← Conversations with Tyler
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- [00:04]
Ross Douthat
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.
- [00:27]
Tyler 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@mercatus.org for a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am here live and in person with Ross Douthet. 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 why Everyone Should Be Religious. So perhaps today my soul is on the line.
- [01:09]
Ross Douthat
I know it's very high stakes. This is the highest stakes conversation we've ever had. And if I fail my soul, my punishment will be great. No, 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, who won 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.
- [01:55]
Tyler Cowen
And your theology, does converting me win you? It's not really a Catholic view.
- [02:00]
Ross Douthat
It's not. No. No, it's not. There's, there's no. Probably no, no toaster oven. But, you know, you don't want to.
- [02:07]
Tyler Cowen
It's not going to lose you points.
- [02:08]
Ross Douthat
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.
- [02:30]
Tyler 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. Whoever created the simulation.
- [03:00]
Ross Douthat
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 to describe, again, this hypothetical simulation runner as a small G God, certainly. And. 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 Gnosticism. Or you could say, or you could be a kind of polytheist. There are forms of polytheism that are 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 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 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 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.
- [05:48]
Tyler 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, some thing, some being could have created that God. Why aren't you led to that as a view with pretty high probability?
- [06:19]
Ross Douthat
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.
- [06:30]
Tyler Cowen
But the more you make the chain complicated, it can stretch in both directions.
- [06:34]
Ross Douthat
You mean. Oh, in this, you mean stretch in. Well, it can stretch in the direction you're saying where we would eventually become.
- [06:40]
Tyler 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.
- [06:56]
Ross Douthat
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 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. 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.
- [08:24]
Tyler Cowen
But surely it's odd to say not dismiss the Trinity, not dismiss, you know, 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.
- [08:39]
Ross Douthat
But your Occam's Razor has to incorporate the, you know, 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 do think that sort of the parsimony of the hardcore deist or Unitarian or anti supernaturalist Muslim, the kind who don't have any traffic with jinn and things of that nature, that kind of parsimony is plausible enough. It's certainly more plausible than hard materialism. If given the option, I would choose that over the worldview of 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 monotheist. The idea of intermediate powers. So yeah, 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 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, 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.
- [11:25]
Tyler 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.
- [11:39]
Ross Douthat
That is the way of things.
- [11:40]
Tyler 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. 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?
- [12:15]
Ross Douthat
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, 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 question for you, as you know, since you read my responses, right, is what, to you makes religion distinct from other forms of knowledge, belief and belonging? Right. Because everything that you just said about religious belief obviously applies to politics, the.
- [13:22]
Tyler Cowen
Children, but much less, much less, much less the politics. Religion seems far more heritable. But even if it were the same, I would sooner conclude we should be more agnostic about many things than conclude we should be less agnostic about religion.
- [13:36]
Ross Douthat
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 reach the heights of economic theory, at that point you're dealing with people who no one has inherited Keynesianism from their parents and so on. Right. So 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. 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 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 argument. 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 of, you know, our own views on those questions. Right.
- [15:07]
Tyler Cowen
But your response saying, well, everyone else, including Tyler Cowan, 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.
- [15:23]
Ross Douthat
Sorry, which inconsistency? Everyone has weird inconsistencies.
- [15:25]
Tyler 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.
- [15:49]
Ross Douthat
Well, I guess the argument in the book is that you can get beyond probabilistic deism into what I would characterize as maybe probabilistic supernaturalism. 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 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. There are, you know, sort of divine or supernatural impingements on our reality that seem significant in various ways. There's the. 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 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 the relationship runs both ways. And to some degree it has to be up to the higher order of existence 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.
- [18:10]
Tyler 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.
- [18:19]
Ross Douthat
Why? Why is it obviously a natural cause?
- [18:23]
Tyler 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 are linked to actual deity.
- [18:41]
Ross Douthat
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 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 ingredient in ayahuasca yield consistent seeming encounters with a particular kind of being. Of course.
- [19:12]
Tyler Cowen
But I would be shocked neuroscience didn't figure that out. Right. I don't pretend you would be. I would be, absolutely.
- [19:17]
Ross Douthat
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 world picture is correct, right? Again, broadly speaking, then whatever the self is, whatever the soul is, it obviously exists in some sort of dynamic relationship to its body, its brain, 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. If you think of, 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 ingesting drugs that shake up how your brain works is necessarily any different. And if you take. Again, I understand that 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 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 sort of shaking up the brain, there's no necessary reason why that wouldn't sort of open the mind's capacities a little bit more.
