[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Greetings, I'm Tom Gilson. Our episode today is the second half of a conversation between Eric Mataxis and David Berlinsky, originally held before a live audience in New York at one of Texas'socrates in the city events. The topic they'd launched with was David Berlinsky's book, titled On Human Nature. They're both best selling authors, both sought after as speakers, and both definitely inclined to believe in intelligent design. Though as you'll hear today, they have interesting differences on what that means. The first voice you'll hear speaking is that of Eric Mataxis.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: I want to turn a little bit in the beginning of your book, Human Nature, you talk masterfully and to someone like me, somewhat cryptically. I know that that's not your intention to try to explain what led to World War One.
I don't want to get into that too much, but you're making a number of points, and one point that you make well, actually, let me read this because this is some of the flap copy from your book just to kind of frame this piece. Conventional wisdom holds that the murder rate has plummeted since the Middle Ages. Humankind is growing more peaceful and enlightened. Man is surely to be much improved, better genes, better neural circuits, better biochemistry. And we're approaching a technological singularity that well, may usher in utopia.
Obviously, you mock this brilliantly in the book, and I want to talk about that.
Your book eviscerates these and other doctrines of contemporary nihilism masquerading as science.
There are two things that you seem to focus on when we're talking about human nature the idea that we are able to what did Buckley say? Imminentize the know to achieve utopia somehow. You mock, and I want to talk a little bit about that because that's kind of behind the idea that there is no human nature. We can transcend whatever we call human nature and become anything we want, whether lizards or something more fortunate.
But you also draw upon history, mathematics, logic and literature to retrain our gaze. This I'm reading the copy on an old truth many are eager to forget. There is and will be about the human condition beauty, nobility, and moments of sublime insight alongside ignorance and depravity. It's fascinating to me that you deal with both of those strains in talking about human nature. Maybe we can start just with this fiction that we've all been living with. It's like living with the Darwinian narrative, the idea that everything's getting better. The greatest thing ever was that we survived the Middle Ages and now we're enlightened and we have penicillin.
[00:03:39] Speaker C: Well, Stephen Pinker became very well known for a claim that he borrowed from a variety of criminologists, like some guy whose name I've forgotten. Very good. Criminologist.
Manfred something. At any rate, Pinker argued, there's been an 800 year decline in homicide rate.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: 800 year?
[00:04:03] Speaker C: 800 year from 1200.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Okay. And you deal with this in one of the early chapters. Brilliantly. Please, go ahead.
[00:04:10] Speaker C: Homicide rates are simply the ratio of the homicide in a given location to the population. It's a simple ratio, simple number, but it's a number with some remarkable properties. For example, let's say you're living in a village. There's one homicide. The village is comprised of ten people. One homicide, ten people.
The village is located in East Anglia and there's a population explosion in Peru.
Should that affect the homicide rate?
I mean, the homicide rate is the ratio of homicides to population.
There's ten people in that village and a thousand newborn infants in Peru.
Is the homicide rate one over ten or one over 1010?
How do you make that decision? What's the choice?
That's not an incidental question, by the way, in New York City, because the homicide rates for New York City could be computed by the borough or by the state or by the country or by the world.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: How does it affect Pinker's larger point? I mean, he's making a the point.
[00:05:24] Speaker C: Is that since since the high point of the Middle Ages, say, 1200 to 1300, the decline in homicide rates has been paralleled by an increase in population.
So obviously, if those are the only parameters you've been considering, as the world gets larger, the homicide rates stay at medieval levels. Modern homicide rates must appear to have declined for medieval homicide rates.
H over P. P is getting bigger and bigger. H is staying the same. Right?
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: Therefore there's been an 800 year decline in the homicide rate. This is insanity as a form of reasoning. It's just insanity.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: But, I mean, it goes beyond that because what you say very powerfully in the book, actually, I'll read it.
[00:06:23] Speaker C: Because.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: We'Ve all lived with this this idea that everything's getting better. Progress, progress, everything's getting better, which is kind of vaguely tied into the idea of evolution. Everything will always get better somehow. You write, criminologists understand that terrible crimes took place in the 20th century. They are disposed to ignore them. These are the criminologists. Homicide is one thing, genocide another. Their business is the first. Let others deal with the second. The distinction, you say, is entirely artificial. Homicide is murder and genocide. Mass murder. When the statistics pertaining to mass murder in the 20th century are acknowledged, they bleed through every calculation, forming a ghastly but in irradicable spike in the otherwise humdrum human record of murders undertaken in some sorted hotel room or in the alleyway behind the bonhoef, or in a field of winter wheat.
