Video Transcript: Discussion with Roy Clouser and Bob Zomermaand

Bob Zomermaand - Hi, Bob Zomermaand again. And we're here to have a little  more discussion with Professor Clouser about the things that he just been  presenting. And one of the things I want to just begin with before I get a bunch of emails saying How dare we have somebody make a presentation like that  making you try to believe one thing or another. Professor Clouser assures me  that we don't need to look at his things here and say, This is the only possible  way to read Genesis what he's trying to do is to help us see that we can be  faithful to the to the scriptures, and we can be faithful to what God wants for  those scriptures, to speak to us about. And we don't need to spend a lot of time  wondering about how old is the earth and so on. Because, you know, really, we  can't tell up from scripture, from the Scripture, you can't look at the Scripture and say, Oh, I've got that, you know that. The there there was an individual who  spent a lot of time figuring out all the ages and trying to figure out just how old is  the earth? Archbishop Ussher, Archbishop Ussher, and and he had come up  with the idea that it's  

Dr. Clouser - put the creation at 4004, BC 4004  

Bob Zomermaand - Got it down. And Now personally, I don't think 4004 BC is  necessarily accurate, either. I don't, I just can't see myself reading the  scriptures. Where I come from is that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And that means everything is dependent on God. And that's,  that's the kind of thing we're talking about here too. We, you, I everything, the  very fact that you can see that this is all dependent on God's sustaining power  through Jesus Christ our Lord. And that's what we need to always keep in mind  and always be addressing. Now, that's it, I would like to go back to what you  were talking about in that first section with various understanding like ID and  ego. Some of those theories? How do we, as Christians, then? How do we  understand these, these, the books that we're reading that have these various  theories laid out? Do we just I don't think I heard you say, throw them out. How  do we, how do we interact with that can be first?  

Dr. Clouser - Well, first of all, I don't think any Christian feels inclined to throw  out atomic theory. No, we, we certainly don't want to interpret them as purely  physical or purely mathematical, or useful fictions. No, they have many sides,  

they have atoms themselves have many more types of properties than just the  physical, the mathematical. They, they have a wide variety, and they're governed by a number of laws, and kinds of laws. So I would say the same thing about ID, ego, and super ego, there's a lot of help, we may be able to get from that. I think psychology, in many ways, events beyond that. But but we won't be looking to  reduce everything to the physical as Freud himself wanted to do, or nor would  we stuff it into a mind. That's purely rationalist. And actually a separate from the 

body that I don't think is biblical, either there is that about us, which doesn't die,  there's duality. There's something dies and something doesn't. And then there's  the resurrection of the body, and we will live in the body forever. But it's not that  it's not the right way to think of it that what is purely one kind of thing. And the  

other is purely another type of thing. Because if you do, then they can't even  interact. All of them, both sides of human being have all the different kinds of  properties and laws that are in which they function and so on. So we can learn a lot. And we can take a theory for what it's worth. Its explanatory power doesn't  have to be the grandiose one that explains everything. And a lot of theorists  want that for their theory and they claim it too soon, Freud did. But we can  expand it along the lines that don't try to reduce everything down to one sort of  explanation. That's, I think the key that scripture affords us, since we since for us  the divinity belief puts the divine reality outside the cosmos. We don't engage in reducing anything down to something else doesn't all come down.  

Bob Zomermaand - We don't need it when you say reduces, it's like taking,  separating aside all these other things saying, Okay, now we've got atoms, and  that's all there is, 

Dr. Clouser - or that creates everything else. That's right, it doesn't have to be a  completely one sided explanation. It's a multi sided explanation, in a way, it's  more complex. But at the same time, it does greater justice to reality. To the  world we actually live in,  

Bob Zomermaand - yeah, I'm gonna read something by you, and in just to test  some of this out, sure. But I'm not sure I'm gonna remember this all exactly the  way way it was done. But I was listening to the speaker that one time. And he  was talking about how to understand because he said, you know, something, I  can't understand why somebody did what they did. And so what he was trying to do was to give us all an idea of how do you arrive at an understanding of this  really odd or probably not so odd event. And he says, So here's, here's what you did. Now, lying behind that is a feeling. And this feeling is this emotional reaction inside of you, that arises, because behind that, there is your intellectual  understanding of how the world ought to work, okay, you know, what is just what is right and so on. And your, your feeling may be that it treated me wrong. And  then you you react to that. And behind that, there lies your ability to perceive  withstanding has to do with iron shore. And this is and then what lies behind  that, because it says, Unless you believe, many times, you can't see, you can't  feel you can't touch and so on. Because really, at the heart of it, is your belief,  and you know what your problem is, you can't change your belief, you're stuck it  is shaped in you in the first three years of your life. And that is that. And so he  was talking about how careful you have to be with children, because in the first 

three years of their lives, you're going to shape how they react to everything  from then on. Because all of these are all subconscious until you just come out  with this action. That's, that's kind of a theory  

