Iain McGilchrist & Sharon Dirckx • Brain science, consciousness & God

if you ask people in this country do you follow a religion i think about 11 or 12 say yes but if you ask people do you think there's more to the cosmos than is contained within the reductionist materialist position about 95 of them say yes that is not a scientific statement there is nothing in any study that will get you to the conclusion that neurons create thoughts the imagination is the only chance we have to reach reality justin i think you're setting up a quite unnecessary and it's my brain hello and welcome to the third episode of the big conversation season four brought to you in partnership with john templeton foundation i'd love to know what you think of ian mcgillcrist and sharon dirich's dialogue by filling out a brief survey it's a multi-choice and really quick we've also got a bonus video for you of the great audience q a that followed straight after ian and sharon's conversation want to see it we'll send you the bonus video when you register for our newsletter plus you'll get updates and more bonus content from the big conversation for the survey and to sign up see the links with today's video and at our website thebigconversation.show let me introduce you both uh dr emma gilchrist is a leading psychiatrist a philosopher and author of the influential book the master and his emissary and the new two volume work the matter with things i've got one volume of it here so there you go this is the book everyone is talking about when it comes to psychology psychiatry the nature of things and the brain um just released and how long did you work on this for well it depends what you mean but i mean literally about 10 years i think wow okay so it's been a labor of love um i'm making my way through i don't confess to have read the whole of it yet but it's it's an it's an amazing book um sharon is a speaker author and adjunct lecturer at occur the oxford center for christian apologetics and has a background herself in neuroscience so it's a very appropriate person to be speaking within tonight she's also the author of am i just my brain i have bizarrely the spanish version here um but you can actually get this in english as well um so so that's an excellent book that gives you sharon's perspective on these issues that we're going to be talking about um and what we're going to be talking about tonight is the question is there a master behind our minds we're going to be talking about brain science consciousness and ultimately god as well well we'll get there eventually anyway um let's start with uh something of of your background first ian tell us how you came to be investigating and become so enthusiastic about the way our brains work what was the journey to that well um it started quite early because i was interested in philosophy and theology and went up to oxford to read that but it was advised by my examiners not to do it because it wasn't an honours degree and nowadays frisbee you can get an honorary degree in but you couldn't get an honest degree in philosophy in theology in oxford in those states so instead i i was interested in in literature and i studied that and i got a fellowship and one of the things that concerned me about the way people approach literature i wrote a book called against criticism in the end is that in taking one of these extraordinarily valuable creations that somebody in the past left to speak to us in in looking at it the way we did we destroyed all its most important qualities first of all if it's good it's unique and irreplaceable and unparaphrasable secondly it's um embodied we don't just experience it somehow through computation and thirdly the most important parts of it are implicit uh all the really valuable things that we care about can't be expressed directly without loss and therefore defiant really to language it's true of great art and of great religious sentiments i believe as well um and so i studied philosophers on the mind body problem because it seemed to me that in essence what we were doing was disembodying it and i found that they were just in a word too disembodied and so i went off to study medicine became a doctor specialized in the area of overlap between psychiatry and neurology um and one day i happened to go to a lecture by a colleague who was talking about the right hemisphere of the brain and in medical school we'd hardly ever heard about the right hemisphere everything important was done by the left hemisphere um that couldn't be more wrong by the way as you would know if you read any of my books but in fact all the really important stuff is is done by the right hemisphere can't speak anyway there were connections with my previous thinking because what i learned from from my colleague who'd spent 20 30 years at the bedside of people who had tumors strokes or whatever in the right hemisphere was that their world was utterly changed it had like having a left hemisphere stroke you can't use your hand often you lose speech but the world itself is comprehensible as it was but with the right hemisphere gone this is not the case and the various things that struck me was he i was told that the right hemisphere and this is true is good and understanding metaphor implicit meaning irony humor narratives myths the left hemisphere takes it all literally the right hemisphere is the one that understands uniqueness the left puts things in categories and says i've got it now pigeonholed and the right hemisphere is the one which understands um embodiment it has richer connections with the body than the left hemisphere quite literally and with the emotional part of our being which all needs to be present if we're to make any sense of our lives at all and your life's work in that sense has been about looking at the way in which the left hemisphere which was supposed to be subservient at some level to the right yes good at analyzing picking things apart but ultimately under the sway of the right hemisphere which had the big picture and saw things in you know as in their larger frame but that we as a society we've essentially did become a left hemisphere society uh just explain that and how that sort of worked is i mean you took a whole book to explain this but but in a nutshell what what's happened in our culture in the last few hundred years yes the first thing to say is how effectively the hemispheres are different i have to say something about that and then explain how that refers to the cultural history and uh to condense 20 years and many pages into a couple of sentences the for evolutionary reasons all creatures need to be able to do two things at the same time that are mutually incomposible as philosophers say one is to pay attention to a tiny detail in order to grab it the other is to look out for everything else that is going on so that while you're getting your lunch you don't become somebody else's and both of these kinds of attention are very very important