Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Philip Goff on Scientism, Limits of Science in Understanding Knowledge | The TRUTH Podcast #48

00:00:00.000 The scientific method is a means of accessing scientific knowledge.

00:00:11.000 What do you do in the scientific method?

00:00:13.000 You start with a hypothesis, and then you test that hypothesis through a series of experiments that either reject your prior hypothesis or in some way confirm your prior hypothesis.

00:00:23.000 That's the core of the scientific method.

00:00:25.000 What we've seen in recent years, though, is people beginning to mistake the scientific method for a different philosophy, which I will call expertism, that is different than the scientific method, which says that you have greater authority on a subject if you happen to be trained as an empirical expert in that subject.

00:00:43.000 We saw this in our country and around the world in the rise of COVID-19, the limitations on what you were able to debate, whether or not you were an expert of a particular class.

00:00:52.000 And this is interesting because, actually, the scientific method itself depends on open debate.

00:00:58.000 It depends on the inquiry of ideas, of no ideas being out of bounds.

00:01:03.000 And yet, in the name of pursuing capital S Science, We created a new culture of expertism to say that if you weren't trained in a particular domain of science, then you couldn't be challenging the hypotheses that were offered.

00:01:16.000 We see that in the modern climate change movement as well.

00:01:19.000 And I think that that's what I call a new philosophy of expertism.

00:01:23.000 Your status and your sense of authority come not from your ability to provide all countermeaning hypotheses or experiments to test them.

00:01:32.000 But instead, the authority that you have based on the number of letters that come after your name and the degrees that follow your title.

00:01:39.000 Well, that's one philosophy and one mistake that I think we've often made.

00:01:43.000 But it's not the most important one.

00:01:45.000 That's an obvious error.

00:01:46.000 I think there's a deeper error that we haven't talked about as much, which is the rise of what we might even call scientism.

00:01:53.000 Scientism is different from the scientific method.

00:01:56.000 Scientific method is one means of accessing knowledge.

00:01:59.000 Scientism refers to the framework which says that's the only means of accessing knowledge.

00:02:06.000 And I think that's a big mistake.

00:02:07.000 While science or empiricism is one way of accessing knowledge, there are many ways and many kinds of knowledge that we access in different ways.

00:02:15.000 You don't access spiritual knowledge through the use of empiricism any more than you can access empirical knowledge through, say, meditation.

00:02:23.000 Although that's an interesting point to reflect on because many of the greatest scientific discoveries actually were made through first reflection on what the hypothesis was in the first place.

00:02:34.000 Einstein didn't arrive at his theory of relativity through empirical experiments at all, actually.

00:02:40.000 Many people don't know this.

00:02:41.000 He arrived at his theory of relativity through deep consideration and meditation of his own, imagining what was possible, a different framework that rejected the Newtonian past.

00:02:52.000 And only years later was that ever confirmed through experimentation.

00:02:57.000 Even think about Galileo.

00:02:59.000 His core discovery wasn't something that was really empirically derived, but it was a different frame shift, a mind shift.

00:03:06.000 Imagine living in a world where you thought the sun and everything else in the universe revolved around the earth.

00:03:11.000 The frame shift in being able to imagine a world that was different was really how we access that knowledge.

00:03:16.000 And so even when it comes to scientific knowledge, but certainly when it comes to types of knowledge that fall outside of science, like spiritual knowledge, the scientific method of empiricism is only one of the ways that we might go about accessing that form of knowledge.

00:03:29.000 And so in that way, I think scientism, and this is an idea I've been intrigued by for a long time, scientism is really a kind of religion in its own right.

00:03:40.000 A religion often posits that its means of accessing truth or knowledge is the only means of getting there.

00:03:46.000 And yet the irony is modern secularists, modern people who think of themselves as empiricists, have fallen into the trap of believing that empiricism or empirical access through the scientific method is the only way they're going to be able to access knowledge in their own right.

00:04:01.000 And I think that makes the same kind of philosophical error that many of those empiricists think that religious scholars make or religious practitioners make.

00:04:08.000 With regard to their own religions, which is a funny full circle.

00:04:11.000 So as I've been interested in the plural ways that we access knowledge, one of the people that I wanted to talk to was a guy who's thought about these questions far more deeply than I have.

00:04:22.000 That's Professor Philip Goff.

00:04:23.000 He's with us as our guest today.

00:04:25.000 And we're going to have a deep diving discussion around how we access knowledge.

00:04:30.000 What is the core error in the philosophy of scientism?

00:04:34.000 And what are the implications for not only accessing scientific knowledge, but accessing spiritual knowledge?

00:04:40.000 And maybe even get somewhere in our conversation to a deeper and controversial discussion about the G-word, God, that we often don't get to in our everyday discourse.

00:04:52.000 So Philip, welcome to the podcast.

00:04:53.000 I've been looking forward to this conversation, an admirer of your work, and I'm glad to talk to you today.

00:04:59.000 Thanks, Vivek.

00:05:00.000 Thanks for having me on.

00:05:01.000 I'm looking forward to the conversation.

00:05:03.000 So say a word about your background just so our audience is familiar with who you are and who they're hearing from today and then we'll get into the discussion from there.

00:05:13.000 So I'm a philosophy professor at Durham University here in the cold north of England, the third oldest university after Oxford and Cambridge.

00:05:22.000 So it's very kind of Harry Potter around here.

00:05:24.000 But I spend most of my time trying to work out the ultimate nature of reality with a big focus on consciousness, which I think poses some of the deepest scientific and philosophical challenges of our time.

00:05:38.000 So I'm just spending my time wrestling with those issues, I think.

00:05:41.000 And why is consciousness important as the relevant question to investigate?

00:05:49.000 Wow, well, I mean, in a sense, consciousness is everything.

00:05:53.000 I would say consciousness is the source of everything that really matters in life, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, rich sensory experiences.

00:06:04.000 But the reason it's posed such a deep intellectual challenge is nobody knows how to fit it in to our current scientific understanding of the universe.

00:06:14.000 Despite great progress on our scientific understanding of the brain, We still lack even the beginnings of an explanation of how electrochemical signaling in the brain could somehow produce an inner world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes that each of us enjoys every second of waking life.

00:06:37.000 And we've been struggling with this for many decades.

00:06:39.000 Some people call it the hard problem of consciousness.

00:06:44.000 Because we've really got nowhere on it, some people like myself are turning perhaps to more radical options on consciousness.

00:06:51.000 What are those radical options?

00:06:53.000 Well, some people think that maybe it doesn't exist.

00:06:58.000 Maybe it's an illusion.

00:06:59.000 Maybe it's like magic or witchcraft things we don't believe in anymore.

00:07:03.000 My own view, known as panpsychism, is the view that consciousness goes down to the fundamental building blocks of reality.

00:07:12.000 That very simple fundamental particles like electrons and quarks have very, very rudimentary forms of conscious experience and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow built up from these more rudimentary forms of consciousness at the fundamental level of reality.

00:07:34.000 So it puts consciousness right down there at the fundamental level of physics and tries to build up.