- [21:15]
Tyler Cowen
But monkeys can't do this, in your view? Like, do monkeys have a soul? Tree shrews?
- [21:21]
Ross Douthat
I mean, I think we should be somewhat agnostic about.
- [21:25]
Tyler Cowen
But trilobites about themselves.
- [21:27]
Ross Douthat
Trilobites. Trilobites.
- [21:28]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I mean, 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.
- [21:48]
Ross Douthat
Deity.
- [21:50]
Tyler Cowen
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. Like, what does the day look like when the trilobite becomes the God perceiving human? What's the critical event in the middle?
- [22:06]
Ross Douthat
I don't know what the Critical event is in the middle. I mean, I don't think we have any kind of access to that.
- [22:15]
Tyler Cowen
Like if someone believed in a fairy world that we can't access, you could be skeptical.
- [22:19]
Ross Douthat
You mean a multiverse or a similiar?
- [22:21]
Tyler Cowen
Something like that.
- [22:22]
Ross Douthat
Something like that.
- [22:23]
Tyler Cowen
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. Not impossible. It just seems to me very strange.
- [22:36]
Ross Douthat
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.
- [22:53]
Tyler Cowen
No, it's not how I interpret quantum mechanics.
- [22:55]
Ross Douthat
How do you interpret quantum mechanics? We can go deep.
- [22:58]
Tyler 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 Barclay, that you need God to prevent, you know, everything from popping out of existence because God is perceiving it all, all the time.
- [23:13]
Ross Douthat
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?
- [23:24]
Tyler Cowen
I don't know what it means. The deepest level of reality? I don't know.
- [23:27]
Ross Douthat
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 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 measurement even mean? Absent consciousness?
- [23:50]
Tyler Cowen
Electrons bump into each other, something. You don't need consciousness.
- [23:53]
Ross Douthat
But if you had a measuring stick.
- [23:55]
Tyler Cowen
In there, that would collapse.
- [23:57]
Ross Douthat
Who puts the measuring stick in there?
- [23:59]
Tyler Cowen
Humans. But when they're not watching, the wave function still collapses. Right.
- [24:02]
Ross Douthat
Why? Well, but it doesn't.
- [24:04]
Tyler Cowen
The measuring stick says it does, but.
- [24:06]
Ross Douthat
We made the measuring stick, but we're not watching.
- [24:08]
Tyler Cowen
You don't need subjective consciousness. You need some process of resolution.
- [24:13]
Ross Douthat
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.
- [24:38]
Tyler Cowen
Yeah, I think the ruler suffices.
- [24:40]
Ross Douthat
In fact, I mean, I want to just to go. No, you can't say the ruler suffices. Look, I want to go back to 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 of tension in there that Christianity has not sort of, you know, figured out a perfectly satisfying resolution of. That would be a different kind of book 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? 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 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 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 further problem, it goes down to 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, 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 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 up to understand its own, to understand the secrets of the universe in full.
- [27:41]
Tyler 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.
- [27:54]
Ross Douthat
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 Cowan and that is Ross Douthat, that you have immediate access to. More immediate access than to anything else in the world.
- [28:13]
Tyler 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. Stating on the surface, I don't have a lot of evidence.
- [28:22]
Ross Douthat
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.
- [28:54]
Tyler Cowen
Some part of me does, yes.
- [28:55]
Ross Douthat
Do you not?
- [28:56]
Tyler Cowen
Most of it happens beneath the surface and I'm not aware of the decisions I'm making.
- [29:01]
Ross Douthat
But you.
- [29:01]
Tyler Cowen
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.
- [29:07]
Ross Douthat
Don't you think you've maybe just sort of imbibed a bit too much of the sort of materialist spirit of the age? I don't even think 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 you. I want to give you credit. The aggregate Tyler Cowen gets the credit for actual existence. And I don't think it is. I don't think that this sort of theory of the mind as aggregation actually does justice to the Direct experience of being a human being.
- [29:47]
Tyler Cowen
But 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?
- [29:58]
Ross Douthat
Why does it seem likely?
- [29:59]
Tyler Cowen
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.
- [30:19]
Ross Douthat
I would also be somewhat surprised. I do think that, you know, the Fermi question still seems to hold even given lots of sort of life friendly or seemingly life friendly planets. Right. 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 think the. And you might think that 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.
- [30:59]
Tyler Cowen
They destroyed themselves would be my guess.
