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Spencer Klavan on Science vs. Religion (and Why the Stoics Were Not Materialists) (Episode 155)
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Has Science proven that the world is nothing more than a physical machine without overarching purpose?
Spencer Klavan’s most recent book answers with an emphatic no. Ancient philosophy and modern science reveal that the worldview of materialism is not enough.
Instead, our picture of the world must include mind as a fundamental ingredient – just as the Stoic and Christian worldviews do.
Light of the Mind, Light of the World
(01:28) Resetting the Narrative About Science
(10:14) Science vs. Religion
(23:30) Secularism and the Sacred
(29:48) Genesis
(42:50) The Stoic View of the World
(49:48) Determinism
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Immaterial Facts in Science
00:00:00
Speaker
And so if we want to speak meaningfully about the scientific world, we actually do have to make reference at least to immaterial facts about material objects. And I think that the Stoics might be quite comfortable with that. i You know, I don't want to put words in like Chrysippus mouth or anything.
Introducing Spencer Clavan's Book
00:00:24
Speaker
the fortune of speaking with Spencer Clavan, a return guest. ah and Back in episode 58 we spoke about how to save the West and since then ah done many things, but amongst others, you have a new book called the light of the mind, light of the world, how new science is illuminating ancient truths about God. So we'll start our conversation talking about that and see where it goes.
00:00:53
Speaker
Terrific. So glad to be back. Thanks for having me, Caleb.
Epicurean Pursuit of Pleasure
00:00:57
Speaker
Of course. So one reading of modernity, perhaps, is that in a sense, we could say the Epicureans won. So the point of life is to pursue a pleasant existence. Well, we can. That's it. After that, everything's over. you know We're just atoms in a void.
00:01:16
Speaker
There's nothing after death. There's no overarching meaning to any of this. um and What do you think about that framing? I think perhaps it it aligns with with your book well. It's fascinating to see.
Science vs Faith Narrative
00:01:31
Speaker
ah you so this This book, is as you intimated, it is a history of science from antiquity until the present day.
00:01:40
Speaker
And its aim is really to reset the narrative at a few key junctures. And I don't mean necessarily to reset the scholarly narrative so much as to reset the default public narrative. I feel that I and many others grew up with a really misleading picture of of how science emerged from or in opposition to the Catholic Church or religious faith more generally. and We got handed a story about the war between science and faith, perhaps. And certainly, I was given the impression that religion was at best totally separate from scientific knowledge, that the hard and fast truths of science
00:02:30
Speaker
are radically distinct from and and the implication is usually better or at least more certain than the spiritual or or immaterial truths articulated in philosophy and
Appeal of Stoicism in Ancient Rome
00:02:44
Speaker
scripture. i I would argue I actually think science has done a done a number on philosophy as well in this way. And in telling that story, I came to grapple in a new way with what you've just said, which is that if you take the various Hellenistic schools, and Stoicism obviously being one major one and Epicureanism being one of its great rivals, and you think of which one of those two ways of looking at the world was perhaps most appealing to the populace more generally in the ancient world. I think there's a really good case that Stoicism, for the Romans at least,
00:03:26
Speaker
really squared with the common sense understanding of things, that there's an order to the universe, that it includes moral realities, that our task as humans is effectively to, if not embrace that moral order, at least resign ourselves to it and find and some form of excellence or some appropriate kind of human flourishing in conforming ourselves with with the logos that ah threads through the universe.
Epicurean Moral Philosophy
00:03:58
Speaker
And this Epicurean idea, which kind of pulls back from, but pulls on and older theories among say, democratists in Leucippus that the world is made of these little tiny chunks of of matter of stuff called atoms because they're indivisible and that those atoms obey numerical laws
00:04:25
Speaker
that produce all the other stuff that the Stoics were so interested in talking about, like virtue and so forth. and And it's not that those things are totally meaningless for Epicureans, but they are products of a deeper reality, which is kind of value neutral and ultimately rather indifferent to human participation in the universe. So to the extent that moral teaching helps us to be at peace with this scenario, Epicureans are very on board with it. But they maintain that the only purpose or point to finding that piece is for our own satisfaction because there's nothing outside of ah a merely human structure that would endorse or even care about what we're what we do ever.
Insignificance in Cosmic Order
00:05:14
Speaker
um And so we kind of stand in the midst of this cosmic flow. We are part of this great cosmic flow of atoms, this multiverse that ah in the end operates according to numerically perfect mathematical laws that have nothing really to do with how we feel or what we want or really the way, the choices that that we make it all.
00:05:37
Speaker
um This was, I think, probably a more, it's fair to say, elite and recherche way of looking at the world. The ideal of the Epicurean is the kind of cultured or genteel garden where we retreat from public life and politics, especially, and just attempt to attain what we might now call serenity. And that's not really, I mean, there there are a lot of invectives, Cicero's come to mind, but there are a lot of invectives from the ancient world against Epicureanism as this kind of the shabby or even self-involved kind of entitled upper crust play thing of a philosophy.
