J.P. Moreland [00:00:00]:

That people don't take Christianity as all that plausible, and so they're not really willing to hear about it. I'll give you a classic example of this. My granddaughter just graduated from or is just graduating this spring from a Lutheran solid Christian high school. Now they had a speaker come in about the pro life movement, and there were about 60% of the students in this school that were pro choice. Now my daughter works with live action. She's 43. Her daughter goes there, and she's a a pro life advocate. And she she said, Dan, what is going on? What why is this happening? And I said, well, there are two reasons, I think.

J.P. Moreland [00:00:48]:

And the first one is that people don't really know the fundamental issues and arguments on both sides. They they hear slogans and that's it. So we need to teach Christians the fundamental basis and the reasons for a pro life position and critique the pro choice condition. But I think the other one is that they are not ravished with a Christian view of following Jesus. It looks boring being able to have sex with whomever you want and getting out of your parents' control and creating your your own path and doing your own thing is and not hurting other people supposedly. That is where life is really at, man. I mean, that's the exciting stuff. The people who are movie actors or rock singers, they're the ones who've got life.

J.P. Moreland [00:01:41]:

Christianity, I think it's it's true, but it's just stinking boring. I mean, it's got it's just a bunch of rules that can strain your life, and and that's what we're presenting to them. But what we've got to start doing is to say, following Jesus is the most exciting, meaningful approach to life that you could ever have, far outstripping these alternatives, and then make the case for that. Give them a vision for what can come from loving and following Jesus and his words. So I don't think that we've done that, and I think that we need we need to do that.

Jim Spiegel [00:02:22]:

That's great. So it is fascinating just to observe our culture and the extremes that people are going to to try to generate meaning even to the point of trying to redefine themselves or create a completely different identity, it's all symptomatic of this universal quest for meaning, isn't it? Absolutely. And I've been fascinated also by how, say 30 years ago with the rise of postmodernism, or is that was really impacting culture, starting to impact culture more broadly. The watchword was a kind of skepticism, or as Lyotard, the French philosopher would put it, a kind of incredulity towards all metanarratives. Right? We're gonna be skeptical about all world views. But as the decades rolled on and we arrived at our present cultural moment, it it seems everybody's dogmatic. The the skepticism is gone and dogmatic certainty about Absolutely. The most bizarre things, right, that we can completely reconstruct or socially devise our own identities, even about things as fundamental as our our sexuality or gender.

J.P. Moreland [00:03:34]:

Well, isn't it ironic what you're saying? I mean, you know, you go from a skeptical posture, and the difficulty with that is that you would have to be skeptical of your own views if you're gonna be if you care about being consistent. Now if you don't care about being consistent, then you lose your right to be heard because because what you're now doing is whenever you espouse your views, it's merely a an assertion of power. A bald faced assertion of that you should have power and we should submit to you. And, you know, I'm sorry, but, that's not gonna work for me because I base my life on what I think is true. I could be wrong in some cases, but I do my best to reason things out. And you're denying all that. So if you don't believe in consistency, you're just you're dangerous. You're just asserting things out of nowhere out of your belly button and you're you know you're pounding the pulpit.

J.P. Moreland [00:04:33]:

But now if you care about consistency, if you're gonna be say that there's no reality that and there's no truth that's really objective, that's gonna have to apply to your own views. And the difficulty then is why should people listen to your views? It opens up a relativism gone wrong. And so a lot of the people began to realize that they really did think their own woke position was true. They really did. And so they began to recapture that, but then they were stuck with this contradiction right on the center of their behavior. So it was a it was a pretty tough place to be, but, that's you're right. That's what's been happening, a decade and a half, 2 decades, something like that.

Jim Spiegel [00:05:42]:

Welcome to the very first episode of the Calos Center podcast. We are pleased to have as our first guest, JP Moreland. JP is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California. JP has authored or edited over 30 books and has published over a 100 journal articles, many in top tier academic journals. JP is one of the most influential Christian apologists of the last 30 years. Some of his strongest philosophical interests include metaphysics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. But JP's strongest interest is his own family. He and his wife, Hope, have 2 grown daughters and now 5 grandchildren.

Jim Spiegel [00:06:26]:

So, JP, welcome to the Kalos Center podcast.

J.P. Moreland [00:06:30]:

Well, my dear brother, it's so good to be with you and good to see you again.

Jim Spiegel [00:06:34]:

It's very fitting to have you as our first guest since much of your work has made the case for and you have personified what the Kalos Center aims to do, which is to integrate faith and reason. In fact, your book, Love Your God With All Your Mind, is all about this, and we'll talk about that shortly. But I want to start at the beginning with you and hear about how you came to faith. When and how did you become a Christian?

