Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think

Sign Up https://events.conversationswithtyler.com/event/e8acc3dc-8b61-4687-bcae-6ccf5827e5fa/summary for the Boston Listener Meet Up For Ross Douthat, phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don't challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how difficult it is to escape religious questions entirely. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious makes the case for religious faith in an age of apparent disenchantment. In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Ross joined Tyler to discuss what getting routed by Christopher Hitchens taught him about religious debate, why the simulation hypothesis resembles ancient Gnostic religion, what Mexican folk Catholicism reveals about spiritual intermediaries, his evolving views on papal authority in the Francis era, what UFO sightings might tell us about supernatural reality, why he's less apocalyptic than Peter Thiel about the Antichrist, and why he's publishing a fantasy novel on Substack before AI potentially transforms creative writing. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/ross-douthat-3/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/T7cDKkrp-nM. Recorded January 16th, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Ross https://x.com/DouthatNYT on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Photo Credit: Abigail Douthat ©

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hey listeners, this is Dallas, one of the producers of Conversations with Tyler. We'll be hosting our next listener meetup in Boston, Massachusetts on Sunday, February 9th. We can't think of a better way to pregame on Super Bowl Sunday. Please click the link in the show notes to learn more and register for the event. We're looking forward to seeing you there. Now, onto the show.

• 0:26Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:48Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am here live and in person with Ross Douthat. Ross is arguably the best columnist in the world. He has many excellent books, and he has a new book, which I'm a big fan of, called Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious. So perhaps today, my soul is on the line.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  I know. It's very high stakes. This is the highest stakes conversation we've ever had. And if I fail, my punishment will be...

• 1:17Tyler Cowen?

  How about your soul?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  No, my... Yeah, there's eternal stakes. I once, when I was a much younger man, was dragooned into debating Christopher Hitchens on a beach in Nantucket. I was substituting for Andrew Sullivan.

• 1:31Tyler Cowen?

  Who won?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Hitchens. It was an absolute rout. That's too strong. It was a rout. And he... I mean, he was at the peak of his powers, and maybe I had not yet come into my full powers. I don't know. I can tell myself that. But afterwards, I was convinced that I had, you know, added 100 years in purgatory to my allotment for those failures. So we'll see how this goes.

• 1:55Tyler Cowen?

  And your theology, just converting me when you points? It's not really a Catholic view, is it?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  It's not. No, it's not. There's no... Probably no toaster oven. But, you know, you don't want to...

• 2:06Tyler Cowen?

  It's not going to lose you points.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  It's not going to lose me points. Let's put it that way, yes. And it may be, it may be sort of indulgent style, it might compensate for some failings in other areas. People who have, you know, there's probably people who have been alienated from, from, you know, the truth about existence because they disliked some, something I said or did, right? So every day is a new chance to make up for those failings.

• 2:30Tyler Cowen?

  I have a basic question about what does it mean to be religious? So 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? Like 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, whatever, whoever created the simulation?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  I mean, I think functionally, the simulation hypothesis is doing some of the work of a kind of polytheistic or gnostic religion, right? Where whoever is running the simulation, the, you know, the version of advanced consciousness that is capable of effectively creating and sustaining our world and presumably, you know, however many trillions of others they have running inside their simulator, that entity is not the creator god of classical theism. It's not the god of Christianity. But I think it's reasonable

• 3:39Speaker 02

  to describe, again, this hypothetical simulation runner as a small G god, certainly. And you could regard it as, you know, the way that gnostics regarded the demiurge, right? The kind of intermediate spiritual power that created this world and was responsible for, you know, all its misery and woe, right? And the gnostics would say, therefore, you need to get past that demiurge and escape to the higher level where, you know, the true god waits, who actually created the whole thing, the whole shebang. Maybe they would say he didn't create the whole shebang. I don't want to overstate my familiarity with the intricacies of, intricacies of gnosticism. Or you could say, or you could be a kind of polytheist. And there are forms of polytheism that are

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Arguably compatible with sort of an ultimate monotheism, you could say, okay, there may be an absolute God beyond the simulators. I would say if you could convince me of the simulation hypothesis, I would still say there probably has to be a God beyond the simulators. But the simulators themselves are in the position of gods to us. And I guess where I would say that view crosses over from sort of analysis to religion is the point at which you start trying to figure out what is your relationship to the simulators. Should you have one? I think you probably should, right? If you actually believe you're in a simulation, you should try and figure out what do the simulators

• 5:06Speaker 02

  want from you? Do they have your best interests at heart? If you think they do, then you should be trying to bring yourself into alignment, if you will, with whatever they have in mind. If you think they don't, then, you know, I would, I would suggest trying to send up prayers to whatever powers might be out there that could rescue you from the simulator's hands. But either way, I think, I think the simulation hypothesis is in effect, an acknowledgement that there's no escape from religious questions. And I think the failure of the hypothesizers maybe is not fully taking seriously the implication that we might be, you know, the playthings of secondary gods.

• 5:48Tyler Cowen?

  But you sound surprisingly close to the Demiurge hypothesis. So clearly you believe creation is possible. And you don't dismiss Bayesian reasoning. How much weight you give it is an open question. So 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, something, some being could have created that God. Why aren't you led to that as a view with pretty high probability?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm led to the view with pretty high probability that there are intermediate powers between us and whatever you want to call God, right?

• 6:29Tyler Cowen?

  But the more you make the chain complicated, it can stretch in both directions.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  You mean, oh, you mean stretch in, well, it can stretch in the direction you're saying, where we would eventually become gods ourselves.

• 6:40Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, I think the weakness of the simulation hypothesis is that we don't have any actual evidence for it. It's incredibly speculative and it assumes a capacity of what you might call sub-creation that is completely speculative and not in evidence, right? So I wouldn't dismiss, I wouldn't dismiss the simulation hypothesis any more than I would dismiss the various multiversal hypotheses that have ended up substituting in at least some intelligent people's minds for what I think of as the rather more obvious likelihood that sort of the old fashioned religious worldview is correct.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  I don't dismiss them out of hand, but I think you are in the position of multiplying hypotheses, multiplying speculations, and in the life that we have, a certain parsimony is probably wiser. We have access to one pretty big, complicated, interesting, varied world. That world appears, I would say, to have been fashioned for a reason. That reason appears to include us. There appears from spiritual experiences to be intermediate powers and then probably some sort of higher power. I think working with all of that rather than adding on six levels of speculation about further change that we can't see is probably the better part of valor.

• 8:24Tyler Cowen?

  But surely it's odd to say, not dismiss the Trinity, not dismiss, you know, the intermediate elf beings, and then invoke Aukens razor, right? You could just be a Muslim, there's one God, indivisible, that's that.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Well, but your

• 8:38Tyler Cowen?

