In Which Tyler Cowen Interviews Me

My imaginary interview with the intellectual and economist

I’ve been an appreciator of Tyler Cowen’s work for many years now. I say “appreciator” because I don’t think grown men should be “fans” of anyone as it seems unmanly and unseemly. Anyway, I have read several of Cowen’s books, gone through some of the economics course he and Alex Tabarrok so generously put out in the world, have been a subscriber to Cowen’s blog forever, and I’ve listened to almost every episode of Conversations With Tyler since it started. So maybe you’re thinking I should just admit fandom but I refuse.

Recently Tyler interviewed Ross Douthat, a Roman Catholic superstar columnist with the New York Times. Douthat’s latest book is called Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious and Tyler took the occasion to ask Douthat several questions about religious belief. I may give Douthat’s book a review soon; the title alone gets my gears turning like crazy. I think all people are inherently religious such that it is a basic part of human nature. Given we need to qualify this word religious, why should everyone be that way? Or are we talking about a belief in the supernatural? Is this another author getting on the reenchantment bandwagon? Etc.

I smoked my pipe as I listened to their discussion and sat on my patio in a bid to absorb precious sunlight on an unseasonably warm midwinter day. I found myself gripping the armrests of my chair as Douthat answered Cowen’s questions–not because I thought he was wrong–Douthat does a wonderful job–but because I simply wanted to answer Cowen’s questions my way.

In the early days of Conversations With Tyler, Tyler used to say, “This is the conversation with so and so, I want to have. Not the one you want to have.” I always liked that line. What follows is the conversation I want Tyler to have had with me, not the one he actually had, which was very good. I’ve taken the main questions Cowen asked Douthat from the transcript and then added my own responses. This is no criticism of Douthat’s apologetic prowess. Douthat gives a wonderful demonstration of how Christian apologetics might be redeemed from their deservedly poor reputation. I very much enjoyed Cowen and Douthat’s discussion and I recommend you listen if such things interest you. But I’m curious to find out how I would respond to some of Cowen’s questions so here we go.

Tyler: I have a basic question about, what does it mean to be religious? Let’s say I believe in the simulation hypothesis, which comes from Nick Bostrom. Robin Hanson has cited it. The notion that, if we can make a lot of simulations, there’s a pretty good chance we are ourselves living in one. How does believing in the simulation argument differ from being religious? Outside the sphere of normal life, how do we distinguish what we might call a god from what we might call — I don’t know — whoever created the simulation?

Anthony: So how does belief in Simulation Theory differ from religious belief, and how does the idea of God differ from the idea of a Great Gamer in the sky who is in some way running our reality as one would a computer program?

I find it helpful to place the thought exercise of Sim Theory alongside Harman/Putnam’s Brain in a Vat scenario as simply being a materialist version of Descartes’ Deus Deceptor or Evil Demon idea. Regarding the specifics of ST, they seem to reflect a lack of imagination in which, because we can simulate (in very limited ways) our reality with computer programs, we decide to take the wild and totally inexplicable leap of analogizing upwards to posit that someone else must be generating our reality also with computer programs. But there’s no reason to think that a higher reality would be anything like our own or that it should operate on the same fundamental principles as ours and, given our reality is really some kind of fiction, we have no justification (at least on purely materialist terms) for assuming we could figure out anything about the nature of that higher reality. So why computers? Why not the dream of a toddler of some higher power species who is dying of a fever? Let’s at least make our thought exercises creative. I don’t believe Brain in a Vat and ST add anything, because of their reliance on technologies and lack of supernatural plot device, to the original Evil Genius idea.

Importantly, ST and its ilk only kick the can down the road of contingency, right? If we grant that we are in a simulation, who made the Simulators, etc? It’s a similar question to where the Big Bang came from. With materialism, we are always avoiding the question of whence and why it all comes. The reality is that, at least from one perspective, reality is ultimately absurd and mysterious in that we live according to contingency and yet cannot avoid some implication of noncontingent origination or source and we must take some swan dive of faith no matter what we believe.

