The Nathan Jacobs Podcast

By Leo Gura - March 8, 2025

Nathan Jacobs is an academic philosopher with surprisingly excellent analysis of philosophy and theology. He’s an example of high quality philosophical perspective, non-ideological and epistemically careful. He’s an Orthodox Christian, which is an interesting twist on the usual. He has some deep knowledge of Eastern Christian theology as well Western analytic philosophy. His videos are worth watching. Lots of value there. I don’t agree with all his views, and you certainly shouldn’t expect a Christian to have a full understanding of God, but he does a solid job overall.

If you’re looking for a steelman of Christianity, Nathan Jacobs is it. This is about as high as Christianity gets before you realize you should abandon it entirely.

More good videos from Nathan:

A lot of commentary can be added here. I will just make some random comments to spur your further contemplation:

  • The more fundamental question is, What is real? What does it mean for anything to be “real”? These guys can’t ask, “But do you think these things are real?” because none of them have ever seriously questioned what “real” means. What does it mean for anything at all to be real? Of course, if they had an answer to that they would be Awake and none of this philosophy or debate would take place.
  • In a sense, anything that you can imagine is real, and the deeper you can imagine it the more real it is. That’s what it means to say that reality is a dream/Mind.
  • Consider the possibility that there can be various degrees or levels of realness. The ability to construct a conceptual category, distinction, or abstraction has a kind of reality to it, but conceptual reality is different from non-conceptual reality. Or, more accurately, Mind imagines that difference.
  • Realism vs nominalism is ultimately a false and misleading dichotomy. Neither one is strictly right. The way things actually are is that you are dreaming up reality, but this dream has layers to it which are beyond your control. Those aspects of the dream outside your control are what realism emphasizes, and those aspects of the dream which are within human control, like social reality, are what nominalism emphasizes.
  • As a good rule of thumb you can cut through the noise of this realism vs nominalism debate by thinking of reality as 50/50. Half of reality is structures which humans do not control, and half of it is social constructions. And these are blended so much that you cannot easily tell which is which. It is a mistake to operate in the world as though reality is mind-independent, but it is also a mistake to operate as though reality is entirely dependent on the human mind. 100% of reality is Mind, but not human mind and not social mind, a deeper Mind which humans don’t understand or control.
  • Jordan Peterson is gonna waffle between realism and nominalism because he’s confused. On the one hand he needs to say that religion is right, but he also wants to say that science is right, and he doesn’t know how exactly to reconcile those two things because he doesn’t understand that science is imaginary. That’s too radical of a notion for him to admit. On the other hand he cannot claim that literal religion is right because it sounds too unscientific and absurd. So he has to dance around in the middle while being evasive and vague. Because the structure of Consciousness is not clear in his own mind.
  • Is Jordan Peterson a realist or nominalist? You’re not going to get a meaningful answer to this question. The answer is, he’s confused and poking around in the dark. As are most Western philosophers.
  • Studying Kant is such a waste of time. Kant did not understand what God, reality, or morality were. Trying to understand Kant is like trying to understand a deeply confused man while thinking he’s saying something profound. Trying to figure out whether Kant was a realist or anti-realist is a waste of time. And the same goes for trying to apply such labels to other philosophers like Plato, etc. You’re just not going to make sense of reality this way. You’re going to get lost in academic distinctions.
  • Marxism is a profound corruption of Hegel. Marxists do not deserve to smell Hegel’s shit. No Marxist understands Hegel. To call Marxists Hegelians is absurd, even though Marxists like Zizek dare to identify themselves as such.
  • Mind is 100% constructing all of reality, but that doesn’t mean it’s your ego-mind, and that doesn’t mean that anything goes, that there are not consistent and crucial patterns and structures which can be changed at the ego’s whim. Gravity is imagined by Mind, but that does not mean it is within your human power to unimagine. You do unimagine it in your nightly dreams, but those dreams are beyond your control. You don’t control your transitions for dreaming to waking, and you don’t control your need for sleep, even though sleep is imaginary.
  • What all sides are missing is that imagination IS reality. When you imagine men and women deeply enough, that difference becomes real, serious, and important. But that difference is not some eternal structure, it can easily be unimagined by Mind at large, and it can even be unimagined to some extent by human social conventions and consensus. Man and women are complex figments of Consciousness with aspects which are within human ability to unimagine and other aspects which are not. There is no clear cut easy answer here. In order to create a man and woman universal Mind is doing so very heavy serious imagination which is beyond any human mind to understand or undo. Which is why a trans person is not able to just unimagine their sex. The reason that trans people want hormones and surgery is because unimagining sex is beyond the capability of a human mind, because sex is so deeply imagined by universal Mind on your behalf. It’s like trying to unimagine the moon. The moon is 100% imaginary, BUT, 1) imagination IS reality, and 2) a human ego-mind does not have enough consciousness to unimagine or reimagine the moon. Which is why humans build rockets. Rockets are imaginary, but they are necessary for humans to travel to the moon because the human mind is incapable of the levels of imagination necessary to just teleport to the moon. You could use your mind to teleport to the moon, but you’re not conscious enough to do so.
