The Myth of Enlightenment | Dr. Chris Firestone | Episode 5

Nathan Jacobs podcast. I'm here with a good friend of mine, Chris Firestone, and we'll be talking about the very popular myth, and it is a myth, that all one day, all of a sudden, a bunch of religious folks decided to use reason and poke and prod some stuff, and they became atheists. That's coming up today on the Nathan Jacobs podcast. All right, welcome, Chris Firestone. Wow, it's been a while, Nathan. So good to be here with you. Yeah, well, it's good to see you. And for anybody, since this isn't a visual podcast, we're here recording actually at Trinity University in Deerfield, Illinois, right down the street from Michael Is Michael Jordan still here? He's not, but his house is.

I I don't think he's been able to sell it for the, you know, mega millions he's looking for. Fair enough. I do hear the housing market in Illinois leaves something to be desired. Yeah, I wouldn't want his tax bill, that's for sure. Well, this place is a blast from the past for me, as are you, of course, Chris, although you're still part of my present. So, what I want to talk about today with you, and let's just contextualize this for folks so they know what to expect. There's a very popular myth out there in the cultural sphere, right, in the cultural consciousness.

That a lot of folks presume, look, you know, there was a time when people were religious, you know, and they were engaged in faulty reasoning, you know, sort of Monty Python style, you know, fallacious reasoning, ridiculous assumptions, and then one day a bunch of folks woke up, right? They they were enlightened, right, the enlightenment. And all of a sudden they were like, you know what we should do is we should maybe think about some stuff, you know, maybe use reason, maybe poke and prod some stuff, look at the world, and lo and behold, all of a sudden they realized through investigation that all that crazy ridiculous religious stuff they thought is false, they all became atheists, and and then science, you know, propelled us forward and advancement and all the rest, and here we are.

And you know, religion is just sort of a silly, you know, remnant of the past for folks who haven't gotten the memo. And obviously you and I have spent a lot of time together working in a variety of ways to dispel that myth, because it is a myth, right? It is a very and not the true myth, like Tolkien. It's an absurdity. It's a totally false myth. It has nothing to do with any of the his- history of ideas proper. So, I want to talk about that, but before we get there, let's just give a little context about us.

So, I had said you're a blast from the past because I was once upon a time a student of yours when I first started studying philosophy. I don't even remember how long ago that was. What was that, like '99 or something like that? 25 years ago. Oh my gosh. Seems like yesterday. Yeah. And then, after I finished my PhD, or actually while I was finishing my PhD, a good friend of ours, Steve Pointer, who we who who we dedicated a book to once upon a time, one that we'll probably mention in this, went and sniped me. He was like, oh man, there's some schools looking at Jacobs, can we get Jacobs?

And he brought me back here, and I taught here for a while before going to moving on and doing some other things. So, we went from teacher and student to colleagues, right? And then and we wrote we wrote a couple of books along the way, you know, well, co-authored co-authored a book, co-edited a book, wrote some stuff. sound so easy and so simple, but obviously It wasn't it? No. Just like Oh my goodness, there's so many awesome stories in there. I hope we get to tell those stories sometime. Yeah, well, you know what we should maybe do, just as a side, just for folks to get a sense of our wild and crazy I know what I my favorite story would be.

Do you have a favorite from from our past in terms of our time working together before we jump into the real stuff, right? I do, yeah. I do. Okay, I'll be curious to hear this one. I wonder if this the same story. Maybe you should go first. No, no, no, no, you tell me. Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness, well, one of the things that you were well known for as an undergraduate was rising above your place to uh to do professional papers at conferences you weren't supposed to be in. I Okay, so I do suspect we are about to tell the same story. Okay, so let me contextualize this for listeners.

So, yeah, so Chris, when he first met me, I I had left art school, I was studying philosophy. Anybody who's read about my sort of journey where I went into existential crisis from LSD and you know, started studying philosophy and religion. And I talked about certain people who took me under their wing, who recognized, oh, this guy's a little different, right? Like he's he's rough around the edges, he's not a typical academic student, but he's a really sharp guy, and it seems like he's really more about the questions and the answers than he is about, you know, about the grades or something like that.

And Chris was, you know, bar none, you know, he was he was definitely the guy in that category of folks who who took me under his wing, and and I've always been one who, you know, enjoys a good challenge. And I think I recognized that early on, and so I just kept throwing them out there, wondering which one he'd give up on, and really there weren't many of those. So, one of the things that Chris did for me, that you did for me, was you were like, you know, there's these academic conferences, and I that blew my mind, right, cuz I had read all these different books, I'd dug around, and I was never bashful about, you know, going and approaching somebody.

In fact, that's how I ended up here in the first place. Number of the people I had read, I was just like, oh, they teach somewhere outside of Chicago, I grew up there, I'll just go make an appointment, talk with them. At some point they were like, do you go here? Are you a student? I'm like, no, I mean, I just just walked into your office to talk to you. And so Chris introduced me to conferences like the American Academy of Religion, I think was the first one you probably introduced me to. And it blew my mind cuz it's thousands upon thousands of people from all over the world, scholars, students, things like that.

And there were all these people I had, you know, I had read things about, like Nicholas Wolterstorff, I think was there, you know, the first session I ever walked into, John Hick, the religious pluralist, we met him. And so I had seen these, you know, they go there and they talk about their latest ideas and their latest book project and whatever, and I was fascinated cuz I was like, well, this is where the stuff is really happening. And you had the audacity to be like, well, why couldn't you submit a talk? Or a paper to one of those, and and I was like, well, I mean, if Chris thinks I can, maybe I can. Well, I do wonder if we have two different ones.

There's multiple ones here, right? And the one I'm thinking of is in a regional, but there's also one in an annual conference. Yeah, yeah. Well, which one do you want to tell? Cuz I think I'll tell the regional one. That's super funny. That one is funny. Yeah, so again, a little bit more context here is that I had started submitting these papers, and and much to Well, maybe I should go first with the annual one. Yeah, that was the first one, I believe. it was, right? So, like I submitted all these, you know, I submitted proposals like professionals do. I didn't realize that undergraduates do not typically submit proposals.

And you know, there's hundreds of proposals coming in, so if you beat people out, you get selected, it's it's a it's a real honor. And so like I had submitted one on the problem of evil, I think was the panel. And I ended up getting selected as an undergrad. Yeah, we were we were all amazed, you know, I I I wasn't amazed, I knew it could be done. It was early in the conference sort of growth, and they weren't really aware that students might try to pull this. Right. And so Nathan was eager to to give it a whirl, and he did, and he got in.

I think what happened next was shocked us all because we thought probably a room with, you know, 30 30, you know, people present, you know, one of these little side rooms or something. But we get there, and we come to realize it's basically a plenary. I mean, it's a huge ballroom with, you know, I don't know, let's let's call it 3 to 500 people. I I didn't count them all. And Nathan's one of the main presenters. And I I remember the guy who organized that panel coming up to me cuz they had asked for a bio, and I said, Chris, what do I say? I mean, what's my bio? I'm a student, I'm an undergrad. And so I sent some really ambiguous short bio.

And and I had a respondent, John Stackhouse, right, who is a well-known, you know, Christian apologist guy who'd done a book recently on the problem of evil, I think it was, which is why he was the respondent on the panel. And I remember in the bathroom, you know, he ends up in the urinal right next to me. And he's like, so I didn't catch in your bio, you know, are you are you a professor at the at the grad school or at the divinity school or the I said, yeah, I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a student at the uh at the undergrad. He was like, really? Well, good for you. I think he realized like, what in the world?

So, yeah, sure enough, we were there, big big ballroom. Yeah, there's some a couple features about that that were extraordinary. I sat up in the front with a a number of other students. I believe, wasn't that the day I I gave you that uh philosopher's jacket? Because you were like disheveled. I'm like, this guy can't go up to the front with that with that button-down he's got that's all wrinkled, he's got the sleeves rolled up the side. I I here, take my jacket, put this on, it'll be just fine."

So, he he Ethan gets up there, he reads his paper, and all's going well, except that John Stackhouse is not a joke of a you know of a thinker, philosopher, theologian, apologist, and uh He came to play ball, man. He was He came to take this undergraduate to task. I I'm sure what happened in the urinal just got wet his appetite, really. So to speak. Oh, gosh. But he came out after you with a series. I don't know if it was seven, was it? I think seven critiques.

Look, the and the fact of the matter is for for good reason, like what was what was interesting I mean as anybody again who's looked at my history knows, like I went through I was an overt like heretical philosophical theology guy. And Stackhouse recognized that. Like he was saying like, "Look, man, there's things in here that that sound like Pelagianism, right?" And he's saying like, "And sometimes that's just a slur, but I think this guy's like actually a Pelagian." Like He was right, I was. Well, those earlier years you were dabbling with lots of interesting ideas, and I'm sure Pelagianism was one of them. Oh, yeah, no doubt.

But yeah, so he came out hard and like just sort of like cataloged a whole host of concerns he had. By the time he was done, I'm sitting here with these other students, and I'm like slouched in my chair thinking, "Oh good lord, what's Nathan going to do?" So, they he I remember the the the moderator says, "Okay, uh Nathan, you can come forward, and you have I think it was 2 minutes to reply or 5." It was that long I mean maybe yeah, 5 minutes. It was something like that.

