Foreign.

Here we are again, the Secular Foxhole podcast today.

Our guest is Andrew Bernstein, philosopher and writer and author.

And we're here to discuss his latest non fiction work,

a series of essays.

The title essay is Aristotle versus Religion, which is also on the COVID of his wonderful

book.

How are you, Andrew?

I'm good, Blair and Martin, and thanks for having me back on.

It's always great to be in the foxhole with you guys.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for that.

I did a screenshot of when you're showing your book there, also the COVID art.

And that was interesting how you picked the one and which one you liked and got responses

from potential buyers and readers.

So I like that.

Could you, could you tell a little about that

before Blair is continue with your question?

Yeah.

Cover image.

Yeah, sure.

I'll put it, put it back up here.

Yeah, please.

Yeah, I went to.

This is.

There's this design company guys called 100

covers.

Yeah.

And I like them a lot.

They,

they did a good job on volume one of the Tony Just saga.

And I went back to them and told them what I wanted and they sent me three possibilities.

There's three, three possible covers, all of which I like.

I thought they were all really good and so I put them up on Facebook and asked,

you know, my, my got some, I got some market feedback from my, you know, my friends,

potential customers and they, they basically agreed with me that all three covers were,

were really good.

I think the majority of them liked what of the other coffers, but, but I, but I preferred

this one.

So I went with, I went with my own,

my own taste and a number, a number of my friends, like, you know, like this one the

best also.

But they were, they were all really good and

I, I think I could, could not have gone wrong with any of them.

But, but I like the eyes,

you know, Aristotle's eye.

Yeah.

He was the great empirical philosopher, in contrast to Plato, who was,

you know, was,

who was concerned more with the ideal world transcended to this one.

Aristotle was the great biologist, he was the great empiricist.

And so his eyes looking out at the world, observing whatever errors Aristotle made.

Nevertheless, he was observing.

He was trying to tie principles to observable

facts.

And so the eyes of Aristotle observing the

world, that's what I really loved about this code.

Plus, I like the gold.

I like the gold and the black, you know, know, background.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a great, it's a great cover with a great.

For a great book.

Thank you.

Great book.

Speaking for myself, I I love the Greeks.

I, I,

I just constantly,

I pay homage to them for all the, the gifts they gave the west and, well, to the world,

not just the west,

whoever decides to pick them up.

But I'd say maybe you agree that philosophy is the Greek's greatest gift to the West.

What do you think?

Well, philosophy certainly originates in Greece.

Thales is the first great philosopher we know of.

And one of the essays in here is Heroes and Villains in Western Philosophy.

And I go through the whole history of philosophy showing it as an attempt to

establish an objective method of gaining knowledge.

And Thales is the first hero because he's not giving mythical explanations of natural

phenomena.

He's trying to give empirical based claims,

even though his specific claims were wrong, like all things are water, but he's trying to

give observation based claims.

So I think he was the first great hero of

philosophy.

So philosophy is a great gift to the human race.

From the Greeks.

Was it the greatest?

Perhaps.

They did so many great things.

I, I mean, their contributions to literature and the arts and, and,

you know, and to science and mathematics.

But rational philosophy or, you know,

philosophy.

Well, there's faith based, that's the whole question.

Is, is are these faith based beliefs really philosophy?

I mean, they attempt to answer the questions of philosophy, but by faith rather than

reason.

So if we just say philosophy is a rational attempt to answer these fundamental questions

that it definitely comes from the Greeks.

And then.

Yeah, yeah, I think we have to agree with you, Blair.

Although all these other contributions, like in the arts, are also magnificent.

Yeah,

true philosophy,

I think, is the most fundamental.

Now you again, you, you just mentioned the contribution of observable facts.

I know that science, the scientific method and science in general today is under attack

probably because it's racist.

Didn't you know that?

No, tell me.

Scientific method is racist.

Oh,

yo, grammar is racist.

This is the critical race theorists and critical whiteness studies people like Robin

d' Angelo and their real.

I'm sorry, it's very irrational.

I just, I brought it in as a, as a joke.

That's quite all right.

That's quite, it's true though.

I mean, it's, they're, they're out there.

Oh yeah.

And they control the universities,

unfortunately.

So, I mean.

But you were talking about the scientific method.

Yes,

Yeah, I want to.

Is there a certain.

Maybe you know more about this than I do.

But, but what is a scientific method?

It's observable facts.

You, you test something and then you observe

the results and then you go,

is it cause and effect?

What, what what? Is it all part of the same thing or do you

know more than I do probably?

Well, I, I'm not an expert on that.

I'm not a scientist.

I'm just a writer and a philosopher.

But, but I could take an educated guess,

you know at this that a scientific method needs to be oriented in, in observational

facts that you know and, and, and, and, and, and and you know I think it's very similar to

philosophy in that both,

both of them are rational fields meaning mythology or faith based beliefs as, as a

starting point of cognition in the, in and, and I think a scientific method and rational

philosophy or just, just philosophy begins you know, you know where religion starts with the

revealed text.

It starts the Jew, the Jews and the Christians with different parts of the Bible,

the Muslims with the Quran and you know, and so on.

Religion starts with a revealed text that was held to be used know, written by men.

Divinely inspired.

Science and philosophy don't start with a text.

They, I'm looking out the window here in my, my apartment.

They start with observation of nature.

Nature is the text.

And look,

yes, I'm looking at the grass.

I mean it's August while we're doing this,

right.

So it's high summer.

Sure.

And I'm looking at the grass and the bushes and the trees and everything's in

bloom, everything's green.

And there's the downside.

There's all kinds of insects flying around,

you know, yo and stuff.

But, but you know the scientific method starts

that's, I think this is critical.

You start with the observation of facts.

You don't bring some preconceived notion to it.

God created it or, or, or whatever.

You don't bring any preconceived notions to

it.

You just wouldn't.

You know what was Newton's famous line who was, who was a devout Christian said I make no

hypotheses.

I think he, you know, he said when, when, when I'm dealing with scientific questions, I start

with the facts.

