C.S. Lewis in his 1943 book, The Abolition of Man, "The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins. One was sickly and died, the other strong and throve, but they were twins. They were born of the same impulse." David Berlinski, Stephen Meyer, and James Orr on Uncommon Knowledge now.
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, recording today in Fiesole, Italy. I'm Peter Robinson. Mathematician, philosopher and author, David Berlinski, received his undergraduate degree from Columbia and his
doctorate in philosophy from Princeton. He has taught at institutions such as Stanford and the Université de Paris, and his books include The Deniable Darwin, The King of Infinite Space, Euclid and His Elements, and Newton's Gift. Philosopher and author, Stephen Meyer, earned his undergraduate degree at Whitworth College, and a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science
from Cambridge. Now the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, Dr. Meyer has published books including Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and the Return of the God Hypothesis. Philosopher of religion, James Orr, read classics at Balliol College, Oxford, then received his doctoral degree in philosophy at St. John's
College, Cambridge. Before deciding he was an academic at heart, he practiced corporate law at a couple of firms, including Sullivan & Cromwell. Dr. Orr has taught at Christ Church Oxford and now serves on the faculty of Divinity at Cambridge. His many published works include the light reading, Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature. David, Stephen, James, [foreign language 00:02:03], which is meant to mean good afternoon, but I think I may have said
good cheese, I'm not sure. All right. Sagan and Berlinski, two quotations. The late astronomer, Carl Sagan, "This cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." David Berlinski, "Sagan is hardly alone. Some form of materialism has become a contemporary orthodoxy." You have to tell us what you mean by materialism. What I meant. What you meant? It's been a long time since I wrote those words, but I cherish them over the span of decades.
Materialism is an ill-defined term, we all know that. The manifest meaning of materialism is something solid, something enduring, something that counts as an object. A material object has extension, mass, durability and so on. But the minute we say that, we restrict the world of material objects to the countable objects. The table is countable. There's one of them, there could be two, but does mud count as part of the materialist panorama? How many muds
are there in fields? That's not a question that obviously admits of an answer. So from the first doctrine of materialism, it's not compromised, but certainly it's not very, very clear. The rudiment of materialism seems to me the primordial concept of an object, a physical or a material object. That's completely impregnated with the natural numbers that go together. You cannot imagine
an object without its numerical identity. But if the two are necessarily associated, if anything that counts as an object, counts as a numerical object, has somewhat necessary numerical identity. The numbers are not material objects. What are they doing in a materialist scheme? It seems inexorable, inevitable, irrefragable. From the very first moment one says, "I'm a materialist and extremely proud of being a materialist," as so many people
would say. I just believe things as they are. Well, it's not a position that lends itself to an enormous degree of lucidity. Just when I was hoping for a simple beginning. That was a simple beginning. David, it complicates matters from the get-go. No, it's not that big. James, David said, "Some form of materialism has become a contemporary orthodoxy." You now have to help me make
sense of David's words, orthodoxy, materialism. What did Carl Sagan mean when he said, Carl Sagan was actually making that was an aggressive assertion, "This cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be." What did he have in mind? What was he asserting himself against? In David's defense, the materialists don't make it easy for us, and it's true. There's been semantic slippage in how we describe this particular orthodoxy. So materialism used
to be the word that was used an awful lot. That seems to have slipped into the word physicalism. As it turned out, that matter was actually not quite as straightforward, not quite as legible to scientific inquiries, all that. But a rough definition of physicalism, naturalism, materialism, just to put it on the table, might be all truths are material truths. All truths are scientifically explicable truths, all truths that can be reduced to the natural,
scientific truths. That's it in a nutshell. With the exception of the proposition you just uttered. Well, we can get into that. I just wanted to put the definition on the table, and we can start looking at way in which mathematics and propositions can undermine that thesis. Let me put things, I'm going to have to recapture the conversation or we'll spend the next four hours on the first definition, which would delight David, I'm sure. Nothing wrong with that.
So to put it very crudely, but correctly question mark, I know I'm about to put it crudely. The question is whether I'm putting it correctly. If Sagan is asserting anything, if he's being aggressive toward any proposition, what he's trying to do is rule out any religious sensibility. That's what he's after. He's trying to rule out God, isn't he? At the very least. All right.
At the very least. I think one way of describing his position would be simply to say that the natural scientist is the ultimate arbiter of all that's real. Okay, that's even more aggressive in a sense. That's an epistemological claim about what we can know or how we can know it, but then the metaphysical claim underlying it is that matter and energy are all that really exists. There's nothing beyond that. And even our experience of the mental reality is an epiphenomenon
or a consequence of matter in motion. Okay. For the second part of David's proposition, some form of materialism, we stopped there because that already is complicated, has become a contemporary orthodoxy. All right. You teach at a fancy, high-flown faculty. David has been an academic in this institution, the other institution, likewise you, you're all professional academics. Do you encounter a materialist orthodoxy? Oh, you're rolling your eyes. Well, indeed.
And how is your answer? It's a default way of thinking among many people in the natural sciences, the social sciences certainly. And many of the ideologies that are derivative of those ideologies in the humanities, are also essentially materialistic at the root. Okay, so that's something we grant? Largely. I would say it's the unreflective assumption of most undergraduates today. All right. But David,
in his nuanced definition, is already pointing out a problem with it. What do you do about conceptual realities like the natural numbers or math? Even on its own terms, it doesn't hold up terribly well is what you're trying to suggest? It need not hold up very well to inquiry. It still can remain a prevailing orthodoxy, and that's exactly what happened.
It's the water we're swimming in. All right, C.S. Lewis again. Her Lewis is noting that in the Early Renaissance, modern science and widespread interest in magic appear together. Lewis points out this notion that the Middle Ages were interested, that's just not so. Early Renaissance, we get modern science and we get magic, we get Faust and all of that.
