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- [00:01]
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all new season of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
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Christopher Bea
Mom Talk has just been blowing up.
- [00:37]
Dr. Dan Koch
Whitney and Jen are on Dancing with the Stars. Taylor is a bachelorette.
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Christopher Bea
Saying that out loud is crazy. Like that is huge. But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart.
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Dr. Dan Koch
It's causing issues in everyone's marriage. My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos.
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Watch the Hulu original series the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers to supply.
- [01:08]
Dr. Dan Koch
Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I am your host Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and today we've got author and really I would say at this point, history of philosophy teacher Christopher Bea, also known as the editor of Harper's Magazine, novelist and Chris, you have just put out a book, why I Am not an the Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. It was heartily recommended to me by a good friend of mine and also your publicist reached out. It was a little one, two punch there and I'm very grateful. I've been reading it and enjoying it and thanks for being here.
- [01:52]
Christopher Bea
Thanks for having me.
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Dr. Dan Koch
I want to actually really heartily recommend the book to listeners for a reason that certainly was not obvious to me before I started reading it. Just the title is very memoir heavy, but really the majority of the book is this tidy history of most of Western philosophy. Very readable, very digestible. I would say if that sounds interesting to you listener, you would come away from the book with sort of like a good thumbnail sketch of every single major philosophical figure from Plato and Aristotle to Bacon, Mill, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche. There's probably 20 more that I didn't mention and it was less memoir y than I anticipated, more of like an intellectual history. But I actually think that that has this really incredible value. I don't know like if you were like the same age when I was a philosophy major and I have not. I am so glad after reading this book too that I have not pretended to be a philosopher as an adult because I could not have written this or researched it. I always felt kind of bad. Like my friends who were really serious about it, who are now professional philosophers, who. They read the J.P. morland history of Western Philosophy, like multi volume set coming out of Biola, and I was like, maybe I'll get to that someday. And now I don't have to because I read your 360 page single volume.
- [03:27]
Christopher Bea
Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I hope the book is. There's enough in it that there's something, a little bit of something for everyone. But I will say it does my heart really good to hear you praise that element of the book because I think there are certainly other readers who find the memoiristic parts a little more engaging and maybe find the philosophical history slightly heavy sledding. But I certainly try to make it as accessible as possible. I did not study philosophy in academic setting. All the philosophy I've read, I've read because I wanted to read it, because I wanted to try and sort through the answers to the kinds of questions that philosophers ask. And on that level, to me, the two sides are closely connected. It is a memoir, but it's a memoir of my evolving thoughts and ideas about things. And that evolution was really strongly influenced by this reading. And so it's not possible for me to give an account what I believe and why I believe it that isn't also an account of these thinkers and the way that I've tried to wrestle.
- [04:44]
Dr. Dan Koch
Well, he did a good job. And on the memoir side of things, I will say you have one of the funniest and most honest sentences in any memoir I've ever read. Quote, I wrote little during this time, but thought constantly about being a great writer, which I immediately shared with a couple friends.
- [05:05]
Christopher Bea
Yeah, I think it's a common experience.
- [05:07]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure it is. So, okay, what we're going to really do here is you sort of name sort of the core argument of the book is that you sort of name and trace two alternatives to theism. I would say one is scientific materialism and the other is called romantic idealism. And that kind of. That's pretty well associated with what is known as continental philosophy. And what I want to do is kind of have you define each of those briefly as you see them. We'll talk a little bit why they don't work for you and why theism of this sort of skeptical belief type. That is a term. You've coined that term, right? You're not grabbing that from anybody?
- [05:54]
Christopher Bea
Well, no, the term skeptical belief I coined in the sense that I'm not taking it from anyone else. I'm sure it has been used before. There are traditions. Like someone like Montaigne is called a Christian skeptic. So the idea that one could be a skeptic and a believer is not new to me at all. But I am not taking that term from my title, my self description. I'm not taking from someone else.
- [06:22]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah. So I want to. We'll talk a little bit about agnosticism and where it kind of fits with that. And then I really want to sort of spend a good chunk of our time exploring what this posture of skeptical belief is like for you and how it actually helps you make sense of the world and your life. And I think we'll get into some interesting connections backwards to the materialism and idealism stuff as we go. So. So that's my basic overview. And then also, of course, that could be wrong and we could end up talking about other things largely instead, but I'm going to try. So what is scientific materialism the way that you mean it in the book?
