outside of reality to cause all of reality. That’s an absurdity. There’s not, if it was outside of all reality. Then it would be non reality. It just doesn’t make sense, right? So there has to be some layer, some foundation, some bottom floor to reality that exists in a radically different way.

And it has a necessary nature. It exists because reality had to include it. Or because of it, the rest of reality is able to exist. And these are the type of sort of logical deductions that are extremely tight. That you can show look, it’s unable to explain why anything exists at all. People, Fermions, bosons, electrons, protons, any, anything that could change or could be otherwise, there has to be some necessarily existing ground of reality, and then we can probe and ask like questions about that, where I would say look, if it isn’t mind, and personal, then there’s no way we could get consciousness or this or that.

So it can’t just be Fermions and bosons. Those are serious arguments or arguments that once I encountered them when I was, working through this stuff they convinced me because you can’t really why 

Mike: Christianity though versus maybe an Eastern type of or not even maybe even an agnostic type of spirituality, something that.

It would postulate maybe that we are spiritual in nature. We’re not our bodies. We have bodies. We have even minds, maybe that’s even separate, right? And we use our minds. Why Christianity? Two things. You can still have a supreme being 

Pat: in this. 

Mike: Of 

Pat: course. Yeah. So I was a theist before I was a Christian and I was a Thomist before I was a Catholic, right?

You bring up a good point, and the short answer is because because Jesus, and I think we can talk about that, but also the Catholic Church always interested me because it had such a robust, consistent, and coherent worldview from start to finish of what reality is. And you say, the way that the Catholic Church views the soul is as the form of the body in a sort of Aristotelian sense.

So it’s not this weird Cartesian dualism, which I think is actually Pretty incoherent when you get to it. And it’s a problem of a lot of the sort of mind, body problems and philosophy of mind and stuff like that. The Catholic church is able to avoid all of that in their background, metaphysics and stuff like that.

So I was always intrigued as I kept going deeper into philosophy of ethics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, to just see that all of my conclusions somehow kept lining up with the things that the Catholic church teaches and believe. So that just made me, that just made me interested first off.

But the Catholic church isn’t a school of philosophy either, right? It’s a religion. And it makes some. It claims that God not only exists, but he incarnated. He came to earth, that we’re sinful. There’s something wrong with us. That seems obvious that there’s something wrong with us, right? And that he somehow got nailed to it.

And he somehow got nailed to a piece of wood in atonement for our sins, whatever that means. And then here’s the critical claim. And divine endorsement of that, to say this is actually true. There was a super miracle, which is of course, the Christian resurrection. And that, that always intrigued me because it seemed like it was the one religion that was, that really made itself vulnerable to falsification, especially through the historical method.

It’s okay, maybe we can look through history and see that this is all made up or legendary or myths. But what absolutely surprised me, Mike, is as I started to take the historical method seriously, and I learned so much about the historical process when I was looking through this. The data that the vast majority of historians agree on about the person of Christ is really solid.

They agree on data points of not only his existence, but the empty tomb, the experiences of post mortem appearances, the origin of Christian belief. All these things. And then we’re back to the same thing we were talking about before is like, what can best explain that hallucination can’t do it, conspiracy theories can’t do it right.

But it actually seems like a miracle. The one thing that everybody talked about did happen actually explains this really well. And then we can use probabilistic reasoning and saying, okay, if I have good reasons for thinking God exists and that God is all good and all loving, and I think 

Mike: God per se, or that’d be Jesus, that Jesus existed.

Pat: Hold on. Yeah, I’m not saying that yet. I’m saying if I have good independent reasons to think that God is all good. All loving supreme. And I, I think all that can be demonstrated philosophically. So let’s just, we can go back to that if you want. But if I have independent reasons to think that’s the case, then what is the probability that something like what we have historically with Jesus would occur, it actually seems like the probability might be pretty high.

The God that created us for a reason and purpose because he loves us might actually want to do something like this. That seems consistent. So not only do we have a strong historical basis. We can try to make inferences from that are certainly reasonable. I don’t think 

Mike: you can why create and please don’t take this, I’m not trying to challenge you in a please challenge.

