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- [00:00]
Moderator
Rebecca, what are some of the ways in which even the most secular people act out impulses that conventionally are expressed in religion?
- [00:10]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, that's actually one of the tactics I take in the novel. It's, I think, one of the most. It's the ways I try to generate humor. In fact, with these parallels, I'll mention I mentioned three very, very briefly. One is romantic love and the kind of deification of the loved objects that can almost feel like a religious conversion sometimes. And, you know, with all of the world reconfigured around this one creature who must love one back in return, or one is damned, one is doomed, you know, and redemption, saving rests entirely in that way that person regards you back. Do they love you back? Has something of the religious about, can have something of the irrational about it, which is often when you fall out of love, you know, it's like it feels like you've been. What is it, you know, deprogrammed. What do they used to do with the Moonies? You would go deprogrammed. Right. It's like, you know, how could you have infused that creature with all of these supernatural qualities almost. So there's that. And to make the case for that, and I believe this to be true, actually, that to make the case for that, I give my main protagonist, Cass Seltzer, a tormented love life. He is a terrible judge of women whom he deifies, you know, who he just slathers with all sorts of supernatural characters, characteristics. And it's very sad. I make him suffer very much because of this. And there is a character, it's one of his former girlfriends who comes bursting into his life, while his present love object, Lucinda Mandelbaum, is at a conference on game theory. And she, this former girlfriend is an anthropologist who's been doing research on Amazonian hunter gatherers. And she has thinks she has discovered the secret to immortality. And she's retired from academia and she started a nonprofit called the Immortality Foundation. And she's going to achieve, if not immortality, a very long life. She says anything less than 500 years is barbaric. That, you know, through biochemistry, through popping lots of vitamins and antioxidants, and she's reprogramming her body so that, you know, to achieve immortality. And I do think that fear of death is one of the primary religious impulses. And last, briefly, is the kind of certain figures can become charismatic and they can seem to be channeling truth from on high. And you find these figures not just in religious contexts, but you find them in secular contexts, indeed. You can find them in the bastions of rationality, you can find them in universities, these kind of self declared, almost messianic figures who have their disciples, also known as graduate students, you know, who take everything that these figures, you know, I've watched this time and time again in academia and every time this figure changes his or her, sometimes they're women, usually men, changes his opinion about something. All of the graduate students, you know, change their opinion about something. And that is, that is something that I think again has something of the religious hanging around it. And I satirize it viciously in the.
- [04:21]
Audience Member 1
Novel.
- [04:24]
Moderator
Off Religion now and onto science, but through an odd avenue, perhaps, because I'd like to take advantage of having on the platform two world experts, one on Spinoza and the other on Darwin. And the lives of those two men didn't overlap. Spinoza died in 1677 and Darwin didn't have the foresight to be born until 1809. But they did overlap in their deep interest in science. And I'd like to know whether Spinoza in any way anticipated modern science and has Darwinian science turned out to look like that? I suspect that the answers could reveal some really interesting aspects of modern science and of the huge progress that scientific method has made since Spinoza's time. So first, Rebecca, what might Spinoza have thought of Darwin's science?
- [05:20]
Rebecca Goldstein
So Spinoza was very eager to eliminate all argument from design, what we call teleological. And he thinks this is very, very bad model for explanation, that the world was recreated or that any features of the world should be explained in terms of the goal that they meet. I mean, he thinks that this is delusional. And he also felt very strongly. And so in that sense he would, like Darwin, right. He also believed, and this is the deepest intuition in Spinoza, that all facts ultimately have an explanation, that there's no, what we call brute contingency, that a fact is a fact because it happens to be a fact. And so even the laws of nature must ultimately have an explanation. There must be a. It's not a matter of just tracing things back to the fundamental laws of nature, but that these laws of nature themselves can't be brute contingencies, that they must have an explanation. So this is a very. It's what his slightly younger contemporary Leibniz called the principle of sufficient reason. He really stole it and did not give proper attribution from Spinoza. This is the deep axiom in Spinoza's very weird book, the Ethics, that all facts have explanation. And this is what leads him to say that ultimately everything must be necessarily true, that the laws of nature must be necessarily true, if we had the final theory of everything, which is basically what he means by God, the final theory of everything. This is why I've had recently some string theorists tell me that when they read my book, they realized that they were Spinozas because they believe there is a final theory of everything which will explain everything, including why that final theory has to be that final theory. But he believed that ultimately the model for explanation, since he's spurning teleology, must come from mathematics, because mathematics in a mathematical proof, you're showing that everything is necessary and that ultimately that is the only kind of explanation that would satisfy this axiom of the principle of sufficient reason, that everything has an explanation. So there are two intuitions warring there. Within Spinoza, the deeper intuition is that good explanations. And that leads me to say, you know, he had no way of ever foreseeing a Darwinian explanation which offers beautiful explanations, but they're not mathematical explanations. It's a different model of explanation. So I would like to think that he would welcome Darwinian explanation. It depends which of those intuitions of his goes the deeper. I think it was his sense of what a good explanation is. And his only model for that was mathematics. Darwin offered a different model, and I think that Spinoza would be intellect enough to appreciate that, but who knows?