I, you know, I, I start with observation.

And then you need a theory that explains you know, some principle that, that, that explains

the facts.

And I think what little I know about the history of science,

you know the development of an experimental method is, is a renaissance development, right

with people like Francis Bacon,

you know, Francis Bacon, Galileo, people like that where you, you, you form a hypothesis,

you know,

a set of rational principles that explains the observed facts.

And then you test,

you, you know, you test hypothesis in the, in the laboratory.

And I think and, and the results are observable So I think what a scientific method

does is it kind of shuttles back and forth from observed facts to hypothesis which is

tested, you know, and then, and then the, the hypothesis is validated or,

or, or undermined by the observed facts of, you know, of, of the experiment.

So it's like a shuttling back and forth between observation, observation to theory and

then, and then back to, back to the facts, to the facts that are the result of the

experiment.

So I think it's always linked to observation, you know, to the facts of observation and

always attempt to develop a rational theory rather than, you know, faith based or

mythological one that, that, that explains,

that explains the facts.

So I think that's, that's a scientific method

at least as I, that's great.

No, I appreciate that.

I clearly understood that and I appreciate

that.

Thank you.

Let me, let me, let me give you an example.

I always, I always use in class because I think one of the, I think Aristotle's greatest

achievements.

Now he made many errors we know in physics,

for example,

understandable in the fourth century B.C.

but he made a lot of tremendous strides in the field of biology.

That's really where he shines as a scientist is in the field of biology.

But you know, a great philosopher, nobody ever doubted what a great philosopher was.

And I think Aristotle's greatest achievement is, is that he,

and I'm not an Aristotle scholar, you know, I don't read ancient Greek or anything.

I just read Aristotle in English translations.

So I'm not a scholar.

You know, my good friend Professor Carrion Biondi is an Aristotle scholar.

She, you know, she's fluent in ancient Greek and you know, and everything and she knows

much more on Aristotle than I do.

But just as a generalist in the field of

philosophy,

I think Aristotle's greatest contribution to humanity and I think I would argue the

greatest contribution anybody ever made to humanity in history is that he more than

anybody taught the human race how to think.

Because one,

he formulated the laws of logic, you know, he, you know, he developed the, the, you

formulated the rules of proper reasoning, identified the main errors or the fallacies,

you know, of reasoning.

And two,

he linked that, he married it to his observation based method to his empirical,

his empirical method.

And so that knowledge is gained for Aristotle

by logical,

non contradictory thinking about observed facts.

And that not, not by faith, not by mythology, not by going by our feelings,

but knowledge is gained by logical, non contradictory thinking about observed facts.

This is a tremendous advance.

And one example of this is,

I mean Aristotle was well aware of Greek mythology.

You remember in the myths palace, Athena springs fully developed from Zeus's head.

Now I hate it when that happens.

That hurts.

But I mean,

so yeah, I have.

Several holes in my head.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm glad my daughter didn't come into the world that way, you know.

But according to the mythology, that's the way Athena came into, you know, she was, she was

born.

Now notice what follows from that.

Zeus,

who was running around with many different females,

goddesses, women, you know, human females,

had God knows how many children.

You know, they call him the father of the human race.

In his case it was literal.

He had all of these children,

but in all the other cases he had to share them with their mother.

But Athena was his.

Athena doesn't have a mother, she was his,

100% his.

And he doted on her.

And so it makes sense that if a child has one parent but a loving one,

that that child will love that parent and their bond will be very close.

And so according to the mythology,

Athena was the only one Zeus trusted to hold, you know, the most powerful weapon in the

universe, Zeus's thunderbolt.

If it wasn't in his hands, it was in Athena's

hands because he could trust her.

Now all of that's very logical.

There's nothing contradictory about that.

You have a child has one parent, but a loving

one.

So their bond is very, is very close.

She's loyal to her father, he could trust her.

So she's, you know, it's all very logical,

there's no contradictions there.

But the starting point is anything but observational fact.

The starting point is bizarre mythology.

You know, somebody developed out of, come right out of our father's head.

Nairistal was one, a father and two, a biologist.

And he knows that's not the way, you know, offspring come into the world.

And so that's mythology.

Even though, even though what follows from the

starting point is very logical, it's not good enough just to be, that's rationalistic, you

know, to be very logical but based on a non empirical starting point.

That's not knowledge.

You know,

knowledge is gained by logical, non contradictory thinking about observed facts,

not about myths or faith based beliefs or emotions.

That's Aristotle's tremendous contribution to the human race.

I think.

It'S all been forgotten sadly.

I think also.

But I wanna, I'm gonna jump around a little bit because I, I just,

I've been, while I'm listening to you, I've been formulating the next question because I

have several nieces and nephews and they're all.

They didn't come from the right.

Out of their father's head, I'm guessing.

Well, mom probably had to bring them into the world.

Right?

That's right.

That's right.

Go through.

Go through the pain, the pains of childbirth.

Yes.

Women are tough, man.

I don't know how they go through that, but.

But they do.

Yeah. Yeah, they.

They certainly do.

And that's certainly a great contribution to the human race.

It's a superpower.

You know, the leftists don't want it.

The leftist feminists don't want to hear this, but this is really a superpower that.

That women have.

A woman's body has the power to create human

life.

I mean, they need a little help from their friends, obviously.

Yes.

To initiate the process.

But once.

Once. Once she conceives her body, I mean, just creates human life.

That is a superpower.

And I'm not saying women shouldn't get an education to have careers, too, if they want.

But.

But nevertheless, it is a. It is a superpower,

the capacity to create human life.

It's amazing.

I will agree.

I will agree.

But what I'm afraid of for them, and I've seen this come to fruition with some of

them, not all of them to their credit,

but some of them,

from preschool to graduate school, they've been plastered.

They've been bombarded with environmentalism,

climate change,

catastrophe,

doom.

The world will end in 12 years.

You know, the Ice Age is coming, by Ben Thunberg.

Yeah, the ice age is coming by 1970.

