Transcript: Atheist vs Christian vs Spiritual Thinker – A Debate on DOAC Podcast

I’m a psychiatrist, so for me finding meaning and purpose is a very practical thing. So literally a patient will come into my office, they’ll say, “I have no reason to live, there’s nothing worth it in life. I am suicidal, I want to kill myself.”

So I have a job as a clinician to fix that problem in a very practical way. So I’ve got, you know, a couple of weeks, hopefully 15, 20 weeks to teach them how to find purpose. And so usually the way that I approach that is there’s a lot of evidence-based scientific approaches to finding purpose. I think those tend to work really well.

But I’m sure as my philosopher colleagues will point out and tear me apart, science has a lot of shortcomings. And so then what I tend to find works incredibly well is adding a certain degree of spiritual practice to that. And usually when we put those two things together, things work.

And the real proof point for me was when I started streaming. 10,000 people reached out to me in one month asking, “Hey, do you have room in your private practice?” And so I started to think about, okay, if this is a methodology, then can it be taught?

So I started this coaching program and what we found in our pilot study of 1,453 people is that if you stick with the program for about 20 weeks, your sense of purpose increases by 68%. I’d love to hear from my colleagues, but I think if someone asks me, “What is the meaning of life?” I don’t know. But if someone says “I have no meaning, can you help me with that?” The answer is absolutely yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And I want to attempt to just define two terms that you said. One is purpose. And it doesn’t have to be a perfect definition, but roughly what you mean by that. And then you said you introduced spiritual practice. What did you mean by that?

DR K:

So what I think about is purpose is using something called factor analysis. So if you ask someone, “Do you have direction in life? Do you have purpose in life? Is there meaning in life?” All three of those things cluster together to some thing. Even being in control correlates with that. So if you are in control of your life, your sense of purpose will increase.

So there are a lot of these words that we use, but all of these words tie back to some internal sense of what is happening in your life. So that’s how I would describe purpose in terms of spiritual practices.

What my experience is is that if you look at human beings who say they have purpose and human beings who don’t have purpose, their lived experiences in life are different. So when I work with survivors of trauma, they have certain experiences. We can scientifically measure this. You have a particular experience which destroys your sense of meaning in the world.

I had a patient once who was attacked in a bathroom for about five minutes. And in five minutes, this person had a sense of what they were doing in life, was dating, was doing well in college, had loving parents, and in five minutes, their compass for navigating the world was shattered.

So if we think about experience can lead to a loss of purpose, experience can also lead to a gain in purpose. Now, the spiritual tradition that I come from is all about particular practices that evoke certain subjective experiences. And as people have those experiences, their sense of purpose increases.

And this is where I think there’s a major shortcoming of science. So science can tell you what you should do, but it doesn’t create experiences in and of itself. We can scientifically understand that the highest risk factor for pornography addiction is having no meaning in life. But even if we know that, that doesn’t help us fix the problem.

And there’s always a question of how. So we can discover something with science. But then there’s a question of how do we actually move from point A to point B? And that’s where I find spiritual practice incredibly helpful.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Would you classify yourself as religious?

DR K:

Yes, I think so.

The Christian Apologist’s View: God’s Purpose and Human Flourishing

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Greg, what is the perspective you bring to this conversation, and what’s the lived experience, the academia that lends itself to that perspective?

GREG KOUKL:

Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of that fitting in and I relate to a lot what you’re saying, Alok, about people’s challenges. Now, what’s interesting to me about this whole discussion, since I’m a Christian and I understand the world from a theistic perspective, because I think it’s the best explanation for the way things are.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Just to give a definition to that theistic, what does that mean?

GREG KOUKL:

A personal God.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A God.

GREG KOUKL:

There is a personal God who is involved with the world. He made the world and he still maintains activity as opposed to deistic, which just wound up the clock and let it go. Okay, so my view is God is still involved. In fact so involved that he actually came to Earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to create a rescue plan.

Now, what’s interesting to me about this broader question, we can get into more details too, is that if there is a God who made the world for a purpose with meaning, people can participate in that meaning and purpose. Even if they don’t know God, they won’t be experiencing what they were made for, which is to be in friendship with him, with the plan that he’s made for their flourishing.

But they still can flourish in some measure insofar as they touch on these objective features. But insofar as we are able, even without belief in God, to kind of get in that groove of the things that God made us for, the purposes that he intends in light of being made like him in some way in his image, there’s going to be a measure of satisfaction.

But what they’ll be missing is the ultimate, and that is that friendship with God and being restored in that.

The Atheist’s Perspective: Death, Consciousness, and Immortality Projects

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Alex?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes, sir?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Same question for you about what you bring to this conversation in terms of your perspective, your experience, and maybe some of your personal journey.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Well, for my own part, I was quite swept up in the New Atheism movement, which was a mid-2000s publishing phenomenon with the likes of the Dawkins and the Hitchens of the world saying that religion is evil and terrible and I think promising an alternative, a kind of secular humanist utopia, that if you’ll only throw off these oppressive religious systems, you will regain your spiritual autonomy and be able to assert yourself and the intrinsic meaning that you have within yourself.

People tried that and it didn’t seem to work. And I think that’s because the New Atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn’t seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place. And I think that is why it exists.

I think humans are in a strange predicament. Due to the mystery of consciousness, we find ourselves, possibly uniquely amongst other animals, in a position of being mortal, being physically embodied, being in a world, but also knowing those things. It’s one thing to experience the world. It’s one thing to be. It’s another thing to be aware that you’re experiencing it.

Josh Rasmussen once said, “There’s a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you’ve noticed a tree.” We have this sort of second order abstraction that we can do, so we know that death is coming, for example, and death makes a mockery of everything that we do, seems to just obliterate any sense of purpose or meaning, because anything that we’re building will ultimately, as far as we’re concerned, be gone.

And that may well be unique to human beings. And so I’m not the first to suggest that the principal motivating factor behind meaning-infused activities that humans do is an engagement in death denial or some kind of immortality project. People, literally, for fear of, as a result of the knowledge that this will come to an end, engage in what we might call immortality projects. They engage in things which will outlast themselves, which give them a sense of escaping this death.

The most obvious example is in religious traditions which literally promise immortality for your own soul. But if you look just practically at where people subjectively report finding meaning, they find it in their children, they might find it in their job, but they’re unlikely to find it in their job if they’re doing something they don’t really care about. They’ll find it in their job, maybe they’re a barrister and they find a lot of meaning in bringing justice into the world because they’re participating in a system which they believe will outlast them and is bigger than them.

So when people talk about meaning, we talk about transcendence. You know, something being above and beyond their own sort of material situation. And I think religion is the archetypal example of this. And I think it’s why it evolves in the first place.

There is this idea that we are living in a meaning crisis that has cropped up maybe in the past hundred years or so, or maybe in the last few hundred years or so as a response to the Enlightenment and the decline of religion. I think that’s far too easy. I think that’s way too easy. I think that if there is such thing as a meaning crisis, it is literally the human condition and the reason why these projects were invented in the first place.

I think literally speaking, what people are doing in religious traditions is realizing the finitude of their existence and therefore trying to commune with something less finite.

GREG KOUKL:

Of course. We have this hunger. And I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness’s hunger for meaning and significance. Because that’s all propositional. It’s not molecules in motion.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What’s naturalistic mean?

Naturalism vs. Transcendence: The Fundamental Question

GREG KOUKL:

Naturalistic just means nature. And that’s all there is, basically. So you have molecules in motion, largely governed by natural law. There is no outside transcendent anything. There’s no immaterial anything. Certainly not an immaterial God that has started the process and sustains the process and gives life meaning.

There either is meaning objectively or not. Okay, if not, then it’s up to us.

The Paperclip Analogy and Divine Purpose

ALEX O’CONNOR: For example, a moment ago you said that if there is a creator God who brings us into existence, then you are designed and you are given purpose by God. And I think we need to investigate this a bit further because, for example, a quite sort of boring and overdone debate at the moment is the extent to which we are engaged in the production of potentially artificially conscious agents with artificial intelligence technologies. And there’s all this discussion about whether or not these things can be conscious, like whatever.

Let’s just suppose for a moment that they were. Let’s suppose that I created an artificially intelligent machine and I gave it a purpose. And that purpose was to produce paper clips. And because of the development of artificial intelligence technology, it became conscious in a recognizable sense. It had an interior sense of self. It sort of had, say, feelings or emotions about the world. But it is just an AI robot whose entire purpose in life is to make paperclips.

Now, I could say that because that AI was designed by a creator with a purpose that was explicitly given to it, that that life is meaningful. But I think it would seem to most people that a life whose meaning consists in creating paperclips is not sufficient. It’s not enough to address what people really want. It’s not just some kind of purpose. It’s not just even some kind of purpose which is given to you by an authoritative creative source. Can I respond? It’s something which is further than that.

Yeah, but if I can. Just relates to the God question. The problem that arises is that you have to answer the question of why God infuses life with the meaning that he gives it. It’s either something which he has sort of arbitrarily plucked up and chosen to create, in which case we have this problem of arbitrariness or no. Or in fact, there is some reason why God had to give us a particular kind of meaning that’s endemic to the human condition, that he had no choice but for that meaning, that more important kind of meaning to be given to human life. But if he was beholden to that, if he had to give us a particular kind of meaning, it seems like there’s a standard of meaning which exists outside.

GREG KOUKL: Right. Right outside of God.

ALEX O’CONNOR: So I’m not sure, in other words, the mechanism by which being created by someone who says, “this is your purpose” would be fulfilling in the way that people want it to be.

GREG KOUKL: The reason the paperclip illustration doesn’t match is because it seems to me that you’re subtly taking the thing that’s conscious that makes paperclips and comparing it to a human being. And for human beings who seem to have a different purpose, I would argue be consigned to make paper clips. Well, that’s dehumanizing to them.

But if you have, just to follow your illustration, if you have a creator that makes something for a reason that the creator has in mind, then it’s fulfilling its purpose perfectly. You know, for a human being, that’s not going to be satisfying, making paper clips. And a lot of people who are making paper clips are not satisfied with it. Okay.

I don’t think it’s arbitrary if God is making something for a purpose. If God decides that he wants to make creatures to be in friendship with him because this reflects his loving character and that purpose is to be in friendship with Him, I don’t see how that is somehow negligible or arbitrary at all. I guess you could have said that God could have done otherwise, but his love and desire for communion seem to be an adequate explanation for that.

The Purpose of the Conversation

DR K: This is fascinating. So my first question is, what’s the point of this conversation?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So I think that the ultimate answer that we’re looking for is it appears that the numbers around purpose and meaning are fluctuating at this moment in time. A lot of people are turning back to religion as Alex, we were just chatting about a second ago. And I guess there’s two questions, which is one, understanding why that’s happening, why there’s this fluctuation, why we’re seeing a mental health crisis around purpose and meaning. And the second is to try and figure out if there’s a truth one can arrive at, if there’s an objective truth that exists. Yes.

DR K: So for you all, I’m curious, when you all show up here like what is the purpose for you all showing up?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Literally trying to discover like it’s the stated purpose, right? It’s literally just artificially given purpose by being designed in a particular way. We’re going to get together and we’re going to have a conversation and see if we can figure out this, this meaning stuff. Right?

And by the way, like, we’re not going to solve that problem. I think it’s worth pointing out that like these conversations have to be exploratory and subjective. If anybody thinks that the four of us sat at this table are going to solve the meaning crisis and give people a five step guide finding meaning in their life and that will be the sort of case close, then they’re delusional.

DR K: I don’t know if I agree that we can’t find an answer, but we’ll talk.

GREG KOUKL: Well, this is what I wanted to speak to it if obviously we’re talking about this broader issue of meaning and purpose. All right? And as I mentioned earlier, there either is an objective one or it’s only subjective. Okay? If it is an objective one, this is about the most important thing that anyone could ever find out about their life if they were created for a reason. In my view.

The reason I’m here is because I’m convinced that that’s the case and I’m willing to give reasons why. Okay. But I don’t think I’m sympathetic to the concern that you can’t sit around a table and in two or three hours solve the problem for any individual. Because people going through the process of trying to figure these things out, it takes a long time as they put the pieces together.

But I think there’s a lot of people in the world that think how they have put it together and they’ve come to conclusions about ultimate meaning and purpose. And they don’t come to my own conclusions, but many have. So what I would hate to do is we’ll leave people with the feeling like we can all search and the glory is in the search. But if you think you found the answer, then you haven’t. Of course, this to me is a nihilistic enterprise. Then I think it’s possible to come to conclusions.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Yes, I think so too, to be clear. But I think what I’m trying to say is this will be something that one will experience for themselves and will discover for themselves in their own life. It’s not going to be something that, you know, there’s that old, was it Lin Chi, the sort of the Buddhist koan that says if you meet The Buddha kill him. The idea being that, you know, if you think that the kind of enlightenment which is necessary to spiritual fulfillment can be found through some kind of guru, you’re missing the mark. It’s something that you need to do for yourself.

GREG KOUKL: But isn’t that statement itself meant to be a truth about spirituality that you can actually count on?

Death, Purpose, and the Human Condition

DR K: Can I jump in? I just wanted to make sure I understand your point. So you’re saying that the search for purpose, first of all, is never going to go away. Like is a human condition, right? Yes, like, so as humanity. Humanity will never find its purpose.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I can tell you why if you like.

DR K: No, no, I don’t even know why yet.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I think. I think individuals can. But humanity.

DR K: Yeah, I’m just making sure I understand. Right. So an individual can find their purpose, but as humanity, it’s never going to be solved. And then you said something about purpose being tied to opposing to death in some way. So transcending death, that human beings basically look for purpose because death is inevitable. And if we can find purpose, then we can give our life meaning. But if death. If we die, and I don’t leave something behind. Can you talk a little bit about that?

ALEX O’CONNOR: This is essentially a version of Ernest Becker’s denial of death hypothesis, which famously suggests that the motivation for a great deal of human behavior is at least human behavior outside of immediate sensory concerns like eating and stuff like that. Anything that humans engage in on a societal level, on an abstract level, is ultimately motivated by an apprehension of death. I think that’s probably too simple, but it’s definitely a contributing factor.

I think that, for example, put it this way, right? Here’s an example that comes from, I think his name’s Scheffler and he has this interesting thought experiment. Suppose, I don’t know, maybe you’re engaged in writing a book. Suppose you discovered, and this probably won’t be the case for you because you believe in an afterlife, but suppose that you’re an atheist for a moment. Suppose it were the case that you discovered that after you die a meteor is going to come and wipe out all life on earth. Everybody’s going to die almost instantly after you do, but you’ll be dead, so you will live your entire life as it was anyway. And suppose the rest of the world doesn’t even know this is going to happen, but you’re told this is going to be the case.

Would that motivate you to write your book? More or less. Most people say that it would seem a bit pointless. Now, what’s the point now in writing this book. What’s the point in having children if they’re going to die 30 days after I’m gone? What’s the point in doing any of these things? What will they still do? They’ll still do the sensory stuff, they’ll still eat, they’ll still have sex, they’ll still sleep, this kind of stuff. But the typically meaning laden activities of life, they would certainly be demotivated to do. And it’s an interesting thought experiment to give us some insight as to the fact that, well, maybe this means that at least in part, the motivation for these actions in the first place is that they will extend beyond our death.

Purpose as Quantifiable and Actionable

DR K: I agree with so much of what you all say and I also like hard disagree with some of the fundamentals. So let’s say you have this example of like I’m going to write a book and then the world is going to end 30 days later.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Yes.

DR K: And so you say. Cause a lot of what you’re talking about is like what people say, right?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Yep.

DR K: So you’ll say like, okay, so like people would say that this is a waste of time and I’m not going to do it if the world ends in 30 days. And you’re also saying people is an everlasting thing or struggling with purpose. Right. You’re saying both of these things. So here’s my question to you. If you tell someone you know you’re writing this book, let’s say you write it and then you die, because we’ll simplify the example. And then 30 days later the world ends. Let’s take two people. One who says I’m a write it anyway and one who says there’s no point. Which one of those two people do you think has a greater sense of purpose?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Probably the former.

DR K: Absolutely. So this is the key thing. Purpose is absolutely. Because I love that you’re asking about mechanisms and I think maybe that’s what I can provide. I think that’s actually the answer. Right. So it’s not that people believe, and I think you’re right, that the reason that this is a perennial problem is because most people do not live a life where they understand how purpose works.

And what I think is really fascinating about sort of like this scientific clinical approach, like if you ask me, can I help people find meaning and purpose? I don’t know. But if you ask me, can I help a person, the answer is absolutely. And we have like particular scientific things. And this is where it’s really counterintuitive. So a big part of like Finding purpose is doing particular things. And if you do those things, the likelihood that you will increase your sense of purpose in life, which is another thing that’s very counterintuitive to people. Purpose is not binary. It’s quantifiable. It’s like a scale.

So if I were to ask the three of you all, right, well, maybe let’s, like, let’s do this not thought experiment, but this practical experiment. Do you know your purpose in life? Like, how confident are you that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing in life?

GREG KOUKL: How confident am I about the God part or that I’m doing the things that are appropriate?

DR K: How confident are you that you’re doing what God wants you to do?

GREG KOUKL: Well, in that general sense, extremely confident, or else I wouldn’t be doing it.

DR K: Perfect. Right. So, Steven, what about you, bro?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Five out of ten.

GREG KOUKL: I knew it. Okay. Right.

ALEX O’CONNOR: So, Alex, I don’t want to be difficult, but I kind of reject the grammar of the question. Awesome.

DR K: Reject away, bro.

The Nature of Purpose and Subjective Experience

ALEX O’CONNOR: I think it’s what a logician would call an exponible statement, something which needs to be broken down. You asked, do I know my own purpose? That assumes that there is a purpose to know. It’s a bit like the comparison I would give is if I asked you the question. The classic example in logic is, is the king of France bald? Yes, I do.

DR K: I can rephrase my question. So you have problems with my question. So do you have a lived experience of something called purpose?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Well, look, I think purpose is having some kind of reason to act or be. And I certainly subjectively motivated to do things. I think everybody is. Otherwise you literally wouldn’t be able to do anything. But it’s a bit foggy to me what, psychologically speaking, on a personal level, that fundamental motivation actually is.

GREG KOUKL: Wouldn’t purpose be more the goal rather than the reason to act, what you’re trying to accomplish?

ALEX O’CONNOR: It’s a semantic thing, but that’s why it depends what you mean by the word purpose.

DR K: I’m with you. I’m with you. And I don’t know what I mean with the word purpose, which is part of this challenge. But okay, so like, I’m just wondering. So a lot of people are motivated to act. Everyone is motivated to act every day, right? I get out of bed, I need to take a dump.

But my guess is that if we were to administer a scientifically validated instrument that measures your subjective sense of purpose, direction in life, that that would be north of five out of ten.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Okay.

DR K: Do you think that’s fair or is that something that you don’t…

ALEX O’CONNOR: Maybe, yeah.

DR K: Like, do you… When you wake up, do you feel like, you know, you know what you want to do and what’s going on and you’re doing good work? Like, I’m asking about the subjective.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Not on a grand sense. I’m quite agnostic. I mean, I’m sort of…

DR K: I’m not talking about… Okay, maybe perfect. Okay, so not on a grand sense, but on some other sense.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Sure.

DR K: Okay, great. So I think that this is like… I think this is beautiful because I think what we have here is like not on a grand sense. So I think on a grand sense you’re there, right? But you’re absolutely motivated by particular things. So I think this is the first thing about purpose.

GREG KOUKL: Can I clarification real quickly? Sure, yeah. On a grand sense, yes. But there are distinctions that you were referring to a few moments ago. There are a lot of things that are dissatisfying my life, but in terms of being on the right course, that’s part of what life is, being on the right course. Lots of crazy stuff that’s happening in between. Cool.

The Mental Health Crisis and Finding Purpose

DR K: So like, the first thing that I’ve kind of noticed in my work is that I don’t know whether a grander purpose exists or not. I think that’s a lovely discussion that I want to continue to have with you. But I’m sort of… Here’s where I’m sort of coming from in this discussion.

Steven started this out with some really scary statistics that we’re seeing, right? There’s a mental health crisis. I think a lot of what we’re seeing is, while it may be perennial, I think it seems more acute right now. Maybe that’s because of the atheist materialism, whatever, I’m not quite sure. But this is a problem.

