Rational and Religious (with Ross Douthat)

Ross Douthat: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Ross Douthat: So, the conceit of the book is that most of the reasons that made people, made it seem reasonable to be religious back then–as your correspondents would put it–still obtain today. And, that there is a sort of master narrative of modern secularism or modern atheism that says, ‘Look, there were good reasons to believe before Copernicus and Galileo.’ Or ‘There were good reasons to believe before Charles Darwin.’ Or maybe, some people would say there were good reasons to believe before neuroscience; or different sort of scientific revolutions are picked out and identified.

And, I think that those revolutions did in fact call into question certain specific tenets of specific religions. And, we operate in the West inside a monotheistic Abrahamic heritage. We’ve had a sort of heavily Christian–Christian-dominated–culture, and there’s no question that the early scientific revolutions and revelations about the shape of the cosmos and the solar system and everything else challenged medieval Catholicism’s conception of the order of the planets and the sun and the stars. Which was I think not really, strictly speaking, a point of Catholic doctrine, was more an inheritance from Ptolemy; but it was something the Church was committed to, and that very famously created a particular crisis.

Darwinism goes a little further and calls into question a lot of readings–Jewish and Christian I would say, but especially Christian–because of Christian ideas about original sin of the Book of Genesis and the origins of human life, right?

So, it’s absolutely the case that science can and has challenged particular doctrines and particular beliefs. But, the general religious picture–and this is a book that I think for various reasons tries to start by laying out a very general case for why someone would be religious, before you get to whether you should be Jewish or Muslim or Christian or Buddhist or whatever else–the general religious argument that we find ourselves in a universe that appears to be structured and designed in ways conducive to the emergence, not just of order and sort of regularity and mathematical patterns, but planet, stars, and conscious life: that’s a striking thing. There are lots of other possible universes that would not contain anything quite like the world in which we find ourselves. And, the fact that there’s a correspondence between that overarching structure and the mystery of our own consciousness, our own mind and its ability to penetrate into the deep mysteries of the cosmos and to understand them.

And then, the fact that a persistent feature of human culture from ancient times from back then–as your correspondents would say–to the present, is religious and spiritual experience. Intimations, experiences, some of them more commonplace, some of them more outré, some of them alarming. But, experiences that persist under secular conditions, experiences that happen to people who don’t believe in God, as well as people who believe in God. Experiences that seem to give strong indicators that there are invisible forces in the world, higher powers if you will, that are interested in communicating with and being in some kind of relationship with us. I think that combination–general order, yielding human life, a correspondence between our consciousness and the general order, and constant persistent enduring intimations of transcendence–is enough to make it very, very rational to be a religious believer of some kind.

Ross Douthat: I agree, and I think at the very least you would say you have only to look at human behavior in the past to get a strong indication that whatever people formally believed, they were not living their life in some way where–they were not manifesting the kind of certainty in belief that you associate with saints, great philosophers of religion, pious peasant women, whoever else. Right?

One thing in Christianity: we have a lot of debates about the doctrine of Hell. That is a big point of debate and discussion always, but especially nowadays. And, one thing you will often hear is a complaint from critics of the doctrine who say that, ‘Well, the fear of Hell was this horrible punishing thing that hung over every Christian believer for the last 2,000 years and made their life a misery.’ And, obviously, there are cases where that is true; there are people whose psychology has been warped by an overemphasis on eternal damnation. But, if you go back and look at, like, the history of the Middle Ages and how Christians were actually behaving at what was a–I think it’s fair to say–a peak of formal belief in the doctrine of Hell, I don’t get the strong sense that the average knight and chevalier in 13th century France was waking up every day thinking, ‘Oh, the–Hell, it’s this thing that I have to think about all the time that’s preventing me from having a good time and smiting my enemies and bedding my mistress,’ and anything like that. People have always been people, and have always tended to prioritize the immediate and the material even under cultural conditions, obviously, that make religious belief seem more compelling and more commonplace.

Ross Douthat: I sort of think that a primary question that drives the divide between the religious person and the non-religious person is: what do we think is the primary thing in the cosmos?

We have access, as people experiencing life, to two broad categories of things. One is mind, it’s the direct experience of being a conscious being, whatever that may mean. Right? It’s an experience I’m having, you’re having right now having this conversation.

And the second experience is the experience of matter and the material world, which is filtered through our conscious experience. Right? If I touch the table here or rub my laptop screen or something, I’m having an encounter with the material, but that is then being translated in some way into my conscious experience, the experience of being a self in the world.

And, I think the religious argument is basically just that we have a variety of good reasons to think that mind is probably primary. And, matter, while real–the question of what matter actually is, is itself a slightly harder question to answer than some materialists tend to think. But, you said only five or 10 minutes, so we’ll set that one aside, and just say there are good reasons to think that mind is something primary. And, those reasons start with the fact that it is very, very hard to give a clear account of how the experience of mind arises from–in any kind of direct, scientifically testable way–from the electrical impulses and everything else and chemical reactions in the brain.