- [31:01]
Ross Douthat
They destroyed themselves and left no signals tracing their way through space.
- [31:07]
Tyler Cowen
The speed of light is a tough one. Maybe we're somewhat early. I agree it's a puzzle. I don't find it insuperable.
- [31:16]
Ross Douthat
I mean, I. So, but just to, just to go back to your question, I mean, 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 their apparent relationship 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 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 Lengle, 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 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 Lengle 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. 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.
- [33:49]
Tyler Cowen
And if you're weighing Those probabilities that UAPs are alien drone probes.
- [33:54]
Ross Douthat
Oh, boy.
- [33:55]
Tyler 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.
- [34:20]
Ross Douthat
Yeah.
- [34:20]
Tyler Cowen
So there's like five explanations.
- [34:22]
Ross Douthat
Yep.
- [34:22]
Tyler Cowen
And that's one of the five.
- [34:24]
Ross Douthat
Well, there's. Yeah.
- [34:24]
Tyler Cowen
So it's up my p. I mean.
- [34:25]
Ross Douthat
The move that people. The move that people make is to say that they're interdimensional. Right. That they could be. This is sort of the.
- [34:32]
Tyler Cowen
I don't know what that means, but.
- [34:34]
Ross Douthat
I also don't know what that. I don't know how you distinguish that from sort of essentially supernaturalist explanations. I mean, so 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 Vallee made sort of early in the UFO, sort of, you know, many decades ago, right. That, you know, if you compare an account of an alien abduction to an Irish 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. 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, 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 be a connection between weird abduction stories and Navy pilot sightings. But I guess it's a case where I sort of, I find the subject quite interesting, but I 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 Drear on who 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 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 the plan there? So, yeah, I'm trying to be, you know, resolutely open minded.
- [39:13]
Tyler 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 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's 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. 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 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, I mean, isn't David Hume. Right. And we should not dismiss the stories, but they're not going to budge us out of a more commonsensical worldview.
- [40:14]
Ross Douthat
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 the wide range of attested spiritual, 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 kind of experiences, reading a lot about those kind 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 give to them is wrong or deluded 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 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 either hallucinated or made it all up? Again, I'm less, certainly much less confident than you would be in saying that. And I do not believe it's almost.
- [42:23]
Tyler Cowen
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.
- [42:32]
Ross Douthat
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, Right. 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 and through imperfect, I 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. Right. 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. And 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. Right. 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 when they die and are resuscitated and report, you know, 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. Right. You do have to figure out like, okay, why is there this consistency but also this variation. But there's also a challenge for the Humeans to say, well, we're just writing off this fairly consistent cross cultural realm of human experience because, you know, 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, you know, you would describe as prone to hallucination and insanity. There are, of course, cases, but that's not sort of the norm. And the other thing, Sorry, I'm just going on a bit right on the Humean point. Right. Like if you go back and read Hume, he doesn't exactly say this, but 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 still.
- [45:22]
Tyler Cowen
And that's wrong.
- [45:23]
Ross Douthat
Right, 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, the multiple places where atheists, 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.
- [46:00]
Tyler 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.
- [46:20]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I mean, I guess I worry though a little about, I mean, the assumption of supernatural experience, I would say, is that let's say there's sort of 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 a higher power, God, angel, demon, whatever is sort of 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. Under the right laboratory conditions. I don't think that's. I mean, again, the hardest core materialist might say eventually we should. Right. We should be able to get it, see what's happening in their brains. These two people are going to fall in love. But in practical terms, 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, you don't have.
- [48:09]
Tyler Cowen
To conjure it, but there's no way to measure it reliably.
- [48:13]
Ross Douthat
What do you mean by. I mean just whatever it would take.
- [48:16]
Tyler Cowen
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 sort of 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.
- [48:37]
Ross Douthat
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 wouldn't sort of expect sort of constant predictable operation of supernatural forces in the world. I Am also, though. I mean, I think that there are. There are also reasons to think that, you know, I mean, there. There are a lot of. For instance, with psychic phenomena, right, like this has been subject to. Thanks in part to 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 do have. You can find people who have done 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 paranormal ability. But then you enter into the replication crisis, right, and 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 are psychic, maybe we should be able to 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 Dyson, I think in the book, right, the sort of maverick polymath scientific genius, right? And he was a believer in psychic phenomena. And his argument was basically that if you read about the cases where people have sort of these kinds of experiences, they're similar to, like, cases of sort of bursts of artistic creativity or sort of things, again, that it's very hard to sort of predict and measure scientifically. They happen under periods of great physical or personal duress. They happen around the deaths of a loved one. They happen in sort of inherently eccentric circumstances. Seem to, again, if these capacities existed, be the things that generated those capacities, which again, create some. Some problems for laboratory measurement, I would say.
