“The Academic’s Doubt: How Kyle Whitaker Challenged His Own Faith” Ep#33

Philosopher Kyle Whitaker, a Christian materialist and co-host of “A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk Into a Bar,” joins Spiritual Hot Sauce to explore how science and faith can coexist without easy answers, sharing his journey through doubt, powerful spiritual experiences, and why he now understands faith more as trust than certainty, especially around questions like the soul, prayer, and the hope of resurrection for those wrestling with the tension between intellectual honesty and belief.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-pastor-and-a-philosopher-walk-into-a-bar/id1512686327

Links to more on this subject

https://www.buzzsprout.com/967219/episodes/12407131

https://www.buzzsprout.com/967219/episodes/12407131

https://www.buzzsprout.com/967219/episodes/12407131

https://www.buzzsprout.com/967219/episodes/12407131

https://www.buzzsprout.com/967219/episodes/15825226

https://www.buzzsprout.com/967219/episodes/11204931

This episode of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  

Transcript

Chris Jones 0:00

Kyle Whitaker is a PhD in philosophy and co-host of A Pastor and a Philosopher Walking to a Bar. Today we're talking about what it means to be a Christian materialist. Kyle opens up about how he sits in faith, balancing science and religion, and more importantly, how he found a way to be comfortable in that uncertainty. If you've been wrestling with both, this episode is for you. Welcome. I'm Chris Jones. This is Spiritual Hot Sauce. Kyle, welcome back to the sauce. Hey Chris, good to see you. It's good to see you. All right, so the last time you were on here, you shared a lot as an academic who still holds to Christianity. And that spoke to people. A lot of people feel like they have to pick either I take science seriously or I keep my faith. I can't have both. And that's not true, and that's why you're on here again. You live honestly in that space between science and faith without forcing them together while respecting both. You identify as a Christian materialist. So I wanted to open that up. The last time you said that humans aren't like a trichotomy or dichotomy or have a soul, but they're rather in millions of parts, like from biology or neuroscience. But yet you still leave room for God. Walk us through how you sit in that space of uncertainty.

Kyle Whittaker 1:31

Yeah, space of uncertainty. Well, let me let me start there. So there's there is no such thing as a space of certainty. So maybe we we could unpack that if you want. There's no other way to sit. But whatever your, you know, whatever your convictions happen to be atheistic, theistic, agnostic, whatever. It's it's uncertain all the way down. Okay. I've become comfortable with that. I was I was convinced that I was wrong about some stuff when I had time to think about it. And so I changed my mind about those things. And I became comfortable sitting in a place of uncertainty with respect to God. You know, I was convinced of a certain kind of approach to the the big questions of, you know, the the sorts of things that kept those of us up at night who were a certain kind of zealous evangelical who were trying to figure out everything about God in the world and what was actually true with respect to religion and what we should do about it and how we convince could convince other people to believe like we did, you know. I I got to a place with those questions where I convinced myself at least that most of those things could not be known. And that the level of confidence I could have about any of them was pretty low. Now that's not to say that I don't still have beliefs about those things I do, but I'm not super confident about any of them anymore. And I came to a place where I feel okay about that, right? And I have to kind of move on with my life. Right. And so that's what I've done. And yeah, that left me in a place where if you want to put a label on it, you could call me a Christian materialist. That's fine. There's probably other labels that I'd be happy owning. I'd I'm I'm okay owning the label agnostic about certain kinds of things, but I'm also okay owning the label Christian, or even more specifically, cut, you know, specific kinds of Christian, if you want. Like I sometimes still refer to myself as a Pentecostal, which would be weird for a lot of Pentecostals, you know, given the other things I believe. But yeah, I'm happy to unpack as many of those things as you like, Chris. Let's let's dive in.

Chris Jones 3:31

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, let's go through because I I I really like what you said, that you got comfortable with the uncertainty.

Kyle Whittaker 3:38

Yeah.

Chris Jones 3:39

And I think that is where most of us struggle. So how did you get to a place where you could be comfortable not knowing?

Kyle Whittaker 3:45

I don't even know if it was ever conscious. I've had several sort of like realization moments where I had occasion to think about a thing that I used to care a lot about or believe pretty hard and realize that I no longer did, either believe it or care about it as much. And and then had to reflect on when did that happen, right? So for example, I could I could point to several examples, but I'll just grab one out of the ether. I used to think it was really important to be a Trinitarian, to think that, you know, God is three persons, one Uzia, and that that that's what defined Christianity, that if you were going to be on the inside, if you were gonna really call yourself a Christian, that was one of the sort of core essential things that you had accept. And that was even part of the process, believe it or not, of evolving to a sort of a more expansive and open faith, because I was trying to sort of get away from everything in Christianity is equally important. And there are sort of there are peripheral things that you can differ on with respect, you know, who who is your brother and sister in Christ. How do you know who's still in the tent with you? Let's maybe make the peripheral things less important and let's really focus on the sort of things in the center that we that we've all been historically agreed on, at least I thought so at the time. And for me, one of the ways of like expanding and being more inclusive in my definition of Christianity was emphasizing the things at the center. And I put like Trinitarianism in there, you know?

