'Israel's hidden hand exposed'
Christian Zionist lobbyists reported hiding money trail
Conant's comments on the story below
I am no leftist. I am a libertarian -- whose positions at times align with those of conservatives and at other times with liberal views. In turn, some liberal ideas have been taken over (hijacked?) by the hard left, making my position rather precarious, I suppose.
I add that neither am I anti-Semitic nor militantly anti-Israel. In fact I thoroughly detest the Iranian regime as a horrendously oppressive and murderous barbarian cult.
Even so, as an American I think it important to call out the shady maneuvers of foreign governments wishing to influence U.S. policy. And that goes for Israel and some of its U.S. helpers. To be fair, we must acknowledge that the Israeli government, like virtually all national governments, is simply playing the game of realpolitik in furtherance of its agendas. From its perspective, it is doing nothing wrong. But from America's perspective, such maneuvers are an unwelcome intrusion into the right of the American people to self-determination.
The following story, by Nick Cleveland-Stout, an independent reporter, is published by Drop Site News, which the White House has excoriated as a sewer of leftist propaganda -- hence it need not comment on the truth value of any particular story. While I certainly agree that Ryan Grim, Drop Site editor, has a strong anti-Israel and leftist bias, it does not follow that the newsletter never publishes anything of value.
The following expose tells of the Israeli government's very quiet financing of a U.S. Christian Zionist group's drive to influence Americans in general and political Washington in particular in order to squelch "lies" about Israeli meddling and deviousness.
The story appears to be properly documented, raising the important point of why these Christians are hiding their funding, and seemingly evading the U.S. foreign agents registration law. The report that neither the Israel foreign ministry nor the Eagles' Wings Christian group was able to answer the reporter's questions speaks volunes.
By Nick Cleveland-Stout
Via Drop Site News
WASHINGTON, D.C.—On Monday night, over 500 people packed into the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown D.C. to kickoff Israel Advocacy Day—a major pro-Israel lobbying push on Capitol Hill spearheaded by Eagles’ Wings, a New York-based Christian Zionist organization. During a break in the evening’s programming, a list of sponsors of the event appeared on screen. The list included the National Religious Broadcasters, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Israel365, a group that organized a trip of MAGA influencers to Israel last year.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was not advertised as a supporter—despite funding upwards of half of the lobbying push. Eagles’ Wings was secretly paid a total of $700,000 by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, $245,000 of which was allocated for its lobbying efforts this year, according to a previously unreported Israeli procurement document.
Robert Stearns, a pastor and the founder of Eagles’ Wings, did pause to thank Tammy Ben-Haim, a Ministry official, for attending—but left it at that.
The lobbying campaign plans to hold more than 100 meetings across Capitol Hill this week. “We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you to discuss the U.S.-Israel relationship,” reads a meeting invite sent to a Democratic Congressional staffer obtained by Drop Site.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes in the contract that it is funding Eagles’ Wings in order to prevent churchgoers and priests “from adopting pro-BDS and anti-Israeli positions.” In the contract, an Israeli official conveyed that the campaign has support from high-ranking officials within the Israeli government. “The Eagles’ Wings project is very important to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Office of the Director General in particular.”
Eagles’ Wings, the official added, is trying to invite the “most important among the attendees to more intimate meetings in order to improve their views on the State of Israel and to fight against the lies [people] are spreading about the country.”
When contacted for comment about the funding, which Eagles’ Wings does not disclose anywhere on their website, Eagles’ Wings did not respond. A spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Eagles’ Wings, which has about 30 employees, is not a registered foreign agent. Craig Holman, an ethics expert and government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, told Drop Site that Eagles’ Wings’ lobbying campaign raises serious questions about the organization’s compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the U.S.’ preeminent law for regulating foreign influence. “They should register as a foreign agent, declare how much money they’ve been paid, what they’re using the money for, and what offices they are lobbying on behalf of Israel,” said Holman.
Religious organizations can avoid registering as a foreign agent if they are solely engaged in religious pursuits. However, Jonathan Winer, a Washington D.C.-based attorney who has worked on FARA issues for decades, explained that if an organization engages in “political activities”—an activity intended to influence the U.S. government to change its policies—they are required to register.
“If you’re doing public relations work for a foreign government, that’s what FARA registration is for,” said Winer. “It’s not a gray area.”
The goal of Israel Advocacy Day, according to the organizers themselves, is to shape U.S. policy towards the Middle East. This year’s agenda will focus on “reinforcing US support for Israel’s security, addressing the sharp rise of anti-semitism, and advancing protections for faith-based institutions facing increasing threats.”
Last year’s Israel Advocacy Day featured speeches by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). It also included a performance from musician Yair Levi, who is a registered foreign agent of Israel and oversees a cohort of social media influencers paid by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Israel Advocacy Day is co-hosted by the American Christian Leaders for Israel, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), the Israel Allies Foundation, and the Israel Christian Nexus, another organization led by Stearns.
By not registering as a foreign agent, lawmakers are left in the dark about who is funding the pro-Israel lobbying effort. “Members of Congress will want to know if the person they are talking to is a foreign agent who is being paid to represent Israeli interests,” said Holman. “That shouldn’t be used to discriminate against the lobbying effort, but it’s useful knowledge to weigh the merits of the messages they’re receiving from that lobbyist,” he added.
The Israeli government also gave funding to Eagles’ Wings for major events with Evangelical Christians in Orlando, Washington D.C., and Memphis, a solidarity event for Israel featuring speakers from the Israel Defense Forces, and a music tour led by Christian singer-songwriter Jordan Feliz. Eagles’ Wings’ revenue was about $6 million in 2024, the most recent year available. If its revenue in 2025 is similar, the Israeli government will account for over 10% of its funding last year.
The Israeli government has poured money into other ventures to win back support from American evangelicals. In September, the Israeli Foreign Ministry greenlit a $3.2 million plan to pay pastors, hire celebrity spokespeople, and target attendees of major evangelical churches in the American southwest during worship hours with ads. After significant backlash, much of that plan was scrapped.
Anne Nelson, author of “Shadow Network: Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” explained in an interview with Drop Site that Israel is spending an “unprecedented amount of money to cultivate relations with Evangelical Christians” who have broken with Israel over Gaza. “Israel is going to be facing headwinds among younger Evangelicals who have been increasingly critical of Israel due to human rights and America First concerns,” she said.
Stearns, the founder of Eagles’ Wings, acknowledged to the Jerusalem Post in October that his work bringing Evangelical leaders to Israel is partially funded by Israel. “We’ve brought 900 leaders so far…I’m so grateful for the visionary support Gideon Sa’ar and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are giving in funding toward this project,” said Stearns.
The Israeli government frequently sponsors trips to Israel; in December, 1,000 evangelical pastors flew to Jerusalem as part of a fully funded trip backed by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
However, he has not acknowledged the funding appropriated for the lobbying campaign. According to annual IRS filings, other donors to Eagles’ Wings include the Christian Broadcasting Network and the 85 Fund, an organization co-founded by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo.
Stearns, who founded the organization in 1994, has said he is willing to die for Israel because he sees it as a “crucial ally in a war against Islamic extremists.” A week after the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran began, Stearns authored an article in the Jerusalem Post asking Christians to stand with Israel and visit the country. In a video on his YouTube channel, Stearns criticized the lack of American support for the war, blaming what he called the “dumbed down American public.”
Stearns has spent years sounding the alarm about declining Evangelical support for Israel. “Support for Israel doesn’t just seem to be weakening; it is weakening, and at a concerning, alarming rate,” he told the Jerusalem Post.
Support for Israel among evangelical Christians, a historically staunch pro-Israel stalwart in the U.S., has dropped in the past few years as Israel carried out attacks in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Among white evangelicals, approval of Israel dropped ten points from February 2024 to September 2025, according to Pew Research.
Last year, the Israeli government also gave more than $300,000 to create a show on Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the largest Evangelical television network in the world, according to a separate Israeli government procurement document. The payment was made to Shar-El Media and Productions, the official representative of TBN in Israel, to produce and broadcast a television program called “Insights.” The show, historically, has done several episodes dedicated to highlighting Israel’s military, artificial intelligence, and drone industries.
Meeting with evangelical leaders in Palm Beach in late 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Christian Zionists to help fight Israel the “eight front,” the public relations battle. Stearns, for his part, sees himself as a foot soldier in this new “propaganda war.”
At the gala on Monday night, Israel’s public relations crisis was a central theme. “According to recent statistics, less than 38% of young Americans, ages 18 through 34 hold a favorable view of Israel,” said Stella Inger-Escobedo, an anchor with One America News and one of the emcees of the night. “Their views are the result of lies, misinformation, propaganda that they have been exposed to by the media, academia, literally like 15 second TikTok videos.”
Two IDF reservists from the U.S. and Canada, Noy Leyb and Max Long, delivered a video message at the gala echoing her concerns about Israel losing the eighth front. “What was happening on the ground was one thing. What the world was hearing was very different,” said Leyb and Long, who co-founded an organization that brings Israeli soldiers to American churches and schools. They credited Stearns with helping facilitate the partnership.
--30--
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Russell/Copleston 'God' debate.....K series
Transcript of the Russell/Copleston radio talk
A DEBATE ON THE EXISTENCE OF GOD Broadcast in 1948 on the Third Program of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Published in Humanitas (Manchester) and reprinted in Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell (George Allen & Unwin 1957). Bertrand Russell [hereafter R:] and F.C. Copleston [hereafter C:]
C: As we are going to discuss the existence of God, it might perhaps be as well to come to some provisional agreement as to what we understand by the term "God." I presume that we mean a supreme personal being -- distinct from the world and creator of the world. Would you agree -- provisionally at least -- to accept this statement as the meaning of the term "God"?
R: Yes, I accept this definition.
C: Well, my position is the affirmative position that such a being actually exists, and that His existence can be proved philosophically. Perhaps you would tell me if your position is that of agnosticism or of atheism. I mean, would you say that the non-existence of God can be proved?
R: No, I should not say that: my position is agnostic.
C: Would you agree with me that the problem of God is a problem of great importance? For example, would you agree that if God does not exist, human beings and human history can have no other purpose than the purpose they choose to give themselves, which -- in practice -- is likely to mean the purpose which those impose who have the power to impose it?
R: Roughly speaking, yes, though I should have to place some limitation on your last clause.
C: Would you agree that if there is no God -- no absolute Being -- there can be no absolute values? I mean, would you agree that if there is no absolute good that the relativity of values results?
R: No, I think these questions are logically distinct. Take, for instance, G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, where he maintains that there is a distinction of good and evil, that both of these are definite concepts. But he does not bring in the idea of God to support that contention.
C: Well, suppose we leave the question of good till later, till we come to the moral argument, and I give first a metaphysical argument. I'd like to put the main weight on the metaphysical argument based on Leibniz's argument from "Contingency" and then later we might discuss the moral argument. Suppose I give a brief statement on the metaphysical argument and that then we go on to discuss it?
R: That seems to me to be a very good plan. THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTINGENCY
C: Well, for clarity's sake, I'll divide the argument into distinct stages. First of all, I should say, we know that there are at least some beings in the world which do not contain in themselves the reason for their existence. For example, I depend on my parents, and now on the air, and on food, and so on. Now, secondly, the world is simply the real or imagined totality or aggregate of individual objects, none of which contain in themselves alone the reason for their existence. There isn't any world distinct from the objects which form it, any more than the human race is something apart from the members.
Therefore, I should say, since objects or events exist, and since no object of experience contains within itself reason of its existence, this reason, the totality of objects, must have a reason external to itself. That reason must be an existent being. Well, this being is either itself the reason for its own existence, or it is not. If it is, well and good. If it is not, then we must proceed farther. But if we proceed to infinity in that sense, then there's no explanation of existence at all. So, I should say, in order to explain existence, we must come to a being which contains within itself the reason for its own existence, that is to say, which cannot not exist.
R: This raises a great many points and it is not altogether easy to know where to begin, but I think that, perhaps, in answering your argument, the best point at which to begin is the question of necessary being. The word "necessary" I should maintain, can only be applied significantly to propositions. And, in fact, only to such as are analytic -- that is to say -- such as it is self-contradictory to deny. I could only admit a necessary being if there were a being whose existence it is self-contradictory to deny. I should like to know whether you would accept Leibniz's division of propositions into truths of reason and truths of fact. The former -- the truths of reason -- being necessary.
C: Well, I certainly should not subscribe to what seems to be Leibniz's idea of truths of reason and truths of fact, since it would appear that, for him, there are in the long run only analytic propositions. It would seem that for Leibniz truths of fact are ultimately reducible to truths of reason. That is to say, to analytic propositions, at least for an omniscient mind. Well, I couldn't agree with that. For one thing it would fail to meet the requirements of the experience of freedom. I don't want to uphold the whole philosophy of Leibniz. I have made use of his argument from contingent to necessary being, basing the argument on the principle of sufficient reason, simply because it seems to me a brief and clear formulation of what is, in my opinion, the fundamental metaphysical argument for God's existence.
R: But, to my mind, "a necessary proposition" has got to be analytic. I don't see what else it can mean. And analytic propositions are always complex and logically somewhat late. "Irrational animals are animals" is an analytic proposition; but a proposition such as "This is an animal" can never be analytic. In fact, all the propositions that can be analytic are somewhat late in the build-up of propositions.
C: Take the proposition "if there is a contingent being then there is a necessary being." I consider that that proposition hypothetically expressed is a necessary proposition. If you are going to call every necessary proposition an analytic proposition, then -- in order to avoid a dispute in terminology -- I would agree to call it analytic, though I don't consider it a tautological proposition. But the proposition is a necessary proposition only on the supposition that there is a contingent being. That there is a contingent being actually existing has to be discovered by experience, and the proposition that there is a contingent being is certainly not an analytic proposition, though once you know, I should maintain, that there is a contingent being, it follows of necessity that there is a necessary being.
R: The difficulty of this argument is that I don't admit the idea of a necessary being and I don't admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings "contingent." These phrases don't for me have a significance except within a logic that I reject.
C: Do you mean that you reject these terms because they won't fit in with what is called "modern logic"?
R: Well, I can't find anything that they could mean. The word "necessary," it seems to me, is a useless word, except as applied to analytic propositions, not to things.
C: In the first place, what do you mean by "modern logic?" As far as I know, there are somewhat differing systems. In the second place, not all modern logicians surely would admit the meaninglessness of metaphysics. We both know, at any rate, one very eminent modern thinker whose knowledge of modern logic was profound, but who certainly did not think that metaphysics are meaningless or, in particular, that the problem of God is meaningless. Again, even if all modern logicians held that metaphysical terms are meaningless, it would not follow that they were right. The proposition that metaphysical terms are meaningless seems to me to be a proposition based on an assumed philosophy.
The dogmatic position behind it seems to be this: What will not go into my machine is non-existent, or it is meaningless; it is the expression of emotion. I am simply trying to point out that anybody who says that a particular system of modern logic is the sole criterion of meaning is saying something that is over-dogmatic; he is dogmatically insisting that a part of philosophy is the whole of philosophy. After all, a "contingent" being is a being which has not in itself the complete reason for its existence that's what I mean by a contingent being. You know, as well as I do, that the existence of neither of us can be explained without reference to something or somebody outside us, our parents, for example. A "necessary" being, on the other hand means a being that must and cannot not exist. You may say that there is no such being, but you will find it hard to convince me that you do not understand the terms I am using. If you do not understand them, then how can you be entitled to say that such a being does not exist, if that is what you do say?
R: Well, there are points here that I don't propose to go into at length. I don't maintain the meaninglessness of metaphysics in general at all. I maintain the meaninglessness of certain particular terms -- not on any general ground, but simply because I've not been able to see an interpretation of those particular terms. It's not a general dogma -- it's a particular thing. But those points I will leave out for the moment. And I will say that what you have been saying brings us back, it seems to me, to the ontological argument that there is a being whose essence involves existence, so that his existence is analytic. That seems to me to be impossible, and it raises, of course, the question what one means by existence, and as to this, I think a subject named can never be significantly said to exist but only a subject described. And that existence, in fact, quite definitely is not a predicate.
C: Well, you say, I believe, that it is bad grammar, or rather bad syntax to say for example "T. S. Eliot exists"; one ought to say, for example, "He, the author of Murder in the Cathedral, exists." Are you going to say that the proposition, "The cause of the world exists," is without meaning? You may say that the world has no cause; but I fail to see how you can say that the proposition that "the cause of the world exists" is meaningless. Put it in the form of a question: "Has the world a cause?" or "Does a cause of the world exist?" Most people surely would understand the question, even if they don't agree about the answer.
R: Well, certainly the question "Does the cause of the world exist?" is a question that has meaning. But if you say "Yes, God is the cause of the world" you're using God as a proper name; then "God exists" will not be a statement that has meaning; that is the position that I'm maintaining. Because, therefore, it will follow that it cannot be an analytic proposition ever to say that this or that exists. For example, suppose you take as your subject "the existent round-square," it would look like an analytic proposition that "the existent round- square exists," but it doesn't exist.
C: No, it doesn't, then surely you can't say it doesn't exist unless you have a conception of what existence is. As to the phrase "existent round-square," I should say that it has no meaning at all.
R: I quite agree. Then I should say the same thing in another context in reference to a "necessary being."
C: Well, we seem to have arrived at an impasse. To say that a necessary being is a being that must exist and cannot not exist has for me a definite meaning. For you it has no meaning.
R: Well, we can press the point a little, I think. A being that must exist and cannot not exist, would surely, according to you, be a being whose essence involves existence. C: Yes, a being the essence of which is to exist. But I should not be willing to argue the existence of God simply from the idea of His essence because I don't think we have any clear intuition of God's essence as yet. I think we have to argue from the world of experience to God.
R: Yes, I quite see the distinction. But, at the same time, for a being with sufficient knowledge, it would be true to say "Here is this being whose essence involves existence!"
C: Yes, certainly if anybody saw God, he would see that God must exist.
R: So that I mean there is a being whose essence involves existence although we don't know that essence. We only know there is such a being.
C: Yes, I should add we don't know the essence a priori. It is only a posteriori through our experience of the world that we come to a knowledge of the existence of that being. And then one argues, the essence and existence must be identical. Because if God's essence and God's existence was not identical, then some sufficient reason for this existence would have to be found beyond God.
R: So it all turns on this question of sufficient reason, and I must say you haven't defined "sufficient reason" in a way that I can understand -- what do you mean by sufficient reason? You don't mean cause?
C: Not necessarily. Cause is a kind of sufficient reason. Only contingent being can have a cause. God is His own sufficient reason; and He is not cause of Himself. By sufficient reason in the full sense I mean an explanation adequate for the existence of some particular being.
R: But when is an explanation adequate? Suppose I am about to make a flame with a match. You may say that the adequate explanation of that is that I rub it on the box.
C: Well, for practical purposes -- but theoretically, that is only a partial explanation. An adequate explanation must ultimately be a total explanation, to which nothing further can be added.
R: Then I can only say that you're looking for something which can't be got, and which one ought not to expect to get.
C: To say that one has not found it is one thing; to say that one should not look for it seems to me rather dogmatic.
