James Orr: Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion Dr James Orr. They discuss Dr Orr’s early upbringing, why Dr Orr focuses primarily on the Philosophy of Religion, how to not get lost in a circle of reasoning, why philosophy is important to understanding life, what we can learn from ancient Philosophers about Religion and life, how philosophers have interpreted the existence of God, How philosophy helps answer the big questions of life, what Atheists get wrong, why Richard Dawkins was wrong for saying he’s culturally Christian, The main issue with post-modern atheists like Christopher Hitchens and why former atheists are becoming Christians today.

Episode Summary

• How Dr Orr became a Christian
• Why he chose to study Philosophy and Religion
• His early upbringing in London
• How to not get lost in a perpetual cycle of reasoning
• Why Philosophy is important to understanding life
• What we can learn today from ancient philosophers about religion and life
• How ancient philosophers vs modern philosophers interpret the existence of God
• How philosophy helps answer the big questions of life
• What Atheists primarily get wrong
• Why Richard Dawkins was wrong for saying he’s culturally Christian
• The main issue with post-modern Atheists like Christopher Hitchens
• Why former Atheists are becoming Christians

James Orr: Episode Transcript

Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student wellbeing, character development, and academic improvement.

Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project, where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. Here’s your host, Brendan Corr.

Brendan Corr
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast. Today, we’re spending some time talking with Dr. James Orr. Dr. Orr is associate professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, a position he took up after four years as McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology, Ethics and Public Life at Christ Church Oxford. He held a PhD and a master of arts and philosophy of religion from the University of Cambridge and a BA in classics from Balliol College in Oxford. Dr Orr’s research interests include the background to early movements of German phenomenology, including Martin Heidegger’s Critiques of Theology, and Immanuel Kant’s Pre-Critical Appears of Teleology. He is a published author, having written books called Being and Eternity, the Neo Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature and the Mind of God and the Works of Nature. We pick up the conversation with Dr. Orr as he and I are discussing the demands of his academic life and how he manages them. I hope that you enjoy it.

Dr. James Orr
What I do does not feel like work, and I joke with my dad. My dad retired from corporate law in 2009. I was in corporate law at the same time and I also left corporate law in 2009. I joke that we both retired at the same time and I left Cambridge to start graduate studies and I really … There was just so much satisfaction that I got from it, that it very, very rarely feels like work. So I think you naturally … making that distinction between trade and vocation perhaps or I mean, a trade can be a vocation, but where your work is a vocation, you never really consciously think about yourself needing to be fit for it or training for it because you’re doing it … sort of it comes naturally, you find it comes naturally. I think that the challenge is actually the reverse. The challenge is working out how to stop the cognitive … to restrain the cognitive overload. And I think for academics, just getting out and going for a walk or slowing down or being contemplative or acknowledging that cleverness and breadth of reading is not, in fact, at the end of the day. What’s most important is the bigger challenge.

Brendan Corr
Do you find that there is a juxtaposition between your academic life and the way you engage professionally, even though it is not work and conversation over breakfast and engaging with family? You talked about in your previous conversation or how you read books in different gears. Are you gearing up and gearing down as you navigate real life?

Dr. James Orr
Well, the wonderful thing about having a family and a supportive and loving wife and children is that they do keep you grounded and that they remind you of the important things. Yeah, so conversation in the home ranges very widely. I mean, my children will often roll their eyes if I’m starting to get to … Well, actually, last night I had a fantastic conversation with my 12-year-old daughter about the British Empire, and she’s doing five of India and the East India company and in fact, all credit to the school, given the current climate in English schools, they’re teaching it in a very broad and balanced way. And we talked about the good bits as well as the bad bits. And that happens quite often, but we’re very lucky here where we are in Cambridge, we live in a I suppose you could call it a compound. We have a rather eccentric house. Well, I like to joke with my wife. It is a sort of big garden with a house attached and a rather eccentric house, but there’s a couple of apartments. There are some shepherd huts, there’s a chalet, there’s some art studios and a boathouse that we’ve converted into bungalows. So we have about 10 students living with us. They’re mainly PhD students or postdoctoral fellows, research fellows. And although we don’t exactly live together, we’re not eating every meal together. We always come together for Sunday lunch and we’ll often have supper together with some of them. So that’s amazingly stimulating, they’re all studying … they’re all really at the cream of their generation in their respective subjects. So conversation can be absolutely fascinating, hearing what they’ve been working on and really from different disciplines, so you get a genuine interdisciplinary mix and it’s wonderful. I find it’s an antidote to the multiversity phenomenon. In modern universities, research intensive universities, you find that these inevitably … that silos pop up, not just in faculty, even within faculties, as people are really scrutinising minute areas of their subject matter. And it’s very hard to retain that single organising horizon that held the mediaeval university together.