one highly focused on the detail to manipulate it to get it to pick it up to use it and the other which is the right hemispheres tasks to hold the whole thing together with broad vigilant open uncommitted sustained attention now it may not strike you as it didn't immediately strike me how significant this matter of attention is since then i've had much to think about and to say about attention [Music] which i think is a deeply moral act because it changes the world and it also changes you so we are always in what we say we know we are encountering a world and it's not one that exists totally independent of us as they we didn't come into it at all but it's also not something we make up there's something there for us to encounter and that encounter involves being able to see the world with a kind of site that is underwritten by the right hemisphere if you become over concerned with grabbing getting manipulating tools and machines which are all preferentially dealt with by the left hemispheres and you don't see the big picture in which the sort of things that i want to know about and i guess you want to know about questions like who are we what are we doing here what is the world what is our relationship with it these are not easily answered and in the first of the two main books which i remembered the master and his emissary um i in the second half of the book i looked at the history of the west through the prism of what we knew about the hemispheres and saw that three times we'd started off in greece and in rome with a very beautiful symbiosis and synergy of what the left hemisphere gives and knows and what the right hemisphere gives and knows always with the right hemisphere taking under its aegis the left hemisphere it needs to be the master the emissary goes and does work for the mass it doesn't really understand the importance of it it does it it does computation then it brings the results back to the master but at the end of these civilizations they became more and more bureaucratic devitalized categorical rather than subtle and effectively the life the magic the imagination the spirit went out of the civilizations and they collapsed and i'm afraid that what i see very very vividly is in the last couple of hundred years and particularly acceleratingly in the last hundred and even more in the last thirty or forty that we are moving into this world in which things are atomistic static certain known black and white in their nature disembodied abstract categorical and really only representations of the reality that word representation is important because at first the world is present to us or even better presence is to us which is a locution used by philosophers after heidegger which i rather like the suggestion that there's an activity in that the world comes to our presence and the representation is literally an attempt to make it present after the fact when it is no longer present and that's what you have when you have a map a theory an abstraction and we live nowadays in the world of maps theories abstractions we don't seem to look out of the window and say the world's not at all like that but if we do that's what we'll see so that is in brief what i feel we're suffering from at the moment well we're going to delve into that and in all sorts of ways in the course of this conversation let me um come to you as well sharon give us a bit of your background because although you work in christian apologetics and theology now you started off really as you were telling us earlier in science and neuroscience specifically what was your engagement that what were you doing and what did you learn in the process about the nature of the brain and consciousness yes um thank you justin um so i my undergrad was in biochemistry and i went on to do a phd in in brain imaging and that's where i got to study well for my phd some of the methodology around functional mri i was studying in the late 90s when this new modality was really just getting going and people were really getting the hang of what it could or couldn't tell us and just explain that's when you're scanning the brain essentially yes it's a way of looking inside the human brain without cutting into it and that's why magnetic resonance imaging and other subsequent imaging techniques have really revolutionized neuroscience and how we can study because prior to that people were limited to postmortem studies and disease state studies in people that had were so desperate that they would you know be involved and be a research subject but but with the advent of brain imaging we could study healthy volunteers and be looking at healthy brains as well as disease states and so i i studied methodology for my phd and then i went on to do a post-doc at the medical college of wisconsin actually studying cocaine addiction so it's interesting that we're here discussing consciousness tonight this was looking at essentially an altered state of consciousness in in addicts this is an ethically approved very rigorous ethically approved process to to even begin a study like this in a very well established laboratory and so we were looking at the areas of the networks in their brain involved in reward and addiction and that sort of thing and i was you know working alongside people that were looking at all sorts of other things as well and by the time you were doing this you were a christian um what to what part did that play in this did because there are of course plenty of people who know plenty about the brain and its activity that the daniel denitz and the sam harris's and so on who say well now we can see the way the brain works we can assume that it's all a material process going on when we see the bits flash up in our brain when we're having this experience or that experience that explains the experience what's your perspective on that yes my perspective on that is that we need to be very clear on what the science tells us and where we make a leap and start to make a philosophical and worldview statement that the science doesn't uh get you to so the science gets us to connection um there is a connection between the mind and the brain very clearly um that we see both in the development and you know the unborn and in sort of child development also there's a clear connection in degenerative disease states and what you're seeing going on mentally and of course just in a healthy volunteer if you put them in an mri scanner and give them a task to do you will see networks lighting up that correspond to that use of their uh their mind and so clearly mind and brain are connected that is where the science gets us to but the science doesn't say anything about the nature of that connection um and that is where people uh move into a world view perspective on it you know you might see the the the front page of um scientific american in 2017 had uh had a headline about um looking at brain networks and how neurons create thoughts now that is not a scientific statement