Interview with Joshua Hall on Bahá'í Philosophy of Religion

Introduction

This past week I have been furiously rabbit-holing Baháʼí, a new-ish religion founded by Bahā’ullāh — the 19th Century revelator, Persian prophet, and Manifestation of God.

Baháʼí teaches the unity of religions, human equality, and a unique flavour of globalist politics. It also has a cool and possibly Hume-proof ^[1] miracle in its early history — a real-life analogue of Leslie’s firing squad — which the Baháʼís, a humble people, don’t bang on about as much as Christians or Muslims would if the same event were part of their histories.

To help me get a handle on Baháʼí philosophy and theology, I asked Joshua Hall — cradle Baháʼí, historian of philosophy, and polyglot — to walk me through the religion of Rainn Wilson and Penn Badgley.

Joshua did his MPhil in Islamic Studies and History at Oxford, and is now dissertating on Avicenna at UCLA. To my knowledge, he is the only living Baháʼí doing analytic philosophy of religion. (For a list of his translations, as well as his 84-page paper on the attributes of God in Baháʼí, see his website here.)

In our conversation, we discussed, among other topics, Baháʼí history, Baháʼí politics, classical theism, soteriology, animal ethics, the miracle of the Bab, the limits of religious pluralism, common objections to Baháʼí, and Joshua’s personal pitch for taking the faith seriously as Something-That-Might-Be-True. (Amos Wollen, from wollenblog.substack.com/p/bahai-philosophy-of-religion-w-joshua)

¹ I am assuming that the distinctly Humean argument — distinct, that is, from more generic gripings about the low prior probability of miracles, interventionist theism, etc. — makes indispensible reference to the laws of nature, and violations thereof; for reasons I opine in my discussion with Joshua, I don’t think Hume’s argument against belief in miracle testimony — as I read it — applies to the putative miracle (or miracle*) in question.

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Outline

Transcript

Transcript generated through Riverside and formatted by Claude Sonnet 4.5, prepared by Adib Masumian. Not checked for accuracy.

INTERVIEW: Amos Wollen with Joshua Hall
Topic: Bahá'í Philosophy

AMOS WOLLEN: Well hello everyone, I'm Amos, this is Joshua Hall more importantly. Joshua, can you say a little bit about yourself before we kick off and talk about Bahá'í philosophy?

JOSHUA HALL: Certainly, I'm currently a doctoral student at UCLA and I focus on Persian literature and Islamic thought and philosophy. I focus principally on the 11th century philosopher Avicenna. I am a member of the Bahá'í community and have been so. I was raised in a Bahá'í family and became committed when I was a teenager and that inspired my academic trajectory insofar as the Bahá'í scriptures are originally in Arabic and Persian. So I began to study those and became interested in the fields in which I specialize.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah. Well, I was just going to ask, I mean, in your community, what's the sort of ratio between cradle Bahá'ís and converts?

JOSHUA HALL: I'd say it really depends on the locale, of course. I would say in America, in Los Angeles, probably about even, I don't know the exact statistics. Many of Bahá'ís here come from a Persian or Iranian background, they grow up in the faith. But it's very common for there to be first generation converts to the faith.

AMOS WOLLEN: So most people watching won't have heard of Bahá'í, probably. Maybe some people have heard about it a bit, but don't know anything about its contents. If you were kind of presenting this sort of outline, maybe a bit of a history of Bahá'í to somebody who didn't know anything about it, but you know, as all of my viewers are sort of quite intelligent and knows a bit of philosophy, how would you go about it?

JOSHUA HALL: Any Bahá'í, since we have a relatively small religion of about 8 million adherents scattered throughout the world, is often called upon to give an encapsulized version of the faith. And it's very difficult, not because what the Bahá'í faith teaches is necessarily obscure and abstruse in itself, or its origins strange, but rather because it is hard to encapsulate any religion in, say, 30 seconds to one minute. And few other religions have, world religions have to do this.

I mean, imagine just having to explain Christianity to somebody who had never heard it before. And you had to explain that we believe that there is one God, one essence, three hypostases or persons, one of these hypostases joined to the human nature of the Galilean preacher who died on a cross as a fomenter of sedition in the Roman state, somehow that redeemed all of us from our original sin and he's coming back. I'd be like, what is this? So some things might seem strange about the Bahá'í faith, but I think that that's merely because they have not yet been encountered and that in its specifics, it is not so at all.

The Bahá'í faith is the religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh in the 19th century. He was born in 1817 and he was a member of the aristocracy in Iran at the time. Now the religious context of 19th century Iran was Islam, particularly one branch of Islam, Shi'i Islam. And it was a time of great messianic expectation since the Shi'i and other Muslims are expecting messianic figures or promised ones to appear, such as the Mahdi and the Qá'im. There's a similar fervor in the time in the Christian world. Many were expecting the imminent coming, second coming of Christ.

So Bahá'u'lláh is born in this context and he is from childhood distinguished not only by his erudition, by his preternatural wisdom and by his moral character, but also by his profound generosity. His father is a preeminent figure in the nobility, a governor of the northern provinces. Bahá'u'lláh focuses all of his time and attention on the alleviation of the suffering of the poor.

Eventually in his youth, he accepts the cause, he becomes a member of the cause of the Báb, and the Báb was really a firebrand prophet from the merchant class in Shiraz. We won't get into the specifics of this history, but basically he claimed to fulfill the expectations to be the promised Qá'im, the messianic figure in Shia Islam, but in a way that was contrary to the expectations of the people. Most of the people thought that Qá'im would return, that he would conquer the entirety of the world, that it would somehow be associated with the physical resurrection of the dead and the like.

The Báb said, no, no, no, I am the return of the Imam Mahdi. I am from his line of the Prophet Muhammad. But it's a spiritual return, it's a spiritual resurrection of the dead. And I have come to inaugurate a new age. I will abrogate the old Islamic law, will found a new religion. And he thought of himself in the role of a manifestation of God.

Bahá'u'lláh accepts his cause and he loses much as a result. And the adherents of this movement, which is the Bábí movement, are persecuted throughout Iran. Eventually the Báb is executed in 1850 and the Bábí community is extremely persecuted and eventually it starts to center around the person of Bahá'u'lláh. Bahá'u'lláh is exiled from Iran and goes on to inhabit the Ottoman Empire and he eventually is exiled, he and his community, in Acre, which is today in Israel. It was a penal colony at the time and he was sent to exile there by the edict of Sultan Abdulaziz.

In the meantime, he proclaimed himself to be the fulfillment of the Báb's promise that he whom God shall make manifest, one greater than himself, would appear and would be the next manifestation of God or prophetic figure which we have to await. And in the 40 years of Bahá'u'lláh's ministry, he established the principles of the Bahá'í faith.

AMOS WOLLEN: Could you tell us a bit about what some of those principles are? I assume they're something like... There's only one true religion, all other religions are completely false and half of humanity goes to hell. Is that roughly the idea?

JOSHUA HALL: That'd be very interesting and perhaps altogether regrettable for Bahá'u'lláh to have given his entirety of his life and sacrifice to promulgate. No, Bahá'u'lláh continued the teachings of the Báb and further universalized them. Bahá'u'lláh taught that, really the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh center around unity and that's often how Bahá'ís present it and I think it's the best way. Unity on different levels.

First there is one transcendent creator of all that exists in the world, so one God. The second, and this is very controversial, is the unity of religions. The teaching of the Bahá'í faith is that it is one stage and one form, the latest but not inherently superior in essence to other forms of one religion, but there's one transcendental faith. It appears in numerous guises over history, but the different forms of this one religion can have incidental and secondary attributes, but in essence the same.

So Bahá'ís believe that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and other traditions actually have a divine basis, have a basis in divine revelation, that their founders are manifestations of God, people who mirror and reflect the attributes of the deity and who have been found safe with a special task to educate and spiritually edify humanity and to enable us to found ever more advanced civilizations on a variety of levels.

Then there's the unity of humankind. Bahá'u'lláh taught the radical unity of all peoples and he thought his mission was the reconciliation of all the nations and kindreds of the earth, that there should be an elimination of hatred and prejudice of all kinds, racial, creedal, class, economic, et cetera. And that his message to the leaders of the world specifically was that they had to let go of their national prejudices and ambitions in order to establish an unabiding peace.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, so could you talk a little bit more about the political content of Bahá'í and how that manifests today, right? So I take it the theological authority that's living today in Bahá'í is the Universal House of Justice, which is just an epic name for a religious body. Could you say a bit about its sort of political orientation? What are its goals with politics and society?

JOSHUA HALL: Yes, I think that this is a very important topic and I think the Bahá'í position on this might be a little strange for some. Anybody who's encountering the Bahá'í faith would know and would quickly find that one of its principles is non-participation in politics. The Bahá'í administration, since it is an organized religion that has an administrative order that was set out by Bahá'u'lláh himself, this administration or administrative order does not meddle in the politics of any one country in which it resides and does not take any partisan stance whatsoever. It's always firm on its principles, but it will never come out for the liberals [by] saying "you're gay" [meaning: by taking their position on LGBTQ issues] or for the Democrats in America.

And one of Bahá'u'lláh's teachings is obedience to the rulers wherever you are, to respect their authority as a manifestation of the divine sovereignty. At the same time, the vision of Bahá'u'lláh for the ordering of the world, the order of Bahá'u'lláh has material directly relevant to political questions. It simply transcends the partisan issue. What Bahá'u'lláh wanted to achieve is an inculcation of a new mentality, a new attitude in the entirety of humanity that would essentially preclude those passions and those appetites which lead to war and which would eventually become realized in the establishment of an enduring and universal peace, perpetual peace.

On a new basis, and that the civilization would have a spiritual basis. What the Bahá'í faith provides is a spiritual inspiration for this world order. And its administrative order is an image in the religious sphere of what in the secular sphere must be realized. And it's for this reason, Bahá'u'lláh wrote all the leaders, all the major leaders of the world, the Ottoman Sultan, the Iranian Shah, the Pope, the Queen Victoria, the Russian Tsar, etc. etc. And he laid out this plan for world peace.

What his vision entails is not the elimination of nation-states whatsoever, or even the complete elimination of all armaments. What it requires is a more federated order. One important figure in the Bahá'í history, Shoghi Effendi, since he was one of Bahá'u'lláh's successors and really laid out the, and really was able to guide the formation of the administrative order and delineate Bahá'í theology. He talks about the world order of Bahá'u'lláh in some length in many of his letters.

AMOS WOLLEN: That's great. We'll probably return to some of this later, but one question I had is, you know, a criticism that older religions tend to have of new religions is that their devotional practices and their scriptures are quite spiritually thin. To what extent do you think this is true of Bahá'í? Do you think there's real spiritual depth there, or do you think the criticism holds?