Revival of Epicurean Ideas
00:06:17
Speaker
But
00:06:18
Speaker
In modernity, with the advent of the Newtonian Revolution and with the gradual kind of um sharpening of this physical picture of the world that that Galileo was really the first to um crack open in in the modern world, and you do start to get this idea that actually maybe the Epicureans were playing the long game here. Maybe they were onto something much more profound about the universe. um And so you get expressly, you get neo-epicurians starting to emerge, people like Pierre Gassendi and other sort of adamists express atomists of of the kind of early and and middle modern period.
00:07:06
Speaker
and people like Thomas Jefferson, who who writes famously in a letter that he is now an Epicurean, and and his sort of frenemy, John Adams, who refers, I think, indirectly to Jefferson in saying, all our philosophers are now Epicureans. He says, like everybody we at least in the ancient world, they had sort of a variety of options to choose from, many of which were quite noble, including Stoicism. They weren't and weren't Christians, but at least you know there was there was some dignity in all of these different schools.
00:07:33
Speaker
except for Epicureanism. and And that's what we've gone for. um And there is a way in which it's now the case that whether we would really say this expressly or not, whether we know anything about Epicureanism or not, um even if we have kind of if we pay lip service to certain ideals like justice, for instance. and ah Many, many people, I think, have an operating script about the universe that basically is Epicureanism, that and Newtonian physics and then the atomic physics that kind of came in its wake
00:08:08
Speaker
and can explain everything meaningful about the truth and anything that we might impose onto that material world including value judgments like like good and evil. and and Those are really purely human affairs and if they help us to feel more serene or to you know if they make us feel good then they're useful and but they don't correspond to any bedrock feature of of reality. So yeah, I think I think Epicureanism has one in a big way.
Epicurean 'Swerve' and Modern Physics
00:08:41
Speaker
And although what one coda that I'll add, and maybe this will spark another question, but I'll just note that there's an interesting kind of twist ending here, which is that um although the Epicureans were the atomists of the ancient world, they were also
00:08:56
Speaker
um the anti-determinists because they believed in the swerve. right So they had this idea that even at the atomic level and and also at the human level, there are certain there's a certain room for randomness to intervene that enables things to be more than just mechanical or more than just determinist. Whereas the Stoics, as I'm sure we'll get into talking about, had ah had a more determined idea about fate and and how the universe was kind of locked into a path or a natural trajectory. um And it turns out in 20th century physics that actually that swerve idea, the idea that there's a little bit of indeterminacy or wiggle room in the world, um has come back into fashion. It starts with the
00:09:47
Speaker
statistical mechanics of Ludwig Boltzmann and the um and you know the second law of thermodynamics, it moves on through the quantum revolution. And it has actually kind of undermined a lot of this ah idea that we are living in a machine, that our consciousness has nothing to do with reality, all all that stuff. and So weirdly, the Epicureans have been so endorsed that they might, in the end, become their own undoing if that makes any sense at all.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that is ah that's an important code and we should we should get it into that. It may be useful to um sketch out that that first version of I think that many people were taught something like you have philosophy, religion and such, and then along came this picture of the world of that was given to us by science, which is a way of breaking the things down in the natural world into atoms, understanding physical laws such that we could manipulate the world and come to understand it as it really was, and expel all these ghosts you know that we're interfering with.
00:10:51
Speaker
our picture of the world. you know There's nothing outside interfering ah with ah the weather or something like that. You can explain that with natural laws and then moving that picture ah to the rest of the natural world and in the end ourselves and seeing the entire cosmos as a kind of machine that can be understood. in ah ah you know if If we understood these laws, we could understand it properly in a deterministic and predictable fashion. So ah yeah maybe say more about that that general that general story, how that comes to emerge.
Galileo and Church Misrepresentation
00:11:25
Speaker
Sure. Well, I think it's really Galileo whose conflict with the Catholic Church serves as ground zero for this story. I actually think that it's it's fair to accuse many high school teachers in the US at least of giving the impression that science proper begins when Galileo breaks the bonds of of religion. And we get a few little episodes of the conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church, and those are often dramatized as a kind of morality tale about the ah liberation of scientific inquiry, real true knowledge from mere prejudice or doctrine or dogma as represented by religious faith.
00:12:16
Speaker
And whatever else is true, that's certainly not how Galileo himself would have understood it, let alone the Robert Cardinal Robert Bell Arminae and the Catholic Church. But it is how various 19th century historians sort of portrayed this story that mankind has a natural ability, the story goes, for knowing the world, we are endowed with reason,
00:12:41
Speaker
There are techniques we can use to attain true knowledge about the physical world. but that we, those techniques and and that ability have been stunted, held in chains for hundreds and hundreds of years by religious superstition, which is mostly a tool for power, I think is the typical account. And this was Voltaire's account, it was sort of Rousseauian idea as well, but Voltaire famously is talking, when he says, eh, kraze lan fam, destroy the hateful thing.
00:13:18
Speaker
He's talking about the Catholic Church and he's he's talking about it as a purely repressive force on truth, knowledge, raw, unrepressed, natural human reason. And leaving aside the fact that that hasn't gone so well for us in the wake of the Enlightenment, just looking at the actual history before the Enlightenment, um I find this a really unsatisfying picture.
