The Stand-Up Theologian
James Cary, BBC comedy writer, author and touring stand-up theologian is on a never-ending quest to understand comedy, the Bible, culture and the church.
The Stand-Up Theologian
Conspiracies, the Moon Landings and Thomas Aquinas? w/ Jonny Woodrow
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A deep dive into Conspiracy theories - not a big long list of them, but why we might believe them, or find it hard to prove them one way or the other. A fascinating conversation with Dr (Dr) Jonny Woodrow, host of the Stop it! You're Killing Me Podcast. Listen the episode with with Yours Truly here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/stop-it-youre-killing-me/id1738098579?i=1000717379359
Also mentioned:
The Sacred Art of Joking (Affiliate link)
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Welcome to the Stand Up Theologian Podcast. My name is James Carey. I am the Stand Up Theologian in question. And in this episode, I am talking about conspiracy theories. But you know what? We talk more about how we know things and what conspiracy theories are actually giving us and why people necessarily believe them or put them about. I'm talking to Johnny Woodrow, who is a Reformed Baptist pastor, but he also has a podcast.
SPEAKER_01He's great valley, he says stuff like this. You get into sourdough, you start clicking on links about sourdough, and before you know it, you're making sourdough for Hitler.
SPEAKER_02He's actually quoting a national newspaper at that point, would you believe?
SPEAKER_01Hyper skepticism is a form of mind leprosy, basically.
SPEAKER_03Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported yet.
SPEAKER_01Can I restory that for you? Can I can I can I do that? Sounds good, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_02Here we go. Johnny, thanks so much for joining me on the Stand Up Theologian podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much for having me. I've I very much enjoyed our chat that we had a few months ago on my little pod, my occasional pod. And so I'm I'm very pleased to uh to to pop on and keep chatting about some fun stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we did talk for quite a long time, and I'll I'll put a link to that interview in the show notes. If if this conversation has made you even more hungry for the sound of our voices, which I think we both find quite incredible, then you will be able to go and listen to that. But the way that the conversations you've had have developed, and I've listened to a few, and also the fact that you've been on the Delling Pod, which is James Dellingpole's podcast talking about Psalms, uh, because you're also a Christian minister. Can you guess why I might have said, Oh, what could I talk to Johnny about? Conspiracy theories. Why why do I think you might be conversant in this world of conspiracy theories?
SPEAKER_01Well, well, well, well, because I'm guessing, because I I've been chatting to a few people who have sort of even folks who would that the world would label up as conspiracy theorists would sort of struggle with sort of saying their world, as it were. Right. Um, I think because because um it's not although there is a sort of a subculture to it and there is a language to it in certain areas, it it it also it and I think this has happened in the lot since the COVID. Yeah, it now bleeds into what once was mainstream so people coming out of mainstream media, yeah, folks who so you sort of think about somebody like in the in the states like Tucker Carlson or something like that, yeah. Somebody like that was on Fox News, who I guess, depending on whatever your political persuasion was, maybe everyone always thoughts Fox News was a kind of um uh staged sort of um conspiracy outlet or something.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_01People going onto their own media platforms with GB News popping up and then it ex a whole load of folks exiting that. So ex-journalists and then setting up their own podcasts, things that people like um Dan Wooden. I don't know if any listeners listen to, or used to listen to GB News. Folks like uh Naomi Wolfe, who is known as a leading feminist one over the last few decades, actually, and was involved in high-level White House advisory roles um for the Clintons and leading feminist sort with the COVID stuff and starting to uh do some investigations into women's health and reproductive health or health around Pfizer vaccines, found herself booted from all her uh old, typically Democrat-led um media platforms, stopped being invited onto talk shows and that sort of thing, and found herself talking to some unlikely fellas from another part of the American wing of uh sort of uh political establishments.
SPEAKER_02Yes, unlikely bedfellows, particularly over um let's call them injections. Oh, this isn't on YouTube, so it doesn't matter, we can call them vaccinations. Yeah. But I guess as you were saying about this uh lady who uh Naomi Wolf, she was essentially, I guess, cancelled. And to this extent to which conspiracy theory is the byproduct or the flip side of cancel culture, isn't it? Because these people don't suddenly stop talking, they just go, they just start talking in places that don't have the mainstream media gatekeepers like before, but they find this, they find this coalition amongst other people.
SPEAKER_01So I I think to come back to your sort of original original question, I think I started I can started connecting with folks who growing up as I did in the sort of the 80s. I don't know if you had this experience, there was all some mates who the what the internet wasn't really get wasn't there, was it? No, and there were some mates who had something about the pyramids being uh a book by about the pyramids being built by aliens or something like that.
SPEAKER_02Near-death experiences, 14 times stuff before we get to the 90s. Oh, what was it? Um adult human spontaneous combustion was one. Oh yes!
