Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Uncovering the Lost Connection Between Science and Faith with Spencer Klavan

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Can science and religion be reconciled to provide a deeper understanding of the universe? How do modern scientific discoveries, like quantum mechanics and cosmology, relate to ancient religious texts? And what role do consciousness and language play in bridging the gap between scientific knowledge and spiritual belief? Here today, to challenge conventional narratives about the relationship between science and religion is host of the Young Heretics podcast, Spencer Klavan! Spencer is an acclaimed author and scholar specializing in classics and literature. He is known for his work on cultural and political commentary, often focusing on the intersection of Western civilization, literature, and contemporary issues.  Tune in to discover ancient wisdom, modern science, and the long-lost link between the two!  Key Takeaways:  00:00:00 Audio essay 00:24:31 Interview introduction  00:26:10 Judging a book by its cover  00:37:25 Reconciling the material with the immaterial  00:43:31 The cosmological argument  00:55:05 Is faith immune to falsifiability?  01:05:31 Aristotle and modern science  01:23:57 Audience questions  01:34:26 Masculinity, conservatism and homosexuality  01:41:16 Transgendarism, alchemy, and astrology  01:52:44 Outro Additional resources:  ➡️ Learn more about Spencer:  ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/SpencerKlavan/  📚 Light of the Mind, Light of the World: https://a.co/d/fam2Tx5  🔔 Young Heretics: https://www.youtube.com/@YoungHereticsShow  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Hey, everybody. It is your fearful host, Professor Brian Keating. And you are listening to an audio essay. I haven't done one of these in a long time, maybe six months since I had on renowned consciousness. expert, the Malibu Meditator, my sort of friend, I would say, Sam Harris, he and I have spoken a bunch since his episode. I don't think he was as upset as some of you were with that episode, but that was the last time I did one of these audio episodes, audio essays rather, and I thought

it would be kind of fun to reestablish these, maybe make it a regular segment. And the occasion of this one is my hosting of Richard Dawkins this past weekend in Vancouver, Canada. and Richard is the only other living member of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I had on Corr's Daniel Dennett. I never had on Christopher Hitchens, although I spoke with Richard about that in Vancouver. And I spoke about Sam and Dan Dennett. On my first of the two episodes I've done with Richard Dawkins so far, you know, he must have been rather pleased with those because he did invite me to be his host in Vancouver. And they flew me up their first class all the way and put me up in a wonderful,

hotel and all expenses paid from here in San Diego all the way up to Vancouver. And I hadn't been to Vancouver in a long time. It's a beautiful city. I posted some pictures of the event, my time there on X. And I was privileged to be able to introduce him and speak in front of about 1,200 people live on a Sunday night in the middle of fall in Vancouver. It was quite a mind-blowing experience for me. He's had on many other great hosts at live events. This is his final tour. And in fact, my event on Sunday, the 6th of October, was the last event he ever will do like this in North America. And it was the only one in Canada.

So it was quite a privilege, as I said. And I love talking with him. I love debating. We don't agree on everything. We spent a couple hours together before the show schmoozing with him and his co-author slash partner, Yana Lanzova, who did the illustrations for. for his flights of fancy book and also for this book, which is quite wonderful, the genetic book of the dead. He did enjoy it, and he had many people to choose from, including local Canadians,

who were probably myth that a San Diego flew up from the farthest possible point in the West Coast to Vancouver to do it. I took jobs away from Canadians, which is something I love to do. But this episode is with Spencer Clavin, and I thought it would be kind of interesting to compare and contrast my experience with Richard Dawkins and that of Spencer Clavin. Spencer is also unique. He's a gay conservative, an openly gay conservative. And he is quite erudite and just a lovely scholar to talk to. But he's a believing Christian. Actually, his father was a convert to Christianity, so-called messianic Jew. He is Andrew Claven, who I've been on his podcast. And I met him, Andrew, two years ago in Italy, and I met Spencer just this past year in Italy when I was an attendee at a conference sponsored by Peter Thiel.

So Peter loves to bring together people from all different backgrounds, including atheists and secular people, Jews, Christians, Christian Jews, Jewish Christians, all sorts of people. And he's had on many, as I said, non-believers, Heather McDonald, Michael Shermer, and many others. But, you know, sort of we practicing Jews and slash secular Jews. Jews were vastly at numbered at those conferences, but I have used it as an opportunity to consult and converse with people. And I actually was able to record an episode of the Hoover Institution's podcast, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson and Luke Barnes and Jay Richards. And that was a wonderful experience for me and got over 100,000 views immediately on YouTube. They have a million

subscriber channel and great reach. And I'm hoping to do another episode with them in the future as well. So these conferences, Peter Thiel puts on completely at his own expense. These are quite expensive. Many, many dozens of people come to Italy for a week at a sumptuous hotel in Florence. And that is just one of the best experiences that an intellectual can have. Fine food, fine wine, find discussions in sumptuous surroundings. I'll tell you more about that in the future if you're interested in learning more about those things that Peter Thiel also speaks at these conferences. And I enjoy them greatly.

and again, we're surrounded by great intellects, and it's just a wonderful experience. But this audio essay is not about any of those people, no far from it. It is inspired by my new friend, Professor Dawkins, who I've come to know over the past few months since I received his latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, and then had this wonderful, unique opportunity to be the last person to host him on his final tour in North America. And at age 83, I have to say, I hope I'm that good looking. I mean, his face is like a 25-year-old, you know, Scandinavian face cream model. It's just amazing.

He's so well-preserved for an 83-year-old. And he is also incredibly energetic. He had a very bad cold, which I've developed a little bit of it. He could run here. But he still did the tour anyway after just arriving the day before from Portland, the day before that, hosted by Michael Shermer in San Francisco, and soon to be hosted by my good friend, Peter Bogosian, in Europe and many other people. And he's also had a great time in Austin, Texas. He was hosted by Chris Williamson. And he's really just a renowned individual, just intellect

combined with this incredible energy, something like 20 tour dates and 30 days in America, and then an equal amount coming up in the UK and Europe. He'll be in Belgium with Peter Bogosian and find out more information on his website, Richard Dawkins Tour.net, something like that. So I wanted to have a discussion with you or maybe a monologue with you about my thoughts on something that Richard inspired me to after preparing for the episodes. You know, I'm not good at a lot of things. I think, you know, my day job is a cosmologist.

I think I'm pretty good as a professor, but I'm very good at preparing for these interviews, and I do enjoy it. And maybe I'm not the greatest at being a podcast host, but I think my record kind of speaks for itself in terms of, you know, getting the most out of my conversations in a unique way and bringing a unique angle as an experimental physicist. I mean, it's very rare. He's had people, again, hosting him like Michael Shermer and Chris Williamson and Colin Wright and many others, Kamel, as well, a friend, hosted him in Newark, New Jersey in front

of 5,000 people. But I think I bring a different perspective as a real professor operating every day, you know, this podcast is more of a hobby and a side hustle, not a source of income or, you know, aspirations to be in the memosphere and just wanting to share my thoughts that I've gleaned from reading 500 books in the past four years and doing that number of episodes. on the Into the Impossible Podcast. So I think I prepare really well. And in the preparation, I came upon his book, The Selfish Gene, which appeared almost 50 years ago. It's incredible just after I was born in the 1970s, 1976.

That was kind of a revolutionary book. It wasn't necessarily postulating unknown theories of biology or evolution. He's a zoologist, after all. But in that book, he did propose that genes are the fundamental units of natural selection, and that they act selfishly in their own interest to ensure their own survival and propagate into future generations. This is not at the DNA level. This is more holistic encapsulation of the genetic legacy, if you will, of the organism. So a lot of his books deal with genetics, not necessarily at the psychological level or what have you,

but the impetus and why different aspects of the gene and are genotypes, manifest in what he calls the extended phenotype. And that is another thing he's known for. And by the way, he coined, I think, in that same book, the concept of the meme, a cultural element, a nugget, like a gene that propagates and spreads. It could be spread virally. And so it was a great contribution to culture. And obviously, if you've ever shared a photograph of the bad boyfriend or Drake, And as I said in my introduction to Richard in Vancouver, you know, Elon Musk owes him not an insignificant amount of meme coins, of doge coin. And I hope that we'll receive it. So I want to talk about a related thought that I had upon rereading and re-encountering the selfish gene. And that was maybe in contrast, not to disagree, but to provide what I think is more valuable to all of us than genes. And I want to explain it. It's something I call, giving valve, the giving valve. Hopefully that'll be made more apparent.

Originally, I thought of it as calling it the altruistic valve, but I think the giving valve makes a little bit more sense. And that's because I fundamentally think that what's important to us is the only really conscious in the way that we are individuals, Richard and I both deride concepts like panpsychism and so forth. But what really matters is not your genetic material being sprayed into the future, so that future generations can propagate some sequences of a quaternary code. But rather, what matters to each of us is actually that our values get propagated.

That's our legacy. In other words, it's sort of parallels this wisdom versus knowledge dichotomy that I always try to explore. I've interviewed 21 Nobel Prize winners coming up soon as Catalan Carrico, my most recent interview, with a Nobel laureate, inventor of the COVID-19 vaccine co-inventor. And I often want to explore for my own benefit, if not for your benefit, as the audience, the notion of whether or not a sufficient amount of knowledge can equal wisdom. In other words, if you just have enough knowledge, are you functionally equivalent to something with wisdom? You know, will chat GPT-5-0 Strawberry Review, whatever, will that eventually become not only artificial, general intelligence, but artificial general wisdom. And I think not, as I've explained in many

conversations that I've had with leading consciousness thinkers. But I'll save that, you know, kind of conjecture for another audio essay perhaps. But I want to focus on what I believe is more significant, and that's the transmission of our values. So to recap some from the selfish gene, you know, humans share over 50% of our genetic material with fruit flies. and not too dissimilar amount with bananas. So when you consider that, and then you consider furthermore, the 99% similarity with chimpanzees, there's something special about that minuscule, you know, 1% difference. If you shared 99% of your net worth with Elon Musk, that wouldn't be much of a difference

between 99% of Elon and your wealth or, you know, and his wealth. But that minuscule 1% difference accounts for the remarkable distinction in our own phenotype, genotype. That makes us distinct. And that's that 1% is by itself equal to an entire universe. If you think about it, it accounts for our language, our social structure, cooperation, science, development of science, technological innovation, or memory. I don't believe we share the same memory capacity as. a chimpanzee. All these things that they're so different and not just pure intelligence that were more raw intelligence or brain size. Richard, you know, talked about the concept that

Yuval Noah Harari, who I've invited on, but has not replied yet, you know, suggests that in 100 or 200 years, homo sapiens will be subservient to a new genus of hominid that comes around. And Richard thinks that's likely to be true, that these augmented humans, or these AI-enabled transmetahumans will really supersede homo sapiens and will be left in the dust. Now, what does homo sapiens mean? Homo sapiens. It means a hominid that is sapient, that is wise, not one that is pure knowledge. That would be homociences.