there is nothing in any study that will get you to the conclusion that neurons create thoughts that's a worldview perspective and we need to be really clear on when when we make that leap and where suddenly we've moved out of the realm of science scientific methodology and inference into world view and philosophy would you like to comment on that aim because i know that from the outset there's i think there's a certain amount of shared ground between you and sharon here that you you think there has been far too much of a reductionistic approach to the mind consciousness and so on the idea that well if we can see the way it works physically we've explained we have a completely physical explanation for this what's your perspective on it well i mean i'll probably show you because you know we need to get to the meat of it but the the difficulties in interpreting these scans actually what is going on it's not always what you think it might be inhibitory there may be other areas that are important so i think you know there's a problem about that kind of way of understanding it but certainly i i wouldn't um accept from a philosophical point of view that just because we can see a parallel between the brain and consciousness that the brain makes consciousness there are logically three possible relationships between them one the one that is favored by modern science seems to be the least likely which is that the brain gives rise to consciousness emits it another alternative is that it transmits it in the way that a receiver would take in consciousness and produce a like your radio set produces a program but it's not not out of the set and the third which is the one that i um adopt when we may come on to that is permit in other words the brain permits a certain element of consciousness to be expressed and that's quite important because often things only come into being by being restricted or sculpted william james makes this wonderful remark that it's only because of the vocal cords inhibiting the outflow of area from his lungs that he has a personal voice and it may be that the brain as it has been thought by some other people to be is a sort of filtering uh device which allows aspects of consciousness which are my consciousness to become apparent but in any case i certainly don't think there's much going for the idea that if matter is and it's a big if if matter really has no consciousness in it then you can't make the step from that to consciousness many philosophers have tried nobody has sex well one of the first big conversations i had on this was with daniel bennett opposite keith ward discussing these kinds of issues daniel dennett as i'm sure you're familiar is you know takes this view that actually it is a purely material phenomenon and that essentially consciousness arises out of very complex chemical physical interactions um why you know and his reasoning i would assume would go along the lines of well we don't have any evidence that anything else is going on than physical stuff because that's what we see when we measure it and look at it and do the mri scans why would we assume that there is some other thing we call consciousness coming in from the outside either being transmitted or permitted what's your perspective on that well it's a very basic and well-known point that not everything that matters is matter and is measurable um love where do you measure that how do you do it the meaning of music where in what lab is he going to find that does he deny that music has meaning i don't know um but i think his position is wholly incoherent he says that consciousness is an illusion but i would point out that for it to be an illusion there must be a consciousness to be eluded and so it's one of the most um remarkable uh statements by an obviously rather intelligent man and to that extent though a lot of people i think assume that that is the de facto position that exists um because it has been widely spread and it is one of the best known ones um and yet i see interestingly people coming alongside you who aren't just necessarily from a religious perspective i saw philip pullman you know well-known atheist author who's incredibly enthusiastic about your work and has you know endorsed uh the master in his emissary is there a sort of do you find that people are kind of moving away from that naturalist reductionist view of the mind other people even if they're not necessarily religious willing to say no there must be more than just a material explanation yes i i think there are there are and in a way the word religion is an impediment to this happening more freely because most people who haven't been brought up in a religious tradition and have perhaps rather simplistic black and white ideas about what's involved it's a real turn off but um you know if you ask people in this country it's different in america i know but in this country are you do you follow a religion i think about 11 or 12 say yes but if you ask people do you think there's more to the cosmos than is contained within the reductionist materialist position about 95 percent of them say yes so it's that that i feel is there and everywhere i go i find that young people are very receptive to these ideas and as i think niels bohr was it or max planck said that science moves forward a funeral by female at a time yes yeah interesting um sharon anything to add to that before we move on to some of the the other issues that we're going to explore tonight are you sensing that the ground is shifting people are becoming less willing to just say yes it's all a purely material phenomenon well i think that the the reductive materialist position will always be there and so we need to have you know responses to that ready to hand and there are different expressions of it um daniel dennis is one but um you know the view that the mind simply is the brain is is another way of of expressing it and of course we we can point to um you know what's known as philosophically qualia that there are all kinds of qualitative qualitative experiences that we have in life that actually are impossible to describe physically uh if i were to ask you to describe to be the smell of coffee in physical terms you would be at a loss as for how to describe it the chemical structure of caffeine wouldn't be enough doesn't get you to the smell of coffee and so the all of these kind of qualia that in life and not least the quality of what it is to be you there is something that it is to be a human being that um actually nobody else even a scientist with the highest most highly developed technology can't really access the inner reality that it is to be you and that's really what the conversation and and do you sense then that people are opening up to that perspective i feel like i've heard a lot about the daniel bennett sort of materialist perspective i feel like there are a lot of people even in the non-religious sort of sphere are sort of going in other directions we