It was something short with seven critiques to deal with, and you did something that I think set you apart in my mind from all the other students that I was dealing with at the time. And you you stopped, and you said, "You know what? There's too much here for me to address. I would like to open it to the audience and have you pick I think it was two of them for me to answer." Yeah. And I was like, "Dang." Pretty bold and pretty good. And he actually got the audience hands popping up, and they they gave you two two of the critiques to to answer, and and you did. Yeah.

No, I actually remember I don't remember what the second one was, but I remember I had talked about John Hick's like epistemic distance argument, which for anybody who doesn't know is basically Hick saying like that part of the hiddenness of God is there in order to preserve freedom. And I I had reiterated that in in the sort of theodicy I'd posed sketched out in my paper. And you know, Hick was like or and Stackhouse had actually said like, "Well, and you know, he gave an example of like Mount Sinai." And he's like, "How much epistemic distance is that?" And you know, and I had and I pointed out and somebody brought that up. Could you talk about the epistemic distance? I was like, "Yeah."

I was like, "Okay." So, he brought up Exodus. So, I was like, "Well, actually one of the things it says in the passage is it says that, you know, Moses tells the people that God did this in order to instill instill fear in you in order that you might not sin." And I said, "So, that indicates that that text, even the one you're ushering out, indicates that the violation of the epistemic distance has effects on your behavior exactly as Hick and myself have have proposed." So, it was that sort of thing, right? Like where it was you know, so there were a couple of those that were just out there, and I think you're right.

That did have a little bit of an effect of saying, "Well, maybe I mean, that was my intent, right? To say like, "Look, I'm happy to address any of these. I don't have time, so happy to take you guys name which one you find most effective." Yeah. No, that was that was pretty stellar, and and to do it with that kind of crowd on your first go around, I was like, "Dang." That's impressive. Yeah, well, and I remember there was that was the time when Fordham decided to like come and try to scout me out, right? Cuz there was guy in the in there some guy from Fordham who was like, "I missed it." Like so, he asked the same thing that Stackhouse did.

"I missed it in your bio. Are you a professor at the divinity school or at the college or" I was like, "No, I'm an undergrad." And all of a sudden like Fordham was writing to me regularly going like, "You want to come over here to the PhD You you were the first cuz we you we ended up as you know having like 10-year run of really quality young philosophers coming out of the program, and you were the first but you're not the only one who was basically offered a job at one of these things but without their credentials. Yeah, that's right.

So, uh but uh It was an impressive run, and then that jacket that you initiated, that became a fun little tradition in our department because all of these sort of rogue, you know, rebel philosophy guys who were doing things that you weren't supposed to be doing like speaking at professional conferences, that became essentially like what what would you call it? It's like the it's like the the you know, some sort of rite of passage that you know, you broke through, so you get to you get to put this on, right? Yeah, we we utilized it for years.

I don't know how many students, probably in the range of 15 to 20, actually wore that jacket in subsequent years for professional presentations of one sort or another. Yeah, and I honestly think and I don't think this is an exaggeration, I think we ended up being the reason that some of these conferences changed the rules to specify that undergrads couldn't Indeed. It was somewhere in the 2010-2015 range where it started coming you started seeing everywhere that you had to have certain degrees and other things to to to get into the conferences. Yeah, cuz they noticed a little too many of us like breaking through and pushing out to the margins the I was so glad to be a first mover in that area.

Yeah, so then the second one I know I'm certain I know what your second one is. Yeah, well, this is another time you wore the jacket. It was at a regional conference. I believe it was downtown Chicago, and um the interesting thing was I think it started because we thought you had submitted a paper to a conference, but you we forgot the date, and it ended up being like a month later. And you just said, "Let's submit it anyway." And it was to a conference it was on I believe it was on Augustine. Is that right?

Well, no, so so what it was was the regional guy cuz you and I would never, you know, the American Academy of Religion would roll around or you know, APA or whatever it was. We'd always look at the call for papers, see what we what we can latch hold of. And I remember it was the regional one they decided to focus I mean, who came up with this? They're like, "Let's do the whole conference on philosophy and humor." And we're like and so it's just like, "Man, I don't I don't have anything to say on that." And so we were going to just let it pass, but then I remember one night we were hanging out.

And we were like, "Look, you know, I think I think it's the the call for papers ends in like 10 minutes. Let's see if I can quick throw something together." I think we you threw it together, we submitted it, and we realized it was like a month late or something like that. It's like, "We got the wrong dates." Anyway, they wrote back to you saying like, "You're in. That's great. That's a great proposal." And I was like, "Oh, man, who knew?" But the the fun doesn't stop there though because when we realized you got a paper on I think it was Augustine, maybe Aquinas.

No, it wasn't so what it was was I I this was where I was really fudging cuz I was like, "What's the angle I'm going to take?" And it was on theological anthropology. And I was taking I was putting John Hick and Augustine of Hippo in dialogue and springboarding off of Being There. Yeah, the movie with Peter Sellers, And I was like, so I used Being There as like this excuse like, "Oh yeah, yeah, I'm going to talk about humor." Right. Right. But it was like really I'm going to talk about philosophy. Chauncey Gardiner was in the title. Right. So, anybody who doesn't know that film Chance the Chauncey or something like that. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, from Okay.

Yeah, from Chance the Yeah, so in the film, right? It's a it's a story it's a story of mistaken identity, right? This guy, or at least that's what it seems at the beginning. The ending raises some questions, but like a guy named Chance who's the gardener. And then when the guy he works for dies, and he seems touched, you know, he seems he seems like he's maybe a little off. And then people mishear his name as Chauncey, and so he becomes known as Chauncey Gardiner. That's right. A mistaken identity piece. Right. And uh And he goes to the heights of power and of our favorite movies. I mean, we've watched it a couple times over the years.

It's really fun and funny, and uh And but the the irony of it, and this is why it comes to my mind all the time, is that you're going into this thing, we find out that it's been accepted. It's kind of a what you might call a Western paper. Right. Oh, yeah, sure. it's accepted in the section on Eastern religion laughter in the East or something like that. laughs in the East. That's what it was. That was the title. And he gets this paper on Chauncey Gardiner in, and it's like hilarious. How in the world did he possibly get this in? Yeah. Anyway, again, I bring a number of other students with us.

We're sitting, and it's it's a being a a fairly large square seminar base type thing with a podium in the middle. Yeah. And uh And uh they they have these papers on I don't know Hare Krishna and you know, just Yeah, well, I remember when I sat down on the panel, the guy next to me sits down, and he pulls out this little Vishnu idol and sets it in front of I'm like, "Man, where am I?" What are you doing in the world? This is hilarious.

So, And the first three papers go, and then Nathan's called up, and I'm just in stitches at this point because here's this undergrad doing a professional paper on a Western philosophical tradition in in a laughter in God laughs in the East. You can't make this stuff up. And when you get up there, he introduces yeah, well, all right, well, you're getting to his introduction. you as Dr. Nathan Jacobs. Yeah, well, before that, I mean, that's when like you guys I could tell like you guys nearly lost it. But before that, he starts with he's like, "So, he's going to be talking about our next presenter is talking about Being There, which we all know is like a metaphor for Sundar Krishna.

What Like he said I'm like I don't even remember what he said, but and I'm sitting there thinking, it is? And I can hear you guys like repressing chuckles at that point. And then he called the names or he's like, "Now, without further ado, Dr. Nathan Jacobs." And so that Yeah, it was it was Chance turns into Chancey Gardner right before our very eyes. And then and he walks up there as an undergraduate with a sport coat on becomes Dr. Nathan Jacobs. At this point, what are you thinking? I'm just thinking I'm just hope we get out of here. I mean, it's once this guy is once you know, the emperor has no clothes on, we're going to be ushered out of the room.

But what transpired next is just continue to boggle my mind to this day because he reads the paper, gets a number of questions on it, then they open it up to a wider discussion, and they they basically say, "Well, the best paper here is the one on Chance to Chancey Gardner by Nathan Jacobs." And every question was on that paper. Yeah, so I remember getting up there. I'm walking up to that podium. I I'm side-eyeing you guys who are are chuckling, which I can't blame you. I'm just thinking, Lord have mercy. How did I get myself into this? And I get up there and I don't know if you remember my opener.

I said um "Now, the the title of today's conference is God laughs in the East. But I wonder if it would be more aptly titled God laughs at me. Because my paper is not in fact on any Eastern shaman or sage, nor does it deal in Eastern religions generally, other than the fact that Shirley MacLaine is in Being There." But to watch the rationalization of the of the moderator who says, "But but but but Nathan, it really is an appropriate piece for this group." Right. And then I don't even know who she was, but do you remember there was some woman who clearly had this gravitas in this group where like we don't know who she is, but obviously everybody here knew she was.

And she was like, "Well, I would like to circle back to Dr. Jacobs' paper because even though he insists that it's not relevant, there is no paper here that is more relevant." And then she goes on to give some exposition about why it's the most relevant piece and I think I think that's In all honesty, that's what took the jacket from being just a thing to being an icon of the philosophy department. It's the ring of power, yeah. Because everyone who wore it since, yeah, I mean, hears that story from us somewhere down along the way. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's lots of great stories, lots of memories with this place, with you and all the rest.

But so let's circle back now that people have a little bit of a taste of your and my history cuz obviously I went off from that point and I did grad work and you know, my doctorate and then Steve Pointer had always had his eye on me as somebody who would love to get back here to sort of continue that philosophical trajectory that we had going and he did for a while a time until Well, he and I talked a lot about that possibility cuz you were kind of iconic of what Trinity in its better days was hoping to produce. Somebody who'd been through the undergrad, been through the grad school, onto a PhD, was beginning to make some noise.

