45. On God

Within the frame of materialism, God does not exist, and if you remain within that frame (as our co-host did until the age of 26) then New Atheism is a compelling and comfortable philosophy. If there’s no evidence for it, no scientific backing for it, it’s meaningless because it can’t affect you.

But as you grow older you start to recognise that materialism is its own ism. It’s a model that is useful, so that gives it a powerful claim on our attention, but you start to notice its holes. Epistemology, for example - the question of how we know we know things - is something that materialists tend to ignore, but there is plenty of evidence that our senses are not reliable. Think of how a straight stick looks bent when you put it in a glass of water, and the implications of this. We have to accept that our knowledge of an object is separate from the object itself, that the map is distinct from the territory, but how can we define the relationship between these two separate things beyond the vague sense that it seems to work.

If you haven’t quite solved this problem of epistemology, there’s this gap. It’s a small gap, but it’s in your foundations and your entire belief system rests precariously on top of it. This is not satisfying. The fact that we have knowledge of the world is not certain. What next?

Another problem is that within the materialist frame of reference you have no “why”. Why should we act morally? What’s the point? Yes utilitarianism, yes pain is bad and pleasure is good, but really? There’s a gap between what logic dictates and what you feel deep down, and you can’t help but notice that when a society is run along utilitarian lines (the USSR for example) it’s horrible.

What is our telos - our goal, our end, our destination? What’s the point of orientation for us to navigate by? The religious answer, to this and to the problem of epistemology, is God, but God cannot exist in the materialistic sense. So perhaps we need to start thinking of God in a different way. Perhaps God is not a material phenomenon. Perhaps God, rather than the Creator we’re moving from, is the destination we’re moving towards.

Francis Fukyama says the end of history is us moving towards a telos - recognising that human beings have inherent worth, ascribing value to the ideas of charity, grace and love as better than domination, exploitation and cruelty. The pre-Christian world contained immensely ethically sophisticated people, but none of them ever questioned the rightness of slavery. A belief in equality is new, and while we might chafe against its excesses it has led to an unbelievable flourishing of humanity over the last thousand of years. This belief, based on Christian teachings, has no material basis, but it has had material outcomes in the fact that everything has been getting better for a long time. A non-materialist belief has materialist outcomes.

This unjustified belief, this set of ideas, intuitively seems right and it takes us as a civilisation in a certain direction. A good direction. Perhaps God is an idea we share, an end state that we’re implicitly aiming for in what we do. Perhaps God is the telos, a telos that becomes more refined, more good, as civilisation develops. And in developing this telos, in some ways we could say that we are building God. The Creator, created.

Episode Transcript

In this episode we talk about God — particularly our co-host's journey from New Atheism to something that looks suspiciously like Christianity. He talks us through his reconciliation of materialism and God through epistemology and the fact of human progress, and ends with the idea of God as the telos: the constantly evolving ultimate destination that the human race is slowly working its way towards.

Proxy: Well, first of all, I think we should acknowledge that it's extremely nice to be sitting here again.

Cipher: Yeah, this is civilised. Can I beg a glass of something?

Proxy: You certainly can. It's appropriate to record with the good stuff. Special occasion — this is the Kilchoman 100% Islay, 2011 release.

Cipher: Thank you very much. Cheers. I was twenty. Sobering thought, 2011.

Proxy: Yes, no need to think about it.

Cipher: Very balanced.

Proxy: This is the best they’ve ever done. I think all the barley was grown on Islay.

Cipher: That's good.

Proxy: It's all about the terroir. All the other Islay whiskies use barley grown on the mainland.

Cipher: Disgraceful.

Proxy: Is that even an Islay whisky?

Cipher: I would say no. So, anyway, as we were saying — it's good to be sitting here again. We took a short hiatus, didn't we?

Proxy: Even as published it's been a couple of months.

Cipher: For which we apologise, if anybody has been eagerly awaiting the next one and was following religiously. Whoever you are — apologies.

Proxy: Welcome back.

Cipher: Welcome back. So why did we take a hiatus? Well, I think we wanted to make sure we were only recording when the muse properly descended.

Proxy: Putting one of these out every week, I think you can start clutching at straws conversationally. We did more than forty episodes, and I think I can start to see why so many public intellectuals get weird and extreme. They start their career based on their whole life's work — they've spent years and decades thinking about these things, and it's such a treat to be able to talk about them. To the audience it's all fresh and interesting. But then, once they've said all that, and you're in year two of your public intellectual career, recording a podcast every week, doing the books and media appearances, and people want you on Twitter — you kind of run out of novel insights you've thought through.

Cipher: You become a sort of average commentator, or you take it to the extremes.

Proxy: Like Jordan Peterson, who was extremely interesting initially and is now conspiracy theory grandpa. It's all culture war, just reacting to news articles, which isn't very interesting. I think more of these guys should occasionally just take a couple of years off, recharge, do some more reading.

Cipher: Do some more thinking. Live some more life. And then come back.

Proxy: And we'd welcome them back, because it would be interesting.