All right. Lewis, now, he's talking about the medieval period and classical period. "For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem has been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline and virtue. For magic and applied science alike, the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men." Is Lewis onto something here? This notion that
in magic and in much of modern science, modern science has not always been this way. I've got a question or two for you coming, Steve. But in magic and much of modern science, it's almost a Nietzschean will to power. We are attempting to subdue reality to us, fair? I think that's fair. I think there are at least two factors driving it. Go. Once the discarded
image problem emerges, which Lewis describes. That is to say once reality is naturalized, even very early on it became clear, that there were still aspects of reality that couldn't easily be reduced to the natural sciences. And so in a way, magic then becomes a way of trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I think the second factor is absolutely the one that you intimated earlier, that there was a Faustian, Promethean sense,
as the humanism emerges in the Renaissance and afterwards. The idea is that we're shifting from a theocentric conception of the universe, which Lewis describes, to an anthropocentric one. The human mind becomes the great organizer of reality, the great constructor of reality. David? Yeah, I guess so. There's a little bit of that, but it depends which part of the historical record you really look at. It's not a point of view that a close reading of Thomas Aquinas might suggest.
Well, but Aquinas would precede what Lewis is. talking about. Oh, yeah. Okay. Three centuries, yes. So the record is not entirely clear. Certainly, the Greeks were under no illusion about the importance of the human mind in apprehending the natural order. Which leads to it has not always been thus. The unmoved mover, the first cause, the ground of all being, some belief in God. Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Newton. We'll come to Newton, Newton in spades, so to speak.
Ray, Huygens, the list goes on. Yeah. So how do we go from these early men? Are they all men? Well, until we get to Madame Curie in the- They're all men. They're all men? We can admit it. Okay. How do we get from these early men of science to our own time? And here's our own time. Nobel Prize winner in physics, Stephen Weinberg, "The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done."
Physicist Stephen Hawking, "Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. I'm an atheist." How do we go from Galileo and Newton, to Weinberg and Stephen Hawking, and Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan? How did this happen? It's a big story. There's a lot of facets to it. I think there is kind of a rise, fall, rise plot structure in play. In the period of the Scientific Revolution, you have and this is
let's say the 17th century, 16th, 17th century. Okay. This is what Lewis is talking about. You have the Boyles, and the Newtons, and the Keplers, these figures, and they are influenced by a profoundly Judeo-Christian understanding of the relationship between God and the natural world. And so they perceive that science is possible, because they believe that the human mind has been made in the image of a rational creator. And that same rational creator made the natural
world and endowed it with rationality, and order and evidence of design. So there was a principle of correspondence between the human mind and the rationality built into nature such that we could understand it. And this gave people confidence to pursue what is often very a hard thing to do, which is to get nature to reveal its secrets. To pursue systematic methods of studying nature, which we now call modern science.
So again, being very crude, I believe in a good and loving, and all-powerful God. Because I believe in a good and loving, and all-powerful God, I strongly suspect that the manifestations of His work that I see in nature will prove intelligible. Intelligibility is a key word, yeah. Intelligible, orderly and beautiful. Right, right. In other words, the starting position.
You see this in the title of Newton's great work, the Principia. Newton was tutored by Isaac Barrow, a great, early physicist at Cambridge. He was tutored in turn by John Ray, who was the founder of what's called British natural theology. So there's this tradition was intimately connected with the rise of modern science. That what the scientists were doing, was trying to understand nature in a way that would reveal the reality of the divine order.
They are exploring the mind of God. Exactly. So it's in the title of the Principia or the Principia, however you like your Latin, and Newton, why did he title the book that way? Well, he was trying to reveal the mathematical principles that governed the universe that were an expression of the mind of God. The expression of divine rationality. So this was where science in the West began with this sort of connection between the theological and the scientific. And what breaks the connection?
It occurs gradually, but particularly in the late 19th century, and you have the rise of figures in the field of geology. You get a new story of science and the story is- Darwin, Freud, Marx. Before that, you have the geologists who begin to tell us about the origin of the great features on planet Earth. It's a result of slow, gradual, purely naturalistic processes. Then Darwin does the same in biology, explains the origin of new
forms of life from simpler pre-existing forms. His evolutionary program is extended by people like Haeckel and Huxley, who want to even explain the origin of the very first life. And then yes, you have Marx who uses a materialistic, he has a materialistic understanding of the future. So you get this comprehensive story, Laplace in astronomy, where you can go from the origin of the solar system, to the origin of man without invoking a guiding intelligence or
mind of any kind. So it's a materialistic narrative from beginning to present. David, here's what was going on. During the long eons of belief, humankind got nowhere, subsistence living for the last 250,000 years. Then we get modern science and living standards take off. We get the Industrial Revolution, the expansion in agriculture, the population booms. God gave us nothing. Science gave us abundance. That's the underlying story. Who needs God, correct? Yes. Care to elaborate? No. James?
On that particular thesis? Yes. I'm not gainsaying a thing that Stephen is saying, but there's an underlying psychology here. Well, I mean religion, you know that. This is the hand-fisted explanation, "Science gives us abundance. Religion gives us religious wars. Who needs it?" Well, the first thing to point out, is I think that this association of materialism or this split between materialism and religion, is a
very shoddy reading of the history of philosophy. I think before theism even steps onto the philosophical field, we've got figures like Plato, we've got figures like Aristotle, we've got the Stoics. They are not Abrahamic monotheists, but nor are they materialists. Nor are they materialists. Materialism is really, there were a few of them around. There was Democritus, there were the Epicureans, but really it was a minority position. It was well-understood, but it was not widely accepted.
Now, the great emergence of capitalism that the Industrial Revolution of the 17th, 18th century, there are just so, so many factors at play. But a lot of theses too, that would attribute that extraordinary growth to the Protestant Revolution, the Protestant Reformation. There's Weber's famous thesis, which I think still- And that holds up? Well, I think it commands quite a lot of support even today among sociologists, absolutely.