Chris Jones 5:14

Okay.

Kyle Whittaker 5:14

And then I went to grad school and I met a lot of really smart people and had conversations with them for a period of years about various things. Some of those conversations were about Trinitarianism. Most of them were not. One one really good friend of mine had some arguments about Trinitarianism with, he was, he was not a Trinitarian, still a Christian, though. And so that had an impact on me, but it wasn't those arguments that convinced me that Trinitarianism was unimportant. It was, I what I think it was, this is me sort of psychoanalyzing myself. Okay. I came to a point where I I sort of realized, I don't know what occasioned it, but realized that that particular belief was no longer important to me. And that people who disagreed with me about that, that I didn't think I had any standing to say that they were any less Christian than I was, uh, or that their beliefs were any more unreasonable than mine were, you know? And I don't think, again, I don't think that it was specific arguments or like discoveries of new evidence about Trinitarianism. Here's what I think it was. I think that the process of being in graduate school gave me a level of i i it gave me two things. It gave me an ability to be more sophisticated and critical in the standards for beliefs that I was willing to accept.

Speaker 2 6:39

Okay.

Kyle Whittaker 6:39

And also, you know, ways to assess evidence. And then simultaneously, it gave me an awareness of how many legitimately reasonable and sophisticated options there are with respect to any question like that. And those two things together, simultaneously, I think, increased what I would require, what I would demand uh in order to form a new belief about something, and also decreased the level of importance I put on the beliefs that I hold about any of those things. So it's something that happened sort of pervasively to my reasoning capacity. And then that got applied kind of universally, so that when I then had occasion to consider something that I hadn't thought about in a long time, like for example, Trinitarian belief, I realized that one, the arguments I used to accept as decisive were no longer decisive to me because my standards were higher. And two, I don't care about that as much anymore because I now recognize how many other p potentially reasonable options there are with respect to that. And how, you know, how how plural really people's experience of questions like that can be.

Chris Jones 7:42

So would it be fair to say that part of getting comfortable in that is realizing focus on what you can control and the things that you'll never have an answer for? It's okay. Just accept what you can.

Kyle Whittaker 7:53

Yeah. And and you know, when you say it like that, it sounds a little bit therapeutic, I guess. I'm not sure of a better word there. And I didn't think of it in those terms, right?

Chris Jones 8:03

Okay.

Kyle Whittaker 8:04

Because I was not I was not attempting to do any kind of like introspective work. It's just a ch it's just a change in the way I thought and then a realization about what that did to the things that I believed. And then if I was going to maintain a faith, it would have to be a different kind of faith, right? It would have to not be defined by the focus on those sorts of things in the way that it had previously been. But I didn't ever find that this made faith more difficult for me.

Chris Jones 8:31

Okay.

Kyle Whittaker 8:32

That was that has not been my experience.

Chris Jones 8:34

But that I guess that's what faith is, though. Accepting things that we don't have evidence for, but.

Kyle Whittaker 8:41

I don't think that. No. Not really well, it depends on uh I want to be more precise about this. Aaron Powell Be precise for me, unwrap that. Aaron Powell Yeah. So we could spend a long time talking about faith because there are many ways as as you might expect me to say about anything theological at this point. There are many ways to understand this and and many reasonable directions from which one might approach the question of what is faith. Faith, as I think as it's used in the New Testament context, has more to do, and there's some translational issues here that I won't go into, some, you know, history of the concept. To me, it has more to do with if you want to think of like what is a modern notion that most people would be able to immediately recognize as an analogy for what you know Christian faith as presented in the New Testament might be like. Belief is a really bad analogy, and trust is a better one. So faith as trust is a thing that, you know, you'll heal hear certain kinds of progressive pastors talking about. There's good reason for that. The problem is we've all, most of us anyway, in certain kinds of fundamentalist traditions for sure, have been brought up with the notion of faith as belief. And it it's I don't think that is a good way to think about it, either conceptually, theologically, or as like a translation of the words that are actually in the in the Greek New Testament. So there's that. Faith as it's presented in that text, I do not think, has much to do with your cognitive state at any given moment. But that is not to say that faith is like believing against the evidence or even acting against the evidence. It's not like being irrational or something like that, right? As a lot of the the new atheists from like the early 2000s wanted to say, faith is believing what you know ain't. So it's not that at all. The way I like to think about it, there's a philosopher named William James, who was a very influential American philosopher in the 20th century, who had this idea that you could come to a kind of evidential equilibrium about a question. And what that means is cognitively, just thinking of what is rational to believe, what do I have evidence for, you're at a state where it's indecisive. So your evidence for it, your evidence against it is equivalent. It's sort of a wash. So the the facts on the ground and the evidence that you possess do not put point you, do not tell you what you should believe or do about X, whatever X happens to be. And but also you can be in a situation where you have to make a decision about X. It's forced on you for some reason, and it's important to you, right? This happens a lot in human life. There's something we have to do, and the evidence on the ground does not tell us which thing we should do, ought to do, right? That is the space where faith is possible, where faith becomes a rationally accepted, acceptable, I should say, and important stance. And I think all humans are at least occasionally in that position, in that stance. They take that stance towards things. It doesn't have to just be religious. You can have faith uh in a lot of different contexts, but it is primarily associated with religious belief for obvious reasons. So from my perspective, I don't have sufficient evidence about any particular theological question to say argument and evidence and reason point me toward this conclusion. I really used to think they did. I no longer think that. Okay. So a stance of faith is to say the evidence is indecisive, but I still have to make a choice. I have to live in a certain way. And I have to accord the tr my ethical choices with a certain perspective on the world. And that perspective involves, you know, beliefs about God and meaningfulness and you know what what is a good life and lots of other stuff. And my choice to take a stance is a choice, is a faith choice. It's a it's a choice to trust that certain things are true in a way that I can't justify. And I'm gonna act on that. That to me is is faith.