J.P. Moreland [00:07:00]:

Well, in 1966, I went to the University of Missouri and was a chemist physical chemistry major. Yeah. Around November of 1960 8, Campus Crusade, which is now called Crewe, came by my fraternity house and presented a rational case, the liar, lord, lunatic talk, that that Jesus Christ really was the son of God and that there was evidence for this. And the idea that there was evidence for this, I never heard that. And I was very interested. And so I made met with a guy, a staff member, for 3 or 4 times. He gave me some things to read, and I eventually became persuaded that it was more likely than not that Christianity was true in its basic affirmations. And so the 3rd week of November of 1968, I got down on my knees and confessed my sins, and I, asked Jesus to be to forgive me and to be my lord and and my savior.

J.P. Moreland [00:08:02]:

That began the greatest adventure with plenty of ups and downs, but, that, I has. I eventually when I graduated in 1970, I had a full ride to do a PhD in nuclear chemistry at the University of Colorado, but instead, I went on the staff with what was then called Campus Crusade for Christ, and that led me into the ministry. And I've followed that ever since.

Jim Spiegel [00:08:29]:

Very good. And so when and how did you come to see doing philosophy as a significant way to apply your faith?

J.P. Moreland [00:08:36]:

I've got when I was on staff with crusade, I've served 2 years at the University of Colorado and 3 at the University of Vermont, and these were skeptical schools. And I had my own questions about certain aspects of Christianity that just didn't make any sense to me or seem reasonable. And so people began to give me things to read. And one of the things I noticed, Jim, is when I read books in other fields, like historical evidence or science and Christianity, I would always have the feeling that there was something deeper down that we weren't talking about. And so people began to give me philosophy books to read, and what I found is this was what was down there because when I read philosophy there was nothing further down except more philosophy. So I began to realize that philosophy was in fact the handmaid to theology and Christianity, and that was a key insight for me. So I wanted to get to the root of what was going on and to be able to not only answer my own questions, but I was an evangelist and I still consider myself to be a Committor to the Great Commission. And I began to realize that we were losing ground in this culture because we did not have enough people that were going into academic work for the kingdom, and philosophy was the most fundamental important field that you could get into because it has its fingers in everything.

J.P. Moreland [00:10:21]:

So I that dawned on me. I eventually went to Dallas Seminary to get biblical studies and theology. Then I went to UC Riverside for my MAM, then my USC was my PhD in philosophy, and I have found since then that I made the right decision. My my philosophical training has just given me a chance to speak to radical skeptics or to just lay people and to kind of help them get clarity about things of that sort. May I make one more point? Just a week ago 2 weeks ago, a gentleman in our church has a daughter doing an MA in geology at the University of New Mexico, and she's abandoned the faith. And he has always told her, well, I don't know how to answer your questions, but I just know Jesus came into my life 30 years ago, and he's changed my life. And and that wasn't sufficient for her. So we asked if I'd get together with her, and so we met at McDonald's.

J.P. Moreland [00:11:21]:

And we spent about an hour and a half just, interacting and answering her questions and maybe pushing back a little bit graciously, but saying that you don't really know that, do you? I mean, and then but at the end of the day, we gave each other a big hug, and she said, this is just this is what I've been looking for. This is I I somebody who takes this seriously and could understand my questions and answer them. And it was my philosophical training that let me do that.

Jim Spiegel [00:11:50]:

Yeah. Very good. That was my next question for you was how you conceive of the calling of the Christian philosopher. You've you've touched on that. These are some excellent examples. Can you say more about how a Christian philosopher should be serving God's kingdom?

J.P. Moreland [00:12:06]:

Years ago, Alvin Planting wrote a paper called advice to Christian philosophers. And in that paper, he basically said that if you're gonna be a Christian philosopher, you have to commit yourself to the lordship of Jesus Christ and recognize that you're serving him and his people first. Now we, of course, serve the non Christian community, but that's as Christian philosophers. And so for me, my calling is to begin with biblical teaching and to develop philosophical arguments for the core commitments of Christianity that don't depend on scripture. So I'm trying to come up with, our arguments that say that there is a soul, for example, makes a lot of sense. It's not something that's just you just believe with your eyes closed because religion says so. No. The evidence for that is really, really good.

J.P. Moreland [00:13:06]:

And and on it goes for other things. And so I wanted to be able to make the case as a Christian philosopher for a whole range of things that were being criticized by a secular culture, and hopefully that would create a plausibility structure in the culture where people would consider the Christian faith plausible and be willing to listen to it. And then I wanted to train others to do the same thing, and so it was an expression of the lordship of Christ in the field of philosophy, trying to integrate philosophy with other fields of study that would produce a coherent worldview and help people understand that there's a lot of reason to believe this is the best worldview going.

Jim Spiegel [00:13:57]:

Yeah. Very good. So this is sometimes called pre evangelism.

J.P. Moreland [00:14:01]:

Absolutely.

Jim Spiegel [00:14:01]:

We're addressing issues, often impediments, obstacles to even hearing the gospel, such that now you can get it into a realm of, as you say, plausibility that, you know, at least this is possible, and then you can go from there. And you, mentioned Alvin Plantinga, who's just a towering figure for those who don't much know much about philosophy, in what's been called a renaissance in Christian philosophy over the last 50 years.

J.P. Moreland [00:14:28]:

Yes.