It is in this sense that the 20th century, having introduced into human history crimes never before imagined, or, if imagined, never before undertaken, is immortal and will, like the crucifixion, remain a permanent part of the human present. It is simply there an obelisk in human history. Black forbidding, irremovable and inexplungible. So a big part of your case against Pinker and this Pollyanna view, this topianist view is excuse me, the 20th century.
[00:07:45] Speaker C: I think that's absolutely true. Look, when Criminologists study the homicide rates, they do exclude genocide.
They say, that's not our business. That's a state crime. It's not an individual crime. Homicide is within the purview of the criminal law, and genocide is beyond the purview of the criminal law. It may be part of international law, but it's not part of criminal law.
And therefore they missed the blazingly obvious facts about the 20th century, that there were portions of the globe where the homicide rate converged to one that is with a probability approaching certainty. If you happen to have been living in certain parts of Eastern and Central Europe, the probability that you were going to be killed, murdered, in fact, was very close to one. There's no question about that. We know that's true for Nazi Germany. We know something similar, although not identical, was true for Stalin's Russia, Mao's, China. We know it was true in Cambodia. These are new crimes in human history. And it's pertinent to observe that when you factor in genocide, far from an 800 year decline in homicide rates, you have an explosion in homicide rates in the 20th century, an explosion. And I think it's seriously reprehensible to argue for a decline in homicide rates in the face of the sordid facts of the times in which we live. That's just a mistake.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Well, but I mean, you're making it sound, I think, a little overly technical. The larger point you're making is that there is this utopianist view that seems to say human beings are more wonderful, obviously, than they actually are, and the 20th century is a rebuke to folks like Pinker and to anyone who says, we're making progress. I mean, you don't really resolve it, but you stick it out there that there's a great mystery why?
You don't say why, but you do imply in your larger discussion of human nature that there's this strange thing called evil. I don't know if you use that word, but, I mean, if you read what happened in the 20th century and you list more than just what the Nazis did and what the Soviets did, it's chilling. And it works very strongly against this narrative that, hey, everything's getting better. Technology is making everything wonderful.
[00:10:30] Speaker C: Well, I'm a strong believer in original sin, and as such, I can hardly be accused of having an overly optimistic view of human nature. I think it's a powerful doctrine, the most powerful doctrine of the Catholic Church, in fact, and convincingly and absolutely true.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: But you're not a Catholic.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: Not in the least.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: But you're not in the least.
[00:10:53] Speaker C: How could I be a Catholic?
[00:10:56] Speaker A: Have you read my Luther biography?
[00:10:58] Speaker C: Never.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Well, there's a copy for you in the dinner room.
No, I don't mean to make light of whether one is Catholic or not, but the larger point of original sin, speaking as a pro Catholic, non Catholic, I subscribe to anything that I think is true, including this doctrine of original sin. It seems inevitable, the evidence for it, which you give just in citing what happened in the 20th century. I don't know how somebody gets around that. But when people like Pinker and others try to I think they are maybe semi wittingly rejecting the doctrine of original.
[00:11:42] Speaker C: Of course they are. Of course, Pinker would be the first to say he rejects it as a piece of medieval superstition. But, you know, Dr. Johnson had a wonderful response. Boswell posed him the same question. Dr. Johnson, what do you think of original sin? And Johnson puffed himself up and said with a considerable amount of he said, sir, the inquiry is not necessary, for men are so avowedly and confessedly corrupt that all the laws of heaven and earth are unable to prevent them from the commission of their crimes. Surely that has a ring of truth.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: So without using religious terms, you seem.
[00:12:26] Speaker C: There'S not one word about religion.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: No, I know, but you're nonetheless describing what I would call fallenness.
You seem to shrink from using terms like that. But that's the obvious implication when you're looking at a species, when you're looking at human nature and you see this record, it seems like something it's like.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: Everything else we're discussing. It's both what a work of art is man that has to be said as well.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: Who said that?
[00:13:04] Speaker C: Shakespeare.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: You're right.
So the other side, though, it's just interesting to me that you have some folks who are painting this rosy picture of human beings and they seem to really be wedded to that narrative. And some of the folks that you've debated, Christopher Hitchens and others, and that you've taken to task in your books, they really did seem hostile to these facts.
[00:13:42] Speaker C: I think Christopher Hitchens was a little too intelligent to be taken in by his own rhetoric. And there was something of a showman.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: About him to be that intelligent, not to be taken in by his rhetoric, but I know what you mean. Go ahead. So you think he was basically making.
