Echoes Underground

About Echoes Underground

Do you ever look up from your desk and wonder what is going on? Do you yearn to pierce the veil but find yourself trapped by the mundane? You are not alone. Join our hosts (two respectable professionals) as they leave the banal light of the everyday to poke around under the bonnet. We talk of philosophy and history, narrative and consciousness, and what we did last week and why it was actually pretty strange when you think about it. And when we’ve finished arguing about evolutionary psychology and pretending to know more about physics than we do, we sometimes - sometimes - unearth something worthwhile. For the truth is not to be found above, it is to be found below. Follow us underground. Also follow us on Twitter: x.com/echoesundergrnd (http://x.com/echoesunderground) New episode every time the muse descends (every couple of weeks)

Publisher

Echoes Underground

Category

history · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Sept 2024

Latest episode

10 May 2026

Latest episodes

45 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   10 May 2026

   On God

   Within the frame of materialism, God does not exist, and if you remain within that frame (as our co-host did until the age of 26) then New Atheism is a compelling and comfortable philosophy. If there’s no evidence for it, no scientific backing for it, it’s meaningless because it can’t affect you. But as you grow older you start to recognise that materialism is its own ism. It’s a model that is useful, so that gives it a powerful claim on our attention, but you start to notice its holes. Epistemology, for example - the question of how we know we know things - is something that materialists tend to ignore, but there is plenty of evidence that our senses are not reliable. Think of how a straight stick looks bent when you put it in a glass of water, and the implications of this. We have to accept that our knowledge of an object is separate from the object itself, that the map is distinct from the territory, but how can we define the relationship between these two separate things beyond the vague sense that it seems to work. If you haven’t quite solved this problem of epistemology, there’s this gap. It’s a small gap, but it’s in your foundations and your entire belief system rests precariously on top of it. This is not satisfying. The fact that we have knowledge of the world is not certain. What next? Another problem is that within the materialist frame of reference you have no “why”. Why should we act morally? What’s the point? Yes utilitarianism, yes pain is bad and pleasure is good, but really? There’s a gap between what logic dictates and what you feel deep down, and you can’t help but notice that when a society is run along utilitarian lines (the USSR for example) it’s horrible. What is our telos - our goal, our end, our destination? What’s the point of orientation for us to navigate by? The religious answer, to this and to the problem of epistemology, is God, but God cannot exist in the materialistic sense. So perhaps we need to start thinking of God in a different way. Perhaps God is not a material phenomenon. Perhaps God, rather than the Creator we’re moving from, is the destination we’re moving towards. Francis Fukyama says the end of history is us moving towards a telos - recognising that human beings have inherent worth, ascribing value to the ideas of charity, grace and love as better than domination, exploitation and cruelty. The pre-Christian world contained immensely ethically sophisticated people, but none of them ever questioned the rightness of slavery. A belief in equality is new, and while we might chafe against its excesses it has led to an unbelievable flourishing of humanity over the last thousand of years. This belief, based on Christian teachings, has no material basis, but it has had material outcomes in the fact that everything has been getting better for a long time. A non-materialist belief has materialist outcomes. This unjustified belief, this set of ideas, intuitively seems right and it takes us as a civilisation in a certain direction. A good direction. Perhaps God is an idea we share, an end state that we’re implicitly aiming for in what we do. Perhaps God is the telos, a telos that becomes more refined, more good, as civilisation develops. And in developing this telos, in some ways we could say that we are building God. The Creator, created.

2. 

   4 Nov 2025

   On Kitesurfing in the Western Sahara

   A co-host discusses kitesurfing in Western Sahara, highlighting the ideal conditions, local culture, and vast wilderness, while another co-host questions life choices and explores isometric training.

3. 

   6 Oct 2025

   Notes on Attending a Football Match

   An intrepid correspondent attends a women’s football match and discovers a surprising affinity for hooliganism, understanding how the environment primes individuals for potential violence.

Podcast Authority Score: 24 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

49

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0