So it does raise the question of this 1% difference, this one critical percent. Where does it reside? And what does it manifest itself in? I'd like to think that it manifests itself in those very distinct capabilities, language, complex social structures, technological innovation. Those are all shared by other animals, but not at the level that we have. But there's one thing that no animal has, and that's a value system. And so if that's tiny genetic variation leads to such profound differences in our social

structures, language, cooperation, science, shouldn't we also kind of treasure and maximize a unique 1% difference in the ways that truly matter, which is in our value system. So I want to talk about this, this difference in what humans can achieve, not just in terms of those three, you know, properties I talked about thinking, problem solving, and language and science, etc. But those are important. They enable us to, you know, decode the mysteries of the cosmos in my case and study subatomic particles and understand. how biological systems work and all the incredible discoveries that science has provided. But, you know, kind of the ultimate and intellectual curiosity still is important, but it's not really at the level of

something of crucial importance to you or me. And I'll explain that. Yes, it's true and we're proud of it as a species, but on a daily basis or even in a lifetime, your legacy is not really what you did. You talk about a famous book by David Brooks, I think in The Road to Character, he talks about these two different types of virtues, resume virtues, you know, things you brag about, what college you went to, where you're a professor, if you want a Nobel Prize. And then there's eulogy virtues where somebody bespeaks of what you meant as a husband, father, wife, sister, daughter, et cetera. And that's what people really care about. By the way, that comes from Rabbi Salavichik's concept of Adam 1 and Adam 2 and the Torah and the Old Testament and Genesis,

beginning of Genesis. There are two almost identical descriptions of Adam, the first human being. And again, this is not a science topic, but it's a question of morality and wisdom connected to our values. And in that duplicative discussion of Adam, which many atheists and skeptics used to point out the fallibility and the falsehood of the Bible of the Torah, because, oh, they say, oh, there's two different descriptions and they disagree. That's not really the message. The message is to, and I'm not being an apologeticist, I'm just explaining how at an advanced level, and I studied the Torah, the Old Testament, and the original Hebrew and Aramaic, so I can hold it. my own with people like Spencer. Even though I'm a scientist and my day-to-day life is to study the

14 billion-year-old universe, not believe that it is 5,785 years old, literally, and I do want to wish you all a happy new year, Shanat Tova. But when we think about these two different atoms in the Torah, there's a type of atom that plows the fields and makes a living and has a wife and has kids, and then there's the one who prays to God and supplicates and makes sacrifices. And that is sort of of the eulogy virtue versus the resume virtue. You know, on Adam's tombstone, it says, you know, he plowed the fields for a couple hundred. No, it doesn't say that. He wasn't a son.

He was the father, and he also, you know, he has one fewer rib and then his wife for reasons we're not going to get into. But the point is that we're made up of these two diametrically opposed sorts of aspects. And your eulogy, no one's going to say, you know, Brian Keating went to Brown University for his Ph.D. nobody cares they're going to care i was as a father son a brother a friend husband hopefully i said that at least once for my wife who's listening so it's not just our capabilities it's not just our knowledge it's not just our genes you know he was healthy he ran a five-minute mile which i can aspire to someday or you know i played uh tennis in high school no nobody cares about my genetics that won't matter and no one will remember as it's often said you know a man dies twice once when he

physically departs and the last time his name has ever said. I don't know if I really believe that. There's some people that never die then. And they're not undead because they live forever genetically or biologically. They're undead and they live on because their contributions to the world made a big difference. I'll explore this concept and contradistinction to the selfish gene. And I call it the giving valve where a valve, instead of being the gene, the gene is the unit of genetic and physical, biological encapsulation, encoding the uniqueness of the chromosomes and the genetic makeup of an individual. And those, I agree with Richard, they have a desire in a categorical imperative to move into the future and lodge themselves and spray themselves out into history

into posterity, spray themselves out into posterity. But that's not what matters to us. It's our values that we choose to pass down. That's what matters. And you don't have to have kids, by the way, I do think it's important for people to have children if they can or raise children, adopt children, I'm adopted. And because of that, you know, they're different kind of perspectives than I have. So not just biological, but you can influence people ideologically. And I often talk about that when I discuss the will, the ethical will, the Zava Ah, in Hebrew, that I often ask every Nobel laureate that comes on the podcast. So let me ask you a question to illustrate this. What would you prefer to have? Would you like to have 10 children? It would be a lot,

except if your name is Musk, who has at least two more. We don't know exactly there are Poisson uncertainties and how many kids he has. But would you like to have 10 children who are, you know, which is an enormous number, it's five standard deviations in America from the average. Would you rather have 10 children who are your political opposites, your religious opposites, converted to different religions? Maybe they became atheists, or maybe you're an atheist, and they became religious. My father used to feel that way, too. He'd say, I don't believe in God, but I believe in the devil because he made you become more. spiritually active in Judaism. Or would you rather have one child, just one, who shares and upholds

your deepest values? It's amazing. Our genes, as Richard says, I agree 100%. They ensure our biological survival, but our values ensure the survival of meaning. And this perspective shift from genetic legacy to a legacy of values is the essence of what I call the giving vow, the giving being an altruistic act, giving by its nature, without any expectation thereof. So it kind of flips the script where genes operate on survival, competition, and have to be possessed as virtue of selfishness, valves, so I call them, represent the flow of values, wisdom, ethics, compassion, not for your individual gain, but for the collective good of future generations. To me, that's about instilling ethical frameworks that will guide society many, many generations after we're gone. Again,

we don't think about someone genetics. We don't know anything about Moses's genetics or Jesus's genetics. Similarly, we don't know much about Galileo's genetics. People like Isaac Newton didn't have any children. But we can see it manifested in many cultural and religious practices. In my religion, I just mentioned, ethical wills or Zaba As these appear in Orthodox Judaism. In the Torah, Jacob blesses his children with a blessing of wisdom, how they should act. Again, I'm not taking it literally, but just when you take it seriously, you look at how unlike a legal will that bequeaths material possessions and ethical will passes down your values, your moral guidance, and your spiritual beliefs, if any. And it could be atheist. Moses did the same thing at the end of

Deuteronomy. And I know my Mormon friends have a practice of family sealing, I believe it's called, where family members are bound together eternally. It goes beyond the spiritual beliefs. It's a moral commitment to uphold the set of values that transcend individual lifetimes. Genealogical work and baptisms for the dead as they practice it reflect a deep commitment to ancestors. sisters and descendants. And that's what I'm emphasizing. Your legacy is of your shared values, not your genetic chemical makeup of G's and A's and T's and C's. So in both these faith traditions, the focus isn't on being perpetuating sacks of chromosomes, but on transmitting values. And that's the heart of what I call the giving value. Our biological makeup certainly is

significant. It's the ethical and moral compass we leave behind that really will be your legacy, or eulogy, if you will. So with the rise of AI and large language models, concerns about existential threats are numerous. And I worry about those too. But I take comfort in the fact that these systems of large language models have no values whatsoever. That's way more than a 1% difference.

It's not just the realm of bits and atoms that I study, but it's the values that make us human. And no AI can replicate that. So how do we maximize this distinction? I say, you know, take on descendants, either biological or ideological, prioritize how you can cultivate your ideology to be helpful to future generations. Remember, Homo sapient, wisdom, man, that's what we are, men and women. By focusing like this, we can enhance our lives and really enrich the things that are most valuable. The giving valve

is a conduit through which our most cherished values can flow into the future, shaping humanity in ways that genes alone cannot. Like genetics, it's a one-way valve. It's a one-way valve. It's a It's a one-way street. You can't be influenced from the future, not yet at least. But in our world, we're so obsessed with genetic legacy, survival, procreation, just spraying genes out. I know for a fact. Elon Musk said that one of his kids is dead to him. That's an awful thing to say, by the way.

And I hope to someday get him to flesh out that concept that he talked about with Jordan Peterson. Jordan's a friend. I've had Elon's, you know, attention on the podcast earlier this year for 15 minutes. I hope to get him back on, and I do want to talk to him about that respectfully. What does that mean? Does it mean that he regrets another human being? As a father, it's hard for me to hear that. It makes me emotional. So in a world of success with genetic legacy and survival, let's look at the things that we care about. And that to me is transmitting our values and doing so. We can embrace giving valve and make a conscious effort to pass down not just our genes, but the very best of what and who we are. What makes us? human. Anyway, that's it. Now on to the interview with Spencer Claven, I'll turn it over to my introduction that I made for that episode. I hope you enjoy it. And let me know in a review what you thought of this audio essay. You can leave a review. It's only on audio you're not going to see on the podcast. On Apple Podcasts, Audible podcast, and on Spotify, you can leave

feedback and leave a rating, if you would as well. Don't forget to follow, even if it's a hate follow. I appreciate all of you. Happy New Year to those that observe. And talk to you on the flip side of this introduction. Bye-bye. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month.

Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google FiWi Wireless is a month. not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And science and religion be reconciled to provide a deeper understanding of the universe. How do modern scientific discoveries like quantum mechanics and cosmology relate to ancient religious texts? And what role do consciousness and language play in bridging the gap between scientific knowledge

and spiritual belief? In a world where faith and reason are often portrayed as opposing forces, Spencer Claven, acclaimed author scholar and host of the Young Heretics podcast, explores the surprising harmony between scientific discovery and religious understanding. I don't normally have on guests like Spencer, and I think you'll find that his blend of very, very deep understanding of scientific principles stemming from his extremely erudite classical education, lead us to challenge conventional narratives about the relationship between science and religion, not questioning science, not doubting it or asserting some young earth creationist type nonsense,

but rather revealing the influence of faith on some of humanity's greatest intellectual achievements. Join us as we dive deep into the spirit realm, armed with a healthy dose of scientific skepticism. Let's go. Spencer Claven, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. Brian, long-time listener, first-time caller. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. We met over the summer. We had an arranged meeting. I met you only after meeting your father, who was denied paternity like I have with many of my offspring. No, I've never done that.