All right. So there are certainly, if you think of all of the great institutions that begin to emerge, a lot of the great principles that begin to emerge. The stress on individual autonomy, individual capacity, the enlightenment. You can really see a great precursor to it in the turn to the subject, in the Reformation. I think it's also a bit of a misreading to think of the wars of religion as wars
of religion. Protestants are perfectly good at killing Protestants, and Catholics are perfectly good at killing Catholics. What we're seeing really is not the death pangs of religion, but the birth pangs of the secular nation state. Okay. So on the compatibility, on the fundamental compatibility of science and some notion of theism, I give you Isaac
Newton. I'm quoting your book, Newton's Gift. You write about Isaac Newton lives 1643 to 1727, and you write about the years 1684 to 1686. "For two years, Newton's body functioned only to sustain his mind." David, what did Newton accomplish during those two years? It's really hard to overestimate what he accomplished in those two years. The controversy between Leibniz and Newton about who first had the idea with respect to the calculus is still
ongoing. But it's clear that Newton independently thought of the leading ideas of the calculus, which is to say the leading idea, flying ordinary differential equations with bodies in motion. That was the essence of the Scientific Revolution he initiated. His laws are all ordinary differential, and partial differential equations. He invented the technique of representing nature by differential equation. Incredible revolution, incredible revolution in mathematics,
an incredible revolution in physics. All right, let me quote you. If I could interject something that I just learned that Isaac Barrow, his tutor, examined him in mathematics right at the beginning of that period, 1684. He found him to be deficient. And by the end of that two-year period, he had not only mastered the whole of the Western corpus of mathematics, but he had, as David just pointed out, solved a problem that had
bedeviled mathematicians for almost 2,000 years. Yeah. But Steve, imagine you're on the podium as a professor of mathematics and you look out at a group of students, half of them are snoring and the other half are scribbling away. Then you see just in front of you, Isaac Newton's cold, black eyes staring at you, and you know exactly the meaning of that look. Someone of incredible intellectual power is taking in what you said, digesting it, rejecting it,
and conjecturing about the replacement. A ferocious tenacity to discover and to understand, yeah. Newton's Gift, let me quote you again, "The Principia is without question, our greatest work of pure thought." Staggering statement, "Our greatest work of pure thought. Yet a good part of Newton's time was given over to alchemy." Alchemy, the belief that base metals could be converted into gold. A field of study, little short of magic itself. I continue the quotation, "A good part of his time
was given over to alchemy. Newton wrote more than a million words on alchemical subjects, conducting endless experiments in his own laboratory." The man who gave us the calculus, gave us over a million words on alchemy. How can that have been? I think you have to project yourself backward 300 years. When Newton was writing the Principia at end of the 17th century, the subject of chemistry really didn't exist. Newton was not a quantum physicist. He had no idea
about the quantum world. He had no idea about the elements. He had no idea about coordinate bonds between molecules. Everything was conjecture. He turned to the tradition that seemed to offer him the richest schemata of possibilities and that was alchemy. It's a very rich chemical. Happened to be wrong, that doesn't mean it was not rich. It was very sophisticated, very rich, and it offered an extraordinary promise. Master this body of esoterica, and just
maybe you'll be able to convert mercury into gold. Then think of where you'll be and what you'll be able to accomplish. So, of course, Newton was busy in his attic mixing up horrible chemicals, noxious fumes escaping through the grenier. How do you say grenier in English? Attic. Attic, escaping through the attic. Of course, he was doing that, everybody was doing that. But the interesting question is alchemy
is flourishing. Astrology, which is a comparable system of thought, flourishes in the 17th century. Just there's an astrologer on every London Street corner, many of them involved in gynecology. It's a very curious, very strange teaching. I don't have the background to explore the sources, but if you go through the medical specialists in the 17th century, the people who are addressing gynecology were almost all astrologers and very successful astrologers, very successful.
Successful meaning what? They got paid for it? William Lilly came to London from the provinces because, "There was money to be got." That's a quotation from Lilly. He opened up his own practice. He specialized in finding lost objects. And over something like a 30-year career, he was enormously successful, successful at finding lost objects. We have no idea what he did. He wrote 13 volumes of a book that's entitled Christian Astrology, because he
wanted to stay in the good graces of the church. You read that, it's a very interesting 13 volume, they're all small. He explains everything except the secret of his success. He said, "You want to find a lost fish, here's what you do. You cast a horoscope at roughly the time the fish, and you follow the charts, and therefore, you will find the fish." I'm saying, "Yeah. That's okay, William, but how do you find the fish?" And that he leaves out entirely.
A very flourishing, very interesting, very eclectic society, until they held the dinner every year. 1684, 1685, Newton publishes the Principia, and like a group of birds scattered by a shot, they disappear, never to be heard of again. Where did they go? What did they do? What was the intellectual relationship between the publication of this very difficult work, Newton's Principia? You have to learn a lot of mathematics just to make it through. And the disappearance of
the astrological tradition in London, what is the connection? It almost tempts one to a Collingwood style of intellectual idealism. There was a rapprochement of current between ideas, which was causal, but between ideas. If I had a lot of time, that's something I'd like to pursue. There's somebody coming just on board with a magnificent interpretation of Newton's unpublished stuff. His name is Michel Jolland, and he is pursuing these ideas and they need pursuit.
I'm in awe even of your discursions, but back to C.S. Lewis. Lewis presents magic and science as twins, both in a kind of rebellion against the divine order. In Newton, we see something like the opposite. A man of such faith, that he seeks to understand both science and magic in light of the divine order. Is that fair-ish? Spring to my defense, James, before we- No, I'm not going to attack. I think Newton is a
profoundly religious figure by his own hand. He writes a way that only a profoundly sensitive, religious figure could possibly write. He thinks he's exploring the divine architecture of the universe. There's no question about that. He certainly would regard a Stephen Weinberg as kind of an alien figure. No connection between Newton and Weinberg in that regard.
Once again, Newton's Gift. I'm bringing you in, boys, on this one. "There is one aspect of the Newtonian world that is not explained by Newton's theory, and that is Newton's theory itself. "The law of universal gravitation binds the world's far-flung particles into a coherent hole, but the law itself is transcendent. It cannot be given an explanation in material terms." David, you want to stand by that, of course? Yeah. Yeah, all right. Beautifully expressed.