So Brain in a Vat, ST, and Deus Deceptor, are all asking the same questions: How can we trust what we think we know? How can we escape the solipsism and nihilism of radical skepticism? Am I safe? Is this real? Is it all a lie? Does someone really love me? What are we doing here? Etc.

There are two paths I’d suggest, one I’d offer to walk with you:

One. The Transcendental Argument for God or TAG. Personally, TAG is one of the more compelling ways of using reason to systematically build a case for the existence of God or at least the transcendent. Regardless of how far TAG takes one, it does irreparable damage to materialism/physicalism/Scientism. If you sit with the questions TAG asks us to ask about how we justify the things we believe, I think there is no way to remain a devotee of the philosophically bankrupt religion known as Scientism. In many ways, TAG asks the same questions as Sim Theory but instead of theorizing a void, running into it, and then trying to ask the big questions from that vantage point, TAG starts with fullness, sensibility, beauty, awe, and honestly faces the reality of meaning, information, predication, considering what they might imply. You can find books and YouTube videos about TAG so I won’t try and make the case here.

Two: The path I’d love to walk with you is the path of getting to know Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God, the god-man, the culmination of history, the beginning and middle and end of creation, the Logos, the one in whom we have seen the Father. I really believe that Christianity is the most satisfying story from every vantage point: from the philosophical and the most rigorous application of reason, from the ethical, anthropological, aesthetic, from the vantage point of your discipline, Tyler, the economic. In fact, I would almost say that you should become a christian and pursue the faith if only for the territory it would open for you as an economist. Economics comes from the Greek words oikos and nomos or Household Order. The universe is God’s house and the order and logic and stewardship of God’s house is of great importance to Him and has a divine end. You have actually chosen a sacred path in becoming an economist and I think following Jesus will create far more vocational satisfaction and enlightenment for you than wondering what it would mean if some pimply teenager of a higher order was moving you around with a joystick.

To invite you to learn more about following Jesus is not an avoidance of Descartes’ question. But it is an acknowledgement of the fact that radical skepticism is like the child who closes their eyes and covers their ears when their mother tells them it’s time for bed. But what they really want is to be picked up and held and taken care of. Reality beckons to you, it allures you.

You started with the question of what it means to be religious; this is a big question which we could pursue if you’d like but I would start with the idea that religiosity is fundamentally a part of being human. The word means different things depending on how we’re using it but I would say to be religious is to seek meaning and coherence as part of a community in relation to the divine.

Tyler: Clearly, you believe creation is possible, and you don’t dismiss Bayesian reasoning. How much weight you give it is an open question. Why not think there are multiple layers of God? What we think of as God is just part of the chain. In Bayesian terms, if a god created us, well, some being could have created that god. Why aren’t you led to that as a view with pretty high probability?

Anthony: I do think the Bayesian Fine-Tuning argument holds water. And no amount of appealing to unproven and inaccessible infinite universes can satisfy for me the miraculous nature of being, of reality, of creation, of us sitting here together.

But you’re asking a different question and I think, at a technical level, Bayesian reasoning has no seat at the table as we are talking about things for which we have no ability to grasp at the probabilities and no justification for their estimation. The very idea of probability and measurement and coherence and predication and intelligibility all depend on some transcendental priors for which we need to account; and re: the TAG logic hinted at above, I think the existence of all those things ultimately only coheres in the trinitarian God of Christianity.

But if we let go of the technical requirement for probabilities and think of Bayesian reasoning as simply a helpful argumentative structure, well, I still wouldn’t be the best interlocutor for you because I don’t think that’s how love works. I’m sure someone has worked through–let’s call them the bayesian syllogisms–in the apologetic tradition of adding to humanity’s body of knowledge through arguments for God’s existence, but I want you to know that God is Love and you are created by Love in Love for Love and Love is knocking on your door. Bayesian reasoning won’t teach your heart to receive Love and it won’t open your spiritual eyes but I can lay hands on you and pray for you to be filled with the Holy Spirit, if you wish.

Tyler: The Christian God is a demiurge. There’s some higher god who created that and maybe many other gods. It seems once you even consider the logic of the simulation hypothesis, you become fairly agnostic about the true nature of the ultimate god. Surely, it’s odd to, say, not dismiss the Trinity, not dismiss the intermediate elf beings, and then invoke Occam’s razor, right? You could just be a Muslim. There’s one God indivisible. That’s that. Or be a Unitarian.