There'll be an Oreo shortage by 1983.

You know, things.

An oreo shortage, Is that what you said?

No, an oil shorty.

I said, God, we don't want to run out of Oreos.

You don't want to run out of Oreos, that's for sure.

Now, that would be a trash.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now contrast this to.

Again, I want to bring it back to Aristotle.

Is it Eudaimonia? Flourishing?

Oh, I do, yeah.

Daimonia.

Thank you.

Yeah. Contrast, you know, this doom and gloom with Daimonia to human flourishing, human

progress, human.

So that's.

Again, that's.

That there's this war of ideas right in that area.

Yeah,

yeah.

Now, you know, it's.

It's when I was in graduate school, this goes

way back.

This.

This is 50, 50 years ago, 1970s,

roughly.

But eudaimonia back then, you know, Aristotle

was famous for advocating Eudaimonia,

and that was generally translated into English as happiness back then.

Right. Yeah, I thought.

Yeah, yeah.

But Aristotle scholarship has come, you know, a long way since then.

I mean Aristotle.

Here we can.

What little I know about the history of this Aristotle scholarship really took off in the

19th century.

I think.

You know, the mod, the modern analysis of Aristotle and amongst the German philosophers

you got to give you, you know, I'm always haranguing against German philosophy, against

Kant, Hagel and Marx,

the, the unholy triumvirate as I call them.

And you know, and you know, and for good

reason but, but you know, people like Werner Jaeger and there, and there were German

Aristotle scholars who really kicked off the modern, you know, the realisation of how

important Aristotle is.

And, and English scholar, English speaking scholars in, you know, both sides of the pond

in Great Britain and in the United States picked it up in the, in the 20th century.

So Aristotle scholarship has become, you know, huge in the, in the modern academy, in

philosophy departments, which is, which is one of the real good signs.

And Aristotle scholars today assure us that eudaimonia really means flourishing.

Like you said Blair, flourishing life,

which really makes sense because it integrates with Aristotle's biology, you know, and what a

great biologist he was.

And you know, the flourishing life.

I mean the, the, the imagery that comes to my

mind is, you know, you see,

you see the forest looks like on a beautiful day in June,

70 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's not too hot, it's not cold.

There's a breeze blowing the evergreens and all the trees, other trees in bloom and the

grass is green and there's a lake down below and the sun is shining and the birds, birds

are chirping the trees and of course the insects are buzzing around,

you know,

all those annoying,

annoying living creatures.

But flourishing like you see the flourishing.

And of course Aristotle's talking about human life, flourishing as a human being, which

means life.

And as he puts it, I think it's in the

Niconachean ethics, life in accordance with a rational principle.

This is where, this is where the famous claim made that Aristotle, Aristotle says man is the

rational being.

That you know, that to achieve a fully human life means life in accordance with a, with a

rational principle.

Which I think you know, close enough that you

know, man is the rational animal and as a rational.

So we achieve today in the modern world.

I, I think Aristotle couldn't have conceived of this in the 4th century BC but I think you

logically argued that this is in congruent with Aristotle.

Because human flourishing, you could prove logically I think requires,

you know, that we grow crops and we cure Diseases, which Aristotle certainly would

approve of as a biologist.

But you build homes and cities, you know,

where culture flourishes in the, in the cities and industry.

This is all part of human flourishing.

You know, we, we can't flourish as cave

dwellers.

Here's where human flourishing comes into

conflict with environmentalism because,

you know, they want a pristine nature.

You know, nature has intrinsic value in and of itself, right,

Regardless of any utilitarian value for man.

But human flourishing requires that we, we remake nature.

We cut down trees to, you know, for farms and go to grow crops and build towns and cities

and, and everything.

So,

so the, the environmentalists are certainly opposed to human flourishing as there's,

there's, there's one conflict, but another point I wanted to make an answer to your

question, Blair,

regards knowledge.

That knowledge consists of logical,

non contradictory thinking about observed facts.

So you mentioned climate change and various other environmentalist scares in the 1970s

that you're, you're right, you mentioned it.

There was the Ice Age, the Great Ice Age,

because,

you know, the Earth had cooled roughly from 1940 to 1975.

It was in a cooling period.

And the scientists were talking and all the

news magazines were talking about the coming Ice Age and everything because they blame man,

because they blame human beings for it.

But,

but here's where Aristotle's method is so important is are human beings impacting the

climate?

Let's eliminate the hysteria and look at the data.

And I've written an essay,

a booklet on this issue,

the Truth About Climate Change.

And I would just point out there's a lot of facts that need to be adduced here.

But the one that gets overlooked by all the alarmists and even, and very often even by the

sceptics of agw, you know, anthropogenic global warming or man made woman,

is to point out the undeniable fact of a natural.

There's a natural climate process.

We're in the modern war period.

Now.

Prior to that was what they called the Little Ice Age,

you know, when it was colder,

1300-1800, roughly.

Prior to that was the mediaeval warm period, 900 A.D. to 1300 A.D. roughly when, when the

Vikings were able to settle Greenland, grow crops there.

He even thought to name it Greenland because they could grow crops.

It was warmer.

Prior to that was the, was the, was what they

call the Dark Age cold period.

And prior to that was the Roman one period.

And prior to that was an unnamed cold period.

You know, I Forget the date, 600 B.C. to 200 B.C. something like that.

I named it I took it upon myself to dub it the Biblical Cold period.

And I said in the booklet, if scientists don't like the reference to religion, let them give

it a name.

I was outraged by the period not having a

name.

But guys, prior to that was the Minoan Warm Period, you know, roughly 1500 BC to a

thousand BC, which was significantly warmer by several degrees warmer than it is today.

All the proxy data indicates that many years, many centuries before industrialization, which

is a late 18th century British development.

So when you plug the Maya one period into this ongoing natural climate cycle, never mind

going back millions and millions and million years, the ice ages and the end of ice ages,

long before man's earliest ancestors even appear in the fossil record.

When you plug in, you know, Wein Rand taught us to see the big picture,

integrate, go as wide as far as you can.