I asked him to do that, actually. That's by my request, yeah. Your father's had a big impact on me. I've been on his show, and I really enjoy him. And I very much enjoyed your newest book, which is just a phenomenal contribution. to both philosophy, but also to science and the reconciliation, perhaps, of religion with science, the age-old quest. And we're going to finally do it today, Spencer. We're going to finally reconcile science and religion, the two non-overlapping magisteria, as they call it. As I told you, you're kind enough to send me a copy of the book.

And that was most appreciative. And I want to do what you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. But before we did that, because my favorite medium is audio, I wanted to share with you a creation that I made based on this wonderful book. And that was to use an artificial intelligent app called Speechify, not sponsored yet. I mean, we're going to try because I do use this a lot. And I had a choice of narrators, and I wanted to introduce you to the narrator that I decided to choose. Here we go. I'll play it on my...

The developments of history and the ingenuity of great minds have placed into human, The human hands an awesome and terrible power. The power to transform the world. It is no longer a matter of mainly academic interest. If it ever was. Right. All right. Well, that's Snoop Dog.

And he's also not sponsored. I don't know. Maybe he is sponsored. But you just saved me so much time. I'm recording the audiobook right now. But I don't need to anymore. That's obviously the way to go. But Spencer, I want you to do what we're never supposed to do, which is to take this wonderful

book. Do you have a copy of the hard copy somewhere? I sure do. Yeah, here I'll pull it up. Thank you for the opportunity. My agent thanks you for this request. Here it is. Light of the mind, light of the world.

Today is publication day. So what I love for you to do is to take us through the title, the cover art, and especially the subtitle. That's always so interesting. Subtitle for those in the know is like an SEO grab, right? You just throw in every keyword you possibly can until it covers the entire. front of the book. But I guess I don't know if I'm telling tales out of school here, but there's actually a lot of wrangling in the background of this cover. The book initially began its life with a different

publisher, Regnery. And then Regnery was acquired by Skyhorsen. In the process, the old cover that we had changed. So I should have sent you in advance. You might be interested to see. The old cover was a medieval-looking stone column from a church, very spare with a kind of rainbow of stained glass light reflected onto it. And that, I think, was picking up on the fact that the rainbow is a major motif in the book, as it has been for a lot of my inspirations. Owen Barfield's saving the appearances begins with the rainbow. John Keats talks about the rainbow. Gerta was fascinated by color theory and with the attempt to refute sort of Newton's idea about how colors are formed. And the idea of the rainbow, right, is that it's a thing which exists,

but it exists only in the space between mind and matter. So you can predict where you might see it, but you can't describe it or account for it except as a perceptual phenomenon. So that was kind of, I think, the idea of the old cover. We bid that one farewell for this, which somebody told me it looks like Dr. Who, with the, what was it called the TARDIS that descends, but in this case, it's a stained glass window coming out of the cosmic sky. And it was designed by my good friend Jonathan Hay. I love this cover. I'm very, very pleased with it. And I got to be involved in the design,

including this really cool font, which kind of fades into the background. So if you're into fonts, I would say, buy the book for that purpose alone. I will not be offended, by the way, if you buy this book only for the sake of its cover. And I will still get the royalties. It'll still go up on Amazon. Be more than happy. But I think you might like what's within the covers too. Anyway, yeah. So the subtitle, illuminating science through faith, that too was kind of went through a bunch of different revisions. Initially, it was how new science is illuminating ancient truths about God. It's interesting. I actually think that would kind of describe what I think the book is about. That's where I landed initially after I wrote the book, that not only in the book do I

argue that science as an enterprise in the West arises out of a religious impulse, that is the conviction that man's mind is designed to understand the whole of the universe in its totality. Without that conviction, you kind of can't sally forth into the great scientific enterprise. But that also this idea which kind of got kicked up in the process of the world as devoid of God, that science had moved away from religion or was disproving God or that the world science reveals looks nothing like the world is described in the Bible. All of that, I argue, in the book, is really outdated and that we need a new and intellectually robust history of science that takes account of the fact that we are now returning to a picture of the world that looks, I think, a lot like the one in the book. of Genesis. And, you know, if both sides of this ancient dispute can kind of lay down their arms, we might see that we have a lot to say to one another. And so that was the original subtitle was

sort of like all of what I just said kind of on the cover of the book. And we were designing the cover and it was like, I don't think that's going to fit. So illuminating science through faith is like the Cliff Notes version of all of that. It is a wonderful cover. And your, your tortured route to your final cover and publishers almost as tortured as mine. My first book, at least, that, that cover photographer, you know, was threatening to sue my publisher because I appeared on a podcast such as your fathers and Glenn Beck's and all sorts of conservative thinkers, even though I was talking about cosmology in the Big Bank. So he threatened to be quite nasty about it. So we ended up changing the cover, but that ended up being a great favor to me because I had a little

known clause in my book contract that every time there was a new edition, new cover, They had to release it and put a lot of advertising marketing behind. So I ended up going on many more podcasts. Nice. So despite that individual's best attempts to take me down. But now, Spencer, the day that we're speaking is an auspicious one. We're speaking on the eve of Russia Shana in the Jewish calendar, just two weeks, mere two weeks before your book actually comes out, which is the beginning of Sukkot, the festival

of booths and other events. And so your book comes out at a very auspicious time. Now, Rosh Hashanah is thought to represent the origin of the universe, which is the way the bread gets buttered around the Keating household, studying cosmology. But it's not. Actually, according to rabbinic sages, and you know this from your studies of classics and your PhD and research, it actually commemorates the birth of mankind, you know, the connection of Eve to the divine. Why is there this sort of eternal attention, so to speak? And what do you make of some of the resolutions to it? The most common one that I invoke on occasion is a version of Stephen J. Gould's non-overlapping magisteria.

Where does that kind of interpretation lay flat versus the one that you promote in this book? Well, I have a lot of respect for the non-overlapping magisteria stands among us. I quote in the book, speaking of cosmology, the really kind of father of Big Bang theory, George Lometra, who gave an interview in which he basically articulated exactly that perspective, that I'm studying truths on parallel tracks. And if you went back even further, you could cite St. Augustine and say, you know, there's the book of nature and the book of scripture. and that if either of these two seems to be contradicting the other, you need to put them into conversation and you need to use each to sort of re-evaluate your interpretation of the other. And I think that, as I argue in the book,

there was a period of time when it looked expedient for science, especially, to make those two. two overlapping, or rather those two separate spheres, not only distinct, but hermetically sealed, hermetically distinct from one another. And that, I think, is what Lemaître, who was himself a priest, was trying to protect, was this sort of enlightenment-era idea that in the most extreme form, you have this story about Pierre Simon Leplas, that I have no need of God as a hypothesis in my description of the world. And I would say that from one perspective that is perfectly true, that is to say the proper domain of scientific knowledge is just that domain, which is accessible

to us through, I would say, our God-given faculties of perception and reason. And that to invoke, as your boy Galileo fondly observed, right, to invoke kind of the omnipotence of God as some sort of escape clause from any scientific result you don't like is definitely cheating at the game. But the case that I'm making in this book is that somewhere down the road, and I, of course, would blame the French because that's just the kind of guy I am, but somewhere in that revolutionary enlightenment period, the assertion that science can do its work without reference to wisdom traditions or to scriptural faith became confused with the assertion that science can exhaustively describe all of reality in just that domain. And what I'm putting forward in this

book is that that is well and truly false. And not only that, a richer understanding of both spheres will come from acknowledging that actually they are. in conversation. At the end of the day, when you take off your scientist hat and I take off my classicist hat and we really just try to get down to the heart of the fullness of what we can know as humans, a richest understanding comes from bringing these two spheres into overlap. So the separation, in other words, is like artificial or provisional. But the communion of the two and the sort of stereo opticon you get when you overlay these two kinds of knowledge. on one another is not only dazzlingly beautiful, but also the necessary to gain a full understanding

of ourselves in our place in the universe. Yeah, that's a lovely way to interpret it. And one of the things you're known for on the young, not the young Turks, that's a different podcast, but the young heretics is a segment you call words, words, words, right? And in Hebrew, as you know, but the audience may not. The word for word and the word for thing are the same thing, the same word, DeVard. Yes. And it's suggestive of a link between ethereal things that are non-material and actual material things. I was a Catholic for a little time. I mean, you and I have very similar, at least complex, if not complicated, ways to faith.

We won't get into it here. But the faith of my birth was Judaism, but the faith of my youth was Christianity, Catholicism. And I was actually an altar boy when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah. I actually only had my bar mitzvah last year at the Western Wall in Israel at age 52, which is four times 13, as you may recognize. But let's get back to this concept, word and thing. You speak in the book about the Christian belief of Jesus as the word. Obviously, words, words, words. What does the word mean to you?

And how can we reconcile the material with the immaterial? I love this question. And as you know, one of the pivotal chapters in the book is just called word. and not, unfortunately, in the Snoop Dog's sense of word to your mother, although I really want to hear him read that part of the book. All right. This is for the outtakes for people that really want to get in deep, you know, afterward. But you're absolutely right to invoke the Hebrew language, which I think Christians and Jews alike, and indeed people of all backgrounds, could do well to know more about because it is profoundly and meaningfully different from. the English language we're speaking now from the Latin of the church, from the Greek of the New Testament.

And one way in which it's different is in this tight link between what we would call the immaterial and the material. And the verbal or the active, that is sort of abstractions like motion and verbs, versus kind of objects and things. The line between those two is much more permeable in Hebrew. And I think that that helps to underwrite the Genesis picture in which, vio mer Elohim and God said over and over again, let there be light, yeh, or. I mean, even in that line, right, Viomere, alheme, yhi, or, what we translate as, God said, let there be light, and there was light, is almost the same word. It's like if you said, and God said, light be and light be, right? So there's this like instant, totally inseparable connection between this idea

of God's speech and God's creation. And what I suggest in the book is that this is not a mere relic of the Hebrew morphology, but actually kind of a key also to what we're up to, to our role in the universe and our job as understanders of things. And the text that I kind of want to invoke here is a lesser-known text by Thomas Aquinas, Speaking of the Catholics, it hasn't had a really good English translation, so it's kind of like hard to really get your handle on this. But I talk about it in those podcast segments a lot. I always get the title mixed up, but I think it's de natura, where be intellectus.