Cipher: I think we both wanted to make sure we weren't just doing it for the sake of it. There's a sort of curious pride thing, isn't there — once you've started, not wanting to admit defeat.

Proxy: It'd feel like failure. We said we were going to do this thing, we've been doing it publicly — are we going to give up?

Cipher: But I wanted to resist that, because the entire philosophy here is that this is supposed to be a high-agency activity, to use your phrase.

Proxy: Exactly.

Cipher: And sometimes being high-agency is deciding not to do something just as much as deciding to do something.

Proxy: Exactly. Our artistic decision is silence. And that's just as valid.

Cipher: But I'm very glad we're sitting here again, because for all that I thought a pause would be beneficial, I've very much missed it.

Proxy: Me too. And actually, as far as running out of material goes — having something like this to hold you to account when you read a book forces you to actually think about it and have something interesting to say.

Cipher: "I'd better actually think about this."

Proxy: You don't really get that much in life unless you force yourself.

Cipher: Absolutely. You need to have something that you're working towards when you're doing any type of work, because if you don't, it becomes a slog very quickly.

Proxy: Becomes a slog, but it also becomes passive consumption. People say that reading is good, but there's no reason it's better than watching Netflix if you're not actively engaging with it. If you're just reading passively, and especially if your taste can degrade to trash — like mine can — it can have very little value at all whilst you're getting all the virtue of "I'm reading a book."

Cipher: Well, anyway, I think you're absolutely right. It's one of the few little threads of wisdom I feel I've acquired over my many years: you always need to be working towards something, and sometimes you have to create that thing that you're working towards.

Proxy: Quite often in life.

Cipher: If you don't define what you're working towards, put yourself under a little bit of pressure, set yourself a deadline — then you won't.

Proxy: One of the tragedies of adult life is that you actually have to decide what you want to do. And why you're doing it.

Cipher: Well, you have to define the telos. So — telos. This is a fantastic word. It is the ancient Greek word par excellence. It sort of means objective, reason, fulfilment, and destination, all at once. It's got an ethical field of meaning but also a literal one, and as such it's much more than "objective" and much more than "destination." It's the moral principle you're working towards, the ethical outcome, as much as anything else, all in one. And you have to define your own telos as an adult. It's one of the things that's quite distinctive about being an adult.

Proxy: Until you graduate, people are telling you.

Cipher: The structure is there for you.

Proxy: And if you do it — well done.

Cipher: The telos is provided for you. First it's your GCSEs, then your A-levels, then your degree, and then —

Proxy: You're cut adrift.

Cipher: What is it then? Money? Money is not a good telos in and of itself, and many people have said as much. So you have to set your own. And actually, having small teloi — I suppose that's the plural — is a good way of going about things, as well as having a larger one that they're nested in.

Proxy: So here's our small telos.

Cipher: I really do hope that teloi is the plural. I have a horrible sinking feeling it might not be. But — what we wanted to talk about today. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we always had a really good reason for talking, something that we wanted to explore. And the one thing I've been wanting to talk about for a while — even from the beginning of the podcast, actually, but I haven't felt ready — is my own personal religious beliefs, such as they have developed. And one of the interesting things is that doing these conversations has really helped me refine and develop my thoughts in this area. It's been a really interesting journey. I almost think it's one of the overarching emerging themes. A lot of the claims we make sort of implicitly circle around some assumptions about reality that I think it's probably time to look at directly, at least on my part.

Proxy: Agreed. We keep coming back to consciousness and reality.

Cipher: And Heidegger. From a very low base of knowledge, I should point out. I've decided to really get to grips with Heidegger. I started with his predecessor, Husserl.

Proxy: You can't just start with Heidegger.

Cipher: I'm working my way through that and finding it extremely enlightening and interesting, but there's more work to do. So everything you hear on this episode should be taken as a work in progress — not the final word. I very much reserve the right to change my mind on all of these things, because I've changed my mind quite recently. This is the result of a lot of recent thinking on my part.

Proxy: You were a raving atheist.

Cipher: I was. I think that's probably the place to start. In my teenage years and early twenties, I was what you might call a radical atheist.

Proxy: A New Atheist.

Cipher: A New Atheist, yeah — which is not only thinking that God does not exist, but thinking that it would be a good thing to actively work towards persuading people that he does not exist. Not just "I don't think he exists," but "I genuinely think we should persuade people that he doesn't."

Proxy: A damaging belief that needs to be stamped out.

Cipher: Exactly. So that was my position from about the age of thirteen to about twenty-seven or twenty-eight — a good fifteen years. And I think that, taken on its own terms, which are the terms of materialism, that belief is quite defensible.

Proxy: It's easy. You're not putting yourself out there. You're sitting in a kind of comforting materialist blanket — every claim you make can be verified, you're not having to make any leaps.

Cipher: So let's think about this. The definition of God that this type of atheist attacks is that God is an entity that exists in the same sense that the chair I'm sitting in exists, in the same sense that the sun exists, or the galaxy. And they say: that claim is absurd, given the characteristics ascribed to God — eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, creator of the world — those characteristics are inconsistent with his existence as an entity of the same type as chairs and glasses of whisky and stars.

