Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Peter Boghossian: How to have IMPOSSIBLE conversations! (#141)

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

In How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation -- whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control. Boghossian and Lindsay teach the subtle art of instilling doubts and opening minds. They cover everything from learning the fundamentals for good conversations to achieving expert-level techniques to deal with hardliners and extremists. This book is the manual everyone needs to foster a climate of civility, connection, and empathy. Support our Sponsor LinkedIn Jobs! Use this link to post your first job ad for FREE LinkedIn.com/impossible In our current political climate, it seems impossible to have a reasonable conversation with anyone who has a different opinion. Whether you're online, in a classroom, an office, a town hall -- or just hoping to get through a family dinner with a stubborn relative -- dialogue shuts down when perspectives clash. Heated debates often lead to insults and shaming, blocking any possibility of productive discourse. Everyone seems to be on a hair-trigger. Peter Boghossian is a full-time faculty member in the philosophy department at Portland State University and an affiliated faculty member at Oregon Health Science University in the Division of General Internal Medicine. He is a national speaker for the Center of Inquiry and an international speaker for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists. He lives in Portland, Oregon. James Lindsay holds degrees in physics and mathematics, with a doctorate in the latter. He has authored two previous books: Everybody is Wrong about God and Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinguishing of magic. Welcome everybody to the Into the Impossible podcast. The Into the Impossible podcast is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, where I am the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics. And I talk to people in all different capacities from billionaires, brainiacs, and thought leaders. and today I'm speaking to someone who's all three of those, a billionaire, a billionaire. I don't know, not yet, right? Peter, you say the first billion is the hardest, right? Yeah, I think I'd rather be the first than the second of the third. So Peter Vagozian is a professor at Portland State University.

We're going to get into aspects of academia, but this is meant to be a conversation that I've long wanted to have, and that involves the difficulties and challenges presented when discussing difficult, sensitive, thought-provoking ideas and concepts, but wanting to do so with comity, and maybe some comedy, too. And Peter exemplifies that and is really kind of a rare breed, someone who seeks to achieve not agreement, but clarity. And I think that's a rare trait. So, Peter, thank you so much for joining us on The Into the Impossible podcast. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

And I'm eager to kind of test some, my ideas as my unlettered opinions in physics, if I can. And I was hoping maybe we could start that way. Yeah. Okay. I'm happy to do that. And just to remind folks that we will take questions from the Clubhouse stage later on in the podcast. After we get our host prerogatives, we're kind of dual host. posting this particular episode.

But yes, I'm happy if you want to start off, I am more than happy to do it. And otherwise, we will stay tuned, though, because we will do what's called live action role-playing using astronomy. And this, I don't know if you can see Peter, but this is a finger puppet of Galileo-Galai, the very first astronomical observer in human history. Some say the father of all of science. Some say the father of relativity. but he's also the father of a very important project to me,

which I am going to find called the dialogues. The dialogues on the two chief world systems. And we're going to talk about that, I hope, and maybe do some live action role playing where I take the role of Galileo and you become the inquisitor in the Catholic Church. But for now, you're already... Okay, so I have decided that I want to jump to that.

I love that. I just absolutely love that. You want to do that first? Is that okay? Yeah, let's do it. So I'm fascinated by Galileo for many reasons. He was a brilliant person. He was a very flawed person.

He was a complex individual like we all are. He was one of the best and first popular science writers. He had venal ambitions. He had several mistresses and illegitimate children to support. And he's famous for constructing many, many things that we take for granted perhaps not really knowing that it's attributed to him, and one of which I want to start off reading to you and ask you if this resonates with you.

It's something that you've written about. It's a statement made in the book, the dialogue. By the way, this book does not exist in audio form yet. I am recording the first ever audio book of Galileo Galilee, along with a very, very famous scientist by the name of Carlo Rovelli, who wrote seven brief lectures on physics. He's an amazing person. So we're reading these voices back and forth, and stay tuned for more information.

You can see my website. I should have that audio book already listed. Anyway, here's a sentence kind of in the middle of Galileo, in the middle of the dialogue. He says the following. He says, about intellectuals. He says, this vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything for anyone who had experienced just once. the perfect knowledge of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, he would recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing.

And this to me, I want to try it on you, is kind of reminiscent of what you guys call the Dunning Kruger effect, the sort of steepness of the learning curve. And I submit that Galileo had extreme brilliance and genius in physics, but of course his genius did not extend to the political realm. And in sort of this role-playing adventure, I want to perhaps investigate that, how someone can be so intellectual in one realm, but so clueless about human nature. And in so writing the dialogues, he tried to have an impossible conversation, one that you are intimately familiar with involving a revolution on the understanding of the earth and its position in the universe, which was basically the solar system. Galileo-Fa.

famously believed that the earth went around the sun and not the other way around. But I submit to you, you're a brilliant person. Peter, can you prove to me as the Pope that the earth, let's say now for a second, you be Galileo, prove to me that the earth is in motion. Can you prove it to me? Do you know how we prove it? Yeah. So I'm just going to jump into the role play. Yeah. Okay. So what evidence would satisfy you that that's the case? What would that have to look like that I show you? So it would have to be evidence that is accessible. It shouldn't require something beyond humanity's ability to collect.

It should be interpretable. It should be that evidence should be dispositive. In other words, it should be necessary evidence and sufficient evidence. It shouldn't be necessarily circumstantial, I would say. Those are all pieces of evidence. that I would require. But the main point is evidence, in some sense, although we now, and you talk about a lot in your book, disconfirmation, that wasn't really a concept that existed back then.

Not that I'm saying we have to be beholden to that framework. But nevertheless, I submit that, I don't even think in modern physics that disconfirmation is a necessary part of the intellectual refutation or proof of a scientific theory's validity. Right. And it might not be, but in the context of what you've asked me to do, we're talking about the Pope's belief system, right? And so starting off with the disconfirmation question is the best way to elicit whether or not he's genuinely willing to revise his belief on the basis of evidence. So back to the role play. So just so that we're clear, so that if I can give you evidence that satisfies all three criteria, you would be able to change your mind.

You would change your mind. Yes, I would certainly change my mind. Okay. So if you're willing to change your mind on that, then you're in a very real sense, you're beholden to the evidence. Is that right? Yes, I am. But you should also note that I believe nothing is beyond God's ability, even the simulation of effects that would prove your hypothesis, correct? In other words, there's nothing God can't do, including make it appear that the earth is moving when, in fact, it's stationary. Well, that really moves the bar a little bit. I didn't say it would be fair.

Right. So I guess my concern then is if I brought up a piece of evidence and you were to say to me that that's just an artifact of how Gaunt wants you to see things and you'd use that to retain your worldview, what would you suggest that I do in that case? Well, first I would ask you, do you believe it's true that God can make it appear that the earth is in motion when in fact it's stationary? I don't think that the question has bearing in the context of our conversation. I think what has bearing is that we can both admit, if we can, what would constitute, as you said, necessary and sufficient evidence for that? And if we can agree upon that, then it seems to me the burden is upon me to show you that evidence, right? Yeah, I would stipulate that, sure.