R: Well, I don't know. I mean, the explanation of one thing is another thing which makes the other thing dependent on yet another, and you have to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire to do what you want, and that we can't do.
C: But are you going to say that we can't, or we shouldn't even raise the question of the existence of the whole of this sorry scheme of things -- of the whole universe?
R: Yes, I don't think there's any meaning in it at all. I think the word "universe" is a handy word in some connections, but I don't think it stands for anything that has a meaning.
C: If the word is meaningless, it can't be so very handy. In any case, I don't say that the universe is something different from the objects which compose it (I indicated that in my brief summary of the proof), what I'm doing is to look for the reason, in this case the cause of the objects -- the real or imagined totality of which constitute what we call the universe. You say, I think that the universe -- or my existence if you prefer, or any other existence -- is unintelligible?
R: First may I take up the point that if a word is meaningless it can't be handy. That sounds well but isn't in fact correct. Take, say, such a word as "the" or "than." You can't point to any object that those words mean, but they are very useful words; I should say the same of "universe." But leaving that point, you ask whether I consider that the universe is unintelligible. I shouldn't say unintelligible -- I think it is without explanation. Intelligible, to my mind, is a different thing. Intelligible has to do with the thing itself intrinsically and not with its relations.
C: Well, my point is that what we call the world is intrinsically unintelligible, apart from the existence of God. You see, I don't believe that the infinity of the series of events -- I mean a horizontal series, so to speak -- if such an infinity could be proved, would be in the slightest degree relevant to the situation. If you add up chocolates you get chocolates after all and not a sheep. If you add up chocolates to infinity, you presumably get an infinite number of chocolates. So if you add up contingent beings to infinity, you still get contingent beings, not a necessary being. An infinite series of contingent beings will be, to my way of thinking, as unable to cause itself as one contingent being. However, you say, I think, that it is illegitimate to raise the question of what will explain the existence of any particular object?
R: It's quite all right if you mean by explaining it, simply finding a cause for it.
C: Well, why stop at one particular object? Why shouldn't one raise the question of the cause of the existence of all particular objects?
R: Because I see no reason to think there is any. The whole concept of cause is one we derive from our observation of particular things; I see no reason whatsoever to suppose that the total has any cause whatsoever.
C: Well, to say that there isn't any cause is not the same thing as saying that we shouldn't look for a cause. The statement that there isn't any cause should come, if it comes at all, at the end of the inquiry, not the beginning. In any case, if the total has no cause, then to my way of thinking it must be its own cause, which seems to me impossible. Moreover, the statement that the world is simply there if in answer to a question, presupposes that the question has meaning.
R: No, it doesn't need to be its own cause, what I'm saying is that the concept of cause is not applicable to the total.
C: Then you would agree with Sartre that the universe is what he calls "gratuitous"?
R: Well, the word "gratuitous" suggests that it might be something else; I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all.
C: Well, I can't see how you can rule out the legitimacy of asking the question how the total, or anything at all comes to be there. Why something rather than nothing, that is the question? The fact that we gain our knowledge of causality empirically, from particular causes, does not rule out the possibility of asking what the cause of the series is. If the word "cause" were meaningless or if it could be shown that Kant's view of the matter were correct, the question would be illegitimate I agree; but you don't seem to hold that the word "cause" is meaningless, and I do not suppose you are a Kantian.
R: I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother -- that's a different logical sphere.
C: Well, I can't really see any parity. If I were saying "every object has a phenomenal cause, therefore, the whole series has a phenomenal cause," there would be a parity; but I'm not saying that; I'm saying, every object has a phenomenal cause if you insist on the infinity of the series -- but the series of phenomenal causes is an insufficient explanation of the series. Therefore, the series has not a phenomenal cause but a transcendent cause.
R: That's always assuming that not only every particular thing in the world, but the world as a whole must have a cause. For that assumption I see no ground whatever. If you'll give me a ground I'll listen to it.
C: Well, the series of events is either caused or it's not caused. If it is caused, there must obviously be a cause outside the series. If it's not caused then it's sufficient to itself, and if it's sufficient to itself it is what I call necessary. But it can't be necessary since each member is contingent, and we've agreed that the total has no reality apart from its members, therefore, it can't be necessary. Therefore, it can't be -- uncaused -- therefore it must have a cause. And I should like to observe in passing that the statement "the world is simply there and is inexplicable" can't be got out of logical analysis.
R: I don't want to seem arrogant, but it does seem to me that I can conceive things that you say the human mind can't conceive. As for things not having a cause, the physicists assure us that individual quantum transitions in atoms have no cause.
C: Well, I wonder now whether that isn't simply a temporary inference.
R: It may be, but it does show that physicists' minds can conceive it.
C: Yes, I agree, some scientists -- physicists -- are willing to allow for indetermination within a restricted field. But very many scientists are not so willing. I think that Professor Dingle, of London University, maintains that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us something about the success (or the lack of it) of the present atomic theory in correlating observations, but not about nature in itself, and many physicists would accept this view. In any case, I don't see how physicists can fail to accept the theory in practice, even if they don't do so in theory. I cannot see how science could be conducted on any other assumption than that of order and intelligibility in nature.
The physicist presupposes, at least tacitly, that there is some sense in investigating nature and looking for the causes of events, just as the detective presupposes that there is some sense in looking for the cause of a murder. The metaphysician assumes that there is sense in looking for the reason or cause of phenomena, and, not being a Kantian, I consider that the metaphysician is as justified in his assumption as the physicist. When Sartre, for example, says that the world is gratuitous, I think that he has not sufficiently considered what is implied by "gratuitous."
R: I think -- there seems to me a certain unwarrantable extension here; a physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes. As for Sartre, I don't profess to know what he means, and I shouldn't like to be thought to interpret him, but for my part, I do think the notion of the world having an explanation is a mistake. I don't see why one should expect it to have, and I think you say about what the scientist assumes is an over-statement.
C: Well, it seems to me that the scientist does make some such assumption. When he experiments to find out some particular truth, behind that experiment lies the assumption that the universe is not simply discontinuous. There is the possibility of finding out a truth by experiment. The experiment may be a bad one, it may lead to no result, or not to the result that he wants, but that at any rate there is the possibility, through experiment, of finding out the truth that he assumes. And that seems to me to assume an ordered and intelligible universe.
R: I think you're generalizing more than is necessary. Undoubtedly the scientist assumes that this sort of thing is likely to be found and will often be found. He does not assume that it will be found, and that's a very important matter in modem physics.
C: Well, I think he does assume or is bound to assume it tacitly in practice. It may be that, to quote Professor Haldane, "when I Iight the gas under the kettle, some of the water molecules will fly off as vapor, and there is no way of finding out which will do so," but it doesn't follow necessarily that the idea of chance must be introduced except in relation to our knowledge.
R: No it doesn't -- at least if I may believe what he says. He's finding out quite a lot of things -- the scientist is finding out quite a lot of things that are happening in the world, which are, at first, beginnings of causal chains -- first causes which haven't in themselves got causes. He does not assume that everything has a cause.
C: Surely that's a first cause within a certain selected field. It's a relatively first cause.
R: I don't think he'd say so. If there's a world in which most events, but not all, have causes, he will then be able to depict the probabilities and uncertainties by assuming that this particular event you're interested in probably has a cause. And since in any case you won't get more than probability that's good enough.
C: It may be that the scientist doesn't hope to obtain more than probability, but in raising the question he assumes that the question of explanation has a meaning. But your general point then, Lord Russell, is that it's illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world?
R: Yes, that's my position.
C: If it's a question that for you has no meaning, it's of course very difficult to discuss it, isn't it?
R: Yes, it is very difficult. What do you say -- shall we pass on to some other issue?
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
C: Let's. Well, perhaps I might say a word about religious experience, and then we can go on to moral experience. I don't regard religious experience as a strict proof of the existence of God, so the character of the discussion changes somewhat, but I think it's true to say that the best explanation of it is the existence of God. By religious experience I don't mean simply feeling good. I mean a loving, but unclear, awareness of some object which irresistibly seems to the experiencer as something transcending the self, something transcending all the normal objects of experience, something which cannot be pictured or conceptualized, but of the reality of which doubt is impossible -- at least during the experience. I should claim that cannot be explained adequately and without residue, simply subjectively. The actual basic experience at any rate is most easily explained on the hypotheses that there is actually some objective cause of that experience.
R: I should reply to that line of argument that the whole argument from our own mental states to something outside us, is a very tricky affair. Even where we all admit its validity, we only feel justified in doing so, I think, because of the consensus of mankind. If there's a crowd in a room and there's a clock in a room, they can all see the clock. The face that they can all see it tends to make them think that it's not an hallucination: whereas these religious experiences do tend to be very private.
C: Yes, they do. I'm speaking strictly of mystical experience proper, and I certainly don't include, by the way, what are called visions. I mean simply the experience, and I quite admit it's indefinable, of the transcendent object or of what seems to be a transcendent object. I remember Julian Huxley in some lecture saying that religious experience, or mystical experience, is as much a real experience as falling in love or appreciating poetry and art. Well, I believe that when we appreciate poetry and art we appreciate definite poems or a definite work of art. If we fall in love, well, we fall in love with somebody and not with nobody.
R: May I interrupt for a moment here. That is by no means always the case. Japanese novelists never consider that they have achieved a success unless large numbers of real people commit suicide for love of the imaginary heroine.
C: Well, I must take your word for these goings on in Japan. I haven't committed suicide, I'm glad to say, but I have been strongly influenced in the taking of two important steps in my life by two biographies. However, I must say I see little resemblance between the real influence of those books on me and the mystic experience proper, so far, that is, as an outsider can obtain an idea of that experience.
R: Well, I mean we wouldn't regard God as being on the same level as the characters in a work of fiction. You'll admit there's a distinction here?
C: I certainly should. But what I'd say is that the best explanation seems to be the not purely subjectivist explanation. Of course, a subjectivist explanation is possible in the case of certain people in whom there is little relation between the experience and life, in the case of deluded people and hallucinated people, and so on. But when you get what one might call the pure type, say St. Francis of Assisi, when you get an experience that results in an overflow of dynamic and creative love, the best explanation of that it seems to me is the actual existence of an objective cause of the experience.
R: Well, I'm not contending in a dogmatic way that there is not a God. What I'm contending is that we don't know that there is. I can only take what is recorded as I should take other records and I do find that a very great many things are reported, and I am sure you would not accept things about demons and devils and what not -- and they're reported in exactly the same tone of voice and with exactly the same conviction. And the mystic, if his vision is veridical, may be said to know that there are devils. But I don't know that there are.
C: But surely in the case of the devils there have been people speaking mainly of visions, appearance, angels or demons and so on. I should rule out the visual appearances, because I think they can be explained apart from the existence of the object which is supposed to be seen.
R: But don't you think there are abundant recorded cases of people who believe that they've heard Satan speaking to them in their hearts, in just the same way as the mystics assert God -- and I'm not talking now of an external vision, I'm talking of a purely mental experience. That seems to be an experience of the same sort as mystics' experience of God, and I don't seek that from what mystics tell us you can get any argument for God which is not equally an argument for Satan.
C: I quite agree, of course, that people have imagined or thought they have heard of seen Satan. And I have no wish in passing to deny the existence of Satan. But I do not think that people have claimed to have experienced Satan in the precise way in which mystics claim to have experienced God. Take the case of a non-Christian, Plotinus. He admits the experience is something inexpressible, the object is an object of love, and therefore, not an object that causes horror and disgust. And the effect of that experience is, I should say, borne out, or I mean the validity of th experience is borne out in the records of the life of Plotinus. At any rate it is more reasonable to suppose that he had that experience if we're willing to accept Porphyry's account of Plontinus' general kindness and benevolence.
R: The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.
C: No, but if it could actually be proved that the belief was actually responsible for a good effect on a man's life, I should consider it a presumption in favor of some truth, at any rate of the positive part of the belief not of its entire validity. But in any case I am using the character of the life as evidence in favor of the mystic's veracity and sanity rather than as a proof of the truth of his beliefs.
R: But even that I don't think is any evidence. I've had experiences myself that have altered my character profoundly. And I thought at the time at any rate that it was altered for the good. Those experiences were important, but they did not involve the existence of something outside me, and I don't think that if I'd thought they did, the fact that they had a wholesome effect would have been any evidence that I was right.
C: No, but I think that the good effect would attest your veracity in describing your experience. Please remember that I'm not saying that a mystic's mediation or interpretation of his experience should be immune from discussion or criticism.
R: Obviously the character of a young man may be -- and often is -- immensely affected for good by reading about some great man in history, and it may happen that the great man is a myth and doesn't exist, but they boy is just as much affected for good as if he did. There have been such people. Plutarch's Lives take Lycurgus as an example, who certainly did not exist, but you might be very much influenced by reading Lycurgus under the impression that he had previously existed. You would then be influenced by an object that you'd loved, but it wouldn't be an existing object.
C: I agree with you on that, of course, that a man may be influenced by a character in fiction. Without going into the question of what it is precisely that influences him (I should say a real value) I think that the situation of that man and of the mystic are different. After all the man who is influenced by Lycurgus hasn't got the irresistible impression that he's experience in some way the ultimate reality.
R: I don't think you've quite got my point about these historical characters -- these unhistorical characters in history. I'm not assuming what you call an effect on the reason. I'm assuming that the young man reading about this person and believing him to be real loves him -- which is quite easy to happen, and yet he's loving a phantom.
C: In one sense he's loving a phantom that's perfectly true, in the sense, I mean, that he's loving X or Y who doesn't exist. But at the same time, it is not, I think, the phantom as such that the young man loves; he perceives a real value, an idea which he recognizes as objectively valid, and that's what excites his love.
R: Well, in the same sense we had before about the characters in fiction.
C: Yes, in one sense the man's loving a phantom -- perfectly true. But in another sense he's loving what he perceives to be a value.
THE MORAL ARGUMENT
R: But aren't you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good -- the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you're saying, because if so, it wants a bit of arguing.
C: I don't say, of course, that God is the sum-total or system of what is good in the pantheistic sense; I'm not a pantheist, but I do think that all goodness reflects God in some way and proceeds from him, so that in a sense the man who loves what is truly good, loves God even if he doesn't advert to God. But still I agree that the validity of such an interpretation of a man's conduct depends on the recognition of God's existence, obviously.
R: Yes, but that's a point to be proved.
C: Quite so, but I regard the metaphysical argument as probative, but there we differ.
R: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don't say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.
C: Yes, but what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?
R: I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.
C: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?
R: By my feelings.
C: By your feelings. Well, that's what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?
R: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn't been gone into in the same way and I couldn't give it you.
C: Well, let's take the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen. That appears to you as undesirable and evil and to me too. To Adolf Hitler we suppose it appeared as something good and desirable, I suppose you'd have to admit that for Hitler it was good and for you it is evil.
R: No, I shouldn't quite go so far as that. I mean, I think people can make mistakes in that as they can in other things. If you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You're making a mistake.
C: Yes, one can make mistakes, but can you make a mistake if it's simply a question of reference to a feeling or emotion? Surely Hitler would be the only possible judge of what appealed to his emotions.
R: It would be quite right to say that it appealed to his emotions, but you can say various things about that among others, that if that sort of thing makes that sort of appeal to Hitler's emotions, then Hitler makes quite a different appeal to my emotions.
C: Granted. But there's no objective criterion outside feeling then for condemning the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen, in your view?
R: No more than there is for the color-blind person who's in exactly the same state. Why do we intellectually condemn the color-blind man? Isn't it because he's in the minority?
C: I would say because he is lacking in a thing which normally belongs to human nature.
R: Yes, but if he were in the majority, we shouldn't say that.
C: Then you'd say that there's no criterion outside feeling that will enable one to distinguish between the behavior of the commandant of Belsen and the behavior, say, of Sir Stafford Cripps or the archbishop of Canterbury.
R: The feeling is a little too simplified. You've got to take account of the effects of actions and your feelings toward those effects. You see, you can have an argument about it if you can say that certain sorts of occurrences are the sort you like and certain others the sort you don't like. Then you have to take account of the effects of actions. You can very well say that the effects of the actions of the commandant of Belsen were painful and unpleasant.
C: They certainly were, I agree, very painful and unpleasant to all the people in the camp.
R: Yes, but not only to the people in the camp, but to outsiders contemplating them also.
C: Yes, quite true in imagination. But that's my point. I don't approve of them, and I know you don't approve of them, but I don't see what ground you have for not approving of them, because after all, to the commandant of Belsen himself, they're pleasant, those actions.
R: Yes, but you see I don't need any more ground in that case than I do in the case of color perception. There are some people who think everything is yellow, there are people suffering from jaundice, and I don't agree with these people. I can't prove that the things are not yellow, there isn't any proof, but most people agree with him that they're not yellow, and most people agree with me that the commandant of Belsen was making mistakes.
C: Well, do you accept any moral obligation?
R: Well, I should have to answer at considerable length to answer that. Practically speaking -- yes. Theoretically speaking I should have to define moral obligation rather carefully.
C: Well, do you think that the word "ought" simply has an emotional connotation?
R: No, I don't think that, because you see, as I was saying a moment ago, one has to take account of the effects, and I think right conduct is that which would probably produce the greatest possible balance in intrinsic value of all the acts possible in the circumstances, and you've got to take account of the probable effects of your action in considering what is right.
C: Well, I brought in moral obligation because I think that one can approach the question of God's existence in that way. The vast majority of the human race will make, and always have made, some distinction between right and wrong. The vast majority I think has some consciousness of an obligation in the moral sphere. It's my opinion that the perception of values and the consciousness of moral law and obligation are best explained through the hypothesis of a transcendent ground of value and of an author of the moral law. I do mean by "author of the moral law" an arbitrary author of the moral law. I think, in fact, that those modern atheists who have argued in a converse way "there is no God; therefore, there are no absolute values and no absolute law," are quite logical.
R: I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.
C: Well, I don't see that differences in particular moral judgments are any conclusive argument against the universality of the moral law. Let's assume for the moment that there are absolute moral values, even on that hypothesis it's only to be expected that different individuals and different groups should enjoy varying degrees of insight into those values.
R: I'm inclined to think that "ought," the feeling that one has about "ought" is an echo of what has been told one by one's parents or one's nurses.
C: Well, I wonder if you can explain away the idea of the "ought" merely in terms of nurses and parents. I really don't see how it can be conveyed to anybody in other terms than itself. It seems to be that if there is a moral order bearing upon the human conscience, that that moral order is unintelligible apart from the existence of God.
R: Then you have to say one or other of two things. Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind -- which happens to include yourself -- or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages.
C: Well, you see, I'm not suggesting that God actually dictates moral precepts to the conscience. The human being's ideas of the content of the moral law depends entirely to a large extent on education and environment, and a man has to use his reason in assessing the validity of the actual moral ideas of his social group. But the possibility of criticizing the accepted moral code presupposes that there is an objective standard, and there is an ideal moral order, which imposes itself (I mean the obligatory character of which can be recognized). I think that the recognition of this ideal moral order is part of the recognition of contingency. It implies the existence of a real foundation of God.
R: But the law-giver has always been, it seems to me, one's parents or someone like. There are plenty of terrestrial law-givers to account for it, and that would explain why people's consciences are so amazingly different in different times and places.
