Excuse me I'm just eating peanut chips. Hello and welcome to another episode of Into the Void. This is your host officially now, legally, Annie K. That's A-N-N-I-E. Last name is K-K-A-Y-E. Now you're in the know. Well, at my upstate home and my ex Daniel is staying with me. We broke up before the pandemic, like right before the pandemic. And when I say we broke up, I broke up with him and I haven't seen him since in person. This is the first time I'm seeing him in person since, but before the pandemic. That's a long time. And he's changed and I've changed. And it's been lovely hanging out with him. It's been so, so nice. He is such a sweetheart and he's so smart. And like I haven't had the pleasure of conversation like this in quite a while. And I like speaking to a man when I can ask questions and he can educate me. I appreciate that. Like I don't want to necessarily always be the smartest one in the room. If you know what I mean. I can be hard to find someone. And I know that makes me sound maybe a little bit conceited, but I think it's just realistic. Like I'm not smarter than the average bear, but oh well. Here's the point I'm trying to make. I'm going to segue to Dan and I having one of our really fun intellectual conversations. And I hope you guys can enjoy it also. This is again your host, Annie Kay. The show is into the void. And the day is Sunday. I'll get something. And oh, get you my Peter chips. Oh, look at this. This is very handy. It's Sunday. No, it's not Sunday. It's Friday. Wow. Okay. I'm just oriented. This happens to me and it's embarrassing. Like I don't like for that reason. I just don't like. I kind of joke about it a lot, but this dissociative disorder causes a lot of difficulties for me in life. And things that are really hard to explain. So I just don't explain them. But like I just was getting into a whole thing with my building. About a missing package because I look to see. If it had been delivered and it had been delivered, but I didn't remember. I ever receiving it or seeing any of the seven items of clothing I'd order that were in it. I mean, seven items all below $100. It wasn't like a crazy, crazy purchase. It was probably like around, you know, $200 of clothing. It wasn't, you know, I buy like very cheap used stuff, but it was still significant. And I was upset. I'm like, I go through this whole thing with, I write the building. I write, I write the store. And then I'm like, oh my God, I think I already bought, saw them, tried the mind and returned them. I am back so crazy to the outside world. For me, it's a symptom of the dissociation. I'm missing time. I'm missing memory. It's very hard to live like this. And it's hard to explain to people, and it's hard not to explain to people what's going on. The memory loss is embarrassing, and it's been happening more frequently, and it's very troublesome. Okay, so. Okay, wait, we've got to say, let's just lay the land again. What we're discussing is how would you summarize it because you might be better at summarizing it than me. We're talking about atheism, the existence of God, and how we know right from wrong, and the existence of an objective right and wrong. And whether the fact that there is an objective right or wrong is, in fact, evidence of a divine being. Yes. And Dan could have put that better than me. This is Annie Kay. Welcome to another episode of Into the Void. Today is Friday, August 16th. Thank you. I'm here with Daniel, who's my old friend, good friend, not old friend. We're both old. We're both old. We both have some gray hair. We both have a little gray hair. But, and we're talking about all this stuff. And so, okay, give me the, so we just sort of summarized that maybe you put better summarized the two sides of this argument, because one side says, so you, I'm going to give it to you now. How you were saying that this, what I just said, but you could say it better than me. Dan's looking at me like I'm. No. It's my head falling off. Maybe. Okay. No, it's not. It's rolling across the room. Uh oh. Um, I guess it's a matter of whether there is objective right or wrong, or what people call evil. Right. And whether that can even exist in a universe where there is no transcendental aspect of existence. Right. And how would we measure that? Yeah. And that's used as one of the proofs that there is an objective moral code, because otherwise everything is subjective. And we would have examples through history of evils that people believed were good, but we all know that they're actually wrong. Okay. Well, there could be anything if, if, if, if what determines right and wrong is just society. Now the reality, the, the real problem is it, if science is correct, and the world is sterilized from any kind of non material. Aspects. And everything is materialistic and empirically observable. And everything boils down to what can be measured in a physical reality. And if that's true, then there can't possibly be any objective. Wrong. Or right. It's just opinion. Okay. And. But we don't really feel like we're going to feel that way. No, it seems obvious that there are things that are definitely wrong. Even if nobody believes they're wrong, can something still be wrong? Right. Absolutely. And we can use examples in our modern world. Like we can take a, a backwards society like Afghanistan, where they do horrible things to young girls and women. And according to their worldview, what they're doing is perfectly normal and reasonable and, and right. That's righteous. That's righteous. So our girls are getting right for something. That's right. Yeah. And it, from a scientific perspective, who are we to say they're wrong? Right. How dare we say that they're wrong? Right. It's cultural. It's cultural. Right. But most of us in this country, I think, wouldn't have a problem conducting that. And where