Okay, so admittedly at that time also lens technology is very crude, and there's some fascinating stuff about what would happen when people actually did look through telescopes. But, you know, Wittgenstein just parenthetically has a famous quotation. What would the earth look like? How would things be different if the sun rotated around the earth? It wouldn't look any different than it does now, right? So what about optics, right? So, again, I understand that this is going back, we're in time,

but what about optics? If I can present you with admittedly crude and fuzzy, but images from far away, would that sway you? Yeah, I would do that. I would even put my eye on the telescope, if you would, I'm not frightening. Yes, I would, certainly. Oh, okay.

Well, then you are indeed, you are indeed a man whose views I come to respect because you're willing to revise your beliefs. So what I just did there is I alter cast at him. Oh, and by the way, Peter, we here in the Vatican, we here in the Vatican have a very advanced, even to this day in 2021, a very advanced astronomical observatory with a four meter diameter telescope that is used not to make observations of angels and so forth. We actually do serious scientific research with the Vatican Observatory. By the way, Peter, is there any way to turn to make, are you hardwired in on Ethernet?

Your video is very grainy. I don't know if mine is too. Oh, my audio is fine, which is. I'm on DSL. I'm in the middle of nowhere right now. Do you want me to do something else? Okay. Is your phone or are there any other device?

using the Wi-Fi, too? Only my phone. That's it. I'm in a very low-tech place. Okay. Okay. That's fine. I know how you guys do things in the Northwest.

I won't judge. I won't judge if you don't. So, yeah, so getting back, yes, I will certainly not, yeah, not only use a telescope, I will fund the construction of a telescope because even in the Inquisition, I had teams of scientists working for me and the Vatican staff, the best scientist of our time. To do what? So they were investigating natural phenomena that would bolster the majesty and extravagance of the creator's abilities. And did they start from the conclusion that they weren't sure if the Earth revolved around the sun?

Do they have a starting conclusion? I think they had a starting point, which is that in context of monotheism, that the phenomena that we witness in the natural world are governed by natural laws, themselves established by the creator, some for our benefit, and these laws are not governed by other gods. So we believe in a monotheistic god. Therefore, we don't believe in the god of thunder and the god of lightning. We believe in one unified God who set the laws of nation.

And would there ever be any evidence that could cause you to challenge, challenge that belief or lower your confidence in that? If there was a testable prediction, it's hard for me, actually, Peter, to argue this because it's actually not true in the Jewish Bible, right, that the earth is the center of the universe. But arguing, as my Christian brothers and sisters would argue, it seems that the evidence was from the book of Joshua, once or twice. my personal belief is that it didn't. It did not, obviously, prove that the Earth or the Bible does not state explicitly that the Earth is the center of the universe. But from the Vatican's perspective, I would accept it insofar as it does not limit God's ability, but I would be very cautious to you, Peter, Galileo, because you're upsetting an entire worldview, right? So you're playing with fire that you would

come to question the veracity of the of the of the of the of the bible so so in other words the stakes are very high in this conversation aren't they yeah so i think that's part of the problem i don't think he would answer that i don't think that would be his response i think he'd just say no because he was also remember in aristotle in book eight of the physics and book 12 in the metaphysics he's very specific about an immortal unchanging being and and you know they it comes plato's tamas talks about this very explicitly about the globes and the heavens, although it's not specifically to the earth revolving around the sun. But I don't think he admit that there's any evidence that could ever cause him to revise his God belief. Yeah, I would say that's right. Yeah. So if I say that,

what would you say next? I mean, the Dalai Lama has, you know, said if the claims of Buddhism contradict the claims of science, he'll defer to the claims of science, which is really an extraordinary claim for a religious leader. But I think that in those cases, if you can, in a context of a conversation like that, that it's almost an impossible conversation. The key is to figure out what the disconfirmation criteria are. So if people can agree upon those, then they can move forward. The difficult thing is that he was living absent the technology, you know, the lens technology, for example, to make that case in any convincing way.

Right. But let me turn it around on you. So I agree 100%. Yeah. But I think Gallo, actually, the conclusion of this book, It's not written with the catchy title like your books are. This book, the original title, was not the dialogue on the two world systems. The Pope forced Galileo to change the title to this title from its original title, Peter. Its original title was not as catchy as how to have

impossible conversations or losing the Nobel Prize. The original title was on the flux and reflux of tides and the earth's oceans, rivers, and ferns. Now, I know you're up in the land of ferns, but it's a different kind of fern. Apparently, it's a type of waterway that they had over there in Italy. But the point being Galileo, his evidence, the strongest piece of evidence, was that the tides on the earth are governed by the combined sloshing of the Earth's oceans as the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. So in other words, this, here's some whiskey here.

So as it's rotating around, it's kind of sloshing around, and you see it sloshing maybe in the camera. So that was, according to Galileo, the proof of this, of the Earth's fundamental proof that the Earth was in motion around the sun, which is what his thesis was, right? Now, you as Galileo, what if I say that to you? Well, you'd have to be able to rule out alternative. Yeah, it was not only false approval. Yeah.

I mean, it's funny, it just, not to drag the conversation. Go ahead. No, no, no, go ahead. Not to drag it. What? I was going to say not to drag the conversation. into it, yeah, not to drive the conversation into the gutter. I was thinking about Bill O'Reilly's argument for the existence of God.

Tides go in, tides go out. So that phenomena can be interpreted any one of a number of ways, and you have to rule out alternative hypotheses for those, right? Right, right. And don't forget, he's a master of spin. So be careful. Correct. Correct.

But I think. Bill O'Reilly knows everything there is to know about spin. I think in the context of these conversations, the conversation we're having now, what's most important is to establish criteria right from the beginning of the conversation. So what would it take for you to believe? So you don't present your evidence because there's almost a wired desire for people to want to cling to existing beliefs. So belief revision is not a moral virtue. So you have to ask them to provide their disconfirmation criteria.

And I realize that that's a historical. And then if you can agree upon that, then that's how to move forward. The problem is, I think in this context, there really is no, excuse me, disconfirmation criteria because the beliefs aren't formed in the basis of evidence, right? So they'll use evidence to buttless beliefs that they already have. And so those things are almost always sociological, psychological, moral, but not epistemological or scientific. So that brings us, you know, 400 years to the future to now,

and we're still having these kinds of conversations in some sense that are impossible. In that in the scientific realm, people believe things for which there's no evidence currently on an observational front. And there are some that say it's even if I stipulate to you, Peter, let's say you believe in the string theory multiverse of our friend Lawrence Krause. You believe that there is a string theory multiverse. that not only can't be falsified, it also, there's, there's no prospect to eventually even prove it. In other words, the existence of a multiverse can admit the existence of an infinite number of universes in which I'm in Portland State and you're at UCSD.

And so I wonder, you know, in this context, how do you handle things? That's a preferred universe. Yeah, the problem is, I mean, Victor Stanger was a friend of an informal mentor of mine, and God in the multiverse addresses that. Krauss addresses also a mutual friend of ours. Krauss addresses that as well. It's the same thing as anything else. There's no special pleading.

You know, Brian Green would say, geez, it could be a waste of a lot of good math. Why would you believe it if it's not falsifiable? There's no evidence for it. It certainly makes an elegant theory, but on what basis do you believe it? Right. And this, of course, is true from Galileo's time to today. Well, I also think that that's a kind of a superstition that I see in academic philosophy and elsewhere. The idea that there has to be some kind of a unified field theory, the idea that the realm of the very small and the very large have to be somehow connected. I mean, you know, it's Heisenberg's Udnerner de Verklauchklaid.

