Oct. 16, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I talked to a guy recently who's in coding, you know, and he said all his friends are like sitting at their desks and thinking, you know, I start out with nothing and I put raw ideas, pure immaterial thought into this computer and something new emerges. | ||
| That actually can't happen unless there's some organizing principle outside the system. | ||
| And if you apply that then to the idea of the universe itself, you start to think, well, actually maybe science itself kind of trends us in a different direction. | ||
| And I suspect that just as materialism took a long time to kind of work itself out... | ||
| And eventually sputter into, you know, bloodshed and despair. | ||
| These new discoveries of science about information theory, about the role of consciousness in the world, have yet to really make their way fully into our politics. | ||
| It's going to take a while, but this book is kind of about a new turn that I think is coming, where some of the latest discoveries in science actually point in a different direction than the scientific American Kamala Harris direction, which is kind of good news. | ||
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It's a crazy world! | |
| Crazy world! | ||
| Somebody's gotta have the same views. | ||
| It's a crazy world. | ||
| It's a crazy world. | ||
| Somebody's gotta have the same views. | ||
| Joining me today is the host of The Young Heretics Show and the author of the new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Illuminating Science Through Faith, my old friend Spencer Spencer, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, great to be back. | ||
| Always good to see you. How are you, my friend? | ||
| You multi-time author, you. | ||
| This is book number two officially. | ||
| Yeah, I lose count at two. | ||
| I sort of stopped being able to – I can't count that high. | ||
| But I am proud to say that unlike Kamala Harris, I did not copy-paste any sections from Wikipedia into this book. | ||
| It's really hard to write a book without doing that. | ||
| So please clap. | ||
| Yes, congratulations for not having your ghostwriter plagiarize the book. | ||
| That's the big story around Kamala this week, which it's got to be nice to be releasing a book on a week like that. | ||
| But yes, you were at two books according to what you just told me and the numbers that I'm seeing in front of me. | ||
| Your dad has written, Andrew Klavan, of course, has written like 7,000 books. | ||
| So you have a lot of work to do, basically. | ||
| Time is on my side because he can't keep writing and living forever. | ||
| So, you know, morbid as it is, I have a lot of time. | ||
| So tell me, it's an interesting title, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Illuminating Science Through Faith. | ||
| I feel like there's a lot of books that probably do it the other way, where they want to illuminate faith through science lately. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| And really, what was the genesis, let's say, of the book? | ||
| It's funny, that was one possible subtitle that we played with, illuminating faith through science. | ||
| But no, I actually want to make the opposite claim, so you're astute to notice that. | ||
| You know, I think the proximate cause of this book, the kind of immediate genesis of the book, was really during the COVID regime. | ||
| And it was in those years, as you well remember and we both experienced, That the science suddenly became this kind of new god, and it was perhaps embodied in its priest, Dr. | ||
| Fauci, who claimed to be the science and therefore to have authority over all and sundry aspects of our lives. | ||
| And I think those of us that love science and have an interest in it, and I count myself very much among those people, even before writing this book, we're really dismayed to see the The government effectively weaponized in the name of this weird thing called capital S science, which is not what any of us knows as the scientific enterprise. | ||
| That is this noble human tradition of understanding and trying to know about the natural world. | ||
| But that led me, as I was thinking about this, I was led to realize that really for my whole lifetime, and I think basically everybody around today grew up with this idea that science was the root of all knowledge and that other kinds of knowledge were at best ancillary. | ||
| They were sort of a little bit iffy, like literature, kind of dicey, maybe a little subjective. | ||
| And religion Definitely not a source of knowledge or truth. | ||
| Definitely superstition, distraction, humbug, kind of weird and antiquated at best. | ||
| And I started to really, you know, I'm a classicist and a historian, and I started to just get really fascinated by the birth of this idea that we all grew up with, that like science... | ||
| It's the only truth there is. | ||
| The whole world is just made of matter and there's nothing transcendent, nothing beyond. | ||
| Because I think it's a root of a lot of crises that we're living through. | ||
| And so what I set out to do in this book is tell the story of how science first emerged, what we know about the ancient history of what was then called natural philosophy, and then how that Noble endeavor got kind of split off from the other forms of knowledge. | ||
| Because originally, you know, the scientific revolution that we all know of was not an anti-religious crusade, just the opposite. | ||
| It was a religious endeavor to know God's universe. | ||
| And I'm pleased to report that after years of research, I will confirm, we can blame the French. | ||
| It's actually always my favorite thing to do. | ||