- [08:58]
Moderator
Would you like to talk about that?
- [08:59]
Steve
Yeah. There certainly is a tension in, I guess, the aesthetics of explanation between a Spinozist approach that there are some equations you crank them through and you deduce why the world is the only way it could be, and the massive contingency of historical explanations in sciences like evolutionary biology and maybe to some extent cosmology, where accidents, perhaps ultimately due to quantum fluctuations, or at least things so small you can't measure them and predict them, could have massive consequences. And the Darwinian style of explanation has contingency at two levels. One, the source of variation, namely mutations, where it just depends on which cosmic ray hit which DNA base in a particular organism. And evolution could have gone this way or that way in a particular lineage. And also at a more macroscopic level, the particular ecological circumstances that define the adaptive landscape that organisms traverse. As Stephen Jay Gould put it in really, the essence of evolutionary biology is that if you could rewind the tape of history and play the history of life again, the organisms that evolved presumably would be different. So unlike what, if I understand it, the Spinoza stream would be that you work through some equations and you can Deduce that there are, you know, warthogs and broccoli and slime molds and, you know, that seems very unlikely.
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Rebecca Goldstein
It seems absurd. Yes.
- [10:40]
Steve
And I think that.
- [10:41]
Rebecca Goldstein
That.
- [10:41]
Steve
Although I tend to agree that the fact that even with this admission of contingency, there is a great deal of elegance in Darwinian theory with the modern synthesis, that perhaps he, if he were born today, another kind of rewinding the tape of history, he might be pretty happy with it.
- [11:02]
Rebecca Goldstein
Well, of course, I mean, he would have to be. He understood a good explanation when he saw it.
- [11:06]
Steve
You know, interestingly, I think that there are still people who have a visceral dislike of the theory of natural selection, and I think from at least Spinoza's emotions, if not from Spinozist arguments. So my former colleagues at mit, Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, just can't stomach the theory. And Fodor has recently written a book arguing preposterously that there's an elementary philosophical flaw that the entire discipline of biology has overruled, which he is going to now educate them about. This position has been savaged both by evolutionary biologists and by Fodor's fellow philosophers. And you wonder why a smart person like Fodor could put forward such a preposterous argument. And I think it is ultimately the aesthetic of what an explanation looks like for. For a certain mindset. It has to be deduced from first principles. And the way it is is the only way that it could be. And I think one of the revolutions of Darwin was to say you can have an elegant explanation that doesn't look like that, that has lots and lots of contingency, but nonetheless deep explanations.
- [12:25]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the interesting things, and when I take it up as a novelist that's always very interesting to work out, is that those of us who think for a. Who care about ideas, we have a kind of personality almost the way liberals and conservatives do, so that different intuitions about far flung subject matters are somehow linked up because your basic orientation is a certain way. And I think this does define certain philosophers. I mean, do they need their taste in explanation of what counts as a good explanation? Can they tolerate a certain degree of just contingency? It just happened this way. And so.
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Moderator
Yeah, but they tolerate an awful lot of bad argument in putting that through.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Putting that through, yes. Yeah. And I think because it goes so very deep down, it's a deep intuition and. And it has to be worked out, and it makes them very dissatisfied with certain kinds of Explanation.