Metaphysical Premises of Science
00:13:50
Speaker
First of all, because it obscures the first premise of science it by by take but proposing that you have this kind of spark of reason detached that you're born into the world with a kind of pure access to truth. and We lose sight of the fact that in order to study the natural world at all and in order to believe in the validity of your existence, of your experiments in order to think, well, if I use mathematical reasoning to predict the motions of the heavens today, I'll be right tomorrow. You really have to have a a few, if not doctrinal, then certainly metaphysical premises in place. You have to have a few premises that don't ah emerge naturally out of your contact with the world, but actually ah presuppose it or or rather stand behind it. One of them is
00:14:43
Speaker
the validity of human reasoning throughout all space and time. and If you think that we are just sort of randomly evolved hunks of atoms, then there's every reason to expect that our brains would be evolved to be able to handle our immediate surroundings, to reason about, say, lion attacks or finding water, you know, these these things that as animals, we would have been able to to figure out.
00:15:13
Speaker
But we have this very strange expectation of the universe, which is that it should be answerable everywhere to our reasoning. That is, if I can meaningfully hit upon a law to calculate the trajectory of Venus, which I have no reason for caring about at all, except my interest,
00:15:36
Speaker
then ah we expect the universe to answer back. We expect these things called numbers in our heads to to work for describing the world. And when we press forward in that conviction, we often discover that we are right. In fact, this was kind of Newton's great achievement was to to expand the consistency of human reasoning beyond the orbit of the moon into the the rest of the world.
00:16:01
Speaker
um This is something very like, I think, what Stoics mean when they talk about the Logos. And of course, the Christian idea of the Logos is that it is, in some sense, God, that it that it has, and you know, of course, Stoics also think the Logos is Zeus, although there are important differences, but we can get into them. The point I only want to make right now is that the whole idea of this kind of science fighting against religion fails in the the historical sense because science emerges out of certain religious or metaphysical convictions. And then once you actually get to Galileo, you're able to understand that, of course, this is not an irreligious man fighting against the church. This is a deeply devout believer arguing with other believers about what their responsibility to God is. And Galileo says at one point, God gave me my reason.
00:16:55
Speaker
He endowed nature with logic and therefore he means from it would be an insult to him not to use it. This was effectively the point of view of every architect of the scientific revolution, Kepler, Newton, Tycho Brahe, you name it, they basically all thought something like this. and And it was only sort of in the wake of those achievements once the mechanical picture of the world started to work so well that it became easy to kind of forget where what where all of this was founded. And you start to think, well, if we can explain the motions of Saturn in terms of
00:17:36
Speaker
mathematics. Surely we can explain everything in terms of physical reasoning and and mathematics. And that's kind of the the later part of the story where this narrative starts to emerge that we later got. But it then gets kind of cast back into the into the past as an ideological project and to delegitimize the very notion of kind of of of any sort of transcended principle or or anything metaphysical at at all. So I do think that we grew up really with the false inheritance of that enlightenment idea, that it was all pure human reason, and which finally one day became unfettered from the evil church, and then the dawn of of truth broke. Right, right, right. broke Yeah, you of course just have the historical reality that many of these scientists were religious, and then that that philosophical point
00:18:26
Speaker
that, ah well, I suppose there are two there, there's that idea that look our ability to come to learn about the world, there's that question, is that
Reliability of Human Epistemic Faculties
00:18:39
Speaker
reliable? Or, you know, sometimes philosophers talk about our epistemic faculties, or what have you, is that the sort of thing that can produce truth, or there's always that concern if you i think they're just, you know, we're machines produced by evolution, what's making our perceptive faculties reliable. There's that that that point. And I think also the point that if we're coming to learn about the world, there's that question, is there any order in the world to discover at all? And I think that's ah part of the the scientific enterprise relies on the assumption that there is. And you know as you say, that's something that Stoics and Christians can account for, ah but perhaps others cannot.
00:19:23
Speaker
Absolutely. The notion of an implicit order, which is there waiting for us to discover it. um This is something which the Epicureans are are a little bit smarter than our modern sort of, I won't call them scientists because not all scientists think this way. Of course, of course. Our modern materialists tend to take for granted that they can just go on expecting the universe to yield answers to our particular kinds of questions. For instance, there's currently a controversy in physics over how relativity and quantum effects can be reconciled. it's you know All these questions about quantum gravity are are akin really to the barrier that Newton faced between
00:20:17
Speaker
things below the moon and above the moon, that they're there's like ah a hitch or a snag in the fabric of our understanding. And Newton had a very good philosophical reason for believing that he could smooth that hitch out, that there was an underlying unity or a set of rules that he could used to um to to unite these various regions of of space. We have a similar problem. We're we're kind of at the very level of the very small. we We have these two sets of rules for understanding things, and they don't seem to line up. And so we obviously need some other set of rules that incorporates both of these theories and accounts for their effects with one unified system.