  Or be a Unitarian.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  But your Occam's razor has to incorporate the religious phenomena as we experience them. Right. Or I would, I would say that it has to. Right. So if any, any theory, I mean, first of all, I don't, I, I, I do, I do think that sort of the parsimony of the hardcore deists or Unitarian or anti supernaturalist Muslim. If you, you know, the, the kind who don't have any traffic with gin and, and, you know, things of that nature, that kind of parsimony, you know, is, is plausible enough. It's certainly more plausible than hard materialism. I certainly, if given, if given the option, I would choose that over the worldview of

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. But I don't think it adequately encompasses sort of the terrain of actual religious and spiritual experiences that people have, that I think is a crucial reason for the persistence of religion, even in an allegedly disenchanted age. It's obviously the point of origin for most of the world's religions. Most of the world's major religions make some kind of accommodation, even when they are monotheistic to the idea of intermediate powers. So yeah, if, if we had no, I mean, I think it's useful to think about counterfactuals. Right. Like if we lived in a world where every religious experience was the kind of

• 10:04Speaker 02

  religious experience where you just had sort of a sense of oneness and deep connection with a singular being who seemed responsible for existence. Right. People have such experiences. If that were the only kind of experience you had, then that anyone had, or that 99% of religious experiences fit that pattern, then yes, parsimony, I think, would suggest, you know, whatever might be out there. There's not just probably one god, but that god is probably the only higher power concerned with us, with whom we might be in relationship. In the event, though, there's a much wider range of spiritual experiences.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  There does seem to be a realm of powers, you know, that, again, you could classify them with the small g god, you could classify them as Christians would usually in angelic and demonic terms. But yeah, I think the variation, both the variation and the consistency in religious experience, right? There's a lot of variation, but then there's a certain kind of consistency of the kinds of variations across cultures. You want something that, I think, explains that. And the theory that explains that is that there is some sort of hierarchy. We're not just alone with the one true god.

• 11:24Tyler Cowen?

  This gets us to the part of your book where you discuss me. And I'm never quite sure how one settles on a particular religious belief. So if I go to Sri Lanka, the children of Hindus tend to be Hindu, the children of Buddhists tend to be Buddhist, Muslims, some Christians even.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  That is the way of things.

• 11:40Tyler Cowen?

  And that makes me very suspicious about our particularist intuitions. So 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.

• 11:52Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Well, right. I mean, and this is where, you know, I've been saying to some of my religious friends that this is my most liberal book in a certain way, in that I go a certain distance with that argument. I do think that the diversity of religious traditions strongly suggests that.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  You know, some form of connection to God is available in a lot of different places. This is sort of, you know, this is the official teaching of the post Vatican II Catholic Church. It's not some radical controversial opinion, but it is on sort of the liberal side of potential theological interpretations. And I don't think it's, you know, given absent any other indication of what kind of religion you should be, what sort of religious perspective you should have, a default to the one that works in your culture is, I think, by no means crazy. I guess my, my question for you, as you, as you know, since you've read my responses, right, is what to you makes religion distinct from other forms of, you know, knowledge, belief and belonging, right?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Because everything that you just said about religious belief obviously applies to politics, that children-

• 13:22Tyler Cowen?

  But much less.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Much less?

• 13:23Tyler Cowen?

  Much less of politics. Religion seems far more heritable, but even if it were the same-

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Does it?

• 13:29Tyler Cowen?

  I would, I would sooner conclude we should be more agnostic about many things than conclude we should be less agnostic about religion.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Certainly, but you are a professional arguer. You take strong views on all kinds of questions. You are a trained economist who takes all kinds of strongly held views on economics that are hotly contested by, you know, maybe not equally intelligent, but almost as intelligent rivals who have different views, right? And you could say, well, you know, once you reach the, you know, heights of, of economic theory, at that point, you're dealing with people who, you know, no one has inherited Keynesianism from their parents and so on, right? So, you know, you should be able to trust the choices that you versus Paul Krugman and so on have made. Well, maybe, but there are all kinds of other ways in which your economic views are conditioned. They're presumably conditioned by-

• 14:20Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I'm just consistent.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Right, but it just seems to me that there's a tendency to sort of place religion in this special category, right? And say, okay, you know, it's, it's inherited, it's culturally contingent, and therefore it's silly to have arguments about this belief versus that belief. But, you know, people change religions all the time, right? Like new religions come into being because of conversion. People change their minds because of arguments. It's not like we don't have tons of examples of this. And I feel like it should be possible to balance a certain respect for the reality that, you know, there's religious diversity for a reason. There are hard questions that you're not going to argue your way to a singular answer, but also say, the argument is worth having and maybe you or I can make progress on some

• 15:03Speaker 02

  of, you know, our own views on those questions, right?

• 15:06Tyler Cowen?

  But your response saying, well, everyone else, including Tyler Cowen, has these weird inconsistencies. While I agree, I don't see how that gets you to religious faith. It might get you to some kind of Bayesian deism.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Wait, which, sorry, which, everyone has weird inconsistencies?

• 15:25Tyler Cowen?

  Well, everyone is influenced by the views of their parents on all kinds of things. The soap I use actually is still the same soap my grandmother used when I was a kid. That's probably related, right? It's arguably irrational, no doubt it's true. But saying that happens everywhere, I don't see how it gets you to religious faith. I just think at best it gets you to some kind of probabilistic deism.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Well, I guess the argument in the book is that you can get beyond probabilistic deism into what I would characterize as, you know, maybe probabilistic supernaturalism. I don't know, I don't know exactly the right term. I use the term religion, as you said at the outset, is obviously a contested term and people argue about what constitutes a religion. But I think you can get somewhat probabilistically to the view that, you know, not just, not just that deism is true, but that, you know, there is a fundamental order to the cosmos in which human beings have an important or significant role to play.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  There are, you know, sort of divine or supernatural impingements on our reality that seem significant in various ways. There's, you probably have a soul that is related to your body, but distinct in some way. There's probably life after death. I would say, and, you know, People can read the book and agree or disagree, but I think that there's a preponderance of evidence in favor of most of those claims. Now, once you get, I agree that even going that far, quite a bit past deism, doesn't get you to a particular religious decision. And there, I mean, I make, you know, I have some explanations at the end of the

• 17:09Speaker 02

  book about why I'm a Christian and why I think the choice to believe in, let's just say, the significance of Jesus's life and death and resurrection seems like a rational sequel to those initially rational ideas. But I think there's absolutely a reason why religious believers talk in terms of relationship, on the one hand, you're seeking not just a sort of theory of God, but a relationship with Him or them, if you prefer. But also in terms of divine grace, right? That, you know, the relationship runs both ways. And to some degree, it has to be up to the higher order of existence.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  You know, what your relationship to that order might be. But what I'm trying to suggest is I think there's a broader and thicker foundation for seeking that relationship than many intelligent people right now seem to think.

• 18:10Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Why? Why is it obviously a natural cause?

• 18:23Tyler Cowen?

  Well, 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 actual deity.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  See, I don't think that that's true. What is the naturalistic explanation? I think it's quite clear. That taking a psychedelic drug does something to, you know, the, the normal operation of your brain that changes your conscious experience of reality. I don't think we have any kind of sort of demonstrable proof of why the particular ingredients in ayahuasca yield, you know, consistent seeming encounters with a particular kind of being like, of course.

• 19:11Tyler Cowen?

  But I would be shocked if neuroscience didn't figure that out, right? I don't pretend.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  You would be.

• 19:16Tyler Cowen?