Jim Spiegel [00:14:29]:

Can you talk about that? What led to this? And talk about the impact that's had in the broader world of academic philosophy.

J.P. Moreland [00:14:36]:

Absolutely. Up until that time, which is around 1970 or somewhere around a little later maybe, secularism had come to dominate the academic fields in the university, and that trickled down into the culture. It trickled into providing a backdrop for people in the media and the entertainment industry. They didn't know they were, you know, skeptics in epistemology, but they had absorbed that from their college training. And there were Christianity was just not considered, a topic that would could be discussed rationally in a classroom unless it was to critique it. Now there were Christian philosophers, but they lacked courage, they didn't know other Christian philosophers, there was not any way to connect with each other, and so a group of highly regarded Christian philosophers who were at the top of the field, William Alston, Alvin Planting, and others came together to form the Society of Christian Philosophers whose job was to take people who consider themselves Christians and philosophers and give them a community where they could work out their Christian faith in the field of philosophy and begin to develop more connectedness and courage to to reach out on the universities. And what happened, Jim, was that more and more people began to read their stuff and go into college and major in philosophy. So it it began to draw people to the discipline.

J.P. Moreland [00:16:18]:

And then I I wanted to go on and get my PhD so I could be a part of that drawing. But I think what happened was that there was and continues to be an explosion. What what's happened is that there are now well regarded Christian philosophers in every branch of philosophy and you can't pick up a journal without there being a a Christian theist making some point in that journal. So you can no longer ignore us. And if a professor in a classroom says, well, Christianity is just ridiculous. It's stupid. It's, it's superstitious. It's only for people that are uneducated.

J.P. Moreland [00:16:59]:

That person ought to be ashamed of himself or herself because that is not true any longer, and he he or she needs to come up to speed and read a little bit in his own field.

Jim Spiegel [00:17:09]:

So the MA program in philosophy or philosophy of religion at Biola's, Talbot School of Theology has played a significant role in this historical development. Can you talk about your original vision for this and how that's played out in practice?

J.P. Moreland [00:17:25]:

Yes. Thanks for asking. I I came to Talbot in 1990 with the hope of starting an MA program. And, Scott Ray, who is a bioethicist and a business ethicist, who has his PhD from USC, he and I were given permission to start an MA program in philosophy to see how it went. So we got a went to McDonald's, got a napkin out literally and began to write down what our values would be. And so the first thing we did was to conceive of our our department, not as a department, but as a movement designed to embody, to equip, and to produce books and articles and talks on behalf of Christianity that's centered around a set of values. One of them was to become academically rigorous Christian philosophers and thinkers. That was number 1.

J.P. Moreland [00:18:25]:

We valued the life of the mind, and so we used the same secular books that people use in in secular doctoral programs. We didn't use basically Christian books unless there was one that was really outstanding, like, but one by Richard Swinburne, let's say, or or planting or something like that. The second the second value was that we wanted our students to be formed spiritually and fall more and more in love with Jesus and so that meant that we had electives in spiritual formation. We encourage them to get Christian therapy and to deal with their maybe anxiety and depression and and to grow in their affection, for God and to deal with their issues. The the third was that we were a community of people. We're not competing. We're not gonna share with each other our grades. We're not that's we want everybody to be doing well because we're all soldiers on the same team.

J.P. Moreland [00:19:23]:

And so if there are people that aren't doing well, find the people that are and the people that are, raise your hands and help them. This is we want everybody to be successful. And then for the 4th value is that we are activists. We're not just scholars, but we're scholar activists, which means that we need to find a way to take our gifting and our circumstances of life and to serve the kingdom of God and and the scriptures as Christian philosophers in the various areas of our lives. And so what we've done, in the years that we started in the early seventies is if we've placed, I'm gonna guess 230 to 240 of our graduates in the top PhD programs in Europe, Canada and America. And we now have 90 to a 100 tenure track professors in secular schools and Christian schools that are that are faithfully doing their work, writing, publishing, teaching great classes. And so we're just be trying to be a little bit of leaven out there. That's all.

J.P. Moreland [00:20:31]:

And we're trying to leaven the whole thing and and, yeah, that was the vision.

Jim Spiegel [00:20:35]:

Yeah. That's pretty understated given the impact.

J.P. Moreland [00:20:39]:

Well

Jim Spiegel [00:20:39]:

And, you you far surpassed your original goal.

J.P. Moreland [00:20:42]:

Well, our first goal original goal was a 100 Yeah. Students. And and when I see these students and what they're doing, I just think, good lord. I hope they don't come back because, they've gone way beyond me.

Jim Spiegel [00:20:54]:

Yeah. Isn't that a great feeling when when you get feeling. Surpassed by your students. It's just so gratifying.

J.P. Moreland [00:20:59]:

Unless they ask me a philosophical question and I don't understand it. Yeah. That that isn't that's not a great feeling. Yeah. But the rest of it is.

Jim Spiegel [00:21:08]:

Yeah. That's good. So what are some of the challenges facing the church today, particularly in the west and more specifically in America, that beg for input from Christian philosophers?