| Good, good, good. Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so really it's in the era of the Enlightenment in the 19th century that you start to get this idea that... | ||
| Yeah, you could only ever know anything by looking at the physical world and therefore God, as Pierre-Simon Laplace, the famous French astrophysicist, is supposed to have said, you know, we have no need of God as a hypothesis. | ||
| And I really think we're living through the exhaustion of that idea and I actually don't think that science itself supports it. | ||
| So the conclusion of this book, the last section of this book, is about What modern science, the actual science, really says about our place in the universe and especially the importance of human consciousness. | ||
| Because it's a very different story than we actually were brought up to believe. | ||
| And I kind of think we need a hard reset on this if we don't want, you know, another four years of rule by Fauci or whatever. | ||
| Right, which unfortunately we may be careening towards, I suppose, at the political level we'll probably see in a couple weeks. | ||
| But let's try to put politics aside for the moment. | ||
| What would you say, and I guess this will take us to France, was the moment that it really did go haywire? | ||
| Because I think most people that live in largely secular Western countries... | ||
| We're pretty much like, ah, the institutions kind of work. | ||
| It all kind of works, and we're busy with other stuff. | ||
| And in the modern age, we have our phones and distractions. | ||
| So the stuff doesn't have to work that well, and we still go along with it. | ||
| Then, of course, COVID comes, and suddenly we all got hit like a frying pan in the face. | ||
| And then we're like, wait a minute, Anthony Fauci is emailing people that, you know, friends of his, like, oh, go on vacation, don't wear masks, while he's telling us we should double mask. | ||
| Then something happened. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| That's well put. | ||
| I mean, there's a fascinating moment, and this really is kind of at the heart of the book, and it comes with Isaac Newton, who I learned about Newton, of course, in school. | ||
| I think I have a tolerable understanding of Newton's loss of motion and force and acceleration and all that. | ||
| But in order to really understand what Newton was up to, you have to think your way back to a time before anybody understood about gravity or even kind of the general patterns of how things move through the world. | ||
| And there was this idea that there was a boundary at the moon. | ||
| So if you think like, you know, taking a spaceship up, Elon Musk's next expedition up to the moon, The idea used to be that once you got past that point, the world probably worked differently because the stars seem very regular and they seem to obey these fixed patterns. | ||
| But down here, everything's manifestly a disaster, obviously a mess. | ||
| So there must be this kind of barrier. | ||
| It's called the superlunary and the sublunary region. | ||
| And the fact that Newton was able to figure out rules that applied everywhere that kind of broke that barrier and could explain not just the motion of the planets, but also like fruit falling from trees and billiard balls and yada yada... | ||
| It made people suddenly realize that actually the human mind has a key to this logic that seems to spread throughout the entire universe. | ||
| And there's something really important about this, which is that you actually couldn't... | ||
| Newton wouldn't have thought he could do that unless he had some kind of religious belief. | ||
| He was a devout Christian. | ||
| He was sort of an unorthodox Christian. | ||
| He was a devout Christian. And unless you believe that the human mind is more than just an accidental byproduct of evolution... | ||
| You have no reason to expect that it will be equipped to deal with anything outside of our immediate surroundings. | ||
| So if we evolved to sort of think and calculate, that makes sense up to a point. | ||
| But then you reach a point like in the Star Trek universe where you get to cue and the rules are totally different, right? | ||
| Newton didn't believe that because he thought man was made in the image of God. | ||
| Because he was convinced, as Galileo also was, that there was this plan and pattern invested in the universe that we were made to know. | ||
| It's ironic that that discovery, which was expressly founded on religious ideas, then also paved the way for people in the Enlightenment, especially in France, to sort of I think? | ||
| Physics, but everything. | ||
| And this is a real problem, because what then emerges is this notion that if it's all just matter moving around, then really the future belongs to whoever can impose his will on matter most effectively, which is the French Revolution. | ||
| The French Revolution is just like, we're going to clear everything else away, we're going to have pure reason, and we're going to use the metric system, and we're also going to kill people en masse if they don't agree with us. | ||
| I mean, this is sort of like the birth of a lot of modern dysfunction. | ||
| And then with Darwin, you know, as people start to think, well, even humanity is sort of a product of this raw material motion, you really do start to get this idea of the quote-unquote war between science and religion, which is really more of a rebellion of science against religion that has not really seemed to go so well for science. | ||
| Right. So in essence, if we just were to take that into where we've been for the last couple of years, it's like, oh, it can work for a certain period of time, basically. | ||
| And then you get to the moment where it kind of doesn't work anymore. | ||
