Why Atheists Keep Finding God (in everything) - Alex O’Connor - #1175

“the original title for his famous book was going to be Faith Seeking Understanding, which is to say the point of all of this intellectualizing about God is not to prove God's existence to an atheist.”

Our IdentificationSaid as “Faith Seeking Understanding”. We believe this refers to Proslogion.

“The Proslogion where it shows up is a prayer. It's not like, you know, dear atheists, here's why you should believe in God. He's just reflecting on the nature of God. And so much of that is present in religious history such that these arguments for God's existence, which we kind of call”

“There's some kind of intrinsic motion. Michael Pollan's recent book is brilliant talking about, you know, watching time lapses of plants growing and watching how they move and being like, dude, like these things, I don't, you know, I don't think they feel pain. I don't think they have a conscious awareness or anything, but there's something weird going on there, man.”

Our IdentificationNot named in the episode. From the description, we believe this refers to A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

“I was reading Merlin Sheldrake's book about mushrooms, which is really interesting. And he was talking about these amazing dogs that can go around sort of sniffing out truffles. And I thought, okay, suddenly something kind of struck me, which is a bit weird about this, which is like, we sometimes feel as though we can explain our sensory interactions with the world in objective terms.”

Our IdentificationNot named in the episode. From the description, we believe this refers to Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.

“But then in the Scolium, in the appendix to the book in which he published this, Principia Mathematica, he explicitly addresses the question: okay, but as for what gravity actually is, like why things are actually falling to the ground, he famously says hypothesis non-finger.”

“philosophy thing altogether. Thomas Aquinas leaves the Summa Theologica, one of the greatest contributions to religious philosophy in history, perhaps the best, unfinished on his deathbed because he had a religious experience while he was performing the Eucharist.”

“I think we could do with a different word for them. David Bentley Hart's book, The Experience of God, is good on this. I think that when we're talking about those gods, we should use a different word to avoid confusion. Because after all, there's actually a bit of a debate as to whether like, you know, did the Greeks believe their gods?”