And it's about this concept of the word that goes so much deeper than just the sounds that we're currently making or the particular things we're saying, down into what it even means to understand or to see the world at the way. that we see it. You think about how we experience reality. It's not actually just this series of kind of Newtonian snapshots of particles in motion. It's actually, even in the bare instance of our experience, it's gathered into form and meaning. And it's actually kind of impossible for me to see the world without overlaying onto it this imprint of Logos, the Greeks would have called it, which is, of course, the Greek that we translate as the word in the beginning was the word. And so when John writes that, I think what he's saying is the order and the structure that we perceive in the cosmos, that we can't help but see, that is by definition part of what we

see. That was in there from the beginning. In fact, that's baked into what the world is. And when we experience the world, the way that we experience the world, isn't an evolutionary accident. It's not just something that will one day move past and get to the pure perfection of numerical calculation, it's actually a part of the structure of reality. And the fact that we use small W words, the fact that we have language and speech like Hebrew and English, that's only the tip of the iceberg. That's like the last thing that we are able then to generate. Because if I say a word, even a simple word, like cat, right?

Underneath that word, there is this abstract concept that exists nowhere in bare matter. There's no cat in just the fur and the muscles of the being in front of me. I'm putting that name onto the thing to as a sign, a stamp of the fact that to me, it's part of a class. And no surprises, but what does God do on that Rosh Hashanah day when mankind kind of comes into the world? He says, here's all the different animals after their kinds, in their species. what are you going to call them? And so the creative act of God, which imbues the world with these intelligible forms, which we study, yes, in science and also in literature and sort of throughout all of our ways of knowing, the creative act of God invests these forms, these words into the world,

and we draw them out in response. And that's kind of our answer in the word or in our kind of like deep intellectual sense of what it means to be languages and creatures. What do you say to those like me who are maybe Jewish or maybe atheists who believe in such concepts as the column, you know, cosmological argument promulgated and postulated by your, the author of the preface to the book, the foreword to the book, Stephen C. Myers, past guest and upcoming future guest on the podcast? And how would you react to this argument that often troubles me as, again, as a practicing Jew, not orthodox, but practicing very seriously in whatever ways you can imagine.

That means stoning adulterers, of course, and, you know, naturally. Where's the fun if you don't do that? Come on. And not boiling the kid in its mother's milk, but every other kid I do. Now, here's the way I typically, you know, have a recoil to the column argument because it starts off with rational supposition, you know, all things that exist were, you know, created to exist. There was essentially a moment of creation of existence. And then the, you know, proposition that that will trace to a creator or, you know, someone who actually caused them to be instantiated into the world or into existence. And then the notion is, well, that's kind of a

sterile universe that, you know, just came into existence. Fine. But that God has to have a personal relationship. Fine, even in Judaism, we can accept that there's a personal relationship. But it always seems to, you know, have it, you know, in the content funnel, you know, it starts at column at the top, it ends at Jesus. And the fact, the fact is that that is untenable for, for many of us who are serious Jews, or maybe even just atheists, a much larger population than the 0.01% of people that are serious Jews. So how do you react to that? That, that does it need to have the personalization in the form of Jesus Christ? And if for some, in some scientific sense, if we could falsify Jesus.

We'll get to aspects that you talk about the book. But if Jesus could be falsified, in other words, proven not to have existed, whatever that means, how would that impact the argument of first cause, essentially? I love this question. And I tried to make the book both explicitly Christian and worthwhile to atheists, Jews, Muslims, anybody, right? I mean, there's, I think the core of the argument doesn't actually. funnel you irrevocably to Jesus. What I tried to do is instead say, here's my argument for a theistic view of the world. Here's where I think Jesus fits in as kind of the capstone of that. But you're right that that personal relationship, that one-to-one relationship between a human

savior who walked the earth and rose again, that's very important to Christians and it's very important to me. Like if somebody, we maybe get into talking about my way of reading the Bible later on, but if somebody proved that, like, it was actually a guy named Mo who rose from the dead, that wouldn't bother me too terribly much. If somebody proved that nobody had ever rose from the dead, that would be a serious problem for my faith. I don't think it would be a serious problem for the cosmological argument. And here's why. Everything that we've been talking about so far seems to me to suggest very strongly that human reason taken in general has a form and a structure that is very, very difficult to account for by reference to random chance and

spontaneity. And I would even suggest that you've had guests on this podcast who can make that case in a much more granular way than I can. I mean, I as a humble classicist will often take arguments from, you know, scientists who have made this case. But that much, I think, you can kind of get to, that the human mind is more than just an accident, that it meets in the external world, even in the world described by science, with something very much like it, that something akin to what we have in our minds is stamped into the structure of the world, if we want to say that our science is true at all and that our reasoning is valid. All of that, I think, you can get to without ever talking about Jesus and his fulfillment of the prophecies.

What I'm not sure that you can get to is the claim that your mind specifically, and indeed your personhood, your personality and your individuality, you, Brian Keating, me, Spencer Claven, finds an answer in the cost. cosmic mind that we are interpreting or learning about as we study the world through science. I think that's the fundamental claim of Christianity, that not just humanity, not just the mind, not just creation, but you specifically have an answering face to look to when you stare, ponder the mysteries of the universe. And again, Christians believe that that guy is named Jesus, that he fulfilled the various prophecies of the anointed one, the Messiah, or the Messiah, that we find throughout the Old Testament, and that actually his life sort of perfectly embodies.

How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy how many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. What you would need to know to get a route into, that individual personal relationship. If it turns out it was like a dude named Stan, not so much of a problem for me. If it turns out there's no such dude, then my personal view of the world and my fate has to be radically rewired and radically altered. And that's what Paul says too, right?

If the resurrection doesn't actually happen, then we're like pitiful nobodies, essentially. We're hanging our hopes on a dream. But I don't think that that applies to these broader and more general arguments about the structure of our minds and the structure of creation or the physical cosmos. I think all of that hangs in place kind of with or without the Christian claims and is accessible to people of every background to kind of sink their teeth into. It's the you and me of it all that gets you, I think, to Jesus and makes Jesus necessary. Would it change your argument if, as my colleagues and I have to be dispassionate, I'd like nothing better than to, you know, make an ester.

detection of, you know, the singularity at the beginning of the universe, postulated by the inflation theory, which you talk about in this book. But we have to be reminded of the fact that science is about, you know, doing research and research is about not knowing the answers. And it may be that the universe did not begin. And I've talked with Stephen Meyer, about Steve Meyer about this as well, and that there's a whole cutting edge. In fact, one of the founding fathers of the inflation theory, the modern version of it, Paul

Steinhart, past guest on the show, he believes. that the universe is much more likely to be cyclical and effectively eternal, what's called a bouncing cosmological model, which would have no beginner, which would be eternal, and would not produce the relic gravitational wave perturbations that my telescopes are looking for, my colleagues and I are looking for around the globe, from the South Pole, the Chile, to space. So I ask you, what if we found, you know, the negative? Although for technical reasons, it's very hard to prove that the cyclical models are correct and also falsify the inflationary models. It's actually easier to do the reverse where you give evidence for inflation and falsify the cyclical model.

But ignoring that, what do you, what would you make of such a discovery? Would it impact your faith? Or would you, you know, in some ways, find ways to reconcile them? Bouncing cosmology reminds me of a theory from the ancient world that I'm actually quite partial to. And I didn't get to talk about as in the book just because of space, I sort of want to to give people who are not scientists a way into, like, the standard ideas that we all kind of learn in school and how those fit into a religious faith. But bouncing cosmology is very stoic. So the Stoics had this idea of ekeperosis, that the universe kind of like got burned up. It was the opposite of heat death. It was like heat maxing so that the universe then like began again. I invoke this only

to say that, you know, the Stoics also believed in a lot of the stuff about the Logos that we're talking about and believed that the universe kind of necessitated a conviction that the human mind knows a reason that's imprinted into the world. So bouncing cosmology is not incompatible with some of the stuff that I am arguing here or suggesting. What I say in the book to kind of cover my bases about this to a certain extent is there are lots of things that are, a lot of questions that are unanswered, research that you're doing, that I am not going to answer, right? You're not going to hear about it first from me if there's some sort of conclusive discovery that either the universe has a beginning or either it doesn't. But I'm

less vexed, maybe even than Stephen, although I don't know, I'm slightly less vexed by the possibility because as a philosopher and as a student of history, it seems clear to me that there are certain questions which will endure irrespective of whatever data we may encounter. And one of those questions is not actually about priority in time, which is what the cosmological question deals with, but priority in cause. And many of the theories that even I have read that offer an alternative to the singularities still leave open this massive question about why is there's something rather than nothing? I don't ask science to answer that question. I don't even ask scientists to adopt a position on that question. But by virtue of that very fact, I think we still

will have to refer to issues of matters of faith. Now, if you come up with something tomorrow that changes everything, I'm perfectly ready to do the Augustine thing, right, and take the book of nature back to the book of scripture and kind of ask, like, how do these two things hang together? even a cyclical universe, even a universe that's eternal in time, Aquinas talks about this, is really not sufficient to explain itself, can't be self-caused merely as a material entity, and still requires all of the kind of mind stuff that we find even in the world as we currently encounter it. So all those questions will endure. And yeah, again, sort of what I say in the book is here is how I think most people kind of picture the world according to science.