  I would be, absolutely.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  I mean, it seems to me that neuroscience needs to have some theory of how normal human consciousness operates before it can have a coherent theory of how abnormal human consciousness operates. I mean, look, if the religious, if the religious world picture is correct, right? Again, broadly speaking, then whatever the self is, whatever the soul is, it obviously exists in some sort of, you know, dynamic relationship to its body, its brain, you know, its, its chemist, its, its chemistry, its bloodstream, all of that, right? But the fact that you're more likely to have a supernatural experience when you shake up that material substrate, I don't think tells you anything about the actual nature of what you're encountering, right?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  If you think of, I mean, first of all, like, you know, hermits in the desert, right? Who go out into the desert and mortify their flesh, right? Or, you know, Native Americans on a spirit quest and so on, right? It's always, these are, you know, traditional religious practices that even absent psychedelic drugs have always taken, taken as a given, that the default experience of the world is natural and material. And if you want to have a supernatural experience, you need to shake up the natural substrate a little bit. I don't think that, you know, ingesting, ingesting drugs that shake up how your brain works is necessarily any different. And if you take.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  You know, again, I understand that this is not this, this, this seems like a sort of outlandish conception, but I think in the end, it is the religious conception, right? Religious conception is that your, your mind's coexistence with your brain effectively sort of reduces your mind's capacities to enable it to sort of operate normally in physical reality. And that, you know, sort of shaking up the brain, there's, there's no necessary reason why that wouldn't, yeah, sort of open the mind's capacities a little bit more.

• 21:15Tyler Cowen?

  But monkeys, monkeys can't do this in your view. Like, do monkeys have a soul? Tree shrews?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I think, I think we should be somewhat agnostic about.

• 21:25Tyler Cowen?

  But trilobites don't have a soul.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Trilobites, trilobite. Well, I mean.

• 21:28Tyler Cowen?

  But there's some day of transition. And that, to me, seems very weird. You know, for a long time, everything operates according to quantum mechanics and Einstein and Newton. And then one day, there's like a monkey or a tree shrew, and 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' interaction problem, how one day is different from the next. But what does the day look like when the trilobite becomes the God-perceiving human? What's the critical event in the middle?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  I don't know what the critical event is in the middle. I mean, I don't, I don't think we have, I don't think we have any kind of access.

• 22:13Tyler Cowen?

  But even in principle.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Access to that.

• 22:14Tyler Cowen?

  Like, if someone believed in a fairy world that we can't access, you could be skeptical.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  You mean a multiverse or a simulation hypothesis?

• 22:21Tyler Cowen?

  Something like that, yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Something like that, right?

• 22:23Tyler Cowen?

  But there's no interaction problem to explain. Whereas when someone thinks that a god-like being is interfering all the time. With the principles of quantum mechanics, not impossible. It just seems to me very strange.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  But don't the principles of quantum mechanics, under one perfectly reasonable interpretation, suggest that for physical reality to exist at all, some sort of consciousness has to be constantly, you know, performing an act of perception to collapse possibilities into reality? Right? I mean, it seems to me that-

• 22:53Tyler Cowen?

  No, it's not how I interpret quantum mechanics.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  How do you interpret quantum mechanics? We can, we can go deep.

• 22:57Tyler Cowen?

  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 Barkley, that you need God to prevent, you know, everything from popping out of existence because God is perceiving it all, all the time.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Right, but don't you think that's a somewhat commonsensical, however, you know, anti-materialist interpretation of what seems to be going on at the deepest level of reality?

• 23:23Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know what it means, the deepest level of reality. I don't know-

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Well, we don't know what the, all right, at the quantum, I won't say the deepest level, at the quantum level of reality, it seems, as far as, as far as we can see with our perception, right, that in order to go from contingency to reality, you need an observer, right? You need measurement. How do you get measurement without consciousness? What does that, what does measurement even mean, absent consciousness?

• 23:49Tyler Cowen?

  Electrons bump into each other, something. You don't need consciousness.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  But again, the essence-

• 23:54Tyler Cowen?

  If you had a measuring stick in there, that would collapse-

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Who puts the measuring stick in there?

• 23:58Tyler Cowen?

  Humans, but when they're not watching, the wave function still collapses, right?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Why, but, well, but it doesn't?

• 24:04Tyler Cowen?

  The measuring stick says it does.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  But we made the measuring stick.

• 24:07Tyler Cowen?

  But we're not watching. You don't need subjective consciousness. You need some process of resolution.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  I deny that, I deny that you can have a measuring stick without a process of consciousness. The measuring stick without a process of consciousness is itself just, you know, a ruler, right? Absent your consciousness, a ruler is a collection of, you know, atoms and molecules cut out of a tree with some markings on it, right? In order for the ruler to be a unit, an instrument of measurement, you, Tyler Cowen, have to be perceiving it and be conscious of it, right?

• 24:38Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I think the ruler suffices.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  In fact, I mean, I want, I want, I want it just to go, no, you can't say the ruler suffices. Look, I want to go back to your, your, your prior question, I think, is a fundamentally difficult question, right? We do not know what constitutes the transition from non-conscious life to conscious life. Now, we also don't know exactly what constitutes the transition from non-life to life. We have some difficulties figuring that out as well. But, and I think that there is, you know, if, if we were having a conversation about sort of difficulties in the Christian interpretation of the human person, I think the interaction between what we know at the moment or understand at the moment about evolution and human origins and the traditional Christian account of the fall, that there are some real points

• 25:24Speaker 02

  of tension in there that Christianity has not sort of, you know, figured out at perfectly satisfying resolution of. That would be a different kind of book than, than this one. But there is an interesting argument there. But it's an interesting argument precisely because it takes place in a larger context where we have good reasons to take the supernaturalism of the human mind very, very seriously, right? Like, it's not, it's a mystery, not just because the Christians don't have a full account of it, because the materialists don't have an account of it at all, right? Because there is no satisfying materialist account at the moment of what consciousness is, why we experience it the way we do, and so on. And nor is there

• 26:09Speaker 02

  a satisfying account, and now I'm going to circle us back to the measurement problem, of why our consciousness is capable of all this measurement, all this successful measurement at all, right? I mean, it's not just, the difficulty for the materialist isn't just that you have this, you know, this sort of fine-tuned universe that, you know, in its basic structure seems to have been sort of jerry-rigged for our emergence. It's not just that problem, which we, the materialist tries to solve by positing an infinity of invisible worlds that are supposed to be more compelling than fairyland, not sure why. The, the further problem, it's, it goes down to

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Us, but then it goes back up, right? Because human consciousness has turned out to be really good at not just figuring out how to survive on the African savanna, right? But figuring out how to plumb the deepest secrets of the physical laws of the universe. Like, we've figured out something about quantum mechanics, something about this deep structure of the universe that is very peculiar in a narrative where it's trilobite brains giving way to monkey brains, right? If it's unlikely, put it this way, if it's, if it seems incredibly unlikely that the universe should be fine tuned in a way that allows for the development of conscious life, it seems to me even more unlikely that that conscious life would then work its way back

• 27:35Speaker 02

  up to understand its own, to understand the secrets of the universe in full.

• 27:40Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  But the entity that you're, the entity involved is, no one is, no one is multiplying entities when it comes to explaining consciousness. They are simply describing the entity that is Tyler Cowen and that is Ross Douthat, that you have immediate access to, more immediate access than to anything else in the world.