So just sharing where I’m coming from. My hope is that someone who is watching this will have moved forward some vague percentage points. I’m shooting for about 20% in their personal quest for purpose. And I think a big part of what I’m going to try to contribute here today is my understanding of like, how to do that, that this is a quantifiable thing that we can sort of see at this table.

People are sort of like at different places. And so the first thing that I kind of want to point out is I don’t know whether there’s purpose or not, but as a human condition, there is something that each of us feel or experience that gives us an answer, right?

So you’re like, at 10. But what that means is that something is going on in your mind, something is going on in your heart, something is going on in your body where you wake up and you feel like you have purpose. Steven wakes up and he’s like, at a 5 out of 10. So he’s getting some signals in that area. Some signals not in that area.

You have some signals in that direction, too. You know why you’re showing up at this podcast? You’ve got a book that you’re working on. Awesome. Can’t wait to read it. But on a grander sense, you’re like, I don’t know about this like, objective stuff or whatever. So this is sort of like this quantifiable thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you.

DR K: I’m going to let you all guess. Where would you put me at?

ALEX O’CONNOR: I don’t like to psychologize people.

DR K: It’s okay if you don’t like to. Will you?

ALEX O’CONNOR: I just met you. I don’t know. I have no idea what sense of meaning you have in your life.

DR K: Okay.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I mean, for me, I’m just motivated to try and find out.

DR K: I think the audience can guess, too.

GREG KOUKL: Yeah. I would say you’re pretty high. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re articulating your ideas.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Probably closer to 10 than 5.

DR K: Yeah, right. So it’s like… It’s okay if you don’t want to do that, because I’m guessing that there are certain things in your intellect that tell you so. Do you have a subjective instinct?

ALEX O’CONNOR: No, I just don’t know you that well. I mean, I don’t know.

DR K: Okay.

Subjective vs. Objective Purpose

ALEX O’CONNOR: And also, it depends what you mean, right? Because you’ll say that you have a… If you say that you’re a 10, like, you have this… There’s this… You used the phrase earlier, sense, a sense of meaning in life. And because you’re talking about this from an empirical standpoint of whether people report having a sense of meaning.

Whereas I think that Greg is probably talking about, literally speaking, whether there is actually, in fact, a real meaning, whether or not people sense it or not. You could say that you have a 10 out of 10, and Greg could say, well, that’s great that you feel that way, but it’s misguided because the purpose that you have identified in your life is the wrong one.

And so, to me, the important question is not so much whether you subjectively report feeling like you have purpose in life, but whether that purpose is grounded in something real and true.

DR K: Yeah. So I think that your answer right now is the reason why you think some of these questions are unanswerable. So I think if you adopt that frame, you’ll never know.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I don’t think they’re unanswerable.

DR K: Okay, let me just finish. Okay. So my first experience of this, right, is that, first of all, there is a subjective barometer. Like, how do we know whether we have purpose? Maybe we listen to other people, but there is some sort of internal sense of this.

And this is where the science becomes really important. Because if you look at people who have like, a history of trauma or something, what you tend to find is that there are certain like, neurobiological things that can happen to you that will literally affect the parts of your brain that are able to detect purpose. So this is sort of like a subjective experience.

And I think the way that… And I love your emphasis on mechanism, and I think this is what, in my opinion, science and spirituality can really add, is they add the how, right? They add like, why is it that one person has purpose and another person doesn’t have purpose?

Active vs. Passive Challenges

So first thing is that in my experience, in the way that I operate, I’m not saying it’s correct. It’s just… It’s effective in terms of helping people move the needle on reducing suicidality, improving resilience, giving them a reason to wake up in the morning. Like, it tends to work. And it’s not just me. It’s that there’s a bunch of methodologies that we have in psychotherapy and stuff like that that accomplish these kinds of things, that there’s some internal sense of purpose.

Now, what I think surprises a lot of people is that there are two ways that you increase that sense of purpose. The first is a bucket of things that are kind of counterintuitive. And this is where we also have to understand that purpose correlates with certain other things in life.

So if I feel like I am in control of my life, then my sense of purpose will increase. Those two things are correlated. It’s not clear whether it’s one thing that manifests in two ways or it’s probably two discrete things because there’s some subtlety there. But just as a very simple example, if you take someone who feels out of control in life and you help them get control of their life.

And there’s a really great example of this, which is something called passive challenges versus active challenges. So there’s a fascinating research on anxiety that shows that if you’re someone in life whose life is happening to you… Like, you wake up one day and then like, your boss wants you to come in for work and you have to pay rent at the end of the month. And like, you’re logging onto Tinder and people aren’t responding to you. Life is controlling the direction that you move.

And people feel overwhelmed by this, and they want freedom, they want control. What they end up doing is they wish that they didn’t have these things, so they run away from these problems. So passive challenges are challenges that life imposes upon you that you didn’t sign up for.

Then there’s something really fascinating, which is your sense of control in life does not correlate just with the passive challenges. It correlates with the ratio of passive challenges to active challenges. Active challenges are things that you choose to do that are difficult.

So this is really fascinating. But if you’re getting bodied by life in three different directions, the solution to that is not run away from those problems. It’s actually to wake up and start to push yourself in a particular direction. I want to do this instead. If you want to learn how to like, read, you know, learn philosophy, you know, start studying philosophical texts, you know, like, as you start to take on more, which is very counterintuitive because when most people feel overwhelmed, they don’t feel like they can do more.

The exact solution is to take on more active challenges. Then you have some sense of control in life. And once your ratio of active challenges to passive challenges is more evened out, this does something really cool. It gives you a sense that I’m no longer out of control.

Once you feel like you’re no longer out of control, this is the really cool thing, then your capacity to deal with the stuff that life throws at you actually improves. So there’s this… This is just one example of like, one scientific neurobiological principle that has some psychology associated with where you can do particular things to give yourself a sense of direction in life.

Now, some of the stuff around worship and spiritual practice, that can do it too. But I think that usually what I tend to see is that if someone is lost in life, you can sort of answer it by these big questions. You can sort of think about this sort of transcendental purpose, which I’m happy to talk about. But I think there’s a lot of like, little stuff that you can do. And as you implement these things, the sense of purpose in your life, your internal lived experience of feeling out of control will change.

Motivation vs. Justification

GREG KOUKL: Let me offer a few thoughts, if I could. One, I want to speak to something that you said, Alex, that I just want to offer a caution about. When we talk about motivation, the motivation for something, we sometimes confuse that with justification.

So someone might say to me, as an atheist, for example, well, you’re a Christian because you were born in America. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you wouldn’t be a Christian, you’d be a Muslim. Of course, that’s irrelevant to the question of whether Islam or Christianity or some other religion is true. It doesn’t speak to that. It speaks psychology. Okay.

And the fact is that if the atheist was born in Saudi Arabia, he wouldn’t be an atheist either, likely. The key question is what motivates people, for example, to think about purpose. Death may be a fear of death. That might be a motivation. The question is whether the place they land in answering the question has any objective truth to it or not.

It could be that there is a God and that there is an afterlife, and facing death does give comfort to that. I should say, when facing death, you have comfort because there is a God and there’s something that you’re going to closer communion with him. Okay? Just because you’re motivated by death doesn’t mean that your belief about the afterlife is somehow an error.

The Search for Meaning in Modern Life

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I just wanted to add something in here. So I think part of the reason I’ve also convened you guys to have this conversation today is because I’ve got several people in my life that are. I can literally lay out the personas, but I’ve got one particular friend who’s 35, between 35 and 40 years old, living in Dubai, living in a glass box. Freelancer. So he wakes up in the morning, his bed is there. He then works there, then goes back to bed. He’s single, no kids in his life at the moment.

He said to me that he can’t get out of bed anymore. He feels stuck. And then about six months after, out of the blue, it turns out, without telling any of us, and we’re his best friends, he’s flown to America, he’s been baptized, he’s a Christian. Suddenly his life has purpose and meaning again. He’s a completely different person. And this individual, never, ever he would be the last person that you’d think would be religious.

Got another friend, female, just over 30 years old, doesn’t have kids, freelance, works at home. When I asked her what her meaning and purpose in life, she said to me, she wants to get to having 200 plants, plants she can water. She names all of them. She then told me a week after she’s in therapy because she feels lost and stuck in life.

And so much of the central point, why I’ve been motivated to have this conversation is, it appears to me, and I haven’t nailed this hypothesis yet, that freedom, independence, be your own boss. The decline in people having children, the glamorization of, as you said at the very beginning, do it yourself, do it your way, is failing people in some way. And that actually the push for independence was in some way some kind of lie.

I actually also went through the same new atheist baptism that you went through. And I read all those books at 18 years old and two years I was debating dog walkers on the street about God. I was so such a staunch atheist. But I now find myself in a position where I’m almost back to being curious again, because it feels like independence wasn’t the answer.

Purpose as an Unfulfilled Task

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Just wanted to reframe curious, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think people need to ask. I think that purpose is intimately tied up with the idea of task to fulfill. That’s why people tend to find meaning in projects which are not completed yet.

In fact, Pascal writes quite compellingly about this when he writes about boredom. And he imagines a gambler, someone who enjoys gambling, and says, well, why is this person gambling? Because they’re doing this thing with the chance of winning some money. Okay, so why don’t you just give them the money? Just take the gambler and give him all the money that he could possibly receive without playing the game, and he won’t be very fulfilled, even though he’s getting ostensibly what he was trying to get.

No, no, that wouldn’t be fulfilling because he enjoys the gambling. Okay, says Pascal, then let him play the game, but make it such that he’ll never actually win the money, but he gets to keep playing the game, and he’s not going to be very fulfilled by that either. That’s also going to be completely pointless.

And so Pascal noticed that what you kind of need to avoid boredom and I suppose to imbue your life with purpose, at least in this analogy, is some kind of task to fulfill that you haven’t fulfilled yet, that you don’t know if you’re going to fulfill, that you believe will bring you fulfillment when you get it, but you haven’t got it yet. That’s why I think religion does it really well, because it’s the definition of something which you don’t have now, which you can strive for, which when you get, you believe will be fulfilling.

The Neuroscience of Motivation

DR K:

Yeah, so, so, so I love these examples because actually we know exactly what’s going on in that thought experiment, right? So now there have been so many advances in neuroscience that we understand why people gamble, right? So we understand that giving someone money will satisfy a gambler in one of two cases. And I’ve seen this, I’ve worked with people who are professional poker players, some people, what we describe motivation is actually a dozen different things going on in your brain.

So if you are a professional poker player in poker, and I’ve literally worked with professional poker players who had no meaning in life, it’s so funny, I’m thinking about a particular person and then, you know, achieved a certain financial goal. That’s why they play poker. So if your motivation is that I’m playing poker because I have a skill that I’m using to get money, if that is your internal motivation that is going to come from certain circuits in your brain, it’s going to come from places like your frontal lobe.

Now, as Pascal pointed out, if you give the average person who gambles money, what are they going to do with it? They’re going to gamble more, right? So that means that their motivation is coming from something more closer to the nucleus accumbens, a random reinforcement schedule. Maybe they’re trying to suppress amygdala emotions. So we actually can look at that example and we can understand why each of those things happens.

And then the most beautiful thing is that there is absolutely a scenario where someone can gamble and never win and they can absolutely have purpose. So this is where I know that sounds insane, but if you look at some of these things from the Zen tradition, right? So these are practices that have no purpose, to act with no meaning whatsoever.

And the beautiful thing about that is, as you explore that sort of angle, and there’s sort of a neuroscience perspective to this as well, is that if you really think about it, you’re saying, okay, so people invest in this purpose, or in this purpose seeking thing like religion, with the idea that I’ll find payoff at the end. Is that what you were saying earlier?

Evolution and the Meaning Crisis

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I’m saying something a bit different. What I was going to go on to say is to point out and bear in mind this comes from a part of Pascal’s Pensée which is titled “Man Without God.” He goes on to discuss man with God, but I look at the development of the human species and our particular proclivities.

Lewis makes this argument from desire that you mentioned. Why do we have a desire for food? Well, because there is actually food to have. The evolutionary biologist says the reason that we develop hunger is because those who didn’t died. And if you don’t have some sense of hunger, you’re not going to seek out food and you will die. And so it just so happens that those who develop this feeling of hunger will be more likely to survive. And therefore hunger is a part of our human condition.

Well, such is meaning if you have two isolated communities, one of whom, I just don’t care whatever, man, no interest in having children, no interest in building societies, legal systems, constitutions, whatever the case, moral systems, none of that. They just don’t care. Nihilists, they’re not even going to have children. That society will die out.

Another society which just so happens to perhaps delusion, like in an exercise of delusion, just develop this inexplicable feeling. And of course this evolves over time and starts with essentially the kind of random mutation of ideas that works on the genetic level in evolution. They call it memetics when it’s ideas rather than genes. The society which just ends up developing this idea that actually I can’t quite explain why, but I just have this drive towards building a society and engaging in legal justice and moral systems and kind of, they’re just more likely to survive.

So we end up with this, with this sense, this drive within us that we can’t explain and yet we have. So imagine for the majority of our evolutionary history what it was like every single day. You woke up and you did not know if you were going to have a roof over your head. You didn’t know if you were going to have food to eat. You had to go out and you had to hunt it, you had to go and find it. Every single day the game reset.

And so I would imagine that those lives were probably quite meaningful, at least in the sense that I don’t think there will have been many existential crises on a day to day, because the purpose was quite clear. And like Pascal’s gambler, they had a task that they think will fulfill them when they get it. And they don’t know whether it’s going to be fulfilled.

So what’s happened today? Well now we’ve been given the money without the game. We’ve got houses, we’ve got food, we can go next door and get some water, get some food from all over the planet. That’s it, you’ve got the money without the game.

So what do people do in the modern situation when they find that their life is a bit meaningless? They start intentionally doing things which are difficult. They start doing ice baths, they start exercising, they start going into a room just to physically exert themselves in order to sort of build muscle and whatnot, like on purpose, for its own sake.

GREG KOUKL:

Why?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Because today we’ve got the money without the game. So people are going out and seeking the game without the money. They’re going and doing the ice baths in the gym. Whereas the truly meaningful life, it’s one in which you are playing the game in the service of getting the goal.

That is why I think that, you know, literally just seeking out those things, I think that there’s a reason why they have a psychological impact. It’s not as simple as just, oh, well, if you go to the gym, you know, it releases endorphins and makes you feel good. Let’s think a bit deeper than that. What’s actually going on? People are seeking out the game without the money.

Crucially, I’ve talked about this as a death denying pursuit, right? The idea that the things that you engage in here, at least in terms of grand projects like religion and society, are even if you’re subconsciously an exercise in the denial of death. What would that mean? It means that if you encounter other communities, if you encounter other traditions who just, just by their mere existence threatens the truth of your claims, those traditions subconsciously represent death. They represent nihilism.

So what happens in a society that develops the kind of telecommunication technology whereby every single day you open your phone and you are addicted to a process of scrolling through every seven seconds a new person with new ideas, with different beliefs from all over the world? Do you think that might have something to do with the meaning crisis that we find ourselves in?

We’re told that what’s happened is that people stopped believing in God and now they’re all depressed, upset and nihilistic? That’s far too simple. You don’t think it might have something to do with the fundamentally revolutionary change to our society that has been brought about specifically by telecommunication, by the ability to oftentimes unintentionally and non consensually be confronted with traditions and people from halfway across the world that just remind you every single day, zing, zing, zing, every single day that your truth is not the only truth, that the transcendence that you’ve placed your trust in is completely subjective and personal and that someone over there believes something totally different and seems to be living just the same kind of happy life.

That I think is why people are struggling so much. It’s not just because they’re atheists.

Truth Versus Subjective Experience

GREG KOUKL:

Now, I have a lot to say about this. I’ll try to keep it compact, by the way. Just we are aware of all kinds of different options for us spiritually. That doesn’t necessarily suggest that none of the options are actually accurate in that are okay, so I’m making such an implication there. And this is what creates kind of the angst, because all we have is our own personal, subjective point of view.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I think that’s why people experience that. Now, of course, as a matter of truth, you could say, for example, yourself, you could say, yes, I’m constantly confronted by different religious traditions, but I believe that Christianity is true. I think it has the best evidence.

GREG KOUKL:

This is even true in, even in the scientific realm. You’re all kinds of different ideas, but no one wants to say just because there are so many different ideas to explain things that nobody can be correct.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Which is why what I’m saying is insensitive to the truth or falsity of any of the traditions. What I’m saying is, okay, that’s it.

GREG KOUKL:

Because I want to go to that.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Next as an explanation for the psychological phenomenon, the literal feeling that people have. Because likewise, you would say that there is a meaning crisis. Maybe you would say that lots of people, the statistics we just heard, you would say lots of people, you know, don’t feel meaning in their life and you’d want to offer an explanation for why that’s the case. You think their lives are meaningful. Right. You think that all of those people who say my life has no meaning, they’re wrong. Their lives actually do have meaning.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is that what you think?

GREG KOUKL:

Well, this was the subject of response. They feel like they don’t have meaning. Exactly. But they were made for a purpose. If they’re not in touch with that meaning and purpose, then they’re going to feel bereft.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Exactly. They believe there really is a purpose for their life, but subjectively they have either found it or they don’t feel it. What I’m doing is I’m offering a psychological explanation for why they don’t feel it, which is completely insensitive to whether or not there’s a truth of themselves.

The Two Different Pictures of Reality

GREG KOUKL:

I’m so glad you put it that way, because this is exactly my point. I don’t want anybody to miss it. We’re really offering two different pictures of reality here. Okay. People have to ask themselves two questions, I think.

One is they reflect on their own personal awareness of the need for meaning and significance. Does it seem to them that this is just a psychological thing that people can satisfy in all kinds of different ways depending on the individual? Or does it seem to them—I’m asking these questions because I suspect there is a truth about life that might be discovered. Okay, that’s the first question.

And I think most people’s awareness of this is that there’s something transcendent, something bigger than them. Okay? And any kind of naturalistic explanation is not going to ultimately satisfy them.

The other thing is, is there any reason to believe that there is a transcendent reality that God exists, that souls exist, that there is an objective morality that guides our life? And if we’re living virtuously, that’s going to be satisfying even if we don’t believe in God or not. Those are the two things at stake here and now.

This description, the story of reality I just described that I hold to, it seems to me completely coherent. Maybe not true, but it certainly is coherent that if there is a God who made us for himself and places eternity in our hearts, that we’re going to yearn for that and made the way for us to live. And then we’re going to find good ways to live as opposed to unsatisfying ways to live. That makes sense.

Doesn’t make any sense to me at all to say that my molecules are moving in a certain way to create in my conscious mind, which Darwinism cannot offer an explanation for. It hasn’t. That’s why Daniel Dennett said consciousness is an illusion, you know, because he couldn’t do anything with it.

Thomas Nagel wrote his book “Mind and Cosmos.” You’re familiar with this, I’m sure. You know why the neo-Darwinian materialistic view of the world is almost certainly false. And he’s an atheist, for goodness sake, because he can’t explain consciousness, not in a Darwinian way.

So how is it that this mystery of consciousness, which contains propositional thoughts, ideas and purposes, if consciousness can’t be explained a Darwinian way, how can some characterization of molecules in motion accomplish that same end? That’s my concern. That’s why I’m not convinced at all about the naturalist one. And this one seems so much more plausible.

The Problem of Consciousness

ALEX O’CONNOR:

What you’re raising is the problem of consciousness, which is, I think, a new question, but an important one. I wanted to point out earlier that when I gave an explanation as to why people feel a lack of meaning, and you said that has no bearing on truth, I think that’s—

GREG KOUKL:

You admitted that too at the end there.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I don’t admit it. I assert it. Of course that’s the case.

GREG KOUKL:

You weren’t making the case in the—

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Same way that if somebody says that, like if you’re a Christian and you say the reason everyone’s so depressed is because society has become atheistic, somebody could say, well, yeah, I mean, that might be the case, but that doesn’t mean atheism is false. It might be that it is true and just depressing. Of course, like the question if we’re—

GREG KOUKL:

Discussing, there are alternate explanations.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

If you want to know why somebody feels a particular way psychologically, you can offer an explanation which has absolutely nothing to do with the truth or falsity of a worldview. You can then separately discuss the truth or falsity of a worldview, which you’ve then gone on to do with specific reference to the problem of consciousness.