Maybe there is no ordering of reality. Maybe there's just, maybe there's just, there's just is. And I think a lot of people are hoodwinked both by the language. You know, we mentioned before in a very brief conversation we had about the infinite regress, which I also think is a kind of academic superstition. So I think people are hoodwinked by concepts that have been around for a long time. Yeah. And that dovetails nicely with another concept of someone you bring up in the book, Carl Sagan, another sock puppet here for those that will be watching on YouTube.

the notion of, you know, the amount of space in the universe that kind of is allied in concept with the Fermi paradox, which we can talk about. But this notion that if there is no life, it's an awful waste of space. But there's no obligation for us not to waste space. And there's no saying that there has to be necessarily a purpose. I actually had this conversation with Sean Carroll, who's an eminent physicist at Caltech, when he was on the podcast. And I said, he is a famous lecture, you know, why God is not a good theory.

He doesn't say that equivocally you can rule out the existence of God, although he is a, what he calls a poetic naturalist. We can talk about materialism and naturalism and secularism later. But he basically says, because of the existence of a simpler universe than the one that we exist in, and because of the parsimonious nature of an omnipotent being, you know, the existence of the Hubble Deep field with trillions of galaxies, you know, possibly in our universe that led to the notion there are trillions of galaxies and just our observable universe. That's a huge waste of space.

In other words, it's just another extension of, as you said, waste of beautiful math. So far I've heard you say, it's a waste of beautiful math of string theory is wrong. I've said, Carl Sagan said, it's a waste of the space in the universe in our galaxy if there are no other intelligent technological life forms. and then three, if the universe is... Well, the difference in those things is... But there's no obligation. Nature has no obligation to make the universe accessible

or follow our reason. But you could say that about God too, right? You can say God doesn't have to make sense to Peter and Brian, right? Well, the first thing is we can do something about the fact that we're wasting a lot of good math. We can't do something about the fact that we've wasted a lot of good space. you know and even that that concept itself is anthropogenic or it's a human-centered concept that I don't think it's I don't think that it has any it does any work it does any weight I so here's

part of the problem Brian I think that people are trying to impose rational structures of thought through language on problems that don't necessarily have convenient answers or explanations right and so people are both making claims and I see this in philosophy along. People become, I think it's a combination of becoming hoodwinked by language, like the, you know, even the word, the word regress itself is a problem. Peter Klein, the philosopher, says that infinite regress as opposed to infinite series, you know, people become hoodwink by these words. A more contemporary example is diversity, equity, inclusion, safe spaces, et cetera. And, you know, the power of words,

it just people are befuddled by that but I'll give you something else just because you put a question word I wrote about this in my first book a manual for creating atheist just just because you put a question word in front of a bunch of other words it doesn't make it a legitimate sentence and I think people have are asking questions about things that just it's just they're just features there just is you know and you see this in Christian apologetics a lot you know and you know William and Craig or what have you, they impose questions and then they look to modern day sciences like, you know, Valenkin or what have you, or the Big Bang. And I think that the problem is that we're both hoodwinked by language and we're trying to analyze, we're trying to use reason when what we

should be trying to do is test hypotheses and make evidence. Of course, if you say that, if you make that claim, then people accuse you of scientism. Okay, I'll start. Yeah, yeah. So to address that point head on, I actually had this conversation with a difficult, in a difficult scenario, which is with Ben Shapiro, who you may or may not know. And so he had on William Lane Craig, who I always confuses it, William Lane Craig, William Craig, William Craig, Lane. Anyway, the guy's got a lot of names. But typically, the issue I have with him and people like him is that this will be the following argument. Everything that began had to have a beginning. And everything that began, had a beginning was begun. And that beginning, we call the first mover, that is the column cosmological

argument, that there had to be a beginning for anything that begun. And then I said, but let me keep going. And then he said, and then I say that my second problem is that once it begins, there's a teleological implication that there was some purpose, you know, it wasn't random if there isn't all, so then you get the notion of a personal God. And the personal God goes from, from that to Jesus Christ. Now, I am a practicing Jew. I'm not Orthodox like Ben Shapiro, but I'm a practicing Jew. And I can see tons of holes in the first two statements,

but certainly the third statement is kind of anathema to me. I mean, I believe the best thing, as Iliuizel said, when Jesus Christ comes back or the Messiah comes back, and we're speaking on Good Friday, by the way. So I'm wishing everybody a good Friday and happy Easter. But nevertheless, if Jesus does come back, All we have to do, according to Ely Weasel, is ask him, is this your first time here or your second time here? And then we'll know for sure. That was his falsifiable. That was his disconfirming postulate, the great Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wazel.

But Peter, you know, for me, it troubles me because I don't accept Jesus. I accept that he existed. The historicity of Jesus is not without, is without doubt that he existed. We as Jews have meticulous records in the Talmud going back 2,000 years exactly. we know not only who he was, where he lived, who his rabbi was, who that rabbi's rabbi was, so he's very well documented who Jesus was, and I don't have doubt about that. The question is as to his messianic character. So anyway, my feeling is that once you have this, you know, and I might agree with somebody like William Lane Craig that if there is a beginning, but what if there's not a beginning, a beginning?

So how do you deal with those kinds of statements? Yeah, so go ahead. Yeah, so that's correct. So just as a few points of contact, if your listeners want to look out. Check out, again, our friend Krause has come up in the conversation. His debate with Craig in Australia, one of the things he says is you answer these questions through science and physics, not through make-believe, not through religious questions. And if you want to see a summary of Craig's argument, check out his debate.

That's helpful, though, Peter? Sorry to pause. Do you think it's helpful to say, like, oh, it's make-believe? Like, I mean, I could say string theories make-believe too. But I mean, is that a helpful tactic? I mean, according to your book, it's not, right? Like to say that you're full of make-believe. Well, it depends what you mean by helpful, right?

Yeah. If sometimes people will say something is not helpful if you're speaking too bluntly and too clearly about facts and evidence. And so, look, if I told you that I know that my solution to how the universe got here is to ask my cat. And you say to me, well, that's just make-belief. I mean, there are a certain, we have to, do we have to drive? all the line, we have to have some criteria that we invoke when something is just so silly,

we don't take it seriously. But again, if people make those arguments, so just go back real quick. So the debate with Alex Rosenberg, Craig lays those out in premise, premise conclusion, I think seven conclusions that people, if they wanted more information, and then the Kraus debate. So I think that we need to call things out for what they are. And there's a difference in calling something out in a public debate and in a personal conversation. right and so the debate the idea is to win the personal conversation it can be any one of a number of things in a personal conversation i would not do that do you think that debates are pointless in some sense like i i can't imagine the debates in 2020 where someone's like i'm really going to vote for

biden and then all of a sudden there's some brilliant point scored by trump and oh i changed my mind Like, what fraction of people tuning in converted their opinions? Yeah, so I've had a change of mind about that. I don't really like debates myself. I strongly prefer conversations because with debates, you're wedded to not changing your mind, to not revising your belief. And if the goal is truth, that,

and what are we going to debate now 2400 years later, for example, debating the existence of God? So I think debates play their role, play a role because they force people to sharpen their arguments and make them crisper and even more accessible to people. But I think that the older I get, the more I realize that it's conversation and that it's the idea that we should be engaging in, you know, as a philosopher and Rhegge and Haramas says, mutual understanding, right? So we want to communicate to understand with an eye or the truth. And if we can do that, the problem is that there are so many impediments

to thinking clearly about issues. I mentioned one, being hoodwinked by words, sentences. We haven't even begun to talk about disinformation and what have you. And I think superstition plays a big role in that as well. Academic superstition. And now we have a whole host of the segue, I don't know. We have a whole host of new problems with ideological infiltration of major systems in American universities and American institutions.