hear about pan-psychism and other sorts of ways of thinking about consciousness exactly that was the next thought in my head that um actually the the view that everything is conscious is a way that people are using to solve what's known as the hard problem of consciousness if we take the term coined by david chalmers that the hard problem being how do you get from non-conscious neurons to conscious human beings he turns he describes that as the hard problem and so rather than starting with the building blocks of matter atoms and molecules and trying to build a bridge to consciousness pan psychists and others of other views would say look we're starting in the wrong place let's start with consciousness and make that fundamental and primary and build a bridge back to the building blocks of the brain and that's essentially uh um panseikin's pancychism is an increasingly popular view today that i'm coming across and spoke to philip golf on my shoulder a year or two ago and so obviously there are some critiques of that position there are many benefits and in that it puts consciousness back on the table um but there are some kind of critiques that i think kind of christian theism is more persuasive okay ultimately um but it's a helpful it's a helpful viewpoint in in hearing from people that are dissatisfied with a very reductionist approach which seeks to kind of segment human beings into just one dimension and just look at them through one lens what's your perspective on pan psyches and this idea that we start with consciousness and sort of build back from there i think that is right i think that um for what it's worth um i think that matter is a phase of consciousness so matters not prior to consciousness nothing is prior to consciousness this is a point of view that's been common to many traditions all around the world for thousands of years i think people often have insight into the brain without using scanners but the idea that um consciousness is a fundamental what's called an ontological primitive there's nothing behind it that it can come out of it is primary um seems to me to make a lot of sense but of course if they're phases of one another then matter is also a primary because it's part of consciousness give an analogy perhaps water um what is water well normally it's translucent it flows easily and it moves over your body and it finds its way through the landscape but it's also ice and ice doesn't look at all like water or behaved like it it's solid it stays where it's put on that given a push it's completely opaque and it'll break your head open if you hit it which is not the case with water and then of course there is steam in which water is suspended in the air and can be invisible so what you say well you know matter doesn't look like consciousness well no ice doesn't look like water steam doesn't look like water but there can be different manifestations of the same essence right different phenomenological expressions of the same essence that's that would be my view on that one it's also frequently given as a slightly poor analogy for the holy spirit and the the trinity but um i'll leave that aside the water ice and steam analogy um look fascinating stuff taking us into this sort of whole area of the mind and consciousness and so on i want to return though to to your central thesis ian which is that this hemispheric duality and the way in which the the right hemisphere has done sorry the left hemisphere has come to dominate the right hemisphere and in what ways are you seeing that come out in terms of the way people think about big issues around purpose around the cosmos around god as well which we'll come to it has has that sort of domination of the left hemisphere which wants to simply organize categorize and provide data is that what is in your view become the problem with people no longer feeling like they can believe in spirituality or ultimate purpose or even that you know music has its own intrinsic beauty rather than simply being the thing that hits our ears and stimulates neurons and so on well there are a number of ways in which i think it's it renders it very hard to understand what people mean when they talk about spirituality or religion and one is that it's it's very hard to make explicit in language but that doesn't mean it's not real as uh niels bohr said about physics modern physics it can only be expressed using the language of poetry but it doesn't mean it's not real he made the explicit connection with religion that's one thing that happens another is that the left hemisphere starting with details and building up sees everything as mechanical in the way it would make it by putting this together with that that's what the left hand this is for it's our the bit of us that enables us to make things make tools and manipulate the the the world around us whereas the right hand is able to see a hole and very often in fact i would say everywhere in the cosmos you don't just arrive at something by finding out the parts it's made of because you can't know the parts until you know what sort of holes it can go to make the very fact that certain things that look when taken out of context very basic and simple can be very highly important parts of a whole of something else shows that this process is creative and needs to be seen in both directions um the left hemisphere is not happy with ambivalences with things that can't be specified in black and white because it's the one that needs to go i'm going to grab it it's a rabbit or whatever it is whereas um the the right hemisphere is content with the idea that it has to be able to keep together two things both of which seem to be true and the last part of that book of that volume the beginning i have a chapter on the coincidence of opposites which i think is incredibly important explain what well it's effectively the idea that um if you further and further in a certain direction you don't get further and further away from what you thought you were doing because you come round to it in the end it's a very old point that the extremes in politics have more in common than the parts in the middle you know there's a fascist left a fascist right and there are people in the middle who don't want to be either i actually believe there are militant fundamentalist atheists and militant fundamentalist christians and i put them in a box together and good luck but the people um that i respect and i think there are enormous numbers of these are people who who are not entirely certain if they were certain it wouldn't be faith only faith is a word which requires a disposition towards something not um accepting a bunch of propositions it's not a matter of a logical argument it's a matter of disposing your consciousness in such a way towards the world that it will allow you to experience certain things because we can easily by the way we attend we can rule things out and then we think well it's not there show me and i can't show you because