C: It helps to explain differences in the perception of particular moral values, which otherwise are inexplicable. It will help to explain changes in the matter of the moral law in the content of the precepts as accepted by this or that nation, or this or that individual. But the form of it, what Kant calls the categorical imperative, the "ought," I really don't see how that can possibly be conveyed to anybody by nurse or parent because there aren't any possible terms, so far as I can see, with which it can be explained. it can't be defined in other terms than itself, because once you've defined it in other terms than itself you've explained it away. It's no longer a moral "ought." It's something else.
R: Well, I think the sense of "ought" is the effect of somebody's imagined disapproval, it may be God's imagined disapproval, but it's somebody's imagined disapproval. And I think that is what is meant by "ought."
C: It seems to me to be external customs and taboos and things of that sort which can most easily be explained simply through environment and education, but all that seems to me to belong to what I call the matter of the law, the content. The idea of the "ought" as such can never be conveyed to a man by the tribal chief or by anybody else, because there are no other terms in which it could be conveyed. It seems to me entirely....
R: But I don't see any reason to say that -- I mean we all know about conditioned reflexes. We know that an animal, if punished habitually for a certain sort of act, after a time will refrain. I don't think the animal refrains from arguing within himself, "Master will be angry if I do this." He has a feeling that that's not the thing to do. That's what we can do with ourselves and nothing more.
C: I see no reason to suppose that an animal has a consciousness or moral obligation; and we certainly don't regard an animal as morally responsible for his acts of disobedience. But a man has a consciousness of obligation and of moral values. I see no reason to suppose that one could condition all men as one can "condition" an animal, and I don't suppose you'd really want to do so even if one could. If "behaviorism" were true, there would be no objective moral distinction between the emperor Nero and St. Francis of Assisi. I can't help feeling, Lord Russell, you know, that you regard the conduct of the commandant of Belsen as morally reprehensible, and that you yourself would never under any circumstances act in that way, even if you thought, or had reason to think, that possibly the balance of the happiness of the human race might be increased through some people being treated in that abominable manner.
R: No. I wouldn't imitate the conduct of a mad dog. The fact that I wouldn't do it doesn't really bear on this question we're discussing.
C: No, but if you were making a utilitarian explanation of right and wrong in terms of consequences, it might be held, and I suppose some of the Nazis of the better type would have held that although it's lamentable to have to act in this way, yet the balance in the long run leads to greater happiness. I don't think you'd say that, would you? I think you'd say that sort of action is wrong -- and in itself, quite apart from whether the general balance of happiness is increased or not. Then, if you're prepared to say that, then I think you must have some criterion of feeling, at any rate. To me, that admission would ultimately result in the admission of an ultimate ground of value in God.
R: I think we are perhaps getting into confusion. It is not direct feeling about the act by which I should judge, but rather a feeling as to the effects. And I can't admit any circumstances in which certain kinds of behavior, such as you have been discussing, would do good. I can't imagine circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect. I think the persons who think they do are deceiving themselves. But if there were circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect, then I might be obliged, however reluctantly, to say -- "Well, I don't like these things, but I will acquiesce in them," just as I acquiesce in the Criminal Law, although I profoundly dislike punishment.
C: Well, perhaps it's time I summed up my position. I've argued two things. First, that the existence of God can be philosophically proved by a metaphysical argument; secondly, that it is only the existence of God that will make sense of man's moral experience and of religious experience. Personally, I think that your way of accounting for man's moral judgments leads inevitably to a contradiction between what your theory demands and your own spontaneous judgments. Moreover, your theory explains moral obligation away, and explaining away is not explanation.
As regards the metaphysical argument, we are apparently in agreement that what we call the world consists simply of contingent beings. That is, of beings no one of which can account for its own existence. You say that the series of events needs no explanation: I say that if there were no necessary being, no being which must exist and cannot not-exist, nothing would exist. The infinity of the series of contingent beings, even if proved, would be irrelevant. Something does exist; therefore, there must be something which accounts for this fact, a being which is outside the series of contingent beings. If you had admitted this, we could then have discussed whether that being is personal, good, and so on. On the actual point discussed, whether there is or is not a necessary being, I find myself, I think in agreement with the great majority of classical philosophers.
You maintain, I think, that existing beings are simply there, and that I have no justification for raising the question of the explanation of their existence. But I would like to point out that this position cannot be substantiated by logical analysis; it expresses a philosophy which itself stands in need of proof. I think we have reached an impasse because our ideas of philosophy are radically different; it seems to me that what I call a part of philosophy, that you call the whole, insofar at least as philosophy is rational.
It seems to me, if you will pardon my saying so, that besides your own logical system -- what you call "modern" in opposition to antiquated logic (a tendentious adjective) -- you maintain a philosophy which cannot be substantiated by logical analysis. After all, the problem of God's existence is an existential problem whereas logical analysis does not deal directly with problems of existence. So it seems to me, to declare that the terms involved in one set of problems are meaningless because they are not required in dealing with another set of problems, is to settle from the beginning the nature and extent of philosophy, and that is itself a philosophical act which stands in need of justification.
R: Well, I should like to say just a few words by way of summary on my side. First, as to the metaphysical argument: I don't admit the connotations of such a term as "contingent" or the possibility of explanation in Father Copleston's sense. I think the word "contingent" inevitably suggests the possibility of something that wouldn't have this what you might call accidental character of just being there, and I don't think is true except in the purely causal sense. You can sometimes give a causal explanation of one thing as being the effect of something else, but that is merely referring one thing to another thing and there's no -- to my mind -- explanation in Father Copleston's sense of anything at all, nor is there any meaning in calling things "contingent" because there isn't anything else they could be.
That's what I should say about that, but I should like to say a few words about Father Copleston's accusation that I regard logic as all philosophy -- that is by no means the case. I don't by any means regard logic as all philosophy. I think logic is an essential part of philosophy and logic has to be used in philosophy, and in that I think he and I are at one. When the logic that he uses was new -- namely, in the time of Aristotle, there had to be a great deal of fuss made about it; Aristotle made a lot of fuss about that logic. Nowadays it's become old and respectable, and you don't have to make so much fuss about it. The logic that I believe in is comparatively new, and therefore I have to imitate Aristotle in making a fuss about it; but it's not that I think it's all philosophy by any means -- I don't think so. I think it's an important part of philosophy, and when I say that, I don't find a meaning for this or that word, that is a position of detail based upon what I've found out about that particular word, from thinking about it. It's not a general position that all words that are used in metaphysics are nonsense, or anything like that which I don't really hold.
As regards the moral argument, I do find that when one studies anthropology or history, there are people who think it their duty to perform acts which I think abominable, and I certainly can't, therefore, attribute Divine origin to the matter of moral obligation, which Father Copleston doesn't ask me to; but I think even the form of moral obligation, when it takes the form of enjoining you to eat your father or what not, doesn't seem to me to be such a very beautiful and noble thing; and, therefore, I cannot attribute a Divine origin to this sense of moral obligation, which I think is quite easily accounted for in quite other ways.
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R: Yes, I accept this definition.
C: Well, my position is the affirmative position that such a being actually exists, and that His existence can be proved philosophically. Perhaps you would tell me if your position is that of agnosticism or of atheism. I mean, would you say that the non-existence of God can be proved?
R: No, I should not say that: my position is agnostic.
C: Would you agree with me that the problem of God is a problem of great importance? For example, would you agree that if God does not exist, human beings and human history can have no other purpose than the purpose they choose to give themselves, which -- in practice -- is likely to mean the purpose which those impose who have the power to impose it?
R: Roughly speaking, yes, though I should have to place some limitation on your last clause.
C: Would you agree that if there is no God -- no absolute Being -- there can be no absolute values? I mean, would you agree that if there is no absolute good that the relativity of values results?
R: No, I think these questions are logically distinct. Take, for instance, G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, where he maintains that there is a distinction of good and evil, that both of these are definite concepts. But he does not bring in the idea of God to support that contention.
C: Well, suppose we leave the question of good till later, till we come to the moral argument, and I give first a metaphysical argument. I'd like to put the main weight on the metaphysical argument based on Leibniz's argument from "Contingency" and then later we might discuss the moral argument. Suppose I give a brief statement on the metaphysical argument and that then we go on to discuss it?
R: That seems to me to be a very good plan. THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTINGENCY
C: Well, for clarity's sake, I'll divide the argument into distinct stages. First of all, I should say, we know that there are at least some beings in the world which do not contain in themselves the reason for their existence. For example, I depend on my parents, and now on the air, and on food, and so on. Now, secondly, the world is simply the real or imagined totality or aggregate of individual objects, none of which contain in themselves alone the reason for their existence. There isn't any world distinct from the objects which form it, any more than the human race is something apart from the members.
Therefore, I should say, since objects or events exist, and since no object of experience contains within itself reason of its existence, this reason, the totality of objects, must have a reason external to itself. That reason must be an existent being. Well, this being is either itself the reason for its own existence, or it is not. If it is, well and good. If it is not, then we must proceed farther. But if we proceed to infinity in that sense, then there's no explanation of existence at all. So, I should say, in order to explain existence, we must come to a being which contains within itself the reason for its own existence, that is to say, which cannot not exist.
R: This raises a great many points and it is not altogether easy to know where to begin, but I think that, perhaps, in answering your argument, the best point at which to begin is the question of necessary being. The word "necessary" I should maintain, can only be applied significantly to propositions. And, in fact, only to such as are analytic -- that is to say -- such as it is self-contradictory to deny. I could only admit a necessary being if there were a being whose existence it is self-contradictory to deny. I should like to know whether you would accept Leibniz's division of propositions into truths of reason and truths of fact. The former -- the truths of reason -- being necessary.
C: Well, I certainly should not subscribe to what seems to be Leibniz's idea of truths of reason and truths of fact, since it would appear that, for him, there are in the long run only analytic propositions. It would seem that for Leibniz truths of fact are ultimately reducible to truths of reason. That is to say, to analytic propositions, at least for an omniscient mind. Well, I couldn't agree with that. For one thing it would fail to meet the requirements of the experience of freedom. I don't want to uphold the whole philosophy of Leibniz. I have made use of his argument from contingent to necessary being, basing the argument on the principle of sufficient reason, simply because it seems to me a brief and clear formulation of what is, in my opinion, the fundamental metaphysical argument for God's existence.
R: But, to my mind, "a necessary proposition" has got to be analytic. I don't see what else it can mean. And analytic propositions are always complex and logically somewhat late. "Irrational animals are animals" is an analytic proposition; but a proposition such as "This is an animal" can never be analytic. In fact, all the propositions that can be analytic are somewhat late in the build-up of propositions.
C: Take the proposition "if there is a contingent being then there is a necessary being." I consider that that proposition hypothetically expressed is a necessary proposition. If you are going to call every necessary proposition an analytic proposition, then -- in order to avoid a dispute in terminology -- I would agree to call it analytic, though I don't consider it a tautological proposition. But the proposition is a necessary proposition only on the supposition that there is a contingent being. That there is a contingent being actually existing has to be discovered by experience, and the proposition that there is a contingent being is certainly not an analytic proposition, though once you know, I should maintain, that there is a contingent being, it follows of necessity that there is a necessary being.
R: The difficulty of this argument is that I don't admit the idea of a necessary being and I don't admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings "contingent." These phrases don't for me have a significance except within a logic that I reject.
C: Do you mean that you reject these terms because they won't fit in with what is called "modern logic"?
R: Well, I can't find anything that they could mean. The word "necessary," it seems to me, is a useless word, except as applied to analytic propositions, not to things.
C: In the first place, what do you mean by "modern logic?" As far as I know, there are somewhat differing systems. In the second place, not all modern logicians surely would admit the meaninglessness of metaphysics. We both know, at any rate, one very eminent modern thinker whose knowledge of modern logic was profound, but who certainly did not think that metaphysics are meaningless or, in particular, that the problem of God is meaningless. Again, even if all modern logicians held that metaphysical terms are meaningless, it would not follow that they were right. The proposition that metaphysical terms are meaningless seems to me to be a proposition based on an assumed philosophy.
The dogmatic position behind it seems to be this: What will not go into my machine is non-existent, or it is meaningless; it is the expression of emotion. I am simply trying to point out that anybody who says that a particular system of modern logic is the sole criterion of meaning is saying something that is over-dogmatic; he is dogmatically insisting that a part of philosophy is the whole of philosophy. After all, a "contingent" being is a being which has not in itself the complete reason for its existence that's what I mean by a contingent being. You know, as well as I do, that the existence of neither of us can be explained without reference to something or somebody outside us, our parents, for example. A "necessary" being, on the other hand means a being that must and cannot not exist. You may say that there is no such being, but you will find it hard to convince me that you do not understand the terms I am using. If you do not understand them, then how can you be entitled to say that such a being does not exist, if that is what you do say?
R: Well, there are points here that I don't propose to go into at length. I don't maintain the meaninglessness of metaphysics in general at all. I maintain the meaninglessness of certain particular terms -- not on any general ground, but simply because I've not been able to see an interpretation of those particular terms. It's not a general dogma -- it's a particular thing. But those points I will leave out for the moment. And I will say that what you have been saying brings us back, it seems to me, to the ontological argument that there is a being whose essence involves existence, so that his existence is analytic. That seems to me to be impossible, and it raises, of course, the question what one means by existence, and as to this, I think a subject named can never be significantly said to exist but only a subject described. And that existence, in fact, quite definitely is not a predicate.
C: Well, you say, I believe, that it is bad grammar, or rather bad syntax to say for example "T. S. Eliot exists"; one ought to say, for example, "He, the author of Murder in the Cathedral, exists." Are you going to say that the proposition, "The cause of the world exists," is without meaning? You may say that the world has no cause; but I fail to see how you can say that the proposition that "the cause of the world exists" is meaningless. Put it in the form of a question: "Has the world a cause?" or "Does a cause of the world exist?" Most people surely would understand the question, even if they don't agree about the answer.
R: Well, certainly the question "Does the cause of the world exist?" is a question that has meaning. But if you say "Yes, God is the cause of the world" you're using God as a proper name; then "God exists" will not be a statement that has meaning; that is the position that I'm maintaining. Because, therefore, it will follow that it cannot be an analytic proposition ever to say that this or that exists. For example, suppose you take as your subject "the existent round-square," it would look like an analytic proposition that "the existent round- square exists," but it doesn't exist.
C: No, it doesn't, then surely you can't say it doesn't exist unless you have a conception of what existence is. As to the phrase "existent round-square," I should say that it has no meaning at all.
R: I quite agree. Then I should say the same thing in another context in reference to a "necessary being."
C: Well, we seem to have arrived at an impasse. To say that a necessary being is a being that must exist and cannot not exist has for me a definite meaning. For you it has no meaning.
R: Well, we can press the point a little, I think. A being that must exist and cannot not exist, would surely, according to you, be a being whose essence involves existence. C: Yes, a being the essence of which is to exist. But I should not be willing to argue the existence of God simply from the idea of His essence because I don't think we have any clear intuition of God's essence as yet. I think we have to argue from the world of experience to God.
R: Yes, I quite see the distinction. But, at the same time, for a being with sufficient knowledge, it would be true to say "Here is this being whose essence involves existence!"
C: Yes, certainly if anybody saw God, he would see that God must exist.
R: So that I mean there is a being whose essence involves existence although we don't know that essence. We only know there is such a being.
C: Yes, I should add we don't know the essence a priori. It is only a posteriori through our experience of the world that we come to a knowledge of the existence of that being. And then one argues, the essence and existence must be identical. Because if God's essence and God's existence was not identical, then some sufficient reason for this existence would have to be found beyond God.
R: So it all turns on this question of sufficient reason, and I must say you haven't defined "sufficient reason" in a way that I can understand -- what do you mean by sufficient reason? You don't mean cause?
C: Not necessarily. Cause is a kind of sufficient reason. Only contingent being can have a cause. God is His own sufficient reason; and He is not cause of Himself. By sufficient reason in the full sense I mean an explanation adequate for the existence of some particular being.
R: But when is an explanation adequate? Suppose I am about to make a flame with a match. You may say that the adequate explanation of that is that I rub it on the box.
C: Well, for practical purposes -- but theoretically, that is only a partial explanation. An adequate explanation must ultimately be a total explanation, to which nothing further can be added.
R: Then I can only say that you're looking for something which can't be got, and which one ought not to expect to get.
C: To say that one has not found it is one thing; to say that one should not look for it seems to me rather dogmatic.
R: Well, I don't know. I mean, the explanation of one thing is another thing which makes the other thing dependent on yet another, and you have to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire to do what you want, and that we can't do.
C: But are you going to say that we can't, or we shouldn't even raise the question of the existence of the whole of this sorry scheme of things -- of the whole universe?
R: Yes, I don't think there's any meaning in it at all. I think the word "universe" is a handy word in some connections, but I don't think it stands for anything that has a meaning.
C: If the word is meaningless, it can't be so very handy. In any case, I don't say that the universe is something different from the objects which compose it (I indicated that in my brief summary of the proof), what I'm doing is to look for the reason, in this case the cause of the objects -- the real or imagined totality of which constitute what we call the universe. You say, I think that the universe -- or my existence if you prefer, or any other existence -- is unintelligible?
R: First may I take up the point that if a word is meaningless it can't be handy. That sounds well but isn't in fact correct. Take, say, such a word as "the" or "than." You can't point to any object that those words mean, but they are very useful words; I should say the same of "universe." But leaving that point, you ask whether I consider that the universe is unintelligible. I shouldn't say unintelligible -- I think it is without explanation. Intelligible, to my mind, is a different thing. Intelligible has to do with the thing itself intrinsically and not with its relations.
C: Well, my point is that what we call the world is intrinsically unintelligible, apart from the existence of God. You see, I don't believe that the infinity of the series of events -- I mean a horizontal series, so to speak -- if such an infinity could be proved, would be in the slightest degree relevant to the situation. If you add up chocolates you get chocolates after all and not a sheep. If you add up chocolates to infinity, you presumably get an infinite number of chocolates. So if you add up contingent beings to infinity, you still get contingent beings, not a necessary being. An infinite series of contingent beings will be, to my way of thinking, as unable to cause itself as one contingent being. However, you say, I think, that it is illegitimate to raise the question of what will explain the existence of any particular object?
R: It's quite all right if you mean by explaining it, simply finding a cause for it.
C: Well, why stop at one particular object? Why shouldn't one raise the question of the cause of the existence of all particular objects?
R: Because I see no reason to think there is any. The whole concept of cause is one we derive from our observation of particular things; I see no reason whatsoever to suppose that the total has any cause whatsoever.
C: Well, to say that there isn't any cause is not the same thing as saying that we shouldn't look for a cause. The statement that there isn't any cause should come, if it comes at all, at the end of the inquiry, not the beginning. In any case, if the total has no cause, then to my way of thinking it must be its own cause, which seems to me impossible. Moreover, the statement that the world is simply there if in answer to a question, presupposes that the question has meaning.
R: No, it doesn't need to be its own cause, what I'm saying is that the concept of cause is not applicable to the total.
C: Then you would agree with Sartre that the universe is what he calls "gratuitous"?
R: Well, the word "gratuitous" suggests that it might be something else; I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all.