does that come from? Right. If we're animals, just trying to survive, then why is stealing wrong? What makes anything wrong? Right. Why is there anything objectively wrong? Right. And not just, you believe it's wrong, but I don't. You do and I don't. You do and I don't. That could be individuals arguing about whether or not something is ethical, or it could be societies, or it could be generations. Do you know there's like a personality after a miso interesting, and I guess I think I agree with you, because some people are touched by some kind of entire power. And they do have that knowledge within them. Yes. And that's God. And it's not really a matter of whether or not somebody, and look, one of the arguments against the belief in an objective right or wrong, usually gets slippery because people will start to say, "Well, just because I don't believe in God doesn't mean I can't determine what's right or wrong." It's not really saying that. Right. The fact that you can recognize that something is wrong, objectively, is a sign that God exists. Yes. Nobody's saying that atheists can't do the moral act. Right. The fact that they can judge it as a moral act, and not an immoral act, shows that there's an objective correctness to the act itself. And ironically, I think that I didn't use to understand this, and it's, you know, atheism, it just is actually kind of, particularly, like whether you believe in God or don't believe in God, is sometimes a choice. Sometimes it's not a choice, because I feel like, you know, I was raised as an atheist, like I was told from a very young age that God didn't exist. So it was very hard for me to broaden my worldview or perspective to take in the possibility that God did exist, because it was never part of my reality, kind of thing. But I think that in general, it's sort of actually like a narrow-mindedness that closes itself off to that possibility. Yeah, you can come to the conclusion that God exists by pure reason, without faith. We can use rational arguments to observe the physical universe and the behavior of entities in it, and come to the conclusion that there is a determining factor that transcends the natural world, based on pure reason, without faith. I like that. Let's give what's another example of that, if there is one. Besides the knowledge of right and wrong, is there another example of that? Well, yes, the origin of the universe. Now, that the universe has a beginning. Now, explain that to me, because for me that would be like a chance, a chance, like just a random chance. Well, I guess there's two things going on here, the existence of evil. Sometimes people say that, "How can a God allow evil?" And the reality is, the fact that there is evil, in a sense, or rationally proves God's existence, because we're able to even judge it as evil to begin with. So we've gotten through that little dialogue, but the fact that the universe has a beginning is also a sort of proof that there is a beginner, a creator, to the beginning. And this is not a new argument. This is historically called the prime mover, or the philosophical debate that's been going on for five or six hundred years. And the fact that science, and this is another one, just like people will say, "Oh, well, the fact that there's evil proves that there's no God." In actuality is to reverse, to prove that there is one, because we can determine that it's evil. And also, the same way people will say, "Oh, because we have the big bang that proves that God doesn't exist." Well, actually, no, it proves that God doesn't exist, because it proves that the universe has a beginning, and it's not some infinite... Yeah, well, that does actually coincide with Genesis. It does. And regardless of it coincides with Genesis or not, that can be mere chance. But the fact that modern science and modern physicists claim that there was a detectable beginning to the universe, and it's not an infinite trap door with no beginning, by the nature of how we observe everything about our universe suggests that something had to start that. The fact that it has a beginning is evidence of a creator, and there's no way around that. Well, wouldn't it just be a random act that it began? That's what I would think the answer to that would be. Well, no, because science would say that everything came from the big bang, before the big bang, there was absolutely nothing. There was no material to work with. There wasn't even space. You're educating me, because I forgot what the big bang was. The big bang created space in itself. There was no matter. There were no materials. You know what? I don't know what to do, because for me, you've actually just done what you said you were going to do, which is to me, this stuff actually rationally proved the existence of a higher being. I was looking, for some reason, I looked up Genesis last night. I looked up that. I was just curious, because I used to know that part of it by heart, and it's very complicated. It's not complicated, but it goes on and on, but it's also very structured in the way it describes what happened. This happened, and then this happened, and this happened, and then God took a day off. But even if you get rid of the first day and the second day, the first words in the Bible in the beginning. Right, exactly. That's what I was thinking of. That Moses, or whoever, when they wrote this down, they decided that there was going to be a beginning. Why not have an incident? And it was accurate to decide that's fascinating. I happen to agree that's fascinating. And beyond that, out of the void, it talks about out of the darkness. And science says there was nothing. There was no material. There were no molecules. There were no atoms. There was no quantum material. It was not even space or time. It's actually just really fascinating. You know, there was absolutely