Let's get him back here and you know, you'll be sort of like the you know, poster child of what we're trying to accomplish here at Trinity. Right. And and at some point in there, specifically in the grad years and then into the PhD, you and I had moved from sort of mentor-mentee to co-authors, right? We were doing joint research on Immanuel Kant and we even published our notorious you know, our infamous book, right? In Defense of Kant's Religion. Yes. And then it was while we we were here that we were editing The Persistence of the Sacred, which is the one that's most relevant to to what I wanted to talk with you about today. That came out while we were here, right?

Because we dedicated it to Steve and I remember us presenting it to him like right as he was round like winding down his time here, right? I believe that's right, yeah. And boy, it's cuz we're working on so many projects simultaneously. This one this one we had in our head over a number of summers because of the Communitas fellowship thing. We were there talking about how we might get some authors to do certain essays in the book and and uh Yeah. so forth.

So I remember us starting that editing process took years and that was largely cuz of slowdowns with Notre Dame, but um anyway, maybe I've already given a little bit of an intro to the folks in terms of what I wanted to talk about here, but why don't you sort of offer to us a quick abstract for what that book was was really all about? Yeah, I think to capitalize on what you said earlier about the myth, we we knew early on cuz you and I had both done a lot of work in modern philosophy that very little of that myth is actually true.

I mean, from the first modern philosophers, Descartes and Bacon, you realize their motivations are not to dispel religion or God or anything of the kind, but quite the opposite. They saw some of these malicious sort of philosophies beginning to emerge and they're trying to stake claims to defend theology. Right. You know, that I mean, it's well known that you know, in the meditations he's writing to the theological faculty for that very reason to try to Right. And so we knew that in our own studies, you know, on Immanuel Kant and philosophers in and around Kant there, we realized that the best readings were always the theologically affirmative readings of these of these thinkers.

And yet we'd been trained or at least we've interacted with you know, contemporary I guess what I would call them now is revisionist historians of some sort Right. who who systematically removed God from the from the center of their philosophical purview. And we had seen that in Kant pretty clearly because there's this standard traditional Kant, you know, the all destroyer of metaphysics and the one who is just a moralist and not really he's he's really an agnostic, borderline atheist. But when we started reading Kant and realizing, "Hold on, none of this holds together without his theological affirmation throughout his writings really."

And when we started following those trains of thought, we realized this really could lead to a potential solution to one of his most malign texts, Right. Religion within the boundaries. Yeah. I mean, reason, yeah. And we did all that hard work over many, many years, you know, and and and found some real fruit out of that. We started asking ourselves, I wonder if this is going on in any other of these Well, don't forget I was I had finished up my dissertation by this point and my dissertation was on the same thing on Leibniz. Now, nobody doubts that Leibniz believes in God, but the thing I had discovered was he's always read in some contemporary analytic anachronistic sort of way.

And I was when I read him, much like when I first started reading Kant, right? When when I was reading Kant with you, I was like, "Wait a second, this is Augustine here that he's talking This this is Aquinas here." And so I recognized all these sort of theological, you know, markers that were in there that Kant was was doing, which is how I got into the text in the first place with you. And then you had been in in that down that road for a while, but that's how I got sucked into it. And but you know, for same thing with Leibniz. When I read Leibniz, I was like, "Wait a second, I know the guys that Leibniz is citing.

I know I recognize this stuff." And Leibniz isn't shy about it, but I noticed that Leibniz scholars don't read what Leibniz read, which is all the theology stuff. That's right. And so all of a sudden I was doing that revisionist and you're right, we were starting reaching out. Just a side note as you're going on with this is one of the one of the themes you and I discovered very early on is the many times contemporary philosophers can't understand the modernists because they're not theologically sophisticated. You can't read Leibniz or Kant without at least some theological sophistication or else you have to dismiss it as philosophical dribble, right? You know? Yeah.

And so I think we I saw it first in Kant because that's how I invited you into reading Kant with me. I said, "Look, I'm I'm kind of bumping my head theologically here, Nathan. Have a look at some of this. Tell me what you're seeing." And that's how we started partnering on reading Kant together. But I think you were seeing something similar with Leibniz, a sophisticated philosopher and a sophisticated theologian. And a lot of contemporary thinkers who are reading them don't have the theology part. And so they can't understand where he's going. That's right. And we And that was the thing. We were curious. We're like, "There's got to be other people." And so we started just kind of at random, not total random, right?

We we looked at guys like I remember I had been spending some time with Hegel and I noticed that the more theologically robust texts in Hegel had been translated by Peter Hodgson. So we just took a a whirl, you know, we're like, "Okay, let's send an email to Peter Hodgson and be like, 'Hey Peter, this is this is what we're seeing. This is what we're thinking. We're thinking about putting together a book that tries to show that this is actually more par for the course, right? The idea that these guys actually are theologically robust and theologically concerned, but you know, their readers are not.' And and Hodgson was like, "Man, I've been waiting for somebody to say this." Like, yeah, absolutely, sign me up.

Then we got the same thing from John Cottingham, a famous sort of Descartes scholar and translator of Descartes' work. He was like, "Thank you. Finally, somebody gives me to the platform to say this." those two guys in particular got us their essays in like record time. Yeah, it was like they had been waiting to write it for years and we gave them we gave them the runway. But you know, so yeah, so that was that was how that book came about. You know, one of the things that I find so interesting about this myth, right? And it like Walter Strove, Nicholas Walter Strove, well-known philosopher, analytic philosopher. Well, what do you call him an analytic? Anyway, contemporary philosophy dabbles in a lot of different things.

But he sort of hang hung out with a lot of analytic guys like Alvin Plantinga. Um but we knew Nick cuz he we won him over on our book on Kant and he had been a big opponent on of Kant and then he wrote the forward and said it it's the best it's the best treatment of Kant on this topic that we got. Yeah. And so we talked with him about anybody you'd like to talk about and he called out like he did Locke. He did the John Locke essay.

And he really called out the fact that this is this is traceable largely the contemporary version is traceable to like Leo Strauss and the Straussians, which is really kind of a conspiracy theory, wouldn't you say in terms of It was it was a conspiracy theory until we started digging into it for the introduction and we come come to realize I think Nick's Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we started tracing the sort of atheistic revisionist historians that emerge after you know, the Strauss and the I guess you would call them basically Straussians. Yeah. And realizing that what was happen what had happened in the 20th century was a systematic downplaying of the theological side of these these persons.

That not only makes them less formidable, you know, it also makes them antagonistic to religion. Yeah. And the sacred. And that's really the genesis of the book, you know, and when we started realizing somebody has to tell the the right side of this story. Right. Yeah. And and and I say it's a conspiracy theory because really the Straussians they just sort of start with the premise that it's like well, any sophisticated person would be an atheist like me, right? And so Plato, I mean, yeah, he talks about God and the good and all that, but I mean, he doesn't really believe that. Like the the real the real stuff. If you read between the lines, right?

You know, the truth between the lines is that he he's an atheist like me. And that was kind of I mean, to caricature a little bit. That's that's just that's just the gist of it, right? That the main hermeneutic guide is these guys are sophisticated enough to not be theists. And so they're sort of saying what they have to say in order to like fly under the radar, but they're all part of a wink and a nod that you know, later generations will finally have have the balls to go ahead and say what I'm saying. That's right. I think we I think it was called what was it Walter Strove? I can't remember he called it the esoteric reading of these things.

Right, that somehow the good stuff is the stuff that has to do with material reality, physical, you know, appearances and so forth. And when they start diverging into metaphysics, you know, they're it's tongue in cheek. They're just doing it for the sensors or whatever. But that is that is a hard sell when you look at the logic in our logic of these. And that's why we brought all these authors together cuz they were experts on the you know, the various modern philosophers and they were all saying the logic doesn't work without God. It doesn't work without their positions on the soul and immortality or whatever.

And so that was convincing to us at the time and you know, that book came together in record time for a contributor volume. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So one of the things that I find so interesting about that that myth, right? Is that usually the sort of the pop version of that myth is that you essentially have shotty religious reasoning, right? Superficial superficial, you know, sort of uh philosophical religious jargon, right? That's really just uh you know, it's it's really just church dogma, right? It's it's superstitious nonsense.

And then one day like reason awakens and people decide to question their presuppositions and as they begin to question it all of the prior stuff just unravels in their hands and it gives way to modern science and eventually like God of the gaps starts to fall away and soon we realize we're in a materialist world. One of the things like the first step in that entire narrative that I find so insane, right? It crazy is like let's start with the scientific portion. So this would be the sort of thing that Richard Muller talked about in his piece on Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle the the scientist.

So what I what I find so fascinating is that none of the like none of the the the scientists, right? So early on the early empiricists who go into the scientific you know, you mentioned Bacon, right? So Bacon's like we've got to go into empirical not just empiricism, right? Where we trust senses. Well, we've got to find a way to do like a scientific method where we have hypotheses and we observe stuff and you know, we test it and all that sort of stuff. So that's the you know, this is the birthing of the empirical sciences. And what's interesting is when you look at when you look at what the empiricists are questioning they're not actually questioning the religious stuff. Right?