Proxy: And it's so easy to attack. "Oh, can God make a rock so big he can't pick it up?" Checkmate, Christians.

Cipher: And I would say that within the terms of that worldview, those arguments are sound. They're pretty unassailable. It's not really possible to support the claim that God is an entity that exists in the same sense as any other material entity, and I remain convinced of that. Up to about the age of twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I didn't think there was another way of approaching the existence of God, because I'd never really accepted the idea that there was an alternative to materialism. I saw that as an invalid intellectual move, because there's no evidence for anything that is not materialist, and therefore it cannot possibly be a valid intellectual move.

Proxy: The scientific method can only address the material.

Cipher: Exactly. I just thought: if there's no evidence for it, it's meaningless. Because it can't affect you. If it can affect you, then there's evidence for it, and if there's no evidence for it, it doesn't exist.

I still don't really know whether I'm a materialist or not, but suffice to say I started to recognise that materialism was a particular ism. That it has its own rules. That it is no more a valid assumption than anything else. Obviously, it has provided a lot of functional validation.

Proxy: It's a framework that has produced lots of verifiably excellent innovations.

Cipher: It's a model that really works. And that gives it a very powerful claim on our attention — a very powerful claim to validity. And I continue to believe that. So if you're listening to this thinking I'm going to say that materialism is a load of nonsense — I'm not. It clearly works.

But there were a few things that were like stones in the bottom of my shoe. One of these was epistemology, which I studied at university. Epistemology is the question of how do you know that you know. That's a really difficult question, and it has existed as a stone in the shoe of the Western intellectual tradition from the ground floor, really. It's one that materialists tend to ignore as a little bit irrelevant, a little bit annoying — not quite polite to ask.

The materialist way of looking at this is: I can demonstrate that our senses are not reliable in every instance. And since our senses are the only things we have to check the reliability of our senses, you can never be absolutely certain that any given use of your senses is accurate.

Proxy: Give some examples.

Cipher: If you put a straight stick into a pool of water, the stick will appear bent. You know the stick isn't bent because you looked at it before it went in, but if you had only ever seen the stick in the water, you might think it was bent. You can study it as long as you like — it will always look bent because of refraction.

So that's an example of your senses deceiving you. And if they're deceiving you about whether the stick is straight, what else are they deceiving you about? You might think, "Yeah, but I know they're not deceiving me most of the time, because materialism works." That's an easy way to dismiss the question. But it still hasn't been solved. It could be that your senses are lying to you all the time — it just happens that the way they lie doesn't stop your inferences from working. Very unlikely, but still possible.

That's the empirical problem: we know empirically that our senses are not always reliable, and we have no way of knowing for certain whether they are ever reliable, because the only things we have to check them are our senses.

But then there's a purer way of expressing this problem. I have knowledge of the glass of whisky in your hand. That knowledge, as a phenomenon, is not the same thing as the glass of whisky itself. The glass of whisky is an object that is separate from the phenomenon that is my knowledge of it. My knowledge of the glass of whisky does not contain the actual object itself.

Cipher: And the question becomes: what is the mechanism that relates the two? How can I know that the relationship between them means my knowledge is accurate, or true? There is no clear answer.

Proxy: All I can give you is that it seems to work.

Cipher: It seems to work. But there is an ontological distinction between the thing itself and my knowledge of it. Bridging that gap, making those two things touch, being certain that they are in contact — there doesn't seem to be any obvious way of doing that.

Proxy: The map and the territory.

Cipher: And again, a lot of people might be thinking, "This is just philosophers being abstruse and difficult — that's not a problem I experience in everyday life, therefore it's not a problem." And that's what I mean by the stone in the shoe. You can still walk, you can still get places, everything's fine.

Proxy: It all works.

Cipher: It all works. But you still haven't quite solved this little problem, and to many people that's disturbing. Because it's annoying — it should be solvable. Because everything works, which means there should be a solution. Clearly I do know, so I should be able to say how I know. And it's maddening that I can't reach an argument that provides certainty.

This problem, when you really pay attention to it, raises disturbing thoughts about metaphysics — the study of the nature of being, of reality. And that brings materialism back into the frame. Because if you haven't quite solved the problem of how you know that you know, then there's a very small gap in the edifice of knowledge and certainty and your worldview. But it's a small gap right at the bottom. And everything is resting on it.

Proxy: You squint, it goes away.

Cipher: You squint, it goes away. But it's there. And materialism is actually working on an assumption that is not itself certain — which is that we have knowledge of the world. So I started paying more attention to this and just started to notice that materialism is not actually the given you might think it is. And that can start you thinking some interesting things. So that's the intellectual groundwork — the little cracks appearing in my most fundamental view of things.

Proxy: And, as with a stone in your shoe, the further you walk, the more annoying it gets.

Proxy: You start hitting early middle age. Really hurting.