00:21:01
Speaker
um We are acting as if we expect to find such a thing. we We certainly are not throwing up our hands with this is an object of intense ongoing scientific research. But unlike Newton, we don't really have good reason to expect if we don't believe in that logos or that order that's implicit in the universe itself, then we have no reason to expect that things will ah answer ultimately to our demand for unity. Epicureans ah would have said, I think, well, that's by design. There's no reason for you that you. You may just have hit up against a wall. You might have just reached the part of Star Trek where Q comes in and says, well now I'm just changing the rules of physics. And why should your monkey mind yeah ah understand it? This is, I think, the implication of the controversial Epicurean doctrine of multiple explanations, that there are certain things which we can, with our present data at least, we can see and account for in a bunch of different ways. And maybe they're all
00:22:10
Speaker
Maybe all the explanations are true. Maybe only one is true, but we don't know which one. Maybe you know some maybe both explanations are part of some other larger explanation that's not accessible to us. um and and And anyway, there are um worlds out there where things don't work at all the way they work here on Earth. This is the doctrine of many worlds. So there's kind of one set of laws, the law of of atomic motion that's supposed to be true everywhere throughout the universe.
00:22:38
Speaker
But then those laws are supposed to be able to generate all sorts of things that maybe we are not equipped to understand fully or to account for, and which you know that's the the real Epicurean position. And ultimately, it would lead, I think, to despair, to just giving up on these on these projects if they don't yield enough ah understanding.
00:22:58
Speaker
Whereas the the stoic premise, the Christian premise, and basically says just keep at it, you know, which is kind of what we are actually doing in in practice, we are just keeping at it because I think There's some instinct. It's not even, I don't think even a leftover cultural instinct at this point. I just think it's how we humans, um it's what we humans feel in our bones. We have this kind of conviction that that the stoic view is right, even though we may not say it that way to ourselves.
00:23:30
Speaker
Right, right. So something I was wondering about is you have a little bit of a shift in some secular um type, some popular popular narratives about science. I think maybe Sam Harris is the most well-known proponent of this where the view is Ordinary physicalism isn't enough and we do need to make space for some phenomena, whether it's consciousness or morality in a way that the current, ah so I would say simplified scientific paradigm where you understand it purely as you know physical and the world in a purely physical and mechanical way ah is is is not sufficient. we We need more than that.
00:24:13
Speaker
but What do you did take about that story do you think that story? I would take it you say that story is moving in the right direction, but perhaps isn't isn't sufficient. so yeah I was curious to get your your reaction against that as as a foil. Absolutely. Well, I do think it's interesting that this is creeping up on people that's sort of dawning on a lot of different people that it You're right. It is a simplified idea about what science says about the world. But it's also our working model. So I think even sophisticated scientists who might say otherwise, if really pressed to articulate things, have for a long time felt comfortable just getting by with a kind of good enough idea of the world that it is just bodies in in motion. and And that seems
00:25:00
Speaker
no longer to suffice for a lot of people. And it's kind of, I think, easy to see why. and Some of the reasons are reasons that I focus on in my book, like that science itself now requires us to think in very different ways. If you want to have a hope of grasping quantum physics, you have to get that objects in motion picture out of your head. Now, the question then becomes, what do you replace it with? And and that's, I think, what people like Harris and and others are now grappling with. um And this to me is of a piece with, in the analogous kind of political sphere, it's of a piece with people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali saying it it it may have been enough to get by on
00:25:44
Speaker
secular prejudice for a while. But intellectually, it really doesn't track down to the bottom. And so if we want to preserve our whole civilization, but especially, you know, natural rights and the idea of human dignity and all that, um we're really going to have to take a serious hard look at the idea of a creator.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Conversion
00:26:05
Speaker
And that's kind of, as I understand it, why Ali converted. And it's also an argument that Tom Holland makes in in another form in in the book Dominion. ah So there are all sorts of people, not just in the scientific arena,
00:26:21
Speaker
who are coming to grips you know in a more real way than they have before with the inadequacy of a materialist-pointed view. And to me, is you know and any motion in in that direction is is salutary and and good. I think I find it a little bit touching. and And maybe you'll relate to this as a fellow scholar of ancient ideas. I find it touching that having spent the better part of a lifetime paying no attention to these ultimate questions of purpose and metaphysics and the transcendent.