Here's what a lot of our best guesses look like and how a layman might understand them. And here's how those guesses would describe a world that really perfectly conforms to the Genesis picture. If you tell me that there's like a totally radical upheaval in that tomorrow, I'll take that on board. But I don't think that it's going to like unsettle the issues. that I'm raising here or even really touch the necessity for a mind beyond our own, on the other side of the universe, all of the basic theistic arguments that I'm making here. Would the universe from nothing kind of hypothesis popularized by many time past guest

and many time lapsed Jew Lawrence Krause? Would that affect, again, that is sort of the the endpoint of the inflation funnel and that their spontaneous creation within what's not as a multiverse, do those notions can they challenge? Or is there nothing? I mean, is it immune to falsifiability? Which might be fair because it's not a science claim that you're making, right? Faith is faith because it is actually outside of the realm of falsifiability. And I would be making not only exaggerated claims on its behalf, but also, I think, false claims to its nature if I said, yeah, like there's some measurement you can take that is going to shut this question off altogether. Really what I'm stressing is that by its structure,

science is not equipped to shut this question off altogether. But I will say something just briefly about the universe from nothing hypothesis. I mean, I get into multiverse theory in the book, and I'm not very impressed by it, just logically speaking. And I think that I'm kind of of in good company there. But even just sort of leaving that aside, you talk about like quantum foam, you talk about all this stuff that people kind of raise of, you know, what if there really is nothing but nothing kind of fluctuates between the potential for something and not. It seems to me that these arguments always smuggle in something under another name and that the reason those who advance them are unable to recognize this is because they've defined

their epistemological universe as only containing some things which we can touch. So you say, well, there is a string inflationary landscape or there is a series of quantum possibilities or all these things. And my answer to that is like, that ain't nothing. That's just not an object. You're still talking about something. You're talking about now pure abstractions. It's kind of like when Stephen Hawking says in the Wall Street Journal that the universe can

be generated using a few laws. We can generate universes using a few scientific laws. And he thinks that that's a universe from nothing. I think, Stephen, who wrote the laws? So there's kind of like a disconnect maybe in what we mean by a universe from nothing. And that's part of what I'm arguing against in the book is the idea that if you can prove there was no matter, there was no thing. But in general, I'm kind of unimpressed by these arguments because I think they argue past really the point. How much of the influence of modern, you know, investigations into consciousness, which, as an aside, if you think modern cosmologists are, you know, confused and lacking a common lexicon or divided by a common lexicon, as it sometimes said, you should go to talk to some consciousness experts like I've had on the show. Nobody can define it. At least I can define when an exoplanet is. And even though it might piss off, you know, a lot of people, as you can imagine, these battles are quite controversial. heated. But, you know, somebody looking at, imagine, you know, a Richard Dawkins, you know, I'm going to

be hosting in Vancouver, well, that'll be a week ago after this video was posted. But, you know, I'm going to be hosting him and talking about him. And I wonder, you know, he's obviously had many books. I think one is unweaving the rainbow. This book relies on the current status of our interpretation of things like the multiverse, like the string landscape, like quantum mechanics, interpretations, many worlds theories, even the Big Bang itself. Just as a brief aside, although this is violating the oath of podcasters to have six questions, you know, enmeshed in one, but I will remind you of them. There's a famous rabbi scholar, Aisha Toro, the yeshiva in Israel at the Kotel at the Western Wall.

And he has a book, Genesis in the Big Bang. And he talks about reconciling all these things together and that the seven days really do correspond on to 15 billion years. Actually, I think it's 16 billion years. And the problem is, you know, when he wrote that book, it was in 1993, you know, right after Kobe first discovered fluctuations in the cosmic microbe background. And there are, you know, terms in our understanding of modern cosmology and structure formation that depend on things, say, the age of the universe to like the seventh power or something

like that, or the over density of matter and what's called sigma 8, having those to a very high power. In other words, there's an extreme sensitivity to the value. Therefore, if the value gets updated, anything downstream of it gets radically altered. And so what do you do with that? Do you say God is wrong? So I find those elements very, very disheartening. And it leads me back to the original question I asked you, which was whether or not it's possible for, you know, the input dynamics or the input parameters to be so such a strong forcing function for what you conclude in the book that, you know, a discovery tomorrow might really invalidate some of the, you know, anti-materialist or non-materialist sentiment in the book. How would Richard Dawkins react to

it? Or, you know, I plan to ask him about it on Sunday, but, but how would he react to it, the fine-tuning, the knowledge of our current state of physics, consciousness, quantum mechanics, etc. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and I'll state again for the record that what we started out by talking about the two magisteria, as you put it, means that you are going to be the person much sooner than I am who's going to seek and find answers to these questions. And it will be up to me to integrate. I mean, you know, you could discover, the range of things that you could discover is so vast from my perspective that I can't even, you know, possibly cover all the basis of what might happen. And so in the book, I actually try very hard not to do that. And

this book is not arguing that science has proven God any more than it is arguing that science has disproven God. I think that those are both foolish arguments for really the same reason. And we've lived with one of them for so long, this idea that science has shown there is no God. As I say in the book there's a Soviet cosmonaut who went up into space and said, I saw no God up there, so there must be no God, right? And I find this like clearly a confusion in terms, a contradiction in terms. That's very simplistic. And a category era. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say like, I also don't believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in. You know, they have a very So, sophisticated belief in God's system, as you and I might interpret it.

And there is another danger, though, on the other side of this, which I think some theists fall into. And that is to say, no, actually science proves God. The fact that, say, quantum entanglement currently looks this way to us, shows that God is just how the Bible describes him. Or as you say that the billions of years that science is looking at are those periods as described in Genesis. And I certainly venture into in the book interpretations of Genesis that try to map onto some of our current understandings of those things, especially as you indicate quantum mechanics and especially the sort of early, our model of the early formation of the universe. If those models are wrong, then those interpretations will become outdated. There will be a part of the book that isn't there.

And so I really tried to kind of provide for that by basing the foundation of my argument on questions that are actually prior to those things that speak not to the nature of any one scientific discovery, but to the nature of the enterprise as a whole. And what we would need even to say that any discovery we might make in the future has validity that we can rely upon. So in other words, if you come to me tomorrow and you say, like, actually the universe rides on the back of a turtle, I am. Don't scoop me, Spencer. I know. I'm sorry. Coming on the archive. And I don't mean to discredit indigenous knowledge, right? But if you say that to me tomorrow, you know, it'll take a very, very long time for you to show me your evidence to convince me.

But I will say like, okay, I have to think about like, you know, what in Genesis this corresponds to or whether at all I can like square this with my interpretation of Genesis. But I will still, I think, come back to you and ask the questions that I ask in this book. how do you know? What's the method that you employed? What sorts of templates did you apply to your empirical data in order to draw those conclusions? And I suspect that you're going to answer, well, you know, numbers work and experiments work. And so do extrapolations from experiments of the kind that David Hume was actually very, very worried about. It was, you know, it used to be the religionists who are making these arguments and the atheists who are saying, well, how do you know, you know that these experiments work? Now I'm saying, yeah, you do know, if you could show me

reliable scientific evidence that the earth is on the back of a turtle, I would be like, okay, that's because your mind was formed in the image of God. And unless you believe some version of that, you actually can't stand behind that conclusion or any of the words that we've said on this podcast. So, yeah, there's some stuff that, like, you know, could be exploded. I hope it won't. But the core of the argument actually is prior to and designed to be prior to the particular discoveries that science makes. At the risk of committing another cardinal sin of podcasting and offending your heroes, I have to ask you about Aristotle. Was he ever right about anything?

I mean, I did check my wife's mouth and she does have fewer teeth than me. I did verify down at the beach off the coast of San Diego that actually whales are mammals, but four elements, heavy things fall faster than light ones, innumerable other conject. The earth is the center of the universe. Was he ever right? How can you worship such a flawed individual, Spencer? This actually speaks directly to the last question that you just asked. This is a perfect illustration of exactly what I am talking about, right?

Because what you just said is a classic attack on Aristotle. It's been classic since the end of the Middle Ages. And in fact, Aristotle has been sort of cast as the great villain. Like before there was Cardinal Bel Armini and the Catholic Church and the evil nasties who did bad by Galileo. Burned Giordano Bruno at the stage. Yeah, exactly. Prison Galileo in that awful slend shumptuous villa that I'm going to take you to next time we're in So before there was that, though, right, there was Aristotle. And the idea that these hidebound, kind of the dogma of Aristotle, reinforced by another one of my big guys, Thomas Aquinas, had stopped people from actually going out and looking at the world as it really is. And this is Bacon's big complaint. But before him, of course, you, you know, you've got Nicola Orem and you've got all the kind of great academicians who cut their teeth by sort of pushing against these Aristotelian claims. I think,

that Aristotle would have been only too delighted to learn about this personally, to discover that he was wrong about like the cuttlefish or momentum or your wife's teeth or whatever, right? And that's because I don't actually view or understand Aristotelian philosophy as hanging upon the particular information that was available to Aristotle at the time. What Aristotle created and what we all still use whether we like it or not, whether we hate him or not, is an extraordinarily powerful engine of thought designed to answer prior questions. I mean, Aristotle's metaphysics, that is, that which is beyond or before physics, remains one of the more profound ways, I think, of sort of sorting out which sorts of questions we might leave to faith or think about through faith

in which we might think about through science. And it was indeed the insistence upon proper epistemology, which the medievals were schooled in, right, which the kind of precursors to the scientific reformation were obsessed with. And they were always making these commentaries on Aristotle because they were following Aristotle's advice to very carefully weigh ideas against one another, that they ended up overthrowing a lot of the particulars that Aristotle thought. Aristotle didn't have the observation technology that we have. He didn't have the, I mean, I will freely admit that. And I will say, like, yeah, he therefore didn't know a lot of things that we know.

The question is a question of importance, right? Does that discovery, does the discovery of momentum, does the discovery, the potential discovery of a cyclical universe, down the line or any particular thing that you might come to me and say about the earth being on the back of a turtle, would that invalidate the structural issues of our nature as knowing beings and our position in the universe as conscious minds? In the same way that it said, you know, the discovery of momentum invalidates Aristotle. I think not at all. I think that in order to even make that sort of a claim, you have to be so steeped in Aristotle that you don't even realize you're already playing by his rules. But those have become so structural and so embedded

that we don't notice them anymore. And the extra stuff, the stuff about like measurement and observation, I have the highest possible respect for it. I would never try to cling to like my Aristotelian idea of, for example, conception over the idea of modern biologists. I just don't think that it, I think the answer to your question is like, was he right about anything? Yeah, he was right about basically everything that matters most, and he got a lot of other stuff wrong. One thing I'd like to pick your brain about, he was a pagan effectively, right? Yeah, yeah. Why would the church, you know, nominally monotheistic, you know, champion of monotheism,

why would they, you know, effectively sanctify and order basically, you know, the claim of heresy, what would cause them to go to bat for, you know, basically a pagan? And under penalty of death, as I understand if I think I learned from Steve. He was basically sanctified at some level. How does that work? Well, it was a big question. For the early church, it was an enormous question, right? So Tertullian back way before the medieval era, right at the start of the church,

this church father Tertullian says, what half Athens to do with Jerusalem? And this is the gauntlet that the church throws down to pagan knowledge of all kinds. because you had, at the birth of the Christian church, this very developed and highly sophisticated, not only system of thought in, for example, Aristotelian, parapetetic thought, but this whole suite of options for understanding the structure of logic, the nature of the universe in the Hellenistic schools. And there was a version of Christian polemic that said, not only, we ain't need no stinking pagan wisdom. But actually, this is like demonic.