That’s what philosophers in a hostile, in a hostile way. I know you wouldn’t, I’m figuring you wouldn’t take it like that. But even anybody listening, my questions are actually genuine. . It’s not me trying to like gotcha on anything. And honestly, you know a lot more about this stuff than I do.

So things I had to work, I couldn’t. Got you. Anyway, I’m not trying to do that. But why? So if that’s the case, why bother with all of this? Then why create us and make us go through all this suffering? And it was God just bored. 

Pat: So that’s the key, right? Is and that is the strongest argument against theism.

If an all good all loving God exists and why is there evil and suffering right? And that’s the thing. I used to trot out more than anything when I was an atheist. And the problem with that is no, 

Mike: I actually understand. I could come up with an argument against that fairly easy.

Like, why bother with any of this? Why if he knows everything, if we’re all, if he has a plan, everything’s predestined. Why bother with any of it? Who cares about what’s right and wrong, suffering, bad things happening. You could just say, oh, that’s part of a bigger plan. And we don’t know what that plan is.

And so what looks like, what comes next? I understand that. That’s another, that’s a different, but why bother with any of it? 

Pat: Let’s take it. Let’s take it one step at a time. Cause I think it is important to address the problem of evil. Cause there might be somebody listening right now who that actually hits, who actually hits pretty hard.

I’ll probably have something to do, but I’m just saying 

Mike: That, like that, even to me, someone would say that I’d be like, eh, I think I could probably come up with a 

Pat: good yeah, but it is important. And then I will get to your point. Cause that is equally important. The problem of evil or suffering is not.

It’s not actually all that intellectually difficult because it rests on two broken premises, right? If God is all powerful, he can create any world he wants. If God is all good, then he would create a world of that’s free of suffering and evil. And there’s no reason to think that either of those premises are true.

So first off, to say that God is all powerful doesn’t mean that he can create nonsense, right? He can create any logically possible world. But a world of free creatures that are forced to act a certain way is just an inherent contradiction. It’s a meaningless statement. So if God had reason to create free creatures, which I think is actually going to go into your point, Mike then built into that is the, is just the inherent consequences that they might choose to do some really wrong things.

And for souls to interact meaningfully, to have moral development, to learn from consequences, to progress in our, in the sort of quality of our souls, we also need a fixed and rigid playing board, right? If things just work by miracles all the time that we’d never be able to interact nothing could be learned or could be happening.

So there we have the sort of basis for why the world is orderly, intelligible, et cetera. But even furthermore. It just assumes that God couldn’t have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil and suffering to exist. And I think that’s plainly false. I think most of us can look at our life, and if there’s just one counter example, then this argument is clearly not necessarily true.

If there’s one example in your life where you’ve gone through suffering, or suffered from something, but some greater good came out of it, then that’s it. Then the whole, the problem, the problem of evil collapses. Because both of the premises are not necessarily true. So intellectually, it’s actually, it doesn’t have that much force and most philosophers don’t really argue about it.

Is that not an odd 

Mike: though with some of the stuff we’re talking about earlier? I take a baby getting raped to death. Is there really much good in that? Then we have like just a visceral, we go, no, that’s wrong. It’s just not right to rape babies to death. And then If you do go rape a baby to death, could you then use that as a justification that, hey, this is God’s world.

I’m just playing in it and this is happening and again I really like your beliefs allow for free will, but they’re also and again, I’m just ignorant, but aren’t there mainstream, for lack of a better word, sects or strains of Christianity, that, that reject that and say that everything is pre destined and predetermined.

Pat: Yep. Yeah. And so that’s part of the reason I’m Catholic. So you talked about Calvin full on double predestination. It’s a mouthful, right? That’s what they hold. I think that you cannot reconcile that with an all loving and all just God. I don’t think that an all loving, all just God from all eternity would just choose certain people to save and yeah.

Through no fault of their own, just damn a bunch more. And I think that is a defeater of Calvinism. It’s inconsistent with what we can know coherently about God. Catholic Catholics don’t believe that. So yeah, that’s just, I think you can actually use philosophy to cut down not just Christianity, but religions that can’t be true, right.