- [13:36]
Moderator
Well, on bad arguments. Just a brief question before we open it to the audience to ask questions. A question about British and American culture in your book. The famous professor in the book whom you deftly named Clapper, is a purveyor of utter claptrap on an industrial scale and in the usa. He's widely lauded and adored, though admittedly not universally so. Some people see through him. But apparently the British are not at all taken in by this Clapper trap. So is this just a plot device or does it reflect a difference that you've actually observed between American, British culture?
- [14:15]
Rebecca Goldstein
That was before I spent all this time across it. That was before I spent all this time in Britain. Discussion. They're just as irrational as we are. No, no, no. Yes. He is the extreme distinguished, extreme distinguished professor of faith, literature and values. They had a university, had to make it new department just for him, and he's the sole member of the department, which is a good thing because of course, he can't tolerate his colleagues.
- [14:43]
Audience Member 2
So.
- [14:45]
Rebecca Goldstein
And he is, you know, he's just a mountain of, as you say, claptrap and of pomposity and self mythologizing grandiosity and he's revered the world over, but as he always repeats because it's such a thorn in his side, except in Britain. And the reason I. Well, I wanted there to be some place, and I do have maybe inflated respect for Britain. I think you'd say something about that. Yes. You know, I mean, it's just I love their literature, I love their philosophers and so. But the other thing about Clapper is that although he was born on the Lower east side of New York, he has somehow acquired a British accent, as you often find in the US And I mean, maybe he spent a summer here. It was enough he got the accent and I somehow felt, you know, that the Brits would be sensitive to that and realize it wasn't the real thing and therefore read his work with a little more skepticism. So I was paying a national compliment.
- [16:05]
Moderator
I was hoping that we.
- [16:06]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yes.
- [16:08]
Moderator
Well, thank you to both of you for that. And I'd now like to open up the questions to the floor. Do put up your hand if you'd like to ask a question. There are just a few ground rules. Wait until the roving mic gets to you before you start speaking. And please state your name and unless you prefer not to do so where you're from. And please, please be brief. So, questions.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Right.
- [16:34]
Moderator
Okay. I'm going to start right up there.
- [16:36]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yes.
- [16:37]
Moderator
With you.
- [16:37]
Audience Member 1
Yes.
- [16:42]
Dean Peters
Hello, can everyone hear me?
- [16:43]
Rob
Yeah.
- [16:44]
Moderator
Start with your name.
- [16:45]
Dean Peters
Yeah, I'm Dean Peters from the LSE Philosophy department. So one thing that kind of came up peripherally was people's emotional need for religion. And the one that came up a little bit, which I'm kind of most interested in, is especially the need for community. And so I've been kind of observed anecdotally that often people will almost in a sense, shop around for churches. And it seems like what they're looking for is they're not looking for a particular theological perspective. What they're looking for is the right sort of community. Now, what worries.
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Moderator
Brief, brief, please.
- [17:19]
Dean Peters
So what worries me about that is, is that something that currently only religious institutions can provide is that particularly there's a community, it's regular, it meets regularly, the entire community meets. And it's a very emotional experience. And it seems like especially the harder your life is, the more you need that sort of experience. And is that something that only religion can currently provide and should we be looking for alternatives?
- [17:45]
Moderator
Thank you.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Thank you. And religions do provide that. It's a very, very important service that they provide. I think other places can provide it. I've always felt, you know, being actually a part of an academic community is a good thing. I don't feel the need for a religious community. And maybe that's why we spawn so many non believers. It's not just that we're smarter, but that we have community of people who, you know, we kind of get. We speak the same language, shared values. I don't mind if my daughters date the sons of fellow professors for the most part. But it's, you know, it's a community. And I do think that those, you know, those who wish that secularism spread, that it's incumbent on them to provide alternative communities. Communities also for good works. I was very, very happy. Steve and I are both on the board of Sam Harris's Project Reason. And during the Haiti catastrophe, we were able to contribute through that, through this secular organization. And I think that that sort of thing, soup kitchens, visiting hospitals, visiting people who are in grief and are mourning, all of those needs, you know, ought to be, have to be met if people are not going to be seeking it in religion. Frankly, it doesn't bother me so much that people do seek it in religion. As long as it's moderate religion, religion that's able to entertain self doubt.
- [19:36]
Moderator
Next question over here and up there for the next one. Okay, you're the next one after that.