GREG KOUKL:

It thinks it has absolutely nothing or it can be experienced apart from the issue of worldview.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I’m saying that if you’re literally just trying—I mean, if the question I’m asked is why do people perceive a lack of meaning in their life? That’s just a question about their psychological constitution. That’s just—that’s literally a question about why they feel a particular way.

GREG KOUKL:

So if a person was a total nihilist, didn’t believe in anything was important, and then they were depressed and even suicidal, would you say there wasn’t a link between that worldview and their feelings?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes, there is. But what I’m saying is that the link between that worldview and that feeling has nothing to do with the truth of the world. You see what I’m saying? Nihilism can be true. Nihilism can be false. Nihilism can be an unintelligible concept. It can still be the case that that person’s conviction is making them depressed.

GREG KOUKL:

I agree.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

In the same way that somebody could be a Christian and that makes them really happy, that doesn’t mean Christianity is true. Someone can become a Christian and become really depressed. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is false. What I’m trying to point out, it is just trivially true.

Exploring the Nature of Purpose

DR K:

So I still want to try to understand a little bit about what you’re saying.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Okay.

DR K:

Because I don’t fully follow.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Fine.

DR K:

And I think that the reason I’m—I feel way more confident in what you’re saying is because Christ is pulling at you 100%. Yeah. So I think we both talk to Christ, so we’re good on that. I know where he’s coming from. So a couple of things that I’m—

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I talk to Christ too, you know. Awesome.

DR K:

Does he talk back?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

He does not talk back.

DR K:

Yeah, that’s tricky. We can talk about how to get you there.

GREG KOUKL:

One person said, just read the Gospels aloud.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I’ve done that a few times.

DR K:

A couple of things that I’m curious about. One is, so I’m noticing that you’re—I’m trying to understand where—so I love the way you’re sallying forth to grapple with this problem of purpose. You do a beautiful job of sort of talking about, like, okay, what’s the truth? And then there’s this psychological perspective.

And I want to just try to understand this. So are you of the mind that from a psychological perspective, you can wake up one day and feel like you have purpose? But that doesn’t necessarily talk about purpose transcendentally, capital P. I’m saying that doesn’t—

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Talk about the truth of your belief. Okay, so, for example, you could believe that your children are about to die and that suddenly your life feels really meaningless and really purposeless. It could be completely false. You could have been, like, misled. Someone could lie to you.

But, like, what I’m saying is the psychological explanation for why you feel a particular way has nothing to do with the truth of the thing that you believe that’s making you feel that way.

DR K:

Gotcha. Okay. So what I’m curious about is when you are exploring purpose, are you exploring it from—are you trying to find the answer at the top? Like, what is the truth of purpose? Or are you focused on the subjective experience of purpose?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Depends on the context. If you’re asking, I mean, we were talking literally about a psychological explanation for why people feel a particular way. You know, is it due to a decline in religion, that kind of stuff? In that case, it’s subjective. It’s individuals. Yeah.

DR K:

Yeah. So do you think that the top one can be answered what the top—

ALEX O’CONNOR:

One is in, like, there being—

DR K:

There being purpose. Right. So that’s not subjective at all.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

So what does that mean, their being purpose? Because to me, that looks like some kind of reason to act or to be that is not contingent on some other fact. Just to be clear, to make it clear to the listener. I think you hear what I’m saying, but, like, suppose you woke up and you were a Christian and that brought you meaning. What I’m saying is that subjective sense of meaning that you get from Christianity has no bearing on the truth or falsity of Christianity.

DR K:

Gotcha.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Right.

DR K:

Right. So what I’m curious about is, in your opinion, and if you don’t have one that’s totally fine, you know? Do you think that—so, sure, there’s a subjective experience which doesn’t speak to truth. Right. It’s just a subjective experience. Do you think that there is some way to grapple with that truth?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

What, the truth of Christianity or something?

DR K:

The truth of purpose?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

We’re shifting here, right? Because what I’m saying is—

DR K:

Let me shift. I don’t want to do that. So then I’m going to go back.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

That’s why—maybe I’m not understanding your question. All I’m saying is that if you feel—if you feel a subjective sense of purpose from proposition P, like the fact that you feel purpose from that does not have any bearing on proposition P.

And then you just ask, but is there a way to discuss whether P is true? Well, yeah, like—so if proposition P is Christianity, then yeah, we can talk about the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus or something.

DR K:

Gotcha, gotcha.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Okay. I’m not trying to reach into some mystical capital P, purpose realm.

The Nature of Evidence and Belief

DR K:

Gotcha. So, right. And I think that’s so helpful. Thank you so much. Okay. So that’s really helpful for me because then I want to go back to something you said earlier about cell phones. And we’re scrolling on cell phones and things like that, and we have this worldview. And then if we encounter a worldview that is different from ours, that could put us into some form of crisis or difficulty, and we’re getting bombarded by all of these things.

And so what that means is that the individual, when they wake up in the morning and they scroll through their phone, we’re not talking about whether the proposition P is true or not. Their subjective experience is like, I have no meaning and I have no purpose in life. Right. And so you posited one mechanism which I think is a completely valid mechanism, is a philosophical mechanism, but we have a lot of neuroscience mechanisms that support what you’re saying.

And this is where I think that we kind of, I’m going to sort of restate that. What my experience of this stuff has been, because I’m not a philosopher, is I don’t really know too well how to contend with whether proposition P is true or not. That’s why I was asking. And it’s not that you weren’t being clear, it’s that I’m just ignorant of how philosophy works. And so that’s why I was kind of asking, like, you know, can you do that?

So that’s where it’s also where I’m kind of coming from is that we have this crisis that has high suicidality, high addiction rates. People left the church in big ways, and then we’re sort of left with like, okay, how do we navigate this? And that’s where I think if we look at a lot of the influences on society, we see that there’s profound neurological influences.

And what I sort of found is when I was working especially with patients with trauma, that there is a set of things that is happening in the world around them that induces certain changes to how they experience the world. So a really good example of this is if you want to find your purpose in life, you should reduce your level of alexithymia. So alexithymia is the inability to tell what you’re emotionally feeling.

And if we look at the influence of things like cell phones, what they’re doing is they’re suppressing the parts of our brain that have that experience negative emotions. Sometimes they provoke negative emotions, sometimes they suppress negative emotions. And so if you start to be able to feel more, right. So this is literally shutting down the parts of our brain that give us an internal sense of what we feel.

And so as you shut down your ability to detect what you are feeling on the inside, that correlates with your not having a detection of purpose on the inside. So I think that this is, you asked the question, why is this happening? I think we’re disabling. And I was working with people with trauma and sort of figured out a sequence of things that is based on the literature that involves things like reducing your alexithymia.

Another big part is managing your ego. So I think this relationship with God thing is a really great example of, like, if you ask, what is the mechanism of a relationship with God? So we as human beings tend to be like, I’m here. But then as you relate to other people around you, your sense of identity changes. And when you relate to something that is transcendent, I know that that’s a scary word, and I don’t know exactly what that word means, but as you relate to something that is really big up here, that has noticeable effects on your default mode network, your sense of self.

And as your default mode network no longer becomes hyperactive, the more hyperactive your default mode network is, the more likely I think you are to be nihilistic to have a pessimistic worldview. As we start to make those changes, then people start to feel a sense of purpose. They start to feel a sense of connection. And then the last kind of really interesting data which we can go into is psychedelics, which is really fascinating because this allows us to test subjective experience and the effect of subjective experience on a person.

GREG KOUKL:

Is this an opportunity?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Please.

GREG KOUKL:

I’m just concerned that you might have overstated something, maybe reflecting back something you thought I was saying and I was making the case about the genetic fallacy. And just because the person has a motivation to believe something doesn’t necessarily mean that that thing is true or have a subjective experience.

I think it goes a little further than that, though. If you went to the doctor and you weren’t feeling well and doctor gave you a pill and then you went home and you took the pill, then you felt better, I think it would be appropriate for you to say, well, that pill, taking that pill, going to that doctor had something to do with my experience that I’m having right now.

Oh, yeah. This is why I think it might have unintentionally been an overstatement on your part, because I think just like your friend Stephen, who in Dubai all of a sudden became a Christian, everything changed. Okay, well, I guess you could say the change of life isn’t maybe knock down, drag down proof that what he believes now is actually true. Big P, big T. That like Jesus…

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Rose from the dead.

GREG KOUKL:

Seems to be. Pardon me.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

That like Jesus rose from the dead. It’s got no bearing on whether that’s true or not.

Subjective Experience as Evidence

GREG KOUKL:

Well, I’m speaking of a different thing right now. I’m thinking about the experience now with God that he’s having. If he’s having this changed life, this is evidential. This lends credibility to the belief system that he’s now adopted because it created this particular significant change in his life.

It may not be proof, and that word is really an oosy, goosey word you know how to pin down. But nevertheless, it still seems to be evidential. It speaks to the legitimacy and accuracy and truthfulness of the belief system that produced this change. Life.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

That’s what I’m saying. It’s only evidence that belief in that thing makes someone feel more fulfilled. That’s the only thing it’s evidence of.

GREG KOUKL:

Okay, so this is where we differ. Just like I’m with him on this one. Okay. Just because, just because a certain, you’re saying just because they believe it, this makes them better, it doesn’t mean that the belief is actually sound.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Greg, I’ve got a good way of coming at this, then.

GREG KOUKL:

This is where we differ.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If I had five friends and they all picked five different religions, and they all felt the same thing that my friend did in Dubai, where they all felt better for it. Is that evidential that all five religions are true?

GREG KOUKL:

Well, see, I don’t actually think it works that way. You can speculate and say, and offer that illustration, but I don’t think it actually works that way. I think that universally the experience of Christians is very, very quantifiable in terms of transformed lives. And this is one of the reasons that these transformed lives lend credibility to the belief system itself.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So in that scenario where one of my friends turns to Islam, one of my friends turns to Christianity, et cetera, et cetera, the only experience that’s evidential of truth is the Christians.

GREG KOUKL:

Well, I think you have to look at every individual thing. All right? And here’s my suspicion, and I haven’t quantified this across the board, all right? Different people have different experiences by engaging different religious belief, traditions, whatever.

But insofar as anybody’s life is significantly altered by that thing, this to me is evidence that something is going on here than merely the belief. If it’s just the belief, you’re back to Marx again and the opiate of the people. You know, that would be Carl, not Groucho. Although it’s not if anybody knows who those two people are anymore.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

It sounds as though, you know, if I lied to somebody and a cruel prank, and I told them that, say they’re really struggling with money, they’re really, really suffering for it. And they feel, and they have these psychological effects of feeling that life is meaningless. They want to kill themselves, whatever it is, they just, they cannot keep living.

And I tell them, good news, you’ve won the lottery, you’ve won a million pounds. And suddenly the weight is lifted, the joy is brought. Of course, money isn’t sufficient for bringing about meaning life at this point, but I’ve lied to them. Like the fact that they feel this immense sense of meaning from a belief that they’ve adopted has bears absolutely no evidence on whether it’s true that they’ve…

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Won a million pounds.

GREG KOUKL:

I’m just saying that to divorce all results from belief systems is a mistake.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I don’t want to do that.

GREG KOUKL:

There can be a connection, there can.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Be something about that.

GREG KOUKL:

Because you can mislead somebody by telling them a lie and they can experience something emotionally, doesn’t mean that the other person who’s experiencing something transcendent in their emotions. And by the way, for Christians, it’s not just a high, because Christianity is not a continuous high.

Even people who are suffering terribly as Christians in persecution, read Fox’s Book of Martyrs, still have this strong sense of value, purpose and security. Even so, I’m just saying there’s an evidential relationship between those. It’s not enough to just simply dismiss it because you can tell a lie and someone could have the same.

Christianity and the Resurrection

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I’m even happy to say that, like, I don’t know if this is true, but suppose it were just the case that only Christianity brought about this positive effect. Suppose we just discovered that everybody who claimed to feel meaning just didn’t compare.

GREG KOUKL:

That’s not what I’m saying.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But suppose that were the case. Even if there was something really special about Christianity that gave some evidential credence to something specific about Christianity, that’s true about Christianity, that it particularly infuses life with meaning, I still think it just has nothing to do with the truth of Christianity as a worldview.

I mean, Christianity hinges on the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus, right? And so the best way of explaining this is to say that if your friend from Dubai starts going to church and they start feeling really like meaning, like stop experiencing a lot of meaning in their life, that has absolutely no evidential bearing on whether Jesus rose from the dead.

And if Christianity as a proposition essentially is the resurrection of Jesus, and this feeling that your friend had has no evidential bearing on the resurrection of Jesus, then the feeling that your friend had had no evidential bearing on Christianity.

GREG KOUKL:

Well, it turns out that Christianity has multiple factors of support and evidence crucial. Obviously, the crux, one might say, is the resurrection of Christ, the death and resurrection, because of the theological significance of that is in the whole system.

But there are lots of other things too that are bearing. And actually, I think there are people who have become Christians without having a robust understanding even of the resurrection or death. So even though theologically that is the crux, it doesn’t mean that for subjectively, every person who enters in a relationship with Christ has all of that in place immediately.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’m really interested to understand for my friend in Dubai, if he came to you and he was your friend in Dubai, and he said, my life is lacking meaning, I can’t get out of bed anymore. What would you prescribe him? What would you recommend? What would you suggest? As he’s your friend.

# The Nature of Meaning and Consciousness

ALEX O’CONNOR:

It’s hard to know without knowing that friend. But if it seemed to me like going to church or reading the gospels might provide that for him, then I’d probably recommend that he did that. But I think that literally the subjective feeling of meaning is usually tied up in the identification of something that transcends your individual self. And I think whatever is the most plausible course of action for that person to engage in something like that would be what I would recommend for them.

If they’re maybe not particularly interested in religion, I’d recommend that they read some philosophy of mind and try to understand the nature of consciousness. And they might start. I might recommend, depending on who they are, that they take a psychedelic drug and try to experience something which cannot be put into words. Because a lot of the time when you experience something like an ego death, you might realize that the individuated self is an illusion. And that these cliches that keep cropping up when someone does psychedelics.

And I actually think that the problem of consciousness is absolutely crucial to this. I mean, I think the most plausible account of consciousness implies that consciousness is something which is sort of received by the biological organism rather than produced by it. Because I agree with you that you can’t just put a bunch of molecules together and get consciousness. That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But it’s interesting that some of our best scientific evidence is suggesting the fact not that the brain produces consciousness, but that the brain inhibits and focuses and organizes consciousness. It does not produce it.

DR K:

Yeah, so I love your answer. So you were saying, you know, depending on the person, you can do different things. You can read philosophy about.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

So I’d recommend them to do that. In other words, you know, look at that.

Religion as a Structure for Subjective Experience

DR K:

Depending on who they are, you know, read the Gospels. So I think what’s interesting is that when you, you know, when Steven gives the concrete example, it’s like, if my friend comes to you, who’s had this religious awakening or prior to religious awakening, what would you recommend to them? And I think what’s really interesting is basically all of the answers that you said I think can map onto mechanism. And I just love to talk about that for a second.

So the first thing is, you know, you asked me at the beginning, am I religious? I think here’s my understanding of, and we were talking a little bit about, you know, people can have the subjective feeling of religion. What is the relationship to that thing being true? So here’s what I’ve sort of observed. I don’t know if y’all have ever been to, like, a really great cathedral.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Oh, yeah.

DR K:

But, like, you know, if you go to a great cathedral, you don’t have to be Christian to be awe inspired by what you see. So when I look at the project of religion, which is a little bit different from spirituality, one of the things that I’ve observed is that religion is a series of structures to evoke a personal experience.

So the whole point of reading the Gospels is fingers crossed, and we’ll get to how to optimize that. Fingers crossed, if you read the Gospels enough, or you go to church enough, or you pray enough, if you keep on talking to Christ, one day he’ll start talking back. But I think the really interesting thing is if you struggle with purpose, you can read the Gospels if you go into religion.

And I think what’s changed now is that we have so much science to understand the mechanism through which religious practices evoke subjective experience. So I can go to church until for my whole life, but until I have that relationship with God, that is a subjective experience that is evoked by the sort of structure of the religious practice. So that is absolutely one thing you can do.

I think the cool thing is that the problem with reading the Gospels, as I can clearly see that you’ve done, and you know, I see the striving for religion in you. Like, you’re like, you want to have that, right? Like, you want to know, like, what are these people actually kind of talking about? I could be wrong there, but I see this beautiful striving that you’re like, you’re trying really hard to figure this stuff out, which is just awesome to see.

Psychedelics and Ego Death

I think, though, that if we kind of look at it, and you mentioned kind of psychedelics as well, and I think psychedelics is really interesting because we know that if you take someone who has treatment refractory depression, or someone who has PTSD and you give them a psychedelic, the psychedelic is not healing. What is healing is specifically whether they have an ego death experience.

So if I see colors and things like that, that doesn’t solve things. But the ego death experience is what correlates with clinical improvement. So psychedelics are a good way to evoke a subjective experience. Right. So we know that there are a couple of pieces. And when I worked with people, so one of the things that we know is that when you experience trauma, it shatters your meaning of life.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes.

DR K:

And so working a lot with people with trauma, and this is something that I kind of laid out, I’m in terms of, like, making a guide about it. But what I realized is that there’s a set of things that you can do relatively sequentially to get your meaning back.

And so I think the cool thing about, like, you know, reading the Gospels or psychedelics or things like that is those each have some fingers crossed change in you. But the cool thing is, like, if you start with something called alexithymia. So as long as you are, like, using a bunch of substances, as long as you are not able to detect what is going on inside you, that is a fundamental prerequisite of the subjective experience of meaning.

The second step to that is to go through some stuff around ego. So this is like the other big thing that we try to focus on is like, when your default mode network is hyperactive, this is the part of your brain that gives you a sense of who you are. Hyperactive default mode networks lead to depression. Hyperactive default mode networks also lead to some degree of, like, existential depression.

And this is where so many of my patients get tripped up when they start reading philosophy. This isn’t against philosophy, but remember, this is happening in a subjective mind if you’re not careful. What we know is that philosophy can turn into intellectualizing, that there is a psychological defense where you start looking at theoretical stuff and it sort of shapes the way that your mind functions and it starts to become maladaptive.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What does that mean in simple terms?

DR K:

So people, if you have a problem in life, you can think about it a lot, you can read about it a lot. There are a lot of people that I’ve worked with that just go on watching podcasts, like chain watching podcasts and reading books and things like that. Right. But their life never changes.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes.

Purpose Beyond the Ego

DR K:

So this is where, so there’s a certain amount of, like, you know, learning how to ground yourself in your experience, which involves reducing alexithymia, which involves dissolving your ego. And this is another really, really important thing that I think we find in people who have purpose.

Because if we go back to the earlier example of the person who 30 days after they die, the world ends, that person, if they decide to still write the book, I think that there is a certain ego less involved in that. Right. I’m doing it for the sake of the work. It’s not for the benefit of humanity. It’s not for some transcendent purpose. It’s not for something that goes beyond my death. Actually, it’s the opposite. I am doing this thing here and now just for its own sake.

And so preparing for this podcast, I actually texted and called a couple of my former patients. These are people that I haven’t seen in three to five years. And I just asked them. I was like, hey, bro, do you have purpose? Tell me what it is. And I was stunned by how their answers are not about what happens after they die. They’re very like, I’m just here for the flow of it. Right. My purpose in life is to experience what life has to offer. That’s it. It’s not about something beyond you.

And I think this is where you’re spot on, Alex, that a lot of people deal with the fear of death by wanting to live past it. But that is actually, that’s the default mechanism that we use. But that is actually ego driven. Right. I want to exist beyond when I die. And so that gives people some sense of purpose. But I think the deepest sense of purpose actually comes without that, comes from being able to make paperclips every day and being content with that exercise.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

You’re describing Sisyphus being happy is what you’re doing.

DR K:

Yes. So Sisyphus can be happy.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yeah. I mean, explain Sisyphus for those that don’t know.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

About the guy pushing the rock up the hill.

The Myth of Sisyphus

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Camus, who is an existentialist, even though he doesn’t call himself an existentialist, he founds this school known as absurdism, which is a word I used earlier too. And he tries to describe the absurdist condition of one in which you have all of these desires about the world, but the world literally just can’t fulfill them. You’re looking for meaning, it’s not there. It literally your desire and the real world are in conflict. And he calls this the realization of this absurdity.