Brendan Corr
So in that space, one of the things I was interested in exploring with you, you focus on philosophy, specifically philosophy of religion, and many people would hold the view, the simple view that philosophy and perhaps even religion, is rather removed from the nitty-gritty and the earthy components of life. And what you’ve just described does seem a very rarefied environment, in which the big ideas can be tossed around and teased out and what’s going on in the marketplace or the high street could be quite separate and quite different. Are you conscious of that? How do you … as academics or you individually, how do you make sure that the things you’re thinking, you’re not just lost in a circle of reasoning?

Dr. James Orr
Well, it’s a very good question. I often hear the phrase used by colleagues and students. So when I leave Cambridge, I really need a job in the real world, and I’ve had a job in the real world. I worked in corporate law for a few years and it felt far more synthetic than the world that I’m in at the moment. So working in the markets is working in the real world or the entire world is real, you might say.

Brendan Corr
Well, that’s philosophy, isn’t it. It’s a construct.

Dr. James Orr
Well, that’s exactly right and I think what is so intoxicating about philosophy is that there is simply no aspect of human experience or reality. That it is not probing in some way, whether successfully or not, even to ask the question, is philosophy useful and does it have much purchase in the real world, is itself to begin taking up a philosophical posture, so you can’t escape it. Some philosophy is abstract and speculative, Metaphysics is to some extent. Other areas of philosophy. And I’m writing a lecture at the moment on freedom, political freedom and economic freedom. And there I’m … that’s still quite theoretical, but it is thinking hard about questions of religious freedom. And I’m going to draw in what’s been happening to politicians in Finland and in Belgium and in France, and these are real world questions. There are trials happening, there are people being locked up for their beliefs, et cetera. And then, I just got back from Vienna where I was talking to a group of very impressive CEOs and the hedge fund world and the private equity world, but also, doing remarkable charitable work. And the talks that I gave were certainly quite philosophical, and what I found was that there was an enormous appetite to think philosophically about problems that they’re facing and opportunities that they’re confronted with. And of course, there’s such a range in philosophy. There’s the more technical theoretical stuff, but there’s also, the existentialist tradition and there’s also, the question was what brought me into philosophy, the way in which philosophy and faith compliment each other. So people within the Christian fold or who are curious about The Christian way often find that they’ve got philosophical obstacles in front of them that they’d never been told that these are obstacles that many had come across before and were not in fact as insoluble as they might think. So I find that philosophy does really have a lot of purchase in the real world. Although one’s got to be grounded and one’s got to remember that parts of it are inaccessible and abstract. They’re important, but some areas are going to have less purchase than others.

Brendan Corr
I’ve listened to some other conversations that you’ve had with other podcast presenters and teachers, and you make the point that philosophy is one of the longest, most enduring dimensions of human activity and engagement across millennia of time and however simple life might be, you are as a inherently human being, asking questions of existence and of meaning and of worth and of value, which is what philosophy is.