Chris Jones 12:34

So the last time you told me you had some powerful experiences that even when I try to give you a door to get out of where I said it could have been an emotional thing where people are gathering together, it could be different things, and you said, no, this was God.

Kyle Whittaker 12:49

I mean, I was like, wow, he was he was definitive here. He let me make that though consistent with what I just said, because it might sound like it's not consistent. I it is totally possible that it was that you could reduce those experiences to some kind of psychological state. You know, there are many ways that you could explain that externally, you know, if I if you're a scientist thinking Well that's how I took that.

Chris Jones 13:12

I took that as exactly what you said, that you in that place said, no, this is how I'm choosing to believe. It was God.

Kyle Whittaker 13:20

Yeah. Yeah. And I and that is that's a fair example of what I mean by faith. My acceptance of how I experienced it.

Chris Jones 13:28

Yeah.

Kyle Whittaker 13:28

How it appeared for me, how it showed up for me, what like that, you know, I had the experience. And my acceptance of that as being what it seemed to me to be is, I think, a faith stance. I'm making the choice to interpret it that way. I could, I think I could choose to interpret it differently, but even that's a little tricky because I would have to like talk myself into it. It's actually very difficult to choose to believe a thing. I don't know if you've ever, if you've ever tried to do that, right? Like your first of all, your evidence has to be indecisive. It has to seem indecisive to you to even have the possibility of doing that. But like if everything in your emotional life and and your context and your, you know, your your social circumstances are disposing you towards one kind of conclusion there, it's very difficult to choose to believe different, you know, against that stuff. I don't want to say it's impossible, but it's hard. Um, and I think you need to be motivated to do so. And I'm just not motivated to believe, for example, that that that was like the power of suggestion or something, that those experiences I had were fully reducible to some kind of accidental brain state that had nothing to do with reality, uh beyond what's going on in my head, you know?

Chris Jones 14:34

Are you comfortable with sharing those experiences with us?

Kyle Whittaker 14:36

I mean, there's nothing honestly dramatic or or weird about them. One that comes to mind is and some of these happened in like church worship services. Some of them happened when I was having, you know, private devotional time, which I used to do. Most of them happened in college, maybe two happened in grad school. I'm not certain of that number, but not many.

Chris Jones 14:56

Yeah.

Kyle Whittaker 14:57

Um and then since then, none. But to be fair, I haven't like been actively seeking those kinds of experiences for a long time. Uh the ones that stand out most to me are the ones I wasn't seeking when it felt more like a thing happened to me, like unannounced, God's presence was there.

Chris Jones 15:13

Describe that force.

Kyle Whittaker 15:16

Yeah. So one time I was with a friend in his apartment and we were shooting the shit about I don't even remember what. And he had to go, he got up and left to go get something out of his car. I don't remember. He he would he left. And then so I was like, all right, pulled out a thing and started reading it. And unannounced, unanticipated, it felt to me as though this is going to sound weird, but it felt to me as though Jesus was physically next to me. And I I was overwhelmed with a sense of peace and kindness. Um the times I've experienced God most powerfully, it's been a kind of sense of kindness and joy, happiness, like the sort of I don't know, the sort of happiness that you experience with a good friend when you really kind of contemplate how much you care for them and how much they care for you and you just feel loved. You know, it again, nothing profound or unusual about this, but it was so powerful that I had I went to his bathroom and laid on the floor and cried for about 10 minutes. And he came in and was wondering what was wrong with me, you know?

Chris Jones 16:11

But you don't seem like that kind of person to me. You don't seem like that guy. You're not emotional.