JOSHUA HALL: I could speak here personally, and I think that this is actually sociologically illuminating. I think that if you were to say, write out the Bahá'í Faith and the kind of specifics, first you have this very particular history. It grows out of Islam. It grows out of Shi'a Islam. It grows out of a particular school of thought in Shi'a Islam, but then takes on this universal dimension. So there's a particularity to the Bahá'í Faith that one has to grapple with and which actually gives it historic depth and authenticity.

I mean, it reflects a centuries long tradition of Islamic thought, Persian literature, all of which really yearned for the universal, for the rational, for the intensely mystical, but which always before the Bahá'í faith remained within the structures of one particular religion. And the Bahá'í faith takes all of that and just universalizes it to make a meta-narrative, a meta-religion, a meta-revelation, somehow trying to encompass and encapsulate, or at least to explain the entirety of man's spiritual experience.

So to me what gives it depth is that particularized history, and I can be a bit more specific here. You know, you could lay out just a fully rational religion, the perennial religion, something like that, and I think that you would have many doctrines that would be the same as the Bahá'í faith. What you wouldn't have is a whole library of writings in Arabic and Persian of the most stunning, often ornate quality. What you wouldn't have is reams of the most impassioned prayers and supplications. What you wouldn't have is an entire lifetime of Bahá'u'lláh's correspondence with his followers, or an entire lifetime of the correspondence of his son and successor, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, to his inquirers.

And these are not just writings that exist in some vacuum. These are writings that are occasioned by the live questions of Bahá'ís who are enduring persecution in the 19th century and beyond in the 20th century, who are trying to grapple with the implications of this earth-shattering new revelation. So all this enables the Bahá'í faith to be incredibly rich in its devotional practice. And the personal connection that Bahá'ís have to Bahá'u'lláh is no less than that which, say, a follower of Christ has with Jesus, no less than that which the devotee of any Buddhist school of thought has to the bodhisattva, et cetera, et cetera.

And Bahá'ís, I think something that's true for all Bahá'ís is that our connection to the faith is so imbued with a love for language itself, for the poetic faculty. And you can't appreciate the Bahá'í writings without having some capacity for aesthetic and poetic savour.

AMOS WOLLEN: Very good. There's, if I'm right, a short prayer that Bahá'ís say once a day. Is it at sundown?

JOSHUA HALL: Yeah, to be more specific, Bahá'í practice consists in daily obligatory prayers, which is not a very poetic translation for what in Persian and Arabic is called, Persian is called namaz and Arabic salat, same word that Muslims use. And we have three choices. There's actually a longer, a medium and a short. In addition, Bahá'ís have a meditative practice, a recitation of the divine name, Alláh-u-Abhá, every day.

We have our own calendar that was established by the Báb and affirmed by Bahá'u'lláh, which starts, which has its new year in the old Iranian holiday of Nauruz, which is the spring equinox, it's the start of the year. We have a 19-day month of fasting, which is just abstaining from food and drink during the daylight hours. And we have many munáját, or kind of devotional prayers, which we can say at any time.

What we don't have is an ecclesiastical order in the sense of a clergy, nor do we have ceremonials officiated by that clergy. We don't have sacraments as such. The devotional practice is more individual in these formal elements. Then devotions that are shared by a community are more just reciting these prayers and keeping together in shared spaces. There are a few fixed rituals in that sense. But the ones that we do have are rich and are in aesthetic and in devotional ways.

AMOS WOLLEN: Just to give listeners a taste, would you mind just reciting the short prayer, you know, the long prayer, maybe will be too long, but...

JOSHUA HALL: Yes, I could actually, I could give a sample of the long and the short. So the short is... You know, Bahá'u'lláh did not intend to make the laws onerous. So it's actually easier to perform, say, than the Islamic prayer, which is five times a day. So you can choose just the short one. Actually, I know it in Arabic, so I might be off a little bit on the English translation.

But it's: I testify, oh my God, that thou hast created me to know thee and to worship thee. I testify in this moment to my powerlessness and to thy might, to my weakness, to my poverty and to thy wealth. There is none other God but thee, the help in peril, the self-subsistent.

And the long obligatory prayer, which is more elaborate, which involves actually prostration and the like, I actually prefer it because it's so rich and the Arabic is quite striking. [Recites in Arabic]: O thou who art the God of all names and the creator of the heavens, I beseech thee by them who are the day-springs of thine invisible essence to make of my prayer a fire that will burn away the veils that have shut me out from thy beauty, and a light that will lead me into the ocean of thy presence.

AMOS WOLLEN: So speaking of God's invisible essence, we might turn to Bahá'í philosophy. What is the Bahá'í conception of God? In particular, what do you commit to philosophically about God if you're to sign up to the sort of bundle of propositions that Bahá'í infallibly confirms?

JOSHUA HALL: I would say there's nothing that's too surprising here, and I think that is as it should be. After all, Bahá'u'lláh did not come to advance what he conceived as a radically different religion from what had come before. What he came to advance is what he calls the eternal faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future. Religion, which is the same in its fundamental verities and its precepts, but which changes according to the needs of the age.

So that is why the external laws of the religion change, the practices in life, considering the stage of man's development. What Moses was able to teach to his people and Zoroaster to his people and Christ to Muhammad is not what Bahá'u'lláh was able to teach to his. I would say the Bahá'í faith, since we have so erudite and educated an audience, is very clearly within classical theism. And the God of the philosophers just is the God of Bahá'u'lláh. And I say that very clearly.

I would say the conception of the divinity that we have in the Bahá'í faith is super personal and its transcendence is everywhere affirmed and in no way is it ever disregarded or rejected. So I would say rather robust classical theism in terms of the idea that the deity is absolute, unconditioned, necessarily existent, immutable, eternal, immaterial, totally outside the contingent world in which we find ourselves.

At the same time, this deity, this unknowable essence, is the ground of all existence. That is to say, it is that which all other things, all finite beings, all contingent existence, always depend upon for their existence, and from which they receive their existence at every and all moments. In this sense, then, the deity, because it's the ultimate reality, and in a higher order, and so transcends any finite creature that we cannot encompass it with our mind. And at no time in Bahá'í thought is the essence of God able to become incarnate or inhabit the world.

Nonetheless, insofar as everything comes from God, everything reflects the attributes of God. Everything reflects the fact that it has received existence from God. In that sense, Bahá'í theology centres on the concept of participation and manifestation. Participation, they use the platonic term, but manifestation really the Bahá'í term. Everything manifests God in a certain degree and the higher orders of reality manifest or give evidence to him in an even greater fashion.

AMOS WOLLEN: And so what's the difference between the sense in which just every part of creation manifests God to some extent and the sense in which the manifestations such as Bahá'u'lláh manifest God? Is it just a difference in degree or is there a difference in kind?

JOSHUA HALL: It's a difference in kind, and it's the same difference in kind in which we would find every level in the hierarchy of being. But I think before we get into that idea of the manifestation of God, in fact, it might be too quick. So first, I've been kind of talking about the manifestation of God as those figures who found religions.

So we can think of them as prophets, although that's more Islamic language. And the Islamic language or biblical language. And that's language the Bahá'í faith, the Bahá'í scriptures sometimes use, which is generally transcended in favor of this idea of the Mazhar-i-Iláhí, the divine manifestation. In that sense, you know, it has some similarity with the Christian idea of the incarnation. Of course, it doesn't involve the actual descent of the divine essence into the human realm or the assumption of human nature in one person by the divine essence.

All the same, it does mean that when one encounters a manifestation of God, functionally, one has met God. And that's the Bahá'í idea. It also has similarities with the idea of the bodhisattva in Buddhism, the idea of a fully enlightened being who enters this world in order to achieve the enlightenment of all conscious beings. And it also has similarities with the idea of the avatar that Krishna speaks of in the Bhagavad Gita.

So the manifestation of God is the highest order of existence that we find in the creative realm. So they are human beings. But even as we are distinct from the animal by virtue of our rational faculty, the manifestations of God are distinct from us by having a human nature and a human soul, but having a special illumination from the divinity, which gives them an innate knowledge of the necessary relationships that bind all things.

And before we get to that point, perhaps you might want me to talk about how in Bahá'í theology, the structure of reality is viewed.

AMOS WOLLEN: I think that would be very helpful.

JOSHUA HALL: So I would say that, you know, I would say the really interesting thing is that if you want to, if you want to think like what basically is Bahá'í theology and Bahá'í metaphysics, it's neoplatonic, I think, essentially. And in that sense, Bahá'u'lláh and the Báb affirm the tradition of philosophy that we see originate in ancient Greece and which influences Christianity and Judaism and Islam in the philosophical and the mystical traditions, and which is further animated, right, and revivified by the teachings of the prophets, which I think is something that 20th century writers like Etienne Gilson actually show rather eloquently, that the Bahá'í faith really accepts this perennial tradition as that which is something that has a rational basis and which accounts for many features of reality.

But it doesn't simply borrow it. Bahá'u'lláh affirms four elements of this, but the Bahá'í teachings are not a mere pastiche. It is adapted dynamically and in a way that's a bit different than we see in the previous traditions.

So I would say one Neoplatonic kind of element is this idea of emanation and eternal creation, which were controversial theses in Islam and Christianity, but which Bahá'u'lláh and the Báb unequivocally affirm. So the divine essence is utterly transcendent and beyond the material order. So there's a puzzle. How do you get this realm of multiplicity, of materiality, of contingency from something which transcends these qualities whatsoever, especially if God is pure unity? How does absolute multiplicity come from absolute unity?

In the Bahá'í idea, it cannot, there has to be some mediating figure. And in Bahá'í theology, this mediating figure, this first emanate is a first emanation from God, which then is the source of the rest of reality, which emanates from it. And there are many names for this mediating figure. But really in all revelations has been discussed. So this is the Sophia, the wisdom of the Old Testament or the angel of the Lord. This is the logos of the gospel of John. This is the first intellect of the Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna. This is the most exalted word that the Sufi speak of. This is the nous, which is spoken of by Plotinus. It's the immediate emanation and splendor of the deity. It is the thought of God externalized in this first creation.

And this reality is sometimes called Mashíyyat-i-Awwalíyyih, or the primal will in the Bahá'í faith, will being synonymous here really with an intellectual being. And it really has within itself the blueprint and archetype for the natural world and the realities of all things. So nature is the externalized manifestation in the sense of this universal and all-pervading nous or intellect.

So then reality has three, is tripartite or triune. There is Láhút, the realm of God, the absolute, the unseen essence. There's Jabarút, the realm of command. The command is a Quranic term which also talks about this intermediary since the Quran says that God creates through his command, be and it is. So you have this intermediate realm and then you have Násút, the realm of creation.