Dr. James Orr
Yes, that’s right. Certainly, I think I believe in this idea of homo religiosus, that what distinguishes us as species is that we are somehow oriented towards … if not, the transcendent, at least we are shaped by belief in the holy. I mean, there’s a lot of debate about what exactly the great cave paintings of Lascaux and elsewhere are depicting, but I think it’s quite plausible that it crystallises a religious spirit or at least a spirit that is seeking to organise and understand the world as something that is more than merely material and the capacity for representing reality as we see on the cave, on the walls of the … in the cave art and the capacity for intentional thought and the capacity for issuing prohibitions and interdictions or commending or praising. These are all bound up with something that is metaphysically distinctive about us as species. It’s true that I probably wouldn’t say that we are homo philosophicus from the get-go, and that I do think there is a point at which philosophy as we recognise it today, begins, and that is, let’s say 550 BC, 15th of August roundabout tea time. Well, I mean there is a sort of … really, with the pre-Socratic philosophers, I think with Heraclitus in particular, Pythagoras and then, Parmenides, those early precursors there. You are starting to see all the Milesian philosophers, Thales and Anaximenes and Anaximander. There is something new happening there. They are starting to think about reality and ultimate reality in the sort of systematic way and asking the kinds of questions that I think we would now recognise as being the first philosophical questions, in a way that you don’t really see in the ancient near Eastern traditions, you don’t really see in Ancient Egypt or in Sumeria. Now, I should qualify that by saying … things are happening in the Indian subcontinent and in China, which are in the Rigvedas, in Vedanta. Again, I would say that’s really coming to full fruition as philosophy, around about the same time. This is the famous thesis of Karl Jaspers where he talks about the so-called Axial Age. This astonishingly intense burst of philosophical activity all across the world. From roughly 650 BC to roughly 350 BC, you see the emergence of Vedanta coming to its full fruition, at least. The emergence of the Hebraic traditions, the explosion of Hellenic philosophy. The emergence of Confucianism. Buddha, we would probably date to … well, it’s contested, but let’s say roughly speaking fourth, fifth century BC. So yes, and I would say that’s probably the threshold of thought that we would recognise to be philosophical.

Brendan Corr
You’re starting to, I think, form a response to one of the questions I wanted to ask you. So, if I can press you a little bit, when I was reading your title, associate professor of the philosophy of religion, and I was interested in thinking about how language is structured and what is said as what precedes what, when you are labelling or giving titles to things and the notion that you could have a philosophy of religion, does that imply that there is something precedent about philosophy that gives rise or that can be used to interrogate a derivative or a subordinate concept that is religion? Am I making myself clear in that question?

Dr. James Orr
Yes, you are. It’s a very, very astute question if I may say so. You are absolutely right that by naming a discipline philosophy of religion, which is I think the actual name for the discipline, is only as old as the early 19th century. The way one taxonomizes knowledge within a research university, inevitably is going to attract charges of domesticating and sort of doing a kind of categorical violence to the sum of human knowledge and so on, and hierarchies too and so forth. I would say the same is true of religion itself as a concept, which notoriously is a word that those whose profession it is to study religion, that is professors of the study of religion have not been able to give, sort of have thrown their hands up in despair, at ever reaching an adequate definition of what religion is. And it’s become a fairly common complaint that really before the 17th century, religion itself didn’t mean what it means today to use the word religious of somebody was really to note that they were part of a monastic community. So you would talk about the religious life, that sense of religion still persists in that phrase when we talk about, “Oh, she’s in the religious life or she’s a religious.” And that’s really was the sort of stable semantic sense of the word religion up until the 17th century. Similarly, we’d talk about secular priests. So secularity has also taken on a meaning that it didn’t used to have. Really from Augustine onwards, the secular was understood to be the temporal as opposed to the eternal. Earthly power as opposed to the ecclesiastical polity. It’s taken on this different meaning, of course, religion and the secular are structurally complicated as notions. So you are right. I mean I talk about philosophy religion simply because it makes things easier in the lecture hall, but really what I do is philosophical theology. In some sense, it’s thinking about theological questions very often in trying to do it in a philosophically self-conscious and robust way, but I’d also say that you are right to raise the concern because frankly before about 1600, let’s say before somebody like Descartes, just to take a convenient figure, a threshold figure, I think the distinction between philosophy and religion or between philosophy and theology would’ve been very difficult for a European figure to understand. Because they would ask, “Well, what do you mean when you say that … asking about the existence of God or the nature of God or the nature of human moral fragility? What do you mean when you say that that’s not philosophy, that those are not philosophical questions? Those are questions that should somehow be sequestered into a kind of religion box.” Similarly, you read many of Plato’s dialogues, if you read Aristotle’s Metaphysics or you read the Stoics, I mean they’re just shot through with questions about the divine Atheos, about transcendence, about the nature of human beings and so on, that are all recognisably theological.