you're not standing right right interesting you've obviously been engaging for a little while now with with ian's work on this what where where have you seen the connections with with your own work and the way in which ian talks about this right left hemisphere and the way it's come to change the way our culture thinks about things and interacts with them yeah i mean first of all i just i found ian's work enormously helpful and extraordinarily comprehensive and will be referring to it for many years to come and as i was reflecting on on it i see all kinds of um illuminations actually um some of them incredibly practical firstly um where you emphasize the importance of destruction and rest for the flourishing of the imagination and intuition and we are a society that has forgotten how to rest and so we are unable to awaken that side of our brain functioning another area uh caused me to think about a.i in the influence of our increasing interaction with algorithms which you could say is a distillation of the proficiencies of the left hemisphere and so what does that mean for us as human beings as we continue to interact increasingly with algorithms and our kind of life's direction or success in interview is is not decided on the base of intuition and embodiment but on algorithmic kind of programs and factors and then of course there's the broader discussion about a change of view and the perspective that is needed to change one's perspective requires us to be aware that there are factors that we hadn't considered before and if we have kind of shut down the part of our brain that is proficient in doing that then the the likelihood of us coming to any kind of change change of heart or perspective whether that is religious or anything political or you know relational then we are becoming less and less emotionally intelligent i think you're right we're actually interestingly becoming less cognitively intelligent but that's by the way but importantly we're also becoming less emotionally intelligent and these views are not just um reductive in the way that they try to account for everything by breaking it down into simple bits but are actively reductive of what a human being is so that i believe that in the explosive increase in the amount of time we now have to spend just within the last five years you can see accelerating the amount of our day that is spent interacting with machines algorithms because people are expensive algorithms are cheap but unfortunately they're also stupid and i say it's not artificial intelligence it's artificial stupidity it's modeling a sort of thing we would never never do and in the past something that would take you five minutes on the telephone can now literally take four hours on the net as sometimes these algorithms go into loops that you can't break out of but nobody's tested them properly oops something went wrong very helpful comment yeah anyway um i think it has this impact on us but importantly intuition and imagination are now um thought of as sort of second-class ways of coming into contact with reality perhaps leading us away into fantasy but as i say in that book and i'm constantly saying fantasy is one thing but imagination is the only chance we have to reach reality it's not a matter of putting fancy dress versions of the world in front of the world it's clearing all that away so that for the first time we can see reality as it is those of you who know the work of wordsworth and coleridge will know exactly what i'm talking about yeah orange thinking is given the work of you know tolkien and the lord of the rings that's a wonderful combination of kind of fantasy but that is pointing to a reality can i tell that little joke please yes apparently j.r.r tolkien was a professor of english at merton college in oxford and the other fellows got thoroughly fed up with um people being brought into dinner and warning on the great man and one day uh somebody brought in a guest who went up to tolkien said oh mr tolkien your works are so full of full of imagination and from behind a newspaper a grumpy math don was heard to snort imagination imagination made it all up wonderful because neatly points out the difference between just random creation and actually imagination which contacts the reality and brings it to us yes absolutely um i mean and that's the thing isn't it that the maths should serve the thing that really matters which is the imagination which is the the contact with the the the values the the the purpose the everything that the lord of the rings inspires in someone who who reads it now that's not to say maths can't inspire someone but at the same time certainly exactly but but there's a sense in which we've got to ask which thing is serving which i suppose in the end hey hope you're enjoying today's conversation i'd love to know how you respond please click the survey link with the video and tell us what you thought it's a multi-choice and really quick we've also got a bonus video for you of the great audience q a that followed straight after ian and sharon's conversation want to see it we'll send you the bonus video when you register for our newsletter plus you'll get updates and more bonus content from the big conversation again the sign up link and survey are with today's video and at our website thebigconversation.show i want us to move on to probably in a blunt way god because this is something you said in this latest book you've written you decided to tackle um ian the question of is there a divine source to what you have been you know so very well explaining in terms of the nature of mind um the brain and the way it engages the world you said this was the thing you were most worried about writing about because it's so difficult to get right it's such a divisive topic the hardest part of the book um okay in a nutshell can you can you tell us but what where where have you found yourself landing when it comes to the question of god and how do you would you even define that term in the first place when it comes to well it's the left hemisphere that asks me to define it and if i do if i do define it it will just say well it doesn't add up so right we have to get away from all definitions but i i know what you're asking me to do which is the summary summarize a lifetime and that chapter alone is a small book over 100 pages long and it was the hardest thing i've ever done in my life and many of my colleagues philosophers who read what i wrote said beg me not to include it because they said you know the philosophy is great but people will just dismiss you so far they haven't so that's on the good side but it seems to me quite wrong if i left that out that was really in some ways the most important thing i had to say about anything um and i knew before i started that any language was going to betray me you know the dao that is the real dao cannot be named that's the opening of the dao de jing for christians um uh saint augustine see