00:07:41.000 That's a radical thought indeed, at least relative to our current understanding, which is broadly that you have inanimate, unconscious physical attributes like the electrons and protons and neutrons that comprise atoms.

00:07:57.000 And then there's an emergent biological consciousness in human beings and of a different kind, maybe in other biological organisms.

00:08:06.000 What is it that gives you the basis to believe, I won't even say evidence necessarily, maybe it's evidence, but the basis to believe that even something as fundamental as an atom or even subatomic particles like an electron or a proton or even a boring neutron would have consciousness in its own right?

00:08:30.000 Well, Vivek, I liked what you said about scientism at the start there.

00:08:34.000 And I think we're going through a period of history where people are so blown away by the success of physical science, quite rightly, that it leads them to think that every question can be answered with an experiment.

00:08:48.000 You know, Sam Harris famously said, even moral questions can be answered by science. 0.86

00:08:53.000 That might be the dumbest thing I've ever heard, actually. 0.88

00:08:57.000 I think it's some experiment that can tell whether the left or right of politics is correct or the correct view on abortion. 0.98

00:09:04.000 Surely these are questions that experiments might be relevant to, but you can't say, oh, scientists have discovered the pro-life position is correct or...

00:09:14.000 But even when it comes to the nature of reality, you know, there are always assumptions, worldviews in the background that are so foundational that they can't themselves be tested.

00:09:27.000 And you'd mentioned Galileo.

00:09:29.000 It's a great example.

00:09:30.000 We think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which of course he was, but he was also a radical philosopher.

00:09:38.000 So what Galileo wanted in the 17th century, we call him the father of modern science, He wanted, for the first time in history, science to be purely mathematical, right?

00:09:49.000 Something we take for granted now.

00:09:51.000 This was a radical innovation.

00:09:53.000 But there was a problem.

00:09:55.000 Galileo appreciated that you can't capture the qualities of conscious experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells and the tastes in the purely quantitative language of mathematics.

00:10:09.000 An equation can't capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun.

00:10:17.000 So Galileo thought, right, what am I going to do about this?

00:10:18.000 How can I deal with these qualities?

00:10:20.000 He thought, right, I'm going to propose a radical new philosophical worldview.

00:10:25.000 This wasn't something proven with an experiment.

00:10:28.000 He just said, this is what we're going to do.

00:10:30.000 We're going to say consciousness and all its qualities, the colors, the sounds, the smells and the taste.

00:10:36.000 That's outside of the physical world.

00:10:38.000 That's outside of science.

00:10:39.000 That's in the soul.

00:10:40.000 That's just a different story.

00:10:41.000 And once he'd done that, once he'd stripped away the qualities of consciousness, everything else could be described with mathematics.

00:10:49.000 And this was the start of mathematical physics.

00:10:53.000 Now, that has gone incredibly well for the past 400 years, years.

00:10:58.000 But we've forgotten that it was all premised on this dividing up of nature with the mathematical world of physics and science on the one hand and the qualities of consciousness in the soul outside of science.

00:11:13.000 And now, you know, physical science has gone so well and produced incredible technology.

00:11:17.000 People think, oh, well, that's the full story.

00:11:20.000 It's going to explain consciousness.

00:11:22.000 Well, no, the irony is...

00:11:24.000 The whole project was premised on designing science to exclude consciousness, to set it outside of the domain of physical science.

00:11:33.000 And so if we now want to bring consciousness back into the scientific story, I think we need to rethink that worldview that Galileo bequeathed to us.

00:11:44.000 We need to bring together those two domains that Galileo separated.

00:11:50.000 And I think panpsychism gives us a way of doing that.

00:11:52.000 A question for you is, even if we separated that question of consciousness from the rest of truth that we could access through mathematics, the bifurcation that Galileo conceived,

00:12:09.000 is there a role for at least describing I think?

00:12:33.000 As a tool of inquiry, does that give us at least insight into understanding consciousness that we otherwise may not have had?

00:12:40.000 Or is it really a different mode of knowledge and understanding that must be accessed entirely independent of the tools of mathematics and science?

00:12:50.000 No, that's a good point.

00:12:52.000 I certainly don't want to say that science isn't important.

00:12:56.000 And, you know, in my book, Galileo's Era, it's called, the subtitle is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.

00:13:03.000 This is about bringing the philosophy and the science together to work hand in glove.

00:13:09.000 So I think, you know, the scientific task for consciousness is to work out which kinds of brain activity Go along with which kinds of experience?

00:13:20.000 And this is already a very difficult project, but if you can scan people's brains and you can ask them what they're feeling and experiencing, we can start to map these together and hopefully map in general which kinds of brain activity go along with consciousness in general.

00:13:37.000 But that isn't the only task we want from a theory of consciousness.

00:13:42.000 Ultimately, we want an explanation of why.

00:13:45.000 Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with consciousness?

00:13:51.000 Why should consciousness and brain activity have anything to do with each other?

00:13:55.000 And that's, I think, where we need to turn to the philosophy, because there are various philosophical possibilities here.

00:14:03.000 Some people think the physical universe is fundamental and consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain.

00:14:13.000 Other people, like myself, turn that upside down and think, no, it's consciousness that's fundamental.

00:14:21.000 And the physical universe emerges from some more fundamental story about consciousness.

00:14:27.000 Now, these two rival worldviews, physicalism we call the conventional scientific story, panpsychism is the view I defend, they're so foundational.

00:14:38.000 You can't distinguish between them with an experiment.

00:14:41.000 They're sort of internally consistent stories.

00:14:44.000 And so for any scientific data, each of these worldviews will just interpret that data on their own terms.

00:14:51.000 And you know, this makes people very nervous.

00:14:53.000 Like, what can we do if we can't answer with an experiment?

00:14:57.000 But we have to remember...

00:15:00.000 The role of philosophy.

00:15:01.000 I think philosophy does give us the tools for asking ethical questions, political questions, but also evaluating these different theories of reality, these different fundamental theories of reality.

00:15:14.000 Maybe I could give you just a quick example, going back again to Galileo.

00:15:19.000 One of the brilliant things Galileo showed us is that Aristotle was wrong.

00:15:25.000 Right.

00:15:25.000 Before the scientific revolution, the thought of Aristotle dominated for hundreds of years.

00:15:26.000 Before the scientific revolution, the thought of Aristotle dominated for hundreds of years.

00:15:31.000 And Aristotle believed, and this is kind of common sense, that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects.

00:15:39.000 Right.

00:15:39.000 That's kind of common sense.

00:15:40.000 That's kind of common sense.

00:15:41.000 You think a lead ball is going to fall faster than, you know, something really light.

00:15:41.000 You think, yeah, a lead ball is going to fall faster than, you know, something really light.

00:15:45.000 Galileo proved that was false.

00:15:47.000 And we have this myth that he went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped a lead ball and a feather.

00:15:52.000 Most historians think that didn't actually happen and he didn't need to experimentally prove it.