Kyle Whittaker 16:16

I I know, I don't, I don't. And and that is not typical for me, okay? But that sort of thing has happened a handful of times in my life. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Chris Jones 16:24

Can I ask you this? Because you were talking about that moment of when you get to that buoyant place where the evidence isn't there and you have the option to choose, I guess from free will, however, you want to believe. Do you feel like those moments, though, are what nudged you in a certain direction where you said, no, I'm gonna believe it.

Kyle Whittaker 16:43

So that's a hard question because I was already firmly religious when these things happened, and they happened within that context. And I, you know, it's an interesting question to think, well, let's see, let's say I had had the beliefs about religion then that I have now. Let's say I was already at that kind of agnostick-y kind of position then. Would I still have had those experiences? And I have no idea how to answer that, right? Because I was I was primed in a lot of ways to have an experience like that. And it's probably it probably means something that since I have shifted my perspective, I have not had those experiences.

Chris Jones 17:17

Well, do you need those experiences now?

Kyle Whittaker 17:19

No, but I don't think I ever needed them, right? But I but I think you, you know, you got to be psychologic psychologically honest here and say I had them at a at a time in my life, if you're looking at this totally objectively, and you were saying you you believe this at this period of your life and you believe these things at this other period of your life. If you're gonna have a religious experience, where is it gonna happen? It happened exactly where you would predict that it would happen. Okay. Right. And it hasn't happened in the air in the times when you wouldn't. So that's that's maybe telling. And this is why I think externally it's totally reasonable to conclude that this guy did not experience God. And I don't expect this to be compelling or have anything to do with what any of other people believe. I can only exp describe it from my own perspective, which is that I had, you know, I had an encounter with God, several of them, and I haven't since then had reason to believe that it was something other than that. And I also fully believe that if I were to change my habits in a certain way, I could probably have another experience like that. I don't think it was in fact, this is one of the reasons I'm Pentecostal. I don't think that there was anything unusual about that. I don't I I I view that sort of thing as sort of normative to the Christian experience. And I think that if I were to, you know, align my behavior in a certain way, I could recreate it, so to speak.

Chris Jones 18:29

Yeah. So if you in this moment, if you sit and think about that, do you miss that experience? Do you miss having those things happen?

Kyle Whittaker 18:35

You know, that is a great question. Sometimes yes, most of the time I don't think about it, and sometimes no. It's because it's it's almost like it formed the background of everything I think about God. And so it's like to to miss it might suggest that that I've lost I don't even know how to say this. I still believe God is like that. And I still believe that that is kind of in the background of the world, like the foundation of the world is like that if God is real, you know? And so it's not like I think that's not still there and accessible. If I it is. And so it's almost like here's an example, here's an analogy. Here's an analogy. So our common friend H.O. Yeah, is somebody I love dearly.

Chris Jones 19:28

Absolutely.

Kyle Whittaker 19:29

And and almost never talk to. And he's that kind of guy you don't have to. Right. Like when I when I have occasion to think about how little I interact with him, in one sense it makes me a little sad. And in other sense, it's like, well, shit, I could call him. You know, he's right there. I could I could have a conversation with him, I could go visit him, I could carve out space in my life to do that. And it's my choice, my perpetual, uh mostly unintentional, but kind of intentional choice to not do that. God is a little bit similar. He's like a friend that I know I could still have that experience with. Trevor Burrus, Jr. That sounds like relationship, though.

Chris Jones 20:02

That sounds like in those moments was uh an expression of your relationship with God. You know what I mean? And that I I kind of think it's almost growth. We all start in square one, and sometimes we get what we need in those moments to form whatever relationship it's gonna be. But we progress and we grow and we move on, and we don't necessarily need those moments anymore, but yet they're still there, and they kind of formed how we perceive God that makes it possible for us to believe. Is that fair? Or am I painting you into a corner here?

Kyle Whittaker 20:34

No, I think that's fair. Yeah. And I expect there will be times, just because I have children, where this is gonna be important to think through again, you know, to Yeah.

Chris Jones 20:45

So I mean you're not done in your growth. You're not done. I mean, your life is still moving and evolving, and you're gonna grow and and whoever you're gonna end up being and when and where. But that moment you had is so impactful, it it's definitely gonna play a part in who you are and how you perceive God and how your children's gonna see God through you, through their father's expression of that.

Kyle Whittaker 21:08

Yeah. Or lack thereof, right? Yeah. And I have to make- I have to make some choices about that.

Chris Jones 21:11

Absolutely. Okay. This takes us into a great place. The last time we talked, you said you no longer prayed, that it felt false, like it it really wasn't you at the time that it it's not that it wasn't up for changing again, but at the time it's just didn't feel honest for you. Are you still wrestling with

Speaker 21:35

No, because I don't think about it. To wrestle with something, you have to, you know, give it concern. It's like it's this time of year, every year during Lent, when I think I need to be wrestling with this, and I'm not. I think it the way that that will happen eventually is I'll get back into some kind of church context where the structures are there and the sort of social supports are there to provide a space for wrestling with it. And I'm just not currently in that that life stage. I want to be, you know, I want to be.