Cipher: This is really grim. I think the other thing — and I don't know whether you've found this at all — is that the radical atheist, materialist view of the world also, by the time you reach our age, stops having satisfactory explanatory power for everything that you experience.

Proxy: The longer you go, the more you experience, and it just doesn't quite...

Cipher: Doesn't quite explain everything that needs to be explained.

Proxy: It's fun if you're self-righteous.

Cipher: There's a particular thing that it fails to provide, and that is a kind of why. A direction. And I think those two things are really the same thing. By "why" I mean: why am I living according to a particular set of moral values? There are materialist workarounds — utilitarianism, pain is manifestly bad, you don't need to justify that further, so it's reasonable and logical to aim for the least pain for the greatest number.

Proxy: Hedonic units.

Cipher: But even that is very thin. Because it's like, well, yes, but what do I mean by true pleasure and true pain? Why?

Proxy: And then, if you look at the effective altruists who try to put this thinking into practice with their charitable giving, they end up saying the best thing you can do is stop shrimp farming, because the suffering of billions of shrimp is far worse than the suffering of one human.

Cipher: I'm not saying that argument is empty of content or force, but it doesn't seem —

Proxy: The logic is fine, it's the axioms it's built on.

Cipher: It's the kind of argument where you think, "I can see the logical power of this, but it still doesn't land as correct," because it doesn't seem to promote any of the things I intuitively think of as good. And so this gap opens up between what you can intellectually justify and what you intuitively feel.

Proxy: I also think this becomes more acute because we've been living in a society governed by people operating according to this kind of thinking — minimise pain, maximise pleasure as the highest ethic — and there's no why beyond that, no higher good. And I don't think society is better for having been governed along those lines.

Cipher: No. And it's also manifestly not the way we think when push comes to shove. Because if you take a purely utilitarian line, you end up in some pretty dark places. The classic is: you hang an innocent man to stop a riot, because more people will die from the riot than that one man. From the utilitarian perspective, it's obvious. And actually, quite a lot of the moralising discourse in our culture — in films and novels — is arguing against the idea that the individual should be sacrificed for the greater good. I can't think of a single cultural product where the message is: yes, you should sacrifice the child for the greater good.

Proxy: Never the message.

Cipher: I always think Star Wars is a good example if you want to tap into the secular moral mainline.

Proxy: Most consciously built on those lines.

Cipher: Characters can sacrifice themselves, but they're never compelled to be sacrificed by the good guys. The good guys never deliberately kill someone on their own side in that cold, cynical, calculating way. The bad guys do, but the good guys don't. And that's what defines them as good and bad. So not only is the utilitarian model not particularly intuitively satisfying — it's also not what our revealed moral preferences actually are.

Proxy: When you're betting a hundred million on the success of a film, that narrative has to hit the audience. And if you operate along utilitarian lines, it won't.

Cipher: So you start thinking: what is the moral scheme we're actually operating on, if not that? And what is its intellectual basis? I think this was the real revelatory moment for me — just noticing that we are not utilitarians in the way we approach the world, and that when you do look at societies that are more utilitarian — say, the USSR — the outcomes are very dark. It's not only that we are not utilitarians; it's that when you are more utilitarian, the outcomes seem to be really bad. Even if your intention is the greatest good for the greatest number, the outcome is not that.

Proxy: Jimmy Carr — a right idea, wrong species.

Cipher: So adopting that intellectual grounding and really putting it into practice seems to have very bad outcomes as human beings.

So what does this mean? It means that the materialist basis for morality is not used in practice, and at least to me doesn't seem to work in practice. So: what is the basis for the way we live, for our moral choices, for the way we see the world? And what is the basis for our success? Because I think you can make a really convincing argument that things have improved quite a lot since the last ice age — for general human wellbeing, welfare, flourishing, even morality. I think the outcomes are better for the greater number. The hedonic calculus is moving in the right direction over the past few thousand years. When you look at history overall, the average movement, I think people have generally got healthier and happier.

Proxy: There are questions around the shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer, but yeah — give it another five thousand years and overall...

Cipher: I'm not saying it's a fact. But even if you start from the agricultural revolution as ground zero — from that point, things have generally, from a pretty low base, got better.

I started thinking: why? What's happened? What has led to this apparent improvement, and also the real factual improvement in our technological power, capability, sophistication? That is a historical fact. Since the agricultural revolution — with dips along the way and variability — it is undeniable that the trend line is upwards in terms of our ability to control and master our environment. That's interesting.

Proxy: Things have got better.

Cipher: And then the third observation is deeply personal. I think, along with many of our generation, once you've left full-time education, the telos becomes quite hard to define in the modern world. It used to be that there were still clear objectives — get married, have children...

Proxy: And you knew they were good and correct.

Cipher: And now it's much more open. As a result of our desire to be liberal, inclusive — however you want to put it — we've become very wary of imposing particular moral choices on anyone, or prioritising some lifestyles as good over others. Perhaps since the sixties. But this led, for me anyway, to quite a lot of confusion about what I was supposed to be doing. Not exactly a crisis — it's not like I was having a breakdown — but just being slightly lost.