And the realm of creation itself has different ontological levels. So the lowest would be pure matter and then you have the material creation, chemicals and rocks and the like. And then you have the vegetative, then the animal, and then the rational, which is the human. And then beyond that, you would have the level of the manifestation of God.

The manifestations of God give the clearest proof of the deity insofar as they manifest all perfections of God at once that are possible in the creative order. And we can think of them as having just an innate intellectual, spiritual illumination from the primal will or the logos, such that they have an innate grasp of those universal laws and necessary relationships that bind all things. As such, they are able to operate as divine educators of humanity on the individual and the civilizational levels.

AMOS WOLLEN: So let me make sure I have this right, because a lot of this is quite new to me. So you've got this three stage level of reality, top God himself, second level God's commands to be, the command by which he creates everything and orders things. And then third level, the stuff he creates. And then within that third level, there's like a hierarchy of being where some types of things have a higher mode of being than others, matter being the lowest, manifestations like Jesus or Bahá'u'lláh being the highest. Exactly.

JOSHUA HALL: Exactly. One thing that you might find is really interesting is that in some respects, the Bahá'í faith insists on absolute equality. All human beings are fundamentally equal, irrespective of contingent properties of creed and race and sex, etc. All the same, the religions are fundamentally equal. They are different according to in what ways they were adequate to the times and conditions of the time in which they were revealed.

All the same, Bahá'u'lláh is not a relativist. He doesn't think that everything just has the same value. I think Bahá'u'lláh is like others would think that if everything has the same value, it's really just another way of saying that nothing has any particular value at all.

One analogy that Bahá'u'lláh gives is that consider your own selves. The nails and your eyes are part of the same body, but you cut away the one while you preserve the other, even as your own life. So the idea that there isn't a hierarchy of value in the realm of creation, Bahá'u'lláh regards as immediately vacuous an idea.

Yes, a man, a chicken is worth more than a rock. A dog is worth more than a stock of broccoli. A man is definitely worth more than a horse. And a manifestation of God surpasses a mere man. Not to say that the manifestations of God would prefer themselves to us. They don't. In fact, they sacrifice their entire physical well-being in order for the realization of human happiness on a societal scale.

It does mean that Bahá'ís don't think of Bahá'u'lláh as a mere man. We don't think of Bahá'u'lláh as a mere prophet. We don't think that he was just somebody that God elected to give us a certain message, and he's just this spiritual courier. No, Bahá'u'lláh is the one, he is the image of God reflected to perfection. He is the closest thing to God that we can ever apprehend.

And that same statement would be true for all the manifestations of God, because we think of the manifestations of God as one in their spiritual station. So we think that Bahá'u'lláh and Christ, they're one in their spiritual station. In their human persons, they are distinct, but in relation to the Logos, they're one in the same.

AMOS WOLLEN: So Joshua, this is all well and good, but I've heard what I think is a pretty game-ending objection to Bahá'í, so I listened to a podcast with some evangelical Christians and they were saying the reason we can know Bahá'í is false is because it violates the law of non-contradiction, right? If you believe in the law of non-contradiction, but you believe that all of these contradictory religions are true or inspired, then boom, you have yourself a contradiction and you can't be a Bahá'í. What do you make of this kind of objection?

JOSHUA HALL: I said the evangelical Christian should not banter about the law of non-contradiction or it will be reflected back at him. I would have a very loving response. First off, this is what simply happens when you attend the first 15 minutes of the class in formal logic but don't stay for the rest of the semester.

First off, I think it's very difficult. I mean, these things are not so easy. A religion that says that God is one essence and three hypostases and all these three hypostases are distinct from each other but identical to the one essence and yet they're not identical to each other. Neither are they parts such that one is 33% God and the other is 33% God but all are fully deity and even then to claim that there still is no principle of non-contradiction, there's still no contradiction in this. Or perhaps there's a contradiction merely to our finite reason and like.

I mean, Christian theology is altogether rich and the seemingly blatant contradiction, which is at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity, nonetheless has very beautiful and cogent explanations by thinkers like Aquinas and St. Augustine. The Bahá'í perspective is that God is an ultimate unity and that's simply, and simply there's nothing to explain there. But nonetheless, I think that it illustrates that what seems to be a blatant contradiction really can be resolved when you look at something from a different perspective.

So what I mean, stay for the rest of the semester. You know, A, it's true, A cannot be B at the same time and in the same respect. But what about at a different time or at a different respect? So we think that every religion and the teachings of every religion are established by the manifestation of God in order to address, in order to be adequate to the understanding of the people at the time and the conditions in which they find themselves.

So some differences of religion are in terms of practice, in terms of law. So for example in the Mosaic law it's forbidden to mix cotton, linen and wool. Perhaps there's a reason for that. It's no longer applicable in the time of Christ. And that is why Paul insisted that the non-Jewish converts to Christianity do not have to obey those laws. And eventually this just became characteristic of all followers of Christ, that you don't have to worry about eating blood and the like. And eventually the whole system of sacrifice to the Catholic temple became abrogated. Why? Because the needs of the people changed.

What about theological understandings? I would say that we would say the direct teachings of the manifestation of God, of manifestations of God, do not differ across time, but they are advanced in radically different situations and contexts. What Jesus was able to say about God is simply different from what Zoroaster among the people of Iran and adjacent areas before 1000 BC, what he was able to say in that context is just radically different from what Moses was or Mohammed was or what Krishna was or anything. Every culture has its own concepts by which it works in its own language.

So we really see that there's no contradiction which cannot be explained in one of several ways. One is that the apparent differences in intention and in meaning are simply resolved when we understand the societal and historical circumstance in which the manifestation of God made such a teaching. So for example, the Old Testament might talk about God having affects and emotions, say wrath and the like. For us, this contradicts the God of the philosophers, right? But we can understand it on the order of analogy, that in order to make the idea of transcendent and fully unified God intelligible to people of those times, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible used human language. Bahá'u'lláh talks about the unseen, the unknowable essence. Moses speaks of Jehovah. There's not an intrinsic contradiction here.

Other is that some teachings that the true religions have are accretions that come over time. So for example, there are many doctrines in Islam which the Bahá'í faith simply rejects. We regard the Quran as the divine revelation, but that doesn't mean that we don't have an understanding of its, Bahá'ís of many of its teachings that differ from what Muslims have. And this is just, I'll be perfectly frank about this.

So for example, Muslims believe that Muhammad is the last prophet. In the sense of the last bearer of revelation to mankind, they think what is next to happen is the coming of these messianic figures, the physical resurrection of the dead, the coming of the liqá'u'lláh, or the meeting with God, that there will be some tangible beholding of the deity. Bahá'ís understand this differently. So it's not that Bahá'í teachings contradict those of Islam in our mind. The Quran is our Old Testament, but we do have a different understanding.

And the same thing is true of many Christian doctrines. There's no word of Christ, which we don't understand to be compatible with Bahá'u'lláh's teachings, essentially. That doesn't mean that Bahá'í understanding of the teachings of the gospel accords with that of the councils, Chalcedon and the like. For example, we do not think that God is three persons. We do not think that Jesus is an incarnation of God.

But we also find that our understanding is actually rather in accord theologically with some of the earliest theologians of the Church's origin, who took really the logos to be an external procession of the deity, to have a special relationship with the human person of Christ. So for example, if the Christian were to say that the idea of the manifestations of God is incoherent, because Jesus says he is the only one where you say that there are many, I would say no. Jesus, when he says, I'm the way, the line, the truth, the way and the life, nobody goes into the father, but by me, we affirm because he was speaking of his spiritual station as a logos. And this logos pervades all of nature and is also manifest in other human persons.

And this is established by the fact that he distinguishes this divine station from his human person. When he is called good, he says, why do you call me good? There's only one who is good, and that is God the Father in heaven. He diminishes himself there. So it's all about function and relationality and context.

A whole book could be written about this, and we could take all the teachings of all religions, and the Bahá'í could show in what way they can be reconciled, either as an external accretion, either as something that was advanced or spoken in a certain way by a manifestation of God in order to fit the time and place, or merely to be a superficial or verbal difference, which can be dissolved upon analysis, or as relating to some law or stipulation of practice, which was appropriate to a time, but which is abrogated or annulled in a later time. Probably went a little bit too long on that.

AMOS WOLLEN: No, no, that was really helpful. I mean, so just following up, most New Testament scholars are going to say that there's some discrepancy between what the gospels say Jesus said at a particular time and what Jesus actually said, and they'll disagree about the extent of that discrepancy. Is it open to Bahá'ís to just deny that a particular manifestation says something that's in the sort of earliest holy books recording what they say?

So is it open to Bahá'ís to just deny that something attributed to Jesus in the Gospels is actually something that Jesus said? Or to take another example to sort of put more meat on the bone, so it seems like there's going to be some difference when we get to Bahá'í philosophy of mind between what the Buddhist tradition takes us to be and what Bahá'ís take us to be. So in particular, the majority of the Buddhist tradition seems to hold the view that there is no immaterial soul that is the seat of personal identity. And I take it that Bahá'ís do think that there is an immaterial soul that is the seat of personal identity.

And so to the extent that Bahá'ís need to affirm that the manifestations, albeit not omniscient and being able to say things to a culture at a particular time, they can't sort of say something as part of their religious mission that's strictly false, right? So the teachings of the manifestations are in that sense infallible. And so with the Buddha or maybe with some teachings of Jesus, is it open to Bahá'ís to just deny or doubt that the manifestation's actually said the things that they're said to have said?

JOSHUA HALL: The Bahá'í position is very clear when it comes to the Gospels. As to the authenticity of any one statement of the Buddha, this is something that has to be determined by historians, and I'm not an expert specifically, well, not expert in any of these religions, but I'm not as deep in Buddhism. And I say it's very true. I think that when it comes that Bahá'ís are well aware that there are real differences in these religions, and especially in their theological and philosophical schools as they have developed.

You're right that it's specifically the words of the manifestations of God that we affirm. One thing that's very distinctive of Bahá'u'lláh's treatment of Christianity is his affirmation of the truth of the Gospels. This is very different from the general Muslim mentality, or almost the universal Muslim view. Muslims found it very difficult to reconcile some of the contents of the gospel with the Quran. And these are instances of superficial difference that Bahá'í theology can reconcile.

So for example, the Quran is very clear that God is not a triune entity, that tawhíd, divine unity, is everywhere confirmed by the Quran. And even says that God has no son as he has no daughters. Now this seems to be a blatant contradiction because Jesus is the son of God. But the reason is, it's very clear in the Quran that what the Quran is teaching against is this, is thinking that God has a peer or an equal, that he is any way can be likened to a finite and contingent creature.

