Can religious people and people who have left a religion talk about it together? Alex and Todd sit down for a frank conversation about religion. Todd is a Christian and practicing Latter-day Saint. Alex has left the LDS (Mormon) church. We talk about the difficult and often uncomfortable challenges of bridging this divide.
This episode covers Aristotle’s philosophy of the soul as both matter and form, a model of the soul as a braided four-dimensional structure, ways to infer the four-dimensional structure from three dimensions, and to account for variation observed in three dimensions using design notions of tolerance and perceptual coding, why the concept of the soul need not be eliminated in modernity even if it comes to seem less mysterious in the process of investigation, and the ongoing intellectual conversation on the soul carried on from classical times through medieval and modern Christian thought.
A video version of this episode is available on YouTube and displays visual aids that may be helpful to follow the material. On the Soul, Part II: Matter and Form
Jared and Todd discuss meaning. Is there a current crisis of meaning? What is the source of meaning and why might it be lost? How can it be recovered?
What is the nature of the soul? In Part I we look at this question through the thought experiment of the Transporter Problem. What is it that would have to be preserved in a transportation process in order to say that the person stepping out on the other side is the same person? What are the implications for the nature of personal identity and the makeup of the human person, or soul?
Todd Decker 