| Let's say with COVID that maybe came from a lab or didn't, or maybe had something to do with the institutions or didn't, and people that have been... | ||
| get to a line that you referenced earlier, which is when Fauci said, if you criticize me, you're criticizing the science, which basically is Palpatine in the prequels talking about the Senate, you know, talking about democracy. | ||
| And that so so in some sense, in some sense, I suppose you think we were going to get to this exact place no matter what. | ||
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Right. | |
| Yeah, it's kind of interesting. | ||
| I don't really think that there are villains in this story, as much as I would like to cast the French as the villains. | ||
| You know, there are definitely wrong turns that we've taken. | ||
| But there were also, I think, natural reasons why we took every step along the way. | ||
| And as you indicate, this idea that science can detach itself from its metaphysical, theological underpinnings Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. Yeah. | ||
| Kamala Harris for president as though the science is a Democrat. | ||
| Like, seriously, why is that happening? | ||
| It's happening because science without its first cause, without the set of principles that science itself can't discover, has to attach itself to some other set of ideals. | ||
| It can't actually just operate autonomously forever. | ||
| And ultimately it's going to become – if it's not going to be in service of absolute truth, transcendent principles, knowing the creation of God, then it's instead going to be in service of whoever is most powerful and whoever can wield it most effectively in this kind of rhetorical, cynical rhetorical way. | ||
| And right now that's the fight that we're sort of in. | ||
| Meanwhile, and this is also important, you know, while you have this kind of decrepit establishment endorsing Kamala Harris, you also have things like this article in City Journal that came out recently about all these scientists who are starting – totally shocking themselves by starting to think maybe there's more to the universe than just math and matter And I've experienced this myself. | ||
| I talked to a guy recently who's in coding, you know, and he said all his friends are like sitting at their desks and thinking, you know, I start out with nothing and I put raw ideas, pure immaterial thought into this computer and something new emerges. | ||
| That actually can't happen unless there's some organizing principle outside the system. | ||
| And if you apply that then to the idea of the universe itself, you start to think, well, actually maybe science itself kind of trends us in a different direction. | ||
| And I suspect that just as materialism took a long time to kind of work itself out... | ||
| And eventually sputter into bloodshed and despair. | ||
| These new discoveries of science about information theory, about the role of consciousness in the world have yet to really make their way fully into Our politics is going to take a while, but this book is kind of about a new turn that I think is coming where some of the latest discoveries in science actually point in a different direction than the scientific American Kamala Harris direction, | ||
| which is kind of good news. Yeah, well, it's interesting because I think it's directly connected to something I've been talking about on the show a lot, which is that I feel like we're basically watching an old world and the old institutions end. | ||
| We're watching a series of politicians and a media that's trying to hold on to power as long as it can. | ||
| And then if you just were brave enough to look around the corner, it's like Elon is catching rockets that are coming back down to Earth. | ||
| Yeah. We have all of this unbelievable AI stuff happening right now. | ||
| The robots and the driverless cars and all the stuff. | ||
| And look, I'm a sci-fi guy, so I've seen every dystopian future. | ||
| I mean, I know all the bad things that can happen. | ||
| But if you're willing to just look around the corner where potentially science could lead us, hopefully within, I get what you're saying, within the lens of sort of a greater good, let's say, then there's some really cool stuff happening. | ||
| And that seems to me to be the tension of where we're at right now that everybody's feeling. | ||
| Bingo. Absolutely. | ||
| I'm with you on this idea, not just in the domain of science, but in politics and in culture and civilization generally. | ||
| We feel like we are living in this disaster zone. | ||
| And we might be. | ||
| I mean, civilizations do end and a lot of the forces we've been toying with are no joke, nuclear grade, napalm level civilization destroyers. | ||
| things like just throwing open your borders, like accumulating debt, you can't just do that forever. | ||
| On the other hand, we may also be living through the convulsion or the death throes of kind of an old and decrepit order. | ||
| And nobody can say whether it will grasp one last time at power in this moment, or whether maybe we're actually just on the cusp of the dawn, but everything depends on whether you can see kind of what's over the horizon. | ||
| And in the case of AI, which you mentioned is a great example, right? | ||
| We come up with this, like, basically this big black box that, like, spits out – makes up movies out of nothing or, like, you know, does – writes code for us, can model, you know, the human genome, can help us find all this new information about health and medicine. | ||
| And instantly, everybody's like, it's gonna eat us alive. | ||
| It's gonna turn us into paperclips, right? | ||
| Now, why do we think that? | ||
