Bishop Robert Barron: Christianity and the Catholic Church | Lex Fridman Podcast #304

When we're beyond good and evil, you know, and all that's left is the will to power, then why are we surprised that the powerful rise and that they use the power less for their purposes? When we forget ideas like equality and rights, which are grounded in God, why are we surprised that death camps follow?

The following is a conversation with Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire and one of the greatest educators in the world on the beauty and wisdom within Catholicism, Christianity, and religious faith in general. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Bishop Robert Barron. Let's start with the big question: Who is God-

(laughs)

... according to Christianity, according to Catholicism? Who's God?

I'll give you Thomas Aquinas' definition. Uh, God is ipsum esse subsistens. God is the subsistent act of to be itself. Another way to state that, in Aquinas, is God is that reality, unique, absolutely unique, in which essence and existence coincide. To be God is to be to be. Those are all ways of talking about (laughs) what we mean by God. They are kind of gnomic, and, and that's on purpose. There's almost a Zen koan kind of quality about the way we talk about God. I'm saying something that's substantive, but it's more in like a via negativa mode. It's more like what God is not, because there's nothing in the world that would correspond to those descriptions. So anything in the world would be a being of some type or an event of some type, some particular mode of existence, and God is not an entity in the world. In fact, I would say that's the fundamental mistake that atheists, old and new, make all the time, is they think of God as a big being. When Aquinas says that God is not in any genus, even the genus of being, it's one of the strangest remarks in the whole tradition, but it's really interesting. So you say, "Well, at the very least, God must be a being," right? And Aquinas' answer is, "No, he's not in the genus of being." So we talk about God being beyond being and so on. To say in God essence and existence coincide is to say God's very nature is to be, and that can't be true of any contingent thing in the world. So what I'm doing there is I'm, I'm gesturing the way the tradition does toward God using language that's at the same time philosophically precise and gnomic. (laughs) You know, it's, it's both accurate, it's true. I- in God, essence and existence coincide. What God is is the same as God's, uh, active to be. But now what does that mean? (laughs) I'm not quite sure, because nothing in our ordinary experience corresponds to that. Everything in our experience is, is a being of some type. So it's existence received according to the mode of some essence. That's not true of God, which is why he can't be found in the world. And, and that's, as I say, the fundamental mistake is, uh, oh, I guess theists are those that believe there's this being alongside the other beings in the universe. And then atheists say, "Oh no, there is no such being." Um, and that's precisely wrong. That's just a category error. Uh, Dawkins, I think, cites Bertrand Russell to the effect that proving the non-existence of God is a bit like proving the non-existence of a china teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars. You know, no, that's precisely what (laughs) God is not, some entity that's sort of hidden among the other entities of the universe. God is the reason why there's a contingent realm at all. This is a way to put it. In more theological language, God's the creator of all things.