00:15:57.000 Galileo showed that if you really think carefully, and I'm not going to tell you the details now.

00:16:04.000 You can look at my book, Galileo's Arrow, the audience.

00:16:07.000 But he showed if you really think through carefully that idea that heavier objects fall faster, this idea that people had believed for thousands of years, It doesn't make sense.

00:16:17.000 It's actually internally contradictory.

00:16:20.000 So this was a genius bit of philosophy.

00:16:22.000 And this is what philosophers are skilled in, to really think through the logical details of a theory.

00:16:29.000 And sometimes we can show, actually, when you really think it through, it doesn't make sense.

00:16:32.000 I actually think that's actually true of our current scientific view that consciousness emerges from physical processes in the brain.

00:16:40.000 I think when you really think through the details, You can see, actually, as Galileo appreciated, it just doesn't make coherent sense.

00:16:48.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:16:51.000 Do you believe that certain people are endowed with the capacity to do that?

00:16:58.000 Versus others who are not.

00:17:00.000 I mean, they think that how much of this is accessible to most ordinary human beings?

00:17:06.000 I mean, Galileo, Einstein, maybe yourself, are rarer human beings that may have a different mode of accessing knowledge versus ordinary human beings where you may...

00:17:23.000 I wonder if we're talking past each other to say that it's like teaching someone like an average person off the street, go do slam dunks.

00:17:31.000 And he's like, oh, Michael Jordan can do slam dunks, but you just don't have the capacity to do the slam dunks.

00:17:36.000 That doesn't mean that you can't Engage in a wide variety of worthy activities that allow you to enjoy basketball, that allow you to play basketball, but you can't go do the slam dunk.

00:17:46.000 It's like you're just missing that in your toolkit.

00:17:48.000 How much do you think that's actually what's going on here as well as maybe a differential in the difference in innate capacities that certain people have for philosophy versus just having a different toolkit available to them, which is empiricism, that they otherwise resort to as a second best?

00:18:05.000 Yeah, and I definitely wouldn't want to be elitist or...

00:18:08.000 I don't think it's elitist at all.

00:18:10.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:18:11.000 I mean, the point is, it's not a value judgment.

00:18:13.000 I'm saying that that one is better.

00:18:14.000 I'm not saying that your Galileo Einstein is better than anybody else.

00:18:17.000 But I'm saying that it just is a capacity question.

00:18:20.000 Absolutely.

00:18:21.000 I think there are different skills, aren't there?

00:18:23.000 There is the skills of the great mathematician.

00:18:25.000 I'm not particularly good at mathematics myself.

00:18:29.000 Or the skills of the experimental scientist.

00:18:33.000 And I think philosophy is a unique skill in its own right.

00:18:38.000 With philosophy, we are thinking about real things like consciousness or knowledge or morality.

00:18:47.000 But we're thinking of them in a very abstract way.

00:18:51.000 We're trying to pin down the essential core of these things.

00:18:57.000 And to do that, we might have these funny thought experiments.

00:19:01.000 I mean, like the one Galileo had to prove...

00:19:05.000 prove Aristotle was wrong.

00:19:06.000 We think of them in these weird sci-fi thought experiments.

00:19:09.000 But the reason we're doing that is we're trying to sort of shock ourselves out of our ordinary assumptions about consciousness or knowledge or morality, just pinning down, you know, what is the core of these things?

00:19:21.000 And that is something that is quite hard to do.

00:19:24.000 It's something that I'm not good at a lot of things, but I think I've always found that kind of intuitive, But it's also something you can get better at.

00:19:34.000 You know, you can get better at the logical structure of arguments, mistakes in reasoning.

00:19:40.000 That's something that's quite objective, actually.

00:19:43.000 We can identify what we call fallacies, errors in reasoning.

00:19:47.000 And these are what you can learn as you take a philosophy degree.

00:19:51.000 So there are a lot of objective skills here.

00:19:54.000 Obviously, there's so much controversy and disagreement in philosophy.

00:19:58.000 But yeah, to an extent it's aptitude, to an extent these are skills you can hone.

00:20:02.000 Plato, in one of his dialogues, had this famous section where he taught a slave boy to do mathematics, and this was supposed to show, you know, we've got these inherent skills that you can train up, even in the common man.

00:20:16.000 But yeah, I think it's a mix.

00:20:18.000 Like anything, I think it's a mix.

00:20:19.000 Yeah, it's a mix.

00:20:20.000 You know, it's...

00:20:21.000 Interesting when we think about the plural modes to accessing, you know, knowledge.

00:20:27.000 And, you know, there may be different frameworks that are not compatible to be tested by experimentation, right?

00:20:33.000 Does consciousness precede, you know, the physical universe or is consciousness emergent from physical attributes?

00:20:43.000 You could say a parallel question that different philosophers maybe tangle with is the question of time, right?

00:20:48.000 Does time move as we sometimes may think of ourselves experiencing it?

00:20:53.000 Or is time actually in some sense static and we're just moving through it?

00:20:58.000 I think that that's where many philosophers of time have landed today.

00:21:04.000 And that's, I think, different from the question of You know, whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun revolves around the earth, but in either case, it requires a frame shift in your thinking.

00:21:15.000 So if you have one realm of accessing these questions, which is through empiricism, one is through logical, philosophical reflection.

00:21:24.000 Just for a second, like, what are the other sort of roads?

00:21:27.000 What are the different other forms of off-road driving here?

00:21:30.000 Is meditation one of those forms?

00:21:32.000 Is sort of sensation the ability to Understand your most immediately lived experience.

00:21:40.000 This is what certain sort of sage types might say in Eastern philosophy.

00:21:46.000 Maybe that's on the menu, which is different than the experience of just sensing your presence of what you experience now.

00:21:52.000 That's different from logical orientation, which is different from empiricism through the scientific method.

00:21:58.000 What does that full menu set look like in terms of how broad that That the roads are for us to access knowledge, in your view.

00:22:08.000 Absolutely.

00:22:09.000 And just on the question of time, you know, many people think Einstein's theory of relativity has these strange implications about time, that there's no privileged present moment and past, present and future are all equally real.

00:22:25.000 But actually, and this connects with what you said in your intro, Einstein, for his special theory of relativity in 1905, the equations, the mathematics, was taken from someone else, Lorentz.

00:22:39.000 And Einstein's spin on it, again, did not make an observational difference.

00:22:44.000 You couldn't distinguish Einstein's special relativity.

00:22:49.000 Which had all these weird implications about time, from the view of Lorentz that preceded it, which was the more commonsensical view of time.

00:22:58.000 These were, in terms of experiments, were equivalent.

00:23:01.000 But what Einstein brought was a beautiful unity and simplicity.

00:23:07.000 And I think the scientific community almost universally went with Einstein.

00:23:12.000 It was more counter to common sense, but it had this beautiful simplicity and unity.

00:23:17.000 So that's one example where it's not just about experiments.

00:23:20.000 It's about the inherent beauty, almost, of the theory that influences how physicists think about these things.

00:23:28.000 But I think you're right.