J.P. Moreland [00:21:22]:

Well, the church is just flat out anti intellectual. I mean, take this girl that I met with in McDonald's. She told me that for for years, she had been drifting away from the faith, and all that her parents could tell her or other people in the church who got together with her was you have to accept the bible, you know, by faith. You have to just trust it and and move on in experiencing the love of God. And they weren't doing anything to answer people's questions. So philosophy needs to start being taught in Sunday schools and along with it apologetics to help people be able to parent their children and answer their questions and be able to have confidence and courage to address what's going on in the culture that is against us. So now what would some of those issues be? Well, is there science the only way to know reality, or are there other ways to know reality? That's certainly one of them for the engineers and scientists in our churches and even pushing back against those that aren't believers to make the case that there are fundamental ways of knowing reality that have nothing to do with the empirical methods of science. It's a both and, not an either or, but but we we need to teach people that it's possible to know objective moral value.

J.P. Moreland [00:22:51]:

We need to give them arguments for god's existence and to deal with the questions they're getting at work. I think we need to be moving into some metaphysics, which is basically the study of the a priori study of reality, meaning that you're you wanna know about reality by simply thinking about it. And there are all kinds of things. Is there a soul? Is there free will? What is that? Are there things that exist that you can't see but that we know are real? Now they'll be skeptics, but there are positive answers to those questions that the visible world just is not the only reality there is. So that plus ethical questions are part of the secular culture and maybe I could say that in my opinion setting Islam aside, the 2 major competitors for the hearts and minds of people today, in addition to what I would call Christian monotheism or biblical monotheism, would be scientific naturalism. Physical world is all there is. If there's anything besides that, it depends on the physical world for its existence. The best way to know reality, maybe the only way is through the hard sciences and everything else is opinion.

J.P. Moreland [00:24:07]:

The other one would be what you might call critical theory or or, radical postmodernism, which is sometimes called cynical theory. Being woke is to adopt this view. And it's roughly about the idea that identity groups like fat people, there's there are now fat studies in the universities, LGBTQ people, feminists, and there are several identity groups and they construct reality according to their own views and beliefs. There is no such thing as objective reality. If there were, you couldn't know it anyway, and that we can only project outside of ourselves a shared created reality that we all agree with. And the important thing about our constructed reality is the power it gives us to counteract the power that has governed western culture, namely Judeo Christian worldview, and to undermine the the power that comes from that, not by truth, but by finding ways of ridiculing and and so on. So those would be some of the things I think are absolutely essential. And we're we're fighting a war, Jim, for the for the hearts and minds of people.

Jim Spiegel [00:25:28]:

So a lot of these issues come down to what's called philosophical anthropology. Right? Hey, man. What is your philosophical view on what a human being is? Now you're a substance dualist. Why do, why do you believe that's superior to competing theories?

J.P. Moreland [00:25:47]:

Yes. May I just give one background statement? We have a lot of things. We have cars. We have, mixers that blend, you know, protein drinks. We have televisions. And, I wouldn't wanna try to use my television as a blender for protein drinks. And I wouldn't I wouldn't wanna use my car as, you know, a door stop because I'd have to tear the walls down to get the car in. The point is that things flourish if you use them according to their nature and and their purpose.

J.P. Moreland [00:26:26]:

And so you try to use the television according to what it was made for and then you've got a chance for that television to have a life period where it works and it's it really helps. Now the same is true of humans. How a human being should live depends upon what a human well, I would say human person is. So if you just make up anything that is the way I would like to live, then you're gonna bump up against reality. And if that's not the way you were made to function and flourish, you're eventually gonna gonna find out that you're destroying your life. You're not enhancing, a virtuous and a happy and joyful life. And so to me, the question of how we should live is grounded or rooted in what is, as you pointed out, a human being or or a human person. And so that is now the fundamental issue that is being debated on the university campuses.

J.P. Moreland [00:27:27]:

Every field has a view of a human person and there are implications of those views. Now that's why I went into philosophy of mind, which is the study of, you know, what let's just focus on humans. What are we? Are we a mind and a body or just a body or brain? What do we make of us? I believe that the scriptures teach that we are souls that are embodied and that our body is a set of, organs and tools that we use, violin body to accomplish things. So I use my eardrums to hear, my eyes to see, but my eyes don't see, I see by using my eyes. If they get damaged, then I'm missing a tool. But, that doesn't mean that the eyes were what saw. It's consistent with that that they were a tool for me to use. So the question for me is what is the me? What's the I here? And for a number of reasons, I believe that consciousness is not physical, like water can be in the state of solid liquid and gas, but it's still water.

J.P. Moreland [00:28:42]:

Consciousness can be in at least 5 states. There are states of having a sensation. That might be the taste of a lemon or a feeling of pain. There is a state called the thought where you may be driving your car and a thought comes into your mind. And the thought might be, I think that it could it could start raining, later in the month. And you don't know if it's true or not, it's just a thought. You don't believe it. It's a thought.