SPEAKER_01Do you remember that guy when gotten that one? Yes, yeah, with leaving sort of outline, darkened outlines and a pair of shoes.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and there's a reference to it in Spinal Tap, isn't it? One of their drummers.
SPEAKER_04He exploded on stage. Just like that. It just went up. It just was like a flash of green light, and that was it. Nothing was left of his face. Well, there was that true, there's true. There was a little green globule on a drum seat. It's like a stain, really. It was a small stain in a globule, actually, anyway.
SPEAKER_03You know, dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, it wasn't in mainstream media, and then when um David Icke started saying some stuff about lizard people in the moon as a hollowed-out satellite, and did so on Wogan, there was the kind of the two kind of, and that was an explosive and formative moment for him and and and what he did. But what happened post-COVID, I remember so during COVID, the the the COVID era did some did some terrible things um to people, and the kind of overreach has left people going something, some somebody somewhere or some people somewhere, for some reason decided on some lockstep policies across the West in response to a huge fear campaign, whether whether, you know, and and at that moment, that's what supercharges those who've said, see, we always knew that there was this these sinister plans to to move to population management, that sort of thing. From what I've heard, Naomi Wolfe, who's serious academic, uh Oxford D Phil, um written number of books, uh, you know, uh, and used to be a guardian columnist and the rest of it, then looks at this kind of government overreach, the curtailment of being able to see your family, to be able to freedom of travel, freedom of speech, experiencing being cancelled herself by mainstream media, has a sense that something really quite evil is happening. Yeah, and in what I've heard her say is then then she starts going, okay, if there's something this evil, there must be an answer to it that that would be good. And so she starts talking about God and she starts reading the Bible. Now, I followed a little bit of Naomi Wolfe stuff. My academic background um has me r reading from very left wing, uh I I sort of stuff on sort of postmodernism and that kind of thing. That's the and I enjoy reading that kind of stuff. I think I think it's quite interesting. But also uh during the COVID period, I was I was at home thinking, okay, you can't see family, you can't gather for worship, you can't work, and in my understanding, biblically, but also just from a natural law perspective, if you're gonna deal with any kind of illness on any kind of scale, you need an economy functioning, you need family to be able to look look after one another, and you need to be able to gather for worship. My theology of worship is the presence of God is there. So initially, so immediately, I didn't need to get in the stats, I thought something terrible was happening. So I started listening to James Dellingpole. Here's the connection, right? Yes, and Dellingpole, well-known journalist from you know writing The Spectator and all those sorts of things, and he did this series of podcasts with Laura Perrens, who's another journalist, okay, mainstream writers on the BBC and the rest of it. And Laura Perrens has a brilliant way of putting things, and she's she's Catholic, um, and so has a strong natural law sort of approach to life. So, all this is to say is that you the the worlds that were once funny things that teenage boys kind of read and passed around uh from you know, uh but was quite peculiar and niche started to bleed together in various ways. And I I don't know if you were aware, during the COVID thing, there was there was a the stand in the park protests where so people would gather on a Sunday. I didn't know about this actually until recently. Um and there they were so folks from all sorts of backgrounds from who might have been involved with you know, read some stuff about the aliens and pyramids and all that sort of stuff, um or were medical professionals who thought that bad things and bad policy was happening and that there was there were other agendas at play and didn't want lockdowns, stood in parks, and there were regular meetings uh sort of about 10:30 when you know other people would Christians would be going to church if their church was was open and and that sort of thing. And people started to meet uh in those contexts and started to ask questions about good and evil, right and wrong. And we've had folks come along to the church who met and formed strong relationships during the the Stand in the Park protests, um, who had decided to pick up Bibles and start reading Bibles because they wanted to get us a bit like Russell Brand started reading the Bible out, and people are always sort of fighting over what his motivation is. Um Naomi Wolfe, who's Jewish, starts reading through the Geneva Bible and doing a podcast about it, and we had folks who really wanted to know what was in the Bible, yeah. Um, and then James Denningpoul started his um his Psalms podcast, and I I got invited on that, and there's actually there's a few people from um from I suppose you say sort of conservative evangelicalism popped up on there.
SPEAKER_02I think I had three or four of them, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, um, and and he another one wanted to get dig out his sort of cultural Christianity upbringing from the the the kind of particular schools that he'd been to and that sort of thing, and start investigating the Bible. Um and as a as a Bible-believing Christian who you know is a minister, um uh you you don't argue with somebody who wants to well, somebody somebody comes to you and says, Can you explain to me what's in the Bible? Yeah, you go, yeah, okay. Yes, that's right.
SPEAKER_02I think I'm up for that. You don't need to be Philip the evangelist and the Ethiopian eunuch to, you know, what is this talking about? Is it talking about another or someone, you know, or himself, or uh it's like, oh, okay, well, I think this might be an evangelistic opportunity, sure.