| In the book, I spend some time on AI for this reason, because I think those predictions don't necessarily say what's definitely gonna happen with AI, but they say a lot about where our philosophy is leading us. | ||
| And if you think that humanity is just a primitive machine, like, As some people say, like an ape-brained meat sack that got kind of tossed up out of the primordial ooze, then yeah, of course, you're going to see a better calculating machine come along and you're going to think, we're doomed! It's over! | ||
| But if you think that humanity is actually essential, not only in our ability to do math problems, but like in the raw experience that we have of the world, then, you know, our machines serve us. That's what they're there for. | ||
| Like, who cares if they can make a better world without us? | ||
| Like, without us in it, it won't be a world. | ||
| And this is also kind of what I think the quantum revolution has unlocked is this realization that actually self-awareness and consciousness are irreplaceable things. | ||
| They're not like you can get rid of them and you can replace them with an automated machine that churns out the results of self-awareness. | ||
| That's kind of what Alan Turing thought. | ||
| You can build a machine that fakes humanity and then it will be human. | ||
| But actually, that turns out to be the opposite of true. | ||
| It turns out that we're, in our weird little way, seeing colors, hearing music, feeling feelings, those things are actually... | ||
| Essential to the nature of the world that we study with science. | ||
| And again, if we can incorporate this into our worldview and understand these things, then it's not necessarily doomsday. | ||
| It's certainly a turbulent time. | ||
| But whatever comes next, as you say, what's going on now is ending. | ||
| This can't go on forever. | ||
| So I'm really interested in what comes next. | ||
| And I do think that with a more humane vision and a vision informed by our scriptures and our wisdom traditions, there's actually some good stuff that could be coming down the line. | ||
| Right. It's actually why I'm excited about the future, despite having watched every dystopian sci-fi movie of all time. | ||
| Like, I think it is possible that the machines turn on and Skynet turns on. | ||
| I think it's possible we end up in pink slime in The Matrix and all of those things. | ||
| But I also think that for the reasons that you just laid out there, like, A, you can't stop progress. | ||
| You can't stop science from evolving and AI from evolving. | ||
| So we're on the ride no matter what. | ||
| But B, I believe in the human spirit, which I think is probably, well, let's say connected somewhat to the divine enough to get us through the craziness. | ||
| How about that? I like that. | ||
| Yeah, it's only just occurred to me as you're talking that in A Space Odyssey, isn't the guy named Dave who ends up getting... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. He's Dave. So you're really on the chopping block here. | ||
| He's just putting your money where your mouth is. | ||
| Trust me, when he's not letting Dave back in the airlock, it's quite jarring for me. | ||
| I would imagine. Yeah. | ||
| When YouTube was constantly demonetizing me, there was a meme, you know, it's like, I can't do that, Dave. | ||
| Sorry, I can't do that. | ||
| Sorry, Dave, I can't do that, whatever it was. | ||
| So you've already lived through it. You don't have anything to fear. | ||
| You've lived through the dystopian scenario. | ||
| I'm already on the other side. | ||
| What do you think that, you know, we can do the science people and what they've gotten wrong forever. | ||
| Okay, fine. What do you think that the more religious people at this point can do if there's a certain set of religious people that, let's say, are just leery of all of these ideas or afraid of progress or don't want to let some of the old stuff go or want to figure out how to carry it into a new world? | ||
| What do you think they can, what's the messaging to them about what this new world can look like and how they can still believe in eternal truths or believe that the Ten Commandments are real, etc. without mucking up all of their world views or their ethos? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, on the one hand, I think the small-mindedness of religious people may have been somewhat exaggerated in part by this whole science versus religion debate. | ||
| On the other hand, it's not like that's not a thing, right? | ||
| And in the book, I cite a sermon by Charles Spurgeon, who's a preacher I really love, But who responded to evolution, the theory of evolution, basically by saying, it's like the latest fad, essentially. And people were coming to him in his church and saying, how do I grapple with these observations that scientists seem to be making? | ||
| And how can I maintain my faith and preserve my faith? | ||
| And he was saying, just basically ignore it. | ||
| I feel that this is exactly the wrong approach to take because it's basically a retreat from the territory of what used to be called natural theology. | ||
| So if you go back before the scientific revolution, before this idea that material truth was somehow hostile to or in odds with biblical faith, Natural theology was one of the major ways that religious people thought they could know God. | ||
| St. Augustine famously talks about the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture and holding them up against each other. | ||
| There are Psalms in the Bible that talk about the heavens as a kind of book in which God's glory is written. | ||
| And if you go even further back to Genesis, there's this idea that God speaks the universe into existence, meaning that it's in some sense a language meant for us to understand. | ||