Just because what we can know about God philosophically. Doesn’t correspond with the theology of that religion. And that’s what I did. I used philosophy as a parsing method. And then it just kept lining up with the Catholic church. And so not lining up with any other religion as to your point about why would God bother to me?

I think it’s actually pretty 

Mike: hard. Just quickly. I’m actually curious. What about the baby raping point? Then you’d say a baby that got raped to death. There’s some sort of greater good in that. 

Pat: I think that ultimately there’s gonna be reconciliation, right? On the theistic worldview, we can at least hope that no, despite that horrific tragedy that it is, that there’s some eternal salvation for that baby.

There’s some eternal justice. So yeah, it’s theism, is, theism is the only worldview that can actually give us any hope. Of any good coming out of an otherwise horrific situation. Physicalism doesn’t answer that. That baby’s dead, it’s gone, the parents suffer until they die, and that’s the end. There’s no justice, there’s no reconciliation.

So 

Mike: then it would be the good that would come of it would be more of a spiritual sense. You’re saying, okay, so the baby’s soul could go to heaven, and therefore, there was a greater good to that happening? 

Pat: Yeah, or reincarnate if you believe in that or whatever, right? But there’s at least the possibility, right?

And we don’t have to, we don’t have to know how it necessary, 

Mike: yeah, for a baby to get raped to death, though, for that to happen? Couldn’t it not, couldn’t it not get raped to death and have that happen too? 

Pat: Maybe not, right? God, so the way that we think of God is He has eternal knowledge.

Catholics don’t think of God as having foreknowledge, right? So God could In a simultaneous moment, understand all logically possible realities all ends to all realities is outside of time. Is it necessary? That’s an interesting question. And I don’t, but I don’t think we have to answer it.

I think we can just say that the fact that it did happen. Means that, and this is the important thing for the problem of evil, right? If it doesn’t go through, it doesn’t go through. And then we can wrestle with these questions, but just because we’re wrestling with them, like they’re no longer an argument against theism, you see what I’m saying?

They’re just difficult for us emotionally at this point. And that is where evil has really forced. Cause it is I’m with you, man. Like you hear these horrible things happening and it makes you. It makes you angry, and it almost makes you angry at God, especially if you are a theist and there’s so much of that, and the funny thing is there’s so much of that in the Bible, most of the Psalms in the Bible are just complaints against God, right?

They’re just like what is going on here? And 

Mike: In the Old Testament, God is He’s pissed. He does a lot of, there’s a lot of genociding. There’s a lot of bad stuff in there. The Psalms are in the Old Testament, right? Okay. 

Pat: And that shows my ignorance. Yeah. So much of it is, and then, you have biblical interpretations of is that literal history or is this allegorical?

And that’s really important too, is Catholics don’t look at the Bible as. The Bible is a collection of books that, by the way, the Catholic church put together, right? People sometimes don’t realize how the Bible came together. It was the Catholic church that closed the canon and assembled the Bible.

So even if you’re a Protestant, you think you rely on no tradition, but just the Bible, you’re still relying on the tradition of the Catholic church that they decided these books should be in and shouldn’t. But the Catholic church, for example, and I want to get back to your other point. All of these are really interesting topics and important.

It doesn’t interpret like Genesis is a little as a map of etiology of how the universe scientifically unfolded and it never has St. Augustine, in the fourth century said that, look, God could have released certain potentialities in the universe that could have unfurled in any manner over any expanse of time.

What Genesis is teaching us are deep, important, spiritual and theological truths, and that again, also really appealed to me about the Catholic church is it didn’t. It never took. And this is like some 1500 years before Darwin, mind you. So it’s not like the church is retreating in the face of modern science.

It’s just always held this tradition of saying, look, the Bible is a collection of books. Some of these books are allegorical. Some of them are literal history. Some of them are pastoral letters. Some of them are biographies. Some of them are poems. So if you ask, people will ask me you’re a Catholic.

Do you take the, the Bible literally I’ll say, do you take the do you take the library? Literally, it depends what section you’re in. It depends what book you’re reading, right? Yeah. That’s a good answer to that. Yep. So yeah, so that’s all that’s important. But the, yeah, the whole Psalm thing, the interesting about the Psalms are just all the laments and the complaints.