When you plug the modern Warm period into this

vast climate history, the earth has 4.6 billion years of climate history, constant

climate cycling.

The modern Warm Period.

The modern Warm period is just a relatively

minor blip, you know, it's a relatively minor warming, which is good anyway.

When you do that, you see the big picture.

You use Aristotle's method and you reason logically about all the facts, not just some

of the facts.

You realise this is hysteria, guys,

this, this is unwanted hysteria.

Not to mention the fact that, well, no, here's

another fact I'll throw in.

Warming is beneficial.

You know, the extends, the growing seasons,

we, we grow more crops.

It's the colder periods that are harmful, always have been.

The growing seasons are shorter, it's harder to grow crops.

Northern Europe suffered horribly during the Little Ice Age.

The famine in Finland wiped out like a third of the population.

1690s,

lean years in Scotland, the 1690s, thousands of people died of starvation.

In the colder periods, it's harder to grow crops.

The further north you go, the harder it gets.

So the warm periods are beneficial, not to

mention natural.

So Aristotle's method here is critical.

So advocate human flourishing as opposed to

doom and gloom like you said,

but also base it in reason.

Examine the data.

Is there a looming ice age?

Is warming man made? Is warming harmful to life?

The Aristotle's method is ideal for that.

And I think the IPCC,

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their shills in the leftist media,

they don't employ it, they're engaged in hysteria, they don't employ reason on this.

So it's your thumbs down, thumbs down for those guys.

Very good, sir, very good.

Now I want to jump around some of the essays

in your book, if we could.

But we'll keep with the philosophic theme, if you don't mind.

Well, that is my field.

Yes.

By the way, let me point something out here.

Going back.

Can I go back to climate change for one

minute?

Yeah, go for it.

I'm not a scientist, but I have buddies with scientists and I'm a bookworm.

And fortunately, scientists write books.

I've read a tonne of books on climate

scientists and geologists, you know, and, and you know, and so on.

Astrophysicists who study the, the sun, climate connection.

And I think two things I could add to this once I have all the data from the scientists

because I, you know, as a philosopher, I don't know the data, but I read the scientists their

books.

I get the data.

But as a philosopher, one thing I could add is

one, what I learned from my rant.

See the big picture.

Don't just focus on the last 150 years, guys.

The IPC focuses on the last 150 years, you know, of, of a warming trend.

See the big picture.

Plug it into the ongoing natural process of

climate change.

It goes on for millions of years.

And then two,

my knowledge of logic.

I've taught logic for four, 40 years.

I know how to present evidence in support of a conclusion.

What counts as evidence, what doesn't.

And I spoke with the friends of mine who were

scientists and objectivists and they, they always tell me scientists too often don't know

enough logic.

They don't.

That's part of philosophy.

It's Aristotle's contribution, by the way.

Logic teaches us how to establish the truth of a conclusion.

What counts as evidence, what doesn't count as evidence?

How much evidence is necessary? How do we avoid fallacies, you know, you know,

in the presenting of evidence.

I know logic better than they do.

And that's why I think they're often guilty of this half truth fallacy.

They'll show us the facts from the last 150 years,

but it's only part of the truth.

They're overlooking thousands and thousands

and thousands, even millions of years of, of evidence here.

So as a philosopher, I think one leftist woman said to noise well, why should I listen to

what a philosopher has to say about climate change?

This is a fair enough question.

And I said, well, I know as much about climate change as Greta Thunberg does,

you know,

or Al Gore,

but, but the real answer is, you know, I did the research and what the scientists have to

say.

And as a philosopher, I have something to

contribute that they don't have.

Yeah. Now my.

Let me throw this out.

Then. The last.

They use the last 150 years because they want to attack the industrial revolution,

I think,

and blame man again, that's their Blame progress and blame man.

So.

But you have a great chapter in here called Great Islamic Thinkers versus Islam.

You want to touch on that for a minute in keeping with the philosophic theme.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's.

There's.

I think that's an important essay that I'm

very proud of because it's about the Golden Age of Islam, you know, roughly 800 A.D.

to 1200 A.D.

and a lot of people in the west,

you know,

in the modern world,

when they discuss the Golden Age of Islam,

either they also often take one of two alternatives.

They either poo poo or they minimise it.

Oriana Falachi, who I admired in many ways because she spoke out,

you know, against the dangers of Islam.

In fact, I think she was.

Well, she was going to be incarcerated in Italy, wasn't she?

For, for speaking out against.

Against.

I know, I know the name, but I haven't seen her name lately, you know.

Well, she died of, she died of cancer, I think.

She died.

That's right.

In the United States.

She couldn't go back to her native Italy

because they were going to imprison her for,

for what she said, not for any crime she committed, but, but because her criticism of

Islam.

And, you know, I had a lot of respect for her courage in that way.

But one of her books, I don't remember the name of it offhand, it was shortly after 9 11,

and it was written in a white heat,

written by a righteously angry woman.

She said, oh, the Golden Age visa wasn't really that great.

And, and I think there's a lot of, you know, people in, in the west who, you know,

they'll minim.

They'll try to minimise it or the other

alternative is they'll say, see,

Islam is compatible with advanced culture, you know, you know, that the olden age was real

and it's compatible with, you know, with high culture.

And the truth is both of those interpretations are false.

The golden eggs of Islam was real,

that's for sure.

But it was Islam that destroyed it.

And, and, and I think the history shows that very clearly.

So the Muslim, Muslim warriors conquered the Middle east, you know, after,

during and after Muhammad's lifetime.

When he died.

Muhammad was what, 570 to 632 AD, 7th century AD that, you know, they conquered parts of the

Byzantine Empire.

Which was Greek and Christian had kept alive a lot of the Greek writings.

And Muslim scholars were fascinated by what the Greeks had said.

And this, this was Islam is fundamentalist Islam or just Islam All Islam is false.

Fundamentalist Islam didn't strangle the culture yet at that time like it, like it does

today or for the last 800 years.