| And it might be the case that scientists have used their expertise and their discoveries to belittle religion and in some cases to claim that the Bible is now just completely defunct or whatever. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| well our religion is true and your science is false. Like our project actually should be about showing how even science makes more sense in the light of faith. That's why it's illuminating science through faith is that yeah we find out things about the material world and then there are a million possible interpretations that we can imply to every discovery we make. | ||
| I mean, quantum physics is the classic example of this, right? | ||
| We have these equations that seem to describe a world outside of the realm of our observation that doesn't neatly answer or map onto the categories of anything in our minds. | ||
| Like, we almost can't picture anything that's going on in quantum effects outside of our observation. | ||
| And there's a million different interpretations that you can give to that. | ||
| Science is not going to answer which interpretation is correct because it's a pre-scientific question. | ||
| It's about the nature of reality. | ||
| So I would suggest to the religious, as I say in this book, I'm not a scientist. | ||
| I'm not going to resolve the question of quantum gravity. | ||
| I'm not going to figure out how special relativity aligns. | ||
| I'll skip that question. | ||
| Sorry, yeah, I don't know if you had other material prepared, but that's not going to be my role. | ||
| But when those discoveries are made, it's actually not up to the scientists to tell us what they mean about our place in the universe. | ||
| It's up to those with access to an understanding of our deepest wisdom traditions contained in stories, for instance, like the book of Genesis. | ||
| And if, as in this book I do, if you take Genesis and you hold it up against the The latest discoveries in cosmology or the revelations of quantum physics. | ||
| You'll find there an actually amazingly powerful template for saying, well, okay, so you're telling me that matter is really in some sense pure potential until it meets with consciousness. | ||
| That kind of sounds like a formless void over which broods the spirit of the one mind to bring it into reality, right? | ||
| And this is something that modern scientists who are often quite addicted to materialism don't It doesn't even occur to scientists to think in this way half the time. | ||
| But those of us who believe like have to bring that to bear on the science or else we're just left with like whatever new age voodoo Mark Zuckerberg comes up with tomorrow and or Stephen Hawking where chemical scum on the surface of a moderately sized planet is I | ||
| think? | ||
| Don't be afraid. If the truth is true, it's not going to be disproven by any other truth. | ||
| And it actually can't be disproven by science because these questions that we deal with in religion are prior to science. | ||
| And science actually needs them in order to make sense in a humane way out of its discoveries. | ||
| It's interesting because I think it's partly why some people have had such an aversion or so many people have had such an aversion to joining Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse, which everyone thought we would already all be in. | ||
| But people just have an instinctual knowledge of like, wait a minute, this guy had a lot to do with screwing up this world, so why would I follow him into the digital world where in essence now he becomes God? | ||
| I take it you would agree with Albert Einstein that God does not play dice with the universe? | ||
| I sense that that's a bit of a theme here. | ||
| The interesting thing about that Einstein quote is that it was one of his many reactions against quantum physics, which really appalled him, really alarmed him, in part because it's fundamentally probabilistic. | ||
| And this was true, you know, scientists were kind of already edging up to this when they were studying thermodynamics. | ||
| And this whole idea of the world is like a determinist machine where there's no free will and all the atoms just bounce off each other automatically was kind of coming apart. | ||
| But Einstein, who helped really to make a lot of these discoveries and paved the way for them, was also really devoted to the idea that like the world is made of math and math describes the world. | ||
| And so if you can't picture something as he was so good at picturing, for instance, like the motion of light and stuff, if you can't picture it, you can't really have understood or figured it out. | ||
| And so Einstein was actually, he shared this with the Soviets. | ||
| The Soviets were really alarmed by Quantum physics and by relativity because it meant that the world wasn't a machine. | ||
| They couldn't calculate the future of history. | ||
| But Heisenberg and Bohr really got this, I think, quite right, that they were suddenly coming to the other end of a tunnel that scientists had been through, where it looked for a while like everything was just made of meat and we were just chemistry sets. | ||
| But actually, there's something much more capacious on the other side. | ||
| We could do many, many hours of this. | ||
| I think we'll have to continue this at my holiday party over some tequila. | ||
| Then it'll get really weird. | ||
| What do you think? Yeah, it's trippy. | ||
| If you think it's trippy now, just wait. | ||
| The book is Light of the Mind, Light of the World, Illuminating Science Through Faith. | ||
| Spencer, my friend, good to see you. |
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