C: Well, I can't see how you can rule out the legitimacy of asking the question how the total, or anything at all comes to be there. Why something rather than nothing, that is the question? The fact that we gain our knowledge of causality empirically, from particular causes, does not rule out the possibility of asking what the cause of the series is. If the word "cause" were meaningless or if it could be shown that Kant's view of the matter were correct, the question would be illegitimate I agree; but you don't seem to hold that the word "cause" is meaningless, and I do not suppose you are a Kantian.
R: I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother -- that's a different logical sphere.
C: Well, I can't really see any parity. If I were saying "every object has a phenomenal cause, therefore, the whole series has a phenomenal cause," there would be a parity; but I'm not saying that; I'm saying, every object has a phenomenal cause if you insist on the infinity of the series -- but the series of phenomenal causes is an insufficient explanation of the series. Therefore, the series has not a phenomenal cause but a transcendent cause.
R: That's always assuming that not only every particular thing in the world, but the world as a whole must have a cause. For that assumption I see no ground whatever. If you'll give me a ground I'll listen to it.
C: Well, the series of events is either caused or it's not caused. If it is caused, there must obviously be a cause outside the series. If it's not caused then it's sufficient to itself, and if it's sufficient to itself it is what I call necessary. But it can't be necessary since each member is contingent, and we've agreed that the total has no reality apart from its members, therefore, it can't be necessary. Therefore, it can't be -- uncaused -- therefore it must have a cause. And I should like to observe in passing that the statement "the world is simply there and is inexplicable" can't be got out of logical analysis.
R: I don't want to seem arrogant, but it does seem to me that I can conceive things that you say the human mind can't conceive. As for things not having a cause, the physicists assure us that individual quantum transitions in atoms have no cause.
C: Well, I wonder now whether that isn't simply a temporary inference.
R: It may be, but it does show that physicists' minds can conceive it.
C: Yes, I agree, some scientists -- physicists -- are willing to allow for indetermination within a restricted field. But very many scientists are not so willing. I think that Professor Dingle, of London University, maintains that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us something about the success (or the lack of it) of the present atomic theory in correlating observations, but not about nature in itself, and many physicists would accept this view. In any case, I don't see how physicists can fail to accept the theory in practice, even if they don't do so in theory. I cannot see how science could be conducted on any other assumption than that of order and intelligibility in nature.
The physicist presupposes, at least tacitly, that there is some sense in investigating nature and looking for the causes of events, just as the detective presupposes that there is some sense in looking for the cause of a murder. The metaphysician assumes that there is sense in looking for the reason or cause of phenomena, and, not being a Kantian, I consider that the metaphysician is as justified in his assumption as the physicist. When Sartre, for example, says that the world is gratuitous, I think that he has not sufficiently considered what is implied by "gratuitous."
R: I think -- there seems to me a certain unwarrantable extension here; a physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes. As for Sartre, I don't profess to know what he means, and I shouldn't like to be thought to interpret him, but for my part, I do think the notion of the world having an explanation is a mistake. I don't see why one should expect it to have, and I think you say about what the scientist assumes is an over-statement.
C: Well, it seems to me that the scientist does make some such assumption. When he experiments to find out some particular truth, behind that experiment lies the assumption that the universe is not simply discontinuous. There is the possibility of finding out a truth by experiment. The experiment may be a bad one, it may lead to no result, or not to the result that he wants, but that at any rate there is the possibility, through experiment, of finding out the truth that he assumes. And that seems to me to assume an ordered and intelligible universe.
R: I think you're generalizing more than is necessary. Undoubtedly the scientist assumes that this sort of thing is likely to be found and will often be found. He does not assume that it will be found, and that's a very important matter in modem physics.
C: Well, I think he does assume or is bound to assume it tacitly in practice. It may be that, to quote Professor Haldane, "when I Iight the gas under the kettle, some of the water molecules will fly off as vapor, and there is no way of finding out which will do so," but it doesn't follow necessarily that the idea of chance must be introduced except in relation to our knowledge.
R: No it doesn't -- at least if I may believe what he says. He's finding out quite a lot of things -- the scientist is finding out quite a lot of things that are happening in the world, which are, at first, beginnings of causal chains -- first causes which haven't in themselves got causes. He does not assume that everything has a cause.
C: Surely that's a first cause within a certain selected field. It's a relatively first cause.
R: I don't think he'd say so. If there's a world in which most events, but not all, have causes, he will then be able to depict the probabilities and uncertainties by assuming that this particular event you're interested in probably has a cause. And since in any case you won't get more than probability that's good enough.
C: It may be that the scientist doesn't hope to obtain more than probability, but in raising the question he assumes that the question of explanation has a meaning. But your general point then, Lord Russell, is that it's illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world?
R: Yes, that's my position.
C: If it's a question that for you has no meaning, it's of course very difficult to discuss it, isn't it?
R: Yes, it is very difficult. What do you say -- shall we pass on to some other issue?
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
C: Let's. Well, perhaps I might say a word about religious experience, and then we can go on to moral experience. I don't regard religious experience as a strict proof of the existence of God, so the character of the discussion changes somewhat, but I think it's true to say that the best explanation of it is the existence of God. By religious experience I don't mean simply feeling good. I mean a loving, but unclear, awareness of some object which irresistibly seems to the experiencer as something transcending the self, something transcending all the normal objects of experience, something which cannot be pictured or conceptualized, but of the reality of which doubt is impossible -- at least during the experience. I should claim that cannot be explained adequately and without residue, simply subjectively. The actual basic experience at any rate is most easily explained on the hypotheses that there is actually some objective cause of that experience.
R: I should reply to that line of argument that the whole argument from our own mental states to something outside us, is a very tricky affair. Even where we all admit its validity, we only feel justified in doing so, I think, because of the consensus of mankind. If there's a crowd in a room and there's a clock in a room, they can all see the clock. The face that they can all see it tends to make them think that it's not an hallucination: whereas these religious experiences do tend to be very private.
C: Yes, they do. I'm speaking strictly of mystical experience proper, and I certainly don't include, by the way, what are called visions. I mean simply the experience, and I quite admit it's indefinable, of the transcendent object or of what seems to be a transcendent object. I remember Julian Huxley in some lecture saying that religious experience, or mystical experience, is as much a real experience as falling in love or appreciating poetry and art. Well, I believe that when we appreciate poetry and art we appreciate definite poems or a definite work of art. If we fall in love, well, we fall in love with somebody and not with nobody.
R: May I interrupt for a moment here. That is by no means always the case. Japanese novelists never consider that they have achieved a success unless large numbers of real people commit suicide for love of the imaginary heroine.
C: Well, I must take your word for these goings on in Japan. I haven't committed suicide, I'm glad to say, but I have been strongly influenced in the taking of two important steps in my life by two biographies. However, I must say I see little resemblance between the real influence of those books on me and the mystic experience proper, so far, that is, as an outsider can obtain an idea of that experience.
R: Well, I mean we wouldn't regard God as being on the same level as the characters in a work of fiction. You'll admit there's a distinction here?
C: I certainly should. But what I'd say is that the best explanation seems to be the not purely subjectivist explanation. Of course, a subjectivist explanation is possible in the case of certain people in whom there is little relation between the experience and life, in the case of deluded people and hallucinated people, and so on. But when you get what one might call the pure type, say St. Francis of Assisi, when you get an experience that results in an overflow of dynamic and creative love, the best explanation of that it seems to me is the actual existence of an objective cause of the experience.
R: Well, I'm not contending in a dogmatic way that there is not a God. What I'm contending is that we don't know that there is. I can only take what is recorded as I should take other records and I do find that a very great many things are reported, and I am sure you would not accept things about demons and devils and what not -- and they're reported in exactly the same tone of voice and with exactly the same conviction. And the mystic, if his vision is veridical, may be said to know that there are devils. But I don't know that there are.
C: But surely in the case of the devils there have been people speaking mainly of visions, appearance, angels or demons and so on. I should rule out the visual appearances, because I think they can be explained apart from the existence of the object which is supposed to be seen.
R: But don't you think there are abundant recorded cases of people who believe that they've heard Satan speaking to them in their hearts, in just the same way as the mystics assert God -- and I'm not talking now of an external vision, I'm talking of a purely mental experience. That seems to be an experience of the same sort as mystics' experience of God, and I don't seek that from what mystics tell us you can get any argument for God which is not equally an argument for Satan.
C: I quite agree, of course, that people have imagined or thought they have heard of seen Satan. And I have no wish in passing to deny the existence of Satan. But I do not think that people have claimed to have experienced Satan in the precise way in which mystics claim to have experienced God. Take the case of a non-Christian, Plotinus. He admits the experience is something inexpressible, the object is an object of love, and therefore, not an object that causes horror and disgust. And the effect of that experience is, I should say, borne out, or I mean the validity of th experience is borne out in the records of the life of Plotinus. At any rate it is more reasonable to suppose that he had that experience if we're willing to accept Porphyry's account of Plontinus' general kindness and benevolence.
R: The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.
C: No, but if it could actually be proved that the belief was actually responsible for a good effect on a man's life, I should consider it a presumption in favor of some truth, at any rate of the positive part of the belief not of its entire validity. But in any case I am using the character of the life as evidence in favor of the mystic's veracity and sanity rather than as a proof of the truth of his beliefs.
R: But even that I don't think is any evidence. I've had experiences myself that have altered my character profoundly. And I thought at the time at any rate that it was altered for the good. Those experiences were important, but they did not involve the existence of something outside me, and I don't think that if I'd thought they did, the fact that they had a wholesome effect would have been any evidence that I was right.
C: No, but I think that the good effect would attest your veracity in describing your experience. Please remember that I'm not saying that a mystic's mediation or interpretation of his experience should be immune from discussion or criticism.
R: Obviously the character of a young man may be -- and often is -- immensely affected for good by reading about some great man in history, and it may happen that the great man is a myth and doesn't exist, but they boy is just as much affected for good as if he did. There have been such people. Plutarch's Lives take Lycurgus as an example, who certainly did not exist, but you might be very much influenced by reading Lycurgus under the impression that he had previously existed. You would then be influenced by an object that you'd loved, but it wouldn't be an existing object.
C: I agree with you on that, of course, that a man may be influenced by a character in fiction. Without going into the question of what it is precisely that influences him (I should say a real value) I think that the situation of that man and of the mystic are different. After all the man who is influenced by Lycurgus hasn't got the irresistible impression that he's experience in some way the ultimate reality.
R: I don't think you've quite got my point about these historical characters -- these unhistorical characters in history. I'm not assuming what you call an effect on the reason. I'm assuming that the young man reading about this person and believing him to be real loves him -- which is quite easy to happen, and yet he's loving a phantom.
C: In one sense he's loving a phantom that's perfectly true, in the sense, I mean, that he's loving X or Y who doesn't exist. But at the same time, it is not, I think, the phantom as such that the young man loves; he perceives a real value, an idea which he recognizes as objectively valid, and that's what excites his love.
R: Well, in the same sense we had before about the characters in fiction.
C: Yes, in one sense the man's loving a phantom -- perfectly true. But in another sense he's loving what he perceives to be a value.
THE MORAL ARGUMENT
R: But aren't you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good -- the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you're saying, because if so, it wants a bit of arguing.
C: I don't say, of course, that God is the sum-total or system of what is good in the pantheistic sense; I'm not a pantheist, but I do think that all goodness reflects God in some way and proceeds from him, so that in a sense the man who loves what is truly good, loves God even if he doesn't advert to God. But still I agree that the validity of such an interpretation of a man's conduct depends on the recognition of God's existence, obviously.
R: Yes, but that's a point to be proved.
C: Quite so, but I regard the metaphysical argument as probative, but there we differ.
R: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don't say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.
C: Yes, but what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?
R: I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.
C: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?
R: By my feelings.
C: By your feelings. Well, that's what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?
R: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn't been gone into in the same way and I couldn't give it you.
C: Well, let's take the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen. That appears to you as undesirable and evil and to me too. To Adolf Hitler we suppose it appeared as something good and desirable, I suppose you'd have to admit that for Hitler it was good and for you it is evil.
R: No, I shouldn't quite go so far as that. I mean, I think people can make mistakes in that as they can in other things. If you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You're making a mistake.
C: Yes, one can make mistakes, but can you make a mistake if it's simply a question of reference to a feeling or emotion? Surely Hitler would be the only possible judge of what appealed to his emotions.
R: It would be quite right to say that it appealed to his emotions, but you can say various things about that among others, that if that sort of thing makes that sort of appeal to Hitler's emotions, then Hitler makes quite a different appeal to my emotions.
C: Granted. But there's no objective criterion outside feeling then for condemning the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen, in your view?
R: No more than there is for the color-blind person who's in exactly the same state. Why do we intellectually condemn the color-blind man? Isn't it because he's in the minority?
C: I would say because he is lacking in a thing which normally belongs to human nature.
R: Yes, but if he were in the majority, we shouldn't say that.
C: Then you'd say that there's no criterion outside feeling that will enable one to distinguish between the behavior of the commandant of Belsen and the behavior, say, of Sir Stafford Cripps or the archbishop of Canterbury.
R: The feeling is a little too simplified. You've got to take account of the effects of actions and your feelings toward those effects. You see, you can have an argument about it if you can say that certain sorts of occurrences are the sort you like and certain others the sort you don't like. Then you have to take account of the effects of actions. You can very well say that the effects of the actions of the commandant of Belsen were painful and unpleasant.
C: They certainly were, I agree, very painful and unpleasant to all the people in the camp.
R: Yes, but not only to the people in the camp, but to outsiders contemplating them also.
C: Yes, quite true in imagination. But that's my point. I don't approve of them, and I know you don't approve of them, but I don't see what ground you have for not approving of them, because after all, to the commandant of Belsen himself, they're pleasant, those actions.
R: Yes, but you see I don't need any more ground in that case than I do in the case of color perception. There are some people who think everything is yellow, there are people suffering from jaundice, and I don't agree with these people. I can't prove that the things are not yellow, there isn't any proof, but most people agree with him that they're not yellow, and most people agree with me that the commandant of Belsen was making mistakes.
C: Well, do you accept any moral obligation?
R: Well, I should have to answer at considerable length to answer that. Practically speaking -- yes. Theoretically speaking I should have to define moral obligation rather carefully.
C: Well, do you think that the word "ought" simply has an emotional connotation?
R: No, I don't think that, because you see, as I was saying a moment ago, one has to take account of the effects, and I think right conduct is that which would probably produce the greatest possible balance in intrinsic value of all the acts possible in the circumstances, and you've got to take account of the probable effects of your action in considering what is right.
C: Well, I brought in moral obligation because I think that one can approach the question of God's existence in that way. The vast majority of the human race will make, and always have made, some distinction between right and wrong. The vast majority I think has some consciousness of an obligation in the moral sphere. It's my opinion that the perception of values and the consciousness of moral law and obligation are best explained through the hypothesis of a transcendent ground of value and of an author of the moral law. I do mean by "author of the moral law" an arbitrary author of the moral law. I think, in fact, that those modern atheists who have argued in a converse way "there is no God; therefore, there are no absolute values and no absolute law," are quite logical.
R: I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.
C: Well, I don't see that differences in particular moral judgments are any conclusive argument against the universality of the moral law. Let's assume for the moment that there are absolute moral values, even on that hypothesis it's only to be expected that different individuals and different groups should enjoy varying degrees of insight into those values.
R: I'm inclined to think that "ought," the feeling that one has about "ought" is an echo of what has been told one by one's parents or one's nurses.
C: Well, I wonder if you can explain away the idea of the "ought" merely in terms of nurses and parents. I really don't see how it can be conveyed to anybody in other terms than itself. It seems to be that if there is a moral order bearing upon the human conscience, that that moral order is unintelligible apart from the existence of God.
R: Then you have to say one or other of two things. Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind -- which happens to include yourself -- or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages.
C: Well, you see, I'm not suggesting that God actually dictates moral precepts to the conscience. The human being's ideas of the content of the moral law depends entirely to a large extent on education and environment, and a man has to use his reason in assessing the validity of the actual moral ideas of his social group. But the possibility of criticizing the accepted moral code presupposes that there is an objective standard, and there is an ideal moral order, which imposes itself (I mean the obligatory character of which can be recognized). I think that the recognition of this ideal moral order is part of the recognition of contingency. It implies the existence of a real foundation of God.
R: But the law-giver has always been, it seems to me, one's parents or someone like. There are plenty of terrestrial law-givers to account for it, and that would explain why people's consciences are so amazingly different in different times and places.
C: It helps to explain differences in the perception of particular moral values, which otherwise are inexplicable. It will help to explain changes in the matter of the moral law in the content of the precepts as accepted by this or that nation, or this or that individual. But the form of it, what Kant calls the categorical imperative, the "ought," I really don't see how that can possibly be conveyed to anybody by nurse or parent because there aren't any possible terms, so far as I can see, with which it can be explained. it can't be defined in other terms than itself, because once you've defined it in other terms than itself you've explained it away. It's no longer a moral "ought." It's something else.
R: Well, I think the sense of "ought" is the effect of somebody's imagined disapproval, it may be God's imagined disapproval, but it's somebody's imagined disapproval. And I think that is what is meant by "ought."
C: It seems to me to be external customs and taboos and things of that sort which can most easily be explained simply through environment and education, but all that seems to me to belong to what I call the matter of the law, the content. The idea of the "ought" as such can never be conveyed to a man by the tribal chief or by anybody else, because there are no other terms in which it could be conveyed. It seems to me entirely....
R: But I don't see any reason to say that -- I mean we all know about conditioned reflexes. We know that an animal, if punished habitually for a certain sort of act, after a time will refrain. I don't think the animal refrains from arguing within himself, "Master will be angry if I do this." He has a feeling that that's not the thing to do. That's what we can do with ourselves and nothing more.
C: I see no reason to suppose that an animal has a consciousness or moral obligation; and we certainly don't regard an animal as morally responsible for his acts of disobedience. But a man has a consciousness of obligation and of moral values. I see no reason to suppose that one could condition all men as one can "condition" an animal, and I don't suppose you'd really want to do so even if one could. If "behaviorism" were true, there would be no objective moral distinction between the emperor Nero and St. Francis of Assisi. I can't help feeling, Lord Russell, you know, that you regard the conduct of the commandant of Belsen as morally reprehensible, and that you yourself would never under any circumstances act in that way, even if you thought, or had reason to think, that possibly the balance of the happiness of the human race might be increased through some people being treated in that abominable manner.
R: No. I wouldn't imitate the conduct of a mad dog. The fact that I wouldn't do it doesn't really bear on this question we're discussing.
C: No, but if you were making a utilitarian explanation of right and wrong in terms of consequences, it might be held, and I suppose some of the Nazis of the better type would have held that although it's lamentable to have to act in this way, yet the balance in the long run leads to greater happiness. I don't think you'd say that, would you? I think you'd say that sort of action is wrong -- and in itself, quite apart from whether the general balance of happiness is increased or not. Then, if you're prepared to say that, then I think you must have some criterion of feeling, at any rate. To me, that admission would ultimately result in the admission of an ultimate ground of value in God.