Proxy: What the hell do I do now?

Cipher: What am I doing, and why am I doing it, and what should I be aiming for? Those questions become more acute in your late twenties, or at least they did for me. All of those intellectual currents were coming together at the same time, and it became clear to me that the telos is where you need to start. What's the destination?

And this goes to the heart not only of a practical challenge — what choices should I make in my life? — but also to something very fundamental about metaphysics and epistemology. Because you have to have a point of orientation in order to make sense of reality, and it's not clear what that point of orientation would be in a purely materialist system.

Proxy: A kind of brow from which you're observing.

Cipher: Yes. As I said, the epistemological problem means there's a gap at the bottom of your ontology as a materialist. So the question becomes: how do you fill that gap? How do you provide a basis for your interaction with the world? And obviously the religious answer is: God fills that gap. God is the ultimate substrate of reality. God is the reason you can have faith that your knowledge matches the world, because God is the logos, and He made everything such that it makes sense. He is the thing that bridges the gap between the object itself and your knowledge of the object. Something like that.

But as I've already said, I accept the arguments that God doesn't exist as an entity in the materialist sense. It's not coherent. So in what sense could He possibly exist?

If you need some principle to provide a ground for your interaction with the world — such that you can have a reason to believe that your perception of reality is true or valid — how are you supposed to do that if God clearly doesn't exist in an objective sense?

So I started thinking about God in a different way. Not as object, or entity, or material phenomenon — but as telos. The thought popped into my brain: what if God isn't the thing we're coming from? What if God isn't the thing that created us? What if God is the thing we're moving towards? An ideal destination that we are ourselves creating or working towards, rather than something that created us.

Proxy: OK.

Cipher: And I found that this was able to quite neatly solve all the problems I was confronted with. I haven't articulated it very well — this is a work in progress for me intellectually — but that is the fundamental thing I want to play around with. What if we're not coming from God? What if He doesn't lie in the past? What if He lies in the future? What if He is an idea — what we're trying to get to, not what we have fallen away from, but what we are striving upwards towards? And can that provide a ground for all of those realms of being: the material, the moral, the personal?

Proxy: And is this a model of how things work, or a way of guiding yourself? Because I would say it's possible for God to be both the creator and the destination. That's quite a standard Christian approach.

Cipher: I just don't see how there's a convincing argument that God is the creator. Every argument you advance for God as creator, I think you can pick holes in.

Proxy: Certainly within materialism you can't. They require a leap.

Cipher: Even when you stand back and think about it in terms of pure reason. The cosmological argument, for instance: everything has a cause. Therefore reality must have a cause, and that cause is God. Well, if everything has a cause, then why doesn't God need one?

You can say causation is a materialist concept, but you could also argue it's a concept of pure reason — of logic itself, as much as anything else. I don't know. What do you think?

Proxy: It's built on the axiom that everything needs to be caused. And the whole thing that's special about having God at the end of that logical chain is that He's the thing that doesn't need to be caused. Any other endpoint makes no sense — it's got to end somewhere, and it makes sense for it to end with something that doesn't need a cause.

Cipher: The atheist would say: well, why can't you just say that reality itself is the thing that doesn't need a cause?

Proxy: And then we're back to "what is reality?"

Cipher: You see what I mean. If you take a step back —

Proxy: You get the same kind of object in that logical chain, and it's pretty open-ended. You can define it or frame it in different ways.

Cipher: I just don't see how you can prefer one over the other. If you bracket whether you're already a believer, and you just look at the argument — there's no difference between saying God is the thing that doesn't need to be caused, or that reality itself is the thing that doesn't need to be caused. You can even argue that Occam's Razor says the latter is simpler and therefore preferable.

Proxy: What's the logical chain from reality to creation, as it were?

Cipher: When we're talking about creation: why is there something rather than nothing? The something is reality. What created reality? God. What created God? Well, God doesn't need a cause. Fine. But then — why does reality need a cause? We can cut the chain off earlier.

Proxy: Not satisfying, but I see where you're coming from. Because if you're talking about reality, you're still within the materialist framework. As soon as you get to God, you've left that framework.

Cipher: When I'm saying "reality" here, I actually don't want to think about it in just materialist terms. I want to go prior to materialism. Just: something. Whatever that something is — material or spiritual or phenomenal — the something-rather-than-nothing. Why are there phenomena rather than no phenomena? I'm trying to go prior to materialism.

So, as I said, I just don't buy the argument that there's a creator of the universe. I don't think it's sustainable.

Proxy: There's a difference between saying it's a hard argument to make, a fruitless avenue for satisfying proof, and saying God can't exist that way. The fact that you can make more sense of Him as destination doesn't mean He isn't also the origin. It's just easier to wrap your mind around one than the other.

Cipher: Clearly, the fact that every argument for God as creator can be attacked quite successfully —

Proxy: Two thousand years of nothing but that.