This comes from the deceptions and deceit of the extra, you know, only the Jews and then following them the Christians have had any truth that matters. And from the beginning, you had an argument over how that could possibly be right. Because so much of what Aristotle has to say and indeed what Plato was wrestling with via Socrates, if you don't agree with all of it,

it's at least manifest in its profundity. And I think there is still a temptation among Christians of a certain stripe to make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry

with a large capacity washer, and host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store online for details. Reject extra-biblical knowledge for the same reason. It's precisely because it's extra-biblical and to insist that the Bible itself is even self-interpreting. And I have to be honest with you, Brian, I don't even know what that means.

Like, I don't even know what it would mean for any book to teach you how to, like, is a Hebrew grammar contained in the Bible that I skipped over in the Gats and the Book of Kings or something? Like, there's obviously knowledge that we need and can access outside of the wisdom traditions. And so then if that's true, and if you don't just want to scrap all of this stuff, you have to ask yourself what to do with it. And it's actually the exact same question that we're dealing with on this podcast that Christians ask when confronted with things like cosmology, Big Bang Theory, with evolution, with the age of the universe, right?

If science is a valid way of knowing things, as it so manifestly is and as it becomes ridiculous to claim otherwise, what are we going to do with it? How are we going to incorporate it? And Aquinas' answer, which is effectively my answer, vis-a-vis secular knowledge, is to baptize it. That is to show how the truths which pagan philosophy had legitimately and demonstrably discovered within its sphere could be made not only to conform to, but shall we even say illuminate the truths that the church knows via its wisdom. traditions. So a classic example of this, I think, would be hyalomorphism, right? This Aristotelian idea that the soul and the body are not these two separate entities, but are these kind of intertwined. Two layers or two ways of looking at the same object. You call it any number of other things. In my last book, How to Save the West, I talked about this idea and I said, like, you couldn't read Genesis and get

hylomorphism. But if you take hylomorphism and you read Genesis, here's this sentence, right? God breathed into the dust, the breath of life, and it became a living soul. In other words, the living soul is neither this disembodied thing nor this lump of clay, but whatever it is that results from the kind of inextricable fusion of the two. So the soul's not a ghost in the machine. The soul is like woven through the dust, right? That's hyalomorphism. And so this is something that the church has been doing kind of throughout its history. And I think that it is akin to what I do actually in this book is just to say, like, look, we would be making fools of ourselves to claim much as many have tried that, like, there's no validity to the scientific method, even if the scientific method

has been abused, right? Even if it has been wielded as a cudgel against the church, even if all those things are true, like we shoot ourselves in the foot if we react by saying, like, and therefore, you know, science has nothing to say about truth at all. All truth is only biblical truth and everything else. Instead, we baptize. We go around saying, based on the best of what the scientists tell us, how can we infuse our understanding of scripture with our understanding of the natural world? And that's not a form of sort of philosophical retconning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, I would. We see this in string theory.

Yeah. If we discover something that doesn't, you know, fit within the context of string theory, I'm told that we'll just call that new thing string theory. So is that, you know, essentially the retrospective, you know, retrospection of details to past history? It definitely could be. There's no question that that is a danger in this mode of thought. And if you end up with an interpretation of scripture that looks nothing like one that

anyone has ever advanced. And you can't really pretend, right, that you always thought there was a big bang, right? But here's one of the things that really interested me as I embarked on this book project, like way back when I was kind of thinking about where I wanted to go with and what I wanted to argue, was that it would be possible to end up with a reading of Genesis that harmonizes with modern science, but would have been totally alien to St. Augustine or to Tertalian or to the church fathers. And I sort of worried that that's what would happen. Because in order to make this act of reconciliation, you do kind of have to give up on literalism of the kind of says the days of creation are seven, 24 hour days.

And that literalism has been really closely associated, I think, with orthodoxy. that because it requires so much faith to believe, biblical literalism must be the ancient faith of the church. And it's been what the church always believed. But one of the things I argue in the book is that's actually a position that emerged after the scientific revolution in reaction to it. And the attempt to inform our understanding of scripture with science and vice versa leads us to something that we can find mirrored really beautifully, for example, in Augustine's books on Genesis. I mean, the stuff I'm talking about about consciousness being an answer to God's creative act is almost exactly how Augustine, before any of this, understands the creation account in Genesis. So I'm in no way

claiming that Augustine, like, always knew about quantum physics, but I am suggesting that the interpretation of the Bible we get out of quantum physics is actually prefigured. in a lot of the church's tradition. And it's only by sort of veering away from that in defense of scripture against science that we ended up with this idea that like the only faithful version of the Bible is the one that kind of interprets it in this literal materialistic way. Like that's kind of a very modernist scientific revolution idea. Like so I guess what I'm saying is like it could be retconning, but it might also be

recovery. And one of the most exciting parts of writing this book for me was to, discover that actually, like, if you follow, if you quote unquote follow the science, you end up understanding what Augustine was talking about way more than if you just kind of took whatever you get from 20th century Christianity. One of the more endearing parts of the book are the frequent invocation of neologisms, another word that sounds dirty, but it's not like frost on the pumpkin and gist and all sorts of things. But one of these wonderful terms is, um, a good. ghosts in exile. I found that so beautiful, so evocative. Explain that phrase and what it represents

the transcendent notions of human experience that go beyond the material. It's actually one of the first parts that I wrote. And yeah, I think like, just as a side note, unrelated to kind of the meat of our discussion, as a writer, I just think like you should make things as beautiful as possible and as poetic as possible, and that one of the things that... As I said, it's a truly unique book and the highest incommium as I wish I wrote it. But keep going. No, that brings me great joy. And I just say that because, like, you know, we have this idea that in order to be true,

something has to be dry. And I actually think that in the domain that I'm talking about, which, you know, I think your work has to be dry, Brian, probably. Like, you know, because if you're using rhetoric to persuade people, of scientific arguments, you would be using the wrong tool for the wrong task, and that would be disingenuous. But that doesn't mean that rhetoric or language corresponds to nothing. In fact, it might be that there's a proper domain for understanding things, both with rigorous philosophical argument and with a certain form of poetry, that helps us to see what's really going on. And what I think

really happened in the kind of end of the medieval era and leading into the modern period. And I spent some time actually on the discovery of momentum because one standard account of the history of science is that that discovery chased the angels out of the cosmos. Because before that, you thought like you needed somebody to push the planets along, right? The spheres had to be maintained, supervised. Yeah, they needed, right, some sort of escort. crystals aren't going to move themselves, Spencer. Yeah, exactly.

And so that's one of those things that, like, Aristotle was wrong about. He didn't think it was angels, but, like, you know, Aristotle had this idea of the inward motive force. And that became associated with a kind of spirit in things. It's a spirit in the rock that wants to fall down, right? And so we had this picture of the world as teeming with life, most beautifully, I think, expressed in Dante's Divine Comedy, that you end that poem with the love that moves the sun and other stars. And Beatrice says to Dante in a very kind of Aristotelian moment, like the love that

binds you to God, that binds man to wife, all of that is also the love that sends fire spiraling upward or sends rain down toward the earth, right? That there are these kind of like motive forces within things. And once it became possible to account for this instead by way of reference to kind of mathematical postulates, to abstract relations, and without kind of entities inside of rocks that make them move, it became kind of easy to look at the world as if it had been, had all of those spirits driven, driven out of it. But I call them ghosts in exile because the suggestion in the book is we didn't actually drive immaterial entities out of the world with that, with those discoveries. And the best philosophers realize that,

Leibniz took Newton up on this point. Like, what is gravity? Kepler calls it the animo-motrix, the moving soul of things. And these immaterial aspects or dimensions of our description of material reality persist. They have to because we have to use reference to immaterial concepts. And we are, in fact, partially immaterial, partially supernatural in our consciousness, if I can put it that way. We have to use those ideas and those kinds of. entities in order to make sense of the world, what we've really done is sort of fail to recognize them as immaterial, which is what makes them, I think, ghosts in exile. And this is something

that speaks to one last thing I'll just mention, you know, about this history of science, which is there are no villains of this story, right? Like, it's easy to tell the tale as if, like, oh, it all started to go wrong when Laplace or when Galileo or when whoever came along and mucked things up, right? And the truth of the matter is that at every step of the way, these things looked reasonable to people. It seemed as if, genuinely, they were going by their best lights. And it seemed like the angels had vanished from the heavens. And what I'm arguing essentially is, like, that may have just been a temporary sort of appearance of things. Like, That might be how things looked for a while, but the longer arc of history is starting to suggest that that was kind of the aberration, whereas faith, the spirit, the soul, those things might have more saying power than we give them credit for.

So we'll take a little break here to take audience questions in the segment I like to call questioning authorities. person or persons by the name of Ev Calvin Mimian and expertologists asks a very, very potentially offensive question. Were you or were you not, Spencer, at the Scottish Games in Fresno, California on September 21st? I almost approached, but the kilt threw me off through a spelled T-H-R-O-U-G-H. This sounds like I'm being framed for a murder. Like, do I need an alibi? No, that was not me. As Tolkien, I think, said of somebody who thought he was Jewish, I regret to say that I have no association with those noble people.

I'm not Scottish. I'm Irish. Then another commenter, also on X, where you can follow Spencer at Spencer Claven, just his homemade, a nice moniker. Alligator Snapper, which I was going to choose for my second child's name. They write, Handsome Feller, like a Roman Caesar, chiseled out of the finest marble, already pre-ordered the book, October 15th, mark it on your calendars. Buy it right now. Would you like to deny or present your rebuttal to Alligator Snapper or just leave it unaddressed? It would be indecorous of me to comment, I think, one way or another on her larger, his or her larger comments.