• 28:12Tyler Cowen?

  I think most of my decisions are made without my awareness, and 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.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  I mean, this is where, I don't really believe you. I don't think that that's, I think certainly that like if you're driving through Arlington, Virginia, there is, you know, a set of unconscious things that your body does out of habit as you drive around that you are not self-consciously doing. Certainly, there's lots of things, you are a mind in some kind of dynamic relationship to a brain and body. There's plenty of things going on that your consciousness is not responsible for. But you write books, do you not? You host podcasts.

• 28:54Tyler Cowen?

  Some part of me does, yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Do you not?

• 28:56Tyler Cowen?

  But most of it happens beneath the surface, and I'm not aware of the decisions I'm making.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  But you

• 29:01Tyler Cowen?

  There's an exposed reconstruction of it that makes me feel like I'm in control, but I don't think I am very much, if at all.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Don't you think you've maybe just sort of imbibed a bit too much of the sort of materialist spirit of the age?

• 29:14Tyler Cowen?

  I don't even call it materialist.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I want to give you credit. I think you write your own books. I think Tyler Cowen, you know, with some assistance, obviously, from, you know, angels on one shoulder, demons on the other, maybe some fairies thrown in. I think, I think you, I want to give you credit.

• 29:29Tyler Cowen?

  The aggregate Tyler Cowen gets the credit.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  For actual, for actual existence. And I don't think it is, I don't think, you know, that this, this sort of theory of the mind as, as aggregation actually does justice to the direct experience of being a human being, but.

• 29:47Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Why does it seem likely?

• 29:59Tyler Cowen?

  We keep on discovering more planets.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:01Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  I mean, I

• 30:14Tyler Cowen?

  I would be shocked if there was not other

• 30:16Speaker 02

  I, I

• 30:17Tyler Cowen?

  meaningful life in the universe.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  I, I would also be somewhat surprised. I do think that, you know, the, the Fermi question still seems to hold, even given lots of sort of life-friendly or seemingly life-friendly planets, right? It, it seems the silence of the cosmos seems quite odd, if at the very least, there are lots of star-faring species out there capable of sending messages into the deep. I, I think the, and, you know, you, you might think that, you know, we are among the first, in which case we seem fairly special. Or you might think that there are just very, very few, in which case I think we seem fairly special again.

• 30:58Tyler Cowen?

  They destroyed themselves.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  I think it's unlikely.

• 31:00Tyler Cowen?

  Would be my guess.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  They destroyed themselves and left no, you know, signals tracing their way through space.

• 31:07Tyler Cowen?

  The speed of light is a tough one.

• 31:11Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe we're somewhat early. I agree, it's a puzzle. I don't find it insuperable.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  I mean, I so but just to just to go go back to your question. I mean, I think that the I think that the question for the Christian, given the existence of other beings with our kind of consciousness in the galaxy would be, you know, what is what is their what is their apparent relationship to to God? And yeah, just just to God, right? Because I mean, this is where the Christian doctrine of the fall is sort of useful, right? The presumption would have to be that either they had some kind of, you know, that there was some role for Jesus in their existence. And maybe we're the vehicle for that. You know, there are

• 31:58Speaker 02

  fun science fiction novels where the Jesuits send missionaries to other planets. I think you could imagine a scenario where the Catholic Church would very quickly try and recruit some missionaries to evangelize an alien species. Or you could have the scenario that you get in sort of Christian science fiction novelists. You get a little bit of it in Madeleine Lengel. You get it in C.S. Lewis's The Space Trilogy, right? Where there are other species in the universe that are made in the image of God, maybe, and they have not fallen. And we have. We are alienated from God in some profound way that other species might not be. So those, I think, would be the two, the two reasonable moves

• 32:42Speaker 02

  that a Christian might make confronted with some form of extraterrestrial life. I do think, though, again, that the the silence that we are faced with suggests that something more is going on than just life is commonplace. It's all over and we haven't run into it yet. I think it either has to be quite rare or, you know, to be, I mean, in in both the Lewis and the Lengel novels, there's a kind of supernatural blockade on planet Earth because we fell, right? Like, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is obviously what people people who believe People who believe that, I guess, UAPs, right? As we're now supposed to call them, the UFOs. People who believe that those are actual visitors from other worlds.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  They have to believe in a kind of, you know, non supernatural version of that. Right? They have to believe that there's some sort of like management of Earth's knowledge of the galaxy going on to explain why there are all these crafts zipping around, but we've never heard a radio signal from deep space. So you could imagine a kind of more supernaturalist version of that hypothesis, I suppose.

• 33:49Tyler Cowen?

  And if you're weighing those probabilities that UAPs are alien drone probes.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 33:54Tyler Cowen?

  Versus angels and demons. Just what, what do you bring to bear on trying to figure that out? Because even I, 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. And there's what you could call broadly supernatural.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:20Tyler Cowen?

  So there's like five explanations.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:22Tyler Cowen?

  And that's one of the five.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Well, there's.

• 34:24Tyler Cowen?

  So it's up my p.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  I mean, the move that people, the move that people make is to say that they're interdimensional. Right? That they could be, that this is sort of the.

• 34:31Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know what that means.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  But I also don't know what that, I don't know how you distinguish that from, from sort of essentially supernaturalist explanations. I mean, so my, my basic, if you had asked me, you know, five to 10 years ago, my basic view about UFOs. I didn't have strong views about them. But I would have said that most of what I'd read in the literature about sort of personal encounters with supposed extraterrestrials seemed to line up reasonably well with sort of pre-modern accounts of encounters with angels, demons, and maybe especially sort of fairies. Right? That like they're, this is an argument that the ufologist Jacques Vallée made sort of early in the UFO and sort of, you know, many decades ago. Right?

• 35:18Speaker 02

  That, you know, if you compare an account of an alien abduction to an Irishman's tale of being abducted by, you know, the unseelie court. Right? There's, there's a lot of interesting similarities. And so. You know, there are sort of two conclusions you could draw from that. You could say, well, there's this kind of Jungian unconscious that human beings have that grants us these, you know, weird, dreamlike experiences. And in modern times, we attribute them to aliens and we used to attribute them to fairies. Or you could be more of a supernaturalist and say, there are beings out there who like to, you know, pardon my language, fuck with us, right? And they do it in different ways, in different times and places.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  That, that seems to me to be the straightforward reading of the data on individual encounters, right? Abductions, encounters, that stuff. I honestly don't know what to make of the craft zipping around stuff. And that's part of why it's interesting. I, I have difficulty fitting it into a sort of non-supernaturalist paradigm. I think you can, you can, right? You can say the best argument would be these are, you know, extraterrestrial drones sent from deep space or from some, you know, observation base deep under the oceans, right? If we're going to get really, really kooky.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  And this is what you'd expect from an advanced civilization many light years away. They can't travel to every planet that has life on it, so they, you know, have some drones keeping an eye on things, I guess you could make that argument. Then, if you make that argument, then you sort of have to separate that from all the kind of paranormal UFO abduction stuff and say, well, these are just separate things. One belongs to the realm of religious supernatural Jungian experience and one is literal aliens visiting us. I find that unsatisfying. I feel like they're probably, if they aren't Chinese drones, right? If they aren't sort of native Earth tech. I don't know if it's probabilistic reasoning or not, but my mind sort of wants there to