- [19:45]
Rob
Hi, my name is Rob. I'm a PhD student at Birkbeck I noticed looking around the world, many religions, but not all, have a Redeemer God. And the life histories of these Redeemer gods are remarkably similar. They tend to be born of virgins. They tend to come back to redeem our sins. Even often they have similar words about them, that they're the son, the light bringer. Do you think this reflects an underlying psychological need? And if so, what?
- [20:10]
Rebecca Goldstein
We want to be redeemed. So even, you know, the popularity of the virgin figure, you know, this is. Recurs over and over again, you know, and I think controlling our. That emotion of disgust that I spoke about before, that seems to be very prevalent in religions and feeling some shame at our own bodily needs, including sexuality. And it's not an accident that women are very controlled in religion. And the more fundamentalist it is, the more controlled the women are. They're often covered in my own. I grew up in a very religious household, I ought to say. And in my family, the women, their hair is all covered. They're very, very covered. I think that is something that you find recurring, but also wanting to be a good person and knowing that we fail and wanting to fail, feel that there is some way that we're forgiven, that we can redeem ourselves. I mean, this is a good thing. I mean, our moral sense is a very good thing. And I think guilt is a very good thing. That's one of, I think, a good emotion that can have completely secular counterparts. But our dis ease with that guilt, our dis ease with our constantly failing to live up to our own ideals, can be eased in these stories and is eased in these stories. I mean, God dying for our sins is one of the sweetest stories that we can tell ourselves.
- [22:08]
Steve
I think that a lot of these archetypes which you do find in a number of religions, although probably no single one is found in all religions. I suspect that there's a large pool of human thought patterns and yearnings and that particular religions draw subsets from them, often overlapping subsets. So indeed, the sacrificed and reborn son of the divine recurs, although it wouldn't be found in 100% of religions either.
- [22:37]
Rebecca Goldstein
But what you do find always is a kind of blending a mythological narrative which does justice to our sense of mystery in the world. I mean, there are always very mysterious narratives that combine cosmology and morality. I think that's almost universal in all of these religions.
- [23:00]
Moderator
There was somebody up there next. And just put your hands up over here so I can see.
- [23:04]
Rebecca Goldstein
Okay.
- [23:07]
Moderator
After that, you.
- [23:09]
Rebecca Goldstein
After that?
- [23:10]
Sal Corral
Yes, I am Sal Corral. I'm a visiting artist from the United States. My question deals with the parallel or polar concepts between Newtonian type science, the idea that there is a fundamental origin of understanding, a sufficient reason concept as explained and the more modern concept of the chaos theory. And within those two things I see sort of a parallel within with order and chaos which is a primary concept in a lot of religions. A lot of religions their origin begins with order coming from chaos. And my question is what really separates the concept of chaos theory from the supernatural?
- [24:17]
Rebecca Goldstein
Actually yeah, Chaos theory is actually a very deterministic theory. I think the word is somewhat misleading. It really means that very small, small initial conditions can permeate and have great effects throughout the system. So in fact chaos theory is not at all in opposition to strict deterministic laws of nature determined physics.
- [24:54]
Moderator
And somebody over here.
- [24:56]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yes.
- [24:58]
Audience Member 1
We all seem to be dancing around this topic of the God shaped hole to use rushed term. And I was thinking, you know this atheism is a bit of a dirty term. I think one of the reasons is that you haven't put anything back in this hole. So I'm a 50 year old woman. I meet you know, relatives and friends from school who are 50 year old and it's all crystal and new age novels. It's so embarrassing. I don't have a problem being an atheist but I do spend a lot of time writing in my, you know, Jean Alan Thim, my personal diary and I'm beginning to buy it, you know, nice leather covered books. I'm getting quite worried. This is probably my replacement for God and one of the criticisms or let me put it as a question to you as a philosopher. What can you provide to replace this big hole that you've dug? Is this.
- [25:59]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yes. Well I think you're buying books.
- [26:01]
Audience Member 1
I wouldn't be surprised if you could not.
- [26:06]
Rebecca Goldstein
You know I suppose again this is one of those very. Individualist answers, very individual answers. That it all that it's very. See I don't feel whole at all. Well all those things that is what there is is. I mean I can only answer it very personally and I suppose all of it really depends on your personal psychology. But for me what there is is trying to figure out what this world is like. I mean it's a tantalizingly complicated intricate world. Can I. There are personal relationships just make it very specific.