And he writes this short treatise called “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which is based on an actual ancient myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned by the gods as punishment to roll a boulder up a hill. And when it gets to the top, it rolls back down again and he goes back down and he pushes the boulder up to the top of the hill and he does that over and over again for eternity.

The real torture of this is not so much the suffering of the pushing of the boulder, there’s that, but the suffering in the knowledge that it’s meaningless. And that describes the absurdist condition. And Albert Camus tries to respond to this by imagining Sisyphus being happy. And essentially as an act of rebellion against this condition, just getting on with it anyway and being okay with it.

I’ve never been fulfilled by this. I’ve sort of always thought that this may literally, and I understand that there are people who could do that, there are people who could write the book. And I thought of Sisyphus when you said the person who writes the book anyway, because it almost feels like an act of rebellion because it’s not. You didn’t just say they still write the book. You said they write the book anyway. They do it destroyed. They do it almost in protest of this condition. Some people can do that. But I think that is probably a sort of psychological cope.

DR K:

No, it’s not a cope, it’s a mechanism.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Well, I’m saying I think it’s a cope. I think that it’s not grounded in anything rational.

DR K:

I don’t know if it’s grounded in anything rational. It’s absolutely grounded in something empirical.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Sure. But again, you can empirically explain exactly why somebody’s brain is doing what it’s doing, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any rationality or truth in the thing that their brain believes.

GREG KOUKL:

Sure, right.

Mechanism Versus Delusion

DR K:

I think this goes back to the issue of whether there’s capital P, but I think that you can observe the world and you can make observations and you can. I don’t know what your relation to scientific observations and truth is, whether those things are connected or not. But I think that we know actually there are multiple psychological mechanisms, some of which are copes and some of which are not copes.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I suppose I mean like a philosophical. I mean like it’s not. I think it’s untrue. I think that the person who is content in such a condition is almost by definition delusory.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What does delusory mean?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Like under the influence of a delusion? I think that it is not a happiness inducing condition to be Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the mountain.

GREG KOUKL:

Yes.

DR K:

So this is where I think the data is actually against that. So what the data shows is that it is your attitude towards the circumstances of your life that determines your happiness or your lack of happiness.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Well, someone can be in a happy delusion. In fact, that’s why most people suffer from delusions, because it makes them happy.

DR K:

That’s not why most people suffer from delusions.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But you understand what I’m saying that like.

DR K:

Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I just think that it’s.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

You can’t empirically show that something is not a delusion because it makes people happy.

The Nature of Delusion and Purpose

DR K:

Yeah. So you can absolutely differentiate between a psychological cope and an attitude towards life that is not a cope. And the reason you can differentiate that is because of what is underneath. And people can be delusional, but they’re not necessarily delusional to make themselves happy. In fact, quite the opposite.

So we have diagnoses like schizophrenia, of which one of them is having delusions. And those delusions, generally speaking, the more schizophrenic and the stronger your delusions are, the more that inversely correlates with your happiness.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

To be clear, I’m talking about like a philosophical delusion.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The question I want to get an answer to is this idea of the person who writes the book or pushes the boulder up the hill. And can that person have a purposeful life?

Self-Determination Theory and Purpose

DR K:

Absolutely. So this is what’s so confusing for people is that people think. So what Alex is saying, I think is a really, really common representation of what people think about purpose. My purpose is to make something that is greater than me. My purpose is to have some meaning or impact in the world around me.

What we know is there’s a great example of this called self-determination theory, which is that if you ask people, if you look at people who have purpose, what you find is it’s not about anything transcendent.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Have purpose or have a sense of purpose.

DR K:

Have a sense of purpose. Okay. We’re asking them subjectively, right? So if we’re like, you know, that’s what I think. And these people are less likely to be addicted to things, are more resilient, tend to be subjectively happier as well. So we’re talking about subjective, right?

What you find is that they have three things. The first is that they have some degree of self-direction. So this is like, I choose to do something, they’re not just taking it from life. They are making choices. And this is where people also get confused because they think, like, which choice is right. That kind of thinking is actually irrelevant. There isn’t a right choice or a wrong choice. What correlates with your sense of direction is whether you make it or not. So you actually need to get away from the concept of right and wrong.

The second thing is that they need a stretching of their competence. So if you just take a bunch of people who are not being pushed and finding themselves grow, then their sense of direction or purpose will decrease.

And the third thing is a sense of relatedness. So there is something where I have to know who I am and have other people see that part of me. And if you cultivate these three variables, then your purpose will empirically. And by empirical, what I mean is we can literally measure people’s subjective experience in an objective way. And so, like, these kinds of things, I think can end up improving your purpose.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

What are you measuring when you’re looking for…

Can Sisyphus Be Happy?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Alex, just. I just would love to get your answer to this idea. Can you. Do you think the person who is pushing the boulder up the hill or is writing the book, even though the world’s about to end, can still genuinely live a subjectively. And by subjective I mean in their opinion, purposeful life.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes, yeah, absolutely. I think Sisyphus can be happy, but I think that’s not the attitude that I would have. And I don’t for myself find it satisfying. Any analogy which is sufficiently similar to the Sisyphus condition, that is. And the attempted solution is, well, just imagine Sisyphus happy. That’s how he literally ends the myth of Sisyphus. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. And I can imagine him and say, you know, good for him.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you think you’d be happier if you believed in Greg’s views of the world?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Almost certainly. But not because of Greg’s views, but because of the confidence and satisfaction that they bring. I think I’d feel just as much meaning in my life if I was a convicted Muslim or were I a Jain or something like that. I think I would find that fulfillment.

GREG KOUKL:

So the content of the theology has no bearing in your mind on the way a person experiences their life?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Of course it does.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Can you explain that specifically? Content of the theology?

The Role of Theology in Human Experience

GREG KOUKL:

Well, the content. Well, you talk about different religions and there’s these different religions. They cannot all be true, as Alex has pointed out. They have different content. They say different things about human beings.

For example, the view that human beings are just an illusion. The reality is illusion, Maya, that kind of thing. Well, that seems to me to convey a certain understanding to human beings about themselves and about the world. If you have a view that human beings are significant individuals, this is going to convey a whole different experience that they have.

So in other words, the theology that they believe is true is going to affect their feelings and their experience. This is what I was getting back at a little bit ago when I talked about the person whose life has been changed by becoming a Christian. And these aren’t just what you explained to your friend. These are not things that just happen here and there. But there seems to be a very, very broad experience of this and a change that doesn’t depend on circumstances.

Okay. It’s because they adopt an understanding of the world that I think is an accurate understanding. And this is why their emotions and their experience follows along, because their choosing an accurate understanding of the world.

When you look at Jesus in the Gospels, I think it’s so interesting to me that people read the Gospels to be uplifted by the reading of it. It seems that misses the point that Jesus is talking about the way the world is. He’s teaching about the nature of reality. He was a Torah observant Jew. He wasn’t a Hindu, he wasn’t a Buddhist, he was a Jew. And he spoke in the context of that.

So just to simply read the Gospels as if we’re going to read some nice things that people said to make me feel better is missing Jesus’ point when he’s trying to describe the nature of reality.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I don’t think that’s how the Gospel should be read. But I do think I have a…

The Question of Belief and Happiness

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Question for you on that. It’s a personal question more than anything. So I find myself in the same position as Alex where I think I’d be happier, all things considered, if I had an anchoring in a religion. I think that’s like subjectively true, that I’d be happier probably just because it would close a gap of some sort. It would anchor me in some way.

GREG KOUKL:

Answer a question.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

It would answer a question. And then it would give me more of a structure to my decision making. And, you know, it would mean that when I have moments of suffering, I’d have a solution to that moment of suffering.

So if my parents end up dying someday, which I’m sure they will, I will believe that they are still alive and they are somewhere and they’re fine, which will ease my suffering. So I agree with Alex in that regard.

The problem I have is in order to adopt that view, I need some kind of. I need to believe it. It’s true. Like, people can’t. Aren’t very good at lying to themselves. And also when you talk about. My friend in Dubai has had this experience. He now feels better. He could have. Well, felt better, I believe, if he had, you know, believed that Islam was true and become a Muslim.

So it’s the feeling itself people can get in a lot of ways. I know people that actually would tell you that they feel better now that they’re out of the cult and they’re agnostic and the cult made them feel terrible. Now they’re agnostic, they feel better. Does that mean agnosticism is truth?

GREG KOUKL:

So the presumption that you made is a presumption. We have to keep that in mind. I mean, the people that I have talked to who were former Muslims and are now Christians, very devout Muslims, they did not have the experience of satisfaction, fullness and connection with God in Islam that they do in Christianity. Okay. So we want to be careful that we don’t know. There are people who do calculate.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah, there’s people that would have gone the other way. And they’ll be in the comment section right now saying, well, I went from Christianity to Islam.

GREG KOUKL:

Okay, well, sure. I’m just telling you what I know of those people. Okay. And I think it’s a mistake to say, well, everybody has their own religion. They have their somic experience with their religion. Because I don’t think that’s the case. I’m not saying there aren’t satisfied Muslims. That’s not what I’m saying. Or Buddhist or Hindus or whatever.

But what I’m saying is there is an evidential element to the changed life, and it may not be decisive. There may be other things that are involved. I do think that for many Christians, I think you’ve made this point in the past, too. It’s the experience with God that makes the difference. But it’s not that the other evidences for the existence of God, maybe philosophical type of evidence, haven’t made a difference because I’ve talked to lots of people where they have made the difference, moving them in that direction.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The point there, that it’s evidential, that’s a presumption.

GREG KOUKL:

What I mean by evidential is that there is information that can be brought to bear that seems to be evidence indicating that the belief system is true.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is that a presumption?

GREG KOUKL:

I don’t know why you would call it a presumption.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

As in the evidence that Christianity is true from the increased sense of purpose that people get from becoming a Christian.

GREG KOUKL:

I think that’s one of the evidence. It’s a subjective evidence.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yeah. And the truth of Christianity, Well, I wouldn’t build the whole thing, but it’s contributing evidence to the act of truth.

GREG KOUKL:

Christianity as a world, the story of reality is simply that God made us to be with him, and then we find the way that God intends for us to connect with him, principally through forgiveness and be restored to our relationship with the Father. And then that gives us, when we do that, a deep sense of satisfaction. I do think that’s evidential.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You know, in Alex Field, he could explain that through neuroscience.

GREG KOUKL:

Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Serotonin, dopamine, endorphins.

DR K:

Yeah. So can I go back to something real quick?

GREG KOUKL:

Go ahead.

The Sisyphus Example Revisited

DR K:

So, you know, I was thinking about the Sisyphus example.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes.

DR K:

And I was just thinking to myself, you know, so many people go to the gym to do futile physical activity.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But not on its own for eternity, with no sense in which it’s improving their life. Right. Imagine going to the gym and not only is it not making you healthier, it’s actually just making you fatter, and you have to do it forever, for the rest of eternity, for no reason, with no end. And then somebody says, well, all you’ve got to do is imagine that person being happy.

DR K:

Yeah. So that’s kind of interesting because then that presumes that the attitude through which you approach the action is what determines. It determines what determines whether you’re happy or not. Right. So every time you eat, you buy yourself a trip to the toilet. This is something you can never escape. It is true for all time. And yet, how do you feel about going to the toilet?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re getting.

DR K:

So I think it’s interesting, right, because you’re saying the problem of Sisyphus is in the way that he views it. And this is exactly why I think the paperclip example is like, actually such a good one. Because I think what we find when we look at some of these things, like radical acceptance, dialectical behavioral therapy, sort of the ways in which people become happy despite the fact that there are painful things in life, it is an attitudinal shift.

Feelings Versus Philosophical Truth

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Totally. I think one of the reasons why it might seem like we keep talking across surfaces is because I think you are offering an explanation for why people feel a particular way. And I’m trying to see whether those feelings are, shall we say, philosophically validated, whether they are. Those feelings are sensitive to truth, if the way you feel about the world is accurate.

So I can. I can perfectly understand that it’s possible for Sisyphus to be happy. What I’m saying is that I think that the philosophical underpinning that would be required for him to be content in that condition is unsatisfying, at least to me. So, as a what.

DR K:

So what is it? What is a philosophical truth?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

It doesn’t have to. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t say philosophical truth, but I mean to say, I mean to separate it from what you might describe as like a neurological truth, which is to say it could be true that your brain believes this or believes that based on this or that condition. I’m saying that totally.

But what I’m interested in is the thing that it believes. Is it true or false? It could be in the same way that believing in Christianity can make you happy, it can make you sad. And you can scan someone’s brain, you can put them in an MRI scanner and scan their brain at the moment they convert to Christianity and see that it starts going haywire. But the brain, nothing to do with…

GREG KOUKL:

MRI is not going to show any beliefs, nothing to do with the truth of the brain. Neurological activity. Beliefs aren’t in the brain.

DR K:

Yeah, we’re going to get to that.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I kind of agree with that.

DR K:

So, Alex, I think this is, thank you so much for pointing out how we’re kind of talking across each other, because I think this is the really weird thing and I’m going to say something. And then as we talk about consciousness and what we just talked about, I’m going to torpedo it.

But I think what we sort of find is that from a practical sense, and this could be where, like philosophy, I don’t know what the, how the word practical ties together with philosophy, because I tend to think of philosophy as sort of practical. We can go into that in a second.

But I think from the perspective of finding purpose, now, I’m not talking about purpose as a capital P truth, right, like capital T truth. Finding purpose, it may not be philosophically satisfying to you, but what we sort of know from empirical evidence of people who are purposeless and people who are purposeful is that the subjective feeling of purpose comes out of a number of different things.

Like I mentioned kind of autonomy, being able to detect your emotions, also a sense of narrative identity. So having a purpose in life requires a you. And one of the reasons that no one feels like they are going somewhere in life is because they don’t really have a clear sense of who they are.

And so I think that it’s a great kind of catch that we’re sort of talking across purposes because, I don’t know, the thing that you find not philosophically true, maybe neurologically true, but isn’t philosophically true? I don’t know how to approach that. I mean, I think I sort of do because if we talk about consciousness and subjective experience and how your friend was transformed and by the way he may not be transformed.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

So there’s…

DR K:

Speaking of coping, there’s a chance that when someone, you know, drastically joins a religion like this is great, that is like the mother of all copes. Right? So sometimes they find they adopt, it’s not identity formation, it’s actually identification where, like, I’m going to join this team, and now I’m on this team. And now that I have this team, now I know who I am, now I have a purpose. Like everything kind of gets laid out.

But oftentimes this is also why religion is not like 100% at giving people happiness and things like that, because there is an internal subjective experience of a relationship with God or something like that, which I think we can segue to consciousness. That’s ultimately what determines whether you feel really good about it.

And then the other really interesting thing is through some of those subjective experiences, I think we, the people who have these subjective experiences, believe that it gives them access to truth with a higher T, like the Gnostics and folks like that.

Do We Each Have a Specific Purpose?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I want to bring it back down to some of the popular questions we had from our audience. One of the most popular questions we had is do we each have a specific purpose or is it self chosen? Greg?

GREG KOUKL:

Well, my view, if God has made us for a reason and he wants us to be in relationship with us, each individual person has different capabilities and fulfilling those capabilities that God has given him, general ones and specific ones. Like I have my own particular peculiar capabilities. Doing that is going to make me satisfied.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So did God give me a purpose?

GREG KOUKL:

Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And is it different from Alex’s purpose?

GREG KOUKL:

I would say in the kind of the minutiae, yes, you’re a different individual than he is.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And can I ask you a question that then springs to mind again, I’m very curious. If Stephen Bartlett had gotten cancer at nine years old and I died…

GREG KOUKL:

Yeah. Well, then you wouldn’t be fulfilling the particulars that God had intended for you. But that kind of thing happens because we live in a broken, it isn’t the perfect world. It is that the good, it’s not the totally good world that God made. Something happened that broke the world. Human rebellion.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

At what point in history?

GREG KOUKL:

Well, early on, with our first parents.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Okay, so the first humans.

GREG KOUKL:

The first humans. That’s why all humans since then would have the same proclivity towards evil.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Does that include other…

GREG KOUKL:

Pretty much quantifiable.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Does that include other species of human?

GREG KOUKL:

Homo Neanderthal? I know that’s a question that a lot of people are discussing right now. Okay. And where exactly do you draw the line? And I’m not, that is the area that I go deep in. But I do think that there was an original progenitor to the human race as we understand it right now, that has the image of God in man and violated God’s commands, rebelled against God and that had an impact on the world. Okay?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

And that is why…

GREG KOUKL:

So therefore you’re going to have, some people aren’t going to be, you know, fulfilling all of their, the ultimate purposes that God has for them in this lifetime.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Just to be clear, children get cancer…

GREG KOUKL:

Sure.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Because say, 2 million years ago, roughly the start of the human species…

GREG KOUKL:

I’m not going to set a date on it.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Somebody rebelled against God’s commands. And that is the explanation for that question.

GREG KOUKL:

This is a fixation. And you know, some of these details I haven’t worked out. What about earthquakes and tsunamis and all those kinds of things? Okay. Clearly there is an impact of human rebellion upon the earth. Okay. What the extent of that impact is, I’m not entirely sure.

But this is why I use the word “broken,” because it’s a rather broad term. Rather than trying to identify every instance of things that seem anomalous to a good world, not the way it should be, so to speak. Okay. I think that’s an explanation for these things, even though we can’t necessarily itemize each individual particular instance and how it falls short.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Alex, I want to put the same question to you, which is, do you think that you were born with a purpose that was endowed for your life?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

No. Not in a literal sense. I think that there are, that I was born with literal, like proclivities built into my consciousness and my DNA’s almost wants to do tendencies. Yeah, tendency is a great word. Yeah.

For example, my tendency to eat food. I don’t think I learned that. I think I was born with it. But it’s like I would use the language of when you say, if you said, do you think that you were, you know, you were given hunger from birth? I’d be like, no. In a poetic sense, maybe. But what I mean to say is I was born with this thing called hunger, which I didn’t learn, which was just a part of my makeup.

I think the same thing is true for many motivations of life, such as the sort of meaning that you, that you might report feeling. I think it’s there from childbirth.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Same question for you, Alok. Do you think that we each have a specific purpose or is it self chosen?

Dharma and Karma

DR K:

I think it’s both. So I’m going to introduce two concepts that we haven’t talked about yet. Dharma and karma. And I think these are concepts that are sometimes hard to understand. I’m going to do my best to kind of speed run them.

So dharma is the Sanskrit word that kind of gets translated as duty. The way that I would describe Dharma, the reason I think it’s so important is right now, if we look at the world, people are like not having a good time. And oftentimes what they do is they’re stuck between this choice of doing what they want and doing what they should.

So doing what they want is maybe dopaminergic is maybe fun in some way. Doing what they should is like painful in some way. So for me, what I think Dharma is, Dharma is like sort of duty. But I think the key thing that helps people once they find their daily dharma is it’s what allows you to choose the negative thing. It’s what allows you to choose the hard thing.

So if someone points a gun at me and I look at that gun, that gun means pain, suffering, death. You know, my life will end and then I will have nothing to leave behind me. So my purpose will end. So I try to move away from that thing. But if someone points the gun at my child because I have this overwhelming sense of love and joy or whatever, I step into the path of that thing.

So I think once we understand what our duty is, that gives us a sense of tethering. It gives us a sense of direction. I think what confuses a lot of people is that they think duty is like some transcendental. It’s like a big thing, like duty with a capital D. Like, I was born on this earth to do these particular big tasks, like I need to say, cure cancer or something like that. Oftentimes dharma is really small.

GREG KOUKL:

So duty is not transcendent and it’s not tied to some moral transcendent thing.

DR K:

I think I don’t know about moral. So this is where I think, like I said, should…

GREG KOUKL:

Yeah, sure, should. So that’s usually a moral term, right?

The Nature of Dharma and Purpose

DR K:

In the West, right. So I think there’s a whole different set of axioms. I’m using Dharma, and that’s what people will put morality onto dharma, where I don’t think that that’s actually fair.

So going back to, I have a duty just to give another example, and y’all can decide whether this is moral or not. But when I’m working in the emergency room and a patient walks in, I have a duty to that patient.