- [07:03]
Christopher Bea
Okay, so the first thing I'll do is step back just slightly and say, as I tell in the more memoiristic parts of the book, I grew up in a religious family. I was raised Catholic. I left the church at a young age. And when I did, I found myself going in search of some other system of belief besides Catholic Christianity, but also besides theism. I wanted to know what kind of atheist I was going to be. Atheists, many atheists are will states quite strongly that they don't have beliefs, that being an atheist isn't a system of belief. That just means I don't believe this thing. And in that sense, you know, I think, I think that's true. There isn't one set of beliefs that you would call atheism. Right. However, I reject the idea that atheists don't have beliefs. You know, I think that in fact it's necessary to have a certain worldview to get through the world, one or another worldview. The philosopher Charles Taylor speaks about what he calls subtraction stories. There's versions of the story of secularism that is essentially that there is a kind of neutral, common sense reality that we all share. And then certain people or certain cultures pile on top of this, this supernatural or metaphysical set of beliefs. And that secularism is just the, the removal of that superstructure so that we can all just live in this world that we all shared in the first books that was their own. And I don't think that's, that's true. On a historical level, on a personal, psychological level, or on a philosophical level, there isn't just the neutral reality that we all experience. We all have kind of constructive. So my book tries to outline the historical process by which what I take to be the two in the west, the two major atheist worldviews, how they came to be and then what they are. So scientific materialism, this is probably the one that people most closely associate with atheism or with secularism. And roughly it is. And, and I'll get a little more deeply into the, into the philosophy for one second and just say, as I see it, a worldview has three things. It has a metaphysics, which is its description of what reality is, of an ultimate nature of reality. It has epistemology, which is its description of how it is that humans can have knowledge of this reality, what knowledge even entails, what form knowledge takes. And then it has an ethics, which is, you know, sort of rules for how we ought to behave, but in a broader sense a concept of kind of what is the. And that a satisfying worldview is going to have all three of those. And ideally they're going to relate to each other. They're going to interact in some way such that they all kind of fit together. So the scientific materialism, its metaphysics, as its name suggests, is materialist. And what many materialists would say is, that's not a metaphysics, it's a physics. Basically it is a belief that physical reality, material reality is all that exists, everything is.
- [10:28]
Dr. Dan Koch
And that can be a little bit dicey when you start to ask them, like anything about, you know, before the Big Bang or how did it, how did a universe come to be? There's sort of like a built in. You kind of have to dodge that question or you have to, you have to find a way to say that that question is nonsensical or doesn't matter or something like that. Right. If you're going to be committed to an atheistic materialism.
- [10:56]
Christopher Bea
Yeah. What I would say about materialism, which, which does have certain things going for it for sure, but is that it has existed for a very long time. It's not as though it's a product of the modern age. It's not as though Thomas Hobbes came along and said everything is matter. And before that you had, you know, Christian spiritualism. There were early materialists, were, you know, the pre Socratic philosophers.
- [11:20]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, I was just thinking about them. Earth, fire, wind, you know, things like that. That was like a materialist Metaphysic, Yes.
- [11:27]
Christopher Bea
So it's, it's always been a live option. It's not like it took a while for it to occur to people. But it has also always, until the era of the modern secular west, been a kind of niche. You know, we now think that it's very kind of amusing or quaint or something to read about some pre Socratic who said like everything is fire or whatever, but, but in a way for most people everything is physical stuff actually seemed just as bizarre. Right. Because what about our subjective experiences? What about our mind? What about consciousness?
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Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
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Christopher Bea
And that is for most of us, I mean for all of us, that that is what we experience.
- [12:15]
Dr. Dan Koch
You know, I hope that we can come back to this. I, I don't want to like derail too early, but one of the things that I struggle with, I would probably say skeptical believer, is a pretty good approximation for where I sit as well. We can maybe hash some of that out later on. But I really struggle with accounts of the world that in my mind seem to take the physical world not seriously enough. So like we were just talking about this on the great Divorce series that I was doing with my friend Kristen and how like, you know, C.S. lewis's whole big metaphor for the afterlife is like, well, you're this way on earth and then you die and God kind of lets you stay that way and, and you know, that leads you to heaven or hell or whatever. My problem with that is on earth, all the things that we think of as these moral choices, this characterological stuff, like it is seated in our brains and if we didn't get enough nutrition in the womb, we come out a different way. Or if we have a brain injury, our personality changes, our moral choices seem to change that kind of like the sort of divorce, that great divorce of the two actually doesn't work for me, not even as a metaphor because it's like, well, how would that work in a non finite sort of living situation or whatever? So maybe we can come back to that. But just to maybe say or ask you this, is it possible to end up in your camp of skeptical belief while still being something like, you know, to get nerdy, like a non reductive physicalist or a dual aspect monist, like thinking that really human beings while alive are physical things, that is what we are. And then maybe there's more going on.
