Part 2. Further analysis and discussion. So, Gellin, in your book, you briefly mention your studies of religion, a good example being

in the 60s of how you were keen on making what you call spiritual progress.

In the religious sense, do you think you have made spiritual progress throughout your life?

I would want to separate the notion of spiritual progress from the word religious, but having

said that, Tom Nagel wrote a really good paper called

secular philosophy and the religious temperament and he tried to, and he found a definition

of religious, which I think is very good. What he says is, the fundamental question you're asking yourself, if you're spiritually concerned,

is how can one bring one's individual life, no, how can one bring into one's individual

life a recognition of one's relation to the universe as a whole, whatever that relation is?

And actually, this, I've since found this thought in many people, almost exactly the same.

So have I made spiritual progress by that definition?

I don't know. I think something's got a little bit better.

But it's not religious in any sense that involves any dogmatic belief.

So in your book you mentioned that you had a non-religious upbringing. What do you think are the, and you said in the

introduction that you're an atheist, what are do you think the strongest arguments for non-belief?

Well, I'm an atheist. What I'd say is I may not be an atheist with respect to Spinoza's God,

but as you probably know, Spinoza's God is just nature, just the universe.

And so I believe that exists.

So you might be a, could you clash yourself as a pantheist or something like this? Yes, there's some complicated distinct between pantheism and pan-entheism, which I'm not clear about, so I'm not sure.

But I am, yes, I'm an atheist with respect to what you could call the ooh god, where ooh stands for omnipotent, omniscient and omnipotent.

And the reason for that is the problem of evil.

So that's a very familiar reason for not only not believing in such a god,

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