[00:14:04] Speaker C: Well, it was the same personality that insisted on dying flamboyantly in public. He could have arranged a symphony orchestra at his last moments, he would have done so. And that was part of his charm. He was a very large personality. But what is much more interesting, people like the historian Yuval Harari, who looks forward to exactly this kind of utopian.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Scenario, where is he a transhumanist?
[00:14:33] Speaker C: Very much so. Very much so. He has a certain skeptical moral skepticism as well, but he's a transhumanist. He believes in the promotion of human beings to completely artificial form as a computer entity, something like that. What's very interesting about all these transhumanists is that they're in incredible hurry to get out of the human condition.
Having a human body seems an unbearable imposition to these guys. They'd much rather live as a robot no, I'm being perfectly serious.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Although what does that even mean?
[00:15:10] Speaker C: I have no idea. But that's what they say.
They look forward to the acquisition of an entirely synthetic nervous system, vast computational powers, limbs of solid steel, that sort of thing.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: Just take a little adderall.
[00:15:26] Speaker C: What's that?
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Never mind.
No, it's just so funny to me.
[00:15:31] Speaker C: Because I'm willing to try it if.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: You no, I'm just saying, I don't know, maybe your generation would say, just do a line of Coke or something. But the point is that either the idea that they're not dealing with the heart of the matter no, I agree, right.
[00:15:50] Speaker C: Being human with a human body, human experiences, human aspirations and human failings, that's really hard to come to terms with that because for all of us, it ends in the same way.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: To get back to Hitchens for a second, there's another quote in your book. You say, Hitchens is prepared to denounce the Vatican for the ease with which it diplomatically accommodated Hitler. But about Hitler, the Holocaust or the Nazis themselves, he has nothing to say. This is an OD omission for a writer who believes that religion poisons everything.
I think I said this to you last night. I'm amazed at what seems to me like sheer intellectual dishonesty. You can call it showmanship, but when someone like Hitchens and others only point to things that in this case, the Vatican has done or failed to do, but it really betrays their animus, and I'm just amazed that they were able to get away with that. And you did better than anyone in taking them on in your book, The Devil's Delusion, which I recommend very highly, as does William F. Buckley. But I'm amazed they were able to get away with that, that for years, that they were kind of making the rounds and nobody just said, this is preposterous, because it was really preposterous.
[00:17:29] Speaker C: Here's the thing. I kind of liked Christopher, and so I'm unwilling now to criticize him.
I think he was a very large figure. Doesn't mean I agreed with anything that he said. He clearly was wrong about lots of things.
In many respects, I prefer punching down to punching up. I like my targets to be squatting in front of me, and Pinker is much more amenable to the adoption of that posture.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Well, look, it doesn't matter. And I'm not trying to single out Hitchens, although I will be honest with you, is that that's what is, to my mind, enraging about somebody like Hitchens is because he was so brilliant. I expect better from him.
[00:18:18] Speaker C: Well, I think a much better target. Also dead is Stephen Weinberg, the physicist. Now, Weinberg was a great physicist, one of the authors of the Standard Model, but just all over the place in physics and clearly a very smart guy, very pompous. He took himself very seriously, especially at the end. And he's talking to a group of scientists and he felt impelled to deliver himself of a piece of personal wisdom.
That happens very often as scientists grow older. They feel impelled to commit some sort of a moral utterance into the universe. And he said, for bad people to do bad things, we know they're going to do that. They're just rotten. But for good people for good people to do bad things you can imagine his finger waggling in the wind. For good people to do bad things, that takes religion. I ask you to concentrate on that phrase. It's almost a quote. For good people to do bad things, that takes religion. He must have had an audience of 500 people.
Not one person raised his hand, not one, and said, professor Weinberg, I have a small question.
Just who is imposed on the suffering human race? Barbed wire, poison gas, long range artillery, cyclone b?
The secret formula for crematoria or nuclear weapons? Professor Weinberg, of memory serves, it was not the Vatican. Not one person asked the.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: I mean, you've been very brave in going against some of these folks, but I guess I'm disappointed that others haven't been more aggressive, because it really is it's one thing to have a difference of opinion. It's another thing to float things that are just completely preposterous. And a lot of for example, you're part of the Discovery Institute. When we're talking about intelligent design or we're talking about we're trying to figure things out as everyone is. That's what we do. We try to figure out how did things get to be the way they are? And the idea that scientists have become almost monolithically scientistic and saying that the one thing that we cannot consider is the thesis that there's a God, that there's an intelligence or whatever, it's unscientific to make that assertion. They have no business making that assertion. The idea that we're going to say that this is the only place we can look, and only you and just a few others have gone after them on that.