Dr. Clouser - it's a pretty deterministic theory by saying that we haven't the  freedom to change our, our beliefs. But there are plenty of examples in which  that's happened. There are people who are raised in a certain culture, let's take  people who are raised in church and they're Christian, and, and they go along  with that. And then somewhere in their life, they encounter something else,  materialism, and they say, Oh, there's the truth. That's what something always  bothered me about that other stuff. I didn't really believe it. Of course it happens  in the reverse, too. there are people raised materialist, atheist, they encountered the gospel and say, Oh, just it just looked true right away. I just knew it was right. That kind of thing happens, which is why his explanation can't be right. It's not  that what he points to never happens. But it can't be the explanation for all  behavior because it's not going to explain the examples I just gave are beliefs  are important, is determined  

Bob Zomermaand - is determinism kind of divine thing in the theory like that.  They were, you can't help it because you've been made this way. 

Dr. Clouser - I'd have to hear more of his theory, I'd have to hear whether this is  because when parents inculcated beliefs in a very young child, it set their brain  in a certain way. And now they can only see things that way. That might be it, in  which case, it's for materialists, he could have a number of reasons for thinking  that they might be they might be rather different.  

Bob Zomermaand - When I encountered that, I just thought there's something  wrong we oh yeah, there's something wrong. Because because I feel like you  know, if what he said is accurate, then preaching means nothing. And I was a  pastor of a church at the time and I was trying to help people have different  

belief about themselves and  

Dr. Clouser - And by the way, not only would your preaching be vain to anyone,  but so would the parents can continual attempts to be parents to that three year  old once he got past three. they can never make a dent in anything the child  didn't already believe, you know, it's all there. It's all programed. No. We're all  aware that we've changed our opinions and our beliefs. And as we get older, we  think back on being young and stubborn when we were acting stupid and things  like that. We know that we're can make mistakes and needs to change. It's not  that people can't. 

Bob Zomermaand - One of the one of the things that distresses me about things like that, is this guy was kind of a prominent speaker. Yeah, sure. And so you  have all these people sitting there listening to this, and they're all thinking, I am,  what I am, and there's nothing I can do.  

Dr. Clouser – No, it's not just your preaching, and the parents continuing  attempts to parent but something like the AA is not going to help anybody. But  1000s of people that get help from AA. There are people who have recovered  from being alcohol, while they still, they will tell you, they're still an alcoholic,  they don't drink, they're in recovery. There are ways that people can do change,  for sure. And some of them are major league, as when someone encounters  God's word. And by the grace of God Spirit is able to see this the truth about  God from God, they, they believe it makes profound changes throughout their  lives.  

Bob Zomermaand - And one of the things I like about philosophy, then, is that  we try to get at these things that lie behind, because yes, that's where some of  the bad problems are, you know, because we're putting something else in the  Divine, the position?  

Dr. Clouser - That's right, if somebody does that, then then the theories all skew  it's found to be one side is it will overestimate the role of what it regards is  divine, divine and correspondingly underestimate the role of all the rest of the  reality that they experienced, even to the point of them denying the the rest is  real at all. It's only this, some of them go that far. And so it distorts things instead of getting a balanced explanation of all sides of a problem. You get no, it's all  this. Yeah, something like that. It's actually stultifying, to what, in respect of what  theories hope to accomplish.  

Bob Zomermaand - When someone is a phenomenologist, I have a  phenomenalist, those are actually different, those are difficult words and want to  keep them straight. A phenomenalist. It's what they can sense. Is that real?  

Dr. Clouser - what we experienced are our sensations that register in our minds.  And most of them would add a plus the logic that's already built in, and we use  the logic to, to explain the sensations. This is a view that was held by Descartes, for example, the most famous person in philosophy to hold it, not the only one.  And he said that, then we're entitled to believe that our sensations correspond to real objects. If the math turns out, right, the math is the real designer. And you  would be spies who's, who bought that? Einstein shows exactly the same thing.  We don't experience external physical objects. All we have are the sensations.  But when we construct a theory and and then test it and things turn out the way 

we expected, then we have we have a proper confidence to believe that it  corresponds to real objects.  