J.P. Moreland [00:29:09]:

Another one are beliefs. Those are thoughts or are semantic contents or propositional contents that you take to be true from 51 to a 100%. You can vary in your the strength of the of the belief. Those vary, the strength of the beliefs do. But beliefs. Their desires, that's a felt inclination towards, or away from the dentist. And then finally, there are acts of will, what I would consider voluntary acts. Those are all states of consciousness, and the reason I believe that is that there are things that are true of those states that aren't true of brain states, so they can't be the same thing.

J.P. Moreland [00:29:51]:

Just a simple example is that for all my conscious states, there is a what it's like to be in that state. For example, there's a what it's like to have a pain. There's a what it's like to taste a strawberry. There's a what it's like to be thinking about George Washington, and that differs from the what it's like or the experiential texture of thinking about the Pythagorean theorem. And that's why I can know what I'm thinking about by simply introspecting and paying attention to my thoughts because they have discernible textures that I can become aware of. But no brain state has what it's like to it. There's no what it's like for a set of neurons to be firing. There's no what it's like to be an electron or to be in the state of negative charge.

J.P. Moreland [00:30:38]:

There's no phenomenal experiential texture to any of that. So conscious states have some things, what it's like the physical states including brain states don't have, so they can't be the same thing. So all you can do is correlate the 2 that I think and and show causal relationships. If you get hit, maybe your brain will begin to spark in a certain way and that'll bring about the experience, the mental experience of pain. Alright. That's pro what's called property dualism. Now what about substance dualism, which is basically the view that not only is my consciousness immaterial or mental, but but I am an immaterial substance. That means that I am a unity, a primitive unity of properties and powers, that's powers or dispositions to act or to do different things.

J.P. Moreland [00:31:33]:

I remain the same through change. I have properties, but I am not had by anything more basic. I'm fundamental and, that I can grow and gain and lose parts and still be the same, literally the same individual substance as I was 10 years ago. Say I lose my arms, it's still it's still I. And so those are reason that's what a substance would be. And that means that I am not a physical object, but that I am embodied. But I am the thing that's embodied. And so those would be what dualism is and and there are different varieties of it, but that maybe that's enough.

J.P. Moreland [00:32:18]:

I don't know.

Jim Spiegel [00:32:19]:

That's good. Yeah. Even mainstream philosophers, Frank Jackson and, even an atheist like Thomas Nagel have have noted some of these problems over the years in terms of physicalism or naturalist view of human nature. It says we're just physical parts. The inability of physicalism to explain these things, as you mentioned, personal identity through time and this irreducible first person quality of of our experience.

J.P. Moreland [00:32:46]:

Yes. Absolutely.

Jim Spiegel [00:32:47]:

It is just a persistent problem with physicalism to the point where Thomas Nagel, in a book about 10 years ago called Mind and Cosmos, he recognizes even with the subtitle, he notes that, you know, the materialist Neo Darwinian view of the universe is almost certainly false. So it's a theory in crisis, and dualists are are right to point this out, you know, and even use some of the arguments that some of these mainstream naturalists recognize are strong objections. Now a whole Absolutely. There's a whole other category of arguments for mind body dualism that has a lot of popular appeal, and that is near death experiences. You've done a fair amount of work on this. How should that impact our thinking about human nature?

J.P. Moreland [00:33:35]:

Well, 2 things. I think that you have to realize that there are there have been around 300,000,000 of these that have happened throughout the world. 1 in every 25 persons in this country, in Germany, and some European countries have had a near death experience, and there have now been tens of thousands of these that have been carefully studied and subjected to rigorous academic standards, of survey taking and so on. And so as a result, we've we've learned that people born blind who've had near death experiences see for the first time. They don't have words for color, but they can they can be given a word for dark darker or lighter, but they see things that are verified, that they couldn't known, like if they were in a home for people that are blind. They see they for the first time, they can see that there is a purple spot on their roommate's head that they had no idea about, and they report this. So the the point is that there are now so many verified MD, and there's a core that's the same worldwide Even though some of the interpretations might be different, but these are almost all biblically consistent. And if you wanna proof of that, read John Burke's book, imagine heaven, where he goes into what we're learning about in these experiences, and do they conflict with the Bible or comport? And he says that the overwhelming majority of these are consistent with scripture.

J.P. Moreland [00:35:22]:

There's what you expect. And they're not what you would expect if Hinduism were true or Buddhism or or anything like that. So I think that near death experiences have been a powerful set of evidence, especially those that have been verified by doctors and nurses as to what people saw and so on. There's more to us than our bodies, and in fact, we have a soul or a self, an immaterial eye, call it what you want, that can be on the ceiling and look down and say, there's my body. It's my body. And, you're up here and you're different from your body. And you leave and different things happen to you and you come back and you're embodied again when you didn't wanna be. But God sent you back for because you had work to do.

J.P. Moreland [00:36:14]:

So I would say that it's provided a tremendous amount of evidence that that the soul is real. There's another way it's provided evidence that people might not think about, and this is that it supports what's called the modal argument for the soul. Now it goes like this. There's something true about me, namely, I am possibly disembodible. Maybe there's no afterlife, but certainly such a thing is possible. And we we find that people who watch, you know, 48 hours or or dateline programs on, near death experiences, almost all of them are are saying, look, I'm kinda skeptical of these things. But, look, I I wanna see or hear what the evidence is. So I wanna listen to the program and see what do they got, which means they're telling us that would they agree that these things are possible.