Anthony: First off, let me clarify that I believe the Christian God, Yhwh, the great Three-in-One, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the higher God who created the many other gods, even the machine elves and forest spirits and the angels and demons and the gods of the nations. I think a more historically and academically correct use of the word “god,” though most people use that term to refer to their concept of the highest power, is basically in relation to any divine being.

So I think the Muslim god is real, it’s just that he doesn’t love you and is a created being in rebellion against the Most High God who is Love and does love you and is your source and highest end.

In a sense, the Muslim god is a unitarian god and this is one of the biggest strikes against him as candidate for the highest power. Nothing could exist if God were not the Holy Trinity. You might think the idea of Trinity has no special meaning or is arbitrary or is just one equivalent cultural fiction aside so many others, but it is actually the highest revelation of Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Love. That God is Holy Trinity and that Christ is both god and man, that God’s act of creation culminates in a kind of self-creation in the god-man and his self-offering on the cross, and universe-filling in the Spirit, and bringing into the body of Christ as their End all people and the universe, this is the highest revelation.

Unitarians get at least one thing right about God, God is One, but his oneness is that of perichoretic Love, which means God’s oneness is in his threeness and vice versa, in the eternal mutual self-offering and receiving of each person of the Trinity, the eternal divine dance, the happy generative family that God is and from whom all creation emanates.

Tyler: If I go to Sri Lanka, the children of Hindus tend to be Hindu. The children of Buddhists tend to be Buddhists, Muslims, some Christians even. That makes me very suspicious about our particularist intuitions. If you just showed up and said, “Tyler, I will save your soul. You should be a deist,” we’d have a very different conversation. But when someone puts forward a very specific claim, I just don’t trust their specific intuitions. They seem so tied to society, conformist pressures, family, what they learned as a kid. I just think we should look at all of Sri Lanka and figure, “Hey, these people ended up where they did because of how they grew up.” That’s fine. It’s maybe good for social cohesion, but then move on to just thinking about it more abstractly. Why is that wrong?

Anthony: The particularity of reality is very often offensive to our philosophical inclinations. If we want to, as I often do, make things philosophically abstract so we can model them in our heads, the Real and Particular will always be waiting for us to step outside and touch grass and run into the Other. So, like any good story, and certainly like the story we’re in, there are stakes. If kids grow up in a household of a certain faith, yes, they are more likely to adhere to that faith. The fact that we can measure this statistically, does not mean that it must or can all be boiled down to so many materialist and determinist dominoes falling. We are just measuring the effects of causes that exceed the materialist’s grasp.

It so happens that we live in a great spiritual war. The territory is the human heart. There are real spiritual powers that are seeking the destruction and allegiances of human hearts in an attempt to advance their side in that war. God is pursuing every human heart, from the stillborn child whose existence was never even known, to the Buddhist who lived their entire life without having ever even heard of Jesus or Christianity. He will be totally victorious in the end. Why the war? Why are things the way they are? There are answers, stories, and there is great benefit to pursuing these questions in their theological, philosophical, and mythological gravitas, but you will never escape (and in fact will only ever increase your awe at) how overwhelmingly big Reality is and how frustratingly small you are. We will never comprehend but may only ever apprehend the Infinite.

So maybe you’re right, maybe people only believe what they believe for materialist/determinist reasons, maybe everything is merely incidental; but maybe the stories are true, maybe the things we measure have more mysterious–outrageous even–origins; maybe you’ll find that if you start praying to Jesus Christ you will encounter the Love at the center of the universe and recognize your place in this great spiritual war.

Tyler: Does it worry you that when many people take psychedelics, they feel spirituality, religion, the presence of God, the supernatural? It’s obviously a natural cause…It could be that God is intervening every time someone takes LSD and giving you visions, but it just seems it’s the operation of the drug and that there can be quite naturalistic reasons why people feel religion, the presence of God, the supernatural, and it’s not, in a way, that mysterious or linked to an actual deity.