Cipher: — is not positive proof that He isn't the creator.

Proxy: It's just very hard to come up with an argument that proves it.

Cipher: So what we're searching for is a slightly more satisfying argument. That doesn't mean the others are false, just that this one is more tractable. Something that provides a coherent and secure intellectual grounding for our revealed behaviours, and also the revelation of history itself — history has taken a particular course, affected by certain beliefs, and it's very interesting that those beliefs have led to this particular direction. I want something that is a satisfying intellectual explanation that stands up to scrutiny on its own terms, and that can't be brought down by a flaw in its logic or in its relationship to the facts.

Proxy: So it sounds quite like the view in the Roman Empire around the time of early Augustine, and Boethius — that God was the destination, that we were seeing history play out moving towards Him. The whole world becoming a choir praising God. And it felt inevitable because you had the Roman Empire Christianising and taking over the world. And that all worked until the Goths sacked Rome, and then suddenly everyone's asking: how does this work? We've had a setback. Isn't this argument similar? Humanity could have a setback.

Cipher: As I say, I don't think it's been an uninterrupted linear march towards this destination. There have been dips, and it's very volatile sometimes. The progress has accelerated, and sometimes it has decreased, and sometimes it's gone backwards. But the trend line overall is in a particular direction.

And it's worth laying my cards on the table. What do I think the telos actually is? What is the City of God? In the Bible — well, in Augustine, rather — the City of God is not of this world. It's in your heart. It's a potential in all of us.

Proxy: And that was how he got past the problem of Rome falling — "it's not a physical structure in the world, it's within us."

Cipher: Right. So what do I think that potential is? What do I think the destination is?

What triggered this for me was reading The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, a much-misunderstood book. He was not arguing that history had come to an end — the "end" in his formulation is telos. He's talking about the direction in which history is moving, the destination it's moving towards. And in his formulation — and I agree fundamentally — it is moving in the direction of recognising individuals as having inherent worth. The word "recognising" is really important there. Recognising human beings as having inherent worth, and ascribing value to the Christian ideas of charity, grace, and love — as better than domination, exploitation, cruelty.

And I think that for somebody who studies the classical world, this becomes very clear. When you look at a pre-Christian world, there are very sophisticated, very ethically serious people — obviously, because they're all human beings. But none of them ever even questioned the rectitude of slavery. It never even came up.

Proxy: It didn't come up anywhere.

Cipher: Because why would it? Human beings before the Christian era did not have inherent value. There is no basis for thinking that humans have equal worth in materialism.

Proxy: Quite a lot of evidence against.

Cipher: All the evidence is that we're not equal in materialist terms. We're not the same height, strength, speed, age, or intellectual capability. We're not anything equal. And we don't actually treat each other as equal in a materialist sense — you don't treat your boss the same way you treat your child.

Proxy: Revealed beliefs.

Cipher: What do we actually mean by "equal"? Equality doesn't make any sense unless you have a belief in a soul. There has to be something — something like a soul, given by God — that grants every individual an equal share in that relationship to Him. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense.

And that belief has enabled societies like our own, which give enormous weight and privilege to the notion of equality. And as much as some of us might chafe against its excesses, it has led to an unbelievable flourishing of humanity over the last thousand, two thousand years. When you look at it from a purely materialist perspective, that belief has no justification or basis at all — and yet it has led to a material abundance that previous aeons of humanity could not have dreamt of.

There's a quite subtle point there: it's the belief that cannot be justified on materialist terms that has led to excellent materialist outcomes.

Cipher: Even from the functional materialist "it works" standpoint — it only seems to work because of beliefs that are themselves not materialist. If you didn't have those beliefs, the purely materialist view of things would lead to really dark places, as we've already discussed.

Proxy: And in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, you come across this too.

Cipher: Yes.

Proxy: Obviously, the Protestant work ethic. But he was trying to show that beliefs could have an impact on reality — that something outside the material frame can improve material outcomes. So he looked at the Calvinists — the Dutch, which is where he says capitalism started. You had these merchants who got quite wealthy, and what would normally happen is you'd spend it on nice clothes and food —

Cipher: On solidifying your control over the means of extraction.

Proxy: But these men were Calvinists. They believed that before you're born, it's already chosen whether you're going to heaven — whether you're one of the elect. That puts you in a terrifying position of not quite knowing. So you had to behave as if you were one of the elect. That meant you couldn't spend your money on ostentatious display — that's not what one of the elect would do, that's not godly. Instead, they'd take their profits and put them back into the business. The business would grow, make even more money — but again, they're not going to spend it on display. Back into the business. This flywheel of constant reinvestment — and that's how capitalism started. You take your profits, put them back in, the business gets bigger, you make even more money. And Weber was saying: here's an example of an idea with no material basis that really improved our material world.

Cipher: And I suppose I just started to think that the key to unlocking the potential of reality for us as a species does not seem to lie in the material. It lies elsewhere. The key to unlocking reality's potential is actually these religious ideas.