And I think that, part of us, that’s a very natural thing. So it’s important to settle it intellectually by saying, okay, this isn’t. I shouldn’t not believe in God because of evil. And in fact, evil points to God, because it just brings us back to the moral argument, right?

Evil is a lack of good, and the fact that we even experience any lack of good, and somehow perceive this standard of supreme goodness, of ultimate justice, mercy, compassion. Like, where did we ever get these ideas from? Yeah. Yeah. . So in, in an indirect way, I would say evil, actually. If you even want to get the problem of evil off the ground, you already have to affirm God’s existence.

Otherwise, it makes no sense. ’cause there is no evil, there is no good. 

Mike: Would you say though you have to affirm the existence of something beyond the material. It doesn’t have to be the Christian God. It, it could be a supreme being of a different type. 

Pat: I think if you’re 

Mike: going to be, I understand how you’ve come to that but to start, it’s okay, there’s something else.

Let’s say you’re somebody and you’re like, yes, I see what you’re saying. I do think there is. I think there’s a strong argument to me that there’s something else. Is it Jesus? I don’t know. But you know that this is the first step is I’m going to say that, Yeah, I’m open to the idea that, maybe there is a bit more than just a bunch of articles.

Pat: You’re absolutely right. Yeah. And that’s what happened to me, right? Like I said, I became a theist before I became a Christian and a Thomist in line with Thomas Quines before I became a Catholic. And this is actually what C. S. Lewis does in Mere Christianity. Really great book, is he actually gets people to theism first through the moral argument.

The first couple chapters are just a classic development of these types of, Moral arguments that we’ve been highlighting, but not developing too deeply in this conversation. And then, only once he gets people to theism, which you can get to, you can just get to, belief in a transcendent God that’s, that has these, The certain nature, right?

But then you might not think that there’s basis or ground for becoming a Christian or something like that. You could do that. I would say that you’re stopping a little prematurely and there actually is good basis to make that move. But yeah, in principle, you certainly could. And that’s, that’d be a better, 

Mike: probably a better place to be.

And again, if we come right back down to how it’s going to impact the quality of your life. The reason why I’m bringing it back to that is that matters. I just doesn’t, it just matters. Even though it’s, it seems so insignificant when you’re looking at the mysteries of the universe. If for nothing else, you’re like, you know what I’m going to, even if it’s okay, let’s say take the afterlife, right?

There, maybe there is something after, and maybe it’s heaven and hell, or maybe it’s reincarnation. Let’s say those are the two options that we’re considering. 

Pat: Or maybe it’s mixed. You could keep it open. But 

Mike: let’s just say that we’re not going to, we’re not going to think with maybe it’s Valhalla or whatever.

Yeah. 

Pat: There could be any number of possibilities after you died. You don’t have to be settled on that right now. 

Mike: But okay. So if that’s the, if that’s the case, I’m going to accept that as, as true as in, and that just means as true as I can’t now unconvinced myself, or I can’t make a strong enough argument to say it’s definitely not the case.

And I can make a strong argument for being the case. And so I’m going to accept it as true. That is then inevitably going to have positive impacts in your life, because maybe it’ll occur to you then that certain things are not a great idea. If that means you, maybe you’re going to be judged by your creator after this is all done, or you’re just going to come back to the world that you are leaving behind.

And then it can give you some hope too, that when you’re going through hard times, whether it’s, There might be, you might have an eternity in heaven waiting for you. And that’s going to be very nice, or you might have a lot, many more lifetimes ahead of you. And the fact that right now this one is not going so well, okay.

In the scheme of things, actually that’s okay because maybe this is this infinite game that we’re playing and the game is not going so great right now, but that’s the nature of any game, right? If a game was always going well, it’d be boring, right? We need some chaos to make it fun. 

Pat: Yeah, and, the thing of heaven, too, and of course it’s been so caricatured over the years that, that the way that, that Catholics think of heaven, and especially hell, is often way different than what most people are familiar with.