Except buy the book in all three forms. And I'll sell you the Snoop, the Snoop Dog version. version. Are you familiar with the concept of something called cosmic insignificance therapy? Have you heard that term before? I have. And I think I know what it is, but could you tell me the price? Yeah. So I believe it was popularized by Oliver Berkman, who would a very just runaway smash hit called 4,000 weeks. And that's about your life and you only get 4,000 weeks and make the most of them. And he's sort of a stoic. But also he brings up this topic that, look, you are, you know, not even the logarithm of the size of Jupiter. You know, there are gas clouds that aren't even named in the Milky Way that are bigger than you, older than you.

And it sort of takes this stock that you should actually take comfort. I've heard people, atheist from, you know, Sam Harris to Scott Galloway talking about how their atheism gives them comfort. And effectively, I think this is almost an outgrowth of that, that we have to reconcile with the vastness of the universe and actually leaning into that and saying, well, we're just these little nothings will be gone and no one will remember your name in three generations. That brings solace to some people. I find that deeply misleading and really sort of terrifying that people believe such a thing. Because, you know, I mean, by those standards, we're, you know, almost infinitely bigger than a quark. So does that give us this great significance? So how do you reconcile with this notion of kind of an animating notion that the material is all there is.

And you can kind of rank order things based on their size, age, and sort of mass. Although, you know, you might react positively to body mass. I don't. But tell me, Spencer, how do you react to this notion that, you know, our insignificance makes us significant? Thomas Aquinas, himself at Jimbrough, he has this answer to multiverse theory, actually, which obviously had not been put forward. And it's in, you know, he wasn't dealing with like Hugh Everett in many worlds. He wasn't dealing with string inflationary cosmology, all that noise.

But he was dealing with some pretty tight ancient analogs, actually, in the person of Democritus and Lecippus and Epicurus. You know, there's, there's a fair amount of kind of many world speculation in the ancient world. And he does his typical Aquinas thing where he sort of considers the possibilities, then refutes multiverse theory. And then says in a classically understated dig, he goes, those only have been able to propose multiverse theory like Democritus and Lecippus and those who are obsessed with mere size. And that's what I think when I hear this stuff. I mean, first of all, I don't understand how it's supposed to be comforting that, like, all of my dreams and aspirations are a pointless split. I guess it means that I don't have to worry about things that might be going wrong.

But it also means that I don't have any justification for being happy about things that are going right. So on that score, it seems like kind of a wash or a void. And I think there's something in us that really rages against the idea of a void at the end of the day. So I find the premise kind of silly, but I also find this idea that like more means more, right? That bigger is the only kind of mourness there can be. Like what a crude and animalistic idea about the world. Like would would this person putting force this theory be comfortable maintaining that association between size and consequence if faced with a newborn infant and asked to throw it off a. cliff. I mean, it's smaller than you, right? What if it gets in your way? Right? We, this is like

preposterous to imagine that the size of a thing somehow dictates its significance. And this has been used, I think, really tiresomely to like, I don't know, invite people into, like, to con con people, I think, out of their sense that we matter, right? Well, you're so small. Like, oh, yeah, like, so as you say, so we're quarks. Compared to what? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Right, exactly. If I could make a record scratch like pivot, I want to bring up, maybe on screen we'll bring it up, your most popular tweet slash post. Are you ready for it? Oh, no. This is like when the woman at the well says to Jesus, he told me everything that I have done. Like, I'm really, I don't know what you're going to put up here. All right. Well, we'll get into it. Okay. Your most popular tweet is, I love Mike Pence so much that I'm ready to sign up for conversion therapy. I thought you were not gay, but your husband is. walk us through this tweet.

What is the meaning of this tweet? That's like we are, we must be at the 40 year anniversary of that tweet because that was the vice presidential debate. And as you witnessed last night, I like to live tweet debates of all kind. The traffic is great. The vibes are hot. I didn't watch it. I just, I just watch your feet.

A lot of people, many people are saying it's more fun that way. I said, look at me. I am the debate now. But yeah, I just like, you know, I have to make. it entertaining somehow and I try not to drink too heavily. So this is my only other option. Yes, I am in fact gay as my Twitter detractors love to remind me of. I get a lot of you are Jewish and you are gay, both of which news to me and my husband, as you say, was shocked. But once I sort of looked into the work of these fabulous online sleuth, I did discover that in fact, you know, I do have Jewish

heritage, and I am, I am in fact gay, but I'm also enough of a conservative to fanboy over Mike Pence, I guess. So one of your greatest fans that I tried to FaceTime with you while you were in Italy together, when we were together in Italy, he asked for advice about marriage, marriage advice, he's looking for a nice Jewish girl. And I thought actually we'd kind of pivot, you know, to how do you square those circles, the conservative, being gay, but also, you know, tapping into the cultural landscape. And really, I think a lot of these revolve around masculinity. I find you, you know, quite masculine.

And as the other listeners and posters were saying, you know, handsome Roman God. But the most intriguing thing about you is your voice. And I know that you train very modestly on your voice. And it does, you know, elicit a chad-like response. What does masculinity mean to you? And how can, you know, my young friend who's a big fan of yours, how can he pursue, you know, kind of the similar goals of conservatism? He's straight, but wanting to know, how do you, what advice do you have for young men? I have a lot of male listeners to my podcast.

First of all, the first rule of fight club is you never talk about fight club. So now that you've called me mastiline, I think you have to punch you on the arm or something. And shout, no homo, no homo. This is, I think, a vexed question. And I know, you know, as I indicated, like, people get mad at me about this from every possible side. But, like, who cares? I'm right and they're wrong. You have to understand, I think, a little bit, first of all, about the story of my life and story of my jury to faith.

And then also what that means about how I read the Bible. And that this is not, I'm not speaking now as a priest. I'm not speaking as an authority on anything, really. I'm just telling you kind of like where I am at and how I got to this place. So there will be people who just cannot go with me on this. And I love and respect many of them. I mean, I joke about my haters, but I also have a ton of really wonderful supporters that have a traditional view of sexuality. And that doesn't include accepting gay marriage.

And I have nothing but respect for that point of view. It's not my point of view. And that's because, you know, I knew I was gay actually before I knew I was a Christian. And as you say, I'm not exactly like your stereotypical gay guy. And so it wasn't obvious to me. And it wasn't something that I was like trained into. Nobody molested me. Like none of these like Freudian theories you might have.

I have very happy, normal. And whenever I was sorry to interrupt, I ever tell somebody, you know, I was an altar boy. The look of horror on their face. It's like, you know, Michael Jackson wasn't in my troop with me. man we had. P. Diddy. Piedity was not, you know, the, the, the head Monsignor at the church. I was, I mean, anyway, go on. So. You weren't at the freakoff and the, like, Chiquire is that what's called a freakoff? Yeah, the Johnson's baby oil sponsorship after speech you call. I need to shower after this pocket. I guess I bring all this up just to say, like, you know, people tell all sorts of weird shadow plays about the people they, they know, they know online.

And sometimes people assume that, you know, I kind of got groomed or, I. I got like whatever. Like that's that's just not what happened. As soon as I had not only sexual feelings, but romantic feelings. As soon as I was capable of falling in love, it was just with men. And that I think is important to stipulate at the outset because if you don't, if you talk about this stuff as if it were just about sex, which both the right and the left to do all the time, you're not really facing up to the reality of the situation, which is, which is about a romantic orientation, right? And sex comes along with that as I hope and as expression of love. And I came to faith kind of from a relatively secular background. My dad was not yet Christian when I was born.

My mom was sort of from a laps Catholic background. It was really as much of fact of life as that I was gay was that I had always sort of believed in God. I've always had this sense. I'm told that when I was a kid, I walked outside and thanked the sun for shining on me. and eventually it just became clear that that presence I was in contact with was going to be the first and last thing of my life. And then I did have to bring this romantic part of my life to bear upon Christian scripture. And especially on the parts, I think, where Paul sort of says, like, you know, the words in Greek are arsenicotaita and Malacoy, the soft. and the man betters or however you want to put it. There's some dispute over translation, but, you know, a lot of people think he's saying they're like,

nobody that does gay sex is going to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Right. And Leviticus, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's less. I mean, there's less of a problem for Christians, I think, because we don't keep kosher either. You know, there's there. That's right.

But there is an argument, a Christian argument that there's like a current of natural law that sort of like forbids this all together. for me, and if this hasn't already become clear from our conversations about science, the Bible is a route to Jesus. And it's a route for connecting you, your personal history to Jesus. Jesus is, I believe, the person that I didn't know I was thanking behind the sun. Like, I think that that is God, right? And so some people would say, like, whatever your church tells you is the end of this. that, I say you are accountable to a relationship with this text. You're accountable to trying to figure out what Paul is talking about, and you're trying to figure out how that gets you closer to Jesus,

not how that gets you closer to Paul. And when Paul goes on to describe what he's talking about, he's talking, I think, very clearly as a classicist about the temple debauchery that was rampant in the ancient world. Again, as a classist I know about this, like, you know, the sleeping with little boys, temple prostitutes, all this stuff. And he goes on and on into these like totally extravagant sins of the flesh. And I've seen those sins of the flesh in real life. I think we see them like on the streets all the time now in our degraded time. Unfortunately, the left has sort of associated that kind of extravagance with homosexuality of all kinds. But it just own it all.

Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamaba's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th.

Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. This doesn't describe the experience that I was having.

in the life that I wanted to live, which was one shaped in part by the scripture, toward the expression of love and the expression of joy in all things. And ultimately, my diagnostic is the fruits of the spirit, right? If it produces patience, charity, long suffering, et cetera, you know, then I think I'm on to something. That is my route into kind of squaring this circle, as you put it, is, you know, what is Paul talking to the Corinthians and the, his other audience is about. And how is that route, you know, how can I direct myself on that path, which is toward God? And it was my conclusion that that is, that, that the specific situation Paul is talking about is not really the burden of his, his point. He's talking about giving yourself

over to mere animal lust. And that that's not actually what's going on in, in some homosexual relationships. I say all of that is a very long-winded way of saying, like, masculinity, virtue, womanhood, all of these good, noble things to a tree spy. These are archetypes. They are ideals. And we are all formed of crooked timber trying as best we can to orient our lives toward these ideals. Nobody is the perfect manly man. Even Hulk Hogan is not the perfect manly man. Like, you think he is from the outside, but on the inside, we are all bent and twisted in some way. We're all a little offbeat. Creation is much more hilarious and varied than I think our theories make it out to be. And you have to be in negotiation. You have to be in relationship

with wisdom tradition, with your ideals, and with the actual situation on the ground as you find it. And I don't know like what this guy that, you know, FaceTimed is dealing with precisely. But I do think because Jesus that in the mess of that and in the imperfections of it, there's a step you can take that takes you one step closer to the God of love and creation. And I'm just trying to take that next step. And I think that involves ideals like masculinity, but it also involves a little bit of grace for the fact that none of us is ever going to live perfectly up to them. Hey there, I hope you're enjoying this incredible conversation with Spencer as much as I am. And speaking of incredible conversations, I want to share a way for you to go even deeper into

the impossible, and that's to join my Monday Magic mailing list, where I write about all my conversations, including this one with Spencer. I want to share with you the wisdom that I've learned from 21 Nobel laureates, several billionaires, Pulitzer Prize winners, astronauts, award-winning authors in the field of space, science, technology, engineering, math, and even as you see today, spirituality. So head on over to briankeating.com slash list and sign up now. And if you have a dot edu email address and you live in the United States, I'll send you a genuine meteorite just like this one.