And the immediate audience of the Quran, the Arabs of the seventh century thought of begetting in physical terms, that God could just make an equal to himself that is somehow distinct from himself. It's really different from this notion of the son, which is just like the, which is really just the logos. The thought of God, which has a special connection with the person of Christ. That's really not what the Quran is talking about. It talks about all the same. The Quran calls Jesus, Rúhu'lláh, the spirit of God and Kalimatun min Alláh, a word from God, the logos from God. And so it actually has a very rich Christological idea.

In addition, the Quran says something like the Jews think that they have killed Jesus and crucified him, but he has not been killed, he has not been crucified, it only appeared to them that they did. The Bahá'í very simple explanation of this, we do not deny the historical crucifixion. The Qur'an's point was that Jesus was spiritually triumphant even as he appeared to be materially destroyed. But many historical Muslims just think that Jesus wasn't crucified and brought up into the presence of God. But the Qur'an's saying that Jesus was brought up spiritually to God.

So for us these are superficial differences, but because of the apparent differences between the gospel and the Quran at some points Muslims thought that the Gospels were not authentic witnesses to the life and teachings of Christ and that they were perverted, that they were corrupted, that the Christians had really corrupted their scriptures.

In the Kitáb-i-Íqán, the book of certitude, Bahá'u'lláh advances several arguments for the authenticity of the Gospels and he really says, and some of these are providential, that God would not have provided guidance in the person of Christ, but then immediately remove that guidance by the corruption of the scriptures. Another is that their transformative spiritual and moral power is immediate evidence of the divine revelation. Another instance is that the evidence, the historical evidence, the Muslims advance simply is not adequate to support their claims. When the Quran talks about the perversion of the scriptures, it's the perversion with their mouths. It's the perversion of interpretation, not of actual scribal interpolation.

So we regard the gospels as authentic witnesses, as I said, to the life and teachings of Christ. For us, they have less authority than anything that would be written directly by the manifestation of God in His own hand and sealed with His own seal, like we have from the Báb and from Bahá'u'lláh. These are still impressions. They're true impressions, but it is a matter for historians to determine, you know, the levels of authenticity. But I think Bahá'ís can confidently state that the four gospels we find to be authentic scripture, and there's no one statement in there that a Bahá'í would simply dismiss. And that would be rather ad hoc and a bit too convenient.

Indeed, there are, and I would say that's the whole of the New Testament. Bahá'ís respect the primacy of Peter as first among equals in a way that's similar to Eastern Orthodoxy. And we respect also the station of the St. Paul as an expounder of the teachings of Christ. And although there have been some Bahá'ís who took exception to some of Pauline language with regard to Christ, I found in my own studies that Pauline language and Pauline understandings of Christ are deeply embedded in the Bahá'í understanding. So for example, 'Abdu'l-Bahá gives a spiritual explanation of the resurrection of Christ as a resurrection of the ecclesia, of the church, which is the body of Christ. This is an essentially Pauline idea.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, so you're saying that there's no sort of portion of the Gospels say that Bahá'ís as a matter of Bahá'í doctrine just have to say this portion of text is saying false things, but there's a certain amount of freedom you can have intellectually. So if you're a Bahá'í New Testament scholar, you can have a range of views as to the historical reliability of the Gospels. So long as you affirm that like the gist is authentic, you think like it's sort of mostly pretty good or largely good or quite good. You know, of course like if you're really skeptical of everything in the gospels and you're a Jesus mythicist or somebody, that would run counter to Bahá'í teaching. So there's an extent of authenticity you have to affirm that you don't have to go the whole hog and say that every word recorded is actually something that historical Jesus said. Is that right?

JOSHUA HALL: That's correct. So I'd say I'm probably have a providential argument that what settled on to be the four gospels contains authentic teachings. Not that every word is from Christ, but certainly I think those sections which have commonality among the gospels, we can be fairly certain are accurate depictions of Jesus. And indeed, this is impressionistic and experiential, but it's just the fact that the gospels have the quality of scripture. There's a memorability and power to them which simply cannot be denied. It's a similar power that the Quran has and by which it was able to command the ascent and obedience of the people of Muhammad.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, and so just to kind of pull on this thread a bit further, I mean, there are going to be interpretations of passages in the Gospel that Christians have interpreted a certain way as implying, for example, that Jesus is literally God, as opposed to merely a manifestation of God, that Bahá'ís are going to want to reject those interpretations. But suppose you thought, for example, that it's most plausible that what the author of John's prologue had in mind was the teaching that Jesus was literally God as opposed to just a manifestation of God. Just suppose you thought as a matter of history that was the most plausible interpretation of the text. Could a Bahá'í then just say, oh, this author is in error?

JOSHUA HALL: No, I don't. There'd be no justification for the rejection of the Gospel of John insofar as it is cited by Bahá'u'lláh and by his successor, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and given interpretations by them. I would say that this is just a very important element. There's no point in the Gospels in which we find a clearly articulated doctrine of the Trinity, simply because the function of the Holy Spirit is altogether obscure. Is it a hypostatic entity? Is it a force of divine operation and inspiration, is it separate from or distinct from the word, it's just not clear. And that's why it took centuries to develop.

So not to say that they're, I would say that the metaphysical data of the gospels are simply under-determined and many different interpretations could fit them. And that's why I think the early theologians of the church have ideas that are very close to Bahá'í teachings. And I think that also the kind of the context, I think with figures like Philo of Alexandria, the idea of the logos itself in Greek philosophy helps illuminate what John, what the author of the Gospel of John intended.

So here's the Bahá'í understanding. So it says, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God or say else, divine, and the Word became flesh. We get this a manifestational reading. So, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Bahá'u'lláh's son and successor, who is an authoritative interpreter of the Bahá'í teachings, as selected by Bahá'u'lláh, he gives this explanation.

So, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, some immediate emanation, and the word was God. So, for him, the word refers to the totality of the divine perfections. And he says why? Because you have a word and it consists of letters. But each letter is unable to convey a whole meaning, a complete meaning. It's an incomplete meaning. The word is the complete meaning. So it is the full collection of the perfections of God. So in this way, the word is divine. It is God because it is the totality of his perfections.

But the very idea of a word, that is an external procession of a reality that has its origin and unity in God, but in which there is some distinction. So first, the Word is the externalization of the inner thought. So for us, the Word is the immediate manifestation of God in this metaphysical plane. And then it becomes evident in the material plane, in the person of Christ, in the Gospels, and in the Bahá'í dispensation in the persons of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh.

AMOS WOLLEN: That much sounds plausible. I guess what I'm wondering is if a Bahá'í New Testament historian just in their role as a historian ended up thinking that the Gospel of John at one point affirmed a doctrine that's incompatible with the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh just like on its most plausible reading even if there's another reading that's independently less plausible that's consistent. I'm wondering, can they sort of read Bahá'u'lláh's invocation of the Gospel of John to be, you know, endorsing the text in a sort of broad way, but not saying that every particular has to be right? And so could they sort of affirm what they took to be the most plausible interpretation? Sorry, affirm that that was what the author of the Gospel meant, but then just say of this passage that it's in error. Given that you're saying with the Gospels, they don't have to get every word of Jesus right, could the Gospels get something doctrinally wrong just at one point, but then in their sort of broad sweep get the gist correct?

JOSHUA HALL: I think the Bahá'í New Testament scholar in question here is actually relevant question is how many, what is the consensus among New Testament scholars that the opening of the Gospel of John includes within it a full doctrine of the Incarnation? Is that a view? I'm more, I've lately been more interested in metaphysical arguments for God's existence than New Testament scholarship. So what is your understanding? What is the consensus view of the intention of this text if we believe that texts have intentions?

AMOS WOLLEN: Good question. I don't know. I think there is something of a consensus that there's just like a very high Christology in John, but they might agree with you that it's so I think you're agreeing with Christians that Jesus is sort of higher than a mere prophet and they might say, okay, like as long as you're saying that the view you're putting forward could be sort of read into the prologue. I don't really know. I think there's sort of a live controversy about it. And I guess I'm just wondering suppose it's just a minority of scholars who thinks that the prologue strictly commits you to the doctrine of the incarnation, but you just find that view really plausible as an interpretation of the prologue. Could a Bahá'í in principle say, this is actually what the author meant, the interpretation that I think is most plausible? But given that the Gospels can be fallible in keeping with Bahá'í teaching, couldn't that just be one of the areas in which they're fallible? Like, they get some matter of doctrine wrong, even if they were kind of driving at the right point.

JOSHUA HALL: Yeah, I can imagine that. I can imagine a Bahá'í having that opinion and perhaps being able to justify it. I don't think that I would have that opinion, and I'll explain why. I think one of the important elements of the Bahá'í hermeneutic, which we borrowed from or in continuity with the Islamic, is the idea that Christ himself, the manifestation of God, has the right to say, I am God. This seems like incarnation language, but here's how he explains it.

The logos is the totality of the divine perfections. It is the externalized being and existence of God that proceeds from him. In this sense, it is as the rays that proceed from the sun. Now, do we see the rays? Do we see the sun itself or do we see its rays? We see its rays. And I might say the sun is even coming in through my window, but the sun is not coming in through its rays. Origen uses this image very much.

Now, if I were to have a perfectly clear mirror opposite to the sun, and if you were to see that mirror, what would you see in that mirror? You would see its rays reflected, the sun. You would even perhaps see the disc of the sun in its splendor. Now, for Bahá'u'lláh, if the mirror were to say, I am the sun, you would say, yes, indeed. And you have seen. The one who has seen you, O mirror, has seen the sun, the day star, the celestial orb of our firmament. But the sun has never actually descended from its transcendent stock.

So it's the same way, and this is Old Testament language, often the angel of the Lord is called the Lord himself, but he appears in the angel, or he appears in the fire of the burning bush. Now the bush had such a distinction that though it was merely a vegetable, it could say, I am God. So for Bahá'u'lláh and for the Báb, it is much more fitting that a man who is the highest order of existence, one of the manifestations of God, it should arrogate to himself the claim of divinity. But it doesn't mean that the unknowable essence has actually descended from a state of utter transcendence in order to join itself to a material nature.

So there's really nothing there in the doctrine that we would reject. Yes, the word is divine. It is God in so far as God has manifest to us. And then Jesus is God in so far as he reflects the logos. What we don't have here is God becoming human in that sense. What we have is the absolute taking on the garment of mortality in the sense that there is a mortal being in whom we see reflected the perfections and glory of the divinity.

But also we could say this, that there are different Christologies among say the synoptic gospels and the gospel of John. These reflect the various perspectives of his immediate followers. In this sense, they reflect the contingent personal and historical circumstances that surround the composition of these gospels. And the Bahá'í would not be anxious necessarily to immediately resolve all the contradictions among these gospels, nor would we need to.