- [51:49]
Tyler Cowen
But 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.
- [52:07]
Ross Douthat
Well, I mean, there are. I mean, there. I mean, what, I guess what kind.
- [52:11]
Tyler Cowen
Of none of them seem to have.
- [52:13]
Ross Douthat
Held up would convince you? Well, I mean, you know, I mean, Catholics always go for this one. So you.
- [52:19]
Tyler Cowen
I can hear Winston Churchill on YouTube. Right.
- [52:21]
Ross Douthat
There's. Right. Well, you can. You know, you can. There's the, you know, miracle of the sun at Fatima in the 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 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. If I presented you. If I presented you tomorrow with a video of the Archangel Michael, Right, walking through the halls of George Mason wielding a sword, you would assume that it was AI generated, right. @ this point?
- [53:11]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I would bring it to someone. I could find out.
- [53:14]
Ross Douthat
Well, but at some point soon, you won't be able to find out if you're right about the progress. If you're right about the progress of AI.
- [53:20]
Tyler Cowen
But that there's not one to date makes me much more skeptical.
- [53:25]
Ross Douthat
Right. But there. Right. I mean, you want. You want God to manage, but in.
- [53:35]
Tyler Cowen
Reproducible form that can be verified. It just seems odd that it never turns out that way.
- [53:41]
Ross Douthat
Yeah. I mean, did you read Carlos Ayer's book they Flew?
- [53:44]
Tyler Cowen
No.
- [53:45]
Ross Douthat
Okay. It's worth reading, I would say. It's a book about levitation in 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. There were no cameras, obviously, in the early 1600s. Ayer's 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 in the realm not just of, like, personal delusion, but a kind of mass delusion. Right. In the contemporary world, yeah. 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 the 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.
- [54:52]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I would have people look into it for me.
- [54:54]
Ross Douthat
Right, yeah, right. But I mean, that's, you know, it would be grainy and so on. Right. I mean, you want video. The best video. Yeah. I mean, 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 updated Your priors about UFOs based on video evidence.
- [55:22]
Tyler Cowen
Absolutely.
- [55:22]
Ross Douthat
Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, we'll.
- [55:24]
Tyler Cowen
And my priors on God, for that matter.
- [55:26]
Ross Douthat
Right. So we'll come back to that.
- [55:27]
Tyler Cowen
I'm not inflexible here.
- [55:29]
Ross Douthat
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 generalized. 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.
- [55:58]
Tyler Cowen
What do you think of Peter Thiel's fascination with the Antichrist?
- [56:02]
Ross Douthat
I think Peter is more apocalyptic than you are. Than I am.
- [56:06]
Tyler Cowen
Not enough intermediaries in his story. Well, so all the stakes are on the table at once.
- [56:12]
Ross Douthat
I think it's more that the threat of the anti. Like, let's. I mean, he, you know, I think he's going to maybe elaborate his theories of the Antichrist at some point, at some point in the future.
- [56:24]
Tyler Cowen
On video, Most likely.
- [56:25]
Ross Douthat
On video. Most likely, yes. And I think that 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 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. So 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, 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 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 an example that I'm sure, I know that Peter's been very concerned about the alignment of big tech companies with control over the Internet, with sort of woke ideology and its hostility to free speech and its 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 interlocking directorates. A cathedral. Right, The Yarvin phrase. Right. From which we can't escape. But it kind of seems like we can escape from that right now. Right. Like the true rule of the woke cathedral, where no dissent was brooked, you know, what did, what did last for, you know, six years. Yeah. I mean, and Donald Trump was president.
- [58:22]
Tyler Cowen
For some of those years.
- [58:23]
Ross Douthat
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 know, you want to be non supernatural, could be whatever, you know, the machine God view of AI. Right. I think, you know, if you take a kind of maximalist doomer view of strong AI, then that's effectively a theory of the Antichrist. Or you could go back to our early discussion about, you know, the Sumerian gods returning and using the guise of aliens or something that to, you know, sort of enthrall 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.
- [59:20]
Tyler Cowen
Should Peter just be an Opus DEI Catholic? He's right leaning. He doesn't quite seem like a Lucifer to me.