So a lot of people don’t understand about Dharma is that it is very environmentally determined. So your dharma will depend somewhat on the family that you have, the responsibilities that you have. If you have children, you have a dharma to those people. So I think that’s one part of what we would call purpose.

I think the other part of purpose, and I think this gets really clear closer to the more Western conception, is karma. So going back to your question about if a child with cancer dies at the age of one, is their purpose fulfilled? Arguably, yes, because that could have been their purpose in this life. So their purpose could have been…

So there’s a really interesting story about many years ago, there were a group of angels. I’m just going to use the Western terminology. Devas, who disturbed Shiva in his meditation. And so he cursed them, and he said, “I’m going to… The curse that you guys are going to do is y’all are going to be born on the earth for one lifetime of a human.”

And then the devas were like, “Oh, my God. This is terrible. We’re going to be cursed to be born on the earth, and the earth is full of suffering and Sisyphus, and there’s no meaning with a capital M.”

So then they go to Shiva’s daughter and they ask her, “Hey, can you help us out? Can you please go talk to your dad? Can you please get him to change his sentence?”

And she says that Shiva’s never going to change his sentence. That’s impossible to do. He’s also kind of this embodiment of karma and things like that. But so he says, “But I can help y’all out. What I can do is I’m going to be born with y’all.”

GREG KOUKL:

All.

DR K:

And then there’s this other story in the Mahabharata where basically she has seven children, and then she drowns them the day after they’re born. And so she says the technical situation is you’re going to be born for one lifetime. I can make a lifetime happen in a moment. Now, I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if it’s moral, I don’t know if it’s mythology, but…

ALEX O’CONNOR:

A potential explanation for why children get cancer.

DR K:

It’s a potential explanation for why children get cancer. Now, I think the karma thing is when you said, is your purpose in life predetermined? So I think that you inherit a certain amount of circumstances and that part of your purpose will be in relation to the circumstances that you inherit.

But the other thing about karma, which I think a lot of people misunderstand, is they think that it means destiny. I think all it means is Newton’s third law, which is every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That while you may inherit a set of circumstances, the way that you act is sowing seeds for your future life.

So this is where, you know, I know I’m introducing a bunch of concepts and it’s interesting, we started a membership program here at HealthyGamer. And part of the reason we did that is because a lot of these concepts, if you turn them into 50 minute YouTube videos, people just end up with more questions than answers. So we go into a lot of depth. And I think it requires some depth because I’m sure everybody who’s listening has a ton of questions.

But in order to succinctly answer your question, I would say that, yeah, you were born for… I don’t know about a specific reason, but there’s a set of different things which only you can do. You are a unique set of genetics, you are a unique set of experiences, you are a unique set of psychology.

And this process in psychiatry is something that we call meaning making. Helps a lot when people have trauma, right? So to help someone understand, why did this terrible thing happen to you? And once you make meaning from it, that helps you adaptively. But I think that it’s also not predestined necessarily. You can procrastinate on fulfilling your karmas and then they’ll just keep coming back.

Dharma, Duty, and Moral Categories

GREG KOUKL:

So, Dr. K, I still have a question about this. You talk about duty and I’d asked about morality there and you kind of begged off on that. Well, not really. But then you use the word obligation in the emergency room and it sounds to me when you talk about those things, you are actually invoking moral categories.

Things you ought to do, you have an obligation to do, you have a duty to do maybe the right thing. You didn’t use this phrase, but it sounds like you’re saying this is the right thing to do, the virtuous thing to do, as opposed to the wrong thing to do. So how am I to understand those phrases if they are not really invoking genuine moral categories?

DR K:

So when you say moral categories, are you referring to a transcendental right?

GREG KOUKL:

I’m talking about ethical principles, ethical rights and wrong, if you want. They are transcendent because they’re not simply in the molecules, as it were. They’re above us. Okay. So, yes, in that sense.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Okay, yeah.

GREG KOUKL:

And there are consequences to our behaviors one way or another. And the consequences, it’s not just utilitarian. It’s not just, well, if I put toast in too long, it’ll burn the toast. But you ought to do the things that you just described. You ought to help that person. Okay. I think it’s a fairly common, sensible word, a moral category, virtue, vice kind of thing.

DR K:

I think whether it’s commonsensical depends on what’s common. Right. So I think that this is where these concepts, I don’t think, are one to one. So I think doing your dharma is basically the way I would describe your Dharma is when I throw a ball in the air, it comes down.

GREG KOUKL:

Okay. Right.

DR K:

So Dharma is kind of doing what is the second part of what you’ve kind of signed up for.

GREG KOUKL:

So when you say you ought to help the person in the emergency room, all you mean is you’re not morally compelled to do that in terms of a virtue, but there is a consequence for you to do that as opposed to doing the opposite.

DR K:

Yes. And I think there is a layer of morality, but that is not within Dharma. So, for example, there are yamas and niyamas, which are things like truthfulness, ahimsa, which means nonviolence. So there’s a set of different things that we would, generally speaking, call morality. And doing those things is usually in accordance with Dharma.

But, you know, the Mahabharata is a great case of someone saying, “I don’t want to kill my cousins and I don’t want to kill my teacher,” and Krishna saying, “You absolutely should because it is in accordance with Dharma.” So I think dharma oftentimes gets translated over to morality, but I think you lose something in translation.

Purpose, Flourishing, and God’s Design

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Rick, can I ask you, do you think you can have a fulfilling life without having a transcendent purpose?

GREG KOUKL:

In some measure? In some measure, what I described earlier is if God made us for a purpose and made the world for human flourishing, and I think we get a basic description of that in the beginning of our story, for example, then people who don’t even believe in God or even about even anything religious at all, if they fall within the pattern of the things that God has created for flourishing, they’re going to flourish in some significant measure.

You mentioned a few moments ago about having children, and this is somewhat of a universal experience now. You made a kind of a naturalistic characterization of why we feel that way. My sense is that God made us for that purpose: be fruitful, multiply, subdue. And subdue doesn’t mean rape the earth. It means to work productively what God has given us to serve.

Now, somebody can get married and stay married and have children and fulfill that purpose there and be very satisfied in doing it, as opposed to all kinds of other variations, that it’s just going to mess up their life and they’re going to experience satisfaction and fulfillment in it. But that’s because they’re, in a certain sense, they’re doing the things that God has made human beings to do so that they would flourish.

It’s just like you can think of it in very mechanistic terms. You have a vehicle that meant to operate a certain way, and if you do the things properly for that vehicle, it’s going to run well and do so.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I can have a grand feeling of purpose if I do many of the things that are considered virtuous within scripture without needing to believe.

GREG KOUKL:

Yeah, you could still be virtuous. Certainly you can do those things. My argument, and this is what I was getting at a little earlier, Dr. K, is that if there is no God establishing a right and wrong, then there is no right and wrong because there is no law that we’re conforming ourselves to. We are just doing stuff. All right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Now, if you believe the sort of evolutionary perspective…

GREG KOUKL:

I don’t take it as a whole. I don’t. Not the way that Alex has taken. It’s the grand explanation of pretty much everything.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

It’s not an explanation of everything. It’s an explanation of the variance of…

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Life on Earth, because evolution does. I was thinking about my dog, thinking about Pablo, and I was thinking, why does he have sex with other dogs? Why does he eat? Why does he protect his puppies? Why does he do these things that somewhat, in Dr. K’s example there, he takes care of things. He takes care of me when I’m not in the house. If someone comes in and my girlfriend’s there, he takes care of my girlfriend. He barks only when she’s at home alone. So he seems to be expressing some form of morality. He seems to understand his own sort of idea of right and wrong.

GREG KOUKL:

But I wouldn’t characterize it that way. As if he’s thinking, “I ought to do this,” and if I don’t do that, then I’m doing something wrong. I think animals have instincts that they’re imbued with that can be influenced by natural factors to some degree, I guess, but they are made for purposes.

And this is the reason that many of the creatures act the way they do is because of these very sophisticated instincts that allow them to get along in life and do well, survive and reproduce. I don’t have any reason to think that they’re… Yeah, survive and reproduce, of course, but I don’t have any reason to think that they’re thinking, “I’m doing the moral thing.” And if they didn’t do the thing that we would be… It would be appropriate to accuse them of doing something immoral.

The Evolution of Morality

STEVEN BARTLETT:

History’s almost shown that even in times where we look back and go, that was not the moral thing. Like, you know, Nazis in World War II.

GREG KOUKL:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

They acted in a way that was… helped them survive in the context they were in. So the Nazi that would go to the concentration camp and come home and be really nice to his family, he thought he was doing the right thing.

GREG KOUKL:

This is why one of the reasons I think this is the evolutionary explanation is inadequate, okay. Because it seems that there are lots of things that people do that seem to be good for them or for their tribe. They characteristically will look at and will assess it. And the assessment is that that is wrong, it’s evil, it’s wicked.

And I think that our assessments are reliable in that regard, okay. That we have moral intuitions that allow us to see things that are real about that. And these things are relatively universal. I mean, it doesn’t matter where you live or when you live. People are asking the question about the problem of evil in the world, okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And I think it’s not of what evil was. Seems to change over time. Because me, I mean, I wouldn’t be sat at this table many a couple hundred years ago because I’m black. And everybody at the time thought that that was the right thing. They didn’t think that was an evil thing at the time.

The Problem of Moral Relativism and Cultural Change

GREG KOUKL: Well, everybody at the time didn’t think that there are going to be social mores that are going to change over time. And people do respond in different ways. But just because you have variations in the way people believe about morality doesn’t mean that there isn’t a morality that’s a sound morality.

And CS Lewis has done a study of this, looked at the kinds of things that seem to transcend culture in terms of assessments, moral assessments that seem to be true about every culture. A lot of times the differences are not differences in moral facts, but they’re like the morality has actually changed, but a difference in perception.

Okay, so what counts as heroism in some cases would not come as heroism in other cases, even though heroism is considered a noble kind of thing.

Challenging Religious Explanations for Suffering

ALEX O’CONNOR: I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to rewind to the fact that we just brushed over two of what I think are the best available, at least. First, that came to mind, explanations as to why children get cancer. And I just wondered, as a question, whether you consider whether your explanation sounds to you as your explanation sounds to you, as I think both of them sound to me.

And I don’t know how they sound to you, Steven, but the idea that the thing that we are most fundamentally confronted with, I think on an existential level is suffering, and there’s our own suffering, and then there’s the suffering of others and the seemingly meaningless suffering of a child who’s undergoing cancer and does not survive it.

And I’m told that in the face of such existential tragedy, turn to religion to give us a sort of sense of fulfillment and sense of explanation. But when asked about the mechanism of how, I’m told it’s because at some undisclosed number of years ago, somebody committed sin against God, and that’s why your child has now died of cancer.

There are millions of people who listen to this show. There will be people listening to this whose children have died of cancer. I wonder if that brings them any kind of consolation. Similarly, the idea that, you know, maybe it’s some disgruntled angels who didn’t want to come down to earth for too long, and so, if anything, you’re actually doing them a favor by killing them of cancer. I don’t know if that’s bringing the kind of people they’re looking for.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s your answer to that?

ALEX O’CONNOR: I don’t think I have one. But I don’t like people professing that they do have an answer, but when it comes down to it actually saying something which I think will provide the opposite effect, which. And I don’t mean this personally, I mean, as a point of religious explanation, the idea that this…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Everyone’s going to get a chance to respond to this.

The Naturalistic Explanation for Suffering

ALEX O’CONNOR: The idea that this even approximates an explanation as to why this happens, I would ask you to consider what you find more likely. If we assume that we are essentially existing here as accidental organisms just competing in a struggle for survival with no endowed meaning or supervision, what might we expect to find? And I would ask what you would expect to find.

If we were created with purpose by a loving God who wants us all to come into communion with him, but for some reason thinks it’s necessary that we exist in this vale of tears in this material world first, what would you expect to find? I don’t think. And then look at what you do find.

Look at what you do find in the natural world. Even if you just take into consideration non human animal suffering, just an unfathomable amount of negative experience for seemingly no reason, not to mention the fact that children are getting cancer, as you say, and as you’ve already alluded to, there are evils that humans commit like the holocaust, but there are evils which they don’t, like earthquakes and tsunamis and the like.

I don’t think we would expect to see any of this if we assume that hypothesis. But if we assume that we are just accidentally existing organisms in a struggle for survival, not only do we explain this, but we also come to expect it. So I think it provides a much better explanation. That is not to say justification.

The idea we were talking about evolution, you said that the problem that you have with the Darwinian worldview that it seems to say that it seems to favor survival of the fittest and yet there are things which evolution seems to point to that we would morally condemn. Well, of course, because evolution by natural selection is an explanation for how things got the way they were. It’s in no way a justification for behaviors. It doesn’t even function that way.

No scientific theory of why things happen are any kind of justification, any more than Newton’s laws of gravity are a justification, a moral justification for the motion of the planet. That’s of course, it’s not the case. It’s just an explanation.

I just really want to drive home this point that it has to do more. If you want religious traditions to do what you claim that they do, which is provide existential comfort for people who are suffering, you have to do more in the face of children dying of cancer than some reference to mythical human beings who existed in a way that is completely unintelligible.

The Fall as an Explanation

GREG KOUKL: There’s a lot there. Okay. I don’t expect this could be comfort to anybody to say who’s suffering from whatever, to say that there was a fall. Okay. The fall is just the explanation for what went wrong and why there is wrong in the world.

Like I said earlier, it doesn’t matter where you live or when you live. Everybody knows something’s wrong. And the way they express that concern about something wrong is in moral terms. The world is not the way it ought to be, should be different. And then when they give examples of it, sometimes there’s natural evil, but generally it’s examples of moral evil. What we would call moral evil. Okay. Things that people shouldn’t do. Okay.

ALEX O’CONNOR: That’s why I particularly avoided those.

GREG KOUKL: No, right. You didn’t include any examples. But the implication is. And this is where. You know Richard Dawkins’s famous statement that this is exactly the kind of world we’d expect if there was at the basis, you know, no design, no justice, no evil, no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless.

Well, I actually think this isn’t the world that we find, the one he just described. Yes. It’s a world filled with suffering. And there’s a way of explaining that, which you just did. There’s also another way of explaining it that has a solution. Okay, what is that explanation? Pardon me. That God is in the process of solving the problem of evil over time.

ALEX O’CONNOR: To why the evil’s there in the first place. You set the. I don’t mean to interrupt, but you said it. You’ve referenced the fall twice now. And the last time I tried this, it seemed like you sort of said that you don’t really know. But if the fall is…

GREG KOUKL: I wasn’t giving particular details about the ancestry of human evolution.

ALEX O’CONNOR: What is the fall? Historically, what is the fall?

GREG KOUKL: The fall is when our first parents, characteristically known as Adam and Eve in the story, in the account of reality, rebelled against God. And when they rebelled against. What did they do? They disobeyed him is what’s important. He had given them a restriction. They disobeyed that.

And when they disobeyed that, they broke their relationship with God through rebellion. They broke their relationship with each other, they broke their relationship with the environment. All of that had these kind of cosmic effects. There’s a solution, though. That’s just the first three phrases.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Do you know what the command was?

GREG KOUKL: Finish the thought. Okay. The principal issue is rebellion or disobedience. Okay. There are different ways it’s characterized, but that’s the point, in my view. The disobedience of what, though?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Pardon me, Disobedience of what?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like, what was it?

GREG KOUKL: God told them not to do one thing. Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they disobeyed.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Do you interpret that literally?

GREG KOUKL: Pardon?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Like an actual tree and an actual fruit?

GREG KOUKL: Yes, I do take that as a straightforward account, but that’s not the important part. I don’t want to get…

ALEX O’CONNOR: So children get cancer because somebody…

GREG KOUKL: Pardon me.

ALEX O’CONNOR: So children get cancer because a few million years ago someone ate a…

GREG KOUKL: Let me just back up and give…

ALEX O’CONNOR: You the entire talent, please.

GREG KOUKL: This would be, I think, more help.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I’m not trying to be difficult, by the way. I just really. I don’t want to just brush over these points when we reference. I mean, people listening might be like…

GREG KOUKL: I’ve never heard an Adam and Eve.

ALEX O’CONNOR: And they’ll need to know what you’re talking about.

God’s Plan for Redemption

GREG KOUKL: The point I’m making is that there was a disobedience by human beings that had an impact on their relationship with God, which they were created for, and had an impact on the rest of the world. And since then, that problem of evil broadly writ, since then, the world’s been broken, and God has a plan for bringing that back together, not only for making the world whole again, but also for bringing human beings back in proper relationship with him when they’re in rebellion with him. And this is where Jesus comes in.

Now, I’ve written a piece called the Story of Reality, a book that’s meant to characterize that in fairly clear terms. In more general terms, it isn’t meant to answer all of these questions because some of them, frankly, are imponderables. But the larger picture can be understood and is in the story. It’s in the account of reality and the scriptures, in the Hebrew scriptures and in the Christian scriptures, they form a unit. Okay. And these are the things that Jesus spoke to. And Jesus took these things seriously based on what he had to say about these particular things. Okay.

So because broadly speaking now, because we live in a broken world, there is an answer that we have to. That we have a possible answer. You know, it was Bertrand Russell who famously said, “How are you going to talk about God when you’re kneeling at the bed of a dying child?” Which I think is very emotionally compelling.

But I listened to philosopher William Craig, who you also know, I think, who said, what is Bertrand Russell, the atheist, going to say when he’s kneeling at the bed of a dying child? He’s good luck, too bad. That’s just the way it goes. There is no answer that he has.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, can you come with your response as well?

Personal Experiences with Suffering

DR K: Sure. First of all, Alex, I want to thank you for bringing up and being a bit bulldogish. I mean that in a good way. You grabbed something, you were like, this is not okay.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Well, we forget that people are listening to this, whose children have died of cancer.

DR K: I totally get it.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I think we just need to keep it in mind, you know, 100%.

DR K: So I’m really glad you said that because I realized that I offered a terrible example. And I say this as someone I can remember the day I was a third year medical student on my first pediatric rotation. I was working in the ICU overnight and there was a nine year old child who had, I think, lymphoma. And I watched and was with their parents as that child moved towards death.

I have worked in offices where people will come into my office and they’ll say, you know, they’ll ask me about karma and they’ll be like, “I was nine years old when I was sexually assaulted. Are you telling me that this is like part of purpose or whatever?”

I also remember when I was in India, one of my best friends, the first time I went to India, I spent about seven years studying to become a monk. I discovered a lot of really cool stuff like meditation, had some transcendental experiences, altered my worldview. And one of my best friends, who is also a very accomplished meditator, we kind of got to talking about religion and I was like, you know, what do you think about Hinduism and some of these concepts?

And he said, “I can’t accept any religion that says, if you were raped, it’s your fault.”

ALEX O’CONNOR: Yes.

Understanding Karma and Cause and Effect

DR K:

So that stuck with me. And so for a long time, at the very beginning, Steven asked me a question. Am I Hindu? I mean, am I religious? And I guess I would say yes. So that thought really stuck with me. I think for a long time I was an atheist. I think I’m still an atheist. I think there are a couple of other things that are a little bit unusual.

So like people think like in the west, we think that atheism, polytheism and monotheism are contradictions. We don’t really think that in Hinduism, like those things can coexist. And what I’m really grateful for you for is because I think when I’m so glad you said that, because I think when I offered the example that I offered, it’s so interesting because I was thinking about why I mentioned that we have a membership.

And the reason I mentioned it is because this is one of those things that I have lectured about for four to six hours. And if you listen to that lecture, then you will understand the context that I’m coming from, but without that context. And if you sort of assume there’s so many axioms about morality and deserving that that example without the appropriate context sounds awful. It’s like your kid died at the age of one. Oh, there’s some greater purpose. You just don’t know what it is. Fuck you. Right? That is not comforting at all.

So here’s where I am now. I really think this is. I think karma is good in the sense that it helps people. I also think it’s true. But here’s kind of where I am now. So that was sort of my journey. I realized it was out of order, transcendental experience. Karma seems awful. There’s this concept of deserving.

Then many years later, through practice with people who have been sexually assaulted and watching children die in the pediatric ICU, grappling with these problems, not just like there are people out there. It’s like you’re in the room with these people when their child is dying. What do you say to them? And even more so now as a psychiatrist with end of life care and things like that.

