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Robert Barron

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123

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2022-07-20

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2022-07-20

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1. “Love. God is love. And the purpose of my life is to become God's friend. And that means I'm more conformed to love. And so my life finds meaning in the measure that I become more on fire with the divine love. I'm like the burning bush is to become more and more radiant with the presence of God. That's what gives life meaning. Meaning is to live in a purposive relationship to a value, I would say. So there's all kinds of values, as I say, moral, aesthetic, intellectual values. And when I have a purposive relationship, so right now you and I, we have a purposive relationship to the value of, let's say, finding out the truth of things and we're speaking together to seek that. Well, good. What's the ultimate value? The value of values is God, the supreme good, right? The supremely knowable, the supremely intelligible is God. And so to be conformed to God is to have a fully meaningful life. And who's God? God is love.”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Pattern persists in the mind of God and then is used as the ground of the reembodiment of me. So it's not like I've just become a Platonic form. I'm going to be reembodied because the Christian hope is not for Platonic escape of soul from matter. That's never the Christian hope. It's for the resurrection of the body, we say. And you said, what a fantastic idea. Well, I don't know. I mean, this body is being reconstituted all the time according to this pattern, right? It's not the same matter. And so might there be another sort of higher material that is organized according to the same pattern, which has been remembered by God. So therefore, we can hang on to the language of body and soul, if you want, or matter and form. But it's the form remembered by God and then reconstituted in an embodied way by God that we call heaven, the heavenly state.”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Wrong word, as though it's like derivative. I mean, it's known by God. And so God can therefore re-embody me according to that pattern at a higher pitch, what we call the resurrected body. So Paul talks about a spiritual body. Body for sure. I mean, because he believes in the resurrection of Jesus. But it's not a body like ours from this world. It's a body at a higher pitch.”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “What survives after we die? So this body clearly dies and goes into the ground or it's burned up or it goes away, right? But what's preserved? And he says what Aristotle would have called the form, Polgham calls it the pattern. So the pattern that's organized, the matter that's made me up over all these years, that's obviously not the same as it was even, I mean, you would know how often does it all change, all your atoms and cells. And, you know, the little, you know, Bobby Barron, who was growing up in Birmingham, Michigan, I can have a picture of him. And then there's me. And I say, oh, that's the same person. Well, I mean, clearly not materially speaking, not at all. Completely different. There's a unity to whatever that pattern is by which all of that materiality has been kind of organized. So Polkaren says, I think that pattern is remembered by God. And remembers the”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “And that's stating it kind of in a more poetic way. Dino John Polkinghorn's work. Do you know that name? John Polkinghorn was a very interesting, it just died recently. He was a Cambridge University particle physicist, right? High, high-level scientist, who at midlife became an Anglican priest. He left his job at Cambridge and went to the seminary and became an Anglican priest, right? And then wrote, I think some of the best stuff on science and religion, because he really knew the science from the inside. Here's Polkhorn's account that I've always found persuasive. He said,”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Sure, I'm afraid of it because I don't know what's next. I mean, I can't know with the way I know you. So of course I'm afraid of it. And I think of it every day. That's true. My prayer life compels me. You know, we have the Hail Mary prayer. You pray the Rosary now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Now at the hour of our death. Amen. He prayed the whole rosary 50 times. You reminded yourself of your own death. But I do. I think about it because it's the ultimate limit. It's why it's beguiled every artist and writer and philosopher. It's the ultimate limit question. But yeah, sure. I'm afraid of it because it's the unknown. What do I think happens? I think I'm drawn into the deeper embrace of God's love.”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Right. I think that's the name of the game. But it's tricky. And if we don't have moral mentors and intellectual mentors, it becomes hard. And if you tell a kid, that's deadly to me. Just decide for yourself. Just off you go and you make your own choices. You got to have your choice has to be disciplined. Your desires got to be directed. Then you'll find your creative path. Everyone does it in its own way. But it's a guided choice. Your freedom is not sovereign. It's a guided freedom”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yeah, well, you're good at what you're doing right now, and you've dedicated that to bringing more light and illumination and joy to the world. It's true.”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I think I say find something you're good at because that's from God. It's a gift that God's given you. And then dedicate it to love. You know what I'm saying? So you're good at science or math or sports or whatever. Okay, I'm going to use that now for my aggrandizement, for my wealth, for my privileges, and to become famous. No, no, no. Find what you're good at, but now dedicate it to willing the good of the other. So use your science and use your mathematics and use your sports and use your musicianship to benefit the world, you know. That's how I would say them. So find what you're good at. That's from God.”