SPEAKER_01Um so so I've met folks who they're they're they're not lunatics, they are they are people who uh have a deep sense that there's something wrong with the world, and they they research things to the nth degree, but there are patterns of thinking within those circles that actually one of the one of the things that I find interesting is are starting to sound like and match the patterns of thinking that you get around progressive wokery. Okay. So, in a sense, I think this is my I think we're all conspiracy theorists now. Right. Um, and in fact, I was reading uh uh an article that popped up on the on my Apple news stream thing. It was in the independent, and it was so this might be a slightly straw-manning way of putting it, but but the summary was there's all these trad wives, right? It all starts off with sourdough. You get into sourdough, you start clicking on links about sourdough, and before you know it, you're making sourdough for Hitler, right?
SPEAKER_02Hitler's at the down the down the sourdough famous fan of sourdough, yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And the way it leads you down there is it keeps giving you, because we know the social media algorithms kind of kind of work on the dopamine hit. We're all now sort of cattle being led to by dopamine hits from sourdough to Nazism. Right. And I thought, okay, there is issues with social media, the way in which it reshapes knowledge and our interaction with knowledge and all that kind of stuff. But I I this article was in independent, so there's something about the way in which that thinking happens that is kind of fear-mongery. If you think this about uh an inconsequential thing, you must end up thinking this about a consequential thing, yeah, and those kind of connections, which are happening in the mainstream media actually about certain things, and it mirrors certain four ways in which certain air certain circles within the what let's call it the conspiracy theory world, just because I can't think of another way to think, have also started to do it. If you think this, then you're in, if you think that, yeah, then you're out, and you're controlled opposition and you're you're a dangerous person.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So there's a kind of a purity spiral happening in a number of different places, and it's not so in that sense, we I think we're all we're all somehow descending into some kind of everything is consequential, even the the tapping of the walking stick by the man over the road on this is GK Cheston has a wonderful page in his book Orthodoxy, where he's he's he talks about okay, let's start with madness. Is Christianity a form of madness? Oh yes, and he describes a conspiracy theorist, yeah, doesn't use that phrase, but the guy who sees somebody walking on the grass, tapping walking his walking stick along, and then thinks, okay, the tapping of the walking stick is a code to a handler somewhere, standing on the grass is a is an invasion of property rights, and somehow the person who's observed this is the enemy now of it, everything is set is referred to the person who could code it, and there's something about the way we do knowledge these days that everybody if somebody thinks that uh I and I encountered this recently, and it is and it pastorally it's devastating. If somebody thinks that the Bible's been changed to remove bread, to remove meat and replace it with bread, because for centuries, people the cabal have wanted us to eat wheat in order to undermine our metabolism and and turn us into controllable people. And the Bible's been changed on that. And then over here in the independence, somebody's saying you sourdough, yeah, trad wifery, which leads you into a cult, which leads you into, and at the bottom of the cult is kind of fascism and follow Nazism and and ethno-nationalism, um, and it's all connected, uh, and it's your dopamine that's gonna get you there, then I I'm like that there's some interesting parallels here. Yes. Before you even get to the truth of the thing, there's just some interesting ways of thinking.
SPEAKER_02They're there parallels, they are modes of thinking, they are trajectories, they are corresponding theories that can't both be true. And I think that's the thing that's my frustration, particularly listening to the Delling Pod on which he'd been, is A, there is the assumption that if you believe the moon landings were real, you're obviously there's no point talking to you. So I personally do believe the moon landings were real. Okay. I think quite a lot of the proof of that was fake because basically it's quite hard to take pictures and all that kind of stuff. So I'm perfectly prepared to believe, and there was a very good episode of The Haunted Cosmos about this recently, and those guys are completely down the rabbit hole spiritually speaking, um, about giants and all that kind of stuff. But actually, the technological miracle of getting to the moon and back, I think, is partly because there were so many Christians working at NASA, the power of prayer alone got those guys there and back again. When we had absolutely no right to expect that those guys weren't essentially committing suicide. I think it's I think what they did was bonkers, and I think they got away with it because God is way kinder than we think. However, when people start to imag to examine footage and all that kind of stuff, I think they're seeing seeing holes in it because what do you know the official photographs don't quite represent so there's that which is very frustrating. So you you get these purity tests straight away. Yes. And then there's also this sense of there are whole there are these all of these other conspiracy theories as well. And the more you listen to them, the more you think they can't all be true. Okay. So are we run by Freemasons or the Rothschilds or this other cabal or Davos, which is you know, in one sense, I think Davos, Davos is the conspiracy theory hiding in plain sight. It's just billionaires and powerful leaders talking to each other. I mean, it's like, of course it's a conspiracy. Look at them. There they are. It was the Bilderberg group, it was a secret thing, and now