Beautifully expressed. Well said. So this gets us into? This is the connection between the magic and the scientific. Well, the magic and the science, this gets us into, apart from anything else, it gets us into this notion of infinite regress. The scientists can give us more and more rigorous explanations. Or descriptions. Or descriptions. Go ahead, tell me what's going on here. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, this is the connection.
Newton is accused by Leibniz of bringing the occult into science, because he has this wonderful inverse-square law that the force of gravity is proportional to the masses. The two masses exerting the force on each other divided by the distance squared, but the distance squared term is the rub. Because it implies that a force is being transmitted through empty space without a mediating material interaction between,
for example, the moon and the water that forms on the tides on earth. So what comes out of Newton's theory is this mysterious notion of action at a distance. That force is being transmitted, again, through empty space with no pushing and pulling. Now in this period of scientific history, the late 17th century, the scientists had rejected what were called Aristotelian formal causes.
The scholastics, late and medieval scholastics often reasoned like this. If I smoke some opium and then it puts me to sleep, then I ask the question, "Well, why did that happen?" Well, it's because the opium had a dormitive virtue. You attribute causal powers to the name of the effect. Right. So the mechanical philosophers in the late 17th century, figures like Boyle and others say, "We got to get rid of that type of explanation. It's just playing a word game."
Tragic loss. Agreed. So Newton comes along and formulates this beautifully comprehensive theory with this highly accurate, mathematical descriptions of the motions of the planets, but it doesn't have a pushing and pulling element to it. I can understand why the table moves because I just shoved it, but there's nothing like that.
The theory before him was something called the vortices. The idea that there was this mysterious but physical substance called ether pushing the planets around in the way that sticks in a vortex would swirl. Just sort of make up a substance if you can't see it. Leibniz's objections to Newton is what? Well, he says, "Look, what causes gravity? What is gravity? Well, it's the tendency for unsupported bodies to fall, but why do they fall?"
Well, because of gravitational force. So what is gravity? It's the tendency for things to fall. Why do they fall? Because of gravitational force. So Leibniz says, "This is circular." He thinks you're doing nothing more than the scholastics did. You're just renaming the effect as its own cause. But that was just a mistake, because Newton offered an incredible insight with his mathematical formulation. Exactly. He had something the scholastics didn't have, which was the powerful
mathematical description. But it raised this deep question then, what is the cause of gravity? The other part of the dilemma that Leibniz was confronting Newton with, was in a series of letters that passed between one of Newton's associates and Leibniz was, "Well, if you don't think, if it's not just an empty scholastic word game, then maybe you're talking about an immaterial entity. Maybe you're bringing God into science in a way we're trying to get rid of Him."
Okay. James, so let me read you a couple of quotations. That Newton can do what Newton did in the Principia suggests what? And here we have a couple of quotations. Here's Richard Feynman, "The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle, that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse-square rule of gravitation, is some sort of miracle." 20th century philosopher, no, he was Oxford. Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein was Cambridge. He was, indeed. All right, so he's your
fellow Cambridge man. Here's Ludwig Wittgenstein, "At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena." Explanation, I take him to mean explanations as opposed to? In the causal sense, yeah. Right. "The modern system makes it appear
as though everything were explained." We grant the genius of Newton. We move along to the 20th century and grant Einstein. But even when we do that, we're talking about explanations of natural phenomena, which properly understood, still leave all kinds of room for some grasp of ideal forms if you want to be. It does not, properly understood, rule out the supernatural. That which exceeds our five senses, correct? Broadly speaking, that is correct. Broadly speaking. You boys all
feel as though you're slumming in having this conversation with me. Do your best, do your best. Not a bit of it, not a bit of it. Not a bit of it. One of the great paradoxes of the 17th and 18th century, is while the language of laws of nature begin to emerge and with it this sort of idea of a divine legislator or ex machina. At the very time when widespread
commitment to the existence of God is beginning to wane. And yet, the laws of nature as a notion, keep persisting all the way through into the 20th century, right up to the present day. In fact, they didn't just persist. They are very much the jewels in the crown of the natural sciences. They lie right at the bottom of the entire materialist paradigm that we were talking
about earlier. Now, I take the view that laws do explain to some extent. That is to say, the laws of nature that we invoke, will explain the distinctions between accidental regularities in nature and non-accidental regularities in nature. The standard textbook example is that, "Look, it's a regularity that you can't get a cubic sphere of gold more than a mile wide." That's an accidental regularity. In principle, if you had enough gold you could put that together, but
it is a law that you can't get a sphere of uranium a mile wide. Why? Because it would set up a chain reaction. Now the law gives us an explanation. It explains why certain regularities are accidental and others have a law-like, gnomic force and that is science depends upon that. Now, how do we explain it in secular, naturalistic terms? It's not easy, not easy at all without
the divine lawmaker, as it were, imposing the laws top-down. And yet secular, materialistic philosophers try to lift up this idea, lift up the conception, and will all bring in causal language. David Armstrong, a famous Australian metaphysician of the 20th century, says that there's a kind of, if you think of Newton's second law, think of F = ma, you think of them in terms of universals.
You think of these properties of having force, having mass, having acceleration. These are, there's a kind of what he calls a quasi-causal connection between these universals, which concrete examples of force and mass and acceleration down here, as it were, conform to. And that conformity can be explained in scientific terms. So it's not quite causal, but it's an explanation for why there are the causal regularities that we see.
All right. Can I interject? Just one thing in context historically that supports what James is saying, is that the notion, there was a famous paper in the history of science by a fairly obscure figure, obscure but famous. The paper was famous, Edward Zilsel, was called The Genesis of the Concept of Natural Law. He goes back and he says, "You don't find it in the Stoics. You don't find it in the Greeks. There's the idea of natural law as the moral law that's accessible to
human reason." But the idea that nature- It's the key for scriptures, isn't it? Yes, but that nature is governed in some way, and that the regularities in nature are a product of the divine mind. This was Newton's own view. It was, as my Cambridge supervisor put it when I was working on Newton, Newton's view of gravity was that the ultimate cause of it was what Leibniz feared. It was constant spirit action, that it was a mode. What we call the laws of nature are a mode of divine action.