   2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “It is up to me to decide. God help us. No, it's the values that we intuit around us intellectual, moral, and aesthetic, the values. Think of the dog on the beach again. And that you get ordered to those by your education, by your family, by your religion. And that's beautiful. That makes you free. Now I can freely enter into this. So this sovereign self-determination business, that's not my game.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Freely speaking English to you. And you had the experience, and I've had it too, of learning a foreign language. And don't you feel unfree? You know, like when you're struggling with a language, when I was over in Paris doing my doctoral work, and I was okay with French, but my first time in a seminar, there's all these intelligent francophones around the table and they're all just, and I'm trying to say my little thing in my awkward French. And I felt unfree because I my desire wasn't directed, you know, but then over time, I became freer and freer speaker of French. I was ordered more to the good. That's a better understanding of freedom than sort of sovereign self-determination. But our country is now, I think, really in the grip of that. I decide. And that's why the Nietzschean thing comes to my mind of, you know, the will to power. I'm beyond good.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless. So modern freedom and the roots of that are people like William of Occam in the late Middle Ages. Freedom means I hover above the yes and the no. Do I do yes or no? And I'm the sovereign subject of that choice. And on no basis, I will say yes or no. I'm like Louis XIV or I'm like Stalin or something. But Aquinas wouldn't have recognized that as freedom. For him, it's, I got this desire, you know, in me. I've got this will. And it's pushing toward the good. But the trouble is I got so many attachments and I'm so stupid and I'm so conditioned by my sin that I can't achieve it. So I need to be disciplined in my desire so as to make that achievement possible and then effortless. So right now I'm”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Right. It's a beautiful struggle. Maybe the freedom is the most important, the sort of freedom run amok. Or, you know, in classical philosophy and theology, freedom is not self-determination. Freedom is the”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “It'll return it to the individual states. It's not going to solve the problem. The individual states will have to decide. I just heard yesterday, we were up in Sacramento, the bishops having our annual meeting. And so we got the word from the governor and the legislators that they're going to push for a constitutional amendment in California. So basically to make any attempt to limit abortion in any way just illegal. I think that's barbaric. So I stand radically opposed to that.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “To determine the meaning of one's own life, and I don't get the language exactly right, but and of the universe it gives this staggering scope to our freedom that we can determine the meaning. See, but that's repugnant to everything we've just talked about, that I'm inventing the meaning of my life and of the universe. And so Casey, though, was instructive in a way because it tips its hat toward the problem culturally is that I think in my freedom I can determine everything. My choice is all that matters. And I would say, no, your choice should be correlated to the order of the good. It's not sovereign. It doesn't reign sovereignly over being and it makes its own decisions. So I think Casey was terrible law and it was backing up Roe v. Wade, which is terrible law. I'm in favor of the overturning of those. I've spoken out many times.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Yeah, I mean, I'm against abortion. I'm pro-life. Especially as you see the unfolding of that person across a pregnancy. But at every stage, we recognize the beauty and the dignity of that human being. And so we stand opposed to the outright killing of the innocent. So that's the church's view. Again, reaching out always in love and understanding and compassion to those who are dealing, and believe me, every single pastor, every single priest understands that because we deal with people all the time who are in these painful situations. But that's the moral side of it. The legal side, I think Roe v. Wade was terribly decided. I think one of the worst expressions of American law since the Dred Scott decision. So I stand in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey. I think they were terrible. The Casey decision is instructive to me that it belongs to the nature of freedom, that decision says.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I think so. Yeah, which is why the church says in its official teaching it's the physical expression, let's say, of sexual passion between two men that is problematic, not their friendship, not their love for each other. So I think, yeah, we confirm the first.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “People like in the gay community and people in gay marriage and so on. So the church holds to the The intelligible structure, if you want, of human sexuality, and it reaches out to real human beings always in an attitude of invitation and love and so on. So it's somewhere in there that the church takes its stance.