Chris Jones 22:09

Do you you think you're missing something that you didn't have when you were praying?

Kyle Whittaker 22:47

Yes. Yeah. But very sort of concretely, I'm missing the discipline that prayer brings. And the sort of that's discipline in the sense of, you know, exterior pragmatic discipline, like you carve out space in your schedule for this and you do so regularly. And it's just training yourself in that way. But also the sort of interior discipline to like structure your thought life in a certain way. And to it's meditative, you know, prayer is is meditation in a lot of ways. And so I'm I'm missing both of those forms of discipline. I eventually I see myself landing in some high church tradition where prayer is incorporated into a liturgy that will give me the structure to get back on the wagon, so to say it's just not a priority right now.

Chris Jones 23:34

I I think you're 100% right. You know, of yourself and in its structure in your life. I I think you're 100% correct. And you brought up your children earlier. So I'm I'm assuming that yours this do you feel like that brings a sense of urgency to the table that you're kind of counting down the time and looking at when do I need to jump in and do this?

Kyle Whittaker 23:55

A little A little bit, yeah. They're still pretty young but like you know every now and then something will happen and I realize they don't know anything about this thing that has formed such a huge part of my life. Yeah.

Chris Jones 24:13

Now the last time we talked about this, I mentioned my Christian atheist friend who said he rejected the resurrection, but he embraced the teachings of Christ of love. Yeah and that he because of that he identified as a Christian atheist and you said that you would reject that and you would defend the resurrection because Christianity hinged on it and that was the experience of it. Break that out for me.

Kyle Whittaker 24:39

Yeah let me contextualize that there's two there's a couple ways you could approach a claim like I would defend the importance of the resurrection. I would not defend it in the old apologetic way that I used to care about defending it, where you try to like you know give evidence for its historicity or something like that, or that you have to like believe it was a that it's like the belief in that fact if you can sort of convince yourself that that really happened. My God then that's like core to what it means to be a Christian. It's kind of like that Trinitarian thing again, right? That's the thing that we put in the center of our con of our concentric circle view of religion and that's the thing we, you know, rest on. And if you're not really that then you're not really a Christian. I don't I wouldn't defend it in that way anymore. I have no standing to say whether someone who accepts the resurrection or not is a Christian or not, right? That that just isn't live to me anymore. But in a from a very personal perspective, what makes Christianity meaningful to me? What sort of keeps me in it and what and what do how you know how do I make sense of those experiences that I had and and alongside everything else that I know about the world? To me resurrection is very important for that sort of personal why does this matter kind of lens. And and I could put it sort of academically by saying without that I can't I can't make sense of suffering at all. But it's more like I don't mean that in sense of like I can't respond to the arguments about I mean it like for me personally. If that if I'm ever going to have a cordial, much less a loving relationship with that being I think I encountered, then there has to be something like resurrection that still doesn't solve it, right? But there has to be something like that or or or suffering wins. There's a philosopher named Keith DeRoose who we talked to once on our show who said something like the problem of suffering, the problem of evil, why why is there evil in the world is a killer argument. And what he meant is if you don't have some kind of way to respond to it, even if it's just a stance of hopefulness of what a response might look like, then it destroys faith. It's it's dead. I cannot make sense of any possible approach to responding to that that does not involve a continuation of the the personhood of individual humans. And I'm a materialist so the only thing that could mean is some kind of resurrection as far as I can tell. Because on any other paradigm that I'm aware of, you're no longer that person anymore. Any I should say any other afterlife paradigm, right? So resurrection while wildly evidentially underdetermined, which means we have nowhere near enough like you know argumentative evidence to conclude that the rational thing to believe is that a resurrection will eventually happen. Nonetheless, I think the thing that keeps me or choosing to believe having faith that such a thing will happen is that it's the only way to make sense of this is how you reconcile suffering and how God makes sense. Yeah this is a necessary thing for me to continue being willing to have a conversation with a being who could be responsible for this. It's ethical as much as anything else. It's like if death is the end full stop then there there can be no even possibility of as far as I can tell justifying any of this and if there really is a being behind it then that being is not good. And it's certainly not the being I thought that I encountered unless that being is also like a master of deception, right? Certainly, not the kind of being I would wanty to have anything to do with.

Chris Jones 28:24

Well that to me, that experience you had now seems much more practical.

Kyle Whittaker 28:34

Yes! It seems like how it it communicates something to you that you haven't experienced It's like you know you had a you had some really wonderful loving experiences with someone you considered a dear friend. You kind of lost touch and then a decade later you heard some awful, awful things about that person and you're not sure whether to believe them now. And and you're thinking about what what needs to happen in the future for me to maintain the relationship with this person that I thought given the new information I possess. And but it compounded a thousand times because it's very difficult to get any actual evidence about, you know, what this person thinks or does.