And these scholars were free to read the Greeks especially Aristotle who they

enormously admired.

11 Caliph in Baghdad, you know Aristotle appeared to him in a dream and you know one of

them, one of the, you know one of them established a house of wisdom in Baghdad where

they trained intellectuals and you know and,

and you know in, in high intellectual studies and there was a,

a very active translation movement that translated the Greeks and especially Aristotle

from Greek into Arabic.

And for, for centuries the, the,

the Islamic world whether Arab or Persian and whether in the Middle east or in Spain because

remember the Arab warriors conquered Spain in the, in 711 A.D. and and held it for

centuries.

But but in both Spain and in the Middle east both Arab and Persian in present day Iran

Persian scholars,

all of whom were Muslim at least nominally not, not all of them were were practising

Islam but some of some of them were based on their study of Al Farabi I think it was was

called the second teacher,

Aristotle being the first.

Avicenna was a great Aristotle scholar as well as a great physician.

Averroes was a great Aristotle scholar.

Thomas Aquinas considered him the greatest of

the Aristotle scholars as well as a great physician.

And Arab intellectuals,

Arab and Persian but Muslim intellectuals made great great advances in mathematics, in

astronomy, in, in medicine.

Some magnet much magnificent poetry, you know written by Muslim writers back to like I said,

they were all nominal Muslim at least some of them practising some, some not.

But for 400 years roughly from 800 to 1200 A.D.

the Middle east and Spain the, the, the Arab Islamic world led the world in intellectual

development.

And that's that is true what happened?

Islam, I mean Islam was was always there and there was always some tension between these

great intellectuals and you know, and the, the faith based mentality.

But Al Ghazali who's considered was the 11th century,

who's considered today and for centuries in the past second in importance in the history

of Islam, second only to Muhammad Al Ghazali harangued against what was his famous work the

incoherence of the philosophers, the incoherence of philosophy argued that

philosophy could not explain the world,

that it led to these inevitable contradictions, that only faith in the Quran,

faith Based beliefs in the, in the Quran.

You have to give up philosophy and give up

reason,

you know, and just have, have faith in the,

you know, fundamental fundamentalism, faith in the literal truth of the Quran.

Al Ghazali was enormously influential.

Other theologians as well.

They, you know, they, they built on the Islamic foundation, foundation of the, of, of

the culture.

And their influence unfortunately was tremendous.

And you start to see the caliphs and the political authority started to burn the books

of the philosophers, including of Averroes.

And here's the one great historical point.

Thomas aquinas in the 13th century,

1225-1274, his dates.

Averroes book survives enough that Thomas Aquinas was able to,

you know, to procure copies.

He considered Averroes the greatest

commentator on Aristotle and Cat.

You know,

Catholic Spaniards had fought against the Muslims for centuries,

you know, and they, they eventually they reconquered Spain, right?

La reconquista.

And by 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella, two

Catholic fanatics marry and they want an entirely Catholic Spain.

So they expel all Muslims, some of whose families had lived there for like 700 years.

They expelled the Muslim and let's kick out, let's kick out the Jews while we're at it.

Expel the Jews also and get special dispensation from the Pope to establish, you

know, an inquisition in Spain, the infamous Spanish Inquisition, to make sure nobody was

secretly practising Islam or Judaism.

Catholic scholars, I mean, Catholic warriors retake Spain over, over the centuries, 12th,

13th century, they, the Islamic world, Andalusia, Islamic Spain was vastly advanced.

You know, the, the, remember in Lawrence of Arabia, Alex,

as, as Faisal says, I. I dream was.

I dream about the lighted streets of Cordoba,

you know, or something.

They had street lights, they had street lights

In Cordova, like 1200, you know, they had sewers and universities and libraries.

It was much more advanced.

And the Catholic scholars got access to all the works of the Greeks which had been lost in

the West.

And what's his name, Archbishop Raymond the first of Toledo initiated a second great

translation movement, whether the Catholic, Jewish or Muslim scholars to translate the

great works of the Greeks, including Aristotle, especially Aristotle, from Arabic

into Latin,

the language of European scholars.

And then you start to see Aristotle being

studied again and other Greeks being studied again.

University of Paris, for example, became a hotbed with Albertus Magnus.

Thomas Aquinas a hotbed of Aristotelians.

The Church opposed it,

but some people got burned at stake.

But this time Aristotle,

Aristotle survived, the Greek approach survived.

And the Church wasn't able to squash it.

So the Golden Age of Islam was real.

In summary, it was destroyed by Islam,

but it helped revive Aristotle and Greek scholarship in the west in what became known

as the Mediaeval Renaissance in the, the 13th century with people like Albertus Magnus and

Thomas Aquinas and the revival of Aristotelianism, which leads directly into the

Italian Renaissance.

So the, the golden age of Islam had a positive impact in Europe as it in fact brought Europe

back its, its Greek legacy back to the west.

Even though in the Arab Islamic world For the

last 800 years it's been squashed.

And, and the Arab Islamic world's been in a dark age for the hundred years because of

Islam.

So yeah, the golden age was real, but it's not compatible with Islam.

Islam was its death.

Sure, sure, all right, sir, I know.

And by the way, some of, some of those great thinkers from the golden age of Islam

were openly sceptical of religion.

Al Razi, one of the great medical men during that period,

who's a, an Arab I believe, but also, what's his name, Omar Khayyam, who's,

who's mostly known in the west for his poetry.

Oma Kam was, was a, was a great mathematician, a brilliant mathematician and was openly

sceptical of, I don't know how he didn't get,

you know, beheaded or you have his books burned because he was, he was openly sceptical

of religious.

So some of those,

some of those Muslim thinkers, you know, who, who were so were great geniuses were nominally

Muslim but they weren't religious.

Some of them were openly critical of religion.

Okay, very good, very good.

Well, let's jump forward to another philosophical essay and in your literature

section you, you have a chapter on objectivism versus Kantianism in the Fountainhead.

Now do you want to jump, do you want to do a little contrast there real quick?