And this is what Zilsel found is that he said that the concept of the law of nature is a juridical metaphor of theological origin. So as James is saying, a little bit paradoxical that we have these modern materialists saying, "We can explain everything by reference to natural laws, without really being able to explain what the natural laws themselves are." Zilsel, I was thinking to myself, "Why am I familiar with that?" Of course,
the answer is because I read it in your book, the Return of the God Hypothesis. Boys, all right, I want to move to a related but slightly new topic. On this one, I think, I may indulge myself because this is one that has fascinated me personally for a long, long time. However, I lack the intellectual equipment that you possess to think it through properly. We have, to this point in the conversation as I read it, established that you can take a great
mind such as Newton. And even his explanations, rigorous and broad and sweeping as they are, not only leave room for but seem in some ways to rely upon some nature of the divine, of a first mover, of a legislator. For Newton. For Newton. Yeah. Okay. Now we come to, what I'm trying to do is push different problems with the materialist outlook, and now we come to the mind-body problem or the mind-brain problem. Here are a few quotations. Bear with me while I set this up, because as I say,
it fascinates me. The three of you will actually be able to provide the answers, I'm sure. Charles Darwin, "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy." Darwin sees the problem. If our minds have evolved from sheer, random accident, why should we trust their ability to reason? Physicist John Polkinghorne, who died a
couple of years ago, as I recall. "If thought is replaced by mere electrochemical neural events, then thoughts are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen. The world of rational discourse disappears into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that can't be right and none of us believe it to be." Last quotation, back to Lewis. C.S. Lewis, "The naturalists have been engaged in thinking about nature. They have not attended to the
fact that they are thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot be a merely natural event, and therefore something other than nature exists." Now, in my little mind, this has always been a stop the presses argument. If we reason something above and beyond near matter must exist, and yet the rest of the world seems totally unimpressed by this argument, in particular science. I'm not sure, I don't think
many people know the argument. I toss it over to you, James, because you're nodding away as though you... Go ahead. It's worth pointing out that there are at least two challenges in what you've just said for the materialist. Oh, you double it for me. The first one is a pretty straightforward one. The fact of mind, the problem of consciousness or the so-called hard problem of consciousness
for materialists. And before getting into debates as to the evolutionary dynamics of the evolution of mind and reason and rational discourse, it's worth just putting that on the table. That it is incumbent upon the materialist to explain how mind can be identified and reduced to without remainder neurophysiological processes, problem number one. Problem number two,
Darwin's doubt, developed, of course, by C.S. Lewis in his lovely book, Miracles, and later with Real Philosophical Firepower by Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s. Basically, it's I think known as the evolutionary argument against naturalism. The thought is, the way Lewis puts it in Miracles, is that it's very tempting for us to conflate rational processes with causal processes. We talk about, "Well, he led me to believe that." We often talk about how
we reason in causal ways. Lewis's point is that we're actually speaking metaphorically there. Rational discourse, rational reflection, reasoning our way through an argument, although it's tempting to use causal metaphors, these are not causal connections. Or at least certainly they may be identified and correlated with causal, neurophysiological
connections, but they're not the same thing. Of course, the argument when it gets married to Darwinism and the evolutionary theory, is that the Darwinian theory is that our cognitive faculties are not truth-tracking but survival tracking. Yes, and that's the absolute basic problem for them, isn't it? And it may well be the case that sometimes truth-tracking cognitive faculties will confer survival value. If I can count the number of tigers in the next-door valley, the chances of my surviving
over the person who can't are a lot higher. But of course, it may well be the case and it plainly is the case, that falsity tracking cognitive faculties will confer survival. What is it that atheists accuse religious believers of? If not being committed to a false belief system, which must be explained in Darwinian terms because there is religion, whether it's false or not,
as some kind of survival coping mechanism. Dawkins himself makes exactly that argument, that religion has a survival value, but yet he also claims it's false. So there's a negative correlation between what we are programmed to believe and the truth of things. It's a fascinating moment in the history of 20th century philosophy, because it raises the specter not just of a skeptical objection. But skepticism is a universal solvent. It means thought must stop. Yes.
I don't see any of that. You know, I knew you wouldn't, David. That's why I'm so happy to have James. Go ahead. It's the expression of the genetic fallacy that there is some significant relationship between the causal story about the evolution of our cognitive power. And the standard of assessment we use to determine whether an argument is valid or sound, or not valid or sound. It was, according to James, completely disjoint.
My particular ancestors were probably struggling for survival at the expense of truths. I'm convinced they were. So what? So what? I can open up a logic book, see what sound reasoning is. The causal sequence has absolutely nothing to do with the standards of assessment, so Darwin's horrid doubt remains just what it was. It was Darwin's horrid doubt. He was doubtful
about a lot of things with very good reason. But as far as we're concerned, if we accept this as a universal point of skepticism, it perishes on a self-imposed blaze of self-reference. Universal skepticism must be self-referential, and if it's appropriate, then universal skepticism itself may be dismissed. After all, if my ancestors were scrabbling in a shtetl somewhere in Poland, indifferent to the truth, what relevance would universal skepticism
have to those particular circumstances? The more so, since universal skepticism must in the end be skeptical about universal skepticism. James Orr, you have explaining to do, because you were nodding happily away as I read my quotations. And then David just rejected it all with the back of his hand, and you were nodding happily away as he did that.
Well, my point was simply looking at it from a strictly atheistic perspective, the emergence of mind, truth-tracking cognitive faculties is a puzzle. It's not a puzzle if you don't accept the materialist hypothesis, which I don't. But can you grant that the mind-body problem is at least a puzzle? What's the problem? For the materialist. For the materialist. What's the problem?