  • A better question you could ask here is, Are abstractions real? What is the reality of abstractions? This is not an easy thing to make sense of because you cannot think your way to the answer, you need massively higher consciousness to make sense of it. The answer is, if you can imagine an abstraction, it is real, as an abstraction right there in your mind. But you want to be conscious of the difference between an abstraction and a material form. “But which one is more real?” That’s not such an intelligent question, because they are each real in their own way, with their own trade-offs. The abstraction of a cat is real, but it is different than the cat sitting in your lap. Then again, even that difference itself you can recognize as imaginary. It is not that some abstraction of a cat exists somewhere in heaven, the abstraction of a cat exists right now in your experience if you just contemplate it. And when you stop contemplating it, it stops existing.
  • Is the archetype of a dragon real? Look! Everything you experience is real. If you pull up a dragon in your mind right now, it’s real! There it is! It’s a figment of consciousness. What does it mean? Well, whatever you imagine it means. It could just be a hollow mental picture, or it could be the cornerstone of some elaborate worldview with rich survival and even mystical significance. But it’s up to you to construct/imagine that worldview. If you so desire, a dragon could be your God. Is that real? Is that true? It that useful? It could be, if you want to imagine it deeply enough. But were there actual dragons who walked to Earth? Well, don’t forget that Earth and the history of the Earth are figments of Consciousness too. According to your imagination of the Earth, dragons probably are not part of the historical record, unless you wish to consider dinosaurs dragons. Were dinosaurs dragons or not? Well, that’s up to you! Don’t got asking God to tell you.
  • If you were seriously Awake you would deeply appreciate the reality of dragons, as figments of Consciousness. I live in a reality where I appreciate demons, because they are beautiful forms within Mind. To me, a demon is no less real or beautiful than a chair. I can look at AI images of demons and wonder at their beauty and reality. But to a typical materialist human this makes no sense because they have such a narrow comprehension of what reality is. But I understand that the image of a demon in my mind is as existentially significant as a demon gnawing on Richard Dawkins’ leg. Does Richard Dawkins comprehend this? No way.
  • Not only can I appreciate the reality of abstract human categories, I can appreciate the reality of higher level meta-abstractions which the human mind can barely imagine. I can blend various abstractions in my mind, invent entirely new orders of reality, and appreciate them. But only because I have a serious grasp of what Consciousness is and how it works, and only because I am not sitting around fruitlessly arguing over whether Kant was a realist or nominalist or whatever. To me, a demon has more importance than Kant. While humans sit around arguing over what Kant said, I sit around appreciating demons in pure abstraction.
  • But do dragons exist? Not for me on Earth. But dragons exist within Infinity/Mind. Everything exists within Infinity. That’s what Infinity is. If you can imagine it, it exists within Infinity. And if you can’t imagine it, it also exists within Infinity, you’re just too weak-minded to see it But what is this Infinity? Is Infinity more or less real than Earth? Infinity is maximum realness. You can’t get realer than Infinity. Infinity is so real that it’s too real to have a form. And yet, it’s not different than form. If you were conscious enough you could realize that there’s literally no difference between a cat, a dragon, and a demon. But good luck learning that from Kant or Jordan Peterson.
  • A more interesting line of attack against Dawkins would be ask him, But are atoms literally true? Or better yet, Is Richard Dawkins literally true? See, Dawkins wants to be a simple literalist with regards to science, but that must ultimately fail because science is not a literal description of the world. Dawkins will have to do mental gymnastics to treat science as literally true. That’s not going to fly under serious philosophical scrutiny. When we say, Richard Dawkins is real, what does that really mean? What is the reality of Richard Dawkins? That’s far less obvious than Richard Dawkins wants to believe.
  • JP wants to be a realist about God, but he doesn’t know how to pull it off. How do you get God to be real and yet square that with the Bible being full of human bullshit that contradicts modern science? Unfortunately JP is so attached to the human bullshit that he doesn’t know how to separate God from it. What really ought to be said about the Bible is this: “The Bible is full of human bullshit but God is real. Don’t get distracted by the human stuff and focus on realizing God directly for yourself, which has nothing to do with Jesus, mythology, Christianity, humanity, or even morality. Do not try to be a good person, or a Christian, just realize what God actually is through contemplative inquiry and deconstructing all human stories, fantasies, and biases.” That would be a crazy powerful teaching. But of course it requires surrendering the Christian identity — which is the whole game here. Ironically, to realize God you must stop being Christian. How profound, yet also entirely obvious, since for God to have any worth it cannot be limited to any human invention such a Christianity.

Click Here to see ALL of Leo's juicy insights.