Bob Zomermaand - Now when they're saying we, you know, then that all  humans see okay, so so you're not just a bunch of sensations in your mind you  actually exist?  

Dr. Clouser - Well, that would say, when when we interact with one another, we  probably don't think about this at all. We're so used to regarding the objects that  work out well, when we try to reason about the fit in to all the other things and  don't violate the laws that apparently hold for everything. If I saw you and you  pass through the wall came back and I say I'm hallucinating. That wasn't really  Bob. Okay, but that's the way they're making. Okay? On that, on those grounds,  they're saying we can distinguish veridical perception from perception that  slowly sedation or something, but that I think that's wrong. We don't experience  just the sensory qualities of things we experience all at once. Their physical  qualities, their spatial, their mathematical, sensory, and so on. It's it's a multi  sided thing that way, the world that we are we encounter and we have To give  multisided explanations that are going to come up short.  

Bob Zomermaand - Who was it that said, I think therefore I am? 

Dr. Clouser Descartes. To put him in time, he was born in 1595 and died in  1650. He was, he inherited some money and he did a lot of work in math, he  invented analytic geometry, very famous. He didn't like to get up early. He laid in  bed all morning every morning and wrote philosophy and mathematics and stuff. And then Then he'd attend a lot of parties at night to sleep in in the morning  again. And then when he ran into hard times, the Queen of Sweden asked him  to come up and be her tutor. And he didn't want to go because he didn't want to  live in Sweden, but finally it's so bad off, he took the offer, and got pneumonia  and died. Really, yeah, he was right not to want to go there. And besides that, it  threw his Schedule all off, because she wanted her lessons to start at five in the  morning. And he wouldn't he never got out of bed before noon. So all that really  thoroughly man he got sick and died.  

Bob Zomermaand - Earlier, I think it was in the in the previous lecture you were  talking about Kierkegaard Yeah, tell us something Kierkegaard.  

Dr. Clouser – Well, we're talking mid to later 19th century, the guy who comes  upon the intellectual world as it's dominated by Kant and Hegel, two of the big  German philosophy, and Hegel thinks he can solve the problems and Kant by  constructing a theory of what amounts to pantheism. Everything's part of the, of 

the great, all knowing mind, all encompassing, and so on. And Kierkegaard  thinks, first of all, it's not Christianity. And secondly it's silly. He was a sincere  Christian. And so he writes, appealing to the real guts of an issue and, and he  writes in a way that hits people in the gut. So he's not doing this, oh, everything  comes out, okay. In the end, you know, which is way Hegel writes, even the  worst looking sins are really just little wrinkles in the fabric of time or something.  It doesn't matter. He's Kierkegaard. I remember one place that impressed me  the story of Abraham, he writes this little story. He says, It just amazes me.  People put on their finest clothes, they go to church, they sit, the story of  Abraham was read to them, and they go home and eat their Sunday dinner. Did  you hear what? God told this guy to go kill his son? And you just sit there as  nothing happened? It didn't register? Do you understand the words at all? He  really rubs it in. And what he's trying to get to is, isn't ethics That's ultimate is  what God tells you. If God tells you, go steal that you go steal it, because he's  created a new law. And if he says sacrifice your son, then that's what you got to  do. But of course, he didn't let Abraham go through with it. But But Kierkegaard's concern is for people's lethargy, he was concerned that Christianity had become too tame. They weren't taking it really seriously. They're just sitting there in their  finery, no matter what the guy read from the pulpit, they probably go home and  eat their dinner in the same way that he says, No, you got to take this to heart.  But imagine what that would be like your Abraham or your Isaac.  

Bob Zomermaand - Kind of like, reminds me of somebody named Annie Dillard,  are you familiar? She's a fascinating writer of recent history. And in she was  saying about, I can't see how people can go to church without a crash helmet. If  this is so? Yeah, that's why we ought to have a crash album because this is  earth shattering.  

Dr. Clouser - And I think it is to philosophy, too. Once we see what a religious  belief is, and we catch the idea and begin to see the way theories are guided by  those beliefs. It ought to become clear to us that we need to construct  theoretical explanations on the basis of that God's the divine being and not not  any part of the cosmos.  

Bob Zomermaand - Will Christian results. A pursuit of any hypothesis or theory  results in something different than a non Christian would.  