R: I think we are perhaps getting into confusion. It is not direct feeling about the act by which I should judge, but rather a feeling as to the effects. And I can't admit any circumstances in which certain kinds of behavior, such as you have been discussing, would do good. I can't imagine circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect. I think the persons who think they do are deceiving themselves. But if there were circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect, then I might be obliged, however reluctantly, to say -- "Well, I don't like these things, but I will acquiesce in them," just as I acquiesce in the Criminal Law, although I profoundly dislike punishment.
C: Well, perhaps it's time I summed up my position. I've argued two things. First, that the existence of God can be philosophically proved by a metaphysical argument; secondly, that it is only the existence of God that will make sense of man's moral experience and of religious experience. Personally, I think that your way of accounting for man's moral judgments leads inevitably to a contradiction between what your theory demands and your own spontaneous judgments. Moreover, your theory explains moral obligation away, and explaining away is not explanation.
As regards the metaphysical argument, we are apparently in agreement that what we call the world consists simply of contingent beings. That is, of beings no one of which can account for its own existence. You say that the series of events needs no explanation: I say that if there were no necessary being, no being which must exist and cannot not-exist, nothing would exist. The infinity of the series of contingent beings, even if proved, would be irrelevant. Something does exist; therefore, there must be something which accounts for this fact, a being which is outside the series of contingent beings. If you had admitted this, we could then have discussed whether that being is personal, good, and so on. On the actual point discussed, whether there is or is not a necessary being, I find myself, I think in agreement with the great majority of classical philosophers.
You maintain, I think, that existing beings are simply there, and that I have no justification for raising the question of the explanation of their existence. But I would like to point out that this position cannot be substantiated by logical analysis; it expresses a philosophy which itself stands in need of proof. I think we have reached an impasse because our ideas of philosophy are radically different; it seems to me that what I call a part of philosophy, that you call the whole, insofar at least as philosophy is rational.
It seems to me, if you will pardon my saying so, that besides your own logical system -- what you call "modern" in opposition to antiquated logic (a tendentious adjective) -- you maintain a philosophy which cannot be substantiated by logical analysis. After all, the problem of God's existence is an existential problem whereas logical analysis does not deal directly with problems of existence. So it seems to me, to declare that the terms involved in one set of problems are meaningless because they are not required in dealing with another set of problems, is to settle from the beginning the nature and extent of philosophy, and that is itself a philosophical act which stands in need of justification.
R: Well, I should like to say just a few words by way of summary on my side. First, as to the metaphysical argument: I don't admit the connotations of such a term as "contingent" or the possibility of explanation in Father Copleston's sense. I think the word "contingent" inevitably suggests the possibility of something that wouldn't have this what you might call accidental character of just being there, and I don't think is true except in the purely causal sense. You can sometimes give a causal explanation of one thing as being the effect of something else, but that is merely referring one thing to another thing and there's no -- to my mind -- explanation in Father Copleston's sense of anything at all, nor is there any meaning in calling things "contingent" because there isn't anything else they could be.
That's what I should say about that, but I should like to say a few words about Father Copleston's accusation that I regard logic as all philosophy -- that is by no means the case. I don't by any means regard logic as all philosophy. I think logic is an essential part of philosophy and logic has to be used in philosophy, and in that I think he and I are at one. When the logic that he uses was new -- namely, in the time of Aristotle, there had to be a great deal of fuss made about it; Aristotle made a lot of fuss about that logic. Nowadays it's become old and respectable, and you don't have to make so much fuss about it. The logic that I believe in is comparatively new, and therefore I have to imitate Aristotle in making a fuss about it; but it's not that I think it's all philosophy by any means -- I don't think so. I think it's an important part of philosophy, and when I say that, I don't find a meaning for this or that word, that is a position of detail based upon what I've found out about that particular word, from thinking about it. It's not a general position that all words that are used in metaphysics are nonsense, or anything like that which I don't really hold.
As regards the moral argument, I do find that when one studies anthropology or history, there are people who think it their duty to perform acts which I think abominable, and I certainly can't, therefore, attribute Divine origin to the matter of moral obligation, which Father Copleston doesn't ask me to; but I think even the form of moral obligation, when it takes the form of enjoining you to eat your father or what not, doesn't seem to me to be such a very beautiful and noble thing; and, therefore, I cannot attribute a Divine origin to this sense of moral obligation, which I think is quite easily accounted for in quite other ways.
END OF TRANSCRIPT
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Reach Petersens album link here
To reach the Spotify link for the Petersens' new album, click here:
https://open.spotify.com/prerelease/4F24Xo4iEKbkXQG2Ek2qvO?si=L5VrAkoiSqKJ_BtbBApb3Q&nd=1&dlsi=af8ee18ac1704e30
Sorry, for the 2-link process, but I couldn't get Substack to accept the Spotify link.
https://open.spotify.com/prerelease/4F24Xo4iEKbkXQG2Ek2qvO?si=L5VrAkoiSqKJ_BtbBApb3Q&nd=1&dlsi=af8ee18ac1704e30
Sorry, for the 2-link process, but I couldn't get Substack to accept the Spotify link.
Friday, April 24, 2026
Braxman transcript
Once again, the FISA section 702 is up
for rubber stamp approval in Congress.
0:06
And for once, it has actually stalled.
And it's about time since the average person doesn't realize that this out-of-control law is what is used to power the surveillance engine of the US. You might think this shouldn't affect you since these specific provisions added to the original Patriot Act were intended to aid in the identification and capture of terrorists. But now it is just a tool for those in political power to bypass the Constitution and reduce your freedoms.
Folks, I don't have a problem with law enforcement or intelligence agencies seeking out bad guys with the surveillance tools at their disposal -- IF there's reasonable cause. But we've been sold a bill of goods. This law was called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Yet, this tool was used extensively for political purposes and even personal spying purposes in some cases. and you thought it was for foreign persons, yet they find an easy loophole around that.
And the most important feature of this law is that it is warrantless, meaning you can justify any surveillance without a warrant and thus can do an end run on the Fourth Amendment, which is there to prevent unreasonable searches and seizures. Would you be comfortable if roadside inspections were done at specific intersections or someone had to check you and your vehicle every time you pass by? Except for a few weirdos among you, likely this is not your expectation in a free country.
Yet, this is being done to us digitally daily and automatically under the guise of protecting us from terrorists. This law is a mistake that needs to be corrected. This law needs to go back inside the limitations of the fourth amendment. The world has changed since this law was created and now we are in a super surveillance world and we have enabled the tools for our own abuse. Let me explain this all in detail.
(Stay right there.)
When the Patriot Act was enacted in 2001, the world was different. This was before the heavy use of mobile phones and social media and data collected on us was primarily targeted towards phone calls and financial transactions. Then the digital world exploded. By 2007, people started posting their entire lives on Facebook and every social interaction became driven by the mobile phone. Surprisingly or not, the FISA 702 was added in 2008, coincidental to the increase in digital data. The change in digital behavior started almost 20 years ago. And what is incredible is that a whole generation of people now accept putting their digital lives on the internet as a normal and expected thing to do. But this has resulted in a gold mine of surveillance data.
Edward Snowden revealed the extent of this data collection in 2013 and politicians were quick to label him a traitor. The reality is that without him we would not have known of the secretive operations of this government all being done without any kind of check and balance. Now our phones collect our location 24/7. Some of you are under the impression that this is something you can turn off. you would be in dreamland. Now Google can track practically every click on the internet and attach it to your identity. Now Facebook has a record of every person you've ever interacted with in your entire life.
Now your every email and communication is subject to mass collection under the prison program, Kalia law and FISA. Now every digital action is tied to real identity information and they tell you that you are not targeted unless you are a foreign person. So the end result is that what was a way to have quick access to phone calls and financial data in 2001 is now the big massive databases that track every move you make and stored at the massive NSA facility at the Utah data centers and whatever newer satellite sites have built since in places like Texas, Georgia, Colorado, Maryland, Georgia, and Hawaii.
Foreign persons BS. The whole justification for how the FISA 702 act does not affect normal people is that it is supposed to apply to foreign persons. But of course, they find a way to stretch the rule. Basically, if you've ever communicated with a non-American, suddenly you are now subject to this surveillance. Particularly in social media, how is it possible today to not have any communication with anyone foreign? They stretch it out even further and this is highlighted in the Snowden movie. It's assuming a connection with a foreign person by degrees of separation. For example, in the Snowden movie, they were surveilling a Saudi banker. So, a dragnet that was initiated against all individuals in the banker's circle of contacts. That's the first degree of separation.
Then you do a search of records of contacts of all those in the first circle. That's a second degree of separation. By the time you get to the third degree of separation, how many people would be included in there? And this is just backward justification, by the way. In reality, they just search for the data they want and then say, "Oh, this search is justified because of a connection with such and such a foreign person. So Trump himself was subjected to wiretapping using FISA conducted by Obama because supposedly he had dealings with a foreign bank. Then Black Lives Matter people were subjected to FISA surveillance probably during Trump's term. The point is this is a surveillance weapon that is often politicized and used because the data is there and they can't help themselves. Do the spying first and we'll justify the search later.
Warrantless searches. The key trait of searches of data using FISA 702 is that it is warrantless. Each individual case of NSA operatives searching the troves of data is actually never adjudicated. The FISA court or FISC, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is just a rubber stamp entity. In fact, it was written into law to perform that rubber stamp function. There are no individual checks for compliance. It's more about reviewing highlevel procedures on how the 5702 is being implemented and it's really just an annual report.
If you expected some actual hearing where each individual case is brought to some judge to decide on reasonable cause, you would be mistaken. No, folks, the reality is that warrantless search is completely out of control and really is just part of the power of the executive branch. Some of you didn't worry about this when Obama or Biden used it against their opposition like Trump. Then now that Trump controls this, suddenly there's serious fear because it now comes back to bite the old guard that used this for their political purposes.
This is an evil tool and it is subject to abuse because there are no actual checks and balances to warrantless surveillance and claiming some foreign connection is a shallow way of removing the protection of the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment is here for a reason. In case we forget, the Fourth Amendment has slowly been weakened by modern technology. Because there's always data of each one of us through our electronic devices, and many of you do not abide by the tools that privacy focused individuals use to limit that data, everyone becomes vulnerable to the dragnet. The dragnet is the random collection of data of law-abiding citizens and then looking for signs of crime. That is the exact opposite of what the fourth amendment seeks to protect. This is the exact opposite of how justice is supposed to work in a free country. It reminds me of the infamous Soviet boast attributed to Laventi Beria Stalin's secret police chief. "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
What the founding fathers were protecting us from was the abuse of power. And here we have handed this unlimited power to our government and sometimes even to just deep state operatives who are not even elected but serve to undermine this democracy. For example, in the interest of protecting the public, a whole area could be demarcated using a technique called geofencing and then all individuals found in that area then targeted for surveillance. This is not the intent of the fourth amendment. It was supposed to be guided by reasonable cause. If a crime was committed nearby, for example, and often these dragnets cover large areas, then innocent people are automatically included.
There are already many incidents of people being dragged into court accused of crimes because they were nearby. And for political targeting, this was used to identify people based on proximity in the case of the January 6 riots or Black Lives Matter protests. If you think this is used only against one political side, you are mistaken. It is a dangerous tool to provide to any elected official.
The lie, only targeted people's data are collected. I couldn't believe this outright lie when I heard it a long time ago. Obama said flat out on TV that only targeted people's data are collected by the intelligence agencies. What a political play on words. That's flatly false. As I said, all data is collected. Whether it be a foreign person or American, the vacuum machines of the NSA will suck in all the data using sources like Prism, Kalia, big tech, and no one can speak about it. What Obama actually was trying to obfuscate was that supposedly unless you're marked as a target, then they don't look at your data.
Yeah, right. Your data is there, but they will close their eyes and not look. In case you're wondering what this user interface is to do this search, back in the old days, it was a Google search-like interface. I'm sure now it's some sophisticated UI that involves AI and powered by Panelier. That probably makes no difference, but just giving you the imagery of how easily this is done. Because everyone's data is there, it takes a whole lot of discipline to say that, "Yep, we won't look. Cross my heart and hope to die." Sure they do. Look. In the Snowden movie, the NSA operatives used it to track their girlfriends.
Warrantless needs to change. The idea that warrantless searches can be done without any checks and balances and without real criminal liability is just unacceptable. There's not much of a risk to the people who break the law and use it without reasonable cause. And I'm talking about the people in the government here. In case you missed it, one of the last things that Obama did in his presidency was to start sharing this data that was previously just under the control of the NSA with the CIA, FBI, and others. So now the number of people who can abuse us has now increased. And as I said, this would now be using advanced tools with AI enabled, all powered by Palantir.
Obama even changed an FBI procedure called rule 41 where now the FBI can hack your devices again without criminal probable cause just because you use encryption. While this is not directly linked to FISA 702 it just shows how you can stretch a rule to create reasonable cause. Could this be used as a way in to permit FISA 702 surveillance against anyone? Just understand how far this goes. If you are a privacy-seeking individual and actively seeking to protect your data using tools like VPNs or end to-end encrypted messaging, then you are automatically a target because you must have something to hide. In other words, if you put curtains on your windows, that's probable cause that you're committing a crime and the government is justified in entering your house and checking out your possessions and activities.
The value of freedom. One of the most important ingredients to me of being an American citizen is my sense of freedom. That I'm free to speak about whatever I want to speak about without fear. Free to exercise my pursuit of happiness. Free to defend my property against intruders. And freedom from some government run amuck that will actually check everything I'm doing. But when someone is able to check my every move on the internet or in real life, able to see my conversations, able to judge my thoughts, it is worrisome. I feel like every time I go to the airport that I will be stopped because I don't happen to agree with some political viewpoint or that I'm free to say what I want to say on social media without being harassed. It makes me angry that this kind of abuse of my data is possible with this FISA 702.
What needs to change? FISA 702 cannot exist as is. It has to be modified so that those who abuse our data are subject to criminal penalties. There has to be some fear associated with trampling of our rights. Searching of our data has to be justified by reasonable cause and not just based on some cause invented by some government operative who may have a political agenda but actual independent review by unbiased third parties. This is important enough. It is written in the constitution. It is not some afterthought. It was meant to stop the abuse of power. Congress needs to stop the thoughtless renewal of these laws that are no longer used to stop terrorists. Instead, these laws are now meant to limit freedom of speech, undermine political institutions with deep state actions, and even manipulate those in power.
FISA 702 empowers those with access to even conduct blackmail on those they want to manipulate. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these same elected officials in Congress are actually under the control of some operative who has dirt on them based on surveillance data. Maybe that's why this law never changes. Disgusting.
Current status of FISA 702. This is the current status as of mid-April 2026. The statutory reauthorization was set to expire April 20, 2026. Congress just passed a short 10-day extension to April 30 amid fights over reforms at the House of Representatives. However, the FISC renewed the program certifications in March 2026. So that already allows data collection to continue into 2027, even without congressional action. Now, fortunately, recent FISC opinions are noting an awareness of ongoing compliance problems with querying tools across agencies. Again, eyes are opening and there is bipartisan opposition to FISA 702 with the so-called warrants or bust crowd.
Some of the lawmakers on my side are Senator Ron Weiden, Democrat of Oregon, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, and then in the House are Representative Jamie Rascin, Democrat of Maryland, Representative Warren Davidson, Republican of Ohio, Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, Representative Lauren Boowbert, Republican of Colorado, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican Florida.
Let your elected representatives know that enough is enough. No surveillance without warrants. Folks, this channel focuses on technology, but not just on the hype, but teaching you about the potential risk to our personal freedoms and privacy. I have a social media platform where my follower community can engage and discuss these issues safely. It is Braxme. Join the community and learn or share your knowledge in technology. To support this channel, we have a store on Braxme where you can gain access to privacy products we have created ourselves. We have Braxmail for identity safe email. We have Bra virtual phone for anonymous phone numbers. We have BitesVPN to guard your IP address and obscure your location. We have other products like the Google phones and flashing services.
And a new product that's coming out is the Bra SIM unlisted. I'll tell you about that soon. We have two crowdfunding projects on indiegogo.com. You may have heard of the Bra 3 phone which is shipping a second batch. Now, these are all found at a different website which is bas.net which is a sister organization to mine. You will also discover the new BRA Open Slate tablet running Android or Linux also on bratec.net. Again, these products are being sold on indiegogo.com.
Thank you very much to all those supporting us on Patreon, locals, and YouTube memberships. Your contributions are very encouraging. You are appreciated. See you next time.
And it's about time since the average person doesn't realize that this out-of-control law is what is used to power the surveillance engine of the US. You might think this shouldn't affect you since these specific provisions added to the original Patriot Act were intended to aid in the identification and capture of terrorists. But now it is just a tool for those in political power to bypass the Constitution and reduce your freedoms.
Folks, I don't have a problem with law enforcement or intelligence agencies seeking out bad guys with the surveillance tools at their disposal -- IF there's reasonable cause. But we've been sold a bill of goods. This law was called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Yet, this tool was used extensively for political purposes and even personal spying purposes in some cases. and you thought it was for foreign persons, yet they find an easy loophole around that.
And the most important feature of this law is that it is warrantless, meaning you can justify any surveillance without a warrant and thus can do an end run on the Fourth Amendment, which is there to prevent unreasonable searches and seizures. Would you be comfortable if roadside inspections were done at specific intersections or someone had to check you and your vehicle every time you pass by? Except for a few weirdos among you, likely this is not your expectation in a free country.
Yet, this is being done to us digitally daily and automatically under the guise of protecting us from terrorists. This law is a mistake that needs to be corrected. This law needs to go back inside the limitations of the fourth amendment. The world has changed since this law was created and now we are in a super surveillance world and we have enabled the tools for our own abuse. Let me explain this all in detail.
(Stay right there.)
When the Patriot Act was enacted in 2001, the world was different. This was before the heavy use of mobile phones and social media and data collected on us was primarily targeted towards phone calls and financial transactions. Then the digital world exploded. By 2007, people started posting their entire lives on Facebook and every social interaction became driven by the mobile phone. Surprisingly or not, the FISA 702 was added in 2008, coincidental to the increase in digital data. The change in digital behavior started almost 20 years ago. And what is incredible is that a whole generation of people now accept putting their digital lives on the internet as a normal and expected thing to do. But this has resulted in a gold mine of surveillance data.
Edward Snowden revealed the extent of this data collection in 2013 and politicians were quick to label him a traitor. The reality is that without him we would not have known of the secretive operations of this government all being done without any kind of check and balance. Now our phones collect our location 24/7. Some of you are under the impression that this is something you can turn off. you would be in dreamland. Now Google can track practically every click on the internet and attach it to your identity. Now Facebook has a record of every person you've ever interacted with in your entire life.
Now your every email and communication is subject to mass collection under the prison program, Kalia law and FISA. Now every digital action is tied to real identity information and they tell you that you are not targeted unless you are a foreign person. So the end result is that what was a way to have quick access to phone calls and financial data in 2001 is now the big massive databases that track every move you make and stored at the massive NSA facility at the Utah data centers and whatever newer satellite sites have built since in places like Texas, Georgia, Colorado, Maryland, Georgia, and Hawaii.