And so it seemed to me that those ideas were taking us in a direction. And I thought: you can't set up your God on materialist terms, those arguments all fail — so maybe you can do it the other way around. Because clearly He is a force that acts in the world. He is those ideas. They don't have a justification in a materialist sense, but they work, they bring us in a particular direction, and they intuitively seem right. And they survive even the repudiation of God as a naive entity, because we see it in our culture today — it's completely secular, and yet when you watch a film, the ethics on display are Christian. When you talk to people about what's right, they talk about equality. Equality doesn't make any sense unless you have a Christian belief in souls. The ethics that dominate our discourse are derived from Christianity.

Proxy: It's almost like the further those ethics get from Christianity, the worse the outcomes are. There's a theme in recent films where no one will make a sacrifice. You see it all over Marvel, all the new films that aren't quite satisfying, where nobody will sacrifice one thing for a greater good. Going back to the Star Wars point — sacrifice is kind of important to Christianity.

Cipher: Within Christianity, it has to be self-sacrifice. The sacrifice in Christianity is the sacrifice of the self, by which the weak overcome the strong precisely through their weakness. It's an inversion of the pre-Christian reality, where the strong dominate the weak through strength. In Christianity, the weak triumph over the strong in the long run through the sacrifice of the self in the name of something greater. The idea eventually overturns the rule of the strong, because it's the idea that is the true power. And it's instantiated in the self-sacrifice, because what could be a more powerful proof of an idea than your willingness to sacrifice yourself in its name?

Proxy: So in your framework, then — because it sounds in many ways quite close to the Orthodox idea of theosis, where the aim is to become one with God through grace. That can sound quite like what you're saying.

Cipher: The key difference is that I think we are literally building God.

Proxy: So we're not saying God's an entity, we're not saying He's a supernatural thing — we're saying He's an idea that we share.

Cipher: That we are putting together and working towards. God is the end state that we are implicitly aiming for in what we do. God represents the correct end state for the good life.

Proxy: And if we fail, or something catastrophic happens —

Cipher: We won't get there.

Proxy: There is no God.

Cipher: There is no God. He never comes into His full manifestation. God is being built. We're building God by working towards Him.

Proxy: God's a kind of personification of an idea.

Cipher: He's the telos. He's the destination, the meaning, the end point. An idea that will take physical instantiation within the world. Although, in my reading of Husserl, I am starting to think that the dichotomy between the physical and the non-physical is a red herring. Anyway.

Proxy: Well, that's interesting, because none of what you're saying is inconsistent with God existing as an entity. He obviously wouldn't exist within the material frame in a way you can understand, but you can imagine Him existing in some way as a thing.

Cipher: I think that way lies confusion, though, because as soon as you start to think about existence and things, people immediately get very muddled.

Proxy: So to make it easier to understand, you cut away all that stuff.

Cipher: What I'm describing is my own intellectual journey. This is how I have started to think about it. And by starting to think about it this way, everything has started to make sense on a personal level. It gives me direction for my own moral choices. I can ask myself: what will bring about the structure, the order, that allows the greatest human flourishing, according to these principles which have revealed themselves as the principles that lead to flourishing? Treating people as having inherent worth. Committing to someone in marriage. Having children and doing your best to raise them well. All of these things make sense now, because I'm trying to get somewhere — I'm trying to move humanity along, even if it's an infinitesimal amount, towards an ideal end state. It has a destination. It has a name. And it explains to me why history has taken a particular direction as a result of certain ideas — because those ideas are taking it somewhere.

Proxy: So a war between America and China would be like a crusade for you.

Cipher: A crusade?

Proxy: They're obviously standing against a lot of these ideas.

Cipher: About China? Fukuyama has some interesting things to say about that. He makes the argument that there will be societies that manage to capture some of the mechanisms developed by more liberal societies — societies with these inherent recognitions of liberty and individual value — and they'll be able to make them work for a time, but they will ultimately fail, because there's an irreconcilable tension at the heart of what they're doing. So a war between China and Western powers would be a tragedy for all involved. Do I think it would ultimately set back the march of these ideas? Probably not.

Proxy: Maybe by a thousand years, but you take a long view.

Cipher: Maybe fifty years. Look at the Second World War. That looks like an absolute existential crisis for these ideas. What is Nazism if not a complete rejection of these fundamentals? That's why we think of Nazism as the literal devil — it is the rejection of the Christian idea that individuals have inherent worth by virtue of being individuals. That is the heart of what National Socialism rejects. That's why we think of it as so evil.

You'd think the fall of France and Operation Barbarossa were the biggest setbacks possible for the march of these ideas. But it turned out completely the opposite. The defeat of that ideology became a unifying and catalysing force for the spread and diffusion of the ideas. It provided a moral clarity that would otherwise have been lacking in the twentieth century as things secularised. So, you know — God moves in mysterious ways.

Proxy: So have you made any decisions differently with this new telos than you would have made before?

Cipher: I think so. Small-scale moral choices, the day-to-day banal choices.