Yeah,

the first handedness, second handedness, I guess or.

Yeah,

you know, now we're talking about my, you know, my, my favourite all time favourite

book,

fiction, non fiction novel, drama, whatever.

I mean I think Atlas Shrugs the, is

objectively by the, the principles of literature, the greatest novel ever written.

But the Fountain is my per, my Fountainhead's my personal favourite because you know, in

the, put it simply because Howard Rock dominates the action and he's seen in Atlas

Shrugged,

John Galt dominates the action, but you don't see him for the first 2/3 of the novel, which

is a tour de force of plot development by Ayn Rand.

Yes, exactly, yes.

You know, you have a character Dominates the story.

You don't even see him for two thirds of the story.

That's extraordinary.

That's right.

I, again, the Fountainhead was what introduced

me to Ms. Rand.

So I, I do have a special place in my heart

for it too.

Yes.

Amen.

I'm a hero worshipper.

And you know,

Atlas Shrugged is sui generis.

You know, I think we'll leave that aside for.

Because the plot structure is so extraordinary.

There's nothing like it in, in world literature that I know.

But the Fountainhead is more conventional in the sense that the hero's right there from

page one.

And you still, he's, he's, he's, he's observable, you know, he's,

you know, the facts are right there.

Observable for the readers.

Howard Rook dominates the story from,

from start to finish.

And so as a hero worshipper, I think Howard Rourke in that regard, in, in these more

conventional stories where you, you, you, you, where the hero is observationally apparent

right from the, right from the start.

Howard Rock to me is the greatest hero in world literature.

And I think I'll write an essay on that one day.

But the Kantianism, that's a good question, right?

It's like, what do you, what do you mean?

You know, Dr. Bernstein,

where's Kantianism in the, in the Fountainhead?

Well,

you know, as I, as, as I pointed out, you know, in the modern world and now, and

nowadays there's an awful lot of second handers.

I mean, Peter Keating,

the, the conformist.

There's a lot of people who recognise Peter.

You know, I taught, I taught the Fountainhead, you know, to my business ethics, you know,

classes at Marymount College for many years.

It was a woman's school and it was, it was weekend college.

So adults and, you know, so the, so one of the, one of the women comes running into class

one day, you know, I don't, she's maybe in her 30s, you know,

working in corporate America, swinging a copy of the fountain and she sings out, my boss is

Peter Keating.

You know,

there's a lot of, that's a very, he's a very recognisable type of, you know, conformist and

a kiss up.

So why are there so many people in the modern

world?

I raised the question,

was it, was it always this way in, you know, in the,

in the history, in the history of the Republic, going back to the American

Revolution, there were a lot of Americans, not all, but a lot of Americans who said no to the

British crown.

They didn't, they didn't kiss up to authority.

They didn't, they didn't just go along with

what the king or parliament said.

You know, a lot of them were pioneers, were

rugged individualists, went out, you know, went out into the wilderness in a virgin

wilderness trying to build a farm,

having to fight off hostile, hostile Indian tribes at, at times and so on.

You know, they seem to be a lot more individualistic types who willing to go by

their own judgement and didn't want a powerful government.

Right.

There's a lot of opposition ratifying the US

Constitution because they said we just fought a war to fight off a powerful government.

We don't want to establish a powerful federal government now where we have to listen to

whatever the government says.

You know, they wanted to go by, you know, live by their own judgement.

So I, I don't know if there was as many, you know, second handers in the, in the American,

you know, back then, in America back then as you would say.

Well if so what happened?

Well, I think you know, Kantian,

Hegelian, Marxist philosophy is,

is what happened.

And I, you know, I traced that in the story

that Kant's philosophy is basically,

you know, truth is, is, is decided by human beings.

I mean I, you know, it's not based on our ideas don't have to conform to outer facts.

Right? That, that truth is, is basically the

collective subjective.

It's the, it's the will of the, you know, vox populi, vox day, right?

The will, the voice of the people is, is the voice of God that you know.

And if you trace it through German philosophy,

Hegel, you know, inherits that from Kant and, and argues that well,

truth varies from society to society.

Truth is what the people say,

but it varies from era to era and from society to society and so on.

And Marx adds that even within society there's warring subgroups which he defines in economic

terms the rich versus the poor, the owning class versus the working class.

And truth is a group oriented concept.

You know, the working class has a different

truth than the owning class does.

You know,

in Hegel, you know, the German people have a different truth than the non German, you know,

people, you know, and, and so on.

So truth is, truth is social.

It's, it's established,

it's established by the, by the group.

And so then what's an individual to do in the face of this?

Well, you, there's three possibilities, right? You could conform,

you can rebel or you can seek to rule.

You conform against the, you can conform to

the group, you could rebel against the group or you can seek to rule the group.

And in the Fountainhead, Ayn Rand shows all three of these brilliantly.

Peter Keating,

you know, he just, he,

the power of the group.

He wants adulation, he wants admiration, he wants respect, he wants people to look up to

it.

He doesn't want to be a great architect, he

wants people to think he's a great architect.

You know, the power of the group is dominant in his life.

He'll kiss up, you know, to, to gain,

to gain the adulation,

you know, from the group that, that, that he creates.

He's like a drug addict.

Lois Cook, on the other hand,

you know, you know, the non conform, she poo, she's spicy,

she spends her life defying and she's really a colourful character.

I like Lois Cook, you know, foam dome in the mouth.

Yo, she's writing word salad,

you know, telling the, telling the,

the, the establishment to kiss off, that you, yo, you admire, you know, Dostoyevsky or

Tolstoy or Shakespeare or all these brilliant writers.

Well, I'm gonna spit in their face and I'm just gonna throw you word salad.

You know, like James Joyce in real life does in the Infinity Wake, where he just throws

letters together.

You know,

they're not words in any, any language.

You know, she's spitting in the face of the literary establishment and of all, and of all

of literary history that admires these great, these great writers who use words to,

brilliantly to, you know, convey meaning and everything.

And she tells Keating, we're going to build on the Bowery, she said,

which is New York City.