it's a public thing. It's the same people having the same conversations. Tony Blair, the great internationalist, has got all kinds of harebrain schemes completely out in the open. He's cooking up with Bill Gates. And if they weren't on public record, you would say they were conspiracy theories because they're so globalist and controlling in so many different ways. And I just wish they just shut up and mind their own business. It's just like just stop trying to help everybody and just sort yourselves out and just you know, um, it's very frustrating. But all of these and and also the other thing that um doesn't happen, my big beef on this. So let's take, for example, the conspiracy theory of chemtrails, okay, which is not a very widespread thing that people talk about. But the idea is essentially there are planes in the sky that are controlling the weather and also dropping various chemicals that are affecting the climate but also affecting people. I don't really know what the theory is because at no point do I ever hear anybody actually try to explain it and make the case. So they've had various chemtrails people on the Delling Pod to which I would say, Am I open to the idea that the government is mass poisoning people and not telling anyone? Yes, yes, I am, because also they've done it in the past. Is are they doing it with chemtrails? I don't know. Could you please explain to me your evidence? Please could you lay it out in a way that is just you know, because more people are like me than than down the rabbit hole, so just make the case, and they they kind of can't do it, and that for me is the red flag that it feels like an internal logical system, which kind of makes sense, but there's no way in to some extent, being a Calvinist who believes in predestination, uh faith is a gift from God that you have to be granted, and once you're in, you're in, and once you're in, you think, Well, how did I get here? to quote talking heads. But these conspiracy theories just seem to have that kind of circular loop, which again has that whiff, as you say, of the religious about it. And I think one of my observations, which I'll be interested in your theory on, is these are replacement religions because they're about the truth, so-called, and meaning, but crucially they don't make any demands on you personally. So you can spend your whole life thinking about aliens and UFOs and whether there's going to be some gigantic disclosure. And there are some great Christians in that space doing stuff like Tim Alberino and those sorts of guys, and the haunted cosmos guys, and all that kind of stuff. And Christians sort of ponder this stuff, but we go to church and we think about the Bible and how to live and how to behave, how to serve God and that kind of thing. But an awful lot of that world is very much, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? And it becomes a religion which doesn't actually make you call your mum because you've just not called her very often, and doesn't and stops you from lying or not cheating on your tax return, or not just stealing stuff from work, or and actually being kind and not swearing so much, and all those sorts of things. So I you know, to what extent do you think it is sort of a religion for secular people?
SPEAKER_01Okay, in in no particular order. Um yes and no. And Christians and there there there's a common I think so there's some highly moral people in it who are really concerned about good or evil. And uh and Delling Paul's one of those. He really is really concerned about it. And connected to that it is there there are lifestyle changes that happened, and some of those become quite ritualistic. So I think there are problems with seed oils. I I imagine. I'd I'd like you can go and look at scientific papers and the rest of it. But but so they're not they're not offshoots of the petrochemical industry. Uh you've got I think it's just a practical natural law thing to sort of say I I think probably animal products closer to the processing of animal foods is is probably better than things that are petrochemical. But you know, the right, but there are some folks that would would get themselves into into a kind of a new sort of personal purity kind of mindset, right? And this this is the thing that happens, it happens both in the conspiracy world and let's say in the COVID world. So so where something very small and inconsequential suddenly takes on immense consequences for the con the cosmos. At this point, it is it is religious in that sense. So for instance, totemic, you know, yeah, uh there's panic, and and uh so I I I I've known folks who have had uh panic about what they're eating, and so aren't thinking in terms of God's providence, um, because they're worried that if it's got a seed oil in it or something, or if it's a bread product, so they've taken the sort of carnivore diet to the point of this is it's not planet saving in an environmental way, it's kind of planet saving in a kind of a sinister um big big agricultural kind of way. Um, and and I'm saving my family, and there's a there's a locked-in panic, and I and I look at that and say that is not the freedom that uh the there's a new kind of food laws that starts to emerge kind of way of thinking. So so I I I think there is something about the conspiracy world that's highly moral people uh who are really and can enslave themselves to that kind of knob twiddling thinking. But there are also people, and these are the ones that I just find I I just don't get where they're coming from, who will claim that everything is fake. Right, and they will go out, they'll do the Sandy Hook thing, you know, that that didn't happen. Uh well, you know, and the thing about being Christian is you tend to know pastors and churches across the world, and you know people in those sort of scenarios, or the the Southport stabbings of those three little girls, and immediately people jumping on, and they're well-known conspiracy writers, and they'll say, Oh, it's fake, it's false flag, it's fake, and they always put the burden of proof on they go, Well, imagine it could have been a fake, and then you have to show how it wasn't, which is uh how are you getting on?