Chris Jones 29:08

So yeah it's like well it's how you describe faith. But at the same time it just really seems like those moments that you had that were so beautiful and honest was so uniquely yours, but it seems like there's a reason behind it that it would something you could carry with you in your life that keeps you in in that place where you can still hold to hope.

Kyle Whittaker 29:28

Hope yes that's yeah that resurrection is a hope.

Chris Jones 29:31

I guess to me as I'm just going through and hearing this, it just that's how it it comes together with me. I'm not trying to force it into a box. It just is kind of unfolding that way to me where just that seems to be a source that is always going to be able to give to you hope because it was so unique. You know, I've never had an experience like that. And I don't think I know anybody else that's had an experience like that. That's uniquely unique.

Kyle Whittaker 29:57

Yeah and it's yeah that's fair. And you know probably most of my friends, many of whom are more much more religious than me, have not had experiences like that. You know, it's interesting this may be an aside but I think it's worth saying like I don't in any way think that the fact that I've had an experience like this should have should give anyone else evidence for anything or or or make them like more confident about it. If anything, I think it goes the other direction. Like so this is a thing this is another thing I sort of changed my perspective on. I used to think that stories like that were and more dramatic stories than that, stories that Pentecostals love to tell each other about things that God did in their lives. I used to think that those were like helpful for building up the faith of other folks, especially folks who didn't have such experiences, but now I think the opposite I think that more likely than not that the fact that some people have them and some people don't who are otherwise equivalent with respect to their faith dispositions and practices, I think that should probably make you more circumspect about what God is like than like encouraging. I don't think that's an encouraging thing at all.

Chris Jones 31:03

Well I think that if you have a unique experience like that, that's that's plays into your truth of whatever that is or your hope and that your hope or your truth however you want to frame that up can never be somebody else's it's always going to be exclusively yours. And it was just for you. That's why it was given to you.

Kyle Whittaker 31:22

Maybe that's a good way to say maybe I don't know what any of this means. Yeah but it's like a it's a thing that happened though, right? It's a fact of life that people have experiences like this and we have to figure out a way to make sense of it regardless.

Chris Jones 31:34

So how do people get comfortable using doubt as a tool to reconcile the unknowable how do we kind of navigate because it's the internally in ourselves that we have to use doubt. It's usually not the external but it's how we process internally that gets us to a place where we we get to a higher hope for ourselves. So how do you use doubt like that?

Kyle Whittaker 32:00

I don't know that doubt is something you use unless you're like Descartes and you're trying to you're trying to like you know formulate a rational basis for all thought but I don't think that's what you mean.

Chris Jones 32:14

you give yourself permission to even go into that some people it's difficult to even say hey you know I'm going to use doubt to navigate negotiate and figure out who I am. Yeah.

Kyle Whittaker 32:25

This sounds like a question for like a therapist or something, Chris. You're not that guy.

Chris Jones 32:32

well I don't think it means that I you have the answers but it's your experience because I I think when other people hear that, you know, because you are brilliant there's no getting around that and and you are an academic not a theological academic when they hear you talking about them it might make them feel better in how they are trying to navigate I don't I really don't think it should I think yeah feeling better is not a way that most people describe hearing me talk yeah I don't know so like how to use doubt or how to make yourself comfortable with doubt or something like that.

Kyle Whittaker 33:23

I don't have any because I never like set out to do that, right? It's just sort of a thing that happened. I think if you That's just who you are yeah if you examine your life in a certain way and you're honest, you're gonna there's gonna be doubt and you're gonna have to learn to live with it.

Chris Jones 33:37

And it's I think you just said exactly what needed to be said. You just have to be honest with yourself.

Kyle Whittaker 33:43

you have to be open to arriving in a place that you are currently uncomfortable with and if you're not I I don't want to sound like I'm judging folks who are not I think it's remember what I said about William James where you're in a an evidential equal evidentially equilibrious place. I don't know how to say that you're you're in a place where you know there's not a rational out for you and you have to make a choice. There there's no judgment from a perspective like that of making one choice over another unless it's dishonest. But if you can make opposed choices equally honestly I am not going to sit here and say that you've made the wrong one. If it is if you don't like if you're not in a life situation where you're able to apply the kind of practices of self-examination that I felt were necessary for me, I have you're a different person. You're living a different life and I have nothing to say about that. Right. And you and you might you know you might be in a situation where it's possible for you to sort of honestly double down on your faith in a way that was not possible for me.

Speaker 2 34:49

Yeah.

Kyle Whittaker 34:50

And if if that is as long as that's not doing any harm to yourself or other people and it can be honest for you in your context, I have no judgment of that whatsoever. So I don't want listeners to think that that I'm saying like you just may not have the capacity to got get to where I got to and it's nothing like that at all. It's if anything I experienced this as a kind of doom in the old sense of like this is the path given my psychological makeup and my life history and where I find myself and how I approach the world this is the path I had to follow and this is where it led me. But people are on different paths, you know you ought to like that phrase with your path I do I do.