That we all seem to be possessed of a thing. We'll call it a mind, we'll call it a consciousness, that cannot be reduced to merely physical interactions. Says who? Me or whatever. Well, when you're asking for evidence, you're asking for something that- Thank you, James, keep going. ... would be accessible to all of us. Let's be reasonable. Let's be reasonable, that's the point. That's the point. You open up your computer. Type in
ChatGPT-4, there's a mind that's entirely mechanical. There's a point of evidence. This is an extraordinary achievement. Hold on, stop there. It's right there, it will talk to you. You were about to assert that there is no difference in principle between highly sophisticated machines and human beings? No, I don't need to assert that. If you want a difference in principle because the defense
in principle, but what difference does that make? There is a counter example to the thesis of the divisibility between intelligence instantiated in a biological system, and intelligence instantiated in an electromagnetic system. We have a counter example. We can't say, "Oh, they're just absolutely inconceivable." They're not inconceivably different, we have to recognize that. That was available as a point of argument as
early as the 17th century. Leibniz was very proud of his computing machine. He looked forward to reducing all intellectual endeavors to computations, and that may still be our future. David, surely you wouldn't say that ChatGPT has a first-person, subjective, conscious-minded perspective on the world. Yeah, but I wouldn't say that about you either, so that doesn't advance the argument. The only one I can see with a first-person,
subjective experience is me. About the rest of you, I have my doubts. Maybe that concedes the point that there is somewhere a first-person, subjective experience, which is qualitatively different than that in ChatGPT. I have no reason to doubt my own experiences. An analysis of consciousness seems to me inconceivable and everything I've read is absurd. But that a form of intelligence, which is measurable, obvious, palpable, exists in a mechanical system.
I think that's been undeniable since the 17th century, and it may be the only form of intelligence, if we're all limited to effectively computable functions. There we go. Artificial intelligence is not, in fact, artificial. No it's not. It's designed by human beings, of course. On that question, we must proceed. We leave that question two to one, two to one, two to one, two to one. We're getting split decisions here. Huh? What do you mean two to one? There's only one. Which two?
For David, there's only one. Since there's only one who really exists. I didn't say you don't exist. I don't want to make a claim. The only point of consciousness with which I am personally acquainted, is the lovely and noble thing answering to the name of Berlinski. About the rest of you, that's your problem. There are degrees of probability, David, and you can work by analogy into my first-person perspective. Or vice versa. And vice versa. Stuart Hampshire made an excellent
argument. John Searle makes a good argument. Absolutely. In fact, one of the very first women ever to get a PhD in America, I think, had a wonderful correspondence with Bertrand Russell. She wrote him and said, "Russell, I've decided to become a solipsist. It's so much fun. I don't understand why more people don't try it." And it's a very unusual, very rare phenomenon in the history of philosophy. I'm delighted to have
met, David's the first solipsist I've met. I'm not a solipsist. All I said was if we're talking about consciousness, there's only one that I'm acquainted with. You mentioned Searle and he has a beautiful observation, John Searle, the philosopher at Berkeley. He gave a wonderful talk. I heard him years ago speak about the philosophers of mind call them Qualia. My experience of the blue in James's jacket, there's nothing that
corresponds to my mental experience of that color. There's nothing that can be causally explained by neurophysiological state. All we can do is show that there are necessary conditions, but we can never close the gap between necessity and true causality, a sufficient condition. And that's been a persistent problem in trying to account for our internal, mental experience, whether
it's just our own or what we think others have. Just go back to you and get rid of causality entirely, as you suggested we do. To finish the point- Ignore that man for the time being. Well, we've never been able to close this gap between saying that, "Well, we have a neurophysiological substrate that's necessary to our experience of the world." The actual, causal relationship between the specific neurophysiological states and what I'm experienced when I see your
purple tie or your blue suit. That's the gap that needs to be explained that the materialists have failed to explain. Good, thank you. Thank you. We'll stop there and move on. No, no, no, because we've got a good enough stopping. Good enough is good enough in the way this is running. Okay, so could I move on? That was my attempt to deal with the problems of materialism in principle, so to speak. It got far more complicated, thank you, David. Thank you, the consciousness known as Berlinski.
You're welcome. Thanks. There's at least one of them. Yeah, we know. A couple of problems with materialism in practice, we'll just go through a couple of big ones, just two big ones from the 20th century. The Big Bang, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian first proposes the theory in 1927. He reasons that if all the galaxies appear to be traveling away from each other, then at some point in the very distant past, all matter and time must have been compressed
into a single point, and then exploded. The universe had a beginning. Scientists don't like the idea, including Albert Einstein. Why did they resist it at first? Einstein, I think, inherited a default materialist view of coming out of the late 19th century. And it was simply inconceivable to him, as it was to Hoyle, another cosmologist in the 20th century, that you would have a beginning to matter. Hoyle said that he was a democratian. He
simply didn't believe that something could come from nothing. On its face, that's understandable. And Einstein's equations at face value seemed to imply that the universe, that gravitation would be pulling everything together. And if that was the only force in the universe, then there must be something, then we would live in a giant black hole. But we clearly don't live in that sort of a universe. We live in a universe in which there's empty space, so there must be something dynamical.
An antigravity force that's pushing things outward, and he called that the cosmological constant. Fair enough, but what he then did, he made an additional move and he assigned a value to the cosmological constant. It was completely arbitrary. Since he fine-tuned it himself so that he could portray the universe, as in a static balance between the inward pull of gravity and the outward push of this additional, hypothetical force that he envisioned.
And he then portrayed the universe as in a state of what was called a steady state, a perpetual balance between the inward pull and the outward push. And in so doing, eliminated the implication of his own equations as to a beginning of the universe. Turned out that subsequent physicists, Lemaître was one, showed that even the physics of that didn't work. Very small perturbations one way or another would cause a collapse of the universe or an expansion.