SPEAKER_02Hope you're enjoying this episode. It didn't turn out the way I'd planned, but I'm loving it. It's such an interesting conversation rather than just being a boring exchange about which conspiracy theories we believe and aghast at the stupid ones and all that kind of stuff. Uh, I'm really enjoying it. And there is an extended version of this, which is available to loyal lollards, that is, subscribers to the Wickcliff Papers. Now, the Wickcliffe Papers is my weekly Thursday funny newsletter, drops every Thursday with some headlines that are aimed at people who know their Bibles and know a bit of church history. It's a bit like the Babylon Be, if you're familiar with that, or The Onion back in the day, but with a lot fewer jokes about politics and not particularly barbed in that way, more geeky and fun than anything else. And if that sounds like it's your cup of tea, then why don't you go over to the Wycliffe Papers? And then paid subscribers of the Wycliffe Papers are called Loyal Lollards, and that is the membership for this podcast as well. And what that will mean if you become a loyal lollard, A, you're just keeping the show on the road and keeping the lights on here at Carey Towers, which would be very kind of you to do. But it also means that when I take a break after series one of this podcast, season two will be back later this year, uh, because I can't stop podcasting and absolutely certainly I'll be back with another season. But there will be lots of audio in the interim, including audio and uh visual words on the page version of Psalm Supplement, which I gave you a sample of last week on the solo episode. Lots of words beginning with S that I like to put a P in front of. So why don't you go on over to the Wickliffe papers if you'd like extra audio? And actually, if you do want more audio, A, you could go and listen to the podcast I did with Johnny over on Stop Your Killing Me. But also you could go and get the Sacred Art of Joking, which is an audio book. And it was recorded by me about five years ago, and it's about how jokes work and how they go wrong. And I had an email from my agent who said, Oh, they're renewing the rights on this, so that is, and I thought, oh, I could re-record it myself and sell it myself, and I just thought I can't be bothered with that. I'll just leave it up there because people might want to listen to it. So go on over to Audible if you use that and download the Sacred Art of Joking. And if you've got a surplus of credits like I do, then uh you could go and listen to that. I think it gets me almost no money because I don't think it's earned out the advance. So that isn't a get rich quick scheme for me. It's not even get rich slow, it's not even get rich at all. So if you enjoy that, uh and enjoy comedy, how it works, why people get upset, then uh go and go and listen to that. There isn't yet an audio version of my other book, The Gospel According to a Sitcom writer, but I feel that there should be one of those before too long. Anyway, I've yammered enough in the middle of this podcast that we're talking about conspiracy theories, and it gets even more interesting as we talk about how we know anything at all and how the fabric of reality works, and oh, it's just great fun. Anyway, uh let's get back to it. Here we go. So the the burden of proof I think becomes impossible because I don't think reality itself withstands that level of scrutiny. So if you subjected, say, the launching of the QE2 to the same standard as the moon landings or the JFK assassination, if you just said, Oh, by the way, there's no such thing as the QE2, it never existed. There was no such boat, prove to me that it was. And I'm gonna or just like Prime Minister's question time last week didn't happen. Prove me wrong. Yeah, and you go, but then they were there were literally 400 people. Oh, yeah, no, it looked like it happened. No, absolutely. Have you spoken to your MP about what they were there? Were they there? Um, do they know what was said? Well, of course they know what was said. They've seen the video, haven't they? Oh it's exhausting because I you can't you can't pass that burden of proof.
SPEAKER_01So there is a hyperskepticism, and but but but actually the the world is resistant to hyperscepticism. Hyperskepticism is a kind of form of mind leprosy, basically. And and it's a hyper-rationalism, it's a particular philosophy that does the soaring the branch off that you're you're standing on. There are some aspects of this in the conspiracy theory world. Um, I'm a bit like you know, we're sort of like the Beatles were just there to send us all into social and moral degradation and that kind of thing, and and all movies are really showing you uh revealing the method that um you know they're pre-programming us to believe and want certain things and this kind of thing. The the hyperscepticism approach not only can never establish that anything is real and actually is built on a view that there is nothing real, that that all all is all is pure perception, and so we've got to actually, as Christians, work out why not all is per pure perception, and unfortunately, dominant modes of Christian thinking in reformed and conservative evangelicalism opts in for the idea that actually perception is all because we're all actually quite Kantian. Bart was, right, and so is Van Til. Van Tillians don't like hearing that, but you go read Karl Barth, you go read Van Till, and you go read Kant, and you realize that Van Til and Kant were both uh and Bart both basically accepted Immanuel Kant's view of how the mind interacts with the world, and then said, Don't worry though, because God's bigger than that, and he's the big revelation that breaks through the Kantian system. But everything else then does boil down to perspective, and you just have to have the Christian perspective, and that will help you out. But it still assumes that the real world, the thing in itself, doesn't contribute. Yeah, and so there's a there's I think we've got several different sort of thought worlds that are all doing the same thing. You've got the hyper skeptical conspiracy theory world that will say everything is a projection, everything is fake, yeah, and so nothing is worth saving. Yeah, and then you get the real world.