So we would say that among the followers of Christ, there are those who immediately emphasized his divinity and those who emphasize his humanity. It was the same in the Bahá'í faith. There are those who, from the beginning, thought of Bahá'u'lláh as the Godhead himself. And later on, it was clarified, this manifestational theology. And there are some, perhaps, who thought he was more of a prophetic figure. And the correct is the middle road. But some people like to emphasize one or the other. And the important thing is not to say they're wrong, but to recognize that there's certain diversity of experience in this regard, and that both languages are legitimate in their own spheres. And this is not purely relativization. It's just saying that sometimes apparent contradictions can happen when one side emphasizes one point of an issue to the exclusion of the other.

AMOS WOLLEN: You have a lecture on YouTube where you talk about Bahá'í philosophy of mind. Do you want to maybe give a sort of potted summary of what you think Bahá'ís are committed to with respect to what we are and the nature of consciousness?

JOSHUA HALL: The Bahá'í philosophy of mind reveals that the human person is unique in the structure of reality. We are the highest point of material existence and sometimes the lowest point of spiritual existence. So we begin in time, we have the physical body and our physical organism includes the realities of the mineral, the vegetable and the animal. But we also have powers and faculties which in our estimation transcend physicality. And this is our rational power of apprehension, our capacity for abstract thought.

We don't think that there's any way to account for our intellect faculties, our highest faculties of cognitive function through a purely physicalist guise. We think that every person has or rather is an immaterial rational soul. It comes into being as emanated by God, whensoever there is a material substrate with a suitable disposition in order to receive that soul and be animated by it. And we believe that after the physical death of the body, the immaterial soul exists forever, everlastingly. It doesn't partake of the eternality of God, yet it always endures and cannot pass out of existence so long as it is sustained in existence by God.

Generally, the Bahá'í language here is Aristotelian or Neoplatonic. There's a sense that the soul is the form of the body. But I would say Avicenna's idea of the soul is rather closely affirmed in the Bahá'í writings. So Avicenna thought, yes, the soul can function as the form of the body, but it's not merely the form of the body. He's considered its perfection. That is, the soul is the animating principle of the body, and through the body it exercises many of its functions.

If I'm able to digest a sandwich, I can't do that without my body. If I'm able to see a sunset, I do it through my physical eyes and my neurophysiology. If I'm to have a memory or to summon up an image, I might use my neurological architecture. Nonetheless, there are spiritual perceptions and higher capacities of rational inference and abstract thought, which simply cannot be accounted for as the motions or operations of some material organ, and which point to our spiritual reality.

So I'd say it's a hylomorphic substance dualism is affirmed by the Bahá'í teachings. And there's nothing really too shocking or new here. One thing I would say is that I think that there are a lot of ideas in Neoplatonic metaphysics, which would be affirmed by the teachings of the Bahá'í faith, but because they exist within a shared heritage of the perennial philosophy. So you could find similarities between Bahá'u'lláh's teachings and that of Avicenna or Maimonides or Aquinas on many things.

One area we'd differ from Aquinas is that he views that the rational soul so transcends the body that it can exist without it, but that it is in a diminished state. We do not think that we're diminished in death so long as we properly inculcate virtues as stable dispositions of the soul and orient ourselves to higher domains of truth. We think that there are infinite worlds of God and that the human soul continues to progress through those worlds. We never reincarnate literally in this plane. But so long as we develop our spiritual faculties, death is, in a sense, a liberation.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah. So you've already started a little bit, but I wondered if you'd tell us on the Bahá'í paradigm what does and doesn't happen after death. So, you know, what is affirmed and then how maybe does that differ from what other religions teach?

JOSHUA HALL: So are you thinking in terms of soteriology or something? For us, and I think this is actually a good example of the kind of difference of language that you might find between religious dispensations. What is salvation? So I think in some versions of Christian theology, we are saved from say this original sin, this original lapse. Even if the guilt is not inherited, the deformation of our nature is and it leaves us inevitably to sin. So we have to be rescued and we have to be delivered by some transcendental power.

And for us, this is not untrue as, say, a mythopoetic articulation of something which can be understood through more philosophical terms. And it's this, that in human beings, there's an animal nature and a properly human nature, right? And our true flourishing and our true happiness consists in the triumphs of our properly human nature. And that that involves the integration of the passions and appetites with reason and the subordination to reason. And not merely reason as this economical cunning, but reason is that faculty by which we apprehend what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful.

And we think that in order to achieve this perfect flourishing, we have to have some impetus for a moral life, for founding an ethical civilization, and for the recognition of those realities which are inherently above our comprehension unaided to apprehend. So for example, the existence of God, we can infer the existence of God through metaphysical arguments from his effects. But God is not something that we can apprehend in himself and we are liable to fall into error about the divine nature. Some people think that God is many when he is one. Some people think God is physical when he is immaterial, et cetera, et cetera.

Also, there seems to be an intuition of what the fundamental virtues of humanity are, but moral mistakes are extremely common and we often fall short of true virtue. So in the Bahá'í understanding, we need an educator, a divine educator, on the individual and the civilizational level to impart to us the truth about the divine nature, the existence of God, the spiritual nature of man, and the nature of the civilization which we are to establish on a spiritual and virtuous basis.

In this sense, this divine educator must already be what all of us are called to become but somehow fail to realize. And that is the very image of God in man. A person who already has a comprehensive knowledge of this reality, who already has a perfect integrity of will. These are the manifestations of God. They are morally perfect and they have innately a knowledge of reality, which we all strive to be, which we endeavor to have through our sciences and which we endeavor to have in terms of the moral integrity through our spiritual disciplines.

So they provide that teaching, they provide that moral edification and their word is morally transformative. It redeems, it uplifts, it elevates. And we can see this in the teachings of the founders of all major religions. This is salvation. But for us, it's not a binary. Education is on a continuum. And every soul is destined to an everlasting acquisition of the degrees of perfection, even as human civilization goes through stages and achieves ever greater forms or degrees of unity and of spirituality.

Thus, we progress eternally and everlastingly in the next life. That doesn't mean that all of us have the same station or the same benefits or capacities. It is conditioned by our conduct here in life. But there is in principle always the possibility for progression. And there are infinite worlds of God, metaphysical planes, and the manifestation of God appears in every world according to the capacity of that world. So salvation is not a binary. Hell is always a state of rejection of the divine truth, paradise of affirmation, and there are degrees thereof. And divine justice operates according to the very economy of the world in which we find ourselves. Virtue is its own reward. And the full recognition of God is the highest ecstasy that could possibly be known.

AMOS WOLLEN: And so is it accurate to describe the Bahá'í view on this as a version of universalism where there is a hell in a sense, but it's a hell from which people who started in it will sort of progress from over time and eventually escape?

JOSHUA HALL: I would say so. I think there's something just that's true about the universalist intuition. It seems to me that whatever theodicy you have, somehow the created order that God does in fact create, I think in order for it to be the creation of a rational God, must somehow be the fullest diffusion and sharing of the perfections of existence. It has to have some maximum good. And according to the principle of chiaroscuro, it might have many shadows to bring all the more glory to the light. But it seems to me that there might be some evils that are incompatible with the providential order of a rational God. And one of those might well be the eternal conscious torment of any rational soul. In fact, I suspect that is the case.

So I don't think that's what we have because, you know, as I remarked on another occasion, I mean I don't, I just do not concede any finite evil which could merit an infinite punishment, nor can I conceive any finite evil which could not be happily recompensed by infinite good. So I think part of the Bahá'í theodicy is that yes, whatever evil or suffering a person endures in this world is relative to this world and it is nothing in comparison with the total goodness of reality which we'll find in our everlasting progression.

Bahá'u'lláh says this very clearly. He said there would be no way that the manifestations of God would have sacrificed themselves, would have endured sufferings and execution and martyrdom and torture and banishment if they thought, if they knew that this material world was all that there is and that there is not something beyond and something higher. So I think in that way we can make sense of the suffering of this world.

In another sense, it doesn't seem to me that any act committed could be so egregious that in the vantage of eternity it can't somehow be redeemed or recovered from in some sense, even if the effects are everlasting in some way. Just like if in our early development we go through a trauma, perhaps we can overcome it and even become something greater. That doesn't mean that it totally erases that past pain. It just means that it was part of the story of our ultimate development.

So let's say somebody commits something truly egregious, genocide, the slaughter of thousands. It's like, okay, that disfigures the soul. But let's think in terms of cosmic time. How long does it take for the disfigurement to heal? A thousand years? A billion years? A trillion years? Is a trillion years not enough? It seems a bit draconian from the Bahá'í perspective. So let's say we're universalist in that regard.

'Abdu'l-Bahá gives an interesting interpretation of the verse in the gospels that all things shall be forgiven except blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. And he said, what is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit? He said, the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit which can never be forgiven is hatred of the light itself. So he explains that there are some who deny the manifestations of God because they don't know that they're the manifestation of God, right? Jesus would not have been crucified if everybody knew this was indeed the true Messiah, this indeed was the manifestation of God. They thought that other things were goods and they thus preferred them to the manifestations. But they actually don't hate the good itself. They don't hate the light itself. They just think that something else is better than the good itself. They're making an epistemic error.

So I would say what 'Abdu'l-Bahá says, the explanation I think is ultimately clear when he talks about how there's progress for everybody in their own degree in the next life. Basically, damnation, eternal damnation is based on an impossible condition, hatred of the light itself. This is a condition that no rational being could permanently be in. Nonetheless, I don't think we have universalism in the sense that there is like a final point at which we all have the same station or the same beatific vision. I think that within our human degree there are infinite perfections and all of us is going to be a different image or circumstance of human perfection and that there's going to be a differentiation in the next life and this is just a function of reality. If God is truly infinite being, the path to him is infinite and endless. So we're all going to be on the way, at different stations. He is the Alpha and the Omega, but for us, it's an eternal progression.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, right. So there are going to be different types of universalism. One will entail that everyone gets the same stopping point eventually, and then one will be nobody is eternally damned or annihilated, but people progress at different speeds and at different rates, and they keep progressing forever. And as a result of this, it might be that some people are just ahead of the race, as it were, forever, but they'll keep going.

JOSHUA HALL: Yeah.

AMOS WOLLEN: So you mentioned a little while back in passing the martyrdoms of the manifestations. The thing that sort of initially sparked my interest in Bahá'í about a week ago was thinking about the story and the historical accounts which are quite early, many of them from oppositional sources, about the martyrdom of the Báb. Do you want to maybe tell that story because it, for want of a better word, it's a cool story.

JOSHUA HALL: Yes, it was 1850 when finally it was decided by the edict of the King to execute the Báb as pressured, as insisted upon by the clergy because his crime was punishable by death, which is apostasy from Islam. Why apostasy from Islam? Because he claims to be the Imam Mahdi, but to abrogate the Islamic law. So the Báb had a short ministry. It was from 1844 to 1850.