And then the evidence started to come in of the redshift from Hubble and Humason, and others showing that astronomically speaking, the galaxies were in fact moving outward, suggesting an expanding universe. But that is now I hate this notion of consensus science, because the moment you start speaking of the consensus contrarians. Like the three of you all quite rightly say, "Oh yeah?" But it is a widely accepted position,
then the Big Bang today, is it not? Well, it was very controversial even after the redshift evidence was shown. But there's been a series of contrary models and discoveries that have challenged those contrary models and it's increasingly accepted. The notion that the universe had a beginning has had what effect on the philosophy of science? It's very, very rare that in the history of philosophy, scientific discovery actually
changes the game, changes the philosophical discussion. But the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem in the 1960s, which I think commands as big a consensus as there is at the moment, at least in cosmology, did have that impact. And what it did was that it recovered one particular version of the cosmological argument developed in the Abbasid Caliphate in the eighth, ninth century, the so-called Kalam cosmological argument. The universe began
to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. And that cause crucially, and here's the challenge for the materialist, can't be itself a material cause. Because what's being explained is the sum total of matter, space-time. So this opens up the question, there must have been, unless you're going to accept the principle that something can just pop into being out of nothing, some non-material agency or cause that can adequately explain it. Okay. We can pause for hours on each of these
thoughts, but we move on. The discovery of DNA, Darwin publishes on The Origin of Species in 1859. We know all of this that he thinks all life evolves from lower to higher. He's pretty casual about the origins of life because it's assumed that it's some simple blob of jello would do the trick. And what we now know about even the simplest forms of life, every single, single-celled object is fantastically complicated,
and in particular, equipped with a strand of DNA. Two quotations, Oxford zoologist, Richard Dawkins, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." The late philosopher, Anthony Flew, Oxford philosopher who spent more than six decades of his life as an atheist, and then changed his mind. "Biologists' investigation of DNA has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life,
that intelligence must have been involved." Which of those two quotations do you find more persuasive? The Flew or the- The Flew or the Dawkins? Well, I think Dawkins obviously has a point that it's much easier to have become an atheist after Darwin published in 1859 than it was before, and I think that is culturally correct. If you look at the history of journals, diaries, personal asides, until 1859, it was real tough just to say, "God does not exist."
It was possible to say, there's a lot of contradictory evidence. I don't particularly have a relationship with a Christian God, but fundamentally, that defiant assertion only becomes possible after Darwin provides a test case. The intractable problem before 1859 may not have been solved after 1859, but we see what a solution could be like. I see. And that's to my mind, a defense of Dawkins. He is right sociologically, he's right culturally. I think he
has an important point. It was possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist only after 1859. Whether he is right in suggesting in 2024 that everyone should be as full as he is, that's a slightly different question. Slightly? Well, it's a question of taste, because certainly he has a tremendously important point to make. But on the other hand, Flew is entirely rational. I'm not sure these are contradictory or conflicting positions. Flew has an entirely adequate response.
Wait a minute, Dawkins says, "I don't believe in God." Flew says, "I do." Those are contradicting points. Yes, that's true. But Flew also spent decades, as you remarked, as an atheist. So he was facing the consequences of what Dawkins analyzed. He was facing that, he had accepted. A much deeper look at the implications of molecular biology, the existence of life, the existence of cosmos,
this is also a rational point. A much deeper look made possible by science itself, may reveal that Dawkins and in that versions were premature, not unjustified, just premature. Well, and this is the argument of a very famous essay that David wrote for commentary in 1996 called The Deniable Darwin, it later became the title of a book, same title,
that you get the Molecular Biological Revolution in 1950s and '60s. And what comes out of that is the realization, the secret of hereditary transmission has to do with a code. Has to do with information, and at least the building of proteins has to do with information.
And if you begin in '58, Crick advances the sequence hypothesis, in which he asserts, realizes that the nucleotide basis, this chemical subunits along the interior of the famed double helix, are functioning like digital or alphabetic characters conveying instructions for building proteins. By 1965, his hypothesis is essentially confirmed by work that's taking place in laboratories on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1966, there's a conference at The Wistar
Institute in Philadelphia. Some of David's early mentors and colleagues were present called the Mathematical Challenges to Neo-Darwinism, and essentially reducing a very complicated mathematical analysis to a simple example. What they realized that if the information for building the proteins is in a long bit string, that if you start randomly changing those As, Cs, Gs and Ts along the side of the DNA, it's mathematically inevitable that you're going to
degrade the function that you have long before you find new function. Think of a computer code. That if you've got a section of computer code, you start changing the zeros and ones, you're going to degrade the function of the computer program long before you get a new program or operating system. And so these scientists, mostly mathematically inclined scientists from MIT at The Wistar Institute say, "Hey, there's a mathematical challenge with this theory."
And David did a beautiful job explaining that in the '96 essay, that really I don't think has been answered adequately. So James, even as the Big Bang, a version of Big Bang has an effect on the philosophy of science in the 20th century. Professor Flew says there's a code, there must've been a coder. Yeah. One way of thinking about that- This has an impact?
I think David's broadly correct to say that Dawkins is onto something, that after 1859 it becomes possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. But it seems to me that after 1958, that's the second, the neo-Darwinian Revolution. David said he was correct sociologically and culturally. You can affect the manners of an intellectually fulfilled atheist if you're paying attention. All right. Agreed. I think it becomes- What happens after '58?
After '58, I think it becomes very, very hard to be an intellectually fulfilled materialist. We're now dealing with, of course, what is the materialist claim? That the fundamental nature of reality is explicable in material terms. Now we find that deep, deep down is a phenomenon, coding information that is intrinsically ideal or mental, immaterial, and that poses an enormous challenge. Maybe it's too quick, I think it probably is too quick to infer directly to design
or to divinity. But it's certainly too thick a slice of the non-material for the materialist digestive system. Okay. In the 19th century, the scientific consensus was there were two fundamental realities, matter and energy, space and time. And now in the 20th and 21st century, biology has come to the realization that there's a third fundamental entity. It's matter, energy and information within space and time. And that in our experience, our uniformed and repeated experience,
which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, information is a mine product. It's not a product of just an underlying material substrate. David, I'm going to quote you again. This is Newton's Gift. "True not just for Newton's laws, true as well for the equations governing the electromagnetic field, Einstein's field equations for general relativity, and Schrödinger's wave equation in quantum mechanics. The laws of nature, by which nature is explained,
are not themselves a part of nature. They exist beyond space and time. They are what they are." Now, forgive me if this is just a sheer perversity, but I'll tell you that that reminded me of something, Exodus 3. "Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel and she'll say unto them, the God of your fathers." I am that I am. What am I to say to them? What is his name? What shall I say to them? And God said unto Moses, "I am that I am."