- [59:26]
Ross Douthat
Peter should be a Catholic. I don't know if he should join Opus dei. I think it's okay. I mean, I'm not in Opus dei. I'm not. I think it's okay to be a normal Catholic. Right. I think, you know, I'm.
- [59:40]
Tyler Cowen
Are they not normal Catholics? I don't even know.
- [59:43]
Ross Douthat
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, you know, intense, intense Catholic who ever lived or something like that. Right. Which of course, you know, 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 sort of try and lead a serious Catholic life, but I'm not. I think it's possible to have that be your destination rather than saying, okay, you know, you. You need, you know, this more intense 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.
- [60:50]
Tyler 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. In your state of view, you seem not to fit.
- [61:09]
Ross Douthat
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. You're not supposed to be trying to contact the spirits of the dead or doing divination or these kind of things. And so I feel like I'm comfortable enough. I mean, I think you could say that maybe. Well, one, I think 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 that zone. And especially because that zone, the Mexican example, is actually a good example of where you would say that temptations come in, right? Because Mexico has a whole zone of quasi Catholic, para Catholic folk religion, right, where you're attending Mass, but you're also making deals with Santa Muerte, right. And you'll talk to priests who work in that territory who will say that they feel like their parishioners are sort of 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.
- [63:09]
Tyler Cowen
Does the ex cathedra doctrine make sense to you concerning the Pope, I would.
- [63:14]
Ross Douthat
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 that revelation 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. I think the parameters of what could and couldn't be considered infallible are a little bit shaky.
- [64:05]
Tyler Cowen
So maybe the Pope shouldn't get to decide when he's speaking ex cathedral.
- [64:10]
Ross Douthat
Well, the Pope, yeah. I mean, it's not. Well, this is the thing. Right. Again, sort of. The Francis era has raised all of these debates like. Just as Protestants run into difficulty arguing about 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.
- [64:56]
Tyler Cowen
What have been the inspirations behind your fantasy novel? Online and free. Right. The Falcon's Children.
- [65:02]
Ross Douthat
Yes. Online, serialized on substack. Free for now, though once I get through two thirds of it, I think I need to paywall and see how many people are actually interested in.
- [65:14]
Tyler Cowen
Hold the engine back.
- [65:16]
Ross Douthat
That's right. Hold the throngs back. 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 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 very bad fantasy novel in high school, and then I started another one in my 20s and abandoned it. And then when I was ill with Lyme disease for a while over. Well, now, I guess 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 20s and worked through it again. And then I have various sort of high flown theories about why fantasy 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 sort of, that aspect of fantasy is timely for our psychedelic and UFO haunted moment. And finally, in terms of actually publishing it, obviously my intention was to write it and sell the rights to HBO and retire from newspaper column writing and provide for all of my many children that way. That has not happened, but I decided to put it out there in part. It's you, right? You have the line about you should be writing for the AI of course, right? For the. 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 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 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 that moment arrives. I'm quite sure it's sort of stakeable.
- [68:28]
Tyler Cowen
Well, it's capable of some kind shorter lengths at least.
- [68:30]
Ross Douthat
At shorter. Well, right, but. But is AI capable of 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 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.
- [69:11]
Tyler Cowen
My readers wanted me to ask you, how's your health going?
- [69:15]
Ross Douthat
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. 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.
- [70:19]
Tyler 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?
- [70:27]
Ross Douthat
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 before.
- [70:35]
Tyler Cowen
The last question, just to again reiterate, the new Ross Douthat book, 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?
- [70:52]
Ross Douthat
In part, it probably depends on sort of internal questions at the times and playing around with 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 AI, 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 prefer the written word to oral culture. I prefer reading greatly to listening to podcasts. I read transcripts of your podcasts. So do I, 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 my substack of the fantasy novel. I'm reading the chapters. I'm not just publishing them. So I'm trying to think about 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 Teelian 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. 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 21st century culture, Internet culture in particular, as a culture that's going to kill off a lot of not just long standing 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 yeah, that's an interesting question too. But I'm also sort of looking forward to having, in the wake of this book, some more straightforward arguments about why my friends should practice a religion.
- [72:59]
Tyler Cowen
Ross, thank you very much.
- [73:00]
Ross Douthat
Thank you Tyler. It was a pleasure as always and I'll work on the video evidence.
- [73:09]
Tyler 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 TylerCowen and the show is CowanConvos. Until next time. Please keep listening and learning.