J.P. Moreland [00:37:13]:

They wanna know if they happened. Okay? So if if there's something true about me, namely, I am the kind of thing that could possibly exist, disembodied so let's look at the evidence. Well, I know one thing about my brain and body, they're not even possibly the kinds of things that that could exist disembodied. I don't know what a what a disembodied brain would be, a nonmaterial brain or a disembodied body. Your body and your brain are essentially physical. They couldn't be nonphysical, so they are not even possibly disembodible, but I am. So near death experiences show that at least it's possible that I could be disembodied. Now that doesn't prove life after death, but what it shows is there's something true about me that ain't true about my brain and body, so we can't be the same thing.

J.P. Moreland [00:38:07]:

And moreover, I've got to be the kind of thing that could exist without a brain and a body. That is a soul or a spirit of some kind. So I think they think they've been helpful. On the other hand, you gotta be careful. You know, there are some things out there, but you gotta read up to be wise about how to discern. And Burke's book will help you discern on that.

Jim Spiegel [00:38:27]:

Yeah. There's further corroboration as well by the fact that some of these experiences happen when there is a confirmed flat EEG. There's there's no recordable brain activity going on, and yet people are having perceptions or having a very robust thoughts and feelings, which should register in terms of brain activity. While that's going on, they acquire new information. And so all that confirms it. Okay. There's thinking going on without brain activity. That's exactly what the mind body dualist would predict.

J.P. Moreland [00:39:00]:

Yes. And you can't explain that as a physicalist because thinking is just brain activity Mhmm. That may function in your behavior in the right kind of way. If there's no brain activity going on, which there isn't, for a up to a long sometimes a long period of time, then you can't be thinking. But you are thinking because you can report what you were thinking about that could be verified by the doctors and nurses. And so, yeah, that's a great that's a great point.

Jim Spiegel [00:39:32]:

So our listeners should know this is a massive industry. There are organizations, including the International Association For Near Death Studies. You can go on their website and read literally thousands of, personal testimonies. Neardeath.com. You have all sorts of YouTube programs, which have been proliferating over recent years, like Next Level Soul and others. And it's just one personal testimony after another of near death experiences. Like you say, though, one must be wise and discerning because sometimes people mistakenly put into this category what are just called out of body experiences, which might be, say, drug induced, or they could be induced by some sort of occult activity. So, you know, listener, reader, beware.

Jim Spiegel [00:40:23]:

Absolutely. Absolutely. But we can't throw the the the tremendous mountain of evidence that is the baby in that bathwater, and it's, it's worth careful inquiry.

J.P. Moreland [00:40:36]:

Amen, brother. I am with you 100%.

Jim Spiegel [00:40:39]:

So connected with this to some degree, coming back to philosophy of science, is inferences to intelligent design that you've defended appeals to intelligent design in scientific inquiry. Alright. What is intelligent design, and why may this be a legitimate scientific inference?

J.P. Moreland [00:40:59]:

Well, intelligent design is the view that by using certain ideas, which I'll tell you in a minute, we can detect in the natural world cases where something was in effect by a rational intelligent subject, an agent, a person, and not laws of nature or random. And that that the inference to the fact that this is the byproduct of a rational agent or person can be a scientific inference. It's not a philosophical inference, though there are philosophical uses of this. But it's important that people know that because we live in a day when science is considered the supreme or only way to know reality, and I don't think that's true. But if you hold that, well, what do you do with the fact that there seems to be evidence for God in the in the information in the natural world, and that's a scientific conclusion. Now the question is, is it really? And that's what you'd have to do next. There is something called the design filter, and if you're looking at some event or some phenomenon and it passes the design filter, there are almost no false positives. That means it is almost guaranteed that the event was brought about by a rational person.

J.P. Moreland [00:42:35]:

Now this design filter is used in several branches of science. For example, it is used in forensic science. It is used in archaeology to determine whether this is an artifact that was made by a rational agent or it's produced by erosion or a rock. It's used by anthropology. Not long ago, there were certain kind of shapes in a cave where they knew Neanderthals had lived in there. And there was a debate about whether those were natural patterns that were just erosion in the cave or if it was something that was produced intentionally by by the Neanderthals. And the evidence was that this was produced by rational agents who were trying to depict something that represented life after death or whatever it whatever. I don't remember exactly what that was.

J.P. Moreland [00:43:30]:

So it was used to settle the dispute in the science of anthropology. It's used in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Now you may think there's nothing out there that doesn't matter, but the search for it is clearly a scientific project, and they will be able to tell the difference between a signal that's coming from a person and just random noise or something produced by law of nature. So this filter is used in several branches of science. They're the scientists themselves, use this filter and the filter goes like this. Take some phenomenon. Is the phenomenon the result of a law of nature or is it contingent? That means that it happened, but it could have not happened even with the same laws of nature. So what you have is you're you're studying some phenomena.