So it's a problem to think clearly, but if there were such a thing as a unified theory of rationality, I would argue that the ability and willingness to revise one's belief is at the core of that. Okay. So now I want to do more live action role playing. So I am here at the University of California, San Diego. And we have our physics department is named after one of the four women in human history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. And her name is Maria Geppert-Mayer.

and she was denied even an academic post at Chicago, at Johns Hopkins, and she only got a position here, you know, really relative, because her husband was also a physicist and they hired both of them, and they could say, well, she's kind of working with him, and then three years after hiring her, she won the Nobel Prize. But before that, there was Nobel Prize, only Nobel Prize given to a woman was Marie Curie. And around that same time, I hear a lot of conjecture from people like Heather McDonald, who has been on the podcast. Oh, come on. You don't think that scientists, you know, still today are sexist. And I said to her, well, Heather, do you think that science is time translation invariant? In other words, like, to do good science, we think of science as a

meritocracy. And so do you think the best people were doing science back in the early 1900s? And she said, yes, of course. And I said, do you think they're still doing the best science now? even, yes, there's other kind of confounding sociological things that we'll talk about later. You said, yeah, the best science people are doing science. However, you know, it's not, you can't seriously claim that UCSD is as, you know, sexist as it was back, or not UCSD, but University of Chicago, which didn't give her a job. And you can't, I said, well, you know, there was this guy Einstein and he was, he was forbidden to win the Nobel Prize because he was a Jew. They actually had, you know, discussions in the Nobel Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences that,

Einstein must not ever be allowed to win the Nobel Prize because he trafficked in what's known as Jewish physics. And Jewish physics was in contradistinction to Aryan physics, which is superior and it's experimental. And Einstein was a theoretician, a stereotypical Jew, you know, with a pencil and not doing real man's physics. Do we think that nowadays is any different than a hundred years ago? In other words, why shouldn't somebody who, you know, I'm a member of the National Society of Black Physicist, it turns out? And oftentimes we hear a lot in there. There have been no African Americans to win the Nobel Prize in physics. And they've done tremendous, and African Americans do tremendous work.

So is it possible that science has always been kind of like filled with some level of this? Or is it an impossible question to even ask? Why would you think that the problem would be with science as opposed to the attitudes and structures of individuals and institutions? So we're told now that journals and physics departments are filled with, what's called systemic racism. So in other words, the system itself is structured maybe from its core, maybe from its founding. And that's why I'm asking you, if physics is time translation invariant, then why shouldn't an African-American physicist snub for a Nobel Prize in all of his?

Why shouldn't they be as suspicious as Einstein would have been in 1920, you know, the year before he won the Nobel Prize? So if there is systemic racism, it's incumbent upon all of us to look at the systems where it's found and fix them, right? Not just to vaguely claim that there's some kind of problem and then try to fix it on the back end with the quality of outcome, but to actually identify where the structural barrier is and fix it. And so I would ask you, where is the structural barrier? That's the first question.

The second question I have is the same argument that you made now. I have a point. I have another point after this, if you don't mind. The second point is this is exactly what's happening now in the academy. with, I don't know if you've heard of research justice, where you cite, you privilege the citations of people from historically marginalized groups, and you downplay or not at all the citations of white, cis, heteroman. And so I'm going to throw that out food to ponder. And then third thing is, I think that the problem when thinking about these things is that it causes a crisis

of legitimacy in the system, because you want to make sure that it's a meritocracy. But the way to achieve a meritocracy is to make sure that people have equal opportunities. It's not to, you know, jerry-rig the outcomes on the way out. So we need to be honest and ask ourselves about these questions. And I'm sure you'll agree they're multivariate. They deal with, you know, I just saw something today about number of hours Asian study. I do think to be absolutely crystal clear with you, Brian, that there is systemic racism in high red in particular and in K through 12.

And that's against Asians. And I think that if anybody says that that's not. true, I would invite you when we can, I can post the links to mountain of evidence supporting this and even the legal cases that have gone through. And so I think it's a very, very complicated problem, but the way to address the problem is through equality of opportunity. It's providing people with the best possible opportunities. Yeah, and locate, locating the I look at you and the work that you've done. No, I was just going to say, I look at you and the work that you've done and the work that

you've done, you know, I see you as someone who's vehemently opposed to bigotry and to, and to, you know, racism and all its forms. Like I always say, I hate bullies, you know, I work out. I do martial arts. I know how to use, you know, different types of weapons. Yeah, I hate bullies. I used to beat the crap out of bullies as a kid. And I know that you have that same attitude that, like, you are fearless.

you have courage. I hate it when someone says, you know, if I see someone who's a racist, I'm going to kill that. I want to beat that person up. I'm not going to say I'm going to kill the person, but I feel this bitter sense of hostility because it's ultimately a sense of the ultimate form of bigotry, which could turn on me in any moment, right, as a Jew, as a, you know, living in, you know, society. Although I think America is the best place that Jews have ever lived, you know, with the possible exception of Israel today. But anyway, but getting back to like specifically, But then I'm told that, you know, academia is rife with racism. And then yet I ask all my colleagues, and they're very brave people too, Peter.

And they say to me, I'm not a racist. And so I just don't understand how a system comprised of individuals, you know, it's like the atomic hypothesis versus the Monad hypothesis. How is it possible that no physicists will admit to being racist, but yet the system has definitely exhibits racism? So what is it that we're trying to rid something of an effect? Like, we'll never rid the world of anti-Semitism. As much as I would love to do that.

It's just, you know, the world has made of flawed, fallen individuals. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack. You said a lot of stuff there. So upon critical race theory, the ordinary everyday state of affairs is racism. And so every disparity is understood like that. And if you read Helen Pluck Rose and James Lindsay's cynical theories, they talk about a conspiracy. This is a vast conspiracy without any conspirators. The problem is that when people want to make claims

that the very tools of reason, scientific analysis, epistemic adequacy, et cetera, that those things are the white man's tools. Those things are products of the patriarchy. And you can't use those to disassemble the racist structure that we have now. You need to use it something else. And so when you take those tools of analysis away from us, which is interesting because when you take those tools of analysis away,

you can't prove what you want to prove, so you have to make up your own epistemology. I want to say something. So my mentor was interned in Buchenwald, as he told me, his parents were Jewish. And he went back, his name was Frank Wesley. And then he liberated it too. Well, how did you know that?

Did you know him? Did you know Frank? I listened to the audio book all the way to the end. Oh, wow. All right. I knew it from the whole audio book. I do my research. Oh, wow.

