Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vott. I am the content director and the host of this show.

And I'm here with Bishop Robert Barron from Los Angeles this time, not Santa Barbara, welcome Bishop.

Yeah, hi Brandon. I'm down here. We have a Bishop's meeting this morning. So I came in last night and this is my room here at the Cathedral.

And so I'll be doing the meeting and then head right back up because you know what's starting tomorrow.

Confirmation season season begins. So I've got two confirmation Saturday and then one on Sunday. So we're we're getting going.

Well, big update here. The event that so many people have been waiting for finally happened. Namely, you got together with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson for a long conversation about an hour and 45 minutes.

Now in next week's podcast episode, we're going to break down that conversation and discuss the content of it. But maybe give us a light teaser. How do you feel like it went from your perspective?

Always a great joy. We did a Skype thing. You know, we were together. But you know, the great thing with this technology, like we're doing right now is you feel like you're just in the same room with somebody.

And he was in a very, you know, I think a kind of gentle frame of mind. And we never met before. And we I think we just hit it off pretty well.

And you know, I'm quite acquainted with his writings. And so I know a lot of his themes. And I thought it was a fascinating conversation. As you say, it was long. It was. See, it was right around lunchtime on my calendar. I think in his case, he was in Toronto. So three hours ahead of me.

So it was like maybe four in the afternoon or something. But we had a good conversation. I enjoyed it a lot.

All right. So again, stay tuned for next week. We're going to play clips from the episode. We'll break it down. I'm not sure exactly when it's supposed to release. So maybe by the time this podcast is a ring. It's already gone out there. But we'll break it down next week.

Today, we're going to be talking about a viral article from the New York Times. It's been making lots of waves on the internet, both positive and negative. It was written by a man named Peter Atten. I think that's how you pronounce his last name.

He's a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University. And he wrote this piece in the New York Times titled a God problem.

And the subtitle said perfect, all powerful, all knowing. The idea of the deity that most Westerners accept is actually not coherent. And thank goodness that in the year 2019, it's finally being revealed to us that God is in coherent.

Bishop, first of all, I want to walk through different pieces of this article with you. The very beginning, he says, let me say something first though.

I think you were insinuating quite correctly that there's something breathtakingly arrogant about a claim like that. So a professor in 2019 suddenly discovers that the central idea of Western culture, which has been thought through by some of the greatest minds in the last 2000 years.

Oh, it's in coherent. Oh, and I'm a professor at San Diego State and I figured this out. I mean, just on the surface of it, how irresponsible. And they say breathtakingly arrogant that claim is.

No one's thought about these things before. And as we'll see, every issue he raises, you know, if I were teaching philosophy of God 101 in the first couple of weeks, I might raise some of these issues.

And not to trivialize them, but to say, we have thought about these things, you know, in fact, some of the greatest spirits in the West have thought very deeply about these things.

And so just that kind of cavalier, let me toss off in a newspaper article, my conclusion that, oh, the idea of God is in coherent. I mean, just give me a break. I'll just say that at the outset.

Now to be fair, I'm not sure if Peter himself would have written this subtitle to the headline, maybe it was some New York Times person looking for click baby content.

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