Foreign persons BS. The whole justification for how the FISA 702 act does not affect normal people is that it is supposed to apply to foreign persons. But of course, they find a way to stretch the rule. Basically, if you've ever communicated with a non-American, suddenly you are now subject to this surveillance. Particularly in social media, how is it possible today to not have any communication with anyone foreign? They stretch it out even further and this is highlighted in the Snowden movie. It's assuming a connection with a foreign person by degrees of separation. For example, in the Snowden movie, they were surveilling a Saudi banker. So, a dragnet that was initiated against all individuals in the banker's circle of contacts. That's the first degree of separation.
Then you do a search of records of contacts of all those in the first circle. That's a second degree of separation. By the time you get to the third degree of separation, how many people would be included in there? And this is just backward justification, by the way. In reality, they just search for the data they want and then say, "Oh, this search is justified because of a connection with such and such a foreign person. So Trump himself was subjected to wiretapping using FISA conducted by Obama because supposedly he had dealings with a foreign bank. Then Black Lives Matter people were subjected to FISA surveillance probably during Trump's term. The point is this is a surveillance weapon that is often politicized and used because the data is there and they can't help themselves. Do the spying first and we'll justify the search later.
Warrantless searches. The key trait of searches of data using FISA 702 is that it is warrantless. Each individual case of NSA operatives searching the troves of data is actually never adjudicated. The FISA court or FISC, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is just a rubber stamp entity. In fact, it was written into law to perform that rubber stamp function. There are no individual checks for compliance. It's more about reviewing highlevel procedures on how the 5702 is being implemented and it's really just an annual report.
If you expected some actual hearing where each individual case is brought to some judge to decide on reasonable cause, you would be mistaken. No, folks, the reality is that warrantless search is completely out of control and really is just part of the power of the executive branch. Some of you didn't worry about this when Obama or Biden used it against their opposition like Trump. Then now that Trump controls this, suddenly there's serious fear because it now comes back to bite the old guard that used this for their political purposes.
This is an evil tool and it is subject to abuse because there are no actual checks and balances to warrantless surveillance and claiming some foreign connection is a shallow way of removing the protection of the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment is here for a reason. In case we forget, the Fourth Amendment has slowly been weakened by modern technology. Because there's always data of each one of us through our electronic devices, and many of you do not abide by the tools that privacy focused individuals use to limit that data, everyone becomes vulnerable to the dragnet. The dragnet is the random collection of data of law-abiding citizens and then looking for signs of crime. That is the exact opposite of what the fourth amendment seeks to protect. This is the exact opposite of how justice is supposed to work in a free country. It reminds me of the infamous Soviet boast attributed to Laventi Beria Stalin's secret police chief. "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
What the founding fathers were protecting us from was the abuse of power. And here we have handed this unlimited power to our government and sometimes even to just deep state operatives who are not even elected but serve to undermine this democracy. For example, in the interest of protecting the public, a whole area could be demarcated using a technique called geofencing and then all individuals found in that area then targeted for surveillance. This is not the intent of the fourth amendment. It was supposed to be guided by reasonable cause. If a crime was committed nearby, for example, and often these dragnets cover large areas, then innocent people are automatically included.
There are already many incidents of people being dragged into court accused of crimes because they were nearby. And for political targeting, this was used to identify people based on proximity in the case of the January 6 riots or Black Lives Matter protests. If you think this is used only against one political side, you are mistaken. It is a dangerous tool to provide to any elected official.
The lie, only targeted people's data are collected. I couldn't believe this outright lie when I heard it a long time ago. Obama said flat out on TV that only targeted people's data are collected by the intelligence agencies. What a political play on words. That's flatly false. As I said, all data is collected. Whether it be a foreign person or American, the vacuum machines of the NSA will suck in all the data using sources like Prism, Kalia, big tech, and no one can speak about it. What Obama actually was trying to obfuscate was that supposedly unless you're marked as a target, then they don't look at your data.
Yeah, right. Your data is there, but they will close their eyes and not look. In case you're wondering what this user interface is to do this search, back in the old days, it was a Google search-like interface. I'm sure now it's some sophisticated UI that involves AI and powered by Panelier. That probably makes no difference, but just giving you the imagery of how easily this is done. Because everyone's data is there, it takes a whole lot of discipline to say that, "Yep, we won't look. Cross my heart and hope to die." Sure they do. Look. In the Snowden movie, the NSA operatives used it to track their girlfriends.
Warrantless needs to change. The idea that warrantless searches can be done without any checks and balances and without real criminal liability is just unacceptable. There's not much of a risk to the people who break the law and use it without reasonable cause. And I'm talking about the people in the government here. In case you missed it, one of the last things that Obama did in his presidency was to start sharing this data that was previously just under the control of the NSA with the CIA, FBI, and others. So now the number of people who can abuse us has now increased. And as I said, this would now be using advanced tools with AI enabled, all powered by Palantir.
Obama even changed an FBI procedure called rule 41 where now the FBI can hack your devices again without criminal probable cause just because you use encryption. While this is not directly linked to FISA 702 it just shows how you can stretch a rule to create reasonable cause. Could this be used as a way in to permit FISA 702 surveillance against anyone? Just understand how far this goes. If you are a privacy-seeking individual and actively seeking to protect your data using tools like VPNs or end to-end encrypted messaging, then you are automatically a target because you must have something to hide. In other words, if you put curtains on your windows, that's probable cause that you're committing a crime and the government is justified in entering your house and checking out your possessions and activities.
The value of freedom. One of the most important ingredients to me of being an American citizen is my sense of freedom. That I'm free to speak about whatever I want to speak about without fear. Free to exercise my pursuit of happiness. Free to defend my property against intruders. And freedom from some government run amuck that will actually check everything I'm doing. But when someone is able to check my every move on the internet or in real life, able to see my conversations, able to judge my thoughts, it is worrisome. I feel like every time I go to the airport that I will be stopped because I don't happen to agree with some political viewpoint or that I'm free to say what I want to say on social media without being harassed. It makes me angry that this kind of abuse of my data is possible with this FISA 702.
What needs to change? FISA 702 cannot exist as is. It has to be modified so that those who abuse our data are subject to criminal penalties. There has to be some fear associated with trampling of our rights. Searching of our data has to be justified by reasonable cause and not just based on some cause invented by some government operative who may have a political agenda but actual independent review by unbiased third parties. This is important enough. It is written in the constitution. It is not some afterthought. It was meant to stop the abuse of power. Congress needs to stop the thoughtless renewal of these laws that are no longer used to stop terrorists. Instead, these laws are now meant to limit freedom of speech, undermine political institutions with deep state actions, and even manipulate those in power.
FISA 702 empowers those with access to even conduct blackmail on those they want to manipulate. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these same elected officials in Congress are actually under the control of some operative who has dirt on them based on surveillance data. Maybe that's why this law never changes. Disgusting.
Current status of FISA 702. This is the current status as of mid-April 2026. The statutory reauthorization was set to expire April 20, 2026. Congress just passed a short 10-day extension to April 30 amid fights over reforms at the House of Representatives. However, the FISC renewed the program certifications in March 2026. So that already allows data collection to continue into 2027, even without congressional action. Now, fortunately, recent FISC opinions are noting an awareness of ongoing compliance problems with querying tools across agencies. Again, eyes are opening and there is bipartisan opposition to FISA 702 with the so-called warrants or bust crowd.
Some of the lawmakers on my side are Senator Ron Weiden, Democrat of Oregon, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, and then in the House are Representative Jamie Rascin, Democrat of Maryland, Representative Warren Davidson, Republican of Ohio, Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, Representative Lauren Boowbert, Republican of Colorado, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican Florida.
Let your elected representatives know that enough is enough. No surveillance without warrants. Folks, this channel focuses on technology, but not just on the hype, but teaching you about the potential risk to our personal freedoms and privacy. I have a social media platform where my follower community can engage and discuss these issues safely. It is Braxme. Join the community and learn or share your knowledge in technology. To support this channel, we have a store on Braxme where you can gain access to privacy products we have created ourselves. We have Braxmail for identity safe email. We have Bra virtual phone for anonymous phone numbers. We have BitesVPN to guard your IP address and obscure your location. We have other products like the Google phones and flashing services.
And a new product that's coming out is the Bra SIM unlisted. I'll tell you about that soon. We have two crowdfunding projects on indiegogo.com. You may have heard of the Bra 3 phone which is shipping a second batch. Now, these are all found at a different website which is bas.net which is a sister organization to mine. You will also discover the new BRA Open Slate tablet running Android or Linux also on bratec.net. Again, these products are being sold on indiegogo.com.
Thank you very much to all those supporting us on Patreon, locals, and YouTube memberships. Your contributions are very encouraging. You are appreciated. See you next time.
Saturday, March 21, 2026
Did Hegel trust in Jesus?
Claude
What do scholars think were Hegel's views on personal salvation
This is an interesting question that sits at the intersection of Hegel's philosophy of religion and his broader metaphysics. Here's what scholarship has established:
Hegel and Personal Salvation: The Scholarly Consensus
The short answer: Hegel radically transforms the concept of salvation — he doesn't reject it, but he philosophically sublates (aufhebt) it from a personal, otherworldly hope into something immanent, collective, and rational.
1. Salvation as Aufhebung of the Religious Concept
Most scholars (Robert Williams, Cyril O'Regan, Peter Hodgson) agree that Hegel appropriates Lutheran soteriology but reconceives it. For Hegel, the Christian narrative of fall, redemption, and reconciliation (Versöhnung) is the pictorial representation (Vorstellung) of a deeper philosophical truth: the self-alienation and return of Spirit (Geist) to itself. Personal salvation in the traditional sense — an individual soul's rescue by divine grace — is the imaginative form of what philosophy grasps conceptually as the reconciliation of finite and infinite spirit.
Key texts: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (especially the 1827 lectures), Phenomenology of Spirit §§ 748–787.
2. The Displacement of the Individual
This is where scholars diverge sharply. The question is whether anything genuinely personal survives Hegel's transformation.
O'Regan (The Heterodox Hegel, 1994) argues that Hegel's system is essentially a Gnostic displacement of orthodox soteriology — the individual soul's salvation is dissolved into the self-knowledge of Absolute Spirit. The "I" that is saved is not really you.
Hodgson (Hegel and Christian Theology, 2005) is more sympathetic, arguing that Hegel preserves a meaningful role for finite individuals within the life of Geist — reconciliation is not the erasure of individuality but its fulfillment in community (the Gemeine).
Williams (Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, 1997) stresses that recognition (Anerkennung) structures Hegel's soteriology: redemption is fundamentally interpersonal and social, not solitary.
3. Versöhnung (Reconciliation) as the Core Category
Scholars widely treat Versöhnung — not "salvation" in the Protestant sense — as Hegel's operative concept. It appears in the Phenomenology, the Logic, and prominently in the Philosophy of Religion. Reconciliation means the overcoming of the alienation between finite consciousness and infinite being, between the human and the divine. This happens:
Historically, through the Incarnation and death of Christ (the speculative Good Friday)
Institutionally, through the ethical life of the community (Sittlichkeit)
Epistemically, through philosophical comprehension (begreifen)
4. The Afterlife Problem
Hegel is notoriously reticent about personal immortality. Scholars like Emil Fackenheim (The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, 1967) note that Hegel neither straightforwardly affirms nor denies it. His emphasis on the eternity of Spirit tends to swallow up the question of whether this particular person persists after death. The right-wing Hegelians (e.g., Göschel) tried to extract a doctrine of personal immortality from Hegel; the left-wing Hegelians (Strauss, Feuerbach) denied it and drew anthropological conclusions. Hegel himself seems to have regarded the question as philosophically less important than the issue of whether Spirit is fully actualized in history.
5. The Lutheran Inheritance
Scholars including Walter Jaeschke emphasize that Hegel's model is specifically Lutheran — justification by faith maps onto the philosophical claim that the individual who grasps the rational structure of the real is already reconciled, not waiting for a future event. Salvation is not deferred eschatology but present comprehension.
Bottom Line
The scholarly picture is that Hegel preserves the structure of Christian soteriology (fall → redemption → reconciliation) while fundamentally transforming its subject: what is saved is not the atomistic individual soul but finite spirit as it comes to recognize itself in the infinite. Whether this counts as a genuine philosophy of personal salvation or its sophisticated dissolution is the central disagreement in the literature.
What about the eternal life, or not (damnation)?
This is one of the genuinely murky areas of Hegel scholarship, precisely because Hegel himself is evasive. Here's what the literature says:
Hegel on Eternal Life and Damnation
Hegel's Basic Move: Eternity Reconceived
The foundational point, on which virtually all scholars agree, is that Hegel refuses to treat eternity as endless future time. In the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Religion lectures, eternity (Ewigkeit) is the timeless self-presence of Spirit — not a place you go after death, but a dimension of existence available, in principle, now, through genuine comprehension of the Absolute. This is a direct inheritance from Spinoza and Neoplatonism, filtered through his Lutheran formation.
The implication is significant: the traditional eschatological drama — heaven, hell, the Last Judgment — is, for Hegel, Vorstellung, pictorial representation. Philosophy grasps its truth without the imagery.
On Eternal Life Specifically
Hegel does affirm something he calls eternal life, but scholars dispute what survives the philosophical translation:
Fackenheim's reading (The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought) is that Hegel's eternity is genuinely available to finite subjects — but only insofar as they participate in the self-knowledge of Absolute Spirit. The individual has eternal life not as a discrete persisting soul but as a moment in Spirit's self-comprehension. Whether that satisfies the religious hunger for personal survival is, Fackenheim says, precisely what Hegel leaves unresolved — arguably deliberately.
Jaeschke (Reason in Religion) argues more bluntly that Hegel's philosophical transformation effectively liquidates personal immortality as traditionally understood. The eternal life Hegel endorses is the eternity of the rational, not the continued existence of Paul or Heinrich after their deaths. Hegel's community of Spirit (Gemeine) is where eternity is actualized — collectively, institutionally, historically.
Hodgson resists this deflationary conclusion and argues that Hegel's God is genuinely alive in and through finite persons, such that finite individuals are not simply consumed but raised up (aufgehoben) into divine life in a meaningful sense. Hodgson leans on the trinitarian structure: the Father's abstract universality requires the Son's particularity, which means finitude is not mere waste material for Spirit but constitutive of it.
On Damnation
This is where Hegel is most conspicuously silent, and the silence is itself philosophically telling.
Damnation essentially disappears from Hegel's framework for structural reasons:
Hell as eternal punishment for the individual soul presupposes exactly what Hegel contests: a stable, persisting, morally accountable individual who can be definitively adjudicated and condemned. But in Hegel's system, individuality is always already in the process of sublation into something larger. More fundamentally, damnation implies that Spirit can fail — that some portion of finite existence remains permanently unreconciled with the infinite. This is incompatible with Hegel's core commitment to the ultimate self-realization of Geist. Absolute Spirit's logic moves toward total reconciliation; a permanently damned soul would be a surd in that logic.
The Phenomenology's treatment of the "unhappy consciousness" is the closest Hegel comes to a phenomenology of the damned state — the consciousness that experiences the absolute as alien, as a harsh beyond. But crucially, this is a stage in Spirit's development, not a terminal condition. O'Regan makes the sharp point that Hegel's system is essentially universalist in its logic — everything finite is taken up into the infinite, which means nothing is permanently lost or condemned. He views this as one of the markers of Hegel's heterodoxy relative to orthodox Christian theology, which requires the genuine possibility of damnation to preserve the moral seriousness of human freedom.
The freedom problem: Several scholars — including Stephen Houlgate and Robert Pippin — note a real tension here. If damnation is structurally impossible in Hegel's system, what becomes of genuine moral freedom? The worry is that Hegel's teleological Spirit effectively guarantees a good outcome regardless of individual choices, which seems to hollow out the stakes of ethical life. Hegel's defenders respond that Sittlichkeit preserves genuine responsibility at the level of social and historical agency, even if individual soul-damnation is not the relevant framework.
The Right/Left Hegelian Fault Line
This question was one of the fracture points in the immediate post-Hegelian generation:
Right-wing Hegelians (Göschel, Gabler) insisted that Hegel's system was compatible with — even supportive of — orthodox doctrines of personal immortality and divine judgment. They needed this reading politically and theologically.
Left-wing Hegelians (Strauss, then Feuerbach) drew the opposite conclusion: Hegel's logic, followed consistently, means that "eternal life" is a projection of human communal life, and damnation a myth. Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity is the most radical working-out of this position.
Hegel's own texts are genuinely ambiguous enough that both readings had textual purchase — which is either a sign of deep productive tension in his thought, or (as his critics charged) strategic obfuscation.
Summary
Hegel reconceives eternal life as Spirit's timeless self-presence, available through rational comprehension and communal ethical life, not as the survival of the individual soul. Damnation effectively vanishes from his framework because the logic of Geist tends toward universal reconciliation, and a permanently lost soul would contradict that teleology. The cost, as critics note, is the attenuation of individual moral stakes and a tension with any theology that takes human freedom — including the freedom to be finally lost — seriously.
OK. Life after death. What was he expecting, if anything, to follow his own death
This is a question where we have to be careful to distinguish what can be known from what is speculation — but there is genuine scholarly and biographical material to work with.
What Hegel Expected After His Own Death
The Biographical Evidence Is Thin but Suggestive
Hegel died suddenly in November 1831, likely from cholera, and left no deathbed testament or explicit personal statement about what he expected to follow. This silence is itself noted by scholars — he did not, unlike many contemporaries, make pious declarations or express conventional Christian hope. His wife Marie reported that he died peacefully, but the accounts are brief and not theologically informative.
What we have instead is a combination of scattered remarks, his known religious practice, and inferences from his philosophical commitments.
His Religious Practice
Hegel was a practicing Lutheran throughout his life — he attended church, had his children baptized, and by external markers lived as an observant Protestant. Karl Rosenkranz, his first major biographer, presents him as genuinely pious in a Lutheran sense. But scholars like Jaeschke and Terry Pinkard (whose 2000 biography is the most rigorous) are cautious about reading orthodox belief into the practice. For Hegel, Lutheran Christianity was the highest form of Vorstellung — the pictorial representation closest to philosophical truth — and it is genuinely unclear whether his church attendance reflected personal faith in the traditional sense or something more like philosophical respect for the institution.
What His Philosophy Implies About His Own Death
This is where scholars get most interesting, because Hegel's system generates a specific — and somewhat unsettling — implication about the death of any particular person, including himself.
The relevant structure is this: finite individuals are necessary to Spirit's self-actualization, but they are not preserved as discrete souls in the way Christian orthodoxy requires. When Hegel writes in the Phenomenology that Spirit "wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself," or when he meditates on death as the "absolute master" in the master-slave dialectic, he is treating death as philosophically serious — not as a gateway to personal continuation but as the genuine negation that Spirit must pass through.
Pinkard argues that Hegel likely understood his own death in these terms: his individual existence would end, but what was genuinely rational and true in his thought — his contribution to Spirit's self-comprehension — would persist in the community of reason, in his students, his texts, his influence on subsequent thought. This is not personal immortality in any recognizable sense. It is closer to what we might call rational legacy as the only genuine eternity available to a finite thinker.