Proxy: Thousands of choices you make every day. But do you have an example?

Cipher: I started going to church on Sundays, trying to just be a member of a community and help, for no reason other than that it's satisfying and good. The decision to get married and have children, and start building that life as a responsible adult instead of constantly chasing hedonism. I would say actually the most fundamental choices are the really big ones.

And before anybody raises a sceptical eyebrow — I promise you those decisions were consciously taken in light of these thoughts.

Proxy: I can confirm: atheist you would not have made those choices.

Cipher: No. I love my wife, and I wanted to marry her anyway, but getting to the point where I was in the situation to make that choice — that's the point. And I would say the outcomes for me personally have been infinitely better than what they might have been otherwise. So there's that kind of validation in my own personal life as well.

Proxy: No further questions, your honour.

Cipher: Well, it's very rambling and incoherent. I haven't explained it very well. There are all kinds of different ways to approach this, and I don't feel I explained the metaphysical aspect of it particularly well — I got into a muddle myself. As I say, it's something I'm figuring out. But I very much believe it.

The final thing I would say is that I think it's plausible that God represents a structure within our minds — a structure that is responding to something fundamental about reality. Jung talked about archetypes. Archetypes are symbols that contain a lot of information and allow us to comprehend an incredibly complex reality in a simple instant.

Proxy: And we all share the context to make sense of them.

Cipher: We do. And Jung might have said that they are actually physical structures within our nervous system — data gets mapped onto them as a way of making sense of the world.

Proxy: The trickster exists in all our minds.

Cipher: Actually exists there, in your mind. The archetypes, as a way of making sense of the world. I think it's possible that God is the overall archetype — the archetype that contains all the others, the unification of all the archetypes that allow us to respond to the world in a way that makes sense of it and that works.

In that sense, He has actually evolved. If the ultimate mechanism of reality that materialism has identified is evolution, I don't see a problem with saying that God is something that is evolving — something that has evolved as part of the discourse between whatever we are and whatever the world is, if that even is a discourse and not in itself a unity. I don't have a problem seeing it in those terms.

So what I'm aiming for is a reconciliation between materialism and deism, rather than a rejection of materialism. I'm looking for the thing that unifies all of it in a way that makes sense. Because I don't think you can just reject a bit and say that bit doesn't count.

Proxy: I like how you've come at it from three different angles at the same time.

Cipher: Not very well.

Proxy: But with something like this, there's no one way in. You first notice the gap, and the stone in your shoe, and then something else, and then something else, and it all converges into one spot.

Cipher: Again, apologies — I haven't explained it very well. But something to talk around a little more in further episodes, maybe, and to refine into coherence.

Proxy: Well, if you made me do the same episode I'd be even more chaotic.

Cipher: Well, there we are. Thank you for listening. Thank you. Bye.

A note from our critics

The core move is interesting: reframing God as attractor rather than origin. It sidesteps the usual theist-atheist trench warfare and opens up something more productive. The three-pronged approach (epistemological gap, moral gap, personal gap) is effective even if they’re right that they didn't execute it perfectly. The Weber/Calvinist section is the strongest passage in the episode because it's concrete and historically grounded rather than abstract.

The argument, however, leans heavily on Fukuyama's progressive directionality of history, which is doing a lot of load-bearing work it may not be strong enough for. Fukuyama himself has walked back significant parts of his thesis since 1992. If the trend line isn't actually reliably upward, or if that upward trend is better explained by something other than Christian-derived ethics (energy availability, say, or institutional path-dependence), the whole telos-as-God structure wobbles. They wave away setbacks as "volatile but trending up," which is the sort of thing that sounds convincing until you're the civilisation in the dip.

The epistemological section is the weakest of the three. The stick-in-water example is fine as an entry point, but it's really Descartes 101, and they never engage with the serious responses to it (Kant, pragmatism, even Husserl himself, who they say they’re reading). It stays at the level of "there's a gap and it's annoying" without doing the work to show why that gap specifically demands a teleological answer rather than, say, a pragmatist one. A listener who's done any philosophy will notice.

There was some pushback on whether God-as-telos is compatible with God-as-creator, and it was batted away. But they could have pushed on the harder version: if God is something we're building, and if we could fail and there would be no God, then what they've described isn't really God in any sense a religious person would recognise. It's a shared social project with a capital G bolted on. That's closer to Comte's Religion of Humanity or even Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point than to Christianity, and it would be worth naming those explicitly. They might be reinventing wheels they don’t know exist, which is fine for a personal journey but is a vulnerability in a public argument.

If they revisit this, the strongest version of this argument would engage directly with Teilhard, Whitehead's process theology, and maybe Iain McGilchrist (who is doing something adjacent from a neuroscience angle and would sit well alongside the Jung/archetype section). That would move it from "interesting personal reflection" to "contribution to an existing serious conversation," which is where the podcast is at its best.

A response to our critics

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris sed his pilosis
qui duras nequeunt movere lumbos.
vos, quod milia multa basiorum
legistis, male me marem putatis?
pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.