What the Scientific Community Knows About God | Vivek Ramaswamy

I'm curious about why you found it necessary and desirable to open your argument with this proposition that God is real. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, well, I found it necessary because I think it's the most important of all. I found it desirable in part because I was able to bring a dimension to this that is maybe complementary to the one that it sounds like you're bringing in your upcoming book.

I will use that as a chance to say the only thing that I would, uh, not take issue with but expand on what you just said is that I don't think that that's actually limited to the Western philosophical worldview or to even the Judeo-Christian tradition. And so, the reason I thought it was desirable for me to bring to bear here is I'm actually a religious Hindu, and I believe in exactly the worldview that you just described; that sense of unity that rests actually at the heart of even the Hindu worldview.

What's known as the non-dualistic worldview—it's a philosophy that says the dualism, the separation between man and the Supreme Being, the separation between truth and beauty—non-dualism rejects the existence of that distinction. And you know, how I describe Hinduism is it's the reconciliation of man with the Supreme Being and his creator.

I think that that is something that is a common thread through nearly all major world religions. I think that the common thread in that debate, this debate about the atheist and the person of faith in each of those religious traditions and cultural backgrounds and backdrops where that debate has taken place—I think falls into the trap of believing that because you can't understand something, that that other thing no longer exists, which is actually a denial of the entire history of science as well, right?

So, the idea that your body is composed of cells that themselves contain nucleic acids that offer the blueprint for your genetic makeup, the fact that you couldn't see that does not deny its actual truth. I think that's the form of argument that I see with the atheist, not only in the American setting but really for all of Western philosophical religious history.

But it turns out, even if you look to ancient arguments in places like India, for people who had a non-dualistic worldview, you could call it a Hindu worldview of believing that there is a Supreme Being that resides and is unified with each man—the fact that you can't see that or access that is not a valid argument on its own to deny its actual truth.

Well, let's look at that a minute from the scientific perspective, you know, because there's actually, it seems to me that one of the prerequisites, the presuppositions of formal science, is at least the implicit recognition of something like a transcendent unity.

And here's what I mean by that: any good scientist knows that his or her theories are insufficient, right? That the grip that our knowledge has on the world is inadequate. What that implies is that there is a world that's a unity outside of our conceptualization, right? So, that's a belief in a transcendent reality.

So, what you're doing when you do science is that you're subjecting your hypotheses to revision by the facts of the transcendent unity, right? You put your hypothesis up for testing against the manner in which the real but as of yet unknown world will manifest itself. You have to presume that there is a reality beyond your presuppositions, and not only that, you have to presume that that reality is intelligible.

That making the effort to make it intelligible is actually beneficial and good because—and it could be destructive. I mean, you can discover things that are destructive, but the scientific mindset is predicated on the idea that the expansion of our knowledge in the direction of this transcendental unity is actually a net moral good.

Because otherwise, science would be an evil enterprise. And so, it seems to me—and I make this case in this book too—that the hypothesis of something like a transcendent unity is a necessary precondition even for science itself to get its purchase and move forward. The fact that the universities and the scientific enterprise essentially emerged out of the religious monastic tradition historically and technically is an indication of that fact rather than, you know, the kind of post-French Revolution notion that science and religion are somehow at odds.

I don't think that's historically accurate. And so now, there's one other thing too, and I'm interested in your comments about this.

See, the other reason that the proposition that you begin with—God is real—is necessary in a political sense, as far as I can tell, is that there's dawning realization over the thousands of years of human civilization that it's necessary even for those who rule to be subject to some ethical framework or power that's beyond them.

So even among the ancient Mesopotamians, for example, they—and these, these are the oldest writings that we have—which is why I'm bringing them into the discussion—the Mesopotamians realized that their Emperor had to be an avatar of a god they knew as Marduk. Marduk was the god of attentive watching and truthful speech.

In so far as the Mesopotamian Emperor was an avatar of the spirit of careful attention—the attention that updates and learns and truthful speech—he had the right to remain as Emperor. But in so far as he deviated from that moral path, which wasn't a characteristic of him but a characteristic of something transcendent, if he deviated from that, he violated the, what would you say, the principles upon which his sovereignty was predicated.

