When the Metaphorical Becomes Physical | Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

I find it very interesting you often speak, uh, about your experience of religion, and I have a very interesting reaction to it, which is, um, I come from the opposite starting place. I almost never hear you say anything that strikes me as wrong. Um, so I have the sense that we are converging on a perspective, and I want to talk a little bit.

And so the thing that you said happening at Peterson Academy, by the way, we have a bunch of thinkers who are doing exactly that. And it is this new urgency, as you would hope. It's sort of the best indicator that you are on the right track. Either you're telling yourself a foolish story and everybody's converged on it, or you've discovered something real, and that means it doesn't matter where your starting point is; you'll land there.

So, um, your point about God doesn't need to exist to answer prayers—I've long believed this a horrible thing to say. No, it's not! And in fact, I wonder if you will remember that I said something like that to Sam Harris in the debate where I moderated between you two. He laughed about the idea of a prayer-answering God, and I gave him an evolutionary account of how that could work.

In effect, I believe my example would have been something like: were you to pray before going to bed about some problem that you thought needed a divine intervention in order to remedy it, that would likely prime you to dream about that problem and potentially to wake with some insight about it, which frankly waking with insights is a known phenomenon. So that is one way in which prayer could actually manifest in an improvement in the world that does not require there to be an external being.

So let's just take that as a stem. The thing I most want to go back to is you're talking; you laid out a principle, and your principle was that you should not invoke religious terminology or descriptions where they are not necessary. That is to say, we can explain many things without resorting to those tools, and they should be reserved. It's part of not using God's name in vain, by the way.

Now here's the point I want to make to you, and, um, frankly, there's a part of me—I know that you and me and Richard Dawkins need to have this conversation, and I am sorry to say that he has become cowardly in old age and refuses to have the conversation. That's a tragedy because I believe a tremendous amount of productive insight would come from that conversation.

He is going to talk to me, but—and I had proposed you as an interlocutor—but he picked another gentleman who might do a credible job. Yeah, we need better than credible here. And I will tell you that if you go back into Dawkins' catalog, you will find that he did—I’ve forgotten the name of it—but he did a documentary, basically an atheist new atheist documentary.

And there's a scene in it that struck me rather profoundly. The scene is Richard Dawkins is talking to a religious authority, and they are having a pitched argument about the logic of the universe. And it becomes quite clear if you watch this that Richard Dawkins knows he is winning this argument, but so does the other guy. They are each winning to their own audience, and what they're doing is they are missing the opportunity to actually discover anything.

And my concern is I know Richard Dawkins' tradition because I've read many of his books. He's in—I consider him a mentor of mine—and I come from the same tradition. So Richard Dawkins is very close to seeing something important that he hasn't seen yet that actually makes his own work vastly more important than it has yet.

I agree with that absolutely. But anyway, let's put him aside for the moment. The issue that I think is so important is: imagine a continuum from the perfectly literal to the perfectly metaphorical, and let us say that, uh, longstanding religions that have stood the test of time are very close to the end of the continuum where they are perfectly metaphorical.

And that our best cases—the places where we've been most effective at understanding, uh, phenomena that, uh, we now have a great predictive model of—were very close to being perfectly literal about, and then most things exist somewhere in between. Right? Biology, for example, we do not have a perfectly descriptive model because complexity and because the process of time erasing evidence has caused us to have a much cruder understanding of biology than we do, for example, of chemistry or physics.

Right? We’re earlier in the study. You could say the same thing about psychology. But the point is it is natural for us not to look at the vast amount we don't know and be paralyzed by it. It is natural for us to tell the part of the story that we can tell rigorously in rigorous terms and to tell what we no longer acknowledge is a metaphorical story to fill in the spaces.

Even this happens in your science textbook, but your science textbook doesn't admit that that's what it's doing. That's right! That's right! And that was the role that Jung thought dreams played, by the way. Tech—that's exactly his theory of dream.

And I would say that what you described as that greater ability to see across larger gaps—the point is the dream apparatus, which I would tell you has to be logically a product of adaptive evolution. It has served our ancestors to have it; it plays this function where it is allowed to violate any rule it wants to explore a possibility.

And presumably, many of those little explorations land on nothing, and occasionally one of those explorations lands on a transcendent connection. That if your waking mind was free to make those connections at all times, you'd be in big trouble.

Okay, okay! So I want to modify my statement about the unreality of God for a moment regarding what you just said. Okay, so now imagine this: imagine that the revelation that you've been praying for, when you're oriented towards the highest good, makes itself manifest. And then let's say it's valid.

Okay, so it's the valid issue that becomes of crucial interest here because if I have a revelation that's valid, that means I can act it out in the world, and it will have the predictive power of the future that you described. It'll be efficacious in the world. You know how you can strike while the iron is hot? That's what you're trying to do in Washington. You think it's the right time. You know how you can aggregate a lot of information; you can have a sense of timing—it's the right thing at the right moment.

Okay, so now imagine that that speaks of the underlying harmony of being itself. Right? And so here's a weird thing to add to that initial statement: even if God is not real in the way that we just described, the revelations that emerge from that source are deeply real because they speak of the relationship between the individual and the social community and the natural world in a manner that's practically realizable and exactly timed.

And so this is, I think, why it's reasonable to think about God in terms beyond the real and the non-real is because there is that element of non-reality. It's something that you conjure into existence as a consequence of your quest, but it's also the voice of what's truly deepest because otherwise, it would have no purchase in the world.

And so, you know, there's an ancient line of Jewish speculation that proposes that God and man are, in a sense, twins—that they each call the other into being and in a genuine manner. And I think this mode of conceptualization sheds some light on that in a manner that's, you know, somewhat comprehensible.

All right, can I try two things on you as long as we're deep down on this rabbit hole? And this is a point I have been trying to make to Richard Dawkins, which he cannot hear. The ancients had no idea about genes; they couldn't, nor would it have helped them to. They don't understand that they are suffering from a kind of delusion, which is about the significance of self.

Self is a very temporary instantiation of lineage. Evolution does not care about the self because the self is disposable. The lineage either continues or fails to continue; an evolutionary success is not how much you reproduce; it's how far into the future your lineage is capable of making. So that's the story of Abraham, by the way.

You're telling me? Yeah! Yeah! Okay, okay! So here's my point: Is heaven real? Yes and no. We have no evidence that there's a place. On the other hand, if you live so as to get into heaven, what it will do, for reasons that a sociologist—at least a good sociologist—would easily recognize is it will place your kin and your descendants in an excellent position relative to each other to get into the future.

Do you live on after death? Yes, you do; you live on in lineage! Right? It's not the individual, so it's a modification of the reality. But the point is how much difference is there between the idea of living on after you die in the way that any biologist would recognize that a successful individual did and living on after you die in some storybook form that's much easier to convey to a child or to an uninitiated person.

Right? My point is that life after death does exist. Every biologist agrees; they just don't put it in those terms. So the question is: why are we allowed to draw, where in that continuum, from the fully descriptive and material to the fully metaphorical, are we allowed to draw the line and say, "Here is where we have stopped being analytical?"

If it's a continuum, it is a continuum. And the place where I fault my colleague the most is that they do not understand— they do not acknowledge the degree to which even the models that we have inside of biology are largely metaphorical. Not because we won't ultimately know how biology works, but because we don't know yet.

And you know, even just to look back into the recent history of biology, you can see that it is a question of replacing approximate stories—metaphorical stories—with literal stories, and that doesn't break down when we get out towards what is obviously an adaptive tendency of human beings to believe in a spirit realm.