So what's funny is like those guys are questioning the philosophical stuff. Yes. Right? So if if you look at the history of Christianity, right? There's like Judaism, Christianity, the religious realm eventually converges with like Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism and and things like that and that's what sort of grows into the scholastic stuff in the medieval West. And a lot of the empiricists like guys like Robert Boyle they were still 100% fully in favor of Christianity. They just doubted the metaphysics. So the irony is the narrative is like, oh, they doubt the theology. They doubt the God stuff. And all those guys are like, no, it's the metaphysics stuff we doubt. We doubt Aristotle, right? Like that's what we doubt.

And and you can see that in the fact that the first step is nominalism, right? The first step is let's get rid of the realist metaphysics of Aristotle, you know, let's and and what that was largely because so much of Aristotle's metaphysics involved invisible stuff, right? Forms, matter, matter not as particles and things like that, but as the substratum of potential. Um and they wanted stuff that you could poke and prod. So they went back to an alternative uh philosophy which was the mechanical philosophy of the Greek atomists. So one of the things that's just on the surface of it right from the get-go that jumps out to me is exactly that, like the theology didn't bother them. It was the philosophy that bothered them.

Right? And and yet guys like Walter Charlton who were you know, part of that mechanical movement, you know, he was convinced he's actually what he suggested is their return to atomism, Greek atomism in this materialist philosophy. They're like this is the true Christian philosophy. Um there's really no evidence that the Straussian side was was right. I mean, quite the contrary Muller's article is all about his worry that they might be greasing the skids toward atheism because largely because they were in removing all non-empirical stuff. He was like, well, meaning purpose isn't really an empirical object, guys. So we said the only things that are real are things you can poke and prod. Meaning's going to go away pretty quick.

Teleology, purpose or end is going to go away pretty quick. Um so there were worries about it going in that direction. But at the end of the day it wasn't a theological No. movement at all. It was it wasn't an anti-theological movement at all. It was an anti certain type of metaphysic we don't like movement. Yeah. No, that's I think that's fair because they're coming at it as scientists, right? And so I mean, the one that name that comes comes to my mind out of the book is you know, is Newton. Yeah. You know, because Snobelen has done all this work and Newton's an interesting character because he's he's a Christian.

He's a sort of mystic or you know, he's he's he's not wanting to throw out faith by any means. Right. In fact, he's just trying to get science to you know, to to find the sort of causal principles that undergird it, right? And and to stabilize it and to show how it can make progress, but he wasn't by any means throwing out his faith or in the you know, the the belief in the spiritual realm or anything like that. Really you're right, he's trying to fix the philosophy so that it could handle the kind of movements we're seeing in science. Yeah. Well, and the funny thing is when it comes down to it, you know, Newton's laws are descriptive.

And then when you get to the mechanical question of like, yeah, but why do they you move Why do they move that? Why do those laws function that way? Why are they the way they are? Newton's answer is just cuz God wills it. That's right. Right? Like and that's it. And he he's not putting it it's not a punt to God of the gaps. Like Newton's actually recognizing they don't have objects don't have to move this way. This is just the way God's ordained that they move.

And so for all that and Snobelen, you know, in order to reinforce that I think he talks about yeah, he talks about the fact that Newton a lot of the things that he's unearthed was things like that Newton's doing things that we would associate with like Southern Baptist fundamentalists or something like that, which is like he's doing like end times charts based on the book of Revelation. That's right. Things like that. Yeah. No, they he definitely, you know, seems to be drinking deeply from theology, from the Bible, from Revelation and yet obviously his contributions to science are are legendary and prodigious.

But uh But yeah, that I mean, that's the story that Snobelen happily tells in the book, you know, about that side of Newton that's often times marginalized pushed aside. I do think that some of those, you know, what you might call back story presuppositions are distinctly sort of meaningful and I you know metaphysical and rich, right? And and when you get when you fast forward to 21st century 20th century 21st century, you get to things like reformed epistemology, they're all there would be an agreement. Newton would be in agreement that there's certain basic things that we just assume that are God-centered and we have every right to hold them.

We don't necessarily have scientific evidence for them, but we're properly functioning in the environment for which we were made in which we were made and they work and that's how science can be done and done fruitfully. Now of course the Leibnizian in me wants to come in and say, "Oh now this is a problem." But this is so I'll bring up the rationalist side, right? Because the earliest modern discussion, right? When you're talking about modernity at least at the the original fork in the road for modernity, is are we going to be rationalists? Are we going to be empiricists, right? Is it going to be that the most important things are things we observe and can poke and prod and describe, right?

Like the laws of motion. Um or is it going to be the analytic stuff? Is this stuff like math and logic and so on and that's your rationalist, right? And that's the fork in the road. Which one's more important? Which one is more explanatory? So I think what you just said is true of how so many empiricists talk and think. I think it's also true of like the common sense realists, which is sort of where a lot of the contemporary reformed epistemology guys go, right? Guys like Thomas Reid who are just like you just trust your faculties common sense realism. There's a amount of prima facie truth that everybody can sort of get on board with. Right.

And that's where guys like the contemporary reformed epistemologists tend to they grab Reid as their guy, right? Thomas Reid. But what's interesting is on the Leibnizian side, it's like, "Okay, so so what are the rationalists saying? Are they opposing it?" And the answer is no. God becomes even more important in the rationalist systems cuz Leibniz somebody like Leibniz is going to come along and he's going to say, "Well, look. Here's the problem. Right? The exact problem is what Newton grants, which is that the laws of motion could be otherwise, right? No reason objects tend this way rather than that way. I mean, your your your laws are descriptive of what is so, they're not prescriptive. They don't explain anything. That's right.

And that's the Leibniz's concern. I would like an explanation, please. Exactly. And and what's interesting is once Leibniz bring ushers out like the principle of sufficient reason, you know, for anybody who doesn't know basically that you know, you need an explanation that is is, you know, that is complete, right? Um so you know, if if there was an explosion in this room and I said, "Chris, what happened?" And you're like, "Well, obviously there was oxygen in this room." And it's like, "Well, okay. That's a that's a partial reason. It's not sufficient. Every room I walk into isn't blowing up, you know, that's got oxygen in it." And so Leibniz is like you need a sufficient reason, right?

Something that really does offer a complete and closed answer. And where Leibniz traces that to is he says, "Well, once we start tracing from one explanation to the next, soon we start going down a long long long explanatory rabbit hole where we find every explanation is incomplete, right? Even if we explained everything about why you're here, Chris, we get to we get to your parents at some point in that equation and they need the explanation and it's going to trace on and on. And so Leibniz is convinced that what you've got to get to eventually is get to God. But Leibniz doesn't even think and that's this is where his rationalism comes in, right?

He's like just saying like that God, you know, sort of is self-sufficient, he's a necessary being, you can sort of just by understanding what he is, you get an explanation for why he is that doesn't explain why he does the stuff. Right. And that's where you need the principle of the best. So Leibniz's theodicy, right? That our world is the best of all possible worlds, even though it's addressing the problem of evil, in some ways what it's really addressing for Leibniz is it's addressing everything else, right? Leibniz isn't just concerned with answering like why would God permit evil? Like Leibniz is concerned with answering why are the laws of physics the way they are?

And if you can get to something like if you can get to in the idea of God, not just that he exists, but also that he always does the best. Now you have an analytic explanation. You've reached an end point of the inquiry. Yes. And so like what's interesting is for Leibniz, without God and without the sort of classical understanding of God as the optimal being, you can't explain anything. Physics, history, anything. That's a I think that's a pretty good way of assessing the empiricist rationalist debate, right?

The empiricists are going to accept certain things that are only premise because the world is meaningful and that it's orderly, it's essentially {quote} {unquote} Christian or theistic in some fundamental way and they can get science and everything else off the ground. The rationalists are not quite so eager to simply assume that these things are functioning properly, but they want a sufficient explanation for it. And and so you know, the the rationalists quickly go to God to to to as the only possible way to to to put hold that all together. Yeah.

No, it's true and and yet somehow if for the empiricists, so many of them, you know, it does end up it does end up requiring when you ask the why, they do have to grant, "Well, you know, God wills it." Right? Like that's what you get with so many of these guys. So then how does it begin to unravel, Chris? Like like if everybody's there, right? Like you know, maybe there's a fork of some kind. That's a reference for anybody who doesn't know to Hume's fork. Yeah, well, you know, this this I mean there's a lot of ways to tell the story.

You and I are familiar with Kant's sort of watershed of the rationalist empiricist saying, "Look, both of those two are contributors to the knowing process, but nobody's ever analyzed reason as it in its contribution to the knowing process." And this of course where we get the watershed philosophy that is Immanuel Kant's transcendental thought that space-time and the 12 categories as well as freedom and the moral law and some other things are part of the rational makeup of what it means to be a human being. Yeah. And that's just a huge moment in Western thought. Everybody sort of is aware of it. Uh you know, I've taught it a couple of times in different venues, but nobody seems to be really understand it.

And so that's why guys like you and I are so important these days, I guess. Trying to translate this for for for for audiences that don't want to wade into those 800 page tomes. Yeah, yeah. Well, and so I think by way of context, you know, it's really is that and and this is incidentally something that I think is very relevant uh to how we think about these things. Uh I always considered David Hume who precedes Kant occasions Kant, right? The sort of what Kant is trying to answer address is is Hume's skepticism. And so I I always like to say that Hume is the most honest of the empiricists.

And the reason is cuz Hume Hume is all for like, "Yeah, let's just trust the senses. Absolutely. The only thing that's real is sense experience and so on." But then the problem is rather than going from there into supreme confidence cuz that's what the empiricists wanted. They're like, "Oh, I can trust my senses. See? You're right there in front of me. Hear this? That's a table, right? It's hard right there." And so it's like, "Oh, supreme confidence in all this stuff about sense experience." And yet Hume comes along and says, "Yeah, there's a lot of bad habits with the way reason interacts with these things. So just as a simple example is causation."