00:23:29.000 What I'm so passionate about consciousness, I think...

00:23:35.000 Here's another way to see why it's not just about experiments, right?

00:23:39.000 There's something else we know about reality, totally independent of experiments, and that is the reality of conscious experience.

00:23:48.000 The existence of feelings and smells and tastes.

00:23:52.000 This is not something you learn about down a particle collider.

00:23:56.000 You know it just by being conscious and exploring the richness of your own conscious experience.

00:24:04.000 So it's not from experiments, but it's real.

00:24:06.000 And it needs to be factored into our theory of reality.

00:24:09.000 Galileo put it outside of science so we could focus on what we can capture in mathematics.

00:24:14.000 But if we want a full story of reality, we need to accommodate not just what experiments are telling us, but also the rich reality of conscious experience.

00:24:23.000 Now, moving on to a slightly different point, which maybe you were hinting at, some people in certain Maybe after a long meditation, maybe with great creative leaps, maybe after taking certain substances.

00:24:38.000 People have these experiences which seem to tell them more about reality than we have access to with ordinary consciousness.

00:24:49.000 We call these mystical experiences.

00:24:52.000 Still probably the best text on mystical experiences, apart from my own book, Why the Purpose of the Universe.

00:24:58.000 But the classic text is...

00:25:01.000 William James's varieties of religious experience, the wonderful 19th century psychologist and philosopher.

00:25:07.000 And this was a wonderful categorization of these experiences that seem to be telling us there's more to reality than we ordinarily grasp.

00:25:17.000 But at the end of this sort of psychological taxonomy, James said, is it okay for the mystic to trust these experiences?

00:25:27.000 They seem to be telling us, let's say, that reality is deeply interconnected, that we are all one in some sense, that there is an ineffable higher core of consciousness to reality.

00:25:43.000 Would it be rational for a mystical to trust that reality really is as these experiences seem to purport?

00:25:50.000 Or should the mystic just think, no, there's just something funny going on in my brain, I'm hallucinating.

00:25:56.000 And James said something interesting.

00:25:58.000 He said, well, if you say no You're sort of appealing to a double standard.

00:26:04.000 Because we all think it's okay to trust what ordinary experience seems to tell you about reality.

00:26:09.000 You know, my senses seem to tell me there's a Batman cup here, but I can't get outside of my consciousness to check.

00:26:17.000 Maybe I'm in the Matrix.

00:26:18.000 Maybe this is all a big dream and I'm about to wake up.

00:26:21.000 But we think it's okay to trust what our senses seem to be telling us.

00:26:24.000 So if it's okay to trust ordinary experience, what that seems to be telling us about reality...

00:26:30.000 But it's not okay for the mystic to trust mystical experiences.

00:26:34.000 There's a sort of double standard here.

00:26:36.000 You know, all knowledge is rooted in just a leap of faith in a way, a decision to trust experience.

00:26:42.000 Why is it okay in the one case and not the other, especially as many mystics claim that The mystical experience, if anything, seems more real even after it's finished than ordinary sensory experiences.

00:26:54.000 So I think these are deep and puzzling questions that I wrestle with in my more recent book, Why the Purpose of the Universe.

00:27:00.000 Mm-hmm.

00:27:01.000 And what is the purpose of the universe in your book and its thesis?

00:27:07.000 Let's go straight to it, the biggest question of all.

00:27:10.000 Well, yeah, I mean, I think so many people in the West think you have to fit into one of these categories, you know.

00:27:16.000 Either you believe in the God of traditional Western religion, or you're a secular atheist.

00:27:22.000 You know, it's like, whose side are you on?

00:27:23.000 Richard Dawkins or the Pope?

00:27:25.000 Make your mind up, you know.

00:27:26.000 And I mean, I was raised Catholic.

00:27:29.000 I decided I was an atheist at 14. I was quite happily on team secular atheist for 20 years or more.

00:27:37.000 But through my philosophical research, through my many conversations with leading scientists and neuroscientists, I've just come to think that both of these worldviews are inadequate.

00:27:50.000 Both of them have things they can't explain about reality.

00:27:54.000 And where I think the evidence is pointing now is What I call cosmic purpose, that the universe itself has some kind of purpose or directionality, but not one that's imposed by a supernatural designer, one that's just inherent to the universe itself.

00:28:14.000 Can I just pause you there?

00:28:15.000 I think it's fascinating, but I think it's interesting that even you use the language the evidence points to.

00:28:22.000 Why does it matter that the evidence points to that?

00:28:26.000 Because I think part of what you rejected was the idea that that had to be the only method of validation in the first place.

00:28:33.000 Maybe two points.

00:28:35.000 Maybe one is, you know, I would like to have a broad conception of what evidence is, right?

00:28:40.000 Okay.

00:28:40.000 So it's not just public experiments.

00:28:44.000 It's also the reality of our own consciousness, the reality of my pain when I feel pain.

00:28:50.000 Maybe the reality...

00:28:52.000 The mystical experience itself and what it seems to be telling can be taken as basic data.

00:28:57.000 But also, I would say, yes, I reject scientism.

00:29:02.000 I think that's many ways the religion of our time.

00:29:04.000 But still, science is important.

00:29:07.000 And we want to try and respect the evidence, right?

00:29:10.000 We want our theories to try and respect the evidence.

00:29:12.000 And I think, ironically...

00:29:15.000 Our current scientific evidence is in tension with our current scientific worldview.

00:29:24.000 It's a little bit like in the 16th century, going back a century earlier than Galileo now.

00:29:31.000 We started to get evidence that, you know, we're not in the center of the universe.

00:29:35.000 And people struggled to accept that because, you know, it didn't fit with the picture of reality they'd been used to for so long.

00:29:42.000 And nowadays we tend to scoff at those people. 1.00

00:29:44.000 Oh, those stupid religious people. 1.00

00:29:46.000 Why didn't they just follow the evidence? 1.00

00:29:47.000 But I think every generation absorbs a worldview it can't see beyond.

00:29:52.000 Now, I think we've got so used to this idea that science has ruled out purpose. 0.86

00:29:57.000 And that's just silly nonsense.

00:30:00.000 That we're ignoring that current uncontroversial physics, I think, in our normal ways of thinking about evidence, points to some kind of cosmic purpose.

00:30:11.000 And as a society, we're sort of in denial about that.

00:30:14.000 I think future historians looking back will think, why do people ignore this for so long?

00:30:18.000 But yeah.

00:30:19.000 As we always have, right?

00:30:21.000 Yeah.

00:30:22.000 And so what would be one of those pieces of evidence that you think is discordant with otherwise our accepted understanding of the universe today, like as sitting from the present?

00:30:34.000 That could be fascinating to hear.

00:30:36.000 Yeah, I mean, well, I think there are two big things that don't fit in our current scientific paradigm.

00:30:41.000 One, we've already talked about is consciousness.

00:30:43.000 But the other, which I focus on more in my book, Why the Purpose of the Universe, is the fine-tuning of physics for life.