SPEAKER_02So I think the most extreme version of that one you've just highlighted is the fact that we are living in a simulation and that everything is code, and that we are code.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, with all projection theories, you have to deposit some real spot outside that it's being projected from in some kind of way. Now, actually, just to go philosophical, that's Kant's problem. Kant also said that effectively. Um, so it's it's very Kantian and it and then it sort of develops, um, it it gets Hegelian, so you and it's like Hegel read off the back of a cereal packet that really the world is a massive projection. We are all part of the one, and we are all just trying to get our consciousness developing itself in some kind of way in this simulated reality uh where we're we're creating our own moral problems, but you know, uh but we're all going to retreat to the one in some kind of way, and if we could just get out of our bodies, then it'll be fine. That's David Icke. That's David Icke's kind of view.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_01But there's that Gnosticism. Yeah, Gnosticism, and like nothing is worth saving in the world. Nothing. Because it really there's nothing really evil or good, and everything that there is is just a big perception trick. Well, you go over to the the kind of the the woke Marxists who are also drinking from Kant and Hegel, and the you know, the real progressive kind of um the progressive neo-Marxist sorts, uh, the mind is the true thing, and what you think is true is true. So if I think I'm a woman, then my body has nothing to say about it. Right. So the real world, the thing in itself, doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the discussion. It's another form of hyper-rationalism. And guess what? There's nothing worth saving in the world because everything that appears to be solid and fixed and a given is just there as an oppressive thing to be overcome. So, in that kind of radical progressivist view, there are no givens in the world, there is no thing in itself. If you claim there is, it's a power move. Wow. Over on the conspiracy theory world, if you claim there's anything given in the world, it's a power move, it's somebody trying to manipulate your perception. So you've got these two kind of parallel universes drinking from the same sort of pop philosophical kind of view. And my concern is that there's a particular strand of Christianity that go that sort of plays the same game in a sense that says the real is your belief in Jesus, who is the cognitive principle that organizes our perception and gives our correct perception, but we don't have very much to say about the thing in itself. And my my key piece of evidence for that is the way in which the natural law tradition has dropped out largely of um reformed thinking, and we become a form of hyper-rationalism. So you go to David Icke. No, it's not aliens. What unit you're you're you've designed your own religion, it's it's not it's not lizards in the moon. Um, you go to the um the neo-Marxists, and you go, no, no, no, it's not your own version of Gnosticism. If you could both just switch out Jesus into your main a priori cognitive thinking zone, you would upgrade your software and then you would see the world clearly. Um and then and then what you do is you do a move where you go, and we're all really telling the same stories. There's parallels between all our three stories, isn't there? Ours is the most real because there was a resurrection, yeah, yeah, and we do wins them, and then you sort of sidle up a bit and you go, Well, it's a bit like that. Can I restory that for you? Yeah, you're can I can I do can I do that? And that what I've discovered is that doesn't play out actually very well, yeah. Um, because it's it's actually problematic, it's it's it's post-Kantian.
SPEAKER_02Anyway, there you go. That's really helpful. I think the natural law thing is a really big piece here because I my my own sort of conservative evangelical upbringing, and that's a tradition that's kind of put rocket fuel into my face, um, is very, very skeptical, skeptical of natural law to the point where it's not a thing, uh, absolutely particularly within modern conservative evangelicalism. And as we were talking at the very beginning of this conversation, there was that sense in which so-called normies, Christian or non-Christian, were looking at the world and just thinking, this doesn't seem right. Well, that's kind of natural law, and we would say, Oh, you have you have absolutely no basis on which to say that the only thing that's real is what is defined by the Bible that will tell you what is real, as opposed to I'm looking at something and I think it's disgusting. Um well, it doesn't matter, your your own emotions are unreliable, so for forget about those completely. So if you're looking at somebody of one gender and being invited to see them as another gender, your brain is just going, I don't know what I'm looking at here, and you're like, Yeah, so you are immediately trying to work someone's uh gender. And when you can't tell, it is quite disorientating, isn't it? And so if you see someone and you just think, Oh, I actually can't tell, it's the uncanny valley, isn't it? It's like, is that a robot or is it a person? Is that a man or is it a woman? And that's kind of natural law. And so we've been so heavily indoctrinated into now do not trust your emotions by both neo-Marxists and conservative Christians, yes, particularly anti-charismatic conservative Christians, because charismatics, oh blind, they're all they're all over it with their emotions, completely emotionally incontinent, can't trust them. And this opens the door for false teaching and false promises about oh, I've got a picture for you that you're gonna end up doing X, Y, and Z, and then they don't, and that's all fine. And so the the Enlightenment thinking, which is dominant in conservative angelicalism, which is also dominated by Oxbridge graduates who have achieved success in the elite academic institutions, and therefore they've completely drunk the Kool-Aid on all of that stuff, and their opposition to conspiracy theories, is it's inherently ridiculous. The idea that children are being abducted and then subjected to ritual abuse, it's ridiculous. To which I would say child sacrifice is in the Bible and has happened in virtually every culture, but we're so good that we don't do it. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, that is quite interesting. Is it sort of we are the we are the pinnacle cultures that have left that all behind in some places? Apart from obviously the abortion of literally hundreds of thousands uh of fetuses as well. Let's just pass over that uh bloodbath, that's you know, sacrament uh of of a particular view. So yeah, it's it's really interesting that we're sort of there there are people in the middle who wouldn't call themselves Christians but are just thinking something's wrong here.