So it's so easy for us to be like, you know, when you when I do something like this and knock on a table, you know, that if you were sitting there watching that, you're going, "Yeah, of course I observed the causation, right? I saw your hand hit the table and then I heard the sound, right?" Right. But what Hume recognizes is those are two different empirical events. One empirical event is the sound, the other empirical event is the sight. You don't actually observe the connection. Your mind puts them together, right? Right.

Um but you don't observe the causation, which is incidentally why foley artists in movies can swap out the real knocking on the table replace it with a fake one and you don't know the difference cuz That's right. cuz you can and so people like Hume and he goes through a whole heck of a lot of, you know, examples of bad habits of of mind, right? That he suggests are all fallacious and so causation goes away, the self goes away, you know, all these sorts of things that Kant tries to bring back. Um but it's that skepticism that that sets the stage. Now the reason I want to just pause there before we go to Kant is because there's a certain naivete about the contemporary world.

Like the folks who want the Straussian narrative, so many of them tend to be empiricists, Right. right? I don't believe in your sky daddy. I only, you know, I only believe in what I can see and taste and touch and, you know, they're they fancy themselves to be scientifically minded and things like that. But it's it's as if they skipped over the entire part of history where empiricism totally unravels in the hands of everyone who tries to embrace that. attempt in the subsequent decades to resurrect it has failed. Right. Um That's right. And so so with Kant, you know, we get his particular time.

Now I I suspect you and I disagree a little bit not so much on what Kant thinks, but on, you know, how good or successful or whatever he is. I I think there's a published exchange between us where we take differing sides on that, but um but anyway, we we don't need to right. You a fist fight here about it anything. You're but Well, yeah, I think what we both agree on is that he is in fact the next major movement Sure. Absolutely. His it's instructive as to how he gets out of that skepticism. Right. And it is predominantly theistic, you know, the way he does it. Right.

That the whole system of reason is in danger of going retrograde unless it's moving forward in its understanding of the archaeology of faith, a rational faith. And that's I think, you know, what makes the work we did on the religion text so interesting to people is that we show how he holds it all together. That he's not an old man dribbling on himself as philosopher's cloak, but he's in fact doing reasonably good metaphysical work in the transcendental mode of discourse that's uniquely Kant. So let me translate that for for my audience here.

So I mean basically what ends up happening with Kant is he he like so many others like Bishop Berkeley and others start to recognize that part of how you know, skepticism is is getting a foothold is because there's a world out there and a world inside, right? So part of the question is I'm looking at Chris and it's like, okay, but does Chris really look like what's in my head? Right? And that and that's how you start to get to skepticism is this inability to bridge that gap. Yes.

And so you have the initial bridge with Berkeley where he's like, well, let's get rid of the thing outside of your head and just say that the only thing there is are minds and the ideas inside of your mind. Uh But but Kant does something similar but different, right? A turn to the subject where he's like, well, well, you know, I'll there'll be a certain level of agnosticism about whether the thing out there is exactly like it is in my head, but that doesn't really matter cuz what I have is what's in my head.

And so Right. the turn to the subject is really a turn to the mind and the structures of mind and saying like, well, let's let's analyze the thing that we have access to That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. the appearance and various immediate types of experiences he kind of has a common sense view of. He thinks we have them and that um they're they they have to be coming from somewhere other than pure sense perception or other than just logic. They must be rooted in the recesses or the contributions of reason.

And and uh that's his big transcendental turn to the subject in a nutshell. Yeah, but the religious part is that basically Kant recognizes and and this part I think has always been recognized even though some people try to dismiss it as non-realist, we'll say. But like it's always been recognized that Kant needs God in some sense. He's going to talk about morality. He's known as a moralist. He recognizes that, you know, morality requires certain things like that you have free will. Uh if I'm going to be held responsible for my choices, I need to have the ability to do or not do.

You know, um and then he also recognizes that there's certain things about your moral instincts that just grow unstable unless there's a God and you know, somehow, you know, you're held accountable for your choices. That's just pretty well known. I mean, you I would say I would say that's not terribly controversial. Now, how people interpret that, how sincere he is or not varies. Yeah, exactly. Right. Um but nonetheless, I I don't think there's many people who would give pushback to Kant at least arguing along those lines, right? Um for anybody who doesn't know, what would you say when I I just said like that some people treat it as non-realism. What's what what if you want to give a nutshell non-realist?

Like what's what's non-realism for folks who have never heard of it? Yeah, well, non-realist position would be you need the ideas in order to have certain pragmatic uh results, but you don't need to have anything behind those ideas except the ideas themselves. Right. And you and you definitely have people in the world like this right now, right? Who talk about God, but a lot of us sort of raise an eyebrow and go, do you really believe in God or do you think that's a useful symbol? Right? And there's something like that. Uh anyway, so that's that's how the Straussian types try to take over Kant. Like he doesn't really mean it, right?

But but related to evolutionary ethics as well or theories where it's emergent, you know, that we need these ideas to hold, you know, communities together and for survival and whatnot. But that's that's uh you know, that's a classic uh you know, um genetic fallacy of some kind like just because it emerged in some way or if you have that you're not describing whether or not it's true. Yeah. Yeah, and Alvin Plantinga does some good work on that in his what is it warranted Christian belief? I think he's got the Marx Freud objection where he's pointing that out and analyzing it.

But I think the thing that you and I really what our work, which is so beloved in Kant studies Uh that's a sarcasm by the way. We're deeply hated. Um I mean, there's there's really a sense in which, you know, there's our work has stored stirred up a hornet's nest. It's definitely required a lot of people to weigh in and often times there's it's quite divisive, but you I mean, as another side note, one of the outcomes of persistence of the sacred and our work on Kant was the realization that a lot of the readers and receivers of these historic figures Uh-huh. have a kind of religious relationship with them. Yeah.

That if you fundamentally show that they're wrong in their reading or that they're misguided in some way, they do come out uh with some uh you know, viciousness. Yeah. And um and um you know, I think we discovered that in in in Kant studies, but then we saw it happening in other fields as well. Um That is these I don't know what you'd call them. We revisionist readers of of these figures really have religious motivations for why they're reading them the way they are. Yeah.

Yeah, well, and and our our reading, you know, not that we have to go deep into the weeds on it, but the fact of the matter is you mentioned that Kant wrote a text later in life, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, that most people just dismissed, you know, they thought it's incoherent, it doesn't fit with Kant's philosophy. You mentioned that he's dribbling on his philosopher's cloak. He's just an old senile man who's worried about the fact that he's going to die and he destroyed Christianity, right? Like that's kind of like Right. Um the old man was wrong, right?

Like that's the But you and I were like, well, we're just going to treat this text with the level of seriousness that Kant seemed to treat it with when he wrote it and try to make it coherent. And when we did, the result was a Kant that really it's hard to just treat him like he's just some you know, either senile old guy or some guy who really doesn't think there's any importance to to faith or religion or Christianity or anything like that. Yeah, I mean, we we did stir up a hornet's nest, but we also stirred up some real interest from other scholars who said you guys said what we were struggling to utter here and that's the Kant I read as well.

Yeah, so now there's a king of the hill sort of thing going on, who who can get the right interpretation, but you know, but putting that to one side, you know, there's definitely a robust sort of treatment of Kant's religious thought going on, which we were I mean, we weren't the originators of that, obviously. There'd been other people who I mean, you did the whole edited volume with Palmquist before this that was talking about that burgeoning read. But I don't want to get too far into the weeds with Kant's. Um I mean, obviously things went awry, right? So um and I'd just be curious, you know, like at some point it did begin to unravel, right?

There's no doubt that even though these guys had religious bends and you know, the folks after Kant too, right? Hegel. Hodgson is absolutely right. I mean, Hegel is very clearly, even though he's like a pantheist or a panentheist, like God is indispensable in Hegel's thought. And guys like, you know, F. W. J. Schelling, right? These other sort of guys after them are really critical, but at some point it does start to unravel and a certain you know, movement really begins to emerge not in modernity, but sort of on these back end of it where people are like, you know, what if we could get rid of the God thing, right?

So like how would you I know how I diagnose it, but I'd be curious like how do you diagnose that sort of end of the era where all of a sudden the skids are greased. Yes. And we end up here, right? And obviously we've talked about how the narrative gets here. That's the Straussian sort of narrative. But if we're getting rid of Strauss and we're saying that's rubbish, which it is rubbish, these guys were deeply sort of philosophically rich, theologically rich. I mean, God was essential to their thinking. They weren't anti-Christianity. They were unconventional, probably a lot of them were heretical, whatever, but like they were all sort of deeply, you know, rooted in the importance of God and religion and so on.

But at some point you did hit this point where it drops off Yeah. into into into the abyss, right? And and and so how would you diagnose the unraveling? Typically the way I try to frame it and I think this is among the simplest ways I've heard it and I think pretty explanatory is that, you know, all of our thinking is driven towards uh better and better metaphysical paradigms for understanding reality, but it's driven by logic and ethics. Okay. And these are fundamental philosophical fields. Mhm. Analytic logic and, you know, what you might I I mean, let's call it the moral law. Right. You know, freedom in the moral law and that sort of thing. who's a fan of Immanuel Kant.