Brendan Corr
Which is where I think you were suggesting the inherent … that philosophy presupposes some sort of transcendence and whether that is a personal theistic notion of a God or whether they are extracted values or ideals or forms that it’s in the same category of knowledge or of thinking. Am I understanding you?

Dr. James Orr
Yes, I think that’s probably right. I mean, I wouldn’t say that to do philosophy is to be aware of transcendence because certainly, many philosophers today would reject the notion of transcendence altogether. And there were certain schools obviously in the ancient world that also rejected transcendence, as we would understand it. The Epicureans in particular, I suppose you could say the Stoics too, don’t have much track with transcendence, though they are committed to this idea of a logo that permeates material reality but is also itself material. So it depends a little bit on what you mean by transcendence. Even to repudiate, transcendence involves doing some philosophical work. You can’t simply … as is quite fashionable among … was quite fashionable among the new atheists, simply stating a materialist creed and assuming that everyone signs up to it because it’s simply self-evident. That’s certainly not philosophy. You need to give an argument for it. If you are going to do philosophy that is transcendence free, you’ve got to explain why in fact consciousness is an illusory, convenient folk tale that we tell ourselves. You’ve got to explain why despite our deepest intuitions, there is no moral universe. You have to explain why there are no numbers. There is no mathematical reality despite the fact that science seems to be so dependent upon it in its presumptions. Now look, I’m not saying there aren’t ways … one can explain that, but very often one finds with the suit of … materialists, the hegemony of philosophical materialism that has descended upon us over the last 150 years, very often you find with dominant orthodoxies that people get lazy philosophically and don’t feel they owe you an argument or an explanation for their creeds.

Brendan Corr
Professor, I’m also conscious of the nature of this conversation we’re having about the limited … the way in which language limits our communication or even our conception of things. We’re talking about the difference between philosophy, theology, transcendence, natural supernatural, scientific issues, and I’m conscious that we are bounded in our cognition by the language of our age, by the things that have just become the way we understand our own perspective, our own perceptions of the world, that become the limiting factor on how we can unpack or how we analyse or comment on, even our own experience. What role does language and the paradigm in which we live, how is it bounding thinking philosophy and how do you move beyond that?

Dr. James Orr
Well, it’s an excellent question and it’s a question that’s worried philosophers down the ages. I was just reading, going back to some writings by Martin Heidegger, the great German philosopher and founder of existentialism a couple of weeks ago, and one of his big complaints is that German … and one could say the same of English too, is so … when it’s doing philosophy is so freighted with its classical inheritance. It’s so freighted with Latinate and Hellenic expressions, that language itself traps and contains our thinking. And in his view, it occludes the meaning of being, as he puts it, rather grandly and pompously. So you are absolutely right, that language does constrain us, but it also enables us, and Wittgenstein says somewhere that nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can be said. We do need language to just get by and cope and to make any progress at all. One has to use it with caution. And I think the very best antidote to using language as it were unreflectively, is to read old books, read old texts, and to be aware of the concepts, have dates. To be aware that other thinkers and other periods have approached questions using radically different linguistic formulations. And I think that is why here in Cambridge, I am so fortunate to work with people who understand that, certainly in the divinity faculty. I think one of the great advantages of working in a theology and religion department over and above a philosophy department, at least an Anglo-American philosophy department, is that we take ancient texts seriously. And I started my undergraduates on Plato. We work through Aristotle. We go through Augustine and Aquinas. And then we do come up to the modern world, but we show the ways in which language is used differently. The conceptual framing is very different and that helps to … as it were, Bernard Williams, the great philosopher used to … the 20th century philosophy is to talk about how doing the history of philosophy helps you … it helps you in the exercise of making … he calls it making strange. It’s a way in which you are not trying to hunt for parallels to buttress your assumptions, your present assumptions about a particular problem, but to realise that your assumptions are not obvious and not self-evident. And the best way to do that is to look at the different ways in which language is used by previous thinkers.