I'm very impressed by that. But one thing that was really interesting, when he went back and liberated the concentration camps, he advocated that, I mean, that's the gold standard for bad, right? I mean, that's gold standard. He protected the guards, many of whom were vicious to him. He protected the people who showed incredible cruelty to him. And I think that there's some inconceivable decency in that. There's something so lovely and so human about that. But what we have today is something else,

something that if you disagree with someone, you're a Nazi or you're a bigot or you're a racist and you're a homophobic. And we've created a very dangerous situation that's buttressed by a number of things right now. One of those things is that what's coming. out of the university is unbelievably dangerous, hurtful, harmful, and divisive. And it needs to stop. And I don't see any, I don't think it's sustainable, specifically with regard to critical race theory and, you know, seeing color and a lot of the prop, a lot of these propositions. So, you know, you said a lot there from anti-Semitism to violence to how do we address these problems. Yeah, no, I do tend to ramble, but I have an ultimate goal in mind, a path I'm going.

to. I'm just reminding folks here on The Into the Impossible podcast on Clubhouse and eventually on YouTube. We have collections of billionaires, brainiacs, thought leaders, athletes. We have really a panoply of brilliant minds that make up the multiverse of intellectualism. I'm trying to assemble, Peter, the university I wish I went to, the university I wish I could teach at. And I do so remotely. I've had nine Nobel Prize winners on, four billionaires and thought leaders. professors all around the world, including the current president of the American Physical Society, who's a mentor to me. His name is Sylvester James Gates, Jim Gates, one of the fathers of supersymmetry and string theory. He happens to be African American. And he does not deny the

struggles of the African American, but he says it's undeniably equally so that the academia and physics in particular has gotten immeasurably better throughout his career. Now, he's in his late 60s, early 70s, but he said the arc is bending towards progress, towards justice. And I just wonder, sometimes I feel like I'm the victim of, and you and I might be victims because of our aid, of the generation that came before us, the generation of the Feynman's who would like hit on their grad students that were females or the undergraduates that they would come into. They were rampant sexist. And, you know, this is not taking away in revisionist history. It's just a known fact. He was a known womanizer, et cetera. So because of that, because of

his awful treatment of women. And if he treated my daughters like that, I'd beat him and a bunch him in the nose, right? But the point is, I shouldn't have to do that. But I shouldn't be blamed for it either. And I feel like as we're coming up on Easter, again, I used to be an altar boy in the Catholic Church. That's a story for another day, but I'm born biologically Jewish. I do want to wish people a happy Easter and a good Friday, and I'm glad people are joining you and me. But I read your book, and I think about your work and the controversies in your life. And I say, where is there in the world? Where is there a chance to redeem not only us, like currently, like you admit to mistakes that led you to write this book, that you were a boorish person at some conversations with

people that you had, that you should have treated better, and the book is atonement. It's a form of what we Jews called Teshuvah. Is that gone? Is that over? Are we ever able to undo not only what we did personally, but if we can't even undo what we did personally, how can we atone for the sins of the fine men's, you know, womanizing behavior of the past? Is that even possible? I guess it's not possible if you live in a Klingon society. And from listening to your podcast, I know you're a Star Trek fan. I think, of course, it's possible. Not only is redemption always possible, but the idea that we can, this is why reason and evidence is so important, right?

Because if you have one piece of data that comes in that's factually incorrect, then you will create a world outside of yourself that leads you to think that you're bringing about your fly. lurshing, but you're not. That's because you have incorrect information. So just an example of that. I've been toying with these, you know, I love questions, asking people specific questions to figure out what they actually believe and how that lends itself to their ideology. So one question I've been toying with is how many unarmed African Americans were killed by the police in 2019? And from that question, it's kind of... It was 25 or 30? Well, it's under 20.

It depends. Between 7 and 19, basically. But when I asked my neighbors that, they said 20,000, which is an absolutely astonishing figure. But if I thought that there were 20,000 people being an unarmed black men being murdered by the police, of course, you'd need to know the number of white people, too. Say the number of white people was 15. You know, I might be rioting in the streets and trying to,

rip down the civilization as well. I mean, that's basically a Holocaust. But I think that it's so important. Epistemological hygiene is important, but we don't talk about it. You know, we talk about dental hygiene, et cetera. I told my dad that when he was alive that I think we should teach people epistemological hygiene. And my dad said, why don't we focus instead on teaching them how to read? but but I do think that there's something in teaching people what to value so the older I get and the more I throw myself at these issues I realize that most questions are moral questions that masquerade as epistemological questions so people will hold their views on the basis of something moral like their self-identity they want to be a good person and what what have you and so that's why

providing them with evidence doesn't work unless the subject in question has no moral valence. So you're exploring the identity between what it means to be a good person and the belief is crucial in all of these things. And so to bring it back what you're saying, there's always an opportunity for human decency. There's always a opportunity for compassion. But we have to make sure that the tools are in place to get us there. And one of those tools is conversation. Right. One of those tools, I would argue, is democracy. Yeah, go ahead. I would say, you know, and this is where you and I might differ. Yeah, I would say one of those tools is religion. And I don't even mean it has to be, you know, Abrahamic religion that I practice, but that the

the culture of redemption, the philosophical import of self-betterment, of conversation, of course, there are many, many negative things that religion has done, but I'm seeing now, you know, this article by Phil Zuckerman in today's Los Angeles Times about how it's good news, that societal belief in God is declining. And I remember, you know, many times having conversations with Freeman Dyson and others who are self-reclaimed agnostics, as I really call myself a devout practicing agnostic. And I'll get into what that means if you're interested. But for me, the virtues of religion and community, et cetera, are very hard to replicate.

They're very durable. People do things I've spoken at places called the Sunday Assembly. There's many of them around the world. I love them. They are my brothers and sisters. They just happen to be not, that happen to be secular. I've spoken at the Ethical Humanist Society,

the oldest one in the world in Chicago. I have no problem doing that. I love talking, it's respectful. But what do they do? Have you ever been to a Sunday assembly, Peter? Yes. So what do they do there? in Oregon might be the same as here in California.

What they do is they start up with a hymn, and that hymn is usually Peter, Paul, and Mary, or, you know, whatever. You know, a couple of Jews, right? But anyway, then they have a reading, you know, instead of from the Torah, it's from Philip Roth or whatever. And then they get into a reading and some scripture. And then they have a charity, you know, which we call Sadaka and Judaism. And they're basically replicating the structure of an organized religion.

And I don't have to say, oh, you have to invent that. But I wonder, like, do we have an acrimony where we are actually very similar? Because I don't think the people that are not believing in God are going to Sunday Assembly or the ethical humanists. I think they're staying home and watching the NBA. And whatever. We don't need that, but now, you know, it's impossible for politics not to enter every single aspect of life. And we do need a safe space, I argue, where we think about the big questions of, you know, cosmology and metaphysics and meaning. But what do you say that, you know, one of the tools, you know, one of the tools,

You say his conversation. I say it's religion, as Bill O'Reilly would say, prove me wrong. Right. So full disclosure, Phil Zuckerman is a friend of mine. I read his books, yeah. So the question is, we've turned up the substitution hypothesis. And the substitution hypothesis is basically, do people need some kind of religiosity? Do they need some kind of belief?