00:30:52.000 This surprising discovery of recent decades that...

00:30:57.000 Many numbers in physics are, like Goldilocks porridge, just right for life.

00:31:04.000 You know, not too big, not too small, just right.

00:31:06.000 The example that's most perplexed cosmologists revolves around dark energy.

00:31:12.000 This is the force that propels the accelerating expansion of the universe.

00:31:18.000 And once we do the calculations, it becomes clear that if that force had been just a little bit stronger Everything would have shot apart so quickly after the Big Bang.

00:31:30.000 No two particles would have ever met.

00:31:33.000 We wouldn't have had stars, planets, any kind of complexity at all.

00:31:38.000 Whereas if that force had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity and everything would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the Big Bang.

00:31:47.000 So for life to be possible...

00:31:49.000 That number had to be just right.

00:31:52.000 And on the face of it, when you do the calculation, that's just one number.

00:31:55.000 There are many, many.

00:31:56.000 When you do the calculations, it's just astronomically improbable that you'd get the right numbers by chance.

00:32:04.000 And so I think in our normal ways of thinking about this, this is evidence for some kind of It's directedness towards life in the very early universe.

00:32:15.000 Now, some people point to God.

00:32:16.000 I've got problems with God as well.

00:32:18.000 But I don't think we need to go there.

00:32:20.000 But I think we need to just put aside our biases, both religious and secular, and follow the evidence where it's leading.

00:32:27.000 Let me just, for the fun of it, maybe put pressure on that from both directions.

00:32:34.000 We'll start from the pure secular version and then we'll start, we'll then move to putting pressure on the other direction from the supernatural version or the God version.

00:32:45.000 Let's take the first.

00:32:47.000 That's really interesting, right?

00:32:48.000 The exact magnitude of dark energy, had it actually been any greater, would have never resulted in the creation of the universe anyway.

00:32:56.000 I think that you might anticipate this.

00:32:59.000 The counterargument to that from the pure secular atheist angle would be, because the pure secular or pure secular alternative angle would be, Well, there's a probability distribution, and all of those other universes did not come into existence, and this is the only one that did.

00:33:16.000 And so you're using a preservation bias as a way of assuming that's all that ever existed, where on your own theory, all of those other universes would not have existed.

00:33:26.000 So the one that did, you can't draw the conclusion of purpose in that universe if it was just one universe and a probability distribution of universes 99 out of the 100 of which, by hypothesis, would not have existed in the first place, and that this one did is just an artifact of confirmation bias.

00:33:43.000 You see what I'm saying there?

00:33:44.000 Excellent.

00:33:44.000 Yeah, that's a very good, very good point.

00:33:46.000 And so this sounds like the...

00:33:49.000 So I think many scientists and philosophers are a little bit in denial about this, but not all.

00:33:54.000 Many do take this seriously, do think this obviously needs explaining.

00:33:57.000 And the most popular explanation among scientists and philosophers probably is the multiverse hypothesis.

00:34:05.000 So the idea is maybe the universe we see is just one of trillions and trillions, maybe an infinite number with different numbers in their physics.

00:34:15.000 So if you've got enough universes with different numbers, one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life.

00:34:20.000 It's like if enough people...

00:34:23.000 Play the lottery, one's going to fluke the right numbers.

00:34:25.000 And I used to accept this myself for a long time.

00:34:29.000 You know, I've always thought the fine-tuning of Physics for Life needed explaining, but I thought that looked the more sensible explanation.

00:34:36.000 But I've slowly been persuaded, just when I started teaching this stuff, actually, that there's some dodgy reasoning going on in this inference.

00:34:49.000 That it commits what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy.

00:34:54.000 That there's actually...

00:34:54.000 We talked before about errors in reasoning, logical fallacies, and philosophers of probability have identified that there's actually a logical fallacy in trying to explain fine-tuning in terms of the multiverse.

00:35:07.000 Shall I give you a quick analogy to try and...

00:35:09.000 Yeah, please.

00:35:11.000 Obviously, there's a complex debate here, but...

00:35:14.000 You can get into it with a useful analogy.

00:35:18.000 Just so you're responding to the core point, I'll give it in a layperson's term here, right?

00:35:23.000 And then you can maybe respond to it in the more philosophical term.

00:35:27.000 The layperson's term, since you brought up the gambler, would be, okay, well, if you play roulette 32 times and you pick the one time that you won, but you only examine that time that you won and say there had to be a purpose here.

00:35:40.000 The purpose was for me to win when, in fact, you played 32 other times that you lost.

00:35:44.000 It's the equivalent of the universe, not just for life coming to existence, but other universes having blown themselves out of existence in the multiverse hypothesis.

00:35:51.000 What is the logical?

00:35:52.000 That's the logical error that I would be accusing you of if I don't have this.

00:35:56.000 I'm inhabiting this view.

00:35:57.000 So what is the logical error that you would ascribe in reverse?

00:36:00.000 Good.

00:36:01.000 So let me give you another casino analogy, right?

00:36:04.000 Another gambling analogy.

00:36:05.000 And this is related to...

00:36:07.000 People might have heard of the regular gambler's fallacy, like when you've been playing all night and you've had terrible luck and you think, oh, I'm bound to have good luck this time.

00:36:15.000 I'm due some luck.

00:36:17.000 And everyone agrees that's bad reasoning because every roll of the dice, the odds are the same, whether you've just started or you've been playing all night.

00:36:26.000 Anyway...

00:36:27.000 Let me give you another casino analogy.

00:36:30.000 Suppose, Vivek, you and I go to a casino this evening, maybe in London, and we walk in, and the first person, we go in, there's a small room, and we just see one guy in this room having an incredible run of luck.

00:36:44.000 He's just winning and winning and winning.

00:36:47.000 And I turn to you and I say, wow, the casino must be full tonight.

00:36:52.000 And you say, Philip, what are you talking about?

00:36:54.000 We've just seen this one person.

00:36:57.000 What's the rest of the casino got to do?

00:36:58.000 And I reason, well, if there are tens of thousands of people playing in the casino tonight, then, you know, it's not so surprising that somebody is going to win big.

00:37:09.000 And that's just what we've observed.

00:37:11.000 Somebody winning big.

00:37:12.000 Now, everyone agrees that's bad reasoning.

00:37:15.000 That's the inverse gambler's fallacy.

00:37:17.000 Because our observational evidence is just this one particular individual playing well.

00:37:23.000 And no matter how many people there are elsewhere in the casino, that has no relevance to the likelihood of this one person playing well.

00:37:31.000 So that's bad reasoning.

00:37:32.000 But it looks like the multiverse theorist is making strikingly similar reasoning, right?

00:37:40.000 They start observing our universe and they think...

00:37:43.000 Oh my God, it got the right numbers for life against incredible odds.

00:37:46.000 There must be loads of other universes with terrible numbers.

00:37:49.000 Well, that looks like exactly the same reasoning.

00:37:51.000 Our observational evidence is just this one universe we've observed.

00:37:55.000 No matter how many other universes there are out there, have no bearing on how likely it is that our universe, the only one we've ever observed.