Anthony: “Obviously a natural cause”...What the hell kind of thing is that to say? [good natured, humorous tone, ha ha] On the one hand, I know exactly what you mean; on the other, your words break my brain. What is “natural”? What aristotelian levels of “cause” are we referring to and which are we ignoring? “Cause” itself is super“natural”. What is “matter,” even? Having a mind which can connect with the world and make judgments about what is obvious is obviously supernatural in some sense. By “supernatural,” for our purposes, I really mean transcendent in some way.

I’ve done a lot of psychedelics and certainly have had experiences one might call spiritual while under their influence, though of a decidedly negative quality. I think there are many things going on with our use of entheogens and intend to write about this for the Church. Many psychedelic effects are, to your point, simply artifacts of the chemical manipulation of our brains, yes. But there is ample practical evidence that psychedelic use opens many users up to the spiritual world. For example, psychedelic use often results in people becoming demonized or tormented by evil human spirits of shamans and the like. When evil demons or shamans haunt you for months after your ayahuasca trip it is hard to say this is just chemicals in your brain. My own psychedelic use opened a door to tormenting spirits that only let up in their torment when I encountered Jesus in a quite mystical and immediate way. Simply working with one’s breath can open one to spiritual experiences. Our material bodies are all bound up in spiritual reality and the sum total of reports about what people are experiencing on their trips only verifies a supernatural worldview of some kind.

Tyler: Monkeys can’t [have spiritual experiences] in your view, but do monkeys have a soul? Tree shrews?

Anthony: I don’t know what kinds of experiences monkeys can have but I do believe they have a “soul,” though probably not in the sense that you’re using that word. Tree shrews too! (Are tree shrews a real thing btw? I loved Shakespeare’s Taming of the Tree Shrew.) All things participate in God in different ways. I think a great translation of the Hebrew and Greek words for “soul” can be simply, “life.” That humans are, in a very special way, made in the image of God, does not mean that God is not expressing himself through the larger created order and that he is not sustaining animals with the same breath of life he does us. The Bible tells us that humans and animals are all bound up in the same grand narrative and structure of meaning.

Tyler: There’s some day of transition. That to me seems very weird. For a long time, everything operates according to quantum mechanics and Einstein and Newton. Then one day, there’s a monkey or a tree shrew. That animal eats a magic banana and is somehow infused with free will or a soul or the ability to contemplate the deity, but it’s still subject to all the same physical laws. It would be very odd to me. It’s like Descartes’s interaction problem, how one day is different from the next. Look, what does the day look like when the trilobite becomes the God-perceiving human? What’s the critical event in the middle?

Anthony: These are interesting questions: how does God create the world? Taking a theistic evolution perspective: When does the analog curve of the ape’s evolution make a digital, zero-to-one, leap and become a human person with spirit? To Descartes’ problem of interaction, how does mind interact with body if one holds a mind/body dualism?

My honest answer to these questions is, I don’t know. I like that people like Dr. Swamidass still take these questions seriously enough to write books like The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry, which I think you would enjoy. He is some kind of scientist of genetics who takes the scientific account of evolution seriously as well as the biblical creation narrative and develops a theory that is substantial, novel, and brings some blessedly fresh air into the space.

For my part, I am not a dualist like Descartes, though I don’t offer a simple alternative to his dualism that will satisfy many. I am simultaneously a massive idealist and a massive materialist and think it’s all more mind-bending and dialectically complex and compelling than that. So for me, there isn’t an interaction problem as all things head toward their fulfillment and end in God.

Also, isn’t it interesting that the same problem of your “day of transition” applies to each human subject? In one sense I think a human is a person from the moment of conception, when there is a unique (though not totally distinct) human life that has a particular telos; but in another sense, aren’t there multiple stops along the way of becoming a person?

Tyler: There’s no interaction problem to explain. Whereas, when someone thinks that a godlike being is interfering all the time with the principles of quantum mechanics — it’s not impossible. It just seems, to me, very strange. [A view of quantum mechanics that implies an observer is required for reality to maintain] is not how I interpret quantum mechanics. I don’t think we understand what measurement means in the theory, but it doesn’t have to be a subjectively conscious mind. We don’t all have to be Bishop Berkeley — that you need God to prevent everything from popping out of existence because God is perceiving it all, all the time.