And I don't mean a formal structure of belief or an Abrahamic tradition or what have you. And Clay Rutledge has done some good work on this. The idea is that as belief in traditional Abrahamic faith has fallen, other things, other superstitions have gone in to replace that. And so I will make a full disclosure from somebody who was deeply involved in the new atheist movement at every level and say that I did have a polyana view. and I did believe that if we could just eliminate this superstition that was holding down humanity, then that would give an opportunity for reason, rationality, and discourse to thrive.

I did not foresee the metastisization of a new dominant moral orthodoxy that has no redemption narrative in which, but that uses some of the same mechanisms. I published a piece many, many years ago about privileges, the original sin, you know, political correctness is blasphemy. so that prevent the ideas from being dislodged. So if that is the natural state of affairs, then shouldn't we seek the one that leads to the greatest human flourishing? And if that's the case, then by what criteria do we invoke?

And would it be Christianity? Would it be Judaism or would it be Hinduism or something else that we haven't? Of course, the other thing is we don't know. Maybe you need a super intelligent AI to give us what those rules are so that there are objective rules, but we just don't have the cognitive capacity to figure this out. But I think that the larger point is that I personally believe, and my bet is that you believe this as well, is that morals are rationally derivable. So you can, we can, there are reasons for why we should be decent to people and why we should

be compassionate and why we should, for example, why we should value a quality of opportunity and give everyone a public education of the first rate, as John Rawls says, example. My problem is that anything that would interfere in that, like the original example we use with Galileo and the Pope, anything that would privilege on one side de facto out of the gate, that's why I asked, you know, what would you do if the two things were in conflict on which side would you err? And that's also, you just had them on your podcast, Eric Weinstein. That's his question about gender studies, if there's a conflict between biology and gender studies on which side do you air. And so we see the, a very, very pernicious, very dangerous, very divisive, dominant,

more orthodoxy now. And the question that I have from my, my friends who are still deeply involved in the new atheist movement is, were we better off under Christianity or were we better, are we better off in the current situation now, right? I mean, even just think of that one thing, first Peter 315, giving evidence for the beliefs you have, you know, giving a reason for the beliefs you hold. That itself is an affluent to this to this orthodoxy, you know. Right. And I see that, you know, I've had conversation with Michael Shermer with Michael Shermer and I have Lawrence Krause is coming up. But the, you know, I want to turn the tables on you. You know, the student becomes the teacher. How could you be wrong about God? In other words, or let me just say, how could you be wrong about

religion first? Yeah, could you be wrong about God? Do you admit there could be evidence that could persuade you. And if so, what is it? And I'd like to explore that from a physicist's point of view. Yeah, I'd be happy to explain. I've actually had that conversation with Schumer. It was a very good, very close friend of mine. So in order to answer the question, I'll ask your permission if this is okay. I'd like to explore the opposite question. And that is, what is not sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God? Okay. So let's start with that. Sure. that's okay with you all right so it's not a dodge for the question in other words i'm going to get back to i think it's a helpful heuristic to think about it so what is not sufficient evidence

no um i'm gonna let me turn down the the brightness on my screen before it kills me here there we go um so no physical phenomenon would do the trick right no physical phenomenon no um um and this is this is the you really really I have to think about this. Krauss says, you know, what if you walk outside and you look at the stars and it says, I am God, believe in me and you haven't been doing LSD or any drugs or you haven't been drinking and everybody sees it in their own language. To me, that would be insufficient to warrant that belief. When I said that, actually he guest lectured at my class in Portland, he said, well, I know something you don't know. And I love it when people tell me that because I

want to know it too. And I said, well, what do you know? And he said that the total, the aggregate amount of energy in the universe would be able to do that would be just, you would need something outside of the universe. It would cost take more energy to do that. I'll defer to your expertise in that. And I told him, which he later agreed to, that's not sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God because you couldn't rule out alternative possibilities like time travelers, trickster alien cultures, is interdimensional. I mean, so that, that wouldn't be. So when I asked Dawkins that question, I think in our second public conversation, he said, and this is, this is, this is all Christian apologists are also very familiar with this. This is why they don't, the best Christian apologist

don't defer to evidence. They reasoned. You know, Dawkins said if there was something, a hidden message in pie, or if there was something, something that you could reason to. So it wouldn't be, So kind of like a Kalam argument, it certainly wouldn't be fine-tuning, it wouldn't be anything evidential, it have to be based in reason. So the answer to your question then, now we know what wouldn't constitute sufficient evidence for me to change my mind. And I also think at this point what a definition of atheist is. So I am an atheist.

And I define atheists so we can move forward in the conversation as I do not think there's sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God, but if I were given at it, evidence, I would change my mind. And that evidence is, again, that's the disconfirmation question than I started with the Pope. So the older I get, the more important I realize it is when you have a conversation with someone, immediately start with the disconfirmation criteria. Boom. So that's what it would take. That's what it would take. And we have no evidence of that whatsoever. Right. Well, here's so I'm going to, you know, beg your indulgence and your forbearance as Pope, Pope Peter.

And here's one thing I like, again, I am what I consider a devout practicing agnostic, meaning that my friend Freeman Dyson, the late great Freeman Dyson, and Martin Rees, Lord Martin Rees, they say things like they're agnostic, but then I asked them, Peter, I say, well, you know, what church do you go to? And they say, oh, I don't go to church. And I say, well, imagine a super intelligent alien looking at you and looking at Richard Dawkins, who is a atheist, militant self-proclaimed atheist or Lawrence Krause, and they would say, here's Freeman Dyson or Martin Rees,

and here's Richard Dawkins. Well, they both don't go to the same church. In other words, there's nothing practical that distinguishes the most people that call themselves agnostic, I think is a cop-out. I'm talking as an agnostic, but I'm speaking as a devoutic, yeah. I couldn't agree more. And the next thing I want to say, relates to it. Can I just put a pin in that real quick?

Because I think what you said is so important. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. Yeah. So you and I don't, we don't, and I'm going to say that you believe this. I rarely do this, but I'm going to be safe in this. You and I don't believe in the Easter Bunny, right? We don't believe this is a big East.

We don't believe in the tooth fairy. So we're not tooth fairy agnostics. We're tooth fairy atheists. And I think saying that you're agnostic is a cop-out and often people use it so they don't want to seem like they're an extremist. They don't want to hurt people's feelings. So I couldn't agree more. I think it has no business in our lexicon. Even on that, you, in my, thank you. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, I'll let you know on Sunday. Yeah, well, I'll just, I'll finish a thought. So even to, you would even need to get, you would even need on a scale from one to 10, right, in the book

I talk about how to have impossible conversation skills, even to get to a five, you would need evidence. So even to say maybe, well, maybe, I'm an agnostic. Well, okay, so what evidence did you get to make you agnostic? Well, there is no evidence. So you, so you're not an agnostic. Right. Right. Right. And equally so, so it's funny, Peter, because everything you say, first of all, I want to commend you on the book. I read the book by Chris Voss, never split the difference. And I didn't find that as helpful, you know, when I'm having an argument with my wife and I'm like, no deal, you know, like, sorry, It's over. My way, I'm never split in the difference with you, thanks to Chris Vaugh, who might be listening.

