The Hello everybody I'm talking today to Dr. Jack Symes, he's a public

philosopher and researcher at Durham University. He's also known as a podcaster, the Pan-psychast philosophy

podcast, which is one of the UK's most popular higher education programs.

He's also the editor of the talking about philosophy book series.

So he's written and edited a couple of books on the philosophy of consciousness and

then books that describe the concept of God

and also the morality of the God that's being, what will you say?

That doesn't mean that Dr. Symes is a religious believer by the way and the discussion that we had that you'll watch, what would you say? What did we delve into? Conceptualizations of consciousness.

Also, we discussed, what do we have in the popular culture now with regards to the arguments between the

atheists and the believers let's say? Well we have an argument about perhaps whether or not God exists.

There's an argument underneath that,

which is, well, what exactly do you mean?

Who is this God that you're discussing?

How is he characterized?

And is that characterization reasonable on the

theist or the atheist side. That's what we delved into you know before you can

have an argument about belief you have to specify what it is that you're actually talking about.

Now one of the things we alluded to let's say in the conversation was the fact that

the God that's criticized by the atheist types, the materialist reductionist atheist types,

is somewhat of a straw man and a parody god, and that that's not helpful

because if we want to get to the bottom of things we have to make

sure that we're actually arguing about the right thing let's say rather than to

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