Brendan Corr
C.S. Lewis writes an article, I think it is titled ”On the Reading of Older Books” in which he’s arguing that very point, that if you go back and engage with the authors of those ancient texts … G.K. Chesterton also makes the point that it is a way of democratising knowledge across time and not just in your contemporary peers and it’s giving respect to enduring conversation that is being had.

Dr. James Orr
Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. I think that essay you mentioned by Lewis forms the introduction to an addition of Athanasius’s Dae Carcione, On the Incarnation. I think it’s from that. And it’s a marvellous little essay. I can’t remember where it’s been reproduced, but yes, of course that is … I mean, Lewis contained within himself almost all of European literature, and you could see the way in which … Although most of the time he kind of kept it under the bonnet, you could see the way in which it charged his thinking and gave it and invested it with an extraordinary power and authority and clarity. Yeah, the Chesterton line too. That tradition is the democracy of the dead and that we shouldn’t be consumed by the arrogance of those who just happened to be walking around in the moment. And so I think all of that is important that one is aware, that one is part of a much broader diachronic sweep when one’s engaging certainly in philosophy and theology. I think that the trouble though, when one lives in a society and culture in which science is the paradigm discipline as it were, is the paradigm form of human inquiry and invested with the authority of its astonishing successes of the last … over the last 200, 250 years. Science isn’t terrible … I don’t need to be terribly interested in history. Science is much more forward-looking.

Brendan Corr
Yes, perhaps.

Dr. James Orr
It’s inherently progressive, if you like. It’s got to tread this difficult tightrope between excessive dogmatism and excessive scepticism. And we’d be delighted if we found that our children were reading philosophy books at school from 50 years ago, but we’d be horrified if we found that they were reading physics books from 50 years ago. And so I think what that’s done is to, as it were, bring to our culture a certain sceptical posture towards the past. It’s not the only thing that’s brought that with it, I think to understand that we live in modernity is itself to believe that we live in the present moment. Modernitas in Latin simply means nowness. So, the way we describe our age is just by reference to the present, without any reference to what’s gone before. And that’s a terrible shame because although science does change, a lot of other things don’t, including I would say, human nature. Including certainly all philosophical questions you could ask. I mean, philosophy notoriously doesn’t make … can’t progress in the way that science can. That is to say you could pick up a dialogue of Plato and really wrestle with it, and maybe there’s some things that you would think he’d got wrong and things you thought he got right, but where he went wrong, he didn’t go wrong simply because he didn’t have at his fingertips, knowledge that we’ve somehow acquired in the last two and a half millennia, because philosophical questions are not empirical questions, they’re not questions that can be settled by scientific advances because … Well, one philosophical question is what is it for science to advance at all, and to say that empiricism, that discovering truth by experiment is the only way to discover truth is itself a philosophical claim. And it can’t be satisfied by saying, “Well, look, we found all these true things by experiment,” because that’s not going to refute the position of somebody who thinks that there are other means of acquiring truth and there are other kinds of truth that resist empirical inquiry.

Brendan Corr
So in that sort of context, I completely understand the dilemma that you are putting for us. In one of the phrases or one of your responses to my other questions, you spoke about the new atheist, that movement of the last few decades that was presenting the concept of atheism with a new force and with a vigour that was associated with the decline of the Christian West. In many ways though, that term new atheist is an interesting one because there aren’t very many old atheists, that the whole notion of … you’ve made the comment before that, there was a much less clear distinction between theology and philosophy and religion and faith and belief and proposition. Was it the enlightenment or was it Aquinas’s rediscovery or declaration that our reason could lead us to the good that was the beginning of that movement?