So the story is this, that the Báb, along with one of his closest disciples, Anís, his name means companion, were strung up to be executed by firing squad. And it was a Christian regiment led by Sam Khan. And the regiment fires the volley of bullets. But the Báb is not harmed in any way. Anís is not harmed. All that was cut were the ropes suspending them. And in fact when the dust cleared they found the Báb was nowhere to be found. He went into an adjacent chamber to deliver his last revelations. And when they found him they said, now and only now, the Báb said, will I consent to being killed now that my task is complete.

So they suspend him again. And the second time is successful. It does kill the Báb and his companion Anís. The bodies are marred and disfigured, yet the face remains pure and inviolate and unharmed. Eventually the remains of the Báb are cast outside the city gates to be eaten by the dogs. But by perhaps a special act of providence or the coincidence of history, his followers are able to preserve those remains. And they were kept with the Bahá'í exiles. They were kept safely for many years. Eventually Bahá'u'lláh arranged for the transport to Haifa, and now the remains of the Báb are interred in a beautiful sepulchre in Haifa. And now to the despite of his opponents, they enjoy the full triumph of the most beautiful adornment.

So it seems to be a miraculous story that the Báb was indeed martyred, but only when he truly consented to it.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a parable sort of taken straight out of the philosophy of probability, right? Like in debates about fine tuning, there's this case from John Leslie, which is just supposed to show a particular kind of case where you get evidence that something isn't a coincidence, because it would be really improbable if it were. So like the case is you're blindfolded and there are 50 trained marksmen with their guns trained at you and then they fire and you open your eyes and you realize that nobody has got you. And the moral of the story is just supposed to be, look, in these kinds of cases, you do get evidence that your guardian angel intervened or somebody swapped the bullets for blanks or they were intending to miss or something.

And so you just get evidence that it wasn't a coincidence, even though it could be. And so it seems like in this case, you do just get some evidence that it was a miracle in particular because it happened in a very sort of religiously rich context at the beginning of a new global faith. So I think this is one case where even if somebody is a sort of skeptic about Bahá'í and I should sort of disclose for the audience, I'm not a Bahá'í, it's just a clear case where surely you get some evidence for Bahá'í to a non-trivial degree, at least if you're not a Humean about miracle testimony.

JOSHUA HALL: That's incredibly generous. And it is true that it was, it's just a well-documented historical event. Sometimes it's exaggerated. Sometimes you hear people say like 750 riflemen. That's not what it was. But nonetheless, the British and the Russian ambassador witnessed this event. It happened. There were two regiments. It's just historically verified. And that's not the only remarkable event in the life of the Báb or in the ministry of Bahá'u'lláh.

What's interesting is that the Bahá'í teachings, and they serve the explicit words of Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá, do not emphasize miracles, nor do we see miracles as a decisive proof. But I think we do see this event as a confirmation and a sign. It would be another discussion to discuss what exactly a miracle is. And if there was something supernatural going on, what exactly happened? And Bahá'ís often don't talk about that. Like, do we mean to say that the Báb himself, because he has this higher order of existence, can say immediately affect objects that extend beyond his body? Or is there a subtler question that it didn't happen by chance, but it's actually possible physically that it just so happened that just the way every man was pointing his gun, just the way that the wind current was, just the way with these slight imperfections of metal, it all happened.

But in fact, this was part of the providential ordering of God since the foundation of the world, that everything happens by a certain necessity given the causal matrix in which it finds itself. And therefore it was inevitable that the Báb be executed, yes, the second time, just as it was inevitable that everything should so align the first time that he would be spared. I don't know.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, I think this makes the execution of the Báb story a really interesting philosophical test case about miracles where, you know, famously Hume had an argument and we might debate whether it's a successful argument, but an argument, I think we wouldn't debate, but you know, other people would think that it was a successful argument against miracle testimony. And the thought is supposed to be roughly, we have really strong inductive evidence that the laws of nature don't have exceptions. And then look, when we encounter miracle testimony that if it were true would entail that the laws of nature were suspended or violated, you just have such a low prior in that ever happening because of the inductive evidence you have about the laws of nature never, apart from this one case, failing that you should discount the miracle testimony because what would be the greater miracle, the testimony being false or this ridiculously improbable event happening.

And whether or not that's a successful argument, it seems to me that the Humean argument just doesn't even apply to this piece of miracle testimony. Because if it happened, it wouldn't entail that the laws of nature were violated or suspended or that a sort heretofore undiscovered law was present that had always been there and just manifested only then, right? Because I mean, it's consistent with the laws of nature that every bullet in a very large firing squad firing multiple volleys at a large target at close range misses. That could happen. It so happens that it, as far as I can tell, has never happened before, except in cases where it's most plausibly read as people intending to miss, but like it's consistent with the laws of nature that that happened. And so it seems like the Humean argument doesn't even apply because it makes reference to the laws of nature being suspended or violated and the mechanism of this miracle.

It could be that God suspended the laws of nature and caused the bullets to swerve midair by a special act of providence, but it's compatible with the story that it was just a sort of general type of providence where God sort of set things up so that people would miss without intervening especially at the moment that the bullets left the guns, right?

JOSHUA HALL: This is a very insightful analysis, Amos. I think this makes it a quintessentially Bahá'í miracle in terms of what is 'Abdu'l-Bahá. 'Abdu'l-Bahá actually defines nature as the necessary relationships that arise from the essences of things. But he says, he says the religion is, he says, religion is that which is established by a manifestation of God based on his knowledge of the necessary relationships that arise from the essences of things. Religion and nature are ultimately the same. Nature and supernature are not ultimately divorced and divided, right? All nature is a manifestation of God. Those universal laws that bind all things are reflections of the primordial thoughts of the logos itself.

So there's a sense in which, you know, in the Bahá'í faith you have this extremely philosophical religion, one which at every step of the way insists that every belief should have a rational foundation and every belief should be subject to the independent investigation of truth, and which seems perfectly rational, it advances rational arguments for the existence of God, for his utter transcendence, for the existence of an immaterial soul, for the providential need for an educator, lays out criteria for this educator that he has moral perfection and preternatural knowledge and established institutions that endure and which lead to a new civilization, all of that.

But it's also an impassioned faith with a real history, a faith that was born in turmoil, baptized in blood and which has despite all opposition in its homeland and elsewhere nonetheless managed to spread all throughout the world and be an inspiring vision for all those who fight for unity. So I think there is something in the miracle of the martyrdom of the Báb that somehow unites all of this.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, could you talk a little bit about the global nature of Bahá'í and how successful it has been since 1850?

JOSHUA HALL: Certainly. I mean, how do you get from an obscure oriental sect to a world religion embraced by people of the most disparate backgrounds, right? I mean, this itself is a fantastic story. And I think it starts from, originally you could say that one of the kind of disparaging appellations for the Bahá'í faith was that given to it by an Iranian intellectual, Qasravi. He said, you know, it's a sect of a sect of a sect of a sect. Why? Because you have Islam, then you have a sect of Shia Islam, then you have the sect of Shaykhism, and then you have a sect of the Shaykhi, which is Bábism, which then you have Bahá'ísm, right?

But he's wrong, because you could do that with any religion, right? I mean, Salafism could be a sect of a sect of a sect of a sect of a breakaway of a breakaway. But nonetheless, it does come from a very particular religious kind of context, Persian, like Iranian Shia Islam, right? The languages of the scriptures are in Arabic and Persian. And in a sense, there's something that's always irreducibly Persian about the Bahá'í faith, but in a sense, that is the secret of its universalism.

So those who know Persian literature know that there is, for centuries, been this kind of universalizing idea. Sa'di said that all mankind are as the limbs of the body, and if one part is harmed or damaged, it brings pain upon the whole. In the poetry of Hafez in the 14th century, he declares that every place is the house of the divine love, whether it's a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. And this is deeply Persian. We find this in the Bahá'í faith.

Bahá'u'lláh broadcasts his message to all the leaders of the world. He gives a framework for reconciling the diverse religions of mankind under one spiritual and uniting vision. His son, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, he's released from prison. And then he goes about very soon to travel all through Europe and America preaching the message. He preached in Persian and he was translated into English.

Eventually, upon 'Abdu'l-Bahá's death, it's revealed that Shoghi Effendi, his grandson, is the guardian or leader of the Bahá'í Faith. And he makes the active steps of establishing the Bahá'í administrative order, which is grassroots and democratic. It consists in the election of a local council, and the election of a national council, and eventually the Universal House of Justice, which is the supreme governing body of the Bahá'í Faith, which was elected in 1963, once there had been a suitable development of the Bahá'í community across the world.

Under the guardianship of Shoghi Effendi from 1921 to 1957, there were Bahá'í pioneers that scattered all throughout the world sharing the message of Bahá'u'lláh. We don't believe in aggressive proselytizing. We think in teaching and sharing. Bahá'u'lláh is very, very clear. At no point do you ever force your religion on anybody. Perhaps they didn't make clear like the vision of peace in the Bahá'í writings means at no point can you insist that anybody come to your point of view. You offer what you have and if it's accepted, well and good. If not, you continue to love and cherish that person.

I think one reason the Bahá'í faith was very successful in Iran among religious communities like the Jews and the Zoroastrians is how the Bahá'ís treated them. So under kind of the mentality of Muslims in the 19th century, all other religious people and groups were unclean, najis, impure. If a Muslim were to shake the hand of a Christian, he would wash his hand before saying his prayers because he had been defiled. And here, much less Jews and Zoroastrians, because they were treated even worse. And Bahá'í teachers like Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl would go and like, would hug the Jewish rabbi and kiss him on the cheeks, you know. And this is the attitude whether or not anyone accepts the Bahá'í faith or not.

So the Bahá'í faith, the population in Iran remains strong despite the persecution from its inception. But quickly, over the course of the guardian's, Shoghi Effendi's ministry, it spread throughout the world and to the several millions, I believe, at least a million, I believe, I don't know the exact numbers, and it's been growing by the millions ever since to about eight million, which in a sense is small compared to Christianity and Islam and Hinduism. But in another sense, it's comparable to Judaism or Jainism, Sikhism.

AMOS WOLLEN: I think a lot of people watching, especially on Substack, will be quite into animal welfare, animal ethics issues, given some of the things I write about sometimes. I wonder what, to the extent there is one, is the Bahá'í theology of animals and how we should treat them?

JOSHUA HALL: Certainly. I think this actually touches on something that's really interesting is that I think that there has, I think when you look at Bahá'í scriptures, they actually have more philosophic and philosophical contents than the original scriptures of many different faiths because it comes after, right? I mean it takes till the 13th century to have the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas, that takes development. So perhaps you don't have the Summa Theologiae, but our scriptures already have so much philosophical content, it still needs to be, the revelation of Bahá'u'lláh is just in terms of its extent oceanic and even what is just like a representative sample has so much material that needs to be digested and absorbed.

