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Should I be concerned with weather or not the leader of other another country does or does not have extramarital sex? It seems like voyeurism.

Arrogant people suffer because after they become deluded with the belief that they’re omnisapiente they stop learning. There’s also the problem that they lose the ability to properly answer questions. They don’t actually comprehend what they’re being asked. They view every question as an invitation to dump out any and every trite piece of knowledge that they hold, even if it doesn’t pertain to the conversation. Just thought I’d throw that out there. Also, I very much enjoyed listening to the interviewer ask some very thought provoking questions. I just subscribed. Thanks.

Beautiful! Thank you so much for sharing your journey to Faith! It builds my faith.

This is fantastic. Thankyou.

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Would love to hear your (or anyone's) thoughts on cremation, and if it ruins your chances at an afterlife since you have no body to be resurrected on judgement day.

Thanks, that was intense and very helpful. Exactly what i needed to confirm my own conversion of the last 4 years.. whew!, really really well presented. Thank agsin. Glory be to God.

Great Video, thank you! What is your opinion on Michael Allen Gillespie's work on nominalism and modernity?

I love love love hearing people's testimonies. They are always so interesting. Thankyou for sharing. God bless you and the fam. I have been trying to understand what "keep your mind in hell and despair not" means. This was told to me by a convert who also did some kind of psychedelics. Your testimony has helped me understand this a bit better. I'm not too familiar with all these philosophical terms but my thought processes when I was protestant were quite similar eg let's ditch omnis, low view of scripture reliability etc

I have had sleeping paralysis on many occasions. These can be terrifying experiences at the time (they tend to start in adolescence) but in retrospect I wouldn't read too much into them. The really heavy one is the feeling that there is a demonic presence in the room somewhere up towards the right for some strange reason. The presence gathers momentum and approaches ones mental space in an invasive manner and takes one with it. This happened quite a few times until at one point, instead of inwardly recoiling from it, I (metaphorically) opened up my arms to it in a gesture of love and acceptance and the strange thing was, I sensed it withdraw at that point. I perceived nothing, no shadows, just the sense of presence. I guess it's just a case of the ego encountering the unconscious, the shadowy depths of the mind. However, I wouldn't feel inclined to dress the experience up in an occult or even theological explanation. That would be to lend it too much credence in a sense. As for evil per se, evil has a very human face. Look at Gaza or Ukraine today. Evil stares out at us daily. Forget spooks, ghosts and demons. Just look in the mirror.

Just gorgeous, Mr. Jacobs -- Another great episode to add to your ever-growing body of medicinal work. Putting the 'physician' in 'metaphysician'. Thank you. Discovering the grounding simplicity and infinite height of faith that grounds all that we confront and live through in this reality. Discovering that this fuller faith, in all its glory and eternal consolation, has been here for us to humbly encounter and participate in all along. Glory to God.

Many Orthodox people: "LSD and other psychedelics do not help on the spiritual journey.... Also, LSD was a big part of what lead me to Orthodoxy."

IIRC in the Nicomachean ethics the worst type of man is called "theriotes", beastly, so I think that fits very well with the werewolf interpretation. Cf also Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

I gave up on Christianity due to the penal language and original sin ideas. One day I noticed a random comment on a RUclips video discussing the orthodox take on these topics, and it opened a whole new world to me. Thank God for showing me that random comment!

Great!

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God bless you and your family!!!

Dr Jacobs, you are changing lives with your podcast. I've been listening since episode 1, and I have been wrestling with some big questions. Your framing of realism and nominalism have helped me so much. And praise God for your family coming to the faith! Keep up the great work.

Dear Mr. Jacobs, do you have any recommendations for an introductory book on orthodox theology? Or would you recommend going directly to the church fathers? Thank you, and keep up that good work of yours. 😊

Actually, the pronunciation rule is soft g before e and i, also y. "gift" is an exception. P.S. I switched to over when I found it works better.

I wouldn't be ashamed to say that for the 6 years I was a Christian, all I was in it for was to not lose Pascal's Wager. It was the most miserable 6 years of my life. Also, no magical high spiritual experience ever happened. I concluded that the Christpill is not for everybody.

Sure, I think about how many people are depressed because they do what they are "Supposed" to and it doesn't deliver. One reason I couldn't stick to belief because "Just pray harder" was absolutely useless. It was like "Just shout into the void louder, bro." Other times, what people are "Supposed" to do is out of reach. Some people are discussing "Shit life syndrome" because there are people stuck where the job market is impossible, rent is unaffordable, and every form of savings is destroyed. I argue "Nones" exist because the Godpill did not deliver the effect it was supposed to do.