The "Eternity of the Rational" as Personal Consolation
There is a passage late in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827) where Hegel describes the philosophical community — those who have grasped the reconciliation of finite and infinite — as already participating in eternal life. Hodgson takes this seriously as a form of personal meaning: Hegel may have genuinely believed that the philosopher who comprehends the Absolute is, in that act of comprehension, touching something that transcends individual death. Not survival, exactly, but participation in something eternal during life, which makes the end of life less catastrophic.
This would be consistent with a broadly Spinozist consolation — sub specie aeternitatis, the individual life understood in its rational necessity is already eternal, and death is the termination of a contingent particular rather than the loss of anything that was genuinely infinite.
The Honest Scholarly Verdict
Pinkard and Jaeschke both suggest that Hegel probably did not expect personal survival after death in the sense of a continued conscious existence. His philosophical framework does not support it, and there is no private evidence that he believed it independent of that framework. What he may have expected — or found consoling — was something like:
His thought persisting in and through the rational community
His individual life having been a necessary moment in Spirit's self-development; Death as the natural termination of a finite existence that had already, through philosophical labor, made contact with the infinite. O'Regan puts it bluntly: Hegel's system is structurally inhospitable to the kind of personal eschatology that would give him — Hegel the man, the particular Württemberger — a future after November 1831. The price of the system's grandeur is precisely this.
One Complication Worth Noting
There is a minority view, associated with Quentin Lauer and to some extent William Desmond, that Hegel's insistence on the concrete universal — his repeated claim that Spirit is not abstract but fully actualized in and through particulars — leaves more room for individual persistence than the standard reading allows. If finite individuals are genuinely constitutive of Absolute Spirit rather than merely instrumental to it, one could argue that their annihilation at death would be a loss to Spirit itself, which Spirit's own logic would resist. This is a speculative extension, and most Hegel scholars regard it as more wishful than textually grounded — but it represents a genuine interpretive possibility that keeps the question open.
The most honest answer is: Hegel probably expected nothing, in the personal sense — and built a philosophy grand enough that this expectation could feel, if not consoling, at least rationally dignified.
What of the Trinity, power of the Holy Spirit, personal relation with Jesus
This gets to the heart of what makes Hegel so theologically strange — he takes these doctrines with complete seriousness as philosophical content, while transforming them almost beyond recognition. Each of the three deserves careful treatment.
The Trinity
This is where Hegel is most original and where the scholarly debate is most intense.
For Hegel, the Trinity is not primarily a theological mystery to be accepted on faith — it is the speculative truth that reality itself has a trinitarian structure. The doctrine of the Trinity is philosophy's highest Vorstellung because it pictures, in religious imagery, the logical structure of the Absolute: universality (Father), particularity/self-othering (Son), and the return to unity through difference (Spirit). This maps directly onto the triadic movement of the Logic — Being, Essence, Concept — and onto the structure of the Encyclopaedia as a whole.
Cyril O'Regan (The Heterodox Hegel) gives the most thorough treatment of this and is frankly critical: he argues that Hegel's Trinity is a Neoplatonic emanationist structure dressed in Christian vocabulary. The Father is not the personal God of Abraham but abstract, indeterminate being that requires self-differentiation to become actual. The procession of Son from Father is not a free act of divine love but a logical necessity — God must externalize himself in order to be God at all. O'Regan sees this as a fundamental departure from Nicene orthodoxy, which insists on divine freedom and the non-necessity of creation.
Hodgson defends Hegel more generously, arguing that Hegel genuinely preserves the relational character of trinitarian theology — God is not a static substance but a living process of self-relation, which is closer to the Cappadocian fathers than Hegel is usually given credit for. The key Hegelian text is the treatment of God in the Philosophy of Religion lectures: "God is essentially only in thinking," meaning God's being is self-conscious relationality all the way down, not a thing that subsequently has relations.
Jaeschke makes the uncomfortable point that Hegel's Trinity effectively requires the world. Because the Son is Spirit's self-externalization and the world is the domain of that externalization, creation is not contingent but necessary to God's own self-actualization. This is theologically explosive — it means God needs the world to be God, which most orthodox positions strenuously deny.
The Holy Spirit
This is arguably where Hegel is most interesting and where his thought has had the most productive theological legacy.
For Hegel, the Holy Spirit — the third moment of the Trinity — is identified with the community (Gemeine). This is not a metaphor. The Spirit is genuinely present as the rational, ethical life of the community of believers who have grasped the reconciliation of human and divine. The Pentecost narrative, philosophically read, is the moment when the truth previously concentrated in one individual (Christ) becomes distributed through a community — Spirit actualizing itself socially and historically.
Hodgson has developed this most fully, drawing on Hegel's late Philosophy of Religion lectures. The Spirit is not an invisible personal agent performing miracles or moving individual hearts; it is the Geist of rational communal life — which is why Hegel's word for Spirit and the German word for mind, culture, and communal ethos are the same: Geist. This is deliberate.
Hans Küng (The Incarnation of God, 1987) argued that Hegel's pneumatology is one of his most genuinely Christian contributions — the insistence that Spirit is not merely transcendent but immanent in history and community has deep roots in the New Testament, particularly Paul. Küng was more positive about continuity with orthodoxy than most.
The difficult implication, noted by Emil Fackenheim, is that if Spirit is the community, then the Holy Spirit's presence and power is indexed to the rational and ethical quality of that community. There is no room in Hegel for the Spirit acting against or despite the community's rational self-understanding — no sudden sovereign interventions, no tongues of fire disrupting the philosopher's seminar. This is where Hegel parts ways most sharply with Pentecostal and charismatic understandings, and arguably with the New Testament itself.
Personal Relation with Jesus
This is the most personally charged question, and here Hegel is at his most evasive — or most ruthless, depending on your reading.
The Historical Jesus Problem
Hegel was writing in the immediate wake of the early historical-critical tradition (Reimarus, Lessing), and he took seriously the problem of grounding faith on historical contingency. His position, worked out most clearly in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Religion, is that the particular historical individual Jesus of Nazareth cannot be the permanent object of faith. The very particularity that makes the Incarnation theologically significant — God truly becoming this man, in this place and time — is also what makes clinging to that particular individual philosophically inadequate.
The movement Hegel describes is: the disciples knew the sensible Jesus, then lost him in the Crucifixion, then encountered him as Spirit. Philosophically, this means the truth of the Incarnation requires the death and departure of the particular Jesus so that Spirit — universalized, communal — can emerge. The disciples who want to hold onto the historical individual are, in Hegel's reading, spiritually immature. Mary Magdalene at the tomb, reaching for the risen body, is almost a figure of this inadequacy.
Fackenheim found this deeply troubling and said so directly — it seems to make the historical Jesus a disposable pedagogical moment in Spirit's development rather than the permanent living Lord of Christian faith.
"Personal Relationship" as a Category
The modern evangelical notion of a personal relationship with Jesus would have been, for Hegel, a form of religious feeling (Gefühl) — the stage Schleiermacher was stuck at, in his view. Hegel's famous contempt for Schleiermacher's reduction of religion to the "feeling of absolute dependence" applies here: a purely personal, affective relationship with Jesus is subjective in the pejorative Hegelian sense. It has not yet grasped the objective, rational content of what the Incarnation means.
This does not mean Hegel dismissed the content of the relationship — love, reconciliation, the overcoming of alienation between human and divine — but he insisted that feeling alone cannot bear that content. It must be raised to conceptual comprehension.
William Desmond (Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double?, 2003) has written the sharpest critique here. He argues that Hegel's God, precisely because it is the self-actualization of Absolute Spirit through rational comprehension, cannot be genuinely other in the way a personal relationship requires. You cannot have a relationship with something that turns out to be the deepest structure of your own rational subjectivity. Desmond calls this the "counterfeit double" problem: Hegel's Absolute looks like the Christian God but lacks the genuine transcendence and otherness that makes love, prayer, and personal encounter possible.
Rowan Williams (Hegel's Ethics and various essays) takes a more nuanced position, suggesting that Hegel's account of recognition — the mutual constitution of self and other through acknowledgment — does preserve something of genuine interpersonal encounter, including between the human and the divine. But Williams concedes that Hegel's framework strains to accommodate the asymmetry that Christian prayer presupposes: that you are addressing someone genuinely outside and beyond you.
The Overall Picture
What emerges across all three doctrines is a consistent pattern: Hegel takes Christian theology with profound seriousness, more so than most Enlightenment thinkers, but he transforms each doctrine by:
Internalizing what was transcendent (the Trinity becomes the structure of rationality itself) Collectivizing what was personal (the Spirit becomes the community; salvation becomes reconciliation in Sittlichkeit). Necessitating what was free (God's self-externalization is logically required, not a free act of love) Conceptualizing what was affective (the personal encounter with Jesus must be raised from feeling to comprehension). Whether this constitutes a genuine philosophical deepening of Christian doctrine or its sophisticated destruction is the question that has animated Hegel's theological reception from his own students to the present. Desmond thinks the latter; Hodgson and Küng think the former; Fackenheim occupies the anguished middle, unable to let go of either Hegel or the tradition Hegel transforms.
Personal dialog with Jesus?
This sharpens the question considerably — moving from doctrine to something more existential and devotional. Here the scholarly record is thin but revealing.
Did Hegel Engage in Personal Dialog with Jesus?
The Short Answer: Almost certainly not, in any sense recognizable to devotional Christianity. There is no evidence — biographical, epistolary, or textual — that Hegel practiced anything like prayer addressed to Jesus as a living personal interlocutor. And his philosophical framework makes clear why: such a practice would have been, by his own lights, a regression to Vorstellung that philosophy is supposed to overcome.
The Early Hegel: Closest He Gets
The most intimate engagement Hegel ever had with the person of Jesus comes paradoxically from his early writings, before the mature system was in place. In the Life of Jesus (1795, unpublished in his lifetime) and The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate (1798–1799), the young Hegel wrote about Jesus with something approaching personal warmth — presenting him as a moral and spiritual exemplar, a figure who embodied the unity of the human and divine in a way that spoke directly to Hegel's own yearning for reconciliation and wholeness.
Pinkard notes that the early Hegel was genuinely moved by Jesus as a human figure — the tragedy of the Crucifixion, the failure of Jesus's project to transform Judaism from within, the fate of love in a world governed by positivity and law. This is not yet the cold philosophical machinery of the Phenomenology. There is something personal in it.
But even here it is not dialog in the devotional sense. It is closer to the way one might be personally affected by a great tragic hero — Antigone, say — than to prayer or mystical encounter.
The Mature System Forecloses It
By the time Hegel reaches his mature position, the structural reasons why personal dialog with Jesus becomes impossible are clear:
First, Jesus as a particular historical individual has, in Hegel's framework, completed his role with the Resurrection and Pentecost. The Spirit has been universalized into the community. Addressing the particular Jesus of Nazareth as a present interlocutor would be, for Hegel, like trying to converse with a dialectical moment that has already been sublated. It would be philosophically backward.
Second, Hegel's God — the Absolute — does not listen in any conventional sense. The Absolute is not a subject waiting to receive your address; it is the encompassing rational structure within which your subjectivity itself arises. Desmond makes this point with real force: prayer requires genuine otherness, a thou who is not secretly identical with the deeper structure of your own I. Hegel's system, Desmond argues, dissolves that otherness.
Third, the very concept of dialog implies two distinct subjects in genuine exchange — unpredictability, responsiveness, the possibility of being surprised by what the other says. Hegel's Absolute does not surprise. Its self-development follows logical necessity. Rowan Williams identifies this as the deepest problem: a God whose movements are rationally necessary cannot be a genuine conversational partner.
What Replaced It
What Hegel had instead of personal dialog with Jesus was, scholars suggest, something like:
Philosophical contemplation as a spiritual practice. For Hegel, the highest form of relation to the divine is Begreifen — conceptual comprehension of the rational structure of the Absolute. This is his version of what mystics called union with God and what Aristotle called theoria. It is solitary, rational, and impersonal in its form, even if its content is the reconciliation of human and divine.
The philosophical community as mediator. Rather than a personal relation with Jesus, Hegel had a relationship with the tradition of Spirit's self-comprehension — Plato, Spinoza, Kant, the Christian theological inheritance — which is where Geist actually lives for him. His real interlocutors were dead philosophers, not the living Christ.
Lutheranism as ritual container. Pinkard suggests that Hegel's church attendance and Lutheran practice functioned as a kind of institutional relation to the Christian narrative — honoring the Vorstellung that his philosophy sublated, maintaining continuity with the community of Spirit, without requiring personal encounter with Jesus as its experiential core.
The Telling Contrast with His Contemporaries
It is worth noting who Hegel was positioned against here. Schleiermacher — his Berlin colleague and antagonist — grounded religion precisely in the intimacy of personal feeling and dependence, which in practice meant something much closer to a living personal relation with Christ. Hegel's contempt for this position was barely concealed. His famous remark that if feeling of dependence is the basis of religion, then a dog is the best Christian cuts directly at the devotional-relational model.
Kierkegaard, writing against Hegel, would later insist that the whole apparatus of the system was an evasion of exactly this: the single individual standing alone before God, in fear and trembling, in direct personal address. Kierkegaard saw with great clarity that Hegel's sublation of the personal into the communal and rational was not a philosophical achievement but a spiritual abdication — the avoidance of the genuinely personal encounter that Christian faith demands. Whether you find Kierkegaard's critique devastating or overheated depends on what you think faith requires.
The Honest Biographical Note
There is one moment scholars occasionally cite — Hegel's letters during periods of personal crisis, particularly around his illegitimate son Ludwig and various professional anxieties — where the tone becomes briefly more raw and less architectonic. But even here there is no turn to prayer or personal address to Christ. Hegel's private register, when distressed, reaches for Stoic endurance and rational acceptance rather than devotional intimacy.
Pinkard's verdict is probably right: Hegel was a man for whom the philosophical was the spiritual, and who seems genuinely not to have felt the absence of personal dialog with Jesus as a lack — which is itself, from a devotional Christian standpoint, perhaps the most telling thing about him.
What do scholars think were Hegel's views on personal salvation
This is an interesting question that sits at the intersection of Hegel's philosophy of religion and his broader metaphysics. Here's what scholarship has established:
Hegel and Personal Salvation: The Scholarly Consensus
The short answer: Hegel radically transforms the concept of salvation — he doesn't reject it, but he philosophically sublates (aufhebt) it from a personal, otherworldly hope into something immanent, collective, and rational.
1. Salvation as Aufhebung of the Religious Concept
Most scholars (Robert Williams, Cyril O'Regan, Peter Hodgson) agree that Hegel appropriates Lutheran soteriology but reconceives it. For Hegel, the Christian narrative of fall, redemption, and reconciliation (Versöhnung) is the pictorial representation (Vorstellung) of a deeper philosophical truth: the self-alienation and return of Spirit (Geist) to itself. Personal salvation in the traditional sense — an individual soul's rescue by divine grace — is the imaginative form of what philosophy grasps conceptually as the reconciliation of finite and infinite spirit.
Key texts: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (especially the 1827 lectures), Phenomenology of Spirit §§ 748–787.
2. The Displacement of the Individual
This is where scholars diverge sharply. The question is whether anything genuinely personal survives Hegel's transformation.
O'Regan (The Heterodox Hegel, 1994) argues that Hegel's system is essentially a Gnostic displacement of orthodox soteriology — the individual soul's salvation is dissolved into the self-knowledge of Absolute Spirit. The "I" that is saved is not really you.
Hodgson (Hegel and Christian Theology, 2005) is more sympathetic, arguing that Hegel preserves a meaningful role for finite individuals within the life of Geist — reconciliation is not the erasure of individuality but its fulfillment in community (the Gemeine).
Williams (Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, 1997) stresses that recognition (Anerkennung) structures Hegel's soteriology: redemption is fundamentally interpersonal and social, not solitary.
3. Versöhnung (Reconciliation) as the Core Category
Scholars widely treat Versöhnung — not "salvation" in the Protestant sense — as Hegel's operative concept. It appears in the Phenomenology, the Logic, and prominently in the Philosophy of Religion. Reconciliation means the overcoming of the alienation between finite consciousness and infinite being, between the human and the divine. This happens:
Historically, through the Incarnation and death of Christ (the speculative Good Friday)
Institutionally, through the ethical life of the community (Sittlichkeit)
Epistemically, through philosophical comprehension (begreifen)
4. The Afterlife Problem
Hegel is notoriously reticent about personal immortality. Scholars like Emil Fackenheim (The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, 1967) note that Hegel neither straightforwardly affirms nor denies it. His emphasis on the eternity of Spirit tends to swallow up the question of whether this particular person persists after death. The right-wing Hegelians (e.g., Göschel) tried to extract a doctrine of personal immortality from Hegel; the left-wing Hegelians (Strauss, Feuerbach) denied it and drew anthropological conclusions. Hegel himself seems to have regarded the question as philosophically less important than the issue of whether Spirit is fully actualized in history.
5. The Lutheran Inheritance
Scholars including Walter Jaeschke emphasize that Hegel's model is specifically Lutheran — justification by faith maps onto the philosophical claim that the individual who grasps the rational structure of the real is already reconciled, not waiting for a future event. Salvation is not deferred eschatology but present comprehension.
Bottom Line
The scholarly picture is that Hegel preserves the structure of Christian soteriology (fall → redemption → reconciliation) while fundamentally transforming its subject: what is saved is not the atomistic individual soul but finite spirit as it comes to recognize itself in the infinite. Whether this counts as a genuine philosophy of personal salvation or its sophisticated dissolution is the central disagreement in the literature.
What about the eternal life, or not (damnation)?
This is one of the genuinely murky areas of Hegel scholarship, precisely because Hegel himself is evasive. Here's what the literature says:
Hegel on Eternal Life and Damnation
Hegel's Basic Move: Eternity Reconceived
The foundational point, on which virtually all scholars agree, is that Hegel refuses to treat eternity as endless future time. In the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Religion lectures, eternity (Ewigkeit) is the timeless self-presence of Spirit — not a place you go after death, but a dimension of existence available, in principle, now, through genuine comprehension of the Absolute. This is a direct inheritance from Spinoza and Neoplatonism, filtered through his Lutheran formation.
The implication is significant: the traditional eschatological drama — heaven, hell, the Last Judgment — is, for Hegel, Vorstellung, pictorial representation. Philosophy grasps its truth without the imagery.
On Eternal Life Specifically
Hegel does affirm something he calls eternal life, but scholars dispute what survives the philosophical translation:
Fackenheim's reading (The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought) is that Hegel's eternity is genuinely available to finite subjects — but only insofar as they participate in the self-knowledge of Absolute Spirit. The individual has eternal life not as a discrete persisting soul but as a moment in Spirit's self-comprehension. Whether that satisfies the religious hunger for personal survival is, Fackenheim says, precisely what Hegel leaves unresolved — arguably deliberately.
Jaeschke (Reason in Religion) argues more bluntly that Hegel's philosophical transformation effectively liquidates personal immortality as traditionally understood. The eternal life Hegel endorses is the eternity of the rational, not the continued existence of Paul or Heinrich after their deaths. Hegel's community of Spirit (Gemeine) is where eternity is actualized — collectively, institutionally, historically.