And I think in terms of Bahá'í doctrine, we are not very concerned about like having like so detailed a creed that there can't be kind of a diversity of opinion on many things. Just philosophically, metaphysically even. I think there is a clear kind of metaphysical framework in the Bahá'í faith. We all accept it. But on many ancillary issues, I think there could be diversity. So with regard to animal welfare, I would say just ethically, Bahá'u'lláh really does affirm that we cannot treat with cruelty towards animals in any gratuitous fashion.

And there's actually a passage in the Kitáb-i-Íqán about the requirements of the moral life of the true seeker and purification of the heart in which he says no cruelty should be put on an animal. The question then comes to vegetarianism and diet. And there are places in the Bahá'í writings, especially 'Abdu'l-Bahá, where vegetarianism is encouraged as compassionate and even conducive to health. But Bahá'u'lláh did not forbid the eating of meat. He did not forbid hunting. He just says it has to be within limits.

And Bahá'u'lláh, in fact, eases some of the restrictions on meat eating, if you think about it, because we don't have the Islamic law in which pork is forbidden. There's no food, nothing is unclean in the Bahá'í faith. There's no food we abstain from. We abstain from drinking alcohol, but not because it's ritually impure, because of its effects on damaging our rational faculty. And also he told the Christian ascetics directly because they had long fasting days that under his law eat meat and there's not a necessity to abstain from it. But 'Abdu'l-Bahá often does encourage vegetarianism.

So some Bahá'ís have written on this and actually defended vegetarianism and animal welfare very strongly. Michael Sours is among them. He's published in the Journal of Bahá'í Studies. And I think the position here is that we're uncompromising on the fact that animals are at a lower ontological level than humans. Human beings are not animals. We're metaphysically distinct. We have an animal nature, but we transcend it. At the same time, animal nature is a participation in the divine attributes in its own way. And we need to honor and safeguard that creation.

So here, I think that we have a lot of commonality with other traditions on this. I think in terms of ecology and animal welfare, a lot of what Bahá'ís might say is like what Pope Francis had in his encyclical, Laudato Si', something like that. And I would say there is opportunity for a diversity of opinion on the question of vegetarianism, whether it can be justified. In my adolescence, I was actually vegan and vegetarian for extended periods. I'm not any longer. And I think there are advantages from which we can defend meat eating. But to me this is a question in which any single Bahá'í can have an independent opinion.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah, okay good. I wondered if, so in a moment I might ask you to kind of make your pitch for why people should actually become Bahá'í. It can sort of include any philosophical reasons but maybe also spiritual reasons. But before you do that I wonder if we sort of put the shoe on the other foot and say like what do you think is the best objection by your lights to the Bahá'í faith or maybe falling short of that was there a teaching that you encountered that is infallibly affirmed in Bahá'í where when you encountered it you thought oh that's really puzzling I don't know why that would be taught that sort of worries me?

JOSHUA HALL: Yeah, I think it does really differ for the individual what teaching or other might be difficult to accept. I think many people might find difficult the Bahá'í teachings on sexual morality and chastity, because a lot of, we discussed this, the two of us on a different occasion. The Bahá'í faith seems in many ways quite liberal, very accepting sort of thing. But it has very stringent moral standards. I mean, Bahá'ís like, there's no premarital or extramarital sex. There's no doing of drugs. There's no alcohol. There's nothing like this. And we do understand marriage as between a man and a woman, although at no point is homosexuality specifically pathologized or regarded as a mental disorder in that light.

I think that it does fit. It seems to me that orientation is inherently fluid and on a spectrum, and for some people more fixed and determined such that same-sex attraction is their predominant mode of erotic experience. But nonetheless, we see sexuality as ideally fulfilled in a structure in which the procreation and raising of life is essential. So for some that would be difficult and the Bahá'í has to justify it. And I think that there is, and I think this can be justified from a number of levels. I think we share a framework with Catholics in terms of the virtue ethics, but in terms of how to actually develop those virtue ethics in terms of sexual morality, the Bahá'í is free to go in many different directions. And I think that's promising.

Another thing I would say is the Bahá'í faith is an organized religion. Now, it's not a cult, because if you enter the Bahá'í faith, it's completely voluntary, nobody's gonna pressure you into it, and you can leave it anytime and you will not be shunned. And also there's not really gonna be anybody policing your behavior. So if you're a Bahá'í who fornicates and drinks on your own time, so long as it's not flagrant and just obviously degenerate, you're not gonna lose your fundamental rights. So what would those rights be? Of voting in Bahá'í elections and coming to the 19-day feast. And even in that case, you'd be open to other Bahá'í gatherings and wouldn't generally be shunned by the community. There are just, there are a few, there are no secret writings you can give. There is, we do have a tithe, a huqúqu'lláh law, but it's entirely voluntary. And if you don't pay it, nobody comes to your door asking for it. It's completely voluntary. Non-Bahá'ís cannot even give to the Bahá'í Fund in general, because we don't want to lose our objectivity with respect to other organizations.

Nonetheless, it is an administrative order and there is an element of obedience to our institutions. They govern the faith and the Universal House of Justice is the ultimate authority when it comes to the legislation of Bahá'í law and what ought to be done. And no individual Bahá'í has the right to defy a direct injunction of the Universal House of Justice. They wear their power lightly, but that's true. And the universal house of justice in Bahá'í language is considered to have certain infallibility. As I said to you, this does not mean that they're omniscient. It doesn't mean they're the Oracle of Delphi. It doesn't mean that we think you can go to them and get the best prediction of the stock market or anything of the kind. It simply means, in essence, that functionally, they're the highest authority when it comes to Bahá'í legislation, that there's a general providential protection of our institutions. But that their rulings can change over time as dictated by circumstances. The explicit laws of Bahá'u'lláh never change, but their application or interpretation by the Universal House of Justice can.

So I would say there's that. The most difficult thing, to be perfectly frank, is that the Bahá'í faith does teach the rather absolute equality of men and women, and this is actually very important to Bahá'í history, because the Báb abrogated the veil. And one of his most honored followers was Táhirih, who in the conference of Badasht in 1848, to establish the newness of the revelation, took off her veil. And one of the guys was so freaked out, he like slit his throat, right?

And so Bahá'ís everywhere promote the equality of men and women. And that's actually something remarkable sociologically with Bahá'í families in Iran. A Bahá'í family is not like a Muslim family in Iran. So if you just go into one, like it's different. In Muslim context, men and women do not have mixed gatherings, right? Women do not appear unveiled, that sort of thing. And this actually has been the cause of the Bahá'í faith being attacked from conservative Muslims from its inception. They say, yeah, Bahá'ís get together and they have orgies because men and women are mixing.

And there's actually, I have a mentor of mine who grew up in Iran in the 70s. And he said he had a non-Bahá'í friend who was really interested in coming to a Bahá'í gathering. He was excited, he wanted to show him. But his friend meets him and he's dressed in a suit, he has cologne and everything. And he brings him to the feast and his friend's very disappointed. And he's like, what were you expecting? It's like, well, I was expecting there to be this orgy that we hear about. Nothing of the kind, it was just prayers and administrative matters.

But I think that goes to show that the Bahá'í faith is totally mixed and the administrative order is open to men and women. There's no preference. But the membership of the Universal House of Justice is restricted to male members because of certain statements of Bahá'u'lláh, which actually are rather ambiguous since he did say that women in this dispensation have the station of rijál, of men, and then he talks about the men of the House of Justice. Nonetheless, 'Abdu'l-Bahá did restrict the membership of the Universal House of Justice to men. He said there was a reason for the time and that the reason would become evident later on. And Shoghi Effendi, the guardian of the Bahá'í faith, never changed this, and the Universal House of Justice, as it is currently constituted, does not regard this as something that it can change.

Nonetheless, the highest echelons of Bahá'í leadership are open to women with the exclusion of the Universal House of Justice, like the International Teaching Centre and the like. And wherever Bahá'ís are, really, the equality of men and women in Bahá'í affairs and in how they try to influence society is demonstrated. So to some, this does seem to be kind of a violation of a principle. And I just put it out here because it's going to be found, it's perfectly, and we need to be upfront about it. And I would just say on the whole, the equality of men and women is everywhere practiced by Bahá'ís. And just sociologically, wherever Bahá'í communities are, it's just an effect, and that's a fact itself too.

So the net total outcome of Bahá'í teachings has been the elevation of women since its inception. Might there be a providential reason for this ordinance? Perhaps, and I really can't adjudicate on this. So that would be the one anomaly. And I can make my pitch for the Bahá'í Faith when we're ready. And I would say that any worldview or religion might have some anomalies, and I think they can be justified, because even our best scientific theories insofar as they are inductive might be the best account for data, yet nonetheless have anomalous elements, which we can only explain through some ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis.

I mean, general relativity is a really good theory about how the physical universe works, but it predicts that the galaxy should so move that unless there's 75% more matter in the universe than we actually observed, the theory doesn't work. Physicists have decided that it just means there's this mysterious dark matter and the theory is just fine. Perhaps it is. That's a big anomaly. But still, most educated scientists believe that the theory of general relativity is the best scientific theory and that it's true in a relevant sense.

To me, I can take this one anomaly when everything else fits so clearly. And although I believe that no belief can be accepted without a rational foundation, I am not so hubristic as to regard my finite human reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. And I have found in Bahá'u'lláh and in the order he has established the guidance, the best guidance that I can see if I wish to order my own life.

AMOS WOLLEN: Yeah. So maybe, maybe now is a good time for you to kind of make your pitch and in so doing feel free to sort of throw in any important features of Bahá'í that we haven't had a chance to discuss yet.

JOSHUA HALL: I think I'm actually aided by this because I think the argument for the Bahá'í faith is contained in the Bahá'í scriptures itself and writings like the Kitáb-i-Íqán by Bahá'u'lláh and works like Some Answered Questions from 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Incidentally, the work Some Answered Questions is one of the best books on Bahá'í philosophy and it's just a sequence of talks, table talks given by 'Abdu'l-Bahá on many questions, including Christianity, but really notably these metaphysical questions.

So, for me, I think why I believe in the claims of Bahá'u'lláh is that it is the consummation of an entire framework of a rational investigation of the nature of reality and of the human place within it. And it seems to me the best one. And I get to a point at which I cannot not believe it, all remaining consistent with my own principles. And that might sound rather extreme. And my approach, while vindicated by the structure of the Bahá'í teachings themselves, would be different from others. I think some do have kind of an experiential basis of it. They're raised in the community, or they see just the beauty of the community itself and the good that it does in the world and believe in its mission of the reconciliation of all peoples. That's enough, the principles. But for me, I'm a first principles sort of person.