00:27:03
Speaker
Of course, people who don't reach out for any cut kind of help from previous kind of treatments of these subjects are just going to stumble across the same old furniture. It would be sort of like if I had lived my whole life believing we're there's only spirit. And tomorrow I thought, actually, there's this thing called matter. And instead of brushing up on Newtonian mechanics, I just sort of tried to figure out, like, how things move on my own steam, I've probably come up with something that looks like, you know, if I were lucky, I might arrive at like, Empedically, Empedocleanism, right, I would arrive at like, there's sort of these four elements. And, um and that would be just a
00:27:44
Speaker
this ah ah a silly way to go about things. Instead, I could say, oh, wow, there's a whole rich literature kind of available for thinking about things that can warn you against common errors and missteps and send you down better paths. And that's how I understand Scripture really to function. It's a record of sort of the most trustworthy ideas in this domain and also ah a manual and a warning against a lot of the common pitfalls, putting your faith in the weather and the elements, putting your faith in you other forms of higher powers that that are not actually the highest possible power and that can't be consistent. And then if you sort of broaden that research to include like Thomas Aquinas and some of the
00:28:32
Speaker
medieval theologians, you really will have a pretty good backing in like, okay, what are some of the best options for thinking through the immaterial and for dealing with? um And and i guys like Harris just strike me as, you know, weirdly not doing that, or i not that weird, I sort of know why they're like allergic to it. But like, you know, they're they're stumbling around in the dark over old and like Maybe it's all in my head. like Maybe it's all a narrative. Maybe it's all a story. You can find this in Heraclitus. You can find some of this stuff. And and you know it's been exploded multiple times, and it has it has caused problems. um And basically, ah if I had to state the argument of ah this latest book in one sentence, it would be like, why not try the book of Genesis? While you're testing out possible frameworks for interpreting
00:29:22
Speaker
what science seems to be telling us about human consciousness, about its kind of constitutive role in reality. Like, you know, Genesis is has a pretty good track record for shaping and guiding people's thought in this domain. And it actually works better than simulation theory, multiverse theory or whatever else you're going to come up with just by trying to kind of reinvent the wheel.
00:29:48
Speaker
yeah yeah absolutely I think it's important to make a distinction that you do in in the book, which is when someone hears, check out Genesis, they might say, wait, is this guy going to tell us that the earth is 6,000 years old? ah yeah is ah so Is that what you're telling us? It is not. and yeah' you know This is a funny part. This was actually ah a sensitive part of the book for me to write because there There are really two intended audiences for this book. And I sort of say this, you know, that there are those who have come to believe or been sold the idea that if they want to be serious thinkers, they have to um pay no attention to anything other than kind of the material laws of ah science.
00:30:37
Speaker
um And we've sort of been talking about that element of the book this whole time. But there's also another side to this, which is that my fellow believers who feel that science is a danger to their belief and that because it has so often been presented, scientists have often been presented as hostile to religion, antithetical to religion. Maybe people have argued that science is disproven God. um Christians and believers more generally have have had a number of, I think, unhelpful reactions to this admittedly quite aggravating and and and to many offensive, you know,
00:31:22
Speaker
claim on the part of science, but people have said, well, no, actually the Bible, the Bible has a better record of like material fact than science or science is deceptive and those who go in for it are seduced. So we just shouldn't pay any attention to it at all. And, you know,
00:31:46
Speaker
i I am open to and ah happy to entertain anybody's argument that the world really was made in seven 24 hour days. and But it's certainly not my position. And it also this is more important than than what my position is. It also doesn't seem to me in the slightest to be necessary in order to make a robust defense of and case for scripture. In fact, I think the insistence on a seven day creation is in itself a reaction to the scientific revolution, which accepts
00:32:21
Speaker
the crudest possible premises of materialism. If you go back before the scientific revolution, there are, of course, people who thought that Genesis meant seven, 24 hour days, but there were also people like Augustine, who's you know certainly not ah and a heretic, people like Augustine who said, it it doesn't make sense to think of this in terms of of human perception, because this is a description of the world before there was human perception. so When the text says days, it must be using human experience after the sun was made to talk back into pre-human experience from the perspective of the Godhead. This is also John Milton's ah kind of
00:33:04
Speaker
theory of the case. When he has Raphael come to Adam and tell the story of the war in heaven before the creation of man, he says, um this all happened in a kind of spiritual space. But I'm going to tell it to you as if it were a physical army of people, because that's your mode of perception. Like you see the world this way. So I'm going to use this language in in a kind of allegorical sense.
00:33:26
Speaker
um I wouldn't say that this is the proper mode of interpretation for every kind of scripture. I think there's obviously parts of scripture that are clearly historical in our particular sense that they describe material events and you know state dates of political happenings and so forth. um But as we know, the Bible has many, many genres in it and many modes of of speech, each of which is differently appropriate for different subject matters.
00:33:54
Speaker
um And when the scientific revolution installed the idea that all truth has to be materially factual or else it's not truth at all, and many Christians I think kind of accepted this premise and then fought the battle on those terms so that it became the case that only a seven-day interpretation of Genesis really counted as orthodoxy because it took more faith to believe and it was more so supposedly rigorous. um I think we should have gone in almost in exactly the opposite direction, which is to reject the premise out of hand and recover the dimension of our tradition, which does stretch back all the way to the early church in which
00:34:38
Speaker
questions of of material time actually look different to the author of Genesis than they do to the the ah invest researchers of science because they' they're asking different questions or perhaps they're asking the same question in slightly different terms. um So no, i I think that actually there are periods in the current cosmological account of deep time, like for instance, I think it's 360,000 years during which the universe is invisible to us before light can break free of matter, and the universe can become what's called transparent. um I think that corresponds quite neatly to the first day of creation that you have this kind of cutoff
00:35:20
Speaker
period where before this everything is is darkness after this there's evening and morning invisible stuff um and yeah from from a human perspective it looks like that period was about three hundred and sixty thousand years long the scripture describes it as one day which is either totally incompatible with with science or is a ah a poetic language or ah an allegorical language for describing exactly the same thing that science is, is mysteriously, quite eerily, the same thing that science is describing. i I prefer to read the Bible in a way that
00:35:56
Speaker
actually conforms miraculously to what science uncovers than to insist that the Bible is is just kind of a form of rival science. and So no, people who are worried that this book is going to argue them into like, you know, a seven day creation, like that's that's really not my technique. And i don't I don't think that that's a wise way of approaching this question.