- [14:06]
Christopher Bea
So as I will get into, you know, the often people think of, and we'll get into what idealism is. But, but, but at its most extreme, it, it, it views everything as Ideational everything as our subjective consciousness, everything is concerned. Yeah, almost that there's any physical reality at all.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
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Christopher Bea
Those are two polar opposites.
- [14:27]
Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
- [14:28]
Christopher Bea
But to reject materialism does not mean rejecting the reality physical. So just depends. So. So, for example, when you do bring up consciousness as one of the things that materialism struggles to explain, someone will say to you, well, no, we know that if you alter the brain in this way, people's conscious experience alters. Thus we know that consciousness just is the brain. But, well, we don't know the. I mean, what is being denied when one raises consciousness as a problem from a materialism? It's not a connection between your physical brain and your subjective consciousness. What's being denied is that matter as a conceptual category can capture subjective experience, which is one of those things that to me seems just obviously true. It seems very difficult for someone to deny that subjective experience is not mad. And now one of the things that happens is there's many people who are a lot smarter than I am who've thought about it a lot harder than I have, who actually have no problem just saying. No math. Consciousness is matter. You know, like a Daniel Dennett.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
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Christopher Bea
There's also people who are smarter than me or Daniel Dennett who have had the same problem I've had. So you can't settle it by just saying, you know, I can't just say, well, it's self evidently true.
- [15:59]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
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Christopher Bea
That consciousness isn't matter because to lots of people it isn't. But anyway, that's a challenge for me.
- [16:04]
Dr. Dan Koch
To me, what I think is self evidently true is that consciousness emerges out of or from the brain. And so it's very, I find it very unlikely. And you know, I guess there are panpsychists who would say that consciousness is not a flip of the switch. It's not an either or. It's like a smooth ramp. I'm fine with that too. But there is, you know, like, yeah, if you turn off someone's brain, they would stop having the kind of conscious experience that they have while their brain is turned on. I'm comfortable with that. Now maybe there's something else that happens but you know, like that. But that's not the same as saying it's reducible to it, or it is just the matter, but it seems to depend upon the matter. I have unsuccessfully not derailed us. I have in fact derailed us. Tell us.
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Christopher Bea
Well, let me.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Okay, go ahead.
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Christopher Bea
Yeah, so, so that's, that's fine because that's what we're here to do. Is just hash this the hoppit. But I'll just finish giving my, my description of scientific materialism because it starts with materialism as the metaphysics, but then it adds its, its epistemology, which is scientific, meaning that we can know this physical world kind of outside of us, or that we're in, but it's also all around us by way of sense perception, by way of experience, empirically, not by way of abstract thought, but by way of studying it through the senses. But then in addition, what scientific epistemology tells us is that even though we are first person sort of subjective experiencers of reality, because reality is objective matter, our goal in studying it, or when we can say to have true knowledge of it, is when we have arrived at its objective reality, which is to say we, as much as possible, we strip away our personal perspective, our subjectivity, our emotions, our passions and intuitions, and we study the thing objectively. And we study it in a way so that different observers from different vantage points will come to, to share conclusions. And we do that by way of quantification, experimentation, etc. And that what we are trying to do in the process now, that is those two things are kind of core features of scientific materialism. Foundational, right, what scientific materials also believe. And this, the material universe wouldn't have to be this way. But as it happens, it's governed by a bunch of laws. It's consistent in the way it acts in such a way that we can move from our experiences of individual data points to generalizable principles and loss, and then we can use those laws to make predictions and to, to, to, for experimentation, et cetera. And so what knowledge is basically is knowledge of the laws, its knowledge of, you know, the way that matter acts under certain circumstances. And then the, the last bit is the ethics. It is possible to have all sorts of different ethics while believing in those first two legs of the stool. But in practice, most scientific materialists adopt some form of utilitarian ethics. Now utilitarianism basically says one, the good has to itself be located in experience. And the way that we understand the good is not through abstract reasoning, but through our own sense of pain and pleasure. The thing that human beings, or sentient beings in general naturally aspire toward is the best definition we're going to have of the good. And the thing that they naturally avoid is the best definition we're going to have of evil. And so pleasure and pain, those are good and evil. That's 1, 2. In keeping with the scientific mode, utilitarianism allows us to kind of quantify the pleasure and pain and to conduct experiments essentially in social engineering or in political or legal codes etc, with the goal of maximizing pleasure. So that's the ethic is a utilitarian. And an important part of utilitarianism, right, is that it's completely consequentialist. If we're saying that pleasure is the good and pain is bad, we are judging actions entirely on their consequences. Within that framework, your motivation for doing something doesn't matter. Part of the reason your motivation for doing something doesn't matter, most utilitarians would argue, is because we all do things for the same reason, which is to maximize concentration. That is the most. So that's scientific materials.