Anthony: I’m not sure most people of faith would say God is constantly interfering with quantum mechanics. Some people do have what’s called a “voluntarist” view of God in which everything God does is raw power and capricious exertion of will. I hate voluntarism with a passion and believe that the order of the universe instead reflects the nature of God. The principles and laws and predictability of the universe depend on him for their existence as do all things that participate in Being and are reflective of his nature.

Miracles, while being by one definition a “violation” or exception to the laws of nature, I think actually reflect a deeper expression of God’s commitment to all things being as they should and are actually a return to the created order and fulfillment of it when that order threatens to veer off into disorder in the course of its becoming.

I’d argue that there is certainly no meaning to the word “measurement” that does not depend on the Subject but I make no claim as to which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. The scientific consensus is still out and so is mine, not that anyone cares.

Berkley’s view, while typically being less appreciated in its nuance and creativity than it often gets credit for, ultimately is unsatisfying in its lack of appreciation for the Real. I think God really created everything and we shouldn’t tell him he’s dreaming. On the other hand, God is Being and all things have their being in Him.

Tyler: I think I’m closer to the Colin McGinn view that we’re just not smart enough to understand consciousness. It’s a puzzle. It should make us more agnostic about many things, but it’s not an excuse to go multiply all these other entities.

Anthony: So far, it is self-evident that we are not smart enough to explain consciousness with the resources of science. Even philosophically and theologically it is challenging to pin these things down.

You’re saying, “If we can’t even figure out what consciousness is, why postulate about God?” Your point reminds me of a debate I watched several years ago between, if I remember correctly Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson. A wonderful exchange. Wilson at one point says something to the effect of, “Just because I’m trapped in Plato’s cave and can’t get out to reach God, doesn’t mean God can’t reach out and touch me on the nose.” That has gotten a lot of mileage with me.

You are made for union with God. It is most natural. Your grasp of God is not limited by your intelligence and ability to understand consciousness but by sin and fallenness. But Jesus pursues you and has made a way for you to know God and even to receive God’s very life into your mortal body. Jesus brought humanity into the heavenlies and brings heaven into you if you only call on him and follow him.

One more note: Why not let the mystery of consciousness serve in the more obvious way, as a signpost toward the God who is the source of consciousness? I think this is more reasonable!

Tyler: I think most of my decisions are made without my awareness. What I feel is my consciousness is some kind of blip or epiphenomenon. Skating on the surface of that, there’s a lot of evidence…Most of it happens beneath the surface, and I’m not aware of the decisions I’m making. There’s an ex post reconstruction of it that makes me feel like I’m in control, but I don’t think I am very much, if at all.

Anthony: You just said you’re not smart enough to understand consciousness and I agree. Me neither. The experiments around the chain of events in the exertion of human will: a stimulus, the body’s response, the conscious mind’s apparent post hoc decision to act, and things like that, are really interesting but I don’t think there’s enough to work with yet, and who’s to say that some prior source of spirit doesn’t rest beneath all the things we are capable of measuring? As I see it, logic necessitates that this is the case. I do look forward to whatever insight science can provide us in understanding consciousness as epiphenomenon but this would only add to my delight as we scratch at the surface of understanding how God gods through us.

Tyler: If there are many alien beings on other planets — as I would say now seems likely, whether or not they’ve ever come here — does that make Jesus Christ less important? We keep on discovering more planets that appear possibly habitable. We don’t know what’s on them, but it’s certainly more likely than if we were not discovering any such planets, so we should be raising our probability. It’s a big place out there. I would be shocked if there was not other meaningful life in the universe.