And for those of you with it, those dot edu email addresses, go to briankeating.com slash edu and sign up now. One thing that's often conflated, although I think it's ludicurously so, is transgenderism and homosexuality. at the risk of touching the third rail of, you know, conservative, you know, politics and podcasting. I wanted to sort of get your take on this argument that, hey, my job owes not a small debt of gratitude, but a big one, to astrologers. And actually, astrologers weren't onto something. I mean, the position, you know, objects do affect, you know, Earth in some way or another. The moon affects

the Earth's tides. The tides are partially responsible for the influx and e-flux of, of, you know, material that, you know, led to early life, primitive life on Earth. The moon shielded the earth from impacts. The moon is essentially, you know, this constant companion. The sun influences the Earth, the tides. Obviously, we couldn't exist without it. And so they were right. And, you know, and not completely, I mean, a lot of things they didn't talk about. They didn't talk about the cosmic microwave background, right? And what they did at the time was provide invaluable service to later astronomers, including some, you know, trans, you know, astronomers, you know, astronomers, astrologers like Kepler. I mean, without Kepler, after whom a satellite is named after all that's

discovered 3,000 Earth-like exoplanets. And then concomitantly, the work of alchemists that failed in their quest to transmute base elements into gold, but still provide a lot of the early data and very substantial corpus of knowledge about, you know, chemistry, actual honest-to-goodness chemistry. So I ask you, Spencer, those two provisos, knowing that they influence great you know, perhaps this day, the fields that would later become sciences, why not, you know, have a broader tent and expect that perhaps transgenderism and maybe even transhumanism might provide similar benefits to humanity. So can you, can you respond to that? Well, I'll take your point that transgenderism is akin to voodoo, astrology, and

horoscope casting. I mean, you know, it's funny in the book I talk a little bit about, this too, that like, yeah, there are truths that emerged out of the winnowing down of kind of a larger body of mystical speculation. And that should tell us something about mystical speculation that it's not all hokom and in fact some of its assumptions are really still active, even if we don't totally recognize them in their transmuted form. That, I think, is we can say that because astrology and alchemy and these various projects produced results. They produced things. They didn't reliably produce results the way that true science has been able to.

But science itself is the best argument for giving some time to those older traditions. The Christian way of talking about this would be you will know a tree by its fruits. you know, if you want to, you know, I would invite people, you know, they want to know whether homosexuality is always corrosive and evil, like to sort of examine like my life and see if you think this is a tree that is bearing evil fruit. I would also invite you to look at transgenderism and what it does to people and examine the fruits of this movement. And I say this with all of the compassion in my heart for people who feel discomfort in their bodies, feel discomfort associated with their gender, their sex, I should say. I have nothing, nothing but compassion for that.

And I understand what it feels like to be kind of trapped in that problem. I think we all, to some extent, like, feel that sort of discomfort. But to me, the only philosophical question that matters at the end of the day is, how's that working out for you? And you come to a girl that's struggling with her, struggling through puberty and you tell her that she needs to like slice off a trunk of her arm and suture it onto her nether regions. And you look at the data that's come out about how people feel after these surgeries. And you just think there's something deeply, deeply wrong here, I think. And I've never seen even a case that doesn't make me feel that way. And I think you can see that in the philosophy of trans maximalism. And I think you can see

that as manifestly distinct from the philosophy of kind of gay rights or whatever you want to call it. Now, there are people who will say, how can you say that you can't possibly, you can't get away with dissociating gay liberation from trans liberation because look at what gay liberation has become. Look at all the stripes they're putting on the flag. This is obviously a natural evolution. I say, I see how you might look at it that way. But, you know, if we're going to talk slippery slopes, then we have to just yoke everything that happens to being a consequence of everything that came before it. And I don't actually think that's the way the world works. I think sometimes movements get hijacked. And in this case, you have a situation like the one that I was in where actually sex is so real, male and female is so real, that at great personal cost and no sort of. small sort of embarrassment, I had to say, you know, I can't in good conscience marry a woman because women are different from men. And you compare that with what is effectively the opposite idea that women and men are confected imagined categories that can be migrated across from

kind of at will. And you think, what does that do to people in their sense of themselves? Like, nothing good that I can see. You know, I want to help. You know, do you tell me you're struggling with your sex, you know, that you were born a woman and that makes you feel uncomfortable. Like, yeah, like join the club, right? Like, tomb boys are a thing, you know, like I did musical theater in high school. Like, you know, not to diminish it or whatever. But like, I truly, I want to help. I just don't think this is helping. And I think that it's, it's bad fruits are a consequence of its bad philosophy and that those, that philosophy is like actually the exact opposite of what people were saying when they were saying, like, you know, stop putting gay people in prison,

basically. To kind of start to bring us into land, I want to come to a discussion, maybe melding what we just talked about, with another neo-logism, my favorite scrabble word today. And that's the metal mind. You talk about this very evocative phrase. And I wonder if you could kind of sort of compare that to the age, which you touch upon, but not as great detail, of the artificial intelligence age that, you know, Sam Altman is claiming we have now entered the age of intelligence, although I can certainly provide some counter examples to good old Sammy Boy. What are the philosophical implications of AI and consciousness? Is this really, you know, going to establish or come to fruition, this notion of this, you know,

automaton metal mind that was the goal of many not only scientists but science fiction writers? It's funny because it's a measure of how quickly this technology has taken off. Although it's a part of the book and although I thought about it while writing the book, it's since submitting the manuscript that it has really ballooned into prominence. And from a purely cynical standpoint, it's been very, very helpful for me that all the stuff I'm talking about in this book is like now right front and center of the news cycle. It's like, great, buy my book. But more seriously, you know, I talk about the metal mind, as you say, and I talk about the metal mind and the man machine, that these ideas kind of start to arise right when the idea of a purely mechanical atomistic universe starts to take hold. And there's a reason for that, which is whatever we think the world is made of, we're made of it too. And so if the world is a machine, we're machines. And this idea is in Thomas Hobbes. Descartes wrote about it in an unpublished, treatise, the treatise he didn't publish until after his death, you know, all these guys,

kind of at the dawn of modernity, speculated about the possibility that if you can build a machine that kind of has all the same moving parts as a person, then you can reproduce humanity. You can make, you can make man. You can do the Frankenstein thing. And there was kind of a coda to that, I think, at the dawn of the computing age with Alan Turing and his famous Turing test, where he says, if you can build a machine that walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. There's all we are is just a machine that produces outputs and the outputs are language, highly sophisticated thought, so on and so forth.

And so this idea now leads us to suspect or even perhaps fear that chat GPT is like one degree away, right, from that thing. And I take from this almost exactly the opposite conclusion, which is that whatever large language models are doing in that big black box where all the probability functions are whirring away and self-correcting, whatever's happening in there, it ain't what's happening in here. And I do think this requires us to step back and reevaluate exactly what it is that makes us unique. We've gotten very used to thinking of ourselves as the animals that can produce the most sophisticated calculations, the animals that can, you know, perform the most elaborate kind of operations of mathematics. And that has gotten very bound up with our idea of ourselves. And so now that these machines might be able to produce those results in much more sophisticated ways, maybe, I think the jury's still out, but maybe, we start to feel like, oh, no, these guys are going to. usurp us, just like Turing said. And, and my feeling is, no, actually, this is the perfect kind of proof of the opposite concept from Turing's, that even if a machine looks very much

like a human in what it does and in its outputs, its inputs are still radically different. And it's the inner life that actually really matters that makes it significant that a poem kind of moves me or whatever. Like, yeah, you could maybe, maybe trick me into thinking that a poem was written by human and was written by a machine. But if you then told me it was written by a machine, my relationship to that poem would change in a, in a material way, not in a materialist way, but in a consequential way, because I would no longer feel that I was on the other side of a two-way street from soul to soul. Is AI going to pose challenges? Yes. Is it going to pose opportunities? Yes. Does it make me lose sleep over like the nature of our humanity or our uniqueness in the

world, like kind of the opposite, actually. Spencer, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I want to give you the last word and the word is going to be good. And that is for you to indicate where you want to communicate with my audience. Tell them your new book, your podcast, and your website. Well, Brian, my friend, it has been a true delight. I mean, you'd probably know you'd like go around, you do podcasts and some are better than others. But sometimes you just forget you're on a podcast.

and you're just having like a really interesting conversation with a really smart friend. And I want to thank you for that. I would really, really love if your audience checked out my book. It is called Light of the Mind, Light of the World, illuminating science through faith, and you can get it wherever fine books are sold. I'm recording the audiobook now. I think and hope it'll be available on Audible by the time you hear this. But just to be sure, you should probably also get the hardcover and the Kindle version,

which definitely are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, what have you. That's the main thing. If you want to get in touch with me otherwise, I really, really welcome and love to chat to the people on the other end of this whole transaction. And the easiest way to do that is on Substack at Rejoiceevermore.substack.com. That's kind of my clearinghouse. I do weekly essays there. And there's a bunch of stuff, but you can also find all the rest of the things. For my sins, I tweet, as you indicated, that's at Spencer Claven. But if you really want to like DM me or send me an email, Rejoiceevermore.comstack. com and I have to end by saying one more time, light of the mind, light of the world,

wherever books are sold. Well, Spencer, I want to wish you and your family, a Gemar Hatimatova, Ashana Tova, and may your book be inscribed on the bestseller list. Oh, I'm moved and the feeling is mutual. Back to you, Brian. Thank you, Spencer. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items.

then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.