Dr. James Orr
It’s a very interesting question. The new atheists, as you say, were … Well, first of all, even if they were new in 2005, they’re not new anymore. And they do seem rather quaint and dated, and indeed many of them have come round to saying, “Well, we didn’t mean our criticisms of religion to be so solvent that it would usher in the barbarism of a kind of post-religious world.” And thinking of a conversation of a friend of mine organised between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali last week or a couple of weeks ago in New York, and some of the new atheists seem to be backtracking in quite interesting ways. You are right. There was also … even back in 2005, there was nothing new about them. None of them could hold a candle to Hume’s dialogues concerning natural religion or even Nietzsche at his best, or even though I think they’re dreadful, some of the arguments that Kant advances in the critique of pure reason in 1781. I mean, I think … to go back to Aquinas, I think that’s probably pushing it back further. I think quite a lot further back than when it did in fact begin, I think with Aquinas and with Anselm … in the 13th Century, atheism was almost inconceivable. I mean, when Anselm is trying to imagine atheism, he refers to that verse in the Psalms about the fool who says in his heart, there is no God, he almost can’t … There were infidels. So there were God believers and religious believers who didn’t believe in the Christian way of doing things. They were aware of that. They were sort of dimly aware of that, of course. And of course, they’re aware of paganism, but atheism as an option is one of the very few, they don’t really consider in any detail at all. Yeah, so the new atheism as a phenomenon I think emerges … Well, it’s hard to understand it as a unified phenomenon. It was really a rag bag of angry polemics against … my sense is really against the eruption of Islamic terrorism after 9/11. And I think this is … a friend of mine, we were talking about this the other day, but one way to understand the new atheist is really that it was a sort of politically correct way of criticising Islamism and political Islam. That’s certainly the case, I think that’s certainly what was driving Christopher Hitchens, and I think maybe to some extent Richard Dawkins and they were part of that, the Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis set. And they’ve, in fact, been haunted by Islamic terrorism since the Rushdie affair in the late 80s. And when you look at somebody like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who also famously wrote that book Infidel and was effectively hounded out of the Netherlands after very credible death threats. She was part of that set too. And my sense is there, that it was really a way to express horror at Islamist incursions into the West, and it was really a way of asserting a kind of enlightenment values over against the Islamic other. And I think that would make sense, for example, of Dawkins coming out recently and saying, “Well, I’m actually culturally Christian. I’m fine with this.” And Ayaan Hirsi Ali herself converted to Christianity. So yes, I think the other dynamic in play is the failure of the new atheist prediction that a post religious world would be a rational world. We’ve actually seen the opposite. I mean, I for example, no longer accept invitations to go and talk about the theme of religion and science, are they compatible? I simply don’t want to give that debate any more oxygen anymore. The real question is, are science and secularism compatible? Are science and progressivism compatible? And I think it’s plainly the case that they’re not. And I think the sort of … Dawkins is intellectually honest enough to recognise that. He’s not having to convince Bible believing orthodox Christians that men can’t become women. It’s the progressives who’ve gladly left God behind, who seem to be going down the most irrational rabbit holes.

Brendan Corr
Yes, it’s interesting that following this line of thinking, there was a book that Carl Trueman wrote recently, the Rise and Triumph for the Modern Self and the thesis there is the predominant psychologizing of the self. And I know that you’ve made some comments about the way in which that conception of identity, expressive individualism has led to this therapeutic approach to life and to community and to politics and to the entire sphere of our endeavour. Have I understood your argument right there?