Anthony: First off, speaking of things we’re not smart enough to understand, we don’t know what life is, so the Drake Equation and its general logic is totally meaningless. The Drake Equation is a good conversation piece, which I believe is what Frank Drake intended it to be, but it gets deployed as an established fact when it is missing one huge factor: WHAT IS LIFE AND HOW DID IT START? So we can only estimate, sort of, how many planets that might support our kind of life might exist, but not how many planets might exist that might host whatever caused life since we don’t know what that is, scientifically. We may be able to estimate how many planets like ours are in the universe based on some selection of factors of comparability, but we have no meaningful way of guessing the likelihood of life in the universe. So, for instance, if the answer was “panspermia,” which of course also kicks the can down the road, we’d need to account for the Sowers’ rationale in order to make any kinds of estimates.

I also wonder what “meaningful life” means to you but, sadly, this is an imaginary conversation.

Let’s grant your premise, though: there is extraterrestrial, meaningful, intelligent life in the universe. Many christian thinkers have thought about this. Theologically, we’re especially interested in what it would mean for other persons made in the image of God to exist on other planets. This might be where your question about the importance of Jesus would come in for most thinkers on the topic. But I believe that the entire universe is destined to be the temple in which the glory of God dwells, that creation is itself a kind of incarnation, that the work of Christ is cosmically significant, that the body of Christ is fractal, that, while it would be a different story in many ways, Christ would do some similar work of incarnation for the Martians. Jesus is the point of the universe and not just an incidental provision for sins though his setting us free from those is wonderful enough and so the Martians get to know him too.

If you haven’t read C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy starting with Out of the Silent Planet, you must! Out of the Silent Planet is all about the question you’re asking.

Tyler: If you’re weighing those probabilities that UAPs are alien drone probes   versus angels and demons, what do you bring to bear on trying to figure that out? Because even I would say this: UAPs have increased my probability that there’s a God because there are not many explanations for them. There’s China. There’s Russia. There’s craft of our own. There’s alien drone probes. There’s what you could call broadly supernatural. So, there are five explanations. That’s one of the five? So, it’s upped my p. I don’t know what that means, though.

Anthony: Regardless of what these phenomena are, it’s good that they are increasing your sense that the supernatural might be real. Soon, a good book, a baby’s cry, a symphony, will make us feel the same way. God is using everything in your life in order to draw you to Himself.

I accept your five explanations and, not to reduce the probability you perceive that God is real, would guess there are more good candidates. What if it was guaranteed to be spiritual in nature whether or not the UAPs themselves are supernatural phenomena? What I mean is, let’s say UAPs are tools of war being tested out by various nation-states; I would still view this as “spiritual” phenomena in that I believe nation-states themselves are spiritual phenomena. I believe humans and the spiritual powers are all caught up together in the story of reality and that kinetic war reflects spiritual war. I also would not be surprised at all if they turn out to be what we’d generally call “demonic” in nature. Who knows! I have my popcorn.

Tyler: In general, you weigh personal testimony higher than I do. Let me see if you can talk me into it a bit. Something is recorded in data sensors and confirmed across multiple sensors. Maybe I don’t know what it is, but I’ll believe there’s something there. But if people say X, Y, and Z — there’re all sorts of religions neither you nor I would sign onto, and plenty of humans who will assert, insist that there’s direct evidence for that particular religion..

The story of Joseph Smith, the plates from LDS would be one example, but there are plenty of religions that don’t even exist anymore, where there are very particular stories that people have attested to. We really do dismiss them in the numbers of the tens of millions or maybe even billions. So, if we’re willing to dismiss all those stories, isn’t David Hume right? We should not dismiss the stories, but they’re not going to budge us out of a more commonsensical worldview…It’s almost an Islamic doctrine you’re holding. There are these various tiers of prophets, and they’re imperfectly right, but they’re getting at the divine.

Anthony: The “commonsensical” worldview fails to ask enough questions. I don’t want to be redundant but all my comments on the transcendental argument for God, on the justification of prediction and predication and coherence and intelligibility and mind and life, would apply here. So Hume’s appeal to natural law cannot justify itself. And I don’t see why your trust in sensors and their designers and your mind’s ability to grasp information in the world should seem more reasonable than my trust in the Good News of Jesus Christ passed down to me through the Church and the scriptures and attested to by the Spirit. They’re both a little bit “out there” and we need to dig deeper and maybe bust out the cigars to get somewhere here.