You know, you have to ask yourself how could it be other than dangerous for anyone to inhabit a political system where the presumption was that the ruler was the fundamental final source of ethical evaluation. I mean, there's no difference between that and a tyranny, obviously.

So, um, so much in what you said there and again, it's another great example in parallel to our climate discussion. Now, on this discussion about religion, one of the things I try to do in this book is to make that accessible to, again, ordinary Americans who feel in their, who understand in their heart probably what you said but may not have been able to parse it exactly in the manner that you have.

So, let's just separate, as we did for the climate discussion, into a couple different categories of argument here. It's funny, I actually, this actually relates directly to the opening chapter of truths as well. I'm sure your book is a full book on it, this is a shortened version.

The first point about science itself being predicated, the scientific method itself being predicated on that unity—that's exactly right.

And so what the observation I make to just make it simpler and more convincing to layers is that it is therefore not an accident—every great scientist or many great scientists, you know, Albert Einstein, you go straight down the list, Blaise Pascal—some of the people who have made the greatest discoveries that have improved the frontiers of scientific understanding of the universe did indeed believe in a single true God.

I do believe that that is something that at least should surprise people who adopt the post-French Revolution worldview that says how science and religion are at odds, when some of the unambiguously greatest scientists—physicists, biologists, chemists—have all arrived at the conclusion that there is some greater mover of this universe that we're unified with.

And the scientific method almost presupposes that exactly. You're going to incrementally access knowledge that you don't have. And the fact that you're able to do that in the realm of science is actually validating, not contradictory, of the fact that you may do the same through religious experience.

So that's one category of argument, which is different from—an entirely different point—which is scientific knowledge is only one form of knowledge. Right? The idea that truth is limited to that which you can access through empiricism or through empirical testing is just a claim. That's an assertion. When in fact empirical, well, it's also one that's been scientifically invalidated exactly in recent years.

Because, yeah, the advanced cognitive scientists, in particular the scientists of perception, understand that we have to prioritize our perceptions because otherwise there's an infinite number of potentially relevant facts, and an infinite number is too many. So, we use a value structure to prioritize our perception of facts, and so there's no escaping from the value problem. Right?

It's not even at the level of perception; it's logically inescapable. And then again, in the interest of sort of making this accessible again, you go to Albert Einstein—he did not deduce his theory of relativity through empirical deduction or through empirical, even through empirical observation.

He deduced it through what you could call a form of meditation—right? Deep reflection on what must be true in the universe, accessing what we now accept as truth through a different mode than empirical deduction, which was later validated through empirical testing that at least accounts for our current understanding of relativity.

So, you've got the fact that the scientific method itself relies upon the idea of some broader unity, as you call it. B, the fact that the empirical deduction of truth is not the only path—in fact, you have almost definitive proof that it can't be the only path to accessing truth.

Good historical examples to support that, and that's all separate from the other category that you brought up, which is the utility of religious belief, whether that's in providing a constraint or a structure around the sovereignty of any particular kingdom or republic or whether it's even the fulfillment that most people are able to experience in their own lives.

And here you may actually be making a case for even a Dawkins-like atheist—I don't know what Dawkins' own views are—but an atheist believing that their kids would still be better off if their kids at least grew up being raised in a traditional religion and believing in God because it, well Dawkins has, Dawkins has described himself recently as a cultural Christian, and I think it's exactly for those reasons.

Exactly; it's just the utilitarian, the utility-enhancing argument for it—for the same reason that you would believe that a republic like that of the United States or an old kingdom in Mesopotamia would be better governed if its leader were, their sovereignty were derived from but also located within a broader sovereignty under God.

And so I think that those are four different categories of arguments. Some are actually grounded in truth, others are grounded in utility, but all of which lead to, as you put at the beginning, the desirability but also the importance and necessity of starting the book with that exploration of why God is real and why that's important.