I don't know. He's on Clubhouse a lot, that guy. And I love that book, too. But yours is much more practical. Yours is much more, you know, his is practical for hostage negotiators and, you know, CEO, you know, Titans of the negotiating world. But anyway, yours is much more practical, interpersonal, introspective. And I do love that book, How to Have Impossible Conversations, Today's guest in the Impossible

podcast, Peter Bogosian, professor at Portland State University, author of this wonderful book with James Lindsay, who is known as Conceptual James on Twitter and elsewhere. We'll get to Twitter, hopefully, a little bit. And Clubhouse, I'm not going to leave Clubhouse out. There's some impossible conversations that we need to have about Clubhouse. And with the guests on Clubhouse, the folks that are in the room, there's about 90 plus people there. Now, we're looking forward to talking to you in a few minutes, taking your questions and comments. But as the host of the End to the Impossible podcast on YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating. on iTunes everywhere else. I do want to explore this a little bit more because one thing that speaks

to me about Judaism, and I have, as I said, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. I was a, I was born biologically Jewish. I came back to it later in my life. I taught myself to read Hebrew and Aramaic and studied it in great depth. I find, you know, now I'm going to attack my friend Lawrence Krauss or our friend Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins. Because oftentimes it's incredibly sophistic in the sense that the essence of what they're looking for is scientific evidence. For example, Avi Loeb, who I've had in my show, who I've had in my show, who's got number one book called Extraterrestrial about this object. I listened to that.

Yeah, so that's a wonderful book, and I had a great conversation with him. And nevertheless, we had to debate this issue of whether or not, you know, what would constitute proof that this really came from an extraterrestrial civilization. And he said, well, we just have to wait a couple of years for more objects to be discovered with this brand new telescope called the Rubin Observatory. I said, Avi, if I believe that this was my one chance to prove the one known example of extraterrestrial intelligence, I would not wait a minute. I would tell my friend Yuri Milner, the ultra-Russian billionaire, I would say, scrap these plans to send cell phone cameras to Proxima Centauri. no instead let's send a CubeSat to Omuamua before it gets past the heliopause and is completely out of reach and he said no no no we don't need to do that I said Avi I'm not sure you really believe what you're saying

and then he went on to talk about he's Israeli um you know which uh I remind my friends of uh of the Israeli persuasion that their nickname is the Sabra and the Sabra is a cactus that's very spiky on the outside and very squishy on the inside but Avi he said things like well you know we really could have resolved, if God really wanted to prove himself to Abraham, he could have just advanced the technology of the iPhone and given him an iPhone back then on the mountaintop when he was sacrificing Isaac. And I said, that's so ludicrous. It's like completely ludicrous. And it's ludicrous even in the context of the Bible itself. So one reason that I think the Bible has wisdom and not knowledge, two separate things to me, and much more important to have wisdom than

knowledge, I'll get into that some other time. But the Bible says, 40 days after the Jews, and I'm speaking as a Jew, we're supposed to be smart. You know, we have 30% overrepresentation of Nobel laureates, right? People think of Jews as smart. But these smart Jews supposedly 40 days after seeing. We should put a pin of them. I would love to talk about that. We might need a part too, by the way.

Yeah, because I know that people like Eric Weinstein and others. Do you know that's only Ascanazi Jews from a certain region? The region around Breslau. Yes, yes. I always say. Yeah. Yeah, I always say God is a sense of humor because he gave us the Nobel Prizes, but he also gave us all the Ashkenazi Jew diseases like Taysax and Crohn's disease. Anyway, let me get back to this. So after the miracles led to the Passover miracles that we're celebrating right now, Hagsamaic to all my Jewish listeners out there.

But we're 40 days after witnessing this, the Jews build a golden calf. In other words, the Bible is saying don't expect science. scientific evidence, because even if you get the most powerful scientific evidence that you could ever see mass witnessing of a supernatural event, 40 days later, you're going to make a God out of gold and you're going to worship it. And I do agree with you, people seem to need a religion. Nowadays, it might be socialism or wokeism or whatever you want to call it, or it might be, it might be the green movement, or it might be secularism. And in my field, it's nobillism. People worship the Nobel Prize and the people that win it and the committee that elects it almost unparalleled as a monopoly. Anyway, I've been talking.

So if you want to respond to any of this. Yeah, I do. And let me know if you think that this response, one of the reasons I like speaking to you is because you're very sincere and you're very clear and there's absolutely no obfuscation whatsoever. And I always appreciate that. So thank you. So the difference is, yeah, the difference is Dawkins in particular and Dennis. it myself and others. We are taking aim at people who make objective claims. And so there was a man who walked on water, right? That's an objective claim about the nature of reality. Muhammad flew to

heaven on a winged horse. Someone reincarnates through time and bodies. There's a happy hunting ground. All of these things are objective claims. And what we are targeting is there is insufficient evidence to warrant belief in these objective claims. Now, those objective claims ground the moral claims, right? So you the whole idea of, you know, and what you said about the Bible having wisdom but not knowledge, that's again the subject of another podcast. But

we can take a step back and look at if and look at this, one of the reasons that people believe that the moral edicts of the Bible are true is because they are accompanied by metaphysical morals.

So Dawkins, myself, and others are just saying, we do not think that there is sufficient evidence to warrant belief in these phenomena. And in the God delusion, Dawkins on the Dawkins scale of one to seven, he says he's a six of one being absolute belief, seven being disbelief. Later, he calibrated that up to six point nine. I'm probably like a six point nine myself. So I think that occupying a one or a seven is a mistake. It's not just an epistemological mistake, but it's a very dangerous mistake to make. So the bottom line and all of that is we're taking, the problem is that people are making objective claims, and then those

objective claims are informing public policy. And I want to just go to that next, because next week I have a video coming out from Prager University, which will turn off a lot of people, but that's okay. I do videos with Noam Chomsky and Lawrence Tribe, and I do videos with Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro. But this video is called trust the science or the scientific method. And it's about the statement that we get that we must trust the science or listen to science or trust scientists. And I rail against that as a scientist because I think the secret coded message is obey scientists, that we are actually commanded now not just to listen to science, but because science is opaque, it's obfuscated,

It's specialized activities done by special individuals using special technologies. And no more would I go down to the health sciences facility here at UCSD and poke my head around the CAT scan machine. I don't have access to that technology. I don't know how to use it. So, so too, should people not question science because it's not really for us. Yeah, my tax is paid for it. But no, we must obey. And I have a great deal of problem with that, even as a scientist, right?

Because I don't think we've earned the right to be politicians. That's why we elected Joe Biden, right? We didn't elect Anthony Fauci. We elected Joe Biden. And so the problem with obeying science and the notion that there is one party of science and there's one party of ignoramuses, I wonder, you know, is that message a good one for society like ours with nuclear weapons and a powerful, is that a dangerous scenario to be in where we basically have ruled by unelected dictators called scientists?

Well, that's a great question. Part of that is if we had a system that was, so we're in the middle of a legitimacy crisis right now, right? So we have, and he had mentioned this before about black physicists, et cetera. So I don't know if I should take this question in terms of legitimacy or not or take the question in terms of obey. I personally don't see the problem. You're articulating a concern, which is so far from reality, that I don't see that it's even with all due risk. I don't even understand why you're bringing it up. I mean, we have a populace that does not respect the science, does not, I mean, what's

Jerry Coyne in why evolution is true and then faith versus fact, he puts it, he's an evolutionary biologist, you know, roughly the statistics or half of Americans don't either don't accept the facts of evolution. Notice I didn't say believe in evolution, but accept the facts of evolution, and think that the world, that humans existed in their present form 10,000 years. And then you can look at the attitudes about anthropogenic global warming. You can look at – and again, I'm not taking a side in that fight. Matt Ridley is the rational optimist.