So I think the first thing to understand, first question that I have for you is when I say the word karma, what does that mean to you?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean by that.

DR K:

So I think the first thing to understand about karma is it’s just the principle of cause and effect.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yeah.

DR K:

So when a child dies of cancer, what would you say is the cause of their death?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Well, I don’t know about the signs of cancer very much, but I would suppose it’s the cancer.

DR K:

Perfect. Right. So that is in accordance with the law of karma. Now what is the reason they got cancer?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I don’t know. I mean, pick any reason you like.

DR K:

There could be a genetic mutation, random chance, things like that. So what I think that all karma is is action and reaction. That’s it. So if you understand the doctrine of karma, what it helps you do is see the way that causes and effects link to each other. It does not have anything to do with deserving.

More so than if I have a genetic mutation and I wind up with cancer. That is an action that has an effect. This is why I was reluctant to engage with moralities, because I think there are certain assumptions that I think come from this kind of Abrahamic or Judeo Christian worldview that get injected into these concepts like karma and dharma. Which is why I hate translating them. Because anytime I translate something, it’s going to be filled in.

So you really have to understand karma. But I would say all karma is remove it, denude it of all morality, remove it of all deserve beyond simple Newtonian mechanics, and that actions have consequences. Now, the reason that this is helpful. Okay, now I realize I’m making a functional claim here, not a claim about philosophical truth, because I don’t know what else to call it. I do think it’s philosophically true, but that’s not what I’m talking about right here, is that when you’re sitting with a human being because your primary concern is when a child with cancer dies or is dying, how do you deal? How do you. There are people who are suffering. If we’re not careful, we’re going to hurt them. Right? That’s what you’re saying.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

That’s one thing.

DR K:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So I think what I sort of…

ALEX O’CONNOR:

There’s how it makes people feel, but there’s also the literal explanation for why they suffer. You know, it’s one thing to say that, you know, this religious narrative will bring you some comfort, but it’s another thing as well. I think that’s something you need to keep in mind. But you say more than that as a religious person, and you’re not just saying that this narrative will bring you comfort. You’re saying, this is why it’s happening. This is why your child has cancer.

The Role of Meaning-Making in Healing

DR K:

So what I would say. So here’s my kind of response to that. So the first is, I think that when I sit with people who are sexually used at the age of nine, didn’t do anything to deserve it, you know, people will say, like, oh, like, you have to be careful what you wear and stuff like that. I mean, you know, I have patients that were in onesies and overalls and all kinds of stuff.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Nine it, huh? At the age of nine.

DR K:

Yeah, people will say all kinds of stuff. So. And what I find with working with them, and there’s plenty of data to back this up, is that there’s a certain amount of meaning making that is necessary to comfort those people, to heal from that thing. And the meaning making, if we’re talking about empirically making meaning out of things that are bad, is one of the ways that you alleviate suffering.

So one of the things that I find is helpful as an option for that meaning making is understanding the doctrine of karma. And when I share it with people, doesn’t work for everybody. So from a clinical standpoint, I’m not saying you should believe in the doctrine of karma. I’m just. And I’m not saying you should believe in Christianity or anything like that. The important thing is this is what the science shows, is you should make a concerted effort to make meaning.

And because of my background, because of my expertise, helping people understand things from a karmic perspective, I would say is helpful about 80 to 90% of the time. But there’s a very important caveat there, from a data standpoint, is that there is a huge selection bias to who comes into my office. There’s a good chance that these people are already open to that concept and are interested in learning more.

So I make no claims about that concept being superior to anything else. But I think what we know from psychiatry is that it’s not so clear which one is the best, but that you just have some way of, like, making sense of what happens to you. And that’s just one thing that I think is an option. And I happen to believe in the principle of cause and effect, which is all karma is. There’s no morality tied to it.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Sounds like you’re saying. Saying that it’s just something that it just happens.

DR K:

What do you mean, it just happens?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

It just happens?

DR K:

No, absolutely not. I’m saying the exact opposite. So it just happens does not imply a cause.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I mean, it just happens as the result of some series of causes. Like why do children get cancer? It’s just the result of a series of causes. Yes, that’s it.

DR K:

Yes.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

There’s no redemption. There’s no meaning. There’s no intention. It just. It just happens. And that’s fine because I believe that’s the case. I think that’s true.

DR K:

No, no. I mean, I think that we have overwhelming evidence. Overwhelming, that if you have a BRCA negative mutation on both sides, that you have a 98 to 99% chance of getting breast cancer, that having this mutation here warrants a prophylactic double mastectomy, which means removing both breasts before the cancer even shows up.

The Problem of Pre-Human Suffering

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But I think the reason. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think the reason you brought this up, Steven, was not because you were interested when you said, like. I don’t think you worded it like this, but, you know, why does the child get cancer? Why would young Steven have gotten cancer? I don’t think you mean in the scientific sense. I don’t think you mean literally explain to me the process by which cancer develops in my brain gives me leukemia.

I think you mean, why does this happen if being supervised. I mean, you asked it to Greg in the context of religious supervision of the universe. And I think the irony is that we’re in a context of a discussion where usually the boot is on the other foot. And I’m sort of being told that as a non religious person, as an atheist, agnostic, I don’t have a satisfying explanation. You know, what am I going to say at the footstool of somebody who’s dying of cancer?

But it sounds to me, at least today, like we don’t have a very plausible alternative in Christianity. For example, I did have a few questions which, which maybe I’ll be permitted the time to ask and I don’t want to bang on about this, but it’s important because this is ultimately you’re here to represent your view and a worldview more broadly. And this is to me the question is the question of suffering.

And you’ve explained your views about the fall and I wanted to let you put them in full before I ask a few questions. But the first question that jumps out at me is the question of pre human suffering. We’re not the first species to inhabit this planet and before we existed billions of years. I don’t know if you believe that the Earth is four and a half billion years old, but billions of years, hundreds of millions of years at least of animal suffering.

Yeah, like, and that is experience. And you could say that it somehow is less like relevant or doesn’t matter as much. But if you saw me right now step on a dog’s tail and watch it squeal, you tell me to stop because you know that absent just the effect that that has on our human situation, that’s bad for the dog. That kind of stuff was going on for hundreds of million years before humans were around. That means before the fall.

DR K:

Yeah, that’s true.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

The second question I have, and I…

Pain, Suffering, and Moral Assessment

GREG KOUKL:

Don’t entirely know how to answer that part of the problem comes when you create a world in a certain way that has certain cause and effect kind of thing. So pain is there for a reason. Pain is there so that you can avoid something that’s harmful to the body. When you start feeling pain, you withdraw from it. Okay, In a very simplistic sense. It also has a downside. And the downside is that pain is painful and sometimes dying is very painful too. So there’s a trade off there.

Now I haven’t worked all those details out, okay? But what I look at is a larger picture because I can’t refine all of those things from my own thinking. The larger picture is we both, we all live in the same world that is filled with pain and suffering. So then the question is who has the best explanation writ large about how that works? No explanation. Well, maybe some are going to go very granular and get the. Here’s why your baby is suffering in this moment for this thing. We’re not going to be able to do that, but we can understand why the world is broken now.

If you don’t hold that the world was made for something better, then the world we see right now is not broken. It’s just the way it is. There is no moral assessment whatsoever that we can make that would make any sense. But we constantly make moral assessments. Which is why you’re bringing this issue up about suffering.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I’ve been very careful to avoid moral language because I saw this reason.

GREG KOUKL:

Let me explain. It seems to me that you are bringing kind of smuggling in moral categories with the suffering issue. Because if I said I don’t care about the suffering, I of millions of years of organisms that had experienced pain, that kind of cast me in a kind of a negative moral light. You don’t have to say that. It does seem to me that you’re smuggling in the notion that suffering is bad morally.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I know that people often do that. I’m specifically avoiding that because I’ve had this conversation a hundred thousand times and that’s the accusation that gets brought up. And some people do that. But I’m specifically—you can rewind the tape—I make great pains. I don’t say “the problem of evil,” for example. I say “the problem of suffering.”

If you said that you didn’t care about suffering, I would say that you’re probably just being inconsistent with your Christian worldview, for example. I wouldn’t say that you’re doing anything immoral in the context of—

GREG KOUKL: So I’ll accept the qualification.

ALEX O’CONNOR: What I’m saying is that if Christianity were true, we would not expect the kind of suffering that is present in the natural world. I’m not saying that on my worldview that suffering is wrong and must be fixed and there’s some moral element. I’m not saying that at all. All I’m saying is that it is unexpected if Christianity were true that that suffering would be as it is, in particular the non-human animals.

GREG KOUKL: No, I understand that. Okay. And the way I’m looking at it—

ALEX O’CONNOR: Do you understand that I’m not smuggling in those moral—because you said that I’m smuggling in moral—

DR K: No. Okay.

GREG KOUKL: I buy that. It’s okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you have a second question?

The Fall and the Proclivity to Sin

ALEX O’CONNOR: I did. Which is that if the Fall is the explanation for, shall we say, the moral evils that people commit, like the Holocaust—the reason why people have proclivity to commit the Holocaust is because of the betrayal of God’s trust a few million years ago, whenever it was you think it was—if Adam and Eve’s transgression is the explanation for why humans have a sinful nature and act upon sin, then why did Eve act upon the sin before the Fall had happened?

Eve must have had a proclivity to sin in order to betray God in the first place. And so I don’t think it suffices to say that the explanation for why we have human beings with a proclivity to sin like Adolf Hitler is because of the Fall, if the Fall is a result of a proclivity to sin from Eve.

GREG KOUKL: Well, the nature of freedom, in my understanding, my view is that it can initiate things. Okay. You don’t have to have, in a certain sense, deterministic element in your soul that forces you to act a certain way. Why did Adam and Eve—Eve in this case—act the way she did? Because she was capable of initiating a free action.

Do you think she had to initiate free action in terms of rebellion? Okay. That’s the nature of freedom. Okay. I can’t get into her mind. And I think sometimes asking questions like this, “Why did she, under those circumstances, do what she did?” I can’t answer that.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Do you think she did something immoral?

GREG KOUKL: Yeah. She disobeyed God.

ALEX O’CONNOR: And what did she eat from? The tree of the—

GREG KOUKL: I’m not sure.

ALEX O’CONNOR: She ate from the tree of the—

GREG KOUKL: Knowledge of good and evil.

ALEX O’CONNOR: So she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, implying that before she ate of it, she didn’t have a knowledge of good and evil. How could she have done something immoral before she ate it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can I ask you a question?

GREG KOUKL: Hold on. This goes to a contradiction of my view, so I just need to clarify this.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Do you understand what I’m saying?

GREG KOUKL: Right, like, yeah, I understand entirely. Sure.

ALEX O’CONNOR: If she hasn’t eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, doesn’t know good and evil, so how does she know that it’s—that she hasn’t yet eaten from the knowledge of good and evil?

GREG KOUKL: Because the knowledge of good—the word “knowledge” oftentimes in the Hebrew is talking about experience. Okay. It is not talking about mental awareness. Okay. She wouldn’t have been—she wouldn’t have not been able to even understand the command not to do something if she didn’t have those moral categories. I think that’s part of the image of God in man.

Consequently, she knew she ought not do it, but she still chose, for whatever reason, to do that. And that act of disobedience created a big mess.

ALEX O’CONNOR: What that means is that the Fall does not explain the proclivity to sin because Eve already had it. It does not explain the existence of evil, because knowledge of that already existed before she committed the Fall. It also doesn’t explain the origin of suffering, because, of course, Eve’s punishment for eating from the tree of the—well.

GREG KOUKL: You talk about suffering prior to human beings in animals. I’m talking about suffering in human beings. It does explain the fall of man, because human beings made a choice that they could have made differently, but they didn’t. And their rebellion against God, it had a consequence.

ALEX O’CONNOR: I don’t think it could be called—

GREG KOUKL: And this is why the rest of the world has unfolded the way it has, why there is suffering and evil in the world. A naturalistic explanation can explain, “Oh, suffering before, suffering after,” but you’ve been very careful to make it that there’s no moral ramifications to this at all. It seems most people are pretty aware that there are moral ramifications.

So if your worldview does not have a way of making sense of moral intuitions about suffering, even animal suffering, it’s not an adequate worldview.

Alex’s Agnosticism and Search for Meaning

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Alex, how do you categorize your belief or lack of belief? Are you atheist, agnostic, religious?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Agnostic is probably the best, the best term.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how do you define the word agnostic?

ALEX O’CONNOR: It means that I don’t know. I think that a lot of religious language escapes us and I’m also not entirely sure always what people are exactly talking about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I asked you the question, how did life come to be on the earth, what would your answer to that be?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Oh, I have no idea. Of course, I have no idea.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does someone who is agnostic create a really meaningful life in your perspective?

ALEX O’CONNOR: Well, I don’t know how somebody else might do that because crucially, I mean, we talked about this earlier when we talked about—we had this brief interlude where you were sort of saying meaning for humans and meaning for individuals. And the reason I make that distinction is because if you consider the way that—take like scientific progress, right, from Galileo’s time to today—the idea is that there are some kind of scientific innovations. And then you have a child and you teach that child the latest science and then that child will build upon it and teach their children the latest and they’ll build.

And so as generations go on, the starting point for each individual human is like further along, right? So you can have a child who’s like 12 now and knows calculus, you know what I mean? And with successive generations, the starting point for each individual is like further along the path of discovery.

With meaning and existential concerns, it doesn’t work like that. It resets every single time. You can’t figure out how to live a meaningful life and experience meaning and come to some kind of spiritual enlightenment and then teach that to your children. And that’s then their starting point for them. It resets, it’s new. So I think that every individual has to do it on their own for themselves. Right. And we’re all doing that together, as it were, going around the world.

So the way that I’m approaching this—we were going to talk about consciousness, which we didn’t. And perhaps it’s a good job that we didn’t because it’s just such a big topic. But my views on consciousness are crucial to my sense of sort of what it’s all about, as it were. Because the greatest mystery that we are confronted with every single day, if you just take a moment to remember it, is that we are conscious, is that we are experiencing things from a first-person perspective. That I have thoughts which are inaccessible to you, and you have thoughts which are inaccessible to me. It’s extremely strange.

So there’s a view that I’m quite attracted to in the philosophy of mind called panpsychism, which literally means sort of like the view that consciousness is everywhere or in everything. It doesn’t mean that everything is conscious. It doesn’t mean this pen is conscious. What it means is that the stuff that the universe is made out of, so the fundamental matter of the universe, has at least mental properties, or might be mental properties. Because when you say, for example, you know, we’re in a world of like molecules in motion, right, I understand that sentiment. But if you ask a scientist what is stuff actually made out of, ultimately speaking, they will not be able to tell you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For you personally, what makes your life full of purpose and meaning?

ALEX O’CONNOR: I can’t just jump—I can just jump there. But it won’t make much sense because what I would say is something like a recognition of the illusion of divisible selves, which doesn’t make a ton of sense.

DR K: I can explain.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Unless you lay the groundwork, which can be explained in many different ways. And in fact, it’s something which most—like the Vedic tradition—it’s one of the reasons I’m so attracted to it, and particularly the Upanishads, is because they seem to embody this idea. They’re constantly banging on about how the individual self, the individuated person, is an illusion and there is one ultimate self. They call it Atman.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But are you going to have kids?

ALEX O’CONNOR: I don’t know.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you want to have kids?

ALEX O’CONNOR: I hope so, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you do want to have kids?

DR K: Oh, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

ALEX O’CONNOR: I’m not sure. I don’t know. It just feels—it feels as though I’ve got—it’s a bit like asking, you know, there’s a literal explanation. If you ask me, am I going to have dinner today, I’ll say yes. If you say why, I could say, well, because I’m hungry. But if you ask me, like, but, like, why, like, why—why do you care about being hungry? Why do you care about satisfying it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I would say I’m a—and I’ll tell you, I want to have kids because I think it will bring a lot of joy to my life. I think I’ll enjoy the challenge.

ALEX O’CONNOR: It’s proven to be just for your sake.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes.

ALEX O’CONNOR: So it’s not for their sake.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think everything. No, no, no, no, no, no. I think everything everyone does at some… You can look at the neurological level is for their sake. The reason why people… Why Dr. K works on that ward and saves the life is ultimately because it’s…

ALEX O’CONNOR: So, then in a way, I agree with you. But if it is true that there is this sort of thing called consciousness that the universe is made out of and brains are kind of complex organizations of consciousness, then when you ask me, like, you know, why, what’s wrong with harming another person on this… on this worldview, on this materialistic worldview?

Well, I think the material of the universe is consciousness. And I think that when I harm someone else, it could literally, in a fundamental sense, be a… be a case of self harm. By the way, can I just say, because it sounds a little bit insane without the space to explain the panpsychist worldview. It sounds absolutely mental. But there are some… there are some really interesting clues.

Can I give you one clue? This is really, really fascinating about the fact that the brain, as Aldous Huxley said it, was a tool for focusing the mind. Aldous Huxley writes in the Doors of Perception, essential reading to anybody interested in consciousness. By the way, Aldous Huxley in the 20th century takes a psychedelic drug, and he writes about his experience, and he writes about it beautifully.

And one of the things he realizes is that his mind has been open. And he thinks, okay, well, if my mind has been opened during this experience, and that means that in normal waking hours, something must be closing my mind. What could be closing my mind? Answer, the brain. He concludes that the brain is a tool for focusing the mind.

So the psychedelic experience… This is before we’d done any scientific experiments on this. You can scan people’s brains in, like, an MRI scanner, right? Okay. So when you take a psychedelic drug, your experience just blows up, right? You start seeing colors you didn’t know existed. You start experiencing things as if they were new. It’s like the experience is unimaginable.

So we’ve taken people and we’ve measured their brain activity, and their brain activity is at a certain level. And then you give them a psychedelic drug and you put them in the MRI scanner and their brain activity goes…

GREG KOUKL: Down.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Brain activity goes down as the mental experience expands and goes up. Which for the person who experiences the psychedelic drug, they will report this as a feeling that they just get from the experience. The scientist who measures the brain activity, the sages writing the Upanishads, the Buddhist monk after a series of long meditation, will all say the same thing, which is that in some inexplicable way, consciousness is more foundational than the brain is.

And the brain is focusing consciousness. And in some sense that means that our individuated selves are essentially illusory.

DR K: I’m going to do my best in the…

ALEX O’CONNOR: Same way that distinction between objects are…

DR K: Illusory to support what you’re saying. I totally empathize with having fallen into this mistake of invoking karma and not having the bandwidth to explain what I mean, opening myself up to misinterpretation.

ALEX O’CONNOR: That’s also why I completely understand what you said a moment ago, which is…

The Quantification of Meaning

DR K: So I think the funny thing about this is if we look at the quantification of meaning, I think everything that I said about self determination theory… make choices in life, doesn’t matter what they are. We get so caught up about making the right choice. Where does the concept of right or wrong come from? It comes from the social conditioning around us.

When I was nine years old, my grandmother was like, oh, you’re going to be great doctor one day. Great doctor, great doctor, great doctor. And so then I went to medical school. I was pre med and I promptly failed out because the reason I wanted to be a doctor is because I thought it was going to be cool. And I was going to go to Harvard, by the way. I was going to be the best doctor, not just a doctor. And that didn’t really align with my motivational system at all. It was coming from the ego. And so I kind of failed out.

And then seven years later started med school a few years later at that wound up, ironically, training at Harvard and being faculty there and so going back to karma for a second. I share this example because a lot of times when we look at things that we think are bad and I’m not saying that cancer applies here clearly, but this is what the meaning making, the practical, functional work of when someone comes into my office, who was the result, who was sexually abused or something like that, how do we help that person? We make meaning.

So for me, this was… I used to think that there’s no scenario in which a 2.5 GPA is better than a 4.0 GPA. That in school, getting Fs is in no way better than getting As. Now, years later, I realize that all of those experiences of suffering, of struggling, of having no meaning in life, playing video games for 20 hours a day, joining a fraternity when I was a freshman, which is lots of great times, you know, made me the person that I am.

And even if you look at the brand of Dr. K, the whole point was I was a college dropout and then ended up as faculty at Harvard Medical School. Amazing, right? So in this context, that a lot of times that if we sort of, the more we are zoomed into our life, the less we will see this broader perspective.