And we also have to remember we grew up in a heavily Protestant culture. Catholicism was not generally favored in the founding of America, right? They were restricted to two states. They were often hung, persecuted, things like that. So our country is founded by Protestants. So what most people, the picture of Christianity that most people get in America is very Protestant y, right?

It’s not very Catholic, but the Catholic conceptions of heaven make perfect sense, right? If we have a maximally good God who wants to will the maximum amount of good that he can, then it seems like anything less than heaven’s actually incompatible with that. So the argument that heaven sounds too good to be true.

Is actually an argument for what exactly we should expect if we have an all good Supreme being right and then anything less than that doesn’t quite make sense. And then the Catholic conception of the hell just real quick. Because again, it’s just I know it deters a lot of people, but hell in Catholic theology is in a place where God sends people right?

Hell is a state that people enter into by willfully rejecting God, right? So hell is a place that God allows people to go. And he makes this, very clear that isn’t what he wants, but he respects his creature’s freedom. It comes back to that fundamental thing. And it seems to me like, why would God bother to your other point is that you, God would want to make a maximally good world.

And it seems like a world where there are moral agents, moral creatures that can learn to do really good things like love, like that seems like the highest. But learn to love. Other people, but there’s other really good things. Other really good experiences too, and can develop morally in communion and relationship to other people.

That just seems like such a bet and do so freely, right? Freely. Not, they’re not puppets. That just seems like such a much better world than one with puppets or no opportunity for that at 

Mike: all. 

Pat: So that’s, do I know that I know the mind of God? Yeah. If 

Mike: you’re going to, if you’re God and you’re going to do it in a way that’s most interesting.

Or most good maximal goodness, as I would say, and like 

Pat: that just seems so much better than a maximal 

Mike: goodness, literally be only good. Like why even have evil if you really want? And I don’t, I don’t mean to just went over, right? But. No. 

Pat: Because 

Mike: think 

Pat: about it, right? Is it necessary? In order to have, yeah, in order to have justice, you have to have injustice.

And justice is a really good thing. In order to have compassion, you have to have issues where you can be compassionate about. So it’s, and all this comes from free will. Like in order to have genuine free will and consequences, it seems like the ability to, especially to choose love, right? If that’s the target.

And I think that’s a reasonable target. And let me just say. It’s dangerous to say if I was God, I would do it this way. Cause that leads to a lot of bad ideas, right? If I was God, I wouldn’t design like centipedes, but that’s not an actual argument against God. But it seems like it’s cool, actually.

Mike: Yeah, they’re definitely from some other planet, but. 

Pat: So we’re in theology now, right? And I’m not an expert in this, but it seems consistent with what I can know philosophically about God that evil would exist and that some greater goods that might not be possible without free will. Or, and, or only possibly cause of free will actually help to explain why bad things happen and why bad things happen to otherwise good people and why good things even happen to bad people at times, right?

So it’s not something that we can know because we don’t know absolutely the mind of God, right? But it’s something we can see there’s certainly a consistency and coherency to that picture. 

Mike: Yeah. Again, I want to dwell on that. I just have a hard time reconciling to my mind. And again, it might just be that I’m not very educated.

I’m, I don’t consider myself even remotely an expert. I’m barely a dilettante here, but you can have free will and a lot of good, or you can have no, no free will and maximum good. But that just might be me being unsophisticated. 

Pat: Yeah. So if you don’t have you don’t have maximum good because it seems like free will is a good thing, right?

So you’re automatically minus one there, right? 

I feel 

Mike: like that might though, just be our, if you’re a construct, don’t 

Pat: you think it’s better that you chose to love your wife and that she chose to love you 

Mike: rather 

Pat: than 

Mike: you’re just 

Pat: pre programmed? 

Mike: What if I don’t even, what if I don’t know that?

What if I’m pre programmed and I’m not aware of it? And I just say, 

Pat: Just go as you are, right? Cause, cause free world is one of those properly it just really seems like I’m choosing to raise my arm right now, which I am, right? So unless I have some really good reason to doubt it, which again, is a prior metaphysical commitment, it just seems obvious.