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “We love friendship and friendship is at the heart of things. And so nothing wrong with friendship between a man and a man, a woman and a woman. But go back to Aristotle Thomas Aquinas about natural finalities and intelligible forms, that there's a certain form to human being, which includes the physical and includes the sexual. It has a proper finality. And so we'd recognize that finality is twofold, both unitive and procreative. And so those two we recognize as the appropriate expression of human sexuality. So that's why the church holds to sex between a man and a woman within the context of marriage is the right expression. We reach out to everybody in love and in respect and deep understanding and seeking to understand their lives from the inside. So, I mean, all of that, I agree with the bridge building that we need to do to”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “I can name them for you, exactly what they are when it comes to religion. How do you know there's a God? So the God question. Secondly, why is there so much suffering in the world? Third question, why do you think your religion is the right religion? Fourth, why are you so mean to gay people? So those are the four things that I again and again come up when dealing with young people. I've told my brother bishops and priests about that. I said, structure your adult education programs or structure your youth outreach around those four questions.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Challenging. Yeah, maybe all the above, but more exciting. You know, I would say I like doing that. I was a teacher for a long time. I taught in the seminary for like 20 years. And so, you know, I've been engaging these questions for a long time. I'm a writer. I've written about 20 some books. And I write some at a popular level. I write some at a high academic level. And I like doing all that. So I love those ideas. I love those questions. Love engaging people. And I find my own experience, you do run into, of course, a lot of the vitriol and kind of just stupidity and all that online. And I get it. And religion is such a magnet for people's hostility for different reasons. So I get that. Like you read it. We talked about you have to wade through, you know, swamps of obscenity and everything. But I do it and I like it. And it's worthwhile because in that Reddit experience, so many of the issues that preoccupy young people.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, it's just using the media, especially the new media, social media, to get the gospel out. So I started, what, 20-some years ago just on a radio show in Chicago, 5.15 on Sunday morning. I had a 15-minute sermon show. And I asked the people in this parish I was at, I said, I need $50,000 to get on for 15 minutes at 515 on Sunday morning. And they all laughed when I proposed that, but they gave me the money. So that's how I got started, just doing a sermon on the radio. And then it branched off into video stuff and TV. And then I did a documentary. I went all over the world and it kind of told the story of Catholicism. So that's how we started. And now I'm using all the new media and social media. But what I really love, what we're doing today is something I really like, which is having a conversation outside of just the narrow Catholic world or even the narrow Christian world, but to look out to the wider culture. And who's talking about interesting things and how can the church engage?”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Okay, well, why do you want that? Well, because I want to bring more and more people into what I think is beautiful and true and good in the church. Well, how come you want that? Well, because a long time ago, I was kind of myself brought into that realm and find it very compelling. Yeah, but then why do you want that? Well, because ultimately I want to be, I want to be friends with God. Now, I've given you one example there, but any act of the will, it seems to me, has to be analyzed that way. The will seeks something. It seeks the good, right? By definition. But the good always nests like a Russian doll in a higher good, right? Which then nests in a still higher good until you come, this is Aquinas, to some, in this sense, uncaused cause, an uncaused final cause. There has to be some sum bonum, right? Some supreme good that you're looking for. And that's God, by the way. That's another thing.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Know what that triggers my mind? I wonder if you agree with this the modern sciences drew their strength from their narrowness. And what I mean there is they almost completely bracketed formal and final causality in the Aristotelian sense and they focused on efficient and material causality. And that gave, as I say, great strength, but from the narrowness of focus. But for Aristotle, the more important causes are the final and the formal causes. And so final causality there. What's drawing us? So for Aristotle, he'd look at someone like me and say, okay, you have an intelligible structure and that leads you to seek certain things for the perfection of that structure. Fair enough. That's right. So I seek the good. Right now I'm seeking the good of being with you. I said, yeah, I'll sit down with Lex Friedman and we'll talk about deep and important things. That's the good I sought this morning when I woke up. Now why am I seeking that? Well, for a higher...”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “I'd be somewhat sympathetic to Jordan Peterson's reading of Nietzsche there, namely it's not Nietzsche crowing from the mountaintop. Hey, God is dead. It's more of a lament. God is dead and we've killed them. And what will happen in the wake of that? And I think, yeah, much of the totalitarianism of the 20th century follows from that. That questioning of God and the dismissal of God from public life. So I would be sympathetic with that. When we're beyond good and evil, you know, and all that's left is the will to power, and then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes? When we forget ideas like equality and rights, which are grounded in God, why are we surprised that death camps follow? So I think there's a correlation there for sure.