He has some really good stuff. But I think that the key of this whole thing is I don't understand why – to me, that's not a concern at all that people are trusting science too much. To me, I think we have exactly the opposite problem. Very good. Very interesting. And actually, it's not only unique to America. I remember giving a talk in Galileo's hometown of our Chetri, Italy, outside of Florence. And I showed a slide kind of mocking American understanding of science.

And it said, one in four Americans think the sun goes around the earth. And everyone in the audience, ah, stupid American. I don't know why I always get like a Russian accent or whatever. But then I showed the next slide, Peter, and it was 33% of Europeans believe that to be true. So it's not unique to us. And I do feel like that is, we live in an unprecedented technological age at which we have access, you know, to mass technology like Twitter, like Clubhouse. And actually speaking of Clubhouse, I should turn to that now because, Peter, I have a scientific, you know, you think of astronomers that we're always on telescopes, but we're actually always on telecons. They're not telescopes, unfortunately.

So I have a telecon in 20 minutes. And I want to get questions and answers from our Clubhouse friends. So maybe I'm just going to ask you one. more question just for me. We'll end this video interview. This will be a part one. We'll do a part two soon. I'd love to do this with you, Peter.

I'd love to have a conversation with you and me and Stephen Meyer, who is not like William Craig and a very different kind of approach. I don't know if you've ever met him. He lives up in your corner of the planet, but we can talk about that some other time. He was just on my podcast this past week. I want to ask you the last thing, which is about kind of the notion that you talk about very different in contradistinction to Voss. You end the words with an imprecation.

You say, be like water. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to be like water? When the stakes are so high in some conversations, I feel abortion is murder. I think gun control. I think the vaccine is Bill Gates. I don't really believe that, by the way.

But how can you be like water? I mean, you know, why should I be like water? This should be like fire. So can you explain that philosophy, which is so unique and commendable, but I would like you to flesh it out. I have trouble being like water in certain circumstances as well. I think if you start, you know, Socrates said wisdom begins in wonder. I think if you start with a genuine curiosity about why people believe what they do.

In the Thetetus, Socrates says Plato was the, Plato wrote, Socrates as a character in the dialogues. Socrates says that people only believe what they do because of the information they have. And if everybody had perfect information, you used the word perfect before when you were speaking about the Pope. If everyone had perfect information, they'd come to the same conclusion about something. And so every time you create an adversary relationship or defensive posture in someone, you're less likely to help them revise their belief. But what's even more important is that you're less likely to revise your own belief. And if you want to be someone who believes true things, that's absolutely essential.

And so, you know, just reading something today about German interrogators who are very kind, something that's very common in the interrogation realm, to be particularly kind to your subjects because they're more likely to reveal information than if you're nasty to them. I'd like to perhaps end with a story that my mentor taught me about chickens. Oh, it was in the book. Was that in the book about the chickens? So he was telling me this story. He put a caller.

Was this in the book? Yeah, chicken, an electrical shock collar in these seven chickens. And there's a strict pecking order of chicken one picking chicken, picking all the other chickens, chicken two not picking chicken one, chicken seven not pecking anybody. And once the chicken raised its head, they would give it a shock. Now the question to the audience is, is it easier to turn chicken seven to chicken one or chicken one to chicken seven? And once this is groked, you can understand why you should be kind to people, why harsh punishment doesn't work for prisons, for schools, etc. And the idea is that it's more difficult, you can't turn, chicken seven's been, had it

the shit kicked out of him his whole life for her. But one zap or two zaps achieves that. So I think being like water is a more compassionate way to deal with not only other people's beliefs, but your own beliefs. Just get more mileage out of it. You're more likely to find that. Yeah, absolutely. No, I do love that. And like I said, I love Chris Voss.

But it's not as practical on a daily basis. and not all of us negotiate with the FBI hostage negotiation team. And so I think there's a lot more practical wisdom, although you give them a lot of shoutouts in the book. I want to end Peter with the video portion, then we'll switch to Clubhouse only. So get your questions, raise your hands on Clubhouse, if you're interested in talking with me and or Peter.

And I ask all my questions, all my guests who honor me by coming on the Into the Impossible podcast, three questions, but I don't have as much time. And so we're going to do a part two. I'm going to ask you just one question. And that relates to Into the Impossible. That's a phrase that Sir Arthur C. Clark came up with. In addition to two of my favorites, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,

which reminds me if you want my Monday magic emails, you can subscribe at briankeating.com, and you can find Peter on Twitter, Peter Bogosian. But Arthur also said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And the last thing he said is the only way of discovering the limits, of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. That's the origin of the podcast name. And I want to ask you, Peter, kind of advice to your former self. If you could talk to 20-year-old Peter and you would tell him one piece of nugget of wisdom that would give him the courage to go into the impossible when the chips are down, what would you advise young Peter to do?

Boy, I have to think about that. Let's see, in five seconds or less. I think I would advise myself of the ancient Greek virtue of Parahesia, of speaking truth in the face of danger, regardless of the consequences, of a kind of radical honesty with yourself and others. And one of the many reasons you should do, so Aristotle talks about the highest form of friendship being between two virtuous people. You'll have genuine relationships. You won't have to fake it. You won't have to lie. You won't have to be deceitful. You say what you mean, and others will say what you mean. you'll know what other people mean because you have genuine friendships with them. Any disagreement can be adjudicated with the context of that.

So I would say, don't be a coward. Like speak, but also you have to have one other principle, and it's the emerging theme in this podcast, which is you have to be willing to revise your beliefs. And if you're willing to revise your beliefs and you couple that with being forthright in your speech, particularly unpopular speech, then I think you really have a, recipe for a life worth living. Yeah, and you become an unstoppable force once you have courage in this way. And I'd just like to add to that, you know, another famous quote by Feynman, who's a very complicated character. He said, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, meaning that if you just

trusted everything that, you know, Isaac Newton had believed and said, or the Pope and the, you know, earlier than that, you would never have had Galileo. And then Galileo, if you trusted everything he said, you'd be wrong. And we should even doubt what Feynman said. And if you don't do that, as Feynman said, you are the biggest fool of all. And it's appropriate for the day after April Fool's wanting to recognize that we made it through. I want to wish everybody a good Friday, a good, good Friday. Happy Easter, if you celebrate, happy Passover if you celebrate, or whatever you celebrate, I wish you a happy weekend. And now we're going to switch Clubhouse only. I see a couple of hands raised. Peter, if you want to go and get your phone and take yourself off.

of mute or raise your volume. Let's do that. And for now, signing off on the video portion of the Into the Impossible podcast with today's guest, Dr. Peter Bogosian, author along with James Lindsay, of how to have impossible conversations. What could be more appropriate for Into the Impossible podcast. Signing off of this particular pandemic podcast now. Thanks for listening to Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you. and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating.

That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into The Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center

for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Heating.