Well, there's there's some basic sort of things that have driven Western philosophy to the heights that it has achieved. And in the 19th century, we see both of those two pillars of the quest for truth, beauty, and goodness undermined. I think we first see it in in the movements towards understanding the very mind of God to be synthetic. And that is somehow A equals not A is a fundamental ingredient of how truth comes into being. And this is I I guess, you know, I look at a an apologist who isn't often times right on philosophers, but on this one I think he is. A guy named Francis Schaeffer talked about Hegel. Dusting off the old Francis Schaeffer. I am. I am.

Because there's I mean, he's known for this line of despair, and it really is the breaking the back of analytic truth and replacing it with synthetic truth. Now, that alone isn't enough to cause the problems that we see in the 20th and 21st centuries. Um Because there is some truth to synthesis. All right. So, let me pause you there. I presume, it's been a long time since I read Francis Schaeffer, but I'm presuming he probably pegs that with Hegel. Right. That he's So, Hegel's dialectic Kant discovers synthesis in a sense based in intuition and concepts being united in the act of synthesis.

But Hegel takes it to be fundamental to God's self-understanding, positing the world and coming to a self-understanding in and through the synthesis that happens in the human mind. So, let me translate this for some folks again, you know, this is you know, so when when Chris is here talking about synthetic, right, he's talking about Kant's synthetic notion is somehow that the the mind has certain innate ideas in it. Right. And then it encounters the world, and then those two things merge, and that's that's where we get, you know, that's where we get understanding. Right. Some sort of direct, you know, what we presume is sense experience, right? So, if you're going with a standard empiricist stuff, right? Like that's just the encountering of the world.

Yes. Is is, you know, and but for Kant it's synthetic, right? The mind meeting whatever it's meeting. Yes. That's the contribution, synthetic a priori contributions of the mind that make an appearance to us a viable thing. That's consciousness. Right. And then Hegel is known for his dialectic, which is the idea that there is a thesis, right? Some stated something. Right. An an antithesis, right? An opposite, you know, an opposition at least. And then a synthesis that moves things forward where it's neither those two, but you know, it gets a third third sort of thing.

And you know, I know that I don't know if this is what Schaeffer is citing, but certainly when Hegel starts to give a creation narrative, which incidentally what I'm about to describe is found in G.E. Lessing before Hegel. But but Lessing wrote a little essay where he talks about this. But Hegel basically thinks of the world as like you have God who is the absolute, right? And then, you know, sort of you have the absolute nothingness, right? Like this sort of being and non-being, and then the synthesis is where you get finitude. So, you go from like absoluteness and not absoluteness, right? To like finitude, right? Right. Finitude to the world as we experience it. Right. And this is how Hegel understands the world.

I said he's a pantheist or a panentheist. Panentheist is a newer term. So, in his day he was called a pantheist. But the idea is like that the world itself is sort of this unfolding of God, like which is not entirely contrary to the ancient world, right? The ancient world did have this notion that somehow the world is an articulation of God, right? Like that God is somehow expressing all the different dynamics of his wisdom and his being and his power through all the different stuff, right? Right. And Hegel's playing on that, right? And it's the unfolding of God's own being and self-realization. So, that's what Absolutely. Schaeffer doesn't like that, huh?

Yeah, prior to that, you know, the way he tells the story, analytic thought was all about understanding the world, breaking it down to its composite parts, and better understanding the whole. But after Hegel, something different's happening. We think we've unlocked the hidden mysteries of God's understanding of the God-world-man relationship. Mhm. And that is what he calls a line of despair where the old rationality of the Greeks is overcome by a new synthetic rationality that is distinctive to the 19th century. The other movement, and this is on the ethics side of it, is the coming of Friedrich Nietzsche. Mhm.

And Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil overcoming the very notion of any separation between good and evil for people who are of, say, a higher historical, you know, the end of the earth as he calls them, the superman. Mhm. And it's the breaking the back of analytical logic with a new synthetic logic coupled with the breaking the back of the moral law with the emergence of the superman who creates his own laws through the will of, you know, act of the will to power, conscious act of the will to power, that we get this kind of double piston that used to drive our collective understanding of how we formulate a worldview in the first place.

And both of those two things are taken in a sense off the table. Mhm. And um this promotes the individual, it promotes the notion that we're conscious manifestations of the will to power, and a lot happens that then transforms itself in the 21st century to what we now call postmodern philosophy, rooted in this this this twin thing that's happening in the 19th century. Mhm. Um It doesn't mean that people wholesale have given up on these things. In fact, lots of people hold to the importance of logic and the importance of ethics, but now we're getting separation on these issues, you know, moral relativity, um you know, atomistic individualism based upon the individual is the one who makes discerns where meaning is to be found, what things, you know, what things mean, and and how we can now reorganize nature through an act of will.

Yeah. Um And so, that's, you know, if I'm trying to describe what's what, you know, the origins of what went wrong, and a lot goes wrong in the 19th century, and these are people who fancy themselves as somehow related to Kant Mhm. and yet transcending him fundamentally. Yeah. So, let me give you my diagnosis, see whether or not you see overlap or dissonance between you and me on this part. Um and then I want to ask you a question specifically about the Enlightenment. So, um well, modernity generally, but um So, anybody who has tracked my work, uh and I don't know how much you track my work, Chris. I don't, you know, you never write anymore. You don't call. Yeah, it's been complicated these years.

Anyway, uh but so, they know that, you know, one of the ways that I think is is how I think, you know, the lens by which I I look at the history of ideas that I think is really, really useful, is the entire idea that in some ways uh the history of ideas is really the story of two roads. The road of realism and the road of nominalism. And folks who listen to this uh know what I mean by those terms, and obviously you do as well, right? The idea that the mind looks out into the world, we see, you know, we see categories, we see genera, species, we see groups, we see numbers, we see logic, all this sort of stuff.

So, the question, right? The question of realism is when the mind does that, is it doing that because those things are real, right? And it's abstracting out of reality um those structures that are there and informative, uh or are they mental fictions, right? Are they mere names, hence nominalism from nomen for name, uh that the mind projects on reality to organize a reality and give it structure that isn't really there. And and basically the way I think is a really useful way of looking at the history of ideas is exactly that, right? That it's the story of these two different roads. So, very early on in the Presocratics, you have people testing these different roads.

You have folks like the Pythagoreans who are noticing like, I think there's this immaterial stuff. It's called math, right? That's just sort of like an important feature of reality. And then you've got atomists who are like, no, I think it's just like hard bits of matter like colliding and coalescing and all this sort of stuff. And eventually you have realism win the day, right? With people like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Stoics and Neoplatonists. The Jews and the Christians get in on this, right? Alexandrian Jews end up embracing realism. The early Christians, east and west, embrace realism. And now like the the pagan world and the Christian world and all that is sort of converging into this burgeoning trajectory of realism, right?

That this is the nature of reality. Primary is mind, right? Specifically the divine mind. And then the structures of reality that follow from that. And then, you know, and that really what we as images of God, or if you were a Stoic divine sparks or whatever it is, you know, are capable of discerning that, and that's discerning what those structures are and figuring out our place in that is what offers us a way forward in terms of knowing how we ought to live, right? And and and so, that's sort of like the realist trajectory. And then nominalism enters in, and, you know, it first enters in in the late medieval period.

People like William of Ockham who are really sort of initially pietistic about it, right? They they want to say in some ways like, I don't like saying there's certain things God can't do, right? He can't make square circles, which was a a quintessential, you know, realist sort of thing to say like, "Yeah, you you know, logic, structures of reason, are structures of reality, reflective of the divine mind." But nominalists like Occam didn't like that, so they want to say, "Well, those are just sort of our structures. They're the imposed structures that God's given to us, but they're not sort of like innate in reality." But, you know, nominalism really becomes a driving force in modernity.

The empiricists, we always refer to them as empiricists, but they're really nominalists first. Mhm. People like John Locke, you know, the whole opening of his, you know, new essays in human understanding, or sorry, that was Leibniz. His essays on human understanding. Uh Leibniz did the new essays. Uh but uh you know, Locke's essays on human understanding is really an attack on innate ideas and really Plato, right? It's an attack on realism. And so, empiricism is uh and I had said, you know, early on in this this discussion that it's first and foremost attack on Aristotelian philosophy, not on religion. And that's true, right? Aristotle had won the day in the Latin medievals. And uh they all recognize that.

So, they're they're really sort of attacking those metaphysics more so than anything about the religion. And so, the the way I see it is I see a certain flourishing of morality, of politics, of metaphysics, of human understanding and civilization in the culmination of realism. And in many ways, I really sort of identify the underlying rot that gives way to post-modernity as nominalism itself. And so, when I look at it, I think, you know, empiricism is the let's give nominalism a try. And I say that not sort of like hyperbolically, literally, the mechanical philosophy was a let's dust off the atomism of the Greeks and give it another whirl. So, it really was that sort of like nominalist materialism.

And and I think Hume is the the right culmination of that. That like once you start to go this route, you end up alienated from the world. You're you start to have trouble justifying basic things like causality. And even though I recognize that what somebody like Immanuel Kant does with the turn to the subject is meant to remedy, you know, the problem, I really do think, you know, Kant in some ways perpetuates the problem or at least embodies the fact that you're what you're left with is like a certain amount of agnosticism, right? That there really is this, well, we're sort of left with what reason, you know, like reason philosophy almost becomes a form of psychology more so than metaphysics.