J.P. Moreland [00:44:27]:

Let's let's say some organ in in a frog. And you ask, is this something that was highly improbable and that there would be a frog that would develop this kind of organ? And if the answer is, yeah, that's very that's very improbable, which which it almost always is, then you have to ask a second question because if we're playing bridge and we're playing for $500 and I deal myself on the dealer and I deal myself a perfect bridge hand, you may think I'm cheated. But but wait a minute. Why? Because your that hand's improbable. Yeah. But so is yours. Your hand is equally improbable as mine even though it's just a random collection of cars. But if I had predicted you'd get that random collection of cars before the deal, you'd think something was up.

J.P. Moreland [00:45:14]:

Improbability is necessary but not sufficient. There has to be something else. And that is there's something very special about this particular phenomenon besides the fact that it happened. Okay. Take the the bridge deal. There's something special about my hand besides the fact that it's the one I got. And what's special about it is that there's something independent of me getting it. The rules of bridge that say, anybody who gets that hand wins.

J.P. Moreland [00:45:47]:

So it's the combination of it being improbable but independently special that indicates that I cheated and that this deal of cards was done by a rational agent on purpose to win the kitty. There's nothing special about your hands. It's just the hand you happen to get. Now this was used in a court of law to demonstrate that the Republicans had cheated in the balloting for state elections in the state of Ohio. And what happened was there were a group of local districts that were having elections, and there were, like, 8 parties running in each of those districts. Green party, you know, all kinds of they had 8 parties. And in the ballots that were sent out to all of these districts, the Republican candidate was listed first among the 8 parties on all of the different districts' ballots. Now we ask, how likely is that to happen? Very unlikely.

J.P. Moreland [00:46:50]:

But, I mean, after all, if if Republican, Democrat, and and Green party had been the first three on all the ballots, I mean, that would that could have been but so it's improbable. But is there anything special about it? My gosh. We know that whoever is listed first on a ballot gets more votes just because they're listed first. And guess who made the ballots? A Republican. And so in court, they've charged this guy with fraud because they said that these these were produced intentionally by a person who did it on purpose, namely this guy here, the the Republican ballot maker. And it made sense because it was this didn't happen randomly, and it was certainly special because whoever is there first wins and so on. So we have examples of this in science. There are structures and organisms that contain, let's say, 50 to a 100 different parts.

J.P. Moreland [00:48:00]:

Now the idea that these precise 50 parts would randomly come together in that specific structure. So it's those parts and that structure is highly improbable. Okay? But improbable things happen all the time. But there's something else that people that that weighs here, and that is that that structure is the only one that's gonna help that organism move and get food and avoid enemies. Why? Because if you move one single part out of that 50, it won't work. If you add a part to it, it becomes a dysfunctional slab of chemicals that are a part of the organism. Only if that precise 50 in that structure are present will it help the organism survive. And so the fact that it happened and it's fits the design filter indicates that this is something that was engineered, and it for it could not have happened randomly because if you have 3 or 4 or 5, 6, up to 49 of those parts together, it's gonna hinder the organism.

J.P. Moreland [00:49:18]:

It's not gonna help, it's gonna be dead weight. And so it's only until that 50th part drops into place in the right structure that you get something that's survival enhancing. And so that's what and the idea that this is intelligently designed is the best explanation of that. So that would be the argument.

Jim Spiegel [00:49:39]:

That's very good. Yeah. This is sometimes regarded or referred to as a a kind of fine tuning argument for the existence of some higher intelligence. Fine tuning arguments, have also been devised in the context of the inanimate physical world and how all the different laws of nature Yes. Are just right for the very possibility of life in the universe. Robin Collins and others have developed that argument. We don't have time to talk about that. But fine tuning arguments for the existence of God, whether they regard inanimate nature or living organisms.

Jim Spiegel [00:50:14]:

And at every level, we're, we're talking about, cellular biology or just even basic proteins, what we call basic proteins. So it require dozens, even scores or 100 of amino acids that are all levo or left handed forms. And that's just for the possibility of, you know, a protein there, let alone cell walls and different organelles. And then at the more macro level, at the different organ systems and how they work together, it's quite fascinating.

J.P. Moreland [00:50:42]:

It is.

Jim Spiegel [00:50:44]:

But as a scientist, given as you laid out, so wonderfully, it is a legitimate move to make to infer some sort of intelligent mind or consciousness. There's a designer that's responsible for this. It should be a perfectly legitimate scientific, inference.

J.P. Moreland [00:51:02]:

And if the evidence warrants that inference, make it. I mean, the issue is whether the evidence justifies it or not. You know? Not what kind of inference it is. And I think I think what we're saying is if look at the facts. This fits the design filter. It fits what psychologists do, what forensics all these other branches of science do. So what's your problem? You know? You don't like this, I think.

Jim Spiegel [00:51:27]:

That's good. Yeah. Maybe there's something else going on here besides just the reasonableness of this inference that's, prompting you to to reject it.