comprehendes no nest dales if you understand god it's not god you've understood which actually makes an interesting parallel with richard feynman the quantum physicist who said if you understand quantum physics you don't understand quantum physics yeah so so that was the difficulty but you're asking me to say where i've landed over a lifetime i certainly feel strongly that there is something very powerful of ultimate importance of great beauty in and and the source of life and creativity which is behind this cosmos that is expressed in its richness complexity and responsiveness because i believe the cosmos is conscious and i believe in short but it sounds very odd to say it very boldly and cheaply and quickly but i think that it's perfectly coherent that the whole cosmos is conscious and i my view is that of a panentheist so pantheism is the belief that all things are god and that god is all things but panentheism uh is really importantly different that little syllable n in the middle means in so god is in all things and all things are in god but neither of these things exhausts god if you see what i mean say god is bigger greater than anything we can say or conceive but there is no divorce between god and any part of what we find ourselves experiencing very interesting um and thank you for condensing it into into a nutshell i know it's very difficult to do um okay where where do you land then when it comes to this and i think you've interacted with the kind of perspective that ian sketched out there um sharon both as a scientist and obviously as a christian how do you put together the mind the consciousness and the nature of god within all that well so i very much hope that neuroscience continues to flourish and develop and you know there will be enormous growth in understanding and elegant kind of uh you know theories as to uh you know the mind-brain relationship and i very much hope that is the case but where i kind of came to my book and in terms of how i think about it is that there will always be questions that science can't answer and was never intended to answer questions like the one that i had myself as a young child slightly bored on a sunday looking out the window on a rainy day suddenly the question comes to me why can i think why do i exist you know i don't know what i was attending to exactly at that moment but or maybe i was just distracted and my mind was on freewheel the clutch was in and i was just kind of coasting and but then questions bubble to the surface of my consciousness and so why can we think at all and that's a really important question to answer and of course if the forces of nature are not enough to explain um consciousness then maybe ultimate answers to that question lie beyond the forces of nature and in what kind of universe makes sense of the fact that here we are as conscious beings is it a one made of you know a non-conscious universe in which human beings are a an accidental occurrence um or is it one in which um a conscious being has been present right from the beginning and has kind of um brought into being the universe that we find ourselves in and and so that's the view that i hold um genesis 1 1 says in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and so before there was anything material there was god not just a god of soul being but the godhead the trinity father son and holy spirit in a kind of complete um mutually loving expressive community of conscious beings and from there the trinity created the material world now to that extent that's different to panentheism as as i understand it um and and would you i mean i'll leave you guys to sort of discuss this through yourselves at this point but but why for you does the christian theism help you to understand the cosmos more than perhaps a panentheistic view justin i think you're setting up a quite unnecessary and it's my left brain going to non-supported dichotomy go on um pananthism is in fact a very common belief by christian theologians moltmann for example go to greece or russia and look at the orthodox churches they see god in the whole of creation they see all the animals and the plants and even the stones so it's obviously true in in in other religions in the verdante it's true of buddhism in as much as it's a mistake to say there is no god in buddhism it's just they don't like that particular word but they have the idea of an all-supporting creative force which is in the cosmos and i think we don't have to uh pick and choose in fact what i'm trying to do is say that everything as indeed the poet william blake said all that lives is sacred but i think i'll go further and said all it is is sacred and we certainly need more emphasis on the sacred in this day and age and i think where i um a question that i that i had around pananthism is around the content the question of really where love and freedom come from in that world view um because if if consciousness and the the universe are very much in connection to each other and one helps the other into being then is the act of creation an act of necessity because it is the means by which the divine kind of develops and becomes itself in in relationship to the universe and also the universe are they slightly obligated to get to know the divine and and in doing so help it into being well yes i i think i i'd resist the idea of applying necessity to god under any circumstances i just think we're confusing categories and but i do think as you know from reading my my my books that um that the divine being the divine essence the ground of being that answers the question why is there anything rather than nothing um is in process and i know this is not always a view that christians are happy with but the idea is that god at least in an important aspect and because we can't know god fully it may not contradict the idea of god being eternally the same but my view is that god is manifesting in all kinds of ways and bringing into being uh the the what is implicit or only potential within him and that we and the cosmos and that divine being are in co-creation together what we are doing is unfolding aspects of the divine yeah and what i particularly like is another creation story which is that of the kabbalah or at least lurianic kabbalah which is um which goes like this in origin there was a being ends off i i don't speak hebrew but i'm told it means either nothing or the being as it were and that being being relational in essence wanted to create something to have a relationship with and the first act what was the first act of reigns of it was to withdraw it's called simtum and that's the moment when god withdraws or contracts was like kenosis in christianity to create a space in which there could be something that was not just part of god and in that space there were 12 vessels a little spark of fire came out of ain's off fell on the vessels and shattered them all that's shepherd kelly man the last is tikkun which means repair and in this