Stoicism and Modern Physics
00:36:23
Speaker
right Yeah, I suppose you have that, there's that idea of many claims, um the scientific enterprise concern, just material facts. And then I think the question is, if you feel like your tradition is being challenged,
00:36:39
Speaker
is your Does your tradition have a claim that go beyond material facts? Or is there some way to make sense of that? Or do you want to sort of dispute make the dispute at the level of ah material reality? And just to flesh that out a little bit more, in traditionally Stoics, you know they rejected atomism, of course. so And perhaps you could say the Stoics had something that was closer to ah field theory type versions of of physics.
00:37:07
Speaker
um and And that might be a possible move you could you could make if you were a traditional Stoic uncovering you know these newest scientific discoveries. And you might say, yes, this is confirming my view about ah Stoic metaphysics. The physics aligns perfectly. Alternatively, you might make the claim that the Stoic view perhaps had more to do with ah how we conceive of material bodies at all or something of this sort. And it doesn't have as much have to do with scientific mathematical or formula or natural laws or something of this sort. So i I think sometimes that that's a useful way to think about one's one strategy i when when facing these kinds of questions. Yeah, I like that. I mean, I think that the
00:38:02
Speaker
the The strategy of contesting material facts is perfectly legitimate if you think you have other material facts to show. and There are some areas right where I do think this is true. so For instance, in the case of evolution, I am myself pretty content if it turns out that the canonical description of human evolution is is true. it it It won't sort of shake my faith because of something I say in the book, which is at some point human consciousness came into being and at that point there was a sort of
00:38:45
Speaker
formal break that is a chasm of but division between what went before and what went after. And it doesn't really worry me sort of how that came about, how how God brought that about. um so So this is not, a for me, a high stakes question, really. But I do think that people who challenge the current account of evolution are have a lot of very legitimate questions to raise. like There does not, for instance, seem to me to be enough time from from our best estimates of how how speciation works. It seems as if the current model of how long the world has been around doesn't leave enough time for the degree of complexity that we observe in evolutionary ah organisms to have evolved, to have come about.
00:39:36
Speaker
Also, synthetic chemists point out that even when they take what we currently understand to be the ingredients for life and provide them with optimal conditions for spontaneously generating DNA, ah coming together to make something that we would call alive, um we cannot make them do it. So this idea of like a primordial soup of lipids and ah nucleotides kind of eventually just happening to bang up against each other and just the right combination to form the first amoeba or whatever. That also seems to have some problems. So i'm I'm very comfortable raising those objections. And I'm even comfortable with people raising them out of certain philosophical motivations, even if if those motivations don't color the way that they perform their research, right? You might start out in your private study saying,
00:40:28
Speaker
This whole Darwinian this old neo-darwinian materialism seems really godless and and disgusting to me. I'm going to set out to refute it, and I'm going to do that by a lifetime of research in the field of synthetic chemistry. um That's your prerogative, as long as what you're doing in your laboratory is actually synthetic chemistry. And the questions that you're raising are are legitimate questions in the terms that science has set out.
00:40:54
Speaker
um On the other hand, if if what you're saying is simply you know the genesis account is different, yeah would would lead us to different material conclusions than the scientific record. Therefore, I reject the scientific record and accept the genesis account. I i don't think that's ah an effective or appropriate strategy. um And on the other hand, I do think it's effective and appropriate to say, like based on our best scientific research,
00:41:24
Speaker
um This seems to be how the world looks to human consciousness, materially speaking. and There are a range of possible interpretations of those of that data, as there always are. Any data has a range of possible interpretations. What would be the genesis interpretation? In other words, what would be the interpretation that takes Genesis as true in some bedrock sense, as as true in some spiritual sense, and and then uses it as a filter to select between multiple possible interpretations. I think that's probably ah a wiser thing. So then if you are stoic right and you have ah Perhaps something like field theory um as your as your picture of of the universe but you also are forced to accept the existence of atoms, you might have reason I think to kind of use your pre existing stoic commitments.
00:42:18
Speaker
and to to speculate or hypothesize about what's underneath the atoms. And if you did that, you would be like up onto something quite real about how Einstein himself sort of arrived at his ultimate reconciliation of of mechanics with um you know Maxwell's theory of light. So yeah, I think I think that our wisdom traditions can guide us in in that sort of way. But I think we go on the defensive too easily and therefore engage in kind of contentious or bad scientific arguments.