Clearly, the two are intertwined in some way. And, obviously, neuroscience has demonstrated convincingly that certain parts of the brain have certain effects on your consciousness–just that we sort of knew that already because we knew that drinking strong spirits has a strong effect on your consciousness.

But we know a lot more about that now. So, there’s no–I think a sort of hard Cartesianism where mind and body are completely separate in some way and they only attach at one particular point: That seems wrong. Consciousness somehow interpenetrates the material.

But yeah: there’s no good account on offer, I think, from any materialist or reductionist–and I’ve read most of those accounts–that it actually explains what consciousness is and how it works. And the best you can get to is a kind of illusionist case in a sense, which says that consciousness is sort of–it’s an illusion of control. Right? We have the illusion of selfhood and the illusion of control, and this is advantageous in some way that is then hard to explain, because, presumably, if it’s an illusion of control, all the processes would run the same way without this sense of being a spectator and a passenger and an actor. Right? So, it’s sort of, like, you know, you think that you’re making choices and making decisions, but really, you’re just sort of watching a movie and thinking you’re participating in it.

But, wouldn’t it be simpler to have a universe where the systems just ran on their own, if the conscious observer isn’t actually doing anything?

So, I think materialism struggles to explain consciousness, but then we also just have a number more of specific reasons recently, including the ones I alluded to before, but adding in some of the spooky stuff that goes on with quantum physics and the way that measurement and mind seems to interact and sort of collapse possibility into reality.

And, there’s a number of ways I think in which the case for mind as a primary thing has actually gotten stronger in the last 100 years, notwithstanding all the advances in neuroscience and everything else.

Ross Douthat: Well, I think that the weakness–and I’ve read a bunch of Lightman, actually. And the problem is still the explanation of–whether they’re a bonus or not, right? Whether are they essential to the functioning of the brain or not, right? Could you have human beings without consciousness? Could you have P-zombies, right? The idea–zombies, basically human beings who do everything that conscious beings do, but are in fact not conscious? Could that exist?

And those are really interesting questions. But there is still also just the primary question of: How do you get consciousness? Like, how do you get it? How do you actually generate this kind of particular experience? Which has different layers, right? There’s sort of a primary experience just of the mystery of, like, yourself in the world. You’re having the experience of this conversation. Like, how do you experience the redness of a rose, right? The qualia–to use the lingo of neuroscientists–the qualities of existence that are not explained just by doing, deconstructing the chemical composition of the rose.

Then you have above that, like, reason and judgment, right? Like, what is it to reason? Human beings reason abstractly. What does that mean in the context of a material cosmos? How does a strictly material cosmos generate abstract reasoning that works? That sort of–the further question–right?–you mention: we’ve unraveled all these mysteries, figured out all these things, developed an abstract language of mathematics that just happens to correlate really well with how objects work in the real world. How does any of that work?

And Lightman, as I recall, spends a certain amount of time talking about emergence–right?–which is the sort of catch-all term that would be, well, they wouldn’t say they’re reductionists. They would say, ‘We’re not reductionists because we think consciousness is real. We just think it’s emergent. It’s an emergent property.’

And, I’m not sure if I’m getting the Lightman one right, but I think he talks about the motion of a car. Right? Like, it emerges from the wheel and the axle and everything else, right? So, you can’t define it to one material thing, but you know it when you see it.

But, consciousness is just not like the motion of a car. You can observe the motion of a car and draw a strict material correlation between the movement of all the parts and the larger motion. There’s no such connection with consciousness. When people talk about emergence to me, they’re still talking about magic.

Ross Douthat: I think that’s the right posture for the person like you and I, who thinks that this is a seeming hard limit on materialism. You should be skeptical that just by sort of building a machine without having any conception of how to make it conscious, but just building something that seems to produce outputs that are like the human mind, you’ll get the inner experience. But, you shouldn’t rule it out precisely because we don’t have a materialist account of how consciousness emerges. Right?

So, if it turned out that at some level of complexity, AI suddenly manifests consciousness–and again, it would be hard to prove exactly; the proof question would be a tricky one–I certainly think people will think AIs are conscious before they are. I think that is almost certain. But if it did emerge, that would not actually prove anything about materialism, because materialism still wouldn’t have an account of how it had actually happened. Right?

And I mean, to put on my spooky, spooky weird religious-stuff hat for a minute too, there is an element in the AI project of a kind of–I mean, well, in Jewish terms it’s the Golem legend, right? But, it’s a summoning, right? There isn’t in some way an actual sense in which the AI project is saying, ‘We are building agents that can do human things,’ and at some level we sort of expect to call up out of the vasty deep a spirit that will inhabit them, which is part of the strangeness of our own time. I think there’s sort of a general strangeness that is one reason I wrote this book now, is that I think we’re in a stranger moment than we were 10 or 15 years ago, in terms of sort of the spiritual and the material.