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Inequality. Now, in the classical world, yes, but heck, look at the 20th century. I mean, when God is excluded in a very systematic way, I think you saw the suspension of rights and the suspension of equality like mad. So no, I think it's very important that God is in the picture and that we're a nation under God. It matters enormously. That's not Pius boilerplate. That's at the rational foundations of our democracy”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Of a political philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. It's not equality. For them, it's our inequality that's really interesting. So Plato divides us into these three classes. And Aristotle says only a tiny little coterie of property males, of sufficient education should be in the political life. The rest should all be in private life, you know, and then some are suited for slavery. So, I mean, he divides us dramatically. Same with Cicero and so on. Where does this come from, this weird idea that we're all equal? I mean, how? We're not equal in beauty, not equal in strength. We're not equal in moral attainment. We're not equal in intelligence. So what is it? And I think the residue, especially comes through in that little word, that all men are created equal. That's our equality, that we're all equally children of God. So take God out of the picture. I think we are going to slide rapidly into an embrace.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah, I think so. The founders would be some kind of combination of deism, certainly Christianity is coming up through them. Enlightenment, rationalism, all in kind of a mix. So you're not going to find in our founding fathers simply Thomas Aquinas or like a purely classically Christian understanding. It's Christianity in those various expressions because actually I would see the enlightenment as a sort of child of Christianity. We could talk about that. But having said all that, yes, I think they are expressing at least the residue of a once deeply integrated Christian sense of things that our rights are not created by the government. They're not doled out by the government. They come from God. And the other thing I find really interesting is equality. Look in classical philosophy.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “No, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say more perfect. I'd say they're just different. It's like a symphony. And God's like a conductor and there's all kinds of different instruments in the orchestra. And he loves his debris through the psalms. I prayed the psalms this morning. I do every day in my office. Those are songs. They probably were literally sung most of them at one point. He breathes through apocalyptic. We're reading the book of Revelation now in the Easter season and it's wild and woolly book. It should be filmed by Spielberg or somebody today. And he speaks through the gospels. The Gospels correspond in genre to what I call ancient biography. That's the genre of the Gospels. It's wrong to call them like mythic or simply literary. They're like ancient biographies. You have the Pauline letters, which are about, you know, particular cities that Paul was visiting and particular people he knew. So you just got to be sensitive to the genre all the time.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “He inspired all of it, right? In Spirare. He's breathing through all of it. God is speaking through all of it. But he speaks in different voices. He uses different human instruments and he uses different genre and different types of language. So we have to be sensitive to that when we're interpreting the Bible.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Think the best way to get at the Bible is to think of it as a library, not a book. So it's a collection of books, right? from a wide variety of periods, different authors, different audiences, and different genre. So in the Bible, you find poetry, you find song, you find something like history, not in our sense, but something like history. You find gospel, which is own genre. You find epistolary literature like Paul. You find apocalyptic. There's all this in the Bible. So is the Bible literally the Word of God? It's like saying, is the library literally true? It depends on what section you're in. So parts of like one and two Samuel, one and two kings. God breathes through all of it, I would say.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “We generate philosophical reflection. We can find common ground with archetypal thinking and all that. We can. And the church fathers used Greek philosophy and Aquinas uses Aristotle and all that's great. But we're an historical religion. And that matters immensely.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “That's not the New Testament. The New Testament is did you hear? Jesus of Nazareth, whom they put to death, God raised him from the dead and he was seen by 500 and he was seen by Peter. And then lastly, I saw him. That's how Paul talks. It's not the detached psychologist musing on archetypal. Things. And I think that makes a huge difference when it comes to Christianity.