nothing to even work with, you know? Yeah. So, just using rationality, you can come to a good bed, you know? Yes. Now, I want to read Genesis because I just, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, the earth, this isn't the King James version, but I'm going to edit it for it. Because this is what I'm, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light that it was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. And the light he called day, and the darkness he called night. And there was the first, and there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. I love that. There's something beautiful, and simple, and apparently also from what science tells us accurate about that description. So, you know, that's very interesting. I have to say, yeah, it's, it's really interesting. So, Daniel and I knew one another have known each other for a while. I was spent a little bit of time, kind of a part, and now we're hanging out again. And I think it's really interesting how in the time apart we each traveled a little bit of a road or distance, but it seems to have brought us back into more of a similar spot than we were when we first knew each other. Isn't that interesting to you? That's like we independently traveled our own little road, but it took us to the same place, kind of, or a more similar place. That's what I was saying a little bit earlier. I think it's definitely true. I think that because I do believe that there's a God influencing all of our behavior, I think that all that was for a particular reason. And that might be getting a little bit too esoteric and non-scientific, but... I'm not a scientist. I don't necessarily take the scientific perspective, but I'm listening and I'm curious to what about what you're saying. Well, I'm saying that the same thing I was saying like in the car right up, which was that sometimes God works through broken hearts. Yeah, and the purpose is to it. For me, I guess I feel like it's a blessing that my life blew up or fell apart, however you want to put it, because now I would use the terminology of psychology to explain it in a way that I can understand it well. I think I was kind of living my life a little bit as a false self. And that false self was becoming increasingly false, or was becoming increasingly... was a further distance from my authentic self as time were on. And at some point, that false self that I was inhabiting became an untenable false self. And that's when things spiraled in a really disconcerting, weird way for me. And we used the word disorienting, I think, in the car. And it was disorienting, because I felt like I didn't know who I was, like it was just such a confusing time. And I don't think I've figured out yet exactly who my authentic self is, but I'm getting a little bit closer. And so in a weird way, all that awful period I went through was a blessing, because it gives me the opportunity to be happy and authentic in my life in a way that I wouldn't have been able to without... Sometimes you got to like rip everything apart to put it back together. And I think that's gonna do what happened for me. And it's like it was a weird paradoxical blessing. But I didn't feel it was when it happened. It was like a nightmare. It's the worst thing they ever had. Yeah, like a nightmare. So, and a lot of people have gone through a nightmare sort of scenarios recently, I think. COVID was like that for a lot of folks I'm sure. Yeah. And a lot of like religious and esoteric literature they call it, Dark Knight of the Soul. So you have to educate me again. What is that? What is Dark Knight of the Soul? Was COVID? Well, I guess the COVID was probably the catalyst for many people's Dark Knights of the Soul. Oh, okay. And that just refers to like a very difficult time in someone's life. Yeah. Well, from a religious perspective, it's a time where you feel like you've been abandoned. Yeah. Oh. That's happening. But it's usually considered to be one of the main foundational kind of upticks for what makes spiritual adepts and mystics and saints. Okay. Now, I don't know if we're going to put this on this part, but this is because I feel like it's a little crazy. But I do feel like there's something I feel like a little touched sometimes by God in a way. I don't know why I wrote about it. I think in the general book that I thought I was a saint or something. I think I told you I thought I was Jesus. I mean, I don't think I'm actually Jesus or a thing. But what's the other term you use? The spiritual adapt and then you said something else. What does those things mean? Well, like a somebody who's in keeping with the spiritual life. A spiritual adept, you know, like an adept. Like, you know, if you take that as a discipline. Kind of like a competent, competent spiritual. Yes, yes. Exactly. Okay. Well, I don't know. This has been a heavy duty. This has been a heavy duty. Hello, everybody out there. Anybody listening? We're going to listen to this and edit this later, perhaps. This has been Annie Kay and Daniel. Daniel M. You want to hear? You want to introduce yourself how you'd like to? Daniel Meredith. Daniel Meredith. Okay. And Daniel happens to be a psychologist. He has a PhD in experimental and cognitive psychology. Is that right? Is that accurate? And he's also, I guess, can we say a practicing or Catholic? Or how should we say that? That's his Catholic. Okay. Practicing Catholic. So it's a long road of looking at a lot of other things. A lot of other things. So we have some time together and we're having some interesting chats that we'd share it. On the void. I know anybody listening to this thought I really did live in a void. But this is substantial proof that I have people that I know and that I speak to because Daniel's here speaking to me right now. Thanks for listening. Set in love out to y'all. Bye.