All I ever saw in suppressing desire was "Fake it till you make it." Somehow if people went long enough not doing what they wanted, the want would not be bothersome. Then people would just spawn a want somewhere else, and the want would be some wholesome thing. I tried to make my burning desire to visit Japan go away. It never happened. The amount of mental burden it would take off me would be great. I like how Allen Carr discussed addiction. He discussed the difference between not doing something and not craving it. His way of pulling if off involved trying to find out why people did the addictive thing, then debunk the reasons. It started because he had a hard time stopping smoking. It was when he was able to see that it did not act as a relaxing thing or an aide to concentration that stopping was not hard.

I saw divine hiddenness as "I did the thing the holy man said to do. It did not work. The mechanism is broken."

It's becoming quite common for atheists to espouse this idea that free will is an illusion and it is my feeling that why they choose this is because having free will opens up the possibility or even likelihood of a God & you escape that by insisting humans are meat machines programmed from the beginning acting on what only appears to be free will.

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Wonderfully and efficiently summarized; thank you!

Great episode Nathan, thanks for doing these it’s really helpful

On PARTICIPATION question: there's something in your explanations that doesn't seem correct or maybe not clearly formulated. 1) "Participation in human nature" may be a misleading expression. We don't take part in human nature, but the same undivided human nature exists in every our hypostasis (in every one of us). We may participate in God's energies for example because they may be divided, therefore we may be more or less virtues, but we can't be more or less human (in a metaphysical sense). 2) It seems to me that not essential properties themselves take residence in our mind in act of perception, but our mind forms an image - abstraction - of them. Don't you think so? 3) Sphericality and such other things are not the divine logoi or ideas, but the created expressions of them (the results of the divine energies or actions). And here we must recall the dispute between Barlaam and st. Gregory Palamas and also st. Maximus. There are two types of energies (and therefore of perception): active energy and passive suffering. When we perceive or study something created, we actively deal with it by touching or analysing etc. But God does not suffer anything, we can't actively study Him or comprehend Him. The only way (!) of getting knowledge of Him or perceiving Him (or comprehending if this word fits more) is by participating in Him by His divine energies. This participation is possible because of our ability to passively suffer the experience of His supernatural divine energies (actions) in us, which elevate us above our created nature (essence). Through our active natural created abilities of mind we are able only to learn or perceive the creative reality by its created energies, but not God. God does not suffer any activity of creatures, so in order to perceive God we need His revelation, when He Himself supernaturally touches our mind giving us participation in His Wisdom. Such supernatural enlightenment the saints afterwards express in human words (as far as it may be expressed at all) - in parables or philosophical terms, which are all used as the images of uncreated reality, revealed to them by supernatural participation in divine Grace. This is a supernatural revelation. When we learn about God through the natural revelation - through observing the design of the created world, its beauty and harmony in unthinkable complexity, we only come to a conclusion that there must be a supernatural Being which could create such wonders. But this way we do not perceive God directly by participation in His divine uncreated energies. This way - through the natural revelation - we only perceive how Logos expresses and embodies Himself in creatures, preparing the ground to the full embodiment by accepting in His hypostasis our human nature and becoming one of us. But we do not participate in God by scientific or philosophical studies, observations and perceptions as Barlaam thought. He believed in created Grace (energies) of God, so of course he didn't differ between the divine creative energies and the created results of them. Therefore for him all scientific and philosophical knowledge was the God's energies themselves and not only the created expressions of them. I hope, I was able to convey the meaning clearly enough. Please, respond in some way to this arguments if you have time. And thank you for every episode! Very interesting to listen to!

I was watching your next video on the existence of fairies, and it prompted a question about this video. Can God not consider the possible futures of possible beings before deciding whether to create them in actuality? I'm thinking here of Molinism, where God, from outside time, knows the timeline of all possible worlds, and chooses to make actual the best one.

I’m here for an obligatory divine hiddenness episode or two. We’ve seen how you acquiesce to demands. Great podcast and documentary.