Oh no, I agree there. I agree there. I’m not and it does seem obvious that it would be better for me to be able to choose to love. And to be pre programmed that, that seems perfectly, 

Mike: If you start with that saying, okay that’s, we’re going to hold that as the highest good. And then from there, we’re going to have to accept some things that would appear not to be good, but they’re in service of the higher good.

Then I could see that from a, just a logical, 

Pat: and there’s logical design constraints is what we’re saying. It’s like there’s a logically incompatible. Realities here. It’s a, or not a, like if we have free will, and that is, is a better thing to have than not than that, then there’s certain design restraints that were possibilities that could fall out of that.

And evil was absolutely one of them. Now, I don’t want to just wave this away because I struggle with this a long time, right? Everybody suffers. Everybody knows absolute tragedies where you look and oh my God. How could, how can that make any sense? Especially if it happens 

Mike: to you, right?

That’s going to, that’s going to cut 

Pat: the, or your kids, let’s make it worse. Your kids, right? So what I would say is go back to the intellectual side of it. Realize, okay we have good reasons to, to support our belief here in something higher up and further out, and that we can hold on to hope.

And this is why. In Catholic theology, hope is a virtue, right? It’s the fighter’s virtue. You keep punching because you won’t need hope in heaven because you’ll see things fully, right? But we do need hope here and now. So it’s hope and faith. And again, Catholic theology isn’t just like some thing.

I just believe it. No faith. Is an act of trust to Catholics. Like I have good reason to believe this and I’m going to continue to trust it. Even in the face of adversity, even as I suffer, even as my family suffers, right? Because I have good reason to believe it. I’m going to try and make the best of the situation.

So that’s where you have to. You have to actually exit philosophy because you can drive yourself in really painful circles and then start to live the spiritual life and start to do things like all these weird things as Catholics do, pray and all that, not eat meat on Friday.

Yeah. Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes we do that. Yep. And that’s the whole point of those prudential considerations are just their help to build virtue virtues, like temperance. Fortitude and virtues are like soul building qualities, right? So people think they’re arbitrary, but there’s actually reasons that Catholics historical reasons why these things are there.

And a lot of it comes down to trying to live the spiritual life because Catholics don’t believe in once saved, always saved or predestination, right? We believe that this life actually matters and that there’s certain ways that we could dispose our soul toward God. And there’s certain ways that we can turn our soul away from God.

And that’s what it ultimately comes down to. And that’s where I have to punt to a theologian or priest to do more work than that. Cause that is not my area of expertise. 

Mike: No way. This is, this was a very interesting conversation. I actually, so for people who are still listening let me know.

I’ll see on the analytics but let me know if, Pat, if you’d be up for this, I just like talking to you. I, we could probably talk about a lot of different things because you just know a lot about a lot of different things and I know. Some about, I know a bit about some things, and this would be fun to do as I don’t know, once a month where it has nothing to do with fitness.

And it doesn’t have to be about we went all over the place here, but we could just have wide ranging whatever, wherever it goes. We could start with maybe a loose topic or two like actually about. Yeah. We could do kettlebells too. We could do kettlebells, but.

Anyway let people, if people were people listening, reach out, let let me know if you’d like that. Would you be up for that, Pat? Oh, I’d 

Pat: love to, man. This has been a blast. This is you’re an excellent conversationalist and you present really good questions and honestly challenges too. That’s what it’s all about.

If you can overcome these challenges, then That’s an issue. Like you have to be able to think these were things I had to think through. Like everything you’ve talked about on this mic were things that I had to think through as I was searching around, searching these foundations.

So it’s not like I was just, born and brought up in this now, if that were the case, it still wouldn’t mean that it’s false, right? That’s another but I had to, really, I started on the opposite end of the spectrum, like your friend, who was influenced, which makes it more interesting, actually.

I was deeply influenced by it was actually a writer who really got me into the Atheist at first, just and I don’t want to bore people any longer, but it was H. L. Mencken. Have you ever heard of him? Of course. The 

Mike: What’s that famous quote? Basically every so often a man just has to spit on his hand.