Dr. James Orr
Yes, absolutely and Carl’s book is a tremendous sort of guide and manual and a kind of historical scene setting for what Philip Reeve calls the triumph of the therapeutic in his book of that name in 1966, which is an important book, but almost completely indigestible. And Carl has done a great service, one of the services that book does, Carl’s book does is to unpack it and explain it and bring it up to date. Yes, I do think that the transition to homo psychologicus has been a disaster. I think it is … therapeutic man is ironically a man who is singularly incapable of navigating the challenges that life brings. And there are various reasons for that. I think the first is that the quicker you are to pathologize the sorts of challenges and difficulties that human beings encounter every day, the quicker you will disempower yourself and hamstring yourself from ever really getting through life in a successful or productive way. And one sees this among the young today. It’s not their fault a lot of the time. It’s simply part of the way the culture has changed and the constant talk about mental health, which I find to be … and I think I’ve said this, I’ve said this before, that mental health seems to me a completely incoherent, philosophically incoherent phrase. Health is something that pertains to one’s physicality. I can get a clean bill of mental health from my doctor. I might get a second opinion, but that will be to confirm to try and find what the truth of the matter is. I just don’t know what a clean bill of mental health would look like because the mind is not the body. The mind is a completely different kind of thing, philosophically speaking, at least I think it is. Unless therapists have solved the mind-body problem, the biggest problem, one of the biggest problems in the history of philosophy. The mind is a completely different kind of thing. So I get very uneasy about … people talking about their mental health. That’s not to say that suffering isn’t real of course, but one should use a different language. Going back to your point earlier about how language holds us captive and how language makes it easier for us to make missteps and get confused, I think that phrase is a classic example of that. And then, of course, it feeds into public policy because then we then have to start thinking about solutions to the mental health crisis in ways that are effectively parallel or identical with the ways in which we solve the ordinary health crises and so on. So I think it may well be a feature of a post-religious age. I think that’s quite a plausible hypothesis that with the loss of ordinary ways of sense-making that religion and particularly religious institutions provided, whether in the confessional or through the sort of ordinary self-examination in morning prayer or stopping to pause on a Sunday morning in church. With the relatively sudden loss of all of that one needed to find more mechanisms for meaning making. And I think the therapist couch, the therapist office filled that gap very fast. And I’ve just got back from Vienna where I did a little lecture on the emergence of psychoanalysis and Freud and Jung and Adler and Viktor Frankl and so on. And one of the things that struck me as I was researching and doing some research for that lecture was simply how mutually incompatible their accounts of the mind and the subconscious were. They couldn’t all be right and they couldn’t all be nearly right. And that persists to this day. Psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis has not evolved in the way that it ought to have evolved had it in fact been a science. We don’t see five or six mutually incompatible skills of chemistry or of biology. That’s a sign that something’s very badly wrong given that it’s … now of course, things are a little bit different in theoretical physics, but the question there is just that we’re not yet able to develop technology that can keep up with our theoretical speculation. So I think the bet that psychology and as it were, the entire therapeutic industry made, namely that we can approach psychological suffering and psychological problems as if it were a scientific problem to be solved, I think is now seems wildly implausible. And the basic mistake was the mistake of scientism. Freud’s basic mistake. Jung’s … to some extent Jung’s basic mistake, but all of those early thinkers simply assumed that the mind was a very, very complex machine. And that had we but money enough and time and enough time with patients on the therapist’s couch, we’d be able to come up with … there’d be a sort of Newtonian or a Darwinian moment in the exploration of the psyche in the mind, which simply hasn’t happened

Brendan Corr
In that sort of space, Professor, coming back to the heart of your vocation, philosophy of religion, in a world that is so therapeutically oriented, how do we guard religion itself becoming a means of therapy?

Dr. James Orr
Well, it’s a very good question, and I think we can’t … It’s very tempting in the Christian world, but I suspect this is true of the other great religions too, to assume that we can wind the clock back and we can, as it were, get back to the time in this case before the therapeutic revolution. And I don’t think that’s possible. I mean, people sometimes talk about being the world being … the world is re-paganizing and I’m with C.S. Lewis on this. I don’t think that the world can re-paganize or at least I think it’d be a wonderful thing if it could re-paganized is that wouldn’t … it was the pagan world that was converted to Christianity, but I think that .. Lewis, I think, says that the post-Christian world can no more become the pagan world than the heart could become a maiden. So I think to some extent, to answer your question, we live in the wake of the therapeutic revolution as we live in the wake of so many others, the revolutions that modernity has thrown up. And those revolutions are so tectonic that we are in a very real way … at an unprecedented moment, I think comfortably comparable to the reformation. That is to say, I think we’re living through … in these brief decades, we’re living through something epochal, an epochal transition on many, many fronts. I think the digital revolution alone would support that comparison, but of course, it’s catalysed so many others as well. And there have been many that preceded the digital revolution in the post-war period. So I think it’s very … one of the things one can start to do in the … certainly in the Christian context is to be very wary of pathologizing ordinary human experiences and very wary in particular of pathologizing moral faults. And the language of sin is a language that makes people come out in a rash these days. We get once almost allergic to talking about sin and moral failure, but I think if we don’t, then we’re not going to bring about the kind of psychological repair that comes from confessing one’s sin and finding the absolution that Christ offers there. Whether in the confessional, whether it’s through a more Protestant medium. And I think maybe as Christians, we’ve failed to stress the liberating power of Christ, of the way in which we can be freed and liberated from sin to live a richer life. And perhaps we’ve stressed too much, the kind of finger wagging side of things and not stressed enough what lies on the other side, which is something that the therapist can’t provide. People will be in therapy for years, and they will spend a fortune on it, and all they’re going to get is a diagnosis and medication. And I’ve said this before, that they’ll be told they’ve got a syndrome when in fact, they’re suffering from some kind of sin. And most often it’s narcissism. If you are spending an hour, an hour in somebody’s office every week, talking about yourself and maybe not talking about yourself with a moral clarity and moral honesty, which I think is often the case, then you’re never going to find the sort of liberating or redemptive power that Christianity can offer.