SPEAKER_01There's an there's a few places where Paul in the New Testament will appeal to the non-Christian world looking in at the church and being appalled. Yeah. So, you know, the fame the one 1 Corinthians 5 and the bloke sleeping with his mother-in-law or m whatever, you know, or his mother, his dad's wife. Or even in the way in which there are some cheeky widows taking a load of cash from the church in in 1 Timothy chapter 5, and they're bringing disrepute. Well, that assumes, and of course, he's quite happy to quote poets and philosophers, um, and the book of Proverbs is filled with Proverbs from el elsewhere that assume a kind of a uh a weave to the world that can be read and understood, cause and effect, and all those sorts of things, and tet and tendencies, patterns of things. The non-Christian that has that all available to them. There are certain things that I found a revulsion amongst non-Christians that I think put this the church to shame, and it was particularly over certain aspects of COVID, partly because perhaps the church people in the church weren't kind of aware of some of these things, or there's a general assumption that the government always has your best interests at heart or something like that, um, and that it might not have been at that moment taken over by sort of uh crazed technocrats who just sort of think that humanity is a stock that you can sort of move around and reduced your humanity to um to a biosecurity kind of approach to life. You know, there's a a digital ID, a digital ID, those sort of things, and and you sort of find there are non-Christians who have a visceral response to that and go, ugh. But and this is this is I think from those who've been schooled in a particular form of hyper-rational Christianity, that they might go, Oh, you don't have a right to that response because you didn't think Jesus first. You're not allowed morality because only people who begin with the thought Jesus can then come up with why there's a morality, and so so it sort of wrong foots the conversation. But to be able to go, actually, uh Christian and non-Christian, we're all under God's moral law, which is expressed in the Ten Commandments, but is built into humanity at a certain level, so we all know it. And it's not just an idea, it's because the fabric of the world operates like that in some kind of way, and so some non-Christians might actually come alongside the church and go, you lot repulse me because you are breaking moral law and you've got some clever theology about why that's fine. Yeah, and and I actually came across that and it and it and I thought, oh wow, where uh and I and I was hearing stuff from Catholics, right? You know, get justification by faith wrong. Yeah, they do get justification by faith wrong in their catechism. Yes, they have got a funny idea about the Pope and all the rest of it, but they've actually done a really good job, and you know, it's a it's a broad church of thinking about moral law, and they are pre-Kantian. Now, you know, that the the Enlightenment has a whole number of characters who are problematic from Descartes to Hume to Kant, but Kant has a particular contribution he makes where he does reduce, he separates us from the world in a particular way and puts the focus on psychology and the organizing principles in the head, which are the only place that you can make sense of anything, and even God himself is the necessary thought, but we can't get at him. And what he did was that then he ruled out all of the older metaphysics of the is-ness of a thing. But what went with that was the older understanding, the common sense understanding of how we actually know the world. We are in it, we participate with it. When somebody walks into a room, you don't decide to see them as a man or a woman. The very form that is inherent in their being as form, material, you know, the old four causes, the form informs your intellect. Now, the person that wrote about that most clearly is Thomas Aquinas. And he was not struggling with a Kantian kind of can I get at the world or not? His view of how we know things is a participatory approach. If I walk into a chair in the middle of the night and it smacks into my knee and causes me pain, it's not because I have a pre-programmed cognitive a priori uh pre-loaded schema of chairs in my head, it's because the form at the material of the thing just interacted with my knee, and various other sort of um causal connections kicked off. So we've got to return to, I think, a pre-enlightenment approach to how reality itself, how we participate in reality and we're not cut off from reality. Yeah, and and the the the the form of um the kind of the extreme wokery, the kind of conspiracy, it's all a projection, and I need to think Jesus first, otherwise I can't know anything. Oh, and if I do know Jesus first, I can know things better than anybody else. Yeah. The Van Til kind of approach. All operate on a very defunct view of the the the reality of the thing in itself and natural law. And so there aren't resources in any of them actually to have a meaningful conversation between themselves. That's my particular view.