Did you do that on purpose? They are what they are, I am that I am. It certainly feels like the ground of being. Now, what could I possibly say in response? Because if I said no, it was a sheer accident. The consciousness known as Berlinski could not count that. I could never... I tell you the truth, I don't remember why I wrote those words, but they certainly strike a chord.
But that is not just in my view, I think that is how the scientific community, or at least the part of the scientific community that deals with the mathematics. Right. Biology may be slightly different. But the physicists, the theoretical physicists and the mathematicians, that's exactly how they view the laws of nature, as if they're filled with the kind of primordial energy that not only explain but govern the world, the universe. They have a power not only to command, but to
the all, and I think that that is entirely correct. That is what the laws of nature, that is how the laws of nature appear to the community of theoretical physicists. Okay. So for the two of you then? It leads open the question whether that point of view is true. Yeah, because it raises a really interesting question. The laws of nature are expressed in mathematics, but how is it that mathematical expressions are causing something in the real world? This is
a conflation that occurs a lot among physicists. And David writes about it in Science After Babel, his newest book, and so it's a category mistake. It's like saying that the longitude and latitude lines on the map are responsible for the height of the Himalayan mountains. Unless there's no such thing as the physical world, there's only mathematics. A point of view we mathematicians are partial to. Which is a decidedly anti-materialistic view.
The two of you may excuse yourselves and go to the bar to continue this conversation later, but I have a question for James. I have a question for James. I am in what I was hoping were my final questions. Is it fair to say, again, you have here the little layman thinking things through. For a long, long, long, long time when I was a student, the general notion in the air was that as science progresses, it squeezes God out. And sooner or later, science will explain
everything. That no longer feels to be the case. Now, if you stay with the science as long as you can and you get to a Big Bang, and science is no longer explaining away God. It's reaching a point where it can't say, where it loses its explanatory powers. Science discovers DNA. How did this strand of three billion characters get into the simplest cell? And so is it the case that properly understood, science no longer leads us away from God,
but takes us straight to the foot of the throne? You may not go for that, but that there's a change here. You follow the science today and it takes you to places you wouldn't have expected just a couple of decades ago. Is that fair? It used to be very fashionable for materialists to accuse theologians of indulging in God of the gaps reasoning. That is to say-
Explain that. Yeah. ... and this is the idea that theologians where there's a gap in our scientific understanding, natural theologians would rush in and say, "Well, God is the explanation. God is what fills in the gaps." Now, there are all sorts of reasons to be concerned about God or the gaps reasoning, but I think what we see today is a godlessness of the gaps. A kind of scientific imperialism and triumphalism.
The idea is roughly, "Okay. We can't understand mind, we can't understand DNA, we can't understand moral truths, or modality or mathematics, or indeed, metaphysics itself. But don't worry, just give us time. We'll get there. We'll fill in the gaps. Science will fill in the gaps." Materialist science will fill in the gaps, yeah. Materialist science will put in the gaps. I think it is absolutely true to say that as a research program,
which is really what it is. Materialism is a research program fusing science and philosophy, is unraveling on all of those M words that I mentioned. Whether it's the philosophy of mind and the return of the hard problem of consciousness. Whether it's mathematics and the conviction that mathematics must be real, because science presupposes mathematics and couldn't detect
or establish or verify mathematical truths. Questions of modality, questions of morality, these are questions that science are simply not equipped to cope with. Without if it's not going to simply reduce or eliminate those truths away, which cuts very deeply against our intuitions. So I think the thrust of your question is well taken. Beta plus maybe. All right. Here's your last question, Steve. I'm going to quote Lewis
again in The Abolition of Man. "The triumphs of modern science." Note that he grants triumphs. As Do we all. As do we all. Yes, yes. "The triumphs of modern science may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price, reconsideration and something like repentance may be required." Now, James just used the term scientific imperialism. Do you see any signs of reconsideration, let alone repentance? I do. I like the repentance word because it has a religious connotation,
but it literally means to rethink. I mentioned there was a kind of, I think, a rise, fall, rise plot structure in the history of science. That science arose in the West in a Judeo-Christian milieu for many discernible, Judeo-Christian reasons. The intelligibility of nature and things we've talked about. It lost that thread in the late 19th century, materialism became the more dominant framework in which science was done, and so that's
the fall of that theistic perspective. But I think it's coming back and at least there is at least- It's coming back, the theistic? The theistic, right. A case for theism based on scientific discoveries, I think, is coming back. It's not that we are inferring that God is an explanation because of what we don't understand. It's because of the things we do understand, the things we have discovered about the beginning of the universe. The fine-tuning of the universe.
The incorrigibility or the absolute necessity of information to understand what's going on in life, and what we know about where information comes from in our general experience. So I do think this is why I wrote the book, Return of the God Hypothesis. I think materialism is increasingly an adequate explanatory framework. I think the theistic framework that gave rise to modern science, provides a nice way of understanding these new
things that we've been discovering. And now, may I close the program by making a request of the remarkable consciousness known as Berlinski? Sure. David, will you end us by, will you read from your book, Newton's Gift? Oh, that's a beautiful passage actually. In old age, Newton allowed the focus of his attention to return to Biblical
studies. He wrote and endlessly rewrote the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms. When at last he came to face death, he chose to describe himself in words of majestic detachment. "I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore. And diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
David Berlinski, Stephen Meyer, James Orr, thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation shooting today in Fiesole, Italy, I'm Peter Robinson. Silence. Everyone, [foreign language 01:11:52]. Unbelievable, this is such an unruly. You, whenever you're on the show, there's trouble. That's what I know, okay.