Ross Douthat: Sure. Well, so first, I agree with you that there are certain forms of religious experience that you would expect to happen or expect some version of them to show up, even were religion not true, God didn’t exist, and so on. Right? And, coincidence–the person who has a dream that turns out to come true. Right? People have a lot of dreams, you live a long time. Eventually one of them is going to stand out and look prophetic just through the law of large numbers. Right? So, I think there are ways–now that doesn’t mean I’m ruling out that you could actually have a prophetic dream. I’m just saying certain things that people experience are expected to some degree within a cosmos that is not created by God.

Ross Douthat: Yeah, so that’s more–I think, the supernatural or mystical experiences that are more persuasive are the ones that don’t seem like just law of large numbers things, that have some sort of concrete reality, in terms of either the intensity of the personal experience, the correlates like physical healing, near-death experiences, which I’ll get to in a minute. Or, the example that I used, which is from the professional skeptic, Michael Shermer, a really smart guy who spent most of his career debunking bad paranormal and supernatural claims. And, at one point in his life, he was getting married and his wife had a radio that had been given to her, I think by her great-uncle, but someone who had passed away who meant a lot to her, who she wished could be at the wedding. And, the radio had never worked. It was an old radio; it was broken. Shermer himself had tried to fix it repeatedly, could never get it to work.

And, on their wedding day, they went back into their house after the ceremony, and they heard music coming from the back of the house. And, they went in–I’m not sure if they found it in a drawer, I can’t remember the details–but it was the radio; and it was playing a love song, a kind you would dance to at a wedding. And, it did this during the wedding, and then it shifted over to some kind of, again, appropriate classical music or something in the evening. And then, it stopped and it never worked again. And, Shermer was clearly really struck by this.

Ross Douthat: And, to his credit–he has written about it several times and tried to come up with different theories. Maybe there’s a multiverse and her great-uncle is still alive in another branch of the multiverse, and they have a way of communicating across the multiverse. Right? I mean, you can come up with theories. But it clearly–it’s a good case study of the kind of thing–and, I’ve known many people who have had things like this happen to them–the kind of thing that happens in the world that you need some explanation besides just coincidence and the law of large numbers to explain.

And, I do feel like people underestimate because we live in a regime of official secularism. Plenty of people are religious, but if you go over to you Yale Law School or write a Wikipedia entry or something, you’re expected to sort of rule out supernatural ideas. People underestimate just how commonplace these kind of weird experiences are. Not in the sense that most people are having them all the time, but lots and lots of people have, couple things that happen in their life that seem like a finger pushing in a little bit.

Near-death experiences, then–sorry, did you want to–?

Ross Douthat: Yeah, no; I think that’s right. I think there are certainly people for whom the default assumption–and this sort of goes back to David Hume, right?–is that if there’s a miracle, by definition it’s so unlikely that you should look for any other explanation. And, even though you think Michael Shermer seems like a trustworthy guy and he has put this story in enough books that if he had really been on drugs at the time, probably someone would have mentioned it and said, ‘Ask Shermer. He was pretty out there at that wedding.’ Nonetheless, yeah, the default should be that he and his spouse were deceived in some way, where, had someone else been there, they would not have seen the same thing or had the same experience, right?

Near-death experiences: I don’t want to over–push this too hard. I have a strong interest in these stories. I don’t think you can say things that are completely definitive about them. But basically, some meaningful percentage of people who experience something close to death–I’m not going to say it’s death because there’s endless debates about when brain activity ceases and when you’re really dead–but, people who come to the threshold of death and then come back, have a strikingly consistent kind of experience that involves the clichés that you hear about in pop culture, that you encounter dead relatives and ancestors. Sometimes you have a feeling of a kind of life review under moral judgment, right? Or, and there’s some–it’s not always under strong moral judgment, sometimes it’s just a review of your life. There’s the tunnel, there’s the white light, there’s feelings of love and peace and so on.

And, this exists across cultures. It takes different forms. You’ll get some Buddhist features in near-death experiences in China and some Hindu features, and there’s clearly some sort of impact of cultural expectations or religious expectations on what you see, which is itself an interesting point.

But there’s also–but these experiences are, they’re quite different as far as I can tell from reading the literature, and from talking to some people who’ve had them: from hallucinatory experiences or dreams, which are the two things they’re most often analogized to. They have a intensity and clarity of experience. They’re perceived as more real than real. They are life-changing. People who come back from them change their metaphysical perspectives, change their moral perspectives. Sometimes in ways that don’t go well, like you’ll have people who are, like, ‘I’m committed to a higher power and I’m leaving my family,’ or something. It’s not like a simple, everyone just becomes good because of this; but it’s life-changing, right? [More to come, 33:20]