And this is really fascinating if you look at the work of Victor Frankl, because Viktor Frankl was a neurologist, went through the Holocaust, became a psychologist, and then he sort of literally, his work is something called logotherapy, which is how do we consistently help people make meaning in life. And he designed a system of therapy.

And the first part of it is de-individuation is the ability of zooming out from your thing. When someone feels like my life is falling apart, there’s no point anymore. Why? Because I just got dumped and she’s never going to talk to me again. Zoom out a little bit. This is not the end of the world. Your life is bigger than this one thing.

So the more that we zoom out from a mechanistic perspective, the more meaning we find in life. And what is the ultimate zooming out relationship with God? Because now we’re way out here, right? This isn’t about you. This isn’t about someone dying of cancer. This is about something that goes way bigger than you.

So what I would say is you can do all the scientific stuff, it’ll get you to 8 out of 10, maybe 9 out of 10. But, and this is what’s so crazy, the scientific stuff, I am incredibly confident I can defend, I can point to studies, we can talk about psychedelics, the default mode, network self determination theory, logo therapy, there are tons of studies. Radical acceptance, dialectical, behavioral therapy, all of these things, acceptance and commitment therapy, all of these things have to do with making meaning in the world.

But if you really want to find that meaning, you keep on asking this question. I mean, you selected that question because you’re looking for it, right? And you won’t let him get away with some philosophical explanation. You’re like, no, you tell me when you wake up, where is it? Show me where it is. Show me how to get it. Because you don’t understand his shit. Because you’ve never had a direct experience of mine.

And so you’re like, bro, you don’t know God. How do you find it? The desperation of, like, no, no, no. Slipping away, Alex. No stories that end up in a delightful way. Right? So how do you find that last chunk, that last way, that last step of the way there is through the direct experience of Brahman.

So when he says panpsychism… In the Hindu system, we believe that consciousness is the foundational element of the universe.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Brahman is Brahman.

Brahman and Atman

DR K: Atman is not Brahman. Well, sort of, yes and no. Atman is individual soul. Brahman is the cosmic soul, the cosmic consciousness that the fundamental thing that is out there is transcendent. And having a relationship with that thing is how we get meaning. This is how we get a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 meaning.

Because this guy has done something where he had this experience where he’s been talking to God, but one day someone answered the phone. And when you have that transcendent experience, when you have this direct experience of the Brahman, and this is why I’ve been avoiding saying it, because it’s completely undefensible. It is what I believe is philosophically true. It is what I believe is absolutely true. And it is not transmissible. It can only be witnessed.

The Ineffability of Religious Experience

ALEX O’CONNOR: Exactly. That’s the most important point is… That’s why I say that this is something that everybody has to start afresh because… because if there is an answer to this question, it is something that you… that you cannot syllogize. By the way, this isn’t just some, like, you know, Hindu thing. Like Christians say the same thing about their religious experiences. The ineffable quality.

William James famously tried to identify the characteristic aspects of religious experience. And one of the most important was the ineffability, the inability to explain. That’s what that means. The idea of ineffability is put into words and to explain and to say what it’s like.

And interestingly, some of my favorite examples of this throughout history have been some of the most important Christian thinkers of all time who have essentially abandoned the project of communicating ideas to other people. I mentioned Blaise Pascal earlier. He famously had his “Night of Fire,” where he has a religious experience, and he’s one of the greatest writers in Christian history. And he has this experience, experience of God, and he writes in his diary and later has it etched into his jacket. “Fire.” He writes, “Not the God of the philosophers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”

Because he realizes that he’s experienced something which is not this abstract first cause design of the universe. It’s not that. It’s something more deeply personal.

Thomas Aquinas, undoubtedly the greatest metaphysician of Christian history, writes the Summa Theologica, which is to this day one of the most celebrated works of Christian metaphysics, trying to explain and analyze the nature of God. It’s where we get his famous five Ways of showing the existence of God and all of this kind of stuff. And it’s really long and still studied in depth to this day.

He left it unfinished when he died. Why? Because one day he was performing the Eucharist and he had a religious experience. He believed that he experienced the presence of God and he stopped writing it. And he was practically begged by friend and patron like “Thomas, you’ve got to finish the book.” And he wrote back and said, “I can write no more after what I’ve seen. It’s like straw compared to the experience I’ve had.”

So quite clearly, when you look at people who actually report the stuff that people want, which is the certainty, the experience where they say, “I’ve met God and I know what that feels like,” the number one characteristic of such experiences is that they are not transmissible, is that you cannot write it down and give that experience to somebody else.

The Process of Finding Transcendent Experience

DR K: So here’s the beautiful thing. You can’t write down the experience, but you can absolutely write down the process of finding that experience. So I’m with you. That is an individual journey. And I think this is where something really interesting… I don’t know if this is, like, accurate or not, but I sort of noticed that all of our most common religions have spiritual traditions that are not necessarily the same as the religion.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Yeah.

DR K: So in Hinduism, it’s really interesting because we have priests and then we have swamis. A priest is not a yogi. So the person who does the practice of the religion is not the same as the person who sits in the Himalayas and meditates for 12 hours a day. And even if we look at, like, Christianity, you know, I know… So I read a Gnostic Text for the first time.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Which one?

DR K: Thunder Perfect Mind. And what I realized is, oh, I know exactly what this is. I read some stuff about it and people were like, oh, it’s talking about this. I’m like, no, it’s not. Thunder Perfect Mind is a series of meditation techniques. That’s what it is, right? That’s what… It’s a series of meditations.

And if you do these meditations and there’s all kinds of stuff, and I think Sufism was there. Kabbalah is there in Judaism, there’s the Gnostic tradition. Every religion has this spiritual component which sometimes comes down to going to church, witnessing God. But, you know, the whole thing is like, you got to have fingers crossed. Which is part of the way why it’s designed because there’s no definitive way to do it.

You have to have God’s grace to get it. There’s a certain amount of surrender, there’s a certain amount of ego that you have to get rid of in order to open yourself up to God. But there are a series of practices that you can do that will cultivate the right setting for God to pick up the phone. These are things that we will sort of use psychedelics for.

ALEX O’CONNOR: It’s a very good evidence to use psychedelics. I was about to say.

The Path to Transcendent Experience

DR K:

Yeah, so psychedelics will do this kind of thing where it takes you to that state to a certain degree. But there’s way, way, way further to go than what psychedelics can do. I would say psychedelics take you to a helicopter to about 6,000 feet. You can go to 20,000 feet, 30,000 feet, have experiences of Brahman.

And this is where all of these weird esoteric practices from the science of yoga, kind of like now that we have so much mindfulness everywhere, where everyone’s got apps and stuff like that, we’ve lost a lot of the most important stuff. If you want to have a transcendent experience, there are things you have to do with your diet, there are things that you have to do with your respiratory rate. You have to set up your body’s capacity to handle metabolic acidosis because, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And you’ve done this yourself.

DR K:

I will not answer that question.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You can answer the question whether you’ve done it or not.

DR K:

I can. I will not.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Why?

DR K:

The cost to my shakti is too high.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So I asked you this question before. Do you remember?

DR K:

What did I say?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You told me that you have seen things and gone to a place. But when I asked you what you saw, you told me you wouldn’t tell me.

DR K:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But you’re happy to say that you have done this.

DR K:

No, I didn’t say that I’ve done this.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So you said to me last time.

DR K:

Oh yeah, well, maybe I made a mistake. I mean, sort of. So if that’s what I said last time, that’s my answer, then my answer today is I will not talk. I will not answer that question.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And the reason you won’t answer the question is because the depletion of the…

DR K:

Shakti is too high.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And what does that mean?

Panpsychism and Collective Consciousness

DR K:

Okay, so, okay, so sounds like I’m panpsychism that…

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Locked out the house. Like I can’t.

DR K:

There are many reasons, but okay, so panpsychism, there’s this idea that there’s this weird collective consciousness. That’s the basic unit. I think we can easily call it God, a relationship with that thing. So I’m down here, it’s up there.

So the key thing is, if we look at psychedelic usage, if we look at dark night of the soul, if we look at these moments of rapture where you go into church and one of two things is happening. Either your psychological defense mechanisms are creating the ultimate cope and you’re saying, now I’m healed even though you’re not, or you actually have a direct experience of God and you are transformed.

What is the nature of that transformation? It is the loss of ego that is the most conserved thing. We surrender before God. Before God we are nothing. Right? Doesn’t matter which religion you talk to. This is where I think that there’s evidence of truth with a capital T. Because human beings from all over the planet have done these explorations using the technology of our mind and our consciousness. And we arrive at very similar conclusions.

So the beautiful thing is that when, so when our ego is active in the most powerful way, it becomes narcissism, also becomes things like depression. Still actually a very ego. I’m terrible, I’m pathetic, I’m worthless. The world would be better off without me. The focus is on me, me, me, me, me. It’s hyperactive default mode network. So in order to connect to the divine, you need to dissolve your ego as much as possible.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So the reason you won’t tell me…

DR K:

Is because if I say it, my ego will increase. You also will not, what will happen is you’ll get an idea of it. Right. The more I talk about it, the more that your mind will create a map without experience.

So I do not discuss my experiences in meditation. What I will absolutely say though, and this is what I love about it, Alex said, this is the one thing we cannot stand on the shoulders of giants. You have to walk this whole journey by yourself. No one else can walk it for you.

So I won’t tell you how far I’ve gone. Maybe I’m just, you know, talking shit. Who knows? But what I will tell you is that you don’t need the answer from me. Why are you asking me? Because you want to know that you walk it.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

If you see the Buddha, kill him. That’s the meaning of this. One interpretive meaning of this Buddhist koan is stop looking for gurus and start looking inside yourself.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you think I could then sit here and say, what, your experience is not true?

DR K:

Absolutely. Yeah, of course.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And I could pick it apart and stuff like that?

DR K:

Absolutely. So this is the thing that I…

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is there any value in that?

DR K:

From what?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

For me doing that to you?

DR K:

Of course there’s value for you. If you want to pick me apart, if you want to continue to live the life that you live, if you want to continue to get 5 out of 10 meaning, because you’ve accomplished a lot, you have a lot of stuff. I mean, so many videos that you have left, so many people that you help, millions of people across the globe. Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I say this because that’s what’s happening here, what that Alex is picking apart. Fine.

DR K:

So I have no problem with picking things apart. If you want to pick things apart, pick things apart. But be very clear about what picking things apart does.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What does it do?

The Value of Understanding vs. Picking Apart

DR K:

So it’s a great question. I have a different way of answering it. So when I listen to philosophers, like these guys were just in it about evil. And if evil was created when Eve ate the apple, was she evil when she made the apple? Right. It’s so great. It’s picking things apart.

So it’s so interesting because as a psychiatrist, my training is actually the exact opposite. What I’ve trained myself to do is to twist and turn in mental gymnastics to understand somebody else’s view. When a patient walks into my office and they say, I’m suicidal, I don’t want to pick their view apart. No, you have so much to live for. It doesn’t work. I try to understand them.

So there is value to picking things apart in terms of political debate, in terms of you’re arguing with your wife whether you should buy a car or lease a car. There are all kinds of values to picking things apart. But the question is, what do you want?

Now, I think if you take Alex’s road, which I think is going to change real quick. If it hasn’t, why? Be honest, I think he, he’s going to go down the road of gnosis if he isn’t already.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Gnosis? What is gnosis?

GREG KOUKL:

Knowledge.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Gnosis is a, it’s a Greek term. Gnosis means knowledge, but it’s attached to, I guess, a kind of an ancient school of philosophy which believes that truth is obtained from looking inward.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you mean narcissism?

DR K:

Not narcissism. So I think, if you want to, Alex, it’s not a philosophy, it’s a practice.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But what do you mean when you say, I mean Steven asked, you said, I’m going to go down a, yeah, I think…

DR K:

You got to walk down the Gnostic road.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Dude, would you tell us you didn’t just say, you said you thought I was going to do that. What does it mean that I think…

DR K:

You’re going to do that or the path of that?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

What is the thing that you think I’m going to…

DR K:

Yeah, I think you’re going to have to start practicing Gnostic stuff.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What’s the Gnostics?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

What does that mean?

Gnostic Practices and Meditation

DR K:

So Thunder Perfect Mind is a series of meditations. If you look at that and you do what it tells you to do, you will understand what the Gnostics understood. You have to walk that path that they walked. But doing so does not involve the philosophy of gnosis. Right. The part of gnosis, I don’t know what the philosophy, I mean, I get what you’re saying from philosophical perspective, but the Gnostics were practical practitioners, as far as I understand. I read one Gnostic text and I was like, oh, this is like a, this is like a meditation.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

So what is it that makes you think, why do you look at me and say that’s, I mean, you’ve read one Gnostic text.

DR K:

I have an intuition, so…

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But I wonder what, what you mean.

DR K:

It’s not explainable, but…

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But you have an intuition.

DR K:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Based on pattern recognition.

GREG KOUKL:

Sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

That an individual like Alex…

DR K:

I don’t know. No, not pattern recognition. This is indefensible.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I get told a lot by a lot of different people that I’m quite clearly on a particular road. Christians very often say that it seems as I’m on the verge of Christian conversion. And I think that’s often just a result of having nice conversations with them where I don’t jump down their throat and say, actually there’s some, there’s some truth in this. Or actually there are some good arguments for the resurrection of Jesus or this kind of stuff. And suddenly I have people saying, you know, he’s so close.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is that clearly a man searching for meaning?

DR K:

Something about you don’t tell us what gnosis is.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

You said it’s a series of practices. But like, what? So is, you know, so is vegetarianism.

DR K:

So, like, so I think gnosis from what? Reading one text, I’m not a Gnostic expert. Okay, so there’s a set of practices that if you do them, have a high probabilistic chance of having a direct experience of God.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Like what?

Transcendent Practices and Physiology

DR K:

So Om chanting is a simple example, but there are things that you can do to increase the likelihood of having a transcendent experience of Om chanting. So for example, if you adopt Siddhasana. So Siddhasana is a particular yoga posture where your left heel is placed against the perineum of your body. So the perineum is the taint, the area between the anus and the scrotum.

So if you also do certain Pranayama practices, so these will do things that induce a very, very, very low respiratory rate. And one of the things that we know about transcendental experiences is that high levels of CO2 tend to, actually, we don’t know this, but this is kind of the best hypothesis that I’ve read that I happen to think is true, that if we alter the neurons of our brain chemistry, we can evoke transcendental experiences.

So if you look at some of these esoteric traditions, what’ll happen is you have all of these different practices. And as you do these practices, I think you are very clearly refining your physiology and your neurology to induce certain states. And let’s remember that psychedelics don’t create anything.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes.

DR K:

Psychedelics simply activate the circuitry that is already there, or deactivate, how to…

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Or deactivate.

DR K:

Or deactivate. Right.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But yeah, that’s a crucial point to make.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’d love to understand why you think he’s going to go down that path.

DR K:

Let’s call it intuition.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But I need something a little bit more than that. So you’re saying, okay, so I’ll give you more.

DR K:

So in the system of, so can I answer truthfully or defensively?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Truthfully.

The Practice of Kundalini Yoga and Chakra Meditation

DR K:

Which ones do you guys want? So in the system of Kundalini yoga, there are seven chakras. So 21 years ago, almost 22, I went to a teacher who taught me the first of a Kundalini practice which is based on the agna chakra. So the agna chakra is your third eye chakra and gives you. It is the chakra that governs understanding.

So if you want to understand things, then agna chakra practices are the right thing to do. So many years ago, back in a former life when I was still an academic at Harvard, I was trying to develop an evidence based meditation program for different diagnoses. And part of what I leaned into and initial results were good, but never really then I started doing this.

So as one example, there’s this chakra called the Muladhara chakra, which is our root chakra. So the Muladhara chakra governs our primal important impulses in life. So I looked at my patients with addictions and I was like, okay, these people have a problem with impulse control and they want something and they can’t restrain themselves from getting it.

So I wondered, can I teach them muladhara chakra practices to sort of basically like reduce their flow of wanting the basic things? And I found that that was efficacious. Now, meditation works for addictions, but the question is, can we do a specific meditation for a specific mental illness?

So there’s one study, for example, that looks at anahat or heart chakra meditation, specifically for depression because it cultivates compassion and self love and stuff like that. And they found it’s a very small study. Hopefully we’ll do more research in this. But they found that the effect was superior to other forms of meditation.

So hypothetically, theoretically, there are specific meditation practices which work in different ways. And I teach a lot of this stuff in Dr. K’s guided meditation and stuff. But so there are these specific practices. So I specifically did a practice based on agna chakra stuff, intuition, right?

So then something weird happens which is when I sit with people, I have intuitions about them. Now is this real? Is this fake? Is it delusional? I don’t know. You could argue that I’m just a really good psychiatrist with really good cold reading, right?

But this is a… I don’t. So if you want to know the real answer, I’m not a great psychiatrist. People think I’m so brilliant, I’m not. I’m cheating. I’m using a layer of information that I don’t think most people have access to, which I know is a completely indefensible claim. Except if you do agna chakra practices too, you will see what I’m talking about.

Finding Meaning and Purpose in Life

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Alex, if I were to ask you that, if someone’s listening now and they feel lost in their life, is there any advice that you could give them or a simple action that they could take that would help them to find, to remove the feeling of feeling lost in life?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

It’s always difficult because it’s such an individual thing that is difficult to give advice writ large. Also because I’m no paradigm of meaning and purpose in life and not some fountain of wisdom from which people can drink. So I wouldn’t presume to do so. But if a friend… So if they came to me, as I’m the guy on the camera with the microphones and stuff, so what do I do? I would say probably the reason a…

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Lot of people click this video.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yeah, I would say that firstly, stop doing that. Don’t stop clicking the video. Everybody subscribe. Stop thinking that you’re going to find some kind of teacher or guru who is going to give you the answer.

Instead, the most valuable form of person to listen to, I think, and I found, is somebody who’s quite clearly also trying to do the same thing. There are people out there who think they’ve achieved certain things, they found meaning, they’ve understood the truth, and you can learn a lot from them, trying to explain their worldview to them.

I don’t claim to be such a person. So the only thing I can do is say, I’m actually doing this at the same time as you, so I can’t give you advice from experience. I can’t say, here’s what to do to find meaning. Here’s what I did.

What I can say is, here are some things that I’m trying. For example, I’m really interested by this question of consciousness and what it means to say that reality is fundamentally mental and that we’ve made a mistake in thinking that complexity produces consciousness and rather complexity allows consciousness to do particular things like memory and emotion and stuff like that.

That’s really exciting. And there are some implications of seeing the world in that way. Implications about the unity of experiences.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Are you saying pursue answers?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yes, pursue answers, but also try to experience it as you get… It depends who it is and I don’t like to say on camera exactly, but psychedelics can be really, really useful for a lot of people. They can… If you are not in the right mindset, as they say, if you’re a bit disintegrated, it can… The reason I don’t like to advise it is because it can bring about a very bad experience for a lot of people.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

But you’re saying within the right set…

ALEX O’CONNOR:

And setting, something like that might be what I’d recommend. It depends who I’m talking to. But there are friends in my life, for example, who I would say, don’t take psychedelics. From my experience, I just don’t think it seems like the right thing to do. But there are other friends who I would say, if you did, in the right circumstance, I think this could blow open.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Would you characterize yourself as being lost and directionless to some degree?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Of course, yeah. To some degree, everybody is lost. Lost is quite a heavy word. When people say, “I’m lost” by volunteering that information, they tend to be implying that it’s a strong enough feeling that they’re troubled by it and want to make it happy. That’s why people say it. But when you ask, well, there are different questions here, right? Am I happy right now? Sure. Tomorrow, maybe not across life.

Measuring Contentment and Happiness

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If you had to rate your contentment in life out of 10, I’ll do the same.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

It’s not a very easy thing to quantify.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Do you think? But I ask. I’ve asked hundreds of people, 400 people, this question. Everyone on the podcast has been asked this question. Just finish this train of thought.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I’ll pass you so I can say to you, for example, yeah, I’m a 5 out of 10 contentment.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is that true?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Maybe, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll give you a simple way to quantify.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I literally can’t quantify. And the reason I can’t…

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I’ll give you a way to quantify. I’ll give you the yardstick. So if you think about… How old are you?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

26.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

26. So you think about those 26 years. Has there been months of your life where consistently you’ve felt really fulfilled and positive for weeks, months in a row?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Probably, yeah, I think so. Memory’s difficult.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When was the last time for a full month, for a full 30 days, you felt really good on average?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Out of 10, what counts?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Really good on average?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

I don’t know. It might have been… Usually when I have some kind of project, as I said, I think meaning is intimately tied up to having a task to fulfill. So when I’ve been touring for the purpose of filming podcasts and doing talks and stuff, I feel pretty content because I wake up and I know what my task is for the day and I get it done.