Skid row.

It's where all the alcoholics end up, you know, the drunken bums.

And we're going to build.

She had, she's made money.

She could build a house in the most exclusive neighbourhoods of New York City, but she

chooses skid row, you know, the Bowery.

And she says, Keating, I want the ugliest

house.

And we're going to build the ugliest house and no electricity.

Who the hell is Thomas Edison anyway? You know, she says,

you know, Keating goes the ugliest house.

You know, Keating can't, can't quite get himself to do that because he wants

admiration.

But Lois Cook wants to, in fact, he wants to spit.

She says, in so many words.

They all strive for beauty and for elegance

and for good looks.

Let's spit in all their faces.

Let's be gods, let's be ugly.

And she wants to, you know, stick it to the bourgeoisie.

She wants to, she, you know, the conformist finds out what other People want or think in

order to go along with them.

The non conformist finds out what other people want or think in order to spit in their face.

But both of their lives are dominated by the group.

You know,

want to obey one, to rebel.

Unlike Howard Rourke,

who doesn't care what the group thinks.

He's looking at nature.

He's not looking at society for truth or what people believe.

He's looking at nature for facts.

He's on an Aristotelian method.

And then there's Tui.

Well, if the group has all his power,

you know, then the idea will be get control of the group,

rule the group,

gain power over the group.

And there's Tui, the power lustre.

And he says to Keating, remember this confession speech at the end?

He says, peter, he says,

he says, I'm more, I'm, I'm less independent than you or I'm more dependent, you know, than

you are.

Because in ruling the group I have.

What, what do I need to do?

Well, to get your obedience, I have to, you know,

tell.

I have to, you know, tell you.

Oh, Peter, you're such a great architect.

I gotta, you know,

roll over, Peter, I'll scratch your belly, you know.

I have to.

You'll have to.

I have to keep you satisfied.

To get control of your girlfriend Katie

Halsey.

I have to constantly give her altruistic pep

talks.

I have to constantly, you know, cajole the

group and tell, you know, build them up in their own minds and tell them, organise, let

us organise.

Let us organise.

I have to, I have to, you know,

I have to build them up.

I have to give them strokes.

I have to constantly,

you know,

trying.

I have to keep them satisfied in order to gain

their obedience.

I'm more of a kiss up to the group than you are.

And he's right.

And, and iron Ran Ayn Rand shows the, the only three logical possibilities once the Kantian,

Hegelian,

Marxist philosophy is, is dominant.

If that's, if you hold that philosophy, that,

that the group is all powerful, the group is God.

On her society has gone on earth.

Society sets the term.

And most people believe that.

I ask my students,

where do moral laws come from? Few of them say God.

Few of them are religious.

Most of them are secular.

They'll say from society,

you know, they'll never say.

Nobody says from nature, you know, and, and the requirements of human nature and human

life.

They, most of them say from the state, from society.

And that's what the modern world, that Kantian, Hegelian,

Marxist philosophy is very Prevalent.

And if you hold that philosophy, then there's only three possibilities for what an

individual can.

Can do.

Confronted by the power of the people, the power of society.

You can obey, you can rebel, or you can seek to rule.

And iron man.

There's Kant.

There's the Kantianism in the found.

Howard Rook.

Howard Rook.

Howard Rook is the Aristotelian Objectivism.

Just push aside that whole construct.

Society doesn't have that kind of power.

Truth comes from nature.

Looking at 1, 1 exam, 1 example of many.

He walks out of the.

That meeting with the dean and he's thinking

about the.

You know, he's 21.

He's thinking about the principal behind the dean.

He knows it's important.

He's got to figure it out.

And then he gets outside and he sees the sunlight striking the stones,

you know,

outside the.

On the outside of the building.

And he forgets about the dean and society and

all the irrationality of many members of society.

And he just thinks of how beautiful the sunlight is on the stone and what he could

build with that.

9 Man showing us the mind of an Aristotelian, the mind of an Objectivist.

He's not primarily concerned with society.

He knows he's got to figure this out because

he's got to live with people.

But his fundamental orientation is not towards society, it's toward nature.

That's the source of truth, the.

The observations of nature.

And that's the way Rock's mind works.

There's the.

He's.

He's the.

That's.

That's the source of his firsthand in this.

It's his mind and nature,

not his mind.

Looking at society and trying to, you know, and granting to society this kind of power and

figure.

Well, what do I do when the society has this

kind of power?

There's the,

There's. What I think makes that essay fascinating is the Kantianism versus the

Aristotelian Objectivism in the conflict of the story.

Very good, sir.

Very good.

I do have to wrap this up here very shortly, but I want to go back to one more.

I want to make a comment.

Speaking for myself,

for me, and it's been this way for a long time.

I would call Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx.

I've called them the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,

if you will.

I see them in black hoods,

skeletal hands on the reins of this,

you know,

horrible beast, writing,

you know, writing roughshod over civilization and that.

Yeah. I'm going to go back to our.

One of your earlier essays, and then I'll have

to wrap it up, sadly.

But,

well, we can always have a.

Follow up show if you guys want.

Yes, we have to do it.

Several more I want to talk about.

Believe me, there's several more.

But for this episode I want to go back to Religion versus Morality.

And for me, I'll say this again, speaking for myself,

I've come to the conclusion that religion is death worship.

Now, I'm sorry if that offends people, but that's the way it is.

Can you extrapolate on that essay for us, Addie?

And then, then we'll have to wrap it up.

Religion versus Morality.

Yeah, that was a talk I gave for many years

when I was working for the Ayn Rand Institute.

And yeah, and then I, you know, I, I converted

it into an essay for the objective standard and then,

and, and then for this book.

And what it shows is that every, every

religion opposes every major moral principle that, that human life,

human life depends on.

You look at the, the rational principles that Ayn Rand established.

That human life is the standard, is the, is the standard of moral value for one,

two,

that egoism.