This is so stupid! Realists asking questions that they know can’t be proved… High school level

On DARWIN question: why you were saying that evolution might be compatible with the eastern orthodox theology? You probably very well know that the metaphysical commonalities are an expression of the creative logoi, if we speak in terms of st. Maximus. These logoi are immutable, that's why the essential properties of the creatures cannot change - they are the results of the creative energies of God. The only change that will happen is that logos of deification will limit logoi of being and wellbeing, so that the body will become spiritual and will - incorruptible. Therefore I don't see how your supposition that evolution may be compatible with orthodox theology can be true. Theology is the basis of metaphysics: the metaphysical reality is a created result of divine energies (first of all - creative logoi). Logoi of being only establish such limited change as metamorphoses, while logoi of Providence don't change the essential properties at all, so the macroevolution is impossible from the point of view of theology, and metaphysical impossibility is only a consequence of it.

Sad to see you don’t accept macroevolution but happy to see you say that it's compatible with the theology of the greek fathers. There's actually a book that came out about a week ago called: Maximus the Confessor and Evolutionary Biology The Phylogenetic Logoi By Andrew P. Jackson, who has advanced degrees in both Zoology and Theology. I think it would be worth checking out.

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I really appreciate your efforts! Just a quick off-topic question: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How can I transfer them to Binance?

What is the best way to ground moral realism? (Submission for the next Q&A)

I don’t think science needs to assume realism, at least on the level of forms of animals or forms of anatomy (like a telomere). It assumes there is some ontological truth with regard to mechanics, such as mass or energy, but patterns derived from those fundamental mechanics are abstractions we use on a human level. It’s fine if telomeres can’t be strictly defined to encompass all scenarios, we simply have the category for the sake of our own operational capacity in the world, because we can’t process the amount of information necessary to describe the fundamental layer of things in normal communication (or at all?). The fact that the human language and mental process has limitations like this does not prove that evolution is false and, while I’m not an evolution expert, I don’t think Stephen Meyer is making any better progress on the scientific side.

I don't think it would be super complicated to create an AI based tool which would decompose statements into the formal arguments with all of the hiden premises etc. More complicated woukd be then to check the primary sources. I was thinking about project like that recently. Hit me up if you want to elaborate on that.

My wife and I adopted several kids from foster care. Bless you for adopting! It's one of those super rewarding/super challenging things that few people can do.

Thanks for answering my questions Dr. Jacobs!

1:53:51 Basil of Caesarea is from Chicago apparently.

Complex meat robots.

Am I the only one who thought that what he would take out of the box was a 105mm round?

Perhaps for your evolution episode: The 19th century Russian Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Soloviev seems to ascribe to something like the "organic evolution" (if that's not a contradiction) that you described, and as you likely know, a lot of Christian philosophers at the time and into the 20th century held to various forms of organicism, some better than others. Soloviev, claims in his Justification of the Good that inanimate things can change into other inanimate things, but in order to go from inanimate to animate, an act of God is needed. So, too, to move from vegetative to animal, an act of God is needed. Again, to go from animal to rational animal, an act of God is needed. And last, in order for us to be deified, of course an act of God is needed. Soloviev's reasoning is that at the level of genus there is a difference of kind that cannot be reduced merely to increasing complexity. At the same time, however, he, like evolutionary thinkers, still thinks each stage of creation serves as the material basis for what follows. What do you think of this? Does Soloviev (or my summary of him) preserve realism while also affirming a form of evolution? Or are "organic" and "evolutionary" mutually contradictory terms? I have in the past called Soloviev's view a form of "theistic evolution," but is it? How flexible is the term "evolution"? For example, in my limited understanding, most modern evolutionary biologists emphasize random mutation rather than smooth, Darwinian gradualism. Are there forms of evolution that are more compatible with realism than others?

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First 🥇 here 😊

What is you discovered that the world is actually not a sphere? would this impact how you see hades....

Absolutely wild. Thanks for explaining

Regarding Peterson and non-realists, is non-realism always assumed to be volitional? If it is, then it would seem to be a deeply sociopathic quality, by 1) thinking oneself to be so far above the proletariat, and 2) thinking they care about your guidance, and 3) fooling them all because it’s better for them to be your fools than know the truth. I guess it could happen on a small level too, a pastor, or father, or any kind of salesperson. But I take Peterson to be genuine, even though your points do seem to hit. When I ran it past my wise wife, and her response was that Peterson is just confused. Which seemed to make sense of things for me. Blindness is blindness. At least it’s not sociopathic. Personally I think I vasilate between realism and non-realism. Lord I believe, help my unbelief. In any moment I’m choosing sin and hiding it I’m acting as a non-realist. If I were in such a state in an interview I’d deny disbelief. Maybe at least Peterson is being honest and keeping his integrity by not being double minded?