00:38:02.000 So marshalling some element of empiricism to sort of Or not necessarily empiricism itself, but the value of empiricism to say that actually it would be the less plausible of hypotheses to say that there are these multiple other universes that have never been observed versus at least going with the most parsimonious version as here's the one we have, which at least allows us to draw a greater inference of purpose rather than Stochasticity amongst universes as their basis for explaining this one.

00:38:32.000 And I find that persuasive, by the way.

00:38:34.000 So I say that to offer maybe a different version of what neither you or I believe to put pressure on.

00:38:40.000 Let me put pressure on you from another direction that I do believe in, though, which may be different from yours, is why is it important to you to make sure that that purpose is divorced from the invocation of God?

00:38:57.000 You went out of your way in your description of it.

00:38:59.000 It's almost as though you caveated it.

00:39:02.000 I'm just playing around with you a little bit, but an inverse Catholic impulse of you have a guilt if you did bring God into it that you have to flog yourself and have to caveat it so many times to say, yes, there is this great purpose, but it's different from saying there's God.

00:39:14.000 Don't accuse me of saying there's God, but there is this purpose.

00:39:18.000 What is it?

00:39:19.000 About your observation or reflection that makes that exclusion so important to state, just even as a priority, versus leaving the possibility of it open.

00:39:32.000 Tell me about that, because that's interesting to me.

00:39:34.000 That's a very good question, because I do think...

00:39:39.000 We need to be alert to these biases and prejudices.

00:39:42.000 I feel as someone raised in intellectual circles in the West, we're very well trained to be alert to religious biases, but we're not very well trained to be alert to secular biases.

00:39:55.000 Yes, totally.

00:39:58.000 I find it hard, to be honest, standing up in front of my peers and defending panpsychism and cosmic purpose, because it feels silly in the intellectual circles I swim in.

00:40:09.000 So we do need to be...

00:40:11.000 But, you know, eventually I just decided, well, look, this is where I think the arguments and the evidence are pointing to, and I've got to be honest with myself.

00:40:18.000 But likewise, yeah, you're right to question, is this just a prejudice against God or something?

00:40:23.000 The UK is very, very secular.

00:40:28.000 Well, I do think there are a couple of issues I have with God, although I'm, you know, very open minded on all of these topics.

00:40:37.000 I mean, one is the classic problem of reconciling an all loving, all powerful God with the terrible pain and suffering we find in the world.

00:40:49.000 In the human case, maybe Believers in God point to free will, and maybe that can do some work.

00:40:56.000 But what about the terrible suffering we find in the animal world?

00:41:00.000 What about the short-tailed North American shrew which paralyzes its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it eventually dies from its wounds?

00:41:13.000 Why would a loving or powerful God choose to bring that into existence?

00:41:18.000 So I do have that worry.

00:41:21.000 Can I ask a question about that?

00:41:23.000 Yeah, we could go with that.

00:41:25.000 Why, if such God was all-powerful and you recognized yourself as not that God, would you have the capacity to second-guess that existence?

00:41:44.000 That's a very good question.

00:41:45.000 And one I go into in some detail in my book, I think, and I'd invite people who go for the multiverse or go for God to dig into the book.

00:41:56.000 Actually, well, I should say that the book is aimed at both a general audience and an academic audience.

00:42:02.000 So each chapter has a more accessible introduction and then a digging deeper section where I try to get into all of these topics.

00:42:10.000 Cover almost every objection.

00:42:11.000 That's what philosophers want to do.

00:42:13.000 You want to cover every possible objection.

00:42:15.000 So if you've got a good objection, probably it's there in the book.

00:42:18.000 But actually, I think probably the cutting edge of the philosophical discussion of this is a position called skeptical theism, which says we have no idea why God allows suffering.

00:42:37.000 But, you know, we shouldn't expect to.

00:42:39.000 We're not God.

00:42:40.000 Like, we could give an analogy.

00:42:42.000 Suppose you're a first-year physics student, undergraduate, and you don't understand, you know, some equation.

00:42:49.000 You don't understand in a textbook.

00:42:51.000 You don't understand some move in the reasoning.

00:42:53.000 And you think, oh, well, I can't see the reason for that.

00:42:57.000 So it must be wrong, right?

00:42:59.000 That would be crazy, right?

00:43:01.000 That's right.

00:43:01.000 You're not a physics expert.

00:43:03.000 So...

00:43:04.000 I'm pretty sure most of us make that mistake all the time.

00:43:06.000 I do, I'm sure.

00:43:08.000 Human nature, I think we're God.

00:43:11.000 But yeah, God is so much better, you know, cognitively, if God exists, cognitively greater than me.

00:43:18.000 How could I expect to understand God's reasons for creating the universe?

00:43:22.000 The story of Job in the Bible, I think, expresses that very well.

00:43:27.000 What is my response to this?

00:43:28.000 You know, it's a very interesting argument, but I suppose ultimately I think All we can do is work with the evidence, in a broad sense of evidence, and the arguments we currently have.

00:43:43.000 If God exists, then Who am I? God is greater than me and God must have some reason I don't understand for creating the short-tailed.

00:43:54.000 I never remember if it's long-tailed or short-tailed.

00:43:56.000 Anyway, North American, true.

00:43:58.000 But when in a position of uncertainty, and I'm always in my work about emphasizing uncertainty, the importance of embracing how uncertain life is, and I'm trying to work out whether God exists or Then all I can do is work with my understanding of morality and try and make the best guess I can.

00:44:19.000 I mean, you know, take an analogy, scientists now tell us, what is it, 80-90% of the universe is dark matter and energy that we don't understand at all?

00:44:28.000 So does that mean we should stop doing physics?

00:44:31.000 No, we try the best with the evidence we've got.

00:44:34.000 So I think I try with the moral understanding, not just me, but...

00:44:38.000 Great moral thinkers have to try and work out, would a God create a universe like this?

00:44:44.000 And that leads me to have some doubts about the existence of God and at least explore other ways.

00:44:53.000 I think, as I say, people think it's either God or it's atheism, you know?

00:44:57.000 It's at least interesting and important to explore different ways of different worldviews, lay all the Positions on the table.

00:45:07.000 Let's see what comes out of it.

00:45:09.000 Other ways of making sense of purpose and directionality in the universe and the meaning of existence.

00:45:15.000 Can I... Maybe ask...

00:45:18.000 It's a slightly different...

00:45:20.000 Level of question here.

00:45:22.000 The order of what I'm concerned with in this question is different than what we've been talking about so far, which is exclusively in the realm of truth, right?

00:45:29.000 So far we're talking about what is true.

00:45:31.000 The question I'm about to ask is one about your opinion about practicality.

00:45:37.000 So do you believe that our world or our nation would be better off, or children in their upbringing would be better off If we at least parsimoniously described the other purpose of the universe in the language of God, actually.

00:46:02.000 Like, do you think that that would just be strictly better?

00:46:05.000 Where your concern is purely a exploration in terms of what is true.