• 37:23Speaker 02

  be a connection between, you know, weird abduction stories and Navy pilot sightings. But I don't, I guess it's a case where I sort of, I'm, I find the subject quite interesting, but I

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Don't want to make any kind of commitment because I think we lack, you know, we just conspicuously lack evidence. I mean, there is, I think there's a sort of, you know, a contingent of Christian and religious interpreters of this stuff who say, you know, look, it's probably demonic. It's basically how the old gods of paganism, who are really demons, get back in. They pretend to be, instead of pretending to be angels of light, they pretend to be ETs of light and so on. You know, if you had my friend Rod Dreher on, who's, you know, writes a lot about mystical issues and has lately started writing about UAPs, he's very interested in that argument. I think, were that the case, it would be

• 38:24Speaker 02

  quite striking and strange that there would be actual craft of some kind involved. Certainly kind of departure from what we know about, you know, supernatural interventions otherwise. Kind of an escalation, that would be kind of strange. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't, and also, like, you know, if I were a, let's say, Assyrian, you know, demi-demon, trying to get worshippers back, right, after all these thousands of years, I feel like the strategy might be, I don't understand the end game, I guess, of sending a bunch of crafts zipping around to freak out Navy pilots. I don't know how that, like, what's, what's

• 39:06Speaker 02

  the plan there. So, yeah, I'm, I'm trying to be, you know, resolutely open-minded.

• 39:12Tyler Cowen?

  In general, you weight personal testimony higher than I do. And let me see if you can talk me into it a bit. So if something is recorded in data sensors and confirmed across multiple sensors, maybe I don't know what it is, but I believe there's something there. But if people say X, Y, and Z, there's all sorts of religions neither you nor I would sign on to, and plenty of humans who will assert, insist, that there's direct evidence for that particular religion. So the story of Joseph Smith, the plates from LDS would be one example, but there's plenty of religions that don't even exist anymore, where there's very particular stories that people have attested to.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 39:55Tyler Cowen?

  And 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.

• 40:05Tyler Cowen?

  I mean, isn't David Hume right? And we should not dismiss the stories, but they're not going to

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:10Tyler Cowen?

  budge us out of a more commonsensical worldview.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Well, I guess that, yeah, I mean, I don't dismiss all of those stories. I guess that's part of my strong departure from Humean assumptions. Right? That I think that, you know, certainly there are fakes and frauds and charlatans in religion. And there are people who are just sort of sincerely mistaken, who think that they, you know, had a religious experience when, you know, really they have, you know, a diagnosis. They should get, you know, a diagnosis of some form of mental illness or insanity. Right? At the same time, I think that there, I think that the wide range of attested spiritual,

• 40:56Speaker 02

  just frankly bizarre experiences that human beings have, of which UFO encounters are a subset that, again, has familiar antecedents going back millennia. I think we should take those seriously and have a, a theory of what they are that is more complex than fraud meets insanity meets delusion. Right? And part of this is just, you know, knowing people who've had those kinds of experiences, reading a lot about those kinds of experiences, not just in my own tradition, but in other religious traditions. I think that they correspond to something real, even if the interpretation that people

• 41:39Speaker 02

  give to them is wrong or diluted or misguided. So I don't, you know, I don't think that Joseph Smith was in fact chosen by God to restore the lost truths about, you know, Jesus Christ, polygamy, and the ancient civilizations of the new world. I don't think that's true. Do I think that Joseph Smith didn't have some kind of weird supernatural encounter? I'm less, I'm less confident about saying that. And, you know, the same would go, you know, I don't think that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets. Do I think that Muhammad, you know, either hallucinated or made it all up? I'm, again, I'm, I'm less, certainly much less confident than you would be in saying that. And I do not-

• 42:22Tyler Cowen?

  It's almost an Islamic doctrine you're holding. Right? There are these various tiers of prophets, and they're imperfectly right, but they're getting at the divine.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Yes, I think any coherent theory of supernatural experience, given what you can encounter just by reading William James, has to say either there's sort of infinite realms of deception out there. Like, this is something that some religious believers would say. There's one subset of totally authentic, trustworthy religious experiences, and then there's a vast realm where it's all demonic deception. Or you have to say that there's just a range of ways in which people encounter God and the supernatural that do get filtered through sort of cultural assumptions

• 43:14Speaker 02

  and through imperfect, I don't want to say imperfect prophets, let's just say imperfect human beings. And that helps yield the diversity of religions in the world today. But you can also see patterns in those things, like near-death experiences. The range, there is cross-cultural variation in near-death experiences. If you have a near-death experience as a Tibetan Buddhist, you are more likely to see the Buddha. If you have a near-death experience as a Catholic, you're more likely to maybe see an archangel or a Catholic saint or something. But at the same time, there are some pretty clear commonalities to suggest that people in Tibet and people in Indiana are having the same kind of experience

• 43:57Speaker 02

  when they die and are resuscitated and report

• 44:02Speaker 02

  the lights, the tunnel, all the strange things associated with those experiences. And so, yeah, I think, I mean, there's a challenge here, obviously, for any kind of dogmatic religion. You do have to figure out, like, OK, why is there this consistency, but also this variation? But there's also a challenge for the humians to say, well, we're just writing off this fairly consistent, cross-cultural realm of human experience because it's all supposed to be myth and sort of hallucination? I mean, the people who have these experiences are not generally the kinds of people who...

• 44:41Speaker 02

  You know, you would describe as prone to hallucination and insanity. There are, of course, cases, but it's that's not that's not sort of the norm. And the other thing, sorry, I'm just going on a bit, right? On the the Humean point, right? Like, if you go back and read Hume, and he doesn't exactly say this, but you you really have the strong impression that Hume thinks that once you get rid of established religious authorities and sort of the universal teachings of antique stories from the Bible, that a big swath of supernatural stuff will just sort of go away. Now, he says, you know, humans-

• 45:22Tyler Cowen?

  And that's wrong, right?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Right. Humans still have this propensity toward the marvelous. I think that's the phrase he uses. I mean, I don't think he'd be surprised by some persistence. But I think the original Humean theory is, most people believe in the supernatural because someone has taught them about it at church, and there are these legends handed down from misty antiquity. And that's, I think, we just know that that's not true. That's not what's going on. And that's, I think, one of the multiple places where atheist skeptics and materialists have some sort of prior updating to do about what we've learned over the last 200 years about what life is like under allegedly disenchanted conditions.

• 45:59Tyler Cowen?