[00:21:07] Speaker C: Well, let me correct you in one respect. In my own case, personal case, absolutely no courage was required. I had nothing to lose, so no courage was I mean, I was fired from every academic position I've ever held.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: Yeah, other than jobs. Right.
[00:21:22] Speaker C: And I also enjoyed the work. I mean, I began intellectual life as a high school bully, very much a victim group that I wish to see better celebrated in contemporary culture.
Unlike almost everyone else, we had a great time in high school, oppressing everyone else. I remember those days fondly. I've just carried on that tradition in my polemical life so that no courage was involved.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Okay, all right, so strike the courage remark.
No, I think you're being a little coy and humble because it does take courage in the milieu in which we all live, or most of us live, whether in Manhattan or Paris, to take the stands that you've taken.
The way you seem to deal with it is by being very coy about your stance on religion or God.
[00:22:15] Speaker C: I don't think it's coyness.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: There's no doubt that it's coyness.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: Why?
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Okay, I guess I was going to read another quote that ties into the larger idea. So, in other words, when people are thinking they're doing science, they're philosophizing, they're trying to figure things out.
There's no way to do that without coming up with a theory before you can prove theory. That's the definition of a theory, right. So you float some idea, and you work within that narrative, and you don't apologize for it. You say, we're going to see if this that's what we have with abiogenesis, and so on and so forth.
The page that I have quoted here, you say, the wave function of the universe is designed to represent the behavior of the universe. All of it floats in the void. These metaphors are inescapable and passes judgment on universes. Some are probable, others likely, still others a very bad bet. Nonetheless, the wave function of the universe cannot be seen, measured, assessed, or tested. It is purely a theoretical artifact. Physicists have found it remarkably easy to pass from speculation about the wave function of the universe to conviction that there is a wave function of the universe. This is nothing more than an endearing human weakness. Less endearing, by far, is their sullen contempt toward religious argument when it's engaged in precisely the same attempt to reach by speculation what cannot be grasped in any other way.
It just seems inevitable that deposit the idea of a God I mean, I understand if you don't have tenure and you're predisposed toward intelligent design, you want to say, look, I'm not saying how this happened. I'm just saying this is what the facts are. But a layperson, I think, automatically says, well, it seems like there would be some vast intelligence that did this. It doesn't seem logical to think anything else. In other words, I'm not sure why that's difficult to say. I don't understand.
[00:24:28] Speaker C: You mean for me?
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Well, for anybody.
Sounds okay to mean it does, but you're asking much. Scientists who work in that field or whatever, they all I mean, even Jim Tor, who is very courageous, has to be very, very careful. He has tenure, but he doesn't want to say what I think any person who's familiar with what he's saying would.
[00:24:56] Speaker C: Say, you can't they're laypeople and laypeople. Some people will take that view, but lots of people will say with Shakespeare that it doesn't mean a thing. It has no intrinsic significance. There is no superior figure.
Shakespeare is writing in the 16th century, and he has Macbeth saying exactly that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps through this petty pace from day to day.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Well, Macbeth's not really a hero.
[00:25:26] Speaker C: He's a layperson.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: That's very funny.
[00:25:31] Speaker C: He's perfectly capable of rejecting what you argued was common sense.
It's common sense. I agree with that.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: I think from the point of view of the very early 17th century, it's logical, but it becomes less logical now that we know what we know.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: I'm sorry, what becomes less logical?
[00:25:58] Speaker A: The idea that there is a meaning maker, capital M, behind everything. Maybe you can't prove it, but the more we seem to discover, the more it seems difficult to come up with another theory.
[00:26:17] Speaker C: Well, there are certain questions which we can agree have no obvious resolution or solution, and that agreement does not preclude saying, I have no commitment to either position.
I don't agree with Macbeth, poor player strutting and fretting his hour on the stage, and I don't agree or I don't feel sympathetically inclined to a personal declaration of enthusiastic faith either. I don't think that I'm compelled to do that. Believe me, if I felt a spiritual urge, I would make it manifest. It's not CoinUs. I don't feel the urge.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: I think I read that at the end of Human Nature. You had an interview. I think it's an Italian magazine. I'm not sure, but you say something very similar to what you just said, and I'm not sure that the connection makes sense to me. In other words, when you say a spiritual urge, to me it's just logic, right? In other words, if I look at the fine tuned universe or I look at any number of things, it would lead me, like Robert Hoyle or anybody, to say it looks like some vast superintelligence has monkeyed with the but Eric.