tradition humanity is specially called to repair these vases and urns more beautiful than they were before they were broken and the way i understand that is by the japanese art of preparing ceramics with gold called kintsugi i think which which produces these very beautiful things now that is wonderful to me because it suggests this sort of dialogue between different aspects of creation which i also think goes on in the human mind so the right hemisphere has a little open attentiveness things come into being in that space from which as it were our thoughts have withdrawn so that something new can happen it then goes to the left hemisphere it says oh familiar i put it in this cathode of that one and it's much too big for that so the category has exploded and then the right hemisphere takes it back and makes it better than it was before i think in some ways i i agree with you in terms of on it once things are in being i love i actually love the language that you use about the way that we attend and things come into our consciousness and perhaps use the language of into being but i think there's a lot of resonance between what it means to get to know god as a christian and and the language that you're using that i find very beautiful i think my main question comes back to the very beginning um because if if i've heard you correctly in saying that the divine wanting to have a relation relationality with something and the universe has a role in that that that's i see that has been quite distinct from classical theism which says that um that god himself is already in complete and fulfilling relationship within the trinity and therefore the act of creation is an act of love it's not it's not one that require he doesn't require anything um but he created out of love and that's where love becomes a reality and becomes possible and that's also the foundation of why we're given freedom as human beings why potentially the angelic realm was given freedom and that's why we have evil um because that's the context in which love is possible and so i look to actually the trinity as a way to make sense of that i i wouldn't differ from [Music] anything very much in what you said at all i can i wasn't meaning to suggest that ainsof was compelled to do anything just by the very nature of being uh it was impossible for it to be without there being something more not outside but nonetheless independent this is where language breaks down i do very strongly believe that we have free will determinism is not supported by neuroscience or by anything at all that i know and certainly not supported by physics so um i think that is there it's very obvious that there are forces in the universe and in human experience that draw things um together and and we can think of that as love um and also that to separate them so i always see that the business of creation is a dance of individuation with union that we need both the forces that individuate and one way of thinking about it is as gerald manny hopkins thought the whole business of creation was to was the multiplicity of thisness of all these wonderful creatures i don't think one should negate that but it's perfectly accommodable in the idea that it is all one you know when oriental people say all is one i said that's that's very good and all is many you know that's the other thing and and really those are you know heraclitus said the same thing the greek sentence says you know all is all is many and the many are one i'd be interested in taking this to a quite a practical level because i know that you've you've critiqued the idea ian of an engineering god and a god who sort of stands outside of the creation in some sense and sort of just makes things happen that's too much of a sort of left praying god if you like that's a it's an apotheosis of the left hemisphere i'd like to have power over everything ah there's a god and that's me that that so you don't like that kind of god but is is the god you do have in mind a god that you can pray to a god that will act on your behalf what sort of a god in that sense uh because that was generally the god that a christian will believe in the god who to some extent is we are certainly in only exists because we are in the mind of god we you know god is the the foundation for everything the ground of all being as it were but nonetheless it's it is a god that we can speak to interact with um directs us and so on um what do you make of that well first of all i'm enormously respectful of any points of view in this area because none of us can know for certain anything um i feel that god speaks but not i don't in my bed hear words in my ear but i think that in daily life god speaks to me through the whole of the things that happen and sometimes i listen for words and i say why are you not saying anything and the next day things happen and i it reminds me of the story i should tell my patients because they say i want to get better without medication and often you can't for certain conditions and i'd say you know do you know the story about the man who had a pact with god that he would save him and this man you know went out swimming and got out of his depth and a boat came along to rescue him and he says okay i've got a pact with god and then the helicopter comes no no no it's fine i've got a pact with god and he drowns and he goes to heaven and says to god well you're a fine one you i thought we had a patch i sent a boat i said a helicopter that's my way of seeing it i don't i i'm amazed by people who actually have literal conversations with god but that's not what i believe and i also think that prayer is not about talking it's about listening it's opening one's ear and allowing the talking to come to you saint francis said when we pray we should pray for nothing mother teresa says nothing he actually repeats it so um and mother teresa said you know that um it's in silence when we listen that prayer takes place so much there ian um i just maybe i just come back to this idea of of power actually and i the thing that came to mind for me was that what's interesting about um the trinitarian god uh is that uh yes he is omnipotent and and also imminent and omniscient but he also is willing to step into human history if you like jesus being the ultimate embodiment of the divine yes and he humbles himself and he actually it involves an emptying of his some of his divine attributes in order to perform that rescue yes that you talk about and so for me i i don't think we have to um be afraid of the the notion that that we can combine transcendence with a god of humility and a god who is embodied and with us and present because that's what i've seen in the christian faith a god who has come to be with us and through his being embodied with us has somehow rescued us and made it possible for us to know him well i think the christian mythos a word i use without any um prejudice about whether it's true or not is the most powerful mythos about god