  But 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's captured an elf, right? That as far as I know. And you could switch the topic to some other instance of the supernatural, but there's plenty of testimony of elves.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I would, I worry, though, a little about, I mean, the assumption, the assumption of supernatural experience, I would say, is that there's, let's say, let's say there's sort of two, two ways in which it could manifest itself, just to massively simplify it. You could say it manifests itself through some kind of reaching in where, you know, a higher power, god, angel, demon, whatever, is sort of-

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Operating in, you know, in, in human reality, or you could say it relates to some sort of native gift, right? The idea that some people have psychic powers, right? And so on. In the first case, you are pretty clearly dealing with, you know, sort of wills and intentions and intentionality and choices that are not, you know, that are essentially the equivalent of human will and intentionality and choices and so on. Right? And so saying like, well, we should be able to, you know, consistently predict when someone will be, you know, possessed by a demon or something and under the right laboratory conditions. It's like saying, well, we should consistently predict when two people are going to fall in love

• 47:37Speaker 02

  under the right laboratory conditions. I don't, I don't think that's, I mean, again, you know, the hardest core materialist might say, eventually we should, right? We should be able to, you know, get it, you know, see what's happening in their brains and like, these two people are going to fall in love. But in, in practical terms, right? Science hits a limit when certain kinds of human agency enter the picture. And I don't see why it wouldn't hit a similar limit. I don't see why you would imagine that you could devise a laboratory system for reliably conjuring the supernatural. On the second case.

• 48:08Tyler Cowen?

  You don't have to conjure it, but there's no way to measure it reliably?

• 48:12Speaker 02

  What do you mean by, I mean?

• 48:14Tyler Cowen?

  Just whatever it would take. The editors of science and nature, whoever they may be, I suspect they don't believe in what you believe in. Whatever it would take to convince them. So we have no tools that will bring them along. It's at some odd margin of being quite non legible. It's that way on purpose to test us or it just turned out that way, or it seems like a weird.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it has to be, I think it has to be that way on purpose in order for the sort of basic coherence of physical existence to obtain. Right? Like, I think actually the sort of scientists' point originally that you can't do science if an angel is always, you know, if you can always assert that an angel is just responsible for moving a planet around. I think that is a decent enough explanation of why, you know, you wouldn't, you know, you, you wouldn't sort of expect sort of constant predictable operation of supernatural forces in the world. I am also though, I mean, I, I think that there are.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  There are also reasons to think that, you know, I mean, there are a lot of, for instance, with psychic phenomena, right, like this has been subject to, thanks in part to like the CIA's interest in it, right, this has been subject to a lot of quasi-scientific scrutiny over long periods of time. And, you know, you do, and you do have, you can find people who have done, you know, studies that technically stand up to the rigors of scientific expectations that seem to prove the existence of some kind of psi, some kind of, right, paranormal ability. But then you enter into the replication crisis, right? Sure.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  And you have, you have, you know, competing studies and recreations of those studies. But I don't want to say, I don't want to rule out, in fact, the possibility that if you, you know, if sort of more scientists set aside their materialist presumptions, that you wouldn't be able to get better data about, but I think it would have to be data about characteristics of human beings, right, rather than characteristics of angels and demons. I think the latter is sort of inherently inaccessible to the tools that we use for modern science, whereas I do think it's reasonable to say if, you know, if people

• 50:39Speaker 02

  are psychic, maybe we should be able to design, you know, design a set of experiments that offers clearer indications in that direction. I am, though, also, but when you read, like, you know, I quote Freeman, Freeman Dyson, I think, in the book, right, as a sort of, you know, maverick polymath, scientific genius, right, and he was a believer in psychic phenomena. And, you know, his argument was basically that if you read about the cases where, you know, people have sort of these, these kinds of experiences, they're similar to like cases of sort of bursts of artistic creativity, or, you know, sort of things, again, that

• 51:21Speaker 02

  it's very hard to sort of predict and measure scientifically. They happen under, you know, periods of great, great physical or personal duress, you know, they- They happen around the deaths of a loved one. They happen in sort of, you know, sort of inherently eccentric circumstances seem to, again, if these capacities existed, be the things that generated those capacities, which, again, creates some, some problems for laboratory measurement, I would say.

• 51:49Tyler Cowen?

  But this gets, this gets back to my interaction set of worries. So people report seeing and hearing angels and demons, right? But there's not an MP3 file or a photo where you would, oh, here, here we go. And that's very odd to me. It's not logically impossible. It just seems highly unlikely.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, there are, I mean, there, I mean, what, I guess, what kind of

• 52:11Tyler Cowen?

  None of them seem to have held up.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Evidence would convince you. Well, I mean, you know, I mean, Catholics always go for this one. So

• 52:18Tyler Cowen?

  I can hear Winston Churchill on YouTube, right?

• 52:20Speaker 02

  There's, right. Well, you can, you know, you can, there's the, you know, miracle of the sun at Fatima in early part of the 20th century did happen in front of a large number of witnesses. There are, you know, powerful newspaper accounts, I think, including in the New York Times. I mean, there's a reason that it's been hotly debated ever since. But it was, whatever it was, it was something that clearly had there been video cameras there, something would have been perceived, right? You know, there's a, has a similar case in Egypt involving an apparition of the Virgin Mary where there's, you know, footage and so on. But what would be, I guess, convincing to you, right? You want, if I, if I presented you, if I presented you tomorrow with a video of the Archangel

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Michael, right, walking through the halls of George Mason wielding a sword, you would assume that it was AI generated, right? At this point.

• 53:11Tyler Cowen?

  Well, I would bring it to someone and I could find out.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Well, it's something, but at some point soon, you won't be able to find out, right? If you're right, if you're right about the progress, if you're right about the progress of AI.

• 53:20Tyler Cowen?

  But that there's not one to date makes me much more skeptical.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Right. But there, right. I mean, you want

• 53:32Speaker 02

  You want God to ban it.

• 53:33Tyler Cowen?

  Testimony, but in reproducible form that can be verified. It just seems odd that it never turns out that way.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, did you read Carlos Ayers' book, They Flew?

• 53:44Tyler Cowen?

  No.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Okay. It's worth reading, I would say. It's a book about levitation in, you know, the 1500s and 1600s, sort of Reformation and Counter-Reformation era levitation by various saints. And yeah, I'd be curious what you think about that book. You know, there were no cameras, obviously, in the early 1600s. Ayers' argument is that by any normal evidentiary standard, in terms of sort of collective witnesses and consistencies of witnesses and so on, these stories of levitation would seem to pass muster. So you have to be operating there, you know, in the realm, not just of like, personal, personal delusion, but a kind of, you know, mass, mass delusion, right?

• 54:27Speaker 02

  Now, you know, in the contemporary world, yeah, there isn't, there hasn't been a claim of levitation since, in the Catholic Church, since, I believe, a nun who was involved with the French Resistance in 1930s and 40s. And there was photography then, so it's fair to say, you know, shouldn't we have a photograph? However, if I presented you with a photograph from the 1940s of a levitating nun, I don't think you'd be convinced of it, right?

• 54:51Tyler Cowen?

  Well, I would have people look into it for me.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:54Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Right. But I mean, that's, you know, it would be grainy and so on, right? I mean, you want, you want, you want video.

• 55:01Tyler Cowen?

  The best that can be delivered.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  You want the best video.

• 55:03Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't think that's, I don't think for the more extreme forms of supernaturalism, that's a completely unfair request. But, you know, we'll see what we get over the next 50 to 100 years, right? You don't, you know. I mean, you've already had, you've already updated your priors about UFOs based on video evidence, right? So, okay, yeah, yeah, all right, well, we'll.

• 55:24Tyler Cowen?