00:46:10.000 And that's interesting and we could debate that one, you know, in the remaining minutes as people have for centuries and not resolve it amongst themselves.

00:46:19.000 Take for a second just the mantle of practicality for the betterment of the world, or since you seem to care about the reduction of suffering, because that was by hypothesis one of the reasons why you questioned the existence of God, would there be less discord or suffering if we did just use as a shorthand God as a fill-in for the For the account of purpose.

00:46:43.000 And we have thousands of years of human history suggesting to us that human beings can access that more easily than a novel theory of panpsychism.

00:46:52.000 What's your response to that?

00:46:53.000 I'd just be curious if you think that the practicality of it might actually weigh in favor of, let's say, I don't know if you have children, but if you did have children, could there be a case for bringing them up?

00:47:06.000 In the way your parents brought you up, right?

00:47:08.000 Against the backdrop of God accounting for that which can't be explained through empirical science just because that is more likely to get close to where the truth is anyway and still have a more cohesive Does that make sense as a question?

00:47:27.000 It does.

00:47:28.000 It very much does.

00:47:29.000 And it's another part of challenging scientism, I suppose, isn't it?

00:47:35.000 That we need to believe in God, right?

00:47:38.000 But that we sort of have a need to believe in God.

00:47:41.000 And so that human need to believe in God itself is a worthy reality to take into account in deciding whether or not God exists.

00:47:51.000 Yeah, we do need to think about we only live once.

00:47:55.000 Things are very uncertain.

00:47:57.000 I think it can be rational for the pragmatic considerations to come to play here.

00:48:03.000 I've already mentioned the great William James.

00:48:06.000 Another aspect of his work Was that he argued that in certain situations of uncertainty, it can be rational to choose to believe.

00:48:17.000 He gave an analogy, you're lost in a mountain and there's a huge chasm And you've got to leap over it.

00:48:25.000 And you don't know if you're going to make it.

00:48:28.000 Maybe the evidence makes it look like you probably won't.

00:48:31.000 But he says in this situation of uncertainty, it can be rational to choose to believe you're going to make it.

00:48:37.000 And that would make it more likely that you do.

00:48:40.000 Likewise, he argued, if there's no overwhelming case for either God or atheism, and it's going to...

00:48:48.000 It can monumentally be of great importance in your life.

00:48:51.000 It can be rational to choose to believe.

00:48:54.000 Another thing I explore in my work is...

00:48:57.000 So most of my book is this kind of cold-blooded scientific philosophical case.

00:49:02.000 But the first and last chapters do bring in the questions of what this means for human existence, human meaning and purpose.

00:49:10.000 And one thing I delve into is...

00:49:14.000 Engaging with traditional religion as a profound metaphor rather than a literal truth.

00:49:22.000 You know, I mean, I am, despite not being a Catholic believer anymore, I am still profoundly moved by the beautiful symbolism of Christianity, the wonderful inversion of worldly values, the first shall be last, the last shall be first, That's the emphasis on the poor and the weak that has so transformed Western civilization. 0.84

00:49:42.000 And so I do, to an extent, engage with traditional religion.

00:49:47.000 And like my like my children, my two little girls having some sort of symbolic way of relating to value and relating to something greater than themselves.

00:50:00.000 You know, we're not purely intellectual beings.

00:50:04.000 We need symbols and traditions that bind people together across space and time and mark the seasons and the big moments of life, birth, marriage, death, coming of age.

00:50:16.000 So yes, I do think this is important.

00:50:18.000 We're not robots.

00:50:20.000 I think that's actually one of the unexplored precepts of Christianity, actually, is what we just talked about.

00:50:30.000 On one telling of it, and I... I'm a Hindu, but I've been educated in Christian school and philosophy, and I am deeply fascinated by, say, the connection between the Old Testament, where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and God didn't make him follow through with that sacrifice.

00:50:50.000 But when he comes back in the New Testament, it's kind of a circular reference where God did sacrifice his own son because Humanity of sinners needed that sacrifice in order to see that sacrifice to believe in God.

00:51:10.000 So in a certain sense, it was God's own sacrifice of his son and his love of the people that gave him the need to sacrifice his son so that the people could fulfill their own need to actually have a belief in God itself.

00:51:25.000 And that sort of is a parallel to the conversation we just had is that you...

00:51:30.000 We have a human need to believe in something greater than ourselves.

00:51:33.000 And I think part of the essential Christian theology is God's recognition of our human need to believe in something greater than ourselves, but to be able to be called to do it.

00:51:44.000 That's why he sacrificed his son, Jesus Christ.

00:51:47.000 And I think that in some sense, acknowledging that isn't incompatible with religion so much as it is, let's say in this case, Christian religion is actually compatible.

00:52:00.000 With everything that you've described as your view of panpsychism.

00:52:04.000 What do you think of that?

00:52:06.000 Yeah, that's very interesting.

00:52:08.000 And, you know, different people will have different views.

00:52:10.000 Some people may, some Christians or people of other faiths maybe think, no, it's very important to believe the official beliefs.

00:52:19.000 And, you know, I hope my work has changed.

00:52:24.000 Positive reinforcement and challenges for both traditional religion, people of traditional religions and traditional atheists, if you could say that.

00:52:33.000 I think it does, yeah.

00:52:34.000 But also, I mean, I'm connected to the Church of England, which is often more flexible in its belief, often brings people together with ritual and symbolism and value and leaves people to interpret Yeah,

00:52:59.000 doing all the rituals, but really you think it's cosmic purpose rather than God in the traditional sense.

00:53:06.000 It depends what church you go to.

00:53:09.000 You know, I think one should be sensitive to what is required in a particular church or mosque or temple or what have you.

00:53:18.000 But yeah, I mean, I don't think people should be afraid to explore these options and it might sort of open more people up to different ways of doing things.

00:53:28.000 I think humans so often get stuck in the dichotomies, don't they?

00:53:31.000 Right.

00:53:32.000 You know, science or supernatural, you know, God or atheism, you know, all of these dichotomies and there's often a richer spectrum in between and I love getting all the options on the table.

00:53:47.000 So how much of this is really just a problem of language, right?

00:53:52.000 I think there was, who was the philosopher, Wittgenstein or whoever it was that said, most moral problems are problems of language.

00:54:00.000 And that actually here, there may be a phenomenon of talking past each other with the invocation of the word God, where you understand yourself to mean different things by it that make you think that you're Description of the universe is one that is different from or incompatible with a traditional religious God-based view when in fact it's really just based on what you just said, maybe more likely to just be a problem of language.

00:54:29.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

00:54:32.000 And, you know, I talk in the book about the traditional idea of God, but actually in all of the Abrahamic faiths that I'm more familiar with, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, there's always been a tradition known as the apophatic tradition, which says that Nothing positive can be said of God.

00:54:55.000 God is totally beyond human understanding and human categories.

00:54:59.000 You know, in Christianity, this goes right back to the early church fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, and there was a very influential book in England in the 14th century, The Cloud of Unknowing, which guided ordinary Christians through Beyond the superficial language we use about God in worship to a deeper understanding of the God beyond human category.