- [26:55]
Audience Member 1
I think the things that these people are looking for are love and understanding. So somebody who listens to them once their husband doesn't understand anymore and a sense of purpose. You know there Must be some reason, it must fit together somehow.
- [27:10]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yes, I think that's true and that's one of my arguments. The arguments from, you know, a personal purpose. And I think that that's one of the arguments that I think is fallacious. I think it's number 17. But I think it is a strong need that we have. I think part of it comes from, and probably again from evolution. It all does come from evolutionary psychology. But we all matter so very much to ourselves. I mean, for each of us, the world revolves around us and everybody else is. We're always playing the central role and everybody else is playing a bit part. And I think that there is the tendency to try to construct a view of the world that will do justice to that. I think that's another one of the needs that is met in religion, that we are as cosmically important as we feel ourselves to be. And we're just not. We're just not. And nothing that we can say no other. I mean, these mythologies can do this for us. And I think that's one of the deepest powers of them, that it can do justice to our own sense of self importance. But it's a lie, I think, and nothing's going to quite take that place. But I think that that's what it is to grow up and to just accept that fact. We are not the center of the universe. We are. Was that an. Applause well, why don't we end with that?
- [28:48]
Moderator
Just one very quick last question. Be very brief, please.
- [28:51]
Audience Member 2
Thank you. My name is Ady. I'm going to do it very briefly. I was surprised by one of your initial remarks about religion needing to be eradicated. The argument. I was surprised because part of the argument of those that think that religion is wrong is that it poses an ultimate truth that others should believe. And wouldn't this argument or wouldn't what you just said be using the same. Couldn't this argument be applied to the criticism to eradicate in religion in terms of if people need to. If we need to eradicate religion, isn't that the same posture of saying there is a God? Isn't the same argument used reversely needing to eradicate all expressions of faith?
- [29:43]
Rebecca Goldstein
I don't actually. If I said that we need to eradicate religion and then I said something that I don't believe, I don't think that we. First of all, there can only be. Kant said there can only be an ought if it's possible, right? You can only have. And it's not possible. Religion serves too many needs and it's not to going, going to be eradicated. And I actually, and I suppose it comes out in the book, I have a great deal of sympathy for those who seek religious communities and for those who. It's very hard to be a human being. We need a lot of support and I have, I can understand trying to deal with our existential dilemmas in the, in the context of a religious community. So it's what has worried us in the US is the erosion of the wall between private religion and public policy. And I think that's one of the reasons that there's been this pushback by atheists. Decisions being made about stem cell research, about gay marriage that is going to affect all of us. And it's being, it's coming from religious point of view. So I mean that's the sort of thing I think, you know, absolutely, we can't compromise on, but all of us have to wrestle with these questions and these dilemmas for ourselves. And I, as individual as psychology is, that's how individual these solutions are going to be. So I do not, you may feel differently, but I am not in favor of the eradication of religion as if that were a possibility. Anyway.
- [31:34]
Steve
I agree and I think it's an important enough point that I'm going to say it in my own words, but really to reinforce what Rebecca said, I, as a thoroughgoing atheist, would not have a desire to, as you put it, eradicate religion. I think it's important to come to the best collective understanding that we can about the nature of the world and the nature of morality and justice. And that will often require overturning long held religious beliefs. But religions themselves, as social institutions have obviously evolved. Thank goodness. The way all of the major religions are practiced now is very different from the way they were practiced a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, 2000 years ago.
- [32:27]
Rebecca Goldstein
Thanks to the Enlightenment.
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Steve
Thanks to the Enlightenment, thanks to pressure from secular reason, there's no reason why that couldn't occur. And all of the things that are valuable about religion, that they are places for people to meet, their forums for ethical discussion can continue to exist. But as long as we, it doesn't entail that we indulge propositions about the world that our best reason indicates are incorrect or moral arguments that our best moral reasoning indicate are indefensible.
- [33:02]
Moderator
Well, sadly, it's time to draw this event to a close and I'd like to thank the audience for coming along and being so appreciative and so stimulating. You can get copies of both Rebecca's and Steve's books right outside this lecture theatre. And then if you would like them to sign the books, the stewards will show you how to come up here to the platform where they'll be sitting here to sign the book on the stage. They'll be happy to sign them. And finally, I'm sure that you want to join with me in offering our very sincere thanks to both Rebecca and Steve for an immensely.