that i can think of and the very idea of incarnation is quite wonderful and the idea of the resurrection of the body which sounds a child can tell you that can't be right is saying something very deep about the way in which flesh is taken up into the realm of the spirit and of the divine so i i am enormously indebted to and in the sense um i try to honor the christian tradition in which i was brought up is incredibly rich i also find things in in other religions and it would be odd if there weren't parallels because if we're on to a truth we're all on to some sort of truth i don't like the exclusivity of christianity where that exists i think that's a mistake um but yeah the business of personal intervention is a difficult one for me for all the obvious reasons that you must have heard a thousand times before the holocaust in brief and so many other instances of needless human suffering the way i make sense of them i mean rape and torture of children i mean what one has to say is that this is the price that is paid for a free creation i think that's the only sensible way of thinking about it that if we are to be free we are free to depart utterly from what god would intend but then see i um i see god as pretty much omnipresent um but i don't know that he's omnipotent because god can't actually make things that simply don't make sense make sense and that's what seems to me miracles are about now i'm not saying that miracles don't take place what i would say is for that i'd like to know more it's never happened to me i don't think it's ever happened you know in my experience at all um it's lovely that it happens to some people but it seems a little bit random i mean there are great ways in which if god's going to intervene they could intervene rather than helping you catch a train or whatever it is and and that's that's the difficulty i have with it it's not original i think almost everybody has this including christians huge kind of worms just before we go to the the you know the questions but do you want to make a brief response and then we'll start to take some some questions yes i do um yes i think that that um that miracles are a huge area i think that um firstly that you know you know that that we there can be the impression that we are being asked to sort of choose between laws of nature or a miracle but actually when we when we think about the laws of nature we're told but that they're actually probabilistic they're not fixed certainties which means i could throw this glass into the audience and it would follow a certain projectile but that doesn't mean someone can't reach their hand out and grab it and pull it to themselves and change the trajectory and so the laws of nature are probabilistic but they're not certainties secondly it's through the laws of nature that you recognize a miracle it's because you know you recognize the paranormal because you know what the normal is and you recognize the supernatural because you know what the natural is and those that wrote about the resurrection of jesus said it's actually because dead people don't get up and walk again that there's something extraordinary about this event that makes us attend to it and some very logical thinking people wrote about this one of whom was luke the physician and uh in one of his biography of the life of jesus writes not just about his life and morality and teachings but also his miracles and so for me as from a scientific background that just gave me pause the thought to think okay well some very wise and learned people don't seem to have a problem with with miracles and i guess the truth is that if god exists and has created everything that we see then he would be able to either work within the laws of nature or suspend them and not because he meddles with nature but because he is a god who cares and rescues so that's kind of how i think the conversation would take a long time i don't actually accept the probabilistic thing it's quite right that nothing is certain that everything's probabilistic but this doesn't mean it's a free-for-all and that somebody can make water spring out of a wall or something i mean so there is a but believe me i'm not dismissing i have to i have to say other people have experience that i have not had but if you ask me i have to base it on everything i know which is my experience what people have said to me and all the things i've done and read in my life and i find them a problematic area i must admit yeah but i'm not saying it couldn't happen and about the resurrection i feel something slightly different which is that the if in a way this mythos is so great and so true that it would almost be a flaw in if it were not to have literal truth as well as metaphorical truth but perhaps something for another day i believe that metaphorical truth is more important than literal truth literal truth is a subset of metaphorical truth in which the potential in the metaphor has been collapsed into an actuality in the way that a wave function is collapsed into a particle doesn't make the particle greater than the wave function or the field in fact the field is greater than the particle yes wow yes and i can see that you know there's a there's common ground even in this area i guess i would just say that if i'm in my last days of life do i want metaphorical truth or do i want literal truth am i going to live beyond the death of my body or not that i think that for me is when the crunch comes but we know from the fact that possibly our bodies are there after death that maybe the loss of one's body at death is not a literal truth but a metaphorical truth anyway we'll leave it there wow can we give him a round of applause to both thank you for watching today i'd love to know what you made of ian and sharon's conversation on whether there's a master behind our mind please click the survey link with the video and tell me what you thought it's multi-choice and really quick we've also got that bonus video for you of the great audience q a that followed straight after ian and sharon's conversation you've mentioned this problem of the lack of emotional intelligence both of you how are we going to go about regaining it do you want to see it well we'll send you the bonus video when you register for our newsletter plus you'll get updates and more bonus content from the big conversation the sign up and survey links are with today's show and at our website thebigconversation.show you

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 83,354

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, science, evidence, Bible, big conversation, Sharon Dirckx, Iain Mcgilchrist, Master and emissary, consciousness, brain, mind, Daniel Dennett, imagination, left brain, right brain, hemisphere, Master and his Emissary, Master, Emissary, Matter with Things, Am I Just my Brain, panentheism, panpsychism, trinity

Id: oiE2OcxZpRY

Length: 61min 39sec (3699 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022