00:55:28.000 And we have the Sufi tradition in Islam and, oh, the name in Judaism escapes me now, Kabbalah?

00:55:35.000 Am I pronouncing that correctly?

00:55:37.000 Yeah, mysticism in Judaism, yep.

00:55:40.000 Yeah, there's always, in all of these traditions, and obviously in Hinduism, on the surface, there are rich mystical traditions.

00:55:47.000 So there's always been this tradition of the mystical, the ineffable.

00:55:53.000 And so, yeah, the distinction between Hinduism Believing in God or believing in some kind of purpose or directionality that's not, quote-unquote, the traditional God.

00:56:09.000 That binary starts to dissolve a little bit in that context, I think.

00:56:13.000 Yeah, and how familiar are you with, since you brought it up, with Hinduism as an alternative framework to what you think of as traditional religion in the Abrahamic sense?

00:56:25.000 Somewhat to the, I mean, it's interesting, my own philosophical tradition, known as analytic philosophy, when it began in the mid, early to mid 20th century, was very scientistic, logical, dry.

00:56:40.000 And yet, as time has gone on, I think maybe people have seen that...

00:56:45.000 That approach just doesn't have the resources to explain everything we need to explain.

00:56:51.000 And there have emerged people defending a great variety of options.

00:56:57.000 A great philosopher in Australia, Miryel Bahari, who defends a version of Advaita Vedanta, the mystical Hindu tradition, or at least inspired by Advaita Vedanta, But defends it partly, partly in these very dry, logically precise terms.

00:57:15.000 So it's absolutely fascinating.

00:57:16.000 She argues that it's rational to trust the expert testimony of meditators who've spent 20 years in a cave or whatever.

00:57:25.000 So it's a wonderful...

00:57:26.000 Again, I like mixing things up, marrying the cold, dry, logical.

00:57:31.000 And she's not just doing that to the mystical, the...

00:57:35.000 Learning from meditation and mystical experience.

00:57:38.000 So I am somewhat familiar with, and it's an open question, how much of these different traditions really have the same core.

00:57:51.000 Aldous Huxley, in the early 20th century, talked of the perennial philosophy, and he had this idea that Really, there's a mystical core to all of these religions, and then that mystical core is just expressed in different ways.

00:58:08.000 I'm not sure how much I think that's right.

00:58:10.000 Maybe there are real doctrinal differences between the different religions, but certainly I think there is mysticism in all of the different traditions, and to that extent there is overlap and commonality.

00:58:23.000 So we should see the difference as well as the similarity and the sameness.

00:58:28.000 Yeah, I think, you know, it's part of why maybe I'm more predisposed to see your worldview and philosophy as less incompatible, or I would go so far as to say entirely compatible with the existence of God, even in the traditional sense.

00:58:42.000 I mean, part of the Hindu theology is the belief that there is one true God, certainly in the non-dualistic strand of Hinduism, there's one true God, but he resides in each of us and resides In part and parcel across the universe, which I think is compatible with even the worldview of modern physics of the matter coming from the universe and returning back to the universe.

00:59:06.000 And so I don't think that those...

00:59:07.000 You may have a problem of language there, describing one in religious terms and describing another in secular terms.

00:59:14.000 But apart from that problem of language, I don't know that the underlying...

00:59:18.000 View is actually as different as we make it out to be, although I could see why maybe given your initial introduction to religion, it may have maybe presented itself as more of a tension between even your middle way and what you think of as God or traditional God-based religion.

00:59:41.000 Maybe from the vantage point that I was introduced to what I think of as religion, don't see that dichotomy so much between a belief in traditional God and your view of universal consciousness.

00:59:56.000 Yeah, it all depends, doesn't it, what we mean by God.

01:00:01.000 And, I mean, I had certain assumptions about my Catholic upbringing, but actually, when you dig into the views of Augustine and Aquinas...

01:00:10.000 I'm just going to bring up Aquinas, yep.

01:00:13.000 ...who were foundational in Catholic doctrine, it's very far, actually, from an anthropomorphic idea of God, the old man in the sky.

01:00:23.000 Aquinas said...

01:00:25.000 We can never talk straightforwardly about God, even when we're saying God is all-powerful.

01:00:30.000 God isn't powerful in the way a human being is powerful.

01:00:35.000 God is radically distinct from anything in creation, and therefore we can only talk about God by analogy.

01:00:42.000 So really, for Aquinas, when we're saying God is powerful or God is good or God knows things, We mean God.

01:00:49.000 There's something about God that is analogous to these qualities in human beings.

01:00:54.000 But it's not quite the same.

01:00:56.000 So sometimes I think, yeah, the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris maybe had too simplistic an idea of what God is supposed to be.

01:01:04.000 But, yeah, I suppose I still come back to the...

01:01:09.000 The problem of suffering for me, insofar as we think God is in some sense all-powerful, however we cash that out, insofar as we can understand that, and good, it is hard to understand why the universe would be the way it is.

01:01:26.000 And so...

01:01:28.000 I'm led to, I mean, to my, as I say it, the universe is a cocktail of accident and design.

01:01:35.000 You know, some things like the fine tuning in physics, other things to do with consciousness are sort of too improbably good to be fluke.

01:01:44.000 But at the same time, there is horrific, gratuitous suffering and masses of empty space.

01:01:52.000 And I think we need to somehow reconcile both of these things.

01:01:56.000 And that's really the project of my book, Why the Purpose of the Universe, is atheists are getting something right. 1.00

01:02:03.000 Traditional believers in God are getting something right, but they're both getting something wrong at the same time.

01:02:08.000 And we need to somehow explain both of these things, which is a tall order, but...

01:02:13.000 That's why I found this conversation fascinating.

01:02:16.000 I've been looking forward to this conversation with you and it has exceeded my high expectations because you are able to at once put pressure on both the traditional secular narrative or the traditional, at least what is viewed even in a reductionist way as traditional religion.

01:02:35.000 And one of the things I loved about this hour we spent together is there isn't a single challenge that I could muster that you haven't already anticipated and thought deeply about through your careful study of history and the history of people like you who have preceded you for thousands of years who have tackled these same questions and I think that that's admirable and I think that that It naturally evokes a response of humility that I think is a beautiful thing that we sometimes miss in our modern moment.

01:03:05.000 And so for that, I want to thank you.

01:03:07.000 And I hope this is the beginning of more conversations that you and I are able to have.

01:03:11.000 So thanks for joining the podcast and keep up the great work.

01:03:15.000 Thanks very much, Rick.

01:03:16.000 It's been a wonderful conversation.

01:03:17.000 Yeah, you have challenged me.

01:03:19.000 You've provoked some thoughts.

01:03:21.000 I'm going to carry on thinking and hope we can carry on the conversation.

01:03:24.000 I would enjoy that.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - May 22, 2024

Philip Goff on Scientism, Limits of Science in Understanding Knowledge | The TRUTH Podcast #48

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