What is it? Ray, raise the black flag and start. Cutting off heads or something, right? Yeah, he’s got so 

Pat: many great quotes. He’s such an amazing pro stylist, but he was a bitter old atheist, right? And so he is, through him, like in my early interest in writing that I just got so steeped in the old atheists and they colored my world view for so long until I just, it ultimately just collapsed and And then, yeah, and then everything we just discussed, but yeah, making hilarious.

He’s absolutely it 

Mike: is. Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. How great is that? There’s something primal. There’s something as a man that just resonates to your very fiber. You know what I mean? 

Pat: Yeah, and he’s such a polemicist.

He, he stirred so much controversy in his day, but he’s just, he’s such a, he’s so witty. He’s so in his pro style is so unique and so interesting. Obviously I have deep, philosophical disagreements with him at this point, but as a writer, if you’re into writing, get a Mankin Christomathy because it’s just and that Christomathy mean just it’s, that’s, he uses big fancy words like that.

It’s just a collection of his choicest writings. But then I would also, my other favorite writer, who really turned a lot of it for me, who I was reading a little bit later, was C. S. Lewis. So I would also recommend, cause Lewis was a great philosopher, he wasn’t just a great writer, which I think Mencken was missing.

He was smart, he was, but he didn’t think on as deep a level as Lewis. So when you get to Lewis books not just mere Christianity, but his book Miracles is just awesome. And it’s not miracle stories, right? He’s giving a philosophical analysis of naturalism, Of supernaturalism at the beginning.

And he was engaging with some of the smartest thinkers of his time. So it’s a really cool read to, to work your way through. So if listeners are interested in kind of diving, if you’re looking for like inaccessible, but yet still pretty rigorous, Presentation of some of the things we’ve talked about.

I would recommend those two books from Lewis. Awesome. 

Mike: And you’d also recommend that people go to where to learn more about you and your work. 

Pat: If you enjoy these types of conversations the Pat Flynn show also read your book, of course. Yeah. Oh yeah. So the Pat Flynn show on iTunes every Sunday, I have a segment called Sunday school.

That’s where I bring on a lot of philosophers, people who are way smarter than I am. And Then, and people that kind of tackle these big questions. Oh, stop. You’re being so modest. No it’s actually true. People actually ask me where I find a lot of these P these people. Cause they’re, like they’re in there.

A lot of the, a number of them are in academia, so they’re not well known. But they’re really interesting. I think anyways, it’s a selfish podcast. Cause I just like talking about this stuff. Like I think we both do. And then I had, I talk with Dan John once a week and we, and I do talk about fitness as well.

So the Pat Flynn show on iTunes, my book, how to be better at almost everything, which we talked in our last conversation is on Amazon. And that’s about, 

Mike: which I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m just going to make a note that you came before it’s called range by the guy who wrote, Oh, the sports gene. I think, you know what I’m talking about?

I 

Pat: know who you’re talking about. Yes. And thank you. Nobody’s accused me of plagiarism yet, but I did come before that guy. Yep. 

Mike: And David Epstein, 

Pat: yeah, Epstein. And I actually, I honestly, I haven’t read that book. I’ve heard good things, but I haven’t had a chance to pick it up yet, but my book is on generalism that it’s good to be good at a lot of different things and stack skills.

And that can give you competitive advantages and refer people to our previous conversation. And my website is chronicles of strength. com. So you can hop over there and check it out. Get on my email list and all that if you so 

Mike: desire awesome. This was great patent. We’re going to do it again.

We’re going to I’m sure I’m going to I’m going to hear from quite a few people who are going to who are going to say yes, please do it because whenever I put something up that is a bit of field, right? Is not just me monologuing about something related to fitness or interviewing somebody related to fitness.

It always gives good feedback. So I look forward to the next one. We can line it up. A monthly segment, 

Pat: man. I’d love it. That’d be a ton 

Mike: of fun. 

Pat: If people can tolerate it. So you listen to your audience, we’re going to 

Mike: do it. And then people are going to have to force us to stop. That’s how it’ll work.

Awesome, man. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my bestselling health and fitness books, including bigger, leaner, stronger for men. Thinner, leaner, stronger for women.

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