And even though people like Hegel tried to reintroduce metaphysics with his pantheism, pretty quickly, you know, the sort of empiricist impulse here of the underlying nominalism of the age says, "Well, yeah, but we don't really have access to the God stuff. We still only have like the human stuff and the material stuff. So, now Hegel gives way to people like Karl Marx, where it's like, you know, you know, well, first Feuerbach, right? That we're really play-acting that this is about God. Let's be honest, this is about man projecting, you know, and then Karl Marx, the dialectic is is really just about politics. And in some ways, I see Marx as sort of the leftist version of this and Nietzsche as the right, right?

You it either devolves into a sort of superman Nazism, right? Or a leftist Marxism, right? And and so, in some ways, what I see is I see the destruction of, you know, words, right? And the reduction of words not from objective definitions like in Plato, but reducing them to subjective things, which then means they can be controlled and manipulated. Yes. Uh you know, that the political sphere is not about transcendent good and bad, right? It's about here and now gritty good and bad, which is not really about morality per se, but it's about utility, right? It's about what we can get, you know, in order to increase pleasure and decrease pain, right? Where morality becomes utilitarian in nature and so on.

And so, in some ways, I think Hume rightly nails the problem of nominalism. And everything else is sort of flailing to get out from under that problem, and it just keeps on collapsing down into it. Some point, this really is a struggle for power. This is a struggle for resources. This is a struggle for getting what we can here and now. And objective meaning, objective morality, you know, objective, you know, really anything other than, you know, what I objectively want for myself. Whatever object I want for myself is tends to be what it keeps on collapsing into.

And and the reason I bring that up as relevant here and now is that I see that divide, that realist nominalist divide as between all of the divides in culture, right? Like trans says like its first premise is gender is a social construct. That's an inherently nominalist premise. Like the premise is that all the sort of categories we use of male and female, you know, penis, vagina, right? Like those are just words imposed on a world that really is just a bunch of matter floating around. And if we hack it apart and reshape it and give it a new name, it is that thing, right? Right. And that's a nominalist worldview.

Whereas then the the man on the street who's going, "You know, I'm I'm pretty sure a man can't become a woman. And I'm I'm pretty sure that that hacked-up penis isn't a vagina. I think it's still a penis." Right? Like that's a realist instinct, right? He thinks the world just is a certain way and you can't just by force Right. make it another way. And um and in some ways, that's the divide where you have one group that, you know, the original oppressor is reality itself. And that's why we can manipulate it and remake it. And you know, we need to be the superman in this situation, somebody who realizes that realism is false, right?

The superman is the one who realizes that reality is whatever we call it and whatever structures we give to it. And therefore, let's just give it new structures, right? the realist is the one who's going, "You know, I think reality is our friend." Right? Like I I I think meaning is found by figuring out our place in it, submitting to it, and like, you know, moving through it in a way that leads to flourishing and so on. Yeah. So, that's how I would diagnose it. But I guess my question is I I have two questions for you. So, the first is given your sort of Schaefferian diagnosis that you gave, Yes. do you think that there is harmony or dissonance between that?

That's the one question. Yeah. You know, and then the second question is, as someone who has lived and breathed Kant for as long as you have, Yeah. uh do you see, I mean, I obviously see modernity and and the Enlightenment in a negative way. I do. I think it's a step backwards and I think uh the fruit of that tree is shown by where we are right now. Yeah. Um and so, but I guess my question for you would be, would you defend the modern turn? Cuz and and I'm not saying defend it in the sense of like these guys aren't atheists, agnostics. But do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing, you know, step forward, step backwards, whatever.

So, those are my two questions. So, take it away. Wow, Nathan, that's a tour de force and a very You you know that your account on the realist nominalist thing has been influential on me. I think you're I think you're right. Mhm. The way I think of uh our approaches and why they're they appear to be different Mhm. is that the big questions of life, the way I understand what I call the tree of philosophy, can be approached ontologically or can be approached epistemologically. Mhm. And I I choose to approach it epistemologically, probably a son of the Enlightenment. Yeah. You're not a son of the Enlightenment.

You're maybe more medieval or early church or, you know, I'm And so, the ontological move of understanding the realism-nominalism piece as the lens through which to see the problem with our worldview these days, um makes a ton of sense to me. Right. Um and I'm so, I guess in answer to your first question, I do see them as compatible. Where they differ is when I'm looking at the question of knowledge in the Kantian turn, I see that um that that can be done critically and well, and critical in the sense of the Kant's understanding of critical, where you take the truths in both positions to find a higher order position, articulate that analytically, and feel like you've made progress in your understanding of the world.

Um I see that as kind of what happens in the history of ideas. Um And so, with Kant's uh turn to epistemology, really is you know, one of the things I think you and I discovered with Kant is that the best reading of Kant is to hold on the ontology in favor of the epistemology until a full excavation of reason is done. Mhm. And when you do that, you see that Kant's rational faith starts to look strangely familiar to metaphysicians. Because he's under trying to do a transcendental analysis of what we must believe for moral hope. Mhm. Um and if you hold out long enough, you get a kind of understanding of rational faith that looks awfully amenable.

And the leap from rational to empirical faith isn't quite as far as we thought it was. It's not the Kierkegaardian sort of leap of faith in an irrational sense, but a very rational movement. If I can't see, Kant talks about, if I can't see any divergence from the prototype in a an empirical manifestation, ala Jesus, Mhm. then that's a reasonable kind of empirical faith to have. Um, so I do think there's renditions of Kant that are actually epistemically very reasonable to hold and um I'm not sure I'm all the way there with Kant even on that rendition, but but I do think something does go vitally wrong after Kant in the receivers of Kant epistemically speaking.

They give up on God, they give up on immortality, they give up on um, faith in the moral laws. I've stated previously logic and ethics become problematic in the 19th century in a in a way they hadn't been before that. And um, and so when I'm looking at the big questions, I'm I'm approaching it from that epistemic problem of logic and ethics. Without those things, we're not going to really be able to have a round table discussion that aims at truth. You know, a Socratic dialogue that actually has the hope of getting to truth, beauty, and goodness, you know. And so that's the way I'm approaching that same kind of problem.

But I'm very sympathetic to the metaphysical, you know, sort of ontological approach to the big questions where you where the realism piece, which has been so fruitful to Western intellectual history, has been systematically replaced by nominalism and that explains an awful lot of what we're seeing in this sort of crazy universe we're now living in in the 21st century America where all these things are reversed and flipped under head and what we take to be rather obvious um, we can reconstruct through our own creative means and come up with something just as good as reality. Yeah.

So, here's what I think is interesting as I listen to you is that I've always known from our early days of of working together and talking that we had differing dispositions on these sorts of things. Not necessarily overtly differing worldviews, but I always knew that I was more of a purist in metaphysics. And obviously, you know, you knew that about me as well, right? I was one of the rare people who goes around calling themselves a metaphysician, right? Do those exist anymore? I thought Kant got rid of all those guys. Yeah, that was exactly your disposition.

And I've also always known that I don't know that I would call you a pragmatist, but there always was something about you that was like, well, okay, let's work within Okay, this person has these presuppositions or they have this point. Let's work within that. And I've never been opposed to that, right? Obviously, I think like with Aquinas or even Gregory of Nyssa's you know, a great catechism, right? The idea of starting with what are the You you can't reason with an atheist the same way you could reason with a fellow theist, right? You know, they you have to deal with the the views that are there.

Um, and I've always known this that I'm more of a purist where I'm like, I want to know whether the entire worldview the metaphysics down to the foundations. I'm going to go in and I'm going to examine the foundations. Whereas you've always been a little more like, well, let's look at the house and working within this house, what's the best version of this? Now, I do think though and I'll be curious to see over time whether whether you'll be more and more persuaded to my side cuz I I dare say I think I've seen movement with you on this, which is that as we're getting down the road where we're no longer talking about gray in worldview. We're talking like cosmic differences. Yes.

Where like in this culture it's like people are looking at each other going we literally live on different planets. Like that it start All of a sudden it's it's starting to look more and more like maybe you have to go down to the foundations because because at least I would diagnose that is I think we've we've benefited from something that the Enlightenment generally, modernity generally, benefited from, which was the fumes of Christianity. So, even when people were like, yeah, let's cast off Christianity, we still thought, well, we can have a common sense discussion here. I mean, these people aren't crazy.

But in some ways like the boundary lines of the discussion were nicely constricted by the fact that we all grew out of this Judeo-Christian culture. And we didn't really ever sit across the way from the Marduk worshiper who's going to burn his children, you know, like the valley as a sacrifice to the pagan god. Like we were never really that far apart. But I think what you're seeing is the fumes are dissipating. And now the polarity is starting to emerge and it's almost like, wow. Maybe we can no longer have that good faith discussion and we do have to go down right to the foundations. I think you're you're you're almost certainly right.

I I don't want to give up quite yet, but but I do think that Your charity has known no bounds. Yeah, well, you know, I'm I'm maybe I'm an eternal optimist or something, but I I do see the fact that we're now talking past each other, Not you and me, but the not you and me, but the culture's talking past each other. We once upon a time had dignity, civility, basic, you know, things that we agreed upon in the Western intellectual tradition. But this type of skepticism that we're seeing is a little different than the skeptics of the Greek world. They're now calling everything a manifestation of the will to power and everything's on an equal plane and everyone is potentially your enemy.