Every, every living being, and including every

human being must seek to fulfil its, fulfil itself,

to seek flourishing life in, you know, in, in Aristotelian terms, you know, seek to gain the

values that its life depends.

Every individual organism,

especially, you know, human beings who must do it deliciously, you know, by choice, must,

must seek to gain the values that their life depends on.

And then that rationality is man's fundamental means of survival.

These are the three key moral principles that human life depends on.

And religion opposes every one of them.

So if followed religiously,

you know, it makes human life impossible.

So take them one at a time.

Man's life has the standard of value.

No,

God's will is the standard of value.

Whatever God says goes.

Now this is most, you know, how this opposes human life is most clear in Islam.

Islam is the most, you know, Christianity.

We can, we'll leave Judaism aside, you know,

because it's a tiny little religion and, and a great deal of its influence has been on, on

the development of Christianity, which Christianity is, you know, gigantically

important.

The Christianity has been,

you know, like I told Dinesh d' Souza when we debated this topic years ago,

Christianity has been emasculated.

You know, it's been defanged.

I think it was right.

Yes, yeah, it was defanged by the rational principles of the alignment.

But real Christianity, which you see in the Middle Ages and the, and the, and the Dark

Ages,

and you know, Christianity has been defect.

Islam is not defect.

Islam is un unreconstituted religion.

It makes the claim the clearest example of how

religion is anti life.

But a thousand years ago, Christianity would

have been a very good example of, of this too.

Maybe not as virulent as Islam, but you know, that's damning it with faint praise.

So God, God very often didn't care about, you know, innocent human, innocent human life.

You know, I mean it's more dangerous today because of the nuclear weapons, frankly.

Yeah.

And that's why I know applauded President Trump and taking out the, hopefully

took out the Iranian nuclear facilities or set it back by, by years of development because

that regime can't be trusted, you know, in any way, shape or form.

But anyhow,

look at some of the biblical stories that the religionists,

you know, salute Moses.

Moses descends from Sinai with the ten

Commandments.

He's been gone for a while.

So the Hebrews, God's chosen people,

a worshipping, a golden molten calf.

And if I remember the story correctly, Moses and the children of Levi slay like 3000 of

God's own people for, for flouting a commandment that they haven't yet received.

Right.

The first,

the first commandment states that, you know, I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other

gods before me.

They haven't even received it yet,

but they're over.

They're killed.

Thousands of them are killed, you know, for violating a commandment they haven't received,

you know, and so on.

God requires Abraham.

Why is Abraham's submission to murder his son Isaac?

Now God backs off on this and he spares Isaac, but only after Abraham shows he'll do it.

Abraham will do it.

He will.

God's will comes first before the life of his

son.

Once, once Abraham is willing to do it, God

relents.

But he did require Abraham's willingness to

kill his son.

So we can go on and on with these kinds of biblical stories.

God's will is the basis of morality, not the requirements of human life.

So there's one major opposition, egoism.

Well, I mean that's easy to show that religion

opposes that.

You know,

it's over and over again we're enjoying to God comes first and other people come second.

You're not, you're not supposed to be concerned with yourself.

You sacrifice you for one for God,

you know,

and two for other people.

And it's easier, it's easier for camel, you know, to pass through the eye of a needle and

for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Jesus says he doesn't, he doesn't distinguish how the rich man became rich.

The rich man might have been very hard work, very productive and earned as well.

Doesn't matter.

He's rich.

He's not going to enter the kingdom of God.

Right.

The last shall be first,

Jesus says.

So we're constantly enjoying to, to sacrifice

ourselves,

whether to serve God or, Or serve, but with Mother.

Mother Teresa said very famously,

and I don't think she coined this term, I think the Christians said it before,

but she said, you know, you have to give till it hurts.

He said, give till it hurts.

You know, how about, you know, we give to other human beings because we want to give to

them, because it makes us joyous, it makes us happy to give to my child, to give to my wife

or my husband or my closest friends or even to strangers who I assume are good people because

I don't have any knowledge that they aren't.

You know, it's joyous to, to give to good people.

No,

that's not,

that's not what Mother Teresa said.

You got to give till it hurts.

Well,

that speaks for itself.

You know, what's the old legal expression?

The thing speaks for itself.

You don't have to say anything else about that

except kiss off.

I'm not giving till it hurts.

I'm giving the people because it makes me happy.

Like to teach my students.

It makes me happy to do it.

Doesn't hurt.

Right,

but the last point, of course, is reason as man's instrument of survival, which Iron man

shows brilliantly.

And that was shrugged.

No, religion enjoins us to have go by faith, not by reason,

and has burnt many rational people at the stake for rationally criticising the faith.

So all three major moral principles that human life the.

Depends on or opposed by religion.

All right, so this.

My battery just went dead on my laptop or it's

fading very, very fast.

So,

yeah, I have to, I have to end this.

Martin, do you want to wrap up real quick?

Yes, I will, I will do that.

And we have to have a backup plan, but for

next time and, and we'll talk more about your work with your book.

And also you could end with saying where could they.

The listener could find it.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you, Martin.

This is the book Amazon.

Maybe you guys could put, put the Amazon link

to the Amazon page.

Absolutely, yeah.

You can certainly find it on, on Amazon.

Title Aristotle vs Religion and other Essays.

And as for me, you know, my, my website is

andrewbernstein.net.

you could andrewbernstein.net you can find my

books on on Amazon if you're interested in where is it my hard boiled detective series

Tony the Tony just series his Red Beat Village again you can find that on Amazon and The

website is tonyjust.net again.

All right.

All right.

So I'm not you can find me on the, you know, Facebook and Twitter and everything.

So I'm not hard to find.

Great.

Very good.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we've had the the

great pleasure of handy of having Andrew Bernstein on is our guest today.

Andy, as always, thanks for manning the.

Foxhole with us,

Martin and Blair.

It's always great to be in the foxhole with

you guys.

So thanks again for having me on.

I look forward to being on with you guys again.

Yes, thanks.

All right.

Talk soon.

Bye for now.

All right, bye.

Bye guys.

Sam, sa.