  And my priors on God, for that matter.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Right, so we'll come, but we'll come back to the video.

• 55:27Tyler Cowen?

  I'm not inflexible here.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  I think, I think we should, you know, we can revisit the video evidence question. We only have, you know, a rather short number of decades of widely available video technology. So I think just generalize, which also has happened to be a period of sort of, you know, peak arid secularism. So I think, I want to say that I think generalizing from that to a universal point that you could never have video evidence is maybe a little bit of a leap, and we should give it a few more decades and see what surfaces.

• 55:58Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think of Peter Thiel's fascination with the Antichrist?

• 56:02Speaker 02

  I think Peter is more apocalyptic than

• 56:05Tyler Cowen?

  than you are.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  than I am.

• 56:06Tyler Cowen?

  Not enough intermediaries in his story.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Well.

• 56:08Tyler Cowen?

  So all the stakes are on the table at once, so to speak.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  I think it's more that the threat of the Antich... like, let's... I mean, he, you know, I think he's going to maybe elaborate his theories of the Antichrist at some point in the future.

• 56:23Tyler Cowen?

  On video, most likely.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  On video, most likely, yes. And I think that the, you know, what we've seen so far, I would say, in the 21st century, I mean, take the Antichrist to be some sort of comprehensive global rule by a singular power dedicated to sort of a false view of reality. I don't know if that's how he'd define it, but let's say I would, that might be how I'd define it. I think we've tended to see sort of brief flares of forces and powers that sort of resemble that, that then quickly collapse under pressure from competing forces, other forces, and so on, right?

• 57:05Speaker 02

  So, you know, in 2008, Barack Obama was, for six months, the most popular man in the world, not just in the US. He could have been elected president of the world, right? And so you could say, you know, well, in that moment, you could see how one person, one incredibly charismatic individual, could dominate the world in a mass media age. Okay, but, you know, six months into his presidency, Obama was back to being a normal politician with normal enemies, totally unpopular in various ways, and so on. Or again, to take, you know, an example that I'm sure, you know, I know that Peter's been very concerned about, like, you know, the alignment of big tech companies with control over the internet with, you know, sort of woke ideology and its hostility to free speech

• 57:50Speaker 02

  and its, you know, sort of ideological fantasies, right? You could say, okay, that's not an individual, but it's a system, and a sort of a system of, you know, interlocking directorates, a cathedral, right? The Yarvin phrase, right? That from which we can't escape. But, you know, it kind of seems like we can escape from that right now, right? Like, the rule of the true rule of the woke cathedral, where no dissent was brooked, you know, what did it last for, you know?

• 58:18Tyler Cowen?

  Six years.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and Donald Trump was president for a couple of those years, right? So I think that to be... I think to be a kind of an Antichrist fearer, you need to fear some power not yet fully in evidence. And that power, if you want to be non supernatural, could be whatever, the machine god view of AI. Right? I think if you take a kind of maximalist doomer view of of strong AI, then that's effectively a theory of the Antichrist. Or you could go back to our early discussion about the Sumerian gods returning and using the guise of aliens or something that to

• 59:03Speaker 02

  sort of enthral us all, that could be a theory of the Antichrist. But those are theories of things not in evidence to me in the year of our Lord 2025. So I worry less about the Antichrist today than I did at various points recently.

• 59:19Tyler Cowen?

  Should Peter just be an Opus Day Catholic? He's right leaning.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Peter, Peter.

• 59:24Tyler Cowen?

  He doesn't quite seem like a loser to me.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Peter, Peter should be a Catholic. I don't know if he should join Opus Day. I think it's OK. I mean, I'm not in Opus Day. I'm not. I think it's OK to be a normal Catholic. Right? I think, you know, I'm.

• 59:40Tyler Cowen?

  Are they not normal Catholics? I don't even know.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Well, one of the, well, one of the, I may have said this to you before, but one of the curious things about being a conservative Catholic who writes for the New York Times, right, is that, you know, people have an idea that, you know, that you are the most intense, intense Catholic who ever lived, or something like that. Right? Which, of course, ultimately, you should be. We should all be seeking to be saints and so on. But in practice, I mean, I try and go to mass on Sundays. I try to go to confession. Right? I try and, you know, sort of try and lead a serious Catholic life. But I'm not, you know, I'm not. I think it's possible to have that be your destination rather than saying, OK, you know,

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  you, you need this more intense.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Order this, you know, this more intense subculture or anything, anything like that. Right. So I think it's sufficient to say, yeah, you know, Peter should convert to Catholicism and attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation and, you know, go to confession. I think that's enough.

• 1:00:49Tyler Cowen?

  Catholicism in Mexico is pretty friendly to this idea of intermediaries. But in the United States, it's pretty suspicious. Does that make you uncomfortable, being an American Catholic? There's other ways you could be a Catholic, but you strike me actually as not that much of an American Catholic. I don't doubt your sincerity and your stated views, but you seem not to fit.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Well, the thing is, like, I'm interested in the intermediaries as a, I guess you could say, would be analyst of like, what is actually going on in reality? Like, I'm, I'm interested in what is going on in reality. I think these intermediary spiritual experiences are part of reality and they're interesting and they have a place in any argument for why one should be religious. In my everyday life, I'm not like, you know, I'm not out there performing exorcisms. Right? I don't take ayahuasca. I think, I think there's a prurient interest in intermediary spiritual powers that is forbidden to Christians, certainly to Catholics.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  You're not supposed to be trying to contact the spirits of the dead or doing divination or, or these kind of things. And so I, I feel like I'm comfortable enough. I mean, I, I think you could say that maybe, well, one, I think, you know, Mexican Catholicism kind of is part of American Catholicism now to some degree. Right? But I think it's okay to say Mexican Catholicism maybe captures the totality of existence more completely than suburban, you know, suburban, American Catholicism without necessarily, you know, wanting to spend all of your time in. In that zone, and especially because that zone, the Mexican example, is actually

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  a good example of where you would say that temptations come in, right? Because Mexico has a whole zone of quasi-Catholic, paracatholic folk religion, right? Where you're attending Mass, but you're also, you know, making deals with Santa Muerte, right? And, you know, you'll talk to priests who work in that territory, who will say that they feel like their parishioners are sort of, you know, you know, yeah, going to Mass one moment and making deals with minor demons the next. And that's not what you're supposed to do at all.

• 1:03:08Tyler Cowen?

  Does the ex cathedra doctrine make sense to you concerning the Pope?

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  I would say I have more questions about the nature and limits of papal authority today than I did 10 or 15 years ago, before the age of Pope Francis. I think it makes sense that if there is a God, and if the second person of the Trinity came to earth to suffer and die for your sins and mine, and if, you know, if there was a church established that was supposed to carry the, you know, carry that revelation and forward throughout history, that that institution would be protected in some way from the most serious forms of error. So in that sense, yes, some version of infallibility makes sense to me.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  I think the parameters of what could and couldn't be considered infallible are a little bit shaky at the moment.

• 1:04:05Tyler Cowen?