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “That's right. You know, it always strikes me the difference between, let's say, mythic expressions and the New Testament reads someone like Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell, whom he influenced and then now Jordan Peterson, who's very Jungian, and this sort of archetypal reading of the scriptures. And great. I mean, I think it's very interesting. And there's a lot going on there. There's a sort of calmness, though, about it. Like, yeah, interesting. And that's in this culture and that culture. And it's the form of the moral life. And I understand all that. Then you read the New Testament. Whatever those people are talking about, it's not that. They are grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you to get your attention to tell you about something that happened to them, right? Like the resurrection, the myth of the dying and rising God and how powerful that is and shaping our consciousness.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “And as I read Peterson, especially and talk to him, I think he's kind of there with the archetype of Jesus. And even language of like live as though God exists. That's the Altob of Kant, you know, the kind of as-if attitude. And where I oppress him when we talk is in the direction of, no, that's not Christianity yet. I mean, that's enlightenment moral philosophy. But Christianity is very interested in this historical figure and very interested that God really became one of us. And he's not just an archetype of the moral life. He's someone. He's a person who's invaded our world and gone all the way to the bottom of sin and thereby saved us. So the facticity of Jesus and the resurrection. So Peterson will talk about the resurrection as a myth and all that. And you can find that in different cultures, et cetera. But Christianity.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “He's a very interesting guy. I've had a couple conversations with him, and I do think he's moving in the direction of faith. And his lectures on the Bible are very fine, I think. He reminds me of the church fathers because the church fathers would have looked at the, they called it the moral sense of the scripture. Peterson probably called it the psychological meaning. But I think he's doing a lot of that. As I read him and talk to him, I think he's kind of at a Kantian level in regard to Jesus. What I mean there is For Kant, Jesus, it's not so much the historical Jesus, this figure from long ago. It's Jesus as an archetype of the moral life. You know, he says he's the image of the person perfectly pleasing to God. And so Jesus inhabits our kind of moral imagination as a heuristic, as a goal that we're tending toward. But the historical person of Jesus for convict, well, let's not fuss about that so much. It's this figure.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “My answer is God. And I don't know a better answer. And as I read Wigner, he wasn't ready to say that, but I think the language is gesturing. I was reading someone recently, some very well-known physicist, who said his answer to Vigner's question is that whoever is responsible for the universe must be a mathematician. And I thought, yeah, that's right.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Give me a billion other universes, it would still be existence, right? It's turned toward the one that being unites our experience. And so now I'm at the metaphysical level of analysis. I've taken another step out of the cave. In Plato's language, I'm at the formal level now beyond mathematics level forms. And the formal is inclusive of the mathematical, which is inclusive of the physical. And I think that's Eugene Wigner, is that the mathematical includes the physical. It is metaphysically prior to it.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Why would we call it that? Why wouldn't we just call it an aggregate? It's just an aggregate of stuff. It's an aggregate of all kinds. But we call it a universe. And my answer from the classical metaphysical tradition is, it's the intuition of being. So I immediately experience things here, the color and shape, and I can measure them. But when I've really stepped out of the cave and I've now engaged beyond mathematics even, I'm now into metaphysical reflection. I'm interested not just in this thing as an object and how it's colored and shaped and what its atoms and quarks and all that are. That's fine. But I'm interested now in, what does it mean to say this thing is real? So what makes this a being? And then what are the characteristics of being? So now from Aristotle Heidegger, you know, this question of the nature of being. We call it a universe because it's turned toward the one of being. It's this intuition that whatever from quarks to galaxies to whatever.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Can I introduce another one? So I talked about mathematics, I think it's stepping out of the cave, it's stepping out of just the purely empirical world. But the very fact we use a word like universe to me is very interesting. Even if you say multiple universes, to me that it's like, well, whatever the whole is, the totality. Universum turned toward the one.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “But secondly, that it's absolutely in every nook and cranny intelligible. And those two ideas are correlated to the idea of creation. So it's been created. It's not God. It's other than God. But yet it's touched in every dimension by God's mind. And when those two things are in place, the sciences get underway. I don't worship the world anymore, but I'm also utterly confident I can come to know it. And those are theological ideas.