J.P. Moreland [00:51:37]:

I think you may be onto something.

Jim Spiegel [00:51:39]:

Yeah. So we've we've covered a lot of ground here. We've talked about metaphysics. We've talked about philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. These are all areas where you've done wonderful work. I wanna close just by asking you another kind of boilerplate question that I'm asking all of our guests, which really is the question that people expect philosophers to address, but most philosophers, even Christian philosophers, never publish on this particular question. And it has to do with the meaning of life. K? So, JP, what is your view of the meaning of life, and how has your professional work aimed to work out that conviction and practice?

J.P. Moreland [00:52:23]:

Well, let me let me do a 2 step answer to that question. Let me first of all say that if there is not a theistic God who loves who cares about us and put us here for a purpose, then there would be no meaning to life. And let me explain why. If god does not exist and you say that the material world is all there is, that's a popular western version of atheism, then you're not gonna have free will because you're just gonna be a physical object complicated window down. But whatever inputs into your your brain and nervous system is going to be determined by the laws of physics and chemistry that will generate an output, and there's no room for free will to have any any role in your behavior. And scientists believe that everything is either determined or at the quantum level, indetermined. And if your behavior is indetermined, then it's random. So that's not gonna help there be anything like free will.

J.P. Moreland [00:53:32]:

The other thing is that there's no teleology. That means there's nothing that happens for the sake of a purpose or an end. That has been almost universally acknowledged since 16 to have gone the way of the dodo, and teleological explanations are not considered plausible scientific explanations for things. But so I I've I put it the problem for the naturalist atheist as follows. Suppose I invited you to my house to play a game of monopoly, And I said, we're gonna do this a little different, Jim. Stay with me. Over there on the on the table is a set of jacks. You can toss the ball up and grab some jacks if you want.

J.P. Moreland [00:54:20]:

It's your turn. Over there is a coin you can flip it and see whether it lands on heads or tails. There's a monopoly board and you can just put hotels everywhere you want. You can put hotels and just when you're finished, you just tell me. And one other thing, there's the fridge. When it's your turn, you can go in there if you want and fix something a sandwich. And so it's up to you what you do when it's your turn. Okay.

J.P. Moreland [00:54:46]:

It's your turn. I'll let you start. So you say, gosh. This is so you put hotels. You use up all the hotels and put them around the board. And you look at me with a smug face and say, it's your turn now. And I get up and I sweep everything off of the board and I flip a coin. And it ends up heads let's say.

J.P. Moreland [00:55:08]:

And I say okay it's your turn. You think boy that was wild, I'm gonna do that again. So you put the hotels back again and you're a little leery this time, but you said, okay. It's your turn. I go to the fridge and I fix myself a a a turkey and cheese sandwich. Now it wouldn't take too many iterations of this for you to recognize that it didn't matter what you did when it was your turn. And here's why. If there is no purpose to the game as a whole, there's no meaning to the individual things that you do in the game because the meaning or lack thereof of the individual moves that we make depend upon whether there is meaning to life as a whole.

J.P. Moreland [00:56:02]:

And so the only way that can make sense to me, the most sense, is if there is a theistic god that that created me to have value so that I and my choices are valuable and gave me a free will, and I have the ability to act for the sake of a purpose or an end. And that meaning in life, therefore, for me, is to live my life so as to 1 know and love God as much as I can and 2 become as much as I can like Jesus Christ and embody the fruit of the spirit in Galatians and work on that until I'm gone. So I wanna become a certain kind of person. And the third thing is that I am to serve Jesus Christ with my natural talents and spiritual gifts and my, what I'm going to call, historical setting where I live and if I'm married, who I'm married to, who my friends are. So my service will depend upon my unique, let me just say, calling which will be grounded in my life circumstances and my natural talents and spiritual gifts. Now this will include loving others and caring for this, all kinds of things that are packed under each one of these. But to state it briefly again, the me the purpose of my life is to live in such a way that I embody 3 things. 1, I grow continually in my love for and knowledge of god himself.

J.P. Moreland [00:57:52]:

Number 2, I become a different kind of person as I grow, Namely, we can become like Jesus in my circumstances and embody the fruit of the spirit, and then finally, given my place of of existence and my talents and gifts, find a way to serve the kingdom of God and the Lord Jesus and other people in my unique way better and better as I go on. And then I would enjoy heaven with with God after I've finished that.

Jim Spiegel [00:58:27]:

Very good. Thank you. I think with that, that will conclude. It's a fitting end to our conversation. So thank you again.

J.P. Moreland [00:58:34]:

This is such an important thing you're doing. It's a part of the solution. And I wanna just urge you not to get discouraged to keep doing this, get great guests on. You guys weigh in, and this is gonna make a difference over time. I'm so excited about your your work.

Jim Spiegel [00:58:50]:

Thank you. We're excited. Our next guest is David Bahnsen, who's a head of a major investment firm, and, he's a frequent guest on Fox News. And we got a number of other people lined up, so we're excited.

J.P. Moreland [00:59:02]:

God bless you, man.