Chris Jones 35:31

Thank you. Well you know we all have community where we come together and we kind of see God in a one-dimensional way. But we all have to go outside the community to figure out how we need to see God.

Kyle Whittaker 35:45

I think that's right. Yeah.

Chris Jones 35:47

Is there a place where you can get to personally where science and faith can coexist in harmony internally or is this constantly something that you're negotiating and compromising with inside?

Kyle Whittaker 35:59

Yeah so I don't feel this tension at all. I I understand why a lot of folks have thought there is a tension between those things. I think they're all the things that would lead one to the conclusion that there is a tension are all mistaken or misguided in some way, in my view, there need not be any tension whatsoever between science and faith. It is I think only due to contingent recent historical social circumstances that a lot of folks think there is a tension because earlier periods in history there was not. And then in other periods in history there were, right? So this is clearly a contingent thing whether or not people think there is this tension or not because in the history of the relationship between science and faith different periods have had different levels of that tension that sort of people on the ground took for granted or not. I tried to express my view about this in an episode that we did on science and faith. I forget how long ago it was but my view is that they sort of each have their spheres their their their I don't know they play in their own areas.

Chris Jones 37:01

They're both integral to human life at this moment like you're not going to get away from either of them and be sort of so I've heard it put like that that uh science is one wing of the bird and and religion is the other wing. And if you don't have both, you're not going to have proper flying bird that you're gonna have a proper what what is what's referring to society as well okay I was going to say what's the bird in this analogy?

Kyle Whittaker 37:26

But a healthy society needs both needs maybe, maybe but it has like the facts on the ground are that humans experience both of these things. And even pr even pre-science there was the sort of rationalist impulse, the intellectualist impulse science is a way of m making that m methodological and and and concrete and productive in certain pragmatic ways. But that has always been in the human species, right? It's it's a part of us, it's in our nature and so is the religious impulse. And again I think they both have their place. Maybe the bird analogy is a good one. I haven't thought carefully enough about it. But but the problem comes I think when you try to mix their methods and and we run into all sorts of error in both directions when we try to do that.

Chris Jones 38:11

So I try to keep a healthy distance between them while simultaneously recognizing the equal importance of with both and and this is a good place because I would say that you are somebody that could probably do this for others. People that are struggling and feel like that they can't do both what is there something you could say to them to make them a little more comfortable Yeah why not?

Kyle Whittaker 38:29

I mean I would like to have a conversation with with such persons yeah what what makes you think that you can't? Is it that you're holding on to something tightly in one sphere that makes it difficult for you to see how you could accept something you also want to accept in the other sphere? And if so, one why are you holding on so tightly to that thing? What's the what does it mean to you such that you know you think if you were to give it up you'd have to abandon something important to you and is that really true, you know? Or is it something that you've inherited from your community or or your culture or something else. Examine that is is would be one step of advice. Because I found that all the things that I thought were important I needed to hold on to in one sphere that made me think it was intention with something in the other sphere, on examination it turned out I was mistaken about something either either the facts or the importance of of the that I was placing on the facts, right? So for example, if if you want an example I wondered a lot about evolution at one point in my life and I thought that it was intention with certain religious convictions that I had. And I was wrong on both of those levels. I was wrong about the facts but I was also wrong about how intention it was you know the the connection I thought it had to the the the things in the other sphere.

Chris Jones 39:47

Tell us about that to give some more detail.

Kyle Whittaker 39:50

Yeah so I I thought I'm trying to remember what it was like to be in that place because it's been so long. I thought it was really important that I needed to get to the the bottom of of that because everybody in my circles had been uh totally convinced that if evolution were true, then what we think about God can't be and vice versa. You know, our trust of the Bible is unfounded. We're wrong about that. And with that goes everything else they thought. And so I thought that too and I was trying to get real you know trying real hard to get to the bottom of it. And it turned out that I was just I was fundamentally mistaken because they were all fundamentally mistaken because they how how could they not have been? They never tried to study it. They'd never had any informed people to talk to them about it. They were getting on with their lives like everybody else and accepting what their pastors were telling them. I was mistaken about what evolution was I just didn't know what it meant. And when I figured out what it meant, part of the urgency went away because it wasn't what I thought. It wasn't as threatening as I thought. But also when I had occasion to think about okay let's assume this is true in light of that, what does it really mean for these other religious beliefs that I think are important? And it turned out that the connection wasn't as strong as I thought that God could be every bit as loving and you know all the important things that I thought stood or f or fell with that issue. Like God was attentive to God's creation and that God was a create like that there was a creation, like God was actually behind the world in some sense. I didn't have to give up any of that by embracing you know the evolutionary view of the world. If anything it made it richer. It made it I don't know i and on the one hand it made it just accord better with the facts so I didn't have to like experience this cognitive dissonance all the time. But if I tried to think about those facts in a theological way, it wasn't any worse at all. If any if anything it was it was more beautiful and less fraught with potential ethical complications. So and it's worth saying that I was only able to do that because I was in a position of relative privilege, right? I had the resources and the time to process that in a way that a lot of people do not so I that's just a fact that I have to be open about a lot of people are not in a position to be able to go through a process like that. But and so for such people maybe hearing someone who had that privilege and who was able to do that say, you know, the water's fine on the other side don't don't be so don't be so worried about that. Maybe that'll be a little bit helpful for some folks who don't themselves have the time. Aaron Ross Powell I think it will because that that's a lot of turmoil for a lot of people that's a good example of the sort of keeping the methods distinct thing I was talking about. Because that whole confusion I think was created by blending the methods in a way that you ought not to have. The people who were asking theological questions were trying to do so in scientific ways and that was a mistake. And the people who cared about the scientific stuff and some of them were trying to overlay theological meaning on some of that stuff. And that's also a mistake.