[00:27:49] Speaker C: Everything looks like something else.
That's easy to say. There's no purchase in an argument because all metaphors are false, all similes are true.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: I'm just surprised you don't find that compelling. It's one thing not say that I don't have a spiritual inclination, but yeah, I'm just not clear on how you go from those facts to I mean, abiogenesis, we haven't talked about that here, but, I mean, the level of what's.
[00:28:29] Speaker C: Required I agree with that.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: I agree with that is so staggering that I'm just knocked back with awe that this could have occurred, and it suggests some kind of in other words, to me, it's just a logical inference. It's not like I feel like it's pushing something spiritually. It's just maybe we don't know who is behind this.
[00:28:52] Speaker C: But the point that I can't quite seem to grasp is what is the.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Logical inference that a vastly creative, infinitely intelligent, probably personal force is to account for what we discover?
[00:29:15] Speaker C: What's the premise to that argument?
[00:29:20] Speaker A: It's the other theories falling flat. In other words, if you can plausibly state that we got here through accident, then people go, okay, we got here by accident. That makes sense.
[00:29:30] Speaker C: But the more that's your standard of success, then philosophers should be kings.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: That's an old joke about Socrates, and.
[00:29:37] Speaker C: They should he says to Mino, surely you'll agree, Mino? The night follows the day. Mino says, yes, Socrates. That's true. And the day follows the night. That's true, too. Socrates and Socrates says, therefore it follows philosophers should be kings. That's about the structure of the argument you've just offered. Therefore it follows philosophers should be kings. It's complicated. Therefore there's a personal god. That's an interesting claim.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: No, I think you've reduced what I was saying because I don't think it's just complicated. In other words, I think the implication listen, I don't think anyone can be forced to believe, but I think dealing with the fact at this point it is so compelling that, yes, it looks like there's a super intelligence behind this. So until we know that there isn't, or until we know what that superintelligence is like, why is it difficult to say, yeah, that's what it looks like?
[00:30:37] Speaker C: Because I don't find it compelling. Yeah, I'm perfectly prepared to be compelled coin us again, but you haven't compelled me.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: I'm not here to compel you, but I'm just fascinated by how you process this. In other words, what is it about it?
I don't know if you can describe how you find something not to be compelling, but I'm curious. In other words, what possibly could account.
[00:31:08] Speaker C: For the grander of existence?
[00:31:13] Speaker A: Well, it used to just be the grander of existence, but now there's a.
[00:31:17] Speaker C: Level of what the complexity and grander of existence?
[00:31:21] Speaker A: Well, and even complexity I mean, the fine tuning. I don't know what that is. That's not merely complexity.
It suggests mind.
[00:31:34] Speaker C: Well, it suggests mind to you. It don't, to me, very complicated.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: It doesn't suggest mind to you. I'm fascinated by that. So I wish you could tell me more about that because I'm just fascinated by how you're I think here's something.
[00:31:51] Speaker C: Actually look, I'm an equal opportunity employer. It doesn't matter which position I'm attacking. If I don't find it plausible, I don't find it plausible. The argument you've given I've never found plausible. It goes back to Aristotle, but I didn't find argument recasting of the ontological argument plausible either and was a very great logician. He didn't make the case either.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Let me read I know we don't have too much yeah, I got all the time in the world time left.
Let me read something that you wrote here you write if we are able to explain how the human mind works, neither in terms of a series of physical causes nor in terms of a series of infinitely receding mechanical devices, what then is left? There is the ordinary, very rich, infinitely moving account of mental life that without hesitation, we apply to ourselves. It is an account, frankly, magical in its nature. The human mind registers, reacts and responds. It forms intentions, conceives problems, and then, as Aristotle dryly noted, it acts. And in none of this do we seem to be doing anything that can be explained or expressed in terms of what the brain does or what any machine can do.
Mind is like no other property of physical systems. The physicist Eric Harth has reasonably remarked, it is not just that we don't know the mechanisms that give rise to it to mind. We have difficulty in seeing how any mechanism can give rise to it.
[00:33:35] Speaker C: I think that's true.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: Well, you wrote it, so of course you think it's true.
[00:33:38] Speaker C: No, that doesn't follow.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: What?
[00:33:40] Speaker C: That doesn't follow.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: Okay.