Dr. Clouser - Often Yes, only because of this many sides of this that I'm talking  about. The Christian ought to be they ought to be alive to the many side and  look for the many factors. So that someone comes in with a heavy materialist or  rationalist bias, whatever it is, is then delimiting shutting themselves off from  possible insight into the whole truth. So they may, just because of that emphasis

may see one particular side of things very clearly, often it leads to real discovery  because of that, but it's one sided. And then gradually over, over time, people  discover other sides will begin to add to that. But it should enable a Christian to  start out with the notion that it whatever it is, I'm looking at, it's going to be a  many sided problem isn't going to have just going to have anything as an  explanation that has only one kind of nature, it's going to be multi multi sided.  

Bob Zomermaand - Okay. So then, rather than saying, I'm going to come up with as a Christian chemist, I'm going to come up with just one answer to this whole  question. I need to see that it's a facet of the whole? 

Dr. Clouser - It may not be that there's more than one answer, but the answer  itself is going to be multi sided. It has a context. Yes. So okay, so that whatever  I'm trying to explain, has many sides to it. Look, I've been talking about talking  about materialism the way materialists do. So we want to get down to the purely  physical, that's the metaphysically ultimate level, there's no such thing as purely  physical. There's no such thing as purely anything, is what I'm going to argue  later. Okay. You can't take all the other things away, you can't take them away  and have anything left whatever you want to be pure just disappears. So there is no purely logical, purely mathematical, purely physical, purely spatial, or purely  anything. Everything is impure, it's got all kinds of sides to it and you can't get rid of them. And if you ignore them, then your your explanation is deficient.  

Bob Zomermaand - Okay, so you're saying like it's deficient? Yeah. Just wrong.  

Dr Clouser - That's right. But it will be deficient. It might be right. As far as it  goes. Well, chances are chances are, though, that it will be as far as it goes will  be somewhat distorted anyway, just for leaving the others out. Yeah.  

Bob Zomermaand - Okay. Now, how about this thought floated through my head, as you were talking about that. If I, if I am on the faculty, I for many years, I lived  in a place. That was right next door to a big 10 University major research  university. And there were many people I got to know who were very highly  respected individuals in their field. Now, at what point does being a brilliant  person in my fields come up short? And it seemed to me like so many of them,  were just dealing with chemistry just only as chemistry.  

Dr. Clouser - Oh, yeah. I'm not expressing any quarrel with that. Somebody can  limit what it is they want to find out about now, just something very fine. And then that way, make progress might not be able to make if they took six problems  instead of one, or one great big one in this. It's not how much of it or how wide  you cast your net? It's, it's the kind of nature you attribute to what you find. share

you attribute. Yeah, what's what I've been talking about. So okay, in some of  these examples, I hope to illustrate is that the guy who thinks the purely physical is ultimate is going to say Id, ego, and super ego are ultimately physical, and  nothing else. That's where it becomes deficient. No, maybe there are these  aspects. Humans often behave in these ways that correspond to these many  humans. But there are cases where it really applies and work, but it's not going  to just be the physical, there are going to be real, psychical and psychological  factors, emotional, feeling, reason, and motivating beliefs that may be  unconscious. For Freud to say all our beliefs are, are expressions of our  unconscious emotional needs, undercuts itself. It's gives one an explanation for  all beliefs. There are more explanation, more kinds of factors. There on any ID,  ego and super ego than just the physical or just psychological or just the  rational. It's all of them and you try to trace the pathways and see how they work together, how they interact, and you have a bigger picture. That's, that's what  we're going to be seeing Dooyeweerd do in theory of reality? He's going to take  all the different aspects and not say, if any of them is real, or less important or  unreal, and so on. Because he's going to say, no, no one of those on that list  causes the others. They're all they don't cause the cause the others, they're all  produced by God, God's the cause of them all simultaneously, and they're all  simultaneously true of all things. And there's no one of them that generates the  others. That's going to be a big change. After after, what, 2700 years of human  philosophy another way, here's the way nobody ever tried before. And he's doing it for the sake of and because he believes in God, and that God's will transcend  that.  

Bob Zomermaand - Okay, we look forward to hearing lots more about it  continues to develop as you go along.  

Dr. Clouser - But there's going to be fun for me to try to, to go through it. And  they'd be great to have somebody checked on whether it's clear. Yeah, because  it isn't. It isn't. It's not fiercely complicated. But it's so different, that it takes a  while to sink in. And then I have to just check on whether I've gotten the point  point across. So this is the outtakes.  

Bob Zomermaand - Okay, yeah. Thank you, and we'll see you next time.