Hodgson resists this deflationary conclusion and argues that Hegel's God is genuinely alive in and through finite persons, such that finite individuals are not simply consumed but raised up (aufgehoben) into divine life in a meaningful sense. Hodgson leans on the trinitarian structure: the Father's abstract universality requires the Son's particularity, which means finitude is not mere waste material for Spirit but constitutive of it.
On Damnation
This is where Hegel is most conspicuously silent, and the silence is itself philosophically telling.
Damnation essentially disappears from Hegel's framework for structural reasons:
Hell as eternal punishment for the individual soul presupposes exactly what Hegel contests: a stable, persisting, morally accountable individual who can be definitively adjudicated and condemned. But in Hegel's system, individuality is always already in the process of sublation into something larger. More fundamentally, damnation implies that Spirit can fail — that some portion of finite existence remains permanently unreconciled with the infinite. This is incompatible with Hegel's core commitment to the ultimate self-realization of Geist. Absolute Spirit's logic moves toward total reconciliation; a permanently damned soul would be a surd in that logic.
The Phenomenology's treatment of the "unhappy consciousness" is the closest Hegel comes to a phenomenology of the damned state — the consciousness that experiences the absolute as alien, as a harsh beyond. But crucially, this is a stage in Spirit's development, not a terminal condition. O'Regan makes the sharp point that Hegel's system is essentially universalist in its logic — everything finite is taken up into the infinite, which means nothing is permanently lost or condemned. He views this as one of the markers of Hegel's heterodoxy relative to orthodox Christian theology, which requires the genuine possibility of damnation to preserve the moral seriousness of human freedom.
The freedom problem: Several scholars — including Stephen Houlgate and Robert Pippin — note a real tension here. If damnation is structurally impossible in Hegel's system, what becomes of genuine moral freedom? The worry is that Hegel's teleological Spirit effectively guarantees a good outcome regardless of individual choices, which seems to hollow out the stakes of ethical life. Hegel's defenders respond that Sittlichkeit preserves genuine responsibility at the level of social and historical agency, even if individual soul-damnation is not the relevant framework.
The Right/Left Hegelian Fault Line
This question was one of the fracture points in the immediate post-Hegelian generation:
Right-wing Hegelians (Göschel, Gabler) insisted that Hegel's system was compatible with — even supportive of — orthodox doctrines of personal immortality and divine judgment. They needed this reading politically and theologically.
Left-wing Hegelians (Strauss, then Feuerbach) drew the opposite conclusion: Hegel's logic, followed consistently, means that "eternal life" is a projection of human communal life, and damnation a myth. Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity is the most radical working-out of this position.
Hegel's own texts are genuinely ambiguous enough that both readings had textual purchase — which is either a sign of deep productive tension in his thought, or (as his critics charged) strategic obfuscation.
Summary
Hegel reconceives eternal life as Spirit's timeless self-presence, available through rational comprehension and communal ethical life, not as the survival of the individual soul. Damnation effectively vanishes from his framework because the logic of Geist tends toward universal reconciliation, and a permanently lost soul would contradict that teleology. The cost, as critics note, is the attenuation of individual moral stakes and a tension with any theology that takes human freedom — including the freedom to be finally lost — seriously.
OK. Life after death. What was he expecting, if anything, to follow his own death
This is a question where we have to be careful to distinguish what can be known from what is speculation — but there is genuine scholarly and biographical material to work with.
What Hegel Expected After His Own Death
The Biographical Evidence Is Thin but Suggestive
Hegel died suddenly in November 1831, likely from cholera, and left no deathbed testament or explicit personal statement about what he expected to follow. This silence is itself noted by scholars — he did not, unlike many contemporaries, make pious declarations or express conventional Christian hope. His wife Marie reported that he died peacefully, but the accounts are brief and not theologically informative.
What we have instead is a combination of scattered remarks, his known religious practice, and inferences from his philosophical commitments.
His Religious Practice
Hegel was a practicing Lutheran throughout his life — he attended church, had his children baptized, and by external markers lived as an observant Protestant. Karl Rosenkranz, his first major biographer, presents him as genuinely pious in a Lutheran sense. But scholars like Jaeschke and Terry Pinkard (whose 2000 biography is the most rigorous) are cautious about reading orthodox belief into the practice. For Hegel, Lutheran Christianity was the highest form of Vorstellung — the pictorial representation closest to philosophical truth — and it is genuinely unclear whether his church attendance reflected personal faith in the traditional sense or something more like philosophical respect for the institution.
What His Philosophy Implies About His Own Death
This is where scholars get most interesting, because Hegel's system generates a specific — and somewhat unsettling — implication about the death of any particular person, including himself.
The relevant structure is this: finite individuals are necessary to Spirit's self-actualization, but they are not preserved as discrete souls in the way Christian orthodoxy requires. When Hegel writes in the Phenomenology that Spirit "wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself," or when he meditates on death as the "absolute master" in the master-slave dialectic, he is treating death as philosophically serious — not as a gateway to personal continuation but as the genuine negation that Spirit must pass through.
Pinkard argues that Hegel likely understood his own death in these terms: his individual existence would end, but what was genuinely rational and true in his thought — his contribution to Spirit's self-comprehension — would persist in the community of reason, in his students, his texts, his influence on subsequent thought. This is not personal immortality in any recognizable sense. It is closer to what we might call rational legacy as the only genuine eternity available to a finite thinker.
The "Eternity of the Rational" as Personal Consolation
There is a passage late in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827) where Hegel describes the philosophical community — those who have grasped the reconciliation of finite and infinite — as already participating in eternal life. Hodgson takes this seriously as a form of personal meaning: Hegel may have genuinely believed that the philosopher who comprehends the Absolute is, in that act of comprehension, touching something that transcends individual death. Not survival, exactly, but participation in something eternal during life, which makes the end of life less catastrophic.
This would be consistent with a broadly Spinozist consolation — sub specie aeternitatis, the individual life understood in its rational necessity is already eternal, and death is the termination of a contingent particular rather than the loss of anything that was genuinely infinite.
The Honest Scholarly Verdict
Pinkard and Jaeschke both suggest that Hegel probably did not expect personal survival after death in the sense of a continued conscious existence. His philosophical framework does not support it, and there is no private evidence that he believed it independent of that framework. What he may have expected — or found consoling — was something like:
His thought persisting in and through the rational community
His individual life having been a necessary moment in Spirit's self-development; Death as the natural termination of a finite existence that had already, through philosophical labor, made contact with the infinite. O'Regan puts it bluntly: Hegel's system is structurally inhospitable to the kind of personal eschatology that would give him — Hegel the man, the particular Württemberger — a future after November 1831. The price of the system's grandeur is precisely this.
One Complication Worth Noting
There is a minority view, associated with Quentin Lauer and to some extent William Desmond, that Hegel's insistence on the concrete universal — his repeated claim that Spirit is not abstract but fully actualized in and through particulars — leaves more room for individual persistence than the standard reading allows. If finite individuals are genuinely constitutive of Absolute Spirit rather than merely instrumental to it, one could argue that their annihilation at death would be a loss to Spirit itself, which Spirit's own logic would resist. This is a speculative extension, and most Hegel scholars regard it as more wishful than textually grounded — but it represents a genuine interpretive possibility that keeps the question open.
The most honest answer is: Hegel probably expected nothing, in the personal sense — and built a philosophy grand enough that this expectation could feel, if not consoling, at least rationally dignified.
What of the Trinity, power of the Holy Spirit, personal relation with Jesus
This gets to the heart of what makes Hegel so theologically strange — he takes these doctrines with complete seriousness as philosophical content, while transforming them almost beyond recognition. Each of the three deserves careful treatment.
The Trinity
This is where Hegel is most original and where the scholarly debate is most intense.
For Hegel, the Trinity is not primarily a theological mystery to be accepted on faith — it is the speculative truth that reality itself has a trinitarian structure. The doctrine of the Trinity is philosophy's highest Vorstellung because it pictures, in religious imagery, the logical structure of the Absolute: universality (Father), particularity/self-othering (Son), and the return to unity through difference (Spirit). This maps directly onto the triadic movement of the Logic — Being, Essence, Concept — and onto the structure of the Encyclopaedia as a whole.
Cyril O'Regan (The Heterodox Hegel) gives the most thorough treatment of this and is frankly critical: he argues that Hegel's Trinity is a Neoplatonic emanationist structure dressed in Christian vocabulary. The Father is not the personal God of Abraham but abstract, indeterminate being that requires self-differentiation to become actual. The procession of Son from Father is not a free act of divine love but a logical necessity — God must externalize himself in order to be God at all. O'Regan sees this as a fundamental departure from Nicene orthodoxy, which insists on divine freedom and the non-necessity of creation.
Hodgson defends Hegel more generously, arguing that Hegel genuinely preserves the relational character of trinitarian theology — God is not a static substance but a living process of self-relation, which is closer to the Cappadocian fathers than Hegel is usually given credit for. The key Hegelian text is the treatment of God in the Philosophy of Religion lectures: "God is essentially only in thinking," meaning God's being is self-conscious relationality all the way down, not a thing that subsequently has relations.
Jaeschke makes the uncomfortable point that Hegel's Trinity effectively requires the world. Because the Son is Spirit's self-externalization and the world is the domain of that externalization, creation is not contingent but necessary to God's own self-actualization. This is theologically explosive — it means God needs the world to be God, which most orthodox positions strenuously deny.
The Holy Spirit
This is arguably where Hegel is most interesting and where his thought has had the most productive theological legacy.
For Hegel, the Holy Spirit — the third moment of the Trinity — is identified with the community (Gemeine). This is not a metaphor. The Spirit is genuinely present as the rational, ethical life of the community of believers who have grasped the reconciliation of human and divine. The Pentecost narrative, philosophically read, is the moment when the truth previously concentrated in one individual (Christ) becomes distributed through a community — Spirit actualizing itself socially and historically.
Hodgson has developed this most fully, drawing on Hegel's late Philosophy of Religion lectures. The Spirit is not an invisible personal agent performing miracles or moving individual hearts; it is the Geist of rational communal life — which is why Hegel's word for Spirit and the German word for mind, culture, and communal ethos are the same: Geist. This is deliberate.
Hans Küng (The Incarnation of God, 1987) argued that Hegel's pneumatology is one of his most genuinely Christian contributions — the insistence that Spirit is not merely transcendent but immanent in history and community has deep roots in the New Testament, particularly Paul. Küng was more positive about continuity with orthodoxy than most.
The difficult implication, noted by Emil Fackenheim, is that if Spirit is the community, then the Holy Spirit's presence and power is indexed to the rational and ethical quality of that community. There is no room in Hegel for the Spirit acting against or despite the community's rational self-understanding — no sudden sovereign interventions, no tongues of fire disrupting the philosopher's seminar. This is where Hegel parts ways most sharply with Pentecostal and charismatic understandings, and arguably with the New Testament itself.
Personal Relation with Jesus
This is the most personally charged question, and here Hegel is at his most evasive — or most ruthless, depending on your reading.
The Historical Jesus Problem
Hegel was writing in the immediate wake of the early historical-critical tradition (Reimarus, Lessing), and he took seriously the problem of grounding faith on historical contingency. His position, worked out most clearly in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Religion, is that the particular historical individual Jesus of Nazareth cannot be the permanent object of faith. The very particularity that makes the Incarnation theologically significant — God truly becoming this man, in this place and time — is also what makes clinging to that particular individual philosophically inadequate.
The movement Hegel describes is: the disciples knew the sensible Jesus, then lost him in the Crucifixion, then encountered him as Spirit. Philosophically, this means the truth of the Incarnation requires the death and departure of the particular Jesus so that Spirit — universalized, communal — can emerge. The disciples who want to hold onto the historical individual are, in Hegel's reading, spiritually immature. Mary Magdalene at the tomb, reaching for the risen body, is almost a figure of this inadequacy.
Fackenheim found this deeply troubling and said so directly — it seems to make the historical Jesus a disposable pedagogical moment in Spirit's development rather than the permanent living Lord of Christian faith.
"Personal Relationship" as a Category
The modern evangelical notion of a personal relationship with Jesus would have been, for Hegel, a form of religious feeling (Gefühl) — the stage Schleiermacher was stuck at, in his view. Hegel's famous contempt for Schleiermacher's reduction of religion to the "feeling of absolute dependence" applies here: a purely personal, affective relationship with Jesus is subjective in the pejorative Hegelian sense. It has not yet grasped the objective, rational content of what the Incarnation means.
This does not mean Hegel dismissed the content of the relationship — love, reconciliation, the overcoming of alienation between human and divine — but he insisted that feeling alone cannot bear that content. It must be raised to conceptual comprehension.
William Desmond (Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double?, 2003) has written the sharpest critique here. He argues that Hegel's God, precisely because it is the self-actualization of Absolute Spirit through rational comprehension, cannot be genuinely other in the way a personal relationship requires. You cannot have a relationship with something that turns out to be the deepest structure of your own rational subjectivity. Desmond calls this the "counterfeit double" problem: Hegel's Absolute looks like the Christian God but lacks the genuine transcendence and otherness that makes love, prayer, and personal encounter possible.
Rowan Williams (Hegel's Ethics and various essays) takes a more nuanced position, suggesting that Hegel's account of recognition — the mutual constitution of self and other through acknowledgment — does preserve something of genuine interpersonal encounter, including between the human and the divine. But Williams concedes that Hegel's framework strains to accommodate the asymmetry that Christian prayer presupposes: that you are addressing someone genuinely outside and beyond you.
The Overall Picture
What emerges across all three doctrines is a consistent pattern: Hegel takes Christian theology with profound seriousness, more so than most Enlightenment thinkers, but he transforms each doctrine by:
Internalizing what was transcendent (the Trinity becomes the structure of rationality itself) Collectivizing what was personal (the Spirit becomes the community; salvation becomes reconciliation in Sittlichkeit). Necessitating what was free (God's self-externalization is logically required, not a free act of love) Conceptualizing what was affective (the personal encounter with Jesus must be raised from feeling to comprehension). Whether this constitutes a genuine philosophical deepening of Christian doctrine or its sophisticated destruction is the question that has animated Hegel's theological reception from his own students to the present. Desmond thinks the latter; Hodgson and Küng think the former; Fackenheim occupies the anguished middle, unable to let go of either Hegel or the tradition Hegel transforms.
Personal dialog with Jesus?
This sharpens the question considerably — moving from doctrine to something more existential and devotional. Here the scholarly record is thin but revealing.
Did Hegel Engage in Personal Dialog with Jesus?
The Short Answer: Almost certainly not, in any sense recognizable to devotional Christianity. There is no evidence — biographical, epistolary, or textual — that Hegel practiced anything like prayer addressed to Jesus as a living personal interlocutor. And his philosophical framework makes clear why: such a practice would have been, by his own lights, a regression to Vorstellung that philosophy is supposed to overcome.
The Early Hegel: Closest He Gets
The most intimate engagement Hegel ever had with the person of Jesus comes paradoxically from his early writings, before the mature system was in place. In the Life of Jesus (1795, unpublished in his lifetime) and The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate (1798–1799), the young Hegel wrote about Jesus with something approaching personal warmth — presenting him as a moral and spiritual exemplar, a figure who embodied the unity of the human and divine in a way that spoke directly to Hegel's own yearning for reconciliation and wholeness.
Pinkard notes that the early Hegel was genuinely moved by Jesus as a human figure — the tragedy of the Crucifixion, the failure of Jesus's project to transform Judaism from within, the fate of love in a world governed by positivity and law. This is not yet the cold philosophical machinery of the Phenomenology. There is something personal in it.
But even here it is not dialog in the devotional sense. It is closer to the way one might be personally affected by a great tragic hero — Antigone, say — than to prayer or mystical encounter.
The Mature System Forecloses It
By the time Hegel reaches his mature position, the structural reasons why personal dialog with Jesus becomes impossible are clear:
First, Jesus as a particular historical individual has, in Hegel's framework, completed his role with the Resurrection and Pentecost. The Spirit has been universalized into the community. Addressing the particular Jesus of Nazareth as a present interlocutor would be, for Hegel, like trying to converse with a dialectical moment that has already been sublated. It would be philosophically backward.
Second, Hegel's God — the Absolute — does not listen in any conventional sense. The Absolute is not a subject waiting to receive your address; it is the encompassing rational structure within which your subjectivity itself arises. Desmond makes this point with real force: prayer requires genuine otherness, a thou who is not secretly identical with the deeper structure of your own I. Hegel's system, Desmond argues, dissolves that otherness.
Third, the very concept of dialog implies two distinct subjects in genuine exchange — unpredictability, responsiveness, the possibility of being surprised by what the other says. Hegel's Absolute does not surprise. Its self-development follows logical necessity. Rowan Williams identifies this as the deepest problem: a God whose movements are rationally necessary cannot be a genuine conversational partner.
What Replaced It
What Hegel had instead of personal dialog with Jesus was, scholars suggest, something like:
Philosophical contemplation as a spiritual practice. For Hegel, the highest form of relation to the divine is Begreifen — conceptual comprehension of the rational structure of the Absolute. This is his version of what mystics called union with God and what Aristotle called theoria. It is solitary, rational, and impersonal in its form, even if its content is the reconciliation of human and divine.
The philosophical community as mediator. Rather than a personal relation with Jesus, Hegel had a relationship with the tradition of Spirit's self-comprehension — Plato, Spinoza, Kant, the Christian theological inheritance — which is where Geist actually lives for him. His real interlocutors were dead philosophers, not the living Christ.
Lutheranism as ritual container. Pinkard suggests that Hegel's church attendance and Lutheran practice functioned as a kind of institutional relation to the Christian narrative — honoring the Vorstellung that his philosophy sublated, maintaining continuity with the community of Spirit, without requiring personal encounter with Jesus as its experiential core.
The Telling Contrast with His Contemporaries
It is worth noting who Hegel was positioned against here. Schleiermacher — his Berlin colleague and antagonist — grounded religion precisely in the intimacy of personal feeling and dependence, which in practice meant something much closer to a living personal relation with Christ. Hegel's contempt for this position was barely concealed. His famous remark that if feeling of dependence is the basis of religion, then a dog is the best Christian cuts directly at the devotional-relational model.
Kierkegaard, writing against Hegel, would later insist that the whole apparatus of the system was an evasion of exactly this: the single individual standing alone before God, in fear and trembling, in direct personal address. Kierkegaard saw with great clarity that Hegel's sublation of the personal into the communal and rational was not a philosophical achievement but a spiritual abdication — the avoidance of the genuinely personal encounter that Christian faith demands. Whether you find Kierkegaard's critique devastating or overheated depends on what you think faith requires.
The Honest Biographical Note
There is one moment scholars occasionally cite — Hegel's letters during periods of personal crisis, particularly around his illegitimate son Ludwig and various professional anxieties — where the tone becomes briefly more raw and less architectonic. But even here there is no turn to prayer or personal address to Christ. Hegel's private register, when distressed, reaches for Stoic endurance and rational acceptance rather than devotional intimacy.
Pinkard's verdict is probably right: Hegel was a man for whom the philosophical was the spiritual, and who seems genuinely not to have felt the absence of personal dialog with Jesus as a lack — which is itself, from a devotional Christian standpoint, perhaps the most telling thing about him.
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