00:42:50
Speaker
yeah yeah Yeah, it's a tricky issue. um so how do you see Stoicism is interesting. I was thinking about stoicism and your book. Stoicism rejects this picture of the world as a machine, which you do as well. It's complicated both for philosophical reasons and now scientific reasons.
00:43:11
Speaker
But it does it does accept that the world is determined. It does accept that the world is largely made up of bodies, although that picture gets complicated relatively quickly. it is it I should say, it is made of bodies. The picture gets complicated quickly by the ideas of subsistence and so on, and also the fact that you know you have ah the logos and everything, this idea of the active principle ah giving breath giving energy giving life to to the world um So you have these some elements of the machine picture if you will the mechanical picture determinism materialism mix in with ah These philosophical ideas ideas about Providence teleology um So and if if you could comment on how you see how you see that Interacting with the core narrative of the book
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah, I find it really intriguing. I mean, as you indicate, there is what I was taught in grad school to call a corporealism in stoicism. And and there was a distinction made, which I always found did dubious, but potentially useful between corporealism and materialism. I think because materialism would be the strict, there are only objects sort of proposition.
00:44:31
Speaker
Whereas the Stoic proposition, as I understand it, is there are somata, there are bodies, um but there are also things like lekta. There are four, at least, categories of kind of incorporeal things, um which are understood, I think, to subsist in or pertain to um arrangements of bodies, activities of bodies.
00:44:56
Speaker
And actually, I think that idea that there are maybe even emergent properties of of bodies is something like how I in the book argue we should understand things like forces. So we have a, I think, material mistake ah that we make, which is that um We think if we're talking in terms of things like forces and energy and momentum, then we are still in comfortably in the realm of matter. We're still talking about things. and But as William of Occam, of all people, pointed out when the idea of momentum or impetus was first getting going.
00:45:37
Speaker
we're really We really have departed actually from from material pure materialism. The minute we admit that there is such a thing as force or gravity, and or even i mean since gravity is is now kind of understood as a property of space time, we might refer to things like energy, right which is supposed to be kind of one of the fundamental ingredients of things, but energy being the capacity to do work is is is an abstraction that it can only be explained in terms of other abstractions. and so If we want to speak meaningfully about the scientific world, we actually do have to make reference at least to immaterial facts about material objects.
00:46:17
Speaker
um And I think that the stoics might be quite comfortable with that I you know I don't want to put words in like chrysippus mouth or anything. But I think that the you know if you can have if you can have a sayable.
00:46:30
Speaker
which is this idea or this thing that attaches to these material arrangements of letters in in the techne periphones and the sort of like linguistic theory of the Stoics, um then I don't see why you can't have something like force or or momentum that emerges out of or subsists within um the the relations of of bodies. um It's not quite the account that I would give,
00:46:58
Speaker
that's not my metaphysics, um but I think it is and ah like a pretty robust metaphysics and it allows for, indeed, ultimately leads to and I think is designed to support um the the conclusion that Logos is a fundamental or the fundamental principle in in reality, um which I would say is quite close to my own view that that mind is an indispensable principle of of reality. It's impossible to to do away with some sort of conscious perception or observation if you want even to give a rigorous account of matter and that matter, in fact, is born in a communion between
00:47:42
Speaker
what is external to mind and and and mind itself. where I part ways with the Stoics here is not actually in the belief of of in their beliefs about the Logos, um but in the thorny question of whether the Logos is coterminous with the corporeal universe.
00:48:02
Speaker
and so i think that because yeah i mean I think this is the ancient Christian dispute with the Stoics. I'm not really saying anything new, but just that you know um Christians are committed to an idea that the Logos or the divine mind um extends infinitely beyond the world of of matter. And I don't think Stoics are are ready to accept anything extending beyond the world of matter, but rather they they sort of want things to adhere in the world of of matter that are not themselves material. um But it's ah you know I think it's actually with it's it's held up better than
00:48:41
Speaker
kind of crude Epicurean atomism, ah especially because of this idea that that mind is an essential ingredient of of reality that that seems ah to be right. Yeah, I think that's right. and I think that's probably one of the crucial areas of agreement is that know the Stoics thought we had this you divine spark within us and that was that ability to reason and that's what was shared between ourselves.
00:49:06
Speaker
And God, God understood as what animates the the whole cosmos. And descriptions, purely material descriptions ah that leave leave out that fact are going to be missing an essential aspect of of reality.
00:49:22
Speaker
um Now, the traditional stoic view might be challenged by what you said in the very first ah answer to the question about you know swerves of atoms
Stoicism vs Epicureanism
00:49:32
Speaker
and such. The deterministic picture is certainly at least has some question marks around it. um And then of course, there's that there's that dispute between Stoics and Christians about the nature of the the Logos. I think that the determinism part is really intriguing because of the weird kind of bait and switch that happens between Stoicism and Epicureanism in in the modern day. So I come back a lot to
00:50:05
Speaker
I want to say it's an Alexandria of Aphrodisias, this crazy idea of the cylinder rolling down a hill. And this is sort of supposed to be a picture somehow supposed to be a picture of our nature, that we we do ah we are accountable for our actions, but we don't um really kind of choose them among ah an array of other possibilities so much as we ah live into the logic of what we are and what our environment is. um And I am a, I i i feel the questions have,
00:50:43
Speaker
you know determinism and free will in eternity, in the grand design, are are a bit outside of the purview of of human reasoning. I actually think that when people start to try and think about this from the perspective of outside of time, um it it becomes very, very difficult or even impossible because we are within the system that we're trying now to comprehensively sort of assess.