- [21:29]
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Christopher Bea
Experian.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Okay, so obviously there are like 25 possible roads to go down there. And so I really have to hold myself to some basic level of discipline, which is. So we're just gonna. Let me put it this way. What is the strongest reason that that scientific materialist worldview does not pencil out for you, does not ultimately end up being convincing, meaningful, you know, fill that in however you want.
- [22:35]
Christopher Bea
Well, I guess the first thing I, I would say is I want to acknowledge what is obviously attractive about scientific material. It is in a certain way a very hopeful view of the world insofar as it really believes in human progress. It believes that we're constantly experimenting in a way that is increasing the store of human knowledge. It tends to believe that humans are fundamentally rational and utilitarians have very often believed in scientific materials in basically what used to be called the theory of secularism. That said that as we get more educated, as we know more about the world.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah.
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Christopher Bea
As science does a bigger job of a better job of answering answering the big questions about reality, religion and other forms of superstition are going to fade away. These were responses to human needs, to real human needs that at certain points in our education as a society, we weren't able really to meet in any better way than by telling these crazy stories. And as science does a better job of meeting these needs, religion is going to feed away. So it has a really high degree of confidence in human reason and our ultimate ability, at least in theory, to answer all of the outstanding questions about reality. And then there is the fact that scientific epistemology, when applied to the physical world, is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly effective.
- [24:10]
Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, I wrote down under, under epistemology. I said, for a whole lot of questions, this sounds like a pretty good way to know things.
- [24:19]
Christopher Bea
So it. And it may be that, well, you can believe that it is absolutely the best way to gain knowledge about the material world while also believing that there is something other than the material world. And in that case, you don't have to abandon science if you abandon scientific materials.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
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Christopher Bea
You also don't have to abandon matter if you abandon scientific materialism. What you have to abandon is the idea that matter is all there is and that therefore the kind of knowledge that science provides is the only kind of knowledge worthy of the name.
- [25:01]
Dr. Dan Koch
In theory, that's true. You can posit both in practice, if you reject scientific materialism, it is usually because you accept a religious, more enchanted view of the world. And I think that there's sort of a problem on the other side of what you're talking about, which is if I want to try and keep both, what I actually have to reject is a ton of things that my religious community is going to teach me about how to know things. So it's not only like, I understand you're coming, you left it, you're coming from atheism, back at it. But if I'm just still in a religious community, I'm going to have the authority figures in my life giving me all kinds of, you know, varying levels of how fleshed out they are sort of methods for knowing things. And I'm actually going to have to unlearn a ton of that shit because it's. Because, like, just a really simple example, so many of my clients were taught that mental health care was not real or it was certainly not prioritized. You've got this problem. Oh, that's a sin problem. No, actually, you were having hypomanic episodes. Like, that's not a sin problem. And so I guess. Yeah, just. Yes, I totally hear you. I just think it's. Maybe what I'm saying is it's a tighter. I may be framing it as a more difficult tightrope balance because you've also got a corresponding set of problems on the other side.
- [26:33]
Christopher Bea
Sure. But I will say for what it's worth in my approach to this book, I'm not. I'm trying to understand these worldviews. And it's not necessarily that. If I can somehow quote, unquote, prove that they're wrong, then by process of elimination, the answer is one of the major organized religions.
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Dr. Dan Koch
That's a good clarification.
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Christopher Bea
It is, it is. I mean, I know you're not saying that in this spirit, but it is. It is. It is common, I think, when you're speaking with someone who is a, like, fervent scientific materialist, when you raise a criticism like this, if they don't have a good response, what they will say is, oh, yeah, well, what's your alternative? The big sky daddy who made everything?
- [27:17]
Dr. Dan Koch
The flying spaghetti monster?
- [27:19]
Christopher Bea
And the answer is, I'm not even discussing possible alternatives right now. Yeah. What I'm trying to work through is how compelling this worldview is. Yeah. And it doesn't always, you know, a lot of commenters on, on these topics from the scientific side will. Will talk about the God of the gaps. Right. That everyone's constantly trying to identify some crack in the materialist worldview and then say, there's God, you know.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Right.
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Christopher Bea
And for a while it was designed, had the appearance of design, and now Darwin ended that. So now it's the Big Bang or now it's consciousness or whatever. But, but it's worth admitting that there are gaps. That doesn't mean that you have to allow God to fill that gap. That doesn't mean that rhetorically you have to allow the theist to say, well, that's where God is. But it's a mistake, I think, to be so defensive about the possibility that you, that you, you won't allow that there are gaps.