Chris Jones 42:49

And so keeping them importantly distinct while equally important and live helps to resolve the pulpit should speak from the pulpit and the podium should speak from the podium stay in your lane and everything's good.

Kyle Whittaker 43:02

It's at least bet we don't have to there's enough problems in the world we don't have to invent new ones, you know? And and the evolution problem is an invented problem.

Chris Jones 43:09

Yeah. We're good at that take a few minutes and just give some last thoughts to everybody on this subject and for people who might be wrestling between faith and science, what advice could you give them in this process?

Kyle Whittaker 43:24

Honestly it's not important enough to wrestle with like objectively, right? But if it's important to you and it's something that you feel like you need to get to the bottom of, I really don't think you do. But if if you do, you know and I'm saying this to my past self, right? This is not as this is not important enough to spend the amount of hours that I spent in consternation over this issue and an argument with friends and whatever. But if you're the kind of person like I was who has to get to the bottom of it I could recommend some reading material if you want some some things that you could point to or go listen to the episode that we did on it where I think we do recommend some stuff.

Chris Jones 43:59

We have a couple episodes on that actually but on a pastor and philosopher walk into a bar obviously that's right.

Kyle Whittaker 44:06

I can send you a couple of links if you want to include those where we hash it out a little bit if you want to I'll post them up there in the episode for people.

Chris Jones 44:14

So what would you tell parents who have children and teenagers because this is something that teens and children are going to be you know wrestling with what could you tell parents that you know some advice for them and helping their children with it?

Kyle Whittaker 44:28

Trust experts to educate your children for you. Don't try to do it yourself unless you are yourself able to assess genuine expertise. And if you're not sure, then you're probably not. So you know, professional educators are not the boogeyman. They they chose that job because they want to educate your children and they're better at it than you probably are able to be. And they're not trying to indoctr for almost for by and large, you know, there are exceptions, obviously, but they're not trying to indoctrinate your kids. The people who are most likely to try to indoctrinate your kids are the ones telling you you ought not to listen to the professional experts. Be suspicious of those folks, the ones who are are trying to create controversy where none of the actual experts think controversy exists. So we can have a whole separate conversation about following the consensus of relevant experts. But my one piece of one-sentence advice is listen to the folks who know what they're talking about.

Chris Jones 45:27

Man, always love talking to you. This is awesome. Tell us about what you got going on and tell us about what's going on with the pastor and philosopher walking to a bar.

Kyle Whittaker 45:34

Yeah, we've taken sort of a winter hiatus. So if you look at our our feed currently, you'll notice we haven't updated it in a while, but we're getting we're getting back on the wagon here soon. We we have several things in the queue. We've been talking to some interesting people recently. So I'd say in the next month or so you can start to expect regular episodes again.

Chris Jones 45:52

Yeah. Pastor and Philosopher walk into a bar. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Aaron Ross Powell I appreciate that. Yeah. And uh I brought up to Randy because I just had Randy, your your co-host on here. Yeah.

Kyle Whittaker 46:05

And uh was he a better inter interview guest than than me? You don't have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable. I was better though, right?

Chris Jones 46:12

You know, he is more of a protagonist and you are more of an antagonist. I'm just playing. Hey, Kyle, thanks so much, man. Oh, you're up. I will uh talk to you again soon. And uh oh, if people want to get in touch with you, I guess I should mention this. How do they get in touch with you? Because there might be some people have questions.

Kyle Whittaker 46:33

Yeah. Probably the easiest way through our show. So just Google a pastor and philosopher walking to a bar. You'll probably find our contact info there. Uh, we have an email address that I think is posted on there and in all of our show notes. Um, so that'd be the easiest way to reach me, most likely. And I'm yeah, I'm happy to yeah, talk to whoever. Man, I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Chris Jones 46:52

Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments, andor concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.