Non-religious people still need to think about meaning and selfhood

Across multiple surveys, about 30 percent of Americans say they have no religious beliefs, and for the past several years, a majority of people say they “seldom or never” attend religious services.

People are free to think whatever they want to about philosophy and metaphysics, of course, but are they actually doing so? I have my doubts. Whether you agree with religions or not, they at least get people thinking something about minds, selfhood, and ethics.

Daoism, Buddhism and some other Eastern religions figured out centuries ago that you don’t need to believe in gods in order to think deeply about these topics. But here in the West, we never developed non-theistic epistemic traditions to any real degree, and so many non-believers here are philosophically impoverished, and don’t have much to say about minds and ethics.

Luckily for us, however, my guest on this episode, Eric Oliver, has been doing a lot of his thinking in this regard, and he’s written a great new book about it called How to Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.

You might recall Eric from his first appearance on Theory of Change and the fact that we also distribute his podcast on the Flux network called Knowing: With Eric Oliver. He’s a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of six different books. This one is based on a very popular course he teaches there called The Intelligible Self that’s based on his extensive research in philosophy, psychology, religion, and cognitive science.

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This episode is audio only. The full transcript is available. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

09:18 — Erich Fromm, love, and the terror of agency

17:44 — Transcendence for non-religious people?

26:04 — Abstract reasoning made humans much more intellectually powerful, but also more vulnerable to delusion