And um and so we no longer have that kind of civility that we once did in how we see the other. Um, everyone's a political animal now. Everyone has some axes to grind. Um and you can no longer assume that you are common human beings questing after truth together. And that does put a real stress on the epistemic approach to the big questions of life. I have to admit because I can no longer have co-sojourners on this quest with me. I really have to smack them in the face with reality. Now, in ways that I could assume we would agree upon in in in the in days of old.

Um, and so that that's giving me a lot more charity and pause and and amenability to your view on the realism non nominalism aside of things because that really uh that that's that's a much stronger tool when you get to open discourse with people. It's no longer, let me give you another argument because you're seeing that as a power play. And now I just say let's look at reality and how's that working for you? No, I mean it it is true. I I do think it I think I do think there was a time and I I think you and I saw this.

Uh, there was a time when you and I can't even remember where we were standing and thinking back and I think we were listening to a talk by Harold Netland. And we were um, who's for anybody who doesn't know his area is religious pluralism. And I think we were sort of like snickering a little bit, you know, to our shame that we were snickering a little bit listening to some of these like dooms dayer Christian apologists who are like, what's coming is like a pure relativism, man. And we're like, what? Who Who really thinks that? I mean, this is some this is some straw man, you know, it would never get here.

And the funny thing is we were shown to be the ones who were naive cuz they did see what was coming down coming down the pipe and we didn't. We we thought it was all a good good faith intellectual discussion. And we didn't see where it would would end up. You know, guys like C.S. Lewis and and Schaeffer, you know, they had they had blind spots in their understanding of some of the big questions and but they were really acutely aware of where this could go and how how quickly it could go there.

And then a number of other, you know, thinking of the '80s, '90s, 2000s when Christian philosophy was flourishing, a number of these apologists were warning, this is not good if what we're seeing and and what you're going to see 30 years from now is going to be really bad. Yeah. And I remember there was a shift, right? You and I went from like going like, no, I think it's a good faith discussion. And that's where it seemed more like preference, right? Me being like, I think like a metaphysician, you're willing to work within the the boundary lines of whoever you're engaging.

But it seems like now I I have to say I I think the sifting out the separation happening in culture almost requires in order to have a coherent discussion, you have to go down to the foundations at this point cuz the divide is so so big. Yeah. Well, I I think you've convinced me of that over time and uh current events have convinced me that there's no amount of you know, discourse, arguments, and so forth. I I used to really appreciate the apologists who would go into the secular environments and stake these powerful analytic arguments, you know, like uh, you know, pillars or something into the ground so that we had the sort of social imaginaries as Charles Taylor talks about it to actually breathe and live and breathe a faith a Christian faith in the midst of that.

Um I'm not sure that's sufficient anymore. I think that era, it was about a 50-year era is kind of over now. The plethora of podcasts, not unlike this one and other things that people are listening to, the voices that are, you know, the the postmodern cacophony of voices is just too overwhelming to people. You really do need to get down to those basics again. So, this is I think where you've convinced me for sure. Yeah. So, last question is the one that I asked like modernity, right? The modern turn. Um, we're going to we're going to go back to basics, let reason have its say, all that sort of stuff. Step forward, step backwards, somewhere in between? How would you diagnose that? Wow.

Um you know, I guess I mean, my gut tells me it's a step forward. But then a step forward can sometimes be off a cliff. And so but I'm I'm I'm particularly thinking of you know social contract theory the the sort of founding documents of the United States of America separation of powers certain sort of what I would call instrumental or technical achievements that have proven themselves to be worthwhile over time and as a bastion for holding to traditional Western values you might say. There's some really good things that have happened there.

I think again what we're seeing in recent times is a shaking of these structures because now you have philosophical systems this nominalism you're talking about this will to power this dialectical materialism all out against those structures. As those are illegitimate in some way even though they have proven themselves time and again to be tried and true.

And so yes it's a mixed bag and the verdict is still out on whether or not America's going to be able to weather this and its structures are going to be able to weather this because there's some great wisdom that went into the enlightenment movement that made possible you know the government and democracy this sort of a democratic republic we have now but it's unclear if without the roots the realism the the metaphysical foundations being imbibed by good people you know and they're the majority of people whether or not those structures are sufficient to withstand what's coming. Yeah I think I think you're spot-on with that which is that I would say the naivete I mean we I spoke about our naivete 30 years ago.

I think you see the same sort of naivete in a lot of the founding principles. Which is that you know on the one hand they're doing separations of powers and those sorts of things that you're talking about. Um on the other hand where they left vulnerable was that none of them saw coming post-modernity. Right. Right and so there's this certain naivete that as long as the texts are clear right as long as the principles are there like obviously future generations will you know be able to navigate these things and that will hold.

Um now they recognized that you needed a moral you know society in order to do this but you know there really was there really was a sense in which the documents themselves left up for grabs the world view side of it. Right cuz on the one hand it tacitly presumes it mention of God of a creator things like that. Um but certain things like obviously natural law is clearly part of you know the founding documents. A natural view of rights is there where you have like what is it like uh where you have um you know the statement about you know the the people have more rights than are here enumerated and they retain those rights or you know statements like that that clearly indicate a natural view of rights you know endowed by their creator right this that's that's a natural view of rights.

And yet somehow you know in the early discussions about like could an atheist hold office right the answer was well I guess so right and and there was no recognition that if you leave the world view commitments up for grabs there's a certain naivete that says the documents and the principles will take care of the world view side and it's like well that's not true. Right and we're seeing that it's not true. That you really need you know the idea that somehow you would have a system of government that's based entirely on a natural view of rights but you could have somebody with a positivist view of rights that thinks they're just governmental inventions holding office and interpreting the documents in a judicial capacity is insane.

Right because you can't they can't be trusted right and so there's sort of this weird sense in which so much so many of the founding principles had a distrust in government but an odd trust in human reason. And and it's and and we're seeing the fruit of that. And so like I I do think you're right that that there's a lot of good fruit that comes out of modernity. But there's a lot of vulnerability because there's still this sort of a certain level of assumption you know naive assumption about you know about man and and reason and documents and language that doesn't anticipate the post-modern turn and leaves it vulnerable in a certain sense.

And this is where I would say obviously you know that in the narrative I just painted earlier that I would look at the modern turn is in some sense negative right the turn to toy with nominalism and so on. But I guess here's here's where I see that going and this is where the verdict is still out. I could see that narrative going to its logical conclusion and collapsing the whole thing. Right which is what you hinted at about I don't know. We could survive this.

I could also see it going to its logical conclusion and it's like a drug addict hitting rock bottom where they're like man reality doesn't play nice when you decide that reality is the enemy and we can manipulate it and and all of a sudden there's a turn back to how do we rediscover reality. And I actually am seeing signs of that. When I look at the the generation of folks who have walked away from religion many of them are sort of hitting the end of that road and realizing something is still lacking and then turning back to religion often times more traditional religion than they were raised in. And so I think you're seeing hints of that.

Right hints of this turning back from having stepped off a cliff right. Um the question is you know is the critical mass going to go with those folks or is it going to go with the folks who continue to war against reality? And I really don't know. Yeah I I don't know either but I totally agree with what you're saying here and I'm I'm I'm I'm trying to be cautiously optimistic and then I see You the eternal optimist are still optimist? I and I and I see well part of the sifting that's going on and that we're seeing in the academy is optimism right?

Schools are going down one of which I was teaching at went down but other schools are rising up with like-minded sort of metaphysical realists focused on you know the canonical canonical books of the Western intellectual tradition and you know biblical principles and you know some of the good founding elements of our nation recognizing lacunas but still seeing that that synthetic wedding if you will those of those things um can have a future and that maybe we ought to you know nostalgically return to those roots as our point of orientation um for getting back something that we used to call the American dream a hope in the future uh if you just work hard enough and uh believed you know in in in in human dignity

and God you know the the you know God's got a plan for your life and that it could all work work out well if you if you put the pieces together and face reality head-on. And so uh but I am uh I am vitally concerned that you know once you have let the demons loose as it were that they are very difficult to put back in into the cage as in the Western intellectual tradition coupled with this marriage to Christianity was successfully able to do that and you see people flocking to these places around the globe. These are what we call colonies.

That have gotten such a bad rap as but they're still dying to get to those places because there's something about them that is true good and beautiful. And um and yet uh they're being they're under assault full full scale assault right now and uh without without those things without the things that made those made made us great in the first place um I don't know if I can be as optimistic as I want to be on this thing. Well I suspect that maybe the we're we're getting to a point in history where the real bottles for how how uh truth and goodness and beauty rise above that is probably actually the early church when it was thrust into a pagan culture cuz I think we're pretty quickly getting back to that.

Yeah so Well that's you know I I have heard about the martyrs and the saints. I was hoping we'd never have to go there. But we do it does seem like there's some strange similarities with you know what Jesus is the the apostles the early Christians encountered and what we're starting to encounter once again here in the West. Yeah. Well on that note we'll we'll hope your eternal optimism proves to be right and and maybe we'll we'll end it there. Thanks for being with me Chris. Hey my pleasure and looking forward to you know chewing the fat on some of the other great stories of our past 25 years. Sounds good.

All right well on that note I'm Nathan Jacobson this is the Nathan Jacobson podcast. Hey everybody thanks for watching thanks for listening. If you haven't done so already please go ahead and follow subscribe hit like if that's an option on whatever you're listening to all that sort of stuff really helps us out here. So I greatly appreciate your support and until next time I'm Nathan Jacobson and this is the Nathan Jacob's podcast. Jacob's podcast.