https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=m3ppAr5o2EQ
So, what I’m hoping to do with you today is to talk about the question of what religion is, whether or not the picture that you see coming from a religious perspective and the picture that I see coming from a scientific perspective are actually the same picture just viewed from a different angle. I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m curious as to what you will say. And then the question, the one that I think is really important is given the picture that we can agree on, whatever the overlap may be, what is its implication for how we should view these questions that have historically been cast in religious terms? What is it that we moderns should do in light of the information about what we now seem to know? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a conversation I was hoping to have with you, so that sounds great. Great. Anywhere in particular you want to start? I think that maybe I can, because I’ve heard your explanation about the function of religion that’s there, the theory of religion. And the way that I like to present religious pattern is maybe a lot wider than the way it is presented socially. I tend to think of, I tend to actually not like the term religion as a very specific, very narrow type of behavior that we have. And I like to understand religion in general as the manner in which we bind together. That is, the things that we do as humans to bind us together into groups in general, bind us together towards higher purposes is maybe the best way to understand it. That is, we organize our behavior in a certain manner, which makes us able to exist as higher beings or higher units. When I say higher beings, I mean, you know, families, countries, higher, but that is also analogous to the manner in which we cohere inside ourselves, because a human being is also made of different parts and different aspects, different thoughts, different desires, different, there’s all these things competing inside us for supremacy, you could say, or for attention. And the manner in which we cohere those aspects together will be part of what we tend to call Which is why religion has an individual aspect, whether it’s prayer, worship, meditation, depending on the different religious practices, but then that scales up to the social level. Well, you’ll have a type, you’ll have ritual behavior, you’ll have sacrifices, you’ll have common worship, you know, circumambulation of important places or important things that bind us together. So that is more so the way that I understand religious practice, because it seems to encompass more clearly what it is, like what it is we’re doing at all the different levels at which we do them. So would it be all right if I put a couple tools on the table? Sure. First, I want to start with the question of faith in science, because I really think one of the reasons that people misunderstand the status of religion, however we describe it, when it comes to scientific explanations, is that we do not do a fair job of correcting for the way scientists work on other questions. And I think the more I think about this, the more important I think it is. When I talk to most scientists about the question of faith, it turns out that most scientists have the belief that they are functioning without any faith at all. And there are exceptions to this. There are scientists who very often have to be careful in their academic context not to speak too publicly about it. There are scientists who do have a separate faith, right? They go to church or temple or whatever it might be. But they tend to see faith as something absent from their scientific practice. Now, to me, this seems absurd. I don’t think you, I literally think it is impossible to do scientific work without any faith. And basically, I would argue that you have to, faith are things that you take without evidence. The fact that you are a being that is capable of observing a universe, which it is necessary that you are in order to do scientific work, is something you cannot prove. And yes, we can say, well, Descartes proved it. But I don’t think he really did. I think what he did is he took the first cheat and he said, let’s just assert that I exist and that I know because I’m thinking and go from there. And my point would be, if you really scrutinize Descartes’ proof, you will discover it’s not a proof. It’s a leap of faith. And if you don’t make it, then you will literally spend your entire career attempting to solve this unsolvable puzzle, which will be a waste of time because you won’t do it. Or you can make that leap of faith and you can say, assuming that I am a being who can observe the universe, then here’s the science that I’m going to do. And so to make a long story short, scientists work to minimize the amount of faith necessary in the explanations of the universe that they come up with, but you cannot bring it to zero. And if we then move from there to this question of things that are literally false but metaphorically true, these things are features of every scientific model that we have that is incomplete. And Darwinism is extremely incomplete because it’s so new and so complex. Our models get more complete as we go into chemistry and physics, the simpler realms. But the point is all of these things involve places where our explanations aren’t very good and where we fill in some feature of the model that we cannot demonstrate, but that functions well enough if we operate on the basis of it. So what I’m getting at is religions may be largely based on literally false metaphorically true beliefs and science starts out based on those things and whittles them away but can never get to zero. But really, these two realms have the same characteristic, which is that they depend on us being able to skip certain levels of explanation in order to do the job of the whole. All right. So I’m going to put you a little on the faith thing or what faith is. The way that I, faith is the trust in things that are unseen. That is, at all levels of analysis, the level which is above it is unseen from that level. Okay, so what I mean is that if you’re analyzing something at a molecular level, you can never see the apple. You’ll see its constituents. If you go down, same problem. If you go up, same problem. If you’re talking about the apple and an orchard, if you’re looking at the level of the apple, you’ll never see the orchard. And so what faith is, is that move between levels because from the level in which you are, if you only take the elements given to you at that level and you analyze them, there’s no jump to the higher identity. That jump is always a leap of faith. Once you have it, then you can analyze things at that level. That is, once you reach that higher level, once you, for example, if you look at the people in a mass, you can’t see the city. You have to jump up until you see the city. Once you have the city, then you can use that identity and compare it to other cities and compare it to other levels at the same level. But in the way that our mind or our experience tends to work is that we can see parts of things and we can see holes of things and we can notice that things are made of parts and also have unity. But the jump from the parts to the unity is one which is not accessible at the level of the parts.