But at least for me, it rises to the level of being a staggering thing. No istery of mind.
It's not just it's a mystery. It's a staggering thing. And the idea that people are so hostile to it that they would actually say, no, there's a naturalistic explanation we're robots. That your mind is your brain, and so on and so forth, it seems silly.
[00:34:11] Speaker C: I agree with you. That's a meritious point of view.
To dismiss the grandeur mystery of the mind is just clumsy reasoning. We have every reason to appreciate the human mind for what it is, something unlike anything else in existence.
That's just a fact. We should appreciate the facts more, do less by way of theories.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Well, even when you're talking about something like mind, trying to theorize about whether we're trying to theorize beyond the thing itself seems it's magnificent.
But, I mean, it seems to partake of something not of this world. That, to me, seems a logical inference. It doesn't seem like much of a leap when we're talking about something like mind.
[00:35:03] Speaker C: What world do you find your mind in, if not this world? How many do we have available to us? Me, I got one.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: Well, no.
You know enough about physics to know that there are more dimensions than what we have here.
I don't think that it is any kind of a leap backwards to some magical I mean, even you use the term it is an account, frankly, magical in its nature. When you're talking about something that seems magical, it seems we're appealing to the idea we sense. I mean, C. S. Lewis writes about it. We sort of can smell that there's something beyond, and we shouldn't be ashamed of admitting that. And I think that the secular culture and we live tells us, yes, you should be ashamed of that.
[00:36:06] Speaker C: But I think most people question of shame or guilt or reprobation. I think there's a certain amount of sophisticated judging that goes into these discussions, and a certain amount of taste is involved.
Very few people, very few people, even among scientists, would be inclined to take umbridge with respect to Shakespeare. What a work of art, this man. How infinite in faculty. It's plainly true. It's plainly true.
Look at the glories of human existence. At the same time, we all agree with Dr. Johnson. Inquiry into original sin is not necessary. We're rotten as well.
But that there is some compelling force urging us to go beyond the facts.
It may be true for some people. Clearly it's true for you, but doesn't seem to be true for. Me that is, I don't see the merit of the compulsion.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Yeah, that becomes a much larger conversation. But I'm fascinated by that, believe me.
[00:37:11] Speaker C: I tell you, if I felt it, it's not being coy.
[00:37:16] Speaker A: Have you ever had a supernatural experience, what one would describe as a supernatural experience?
[00:37:21] Speaker C: No, I don't think so.
[00:37:22] Speaker A: Well, because I know so many people who have.
I mean, I certainly have. And I think that there are intimations of something, even if you're not sure what it is. And so many people it seems to be so common in the human experience. When you ask people, maybe they wouldn't talk about it publicly, but they will admit to me and tell me a story or this or that. And I think if I were just a scientist, I would be fascinated by these stories and what do they say? And there seems to be in the same way when you're in your book on Newton, another marvelous book called Newton's Gift, written, what, about 20 years ago?
[00:38:00] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:38:01] Speaker A: About 20 years ago you wrote Newton, and in it you talk about how Newton, this probably the greatest scientific genius who ever lived, he was really into alchemy. And we know, of course, that he was climbing a ladder that was leaning against the wrong building. We know that. But of course, you say at the heart of that. Nonetheless, they're beginning to get to what are the elements and atomic structure and the periodic table. They're just feeling their way in that direction. And I feel similarly that there's an invisible world we don't know yet. I mean, 200 years ago, we didn't know that there were all these waves in the room that are I can find out a sports score.
So there's an invisible realm. And I'm just fascinated, almost just as a philosopher, the idea that people have had these experiences. And if you begin pulling them together, do you get sort of the rudiments of a shape, of something beyond hard to know, right?
[00:39:09] Speaker C: It's hard to know. But you don't need to repair to physics for that sensation. I mean, after all, the undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns puzzles the will. That was clear in the 16th century. It's clear today.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: I know some people who have returned from that world, so I would quibble with Shakespeare on that. Nonetheless, the point stands. It's too much fun to talk to you, and I'm sorry. I think we're out of time. How about a round of applause for our new friend, Dr. David Berlinsky?
[00:39:46] Speaker B: That was Eric Mataxis and David Berlinsky at a Socrates in the City event in New York, concluding a conversation that started with Berlinsky's book titled On Human Nature, yet covered much ground beyond that. I think this is one you'll want your friends to hear, so pass the word along they can find this and the episode with the first half of this
[email protected]. For Idthefuture. This is Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