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Dr. Dan Koch
Yeah, there's.
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Christopher Bea
There is, you know, a lot of philosophers of mind who are themselves committed atheists who will acknowledge that materialism does a really bad job of dealing with. Dealing with consciousness. Yeah. And they say, well, yeah, I'm a philosopher. I look at this stuff seriously, and it's quite clear these things don't add up. And I don't have to pretend that they add up because the alternative is theism. That doesn't make me a theist, you know, And I think, you know, David Chalmers is there. Thomas Nagel is there. John Searles was there. Lots of, lots of people who thought very hard about this stuff have said, no, I'm an atheist and I'm a good scientific thinker. But I think if you honestly look at the evidence, this is a problem. This is a shortcut on immaterialism, as
- [29:20]
Dr. Dan Koch
it will just one thing to maybe just a quick drive by. As a trained therapist these days, you get a lot of Carl Rogers and the idea that unencumbered human beings will tend to choose things that are adaptive, that sort of lead to lowercase F, flourishing. Maybe not capital F, flourishing in the Christian or Aristotelian mold or something, but if people aren't injured, if they don't experience adverse childhood experiences, if they have secure attachment, if they're sort of cared for and in the therapy room, if you can kind of give them a safe place for them to work their shit out, they will tend to make better choices. Existential therapy goes even further down this road, depending on how you look at it, where they will say, like, yeah, sometimes you tell a client, sounds like part of you wants to kill yourself. And if you just name that, what the vast majority of clients will do is go, oh, yeah. Also another part of me doesn't, that even you get all the way down to the very bottom of the barrel. And if you just look at things, there is a real strong reflex in humans not only to survive, that would be that question of, like, maybe I don't wanna die. That's like a survival instinct, I guess, but also a sort of a flourishing instinct of, like, when someone can really see clearly, like, oh, do I wanna treat my spouse with love and respect or do I wanna keep being a little bitch to them? Like, they tend to wanna treat them with love and respect. So there's also things in the ethics here that, you know, and there are Christian versions of that. I think about Thomas Merton talking about how, like, becoming, you know, becoming the most. Christ, like, is actually becoming the most like myself. There's a real. There can be a real affirmation of. Of stuff in there, but then there's also, you know, and again, I know you're not arguing for traditional Christian anthropology here or whatever, but, you know, for myself and my listeners and a lot of my clients, that's sort of the alternative that we're dealing with. And so I just want to name that. I don't think that, like, that's not like a point for scientific materialism or anything, but it gets at something that a lot of us feel kind of lacking. Growing up religious.
- [31:35]
Christopher Bea
Well, let me. I think. I think there's something to all that, and I should say I'm very happy to take this conversation into the direction of your area of expertise, which I think is. Is interesting and is outside of my Wheelhouse. You know, I don't pretend to know a lot about the different, like, schools of therapy. I have gone to therapy at different times in my life and sometimes found it valuable and other times less so. I also have people in my life who have been incredibly helped by pharmaceutical responses to mental health problems. Right. And that's one of the things that a materialist will say, right. Is that depression, if depression can be helped by, by a pill, that suggests that it is about you, your brain posture. And as I said, if you reject materialism, you don't have to reject the idea that the material exists or that there's a connection.
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Dr. Dan Koch
That can also be true. Yeah.
- [32:36]
Christopher Bea
So that can also be true. But the flip side of it is there are people who either aren't helped by those medicines or are helped by those medicines in concert with the kind of work that you do. Right. And the idea that your own mental health can be improved basically through talk through, you know, not if that, that seems to me to fly in the face of the idea that consciousness is simply something that emerges out of brain chemistry. Because it's almost, you know, if, if consciousness is like a happy phenomenon that comes out of the brain, Right. How do you, how can you approach it from the other end and change it? Right. It's, it's, it's as though. It's as though you were watching a movie on the screen, right. And then you started interacting with the people up there on the screen. Right. But the people up there on the screen are just projections, right. That are coming out of this projector in the back of the room. And if you can't get in there and start fiddling with the machinery. Yeah. If it is true that consciousness is merely something that emerges from the brain, you should not be able to get at it.
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Dr. Dan Koch
You shouldn't have any leverage there. Right, right, exactly.
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Christopher Bea
Okay.
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Dr. Dan Koch
So. All right, license to get fucking nerdy here for a second. So this is why I'm drawn to something like what is called non reductive physical physicalism that is currently my working anthropology.
- [34:18]
Christopher Bea
You can listen to the rest of this episode by joining the patreon@patreon.com Dankoke. Ra.