So to me, it goes like this. I think from the beginning we have to decide whether our rational powers are adequate enough to understand reality that we can actually have a true metaphysics or a metaphysics that's robust enough to give us an argument for the existence of God. And I think it is. I think from logical principles like non-contradiction and our immediate intuitions of existence and say modal ontology like necessary and contingent, we can reason our way to an absolute reality that cannot not exist, and which is the necessary ground and foundation for any contingent being whatsoever.

To me, the question simply put is Leibniz's question, why does something exist rather than nothing? And if everything were contingent, then there just wouldn't be an explanation of existence. Things could have failed. Beings could have failed to be. And there must be at least one thing that cannot fail to be whose very essence is to exist, and this we call God. I think this ultimate reality, because it transcends space and time and materiality, must be on the order of intellect and mind, supreme intellect and mind, and super personal. But nonetheless, it is not some dumb force, not some great electron, to quote the comedian George Carlin.

I believe that intelligence and mentality is itself the foundation of reality, and that all material existence in its intelligible structure is a participation in this originary mind. So that if everything is the creation and emanation of an ultimate existence, which is ipsum esse, subsistence existence, subsistent existence, subsistent being itself, the wájib al-wujúd, the necessary existence, if existence itself is pure intellect and spiritual reality, if it orders and creates this entire universe, then there must be some purpose and direction in human existence and in our place.

And I think that we find ourselves as human beings in a very curious place. We are material beings, we are physical organisms, yet we also are possessed of powers and faculties that seem to transcend the physical. What is our power of abstract thought and rational inference? And it's through these powers that we understand the universe in which we are, in which we can deduce the universal laws by which things are governed, and therefore ourselves to have control and governance over nature. So we transcend the natural world.

I think that there is no way a physicalist can adequately account for these higher functions of the mind. And that's not the consensus in the philosophy of mind. But really, I think that any attempt to reduce the mental to the physical simply eliminates the mental without accounting for it at all. And when we have something like a properly abstract concept, insofar as the abstract concept is not a physical entity within time and space, it simply cannot be reduced to any neural correlate whatsoever. And that our highest functions can only be explained by reference to an immaterial intellect.

I think this is significant because it is this rational power and faculty which enables us to apprehend the truth, to deduce the highest reality, and also to come to a knowledge of the normative structure of existence. That is the values of goodness and beauty that we see in the world and which are not simply created by us, but recognized by us as rational beings. So I would say that the examination of human nature as rational indicates that our purpose is to know the truth and the good and the beautiful in the highest way, and that is actually a knowledge of God, and that because we transcend the physical, our destiny is beyond this world.

So it would seem to me that human happiness and the good and flourishing consists in the apprehension of God and a proper preparation for our true existence beyond this world as the consummation of this material existence and then in the transcendence of this physical domain. It also seems to me that this end of human happiness and flourishing cannot be achieved by our own lights and our own efforts. The path to the goal is set by too many difficulties for us to traverse it without a guide. And therefore it would be contrary to the providence of the deity to give us this end and this purpose and then to deprive us of the very light by which we would traverse this veil of darkness to achieve the highest end.

Avicenna has a very good point. He says, we look at the providential governance of the world and we see that even minor things have been accounted for, such as the placement of the eyebrows or the nails, which are helpful but not necessary, how strange would it be then that we should be deprived of the true legislator who founds the religious law for the guidance of mankind, that which is most essential to our existence. So it seems to me that in order for us to be elevated to our highest potential, or the highest actualization of our potential, we do require an actualizer, an educator, and that this being, this reality would have to already be what we are called to become, and therefore perfected humanity, just as we are perfected animality by being rational beings.

And therefore, it would be part of the providential structure of reality that there should be these individuals who are a higher order of existence, and that the commonality of man requires these figures. Because on occasion you might get a Plato or Aristotle, one who by its supreme attainment of the intellect is able to have a piercing penetration into the nature of reality and to evince moral laws, but still these figures, the greatest philosophers, do not seem to be able to inspire the devotion of all mankind and their obedience through a transformative word. But this is indeed the characteristic of the prophets.

Therefore, I think that after we recognize God and our rational nature and that we need a divine educator, we can simply lay out rationally what the criteria of this divine educator would be. What must they be in order to achieve the end that we have outlined as being the human end? I would say first off, this true educator must be morally perfect. He must have preternatural knowledge, established preternatural knowledge. Not to say that he can write us a scientific textbook, right? I don't think that would be actually proper. It's not his task for him to remove our need for rational investigation of the world. But he would give us clear and philosophically congruent information on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.

A second is that he would be distinguished by his very person and charisma and beauty as a distinct being. Therefore, he would have the true, the good, and the beautiful on all levels in his own person. Therefore, he's good in his moral character. He is true in terms of his preternatural knowledge, and he is beautiful in terms of his unique charisma. His word, his teachings, would align with what we have established philosophically. They would give us added insights. And in addition, they would be morally transformative. Because if people were not morally transformed by his word, then he would not be a successful educator.

In addition, his teachings would be able to endure through time in order to influence the civilizational growth of mankind. Therefore, he would establish laws and institutions. He would raise up an enduring community, and he would have an ongoing spiritual presence in this community. And these criteria might sound well and good, but couldn't many people be said to have them? And I would say no. I'd say some people have some, but not all of them. Even if you look at a philosopher like Socrates, you might have moral perfection and penetrative understanding. But he didn't necessarily raise a community to himself or establish those institutions or make the claims such that we should call him a divine manifestation, although he may well have been, but that he didn't claim such a thing.

Then you have people of great intellect or creative power, such as Bach or Mozart, and they're definitely a higher level of human achievement. But they don't seem to have the moral perfection, nor do they necessarily have a penetrating knowledge into the nature of reality. Or you might have great philosophers, but again, their words do not command the assent and the obedience of mankind, this sort of thing. They're missing one dimension or other.

I think that when you look objectively, the people who are the best candidates for such divine educators are the founders of the world religions. Jesus, I think, Muhammad, the Buddha, Krishna. The problem is that these figures are remote enough in time that it is actually difficult for us to establish with certainty, whether they fulfill all criteria. For example, preternatural knowledge. Jesus seems to have a prophecy for the destruction of the temple. But this could be historically debated whether after the destruction of the temple this arose. He seems to have had a morally perfect life, if we take the documentation to be accurate. He had this wisdom from the time he was 12, and he's had a morally transformative effect in world history. He gave an extremely insightful understanding of the philosophical metaphysical structure of reality, et cetera, et cetera. I think Christ fulfills the criteria, but some could be doubted.

So the question is whether we just get one divine educator or several. And it seems to me that every time and place, we might need fresh guidance and that would be restricted to one sphere of humanity. And that it wouldn't be restricted to any one time. And therefore, our duty would not be to evaluate the criteria of just anybody who could be a manifestation, but those who are nearest to us in our time. And the nearest to us in time is Bahá'u'lláh.

And when I look at the person of Bahá'u'lláh, not only does he affirm and augment the philosophical structure of reality that I have outlined, but he fulfills all the other criteria in a way that I find to be simply remarkable. We talked about miracles. To me, the true miracle in the life of Bahá'u'lláh is not turning water into wine. It is a man who endured 40 years of imprisonment and exile, who devoted the entirety of his existence to the realization of one aim, which is the reconciliation of the kindreds and peoples of the earth and the total revitalization of the spiritual impulse that would guide humanity to an enduring world civilization, and that he accepted this hard path in preference to what was placed before him in his youth.

He could have remained a very comfortable aristocrat in Iran. He could have ascended to the highest levels of governance. He could have assured his material happiness and prosperity and that of his descendants, but he chose the way of integrity. He chose a way that would lead to what he saw as the total revitalization of humanity. And there's no aspect of his life which was not marked by his supreme courage, his generosity, his nobility. His insights simply surpassed that of the 19th century at the time. Bahá'u'lláh's vision is not modern. It's not even postmodern. It's something beyond.

In addition, he gives us a properly philosophical conception of the deity. He gives us a conception of the human soul and of its destiny, which requires every rational requirement. He morally transformed those around him to such a point that there are Bahá'ís who are murdered, and the family of those murdered Bahá'ís pleaded with the authorities to preserve their lives because they had so transcended themselves as to prefer even the murderer who killed one of their own to their own well-being and their own happiness.

Bahá'u'lláh, in fact, displayed preternatural knowledge in the fulfillment of over 10 prophecies about future events. And there's no failed prophecy of Bahá'u'lláh. He foretold the coming of World War I. He foretold the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate. He foretold the destruction, the loss by Napoleon III of his empire in documented cases. He actually prefigured nuclear power and the transmutation of the elements. He foresaw this in his writings. These are documented prophecies of Bahá'u'lláh which have been vindicated.

And he also established a community that endures and which embodies his principles and institutions and teachings which are appropriate to the age in which we live, and he has an enduring spiritual presence not only in this community but in individual Bahá'ís. Personally, everything that is in me has proceeded from Bahá'u'lláh and his teachings. So when I am brought before the person of Bahá'u'lláh, and when I face the beauty of his writings and their transformative power, and when he says to me, I am the one who has been awaited for centuries by all the religions of the world, I am the progenitor of a new civilization, I am come to bring about a new race of human being.

And when the choice is to accept or deny, I find that it's not so much that I am bombarded by many reasons to accept Bahá'u'lláh, by which I could justify the acceptance. It's that I find myself at a point at which I cannot justify my rejection. I cannot justify denying Bahá'u'lláh after all of this evidence. And I must finally submit myself to one who transcends and is beyond me in almost every way.

AMOS WOLLEN: That was great. Where should people go if they want to find more of your work and where should people go if they want to learn more about Bahá'í?

JOSHUA HALL: There are many online resources. So you can go to bahai.org and Bahá'í Reference Library and so many Bahá'í writings are available. And I just encourage people, read the writings of Bahá'u'lláh. I mean, I think they speak for themselves. And yes, sometimes they'll be difficult. Sometimes they'll make allusions, literary and philosophical allusions that are difficult, but I think there's a beauty there that communicates to everyone. I say read the Seven Valleys, in which Bahá'u'lláh talks about the spiritual quest, and it begins with the Valley of Search.

There are many introductory books on the Bahá'í faith by scholars such as Christopher Buck, by Moojan Momen. I encourage people to read these introductory materials. I also encourage people to reach out to Bahá'ís in their area. There are Bahá'í communities everywhere. And you will be welcomed in the community. Nobody will ever pressure you to become Bahá'í. We believe in friends of the faith. And we want to be co-workers with everybody who wants to work for, who wishes to advance the unity of humankind.

AMOS WOLLEN: Joshua Hall, thank you very much.

JOSHUA HALL: You're welcome. Thank you so much, Amos, for having me.