00:51:09
Speaker
um I think that everybody is struggling with the fact that we we experience ourselves to make choices. we the the if If there's anything immediate about our experiences, that we could do this, we could do that, but we decide what what we're going to do. um And if there is an underlying other truth that's not evident to us, which invalidates that,
00:51:35
Speaker
sensation, um we end up in a real pickle because everything else that we currently believe to be true on the basis of what seems like in immediate sort of testimonial from our experience is now also called into question. And this is not a problem that's unique to sort of the determinism argument. It's also a problem that's unique to science as well. Science both demonstrates that things are not as our as they appear to our naked eye, but also proposes to restrict our knowledge to that which can be directly observed by our senses. And this is like kind of a paradox unless you think that we are, through our senses, accessing some grander, grander logic and design.
00:52:23
Speaker
um
00:52:25
Speaker
The Epicureans, on the other hand, just want to kind of give a material cause for our experience of choice. And this they do by way of the swerve, or at least that's what Lucretius attributes to Epicurus. Sure. um And something like the swerve seems to be true about atoms. This is kind of a really unsettling discovery in the late 1800s that, for instance, the increase of entropy over time isn't so much an iron clad determinist law as it is a highly, highly, highly probable thing. So that by the time you've had as many collisions of atoms as there are, even in a very small box of gases,
00:53:08
Speaker
The alternative, which is that more order would emerge out of out of chaos spontaneously, um just doesn't happen because you've had so many events that those events are all kind of compounding in the the and unlike to to make it functionally impossible. um And this is sort of like what David Hume was was getting at, I think, with a lot of his arguments about about ah physics. And i I do think it is suggestive that um our experience of having an effect on things that we can voluntarily sort of generate
00:53:44
Speaker
is at least at least corresponds to something very deep about the universe. um but i yeah So I guess I'm ah a little unsure um that I understand the Stoic view on choice well enough to um say whether it comports with what we're finding out about ah determinism or or not. My my suspicion is um That it, it might be best to understand the stoics in terms akin to what you were saying earlier, that like this is not so much a ah material description the cylinder rolling down a hill is not like a physical description of how things work so much as so an image for conceiving of how our
00:54:32
Speaker
ah unchosen attributes, our our nature and our our nurture ah kind of contribute to shaping our what what we experience as as choices. i think Yeah, that's interesting dean because I think i think probably a Stoic should say at least ancient Stoics probably did have the traditional deterministic view. And there were a number of moves they made to protect free will, events being co-fated and so on that they intended to not reject determinism as such. So perhaps there's there's always that move that and maybe we have
00:55:16
Speaker
indeterminacy at the micro level, but at the macro level, everything is determined, and perhaps the studies can say something there. But there's also the risk that does providence, the stoic picture of providence, does that depend on determinism?
00:55:31
Speaker
or yeah Perhaps so, perhaps and perhaps not. I think that's ah another another open question. Well, this is where Christians, I think, do face some of the same questions and famously disputes within the church have really kind of circled around this.
00:55:50
Speaker
um whether or not, for instance, once you're saved, you know do you do you have no choice in the matter? Is it just the pure action of the Holy Spirit? And now all the stuff all the choices that you make are bound to tend you and in one direction. um There's a Charles Spurgeon sermon, I think it is, where he talks about the the idea of free will and the idea of providence being parallel lines that meet a eternity. And I'm partial to this idea that these that these two ways of looking at things may actually both be equally true.
00:56:19
Speaker
um I will say that as a Christian, um it is and this is actually one of the major advantages of looking at the logos as being outside of time and space, um as well as as embodied within it. and As a Christian, it's possible to conceive of God, if not to visualize him doing this, then at least to conceive of God standing outside of the whole timeline of material events, including choices that he knows we will make and arranging the universe around those choices. And so that would be that that would be sort of my response to it, although I know that's probably not what the stoics would say.
00:56:58
Speaker
Right, right. I do like the thought that there's some way of reconciling free will and determinism ultimately. and you I think you have both. In an intuitive sense, perhaps, of that is that as many great moments in one's life, good moments in one's life, it felt like they were the product of free choices and yet things were faded. And I think that's ah there's something there's something to that. Yep. No question. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for joining.
00:57:27
Speaker
It was a delight. Thank you, Caleb, for having me. for listening to stoic conversations please give us a rating on apple podcasts or spotify and share it with a friend if you want to dive deeper still searched doa in the app store or play store for a complete app with routines meditations and lessons designed to help people become more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.