While we do dismiss many stories told by people over the years, it’s funny how often materialists assume that the fact that something like 99% of all humanity have believed and attested to supernatural reality is not real data about the nature of reality. So at least we should consider that some sense of the supernatural is commonsensical, whether, to your point, any particular framing of it is. I assume most of the stories out there are at least based on real things.

But why should you follow Jesus rather than Mohammed? I do believe that there is some degree of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, in most faiths, but I also believe the Trinitarian God made known to us in Christ is the ultimate source of those things. To go further we’d need to have that cigar or a meal together.

Tyler: Doesn’t it worry you that for all of these instances of the supernatural, there’s never enough evidence accumulated to convince actual scientists? No one has captured an elf, as far as I know. You could switch the topic to some other instance of the supernatural, but there’s plenty of testimony of elves.

Anthony: I deny the premise, first of all! Of course many actual scientists are convinced of the supernatural.

Three points:

1. One need not deny the transcendent in order to be a great scientist and I would argue that believing in God would only improve one’s ability to think well and to seek the order of things. Scientism is, as I said, utterly bankrupt philosophically and cannot justify its own conditions or commitments or results in any meaningful way.

2. “Science” needs some kind of direction, some values, some sense of meaning. As you know, we are making value judgments every time we fund one study and deny another. The decision to manufacture bioweapons in labs is a purpose and (bad)spirit-driven endeavor even though it is science. The ethical, political, aesthetic, the Good, are all outside science’s purview and science should explicitly be subject to some higher call.

3. There seems to be ample evidence, though I’m not the most well-read here, that the scientific endeavor arose out of a history of men and women who believed in God and wanted to explore the universe he created. Science, at its highest expression, is worship.

Let us grant that a large percentage of scientists don’t believe, though; what do we make of this? To me it means that we need a resourcement, a renewal, a revival of the academy in every way. We need a better education system. Yes, atheistic scientists indicate poor education. We need a scientific establishment that repents of its commitment to unjustified claims about whether science and faith are compatible. We need to fix the flawed politics and coercive economics that keep our scientific edifice captured. We need philosophy of science (or math, etc.) and aesthetics and ethics to be part of the basic program of all STEM programs.

As to your point about the ratio of elf-reports to elf-captures: maybe elves are sneakier than we give them credit for!

Tyler: But this gets back to my interaction set of worries. People report seeing and hearing angels and demons, right? But there’s not an MP3 file or a photo where you would [say], “Oh, here we go.” That’s very odd to me. It’s not logically impossible. It just seems highly unlikely. None of them seem to have held up.

Anthony: You seem to have decided what is evidence of supernatural reality and what isn’t. So life, consciousness, existence, the world, a tree, the fact that the world makes sense and you can interact with it, love, a beautiful woman, a single breath, Chinese food, the logic of economics, none of these point you to the transcendent? And you’ve decided, “You know what? An audio recording of an angel or a demon, that would do it.” But I don’t think it would. Why would it? You could just say AI made it. I think what you need is not some kind of artifact such as a journalist would use to try and report on an event–a photo or recording–but what you need is to be filled with the Spirit and to have your spiritual eyes opened. St. Paul tells us that only through Christ is the veil taken away. So I pray that you would meet Christ. That you’d be haunted by him. That you’d become allegiant to him. That you’d encounter his love in exactly the way your personality and mind are designed to experience him. That your genius would find its fulfillment and source in him.

There’s this story of one of the first encounters with Jesus after his resurrection. These two disciples are walking to a town called Emmaus and the resurrected Jesus listens in on their conversation and joins them. They’re disappointed and scared because Jesus was in his tomb for three days and nights and it seems like he hasn’t come through as he promised. It seems like he’s just dead. Then Jesus tells them about how the entire Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, is actually about him and about why everything that happened had to happen and what it all means. They invite him to dinner but he takes over as their host and serves them the bread and wine, the communion feast. Only when he breaks the bread and pours the wine, only then are their eyes opened. Then he disappears. Even Jesus’ own disciples couldn’t recognize him, even when they were face to face with him, not until they had a meal with Jesus and their eyes were opened. Luke writes, “he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.” So what else can I say but do you want to get dinner?