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Thought it into being, that the world has been when the Bible says that God said, let there be light. And there was light. God said, well, again, we don't literalize the poetry, but it's very rich that God spoke the world into being. So that means it's been imbued with intelligibility from the beginning. They say that the condition for the possibility of the Western physical sciences was a basically Christian idea, namely that the world is not God. Therefore, I can analyze it, experiment upon it. I don't divinize it. I don't have a mystical relation to the world. It's not God.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “We shouldn't picture that so much. It's gesturing in this very powerful direction. There's an intelligence that has imbued the world with intelligibility. And we discover that, you know?”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Yeah, but that's really cool to me. That's a very interesting clue. See, one of the arguments for God is based on the intelligibility of the world. It's like vigner. It's very peculiar fact, it seems to me, that the world is so radically intelligible. Why should that be true? Why should it be the case that being has this intelligible structure to it? So it corresponds to an inquiring mind. So Aquinas can say that the intelligible in act is the intellect in act, meaning there's some deep correspondence between this and that. And I'm with Vigner. That's, I think, really weird and unreasonable and strange. Now, my answer is because the creator of the universe is a great mind and has stamped the world with intelligibility. In the beginning was the word, right? And the word was with God and all things came to be through the word.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Can I ask you where do you think the laws of nature come from? So, I mean, sort of the Wigner question where does the deep mathematical structure of things come from? How do you explain that?”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “But so cool is that he's not a religious man, he was a kind of a secular Jew, but yet he uses the word miracle like eight times in that article. And because he just is so impressed by the fact that high complex mathematics describes so accurately the physical world and can be used to create things and to manipulate. And why should that be true? There's something very weirdly mysterious about that relationship. And I would say it's because you stepped into a higher order of being, which is inclusive of a lower level of being. That's a Platonic approach, is that as you move, now I'm going to a different metaphor, you move to higher levels, they're inclusive of the lower levels.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Very big questions. No, I love the, I'm not a scientist, and I was never all that good at science. I was more humanities guy. But I love and respect the sciences, but I hate scientism. And scientism is rampant today with especially young people. The reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. And I'm a vehement opponent of that. There are dimensions of being that are not capturable through a scientific method of mere observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, etc. As great as that is, as wonderful as that is, but it's still, I think, within Plato's cave. And that's not to say it's not real. It's just at a relatively low level of reality. You step out of Plato's cave when you go into pure mathematics. That's why, you know, that article, I just came across it recently and discovered this whole literature around it, is Eugene Wigner's article, 1960, called the unreasonable applicability of mathematics to the physical sciences. I think that's the title of it.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Physical reflections. For example, on the nature of being. I mean, so I could talk about this thing as a physical object and I can analyze it at all kinds of levels and follow all the scientists up and down through this thing. And fine, fine. But I'm still in Plato's cave. I'm still looking at the flickering images on the wall. But when I step out of that into the mathematical realm, I have...”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “It's staying within the realm of the immediately empirically observable and making the mistake of saying that's all there is to being. That's all there is that needs to be explained. And long before we get to religion, just stay with Plato. The first step out of the cave, if you combine it now with the parable of the line, is mathematical objects. And I'm with those, the many people that would say mathematics is an experience of the immaterial. I've stepped out of a merely empirical physical, naturalistic world the minute I understand a pure number or a pure equation or a pure mathematical relationship which would obtain in any possible world, which are not tied to space and time, that's a first step out of the cave. And then that leads to the more metaphorical.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Well, that's the one is the problem of evil. The other objection in Aquinas, which has a lot of contemporary resonance, is can't we just explain everything through natural causes? Why would you have to invoke a cause beyond the causes in the world? So as I'm trying to explain, let's say for Aquinas' motion, causality, you know, finality, can I just do that with natural causes? Wouldn't that suffice to explain it? So I get like when naturalists are speaking or people that are pure materialists, they'll just say, no, that's perfectly adequate, a scientific account of reality is utterly adequate to our experience. So I would steal man that is say, well, show me why we need something more. And to do that, you got to get out of Plato's cave, it seems to me. My objection to naturalism.”

    2022-07-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #304 – Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source