SPEAKER_02That's very helpful. And I think listeners are now just thinking, wow, you've very we've very much learned into the theologian part of the stand-up theologian podcast. Do we need more gags? All I think is, no, no, this this podcast is just about stuff that I find interesting. We should do a separate episode on Aquinas because I don't understand Aquinas, and I know that he was an absolutely huge deal. After Augustine, Aquinas' effect on Western thinking seems to be up there.
SPEAKER_01I think so, as a Protestant, as I'm a Reformed Baptist, our church is a uh 1689 church. That's only happened in the last uh uh year, in fact, but we've been teaching through. So I'm I'm a Protestant that's finding his way into Aquinas, but I'm doing so as so I've just written this thesis looking at a particular modern theologian's use of Aquinas and Bart.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_01Um that's John Webster, but I I have a previous PhD in psychology and epistemology and Kant and um and um neo-Marxist and Marxist approaches to technology and the mind. So that was my so in one sense, I this I realize I've always been obsessed with how do we know things and how do we account for how we know things. But what I'm discovering as I'm going through Aquinas is this is the the anchor point for ab sailing into Aquinas, so you know you've got your safety rope, right? Okay, yep. He he's using technical language for common sense and what everybody knows, right? Already knows. It's the old does the postmodernist walk out in front of a bus and go the bus isn't there, it's just a social construction. No, they don't, because they know they're gonna get crushed by the bus. Yeah, and really that old medieval world was using metaphysical language to describe the is-ness of things and the why do we we we immediately know that a chair is not an elephant and those sorts of things. How what is it about chairs and elephants? So actually, and this is the this is the thing that that bites conspiracy theory on the backside when it ends up in its hyper-rationalism, wokery when it ends up in its hyper-rationalism, and where the church gets called to account because of its hyper-rationalism, they all get bitten on the bum by reality that won't go away. And so I'm an optimist, not only because I believe that God, uh the Lord Jesus is returning, but also because he built a world that is real, and as much as we want to cover our eyes for all sorts of different reasons and go la la la, it's not there, it is there, and we're going to walk into it. Great. Oh, and by the way, just a resource. My new favourite non-um Reformed theologian is Thomas Joseph White, um, who's a um Catholic who's actually written on the effects of post-Kantian thinking on how we understand God and the rest of it. He does a uh you can get Aquinas 101 on YouTube. Great. And they're brilliant, they're so good at explaining stuff.
SPEAKER_02Okay, well, I will seek that out and put a link to it in the show notes. And then this is one of the last podcasts in this current season of the Stand Up The Legend podcast. I suspect we should probably regroup in a few months and do a bit more Thomas Aquinas, because he seems pretty foundational to me in terms of his impact and uh on our way of thinking. Let's everyone just calm down, okay? Uh, I'm gonna finish with C.S. Lewis. Good. Everything's fine, remain calm. You cannot go on seeing through things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. Um how? Uh if you saw through the garden too, it's no use trying to see through first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see. So that's quite a good way of wrapping things up, I think, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yes, I think so. Uh in fact, the place to land is Thias Lewis, his book, The Abolition of Man, diagnoses the problem that we've been talking about.
SPEAKER_02It does. It's it's a hard book to read. I interviewed Dr. Michael Ward about that hideous strength, which is the more fun fictional version, because I do think that the abolition of man is uh is hard to read, but Ward has also written a commentary on the abolition of man, and so go back and listen, folks, uh, to that episode if you've not heard it. But I think we will return to this subject in future episodes. Anyway, Johnny Woodrow, thank you so much. Dr. Johnny Woodrow. In fact, seem to be Dr Doctor Johnny Woodrow if you've got two PhDs. Do you get to have both doctors?
SPEAKER_01I don't know. I've never really used the first one. I keep forgetting to use. I had to do a DBS check for him this morning and I couldn't put doctor on it because I never got it on my passport. Ah, I see.
SPEAKER_00Well I just suffer with imposter syndrome. That's why I've gone for a second PhD, so I can feel valid validation for the first one, you know.
SPEAKER_02So, talking of imposter syndrome, go and listen to the podcast. Stop it, you're killing me. And uh, you can hear Johnny uh talk to all kinds of different people and interesting voices in his world. Uh that's worth a listen. Including the one where you talk to me if you're not already sick of the sound of our voices. Johnny, thanks so much for joining me on the stand-up theologian podcast.
SPEAKER_01Bye.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's probably enough to be going on with, isn't it? Thanks so much to my guest, to Johnny, and thanks for listening all the way to the bitter end. I hope you found it as interesting as I did. That's how I judge these things. If I find it interesting, I tend to assume that you're gonna find it interesting too. That's also the approach I take with Carrie's Almanac, which is my Friday newsletter where I write about church history and the liturgical calendar and the seasons and all that kind of stuff too. I know I just keep doing too many things, I forget to mention them all. But anyway, that's enough for now. Go into the show notes to see some links, and I'll speak to you next time. Is this how it ends?
unknownYeah.