Brendan Corr
Yes, in that space, I’m reflecting on the psychologizing aspect that we’ve discussed and the preoccupation that that brings with self. And the liberating truth that you’re describing of there fundamental reality is not us, nor our state of mind, nor our mental health. The fundamental reality is a God that calls us into a relationship. And what’s on the other side of that re-conceptualization of we are creatures called into communion with the divine.

Dr. James Orr
That’s absolutely right. And even if one doesn’t believe that, even if one’s an agnostic or an atheist and just simply won’t accept that, you can still point to all of the evidence that there is supporting that you’ve … There’s an incredibly strong correlation between psychological, flourishing and regard for others over oneself. This has been tested over and over and over. Those who serve others, those who are thinking about others, those who are just too busy thinking about others to think about themselves are on almost every indicator happier people. And the advantage of Christianity, I think, is that it crystallises that in all of its teaching, in all of its institutional structures, at least at its best. That is its orientation, a kind of … an orientation away from the self at a focus on this strange paradox that he who’s willing to give up his life will find it.

Brendan Corr
That was a beautiful response. The last question I wanted to ask you, for a professor that spent so many years looking at the philosophy of religion in general, for you, why Christianity?

Dr. James Orr
Well, we could have a whole other podcast on that, but I’ll just try to keep it brief and say that my journey of faith, my journey to Christ was not a philosophical one. It was an experience. It was a series of experiences, occurring over the first six weeks of 2003, from January 1st onwards. And it was a series of immediate, extremely precise answers to sceptical prayers, uttered by an unbeliever. And although I insisted early on in that period that it was not rational for me to accept that there was anything to these answered prayers. Over time, I felt that I was becoming less and less rational, denying that cumulatively there really was a pattern emerging here. So my conversion occurred, I suppose, there was no Damascene moment necessarily, but it was midway between … I think it was probably mid-February 2003. And then, that probably would’ve disappeared quite quickly had I not been welcomed into an extraordinary church in London, Holy Trinity Brompton, which is the home of the Alpha course. And it was being run by the great Sandy Miller at the time and soon to be taken over by Nicky Gumbel. And I think the warmth of the welcome of that church family was so intense and so real for me, that I just couldn’t deny that this was … that I’d stumbled on the truth, that I’d stumbled on something … on a deep truth about the human condition and about the reality of the divine. And I suppose you could then say my journey ever since in philosophy has been … well, a way of making sense of that to those who have not had that experience. And it’s a way of providing some rational, respectable scaffolding to that quite sort of private experiential journey. And that in turn, has opened up lots of other doors over time, but that’s a brief answer to the question.

Brendan Corr
It’s a beautiful answer and it’s such a wonderful thing for you to find the propositions and all presuppositions that have evolved in philosophy, that right at the very heart of things, there’s a real relationship that you found and couldn’t be happy to hear that story, Professor. I want to thank you for your time. You’ve been very generous in sharing so much of your insight and your reflections. Really appreciate you giving us the time and may God bless you.

Dr. James Orr
Thank you for having me.