So on a subjective psychological level, those are probably the times when I wake up with the most, let’s say, drive, the feeling that I’ve got a task to fulfill.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Other days where you feel… Are there weeks, sometimes or months where you feel the opposite, which might be characterized in a clinical context as depression?

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Of course. That’s interesting. Can I ask why you were interested in my answers?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I was trying to see how similar we are. That’s really it. Because we’re both… We both sit in the same agnostic camp. But actually we’re very, very different in terms of our… I wake up in the morning and I wake up this morning, and I’m very happy, and I feel very, very driven.

And I couldn’t wait. I was actually… The night before I couldn’t wake up. I was annoyed I had to sleep because I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning. And that’s typically my experience. I’m like, I can’t wait to get the sleep done with because I can’t wait to get back to life.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

So what’s it all for?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

I don’t really… This sounds crazy, and it also somewhat links to what you’re saying about at the very beginning, about people being really obsessed with not dying. I don’t really care. I’m having a great time, and I love having these conversations because I get to learn more about different people’s strategies to having a great time and to making their lives more meaningful and more exciting on a daily basis.

The Question of Meaning vs. Happiness

ALEX O’CONNOR:

But that sounds quite nihilistic in a way, because you sound like Qohelet in the book of Ecclesiastes, who’s sort of eating and drinking and being merry, who one day might look at it and realize that although you feel in the moment this is all very good, it’s all heaven and relative, there needs to be something more.

And I wonder if the same thing will happen if the North Star that you have for your life and your projects and your career is that you just sort of feel good while you’re doing it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And why isn’t that good enough reason? Because in your presumption, it might be because someday I might get hit by this bus of realizing that it was worth nothing. But for the 70 years up until I die, I’m going to wake up in the morning, feel good. I’m going to love spending time with my girlfriend and my dog and whatever neurochemicals in my brain are going to reinforce me to keep doing that.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

And does it bring meaning?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

What does that mean to you? And the reason I ask that is because conceivably you can imagine someone who’s happy, but their life isn’t meaningful. And you can imagine someone who’s suffering, but their life is meaningful. Like a victim of the Holocaust or something, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

As well.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

And so you’ve got the happiness part, but you also think that you’ve got sort of meaning. What is that meaning and where’s that coming from?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So meaning for me is something that I create by the decisions that I take. And this might go down to what you were saying about having certain tendencies. I have certain tendencies. I have nature and nurture acting against me to make certain things feel meaningful to me.

And one of those things is this pursuit of more information. I do it when you go and I get some free time. Tonight I’ll be on YouTube learning about humanoid robots. Or I might stumble across a video. One of your videos, which I’ve watched many times. And I’ve watched your videos many times. And I watch your videos many times.

Not because I necessarily believe I’m ever going to get to the final answer, because it’s the doing itself that I find so enjoyable. And actually I could kind of relate to the guy that knows the world’s going to end, but writes the book.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Yeah, right.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Because it’s the writing of the book that I love.

Finding Meaning and Purpose in Life

DR K:

So here’s what I think is beautiful. So I think if you guys go back and you watch this, every scientific principle is what Steven is doing. So self-determination theory, right? So he’s self-directed, he stretches his capacities, he relates to other people. And I think this is a really brilliant example of sort of like this problem of finding, like, meaning with a capital M and relates to this kind of idea of if you’re feeling directionless in life, I don’t know that you need to figure it out with a capital M.

And if we listen to some of your questions, is it enough for you? And then Steven’s like, why wouldn’t—why do you assume that you need. So there’s sort of this very natural reaction. Then he’s kind of like, no, I’m actually pretty content.

I think that my favorite thing about your answer is that getting as far as you have, I think you’ve got your instinctual answer of 5 out of 10 is still correct. Because this is as far as you go. And I think you feel this hunger for, like, something else and that thing is going to be big. Right? And I think that’s what maybe Greg can help us out with. Right. Because I think it’s a beautiful way of embodying, I think, how we find meaning in life.

There’s a bunch of psychological stuff that you can do. But it appears that doing some of this weird transcendental—you got to find it in sort of this big way. And I think you’re a perfect embodiment of how far you can go.

The Christian Perspective on Happiness and Fulfillment

GREG KOUKL:

Let me offer clarification based on the questions you were asking Alex, because I feel in many ways very sympathetic to Alex as he described his subjective states. You know, are you happy? Are you fulfilled? Do you have meaning in your life? And I guess I think the tendency sometimes is to talk to somebody who is very confident of their understanding of the big picture and think that everything’s going wonderful for them.

You know, you look at their life, say, well, everything’s just great. Are you happy? I’m happy all the time. I have the truth kind of thing, but that’s not exactly how it works. I’m fully convinced of the truth of the Christian worldview of God’s existence, Jesus, all the things that relate to that. Human beings made in the image of God. I think it’s the best explanation, all things considered, for the way things are.

Nevertheless, I’m still a fallen human being learning to be virtuous with God’s help. I am still living in a world that is fallen and broken. And I have to live with all the contingencies of a fallen world. So if you were to ask me the question that you asked Alex, I would have the same difficulty answering that Alex did because it’s so variegated one’s life.

When I wake up in the morning, do you feel good? Sometimes, sometimes not. Am I confident that no matter what happens in my life, the good, the bad, whatever, that there is a foundation there that gives me stability? Yes, because I think that foundation, God eternal mind, exists and I’m in proper relationship with him.

But part of the reality is this is a veil of tears. You know, how did Job put it? Something about the sparks flying upwards. You know, it’s like life is difficult. Actually, I like the saying, life is hard and then you die. You know, it gives me a perspective on things. Jesus himself said, in this world, you’ll have tribulation. That’s the experience. But the underlying is be of good cheer. Jesus said, because I have overcome the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Are you happy?

GREG KOUKL:

Well, we’re back to that question again, how you characterize it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

You said earlier on that you felt there was a certain path for Alex was going to go down, but Greg did—

DR K:

Not going to go down.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Should or something.

DR K:

It’s ready for him.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. It’s ready for him. Yeah, but you didn’t say that about Greg.

DR K:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And so when you look at these two individuals and you think about contentment and happiness and whatever that word is. Can you feel with your intuition that sort of—

Spiritual Intuition and Contentment

DR K:

So first thing is, this is where I know it’s sound insane. Fucking tanking my brand right now because I used to be believable, I guess. But so first thing about intuition, right? If we look at intuition, technically I can’t activate it. Right. When you have an intuition, it comes, happens, it happens. So that’s what’s so frustrating about this, is everyone thinks like, okay, if you do agna, chakra, sadhana, which is weird third eye stuff, then you can do this thing.

I can’t do anything. I am before God. And when God chooses to let me know something, that’s when I get it. Now, if I had to answer, I think I am not surprised about the difference in baseline contentment between these two people.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

Right.

DR K:

So if you were to ask, why do I relate to Greg in this way? Now, whether this is at a conscious level, neurological level, whether those—whether there’s truly a spiritual level or not. Right. So am I just reading into him, doing pattern recognition based on what he says and stuff like that? But that’s not what my lived experience of it is. I know this man has seen God, and it’s not—

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Is it his behavior, his body language, his—

DR K:

No. I mean, I don’t think so. Right.

ALEX O’CONNOR:

So—

DR K:

So I’ve met some people who have very unhappy lives who still have that foundation of spiritual contentment. And some people who have very unhappy—can have unhappy life with spiritual contentment or spiritual contentment with a happy life, or B, have a great life and have no spiritual contentment. I think all—all of those variables.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What about me? What’s your intuition about me?

DR K:

I think you’re getting there way faster. You’ve changed from the last time I talked to you. I think you’re getting there, and I think you’re going to get there.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Oh, thank God. Where am I going to go?

GREG KOUKL:

There being contentment there. Being what?

DR K:

There. So this is—there is—it’s not something that can be put into words. I’m just going to call it there.

Practical Steps to Finding Purpose

STEVEN BARTLETT:

If someone’s listening right now and they feel stuck in their life, which is why I asked Alex, what is something that they can do tomorrow, a small step that they can take to become unstuck in your worldview?

DR K:

Yeah. So I would start by—Alex offered a beautiful answer. And I think he kind of mentioned that I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to give people things because, you know, give people an answer because everyone’s an individual and stuff like that. So the funny thing is, I have a super concrete answer. I think the difference in sort of the way that I perceive it is I don’t think you have to be someone great to do that.

And that’s, I think, precisely what sort of science tells us, right? Like, is that you don’t have to be some enlightened being. And I don’t claim to be that. I’m not a guru or anything like that, you know.

So I think it starts with understanding, first and foremost, that purpose—how do you know whether you have purpose? Something within you tells you, right? You can have everyone in the rest of the world telling you, oh, you’re doing great, you’re going to get married in a month. You know, there’s a baby on the way, you have a career, you have all this stuff. You should feel fulfilled.

So the first thing to understand is it is an internal feeling. And then the question becomes, how do we create? How do we find that feeling? So this is where things that get in the way at the top of the list right now, which Alex alluded to, is technology. So unless you can feel what is going on inside you, you will never feel purpose.

What are the things that get in the way of feeling? So when you feel bad, what do you reach for, right? How do you manage those negative feelings? And it’s not about making the feelings go away or not making them go away. It is simply about stopping the process of severing yourself. That process is, I think alexithymia is what I kind of refer to it as. That’s colorblindness of your internal emotional state. Like, I have a whole lecture about it, you know?

So first thing you have to do is learn how to feel again. Because if you look at most people who are mean, whose life has no meaning, what they’re actually doing is trying to create a life that is running away from bad feelings. So I don’t like the way my boss yelled at me, I’m going to go to the bathroom, I’m going to pull out Reddit, I’m going to scroll on it, whatever, right? They’re running away from the way that they feel. And it’s not about good or bad. It’s just, you have to reconnect with yourself.

Second thing is focus on your ego. And as best as possible, probably for most people, dissolving parts of your ego. Ego. And ego is anytime you say “I am,” it is. What’s that? So if I say I’m a doctor, that’s part of my ego, I’m a man, that’s part of my ego. So a lot of times what gets in the way of us finding purpose is what we believe we are, right? So I may think to myself, I am a doctor, I am this, or I’m all those. I’m a loser, I’m an incel. Right? So it’s all of these identifications that get us away from purpose.

Third thing to do is find your narrative sense of identity. So there’s some ego dissolution practices like shunya meditation and stuff. And then third thing is we want to develop a story for ourselves. This is when people have purpose in life, what does that presume? That presumes that there’s a temporal quality, that there’s a directional quality. Does that make sense? Like purpose or direction is like literally moving from A to Z.

So there’s time and then there’s like a particular decision that involves going through the most important emotional experiences of your life and stringing them together as a sense of who you are. And then I think the last, most important step is recognizing that everything that has happened to you, I don’t know if it’s karma. I don’t know if it’s the will of God. Whatever it has happened to you, it’s made you in this way, but it does not determine your future.

Your future is determined by how you act in the now. And this is where I would lean into—I would just go back and listen to the way that Steven talks about his life and try to do the same thing. So try to decide what you’re—make a choice for today. Stretch your capacity and try to connect with another person.

The last thing is if all of that stuff isn’t sufficient or you want more, I would say engage in some kind of spiritual practice or go to church.

GREG KOUKL:

Both work equally.

DR K:

I don’t know about equally well, but I think they’re both options. So do the thing that appeals to you more.

A Simple Prayer for Those Seeking Purpose

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And the same question for you, Greg. For someone that’s stuck, what do they do tomorrow to take an action to become unstuck in your view?

GREG KOUKL:

Well, there’s a lot of practical things that have already been shared that I think are helpful. So I have a very simple suggestion. Okay. I have represented a particular view. The Christian worldview didn’t get into a lot of detail, but a lot of people have prayed a very simple prayer that has helped them at whatever junction they’re at trying to figure things out.

And this kind of goes to a point that Alex made earlier. And it was a prayer that turns out I prayed in 1973, I was in the army and I was in the middle of nowhere and I just prayed this prayer. And the prayer was very simple. “God, if you’re real in the way that my brother, the Christian was explaining to me, if you’re real, I want to know it. Show yourself to me.” That was it.

There was no coconuts falling from the tree, no lightning or anything like that. It was just a man praying. Maybe the first real prayer that I’d ever prayed. But I do know that after that, things became more obvious to me. That’s the best way I can explain it.

Though I’m a Christian apologist, I make the case for the truth of Christianity. It wasn’t any particular argument that persuaded me. It was more the experiential thing and not even a pizzazz thing, just a deep awareness that this was true. And this has set my course since then.

There are a lot of people who prayed that simple prayer. It’s a genuine prayer that people can pray. And I’ve heard many people tell me that this, this is what happened to them, even apart from my suggestion to it. So if people are looking for ultimate purpose in their life, if they’re looking to do meaningful things, lots of suggestions on the table. If they’re looking to integrate meaningful things into the ultimate purpose, I think that’s the prayer they need to pray.

Closing Statements

STEVEN BARTLETT: I want to give you an opportunity, Alex, to deliver your sort of closing thoughts and reflections and arguments.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Well, I want to re-emphasize that this topic of meaning and purpose is difficult to even define, let alone communicate to another person. I think it’s individual. Even if there is an objective meaning, even if God exists and Christianity is true, it’s not going to be enough to just tell somebody about Christianity. They’re going to have to live it, right? So it’s not going to be enough to just sit around reading.

I also understand the sort of allergic reaction some people have to philosophy, and you hinted at it earlier, this idea that philosophy is just mind games, literally philosophical, like mass debating, if you like. You know, we just literally sat throwing concepts at each other. But on meaning and purpose, you’re unlikely to find the best advice from someone who’s never gotten out of that armchair.

And even the person who has and claims to have experienced it for themselves and knows what the truth is, I think anybody who says to you with a straight face, “I know what the meaning in life is,” is either lying or will instantly tell you that they’re not going to be able to convey that information, at least not very easily. So it’s going to be difficult.

And don’t trust anyone who says you can do it in five easy steps on a podcast or something, because I think we’ve got a bit of an endemic of that at the moment. People sort of just saying that they’ve sort of discovered this path or this truth. And if only people would understand that the stoics were right all along, even though I don’t care about any of their philosophical views, just their ethical views. I don’t even know what they thought about the nature of matter and stuff. Doesn’t matter that that’s why they thought the way that they did ethically.

You know, just become a stoic and everything will get better. But I do recognize some of that in people saying, do just become a Christian and it will get better, too. It’s always got to be a bit more nuanced than that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. K, your closing thoughts and arguments on today’s discussion.

DR K: To kind of push back a little bit against what Alex said. So I’m with you that there’s an endemic of five easy tips. As someone who is guilty of doing that, and what I’ll do is I’ll see especially, so I saw a recent study that showed that 95% of TikToks about ADHD are incorrect. And so there’s absolutely an oversimplification that’s going on.

I think at the same time, though, we have such an amazing amount of knowledge as human beings. We have such amazing access to knowledge that human beings have. So the human race has so much knowledge, and we have the greatest amount of access to it. And so while I don’t think it is as simple as, one of the most shocking things as a psychiatrist who works with people, is how little it takes to make a big change.

Big questions and big changes don’t always need big effort or big answers. It’s such an interesting thing. When I talk to people who struggle with addiction for 14 years, it seems to be a small thing that just clicks. And so I think the key thing for people is don’t assume that just because you have a big problem, it requires a lot of effort.

And I remember my daughter was trying to close a box, right? So there’s a box, and she’s trying to slam the lid, but the lid is not oriented correctly. Does that make sense? So it kind of gets tilted, and then no matter how hard she pushes, it doesn’t close. And so in her mind, this is a problem that requires pounds and pounds. I need to be a full grown adult. No, you’re just not doing it in the right way, right?

If you understand a little bit how it works, if you sort of orient yourself properly. And I do think that I’ve seen time and time again that in terms of an individual perspective, if you feel purposelessness, there’s a reason for that, right? We know that there’s systemic factors. People are going to church less, people are using technology more. All of the way that the world has been changed affects you.

Once it crosses the barrier, the world is out there and then it crosses the barrier into us and then affects us. And that if you understand that process and if you change a couple of things, and sometimes it’s amazing how small they are, right? Just waking up and making a decision for yourself, pushing yourself a little bit more. Relatedness is the hard one, because that requires another human being. But it’s amazing how much you can do with very little.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you. And Greg, to close off your closing thoughts and perspectives.

GREG KOUKL: I thought I’d just given them a few moments ago, but I guess the distinction that I want to emphasize is when it comes to purpose and meaning, I think actually meaning precedes purpose. You have to know who you are and why you’re here. If you’re here for any reason before the purpose matches.

Now, if it turns out that there is no big picture, it’s just you, then the purpose is going to reflect your individual desires at any given time and pursue that as long as you want. But if there is a grand purpose, that’s the thing to discover. I’m convinced there is. And I think this is why we have this hunger for answering these kinds of questions.

And there’s a lot of variables that are involved here, but as I mentioned before, the things that stand out for me is we have this internal sense that I think is there because we are a spiritual being. People say, “Well, I’m religious, I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” I said, of course you’re spiritual. God made you that way so that you can know him. There is that element. This is subjective, okay?

I think we’re all aware of it. And then there is objective things that we can appeal to. You mentioned earlier, the resurrection of Christ, the existence of the world, the order that the world is in, the existence of morality, the existence of free will, all kinds of other things that are part of the package of the Christian worldview that are well explained by that worldview.

And one of the reasons that I’m a Christian is because I think it’s that, all things considered, it’s the best explanation for the way things are, not because all of the questions are answered. For me, you have raised issues that haven’t thought about that. It’s a mystery, some of these things, but life is filled with mysteries, all right? And this seems to be one mystery at the big picture that is resolved by Christianity, by the Christian understanding of reality. I call it the story of reality.

Final Reflections

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you so much for all being here today. It’s a truly fascinating discussion and it has actually pushed me forward. I shan’t share how it’s pushed me forward, but it certainly pushed me forward in a number of ways and it’s helped me to understand.

I’m big fans of all of yours. You all make a lot of great content on YouTube in various ways. Alex, I’ve watched your channel so many times. I’ve watched so many of your videos for so long because you help. You kind of represent one part of my perspective in curiosity. And you’re a very intelligent, thoughtful, philosophical master of playing with ideas. And you’ve really done your homework. So it’s fascinating to watch your YouTube channel.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Thank you. Quite the accolade. That’s very good.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but it is.

ALEX O’CONNOR: That’ll go on the front of my book.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Good. And your book is on the way. We’re very excited.

ALEX O’CONNOR: One day, who knows when, but it will come eventually.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, keep doing what you’re doing because you’re a vessel for people, and who knows where that vessel ends up going. But thank you, Dr. K. You’re a master of what you do. And actually, when you talked about your chakra, the intuition one, I was sat here giggling because I’ve never felt so naked in front of someone in my entire life as I do in front of you.

And I can only attest to the great work that you do as a result of that bizarre intuition. I think I told you, I think I told other people after the first time I met you that I think you have a magic power. And it’s quite unnerving to be around someone that I feel like has a magic power.

I highly recommend people go and check out your YouTube channel. You’ve been on the show a few times, and the response I get out and about in public is profound. So thank you for coming back again. It’s really, really appreciated.

And thank you, Greg. Thank you for writing these incredible books. There’s actually one here which is what you ended on, called “The Story of Reality,” which I think is a great starting place for people that are trying to tease out some of the truths in their own life.

GREG KOUKL: Actually, we have a chapter that we would like to give to your listeners. If I can give the landing scheme.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sure. I’ll link all of that below. So I’ll link all of your books below, but also that free chapter. Thank you so much, everybody.

ALEX O’CONNOR: Thanks, chef.

GREG KOUKL: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you. Make sure you keep what I’m about to say to yourself. I’m inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the Diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I’m launching to the world.

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