  So maybe the Pope shouldn't get to decide when he's speaking ex cathedra.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Well, the Pope, yeah, I mean, it's not, well, this is the thing, right? There, again, sort of, the Francis era has raised all of these debates, like, just as, you know, Protestants run into difficulty arguing about, you know, what, what, you know, what the authority of Scripture actually delivers, Catholics run into difficulty arguing about where the specific lines are of when and when not the Pope is speaking infallibly. I think I'm, I'd say, you know, when the Pope, when the Pope defines a dogma of the Church infallibly, like the dogma of the Immaculate Conception or something like that, I think that has a useful clarity. I think on questions of morality, yeah, the historical record gets a little murkier.

• 1:04:55Tyler Cowen?

  What have been the inspirations behind your fantasy novel Online and Free, right? The Falcon's Children?

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yes, Online, serialized on Substack. Free for now, though, you know, once I get through two thirds of it, I think I need to need to paywall and see, see how many people are actually interested in it.

• 1:05:14Tyler Cowen?

  Hold the innings back.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  That's right. Hold the throngs back. Well, I mean, it's a combination of things. First, I, you know, I was a sort of Tolkien and sub-Tolkien nerd in high school. You know, one of the lines is that people either become a conservative by reading Atlas Shrugged first, or by reading Lord of the Rings first. And I was, I was Lord of the Rings. So I always liked fantasy as a genre, just as a reader and something to play around in. So I've always, I wrote a, you know, very bad fantasy novel in high school. And then I started another one in my twenties and abandoned it. And then when I was ill with Lyme disease for, for a while, over, well, now, I guess

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  it was four or five years ago when I did this, I sort of went back to that novel. One of the things about, at least the kind of illness I had was that, you know, it was a very physicalized illness in which my consciousness to, you know, my consciousness felt sort of, you know, somewhat imprisoned in my body. And I was sort of looking for things that my consciousness could do while feeling imprisoned and sort of trying to do, writing fiction again, seemed like one of them. So I sort of went, I went back to it and took the stuff I had from my twenties and worked through it again. And then I have various sort of high flown theories about why fantasy

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  is an interesting genre that connect to many of the things we've been talking about here, that, you know, fantasy sort of occupies, it's very interested in the transition from an enchanted world to a disenchanted world, right? From pre-modernity into modernity. And this is true, this is as true of George R.R. Martin's novels as it is of Tolkien, right? This is sort of a recurring, the recurring question that fantasy is navigating. Is, you know, has magic disappeared? Is magic coming back? Is it about to disappear? These, these kind of things. So I think that's sort of, that aspect of fantasy is timely for our, you know, psychedelic and UFO haunted moment.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  And finally, you know, in terms of actually publishing it, obviously, I, you know, my intention was to write it and, you know, sell the rights to HBO and retire from newspaper column writing and, you know, provide for all of my many children that way. That has not happened, but I decided to put it out there in part. You know, you have this, it's you, right? You have the line about, you know, you should be writing for the AI.

• 1:07:45Tyler Cowen?

  Of course.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Right? For the, you know, you want your, if so much of the future is going to be, maybe this isn't how you'd put it, but so much of the future is going to be, you know, AI reading the internet and doing things with the internet. You want to put your work out there. When you say things like that, I think to myself, you know, that, that might be true of my columns. Maybe I'm writing my columns for the AI. But I have sort of a different view with fiction and creativity, which is that I was like, well, I, you know, I don't fully believe that AI is going to be capable of human level creative writing, but on the off chance that it is, I'd like to get my own writing out there before, before that moment arrives.

• 1:08:26Tyler Cowen?

  I'm quite sure it's capable of it.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Well, it's capable of some kind of.

• 1:08:29Tyler Cowen?

  At shorter lengths, at least.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  At shorter, well, right. But, but, you know, is, is AI capable of right of, you know, finishing, finishing A Song of Ice and Fire to the satisfaction of George R.R. Martin's fans? Not yet, right? If it will be, and then at some future point, the world will be absolutely flooded with, you know, works of art that have no actual human consciousness behind them. And I think works of art that have a human consciousness behind them are inherently better, no matter what, you know, our descendants might think about the subject. So I thought, since I have this, you know, I have this novel written, I should, I should put it into the world. So, you know, without an HBO serialization deal, that is what I'm doing.

• 1:09:11Tyler Cowen?

  My readers wanted me to ask you, how's your health going?

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  I mean, it's much, much, much better than how it was when I was at my worst. You know, you reach a certain point with recovery from a chronic illness where you're always telling people you're 90% or 92%, right? Without sort of, you know, it's sort of asymptotic to recovery. You're always sort of approaching 100% and never quite getting there. But I feel like I am still making progress towards full health. And in practice, what tends to happen is that I feel about 97% well until I get some other illness. And then some of my old symptoms come back and I slip back. And unfortunately, you know, we have a lot of illnesses that run through our house because we have a lot of kids.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  So I get, I slip back a fair amount, but which is to say, there's still, there's still something in my system that my body has mostly suppressed, but that recurs. But generally, I'm, yeah, I'm in obviously a much better place than I was at my worst and also a better place than I was when I finished the book about having Lyme disease.

• 1:10:19Tyler Cowen?

  Last two questions. First, your father wrote a poem about you. It's called "The Hold." It's about you as a kid. Do you like it?

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  I love all of my father's poetry. My father has a new book of poetry coming out, in fact, in just a few months.

• 1:10:34Tyler Cowen?

  Before the last question, just to again reiterate, the new Ross Douthat book, "Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious," excellent, great, wonderful book. I very much enjoyed reading it. And once I could, I read it right away. Last question, what will you do next?

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  In part, it probably depends on, you know, sort of internal questions at the times and playing around with different, different day job possibilities. I think one interesting question raised by the age of the internet is not just whether we're transitioning to a future where, you know, AI You know, we're just writing for the AIs, but also the shift from the written word back to oral culture in different ways. So we have a podcast at The Times. I'm, you know, I prefer the written word to oral culture. I prefer reading greatly to listening to podcasts. I read transcripts of your podcasts.

• 1:11:30Tyler Cowen?

  So do I.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Rather than listening to them. But I'm trying to accept the reality that ours is going to be a more oral culture. I'm doing, you know, my substack of the fantasy novel. I'm reading the chapters. I'm not just publishing them. So I'm trying to think about, about that, that zone. If I acquired a really large number of readers for the fantasy novel, I would just go ahead and straightforwardly write the sequel. I think that there's also a, it might not be a book, but a project to be written that's a bit different from the sort of Thelian Antichrist view of our future. And that's a bit more optimistic, but that treats the current moment as a kind of, kind of bottleneck in a way.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  As you know, I'm somewhat obsessed with demographic decline and collapsing birth rates and so on. But I think it's interesting to think about, you know, 21st century culture, internet culture in particular, as a culture that's going to kill off a lot of, you know, not just longstanding institutions, maybe entire countries may simply disappear, but other forms and other forces are going to come through the bottleneck and create whatever world exists on the far side. So that's, yeah, that's an interesting question, too. But I'm also sort of looking forward to having, you know, in the wake of this book, some more straightforward arguments about why my friends should practice a religion.

• 1:12:58Tyler Cowen?

  Ross, thank you very much.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Thank you, Tyler. It was a pleasure, as always. And I'll work on the, you know, video evidence.

• 1:13:08Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowan, and the show is @CowanConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.